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    US House Republican says pay bump would attract ‘credible people’ to office

    A retiring US House Republican who has previously opposed proposals to raise the federal minimum wage has advocated for an increase to the $174,000 salaries collected by rank and file Congress members, saying that would motivate “credible people to run for office”.“Most of us don’t have wealth,” North Carolina’s Patrick McHenry said to the Dispatch in an interview.Apparently alluding to higher salaries collected by figures such as the US president and the supreme court’s justices, he added: “You can’t have the executive branch and the judicial branch on a higher pay scale than Congress. That is absurd and really stupid for Congress to disadvantage themselves in this game of checks and balances.”Perhaps unsurprisingly, McHenry’s remarks prompted mixed reactions.Though some maintained it was logical for higher salaries to potentially draw higher quality House candidates, others have pointed out that McHenry’s stance was hypocritical, given his previous vote against raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.“Retiring Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry wants a higher salary for his buddies in Congress but voted against raising the federal minimum wage,” podcaster Brittany Page wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “If you feel your salary hasn’t kept up with inflation, imagine how poor and working-class Americans feel, sweetie.”McHenry in 2007 also spoke out against raising the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25, dismissing it as “a very nice” but impractical idea that would make it difficult for “the physically, emotionally and mentally handicapped” to land jobs.“What the Democrat majority wants to do … is use other people’s money to pay other people,” McHenry said at the time, when his party was the minority in the House. “Well, that is a very nice thing to do, a nice offer, a very nice thing, to write a check for somebody else.”But, McHenry insisted then, “it is just empty rhetoric and crazy talk”.McHenry, 48, served as the interim House speaker briefly after Kevin McCarthy’s historic ouster from that role in October. He handed the gavel over to his fellow Republican Mike Johnson after the House elected the Louisiana representative as McCarthy’s successor. And in December, McHenry announced he would be retiring at the end of his term in early 2025, which would mark his 20th year in the House.As other lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle have done, McHenry on Wednesday exalted the virtues of implementing pay raises for Congress members and their staffers. But while some have suggested that higher government pay would limit corruption and make officials more responsive to voters, McHenry simply argued that skill and competence cost money.“Most of us live on the salary,” McHenry said to the Dispatch, referring to Congress members who maintain a home in their district as well as another in the nation’s capital. “And then, you know, the very wealthy few end up dominating the news because of their personal stock trades when most of us don’t have wealth.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You especially need the staff to be able to go toe-to-toe with the people they’re regulating or overseeing in the executive branch, which means you need to get the highest quality folks.”But most Americans disfavor hiking pay for Congress, which hasn’t gotten a raise since 2009, as Business Insider reported, citing a poll conducted by the outlet in March.Notably, an individual salary of $174,000 is still substantially more than the US median household income in 2022, which was $74,580, according to US Census figures. Congress members also have access to medical benefits that most in the public do not, among other perks.Some took to public platforms as McHenry’s comments circulated and expressed little sympathy for his perceived lack of adequate compensation, including one who wrote that “the average income in the US in 2023” was tens of thousands of dollars lower.“Maybe he should try living on that instead,” the commenter said of McHenry. More

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    Harry Dunn, ex-officer who defended Capitol on January 6, to run for Congress

