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      Ordered online, assembled at home: the deadly toll of California’s ‘ghost guns’

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      When Brian Muhammad, a program manager at a gun violence prevention group in California, asked a 16-year-old boy in 2018 how young people were getting guns, he assumed the answer would be Nevada, the neighboring state with looser gun laws.“Who would waste time going to Nevada when you can just get them in the mail and put it together?” the Stockton teen nonchalantly replied.Three years later, homemade weapons known as “ghost guns” have risen to the top of the Biden administration’s policy agenda. When the president announced executive actions targeting gun violence after the mass shootings in Georgia, California and Colorado, they included steps to regulate the sale of the devices – the first time the federal government took up such efforts.Warnings about do-it-yourself guns have steadily grown in recent years, spurred by ominous news stories describing the weapons’ use in a slew of mass shootings, domestic terrorism cases and gun trafficking busts. In California alone, homemade guns were used in a 2013 mass shooting in Santa Monica, a 2014 bank robbery in Stockton and a shooting spree in rural Tehama county that killed six in 2017. In 2019, a 16 year old killed two students and injured three others before killing himself with a ghost gun at a school in Santa Clarita. The next year, as protests over police violence filled city streets, Steven Carrillo used a homemade machine gun to shoot two security guards at a federal building in Oakland and a sheriff’s deputy in an ambush in Santa Cruz.But as the role of ghost guns in high profile criminal cases has grown, community violence reduction workers warn of the less visible toll ghost guns are taking : ghost guns, they say, have become a hot commodity in many vulnerable communities, a trend that has only intensified during the pandemic.The ease with which these guns can be ordered and constructed, their low cost and the difficulties in tracing them have made them readily available in many California cities, the organizers say. Their rapid spread, combined with Covid-19 limitations to the in-person contact so many violence interrupters rely on, have created a dangerous combination that is contributing to the surge in gun deaths that began last year.“We have people buying guns on the street at a faster pace. We can’t keep up with the number of guns especially when they may be more accessible than social services for some,” said Muhammad, of the Advance Peace program, a gun violence prevention organization, in Stockton.‘If a person wants a gun, they can get it’Antoine Towers, the chair of Oakland’s Violence Prevention Coalition, said he first heard about ghost guns at the beginning of the pandemic.First from friends who bought a ghost gun and assembled it, next up were some family members, then his co-workers. Gun ownership in Black communities in California rose significantly during the pandemic, mass protests and election chaos of 2020, and Towers’ network was opting for ghost guns rather than buying full-priced guns from stores that were inundated with sales.Soon, Towers said, ghost guns started showing up at his work. “We already had a problem with firearms, but it became really ridiculous,” Towers said. “[Ghost guns] are so easy to get right now that the only solution I see is figuring out a way to make sure people who have them aren’t using them. It’s heartbreaking.”Once a niche hobby among gun enthusiasts, do-it-yourself gun kits have been around since the 1990s, but they’ve increasingly become a feature on the nightly news since the early 2010s.The kits are substantially less expensive than a traditional gun bought from a federally licensed store. For example: a pistol from Bass Pro Shop, a US-based outdoor sporting goods conglomerate, can range in price from $470 to more than $900 while a homemade pistol kit from Polymer80, a popular online gun retailer, costs less than $180 and can be assembled with common tools like screwdrivers and a few drill bits.The guns aren’t subject to traditional firearm sale mandates, including background checks and serial numbers, because of a legal loophole. Since they are shipped in several pieces, they fall out of the bounds of what the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) classifies as a legal firearm.“The argument is that they can’t fire in the condition they’re sold in. Because they require some assembly, they’re not firearms,” said Eric Tirschwell, the managing director of litigation for Everytown for Gun Safety, a national gun violence prevention advocacy group.Previously, police say, they mostly found ghost guns during large gun busts and underground trafficking operations. But in the past two years, they are more frequently turning up in the backs of cars or the hands of individuals. Increasingly popular among gun owners, the guns have also become an interesting business proposition for traffickers.Tina Padilla, a peacekeeper with Breaking Through Barriers to Success (BTBS), a Los Angeles-based violence prevention nonprofit, said she first heard about ghost guns on the news a few years ago, especially after mass shootings. Then she heard some young people trickle into the nonprofit’s office discussing their purchases and what kits they were eyeing in passing conversation.“I learned the logistics of getting a ghost gun from working in the community and found out that they can be purchased from different sites, with different credit cards to different addresses and the government can’t trace who’s buying these guns and where they’re going,” Padilla said.“Now, instead of people having to purchase weapons for $600 to $700, they can buy them on the computer, put them together and use them on the street,” said Padilla.Police in Stockton first became familiar with ghost guns in 2014, when a homemade AK-47 was recovered after a deadly bank robbery that turned into a hostage situation and hour-long car chase. In 2019, the department recovered 42 ghost guns. And in 2020, it seized 175, nearly four times as many.The ATF has been recovering more ghost guns in the US each year. In 2019, they seized more than 7,100 and in 2020 that number grew to 8,712, according to department data. Police departments in other California cities have reported similar rises. San Francisco police started tracking ghost guns in 2016, and found six that year. In 2019, they recovered 77 and, in 2020, the number leaped to 164. Los Angeles county police found 813 ghost guns in 2020. In Oakland, 16% of all guns seized by police in 2020 were ghost guns. So far in 2021, 22% are ghost guns.Violence intervention workers say the rise in ghost guns has played some role in the rise in gun deaths recorded in cities all across America.