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      ‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964

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      ‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964Bill Moyers was there when Lyndon Johnson made his memorable assessment of the Civil Rights Act’s effects The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history, giving protections and rights long denied to Black Americans. Like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Medicare for senior citizens, it was a pillar of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.LBJ OK? Historian Mark Lawrence on a president resurgentRead moreThe Civil Rights Act also had a profound effect on the American political landscape, triggering a reshaping that still influences the fortunes of Democrats and Republicans, particularly in the south.A brilliant political analyst, Johnson foresaw the consequences of his civil rights legislation on the day he signed it into law. He is said to have remarked: “We’ve lost the south for a generation.”Indeed, the south has become steadily more Republican since then, the victories of Joe Biden and two Democratic senators in Georgia in 2020 and 2022 rare blue successes in a Republican stronghold.But did Johnson really say it? He didn’t mention it in his memoir – and he died 50 years ago on Sunday, aged just 64. In his absence, historians debate and write.So the Guardian went to the source: the legendary journalist Bill Moyers. Now 88, he was Johnson’s special assistant when the Civil Rights Act passed.Moyers responded with a detailed e-mail.On 2 July 1964, “the president signed the Civil Rights Act around 6.45pm. Before he went into a meeting in his office with some civil rights leaders and [the deputy attorney general] Nick Katzenbach, he pulled me aside and said, sotto voce, ‘Bird [Johnson’s wife] and I are going down to the Ranch. I’d like you to come with us … I practically ran to my office to pack.’”Moyers made it to the airport in time.“When I boarded the Jet Star, the president was reading the latest edition of the Washington Post. We took off around around 11pm … I sat down across from him. Lady Bird was in the other seat by him … the papers were celebrating what they described as a great event.“I said, ‘Quite a day, Mr President.’ As he reached a sheaf of the wire copy he tilted his head slightly back and held the copy up close to him so that he could read it, and said: ‘Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.’“It was lightly said. Not sarcastic. Not even dramatically. It was like a throwaway sidebar.”To Moyers, “all these years later”, Johnson’s remark seems “maybe … merely a jest, lightly uttered and soon forgotten”. But after Moyers “repeated it publicly just once, it took on a life of its own.“Unfortunately, various versions appeared: ‘for a generation’, ‘once and for all’. I couldn’t keep up. I finally stopped commenting.”And so a legend grew.As Moyers pointed out, in summer 1964, Johnson’s “immediate concern was to carry the south in his own election for president”, against the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, a hard-right senator from Arizona.“He briefly threatened not to go to the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, because he was very tense and uneasy about the fight over seating the Mississippi delegation, and especially the role of Fannie Lou Hamer.”Hamer was a legendary civil rights activist, beaten and shot at for registering Black voters in Mississippi. At the convention, she mesmerized a national audience when she testified in an unsuccessful effort to get the new Freedom Democratic Party seated as the official delegation from Mississippi.“As we all know,” Moyers wrote, “Johnson went on to the convention and lapped his nomination … Now he seemed fully in the game and determined to carry the south.“He called meetings with his campaign team, over and again. He talked often to our people on the ground, from Louisiana to North Carolina. He made the campaign south of the Mason-Dixon Line his personal battlefield. He wanted to win there. And he did – in five states.”Johnson won in a landslide. In the south, he took Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.Moyers remembered that “on election night, as the results rolled in, [Johnson] was elated. His dreaded private vision of losing the south … would have cost [him] the election.“I think he had doubled down on not handing Republicans the south. That would come with [Richard] Nixon’s southern strategy, four years later. For now, [Johnson] was spared what would have humiliated him.”TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsUS domestic policyRaceDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      LBJ OK? Historian Mark Lawrence on a president resurgent

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      InterviewLBJ OK? Historian Mark Lawrence on a president resurgentMartin Pengelly Fifty years after Lyndon Johnson died, the director of the 36th president’s library discusses his politics and progressive idealsFifty years ago on Sunday, Lyndon Baines Johnson died. He was 64, and had been out of power since stepping down as president in 1969, in the shadow of the Vietnam war. Forty-five years later, in 2018, the Guardian marked the anniversary of his death. The headline: “Why Lyndon Johnson, a truly awful man, is my political hero.”Why Lyndon Johnson, a truly awful man, is my political hero | Jack BernhardtRead moreMark Lawrence laughs.“I think I read that one,” he says.It seems likely. Lawrence, a distinguished Vietnam scholar, is director of the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.Johnson was a Texas Democrat who rose through Congress to be vice-president to John F Kennedy, then assumed the presidency when Kennedy was killed. From 1963 to 1969, Johnson presided over great social reform at home and gathering disaster abroad. His legacy has never been less than complex, his place in American culture attracting historians by the hundred and big-name actors in droves. Bryan Cranston, Brian Cox and Woody Harrelson have recently played LBJ.Lawrence continues: “One of the ideas that an awful lot of people hold about LBJ, and I think it’s not wholly incorrect, but it’s problematic, is that he was this vulgar, crude man who used four-letter words and demeaned his subordinates and threw temper tantrums.“There’s no question that Caro” – Robert Caro’s biographical masterwork – “is the go-to source for the uglier parts of his personal style. But I think you can also make an argument, and Caro I think comes around to this view in the later books, that LBJ managed to combine whatever elements of that old caricature hold up with a genuine sense of compassion for ordinary people.“Many biographers see the link between his own hardscrabble youth and the struggles of his family and a peculiar sensitivity to the plight of the downtrodden, which certainly affected his view of racial discrimination. The sensitivity to poverty, whether it affected Black, brown or white, came from his own experience.