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      in Elections

      Senate Republicans block creation of US Capitol attack commission

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      Senate Republicans have blocked the creation of a special commission to study the deadly 6 January attack on the Capitol, dashing hopes for a bipartisan panel amid a Republican push to put the violent insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters behind them.Republicans killed the effort to set up a 9/11-style inquiry into the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob despite broad popular support for such an investigation and pleas from the family of a Capitol police officer who collapsed and died after the siege and other officers who battled the rioters.In a procedural vote in the Senate on Friday, six Republican senators broke ranks to back the commission, which was more than expected, but four fewer than the 10 needed to overcome a filibuster and for it to advance.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned Republican colleagues for blocking a bipartisan commission. “Shame on the Republican party for trying to sweep the horrors of that day under the rug because they’re afraid of Donald Trump,” Schumer said in a Senate floor speech immediately after the vote.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, argued the vote on the commission bill brought “shame” to the Senate and would make the country less safe. She indicated that House committees, which are under Democratic leadership, would continue to investigate the attack. “Democrats will proceed to find the truth,” Pelosi said.The insurrection was the worst attack on the Capitol in 200 years and interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s win over Trump.But the Republican party remains firmly in the grip of Trump who had made his opposition to the commission very clear. Observers believe that senior party figures do not want to anger the former president or his legion of supporters and may also fear what the commission might uncover in terms of links between some of the rioters and Republican lawmakers.Though the commission bill passed the House earlier this month with the support of almost three dozen Republicans, Republican senators said they believe the commission would eventually be used against them politically.Trump has called it a “Democrat trap”.While initially saying he was open to the idea of the commission, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, turned firmly against it in recent days. He has said he believes the panel’s investigation would be partisan despite the even split among party members. McConnell, who once said Trump was responsible for provoking the mob attack on the Capitol, said of Democrats: “They’d like to continue to litigate the former president, into the future.”The Republican opposition to the bipartisan panel has revived Democratic pressure to do away with the filibuster, a time-honored Senate tradition that requires a vote by 60 of the 100 senators to cut off debate and advance a bill.With the Senate evenly split 50-50, Democrats needed the support of 10 Republicans to move to the commission bill, because Republicans invoked the filibuster. The episode has sparked fresh debate over whether the time has come to change the rules and lower the threshold to 51 votes to take up legislation.On Friday, the Democrats only got 54 votes by the time the vote was gaveled out.Friday’s vote marked Senate Republicans’ first official use of the filibuster to defeat a bill, and Schumer said he hoped this was not the beginning of a trend of Republicans blocking “reasonable, commonsense legislation”.The six Republicans who voted for the commission to proceed were Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Rob Portman of Ohio.A spokesperson for the Republican senator Pat Toomey told HuffPost that he was not in Washington for the commission bill vote because of a family obligation However, the spokesperson said, Toomey would have voted in favor of starting debate on the bill.Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Twitter: “If Senate Republicans can block an independent commission investigating a deadly armed attack on the Capitol because it might hurt their poll numbers with insurrectionists, then something is badly wrong with the Senate. We must get rid of the filibuster to protect our democracy.”The Republicans’ political arguments over the violent siege – which is still raw for many in the Capitol, almost five months later – have frustrated not only Democrats but also those who fought off the rioters.Michael Fanone, a Metropolitan police department officer who responded to the attack, said between meetings with Republican senators that a commission is “necessary for us to heal as a nation from the trauma that we all experienced that day”. Fanone has described being dragged down the Capitol steps by rioters who shocked him with a stun gun and beat him. “So I don’t understand why they would resist getting to the bottom of what happened that day and fully understanding how to prevent it. Just boggles my mind,” she said. Video of the rioting shows two men spraying Sicknick and another officer with a chemical, but the Washington medical examiner said he suffered a stroke and died from natural causes. More

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      in Elections

      Senate Republicans will likely sink Democrats’ bid to set up Capitol attack commission

