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      Capitol attack: Cheney says Republicans must choose between Trump and truth

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      Capitol attack: Cheney says Republicans must choose between Trump and truthRepublican member of the House committee investigating the events of 6 January issues stark warning to her party

      The Steal: stethoscope for a democracy near cardiac arrest
      On a day of alarming polling about attitudes to political violence and fears for US democracy, and as the first anniversary of the Capitol attack approached, a Republican member of the House committee investigating the events of 6 January 2021 had a stark warning for her party.One in three Americans say violence against government justified – pollRead more“Our party has to choose,” Liz Cheney told CBS’s Face the Nation. “We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the constitution, but we cannot be both.”Trump supporters attacked Congress in an attempt to stop certification of his defeat by Joe Biden, which Trump maintains without evidence was the result of electoral fraud. Five people died around a riot in which a mob roamed the Capitol, searching for lawmakers to capture and possibly kill.On Sunday, Cheney and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee chairman, again discussed the possibility of a criminal referral for Trump over his failure to attempt to stop the riot or for his obstruction of the investigation.Speaking to ABC’s This Week, Cheney said there were “potential criminal statutes at issue here, but I think that there’s absolutely no question that it was a dereliction of duty. And I think one of the things the committee needs to look at is … a legislative purpose, is whether we need enhanced penalties for that kind of dereliction of duty.”Thompson said subpoenas could be served on Republicans in Congress who refuse to comply with information requests of the kind which have led to a charge of criminal contempt of Congress for Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, and a recommendation of such a charge for Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff.The Democrat told NBC’s Meet the Press the committee was examining whether it could issue subpoenas to members of Congress, immediately Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.“I think there are some questions of whether we have the authority to do it,” Thompson said. “If the authorities are there, there’ll be no reluctance on our part.”Last month, the committee asked Jordan for testimony about conversations with Trump on 6 January. Jordan told Fox News he had “real concerns” about the credibility of the panel.Perry was asked for testimony about attempts to replace Jeffrey Rosen, acting head of the justice department, with Jeffrey Clark, an official who tried to help overturn Trump’s defeat.Perry called the committee “illegitimate, and not duly constituted”. A court has ruled that the panel is legitimate and entitled to see White House records Trump is trying to shield, an argument that has reached the supreme court.Sunday saw a rash of polls marking the anniversary of 6 January.CBS found that 68% of Americans saw the Capitol attack as a sign of increasing political violence, and that 66% thought democracy itself was threatened.When respondents were asked if violence would be justifiable to achieve various political ends, the poll returned an average of around 30%. A survey by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland said more than a third of Americans said violence against the government could be justified.ABC News and Ipsos found that 52% of Republicans said the Capitol rioters were trying to protect democracy.Other polling has shown clear majorities among Republicans in believing Trump’s lie about electoral fraud and distrust of federal elections.On CNN’s State of the Union, Larry Hogan, Maryland governor and a moderate Republican with an eye on the presidential nomination, said: “Frankly, it’s crazy that that many people believe things that simply aren’t true.“There’s been an amazing amount of disinformation that’s been spread over the past year. And many people are consuming that disinformation and believing it as if it’s fact. To think the violent protesters who attacked the Capitol, our seat of democracy, on 6 January was just tourists looking at statues? It’s insane that anyone could watch that on television and believe that’s what happened.”Cheney told CBS the blame lay squarely with her own party.“Far too many Republicans are trying to enable the former president, embrace the former president or look the other way and hope that the former president goes away, or trying to obstruct the activities of this committee, but we won’t be deterred. At the end of the day, the facts matter, the truth matters.”Her host, Margaret Brennan, pointed out that Republicans across the US, some in states where Trump’s attempt to steal the election was repulsed, are changing election laws to their advantage.“We’ve got to be grounded on the rule of law,” Cheney said. “We’ve got to be grounded on fidelity of the constitution … So I think for people all across the country, they need to recognise how important their vote is for their voices. They’ve got to elect serious people who are going to defend the constitution, not simply do the bidding of Donald Trump.”Trump acolytes vie for key election oversight posts in US midtermsRead moreCheney faces a primary challenger doing Trump’s bidding and enjoying his backing. The other Republican on the 6 January committee, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, will retire in November rather than fight such a battle of his own.Cheney said she was “confident people of Wyoming will not choose loyalty to one man as dangerous as Donald Trump”, and that she will secure re-election.She also notably did not say no when she was asked if she would run against Trump if he sought the nomination next time.On ABC, Cheney was asked if she agreed with Hillary Clinton, who has said a second Trump presidency could end US democracy.“I do,” Cheney said. “I think it is critically important, given everything we know about the lines that he was willing to cross.“… We entrust the survival of our republic into the hands of the chief executive, and when a president refuses to tell the mob to stop, when he refuses to defend any of the co-ordinate branches of government, he cannot be trusted.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      One in three Americans say violence against government justified – poll

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      One in three Americans say violence against government justified – pollWashington Post releases survey showing ‘considerably higher’ number saying it is sometimes right to take up arms

      The Steal: stethoscope for a democracy near cardiac arrest
