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      Fourth officer who responded to US Capitol attack dies by suicide

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      US Capitol attackFourth officer who responded to US Capitol attack dies by suicideKyle DeFreytag, who was deployed to protect Capitol after police cleared building of rioters, died earlier in July Hugo Lowell in WashingtonTue 3 Aug 2021 08.29 EDTLast modified on Tue 3 Aug 2021 10.41 EDTA fourth police officer who defended the US Capitol during the 6 January insurrection by extremist supporters of Donald Trump is now confirmed to have taken his own life.Washington DC’s Metropolitan police department (MPD) confirmed late Monday that another of their officers, Kyle DeFreytag, died by suicide earlier in July, just hours after declaring that MPD officer Gunther Hashida killed himself on 29 July.In January MPD officer Jeffrey Smith, a 12-year veteran of the force, and Capitol police officer Howard Liebengood, a 16-year veteran, both of whom also responded to the 6 January attack, died by suicide.DeFreytag, who was 26, was deployed to protect the Capitol after police cleared the building of rioters, and was involved in enforcing a curfew, the department said.The MPD chief, Robert Contee, had notified personnel of DeFreytag’s death on 10 July in a department-wide message, the department confirmed.He had been an MPD officer for five years, according to his obituary.Hashida had helped secure the Capitol on 6 January as part of the emergency response team within MPD’s special operations division after a mob of thousands of Trump supporters stormed the building.‘This is how I’m going to die’: police tell panel of trauma of Capitol attackRead moreThe announcement of the deaths of DeFreytag and Hashida came a week after several officers testified to a House of Representatives select committee investigating the 6 January insurrection, when extremists stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win over Trump in the 2020 presidential election.That attempt failed and Biden’s victory was successfully certified by Congress in the early hours of the following morning.But the attack on the Capitol, which lasted several hours, involved rioters assaulting outnumbered officers to break into the building in a failed effort to hunt down lawmakers, including the then vice president, Mike Pence.Trump was impeached, for an unprecedented second time, on the charge of inciting the insurrection, and acquitted in February by the Senate.Almost 600 people have been criminally charged for their part in the events.
      In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
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      Officer who responded to US Capitol attack is third to die by suicide

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      US Capitol attackOfficer who responded to US Capitol attack is third to die by suicideGunther Hashida, 44, was found dead at home on 29 July, the Metropolitan police department said Hugo Lowell in WashingtonMon 2 Aug 2021 16.54 EDTLast modified on Mon 2 Aug 2021 17.23 EDTA third police officer who defended the US Capitol during the 6 January insurrection by extremist supporters of Donald Trump has taken his own life, Washington DC’s Metropolitan police department confirmed on Monday.Officer Gunther Hashida, who was assigned to the emergency response team within the special operations department, was found dead at home on 29 July, the department said.‘I went to hell and back’: officer condemns Republican lawmakers who spurned Capitol attack hearingRead moreHashida, 44, joined the force in May 2003 and was among those who responded to the Capitol attack, spokesperson Brianna Burch confirmed to the Guardian.“We are grieving as a department and our thoughts and prayers are with Officer Hashida’s family and friends,” Burch said.Hashida is survived by his wife, Romelia, and three children, his sister and other members of a “wonderful family”, according to an online fundraising campaign established in his memory.The death of Hashida is the third known instance of a suicide by law enforcement officers related to the 6 January insurrection, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent attempt to stop the certification of Biden’s election win.The attempt failed and Biden’s victory over Trump from the 2020 election was certified by Congress in the early hours of the following morning.Trump officials can testify to Congress about his role in Capitol attack, DoJ saysRead moreBut the attack on the Capitol, which lasted several hours, involved rioters attacking outnumbered officers to break into the building in a failed effort to hunt down lawmakers, including then-vice president Mike Pence.Trump was impeached, for an unprecedented second time, on the charge of inciting the insurrection, and acquitted in February by the Senate.Officer Jeffrey Smith, a 12-year veteran of the force, and Officer Howard Liebengood, a 16-year Capitol police veteran, also responded to the 6 January attack and later died by suicide.Hashida’s death comes a week after officers testified to a House select committee about their harrowing experiences defending Congress.Almost 600 people have been criminally charged for their part in the events.
