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    American democracy is fighting for its life – and Republicans don’t care | Robert Reich

    On Sunday, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin announced in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail that he opposes the For the People Act. He also opposes ending the filibuster.An op-ed in the most prominent state newspaper is about as non-negotiable a position a senator can assert.It was a direct thumb-in-your-eye response to President Biden’s thinly veiled criticism of Manchin last Tuesday in Tulsa, where Biden explained why he was having difficulty getting passage of what was supposed to be his highest priority – new voting rights legislation that would supersede a raft of new voter suppression laws in Republican-dominated states, using Trump’s baseless claim of voter fraud as pretext.“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’” Biden asked rhetorically in Tulsa. “Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House, and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. But we’re not giving up.”Everyone knew he was referring to Manchin, as well as Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, another Democratic holdout.Manchin’s very public repudiation of Biden on Sunday could mean the end of the For the People Act. That opens the way for Republican states to continue their shameless campaign of voter suppression – very possibly giving Republicans a victory in the 2022 midterm elections and entrenching Republican rule for a generation.As it is, registered Republicans make up only about 25% of the American electorate, and that percentage appears to be shrinking in the wake of Trump’s malodorous exit.But because rural Republican states like Wyoming (with 574,000 inhabitants) get two senators just as do urban ones like California (with nearly 40 million), and because Republican states have gerrymandered districts that elect House members to give them an estimated 19 extra seats over what they would have without gerrymandering, the scales were already tipped.Then came the post-Trump deluge of state laws making it harder for likely Democrats to vote, and easier for Republican state legislatures to manipulate voting tallies.Manchin says he supports extending the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to all 50 states. That’s small comfort.The original 1965 Voting Rights Act was struck down by the supreme court in 2013, on the dubious logic that it was no longer needed because states with a history of suppressing Black votes no longer did so. (Note that within 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced it would implement a strict photo ID law, and Mississippi and Alabama soon followed.)The efficacy of a new national Voting Rights Act would depend on an activist justice department willing to block state changes in voting laws that suppress votes and on an activist supreme court willing to uphold such justice department decisions. Don’t bet on either. We know what happened to the justice department under Trump, and we know what’s happened to the supreme court.Besides, a new Voting Rights Act wouldn’t be able to roll back the most recent round of voter suppression laws from Republican states.Without Manchin, then, the For the People Act is probably dead, unless Biden can convince one Republican senator to join Senate Democrats in supporting it – like, say, Utah’s Mitt Romney, who has publicly rebuked Trump for lying about the 2020 election and has something of a reputation for being an institutionalist who cares about American democracy.Yet given Trump’s continuing hold over the shrinking Republican party, any Republican senator who joined with the Democrats in supporting the For the People Act would probably be ending their political career. Profiles in courage make good copy for political obituaries and memorials.I’m afraid history will show that, in this shameful era, Republican senators were more united in their opposition to voting rights than Democratic senators were in their support for them.The future of American democracy needs better odds. More

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    Republicans pledge allegiance to fossil fuels like it’s still the 1950s

