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      Democrats want 'illegal aliens and child molesters' to vote, Ted Cruz says – report

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      Claiming Democrats want to expand voting rights to “illegal aliens” and “child molesters”, the Texas senator Ted Cruz warned that if Republicans do not block the For the People Act, major legislation now before the Senate, they will be out of power for years.Cruz also said there was no room for compromise, according to the Associated Press, which cited a recording of a call hosted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or Alec, a rightwing group which writes and pushes conservative legislation at the state level.Democrats say the bill passed by the US House, also known as HR1, is the only way they can counter voter-suppression legislation under consideration in many Republican-held states, aimed at reducing the voting power of groups, many of them minorities, that traditionally back Democrats.Increasingly, senior Democrats advocate reforming or abolishing the filibuster, which creates a 60-vote threshold for legislation in the Senate and gives Republicans an automatic block in a chamber split 50-50, as a way to pass HR1.“There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights,” the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, told the Guardian this month. “That just ain’t gonna happen. That would be catastrophic.”HR1 does contain protections for the voting rights of former felons. It does not propose extending the franchise to undocumented migrants, though the Biden administration has proposed to move some such groups closer to US citizenship.HR1 also contains campaign finance reform, measures to protect voting by mail and to limit partisan gerrymandering and new ethical rules for holders of federal office.Writing for the Guardian in 2019, when HR1 first passed in the House, Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University, said HR1 was “designed to restore some integrity to a democratic system that the supreme court and Republicans have severely wounded.“Or, as LaTosha Brown, co-founder of BlackVotersMatter, asked in 2018, ‘Why is it a struggle for us to cast our damn vote?’”Speaking to CNN last week, Stacey Abrams, a former candidate for governor in Georgia who now campaigns for voting rights, put the issue more starkly still. Republican moves to restrict voting rights, she said, were “Jim Crow in a suit and tie”.Jim Crow was the common name for the system of laws in many southern states which undid post-civil war Reconstruction and suppressed the Black vote well into the 20th century.On the Alec call, Cruz reportedly insisted Democrats’ “only objective” was “to ensure that [they] can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century”.Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, although the electoral college system has placed their man in the White House after three such contests.Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots. Last year, he lost to Joe Biden by more than 7m – and lost the electoral college by the same score by which he won four years before.Republican moves to restrict voting access are backed by claims of electoral fraud which are not borne out by evidence. Trump continues to claim his defeat by Biden was the result of massive fraud, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court.Republicans in states including Georgia and Texas are moving to pass legislation that will seek to restrict access to the vote.Such moves have broad support among conservative voters. Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action, a Washington advocacy group, told the AP: “It kind of feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement, when the movement writ large realizes the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high. We’ve had a bit of a battle cry from the grassroots, urging us to pick this fight.” More

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      'Blindsided': Biden faces tough test in reversing Trump's cruel border legacy

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      Lauded for his human touch, Joe Biden is facing an early political and moral test over how his government treats thousands of migrant children who make the dangerous journey to America alone.

      Officials say the number of people caught attempting to cross the US-Mexico border is on pace to hit its highest number for 20 years. Single adults and families are being expelled under coronavirus safety rules inherited from Donald Trump.
      But a growing number of children, some as young as six years old, from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are arriving at the southern border without parents or guardians. These minors are brought to border patrol facilities – where many languish in cramped, prison-like conditions for days on end.
      The fast-developing humanitarian emergency shows how Biden’s determination to break from Trump’s harsh, nativist crackdown in favour of a more compassionate approach has collided with the reality of finite resources and a broken system.
      “I do think that they were blindsided by this surge,” said María Teresa Kumar, founding president of the grassroots political organisation Voto Latino. “As someone that monitored this a lot, I didn’t see that coming and I don’t think the community saw that coming. It took everybody by surprise.
      “It is heart-wrenching knowing that there are children that are cold and don’t have family. It’s one of these cases where there seems to be no right answers. Knowing the people inside the administration are very much on the side of immigrants speaks to me that there are real moral dilemmas happening right now and I would not want to be in that position.”

