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      So what if Biden trips up? On the political stage his footwork is the fanciest seen in decades | Will Hutton

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      He stumbles when coming down the stairs of Air Force One; he trips over a sandbag on stage to fall flat on his face when handing out diplomas at the US air force academy; he muddles his words with alarming regularity. It is easy to write off President Joe Biden as a senile, 80-year-old duffer. Yet he is already being regarded by many Democrats, and some Republicans, as significant a Democrat president as Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson. He is dramatically changing the face of the US around Democrat priorities – reindustrialisation to support blue-collar jobs and wages, wholeheartedly fighting climate change, investing massively in science and education, doing more for the poorest and, not least, rejuvenating the US’s decaying public infrastructure.But, unlike his famous predecessors, he has never had their big majorities in Congress, and after November’s midterm elections he does not even control the House of Representatives. He has had to rely on guile, sheer political craft and reading the Washington runes better than any alive. For the last few months we were being warned of financial Armageddon, as an implacable Republican party forced the US to default on its debts, only to be avoided if the administration agreed to its demands for swingeing public spending cuts to avoid going through an artificial debt ceiling limit. Tomorrow was to be the witching day when default occurred and a financial crisis engulfed the world. Instead, last week the wily Biden again outfoxed his opponents, and struck a deal massively weighted in his favour that was voted for by overwhelming majorities. It was an extraordinary victory and, when invited to claim it as such, he replied: “You think that’s going to help me get it passed?” First rule in Washington politics, from which the affable Biden has never deviated: always allow the defeated to save face because you’re soon going to have to cut another deal with them.Yet what lay behind the Republican retreat is important not just for US politics but our own. The ever more ideological US right, so influential among British Tories, has been abandoning fiscal conservatism as a dead end for some time. It goes through the motions of bloodcurdling threats to cuts in public spending, but it does not have the bottle to face the political consequences – the decimation of social programmes beloved of its own base and which any Republican presidential nominee needs preserved to have a hope in 2024. Instead, the new terrain is the fight against “the woke” – from banning drag queen reading hours to penalising investment companies that invest on “environmental, societal and governance” principles – laced with traditional social conservatism fighting against abortion along with a dose of America-first nationalism. It is, in effect, Donald Trump’s politics. The ghastly cocktail might work in the US, although I doubt not enough to win national presidential elections. It certainly won’t work in Britain.Biden’s negotiating tactics were textbook. Publicly, he took seriously the threats of Kevin McCarthy, leader of the House of Representatives, to cut $4.5tn of spending over a decade, talking up the threat and flying back early from the G7 summit to negotiate, showing the depth of his concern. Privately, he knew the Republican would back off: cuts of that scale would mean that social programmes would be decimated, given that so much federal spending is on defence, which the Republicans did not want to touch. This was not 2011, when the Republicans used the same tactic and meant it, when their libertarian tax-cutting right were in control; now they are big spenders too.Biden read the mood swing well: he knows his opponents better than they know themselves. Taking over the key negotiations himself, I am told, he forced the realities home on McCarthy, who successively scaled back his demand to a headline cuts figure of $1.5tn, which helped him save face. But even that was vastly overstated because of a series of side, off-balance-sheet deals. Federal spending will end up by being reduced by 0.2%, if that, over the next 10 years, while all the huge spending programmes on chips, infrastructure and green investment that Biden has negotiated through are intact. A stunning victory.There are problems ahead: the US, accounting for 15% of world GDP, can comfortably afford spending on this scale, but it will just have to increase its tax base. The Internal Revenue Service has been hollowed out over the years. As a first step, Biden wants to build up its capacity to go after the scarcely taxed US super-rich – one area where McCarthy did get a spending cut, if not decisive. But before 2030 the US will have to raise taxes. This will not lower its growth: as the Institute of Government recently reported, there is little or no evidence that tax cuts have any impact on growth. But it will force a huge political battle into the open.Meanwhile, Bidenomics defines the new consensus, what US treasury secretary Janet Yellen describes as “modern supply side” economics, set out in perhaps the best statement of social democratic economic analysis ever to come out of Washington, the 2022 Economic Report of the President. In her recent trip to Washington, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, met the principal architects, including Yellen, all endorsing her own version of modern supply side economics she has been developing since getting the job in 2021. At its simplest, this is a commitment to ambitious public investment, particularly over net zero, in a deliberative partnership with business as the foundation for economic growth. It is working in the US. It will work in the UK.British Tories are in a parallel position to McCarthy’s Republicans. They may deplore public spending and the big state in principle, but they shrink from the consequences of putting their ideology into action. They find themselves giving aid to new technologies and supporting the green transition as political and economic necessities without believing in either – so their approach is tepid, ad hoc, unconvinced. They are tempted to follow the US right into the poisonous thickets of being anti-woke – but Britain is a much more liberal, easygoing society than the heartlands of the US midwest. And round the corner comes the spectre of having to raise, not cut, taxes. It may be that both Britain and the US will be in the throes of national elections in autumn 2024. For the first time in 40 years, not only does the liberal left have the better argument; with a following wind, they can go all the way. More