    Joe Biden may be pressing for 2021 to be a transformational year in tackling the climate crisis, but Republicans arrayed in opposition to his agenda have dug in around a unifying rallying theme – that the fossil fuel industry should be protected at almost any cost.For many experts and environmentalists, the Republican stance is a shockingly retrograde move that flies in the face of efforts to fight global heating and resembles a head in the sand approach to the realities of a changing American economy.In a recent letter sent to John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, more than a dozen Republican state treasurers accused the administration of pressuring banks to not lend to coal, oil and gas companies, adding that such a move would “eliminate the fossil fuel industry in our country” in order to appease the US president’s “radical political preferences”.The letter raised the extraordinary possibility of Republican-led states penalizing banks that refuse to fund projects that worsen the climate crisis by pulling assets from them. Riley Moore, treasurer of the coal heartland state of West Virginia, said “undue pressure” was being put on banks by the Biden administration that could end financing of fossil fuels and “devastate West Virginia and put thousands of families out of work”.“If a bank or lending institution says it is going to do something that could cause significant economic harm to our state … then I need to take that into account when I consider what banks we do business with,” Moore, who has assets of about $18bn under his purview, told the Guardian. “If they are going to attack our industries, jobs, economy and way of life, then I am going to fight back.”The shunning of banks in this way would almost certainly face a hefty legal response but the threat is just the latest eye-catching Republican gambit aimed at propping up a fossil fuel industry that will have to be radically pared back if the US is to slash its planet-heating emissions in half this decade, as Biden has vowed.In Louisiana, Republicans have embarked upon a quixotic and probably doomed attempt to make the state a “fossil fuel sanctuary” jurisdiction that does not follow federal pollution rules.In Texas, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has instructed his agencies to challenge the “hostile attack” launched by Biden against the state’s oil and gas industries while Republicans in Wyoming have even set up a legal fund to sue other states that refuse to take its coal.The messaging appears to be filtering down to the Republican electorate, with new polling by Yale showing support for clean energy among GOP voters has dropped dramatically over the past 18 months.The stone age didn’t end for the lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for the lack of oil.But critics say Republicans are engaged in a futile attempt to resurrect an economic vision more at home in the 1950s, rather than deal with a contemporary reality where the plummeting cost of wind and solar is propelling record growth in renewables and a cavalcade of countries are striving to cut emissions to net zero and, in the case of some including the UK and Germany, completely eliminate coal.“We are seeing desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, to squeeze one more drop of oil or lump of coal out of the ground before this transition,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University. “They are looking to go back to a prior time, but the trend if absolutely clear. The stone age didn’t end for the lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for the lack of oil.”The Republican backlash is characterized by a large dose of political posturing, according to Wagner. “If you have aspirations of higher office in some states, you just want to signal you will sue those hippie liberals,” he said. “These are delay tactics and some of them are very ham-fisted.”The US emerged from the second world war with more than half a million coalminers but this workforce has since dwindled to barely 40,000 people, amid mass automation and utilities switching to cheap sources of gas. Large quantities of jobs are set to be created in renewable energy, but some places built upon fossil fuels risk being left behind.Biden has proposed a huge infrastructure plan which would, the president says, help retrain and retool regions of the US long economically dependent upon mining and drilling. The administration has promised a glut of high-paying jobs in expanding the clean energy sector and plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, all while avoiding the current ruinous health impacts of air pollution and conditions like black lung.But unions have expressed wariness over this transition, with Republicans also highly skeptical. The promise to retrain miners is a “patronizing pipe dream of the liberal elites completely devoid from reality”, said Moore, who added that previous promises of renewable energy jobs have not materialized. “And now they are trying to sell us on the same failed idea again.”However the shift to cleaner energy happens, it’s clear the transition is under way – last year renewable energy consumption eclipsed coal for the first time in 130 years and US government projections show renewables’ overall share doubling by the middle of the century. A key question is whether the completion of this switch will be delayed long enough to risk triggering the worst impacts of disastrous global heating.“The Republican response is predictable and pathetic. It is from a very old playbook,” said Judith Enck, who was a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama. “The party will cling to fossil fuels to the bitter end. It’s so sad because so many Republican voters are damaged by climate change, if you look at deaths from the heat or wildfires we are seeing in California. But the party right now is just completely beholden to the fossil fuel industry.” More

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    Children are ‘vulnerable host’ for Covid as cases recede, US expert warns

