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      Republicans will try to impeach Biden ‘every week’, Adam Kinzinger says

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      Republicans will try to impeach Biden ‘every week’, Adam Kinzinger saysAnti-Trump January 6 committee member warns of likely aggressive tactics if GOP retakes House in midterms Republicans will try to impeach Joe Biden every week if they retake the House in November, a rare anti-Trump Republican congressman predicted.Remembering repeated attempts to defund the Affordable Care Act under Barack Obama, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said: “That’s going to look like child’s play in terms of what Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to demand of Kevin McCarthy.Kinzinger: Republicans ‘hypocritical’ for defending Trump over taking classified materialRead more“They’re going to demand an impeachment vote on President Biden every week.”Kinzinger was speaking to David Axelrod, a former Obama adviser, on his Axe Files podcast.Kinzinger is one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the Capitol attack Trump incited. He will retire in November. The other, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, lost her primary to a Trump-backed challenger.Greene, from Georgia, is among far-right Republicans who have already introduced or threatened impeachment articles against Biden, on issues including Covid, immigration, Afghanistan and the alleged misdemeanors of Hunter Biden, the president’s surviving son.If McCarthy is to be speaker in a Republican House, the expected outcome of the midterms in November, he must corral his unruly party.Kinzinger said: “I think it’ll be a very difficult majority for him to govern unless he just chooses to go absolutely crazy with them. In which case you may see the rise of the silent, non-existent moderate Republican that may still exist out there, but I don’t know.”Democrats impeached Trump twice. Kinzinger voted against the first impeachment, over the blackmail of Ukraine for political purposes, but for the second, over the Capitol attack. He told Axelrod he regretted the first vote.“You can always look back 12 years, there’s different regrets, different votes. That’s my biggest.“At the time, I’ll say to my shame, you’re looking for a way out. It is tough to take on your party. It is tough to know you’re gonna get kicked out of the tribe. And it’s tough to make a decision that you know will cost you re-election.“And so I was looking for a reason out. There were moments where I was like, ‘I may end up voting for this first impeachment.’ And then I found a reason out.”At the time, he said: “Since the day President Trump was elected, many Democrats in Congress have been searching for any means by which to delegitimise and remove him from office.“And since then, we’ve seen them jump head first from one investigation to another hoping something so treacherous would be uncovered that we’d have no choice but to throw him out. And at that they’ve failed miserably.”Nine other House Republicans voted for Trump’s second impeachment, making it the most bipartisan in history. At trial in the Senate, seven Republicans found Trump guilty, not enough for conviction.Discussing Kinzinger’s work on the January 6 committee, Axelrod pointed to a recent poll which said 72% of Republican voters still back Trump’s lie about election fraud and say Biden is not the legitimate president.“Tribalism is deeply ingrained,” Kinzinger said, adding: “I think people, in many cases, more than they fear death, they fear being kicked out of the tribe.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      Poll shows Democrats and Republicans tied for control of Congress ahead of midterms – as it happened

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      Let’s dig deeper into the two polls that came out over the weekend and amount to a mixed bag for the Democratic party as they face losing control of potentially both house of Congress in the upcoming midterm.First, the headline: voters in the NBC News poll are split over which party they’d prefer to see in charge of Congress, with 46% each backing the GOP and Democrats. That, however, is an improvement from August, when Republicans had a slight edge. GOP voters do lead in terms of enthusiasm, but not by much, which is a reversal from the double-digit lead they had earlier this year.Consider those the silver linings for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, from a poll that otherwise confirms they will have to fight to keep their jobs. But there were also more disquieting signs from NBC’s data, such as the 47% of voters who say Biden’s policies have hurt the economy, versus the 23% who say they’ve helped and the 28% who say they’ve made no difference at all.The New York Times/Siena College poll of Hispanic voters is important because the demographic is considered a bulwark of Democratic support, with some analysts predicting that increasing numbers of Hispanic voters pose a long-term threat to the GOP’s support base. The former remains true, at least for now, with 56% percent of respondents to the poll saying they plan to vote for Democrats. Dig a little deeper and the news isn’t quite so good for Joe Biden’s party. Economic issues are the biggest motivator for Hispanic voters, but the data showed they are almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans on which party they agree with most on the economy.Polling released over the weekend confirms that Democrats will have to fight hard to keep their hold on Congress in the midterms, including with Hispanic voters, an important party bulwark. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has arrived back in Washington DC after paying his respects at the funeral for Queen Elizabeth II in London.Here’s what else happened today:
      Biden committed to providing Puerto Rico with federal support after Hurricane Fiona knocked out water and power across the island.
      The White House cheered the release of an America held hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan, saying it underscores its commitment to freeing jailed citizens worldwide.
      Congress may soon vote on a bill to stop the sorts of legal schemes that could have overturned the 2020 election results on January 6.
      As always, the legal wrangling in the Mar-a-Lago case continued.
      “Fighting zombies”. That’s how comedian Jon Stewart described the process of getting a bill through Congress in an interview.