      In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
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      America’s left can’t afford to be silent on crime. Here’s how to talk about it and win | Ben Davis

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      OpinionUS politicsAmerica’s left can’t afford to be silent on crime. Here’s how to talk about it and winBen DavisPeople have a right to safety. That’s why we must acknowledge crime and insist that we have the best solutions to address its root causes Tue 6 Jul 2021 06.12 EDTLast modified on Tue 6 Jul 2021 10.33 EDTIn the wake of last summer’s mass uprisings against the police state that killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among so many others, many on the progressive left believed that real change was imminent. Unprecedented numbers of people poured into the streets, day after day, week after week, in the midst of a global pandemic. Polls showed a massive upsurge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement. So-called establishment politicians appeared to be on the back foot, with lawmakers in Minneapolis going so far as to pledge to abolish their police department and replace it with a community-based public safety model. Large municipalities across the country saw a wave of action, from calls to remove police officers from schools to more demands to defund police departments. Politicians and public figures who had previously been loth to wade into issues of police brutality unequivocally acknowledged the need for drastic reform. Floyd’s gruesome death at the hands of police, and the months of protest that followed, felt like an inflection point – at long last, elected officials and the general public alike seemed jolted out of the usual refrains. Enough was enough.Yet just over a year later, the state of policing appears largely unchanged. Almost no US cities have reduced their police budget – some, in fact, have expanded them – and efforts toward the goals of the defund movement have mostly stalled. In addition, a small but notable rise in crime since last summer has changed the picture. While some of this comes from cynical and nakedly misleading crime statistics produced by police departments, and much of it is media narrative, the truth is that many people do not feel safe. Support for BLM has fallen in the past year while support for the police has dramatically risen. This is something people care about, and defensive explanations that this is a bogus narrative are not going to cut it. The left needs a compelling counternarrative around crime in addition to our critique of policing. It is clear that street action and grassroots legislative pressure is not enough: the left needs to win power at the local level, where most police budgets are controlled, with a clear mandate for radical action around crime and policing.Since the protests, however, many Democratic cities have elected candidates who are vocally pro-police. Most notable is the mayoral election in New York City – the epicenter of the resurgent American left – where all the major candidates vocally rejected defund efforts, some after supporting these efforts last summer. The apparent victory of former cop Eric Adams, who heavily focused his campaign on opposing any efforts to defund the police, has been portrayed as a referendum on calls to defund the police. His campaign was powered by widespread support among working-class Black voters in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx – the same voters who gave progressives a surprising win in 2013. Even if Adams loses the election due to the new ranked-choice system, polling shows him taking an astonishing 83% of Black voters in the final round. He framed his support for a more muscular police department through a racial justice lens, claiming that cutting policing would hurt communities of color as “Black and brown babies are shot in our streets”. This is a narrative that has been difficult to counter for a left that is comfortable talking about policing but can sometimes be uncomfortable talking about crime.The left and the defund movement’s goals seemed so close just a year ago, but as the momentum of street protest alone has once again turned into the grinding work of long-term organizing in the electoral arena, we need a reassessment and change in strategy. This means building an overarching shared program on crime that connects with working-class voters at the ballot box in the same way left candidates across the country have on jobs, housing and police brutality. While the nascent left now has an electoral constituency and has increased its elected representation many times over, it has still been unable to build a base in large swaths of Black working-class communities in particular. To fix this, and to actually implement the demands of the defund movement, the left needs a message on crime rather than just policing. Crime overwhelmingly affects the working class rather than the wealthy and is a symptom of neoliberalism as much as job precarity, student debt, lack of access to medical care, and all the other issues the left talks about. Police themselves are in effect an austerity program: replacing needed social services with a punitive force that addresses these problems after they occur. After all, prison cells are cheaper than houses.The solution is a redistributive agenda that ameliorates these causes and prevents crime. As long as we live under the conditions of neoliberal austerity, without providing for the basic needs of citizens, crime will continue to exist. The left cannot run from this; we