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      Biden poised to loosen restrictions on marijuana, but some say it’s not enough

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      The US government appears poised to announce next year the most sweeping changes in decades to how it handles marijuana, the psychoactive drug dozens of states allow to be sold from storefronts, but which federal law considers among the most dangerous substances.Evidence suggests that Joe Biden’s administration, responding to a policy the president announced last year, is working on moving marijuana to schedule III of the Controlled Substance Act (CSA), a change from its current listing on the maximally restrictive schedule I. That would lessen the tax burden on businesses selling the drug in states where it is legal, and potentially change how police agencies view enforcement of marijuana laws.“If it’s going to be finalized at schedule III, it’s going to be the moment that the industry really is able to turn the corner and we begin to see the growth in the cannabis space amongst the legal operators that we’ve been waiting on for so long,” said David Culver, senior vice-president of public affairs for the US Cannabis Council, a trade group.But other marijuana legalization advocates regard changing its classification as a half-measure that would do nothing to resolve conflicts between state and federal laws that emerged after weed legalization picked up speed a decade ago.Marijuana faces the same federal restrictions as drugs like heroin and ecstasy under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), but 38 states have approved its use for medical conditions, and 24 states and the District of Columbia allow adults to also consume it recreationally. That conflict has complicated the marijuana industry in states where it is legal, particularly when it comes to access to banking services, and Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (Norml), said rescheduling the drug would not resolve that.“Classifying it as schedule III would make every existing state cannabis law that’s currently inconsistent with federal law as equally inconsistent going forward. So, it doesn’t solve any of the problems before it,” he told the Guardian.“It needs to be descheduled for logistical reasons, for practical reasons, because we have a system right now where the majority of states are choosing to regulate marijuana as a legal commodity through their own state-specific systems, and that act is not permitted for any substance that is in the CSA. That is only permitted for substances that are not scheduled.”Last month, Gallup released a survey that found 70% of Americans think marijuana use should be legal, a record number.Biden does not appear ready to go that far. In his statement announcing marijuana reform, which was released about a month before last year’s midterm elections, the president pardoned all people convicted of simple marijuana possession federally, and also kicked off the review of the drug’s classification under the CSA.That process is typically a bureaucratic affair, in which the Department of Health and Human Services reviews the substance and sends its findings to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which then decides whether to change its classification. Yet signs have already emerged that marijuana is being treated like no drug before it.On 30 August, the US health and human services secretary, Xavier Becerra, announced on X that his department had completed its review, an unusual public status update for a process that is typically opaque. And his account made the post at 4.20pm, a number of great significance in cannabis culture.Becerra did not specify what his department had recommended, but Bloomberg News obtained a letter from HHS to the DEA that recommended marijuana be put on schedule III, alongside drugs like ketamine and anabolic steroids.Tahir Johnson, a board member at Minority Cannabis Business Association who is planning to open a dispensary in New Jersey next month, said rescheduling would help his business by lessening its tax burden. Federal law currently prohibits marijuana businesses from deducting their expenses from their income, meaning they sometimes pay tax rates upwards of 80%.“It will help all cannabis businesses. But, I think especially for minority businesses, where capital and finances are tight, being able to alleviate that is certainly meaningful,” said Johnson.Armentano also expects a rescheduling could help Biden’s reputation with the voters who make up the Democratic coalition, as well as people outside his base. Gallup found 87% of Democrats think marijuana should be legal, along with 55% of Republicans and 64% of people older than 55.“It behooves the president to have this core base passionate about something that he’s doing to try to address the enthusiasm gap that he seems to have now,” he said.Kevin Sabet, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which opposes legalizing the drug, argued dropping pot to a lower CSA schedule would harm public health.“It’s going to ramp up commercialization, it’s going to ramp up the marketing and the glamorization of marijuana,” Sabet said. “It’s going to do that both in a practical way with this deducting expenses, and it’s going to do so in a global way, by just sending the message that this is harmless.”Until marijuana is legalized federally, it will still be up to Congress to resolve the conflicts between state and federal law, and progress there has been slow. A bill to allow cannabis businesses access to more financial services, known as the Safer Banking Act, has been passed by the House of Representatives six times, and is currently working its way through the Senate.Starting in 1972, groups including Norml have petitioned the DEA and HHS to reschedule marijuana, to no avail. Armentano said the stage appears to be set for political considerations to finally get federal agencies to back down, at least partially.“Frankly, if this petition is successful, and the DEA reverses 50 years of precedent, then it just speaks to the fact that all along this process has simply been a political one,” he said. More

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      America’s undying empire: why the decline of US power has been greatly exaggerated

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      In recent years, the idea that the United States is an empire in decline has gained considerable support, some of it from quarters that until very recently would have denied it was ever an empire at all. The New York Times, for instance, has run columns that describe a “remarkably benign” American empire that is “in retreat”, or even at risk of decline and fall.Yet the shadow American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable. The US has military superiority over all other countries, control of the world’s oceans via critical sea lanes, garrisons on every continent, a network of alliances that covers much of the industrial world, the ability to render individuals to secret prisons in countries from Cuba to Thailand, preponderant influence over the global financial system, about 30% of the world’s wealth and a continental economy not dependent on international trade.To call this an empire is, if anything, to understate its range. Within the American security establishment, what it amounted to was never in doubt. US power was to be exercised around the world using the “conduits of national power”: economic centrality, military scale, sole possession of a global navy, nuclear superiority and global surveillance architecture that makes use of the dominant American share of the Earth’s orbital infrastructure.If proponents of the end of the US global order do not assert a decrease in the potency of the instruments of American power, that is because there has been no such decrease. The