      Senators will later this week vote on a measure that would require more disclosures from super PACS, but which could stumble in the face of Republican opposition.According to Politico, top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer announced the renewed effort to pass the DISCLOSE Act:Schumer says the Senate will vote later this week on the DISCLOSE Act, requiring more donor transparency in politics. Unlikely to get much if any GOP support— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) September 19, 2022
      Democrats have been wanting to pass such legislation for a while, but have been unable to overcome GOP opposition, HuffPosts reports:Schumer announces Senate vote this week on the DISCLOSE Act— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) September 19, 2022
      DISCLOSE Act would require super PACs to disclose donors who have given $10k or more. “Republicans will have to choose whether they want to fight the power of dark money or allow this cancer to get worse,” Schumer says— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) September 19, 2022
      Last straight up or down vote on DISCLOSE Act was in 2012. GOP filibustered https://t.co/4oMriRFJLP— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) September 19, 2022
      President Joe Biden spoke with Puerto Rico’s governor Pedro Pierluisi and promised federal support to help the recovery from Hurricane Fiona, which knocked out power and water to the island.Here’s what the White House had to say about the call, which took place as Biden returned from Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in London:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}President Biden described the surge of Federal support to the island, where more than 300 Federal personnel are already working to assist with response and recovery. In the coming days, as damage assessments are conducted, the President said that number of support personnel will increase substantially.The President said that he will ensure that the Federal team remains on the job to get it done, especially given that Puerto Rico is still recovering from the damage of Hurricane Maria five years ago this week. Governor Pierluisi expressed his appreciation for the partnership and support that he is receiving already from the Biden Administration. Puerto Rico battles blackout and lack of safe water in wake of Hurricane FionaRead moreCase in point of the perilous moment America is in: Donald Trump continued his embrace of the extremist QAnon conspiracy theory at a weekend rally, The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe writes:Donald Trump made one of his highest-profile embraces to date of the extremist conspiracy group QAnon at a political rally in Ohio on Saturday, making the apparently deliberate choice to play music that is virtually indistinguishable from the cult organization’s adopted anthem.Dozens of the former president’s supporters in Youngstown engaged in raised-arm salutes as Trump delivered a fiery address to the background of a song his team insisted was a royalty-free tune from the internet, but to many ears it was nearly identical to the 2020 instrumental track Wwg1wga.Trump embraces QAnon at rally by playing music similar to its anthemRead more“I think we’re in the fourth and perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America.” That’s how acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns described where the United States is today in an interview with The Guardian’s David Smith. Read the interview here:Ken Burns is driving in heavy traffic, trying to get from New York, where he was born, to New Hampshire, where he lives and works in bucolic splendour. He made the move in 1979, not to service a grand masterplan but out of financial desperation.“I was making my first film and starving and rent was going up in New York City and I couldn’t afford it,” the documentarian recalls by phone. “I found the connection to nature incredibly important for this labour-intensive work that we do.”But when Burns’s debut film, Brooklyn Bridge, was nominated for an Oscar, friends and colleagues assumed that he would move back to New York or try Los Angeles. He surprised them. “I made the biggest, the most important professional decision, which was to stay.Ken Burns: ‘We’re in perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America’Read moreNegotiations over government spending bills in Congress are somewhat high risk, because if no agreement is reached, the government could be forced to shut down, as has happened repeatedly in recent years.These shutdowns – and there’s been a bunch of them – often come when one faction in Congress or another refuses to budge on a contentious issue, resulting in everything from embassies abroad to government offices at home closing their doors until an agreement is reached.Politico reports on an early sign of that spirit of intransigence remaining alive, at least in some corners of the House. Around 50 far-right Republican lawmakers say they will not vote for any funding measure approved in this Congress:Texas Rep. Chip Roy is leading a group of nearly 50 other House Rs — mostly House Freedom Caucus members or those who tend to vote w/the HFC — in a dear colleague letter saying they will oppose a CR /any approps package put fwd this Congress while Dems in power. pic.twitter.com/P2DamVlgPN— Olivia Beavers (@Olivia_Beavers) September 19, 2022
      Democratic leaders in Congress are pushing for another $12 billion in aid to be sent to Ukraine, and hope to get it into a bill to fund the government through mid-December, Punchbowl News reports.Administration officials will brief lawmakers tomorrow about how the aid could be used, which comes as Kyiv presses its offensive in Ukraine’s east that has retaken substantial territory from Russia.New: Bipartisan member briefing on Ukraine tomorrow at 8 AM pic.twitter.com/uxkJPTq5zP— Heather Caygle (@heatherscope) September 19, 2022
      The aid is among several provisions of the spending bill – known as a continuing resolution – that is under negotiation in the final months of year. Congress members are also considering how much new Covid-19 aid to include, as well as provisions to reform the process for permitting energy projects, including both fossil fuel and renewables.The US territory of Puerto Rico appears to be in the midst of a major humanitarian crisis after a hurricane knocked out power to the island and cut off clean drinking water, with forecasts predicting more rain to come. Here’s the latest from Nina Lakhani:Most of Puerto Rico was still without power or safe drinking water on Monday, with remnants of a category 1 hurricane that struck there a day earlier forecast to bring more heavy rain and life-threatening flooding.Hundreds of people are trapped in emergency shelters across the Caribbean island, with major roads underwater and reports of numerous collapsed bridges. Crops have been washed away while flash floods, landslides and fallen trees have blocked roads, swept away vehicles and caused widespread damage to infrastructure.Two-thirds of the island’s almost 800,000 homes and businesses have no water after Hurricane Fiona caused a total blackout on Sunday and swollen rivers contaminated the filtration system. The storm was causing havoc in the Dominican Republic by early Monday.Puerto Rico battles blackout and lack of safe water in wake of Hurricane FionaRead moreTo its Democratic and Republican supporters, the Freedom to Marry Act does nothing more than ensure same-sex couples don’t have their rights rolled back by the conservative-dominated supreme court. But to rightwing GOP senator Ted Cruz, the yet-to-be passed bill is something else.“This bill is about empowering the Biden IRS to target every church and school and university and charity in America that refuses to knuckle under to their view of gay marriage,” is how the Texas lawmakers described it in a recent interview.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) fear-mongers about bill codifying federal recognition of same-sex marriages:“This bill is about empowering the Biden IRS to target every church and school and university and charity in America that refuses to knuckle under to their view of gay marriage.” pic.twitter.com/EtgCVD3xV2— The Recount (@therecount) September 19, 2022
