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      Wisconsin governor slashes tax cuts and boosts school funding – for centuries

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      Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, signed off on a two-year spending plan on Wednesday after gutting a Republican tax cut and using his broad veto powers to increase school funding for centuries.Evers angered Republicans with both moves, with some saying the Democratic governor was going back on deals he had made with them.Wisconsin governors have broad partial veto power and Evers got creative with his use of it in this budget, which is the third passed by a Republican legislature that he’s signed.He reduced the GOP income tax cut from $3.5bn to $175m, and did away entirely with lower rates for the two highest-earning brackets. He also edited the plan to increase how much revenue K-12 public schools can raise per student, by $325 a year until 2425.Evers, a former state education secretary and teacher, had proposed allowing revenue limits to increase with inflation. Under his veto, unless it’s undone by a future legislature and governor, Evers said schools will have “predictable long-term spending authority”.“There are lots of wins here,” Evers said of the budget at a signing ceremony surrounded by Democratic lawmakers, local leaders, members of his cabinet and others.Republicans blasted the vetoes.The Republican assembly speaker, Robin Vos, said allowing the school revenue limit to increase effectively forever would result in “massive property tax increases” because schools will have the authority to raise those taxes if state aid isn’t enough to meet the per-pupil cost. He also said scaling back the tax cut put Wisconsin at an economic disadvantage to neighboring states that have lower rates.Vos did not say if Republicans would attempt veto overrides, an effort that is almost certain to fail because they would need Democratic votes in the assembly to get the two-thirds majority required by state law.Republicans proposed tapping nearly half of the state’s projected $7bn budget surplus to cut income taxes across the board and reduce the number of tax brackets from four to three.Evers kept all four brackets. The remaining $175m in tax cuts over the next two years is directed to the lowest two tax rates, paid by households earning less than $36,840 a year or individuals who make less than $27,630. Wealthier payers will also benefit from the cuts but must continue to pay higher rates on income that exceeds those limits.Evers was unable to undo the $32m cut to the University of Wisconsin, which was funding that Republicans said would have gone toward diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – programming and staff. The budget Evers signed does allow for the university to get the funding later if it can show it would go toward workforce development and not DEI.Evers previously threatened to veto the entire budget over the UW cut. But on Wednesday, he used his partial veto to protect 188 DEI positions in the university system that were slated for elimination under the Republican plan.Another of Evers’ vetoes removed a measure that would have prohibited Medicaid payments for gender-affirming care. The governor accused Republicans of “perpetuating hateful, discriminatory, and anti-LGBTQ policies and rhetoric” with the proposal.No Democratic lawmaker voted for the budget, but most stopped short of calling for a total veto.Evers ignored a call from 15 liberal advocacy and government watchdog groups that had urged him to “fight like hell for our collective future” and veto the entire budget, which they argued would further racial and economic inequality.Evers said vetoing the entire budget would have left schools in the lurch and meant rejecting $125m in funding to combat water pollution caused by so-called “forever chemicals”, also known as PFAS, along with turning down $525m for affordable housing and pay raises for state workers.No governor has vetoed the budget in its entirety since 1930. This marks the third time that Evers has signed a budget into law that was passed by a Republican-controlled legislature. In 2019, he issued 78 partial vetoes and in 2021 he made 50. That year, Evers took credit for the income tax cut written by Republicans and used it as a key part of his successful 2022 re-election campaign.This year he made 51 partial vetoes.The budget also increases pay for all state employees by 6% over the next two years, with higher increases for guards at the state’s understaffed state prisons. More

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      White House calls on Republicans to act on gun control after Fourth of July weekend killings – as it happened

