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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

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      Trump calls FBI, DoJ ‘vicious monsters’ in first rally since Mar-a-Lago search

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      Trump calls FBI, DoJ ‘vicious monsters’ in first rally since Mar-a-Lago searchFormer president also calls Joe Biden’s Philadelphia address the ‘most vicious, hateful, divisive speech’02:19Speaking in Pennsylvania on Saturday, at his first rally since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for top-secret material taken from the White House and since Joe Biden used a primetime address to warn that Republicans were assaulting US democracy, Donald Trump lashed out. Democracy is under attack – and reporting that isn’t ‘violating journalistic standards’ | Robert ReichRead moreThe former president said: “The FBI and the justice department have become vicious monsters, controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers and the media, who tell them what to do.”Trump nominated the FBI director, Christopher Wray, in 2017.Biden spoke outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a site with tremendous resonance in US history, on Thursday night.Presenting a “battle for the soul of the nation”, he said: “This is a nation that rejects violence as a political tool. We are still, at our core, a democracy. Yet history tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and the willingness to engage in political violence is fatal in a democracy.”In Wilkes-Barre on Saturday night, Trump called Biden’s remarks “the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president”.The former president was appearing in support of Mehmet Oz, the Republican candidate for US Senate, and Doug Mastriano, the candidate for governor.Oz, a TV doctor, is struggling against the lieutenant governor, John Fetterman. On Saturday night, Trump called the Democrat “a socialist loser”. He also claimed without evidence that Fetterman, who recently suffered a stroke and whose health has been mocked by the Oz campaign, used illegal drugs.“Fetterman supports taxpayer-funded drug dens and the complete decriminalization of illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and ultra lethal fentanyl,” Trump said. “By the way, he takes them himself.”Trump also said: “Fetterman may dress like a teenager getting high in his parents’ basement, but he’s a raging lunatic hell-bent on springing hardened criminals out of jail in the middle of the worst crime wave in Pennsylvania history.”Mastriano is a supporter of Trump’s lie that Biden’s 2020 election victory was the result of electoral fraud. The candidate has compared the January 6 assault on the US Capitol to the Reichstag fire, the event in Berlin in 1933 which propelled Adolf Hitler to power. He has also been photographed wearing the uniform of a Confederate soldier.Biden’s speech continues to resonate. In Philadelphia, he spoke against a dramatic, deep-red background. Republicans protested, some saying the speech was too political to be delivered amid the trappings of the presidency, including attendant US Marines.On Sunday, Tiffany Smiley, the Republican candidate for Senate in Washington state, was asked on CNN’s State of the Union if she believed Biden won the 2020 election fairly and legitimately – a question now asked of most Republican candidates for state and national office.Smiley said she did. But she also said she was “extremely disappointed” with the speech in Philadelphia, “because unity is not conformity. And I think President Biden got that really, really mixed up”.Michael McCaul, a Republican congressman from Texas, told ABC’s This Week: “If this was a speech to unify the American people, it had just the opposite effect. It basically condemned all Republicans who supported Donald Trump in the last election. That’s over 70 million people.”More than 81 million voted for Biden. In his speech, the president said he wanted “to be very clear, very clear up front: not every Republican, not even a majority of Republicans, are Maga [pro-Trump] Republicans … [who] represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”In Wilkes-Barre, Trump told his audience that under Biden, they were “enemies of the state”. Of Biden, he said: “He’s an enemy of the state, you want to know the truth.”Of the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said: “It was not just my home that was raided last month. It was the hopes and dreams of every citizen who I’ve been fighting for.”Calling the search “one of the most shocking abuses of power by any administration in American history” and “a travesty of justice”, he said: “They’re trying to silence me and more importantly they’re trying to silence you. But we will not be silenced, right?”Investigators recovered thousands of documents, including more than 100 with classified and top-secret markings. A Trump-appointed judge is considering Trump’s request for the appointment of a court official to review the documents for any covered by executive privilege.Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016, one success in a string of usually Democratic states which fueled his victory over Hillary Clinton. But Biden won it in 2020, its call four days after election day putting him in the White House. As the 2022 midterms approach, Biden is due back in the state on Monday, the Labor Day holiday, for an event in Pittsburgh.Trump in increasing legal peril one month on from Mar-a-Lago searchRead moreReporters in Pennsylvania for Trump’s rally found support for the former president over the Mar-a-Lago search. Roy Bunger, 65, told the New York Times the Biden administration was “deliberately targeting” Trump “to keep him from running again”.But there are signs that Trump’s endorsement will not be enough to help Oz win a Senate seat Republicans have targeted in their attempt to take back the chamber. Larry Mitko voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He told the Associated Press he would not back Oz, “No way, no how.”Mitko said he did no feel like he knew the celebrity heart surgeon, who narrowly won his May primary with Trump’s backing. Mitko said he would vote for Fetterman, with whom he has been familiar with since Fetterman was mayor of nearby Braddock.“Dr Oz hasn’t showed me one thing to get me to vote for him,” he said. “I won’t vote for someone I don’t know.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS midterm elections 2022US politicsUS CongressRepublicansPennsylvanianewsReuse this content More

