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      American democracy is fighting for its life – and Republicans don’t care | Robert Reich

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      On Sunday, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin announced in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail that he opposes the For the People Act. He also opposes ending the filibuster.An op-ed in the most prominent state newspaper is about as non-negotiable a position a senator can assert.It was a direct thumb-in-your-eye response to President Biden’s thinly veiled criticism of Manchin last Tuesday in Tulsa, where Biden explained why he was having difficulty getting passage of what was supposed to be his highest priority – new voting rights legislation that would supersede a raft of new voter suppression laws in Republican-dominated states, using Trump’s baseless claim of voter fraud as pretext.“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’” Biden asked rhetorically in Tulsa. “Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House, and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. But we’re not giving up.”Everyone knew he was referring to Manchin, as well as Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, another Democratic holdout.Manchin’s very public repudiation of Biden on Sunday could mean the end of the For the People Act. That opens the way for Republican states to continue their shameless campaign of voter suppression – very possibly giving Republicans a victory in the 2022 midterm elections and entrenching Republican rule for a generation.As it is, registered Republicans make up only about 25% of the American electorate, and that percentage appears to be shrinking in the wake of Trump’s malodorous exit.But because rural Republican states like Wyoming (with 574,000 inhabitants) get two senators just as do urban ones like California (with nearly 40 million), and because Republican states have gerrymandered districts that elect House members to give them an estimated 19 extra seats over what they would have without gerrymandering, the scales were already tipped.Then came the post-Trump deluge of state laws making it harder for likely Democrats to vote, and easier for Republican state legislatures to manipulate voting tallies.Manchin says he supports extending the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to all 50 states. That’s small comfort.The original 1965 Voting Rights Act was struck down by the supreme court in 2013, on the dubious logic that it was no longer needed because states with a history of suppressing Black votes no longer did so. (Note that within 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced it would implement a strict photo ID law, and Mississippi and Alabama soon followed.)The efficacy of a new national Voting Rights Act would depend on an activist justice department willing to block state changes in voting laws that suppress votes and on an activist supreme court willing to uphold such justice department decisions. Don’t bet on either. We know what happened to the justice department under Trump, and we know what’s happened to the supreme court.Besides, a new Voting Rights Act wouldn’t be able to roll back the most recent round of voter suppression laws from Republican states.Without Manchin, then, the For the People Act is probably dead, unless Biden can convince one Republican senator to join Senate Democrats in supporting it – like, say, Utah’s Mitt Romney, who has publicly rebuked Trump for lying about the 2020 election and has something of a reputation for being an institutionalist who cares about American democracy.Yet given Trump’s continuing hold over the shrinking Republican party, any Republican senator who joined with the Democrats in supporting the For the People Act would probably be ending their political career. Profiles in courage make good copy for political obituaries and memorials.I’m afraid history will show that, in this shameful era, Republican senators were more united in their opposition to voting rights than Democratic senators were in their support for them.The future of American democracy needs better odds. More

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      Democratic splits grow as key senator Manchin says no to voting rights bill

