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      Democratic Senator Joe Manchin ‘thinking seriously’ about leaving party

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      The West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is “thinking seriously” about abandoning the Democratic party to run as an independent for Congress or as a third-party candidate for president.“I’m thinking seriously,” Manchin, 75, told a West Virginia radio host on Thursday. “I have to have peace of mind, basically. The brand has become so bad, the ‘D’ brand and ‘R’ brand. In West Virginia, the ‘D’ brand because it’s [the] national brand. It’s not the Democrats in West Virginia, it’s the Democrats in Washington.“You’ve heard me say a million times I’m not a Washington Democrat.”Over the past two years, Democrats and progressives have perhaps called Manchin a million names – “modern-day villain” among them – mainly because the fossil fuel-aligned senator has wielded tremendous power over domestic legislation including efforts to combat the climate crisis and protect voting rights.Democrats hold the Senate by 51-49. Of those 51 senators, three – Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Angus King of Maine and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – are independents already.Sinema became an independent last year. Her future looks in doubt, with a gathering challenge from the Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego. But Democrats fear what might happen if both Sinema and Gallego contest Sinema’s seat: a split vote handing a win to a Republican extremist, potentially Kari Lake.In West Virginia, Manchin is a long way behind the current Republican governor, Jim Justice – himself a former Democrat – in polling regarding the Senate race next year.Manchin was governor of West Virginia between 2005 and 2010, years in which the formerly Democratic state turned sharply right.On Thursday, he told Hoppy Kercheval, host of Talkline on West Virginia Metro News: “I haven’t made any decisions whatsoever on any of my political direction. I want to make sure that my voice is truly an independent voice. When I do speak, I want to be able to speak honestly about basically the extremes of the Democrat and Republican party that’s harming our nation.”Manchin could also run as an independent candidate for president, backed by the campaign group No Labels, an outcome feared and derided by pundits who think such an effort will split the vote and return Donald Trump to the White House.Manchin has long flirted with No Labels. He told Kercheval: “When I get ready to make a decision, I’ll come see you. You just can’t tell how this is going to break. If come January and February of next year these are still the main contenders, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, that’s a whole other scenario.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe president, 80, and his 77-year-old, 78-times charged rival are historically unpopular.“If they are not” the candidates, Manchin said, “that changes the game completely. The bottom line is, ‘Will the middle speak up? Does the middle have a voice?’”Saying “moderate, centrist Republicans” feel they “don’t have a voice anymore”, Manchin said “the Democratic party that I grew up with was … socially compassionate and fiscally responsible … so if we can create a movement that people understand, we could have a voice.“We could make a big, big splash, and maybe bring the traditional parties … [back to] what they used to be.” More

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      Senator Dianne Feinstein hospitalized after falling in her home

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      The California US senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, was hospitalized on Tuesday evening after suffering a fall in her home, a spokesperson said.“Senator Feinstein briefly went to the hospital yesterday afternoon as a precaution after a minor fall in her home,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “All of her scans were clear and she returned home.”TMZ first reported the news. The Feinstein spokesperson, Adam Russell, then told the San Francisco Chronicle the senator was only in hospital for “an hour or two”.At 90, Feinstein is the oldest serving US senator. She has said she will retire at the end of her term next year. Three Democratic House colleagues are competing in the race to succeed her. Former Trump impeachment manager Adam Schiff is facing off against the longtime progressive, anti-war congresswoman Barbara Lee and the rising star and consumer protection crusader Katie Porter.But continued health problems have stoked calls for Feinstein to step aside sooner.Earlier this year, Feinstein was absent from Congress for nearly three months while recovering from shingles. During her hospitalization, some progressive House Democrats publicly called on her to resign, saying she had grounded the push to confirm Joe Biden’s judicial nominees. Leading Democrats, including Biden and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, publicly stood beside her.Since her return, Feinstein has at times appeared frail and confused. The Chronicle said Feinstein had been due to attend an event celebrating San Francisco’s cable cars on 2 August, but had missed it after developing a cough.The first woman to be mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein was elected to the US Senate in 1992. As a senator, she led the effort to pass a landmark 1994 assault weapons