Republicans

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares137 Views

      in US Politics

      Talking politics has bartenders on edge in Trump’s Washington DC

      by

      Deke Dunne relocated to Washington DC from Wyoming in 2008 to pursue a career in politics. Though a progressive himself, he worked as a legislative aide for the Republican senator Mike Enzi and spent many nights at local watering holes, guzzling $10 pitchers and eating wings with fellow broke staffers from both sides of the aisle. Long before he began moonlighting as a bartender, he learned that talking politics in DC bars was always a recipe for disaster.“When I used to work in politics, I would spend a lot of time in bars near Capitol Hill,” said Dunne, “so I was exposed to more political professionals. In those spaces, you often find yourself witnessing knockdown, drag-out arguments about politics.”Today, Dunne is one of DC’s most influential mixologists, having abandoned politics almost a decade ago for a hospitality career. Serving drinks in a city that is more ideologically divided than ever, Dunne says he exercises more diplomacy behind the bar now than he ever did working in politics.There has always been an unspoken rule among Washington DC bartenders, according to Dunne, that political conversations across the bar should be avoided at all costs. It is generally understood that maintaining neutrality is critical to ensuring that guests of all political persuasions feel welcome. But the partisan rancor in Washington during the early stages of Donald Trump’s presidential encore has created palpable tension in hospitality spaces, placing undue strain on staff to manage the vibes.“It’s always been an accepted truth in DC that every four to eight years, you get a whole new swath of people in from a different political ideology and if you want to have a strong, viable business, you don’t talk politics,” said Dunne. “Trump broke that rule.”According to local bar professionals in the nation’s capital, the “tending” part of bartending has never been more challenging. “Politics in DC is not only something that a lot of people care about, but it’s also a lot of people’s livelihoods,” said Zac Hoffman, a bar industry veteran who until recently managed the restaurant inside the National Democratic Club near the Capitol. “When you’re talking about work, you’re talking about politics. That’s just the reality of where we live. It’s a company town.”At Allegory, where Dunne oversees the beverage program, the bar has always taken a progressive approach, which occasionally provokes more conservative-minded guests who stay in the Eaton, the boutique hotel and cultural hub in downtown where the bar opened seven years ago. Its aesthetic and cocktail menu reimagines Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but featuring a young Ruby Bridges, the iconic civil rights activist who faced a jeering mob when she desegregated a Little Rock elementary school.“Our very presence as a mission-based bar has sparked many conversations surrounding our concept, but also gender-neutral bathrooms, provocative art and advocacy,” he said. “We’ve had people that are clearly uncomfortable with our concept leave and then post a negative review but frame it about something else.”The resurgent, and often strident, brand of conservatism that dominates the political sphere in Washington today has many of the city’s more progressive bar owners on edge. At The Green Zone, a Middle Eastern cocktail bar in Adams Morgan on the city’s north side, politics have always been integral to the bar’s identity since it opened in 2018. Bar owner Chris Hassaan Francke, whose mother is Iraqi, has earned a reputation for being outspoken about political conflicts, especially those in the Middle East.But since Trump’s return to office, he admits to having toned down some of the rhetoric. “We changed the name of one of our most infamous cocktails [which contained an incendiary reference to the current president],” said Francke. “It kills me that I can’t always say everything I want to say, but ultimately the safety and wellbeing of my staff [are] more important than that.”While the city may be