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      Filthy Rich Politicians review: Matt Lewis skewers both sides of the aisle

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      When Covid began to ravage the US, Donald Trump lied through his teeth but Nancy Pelosi flaunted her assets. Trump repeatedly claimed the virus “would go away”. More than a million deaths followed. Pelosi, then House speaker, treated us to watching her eat $13-a-pint ice cream out of fridges that cost $24,000. Let them eat artisanal desserts?Forbes pegs Trump’s wealth at $2.5bn. Based on public filings, according to Matt Lewis in his new book, Filthy Rich Politicians, Pelosi and her husband’s net holdings are estimated to be north of $46m. In 2014, Trump lied when he said his tax returns would be forthcoming if and when he ran for office. In 2022, Pelosi successfully fought an attempt to ban members of Congress from trading stock. She, it was widely noted, does not trade stocks. But her husband does. Practically speaking, that is tantamount to a distinction with little difference.Despite it all, when Trump tore into Washington corruption, promising to “drain the swamp”, his message resonated. A congenital grifter, he knew what he was talking about.“Right now, your average member of the House is something like 12 times richer than the average American household,” Matt Lewis says. “And that, I believe, is contributing to the sense that the game is rigged.” More than half the members of Congress are millionaires.Lewis is a senior columnist at the Daily Beast and a former contributor to the Guardian. With his new book, he performs a valued public service, shining a searing light on the gap between the elites of both parties and the citizenry in whose name they claim to govern. Subtitled “The Swamp Creatures, Latte Liberals, and Ruling-Class Elites Cashing in on America”, Lewis’s book is breezy and readable. Better yet, it strafes them all. The Bidens and Clintons, the Trumps and Kushners, right and left – all get savaged.Looking right, Lewis mocks Steve Bannon and Ted Cruz for their faux populism, which he views as self-serving and destructive.“The very elites who seek to rule us also rile up the public to hate their fellow elites,” Lewis bitingly observes. “Although he claims to be a ‘Leninist’, Bannon is also ‘an alumnus of Harvard Business School, Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood.’”As for Cruz, he graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law. The husband of a Goldman Sachs managing director, he helped pave the way for making loans by a candidate to their own campaign a money-making proposition. In a 2022 decision, in a case between Cruz and the Federal Elections Commission, the US supreme court ruled that a $250,000 loan repayment limit violated the first amendment and Cruz’s free speech rights. In plain English: a deep-pocketed incumbent can now tack on a double-digit interest rate to a campaign loan, win re-election, then essentially collect a handsome side bet. As Lewis notes, Cruz was already no stranger to ethical flimflam.Lewis also graphically lays out how swank vacation sites are de rigueur destinations for campaign fundraisers and political retreats – being in Congress is now a portal to spas, tennis and haute cuisine – and how book writing has emerged as the vehicle of choice for members of Congress to evade honoraria restrictions.Lewis quotes Marco Rubio telling Fox News: “The day I got elected to the Senate I had over $100,000 still in student loans that I was able to pay off because I wrote a book.” In 2013, Rubio received an $800,000 advance. A decade later, he branded Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan “unfair”.This, remember, is the same Florida man who once exclaimed: “It’s amazing … I can call up a lobbyist at four in the morning and he’ll meet me anywhere with a bag of $40,000 in cash.” Like many in government, Rubio blurs the line between the personal and the public.Lewis also tags Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a member of the progressive “Squad” in the House, for cronyism amid the throes of Covid. At the time, she proposed legislation that would have canceled rent and mortgage payments while establishing a “fund to repay landlords for missed rent”. The bill went nowhere but as luck would have it, Squad members Ayana Pressley (Massachusetts) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) took in rental income as Covid blighted the land. In 2021, Pressley’s rental income surged by “up to $117,500”.As for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, perhaps the most visible Squad member, Lewis raps her for appearing at the 2021 Met gala wearing a backless gown emblazoned with the words “Tax the Rich”. AOC’s Devil Wears Prada moment, Lewis says, “underscores how far-removed today’s Democrats are from being the party of the working class”.It was not something Eleanor Roosevelt would have done.“Such stunts feed the sense that our public servants are indulging in hypocrisy and taking advantage of the system,” Lewis writes.Elsewhere, Lewis describes Greg Gianforte “allegedly body-slamming” Ben Jacobs, then of the Guardian, during a House campaign in Montana in 2018. Here, Lewis goes easy on Gianforte, who is now governor. Gianforte pleaded guilty, a fact Lewis acknowledges. With that plea, the Republican’s lack of self-control went beyond the realm of “alleged” and into established fact.Filthy Rich Politicians closes with a series of proposals to boost confidence in the system. Lewis calls for a ban on stock trading by members of Congress and their families, heightened transparency and increased congressional pay. The prospects for his proposals appear uncertain.Last week, Josh Hawley of Missouri – for whom, like Cruz and many other Republicans, Lewis’s wife has worked – and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York introduced the Ban Stock Trading for Government Officials Act. The public overwhelmingly supports the substance of the legislation. Whether Congress steps up remains to be seen.“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “They are different from you and me.”
      Filthy Rich Politicians is published in the US by Hachette More

