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The fight for voting rights in the US: Politics Weekly Extra podcast
As Republicans continue to pass bills that would restrict voting rights for many, and as the Democrats try to fight back on the federal level, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund about the importance of the battle for minority voters across the country
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As Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to pass laws that would lead to voter suppression, Jonathan and Janai discuss the long struggle for voting rights for millions of voters since the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Follow the work of the NAACP LDF here 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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'It’s every man for himself': the Texans defying end of mask mandate
The parking lot was packed at The Shops at La Cantera, a partially outdoor mall in north-west San Antonio, on the day that Texas officially ended mandatory mask wearing. But it was clear not everyone was ready to embrace the change, with most people who wandered in and out of stores still donning face coverings, and many shops requiring customers to wear one before entering.Governor Greg Abbott announced an end to the statewide mask mandate he issued over the summer on 2 March, and on Wednesday, the new rules took effect. This means that not only are Texans no longer required to wear a mask, but stores, restaurants, and even bars are fully open at maximum capacity despite the fact that only 16% of adults in the state are fully vaccinated.But a few businesses at the mall – including Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret, and L’Occitane en Provence – took it upon themselves to defy the new rules, posting signs informing customers that their policies are not in line with those of the state government. One reads: “Your mask must cover your nose and mouth at all times. No food or drink allowed.” Another says: “No mask, no entry. We welcome 4 customers inside at a time. Thank you!”Eryn Louis sat at a table in the outdoor food court across from her sister. Before agreeing to be interviewed, both women ask for a moment to put their face masks on – a clear indication of how they feel about the governor’s new order.“I absolutely hate it,” Louis said, referring to Abbott’s decision to end the statewide mask mandate. “I was at home with my mom when I found out about it. I almost wanted to cry because even though I’m double vaccinated, I’m still high risk since I’m type 1 diabetic. Our grandfather is high risk. My stepdad is high risk.”Louis and her sister said they had already witnessed a non-cooperative customer defy a store’s mask policy.“Today, when we were leaving Target there was a lady who was getting mad because Target is still requiring people to wear masks,” Louis said. “She said, ‘Target is not a Texas corporation. You don’t have to do this.’ And of course she wasn’t wearing a mask when she walked in.”Louis is both a student and a server in a restaurant. While she is completing her classes online, she must be physically present at work where she has been most at risk throughout the pandemic.“We used to [require masks]. Now our sign on the door just says we encourage them. Even last year, my managers cared more about the guest experience than they did about being mask police,” Louis said. Louis said even before the mask mandate was lifted, she and other servers were told not to say anything to customers if they weren’t wearing a mask, since they would just take it off at their tables anyway.“I’ve had one customer come in who was a doctor. He was terrified of sitting by anyone because he’s seen Covid and what it could do.”Ayana Delvalle works at the cash register at the Pottery Barn, one of the many shops in the mall that is still enforcing a mask policy.“Pottery Barn’s policy from the beginning has always been to cover your nose and mouth from the moment you walk into the store until the time you leave,” Delvalle. “Even more so recently, we have incorporated no food or drink inside the store to prevent people from pulling their masks off.”Devalle says she is not yet vaccinated because she is still too nervous.“Getting the vaccination does scare me a little bit just because it’s still a little soon. I just want to wait it out and see how the more of the population reacts to it before I make that decision myself.”However, she says she will continue to wear a mask in public.“For me personally, it’s everyone’s choice but I would hope people would make the right decision as far as other people’s safety and health,” Devalle said.Mahak Ahsan is a student pharmacist in the city. She expressed frustration that the state government is impeding the work she and her colleagues are doing to administer vaccines, and educate people about the benefits of immunizations and wearing masks.“No one has any respect for the healthcare workers. Not even just for us but nurses and doctors – everyone who works so tirelessly. We’re the ones who are around the sick people the most so it’s just a slap in our face,” Ahsan said. “It just really sucks.”Ahsan believes the mask mandate lift is “a very bad idea”.“Majority of Texas hasn’t even been vaccinated. That’s insane,” Ahsan said. “I don’t feel comfortable knowing that so many people out here aren’t vaccinated and are walking around without masks.”Ahsan said she was angry and concerned because while she is fully vaccinated, her parents only just received their first shots this week. She believes vaccines should be available and accessible to everyone now that masks are no longer required.“They did a horrible job of trying to give the [vaccines] to the people who need it the most. You see these teachers still don’t have it,” she said. “At this point, it’s every man for himself. Everyone needs to have gotten it by now.” More
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Senate minimum wage battle could play out in midterm elections