ban. Between 2017 and 2021, she led Democrats on the judiciary committee, where she helmed a landmark investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.Feinstein’s health challenges have renewed attention on the age and health concerns of some of the US’s most prominent politicians and fueled debates about age limits for members of Congress.The 81-year-old Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has suffered a number of falls and last month froze during remarks to reporters, prompting both expressions of concern and calls for him to step down.At an event in Kentucky on Saturday, McConnell was heckled with calls of “Retire!”The two candidates expected to contest the presidential election next year, the Democratic president, Joe Biden, and the former Republican president Donald Trump, are 80 and 77 respectively.But Feinstein’s age and health problems – side effects of shingles include encephalitis, or swelling of the brain – came into sharp focus when she was absent from Congress, given the need for her vote on judicial nominations.Some observers said calls for her to retire were ageist and sexist, and would not have been aimed at the likes of Chuck Grassley, the 89-year-old Iowa Republican who also sits on the judiciary committee.Rejecting such claims, the Vanity Fair columnist and politics podcaster Molly Jong-Fast said Feinstein was “fundamentally … a public servant, there to serve the public. And this idea that somehow because she’s a woman or because she’s older that she should be immune from [calls to quit] is really ridiculous”.Feinstein has defended her ability to perform her job, though her office said in May that she was still experiencing vision and balance impairments from the shingles virus.If Feinstein resigns before the 2024 election, Gavin Newsom, the California governor, would name her replacement, potentially reordering the race to succeed her. The governor said in 2021 that he would nominate a Black woman to fill the seat if Feinstein were to step aside.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Data says Americans are becoming more conservative. What’s going on? | Jill Filipovic

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      Earlier this summer, Gallup published some surprising numbers: more Americans identified as “socially conservative” than at any time in about a decade. Thirty-eight per cent said they were “conservative” or “very conservative” when it came to social issues, as opposed to 29% who said they were “liberal” or “very liberal”. A year earlier, 33% were on the conservative side, and 30% liberal.What accounts for the rightward shift?While these numbers tell us something interesting about personal identification, they don’t actually tell us all that much about policy. “Social issues” wasn’t defined by the Gallup pollsters, leaving respondents to interpret the term for themselves. But the line between “social issues” and “economic issues” isn’t all that clear. Is income inequality a social issue, an economic issue, or both? What about abortion, which has long been defined as a social issue, but has huge economic impacts for women and their families?What primarily seems to be driving the change is the Biden era.The last time we saw a similar peak in self-described social conservatism was in 2009, the year Barack Obama took office. Social conservatism hit a low in 2021, when Biden was inaugurated after a horrific and deadly pro-Trump insurrection brought national shame to the country and to the Republican party in particular.But it has steadily ticked up since then. And the shift has been driven largely by Republicans, whose conservative/very conservative identification on social issues has grown by 14 points since 2021. Independents have shifted rightward on social issues by five points. Democrats have stayed steady.Republicans, in other words, have doubled down on conservative identity now that their party is out of the White House. And that makes sense: being in the political opposition is often more motivating than being in charge, and feeling like your policy preferences are being sidelined can make you dig in harder than when you feel like you’re winning.There’s also been an age-related shift. While most age groups, aside from those over 65 who stayed more or less even, shifted rightward, the biggest shift – 13 points – was among those aged 30 to 49 (50-to-64-year-olds shifted by 11 points, while adults under 30 moved to the right by six points). This, too, may not be all that surprising: one’s 30s and 40s are the years when many adults find themselves turning inwards, toward nuclear family and home life, which can be a conservatizing force (for women, marriage tends to create a shift to the right; having children, for both sexes, may do the same).There’s actually not much evidence that Americans are growing more conservative when you break it down issue by issue. Support for abortion rights is at record highs, with even many Republicans wanting the government out of women’s uteruses. And Americans aren’t just more pro-choice broadly; they are now more likely to support abortion without restriction.Support for LGBTQ rights is also widespread. Seventy-one per cent of Americans support same-sex marriage rights. Sixty-six per cent favor allowing trans people to serve in the military. And 93% say gay people and lesbians should have the same job opportunities and protections as straight people.When it comes to guns, most Americans want stricter laws. And most Americans also say that more needs to be done to make racial equality a reality.It’s clear that Americans are a more liberal bunch than can be captured by amorphous self-identity questions. One issue, though, is different: crime.According to Gallup data from last year, 56% of Americans said there was more crime in their area than in the previous year – the highest percentage since Gallup began asking the question in 1972. And 78% said they believed crime was up nationwide. Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to believe crime was up, but 42% of Democrats believed crime in their area had risen. And most Democrats also believe that crime is up nationwide.Perception, of course, is not reality. “Crime” is also one of those amorphous terms – are we talking about murders or porch pirates or wage theft, or all of the above? The numbers generally show that, while there was a spike in violent crime during Covid, crime remains lower than it was at its peak in the 1990s. But crime statistics are notoriously poorly tracked, which leaves us with limited data. And “things aren’t as bad as they were at the height of violent crime in modern America” isn’t exactly comforting.People also tend to vote on perception, not data. If the general perception is that crime is rising, that can push voters to the right, as the Republican party has pretty firmly entrenched itself as the party of law and order. This is ironic, given that Republicans’ anything-goes stance on gun control fuels America’s endemic violence problem, but Republicans’ rhetoric on crime is much more aggressive than Democrats’. Republicans also tend to promote more policing and punitive measures in response to crime, while Democrats are more likely to push broader social investments, including in education and poverty alleviation.When many Americans think about rising crime, what they’re really considering is the general sense of things being safe and orderly or not. A big part of what’s driving the perception of rapidly rising crime, I suspect, is the reality of increasingly visible social dysfunction: homelessness, addiction and anti-social behavior.Since the pandemic, homelessness has surged, and there seems to be a higher number of visibly homeless people who are struggling with mental health disorders, substance abuse disorders or both. In New York City, there has been an 18% increase in the number of people who are sleeping on the streets and in the subways, and for the first time ever the city’s homeless population passed 100,000. The San Francisco Bay Area has seen a 35% rise in homelessness since 2019. Los Angeles has seen its homeless population increase by more than 40% since 2018. Maricopa county, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, has seen its homeless population increase by 72% since 2017.Large west coast cities are plagued by tent encampments, which are often sites of gang activity, illicit drug use and deadly overdoses, sexual violence and crime more broadly. The folks sleeping rough are not the majority of people who are unhoused on any given night, but they are a group that reads as homeless, erratic, potentially dangerous and reflective of broader social malaise. That read may not be kind or fair and accurate, but perceptions rarely are.Adding to the general sense of insecurity and instability are surging drug overdoses and the more amorphous sense – backed up with some data – that people are just acting erratically and badly in all kinds of new and disturbing ways. All of this may be combined into a general sense of “things are bad and seem to be coming apart at the seams” which can manifest as “crime is getting worse” – which in turn can drive people to the right if they don’t think Democrats and liberals are responsive to their concerns.And unfortunately, while mainstream Democrats do largely recognize that crime and concern for general order and stability is a problem, a lot of liberal pundits and people in media, and even some elected officials, deny and deflect. One way to drive people who share your values away from your party and your ideology is to deny what they can see with their own eyes.Luckily, there are a long list of issues that Democrats win on, and voters may be more inclined to vote for politicians who promise to protect the environment, reproductive rights and democracy itself than those who say they’ll “do something” about homelessness (especially if more voters understand that “something” has to be housing) or “get tough” on crime (especially if voters are exhausted by a system of brutal incarceration that doesn’t actually solve the problem).It is a problem for Democrats, though – and for progressive movement-building – if more Americans consider themselves socially conservative, whether their policy preferences perfectly line up with the Republican party or not. The latest numbers may just be a blip, spurred on by conservatives who feel victimized by a Democratic administration.But liberals are already at a disadvantage in a country where only a small minority – roughly one in five – has said for the last 20 years that they are liberal on economic issues, while 40% to 50% have consistently said they’re economically conservative. Republicans don’t represent a majority on policy, but conservatism seems to have a better brand than liberalism: while 40% of Americans say they’re conservative, just 26% say they’re liberal.That doesn’t necessary mean Democrats will always lose elections. But it is bad news for the majority of us who value liberal democracy and want to build a fairer, healthier, safer society.
      Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness More

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      Elvis Presley’s cousin is Democratic candidate for Mississippi governor

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      A cousin of Elvis Presley is the Democratic candidate for governor in Mississippi, after winning his primary unopposed on Tuesday.The general election will be held on 7 November. The Democrat, Brandon Presley, said he would advocate for people who struggle to make ends meet.He will face the current Republican governor, Tate Reeves, who defeated two first-time candidates, John Witcher, a physician, and David Hardigree, a military veteran.“The national Democrats think Mississippi is theirs for the taking,” Reeves told supporters in Jackson. “They’ve circled our state, and they’ve hand-picked their candidate … these national Democrats think they can use him to inject their liberal ideology into Mississippi under the guise of being a moderate.”Presley said: “This race is going to come down to … which candidate, and I believe that’s me, has got guts and the backbone to stand up for the people of Mississippi and which candidate has consistently showed us that he will do whatever his lobbyist buddies want him to do and will not stand up for the people of Mississippi.”Mississippi is one of three states holding races for governor this year. Despite Republicans holding all statewide offices for 20 years, the Democratic Governors Association chair, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, has predicted a Democrat could win.In his hometown, Nettleton, Presley took the stage at his victory party to See See Rider, a song Elvis Presley often used as walk-on music. The candidate said he would not sing, though.“We’re trying to get votes,” Presley said. “We’re not trying to lose them.”Reeves, 49, became state treasurer in 2003. He had two terms as treasurer and two terms as lieutenant governor before becoming governor in 2019.“Brandon Presley and his party are happy to see people go on welfare,” Reeves said. “He campaigns on wanting more welfare. He thinks welfare is a destination. I think … a job is a destination for everyone in Mississippi – a job with benefits and healthcare and a chance to move up in the world.”Reeves often touts two laws: one in 2021 that prohibits transgender people from playing on girls’ or women’s sports teams and one this year that bans gender-affirming healthcare to people younger than 18.Reeves signed an income tax reduction into law last year and wants to eliminate state income tax. He says he has fulfilled a 2019 promise to increase teacher pay.“Mississippi has momentum, and this is Mississippi’s time,” Reeves said. “To believe Brandon Presley’s campaign, you’ve got to believe that none of that is true.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPresley, 46, a member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission, has highlighted the challenges of working families in one of the poorest states. Born a few weeks before his famous relative died, he often talks about growing up in a home where his widowed mother had trouble paying bills with a modest paycheck.“Tate Reeves doesn’t care anything about us. He doesn’t care anything about working people,” Presley said. “If you can’t write a campaign check, or you’re not part of his little club of buddies and insiders, you’re shut out of state government.”Presley says he wants to eliminate a 7% state tax on groceries. He also says Mississippi should join 40 states that have expanded Medicaid coverage to people working low-wage jobs that do not provide private insurance.Dr Martha Morrow, an optometrist, said she supported Presley because she sees him as an honest person who wants to improve the quality of life. Morrow said it was crucial to expand Medicaid.“We’re going to have to stop the rural hospitals from closing,” Morrow said. “Tate Reeves can say all he wants to that it’s not a problem. It’s a problem. If you’re sick and you can’t get to a hospital because your hospital’s closed – people are dying already. And it’s going to continue.”Reeves and Presley will also face an independent, Gwendolyn Gray, a 68-year-old newcomer who leads a non-profit, the Southern Foundation for Homeless Children, and says one of her main concerns as governor would be alleviating poverty. More

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      ‘These people are diehard’: Iowa Trump supporters shrug off indictments

