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      Republican says he wouldn’t back unconstitutional third Trump term

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      A conservative lawmaker poured cold water on extremist Republican fantasies that Donald Trump could find a way to run for an unconstitutional third presidential term, saying he would not support that barring an amendment to the US constitution that would legalize it.Asked Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press about Trump’s boasts that he might just stay in the Oval Office after his second presidency ends in 2028, the Republican US senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said: “No, I’m not changing the constitution, first of all, unless the American people chose to do that.”The comments from Mullin – who made it a point to invoke the maxim among some that Trump should be taken seriously though not literally – referred to a 1951 constitutional amendment that barred US presidents from serving beyond two terms.The exchange between Meet the Press host Kristen Welker and Mullin came after after Republican congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee proposed a resolution in support of a constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to serve a third stint in the White House because his two terms were not consecutive. That would bar the other three living former presidents who served two consecutive terms from seeking the Oval Office again.Furthermore, Trump recently referred to himself as “King” – a title with no term limits – when discussing his push to halt New York’s congestion pricing policy.The US constitution expressly forbids presidents from running for a third term thanks to its 22nd amendment. That amendment was introduced after Franklin D Roosevelt served two terms after being elected in 1932 – and then was re-elected in 1940 and 1944 amid the second world war. He served as president until his death in 1945.Proposing to change that amendment – in the form Ogles suggested or otherwise – would need approval from two-thirds of both the US Senate and House, which is a margin of control that Trump’s Republican party does not have in Congress. Three-fourths of the US’s state legislatures also would need to approve the change.Republicans as of last year controlled only the legislatures and governorships of about 23 of the US’s 50 states. Democrats controlled those same levers of power in 17 states, with the rest being divided.Nonetheless, that steep math has not stopped Trump from raising the possibility of staying in office beyond his second presidential term since his victory in November’s White House election.At a White House event on Thursday, he teased: “Should I run again? You tell me.”The audience, which included elected Republican officials like US senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Congressman John James of Michigan as well as famed golfer Tiger Woods, responded with chants of: “Four more years!”According to the Washington Post, Trump remarked that the crowd reaction to his comments would draw “controversy”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThey did indeed.On Sunday, the Democratic US House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said Trump is trying to “disorient everyday Americans” by talking about a third term and referring to himself as a monarch. Jeffries said those “outrageous” comments were “intentionally unleashing extremism”.Trump “is not a king”, Jeffries said on CNN’s State of the Union. “We will never bend the knee. Not now, not ever. And we’ll continue to point out that he’s focused on the wrong things.”As Republicans are wont to do when Trump muses on unconstitutional ideas, Mullin on Sunday insisted Trump was only joking about pursuing a third White House term.“The president is a very interesting guy that you can find extreme humor when you sit down to visit with him,” Mullin added. “At the same time, he can be deadly serious.” More

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      ‘X-rays into the president’s soul’: Jeffrey Toobin on Trump, Biden and the pardon power