      One in three Americans believe violence against the government is sometimes justified, according to a new Washington Post poll.Trump acolytes vie for key election oversight posts in US midtermsRead moreThe survey, with the University of Maryland, was released on New Year’s Day – five days short of a year since rioters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat by Joe Biden.According to the authors of The Steal, a new book on Republican attempts to fulfill Trump’s aim through legal action in key states, the rioters of 6 January 2021 “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”.But it was still by far the most serious attack on the seat of federal government since the British burned Washington in 1814 and the Post poll comes amid a sea of warnings of growing domestic strife, even of a second civil war.The Post reported: “The percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34%, which is considerably higher than in past polls by the Post or other major news organisations dating back more than two decades.“… The view is partisan: The new survey finds 40% of Republicans, 41% of independents and 23% of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified.”Other polls have found that more than half of Republicans believe Trump’s lie that Biden won the White House thanks to electoral fraud, and do not trust elections.As pointed out by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague, authors of new book The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and People Who Stopped It, Trump was ultimately stopped by “the integrity of hundreds of obscure Americans from every walk of life, state and local officials, judges and election workers. Many of them … Republicans, some … Trump supporters”.Nonetheless, at a rally near the White House on 6 January, Trump told such supporters to “fight like hell” in his cause.“And if you don’t fight like hell,” he said, “you’re not going to have a country anymore”.Five people died, including a rioter shot by law enforcement and a police officer.The Post poll found that 60% of Americans said Trump bore a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the Capitol attack. However, 72% of Republicans and 83% of Trump voters said he bore “just some” responsibility or “none at all”.The Post reported: “A majority continue to say that violence against the government is never justified – but the 62% who hold that view is a new low point, and a stark difference from the 1990s, when as many as 90% said violence was never justified.”The paper interviewed some respondents.Phil Spampinato, 73, from Dover, Delaware, and a political independent, said he first “contemplated the question of whether violence against the government might be justified” as a way of “defending your way of life” after he saw Republicans changing state laws to restrict voting by Democrats and to make it easier to overturn results.US ‘closer to civil war’ than most would like to believe, new book saysRead more“Not too many years ago,” Spampinato said, “I would have said that those conditions are not possible, and that no such violence is really ever appropriate.”Anthea Ward, a Republican 32-year-old mother of two from Michigan, said: “The world we live in now is scary. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist but sometimes it feels like a movie. It’s no longer a war against Democrats and Republicans. It’s a war between good and evil.”Ward said she did not approve of the Capitol attack. She also said she would not participate in violence over Covid-19 vaccine mandates – another social flashpoint.But, the Post reported, Ward did say other people could be justified in choosing to “express their second amendment right” if the government “infringe[d] their freedom of choice” over vaccines, “and nonviolent action such as protests were unsuccessful”.TopicsUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS press and publishingnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans aim to sow outrage, Trump-style, with an eye on 2022 midterms

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      Republicans aim to sow outrage, Trump-style, with an eye on 2022 midterms Republicans embrace the culture war battles Trump waged, as a strategy for winning back control of the House and SenateThe debate was ostensibly over a stop-gap spending bill that would avert a government shutdown. But Chip Roy, a Republican congressman from Texas, seized the opportunity to accuse Democrats of supporting “unconstitutional” vaccine mandates, critical race theory, “woke gender ideology” and open borders. A vote to fund the federal government, he warned, was a vote to allow “tyranny over the American citizen”.The speech infuriated Congressman Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio.“Tyranny?” Ryan fumed on the House floor. “What are you people talking about? We’re talking about universal preschool, and they have it as a communist indoctrination of the American student. It’s insane.”Ryan’s frustration crystallized a dilemma for Democrats as they defend paper-thin majorities in Congress next year: how to talk about their legislative victories when Republicans are talking about everything else.Emboldened by a string of off-cycle electoral victories, Republicans are embracing the culture war battles that Donald Trump waged from the White House as a strategy for winning back control of the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.“Lean into the culture war,” was the title of a June memo from the leader of the House Republican Study Committee, Indiana congressman Jim Banks.The “culture war” offensive comes as Democrats, facing deep economic malaise and historical headwinds, race to deliver on the president’s domestic agenda, which includes an ambitious social policy package that faces serious legislative hurdles, hampered by Democratic holdout senator Joe Manchin.“We have a plan to give you a better country, and they have a ploy to win back power for themselves,” said New York congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “We are tackling the tough problems of the economy and the pandemic. They seek only to win power and will say or do anything to achieve that.”The party controlling the White House typically loses seats in the first midterm elections of a new presidency. With Biden’s plunging poll numbers, uncertainty over the centerpiece of his legislative agenda and Republicans’ redistricting edge, Democrats are increasingly dour about their chances. In the House, Democrats can only afford to lose a handful of seats; in the Senate they cannot afford to lose a single one.Maloney said selling their economic achievements – a popular, bipartisan infrastructure law and a poverty-reducing pandemic relief package – is critical for Democrats. But he said the party must also aggressively confront the Republican cultural assault. He urged Democrats to call out the opposition party’s embrace of “dangerous and reckless conduct”, which includes amplifying Trump’s false claims of a stolen election and downplaying the seriousness of the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.On social issues, he believes that Republicans have pushed too far, particularly on the issue of abortion. As the supreme court considers whether to weaken or overturn the landmark Roe v Wade precedent, Democrats are loudly trumpeting their support for women’s reproductive rights, as they try portray Republicans as an increasingly extreme party determined to ban abortion.