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      From 2h agoWhite House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called on Republicans to support tighter gun restrictions after the Independence Day holiday weekend was marred by mass shootings across the United States.“As we have seen over the last few days, there’s a lot more … work to do to address the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing up our communities,” Jean-Pierre said, pointing to Joe Biden’s support for legislation approved by Democrats and some Republicans in Congress last year that included modest steps to prevent mass shootings.“He also knows that that is not enough. Which is why, on the heels of the tragedies we saw unfold across the last few days, the president continues to call on Republican lawmakers in Congress to come to the table and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to require safe storage of guns, to end gun manufacturers, immunity from liability and to enact universal background checks.”Jean-Pierre continued:
      Lives are at stake here, folks, lives are at stake … these are meaningful, common-sense reforms that the American people support, the majority of the American people support these reforms. And we need Congress to do something, we need Republicans in Congress to do something to protect our communities.
      Once again, America is dealing with the aftermath of mass shootings, both those that occurred over the just-concluded Independence Day holiday weekend, and others less recent. A man accused of killing five people in Philadelphia has been arraigned on charges that include murder, one of more than a dozen mass shootings that happened as Americans gathered to celebrate the country’s independence. But there were few festivities in Highland Park, Illinois, where a ceremony was held to memorialize the deaths of seven people and wounding of dozens more by a shooter last year. And in Texas, a gunman who killed 19 people at a Walmart in El Paso is expected to receive multiple life sentences today after pleading guilty to federal charges.Here’s a rundown of what happened today:
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the violent weekend is proof Republicans must support tighter restrictions on firearms.
      A gun violence researcher told the Guardian’s US politics live blog that widespread gun violence represents a “new normal” for the annual Independence Day celebrations.
      That was indeed cocaine discovered at the White House, testing confirms. The powder was reportedly found in an area where visitors lock up their cellphones, and the Secret Service is investigating.
      More details of the government’s reasoning for searching Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort could become public, after a judge ruled that portions of the search warrant affidavit should be unsealed.
      Global average temperatures on Monday and Tuesday broke records, data indicates.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also responded to a federal court ruling from Tuesday that curbed the ability of Biden administration officials to meet with social media firms over the content they allowed on their platforms.Here’s what Jean-Pierre had to say:The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington spoke to a top disinformation expert, who warned the ruling could undermine efforts to fight lies spread over social media ahead of next year’s presidential elections:
      Nina Jankowicz, a specialist in disinformation campaigns, told the Guardian that an injunction imposed by a federal judge on Tuesday against key federal agencies and officials blocking their communication with tech platforms could unleash false information in critical areas of public life. She said that election denialism and anti-vaccine propaganda could be the beneficiaries.
      “This is a weaponisation of the court system. It is an intentional and purposeful move to disrupt the work that needs to be done ahead of the 2024 election, and it’s really chilling,” she said.
      In Tuesday’s ruling, a federal judge from a US district in Louisiana imposed tough restrictions on federal agencies and officials liaising with social media companies over online content. The injunction comes amid mounting pressure from Republican leaders and rightwing groups claiming collusion between the Biden administration and social media platforms to censor conservative speech.
      The judge, Terry Doughty, sided with Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri who sued the Biden administration, claiming it violated the first amendment right to free speech. He ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits in showing that the government “has used its power to silence the opposition”.
      He added that the Biden administration’s handling of social media content during the Covid pandemic resembled the “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’”.
      If the allegations raised by the Republican officials were true, Doughty wrote, they would involve “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre didn’t have much to say about the cocaine found in the White House over the weekend.The Secret Service is investigating, she said, and noted that the substance was found in a “heavily traveled area”:Joe Biden, who was not at the White House this weekend, did not respond to a question from a reporter about the cocaine during his meeting with Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristersson.The wave of mass shootings that occurred over the Fourth of July weekend was fueled by factors including the easy access to firearms in America and higher temperatures, and shows no sign of stopping, a gun violence researcher warns.“Unfortunately, I think this is our new normal when you factor in numbers of guns on the street, a holiday weekend and soaring temperatures. Given the way the country is right now with our lax gun policies and rising rates of shootings, I believe this is the way things are and tragically not an aberration from the norm,” the Vanderbilt University sociology professor Jonathan Metzl told the Guardian’s US politics live blog.When it comes to stopping these tragedies, Metzl, who is also research director at The Safe Tennessee Project focused injuries from firearms, says local police and law enforcement agencies can only do so much.“I believe they are as prepared as they can possibly be given the frequency of these tragedies. However, it’s not simply a matter of training or preparedness, and there are quite simply many more guns and many more shootings than any safety department can manage by themselves. The key is prevention,” he said.“We need to rebuild community infrastructure and trust in communal governance – but that this is a much broader issue than a single gun policy or even a series of gun policies can address by themselves. Mass shootings are a symptom of much larger issues.”White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called on Republicans to support tighter gun restrictions after the Independence Day holiday weekend was marred by mass shootings across the United States.“As we have seen over the last few days, there’s a lot more … work to do to address the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing up our communities,” Jean-Pierre said, pointing to Joe Biden’s support for legislation approved by Democrats and some Republicans in Congress last year that included modest steps to prevent mass shootings.“He also knows that that is not enough. Which is why, on the heels of the tragedies we saw unfold across the last few days, the president continues to call on Republican lawmakers in Congress to come to the table and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to require safe storage of guns, to end gun manufacturers, immunity from liability and to enact universal background checks.”Jean-Pierre continued:
      Lives are at stake here, folks, lives are at stake … these are meaningful, common-sense reforms that the American people support, the majority of the American people support these reforms. And we need Congress to do something, we need Republicans in Congress to do something to protect our communities.
      The Philadelphia shooting is the 29th mass killing in the US of 2023. It means the country has witnessed the highest number on record of mass killings and deaths to this point in a single year.Here are some of the other mass killings that occurred this year, from the Associated Press, which maintains a database of these tragedies together with USA Today and Northeastern University:
      Here’s what happened in each US mass killing this year.
      KELLOGG, IDAHO: 18 June
      A 31-year-old man is accused of fatally shooting four members of a neighboring family in their apartment on Father’s Day. The man was upset that the neighbor’s 18-year-old son had reportedly exposed himself to the man’s children, a police document alleges.
      SEQUATCHIE, TENNESSEE: 15 June
      A 48-year-old man is thought to be responsible for killing himself and five others – including three children and his estranged wife – in a home where police responded to a shooting and arrived to find the residence ablaze, authorities said. A seventh person suffered gunshot wounds and was found alive at the home after firefighters extinguished the flames.
      MESA, ARIZONA: 26 May
      A 20-year-old man shot four men to death and wounded a woman in a 12-hour crime spree in metro Phoenix, authorities said. He told police that he met the victims at random that day at a range of places, including a park and a convenience store, and became angry when the subject of drugs came up.
      NASH, TEXAS: 23 May
      Authorities jailed an 18-year-old man in connection with the shootings of his parents, sister and brother inside a home. A victim’s co-worker who went to the home after one of the victims failed to show up for work told police that the man said “he had killed his family because they were cannibals, and they were going to eat him.”
      Away from the gun violence of the weekend, my colleague Ed Pilkington has spoken to a leading disinformation expert after a judge limited the Biden administration’s ability to work with social media companies on moderating content.Nina Jankowicz, who used to lead a government unit aimed at combatting online conspiracy theories, said the decision represented a “weaponisation of the court system” aimed at disrupting efforts to minimise disinformation ahead of the 2024 US elections.Jankowicz was initially named as a defendant in the Missouri case but removed from the suit on grounds that she no longer has a governmental role. In April 2022, she was appointed to lead a new Department of Homeland Security unit devoted to combating online conspiracy theories and false information.The board was shut down days later, after it came under a massive storm of rightwing criticism accusing it of censoring conservative speech.Speaking to the Guardian, Jankowicz said Tuesday’s injunction was the culmination of an ultra-rightwing campaign to crush efforts to constrain disinformation that started with the attack on her board.“They got a win in shutting us down, so why would they stop there? This is why the lawsuit continues – because they’ve won – and nobody knows how to deal with it.”“It’s a weaponisation of the court system that is purposeful in disrupting work that needs to be done ahead of the 2024 election,” she said.Once again, America is dealing with the aftermath of mass shootings, both those that occurred over the just-concluded Independence Day holiday weekend, and others less recent. A man accused of killing five people in Philadelphia has been arraigned on charges that include murder, one of more than a dozen mass shootings that happened as Americans gathered to celebrate the country’s independence. But there were few festivities in Highland Park, Illinois, where a ceremony was held to memorialize the deaths of seven people and wounding of dozens more by a shooter last year. And in Texas, a gunman who killed 19 people at a Walmart in El Paso is expected to receive multiple life sentences today after pleading guilty to federal charges.Here’s a rundown of the day’s events thus far:
      That was indeed cocaine discovered at the White House, testing confirms. The powder was reportedly found in an area where visitors lock up their cellphones.
      More details of the government’s reasoning for searching Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort could become public, after a judge ruled that portions of the search warrant affidavit should be unsealed.
      Global average temperatures on Monday and Tuesday broke records, data indicates.
      The Washington Post reports that the cocaine discovered at the White House was found on the ground floor in an area where visitors leave their cellphones.White House employees can give tours of the building, usually on evenings and weekends, and part of the security protocol involves having visitors leave their cellphones in a locked box. As the for the cocaine, the Post adds that “Authorities are trying to find the person who left it at the White House.”There’s a correlation between heat and homicides, and the Guardian’s Damien Gayle reports that across the world, average temperature records indicate Tuesday was the hottest day ever:World temperature records have been broken for a second day in a row, data suggests, as experts issued a warning that this year’s warmest days are still to come – and with them the warmest days ever recorded.The average global air temperature was 17.18C (62.9F) on Tuesday, according to data collated by the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), surpassing the record 17.01C reached on Monday.Until the start of this week, the hottest day on record was in 2016, during the last El Niño global weather event, when the global average temperature reached 16.92C.On Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization, the UN’s weather body, confirmed El Niño had returned. Experts predicted that, combined with the increased heat from anthropogenic global heating, it would lead to more record-breaking temperatures.The suspect in a mass shooting in Philadelphia on Monday evening that killed five people and wounded four has been arraigned, the Associated Press reports.Kimbrady Carriker, 40, will face charges of murder, among many others. Here’s more on the killings, which took place seemingly at random in a Philadelphia neighborhood, from the AP:
      A 40-year-old accused of killing a man in a house and then gunning down four others on the streets of a southwest Philadelphia neighborhood before surrendering to police officers has been arraigned on murder and other charges.
      Kimbrady Carriker was arraigned Wednesday on five counts of murder as well as charges of attempted murder, aggravated assault and weapons counts of possession without a license and carrying firearms in public, prosecutors said.
      A 2-year-old boy and a 13-year-old youth were also wounded by gunfire and another 2-year-old boy and a woman were hit by shattered glass in the Monday night rampage that made the working-class area of Kingsessing the site of the nation’s worst violence around the July Fourth holiday.
      Police called to the scene found gunshot victims and started to help them before hearing more shots. Some officers rushed victims to hospitals while others ran toward the gunfire and chased the firing suspect.
      Staff Inspector Ernest Ransom, the homicide unit commander, said witness interviews and video indicated that the suspect went to several locations in a ski mask and body armor, carrying an AR-15-style rifle.
      “The suspect then began shooting aimlessly at occupied vehicles and individuals on the street as they walked,” he said. The vehicles included a mother driving her 2-year-old twins home — one of whom was wounded in the legs and the other who was hit in the eyes by shattered glass.
      Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said the “armed and armored individual” was firing “seemingly at random.”
      Cornered in an alley, the suspect surrendered and was found to have not only the rifle but also a pistol, extra magazines, a police scanner and a bulletproof vest, police said.
      Another community is today continuing to grapple with the aftermath of a mass shooting that occurred almost four years ago.Patrick Crusius killed 23 people at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in a 2019 attack targeting Hispanic shoppers, and will be sentenced today after pleading guilty to federal charges. He is expected to receive multiple life sentences, but has also been charged with murder in state court, and could face the death penalty.Here’s more on his case, from the Associated Press:
      A white Texas gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart in 2019 returns to court Wednesday for sentencing in a mass shooting that targeted Hispanic shoppers in the border city of El Paso.
      Patrick Crusius, 24, is set to receive multiple life sentences after pleading guilty to federal hate crime and weapons charges in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. Although the federal government did not seek the death penalty, Texas prosecutors have not taken lethal injection off the table under a separate case in state court.
      Investigators say the shooting was preceded by Crusius posting a racist screed online.
      The sentencing phase could last several days. It is the first time that relatives of the victims, who included citizens of Mexico, will have an opportunity to address Crusius face-to-face in court.
      The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that a federal magistrate judge has ordered additional portions of the affidavit used to justify the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last year be made public:The former president was indicted last month over the government secrets federal agents found during their search of the south Florida property. Media organizations last year argued successfully to unseal portions of the affidavit submitted by investigators to justify the search, but parts of it remained secret.NBC News confirms that the white substance discovered at the White House on Monday was indeed cocaine:Now for the question of who brought it in there, and how did they get it past the building’s strict security. There are no firm answers to that yet, but since the area where it was found is accessible to tour groups, one can assume that the list of suspects is long. Here’s more from the Guardian’s Edward Helmore on the initial discovery:
      A preliminary field test on a white substance found in the White House has reportedly come up positive for cocaine, law enforcement authorities said, and the US Secret Service was investigating on Tuesday how it came to be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
      The presence of the substance – which has been sent out for further testing – came to light late on Monday when a firefighter with the Washington DC fire department’s hazardous materials team radioed: “We have a yellow bar saying cocaine hydrochloride,” the Washington Post first reported.
      A Secret Service spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, told the Post that the discovery led to an elevated security alert and a brief evacuation of the executive mansion after it was found during a routine inspection.
      On 4 July last year, a gunman opened fire at the annual Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, killing seven people and wounding more than 30. One year later, the Chicago suburb commemorated the massacre with a ceremony, as well as some Fourth of July celebration events free of fireworks, the New York Times reports:
      There were no marching bands this year. No floats. No church groups tossing snacks to spectators. No American flags lining the sidewalks.
      Instead, there were prayers. There were tears. And there was a somber stroll down Central Avenue, a collective effort to take back a parade route that was stolen in a storm of bullets.
      Over generations in Highland Park, Ill., a quaint parade through downtown became synonymous with the Fourth of July.
      But in less than a minute last Independence Day, a gunman firing from a rooftop killed seven people, wounded dozens and sent families scrambling for cover, leaving water bottles and red-white-and-blue lawn chairs scattered on the ground.
      As the first anniversary of the massacre approached, city leaders faced a seemingly impossible set of demands: Honor the people who died. Reclaim the parade’s path through downtown. Give people space to celebrate the country’s birthday. And support residents of the Chicago suburb still carrying devastating wounds, mental and physical, from last year.
      “When there are mass shootings in this country, a day or two later, people move on,” Mayor Nancy Rotering said. “But those communities that are directly impacted are carrying this pain and this trauma forevermore.”
      That this past Independence Day weekend was a violent one is not a surprise. As the Guardian reporter who is also writing this blog reports, the Fourth of July is the most mass-shooting prone day over the last four years, research indicates, with the day after it coming in as a close second: Gun violence is a daily reality across the US, but an emerging body of research indicates the most risky day for mass shootings in the nation is the Fourth of July, when Americans celebrate their independence from Britain.Using data from the Gun Violence Archive, James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, found that there have been 52 mass shootings on the Fourth of July over the past decade, averaging just over five a year, and more than on any other given day.His analysis, which he implemented for USA Today, underscores how, in a country where Republicans in many states have acted to loosen gun laws, it is routine that the barbecues, block parties and parades held to commemorate the US’s birthday become scenes of bloodshed.The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington crunched the numbers from the long Independence Day holiday weekend to report just how bad the period was for gun violence across the United States:From the nation’s capital to Fort Worth, Texas, from Florin, California, in the west to the Bronx, New York, in the east, the Fourth of July long weekend in the US was overshadowed by 16 mass shootings in which 15 people were killed and 94 injured.The Gun Violence Archive, an authoritative database on gun violence in America, calculated the grim tally using its definition of a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people excluding the shooter are killed or injured by firearms.The tragic bloodletting was recorded from 5pm on Friday until 5am on Wednesday across 13 states as well as Washington DC. Texas and Maryland both entered the register twice.Good morning, US politics blog readers. Yesterday was the Independence Day public holiday in the United States, and Americans gathered for their customary barbecues and fireworks displays – several of which were marred by gunfire. In Washington DC, nine people were shot and wounded on the evening of 4 July, two of which were minors, while in Tampa, Florida, a seven-year-old was shot and killed. Those shootings came a day after a gunman, firing seemingly at random, killed five people and wounded two in Philadelphia, while another shooting left three people dead and eight wounded in a parking lot in Fort Worth, Texas. The tragedies put Joe Biden in the familiar role of once again decrying gun violence across the United States, a phenomenon he has little control over.Here’s what else we are watching today:
      Biden will host Sweden’s prime minister Ulf Kristersson at the White House at 2pm eastern time.
      Senators and members of Congress are dispersed across the United States, because both the Senate and House of Representatives are still on recess.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will take questions from reporters at 2.15 pm.
      Was cocaine discovered at the White House? The secret service investigation continues.
      The White House is digesting a federal court ruling prohibiting some Biden administration from asking social media companies to moderate their content. More