“There’s a whole industry of people who are making guns and in this digital age the difficulty factor isn’t there, so if a person wants a gun they can get it,” said Muhammad, the Advanced Peace director in Stockton.Like hundreds of other cities, homicides in Stockton have ticked up in past months. In 2020, 55 people were murdered in the city, the highest number in three years. Muhammad believes that ghost guns have played a role, especially among Stockton’s teens.“We’ve seen a younger group of people engaging in gunplay, he said. “There’s no school right now, and a 14, 15 year old isn’t gonna just sit at home if their parents are out working.” The loss of in-person schooling and extracurriculars, have left “ample time to get in disagreement”, he said.“Whatever people can do to make money, they will. And they know there’s a high demand, with people scared at the beginning of the pandemic and buying guns,” said Rudy Corpuz Jr, the executive director of United Playaz, a San Francisco-based violence prevention and youth development organization.“It’s scary because a lot of the ghost guns are in hands that are not responsible. And when you have kids all over in parks and places where violence happens, there’s potential that one of these can be used, and then one of these kids doesn’t get a chance to grow up.”Padilla, the Los Angeles-based violence interrupter, said the casualness with which she’s heard some young people talk about getting a kit sent to their home worried her. She said language barriers and lack of information among parents can make it difficult for them to regulate the packages that are being sent to their homes.“We need to do more education campaigns because some of these parents may get a package they may not think too much about. We need to let them know that they need to keep an eye out because these guns can cause a lot of harm,” she said.Ghost gun regulationsFollowing three mass shootings this spring, including a downtown San Diego shooting where a ghost gun was used, Biden directed the Department of Justice to develop new regulations around ghost guns. On 7 May, the ATF, which is part of the DOJ, proposed new rules that would close the loophole that allows ghost guns to be sold with little oversight. Under the new measures, the primary parts of a gun kit would be considered firearms, and therefore would need a serial number. Buyers would have to pass a background check.The measures would mark the first effort to regulate ghost guns on the federal level.In California, a 2018 state law required at-home kit builders to apply for a unique serial number, but the requirement only applied to ghost gun builders, and not to sellers, leaving it legal to sell kits without a serial number.San Francisco is set to weigh a proposal that would go further, and ban the sale of ghost guns as well. If the ordinance passed, it would make the city the first in California to do so.Meanwhile, several local district attorneys have sued ghost gun manufacturers and a number of states and cities have had lawsuits against the ATF for their original refusal to regulate ghost gun kits like traditional firearms. The Los Angeles city attorney joined Everytown for Gun Safety in a lawsuit against Polymer80, a popular gun kit seller that is facing a number of other lawsuits in California and Washington DC over their advertisement practices. The suit alleges that the dealer acted negligently and failed “to avoid exposing others to reasonably foreseeable risks of injury”, according to the complaint filed in December.Everytown is also suing 1911builders.com, the gun kit maker and dealer who sold the kit that was used in the Saugus school shooting, on behalf of one of the victims.In November 2019, Mia Tretta was injured in a mass shooting at Saugus high school in Santa Clarita. A 16-year-old student at the school had brought a homemade .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol which he used to shoot five students – two fatally – before turning the ghost gun on himself. The entire incident lasted less than 30 seconds.Since the tragedy, in which she lost her close friend Dominic Blackwell, Tretta’s been a vocal gun violence prevention advocate with Students Demand Action, a youth-led organization that lobbies for strengthened gun laws.“In my situation, we still don’t know who bought the gun. We know who used it, but we can’t trace it back,” Tretta said. “I want people to use my story to show what happens when anyone can get a gun.”‘It won’t stop the guns’Community workers such as Corpuz and Muhammad welcome Biden’s efforts, and agree that the spread of ghost guns needs to be stifled.But they also worry that federal action will beget local police crackdowns, a backlash that would lead to more harm among those who are already most at-risk of being shot. Rather than increased patrols and traffic stops, the interventionists say, communities need traditional violence intervention practices that provide social support and healing services.“The devil’s in the details,” said Corpuz of United Playaz. “You can think a new policy is about the ghost guns but then it leads to harassment. We all want ghost guns off of the street but we have to look to see what the fine print is before we support the rules because they can be harsh on Black and brown communities.”Muhammad of Advanced Peace likened the potential danger of increased policing and harsher sentences for having a ghost gun to the crack-cocaine laws of the late 20th century.“Once the laws happen they affect the bottom rung,” Muhammad said. “Police forces all over the country get access to federal dollars for any campaign, but that won’t stop the shooting; it won’t stop the guns from getting into the hands of young people.” More