share of global transactions conducted in dollars has been increasing, not declining. No other state can affect political outcomes in other countries the way the US still does. The reach of the contemporary US is so great that it tends to blend into the background of daily events. In January 2019, the US demanded that Germany ban the Iranian airline Mahan Air from landing on its territory. In September 2020, it sanctioned the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court for refusing to drop investigations into American citizens. In February 2022, at US request, Japan agreed to redirect liquefied fossil gas, which is critical to Japanese industry, to Europe in the event of a conflict with Russia over Ukraine. At the height of that conflict, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, found the time to visit Algiers to negotiate the reopening of a gas pipeline to Spain via Morocco. These were all quotidian events, unremarkable daily instances of humdrum imperial activity. The practical operation of the empire remains poorly understood, not despite its ubiquity, but because of it.From this perspective, the menial adherence of Britain to the US global project is at least intelligible. Historically, American planners divided their approach to the rest of the world by region. In western Europe and Japan, American interests were usually pursued by cautious political management. In Latin America and the Middle East, constant interventions, coups and invasions were needed. In east Asia and south-east Asia there was military exertion at scale. As long as it lasted, the Soviet Union was cordoned off and contained, against the wishes of the generals in the US Strategic Air Command, who would have preferred to destroy it in a nuclear holocaust. The major US allies were on the right side of this calculus and had less reason to begrudge it.When dealing with the US, elites in countries on the periphery of the global economy still often behave as though they are dealing with the imperial centre. The US permits a variety of political systems in its subordinates. US client states include medieval monarchies in the Arab Gulf, military juntas like Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s Egypt, personal presidential autocracies in the Philippines and Thailand, apartheid parliamentary systems like Israel and reasonably democratic systems with greater social equity and conditions than the US itself. What is required is not democracy, but reasonably close allegiance to American foreign policy goals.In Britain’s case, accordance with US foreign policy has been so consistent, over time and between political factions, that one must wonder whether Britain retains an independent foreign policy at all. The stance of Boris Johnson’s government – “stay close to the Americans” – continued uninterrupted through the collapse of the Truss government and the troubled ascent of Rishi Sunak. In Ukraine, the vision was straightforwardly that of Britain as airbase, provider of troops to the Baltic frontier, and advanced anti-tank weapons when needed. As prime minister, Sunak may have discovered the promises made by his two forebears to increase military spending to 2.5% or 3% of GDP were beyond the capacity of the Treasury, but the decision to back away from those pledges was based on finances, not a different political programme. British leaders may talk of a shifting world system, but the subordinate style in British foreign policy persists.To its credit, the contemporary US foreign policy establishment has shown some candour about its world-ordering ambitions. Much of the discussion takes place in public between a nexus of thinktank and academic institutions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Kennedy School at Harvard, the Wilson Center, the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Foundation. Respectable pillars of the establishment such as Michael Mandelbaum at Johns Hopkins University (formerly of the CFR) have talked of the US acting as “the world’s government”. By 2011, John Ikenberry – the central intellectual figure behind the idea that the US builds and upholds a “liberal international order” – was willing to entertain the idea of “imperial tendencies” in US actions deriving from its overwhelmingly powerful global position. Some discussion has begun about the kinds of imperial activity in which the US should engage. In 2014, Barry Posen, the director of the security studies programme at MIT, began to advocate for US “restraint” in the use of force in global affairs, if only for the ultimate goal of the empire’s reinvigoration. But whatever the merits of these contributions, hegemonists who seek American primacy and neo-cold warriors fixed on the likelihood of a confrontation with China have retained a plurality.For more than a decade, commentators on international affairs have obsessed over the supposed transition from a unipolar order, in which the US is the sole global superpower, to a multipolar or polycentric world in which the distribution of power is less lopsided. But this is easy to overstate. International affairs scholars have long predicted a return to a balance of power among the great states, as a correction to the enormous imbalance represented by the US since the late cold war, if not since the end of the second world war. One question is why it seems to have taken so long. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, two scholars at Dartmouth College, persuasively argued that the extent of American power had to be reckoned with in a different way: the US had attained power preponderance – a degree of global power so great that its very extent served to disincentivise other states from challenging it.To many observers, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was another omen of American decline. Most of the US national security establishment did not welcome Trump’s rise, and four years later would cheer his departure. In parts of the Holy Roman empire, a new prince was obliged not just to attend the funeral of his predecessor but to bury the body. After Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, many Trump opponents appeared to desire the finality of interment.It was clear why Biden’s victory was seen as a form of deliverance by many in the US. But a similar view was not uncommon among the elites in the core American allies. When the election results came through, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung carried the news under the headline “Demonstrativ Staatsmännisch” (Demonstratively Statesmanly), reflecting a belief that a Biden victory represents a return to dignity and rectitude. In the Washington Post, one columnist wrote that Biden held the promise of salvation from the Trump days: “A return to a bipartisan, internationalist foreign policy that moderate Republicans and Democrats have long championed.” For the New York Times, the moment would be accompanied by “sighs of relief overseas”. In Britain there was more ambiguity: Rishi Sunak’s future adviser James Forsyth wrote that the end of Trump was a “mixed blessing”: Biden would “take the drama out of Anglo-American relations” but might punish Britain over Brexit.The Trump administration’s foreign policy was more orthodox than is generally admitted. While derided as an isolationist by the US bureaucracy, for whom the term is a stock insult, Trump was committed to the US’s “unquestioned military dominance”. Many of his appointees were old regime hands: his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, was a Reagan-era official; the director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, ran a torture site under George W Bush; Trump’s fifth secretary of defence, Mark Esper, was formerly an adviser to Barack Obama’s defence secretary Chuck Hagel.Having pledged to “get out of foreign wars”, Trump did nothing of the sort. He pursued the