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      The Supermajority review: How the supreme court trumped America

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      Michael Waldman ran the speechwriting department in Bill Clinton’s White House. His new book about the conservative supermajority which dominates the supreme court is written with the verve of great campaign oratory.Waldman is also a learned lawyer, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and a talented popular historian. His new book focuses on three horrendous decisions the court rendered at the end of its term one year ago, but it includes a brisk history the court of the last 200 years, from the disastrous lows of Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) and Plessy v Ferguson (1896) to the highs of Brown v Board of Education (1954) and Obergefell v Hodges (2015).But the longest analysis is devoted to those three days in June 2022 when the court “crammed decades of social change into three days”.Waldman writes: “It overturned Roe v Wade [on abortion] … putting at risk all other privacy rights. It radically loosened curbs on guns, amid an epidemic of mass shootings. And it hobbled the ability of government agencies to protect public health and safety and stop climate change.”These decisions were the work “of a little group of willful men and women, ripping up long-settled aspects of American life for no reason beyond the fact that they can”.Waldman describes how earlier extreme decisions of the court provoked gigantic national backlashes.The civil war started just four years after the court held in Dred Scott that African Americans could not sue in federal court because they could not be citizens of the United States.In May 1935, the “Black Monday decisions” obliterated key parts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, including striking down the National Recovery Administration. Those rulings led to Roosevelt’s unsuccessful plan to expand the size of the court, which in turn led the court to reverse its position on the New Deal, suddenly upholding Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act. Referring to the number of justices on the court, one newspaper humorist called it “the switch in time that saved nine”.Waldman describes the current make-up of the court as the ultimate outcome of the longest backlash of all – the one to the court led by Earl Warren, who crafted the unanimous opinion in Brown, outlawing segregation in public schools.Equally important were decisions requiring legislative districts to have equal populations. Before Reynolds v Sims in 1964, nearly 40% of the population of California lived in Los Angeles but the state constitution awarded that county just one of 40 state senators. Proclaiming the revolutionary doctrine of “one person, one vote”, the court said: “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres.” By 1968, 93 of 99 state legislatures had redrawn their districts to comply.But these vital building blocks of modern American democracy coincided with the dramatic social changes of the 1960s, including the fight for racial equality and the explosion of sexual freedom.“The backlash to the 1960s lasted much longer than the 1960s did,” Waldman observes. “Most of us have spent most of our lives living in it.”Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign was the first to capitalize on this backlash. A young campaign aide, Kevin Phillips, explained the plan to the journalist Garry Wills: “The whole secret of politics” was “knowing who hates who”, a theory that reached its apotheosis 50 years later with the ascendance of Donald Trump.The problem for America was that most of the energy on the left dissipated after the election of Nixon. At the same time, the right began a decades-long battle to turn back the clock. For 50 years, the right has had overwhelming organizational energy: it built a huge infrastructure of think tanks and political action committees that culminated with the election of Trump and his appointment of the three justices who cemented the rightwing supermajority.Recent reports have highlighted the enormous amounts of money that have directly benefitted justices John Roberts and Clarence Thomas (never mind Thomas’s own gifts from Harlan Crow) through payments to their wives. Waldman reminds us how long this has been going on. Way back in 2012, Common Cause charged that Thomas failed to disclose nearly $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation to his wife, forcing him amend 20 years of filings.Waldman is particularly good at explaining how earlier rulings have accelerated the infusion of gigantic sums that have corrupted American politics. Most important of course was Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, in 2010, when five justices including Roberts “undid a century of campaign finance law”.Citizens United made it possible for corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums in federal elections as long as they plausibly pretended they were independent of the candidates they backed. As Waldman writes, quickly “that proved illusory, as presidential contenders … raised hundreds of millions of dollars for their campaigns, all of it supposedly independent”.This was the beginning of the Roberts majority’s use of the first amendment guarantee of free speech “to undermine democracy, a constitutional contradiction”. Two years after Citizens United, the court eliminated “a long-standing cap on the amount” individuals could give to federal candidates.These rulings “remade American politics”, Waldman writes. “In the new Gilded Age of fantastically concentrated wealth, billionaires again dominated the electoral system.”The shift was dramatic “and largely unremarked”. In 2010, billionaires spent about $31m in federal races. A decade later they spent $2.2bn. Last year, Peter Thiel provided nearly $30m in “independent funds” to support JD Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona.Waldman concludes that the court has become a serious threat to American democracy. He suggests our only hope is that Democratic successes in last year’s midterms – many based on fury over the fall of Roe v Wade – mark the beginning of a backlash against the rightwing revolution the court now shamelessly promotes.