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      Central Park Five’s Yusef Salaam wins Democratic city council primary

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      Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerated Central Park Five, is all but assured of a seat on the New York city council after being confirmed as the winner of a Democratic primary, an improbable feat for a political novice who was wrongly accused, convicted and imprisoned as a teenager for the rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park.Additional votes released on Wednesday showed Salaam as the clear winner of the primary to represent Central Harlem, which took place last week.“I am here because, Harlem, you believed in me,” he said in his victory speech.Salaam, now 49, and four other Black and Latino teens became known as the Central Park Five after their arrest in 1985 over the headline-grabbing rape of a white jogger, one of the most notorious and racially fraught crimes in New York history.Salaam served nearly seven years in prison before the group was exonerated through DNA evidence.He has now prevailed over two veterans, New York assembly members Inez Dickens, 73, and Al Taylor, 65. The incumbent, the democratic socialist Kristin Richardson Jordan, dropped out of the race in May but remained on the ballot.Salaam declared victory with his vote tally barely exceeding 50%, though an unknown number of absentee ballots were yet to be counted. But his lead over Dickens seemed insurmountable and she and Taylor conceded.While all three candidates focused on promoting affordable housing, controlling gentrification and easing poverty, Salaam capitalized on his celebrity in neighborhoods that consider the Central Park Five to be living symbols of the injustices faced by the Black and Latino residents who make up about three-quarters of the district’s population.Zambi Mwendwa said she voted for Salaam because he is “a new face”, not because of the injustice in his past.“I’ve heard him talk. He seems to be talking about the things I care about,” Mwendwa said.But for others, Salaam’s status as a member of the Central Park Five was a motivating factor.“He comes from the neighborhood, and he was incarcerated then turned himself around,” Carnation France said. “He’s trying to do something for the people.”Salaam’s lack of experience in public office might have worked in his favor, according to Amani Wells-Onyioha, a partner at Sole Strategies, which worked on Salaam’s behalf.“In a time like this, when people are looking for a hero, they’re looking for somebody who can relate to them,” Wells-Onyioha said. “I think people saw him as a survivor. He was vindicated and the system eventually ended up working out for him.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSalaam moved to Georgia after he was released and became an activist, speaker, author and poet. He returned to New York in December.He was 15 when he was arrested with Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise, who served between five and 12 years in prison before prosecutors agreed to re-examine the case.DNA evidence and a confession linked a serial rapist and murderer to the attack, but he was not prosecuted as too much time had passed. The convictions were vacated in 2002 and the city agreed to pay the exonerated men a combined $41m.In 2012 a Ken Burns documentary, The Central Park Five, rekindled public attention. In 2019 a TV miniseries, When They See Us, drew attention again, just before the Black Lives Matter movement launched in response to the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.Burns and his co-directors applauded Harlem voters for “electing a man who has dedicated his life to reconciliation”.Donald Trump, who in 1989 placed ads in four newspapers demanding “Bring Back the Death Penalty” for the Central Park Five, later refused to apologize, saying all five pleaded guilty, a reference to coerced confessions. Salaam reminded voters of that in April, putting out his own full-page ad, headlined “Bring Back Justice & Fairness”, in response to one of Trump’s own indictments. More