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      To Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy, pardons are “X-rays into the soul” of the American president who gives them, revealing true character. Pardons can show compassion and mercy in the occupant of the Oval Office. More often, they expose venality and self-preservation.Toobin said: “One thing you can say about Donald Trump is that his moral compass always points in the same direction, and his motives are always the same, which are transactional and narcissistic. This is a good example, I think, of my thesis that pardons are X-rays into the president’s soul.”In his first term, Trump “wanted to settle a score with Robert Mueller, so he pardoned everyone Mueller prosecuted” in the special counsel’s investigation of Russian election interference in 2016 and links between Trump and Moscow, Toobin said.“Trump wanted to take care of his family, so he pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner,” who is now nominated as US ambassador to France, the author added. “He wanted to reward his House Republican allies, so he pardoned several who were engaged in egregious corruption, and he pardoned people who were [his son-in-law and adviser] Jared Kushner’s friends.”Asked why he wrote his 10th book to come out now, so soon after such a momentous election, Toobin, a former CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer, said: “I saw that from a very early stage in the campaign Trump was talking about January 6 pardons. But I also recognized that if Kamala Harris won, there would be pressure on her to pardon Trump” on 44 federal criminal charges now dismissed.“I think the proper way to understand the January 6 pardons [issued on day one of Trump’s second term] is to remember that Trump himself was a January 6 defendant, Toobin said. “He wasn’t charged with the riot the way the others were, but he was charged with trying to overthrow the election with the fake electors scheme. And if you look at the way in the beginning part of his second term he is settling scores and rewarding his friends, the January 6 pardons told you exactly how he was going to go about conducting his administration.”Reportedly saying: “Fuck it, release ’em all”, Trump gave pardons, commutations or other acts of clemency to the absurd, such as the J6 Praying Grandma and the QAnon Shaman, and to the outright sinister: hundreds who attacked police, militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy, Toobin wrote.He said: “If Trump had tried to carve out the non-violent January 6 rioters [for clemency], that that would have been somewhat more defensible than what he wound up doing, which was, in my view, completely indefensible.”His point about pardons being an X-ray for the soul applies to Joe Biden too.On the page, Toobin decries the 46th president’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, on gun and tax charges and any other grounds, having said he would not do so.Toobin said: “When you think about Hunter, this is a guy who was convicted of a crime, who pleaded guilty to other crimes. So it’s not like these were made-up accusations against him. Yes, the criminal justice system came down hard on him, but the criminal justice system comes down hard on a lot of people, and their father wasn’t president of the United States, so they don’t get this kind of break. And I just think that’s not how the system is supposed to work.”Publishing schedules being what they are, The Pardon does not cover the last-minute pre-emptive pardons Biden gave his brothers, his sister and their spouses, as well as public figures held to be in danger of persecution by Trump, Liz Cheney and Gen Mark Milley among them.But Toobin told the Guardian: “The family pardons were just bizarre, because these people, as far as I’m aware, are not even under investigation. But [Biden] was so worried and fixated on his family that he took this extraordinary step, which is just egregious to me.”The pardon is older than America. British kings could pardon people. When the states broke away, they kept the pardon for presidents. George Washington used it after the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, for men convicted of treason. Abraham Lincoln used it during the civil war to reprieve Union soldiers sentenced to die and to forgive Confederates in the name of peace.Such acts of mercy continue, memorably including Jimmy Carter’s clemency for those who dodged the draft for Vietnam and Barack Obama’s record-setting issue of commutations for people mostly jailed for minor crimes. Even Trump handed down mercy in his first term, amid the push which produced the First Step Act, criminal justice reform he swiftly seemed to forget.Asked which modern president has best used the pardon power for the public good, Toobin picks Obama. Inevitably, though, most public attention falls on use of the power for controversial ends, including George HW Bush’s mop-up of the Iran-Contra scandal and Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon for Marc Rich, a financier turned fugitive.The most famous pardon of all, the one Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal, hangs over every president. As Toobin sees it, had Harris taken office in January, pressure to pardon Trump of his alleged federal crimes would have been great, and it would have sprung from “an interesting shift in the conventional wisdom” about Ford and Nixon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It was widely considered a disaster in 1974” – Carl Bernstein told Bob Woodward, his Washington Post partner in reporting Watergate, “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch” – “but now you’ve had Ted Kennedy giving Gerald Ford an award, saying he was right about the pardon. You have Bob Woodward changing his mind [to say the pardon was ‘an act of courage’]’, and at the oral argument of the Trump v United States supreme court case [about presidential immunity, last April], Justice Brett Kavanaugh said, ‘Well, everyone now agrees Ford did the right thing.’”Toobin thinks Ford did the wrong thing, given Nixon’s clearly criminal behavior. He was also “struck by the absence of a book heavily focused on that issue of the Ford pardon. So all those combinations led me to try to not only write a book, but have it come out in early 2025.”He duly devotes most of that book to the Nixon pardon: how Ford agonized about it, decided to do it, then employed an obscure young lawyer to make sure Nixon took it.“I had certainly never heard of Benton Becker when I went into this,” Toobin said. “And I think his central role illustrates how ill-prepared Ford was for the whole issue of dealing with Nixon, because if you want to address an issue that will be the central event of your presidency, maybe you want to entrust it to someone who is not a young volunteer lawyer, who is himself under criminal investigation.“Now, if you say that, you should say that Becker [who died in 2015] was completely cleared. But it struck me as ludicrous that a president with the entire resources of the White House counsel’s office, the justice department and the entire American government, chose to invest so much authority in this young man. I think that just illustrates how Ford’s anxiousness to get the whole Nixon subject behind him led him to fail to consider the consequences of what he was doing.”The rights and wrongs of the Nixon pardon echo to this day. Looking again to last year’s supreme court arguments over presidential immunity, which the justices decided did apply in relation to official acts, Toobin said: “I thought the best question at that oral argument was Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson saying, ‘If presidents are immune, why did Ford need to pardon Nixon?’ Which is a great question, and doesn’t really have an answer. The only real answer is that [Chief Justice] John Roberts just completely changed the rules” in Trump’s favor.The Pardon is Toobin’s guide to how presidential pardons work, for good or often ill. He is not optimistic that the power can be reined in or usefully reformed:“The both good and bad news is that our constitution is almost impossible to amend, and no one cares enough about pardons one way or the other to undertake the massive task of of trying to amend the constitution. It’s not even clear how you would amend it. My solution to pardon problems is not changing the constitution, it’s getting better presidents.”That will have to wait – at least for four more years.

