More stories

  • in

    Appear before 6 January panel or risk prosecution, ex-Trump chief of staff told

    Appear before 6 January panel or risk prosecution, ex-Trump chief of staff toldMark Meadows threatened with criminal contempt referral to DoJ should he refuse to show for deposition on Friday morning Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is facing a criminal referral to the justice department for contempt of Congress should he refuse to appear for an immediate deposition on Friday morning before the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.Republican lawsuits unlikely to halt US worker vaccine mandates, experts sayRead moreThe move to threaten criminal prosecution for Meadows amounts to an abrupt and sharp escalation for the select committee as it seeks to enforce its subpoena against one of Donald Trump’s closest aides first issued in September.Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the select committee, said in a letter to Meadows’s attorney on Thursday that the panel had exhausted its patience with Meadows, and his failure to appear at the deposition would be viewed as an instance of willful noncompliance.The chairman said that would force the select committee to “consider invoking contempt of Congress procedures” that could result in a criminal referral to the justice department, as well as the possibility of a civil action to enforce the subpoena.But despite the threat of criminal prosecution, Meadows was not expected to attend his deposition, scheduled to take place with select committee counsel in a nondescript House office building on Capitol Hill, according to a source familiar with the matter.The select committee is targeting Meadows since his role as Trump’s former White House chief of staff means he is likely to hold the key to uncover Trump’s involvement in efforts on 6 January to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.The select committee also believes that Meadows remained by Trump’s side for most of 6 January, and was therefore in a unique position to know what the former president was privately thinking and doing at the White House as the deadly attack on the Capitol unfolded.But after Trump instructed his former aides to defy the subpoenas on grounds of executive privilege, Meadows moved to negotiate with the select committee about the scope of his cooperation – which members on the panel suspect was an effort to stall the inquiry.Those suspicions among members on the select committee appeared to be bolstered on Thursday after Meadows’s attorney, George Terwilliger, said in a statement that Meadows was “immune” from congressional testimony under justice department opinions.“Mr Meadows remains under the instructions of former President Trump to respect long-standing principles of executive privilege. It now appears the courts will have to resolve this conflict,” Terwilliger added.Thompson said in the letter that rejected the notion that Meadows was immune from testifying to the select committee, noting that every federal court has ruled that presidential aides have no such protections in spite of the justice department opinions.The chairman also noted that Meadows had not produced any materials demanded in his subpoena – including those not covered by executive privilege – though weeks had passed since Terwilliger indicated he would review which records to release.Thompson said in the letter that his patience had expired and demanded that Meadows appear with the requested documents at a deposition on Friday. Noncompliance by Meadows would force the select committee to pursue contempt proceedings, he added.The White House on Thursday backed Thompson, notifying Terwilliger in a separate letter that Biden would not assert executive privilege – a power wielded by sitting presidents – or immunity over the documents and deposition requested by the select committee.“President Biden has determined that he will not assert immunity to preclude your client from testifying before the select committee,” deputy White House counsel Jonathan Su said in an office of legal counsel letter first reported by the Washington Post.Thompson’s warning on Thursday was his third threat against a recalcitrant witness since House investigators starting issuing subpoenas to dozens of top former Trump administration officials and pro-Trump activists connected to the 6 January insurrection.The chairman last week raised the possibility of holding former Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark in contempt of Congress after he appeared for a deposition pursuant to a subpoena but refused to answer any questions, citing attorney-client privilege.Last month, the House voted to refer Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon to the justice department for prosecution after the select committee unanimously recommended his referral after he ignored his September subpoena in its entirety.TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