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      Senate Republicans were poised on Thursday to kill an attempt by Democrats to establish a bipartisan commission to investigate the 6 January attack on the Capitol in which a pro-Trump mob ransacked the building in an attempt to disrupt the formalization of Joe Biden’s winning of the presidency.The bill was intended to set up a 9/11-style commission that would examine its causes and impact and exactly who was involved.Donald Trump is still powerful in the Republican party and has reacted angrily to the idea of such a commission. Observers believe that many top Republicans are fearful of antagonizing Trump and his loyal followers and also worried about what such a commission might uncover, including potential links between Republican lawmakers and some of those who invaded the building.The Thursday vote would mark the first successful use of a filibuster in the Biden presidency to halt Senate legislative action, and is likely to boost pressure on the president to get rid of the Senate tradition that requires a vote by 60 of the 100 senators to cut off debate and advance a bill.With the Senate evenly split 50-50, Democrats needed the support of 10 Republicans to move to the commission bill, sparking fresh debate over whether the time has come to change the rules and lower the threshold to 51 votes to take up legislation.The House had already approved the measure with 35 Republican votes. Democrats have warned that if Republicans are willing to use the filibuster to stop an arguably popular measure, it shows the limits of trying to broker compromises, particularly on bills related to election reforms or other aspects of the Democrats’ agenda.“There is no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission,” said Senator Joe Manchin before the vote though the centrist Democrat still made it clear that he would not support efforts to do away with the filibuster. “I’m not ready to destroy our government,” Manchin said.Before the vote, Gladys Sicknick, the mother of the late Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, along with Sicknick’s girlfriend Sandra Garza and two officers who fought the protesters that day, met with several Republican senators to try to persuade them to act.Sicknick was among many officers protecting the building, some seen in videos in hand-to-hand combat with the mob. He collapsed immediately after engaging with the rioters and died the next day.In a statement Wednesday, Gladys Sicknick was more blunt: “I suggest that all congressmen and senators who are against this bill visit my son’s grave in Arlington national cemetery and, while there, think about what their hurtful decisions will do to those officers who will be there for them going forward.”Republican opposition to the commission, however, was carefully marshaled by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who has declared the bill a “purely political exercise”, since Senate committees are already looking into security shortfalls during the Capitol attack.McConnell, who once said Trump was responsible for “provoking” the attack on the Capitol, now says of Democrats: “They’d like to continue to litigate the former president, into the future.” More

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      in World Politics

      Radical Republicans Are Not Conservatives

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      The House Freedom Caucus is routinely described as conservative, by its members, by the mainstream media and by Wikipedia. The caucus, which draws together 45 Republican Party members of the House of Representatives, is the furthest to the right of any major political formation in the United States. The most extreme and flamboyant politicians in America, like scandal-plagued Matt Gaetz of Florida and gun-toting Lauren Boebert of Colorado, are proud to call the caucus their political home. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, after threatening to form an explicitly racist “America First” caucus, chose ultimately to continue promoting her nativist, QAnon-inspired beliefs from within the Freedom Caucus.

      By any reasonable measure, the Freedom Caucus and its members are not conservative. Because of their disruptive tactics and rhetoric, their contempt for bedrock conservative values like the rule of law and their embrace of the most radical populist in modern US history, they are more akin to European far-right politicians like those in the Alternative for Germany and Fidesz. Traditional Republicans recognize that the caucus and its members have nothing to do with the party they joined many years ago. Former House Speaker John Boehner, a more traditional Republican, gave an apt description of the caucus when he said in 2017, “They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.”

      Can the US Really Rally Other Nations?

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      The misidentification of the Freedom Caucus as “conservative” is not the only example of the misuse of this term. At various points over the last four years, Donald Trump was called a “conservative” president. Certain policies, like the dismantling of environmental regulations or the promotion of laissez-faire economics, have also been erroneously called “conservative.” Various media outlets and personalities, from One America News to Glenn Beck, have likewise been mislabeled “conservative.” When The Washington Post tries to rectify the problem by labeling far-right activist Ali Alexander an “ultraconservative,” it only makes matters worse. An ultraconservative should be even more determined to uphold the status quo rather than, like Alexander, trying to undermine it.

      The recent ouster of Liz Cheney from her position as the third highest-ranking Republican in the House has only further muddied the waters of this definitional quagmire. True, Cheney has upheld law and order in defending the integrity of the 2020 election against the revolutionary fervor of the “Trump Firsters” in her party. Prior to her recent stand, however, Cheney herself flouted many of the principles of conservativism by embracing the more radical policies of the Trump-inflected Republican Party, voting with the former president over 92% of the time on such issues as gutting the environment.

      The misuse of the term “conservative” is the result not only of a structural quirk of American politics, but also the evolution of political ideology in the United States.

      The Europeans

      In Europe, multi-party systems allow for greater nuance in political labeling. Thus, conservatives in the various Christian Democratic parties compete for votes against far-right populist parties that embrace anti-democratic, racist and even fascist positions. America’s two-party system, on the other hand, collapses such distinctions into a binary opposition between a single “liberal” and a single “conservative” party. If a faction emerges within the Republican Party, therefore, it is by definition “conservative” even if it so obviously isn’t. It’s as if politics in America is digital — either one or zero — while European politics reflect all the messy gradations of the analog realm.

