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Key events
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CDC to recommend vaccinated people wear masks indoors – sometimes
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‘This is how I’m going to die’: USCP officer recounts January 6
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Committee must uncover what happened at the White House on January 6, Cheney says
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Thompson plays graphic footage of insurrection in opening statement
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January 6 select committee begins first hearing
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January 6 select committee to hold first hearing
Live feed
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Thompson is using his questions to hit key emotional points in the testimony of the four officers. Such committee hearings are about TV too, remember – which is why Donald Trump may be unhappy that thanks to Kevin McCarthy’s choice to withdraw Republicans from the panel, he has no defenders here, beaming to screens around the country.
Officer Dunn is asked about his experience enduring racist abuse, seeing Confederate flags among the rioters and other such issues.
“It’s so overwhelming and disappointing and disheartening,” he says, that America contains people who would “attack you because of the colour of your skin”.
“My blood is red, I’m an American citizen, I’m a police officer and a peace officer,” he says. “I’m here to defend everybody.”
Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and pariah in her own party, is next up. She asks Sgt Gonell about Trump’s claims that the crowd was full of “loving” people. He is not impressed.
“I’m still recovering from those hugs and kisses,” Gonell says, adding: “If that was hugs and kisses I wish you all go to his house and do the same to him.”
“All of them were telling us Trump sent us,” Gonell adds, dismissing Trump’s claim leftwing demonstrators or the FBI were behind the riot.
Officer Fanone is next to receive a question from Cheney. “The politics of that day didn’t play into my response at all,” he says.
Officer Hodges is asked to describe his experience in seeing protesters in military and tactical gear at the Capitol. Cheney asks Officer Dunn about what police expected on 6 January. “A couple arrests, name-calling, unfriendly people,” he says – but not close to what actually happened.
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CDC to recommend vaccinated people wear masks indoors – sometimes
The Washington Post reports that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will this afternoon recommend that vaccinated people wear masks indoors in certain circumstances. The paper, which tends to turn out to be reasonably well connected in the capital, says the announcement is coming at 3pm ET.
The CDC will revise guidance issued on 13 May, which said vaccinated individuals did not need to wear masks indoors.
As is the way of things, the administration’s view on whether mask advisories or mandates might return, as with the question of whether vaccinations should be made mandatory in any circumstances, has been a little opaque. But as press secretary Jen Psaki said yesterday, Joe Biden regards his scientific and medical advisers as his “North Star” on such matters, so here we are. Or will be, when the announcement comes later.
The highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus has fuelled steep rises in case numbers, particularly among unvaccinated Americans and amid struggles with disinformation and resistance, particularly on the political right.
Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, discussed the possible need to return to advising mask-wearing over the weekend. Report here.
Speaking to the Post, Robert Wachter, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said: “Nobody wants to go backward but you have to deal with the facts on the ground, and the facts on the ground are that it’s a pretty scary time and there are a lot of vulnerable people.
“I think the biggest thing we got wrong was not anticipating that 30% of the country would choose not to be vaccinated.
“In June we were in this virtuous cycle, where cases were going down, people were getting vaccinated, everyone said happy days are here again, and let their guard down.”
Some further reading, from Jessica Glenza:
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This is Martin Pengelly, taking over the controls from Joanie Greve for a while. In response to questions from Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, Sgt Gonell is currently describing his experiences in Iraq: “We could run over an IED and that’s it but at least we knew we were in a combat zone. Here, in our nation’s capital, we were attacked multiple times.”
He adds that police officers were “fighting for our lives” during the assault by the Trump supporters seeking to overturn the election result.
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US Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who is Black, said he was repeatedly called the “n” word as he sought to protect the Capitol from pro-Trump insurrectionists on January 6.
“Nobody had ever, ever called me a [‘n’ word] while wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police officer,” Dunn said, actually saying the racial slur.
Dunn closed his testimony by expressing pride in his fellow USCP officers and encouraging them to protect their mental health as they deal with the fallout of the insurrection.
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with seeking professional counseling,” Dunn said.
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US Capitol Police officers are closely watching the January 6 select committee’s hearing as some of their colleagues testify.
