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      in US Politics

      Nancy Pelosi rebukes Ilhan Omar for tweet on Israel, Hamas and Taliban

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      The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, issued a rebuke of Ilhan Omar on Thursday, after the outspoken Minnesota congresswoman said she was a victim of “harassment and silencing” by fellow Democrats over a remark about the US, Israel, Afghanistan and Hamas.“Drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the US and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all,” Pelosi said, in a statement issued with the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, and other members of the party hierarchy.Omar made the initial comments on Monday, in a tweet accompanying video of a question she asked the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in a House hearing.“We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity,” Omar wrote. “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan and the Taliban. I asked Secretary Blinken where people are supposed to go for justice.”The tweet stoked controversy for seeming to equate the actions of the US and Israel with those of Hamas, an Iran-linked militant organisation in the Palestinian territories which the US lists as a terrorist group, and the Taliban, Islamic extremists US and coalition troops have fought in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years.In May, conflict between Israel and Hamas led to the deaths of 12 people in Israel and 248 in the Palestinian territories – and accusations of war crimes on both sides.As Republicans accused Omar of antisemitism and pushed for her to be expelled from the House foreign affairs committee, a group of Jewish House Democrats issued their own criticism.“Equating the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban is as offensive as it is misguided,” they wrote in a statement. “Ignoring the differences between democracies governed by the rule of law and contemptible organisations that engage in terrorism at best discredits one’s intended argument and at worst reflects deep-seated prejudice.“The United States and Israel are imperfect and, like all democracies, at times deserving of critique, but false equivalencies give cover to terrorist groups. We urge Congresswoman Omar to clarify her words.”On Twitter, Omar responded: “It’s shameful for colleagues who call me when they need my support to now put out a statement asking for ‘clarification’ and not just call. The Islamophobic tropes in this statement are offensive. The constant harassment and silencing from the signers of this letter is unbearable.“Citing an open case against Israel, US, Hamas & Taliban in the [International Criminal Court] isn’t comparison or from ‘deeply seated prejudice’. You might try to undermine these investigations or deny justice to their victims but history has thought us that the truth can’t be hidden or silenced forever.”She also retweeted comments by the MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who said: “Maybe these House Democrats should read beyond the Fox/Daily Mail headlines and faux outrage and not help incite more hate against Omar.”Omar reported receiving threats, including being called “a raghead N-word” and her staff “anti-American communist piece[s] of shit”.“This is the kind of incitement and hate that leads to real violence,” she said.Omar came to the US from Somalia as child and in 2018 was one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. With the other, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, she is a member of the so-called “Squad” of Democratic women of colour whose progressive values and use of the media spotlight often put them at odds with party leaders.Among Democrats who came to Omar’s defence amid controversy over her remark about Hamas and the Taliban, the Missouri representative Cori Bush said: “I’m not surprised when Republicans attack Black women for standing up for human rights. But when it’s Democrats, it’s especially hurtful. We’re your colleagues. Talk to us directly. Enough with the anti-Blackness and Islamophobia.”On Thursday Omar did clarify her remarks, saying she was not making “a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the US and Israel” and was “in no way equating terrorist organisations with democratic countries”.Pelosi and Hoyer said: “We welcome the clarification by Congresswoman Omar that there is no moral equivalency between the US and Israel and Hamas and the Taliban.” More