    Harry Dunn, a former police officer who defended the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, will run for US Congress in Maryland.On Friday, a day ahead of the third anniversary of the deadly riot, Dunn said via X, formerly known as Twitter: “On January 6, I defended our democracy from insurrectionists as a Capitol police officer. After, President Biden honoured me with the Presidential Citizens Medal.“Today, I’m running for Congress, to stop Trump’s Maga extremists and ensure it never happens again.”“Maga” is short for Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, which happened when Donald Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to block certification of his election defeat by Joe Biden.The attack failed. But one police officer, Brian Sicknick, died the next day. Other officers killed themselves.Dunn – a commanding presence at 6ft 7in and 325lbs, once an offensive lineman in college football – was one of a group of officers who acquired a public profile after the riot, testifying before the House January 6 committee, appearing on television and releasing an autobiography, Standing My Ground.He will now run for Congress in Maryland’s third district, a solidly Democratic seat north-east of Washington represented by John Sarbanes, re-elected eight times but not running this year. The primary, which Dunn now joins, will be held on 14 May.In an announcement video, Dunn appeared amid a re-enactment of January 6, a Trump flag seen in the background as actors re-created the Capitol riot.Dunn took aim at Republicans in Congress now ranged behind Trump as he seeks the GOP presidential nomination again.“I swore an oath to protect our constitution, to protect our democracy,” Dunn said. “It’s what allowed me to protect some members of Congress who I knew were bigots, who helped fan the flames that started all of this.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I put country above self. The problem is, a lot of them did not. Some of the same people who stood behind us when we protected them went back on the floor of Congress and stood behind Trump. They voted to acquit him [in his ensuing impeachment trial]. And worst of all, they deny the violence and trauma that led to the death of some of my fellow officers.”Trump now faces 91 criminal charges (17 concerning election subversion), numerous civil trials, and attempts to keep him off the ballot in Colorado and Maine under the 14th amendment to the US constitution, meant to stop insurrectionists running for office. Nonetheless, he leads Republican primary polling by huge margins.“I couldn’t stand by and watch,” Dunn said. “I had another role to play. I used my voice to speak out. And a few weeks ago, I left the force after more than 15 years of service, so that today I can announce I’m running for Congress.“We can’t ever let this happen again, and you’ve heard it from Trump himself: he is hellbent on finishing what he started this day … I believe every one of us has a role to play in this fight. So join me. We’ve got a democracy to protect.” More

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    Trump businesses received millions in foreign payments while he was in office

    Donald Trump “repeatedly and willfully” violated the US constitution by “allowing his businesses to accept millions of dollars from some of the most corrupt nations on Earth”, prominently including China, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee charged on Thursday, unveiling a 156-page report on the matter.Four businesses owned by Trump’s family conglomerate received at least $7.8m in payments in total from 20 countries during his four years in the White House, the report said. It added that the payments probably represented just a fraction of foreign payments to the Republican president and his family during his administration, which ran from 2017 to 2021.The foreign emoluments clause of the US constitution bars the acceptance of gifts from foreign states without congressional consent.Trump broke with precedent – and his own campaign-trail promises – and did not divest from his businesses or put them into a blind trust when he took office, instead leaving his adult sons to manage them.The issue of foreign spending at Trump-owned businesses proceeded to dog Trump throughout his time in power.On Thursday, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the oversight committee, said: “After promising ‘the greatest infomercial in political history’ [regarding his business interests] … Trump repeatedly and willfully violated the constitution by failing to divest from his business empire and allowing his businesses to accept millions of dollars in payments from some of the most corrupt nations on earth.”Such countries spent – “often lavishly”, the report said – on apartments and hotel stays at properties owned by Trump’s business empire, thereby “personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States”.Raskin said: “The limited records the committee obtained show that while Donald Trump was in office, he received more than $5.5m from the Chinese government and Chinese state-owned enterprises, as well as millions more from 19 other foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, through just four of the more than 500 entities he owned.”Those four properties – Trump International Hotel in Washington, Trump Tower and Trump World Tower in New York, and Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas – represented less than 1% of the 558 corporate entities Trump owned either directly or indirectly while president, the report said.Raskin said: “The governments making these payments sought specific foreign policy outcomes from President Trump and his administration. Each dollar … accepted violated the constitution’s strict prohibition on payments from foreign governments, which the founders enacted to prevent presidents from selling out US foreign policy to foreign leaders.”Shortly after Trump was elected, Congress began investigating potential conflicts of interest and violations of the emoluments clause. The investigation led to a lengthy court dispute which ended in a settlement in 2022, at which point Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, began producing documents requested.After Republicans took over the House last year, the oversight committee stopped requiring those documents. A US district court ended litigation on the matter. Mazars did not provide documents regarding at least 80% of Trump’s business entities, Democrats said on Thursday.Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination this year, despite facing 91 criminal indictments, assorted civil threats and moves to bar him from the ballot in Colorado and Maine, under the 14th amendment meant to stop insurrectionists running for office.His campaign did not immediately comment on the Democratic report.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRaskin pointed a finger at a leading Trump ally, James Comer of Kentucky, the Republican oversight chair.“While the figures and constitutional violations in this report are shocking, we still don’t know the extent of the foreign payments that Donald Trump received – or even the total number of countries that paid him and his businesses while he was president – because committee chairman James Comer and House Republicans buried any further evidence of the Trump family’s staggering corruption.”Comer – who is leading Republican attempts to impeach Joe Biden over alleged corruption involving foreign money – issued a statement of his own.“It’s beyond parody that Democrats continue their obsession with former President Trump,” Comer said. “Former President Trump has legitimate businesses but the Bidens do not. The Bidens and their associates made over $24m by cashing in on the Biden name in China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Romania. No goods or services were provided other than access to Joe Biden and the Biden network.”Most observers say Republicans have not produced compelling evidence of corruption involving Biden, members of his family and foreign interests. The New York Times, for example, judged recently that “many messages cited by Republicans as evidence of corruption by President Biden and his family are being presented out of context”.On social media on Thursday, the California Democrat Eric Swalwell said: “No president ever personally enriched himself more while in office than Donald Trump. And mostly, in his case, from foreign cash. I don’t want to hear another peep about bogus Biden allegations. Game, set, match. Move on.”Raskin said: “By concealing the evidence of Trump’s grift, House Republicans shamefully condone former President Trump’s past conduct and keep the door open for future presidents to exploit higher office.”The family business empire, the Trump Organization, including Donald Trump and his two oldest sons, Don Jr and Eric, is in the closing stages of a civil trial brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.Reuters contributed reporting More

