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      Feinstein death inspired lawmakers to avoid shutdown, Pelosi says

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      The death of the California senator Dianne Feinstein may have helped inspire US lawmakers to avoid a federal government shutdown, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said.Speaking on Sunday, to CNN’s State of the Union, the California Democrat mourned the loss of Feinstein and said: “Some of the senators said that maybe her departure and the sadness that went with us focused people more on, ‘Let’s get the job done to keep government open for the people.’”The deal to avoid the shutdown was done late on Saturday, the Senate following the House in backing the deal before Joe Biden signed it.Feinstein, who at 90 was the oldest serving senator, died in Washington on Thursday. Tributes came from both sides of the aisle. On Saturday, a plane from the presidential fleet carried her body to her home city, San Francisco.Pelosi, who accompanied Feinstein’s body with the senator’s daughter, said: “She was my neighbor, my friend. My family loved her personally, politically, in every way.“We used to always say, if Dianne and I ran against each other, my daughter Nancy would probably vote for Dianne. That was the love that existed. But love is a good word for her, because she loved people. She loved California. She loved America.”Pelosi also thanked Joe Biden for arranging the transfer “in the grand way that we did … draped in the flag – she was such a patriot – [to] be welcomed by men and women in uniform as she came off the plane”.Although she and Feinstein “were not always on the same place on the spectrum of politics”, Pelosi said, Feinstein “reached across the aisle all the time”.The former speaker, 83, also recalled a memory from the early 1980s, when Pelosi was chair of the California Democratic party and Feinstein mayor of San Francisco.“When we were moving for the Democratic convention in San Francisco … we went to see her … to say, what about this?” said Pelosi.Feinstein said: “Well, will it cost money?”“And we said: ‘Well, we have to raise money.’”Feinstein said: “Well, my first concern are people at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.”“This is where many lower-income people … who need medical care,” Pelosi said, adding: “She was always about people and meeting their needs with her responsibility.”Pelosi also hailed Feinstein’s efforts to pass the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, calling her a “great legislator”.“Then it was reinstated and then it went away but while it was there, it saved lives,” Pelosi said of the ban. “How many people can make that claim?”Pelosi spoke hours after Biden signed a bill to extend government funding for 45 days. On Sunday, in response to the House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s deal with Democrats, the Florida Republican Matt Gaetz announced that he would try to oust McCarthy. Asked what advice she would give to her colleagues about Gaetz’s plan, Pelosi urged Democrats to follow their leader.“Hakeem Jeffries has done a great job,” she said, of the New Yorker who succeeded Pelosi atop the House Democratic caucus and is now minority leader. “Yesterday, we had a victory in the continuing resolution. It was a victory for Democrats, a defeat for the Magas,” a reference to far-right supporters of Donald Trump.Of Gaetz, Pelosi said: “You’re wasting your time on that guy, because he has no sway in the House of Representatives except to get on TV and to raise money on the internet. But, anyway, forgetting that … my advice [is] follow the leader.” More

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      How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history