under Republican rule at the moment, DC itself is still overwhelmingly liberal (Kamala Harris won over 90% of the vote in the 2024 election), which means that a majority of its hospitality workers are liberal, too. “I know some bartenders who will say the opposite of what they believe around customers they don’t agree with politically,” said Hoffman. “There are plenty of socialists who make great tips talking shit about liberals with Republicans.”It isn’t only the more progressive venues around town that have become targets. After recent articles in the New York Times and Washington Post championed the upscale Capitol Hill bistro Butterworth’s as a haven for Maga sympathizers, backlash ensued. According to chef and co-owner Bart Hutchins – who, like Dunne, also left a career in politics to work in hospitality – being perceived as pro-Trump has attracted crowds to his fledgling restaurant, which opened last fall. But it’s also created some unwanted operational challenges. For one, a serial provocateur with an air-horn routinely disrupts his weekly dinner service by sounding it through the front entrance, often multiple times a week.Despite Butterworth’s reputation for being a sanctuary for high-profile Trump supporters such as Steve Bannon, not every political conversation at the bar is peaceful. “I’ve broken up at least three political arguments since we opened,” said Hutchins. “It always starts with somebody who’s really, really insistent that everyone agrees with them, someone who’s watching way too much cable news who’s really determined to have their Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow moment.”View image in fullscreenAnother unfortunate byproduct of being known as a right-leaning restaurant in a left-leaning town, Hutchins says, has been difficulty hiring and retaining staff. “There have been times where it’s been really hard to hire people,” he said. “Early on, we had some servers self-select out and say: ‘I don’t want to serve these people.’ But a lot of those people have moved on.”Over time, the staff has found ways to put their political convictions aside for the good of the restaurant. “Our No 1 rule that’s written on a door in the back is: ‘Everybody’s a VIP,” said Hutchins. “We’re not interested in using politics as a measuring device for whether or not someone deserves great service.”For DC bars, proximity to Capitol Hill has historically increased the likelihood that the conversations inside them will revolve around politics. And while some bars on the Hill may welcome these spirited conversations, many older, legacy bars prefer that patrons leave their partisanship at the door.View image in fullscreenTune Inn, a well-loved dive bar that originally opened a few blocks from the Capitol in 1947, outwardly discourages political conversations of any kind. “You can always tell the newbies because they want to come in and immediately start talking about politics,” said Stephanie Hulbert, who has worked as a bartender, server and now general manager at the bar for more than 17 years. “They get shut down very quickly.”To keep the peace and maintain non-partisan decorum inside the bar, she and her staff regularly intervene and admonish guests to keep their politics to themselves. These interventions occur at least two or three times every week, according to Hulbert, which is why the TVs inside the bar are deliberately set to sports channels rather than news outlets. “I’ll argue about sports all day long with you,” she said. “But I won’t argue about politics.”Despite the heightened anxiety in Washington, Dunne is optimistic that healthy dialogues in more progressive bars including Allegory can effect positive change. In January, Trump’s inauguration drew conservative revelers to the Eaton, where inclusivity and multiculturalism is essential to its brand and mission. That led to some uncomfortable conversations with Republican patrons about the bar’s progressive ethos.“I don’t know how effective the conversations were, but they were constructive,” he said. “We found middle ground about the fact that what Ruby [Bridges] went through was tragic. It’s common ground you don’t find very often around here any more.” More