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      Supreme court’s student loan decision ‘usurps Congress’s authority,’ says Democrat

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      The US supreme court’s decision to strike down Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan late last week “usurped the authority of Congress”, Democratic House representative Ro Khanna said on Sunday.Khanna, of California, argued that if anyone thought Biden was unduly empowered by the legislation which the president used to issue the debt relief program, “then the solution is Congress can repeal the … act”.Chief justice John Roberts and his colleagues on the supreme court “shouldn’t be overturning the will of Congress just because they think Congress gave too much power to the president,” Khanna said on Sunday on ABC’s This Week.The show’s host, Jonathan Karl, pushed back on Khanna’s stance. Karl played a clip in which former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi – Khanna’s fellow California Democrat – asserted that a president could delay debt repayment but not entirely, single-handedly forgive it.In fact, Karl said, the supreme court quoted Pelosi’s words in the decision that doomed the student debt relief program put forth by Biden.Khanna countered by saying that, after Pelosi’s remarks, the Biden administration solicited a legal analysis of the 2003 Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (Heroes) Act on which the president based his debt forgiveness program.After that analysis, Biden’s staff concluded that the Heroes Act – which enables the government to provide relief to student borrowers amid a national emergency – gave the president authority to cancel or amend the loans in question, Khanna said.The progressive congressman added that he could understand arguments that the Heroes Act – which was passed about two years after the September 11 terrorist attacks – “was way too broad”. But that argument should be advanced in Congress – “it is not for unelected justices to override” federal lawmakers who were chosen by voters, Khanna said.“That’s what this court is doing,” Khanna continued. “It’s very dangerous. They are basically reinterpreting congressional statute to fit their ideological preconceptions.”Khanna’s remarks came days after he spoke to the Guardian about his wish for an extension to an October deadline to resume payments for 40 million students affected by the debt forgiveness program’s defeat.During that interview, he also said the court’s decision to invalidate Biden’s debt forgiveness program proved the institution was “regressive” and in need of reform. Additionally, he pledged to accelerate efforts to pass a bill which would establish term limits for supreme court justices, who currently enjoy lifetime appointments.Three far-right justices on the supreme court – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were appointed during Donald Trump’s presidency.Last week, the conservative supermajority which Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett help form also struck down affirmative action in college admission as well as a Colorado law that compelled entities to afford same-sex couples equal treatment, all about a year after the court eliminated the federal abortion rights established by the landmark Roe v Wade ruling in 1973.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA poll released on Sunday by This Week showed that 52% of Americans believed that supreme court justices ruled “mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law”. That marked a significant increase from January 2022, when only 38% felt that way.However, the poll did show that a majority – 52% – of Americans approved of the decision ending affirmative action in colleges.Khanna said in the short term he would support Biden’s recently announced efforts to implement a new student debt relief plan through the Higher Education Act. That law was unaffected by the supreme court’s ruling involving the Heroes Act.Khanna also called on the president to block student loan interest from accruing beginning in the fall as well.“You have all of these students who have relied on a promise that they are going to have their student loans forgiven,” Khanna said on This Week. “This is a real hardship.”Khanna made clear that past personal experience partly explained his efforts.“I had to take out $150,000 of student loans,” Khanna said. “I’m fortunate now and been able to pay them off.” More

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      The Big Break: Ben Terris on his portrait of Washington after Trump

