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      US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minority | Rebecca Solnit

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      US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minorityRebecca SolnitGuns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power The dots are easy to connect, because they’re so close together, and because they’re the entry and exit wounds inflicted on US society by the subculture whose sacrament is the gun. Texas, while tightening restrictions on abortion, has steadily loosened them on guns. These weapons are symbols of a peculiar version of masculinity made up of unlimited freedom, power, domination, of a soldier identity in which every gunslinger is the commander and anyone is a potential target, in which fear drives belligerence, and the gun owners rights extend so far no one has the right to be safe from him. Right now it’s part of a white-supremacist war cult.Anyplace its weapons are wielded is a war zone, and so this can be racked up as another way the United States is in the grip of a war that hardly deserves to be called civil. The rest of us are supposed to accommodate more and more high-powered weapons of war never intended for civilian use but used over and over against civilians in mass shootings across the country, including earlier this week when 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, were murdered by someone whose 18th birthday made him eligible to buy the semiautomatic and hundreds of rounds of ammunition he used.At the time the second amendment was added to the constitution, reload time for the guns was about a minute and all of them were single-shot weapons. By contrast, the Las Vegas killer in 2017 sprayed more than a thousand bullets out his hotel window to kill 60 people in a 10-minute period. The teenager in Buffalo who killed 10 Black shoppers and an armed security guard was not a well-regulated militia, and neither was the antisemite who killed 11 in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, or the homophobe who killed 49 and wounded 53 in an Orlando nightclub, or the anti-immigration butcher in El Paso who killed 23 and wounded 23 or the childkiller who took 26 lives in Newtown, Connecticut, 20 of them six and seven-year-old children.To accommodate the cult of guns and the series of massacres, teachers and children practice school drills that remind them over and over that they could be murdered. To accommodate them, schools spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security, building reinforcements, trainings and drills, and the federal government spends more millions for campus officers. To accommodate them, municipalities across the country spend a fortune on police and equipment, in a sort of arms race that has also justified militarizing the police. To little avail, and in Uvalde the heavily armed and armored police seem to have essentially protected the shooter, by doing crowd control of parents as their children died, rather than rushing in as they had trained and rehearsed and been paid and equipped to do. All this is a sort of tax on the rest of us, in money and well-being, so that the gunslingers can sling their guns.One of the staggeringly disturbing things about the American right wing is that it is a cult manipulated by corporations and vested interests profiting mightily off its obsessions. In no respect is this more true than of guns. Less than two decades ago, the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers decided to shift from promoting the culture and equipment of hunting and rural life to hawking high-powered weapons of war and the armor and outfits that go with it, turning conservative white men into amateur commandos cosplaying war wherever they liked and the US into a war zone. Fear and hatred increase the profits, and so both crops are cultivated avidly, by the gun industry, the rightwing news organizations, the various pundits and demagogues and militia leaders and neo-Nazis.As former gun executive turned critic Ryan Busse wrote in the Guardian, “As the increasing vitriol of the National Rifle Association (NRA) proved politically effective, some in the gun business realized this messaging could be adopted by the firearms industry to sell more guns. All that was required for success was a dedication to frighteningly dangerous rhetoric and increasingly powerful weaponry.” Republican politicians gobbled up the industry donations and passed laws making gun sales boom, profits skyrocket, and guns start to show up in new ways. The rage that led to the guns was whetted with racism, anti-immigration hatred, misogyny, war imagery, neo-Confederate fantasies, and cartoonishly vile versions of masculinity, and the guns made it all dangerous. Minority rule perpetrates it, because just as the majority of Americans want abortion rights to stand, so do they want limits on access to guns.Gun culture reminds me of rape culture, specifically the conventions that hold the victims rather than the perpetrators responsible for limiting the violence. For women this means being told to radically rearrange our lives to avoid sexual assault rather than to expect that society will protect our rights and freedoms. We are told to limit where we go and when, to be careful about solitude, crowds, bars, drinks, drugs, naps, parties, public spaces, public transit, strangers, cities, wilderness, to see our clothing and even our appearance as potential provocation, a sort of asking for it. To wither away our freedom and confidence to accommodate