      The Pardon is out now More

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      ‘This is a coup’: Trump and Musk’s purge is cutting more than costs, say experts

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      Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s radical drive to slash billions of dollars in annual federal spending with huge job and regulatory cuts is spurring charges that they have made illegal moves while undercutting congressional and judicial powers, say legal experts, Democrats and state attorneys general.Trump’s fusillade of executive orders expanding his powers in some extreme ways in his cost-cutting fervor, coupled with unprecedented drives by the Musk-led so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to slash many agency workforces and regulations, have created chaos across the US government and raised fears of a threat to US democracy.Trump and Musk have also attacked judges who have made rulings opposing several of their moves after they ended up in court, threatening at least one with impeachment and accusing him of improper interference.“In the US, we appeal rulings we disagree with – we don’t ignore court orders or threaten judges with impeachment just because we don’t like the decision. This is a coup, plain and simple,” Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, said.Trump and Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s largest single donor, now face multiple rebukes from judges and legal experts to the regulatory and staff cuts they have engineered at the treasury department, the US Agency for International Development and several other agencies.Incongruously, as Trump has touted Musk’s cost-cutting work as vital to curbing spending abuses, one of Trump’s first moves in office last month was to fire 17 veteran agency watchdogs, known as inspectors general, whose jobs have long been to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse in federal departments.Those firings were done without giving Congress the legally required 30 days’ notice and specific justifications for each one, prompting mostly Democratic outrage at Trump’s move, which he defended as due to “changing priorities”, and falsely claimed was “standard”.In response to the firings, eight of those inspectors general filed a lawsuit against Trump and their department heads on Wednesday arguing their terminations violated federal laws designed to protect them from interference with their jobs and seeking reinstatement.The IGs who sued included ones from the Departments of Defense, Education and Health and Human Services.View image in fullscreenDemocratic critics and legal experts see Trump’s IG firings and Musk’s Doge operation as blatant examples of executive power plays at the expense of Congress and transparency.“I think their claims that they’re going after waste, fraud and abuse is a complete smokescreen for their real intentions,” said Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.Likening Trump’s firing of the IGs to “firing cops before you rob the bank”, Whitehouse stressed: “It’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is a very deliberate effort to create as much wreckage in the government as they can manage with a view to helping out the big Trump donors and special interests who find government obnoxious in various ways.”On another legal track opposing Trump and Musk’s actions, many of the nation’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general have escalated legal battles against Doge’s actions and sweeping cost cutting at treasury, USAid and other agencies.For instance, 19 Democratic AGs sued Trump and the treasury secretary in February to halt Doge from accessing sensitive documents with details about tens of millions of Americans who get social security checks, tax refunds and other payments, arguing that Doge was violating the Administrative Procedures Act. The lawsuit prompted a New York judge on 7 February to issue a temporary order halting Doge from accessing the treasury payments system.In response, Musk and Trump lashed out by charging judicial interference. Musk on his social media platform Twitter/X where he has more than 200 million followers charged that the judge was “corrupt” and that he “needs to be impeached NOW”.Trump, with Musk nearby in the Oval Office on Tuesday, echoed his Doge chief saying: “It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that,’ so maybe we have to look at the judges because I think that’s a very serious violation.”Legal experts, AGs and top congressional Democrats say that Trump’s and Musk’s charges of improper judicial interference and some of their actions pose dangers to the rule of law and the US constitution.View image in fullscreen“The president is openly violating the US constitution by taking power from Congress and handing it to an unelected billionaire – while Elon Musk goes after judges who uphold the law and rule against them,” said Mayes.Ex-federal prosecutors echo some of Mayes’s arguments.“The suggestions by Trump, Musk and Vance that courts are impermissibly interfering with Trump’s mandate to lead is absurd,” said the former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, who now teaches law at the University of Michigan.“Under our constitutional separation of powers system, each co-equal branch serves as a check on the others. The role of the courts is to strike down abuses of executive power when it violates the law. Comments disparaging the courts seems like a dangerous effort to undermine public confidence in the judiciary. If people do not respect the courts, they will be less inclined to obey their orders.”Likewise, some former judges worry that certain judges could face violence sparked by the threats Musk and Trump have publicly made.“While federal judges expect people to disagree with their opinions, I have long feared that personal attacks like those from Trump and Musk against at least one New York judge would expose them to harm and even death,” said the former federal judge and Dickinson College president, John Jones.“Worse, judges are essentially defenseless when it comes to fighting the false narratives that are being promulgated because their code of conduct prevents them from engaging with the irresponsible people who make these statements.”Legal experts too are increasingly alarmed about how Musk and Trump are exceeding their power at the expense of Congress, including some of the retaliatory firings by Trump against critics or perceived political foes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn one egregious case the IG for USAid, Paul Martin, on Tuesday was abruptly fired almost immediately after he issued a highly critical report warning of serious economic repercussions from the sweeping job cuts that Doge was making as it gutted agency staff.Musk has blasted USAid, which doled out over $40bn in congressionally authorized aid in 2023 and consummated $86bn in private sector deals, as a “criminal organization” and an “arm of the criminal left globalists”. The agency’s mission is to provide humanitarian aid and fund development assistance and tech projects in developing countries.“The firing of IG Paul Martin, a highly respected and experienced inspector general, on the day after his office released a critical report, risks sending a chilling message that is antithetical to IGs’ ability to conduct impactful independent oversight on behalf of the American taxpayer,” said the ex-defense department IG Robert Storch.Storch, one of the 17 IGs Trump fired abruptly last month who has joined the lawsuit against the Trump administration, stressed more broadly that “IGs play an essential role in leading offices comprised of oversight professionals across the federal government to detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse and corruption.”A former IG, who requested anonymity to speak freely, warned bluntly: “Trump and Musk are gaslighting the American people. No one should believe Musk and his troops have actually discovered billions of dollars of waste, fraud, abuse and ‘corruption’. If they had, we would know the specifics. They can’t provide them and they won’t. At most, they have seen things that may need to be explained, but they haven’t bothered to seek the explanation from anyone with relevant knowledge.”Despite rising concerns about the powers assumed by Musk, Trump unveiled a new executive order in the Oval Office on Tuesday expanding Musk’s authority and mandate.Trump’s new order requires federal agencies to “coordinate and consult” with Doge to slash jobs and curb hiring, according to a White House summary.All agencies were instructed to “undertake plans for large-scale reductions in force” and limit new hires to only “essential positions”, according to the summary.View image in fullscreenDuring the Oval Office meeting on Tuesday Musk spoke in grandiose terms about his mission with a few dubious and broad claims about frauds that it had uncovered, while declaring without evidence that it was what “the people want”.Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, which have received billions of dollars in federal contracts in recent years, is wielding his new federal authority as a “special government employee” without giving up his private-sector jobs. Musk’s post is a temporary one that bypasses some of the disclosure requirements for full-time federal employees.As Musk’s powers have expanded and Doge has done work in more than a dozen agencies, 14 state AGs filed a lawsuit in federal court in DC on Thursday broadly challenging Musk and Doge’s authority to obtain access to sensitive government data and wield “virtually unchecked power”.The lawsuit argues that Trump violated the constitution’s appointments clause by establishing a federal agency without Congress’s approval.At bottom, some legal experts and watchdogs say the threats posed by Musk’s cost-cutting drive that Trump has blessed, are linked to the record sums that Musk gave Trump’s campaign.“After Musk reportedly spent close to $300m to help Trump get elected, Trump has been giving Musk what appears to be unprecedented access to the inner levers of government, including private and confidential information about individuals,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University.“Musk and his followers can use that access to help Trump kill or neutralize congressionally created agencies and rules that serve and protect the public interest, while ensuring the government protects and serves the ability of the wealthy to grow their fortunes.”Other legal watchdogs fear more dangerous fallout to the rule of law from Trump’s greenlighting Musk’s Doge operation and agenda.“President Trump has not only afforded Elon Musk and Doge extraordinary power over federal agency operations with little public oversight and accountability, but he has also done so at the expense of Congress and its constitutionally mandated power,” said Donald Sherman, the chief counsel at the liberal-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.“Trump enabled Musk’s capture of the federal government after illegally firing more than a dozen inspectors general despite Congress strengthening the laws protecting IGs less than three years ago … ”Sherman noted that “what’s even more troubling is that congressional Republicans have been more than willing to cede their constitutional powers in service of President Trump and Elon Musk’s political agenda.” More