“We’re dealing with a Republican party that wants to ban abortion in all 50 states, bring back mass incarceration and burn books,” he added. “We’re not just going to respond, we’re going to be on offense.”Grievance politics is not a new strategy for Republicans. In 1968, Richard Nixon employed the “Southern Strategy” to exploit white racial grievances coded in language such as “law and order” and “states’ rights”. But as partisanship grows and the parties become increasingly hostile to one another, so too has the potential political benefit of cultural warfare that inflames division and energizes their base.A recent report by the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution, titled Competing Visions of America, found that 80% of Republicans believe that “America is in danger of losing its culture and identity”. By comparison, just 33% of Democrats agree. Meanwhile, 70% of Republicans say “American culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s” while more than six in 10 Democrats say it has changed for the better.As Democrats negotiate amongst themselves over how to pass Biden’s signature domestic policy bill, Republicans have been seeding outrage over – and fundraising off of – all manner of perceived injustices from cancel culture to Dr Seuss to the 1619 Project. They are hammering the administration over its handling of immigration at the southern border and Democrats over rising crime rates in cities. And Biden’s efforts to pursue racial equity as part of his governing agenda has drawn accusations of racism from conservatives who say the efforts discriminate against white people.Republicans are also leading the charge against the administration’s vaccine mandates for companies with more than 100 employees, which they say is an example of “radical” Democratic overreach.On that issue, Republicans are speaking to their base, which is disproportionately unvaccinated. An NPR analysis found that the stronger a county’s support for Trump in the 2020 election, the lower its Covid-19 vaccination rate. But Republicans are betting that opposition to vaccine mandates, terms of personal liberty, will resonate beyond their base.In legal challenges to the mandates, Republican leaders argue that the vaccine mandates will worsen the nation’s supply chain problems and exacerbate labor shortages that have arisen during the pandemic.But with the Omicron variant circulating, Democrats believe public sentiment is firmly behind them. Americans increasingly support vaccine mandates for workers, students, and in everyday public life, according to a recent CNN poll, which found 54% in favor of requiring vaccinations for employees returning to the office.The challenge for Republicans is to avoid alienating moderate voters in the suburbs with their efforts to energize their supporters who are deeply loyal to Trump and have come to expect their politicians to loudly voice their grievances.Republicans believe their unexpected success in Virginia, a state Biden won by 10 percentage points in 2020, provides a playbook.In November, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the race for Virginia governor after pledging to ban critical race theory from the state’s public schools. Democrats were surprised by the potency over culture war fight over education, allowing Youngkin to rev up the conservative base while appealing to suburban parents’ frustrations over Covid-19 school closures and masking protocols in classrooms.“It’s the oldest trick in the book,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging expert and host of Words To Win By. “It’s creating some sort of an ‘other’ so that we don’t notice that they’re actually the cause of our problems.”In Virginia and elsewhere, she said Democrats were caught “flat-footed” by concerns over critical race theory, a concept that, until recently, few outside of academia had ever heard of. Instead of confronting it, she said Democrats’ instinct was to deny support and dismiss the charge as a right-wing talking point, neither of which satisfied voters.Democrats need “an explanation for the rightwing’s origin story of ‘this is why you’re suffering white man in the post-industrial midwest’,” Shenker-Osorio said. “Unless we can talk about race, about gender, about gender identity, our economic promise isn’t going to land.”Columnist Will Bunch, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, put it another way: “Once again, the Democrats showed up to a culture war gunfight brandishing a 2,000-page piece of legislation.”While Democrats agree they have a problem, they are at odds over how to fix it.Some argue that the party has moved too far left on cultural issues, a shift that has alienated non-college educated white voters and, increasingly, working-class Latino and Black Americans. Another cohort believes that instead of trying to recapture the voters who have abandoned the party, Democrats should find a message that appeals to a diversifying electorate.Proponents of this approach believe Democrats should respond to the right’s attacks by adopting what they call a “race-class narrative”, which Shenker-Osorio helped develop.The approach explicitly accuses Republicans of using racism or racial dog whistles as a divide-and-conquer tactic to sow distrust, undermine faith in government and protect the wealthy. When applied, the message not only defangs Republican attacks, it motivates and mobilizes voters of all races, its advocates argue.“Our task is to make the idea of joining together across our differences – the idea of multiracial solidarity, as a means to collectively get these shared values that we all want – sexier than the grievance politics that the right is selling,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Way to Win.In a recently published memo, advocated candidates use the “blows are landing because our agenda and accomplishments remain so far undefined in the minds of voters”.Among its messaging recommendations, the group urges Democrats to contrast the party’s economic vision with a “Republican party that is beholden to Maga extremism” while doing more to sell their legislative achievements and highlight the steps they’ve taken to combat Covid.“The good news is that these are not insurmountable challenges,” the memo states.An increasingly vocal coterie of liberal critics believe the outlook is grimmer: that Democrats are staring into the political wilderness unless they are able to win back some of the non-college educated voters who abandoned the party.Ruy Teixeira, a demographer and election analyst, believes Democrats have moved too far left on social issues like crime and immigration and is in need of a complete rebrand. He said Trump’s gains with non-college educated Hispanic voters was a “real wake-up call” that Democrats need to change course.“We need a durable majority,” he said. “You can’t build a durable majority by ignoring socio-cultural concerns and the values of these huge swaths of the population.”Where Democrats agree is that they must deliver on their promises while in power.“We’re really just at the beginning of what needs to be a substantial change in the way the American economic model works,” Teixeira said. “And to do that, it’s not enough to just win one election and pass some stuff. We need to win a number of elections and pass even more stuff … It’s not much more complicated than that.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      How the politics of prosecco explain what took the fizz out of the Democrats | Mark Blyth