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      in US Politics

      Schumer plans to force key votes to win over Democratic holdouts on filibuster

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      Top Democrats are preparing to make the case to impose new limits on the filibuster, in a move that could bring to a head six months of smoldering tensions over an expected Republican blockade of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.The Senate had its first filibuster of this Congress last week, when Republicans used the tactical rule to block a bipartisan House-passed measure to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack perpetrated a pro-Trump mob.Even as a majority of senators voted in favor of the commission, the bill’s defeat at the hands of Republicans deploying the filibuster underscored the ease with which legislation can be blocked under current Senate rules that require a 60-vote margin in the 100-strong chamber.Republicans at the same time last week delayed a bipartisan measure aimed at improving American competitiveness with China, also proving to Democrats that the party was more interested in denying legislative wins to Biden than advancing bills that they helped write.Now, in an attempt to demonstrate Republicans have all but turned the filibuster into a weapon to wage bad-faith politics, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is embarking on a strategy to force votes on some of Biden’s most high-profile measures.The idea is to demonstrate to Democrats opposed to curbing the filibuster – most notably West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema – that Republicans will sink any Democratic policy, giving Schumer no choice but to defuse the procedural rule in order to pass Biden’s vision.The problem, as Democrats see it, is that Republicans have effectively rewritten Senate rules to force supermajorities for bills that carry widespread public and congressional support. Filibustering bills, once extremely rare, has now become routine.“Will our Republican colleagues let the Senate debate the bill, or will they engage in another partisan filibuster of urgent legislation? We will soon see,” Schumer said last week, previewing his intentions.It is a replica of the playbook followed by then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid in 2013 to gather Democratic support to impose limits on the filibuster, after Republicans blocked former President Barack Obama’s picks for cabinet posts and the federal judiciary.But it remains far from clear whether Schumer can find the same success in persuading the holdouts in the Senate Democratic caucus to move ahead with what is known on Capitol Hill as the “nuclear option” of limiting the filibuster.The political moment confronting Schumer is far darker than the one experienced by Reid, who by virtue of having a larger Democratic majority in the 2013 Senate, did not need to convince all of his senators, such as Manchin, to support changing the rules.In addition, Manchin has come out publicly against making any reforms to the filibuster so often to this Congress, that he may be unable to backtrack even if successfully convinced of the need for imposing new restrictions.Writing in a recent op-ed published in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin warned that “partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy”, and reiterated he would not vote to remove or modify the filibuster.The situation is similar with Sinema, who said during the Memorial Day recess that she would not budge on reforming the filibuster, having previously noted the perils of changing Senate rules that offer the minority party wide latitude to block action.But with Biden’s ambitious political agenda imperiled by expected Republican filibusters, Schumer has reached the point where he believes the only way to pass bills offered by Democrats is to escalate the fight, according to a source familiar with his thinking.The pressure is only likely to increase on Manchin and Sinema in the coming weeks, with Schumer pledging this month to hold a vote on S1, the sweeping voting rights measure expanding ballot access and controls on campaign contributions, known as the For the People Act.In the struggle for voting rights, Democrats have rested their hopes on S1 for turning back a wave of new voting restrictions that grew out of former president Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud enacted by Republican statehouses nationwide.The political stakes, as well as the implications for the country at large, are huge: Democrats believe the bill’s passage could allow them to overrule such state-level mandates, while its failure could allow Republicans to marginalize Black, Asian and minority voters.Against such a backdrop, Schumer’s plan has rattled Republicans. And on Monday, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell railed against the planned series of votes, slamming it as a partisan ploy that is “transparently designed to fail”.“Senate Democrats intend to focus this month on the demands of their radical base,” McConnell said. More

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      in Elections

      Barack Obama criticizes Republicans for pushing election lie

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      Americans should be worried that the Republican party “is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognisable and unacceptable even five years ago”, Barack Obama said on Monday.The former president warned Americans “to recognise that the path towards an undemocratic America is not gonna happen in just one bang” but will instead come “in a series of steps”, as seen under authoritarian leaders in Hungary and Poland.Obama was speaking to CNN the night before two Senate committees released a report on the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.Five people died after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in service of Trump’s lie that his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden in the electoral college and the popular vote was caused by electoral fraud.Trump was impeached a second time, with support from 10 House Republicans. But Republicans in the Senate acquitted him of inciting an insurrection. He remains free to run for office and has returned to public speaking and hinted about plans for running for the White House again in 2024.Last month, Republicans blocked the formation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack. The Senate report released on Tuesday did not address political questions.Away from Washington, in states including Texas, Florida and Georgia, Republicans are pursuing laws to restrict ballot access in constituencies likely to vote Democratic, and to make it easier to overturn election results.In Washington, opposition from centrist Democrats such as the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is blocking federal voting rights protections.Obama told CNN “large portions of an elected Congress [are] going along with the falsehood that there were problems with the election”.Some Republicans did speak up against Trump’s lie after 6 January, Obama said, praising officials like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Georgia secretary of state who resisted pressure to overturn Biden’s win there, as “very brave”.But then, Obama said, “poof, suddenly everybody was back in line. Now, the reason for that is because the base believed it and the base believed it because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch.“My hope is that the tides will turn. But that does require each of us to understand that this experiment in democracy is not self-executing. It doesn’t happen just automatically.”Obama, the first black president, has considered his impact on the American right at length, particularly in his memoir, A Promised Land, which was published after the 2020 election.He told CNN the rightwing media, most prominently Fox News, was a particular driver of deepening division. Republicans and Democrats, he said, “occupy different worlds. And it becomes that much more difficult for us to hear each other, see each other.“We have more economic stratification and segregation. You combine that with racial stratification and the siloing of the media, so you don’t have just Walter Cronkite delivering the news, but you have 1,000 different venues. All that has contributed to that sense that we don’t have anything in common.”Asking “how do we start once again being able to tell a common story about where this country goes?”, Obama said Americans on either side of the divide needed to meet and talk more often.“The question now becomes how do we create … meeting places,” he said. “Because right now, we don’t have them and we’re seeing the consequences of that.” More

