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      ‘What next?’ Schumer lambasts Texas judge’s abortion pills ruling

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      Democratic lawmakers are doubling down on outrage against Friday’s ruling that threatens access to a widely used abortion medication, saying the ruling sets a “dangerous new precedent” that could harm future medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration.“Make no mistake, the decision could throw our country into chaos,” said the Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer on a call with reporters on Saturday. “Republicans have completely eviscerated the FDA as we know it and threatened the ability of any drug on the market to avoid being prohibited.“What could come next if some fringe radical group brings a lawsuit? Cancer drugs? Insulin? Mental health treatment?”Mifepristone was approved for use by the FDA in 2000 and, along with a second drug called misoprostol, is the most common method for terminating a pregnancy in the US. More than half of women in the country who get abortions use the two medications.On Friday, federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas suspended the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in a lawsuit that challenges the drug’s initial approval. Kacsmaryk gave the FDA a week to appeal his ruling.Meanwhile, a federal court in Washington state handed down a conflicting ruling that orders the FDA to not take any action that affects the drug’s availability.The president and chief executive officer of the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nancy Northrup, told reporters the Texas judge’s decision could have a “devastating impact” if it goes into effect.“If allowed to stand, it would remove mifepristone from the market in states where it’s legal and exposes the lie” that states would get to decide their own abortion laws after the US supreme court eliminated federal abortion rights through their Dobbs decision last year, Northrup said. She added: “It threatens the FDA’s authority over its entire drug approval process, which could severely limit the development of new drugs overall and have far-reaching repercussions on patients’ access to FDA-approved medications.”Northrup emphasized that the medication is a safe and effective means of abortion and that the drug is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. She also said the appeal could end up in the US supreme court within a week, if the litigation from the 2021 Texas abortion ban – which was quickly taken up by the court – is any indication.“That’s entirely possible, but abortion providers across the country are preparing and being advised on what to do if this actually goes into effect,” Northrup said.Democrats on Saturday said they support the appeal that the US justice department on Friday indicated it would file, seeking a halt to Kacsmaryk’s decision. And the party is still working to get the Women’s Health Protection Act passed. The legislation, introduced late last month, seeks to protect abortions on a federal measure but lacks the Republican support needed to pass.A Democratic senator from Washington, Patty Murray, said Democrats would “put Republicans on the record every way we can so the American people know exactly who is responsible for this chaos”.“We will have this debate out in the public for everyone to see,” she said.Schumer said that Republicans have likely mostly been silent on the ruling because “they’re afraid to speak out”.“That is outrageous. They are letting the … extreme wing of their party … run the whole show,” he said. “They have an obligation to speak out or they are complicit in taking away mifepristone for tens of millions of Americans.”Beyond the justice department appeal, it is unclear what other course of action Demcrats are planning to take to combat the ruling. Schumer and Murray were asked by a reporter if there is any possibility that the federal government could take similar action to Washington state, where governor Jay Inslee announced on Tuesday that his administration would stockpile thousands of abortion pills for his constituents in anticipation of it becoming difficult to access.“Our very first action is to make sure that this does not go into effect,” Murray said. “Our most important task is to have this appealed.”Also on Saturday, more than 40 House Democrats sent Joe Biden a letter calling on the president to “use all the tools at your disposal to protect access to abortion and reproductive healthcare”.The representatives said that in addition to legal action against the ruling, the White House should defend the authority of the FDA and meet with the pharmaceutical industry to “discuss possible ramifications of an unfavorable decision regarding market access to medication abortions and the implications it will have on the [FDA] drug review process at large”. More

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      Democrats condemn judge’s ‘draconian’ decision threatening abortion drug

