Pete Buttigieg

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      Pete Buttigieg says he feels 'eyes of history' on him as first LGBTQ+ cabinet pick – video

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      Pete Buttigieg thanked Joe Biden as he was formally announced as his nominee for transportation secretary. Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana and Democratic presidential candidate, will be the first openly LGBTQ+ cabinet member in American history to be confirmed into post by the Senate, assuming he wins confirmation.
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      Biden taps Pete Buttigieg for transportation post and Jennifer Granholm for energy More

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      Biden taps Pete Buttigieg for transportation post and Jennifer Granholm for energy

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      Joe Biden has picked Pete Buttigieg, his former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, to be his transportation secretary, in a move which would make the former South Bend mayor first openly gay person to be confirmed by the Senate to a cabinet post.The nomination came as more picks for senior positions in Biden’s incoming administration emerged on Tuesday, including Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan, to run the energy department.Buttigieg confirmed he had been tapped as transportation secretary in a tweet on Tuesday evening, saying he was “honored”.This is a moment of tremendous opportunity—to create jobs, meet the climate challenge, and enhance equity for all.I’m honored that the President-elect has asked me to serve our nation as Secretary of Transportation.— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) December 16, 2020
      Biden said in a statement that Buttigieg was a “patriot and a problem-solver who speaks to the best of who we are as a nation”.“I am nominating him for secretary of transportation because this position stands at the nexus of so many of the interlocking challenges and opportunities ahead of us,” Biden said, “Jobs, infrastructure, equity, and climate all come together at the DOT, the site of some of our most ambitious plans to build back better.”Biden’s decisions comes as he rounds out his cabinet of top officials to run federal agencies, having already selected former Obama adviser Tony Blinken as his secretary of state, retired Army Gen Lloyd Austin as his secretary of defense and former Fed chair Janet Yellen as his treasury secretary. He’s also picked former agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack to reprise that role in the Biden administration, and Ohio representative Marcia Fudge to serve as housing secretary.Buttigieg is one of the few white men Biden has picked to serve as a cabinet secretary. Granholm’s selection as energy secretary was widely reported on Tuesday and confirmed to the Associated Press by four people familiar with the plans, although Granholm has yet to comment publicly.Granholm served two terms as Michigan’s governor and defeated the husband of the US education secretary, Betsy DeVos, to win her second term. In November, she penned an op-ed for the Detroit News calling for Michigan’s auto industry to invest in a low-carbon economy, stating that “the time for a low-carbon recovery is now”.“She’s really a student of the [energy] transition,” Skip Pruss, who directed the Michigan department of energy, labor, and economic growth under Granholm, told Politico. “If you were to ask me what was a limitation in Michigan, I would say that she was slightly ahead of her time.”Buttigieg, 38, ran an upstart presidential campaign and proved to be a competitive candidate with a knack for building a notable warchest. After he dropped out of the Democratic primary for president, he quickly endorsed Biden.Buttigieg’s name had floated around lists for multiple cabinet positions. He was often mentioned as a possible candidate for ambassador to the United Nations, a position that some of his supporters noted could help improve his international relations credentials and give him an opening to New York donors. But Buttigieg was passed up for Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a veteran American diplomat.His name had been mentioned for other positions including secretary of Veterans Affairs. But Buttigieg, a navy veteran, was not interested in that job, according to multiple Democratic supporters. Buttigieg’s team has denied any report or suggestion that he turned down an offer to run that department. He had also been mentioned as a possible secretary of commerce.Throughout his presidential campaign, Buttigieg struggled to get any traction among African American voters. He will probably face similar questions on how his tenure as mayor of South Bend affected African Americans. Still, as transportation secretary Buttigieg will be involved in a part of the Biden administration that affects African Americans across the country.Buttigieg’s appointment was met with praise by some high-profile Democrats.“As a former mayor, he knows the importance of investing in safer, more efficient interstate roads and bridges, and in the connections provided by a secure rail network,” New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, said in a statement. “President-elect Biden has chosen the right person to lead on delivering the promise of clean energy and electric vehicles, on creating new union jobs, and on investments in environmental justice – all of which are inextricably intertwined within our transportation infrastructure.”Biden’s selection of Buttigieg for transportation secretary drew praise from LGBTQ rights groups, with one calling it “a new milestone in a decades-long effort” to have LGBTQ representation in the US government.“Its impact will reverberate well-beyond the department he will lead,” added Annise Parker, president and CEO of the LGBTQ Victory Institute.The South Bend chapter of Black Lives Matter, however, denounced Buttigieg‘s impending nomination. The group had made their displeasure of Buttigieg known during his presidential campaign, following the 2019 South Bend shooting of a Black man by a white police officer.“We saw Black communities have their houses torn down by his administration,” said Jorden Giger, BLM’s South Bend leader, in a statement, referring to Buttigieg‘s effort to tear down substandard housing. “We saw the machinery of his police turned against Black people.”Biden also plans to tap the former Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy to become his domestic climate czar, spearheading Biden’s ambitions for a massive, coordinated domestic campaign to slow climate change. Her counterpart in climate efforts will be the former secretary of state John Kerry, earlier named by Biden as his climate envoy for national security issues.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Buttigieg to Fox News Sunday: Barrett nomination puts my marriage in danger