Sara Fearrington, a North Carolina waitress, joined the Fight for $15 campaign two years ago. A server at a Durham Waffle House, her take-home pay fluctuates between $350 and $450 a week, leaving her struggling to pay bills every month. She voted for Joe Biden, who had pledged to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. It was the first time Fearrington, who is 44, had ever voted in a presidential election.“It would mean everything. It would create stability for my household,” she said of the impact that a higher wage could have on her and her family of five, which includes her husband, who suffers from a rare lung condition, and a granddaughter who has asthma.The Democrats will need her support for their US Senate nominee next year if they are to maintain and strengthen their tenuous hold on the upper chamber. Some of 2022’s hotly contested Senate races are expected to play out in low-wage regions like Fearrington’s home state.The purple states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have rock-bottom minimum wages of just $7.25 per hour – the current federal minimum. Georgia, where the Democrat Raphael Warnock will fight to hold on to the Senate seat he wrested from the Republican senator Kelly Loeffler in November, abides by the federal minimum wage, even though the one it has on the books is $5.15. Recent polling suggests Republicans could gain a seat in New Hampshire, another low-minimum-wage state, where the Democratic senator Maggie Hassan is facing a potential challenge from the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu.The federal minimum wage has not increased from $7.25 since 2009, and for 21 states in the country the minimum wage law that governs employers is no higher than the federal minimum. Fearrington earns an hourly wage of just $3.10 an hour as a tipped worker, making her income unpredictable.Biden had hoped to include a $15-an-hour minimum wage increase in his $1.9tn economic stimulus package, which is expected to pass this week, and would also gradually phase out the sub-minimum wages for tipped workers like Fearrington. But prospects for the minimum wage provision evaporated after the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the wage hike could not remain in the budget reconciliation bill where Democrats had placed it in order to avoid a Republican-led filibuster they lacked the votes to override.Progressives inside and outside Congress pressured Senate Democrats and the Biden administration to override the parliamentarian and take the matter to a vote.“Then, at least, it’s a public conversation, where people are fighting for what they said they were going to fight for, for the poor and low-income people who turned out in record numbers in this past election,” said the Rev Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the National Poor People’s Campaign.Whether such a conversation ever takes place is a growing concern to progressives and a source of discord within the coalition that brought Biden to the White House – at a moment when the battered US economy stands at a crossroads. On Friday, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders made an 11th-hour effort to reinsert the provision into the stimulus package. Eight Democrats crossed over to vote it down, including two senators from his neighboring state, New Hampshire.Delivering a minimum wage increase before the midterm elections would give bragging rights to Democratic senatorial candidates in low-minimum-wage states. In North Carolina, 33% of workers would experience an increase in wages. Once the raise was fully implemented, the average annual benefit to a North Carolina worker who works year round would be $4,065, according to Capital & Main’s analysis of data released by the non-profit Economic Policy Institute in a recent study. Workers in other states would reap similar benefits.The ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, prompted online protests by liberal swing-state candidates in Pennsylvania, including the lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, who is seeking the US Senate seat occupied by retiring the Republican Pat Toomey.“Since the Senate parliamentarian won’t allow a $15 minimum wage to go through reconciliation, then it’s time to end the filibuster and raise the minimum wage,” Fetterman said in a statement. Biden, who generally supports the traditions of the Senate, is coming under increasing pressure to end the filibuster in order to deliver on his agenda.Delivering a minimum wage hike to voters – or at least fighting tooth and nail to get it passed – may also be key to keeping Biden’s fragile coalition together heading into the midterms. The failure to do so could also make for some fractious Democratic primaries. “Every single Dem who voted against a $15 minimum wage should be primaried,” said Krystal Ball, host of HillTV’s Rising.Polls show strong support for a $15 minimum wage, especially among Democrats and independents. And a recent poll by the non-profit National Employment Law Project found that two-thirds of voters in battleground congressional districts supported gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 84% of Biden voters and 63% of non-college-educated white people.The popularity of a minimum wage increase led to Republicans floating watered-down (and, mostly likely, doomed) proposals to hike the country’s base wage. Senator Mitt Romney and Senator Tom Cotton proposed a plan to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour over four years that is tied to stepped-up immigration enforcement. On Friday, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, proposed a $15-an- hour minimum wage plan that would apply to businesses with annual revenue in excess of $1bn. Taxpayers, not the employer, would foot the bill for Hawley’s proposed increase.Opponents of the proposed gradual increase to $15 an hour over five years – like the Business Roundtable, which represents chief executives of major US companies – have argued that wage increases should be calibrated to regional differences in the cost of living. But Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says $15 an hour makes sense as a wage floor and is even low when the cost of living is taken into account. In addition, the minimum wage would jump to $9.50 in the first year, well below its 1968 peak of just over $12 (when accounting for inflation).