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      ‘Stop’: Black Republican congressman attacks DeSantis over slavery curriculum

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      Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has “gone too far” in defending his state’s new educational standards which require public schools to teach that enslaved Black Americans benefited from their forced labor by learning useful skills, Republican congressman John James has said.James – who is Black – made his remarks in a post on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter.“Nothing about that … evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors,” James, from Michigan, said in reference to DeSantis’s support of the recently approved Florida state education board curriculum teaching schoolchildren that enslaved Black Americans “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal” gain.James continued by saying that DeSantis’s education board “is re-writing history”, leaving him “so far from the party” of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican president who emancipated enslaved Black Americans before his 1865 assassination.“You’ve gone too far,” James wrote. “Stop.”The comments from James constituted an impassioned defense of his fellow Black Republican federal lawmakers Byron Donalds and Tim Scott. Donalds, a Florida congressman, and Scott – a South Carolina senator and declared 2024 presidential candidate – each criticized the curriculum in question and DeSantis’s support of it.Donalds had asserted that “the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong [and] needs to be adjusted”. Scott had said “slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives”.DeSantis rebuked both men, suggesting they sounded too similar to Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris, who dismissed the curriculum as “propaganda”.During a 21 July speech in Jacksonville, Florida, Harris – the first woman and Black person to hold her office – had also said: “They want to replace history with lies.”James cautioned DeSantis against assailing Donalds and Scott, who make up 40% of the population of Black Republicans in Congress.“There are only five [B]lack Republicans in Congress, and you’re attacking two of them,” James’s X post said of DeSantis. “My brother in Christ … if you find yourself in a deep hole put the shovel down.”DeSantis joins Scott and several others in a field of Republicans who for the moment are trailing former president Donald Trump in the polls for their party’s White House nomination next year. All are trying to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, who is running for re-election.James, meanwhile, has announced that he intends to seek a second term representing Michigan’s 10th congressional district. The businessman and former US army captain won his seat after a relatively close victory over Democratic candidate Carl Malinga during the November midterms. More

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      States’ rights make a comeback as Republicans rush to defy Washington

