Subterms
A cab driver raises his fist as people celebrate media announcing that Joe Biden has won the 2020 US presidential election in New York City Saturday.
Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters More
A deeply polarised US electorate has given the country its first transgender state senator and its first black gay congressman – but also its first lawmaker to have openly supported the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory.
All four members of the progressive “Squad” of Democratic congresswomen of colour – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib – have been comfortably re-elected, and Sarah McBride’s victory in Delaware has made her the highest-ranking trans official in the US.
“I hope tonight shows an LGBTQ kid that our democracy is big enough for them, too,” McBride, 30, who easily defeated the Republican Steve Washington to represent Delaware’s first state senate district, tweeted after the election was called.
McBride, a former spokesperson for the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, was a trainee in the White House during the Obama administration and became the first trans person to speak at a major political convention when she addressed Democrats in Philadelphia in 2016.
“For Sarah to shatter a lavender ceiling in such a polarising year is a powerful reminder that voters are increasingly rejecting the politics of bigotry in favour of candidates who stand for fairness and equality,” said Annise Parker of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which trains and supports out candidates.
In Vermont, Taylor Small, 26, has become the state’s first openly transgender legislator after winning 41% of the vote to make it to the House of Representatives, making her the fifth “out” trans state legislator in the US. More
The prime minister sidestepped Keir Starmer’s attempt at PMQs to get him to comment on Donald Trump’s call to stop the counting of votes in the US election. Challenged by the Labour leader to agree that it was not the place of either candidate to decide which votes should count, Johnson said: ‘We don’t comment as the UK government on the democratic processes of our friends and allies’
Boris Johnson refuses to comment on Trump’s call to stop vote-counting More
Given Donald Trump’s lifelong predilection for tying up opponents in the courts, and his long-stated threat to do the same with an election result that threatened to go against him, his call to have the 2020 election settled in the supreme court is not a surprise.
So can he do it?
Trump may, with this in mind, have filled the supreme court with conservative appointees, but things aren’t so straightforward. The supreme court is the final court of appeal in the US and has discretion over which cases it should hear, largely relating to challenges to cases heard in lower courts on points of federal law and the constitution.
So a lot of action will happen initially at state-level courts – the election has prompted a spate of new cases in the hotly contested battleground state of Pennsylvania, including two due to be heard later on Wednesday.
What has made the current election landscape more of a minefield is the fact the coronavirus pandemic has led states to look for ways to make voting safer, including expanding absentee ballots, which has opened states up to challenges in the courts over issues such as proposed extensions to the period in which late mail-in votes are counted.
It is important to remember that election challenges in state courts are nothing new, sometimes without merit, and often have little impact in the end. However, one important exception to that was the 2000 election where a series of legal challenges over faulty voting procedures in Florida handed the election to George W Bush.
What’s the thrust of Trump’s tactic?
With more than 40 pre-election cases by Republicans, Trump’s strategy is to argue that any measure to make voting easier and safer in the midst of a pandemic is unconstitutional and open to fraud, a framing aimed at the supreme court.
A second argument that has been deployed several times is that many of the measures to ensure voting is easy have been made by state officials – like governors – rather than state legislatures, opening a path, say conservatives, for a constitutional challenge.
How could this work?
The most common scenario is for lawyers to challenge the way an election was conducted locally and seek to have votes discarded. In the key state of Pennsylvania, conservative groups have already ramped up cases to ensure late mail-in ballots are not counted, with two cases due to be heard on Wednesday.
However, Pennsylvania requires an unusually high burden of proof for challenging elections, including written affidavits detailing wrongdoing.
Pennsylvania is already on the supreme court’s radar in this respect. Republicans in the state have already appealed against a Pennsylvania supreme court decision ordering state election officials to accept mail-in ballots that arrive up to three days after the election, relying on an interpretation of the state’s own constitution.
The US supreme court deferred hearing this case before the election but in a case that it did rule on, the court sided with a Republican challenge saying the state could not count late mail in ballots in Wisconsin. The supreme court chief justice John Roberts made clear, however, that “different bodies of law and different precedents” meant the court did not consider the situation in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as the same.
Isn’t that good news for Democrats?
It’s difficult to know. The Wisconsin decision was delivered before Trump’s third pick for the supreme court, Amy Coney Barrett, formally joined the bench last week, giving conservatives a 6-3 majority.
Trump’s hope, as he has made very clear, is that this would help in the event he challenged the election result, but it is also unclear how Barrett would respond given Trump’s comments. And she could recuse herself from hearing any election-related cases because of a perceived conflict.
Where else could we see challenges?
Michigan, if it is close, is an outlier in that it has no formally laid-out system for a challenge, although any recount is automatically triggered by a margin of less than 2,000 votes.