    A US public health expert has warned that though cases of Covid-19 are at their lowest rates for months and much of the country is returning to normal life, young Americans are still “a vulnerable host” for the coronavirus.Dr Richina Bicette, associate medical director at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told CNN children were now accounting for nearly 25% of US cases.“As adults get vaccinated and become more protected and immune,” she said, “the virus is still in the community looking for a vulnerable host and pediatric patients fit that description.”Children aged 12 and above are eligible to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, one of three in US use. Federal authorities will this week debate extending vaccines to children aged 11 and under.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows that 52% of the US population over the age of 12 has had at least one vaccine dose and 42% is fully protected.The Biden administration wants 70% of US adults to have received at least one shot by 4 July. A range of incentives are being offered.Deaths in the US have slowed drastically, the toll a little under 590,000. But with virus variants causing problems as other countries reopen, experts have voiced concern over slowing rates of vaccination, particularly in Republican states.On Sunday the Republican governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union.Mississippi is 50th and last among states in vaccinations, with 30% of residents fully protected and 40.5% aged 12 and older having received at least one dose, according to the CDC. The states with the highest vaccination rates are Vermont (80.6% – with a Republican governor, Phil Scott), Hawaii (78.6%) and Massachusetts (76.8%).“I believe the vaccine works,” Reeves said. “I believe it’s safe. I believe it’s effective. I took my first dose in January, as did my wife, on TV live, and I have encouraged Mississippians to do the same.“But I also want to point out that President Biden’s goals for 4 July or otherwise are arbitrary to say the least.”Reeves said his focus was on providing “quality care” for people with Covid-19 – and trumpeted a steep decline in hospitalisations.“At our peak, we had 1,444 individuals in the hospital,” he said. “Today, we have 131. We’re down 90%. At our peak, we had 2,400 cases per day over a seven-day period. Over the last seven days, we have had barely 800 cases in total.“And so, for that entire year period, the goalpost was, let’s reduce the number of cases. And we have been successful at doing that. The question is, why?“We have had a million Mississippians that have gotten the vaccine, but we have also had 320,000 Mississippians that have tested positive for the virus. Many people believe that somewhere between four and five times more people have gotten the virus that have not tested [positive].“And so we have got probably a million or so Mississippians that have natural immunity. And because of that, there is very, very, very little virus in our state. But we’re still working to get the vaccine distributed, and hope we will continue to do so.”Asked if he was worried unvaccinated Mississippians could be “sitting ducks” to any surge involving a virus variant, Reeves avoided the question, complaining instead about political clashes with Biden officials.Host Jake Tapper changed tack, saying: “You seem to be arguing everybody should get vaccinated, and yet it’s not that big a deal that not everybody’s getting vaccinated. And those seem to be in conflict.”He then asked if Reeves would agree that Mississippians should go get vaccinated.“I would absolutely agree,” Reeves said. “I think that all Mississippians and all Americans should go get vaccinated, because I think it’s safe, I think it’s effective and I think it’s one way to continue to drive down the numbers.” More

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    Idaho’s Republicans in political civil war as state lurches further right