“In 2021, virtually anywhere in the country, a single adult will need to be working at least full time and earn at least $16 an hour in order to meet their family budget,” says Zipperer.Jim Wertz, chair of the Erie County Democratic party in Pennsylvania, argues that the Senate’s failure to pass the $15-an-hour minimum wage should push people to vote for more Democrats, not keep them from the polls.“The reason we can’t get it done is because of a couple of centrist or right-leaning Democrats,” he said, referring to the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona who have said they do not support such a large increase in the minimum wage and voted against Sanders’ failed attempt to restore the minimum wage hike to the stimulus bill.Fearrington is not paying close attention to the byzantine rules of Congress or its politics. She lost two members of her extended family to Covid-19 this year, and to protect vulnerable members of her family, she spent Christmas and her birthday in isolation after she contracted the virus.Still, she’s undeterred in her determination to vote in next year’s Senate race regardless of the outcome of this latest battle in DC. The Republican senator Richard Burr, who voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, is retiring, leaving the seat open.“I’m going to go for the Senate seat that’s going to listen to the mass majority of people that are saying we need this to help our society, our community and our economy – blue or red,” she said.This article is published in partnership with the award-winning not-for-profit publication Capital and Main More
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Outrage as Georgia Republicans advance bill to restrict voting access
Georgia lawmakers have advanced a measure that would significantly curtail voting access after a record number of voters propelled Democratic victories in the 2020 race.The measure scraped through 29-20 in the GOP-controlled Georgia senate, which was the absolute minimum number of votes Republicans needed. Four Republicans, including some in competitive races, sat out the vote, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The bill, SB 241, would end the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, a policy that Georgia Republicans implemented in the state in 2005. More than 1.3 million people voted by mail in the 2020 general election in the state. Under the bill only people age 65 and older, or who have one of a handful of state-approved excuses, would be allowed to vote by mail. Just 16 other states currently require a voter to give an excuse to vote by mail.The legislation also would require voters to provide identification information, such as a driver’s license number, both when they apply to vote by mail and when they return the ballot.Republicans have frequently held up the specter of voter fraud to justify such restrictions, though there were several vote recounts in Georgia in the 2020 race, as well as audits, and officials found no such wrongdoing.Mike Dugan, the Republican state senator who sponsored the bill, said the lack of widespread fraud should not be an impediment to changing election rules.“You don’t wait until you have wholesale issues until you try to meet the need,” he said. “You do it beforehand.”He also said on the senate floor Monday that the bill was needed to reduce the burden on local election officials and to ensure that voters were not disenfranchised.State senator Elena Parent, a Democrat, said the justification for the bill was a “weaponization of Trump’s lies” about the election.“It is a willingness and embrace of damage to American democracy,” she said. “The numbers to stop this bill may not be here in this chamber today. But I assure you there are many thousands of Georgians right now whose political spirit is awakened by disgust at modern-day voter suppression.”A stream of Democrats criticized the measure as a thinly veiled effort to suppress Black and other minority voters in Georgia. Those groups contributed to record turnout in the state in 2020 and helped propel Joe Biden, as well as Democrats senatorial candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to stunning victories in the state.“I know racism when I see it,” said Gail Davenport, a Democrat who recalledwatching the Ku Klux Klan marching on Saturdays in Jonesboro, just south of Atlanta. “This is not about the process. This is about suppressing the vote of a certain group of people, especially me, and people who look like me, and I take it personally.”The bill will now go to the Georgia House of Representatives, which last week approved its own set of voting restrictions, including new limits on early voting and dropboxes. It remains unclear which proposals will ultimately be sent to the governor’s desk once each chamber fully considers the opposite chamber’s bill.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterLawmakers have until 31 March to send the bills to Governor Brian Kemp’s desk, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.“In the last two election cycles, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of voters of color who voted by mail, the number of young people who used early voting, the number of African Americans who voted on Saturday and Sunday,” Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, told Mother Jones.“We saw unprecedented levels of turnout across the board. And so every single metric of voter access that has been a good in Georgia is now under attack.”Top Republicans in the state, including Lt Gov Geoff Duncan, have said they oppose efforts to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting and Duncan refused to preside over the senate on Monday as it considered the measure to do just that.At several points during the debate, which stretched around three hours on Monday afternoon, Democrats connected the policies under consideration to those in the Jim Crow south. They noted that some members of the legislature had lived through those policies. Harold Jones II, another Democratic state senator, urged his colleagues to pay attention to Black lawmakers who spoke out against the bill.“It’s because that most basic right was denied to us. It’s not 1800, it’s not [the] 1850s, it’s right here in this room. Many of the senators that sit here lived through that process,” he said. “Let me tell you, it is not theater. It is not a performance. It is real because we live with it every single day.” More
