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      in US Politics

      The path to Joe Biden’s victory: five days in five minutes – video highlights

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      President-elect Joe Biden has thanked the American people for their support after winning the US presidential election against Donald Trump. From razor-thin margins, record voter turnout and protests via false claims of victory and Joe and Kamala Harris’s congratulatory call – here’s the story of how the presidency was won
      US election 2020 – live updates
      Biden styled himself as the antithesis to bare-knuckled Trumpism – and won More

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      in Elections

      Joe Biden wins US election after four tumultuous years of Trump presidency

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      Joe Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States, achieving a decades-long political ambition and denying Donald Trump a second term after a deeply divisive presidency defined by a once-in-a-century pandemic, economic turmoil and social unrest.
      Biden won the presidency by clinching Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes, after several days of painstaking vote-counting following record turnout across the country. The win in Pennsylvania, which the Associated Press called at 11.25am ET on Saturday with 99% of the votes counted, took Biden’s electoral college vote to 284, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House.
      “In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of Americans voted, proving once again that democracy beats deep in the heart of America,” Biden said in a statement after the result was called on Saturday, exactly 48 years after he was first elected to the US Senate.
      “With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite and to heal.”
      The president-elect, joined by his running mate, Kamala Harris, was expected to address the nation later on Saturday.

      In electing Biden, the American people have replaced a real estate developer and reality TV star who had no previous political experience with a veteran of Washington who has spent more than 50 years in public life, and who twice ran unsuccessfully for president. Trump is the first incumbent to lose re-election since 1992, when Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush.
      Despite a long-standing tradition of peacefully accepting the outcome of US elections, Trump refused to concede and threatened unspecified legal challenges regarding the vote counting process.
      Biden’s victory, fueled by women and people of color who spent the last four years resisting and mobilizing against Trump, was celebrated as a repudiation of a president who shattered democratic norms and stoked racial and cultural grievance. Cheers, honking and dancing erupted in emotional displays of joy on the streets of major cities across the country, including in the nation’s capital, where Biden will be sworn into office on 20 January.
      However, the nation’s deep divisions were laid bare as pro-Trump protesters continued to claim that the election had been stolen from a president who millions still view as a defender of “law and order” at home and of “America first” abroad.
      With turnout projected to reach its highest point in a century despite the pandemic, a fearful and anxious nation elected a candidate who promised to govern not as a Democrat but as an “American president” and vowed to be a unifying force after four years of upheaval.

      The result also marked a historic milestone for Harris, 56, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants who will become the first woman – and the first woman of color – to serve as vice-president. Her presence on the Democratic ticket was a rejoinder to Trump, who spent four years scapegoating migrants and attacking women and communities of color.
      The outcome threatened to send convulsions across the country, as Trump and his campaign continued to make baseless claims of voter fraud and vowed to challenge the results.
      “Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media,” the president said in a statement, which was sent while he played golf at his golf course in Virginia.
      Trump’s statement included a litany of unfounded assertions about the vote-counting process, and attempted to undermine faith in the integrity of the electoral system by advancing a conspiracy about “legal” and “illegal” votes.
      At 77, Biden is set to become America’s oldest president. His triumph came more than 48 hours after polls closed on election day, as officials in key states worked furiously to tally ballots amid an unprecedented surge in mail-in voting due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 people and infected millions.
      A father and husband who buried his first wife and his infant daughter in 1972 after they were killed in a car crash, and decades later buried his adult son after he died from brain cancer in 2015, Biden sought to empathize with Americans who lost loved ones to the coronavirus. More

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      in US Politics

      US election live updates: Biden edges toward victory with leads over Trump in Nevada and Pennsylvania

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      Key events

      Show

      2.20pm EST14:20
      Biden is poised for victory with leads in Pennsylvania and Nevada

      Live feed

      Show

      4.43pm EST16:43

      Let’s check in with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former adviser who is now facing fraud charges over allegations he misused money that was meant to help build a wall along the US-Mexican border.
      Bannon has now lost his lawyer in the fraud case after suggesting Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.
      The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont reports:

      Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
      ‘Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,’ Bannon said.
      ‘I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.’
      Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
      The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
      Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.