    Idaho’s rightward political lurch has immersed the state’s Republicans in a political civil war that now extends all the way from the grassroots to the executive mansion.In late May, the state’s Republican governor, Brad Little, angrily revoked an executive order banning mask mandates in the state that had been put in place by his own militia-supporting lieutenant governor during a period when she was deputizing for him. Janice McGeachin had ordered that Idaho cities and counties revoke mask orders, playing into a widespread fear among the far right that basic health measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic are a sign of an over-reaching government. Little then called McGeachin’s action “tyranny” and a “stunt” and scuppered it after it had been in place for just a day.But observers say the bizarre fight is symptomatic of a much wider problem in Idaho and the rest of America.They fear that the political dynamics in Idaho – where far-right actors have won recruits and political momentum through uncompromising refusal to comply with public health measures – may presage a worrying direction of conservative politics in the country as a whole.“Political moderates around the country need to pay more attention to what is happening here,” said Mike Satz, executive director of the Idaho97 project, which was founded last year to combat misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic.“Idaho used to follow broader trends, but now it is in the vanguard of extremist activity,” Satz added.Political moderates around the country need to pay more attention to what is happening hereThe mask ban was put in place by McGeachin, a businesswoman who previously spent 10 years as a state representative for a rural district in the state’s far east. Idaho had no statewide mask ban measures in place, but McGeachin’s move was an attempt to prevent cities and counties addressing the pandemic with emergency measures by themselves.The lieutenant governor won election in 2018 after squeaking through a crowded five-way Republican primary earlier that year. Since then she has won praise from the far right and drawn concern from more moderate Republicans over her associations with the Three Percenter militia movement.During her vice-gubernatorial run, a member of her security detail sported a Three Percenter tattoo, and McGeachin refused to answer media questions about security staffing. On another occasion in 2019, she posted to Facebook a picture of herself with members of the Real Three Percenters group, who were protesting on behalf of Todd Engel, who was sentenced in the previous year to 14 years in a federal prison over his role in a 2014 armed standoff with federal agents at Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada.Just weeks later, McGeachin led armed protesters, including Three Percenters, through an impromptu oath which appeared to be intended to swear them in as state militia.Recently McGeachin, while appearing as a guest on the podcast of Southern Poverty Law Center-listed extremist David Horowitz, said that the federal US government did not rightfully own any public lands in Idaho, which make up about 60% of the state’s total area.“I don’t view that the federal government owns the land in Idaho, my view is that the land of Idaho belongs to the state of Idaho,” McGeachin told Horowitz, echoing the views expressed by the likes of fellow Idahoan Ammon Bundy, who led the armed occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge in 2016.Even in a deep red state, until recently such associations and positions may have ruled McGeachin out as a serious contender for the governorship.But Jaclyn Kettler, a political scientist at Boise State University, located in the state’s capital, said that over the last year, “battles over mask mandates have underlined divisions within the Republican party”.She says that the divisions are long-standing, and partly related to the party’s lock on statewide offices and the legislature in a state which has not elected a Democratic governor for more than 30 years, and has returned large majorities for every Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon’s run in 1968.“When you have a majority for so long, it can lead to internal divisions and factions,”, Kettler said, and adds that the recent successes of conservative Republican candidates in winning primaries, elections or re-election has “shifted the legislature and the party to the right”.Satz, the Idaho97 director, says that this rightward move means that the election of McGeachin, who has positioned herself as the hard right’s tribune, is now a possibility.“Before 2018, no one thought that there was a realistic chance of her becoming lieutenant governor, but here we are,” Satz added.In the last year, and particularly in 2021, what has boosted McGeachin’s status among conservatives has been her support of protests against mask and lockdown orders, which have included direct criticisms of Little’s efforts to rein the virus in, and mandates introduced by local governments.Satz says that a range of far right actors have exploited grassroots angst about Covid measures, including McGeachin, legislators like Heather Scott, Dorothy Moon and Chad Christensen and far-right actors like Bundy, and members of Christ Church, based in the Idaho college town of Moscow.According to Satz these increasingly “violent and aggressive” protests came about in a slow boil. While there were only sparse, fringe protests at the outset of the pandemic, racial justice protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd brought armed rightwing counter-protesters into the streets. That included in the North Idaho town of Coeur D’Alene, where dozens of heavily armed men began facing off with relatively small Black Lives Matter protest groups in June 2020.Satz said that these counter-protests began to bleed into anti-mask protests, and later ones against Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, which many Republicans and those on the far right falsely believe was stolen by the Democrats. “It’s all the same people,” he said of the composition of the various rightwing protests movements.Consistent promoters of protests include Bundy, who began early on in the pandemic to characterize mask mandates and lockdowns as affronts to liberty.As early as March 2020, Bundy was fronting meetings in his current home city of Emmett, Idaho, calling on people to reject mask orders. By April, he was rallying followers to the defense of arrested anti-vaxxers, and was a prominent participant in anti lockdown marches on the state capitol, some of which were organized in part by the dark money group the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Last August, Bundy was arrested multiple times while leading a maskless protest against Covid measures in the Idaho state house. .Despite being banned from the state house after his arrests, Bundy himself has now filed to run for governor in Idaho in 2022.Bundy also had a hand in making the tone of anti-mask protests more aggressive from December 2020 on. In that month, protesters succeeded in shutting down a meeting of public health officials who had convened to discuss a mandate in the Boise region to address then-surging cases of Covid-19.That protest included members of Bundy’s People’s Rights group. Bundy has reportedly encouraged members, who include a wide range of far-right activists in Idaho and beyond, to engage in weapons and ham radio training sessions in 10-person cells in order to defend themselves in an armed conflict with government, which Bundy has hinted is an inevitability.Now, People’s Rights-linked farmers have purchased land along the Klamath River in Oregon to protest against drought-related reductions in irrigation allowances to farmers.Amy Herzfeld-Copple monitors extremism and other threats in Idaho and beyond for progressive non-profit the Western States Center. In an email, she wrote that “both Bundy and McGeachin have exploited pandemic anxiety and instability over the last year to build political power and attract attention for disrupting democratic norms”.Herzfeld-Copple added that “they each have long histories of engaging with paramilitaries, encouraging political violence, courting bigoted groups”, and that “there’s a real danger that their campaigns will embolden extremist movements”.In March 2021, again in Coeur D’Alene, protesters, with the support of McGeachin and North Idaho Republican legislators including Scott and Moon, burned masks outside a health center. Statewide, Satz says, different elements of the far right are “working together in ways we haven’t seen before”.“They’re using Covid and becoming more aggressive and more focused. The extreme right are gaining power in Idaho, but we don’t think it will stop here,” Satz said. More