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      Growing fissures in Democratic ranks were evident on Monday over West Virginia senator Joe Manchin’s public opposition to the For the People Act, a sweeping measure to protect voting rights that are under assault from Republicans in numerous states – and also his stance against scrapping the filibuster.The filibuster is the rule under which the Senate minority, currently the Republicans, has the power to thwart the majority’s will on most legislation.Manchin is a centrist Democrat, but one progressive congressman called him “the new Mitch McConnell”, for helping the Republican Senate leader in his quest to stop progress on the Democrats’ agenda at all costs.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail on Sunday, Manchin said he opposed the For the People Act, or HR1, which currently has no Republican support in the Senate, because “partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy”.He also reiterated his support of the filibuster, under which 60 votes are needed to pass most legislation. The Senate is split 50-50 between the two parties and controlled by Democrats only through Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president.Anger over Manchin’s stand was particularly fierce among African Americans, a key constituency in elections which gave Democrats control of the White House and Congress and subsequently a key target of Republican efforts to restrict ballot access in Florida, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere.Mondaire Jones, a New York congressman, referred to the era of racial segregation in the US south when he said: “Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”The writer Jemele Hill elaborated: “This is so on brand for this country. Record number of black voters show up to save this democracy, only for white supremacy to be upheld by a cowardly, power-hungry white dude. Joe Manchin is a clown.”Speaking to CNN on Monday, congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York called Manchin “the new Mitch McConnell”.“Mitch McConnell during [Barack] Obama’s presidency said he would do everything in his power to stop Obama,” he said.“He’s also repeated that now, during the Biden presidency, by saying he would do everything in his power to stop President Biden. And now Joe Manchin is doing everything in his power to stop democracy and stop our work for the people, that work that the people sent us here to do.”Manchin has in fact voted with Biden most of the time so far, and has said he backs the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore ballot protections gutted by the US supreme court in 2013.Asked if it was fair to attack Manchin so stringently, Bowman said: “HR1 has popularity in West Virginia and across the country. Well over 65% of the American people support HR1, and well over 50% of Republicans support HR1.“The American people sent us to Washington to do a job. Just a few weeks ago, we had a bipartisan piece of legislation looking to form a commission to study the 6 January insurrection, the first attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812. It was a bipartisan piece of legislation, and it did not pass. Why? Because of the filibuster, and because the majority of Republicans are focused much more on obstruction.”A study by the Center for American Progress found that Republicans have used filibusters roughly twice as often as Democrats to stop legislation.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and New York Democrat, has said he will bring the For the People Act up for a vote this month. At the outset of a new legislative session on Monday, he appealed for Democrats to stick together.“I want to be clear that the next few weeks will be hard and will test our resolve as a Congress and a conference,” Schumer wrote to colleagues, as reported by the Hill. “The American people gave us a Democratic Senate to produce big and bold action on the major issues confronting us. And that is what we will do.”As the influential Punchbowl News put it on Monday morning, however: “Any legislative strategy that involves dumping the filibuster and then passing a bill is going to fail. That much is clear. If you don’t get that by now, we don’t know how to help you.”Unlike his fellow centrist and filibuster supporter, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Manchin voted for the 6 January commission, which would have investigated an event which Donald Trump incited in service of his lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” and he won, not Joe Biden.On Monday, Trump backed Manchin in his support for the filibuster, telling Fox Business: “It’s a very important thing. Otherwise you’re going to be packing the courts, you’re going to be doing all sorts of very bad things that were unthinkable.”The former president’s words were not without attendant irony.In July 2017, faced with the failure of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump famously tweeted against the filibuster rule: “Republican Senate must get rid of 60 vote NOW! It is killing the R Party, allows 8 Dems to control country. 200 Bills sit in Senate. A JOKE!”McConnell, then Senate majority leader, refused to budge. Now that he is the Senate minority leader, McConnell is still immovable. More

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      Joe Manchin opposes For the People Act in blow to Democrats’ voting rights push