      His comments weren’t much of surprise, since he has already declared he would not support the measure. But as for whether or not it would get the 60 votes it needs to pass the Senate, Cruz said he did not know – underscoring the mystery around the legislation, which will likely only be resolved when it comes up for a vote after the midterms.“You have to seal up every window, and every vent, and every door… you’re fighting zombies, and if there’s any way that they get in the house, you lose.”That’s how comedian and former host of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, described his experience over the summer of pushing Congress to expand medical coverage for military veterans exposed to toxic substances.”You don’t come out of there feeling like this system has any connection to the needs of the people that it purports to serve. That’s for sure.”— Jon Stewart reflects on his political activism, saying it’s like “fighting zombies.” pic.twitter.com/cVOSsMrq7E— The Recount (@therecount) September 19, 2022
      The Pact Act, as the legislation was called, passed in August.Jon Stewart celebrates after Senate passes bill to assist veterans exposed to toxinsRead more More

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      January 6 panel could release report on Trump and Capitol attack before midterms – as it happened

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      The House committee investigating January 6 plans to release preliminary findings into the attack on the Capitol sometime in October, meaning voters may be digesting new details of the insurrection as the midterms approach, Axios reports.The committee has tentative plans to hold its first public hearing since July on 28 September, and Axios reports that its members are meeting today to flesh out the rest of their schedule. The Democratic chair Bennie Thompson said an early version of its report into the attack will come out in October. “The goal is to have … some information pushed out, obviously, before the November election,” he said, adding that the time between the late-September hearing and the 8 November election “won’t be a quiet period.”The committee’s public hearings held in June and July dredged up highly publicized details of the attack and Donald Trump’s actions before, during and after that put the former president and his Republican allies on the defensive. That dynamic may repeat in the two months ahead, assuming the committee is able to match its earlier revelations.For a sense of how the committee is thinking in relation to its impact on the midterms, here are the thoughts of one of its Democratic members, Jamie Raskin: “There are those partisans of former President Trump that will denounce anything we do, so we’re not going to jump through hoops to please people who will call anything we do partisan.”The run-up to the 8 November midterms will be even more eventful than usual, after the January 6 committee made clear its plans to release more details of the attack on the Capitol in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, a federal judge has approved the appointment of a special master to review documents seized by the government from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, while stopping the justice department from further examining them until the master has finished his work.Here’s what else happened today:
      President Joe Biden will meet with the families of two Americans detained in Russia, while Moscow has yet to act on a reported prisoner-swap offer made to secure their freedom.
      The White House condemned GOP governors’ transportation of migrants to Washington, DC and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
      Donald Trump has apparently embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory to shore up his support base amid mounting legal problems.
      Lawmakers faced rancor and strife of all kinds, including a condemnation at a committee hearing, a feud on a flight and a kicking outside the Capitol.
      No, the White House did not hire a satanist as the deputy coordinator of its monkeypox response.
      West Virginia’s Republican governor Jim Justice has signed a recently passed abortion ban into law, making it the latest state to crack down on the procedure after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last June.Today I signed HB 302 – a bill that protects life.I said from the beginning that if WV legislators brought me a bill that protected life and included reasonable and logical exceptions I would sign it, and that’s what I did today.Read the bill ⬇️https://t.co/G7i9DTirSN— Governor Jim Justice (@WVGovernor) September 16, 2022
      The legislation approved by the GOP-controlled state legislature is intended to shut down the state’s only abortion clinic, but contains some exceptions for minors and victims of rape and incest.West Virginia passes sweeping abortion ban with few exceptionsRead moreElsewhere on Thursday, the partisan venom went airborne, when Senator Ted Cruz encountered a supporter of Democrat Beto O’Rourke on a flight.The Texas senator’s camera-wielding foe, whose identity remains unclear, captured their encounter on video, in which he challenged Cruz’s stance on gun control and asked him to name a victim of the May shooting in the town of Uvalde:Senator Cruz was on my flight, and I asked him to name any of the Uvalde victims. He couldn’t. Texas deserves better than spineless hacks like this. Right the wrongs of 2018, and make @betoorourke our next Governor. #betoforgovernor #cancuncrus #uvaldestrong pic.twitter.com/AW34oxuUNv— Beto For Everyone (@Nathan_VBB) September 15, 2022
      Cruz defeated O’Rourke when he stood against him for Senate in 2020. O’Rourke is currently trying to unseat Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is running for a third term.The congressional tumult extended beyond committee chambers on Thursday, when video appeared to show rightwing Republican House representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicking an activist as they argued about gun control.The Georgia lawmaker herself posted a lengthy video of the encounter. The alleged kicking happens at about the 1:15 mark:These foolish cowards want the government to take away guns & the rights of parents to defend their children in schools.You have to be an idiot to think gun control will create a utopian society where criminals disarm themselves and obey the law.“Gun-free” zones kill people. pic.twitter.com/1T37HH8jEO— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) September 15, 2022
