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Rightwing extremists defeated by Democrats in US school board elections
Scores of rightwing extremists were defeated in school board elections in April, in a victory for the left in the US and what Democrats hope could prove to be a playbook for running against Republicans in the year ahead.In Illinois, Democrats said more than 70% of the school board candidates it had endorsed won their races, often defeating the kind of anti-LGBTQ+ culture warrior candidates who have taken control of school boards across the country.Republican-backed candidates in Wisconsin also fared poorly. Moms for Liberty, a rightwing group linked to wealthy Republican donors which has been behind book-banning campaigns in the US, said only eight of its endorsed candidates won election to school boards, and other conservative groups also reported disappointing performances.The results come as education and free speech organizations have warned of a new surge in book bans in public schools in America. Over the past two years conservatives in states around the US have removed hundreds of books from school classrooms and libraries. The targeted books have largely been texts which address race and LGBTQ+ issues, or are written by people of color or LGBTQ+ authors.“Fortunately, the voters saw through the hidden extremists who were running for school board – across the [Chicago] suburbs especially,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, said after the results came in.“Really, the extremists got trounced yesterday.”Pritzker added: “I’m glad that those folks were shown up and, frankly, tossed out.”The Democratic party of Illinois spent $300,000 on races in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reported, endorsing dozens of candidates. The party said 84 of 117 candidates it had recommended won their races.Teachers unions, including the Illinois Education Association, endorsed candidates in school board elections around the state. The IEA backed candidates in about 100 races, and around 90% of those candidates won, said Kathi Griffin, the organization’s president.“I would hope that the tide is turning, to make sure that people who want to have those [school board] positions because they want to do good for our kids, continue [to get elected],” Griffin said.“I think that oftentimes these fringe candidates are funded with dark money. That dark money comes from outside our state.”The results were disappointing for conservative groups, who had pumped money into races.The 1776 Project, a political action committee which received funding from Richard Uihlein, a billionaire GOP donor, said only a third of the 63 candidates it had backed in Illinois and Wisconsin had won their races. Politico first reported on the lackluster performances.Union-endorsed candidates won two-thirds of their school board races in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, although Republican-supported candidates performed better in rural areas.Ben Hardin, executive director of the Democratic party of Illinois, said “values were on the line in these races”.“We knew this work wouldn’t be easy, especially given the organized movement from the far right to disguise their true agenda, but we’re grateful that voters saw through the falsehoods and turned out to support credible community advocates,” he said.“I’m proud that Illinoisans once again voted for fairness, equity and inclusion in our state.”With other states holding school board elections later this year – and a critical presidential election in 2024 – the successes offered some hope for Democrats.At the local level, at least, Griffin said the results “showed the value of having relationships within the community”.“When you have teachers who are part of the community, who have relationships with parents, with other community members who engage in community activities and support that community, there’s a level of trust that is built and that has happened across our state,” she said. More
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Biden may announce 2024 presidential campaign next week – report
The US president Joe Biden and his team may announce his re-election campaign by video next week, according to a source familiar with the matter on Thursday.An announcement on Tuesday by Biden, 80, would coincide with the anniversary of his 2020 campaign launch four years earlier, the source said, asking not to be identified.Biden aides have ramped up planning for the long-expected launch of the president’s bid for a second, four-year term in 2024. Last week, Biden said he would launch his campaign “relatively soon”.He has long said he intends to run again but the lack of a formal announcement had seeded doubt among supporters about whether one of the oldest world leaders would or should commit to another four-year term. He would be 86 at the end of a second term.In recent weeks, Biden has laid out the likely themes of a re-election bid in political speeches, secured a doctor’s note that he is “fit for duty”, told Democrats to re-order the party’s primary calendar in a manner favoring his nomination and picked Chicago as the city where he would ostensibly formally become the nominee next year. More
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Democratic senators condemn federal judge’s ruling to block abortion drug
Top Democratic senators across the US are pushing back after a federal judge in Texas decided to block the FDA-approved abortion drug mifepristone.On Sunday, the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand criticized as an “outrage” Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision, which is currently halted until at least Wednesday 19 April by the supreme court.Speaking to CNN, Gillibrand said: “To take away the right to have medicine is an extension of taking away this right to privacy, to say we can’t have medicine sent by doctors by mail to people across the country is further invading into this right to privacy, where the court and government has a right to what’s in your mail, and who you’re talking to and what communications you’re having. It’s an outrage.”She went on to condemn the supreme court, which in June 2022 decided to overturn Roe v Wade, a ruling that declared the constitutional right to an abortion for nearly half a century.Gillibrand said the supreme court’s decision was an “all-out assault on women’s reproductive freedom,” adding: “What we are seeing in these Republican legislatures as well as these very conservative courts is a continuation of that assault.”Similarly, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar called Kacsmaryk’s decision “unbelievable”.“What is going to be next? Is that judge going to not like birth control pills? Are we going to have a judge that doesn’t like [cholesterol medication] Lipitor? There’s a reason that Congress gave the FDA the power to make these decisions about safety,” Klobuchar told ABC.“I can tell you who is harmed by this. It’s women that are going to have to take a bus across the country from Texas to Minnesota or to Illinois. That’s the problem right now,” she added, pledging to “aggressively litigate” the ruling if the supreme court decides to uphold it.The Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin, meanwhile, said that Kacsmaryk “is not guided by science”.“What we have in Texas is a judge who is not guided by science, but is part of an extreme Republican concerted effort to ban abortion nationwide,” Baldwin told NBC.“We do not need judges, politicians or government telling women about what sort of healthcare they can have. It is an issue that is not only playing out in the court in Texas, but in the state of Florida, with the governor signing a near six-week ban, Idaho forbidding travel out of state for minors, Wisconsin where we’ve gone back to literally 1849. That is the date our criminal abortion ban was passed and that’s 174 years ago,” Baldwin said.Last month, Baldwin and the Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, led the introduction of the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2023, which would safeguard abortion rights nationwide and “restore the right to comprehensive reproductive healthcare for millions of Americans”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFollowing Kacsmaryk’s ruling, the justice department and the drug’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, asked the supreme court to intervene in an attempt to halt the restrictions, which would have limited mifepristone’s use after seven weeks of pregnancy as well as ban mail delivery of the drug. Mifepristone is currently approved until 10 weeks.On Friday, the conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito temporarily blocked the Texas lower court ruling and instead imposed on to it a five-day stay, allowing the justices more time to decide on their next steps.Alito’s move allows for the country’s most common method of pregnancy termination to remain unchanged until at least the end of Wednesday.Despite nationwide outrage from progressive lawmakers and reproductive rights activists, conservative lawmakers have defended the growing wave of various abortion bans.In an interview on Sunday with NBC, the Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said reactions to the Texas ruling are “totally alarmist”.“It’s totally alarmist. And by the way, when did the FDA think they could go above the law?” Cassidy said, adding: “Dobbs, I think, was the correct decision,” in reference to the supreme court’s overturning of federal abortion rights last year.Cassidy’s comments come two days after Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed into law a six-week abortion ban across the state, which currently has a 15-week ban. More
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Will Republicans regret taking on the ‘Tennessee Three’? Politics Weekly America podcast
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