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    Joe Manchin opposes For the People Act in blow to Democrats’ voting rights push

    In a huge blow to Democrats’ hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his party’s flagship bill – because of Republican opposition to it.The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trump’s continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.”Manchin’s opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.Manchin instead endorsed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure named for the late Georgia Democratic congressman and campaigner which would reauthorize voting protections established in the civil rights era but eliminated by the supreme court in 2013.Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim CrowManchin also reiterated his support for the filibuster, which gives 41 of 100 senators the ability to block action by the majority.Democrats are seeking to abolish the filibuster, arguing that Republicans have repeatedly abused it to support minority positions on issues like gun control and, just last month, to block the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol.Republicans have used the filibuster roughly twice as often as Democrats to prevent the other party from passing legislation, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin wrote. “And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”In a sign of growing frustration within Manchin’s own party, Mondaire Jones, a progressive congressman from New York, tweeted that his op-ed “might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”Jim Crow was the name given to the system of legalised segregation which dominated southern states between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the civil rights era of the 1960s.On the Sunday talk shows, hosts pressed Manchin on whether his expectations of a bipartisan solution on voting rights were realistic in such a divided Congress, and with a Republican party firmly in thrall to Donald Trump.Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace told him that if he were to threaten to vote against the filibuster, it could incentivize Republicans to negotiate on legislation.“Haven’t you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists?” Wallace asked.“I don’t think so,” Manchin said. “Because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences.”Seven Republican defections from the pro-Trump party line is not enough to beat the filibuster, even if all 50 Democrats remain united. Manchin said he was hopeful other Republicans would “rise to the occasion”.Wallace asked if he was being “naive”, noting that the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in May: “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”“I’m not being naive,” Manchin said. “I think he’s 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we’re trying to do for America. It would be a lot better if we had participation and we’re getting participation.”With the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, Manchin has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Washington, by virtue of his centrist views in a Senate split on starkly partisan lines. In Tulsa this week, in a remark that risked angering Manchin, Biden said the two senators “vote more with my Republican friends”, though their voting record does not actually reflect this.On CBS’s Face the Nation, host John Dickerson asked Manchin if his bipartisan ideals were outdated.Dickerson noted that since the 2020 election put Democrats in control of Washington, Republicans in the states have introduced more than 300 bills featuring voting restrictions. Furthermore, Republicans who embraced baseless claims about the election being stolen are now running to be chief elections officials in several states.Dickerson asked: “Why would Republicans, when they’re making all these gains in the statehouses and achieving their goals in the states, why would they vote for a bill someday in the Senate that’s going to take away all the things they’re achieving right now in those statehouses?”Manchin said those state-level successes could ultimately damage Republicans.“The bottom line is the fundamental purpose of our democracy is the freedom of our elections,” Manchin said. “If we can’t come to an agreement on that, God help us.” More

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    Republicans have no incentive to abandon Trump and the big lie. We must act now | Pippa Norris

