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      Both sides of gun issue seek to stir up US voters as NRA influence wanes

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      Anti-gun-control groups and gun-safety advocates are launching hefty voter-mobilization drives this year with the stakes high in the fall elections given the stark differences on gun violence policy between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.But the long-powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), which has been beset with financial and legal headaches for several years, is not expected to be nearly as active as in 2016, when it spent more than $31m to back Trump’s victorious campaign by boosting his political fortunes in key states, say gun experts and ex-NRA insiders.Now, though, other anti-gun-control groups are trying to take up the slack.For instance, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), an influential firearms industry lobbying group, has begun an eight-figure voter-mobilization drive to help pro-gun interests defeat President Biden, whose strong support for gun-control measures it finds anathema.The NSSF’s general counsel, Larry Keane, said that the organization’s “GunVote” campaign will focus on seven to nine battleground states, where it will mount voter-registration, education and get-out-the-vote efforts to help Trump win the presidency again.On the other side of this year’s election brawl over gun control, Everytown for Gun Safety is planning a large effort to get its millions of supporters to help re-elect Biden and defeat Trump, who has a record of siding firmly with pro-gun priorities.“We’re going to knock on doors, make calls, rally and campaign for President Biden,” said Nick Suplina, the senior vice-president for law and policy at Everytown, which claims nearly 10 million supporters including mayors, students, gun owners, teachers and others.The stakes seem higher than usual given Biden’s successes as president backing new gun-control measures such as the first new law in three decades boosting gun safety, and Biden’s talk of doing more if he’s re-elected, including fighting for an assault weapons ban, which would probably need Democratic control of Congress to enact.By contrast, Trump has often reiterated his fealty to the pro-gun lobby, which characterized his presidency. At last month’s NRA annual meeting, Trump earned a ringing endorsement and pledged that if he wins, “no one will lay a finger on your firearms”.But the once deep-pocketed and five-million-member NRA remains mired in internal and financial headaches: its annual revenues have dropped for several years while its legal expenses have risen.The NRA’s problems were underscored when its longtime top executive, Wayne LaPierre, resigned in January as he was about to go on trial in New York, where he was convicted of looting the organization to enjoy lavish personal perks including fancy vacations and expensive clothes.“The NRA is going to again be a peripheral player for lack of funding this election cycle, and that could hurt Trump in several battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota,” a former NRA board member said.“It’s a vacuum compared to 2016 when the NRA was robustly engaged,” the ex-board member added.Longtime observers of gun-control fights agree.Robert Spitzer, the author of several books on gun issues and an emeritus political science professor at Suny Cortland in New York, said the NRA was “as strongly behind [Trump] as they have been before”.“However, the organization simply does not possess the money or personnel to be as influential as they were in 2016, when they spent over $31m on his campaign, and over $70m on Republican efforts around the country. Still, the gun issue will continue to be salient to an important segment of the Trump base.”Spitzer added: “Other gun groups, such as the NSSF and state gun groups, will be working to supplant the NRA’s traditional dominance in national politics. They do not possess the degree of organization, experience and reach as the NRA of old, but they will ratchet up their efforts.”That’s what the NSSF, whose members include such gun giants as Sturm, Ruger & Co and Smith & Wesson, plus other anti-gun-control groups say they intend to do. “There’s a stark difference between Trump and Biden,” Keane said in explaining the NSSF’s hefty effort this year. “It’s clear there are ongoing challenges at the NRA.”Some ex-NRA leaders credit NSSF with trying to fill the NRA’s vacuum. “NSSF has attempted, and continues, to fill the gap left by a weakened NRA,” Jim Baker, the NRA’s former top lobbyist, said.The NRA did not respond to a call seeking comments.Further, the Trump campaign in tandem with the Republican National Committee has launched Gun Owners for Trump including firearms makers and gun-rights advocates such as Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation; Women for Gun Rights; and some NRA officials.To spur more pro-gun votes at the polls, Trump has spoken twice this year at NRA events. At their May meeting, Trump employed some incendiary conspiracy-mongering, telling the crowd that Biden “has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGun-control advocates and the Biden campaign are using Trump’s own pro-gun pledges and cavalier attitude towards gun violence to rev up their backers, including younger voters and women.After an Iowa school shooting in January, for instance, Trump callously opined that “we have to get over it”, a clip of which is being circulated by Democrats and pro-gun-control advocates.Likewise, another clip in circulation shows Trump boasting to NRA members in May that he “did nothing” as president on guns. Actually, Trump signed a “bump stock” ban after the country’s largest gun massacre ever in Las Vegas, but the supreme court overturned it this month.Biden cemented his gun-control credentials in 2022 when, after the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre, he pushed hard for a gun-safety bill that passed on a bipartisan basis, becoming the first new gun-control law in almost three decades.To energize his supporters, Biden spoke to an Everytown training event for about 1,000 gun-safety volunteers including students on 12 June, where he cited several major achievements, including setting up a White House office focused on curbing gun violence and beefing up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Explosives and Firearms.Biden urged a ban on assault-style weapons and universal background checks for purchases of firearms, both goals he has stressed before.“We need you to overcome the unrelenting opposition of the gun lobby,” Biden said.Suplina said Everytown’s plans for targeting states to help Biden and how much they intend to spend overall this election cycle were not ready to be announced, but he did reveal that Everytown intends to support 465 of its volunteers who are running for office this year. The majority of these races are state and local.Further, Everytown will be backing Senate and House candidates who support gun-safety measures, Suplina said.Overall, Everytown spent about $55m on 2020 election efforts.Other gun-control advocates have broad election plans“This cycle, GIiffords will use its unique identity as a gun owner and survivor-led organization to reach a broad gun safety coalition in battlegrounds – including Democrats, Republicans, young voters, gun owners, and people of color,” Emma Brown, executive director of Giffords, said in a statementThe group plans on “supporting gun safety champions in key House and Senate races, [and] communicating the Biden-Harris administration’s historic gun safety accomplishments in states across the map,” she added.Looking ahead, Spitzer stressed that Biden “has continued to speak out on gun safety, and gun-safety groups will surely redouble their efforts on his behalf, not only to help him get re-elected, but to advance the cause of down-ballot Democrats running for Congress and state offices, where the fate of many gun laws lie”. 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      No props, no notes, no audience – but Trump-Biden debate will have ad breaks

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      “Will you shut up, man?” It was hardly oratory worthy of Abraham Lincoln, but Joe Biden’s primal plea in the face of relentless interruptions and heckling from Donald Trump provided a defining soundbite of the 2020 presidential debates.The two will face each other again on Thursday for the first of two head-to-head debates for the 2024 campaign, under new rules designed to prevent matters degenerating as they did four years ago. The US president and the former president will meet in a TV studio without the presence of a partisan audience, which some saw as an essential ingredient of Trump’s rabble-rousing approach. And to counteract the repeated butting-in that so irked Biden, the candidates will have their microphones muted when they are not speaking.But the debates are also the first in decades to be held entirely by commercial TV networks – including two advertising breaks – and without the oversight of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the long-established, independent, non-partisan body that has long governed the debate rules. Some critics say they fear that commercialising the process could lead to less substantive, shorter answers, geared more to generating conflict and soundbites than enlightening voters.The verbal volleys in 2020 between Biden and Trump, under the Fox News moderator Chris Wallace, became so vitriolic that the CNN presenter Dana Bash was prompted, live on air, to describe the event as “a shitshow”. Earlier this year, both campaigns chose to circumvent the Commission on Presidential Debates, which had overseen presidential debates since 1988, and on 27 June, Bash and her CNN co-presenter, Jake Tapper, will have a chance to improve on Fox’s effort when they preside over the first debate in Atlanta. A second debate will take place on 10 September, to be hosted by ABC.No props or prewritten notes will be allowed on stage. Candidates will be given a pen, a notepad and a bottle of water.The decisions to switch off a candidate’s microphone when it is the opponent’s turn to speak, and to exclude a partisan audience, have been taken in an effort to reduce the theatrical gladiatorial bloodsport element that has threatened to overwhelm recent debates.Some critics said the lack of oversight from the CPD, as well as the inclusion of two commercial breaks during the 90-minute event, undermined the nature of the debate.