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      The bane of raw intelligence – and history – is that you can always look back and find the signs, but you can’t necessarily look ahead and see where they’re pointing. Many questions remain about the intelligence failures that enabled an insurrectionist mob to lay siege virtually unimpeded to the US Capitol. But here’s one sign that’s been flashing in my head since 6 January 2021.Four days before the 2020 election, a “Trump Train” of motorists swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. Kamala Harris would have been on the bus but for a last-minute schedule change, according to Wendy Davis, then a Texas congressional candidate and the campaign surrogate onboard. The videotaped vehicular harassment – tailgating, sudden braking, passing the bus within inches – got nationwide coverage, courtesy of participants’ back-slapping on social media and Donald Trump’s high-five in return. Though no one was hurt, it took little imagination to see how a 20-ton container of flammable fuel moving in heavy traffic could have turned into a highway bomb. But to the Trump Train, one of its founders, Steve Ceh, told me, the razzing of the Democrats was simply “fun” – “like a rival football game”.No local arrests were reported, but the FBI in San Antonio confirmed it was investigating. Presumably (albeit against Trump’s tweeted wishes) it was still investigating two months later when the explosion came: a massive incarnation of the Trump Train rioting against President-elect Biden in Washington. It was then that I started getting flashbacks to another historic act of domestic terrorism, one also presaged by a difficult bus ride and lately back in the news.Sixty years ago, on 15 September 1963, when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four Black girls attending Sunday school, the shock to the country exceeded the moral language to express it. Both President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr cast political blame on Alabama’s “Segregation forever!” governor, George Wallace. At the time he seemed a pariah, the only “vicious racist” King singled out in his I Have a Dream speech 18 days earlier, at the March on Washington. In fact, Wallace was the spearhead of a proto-Maga minority that more than half a century later captured the White House for Trump. And now political violence is so “normal” that we have a former southern governor, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (whose daughter, Trump’s former spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the current governor), effectively endorsing civil war should the prosecution of Trump over a violent coup attempt derail his return to power.More often than not, though, the slope is slipperier than the cliff of depraved extremism over which Trump led a “conservative” political party. Instead, it is an inertial slide driven by institutional blind spots and choices that were professionally expedient in the moment. Thus it was, more than 60 years ago in Alabama, that the FBI turned a half-closed eye to harassers of a bus and wound up reaping shockwaves that killed children.On Mother’s Day 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying a protest group of integrated Freedom Riders was chased down the highway by a caravan of white Alabamians, who managed to sideline the vehicle outside Anniston and firebomb it. Meanwhile, a second freedom bus headed toward a Ku Klux Klan ambush in Birmingham. FBI agents there had been told by their Klan informant – the eventually notorious double agent Gary Thomas Rowe Jr – that his klavern was coordinating the attack with local police and city hall. But the bureau did nothing to stop the bloody assault. Nor were any arrests made of Rowe’s Klan brothers, certainly not after a widely published news photo showed the informant himself joining in the bludgeoning.When Rowe’s consorts bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church two years later, the FBI was so familiar with them that four or five prime suspects were identified within days. (Rowe was apparently not an active participant.) The first prosecution – of the suspected ringleader, by the Alabama attorney general – did not take place for 14 years and met with stonewalling if not resistance from the FBI. (A couple of decades later, the bureau provided “cooperation from top to bottom,” says Doug Jones, the federal prosecutor who won convictions against the last two living Klansmen in 2001 and 2002. He went on to become Alabama’s brief Democratic senator before losing in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, who recently said of white nationalists, “I call them Americans”.)In contrast to the Freedom Rider attacks, which sent multiple victims to hospital, the buzzing of the Biden team had only one known instance of physical contact, a black pick-up videotaped bumping a campaign car in the bus’s wake. The owner of the pick-up was Eliazar “Cisco” Cisneros, a middle-aged, long-gun-toting San Antonian who had made news six weeks earlier by driving the same Trump-bedecked truck through a peaceful defund-the-police protest. He was not arrested then, but the FBI did talk to him about the Trump Train, according to his lawyer, the former Republican congressman Francisco Canseco. However, Canseco says it was his client who initiated the call, to complain that “his rights were being violated”, meaning the right of Americans “to demonstrate their support for a candidate”. Cisneros claimed the Biden car was the aggressor, despite having boasted on Facebook, “That was me slamming that fucker … Hell yea.” (The available videotape is not definitive, but the analysis by snopes.com contradicts Cisneros’s version.)Perhaps the FBI had bigger Maga fish to fry than the Trump Train, even though the San Antonio paper reported weeks