      The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      Chris Christie just wants to ‘bludgeon’ Trump, Fox News’s Hannity complains

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      Chris Christie has promised to take the fight to Donald Trump when he launches a long-shot Republican presidential campaign next week, but he seems likely to have to do so without help from one key voice at Fox News.The former New Jersey governor just wants to “bludgeon” Trump, the primetime host and close Trump ally Sean Hannity said on Friday, adding that he did not want to give Christie any airtime.“I have no problem giving airtime to any of the candidates who want to come on and give their point of view,” Hannity said.“But I’m looking at Chris Christie, he left office as governor of New Jersey, 13% approval rating, 14% in another poll, and I’m looking at this and I’m saying, ‘OK, you’re only getting in this race cause you hate Donald Trump and want to bludgeon Donald Trump.’“I don’t see Chris Christie actually wanting to run and win the nomination. He views it as his role to be the enforcer and to attack Trump.“That’s not a very inspiring agenda, and I don’t even know if I’m interested in facilitating or listening to him babble on when he left office with nobody in New Jersey even liking him.”Hannity facilitated a friendly hearing for Trump this week, hosting a recorded Iowa town hall.As broadcast, the event did not reference Trump’s $5m penalty for sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E Jean Carroll or his lies about electoral fraud, the broadcast of which cost Fox $787.5m in a suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems and which remains at issue in a suit from Smartmatic, another election machines company.Christie took office in New Jersey in 2009 but suffered in Republican eyes first when he was seen to be too close to Barack Obama after Superstorm Sandy, then when he became ensnared in the “Bridgegate” scandal over political payback.On leaving office in 2015, Christie’s approval ratings were at historic lows. He ran for president in 2016 but only made an impact with a debate-stage destruction of the Florida senator Marco Rubio. Quick to endorse Trump, Christie stayed loyal even after he was fired from planning the White House transition, Christie has said over bad blood with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law whose father Christie helped jail.Christie became an ABC analyst and wrote two books, a memoir and a prescription for how Republicans could win back power. He broke from Trump after the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, which Trump incited in service of his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.In his second book, Republican Rescue, Christie said his party needed to “renounce the conspiracy theories and truth deniers, the ones who know better and the ones who are just plain nuts”.Republicans have not done so. Trump dominates polling despite unprecedented legal jeopardy including criminal charges in New York, over a hush-money payment, and potential indictments in state and federal investigations of his election subversion.Though Christie has denied he is a “paid assassin”, aiming to take Trump down, he has made plain that he hopes to put his pugilistic political skills to good use.Trump, Christie told Politico, “can’t be a credible figure on the world stage; he can’t be a credible figure interacting with Congress; he will get nothing done”.Trump’s vulnerabilities, Christie said, needed to be “called out … by somebody who knows him. Nobody knows Donald Trump better than I do”.An unnamed former Republican candidate said: “No one else has the balls to do it.” More

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      Biden signs debt ceiling bill after months-long standoff, avoiding default

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      Joe Biden signed a bill on Saturday to suspend the US debt ceiling, ending a months-long standoff with the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and averting a federal default that could have upended the world economy.Economists warned that a default could have caused the US unemployment rate to double while significantly damaging gross domestic product.In a televised address from the Oval Office on Friday evening, Biden said: “Passing this budget agreement was critical. The stakes could not have been higher.“If we had failed to reach an agreement on the budget, there were extreme voices threatening to take America, for the first time in our 247-year history, into default on our national debt. Nothing, nothing would have been more irresponsible.”The signing of the bill came one day after the Democratic-held Senate passed it in a bipartisan vote, 63-36, sending the proposal to Biden’s desk a few days before the 5 June deadline. A day earlier, the bill passed the Republican-controlled House by 314-117.