    Academics rarely agree about the big issues, and generally hesitate to enter the political fray by signing collective public statements. Yet a few days ago, more than 100 leading scholars of democracy endorsed a remarkable Statement of Concern, which I also signed, warning about grave threats to American democracy and the deterioration of US elections.“We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary – including suspending the filibuster – in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.”Why the alarm? Is this warranted?On 14 December 2020, after courts litigated challenges and all 50 states certified the count, the electoral college formally declared the defeat of Donald Trump. Most assumed that the peaceful and orderly transition in power would follow, following historical traditions for over 200 years. Instead, the world was shocked to witness the violent Capitol insurrection on 6 January, triggering five deaths, 140 people injured and more than 400 arrests.But even this unprecedented attack on Congress was not the end of the assault on the unwritten norms and practices of American democracy and the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win.For months, the big lie claiming a “stolen election” has continued to be spread relentlessly by the former president, his close advisers, Republican lawmakers and rightwing sympathizers on cable news and social media. According to many polls, two-thirds of Republicans continue to believe that Biden’s victory was fraudulent. In Arizona, the Republican party hired a private firm to conduct an audit of the certified vote count.It is reported that Trump is obsessed about the use of audits to overturn results in other close states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, believing that he will be returned to office in August. In state houses, Republicans have long expressed concern about the risks of electoral fraud and the need to tighten registration procedures and balloting facilities. The Brennan Center reports that since January this year, 22 new laws restricting voting rights have been enacted in 14 states. For the 2021 legislative session, almost 400 bills restricting voting rights have been tabled in 48 states.Challenges to democracy are increasing worldwide. The long spread of “third-wave” democracies across the globe from the mid-1970s stalled around 2005 – since when scholars have noted accumulating indicators of democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism in many countries.Contrary to popular commentary, signs of democratic deterioration in America were on the wall well before Trump became president – such as persistent gridlock in US Congress, deepening cultural polarization and the corrupting role of dark money in politics. The backsliding has accelerated during the last four years, with attacks on the news media, risks to the impartiality of the courts, and the weakening role of Congress as an effective check and balance on executive power.The US electoral system has also long been problematic, notably extreme partisan gerrymandering, the composition of the electoral college, rural over-representation in the Senate, lack of electoral standards as the supreme court rolled back federal oversight of state elections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, low turnout and the expansion of misinformation in the media. Since Bush v Gore in 2000, serious challenges to electoral legitimacy, and growing party polarization over the rules of the game, have gradually deepened. The Electoral Integrity Project has used expert surveys to evaluate the quality of national elections around the world since 2012 and found that US elections have persistently been graded poorly by EIP experts, scoring next to last among the world’s liberal democracies, and ranking about 45th out of 166 nations worldwide.Unfortunately, Republican federal and state lawmakers have no rational incentives to abandon Trump and the big lie about electoral fraud, even if they recognize the falsehood. Most incumbents are nominated through party primaries and hold safe districts due to partisan gerrymandering, so Republican chances of re-election depend on throwing red meat to the Maga base, not building a broader coalition among moderate independents.What is to be done?To fix the system, two steps are essential. Both need to be enacted before the November 2022 midterm elections, when the Democrats are likely to lose control of the Senate, if history is any guide.First, the Senate filibuster has to go as a relic of a bygone era. Worldwide, about 41 national legislatures have some supermajority rules but in nearly all cases these are only used, quite sensibly, for constitutional amendments, not for routine legislation (like establishing the 6 January commission). The rule benefits the opposition party seeking gridlock in DC and stymies effective electoral reform.The Senate rules are not fixed in stone and they can be amended by their own members through various procedural initiatives. The benefits of the filibuster rule for non-constitutional amendments are doubtful and the harm for gridlock has never been more serious. The Senate needs to act urgently to change its procedural rules to protect American democracy.Second, the US Senate needs to pass the HR1 For the People Act. This offers a comprehensive package of moderate reforms designed to protect voting rights in US elections, reduce partisan gerrymandering, make campaign spending more transparent and tighten ethics in public life. Getting rid of extreme partisan gerrymandering and ultra-safe districts is vital to incentivize House candidates to appeal broadly to all citizens well beyond their base. The Senate also needs to pass HR4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, restoring provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring certain states to pre-clear changes to their voting laws with the federal government, which had been struck down earlier by the US supreme court in Shelby County v Holder.A series of other reforms are highly desirable in the long term but impractical right now.One is adopting non-partisan blanket primaries, as in Washington and California, where the two candidates with the highest vote share get to run in the general election, irrespective of their party affiliation. This increases the incentive for all candidates to reach out to a broader constituency than the party base, so it is likely to encourage the election of more moderate lawmakers in Congress.Another is designed to break the stranglehold on two-party winner-take-all competition, ideally by implementing a mixed-member proportional electoral system for the US House, like Germany and New Zealand, with an enlarged number of members, or ranked-choice voting in multimember districts.Yet another reform is adopting a compulsory retirement age for members of Congress, like the minimum age requirement, to increase incumbency turnover, limit gerontocracy and expand representation for the younger generation of leaders, women and minorities.These are all worthy matters for future debate about long-term constitutional and legal reforms to American elections, a generational project. But, in the short term, the most urgent and practical priorities right now facing the Senate majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, means wrangling the US Senate to abolish the filibuster rule and then to pass some version of HR 1 and HR 4. The laws would still face major challenges through the courts. But if they don’t get enacted, American democracy is at risk.The sixth of January was the warning bell. The stress test of the 2022 midterm elections is fast approaching. Other countries have seen democratic breakdown. This is not alarmism. Alas, it’s real. More