“The introduction of commercial breaks will fundamentally change what makes a debate a debate, since the candidates will constantly be able to stop and regroup,” Clea Conner, chief executive of Open to Debate, a research group that has tracked presidential debates over recent decades, told Politico.“Even though there will be only two commercial breaks this time, once we deem them acceptable it’s a classic slippery slope; how many will there be next time, and the time after that?“[Candidates’] arguments will have to be shorter, truncated for the commercial clock, and will result in more outrageous interactions to bump ratings.” Without the presence of an independent broker such as the CPD, she argued, it would lead to “pure political theatre”.Open to Debate’s report into the deterioration of debate quality attested to the need for drastic format changes from 2020, in order to arrest a decline in moderator control and candidate decorum.While there were just three interruptions across three debates in the 2004 election between George W Bush and John Kerry – administered by the CPD – the first 2020 Trump-Biden encounter witnessed 76, the group noted. However, the second debate saw just four interruptions, after non-speakers’ microphones were muted following criticism of the chaos three weeks earlier.Steven Fein, a professor of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts, who has studied the psychological dimension of presidential debates, said excluding a loudly cheering live audience was “rational” and “good for democracy”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“[It] will reduce significantly the chances that the focus of the debate will be not on what is actually said, but on all this stuff around it – the reaction of the audience and playing to the audience,” he said. “I think that changes what the candidates are likely to do.“It also changes what the audience at home takes away from the debate, what they remember, what plays the news the next day – all based on the audience reaction. Because the audience reaction may or may not be valid.”He warned, however, that the commercial TV networks may jettison the new approach “because it makes for less exciting television”.The candidate with more to lose in the controlled, low-key environment is probably Trump, according to Tammy Vigil, associate professor of communications at Boston University.“He tends to feed off of the energy of a crowd,” she said. “He’ll lose some of his energy by not having a crowd to feed off. The other part that’ll probably change is that the candidates will be more apt to speak to the cameras directly.“I think that will improve the overall feel of the debate for television viewers because it’ll feel like the candidates are speaking more directly to them.” More

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      Trump announces Teamsters union chief to speak at Republican convention

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      Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, will speak at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee next month, a move that could spell trouble for Joe Biden’s support among blue-collar workers ahead of the November election.Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, announced on Friday on his Truth Social platform that O’Brien had accepted his invitation to speak at the convention and that he was looking forward to seeing him represent the Teamsters.“Our GREAT convention will unify Americans and demonstrate to the nation’s working families they come first,” Trump wrote. “When I am back in the White House, the hard-working Teamsters, and all working Americans, will once again have a country they can afford to live in and be respected around the world.”A Teamsters spokesperson confirmed the news, saying it was “truly unprecedented since it will be the very first time a Teamsters general president has addressed the RNC”. The powerful union represents more than a million members across sectors such as trucking, packaging, manufacturing and logistics.“Our 1.3 million members represent every political background, and their message needs to be heard by as wide an audience as possible, and that includes all political candidates running for elected office,” the spokesperson said. “We appreciate former President Trump’s openness to inviting a labor leader to speak on behalf of working families.”The Republican national convention will kick off on 15 July, where Trump will once again be nominated as the GOP presidential candidate. The Teamsters spokesperson said O’Brien had made an identical request to appear at the Democratic national convention in Chicago the following month.The Teamsters endorsed Biden over Trump in the 2020 presidential election. But O’Brien, who took over in March 2022, has yet to publicly back a candidate in this election cycle.O’Brien has invited Biden, Trump and the independent presidential candidates Robert F Kennedy Jr and Cornel West to speak to his group. O’Brien drew anger from the union’s progressive members after he held a private meeting with Trump earlier this year. O’Brien later met Biden, who he described as having been “great” for workers. But he stressed there was “still a lot of work to be done” to bolster unions.O’Brien’s appearance at the Republican national convention would challenge Biden’s historic alliance with organized labor and threatens to undercut his claim that he is the most pro-union president in US history.Biden kicked off his re-election campaign last June at a union-backed rally, and has since been endorsed by the United Auto Workers (UAW) after he walked the picket line with union president Shawn Fain during its strike against America’s three biggest car manufacturers. More

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      Biden says supreme court preserved ‘critical protections’ for domestic violence survivors – as it happened

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      Joe Biden said the supreme court’s ruling today upholding a federal law that bans domestic abusers from possessing guns preserves “critical protections” for victims of abuse.“No one who has been abused should have to worry about their abuser getting a gun. As a result of today’s ruling, survivors of domestic violence and their families will still be able to count on critical protections, just as they have for the past three decades,” the president said.“Vice President Harris and I remain firmly committed to ending violence against women and keeping Americans safe from gun violence. We will continue to call on Congress to further strengthen support and protections for survivors and to take action to stop the epidemic of gun violence tearing our communities apart.”The supreme court upheld a federal law that bans domestic abusers from possessing firearms, in a decision cheered by Joe Biden, and supported by all justices on the conservative-dominated court, with the exception of Clarence Thomas. Kamala Harris, however, warned that the law was exactly the type of thing Donald Trump would go after, if elected president. Meanwhile, all signs point to a blockbuster week for the court beginning Wednesday. The justices will release more decisions that day, perhaps including cases on Trump’s immunity petition, whether cities can stop people from sleeping outside, and whether the Biden administration can require states to perform emergency abortions.Here’s what else happened today:
      Steve Bannon, the influential Trump ally, has asked the supreme court to delay the start of his jail sentence after being convicted of contempt of Congress.
      Anti-Trump group the Defend Democracy Project said the supreme court has “very likely guaranteed” that his trial on federal election subversion charges is not resolved before the November election.
      New York prosecutors are asking judge Juan Merchan to preserve parts of the gag order imposed on Trump in his business fraud case.
      Trump’s lawyers are planning a legal offensive against part of his indictment over allegedly possessing and hiding classified documents, the Guardian can reveal.
      A Nevada judge dismissed charges brought against six Republicans for allegedly plotting to submit fake certificates saying Trump won the state’s electoral votes in 2020.
      A judge in Nevada has ordered charges dismissed against six Republicans indicted last year for allegedly plotting to submit fake certificates certifying that Donald Trump won the state’s electoral votes in 2020, the Associated Press reports.The state’s attorney general Aaron Ford vowed to appeal the ruling by judge Mary Kay Holthus, who said the charges were filed in the wrong venue. Here’s more, from the AP:
      A Nevada state court judge dismissed a criminal indictment Friday against six Republicans accused of submitting certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state’s 2020 presidential election, potentially killing the case with a ruling that state prosecutors chose the wrong venue to file the case.
      Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford stood in a Las Vegas courtroom a moment after Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus delivered her ruling, declaring that he would take the case directly to the state Supreme Court.
      “The judge got it wrong and we’ll be appealing immediately,” Ford told reporters afterward. He declined any additional comment.
      Defense attorneys bluntly declared the case dead, saying that to bring the case now to another grand jury in another venue such as Nevada’s capital city of Carson City would violate a three-year statute of limitations on filing charges that expired in December.
      “They’re done,” said Margaret McLetchie, attorney for Clark County Republican party chairman Jesse Law, one of the defendants in the case.
      The judge called off trial, which had been scheduled for next January, for defendants that included state GOP chairman Michael McDonald; national party committee member Jim DeGraffenreid; national and Douglas County committee member Shawn Meehan; and Eileen Rice, a party member from the Lake Tahoe area. Each was charged with offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument, felonies that carry penalties of up to four or five years in prison.
      Supreme court rulings can have long and impactful ripple effects. This week, for instance, Louisiana’s Republican governor signed legislation to require the Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms, which the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington reports was a consequence of decisions the court handed down two years ago:Louisiana’s decision to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments is the latest fallout from a spate of controversial rulings from the rightwing supermajority of the US supreme court which has opened up a Pandora’s box that is fueling efforts to turn America into a theocratic state.The new law, signed on Wednesday by the hard-right governor, Jeff Landry, puts Louisiana in the vanguard of a decades-long movement to obliterate the foundational US separation of church and state. It puts wind in the sails of those who want the US to be reinvented as an overtly Christian nation, and comes in the wake of two highly contentious opinions from the highest court.Both rulings, delivered within six days of each other in 2022, were backed by the six ultra-conservative justices who now have a stranglehold on the country’s most powerful court. The supermajority is one of the main legacies of Donald Trump, who placed three of the justices on the bench.The Second Amendment Foundation, a group supporting gun rights, gave a mixed review to the supreme court’s ruling today upholding a federal law that bars domestic abusers from keeping firearms.In a statement, the group said that though the justices did not narrow their 2022 Bruen ruling, which expanded the ability to carry a firearm in public, as much as gun control advocates hoped, they took issue with the reasoning behind their ruling today in United States v Rahimi:
      Rahimi posed a difficult issue for the Court to resolve. And while the Court may have arrived at a conclusion that society believes to be best, it did so in a manner that poses some inconsistencies with what Bruen demands. To be clear, domestic violence is abhorrent and those who commit such acts should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law – for which a conviction would result in their disarmament through imprisonment.
      As Justice Thomas wrote “the question before us is not whether Rahimi and others like him can be disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment. Instead, the question is whether the Government can strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order – even if he has never been accused or convicted of a crime.” Stripping an individual of their Second Amendment rights, when they have not been accused or convicted of a crime, is not consistent with what the Constitution protects.
      The Court’s justification in upholding the law by cobbling together bits and pieces of historical laws to find a “historical analogue” may allow future courts to uphold various infringements on the Second Amendment by the same sort of manufacture.
      Donald Trump has been criminally indicted four times, with one of his cases leading to a felony conviction on business fraud charges in New York City.The other three cases are stalled, for various reasons. Our case tracker tells you why:While the supreme court issued five decisions today, including one in a closely watched case dealing with gun restrictions, it has yet to rule on Donald Trump’s petition for immunity from the federal charges brought against him for trying to overturn the 2020 election.Trump’s trial on those charges cannot proceed until the court issues its ruling – which the Defend Democracy Project says is the point. In a statement, the anti-Trump group’s chair Mike Podhorzer and Norman Eisen, a legal analyst who assisted Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment, accused the court’s conservative justices of “an act of election interference” by delaying their decision for so long that it is unlikely the case will go to trial prior to the November 5 election:
      Week after week, we all have waited for a ruling on Donald Trump’s presidential immunity claim. It’s time to acknowledge that the delay is the ruling. Regardless of the substance of the decision on presidential immunity, the delays engineered by Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the three judges Trump named to the Court have very likely guaranteed that he will avoid a jury verdict for his criminal conspiracy to overturn the last election before the American people vote in the next one. Those justices have ensured an irreconcilable showdown in the fall between the ordinary operations of the criminal justice system, which would require Trump’s speedy pre-trial and trial proceedings, and the ordinary functioning of the presidential election system, in which both nominees are free to campaign.No matter what the Supreme Court concludes, the MAGA justices on the Supreme Court have already achieved their goal. The MAGA wing of the court has shielded Trump from facing a jury of his peers for so long that it has become an act of election interference. It’s been over six months since the court was first petitioned on December 11 to address Trump’s ludicrous version of presidential immunity that embraces the right to assassinate his political rivals. These delays blow past the markers for prior cases of comparable importance. They are a lifeline for Trump to escape the final judgment of a jury before the next election, and a reminder that the American people lack the impartial judiciary we all deserve.
      Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, said he is “relieved” that the supreme court upheld the ban on domestic abusers possessing guns, writing on X that there was “absolutely no sane legal argument” for striking down the ban.Blumenthal added that Friday’s ruling was the court’s attempt “to try to clean up its own mess” after the “legal catastrophe” of the landmark ruling of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, in which the six conservative justices allowed handguns to be carried in public in most instances. Blumenthal added:
      While I welcome today’s correct decision, I remain fearful about the fate of future gun violence prevention laws in the hands of this ideologically inconsistent & extreme Court.
      While sifting through his work emails one February afternoon, Clyde Estes saw a message that dismayed him.“I started reading it and was just shocked,” recalled Estes, chairman of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. “It’s something you don’t expect to see.”It relayed what Kristi Noem said at the state legislature just a few days prior. In her address at the state capitol, the second-term South Dakota governor blasted US immigration policy, saying that “invasion is coming over the southern border”.Noem alleged that tribal leaders in South Dakota were profiting off drug cartel activity. These remarks, and her controversial comments about Native children, have been met with staunch condemnation from Indigenous leaders, and have dredged up a bitter history between the tribes and the state.As a result, all nine of South Dakota’s federally recognized tribes, which cover more than 12% of the state, have now banned Noem from their reservations.If the governor attempts to enter the reservation, Estes said that tribal law enforcement would notify county sheriffs and ask her to voluntarily leave the reservation.“She would be charged with trespassing,” said Estes, calling the situation “very, very unfortunate”.
      We’re going to stand up to defend our people.
      Read the full story here: Native tribes on banning Kristi Noem from reservations: ‘She’d be charged with trespassing’Kamala Harris has released her own statement responding to the supreme court’s ruling upholding a federal ban preventing anyone placed under a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a gun.Harris’ statement echoes the one earlier distributed by the Biden campaign, where she says while she and Joe Biden “stand up to the gun lobby, Donald Trump bows down.”She notes that the Biden administration have passed “the most significant gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years” and have “stopped nearly 30,000 firearms sales to convicted domestic abusers”, adding:
      If Donald Trump returns to power, all that progress would be at risk.
      Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has doubled down on his accusations that the US is holding back weapons and ammunition from Israel in its war in Gaza.The Israeli leader caused a furious reaction in Washington this week after he posted a video on social media saying that it was “inconceivable” that the Biden administration had held up weapons shipments to Israel, and implied that Israel’s ability to prevail in the nine-month war with Hamas was being hampered as a result.The White House responded by cancelling a high-level meeting with Israeli officials on Iran.John Kirby, the White House’s national security adviser, strongly denied the claims and called Netanyahu’s comments “vexing”, “disappointing” and “incorrect”.Netanyahu, in an interview with Punchbowl News published this morning, said he had aired his criticisms because he “felt that airing it was absolutely necessary after months of quiet conversations that did not solve the problem.” He said:
      I raised this issue with Secretary Blinken. And I said that we are being told by our Defense Department officials that barely a trickle is coming in. He said, ‘Well, everything is in process. We’re doing everything to untangle it and to clear up the bottlenecks.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s what I expect to happen. Let’s make sure that it does happen.’ It must happen.
      The supreme court has upheld a federal law that bans domestic abusers from possessing firearms, in a decision cheered by Joe Biden, and supported by all justices on the conservative-dominated court, with the exception of Clarence Thomas. Kamala Harris, however, warned that the law was exactly the type of thing Donald Trump would go after, if elected president. Meanwhile, all signs point to a blockbuster week for the court beginning Wednesday. The justices will release more decisions that day, perhaps including cases on Trump’s immunity petition, whether cities can stop people from sleeping outside, and whether the Biden administration can require states to perform emergency abortions.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Steve Bannon, the influential Trump ally, has asked the supreme court to delay the start of his jail sentence after being convicted of contempt of Congress.
      New York prosecutors are asking judge Juan Merchan to preserve parts of the gag order imposed on Trump in his business fraud trial.
      Trump’s lawyers are planning a legal offensive against part of his indictment over allegedly possessing and hiding classified documents, the Guardian can reveal.
      The supreme court is scheduled to release more opinions on Wednesday of next week, and chances are good that the justices will by then decide at least one of the cases concerning major constitutional questions that are pending before them.University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck has a rundown of the court’s unfinished business:Prominent on that list is Trump v United States, which is the former president’s request for immunity from the federal election meddling charges against him.Also outstanding is Idaho v United States, which concerns whether the Biden administration can require the state’s federally funded hospitals to carry out emergency abortions, despite the state’s strict ban on the procedure. There’s also City of Grant’s Pass v Johnson, which deals with whether municipalities can pass laws against people sleeping outside.In a statement distributed by Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, Kamala Harris warned that Donald Trump would present a threat to gun laws such as the one the supreme court upheld today, which bans domestic abusers from possessing firearms.Harris’ statement was markedly more political than the president’s, who instead focused on the importance of protecting domestic abuse victims. Here’s what she had to say:
      While President Biden and I stand up to the gun lobby, Donald Trump bows down. Trump has made clear he believes Americans should ‘get over’ gun violence, and we cannot allow him to roll back commonsense protections or appoint the next generation of Supreme Court justices. I have worked my entire career to protect women and children from domestic violence—from prosecuting abusers to supporting survivors. President Biden and I will never stop fighting for the rights of every American, including every survivor of domestic violence, to live free from the horror of gun violence. To continue that work, we must defeat Donald Trump in November.
      Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s presumptive opponent in the November presidential election, Donald Trump, remains under a gag order imposed by the judge in his business fraud case that prevents him from attacking witnesses, jurors and other players.The Associated Press reports that prosecutors have asked Juan Merchan, the judge who presided over the case, to maintain parts of the order ahead of Trump’s debate face-off with Biden scheduled for next Thursday.Here’s more:
      Prosecutors on Friday urged the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal hush money case to uphold provisions of a gag order that bar him from criticizing jurors and court staff, while agreeing to lift a restriction on his public statements about trial witnesses.
      In court papers filed Friday, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office argued that portions of the gag order remained necessary given the Republican former president’s “singular history of inflammatory and threatening public statements,” as well as efforts by his supporters to “identify jurors and threaten violence against him.”
      “Since the verdict in this case, defendant has not exempted the jurors from his alarming rhetoric that he would have ‘every right’ to seek retribution as president against the participants in this trial as a consequence of his conviction because ’sometimes revenge can be justified,” the filing states.
      The gag order, issued in March, prohibited Trump from making or directing others to make public statements about witnesses, jurors and others connected to the case. It does not restrict comments about the judge, Juan M. Merchan, or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office prosecuted the case.
      Attorneys for Trump have called on the judge to lift the order following the culmination of his trial last month, which ended in his conviction on 34 felony counts for falsifying records to cover up a potential sex scandal. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, is set to be sentenced on July 11.
      Joe Biden said the supreme court’s ruling today upholding a federal law that bans domestic abusers from possessing guns preserves “critical protections” for victims of abuse.“No one who has been abused should have to worry about their abuser getting a gun. As a result of today’s ruling, survivors of domestic violence and their families will still be able to count on critical protections, just as they have for the past three decades,” the president said.“Vice President Harris and I remain firmly committed to ending violence against women and keeping Americans safe from gun violence. We will continue to call on Congress to further strengthen support and protections for survivors and to take action to stop the epidemic of gun violence tearing our communities apart.”Steve Bannon, a prominent ally to Donald Trump, has appealed to the supreme court to delay the beginning on his four month-prison sentence for contempt of Congress, the Associated Press reports.Bannon was ordered to report to prison by 1 July after being convicted nearly two years ago of charges related to defying a subpoena from the January 6 committee. He is now asking for the intervention of the nation’s highest court, which turned down a similar request from Peter Navarro, another former Trump White House adviser who was convicted of similar charges.Here’s more, from the AP:
      The request came after a federal appeals court panel rejected Bannon’s bid to avoid reporting to prison by July 1 to serve his four-month sentence. It was addressed to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals from courts in Washington, D.C.
      The high court swiftly denied a similar request from another Trump aide in March. Bannon’s request comes a week before the court is set to begin its summer recess.
      Bannon was convicted nearly two years ago of two counts of contempt of Congress: one for refusing to sit for a deposition with the Jan. 6 House Committee and the other for refusing to provide documents related to his involvement in Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
      Bannon has cast the case as politically motivated, and his attorney David Schoen has said the case raises “serious constitutional issues” that need to be examined by the Supreme Court.
      If Bannon goes to prison next month, he will likely have to serve his full sentence before the high court has the chance to review those questions, since the court is due to take its summer recess at the end of June, attorney Trent McCotter wrote in his emergency application.