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      How the politics of prosecco explain what took the fizz out of the DemocratsMark BlythJoe Manchin torpedoed his party’s key bill for the same reason Italy protected the sparkling wine – the local growth model If you get a bad taste in your mouth when you hear the name Joe Manchin – the fossil fuel industry-backed senator from West Virginia who torpedoed his own party’s “Build Back Better” bill just before Christmas – you might want to reach for a glass of something to wash it away.Given that it’s New Year’s Eve, there’s a reasonable chance you’re guzzling a glass of prosecco, which now accounts for just under half of all bubbly drunk globally. While this may take the taste away momentarily, there’s also an odd thing about prosecco I want you to consider. How that glass of Italian bubbly came to be in your hand gives us a window into understanding how a Democratic senator can derail a multitrillion dollar climate-focused national programme that promised huge amounts of money for his own state.No, really. Stay with me here.The stories of prosecco wine and West Virginia coal are classic examples of a regional “growth model”. Growth models describe the “how we make money” bit of an economy, plus the political and electoral coalition that supports it. Think of all the social, political and regulatory structures that build up over time around making and selling a certain good, and all the folks whose jobs and incomes depend upon it.Think of Germany and car exports. From workers to unions to production hubs, to supply chains, to institutional investors, there is an entire ecosystem that supports this way of making a living and the identities and interest it supports. When that is challenged, those who benefit from the model do not sit idly by. Now think of Treviso, Italy, where they make prosecco.Last year a sociologist called Stefano Ponteunpacked the growth model behind prosecco. Prosecco was first bottled in 1924, but it was not until the early 2000s that anglo-millennials got a taste for the stuff and global demand blew up. Prosecco was defined at the time by the grape used to make it, glera, and not by its place of origin (like how all “real” champagne must come from Champagne), which meant that the brand was not protected. In fact, the actual village of Prosecco was about 150km away from the main growing areas and had never grown the grape that makes the drink.Dire end to Biden’s first year as Manchin says no on signature billRead moreSome enterprising British importers wanted to stick as much prosecco as they could into bottles, which would have taken control (and value) away from local producers. Rising to defend the “prosecco miracle” as it was called, the then minister of agriculture, Luca Zaia, a member of the rightwing La Lega party, expanded the “denominazione d’origine controllata DOC” to cover the distant village of Prosecco, which gave this rather generic product a claim to geographical exclusivity.That in turn paved the way for a successful Unesco world heritage claim a few years later, further cementing the region’s claim to the product. The result was a major expansion of production, and prosecco hit €500m in sales in 2019. In short, those who benefited from the growth model rose to defend it.But there were other challenges to this success. This massive expansion of production brought challenges from environmentalists – wine is essentially an agribusiness – and from local residents. But those who benefited from the growth model again leapt to defend it, this time by painting the industry as an example of small-scale, pastoral sustainability – part of a high-end wine-making tradition going back centuries.In fact, as the historian Brian Griffith details, this pastoral and authentically local framing of Italian wine was originally a project of the fascist period. After the first world war, Italy was saddled with vast overproduction of low-quality domestic wines and enmeshed in a moral panic over working-class drunkenness. Wine industry interests close to the government of Mussolini sought to make Italian wines articles of middle-class consumption and a source of national unity. And they used state-backed mythmaking to do so.Medical authorities stressed “the advantages of responsible … wine consumption”. National exhibitions of regional wines were sponsored by the state. Indeed, the whole idea of “gastro-tourism” in Italy was invented in the 1930s by the wine lobby. As Griffith puts it, “the roots of today’s … Italian wines stretch back not to antiquity … but … to the interwar years”. The result was the development of an agribusiness growth model. The prosecco story a century later was just one more turn of this wheel.Now what does all that tell us about Manchin and West Virginia?The Democratic party story on Manchin and West Virginia was that coal was a dying industry, it employed few people and Build Back Better provided a way out. It was simply a question of giving Manchin enough “sweeteners” and it would eventually pass. But Manchin first vetoed the “clean electricity” provisions of the bill and then ran down the clock long enough to kill it. Why did he do this? Because his job is to defend the growth model against challengers, just as it was for the folks in Treviso.As Adam Tooze has noted, by some estimates “nearly one-third of [West Virginian] GDP in 2019 can be attributed to fossil fuels [which] makes decarbonisation a mortal threat”. Now add to this the fact that West Virginia has the lowest labour force participation rate in the US and huge healthcare issues stemming from chronic illness and opioid abuse, and you end up with a fiscal nightmare kept afloat by current growth model. Given this, the notion that the best-paid jobs in the state ($77,000 a year) will be traded away by the state’s leading elected official for some promises on “retraining” and a “Green New Deal” is simply not credible.Growth models are hard to change. Those who profit from them fight to defend them. From Alaska to the Dakotas, to Texas and Louisiana, the core of the GOP electoral coalition, all these states have carbon-heavy growth models. Like the Italian wine industry, they are a creation of the state in the 20th century. They are embodied with myths and are supported by powerful coalitions. Few in Treviso are keen to dismantle the prosecco growth model. Why should West Virginia, and with it the other carbon states of the US, be any different?