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    Trump aide asked DoJ to investigate bizarre ‘Italygate’ claim votes were changed by satellite

    Donald Trump’s final White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, pressured the acting attorney general to help push the lie of electoral fraud in Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden – even asking him to investigate a conspiracy theory which said people in Italy used military satellites to make US voting machines switch votes for Biden.So reported the New York Times on Saturday night, even as Trump made a return to the public stage with a speech to Republicans in North Carolina.In Greenville, Trump repeated his lies about his clear defeat by Biden, which he called “the crime of the century”.Before he became Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff, Meadows was a hard-right congressman from North Carolina and a loyal Trump supporter. The Times said he emailed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen five times in December and January.One email dealt with the “Italygate” conspiracy theory, the Times said, adding that Rosen refused to set up a meeting with a former CIA agent pushing the claims online.Another email reportedly echoed claims by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who led a legal challenge to election results largely laughed out of court, that results in New Mexico were affected by fraud. There is no evidence that was the case.Rosen resisted Meadows and also rebuffed Trump directly, citing former attorney general William Barr’s view that there was no large-scale fraud in the 2020 election, the Times said.Trump reportedly considered replacing Rosen with an official more amenable to attempts to overturn the election. But Rosen stayed in place through the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, when Trump supporters sought to disrupt the certification of election results.W Neil Eggleston, White House counsel under Barack Obama, told the Times DoJ “enforcement mechanisms should not be used for political purpose or for the personal benefit of the president … if the White House is involved in an investigation, there is at least a sense that there is a political angle to it.”Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent turned CNN analyst and editor for Just Security, tweeted: “We are at a place where Republican voters can more easily be convinced that Italy (?) secretly altered ballots using remote technology than that simply more people voted for a normal candidate from the opposing party.”The academic and author Norman Ornstein said pushing the Italygate conspiracy theory made Meadows an “unAmerican traitor to our fundamental values [who] does not belong in a civil and democratic society or political system.”The emails were discovered by the Senate judiciary committee.In a statement, the Democratic committee chairman, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said: “This new evidence underscores the depths of the White House’s efforts to co-opt the department and influence the electoral vote certification.“I will demand all evidence of Trump’s efforts to weaponise the justice department in his election subversion scheme.” More

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    Start me up: ‘car guy’ Joe Biden accelerates push to turn America electric