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      From his corner of rural Iowa, Neil Shaffer did more than his fair share to put Donald Trump in the White House and to try to keep him there.Shaffer oversaw the biggest swing of any county in the US from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, and increased the then president’s share of the vote four years later. But the chair of the Howard county Republican party is not enthusiastic at the prospect of yet another Trump presidential campaign, and he blames the Democrats for driving it.“Honestly, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with these prosecutions,” he said. “Why is Trump doing so well? Because people feel like they are piling on him. If this is the Democrats’ effort to make him look bad, it hasn’t. It’s probably going to make him the [Republican] nominee and, honestly, he may win the general election again. And then whose fault would it be?”After pleading not guilty on Thursday to federal charges over his attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, Trump denounced the indictment as “a persecution of a political opponent”.“If you can’t beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him,” he said.There are plenty who buy that line in Iowa and the rest of Trump-sympathetic America.With Trump likely to spend a good part of the next year in one courtroom or another, after being indicted in New York, Florida and Washington on an array of charges and with more expected in Georgia before long, his supporters are more than willing to believe it is a plot to keep their man out of the White House.One of them is Tom Schatz, a Howard county farmer on Iowa’s border with Minnesota.“They’re bringing the charges against Trump so he can’t run against Biden. Biden is so damn crooked. We’ve never had this kind of shit in this United States, ever,” he said. “Democrats are gonna keep riding [Trump’s] ass and bringing shit up against him. They don’t quit. They just don’t like him because he’s draining the swamp, and they don’t like that.”Schatz, like many Trump supporters, sees the prosecutions as part of a pattern of establishment attacks, from Congress twice impeaching the then president to the FBI’s investigation into alleged ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign. The same message is hammered home on rightwing talk radio stations that are often the background to the working day in rural America.On the day of Trump’s arraignment, Buck Sexton, a former CIA analyst on AM 600 WMT in Iowa, was energetically telling his listeners, without irony, that the prosecutions undermined confidence in the electoral system.“We are up against something we have never dealt with before,” he said. “They don’t care how reckless this is, the Democrats. It doesn’t bother them the disruption that they are doing to faith in the judicial system, faith in our elections, something that he’s talked about all the time. How can you have a fair election when one candidate has soon to be four criminal trials against him? Specifically timed to happen during the election.”Shaffer, who works for the state as a river conservationist as well as running a family farm, has watched Trump’s support rise, fall and then bounce back.Some support drained away to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, after several prominent candidates backed by the former president lost in the midterm elections last November. For a while, polls put DeSantis ahead of Trump in a primary matchup. Shaffer said his county party was split, although at the time he still thought Trump would win because his supporters had more energy and commitment.“Now I think it’s even more so. When I speak up for DeSantis at our Republican monthly meeting, these people wearing their Trump hats don’t want to hear it. It’s such a foregone conclusion. Trump is going to get the nomination easily, whether he’s in a jail cell or in the courtroom. These people are that diehard,” he said.Shaffer sensed the renewed vigor in Trump’s campaign when he met the former president days before the latest indictment, at the Iowa Republican party’s annual fundraising Lincoln Dinner. Trump was among 13 candidates there to argue their case before meeting party activists one on one. So was his former vice-president, Mike Pence.“I feel bad for Pence because there were 500 people in line to see Trump and there were literally five people in the room for Pence,” said Shaffer. “Trump has that connection. Most of our group was there just to meet him.”Shaffer said the line to see DeSantis was longer than for Pence but nothing like the one for Trump, which he took as further evidence that the rightwing Florida governor’s moment had passed and that the the prosecutions helped revive Trump’s candidacy.“I think DeSantis is awesome. I think he’ll make a great president someday. But as long as Trump is running, there’s no way he’s gonna get the nomination,” he said.The polls back Shaffer’s view. But among some Howard county voters, support for Trump is more ambivalent.Tom Schatz’s son, Aaron, was a reluctant Trump voter in 2016. He voted for Obama but didn’t like Hillary Clinton. He was much more enthusiastic about Trump four years later but has cooled on him since.For all that, Schatz believes the former president is the victim of a political conspiracy.The dairy and corn farmer said he was more concerned about inflation, rising interest rates and falling prices for his milk than the details of the 45-page indictment laying out Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. He preferred to see the charges as evidence of a double standard in which the Washington establishment failed to properly investigate Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden for alleged crimes.Asked about Trump’s part in the January 6 storming of the Capitol, Schatz brushed it off as a bad thing but not very different from what he said were Democratic politicians encouraging the protests and riots that followed the killing of George Floyd three years ago.