    • 175 Shares130 Views

      in US Politics

      Now’s the time for Democrats to hammer Trump on the economy | Lloyd Green

      by

      “Economic Growth Shatters Expectations as President Trump Fuels America’s Golden Age,” the White House announced on Wednesday. But within 48 hours, the data told a very different story, giving the Democrats a badly needed opening if they can muster the competence and focus to seize upon it.On Thursday, the US commerce department announced that inflation had ticked up to 2.6%. A day later, the labor department reported that unemployment had risen to 4.2% in July, and that the US had actually gained 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.From the looks of things, Donald Trump and his tariffs are damaging the economy. Suddenly, things aren’t looking so hot.Rather than copping to a screw-up, however, the president immediately laid blame elsewhere. In a barrage of posts on social media, he lambasted Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, attacked his intelligence and again threatened his tenure at the Fed.The president trashed Powell, who he appointed, as “a stubborn MORON”. Adding insult to injury, Trump brayed: “IF HE CONTINUES TO REFUSE, THE BOARD SHOULD ASSUME CONTROL, AND DO WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS HAS TO BE DONE!”But things didn’t end there. The tantrum continued unabated.Hours later, Trump grabbed another page from the strongman playbook and fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He suggested that she had cooked the books and was essentially giving aid and comfort to Joe Biden, the man who first appointed her.As we know, there is reality and then there is Trump’s version of reality.At Friday’s final bell, the Dow had dropped more than 540 points and the Nasdaq was down 2.24%. The ghost of Trump’s so-called “liberation day” had returned to haunt the markets, giving the Democrats ample material to work with.Already, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act places Trump and the Republicans at odds with their base and with swing voters. According to a Wall Street Journal poll, 70% of the US believes the act benefits the rich. Beyond that, the tax plan is underwater with the public, 42-52, and is disfavored by a majority of independents.Practically speaking, the Congressional Budget Office projected in June that nearly 8 million people would lose their insurance under the Trump-backed bill. For the current iteration of the GOP, that’s a problem. These days, Republican voters tilt working class. Many of them break economically liberal and socially conservative.This why House Republicans danced around the issue of coming Medicaid cuts. They stand to harm their own voters. And they know it.Take Mike Lawler, a representative from New York’s Hudson Valley. More than 200,000 of his constituents receive Medicaid benefits. Town halls in his district have become rowdy events, with the police hauling out a constituent.Lawler claims to have “fought extensively to make sure that there were not draconian changes to Medicaid”.“At the end of the day, this is about strengthening the program,” Lawler added. Uh, that’s why he needed the cops.More than 64 Republican House members represent districts where Medicaid rates exceed the national average, according to CNN. In those seats, five incumbents won last November by five points or fewer.But the GOP’s problems don’t end with Medicaid. These days, social security, the most sacrosanct legacy of the New Deal, may be in the crosshairs of Team Trump.On Wednesday, Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, acknowledged the so-called “Trump accounts” created for kids by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act were actually a “back door for privatizing social security”.The accounts are designed as a vehicle for Americans to build and accumulate wealth as soon as they are born. Under the new law, newborns will be eligible to receive $1,000 from Uncle Sam.“Social security is a defined benefit plan paid out,” Bessent explained. “To the extent that if all of a sudden these accounts grow, and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, then that’s a gamechanger.”As a candidate and then again in office, Trump had pledged to leave social security untouched. Now that pledge is in doubt.In 2024, the Republicans made the economic failures of the Biden-Harris administration central to their campaigns. The Trump-Vance campaign raked the Democrats over the coals over inflation. In politics, turnabout is fair play. It is time for the Democrats to show that they actually care about the average voter.

      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

    • 213 Shares153 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘There’s an appetite for this brand of politics’: the independent politician making a bid for US Senate