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      in Elections

      Trump feared Democrats would replace Biden with Michelle Obama, book claims

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      Donald Trump called Joe Biden a “mental retard” during the 2020 election, a new book says, but was reluctant to attack him too strongly for fear the Democrats would replace him with Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama.Biden went on to beat Trump by more than 7m in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result Trump deemed a landslide when it was in his favour against Clinton in 2016.Trump refused to accept defeat, pushing the lie that it was the result of electoral fraud. The lie resulted in the deadly Capitol attack of 6 January, by a mob Trump told to “fight like hell”, and a second impeachment. Trump was acquitted of inciting the insurrection and remains eligible to run for office.He tops polls of Republican nominees for 2024 and has returned to public speaking. On Monday, Forbes reported a planned tour with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who left the network amid claims of sexual misconduct.Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal, will be published in August. Trump was among interviewees for the book. Vanity Fair published an excerpt on Monday.Previous revelations include that the Fox News host Sean Hannity, who was rebuked for campaigning with Trump, wrote an ad for the Trump campaign – a report Hannity denied.Bender writes that Trump interrupted a White House meeting to ask: “How am I losing in the polls to a mental retard?”The idea Democrats would replace Biden reportedly came from Dick Morris, a former adviser to Bill Clinton who has migrated rightwards and who was informally advising Trump.“Dick Morris told Trump that Biden was too old and too prone to gaffes to be the nominee,” Bender writes.Biden was 78 when he became the oldest president ever sworn in. Trump turns 75 next week.Bender adds that Trump believed his attacks on the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren early in the Democratic primary were too successful. Trump gave Warren a racist nickname, Pocahontas, based on her claim to Native American ancestry.Thinking Warren would have been an easier opponent, Bender writes, Trump fretted to aides that Democrats would “realise [Biden is] old, and they’re going to give it to somebody else. They’re going to give it to Hillary, or they’re going to give it to Michelle Obama.”Trump reportedly feared Democrats would move to replace Biden at their convention.According to widespread reporting, Trump’s fears about Clinton were not entirely without justification. Clinton did consider jumping into a race in which Biden struggled before surging to victory.According to Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere, released last month, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state “would muse aloud sometimes” about taking the nomination at a contested convention.Michelle Obama, however, never expressed interest. The former first lady remains hugely popular with the Democratic base but has repeatedly ruled out a career in frontline politics. More