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      Democrats angrily denounced as “dangerous” and “draconian” a decision by a Texas judge that threatens access to a widely used abortion medication, while demanding the Joe Biden White House do more to protect reproductive rights.Nearly a quarter-century after the Food and Drug Administration approved the abortion pill mifepristone, the federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on Friday sought to invalidate the agency’s decision, handing down an unprecedented order that – if upheld – would severely restrict access to one of the most commonly used methods of terminating a pregnancy.In a dueling court ruling, handed down moments after, a judge in Washington state contradicted the Texas decision, ordering the FDA to maintain the “status quo” availability of mifepristone.With the future of access to medication abortion in potential jeopardy, even in states where the procedure remains legal, Democrats, reproductive rights advocates and providers vowed to keep fighting to protect the drug’s availability.In a statement, Biden called the ruling the “next big step toward the national ban on abortion that Republican elected officials have vowed to make law in America” and pledged to fight Kacsmaryk’s decision. On Friday night, the justice department gave notice that it would appeal the Texas ruling and said it was reviewing the Washington decision.The conflicting court orders left much uncertainty about the future of abortion access, probably elevating the issue to the US supreme court. With little faith in a majority conservative court that overturned Roe v Wade, Democrats are urging the administration to act more aggressively.“Ignore this ruling,” the US senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, said, arguing that the FDA has the authority to disregard the decision by Kacsmaryk, who was appointed to the federal bench by the Donald Trump White House.Wyden added: “The FDA, doctors, and pharmacies can and must go about their jobs like nothing has changed and keep mifepristone accessible to women across America.”Mifepristone is the first pill in a two-drug medication abortion regimen, which is approved for use through the 10th week of pregnancy. More than half of abortions in the US rely on the medication, and the Texas decision, if allowed to stand, would have severe ramifications for access.The president of the abortion rights group All* Above All, Morgan Hopkins, said Biden’s administration must “act immediately to ensure medication abortion care remains available, without interference from politicians or judges”.Since the supreme court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, administration officials have moved to expand access to abortion medication and protect patients seeking care who travel to states where the procedure is legal. But the White House has so far resisted calls from reproductive rights advocates to declare a public health emergency for abortion.Biden has insisted, as he did again on Friday, that the “only way to stop those who are committed to taking away women’s rights and freedoms” is to elect candidates who will codify abortion protections into federal law.The Texas ruling comes days after a liberal judge won a commanding victory to serve on the Wisconsin supreme court in a contest that underscored the enduring potency of abortion politics. The judge, Janet Protasiewicz, had effectively promised voters that if they elected her, flipping the ideological balance of the court from conservative to liberal, the new majority would overturn Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban.Successive victories in favor of abortion rights from Kansas to Michigan have galvanized Democrats, who say the issue was key to their unexpectedly strong showing in last year’s midterms. The party plans to continue harnessing voter anger over the loss of federal abortion protections in upcoming elections.“The Republican party is playing with fire,” said Cecile Richards, a former president of Planned Parenthood who is now a co-chair at American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic organization. “They have put their rightwing politics ahead of the health and wellbeing of American women. They are trying to strip Americans of our basic rights to control our bodies and our futures.”Laphonza Butler, president of Emily’s List, said the group was “working overtime to replace Republicans up and down the ballot with Democratic pro-choice women who are committed to protecting our reproductive freedoms no matter what”.Democrats were quick to cast the decision by Kacsmaryk, who had written critically of the Roe precedent, as part of a broader effort by conservatives to erode women’s reproductive rights.“This judge’s ruling is bullshit,” tweeted Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat of Nevada who narrowly won re-election last year after making abortion rights a central issue of her campaign.The Democratic Connecticut senator Chris Murphy added in a statement: “We cannot allow rightwing judges to ignore the science, and put the health, safety, and autonomy of millions of women at risk.”And Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the US House Democratic leader, said Republican efforts to restrict access to abortion care were “like a malignant tumor” spreading across the US.Yet despite their fury, congressional Democrats see few legislative options. With Republicans in control of the House, and Senate Democrats unable to eliminate the 60-vote legislative filibuster, efforts to protect abortion access are all but certain to fall short.Nevertheless, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, said his caucus was “relentlessly working to protect a woman’s right to choose from this extreme … Republican agenda” and recommitted to passing the Women’s Health Protection Act, legislation that seeks to enshrine abortion protections in federal law. But the measure lacks enough support to overcome the filibuster.In response to the Texas judge’s ruling, a number of Democrats renewed calls to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, though they do not have enough support among their caucus to do so.Some prominent conservatives celebrated Kacsmaryk’s decision. For instance, Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, said: “Life won again today”.But some top Republicans, including Trump, the leading contender for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, were silent late on Friday, reflecting a growing unease within the party about the political risks of overreaching on one of the most emotionally charged issues in American politics. More

