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Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Mitch McConnell says he will fill supreme court vacancy
Democrats cry foul, citing case of Merrick Garland
Opinion: Ginsburg changed US before she joined supreme court
Obituary: Ruth Bader Ginsburg More
There was nothing subtle about Jill Biden’s fashion statement last Monday: the word “VOTE” was spelled out in silver capitals on her black, knee-high boots as she accompanied husband and Democratic presidential candidate Joe to the ballot box in a Delaware primary.Biden’s boots were designed by Stuart Weitzman, with 100% of profits going to public awareness campaign I am Voter. In the run-up to a momentous presidential election in November, they are just the latest example of the word ‘Vote’ becoming the only slogan worth wearing in the US this autumn.Last month, a gold “V-O-T-E” necklace, worn by Michelle Obama during her speech at the digital Democratic National Convention, went viral online.Meanwhile, music phenom Lizzo has designed her own “VOTE” mask, in collaboration with sunglasses brand Quay, of which she said: “The power of voting in midterm and local elections wasn’t something I was taught in school. I want to be part of informing future generations of our power.”Other political figures ranging from actor and activist Cynthia Nixon to Hillary Clinton have been photographed wearing “Vote” face masks.And not to be outdone, Mariah Carey, Bella Hadid and Samuel L Jackson have posed in “Vote” and “Your Voice Matters” T-shirts of late.A raft of designers and retailers are in on the action, from vote-branded earrings doing brisk business on Etsy to Levi’s “VOTE” hoodies and Michael Kors’ “Vote” T-shirts, which raise money for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund.Patagonia joined in, stitching the words “Vote the assholes out” into the labels of its shorts.This trend is no accident. Much of the merchandise has been prompted by campaigning organisations and seeks to attract and persuade younger people, who are traditionally under-represented in voter registration.“We very intentionally work with retailers who reach young demographics,” said Andy Bernstein, executive director at HeadCount, a voting advocacy group that works with brands such as American Eagle Outfitters.The organisation has also distributed “Vote” masks to musicians and social media influencers, including singer Kesha, who was later spotted wearing it in public.“Fashion drives culture and cultural shifts drive voter turnout,” Bernstein added. More
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Joe Biden says there is no doubt the next US supreme court justice should be chosen by the winner of the country’s presidential election, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday.
‘She was fierce and unflinching in her pursuit of the civil legal rights of everyone,’ Biden said of Ginsburg, who had sat on the supreme court since 1993. ‘Her opinions and her dissent are going to continue to shape the basis for law for a generation.’
Biden said her replacement should be selected by the winner of the election in November, citing precedent established by Senate Republicans in 2016, when they blocked Barack Obama’s attempt to replace justice Antonin Scalia in an election year
McConnell vows to push on with Trump’s pick to replace Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supreme court justice, dies aged 87
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For Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus, the threat of a second Trump term is both political and deeply personal.Donald Trump has claimed to be a staunch supporter of LGBTQ rights but he has sought to undermine them through the courts. His vice-president, Mike Pence, has long opposed same-sex marriage.“When you see your own rights come up for debate, when you know something as intimate and central to your life as the existence of your family is something that is not supported by your president, and certainly your vice-president, it’s painful,” Buttigieg says by phone from Traverse City, Michigan, where his husband Chasten grew up.“It creates a sense of urgency that I hope will motivate many people – including a lot of LGBTQ younger people who maybe weren’t deciding so much how to vote as they were whether to vote – to see now is the time to vote like your life depends on it.”Buttigieg, 38 and the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was a breakout star of presidential politics in that seemingly distant pre-pandemic age that was in fact February. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford and war veteran in Afghanistan, he beat senators and a former vice-president to make history by narrowly winning the Iowa caucuses.I’m mindful every day that my marriage exists by the grace of one vote on our supreme courtBut after a crushing defeat in South Carolina, Buttigieg quit the race on 1 March, joining other moderates in throwing his weight behind Joe Biden. He is now launching his own podcast and prosecuting the case against Trump in the media – including on LGBTQ rights.In June, the Republican party issued a press release that claimed “President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to protect the LGBTQ community”. Among its examples to support this were the selection of Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence, making him the first openly gay person to hold a cabinet-level position. Grenell has called Trump the “most pro-gay president in American history”.But LGBTQ rights activists are not buying it, pointing out that Trump banned transgender people from the military and reversed many of their legal protections. He also opposes the Equality Act, that would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in housing, the workplace and other settings, and his agencies are trying to give adoption and foster care agencies the right to discriminate against same-sex couples.The power of Washington over individual lives was made viscerally clear to Buttigieg by the 2015 supreme court ruling that legalised same-sex marriage nationwide. Three years later he married Chasten, a junior high school teacher who became a popular figure on the campaign trail.Buttigieg says: “I’m mindful every day that my marriage exists by the grace of one vote on our supreme court and we’ve seen the kind of extreme appointees that have been placed on the bench by this administration.“We’ve seen how, despite sometimes paying lip service to the community, [Trump has] rarely missed an opportunity to attack the community, especially trans people, whether we’re talking about the ban on military service or issues around healthcare. But even for same-sex international adoption, this administration has taken us in the wrong direction and four more years would be a tremendous setback.“Also around the world, we’re seeing, for example in eastern Europe, really disturbing setbacks in LGBTQ rights and equality without a strong United States leading the way in human rights, which requires leadership and credibility and also that we’re doing the right thing here at home. Without that, I think that people around the world are less safe.”In Poland, for example, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the governing party, has said homosexuality represents a “threat to Polish identity”. When six towns declared themselves “LGBT ideology-free zones”, the European Union froze funding. But the US has been silent. Hosting Polish president Andrzej Duda at the White House in June, Trump said: “I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to Poland than we are right now.” More
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supreme court justice, dies aged 87
Ginsburg changed America long before she joined the supreme court
Q&A: what does Ginsburg’s death mean for the supreme court?