must acknowledge it and respond forcefully. Talking about crime can be a winning issue for the left if it is explicitly part of an overall program of redistribution of wealth, investment in communities, and guaranteeing a society that provides safety and security for all of its members, not just those at the top. We must emphasize that people have a right to safety, and this is the only program that truly provides that.Though the left has failed to accomplish its goals around policing at the municipal level, it is also true that the defund message is not necessarily anathema to voters. Leftwing candidates who have campaigned on defunding the police and abolishing prisons have won a number of decisive victories, including in many areas with large Black populations. After much media chatter about a backlash to his criminal justice reform efforts, the Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, won a resounding victory, capturing more than 80% of the vote in many majority-Black precincts. Last year, after a relentless opposition campaign attacking her support for defunding the police, Janeese Lewis George won a council seat to represent a majority-Black ward in Washington DC. Notably, the former Queens district attorney candidate and abolitionist Tiffany Cabán, won majority support in working-class Black-majority areas that Adams handily swept on the same ballot.Adams’s likely election has a number of confounding factors: he made his political bones in large part as a Black police officer who was willing to publicly advocate for police reform. What his success reveals is that voters can hold muddled, often contradictory, political views: Polls show, for example, that a majority of Black voters support the Black Lives Matter movement, believe police treat Black people unfairly, distrust the police, and simultaneously want more police in their neighborhoods. Fundamentally, people want to feel safe in their communities. Though many people of color do not trust the police, we have yet to successfully articulate an alternative. While activists on the left cannot tail public opinion, shifting our views to follow only what is popular, we also cannot afford to be out of touch with the working class. Instead, we must be the next link in the chain, connecting the organic demands of the working class with more radical demands, pulling the movement forward without losing the chain as a whole.While there is scant evidence that defunding the police is a surefire losing issue among working-class communities of color, it has also not resonated well enough to provide a decisive electoral mandate. Defunding the police – which calls for reallocating public funds from a bloated, militarized police force to necessary, life-saving services – is both a moral necessity and commonsense policy. To actually accomplish this, however, the left needs a comprehensive program on crime and policing that resonates with working-class voters. This requires connecting our vision on crime and policing to proven, election-winning issues such as good jobs, Medicare for All, and housing – in other words, people’s immediate, material needs and desire for safety and security. The key is to make the connection between defunding the police and other foundational elements of any left program: investment in communities and an overall vision of a society that ensures everyone’s needs are met.On the same day that Adams appeared to win the mayoral race in New York City, a socialist candidate on the opposite side of the state pulled off an unexpected upset in Buffalo. India Walton, an open prison abolitionist, unseated the longtime incumbent Byron Brown to win the Democratic nomination for mayor in the state’s second-largest city. Walton is a prison abolitionist, and her platform in effect called for defunding the police on a large scale, although notably, the words “defund” and “abolish” do not appear on her campaign site.Walton told the New York Times that rather than emphasizing defund, “[W]e say we’re going to reallocate funds. We’re going to fully fund community centers. We’re going to make the investments that naturally reduce crime, such as investments in education, infrastructure, living-wage jobs. Nothing stops crime better than a person who’s gainfully employed.” Her message is hyper-focused on the types of social programs that provide material benefits to her constituents. She links defunding the police to a broad redistributive agenda in a way that emphasizes the role of class struggle and the problems inherent to policing without using alienating or activist-oriented language. Her victory in a heavily working-class city provides a clear path forward for left candidates.This is not to say that the left should abandon the phrase “defund the police”. It is a clear, self-evident demand that has mobilized millions, engendered progressive coalitions, and opened the door for people to imagine what a future without prisons and police – or at least one that is far less reliant on them – might look like. But in order to take the next step from protest to implementing policy, the left needs to both sustain energy in the streets and elect legislators who are able to exercise power and achieve movement demands. The left must emphasize a positive program and make the case for redirecting funds from unaccountable, violent police departments back into the community. This is the only serious approach to preventing crime. Our task is to win; to do this, we need a message on crime that not only refuses to shy away from the problem but also provides a clear, mobilizing vision for the future.
