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      China, Fauci and hoaxes: Donald Trump takes aim at usual suspects in return to stage

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      Donald Trump has returned to the stage in predictable fashion as he launched a more active phase of his post presidency: criticising Covid expert Anthony Fauci, calling for China to pay reparations over the pandemic and denouncing the New York attorney general’s criminal investigation into his business dealings.At a GOP convention in North Carolina on Saturday night, Trump was introduced by the state’s party chairman Michael Whatley as “our president”, a nod to Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through voter fraud, which Trump branded on Saturday “the crime of the century”.His appearance had all the hallmarks of his signature campaign rallies, complete with a musical playlist heavy on Elton John.Urging Republicans to support only Trump loyalists in next year’s midterm elections, Trump teased the prospect of another presidential bid of his own in 2024, but vowed first to join the campaign trail for those who share his values in next year’s fight for control of Congress.“The survival of America depends on our ability to elect Republicans at every level starting with the midterms next year,” he said early in a rambling speech that lasted nearly an hour-and-a-half.Some party leaders worry that a rise of pro-Trump candidates in the coming months could jeopardise the GOP’s fight for control of Congress in 2022. While Trump remains a dominant force within his party, he is deeply unpopular among key segments of the broader electorate. He lost the last election by 7 million votes after alienating Republican-leaning suburban voters across the country.The former president joined wider Republican criticism of Fauci – the US’s leading infectious diseases official – for asking Americans to wear masks to guard against the virus and for at times being sceptical of a hotly contested theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.He called Fauci “not a great doctor but a great promoter” for his frequent television appearances. “But he’s been wrong on almost every issue and he was wrong on Wuhan and the lab also,” Trump said.Trump’s own handling of the pandemic, in which nearly 600,000 people in the United States have died and he himself was infected, was a factor in his loss to president Joe Biden in 2020. He also called on China to pay $10tn in reparations to the US and the world for its own handling of the virus, and he said nations should cancel their debt to Beijing.Trump said a criminal investigation launched by the New York attorney general’s office was “the ultimate fishing expedition” and the latest attempt by Democrats to bring him down after two impeachment sagas when he was president. “It’s been a five-year witch hunt, hoax after hoax,” said Trump. “They’ll never stop until November of 2024.”New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has been investigating whether the Trump Organization falsely reported property values to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.Trump’s speech to hundreds of Republican officials and activists was the opening appearance in what is expected to be a new phase of rallies and public events. Out of office for more than four months and banned from his preferred social media accounts, the former president hopes to use such events to elevate his diminished voice.His advisers are already eyeing subsequent appearances in Ohio, Florida, Alabama and Georgia to help bolster midterm candidates and energise voters.On Friday, Facebook decided to suspend his account for two years, after he incited supporters to attack the US Capitol in service of his lie that his defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud. At the end of the suspension period, Facebook said, it would work with experts to assess the risk to public safety posed by reinstating Trump’s accountIn contrast to the mega rallies that filled sports arenas when Trump was president, on Saturday he faced a crowd that organisers estimated at 1,200 seated at dinner tables inside the Greenville convention centre. Many more followed along on internet streams.The former president waited more than an hour to advance falsehoods about the 2020 election, which he described as “the crime of the century”.Since leaving the White House, Trump has regularly made baseless claims that the last presidential election was stolen. The claims have triggered a wave of Republican-backed voting restrictions in state legislatures across the country, even though Trump’s cries of voting fraud have been refuted by dozens of judges, Republican governors and senior officials from his own administration.Trump focused his early remarks on Biden’s White House, which he called “the most radical left-wing administration in history”. “As we gather tonight our country is being destroyed before our very eyes,” he said.Democratic National Committee spokesman Ammar Moussa took a shot at Trump in a statement released ahead of his speech.“More than 400,000 dead Americans, millions of jobs lost, and recklessly dangerous rhetoric is apparently not enough for Republicans to break with a loser president who cost them the White House, Senate, and House,” Moussa said.Invited to the stage briefly, Trump daughter-in-law and North Carolina native Lara Trump announced she would not run for the Senate because of family obligations. “I am saying no for now, not no forever,” she said. More