      Attorney general Merrick Garland said the justice department will continue enforcing the federal law that bars domestic abusers from possessing guns, after the supreme court’s ruling today in United States v Rahimi.“The Justice Department will continue to enforce this important statute, which for nearly 30 years has helped to protect victims and survivors of domestic violence from their abusers. And we will continue to deploy all available resources to support law enforcement, prosecutors, courts, and victim advocates to address the pervasive problem of domestic violence,” Garland said in a statement.Here’s more:From the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, here’s more on the significance of the supreme court’s ruling today in United States v Rahimi, in which the justices upheld a law banning domestic abusers from carrying guns, while weighing in on a major 2022 decision that expanded the ability to carry weapons in public nationwide: The US supreme court has upheld a federal ban preventing anyone placed under a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a gun.The ruling in US v Rahimi, supported by eight justices to one, with Clarence Thomas dissenting, will leave in place legal protections against a major source of gun violence in America. Writing the opinion, the chief justice, John Roberts, said that individuals can be temporarily disarmed if they pose a “credible threat to the physical safety of another” without violating the second amendment to the constitution that allows the right to bear arms.“Since the founding, the nation’s firearm laws have included regulations to stop individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” he wrote.The judgment will come as a relief to gun control advocates who had feared that the ability to disarm dangerous people might fall prey to the radical interpretation of the second amendment advanced by the court’s conservative supermajority. In the 2022 ruling New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, the six conservative justices allowed handguns to be carried in public in most instances.They said that any restrictions on ownership had to conform to the “history and tradition” of firearms regulations stretching back to the 18th century. Gun control groups feared that the ruling might be used to unravel America’s already lax regulations, with potentially disastrous consequences.The ruling in United States v Rahimi comes two years after the supreme court’s Bruen decision, in which the court’s conservative supermajority dramatically expanded the ability to carry weapons in public.But many of those same justices today found in Rahimi that the government could also take weapons away from domestic abusers. That opinion was supported by five of six conservatives, all of whom supported the ruling in Bruen. The court’s three liberals also signed on to Rahimi, with conservative justice Clarence Thomas the lone dissenter: More

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      US farmers turn towards Biden over Trump’s past agricultural policies

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      For two decades, Christopher Gibbs, a row crop and cattle farmer in Shelby county, Ohio, was an ardent Republican party member.He served as chair of his county’s Republican party branch for seven years and when Donald Trump became the party’s presidential candidate in 2016, Gibbs, like more than 80% of Shelby county voters, fell in line.But in 2018, everything changed.Watching Trump stand alongside Vladimir Putin at a summit in Helsinki, in which the president sided with his Russian counterpart against US law enforcement agencies that had indicted Russian intelligence officers for interfering in the US election in 2016, Gibbs was aghast.Then, not long after, Trump began trade tariffs against many of the US’s international allies.“Our allies retaliated by going after our soft underbelly: our agriculture,” Gibbs says. “When China retaliated by no longer taking our soybeans, I lost 20% of the value of my crop overnight.”Gibbs is among a small but perhaps growing group of US farmers who fear that Trump’s threats of renewed trade wars and immigrant deportations could ruin their businesses should he prevail in the November presidential election.Today, Gibbs is a fervent member of the Democratic party and last year went as far as becoming the chair of his county’s branch.“In the Democratic party, not everybody gets their way, but everybody gets a voice,” says Gibbs. “In the Republican party, there’s just one voice.”In important farming states such as Iowa, debates have raged over how another Trump presidency could cost farmers dearly. During Trump’s previous tariff campaign that began in 2018, many farmers in Michigan, an election swing state, railed against the former president’s actions.View image in fullscreenBack then, the Trump administration attempted to ease the financial pain it inflicted upon the agriculture community and ensure farmers continue to vote for him by paying out $52bn in subsidies in 2020 alone.On the campaign trail this year, Trump falsely claimed $28bn was extracted from China, when, in fact, the direct payments to farmers came from the US government via taxpayer money.While Joe Biden remains unpopular with farmers – Gibbs is among only 12% of US farmers who typically vote for candidates of the Democratic party – results from a host of 2022 midterm races suggest that at the state and local level, support for Democratic party candidates in rural America may be rebounding.Moderate Democrats in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, as well as Gibbs’ Ohio outperformed Biden’s 2020 presidential election figures by as much as 15%, according to analysis by Third Way, a pro-Democratic party thinktank.Research shows that under the Biden administration, farming incomes have increased significantly, in large part due to government assistance and a post-pandemic bump in demand for agricultural products. What’s more, polls suggest a large number of rural Americans may vote for third-party or write-in candidates in November, a prospect that would hurt Trump more than Biden.Gibbs isn’t alone.Steve Held, whose family has ranched in eastern Montana since the 1800s, says he’s always considered himself an independent, voting for Republican and Democrat candidates in state and presidential elections all his life.In recent years, however, his worldview has changed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There was only one tornado [in Montana] that I was ever aware of growing up. Recently there was several in one day,” he says. “[Climate change] is real, and people see it, but the propaganda has them not wanting to admit the truth.”This year, Held ran as a Democrat for a seat in eastern Montana, finishing second in a primary held on 4 June.“The dysfunction in the Republican party now has gone beyond the pale. Our current representative [Republican Matt Rosendale] wouldn’t sign the proposed farm bill, which … supports programs so that families can make a living on the farms and ranches in Montana.”A former actor, Held entered politics in large part because of the climate crisis. “I sat in roomfuls of people who said they voted Republican their whole lives but that they were going to vote for me,” says Held.Still, Trump and other Republican candidates are expected to win rural counties handily across a slate of elections in November, and the challenges facing Democrats in rural America remain large.View image in fullscreen“Farmers and rural Americans are values voters,” says Gibbs, who recalls losing around 80% of his friends and colleagues after he spoke out against Trump. “They will continue to vote against their own interests, particularly in agriculture, because it’s the Republicans who speak to their value systems.”He says that Democrats have let themselves be reframed as something that doesn’t match the midwestern value set, such as universally supporting abortion, when “that’s never what they are for”.For Gibbs, the Democratic party could forge inroads with farmers and rural Americans, but to do so would require a recalculation. “The progressive left has had the microphone for too long,” he says.He says he doesn’t expect to see much change in terms of who farmers and rural Americans vote for in November’s election, but that’s not his main focus. He sees a chance of change further in the future.“What we’re doing here now,” he adds, “is building for [elections in] 2028, 2032.” More

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      Supreme court to release more decisions Friday after upholding Trump-era tax rule on foreign income – as it happened

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      The first case is Moore v United States, which deals with whether a one-time tax on Americans who hold shares in foreign corporations is legal.The tax was created under the 2017 tax code overhaul enacted under Donald Trump. In a 7-2 vote, the court held that it is legal.The supreme court put out a batch of new opinions this morning, none of which dealt with hotly anticipated cases on emergency abortions, Donald Trump’s immunity petition, or federal regulations that the conservative-dominated body has pending before it, though the justices did allow a Trump-era tax provision on foreign investments to stand. However, we’re not done hearing from the court this week: the justices will release more opinions on Friday. Meanwhile, the contours of next Thursday’s presidential debate are shaping up, with Trump opting to get the last word, and Biden the podium of his choosing. Robert F Kennedy Jr won’t be on the debate stage, and is not happy about it.Here’s what else happened today:
      Trump has the edge over Biden in several swing states, and is tied with him in Democratic stronghold Minnesota, a new poll found. However, the results are in the margin of error, and the survey also found support slipping for the former president among crucial independents.
      Democrats are seeking to focus the public’s attention on the consequences of Roe v Wade’s downfall, two years after the supreme court’s conservatives overturned the precedent and allowed states to ban abortion.
      Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will make a joint address to Congress on 24 July at 2pm, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson announced.
      Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, signed legislation mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms.
      Two colleagues of Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge handling Trump’s classified documents case, privately suggested she step aside, the New York Times reported. Cannon refused.