“It was critical to reach an agreement, and it’s very good news for the American people,” Biden said on Friday. “No one got everything they wanted. But the American people got what they needed.”In a statement on Saturday, the White House thanked Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress “for their partnership”.The White House also tweeted video of Biden signing the bill in the Oval Office.Heralding the “safeguarding [of] Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and fulfilling our scared obligation to our veterans”, Biden said: “Now, we continue the work of building the strongest economy in the world.”The bill signing followed the release on Friday of strong monthly jobs figures.The new law will suspend the borrowing limit until January 2025, ensuring the issue will not resurface before the next presidential election.In negotiations with Biden, McCarthy secured concessions aimed at cutting government spending. The legislation includes a modest reduction in non-defense discretionary spending as well as changes to work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs.The concessions were a partial defeat for Biden, who spent months insisting he would not negotiate and repeatedly called on Congress to pass a bill with no strings attached. The president was forced to the negotiating table after House Republicans passed a debt ceiling bill in late April.But as he discussed the compromise bill, Biden expressed pride that he and his advisers were able to rebuff many Republican demands. The bill passed by House Republicans would have enacted much steeper cuts and broader work requirements for benefits while raising the borrowing limit until 2024.“We averted an economic crisis, an economic collapse,” Biden said on Friday. “We’re cutting spending and bringing the deficits down at the same time. We’re protecting important priorities – from Social Security to Medicare to veterans to our transformational investments in infrastructure and clean energy.”Biden’s cause for celebration was a source of outrage among hard-right Republicans. The debt ceiling bill was opposed by 71 Republicans in the House and 17 in the Senate, who argued it did too little to address the federal debt of more than $31tn. Members of the House Freedom caucus repeatedly attempted to block the compromise bill.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“President Biden is happily sending Americans over yet another fiscal cliff, with far too many swampy Republicans behind the wheel of a ‘deal’ that fails miserably to address the real reason for our debt crisis: SPENDING,” Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, chair of the House Freedom caucus, said on Wednesday.Progressives harbored their own concerns, saying the cuts and work requirements amounted to a betrayal of voters. Five progressives in the Senate, including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and 46 in the House decided to vote against the bill.“I could not in good conscience vote for a bill that cuts programs for the most vulnerable while refusing to ask billionaires to pay a penny more in taxes,” Sanders wrote in a Guardian op-ed on Friday. “Deficit reduction cannot just be about cutting programs that working families, the children, the sick, the elderly and the poor depend upon.”A particular source of anguish for progressives was the bill’s handling of defense spending. While non-defense priorities like education and healthcare will have to endure cuts, the Pentagon budget is set to grow. The inflated spending outlined in the bill did not go far enough for defense hawks already weighing options to spend more. Progressives saw the uneven distribution of cuts as an insult.“At a time when we spend more on the military than the next 10 nations combined I could not, in good conscience, vote for a bill that increases funding for the bloated Pentagon and large defense contractors that continue to make huge profits by fleecing American taxpayers with impunity,” Sanders wrote.In the end, the vast majority of Democrats voted to prevent a default.Biden’s signing of the bill prevents that outcome for now, but lawmakers will need to take up the matter again before January 2025, when the new suspension expires.Many Democrats and some economists have called for the elimination of the debt ceiling to remove any threat of default in future, progressives suggesting Biden can unilaterally do away with the borrowing limit by invoking the 14th amendment of the constitution. The amendment states that the validity of the public debt of America “shall not be questioned”.If Biden were to follow that path, the recent battle over the debt ceiling could prove to be the last.“The fact of the matter is that this bill was totally unnecessary,” Sanders wrote. “I look forward to the day when [Biden] exercises this authority and puts an end, once and for all, to the outrageous actions of the extreme right wing to hold our entire economy hostage in order to protect their corporate sponsors.” More

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      in Elections

      ‘They fought for freedom’: the nightly vigil to sanctify the January 6 rioters

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      The clock had just struck 9pm when Jeff Sabol, a Colorado man accused of dragging a police officer down a flight of stairs at the US Capitol on January 6 and beating him, placed a call from inside Washington’s jail.Dozens of yards and several layers of concrete and razor wire away, on E Street Southeast, Tommy Tatum, a hulking Mississippian who had been present at the Capitol on January 6 but not arrested, stood with a microphone in one hand and a cellphone in the other.“Hey, are you guys out there? We’ve had some technical difficulties for a variety of reasons,” Sabol’s voice rang out from the phone and over a sound system, drawing cheers from a group of about 15 people who had gathered, carrying American flags and wearing shirts with slogans such as “Abolish the FBI”.Sabol’s voice grew echoey, and the sounds of others filled the room behind him. “Thirty seconds!” he cried.And then, the two groups, one confined behind the jail’s walls over charges they attacked the Capitol in a failed attempt to keep Donald Trump from losing power and the other made up of their friends and loved ones on the sidewalk outside, sang the American national anthem in unison: “O say can you see …”Thus concluded the 303rd evening of the “Freedom Corner”, perhaps the only regular public protest by Trump supporters in America’s capital city, where the demand is accountability – not for the former president, but for the government they believe is persecuting them.The target of their demonstration is Washington DC’s city jail, where an overwhelmingly Black inmate population has long endured terrible conditions. Over the past two years, the Freedom Corner protesters have been joined by some of the hundreds of people swept up in the sprawling federal investigation into the violence on January 6, prompting demonstrators to gather outside on a corner sandwiched between the building and the tilted headstones of the Congressional Cemetery to decry the injustice within.