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      The message was blunt: “Texas will see you in court, Mr President.”The words of defiance came from Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, making clear that he would not comply with a justice department request to remove floating barriers in the Rio Grande. And Abbott is not the only Republican governor in open revolt against Washington.In May Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions despite the supreme court banning capital punishment in such cases. Earlier this month, Kay Ivey of Alabama signed into law a redistricting map that ignored a supreme court ruling ordering the state to draw two Black-majority congressional districts.The disobedience is sure to score points with the Republican base. It reflects a trend that has seen state parties embrace extreme positions in the era of Donald Trump and Maga (Make America great again). And while there has always been tension between states and the federal government, it now comes with the accelerant of political partisanship and blue (Democratic) v red (Republican) state polarisation.“This is an onslaught against the federal government’s reach, power, effectiveness,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “We’re seeing it across the board in immigration, healthcare, education – it is defiance. If you think about America breaking into red and blue states, this is like the culmination. It’s literally the red states separating from the federal government and the rule of national law.”With Democrat Joe Biden in the White House, Republican governors are seeking to assert their independence, with red states such as Florida and Texas styling themselves as bulwarks of resistance even if that means rattling America’s increasingly fragile democracy.In Texas, Abbott has been testing the legal limits of states’ ability to act on immigration for more than two years, erecting razor-wire fencing, arresting migrants on trespassing charges and sending busloads of asylum seekers to Democratic-led cities in other states. The governor recently introduced a roughly 1,000ft line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande to stop migrants from entering the US.This week the justice department sued Abbott over the floating barrier, claiming that Texas unlawfully installed it without permission between the border cities of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Mexico. The White House has also raised humanitarian and environmental concerns. Abbott sent Biden a letter that defended Texas’s right to install the barrier and tweeted: “Texas has the sovereign authority to defend our border, under the US Constitution and the Texas Constitution.”The lawsuit is not the first time the Biden administration has sued Texas over its actions on the border. In 2021 the attorney general, Merrick Garland, accused the state of usurping and even interfering with the federal government’s responsibility to enforce immigration laws after Abbott empowered state troopers to stop vehicles carrying migrants on the basis that they could increase the spread of Covid-19.But it is not just a Democratic president feeling the backlash. Even the supreme court, now heavily tilted to the right by Trump’s appointment, is facing defiance from states over rulings that they do not like.The court made a surprise decision that upheld a lower court ruling that a map in Alabama – with one Black-majority district out of seven in a state that is 27% Black – probably violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black residents. But six weeks later the Alabama state legislature approved a new map that failed to create a second majority-Black congressional district.A group of voters who won the supreme court decision say that they will challenge the new plan. A three-judge panel has set a 14 August hearing and could eventually order a special master to draw new lines for the state. The outcome is likely to have consequences across the country as the case again weighs the requirements of the Voting Rights Act in redistricting.Chris England, a state representative and Black Democrat, noted that change in Alabama has often happened only through federal court order. “Alabama does what Alabama does,” he said in a speech. “Ultimately, what we are hoping for, I guess, at some point, is that the federal court does what it always does to Alabama: forces us to do the right thing. Courts always have to come in and save us from ourselves.”In Florida, meanwhile, DeSantis declared that the supreme court had been “wrong” when its 2008 ruling found it unconstitutional to use capital punishment in child sexual battery cases. He signed a law – authorising the state to pursue the death penalty when an adult is convicted of sexually battering a child under 12 – intended to get the court, now under conservative control, to reconsider that decision.The posturing comes within the context of years of anti-Washington rhetoric from politicians led by Trump, who has long railed against the “deep state” and vowed to “drain the swamp”. Other Republicans have used Washington as a punchbag, a symbol of political elites out of touch with ordinary people.Jacobs added: “This has been a battle that’s been going on for hundreds of years. At this moment you’ve got this toxic mixing of state resentment of the national government when in the hands of the other party along with this really virulent populism. What’s unique about this period is pushing back against and defying Washington is now good politics. Ron DeSantis’s main campaign theme is: I said no to Washington.”Trump has also spent years sowing distrust in institutions and fanning online conspiracy theories. Loss of faith in elections led a violent crowd to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The supreme court has compounded the problem with a series of extremist rulings and ethics scandals. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that the court has a 30% approval rating among registered voters – the lowest since Quinnipiac first asked the question in 2004.Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said: “The integrity of the court has definitely been eroded. Both liberals and conservatives have less faith and feel less obligated to follow its rulings. It’s entirely a situation of the supreme court’s own making.“The justices have been acting politically, the shadow docket [where the court rules on procedural matters], the refusal to be transparent about ethics and gifts, and some of the comments that Justice [Samuel] Alito for example has made in public forums that sound more like a politician’s comments.“When the court acts politically then people see it as a political institution. It just follows as night follows day. It’s going to be difficult to have state governors and legislatures follow supreme court rulings when they have less faith in the integrity of the body and the general public has less faith.”Yet until recently, talk of rebellion against the government had seemed to belong only in the history books. The supremacy clause in the US constitution says the federal government, when acting in pursuance of the constitution, trumps states’ rights.In the mid-19th century, southern states believed that they had the right to nullify federal laws or even secede from the Union if their interests, including the exploitation of enslaved labour, were threatened. With the north increasingly turning against slavery, 11 southern states seceded in 1860-61, forming the Confederate States of America. It took four years of civil war to reunite the nation and abolish slavery.A century later, the landmark supreme court case of Brown v Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, but many southern states resisted integration and refused to comply with the decision. President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a case known as the “Little Rock Nine”.In 1963, the Alabama governor, George Wallace, declared “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to express resistance to the court-ordered integration. In response, President John F Kennedy federalised national guard troops and deployed them to the university, forcing Wallace to yield.Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Sometimes we have the idea that the local level is where grassroots democracy thrives but actually, in the history of American democracy, federal power has been used for ill but it’s also been used as a democratising force. We haven’t seen this confrontation reach this same level since the 1950s, 1960s.”Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, added: “The major breakthroughs in American democracy have come when the federal government has either passed national legislation – think of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act – or had to intervene.“Major moments of backsliding have happened when the federal government turns a blind eye to what’s happening in the states. The 1890s are replete with examples of the supreme court essentially turning a blind eye to abuses at the state level. So in a way the confrontation between the states and the federal government is a confrontation over democracy.” More

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      Mitch McConnell should step down as Senate minority leader after freezing, GOP senator says