before the election that the group’s raucous Thursday-night parades 30 miles up I-35 in New Braunfels had featured a man dragging a Black Lives Matter flag behind his pick-up. (A social-media post of his surfaced from a few years earlier: “I’m not apart of the kkk … just hate black people.”) Some African American residents were reminded of the 1998 white supremacist dragging murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr, 300 miles east in Jasper. But by the time the New Braunfels Trump Train caught up with the Biden bus on 30 October, the bar for actionable political intimidation had been set pretty high. Earlier that month in Michigan, the FBI along with state authorities arrested 14 Maga men in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer.Way back in segregated 1961, within hours of the freedom bus burning, the Kennedy justice department found a statute allowing for a politically neutered prosecution: 18 U.S. Code § 33, covering the destruction of motor vehicles engaged in interstate commerce. A paragraph conceivably pertinent to what happened in Texas – on a federal highway – penalizes one who “willfully disables or incapacitates any driver … or in any way lessens the ability of such person to perform his duties as such”. At any rate, when even symbolic federal charges failed to materialize, the Biden bus driver, Wendy Davis and two others filed a civil suit against (ultimately) eight Trump Train members, including Cisneros and Ceh, under the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They sued the San Marcos police department separately, as the only force along the route that the complaint says ignored SOS calls – though its alleged abdication was more like “we can’t help you” than the Birmingham police’s promise to give the Klan 15 minutes to work over the Freedom Riders.Davis et al filed their suits six months after January 6. While hastening to say that “we can’t begin to compare what happened on the bus to that violence”, Davis calls it “part and parcel of the same trend”. It was intimidating enough to cause the campaign to cancel the rest of the tour. A trial date for the Trump Train case has been set for next year. Two defendants settled separately in April 2023 and have been removed from the suit.Among the plaintiffs’ exhibits included in a court filing on Friday is the transcript of a text chain from late December 2020 about “the March in dc”, in which a message purportedly coming from Cisneros’s phone discusses delivery dates for bear mace and a collapsible baton. Two other defendants, Ceh and his wife, Randi – named in the complaint as leaders of the New Braunfels Trump Train – were among the faithful in Washington on January 6. Steve Ceh told me they did not enter the Capitol but watched “antifa thugs in black breaking windows” and “people in Trump hats telling them to stop”. When I asked if he thought the hundreds of people arrested for their role in the riot were antifa (including a former FBI agent from New Braunfels), he said: “I’m not saying that some people weren’t pretty emotional.”Ceh says the FBI contacted him after he was fired from his job (as a supervisor for a large Texas construction firm) in the aftermath of January 6. “There are a lot of liberals, a lot of Satanists, in this town,” he told me, explaining that they “doxxed” him. Ceh says he invited the FBI man who questioned him (“a very good guy”) to attend the “relevant church” he recently founded. He says the bureau did not seek him out after the Trump Train episode, not even for one of its unofficial “knock and talks”, and in their later interview about the Capitol riot, he says, the Biden bus “never came up”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FBI office in San Antonio declined to make Ceh’s interviewer available for comment and, in response to my request for a Biden bus update, said the bureau did not either confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, apparently even one it previously confirmed. That’s not the worst policy in the world, as then FBI director James Comey painfully demonstrated in 2016 when he violated justice department guidelines with public statements in the Hillary Clinton emails case, arguably giving us President Donald Trump and thereby helping normalize terrorism the bureau is mandated to prevent.John Paredes, one of the many civil rights lawyers representing the bus plaintiffs, says he does “not read anything into [federal officials’] determination not to bring a prosecution”. The US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas emailed its refusal to comment on “the existence or non-existence of investigations”. Still, I have a sneaking feeling that the FBI’s reaction to the vehicular threat on I-35 would have been a little different if, say, those road warriors had been Muslims rather than white Christians.Sixty years ago, the Birmingham church bombing helped unify the country around a consensus that state-sponsored racism had to end and, along with the assassination of President Kennedy two months later in Texas, eased the posthumous passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation. Since the domestic terrorism of January 6, though, the partition of hate has only widened. And so, I got a little jolt of hope and change from Ceh’s surprise answer to my pro forma question about whether he was supporting Trump in 2024.“I’m waiting,” he said. “We have transitioned.”I wish I could say the quote ended there, but he went on to talk about how the issue is no longer “about what man’s in there”, because “we’ve got to turn to God”. If I had to interpret those signs, I would take them to mean that things could get worse. Apocalyptic, maybe.
      Diane McWhorter is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama – The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution More