      Democrats have called the situation a “challenge” and “problem” and blamed Trump’s legacy. Republicans have rushed to brand it the first “crisis” and “disaster” of Biden’s presidency. The battle is proof that border access remains one of the most complex, emotive and radioactive issues in American politics.
      Trump launched his campaign for the presidency by promising to build a wall, routinely vilified migrants and, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, spoke often of an “invasion”. Biden stopped construction of the wall and promised to unwind Trump’s zero-tolerance policies.
      The number of “encounters” between migrants and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has increased every month since April 2020. But when 100,441 migrants were reported attempting to cross the border last month, it was the highest level since March 2019 and included a particular rise in unaccompanied children.
      Many such children head to the US to reunite with family members or escape poverty, crime and violence. Central America has been hit by hurricanes and the economic fallout of Covid-19. In an ABC interview this week, Biden denied that more migrants were coming because he is “a nice guy”, insisting: “They come because their circumstance is so bad.”
      Under Trump, unaccompanied children were sent straight back to Mexico. Biden decided they should go to a border patrol facility and, within 72 hours, be transferred to the health department with a view to being placed with a family member or sponsor.
      However, it has quickly become clear the system is not fit for purpose, leaving about 4,500 children stuck in facilities designed for adult men. Lawyers who visited one facility in Texas described seeing children sleeping on the floor or on metal benches and being allowed outside for a few minutes every few days.
      The administration is scrambling to find more capacity, opening emergency shelters and using a convention centre in Dallas to house up to 3,000 teenage boys. It also deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which typically responds to floods, storms and other disasters, to help shelter and transport children at least until early June.
      Republicans seized on that move as evidence a disaster is unfolding. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, led a delegation of a dozen Republicans to El Paso, Texas, and spoke of “the Biden border crisis”, adding: “It’s more than a crisis. This is human heartbreak.”
      The message has resounded through a conservative media that finds Biden an elusive target. Trump made wildly exaggerated claims in a Fox News interview: “They’re destroying our country. People are coming in by the hundreds of thousands, And, frankly, our country can’t handle it. It is a crisis like we have rarely had and, certainly, we have never had on the border.”
      For Republicans, reeling from election defeat, internal divisions and failure to block Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the border offers a political lifeline.
      Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If the numbers go down next month this isn’t a crisis, but I think what they are expecting is that they’re not going to go down and that this is going to be something that will be an enduring and endemic problem.
      “It’s something that energises and unites the Trump voting coalition and could easily be seen as a failure on behalf of the administration by just enough of the people who voted for him but aren’t hardcore Democrats. So I think it’s a very smart move by Republicans to play this out and Biden needs to figure out how you can be compassionate while not being naively welcoming. He has not yet figured out how to do that.”

      Others, however, regard the Republican response as predictable ploy by a party obsessed with demonising migrants. Kumar said: “They’re phonies and it is coldly calculated because they know they have problems with suburban white women voters, and they are trying to make a case for it for the midterms.
      “It’s cynical and gross because when children were literally dying at the border, when they had a president that was teargassing refugees, not one of them stood up. It’s callous and cold political expediency and it’s shameful.”
      The White House has pointed out that the Trump administration forcibly separated nearly 3,000 children from parents, with no system in place to reunite them. Alejandro Mayorkas, the first migrant and first Latino in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress: “A crisis is when a nation is willing to rip a nine-year-old child out of the hands of his or her parent and separate that family to deter future migration. That, to me, is a humanitarian crisis.”
      Mayorkas argues that Trump’s decision to cut staffing, bed capacity and other resources was reckless given the likelihood that the number of migrants would rise again as the pandemic waned.
      “The system was gutted,” he said, “facilities were closed and they cruelly expelled young children into the hands of traffickers. We have had to rebuild the entire system, including the policies and procedures required to administer the asylum laws that Congress passed long ago.” More