global assassination programme established under Obama and prosecuted the US-backed war in Yemen. Trump did not get along with the diplomats at the state department, but his administration did very little that was out of the usual line of business.Trump was disdainful of international cooperation on terms other than those of the US, but this was nothing new, and disputes with the foreign policy intelligentsia were for the most part matters of style, not principle. In Latin America, Trump made clear through his adminstration’s “western hemisphere strategic framework” that the western hemisphere is “our neighbourhood”. In the Middle East, Trump overturned the minor accommodation the Obama administration had reached with Tehran and in doing so reverted to the traditional American strategy of strangling Iran while prevailing on the Gulf monarchies to recognise Israel. Trump criticised the costs of the US military’s presence in the Middle East, but US troop levels in the region increased during his time in office, as did military spending overall. His eccentricities were those of the modern Republican party, a reflection of the polity’s rightwing shift rather than of a barbarian anomaly. Dismantling American hegemony would have been a historic act, but Trump never considered it.The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, which necessitated the simultaneous withdrawal of the forces of any remaining western allies, was yet another death for American empire. The clamour of the final exit partly drowned out the tawdry record of every US president in Afghanistan from Bush to Biden. That 20 years of occupation and state-building crumbled in weeks confirmed only that the Afghan government had been an artificial and corrupt dependent. Under Trump and Biden, US planners had concluded that the US could no longer afford to keep up pretences with a fragile and exposed government in Kabul.Enough of the US global order survived the withdrawal from Afghanistan that it could die again in February 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Contrary to unserious predictions before its outbreak, this was no “hybrid war” or “cyberwar”, but a traditional ground operation that proved far more difficult than the Russian leadership imagined. In the event, expectations of a dash for Kyiv causing the quick capitulation of the Ukrainian government were frustrated. The US strategy of building up Ukrainian armed forces as a specific counter to Russian armoured invasion proved effective in staving off the initial assault. The US, Britain, Poland and other allies supplied key weapons and detailed intelligence, including satellite targeting, while seeking to inflict some economic damage on Russia with sanctions. That US intelligence appeared to have had a source in the Kremlin with access to the war plans – the US told Ukraine that Russia would invade before it did, and then made that assessment public, and CIA director Bill Burns has said clearly that the war planning was conducted by Putin and a small number of advisers – also ran counter to the narrative of the empire’s demise.That Ukraine, with heavy US support has, so far at least, held the line against Russia even at the extremity of eastern Ukraine reinforces the reality of current American power on global affairs. Russia’s general strategy has, since 2008, been to reassert influence in the former Soviet states around its borders. Yet between 1999 and 2009, Nato expanded into Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania and Croatia. Perceiving this as a defeat, Russia had sought to bring it to a stop through machinations on its immediate borders. Yet in Georgia, the Caucasus, Crimea, Belarus and Kazakhstan, recent Russian operations were comparatively small-scale. Why a completely different and far more hubristic strategy was adopted for Ukraine remains poorly understood. Part of the story must lie in the two strategic agreements signed between the US and Ukraine between September and November 2021. Yet the US, Britain and Nato itself had studiously kept to ambiguous ground about future Ukrainian accession. Putin’s decision to invade may have been taken after the failure of diplomatic talks between the US and Russia in January 2022. In any case, the invasion itself was a terrible crime and a grave gamble. It has been mirrored in the strategy of the US and its allies, which since April 2022 has shifted from a simple frustration of the initial invasion to the grander ambition of using the war to achieve strategic attrition of Russia.In the Middle East, Israel’s brutal retributive attack on Gaza, the mirror of the orgiastic violence carried out by Hamas fighters on 7 October, only reinforces this picture. Over the past two months, the influence of US global power has been plain to see. Thanks to US protection, Israel has been free to carry out what in all likelihood amount to large-scale war crimes while largely disregarding any threat from regional states that might otherwise have sought to limit its attacks on Gaza. The US has supplied Israel (probably with some help from Britain’s military base at Akrotiri in Cyprus) throughout the campaign and has moved aircraft carrier groups and nuclear armed submarines to the region to make the point abundantly clear. Britain has followed in lockstep with its more modest capabilities. The US and its allies have effectively rendered action at the UN impossible. American imperial power is all too evident in the ruins of Gaza city.In large part, talk of the end of American dominance was a reaction to the global financial crisis and China’s industrial rise. For prominent western strategic planners like Elbridge Colby, one of the authors of the 2018 US National Defense Strategy, conflicts in Afghanistan, the Middle East and even Ukraine had come to be seen as distractions from the China threat, which represents the only plausible challenge to American global dominance. In its 2022 National Security Strategy, the Biden administration declared that the 2020s were to be a decisive decade. Past military adventures in the Middle East were criticised as extravagances and distractions in the era of competition with China. “We do not seek conflict or a new cold war,” the NSS said, but “we must proactively shape the international order in line with our interests and values”. In order to prevail in competition with China, the US had to enhance its industrial capacity by “investing in our people”. The present moment was said to represent “a consequential new period of American foreign policy that will demand more of the US in the Indo-Pacific than has been asked of us since the second world war.”What should be made of the fact that it is Biden, not Trump, who has overseen a major escalation of tension with Russia and an escalation in the trade war with China? At the time, the one ostensibly distinct part of the Trump programme appeared to be the trade war. Trump was seen as standing for an insular protectionist turn, but the same basic policies have been continued under Biden through export controls on advanced microchips. Still, Biden has proved to be just as uninterested in limiting capital flows from surplus countries like Germany and China into US treasuries, which arguably have negative effects on industrial workers in the US, but certainly inflate the prices of assets owned by the rich and underpin US power over the international financial system.The US political system as a whole appears, at present, to be opting for China containment. President Biden said on the campaign trail that under him US strategy would be to “pressure, isolate and punish” China. Encouraged by the US, Japan, like Britain, is engaged in a major arms buildup. American politicians make showy visits to Taipei. The US has threatened China with nuclear weapons in the past on the basis that it does not have a comparable nuclear arsenal. There is