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      Nikki Haley suggests Mitch McConnell should step aside amid health concerns

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      Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley has suggested her fellow Republican Mitch McConnell – the longtime powerful US Senate leader – should step aside after an episode in which he physically froze and was unable to speak at the Capitol this week.Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Haley was asked by the host Margaret Brennan whether she still had confidence in McConnell’s ability to lead after the episode.“I think Mitch McConnell did an amazing job when it comes to our judiciary, when we look at the judges, when we look at the supreme court he’s been a great leader,” said Haley, the former South Carolina governor and ex-United Nations ambassador during the Donald Trump presidency. “But we’ve gotta stop electing people because they look good in a picture and they hold a baby well.”She also said the 90-year-old US senator Dianne Feinstein, the 80-year-old president Joe Biden, and 83-year-old congresswoman Nancy Pelosi – all of whom are prominent Democrats – should “know when to walk away”.Haley has called for congressional term limits and mental acuity tests for politicans aged 75 and above.A spokesperson for McConnell, 81, said last week that he intends to fulfill his term, which ends in 2026. He has led the US Senate’s Republican conference since 2007. McConnell’s office said that the senator felt lightheaded but has not released more details on what caused the episode in question.McConnell was hospitalized after he fell onstage earlier this year, leaving him with a concussion and a fractured rib. He also fell in Finland earlier this year while getting off an airplane at Reagan national airport in Washington DC.McConnell survived polio as a child, though the illness has long affected his gait.Publicly, Senate Republicans have backed McConnell. Yet anonymously, some have been more circumspect.One Republican senator told NBC News that McConnell has been relying more on his lieutenants and suggested he should step down.“I’d hate to see it forced on him,” that senator said, according to NBC. “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.” More

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      Alito ‘stunningly wrong’ that Senate can’t impose supreme court ethics rules

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      Senator Chris Murphy has dismissed claims by the supreme court justice, Samuel Alito, that the Senate has “no authority” to create a code of conduct for the court as “stunningly wrong”.The Connecticut Democrat made those remarks in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, adding that Alito “should know that more than anyone else because his seat on the supreme court exists only because of an act passed by Congress”.“It is Congress that establishes the number of justices on the supreme court,” Murphy said. “It is Congress that has passed in the past requirements for justices to disclose certain information, and so it is just wrong on the facts to say that Congress doesn’t have anything to do with the rules guiding the supreme court.”He continued: “It is even more disturbing that Alito feels the need to insert himself into a congressional debate.”Murphy’s comments came after the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Alito on Friday in which he said: “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it. No provision in the constitution gives them the authority to regulate the supreme court – period.”During his interview with State of the Union, Murphy went on to criticize the nine-member supreme court’s conservative supermajority. He accused Alito and the court’s other conservatives of seeing “themselves as politicians” rather than impartial jurists.“They just see themselves as a second legislative body that has just as much power and right to impose their political will on the country as Congress does,” Murphy said. “They are going to bend the law in order to impose their rightwing view of how the country should work on the rest of us.”In recent months, several of the supreme court’s conservative justices have found themselves in ethical controversy after reports emerged of their involvement in real estate transactions with Republican billionaire donors, discreet payments from Republican activists, millions of dollars’ worth of luxury trips and thousands of dollars in private school tuition.As a result, many Democrats have called for tighter ethics rules for the supreme court’s justices, who they say lack conduct rules that are comparable to other federal authorities.Earlier this month, the Senate judiciary committee approved legislation to impose tighter ethics rules on the supreme court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe legislation – which Republicans have adamantly opposed – has slim possibilities of passing in the Senate because it would require at least nine Republican votes. Nonetheless, Democrats say such a measure is a “crucial first step” in restoring public confidence in the nation’s highest court.Murphy said of the committee-approved measure: “It’s why we need to pass this commonsense ethics legislation to at least make sure we know that these guys aren’t in bed having their lifestyles paid for by conservative donors, as we have unfortunately seen in these latest revelations.” More

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      ‘A rerun of a soap opera’: Republican governor warns against Trump 2024 bid