      Mark Blyth is a political economist at Brown University
      TopicsDemocratsOpinionJoe ManchinUS politicsWest VirginiaWinecommentReuse this content More

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      ‘For me, it’s about the mission’: why Cori Bush is just getting started in Congress

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      Interview‘For me, it’s about the mission’: why Cori Bush is just getting started in Congress Lauren Gambino in Washington Missouri congresswoman says she was sent to Washington to disrupt the political order that had long stopped working for people like herselfIf the American political status quo was working, Congresswoman Cori Bush might not have slept on the steps of the US Capitol to demand an extension of a coronavirus-era eviction moratorium. She might not have testified about her decision to have an abortion, consigning the details of her experience to the official congressional record. Perhaps she might not have run for Congress at all.But as the St Louis congresswoman sees it, she was sent to Washington to disrupt a political order that had long ago stopped working for people like herself – a nurse, pastor and activist who has worked for minimum wage, once lived out of a car and raised two children as a single mother. And she says she is only just getting started.Squad goals: Ocasio-Cortez warns Biden patience is wearing thinRead more“I ran and I lost and I ran and I lost. I kept running because there was a mission behind it,” Bush said in an interview. “It wasn’t about me wanting to be somebody in Congress – I know some people have those aspirations – but, for me, it was more about the mission. And I have not completed that mission yet.”Halfway through an extraordinary first term, and gearing up for reelection, Bush is one of the most recognizable – and quotable – members of the House. Part of the progressive “Squad”, she believes deeply that her own personal hardships make her a better and more responsive representative. Her personal story is what connects her to her constituants and what sets her apart in Congress.When her colleagues left Washington for their weeks-long summer recess without securing an extension of the federal eviction moratorium, Bush stayed behind. Having experienced the pain of poverty and eviction, she couldn’t fathom leaving hundreds of thousands of Americans vulnerable to homelessness as the coronavirus ravaged the US. In an instant, she decided to stage a sit-in on the steps of the US Capitol.Her protest on the Capitol steps drew widespread national attention and effectively shamed party leaders into finding a solution where they had insisted there was none. Eventually, the White House extended the temporary ban on evictions.The hard-won victory was an important moment for Bush and her team. She said it proved to her constituents in St Louis that she would always put them first, even if it put her at odds with Democrats, party leadership, even the president of the United States.“For us, winning that extension of the eviction moratorium was a huge part of the story of who we said that we would be in Congress, we said we would do the work, do the absolute most, and that was the absolute most we could do.”Now, she continued, “the White House knows that about us, too.”Bush describes herself a “politivist” – part politician, part activist. In her view, the roles are complementary, not oppositional.“Oftentimes people expect you, because you hear it in your communities, that when you go to Congress, you’re going to change. That is the expectation,” she said. “I think that we’ve already been able to show that St Louis is first…. St Louis is the heart of every single thing that we do.”Bush rose to prominence as a Black Lives Matter organizer in Ferguson, Missouri, where the movement was born after the 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr was shot and killed by a white police officer. The daughter of a local alderman, Bush said it wasn’t until the protests that she considered running for public office.‘It was just unconscionable’: Cori Bush on her fight to extend the eviction moratoriumRead moreIn 2020, Bush became the first Black woman to represent the state of Missouri when she was elected to Congress after two unsuccessful campaigns – first for Senate in 2016 and again in 2018 for Congress. To win, she unseated the Democratic incumbent, William Lacy Clay. Clay had held the seat for 20 years, having succeeded his father, William Clay Sr, a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, who was first elected in 1968.She was sworn in three days before the Capitol was attacked by a pro-Trump mob.“We were still moving into our office when the insurrection happened,” she said. “We didn’t have a panic button yet.”“So that was our introduction to Congress,” she continued. “Since we started off in such an unexpected place, a horrible place, for us, it was just like, ‘OK, dig in.’”While locked in their office, Bush and her staff drafted a resolution to “investigate and expel” any member of Congress who attempted to overturn the election results and “incited a white supremacist attack”.The resolution reflected the increasing hostility between members of Congress. At times, Bush has said she feels targeted by her own colleagues.Shortly after the attack, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, ordered the relocation of Bush’s office, after she asked to be moved away from congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene out of concern for her staff’s safety.Earlier this month, Bush joined House progressives in pressuring the party’s leaders to strip congresswoman Lauren Boebert of her committee assignments over her Islamophobic comments targeting Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim. At a press conference, she unloaded on Boebert, calling her a “lying, Islamophobic, race-baiting, violence-inciting, white supremacist sentiment-spreading, Christmas tree gun-toting elected official” who is a “danger” to her country and her colleagues.Like her colleagues in the “squad”, Bush has been unafraid to challenge Democratic leaders, even the president.“I am who I am,” she said. “I don’t take off my activist hat to be able to legislate in Congress. And so that has been the guiding force this entire time.”During a tense standoff over Biden’s agenda earlier this year, Bush charged Democratic leaders with breaking their promise to progressives by decoupling two pieces of Biden’s agenda – a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a sweeping social policy package. In a word, she captured progressives’ sense of betrayal: “Bamboozled.” TV network chyrons snapped to reflect the comment and soon Bush was on TV arguing their case. House leaders delayed the vote.A month later, Bush was one of just six House Democrats to vote against the infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law last month. Not because she opposed the legislation, which would spend billions upgrading Missouri’s bridges and highways, but because she feared that passing the bill without the larger social policy that was a priority for progressives would sap them of their leverage.Bush now fears she was correct. After a months-long effort to appease conservative Democratic senators, Joe Manchin announced that he could not support the $2.2tn social safety net bill, dooming its chances in the evenly divided chamber.Bush, who previously denounced Manchin’s opposition to the package as “anti-Black, anti-child, anti-woman, and anti-immigrant”, laid the blame squarely on party leadership.