some debate over whether China’s current nuclear-armed submarines are able to avoid tracking by the US. China is also working to make its intercontinental ballistic missiles more secure. It is possible that soon they will together constitute a completely reliable second-strike capability against the US. The most dangerous moment of the cold war was in the early 1960s, when an aggressive and overwhelmingly dominant nuclear power saw itself in competition with an adversary that didn’t yet have equivalent nuclear forces. The US and China may be approaching a similar point.Earlier this month, Biden and Xi Jinping met in San Francisco in an attempt to smooth over relations that had become dangerously unstable. In November 2022, when Biden met Xi at the G20 in Indonesia, both had appeared to strike a conciliatory tone. Biden said the two had “a responsibility to show that China and the US can manage our differences” and “prevent competition from becoming conflict”. But the 2022 decision to ban Chinese access to the semiconductor trade was a straightforward escalation. Trump and Biden responded to their respective moments according to a general strategy that is longer-lived than either of them. US foreign policy has been quite stable for 30 years: a mode best characterised as reactive management of the world empire, with the aim of pre-empting the emergence of any potential challengers to its primacy.For all the talk of multipolar worlds, other poles of world power have been hard to find. Russia has hardly proved itself a global power in its botched invasion of Ukraine. Fantasies of European strategic autonomy have shown themselves insubstantial. India’s economic growth has been notable but it projects very little influence away from the subcontinent. The resurgent nationalisms in Turkey and Iran hardly qualify them as poles of global power, and the former still serves as a staging ground for American nuclear weapons. As the former Tsinghua professor Sun Zhe observed, developing countries are not cooperatively “rising together” to “challenge the current order” – the likes of Brazil and South Africa have, if anything, been declining in terms of economic heft. So where is the multiplicity in world politics?Much of the predicted systemic change consists of the emergence of Sino-American competition. But “multipolarity” is a poor description for this development. The strategic balance so far remains hugely in favour of the US. China does not militarily threaten the US. Chinese naval power is routinely exaggerated; its navy is not predicted to rival the US Pacific fleet for another generation, and it still lacks “quiet” nuclear-powered submarines that resist sonar detection. It is not clear that China is capable of mounting an invasion even of Taiwan, and there are good reasons to think China’s leadership knows this. For its part, China has not even made a serious effort to escape the dominance of the dollar in its trade with the rest of the world. It is the US that asserts a policy of isolation and punishment of China, not vice versa. So long as the US is maintaining a “defense perimeter” in the East and South China Seas that extends to a few kilometres from mainland China, it is not dealing with a peer, it is threatening a recalcitrant.Assertions of the inevitability of American imperial decline over the long term are fair enough; in their most abstract form, and on a long enough timescale, they must eventually turn out to be true. And the US position does look shakier than it has for decades. But what is striking is how seldom this system that is said to be in decline is given even a cursory description, especially in the subordinate parts of the Anglosphere.Why the reticence to explain the nature of American power? And why ignore that so much of contemporary US grand strategy is oriented precisely to prevent its dissolution? As the 2022 National Security Strategy said, “prophecies of American decline have repeatedly been disproven in the past”. This time the effort may be in vain. The risks of a Sino-American confrontation and the Russo-American nuclear standoff implied in the war in Ukraine are considerable. Whatever is to come, the fact remains that global power at present remains unipolar. The task for those not committed to its continuation is to understand it and, wherever possible, to challenge its assumptions.Adapted from Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony by Tom Stevenson, published by Verso and available at guardianbookshop.com The best stories take time. The Guardian Long Read magazine compiles the finest longform journalism the Guardian has to offer: from politics to technology, food to cosmology, literature to sex, there is something for everyone. Beautifully bound, this 100-page special edition is available to order from the Guardian bookshop and is on sale at selected WH Smith Travel stores. More

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      ‘Let’s have that fight’: McCarthy and Gaetz go to war over shutdown deal

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      Simmering hostility between Republicans over the bipartisan deal that averted a government shutdown descended into open political warfare on Sunday, a rightwing congressman saying he would move to oust Kevin McCarthy and the embattled House speaker insisting he would survive.“We need to rip off the Bandaid. We need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” the Florida representative Matt Gaetz told CNN’s State of the Union, saying he would file a “motion to vacate” in the next few days.McCarthy, Gaetz said, lied about “a secret deal” struck with Democrats to later pass money for Ukraine that was left out of the compromise agreement, and misled Republicans about working with the opposition at all.The bill keeping the government funded for 47 days passed the House on Saturday night 335-91, 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in support. It cleared the Senate 88-9 and was signed by Joe Biden.In remarks at the White House on Sunday, Biden said the measure extending funding until 17 November, and including $16bn in disaster aid, prevented “a needless crisis”.But, Biden said: “The truth is we shouldn’t be here in the first place. It’s time to end governing by crisis and keep your word when you give it in the Congress. I fully expect the speaker to keep his commitment to secure the passage of support needed to help Ukraine as they defend themselves against aggression.”Asked if he expected McCarthy to stand up to extremists, Biden replied: “I hope this experience for the speaker has been one of personal revelation.”McCarthy hit back at Gaetz, branding him a showman “more interested in securing TV interviews” than keeping government functioning.“I’ll survive,” McCarthy told CBS’s Face the Nation. “You know, this is personal with Matt. He wanted to push us into a shutdown, even threatening his own district with all the military people there who would not be paid.“… So be it. Bring it on. Let’s get it over with it, and let’s start governing. If he’s upset because he tried to push us into shutdown and I made sure the government didn’t shut down, then let’s have that fight.”Gaetz said he would no longer hold to an agreement made in January to support McCarthy in exchange for concessions including a hard position on federal funding. That deal included a loosening of rules to allow a single member to file a motion to vacate, the beginning of the process to remove a speaker.“The only way Kevin McCarthy is speaker of the House at the end of this coming week is if Democrats bail him out, and they probably will,” said Gaetz.“I’m done owning Kevin McCarthy. We made a deal in January to allow him to assume the speakership and I’m not owning him any more because he doesn’t tell the truth. And so if Democrats want to own Kevin McCarthy by bailing him out I can’t stop them. But then he’ll be their speaker, not mine.”McCarthy would need 218 votes to keep his job. Some senior Democrats said they would not vote to save him and would back the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, instead.