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      In a huge blow to Democrats’ hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his party’s flagship bill – because of Republican opposition to it.The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trump’s continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.”Manchin’s opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.Manchin instead endorsed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure named for the late Georgia Democratic congressman and campaigner which would reauthorize voting protections established in the civil rights era but eliminated by the supreme court in 2013.Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim CrowManchin also reiterated his support for the filibuster, which gives 41 of 100 senators the ability to block action by the majority.Democrats are seeking to abolish the filibuster, arguing that Republicans have repeatedly abused it to support minority positions on issues like gun control and, just last month, to block the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol.Republicans have used the filibuster roughly twice as often as Democrats to prevent the other party from passing legislation, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin wrote. “And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”In a sign of growing frustration within Manchin’s own party, Mondaire Jones, a progressive congressman from New York, tweeted that his op-ed “might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”Jim Crow was the name given to the system of legalised segregation which dominated southern states between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the civil rights era of the 1960s.On the Sunday talk shows, hosts pressed Manchin on whether his expectations of a bipartisan solution on voting rights were realistic in such a divided Congress, and with a Republican party firmly in thrall to Donald Trump.Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace told him that if he were to threaten to vote against the filibuster, it could incentivize Republicans to negotiate on legislation.“Haven’t you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists?” Wallace asked.“I don’t think so,” Manchin said. “Because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences.”Seven Republican defections from the pro-Trump party line is not enough to beat the filibuster, even if all 50 Democrats remain united. Manchin said he was hopeful other Republicans would “rise to the occasion”.Wallace asked if he was being “naive”, noting that the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in May: “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”“I’m not being naive,” Manchin said. “I think he’s 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we’re trying to do for America. It would be a lot better if we had participation and we’re getting participation.”With the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, Manchin has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Washington, by virtue of his centrist views in a Senate split on starkly partisan lines. In Tulsa this week, in a remark that risked angering Manchin, Biden said the two senators “vote more with my Republican friends”, though their voting record does not actually reflect this.On CBS’s Face the Nation, host John Dickerson asked Manchin if his bipartisan ideals were outdated.Dickerson noted that since the 2020 election put Democrats in control of Washington, Republicans in the states have introduced more than 300 bills featuring voting restrictions. Furthermore, Republicans who embraced baseless claims about the election being stolen are now running to be chief elections officials in several states.Dickerson asked: “Why would Republicans, when they’re making all these gains in the statehouses and achieving their goals in the states, why would they vote for a bill someday in the Senate that’s going to take away all the things they’re achieving right now in those statehouses?”Manchin said those state-level successes could ultimately damage Republicans.“The bottom line is the fundamental purpose of our democracy is the freedom of our elections,” Manchin said. “If we can’t come to an agreement on that, God help us.” More

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      Start me up: ‘car guy’ Joe Biden accelerates push to turn America electric