“These are really good guys. They’re fathers, they’re uncles, they’re veterans. Most of them have served this country. They fought for us, they fought for our freedom,” said Helena Gibson, a regular attendee of the vigil who was present at the Capitol on January 6 but said she did not enter the building.“Because these are really great amazing mentors, stand-up men, they don’t deserve what’s happening to them.”The storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters immediately after a speech by the then president has been linked to nine deaths, and saw the halls of the 223-year-old building turned into a war zone. Rioters surrounded and beat overwhelmed police officers, sent lawmakers and the then vice-president, Mike Pence, fleeing and attacked with such violence his Secret Service detail asked others to say goodbye to their families for them.But the Republican party’s right wing has invested in downplaying the incident, even though the mayhem played out on live television, was explored in detail by a bipartisan congressional committee who said Trump and his allies may have broken the law, and is the subject of an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith that could lead to charges against the former president.On the same day last March when the Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired an episode of his now-cancelled show featuring footage he claimed proves the January 6 rioters were, in fact, “sightseers”, the Republican congressman Mike Collins tweeted: “I’ve seen enough. Release all J6 political prisoners now.”In the unlikely event that happens, they would be met with open arms on Freedom Corner. Ringed in by orange traffic barriers and watched by several police cars, attendees set out snacks on a portable table, run the banners of Donald Trump and the United States up a flagpole and livestreamed the entire two-and-a-half-hour gathering on multiple cellphones.“I definitely think people committed crimes that day. I mean, it’s never been our opinion, my opinion, that no one should be charged,” said Nicole Reffitt, a Texas woman whose husband, Guy Reffitt, was last year sentenced to seven and a quarter years in prison after a jury convicted him of obstructing Congress, interfering with police officers and threatening his own children – one of whom turned him in to the authorities.“I believe my husband was overly charged. And, you know, and then he was persecuted for the events of that day, and not necessarily for what he really did.”The vigils began last year on the day her husband was sentenced, said Reffitt, one of the first attendees at Freedom Corner, along with Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot dead by police in the Capitol during the attack. Since then, they have attracted activists from across the country.Carrying a pole with a US flag over her shoulder, as some of the rioters did during the attack, Jamie Crowe said she has traveled to Freedom Corner more than 30 times from Pennsylvania “to support the people that are patriots that marched to the Capitol peacefully”.Though polls have found about a quarter of Republican voters approve of January 6, a majority of Americans do not share that view. Crowe said she was not in Washington when the attack happened, but watched coverage on television.Asked how she could view the same images the rest of America did yet reach a different conclusion about the riot, Crowe said: “I love this country more than you can imagine.”As she spoke, the vigil was holding its nightly roll call of those who died and had been arrested. “Hero,” the crowd intoned with the bang of a tambourine after each name.“And we’ll do like we do every night. We’ll say her name,” Tamara Perryman announced after the names were read, then led the crowd in repeating, “Ashli Babbitt, Ashli Babbitt.”“We just want justice, fair justice, like anybody would want,” said Perryman, whose husband, Brian Jackson, was arrested last year on charges related to lobbing a flagpole at officers defending the Capitol.“If throwing that flag was truly assault, then give him his assault charge and let him go home. Because that is not a year in prison, nor is it eight to nine years in prison [the sentence he could face’],” Perryman said.Last year, 34 January 6 defendants, including Reffitt’s husband, Guy, signed a document submitted in a federal court filing asking that they be moved to the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay if conditions in Washington’s jail do not improve.“My husband’s never been in jail, so I had no idea how the system was,” Reffitt said, describing how her husband has endured inedible food and has slept without a pillow, because prisoners are not allowed to have them.“These are humans in here, and this is not how you rehabilitate anybody,” Reffitt said.Melissa Wasser, policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, sees plenty to protest at the city’s jail. Her group has sued over detention conditions, and documented everything from flooding in the facility’s showers to instances where staff has punished prisoners by withholding food and water.