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      McCarthy worked with Democrats to pause the US shutdown. Now his job is at stake

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      In more normal political times, the successful prevention of a government shutdown might be cause for celebration. For Kevin McCarthy, it may instead mark the beginning of the end of his speakership.After failing to pass a more conservative stopgap spending bill on Friday, the House Republican speaker introduced a different proposal extending government funding for 45 days and allocating $16bn for disaster relief aid. That bill the House on Saturday in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 335 to 91, with 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in supporting the legislation.In a worrisome sign for McCarthy, 90 House Republicans opposed the bill. The speaker still managed to secure the support of most of his conference, but he expressed exasperation with the hard-right holdouts who blocked his initial stopgap proposal, which included severe spending cuts for most federal agencies.“It is very clear that I tried every possible way, listening to every single person in the conference,” McCarthy told reporters on Saturday. “If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.”Indeed, McCarthy spent the weeks leading up to the 1 October shutdown deadline attempting to appease his hard-right colleagues. On Thursday night, House Republicans approved three longer-term appropriations bills that included some of the steep cuts demanded by the hard-right Freedom Caucus.McCarthy had hoped that the House’s ongoing work to pass appropriations bills would diffuse the concerns of Freedom Caucus members, many of whom said they would not back a stopgap bill in any form. But those holdout members were true to their word, opposing every proposal that would extend government funding and prevent a shutdown.When McCarthy’s original stopgap bill came up for a vote on Friday, 21 Republicans opposed the measure. The hard-right blockade easily sunk the bill because of House Republicans’ extremely narrow majority.In the end, McCarthy was forced to take a course of action he had avoided for weeks: passing a short-term funding bill with the help of House Democrats. Although Democrats expressed disappointment that McCarthy’s proposal did not include additional funding to support Ukraine’s war efforts, they ultimately provided the speaker with the support he needed to get the bill across the finish line.The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, celebrated the bill’s passage as a complete surrender by McCarthy and his allies, given that the legislation did not include the severe funding cuts outlined in the speaker’s original proposal.“We went from devastating cuts that would have impacted the health, the safety and the economic wellbeing of the American people, in 24 hours, to a spending agreement that meets the needs of the American people across the board,” Jeffries said on Saturday. “The American people have won. The extreme [‘Make America Great Again’] Republicans have lost. It was a victory for the American people and a complete and total surrender by right-wing extremists, who throughout the year have tried to hijack the Congress.”Hard-right Republicans had warned that they would move to oust McCarthy as speaker if he collaborated with Democrats on a funding bill, and they have the means to do so. Under the current House rules, it only takes one member to bring a motion to vacate, which forces a vote on removing the sitting speaker. McCarthy’s detractors would only need a simple majority to unseat him.Hard-right Republicans appeared ready to make good on their threat after the stopgap proposal passed the House. As the House moved to adjourn on Saturday, congressman Matt Gaetz, a hard-right Republican of Florida, was seen trying to get the attention of the presiding member for another matter of business. The House adjourned before Gaetz could be recognised, but the chamber will be back in session on Monday, when hard-right lawmakers will have another opportunity to take action against McCarthy.Gaetz previewed a potential effort to oust McCarthy on Tuesday, saying in a floor speech, “The one thing I agree with my Democrat colleagues on is that for the last eight months, this House has been poorly led, and we own that, and we have to do something about it. And you know what? My Democrat colleagues will have an opportunity to do something about that, too, and we will see if they bail out our failed speaker.”If McCarthy is banking on Democratic support to keep his gavel, he may be sorely disappointed. Politico reported Saturday that Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker, was instructing her colleagues not to come to McCarthy’s aid in the event of a vote on vacating the chair.Despite the grim state of affairs, McCarthy appeared ready for battle on Saturday. After withstanding 15 rounds of voting to win the speakership in January, McCarthy said he wouldn’t go down without a fight.“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it. There has to be an adult in the room,” McCarthy told reporters. “I’m going to be a conservative that gets things done for the American public, and whatever that holds, so be it because I believe in not giving up on America.”The coming days will determine what the future holds for McCarthy, but if Gaetz and his allies are successful, the House could soon be looking for a new leader. More

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      Democrat Jamaal Bowman pulled fire alarm on Capitol Hill before House vote

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      Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm on Saturday in a Capitol office building before a House vote on a stopgap measure to avoid a government shutdown.The alarm prompted the Cannon House office building to be evacuated and triggered outcry from Republicans including the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who compared the New York congressman’s actions with those of the January 6 rioters.“I was really appalled watching Democrats’ actions today, to delay it, to get a shutdown,” said McCarthy amid Democrats’ complaints that they did not have sufficient time to review the bill Republicans released last-minute in an attempt to avoid a government shutdown.“That’s a new low,” he said, adding, “We watched how people have been treated if they’ve done something wrong in this Capitol. It would be interesting to see how he is treated and what he was trying to obstruct when it came to the American public.”Brian Steil, a Republican Wisconsin representative and chair of the House administration committee, announced that an investigation into the incident is underway.Georgia’s Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she is calling on the justice department to prosecute Bowman “using the same law they used to prosecute J6 defendants for interfering with an official proceeding”.Meanwhile, the Republican representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York said that she is drafting a resolution to expel Bowman, tweeting, “This is the United States Congress, not a New York City high school. This action warrants expulsion & I’m introducing a resolution to do just that.”Malliotakis’s fellow Republican representative Elise Stefanik echoed similar sentiments, tweeting, “A Democrat member of Congress just committed a felony by pulling the fire alarm to try to delay and stop a Congressional vote to fund the government.”In DC, falsely pulling a fire alarm is considered a misdemeanor.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement to The Hill, a spokesperson for Bowman said, “Congressman Bowman did not realize he would trigger a building alarm as he was rushing to make an urgent vote,” adding, “The congressman regrets any confusion.”Speaking to reporters, Bowman said, “I thought the alarm would open the door.”It remains unclear whether Bowman will be prosecuted.The 45-day funding resolution, which Bowman and a majority of Democrats ultimately voted in favor of, passed with a 335-91 vote in the House. The bill is now with the Democrat-majority Senate, and lawmakers have until midnight on Sunday to pass it and send it to president Joe Biden to sign into law before a government shutdown. More