      At the same time, ideologies have evolved considerably in the United States over the last half-century. “Conservative” once stood for preserving traditional arrangements in society such as family, faith, community and small business against the modernizing forces of the market. Conservatives have also adopted the British philosopher Edmund Burke’s distaste for the Enlightenment project of human rights and egalitarianism. Conservatives were also once conservationists (remember: it was Richard Nixon who, in 1970, created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act Extension).

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Reagan/Thatcher revolution changed all that. Conservatives suddenly became ultra-liberal in the economic sense. They wholeheartedly embraced the free market in their eagerness to deploy any powerful force against what they considered to be the primary evil in the world: big government. They supported laissez-faire economics — essentially, no government controls on the economy — even though unrestrained market forces tear apart communities, break apart families, undermine faith, destroy family farms and sweep away small businesses. But since such a market served as a counterforce to government authority, the neo-liberal conservatives prepared to throw out whatever babies were necessary in order to get rid of the bathwater.

      A further revolution in conservative thought came with the neoconservatives. These foreign policy hawks discovered a fondness for human rights and a taste for revolutionary change, as long as it was in countries the United States opposed. Overthrowing the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, which required a revolutionary destruction of the status quo, became a new addition to the conservative agenda.

      In some respects, Trump attempted to purge the conservative movement of these two newer tendencies through his rejection of both the cherished free trade of the neoliberals and the “forever wars” of the neoconservatives. In their place, the new president reverted to the older right-wing ideology of nationalism, populism and racism of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s and the America First movement of the 1940s. At the same time, however, Trump retained the allegiance of these newfangled conservatives by slashing government involvement in the economy and championing higher Pentagon spending.

      As a result, the current Republican Party features a dog’s breakfast of right-wing ideologies. You can still find ardent neoliberals like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio who espouse free-trade economics and a few neocons like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas who rail against neo-isolationism. A solid majority of the party, Cheney notwithstanding, backs Trump no matter how much he deviates from conservative values.

      The Media

      Given the inability of Republicans to define themselves with any degree of precision and their preference for hiding behind labels like “conservative,” it’s no wonder that the media has difficulty parsing right-wing terminology. If the Freedom Caucus calls itself “conservative,” and the American Conservative Union agrees, should it really be the job of The New York Times to correct the record?

      And yet, that’s precisely what the mainstream media does for other ludicrously inapt designations. No major newspaper believes that North Korea is democratic simply because its official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. No mainstream journalists would mistake the far-right Sweden Democrats for the US political party of the same name. As for Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, it is nothing of the sort, since it’s only the personal political vehicle of the raving extremist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and pity the poor reporter who takes the party at face value.

      It’s long past time for the mainstream media to apply these common-sense rules of nomenclature to American politics.

      There are several efforts ongoing to wean the Republican Party of its addiction to Donald Trump. Perhaps a more important first step would be to reclaim the term “conservative” so that it applies in the United States to the same system of values that inspires conservative parties in Europe. Only then will the Republican Party have a chance of becoming once again a defender of the status quo rather than its chief wrecking ball.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      The Democrat standing in the way of his party’s efforts to protect voting rights