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      The courts are a crucial bastion against Trump. What if he ignores their orders?

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      Years before he became the US vice-president and openly advocated defiance of the courts over the Trump administration’s blitz through the federal bureaucracy and constitution, JD Vance revealed his contempt for legal constraints.In 2021, Vance predicted that Donald Trump would again be elected president and advised him to “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”.“Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” he told the Jack Murphy Live podcast.Whether the seventh American president actually said that remains disputed, but the sentiment is alive and well as the Trump administration defies federal court orders to at least pause its subversion of the constitution and destructive rampage through the federal bureaucracy led by Elon Musk.In the absence of action by Congress to defend its powers, it has been government workers, state attorneys general and unions who have counterattacked, with a flurry of lawsuits – challenging presidential orders to limit the constitutional right of anyone born in the US to be a citizen, a federal funding freeze, and the dismissal of corruption watchdogs, among other measures. Nearly 50 legal challenges have been filed in the last three weeks, an unprecedented pushback in the courts against a new administration.The lawsuits have resulted in a string of court rulings. They have put a hold on some of Trump’s executive orders freezing some spending. They have also restricted Musk, head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, from sending his staff to rifle through the financial records of federal agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and the education department as a means to restrict their work or even close them down.But it quickly became apparent that the administration was defying some of the court orders, while its supporters attacked what they called “rogue judges” for ruling against Trump – and Vance portrayed the courts as just another bureaucratic obstacle to the president implementing the people’s will.That has prompted warnings from legal scholars, including Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley law school, of a constitutional crisis in the making.“It’s very frightening to think that they will disobey court orders. If they don’t, it will be a constitutional crisis unlike anything this country has seen, because if the president can violate constitutional laws and disobey court orders then the name for that is a dictatorship,” he said.“This isn’t the realm of normal. What we’ve seen in the first three weeks is unprecedented in American history.”The judge John McConnell has accused the Trump administration of deliberately disobeying an order obliging the government to reinstate billions of dollars in grants. Another judge, Loren AliKhan, accused the administration of defying its legal obligations after she ordered the office for budget and management (OMB) to halt a spending freeze.Vance pushed back against the rulings on X.“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote.“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”Musk called for one of the judges involved to be impeached.Trump won a victory on Thursday when a judge ruled in favour of Musk’s offer to almost all of the 2 million-strong federal workforce of eight months of pay for not working if they resign now. The email’s subject line, “Fork in the Road”, was the same as one he used in a message to employees when he bought Twitter in 2022 and got rid of about 80% of its staff. Shortly after the deadline set by the email for voluntary redundancy, which was accepted by about 65,000 federal workers, unions said involuntary dismissals had begun.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, praised the rare court victory.“This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities,” she said.But mostly the courts have so far ruled against the Trump administration as it pursues a power grab.The American Bar Association, which represents hundreds of thousands of lawyers in the US, has condemned what it called the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself”.“We have seen attempts at wholesale dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law,” it said.The ABA also condemned “efforts to dismiss employees with little regard for the law and protections they merit” and social media posts intended “to inflame”.“This is chaotic. It may appeal to a few. But it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is also contrary to the rule of law,” it said.It’s likely that at least some of the flood of lawsuits will end up before the supreme court. The administration may in fact want to see some cases reach the highest court, which has a solid conservative majority after Trump appointed three of its nine justices during his first term, as it seeks to consolidate even more power in the presidency over issues such as who has final control over spending allocated by Congress.But the process of moving through district and appeals courts before making it to the supreme court is unlikely to be swift, by which time Musk may already have achieved much of what he aims to do in wrecking the work of USAid, the education department and other federal agencies.Then there is the unpredictability of a supreme court that has already overturned precedent in striking down the right to abortion.Chemerinsky believes the Trump administration is all but certain to lose cases on birthright citizenship, the freeze on spending and the dismissals of commissioners that oversee labour rights, consumer protection and equal employment opportunities, because they are in breach of federal law. He said the court was also likely to order the administration to back down from attempts to eliminate individual agencies created by Congress.But what if the administration follows Vance’s call to openly defy the courts? Chemerinsky said that would set up “a constitutional confrontation unlike any we’ve seen”.“The courts have limited ability to enforce their orders. They could hold individuals other than the president in contempt of court. They could figure out who’s responsible for carrying out the court order and hold that person in contempt with fines or jail for civil contempt. But the idea of the courts holding a cabinet secretary, an attorney general, a secretary of defence in contempt is just unheard of in the United States,” he said.“It’s so hard to imagine where we’ll be in four years. When you think about what’s going on in just three weeks, it’s certain Donald Trump is claiming expansive executive power beyond what any president has ever asserted. How much will the courts allow that? There’s no way to know.” More