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      Progressives tout string of wins across US as template for Democrats

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      Progressives in the midwest had three reasons to celebrate on Tuesday. In Wisconsin, the liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz delivered a resounding victory in the state supreme court race, flipping control of the court for the first time in 15 years. In Chicago, the progressive mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson prevailed over Paul Vallas, a more conservative Democrat who ran on a tough-on-crime message. And in St Louis, progressives won a majority of seats on the board of aldermen, the lawmaking body for the city.As they took their victory lap, progressives made clear that they viewed the wins as merely the beginning of a broader trend in America’s elections.“It’s a multicultural, multi-generational movement that has literally captured the imagination of not just the city of Chicago but the rest of the world,” Johnson said in his victory speech. “Let’s take this bold progressive movement around these United States of America.”Several lessons can be learned from Tuesday’s results, progressive leaders say. They hope their victories send a message to Democratic party leaders about the enduring resonance of abortion access, the popularity of progressives’ message and the importance of long-term grassroots organizing. The wins also come at a vital moment for progressives, who have criticized Joe Biden’s recent move toward the political center on issues such as energy and crime.“We’re building a project all across this country, and that project is ascendant,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families party. “It’s both a culmination of years of organizing, and it’s a validation of the popular appeal of that project.”Abortion as ‘a winning issue for Democrats’Reproductive rights appeared to weigh heavily on the minds of Wisconsin voters as they went to the polls on Tuesday. Wisconsin has an abortion ban dating back to 1849 on the books, and anti-abortion advocates have argued that the policy should be enforced following the US supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade last summer.The question of enforcing the 1849 ban is expected to soon come before the state supreme court, and the policy seems likely to be thrown out following Protasiewicz’s win.“We think that there’s a very great chance now that we’ll be able to get this ban off the books and restore access to folks in Wisconsin,” said Ryan Stitzlein, senior national political director of the reproductive rights group Naral. “This is life-changing for folks.”Protasiewicz made the end of Roe a central focus of her campaign, emphasizing her personal support for legal abortion access and attacking her opponent, conservative Dan Kelly, over his past work for the anti-abortion group Wisconsin Right to Life.“I don’t think you can overstate the importance of abortion in this race. Judge Janet led with her support for reproductive freedom,” Stitzlein said.Protasiewicz defeated Kelly by 11 points. The result was extraordinary for the battleground state of Wisconsin, which Biden won by less than one point in 2020. Four years earlier, Donald Trump carried the state with 47.2% of the vote compared with Hillary Clinton’s 46.5%.To Stitzlein, Protasiewicz’s decisive win should dispel any lingering questions over whether abortion access continues to resonate with voters nearly a year after Roe was overturned. Before the 2022 elections, some Democratic strategists suggested abortion would not sufficiently move the needle with midterm voters, but progressive activists firmly rejected that reasoning.“I actually feel strongly that the longer these bans are in place, the more energy and more anger that’s going to be out there because there’s going to be more people that are affected by it,” Stitzlein said. “This is a winning issue for Democrats, for folks that support abortion access because support for abortion access is not partisan, as was demonstrated on Tuesday.”‘Not an overnight coalition’For progressive organizers in Chicago and St Louis, the victories on Tuesday were years in the making.When Johnson turned his attention to the mayoral race in Chicago, he drew crucial support from his longtime progressive allies. He received hefty assistance from the Chicago Teachers Union, where he has worked for the past 10 years as the organization pushed for progressive reform. And when Johnson ran for the Cook county board of commissioners in 2018, he received an endorsement from the United Working Families, an affiliate of the Working Families party.