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      in US Politics

      'His new business': Trump seeks personal political brand as he grips Republican base

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      Days after being acquitted in his second impeachment trial last month, Donald Trump issued a statement lashing out against one of the very Republican senators who made that acquittal possible.“The Republican party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Senator Mitch McConnell at its helm,” the former president said in a statement, after the Republican leader criticized him for inciting the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol. Trump added: “Mitch is a dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again.”But the shocking statement is just one of many colorful examples of how Trump has spent his post-presidency so far: attacking fellow Republicans who dare to criticize him while continuing to promote his personal political brand and his own firm grip on much of the party’s base.Such antics and behavior could cause trouble for the Republican party, as it attempts to take control of Congress in 2022’s midterm elections by continuing to embrace Trumpism as its guiding philosophy. While party leaders have encouraged Trump to focus on the efforts to flip the House and the Senate, the former president at times seems more interested in extracting revenge against the handful of Republican politicians who supported his impeachment.Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) late last month, Trump rattled off the names of each of the 17 Republican lawmakers who voted to impeach or convict him and suggested they should be removed from office. “Get rid of them all,” Trump told the CPAC crowd.Trump is already putting in effort to unseat those Republicans. The former president has vowed to help defeat Lisa Murkowski next year, attacking the Alaska Republican as “disloyal” after she supported his conviction in the Senate. Trump has also endorsed Max Miller, a former aide who launched a primary challenge against Anthony Gonzalez, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him.Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, said the former president would be releasing another round of endorsements in the coming days, including one for a primary challenger running against an incumbent Republican.“There are upcoming endorsements for folks running for reelection, as well as open seats, as well as, in one case, it will likely be a primary challenge against a sitting Republican,” Miller told the Guardian. “His endorsement is still the single biggest endorsement in politics. He plans on using that.”Trump’s attacks on “disloyal” Republicans seem to be the latest example of the former president’s vengeful attitude about politics and business, said Michael D’Antonio, the author of the The Truth About Trump.He is a person who very much believes in getting even with anyone he believes harmed him“He is a person who very much believes in getting even with anyone he believes harmed him,” D’Antonio said. “It’s always a matter of, ‘Are you with me? And if you’re not with me, then you’re against me, and you must be destroyed.’”Miller emphasized that Trump remains “committed” to working with the party’s committee groups, such as the Republican National Committee (RNC), to elect candidates who support the former president’s “America first” agenda. But Trump has been adamant that anyone using his name or likeness to fundraise must have his pre-approval before doing so.In a fiery statement released earlier this month, the former president criticized “Rinos,” meaning “Republicans in name only”, for using his likeness to raise money for their campaigns.“I fully support the Republican party and important GOP committees, but I do not support Rinos and fools, and it is not their right to use my likeness or image to raise funds,” Trump said. “So much money is being raised and completely wasted by people that do not have the GOP’s best interests in mind.”Trump instead encouraged his supporters to donate to his own political action committee, the Save America Pac. According to Miller, the Pac already has more than $80m in the bank, with about a year and a half to go until the midterm elections.Trump’s efforts to direct contributions toward his own Pac, where he and his advisers have much more control over how funds are spent, have led to criticism that the former president is more focused on raising money for himself rather than helping the Republican party regain control of Congress.“He doesn’t want anything to impact his ability to raise money for the super Pac that he has created, so he wants to divert as much cash away from the RNC to that Pac,” said Michael Steele, a former RNC chairman and a frequent Trump critic. “This is all transactional for him. It’s not personal. It’s the next level of financial transactions that Trump wants to engage in.”Capitalizing off of his political brand may be Trump’s best financial prospect at this point. The Trump Organization’s revenue sharply declined last year, and Trump is personally responsible for $300m in loans that are due over the next four years, according to a New York Times analysis of his tax records. His financial woes come as the Manhattan district attorney has launched an expansive investigation of the Trump Organization’s business dealings.“If you look at all the peril he faces legally and the near collapse of many of his businesses, he’s looking for a revenue stream, and no dollar amount is too small for him to fight for,” D’Antonio said of Trump’s latest fundraising efforts. “I think that’s his new business.”The RNC has continued to fundraise off Trump’s name as well, and senior Republicans have generally attempted to downplay any tension between the former president and party leaders, insisting they are united in their goal to push back against Joe Biden’s agenda. “The Republican civil war is now cancelled,” Senator Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a widely shared memo late last month.Yet, when Scott met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida earlier this month, the former president would not commit to staying out of Senate primary races. “He didn’t say he was going to,” Scott told CNN on Tuesday, when asked if Trump indicated he would get involved in primary battles. “I’m sure he wants to be helpful, so the best thing for him to do would be to participate in whoever wins the primaries and come back then.”Scott is one of a number of Republican leaders who have made the journey from Washington to Palm Beach in recent weeks to consult with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and the House minority whip, Steve Scalise, have also paid visits to the Florida resort since Trump left the White House.Even incumbent Republicans, such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have traveled to Mar-a-Lago to fundraise and meet with Trump, with the apparent hope to secure an endorsement from the former president and prevent any primary challenges as they seek reelection.Trump has already endorsed several Senate Republicans up for re-election next year, including Tim Scott of South Carolina and Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Miller said the former president’s next round of endorsements will include more sitting Republican senators.“Everybody is coming to Mar-a-Lago or trying to get President Trump on the phone to ask for his endorsement,” Miller said.The widespread efforts to appeal to Trump underscore the massive influence the former president still holds over the Republican party, even after leaving office. But Trump and party leaders may be on a collision course if the former president continues to target incumbents and redirect money toward his own Pac, potentially jeopardizing Republicans’ hopes of taking back Congress.“They are about to come headlong into each other because their interests don’t align,” Steele said. “Trump is not in the business of expanding the party. He is in the business of having in place people who support him, and he can afford to lose people who don’t support him.” More