      The Senate has left town until 8 July, with only pro forma sessions scheduled until then:The Democratic-led body will be back and confirming judges by the second week of July.Lauren Ventrella, a state lawmaker in Louisiana who co-authored the bill mandating the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms, gave a combative interview to CNN, where she defended the legislation.She starts off by squabbling with anchor Boris Sanchez:Then blows off public school students who do not adhere to her religious views:Hot on the heels of another worrying poll for Joe Biden’s re-election aspirations, Axios reports some Democrats in contact with his campaign worry about its strategy.“It is unclear to many of us watching from the outside whether the president and his core team realize how dire the situation is right now, and whether they even have a plan to fix it. That is scary,” a Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign tells the outlet.From a person Axios describes as “in Biden’s orbit”:
      Even for those close to the center, there is a hesitance to raise skepticism or doubt about the current path, for fear of being viewed as disloyal.
      The person added: “There is not a discussion that a change of course is needed.”Make of that what you will.Democratic senator Tina Smith will seek passage of a bill to repeal the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that Democrats fear could be utilized by a second Trump administration to ban abortions nationwide, the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports:Democrats will introduce legislation on Thursday to repeal a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans mailing abortion-related materials, amid growing worries that anti-abortion activists will use the law to implement a federal abortion ban.The bill to repeal the Comstock Act is set to be introduced by the Minnesota Democratic senator Tina Smith, whose office provided a draft copy of the legislation to the Guardian. The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto will also back the bill, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the news of Smith’s plans. Companion legislation will be introduced in the House.“We have to see that these anti-choice extremists are intending to misapply the Comstock Act,” Smith said in an interview. “And so our job is to draw attention to that, and to do everything that we can to stop them.”Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act is named after the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock and, in its original iteration, broadly banned people from using the mail to send anything “obscene, lewd or lascivious”, including “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion”. In the 151 years since its enactment, legal rulings and congressional action narrowed the scope of the Comstock Act. For years, legal experts regarded it as a dead letter, especially when Roe v Wade established the constitutional right to an abortion.Melinda Gates, the billionaire co-founder of the Gates Foundation nonprofit, announced she has endorsed Joe Biden’s re-election:Gates was formerly married to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and has in the past been critical of Donald Trump.The judge handling Donald Trump’s classified documents case rejected suggestions from two more experienced colleagues to step aside from the case, according to a report.Florida federal district judge Aileen M Cannon, a Trump appointee, was approached by two federal judges in Florida, including Cecilia M Altonaga, the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, the New York Times reported.Each asked her “to consider whether it would be better if she were to decline the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another judge,” the report said, citing sources. Cannon “wanted to keep the case and refused the judges’ entreaties”, it said.Since taking on Trump’s classified documents case last year, Cannon has repeatedly issued rulings that have reduced the chance of the case coming to trial before November’s presidential election, in which he is the Republicans’ presumptive nominee.Congresswoman Suzan DelBene of Washington, who chairs House Democrats’ campaign arm, pointed to the party’s strong performance in recent special elections as evidence of how their stance on abortion is resonating with voters.“The public knows only Democrats are standing up for women and standing up to protect access to safe, critical reproductive care,” DelBene said on a press call today.
      This election is fundamentally about our rights, our freedoms, our democracy, and our future. House Republicans have made it clear they’re willing to do anything to take those away.
      Democrats have failed to pass a federal bill protecting abortion access, as Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House, but they have vowed to do so if they regain control of Congress in November.Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, told reporters:
      We can’t risk another four years of Donald Trump in the White House. And that’s why we will campaign on this issue and we will win on this issue. And when Democrats win, we will restore access to safe, legal abortion nationwide.
      On Monday, the US will mark two years since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, and Democrats plan to make their support for abortion access a central focus of their pitch to voters in November.“When Dobbs overturned Roe, millions of women across the country lost their right to have a choice in their healthcare, a say in their safety and a voice in their own destiny,” Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said on a press call ahead of the anniversary.
      And Trump and his extreme MAGA [’Make America Great Again’] Republicans, regardless if they’re in Washington or statehouses, will not stop until they institute a national abortion ban.
      Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, the vice chair of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, described abortion access as “a defining issue in the 2024 Senate elections”. She said:
      It shows so clearly the contrast between Democrats and Republicans on this fundamental and core issue of whether or not people in this country can have the freedom to control their own bodies and their own lives. That is what is at stake in this election.
      US civil liberties groups have sued Louisiana for what they called its “blatantly unconstitutional” new law requiring all state-funded schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms.The state’s rightwing Republican governor, Jeff Landry, who succeeded the former Democratic governor John Bel Edwards in January, provocatively declared after signing the statute on Wednesday: “I can’t wait to be sued.”The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined with its Louisiana affiliate and two other bodies – Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom of Religion Foundation – to immediately take him up on his challenge by announcing they were doing precisely that.In a joint statement, the ACLU and its allies said the law, HB 71, amounted to religious coercion. They also said it violated Louisiana state law, longstanding precedent established by the US supreme court and the first amendment of the US constitution, which guarantees separation of church and state.The White House has hit back again against accusations by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the US is holding back weapons and ammunition from Israel in its war in Gaza.The Israeli leader made the claims of a supposedly deliberate weapons delay in a video posted on social media in which he implied that Israel’s ability to prevail in the nine-month war with Hamas was being hampered as a result. Netanyahu said:
      I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel – Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies.
      The White House’s spokesperson John Kirby, speaking to reporters today, said he had “no idea” what Netanyahu’s motivation was in making the statement.
      We didn’t know that video was coming. It was perplexing to say the least.
      Kirby described Netanyahu’s comments as “deeply disappointing and vexing”, adding:
      [There’s] no other country that’s done more or will continue to do more than the United States to help Israel defend itself.
      The supreme court put out a batch of new opinions this morning, none of which dealt with hotly anticipated cases on emergency abortions, Donald Trump’s immunity petition, or federal regulations that the conservative-dominated body has pending before it, though the justices did allow a Trump-era tax provision on foreign investments to stand. However, we’re not done hearing from the court this week: the justices will release more opinions on Friday. Meanwhile, the contours of next Thursday’s presidential debate are shaping up, with Trump opting to get the last word, and Biden the podium of his choosing. Robert F Kennedy Jr won’t be on the debate stage, and is not happy about it.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Trump has the edge over Biden in several swing states, and is tied with him in Democratic stronghold Minnesota, a new poll found. However, the results are in the margin of error, and the survey also found support slipping for the former president among crucial independents.
      Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will make a joint address to Congress on 24 July at 2pm, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson announced.
      Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, signed legislation mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr has hit out at both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, after the independent presidential candidate failed to qualify for the first presidential debate, to be hosted by CNN next Thursday.The network said only Trump and Biden met their criteria for the debate. But in a statement, Kennedy blamed the two leading presidential contenders for keeping him off the debate stage:
      Presidents Biden and Trump do not want me on the debate stage and CNN illegally agreed to their demand. My exclusion by Presidents Biden and Trump from the debate is undemocratic, un-American, and cowardly. Americans want an independent leader who will break apart the two-party duopoly. They want a President who will heal the divide, restore the middle class, unwind the war machine, and end the chronic disease epidemic.
      Here’s what CNN said about their qualifications to make the debate:
      In order to qualify for participation, candidates had to satisfy the requirements outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution to serve as president, as well as file a formal statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission.
      According to parameters set by CNN in May, all participating debaters had to appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency and receive at least 15% in four separate national polls of registered or likely voters that meet CNN’s standards for reporting.
      Polls that meet those standards are those sponsored by CNN, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, Marquette University Law School, Monmouth University, NBC News, The New York Times/Siena College, NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College, Quinnipiac University, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
      Biden and Trump were the only candidates to meet those requirements.