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      in US Politics

      Democrats renew effort to get Donald Trump’s financial records

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      A powerful Democrat-led House committee is pushing a federal judge to order Donald Trump to comply with a subpoena for his financial records, arguing he no longer has a viable claim to withhold materials now that he is out of office, according to a source familiar with the matter.The move from the House oversight committee, led by the chair Carolyn Maloney, marks the latest salvo from Democrats in their years-long pursuit to secure Trump’s tax records and related documents, in a case testing the scope and limits of Congress’s oversight authority.If successful, the committee would be a step closer to obtaining Trump’s tax records and potentially making them public, the source said.“While the committee’s need for the subpoenaed information has not changed, one key fact has: plaintiff Donald J Trump is no longer the president,” Douglas Letter, the general counsel for congressional Democrats, wrote in a motion filed last week in the US district court for the District of Columbia.“Because he is no longer the incumbent, the constitutional separation-of-powers principles that were the foundation of the supreme court’s recent decision are significantly diminished,” Letter wrote.Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office in New York obtained the former president’s tax records in March, just hours after the supreme court denied his last-ditch attempt to keep them concealed. But, as they are part of a law enforcement investigation, they have not so far been released.The thousands of documents turned over by Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA include tax returns from January 2011 to August 2019, as well as financial statements, engagement letters and communications related to financial disclosures, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said.But in a separate decision, the supreme court ruled last summer that Congress could not see many of the same records, saying instead the case should be returned to lower courts on account of “significant separation of powers concerns” surrounding the issue.The committee, though, now believes that with Trump out of office, the separation of powers concerns that arose when he was subpoenaed by Congress as a sitting president no longer apply, the source said.If the committee is ultimately successful, it could pave the way for Trump’s tax returns to one day become public, since Congress is not restricted by grand jury secrecy rules that bar the Manhattan district attorney’s office from releasing the documents except as evidence at a trial.A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.House Democrats and Trump have been locked in a bitterly contested dispute since April 2019, when the committee first issued a subpoena to Mazars USA demanding 10 years’ worth of Trump’s financial records under the leadership of the late Representative Elijah Cummings.Maloney reissued the subpoena to Mazars USA earlier this year, after the initial subpoena expired with the new Congress.“For more than 22 months, the committee has been denied key information needed to inform legislative action to address the once-in-a-generation ethics crisis created by former President Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interests,” Maloney said at the time, in a memo obtained by the Guardian.“The committee’s need for this information – in order to verify key facts and tailor legislative reforms to be as effective as possible – remains just as compelling now as it was when the committee first issued its subpoena.” More