      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and is an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America
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      ‘Republicans are defunding the police’: Fox News anchor stumps congressman

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      The Fox News anchor Chris Wallace made headlines of his own on Sunday, by pointing out to a senior Republican that he and the rest of his party recently voted against $350bn in funding for law enforcement.“Can’t you make the argument that it’s you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?” Wallace asked Jim Banks, the head of the House Republican study committee.The congressman was the author of a Fox News column in which he said Democrats were responsible for spikes in violent crime.“There is overwhelming evidence,” Banks wrote, “connecting the rise in murders to the violent riots last summer” – a reference to protests over the murder of George Floyd which sometimes produced looting and violence – “and the defund the police movement. Both of which were supported, financially and rhetorically, by the Democratic party and the Biden administration.”Joe Biden does not support any attempt to “defund the police”, a slogan adopted by some on the left but which remains controversial and which the president has said Republicans have used to “beat the living hell” out of Democrats.On Fox News Sunday, Banks repeatedly attacked the so-called “Squad” of young progressive women in the House and said Democrats “stigmatised” law enforcement and helped criminals.“Let me push back on that a little bit,” Wallace said. “Because [this week] the president said that the central part in his anti-crime package is the $350bn in the American Rescue Plan, the Covid relief plan that was passed.”Covid relief passed through Congress in March, under rules that meant it did not require Republican votes. It did not get a single one.Asked if that meant it was “you and the Republicans who are defunding the police”, Banks dodged the question.Wallace said: “No, no, sir, respectfully – wait, sir, respectfully … I’m asking you, there’s $350bn in this package the president says can be used for policing …“Congressman Banks, let me finish and I promise I will give you a chance to answer. The president is saying cities and states can use this money to hire more police officers, invest in new technologies and develop summer job training and recreation programs for young people. Respectfully, I’ve heard your point about the last year, but you and every other Republican voted against this $350bn.”Turning a blind eye to Wallace’s question, Banks said: “If we turn a blind eye to law and order, and a blind eye to riots that occurred in cities last summer, and we take police officers off the street, we’re inevitably going to see crime rise.”Wallace asked if Banks could support any gun control legislation. Banks said that if Biden was “serious about reducing violent crime in America”, he should “admonish the radical voices in the Democrat [sic] party that have stigmatised police officers and law enforcement”.Despite working for Republicans’ favoured broadcaster, Wallace is happy to hold their feet to the fire, as grillings of Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy have shown.He has also attracted criticism, for example for failing to control Trump during a chaotic presidential debate last year which one network rival called “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck”.Last year, Wallace told the Guardian: “I do what I do and I’m sitting there during the week trying to come up with the best guests and the best show I possibly can and I’m not sitting there thinking about how do we fit in some media commentary.“We’re not there to try to one-up the president or any politician.” More

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      Officer injured in Capitol attack says Republican ran from him ‘like a coward’

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      A Republican congressman “ran as quickly as he could, like a coward” when a police officer injured in the attack on Congress on 6 January saw him and tried to shake his hand, the officer said.“I was very cordial,” Michael Fanone told CNN on Wednesday of his interaction with Andrew Clyde, in a Capitol elevator earlier that day.Fanone, of the DC metropolitan police, was assaulted and injured after he rushed to help defend the Capitol from supporters of Donald Trump who rioted in service of his attempt to overturn his election defeat.Fanone returned this week with a colleague from the US Capitol police, in an attempt to speak to Republicans including Clyde who voted against awarding the congressional gold medal to officers who defended the building.When he saw the Georgia representative, Fanone said, he “extended my hand to shake his hand. He just stared at me. I asked if he was going to shake my hand, and he told me that he didn’t who know I was. So I introduced myself.