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      Donald Trump’s campaign for president is a far cry from his victorious run for the White House in 2016, his fellow Republican and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu said on Sunday.“This is not the Donald Trump of 2016, don’t fool yourself,” Sununu – who recently passed on an Oval Office run of his own in part to elevate his credibility in speaking out against the ex-president – said during an interview on ABC’s This Week. “He doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t have the fastball, he basically is droning on for 90 minutes in his long-form speeches about his legal battles, as opposed to talking about the future of this country.”By a wide margin and even as he faces mounting criminal charges, Trump continues to lead the Republican field seeking to oust the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, from the presidency in 2024. He received a warm reception during a 10-minute speech at the Iowa Republican party’s Lincoln Day dinner on Friday but gave the worst speech “without a doubt”, Sununu said.“Ever seen a soap opera?” Sununu continued. “They get kind of boring. The only thing worse is the rerun of a soap opera. And that’s what he’s bringing. A lot of drama to the table.”Sununu wasn’t the only American political conservative on Sunday who verbally attacked Trump’s aspirations for a second term.The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie also criticized Trump, saying new charges unveiled by special counsel Jack Smith this week showed how brazen and amateur the former president’s efforts to conceal classified documents from the US justice department were. The charges allege that Trump and two aides, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, attempted to delete security footage from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club the day after it was subpoenaed by the justice department.De Oliveira allegedly told an IT worker “the boss” wanted the footage deleted. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.Referring to the family in the mob movie series The Godfather, Christie said on CNN’s State of the Union, “These guys were acting like the Corleones with no experience.“The ‘I can declassify whatever I want’ defense is not a defense. You can declassify whatever you want when you’re president. You can’t do it by thinking about it, you can’t do it by mind melding with the documents. There’s a process you have to go through to declassify, and he knows that.”Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP candidate, said again on Sunday that he would pardon Trump if he was elected. Doing so, Ramaswamy said, would move the country forward.“One of the right ways to do that is to pardon the former president of the United States from what is clearly a politicized prosecution,” he said on State of the Union.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential hopeful, also said on Sunday that she would be inclined to pardon Trump if elected.“We have to move forward – we’ve gotta quit living in the past, and I don’t want there to be all of this division over the fact that we have a president serving years in jail over a documents trial,” she said during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation. “I want all of this to go away.”The Florida governor and fellow Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis also suggested last week that he would pardon Trump.“Well, what I’ve said is very simple – I’m going to do what’s right for the country,” DeSantis remarked in an interview with Megyn Kelly. “I don’t think it would be good for the country to have an almost 80-year-old former president go to prison.” More

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      Why Ron DeSantis’s slavery curriculum is so dangerous | Saida Grundy

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      In the mid-20th century, a generation after the civil war, the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to rebrand the image of slavery. The group, composed of female descendants of Confederate soldiers, was fixated on returning the country’s social order to its antebellum racial hierarchy. It sought to reimagine slavery as a benign institution, and to glorify the “lost cause” of white southern insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow the government in slavery’s defense. The place that served as ground zero for the UDC’s revisionist-history effort? Schools.In one of its most successful campaigns, the UDC called for the widespread adoption of textbooks that trivialized the horrors of slavery. As a result, a 1954 middle school textbook titled History of Georgia claimed that a typical slave owner “often had a barbecue or picnic for his slaves. The [enslaved] often had a great frolic. Even while working in the cotton fields they sang songs.” (It is no coincidence that the book was published the same year the NAACP won the supreme court case to desegregate public schools.) And while most contemporary school texts have since moved towards acknowledging that slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow era were reprehensible, organized efforts against teaching accurate racial history continue to occur.The UDC’s legacy of revision emerged again in Florida recently, when the Republican governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis introduced legislation that would de-emphasize racism in the state’s public education curricula. Last week, DeSantis announced that Florida texts will teach students that slavery benefited African Americans who “gained skills” that “eventually parlayed … into doing other things in life”. Civil-rights leaders, educators, and scholars were quick to criticize this minimization of slavery’s cruelty as ignorance at best and deliberate misrepresentation at worst. Vice-President Kamala Harris even reacted, calling the policy an attempt “to replace history with lies”.The backlash to DeSantis’s move is warranted and necessary, but most of the critiques miss the mark on identifying the Florida law’s deeper insidiousness. What the architects of this legislation are really attempting to do – as the UDC attempted a century before – is galvanize a political right and hold on to conservative white rule in a country with rapidly changing demographics. By denying the true ills of slavery, DeSantis is working to release the American government from the obligation of correcting for its present-day inequalities. The violence of slavery is not just limited to a series of heinous acts that happened in the past, it also includes a deliberate process of disinformation that enables future generations to maintain the power yielded by that violence.Though DeSantis’s career has relied heavily on making power gains by denying violence, the political strategy is not his invention. The practice of violence denial has long been a hallmark of the modern world’s most oppressive regimes. Take, for example, the British empire. During her 21st birthday address in 1947, the heir apparent Elizabeth II memorably declared that her life would be lived in “service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”. Her characterization of upholding Britain’s unrelenting and exploitative colonial system as “service”, and her assertion of an “imperial family” that included subjugated African, Asian and Caribbean people, are examples of the same whitewashing tactic employed by DeSantis. Even his efforts to ban “controversial” texts were cribbed – the British crown consistently prohibited books that challenged colonial rule in conquered territories.Another world power that has sought to subvert the historical record is Turkey, with regard to the government’s refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. To aid in its denial, Turkey spent millions of dollars to control the massacre’s narrative and enacted laws that criminalized anyone who accurately used the term “genocide” in reference to the killing, starvation and forced removal of an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians in the country from 1915 to 1916. Even today, Turkish loyalists dismiss dissenters who speak up about the genocide as having an agenda or being backed by foreign agitators.Ultimately, regimes exploit disinformation about the past because the truth threatens their grip on power. But it should surprise no one when those tactics to win a political advantage also spill over into present-day issues. DeSantis’s war on reality doesn’t stop at slavery. During the pandemic, his administration also banned mandates on masks, quarantines and vaccines, and suppressed facts about the ballooning number of Covid cases, even as the death toll for Floridians soared ahead of other states.Calling out the information that DeSantis and his supporters are distorting in textbooks and other messaging is important. However, it is just as important to not lose sight of the larger threat that violence denial poses for societies. Organized efforts to document and broadcast the truth of our past are the most significant defense we have against disinformation. More