“My writing about LBJ has largely been critical, but I don’t have any difficulty saying this was a man with a genuine sense of compassion.”Lawrence is speaking to mark the half-century since the 36th president died. LBJ is in the news anyway. He was the architect of the Great Society, overseeing the passage of civil rights protections and a welfare system now under renewed attack. Joe Biden often compares his post-Covid presidency to that of Franklin D Roosevelt amid the Great Depression, but comparisons to Johnson are ready to hand.Lawrence says: “The points of similarity are remarkable. The guy with long service in the Senate” – Johnson from Texas, 1949-1961, Biden from Delaware, 1973-2009 – “the guy who could cross the aisle, the guy who spoke in pragmatic, bipartisan terms. Both of these guys became vice-president to a younger, less experienced but much more charismatic person” – Biden to Barack Obama – “and that was kind of their ticket to the presidency.“But I think some of these comparisons are ultimately unfair to Biden, because the political context is just so different. My own view is, sure, LBJ deserves credit for being this enormously persuasive, forceful guy who knew how to bend people to his will. But at the end of the day, LBJ was pushing an open door.“Even the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, these great achievements, they passed by big margins. There were bipartisan coalitions. LBJ deserves credit for his ability to put those coalitions together. But … I think it’s possible to exaggerate LBJ’s importance and to forget the importance of Hubert Humphrey, Jacob Javits and Everett Dirksen, all key players as well.”Bipartisan players, too. Humphrey was LBJ’s vice-president, Javits a Republican senator from New York, Dirksen, of Illinois, Republican Senate minority leader.“I think that’s precisely what’s lacking now. The situation is so polarised that you could bring LBJ back from the dead and he’d be an utter failure in this political context, because his skills would have been meaningless in the context of 2023.”Biden passed a coronavirus rescue package, an infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, all meant to help the US recover from Covid, with razor-thin margins in Congress and against Republicans gone to extremes. LBJ’s shadow may be long – at a shade over 6ft 3in he is the second-tallest president, after Abraham Lincoln – but Biden does not necessarily labour within it.So how might progressives see Johnson? If they read Caro, they will learn how he came from a world of Texas populism, tinged with socialism, that now seems far gone indeed.“At least by the standards of the era,” Lawrence sees in LBJ “a genuine willingness to think hard about poverty and how to insulate people against economic forces over which individuals had no control whatsoever.”Whether teaching in a dirt-poor school in Cotulla in 1928 or working “for the National Youth Administration in the 1930s, LBJ shows glimmers of his willingness to cross racial lines and to think seriously about the situation of African Americans and Mexican Americans”.1968: the year that changed AmericaRead moreTo Lawrence, the Texas years “indicate that LBJ was an unusual person, for a southern white man who came of age in the 1920s and 30s.”In the 1950s, when Johnson led the Senate, he defended white supremacy. As president, he oversaw the Vietnam disaster. But Charles Kaiser, a Guardian contributor and author of 1968 in America and The Gay Metropolis, also sees the bigger picture.“In 1968, I hated Lyndon Johnson with all my heart, because I was 17 – and lived in fear of being drafted. Fifty years later, it is clear three other things about his presidency were much more important than the war that destroyed him.“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made him the most courageous president since Lincoln. Johnson may or may not have said ‘We have lost the south for a generation’ after he signed the 1964 law, but he certainly knew that was true. By fighting for those two laws, he did more to redeem the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation than any president before him.“Medicare is the third prong of a noble legacy. It did more to improve the lives of senior citizens than anything else except Franklin Roosevelt’s social security. A hundred years from now, I think Johnson will be considered one of our greatest presidents.”To Lawrence, Johnson’s reputation is “mixed. But I think the mix of impressions is quite different from what it was certainly 30 years ago.“When he died, and for many years thereafter, Vietnam hung so heavily over LBJ that he was a little bit radioactive … it was something conservatives and the left could agree on. Vietnam was a debacle and LBJ bore principal responsibility for it. But I think in the last decade and a half, there’s been a gradual reappraisal.Turn Every Page: a peek into Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb’s long creative relationshipRead more“The level of dysfunction and partisanship in Washington has led people to take another look at LBJ and how he was able to work across the aisle and achieve so much. There’s a kind of longing, I think, for that kind of political effectiveness.“So many of the issues that LBJ worked on are back with us, and I think this has led at least parts of the political spectrum to have a new appreciation for him.“In a period when immigration and the environment and voting rights are under threat in a profound way, people are rediscovering LBJ as someone who maybe didn’t have perfect answers but worked very effectively, at least by the standards of recent decades, and achieved real results.”TopicsBooksUS politicsPolitics booksHistory booksDemocratsUS domestic policyUS foreign policyinterviewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Joe Biden has been constantly underestimated’: Chris Whipple on his White House book

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      Interview‘Joe Biden has been constantly underestimated’: Chris Whipple on his White House bookDavid Smith in Washington Fight of His Life author on Kamala Harris’s struggles and growth, Afghanistan, a strong second year … and if Biden will run againThere are those who believe that at 80, Joe Biden is too old to serve a second term as president. Yet few clamour for him to hand over to the person who would normally be the heir apparent.The Fight of His Life review: Joe Biden, White House winnerRead moreTwo years in, Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour to be vice-president, has had her ups and downs. Her relationship with Biden appears strong and she has found her voice as a defender of abortion rights. But her office has suffered upheaval and her media appearances have failed to impress.Such behind-the-scenes drama is recounted in The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, written by the author, journalist and film-maker Chris Whipple and published this week. Whipple gained access to nearly all of Biden’s inner circle and has produced a readable half-time report on his presidency – a somewhat less crowded field than the literary genre that sprang up around Donald Trump.