  • in

    Republicans resist mandates to curb Covid but lawsuits likely to prove futile

    Republicans resist mandates to curb Covid but lawsuits likely to prove futileThe Biden administration is on solid legal ground in imposing Covid-related public health measures, scholars argue Republican elected officials continue to challenge government mandates aimed at stopping the spread of Covid-19, but legal experts predict the lawsuits and bans on mandates will largely prove fruitless because the law allows for such public safety measures.But as those legal fights play out the US will probably still be riven by a dispute between mostly Democrats on one hand who argue they are trying to curb a deadly virus, and usually Republicans on the other who say the Biden administration is involved in government overreach, often using rhetoric that can veer into the conspiratorial.Republicans slam Biden vaccine rule for businesses as health groups defend itRead moreTen states filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to block the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers because it could “exacerbate an alarming shortage of health care workers, particularly in rural communities, that has already reached a boiling point”, the filing states. All the states but one have Republican attorneys general.That petition comes days after a federal appeals court temporarily blocked a federal vaccine requirement for large businesses in response to a lawsuit from Republican officials, businesses and religious groups challenging the rules.And judges in two states issued rulings on Wednesday offering potentially different outcomes for masking mandates in schools. In Texas, a federal judge ruled that Governor Greg Abbot’s ban on school mask mandates violated the rights of students with disabilities, which clears the way for districts to issue requirements for face coverings. The Texas attorney general tweeted that he was “considering all legal avenues to challenge this decision”.In Pennsylvania, a state court ruled that the state health secretary did not have the authority to issue a school mask mandate, but the Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, appealed, which means the requirement can for now remain in place.While the judicial rulings create hurdles for Democratic elected officials’ use of government authority to try to bring the pandemic to an end, legal experts say there is precedent for such health policy measures and that they will largely remain in place.“There is no fundamental right to wear or not wear a mask in the public square,” said Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law whose focus is education law and policy, and constitutional law. “Even where some fundamental right might be impinged,” such as the right not to be vaccinated, “it doesn’t mean that it can’t be overridden if there is some compelling state interest for doing so.”The latest wave of lawsuits comes after the Biden administration last week announced rules concerning vaccinations for companies with 100 or more employees, and healthcare workers.The rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), which the federal court blocked, would take effect on 4 January and require large companies to ensure their employees have been vaccinated or regularly administer Covid-19 tests for those who decline the vaccine and require them to wear masks at work. It would affect an estimated 84 million workers.The rule concerning healthcare workers from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has the same deadline – with no option for weekly testing rather than vaccination. That would affect 76,000 providers and more than 17 million healthcare workers.The lawsuit concerning healthcare workers argues that the mandate is unreasonably broad in part because it includes staff who would probably not have contact with patients, such as construction crews.But Sidney Watson, director of the Center for Health Law Studies at Saint Louis University School of Law, argues that the administration is on solid legal ground in issuing the vaccine mandate because hospitals must comply with certain conditions in order to receive payment through the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which they are not required to participate in but which almost all hospitals do.The vaccination requirement “only applies to providers who step forward and say, ‘I want to take this federal money,’” said Watson.But the Republicans are also challenging the mandate on the basis that it could hurt rural hospitals, which are already facing a labor shortage and could lose more employees who do not want to get vaccinated. Hospitals across the country are having a difficult time finding nurses, but the problem is particularly acute in rural areas, according to reports from Vox and PBS.“We think the goal of having all employees in rural hospitals vaccinated is a good one. The problem is, the mandate and its timing may be difficult, especially if it leaves some hospitals with severe staff shortages,” said Brock Slabach, chief operations officer of the National Rural Health Association (NRHA), which is considering requesting during a public comment period that the CMS instead allow hospitals to regularly test unvaccinated workers, the same as the Osha rule for large companies.But Watson, of Saint Louis University, said she sees concern about the mandate causing large numbers of employees to quit their jobs or be fired as speculation. She points to places like New York, where the police union warned that a vaccine mandate would cause 10,000 police officers to be “pulled from [the] streets”, but the number of officers who were placed on unpaid leave was ultimately only 34.Despite his concerns about the mandate, Slabach does not expect courts to strike it down and is recommending that rural hospitals prepare to come into compliance with it.In addition to facing a labor shortage, the rural healthcare organizations must contend with a population base that is vaccinated against Covid-19 at a much lower rate than in urban areas. For example, in Pulaski county in central Missouri, only 17% of its more than 50,000 residents are fully vaccinated.As such, it’s crucial that hospitals in such areas employ staff that is fully vaccinated because they could see a surge in Covid cases, said Slabach.“When you complicate that with the fact that rural communities have populations that are more vulnerable to the disease itself, meaning they have co-morbid or chronic diseases,” then vaccination is “critically important”, Slabach added.TopicsCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationBiden administrationRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