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      US House passes stopgap funding bill under the wire without funding for Ukraine

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      The House passed a bill Saturday to extend government funding for 45 days, sending the legislation to the Senate with just hours left to avert a federal shutdown. Unless Joe Biden signs a funding bill before midnight, the government will shut down.The bill passed the House in an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 335 to 91, with 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in supporting the legislation. Ninety Republicans opposed the bill.The bill – unveiled by the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, just hours before the final vote – would extend funding through 17 November and allocate $16bn for disaster aid. The House bill does not include additional funding for Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage among hard-right lawmakers.McCarthy introduced the bill under suspension of the rules, meaning he needed the support of two-thirds of House members to advance the proposal. Although Democrats criticized the bill’s lack of Ukraine funding, they ultimately provided McCarthy with the support needed to get the legislation across the finish line.Speaking after the vote, McCarthy expressed disappointment that a large share of his conference opposed the bill, but he said the intransigence displayed by hard-right Republicans left him with no other option.“It is very clear that I tried every possible way, listening to every single person in the conference,” McCarthy told reporters. “If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.”The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, celebrated the bill’s passage, saying: “[‘Make America Great Again’] Republicans have surrendered. All extreme rightwing policies have been removed from the House spending bill. The American people have won.”Prior to the House vote, the Senate had planned to hold a vote at 1pm ET on a separate stopgap spending bill, which would also keep the government open until 17 November and provide some funding for Ukraine’s war efforts as well as disaster relief aid.But the Senate vote was stalled after Republicans said they wanted to wait to see whether the House would be able to pass McCarthy’s proposal before the midnight deadline. In light of the movement in the House, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said he would not support advancing the Senate bill for the time being.“It looks like there may be a bipartisan agreement coming from the House,” McConnell told reporters at the Capitol. “Under these circumstances, I’m recommending a no vote, even though I very much want to avoid a government shutdown.”Now that the House has passed McCarthy’s bill, all attention turns to the Senate. Although Senate Democrats have voiced displeasure about approving a bill that does not include Ukraine funding, the House bill currently represents their only option to prevent a shutdown. Because of procedural hurdles, the Senate cannot hold a final vote on its own bill until Sunday at the earliest, when a shutdown would have already started.The rare weekend session came one day after the House failed to pass McCarthy’s initial stopgap bill, which would have extended government funding for another month while enacting steep spending cuts on most federal agencies.McCarthy’s proposal was rejected by 21 House Republicans, as hard-right members continued to insist they would not support a continuing resolution. Hard-right Republicans threatened to oust the speaker if he teamed up with Democrats to keep the government open, a viable threat when it only takes one member to introduce a motion to vacate the chair. Despite the criticism from his hard-right colleagues, McCarthy downplayed threats to his speakership on Saturday.“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it,” McCarthy told reporters. “There has to be an adult in the room. I am going to govern with what is best for this country.”As lawmakers made progress in their efforts to extend funding, the federal government was bracing for the possibility of the first shutdown in nearly five years. The White House has warned that a shutdown would force hundreds of thousands of government workers to go without pay, jeopardize access to vital nutritional programs and delay disaster relief projects.“Extreme House Republicans are solely – solely – to blame for marching us toward a shutdown. That is what we’re seeing right now,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Friday.Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, similarly blamed Republicans for a potential shutdown – although he used more colorful language to describe his congressional colleagues.“The damage to our nation’s reputation and critical programming, and chaos for America’s families is because of a small group of [Republican] peckerheads in the House,” Fetterman said on Saturday. “This national upheaval is inflicted by choice over nothing except Fox News face time and tributes to the lunatic fringe from their district.” More

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      Government shutdown could hurt weather disaster responses, Fema says

