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      in Elections

      Arizona race could give Democrats extra Senate seat for supreme court fight

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      If he wins a US Senate seat in Arizona, the former astronaut Mark Kelly could take office as early as 30 November, an outcome which might jeopardize the launch of Donald Trump’s third supreme court nominee. The Democratic candidate has maintained a polling lead over the Republican Martha McSally, who was appointed to the seat held by John McCain, who died in 2018. Because the contest is a special election to finish McCain’s term, the winner could be sworn in as soon as the results are certified. Other winners in November’s contest, in which Democrats hope to retake the Senate, will not take office until January. Trump has pledged to nominate a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has vowed that the nominee “will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate”.If Kelly wins, when he takes office could be crucial in deciding the ensuing nomination fight. Republicans currently hold the chamber by 53 seats to 47. The prospect of falling to 52 could prompt McConnell to speed up the nomination process. With McSally in the Senate, four defections would defeat a nomination. A tie vote could be broken by Vice-President Mike Pence. Within hours of the announcement of Ginsberg’s death, McSally declared that “this US Senate should vote on President Trump’s next nominee for the US supreme court”. She has not elaborated on whether the vote should come before or after the election. But she highlighted the renewed stakes of her race in a fundraising pitch on Saturday. “If Mark Kelly comes out on top, HE could block President Trump’s supreme court Nominee from being confirmed,” McSally wrote. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats found success in Arizona, long dominated by the GOP, by appealing to Republicans and independents disaffected with Trump. The supreme court vacancy could boost McSally by keeping those voters in her camp. Kelly said late on Saturday: “The people elected to the presidency and Senate in November should fill this vacancy. When it comes to making a lifetime appointment to the supreme court, Washington shouldn’t rush that process for political purposes.” Arizona law requires election results to be certified on the fourth Monday after the election, which falls this year on 30 November. The certification could be delayed up to three days if the state has not received election results from any of its 15 counties. Mary O’Grady, a Democratic lawyer, said the deadlines are firm. “I don’t see ambiguity here,” said O’Grady, Arizona’s solicitor general under two Democratic attorneys general, adding that state law allows recounts and election challenges only under very limited circumstances. Former Senate historian Don Ritchie told the Arizona Republic, which first reported on the prospect for Kelly taking office early a day before Ginsburg’s death: “Usually, the secretary of the Senate’s office goes out of its way to accommodate the new senators coming in.“The old senator is out of their office there. I mean, they actually literally put a lock on the door so their staff can’t go in.” More

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      in Elections

      'I will fight!': mourners' vow at supreme court vigil for Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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      On a pavement across the street from the supreme court, school teacher Amanda Stafford chalked the words carefully: “That’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.”It was a quotation from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a justice more renowned for her dissents than her majority opinions, including on the Bush v Gore case that decided the 2000 presidential election. Ginsburg died from pancreatic cancer on Friday aged 87, the newest jolt to an angry, divided and fragile nation.On Saturday night, as summer succumbed to the chill of autumn, thousands came to mourn her at a vigil outside the court in Washington. Some made speeches. Others sang songs. More joined hands or laid flowers and candles. Stafford paid tribute in chalk.“I wanted to show words that are empowering at a time when a lot of people are feeling worn out,” the 31-year-old from Alexandria, Virginia, explained. “As a woman in a country getting ever more divided, it’s important to come out and make a stand for someone who made this her life’s work.”What is the state of American democracy that one single woman passing away feels like a harbinger of hopelessness?Amanda StaffordLike many others, including numerous mothers and daughters, Stafford was hit hard by the loss of the feminist lodestar.“I broke down crying and went to sit in a park, sobbing. I called my closest girlfriends and we cried together. What is the state of American democracy that one single woman passing away feels like a harbinger of hopelessness? We’re already in a pandemic and losing her felt like the end.”Stafford’s homage was one of many outside the court, built in the 1930s in classical style to project the full majesty of the law, its 16 marble columns illuminated as two US flags flew at half mast. “RIP RGB,” said one banner in the rainbow colours of the LGBTQ movement. “For my daughter,” said another, simply.“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time – Ruth Bader Ginsburg” was written on cardboard sign amid a sea of pictures, candles and flowers. “She kept theology off our biology” was among the acknowledgements of Ginsburg’s support for reproductive rights. More

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      in US Politics

      Rushing to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, McConnell shows power trumps principle | Robert Reich