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      Thanks to bad electoral laws, Detroit will soon have no Black members of Congress | David Daley

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      Thanks to bad electoral laws, Detroit will soon have no Black members of CongressDavid DaleyIf we’re to avoid a future in which the nation’s largest Black-majority city lacks representation that looks like most of its citizens, we need electoral reform Detroit has been represented by at least one Black member of Congress since 1955. That’s four years before Berry Gordy founded Motown Records, three years before Ozzie Virgil became the first person of African descent to play for the Detroit Tigers, and 17 years before General Motors hired its first Black automotive designer in 1972.Now that long, proud run is nearing an end. After this November’s elections, Detroit – nearly 80% Black, the largest percentage, by far, of any major American city – will probably be left without any Black representation in the House of Representatives. An era that covered parts of eight decades, and the careers of heavyweights such as Representatives John Conyers and Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick will close.New legal filings paint Trump as a flailing liar surrounded by lackeys | Lloyd GreenRead moreHow is this possible? This is a story about redistricting, good intentions and unintended consequences, about population loss and suburban growth. It’s about the cold, unforgiving math of our political system, and the way overcrowded primaries divide votes and distort outcomes. And it points to the electoral reforms we desperately need – especially ranked-choice voting, but also an end to single-member congressional districts – if we’re to avoid having the nation’s largest Black majority city lacking representation that looks like the majority of its citizens.Let’s start here: every congressional map in the nation gets redrawn every 10 years, post-census, to account for population changes. When Michigan’s maps were redrawn in 2011, Republicans held the pen and sought to create as many Republican-leaning districts as they could get away with.Any gerrymander involves two key tools: cracking and packing – the art of either spreading the other side’s voters thinly across many districts, or packing them into as few as possible. In Michigan, Republicans packed Black voters – who tend to vote for Democrats – into two wildly contorted, even snake-like districts, then carved the Detroit suburbs into a pinwheel of whiter, Republican-friendlier seats.Michigan’s 13th (56% Black) and 14th (57% Black) districts overwhelmingly elected Black representatives to Congress for much of the decade, usually with 80% or more of the vote and little organized opposition. The 2011 Republican gerrymander worked as expected, however – and, with so many Democratic voters packed into those two seats, Republicans held nine of the 14 seats in this Democrat-leaning swing state for several consecutive election cycles. The state legislature, drawn with the same intent, also produced reliable Republican majorities, even when Democrats won more votes.Frustrated citizens, recognizing correctly that their votes didn’t really matter, demanded a fairer approach to redistricting. In 2018, 61% of Michiganders supported an amendment to the state constitution that would take the line-drawing power away from politicians and put it in the hands of an independent citizen commission that included voices representing many ethnicities, ideologies and geographic backgrounds.The members of that citizen panel did a tremendous job. They held public hearings across the state, worked openly and transparently, consulted experts on the Voting Rights Act – and drew the fairest and most equitable state legislative and congressional districts that Michigan has seen in several decades. Non-partisan experts graded the maps highly for partisan fairness and competitiveness. This fall, the party that wins the most votes will, in almost every likelihood, win the most seats.Yet this decade Michigan lost one of its seats in Congress to faster-growing states. Detroit’s population has plunged; the 2020 census recorded 10.5% fewer residents than the one a decade earlier. Some of that decline could be attributed to Black residents moving from Detroit to nearby suburbs. The Voting Rights Act experts retained by the commission produced a study showing that there was enough “crossover” or coalition voting in metro Detroit that Black voters could still elect a member of their own choosing even if the overall Black voting-age population was less than 50%.But those experts missed something crucial. Black voters, along with white crossover voters, might still elect a Black candidate in the general election. Yet a primary election in a Black political stronghold, where several strong candidates might seek office and divide votes, could be something else entirely. Black voters, in that case, could be punished for producing multiple candidates and having to choose among them.This shouldn’t have been a theoretical concern. It’s exactly what happened in the 2018 primary. Four Black candidates – including the Detroit city council president, a state senator, a former state representative, and Conyers’s son – earned 55.6% of the primary vote between them. Rashida Tlaib ultimately won the race with just 31.2% of the vote, defeating Brenda Jones, the council president, by 900 votes.The same thing happened in the Democratic primary this year. Eight of