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      Muscle memory and a fight to inspire: on the campaign trail with Biden

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      “The fact is that this election, a lot is at stake,” said Joe Biden, collar unbuttoned, mic in hand, watched by about 50 guests at tables dotted with small US flags at Mary Mac’s Tea Room in downtown Atlanta. “It’s not about me. It’s about the alternative as well.”The off-the-cuff remark was telling. After more than half a century in national politics, Joe Biden’s final campaign is defined not by his record but his opponent: Donald Trump. The outcome of November’s presidential election will decide whether he is remembered by history as the man who saved democracy twice – or as a mere interregnum in the onward march of Trumpism.The Guardian spent a weekend with Biden on the campaign trail, shuttling from swing state to swing state on Air Force One and in presidential motorcades, from small gatherings of supporters to flashy receptions for big-money donors. It observed a candidate struggling to articulate an inspiring vision for a second term and recapture the kind of enthusiasm that Barack Obama once generated, but galvanised by the dire threat that Trump poses to his legacy.Biden understands that his long and storied career could yet end in failure. Surveys suggest that he is less popular than other members of his own party. Last week a swing-state opinion poll from the New York Times and Siena College found a generic Democratic Senate candidate led a generic Republican by five points, where Biden trailed Trump by six points.Specifically, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin were doing 14, 11, eight and seven points better than Biden in their respective states. Other polls have come up with similar findings that may tempt Democratic candidates to keep the president at arm’s length. Senator Jon Tester of Montana has already run an ad that says he “fought to stop President Biden from letting migrants stay in America instead of remain in Mexico”.A key reason for Biden’s weakness this time could be a lack of enthusiasm among African American voters, a demographic that powered Biden to the White House in 2020. A Pew Research report this week showed Biden leading Trump by 77% to 18% among Black voters – a shift from 2020 when Biden had 92% compared with Trump’s 8%. Among younger Black voters, Trump’s support crept up to 29%.Last weekend Biden flew on Air Force One to Georgia and Michigan, two critical battleground states, embracing a gruelling schedule that belied concerns about his 81 years. The first campaign stop was Mary Mac’s Tea Room in Atlanta, a historic Black-owned small business, where Biden-Harris campaign signs were plastered on a door.View image in fullscreenBiden’s entrance was greeted with applause and cheers that might be described as moderate rather than raucous. Some supporters and volunteers hugged him as he worked the room and music continued to boom from loudspeakers.He then took a handheld mic and spoke for five minutes without notes, like an ageing tennis player hitting shots from memory. “Look, here’s the deal,” he assured his audience. “You hear about how, you know, we’re behind in the polls. Well, so far, the polls haven’t been right once.”He said of Trump: “I think it’s fair to say – I won’t use the exact phrase that I’d use if I was still playing ball, but my opponent is not a good loser. But he is a loser.” The was an explosion of clapping and laughter. Biden himself chuckled. “Oh, I don’t want to get started. I’m going to get in trouble.”Turning serious, the president warned: “Everything you let me do, everything you helped me do, everything we’ve done, they want to undo … Our democracy is really on the line.”The speech was short on second-term promises but long on warnings about Trump, a familiar pattern. His next event was a significant shift up the wealth ladder: the Arthur M Blank Family office, home to a community-building foundation in a faux-Italian building with Roman-style mosaics.Biden delivered a speech in a room with an ornate ceiling – 15 illuminated recess panels and five chandeliers – and a floor of polished wood. Behind the lectern was a tapestry depicting birds in a bucolic setting. At either end of the room gold-framed mirrors hung above grand fireplaces. About a hundred well-heeled guests had gathered.When the president appeared, people stood, applauded, whooped and took photos. One woman shouted: “We love you, Joe!” This time he spoke for 18 minutes, beginning with relaxed humour: “Who’s that good-looking guy on the end there? How old are you?” The boy replied: “Thirteen, sir.” Biden said: “Thirteen. You got to remember me when you’re president, OK?”He again questioned the validity of polls while insisting that he was running strongest among likely voters and outperforming Trump in primary elections. Biden claimed that his team was building the strongest ground campaign in the history of the US, opening more than 150 field offices compared with Trump’s zero.The message of his campaign, he went on, was that the threat Trump poses is greater in a second term than it was in the first term. “When he lost in 2020, something snapped in Trump. I’m not being facetious; I’m being serious. He just can’t accept the fact he lost, and he lost it.” He accused his opponent of “running for revenge”.Biden listed some of his own accomplishments as president: 15m new jobs, an expansion of health insurance, lower prescription drug costs, climate action and investment in science and technology innovation. He promised that, if Democrats control Congress, he will restore the constitutional right to abortion. The room burst into applause. It seemed sure that dollars would follow.The president spent the night an upscale hotel in a tony neighbourhood then, the following morning, delivered a commencement address at Morehouse College, an all-male historically Black college. Democratic fears that he would be heckled and disrupted by protesters against the war in Gaza were not realised. But nor did Biden get the kind of adulatory reception that Obama might once have done.View image in fullscreenOn the college lawn, framed by redbrick buildings and trees, there was clapping and cheering from Morehouse alumni; less so from young graduates. Perhaps this was the worst fate of all: apathy. Jeremy Mensah, a 2024 graduate who voted for Biden in 2020 but is less sure this time, told the Politico website: “[Biden’s] speech didn’t move me at all. It was very much so a campaign speech. Like, ‘Oh I did this for the Black community.’ I didn’t feel connected to it.”Trump is leading Biden by 10 points in Georgia, according to last week’s New York Times/Siena College poll. Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, said: “Black voters make up more than half of Democratic voters in Georgia and so if you have anemic turnout then it’s going to be difficult to stitch together a multi-racial coalition that is large enough to beat Republicans in the state.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That’s the challenge. Biden can’t afford to lose any constituency. If Black women and Black men don’t turn out at rates that they could possibly turn out to vote in the election then that will cause him to lose.”The president then headed to Detroit, Michigan, where the sun was bright and hot despite the swing state’s proximity to Canada. His motorcade swept from the airport past the Uniroyal Giant Tire, the world’s biggest tire model at 80ft and 12 tons, and into Detroit’s east side, one of the oldest parts of the city, dotted with both fading paint and glimmers of urban renewal.Biden was greeted by the Crawford family, including the former professional basketball players Joe and Jordan Crawford, who opened Cred Cafe as a family business that doubles as a coffee shop by day and a speakeasy by night. The room had bare brick walls, exposed silver air ducts and a ceiling made of rough wooden panels. Audio cassettes, CDs, VHS videos, XBox games, a guitar and a dartboard adorned the walls.Music played as Biden worked the room, meeting and greeting about 50 guests. He took a handheld mic and ad-libbed for four minutes. “We got three reverends back there,” he said. “I saw them at the airport. In addition to asking them to pray like hell for me, I asked their advice on a bunch of things.”View image in fullscreenBiden nodded to the African American vote by talking about his childhood in racially segregated Delaware. “Dr King was one of my heroes, like many of my generation.” The audience listened in polite silence, punctuated by the wailing of a baby. Biden recounted how he left law school, got a job with “fancy law firm”, then quit and became a public defender. “And one thing led to another, here I am.”The final stop was a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) dinner at the cavernous Huntington Place Convention Center in Detroit, with bad acoustics and an estimated 5,000 guests. Some chanted, “Four more years! Four more years!” as the president took the stage. He declared: “I don’t feel tired. I feel inspired.”Biden said the NAACP was the first organisation he ever joined and he got involved in civil rights when he 15. He reeled off a list of accomplishments: cheques that reduced Black child poverty, reconnecting Black neighbourhoods cut off by old highways; removing lead pipes; investing a record $16bn in historically Black colleges and universities. Biden said Black unemployment was at a historic low and Black small businesses were starting up at the fastest rate in 30 years.He also asserted that the racial wealth gap was its lowest level in 20 years. This claim is open to dispute. According to data from the Federal Reserve’s survey of consumer finances, the wealth disparity between Black and white families has persistently grown since 2010. It increased by $49,950 during the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in a difference of $240,120 between the median white household and the median Black one.View image in fullscreenHe accused Trump and his allies of trying to erase Black history. “Let me ask you, what do you think he would’ve done on January the 6th if Black Americans had stormed the Capitol?” The question struck a chord with this audience, prompting gasps and murmurs. “No, I’m serious. What do you think? I can only imagine.”But Biden’s speech was littered with unforced errors. He recalled that as vice-president he tried to fix Detroit during the “pandemic” when he meant recession; he said he was humbled to receive an “organisation” when he meant award; he said the Affordable Care Act saves families “$8,000” a year in premiums when he meant $800; he referred to January 6 “irrectionists” when he meant insurrectionists; he said Trump had predicted “bloodshed” if he loses in November when he meant “bloodbath”.Still, the audience applauded warmly and soon he was back on Air Force One to Philadelphia, then flying by helicopter to Delaware, where he finally reached home at 11pm. There would be more flying and campaigning in the week to come. Joe Biden is an old political warhorse making one last big push, desperate to avoid the fate of one-term presidents such as Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush, who found the magic gone and incumbency a burden.It might not be enough.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “He’s the most opaque presidential candidate in years: you might go back to George HW Bush, who blended into the background. Biden just doesn’t have magnetism. He’s charisma-challenged. For voters, you need to energise and rally and mobilise.“Even the orchestrated events with Biden mixing it up with the ordinary person, it’s remarkable how blasé they are. Bill Clinton going into a bar; Trump stopping by the Cuban restaurant in Miami – these are exciting moments for the supporters of those candidates. But the speech that Biden gave at Morehouse, there’s just utter lack of excitement, engagement. There’s a real powerful disconnect between Biden and the voters that he needs to turn out.” More

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      Biden campaign releases De Niro-voiced video ad warning Trump has ‘snapped’