      A new poll of swing states shows Donald Trump with the edge over Joe Biden, and tied with the president in Minnesota, which has not supported a Republican presidential candidate in 52 years.The poll was conducted by Emerson College, and lines up with other surveys that have indicated Biden faces uphill battle for re-election in November:Spencer Kimball, the executive director of Emerson College Polling, said the data indicates little movement in overall support for the two candidates since Trump was convicted of felony business fraud last month.However, Kimball noted that “results fall within the poll’s margin of error,” and that there have been signs of Trump’s support declining with independent voters, who may play the deciding role in this election:
      In Arizona, Trump’s support among independents dropped five points, from 48% to 43%. In Michigan, Trump’s support dropped three, from 44% to 41%, and in Pennsylvania, Trump dropped eight points, from 49% to 41%. Biden lost support among independents in Georgia, by six points, 42% to 36% and Nevada, by five, 37% to 32%.
      The Trump and Biden campaigns flipped a coin to sort out some of the lingering issues ahead of next Thursday’s first presidential debate, and CNN has announced the results.Joe Biden won the coin flip, and opted to choose a specific podium. That left Donald Trump to specify if he would have the last word of the debate, or leave that to Biden.Here’s what the two candidates chose, from CNN:
      The coin landed on the Biden campaign’s pick – tails – which meant his campaign got to choose whether it wanted to select the president’s podium position or the order of closing statements.
      Biden’s campaign chose to select the right podium position, which means the Democratic president will be on the right side of television viewers’ screens and his Republican rival will be on viewers’ left.
      Trump’s campaign then chose for the former president to deliver the last closing statement, which means Biden will go first at the conclusion of the debate.
      Republican speaker of the House Mike Johnson has announced that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress on 24 July.Netanyahu’s 2pm address will take place in the House chamber, and comes amid tensions with the Biden administration and some Democrats over the Israeli leader’s handling of the invasion of Gaza. Earlier this year, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, called for Israel to hold new elections, and said Netanyahu “has lost his way”.Here’s more on Netanyahu’s planned speech: More

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      In South Carolina, Black voters are split on immigration

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      Republicans claim that their election-year rhetoric about immigration has a new audience in Black communities. North Charleston’s newfound racial complexity tests that claim.The working-class city of about 120,000 people is one of the most strongly Democratic in South Carolina, more so even than Charleston, its larger, storied neighbor to its south. It has also long been split almost evenly between Black and white residents. Immigration has been adding a third dimension to what was a two-way relationship.In the “neck” of the barbell-shaped city, between the primarily white northern neighborhoods and the primarily Black southern neighborhoods, are stretches where the shops advertise in Spanish and almost all the children getting off the school bus are Latino.About 2.5% of North Charlestonians identified as Hispanic in the 1990 census. That rose to 4% in 2000, 10% in 2010 and, on paper, about 12% today, with 8% “other”. But the current census figures are questionable, said Enrique “Henry” Grace, CFO of the Charleston Hispanic Association: “Forget about it. Because Hispanics don’t do the census. Whatever the census says, double it.”Immigration can be a tough topic to discuss in South Carolina’s Black community, which isn’t keen on offering white conservatives who regularly attack cities as “crime-infested” yet another reason to snipe at North Charleston, especially in an election year when immigration rhetoric on the right has become increasingly toxic.But it doesn’t mean they aren’t asking more from Democratic leaders. In early June, Joe Biden announced changes to border policy, significantly curtailing asylum claims in a bid for bold executive action on a campaign issue.The US president’s border order came with political pressure mounting on the president and Congress to resolve negotiations on a bill to change America’s immigration policies and stem undocumented migration. Some of that political pressure comes from big-city leaders like the mayors of New York and Chicago, after border state governors began shipping people who had crossed the border to them last year, straining the social services infrastructure.But the border action has an audience among Democrats in South Carolina, too.Biden was serving red meat to Democratic party loyalists at a January campaign speech in Columbia, South Carolina, talking about his appointment of Black judges and lowering Black unemployment rates, when he threw them one nugget of red-state steak. He complained that Republicans in Congress were thwarting legislation on the border – despite getting almost everything they wanted in the bill – at the bidding of Donald Trump in order to preserve it for him as a political issue.View image in fullscreen“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” Biden said, to applause.As attendees awaited the president before the speech, Michael Butler, mayor of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a Democrat, expressed sympathy with this idea. “I would expect the president, if he’s elected a second time, to close the border,” Butler said.The population of both the city and county of Orangeburg, about 45 minutes north of North Charleston, is mostly Black, poor, rural and Democratic. Biden won 70% of Orangeburg in the 2020 primary – his best showing statewide – and two-thirds of votes in the November election.Without a careful message, this time could be different. Shipping border crossers to big cities seemed like a publicity stunt, but it was one that worked, in Butler’s view, to highlight how problems at the border are problems everywhere, including Democratic strongholds.“I empathize with those mayors,” Butler said. “They have to deal with the expectations of migrants, and the security of them. You know we’re the land of the free and the brave, and we believe in taking care of all citizens. But those borders need to be secured to protect the citizens.”Butler’s take on immigration isn’t uniformly held across the state.Some Black political leaders in North Charleston beam about how immigration has changed their communities. State representative JA Moore, a North Charleston Democrat, boasts of having the most diverse district in the state. “I’m proud of that,” he said. Moore pushes back, hard, against the suggestion that there’s tension between Black and Latino people about housing or jobs where he lives.North Charleston presents a more nuanced test of the Black electorate’s reaction to immigration, because the growth of its immigrant community has come with booming economic growth and overall population increases. Even so, Moore admits that some could conflate something like the rapid increase in housing prices with the rapid increase in immigration.“The housing market in general and in Charleston is higher than it was 10, 15 years ago,” Moore said. “And also the amount of Hispanics that are moving in has increased tremendously in the past 15 years. They see a Hispanic person move into their neighborhood, and they’re seeing the prices of the houses going up … People may be correlating the two.”Donald Trump is counting on those kind of inferences.Biden’s Republican challenger, known for his increasingly strident immigration rhetoric, responded to the border closure at a rally in the Las Vegas heat after Biden’s announcement, describing it as insufficient while arguing that the president is “waging all-out war” on Black and Latino workers. He falsely claimed that the wages of Black workers had fallen 6% since 2021.The international manufacturers that have driven growth aren’t hiring undocumented labor, said Eduardo Curry, president of the North Charleston chapter of the Young Democrats of South Carolina. “A lot of jobs here in Charleston are skilled labor jobs,” he said. “It’s not just … walk off the street and let me hire you.”The problem, Curry said, is that too few Black workers in North Charleston have the training to take those jobs, even as those employers are yearning for more labor. Working-class Black laborers instead compete with recent immigrants for jobs that require less formal education.Tension between Black and Latino people in North Charleston has been relatively low, but may be rising because of job competition, said Ruby Wallace, a job recruiter at a staffing agency in North Charleston that serves warehouses and distribution centers – working-class employers. “Hispanics are working for whatever they can get at this point,” she said. “And they’re doing a lot of work.”The North Charleston native said her staffing agency has lost 40% of its business year over year after some clients found it less expensive to hire undocumented labor through shady organizations.The neighborhood around the staffing agency has become populated primarily with immigrants, and the office, which has historically employed working-class and poor Black people, turns away undocumented applicants every day.A cottage industry