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      Mitch McConnell, the 81-year-old Republican leader in the US Senate who suffered a public health scare this week, should step down from the role he has filled since 2007, an unnamed GOP senator said.McConnell, from Kentucky, remains “intellectually sharp” on “a whole host of issues including baseball”, the anonymous senator told NBC News.But they added: “People think that he’s not hearing well. I think that he is just not processing.”At a news conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, McConnell stopped talking mid-sentence, standing mutely for 23 seconds until he was led away from reporters.He returned to say: “I’m fine.”The moment sparked worries about McConnell’s mental fitness, especially after he was hospitalised and treated for a concussion and a broken rib after a fall in March and amid reports of “multiple” falls this year, including a slip on a snowy day in Finland. McConnell had polio as a child, affecting his gait as an adult.On Thursday, NBC, which reported a fall at Reagan airport this month – described as a “face plant” by one witness – said Republicans were publicly backing McConnell to carry on.“I don’t know how much longer he will want to serve, but I support him as long as he wants the job,” said John Cornyn of Texas, a possible successor.But NBC also said other Republicans, speaking off the record, were not quite so sure.The anonymous senator told NBC “I kind of do” think McConnell should step down.“I’d hate to see it forced on him,” the senator said. “You can do these things with dignity, or it becomes less dignified. And I hope he does it in a dignified way – for his own legacy and reputation.”The senator also told NBC McConnell was relying more on his lieutenants, John Barrasso of Wyoming and John Thune of South Dakota.“Lately … he’s not the go-to guy for, ‘How are things going?’ … It’s been noticeable in the last few weeks.”On Friday, McConnell’s office said he planned to serve his full term, which would runs through 2026, when he would turn 84.McConnell’s freeze was just the latest reminder that the most US leaders are much older than many in other democracies.Joe Biden, 80, is the oldest ever president, nearly two decades older than the median age of world leaders, which Pew Research found to be 62. While Biden is younger than President Paul Biya of Cameroon, who at 89 is the oldest head of state, the US president could be a grandfather to Gabriel Boric, the president of Chile, or Sanna Marin, who stepped down as prime minister of Finland last month. Both are 37.Biden is, however, years younger than some members of Congress.McConnell is not the oldest senator. The Vermont independent Bernie Sanders is 81, the Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley is 89 and the California Democrat Dianne Feinstein is 90.At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Feinstein had to be prompted by a fellow senator and a staffer after appearing to misunderstand a point of procedure. Calls for Feinstein to retire have multiplied after she was absent from Washington for an extended period this year. She has said she will complete her term.Many lawmakers in Congress are in their 70s. The median age of the Senate is 65.3, the website FiveThirtyEight calculated, the oldest ever, versus a median age of 38.8 in the US as a whole. At 64, the Senate has the seventh-highest average age of any global parliamentary body, the Inter-Parliamentary Union calculates, ahead of countries with older populations including Japan, Italy and Greece.Biden’s age has raised questions about whether he should stand for a second term. The president recently fell on stage in Colorado, walks with a careful gait and is prone to verbal slips. He may face Donald Trump, 77, at the polls in 2024. Polling shows many Americans think neither should run.Asked about Biden’s age, the White House points to accomplishments including the 2020 election victory, helping Democrats stave off losses in 2022 and getting legislation through Congress.
      Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Trump, DeSantis and top Republican candidates to share stage at Iowa event

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      Nearly every major Republican presidential candidate will share a stage in the early voting state of Iowa on Friday night, as Donald Trump continues to dominate in the polls despite his numerous legal liabilities.Thirteen candidates will appear at the Iowa Republican party’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, giving them an opportunity to address donors and local party leaders with less than six months left before the state’s crucial caucuses.Trump has cemented his lead in Iowa, even as the former president braces for a third criminal indictment. According to a Fox Business poll taken this month, Trump has the support of 46% of likely Iowa caucus-goers, giving him a 30-point advantage over his closest rival, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.DeSantis will also deliver remarks at the Lincoln Dinner on Friday, offering the governor an opportunity to reset his faltering campaign. DeSantis recently cut a third of his campaign staff, and was forced to cancel two fundraising events last weekend due to lack of donor interest. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of national polls, DeSantis’s support among likely Republican primary voters has dipped by roughly 8 points since the beginning of the month.DeSantis’s recent stumbles appear to have emboldened some of his primary opponents to go on the attack against the governor. Speaking to reporters in Iowa on Thursday, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina criticized DeSantis over his support for new educational standards in Florida requiring middle school teachers to tell students that enslaved people learned skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit”.“What slavery was really about was separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives,” said Scott, who is the only Black Republican serving in the Senate. “It was just devastating. So I would hope that every person in our country – and certainly running for president – would appreciate that.”Scott’s primary prospects look to be on the rise, as polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, another early voting state, show him in third place behind Trump and DeSantis. But Trump remains the candidate to beat, as the former president leads DeSantis by 37 points in FiveThirtyEight’s average of national polls.Trump has maintained his frontrunner status even in the face of mounting legal threats. The former president was informed this month that he is a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of efforts to interfere in the 2020 election, suggesting an indictment could be on the horizon. On Thursday, Smith also filed a superseding indictment in Florida, expanding the scope of charges against Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Trump has already pleaded not guilty to a third set of criminal charges in New York, and prosecutors in Georgia may soon indict the former president for attempting to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the battleground state.Trump will probably address the charges against him on Friday, as he has taken any opportunity to denounce the four criminal investigations as “witch-hunts”. Trump’s primary opponents have struggled in their attempts to address the indictments, torn between supporting a former president who remains popular with the Republican base and highlighting a major vulnerability of the current frontrunner for the nomination.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked last week about the news that Trump is a target in Smith’s investigation of election interference efforts, DeSantis said the then-president “should have come out more forcefully” when a group of his supporters violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.“But to try to criminalize that, that’s a different issue entirely,” DeSantis said. “We want to be in a situation where you don’t have one side just constantly trying to put the other side in jail, and that unfortunately is what we’re seeing now.” More