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      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has released a high-profile new video ad they are calling Snapped, which attacks Donald Trump as a candidate who will stop at nothing to grab power again.The aggressive, 30-second spot is voiced by an old Hollywood foe of the former president, the actor Robert De Niro, and will be distributed nationally.Against a backdrop of dramatic orchestral music and news images from Trump’s presidency, the De Niro voiceover begins: “From midnight tweets, to drinking bleach, to teargassing citizens and staging a photo-op, we knew Trump was out of control when he was president, and then he lost the 2020 election and snapped.”In relevant photographs, Trump is shown on his phone on Air Force One and at the podium in the White House briefing room in a notorious press conference in 2020 when he suggested that being treated internally with bleach might combat Covid-19. Then he is shown posing with a Bible outside what’s known as the Church of the Presidents, near the White House, after nearby demonstrations against racial injustice and police brutality, following the murder of George Floyd in May, 2020, had been violently cleared by the authorities.Then it goes on to show the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, when extremist supporters of Trump, encouraged by the then president, broke into US congressional chambers to try, ultimately in vain, to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory over him.De Niro continues that Trump was “desperately trying to hold on to power”. Then adds: “Now he’s running again, this time threatening to be a dictator, to terminate the constitution.”Footage of Trump shows him warning there will be a “bloodbath” if he does not win in 2024, and additional images showing a mob carrying pro-Trump and election-denying flags clashing with police.“Trump wants revenge and he’ll stop at nothing to get it,” the voice of De Niro continues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US president then says in his voiceover: “I’m Joe Biden and I approve this message”. The closing image is Biden walking towards a doorway and saluting the troops that guard him. More

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      Congress’s latest ‘antisemitism’ hearing was an ugly attack on Palestinian rights | Moira Donegan

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      If you didn’t know what was really going on at US college campuses, the congressional hearing on Thursday – in which the presidents of Northwestern and Rutger’s and the chancellor of UCLA were called to testify before a Republican-controlled House committee – would do little to inform you.The House committee on education and the workforce has held six – yes, six – public events to draw attention to the supposed crisis on campus in the months since the 7 October attack on Israel. They’ve hauled university presidents to Washington to harangue them, allegedly for not being sufficiently punitive toward pro-Palestinian students and faculty. These hearings have been used to belittle and antagonize university faculty and students and have fed racist and anti-intellectual moral panics that have led to the resignations of several of the university presidents who have been called to testify, notably including Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard.The hearings have aimed to pressure colleges and universities to crack down on a wide variety of politically disfavored speech, particularly pro-Palestinian and anti-war speech, and particularly that of students and faculty of color. In many cases, this pressure seems to have yielded the desired results: at Columbia, Minouche Shafik, the university president, twice ordered the NYPD onto campus to conduct violent mass arrests of anti-genocide student protesters; the first of these raids came the day after Shafik testified before the House committee and disparaged her own students in degrading terms.But on Thursday, at least, the university administrators seemed less nervous, a bit more subdued – even if they were not willing to defend the rights of their anti-war students or correct the Republicans’ lies about them.Michael Schill, president of Northwestern, Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers and Gene Block, chancellor of UCLA, were calm, if occasionally annoyed, as the Republicans on the committee told them they should be “ashamed” for using insufficient violence against protesters, called for the defunding of specific programs and the firing of individual faculty members, demanded that undergraduate students be expelled and compared pro-Palestinian demonstrators with Nazis and the segregationist George Wallace. At one point, a Republican congressman also digressed into a prolonged grievance over the firing of a Northwestern football coach.The Republican outrage at the college administrators is nominally due to what they say is a “scourge of antisemitism” on these campuses. That pretext is supported by the false conflation of anti-Zionism or simple concern for Palestinian life with antisemitic animus – a dangerous and insulting conflation that was made repeatedly and without contradiction throughout the hearing. In reality, the false equivalence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is belied by the reality on the ground, in the campus anti-war encampments that have sprung up across the country and in the burgeoning young Jewish anti-Zionist movement. In the real world, Jewish students are not only safe and welcome in the encampments and in the broader anti-war movement; they are frequently emerging as intellectual and organizing leaders.But this reality was not convenient for the Republicans, who hope to cynically use a fear of antisemitism to provide a shield of moral righteousness to their anti-education, anti-diversity, anti-intellectual and fundamentally racist project. The flimsy pretext of fighting antisemitism was required to provide a thin pretext for an effort that is at its core about rooting out and punishing disfavored ideologies and attempting to eliminate them from the public sphere. To say that this is an insult to the history of antisemitism would be an understatement.The attempt to paint the anti-war movement as violent and malicious veered, at times, into the absurd. In one prolonged exchange, the hearing was shown a viral video, produced by a young Zionist influencer at UCLA. In the video, the man is standing in a path on campus, facing a small group of silent pro-Palestinian protesters wearing keffiyehs. The young man declares that he wants to pass them to go into an academic building. The students are mostly silent; one seems to ask him to use a different entrance. “I want to use THAT door,” the man says, pointing, and looking back at the camera. The protesters are quiet; they do not move. No one is violent, or even particularly agitated. The Republican committee members referred to this video repeatedly and in dramatic terms throughout the hearing, claiming it represented an epidemic of Jewish students being violently refused access to campus facilities.Meanwhile, other events on UCLA’s campus went largely unremarked. For while a pro-Palestinian encampment was present on UCLA’s campus for some days, so