An NBC News reporter shared a photo of two USCP officers watching C-SPAN as it streamed the hearing:
Haley Talbot
(@haleytalbotnbc)
As we hear the powerful stories from officers on Jan 6 can’t help but think of the entire USCP force, including those that lost their lives as a result of that day. As you walk around the Capitol today officers are glued to the hearing, watching their colleagues testify. pic.twitter.com/ljw2Br7tk3
July 27, 2021
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Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges, who was nearly crushed against a door on January 6 as pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, delivered his opening statement to the select committee. More
The fight to voteUS voting rightsRepublicans poised to rig the next election by gerrymandering electoral mapsA supreme court justice described the last round of gerrymandering as ‘dishonoring US democracy’. Another round is about to start – will this be another ‘political heist’? The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam LevineTue 27 Jul 2021 05.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 27 Jul 2021 05.01 EDTTen years ago, Republicans pulled off what would later be described as “the most audacious political heist of modern times”.It wasn’t particularly complicated. Every 10 years, the US constitution requires states to redraw the maps for both congressional and state legislative seats. The constitution entrusts state lawmakers with the power to draw those districts. Looking at the political map in 2010, Republicans realized that by winning just a few state legislative seats in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, they could draw maps that would be in place for the next decade, distorting them to guarantee Republican control for years to come.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterRepublicans executed the plan, called Project Redmap, nearly perfectly and took control of 20 legislative bodies, including ones in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Then, Republicans set to work drawing maps that cemented their control on power for the next decade. Working behind closed doors, they were brazen in their efforts.In Wisconsin, lawmakers signed secrecy agreements and then drew maps that were so rigged that Republicans could nearly hold on to a supermajority of seats with a minority of the vote. In Michigan, a Republican operative bragged about cramming “Dem garbage” into certain districts as they drew a congressional map that advantaged Republicans 9-5. In Ohio, GOP operatives worked secretly from a hotel room called “the bunker”, as they tweaked a congressional map that gave Republicans a 12-4 advantage. In North Carolina, a state lawmaker publicly said he was proposing a map that would elect 10 Republicans to Congress because he did not think it was possible to draw one that would elect 11.This manipulation, called gerrymandering, “debased and dishonored our democracy”, Justice Elena Kagan would write years later. It allowed Republicans to carefully pick their voters, insulating them from the accountability that lies at the foundation of America’s democratic system. Now, the once-a-decade process is set to begin again in just a few weeks and Republicans are once again poised to dominate it. And this time around things could be even worse than they were a decade ago.The redistricting cycle arrives at a moment when American democracy is already in peril. Republican lawmakers in states across the country, some of whom hold office because of gerrymandering, have enacted sweeping measures making it harder to vote. Republicans have blocked federal legislation that would outlaw partisan gerrymandering and strip state lawmakers of their authority to draw districts.Advances in mapmaking technology have also made it easier to produce highly detailed maps very quickly, giving lawmakers a bigger menu of possibilities to choose from when they carve up a state. It makes it easier to tweak lines and to test maps to ensure that their projected results will hold throughout the decade.“I’m very worried that we’ll have several states, important states, with among the worst gerrymanders in American history,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, who closely studies redistricting. “That’s not good for democracy in those states.”In 2019, the supreme court said for the first time there was nothing federal courts could do to stop even the most excessive partisan gerrymandering, giving lawmakers a green light to be even more aggressive. And because of the supreme court’s 2013 decision in the landmark Shelby County v Holder case, places with a history of voting discrimination will no longer have to get their maps approved by the federal government for the first time since 1965. It’s a lack of oversight that could embolden lawmakers to attempt to draw districts that could dilute the influence of minority voters. The gerrymandering clock is ticking. There is a consensus that Republicans could use the redistricting process to draw maps that will allow them to retake the House of Representatives in 2022. In state capitols where Republicans have control, there are already discussions about how aggressive lawmakers should be when they carve up districts for the next decade.Texas, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina are all states where Republicans have complete control over the redistricting process and where experts are on high alert for GOP efforts to gerrymander districts. And even though Democrats are at a severe redistricting disadvantage overall, there are a handful of states – Illinois, New York and Maryland – where Democrats hold control of state government and can use that control to draw maps to their advantage.Even though gerrymandering poses a uniquely dangerous threat to democracy, for decades, the process has largely gone under the radar. The mapmaking process is a complex, technical one, difficult to understand for average citizens. While some of the most egregiously gerrymandered districts are obviously contorted, it can be difficult to spot a gerrymander with the naked eye. And even if it were easy, lawmakers have largely taken the process behind closed doors, blocking the public from what they are seeing.That’s set to change this year too.Democrats and grassroots groups have spent the last few years educating citizens about the process and building up an army of volunteers across the country to closely monitor mapmaking. Part of that effort has been teaching people how to use publicly available technology to draw their own electoral maps.