      The Washington Post has a write-up about the encounter between Voters of Tomorrow, a group representing Gen Z, and Greene, whom Democratic leadership booted from her committee assignments for a series of offensive remarks last year.The entire encounter is reminiscent of what Greene used to do before being elected to Congress in 2020. She appeared in Washington the year prior to follow for several blocks and heckle gun control activist David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida.Meanwhile in the House of Representatives, rancor was the order of the day in a Thursday committee hearing when one Republican lawmaker’s comments to a witness prompted a rebuke from his Democratic colleague.“I’m trying to give you the floor, boo,” Republican Clay Higgins said as Raya Salter, a clean energy advocate, spoke before the House oversight committee.New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not pleased by how her colleague from Louisiana treated Salter, who was talking about how the fossil fuel industry affected Black people and other racial minorities.“In the four years that I’ve sat on this committee, I have never seen members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, disrespect a witness in the way that I have seen them disrespect you today,” Ocasio-Cortez told Salter. “Frankly, men who treat women like that in public – I fear how they treat them in private.”In a statement to the Hill, Higgins said, “When radicals show up in front of my committee with an attitude talking anti-American trash, they can expect to get handled. I really don’t care if I hurt anybody’s feelings while I’m fighting to preserve our Republic.”Here’s a video of the exchange:Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis said bringing migrants to Democratic-led areas of the country was necessary to draw attention to the government’s failures at the southern border, Richard Luscombe reports:Joe Biden has accused Ron DeSantis of “playing politics with people’s lives” for flying Venezuelan migrants to the wealthy liberal island community of Martha’s Vineyard without warning, while the legality of the Florida governor’s move is also under scrutiny.In what immigration activists and Democratic politicians have decried as a “political stunt”, DeSantis, who is expected to run for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, arranged for two charter planes of about 50 migrant adults and children to fly from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday.Claiming that “every community in America should be sharing in the burdens,” DeSantis told a press briefing he wanted to draw attention to what he claimed was a failure by the Biden administration to secure the US-Mexico border.DeSantis criticized for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard: ‘It’s un-American’Read moreOne migrant had to be taken to urgent care upon arriving in Washington. Another wasn’t aware that he was arriving on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard until his plane began its descent.Those were some of the anecdotes White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre relayed as she continued her condemnation of Republicans governors sending migrants from the southern border to Democratic-run communities.“This should not be happening,” she said. “Republican officials should not be using human beings as political pawns.”White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is echoing Joe Biden last night in slamming Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, after he arranged for a group of migrants from Venezuela to be flown to the small Massachusetts island, without warning to the state or a true explanation to the people being transported.She said DeSantis did not notify Massachusetts that “migrant children, in need of food and shelter, were about to land on their doorstep.”Jean-Pierre added: “These vulnerable migrants were misled about where they were headed.”She said they were told they were going to Boston and misled about what benefits they would be provided when they arrived, “promised shelter, refuge benefits and more”.She accused the Florida leader, and Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who has unilaterally been bussing thousands of migrants awaiting the processing of their immigration applications in the US to Democratic-led cities New York, Washington and Chicago, of “the tactics of smugglers in places like Mexico and Guatemala”.“And for what? A photo op? Because these governors care about creating political theater, not creating actual solutions,” Jean-Pierre fumed.She accused Republicans of treating humans like “chattel in a cruel, pre-meditated political stunt”.From the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. https://t.co/kKrEtpMa1q— Danny Usher (@dsurte66) September 16, 2022
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is due to brief the media shortly, in Washington DC. The session has been put back slightly from its original 1pm ET scheduling.Joe Biden is due to meet South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House early afternoon.The US president plans to fly to the UK tomorrow, ahead of Queen Elizabeth’s state funeral on Monday.But on Sunday he plans to have his first meeting with the brand new British prime minister, Liz Truss. She met the Queen as incoming prime minister just two days before the monarch’s death last Thursday, providing the world with the last official photographs of the Queen, at Balmoral, smiling and wearing a tartan skirt.And as the campaigns rev up for the US midterm elections in early November, the White House has just said that Biden will hit the trail, traveling to Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday to attend a Democratic National Committee rally.Then next Wednesday, Biden plans a major speech in New York at the United Nations general assembly, where he will expand on the theme he is hammering on this autumn – the battle between the forces of democracy and autocracy, including within the US.Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also now been confirmed as a speaker at UNGA and will address world leaders via a video-link from is country, embattled since the invasion by Russia six months ago.If readers want to dive into live news of all the developments in the war, do follow our global blog on the topic, here.And for news on Queen Elizabeth and the British royal family, as thousands queue to see the casket of the monarch as she lies in state in London, follow developments in our blog out of London, as they happen, here.The run-up to the 8 November midterms will be even more eventful than usual, after the January 6 committee made clear its plans to release more details of the attack on the Capitol in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, a federal judge has approved the appointment of a special master to review documents seized by the government from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, while stopping the justice department from further examining them until the master has finished his work.Here’s what else has happened today:
      President Joe Biden will meet with the families of two Americans detained in Russia, while Moscow has yet to act on a reported prisoner-swap offer made to secure their freedom.
      Donald Trump has apparently embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory to shore up his support base amid mounting legal problems.