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    In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

    Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    US House majority whip Tom Emmer endorses Trump for president

    Donald Trump secured the endorsement of Tom Emmer on Wednesday, completing a full House of Republican leaders backing the former US president even though Trump dynamited the majority whip’s own bid for speaker just two months ago.“Democrats have made clear they will use every tool in their arsenal to try and keep Joe Biden and his failed policies in power,” Emmer said.“We cannot let them. It’s time for Republicans to unite behind our party’s clear frontrunner, which is why I am proud to endorse Donald J Trump for president.”Despite facing 91 criminal charges, assorted civil threats and removal from the ballot in Colorado and Maine over his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, Trump leads presidential rivals including the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley by vast polling margins.In general election polling, he is competitive or enjoys leads over Biden.Emmer, from Minnesota, followed the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and majority leader, Steve Scalise (both from Louisiana) and Elise Stefanik of New York, the conference chair, in endorsing the man who sent supporters to the Capitol to try to stop certification of Biden’s 2020 win.Even after rioters attacked the House chamber, 139 House Republicans and eight senators objected to results in key states. But Emmer was not among them and last October, after the far right ejected Kevin McCarthy as speaker, the Minnesotan followed Scalise and Jim Jordan of Ohio in failing to secure the role.At the time, Trump said Emmer had called him and was his “biggest fan now” but also deemed him “totally out of touch with Republican voters”, lobbied Republicans to reject him and reportedly boasted: “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.”Emmer’s endorsement of his tormentor was therefore widely noted.Rick Wilson, a former Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said: “Remember when you were on those anti-Trump calls in 2016, Tom?”Tim Miller, another former Republican strategist turned Trump critic, chose to be more blunt: “Was Tom Emmer – who was viciously savaged by Trump and his allies during the failed speaker attempt – wearing a ball gag or a gimp mask when he sent this statement? Need some behind-scenes colour.”Miller’s invective was matched by Trump’s campaign team, which said of Erin Perrine, a former Trump aide now working for DeSantis, “nothing can ever wash that foul stench of shit off her”. But regardless of such Republican infighting, endorsements for Trump kept coming in.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe three other House Republicans from Minnesota – Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach and Pete Stauber – joined Emmer in backing Trump.From the Senate, the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, once seen as a possible Republican candidate, also gave Trump his backing.“When Donald Trump was president,” Cotton said, “America was safe, strong and prosperous.”He did not mention his own, infamous claim that regular troops needed to be used to quash protests for racial justice in 2020, when Trump was in the White House.Overlooking the economic devastation wrought that same year by Covid-19, Cotton continued: “The economy was booming, working-class wages were growing, our border was secure, and our enemies feared us.”“I endorse President Trump and I look forward to working with him to win back the White House and the Senate … it’s time to get our country back on track.” More

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    House Republicans to seek to impeach US homeland security secretary