“I said that I was Officer Michael Fanone. That I was a DC Metropolitan police officer who fought on 6 January to defend the Capitol and, as a result, I suffered a traumatic brain injury as well as a heart attack after having been tased numerous times at the base of my skull, as well as being severely beaten.“At that point, the congressman turned away from me.”Fanone said Clyde “pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps”, apparently trying to record the encounter. Once the elevator doors opened, Fanone said, the congressman “ran as quickly as he could, like a coward”.Clyde has not so far provided comment.Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, and the Illinois anti-Trump Republican Adam Kinzinger tweeted in support of Fanone.Swalwell said: “To honour Trump, House Republicans will dishonour the police.”Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, told CNN the congressional gold medal vote on Tuesday was “a new low” for the 21 Republicans who voted no.“They voted to overturn an election,” he said. “But in their vote today, they kind of sealed the deal of basically affiliating with the mob. They now are part of the insurrectionist mob.”Clyde made headlines in May when he told a congressional hearing many in that mob on 6 January behaved as if there for “a normal tourist visit”.As the Washington Post reported, pictures taken as rioters searched for lawmakers to capture and kill showed Clyde rushing to barricade a door. More

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      ‘More cops’: mayoral frontrunners talk tough in New York debate

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      The New York City mayoral race exploded into life on Wednesday night, as the Democratic primary debate saw candidates clash over whether to rein in or bolster the city’s beleaguered police force, and the two centrist frontrunners found themselves variously attacked as Republicans or gun-toters.Andrew Yang and Eric Adams, who are leading the polls along with Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, were the focus of their rivals during the debate, as eight candidates pitched themselves to be mayor of the biggest city in the US – a role once dubbed the “second toughest job in America”.The winner of the Democratic primary later this month is expected to triumph in the mayoral election proper in November, lending an extra frisson to proceedings. But less than three weeks before New Yorkers go to the polls, the debate offered little hope for progressives seeking systemic change.Poverty and homelessness, which have continued to blight New York City under the last eight years of a Democratic mayor, were left by the wayside as law and order became an enduring topic.After a year where tens of thousands of New Yorkers called for the police department (NYPD) to be cut in size amid protests against police brutality and racism, it was Yang, a tech entrepreneur who ran a high-profile campaign for US president last year, who took the remarkable position of calling for the NYPD to expand.“We need to go on a recruitment drive” to hire more police officers, Yang, the early leader in the race said, in a statement which is an anathema to the progressives in the Democratic party. The NYPD is already the largest police force in the country, with a budget of $6bn and a staff 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees.“Defunding the police is not the right approach for NYC,” Yang said – a direct effort to distance himself from candidates who have called for money to be taken from the police budget and spent on social programs and mental health treatment.He later called for “more cops on the subways” – and said the officers should not just be a presence on platforms, but should conduct regular “visual inspections” of carriages.Adams, a former police officer who with Yang and Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner for New York City, has emerged as one of three frontrunners in the race, also staked out his position in support of the NYPD, linking crime to New York City’s recovery.“No one is coming to New York and our multibillion-dollar tourism industry if you have three-year-old children shot in Times Square,” Adams said, an apparent reference to a four-year-old child who was shot in the center of Manhattan in May.He went on to appeal to the city’s wealthiest residents.