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      On a hot, sunny day in Michigan, Joe Biden zoomed around in a new electric version of the Ford F150, one of the automaker’s most famous vehicles.“This sucker’s quick,” Biden said as he drove up to reporters at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center last month.Biden, a self-proclaimed American “car guy”, was there to tout electric vehicles, a key component of his administration’s trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure proposal.“The future of the auto industry is electric. There’s no turning back,” Biden said. “The question is whether we will lead or we will fall behind in the race to the future.”The proposed $174bn investment in electric vehicles represents the biggest ever White House push from fossil-fuel based vehicles and toward battery-powered cars. The Biden administration has made environmentalism and sustainability a key pillar to its job creation efforts, and the president wants to dramatically increase the number of electric vehicles on the road and the infrastructure for manufacturing them.This, Biden says, would create a wave of new green energy jobs and also help to fight climate change.At the beginning of the year, electric vehicles made up less than 5% of automobile sales in the US. But Biden’s proposal aims to dramatically push the American auto industry toward electric vehicles, mainly through incentives and tax credits. It would use funds to transition the fleet of federal agency cars such as those used by the US Postal Service, and the plan includes $45bn towards increasing the number of electric school buses and transit buses.It would also set up a national network of charging stations across the country, the current lack of which is seen as one of the bigger advantages combustion engine cars still have over electric vehicles. There are are only 41,400 electric vehicle charging stations (including fast-charging stations) in the United States, according to the Department of Energy. There are omore than 130,000 gasoline stations.It’s not clear, however, how those charging stations would be distributed – and what portion of them would go to poorer parts of America.But the plan aims to change the supply chain so the US depends less on other countries for batteries and other car parts. The administration wants to become less dependent on foreign countries for manufacturing electric vehicles and the parts that go into them.“It’s a systemic transition,” said John Paul MacDuffie, a University of Pennsylvania professor of management and vehicle expert. “Often if you just tackle one narrow piece of it you don’t make progress, because you bump into constraints in the system. So I think the ambition to be systemic is really good, and probably essential, to make progress.”As Biden drove around the Ford campus, hundreds of miles away Republicans in Congress were planning to gut the electric vehicles proposals in his American Jobs Plan.Negotiations over the entire infrastructure bill are continuing, but the last counter-offer made by Republicans slashed spending on Biden’s plan by about $170bn. It’s not clear what exactly the remaining $4bn would be spent on if the Republican proposal went into effect. A factsheet distributed by the office of Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the lead negotiator, did not specify.In their criticisms, Republicans have cited the price tag on the electric vehicles provision. They say the government should not pour so much money into electric vehicles, and that doing so would end up killing jobs in other alternative vehicle areas, like ethanol.“For a person like me, from Iowa, if you have all electric cars, there’s going to be 43,000 people making ethanol and biodiesel that won’t be employed,” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa told E&E News.Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, another Republican who opposes government spending on electric vehicles, told the Guardian electric vehicles are prohibitively expensive.“My concern about an all-electric car policy is that it’s truly a social injustice. These electric cars are very expensive. Only the wealthy can afford them, and the wealthy benefit from the tax credits,” Marshall said.“I think we’re getting policy way ahead of technology. Certainly way ahead from a price point … But right now the big picture scares me. I think we’d have to increase our electric grid by 60%. That would take, theoretically 20, 40, 60 years to double or to increase the electric grid by 60%.”The price of electric vehicles varies widely. The Mini Cooper SE starts at about $30,000. The cheapest Tesla, the Model S, starts at about $40,000. More expensive models can run as high as $150,000. The price of electric vehicles is likely to drop if and when they become more popular and the technology improves. And the cost of batteries is dropping – rapidly. It’s going so fast that there’s evidence to expect most cars to be battery-powered by 2035.Marshall also said the environmental cost of battery-powered cars is high.“I think we have to look at the environmental footprint in looking what goes into a battery. The making of the battery,” Marshall said. “And eventually the disposal of these batteries.”Even electric vehicle advocates concede that the environmental impact of the raw materials used for electric batteries are not perfect. And there are also human rights concerns about mining those materials.But in Michigan, state senator Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat, said the technology around batteries and electric vehicles was getting better and more environmentally friendly.“I think that there’s a fair criticism in terms of the environmental impact of batteries from the mining perspective. But I think, like everything else, that’s improving,” McMorrow said.Even accounting for battery mining, petrol and diesel cars still have a far more negative impact on the environment than electric vehicles.Right now the American Jobs Plan is still a framework, and the gulf between Republicans and Democrats is vast. It’s unlikely that if a compromise is reached on the entire proposal, Biden will get all the funding he’s looking for. But it’s also unlikely that Republicans will have shrunk that funding to the minuscule amount they have offered so far.And around the country, lawmakers are making moves to nudge the country further toward electric vehicles. Governor Kate Brown of Oregon recently signed a bill to expand electric vehicle infrastructure in her state. In Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker has set a goal of 750,000 electric vehicles by 2030.McMorrow in Michigan has helped craft a proposal to encourage electric vehicles in the state.Congressman Andy Levin of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have introduced legislation that aims to set up a nationwide network of charging stations over the next five years. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate majority leader, also introduced legislation in 2019 that would help set up a network of charging stations also. Biden added that proposal to his American Jobs Plan in March.Even with a huge investment in electric vehicles, transitioning to where combustion cars are the minority on the road and electric vehicles are the majority will take time.“If you don’t start at some point making some move for the US to have a piece of the supply chain you’ll never be ready for the EV transition – and it will take a long time,” MacDuffie said. More

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorses Maya Wiley for New York mayor