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      in US Politics

      US supreme court to hear case over right to carry concealed guns outside

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      The US supreme court stepped back into the gun control debate on Monday, saying it would take up a case focused on whether people can carry concealed guns outside the home in New York.The case could lead to the most consequential ruling on the scope of the second amendment in more than a decade.The case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Corlett, is backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA). It seeks an unfettered right to carry concealed handguns in public. A state firearms licensing officer granted the two plaintiffs “concealed carry” permits but restricted them to hunting and target practice, prompting the legal challenge.It will come before a conservative-leaning court. The court’s 6-3 rightwing majority, entrenched by three appointments under Donald Trump, is seen as sympathetic to an expansive view of second amendment rights.The debate over gun control in the US has intensified amid a spate of mass shootings, including one at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis on 15 April in which a gunman killed eight people and then himself and two in less than a week in March, one in Georgia and the other in Colorado, that left 18 dead.In 2008, the supreme court recognized an individual’s right to keep guns at home for self-defense. In 2010 the court applied that right to the states. The plaintiffs in the New York case want that right to be extended beyond the home.Lower courts threw out out their case, rejecting the argument that the New York restrictions violated the second amendment right to keep and bear arms.A ruling invalidating the New York law could imperil laws in other states with criteria for concealed-carry licenses. Seven other states and the District of Columbia give authorities more discretion to deny concealed firearm permits.A ruling against New York could also force lower courts to cast a skeptical eye on new or existing gun control laws.Gun control advocates are concerned the conservative supreme court justices could create a standard for gun control that will threaten measures already implemented, such as expanded criminal background checks for gun buyers and “red flag” laws targeting the firearms of people deemed dangerous by the courts.Republicans and gun rights advocates have pressed the justices to take up a new case and further extend gun rights. Last year, the court sidestepped a ruling in an NRA-supported challenge to a New York City restriction on transporting firearms outside the home, because the city had rolled back the regulation. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘It would be glorious’: hopes high for Biden to nominate first Black woman to supreme court