  • in

    America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture wars | Hamilton Nolan

    America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture warsHamilton NolanThe hoopla about CRT and the like is a Republican game serious leaders would not play. But Democrats don’t have serious leaders I do not know if I can survive three more years of Democrats stumbling over themselves to disavow the Democratic platform in a doomed attempt to win bad-faith culture wars. It is too painful, like watching ruthless hunters herding panicked animals over the side of a cliff. The poor, dumb beasts inevitably go extinct if they are not able to outthink such a rudimentary strategy.Message to Democrats: embrace economic bread-and-butter issues to win | Matthew Karp and Dustin GuastellaRead moreWalk around your town. Explore a major American city. Drive across the country. What are the most important problems you see? There is poverty. Homelessness. A lack of affordable housing. Vast and jaw-dropping economic and racial inequality. There is a lack of public transportation, a broken healthcare system, environmental degradation, and a climate crisis that threatens to upend our way of life. These are real problems. These are the things that we need our government to fix. These are what we need to hear politicians talk about. These are what we must debate and focus on, if we are really concerned about human rights and our children’s future and all the other big things we claim to value.I guarantee you that neither “cancel culture” nor “critical race theory” nor, worse of all, “wokeness” will grab you as enormous problems after your exploration of America, unless that exploration ranges only from a college faculty lounge to a cable TV studio to the office of a rightwing thinktank. These are all words that mean nothing. To the extent that they are real at all, they are niche concerns that plague such a small subset of Americans that they deserve to be addressed only after we have solved the many other, realer problems.All these terms function primarily as empty vessels into which bad-faith actors can pour racism, so that it may appear more palatable when it hits the public airwaves. Common sense tells us we should spend most of our time talking about the biggest problems, and less time on the lesser problems, and no time on the mythical problems. To engage in long and tortured debates over these slippery and indefinable culture war terms is to violate that rule, with awful consequences for everyone.Let’s not bullshit about this. Racism is a wonderfully effective political tool for Republicans, yet explicit racism is frowned upon in polite society now, so there is a constant flow of new issues to stand in for racism in political discourse. Lee Atwater, who invented Nixon’s “southern strategy”, explained this all decades ago, and it is still true. George Wallace could be outright racist, but subsequent generations of politicians have had to cloak it in “welfare reform” or being “tough on crime” or, now, opposition to “wokeness” and “critical race theory” – things which mean, by the way, “caring about racism”.Three-quarters of a million Americans are dead from a pandemic. We have a Democratic president and a booming economy. So we will get culture wars, and more culture wars, all of which are built on stoking various forms of hate. This is a game that serious leaders should not play. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many serious leaders. We have the Democratic party.Republicans will push these culture wars as far as they can, but it takes Democrats to make the strategy work. There are two types of Democrats falling for this trap now. One type is the group of fairly well-meaning people who assume that the fact there is a cottage industry dedicated to amplifying these terms in the media means there must be something to them. The other type are the opportunistic Democrats, who often brand themselves “centrists”, who see the culture wars as a way to steal power from the left wing of their own party, even if it comes at the cost of hurting millions of Americans.We have seen this movie before. The 1990s was the era of fiery and stupid debates over gay people in the military, flag burning and Sister Souljah. They were just an earlier iteration of the same thing we’re going through now. The decision of Democrats to lean into this dynamic by running to the right led to atrocities like Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform” and crime bills that won him momentary electoral power by immiserating an entire generation of poor, non-white people, many of whom are still caged in prison today. Choosing to give credence to the culture wars has real life consequences. Already, we can see panicked Democrats rushing to decry the very sort of social justice fights that give the decrepit party its only redeeming value.Here is the good news: we don’t have to do this. We can step off this train before it pulls out of Bad Faith Station on the way to the Trump 2024 victory party. What we need is some sort of broad force that can unite people of disparate races and persuasions around a shared, common interest. Something capable of demonstrating the value of the fight against inequality and corporate domination in a real, tangible way. Something that wages its fights in reality, not in the remote world of buzzwords and misdirection.Guess what? That thing already exists. It’s called the labor movement. And it’s energetic as hell right now. A wave of strikes across the nation that has been building for months is garnering levels of attention unseen in decades. The popularity of unions is high. This is a model of progressive values in action that a political party could rally around, if that party was not always so easily tempted to trip over its own shoelaces.In deep red rural Alabama, you can find hundreds of striking mine workers – black and white, Democratic and Republican – completely united and fighting hard, in unity, for economic justice. These people whom our society typically divides have come together in a union, and are sacrificing for one another, side by side. The military is the only other institution in American society that accomplishes this feat of unity, and unions can do it without shooting anyone. The labor movement is living proof that the substance of progressive politics – protecting the poor against the rich, promoting equality, giving everyone fair treatment no matter who they are or how much money they make – is a tool powerful enough to overcome the background drone of Fox News (and the Atlantic).Democrats do not need to wonder how to overcome the culture wars. We already know how: organizing working people to create power that can produce a more just and equal world. It works. But to make it work, you need to hold it up and promote it and help it and talk about it, rather than talking about whether things are “too woke”. Our problems are in the real world. Our solutions are in the real world as well. Our politicians? Many of them are floating in the ether. Come back down to earth, join the labor movement, and help people walk the path away from the incredibly dumb nightmare that awaits us if we get sucked into bullshit debates, with bullshit people, about bullshit.
    Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter at In These Times
    TopicsDemocratsOpinionRepublicansUS politicsUS unionscommentReuse this content More