“Kevin McCarthy is very weak speaker,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told CNN, saying she would support Gaetz’s motion.McCarthy “has clearly has lost control of his caucus. He has brought the US and millions of Americans to the brink, waiting until the final hour to keep the government open and even then only issuing a 4[7]-day extension. We’re going to be right back in this place in November.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to reporters on Saturday, Jeffries said the deal represented a “total surrender by rightwing extremists”.Republicans loyal to McCarthy also attacked Gaetz and the rightwing House Freedom Caucus for their “destructive” pledge to oust the speaker.“What I just heard was a diatribe of delusional thinking,” Mike Lawler of New York told ABC’s This Week. “They are the reason we had to work together with House Democrats. That is not the fault of Kevin McCarthy, that’s the fault of Matt Gaetz. He’s mealy mouthed and, frankly, duplicitous.”Relations between the speaker and Gaetz reached a new low with a testy confrontation in a meeting on Thursday. Gaetz accused McCarthy of orchestrating a social media campaign against him, the speaker saying he did not rate the congressman highly enough to do so.On Sunday, Gaetz insisted “this is about keeping Kevin McCarthy to his word, it’s not about any personal animosity”.Gaetz claimed McCarthy reached a “secret deal”, promising to introduce a standalone bill to continue funding Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russian invaders.A growing number of Republicans object to the US helping pay for the war. Gaetz said: “However you think about [Ukraine funding], it should be subject to open review [and] analysis, and not backroom deals, so I have to file a motion to vacate against speaker McCarthy this week.”On ABC, Gaetz said he did not expect to have enough votes to remove McCarthy immediately, “but I might have them before the 15th ballot”, an allusion to the time it took to elect the speaker in January.“I am relentless, and I will continue to pursue this objective,” Gaetz said. “And if all the American people see is that it is a uni-party that governs them, always the Biden, McCarthy, Jeffries government that makes dispositive decisions on spending, then I am seeding the fields of future primary contests to get better Republicans in Washington.”Shalanda Young, Biden’s budget director, blamed Republicans for bringing the government to the verge of a shutdown, and urged Congress to take a longer-term view.“We need to start today to make sure that we do not have this brinkmanship, last-minute anxiousness of the American people,” she told ABC. “Let’s do our jobs to not have this happen again. Let’s have full-year funding bills at the end of these 47 days.” More

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      Rust Belt Union Blues: how Trump wooed workers away from the Democrats

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      Consider the following social science experiment: go into a unionized steel mill parking lot in western Pennsylvania, look at the bumper stickers and track the political messages. Given the longstanding bond between unions and the Democratic party, you might predict widespread support for Democratic candidates. Yet when the then Harvard undergraduate Lainey Newman conducted such unconventional field research during the Covid pandemic, encouraged by her faculty mentor Theda Skocpol, results indicated otherwise. There was a QAnon sticker here, a Back the Blue flag there. But one name proliferated: Donald Trump.It all supported a surprising claim: industrial union members in the shrunken manufacturing hubs of the US are abandoning their historic loyalty to the Democrats for the Republican party.“The most interesting point, how telling it is, is that those stickers were out in the open,” Newman says. “Everyone in the community knew. It was not something people hide.“It would not have been something old-timers would have been OK with, frankly. They stood up against … voting for Republicans, that type of thing.”Newman documented this political shift and the complex reasons for it in her senior thesis, with Skocpol as her advisor. Now the recent graduate and the veteran professor have teamed up to turn the project into a book: Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party.The book comes out as organized labor is returning to the headlines, whether through the United Auto Workers strike at the big three US carmakers or through the battle to buy a former industrial powerhouse, US Steel. In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump is again wooing union voters. On the 3 September edition of ABC’s This Week, the Manhattan Institute president, Reihan Salam, noted that Trump “was trying to appeal to UAW members to talk about, for example, this effort to transition away from combustion engine vehicles”.Newman reflects: “It is relatively well-known [that] union members aren’t voting for Democrats like they used to. What we say is that for a very long time, Democrats did take unions for granted. They didn’t reinvest in the relationship with labor that would have been necessary to maintain some of the alliances and trust between rank-and-file labor and the Democrats.”Once, the bond was as strong as the steel worked by union hands across western Pennsylvania, especially in Pittsburgh, known to some as “The City That Built America”. Retirees repeatedly mentioned this in interviews with Newman and Skocpol. An 81-year-old explained longtime hostility to the Republican party in unionized steel mills and coal mines: “They figure that there was not a Republican in the world who took care of a working guy.” A union newsletter, one of many the authors examined, urged readers to “Vote Straight ‘D’ This November”. Even in the 1980 presidential election, which Ronald Reagan won decisively, union-heavy counties in Pennsylvania were a good predictor of votes for the incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter.The subsequent sea change is summed up in one of Newman and Skocpol’s chapter titles, From Union Blue to Trump Red. In 2016, the connection between Pennsylvania union voters and Democratic support all but evaporated as Trump flipped the normally Democratic state en route to victory. His showing that year set a new bar for support for a GOP presidential candidate among rank-and-file union members, bettering Reagan’s standard, with such members often defying leadership to back Trump.“It’s a myth that it all happened suddenly with Reagan,” says Skocpol. “Not really – it took longer.”