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed Maya Wiley for mayor of New York, a dramatic intervention that could heighten the chances of the city electing a woman for the first time and only its second Black leader.Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive in Congress popularly known as AOC, shot to national fame in 2018 when she beat a longtime incumbent, Joe Crowley, for the Democratic nomination in a district in Queens and the Bronx.“If we don’t come together as a movement we will get a New York City built by and for billionaires, and we need a city by and for working people,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Saturday. “So we will vote for Maya No1.”Wiley is a lawyer and community organiser who was a counsel to the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, and has taught urban policy and social justice at the New School in Manhattan.“She will be a progressive in Gracie Mansion,” Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to the mayoral residence. “We can’t let New York become a playground for the wealthy where working people cannot afford to live.”Wiley lauded Ocasio-Cortez as a strong leader and promised to do the same for the city.“It’s time we have this kind of courage leading us at a historic crossroads,” Wiley said, according to New York Daily News, referring to the city’s prospects after the coronavirus pandemic. “We need the courage to bring every New Yorker back with us.”This week Wiley told the New Yorker: “There’s one progressive in this race who can win this race. And it’s me.”In April, she told the Guardian she wanted to change a history which has seen New York elect 109 mayors – 108 of them white men, the exception David Dinkins, who led the city for three years from 1990 and who died last November, aged 93.For long periods the New York race has been led by Andrew Yang, a centrist tech entrepreneur who achieved his own national fame with a surprisingly strong run in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.After failing to land a place in Joe Biden’s cabinet, Yang entered the race to succeed De Blasio in New York.Gaffes and missteps including choosing to live outside the city during the pandemic, not voting for mayor between 2001 and 2017 and supposedly misunderstanding the subway system did not stop him dominating early polls.Democrats will choose their candidate – and in all likelihood the next mayor, given the political leanings of the city – on 22 June. The primary will be conducted through ranked-choice voting, which lets voters pick up to five candidates in order of preference. Some early results in other contests might be known that evening but the nominees for mayor are unlikely to be known for weeks.Polls have tightened, with Yang, Wiley, Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams and former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia the top four in a crowded field.Garcia has been endorsed by the New York Times. Wiley will hope Ocasio-Cortez speaks to young New Yorkers as the Grey Lady does to the city’s establishment.Hit hard in the early stages of the pandemic, New Yorkers are only now beginning to return to normal life. In her interview with the Guardian, Wiley said Covid “laid bare once again – like all our crises that reveal racial inequity – our failure to invest in our people.“… You know, 88% of New Yorkers who have died from Covid are people of colour. We are not 80% of the New York City population. The highest rates of unemployment are in the same communities that had the highest rates of death due to Covid. And the highest infection rates, and are the same communities that are over-policed, and are the same communities that are struggling to get the vaccine.“If we want to recover from Covid we have to pay attention to all our people. And what we love about the city … is the fact that 800 languages are spoken here, and the fact that 40% of our people were born in another country, and the fact that we have descendants from North American slaves, and the fact that we have people who live in luxury housing and people who live in public housing, and that’s part of what makes us rich.”She was also asked how she would manage the notoriously difficult relationship between the mayor’s office and Andrew Cuomo, the powerful Democratic governor of New York state.“I would manage the relationship with the governor the way I manage all relationships,” she said. “Open communication, starting with principles and purpose that meets the needs of people.“We have a shared constituency. There are many partnerships, we need to get what we need from the state government. And if you want partnerships that focus on hard problems and real solutions, then pick a Black woman. Because that’s what we do every single day and in every single way.” More

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      I survived a school shooting. My kids shouldn’t have to face the same danger | Ashley Jordan