      by

      Dan Osborn is a man who does not like to lose, and if you had asked him on election night last year whether he would run again as an independent for a US Senate seat representing the very Republican state of Nebraska, Osborn would have told you to, in his words, “pound sand”.Yet the results of his first bid for elected office were alluring, so much so that he has decided take another stab at becoming only the third current member of the US Senate who is not in either of the two parties. While he did not beat the Republican senator Deb Fischer last November, he did narrow her margin of victory to the single digits in a state that Donald Trump won by 20 points. Next year, Osborn will challenge the state’s other Republican senator, Pete Ricketts, in a contest he characterizes as a struggle between the working class and the wealthy.“I think there’s an appetite for this brand of politics,” Osborn told the Guardian by phone from Omaha. “It’s so important they see the value in having somebody like me, who knows what it’s like to put Christmas on a credit card, I suppose, versus somebody like Ricketts, who is probably just in it for himself.”Osborn’s campaign last year was a rare bright spot for many in an election that saw voters pummel candidates who were not on Trump’s team.Nebraska has only elected Republicans to the Senate since Democrat Ben Nelson’s victory in 2006, but Osborn managed to outperform Kamala Harris by more than any other non-Republican Senate candidate. In next year’s elections, Osborn may get a boost from the anti-incumbent sentiment that so often pervades midterms, but Ricketts, a former governor who is running for a full term after winning a special election last year, is one of the best-known Republicans in the state.“I do think he’s going to have a much tougher task this time around,” Dona-Gene Barton, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln who focuses on polling, said of Osborn. Compared to Fischer, Ricketts is “much more popular in the state. He has incredibly deep pockets, and he’s the sitting incumbent.”Osborn believes he has a compelling argument. As a union leader, he organized Nebraska workers during a nationwide strike at the cereal giant Kellogg’s, and now balances campaigning with his day job as an industrial mechanic. The working class may have broken for the real estate mogul Trump last year, but he believes that further down the ballot, they will vote for a candidate who is one of them.“Our government doesn’t look like me, so that’s certainly what I want to get in there and change. And I think that’s what’s on most people’s minds as well,” he said. Osborn draws a particular contrast to Ricketts, whose father founded stockbroker TD Ameritrade and whose net worth is estimated at $184m by the stock tracker Quiver Quantitative.View image in fullscreenAnother potential advantage: he’s not a Democrat. Last year, Osborn wrote in the United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain, on the presidential ballot, and said that if he was elected, he would not caucus with either party.Independent lawmakers are rare in Congress. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine are the only two in the Senate, and both caucus with the Democrats, while the House has not had one since 2021. The last time Nebraska elected an independent federal lawmaker was in 1936.Voters, Osborn believes, are looking for a candidate who will break the two-party logjam in Washington, stand up to the rich and not clash with Trump simply on principle.“I’ll work with anybody … the problem, I think, inherently, with our government right now, is they don’t seem to want to work together,” Osborn said. Though Trump has bashed him on social media repeatedly, Osborn said: “I’m not just going to be anti just for the sake of being anti.”He criticizes how Joe Biden handled the influx of immigrants during his presidency, and repeats Trump’s aphorism that “without a border, we don’t have a country”. Yet he does not like everything he sees from the new administration, such as the way it celebrates new detention centers for deportees, or how Elon Musk pirouetted with a chainsaw at the outset of his so-called “department of government efficiency” initiative.“I just don’t understand the whole bragging about hurting people,” Osborn said.While his relationship with the state Democratic party last year was touchy at times, this year, the party has decided to support his campaign, though a Democratic candidate could also still jump into the race. Jane Kleeb, the state party chair, said in an interview that they view Osborn as an ally for their causes.“On the vast majority of issues, like the core issues that matter to working- and middle-class families, Dan is on the same side of where I think any of those votes would be,” Kleeb said.“Protecting Medicaid, Medicare – he’s not going to side with Republicans on that. Middle-class tax cuts, bringing back childcare credits, making sure that our American energy is diversified … protecting unions, name the issue.”Ricketts’s campaign responded by arguing that Osborn was essentially a Democrat. “Fake Dan Osborn can continue pretending to be an independent, but he is endorsed by the Nebraska Democratic party, funded by Democrats, and backs Democrats’ most extreme policy positions,” said spokesperson Will Coup. (Kleeb said the Nebraska Democratic party does not endorse candidates, and had not endorsed Osborn.)Now, Osborn’s candidacy has prompted the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics to change its rating of the race from “Safe Republican” to “Likely Republican”. Another prominent forecaster, the Cook Political Report, kept their rating unchanged at “Solid Republican”, but noted they may re-evaluate “if Osborn’s blue-collar messaging gets some traction”.On the campaign trail last year, Osborn said he found himself appearing before crowds at campaign events where half of those in attendance were wearing Trump gear, and the other sported shirts from the Harris campaign. He sees recapturing that spirit as key to his victory.“I would see people with both style shirts, grabbing yard signs before they left,” Osborn said. “So I made it not about red versus blue. It’s about uplifting everybody in the communities.” More

    • 238 Shares76 Views

      in US Politics

      With Trump wreaking havoc, a question for the US Democrats: when will you ever learn? | Timothy Garton Ash