North Carolina, for instance, also has a challenge to a late voting extension before the courts. It all becomes something of moot point should Biden secure enough of a lead in the electoral college.
What’s the worst-case scenario?
The closer the outcome in the electoral college, the more messy things become, with the memory of Florida in 2000 looming above everything. The closest of results led to 35 messy days of legal challenges and laborious hand recounts, which gave the election to George W Bush after the state was originally called by news organisations for the Democratic challenger Al Gore.
Bush took 271 of the 538 electoral votes, winning Florida by fewer than 600 votes, after a recount was halted by the supreme court, making Bush the first Republican president since 1888 to win despite losing the popular vote. More
President claimed Bond actor helped him get planning permission for Scottish resortSean Connery, James Bond actor, dies aged 90 It was less licence to kill and more dramatic licence. Donald Trump’s claim that the late Sean Connery assisted him in getting planning applications passed in Scotland fell apart quickly on Sunday when the chair of the planning committee said the James Bond star was not involved.In a series of tweets, two days prior to the US election, Trump paid tribute to Connery, saying he was “highly regarded and respected in Scotland and beyond”. It was announced on Saturday the James Bond actor had died aged 90. Continue reading… More
How poignant to see KentgaragisteNigel Farage interfering in the US election, much in the way a drop interferes in the ocean. Farage is appearing at the odd rally for his emotional support president, Donald Trump, which tells its own story about where the US leader is at, psychologically speaking, for the final days of his campaign. On Wednesday, Trump gibbered to a crowd: “I’m glad I called him up.” So is Nigel’s agent.
Nigel was brought on stage in Arizona by Donald, where the latter introduced him as “the king of Europe”. In fairness, he could just as easily have got away with passing Farage off as the duke of Ruritania or the sultan of Jupiter. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, and Trump went on to hazard that Farage was “one of the most powerful men in Europe”, even though Nigel’s an unemployed radio DJ and has spent a good part of the past four years hanging round the old US-of-A hoping to get a 40-minute 6pm “dinner” invitation to eat a well-done steak with a self-confessed sex offender.
By way of recompense, Farage rubed his way on to the rally platform and took the microphone to declare Trump was “the single most resilient and bravest person I have ever met in my life”. That is probably the only truthful thing to have been said on stage that night. Yes, Trump received five draft deferments – first for college, then for something called “heel spurs” – and once described the business of avoiding STDs in Manhattan during the 1980s as “my personal Vietnam”. But you have to remember that Nigel is himself a wildly overemotional nervous Nellie who would have been interned for spreading panic during the second world war he self-owningly fetishises. There is no one more histrionic, more whiny, and – let’s face it – more willing to make alliances with far-right German politicians. We simply couldn’t have risked him failing to keep calm or carry on among the general populace.
Anyway, this week, he was giving it his best Lord Haw-Haw, informing Trump’s crowd: “You’ll be voting for the only leader in the western world with the real courage to stand up to the Chinese Communist party.” Stand up to them? He pays more tax to them than he does to the US. Later, Nigel justified his media credentials by explaining to Daily Telegraph readers that Trump had “what Americans call ‘the big M’ – momentum”. Is that what Americans call momentum? We’ll have to take this latterday Alistair Cooke’s word for it, I suppose.
Then again, engaging with Farage on his own terms is like trying to debate a fart or conduct a symposium with cystitis. Though operationally pointless and redundant now, he somewhat horrifyingly endures – a vestigial tail on our body politic. It is increasingly accepted that Nigel will always be with us, like far-left antisemitism or a mutating respiratory virus.
It is probably more helpful to step back and see him for what he represents in this case, which in some ways is nothing particularly new. British politicians have always nursed a certain desperation to be noticed by Washington power.
The trouble for Boris Johnson’s government of superforecasters is that they seem not to have forecast in time that it was at least a remote possibility this Joe Biden guy could win the presidency instead of Trump. Thus, with no meaningful bonds forged at all with the current favourite, the omens for the UK should Biden prove victorious are not what you’d file under encouraging. Any appearance of Farage within a restraining order’s distance of Trump simply serves as a reminder to Biden’s Democrats of their long-held conviction that Brexit and Trump are of a piece.
Furthermore, Johnson’s government still fails to understand that there IS a special relationship, it’s just that it’s between the US and Ireland. So when Biden last month warned that the Good Friday agreement must not become “a casualty of Brexit”, there was a very urgent need for the Conservative administration to do and say precisely nothing. As so often, alas, Iain Duncan Smith failed to get the memo, or certainly to understand the words crayoned on it, and consequently could be found across the airwaves honking that Biden shouldn’t be lecturing the UK, but should be trying for “a peace deal in the US” to stop “the killing and rioting” in cities following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. Quite what power Duncan Smith thought Biden would have at that point to strike a “peace deal” is unclear, but details aren’t exactly Iain’s strong point.