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      I survived a school shooting. My kids shouldn’t have to face the same danger | Ashley Jordan

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      “Somebody’s shooting on campus!”The words ripped my concentration away from my laptop screen. Our law school classroom fell silent. “What should we do?” I asked our professor. He said: “Well, if I were you, I’d run.” I paused to type “There’s a shooter” in a chat box to my husband Aaron before slamming my laptop shut.I took refuge between stacks in the law library until police said it was safe to leave, hours later. When I walked out of the law school, I heard loud rumbling above me and looked up to see news helicopters circling overhead against a cold, gray sky. Some kind of war had been waged on our campus, and the air was heavy with it. I was going home to my family, but the flashing lights of police cars and ambulances suggested others weren’t.Surviving a school shooting was an initiation of evil. The world didn’t look or feel the same afterward. Its colors were less vivid, and any sense of peace and security that once surrounded me was gone. I knew I’d never exist with quite the same ease again.The trauma of what’s since become known as the Northern Illinois University “Valentine’s Day Massacre” has never left me. More than a decade later, I can still recall the terror of that day with precise, photographic dread. But I’m no longer a 24-year-old student; I’m a 37-year-old mother of three. Despite 12 years and countless other mass shooting incidents across the country, not much has been done by our federal legislators to make anyone safer from gun violence anywhere – let alone at school.One hundred and ninety-four mass shootings occurred in the US this year, with at least 45 in April alone.I assumed the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary shooting would be the wake-up call our country needed to act on gun violence. Multiple school shootings had taken place since the one I experienced in 2008, yet Sandy Hook was the first to invade my consciousness as a mother.I clutched my eight-month-old son to my chest as the precious faces of young children murdered at school cycled across my television screen on the evening news. As tears streamed down my face, my mind tried to reconcile the fact that the victims in these manmade tragedies were no longer limited to teenagers and college students.Little kids were new casualties in our country’s ongoing struggle to define itself. Its endless argument over guns appeared to be a symptom of a national identity crisis between political polar opposites – two parties so ideologically opposed that even the needless deaths of tiny innocents couldn’t bridge the divide between them.What sickened me most, though, wasn’t our government’s failure to prioritize people over partisanship. It was knowing that there were parents who took their kids to school and returned home eternally empty-handed. My stomach churned over whether their children might have experienced some iteration or degree of what I remembered from the NIU shooting: the hell, helplessness and panic of staring at a doorway, wondering if a person on the other side was about to end my life.The only thing worse than knowing those feelings first-hand was wondering how many more children might one day know them, too.The human cost of school shootings extends beyond those who are injured or die, negatively affecting the mental health of survivorsSo far, hundreds of thousands of American students have been exposed to school shootings, and these incidents have increased in recent years. The human cost of school shootings extends beyond those who are injured or die, negatively affecting the mental health of survivors. According to a 2019 Stanford University study, “local exposure to fatal school shootings increased antidepressant use among youths”.Yet children are not the only ones suffering from this epidemic. Parents are also struggling.Survivors of school shootings like me are now raising kids of their own, worrying they will suffer similar fates. Although the psychological effects of school shootings on parents may not yet be fully known or understood, research suggests that those with loved ones who have been exposed to “assaultive violence” have a higher risk of mental health disorders. Another study found that parents of terrorist survivors were five times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress and three times more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than the population at large. (Mass shootings can be classified as acts of terrorism in many cases.)Like spouses of military veterans, parents of school shooting survivors might also be more susceptible to secondary traumatic stress, especially if they experienced a school shooting themselves or have a history of past trauma. But school shootings may pose mental health risks to all parents, not just those whose children are victims or survivors. One study concluded that acts of terrorism can have detrimental emotional impacts on general populations.School shootings don’t just deprive children of their lives and innocence; they deprive parents of a sense of safety and security their parents and grandparents took for granted. The sanctity and sanctuary of school are long gone. This reality is a painful part of our collective consciousness. We send our kids to school, hoping the horror of gun violence won’t happen there, but knowing no child or school is immune.Carrying this mental load may be commonplace for modern parents, but it doesn’t have to be. Biden recently took executive action to address gun violence, and although Americans are divided on gun policy, strong bipartisan support exists for expanded background checks and preventing the mentally ill from obtaining guns. Measures like these, limiting who has access to firearms, have proven more effective in reducing gun-related deaths than limiting access to specific types of firearms.Precious time has been wasted on political finger-pointing and partisan talking points, particularly when leftists and conservatives have each historically supported and opposed gun control (albeit for morally divergent reasons). Both sides seem content to debate the second amendment and the founders’ intent until they run out of breath. But in the meantime, Congress must come together, in earnest, to find common ground and common-sense solutions to stop this bleeding. The consequences of inaction have become too high – and our kids are counting on them.
      Ashley Jordan is a writer and activist who has contributed to written for the Washington Post, Woman’s Day, Teen Vogue, HuffPost, Business Insider, the Independent and more More