were pro-Israel demonstrators, whose much better-funded demonstration featured large groups of Zionist protestors bussed in from off campus, along with a jumbotron that played pro-Israel propaganda at all hours. When they were there, the Zionist group jeered and taunted the anti-genocide protesters, allegedly yelling racial slurs and rape threats and even allegedly releasing rats into the encampment.On the night of 30 April, a large group from the pro-Israel camp, many of them wearing Halloween masks, violently attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment. They brought “knives, bats, wooden planks, pepper spray and bear mace”, according to one witness, and proceeded to beat the anti-genocide protesters, pushing many into the ground using barricades. The police, whom UCLA had summoned to campus to help maintain order, stood by and allowed the attack to continue for hours. They seem to have assessed, correctly, what they were there to protect, and who they weren’t.At the hearing on Thursday, the Republicans went to extensive lengths to criticize universities that have engaged in negotiations with their student protest encampments, calling these talks “capitulation” to “pro-terror” and “pro-Hamas” forces. Since the encampments sprung up at many campuses this spring, not all universities have chosen to disperse their students by having them beaten and arrested; some have engaged in dialogue – with varying degrees of good faith – and attempted to persuade the students to pack up the tents in exchange for material concessions.At Northwestern, the successful negotiations resulted in a pledge from the administration to include funding for five undergraduate students and two faculty members from Palestine to come to campus, as part of the university’s broader international programming. This promise to include Palestinian scholars in campus life seemed to particularly offend the Republicans, who demanded to know why Jewish affinity groups had not been consulted before the commitment was made.This is not typical of such university funding decisions: Why would a Russian-speakers’ club, say, be consulted before a scholarship was offered to a Ukrainian student? But the message from the outraged Republicans was clear: the inclusion of Palestinians in university life, they feel, should be subject to a Jewish person’s veto.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      House Republicans assail university head for negotiated end to Gaza protest

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      Members of a Republican-led congressional committee confronted another set of university heads on Thursday over their approach to pro-Palestinian protests in the latest hearings on Capitol Hill on a reported upsurge of campus antisemitism.Republicans on the House of Representatives’ education and workforce committee repeatedly clashed fiercely with Michael Schill, president of Northwestern University in Illinois, over his decision to negotiate an end to a tented protest community rather than call in police, as has happened on other campuses.In a sometimes fiery three-hour session, Schill – who opened his testimony by declaring that he was the Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors – became the lightning rod in a hearing also featuring the chiefs of Rutgers University and the University of California, Los Angeles.All three institutions witnessed the appearance of encampments in April similar to one set up on the grounds of Columbia University in New York by students protesting Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and related financial ties with their universities.Schill and Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers in New Jersey, drew Republican ire for adopting a softly-softly approach by persuading protesters to dismantle their sites through agreements that some members depicted as appeasement.The UCLA encampment was dismantled by police after it was violently attacked by pro-Israeli counter-protesters on 30 April. Gene Block, that university’s chancellor – although criticised for deploying police too late and failing to act when pro-Palestinian protesters blocked the movement of students they accused of being Zionist, as detailed by the Los Angeles Times – attracted less rough treatment from GOP members.But Block was strongly denounced by Ilhan Omar, the leftwing Democratic representative from Minnesota, who told him that he “should be ashamed” for failing to protect protesters from violent attack.“You should be ashamed for letting a peaceful protest gathering get hijacked by an angry mob,” she said.Thursday’s session was the full committee’s third hearing on a trend of campus protests that have been subject to accusations of antisemitism and intimidation alleged to have arisen after October’s attack by Hamas on Israel, which produced a devastating and ongoing Israeli military retaliation.An initial hearing last December led to the resignation of two university presidents, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard, for giving answers deemed too legalistic.A second hearing last month on developments at Columbia University brought assurances of action from its president, Minouche Shafik, who immediately afterwards called in police to remove an encampment on the main campus lawn. But her actions triggered an upsurge of similar tented protests at campuses across the US that became the partial focus of Thursday’s hearing.The committee’s Republican chair, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, set a confrontational tone by quoting from Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, where a character describes going bankrupt – gradually, then suddenly.“These three little words paved the road that led to today’s hearing,” she said. “Over the course of years – decades, even – universities gradually nurtured a campus culture of radicalism in which antisemitism grew and became tolerated by administrators.