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      Joe Biden’s promise to nominate an African American woman to the supreme court for the first time holds broad symbolic significance for Darlene McDonald, an activist and police reform commissioner in Salt Lake City, Utah.But McDonald has specific reasons for wanting a Black woman on the court, too.When Chief Justice John Roberts asserted in 2013 that federal oversight of voting in certain southern states was no longer needed because “things have changed dramatically” since the civil rights era, McDonald said, he revealed a blindness to something African American women have no choice but to see.“I believe that if Chief Justice Roberts had really understood racism, he would never have voted to gut the Voting Rights Act,” McDonald said, adding that hundreds of voter suppression bills introduced by Republicans in recent months suggest things have not “changed dramatically” since 1965.“Myself, as an African American woman, having that representation on the supreme court will be huge,” McDonald said, “especially in the sense of having someone that really understands racism.”The gradual diversification of US leadership, away from the overwhelming preponderance of white men, towards a mix that increasingly reflects the populace, was accelerated by the election last November of Kamala Harris, a woman of color, as vice-president.Black women have been overlooked in terms of their values and what they have to bring to society as well as to the benchNow enthusiasm is building around a similarly historic leap that activists, academics and professionals expect is just around the corner: the arrival on the court of a justice who would personify one of the most historically marginalized groups.“Black women have been overlooked for decades and decades in terms of their values and what they have to bring to society as well as to the bench,” said Leslie Davis, chief executive of the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms. “We should be able to look at our highest court in the land and see the reflection of some of the folks who have made America great. And that absolutely includes Black women.”Out of 115 justices in its history, the supreme court has counted two African American justices, one Latina and just five women. The court has no vacant seats but calls are growing for Stephen Breyer, a liberal who turns 83 this year, to retire. Last month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden’s campaign commitment to nominating a Black woman “absolutely” holds.“This is a big moment in the making,” said Ben Jealous, president of People For the American Way, which recently launched the Her Fight Our Fight campaign to support and promote women of color in government and public service roles.“The presumption is that whomever Biden nominates, the first Black woman to the supreme court would be filling both the shoes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall,” said Jealous.The late Ginsburg, a pioneering lawyer for women’s rights, was succeeded last fall by the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett. Marshall was succeeded in 1991 by the George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas, who “is anathema to everything that the civil rights community stands for”, Jealous said.“It would be both glorious and a relief to have a Black woman on the supreme court who actually represents the values of the civil rights community, and the most transformative lawyers in our nation’s history.”Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a civil rights historian, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and professor of constitutional law, said having qualified federal judges who “reflect the broad makeup of the American public” would strengthen democracy and faith in the courts.“It’s an important historical moment that signifies equal opportunity,” Brown-Nagin said. “That anyone who is qualified has the chance to be considered for nomination, notwithstanding race, notwithstanding gender. That is where we are. In some ways, we shouldn’t be congratulating ourselves, right?”Brown-Nagin pointed out that a campaign was advanced in the 1960s to nominate Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to sit as a federal judge, but some Democratic allies of President Lyndon Johnson opposed such a nomination because they saw it as too politically risky.“This moment could have happened 50 years ago,” Brown-Nagin said.Daniel L Goldberg, legal director of the progressive Alliance For Justice, said to call the moment “overdue” did not capture it.“It is stunning that in the entire history of the republic, that no African American woman has sat on the highest court in the country,” Goldberg said. “For way too long in our nation’s history, the only people who were considered suitable and qualified for the court happened to be white males.”The first Black woman supreme court justice is likely to be nominated at a time when a renewed push for racial justice brings renewed focus on the court, which has played a key role in enforcing desegregation and reinforcing anti-discrimination laws.I would like to see someone like Sherrilyn Ifill or Lia Epperson – a woman who comes out of Thurgood Marshall’s old law firmThe killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, by a white police officer outside Minneapolis last weekend during the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin has sharpened cries for a national answer to serial injustice at the local level – precisely the kind of conflict that typically lands before the supreme court.“As we sit here today, and watch the trial of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, that precipitated a summer of protests for the lives of Black people to matter – it feels that it is time for there to be a Black woman on the supreme court, because of the moment that we are in right now,” said McDonald, the Utah activist.Davis said it was “imperative” the country make strides toward racial justice after the invasion of the Capitol in January by white supremacists intent on overturning the 2020 presidential election, goaded on by a former president.“That shows that there are folks who are intentional about not seeing diversity, equity and inclusion thrive,” Davis said. “Now is the time for us as a country to recognize that until we value the voices of everyone, including Black women, we are silencing a very important part of the fabric of America.”‘A significant pool’The percentage of Black women who are federal judges – a common stepping-stone to a high court nomination – is extraordinarily small.According to the federal judicial center, the US circuit courts count only five African American women among sitting judges out of 179. There are 42 African American women judges at the district court level, out of 677.Those numbers are partly owing to Republican obstruction of Black women nominated by Barack Obama, including former seventh circuit nominee Myra Selby. She was denied a hearing in the Senate for the entirety of 2016 – a year later Republicans filled the seat with Donald Trump’s nominee: Amy Coney Barrett.“There is a significant pool of lawyers, law professors, public officials who would be viable nominees for the federal courts,” said Brown-Nagin. “The problem is not the pool.”Last month, Brown-Nagin co-signed a letter to the Senate judiciary committee supporting the nomination of district court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the court of appeals for the DC district, sometimes informally referred to as the second-highest court in the land.“Her resumé virtually screams that she is an ideal nominee for an appellate court or even the supreme court, and that is because she has the combination of educational and professional experience on the federal courts that feasibly fits the mold of typical supreme court nominees,” Brown-Nagin said.“I would say it goes beyond what we’ve seen, frankly, in recent nominees to the court.”Jealous, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said he would like to see a nominee “who cut their teeth defending the people, not corporations”.“I would like to see someone like Sherrilyn Ifill or Lia Epperson – a woman who comes out of Thurgood Marshall’s old law firm, the NAACP legal defense fund, with a courageous commitment to defending the rights of all Americans,” he said.McDonald said having a Black woman on the supreme court would mean American history had “come full circle”.“I feel in my heart that it’s time,” she said. “Everything takes its time. And everything happens at its time. I was raised in a church, so I’m just going to say it like that.” More

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      in US Politics

      Supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett reportedly signs $2m book deal

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      The former attorney general William Barr and supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett have reportedly signed book deals – with Barrett paid a reported $2m for a volume on how judges should not bring their personal feelings into the way they rule.Barrett was appointed to the court in a hurried, politicized and bitter process last year, after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of progressive values.Barrett is a strict Catholic and her presence on the 6-3 conservative court has given rightwing campaigners hope it will soon strike down Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which established the right to abortion.An unnamed source who spoke to Politico said Barrett’s advance was “eye-raising”. A spokesperson for the court did not comment.Barr, who was also attorney general under George HW Bush, is also a strict Catholic conservative. Politico reported that he had begun work on his memoir about working for Donald Trump.Legal analysts decried Barr’s actions in service of the 45th president, including a highly selective handling of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report about Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow and support for Trump’s authoritarian impulses in response to protests for racial justice last summer.Barr resigned in December, over the president’s lies about voter fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden.One legal professional who clashed publicly with Barr and Trump, former New York prosecutor Geoffrey Berman, is reported to have sold a book for “a lot of money”.A source told Politico Berman’s book would be “part Paul Giamatti and Billions” – a reference to a hit TV series about corporate crime in New York – “and then sort of the Trump show in the southern district [of New York]”.Books about Trump’s time in power have proved lucrative, ever since in January 2018 the Guardian broke news of Fire and Fury, the first of two White House tell-alls by the reporter Michael Wolff.The Russia investigation has been retold in print by members of the special counsel’s team including Andrew Weissmann and Peter Strzok.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is reportedly working on a book and former vice-president Mike Pence has signed a deal for two volumes. But Politico said a number of former Trump aides are struggling to find buyers.Peter Navarro, formerly a senior adviser to Trump on economics and trade, told the website: “The reports of my publishing death are greatly exaggerated. I have a major publishing agreement with an attractive advance and my book will be out shortly after Labor Day.”It was not immediately clear if Navarro would again co-operate with Ron Vara, an anti-China policy hand he has quoted liberally in previous books but who turned out both not to exist and to have for his name an anagram of “Navarro”. More