    On a hot, sunny day in Michigan, Joe Biden zoomed around in a new electric version of the Ford F150, one of the automaker’s most famous vehicles.“This sucker’s quick,” Biden said as he drove up to reporters at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center last month.Biden, a self-proclaimed American “car guy”, was there to tout electric vehicles, a key component of his administration’s trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure proposal.“The future of the auto industry is electric. There’s no turning back,” Biden said. “The question is whether we will lead or we will fall behind in the race to the future.”The proposed $174bn investment in electric vehicles represents the biggest ever White House push from fossil-fuel based vehicles and toward battery-powered cars. The Biden administration has made environmentalism and sustainability a key pillar to its job creation efforts, and the president wants to dramatically increase the number of electric vehicles on the road and the infrastructure for manufacturing them.This, Biden says, would create a wave of new green energy jobs and also help to fight climate change.At the beginning of the year, electric vehicles made up less than 5% of automobile sales in the US. But Biden’s proposal aims to dramatically push the American auto industry toward electric vehicles, mainly through incentives and tax credits. It would use funds to transition the fleet of federal agency cars such as those used by the US Postal Service, and the plan includes $45bn towards increasing the number of electric school buses and transit buses.It would also set up a national network of charging stations across the country, the current lack of which is seen as one of the bigger advantages combustion engine cars still have over electric vehicles. There are are only 41,400 electric vehicle charging stations (including fast-charging stations) in the United States, according to the Department of Energy. There are omore than 130,000 gasoline stations.It’s not clear, however, how those charging stations would be distributed – and what portion of them would go to poorer parts of America.But the plan aims to change the supply chain so the US depends less on other countries for batteries and other car parts. The administration wants to become less dependent on foreign countries for manufacturing electric vehicles and the parts that go into them.“It’s a systemic transition,” said John Paul MacDuffie, a University of Pennsylvania professor of management and vehicle expert. “Often if you just tackle one narrow piece of it you don’t make progress, because you bump into constraints in the system. So I think the ambition to be systemic is really good, and probably essential, to make progress.”As Biden drove around the Ford campus, hundreds of miles away Republicans in Congress were planning to gut the electric vehicles proposals in his American Jobs Plan.Negotiations over the entire infrastructure bill are continuing, but the last counter-offer made by Republicans slashed spending on Biden’s plan by about $170bn. It’s not clear what exactly the remaining $4bn would be spent on if the Republican proposal went into effect. A factsheet distributed by the office of Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the lead negotiator, did not specify.In their criticisms, Republicans have cited the price tag on the electric vehicles provision. They say the government should not pour so much money into electric vehicles, and that doing so would end up killing jobs in other alternative vehicle areas, like ethanol.“For a person like me, from Iowa, if you have all electric cars, there’s going to be 43,000 people making ethanol and biodiesel that won’t be employed,” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa told E&E News.Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, another Republican who opposes government spending on electric vehicles, told the Guardian electric vehicles are prohibitively expensive.“My concern about an all-electric car policy is that it’s truly a social injustice. These electric cars are very expensive. Only the wealthy can afford them, and the wealthy benefit from the tax credits,” Marshall said.“I think we’re getting policy way ahead of technology. Certainly way ahead from a price point … But right now the big picture scares me. I think we’d have to increase our electric grid by 60%. That would take, theoretically 20, 40, 60 years to double or to increase the electric grid by 60%.”The price of electric vehicles varies widely. The Mini Cooper SE starts at about $30,000. The cheapest Tesla, the Model S, starts at about $40,000. More expensive models can run as high as $150,000. The price of electric vehicles is likely to drop if and when they become more popular and the technology improves. And the cost of batteries is dropping – rapidly. It’s going so fast that there’s evidence to expect most cars to be battery-powered by 2035.Marshall also said the environmental cost of battery-powered cars is high.“I think we have to look at the environmental footprint in looking what goes into a battery. The making of the battery,” Marshall said. “And eventually the disposal of these batteries.”Even electric vehicle advocates concede that the environmental impact of the raw materials used for electric batteries are not perfect. And there are also human rights concerns about mining those materials.But in Michigan, state senator Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat, said the technology around batteries and electric vehicles was getting better and more environmentally friendly.“I think that there’s a fair criticism in terms of the environmental impact of batteries from the mining perspective. But I think, like everything else, that’s improving,” McMorrow said.Even accounting for battery mining, petrol and diesel cars still have a far more negative impact on the environment than electric vehicles.Right now the American Jobs Plan is still a framework, and the gulf between Republicans and Democrats is vast. It’s unlikely that if a compromise is reached on the entire proposal, Biden will get all the funding he’s looking for. But it’s also unlikely that Republicans will have shrunk that funding to the minuscule amount they have offered so far.And around the country, lawmakers are making moves to nudge the country further toward electric vehicles. Governor Kate Brown of Oregon recently signed a bill to expand electric vehicle infrastructure in her state. In Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker has set a goal of 750,000 electric vehicles by 2030.McMorrow in Michigan has helped craft a proposal to encourage electric vehicles in the state.Congressman Andy Levin of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have introduced legislation that aims to set up a nationwide network of charging stations over the next five years. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate majority leader, also introduced legislation in 2019 that would help set up a network of charging stations also. Biden added that proposal to his American Jobs Plan in March.Even with a huge investment in electric vehicles, transitioning to where combustion cars are the minority on the road and electric vehicles are the majority will take time.“If you don’t start at some point making some move for the US to have a piece of the supply chain you’ll never be ready for the EV transition – and it will take a long time,” MacDuffie said. More