a culture of violence. In the same way, we are now supposed to adapt to a culture of guns.The idea of unlimited rights is meant to apply to a limited number of us. Open-carry laws, it’s often noted, wouldn’t allow Black people to wander through the supermarket with huge guns slung over them and the confidence they could impose on others this way; Philando Castile was shot point-blank just for telling a policeman he had a gun in the car in 2016; 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot for holding a toy rifle in Cleveland in 2014. And the spate of new abortion laws being passed and the likely overrule of Roe v Wade means that those who can get pregnant are being denied even jurisdiction over their own bodies while gun owners assert their rights over the bodies of others.In Oklahoma, anyone who gets pregnant has fewer rights than a cluster of a few cells visible only under a microscope. Any pregnant woman may face prosecution as a murderer if she doesn’t bring a baby to term. They also face grotesque intrusiveness – criminal investigation for a miscarriage, having to try to prove to an unsympathetic legal system that a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, the sense that their pregnancy is supervised and they are potential suspects. There’s a gruesome symmetry to this expansion of patriarchal violence and withering away of reproductive rights.Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power through the stripping away of voting rights and persecution of women, immigrants, black people, queer people, trans people – all of whom have been targeted by mass shootings in recent years. This is the same party that sought to overturn an election through violence whipped up from on high, by the cult leaders, including the former president and various pundits and demagogues. “Trial by combat,” wheezed Rudy Giuliani as he incited the crowd to go rampage through Congress. If guns are icons it’s because violence is a sacrament defended as a right and an identity.Semiautomatic weapons are instruments of death perpetrated by a death cult. And the carnage will continue until the majority can overrule the minority in power that profits from and perpetrates it. This article was amended on 30 May 2022 to correct the spelling of Philando Castile’s surname.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts

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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts The former White House counselor’s memoir is tart, readable and thoroughly selective when it comes to inconvenient truthsKellyanne Conway joined Donald Trump’s orbit after Ted Cruz’s presidential bid collapsed and Paul Manafort wore out his welcome. The Trump White House was a snake pit. Like most Trump memoirs, Conway’s book revels in selective recall as well as settling scores. After all, this is the woman who coined the term “alternative facts”.A Sacred Oath review: Mark Esper on Trump, missiles for Mexico and more Read moreConway strafes Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Her disdain is unvarnished, her language tart. Her book? Readable.Conway labels Bannon a “leaking dirigible” and an “unpaternal, paternalistic bore of a boor”. She dings his aesthetics and questions his stability. Confronted with the possibility Bannon might receive a presidential pardon, Conway says, she told him Trump didn’t owe him anything.“You were a leaker,” she remembers saying. “You were terrible to [Trump] in the press … You were the only source for at least two books riddled with lies.”He got the pardon anyway.Some who feel Conway’s sting are very close to home. She sticks a knife in her own husband, George, for trashing Trump and embarrassing her. Between the two men, Conway posits that Trump was the one who remained loyal. She may wish to reconsider. Her book has kindled Trump’s wrath.“I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time,” Conway writes, about the 2020 defeat Trump has refused to admit. But Trump denies she said any such thing.“If she had I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer – she would have been wrong – could go back to her crazy husband,” he “truthed” on Thursday on his own ersatz Twitter, Truth Social.But Trump can’t say he wasn’t warned. The Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s 2016 campaign exposé, captures Conway both badmouthing Trump’s chances and playing the sycophant.In 2019, Cliff Sims, once a junior White House staffer, framed things this way in his memoir, Team of Vipers: “Kellyanne stood in a class of own in terms of her machinations – I had to admire her sheer gall.”In Here’s the Deal, Kellyanne soft-pedals Green but is far less charitable to Sims. She rehashes his departure from the White House, dismisses him as a lightweight and gloats over Trump targeting him with a “brutal” takedown on Twitter.Left unsaid is that Sims played a significant role at the 2020 Republican convention, drafting speeches for two Trump children. And whatever his sins, he came to be re-embraced by senior Trump staff even after he challenged a Trump-induced non-disclosure agreement in court.On a matter of greater importance, Conway lauds Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the conservative mega-donors who invested in Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct psychographic profiling company which was linked to Bannon.Rebekah Mercer allegedly provided connective tissue for the January 6 insurrection, via Parler. Conway omits such details. Not surprisingly, she also ignores Bob Mercer’s tax woes. In 2021, with his