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      Why do Republicans hate the Barbie movie? – podcast

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      Moviegoers flocked to cinemas last weekend for the highly anticipated release of two of the year’s biggest movies – Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. But conservatives have slated Barbie for being, among other things, too ‘woke’, anti-men and even … Chinese propaganda.
      Is the outrage real or is it just another example of politics employing a culture war to rally the base? Jonathan Freedland and Amanda Marcotte try to figure it out

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Mitch McConnell fell earlier this month, before freezing mid-sentence this week

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      Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, suffered an initially unreported fall earlier this month, before a very public health scare this week revived questions about his age and fitness.On Wednesday, while speaking to reporters at the US Capitol, the 81-year-old appeared to freeze for nearly 20 seconds. Another Republican senator, John Barrasso of Wyoming, a doctor, then escorted his leader away from the cameras.Only four months ago, McConnell, who suffered from polio as a child, affecting his gait, fell and sustained a concussion, leading to a prolonged absence from Capitol Hill.On Wednesday, he returned to work and told reporters he was “fine” shortly after his incident. An aide told reporters McConnell “felt lightheaded and stepped away for a moment. He came back to handle Q and A.”But NBC News then reported that McConnell also tripped and fell earlier this month, suffering a “face plant” while disembarking a plane at Reagan airport, according to an anonymous witness.Another source told NBC McConnell now uses a wheelchair as a precaution in crowded airports. McConnell did not comment on the NBC report.As Republicans relentlessly claim Joe Biden, 80, is too old to be president, McConnell’s freeze and news of another fall revived questions about his own age.After McConnell’s awkward moment in front of reporters, Helaine Olen, a Washington Post columnist, said: “I hope Mitch McConnell has a quick recovery, but both Democrats and Republicans need to hold honest discussions about how age is not just a number.”From the right, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative youth group, said: “The stamina and health of elected leaders has become a major problem in American politics.”Naming McConnell alongside Biden, the Democratic congresswoman and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (83), and two Senate Democrats, Dianne Feinstein of California (90) and the Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman (53 but having suffered a stroke and sought treatment for depression), Kirk added: “These politicians have been entrenched or installed by corrupt party structures, but they are too old or too feeble to run the country. Resign.”On the record, however, Republican senators expressed support for McConnell. One senator told NBC McConnell was “definitely slower with his gait” but said that in party meetings, the minority leader “doesn’t address” his age and his health.McConnell, a ruthless partisan warrior who has described himself as “stronger than mule piss”, entered the Senate in 1984, when he was 42. He has led Republicans since 2007, in the majority between 2015 and 2021, a spell which saw him oversee the rightwing capture of the supreme court among other successes.Returning to work on Wednesday, McConnell said Biden, a Senate colleague for 24 years, had called.“The president called to check on me,” McConnell said. “I told him I got sandbagged.”That was a reference to the fall Biden, 80, suffered last month at the US air force academy in Colorado, and the president’s subsequent joke to the press. More

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      in Elections

      Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell freezes during remarks to reporters – video

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      The Kentucky senator stopped speaking for about 20 seconds during a press event at the US Capitol. He was ushered away from the podium but later returned to the press conference and answered questions. McConnell, 81, was out of the Senate for almost six weeks earlier this year after falling and hitting his head. His office later said he suffered a concussion and fractured a rib More