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      Farmer styles need an illustrative update | Brief letters

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      The illustration published with John Harris’s column (1 December) showed a “typical” farmer hoping for a break in the (economic) clouds. Did he have to be from 1960s central casting? Flat cap, neckerchief, green wellies and chewing on straw? Leaning on a spade in an obviously ploughed field? Surely the Guardian doesn’t share the government’s archaic view of farmers.Ian StewartBrackley, Northamptonshire Simon Jenkins lauds that “thing of wonder”, the US constitution, which has “held the union together … for two and a half centuries” (Biden pardons his son, Trump will absolve his criminal allies. America shouldn’t stand for this, 2 December). Has the small matter of the civil war – southern secession, four years of armed conflict, over 600,000 dead and a divisive legacy – slipped his mind?Alan KnightEmeritus professor of history, Oxford University In his confession (‘Phantom gnome snatcher’ of Formby admits prank almost 50 years on, 26 November), the perpetrator said “I hope the statutes of limitations have passed on this one”. Did he mean statues?Joanna RimmerNewcastle upon Tyne Surely we need a “Middle-class woman of a certain age” mug from the Guardian, to sit proudly alongside a “Tofu-eating wokerati” one (As a middle-class woman of a certain age, all I can say is: ‘Thank you, Gregg Wallace’, 2 December)?Gabe CrispShoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex Was Gregg Wallace not “in a good headspace” when making his Instagram comments (Report, 2 December) because he couldn’t find one large enough to accommodate his ego?Paul McGilchrist Cromer, Norfolk More

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      Biden pardons his son, Trump will absolve his criminal allies. America shouldn’t stand for this | Simon Jenkins