      by

      Nothing is more insufferable than someone saying “I told you so”; so please forgive me for being insufferable. On 29 September 2023, after a couple of months spent in the US, I published a column that was well summarised in its Guardian headline: “Unless Joe Biden stands aside, the world must prepare for President Trump 2.0”. We can never definitely say “what would have happened if …?”, but there’s a very good chance that had Biden cleared the way for a Democratic primary in autumn 2023 the strongest candidate could have defeated Trump. The entire world would have been spared the disaster now unfolding.“No use crying over spilt milk,” you may say. Yes, but it’s always worth learning lessons for the future. I’m back in the US now, and a recent poll for the Wall Street Journal found that 63% of voters hold an unfavourable view of the Democratic party. To put it mildly, the Democrats have a way to go.So what, given all that is happening and everything we now know, are the right lessons? The point of mentioning my old column is not to boast of some special insider insight into Washington high politics; the point is precisely that I had none. It was just obviously crazy to put up a visibly old and frail candidate who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. For comparison, the leaders of the Soviet Union who we think of as the epitome of decrepit gerontocracy were, at their respective moments of unlamented demise, 75 (Leonid Brezhnev), 69 (Yuri Andropov) and 73 (Konstantin Chernenko).It required no special knowledge to see this and most Americans already did. By the time I wrote my column, an opinion poll had found that 77% of Americans thought Biden was too old to be president for another four years. It was only the political insiders, the liberal commentariat, the Democratic establishment, who went on agreeing with the president, his family and what was (you couldn’t make this up) actually known informally as the “politburo” of his closest advisers that he was the only man for the job.In their recent, much noticed book, Original Sin, two leading Washington journalists, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios, argue that there was, as their subtitle suggests, a cover up. Biden’s family and the politburo tried to hide his precipitate cognitive decline, confining most of his meetings to between 10am and 4pm. Even cabinet members did not see him up close for many months and in-depth media interviews were as rare as a Pride parade in the Vatican.The authors generously apportion blame to the president, his wife, other family members and his closest advisers, but there’s one set of people they curiously spare: themselves and their fellow Washington insider journalists. Now, I haven’t gone back over all their reporting on CNN and Axios, and there are certainly some pieces that should be cited to defend their journalistic record. But there is no doubt that American political journalists in general, and the liberal commentariat in particular, were slow and late to say what most “ordinary” Americans had long since seen.Why? The New York Times writer Ezra Klein digs into this in an episode of his excellent podcast. Frankly acknowledging that his own February 2024 call for Biden to stand aside was “late”, Klein explores in conversation with Tapper why most others were even later. The answer seems to be a mix of ingredients: journalistic fear of losing access; the vindictive tribalism of the Democratic establishment; deference to an imperial presidency; fear of Donald Trump; worry about Kamala Harris as the presumptive alternative candidate.Fear of losing access is a professional disease of journalism. “You felt like you were destroying all of your relationships with the White House all at once,” says Klein, recalling his February 2024 demarche. “Yes, not just with the White House but the Democratic party,” adds Tapper. My own September 2023 notebook sums up a private conversation with a Washington-based columnist: “Yes, Biden should stand aside. He [the columnist] can’t say it.” (My note continues: “Jill Biden could, but she likes it.”)I know, also from other sources, just how threatening the Democratic establishment could be when trying to close down any questioning of Biden’s fitness to serve a second term. Even in the critical articles that did appear in US media there was a kind of residual deference to the presidency, almost as though they were asking a king to abdicate rather than just another politician to stand aside. Partly this stems from the 237-year-old US constitutional device of rolling your prime minister and monarch into one. In Britain, we confine our residual deference to the monarch while the prime minister gets roasted every Wednesday at prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons. Someone in Biden’s 2023 state of dotage wouldn’t have survived two weeks in Westminster.Then there’s the fact that people were already panicking about Trump and it was somehow thought, especially after Democratic successes in the 2022 midterm elections, that Biden was the only guy to beat him. The more so since the presumptive alternative was Harris, who was seen as a relatively weak candidate. And so, for fear of getting Harris and then Trump, they got Harris and then Trump.Some lessons, then, are clear. Tapper and Thompson open their book with a quotation from George Orwell: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” But Orwell also calls on us always to say what we do see, even if – no, especially if – it’s uncomfortable for our own side. There’s the double test for journalists: see it and say it.For the Democratic establishment: don’t try to intimidate the media into self-censorship with the argument that they are giving succour to the enemy. You would have been better served by journalists just doing their job, in the spirit of Orwell. Then: change out your old guard. Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, is older than Chernenko and rapidly catching up on Brezhnev. Oh yes, and simply listen to the people you’re meant to represent.The tragedy of this whole story is that the Democrats have a profusion of talent in younger generations – from Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom to New York’s new star, Zohran Mamdani. They don’t yet have the shared platform that could win a presidential election, but thinkers such as Klein and Derek Thompson, co-authors of Abundance, the other book of the moment, are already working up some good ideas. The Democrats can probably swing the House of Representatives in the midterm elections next year with a few fresh faces – and by focusing on the already visible negative consequences of Trump for working- and middle-class Americans. But by 2027, in the run-up to the next presidential election, they will need everything they so spectacularly failed to produce in 2023.

      Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More

    • 138 Shares103 Views

      in US Politics

      Texas Democrats flee state to prevent vote on redrawing congressional map

      by

      Texas Democrats are fleeing the state to prevent a vote on Monday that could see five new Republican-leaning seats created in the House of Representatives.About 30 Democrats said they planned to flee to Illinois, where they plan to stay for a week, to thwart Republican efforts by denying them a quorum, or the minimum number of members to validate the vote’s proceedings.In a statement, Texas Democrats accused their counterparts, the Texas Republicans, of a “cowardly” surrender to Donald Trump’s call for a redrawing of the congressional map to “continue pushing his disastrous policies”.“Texas Democratic lawmakers are halting Trump’s plan by denying his bootlickers a quorum,” the statement read.The scheme to flee the state is reported to have been put together by the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who met with the Texas Democratic caucus late last month and has directed staff to provide logistical support for their stay.The Texas group has accused Texas governor Greg Abbott of withholding aid to victims of Guadalupe River flooding last month in a bid to force the redistricting vote through.“We’re leaving Texas to fight for Texans,” Gene Wu, the Texas House Democratic caucus chair, said in a statement. “We will not allow disaster relief to be held hostage to a Trump gerrymander.”“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” Wu added. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”Last week, Texas Republicans released a proposed new congressional map that would give the GOP a path to pick up five seats in next year’s midterm elections, typically when the governing party loses representation in congress.The areas affected by the redistricting plane would target Democratic members of Congress in and around Austin, Dallas and Houston, and two districts in south Texas that are Republican but nudging closer toward Democrat control.The plan to flee the state is not without potential consequences. Members of the Texas Democrats face a $500-a-day fine and possible arrest, a measure that was introduced in 2023, two years after Democrats left the state for three weeks to block election legislation that included several restrictions on voting access.Ultimately, that bill passed but not before Democrats were able to claim something of a moral victory after stripping the measure of some of its provisions.The latest plan to leave the leave the state came after a House committee approved new congressional maps on Saturday.“This map was politically based, and that’s totally legal, totally allowed and totally fair,” Cody Vasut, a Republican state representative and committee member, told NBC News.Vasut pointed to disparities in other states, including California, New York and Illinois, where the weighting of seats to votes is strongly in Democrats favor.“Texas is underperforming in that. And so it’s totally prudent, totally right, for Texas to be able to respond and improve the political performance of its map,” he said.The political backdrop to the Texas redistricting fight colors Pritzker into the picture of a national fight. Pritzker, a billionaire member of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, is seen as looking toward a bid for the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination.In June, he addressed Democrats in Oklahoma where he met privately in a “robust” meeting to discuss about Texas redistricting, according to NBC News. He later met with Texas Democrats, where offered assurances he would find them hotels, meeting spaces and other logistical assistance.The absence of the Democrats on Monday threatens to derail other issues Abbott is tabling, including disaster relief after to the deadly central Texas floods last month.“Democrats in the Texas House who try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately,” Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said in a post on X. “We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.”Texas house speaker Dustin Burrows said that if, at 3pm on Monday, “a quorum is not present then, to borrow the recent talking points from some of my Democrat colleagues, all options will be on the table”. More