“When you look at our high-income earners, 65,000 people pay 51% of our income tax. When you speak to them [about] leaving the city, they talk about public safety.”Shootings in New York City have spiked in 2021. In the first three months of the year 246 people were shot, Gothamist reported – the highest rate for the first quarter since 2012. Murders in the city rose to 462 in 2020, according to the NYPD, an increase of 45% from 2019.Yang has spent weeks as the frontrunner, but Garcia, who has been boosted by an endorsement from the New York Times, has been gaining momentum as she bids to become the city’s first female mayor. Since 1834, when the mayor of New York City began to be chosen by popular vote, it has elected 109 leaders, every one of them a man, and only one of them, David Dinkins, a person of color.The first debate, which was held virtually in May, proved relatively civil, but with less than three weeks to go until the primary, things have begun to hot up, as candidates have spent $37m in TV advertising.“I don’t think you’re an empty vessel,” Scott Stringer, New York City’s comptroller and a progressive voice, told Yang at one point, referring to a description of the candidate given by one of Yang’s high-profile supporters.“I think you’re a Republican who continues to focus on the issues that will not bring back the economy.”Adams later noted that Yang left New York City during the coronavirus pandemic, and had not voted in several previous New York elections.“How the hell do we have you become our mayor with a record like this?” Adams said. “You can’t run from the city if you want to run the city.”Adams was attacked over his support for “stop and frisk”, the widely loathed policing tactic which proliferated under Rudy Giuliani’s mayorship and disproportionately targeted people of color.He was later challenged over his self-confessed habit of carrying a gun, which he is entitled to do as a former police officer. Adams has said he has carried a gun to church and claimed he would carry a gun as mayor to help save money on his security detail.Dianne Morales, a progressive who would cut $3bn from the police’s budget if elected, presented the case for curtailing law enforcement.“We can’t actually decouple the increase in crime, whether its gun violence or other crime, from the increased insecurities that New Yorkers have faced and encountered over the last 15 months,” Morales said.“I guarantee you that if we actually provided jobs to these young people and we actually provided economic stability to our communities then the violence that we’re witnessing would be dramatically decreased.”Lurking in the background of the debate was the near collapse of a progressive element to the mayoral race.Morales had become a favorite of progressives, but has suffered a spectacular implosion over the past week, which culminated in some members of her staff holding an unprecedented public protest against her campaign, claiming that she had failed to recognize their demands for fair pay and benefits.Stringer had won the endorsement of a number of high-profile leftwing Democrats, but lost much of his backing after he was accused of sexual assault by a woman who volunteered on one of his past campaigns. Stringer denies the allegations.That has left Maya Wiley, a former counsel to the current New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, seeking to consolidate the left-leaning vote, and in an email sent to supporters after the debate she described herself as “the progressive candidate that can win this race”.The polling, however, suggests otherwise. In the two most recent mayoral polls, however, Wiley came fifth and joint fourth, several points behind Adams, Garcia and Yang, and with much to do if she is to be elected mayor. More

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      Val Demings likely to run for Senate against Marco Rubio – report

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      Marco Rubio avoided a Senate challenge from Ivanka Trump but he seems certain to face one from Val Demings, a Democratic Florida congresswoman who was the first Black female police chief of Orlando and who was considered as a potential vice-president to Joe Biden.An unnamed senior adviser told Politico Demings, 64, was “98.6%” certain to run against Rubio in the midterm elections next year.“If I had to point to one” reason why Demings had decided to run, the adviser was quoted as saying, “I think it’s the Covid bill and the way Republicans voted against it for no good reason.“That really helped push her over the edge. She also had this huge fight with [Ohio Republican representative] Jim Jordan and it brought that into focus. This fight is in Washington and it’s the right fight for her to continue.”Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus rescue bill passed Congress in March without a single Republican vote. In April she made headlines by raising her voice when Jordan, a provocateur and hard-right Trump supporter, interrupted her during a House judiciary committee hearing on an anti-hate crimes bill.“I have the floor, Mr Jordan,” Demings shouted. “What? Did I strike a nerve?