“In the beginning, Joe Biden liked having Kamala Harris around,” Whipple writes, noting that Biden wanted the vice-president with him for meetings on almost everything. One source observed a “synergy” between them.Harris volunteered to take on the cause of voting rights. But Biden handed her another: tackling the causes of undocumented immigration by negotiating with the governments of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.“But for Harris,” Whipple writes, “the Northern Triangle would prove to be radioactive.”With the distinction between root causes and immediate problems soon lost on the public, Harris got the blame as migrants kept coming.One of her senior advisers tells Whipple the media could not handle a vice-president who was not only female but also Black and south Asian, referring to it as “the Unicorn in a glass box” syndrome. But Harris also suffered self-inflicted wounds. Whipple writes that she “seemed awkward and uncertain … she laughed inappropriately and chopped the air with her hands, which made her seem condescending”.An interview with NBC during a visit to Guatemala and Mexico was a “disaster”, according to one observer. Reports highlighted turmoil and turnover in Harris’s office, some former staff claiming they saw it all before when she was California attorney general and on her presidential campaign. Her approval rating sank to 28%, lower than Dick Cheney’s during the Iraq war.But, Whipple writes, Biden and his team still thought highly of Harris.“Ron Klain [chief of staff] was personally fond of her. He met with the vice-president weekly and encouraged her to do more interviews and raise her profile. Harris was reluctant, wary of making mistakes.“‘This is like baseball,’ Klain told her. ‘You have to accept the fact that sometimes you will strike out. We all strike out. But you can’t score runs if you’re sitting in the dugout.’ Biden’s chief was channeling manager Tom Hanks in the film A League of Their Own. ‘Look, no one here is going to get mad at you. We want you out there!’”Speaking to the Guardian, Whipple, 69, reflects: “It’s a complicated, fascinating relationship between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.“In the early months of the administration they had a real rapport, a real bond. Because of Covid they were thrown together in the White House and spent a lot of time together. He wanted her to be in almost every meeting and valued her input. All of that was and is true.“But when she began to draw fire, particularly over her assignment on the Northern Triangle, things became more complicated. It got back to the president that the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, was complaining around town that her portfolio was too difficult and that in effect it was setting her up for failure. This really annoyed Biden. He felt he hadn’t asked her to do anything he hadn’t done for Barack Obama: he had the Northern Triangle as one of his assignments. She had asked for the voting rights portfolio and he gave it to her. So that caused some friction.”A few months into the presidency, Whipple writes, a close friend asked Biden what he thought of his vice-president. His reply: “A work in progress.” These four words – a less than ringing endorsement – form the title of a chapter in Whipple’s book.But in our interview, Whipple adds: “It’s also true that she grew in terms of her national security prowess. That’s why Biden sent her to the Munich Security Conference on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She spent a lot of time in the meetings with the president’s daily brief and Biden’s given her some important assignments in that respect.”A former producer for CBS’s 60 Minutes, Whipple has written books about White House chiefs of staff and directors of the CIA. Each covered more than 100 years of history, whereas writing The Fight of His Life was, he says, like designing a plane in mid-flight and not knowing where to land it. Why did he do it?“How could I not? When you think about it, Joe Biden and his team came into office confronting a once-in-a-century pandemic, crippled economy, global warming, racial injustice, the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol. How could anybody with a political or storytelling bone in his body not want to tell that story? Especially if you could get access to Biden’s inner circle, which I was fortunate in being able to do.”Even so, it wasn’t easy. Whipple describes “one of the most leakproof White Houses in modern history … extremely disciplined and buttoned down”. It could hardly be more different from the everything-everywhere-all-at-once scandals of the Trump administration.What the author found was a tale of two presidencies. There was year one, plagued by inflation, supply chain problems, an arguably premature declaration of victory over the coronavirus and setbacks in Congress over Build Back Better and other legislation. Worst of all was the dismal end of America’s longest war as, after 20 years and $2tn, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.“It was clearly a failure to execute the withdrawal in a safe and orderly way and at the end of the day, as I put it, it was a whole-of-government failure,” Whipple says. “Everybody got almost everything wrong, beginning with the intelligence on how long the Afghan government and armed forces would last and ending with the botched execution of the withdrawal, with too few troops on the ground.”Whipple is quite possibly the first author to interview Klain; the secretary of state, Antony Blinken; the CIA director, Bill Burns; and the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, about the Afghanistan debacle.“What became clear was that everybody had a different recollection of the intelligence. While this administration often seems to be pretty much on the same page, I found that there was a lot more drama behind the scenes during the Afghan withdrawal and in some of the immediate aftermath,” he says.The book also captures tension between Leon Panetta, CIA director and defense secretary under Barack Obama, who was critical of the exit strategy – “You just wonder whether people were telling the president what he wanted to hear” – and Klain, who counters that Panetta favoured the war and oversaw the training of the Afghan military, saying: “If this was Biden’s Bay of Pigs, it was Leon’s army that lost the fight.”Whipple comments: “Ron Klain wanted to fire back in this case and it’s remarkable and fascinating to me, given his relationship with Panetta. Obviously his criticism got under Ron Klain’s skin.”Biden’s second year was a different story. “Everything changed on 24 February 2022, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Joe Biden was uniquely qualified to rise to that moment and he did, rallying Nato in defiance of Putin and in defence of Ukraine. Biden had spent his entire career preparing for that moment, with the Senate foreign relations committee and his experience with Putin, and it showed.“Then he went on to pass a string of bipartisan legislative bills from the Chips Act to veterans healthcare, culminating in the Inflation Reduction Act, which I don’t think anybody saw coming.