  • in

    Republicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill threatened with retaliation

    RepublicansRepublicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill threatened with retaliationRightwingers in the party call for members who helped pass the bill to be stripped of their committee assignments Gloria Oladipo in New York@gaoladipoWed 10 Nov 2021 13.37 ESTLast modified on Wed 10 Nov 2021 14.03 ESTA group of congressional Republicans who helped pass the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill last Friday are facing calls for political punishment by their own party, including the threat of having their committee assignments stripped for supporting the president’s agenda, according to reports this week.Several hardline Republicans, including the Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert and former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, have publicly urged retaliation against party colleagues who voted for the $1tn bill. Some members who were among the GOP rank and file who helped the bill pass the House say they have received death threats.Many of the Republicans who backed the bipartisan bill have ranking positions on full committees or subcommittees, including the homeland security committee and the natural resources committee.The bill, which passed 228 to 206, would have failed if no Republicans voted for it in the House late last Friday, prompting widespread fury and intra-party threats, Punchbowl news reported.“That 13 House Republicans provided the votes needed to pass this is absurd,” the Texas representative Chip Roy said, and the Washington Post has reported.Florida’s Matt Gaetz had fumed early on Saturday, tweeting: “I can’t believe Republicans just gave the Democrats their socialism bill.”On Tuesday, Meadows said: “They stripped Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committees for not even voting against the Republican party.… These people voted for Joe Biden, for an infrastructure bill that will clear the way for more socialist spending that, quite frankly, gives Joe Biden a win.”Greene, a radical rightist from Georgia, was demoted earlier this year for promulgating conspiracy theories and untrue claims about issues including mass shootings. She has also been fined several times for refusing to wear a mask to help prevent the spread of coronavirus on Capitol Hill.Before the legislative vote, some Republicans threatened to mount primary challenges to any party members who supported the legislation, according to the Washington Post.“Vote for this infrastructure bill and I will primary the hell out of you,” said Representative Madison Hawthorn of North Carolina.Certain GOP divides in Washington have grown in recent weeks , especially in relation to the bipartisan committee investigating the Capitol insurrection of 6 January by extremist supporters of Donald Trump, and legislative battles on Biden’s agenda.On Tuesday evening, congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who is the leading Republican on that committee, gave a speech in New Hampshire, saying that the US was “confronting a domestic threat that we have never faced before” in the form of Donald Trump, who is “attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic” with his continued attempts to block the investigation of the insurrection and campaign to declare Biden’s 2020 victory fraudulent.Cheney added: “Political leaders who sit silent in the face of these false and dangerous claims are aiding the former president, who is at war with the rule of law, and the constitution.”She emphasized her Republican credentials by pointing out that she disagreed with almost everything Joe Biden has done since coming to power in January.But she added of her own party’s continued support of Trump that “when our constitutional order is threatened, as it is now, rising above partisanship is not simply an aspiration. It is an obligation.”Amid talk that her high-stakes strategy could break her career or set her on a path to run for the White House, observers noted the significance that she delivered her latest broadside in New Hampshire, the small New England state with outsize influence, as it holds the first primary contest in the country during presidential elections.TopicsRepublicansUS CongressInfrastructureUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