business partners, Mercer reportedly entered into a $7bn settlement with the IRS.Like many in Trumpworld, Conway hits Facebook for its role in the 2020 election. But she omits the nexus between Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant and Cambridge Analytica, in 2016 and beyond. The two businesses shared more than a passing acquaintance.Cambridge Analytica illegally harvested personal data from Facebook. Conway takes Bannon to task for profiting from his investment in Cambridge Analytica but stays mum about the Mercers’ ownership.In 2016, the Cruz campaign spent more than $5.8m on Cambridge Analytica services. That same year, the unseen hand of the company put it sticky fingers on the scales of Brexit. This past week, the attorney general for the District of Columbia launched a lawsuit against Facebook in connection with the Cambridge Analytica data breach.Here’s the Deal also contains its fair share of semi-veiled ethnic reductionism. Conway writes of how she “made her bones” – a term with mafia origins – in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Elsewhere, she deploys “clever”, “shrewd” and “calculating” to describe Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who is Jewish. At the same time, she shares a desire to keep things “classy”.Some realities cut too close to the bone. Despite acknowledging Trump’s loss in 2020, Conway is silent on his infamous post-election call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he sought to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”The only thing missing was the president telling Raffensperger he was receiving an offer he couldn’t refuse. Unsurprisingly, Conway has few kind words for Biden. She recounts the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and rightly tags his administration for inflation. But she also blames the president for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout.This Will Not Pass review: Trump-Biden blockbuster is dire reading for DemocratsRead moreHello, alternative facts. In February, Trump praised Vladimir Putin as smart and denigrated Nato. These days, Putin is under siege and Nato is the club to join. This somehow escapes Conway’s attention.As for Tehran, Axios reports that senior Israeli military officials now view Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal as having “brought Iran closer to a nuclear weapon and created a worse situation”. An attempt to placate Trump’s base had a cost.Conway remains in the arena. Here’s the Deal doubles as an audition for a campaign slot in 2024. In Trumpworld, few are ever permanently banished. Conway should ask Steve Bannon. He could tell her some things.
      Here’s the Deal is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without Trump

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      Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without TrumpThe ex-president suffered some humiliation when his candidates lost in the Georgia primaries – but the hard-right strain of Republican politics will survive In his campaign heyday, Donald Trump would declare it the greatest movement in the history of politics and promise: “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.”What never occurred to him was that the “Make America Great Again” movement – or Maga – might get sick and tired of him first.Tuesday’s Republican primaries did not go as Trump had hoped | Lloyd GreenRead moreThe former US president suffered some humiliation on Tuesday when four candidates he handpicked in Georgia lost Republican primary elections in a landslide. It was a stinging rebuke in what has become ground zero for his “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.But it was no rebuke of Maga and all it stands for.The hard-right, nativist-populist strain of Republican politics predates Trump and will surely survive him. This year’s primary season winners in Georgia and elsewhere have been careful not to disavow the movement, or its patriarch, even when they lack his blessing.“Donald Trump has transformed the Republican party over the past five years and it is now a solid majority Trumpist party with everything that entails in policy and in tone,” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “On the other hand, Republicans, including very conservative ones, are clearly willing to entertain the possibility of Trumpism without Trump.”Trump is now 75 and could be living a quiet, golf-playing retirement like other past presidents. But against the counsel of some of his inner circle, he chose to make this year’s midterm elections about him and the primaries – votes in states and districts to decide which Republicans will take on Democrats in November – a referendum on his continued influence.Trump endorsed candidates in nearly 200 races, from governor to county commissioner, often in contests that are not particularly competitive and help bolster his list of wins. But others have been reckless, vengeful bets aimed at dislodging incumbents who defied his claims of election fraud. So far, the results have been a mixed bag.The month began well enough in Ohio, where venture capitalist and author JD Vance leaped from third to first place following Trump’s late-stage endorsement in the Senate primary.In North Carolina, Trump helped the 26-year-old former college football player Bo Hines win the nomination for a seat in the House of Representatives. In Pennsylvania, voters chose his preferred candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who said he would not have certified Joe Biden’s 2020 win of the state.But other governor