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      Pete Buttigieg, a former challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination and a member of Joe Biden’s transition team, believes his own marriage is under threat from Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Buttigieg, who married his husband Chasten in 2018, indicated that the court’s 2015 decision that made same-sex marriage legal was among a number of rulings a strong conservative majority could look to overturn.Republicans are seeking to seat Barrett before the 3 November general election. The Senate judiciary committee will vote this week on forwarding the nomination to a full floor vote.“Right now as we speak the pre-existing condition [healthcare] coverage of millions of Americans might depend on what is about to happen in the Senate with regard to this justice,” Buttigieg said.“My marriage might depend on what is about to happen in the Senate with regard to this justice. So many issues are on the line.”The right to same-sex marriage were enshrined in Obergefell v Hodges, the culmination of a years-long fight incorporating challenges from several states and decided by the landmark 5-4 ruling.Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said Republicans pushing through Barrett’s nomination days before the election, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, sent the wrong message to voters.“It’s not in the spirit of our constitution, or our legal system, or political system for them to do this,” he said. “Most Americans believe that the American people ought to have a say. We’re not talking about an election that’s coming up, we’re in the middle of an election, millions of Americans are voting and want their voice to be heard.”He added: “There’s an enormous amount of frustration that this Senate can’t even bring itself, with Mitch McConnell, to vote through a Covid relief package. People are suffering, people are hurting, there’s no clear end in sight.“There’s been a bill we brought to them months ago coming out of the house, they won’t touch it, they won’t do anything but suddenly they have time to rush through a nomination that the American people don’t want.“Whatever specific word you use for it, wrong is the word I would use.”Buttigieg defended himself against a claim from Wallace that he had talked about expanding the court to 15 justices, so-called court packing.“My views haven’t changed,” he said. “Bipartisan reform with the purpose of reducing the politicisation of the supreme court is a really promising idea. Let’s also be clear that a president can’t just snap their fingers and do it.” More

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      'Slayer Pete': Buttigieg emerges as Biden's unlikely Fox News fighter

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      At home, he is the unassuming former mayor of a small town in Indiana, where he lives happily with his husband, a junior high school teacher, and their two lazy dogs.But on cable TV, where he has emerged in the homestretch of the presidential campaign as a likable and lethal surrogate for Democrat Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg is something else: “Slayer Pete”.Conferred on Buttigieg by the Los Angeles Times columnist Mary McNamara, the nickname captures the efficacy with which Buttigieg has turned his rhetorical chops to the task of obliterating apologists for Donald Trump.Buttigieg’s biggest scores have come on Fox News, an arena not many Democrats deign to enter, unwilling or unable to argue against an alternative reality where Covid-19 is a hoax, Hillary Clinton is public enemy No 1 and Trump is infallible.But if the echo-chamber quality of most Fox broadcasts has led the hosts into a sense of complacency when challenging their guests, they have recently been fed rude surprises – in the nicest possible way – by the rapier-tongued “mayor Pete” (his other nickname).Before the vice-presidential debate, Buttigieg, whose own presidential bid came to an end in March, was asked on Fox News why Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, had modified her stance on healthcare reform after joining the presidential ticket.“Well, there’s a classic parlor game of trying to find a little bit of daylight between running mates,” Buttigieg said. “And if people want to play that game, we could look into why an evangelical Christian like Mike Pence wants to be on a ticket with the president caught with a porn star, or how he feels about the immigration policy that he called ‘unconstitutional’ before he decided to team up with Donald Trump.”Buttigieg is not universally loved. His record on policing and racial justice as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has been heavily criticized, and during the Democratic primary he had a long-running feud with Senator Amy Klobuchar, who in one debate quipped: “I wish everyone was as perfect as you, Pete.”But with the Democrats having mended their differences and the battle lines now clearly drawn in an election with epic stakes, Biden supporters of every persuasion might feel free to sit back and enjoy one thing Buttigieg does seem practically perfect at: dissecting Trump sycophants with a smile.When Fox host Steve Doocy tried to hit Biden for declining to debate Trump in person in the aftermath of Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, Buttigieg deftly turned the tables.“It’s too bad,” he said. “I don’t know why the president’s afraid to debate. All of us have had to get used to a virtual format. Parents are having to deal with e-learning, which is not what we’re used to. We’re having to take meetings over Zoom. It’s not something I think most of us enjoy, but it’s a safety measure.“I think part of why the US is badly behind the rest of the developed world on dealing with the pandemic is because every time there’s been a choice between doing something in a way that’s more safe or less safe, this president seems to push for less safe.”The range of Buttigieg’s analytical intelligence was on display in an interview in a friendlier forum, on MSNBC, when he was asked about a call by supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett for rulings to be “fairly reasoned and grounded in the law”.“This is what nominees do,” Buttigieg said. “They write the most seemingly unobjectionable, dry stuff. But really what I see in there is a pathway to judicial activism cloaked in judicial humility.”“At the end of the day, rights in this country have been expanded because courts have understood what the true meaning of the letter of the law and the spirit of the constitution is.“And that is not about time-traveling yourself back to the 18th century and subjecting yourself to the same prejudices and limitations as the people who write these words.“The constitution is a living document because the English language is a living language. And you need to have some readiness to understand that in order to serve on the court in a way that will actually make life better.”Buttigieg then quoted Thomas Jefferson, smiled, and finished with a dagger: “Even the founders that these kind of dead-hand originalists claim fidelity to understood better than their ideological descendants, today’s judicial so-called conservatives, the importance of keeping with the times.” More