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      The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Yes, any father might do the same for a son. Yes, the boy is reformed, forgiven, on the mend. Only nasty people are out to jail him. Live and let live. Yet there is something monumental in the pardon granted by the outgoing US president, Joe Biden. Six months ago, he scored political points by denying he would pardon his son Hunter Biden. Now, with the election over, he has done so.The easy response is: what is new? President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon; Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother and other figures whose families had donated to the Democrats; Donald Trump pardoned his son-in-law’s father and dodgy aides galore. No one doubts that, as president, Trump will pardon a number of outrageous figures – perhaps even the Capitol Hill rioters of 2021. We wait to see if this includes trying to pardon himself from various pending prosecutions (though he cannot extend these powers to cases brought at state level).Biden can plead a measure of justice in that Hunter Biden’s relatively minor convictions – for tax evasion and lying about his drug use when buying a gun – were frantically pursued by his political foes. But then there was a similar grain of politics in the equally frantic prosecution of Trump’s business misdeeds by the Democratic authorities in New York. The front page of the New York Times went tabloid and gleefully shrieked: “GUILTY”.Cynics – or as they might say, realists – will reassure themselves that all this will be soon forgotten, as it was in the past. Across the landscape of US crime and punishment – aspects of which still border on frontier anarchy – these are peccadilloes. More important issues beckon from a new Trump presidency.But justice is a universal liberty, one that the US purports to champion around the world. That a nation’s executive claims the right – even constitutionally – to override justice must be wrong. The US constitution is built on explicit rights and freedoms, protected by a separation of powers. The ostensive purpose of article two, section two was to strengthen the president in handling the union’s army and state militias. It was not to condone crime. It has been grossly abused. During the election, the Democrats presented themselves as the guardians of morality, with Biden praising Kamala Harris for having the “moral compass of a saint”. In reneging on his promise, Biden has undermined this.The US constitution is a thing of wonder. It has held the union together – sometimes only just – for two and a half centuries, while global nations and empires have been upheaved and disintegrated. Its survival is rooted in two underlying principles. The first is respect for the rights of often very different states to order their local laws, such as on abortion and gun control. The second is a balanced separation of federal powers between the judiciary, executive and legislature. This separation, in what is today a deeply polarised American society, clearly needs strengthening.But how? The constitution’s final task was to make its own reform near impossible. Sometimes, just sometimes, such reforms have been achieved. Presidential pardon looks like a case for change.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Biden must Trump-proof US democracy, activists say: ‘There is a sense of urgency’

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      The skies above the White House were cold and grey. Joe Biden greeted the championship winning Boston Celtics basketball team, quipping about his Irish ancestry and tossing a basketball into the crowd. But the US president could not resist drawing a wider lesson.“When we get knocked down, we get back up,” he said. “As my dad would say, ‘Just get up, Joe. Get up.’ Character to keep going and keep the faith, that’s the Celtic way of life. That’s sports. And that’s America.”Such events continue to be among the ceremonial duties of a “lame duck” president with waning influence. Biden has cut a diminished figure in recent months, first surrendering his chance to seek re-election, then finding himself sidelined by the doomed presidential campaign of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.But with his legacy imperiled by Donald Trump, the president is facing calls to mitigate the oncoming storm. Advocacy groups say Biden, who turned 82 this week, can still take actions during his final two months in office to accelerate spending on climate and healthcare, secure civil liberties, and Trump-proof at least some fundamentals of US democracy.Trump’s signature campaign promise was a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. He has nominated officials including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, architects of family separations at the southern border during his first term, and vowed to use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.The plans include mandatory detention, potentially trapping immigrants in inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading an opposition effort, urging Biden to halt the current expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities, especially those with records of human rights abuses.Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU national prison project, said Ice detention facilities “characterised by abusive conditions, pervasive neglect and utter disregard for the dignity of people in their custody” are key to Trump’s logistical plan.Dozens of people have died in Ice detention facilities – mostly owned or operated by private prison corporations – over the past four years, according to the ACLU, and 95% were likely preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided. Yet the Biden administration has backed new Ice detention facilities in states where they did not existed before, such as Kansas, Wyoming and Missouri.“We are calling on the Biden administration to take action now, in the final days of the administration, to halt any efforts to expand immigration detention and to shut down specifically abusive facilities once and for all,” Cho told reporters on a Zoom call this week. “We don’t need to put down runway for the Trump administration to put in place these mass detention and deportation machines.”She warned: “We know that the anti-immigrant policies of a second administration are going to be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and mass arrest and detention is going to become perhaps the norm to create and carry out these deportation operations unless we can do all we can to put a halt to them.”View image in fullscreenAnother crucial area for Biden to make a last stand is criminal justice. In his first term, Trump oversaw the execution of more people than the previous 10 presidents combined. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, then imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.Trump has indicated his intention to resume such executions and even expand the death penalty. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as Florida’s top law enforcement officer after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her re-election campaign.Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s capital punishment project, told reporters via Zoom that Trump said “he will work to expand the death penalty. He’s going to try to expand it to people who do not even commit killings. He’s called for expanding the death penalty to his political opponents.“But perhaps most dangerously in Project 2025 [a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation thinktank] – and we believe every word of it is this – he promised to try to kill everyone on death row, and the reason why we have to believe this and take it so seriously is the record that Donald Trump left where he, in a span of six months, carried out 13 executions.”The ACLU and other groups are therefore pressing Biden to commute the sentences of all individuals on federal death row to life in prison, fulfilling a campaign promise and preventing potential executions under Trump. Commuting “is really the thing that Biden can do to make it harder for Trump to restart executions”, Stubbs added.Pastor Brandi Slaughter, a board member of the pressure group Death Penalty Action, told reporters this week: “We know what the next president plans to do if any prisoners are left under a sentence of death under the Biden administration. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.”Biden has also received 8,000 petitions for clemency from federal prisoners serving non-death penalty sentences that he could either reduce or pardon. The former senator has long been criticised for his role in drawing up a 1994 crime law that led to the incarceration of thousands of Black men and women for drug offences.This week, members of Congress including Ayanna Pressley and James Clyburn led 64 colleagues in sending a letter to Biden urging him to use his clemency power “to reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our legal system and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration”.They were joined at a press conference on Capitol Hill by Maria Garza, 50, from Illinois, a prison reform advocate who spent 12 years in a state prison. She said in an interview: “There is a sense of urgency because a lot of the people that are sitting waiting for clemency are people that have de facto life sentences that will die in prison if they don’t [receive clemency]. A lot of their unjust sentencing was because of the 1994 crime bill that he was the founding father of.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitzi Wall, whose 29-year-old son Jonathan is incarcerated on a seven-and-a-half-year federal cannabis charge, called on Biden to keep a campaign promise to grant clemency to more than 4,000 people in federal prison for nonviolent cannabis crimes.“We voted for President Biden,” she said. “He gave us hope and we’re asking him to do nothing more than keep his promise.”Wall, 63, from Maryland, added: “President Biden was partly responsible for writing the 1994 crime bill that thrust families into abject poverty and pain. I know he feels bad about that and he can right that wrong with the power of the pen. I’m appealing to him as a father whose son [Hunter] could very possibly be going to prison.”In other efforts to protect civil liberties, the ACLU is recommending a moratorium on all federal government purchases of Americans’ personal data without a warrant. It is also asking Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act to prevent potential abuse of surveillance technologies under the Trump administration.Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare law and stop clean-energy development projects. White House officials are working against the clock to dole out billions of dollars in grants for existing programmes to minimise Trump’s ability to rescind or redirect these funds. Earlier this month, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced more than $3.4bn in grants for infrastructure projects across the country.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, notes that Trump will have the power of impoundment to stall the money flowing out of the government and can order rescissions to programmes funded by Congress.“The singular thing that Joe Biden can do is expedite the flow of federal dollars in all the programmes,” Schiller said.“Any money that is supposed to leave the treasury to go to schools, food safety, environmental protection – anything that is not yet distributed needs to get distributed. It’s like emptying literally the piggy bank before you go on a trip. President Biden needs to be literally getting as much money out the door in the hands of state, local and community organisations as he can.”Another priority for the White House is getting Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible, given the potential impact of the judiciary in challenging Trump administration policies. The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organisation, noted: “Federal judges restricted hundreds of Trump administration policies during his first term, and will likely play a significant role in determining the trajectory of his second.”Senate Republicans forced numerous procedural votes and late-night sessions this week in attempt to stall confirmations. Eventually a deal was struck that will bring Biden within striking distance of the 234 judicial confirmations that occurred in Trump’s first term – but four of Biden’s appellate court nominees will not be considered.The outgoing president could also engage with Democratic-led states and localities to bolster protections and establish “firewalls” against Trump’s agenda, particularly in areas such as immigration. These collaborations could involve reinforcing sanctuary city policies and providing resources to states that are likely to face pressure from the Trump administration.Chris Scott, former coalitions director for Harris, said: “What will be interesting is how or what can President Biden to work with states, especially where we have Democratic leadership in place, to be able to brace themselves and arm themselves with more protection. We already have places like a Michigan or Illinois where you have governors vowing to make sure that they have protections – even in the Trump presidency.”As Barack Obama discovered before handing Trump the keys to the Oval Office in 2017, however, lame duck presidents can only do so much. Trump will come into office with a flurry of executive orders, a supportive Congress and fewer guardrails than the first time around.Bill Galston, a former adviser in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “On January 20 Donald Trump will control all the instruments of government and, at that point, it’ll be up to the courts – and public opinion – to restrain him.” More