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      Is America heading to a place where it can no longer call itself a democracy?

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      If Donald Trump’s inaugural address can be summed up in two words – “American carnage” – Joe Biden’s might be remembered for three: “Democracy has prevailed.”The new president, speaking from the spot where just two weeks earlier a pro-Trump mob had stormed the US Capitol, promised that the worst was over in a battered, bruised yet resilient Washington.But now, four and a half months later the alarm bells are sounding on American democracy again. Even as the coronavirus retreats, the pandemic of Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election spreads, manifest in Republicans’ blocking of a commission to investigate the insurrection. And state after state is imposing new voting restrictions and Trump allies are now vying to run future election themselves.With Republicans still in thrall to Trump and odds-on to win control of the House of Representatives next year, there are growing fears that his presidency was less a historical blip than a harbinger of systemic decline.“There was a momentary sigh of relief but the level of anxiety is actually strangely higher now than in 2016 in the sense that it’s not just about one person but there are broader structural issues,” said Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die. “The weird emails that I get are more ominous now than they were in 2016: there seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”There seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theoriesJust hours after the terror of 6 January, 147 Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election despite no evidence of irregularities. Trump was impeached for inciting the violence but Senate Republicans ensured his acquittal – a fork in the road where the party could have chosen another destiny.As Trump continued to push his false claims of election fraud, rightwing media and Republican state parties fell into line. A farcical “audit” of votes is under way in Arizona with more states threatening to follow suit. Trump is reportedly so fixated on the audits that he has even suggested – wrongly – he could be reinstated as president later this year.Perhaps more insidiously, Trump supporters who tried to overturn the 2020 election are maneuvering to serve as election officials in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. If they succeed in becoming secretaries of state, they would exercise huge influence over the conduct of future elections and certifying their results. Some moderate Republican secretaries of state were crucial bulwarks against Trump’s toxic conspiracy theories last year.The offensive is coupled with a dramatic and sweeping assault on voting rights. Republican-controlled state legislatures have rammed through bills that make it harder to vote in states such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Montana. Their all-out effort in Texas was temporarily derailed when Democrats walked out of the chamber, denying them a quorum.Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, commented: “The most worrying threat is at the state level, the effort to change voting rules, which I think is prompted by the failed effort to alter the election outcome of 2020.“The lesson Republicans have learnt from that is they don’t really suffer any electoral consequences from their base pursuing this kind of thing. In fact, they’re rewarded for it. That’s very ominous because that suggests they’ll continue to try to do this until they pay an electoral price for it, and so far they don’t sense they’re paying an electoral price for it.”Where is this authoritarian ecosystem heading? For many, the nightmare scenario is that Trump will run again in 2024 and, with the benefit of voter suppression, sneak a win in the electoral college as he did in 2016. If that fails, plan B would be for a Republican-controlled House to refuse to certify a Democratic winner and overturn the result in Trump’s favour.Disputed presidential elections have been thrown to the House before, Ziblatt noted. “It’s not unprecedented but in those earlier periods you had two parties that were constitutional, fully democratic parties. The thought of having a dispute like that when one of the parties is only questionably committed to democratic rules and norms is very frightening.”People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutionsIn How Democracies Die, Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky argue that democracies often come under threat not from invading armies or violent revolutions but at the ballot box: death by a thousand cuts. “People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutions,” Ziblatt said.