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      Where did it all go right for Biden? Facts blunt Republican attack lines

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      It was the word that the far right of the Republican party most wanted to hear. Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, said this week his colleagues’ investigations of Joe Biden are rising to the level of an “impeachment” inquiry.Republicans in Congress admit that they do not yet have any direct evidence of wrongdoing by the US president. But, critics say, there is a simple explanation why they would float the ultimate sanction: they need to put Biden’s character on trial because their case against his policies is falling apart.Heading into next year’s presidential election, Republicans have been readying a three-pronged attack: crime soaring in cities, chaos raging at the southern border and prices spiralling out of control everywhere. But each of these narratives is being disrupted by facts on the ground: crime is falling in most parts of the country, there is relative calm at the border and inflation is at a two-year low.“Republican talking points are having a really bad summer,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist. “The core attacks against Biden are evaporating. The economy is strong. Inflation’s down. The deficit’s down. The Washington Post called the border ‘eerily quiet’. We’ve seen murder rates have come down dramatically this year. He’s been competently managing foreign policy.”Inflation has been a millstone around Biden’s neck. Last year the prices of gas, food and most other goods and services surged by 9%, a 40-year high that took a toll on households. Some economists blamed Biden for pumping more money into the economy than it could handle with a $1.9tn coronavirus relief package. The president pointed to other causes such as global supply chain issues, the pandemic, stimulus from the Federal Reserve and the Russian war in Ukraine.But now inflation is down to 3%, lower than in any other major economy, while unemployment has been below 4% for the longest stretch in half a century. Consumer sentiment is at its highest point in two years, according to a survey by the University of Michigan, while both Federal Reserve staff and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office now predict that America will avoid a recession.Crime, meanwhile, has been seen as a vulnerability for Democrats since the days of Republican Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign. Violent offences rose sharply in major cities during the coronavirus pandemic, loomed large during last year’s midterm elections and prompted a backlash against progressives pushing to “defund the police”.But a study of crime trends in 37 cities by the Council on Criminal Justice found that the number of murders in the first half of 2023 fell by 9.4% compared with the first half of 2022 (a decrease of 202 homicides in those cities). Gun assaults, robberies, burglaries and aggravated assaults were also down.Immigration is another quintessential line of attack for Republicans. There were dire predictions about what would happen when pandemic-era Title 42 restrictions were lifted in May. Yet last month, under a new rule that makes it harder to attain full asylum, illegal border crossings fell to the lowest level in more than two years and the issue quickly faded from the news agenda.Rosenberg added: “His argument for re-election has gotten much stronger over the last few months. It’s getting very unclear how the Republicans are going to go after his record as president and what it means is that you’re probably going to see in the short term a much more significant ratcheting up of attacks on him as a person or father and not as a president.”With the numbers trending in Biden’s direction, there may be greater incentive than ever for Republicans to focus instead on his age, his vice-president, Kamala Harris, his son Hunter Biden and the threat of impeachment over an alleged foreign bribery scheme for which they are yet to provide evidence. “Culture war” attacks around gender identity and “wokeness” could also intensify.Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, commented: “It’s not a coincidence that Kevin McCarthy is talking about impeachment. They thought they were going to have the economy. They thought they were going to have inflation … People have a generally decent opinion of Biden’s character so chipping away at that is a smart move if Trump is going to be your nominee.”Mocking the criticisms as “a fragmented grab-bag”, Andrew Bates, deputy press secretary at the White House, wrote in a memo on Wednesday: “At 8am, House Republicans are shouting something about drag queens (yeah, we don’t know); at 9am, it’s ‘Joe Biden’s still old and also he keeps outsmarting us’ (but actually); at 10am, it’s calling Ukraine a US adversary (we’re as confused as you are).