the nine candidates for the new 13th district seat were Black. They divided 71.7% of the vote. The winner, Shri Thanedar, captured Michigan’s last-remaining Black seat with 28.3% of the vote.There’s a better way to do this – one that would allow more Black candidates to run without fears of dividing the vote, provide fair representation to the communities represented by Tlaib and Thanedar, and also guarantee that more votes mean more seats.If Michigan adopted ranked-choice voting (RCV) for primary elections, and required any winner to earn at least 50% support, there would be no spoilers. RCV works much like an instant runoff; if no one earns 50% on the first round, the last-place candidates are eliminated and second choices come into play. This would allow multiple Black candidates to run without fear of vote splitting. And while Thanedar, for example, assured Black voters he would be their representative too, RCV would have pushed him to campaign more within Black communities and work for second choices, rather than best a deeply divided field with a mere 28% plurality victory.Better still, we could end gerrymandering altogether and fix one of the core problems in our politics if we moved from single-member congressional districts to larger, multi-member seats, under a plan currently before Congress called the Fair Representation Act. Under this measure, Michigan, for example, would have the same 13 members of Congress – but they would be elected from districts of five, four and four members. A five-member district with metro Detroit and its suburbs at its heart would probably elect at least two Black Democrats, Tlaib (one of only two Muslims in Congress) and perhaps as many as two Republicans.Under a more proportional system such as this, communities of color and communities that include diverse political perspectives are not pitted against one another. Instead, everyone receives representation according to the number of votes they earn. The side with the most votes would receive the most seats, but everyone would have a voice. This would put an end to our poisonous zero-sum, winner-takes-all politics, in which politicians cater to their base, by providing strong new incentives for leaders to talk to every voter and work together in Washington.It’s outrageous that Detroit lacks any Black representation in Congress. But it’s an outrage that makes clear how damaging plurality primaries and single-member districts have become. Detroit’s story shows how the imbalances and vote-rigging that plague our voting system distort and interfere with equitable representation – and the harm they create for voters who ought to be able to choose among candidates without fearing that their community will lose representation altogether. Fortunately, it’s an outrage that can be fixed.
      David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote
      TopicsDetroitOpinionUS politicsMichiganUS CongresscommentReuse this content More

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      The US has a ruling class – and Americans must stand up to it | Bernie Sanders

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      The US has a ruling class – and Americans must stand up to itBernie SandersIn the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. This is unsustainable Let’s be clear. The most important economic and political issues facing this country are the extraordinary levels of income and wealth inequality, the rapidly growing concentration of ownership, the long-term decline of the American middle class and the evolution of this country into oligarchy.We know how important these issues are because our ruling class works overtime to prevent them from being seriously discussed. They are barely mentioned in the halls of Congress, where most members are dependent on the campaign contributions of the wealthy and their Super Pacs. They are not much discussed in the corporate media, in which a handful of conglomerates determine what we see, hear and discuss.So what’s going on?We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn.Meanwhile, as the very rich become much richer, working families continue to struggle. Unbelievably, despite huge increases in worker productivity, wages (accounting for real inflation) are lower today than they were almost 50 years ago. When I was a kid growing up, most families were able to be supported by one breadwinner. Now an overwhelming majority of households need two paychecks to survive.Today, half of our people live paycheck to paycheck and millions struggle on starvation wages. Despite a lifetime of work, half of older Americans have no savings and no idea how they will ever be able to retire with dignity, while 55% of seniors are trying to survive on an income of less than $25,000 a year.Since 1975, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth in America that has gone in exactly the wrong direction. Over the past 47 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $50tn in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American society to the top 1%, primarily because a growing percentage of corporate profits has been flowing into the stock portfolios of the wealthy and the powerful.During this terrible pandemic, when thousands of essential workers died doing their jobs, some 700 billionaires in America became nearly $2tn richer. Today, while the working class falls further behind, multibillionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are off taking joyrides on rocket ships to outer space, buying $500m super-yachts and living in mansions with 25 bathrooms.Disgracefully, we now have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any developed nation on Earth and millions of kids, disproportionately Black and brown, face food insecurity. While psychologists tell us that the first four years are the most important for human development, our childcare system is largely dysfunctional – with an inadequate number of slots, outrageously high costs and pathetically low wages for staff. We remain the only major country without