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      People in public life tend to fall into one of two broad categories – those motivated by principle, and those motivated by power.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday night at the age of 87, exemplified the first.When he nominated her in 1993, Bill Clinton called her “the Thurgood Marshall of gender-equality law”, comparing her advocacy and lower-court rulings in pursuit of equal rights for women to the work of the great jurist who advanced the cause of equal rights for Black people. Ginsburg persuaded the supreme court that the 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection applied not only to racial discrimination but to sex discrimination as well.For Ginsburg, principle was everything – not only equal rights, but also the integrity of democracy. Always concerned about the consequences of her actions for the system as a whole, she advised young people “to fight for the things you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you”.My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installedRuth Bader GinsburgMitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, exemplifies the second category. He couldn’t care less about principle. He is motivated entirely by the pursuit of power.McConnell refused to allow the Senate to vote on Barack Obama’s nominee to the supreme court, Merrick Garland, in February 2016 – almost a year before the end of Obama’s second term – on the dubious grounds that the “vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president”.McConnell’s move was a pure power grab. No Senate leader had ever before asserted the right to block a vote on a president’s nominee to the supreme court.McConnell’s “principle” of waiting for a new president disappeared on Friday evening, after Ginsburg’s death was announced.Just weeks before one of the most consequential presidential elections in American history, when absentee voting has already begun in many states (and will start in McConnell’s own state of Kentucky in 25 days), McConnell announced: “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”This is, after all, the same Mitch McConnell who, soon after Trump was elected, ended the age-old requirement that supreme court nominees receive 60 votes to end debate and allow for a confirmation vote, and then, days later, pushed through Trump’s first nominee, Neil Gorsuch.Ginsburg and McConnell represent the opposite poles of public service today. The distinction doesn’t depend on whether someone is a jurist or legislator – I’ve known many lawmakers who cared more about principle than power, such as the late congressman John Lewis. It depends on values.Ginsburg refused to play power politics. As she passed her 80th birthday, near the start of Obama’s second term, she dismissed calls for her to retire in order to give Obama plenty of time to name her replacement, saying she planned to stay “as long as I can do the job full steam”, adding: “There will be a president after this one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president.”She hoped others would also live by principle, including McConnell and Trump. Just days before her death she said: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”Her wish will not be honored.McConnell’s ‘principle’ of waiting for a new president disappeared on Friday eveningIf McConnell cannot muster the Senate votes needed to confirm Trump’s nominee before the election, he’ll probably try to fill the vacancy in the lame-duck session after the election. He’s that shameless.Not even with Joe Biden president and control over both the House and Senate can Democrats do anything about this – except, perhaps, by playing power politics themselves: expanding the size of the court or restructuring it so justices on any given case are drawn from a pool of appellate judges.The deeper question is which will prevail in public life: McConnell’s power politics or Ginsburg’s dedication to principle?The problem for America, as for many other democracies at this point in history, is this is not an even match. Those who fight for power will bend or break rules to give themselves every advantage. Those who fight for principle are at an inherent disadvantage because bending or breaking rules undermines the very ideals they seek to uphold.Over time, the unbridled pursuit of power wears down democratic institutions, erodes public trust and breeds the sort of cynicism that invites despotism.The only bulwark is a public that holds power accountable – demanding stronger guardrails against its abuses, and voting power-mongers out of office.Ruth Bader Ginsburg often referred to Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous quote, that “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people”. Indeed. More

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      in US Politics

      'Vote like your life depends on it': Pete Buttigieg's message to LGBTQ youth

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      For Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus, the threat of a second Trump term is both political and deeply personal.Donald Trump has claimed to be a staunch supporter of LGBTQ rights but he has sought to undermine them through the courts. His vice-president, Mike Pence, has long opposed same-sex marriage.“When you see your own rights come up for debate, when you know something as intimate and central to your life as the existence of your family is something that is not supported by your president, and certainly your vice-president, it’s painful,” Buttigieg says by phone from Traverse City, Michigan, where his husband Chasten grew up.“It creates a sense of urgency that I hope will motivate many people – including a lot of LGBTQ younger people who maybe weren’t deciding so much how to vote as they were whether to vote – to see now is the time to vote like your life depends on it.”Buttigieg, 38 and the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was a breakout star of presidential politics in that seemingly distant pre-pandemic age that was in fact February. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford and war veteran in Afghanistan, he beat senators and a former vice-president to make history by narrowly winning the Iowa caucuses.I’m mindful every day that my marriage exists by the grace of one vote on our supreme courtBut after a crushing defeat in South Carolina, Buttigieg quit the race on 1 March, joining other moderates in throwing his weight behind Joe Biden. He is now launching his own podcast and prosecuting the case against Trump in the media – including on LGBTQ rights.In June, the Republican party issued a press release that claimed “President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to protect the LGBTQ community”. Among its examples to support this were the selection of Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence, making him the first openly gay person to hold a cabinet-level position. Grenell has called Trump the “most pro-gay president in American history”.But LGBTQ rights activists are not buying it, pointing out that Trump banned transgender people from the military and reversed many of their legal protections. He also opposes the Equality Act, that would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in housing, the workplace and other settings, and his agencies are trying to give adoption and foster care agencies the right to discriminate against same-sex couples.The power of Washington over individual lives was made viscerally clear to Buttigieg by the 2015 supreme court ruling that legalised same-sex marriage nationwide. Three years later he married Chasten, a junior high school teacher who became a popular figure on the campaign trail.Buttigieg says: “I’m mindful every day that my marriage exists by the grace of one vote on our supreme court and we’ve seen the kind of extreme appointees that have been placed on the bench by this administration.“We’ve seen how, despite sometimes paying lip service to the community, [Trump has] rarely missed an opportunity to attack the community, especially trans people, whether we’re talking about the ban on military service or issues around healthcare. But even for same-sex international adoption, this administration has taken us in the wrong direction and four more years would be a tremendous setback.“Also around the world, we’re seeing, for example in eastern Europe, really disturbing setbacks in LGBTQ rights and equality without a strong United States leading the way in human rights, which requires leadership and credibility and also that we’re doing the right thing here at home. Without that, I think that people around the world are less safe.”In Poland, for example, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the governing party, has said homosexuality represents a “threat to Polish identity”. When six towns declared themselves “LGBT ideology-free zones”, the European Union froze funding. But the US has been silent. Hosting Polish president Andrzej Duda at the White House in June, Trump said: “I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to Poland than we are right now.” More