    US House Republicans will seek to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, alleging “egregious misconduct and refusal to enforce the law” in relation to immigration policy and the southern border.In a statement to CNN on Wednesday, a spokesperson said the House homeland security committee had conducted “a comprehensive investigation into Secretary Mayorkas’s handling of, and role in, the unprecedented crisis at the south-west border.“Following the bipartisan vote in the House to refer articles of impeachment against the secretary to our committee, we will be conducting hearings and taking up those articles in the coming weeks.”A spokesperson told Reuters the first hearing would be next Wednesday, 10 January.In November, a resolution to impeach Mayorkas was blocked, and referred to the committee, when eight Republicans sided with Democrats against a measure introduced by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Trump supporter from Georgia.Conditions at the border with Mexico have worsened and Biden officials acknowledge a backlog of 3m asylum cases. Seeking draconian reforms, Republicans have made the issue central to talks over federal government funding and aid to Ukraine.On Wednesday, the House Republican spokesperson told CNN impeachment would “ensure that the public is aware of the scope of Secretary Mayorkas’s egregious misconduct and refusal to enforce the law”.In return, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson accused Republicans of “wasting valuable time and taxpayer dollars pursuing a baseless political exercise that has been rejected by members of both parties and already failed on a bipartisan vote.“There is no valid basis to impeach Secretary Mayorkas, as senior members of the House majority have attested, and this extreme impeachment push is a harmful distraction from our critical national security priorities.”Mayorkas told NBC he would “most certainly” cooperate with impeachment proceedings, adding: “And I’m going to continue to do my work, as well.”That work, he said, involved “join[ing] the bipartisan group of senators to work on a legislative solution to a broken immigration system. I was on the Hill yesterday to provide technical advice in those ongoing negotiations. Before I headed to the Hill, I was in the office working on solutions. After my visit to the Hill, I was back in my office, working on solutions.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to CNN, Mayorkas said his department did not have the resources to “perform our jobs as fully and completely as we could”.“We need additional personnel to advance our security at the border. We need technology to advance our fight against fentanyl [coming into the US]. We need additional asylum officers to really accelerate the asylum adjudication process.”The House speaker, Mike Johnson, was due on Wednesday to visit the border as part of a 60-strong Republican delegation. The visit underlined the political nature of immigration battles in a presidential election year.The deputy White House press secretary, Andrew Bates, said: “After voting in 2023 to eliminate over 2,000 border patrol agents and erode our capacity to seize fentanyl, House Republicans left Washington in mid-December even as President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in the Senate remained to forge ahead on a bipartisan agreement.”House Republicans, Bates added, had “obstructed [Biden’s] reform proposal and consistently voted against his unprecedented border security funding year after year, hamstringing our border security in the name of extreme, partisan demands”. More

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    ‘They had absolute power’: the US congressman driven out by Republican gerrymandering