paid family and medical leave.In terms of higher education, we should remember that 50 years ago tuition was free or virtually free in major public universities throughout the country. Today, higher education is unaffordable for millions of young people. There are now some 45 million Americans struggling with student debt.Today over 70 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and millions more are finding it hard to pay for the rising cost of healthcare and prescription drugs, which are more expensive here than anywhere else in the world. The cost of housing is also soaring. Not only are some 600,000 Americans homeless, but nearly 18m households are spending 50% or more of their limited incomes on housing.It’s not just income and wealth inequality that is plaguing our nation. It is the maldistribution of economic and political power.Today we have more concentration of ownership than at any time in the modern history of this country. In sector after sector a handful of giant corporations control what is produced and how much we pay for it. Unbelievably, just three Wall Street firms (Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) control assets of over $20tn and are the major stockholders in 96% of S&P 500 companies. In terms of media, some eight multinational media conglomerates control what we see, hear and read.In terms of political power, the situation is the same. A small number of billionaires and CEOs, through their Super Pacs, dark money and campaign contributions, play a huge role in determining who gets elected and who gets defeated. There are now an increasing number of campaigns in which Super Pacs actually spend more money on campaigns than the candidates, who become the puppets to their big money puppeteers. In the 2022 Democratic primaries, billionaires spent tens of millions trying to defeat progressive candidates who were standing up for working families.Dr Martin Luther King Jr was right when he said: “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power” in America. That statement is even more true today.Let us have the courage to stand together and fight back against corporate greed. Let us fight back against massive income and wealth inequality. Let us fight back against a corrupt political system.Let us stand together and finally create an economy and a government that works for all, not just the 1%.
      Bernie Sanders is a US senator from Vermont and the chairman of the Senate budget committee
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      Trump ‘knowingly put national security at risk’ by stashing classified documents, Schiff says – as it happened

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      Adam Schiff, a senior Democrat who led the first House impeachment of Donald Trump, says the former president and his allies “knowingly put our national security at risk” by stashing highly classified documents at his Florida residence.The California congressman gave his assessment in a series of Tweets following the justice department’s legal filing that suggests Trump obstructed an investigation into his improper retention of the documents, lied about having them and tried to conceal them.The government’s brief is devastating. The legal arguments are compelling, but what is most striking are the facts outlining how the former president and his team knowingly put our national security at risk.Here’s what stands out to me:(1/7) pic.twitter.com/VTS69C22hb— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 31, 2022
      “The legal arguments are compelling, but what is most striking are the facts outlining how the former president and his team knowingly put our national security at risk,” Schiff wrote.“This is Trump’s counsel swearing there were no more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. That was obviously false. Someone isn’t telling the truth,” he posted alongside an image of the filing in which Trump’s team claims a “diligent search” failed to turn up documents later recovered by the FBI.“It’s no wonder they wouldn’t allow a look inside the boxes – there were still lots of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago [Trump’s Palm Beach residence and resort].“The deception was deliberate. The government found classified papers in multiple locations throughout Mar-a-Lago, a public hotel. Considering the secret markings, this is reckless in the extreme”.Most damning of all, Schiff added, the documents “so sensitive, so protected that senior FBI agents and DOJ attorneys couldn’t even initially review them. [They] were kept at a public resort. Potentially available to God knows who”.It is not the first time Schiff, a frequent critic of Trump, has accused him of selling out his country. During his fiery closing argument to Trump’s first Senate trial in February 2020, Schiff, the House impeachment manager, said: “He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again.“You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it”.The Republican majority in the Senate subsequently acquitted Trump of obstructing Congress and abuse of power.We’re closing the US politics blog now, thanks for joining us. Donald Trump put the security of the country at risk by illegally stashing highly classified documents at his Florida residence and lying about having them, senior Democrat Adam Schiff said.The California congressman was among a number of political figures reacting Wednesday to the sensational justice department court filing stating its opposition to the former president’s request for an independent “special master” to oversee the investigation into his hoarding. Trump claims without evidence he “declassified” the documents before leaving office, an assertion the justice department is seeking to debunk.Here’s what else we followed today:
      Bloomberg News reported that federal prosecutors are likely to wait until after the November election to announce any charges against Trump, if they determine he broke laws. But the news website says it’s not clear a determination will have been made by then.