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      in Elections

      Far-right Oath Keepers member is first suspect to plead guilty in US Capitol riot

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      A member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group and heavy metal guitarist has become the first defendant to plead guilty to federal charges in connection with the insurrection at the US Capitol.Jon Ryan Schaffer, the frontman of the band Iced Earth, has agreed on Friday to cooperate with investigators in hopes of getting a lighter sentence, and the Justice Department will consider putting Schaffer in the federal witness security program, a US district judge said. This signals that federal prosecutors see him as a valuable cooperator as they continue to investigate militia groups and other extremists involved in the insurrection on 6 January as Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden’s electoral win.Schaffer, a supporter of Donald Trump, was accused of storming the Capitol and spraying police officers with bear spray. He pleaded guilty in a deal with prosecutors in federal court in Washington to two counts: obstruction of an official proceeding, and entering and remaining in a restricted building with a dangerous or deadly weapon.An email seeking comment was sent to an attorney for Schaffer.Schaffer, of Columbus, Indiana, was wearing a tactical vest and baseball hat that read Oath Keepers Lifetime Member on 6 January and acknowledged in his plea agreement that he is a “founding lifetime member” of the extremist group, prosecutors said.The 53-year-old was not charged in the case involving Oath Keepers members and associates, who are accused of conspiring with one another to block the certification of the vote. The case is the largest and most serious brought by prosecutors so far in the attack.Authorities say those defendants came to Washington ready for violence and intent on stopping the certification. Many came dressed for battle in tactical vests and helmets and some discussed stationing a “quick reaction force” outside the city in the event they needed weapons, prosecutors have said.In his deal with prosecutors, Schaffer admitted to being one of the first people to force their way into the Capitol after the mob broke open a set of doors guarded by Capitol police. Schaffer was sprayed in the face with a chemical irritant that overwhelmed officers deployed and left the Capitol while holding bear spray, authorities said.Schaffer has voiced various conspiracy theories, once telling a German news station that a shadowy criminal enterprise is trying to run the world under a communist agenda and that he and others are prepared to fight, with violence.In court documents, the FBI said Schaffer “has long held far-right extremist views” and that he had previously “referred to the federal government as a ‘criminal enterprise’”.He turned himself in to the FBI a few weeks after the riot, after his photograph was featured on an FBI poster seeking the public’s help in identifying rioters.More than 370 people are facing federal charges in the deadly insurrection. More

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      Democrats plan to unveil legislation to expand the US supreme court by four seats

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterDemocrats are planning to introduce a bill to expand the supreme court – proposing to add four justices to the US’s highest court.Senator Ed Markey, and representatives Jerrold Nadler, Hank Johnson and Mondaire Jones plan to present their legislation Thursday at a news conference. The measure would expand the number of justices from nine to 13, according to Reuters, which reviewed a copy of the bill in advance of it being released publicly. Although Joe Biden announced a commission to study supreme court expansion and reform, the politically incendiary question of changing the court is unlikely to be approved.Progressives have been pushing to expand the supreme court, after Donald Trump’s three appointees tilted the judicial body sharply to the right. One of the positions that Trump filled was a seat that Republicans had blocked his predecessor, Barack Obama, from filling in 2016 – arguing that the winner of that year’s election should choose whom to nominate for the vacant. But last year, Republicans reversed course – rushing to approve ultra-conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett weeks before the 2020 election.Discussions over reforming the court have taken on new urgency in recent months as the court is poised to address key questions on voting rights, reproductive rights and environmental protections.Who agrees that we should expand the Supreme Court?— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) April 15, 2021
      Republicans and many moderate Democrats have opposed the idea of expanding the court, or what they sometimes call “court packing”.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said the idea of expanding the court was “a direct assault on our nation’s independent judiciary and yet another sign of the Far Left’s influence over the Biden administration”.Biden has not taken a clear position on expansion. In the past, he has said he’s “not a fan” of the idea.Last week, he created a bipartisan, 36-member commission aimed at studying the history of the court and analyzing the potential consequences to altering its size. The commission is lead by Bob Bauer, the former White House counsel for Obama, and Cristina Rodriguez, a Yale Law School professor who served as deputy assistant attorney general in Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel. But it is unclear what the impact for the commission would be – as it is not required to produce definitive recommendations. More