    • 150 Shares103 Views

      in US Politics

      Senate confirms Trump ally Jeanine Pirro as top federal prosecutor for DC

      by

      The US Senate has confirmed Jeanine Pirro – a former Fox News host and staunch Donald Trump ally who boosted lies that he lost the 2020 presidential race because of electoral fraudsters – as the top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital.Pirro – a former New York state district attorney and county judge who joined Fox News in 2011 – was confirmed on Saturday in a 50-45 vote along party lines.In a statement issued by Pirro after the vote, the Republican said she was “blessed” to have been confirmed as the US attorney for Washington DC. “Get ready for a real crime fighter,” said Pirro’s statement, which called the US attorney’s office she had been confirmed to lead the largest in the country.Before her media career, Pirro spent over a decade as a Republican district attorney in Westchester county, New York, and also served as a county judge.She hosted her own Fox show Justice with Judge Jeanine. And more recently, she became a co-host on the Fox show The Five.Pirro used her time at Fox News in part to publicly support the baseless claims that Trump lost his first presidency to Joe Biden in 2020 because of voter fraud. In 2021, she was among several Fox News hosts named in the defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, which accused the network of knowingly airing false claims about the company’s voting machines after the previous year’s election.Fox ultimately settled the lawsuit for $787.5m and has acknowledged that the fraud claims were false.Pirro has been serving as the interim US attorney since May, when her fellow Republican Trump nominated her to the post months into his second presidency. She was nominated after Trump withdrew the nomination of conservative activist Ed Martin, his first choice for the role. A key Republican senator, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, had said he would not support Martin’s nomination.In announcing Pirro’s nomination in May, Trump praised her record, and said that she was a “powerful crusader for victims of crime” and someone who “excelled in all ways”.“Jeanine is incredibly well qualified for this position,” the president added.The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, on Saturday published a statement exalting Pirro as “a warrior for law and order”.At the end of his first presidency, Trump pardoned Pirro’s former husband, Albert Pirro Jr, after he had been convicted in 2000 on federal charges of fraud and tax evasion.Pirro is one of a number of Trump loyalists with ties to Fox who have joined the president’s administration. Other prominent ones include her fellow ex-Fox News host Pete Hegseth, the embattled defense secretary, and the former Fox Business personality Sean Duffy, the embattled transportation secretary.In June, US senator Adam Schiff accused Pirro of “blind obedience to Donald Trump is nearly unrivaled among his ardent supporters”.“For an important prosecutorial position like this one, the country has a right to demand a serious and principled public servant,” Schiff said. “Jeanine Pirro is not it.”Despite Pirro’s confirmation, the US Senate left Washington DC on Saturday night for its monthlong August recess without a deal to advance dozens of Trump nominees despite days of contentious, bipartisan negotiations.An irate Trump went on social media and told Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL!” More

    • 125 Shares156 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans slam Trump’s firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics chief

      by

      Senior Republican lawmakers are condemning the decision of their party leader, Donald Trump, to fire the leading US labor market statistician after a report that showed the national economy added just 73,000 jobs – far fewer than expected – in July.The disappointing figures – coupled with a downward revision of the two previous months amounting to 258,000 fewer jobs and data showing that economic output and consumer spending slowed in the first half of the year – point to an overall economic deterioration in the US.Trump defended his decision to fire US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Without evidence to back his claims, the president wrote on social media that were numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and the US economy was, in fact, “BOOMING” on his watch.But the firing of McEntarfer, who had been confirmed to her role in January 2024 during Joe Biden’s presidency, has alarmed members of Trump’s own party.“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”Lummis added that if the numbers are unreliable, the public should be told – but firing McEntarfer was “kind of impetuous”.North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, said: “If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just … because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”Kentucky senator Rand Paul, another Republican, questioned whether McEntarfer’s firing was an effective way of improving the numbers.“We have to look somewhere for objective statistics,” he said. “When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that you know, the statistics won’t be politicized.”According to NBC News, Paul said his “first impression” was that “you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting”.Tillis and Paul were both opponents of Trump’s recent economic legislative package, which the president dubbed the “big, beautiful bill”.But Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who supported the legislation after winning substantial economic support for her state, remarked that the jobs numbers could not be trusted – and “that’s the problem”.“And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less,” she said.William Beach, a former BLS commissioner appointed by Trump in his first presidency, posted on X that McEntarfer’s firing was “totally groundless”. He added that the dismissal set a dangerous precedent and undermined the BLS’s statistical mission.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBeach also co-signed a letter by “the Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics” that went further, accusing Trump of seeking to blame someone for bad news and calling the rationale for McEntarfer’s firing “without merit”.The letter asserted that the dismissal “undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families and policymakers”.The letter pointed out that the jobs tabulation process “is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference”, adding that US official statistics “are the gold standard globally”.“When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science,” the letter said.Democrats have also hit out at Trump’s decision. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders described it as “the sign of an authoritarian type”, and he said the decision would make it harder for the American people “to believe the information that comes out of the government”.Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, described the president’s allegation against McEntarfer as “very damaging and outrageous”.He said: “Not only does it undermine the integrity of federal economic statistics, but it also politicizes data which need to remain independent and trustworthy. This action is a grave error by the administration and one that will have ramifications for years to come.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Texas Republicans unveil congressional map that could gift them five seats