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      How can the candidate with most votes lose? The US electoral college explained

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      Even though the United States touts its status as one of the world’s leading democracies, its citizens do not get to directly choose the president. That task is reserved for the electoral college – the convoluted way in which Americans have selected their president since the 18th century.Contrary to its name, the electoral college is more a process than a body. Every four years, in the December following an election, its members – politicians and largely unknown party loyalists – meet in all 50 states on the same day and cast their votes for president. Then they essentially disappear.In recent years there has been growing criticism of the electoral college, accelerated by the fact that two Republican presidents – George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 – have been elected president while losing the popular vote. But there’s no sign that US elections will change any time soon.Here’s everything you need to knowWhat exactly is the electoral college?Article II of the US constitution lays out the process by which a president is elected.Each state has a number of electors that’s equal to the total number of representatives and senators it has in Congress. Washington DC gets three electoral votes. In total, there are 538 electors. A candidate needs the votes of 270 of them, a simple majority, to win.The constitution says that state legislatures can choose how they want to award their electors. All but two states have long chosen to use a winner-take-all system – the winner of the popular vote in their state gets all of the electoral votes.To complicate matters further, two states, Maine and Nebraska, award their electors differently. In both states, two electoral college votes are allocated to the statewide winner. Each state then awards its remaining electors – two in Maine and three in Nebraska – to the winner in each of the state’s congressional districts.Why does the US have an electoral college?When the founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia to draft the US constitution in 1787, they had a lot of trouble figuring out a system for choosing a chief executive. Initially, they proposed a plan that would have Congress choose the president. But that led to concerns that the executive branch, designed to be independent from Congress, would be subject to it.A contingent of the delegates also favored electing the president through a direct popular vote. But the idea never got broad support and was shut down repeatedly during the convention, the historian Alexander Keyssar wrote in his book Why do we still have the electoral college.There were a number of reasons the idea was not widely popular. First, the convention had adopted the racist three-fifths compromise in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for population purposes. This was a win for the southern states, in which slaves made up a sizable chunk of the population. A popular vote system would have disadvantaged the southern states because they had fewer people who could vote.There were also concerns about giving too much power to larger states and that voters would be unable to learn about the candidates from different states, according to Keyssar. It was a debate driven more about pragmatics than about political rights, he writes.Towards the end of the convention, a committee of 11 delegates was appointed to deal with unresolved matters and one of them was how to select the president. They proposed a version of what we have now come to understand as the electoral college.“This brief nativity story makes clear that the presidential election system enshrined in the Constitution embodied a web of compromises, spawned by months of debate among men who disagreed with one another and were uncertain about the best way to proceed,” Keyssar wrote. “It was, in effect, a consensus second choice, made acceptable, in part, by the remarkably complex details of the electoral process, details that themselves constituted compromises among, or gestures toward, particular constituencies and convictions.”What is a swing state?States that either presidential candidate has a good shot at winning are often called “swing states”.In the 2024 election, there are seven swing states: Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Michigan (15 electoral votes), Georgia (16 electoral votes), North Carolina (16 electoral votes), Arizona (11 electoral votes), and Nevada (six electoral votes). Whichever candidate wins the election must carry some combination of those states, which is why the candidates will spend the majority of their time and resources there. Joe Biden carried all of those states bar North Carolina in the 2020 election.The idea of a swing state can also change over time because of changing demographics. Until recently, for example, Ohio and Florida were considered swing states, but they are now considered pretty solidly Republican. Michigan was considered a pretty solid Democratic stronghold until Donald Trump won it in 2016.Does the electoral college allow for minority rule?There have been five elections in US history – in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 – in which the candidate who became the president did not win the popular vote. This has led to wider recognition of imbalances in the system and a push from some to abolish the electoral college altogether.The loudest criticism is that it’s a system that dilutes the influence of a presidential vote depending on where one lives. A single elector in California represents more than 726,000 people. In Wyoming, an elector represents a little more than 194,000 people.Another critique is that the system allows a tiny number of Americans to determine the outcome of the presidential election. In 2020, about 44,000 votes between Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona allowed Biden to win the electoral college. Such a slim margin is extraordinary in an election that 154.6 million people voted in.In 2016, about 80,000 combined votes gave Trump his winning margins in key swing states.Do electors have to vote for a specific candidate?State political parties choose people to serve as electors who they believe are party stalwarts and will not go rogue and cast a vote for anyone other than the party’s nominee. Still, electors have occasionally cast their votes for someone else. In 2016, for example, there were seven electors who voted for candidates other than the ones they were pledged to. That was the first time there was a faithless elector since 1972, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Many states have laws that require electors to vote for the candidate they are pledged to. In 1952, the US supreme court said that states could compel electors to vote for the party’s nominee. And in 2020, the court said that states could penalize electors who don’t vote for the candidate they’re pledged to.How has the electoral college remained in place for so long?Since almost immediately after the electoral college was enacted, there have been efforts to change it. “There were constitutional amendments that were being promoted within a little more than a decade after the constitution was ratified,” Keyssar said. “There have been probably 1,000 or more constitutional amendments to change it or get rid of it filed since 1800. Some of them have some close.” (There were more than 700 efforts as recently as 2019, according to the Congressional Research Service.)When the idea of a national popular vote was proposed in 1816, Keyssar said, southern states objected. Slaves continued to give them power in the electoral college, but could not vote. “They would lose that extra bonus they got on behalf of their slaves,” he said.After the civil war, African Americans were legally entitled to vote, but southern states continued to suppress them from casting ballots. A national popular vote would have diminished their influence on the overall outcome, so they continued to support the electoral college system.The country did get close to abolishing the electoral college once, in the late 1960s. In 1968, George Wallace, the southern segregationist governor, almost threw the system into chaos by nearly getting enough votes to deny any candidate a majority in the electoral college. The US House passed the proposed amendment 339 to 70. But the measure stalled in the Senate, where senators representing southern states filibustered.That led to continued objections to a national popular vote so that southern white people could continue to wield power, according to the Washington Post. President Jimmy Carter eventually endorsed the proposal, but it failed to get enough votes in the Senate in 1979 (Joe Biden was one of the senators who voted against it).“It’s not like we are suddenly discovering this system really doesn’t work,” Keyssar said.Is there any chance of getting rid of the electoral college now?The most prominent effort to get rid of the electoral college today is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The idea is to get states to agree to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the outcome in their specific state. The compact would take effect when states having a total of 270 electoral votes – enough to determine the winner of the election – join.So far 16 states and Washington DC – a total of 205 electoral votes – have joined the effort.But the path ahead for the project is uncertain. Nearly all of the states that haven’t joined have either a Republican governor or legislature. And legal observers have questioned whether such an arrangement is constitutional – something that would probably be quickly put to the US supreme court. More