“I’m glad that there there’s been more coverage of the jail in these conditions. Again, you know, it should not have taken the complaints of these white January 6 defendants and their families for people to act on this,” Wasser said. “Local residents, advocates, family members of the mostly Black residents have been raising these problems for years.” A spokesperson for the city’s department of corrections declined to comment.Statistics released in January show 90% of those in the department’s custody are Black in a city where the group makes up about 45% of the population. In a database National Public Radio maintains of January 6 defendants, most appear to be white.“These guys and their families were shocked beyond belief. They could not believe that an American citizen of any stripe, of any race, of any criminal background could be treated this way,” said Joe McBride, an attorney who has represented multiple January 6 defendants, three of whom ended up in the capital city’s lock-up.“These guys were like, ‘I have rights, rights, I have rights.’ And I had to explain to them, at great pain, that their government doesn’t give a flying fuck about them.”But McBride is no fan of detainees’ tendency to call up the Freedom Corner on prison phones to chat, nor of the developing community of counter-protesters.“It was good for a time, but it appears to me that that event has reached its natural conclusion, and could potentially now be causing more harm than good,” he said.In a solidly Democratic city where many residents feel put upon by repeated instances of pro-Trump demonstrators showing up from out of town during his presidency, Freedom Corner may be Washington’s most hated regular protest, and has attracted a dedicated group of opponents.On Monday’s Memorial Day holiday, the Freedom Corner crew marched from the Capitol to their usual spot about two miles away, but were joined along their route by their chief nemesis: a livestreamer named Anarchy Princess.“Terrorists coming, watch out, there’s terrorists behind me,” the counter-protester, wearing a baseball cap and aviator sunglasses, cried into a megaphone as the group walked. “The Nazis are behind me, Trump’s little cry baby losers, they insurrected the Capitol, are behind me. Fuck Ashli Babbitt!”As the group neared their destination, where a large and noisy group of counter-protesters had also massed, video showed Witthoeft – Babbitt’s mother – pushing Anarchy Princess, and later grabbing a megaphone she was using to broadcast siren noises and smashing it on the ground. Police arrested Witthoeft the following day.Witthoeft was released later on Tuesday evening, and told the Guardian she planned to keep the vigils up “until I feel like I’m done doing what I need to do, and I don’t feel that way yet”. Anarchy Princess could not be reached for comment.After finishing their singing of the national anthem on Tuesday evening, the group on the corner trained their eyes on the prison’s windows, where January 6 detainees have, in the past, been able to make their lights flicker in a tribute to their streetside supporters. That wasn’t happening that night.“They’ve moved them so we can no longer see them flashing the lights,” said a protester who went by the pseudonym Dude and sported a gray camouflage National Rifle Association hat.Perryman wasn’t so sure. Earlier in the night, Sean McHugh, who was found guilty in April of charges related to attacking Capitol police officers with bear spray, had called Freedom Corner and said he had to move cells because of a mold outbreak.“Some things truly are coincidence and just a matter of happenstance,” Perryman said. “But it is easy to get into that mindset where, ‘Oh gosh, are they really messing with me or am I just paranoid?’ You know what I mean?” More

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      Pence will not face charges over classified files found at Indiana home

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      The US Department of Justice has closed its investigation into former vice-president Mike Pence without filing any charges related to classified documents found in his Indiana home, a department official said on Friday.The department notified Pence through a letter, the official added.Representatives for Pence, who served under Donald Trump, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although the Guardian confirmed the development via a source familiar with the investigation, and a Pence spokesperson told the Washington Post Pence is “pleased but not surprised” the investigation has come to an end.Pence is expected next week to jump into the increasingly crowded Republican field for president in the 2024 election, as is former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis are currently the frontrunners for the nomination, despite Trump still being the subject of multiple criminal investigations and civil legal action.Though Pence was Trump’s vice-president during his single term, Pence has since turned against Trump in significant ways, testifying against him in front of a federal grand jury in April on the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Meanwhile, Trump has said that Pence did “something wrong” by not standing by his lies that the election was rigged and he defeated Joe Biden.After revelations of classified material found at Trump’s Florida residence last year after he left office, the National Archives called on former presidents and vice-presidents to make checks for any material that should be in the government’s possession.A lawyer for Pence had notified authorities about the discovery of records with classified markings, prompting an FBI search for records at his Indianapolis residence this year.A justice department special counsel, Jack Smith, is investigating Trump’s handling of classified materials since leaving office in January 2021.A separate special counsel was appointed to conduct an investigation after Biden reported finding some classified material in his possession. More