Nor are they Farage’s. It was during the EU referendum campaign, you’ll recall, that Nigel lost his rag about Barack Obama “interfering”, after the US president announced that Britain would be “at the back of the queue” for a trade deal. This didn’t go down enormously well at the time, it must be said, but has regrettably increased in accuracy as we near the conclusion of the Brexit process, a full four-and-a-half years after the event and without a trade deal lined up. Unless any agreement with the US is signed by April, the legislation allowing it to speed it through Congress will have expired, meaning we will be at the back of a queue of queues. Already, our ability to strike a deal has by all accounts been hampered by the failure to put the NHS on the table, while the need to have anything at all on the table means the table is now heaving with heavily chlorinated chicken shit. Ah well. Perhaps Britain has had enough of exports.
Speaking of chickenshits, you can be sure Nigel Farage will be a million miles away from that queue and all the other queues when they come to pass. What does he care? He’s a wrecker, not a builder. Perhaps the UK will live up to a vision “the king of Europe” couldn’t even be bothered to sketch on the back of one of his fag packets – or perhaps it won’t. Perhaps our chlorinated chickens will come home to roost.
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More
US researchers have warned that a huge asteroid dubbed the ‘God of Chaos’ could smash into Earth in precisely 48 years’ time. It is picking up just enough speed for an impact scenario to be “in play” for 2068. Which should give Boris Johnson’s government just enough time to fix the test and trace system. It might even give Labour enough time to stop arguing about antisemitism and try to win an election. Possibly. Possibly not. Unite and the socialist left are talking about “chaos” and splits after their great hero was suspended by Keir Starmer.Inside the bubbleOur political editor Andrew Woodcock on what to look out for today: More
Andy Beckett presents an entirely negative picture of populism (This is a moment of truth for rightwing populists – but don’t celebrate yet, 23 October). There are many unfortunate examples in our present age of how destructive populist movements can be. However, he appears unaware of earlier and more positive episodes of populism, in particular the founding of the People’s party in 1891 in the US. This became a significant political party, gaining 8% of the popular vote when it fielded a candidate in the 1892 presidential election.The origins of the People’s party, also known as the Populist party, lay in the exploitation of sharecroppers and tenant farmers by business monopolies and the banking elite. These agrarian workers had been plunged into debt, after taking on loans to fund investments in new farming equipment, when they were hit by droughts and falling crop prices, together with extortionate loan terms and interest rates.The Populist party agitated for massive political reforms, which included the recognition of unions, regulation of the railway industry, the direct election of senators, progressive income tax, and women’s suffrage. These ideas were considered radical at the time, and still are!The current problem with populism is that most of it is not genuine, but is either generated by cynical groups with a hidden interest, or is hijacked by unscrupulous politicians for ulterior purposes. However, there still are populist movements that serve a higher purpose. Be careful not to diss populism per se, as it has a distinguished pedigree. It is the pseudo-populists who need to be challenged and brought to heel.Dr Stephen BlomfieldSheffield• Andy Beckett’s piece on populism was a brilliant discussion of one of the most pressing questions of our time. I only have one small quibble. He says we should remember that populists do sometimes “get re-elected”.But that’s not the point. Populism is democracy’s ugly sister. It flourishes when the primordial democratic promise of political equality is negated by a dysfunctional political system. The answer is the maximum possible diffusion of power. It’s not an accident that federal systems are less likely to be infected by the populist virus than centralised ones. A radical overhaul of our dysfunctional political system is the only way out of the populist trap.David MarquandPenarth, South Glamorgan• I disagree that the “predictable and cautious politics” of the 1990s and 2000s provoked an outburst of populism. It was because these political periods were unstable that there was a backlash. The administrations of John Major and Tony Blair produced boom and bust, two massive recessions with widespread unemployment and widening inequality.The Blair government was still essentially Thatcherite even though it tried to fiddle around the edges to make things a bit better for the least affluent. The inevitable crunch came in 2007 precisely because banking and housing remained unreformed. Then came David Cameron, George Osborne and austerity. Populism is the muddled reaction against 40 years of Thatcherism.David RedshawGravesend, Kent• David Runciman highlights the need for politicians with experience and judgment when faced with a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic (Boris Johnson is learning that in politics you cannot simply ‘follow the science’, 24 October). The problem is that our pluralist democratic system is not designed to produce politicians with the wisdom and practical experience to use facts in a relevant way, but only ones that can gain resonance at the ballot box. Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump exemplify the deficiency.Derek HeptinstallWestgate-on-Sea, Kent More