“Brandon is not an overnight sensation; the coalition that he built is not an overnight coalition,” Mitchell said. “This was a coalition that had been measured and patient and consistent over years, slowly aggregating the power to be able to seize the victory on Tuesday.”A similar story unfolded in St Louis on Tuesday. The progressive mayor, Tishaura Jones, and the board of aldermen president, Megan Green, endorsed a slate of candidates who were able to flip three seats on the board. Green, who became board president last year, served as a convention delegate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign.“It’s something that’s seven, eight years in the making,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution. “We’re seeing the fruit of organizing over multiple election cycles.”Our Revolution made 100,000 phone calls and sent 130,000 texts to supporters in St Louis as part of its organizing efforts there, and the group contacted each of its 90,000 Chicago members an average of three times in connection to the mayoral race. The victory in Chicago was particularly meaningful for progressive groups like Our Revolution given that Johnson was outspent nearly two to one on television advertising.“The fact that we were able to out-organize big money with people power, I think, is significant because that usually does not happen,” Geevarghese said. “I think it really speaks to the growing sophistication of the progressive movement as a political force.”‘Another existential election’ on the horizonAs Democrats look ahead to 2024, when they will attempt to maintain control of the White House and the Senate while flipping control of the House, progressives say there are some important takeaways to learn from Tuesday’s results.“There’s something poetic about the victories in Chicago and Wisconsin taking place because there is a through line there,” he said, “both around what people want – which is responsive government, which is an expansion of their freedoms – and also what the opposition was saying.”Mitchell saw “fearmongering” being deployed as a weapon in both Wisconsin and Chicago, particularly around the issue of crime. Vallas, Johnson’s opponent in the mayoral race, received the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police and pledged to “make Chicago the safest city in America”, as he attacked Johnson over his past support for the defund the police movement. In the end, Johnson won the race thanks in part to the support of voters living on the city’s South and West sides, which report some of the highest levels of violent crime.Geevarghese argued that Johnson’s win should prompt some reflection for prominent Democrats, including Biden, who seem fearful of attacks over being “soft on crime”. Progressives expressed dismay last month after Biden signed a Republican bill overturning recent changes to the criminal code of Washington DC.“We were able to talk about a broader vision of community safety, which is having good schools, which is having investment in mental health, which is making sure there’s good jobs,” Geevarghese said of Johnson’s win.Even before the 2024 elections, progressives will have additional opportunities to demonstrate the effectiveness of their message. Philadelphia will hold its mayoral race in November, and every state legislative seat in Virginia will also be up for grabs this fall. Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has called for a 15-week abortion ban.“I think 2024 is an opportunity for us to learn from this coalition that we built and hopefully replicate it in other places, in other states,” Mitchell said. “We’re going to be faced with another existential election on the federal level in not too much time.” More

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      Same world, different planet: Trump’s arrest lays bare US polarization

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      If the US needed a reminder that a rather large group of Americans completely disagree with another very large group of Americans, it got one this week.Donald Trump’s arrest in New York City on Tuesday, when he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in relation to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, was marked by diametrically opposed rallies, commentary and media coverage.For those on the right, the charges were an outrage, a sham, a witch-hunt: evidence of an abuse of political power and proof that the system was attempting to silence their man.For non-Trump supporters, it was justice: recompense, at last, for a man who was dogged by accusations of illegality throughout his presidency, and indeed for decades before that.As Trump was fingerprinted and read his rights on Tuesday, a neat illustration of the divide was on show outside the court.A group of Trump supporters, who had gathered to support their man, chanted: “Fuck Joe Biden”. Yards away, behind a metal barrier, came the opposite chant from people gathered to cheer Trump’s arrest. “Fuck Donald Trump”, the non-Trump voters shouted.As Trump and his lawyers begin to prepare for a trial in the Stormy Daniels case – and brace themselves for other looming lawsuits – some academics believe the country has not been this politically polarized since two sides literally went to war with each other in 1861.“When I look at the numbers that are coming in when we do the polling, I don’t see any daylight in the distance as far as polarization melting away,” said Tim Malloy, polling analyst at the Quinnipiac University Poll.