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,For months, Democrats in Congress have remained united behind passing the For the People Act, legislation that would amount to the most sweeping protections for voting rights in a generation.But those efforts – which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, limit severe partisan gerrymandering and mandate new transparency in political donations – appear to be hitting a wall. “Failure is very much an option – it is, in fact, the most likely one,” the Washington Post reported bluntly earlier this month.The senator getting in Democrats’ way is one of their own: Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, who has publicly signaled recently that he does not back the bill and wants bipartisan support for it. Manchin also does not favor getting rid of the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes for legislation to advance in the Senate, making it nearly impossible for Democrats to pass this bill or any other without support from 10 Republicans. Even after six months of an unprecedented Republican effort to restrict voting rights across the country, Manchin still isn’t budging.My colleague Daniel Strauss and I wrote about this quagmire for Democrats this week. We asked senators and voting rights groups how exactly they might win over Manchin and how they plan to move forward. They told us they were still optimistic about the bill’s prospects and they thought Manchin would ultimately come around as public pressure grew.“There is a ticking timebomb,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which supports the bill. If it doesn’t pass “it will be a significant failure for the country, for the American people … I don’t think Joe Manchin wants that on himself.”Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, told us he saw a “glimmer of hope” last week. He pointed to a letter Manchin released with Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, calling to reinstate a provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that would require states to get election changes approved by the federal government before they went into effect. Such provision was originally included in the Voting Rights Act and forestalled discriminatory changes to voting rules, but in 2013 it was gutted by the US supreme court. “Inaction is not an option,” Manchin and Murkowski wrote.Weiser and other voting rights advocates also pointed to that letter as evidence that Manchin understood the stakes of acting to protect voting rights. But they said it would not be acceptable to treat restoring pre-clearance as a substitute for the more sweeping voting rights bill. Pre-clearance will be a guardrail against future discrimination, they said, but the For the People Act would set a national floor for voting standards.“It has to be both,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “They’re both critically important pieces of legislation and it’s a false choice to say I’m for the other and not for this. Because only together will we fully rebalance the state of voting in America to favor access.”Also worth watching …
      The Republican effort to review 2.1m ballots cast in Arizona’s largest county is getting even stranger. One of the subcontractors that was involved in running the audit is no longer participating, the Arizona Republic reported on Tuesday. The same firm had previously been hired by the non-profit of Sidney Powell, a Trump ally who promulgated lies about the 2020 election, to do an audit in Pennsylvania.
      There is growing concern that conservative activists are seeking to emulate the Arizona review elsewhere, including in California, Michigan and New Hampshire. Experts say the efforts in Arizona are so shoddy as to be illegitimate, and are simply an effort to sow more uncertainty about the 2020 election results.
      Texas Republicans are in the final stages of negotiating new voting rights restrictions. The Texas Tribune has a really good analysis of how that law would limit the number of polling places in Democratic-leaning areas as well as areas where there is a high share of voters of color. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘A ticking timebomb’: Democrats’ push for voting rights law faces tortuous path