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      If you were a pollster, would you ever bet on elections? How about your clients’ elections? How about betting your clients would lose? For Sean McElwee, the wunderkind behind the liberal polling group Data for Progress, the answer was all the above.McElwee had clients including the 2022 Senate campaign of John Fetterman, in Pennsylvania. McElwee placed multiple bets on the midterms, including that Fetterman would lose. Fetterman’s organization became displeased. Following its victory, it severed ties with McElwee. It was just the beginning of a dramatic downfall heightened by the pollster’s connections to the pandemic-prevention advocate Gabe Bankman-Fried, whose billionaire brother Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire collapsed in scandal around election day.The rise and fall of Sean McElwee is one of many storylines in a new book The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses its Mind. For the author, the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris, the individuals he profiles tell a collective story about DC processing the fallout from the Trump years.“Nobody knew what the world was going to be like post-Trump,” Terris says, adding: “If there is a post-Trump.”To explore that world, he turned to Democratic and Republican circles: Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an oil heiress turned funder of progressive causes, whose conservative grandfather HL Hunt was reportedly the world’s wealthiest man; Matt and Mercedes Schlapp, a Republican power couple whose fortunes crested after Matt decided to stick with Trump in 2016; Ian Walters, Matt’s protege until political and personal differences ruptured the friendship; Robert Stryk, a cowboy-hatted lobbyist who parlayed Trump connections into a lucrative career representing sometimes questionable clients; and Jamarcus Purley, a Black staffer for the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein who lamented the impact of George Floyd’s murder and the pandemic on Black Americans including his own father, who died. Disenchanted with his boss, Purley lost his job in disputed circumstances and launched an unconventional protest in Feinstein’s Capitol office, after hours.Terris is a reporter for the Post’s Style section, which he characterizes as strong on features and profiles. He can turn a phrase, likening Fetterman to “a Tolkien character in Carhartt”, and has an ear for the telling quote. Once, while Terris was covering the Democratic senator Jon Tester, from Montana, in, of all places, an organic pea field, nature called. A staffer asked: “Can the senator’s penis please be off the record?” Terris quips that he’s saving this for a title if he ever writes a memoir.His current book is “sort of a travelog, not a memoir”, Terris says. “I tried to keep myself out of the book as much as I could. I wanted the reader to feel like they knew Washington, knew the weirdos, the odd scenes … the backrooms, poker games, parties.”Hunt-Hendrix’s Christmas party is among the opening scenes. Attendees include her aunt Swanee Hunt, a former ambassador to Austria. Hunt-Hendrix aimed to make her own mark, through her organization Way to Win.“She’s very progressive,” Terris says, “trying to unwind a lot of projects, in a way, that her grandfather was all about. To me, it was fascinating, the family dynamics at play.”Just as fascinating was her “figuring out how to push the [Democratic] party in the direction she believed it should go in – a more progressive direction than some Democrats pushed for. It told the story of Democratic party tensions – money and politics, the idea of being idealistic and also super-wealthy … All of these things made for a very heady brew.”On the Republican side, Stryk went from running a vineyard to savoring fine wine in a foreign embassy, thanks to his connection to Trump. Stryk joined the campaign in 2016. When Trump won, Stryk celebrated on a patio of the Four Seasons hotel in DC. A dog sniffed his crotch. When its owner apologized, Stryk found she worked for the New Zealand embassy, which was having difficulty reaching Trump. It was Stryk’s lucky break.“He was in a position to connect New Zealand to Trump,” Terris says. “He got a phone number and was off to the races, a sideshow guy making major deals … $5m with the Saudis, that kind of thing.”When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last year, Stryk was in Belarus, exploring a potential relationship with that country’s government. He had to make his way home via the Baltics.“One of the themes of the book is that the Donald Trump era allowed a bunch of sideshow characters to get out on the main stage,” Terris says. “Stryk is a great example of that.”Others distanced themselves – eventually. Terris sees the rupture between Matt Schlapp and Ian Walters as illustrative. As head of the American Conservative Union, Schlapp presided over CPAC, the annual conservative conference, with Walters his communications director. As Schlapp welcomed fringe elements to CPAC – from Trump to Matt Gaetz to Marjorie Taylor Greene – Walters felt increasingly repelled.“It’s an interesting tale of a broken friendship,” Terris says. “It also helps the reader understand how did the Republican party get to where it is now – where are the fault lines, why one way over another.”The 2020 election was the point of no return. Schlapp stayed all-in on Trump, supporting his claim of a stolen election even in a graveside speech at the funeral of Walters’s father, the legendary conservative journalist Ralph Hallow.“We have to take confidence that he would want us, more than anything else, to get beyond this period of mourning and to fight,” Schlapp is quoted as saying. Walters and his wife, Carin, resigned from the ACU. Ian remained a Republican but marveled at the bravery of the whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson in the January 6 hearings.As for Schlapp, he faced scandal late last year. Assisting with the Senate campaign of the ex-football star Herschel Walker, when Schlapp arrived in Georgia, he allegedly groped a male campaign staffer.“I had to go back into my reporting and ask, were there signs of this?” recalls Terris. “Could I run through all of this [with] the alleged victim over the phone? I did. I ran a bunch of questions by Matt – he never answered.”There was another last-minute controversy. McElwee’s polls proved inaccurate. Another red flag was his ties to Gabe Bankman-Fried, whose brother was arrested in December. Reports of McElwee’s gambling made clients wonder where their money was going. Senior staff threatened to resign. McElwee stepped down.“All of a sudden, it was national news in a way I was not prepared for,” Terris says.Can anyone be prepared for what comes next in Washington?“Donald Trump proved you can win by acting like Donald Trump,” Terris says. “There are a lot of people that learned from him – mostly in the Republican party, but [also] the Democratic party – how to comport yourself in Washington, what you can get away with. People’s confidence is broken, politics is broken, relationships.”Can it all be restored?“Nobody knows yet how to do it. It’s not the same thing as normal. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe normal led to Donald Trump.”
      The Big Break is published in the US by Twelve More

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      President centers ‘Bidenomics’ as 2024 re-election campaign gathers pace