      No, the White House did not hire a satanist as the deputy coordinator of its monkeypox response.
      One of the biggest outstanding questions the January 6 committee is trying to answer is what the Secret Service knew about the attack, and why agents acted the way they did as the Capitol was being stormed.Questions have swirled around the Secret Service as its actions were brought to light, particularly after it was revealed that it deleted much of agents’ communications from around the time of the insurrection. Bloomberg reports that the committee has obtained documents, text messages and other materials from the Secret Service that could answer some of those questions. “It’s a combination of a number of text messages, radio traffic, that kind of thing. Thousands of exhibits,” the committee’s chair Bennie Thompson said earlier this week.It was unclear if any of what had been turned over were the communications from January 5 and 6 that were reported as erased. Another committee member, Zoe Lofgren, said some of what had been obtained was “relevant”.Secret Service watchdog suppressed memo on January 6 texts erasureRead moreThe House committee investigating January 6 plans to release preliminary findings into the attack on the Capitol sometime in October, meaning voters may be digesting new details of the insurrection as the midterms approach, Axios reports.The committee has tentative plans to hold its first public hearing since July on 28 September, and Axios reports that its members are meeting today to flesh out the rest of their schedule. The Democratic chair Bennie Thompson said an early version of its report into the attack will come out in October. “The goal is to have … some information pushed out, obviously, before the November election,” he said, adding that the time between the late-September hearing and the 8 November election “won’t be a quiet period.”The committee’s public hearings held in June and July dredged up highly publicized details of the attack and Donald Trump’s actions before, during and after that put the former president and his Republican allies on the defensive. That dynamic may repeat in the two months ahead, assuming the committee is able to match its earlier revelations.For a sense of how the committee is thinking in relation to its impact on the midterms, here are the thoughts of one of its Democratic members, Jamie Raskin: “There are those partisans of former President Trump that will denounce anything we do, so we’re not going to jump through hoops to please people who will call anything we do partisan.”If there’s one thing Donald Trump likes, it’s people who like him. The Associated Press reports that the former president has reached out to a new group of friends: QAnon supporters.While saying as recently as 2020 that he didn’t know much about the convoluted conspiracy theory-turned-movement, he has lately made several social media posts embracing some of its ideas. The AP reports that it may be a way to shore up his support base as he deals with an array of legal troubles, like the Mar-a-Lago investigation:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The former president may be seeking solidarity with his most loyal supporters at a time when he faces escalating investigations and potential challengers within his own party, according to Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University who has studied QAnon and recently wrote a book about the group.
      “These are people who have elevated Trump to messiah-like status, where only he can stop this cabal,” Bloom told the AP on Thursday. “That’s why you see so many images (in online QAnon spaces) of Trump as Jesus.”
      On Truth Social, QAnon-affiliated accounts hail Trump as a hero and savior and vilify President Joe Biden by comparing him to Adolf Hitler or the devil. When Trump shares the content, they congratulate each other. Some accounts proudly display how many times Trump has “re-truthed” them in their bios.
      By using their own language to directly address QAnon supporters, Trump is telling them that they’ve been right all along and that he shares their secret mission, according to Janet McIntosh, an anthropologist at Brandeis University who has studied QAnon’s use of language and symbols.
      It also allows Trump to endorse their beliefs and their hope for a violent uprising without expressly saying so, she said, citing his recent post about “the storm” as a particularly frightening example.A survey published earlier this year found that belief in QAnon has surged ever since Trump left the White House.Belief in QAnon has strengthened in US since Trump was voted out, study findsRead more More

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      Panel says Confederate memorial at Arlington cemetery should be dismantled

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      Panel says Confederate memorial at Arlington cemetery should be dismantledThe commission presented its final report on Confederate-honoring military bases and assets that should be renamed An independent commission is recommending that the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be dismantled and taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on the renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.Panel members on Tuesday rolled out the final list of ships, base roads, buildings and other items that they said should be renamed. But unlike the commission’s recommendations earlier this year laying out new names for nine Army bases, there were no suggested names for the roughly 1,100 assets across the military that bear Confederate names.West Point’s Ku Klux Klan plaque should be removed, commission saysRead moreRetired Army Brig Gen Ty Seidule, vice-chair of the commission, said the final cost for all of its renaming recommendations will be $62.5m. The total for the latest changes announced Tuesday is $41m, and is included in that amount.The latest group of assets includes everything from the Arlington memorial, two Navy ships and some Army vessels to street signs, water towers, athletic fields, hospital doors and even decals on recycling bins, according to the panel.The bulk of the remaining costs – or $21m – would cover the renaming of nine Army bases, and about $450,000 for recommended new names at the US Military at West Point in New York.Seidule said the panel determined that the memorial at Arlington was “problematic from top to bottom”. He said the panel recommended that it be entirely removed, with only the granite base remaining.The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal, and was designed to represent the American south. According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”The pedestal features 14 shields, engraved with the coats of arms of the 13 Confederate states and Maryland, which didn’t secede or join the Confederacy. Some of the figures also on the statue include a slave woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.And the Latin inscription translates to: “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato,” and was meant to equate the south’s secession to a noble “lost cause.”Seidule said the panel decided early on to propose new names only for the nine Army bases. It said that the Navy secretary has the authority to rename the two ships, which are the USS Chancellorsville and USNS Maury. The Chancellorsville was named for the civil war battle and the Maury was named after a Confederate soldier.He said the service secretaries can find new names for the handful of Army ships and the Air Force’s Fort Fisher Recreation Area in North Carolina. The panel recommended that the defense secretary rename Fort Belvoir, Virginia.The panel’s most sweeping recommendations were released in May, and laying out new names for nine US Army bases that commemorated Confederate officers: Fort Bragg in North Carolina; Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort AP Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Rucker in Alabama.The recommendations are the latest step in a broader effort by the military to confront racial injustice, most recently in the aftermath of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.For years, USmilitary officials had defended the naming of bases after Confederate officers. As recently as 2015 the Army argued that the names did not honor the rebel cause but were a gesture of reconciliation with the south.But in the aftermath of the Floyd killing, and the months of racial unrest that followed, the Pentagon and Congress pushed for a comprehensive plan to rename the military posts and hundreds of other federal assets such as roads, buildings, memorials, signs and landmarks that honored rebel leaders.The secretary of defense is expected to implement the commission’s plan no later than 1 January 2024.The panel also is recommending that the department set up a process to try and save money and efficiently change the names. And it said the secretary of defense should authorize the military service secretaries and other leaders to remove smaller items – such as portraits, plaques and awards – that honor the Confederacy or those who served in it.Created in 2020, the Naming Commission first met in March 2021 and began taking name recommendations from the public in September. Overall, the commission received more than 34,000 potential names for the nine Army bases.Seidule said that some of the names that were not used can be used by the service secretaries as they determine new names for roads and other base locations and assets.TopicsVirginiaUS CongressRaceUS politicsArlingtonnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘You have to run’: Romney urged Biden to take down Trump, book says

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      ‘You have to run’: Romney urged Biden to take down Trump, book saysGabriel Debenedetti, author of book on Biden’s relationship with Obama, reports call on night of 2018 midterms On the night of the 2018 midterm elections, as a wave of anti-Trump sentiment swept Democrats to take control of the House, top Republican Mitt Romney urged Joe Biden to run for president.‘Unhinged’ Rudy Giuliani drank and ranted about Islam, new book claimsRead more“You have to run,” said Romney, the Republican presidential nominee Biden and Barack Obama defeated in 2012, speaking to the former vice-president by phone.The same night, Romney was elected a US senator from Utah, a post from which he would twice vote to convict Donald Trump in impeachment trials.Romney’s exhortation to a man then seen as a likely challenger to Donald Trump in 2020 will probably further enrage the former president, his supporters and the Republican party they dominate.The Biden-Romney call is described in The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama, a book by Gabriel Debenedetti that will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Describing how Biden spent 6 November 2018, Debenedetti writes: “Biden spent election night glued to his phone as usual … He talked to most of the candidates he’d campaigned for, and plenty he didn’t, either to congratulate or console them, or just to catch up.“This time felt better than 2016” – when Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency – “in part because Democrats were winning big, at least in local races and in the House.“But it was also because of a refrain [Biden] kept hearing, and not always from the most expected sources.“At one point he connected with Mitt Romney, who’d been easily elected to the Senate that night as a rare Trump-opposing Republican. They were warm as Biden cheered Romney’s win.“Then Obama’s old rival got to the point: You have to run, Romney said.”In a note on sourcing, Debenedetti says his book is “primarily the product of hundreds of interviews” with “colleagues, aides, rivals, confidants, allies and eyewitnesses from every stage” of Obama and Biden’s careers since 2003.He also says: “When someone’s words are rendered in italics, that indicates an approximation based on the memories of sources who did not recall exact wordings.” Romney’s opposition to Trump is long established, if not entirely consistent.In 2016, the former Massachusetts governor spoke out against Trump, decrying his behaviour on the campaign trail and calling him a “phony” and a “fraud”. After the election, he said he did not vote for the Republican nominee, writing in his wife’s name instead.Trump attorney general Barr a liar, bully and thug, says fired US attorney in bookRead moreNonetheless, Romney then flirted with working for Trump, pitching to be secretary of state. He generally voted with his president after taking his seat in the Senate.But the relationship was never smooth – Trump called Romney a “pompous ass” – and in 2019 Romney told the New York Times: “People say to me, ‘If you’re critical of the president you’re hurting the party.’ No I’m not – I’m laying out a path for the party post the president.”In 2020, when Trump was impeached for blackmailing Ukraine for dirt on rivals including Biden, Romney became the first senator ever to vote to convict and remove a president of his own party.He said he did not vote for Trump in that year’s election – but refused to say if he voted for Biden.In 2021, Trump was impeached a second time, for inciting the Capitol attack. Romney voted to convict again.TopicsBooksMitt RomneyJoe BidenDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2020US midterms 2018newsReuse this content More

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      The Democrats are gaining because Americans want jobs, not Capitol mobs | Lloyd Green

