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CaliforniaCalifornia’s governor recall election is heating up. Here’s what you need to knowWith mere weeks to go, Gavin Newsom and his opponents appeal to voters across America’s most populous state Maanvi Singh@ More
US politicsDemocrats’ divisions could still derail infrastructure bills Pelosi and Schumer pledging to follow two-track strategy to pass a $3.5tn reconciliation bill first Hugo Lowellin WashingtonSun 15 Aug 2021 05.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 15 Aug 2021 05.01 EDTJoe Biden’s economic vision has taken a major step toward becoming reality after the US Senate passed two infrastructure measures, but widening political divisions within the Democratic party could yet derail the entire legislative package.The Senate last week advanced a sprawling $3.5tn budget blueprint for “soft” infrastructure projects to tackle climate change and health care, a day after approving a $1tr bipartisan infrastructure bill to rebuild the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges.But even as Senate Democrats congratulated themselves on pushing through both measures, the fate of Biden’s economic priorities rests on House Democrats clearing several more looming hurdles as well as uniting the party’s left and right.The challenges facing the two infrastructure measures reflects the difficulty in trying to force bipartisan compromise in a deeply divided House and Senate where the Democrats possess only narrow majorities.Liberal Democrats who have bristled at seeing their top climate and social priorities jettisoned as Biden sought an elusive bipartisan compromise with moderate Senate Republicans may seek to change elements of the package, which could upend the delicate legislation.At a minimum, progressives have insisted the House delay considering the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passes a far larger climate and health bill – something not expected until the fall, and against the hopes of centrist House Democrats.In order to deliver the president’s agenda, Democrats are pursuing a two-track approach that involves Congress passing both measures, starting with the $1tn bipartisan compromise that funnels $550bn of new money into traditional infrastructure projects.The second half of the strategy involves the House and Senate passing the climate and health bill, crafted on the basis of the $3.5tn budget blueprint, and passed using reconciliation, a fast-track process that allows Democrats to bypass a Republican filibuster – a procedural convention that can derail legislation.The Democrats’ plan is backstopped by an ironclad commitment from the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that the House will not take up the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate first passes the reconciliation bill, which will take weeks to hammer out in the 50-50 Senate.The move by Pelosi is aimed at trying to balance the competing demands between progressives demanding maximum spending and more fiscally conservative centrists – all while ensuring that both measures are in the end enacted.When the speaker navigated through a similar two-track strategy to approve the Affordable Care Act under President Barack Obama in 2010, the bill passed notwithstanding the defections of three Democrats in the Senate and three dozen in the House.Pelosi now holds such a razor-thin majority in the House that she can afford only three Democratic defections to pass the bipartisan bill and the reconciliation bill if the votes are along party lines. Protest votes from either faction could sink the entire effort.But growing discontent about the legislation on both sides on Capitol Hill signals the prospect of an even more bitter and protracted intra-party fight over the future of the legislation in the coming weeks and months.The speaker on Wednesday reaffirmed her position to House Democrats during a closed-door caucus meeting that the Senate would have to first pass the $3.5tr reconciliation bill before the House would move to consider the bipartisan bill.“The votes in the House and Senate depend on us having both bills,” Pelosi told House Democrats, referencing the thin majorities in both chambers, according to a source familiar with the speaker’s remarks.That means the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, will need his committee chairs to finalize the language for the reconciliation bill and gain the approval of centrist Senate Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin before the House can proceed.In an added complication, both Sinema and Manchin have sounded the alarm in recent days over the cost of the $3.5tr budget blueprint that will guide the reconciliation bill, though they joined their colleagues in voting to allow the framework to pass.The possibility that Democrats could get both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill has outraged Republicans, who have vowed to try to derail the $3.5tr package, which Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell likened to a “reckless tax-and-spending spree”.Challenges in the House also returned on Friday after a group of nine House Democratic moderates threatened in a letter to vote against the $3.5tn budget blueprint when the House returns the week of 23 August, if Pelosi didn’t pass the bipartisan bill first.The missive called on the speaker to abandon her two-track timetable so members vulnerable in 2022 could sell the bill to voters. “We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law,” the nine moderates wrote in a letter, which a House Democratic leadership aide described as “highly problematic”.Threats from moderates have infuriated progressive Democrats, who, emboldened by their successful effort to twist the Biden administration to introduce a new eviction moratorium, have repeatedly warned House Democratic leaders not to deviate from their original plan.In a letter to Pelosi on Tuesday, the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said a poll of their 96 members confirmed a majority would withhold their support for the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passed the reconciliation bill.White House officials have said that they remain closely attuned to the growing tensions in the House and Senate. Pelosi and Biden speak regularly, and aides have started holding thrice-weekly conference calls, according to sources familiar with the matter.But top Democrats in Congress see no alternative to the path they are headed down and are hopeful that the two-track strategy will prove successful as in 2010. “I am very pleased to report that the two-track strategy is right on track,” Schumer said.TopicsUS politicsUS CongressInfrastructureDemocratsnewsReuse this content More