“Each of you should be ashamed of your decisions that allowed antisemitic encampments to endanger Jewish students.”Schill, saying that antisemitism and supporting Israel were not “abstract” or “theoretical” for him, admitted that his university’s rules and policies had fallen short and the university had not been ready for the students’ response to the 7 October attack and its aftermath.But he was targeted by Republican members who questioned his compromise with protesters and suggested he had tolerated antisemitism.He showed visible irritation with Elise Stefanik, the representative from New York, after she told him “I’m asking the questions here” and held up a placard emblazoned with an “F” to signify that the Anti-Defamation League had pronounced Northwestern’s policy on antisemitism a failure.Answering Burgess Owens, a Republican representative from Utah, who used another placard designed as a cheque for $600m to depict funding the university receives from Qatar – a Gulf kingdom that also finances Hamas – Schill said: “I’m really offended by you telling me what my views are.”Jim Banks, a GOP representative from Indiana, told Schill that “your performance here has been an embarrassment to your school”, adding that Northwestern University had become “a joke”.Responding to Representative Brandon Williams of New York, all three heads said they had been taken by surprise by the encampments’ appearance and did not know who was behind them. Williams called this an “astonishing admission”.Several Democratic members questioned the hearing’s premise and the sincerity of Republicans in tackling antisemitism, accusing them of silence when it came from their own side.“The first amendment protects both popular and agreeable speech, and speech that people can reasonably disagree with, including sometimes hateful words but again and painting with a broad brush,” said the committee’s ranking Democrat, Bobby Scott of Virginia. “The [Republican] majority has attempted to remove any distinction between hate speech and genuine political protest.”Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon highlighted what she depicted as Republican hypocrisy. She said: “Just a few days ago, the true social account of Donald Trump included an outrageous video with Nazi-like language about a unified Reich. Did any of my colleagues on this committee call that out?” More

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      Senate Republicans block bipartisan border security bill for a second time

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      Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan border security bill for a second time, part of an attempt by Chuck Schumer to flip the script on immigration – a major political liability for Joe Biden and Democrats in this year’s election.The 43-50 vote was far short of the necessary 60 votes needed to advance the legislation. Republicans, who have repeatedly demanded Democrats act on the border, abandoned the compromise proposal at the behest of Donald Trump who saw it was a political “gift” for Biden’s re-election chances.In bringing the proposal to the floor, Democrats hoped the doomed effort would underline their argument that Republicans are not serious about addressing the situation at the US border with Mexico, an issue that polls show is a major concern among voters.“To those who’ve said for years Congress needs to act on the border,” said Schumer, the Senate majority leader, in a floor speech before the vote. “This bipartisan bill is the answer, and it’s time show we’re serious about fixing the problem.”Democrats had spent the days leading up to Thursday vote hammering the message that the president and his party are trying to solve the issue, but have been thwarted by Republicans following Trump’s lead.“Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system,” Biden said in a statement. “If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.”Biden trails Trump in national and battleground-state surveys. Voters trust the former president over Biden to tackle the border issue by a wide margin, according to several recent surveys, with immigration often ranking as a top concern.In February, after months of negotiations, a bipartisan group of senators had unveiled an immigration compromise – legislation Republicans said was necessary to unlock their support for a foreign aid package that included assistance to Ukraine.The legislation, which would have made major changes to immigration law and received endorsements from the National Border Patrol Council and the US Chamber of Commerce, initially appeared to have the support to pass. But then Trump denounced the plan as weak and demanded his allies in the Senate abandon it. They quickly followed his lead.When it came to the floor, the measure failed in a 50-49 vote, far short of the 60 ayes needed to move forward. All but four Republicans opposed it. They were joined by a group of liberal and Latino Democrats who argued that the approach was too punitive and failed to include relief for immigrants who have lived and worked in the US for years.“The Senate border bill once again fails to meet the moment by putting forth enforcement-only policies and failing to include provisions that will keep families together,” the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said in a statement this week, urging a vote against the bill, which none of its members were involved in negotiating. They called on Congress to pass legislation to protect Dreamers, immigrants who were brought to the US as children, and to expand work visas.No Republican voted for the bill this time around. Instead Republicans accused Schumer of holding a “show vote”, aimed at protecting Democrats’ narrow majority ahead of this year’s election.“This is not trying to accomplish something. This is about messaging now,” Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who helped negotiate the border deal, said earlier this week. “This is trying to poke Republicans rather than try to actually solve a problem.”Kyrsten Sinema, an independent from Arizona who negotiated the compromise with Lankford, also opposed Schumer’s move, which she called an act of “political theater”.“To use this failure as a political punching bag only punishes those who were courageous enough to do the hard work in the first place,” she said in a floor speech on Thursday.Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah, both Republican senators, also changed their vote, opposing the measure after supporting it in February. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the lone Republican senator to vote in favor of advancing the bill.But the bill also lost support from Democrats, among them Cory Booker, the senator of New Jersey, and Laphonza Butler of California. The liberal senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Alex Padilla of California again voted against it.In a statement, Booker said he voted for the bill in February in part because it included “critical foreign and humanitarian aid”, which was passed as a standalone package last month.