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      The woman seeking to unseat Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      “I’m taking on the queen of Qanon: Marjorie Taylor Greene,” reads one tweet from Holly McCormack. “Retweet if you think Marjorie Taylor Greene is an embarrassment to our country,” says another.America’s midterm elections may be 20 months in the future, but a campaign is already under way to unseat the extremist Republican congresswoman and Donald Trump devotee. In a rural district of Georgia that Taylor Greene won last November with three-quarters of the vote, effectively unopposed after her Democratic opponent quit the race, no one thinks it is going to be easy.But McCormack, 36, an insurance agent, singer-songwriter and Democrat, thinks her opponent’s far-right shock tactics have run their course. “People are sick of it,” she told the Guardian. “People are tired of the rhetoric and the division, and people are hungry for a real person who treats people well, and actually shows empathy with action and not words. She claims to be a Christian and then she shows us with her actions the hate.”Taylor Greene, 46, has been throwing procedural wrenches in the works of Congress since she was stripped of her committee assignments last month for antisemitic and other inflammatory statements.She has previously made comments on social media supporting the QAnon conspiracy movement, suggesting mass shootings were staged by gun control activists and proposing a Jewish cabal started a deadly California wildfire with a laser beam directed from outer space. And last month she posted an anti-transgender sign across the hall from a congresswoman who has a transgender child.McCormack’s social media sorties appear to have caught her attention. On Wednesday the Democrat tweeted a screenshot showing Taylor Greene had blocked her on Twitter, asking: “Was it something I said, Marjorie?”She commented: “It’s mind-boggling how many people she’s attacked, from school shooting survivors to the LGBTQ community to Jewish space lasers. Those are real people behind all of these attacks that are just spewing out of her continually. My team can’t keep up and it zones me out to read too much of it.“It’s honestly dangerous for our democracy. It’s not just for Georgia 14th; this is important for the country that we get rid of someone that is sowing so much hate and so much division. If we’re going to get better as a country, we’re going to have to stop the right versus left nonsense and see each other as people and as Americans first.”For McCormack, the daughter of an army veteran, the turning point was the deadly insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January. “That was the day that I quit kicking around running and I said, I’ve got to do this. We have to do this.“I’ve got two teenagers and the representation that we’re having is unacceptable. It’s just horrible and it doesn’t represent how I was raised, how I’m raising my kids. I really hammered into them since they were born to be kind and how you treat people matters and that they should fight for other people. They should stand up if something’s wrong and so, even though it’s hard, it’s the right the right thing to do.”McCormack regrets the political tribalism that means the first question asked is whether someone is Democratic or Republican. She added: “People are wanting healing, and they’re wanting to be able to get along with their neighbours again, and they’re wanting to not have families broken apart over this. It’s not OK, and I think people are ready for a refreshing change.”McCormack, who argues that rural areas like hers have been left behind by noisy politicians, will not have a clear run for her party’s nomination as several so-far unnamed Democrats have filed to run in 2022, according to Federal Election Commission records. The odds against any of them in this ruby red district are daunting, but McCormack finds inspiration in Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock’s victories in January’s Senate runoffs.Her career as a musician – she last released an album in 2012 and a single in 2014 – also offers a chance to stand out from the crowd. “It’s acoustic, folky – chick-rock is the best way to say it,” she laughed. “I should have been of age recording music in the 90s and I would have fit right in. We’re looking forward to some creative fundraising and festivals during the summer.”Among the songs that McCormack has written, her favorite is Fire. Should she unseat Taylor Green in November 2022, the headline will write itself. More