    A little over nine months after he was sworn in to his first term in Congress, Jeff Jackson, a freshman US representative for North Carolina, announced he would leave the body at the end of his term.To an outsider, that might seem like a surprising decision. In just his first few months in Congress, Jackson had become well-known for smart, short videos explaining what was going on at the Capitol. By April, he had more followers on TikTok than any other member of Congress, the Washington Post reported (as of mid-December he had 2.5 million). By all accounts, he was a rising star.But the reason for his planned departure was simple – it was impossible for him to win re-election. In October, Republicans enacted a new congressional map that reconfigured the boundaries of his district. They cracked the district near Charlotte, which Jackson won by more than 15 points in 2022, and divided voters into two districts that heavily favor GOP voters. It was an effort made possible by the new Republican majority on the North Carolina supreme court, which reversed a key ruling limiting extreme partisan gerrymandering it issued just months ago. Jackson announced he would run for attorney general in the state instead.The Guardian spoke to Jackson about gerrymandering, what he’s learned in Congress, and his decision to leave. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.You get that phone call – and you have no chance of winning re-election. What’s that like?To be honest, we knew it was very likely to end up that way. I was not shocked. They had absolute power to draw almost any map they wanted. And we all know what absolute power does to politicians. Frankly, it would have been a shock if we hadn’t seen this level of corruption from them.So you sort of knew that this was coming.I didn’t know it to a certainty. And I didn’t have any advance information. I just knew the legal freedom that our court was going to grant them and I knew what their incentives were. So if you have that information you can predict the outcome.Can I ask you what happened with the supreme court in North Carolina. Obviously, they switched their rulings on the districts within a matter of months after control of the court flipped. And some people might look at that and say that’s not surprising, the partisan makeup changes, the rulings change. Is there something there that you think people should pay more attention to?On its face it’s deeply concerning. I don’t think you have to know much about the court or politics to see exactly what happened here. This is one of those instances where one of the most obvious explanations is simply the right one. The court was elected with a different partisan composition and they acted in a partisan way to accommodate their party. I think the simple read here is the right one.And do you think people pay close enough attention to what’s happening in supreme court races? I mean, there was one in North Carolina that was decided by 400 votes.I am absolutely positive that they do not. Just with my conversations with voters over the years, the judicial races are the ones furthest from people’s radar.Why do you think that is and how do you get people to pay more attention to them?We haven’t had partisan judicial races for a really long time in North Carolina. That’s a recent development. We’re the first state in a long time, many decades, to go from non-partisan judicial races to partisan judicial races.So I think most people in North Carolina just grew up with an understanding that these judicial races were not partisan and were probably between judges and lawyers who wanted to be a judge. But now that’s not the case. Now these offices come with prepackaged partisan agendas as we saw with redistricting in North Carolina.Is there any hope of fixing this problem in North Carolina?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe gerrymandering fix in North Carolina is a long-term fix. There are no immediate prospects for this because of the hurdles that you cited. The only way to mitigate it is by doubling down on our effort to get people to the polls. The only way you overcome the seawall of gerrymandering is through an energetic approach to turning out the vote, and that’s what we’re gonna do.Going back to your district, what do you think the consequences are going to be for voters?That’s a good question, particularly when it’s a brutal gerrymander. The state legislature basically used redistricting to take as much power away from voters as they possibly could. They found the true ceiling of how much electoral power they should shift from the voters to themselves. I don’t care which party you’re in, you really shouldn’t appreciate elections being decided for you for the rest of the decade by the state legislature drawing the map, which is exactly what happened.Walk me through your decision to not run for this new district and to run for attorney general?I’ve appreciated the opportunity to serve in Congress. I’ve found it highly educational and [there have been] moments where I felt really productive but I also appreciate the opportunity to serve as attorney general. The job is to protect people. It’s our state’s top prosecutor. I started my career at the district attorney’s office and it’s about guarding against consumer fraud and keeping kids safe online and combatting the fentanyl epidemic and protecting clean air and water.One thing about the job that’s really great is that it’s really not about the type of jobs you see in Congress. It’s not so much about left versus right. It’s just about doing what’s right. Having been in a highly charged partisan environment like Congress, serving as attorney general would be completely different in a really refreshing way.You were in Congress for a relatively short time – what are your takeaways from what you learned there? Your videos about what it’s like to be a congressman I think really struck a chord with a lot of people.There are a lot of serious people here who want to do good work and they tend to be the people whose names you might not know. And getting to know a lot of those people and find ways to work with them has been a rewarding part of the experience.Another rewarding part, to your point, has been learning that there’s enormous appetite by the American public for being spoken to in a calm, reasonable, sensible way about politics. That wasn’t necessarily what I expected. They’re so used to being screamed at that I sort of thought what I was offering wasn’t going to gain much traction beyond my district, beyond people who personally knew me. But as it turns out there’s huge demand for being spoken to in a normal tone of voice about what’s happening in Congress. I think that’s really encouraging.Can I also ask you one more question about this new law that messes with the composition of local boards of elections? There’s concerns that could be used to interfere with certifying election results in other matters. Is that something that you’re concerned about and that you would be focused on as attorney general?Any time the same group of people who just gerrymandered the heck out of the whole state say that they have some ideas about tinkering with the state board of elections, it should make the hair on the back of everyone’s neck stand up. These people are flatly not to be trusted when it comes to taking power away from the voters. More

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    Congressman Jonathan Jackson on Biden, Gaza and making his famous father proud