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Lindsey Graham: Trump may destroy Republican party but he has a ‘magic’
Senator Lindsey Graham has defended his refusal to abandon Donald Trump in the aftermath of the deadly attack on the Capitol, saying that though the former president has “a dark side … what I’m trying to do is just harness the magic”.He also said Trump’s continued grip on the Republican party could make it “bigger, he can make it stronger, he can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it.”The South Carolina Republican initially said the US could “count [him] out” from backing Trump after the riot but he quickly dropped any show of independence.On Sunday he was speaking to Axios on HBO at the end of a weekend in which Trump was reported to have told the Republican party to stop fundraising off his name and was also reported to be preparing to leave Florida for the first time since leaving office, to visit New York, his home city.Trump retains a firm grip on his party, topping polls of prospective nominees for president in 2024. He is eligible to run for office again because he was acquitted at his second impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting the Capitol riot.Five people including a police officer died as a direct result of the storming of Congress by a crowd Trump had told to “fight like hell” in support of his attempt to overturn election defeat by Joe Biden.Graham was one of 43 Republicans who voted to acquit.“Donald Trump was my friend before the riot,” he said, of a man who attacked him viciously in the 2016 Republican primary and who he famously said would destroy the party if he became its nominee. The senator pivoted once Trump took power, to become one of his closest and most eager allies.“I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot,” he said. “I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history. And we’re going to move forward.”Graham said the best way for Republicans to do that was “with Trump, not without Trump”.Jonathan Swan countered that Trump is “still telling everyone he won in a landslide”, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court and which has placed the former president in legal jeopardy.“I tell him every day that he wants to listen,” Graham said, “that I think the main reason he probably lost in Arizona was he was beating on the dead guy called John McCain.”McCain, an Arizona senator, 2008 presidential nominee and close friend and ally to Graham, never accepted Trump as the face of his party. Trump attacked McCain viciously, even over his record in the Vietnam war, in which McCain endured captivity and torture while Trump avoided the draft.Asked if he could afford to abandon Trump because he is not up for re-election until 2026, Graham said: “Yeah, I could throw him over tomorrow … I could say you know that’s it’s over, it’s done. That’s just too easy.“What’s hard is to take a movement that I think is good for the country, trying to get the leader of the movement, who’s got lots of problems facing him and the party and see if we can make a go of it.‘Mitt Romney [the 2012 nominee] didn’t do it, John McCain didn’t do it. There’s something about Trump. There’s a dark side. And there’s some magic there. What I’m trying to do is just harness the magic.“To me, Donald Trump is sort of a cross between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan and PT Barnum. I mean, just bigger than life.”Helms, a North Carolina senator who died in 2008, was a hardline conservative and segregationist, in the words of one columnist when he died, an “unabashed racist”. PT Barnum was a 19th-century businessman, politician, controversialist and circus impresario.Trump, Graham insisted, “could make the Republican party something that nobody else I know could make it. He can make it bigger, he can make it stronger, he can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it.” More
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Biden officials visit US-Mexico border to monitor increase in crossings
The new US secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, led a visit by Biden administration officials to the border with Mexico on Saturday, amid a growing number of border crossings and criticism by Republicans that a crisis is brewing.Joe Biden has sought to reverse rigid immigration polices set up by his predecessor as president, Donald Trump, whose presidency was dominated by efforts to build a border wall and reduce the number of legal and illegal migrants.Biden has faced criticism from immigration activists who say unaccompanied children and families are being held too long in detention centers instead of being released while asylum applications are considered.The White House said last week Biden had asked senior members of his staff to travel to the border and report back about the influx of unaccompanied minors. It declined at the time to release details about the trip, citing security and privacy concerns.Mayorkas and officials including domestic policy adviser Susan Rice visited a border patrol facility and a refugee resettlement facility, the White House said on Sunday.“They discussed capacity needs given the number of unaccompanied children and families arriving at our border,” a statement said, “the complex challenges with rebuilding our gutted border infrastructure and immigration system, as well as improvements that must be made in order to restore safe and efficient procedures to process, shelter, and place unaccompanied children with family or sponsors.“Officials also discussed ways to ensure the fair and humane treatment of immigrants, the safety of the workforce, and the wellbeing of communities nearby in the face of a global pandemic.”An influx of people seeking to cross the border is likely to be a big issue in the 2022 midterm elections. Trump may use it to rally his base against Biden and lay the groundwork for a potential return as a presidential candidate in 2024 or as a way to boost a successor.“The border is breaking down as I speak,” Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, told Fox News on Sunday. “Immigration in 2022 will be a bigger issue than it was in 2016.” More