“Honestly, I’m frustrated with every Democrat who agreed to tie the fate of our most vulnerable communities to the corporatist ego of one Senator. No one should have backed out of our initial strategy that would have kept Build Back Better alive,” she tweeted. Tagging the president, she said: “You need to fix this.Still, the activist in Bush is not done fighting for the measure, which passed the House in November. “We cannot spend the next year saying, ‘the House did its part, and now it’s the Senate’s turn,’” she said recently. “We need the Senate to actually get this done.”Bush is also working to elevate issues of racial justice that she said the party does not do enough to prioritize.Efforts to pass police reform collapsed earlier this year, and voting rights legislation remains stalled in the Senate. The supreme court will soon decide the future of abortion access.Bush said her Capitol protest was inspired by the moment, but she does not rule out future action.“If I feel led to move in that way, based upon whatever is happening, it is never off the table for me,” she said.Some lawmakers are critical of her legislative style. They call it divisive at worst and naive at best. The suggestion is that she will eventually have to learn to compromise and play by the rules.But in light of Manchin’s opposition, Bush is even more certain of her approach.“If that were the gold star, we would be a lot further in this country,” she said. “There’s more than one way to get things done.”TopicsCori BushUS politicsDemocratsBiden administrationinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Harry Reid, who led Senate Democrats for 12 years, dies at 82

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      Harry Reid, who led Senate Democrats for 12 years, dies at 82Nevada senator helped to pass Obama’s Affordable Care ActReid called Trump ‘the worst president we’ve ever had’ Harry Reid, who emerged from the unforgiving political landscape of Las Vegas, Nevada, to lead the Senate Democrats for 12 turbulent years, died on Tuesday at age 82. Reid died Tuesday, “peacefully” and surrounded by friends “following a courageous, four-year battle with pancreatic cancer,” Landra Reid said of her husband.Tributes for the late Senator poured in after the news of his death, led by president Joe Biden, who called him a “great American”.A son of Searchlight, Nevada, Harry never forgot his humble roots. A boxer, he never gave up a fight. A great American, he looked at challenges and believed it was within our capacity to do good — to do right.May God bless Harry Reid, a dear friend and a giant of our history.— President Biden (@POTUS) December 29, 2021
      The Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer called Reid “one of the most amazing individuals I’ve ever met”.“He was tough-as-nails strong, but caring and compassionate, and always went out of his way quietly to help people who needed help,” Schumer said in a statement.Steve Sisolak, the governor of Nevada, said that calling Reid “a giant” failed to “fully encapsulate all he accomplished on behalf of the state of Nevada and for Nevada families. There will never be another leader quite like Senator Reid.”Ex-Senate majority leader Harry Reid on UFOs: ‘We’re at the infancy of it’Read moreFormer president Barack Obama said he’d written a letter to Reid at the request of his wife, Landra, near the end of Reid’s life. He posted the letter on Twitter, which read: “You were a great leader in the Senate, and early on you were more generous to me than I had any right to expect. I wouldn’t have been president had it not been for your encouragement and support, and I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.”“Most of all, you’ve been a good friend,” he added.When Harry Reid was nearing the end, his wife Landra asked some of us to share letters that she could read to him. In lieu of a statement, here’s what I wrote to my friend: pic.twitter.com/o6Ll6rzpAX— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 29, 2021
      Reid’s reputation as a quiet leader with a sometimes quick temper was reinforced by decades of hard-fought legislative wins, including the passage of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, an economic stimulus package following the 2007-08 recession and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.But his policy legacy was marred in some eyes by his push in 2013 to alter Senate rules to make it easier to confirm Obama’s judicial nominees, a move that paved the way for Donald Trump’s controversial supreme court nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority.Reid defended the tactic to the end.“They can say what they want,” he told the New York Times Magazine in December. “We had over 100 judges that we couldn’t get approved, so I had no choice. Either Obama’s presidency would be a joke or Obama’s presidency would be one of fruition.”Reid’s sometimes defiant bluntness was forged by a childhood in Searchlight, Nevada, a desert crossroads where his father was a gold miner and his mother did laundry for the brothels. The family home had no indoor toilet, hot water or telephone and the town had no high school, so Reid boarded with relatives 50 miles away.Reid and his wife, Landra, met as students at Utah State University, where they converted to Mormonism. In the 1960s the couple moved to Washington DC, where Reid enrolled at George Washington University law school and worked six days a week on the police force patrolling the Capitol, where he would later climb the heights of political power.First, the amateur boxer had to come up through the harsh terrain of Nevada politics, defined by Las Vegas, the state’s casino interests and the presence of organized crime.At the end of her husband’s four-year stint as Nevada gaming commissioner in 1981, Landra Reid found an explosive device in the family station wagon. As Senate majority leader decades later, his chief of staff told the New Yorker, Reid still weighed conflicts by reflecting: “No one is going to kill me over this.”Multiple Republicans bore scars from tangling with Reid. During the 2012 presidential race between Obama and Mitt Romney, Reid announced on the floor of the Senate that Romney had not paid taxes in 10 years: an unfounded and ultimately debunked claim spurred by Romney’s refusal to release a full set of tax returns.Asked if he regretted the charge, Reid said: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”Trump found his way into a war of insults with Reid after the New York developer, then a candidate, criticized Hillary Clinton’s health. Reid replied that Trump was in no position to criticize because he “is 70 years old, he’s not slim and trim, he brags about eating fast food every day”. Trump then mocked Reid for an exercise accident a year earlier that had blinded the senator in one eye.In December, Reid called Trump “amoral” and “the worst president we’ve ever had”.Trump had reason to resent Reid. So well-oiled was Reid’s political machine in Nevada that the state bucked national demographic trends in 2016 to reject Trump. In 2018, voters threw out incumbent Republican senator Dean Heller.Efficacy behind the scenes became a trademark for Reid, who won loyalty from colleagues for his willingness to bestow credit and cede the limelight.