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I remain committed to pursuing commonsense, bipartisan legislation to modernize our immigration system so that it aligns with our most fundamental values,” he said.The White House had lobbied Republicans in advance of the vote. Biden on Monday spoke to the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, urging them to “stop playing politics and act quickly to pass this bipartisan border legislation”, according to a White House summary of the conversations.“You caused this problem,” McConnell said he told Biden during their call, while urging the president to reinstate Trump-era immigration policies. “Why don’t you just allow what the previous administration was doing?” McConnell said he told the president.Since the bill’s failure in February, Biden has taken a series of executive actions to stem the flow of migration and speed up the asylum process, which can take months or even years. But the administration has maintained there are limits to what the president can do unilaterally.“Only Congress can fix our broken immigration system,” the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said in a statement after the vote. “I urge Congress to do so. In the meantime, we will continue to enforce the law with full force with the limited resources we have.”In advance of the vote, Schumer repeatedly acknowledged that he did not expect all 51 members of the Democratic caucus to support it. Johnson had already declared it “dead on arrival”.In a statement, the speaker called the procedural vote an “election year Hail Mary” by Democrats and said the onus was on the president to “use his executive authority to finally secure the border and protect American families”.The measure was designed to clamp down on illegal border crossings, which reached record levels last year, though the overall numbers have dropped in recent months. Among its provisions, the bill proposes provisions that would make it more difficult to seek asylum in the United States, while expanding detention facilities and speeding up the deportation process for those who enter the country unlawfully.It would also institute a new emergency authority that would in effect close the border if the number of migrants encountered by immigration officials averaged more than 4,000 people a day at the border over the course of one week. The authority would be triggered automatically if the average surpassed 5,000 a day or if 8,500 try to enter unlawfully in a single day.Democrats have emphasized the aspects of the bill they say would curtail fentanyl smuggling, which has led to a drug overdose epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of Americans each year. Despite Republican claims, illicit opioids are overwhelmingly smuggled over the border by US citizens, not migrants.The White House spokesman Andrew Bates wrote in a memo released on the eve of the vote: “Congressional Republicans have to choose: will they again decide that politics is more important than stopping fentanyl traffickers and saving the lives of innocent constituents? Joe Biden knows where he stands.” More

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      Louisiana expected to classify abortion pills as controlled and dangerous substances

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      Two abortion-inducing drugs could soon be reclassified as controlled and dangerous substances in Louisiana under a first-of-its-kind bill that received final legislative passage on Thursday and is expected to be signed into law by the governor.Supporters of the reclassification of mifepristone and misoprostol, commonly known as “abortion pills”, say it would protect expectant mothers from coerced abortions. Numerous doctors, meanwhile, have said it will make it harder for them to prescribe the medicines they use for other important reproductive healthcare needs, and could delay treatment.Louisiana currently has a near-total abortion ban in place, applying both to surgical and medical abortions. The GOP-dominated legislature’s push to reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol could possibly open the door for other Republican states with abortion bans that are seeking tighter restrictions on the drugs.Current Louisiana law already requires a prescription for both drugs and makes it a crime to use them to induce an abortion in most cases. The bill would make it harder to obtain the pills by placing them on the list of Schedule IV drugs under the state’s Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Law.The classification would require doctors to have a specific license to prescribe the drugs, which would be stored in certain facilities that in some cases could end up being located far from rural clinics. Knowingly possessing the drugs without a valid prescription would carry a punishment including hefty fines and jail time.Supporters say people would be prevented from unlawfully using the pills, though language in the bill appears to carve out protections for pregnant people who obtain the drug without a prescription for their own consumption.More than 200 doctors in the state signed a letter to lawmakers warning that it could produce a “barrier to physicians’ ease of prescribing appropriate treatment” and cause unnecessary fear and confusion among both patients and doctors. The physicians warn that any delay to obtaining the drugs could lead to worsening outcomes in a state that has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country.In addition to inducing abortions, mifepristone and misoprostol have other common uses, such as treating miscarriages, inducing labor and stopping hemorrhaging.Mifepristone was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2000 after federal regulators deemed it safe and effective for ending early pregnancies. It’s used in combination with misoprostol, which the FDA has separately approved to treat stomach ulcers.The drugs are not classified as controlled substances by the federal government because regulators do not view them as carrying a significant risk of misuse. The federal Controlled Substances Act restricts the use and distribution of prescription medications such as opioids, amphetamines, sleeping aids and other drugs that carry the risk of addiction and overdose.Abortion opponents and conservative Republicans both inside and outside the state have applauded the Louisiana bill. Conversely, the move has been strongly criticized by Democrats, including the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who in a social media post described it as “absolutely unconscionable”.Meanwhile, Louisiana’s Democratic party chairman Randal Gaines released a statement on Wednesday in which he called the bill “yet another example of [House Republicans’] pursuit to take away reproductive freedoms for women in Louisiana.