“That’s Viktor Orbán [in Hungary], that’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [in Turkey], that’s Hugo Chávez [in Venezuela] and what’s distinctive about that is that it often begins incrementally. So people continue to go about their lives, continue to vote, parliament continues to meet and so you think, ‘Is there really a threat?’ But the power concentrates so it becomes harder and harder to unseat an incumbent.”He added: “We shouldn’t overlook that fact that we had a change in government in January. What that suggests is our electoral institutions do work better than they do in Hungary. The opposition in the United States is more well-organised and financed than the Hungarian opposition or the Turkish opposition, so we shouldn’t overstate that. But on the other hand, the tendencies are very similar.”Republicans are also playing a very long game, rewiring democracy’s hard drive in an attempt to consolidate power. Trump is arguably both cause and effect of the lurch right, which takes place in the wider context of white Christians losing majority status in America’s changing demographics.His grip on the party appears only to have tightened since his defeat, as evidenced by the ousting of Trump critic Liz Cheney from House leadership and their use of a procedural move known as the filibuster to block the 6 January commission. Critics say that, in an atmosphere of partisan tribalism, the party is now driven by a conviction that Democratic victories are by definition illegitimate.Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide who is now a Democrat, said: “It’s very clear that the next time there is a violent effort to overthrow our government, Republicans in Congress will be knowing accomplices in that effort. They are the getaway driver for the democratic arsonists.”Bardella, a political commentator, added: “It has become painfully transparent that the Republican party platform is 100% anti-democratic and it is their ambition to impose minority rule on the majority going forward, because they know that when the playing field is level, they can’t win and so they have instead decided to double down on supporting a wannabe autocrat, and are doing everything they can to destabilise the democratic safeguards that we’ve had in place since the founding of our country.“We cannot underestimate the gravity of this moment in time because what happens over the next month or year could be the turning point in this battle to preserve our democracy.”The threat poses a dilemma for Biden, who was elected on a promise of building bridges and seeking bipartisanship. He continues to do so while issuing increasingly stark calls to arms. Speaking in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this week, he repeated his “democracy prevailed” mantra but then warned of a “truly unprecedented assault on our democracy” and announced that the vice-president, Kamala Harris, would lead an effort to strengthen voting rights.Proposed national legislation to address the issue, however, depends on a Senate currently split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans (Harris has the tie-breaking vote). In order to pass it with a simple majority, Democrats would first have to abolish the filibuster but at least two senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have ruled out such a step.Facing this stalemate, activists and civil society are trying to create a sense of urgency. More than a hundred scholars this week released a joint statement, posted by the New America thinktank, expressing “deep concern” at “radical changes to core electoral procedures” that jeopardise free and fair elections. “Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars wrote.Last year’s poll was dubbed “the election that could break America” and the nation was widely considered to have dodged a bullet; it may not be so fortunate in 2024. Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive group Democracy for Action, added: “We’re getting to the place where we might not be able to call ourselves a democracy any more. That’s how dire it is.“It is not just the fact that there is an orchestrated, concerted effort across our country to interfere with the most fundamental right of any democracy but that they’re doing it so blatantly, so out in the open and so unapologetically, and that there have been many attempts and there’s no easy way to stop it.”Simpson compared Democrats’ victory over Trump to the film Avengers: Endgame and warned against complacency. “We just defeated Thanos and everybody was like, ‘OK, let’s take a break,’ and I’m like, ‘No, we cannot take a break because the GOP never take a break’. They know that we’re taking a break and that’s why they’re doing it now and so aggressively: ‘You think you won because Trump is out? Oh, we got you.’”Ibram X Kendi, a historian and author of How to Be an Antiracist, added: “At the end of the day, there is an all out war on American voters, particularly younger voters, particularly younger voters of colour, and it’s happening from Texas to Florida and it’s really causing the American people to decide whether we want our democracy or not.” More