“It’s an entirely new world than 10 years ago in terms of public mapping software. The capacity for the wide public to draw their own maps and identify their own communities,” said Moon Duchin, a mathematician who leads the MGGG redistricting lab at Tufts University, which has built publicly available mapping tools.Empowered with those maps, members of the public can better challenge lawmakers on their justification for drawing strange-looking maps, said William Desmond, a redistricting expert who advised Arizona’s redistricting commission in 2010 and is working with California’s this year.“Members of the public and interested parties, there’s going to be a lot more avenues open to them if they want to try their hand at drawing their own districts,” he said. “If they want to test the claims, like, ‘OK you said you can only do this if you split these counties, let’s see if I can take a whack at it.’ There’s lots more ways you can do it this time, and a lot higher level of quality.”Technology aside, there’s also some hope that 2021 won’t be a repeat of 2011, when Republicans dominated redistricting. While Republicans do have a huge advantage in drawing the districts, it’s not as severe as it was in 2011. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two of the most gerrymandered states a decade ago, Republicans still control the state legislatures, but now have Democratic governors who will be able to veto egregiously extreme maps.Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, a GOP group focused on redistricting, downplayed the effects of Project Redmap. “Redmap has kind of taken on this mythos about what it was and what it was not. The reality was Redmap was a campaign to raise money to fund state legislative races around redistricting,” he said. “The best guardrails for gerrymandering have always been the American electorate. Shifting electorates break gerrymandering.”But critics argue that severe partisan gerrymandering prevents shifting electorates from being heard. In Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Republicans have maintained a majority in the seats in the state legislature for the entire decade even as Democrats have won gubernatorial and other statewide races.Kincaid agreed there would be significantly more public interest in the process this year than there had been in years past.“A decade ago … the number of press calls I got could be counted on one hand. Really on one finger,” he said. Some states are also choosing to strip lawmakers of their ability to draw districts altogether. In Michigan, a group of novice organizers successfully passed a constitutional amendment in 2018 to put redistricting in the hands of an independent commission composed of four Democrats, four Republicans and five independents. The commission has strict partisan fairness requirements it must follow as it draws maps. Colorado and Virginia will also use commissions to draw districts this year, after voters approved ballot initiatives.“The gerrymandering last decade was so extreme that I think it has created this backlash. You see it in the reforms that have passed in a number of states. And you also see it in greater public awareness about gerrymandering,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.At the same time, he added, “I think for Republicans they also learned that this actually does work. They actually can do this with micro-precision.”TopicsUS voting rightsThe fight to voteRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More
US Capitol attackHouse begins Capitol attack inquiry as Republicans set to boycott proceedingsCommittee established by Pelosi features two Republicans, Cheney and Kinzinger, after McCarthy withdrew his nominees Tue 27 Jul 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 27 Jul 2021 03.02 EDTThe much-anticipated House investigation into the January attack on the US Capitol begins on Tuesday, with Republicans set to boycott proceedings in an attempt to undermine any findings.A special committee established by the Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, will convene to investigate the circumstances surrounding the deadly insurrection in Washington DC, when hundreds of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to interrupt the certification of Joe Biden as president.Capitol attack committee chair vows to investigate Trump: ‘Nothing is off limits’Read moreThe committee, which will feature just two Republicans after the GOP leadership refused to participate, will hear this week from police officers who battled rioters during the attack.The investigation into the 6 January attack has become a fiercely partisan issue in Washington. The House voted in May for an independent investigation that would have been evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but the Senate blocked the move.That left Pelosi to create a select committee to conduct the investigation. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, picked five Republicans to sit on the committee, but Pelosi rejected Jim Jordan and Jim Banks’ nominations, prompting McCarthy to withdraw all five nominees. Both Jordan and Banks are staunch Trump allies who deny his role in the attack and objected to the certification of Biden’s win.Liz Cheney, a Republican congresswoman from Wyoming, had already been named to the panel by Pelosi, and on Sunday Pelosi went around McCarthy again to appoint Representative Adam Kinzinger, who like Cheney is a critic of Trump, to the committee.Pelosi said Kinzinger “and other Republicans have expressed an interest to serve on the select committee. And I wanted to appoint three of them that Leader McCarthy suggested. But he withdrew their names. The two that I would not appoint are people who would jeopardise the integrity of the investigation, and there’s no way I would tolerate their antics as we seek the truth.”Kinzinger and Cheney were among the 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump’s second impeachment, and the pair were the only Republicans who voted to form the special committee. Both have cited Trump’s false claims of election fraud as a factor in the insurrection.