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      in Elections

      12 Republicans vote against honoring Capitol police for protecting Congress

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      A dozen Republicans voted against a resolution honoring US Capitol police for their efforts to protect members of Congress during the insurrection on 6 January.The House voted 413-12 on Wednesday to award congressional gold medals, Congress’s “highest expression of national appreciation”, to all members of the Capitol police force.The Republicans who opposed this honor included Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Thomas Massie of Kentucky. They and other opposing members said they had problems with the text of the legislation.Massie told reporters he disagreed with the terms “insurrection” and “temple” in the legislation.The resolution said: “On January 6, 2021, a mob of insurrectionists forced its way into the US Capitol building and congressional office buildings and engaged in acts of vandalism, looting, and violently attacked Capitol police officers.”It also named the three officers who responded to the attack and died shortly after – Capitol police officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood and Metropolitan police department officer Jeffrey Smith – and said seven other people died and more than 140 law enforcement officers were injured.“The desecration of the US Capitol, which is the temple of our American democracy, and the violence targeting Congress are horrors that will forever stain our nation’s history,” the bill said.Louie Gohmert, a congressman from Texas, said in a statement that the text “does not honor anyone, but rather seeks to drive a narrative that isn’t substantiated by known facts”.Gohmert separately circulated a competing bill to honor Capitol police that did not mention the 6 January attack, according to a copy obtained by Politico. His text also named the officers who died after the insurrection but did not specify the circumstances of their deaths, writing instead that they: “All passed in January 2021.”The other Republicans who voted against the legislation were Andy Biggs of Arizona, Andy Harris of Maryland, Lance Gooden of Texas, Michael Cloud of Texas, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Greg Steube of Florida, Bob Good of Virginia and John Rose of Tennessee.All of the bill’s opponents, except for Massie, voted to object to state’s electoral votes in the presidential election in the hours after the insurrection. More

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      Texas Republicans pushing slate of bills to make voting even harder in state