“One thing is for sure: Joe Biden has been constantly underestimated from day one and, at the two-year mark, he proves that he could deliver a lot more than people thought.”Biden looked set to enter his third year with the wind at his back. Democrats exceeded expectations in the midterm elections, inflation is slowing, Biden’s approval rating is on the up and dysfunctional House Republicans struggled to elect a speaker.But political life moves pretty fast. Last week the justice department appointed a special counsel to investigate the discovery of classified documents, from Biden’s time as vice-president, at his thinktank in Washington and home in Delaware.Whipple told CBS: “They really need to raise their game here, I think, because this really goes to the heart of Joe Biden’s greatest asset, arguably, which is trust.”The mistake represents a bump in the road to 2024. Biden’s age could be another. He is older than Ronald Reagan was when he completed his second term and if he serves a full second term he will be 86 at the end. Opinion polls suggest many voters feel he is too old for the job. Biden’s allies disagree.Whipple says: “His inner circle is bullish about Biden’s mental acuity and his ability to govern. I never heard any of them express any concern and maybe you would expect that from the inner circle. Many of them will tell you that he has extraordinary endurance, energy.“Bruce Reed [a longtime adviser] told me about flying back on a red-eye from Europe after four summits in a row when everybody had to drag themselves out of the plane and was desperately trying to sleep and the boss came in and told stories for six hours straight all the way back to DC.”During conversations and interviews for the book, did Whipple get the impression Biden will seek re-election?“He’s almost undoubtedly running. Andy Card [chief of staff under George W Bush] said something to me once that rang true: ‘If anybody tells you they’re leaving the White House voluntarily, they’re probably lying to you.’“Who was the last president to walk away from the office voluntarily? LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson]. It rarely happens. I don’t think Joe Biden is an exception. He spent his whole career … thinking about running or running for president and he’s got unfinished business. Having the possibility of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee probably makes it more urgent for him. He thinks he can beat him again.”
      The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House is published in the US by Scribner
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      The FTC is back to being the activist US agency progressives sought in 1914 | Robert Reich

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      The FTC is back to being the activist US agency progressives sought in 1914Robert ReichLast week, under its Biden-appointed chair, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a new rule banning non-compete agreements – and it’s a big deal Have you ever been forced to sign a non-compete agreement when you started a job?About 30 million Americans are trapped by contracts that say if they leave their current job, they can’t take a job with a rival company or start a new business of their own.The US should break up monopolies – not punish working Americans for rising prices | Robert ReichRead moreThese clauses deprive workers of higher wages and better working conditions. In effect, they’re a form of involuntary servitude.Last week, while America was fixated on Kevin McCarthy’s travails, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposed a sweeping new rule that would ban these non-compete agreements.This is a big deal. The FTC estimates that such a ban could increase wages by nearly $300bn a year (about $2,000 a worker, on average) by allowing workers to pursue better job opportunities.Non-competes also harm the economy, depriving growing businesses of talent and experience they need to build and expand. California’s ban on non-competes has been a major reason for Silicon Valley’s success.The rule isn’t a sure thing. House Republicans will try to kill it. Corporate America will appeal it up to the supreme court, which is hostile to independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC.For decades, non-compete agreements have been cropping up all over the economy – not just in high-paying fields like banking and tech but as standard boilerplate for employment contracts in many low-wage sectors such as construction, hospitality and retail.A recent study found one in five workers without a college education subject to them, disproportionately women and people of color.Employers say they need non-compete agreements to protect trade secrets and investments they put into growing their businesses, including training workers.Rubbish. Employers in the states that already ban them (such as California) show no sign of being more reluctant to invest in their businesses or train workers.The real purpose of non-competes is to make it harder (or impossible) for workers to bargain with rival employers for better pay or working conditions.As we learn again and again, capitalism needs guardrails to survive. Unfettered greed leads to monopolies that charge high prices, suppress wages and corrupt politics.As Adam Smith, the putative godfather of conservative economics, put it in The Wealth of Nations: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”America once understood the importance of fighting monopolies.The presidential election of 1912 was dominated by the question. Once elected, Woodrow Wilson created the FTC to save capitalism from the depredations of powerful corporations and “robber barons” that had turned the economy of the Gilded Age into vast monopolies, fueling unprecedented inequality and political corruption.But as the FTC began prosecuting giant corporations, the robber barons saw the agency as a major threat – and did what they could to strip it of its powers. Within a few years, the FTC was derided as the “little old lady of Pennsylvania Avenue”.In 1976, when I ran the policy planning staff of the FTC, the agency again began cracking down on corporations under its aggressive chairman, Michael Pertschuk. (Pertschuk died just weeks ago.)Big corporations were so unhappy with the FTC under Pertschuk that they tried to choke off the agency’s appropriation, briefly closing it down in 1978. But Pertschuk didn’t relent.He (and I) left the agency when Ronald Reagan appointed a new chairman, who promptly defanged it.Now, under its new Biden-appointed chair, Lina M Khan, the FTC is back to being the activist agency that progressives sought in 1914 and Pertschuk resurrected in 1976.The FTC’s new proposed rule banning non-compete agreements marks the first time since Pertschuk headed the FTC that the agency has issued a rule prohibiting an unfair method of competition.I wouldn’t be surprised if the new radical-right Republicans now in control of the House tried to pull off a stunt similar to what the House tried in 1978.In the meantime, kudos to Biden, Lina Khan (and her fellow FTC commissioners Rebecca Kelley-Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya), and to the FTC staff for protecting American workers and economic competition – and thereby protecting American capitalism from the depredations of untrammeled greed.