BooksThe Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s traumaA revealing blend of family lore, history, policy and anger casts light on the background and legacy of Donald Trump Lloyd GreenSun 15 Aug 2021 01.00 EDTLast year, Mary Trump delivered a salacious and venomous takedown of her uncle, Donald J Trump. Too Much and Never Enough doubled as awesome beach reading and opposition research dump, before the party conventions. Timing was everything.Trump was ‘in pain and afraid’ during post-Covid display of bravado, niece’s book saysRead moreGoosed by the Trump family’s attempt to stop publication and by simple proximity to election day, the book sold more than 1.35m copies in in its first week. Mary Trump then launched a lawsuit of her own against her uncle and his siblings, alleging they swindled her out of millions. The action remains pending, in court in Manhattan.Too Much and Never Enough had a subtitle: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. A year later, it seems a flashing red light. On 6 January, when Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the US Capitol, literary hyperbole acquired prescience.Now the Trump who doesn’t need a ghostwriter – and who is also a trained psychologist – is back with a second book, The Reckoning. It is a less lurid read but a darker one too. Under a slightly less alarming subtitle, Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, she delivers a bleak prognosis.The book is a mixture of family lore, history, policy and anger. As expected, Mary Trump’s disdain for her uncle is once again made clear. At her grandparents’ home, the N-word was bandied about. Her uncle, she says, grew up racist and antisemitic. If you’re wondering how such a man might have come to conquer a political party and win the White House, think on this: Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, has discounted antisemitism in his boss – but declined to deny Trump’s race-baiting.Then there is the bravado Trump showed last October, after contracting Covid-19. “Doing his best Mussolini imitation, he took off his mask in a macho display of invulnerability,” Mary Trump writes, of the moment the then president returned to the White House from hospital, supposedly indestructible. “He clenched his teeth and jutted out his jaw, just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain. In Donald, I saw the latter.”Mary Trump is happy to wade into policy fights. Her diagnoses of America’s ills and policy prescriptions to tackle them place her squarely on the left. It is “almost impossible to grow up white in America”, she writes, “and not be racist”. Perhaps she is too pessimistic. Yes, many of the founders owned enslaved people. Yes, it took one century to end slavery and another to end official segregation. Yes, the effects linger. Inequality is baked in. Like a ghost, the past will always hover.But the US has undeniably progressed from where it stood 75 years ago, let alone 100 further back. Barack Obama won two terms as president. Kamala Harris is vice-president. Even in the Republican party, South Carolina, for so long a hotbed of sedition and segregation, racism and repression, is represented in the Senate by an African American, Tim Scott.Wading into stormy intellectual waters, Mary Trump embraces the 1619 Project, a proposal to center racism in American history, published by the New York Times. She does admit one of the project’s original claims, that the revolutionary war was fought to preserve slavery, was “a factual inaccuracy”. In doing so she joins leading historians including Sean Wilentz and James McPherson of Princeton as critics of the project.Mary Trump is also in favor of financial reparations to Black Americans in compensation for centuries of oppression, and a vocal opponent of “broken windows” policing. Under that theory, minor disorder is cracked down upon harshly, supposedly as a way of stopping more serious crime at source but disproportionately affecting minority communities.Looking at the impact of the policy on her own city, New York, Mary Trump goes full bore at Rudy Giuliani, once mayor, and Bill Bratton, Giuliani’s first police commissioner. She contends that the impact of “broken windows” policing was minimal at best, and that a reduction in crime in the 1990s was merely part of a larger “national trend”. Loathe Giuliani all you want but he deserves credit. His New York drove that trend.She continues: “In our cities and our schools, we all would have been better off if they’d just fixed the fucking windows.” Unfortunately, Bill de Blasio, the current mayor, can’t even be bothered with that. Parts of Fun City are not terribly fun.Mary Trump puts her positions passionately but perhaps she could pause to consider how such agendas play with voters. Even under the horrors of Covid, Joe Biden was the only Democrat who could have beaten her uncle. James Clyburn, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, has acknowledged that one slogan popular on the left, Defund the Police, nearly cost control of the House.Ohio Democratic primary election: Shontel Brown defeats progressive Nina TurnerRead moreMore recently, in Ohio, Shontel Brown won a House primary against Nina Turner – a harsh critic of Biden. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, leading national progressive voices, were in Turner’s corner. Clyburn had Brown’s back. At the ballot box, moderation matters. So do coalitions.According to Mary Trump, “we are heading toward an even darker period in our nation’s history”. This week, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, made light of her uncle’s attempts to have the Department of Justice subvert the election result. There is reason for more than just concern. The past five years, the age of Donald Trump, have cast a harsh spotlight on America.Each of us will see what we will see. Our cold civil war continues. With her second book, Mary Trump offers food for thought – and grist for the mill.
The Reckoning is published in the US by St Martin’s Press ($28.99) and in the UK by Atlantic (£18.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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The New York governor Andrew Cuomo resigned this week after 11 women came forward with sexual harassment claims, ending the career of one of the most prominent politicians in the US
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Andrew Cuomo, the governor of the state of New York, resigned this week after the publication of a report alleging that he sexually harassed 11 women. Cuomo denies any wrongdoing but after fighting on for a week announced he would step aside on Tuesday. Ed Pilkington, the chief reporter of Guardian US, tells Rachel Humphreys that the move marks the downfall of one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic party. He was instrumental in passing liberal reforms on gay marriage, minimum wage and strengthening laws on sexual harassment. But the release of the report documents another story: of multiple allegations of harassment of women. As previous allies deserted him, up to and including Joe Biden, Cuomo announced his departure but continued to deny all allegations. Now, as he ponders his next move, he faces lawsuits, not just over sexual harassment claims, but over his handling of care homes in the Covid crisis. More
TexasTexas senate passes voting restrictions bill after 15-hour filibuster by Democrat Carol Alvarado wears running shoes during marathon speech Civil arrest warrants delivered to 50 absent Democrats A More