races, which often turn on specific local issues, have proved more elusive. Trump’s pick in Nebraska’s primary, Charles Herbster, lost after allegations surfaced that he had groped women. In Idaho a week later, Governor Brad Little comfortably beat a Trump-backed challenger.In North Carolina, meanwhile, voters rejected Trump’s plea to give a scandal-plagued congressman Madison Cawthorn a second chance. And in Pennsylvania, a Senate primary featuring Trump-endorsed TV doctor Mehmet Oz remains too close to call.This week Trump again notched some wins including Sarah Sanders, his former White House press secretary, in the primary for governor of Arkansas. But it was all overshadowed by Georgia, where he has pushed his personal vendetta hardest and so squandered political capital.It was not just that former senator David Perdue, whom Trump had lobbied to run, lost to Governor Brian Kemp, who had refused to overturn the results of the 2020 election in his state. It was also the crushing margin: Kemp beat Perdue by a staggering 52 percentage points.Rubbing salt into the wound, Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who defied Trump’s call to “find” the votes to change the outcome two years ago, also won his party’s nomination. Attorney general Chris Carr and insurance commissioner John King, both opposed by Trump, prevailed in their primaries too.Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, commented: “The results in Georgia were really stunning. Few, if any Republicans, have aroused Donald Trump’s ire so much as Governor Kemp and Brad Raffensperger and they both did substantially better than expected. Donald Trump went all out in Georgia and he ended up an egg on this face, which is significant.“It may be that the people who have been in the bull’s eye of Trump’s ‘big lie’ campaign have started resenting it and took their resentment out. More generally, I think an increasing number of people are asking themselves a question that they weren’t asking previously: would we be better off with a Trumpist candidate who’s not named Donald Trump?”Among those asking the question is Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who campaigned for Kemp in Georgia and told the Politico website: “Trump picked this fight.” Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have also felt at liberty to campaign for midterm candidates denied Trump’s imprimatur.Then there is Mike Pence, the former vice-president, who defied his old boss by rallying with Kemp on Monday and telling the crowd: “Elections are about the future.” Pence, himself a former governor of Indiana, has made a habit of speaking with pride about the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence administration while distancing himself from the “big lie”.Should he run for president in 2024, he may pay close attention to how Little, Kemp and others have studiously avoided criticising Trump while capturing swaths of his base by shifting right on abortion, gun rights and “culture wars” issues and signing legislation to prove it. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is another likely student of the formula.That means there is still little room for more old school Republicans such as Senator Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, who lost the presidential election in 2012. Few are making an impact in the primaries. “A Republican who wants to pretend that 2016 through 2020 never happened and go back to the Romney-Ryan era is not going to do well in today’s Republican party,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington.But Trump does face a further challenge to his authority from the far right.Some on this wing effectively accuse him of not being Trumpy enough, as demonstrated last year when he was booed for urging supporters to get vaccinated against the coronavirus (he now barely mentions vaccines in his speeches).Kathy Barnette, a Senate candidate who mounted a late surge in Pennsylvania with ideas even more extreme than Oz, told the Reuters news agency: “Maga doesn’t belong to him. Trump coined the word. He does not own it.” Kandiss Taylor, a similarly far-right candidate for governor of Georgia, backs Trump’s false claims of voter fraud but is unsure whether she would vote for him again in 2024. She said in an interview with the Guardian: “It’s not about him. The people of America chose him and he’s the one that we elected. Will I vote for him in 2024? It all depends on what happens between now and then and who runs against him.”A further sign of fracturing came this week when Cawthorn, smarting from his defeat in North Carolina, swore revenge on “cowardly and weak” members of his own party and declared: “It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark Maga to truly take command.”The anti-democratic implication was that the end justifies the means in an existential struggle for America. Cawthorn named allies including the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Trump himself, suggesting that the former president has already turned to the dark side.