      4.26pm EST16:26

      The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:
      The corner of 12th and Arch Street has become the epicenter of the political universe over the last few days as demonstrators have gathered to face off. The larger group has urged officials to “count every vote,” while a smaller pro-Trump group has cheered to “stop the steam.”
      At times, it’s felt a little tense as protesters have confronted one another and the anti-Trump crowd has drowned out pro-Trump surrogates like Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski.
      But on Friday the intersection had a notably different tone – the “count every vote” group essentially transformed into a large dance party. The celebration came as Joe Biden took a lead in the count for ballots in this key swing state.

      Sam Levine
      (@srl)
      More dancing pic.twitter.com/IQjaalnCEL

      November 6, 2020

      “It feels great to finally celebrate something,” said Ann Dixon, who said she hasn’t been following the incremental changes in vote totals because she wants “every vote to be counted and it’s not over til its over.” She said she was concerned, however, that Trump would try and drag out the vote count, which would divide the country more and more.
      Protesters young and old danced to a mix of music, which included Beyoncé, the Backstreet Boys, and Shakira.
      “I sort of debated whether or not I should come out and then I decided I should. It’s important to sort of celebrate despite having a bunch of work to still do moving forward,” said Rachel MacDonald. “I’m not really motivated by anger in the same way and so I decided I should come out and dance with everybody as well and not just yell,”
      She was there with her friend Hannah Chervitz, who was attending her first protest.
      “It’s nice to come out and channel all of this energy into something positive,” Chervitz said.

      4.09pm EST16:09

      MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki explained why his network, like the AP, has not yet called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden.

      MSNBC
      (@MSNBC)
      WATCH: @SteveKornacki details the outstanding ballots that remain to be counted in Pennsylvania.#TrackingKornacki #MSNBC2020 pic.twitter.com/epjmpGxRLh

      November 6, 2020

      Kornacki explained that there are about 200,000 ballots left to be counted in the state. About half of them are mail-in ballots, and half of them are provisional ballots.
      Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have been very favorable for Biden, as it appears most of Donald Trump’s supporters chose to vote in person. But some of those ballots may still be challenged.
      Historically, provisional ballots are also very favorable for Democrats, but so far, they have been a bit better for Trump. One explanation for this is that some of the president’s supporters received mail-in ballots but then chose to vote in person instead, so they received provisional ballots to allow election officials to confirm the vote was valid.
      But election analyst Nate Silver said he was skeptical of that analysis:

      Nate Silver
      (@NateSilver538)
      So, I am open-minded but not super persuaded by this. There are a handful of counties to have counted provisional ballots so far and those ballots indeed went for Trump, but they came from counties where the rest of the vote was *even stronger* for Trump.https://t.co/DXMdQJyfS5 https://t.co/h3gyCwCeNK

      November 6, 2020

      3.51pm EST15:51

      A Republican congressman is engaging in a Twitter battle with one of his new colleagues, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.
      It all started when congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican of Texas, sent a tweet this afternoon, saying, “If Trump loses, he loses. It was never an impossible outcome and we must accept the final results when it is over.
      “But the unfortunate reality is that there is very little trust in the process, where irregularities have been flagrant and transparency lacking.”

      Dan Crenshaw
      (@DanCrenshawTX)
      If Trump loses, he loses. It was never an impossible outcome and we must accept the final results when it is over. But the unfortunate reality is that there is very little trust in the process, where irregularities have been flagrant and transparency lacking.

      November 6, 2020

      That second sentence looks past the fact that Donald Trump has worked diligently to sow distrust in the election results, and the president’s advisers have been allowed to view the vote count in multiple battleground states.
      But we’ll set that aside for a second. After Crenshaw sent that tweet, Greene, who is now a congresswoman-elect after winning her congressional race on Tuesday, replied, “The time to STAND UP for @realDonaldTrump is RIGHT NOW! Republicans can’t back down. This loser mindset is how the Democrats win.”

      Dan Crenshaw
      (@DanCrenshawTX)
      Did you even read past the first sentence? Or are you just purposely lying so you can talk tough? No one said give up. I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts. You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one. https://t.co/47a7Gqq4lH

      November 6, 2020

      Crenshaw responded by chastising Greene and urging her to live up to the office she has been elected to. “I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts,” Crenshaw said. “You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one.”
      That dust-up could preview some of the contentious conversations to come in the House Republican caucus once Greene is seated in January.