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      As Joe Biden launches his 2024 re-election campaign, the White House is hoping to revamp the messaging on the president’s economic performance with a series of speeches, memos and the term “Bidenomics”.On Wednesday, Biden delivered what was billed as a major speech focused on the economy as he told an audience in Chicago that the Republican policy of “trickle-down economics” had “failed America”. In its place, Biden vowed to create policies that would prioritize growing the middle class, touted post-pandemic economic recovery and announced “Bidenomics is working” – one of 15 times he used the word over the course of his speech.Earlier in the week, a White House memo from two of Biden’s top advisers was sent to reporters and laid out a range of talking points. It touted the president’s various accomplishments on post-Covid economic recovery and job creation, while reiterating the theme that “Bidenomics is working.”“In the weeks and months ahead, the president, members of his cabinet, and senior administration officials will continue fanning out across the country to take the case for Bidenomics and the President’s Investing in America agenda directly to the American people,” the memo announced.The administration’s campaign appears to take aim at one of the president’s key vulnerabilities for the election, with polling showing voters have a dim assessment of how he has handled the economy. A Pew Research Center survey from this month found that inflation is the top concern among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters, while support for Democratic economic policies lags 12 points behind support for GOP policies. An AP/NORC poll from last month showed that only 33% of Americans supported Biden’s handling of the economy.The perceptions of Biden’s handling of the economy are at odds with a range of positive economic indicators that the White House is eager to highlight. Inflation has gone down to the lowest levels since 2021, while the administration has repeatedly touted months of consistent job growth and low unemployment. The US economy has generally outperformed economic experts’ forecasts, and for now has staved off a recession that seemed inevitable.But these gains have not appeared to resonate with voters, who have repeatedly given Biden poor marks on the economy as workers have struggled with rising prices that often outpaced growth in wages. Republicans have meanwhile been eager to capitalize on issues of inflation, labeling the spike “Bidenflation” and making it a frequent point of attack.Biden’s team attempted to defend the president’s economic achievements in the past, including dedicating a significant portion of his State of the Union address in February to highlight his record on job growth and unemployment. The White House even passed out small “palm cards” to Democratic lawmakers with a list of talking points about the economy. But as the presidential election begins to take shape it appears these efforts are intensifying, attempting to go on the offensive with a positive message about the administration’s economic agenda.Some Democratic politicians have embraced the talking points, earning them favorable positions as surrogates for the president. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, reportedly won praise from administration officials this month after an appearance on the Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show, in which Newsom forcefully challenged assertions that Biden’s economic plans were struggling and touted the president’s job creation.The “Bidenomics” memo sent to reporters earlier this week was the work of two longtime Biden advisers, Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon. Dunn is Biden’s most senior communications adviser and played a key role in turning around his 2020 presidential election bid. Donilon has worked with Biden for decades, and as his chief strategist during the 2020 election was key in shaping the campaign’s messaging.Biden initially joked about the “Bidenomics” term at a rally on 17 June hosted by union members in Philadelphia, where he said it was “time to end the trickle-down economics theory” that was commonly associated with former President Ronald Reagan’s plan of ‘Reaganomics’.“We decided to replace this theory with what the press has now called ‘Bidenomics’,” the president said. “I don’t know what the hell that is. But it’s working.” More

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      Republicans claim Democrats can’t keep us safe – crime data disagrees

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      Be it congressional campaigns or defending Donald Trump from his many legal entanglements, Republicans have kept up a consistent message to the US: Democrats can’t be trusted to keep you safe.“Alvin Bragg … is going after President Trump when you have all kinds of things happening in his town that are harmful to families who live there,” Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, one of Trump’s top allies in Congress, said on Fox News after the Democratic Manhattan prosecutor in March indicted Trump for allegedly falsifying business records. Jordan, who chairs the House judiciary committee, appeared to be ignoring data that shows New York is one of the safest cities in the country.As the Covid-19 pandemic upended the American economy and day-to-day life in 2020, homicides shot up by 30%, the largest one-year jump on record. Republicans used that spike, along with broader crime concerns, as a cudgel against Democrats to successfully regain control of the House of Representatives two years later.But Third Way, a center-left thinktank, has found that states which voted for Trump in the 2020 election had overall higher murder rates than those which supported Joe Biden. This trend, called the “red state murder gap”, has been consistent for 20 years. The pattern remains the same even if the most populous county in each red state is excluded – undercutting an argument common on the right that large cities, which tend to be led by Democrats, are to blame for homicides.“There’s a narrative out there that the crime problem is a blue states, blue city crime problem,” said Jim Kessler, Third Way’s executive vice-president for policy and an author of the study. “We thought, ‘OK, let’s challenge that, let’s see if it’s true.’ And it’s not.”What’s harder to tease out is why this split exists, and even the degree to which political factors are to blame for it. Many of the worst-affected states are in the south, a region that has had historically higher murder rates. And though crime may be a national political issue, in reality, local authorities such as mayors and police officials often have the most powerful roles in ensuring public safety.“I think it’s very difficult to put a partisan spin on this,” said Jeff Asher, a co-founder of AH Datalytics, which tracks criminal justice data. “I think that you can maybe say that places with state legislatures that are not focused on finding effective solutions to gun violence, you could place that blame on them. But generally … gun violence is local, and it’s usually local causes rather than statewide or federal causes.”Before Mississippi overtook it in 2019 and 2020, Louisiana led the nation in homicides per capita from 2000 to 2018, with its most populous city, New Orleans, ranking among the most murder-plagued in the nation. Asher, who lives in the city, blamed that on a range of factors, from the police department’s failure to solve many homicides to a lack of employment and educational opportunities there.And while Louisiana’s electoral votes have gone to Republicans in every election since 2000, it currently has a Democratic governor and was viewed as a blue state in the 1990s, as were many other southern states that are now considered Republican strongholds.“These issues were here in the 90s, when Louisiana was voting twice for Bill Clinton. These issues have not suddenly become issues,” Asher said.When Nick Suplina, the senior vice-president for law and policy at the gun violence prevention organization Everytown for Gun Safety, looks at the states leading the country’s homicide rate, he sees a map reflecting loose gun laws. Firearms were used in almost 80% of homicides in 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, but in much of the south, state legislatures are controlled by Republicans who have in recent years made it easier to buy a gun, and carry it where one pleases.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When you’re seeing homicides rates going up, in 2020, for instance, that’s driven by gun homicides, that’s driven by easy access to firearms, predominantly by people who shouldn’t have access to firearms,” Suplina said. “And so, really, what you’re seeing in this study isn’t so much about politics or voting proclivities, but, rather, what states have strong gun laws and what states have weak ones.”Third Way’s study covers the 2000-2020 time period, during which the National Rifle Association pushed state lawmakers to remove or oppose regulations over firearm background checks, permitting and safe storage. Many states also have preemption laws on the books that prevent mayors from enacting tighter gun legislation within their city limits.And even when states pass stricter gun laws, they are easily skirted. “Our gun laws are only as strong as the weakest gun laws of a neighboring state,” Suplina said. “We have porous state borders in this country. And so in states like Illinois, and specifically with respect to Chicago, most of their crime guns are starting in Indiana and quickly making their way across the border.”There are signs that the pandemic-era wave of murders has crested. Statistics from AH Datalytics indicate murder rates in 90 US cities until the end of May have fallen by about 12% year on year, including in New York City, where Jordan convened a hearing of the judiciary committee into the city’s purported crime problem shortly after Bragg brought his charges against Trump.“If chairman Jordan truly cared about public safety, he could take a short drive to Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Akron or Toledo in his home state, instead of using taxpayer dollars to travel hundreds of miles out of his way,” Bragg’s office said in a statement before the hearing convened, referring to cities in Jordan’s home state that all have higher murder rates than New York. More