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      in US Politics

      The Republican party is now an explicitly illiberal party | Lee Drutman

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      A little more than a century after the American president Woodrow Wilson promised to make “the world safe for democracy” by committing troops in the first world war, the US is now in a fight to keep its own democracy safe.The images of the 6 January siege on the US Capitol offer a stunning portrait of US democratic fragility. A violent mob, bearing red Trump flags alongside a menagerie of extremist insignias, overran police and ransacked the seat of government after attending a nearby Trump rally. Republican congressional leaders, after some initial mealy mouthed attempts to condemn Donald Trump for his role in the rally, have since gone quiet, hoping that if they cover their ears, avert their eyes, and play “culture war” instead, they can avoid a reckoning. This is reflected most starkly in congressional Republicans’ refusal to support a bipartisan commission to examine the events of 6 January. Worse, some elected Republicans have rewritten history in record time by recasting the mob as akin to peaceful tourists. In the long history of democratic declines, a telltale alarm is when partisan leaders refuse to address violent actions by their supporters, thus effectively condoning and even welcoming them.But even more worrying are the initiatives that numerous Republican-controlled states have enacted since 6 January to curtail methods of voting preferred by Democratic constituencies and to both pressure and circumvent election administrators. These changes are transparent attempts to make it harder for Democrats to win elections. However, Republican lawmakers cite unproven claims of “fraud” and claim that they are simply trying to ensure “electoral integrity”. And yet, respected election experts have repeatedly declared the 2020 election extremely secure and free of major fraud. Meanwhile, Trump looms large, lathering falsehoods and smearing insults with astonishing adhesion.As a system of government, democracy has proven quite long-lasting in the United States, though it has evolved and changed considerably since its 1789 vintage. A good part of the reason is that whatever its disappointments and shortcomings, American political elites have remained committed enough to democracy’s basic principles – accepting the legitimacy of political opponents, and accepting that parties can lose elections fair and square. In practice, this means not using power to restrict the civil liberties and voting rights of political opponents, and not declaring electoral losses illegitimate and responding with violence.The Republican party of 2021, and especially its leaders, have now abandoned those principles. At a national level, they have refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election results, and encouraged or condoned violence. At a state level, they have abused their power to change the rules in ways that restrict voting rights. Though these anti-democratic sentiments have been building within the ranks of the party for years, the events of 2021 mark the transformation of the Republican party into a genuinely illiberal party, and a grave threat to the continuation of American democracy as we’ve known it.Given the widespread popularity of the Republican party, combatting the challenge that the party poses is formidable. As Trump and his supporters are fond of pointing out, 74 million Americans voted for him, and you can’t simply dismiss 74 million Americans. Roughly equal numbers also voted for Republican candidates for state and federal offices as well.However, part of the reason for this support is because in the American two-party system, voters have but two effective choices. And for voters who don’t identify with the Democratic party, there is but one alternative. Precisely because there is only one alternative, Republican politicians and strategists have worked especially hard over recent decades to leave themselves as the only option for many voters by disqualifying Democrats as radical and extremist, a messaging mission that has latched on to and amplified latent anti-immigrant sentiments and longstanding racial resentments among non-college-educated whites. By framing Democrats as a cadre of immigrants and black Marxists who want to radically remake America, Republicans have also given themselves a strong justification for preventing Democrats from winning elections, by whatever means necessary. Historically, anti-democratic parties have frequently used these kinds of high stakes fights about preserving national identity and character as a pretense for consolidating power.Historically, anti-democratic parties have frequently used fights about preserving national identity and character as a pretense for consolidating powerIn the immediate term, Democrats must use their narrow majorities to pass democracy reforms that guarantee and protect the right to vote and prohibit state partisan electoral manipulations. In particular, Democrats must pass the comprehensive For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which collectively would legally prohibit the most anti-democratic initiatives being pursued by Republicans, as well as more broadly regulate campaign finance and ethics. This will mitigate some of the most urgent threats.But even with these reforms, American democracy still cannot survive without a conservative party committed to free and fair elections and the basic principles of democracy. This leaves three possibilities. The first is a Republican party that somehow returns to “normal”. But as the most illiberal Trumpist elements continue to rise within the party, and elected Republicans at both the state and national level continue to emphasize divisive culture-war fights and conspiracy theories, such a return seems about as unlikely as an alien invasion.The second possibility is a complete collapse of the Republican party, and the emergence of a new more reasonable party in its place. This also seems highly fanciful, given the winner-take-all nature of the American electoral system, and its punishing obstacles for upstart third parties.This leaves us with a third possibility: a second round of voting reforms that remove single-winner districts and allow new parties to emerge and gain representation through multimember districts with proportional representation. Under such a system, new center-right parties could emerge that are both committed to democracy and not trapped in white grievance politics. This may seem improbable as well, but it is likely the only feasible path forward. A two-party system can only work with two parties that believe in democracy. When one party stops believing, the center cannot hold. The only way to preserve American democracy in the long run may be to recast in the short run. More