“I know my limitations,” Reid told the New Yorker in 2005, the year he took leadership of the Democrats in the Senate. “I haven’t gotten where I am by my good looks, my athletic ability, my great brain, my oratorical skills.”Reid is survived by his wife, five children and 19 grandchildren. Asked in March last year what he thought of Washington since his retirement, Reid shrugged: “I just shake my head is all I can do.”Reid in May 2018 revealed he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was undergoing treatment.Less than two weeks ago, officials and one of his sons, Rory Reid, marked the renaming of the busy Las Vegas airport as Harry Reid international airport.Agencies contributed reportingTopicsNevadaDemocratsUS SenateUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      A day after giving birth, I was asked back to work. America needs paid family leave | Bobbi Dempsey

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      A day after giving birth, I was asked back to work. America needs paid family leaveBobbi DempseyThe US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among developed countries. Yet Senator Joe Manchin struggles to understand why paid family leave is important Twenty-four hours after I gave birth to my second child, my employer called to ask when I planned to return to work.It had been a high-risk pregnancy and a complicated, precarious delivery involving a breech birth. I should have remained in the hospital for several days. But my oldest child – then just a year old – needed major surgery that couldn’t be delayed. So we brought our newborn home and rushed to prepare to leave for a hospital two hours away where our oldest child would have surgery while our newborn was at home being cared for by relatives.As we gathered our things, the phone rang. It was someone from the HR office at the paper bag factory where I worked. After briefly making the obligatory inquiry as to how my new baby was doing, the HR rep got to the real reason for her call.“So, we know you were planning to take a few weeks off, but I just wanted to make sure you knew that you can come back anytime now. I could even get you back on the schedule this weekend, if you wanted.” After a brief pause, she added, “I figured, you know, you might want to start getting paid again.”I got the message loud and clear.My employer provided no paid maternity leave, so the longer I was off from work, the longer I would go without income. With two young children to support and medical bills piling up, this was money I desperately needed. By dangling a paycheck in front of me, the HR rep knew she was making it very tempting for me to return to work sooner than I had planned – and way sooner than I should.That was in the early 1990s, in a rural area in the coal region of Pennsylvania, where I live. I doubt much has changed since then.The version of the Build Back Better plan passed by the House on 19 November includes a provision for paid family leave. While it would mandate only four weeks of paid time off – much less than the 12 weeks in the original plan – it is being heralded as a big victory, which is depressing. Even worse: there’s a good chance that even that minimal amount of paid family leave won’t survive in the final version of the bill.At least, not if Joe Manchin has his way. The West Virginia senator has voiced his opposition to any paid family leave in the bill, and the Democrats need his critical vote to pass the package in the Senate.It’s incomprehensible that one individual could single-handedly decide the fate of something that affects so many American families. Manchin has never had to endure the physical and mental agony of returning to work before you’ve recovered from childbirth. His family is wealthy and has likely benefited from the support of nannies, assistants and paid daycare. I’m guessing he has never known the panic of worrying you might lose your job – or not have enough in your paycheck to pay essential bills – because you need to miss work to care for a sick child or handle a family emergency.It’s stunning that one man who has never needed paid leave has the ability to keep it from millions of parents who do. Manchin seems to be enjoying the power trip, relishing the attention his cat-and-mouse game has attracted. But for many people – particularly postpartum mothers – this is no game. The ability to take even just a few precious weeks at home without fear of financial losses could literally be a matter of life and death.Like many industrial employers (at least at that time), the factory where I worked used a point system to track and regulate employee absences. When you took a day off – unpaid, of course – it didn’t matter if you were sick, taking a vacation, or attending to a sick relative or family emergency. It was all treated the same way. You were given a point for each absence. After five points, you were given a warning. At six points, a one-day suspension without pay. If you reached seven points, you were fired. I received a point after absences for each of my appointments for prenatal care, and another for the time I missed while having the baby.It’s inexcusable that American companies are allowed to operate like this. Among the handful of countries without any form of national paid leave, the United States is by far the largest and richest.Forcing people to choose between their paycheck and their families or their own physical health is heartless. In the case of someone who has just given birth, it is particularly cruel – and dangerous. I suffered serious (and potentially life-threatening) complications during and after each of my pregnancies. I am far from unusual. The US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world among developed countries – and the risk is especially high for black and Native American women and women in poor rural areas. Workers in these communities are also more likely to receive little or no paid leave from their employers.Only roughly one in five workers in the US has access to paid family leave. The rest are forced to make impossible and risky choices. One in four new mothers returns to work within two weeks of giving birth. I know firsthand that is not nearly long enough to recover.Even looking at it purely from an economic and labor standpoint, a national paid leave policy makes sense. Paid leave actually keeps people in their jobs in the long run. When parents don’t have even the bare minimum of paid leave available for emergencies, they may be forced to quit their job – or end up getting fired.While paid family leave could make a big difference to new parents, they aren’t the only ones who benefit. Paid leave can also be extremely beneficial to people in the “sandwich generation” situation – which is exactly where I am now. About 44 million Americans provide care to parents or other adult relatives or friends, representing 37bn hours of unpaid labor each year.Providing a basic minimum of paid family leave to all Americans shouldn’t be controversial – and definitely shouldn’t seem like such an impossible goal.