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      “Somebody’s shooting on campus!”The words ripped my concentration away from my laptop screen. Our law school classroom fell silent. “What should we do?” I asked our professor. He said: “Well, if I were you, I’d run.” I paused to type “There’s a shooter” in a chat box to my husband Aaron before slamming my laptop shut.I took refuge between stacks in the law library until police said it was safe to leave, hours later. When I walked out of the law school, I heard loud rumbling above me and looked up to see news helicopters circling overhead against a cold, gray sky. Some kind of war had been waged on our campus, and the air was heavy with it. I was going home to my family, but the flashing lights of police cars and ambulances suggested others weren’t.Surviving a school shooting was an initiation of evil. The world didn’t look or feel the same afterward. Its colors were less vivid, and any sense of peace and security that once surrounded me was gone. I knew I’d never exist with quite the same ease again.The trauma of what’s since become known as the Northern Illinois University “Valentine’s Day Massacre” has never left me. More than a decade later, I can still recall the terror of that day with precise, photographic dread. But I’m no longer a 24-year-old student; I’m a 37-year-old mother of three. Despite 12 years and countless other mass shooting incidents across the country, not much has been done by our federal legislators to make anyone safer from gun violence anywhere – let alone at school.One hundred and ninety-four mass shootings occurred in the US this year, with at least 45 in April alone.I assumed the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary shooting would be the wake-up call our country needed to act on gun violence. Multiple school shootings had taken place since the one I experienced in 2008, yet Sandy Hook was the first to invade my consciousness as a mother.I clutched my eight-month-old son to my chest as the precious faces of young children murdered at school cycled across my television screen on the evening news. As tears streamed down my face, my mind tried to reconcile the fact that the victims in these manmade tragedies were no longer limited to teenagers and college students.Little kids were new casualties in our country’s ongoing struggle to define itself. Its endless argument over guns appeared to be a symptom of a national identity crisis between political polar opposites – two parties so ideologically opposed that even the needless deaths of tiny innocents couldn’t bridge the divide between them.What sickened me most, though, wasn’t our government’s failure to prioritize people over partisanship. It was knowing that there were parents who took their kids to school and returned home eternally empty-handed. My stomach churned over whether their children might have experienced some iteration or degree of what I remembered from the NIU shooting: the hell, helplessness and panic of staring at a doorway, wondering if a person on the other side was about to end my life.The only thing worse than knowing those feelings first-hand was wondering how many more children might one day know them, too.The human cost of school shootings extends beyond those who are injured or die, negatively affecting the mental health of survivorsSo far, hundreds of thousands of American students have been exposed to school shootings, and these incidents have increased in recent years. The human cost of school shootings extends beyond those who are injured or die, negatively affecting the mental health of survivors. According to a 2019 Stanford University study, “local exposure to fatal school shootings increased antidepressant use among youths”.Yet children are not the only ones suffering from this epidemic. Parents are also struggling.Survivors of school shootings like me are now raising kids of their own, worrying they will suffer similar fates. Although the psychological effects of school shootings on parents may not yet be fully known or understood, research suggests that those with loved ones who have been exposed to “assaultive violence” have a higher risk of mental health disorders. Another study found that parents of terrorist survivors were five times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress and three times more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than the population at large. (Mass shootings can be classified as acts of terrorism in many cases.)Like spouses of military veterans, parents of school shooting survivors might also be more susceptible to secondary traumatic stress, especially if they experienced a school shooting themselves or have a history of past trauma. But school shootings may pose mental health risks to all parents, not just those whose children are victims or survivors. One study concluded that acts of terrorism can have detrimental emotional impacts on general populations.School shootings don’t just deprive children of their lives and innocence; they deprive parents of a sense of safety and security their parents and grandparents took for granted. The sanctity and sanctuary of school are long gone. This reality is a painful part of our collective consciousness. We send our kids to school, hoping the horror of gun violence won’t happen there, but knowing no child or school is immune.Carrying this mental load may be commonplace for modern parents, but it doesn’t have to be. Biden recently took executive action to address gun violence, and although Americans are divided on gun policy, strong bipartisan support exists for expanded background checks and preventing the mentally ill from obtaining guns. Measures like these, limiting who has access to firearms, have proven more effective in reducing gun-related deaths than limiting access to specific types of firearms.Precious time has been wasted on political finger-pointing and partisan talking points, particularly when leftists and conservatives have each historically supported and opposed gun control (albeit for morally divergent reasons). Both sides seem content to debate the second amendment and the founders’ intent until they run out of breath. But in the meantime, Congress must come together, in earnest, to find common ground and common-sense solutions to stop this bleeding. The consequences of inaction have become too high – and our kids are counting on them.
      Ashley Jordan is a writer and activist who has contributed to written for the Washington Post, Woman’s Day, Teen Vogue, HuffPost, Business Insider, the Independent and more More