      by

      Republicans have unveiled a new congressional map in Texas that would allow the party to pick up as many as five additional congressional seats, an aggressive maneuver that has already met decisive outcry from Democrats and comes as the GOP tries to stave off losses in next year’s midterm elections.Republicans already hold 25 of Texas’s 38 congressional seats. But at the urging of Donald Trump, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, called a special session this month to redraw the state’s congressional districts. After contentious hearings across the state, Republicans unveiled their proposed map on Wednesday.“We expected them to be greedy,” said Sam Gostomski, executive director of the Texas Democratic party. “The bottom line is, they are going to turn Texas into almost certainly the most gerrymandered state in the country.”Had the map been in place for the 2024 election, Trump would have carried 30 of the districts, while Kamala Harris would have carried just eight, according to data from Dave’s Redistricting App, an online tool that allows for analysis of voting districts.On first glance at the maps, “it was more packing and more trying to divide people,” said state representative Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, a Democrat from San Antonio and a member of the Texas house’s redistricting committee. “We’re trying to digest it and look at it and look at the numbers and see how it all plays out.”Republican legislators held three hearings to hear from voters about redistricting. But the proposed maps were not presented at the meetings, rendering the legally required hearings into a pro forma exercise.“How do people even know what to comment on if the maps aren’t published?” she said. “I call it a sneak attack to put the maps out after the hearing.”The map unveiled on Wednesday represents the most aggressive effort for Republicans. While analysts said Republicans could target three Democratic seats easily, trying to claim more risked spreading GOP voters too thin.One of the proposed changes in the maps would consolidate two Democratic seats in Austin, currently held by Representatives Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett. Other changes include shifting boundaries of districts in south Texas, where Republicans have made inroads among Hispanic voters.“Merging the 35th and the 37th districts is illegal voter suppression of Black and Latino Central Texans,” Casar said in a statement. “If Trump is allowed to rip the Voting Rights Act to shreds here in Central Texas, his ploy will spread like wildfire across the country. Everyone who cares about our democracy must mobilize against this illegal map.”The map also radically redraws district lines in Houston, eliminating one majority people of color seat held by Democrats.“The map is extreme invidious discrimination and accomplishes what the President has demanded of the governor and more,” said Al Green, a member of the US Congress. “The DoJ demanded that the race card be played, and the governor dealt the people of Texas a racist hand.”Green pledged to run for re-election, despite the changes in district boundaries.Democrats narrowly won two seats in south Texas where a majority of voters also chose Trump. The redistricting widens the margin a Republican congressional candidate might expect to win, given the 2024 result.Democrats have already denounced the Republican efforts as a naked partisan power grab and have contemplated redrawing maps in states where they hold the power to do so. A Super Pac supporting House Democrats has pledged to donate upwards of $20m to target Republicans.The redistricting process in states typically occurs at the start of each new decade, when new census data is available.“This proposed map is a racially discriminatory, brazen power grab. It is an insult to all Texans, who have demonstrated overwhelming, bipartisan opposition to President Trump’s order to draw a mid-decade gerrymander. Texans deserve better than this, and if the legislature and the governor follow through with enacting this egregious gerrymander, it will face fierce legal challenges,” said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, which has opposed the Texas effort.Democrats have few options to fight the redistricting. While a court challenge will be filed almost immediately, federal judges in the conservative fifth judicial circuit may not resolve the dispute before the 2026 election, and may not resolve it in their favor.The Texas house select committee on redistricting has scheduled a public hearing on the proposed maps for Friday. The Texas AFL-CIO put out a call on Wednesday afternoon to pack the capitol in Austin and testify.Democratic legislators may leave the state in order to deny Republicans a legislative quorum and prevent them from passing law. Doing so presents practical and legal costs for those who do, but may be the last remaining bargaining chip they have before the issue enters the courts.“I can tell you that our members are going to fight it for as long as it takes,” Gostomski said, “but at the end of the day, the only real legal mechanism in place is, at some point, the GOP leadership has to decide if they are more interested in representing their constituents than protecting Donald Trump’s power.” More