“By the time 4 o’clock shows up, it’s a game of mad libs with bizarre conspiracies about the President’s family and then something about ‘wokeness’ (we keep asking them what ‘wokeness’ is, but then they leave the chat). Apparently, this clown carousel wasn’t weird enough. Now House Republicans are channeling their frustrated energy into a measured and purposeful urge to impeach … someone … somewhere … for something.”Republicans, however, deny the premise that they have already lost the battle of ideas. They contend that average hourly earnings (not adjusted for inflation) are now $33.58 and a gallon of gas costs $3.60, whereas in January 2021, when Trump left office, those figures were $29.92 and $2.39 respectively – meaning that a worker can afford less “gas for an hour of work” today than when Biden become president.Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, said this week: “No matter how many ways administration officials spin the numbers, folks who work for a living and manage a family budget know that ‘Bidenomics’ has made their lives harder. They know that prices have risen 16.6% since the president took office because they feel it every time they pay their bills.”In addition, America’s immigration crisis is far from resolved. House Republicans describe Biden’s border policy as cruel, inhumane and ineffective and say illicit drugs are flowing into the country. They are continuing with a drive to lay the groundwork to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, over the “illegal immigration crisis”.Crime, while falling, also remains above levels seen before the pandemic and protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Motor vehicle theft rose by 33.5% in the first half of the year. Recent history suggests that Republicans will not hesitate to highlight particularly horrific incidents to whip up fear.Whit Ayres, a political consultant and pollster, said of the policy areas: “They may be moving in the right direction but they still are major problems from the perspective of Republican voters as well as a number of independents. We are a long way from having the border under control.“We’re a long way from having inflation back at the rate we became used to for quite a while. And crime remains a very significant problem in lots of American cities. So while each of those may not be quite as bad as they were, they are still very significant problems and likely to remain so through the election.”Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, agreed that it was too soon to say whether Biden will keep winning on policy. “It’s quite easily possible that inflation pops up, that the border gets worse – June tends to be a low month anyway – what’s it going to look like in September and October? Crime has always been more of a local issue. The argument has points but it’s way overstated at this point in the cycle.”If it comes down to a communications war, Democrats are far from assured of victory. Biden’s claims of success over two and a half years have often not translated to opinion polls. His public approval rating remained at 40% in early July, close to the lowest levels of his presidency, according to Reuters/Ipsos. The president is trying to break through the media noise with a series of public events trumpeting “Bidenomics”.Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, said: “There’s a lag time so it’s going to take a while for people to fully feel it in their own lives. Now, the good news for Biden is he’s got a while. There were points in 1983 where Democrats were salivating to run against [Ronald] Reagan and, by 1984, the impact of the economy was being felt by people and Reagan went on to win 49 states, which you can’t do any more because we’re living in a very polarised environment.”Democrats have long been criticised for lacking clear messaging and a sense of swagger even when the statistics are on their side. But Biden did prosecute a successful case against Republicans in last year’s midterms over abortion rights and the threat of Maga [Make America great again] extremism. A rematch against Trump could make the choice unusually stark.Schiller, the political scientist at Brown University, said: “It’s definitely clear the Democrats do not know how to benefit from their own success in terms of messaging. They’re historically bad at it with the exception of Bill Clinton.“But the intrinsic tendency for Americans, at least up until this point, to go with the status quo incumbent administration when things are pretty good because they fear change I think still holds. So how much advertising Democrats have to do is unclear because people know things are good and Donald Trump represents chaos.”Earlier this week Biden poked fun at Republicans over the threats.Speaking at a manufacturing plant in Auburn, Maine, the president said: “While there is more work ahead, earlier this week, the Washington Post suggested Republicans may have to find something else to criticise me for now that inflation is coming down. Maybe they’ll decide to impeach me because it’s coming down. I don’t know. I love that one.” More

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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