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who belonged to the rightwing Tea Party movement, said: “Maga’s dark enough on its own … Trumpism has metastasised beyond Trump and it’ll go in a bunch of different dark, eerie places but it’s all the same thing. Trumpism now is the dominant strain in the party.”Maga’s identity crisis comes as Biden and other Democratic leaders seek to brand their opponents as “Ultra-Maga Republicans” in the hope that labelling the entire party as extremist will be more effective in the midterms than a singular focus on Trump (though he and his supporters have embraced “Ultra-Maga” in merchandise and fundraising emails).Yet while Trump’s status as a kingmaker has been diminished, and his “Stop the steal” obsession is wearing thin, it would be unwise to extrapolate too much from primaries where it was always going to be hard to oust popular, well-funded incumbents.Trump continues to raise vast sums of money and command loyalty from most Republicans in Congress as well as from the Republican National Committee. Polls suggest that he is more popular with the Republican base now than when he won the nomination for president in 2016. His “America first” mantra is now in the party’s DNA; even the candidates he does not endorse typically do endorse him.Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 presidential primary and now hosts a podcast, added: “Nothing has changed. This is Trump’s party and everything that’s happened this primary season just continues to reflect that … Wake me up when an anti-Trump Republican wins a primary. That would be news.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Kevin McCarthy refuses to comply with House Capitol attack panel subpoena

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      Kevin McCarthy refuses to comply with House Capitol attack panel subpoenaThe Republican minority leader sent an 11-page letter appearing to demand materials from the committee related to his questioning Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, indicated on Friday to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack that he would not cooperate with a subpoena unless he could review deposition topics and the legal rationale justifying the request.The California congressman’s response adopts an adversarial position similar to other subpoenaed Republican Congress members, and it sets a conundrum for the panel over whether to entertain the requests that also challenge the January 6 inquiry’s legitimacy.McCarthy appeared to tell the select committee in an 11-page letter through his lawyer that he would not consider complying with the subpoena until House investigators turned over materials that would reveal what the panel intended to use in questioning ahead of a deposition.Rudy Giuliani stonewalls Capitol attack investigators during lengthy depositionRead moreThe House minority leader also asked the panel to give him internal analyses about the constitutional and legal rationales justifying the subpoena, and whether the panel would adhere to one-hour questioning between majority and minority counsel, according to the letter.McCarthy’s references to the minority counsel amounted to a thinly veiled attack at the investigation, which Republicans have called illegitimate because the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, refused last year to appoint some of McCarthy’s picks for the Republican minority.The accusations, however, are to some degree disingenuous: it was McCarthy who pulled all Republican participation, incensed at Pelosi’s refusals, rather than name different members. Pelosi later added Republican congressmembers Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to the panel.McCarthy’s requests also appeared phrased in a manner expecting the select committee to decline his requests, with the letter accusing the panel of issuing unprecedented subpoenas to five House Republicans in an illegal and unconstitutional manner.“The select committee is clearly not acting within the confines of any legislative purpose,” the letter said. “It is unclear how the select committee believes it is operating within the bounds of law or even within the confines of any legislative purpose.”The response from McCarthy largely mirrored the response from Ohio congressman Jim Jordan on Wednesday. In the letter, obtained by the Guardian, Jordan said he would consider complying only if the panel shared material that put him under scrutiny.Like with Jordan, it was not immediately clear how McCarthy might act if the select committee refused his requests. The investigation’s standard operating procedure to date has been not to share such materials with witnesses, according to a source familiar with the matter.The panel’s next move could have significant ramifications for both its inquiry and Congress. If the panel refused the request and the five subpoenaed House Republicans in turn declined to cooperate, it could leave large unanswered questions about the Capitol attack.But it could also set a problematic precedent for Republicans themselves, who might like the idea of subpoenaing Democrats in partisan investigations should the GOP take control of the House – as Capitol Hill widely expects – after the 2022 midterm elections.A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment.The resistance from McCarthy came as he and Jordan denounced the investigation as a “kangaroo court” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “For House Republican leaders to agree to participate in this political stunt would change the House forever,” they wrote.With McCarthy’s refusal to appear for a deposition without first receiving materials from the select committee, at least four of the five Republicans subpoenaed to testify about their roles in the events of 6 January have now declined to comply without some sort of negotiation.The current chairman of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, Scott Perry, and its previous chairman, Andy Biggs, have both sent letters to the panel refusing to cooperate, CNN reported. It was not clear whether the fifth Republican, Mo Brooks, would comply.TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Kevin McCarthy refuses to comply with January 6 attack panel subpoena