“And that’s not opinion, that’s just looking at the numbers – they really never change.”A recent Quinnipiac survey found that reaction to Trump’s legal travails differed widely between Democrat and Republican voters. Among Democrats, 89% thought the charges against Trump were very serious or somewhat serious. Just 21% of Republicans felt the same.Some 88% of Democratic voters thought that criminal charges being filed against Trump should disqualify him from running for president again. Only 23% of Republicans were of the same view.It mirrors the wider divide over Trump, who retains his unique knack of completely alienating some people, and utterly captivating others. Among Republicans, 73% think the one-term, twice-impeached, criminally charged former president has had a positive impact on the Republican party.Democrats disagree: 93% think Trump’s influence has been negative.It presents a continuing problem for a country that has recently seen its main seat of democracy attacked by thousands of Trump supporters, but in electoral terms, it isn’t great for the Republican party, either.“That the fact that if the election were held today, Biden would beat Trump fairly handily has got to be a huge red flag for Republicans,” Malloy said.The division has worked for Trump previously. From the moment he announced his first presidential campaign, in June 2015, he set out to paint politics as us v them: branding elected officials “losers” who were “morally corrupt”, and would-be immigrants “rapists”.Little has changed.In a rambling speech in Florida on Tuesday, hours after he had been charged, Trump lashed out against basically everyone who doesn’t own a Make America Great Again hat, claiming “our country is going to hell” and accusing “radical left lunatics” of trying to interfere in his run for president.On Truth Social, Trump’s eccentric and misleadingly named social media platform, his followers also received an interpretation of the trial that was completely different from the one in the rest of the world. Democrats have “weaponized our system of laws”, Trump posted, in an effort to drive him out of the 2024 presidential race.A problem for the US is that people listen, and believe him. Outside the Manhattan court on Tuesday, it was no surprise to hear his supporters parrot Trump’s talking points.“This is all just a bunch of BS so that Trump doesn’t run for president,” Shaun Lloyd, a Trump supporter, told the Guardian. “The American people are waking up more than ever, every day, to the truth, and the lies and the Democrats are telling them.”It also doesn’t help that the rightwing media continues to channel lies and misinformation about elections and rival politicians’ behavior. This week some went as far as to hint at violence, with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, telling his audience it was “probably not the best time to give up your AR-15s”, the semi-automatic rifle that has been used in multiple mass shootings.It is difficult to see a path out of the deep polarization in the country, in part because the divide goes to issues that run to race, identity and culture, said Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington.“There is increasing evidence that the best predictor of support for Trump in 2020 (and continuing), in addition to one’s party identification, is not feelings about the economy but racial resentment among white voters,” she said.“For that reason, it seems unlikely that this polarization will decline any time soon. Feelings about race in the US have been continually whipped up by stories of police conduct toward Black people and by a number of Republican Trump supporters, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who find it to their electoral advantage to keep making controversial statements that imply race-baiting.”The divide represents real dangers in the US, beyond the already evident destruction of faith in election integrity, the political gridlock and the inherent unsavoriness of a society at odds with itself.In the two years since Trump left office, polls have shown that one in three Americans – including 40% of Republicans – believe violence against the government is sometimes justified: a number that is at a two-decade high.“We are a nation filled with guns, many of them capable of blasting bodies to pieces,” Hershey said.“A society that’s roiled by conflict can loosen some of those people’s inhibitions. Let’s hope people remember that you can’t kill an idea by killing an individual; ideas can’t be shot.” More

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      Vow of silence: why Biden is saying nothing about Trump’s indictment

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      The biggest news story in the US this week was Donald Trump’s unprecedented appearance at the defendant’s table in a Manhattan courtroom – an event that Joe Biden took pains to appear blissfully unaware of.On the day Trump learned he was facing 34 charges related to falsifying business records in the first-ever indictment of a former American president, Biden spent his day talking on the phone with the French leader, Emmanuel Macron, and Britain’s King Charles III, and presided over a meeting with his science and technology advisers at the White House. And, despite the best efforts of the reporters who follow him around on a daily basis, he ignored all questions about the allegations made by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg.“Look, our focus is going to continue to be the American people. What you all cover is up to all of you, but we’re going to do our best to stay the course, to talk about the issues that matter,” the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Wednesday when asked why the indictment appeared to be a verboten subject at the White House.Observers of Biden’s administration say the strategy is probably a wise one as he heads into a potential rematch next year against Trump, the Republican opponent he bested in the 2020 election. Despite several legislative wins, Biden’s approval ratings have been underwater for months, and CNN on Thursday released a survey that found a majority of Democrats would prefer someone else as their nominee for president in next year’s election.“I think that is sort of the intentional thing. I think they want to keep their distance from what they see as the chaos and divisiveness that Donald Trump creates,” said Navin Nayak, executive director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a former Democratic campaign staffer.This strategy also gives Biden the opportunity to cast Trump as scandal-plagued and unfit for office, and himself as the competent alternative – a tactic he deployed to defeat him in 2020.Biden has yet to say whether he’ll run for a second term, though people close to him have repeatedly said he will. “He says he’s not done,” the first lady, Jill Biden, said in February. Reports from earlier this year indicated the president would announce his re-election campaign sometime after his February State of the Union address – a date that has come and gone. Trump’s prosecution could be one reason for the delay.“Why compete with that?” said the Democratic pollster Carly Cooperman. “I don’t see any reason right now for him to announce that he’s running. He’s already the president, and there’s gonna be all this attention on Trump and his legal battles, at least in the short term. And so I think it’s definitely a reason to push that back a little bit, at minimum.”The former president’s Tuesday appearance at the criminal court in Manhattan was covered by hundreds of journalists, some of whom waited overnight to be in the courtroom when details of the indictment centered on facilitating hush money payments and running a “catch and kill” scheme to suppress negative news stories ahead of the 2016 election were relayed to a scowling Trump.Trump could also soon find himself summoned to courtrooms elsewhere in the US. Fani Willis, the district attorney in the Atlanta-area Fulton county, is investigating Trump and his allies’ failed effort to overturn Biden’s election win in Georgia. In Washington DC, special prosecutor Jack Smith is in the middle of an inquiry into three sources of legal peril for the former president: the classified documents the FBI discovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, his election meddling and the January 6 insurrection.As serious as the allegations in Bragg’s case are – no current or former American president has ever been indicted – Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the White House may view it as the sort of scandal Biden should stay away from.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It wouldn’t surprise me if his team just sees that as almost below the president or not what the president should focus on,” he said. But if Trump were to be charged over the January 6 insurrection or his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, subjects Biden has spoken out against forcefully in the past, that might change the president’s tone.“That’s something where you need the president to be out front. Even if it doesn’t persuade a lot of people, that still is part of the president’s role, to defend the constitutional order,” Schickler said.While Biden may have kept his thoughts about the Manhattan case to himself, Cooperman said the indictment is to the president’s benefit, in part because it serves as a distraction for the discontented public.“By saying nothing, Biden is kind of saying everything,” Cooperman said. “Even if this might help Trump win his own party’s presidential [nomination], I think that from Biden’s perspective, less is more, and being able to say nothing and let that play out is the best thing that he could be doing.” More

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      Unlikely Heroes review: the advisers who helped FDR shape America

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      No modern American political era has been the subject of more books than the 12 years in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. But Derek Leebaert’s personality-driven account of the life and times of our greatest president quickly convinces us there is a place for one more compelling volume.Leebaert’s formal focus is on the four people many agree were the most important deputies to FDR:
      Harry Hopkins, the “son of an itinerant harness maker from Iowa” who became the president’s number one adviser and as secretary of commerce the nation’s “largest employer”, as the New Deal fought to end the massive unemployment of the Great Depression.
      Harold Ickes, who Roosevelt “appointed out of nowhere” to be secretary of the interior, an early advocate for African Americans and Native Americans, the “first American official to be denounced by Hitler” and a “formidable war administrator” who became central to the allies’ victory in the second world war.
      Frances Perkins, secretary of labor and the first woman in the US cabinet, who made the creation of social security a condition of her employment during her job interview on the second floor of Roosevelt’s house on East 65th Street in Manhattan.
      Henry Wallace, the “foremost agronomist” in the western hemisphere who was secretary of agriculture and whose fabled intellectual strength was eventually matched by an extreme naivety about the failings of Joseph Stalin.