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      'Vote like your life depends on it': Pete Buttigieg's message to LGBTQ youth

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      For Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus, the threat of a second Trump term is both political and deeply personal.Donald Trump has claimed to be a staunch supporter of LGBTQ rights but he has sought to undermine them through the courts. His vice-president, Mike Pence, has long opposed same-sex marriage.“When you see your own rights come up for debate, when you know something as intimate and central to your life as the existence of your family is something that is not supported by your president, and certainly your vice-president, it’s painful,” Buttigieg says by phone from Traverse City, Michigan, where his husband Chasten grew up.“It creates a sense of urgency that I hope will motivate many people – including a lot of LGBTQ younger people who maybe weren’t deciding so much how to vote as they were whether to vote – to see now is the time to vote like your life depends on it.”Buttigieg, 38 and the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was a breakout star of presidential politics in that seemingly distant pre-pandemic age that was in fact February. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford and war veteran in Afghanistan, he beat senators and a former vice-president to make history by narrowly winning the Iowa caucuses.I’m mindful every day that my marriage exists by the grace of one vote on our supreme courtBut after a crushing defeat in South Carolina, Buttigieg quit the race on 1 March, joining other moderates in throwing his weight behind Joe Biden. He is now launching his own podcast and prosecuting the case against Trump in the media – including on LGBTQ rights.In June, the Republican party issued a press release that claimed “President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to protect the LGBTQ community”. Among its examples to support this were the selection of Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence, making him the first openly gay person to hold a cabinet-level position. Grenell has called Trump the “most pro-gay president in American history”.But LGBTQ rights activists are not buying it, pointing out that Trump banned transgender people from the military and reversed many of their legal protections. He also opposes the Equality Act, that would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in housing, the workplace and other settings, and his agencies are trying to give adoption and foster care agencies the right to discriminate against same-sex couples.The power of Washington over individual lives was made viscerally clear to Buttigieg by the 2015 supreme court ruling that legalised same-sex marriage nationwide. Three years later he married Chasten, a junior high school teacher who became a popular figure on the campaign trail.Buttigieg says: “I’m mindful every day that my marriage exists by the grace of one vote on our supreme court and we’ve seen the kind of extreme appointees that have been placed on the bench by this administration.“We’ve seen how, despite sometimes paying lip service to the community, [Trump has] rarely missed an opportunity to attack the community, especially trans people, whether we’re talking about the ban on military service or issues around healthcare. But even for same-sex international adoption, this administration has taken us in the wrong direction and four more years would be a tremendous setback.“Also around the world, we’re seeing, for example in eastern Europe, really disturbing setbacks in LGBTQ rights and equality without a strong United States leading the way in human rights, which requires leadership and credibility and also that we’re doing the right thing here at home. Without that, I think that people around the world are less safe.”In Poland, for example, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the governing party, has said homosexuality represents a “threat to Polish identity”. When six towns declared themselves “LGBT ideology-free zones”, the European Union froze funding. But the US has been silent. Hosting Polish president Andrzej Duda at the White House in June, Trump said: “I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to Poland than we are right now.” More

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      Buttigieg, the first openly gay presidential candidate, was hated by the left. Why? | Aaron Hicklin

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      For those who recall when just entering a gay bar was dangerous, seeing a gay presidential candidate get so far while being mercilessly pilloried was a disorienting experience The day after Pete Buttigieg won Iowa, the writer Mark Harris, who is married to playwright Tony Kushner, tweeted, “Even if you support someone else, as I […] More

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      Biden wins backing of former rivals Klobuchar and O’Rourke at Dallas rally

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      Fellow moderates join Buttigieg in endorsing ex-vice-president before Super Tuesday in bid to unify against Sanders With just hours to go before Super Tuesday, the moderate wing of the Democratic party attempted to unite as a group of former candidates flocked to Texas and endorsed Joe Biden over his main rival, the progressive frontrunner Bernie […] More