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      Kevin McCarthy refuses to comply with January 6 attack panel subpoenaThe Republican minority leader sent an 11-page letter appearing to demand materials from the committee related to his questioning Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, indicated on Friday to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack that he would not cooperate with a subpoena unless he could review deposition topics and the legal rationale justifying the request.The California congressman’s response adopts an adversarial position similar to other subpoenaed Republican Congress members, and it sets a conundrum for the panel over whether to entertain the requests that also challenge the January 6 inquiry’s legitimacy.McCarthy appeared to tell the select committee in an 11-page letter through his lawyer that he would not consider complying with the subpoena until House investigators turned over materials that would reveal what the panel intended to use in questioning ahead of a deposition.Rudy Giuliani stonewalls Capitol attack investigators during lengthy depositionRead moreThe House minority leader also asked the panel to give him internal analyses about the constitutional and legal rationales justifying the subpoena, and whether the panel would adhere to one-hour questioning between majority and minority counsel, according to the letter.McCarthy’s references to the minority counsel amounted to a thinly veiled attack at the investigation, which Republicans have called illegitimate because the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, refused last year to appoint some of McCarthy’s picks for the Republican minority.The accusations, however, are to some degree disingenuous: it was McCarthy who pulled all Republican participation, incensed at Pelosi’s refusals, rather than name different members. Pelosi later added Republican congressmembers Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to the panel.McCarthy’s requests also appeared phrased in a manner expecting the select committee to decline his requests, with the letter accusing the panel of issuing unprecedented subpoenas to five House Republicans in an illegal and unconstitutional manner.“The select committee is clearly not acting within the confines of any legislative purpose,” the letter said. “It is unclear how the select committee believes it is operating within the bounds of law or even within the confines of any legislative purpose.”The response from McCarthy largely mirrored the response from Ohio congressman Jim Jordan on Wednesday. In the letter, obtained by the Guardian, Jordan said he would consider complying only if the panel shared material that put him under scrutiny.Like with Jordan, it was not immediately clear how McCarthy might act if the select committee refused his requests. The investigation’s standard operating procedure to date has been not to share such materials with witnesses, according to a source familiar with the matter.The panel’s next move could have significant ramifications for both its inquiry and Congress. If the panel refused the request and the five subpoenaed House Republicans in turn declined to cooperate, it could leave large unanswered questions about the Capitol attack.But it could also set a problematic precedent for Republicans themselves, who might like the idea of subpoenaing Democrats in partisan investigations should the GOP take control of the House – as Capitol Hill widely expects – after the 2022 midterm elections.A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment.The resistance from McCarthy came as he and Jordan denounced the investigation as a “kangaroo court” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “For House Republican leaders to agree to participate in this political stunt would change the House forever,” they wrote.With McCarthy’s refusal to appear for a deposition without first receiving materials from the select committee, at least four of the five Republicans subpoenaed to testify about their roles in the events of 6 January have now declined to comply without some sort of negotiation.The current chairman of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, Scott Perry, and its previous chairman, Andy Biggs, have both sent letters to the panel refusing to cooperate, CNN reported. It was not clear whether the fifth Republican, Mo Brooks, would comply.TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Texas school shooting overshadows primaries: Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      The killing of at least 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in the town of Uvalde on Tuesday has reignited the gun control debate in the US. Jonathan Freedland speaks to the chief correspondent for the Washington Post, Dan Balz, about why, after yet another tragedy involving firearms, the Republican party is still unwilling to talk gun reform

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Archive: CNN, NBC, Channel 4 Listen to the Guardian’s Weekend podcast Listen to Today in Focus Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Democrats looking for 'common ground' with Republicans on gun control, says Murphy – video

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      Senator Chris Murphy has spoken with confidence on ‘finding that common ground’ with Republicans to support gun laws following the Uvalde school shooting on Tuesday.