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      in US Politics

      The Agenda review: why Biden must expand the supreme court – fast

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      If Congress follows Joe Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief bill with an even more ambitious infrastructure bill, the new president could quickly claim the mantle of most transformative president since Franklin D Roosevelt.But this short, powerful new book by the legal journalist Ian Millhiser pinpoints the gigantic threat that could thwart most of the progress embodied in those two pieces of landmark legislation: the new 6-3 conservative majority on the supreme court.Writing clearly and succinctly, Millhiser dissects many of the worst opinions the modern court has rendered about voting rights, administrative law, religion and forced arbitration. After reading his cogent arguments, it becomes perfectly obvious why he thinks it’s necessary to end “with a note of alarm”.The extreme conservatives now steering the highest court may pose the single greatest “existential threat to the Democratic party’s national ambitions – and, more importantly, to liberal democracy in the United States … a Republican supreme court will fundamentally alter the structure of the American system of government” and “is likely to build a nation where … only conservatives have the opportunity to govern”.Trump’s greatest (and worst) achievement was the appointment of 234 federal judges, including three on the supreme courtHow radical are these justices? When the American Bar Association polled experts, 85% of them predicted all or most of the Affordable Care Act would be upheld. Then four supreme court justices voted to repeal it in its entirety. Clarence Thomas has suggested his predecessors were absolutely right to strike down child labor laws more than a century ago. The conservative justices on the current court rarely side with their liberal colleagues in 5-4 decisions – Samuel Alito has never done so. Chief Justice John Roberts dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and many observers think he is likely to join his newest colleague, Amy Coney Barrett, in a ruling this term that could complete the evisceration of the landmark civil rights legislation.Of course, most of the damage to voting rights has been done – and scores of state legislatures are poised to follow the loathsome example of Georgia by doing everything they can to make minority voting every more difficult than it already is.Millhiser does an especially good job of explaining the catastrophic effect of Roberts’ decision to no longer allow the justice department to require local jurisdictions to submit proposed voting rights law changes before they go into effect.This, he writes, gave state lawmakers “a profound incentive to enact gerrymanders and other forms of voter suppression even if those laws will ultimately be invalidated by a court order”, because “if the state gets to run just one rigged election under the invalid law”, it will already have advanced the racist goals of the law’s authors.Millhiser’s book is bulging with examples that prove that the same Republican justices who proclaim the need to rein in the executive branch whenever there is a Democrat in the White House have no trouble at all ignoring their imaginary “judicial philosophies” – as soon, say, as a Republican such as Donald Trump asserts a unilateral right to ban Muslims from entering the US.Trump’s greatest (and worst) achievement was the appointment of 234 federal judges, including three for the supreme court and 54 for the courts of appeals. This means there is only one Biden administration initiative which is potentially even more important than the Covid and infrastructure bills.It is the newly appointed commission charged with carrying out Biden’s campaign promise to investigate whether or not membership of the supreme court should be expanded – something that can be accomplished by a simple act of Congress.It’s no coincidence that Millhiser started making smart arguments to expand the court two years ago.In the words of Aaron Belkin, whose advocacy group Take Back the Court pushed for the rapid creation of the new commission, the current court “is a danger to the health and wellbeing of the nation and even to democracy itself”.“This White House judicial reform commission has a historic opportunity to both explain the gravity of the threat and to help contain it,” Belkin told USA Today.This great short book makes it clear that the breadth of the new commission’s ambitions and the success of the Biden administration in carrying them out will be more important to our nation’s future than everything else the president and Congress accomplish. More