      3.40pm EST15:40

      The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:
      It is a US-born slur that was inspired by Honduras and has haunted Latin America for decades – a deprecatory way to describe politically volatile and economically puny backwaters ruled by erratic and venal autocrats.
      But on Friday, after Donald Trump’s alarming press conference at the White House yesterday, voices across the region, from Mexico to Uruguay, delighted in lobbing the insult back at their neighbours to the north.
      “Who’s the banana republic now?” wondered the frontpage headline of Colombia’s Publimetro, one of many Latin American newspapers whose editors thought the term perfectly captured the electoral turmoil playing out in the US.

      Tom Phillips
      (@tomphillipsin)
      “Who’s the banana republic now?” wonders Colombia’s @PublimetroCol 😬 pic.twitter.com/GGUUB1oUsT

      November 6, 2020

      Over the border in Venezuela, a columnist from the El Nacional agreed calling Trump’s behaviour “intemperate and foolish” and telling readers the US election seemed to be taking place “in a country at war, or a república bananera”.
      Merval Pereira, one of Brazil’s most prominent political commentators, called his daily column “Bananas americanas” and wrote: “This is a singular event in US democratic history which puts the country in the list of banana republics, an expression created by the Americans themselves.”
      The Latin American Twittersphere went bananas too, with the Uruguayan human rights defender Javier Palummo asking followers: “How do you say banana republic in American English?”

      3.29pm EST15:29

      The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:
      One of Donald Trump’s most devoted international disciples, the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, now seems to be decoupling from his political idol.
      Bolsonaro has been one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders and revels in being portrayed as South America’s “tropical Trump”. Last year Brazil’s far-right leader was reported to have told his fellow populist: “I love you”.
      But on Friday morning, with a Trump defeat looking increasingly likely, Bolsonaro appeared to jump ship. “I’m not the most important person in Brazil just as Trump isn’t the most important person in the world, as he’s said himself,” he told an event in southern Brazil. “The most important person is God.”
      To hammer his point home Bolsonaro later posted a video of those comments to his Twitter feed, where he has 6.6 million followers. Despite Bolsonaro’s admiration for Trump, the US president is reportedly not one of them.

      3.16pm EST15:16

      Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, held another press conference as the margin in the race for his state’s 16 electoral votes remains razor-thin.
      “We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections,” Raffensperger said, promising an “open and transparent” vote-counting process.
      Raffensperger once again acknowledged that, with a margin this small, a recount was all but certain in the state.
      The Republican official defended the integrity of the vote-count, saying he was committed to ensuring trust in the process.
      As of now, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 1,603 votes in Georgia, out of nearly 5 million ballots cast in the state.

      3.07pm EST15:07

      The Guardian’s Sam Levin reports from Los Angeles:
      Jackie Lacey, the Los Angeles district attorney, was ousted by her progressive challenger, in one of the most closely watched criminal justice races in the US this year.
      George Gascón, the former police chief and district attorney of San Francisco, won the race to lead the Los Angeles prosecutors’ office with more than 53% of the vote. Black Lives Matter LA and other activist groups played a major role in the heated contest, having protested Lacey’s policies for years. More

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      in Elections

      Senate boost for Democrats as two Georgia races look set for runoffs

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      Democratic hopes of wrenching control of the Senate from Republicans received an unexpected boost as it seems likely that two key races in the southern state of Georgia may be headed to runoff races.
      One of the races is definitely headed to a second round in January, while a second Georgia contest and races in North Carolina and Alaska remain undecided, leaving the chamber now deadlocked 48-48. An outcome may now not be known until the new year.
      Republicans look likely to win in North Carolina and Alaska, but Democrats would undoubtedly focus huge amounts of energy and money on trying to win the Georgia runoffs. If both races did go to runoffs – and Democrats were to win them – it would leave the Senate split 50-50, with the vice-president serving as a tie-breaker.
      If Joe Biden is in the White House, that would mean a vice-president Kamala Harris would be the deciding vote in the Senate. If Donald Trump wins a second term, then it would be Mike Pence, the current vice-president.
      “We’re waiting – whether I’m going to be the majority leader or not,” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday.
      That was still the case on Thursday.
      Counting continued in Georgia on Thursday, where Republican David Perdue was trying to hold off Democrat Jon Ossoff in a multi-candidate race that could also go to a runoff if neither candidate clears the 50% threshold to win.