      Murphy called for a ‘popular uprising of citizens’ to put pressure Republicans when he attended a Thursday gun safety rally and press conference on Capitol Hill.
      Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is expected to bring expanded background checks and potentially ‘red flag’ laws to Congress that allow people to petition a court to temporarily take guns away from a person at risk of hurting themselves or others.

      Texas shooting: latest updates
      How the push for US gun control rises and falls with each school shooting More

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      Why Brad Raffensperger’s victory in Georgia’s primary is surprising

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      Why Brad Raffensperger’s victory in Georgia’s primary is surprisingAs late as a few weeks ago, it was widely believed he would face an uphill battle against Trump-backed Jody Hice Hello, and Happy Thursday,You’ve probably heard by now – on Tuesday night Brad Raffensperger won a surprise victory against Jody Hice in the Republican primary for secretary of state.Raffensperger was one of three candidates in Georgia that won over Trump-backed candidates who had embraced the idea of a stolen election. My colleague Lauren Gambino wrote about how those victories were a major blow to Trump in his quest to punish those who refused to overturn the election.I can’t emphasize how much of a surprise it was that Raffensperger won the GOP primary outright on Tuesday. As late as a few weeks ago, it was widely believed that Raffensperger faced an uphill battle in fending off Hice. “Ultimately, it’s gonna be Hice that’s gonna win that thing,” Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia told me earlier this month. If Raffensperger had a chance, it was believed he would have to win in a runoff election.One takeaway I have from Raffensperger’s victory is that support for Trump and uncertainty about the election doesn’t necessarily translate into voting for other candidates. When I began to see Raffensperger doing well on Tuesday evening, I kept hearing the voice of Carolee Curti, an 82-year-old retiree in Rome, a city in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s deeply conservative district, who told me she voted for the secretary of state. “I felt that under all that pressure, he did a good job,” she said after casting her vote. “I know it upset Trump, and I’m a Trump person, but fair is fair.”Raffensperger also found a way to appeal to Republican voters concerned about fraud in elections while defending the 2020 election results. The central issue in his campaign was preventing non-citizen voting, which is virtually non-existent in Georgia. He also championed SB 202, Georgia’s new law that imposes new restrictions on mail-in ballots and drop boxes, and prevents handing out food or water within 150 feet of a polling place.“He has been threading this needle from the outset of the 2020 election,” Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, told me earlier this month. “From the moment he announced that the election results were what they were and that Joe Biden had won the election in Georgia, he immediately pivoted towards pledging to do more to improve election security, I would argue in an attempt to appease conservative voters who probably were not gonna be satisfied with him.”The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also has a good rundown of some of the other reasons Raffensperger won. Georgia voters can choose to cast their votes in either party’s primary, and there appear to be tens of thousands of Democrats who cast ballots in the GOP contest. Hice also campaigned poorly, the AJC noted, never expanding his base and saving money for a runoff that never came.A few weeks ago, when I spoke with Raffensperger in Georgia, I asked him if he ever got tired of having to continue to debunk baseless claims about the 2020 election. When he said no, I asked him if he could continue to do it forever.“Don’t have to,” he said. “May 24. Then it’ll be decided.”Also worth watching …
      Democrats are headed for a runoff in their nominating contest for secretary of state.
      A Republican who was part of a fake set of electors for Donald Trump in Wisconsin wants to be the chair of the agency that oversees elections in the state.
      Five Republicans running for governor in Michigan face potential disqualification from the ballot after submitting fraudulent signatures.
      TopicsGeorgiaFight to voteDonald TrumpRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More