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      Republicans grapple with Marjorie Taylor Greene: Politics Weekly Extra

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      Jonathan Freedland and Joan E Greve look at what it might take for the Republican leadership to properly punish Marjorie Taylor Greene for the outrageous and offensive comments she continues to make

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      In May Democrats and Republicans condemned Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments comparing Covid face mask mandates to Jewish people being forced to wear a yellow star during the Holocaust. Republicans stopped short of punishing the far-right Georgia congresswoman, though, unlike their decision to oust the veteran party member Liz Cheney from her House leadership position. Cheney was voted out because she continued to publicly reject Donald Trump’s lie that he had won the 2020 presidential election, and because she had voted to impeach Trump over his role in the 6 January insurrection. So why were these women treated so differently? Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in Elections

      Mike Pence says he and Trump ‘may never see eye-to-eye’ on Capitol attack

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      Mike Pence has said he isn’t sure that he and Donald Trump will ever see “eye to eye” over what happened on 6 January, when a mob of the president’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election. Pence, speaking at a Republican dinner in the early voting state of New Hampshire, gave his most extensive comments to date on the deadly events, when rioters broke into the Capitol building, some chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” after the vice-president said he did not have the power to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.“As I said that day, Jan 6 was a dark day in history of the United States Capitol. But thanks to the swift action of the Capitol police and federal law enforcement, violence was quelled. The Capitol was secured,” Pence said.“And that same day, we reconvened the Congress and did our duty under the constitution and the laws of the United States,” Pence continued. “You know, President Trump and I have spoken many times since we left office. And I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that day.”It was a rare departure for Pence, who spent four years standing loyally beside his boss amid controversy, investigation and impeachment. It comes as Pence considers his own potential 2024 White House run and as Republicans, some of whom were angry at Trump in the days after the insurrection, have largely coalesced back around the former president.Pence praised Trump several times during his nearly 35-minute speech at the Hillsborough county Republican committee’s annual Lincoln-Reagan awards dinner in Manchester. He also tried to turn the events of 6 January back around on Democrats, saying they wanted to keep the insurrection in the news to divert attention from Biden’s progressive agenda.Pence also hit upon several favorite themes of conservative Republicans, including pushing back against “critical race theory”, echoing a wider push on the right to limit how history and race are covered in America’s schools. His speech came as Georgia’s education board adopted a resolution insisting that students should be taught that racism and slavery are aberrations rather than the systemic norm.“America is not a racist country,” Pence said, prompting one of several standing ovations and cheers during his speech.“It is past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism,” Pence said. “I commend state legislators and governors across the country for banning critical race theory from our schools.”His choice of states, including an April appearance in South Carolina, is aimed at increasing his visibility as he considers whether to run for the White House in 2024. His team said he plans more trips, including stops in Texas, California and Michigan. More

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      Trump closes his ‘beacon of freedom’ website a month after launching it