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Lines formed at polling stations in three states on Friday, 46 days out from 3 November, election day itself, as early voting began. Concern about ballot access under the pandemic has been widespread, particularly as Donald Trump continues to attack voting by mail with baseless claims of widespread fraud.In Minnesota, a state Hillary Clinton won by just 1.5 points in 2016 and which the Trump campaign is targeting, the president and Joe Biden were both on the campaign trail.In Virginia, the state’s two Democratic US senators were among early voters. At one site in Richmond, the state capital, dozens lined up before a polling station opened. CNN reported local officials as saying “they’ve never seen this many people show up on the first day”.Virginia was until recently a swing state but now leans firmly Democratic. Voting also began on Friday in South Dakota, which is solidly Republican.Trump has repeatedly said he wants to flip Minnesota in November, in hopes that it could offset losses elsewhere. He has visited regularly and has tailored policy moves to rural parts of the state, including reversing an Obama policy prohibiting the development of copper-nickel mining and bailing out soya bean, corn and other farmers hurt by Trump’s trade clashes with China.More recently, Trump has embraced a “law and order” message aimed at white voters concerned by protests against racism and police brutality which have sometimes turned violent. Minnesota saw unrest after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.However, polls indicate Biden has a significant edge in the state. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll this week, Biden leads by 16 points among likely voters, 57% to 41%.On Friday, Trump was scheduled to speak in Bemidji while Biden traveled to Duluth for a tour of a union training center. Duluth mayor Emily Larson told the Associated Press: “One of the things the Trump campaign has been very good about is visibility in Duluth, but also in areas around Duluth.”In Michigan, meanwhile, a judge handed down a key ruling concerning mail-in voting, writing that the state must accept ballots postmarked the day before election day, 3 November, which arrive in the weeks following.The decision will probably result in thousands more voters having their ballots counted in a key battleground state.In 2016, Trump won Michigan by about 10,000 votes. One of the top reasons mail-in ballots are rejected is because they arrive past the deadline to be counted: 6,405 ballots were rejected for that reason in Michigan’s August primary. Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is the state’s top election official, called for extending the deadline.The Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with reports of mail delays, have made that deadline unrealistic, wrote Judge Cynthia Diane Stevens of the Michigan court of claims.“Some flexibility must be built into the deadline in order to account for the significant inability of mail to arrive on what would typically be a reliable, predictable schedule,” the judge wrote, ordering ballots counted as long as they are postmarked by 2 November and arrive within 14 days of election day.The ruling was the second in two days extending ballot deadlines in a key state. On Thursday, the Pennsylvania supreme court blocked the state from enforcing an election night deadline for absentee ballots, instead ordering it to count them as long as they are postmarked by election day and arrive by the following Friday.The Michigan ruling was in a suit filed by Priorities USA, a Democratic group. Michigan also restricts who can return an absentee ballot on behalf of a voter. Stevens, citing the pandemic, said the state could not enforce those restrictions from the Friday before election day through election night. More
Donald Trump
Olivia Troye attacks Trump and says he called his own supporters ‘disgusting people’ he no longer had to shake hands with More
With 47 days to go until the election, Air Force One flew into central Wisconsin’s airport on Thursday evening, where Donald Trump pitched himself as the lone figure standing between Americans and leftwing radicals bent on chaos.“Biden wants to surrender our country to the violent leftwing mob,” Trump told a crowd of thousands beside the tarmac. “If Biden wins, very simple, China wins. If Biden wins, the mob wins. If Biden wins, the rioters, anarchists, arsonists and flag-burners, they win. And we’re not into flag-burners.”In a speech that ran close to 90 minutes, Trump boasted of economic success prior to the pandemic, promised to “deliver a safe and effective vaccine before the end of the year”, and framed Joe Biden as a feckless, career politician eager to confiscate guns, raise taxes and lead the nation toward anarchy.And, as he has done in previous rallies, Trump also veered into rambling, at times bizarre claims, including an unspecific assertion that he “saved the suburbs” and that it’s legal to “climb over” someone’s face while protesting but not always legal to host a rally. More