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      The budget deal Republicans and Democrats reached in the House on Saturday included a 45-day funding extension for disaster relief funds. Lawmakers had been warning that without that provision, a government shutdown would hamper responses to any new weather disasters, leave hazardous waste sites uninspected, and stop work at federal Superfund clean-up sites.“Federal emergency management agency (Fema) staff will still respond to emergencies, but all long-term projects will be delayed due to a lack of funding in the disaster relief fund,” warned the Illinois Democrat Lauren Underwood on Friday.Underwood warned that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would stop inspecting drinking water and chemical facilities too. Also affected, she said, would be efforts to contain polyfluoroalkyl substances – “forever” chemicals, or PFAS – and cleanup activities at Superfund sites.The warnings came a day after New York was hit by torrential rains that shut down parts of the city’s mass-transit system, flooded parts of Brooklyn and triggered the state governor, Kathy Hochul, to declare a state of emergency.Wide-ranging impacts of a federal freeze come amid warnings that there is little left in the primary government relief fund, after 23 confirmed US weather events related to the climate disaster so far in 2023 have cost at least $1bn each.The events included two flooding events, 18 severe storms, one tropical cyclone, one wildfire and one winter storm, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. For comparison, the 1980–2022 annual average was roughly eight events.According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US has seen more billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 than in any previously recorded year.Fema spent an average of $4bn annually between 1992 and 1999 on disaster aid. Since 2000, excluding years that saw disasters like 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and the response to Covid-19, the emergency management agency’s spending has jumped to around $10bn annually.With three months of the year to go and disaster costs running at $23bn, the Fema administrator Deanne Criswell testified before the House transportation and infrastructure subcommittee on emergency management last week that the agency would have difficulties responding to any natural disaster in the event of a shutdown.Criswell pointed to decreasing funding levels for the disaster relief fund, climate change and the need for its mitigation, the costs of flood insurance and border security as among the agency’s concerns. She also said in her testimony that the agency’s mission had become “more challenging”.“We can no longer really speak of a disaster season. With atmospheric rivers in January to tornadoes and wildfires in December, we now face intensified natural disasters throughout the year, often in places not used to experiencing them,” she said.Citing the Maui wildfires and the California tropical cyclone, she warned that disasters required outsized funding.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We are in such a moment today,” Criswell added and said she had instituted an “immediate needs funding” mandate of $16bn.The agency had already cut off more than $1bn in funding to 1,000 public assistance projects, Criswell said.The warnings come as the Biden administration directs more funds toward disaster relief and away from reconstruction grants. Fema has already delayed around $2.8bn, including $555m for long-term recovery projects in Florida, $101m in Louisiana and another $74m in California, as its disaster fund dropped to just over $2.4bn, the Washington Post reported last week.While it is likely the fund will be boosted – disasters affect both red and blue states – Criswell warned that any failure to restock agency disaster relief coffers would leave Fema unable to fund a response to new emergencies.“It is vital that Fema – and the American people – be able to tap into an adequately funded Disaster Relief Fund so that we can continue to respond as soon as disaster strikes, rebuild in their aftermath and prepare for future disasters,” she said. More

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      Voter drive: Biden and Trump battle for blue-collar votes in auto heartland