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      Pelosi faces pressure to seize reins in investigating US Capitol attack

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      Top Democrats are making a renewed effort to press ahead with establishing a sweeping, central investigation into the 6 January attack on the Capitol in what could be the final opportunity to hold former US president Donald Trump to account for inciting insurrection.The move reflects the resolve of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to pursue a comprehensive inquiry even without bipartisan support, after Senate Republicans, fearful of what a full accounting of the violence might uncover, last week voted down legislation for a 9/11-style commission to scrutinize the attack by a pro-Trump mob.Pelosi said on a Democratic caucus call on Tuesday that she was prepared to create a House select committee with subpoena power to replace the commission as the principal investigation by Congress into the assault, according to sources familiar with the matter.The select committee was one of several options raised on the call that included empowering one existing committee, such as the House homeland security committee, to take charge of the congressional investigation, the sources said.Also suggested on the call was the possibility of returning the bill to create a 9/11-style commission back to the Senate for a second vote, while Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic caucus chair, floated the idea of the Department of Justice appointing a special counsel.Pelosi did not endorse any particular proposal, but she did categorically rule out a presidential commission created by Joe Biden, in large part because such a panel would lack subpoena authority or funding without a statutory change.Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, was supportive of empowering the House homeland security committee to take charge, the sources said, while the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, and the assistant speaker, Katherine Clark, were non-committal.It was not immediately clear how Pelosi might proceed. But rank-and-file House Democrats have agitated for weeks for Pelosi to seize the reins and adopt her longstanding fallback plan of empanelling a select committee.Select committees – among the top weapons for congressional oversight – have long been convened on issues relating to corruption and cover-up, from the investigation into presidential campaign activity during Watergate to the Benghazi terrorist attacks.The creation of a select committee could break the logjam that has persisted for months on Capitol Hill over disagreements between Democrats and Republicans over how to embark on a full accounting of the attack that left five dead and scores injured.Proponents of the select committee received a boost last week from Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, who seemingly extended his endorsement to the proposal saying it was “better to investigate with a select committee than not investigate”.Pelosi has previously suggested that a select committee would focus on lines of inquiry likely to have been explored by the commission.That kind of mandate would mean a forensic examination into the root causes of the attack, the former president’s conduct as his supporters stormed the Capitol and threatened to hang his own vice-president, as well as any potential ties between Trump and the rioters.But its work could still be stymied by Republicans, who have repeatedly resisted any comprehensive inquiry into the attack, afraid of being found complicit ahead of the 2022 midterm elections in inciting insurrection by amplifying Trump’s lies about voter fraud.The number of Republicans downplaying or even outright denying the reality of what transpired on 6 January, for instance, has only increased in recent months; Congressman Andrew Clyde described the deadly insurrection as a “normal tourist visit” to the Capitol.Likely opposition – especially from Republican leaders in Congress – could also make any new findings be viewed through a partisan lens and cause a substantial proportion of the country to reject any conclusions that cast Trump in a negative light.The last select committee convened by Congress to investigate Benghazi devolved into a partisan affair, even before the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, admitted it had been created to damage the 2016 election chances of the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.But House Democrats have remained largely undeterred. “If Republicans won’t join us to protect our democracy, we have an obligation to do it ourselves,” said Teresa Leger Fernández, a member of the House administration committee. More