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      Texas Republicans are pushing new legislation that would make it even more difficult to cast a ballot in a state that is already one of the hardest places to vote in America.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThere was no evidence of widespread fraud in Texas or elsewhere in 2020, but Governor Greg Abbott in February declared “election integrity” an emergency item for the legislature to consider.Bills introduced so far would prohibit counties from allowing drive-thru voting, curtail early voting hours, restrict the number of voting machines allowed at countywide polling centers, and block local election officials from sending out mail-in ballot applications to all voters. One bill would also make it easier for prosecutors to bring charges against Texans for technical violations and require those who cite a disability to vote by mail – one of a handful of approved excuses in Texas – to provide proof. Such a requirement would amount to a poll tax, critics say, because there is a cost to a doctor’s visit.“These exact kinds of lies about voting led to people dying in the insurrection at the Capitol. This goes way beyond politicians playing legislative chess to retain power,” Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group, wrote in an email.Texas saw record turnout in the 2020 election, but still had one of the lowest turnout rates among eligible voters in the US. Many of the Republican bills appear aimed at Harris county, the state’s most populous and home to 2.4 million voters, where county officials took a number of creative steps last year to try to expand access to voting. That included setting up 24-hour drive-thru voting and trying to send a mail-in ballot application to all voters.But Republicans went to court to block those measures in the weeks leading up to the election. Abbott issued a proclamation in October only allowing counties to offer a single absentee ballot drop box. The order meant that Harris county, which stretches over nearly 2,000 sq miles, could only have a single drop box location instead of the 11 it intended to offer.Abbott pointed specifically to Harris county’s efforts to expand voting access during a Monday press conference introducing the new restrictive voting bills.“The integrity of elections in 2020 were questioned right here in Harris county with the mail-in ballot application process,” Abbott said. “The county elections clerk attempted to send unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to millions of voters, many of whom would not be eligible to vote by mail. Election officials should be working to stop potential mail ballot fraud, not facilitate it.”Isabel Longoria, a Harris county election official credited with developing the 24-hour drive-thru voting, blasted the proposals.“To micromanage the creative solutions that we have had to come up with in Harris county under the auspices of some false election integrity narrative, is a bill not based in reality,” she said in an interview.The Republican proposals come amid a wave of similar efforts in state legislatures across the country. But the restrictions in Texas are notable for two reasons. First, Texas already has extremely restrictive voting laws – it doesn’t allow voters to register online (there is currently a limited workaround because of a federal lawsuit), requires voters under 65 to provide an excuse if they want to vote by mail, cuts off voter registration 30 days before an election, and places strict limits on who can register voters. Second, Republicans did extremely well in the state in November; Donald Trump overwhelmingly carried the state and Democrats did poorly in state legislative races. This signals how eagerly the party has embraced efforts to make it more difficult to vote.Voting advocates say the measures are designed to block local officials from taking any action to make voting easier.“It’s really kneecapping local election officials from really adopting to facilitate voting that have proved really popular,” said Zenen Pérez, the advocacy director at Move Texas, a grassroots group that works to improve civic participation.One measure would prohibit early voting after 7pm, a time during which more than 17,000 people cast their ballots, Longoria said. Many of those people were medical workers, parents with young children, and workers at the port of Houston.“There’s some theory out there that nothing good happens after dark … the last time we built laws based on sunset was in the Jim Crow era so I don’t think we should base any more laws based on when the sun sets,” she added.Abbott and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a Trump ally, have been among those who have loudly claimed voter fraud is a problem. According to the Houston Chronicle, the election integrity division in Paxton’s office dedicated 22,000 hours in 2020 to investigating voter fraud cases but has found only 16 cases of any actual voter fraud.Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris county, criticized the measures.“What these folks are doing are simply continuing the trend that’s been going on since Reconstruction, through Jim Crow and up to today: trying to confuse voters, intimidate voters and enact policies that keep people from the ballot box.”Longoria said she planned to contest the slate of bills, but thinks the likelihood they will become law is a “coin toss”.“My job is to be a public servant protecting the voters of Harris county, point blank. Voters have told me directly they love drive-through voting. They love 24-hour voting. They love mail ballot voting,” she said. “I will fight for what they love to do and their right to vote until the very last breath I have on this earth. That’s what I’m here to do and that’s what I’m going to keep doing. Anyone who thinks differently, well, good luck to ’em.” More