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      Joe Biden became the first sitting US president to join a picket line when he stopped at a General Motors facility just outside Detroit to show support for striking United Auto Workers last week. “Stick with it. You deserve a significant raise,” Biden told the crowd.A day later, Donald Trump told raucous blue-collar supporters at a speech north of Detroit: “Just get your union guys, your leaders, to endorse me and I will take care of the rest.”The tug-of-war remarks represented the unofficial opening salvoes of the 2024 election season as the parties’ likely candidates set out to woo blue-collar voters in Michigan, a critical bloc in a state that’s a must-win in any White House bid.“Politically, Michigan is ground zero right now because of the auto strike,” said Bill Ballenger, a conservative state political analyst. Biden, he said, was seeking to shore up his slipping support among unions, while Trump had spotted a “weakness in Bidenomics” that the former president was set on exploiting as the strike pushes into its third week.Trump won Michigan, an upper midwest swing state, by about 12,000 votes in 2016. Biden took the state by nearly 150,000 votes in the next election. Michigan is a heavily unionized state, and Biden won with 64% support among union members. But August polling found support among Michigan union members hangs at 49%, and Biden and Trump are in effect tied.“Clearly there’s division among the rank and file,” said pollster Bernie Porn, president of Epic MRA, a Michigan-based survey research firm. Political observers say Michigan is very much in play in the 2024 election.The dueling visits showcased two very different visions for America’s future. Trump criticized the Biden administration’s support for the auto industry’s shift to electric vehicles, which unions fear because they require fewer workers to make. “You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics,” Trump told the crowd in a meandering, hour-long speech. (Later he insisted he would make “sex changes for children” illegal.)Biden’s minutes’ long pitch zeroed in on the unions: “The fact of the matter is that you guys, the UAW – you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 … You made a lot of sacrifices. But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too.”The visits also put on display two competing styles. Despite the historic nature of Biden’s visit, the daytime visit was a low-key, invite-only event among a small crowd of UAW members. The tone was supportive, good-natured. At the nearby Ford Michigan Assembly plant, Biden’s supporters viewed it as a morale boost.Trump, by contrast, set up at night in a non-union shop in Macomb county, an Obama-to-Trump blue-collar swing county. Hundreds of boisterous supporters lined the streets, banging on drums and shouting “Freedom!” and breaking into chants of “USA! USA!” and “Back the blue!” The Trump campaign dismissed Biden’s visit as a “cheap photo op”, and said the rank and file support him, not Biden. Some of his supporters echoed that.“We’ve always known that the blue-collar workers are behind Trump, but the party heads and elites have such a command of the microphone that the floor worker is really underrepresented,” said Trump supporter James Anthony Minnick Jr after attending the former president’s Wednesday speech.Biden’s visit seems to convey an understanding of that, political observers say, but despite that the UAW leadership has been very clear in who it supports.“I see no point in meeting with [Trump] because I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for,” the UAW president, Shawn Fain, said before Trump’s visit. “He serves a billionaire class, and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”Biden had attended the UAW picket at Fain’s invitation, but the union has yet to officially endorse anyone, which could signal an understanding of rank-and-file divisions, or could be read as leverage to gain continuing White House support.Scott Malenfant, 47, an Obama-to-Ted Cruz-to-Trump supporter and union rep, was among those on the picket line outside Ford’s Michigan Assembly plant on Tuesday who split from UAW leadership. After Biden’s speech, the 23-year line veteran said Democrats lost him and other union members over the EV transition and their support of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Democrats are “on the record saying those jobs are never coming back”, Malenfant noted.“Trump is the first one who said ‘We’re going to bring these jobs back,’” he added while acknowledging that Republicans are typically anti-union. But Trump was different, he said: “All he cares about is whether the country does well … and at least he’s the one pushing for workers.”Biden’s Tuesday message that auto companies need to reward workers did resonate with some who are undecided, or describe themselves as “not political”, like Lisa Carter, 53, who works in the plant’s stamping department. She has two jobs despite 17 years on the line, and she cannot afford to buy a new Ford.“If you’re for the people, then I’m for you,” Carter said. “And Trump can stay where he’s at because when he was president he said we make too much money.”Biden needs to address the EV concerns, Porn said, and talk to union members about how batteries and chips could be produced by autoworkers in the state. The visit also comes in the wake of another Trump indictment, and Porn said the former president’s mounting legal numbers appear to be a drag on his favorability numbers, which are down to 37%.Some of that may be down to Trump’s ever mounting legal troubles. But those cases are unlikely to shake his diehard supporters “because they see him as he likes to see himself – a victim, a martyr being crucified by the deep state”, said Ballenger.For now, with more than a year to go before the election, Porn and Ballenger each say Biden has the edge in the state despite his concerning poll numbers. But Ballenger warned the race was far from decided. Just like in 2016: “It could be deja vu all over again,” Ballenger said. More