“For months, lies and conspiracy theories have been spread, threatening our self-governance,” Kinzinger said on Sunday.“For months, I have said that the American people deserve transparency and truth on how and why thousands showed up to attack our democracy. I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable.”Democrat Bennie Thompson will chair the committee, which on Tuesday will hear from four police officers who were on duty on 6 January. They are expected to testify about their experiences that day, including the physical and verbal abuse they were subjected to as hundreds of people swarmed the Capitol.“We have to get it right,” Thompson said on Monday. He said if the committee could find ways to prevent anything like it from happening again, “then I would have made what I think is the most valuable contribution to this great democracy”.Last week a Florida man became the first person to be sentenced to prison for his role in the January attack. More than 570 people have been charged with taking part in the riot, during and after which seven people died.TopicsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesNancy PelosiUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More
Democrats‘We use what tools we have’: Democrats take drastic action in bid to resist Republican rule Across the US, in Republican-controlled states Democrats are being forced to get creative to oppose a conservative agendaJoan E Greve in Washington@ More
US Capitol attackNancy Pelosi primes Capitol attack panel to take hard line on TrumpThe Republican leadership’s decision to boycott the inquiry leaves the ex-president without defenders on the committee Hugo Lowell in WashingtonMon 26 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 26 Jul 2021 02.01 EDTThe House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is readying the committee that will on Tuesday begin its investigation into the attack on the Capitol to press ahead with an aggressive inquiry into Donald Trump, as she seeks to exploit Republicans’ refusal to participate that could leave the former US president unguarded.Can Pelosi’s power play on Capitol attack panel thwart wrecking tactics? Read moreThe move by the top Democrat in the House last week to block Jim Banks and Jim Jordan – vociferous allies of the former president – from serving on the House select committee, prompted the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to boycott the inquiry, pulling his three other Republican picks from the panel.But Pelosi won strong support from Democrats for her vetoes and told her lieutenants that she may have emerged with the upper hand ahead of the select committee’s first hearing.“We have the duty, to the constitution and the country, to find the truth of the 6 January insurrection and to ensure that such an assault on our Democracy cannot again happen,” Pelosi said of the investigation in a letter to Democrats.The speaker has suggested to top Democrats in recent days that McCarthy’s reflexive move to boycott the panel leaves Trump without any defenders in the high-profile investigation into the 6 January insurrection, according to a source familiar with the matter.Pelosi chose some of the former president’s most critical opponents when she made her appointments to the select committee, installing both lead House impeachment managers from Trump’s two impeachments as well as the Republican dissident Liz Cheney, who was ousted from party leadership in May for repudiating Trump.But the absence of any Republican picks on the select committee means that when the investigation pivots from examining security failures to the role Trump played on 6 January, the inquiry will be conducted solely by his political foes, emboldening Pelosi to seek an aggressive inquiry, the source said.It was not immediately clear how Pelosi might proceed with the select committee. But Democrats have agitated for weeks for her to take a hard line against Republicans after they doomed a 9/11-style bipartisan commission into the Capitol attack.Democrats close to Pelosi say she remains furious at how Republicans have sought to downplay the brutal violence of the insurrection, which informed her decision to not give Banks and Jordan a platform from which to twist or minimize the select committee’s findings.But the speaker’s relationship with Republicans deteriorated to a new low, after McCarthy shouted down the phone at her when she informed him of her decision to veto Banks and Jordan, the source said.Republicans have seized on Pelosi’s intervention against Banks and Jordan, as well as her close involvement with the panel, to portray the inquiry as a partisan exercise to gain political advantage ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.McCarthy lashed out anew a day after he was denied his two top picks for the select committee, and pledged to carry out a Republican-only investigation that would focus on how Pelosi should have done more to protect the Capitol.But Democrats said Pelosi was more than justified in upending congressional norms in refusing to appoint Banks and Jordan, both of whom amplified Trump’s lies about a stolen election and objected to certifying Joe Biden’s election win.