“Thanks to Donald Trump, who proudly claims credit for ripping away women’s freedoms, women in Louisiana live in constant fear of losing even more rights … [this] action is a harrowing preview of how much worse things could get under governor Landry and the extreme GOP leadership,” he added.The US supreme court heard arguments in March on behalf of doctors who oppose abortion and want to restrict access to mifepristone. The justices did not appear ready to limit access to the drug, however.The Louisiana legislation now heads to the desk of conservative Republican governor Jeff Landry. The governor, who was backed by former president Donald Trump during last year’s gubernatorial election, has indicated his support for the measure, remarking in a recent post on X: “You know you’re doing something right when @KamalaHarris criticizes you.”Landry’s office did not respond to an emailed request for comment.A recent survey found that thousands of women in states with abortion bans or restrictions are receiving abortion pills in the mail from states that have laws protecting prescribers. The survey did not specify how many of those cases were in Louisiana.Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban applies both to medical and surgical abortions. The only exceptions to the ban are when there is substantial risk of death or impairment to the pregnant person if they continue the pregnancy or in the case of “medically futile” pregnancies, when the fetus has a fatal abnormality.In 2022, a Louisiana woman carrying an unviable, skull-less fetus was forced to travel 1,400 miles to New York for an abortion after her local hospital denied her the procedure. “Basically … I [would have] to carry my baby to bury my baby,” the woman, Nancy David, said at the time.Currently, 14 states are enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions.According to a study released in March, in the six months following the overturn of Roe v Wade, approximately 26,000 more Americans used abortion pills to induce at-home abortions than would have done had the supreme court not overturned the federal law in 2022.In 2023, medication abortions involving mifepristone, as well as misoprostol, accounted for more than 60% of all abortions across the US healthcare system, marking a 53% increase since 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute.The medication abortion counts do not include self-managed medication abortions carried out outside healthcare systems or abortion medication mailed to people in states with total abortion bans. 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      Supreme court rules South Carolina doesn’t need to redraw congressional map to consider Black voters

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      South Carolina Republicans do not need to redraw their congressional map, the US supreme court ruled on Thursday, saying that a lower court had not properly evaluated the evidence when it ruled that the lawmakers had discriminated against Black voters.In a 6-3 decision, the justices sent the case back to the lower court for further consideration. The decision, in Alexander v South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, is a major win for Republicans, who hold a slim margin in the US House with six of South Carolina’s seven congressional seats. It also could give lawmakers more leeway to discriminate in redistricting and use partisanship as a proxy for race. That could be enormously powerful in the US south, where voting is often racially polarized.“A party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” wrote Samuel Alito in an opinion that was joined by the court’s five other conservative justices.“The three-judge district court paid only lip service to these propositions. That misguided approach infected the district court’s findings of fact, which were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard.”The dispute centered on the way the Republicans who control the state legislature redrew the state’s first congressional district after the 2020 census. After Nancy Mace narrowly was elected in 2020, they shifted the district’s boundaries to make it much friendlier to Republicans. As part of that effort, they moved 30,000 Black voters from Mace’s first district to the sixth, currently represented by Jim Clyburn, a Black Democrat. A lower court had ruled that lawmakers had impermissibly relied on race when they drew it after the 2020 census, saying they had to redraw the district.The case had dragged on for so long, however, that the lower court and the supreme court recently allowed South Carolina to use the district for this year’s election.Mac Deford, an attorney challenging Mace, observed oral arguments in person. Deford said he watched Chief Justice John Roberts wrestle with the connection between race and politics.“From my viewpoint, there was some signaling that they were going to draw some sort of line between race and politics. And I think that they did in this case,” Deford said, noting how in the earlier decision Shelby v Holder Roberts had proposed the idea that southern legislators had long abandoned heavy-handed racial discrimination in voting.“This could be sort of setting the stage for a subsequent case, maybe next year, that could be brought on the Voting Rights Act that could further strip away the vote.”The challengers in the case, the South Carolina branch of the NAACP and a South Carolina voter, argued that those actions violated the 14th amendment’s ban on sorting voters based on race. South Carolina Republicans argued that they were motivated by partisanship, not race.In 2019, the supreme court said that there was nothing federal courts could do to stop gerrymandering based on partisanship. Sorting voters based on race, however, still remains unlawful. This was the first case that came to the court since its 2019 decision, forcing the justices to clarify their standard when the two issues are intermingled.The lower court had relied on a trove of evidence and experts that the challengers offered to conclude that South Carolina Republicans were sorting voters based on their race. One of those experts used an algorithm to draw 20,000 maps that didn’t take race into account but complied with traditional redistricting criteria. But Alito and the other conservative justices said that evidence was not good enough.Alito zeroed in on the fact that the challengers in the case had not offered an alternative map that achieved the partisan goals of Republican lawmakers – a safe Republican district – and that also had a higher Black voting age population as the challenged district. Such a map, he wrote, was critical to proving that South Carolina Republicans had considered race above other considerations.