“They burned down Minneapolis. Were they prosecuted for that?“ he asked. “Trump acted poorly when he lost, I’ll give them that. But they’re just out to get anything they can on him. Part of me thinks that all they’re going to do is unite the Trump followers. I think they’re doing more harm than good.”Shaffer, too, is not persuaded by the detail of the indictment.“I still don’t like a lot of what Trump was doing, a lot of what he was saying. People know he didn’t handle himself very well from election day through January 6. But does it rise to the level where he should go to jail because he said something in a phone call? I think we’re more adult than that,” he said.Suspicions about the barrage of indictments even extends to the chair of Howard county’s Democratic party, Laura Hubka, a US navy veteran and ultrasound technologist at the city’s hospital who has no like of Trump.“I think that they’re going after him because he’s running,” she said. “Did he break laws and is he a bad guy? Yeah. But I think if he just went into the sunset, and blathered on Truth Social, maybe they would just have left him alone. But once he ran again, people thought he’s popular enough to win again and we need to do something to stop him. They had to do something, I guess.”The impact of Trump’s coming trials, and the evidence they lay bare, remains to be seen. But it might be expected that while diehard supporters will remain loyal through it all, those who voted for him once but then swung to Biden four years later have little reason to switch back.Trump was defeated by 7m popular votes and 74 electoral college ballots in 2020, and some Democrats are calculating that he will struggle to overcome that deficit with the additional baggage of indictments, trials and possibly even prison time.Yet the polls show the US’s two most recent presidents tied, including in key swing states such as Michigan.“Every time they indict him, he goes up in the polls,” said Shaffer. “I think the Democrats are so arrogant. Some of the liberals believe that, just like they did in 2016, he’ll never be elected, he’ll never get in again. Don’t be too sure about that.”For her part, Hubka cannot believe that the polls are that close even if the election is more than a year away.“I feel like he could be running from prison and it’ll still be a tight race with Joe Biden. That’s what scares me,” she said.Which raises a question about why the Democrats are not doing better in a former stronghold like Howard county.Shaffer says Howard county is doing well in many ways, and thanks to Biden. He said the presidents’s Inflation Reduction Act has pumped money into the county, paying to renew infrastructure, including bridges and roads. Shaffer’s conservation work for the state is well funded thanks to the federal government, and that brings financial benefits to farmers. In addition, the push for green energy has resulted in a proliferation of very profitable windmills.“We’ve got a lot of windmills around here and it’s a huge benefit. Each one of those is valued at a million dollars and we’re able to tax them and it puts money in our budget so we can build bridges and roads and have money for the schools,” said Shaffer.“I’ve got one of my farmers has four windmills and all the roads and lines. He gets $185,000 a year from it. He built a new home. He’s got new tractors. The whole northwest part of the county used to be a more depressed area. The windmills pumped in a lot of money “Shaffer is surprised that, with so many Republicans denouncing renewable energy, the Democratic party isn’t making more of an effort to claim credit for the benefits in Howard county.Hubka blames the Democratic national leadership, which has been accused of overly focusing on parts of the country where a majority of the residents have a college education, unlike rural Iowa.“They need to get some balls, be more bold. I also feel like they just are writing off the rural counties,” she said.But Hubka is still there, campaigning and waiting to see what happens if Trump goes to prison. She bought a gun before the last election because of so many threats from Trump supporters.“I was really very scared that I was going to get shot or hurt. It’s calmed down a bit in that sense. But who knows what happens if he gets thrown in jail,” she said.Around the corner from her hospital, a flag hanging outside a house might be read as a warning: “Trump 2024. The rules have changed.” More

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      Trump looked like ‘scared puppy’ on way to court, Nancy Pelosi says