    Jonathan Jackson’s eyes brim with tears as he recalls the 1984 campaign of his father, Jesse, to become the United States’ first Black president. “To see my great-grandmother, who couldn’t read or write, vote,” the US congressman says, his voice faltering. “It let me see how meaningful it was to be able to vote.”Jackson is a lifelong political activist who has come to elected office late in the game. He was a spokesperson for the Rainbow Push Coalition, an international human and civil rights organisation founded by his father. In Chicago the younger Jackson fought against the closure of public schools and worked on false-confessions cases involving the police. More recently, he co-sponsored a House resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.Next month Jackson will turn 58 and mark his first year representing Illinois’s first congressional district in the House of Representatives. He stepped up after the Democratic congressman Bobby Rush, whom he calls “Uncle Bobby”, retired after three decades representing Chicago’s South Side.In an interview at his Washington office on Capitol Hill, Jackson – whose wife, Marilyn, leads the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky – admits that it had been the last thing on his mind until he took part in a radio show and was urged to run. “My parents were 80. The family’s been through a lot. I want to make Mom and Dad proud and so I jumped in there and it was a good uplift for them,” he says.Jackson’s parents, Jesse and Jacqueline Jackson, are veterans of the civil rights movement. Jesse witnessed Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, twice ran for president in the 1980s and is now living with Parkinson’s disease. (Jackson’s brother Jesse Jackson Jr served time in prison after pleading guilty to spending $750,000 in campaign money on personal items.)Jackson continues: “I have to talk with Dad every day. He’s a junkie for this stuff. He’s in a wheelchair and not moving around as fast but his mind is super sharp as he has challenges from Parkinson’s. He knows the terrain better than anyone I can imagine.”He describes serving in Congress as a “tremendous honour” that often yields “awe and wonderment”. But some days, he chuckles, “it feels like a bad high school that you’ve transferred into” and on others “you feel like you’re walking a tightrope over a pool of sharks without a safety net”.Jackson is a believer in God’s grace. He and his father were arrested outside the South African embassy in DC in 1986 while protesting against racial apartheid, and then again some 35 years later outside the supreme court while protesting for voting rights.One of six siblings, Jackson recalls the family home in Chicago always buzzing with activity and engagement with social causes. He says: “Our phone at the house would ring like a switchboard and my mother and father were both activists, if you will.“I remember the last time we saw President Nelson Mandela of South Africa and he could barely walk any more. He heard my father was in the country and asked him to come to visit him. My father came in the room. The president was trying to stand up and he hollered out to my father: ‘Freedom fighter!’“I would like to think that I come from the background of freedom fighters, not politicians of who’s dividing the pie, who gets what, when, where and how?”When Jesse Jackson first ran for president in 1984, Jonathan was 18 and able to vote for the first time. He was also a campaign surrogate and witness to the backlash from a nation resistant to the idea of a Black major-party nominee. He says: “We started registering the record amount of death threats and it was just insane.“The headlines: what does he want, can he run? Like, the audacity of being able to run? I remember one time we were in a motorcade coming down through from Washington to Virginia and they still had chain gangs out here on the highway, and to see those men stop and wave with pride, you realised it was a bigger issue.”Jesse won four contests and 18% of the popular vote, finishing third behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. Four years later, when he tried again, Jonathan finished college early so he could travel the country with his father.“I would describe that experience as sitting in the cockpit of American history, that we saw all these things happening and we saw it on the news the next day. By 88, you realised this was 20 years after the Rev Martin Luther King’s assassination and how much pride my father had in trying to move King’s dream for political empowerment, justice, economic empowerment forward,” Jackson said.This time Jesse won 13 contests and 29% of the popular vote but still came in behind Michael Dukakis for the nomination. At the 1988 Democratic national convention, he shared a stage with Rosa Parks, whom he introduced as the “mother of the civil rights movement”. Jackson muses that he must find a photograph of that moment so he can put it up in his office.“It wasn’t a political campaign. It was a more of a moral crusade and, from that, we’re so grateful to see President Obama win and Mrs Harris become vice-president and [Raphael] Warnock become a US senator from Georgia and that tipped the balance of power to save the democracy again.”Jesse also channeled energy into social justice and freelance diplomacy, risking friction with US officials by inserting himself into fraught global hotspots. Jackson was at his father’s side during negotiations with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad for the release of the captured US navy lieutenant Robert Goodman, and with Fidel Castro for the release of 22 Americans held in Cuba.