      There already is a 5 January runoff in the state’s other Senate race. Republican senator Kelly Loeffler will face Democrat Raphael Warnock, a Black pastor at the church where the Rev Martin Luther King preached. Loeffler and Warnock were the top vote-getters in the race, but neither candidate was able to get a majority of the vote needed to win the seat outright.
      In North Carolina, Republican senator Thom Tillis hoped to prevail over Democrat Cal Cunningham, whose sexting affair with a public relations specialist has clouded the race. Republicans were confident they would keep Alaska, where Republican senator Dan Sullivan was faced a challenge by Democratic newcomer Al Gross, a doctor.
      Winning the Senate is vital as America’s complex governmental system of checks and balances gives the upper chamber of congress immense power in limiting a president’s ability to get their legislative agenda passed as well as having influence on key administration and judicial appointment.
      McConnell was one of Barack Obama’s chief legislative adversaries while Obama was in office. The Senate majority leader successfully stalled major initiatives by the Obama administration and Senate Democrats. Under Trump, McConnell has successfully ushered through a wave of judicial confirmations through his chamber.
      He has already signaled that if he were to control the senate under any Biden administration that he would be ruthless in exercising those powers.
      A source close to McConnell reportedly told the Axios website that a Republican held senate would work with Biden on centrist nominees but not allow any “radical progressives” or ones who are controversial with its conservative senators.
      Before the election Democrat hopes had been riding high that they would win control of the Senate and wrest it from McConnell’s grip. A slew of favorable polls had many Democrats even eying gains in traditionally strongly Republican areas like Kansas and South Carolina, and money had been poured into those races. But on the night itself, a stronger than expected Republican surge put paid to those hopes as well as dashed expectations in far more vulnerable seats, like that of Susan Collins in Maine and Joni Ernst in Iowa.
      In the end, Democrats’ gains were in Colorado, where former governor John Hickenlooper defeated senator Cory Gardner, and Arizona, where former astronaut Mark Kelly beat Republican incumbent Martha McSally. But Democrats couldn’t hold on in Alabama, where former college football coach Tommy Tuberville defeated Democrat Doug Jones. More

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      in US Politics

      Cori Bush delivers electrifying victory speech: 'This is our moment … I love you' – video

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      Cori Bush is set to become the first Black congresswoman in the history of Missouri after storming to victory over her Republican rival Anthony Rogers with more than 75% of the vote in the state’s 1st district, which includes the city of St Louis.
      Bush, a single mother, nurse and former Covid patient, gave a rousing victory speech on Tuesday, saying: ‘This is our moment to finally, finally start living and growing and thriving … My message today is to every Black, brown, immigrant, queer, and trans person, and to every person locked out of opportunities to thrive because of oppressive systems: I’m here to serve you. To every person who knows what it’s like to give a loved one that “just make it home safely, baby” talk: I love you.’
      ‘Count every vote’: protesters take to streets across US
      Why are the media reporting different US election results?
      Trump v Biden – full results as they come in More

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      in US Politics

      US Senate and House election results: Politics Weekly Extra podcast

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      As nail-biting as the US presidential election has been, Jonathan Freedland and Lauren Gambino have been following the battle for control of Congress. They discuss the latest in both races.

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      The Democrats were hoping for the “blue wave” to crash over the Senate, but that didn’t happen. As it stands, Biden is edging ever closer to the White House but we still don’t know for sure. Democrats are still in control of the lower chamber, and the Republicans still have the upper chamber. There wasn’t a wave, but there were some interesting tidal changes over the last few days and to navigate us through some of these, Jonathan Freedland is joined by senior political reporter for Guardian US Lauren Gambino. Let us know what you think of the podcast. Send your feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on the US elections: a nation dangerously divided | Editorial