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      Donald Trump looked like “a scared puppy” before his arraignment in court in Washington on charges related to his election subversion, Nancy Pelosi said, comments likely to anger an ex-president that the former US House speaker has long delighted in baiting.“I wasn’t in the courtroom of course but when I saw his coming out of his car and this or that, I saw a scared puppy,” Pelosi told MSNBC.“He looked very, very, very concerned about the fate. I didn’t see any bravado or confidence or anything like that. He knows the truth that he lost the election and now he’s got to face the music.”Pelosi, 83, stepped down as the House Democratic leader last year but kept her seat in Congress. As speaker, she became a leading hate figure among Republicans, in large part thanks to overseeing Trump’s two impeachments. She and Trump never got on, rarely meeting to discuss government business.The friction between the two was on very public show in February 2020 at the State of the Union address. First, Trump appeared to snub Pelosi’s proffered handshake. Then, Pelosi responded to Trump’s performance by standing from her seat behind him to theatrically rip up his speech.Trump gave Pelosi a signature nickname: Crazy Nancy. He has also called her an “animal”.In federal court in Washington on Thursday, Trump pleaded not guilty to four charges related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.He faces (and denies) 78 criminal counts, including charges over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels and over his retention of classified documents. He is expected to face more charges regarding election subversion in Georgia.On Friday, Trump’s closest – if distant – challenger for the Republican presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis, edged away from Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, as outlined in the indictment obtained by federal special counsel Jack Smith.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” the Florida governor said in Iowa.But like most of the rest of the Republican field, DeSantis has backed Trump’s claim to be the victim of political persecution.Pelosi told MSNBC it was “really sad” Republicans continued to support Trump, adding: “They have to change the subject and they have nothing to offer the American people in terms of jobs and the rest.”The Republican party, she said, “shouldn’t be a cult to somebody frivolous with the law and his puppets”. More

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      Two of expelled ‘Tennessee Three’ Democrats target re-election

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      The Tennessee representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who became Democratic heroes as members of the “Tennessee Three”, are hoping to once again reclaim their legislative seats on Thursday after they were expelled for involvement in a gun control protest on the House floor.The young Black lawmakers were both reinstated by local officials, but only on an interim basis. To fully take back their positions, they must advance through a special election. Both easily cleared their primary election in June, and now face general election opponents for districts that heavily favor Democrats.Jones, who lives in Nashville, is up against the Republican candidate Laura Nelson. Meanwhile, Pearson, from Memphis, faces an independent candidate, Jeff Johnston.“Let’s send a clear message to everyone who thought they could silence the voice of District 86,” Pearson tweeted earlier this month. “You can’t expel a movement!”Jones and Pearson were elected to the GOP-dominated statehouse last year. Both lawmakers flew relatively under the radar, even as they criticized their Republican colleagues’ policies. It wasn’t until this spring that their political careers received a boost when they joined fellow Democrat representative Gloria Johnson in a protest for more gun control on the House floor.The demonstration took place just days after a fatal shooting in Nashville at a private Christian school where a shooter killed three children and three adults. As thousands of protesters flooded the capitol building to demand that the Republican supermajority enact some sort of restrictions on firearms, the three lawmakers approached the front of the house chamber with a bullhorn, and joined the protesters’ chants and cries for action.Republican lawmakers quickly declared that their actions violated house rules and moved to expel their three colleagues – an extraordinary move that has been taken only a handful of times since the civil war.The move briefly left about 140,000 voters in primarily Black districts in Nashville and Memphis with no representation in the Tennessee house.Ultimately, Johnson, who is white, narrowly avoided expulsion while Pearson and Jones were booted by the predominantly white GOP caucus.House Republican leaders have repeatedly denied that race was a factor in the expulsion hearings. Democrats have disagreed, with Johnson countering that the only reason that she wasn’t expelled was due to her being white.The expulsions drew national support for the newly dubbed “Tennessee Three”, especially for Pearson and Jones’s campaign fundraising. The two raised more than $2m combined through about 70,400 campaign donations from across the