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      in US Politics

      Enough review: Cassidy Hutchinson on Trump and the damage done

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      Cassidy Hutchinson may have done more to place Donald Trump in legal jeopardy than anyone other than Trump himself. By the time the twentysomething deputy to Mark Meadows (Trump’s last chief of staff) completed her first public appearance before the January 6 committee, in June last year, the US had received an up-close-and-personal view of the venom, wrath and malice of the 45th president.Hutchinson “isn’t crazy”, a Trump White House veteran confided to the Guardian before that first hearing. But she is a “time bomb”.When told that he would not be driven to the Capitol to join the rioters, Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his car. He said Mike Pence “deserved” to be hanged for his refusal to overturn the election. He broke dishes and splattered condiments. Hutchinson “grabbed a towel and started wiping the ketchup off of the wall to help the valet out”. Her testimony was extraordinary. It has also withstood scrutiny.The Capitol was defaced for the “sake of a lie”, Hutchinson declared, on camera. She placed Trump, Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, in the middle of it all.Fifteen months later, however, Trump is both a 91-times charged criminal defendant and the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, tied with, if not ahead of, Joe Biden in the polls. In Fulton county, Georgia, a grand jury indicted Meadows and Giuliani as well as Trump, for seeking to illegally overturn Biden’s win. As for Hutchinson, she is out with Enough, her memoir.She shares her life story, pointing a damning finger at the powerful, the guys she once worked for and her own father. She tries to exhale but doesn’t fully succeed. She can’t. She is likely to be a witness at Trump’s Washington trial on four election subversion charges, slated to kick off the day before Super Tuesday, the key point of the Republican primary next year.Hutchinson expresses gratitude for life’s opportunities and disgust for what she has seen and endured. Her nameless “dad”, her mother’s first husband, was all too often a no-show in clutch moments. She considers Paul, the man who followed, to be her “chosen father”. He was there when it counted. Meadows once asked if she had a happy childhood, she writes. She offers a detailed answer.Hutchinson’s disdain for Trump is on record. Now, too, is her deep disillusionment with Meadows and disgust for Giuliani.On January 6, “America’s mayor” allegedly preyed upon her. John Eastman, Trump’s legal adviser in his attempted coup, purportedly looked on and smiled.Over time, Meadows let Hutchinson down, then abandoned her entirely. When the subpoenas began to fly, he left her to fend for herself. He never offered to help, she says, in contrast to how he treated his male deputy, Ben Williamson. To Hutchinson, Meadows extended platitudes as if she were a mass shooting victim.“Tell her me and Debbie are thinking about her,” he told Williamson.In her own memoir, Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s last White House press secretary, gushed at Hutchinson: “You were a constant reminder of faith. Thank you for being an inspiring leader for the entire West Wing.” The contrast in the two women’s post-White House lives is remarkable. McEnany is ensconced at Fox News. Hutchinson gives interviews at home with the shades drawn, worried for her safety.According to Hutchinson, Meadows ceaselessly sought to endear himself to Trump, a task impossible for anyone other than Ivanka, Trump’s oldest daughter. Early on, Meadows told Hutchinson he would take a bullet for his boss.“I would do anything … to get him re-elected,” he said.Months later, Meadows did something: he hid Trump’s Covid from Hutchinson and from the world at large. He knew Trump had fulfilled appearances and taken the debate stage against Biden after testing positive. He did not share that information. Later, when Hutchinson and Meadows were in a limo, she asked if Trump had Covid. Meadows did not answer.“His silence answered every question I had,” Hutchinson writes now.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe did not sicken and flirt with death, as Chris Christie did after helping prep Trump for the debate. But no apology was forthcoming. All were expected to take the bullet.Out of office, however, Meadows ratted Trump out, in his own memoir, The Chief’s Chief. Hutchinson cites his book in hers.“Stop the president from leaving,” Meadows says Sean Conley, the White House physician, told him. “He just tested positive for Covid.”“Mr President,” Meadows says he said, “I’ve got some bad news. You’ve tested positive for Covid-19.” Trump’s reply, the devout Christian writes, “rhyme[d] with ‘Oh spit, you’ve gotta be trucking lidding me”.When Meadows’s book came out, Trump trashed it as “fake news” and derided Meadows as “fucking stupid”. Meadows concurred. These days, though, he appears to be cooperating with Jack Smith, the special counsel. The prospect of prison can bring clarity. Ask Michael Cohen.Giuliani and Eastman deny Hutchinson’s description of how the former groped her as the latter smiled. They also threaten to sue but they have larger things to focus on, professions and freedom at risk.If anyone’s character can be judged by the identities of their enemies, Hutchinson is well placed. Starting with Trump, she has amassed an array of appalling detractors. But she has able folks in her corner. Liz Cheney, the January 6 vice-chair whose stand against Trump cost her so dearly, is there. Hutchinson’s roster of legal talent, meanwhile, includes Jody Hunt and Bill Jordan. A justice department veteran, Hunt was chief of staff to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general.When news of Enough was breaking, another former Trump legal adviser, Ty Cobb, told the Guardian: “Hutchinson was a very devoted White House employee who worked very very hard. She was proud to serve her country. So sad she had to endure this.”
      Enough is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More