  • in

    White House decries Republican over video depicting violence against AOC

    Alexandria Ocasio-CortezWhite House decries Republican over video depicting violence against AOCPaul Gosar condemned for Twitter video that showed him striking congresswoman with sword and appearing to threaten Joe Biden Martin Pengelly in New York@MartinPengellyTue 9 Nov 2021 15.26 ESTFirst published on Tue 9 Nov 2021 09.20 ESTThe White House on Tuesday condemned the Republican congressman Paul Gosar for tweeting a video which depicted him striking the New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a sword and appearing to threaten Joe Biden.AOC says Marjorie Taylor Greene is ‘deeply unwell’ after 2019 video surfacesRead more“There is no place for any type of violence or that type of language in the political system,” the principal deputy White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters at a daily briefing. “It should not be happening, and we should be condemning it.”The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said “threats of violence against members of Congress and the president of the United States must not be tolerated” and called on the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, to “join in condemning this horrific video and call on the ethics committee and law enforcement to investigate”.Twitter attached a hateful conduct warning to Gosar’s tweet, which was also posted to Instagram on Sunday, but kept it up online.“This tweet violated the Twitter rules about hateful conduct,” Twitter’s message said. “However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the tweet to remain accessible.”The roughly 90-second video presents an altered version of a Japanese anime series, interspersed with shots of border patrol officers and migrants at the US border with Mexico.In one section, characters whose faces are replaced with those of Gosar and fellow extremist Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado are seen fighting other characters.Gosar’s character strikes another, made to look like Ocasio-Cortez, in the neck with a sword. The video ends with an apparent threat to Biden.Ocasio-Cortez was in Glasgow on Tuesday, attending the Cop26 climate summit.On Twitter, she wrote: “A creepy member I work with who fundraises for neo-Nazi groups shared a fantasy video of him killing me and he’ll face no consequences because [McCarthy] cheers him on with excuses … well, back to work because institutions don’t protect women of color.”Ocasio-Cortez listed other instances of threatening behavior from Republicans in Congress.“Remember when [Ted] Yoho accosted me on the Capitol [steps] and called me a f[uck]ing b[itch]. Remember when Greene ran after me a few months ago screaming and reaching. Remember when she stalked my office the first time with insurrectionists and people locked inside. All at my job and nothing ever happens. Anyways, back to business.”The congresswoman also called Gosar “just a collection of wet toothpicks anyway”.“White supremacy,” she said, “is for extremely fragile people and sad men like him, whose self concept relies on the myth that he was born superior because deep down he knows he couldn’t open a pickle jar or read a whole book by himself.”Gosar is an ardent Trump ally who in 2018 was the subject of a campaign ad made by six of his siblings, exhorting voters to ditch him.He is also among lawmakers whose phone or computer records are sought by the House committee investigating the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January, in which Trump supporters sought to overturn the former president’s election defeat.On Monday, Eric Swalwell, a House California Democrat, said: “These bloodthirsty losers are more comfortable with violence than voting. Keep exposing them.”The Yale historian Joanne Freeman, author of The Field of Blood, a well-regarded history of violence in Congress before the civil war, wrote: “Threats of violence lead to actual violence. They clear the ground. They cow opposition. They plant the idea. They normalize it. They encourage it. They maim democracy. And run the risk of killing it.”The Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