      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
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      ‘I’ve got to get out and tell people’: Pete Buttigieg on his road ahead

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      Interview‘I’ve got to get out and tell people’: Pete Buttigieg on his road aheadDavid Smith in Washington Can the US revitalise its infrastructure? Is the US ready for a gay president? And does Buttigieg still plan to run one day?From Pete Buttigieg’s old office in South Bend, Indiana, you could see the hospital where he was born, churches built for Irish and Polish immigrants and a factory that made cabinets for Singer sewing machines. “This was the Silicon Valley of its day,” the then mayor told the Guardian in February 2019.Nearly four years later, Buttigieg is occupying a loftier perch. As America’s transportation secretary, his framed photograph sits alongside those of Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris in the lobby of the Department of Transportation. The building is located in Navy Yard, a neighbourhood on the Anacostia River that is home to the Washington Nationals baseball team.Too much, too young? Mayor could become the first millennial presidentRead moreButtigieg has gone from running a city of 100,000 people to a department whose budget is bigger than the gross domestic product of most countries. “As mayor, of course, I worked on a broad range of issues – anything that happened in the city was my concern,” he recalls in a pre-Christmas interview with the Guardian in Washington.“But here you work with a daunting scope and scale. The scope ranges from commercial space travel to the oversight of our Merchant Marine Academy, so not just planes, trains and automobiles, but everything in between.”The meteoric rise helps explain why Buttigieg is widely seen as potential presidential material in 2024, 2028 or beyond. He speaks eight languages, had spells at Harvard, Oxford and McKinsey, became a mayor before he turned 30 and did military service in Afghanistan. He won the Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa in 2020 but, perhaps more importantly, knew when it was time to step aside so the party could unite around Biden.Now Biden is 80 and Buttigieg is 40, until his next birthday on 19 January. Some Democrats yearn to see generational change, especially if Republicans nominate Ron DeSantis, the 44-year-old governor of Florida, for president in 2024. The Politico website recently highlighted the activities of his allies in a “dark money” group and political action committee under the provocative headline “Pete’s campaign in waiting”.But part of Buttigieg’s formidable communication skills is a refusal to take such bait. He insists with AI-worthy precision: “I have my hands more than full with my day job and one job at a time is plenty. And it’s a great job and I have a great boss and I’m proud to be part of this team.”The day job undeniably offers a lot to chew on. American infrastructure ranked just 13th in the world in 2019, according to the World Economic Forum. This was the nation that erected the tallest and most beautiful skyscrapers, built an interstate highway system and put a man on the moon. But in recent decades there has been a sense of turning inward – of decline and neglect – as Asia and Europe raced ahead with gleaming airports and faster trains.Where did it all go wrong? One answer is President Ronald Reagan, an arch exponent of laissez-faire capitalism who memorably declared that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”Buttigieg, who is unapologetically from the government and here to help, says: “The beginning of the Reagan era brought about a vicious cycle of public trust, where resources were stripped away from the government. It became harder for government to deliver for people and then those policy failures reduced trust in government, which made people more reluctant to trust their taxpayer dollars to government, which meant even fewer resources and even worse results.“The cycle of disinvestment has been accumulating for essentially my entire lifetime and part of what’s so exciting about this moment is a chance to re-establish public trust by making big investments to get big results to build public confidence in the things we can do together through good public policy and good public investment.”Biden, openly critical of Reagan’s trickle-down economics, set about changing the paradigm. After long negotiations with Congress, including late-night phone calls and several declarations that the deal was dead, he last year signed a trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure law.‘Glad to have a president who can ride a bicycle’: Buttigieg dismisses Republican claims about Biden’s healthRead moreThe money is being – or will be – spent on rebuilding roads, bridges, ports and airports, upgrading public transit and rail systems, replacing lead pipes to provide clean water, cleaning up pollution, providing high-speed internet, delivering cheaper and cleaner energy – and creating thousands of jobs.One year in, the administration has announced more than $185bn (£154bn) in funding and more than 6,900 specific projects reaching more than 4,000 communities across the country. This includes 2,800 bridge repair and replacement projects and $3bn for 3,075 airport upgrades.The legislation handed the former “Mayor Pete” the biggest infusion of cash into the transport sector since the 1950s interstate highways. He understands how much is riding on it. “What’s at stake in this transportation legislation – and the president talks about it this way too – is more than just the nuts and bolts of it,” he says.“It really is a chance to vindicate the democratic system over some of the systems that are trying to challenge us right now in this century. It sounds a little bit cosmic but that really is part of what is on the table right now with our responsibility to deliver.”The bipartisan law allowed the White House to crow that while “infrastructure week” was a punchline under President Donald Trump, his successor is delivering an “infrastructure decade”. Buttigieg comments: “As you might imagine, I’m no fan of President Trump. I will say this is the one time I was fooled. I actually thought they were going to do it because he talked about it all the time.“It would have been good politics and everybody wanted it to happen, it would have benefited the economy, and they still couldn’t get it done. So after four years of chest thumping and big promises without results, this administration knew, this president knew, that it was long past time to do something and it turned out the public appetite was there, the deal space was there.”Even Republicans who voted against the law, branding it a “socialist wishlist”, are happy to reap the benefits. “It’s hard not to chuckle when I get a letter from some member of Congress, invariably a Republican member of Congress, who declared this legislation to be garbage or wasteful social spending or whatever now saying this is funding that really needs to come to my district for these needs. But at the end of the day, it vindicates our approach.”Buttigieg want to be “strategically shameless” in putting up signs on active projects to make sure that the law gets the credit it deserves. Infrastructure is not like tax policy where, at the stroke of a pen, people feel results instantly. “I often tell the team: part of what we’re doing is building cathedrals and the nature of cathedrals is the person who celebrates the opening may not have been there when the cornerstone was laid.