country. The amount is well beyond the norm for Tennessee’s Republican legislative leaders and virtually unheard of for two freshman Democrats in a superminority.Meanwhile, more than 15 Republican lawmakers have funneled cash to fund campaign efforts of Jones’s Republican opponent, Laura Nelson. Nelson has raised more than $34,000 for the race. Pearson’s opponent, Jeff Johnston, has raised less than $400 for the contest.Thursday’s election will also influence two other legislative seats.In Nashville, the community organizer Aftyn Behn and former Metro councilmember Anthony Davis are currently vying to advance to the general election for a house seat in a district in the city’s north-eastern region that opened after Democratic representative Bill Beck died in June.Meanwhile, in eastern Tennessee, Republican Timothy Hill will face Democrat Lori Love in a general election for Republican-leaning district 3. The seat was left empty when former Republican representative Scotty Campbell resigned following a finding that he had violated the Legislature’s workplace discrimination and harassment policy.Hill served in the state house from 2012 until 2020 and rose to the position of majority whip. He later left his seat to run for an open US House seat in 2020, but lost in a crowded primary to current Republican US representative Diana Harshbarger. More

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      Obama reportedly warns Biden over strength of Trump 2024 challenge

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      Barack Obama has reportedly warned Joe Biden about how strong a challenge Donald Trump will be in their second election battle in 2024, should Trump win the Republican nomination next year as expected.Polling now shows Trump and Biden closely matched for a second presidential contest.At a private White House lunch with Biden in June, Obama also “promised to do all he could to help the president get re-elected”, the Washington Post reported. Citing two sources familiar with the meeting, the Post said Biden welcomed the offer of help from the man under whom he was vice-president between 2009 and 2017.Biden, the newspaper said, “is eager to lock down promises of help from top Democrats, among whom Obama is easily the biggest star, for what is likely to be a hard-fought re-election race”.Trump faces unprecedented legal jeopardy including 78 criminal charges, over hush-money payments, retention of classified information and his attempt to overturn Biden’s election victory in 2020.He is expected also to face election subversion charges in Georgia but his grip on the Republican primary has only tightened with each legal reverse. In Republican polling, Trump enjoys leads of more than 30 points over his nearest rival, the hard-right governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.In 2020, Biden beat Trump by more than 7m ballots and conclusively in the electoral college, a result Trump refused to accept, stoking chaos culminating in the deadly US Capitol attack.Biden and Obama’s relationship has been the subject of widespread reporting and speculation, not least over whether Obama thought Biden should mount a third run for the Democratic nomination in 2020.As a US senator from Delaware, Biden crashed and burned in the primaries of 1988 and 2008, the latter won by Obama, 19 years Biden’s junior. The two men then formed an effective partnership through eight years in power.In 2020, as Biden sought to become the oldest ever president via a campaign based on the need to save “the soul of the nation” from Trump, Obama withheld his memoirs, potentially awkward for his vice-president, until the race was run. But he also long withheld his endorsement.After Biden overcame a rocky start to surge to the nomination, in large part with the support of African American voters, Obama helped drive home his success.Tensions have reportedly remained. For one striking example, the authors Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns described, in their book This Will Not Pass, how Biden, now 80, told one adviser: “I am confident that Barack is not happy with the coverage of this administration as more transformative than his.”Among major challenges, Biden has faced the Covid pandemic, strong economic headwinds, a US body politic under attack from Trump’s extremist Republican party, and the need to marshal global support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. Despite widely acknowledged successes, his popularity ratings remain stubbornly low.Eric Schultz, an Obama adviser, did not comment to the Post about the June lunch.“We place a huge emphasis on finding creative ways to reach new audiences, especially tools that can be directly tied to voter mobilization or volunteer activations,” Schultz told the paper. “We are deliberate in picking our moments because our objective is to move the needle.”A Biden campaign spokesperson, TJ Ducklo, said: “President Biden is grateful for [Obama’s] unwavering support, and looks forward to once again campaigning side-by-side … to win in 2024 and finish the job for the American people.” More