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      Don’t be fooled – Trump’s presidential run is gaining more and more momentum | Lloyd Green

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      The Republican field swells but the 45th president’s commanding lead holds. Like Jeb Bush – another Florida governor and defeated Trump rival – Ron DeSantis has demonstrated himself inadequate to the task. By the numbers, DeSantis trails Trump nationally and in the Sunshine state. DeSantis was born there. Trump only recently moved there. To be the man you gotta beat the man, and right now DeSantis is going nowhere fast.Ill-at-ease and plagued by a pronounced charisma deficit, DeSantis can’t even decide how to pronounce his own surname. He is 44 years old. That’s plenty of time to nail down this personal detail.Following his botched campaign rollout on Twitter, a perpetual scowl creases DeSantis’s face. He does not relish the task at hand. Presidential races are marathons, and he does not appear built for endurance.Trump administration alums fare no better. Both Mike Pence, the hapless former vice-president, and Nikki Haley, the forgettable UN ambassador, have generated little enthusiasm. They are stalled in the doldrums of single digits despite years in the public eye. Both come with the word “sell” stamped atop their foreheads.Pence’s near martyrdom on January 6 has earned few plaudits from the Republican base – a passel of enmity is more like it. His religious devotion elicits yawns and his unalloyed social conservatism in the face of modernity hurts more than it helps.On that note, Trump packed the supreme court with three justices who helped overturn Roe v Wade. He proved his point, takes credit, but is cagey about what may follow. Pence, by contrast, announces that “ending abortion is more important than politics”.That’s a losing strategy. In reliably conservative Kansas and Kentucky, voters scotched attempts to strip abortion of constitutional protections. In poker and politics, you have to know when to say “enough”.As for Haley, a former South Carolina governor, she trails Trump and DeSantis in her home state – never a good sign. Back when he was running for president, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s second secretary of state, derided her tenure at the UN as inconsequential. Plenty of Republicans seemingly concur.If any South Carolina Republican has a chance of making it on to a national ticket, it is Tim Scott, the state’s junior senator and one of three African Americans in the upper chamber. Unlike Haley, he does not evoke mockery. He projects unstudied calm; his eyes don’t glow from ambition overload.Like most Republican wannabes, however, he opposed the deal over the debt ceiling. On Thursday night, he cast his lot with the likes of socialist Bernie Sanders and progressive Elizabeth Warren and voted against raising the ceiling.Regardless, for Scott’s poise to matter, Trump would need to badly stumble. The former guy is already under felony indictment in Manhattan and stands adjudicated of sexually abusing E Jean Carroll, none of which has dented his intra-party standing.Indeed, the pending criminal charges look like a gift. Trump’s rivals fell into line. DeSantis and Pence reflexively attacked Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s district attorney. The base wouldn’t have it any other way.Whether Jack Smith, the special counsel, indicts Trump is the looming unanswered question. Still if past is prelude, the ever-growing Republican field stands to effectively boost Trump if and when he comes under increased legal fire.Going back to 2016, no allegation or bombshell proved powerful enough to sink him. In the end, all rallied around the flag. Beyond that, a bloated field stands to dilute opposition to Trump.Chris Christie is set to announce his candidacy next week. The former New Jersey governor brings backing from Wall Street in the person of Steve Cohen, owner of the New York Mets. By itself, that won’t be enough to win hearts and minds. According to a recent Monmouth poll, Christie is underwater among Republicans, 21% favorable to 47% unfavorable. He is the only challenger with unfavorable ratings.But that is not the end of the story. An ex-prosecutor, Christie is also a skilled debater. In his last run, he eviscerated Senator Marco Rubio even as he demolished his own campaign in the process.Whether Trump agrees to appear on the same debate stage later this summer is unclear. Between his huge lead and a shifting legal landscape, he could well balk on the advice of counsel.The Democrats should not mistake Trump’s legal woes as a glide path to their re-election. Joe Biden is singularly unpopular, questions about his physical and mental acuity abound, and inflation’s scars remain ever-present. His on-stage fall on Thursday at the Air Force Academy will raise further doubts.At the same time, Hunter Biden, his surviving son, is getting plenty of unwanted attention. Like Trump, he too could be indicted.Against this backdrop, the president possesses little room to maneuver. His margin for error is close to nil.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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      Kevin McCarthy’s victory lap over the debt ceiling bill could end early