      Bobbi Dempsey is a freelance writer specializing in topics related to poverty, a reporting fellow at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and an economic justice fellow at Community Change
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      Democracy Lives In Darkness review: how to take politics off the holiday dinner table

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      Democracy Lives In Darkness review: how to take politics off the holiday dinner tableEmily Van Duyn’s study of a group of liberal women in rural Texas is thought-provoking reading for the holiday period

      From Peril to Betrayal: the year in US politics books
      In 2015, Saturday Night Live spoofed the rancorous political arguments besieging American social life.‘It’s who they are’: gun-fetish photo a symbol of Republican abasement under TrumpRead moreCast members seated around a dining table to celebrate Thanksgiving passed the side dishes and threw invective. The verbal heat rose and rose until a young girl pressed play on a cassette player and the Adele song Hello washed over the room. The combatants instantly ceased fire and began lip-synching the lyrics. Their rapture escalated until they physically entered a re-creation of the music video.A Thanksgiving Miracle aired before the Trump presidency and its violent subversive conclusion. This holiday season, it’s hard to think of a song capable of transporting Americans into a state of blissful unity. Masks and vaccines have become an issue and assault weapons have cropped up as accessories on congressional Christmas cards. But there is an alternative to mutually assured bad-mouthing. Americans can meet clandestinely among the like-minded, not just to commiserate but also to plan and participate in election campaigns.Emily Van Duyn, a political communications scholar, embedded with one such group in Texas in 2017. Her book chronicles the journey of 136 liberal women living in a rural and thus predominantly conservative Texas town who, determined to resist Trump, organized themselves into what Van Duyn anonymizes as the Community Women’s Group (CWG).They were middle-aged and senior white women (save one who was Black), afraid to speak their minds and put up yard signs. The author interviewed 24 of them multiple times, attended their monthly meetings on a dozen occasions, and examined meeting minutes from November 2016, when they were in tears and shock, until December 2020, at which point their politicking had yielded higher vote totals for Democrats in the previous month’s election, though not enough to prevail anywhere on the ballot.Van Duyn also conducted a national and statewide survey in 2018, from which she concluded that more than one in five American adults felt the need to hide their politics, and just under one in 10 operated in similarly self-obscured conversational settings.The study explains how social, geographic and political causes shaped the communication practices of the CWG.“[T]he growing animosity between and within parties, the uncertainty about truth, the growing intersectional animosity around ideology, race, class, and gender, made for a political context that was not only unpleasant but risky.”Trump palpably threatened their sense of security as women. Locally, they feared ostracization, loss of business (especially the real estate agents), defacement of property and being run off the road by men in trucks with guns who noticed liberal bumper-stickers, as happened at least once and was talked about often.Van Duyn excels at detailing the evolution of CWG’s communications practices, a mix of private and public facing activities conducted through physical as well as digital channels. Many members had grown up deferring to men about matters political. But a week after Trump’s victory one of them sent an email to eight neighbors: “I would like to suggest that we get together for support and see where that takes us.”That got forwarded, and 50 showed up at the first meeting. In a remote location, with the blinds closed, they wrote a mission statement and formed committees by issue to educate themselves. That super-structure soon fell by the wayside. Their formalized confidentiality agreement held, however. Between meetings they relied on a listserv to communicate among themselves with a brief detour into a secret Facebook group.In their darkened space (the book title inverts the slogan of the Washington Post) they opened each meeting with talk about their fears. A few started sending letters to the editor of the local newspaper using their individual identity, often to register dissent with and fact-check other letter writers. Over the two years of the study, about half emerged as open Democrats. They worked on mobilizing other Democrats (even though not all were registered or comfortable with the party), leaving the heavy labor of persuasion to formal campaigns. Their work shored up the party in their county: they ran phone banks, filled district chairs, updated voter files and raised money. The group had served as a safe harbor to develop political skills and confidence.CWG falls into several political traditions, including the voluntary associations that De Tocqueville valorized, the hidden minorities who have suffered the weights of oppression and, for that matter, the collectives of oppressors and cultists.Women are a demographic majority in America, and the political positions of CWG would fit in the national mainstream. But these women were neither in the contexts of their lives. Even so, by the end of the period Van Duyn examines, their politicking mirrored that of more open demographic counterparts such as the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County, a group that helped first-time candidate Abigail Spanberger turn a central Virginia seat Democratic in 2018 – one that she now has to decamp for a newly re-drawn district.Some Republicans at holiday gatherings this year will continue to relish the opportunity to bait liberals (a practice that goes both ways). They may emulate Trump’s style of discourse, centered on a barrage of lies, exaggerations, accusations and taunts. Or they may not do any of these things; as Trump said about southern border-crossers in 2015 “some, I assume, are good people”. Indeed, some Republicans may feel intimidated by progressive majorities in workplaces and on campuses.All told, the risks of escalated, energy draining crossfire between America’s political tribes have risen and intensified. So this holiday season is no time for engaging others in political matters, for disputing the veracity of their claims and integrity of their motives. Far better to smile wanly, deflect provocations, change the subject, and then join or form a political support group. As Van Duyn’s book shows, good things can follow from going underground.
      Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret is published in the US by Oxford University Press
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