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      Donald Trump has discontinued the blog-type website he launched in a fanfare less than a month ago as “a beacon of freedom” and “a place to speak freely and safely”.Jason Miller, a senior aide to the former US president, confirmed the closing of the “From the Desk of Donald J Trump” online communication tool in a statement to CNBC on Wednesday, just weeks after billing the venture as “a great resource” for his boss’s musings.Miller offered no explanation for the closure, and it remains unclear if it was a voluntary move or was imposed by a third party of some kind, like Trump’s removal from social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook for inciting the deadly 6 January Capitol insurrection.But in a tweeted reply to a Republican activist questioning if the move was “a precursor to him joining another social media platform”, Miller said: “Yes, actually, it is. Watch this space.”In the statement to CNBC, Miller attempted to paint the short-lived project as “auxiliary to the broader efforts we have and are working on”.The Trump blog, a mouthpiece for his false claims about a rigged 2020 presidential election, failed to gain traction and on 21 May the Washington Post reported it had attracted a “staggeringly small audience”.Last weekend, the website mysteriously crashed after Trump posted more falsehoods about the bizarre election “audit” in Arizona that the former president says provides proof that Joe Biden’s victory was “stolen”, despite the failure of many dozens of lawsuits challenging the result, and local, state and national officials declaring that 2020’s was the most secure election in US history.Meanwhile, without evidence, Trump insisted that there were “broken seals on boxes, ballots missing, and worse” in Arizona. Shortly after the entry was posted, the website reported a URL processing error, and the blog page went dark completely.Visitors to the donaldjtrump.com website on Wednesday found only an archive of Trump’s media statements dating back to January and a link to an online shop for Trump merchandise.Trump and his acolytes have long railed against social media platforms for their perceived bias against him, and despite the apparent one-time popularity of his posts. When Trump’s account was permanently suspended from Twitter he had almost 90 million followers.Facebook’s oversight committee, meanwhile, ruled last month that his ban should not be lifted, but left the door open for “a final decision” within six months.The closure of his blog comes as Trump, who is mulling a second presidential run in 2024, prepares to return to campaign-style rallies for the first time since he incited a mob of supporters to overrun the US Capitol building on 6 January in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory.On Saturday he will speak at the North Carolina Republicans’ state convention in Greenville, and is planning a series of public events over the summer in other battleground states, including Florida and Ohio. More

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      Texas governor threatens to defund state legislature after Democrats block voting bill

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      Voting rights advocates on Tuesday excoriated Texas governor Greg Abbott’s bizarre threat to defund the state legislature after Democratic lawmakers thwarted an 11th-hour attempt to pass his priority bill that would have made it even harder for the public to cast a ballot in elections.“At the end of the day, it’s so embarrassing that our governor can’t take a setback without throwing a tantrum about it,” Emily Eby, staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told the Guardian.In Texas and across the United States, Republicans have tried to roll back access to the polls after last year’s election, when their rightwing supporters bought into unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud.Texas’s Senate Bill 7 would have imposed felonies on public officials for certain activities related to boosting mail-in voting, banned 24-hour and drive-thru voting, emboldened partisan poll-watchers and made it easier to overturn election results, among other provisions.The legislation went through a dizzying rash of iterations and revisions to reconcile both chambers’ priorities, even as advocates and experts warned that its bedrock proposals could disproportionately disenfranchise communities of color, city dwellers, voters with disabilities and elderly people.But even after pervasive condemnation of what critics dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0”, SB7 seemed primed to clear the state legislature just before the session’s end – until Texas Democrats walked off the House floor Sunday night.“No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities,” Abbott tweeted Monday. “Stay tuned.”As Texas’s chief executive, Abbott can veto individual line items in the budget, and he said he intended to do away with Article X funding the legislature, including lawmakers, staff and adjacent agencies.But the budget he’s considering won’t go into effect until September, the Texas Tribune reported, rendering his retributive plan largely ineffective while potentially hurting future legislators.“This might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard a politician suggest,” said Wesley Story, communications manager for Progress Texas. “But there is pretty stiff competition in that department when it comes to Texas Republicans.”For pundits and lawmakers alike, a giant question mark loomed over Abbott’s incendiary wielding of power as he tried to exercise the authority to punish a whole government branch.“He didn’t get his voter suppression bill so he’s withholding pay from not only the entire legislature, but the staff and aides who rely on it to survive,” political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen wrote online. “To their core, Republicans despise democracy.”“This would eliminate the branch of government that represents the people and basically create a monarchy,” tweeted state representative Donna Howard.Meanwhile, Abbott said he’s also planning to call a special session – what amounts to legislative overtime – in part to address the specious talking point of “election integrity”, which he still considers an emergency despite the legislature’s failure to pass SB7.When that rapid-fire round will take place remains unclear, though Republican leaders are already presenting it as an inevitability.“We will be back – when, I don’t know, but we will be back,” Texas house speaker Dade Phelan told his colleagues. “There’s a lot of work to be done, but I look forward to doing it with every single one of you.” More