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      in US Politics

      Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supreme court justice, dies aged 87

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg

      Stalwart of court’s liberal bloc had survived four cancer treatments
      Death of justice gives Trump chance of third appointment

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      3:20

      Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her own words – video obituary

      The supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died of pancreatic cancer, the court said Friday. She was 87.
      Ginsburg was the second woman appointed to the court in history and became a liberal icon for her sharp questioning of witnesses and intellectually rigorous defenses of civil liberties, reproductive rights, first amendment rights and equal protections under the law.
      In a statement, the court said Ginsburg, who served more than 27 years on the bench, “died this evening surrounded by her family at her home in Washington DC, due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer”.
      The chief justice, John Roberts, said that the nation “has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the supreme court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her – a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
      Her death thrust an immediate spotlight on who might fill the vacancy on the court, with just over six weeks before the election. The news was received with alarm by liberals and moderates who feared that Republicans would exploit the narrow window to install a third Donald Trump appointee on the supreme court.
      The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, pledged to get Trump a swift vote his supreme court pick. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” McConnell said. More

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      in US Politics

      A disputed election, a constitutional crisis, polarisation … welcome to 1876

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      As Donald Trump warns inaccurately of voter fraud and polls show the unpopular president staying within touching distance of Democrat Joe Biden, the prospect of an unresolved US election draws horribly near, especially as the impact of the coronavirus is widely seen as likely to delay a result by days, if not weeks.Across the political spectrum, pundits are predicting what may happen should Trump refuse to surrender power. The speculation is tantalising but the short answer is that nobody has a clue.History does provide some sort of guide. There have been inconclusive US elections before. They were resolved, but not by any constitutional mechanism and the consequences of such brutal political contests have been severe indeed.In 2000, the supreme court decided a disputed Florida result and put a Republican, George W Bush, in the White House instead of the Democrat Al Gore. Though of course the justices could not know it, they had put America on the road to war in Iraq, economic crisis, the rise of the evangelical right and a deepening political divide.That case is well within living memory. But an election much further back produced even more damaging results.The campaign of 1876 ended with the electoral college in the balance as three states were disputed. Out of deadlock, eventually, came a political deal, giving the Republican Rutherford Hayes the presidency at the expense of Samuel Tilden, who like Gore, and indeed Hillary Clinton in 2016, won the popular vote.Tilden’s compensation was that his party, the Democrats, were allowed to put an end to Reconstruction, the process by which the victors in the civil war abolished slavery and sought to ensure the rights of black Americans, via the 13th, 14th and 15th constitutional amendments.The awful result was Jim Crow, the system of white supremacy and segregation which lasted well into the 20th century and whose legacy remains crushingly strong in a country now gripped by protests against police brutality and for systemic reform.Eric Foner, now retired from Columbia University, is America’s pre-eminent historian of the civil war, slavery and Reconstruction, a prize-winner many times over. He told the Guardian the US of 2020 is not prepared for what may be around the corner.“In 1877 there were three states, Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, where two different sets of returns were sent up, one by the Democrats, one by the Republicans, each claiming to have carried the state.“There was no established mechanism and in fact, in the end, we went around the constitution, or beyond the constitution, or ignored the constitution. It was settled by an extralegal body called the Electoral Commission, which was established by Congress to decide who won.” More