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      Kevin McCarthy was all smiles on Wednesday night after the House passed the debt ceiling bill, crafted by the Republican speaker and Joe Biden, in a resounding, bipartisan vote of 314 to 117.“I’ve been thinking about this day before my vote for speaker because I knew the debt ceiling was coming,” McCarthy told reporters. “I wanted to make history. I wanted to do something no other Congress has done, that we would literally turn the ship and for the first time in quite some time, we’d spend less than we spent the year before. Tonight, we all made history.”But the details of the debt ceiling vote reveal a more nuanced picture of the dynamics in the Republican-controlled House, and they suggest McCarthy’s victory lap may soon be cut short.The debt ceiling bill, which will suspend America’s borrowing limit until 2025 and enact modest cuts to government spending, was supported by 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats in the House. Although roughly two-thirds of House Republicans voted for the bill, 71 members of McCarthy’s own conference opposed the legislation due to complaints that it did not go far enough to rein in government spending.Speaking to reporters after the final vote, McCarthy brushed off questions about why the bill he helped craft proved more popular among House Democrats than his Republican colleagues. Instead, McCarthy focused attention on his successful effort to defy Democrats’ wishes for a “clean” debt ceiling bill with no strings attached. Biden spent months insisting he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling, but the White House was ultimately dragged into talks with Republicans, McCarthy reminded reporters.“We were never going to get everybody, but we have spent four months bringing everybody together. And whether you voted for or voted against it, you wanted something more,” McCarthy said. “But history will write this is the largest [spending] cut in American history.”Members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus did not view the bill the same way. Many of them argued the deal struck by McCarthy and Biden bore little resemblance to the legislation originally passed by House Republicans last month, which would have enacted much deeper spending cuts and stricter work requirements while only raising the debt ceiling into 2024.Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, chair of the Freedom Caucus, attacked McCarthy for failing to “hold the line for the bill that we passed” in his negotiations with Biden.“The speaker himself has said on numerous occasions, the greatest threat to America is our debt, and now is the time to act. We had the time to act, and this deal fails – fails completely,” Perry said on Tuesday. “We will do everything in our power to stop it and end it now.”Those efforts fell short. After Freedom Caucus members failed to quash the bill when it came before the House rules committee on Tuesday, McCarthy’s Republican critics staged one final attempt to prevent the legislation’s passage. Twenty-nine House Republicans opposed the procedural motion to set up the final vote on the debt ceiling bill, and that resistance would have been enough to kill the legislation if Democrats had not come to McCarthy’s assistance. In the end, 52 Democrats supported the procedural motion, clearing the way for the bill’s ultimate passage.But McCarthy’s failure to advance the bill along party lines did not go unnoticed by Democrats.“It appears that you may have lost control of the floor of the House of Representatives,” said the New York representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, on the floor on Wednesday night. “Earlier today, 29 House Republicans voted to default on our nation’s debt and against an agreement that you negotiated. It’s an extraordinary act that indicates just the nature of the extremism that is out of control on the other side of the aisle.”The bold act of defiance from dozens of McCarthy’s fellow Republicans raised questions about his future in the speaker’s chair. Because of Republicans’ narrow majority in the House, McCarthy had to endure 15 rounds of voting before he secured the speakership back in January. To win over the skeptics within his conference, McCarthy offered a number of concessions to allay their concerns about his leadership.One of those concessions could now come back to haunt him. According to the House rules approved after McCarthy’s victory, any single member of the chamber can introduce a “motion to vacate”, which would force a vote on ousting the sitting speaker.Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, one of the Freedom Caucus members who opposed the debt ceiling bill, said on Wednesday that McCarthy “should be concerned” about a potential motion to vacate.“After this vote, we will have discussions about whether there should be a motion to vacate or not,” Buck told CNN.But even Buck acknowledged that he and his allies may not have the votes to remove McCarthy, and the speaker has said he is “not at all” concerned about losing his gavel. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was one of eight Freedom Caucus members to support the debt ceiling bill, dismissed suggestions of ousting McCarthy as “absolutely absurd”.“I think they would find out that it’s not as popular as they think, just because it looks good on Twitter right now,” Greene told reporters on Wednesday night. “It would be a really dumb move.”Even if McCarthy’s critics could somehow muster the votes to oust him, it remains entirely unclear who could earn enough support in the House Republican conference to replace him. So McCarthy’s speakership appears to be safe – for now. More