“Without an alternative map, it is difficult for plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” he wrote.That rationale drew a sharp rebuke from Elena Kagan, who accused the majority of getting the decision “seriously wrong” and inventing “a new rule of evidence”.“As of today, courts must draw an adverse inference against those plaintiffs when they do not submit a so-called alternative map – no matter how much proof of a constitutional violation they otherwise present,” the liberal justice wrote in an opinion. “Such micro-management of a plaintiff ’s case is elsewhere unheard of in constitutional litigation. But as with its upside-down application of clear-error review, the majority is intent on changing the usual rules when it comes to addressing racial-gerrymandering claims.”Kagan went on to outline how Thursday’s decision would give states much more leeway to enact discriminatory maps and voting policies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In every way, the majority today stacks the deck against the challengers. They must lose, the majority says, because the state had a ‘possible’ story to tell about not considering race – even if the opposite story was the more credible,” Kagan wrote in the opinion, which was joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.“When racial classifications in voting are at issue, the majority says, every doubt must be resolved in favor of the state, lest (heaven forfend) it be ‘accus[ed]’ of ‘offensive and demeaning’ conduct.”Leah Aden, a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued the case on behalf of the plaintiffs at the supreme court in October, said the decision “usurps the authority of trial courts to make factual findings of racial discrimination as the unanimous panel found occurred with South Carolina’s design of congressional district 1”. She said the challengers would continue to fight to redraw the map at the lower court.Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Alito and the court majority had “once again come up with a legal framework that makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power”.“He did so by reversing the burden of proof that should apply in these cases in two ways to favor these states: pushing a ‘presumption of good faith’ and raising the evidentiary burdens for those challenging the maps,” he wrote on his blog.Clarence Thomas, a conservative justice, also wrote a lengthy separate concurring opinion in the case saying that federal courts should not be involved in policing constitutional claims of racial discrimination in redistricting – a radical idea that would be a break with the court’s longstanding jurisprudence. “It behooves us to abandon our misguided efforts and leave districting to politicians,” he wrote. The concurrence was not joined by any of the other justices.Joe Biden also criticized the decision in a statement Thursday afternoon.“The Supreme Court’s decision today undermines the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race and that is wrong,” he said. “This decision threatens South Carolinians’ ability to have their voices heard at the ballot box, and the districting plan the Court upheld is part of a dangerous pattern of racial gerrymandering efforts from Republican elected officials to dilute the will of Black voters.”George Chidi contributed reporting More

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      Senate Democrats to investigate Trump’s reported big oil ‘deal’

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      Powerful Senate Democrats have launched an investigation into an alleged quid pro quo offer from Donald Trump to fossil fuel executives.At a meeting at his Mar-a-Lago home and club last month, the former president reportedly told oil bosses he would immediately roll back dozens of environmental regulations if elected, and requested $1bn in contributions to his presidential campaign. It would be a “deal” for the executives because of the costs they would avoid under him, he reportedly said.On Thursday morning, the chairmen of two Senate committees each sent letters to eight oil companies and top fossil fuel trade group the American Petroleum Institute.The letters from Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senate budget committee chairman, and Ron Wyden, the Senate finance committee chair, accused the companies of engaging in a quid pro quo with Trump and requested additional details about the meeting.“As Mr Trump funnels campaign money into his businesses and uses it as a slush fund to pay his legal fees, Big Oil has been lobbying aggressively to protect and expand its profits at the expense of the American taxpayer,” wrote the senators. “And now, emboldened by impunity, Mr Trump and Big Oil are flaunting their indifference to US citizens’ economic well-being for all to see.”Reached for comment, Andrea Woods, a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute, said the investigation is an “election-year stunt to distract from America’s need for more energy, including more oil and natural gas, to power our economy and combat persistent inflation”.She added: “API meets with candidates and policymakers to discuss the need for sound energy policies, and this meeting was no different.”Last week, Jamie Raskin, who chairs the House oversight committee, also launched a House oversight investigation into the companies about the reported offer. But unlike Whitehouse and Wyden, Raskin does not have the power to subpoena companies if they do not reply to his inquiry, because Republicans control the House of Representatives.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has continued to ask oil companies for campaign funding amid scrutiny of his relationship with the fossil fuel industry. On Wednesday he attended a fundraiser luncheon hosted by three oil bosses at a five-star hotel in Houston, including two from companies reportedly represented at the Mar-a-Lago meeting. More