“But because we’re doing so much at so many different scales and in so many different places, the truth is there’s a range of projects where we’ve already turned a spade, improvements that are going to be felt very quickly to some of the bigger cathedrals that will be years and years in the making.”Indeed, Democrats insist that some of the positive effects are being felt already. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia tweeted on 19 December: “Week after week, the infrastructure law is paying dividends. It’s expanding highways like I-64, upgrading airports, fixing crumbling bridges and building new bike paths. It’s revitalizing our communities and making every travel day better.The law’s provisions to tackle systemic racism have come under attack from Republicans and others on the right. Senator Ted Cruz tweeted with sarcasm: “The roads are racist. We must get rid of roads.” DeSantis remarked: “I heard some stuff, some weird stuff from the secretary of transportation trying to make this about social issues. To me, a road’s a road.”Buttigieg is ready to have that debate. He often notes that the phrase “on the wrong side of the tracks”, referring to the undesirable part of town, is indicative of how a railway or highway not only connects but also divides. “As I’ve had this conversation around the country, it’s striking how, wherever I am, I can see in the faces nodding when I bring this up that people are visualising their own community’s version of this.“I talk about this not to go around scolding anybody but precisely because we have the means to do better and that’s why it’s so perplexing to see the resistance to it, because, if you have a choice between having a place become more divided or less divided along racial lines through transportation infrastructure choices, why wouldn’t you want it to be less divided?”At least $1bn (£831m) will help reconnect cities and neighbourhoods that had been racially segregated or divided by road projects. But the legislation is also about including businesses and workers who have been left out in the past.“There’s some impressive – and sometimes moving – things taking place in the building trades, for example, that are in many places opening their doors to workers of colour and women who will make great skilled labourers and make good incomes to build their families around, who just never would have this opportunity in the last round of major infrastructure investment in this country.”Transport contributes more greenhouse gases to the US economy than any other sector; Buttigieg wants it to be part of the climate solution as the infrastructure law promises a national network of electric vehicle chargers. Road accidents kill about 40,000 people a year, comparable with gun violence and far worse than other countries; Buttigieg finds this unacceptable and hopes that self-driving cars might be part of the solution.The secretary, who speaks in paragraphs more polished than most people write, has been willing to make such arguments on Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Fox News network in a series of appearances that have gone viral. It is the kind of outreach to hostile territory that evokes comparisons with Biden’s spirit of bipartisanship – and fuels talk of a future White House run.He explains: “There are a lot of people who tune into ideological networks, as viewers in good faith who may never hear our administration’s perspective if we’re not out there. I’m not the only one doing it but I have been surprised to see it become something of a speciality.“You can’t blame somebody for rejecting our approach if they’ve literally never even heard us defend it, especially when it comes to transportation, where most of what we’re doing is actually broadly well-understood and popular but we’ve got to remind people of that.“It can be tough in a space – and Fox is an example – that tends to offer more coverage of some controversial angle around electric vehicles or racial justice than would offer any coverage of the thousands of specific projects that we’re investing in around the country. I’ve got to get out there and tell people. As long as they’ll have me, I’ll keep doing it.”Buttigieg recently moved from a red state, Indiana, to an increasingly blue one, Michigan, with his husband Chasten and their two young children. On 13 December the couple were on the White House south lawn to watch Biden sign the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex and interracial marriages under federal law.The secretary reflects: “To be sitting with Chasten and seeing the president make that into law was really moving and and reassuring. We shouldn’t have to depend on a one-vote margin on the supreme court to have something as important as millions of marriages be protected and I think Congress recognised that, and I think the American public recognised that.”The shift in public attitudes was illustrated in last month’s midterm elections, where for the first time LGBTQ+ candidates ran for election in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and where Oregon’s Tina Kotek and Massachusetts’ Maura Healey ensured that the US will have an out lesbian governor for the first time. Buttigieg himself was in demand as a campaign surrogate for various Democratic candidates.A New York Times article about him in June 2016 was headlined “The First Gay President?” So is America now ready? “I’m sure it’ll happen,” he says. “What we’re seeing right now is the good, the bad and the ugly. The good news is we have this progress on things like marriage and representation in senior leadership. The bad news is it’s coming in a climate of rights being withdrawn at the US supreme court, including potentially more of the hard-won rights of the LGBTQ+ community.“And the ugly is you see a level of targeting going on for political convenience, in my view, driven by a lot of figures who don’t want to talk about their lack of solutions on other issues, that can really be costly and even physically dangerous for vulnerable communities right now. You can connect the rhetoric we’ve seen, and some of the legislation we’ve seen in state legislatures, with the sometimes violent atmosphere -especially towards transgender youth but across the board for vulnerable people in this community.”The interview draws to a close in a meeting room where one wall is dominated by the faces of past transportation secretaries in neat rows. Biden’s Rooseveltian ambitions look set to make Buttigieg the most powerful holder of the office yet.“Good to see you – and different from the 14th floor in South Bend,” he says affably on his way out. “Who knows where I’ll see you next?”TopicsPete ButtigiegUS politicsInfrastructureBiden administrationUS domestic policyDemocratsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Tlaib and MTG among more than 220 House proxy voters on spending bill