  • in

    McConnell says Trump wrote foreword to his memoir. Trump says he didn’t

    Donald TrumpMcConnell says Trump wrote foreword to his memoir. Trump says he didn’tSplit grows between the two Republicans as Trump says he told McConnell, ‘Why don’t you write it for me?’ Martin Pengelly@MartinPengellyMon 8 Nov 2021 09.31 ESTLast modified on Mon 8 Nov 2021 11.41 ESTDonald Trump once described Mitch McConnell as his “ace in the hole” and wrote, in a foreword to the Senate Republican leader’s autobiography, that he “couldn’t have asked for a better partner” in Washington.Virginia victory gives some Republicans glimpse of future without TrumpRead moreExcept, according to Trump, he didn’t.Speaking to the Washington Post for a profile of the Senate minority leader published on Monday, Trump said he told McConnell: “‘Why don’t you write it for me and I’ll put it in, Mitch?’ Because that’s the way life works.”McConnell did not dispute Trump’s account, about the book The Long Game, telling the paper: “I really don’t have anything to add related to him.”The Post profile lands at a tricky time for Republican leaders. Last week’s stunning victory in the election for governor in Virginia was achieved by a candidate who kept Trump at arm’s length while deploying many of his tactics. But the former president remains a dominant presence, seemingly likely to run for the White House again.He and McConnell, the two most powerful men in the GOP, are firmly at odds over Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen and over control of a party McConnell steers in the 50-50 Senate, which Democrats control via Vice-President Kamala Harris.McConnell’s support for the bipartisan infrastructure deal which the House sent to Joe Biden’s desk on Friday only deepened the divide. In a statement on Sunday, Trump said “all Republicans who voted for Democrat longevity should be ashamed of themselves in particular, Mitch McConnell”.The Post spoke to many who know and work with or against McConnell. The Illinois senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, spoke of being cloistered with him on 6 January, when Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election.Durbin said: “I thought to myself, ‘This could be a transformative moment. He appears to have taken this very seriously.’”McConnell voted to acquit Trump in his resulting impeachment trial, though he excoriated the former president on the Senate floor.John Yarmuth, a senior House Democrat from McConnell’s state, Kentucky, told the Post about working with McConnell on campaigns in their youth but said: “He never wanted to change the world. This is all about being, not doing.“He clearly doesn’t care about being labeled a hypocrite. It just doesn’t bother him. He is brazen about it. That’s one of the cynical sides of Mitch. He doesn’t care. If it’s expedient, he’ll do it.”In his interview, Trump emphasized his role, with McConnell, in passing tax cuts, slashing regulations and stocking the judiciary with conservatives, three on the supreme court. He also bemoaned McConnell’s failure to back his attempt to steal the election.The Post also noted a little-noticed split between McConnell and his daughter, Porter McConnell, who campaigns against big money in politics and against Republican attacks on voting rights. McConnell, the paper said, “declined to respond directly” when asked about his daughter’s activism.Also on Monday, the Hill reported that senior Republicans are worried controversial Senate nominees endorsed by Trump, Herschel Walker in Georgia and Sean Parnell in Pennsylvania prominent among them, could cost the party its chance to retake the chamber next year.Durbin said McConnell was now “looking at Trump, not in the rearview mirror, but looking through the windshield and realizing he’s going to have to live with this man in the Republican party for the foreseeable future”.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansUS SenatenewsReuse this content More