      There will be enough Covid-19 boosters for everyone who wants one, the White House says, after the FDA approved shots of new multi-variant vaccines. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said shots could be in arms as early as next week.
      Secretary of state Antony Blinken paid tribute to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died aged 91, as “a man who changed the course of human history”. Jean-Pierre said it was not decided if the government would send a representative to Gorbachev’s funeral in Russia, especially since most administration officials are banned from the country.
      Charlie Crist, who last week won the Democratic nomination for governor of Florida, resigned from Congress on Wednesday to concentrate on his campaign to try to unseat Republican Ron DeSantis.
      Please join us again tomorrow as Joe Biden prepares to deliver a primetime address to the country on “saving the soul of our nation”.The Biden administration says there will be enough Covid-19 boosters for everyone who wants one, and that shots of the new multi-variant vaccines approved by the FDA this morning could start going into arms as soon as next week.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at an afternoon briefing that both the both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech retooled vaccines targeting the BA.4/BA.5 Omicron coronavirus subvariants will shortly be shipped to “tens of thousands” of sites nationwide.She said the last step was final authorization from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which she indicated was imminent:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Teams are have already started the process of packing and shipping doses across the country and pending CDC action we expect shots in arms to begin in earnest starting after Labor Day weekend.
      We’ve been working with providers, clinics, clinicians, local health departments and other critical groups, and we’ve been doing all of this preparation despite the lack of funding from Congress.She answered “yes” when asked directly if there would be enough vaccines for anyone who wants, or needs one.Karine Jean-Pierre is more comfortable talking about Joe Biden’s prime time address to the country on Thursday night entitled “the battle for the soul of the nation”, although she says she won’t “get ahead” of his comments.But she is happy to talk about the rightwing ‘Make America Great Again’ wing of the Republican party that Biden has taken to attacking in recent weeks, and will no doubt go after again tomorrow night in Philadelphia:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The president thinks there is an extremist threat to our democracy. He is as clear as he can be on that when we talk about democracy, when we talk about our freedoms.
      The way that he sees it, the Maga Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party. That extremism is an extreme threat to our democracy, our freedom to our rights. They just don’t respect the rule of law.
      The president is not going to shy away, to call out what he clearly sees is happening in this country. We’re calling it the soul of the nation. He takes it very seriously when it comes to our democracy.Other reporters will try, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has just shot down the first question about the justice department’s filing in the Donald Trump classified documents investigation at her afternoon briefing.Had Joe Biden seen the photo of secret papers strewn on Trump’s floor at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence? Has the president been briefed on the status of the inquiry?Jean-Pierre was resolute:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}As I’ve said many times… we’re just not going to comment on the investigation. Anything, any underlying pieces of investigation, any content of the investigation.