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      Tlaib and MTG among more than 220 House proxy voters on spending billRepublicans rail against pandemic-era rule as 226 House members from left to far right take chance not to vote in person Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, one of two Democrats to oppose the $1.7tn spending bill that averted a US government shutdown on Friday, did so by voting “present”. But Tlaib was not present at the Capitol, voting instead by proxy.House passes $1.7tn spending bill to avert US government shutdownRead moreProxy voting was instituted during the Covid pandemic and is due to come to an end on 3 January, in the new Congress with Republicans controlling the House.On Friday, as a huge winter storm bore down on Washington, threatening flights home for Christmas, 226 House members cast proxy votes on the omnibus bill.Republicans say they will get rid of proxy voting. According to the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, “In 11 days … [we will] return the House back to a functioning constitutional body by repealing proxy voting once and for all.”On Friday, some on the right of the GOP, a faction McCarthy must woo if he is to win the speaker’s gavel, claimed the large number of proxy voters on the omnibus bill meant the required quorum was not achieved and the bill could thus be challenged. The chair rejected such claims.One high-profile rightwinger was among those who voted by proxy. As reported by Business Insider, a vacation in Costa Rica meant Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia skipped in-person voting on the spending bill and other events this week including the address to Congress by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.By Saturday, Greene was taking heat not just for proxy voting, having introduced a bill to ban the practice earlier this year, but for holidaying while other Georgians endured power outages and plunging temperatures.There was enough anger to go round. Politico observed that though it understood many members of Congress were not “super-thrilled to be in Washington with Christmas in two days … more than half of the chamber skipping out on the most basic duty members face – showing up to vote – is a poor showing, especially given the pandemic rationale under which the system is meant to be used”.The spending bill passed by 225-201, with Tlaib the lone “present” vote and four Republicans not voting.Tlaib said: “People are demanding we take meaningful action in providing relief and protection during this public health emergency. This bill does not go nearly far enough in providing that help and support.”She was joined by another high-profile progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.The New Yorker said she voted no because the bill contained a “dramatic increase” in immigration-enforcement spending which “cuts against the promises our party has made to immigrant communities across the country”.Nine Republicans supported the bill. Seven are leaving Congress, among them Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, the two anti-Trump Republicans on the House January 6 committee.January 6 report review: 845 pages, countless crimes, one simple truth – Trump did itRead moreBrian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Steve Womack of Arkansas supported the bill and will remain in Congress. In the new House, Politico said, “Democrats will surely be getting to know the two of them better”.McCarthy used a long speech on Friday to play to the right-wingers he needs to be speaker, railing against “a monstrosity” of a bill he said was filled with “leftwing pet projects” and “one of the most shameful acts I’ve ever seen in his body”.Nancy Pelosi responded with remarks she said were probably her last as speaker.“It was sad to hear the minority leader earlier say that this legislation is the most shameful thing to be seen on the House floor in this Congress,” the Democrat said.“I can’t help but wonder, had he forgotten January 6?”TopicsHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressUS domestic policyUS politicsDemocratsRashida TlaibAlexandria Ocasio-CorteznewsReuse this content More

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      Arizona to remove wall of shipping containers on Mexico border

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      Arizona to remove wall of shipping containers on Mexico borderState to dismantle wall following lawsuit filed by US government alleging it was illegally built on federal lands Arizona will remove a wall of shipping containers along the state’s 370-mile border with Mexico following a lawsuit filed by the US government against the state that claimed that the makeshift wall is being illegally built on federal lands.Arizona governor builds border wall of shipping crates in final days of officeRead moreAccording to an agreement reached late Wednesday between federal and state authorities, Arizona will dismantle the wall, along with all related equipment by the beginning of next year.“By January 4, 2023, to the extent feasible and so as not to cause damage to United States’ lands, properties, and natural resources, Arizona will remove all previously installed shipping containers and associated equipment, materials, vehicles,” said the agreement.In August, Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, signed an executive order that directed a state agency to close the gaps in the border, saying: “Arizona has had enough … The Biden administration’s lack of urgency on border security is a dereliction of duty.”“Our border communities are being used as the entryway to the United States, overwhelming law enforcement, hospitals, nonprofits and residents. It’s our responsibility to protect our citizens and law enforcement from this unprecedented crisis,” he added.Wednesday’s agreement comes two weeks before Arizona’s Democratic governor-elect, Katie Hobbs, is scheduled to take office. Hobbs has criticized the wall’s construction, saying: “I am very concerned about the liability to the state of Arizona for those shipping containers that they’re putting on federal land. There’s pictures of people climbing on top of them. I think that’s a huge liability and risk.”‘No money, nowhere to stay’: asylum seekers wait as Trump’s border restrictions drag onRead moreLast week, the federal government filed a lawsuit against Ducey and the rest of the state, requesting for the removal of the containers in remote San Rafael valley in the state’s easternmost Cochise county.