“Law enforcement officers deserve better than to be utilised as pawns, and you and your colleagues should be ashamed of yourselves.”Demings was a member of Orlando police for 27 years and chief from 2007 to 2011. She was elected to Congress in 2016. Her husband, Jerry Demings, is a former sheriff and current mayor of Orlando county.Police brutality and institutional racism have become a national flashpoint in light of the killings of numerous African American men.Demings is a political moderate but Quentin James of the the Collective Pac, a Florida group working on Black voter registration, told Politico her police background and political views would not necessarily handicap her.Young and progressive Floridians “aren’t really anti-police”, he said. “They’re against police brutality.”Rubio is a two-term senator who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He was brutally beaten in that race by Donald Trump, then swiftly aligned himself with his persecutor when he won the White House.The prospect of a primary challenge from Ivanka Trump, the former president’s oldest daughter, was briefly the talk of Washington but she has said she will not run.The Senate is split 50-50 and controlled by Democrats through Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president. Demings’s all-but-confirmed decision to run sets up an intriguing contest in a state where the large Latino population has increasingly broken for Republicans. Rubio is the son of Cuban migrants.Demings’s move also leaves the field open for challengers to Ron DeSantis, the Trump-supporting governor seen by some as a possible presidential candidate in 2024. In 2018 Democrats ran a progressive, Andrew Gillum, a former mayor of Tallahassee.Discussing Demings’s likely Senate campaign, James told Politico: “We came very close with Gillum. But now we’re back with a really great candidate.” More

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      Democrats propose quick reaction force in $2.1bn Capitol security bill

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      House Democrats plan on Wednesday to unveil a $2.1bn supplemental bill to enhance security at the Capitol that will propose creating a quick reaction force to guard against future threats in the wake of the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter.The proposed bill will also include the construction of a retractable fencing system around the Capitol, the sources said.Rose DeLauro, chair of the House appropriations committee, is expected to unveil the proposal to House Democrats on a caucus call on Wednesday, amid growing calls urging the adoption of recommendations made by a taskforce in the wake of the 6 January insurrection in which a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol.No lawmakers were injured during the attack, but several, such as Senator Mitt Romney and former vice-president Mike Pence had only a narrow escape from attackers looking for them. Meanwhile, nearly 140 officers suffered injuries and one, Brian Sicknick, later died after being assaulted.The proposed bill largely tracks recommendations made by retired Army Lt Gen Russel Honoré, who was appointed by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to examine security shortcomings, as well as critical flaws identified by the US Capitol police inspector general, the sources said.In the report released to House Democratic leaders last month, Honoré made a series of recommendations, including hiring more than 800 US Capitol police officers, the construction of mobile fencing around the Capitol, and an overhaul of the US Capitol police board.“We are trying to take into consideration understanding what happened, how do we account for that and what we need to do to prevent this from happening again,” DeLauro said of the taskforce recommendations after its release last month.The proposed bill, which could be brought to the House floor as early as next week, will also include a provision to reimburse the national guard deployed around the Capitol. The national guard and other security measures post-6 January is costing nearly $2m a week.Its prospects are still uncertain on Capitol Hill, with House Democrats largely going ahead with the security review alone and Republicans yet to indicate what measures, if any, they are willing to embrace.Lawmakers in both parties largely agree on the need for enhanced security but some – Republicans in particular – have been agitating to scale back the barriers encircling the area and troops patrolling the grounds despite lingering threats.“While there may be some worthy recommendations forthcoming, Gen Honoré’s notorious partisan bias calls into question the rationality of appointing him to lead this important security review,” Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, said of the taskforce in March.“It also raises the unacceptable possibility that the speaker desired a certain result: turning the Capitol into a fortress.”The issue has exposed the divide between members of Congress who want the Capitol to return to a sense of normalcy, and the concerns of US Capitol police and a raft of law enforcement agencies tasked with their protection. More