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      Whoever wins this year’s election, America remains a country bitterly and evenly divided. It has been more than three decades since the last presidential landslide. Despite polls suggesting that Donald Trump was poised to suffer a sweeping rejection by the voters, there was no repudiation of the president. Rather, just a fraction of the popular vote separates Joe Biden and Mr Trump.
      Our view was that Mr Trump deserved to lose and in a big way. His mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, which cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, was cause enough. But there were numerous reasons for Mr Trump’s ejection from the White House, given he ran the worst administration in modern US history.
      It is small comfort that Americans understood the threat that Mr Trump represented and turned out in record numbers to vote against him. Yet, as this election depressingly revealed, there was an almost equal and opposite reaction from Mr Trump’s base. The president’s appeal, it seems, has only widened and deepened since he took office. Mr Trump received so many more votes than he did in 2016 that his tally is only surpassed by Mr Biden this year, and Barack Obama in 2008.
      Should he depart, and there are few signs he will do so without a fight, Mr Trump’s legacy will be the politics of anger and hate. It is a tragedy for America that a poisonous division is becoming the norm rather than the exception. The concern in the US is that cultural divisions have gone past the point of no return. The priority for Americans must be to work out a way to stop the political rift from yawning so wide that the two hostile, sometimes armed, camps are incapable of talking to each other.
      The national conversation will not be easy to start, especially given the venomous way in which President Trump conducts politics. If there was any idea that the country could pick up after the election where it left off in 2016, it vanished the moment Mr Trump declared a victory he obviously had not yet won. His claim that his legal team would attempt to block states from counting all the votes that have already been cast, ballots which are widely viewed as certain to skew Democratic, was as outrageous as it was expected.
      Republicans have embraced their inner Trump, which is why democracy itself was on the ballot in 2020. Under Republican control, the US Congress, for the first two years of Trump’s presidency, did not check Mr Trump’s assault on the norms of democratic governance as much as enable it. The Grand Old Party has increasingly turned to policies designed to constrain the majority electorate. Faced with unfavourable demographic change, Republicans have cemented minority rule across American political institutions. The question that Mr Trump now poses is whether Republicans would go as far in their pursuit of power to undo a presidential election.
      The president may be counting on Republicans to subvert longstanding election norms or hope that the supreme court, to which he appointed three justices, will make the final call. If permitted, the ensuing constitutional crisis would dwarf Trumpism’s outrages. It would also play out against a background of heightened political mobilisation, which would bring with it the threat of civic strife.
      There is a real worry that the two main US parties appear locked in a dangerous and ferocious power struggle for control of the government. Mr Trump’s divisive politics have seen elections become a source of volatility in the world’s leading democracy. The margin of control of the Senate is so narrow that it would be foolish to predict who may end up in charge. Democrats retain their hold on the House of Representatives, but with a looser grip than before. This is a zero-sum game, where one party’s loss is another’s gain. Government in America, and its people, will be the losers. More

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      in Elections

      Record number of Native American women elected to Congress

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      The 117th Congress will have a record number of Native American women after voters elected three to the House of Representatives.Democrats Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo member representing New Mexico, and Sharice Davids, a Ho-Chunk Nation member representing Kansas, both retained their seats after becoming the first Native American women elected to Congress, in 2018.They are joined by Yvette Herrell, who is Cherokee. Herrell, a Republican, beat the Democratic incumbent Xochitl Torres Small for her New Mexico congressional seat.The wins for Herrell and Haaland mean that New Mexico will be the first state to have two indigenous women as congressional delegates. The state also became the first to elect women of color as all three of its delegates in the US House of Representatives.According to a Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) report, 18 indigenous women were running for congressional seats this year – a record in a single year. Native American women made up 2.6% of all women running for Congress this year, the highest percentage since CAWP started collecting data in 2004.There have been four Native Americans in the US Senate and a handful of indigenous US representatives. All were men until Haaland and Davids were elected in 2018.In Kansas, Stephanie Byers, who is Chickasaw and a retired teacher, became the state’s first transgender lawmaker when she won her race for a seat in its house of representatives.“We’ve made history here,” Byers said on Tuesday. “We’ve done something in Kansas most people thought would never happen, and we did it with really no pushback, by just focusing on the issues.”Also in Kansas, Christina Haswood, a Navajo Nation member, became the youngest person in the state legislature at 26. A third member of the Kansas house , Ponka-We Victors, a Tohono O’odham and Ponca member, won her re-election campaign.The US House of Representatives will have its highest number of indigenous representatives after Tuesday’s election, according to the independent Native American newspaper Indian Country Today.Six candidates, including Haaland, Davids and Herrell, won their elections. Two Oklahoma representatives, Tom Cole, who is Chickasaw, and Markwayne Mullin, who is Cherokee, won their re-elections, and Kaiali’i “Kai” Kahele, who is Native Hawaiian, won an open seat for Hawaii. There were previously four indigenous members of Congress, all in the House of Representatives. More