“Officials from Reclamation and the Forest Service have notified Arizona that it is trespassing on federal lands,” said the complaint, adding, “This action also seeks damages for Arizona’s trespasses, to compensate the United States for any actions it needs to take to undo Arizona’s actions and to remediate – to the extent possible – any injuries to the United States’ properties and interests.”The complaint, filed by the justice department on behalf of the Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Agriculture and the Forest Services, went on to cite the federal government’s operational and environmental concerns towards the makeshift wall. The $95m project of placing up to 3,000 containers along the border is approximately a third complete.The US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, criticized the project, saying that it “is not an effective barrier, it poses safety hazards to both the public and those working in the area and has significantly damaged public land”.“We need serious solutions at our border, with input from local leaders and communities. Stacking shipping containers is not a productive solution,” he added.In a statement released on Thursday and reported by CNN, Ducey spokesperson CJ Karamargin said: “Finally, after the situation on our border has turned into a full blown crisis, they’ve decided to act. Better late than never. We’re working with the federal government to ensure they can begin construction of this barrier with the urgency this problem demands.”TopicsArizonaUS-Mexico borderUS immigrationUS domestic policyUS politicsBiden administrationRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Senate passes $1.7tn funding bill to avert US government shutdown

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      Senate passes $1.7tn funding bill to avert US government shutdownBill includes $45bn in military aid to Ukraine after lawmakers reached agreement on a final series of votes The US Senate on Thursday passed a $1.7tn government spending bill, sending it to the House to approve and send to Joe Biden for his signature, averting a partial government shutdown.‘No money, nowhere to stay’: asylum seekers wait as Trump’s border restrictions drag onRead moreThe legislation provides funding through 30 September 2023, for the US military and an array of non-military programs.The legislation provides Ukraine with $44.9bn in wartime aid and bans the use of Chinese-owned social media app TikTok on federal government devices.Progress on the bill slowed after the conservative Republican Mike Lee introduced an amendment meant to slow immigration. That prompted Democrats to put forward a competing amendment that would boost funding for law enforcement agencies on the border. Both amendments failed, which allowed lawmakers to move forward.The massive bill includes about $772.5bn for non-defense programs and $858bn for defense. Lawmakers raced to get it approved, many anxious to complete the task before a deep freeze could leave them stranded in Washington for the holidays. Many also wanted to lock in funding before a new Republican-controlled House makes it harder to find compromise.On Wednesday night, senators heard from the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, about the importance of US aid for the war with Russia.“Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way,” Zelenskiy said.The funding measure includes emergency assistance to Ukraine and Nato allies above Joe Biden’s request.The Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said the worst thing Congress could do was give the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, any signal the US was wavering in its commitment to Ukraine. He also said he met Zelenskiy.“He made it clear that without this aid package, the Ukrainians will be in real trouble and could even lose the war,” Schumer said. “So that makes the urgency of getting this legislation done all the more important.”But when lawmakers left the chamber, prospects for a quick vote looked glum. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, said the funding bill was “hanging by a thread”.Republicans were looking to ensure a vote on a proposed amendment from Lee, of Utah, seeking to extend coronavirus pandemic-era restrictions on asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, known as Title 42. Passage of the amendment would have doomed the bill in the Democratic-held House.“Senator Schumer doesn’t want to have a vote on Title 42 because he presumably knows it will pass,” said Mitt Romney, the other Utah Republican. But the House won’t go along in that case, he added, in which case “everything falls apart”.Lee told Fox News: “I insisted that we have at least one amendment, up-or-down vote, on whether to preserve Title 42. Because Title 42 is the one thing standing between us and utter chaos [at the border]. We already have mostly chaos. This would bring us to utter chaos if it expires, which it’s about to.”The spending bill was supported by Schumer and the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, for different reasons.McConnell cited the bill’s 10% boost in defense spending but faced pushback from Republicans resenting being forced to vote on such a massive package with so little time before a shutdown and Christmas. It was expected, however, that enough Republicans agreed with McConnell that the bill would reach 60 votes.Schumer touted the bill as a win on the domestic front, saying: “Kids, parents, veterans, nurses, workers: these are just a few of the beneficiaries of our bipartisan funding package, so there is every reason in the world for the Senate to finish its work as soon as possible.”Lawmakers worked to stuff priorities into the package, which ran to 4,155 pages. It included $27bn in disaster funding and an overhaul of federal election law to prevent presidents or candidates trying to overturn an election. The bipartisan overhaul was a response to Donald Trump’s efforts to convince Republicans to object to Biden’s victory.Hunter Biden hires Jared Kushner lawyer to face Republican investigatorsRead moreThe bill also contained policy changes lawmakers worked to include, to avoid having to start over in the new Congress next year. Examples included the provision from Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, to ban TikTok on government cellphones. A provision supported by Maine would aid the state’s lobster and Jonah crab fisheries, delaying regulations to help save North Atlantic right whales.On the healthcare front, the bill requires states to keep children enrolled in Medicaid on coverage for at least a year. Millions could still start to lose coverage on 1 April because the bill sunsets a requirement of the Covid-19 emergency that prohibited kicking people off Medicaid.The bill also provides roughly $15.3bn for more than 7,200 projects lawmakers sought for their states. Fiscal conservatives criticize such spending as unnecessary.The Senate appropriations committee chairman, Patrick Leahy, a Democrat retiring after nearly five decades in the chamber, praised bipartisan support for the measure following months of negotiations.His Republican counterpart, Richard Shelby, who also is retiring, said of the 4,155-page bill: “It’s got a lot of stuff in it. A lot of good stuff.”House Republicans, including Kevin McCarthy, probably the next speaker, had asked colleagues in the Senate to support only a short-term extension. A notice sent by leadership to House members urged them to vote against the measure.TopicsUS CongressUS SenateUS politicsUS domestic policyUS foreign policyUS militaryUS healthcarenewsReuse this content More