      This is an ongoing, as you all know, investigation of the department of justice. We are not going to politically interfere, we are not going to comment on anything connected to the investigation. And we’re just going to keep it there.So that’s a no, then.Another one of the former president’s men has appeared before the special grand jury sitting in Georgia.The grand jury is hearing evidence related to allegations that Donald Trump illegally attempted to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election result and prevent Joe Biden from taking power.John Eastman follows hot on the heels of Rudy Giuliani in making an appearance in that case.Trump lawyer John Eastman appeared before the Fulton County grand jury today and pleaded the fifth, according to a statement from his lawyers. He also asserted attorney-client privilege. pic.twitter.com/Z7YF2b2Tm9— Katherine Faulders (@KFaulders) August 31, 2022
      In addition to utilizing his right against self-incrimination, Eastman, who was part of Trump’s campaign to stay in office despite losing the November 2020 election, the one-time lawyer to Trump also invoked invoked attorney-client privilege his non-response to some questions asked today in the criminal investigation.Eastman “is one of a group of Trump allies who were subpoenaed by that panel, which is hearing testimony in Atlanta,” CNBC noted.The Guardian’s Chris McGreal reported at the weekend that of all the legal investigations into Trump and his business, in Washington, DC, New York and Florida, the Georgia case might have him in the greatest legal peril.Of all the legal threats Trump is facing, is this the one that could take him down?Read moreHere’s John Eastman on January 6, 2021.Bloomberg is reporting that federal prosecutors are likely to wait until after the November election to announce any charges against Donald Trump, if they determine he broke laws.The news website cites “people familiar” with the justice department’s investigations into the former president, one over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, and the more recent inquiry into his improper retention of top secret documents at his Florida residence.“Under long-standing department policy, prosecutors are barred from taking investigative steps or filing charges for the purpose of affecting an election or helping a candidate or party, traditionally 60 days before an election,” Bloomberg says.“This year, that would be by Sept 10, which makes it unlikely anything would be announced until after November 8.”Bloomberg said its sources asked to remain anonymous when speaking about potential justice department actions.It further notes that it is not clear if any of the investigations into Trump will have reached the point by November that a decision on charging him could be made.Secretary of state Antony Blinken paid tribute to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died aged 91, as “a man who changed the course of human history”.In a statement posted to the state department’s website, Blinken gave Gorbachev credit for several “massive achievements” of the last century – including the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and reductions in nuclear arms:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}We join people around the world in mourning the passing of Mikhail Gorbachev. Perhaps no word is more closely associated with Mr Gorbachev than glasnost, or openness. That’s fitting for a man whose openness changed the course of human history.
      Mr Gorbachev was open to acknowledging his country’s history – not just its triumphs, but its tragedies – what he called the ‘blank spots’ of the Soviet Union’s past. He created space for dissenting views, and freed dissidents who had spent years in exile or prison. He was also open to working with other nations, including adversaries like the United States, driven by the conviction that dialogue was in the interest of his people – and all people.
      It’s tempting to see the massive achievements of that engagement – including the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first-ever agreement to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the US and USSR – as inevitable. But those achievements would have been unimaginable without the courage and determination Mr Gorbachev brought to his pursuit of openness, and the trust he built with presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.
      He never lost faith in the transformative power of such engagement, even as some of his greatest accomplishments were weakened. In 2018, he wrote, ‘Is it too late to return to dialogue and negotiations? I don’t want to lose hope … We must not resign, we must not surrender’.
      He was right, and his life is a powerful reminder of all that can be achieved when we make those ideals a reality.Donald Trump is repeating his assertion, debunked in the justice department’s legal filing, that he “declassified” the top secret documents seized by the FBI in their raid on his Florida home.Among a series of posts by the former president on his favored Truth Social platform on Wednesday, he also accused federal agents of “haphazardly” scattering the documents on the floor to photograph them:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see.
      Thought they wanted them kept Secret? Lucky I Declassified!As the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports, Trump has produced no paperwork that might confirm the insistence of himself and allies that he issued some sort of a standing order when he was president that any materials he took to Mar-a-Lago were declassified. The justice department, meanwhile, noted in the filing that at no time in the months during which national archives officials were seeking the documents’ return did Trump’s lawyers make any argument he declassified them. Trump’s predictable response echoes the reaction on Wednesday by Republicans, at least those willing to comment publicly. They attacked the FBI and justice department, and glossed over the fact that numerous top secret documents were recovered, some in his desk, after Trump’s legal team claimed a “diligent search” had failed to yield any.Vocal Trump acolyte Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, told Fox and Friends: “The one thing I’ve heard across this country Republicans, Democrats, the public, they don’t trust the [department of justice] and they want this to be transparent.