‘In Union There Is Strength’To understand these changes, Newman and Skocpol examined larger transformations at work across the Rust Belt, especially in western Pennsylvania. It helped that they have Rust Belt backgrounds: Newman grew up in Pittsburgh, where she returned to research the book, while Skocpol was raised in the former industrial city of Wyandotte, Michigan, located south of Detroit.Once, as they now relate, unions wove themselves into community life. Union halls hosted events from weddings to retirement parties. Members showcased their pride through union memorabilia, some of which is displayed in the book, including samples from Skocpol’s 3,000-item collection. Among her favorites: a glass worker’s badge featuring images of drinking vessels and the motto “In Union There Is Strength”.That strength eventually dissipated, including with the implosion of the steel industry in western Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 80s. (According to one interviewee, the resulting population shift explains why there are so many Pittsburgh Steelers fans across the US.) In formerly thriving communities, cinemas and shoe stores closed down, as did union halls. The cover of Skocpol and Newman’s book depicts a line of shuttered storefronts in Braddock, Pennsylvania, the steel town whose former mayor, the Democrat John Fetterman, is now a US senator.Not all union members left western Pennsylvania. As the book explains, those continuing in employment did so in changed conditions. Steelworkers battled each other for dwindling jobs, capital held ever more power and Pittsburgh itself changed. The Steel City sought to reinvent itself through healthcare and higher education, steelworkers wondering where they stood.Blue-collar workers found a more receptive climate among conservative social organizations that filled the vacuum left by retreating unions: gun clubs that benefited from a strong hunting tradition and megachurches that replaced closed local churches. The region even became a center of activity for the Tea Party movement, in opposition to Barack Obama, a phenomenon Skocpol has researched on the national level.In 2016, although Trump and Hillary Clinton made a nearly equal number of visits to western Pennsylvania, they differed in where they went and what they said. Clinton headed to Pittsburgh. Trump toured struggling factory towns, to the south and west. In one, Monessen, he pledged to make American steel great again – a campaign position, the authors note, unuttered for decades and in stark contrast with Clinton’s anti-coal stance. As president, Trump arguably followed through, with a 2018 tariff on aluminum and steel imports. The book cites experts who opposed the move for various reasons, from harm to the economy to worsened relations with China.The authors say their book is not meant to criticize unions or the Democratic party. Democrats, they say, are taking positive steps in response to union members’ rightward shift.“We didn’t have time to research at length all the new kinds of initiatives that have been taken in a state like Wisconsin, like Georgia,” says Skocpol. “They have learned some of the lessons, are trying to create year-round, socially-embedded presences.”In 2020, Joe Biden made multiple visits to western Pennsylvania and ended up narrowly winning Erie county, which had been trending red. As president, he has sought to have the federal government purchase more US-made products, while launching renewable energy initiatives through union labor. Skocpol says Trump’s more ambitious promises, including an across-the-board 10% tariff, propose an unrealistic bridge to a bygone era.“Will Trump promise to do all these things?” asks Skocpol. “Of course he will. Will he actually do them more effectively if he becomes president again? God help us all.”
      Rust Belt Union Blues is published in the US by Columbia University Press More

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      If Trump wins, he’ll turn the justice department into a vendetta machine | Robert Reich

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      Last week Donald Trump said that, if re-elected, he’d appoint a “real special prosecutor” to “go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”.In other words, if Trump is re-elected, you can kiss nonpartisan criminal justice goodbye.His remark made me think back almost a half century ago, to when I was a rookie lawyer in the Department of Justice.The department was in shambles, discredited by the political abuse and corruption of Richard Nixon and John Mitchell, the attorney general.To restore trust in the department, President Gerald Ford appointed Edward Levi attorney general. In naming Levi, who had been president of the University of Chicago and the dean of its law school, Ford found someone whose reputation for integrity was impeccable.As Levi said at his swearing-in: “Nothing can more weaken the quality of life or more imperil the realization of the goals we all hold dear than our failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose.”Levi set out to insulate the justice department from politics, instituting rules limiting White House involvement in law enforcement decisions.The Senate Watergate committee chairman, Sam Ervin, didn’t think Levi’s rules went far enough to protect the department from an unscrupulous future president. Ervin wanted to make the justice department an independent agency with an attorney general appointed by the president every six years and removable only for neglect.At the time, I thought Ervin’s proposal too extreme. I assumed America had learned its lesson from Watergate and would never again elect a president as repugnant as Nixon, willing to sacrifice the institutions of government to his own political ambition.Yet there was some precedent for Ervin’s view. The position of US attorney general was originally viewed as an independent, semi-judicial role – analogous to that of judges.Congress established the office of the attorney general in the Judiciary Act of 1789 – the same act that created the federal court system, as distinct from acts establishing executive departments.In the original draft, attorneys general would be appointed by the US supreme court, not the president. Congress changed this so that attorneys general would be appointed exactly like federal judges.When George Washington appointed the nation’s first attorney general in 1789, Thomas Jefferson referred to him as “the attorney general for the supreme court”.Early attorneys general shared offices with the court. Their budgets were line items under the federal judiciary, not the executive. Originally, the attorney general was not even in line to succeed to the presidency.Even after the attorney general became a key part of the executive branch and the Department of Justice was established in 1870, presidents continued to respect the need for prosecutorial independence.Until Nixon and the scurrilous John Mitchell.But surely, I said to myself at the time, Nixon and Mitchell were the extremes. Edward Levi’s reforms were adequate.Then came the worst offender of all. During his presidency, Trump viewed the department as an extension of his own will – even claiming: “I have an absolute right to do what I want to with the justice department.”Trump interfered in the department’s prosecutions of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, fired the FBI director James Comey for investigating possible collusion between Russia and Trump associates, and demanded that the department reopen a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.John Dean, former White House counsel to Nixon, described Trump’s efforts to use the justice department for personal gain as “Nixon on stilts and steroids”.Now, Trump threatens that if re-elected he’ll turn the department into his own personal vendetta machine. If there weren’t already enough reason to fear a second Trump presidency, this would be it.Public trust in our governing institutions has already sunk to a new low – due in large part to Trump’s first term, his subsequent big lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and now his second big lie that Biden is orchestrating a “witch-hunt” against him.Even if Biden is re-elected, it will be necessary to deal with the damage Trump and his Republican enablers have wrought.Perhaps Sam Ervin’s proposal for an independent justice department should be given more serious consideration.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      A debt default would be catastrophic for the US – and Biden’s re-election chances | Walter Shapiro