of undocumented labor has emerged, undercutting legal operators by skirting federal E-Verify laws and omitting payments into workers’ compensation and unemployment taxes.Wallace has been reporting the violations she sees to the US Department of Labor, to no avail. “I’m trying to figure out, how is it possible for them to load people up and bring them, working here in South Carolina? Is it not illegal for them to do that?” she said.Republican messaging aimed at Black voters mixes threats about job losses with invective about immigration, crime and cities.Black voters are expected to ignore the racial undercurrent of attacks on cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia or most recently Milwaukee – a “horrible city” in Trump’s most recent tirade – while being receptive to the idea that undocumented people from Central and South America make those cities more unsafe.That hasn’t happened in North Charleston.North Charleston began assessing the city’s racial disparity in arrests and victimization in 2020. A majority of North Charleston’s immigrants are Latino. According to a report released in 2021, Hispanic suspects represented about 7.5% of arrests, while Hispanic residents comprised 10% of the city’s population that year.Violent crime increased during the pandemic in North Charleston, as it did in most cities with more than 100,000 residents. It has fallen since. But it is among the higher-crime cities in the state, with a murder rate about five times the national average.Keeping the peace in North Charleston has meant navigating racial tension in a city experiencing poverty and crime. Immigration adds a new element to that challenge.Reggie Burgess, 58, grew up in North Charleston and served on its police force for more than 30 years – five as its chief – before winning election as the city’s first Black mayor in 2023. He said he contends with a common trope: that undocumented immigrants bring with them an uptick in crime.But that depiction of immigrants as criminals is false; they are measurably less likely to commit crimes than the US-born. Burgess, who has witnessed the changes in his community first-hand, said he has had to meet with immigrants to discuss how they are too often victimized by other poor people who look like him.Back when Burgess was still chief of police in 2017, he found himself conducting role-playing exercises with Latino immigrants about identifying Black people, trying to build some trust with the community.“We would actually turn them backwards, and we’d turn them around real quick and say: ‘Look at this person,’ and turn ’em back around,” Burgess said. “I’d ask, can you give me a description of the person? We were trying to teach them to understand that a Black male was more than this Afro. You’ve got to [describe] a shirt, or this lanyard.”It became evident to Burgess 20 years ago that undocumented individuals were being targeted for robberies because they tended to work in cash trades, he said. That revelation led the city to start pushing the financial-services industry to provide banking services, and was the start of relationship-building exercises between civic leaders and immigrants.But the federal government doesn’t do enough to keep victims from being deported long enough to sustain prosecutions, he said, leaving undocumented individuals as easy targets for crime and exploitation.“The U visa is supposedly supposed to help us lock in the witness for a period of time,” Burgess said, describing a victim witness visa program. “And Hispanics and Latinos would fill out the form, and I’m thinking: ‘OK, we’re good.’ The next thing you know, they tell me the prime witness has to go back or got caught up at a traffic stop and is being deported.”Underlying this issue is unstable housing and endemic poverty.“There’s a lot of need in Charleston in the Hispanic community. Need for everything, housing, jobs, everything,” said Grace of the Charleston Hispanic Association.The undocumented community in North Charleston tends to be concentrated in an area of the city with trailer parks and affordable housing. They are too often living in substandard or overcrowded conditions, said Annette Glover, who operates an immigrant-oriented community ministry in North Charleston.North Charleston is part of a three-county metropolitan area of about 830,000 residents. Glover’s organization, Community Impact, assisted 86,387 people within that area last year, she said, with food, language training, housing assistance and other help. Most were immigrants. About 75% – to 80% were undocumented, she said. With that has come a fear of appearing on the government’s radar, even while applying for help from nongovernmental organizations like hers, she said.“We have found a way to actually get them to fill out applications, by allowing them to understand that we’re not going to be giving it to Ice or to anything like that,” she said.Burgess said economic conditions and education are stress points. “I mean, some of these neighborhoods, the [adjusted median income] is $29,000. And then you can go a little further up, and AMI is probably is $101,000,” he said. “And without education, there’s no options. You have to settle for whatever you get.”The gridlock in Washington DC on immigration has an impact on places like North Charleston.Biden’s move to close the border to asylum seekers is a short-term approach to a long-term problem, Burgess said.Without actual reform to the immigration system, undocumented immigrants will remain in the shadows.“We have to step back and push aside these little personal vendettas and squabbles in these parties, and think as Americans,” Burgess said. “My people came here in chains 400 years ago. We’re free now, right? Why? We’re free because the country said enough is enough. And they fought, brothers and sisters, fought each other, and they said: ‘OK, everybody’s free.’ They could do that in 1865. They can do the same thing in 2024.” More

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      White House disputes Netanyahu’s claim that US is withholding weapons from Israel

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      The Biden administration has reacted furiously to criticisms by Benjamin Netanyahu that the US is holding back weapons and ammunition from Israel in its war in Gaza, reportedly cancelling a high-level meeting with Israeli officials on Iran in retaliation.Netanyahu made the claims of a supposedly deliberate weapons delay in a video posted on X in which he implied that Israel’s ability to prevail in the nine-month war with Hamas was being hampered as a result.Speaking to the camera in English, Netanyahu said he had expressed gratitude in a recent meeting with Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, for American support since last October’s attack on Israel by Hamas, which killed about 1,200 and saw another 250 taken hostage.“But I also said something else,” he said. “I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel – Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies.”Invoking Winston Churchill, Netanyahu continued: “During world war two, Churchill told the United States, ‘Give us the tools, we’ll do the job.’ And I say, give us the tools, and we’ll finish the job a lot faster.”The broadside appeared to blindside US officials. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters: “We genuinely don’t know what he is talking about.”At a later news conference, Blinken said that the only delayed weapons were 2,000lb bombs that Joe Biden had ordered to put under review because of concerns over an Israeli plan for an incursion into Rafah in southern Gaza, where up to 1 million people are sheltering.“That remains under review. But everything else is moving as it normally would,” said Blinken.The Biden administration finally won congressional approval for a $14bn military aid package for Israel in April after it was held up for months by the House of Representatives. A separate $15bn sale of US F15 aircraft is also set to move forward.Biden has pressed forward with aid despite opposition from within his own Democratic party, where progressives have accused Israel of committing genocide in a war that has now killed more than 37,000 Palestinians.Senior administration officials were said to be angry behind the scenes. Axios, citing two unnamed sources, reported that a bilateral meeting scheduled for 20 June had been called off to send Netanyahu a signal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe report said the US envoy to Israel, Amos Hochstein, had delivered the message to the prime minister personally, telling him that his accusation was “inaccurate and out of line”.“This decision makes it clear that there are consequences for pulling such stunts,” Axios quoted one American official as saying.A spokesperson for the White House national security council did not confirm the cancellation but amplified the perplexity over Netanyahu’s video.“We have been working to find a time to schedule the next SDG [sustainable development goals] that accounts for the travel and availability of principals, but have not yet fully finalized the details, so nothing has been cancelled,” the spokesperson, Eduardo Maia Silva, said in an email.“As we said in the briefing yesterday, we have no idea what the prime minister is talking about, but that’s not a reason for rescheduling a meeting.”Netanyahu is scheduled to visit Washington in late July to address a joint session of Congress, in response to an invitation by the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a close ally of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. More