      Leebaert’s admirable strategy is to tell us as much about the personal struggles of these four giants as he does about their extraordinary achievements in the greatest administration of all. Part of his thesis is that they were so successful because their boss was as good at exploiting their weaknesses as he was at cultivating their strengths.Leebaert is also masterful at making his history relevant by reminding us of similarities between the challenges Roosevelt faced and issues that bedevil us today.It was during the re-election campaign in 1936 that FDR first talked about how a “concentration of wealth” had generated an “inequality of opportunity”. His more enlightened contemporaries were shocked that chief executive salaries of $100,000 towered over “the $1,200 that barely half of all families could hope for”.Leebaert immediately reminds us how much worse that problem has become in our time, when a “CEO’s job comes at a ratio of 320 to 1 for a worker’s”.There are many other echoes of our own time. We learn about Perkins’ foresight in trying to convince a young New York company, IBM, to invent a way of keeping track of state unemployment records. We are reminded that the original promoters of the America First slogan were the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, a publisher whose greediness and contempt for democracy have been perfectly replicated by Rupert Murdoch.Ickes’ personal struggles provide some of the book’s liveliest passages. First we learn that his “long wretched marriage to a rich divorcée only turned worse after he seduced his stepdaughter”. Almost as soon as he moved into his new office as secretary of the interior, Ickes began an affair with one Marguerite Moser. He dispatched Moser’s fiance to a job in the midwest, then hired his mistress at his own office as well as her female roommate. When the fiance complained that he wanted to come back to Washington, he got a job at headquarters as well.When Ickes started receiving blackmail letters about his affair, at the advice of a White House aide he used “the cruder methods of thuggish interior department investigators”. They persuaded a property manager to open the apartment of the jealous fiance, from which “carbon paper and an incriminating typewriter were removed”. The letters stopped and the fiance lost his government job – but eventually did marry Ickes’ mistress.Ickes’ defiance of convention had much more beneficial effects, as when he began his tenure by ending the segregation of Black and white employees at his department, then hired Black architects and engineers to work on some of thousands of New Deal public works projects.The scope of such efforts is suggested by the fact that in two days, Ickes authorized two of the biggest New York City transportation initiatives: the Lincoln tunnel under the Hudson river, connecting Manhattan and New Jersey, and the Triborough bridge that links three Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis was truly the era when the government worked for its citizens. The Works Progress Administration would eventually employ 9 million Americans over eight years. Between 1933 and 1940, “federal spending would double as tax revenue tripled, which included a Wealth Tax Act in 1935, which raised the top federal rate to 75%”.Also in 1935, the president signed into law his labor secretary’s signature project, the Social Security Act. The year before that, Ickes shepherded the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which ended 50 years of forced assimilation of Native Americans.The struggle to get the US into the second world war is covered with equal thoroughness in the second half of the book, including Ickes’ vital role as one of the first to identify the mortal danger posed by Hitler.Leebaert has written a panoramic history of one of the most successful eras of the US. By the end of his 432 pages, the author has made a convincing case that Roosevelt’s “fractious team of four” may well have been “the single most important to ever have shaped their country’s history”.
      Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      Kyrsten Sinema is readying for a re-election campaign as an independent

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      The Arizona US senator Kyrsten Sinema is preparing for an independent re-election campaign in a move that will not only test whether the former Democrat can build a centrist base apart from her former party – but may also risk splitting votes among Democratic supporters.Earlier this week, Sinema gathered her team in Phoenix and discussed re-election strategies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing anonymous sources. Part of the meetings involved Sinema and her team reviewing slideshows that laid out a timeline of her potential run, as well as timing details, according to the Journal which reviewed the slides.The slideshows covered Sinema’s current communications strategy and highlighted her track record as an independent senator.“Kyrsten is an independent voice for Arizona. As Arizona’s senior senator, she’s committed to ignoring partisan politics, shutting out the noise and delivering real results helping everyday Arizonans build better lives for themselves and their families,” one of the slides said, according to the Journal.Another slide indicated obtaining a poll and opposition research by 30 September and finalizing campaign staff by the end of the year, the Journal reported.Sinema defected from the Democratic party and declared herself an independent last December, days after Democrats and independents secured a 51-49 majority in the Senate.“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” Sinema announced in an op-ed in Arizona Central at the time.The switch came after Sinema, over the last two years, often withheld her support for the Joe Biden White House’s various legislative initiatives, including voting rights protections. That drew the ire of many of her colleagues and supporters of the Democratic president.With Sinema preparing for a re-election campaign, Arizona seems to be in store for a competitive three-way race that also involves Democratic US House representative Ruben Gallego, 43, and unsuccessful 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, 53.According to an individual familiar with Sinema’s campaign, she has brought in $2m this year through March and has approximately $10m “cash on hand”, the Journal reported.Experts speculate that Sinema’s independent re-election campaign could split Democratic votes and set the Republicans up to turn the seat in their favor.Last Thursday, Arizona Democrats announced that they would sue to prevent the moderate organization No Labels from being recognized as a political party for the 2024 elections. The move signals Democrats’ concerns that a third-party candidate may split votes and in turn risk Biden’s re-election as well as bring about a potential Republican majority in the Senate. More