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      The Democrats are gaining because Americans want jobs, not Capitol mobsLloyd GreenThe supreme court’s abortion decision, a drop in gas prices, and Trump’s legal dramas have all helped strengthen Biden’s ratings – and Democrats’ chances this fall Can the Democrats make the formerly Republican slogan “jobs, not mobs” their midterm mantra?They just might get away with it. In politics, jiujitsu is fair play – and these days Republicans are less the party of “law and order” and more the party that denies the outcomes of democratic elections and attacks the US Capitol.The Republican party has reason to fear the midterms | Lloyd GreenRead moreOn Thursday night, President Joe Biden launched a frontal assault on Donald Trump and the right’s embrace of creeping authoritarianism. Twelve hours later, the government reported 315,000 new jobs added in August and stunning prime-age labor force participation.Along the way, Trump said he would “very, very seriously” consider January 6 pardons if re-elected, and bragged of giving financial assistance to some of the insurrectionists. As each day passes, the Republican nexus to law, order and democracy grows more tenuous. Meanwhile, the summer’s special elections and the latest polls portray the Democrats with the wind in their sails.Alaska announced the election of Democrat Mary Peltola to Congress and the defeat of Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee. A week earlier, a Democrat pulled off an upset for a vacant House seat in rural upstate New York.The supreme court’s evisceration of abortion and privacy rights, a sharp drop in gasoline prices, and Trump’s latest legal drama have resurrected Biden’s ratings and the Democrats’ chances. The latest Quinnipiac poll gives them a four-point edge on the generic ballot, placing Nancy Pelosi within striking distance of retaining control of the speaker’s gavel.A separate Wall Street Journal poll showed Democrats now leading among independents.Earlier this year, “Republicans were cruising, and Democrats were having a hard time,” Tony Fabrizio, a Trump pollster told the Journal. “It’s almost like the abortion issue came along and was kind of like a defibrillator to Democrats.”As if to prove his point, Republicans are now scrapping references online to Trump and abortion. Blake Masters, the Republican Senate challenger in Arizona, removed language from his website in which he described himself as “100% pro-life”.For the record, Masters garnered Trump’s endorsement during the Republican primary and a bucketful of bucks from Peter Thiel. Thiel once publicly lamented extending voting rights to women and minorities.“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron,” he wrote in 2009.In a similarly benighted spirit, Herschel Walker, another Trump favorite, branded inflation a women’s issue. “They’ve got to buy groceries,” Walker, a Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, said. On top of his Heisman trophy and football rushing records, Walker holds a record of alleged domestic violence.Also count on Trump’s mishandling of top secret and classified documents to grab headlines in the run-up to election day. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican would-be Senate majority leader and would-be House speaker, respectively, cannot be happy.According to the inventory filed with the court, the FBI search netted dozens of empty folders with “Classified” banners, together with seven documents marked “Top Secret”. Whether Trump retained copies of the President’s Daily Briefing, one of the crown jewels of the intelligence community, is an active and open question too.To be sure, Trump caught a break on Labor Day. A federal judge granted his motion to appoint a special master to weigh claims of executive and attorney-client privilege. The court also enjoined prosecutors from proceeding with their review of documents.At the same time, the court made clear that it would not interfere with the assessment being conducted by the director of national intelligence. An appeal by the government is likely – as is ensuing delay.And then there is Newt Gingrich. He’s back. The disgraced former House speaker may have played an outsized but behind-the-scenes role in Trump’s efforts to cling to power, according to the January 6 committee.“Some of the information we have obtained includes email messages that you exchanged with senior advisers to President Trump and others, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, in which you provided detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election,” Bennie Thompson, the committee chairman, wrote Gingrich.Once upon a time, Gingrich, a former Georgia congressman, was in the line of presidential succession, right behind vice-president Al Gore. According to the Federal Elections Commission, the Gingrich 2012 campaign remains more than $4.6m in debt. As Business Insider put it, “No presidential campaign from any election cycle owes creditors more money.”“Don’t be measuring the drapes,” Representative Tom Emmer, head of the national Republican campaign committee, recently advised colleagues. “This isn’t the typical midterm that we’re talking about.”
      Lloyd Green served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionJoe BidenDemocratsUS CongressBiden administrationDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More

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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump

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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump Dana Milbank of the Washington Post does not fall victim to false equivalency. He knows the GOP is a threat to democracyAfter Joe Biden’s fiery speech in defense of democracy last week, most of the Washington press corps responded with another stream of fatuous false equivalencies.Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book saysRead more“The Two Parties Finally Agree on Something: American Democracy Is in Danger”, was the headline in the New York Times. A Washington Post editorial declared the president was “wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda, which he called ‘the work of democracy’”.In his brilliant new book, Dana Milbank, a Post columnist, does not offer any of the squishy-soft judgements to which most of his Washington colleagues have become sadly addicted.He comes straight to the point that eluded the authors of that Times story and that Post editorial: “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There’s a perfectly logical, if deeply cynical reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans” who have only carried the popular vote once in eight presidential elections since 1988.As America “approaches majority-minority status”, Milbank writes, “… white grievance and white fear” have driven “Republican identity more than any other factor – and drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the US political system”.Working as a political columnist for the last 16 years, Milbank has had “a front-row seat for the worst show on earth: the crack-up of the Republican party, and the resulting crack-up of American democracy”.The book has four roughly equal sections: about the Clinton presidency (“defined by the slashing style of [Newt] Gingrich”), the George W Bush presidency (“defined by the dishonesty of Karl Rove”), the Obama presidency and the era of Trump.This is meticulous history, showing how the Republicans have spent a quarter of a century “hacking away at the foundations of democracy and civil society”, conducting “their war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their sabotage of the institutions … of government, and their dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence”.Milbank traces the Republican love affair with racism back to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign, and dates the beginning of government dysfunction to the four disastrous years from 1995 to 1999 when Gingrich did as much as he could to blow up the federal government when he was speaker of the House.By showing with minute detail “how extensively Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets and interest groups have been pulling at the threads of democracy,” Milbank makes it clear that the Trump presidency was far from an aberration. It represented the real Republican party, without any of the camouflage of compassionate conservatism.There was nothing new about Donald Trump’s 30,573 documented lies as president. Gingrich’s Republicans were “saturated with wild, often unsubstantiated allegations. Whitewater. Troopergate. Travelgate. Filegate. Furnituregate. Fallen Clinton aide Webb Hubbell fathered Chelsea Clinton … commerce secretary Ron Brown’s death in a plane crash … was a Clinton-arranged hit”. And so on.It was Gingrich, the Clinton special prosecutor Ken Starr, his aide Brett Kavanaugh, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh who showed Trump “the political power of an endlessly repeated lie”.The crassness also started with Gingrich.