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      The favored metaphor on the left is to compare the trumped-up debt-ceiling crisis to hostage-taking by the House Republicans.But in a true hostage situation, both sides have something major to lose. The perpetrators risk not getting a payoff or, worse, spending decades in prison. For the families of the victims and the police, the danger is that the hostages will be killed during the negotiations or in the midst of a botched rescue mission.For Kevin McCarthy and the defaulters (which, incidentally, is a promising name for a band), there is no downside. If Joe Biden ultimately hands over his sword in surrender, the Republican incendiaries will be lionized as conquering heroes from the Fox News green room to the dining room at Mar-a-Lago.Sure, the reviled liberal media will grumble if Republican intransigence forces America into default, guaranteeing higher interest for years to come, and jeopardizing the world economy. But that crazed toughness would prove that the House speaker is not a “Republican In Name Only” (Rino) squish like his deal-making predecessor John Boehner, who at the last minute helped avert default in 2011.Marching off the fiscal cliff like lemmings will also inoculate House Republicans against a rightwing primary challenge – which, in Republican circles, is a fate worse than death. And since members of Congress can trade stocks, every smart Republican can personally prosper during the coming cataclysmic economic downturn by adroitly shorting the Dow Jones Average.In contrast, the consequences of debt-ceiling brinkmanship are dire for Joe Biden. In the best conceivable case – one that will prompt dismay among liberals – the president would reluctantly agree to tight spending caps that will limit his domestic agenda and penalize the poor. But, at least, that option would avert default.At the end of his Sunday press conference in Hiroshima, Biden publicly acknowledged the devastating political consequences for him if America were unable to pay its bills. Channeling the thought process of House Republican zealots as they head towards the abyss, Biden said: “Because I am president, and presidents are responsible for everything, Biden would take the blame. And that’s one way to make sure Biden is not re-elected.”Sad, but true.A default might well mean that Biden would be running for reelection with the economy in a Republican-created tailspin. And it wouldn’t matter politically that, as Biden said, “On the merits, based on what I’ve offered, I would be blameless.”But if Democrats believe that they can win the messaging wars about a default, they’re deluding themselves.An Associated Press/NORC poll, released last week, found that only 20% of Americans say that they understand the debate over the debt ceiling “extremely” or “very well.” That number is significant because it is often hard for political insiders to remember that most Americans do not watch cable TV news or obsessively follow political machinations in Washington. The danger for Democrats is that many of these low-information voters will be persuaded by the implicit one-sentence Republican message: America defaulted because Biden wouldn’t agree to cut government spending to deal with the national debt.In order to appreciate the folly of that glib Republican argument, a voter both has to understand the draconian nature of the Republican budget proposals and to grasp that raising the debt ceiling merely authorizes borrowing rather than new spending. Good luck making that complex case to anyone who doesn’t devotedly read the New York Times or listen to National Public Radio.In an era of streaming and thousands of channels, Biden does not have the option of commanding national attention with an old-fashioned Oval Office address. Moreover, there is no guarantee that Biden, with his rambling asides and workmanlike delivery, would convince anyone with a televised speech. To illustrate that point, here is the awkward way Biden highlighted the dangers of the Republican budget plan in his Sunday press conference: “I’m not going to agree to a deal that protects, for example, a $30bn tax break for the oil industry, which made $200bn last year – they don’t need an incentive of another $30bn – while putting healthcare of 21 million Americans at risk by going after Medicaid.”The harsh reality is that Biden has little choice but to grub for the best deal he can. While there is a strong legal argument that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional under the 14th amendment, no one at the treasury department or anywhere else knows how the global markets would react if Biden thumbed his nose at Kevin McCarthy and his wingnut caucus.With the continuing danger that Donald Trump’s comeback tour will end in the Oval Office, there are more important matters on the table than punishing Kevin McCarthy for his hostage-taking. In fact, the best revenge would be a sweeping Biden reelection that brings with it a Democratic House majority. Then, in 2025, without a presidential election on the horizon, Biden would be free to blow up the dangerously irrational debt-ceiling law.
      Walter Shapiro is a staff writer for the New Republic and a lecturer in political science at Yale More

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      Debt ceiling talks suspended as US lurches towards default deadline

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      Negotiations for a deal to raise the US debt ceiling and thereby avoid a default with potentially catastrophic consequences for the world economy reached a worrying impasse on Friday.“We’re not there,” Garret Graves of Louisiana, the lead negotiator for House Republicans in talks with the Biden White House, told reporters at the Capitol.“We’ve decided to press pause, because it’s just not productive.”The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has said that without action the US government will cease to be able to pay its debts on or around 1 June.Joe Biden is away at the G7 summit in Japan. White House officials were leading talks for Democrats.One told the Guardian: “There are real differences between the parties on budget issues and talks will be difficult. The president’s team is working hard towards a reasonable bipartisan solution that can pass the House and the Senate.”For decades after 1917, when the federal debt was capped, raising that limit, or ceiling, was usually a routine procedure, if subject to political grandstanding.In 2006, the Illinois Democratic senator Barack Obama voted against a raise under a Republican president, George W Bush.But Republicans have increasingly and effectively employed threats to refuse to raise the ceiling as a bargaining tool and in 2011, as president, Obama was forced to say he regretted his vote of five years before.In the 2011 standoff, the House GOP extracted trillions of dollars in spending cuts which Obama was forced to sell to his party. Now, under Biden, the same dynamic is in play.With the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, beholden to far-right members who made him endure 15 votes before gaining the position, the GOP is demanding hefty cuts to spending, on Democratic priorities including healthcare and climate, in return for a debt ceiling raise.Democrats say Republicans should agree a clean raise – meaning without preconditions – as they did repeatedly under Donald Trump. Democrats also demand that Biden does not blink.At the Capitol on Friday, Graves said: “Until people are willing to have reasonable conversations about how you can actually move forward and do the right thing, then we’re not going to sit here and talk to ourselves.”Republican leaders outside the talks sought to apply pressure. Not long before Graves spoke to reporters, Trump said his party should not give ground.Republicans, the presidential frontrunner wrote on his Truth Social platform, “should not make a deal on the debt ceiling unless they get everything they want (including the ‘kitchen sink’). That’s the way the Democrats have always dealt with us. Do not fold!”Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, aimed fire at Biden, accusing the president of “wait[ing] months before agreeing to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy on a spending deal.