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      Biden condemns ruling against race-conscious admissions: ‘This is not a normal court’ – live

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      From 5h agoSpeaking at the White House, Joe Biden condemned the supreme court’s conservative justices for their decision released today against race-based admissions.“In case after case, including recently, just a few years ago in 2016, the court has affirmed and reaffirmed this view that colleges could use race, not as a determining factor for admission, but as one of the factors among many in deciding who to admit,” the president said, adding that “the court once again walked away from decades of precedent.”“The court has effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions and I strongly, strongly disagree with the court’s decision,” he said.There are “still a lot of really good Republicans” in the Senate, Joe Biden said during his interview on MSNBC.Biden said that six Republican senators have come to him since he was elected “to tell me, ‘Joe, I agree with you but if I’m seen doing it, I’ll lose a primary’”. He added:
      I’m an eternal optimist. I still think there’s going to come a moment when they’re going to be able to break.
      During his interview on MSNBC, Joe Biden admitted he knew his polling numbers “are not good” but argued that “they were the same way when I ran and won”.Biden said he had “great faith” in the American people and that it was “important that they know that my value set is very different than the new Maga Republican party”.He added:
      Everybody thought I was gonna get clobbered in the primary. I got 80 million votes in the last election.
      Here’s the clip:Joe Biden refused to say whether he knew ahead of time about Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans to march on Moscow.“Every president is amazed that America is the lead in the world”, he told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.He said he had focused on holding Nato together and on expanding the alliance to make sure that “the most significant invasion since world war two does not succeed”.In an interview on MSNBC, Joe Biden was asked about a report that said senior officials at the justice department resisted investigating the possible involvement of Donald Trump and his associates in the January 6 Capitol attack.Biden said he had made a commitment that he would “not in any way interfere” with the justice department, adding that he had “not spoken one single time with the attorney general on any specific case”.He said he had “faith that the justice department will move in a direction that is consistent with the law”.Joe Biden has said the supreme court has “gone out of its way” to “unravel basic rights” following its ruling on Thursday to strike down affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard.In an interview on MSNBC, Biden was asked what he meant at a press conference earlier today when he said the supreme court was “not a normal court”. He said:
      What I meant by that is it has done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.
      He said he found this court “so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people”.
      Across the board, the vast majority of American people don’t agree with a lot of the decisions this court has made.
      Biden said that although he believes the conservative majority on the court “may do too much harm”, he opposes expanding the court because it will “politicize the court forever in a way that is not healthy”.Biden says he knows his polling numbers “are not good”, but argues that “they were the same way when I ran”.
      Everybody thought I was going to get clobbered in a primary.
      Biden says he’s “not spoken one single time” with the attorney general “on any specific case”.Biden says he thinks if we start the process of trying to expand the court “we’re going to politicize it in a way that’s not healthy”.Biden says he thinks it’s a “mistake” to expand the court. He says:
      What I’ve done is I have appointed 136 judges, and … I picked people who are from various backgrounds.
      We’ve appointed more women to the appellate courts, Black women to the appellate courts, than every other president in American history.
      Biden says the vast majority of American people don’t agree with the supreme court’s ruling.He says it “finds it so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people”.Biden is asked what he meant when he said earlier today that the supreme court is “not a normal court”.Biden says the court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court”, pointing to its ruling last year to overturn Roe v Wade.Joe Biden will in a few minutes appear from MSNBC’s New York City studios for a live interview with anchor Nicolle Wallace.While Biden often responds to questions from reporters as he comes and goes from the White House or at the tail end of his speeches, he has done few press conferences compared with his recent predecessors, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Follow along here as the Guardian’s Léonie Chao-Fong covers the interview live. More