“We want people who are going to have allegiance to the oath of office that they took, not an allegiance to one person. And they’ve clearly pledged their allegiance to the former president,” said Democrat Pete Aguilar, a member of the select committee.Several Democrats said they were particularly disturbed by a CNN report that an alleged Capitol rioter, Anthony Aguero, accompanied Banks on a trip sponsored by the Republican Study Committee to the southern border and, at times, served as an interpreter.They also said that Pelosi came to the conclusion that Banks could not be trusted to serve as the top Republican appointee on the panel after he issued a statement that he wanted to investigate the role of the Biden administration in the insurrection.Democrats expressed deep reservations as well about Jordan, the top Republican on the House judiciary committee, after he disparaged the select committee and accused Pelosi of being responsible for a diminished security presence at the Capitol.The speaker does not herself oversee security at the Capitol, which is the responsibility of the US Capitol police board and the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms. Both sergeants-at-arms at the time of the attack were hired by Republican congressional leaders.A bipartisan Senate report released last month detailed multiple security failings on the parts of the US Capitol police and the sergeants-at-arms. It did not blame Pelosi or her then opposite number in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.TopicsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesNancy PelosiUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More
OpinionJoe BidenWhy isn’t Joe Biden doing all he can to protect American democracy?Robert ReichBoth parties are beholden to an anti-democratic coalition. This is stopping real change Sun 25 Jul 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 25 Jul 2021 01.12 EDTYou’d think Biden and the Democratic party leadership would do everything in their power to stop Republicans from undermining democracy.Why are Frito-Lays workers working suicide shifts on the job? | Indigo OlivierRead moreSo far this year, the Republican party has passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country that will make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities. With Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are stoking white people’s fears that a growing non-white population is usurping their dominance.Yet while Biden and Democratic leaders are openly negotiating with holdout senators for Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure proposals, they aren’t exerting similar pressure when it comes to voting rights and elections. In fact, Biden now says he won’t take on the filibuster, which stands firmly in the way.What gives? Part of the explanation, I think, lies with an outside group that has almost as much influence on the Democratic party as on the Republican, and which isn’t particularly enthusiastic about election reform: the moneyed interests bankrolling both parties.A more robust democracy would make it harder for the wealthy to keep their taxes low and profits high. So at the same time white supremacists have been whipping up white fears about non-whites usurping their dominance, America’s wealthy have been spending vast sums on campaign donations and lobbyists to prevent a majority from usurping their money.They’re now whipping up resistance among congressional Democrats to Biden’s plan to tax capital gains at 39.6% – up from 20% – for those earning more than $1m, and they’re on the way to restoring the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes, of which they’re the biggest beneficiaries.In recent years these wealth supremacists, as they might be called, have quietly joined white supremacists to become a powerful anti-democracy coalition. Some have backed white supremacist’s efforts to divide poor and working-class whites from poor and working-class Black and brown people, so they don’t look upward and see where most of the economic gains have been going and don’t join together to demand a fair share of those gains.Similarly, white supremacists have quietly depended on wealth supremacists to donate to lawmakers who limit voting rights, so people of color continue to be second-class citizens. It’s no accident that six months after the insurrection, dozens of giant corporations that promised not to fund members of Congress who refused to certify Biden as president are now back funding them and their anti-voting rights agenda.Donald Trump was put into office by this anti-democracy coalition. According to Forbes, 9% of America’s billionaires, together worth a combined $210bn, pitched in to cover the costs of Trump’s 2020 campaign. During his presidency Trump gave both parts of the coalition what they wanted most: tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks for the wealth supremacists; legitimacy for the white supremacists.The coalition is now the core of the Republican party, which stands for little more than voter suppression based on Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and tax cuts for the wealthy and their corporations.Meanwhile, as wealth supremacists have accumulated a larger share of the nation’s income and wealth than at any time in more than a century, they’ve used a portion of that wealth to bribe lawmakers not to raise their taxes. It was recently reported that several American billionaires have paid only minimal or no federal income tax at all.Tragically, the supreme court is supporting both the white supremacists and wealth supremacists. Since Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined in 2005 and 2006, respectively, the court has been whittling away voting rights while enlarging the rights of the wealthy to shower money on lawmakers. The conservative majority has been literally making it easier to buy elections and harder to vote in them.The Democrats’ proposed For the People Act admirably takes on both parts of the coalition. It sets minimum national standards for voting, and it seeks to get big money out of politics through public financing of election campaigns.Yet this comprehensiveness may explain why the Act is now stalled in the Senate. Biden and Democratic leaders are firmly against white supremacists but are not impervious to the wishes of wealth supremacists. After all, to win elections they need likely Democrats to vote but also need big money to finance their campaigns.Some progressives have suggested a carve-out to the filibuster solely for voting rights. This might constrain the white supremacists but would do nothing to protect American democracy from the wealth supremacists.If democracy is to be preserved, both parts of the anti-democracy coalition must be stopped.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US
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