“When we went to visit Saddam Hussein and they were talking about the weapons of mass destruction and the human shields, we didn’t have the portfolio of the United States government. We didn’t have a ranking member or chairmanship or United States military, went over there with just a Bible and some imams and rabbis,” Jackson says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I believe in the faith community. I’ve seen it work and that’s been at the core. It’s not been politics. It’s been faith that had us travel around the world in some dangerous places with God’s grace.”This philosophy informs Jackson’s decision to sign on as an original co-sponsor of a House resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A member of the House foreign affairs committee, he had visited Israel a month before the 7 October attack by Hamas. During a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, he posed a question about a reciprocal visa waiver programme but found the prime minister evasive.“I can see that he’s a blame shifter. He will not answer the question,” he says. “He took the time to answer all the other questions but not that. I’ve never seen him seek a two-state solution in all these many years … I’ve seen him court Hamas, not wanting the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] to have influence over the Gaza territories.“I know his involvement in this territory over the years and so my basic frame of reference on asking for a ceasefire is not to seek revenge. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will leave you blind and snaggletoothed. You’ve got to break the cycle of pain.”The world was aligned in sympathy for Israel but Israel has squandered that opportunity, Jackson argues: “What happened to Israel was horrific and it was brutal. It was a massacre, disgraceful, and there was so much goodwill and I said, this man is going to mess this up. It’s just not in him. He’s a one-string guitar. The only tool he has is a hammer and he’s not a peacemaker.”The Hamas attack signified failures of both intelligence and diplomacy, Jackson argues, but going forward there are lessons to learn from countries such as South Africa and Rwanda in seeking reconciliation: “After 400 years, African Americans have never been told to pick up arms, to seek any sort of reparations or any sort of vengeance.“We’ve been taught reconciliation, so my position was clear morally from my cultural point of view: to seek reconciliation and that starts now. The spirit of Rev Martin Luther King that peace is not the absence of noise, peace is the presence of justice. The Scripture that stayed on my mind was: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.’ Peace is possible if you seek it and I have not seen Mr Netanyahu seek peace.”The elder Jackson served in the Senate from 1991 to 1997 as a shadow delegate for the District of Columbia but never quite lost his outsider status. It would be understandable if his son were still breaking in life in Congress like a pair of new shoes. But when asked about Joe Biden’s handling of the war – seen by many on the left as ostentatiously pro-Israel and lacking empathy for Palestinians – Jackson is deftly on-message.“President Biden is doing a tremendous job,” he says. “Like any of us in office, we have regrets. I don’t know what his will be at the end of the day, but I know he would like to see an alternative option.“These people are now almost defenceless, certainly the babies, so I want the humanitarian aid to flow. Intelligence is what is needed now more than bombs to find these people. If you … agree that the Palestinian people are being held hostage and you agree that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, you don’t kill the hostage by going after the hostage taker.”Jackson’s Illinois district includes an area known as Little Palestine. In October he attended the funeral of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy stabbed 26 times by his family’s landlord because he was Muslim, according to police. For Jackson, such concerns are more pressing than whether Biden stands to lose Arab American votes in the 2024 presidential election.“I get a call almost every other day when one of these bombs goes on the pain that someone is suffering because of a family’s relative has died. I get a call once a week from someone that’s still in Gaza trying to get on a state department list, so I can’t think about November and who’s voting for calling the state department and other agencies to try and still get people out,” he says.Opinion polls show Biden struggling among African American voters after his efforts to pass racial justice and voting rights legislation stalled in Congress. Jackson comments simply: “Some parts of his record will rival that of LBJ [the former president Lyndon Baines Johnson]. I am proud of his work. Let me leave it with, there’s a lot has been done and there’s a lot more to do.”Then he bursts out laughing.What of his father, who was born in the Jim Crow era and lived to see Obama assume the mantle of first Black president – only to see a backward lurch to Trump and white nationalism?“We are eternally optimistic. There are so many stories of progress and hope. Although this is very dangerous, we’ve not been here: two speakers to turn over in one year; we went 20 days without one of our three branches functioning. We saw a violent insurrection happen here and all of the insurrectionists have not been prosecuted. So he’s very concerned about the fragility of our democracy. We’ve never been here before.” More