“I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Gingrich told college Republicans way back in 1978. “You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power.”Eleven years later, Gingrich told the reporter John Harwood (who last week left CNN after calling Trump a “demagogue”) Democrats were “grotesque”, “loony” and “stupid”.Milbank is especially strong about Ralph Reed, “a crucial figure in the perversion of the religious right into an entity more ‘right’ than ‘religious’.” There is also a long recounting of the gigantic lobbying scandal centered on Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, a former top aide to House majority leader Tom DeLay. Scanlon and Abramoff “defrauded Indian tribes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars” by telling them they were promoting their casinos. They also got Reed to mobilize evangelical Christians to oppose gambling projects that competed with his own gambling interests.Another long section reminds us that the administration of George W Bush actually did even greater damage than Trump, by promoting the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and leading America into the completely unnecessary and utterly disastrous war in Iraq.Milbank’s book is in the fine tradition of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, the 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann which was the first to point out the uselessness of the Washington press corps’ attempts to be “fair” to both parties.‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysRead moreMilbank quotes from it: “The Republican party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”Herein lies the tragedy of Washington journalism. Ten years after Ornstein and Mann made those astute observations, Milbank is one of just a handful of reporters who have incorporated their wisdom into his work. As a result, he is almost alone in treating the pronouncements of the Republican party with the contempt they invariably deserve.As Ornstein tweeted on Saturday: “Tragically our mainstream media have shown that they are either AWOL in this battle or have opted on the side of the authoritarians by normalizing their behavior and minimizing their intentions.”
      The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is published in the US by Doubleday
      TopicsBooksRepublicansDonald TrumpNewt GingrichGeorge BushRichard NixonThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      Republican Senate candidate says she’s anti-abortion but against federal ban

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      Republican Senate candidate says she’s anti-abortion but against federal banTiffany Smiley, a trained nurse, wants to win in Washington state, where a 1991 law protects abortion access A Republican Senate nominee in Washington state said on Sunday she was against abortion – but supported a state law that guarantees the right to abortion until fetal viability.Trump calls FBI, DoJ ‘vicious monsters’ in first rally since Mar-a-Lago searchRead moreSpeaking to CNN’s State of the Union, Tiffany Smiley said she supported the law despite the US supreme court decision earlier this summer, in Dobbs v Jackson, which overturned the right to abortion, a right previously guaranteed for almost 50 years.“I respect the voters of Washington state,” Smiley said. “They long decided where they stand on the issue.”The state law was passed in 1991. Across the US, polls consistently show that nearly two-thirds of Americans support the right to abortion in some form.As the midterm elections approach, abortion has served as a prime motivator for women voters across the US, especially among Democrats and fueling striking special-election successes for the party seeking to hold both houses of Congress.Smiley’s remarks reflected a growing recognition among Republicans that the fall of Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which protected the right to abortion until June this year, may have been a longed-for supreme court success but could cost them dearly at the polls as they seek to take the House and Senate.Speaking to CNN, Smiley also backed off her previous statement that she would welcome an endorsement from Donald Trump.“I am laser-focused on the endorsement of the voters of Washington state,” she said, twice, as she sought to deflect the question.Smiley, a trained nurse, is challenging the incumbent Democratic senator, Patty Murray, who has criticized Smiley for her “100% pro-life” views.In an ad released last week, Smiley told viewers she was “pro-life but I opposed a federal abortion ban”. The ad came in response to a Murray ad which called Smiley “Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked candidate”, referring to the Senate Republican leader known for his anti-abortion views and push to stack the supreme court with conservative justices opposed to abortion.Murray’s ad claimed that if elected, Smiley would support federal abortion bans. Smiley said: “Murray is trying to scare you, I am trying to serve you.”On Sunday, Smiley said: “I made it clear in my ad that … I am not for a federal abortion ban. You know, the extreme in this race is Patty Murray. She is for federalizing abortion.”Smiley previously expressed support for a Texas law that implements a near-total abortion ban, the Hill reported last year. On Sunday, Smiley said “there’s a lot of parts of [the Texas ban] that make it very hard for me in Washington state”.‘I want to work with everyone’: Alaska’s history-making new congresswomanRead moreShe added: “But at the end of the day, I’m pro-woman first and then always pro-life.”In response, Murray told CNN: “What I believe is that we have a constitutional right in this country under Roe by the supreme court that allowed women and their families and their faith and their doctor to make a decision for them about whether or not they should carry their pregnancy.“That is what the law and constitutional right of this land was, until this supreme court overturned that.“I do not believe that politicians should be making these decisions for women. That is what I support.”TopicsAbortionUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRepublicansWashington stateUS CongressUS SenatenewsReuse this content More