“Hiding these documents and this information, keeping it within the DoJ is wrong. It needs to be transparent so people can start to build trust back in the FBI and the DoJ and what they’re doing”.Donald Trump boasted to close associates that he knew secrets about Emmanuel Macron’s sex life from US intelligence sources, it has been reported.The report in Rolling Stone magazine comes in the wake of the release of court documents on the classified and national defence documents found in a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on 8 August, which mention a file referred to as “info re: President of France”.It is unclear whether the file on Macron was classified or what it contained. But Rolling Stone claimed that its mention in the official inventory of what was seized at Mar-a-Lago caused a “transatlantic freakout” between Paris and Washington.A French embassy spokesperson said: “We do not comment on legal proceedings in the US and … the embassy has not asked the administration for any information concerning the documents retrieved at former President Trump’s residence.”Neither the state department nor Trump’s office have so far responded to a request for comment.The Rolling Stone report said that during and after his presidency, Trump claimed to some of his closest associates that he knew details of Macron’s private life, which he had gleaned from “intelligence” he had seen or been briefed on.Macron initially courted Trump, inviting him to the Bastille Day military parade in 2017 just two months after he was elected, inspiring the US president to badger his own generals to stage a similar show of military pageantry in Washington.Relations soon soured between the two leaders, particularly after Macron’s failure to persuade Trump to stay in the nuclear deal with Iran. Trump took the US out of the deal in 2018, and it has unravelled since then.Read the full story:Trump boasted he had ‘intelligence’ on Macron’s sex lifeRead moreAdam Schiff, a senior Democrat who led the first House impeachment of Donald Trump, says the former president and his allies “knowingly put our national security at risk” by stashing highly classified documents at his Florida residence.The California congressman gave his assessment in a series of Tweets following the justice department’s legal filing that suggests Trump obstructed an investigation into his improper retention of the documents, lied about having them and tried to conceal them.The government’s brief is devastating. The legal arguments are compelling, but what is most striking are the facts outlining how the former president and his team knowingly put our national security at risk.Here’s what stands out to me:(1/7) pic.twitter.com/VTS69C22hb— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 31, 2022
      “The legal arguments are compelling, but what is most striking are the facts outlining how the former president and his team knowingly put our national security at risk,” Schiff wrote.“This is Trump’s counsel swearing there were no more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. That was obviously false. Someone isn’t telling the truth,” he posted alongside an image of the filing in which Trump’s team claims a “diligent search” failed to turn up documents later recovered by the FBI.“It’s no wonder they wouldn’t allow a look inside the boxes – there were still lots of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago [Trump’s Palm Beach residence and resort].“The deception was deliberate. The government found classified papers in multiple locations throughout Mar-a-Lago, a public hotel. Considering the secret markings, this is reckless in the extreme”.Most damning of all, Schiff added, the documents “so sensitive, so protected that senior FBI agents and DOJ attorneys couldn’t even initially review them. [They] were kept at a public resort. Potentially available to God knows who”.It is not the first time Schiff, a frequent critic of Trump, has accused him of selling out his country. During his fiery closing argument to Trump’s first Senate trial in February 2020, Schiff, the House impeachment manager, said: “He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again.“You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it”.The Republican majority in the Senate subsequently acquitted Trump of obstructing Congress and abuse of power.Charlie Crist, who last week won the Democratic nomination for governor of Florida, resigned from Congress on Wednesday to concentrate on his campaign to try to unseat Republican Ron DeSantis.Crist, himself a former Florida governor as a Republican, was House representative for St Petersburg, on the state’s west coast where he has his campaign headquarters, since 2017.He told the Tampa Bay Times in a brief statement that his resignation from Washington DC would be effective at the end of Wednesday.He gave no reason for his decision, but there are fewer than 10 weeks left before the November election in which he faces an uphill battle to topple DeSantis, a popular figure in Republican circles for his “culture war” agenda and a likely candidate for the party’s nomination in the 2024 presidential election.Representing the people of his district, Crist said, was “an honor and a privilege”.His resignation erodes Democrats’ working majority in the House, i.e. only voting members, to just three votes. As a first-time presidential candidate, Donald Trump repeatedly demanded that Hillary Clinton be sent to jail. “Lock her up” emerged as a battle cry for the 45th president and his fans. He also pledged that his presidency would properly handle the nation’s secrets.“In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information,” Trump intoned at a 2016 rally in North Carolina. “No one will be above the law.” As promises go, this one aged badly – much like his commitment to release his tax returns.On Tuesday night, the government filed its 36-page opposition to the ex-reality-show host’s demand that a special master be appointed. (A special master is an independent mediator appointed to go through documents and determine which may be protected by privilege.)Trump’s gambit backfired, however. Once again, he looks like a liar. Beyond that, his lawyers became his lackeys. Christina Bobb meet William Barr.New legal filings paint Trump as a flailing liar surrounded by lackeys | Lloyd GreenRead more More