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      After six months of aggressive Republican efforts to restrict voting access, Democrats are facing new questions about how they will actually pass voting rights reforms through Congress.The most recent hand-wringing comes as Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democratic senator, made clear earlier this month he still is not on board with the For the People Act, which would require early voting, automatic and same-day registration, and prevent the severe manipulation of district boundaries for partisan gain.Senate Democrats, including Manchin, met privately on Wednesday to map out a path forward on the bill, which has already passed the US House. They were mostly mum about the discussions of that meeting but overall resolute that some kind of voting rights bill has to pass. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said: “It was a really productive meeting.”Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia said: “I think members of the caucus understand the urgency and we’re focused on getting something passed. We have an obligation to the American people to find a way to protect our democracy.”Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterManchin’s opposition comes at a critical moment when there is escalating concern about aggressive state Republican efforts to curtail access to the ballot. Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Montana have all put new restrictions in place this year. Many see this as an existential moment for the Democratic party and fear that Republicans will permanently reap the benefits of a distorted electoral system if Democrats cannot pass federal legislation. There is heightened urgency to act quickly so that crucial protections can be in place when the once-per-decade redistricting process gets under way later this year.“There is a ticking timebomb,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which supports the bill. “It will be a significant failure if [Congress] doesn’t pass these two pieces of major voting legislation. It will be a significant failure for the country, for the American people … I don’t think Joe Manchin wants that on himself.”Manchin is concerned the bill still does not have enough Republican buy-in, and favors an alternative piece of legislation that would reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and require election changes to be pre-approved by the federal government. Some observers say that solely passing that bill, named the John R Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, would be inadequate to undo the suppressive laws that have gone into effect and that trying to get bipartisan support for the measure is a fool’s errand, given the Republican party’s embrace of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Senator Mitch McConnell has also taken a personal interest in trying to sink the bill, saying it would be devastating to Republicans, McClatchy reported earlier this month.The West Virginia senator’s concern highlights an even bigger question looming over the Democratic party – how to pass any priority legislation with only, at best, 51 votes in the Senate. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, has set August as a deadline for passing a voting rights bill – a deadline the White House has embraced.Schumer has repeatedly said “failure is not an option”. But absent a shift on eliminating the filibuster, a procedural rule in the Senate that requires 60 votes to advance legislation, failure seems to be the most likely option, the Washington Post reported. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another Democrat who does not support eliminating the filibuster, bluntly asked the caucus what the plan on the legislation was earlier this month.“The goal of the authors is to get it signed into law. I don’t see a path,” one Democratic senator vented to Politico.In the past few months it seemed like a showdown over the filibuster would come on a voting rights bill. Now, though, some Democrats think that showdown may come over a vote on a 6 January commission to investigate the mob attack on the Capitol. In both cases Democrats don’t seem to have the votes to overcome a filibuster which would spur a showdown.“Part of what I’ve heard is let’s not race to abolish or even reform the filibuster rule because frankly there hasn’t been a ‘casualty on the floor of the Senate’,” said Senator Alex Padilla of California, a former top elections official in his home state. “There’s no bill this session that has died because of the filibuster rule. So what might it be that breaks the filibuster’s back? Is it the infrastructure package? Is it the voting rights bill? Is it a climate change bill?”Manchin’s comments are being closely watched because Democrats cannot afford to lose his vote – or that of any other senator – since they control only 50 seats in the Senate. Manchin has said he does not favor getting rid of the filibuster.But outside groups supporting the For the People Act say they are unfazed by Manchin’s recalcitrance. They remain optimistic that he will eventually come around to support it.“Reports of the bill’s death are very premature. It is still the priority for Democrats in Congress,” Weiser said.“We remain optimistic about the path forward for this bill,” said Tiffany Muller, the president and executive director of End Citizens United/Let America Vote, which is backing a $30m effort to support the bill.Manchin has pointed to a reauthorization of preclearance requirements as a better way to protect voting rights than a sweeping voting bill. Last week, he released a letter with the Republican senator Lisa Murkowski calling on Congress to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, including the preclearance provision gutted by the US supreme court in 2013. “Inaction is not an option,” they wrote.That letter was a “glimmer of hope”, said Padilla.“All the more reason to continue to make the case not just in Senate chambers but in the court of public opinion across the country,” he added, stressing that Democratic efforts to engage in genuine debate would address Manchin’s concern that a real attempt at bipartisanship should be made.Voting groups say it would be a mistake to only pass a voting rights reauthorization. While current proposals would only require certain places with documented evidence of voting discrimination to be subject to preclearance, Manchin told ABC he thinks every state should have to get its voting changes preapproved. Republicans are unlikely to support such an idea. “That’s just not actually in the cards,” Weiser said.“It’s a false choice. It has to be both,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “They’re both critically important pieces of legislation and it’s a false choice to say I’m for the other and not for this. Because only together will we fully rebalance the state of voting in America to favor access.”Four House Democrats sent a letter to colleagues last week making a similar argument. Advocates are heartened by polling that shows the measure is extremely popular and the fact that Democrats have held together so far and brought the bill to the verge of a Senate floor vote despite some grumbling from their own caucus.“What you’re seeing is a commitment to a floor vote and getting people on record,” Spaulding said.If Democrats went into the 2022 midterms without doing anything to protect voting rights, it would be disastrous, advocates said.“Voters showed up in record numbers to choose new leadership. There were commitments made across multiple Congresses on both bills and so saying ‘we tried’ isn’t going to work,” Spaulding said.“If these bills weren’t to go to President Biden’s desk, they’d have … to articulate why they did nothing when they had the power to do so.” More

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      in US Politics

      MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell turned away from Republican governors convention

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      Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and loyal Donald Trump ally, has said he was turned away from a convention of Republican governors in Nashville, Tennessee, this week.Lindell, who has been sued for defamation over his baseless claims that a company’s voting machines stole the election from Trump for Joe Biden, was turned away as he attempted to go to a dinner at the Tennessee governor’s mansion.A spokesperson for the Republican Governor’s Association told Politico that the event was for members of the association “and Mike Lindell is not currently an RGA member”.On Tuesday, according to Politico, Lindell said he had been invited to the conference and shared a screenshot headlined “RGA – Nashville Meeting”.Lindell’s attempt to attend the dinner comes amid Republican confusion over the future of the party and the role Trump, and his ardent supporters, may play in its makeup.Lindell previously attended meetings of the group, including one last year in which he was floated as a candidate for the Minnesota governorship. That plan, supported by Trump, has not advanced.Lindell, a familiar face on Fox News, found political fame after being invited by Trump to speak at a White House press conference.Lindell later promoted Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election and mass voter fraud, including being photographed with a document mentioning “martial law” after the 6 January attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters intent on denying the election results.The following month, Lindell was sued by Dominion Voting Systems in a $1.3bn defamation suit that accuses him of repeatedly and falsely saying that the company’s voting machines had been involved in foul play.As recently as last month, Lindell told Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist, that Fox News was mounting a conspiracy against him over his election fraud claims.“You know, I’m gonna have those answers soon because I’ve hired private investigators and I’ve spent a lot of money on them to investigate everything,” Lindell said. More