“They are the only two who can reach an agreement,” McConnell said. “It is past time for the White House to get serious. Time is of the essence.”Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, countered: “We are in a crisis, for ONE REASON – House Republicans threat to burn down the entire economy if they don’t get their way.”In a recent column for the New York Times, the Harvard law professor Laurence A Tribe, an expert in constitutional law, accused Republicans of playing “chicken or, maybe more accurately, Russian roulette” with the US debt.Tribe went on to outline his theory of how Biden has the authority to raise the ceiling on his own, under the 14th amendment, which says the US national debt “shall not be questioned”.Tribe wrote: “Mr Biden must tell Congress in no uncertain terms – and as soon as possible, before it’s too late to avert a financial crisis – that the United States will pay all its bills as they come due, even if the treasury department must borrow more than Congress has said it can.”Such a step has support from prominent Democrats.In a letter earlier this week, a group of senators including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (an independent who caucuses with the party), said: “Using this authority would allow the United States to continue to pay its bills on-time, without delay, preventing a global economic catastrophe.”But Biden has resisted so far.On Friday, an unnamed official told the Washington Post the Biden White House still believed “a path to a reasonable bipartisan budget agreement” was possible, “as long as both sides recognise that they won’t get everything they want and compromise is necessary”.The Post also said the two sides had not agreed when to meet again. More

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      The US debt ceiling crisis is more proof of Republicans’ cynicism and bad faith | Jill Filipovic

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      The shamelessness and recklessness of today’s Republican party seems to know no bounds. As the deadline for raising the debt ceiling or defaulting rapidly approaches, the party continues to hold the country hostage, telling Democrats: give us what we want – things we cannot get by going through normal democratic processes – or we will pitch the global economy off a cliff.Democrats in Congress are doing their best to get their Republican colleagues to behave rationally, but it’s notoriously difficult to negotiate with terrorists. The Republicans want major spending cuts, but they want to force those cuts through by threat instead of having to legislate normally. And the cuts they’re asking for are appalling: they include slashing funds to things like cancer research, rental assistance for the poor, support for schools with large numbers of low-income students, and pay for Americans in uniform. The Republican bill would end Biden’s attempt at student loan debt relief, repeal tax breaks for renewables and clean energy while increasing reliance on fossil fuels, raise already-onerous work requirements to receive food stamps and welfare benefits, and decrease the efficiency and abilities of the IRS.The Republican proposal would leave a great many Americans worse off – but it would be a boon for oil executives and wealthy tax avoiders.It’s also an unconscionable display of bad faith and manipulation. This is not the first time that Congress has needed to raise the debt ceiling, and the stakes are so high that, traditionally, it’s been a bipartisan effort, with Democrats and Republicans alike largely agreeing that it would be wildly irresponsible and disgustingly devious to use such a vulnerable moment to strong-arm the opposing party. The big exception came during the Tea Party takeover of the Republican party in 2011, when Republicans also used raising the debt ceiling to start a fight. Those Tea Party radicals seemed crazy then – but they had nothing on the absolutely unhinged lunatics of the Maga Republicans.In a sane Congress operating in a functional country, everyone in Congress would agree that the US cannot default, and would behave accordingly. But this is not a sane Congress operating in a functional country, and that’s 100% because of the far-right takeover of the Republican party.Today’s Republicans are a party of destruction. As much as they claim to want to make America great again, they seem much more intent on sowing division, fomenting chaos and embracing an ethos of nihilism. There is no school shooting brutal enough to make them reconsider America’s extreme gun laws; no pregnant woman who suffers enough to make them take a step back on criminalizing abortion; and virtually nothing their unelected leader Donald Trump can to do make them reject him – allowing a deadly attack on the Capitol, being deemed a sexual abuser by a New York jury, and undermining America’s tradition of free and fair elections have not been enough to end the Republican party’s love affair with Trump. As the party has not only embraced Trump but molded itself in his image, it has become all the more dangerous to the nation.It was clear on 6 January 2021 that a dangerous number of Republicans had gone off the deep end, and were willing to take America down with them. Even after a rightwing mob attacked the Capitol complex in an attempt to overthrow the results of the presidential election, 147 congressional Republicans stood behind them, and voted to overturn the election results. These 147 elected officials voted against American democracy that day; they showed that they were willing to override the will of American voters in order to install their man in office. This is nothing short of fascistic, and it was a sign of dangers to come.Now, that same party is pushing an unpopular agenda, but is filled with elected officials who either don’t care or are totally delusional ideologues. Which is how we wound up watching the days tick down until a default. Democrats, and clear-thinking people, understand just how disastrous this would be: it would likely mean a global economic crash, a downgraded credit rating for the United States, and huge financial repercussions, including significant job losses, for Americans – and for lots of people outside of our borders.Too many Republicans, unfortunately, seem to be fine with that, perhaps because they also seem to enjoy burning things down – and they seem bizarrely confident that they’ll be able to blame the fallout on Biden.They shouldn’t be so sure. It’s obvious what is happening here: Republicans want to get their way, and are willing to use any means to do so. The blame won’t fall on Biden for failing to adequately negotiate with the extremists willing to threaten global financial stability to get their much-wanted cuts to cancer research and help for the poor. Blame will fall on the people who deserve blame: the Republicans acting like cartoon supervillains.Hopefully it doesn’t come to that. Hopefully, Republicans come to their senses, allow the US to raise the debt ceiling without major concessions, and avoid torpedoing the world economy. But even if this immediate crisis is averted – a big if – the fact that we’re here in the first place signals just how dangerous Republicans have become. Many members of the Republican party have already made clear that they have no respect for American democracy, and no desire to maintain it. Now, even more members of the party are making clear that they have no respect for America’s role as a stabilizing global economic force.This isn’t playing hardball. It’s hostage-taking. And unless Republicans manage to pull their party back from the brink, it’s only going to be one more sad example of Republicans’ attempt to make America into an untrustworthy, undemocratic shambles.
      Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness More