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      Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone | Dan Brooks

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      Writing about the assassination of President John F Kennedy for Rolling Stone in 1983, 20 years after the shooting, the novelist Don DeLillo remarked: “Europeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies … Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen.” How times change. Since Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt on 13 July, social media have boiled over with talk of conspiracies, false flags and complex manipulations of state and psyche for unclear ends. After Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for president, various online conservatives argued that he was actually dead. Meanwhile, otherwise sensible observers blamed the media for creating the narrative that Biden had lost mental acuity and keeping Trump in the public eye – a kind of Rothschild conspiracy for people who took undergraduate sociology.It’s fun to scoff at such people, who believe that powerful forces secretly organise the world even as we confront evidence that human intelligence is no longer sufficient to run a branch of Chipotle. In fairness to the paranoid mindset, though, a lot of events from earlier decades’ fiction have been coming true lately. Consider Lisa’s prophetic line from the Bart to the Future episode of The Simpsons, original airdate 19 March 2000: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” It was funny at the time. I believe it was either Karl Marx or Nelson Muntz who said that history repeats itself: first as farce, then as whatever all this is now.The other week, Twitter user @ZeroSuitCamus posted a passage from an essay JG Ballard wrote for Vogue in the 1970s (incorrectly attributed to his 1975 novel High-Rise) about a future in which our daily activities are all recorded on video, and every evening “we sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters …” Here is the Instagram experience and its strange effects, complete with filter, algorithm and night-time scrolling, delivered to us decades before it became reality. David Foster Wallace predicted the filter, too, around page 111 of Infinite Jest, in which internet-enabled video calling makes everyone so insecure about their faces that they briefly adopt electronic face-improving technology, before it develops such a stigma that they all go back to voice-only telephony. Wallace’s 1996 novel about a form of entertainment so fascinating that it amuses its viewers to death raises some uncomfortable questions for any reader who gets screen time updates on their phones.All these texts – DeLillo, Ballard and Wallace for sure, and The Simpsons, too, in my opinion – fall under the category of “postmodernism”. The contours of the genre are still debated many decades after it emerged, but two key themes on which critics agree are (1) characters who find themselves at the mercy of impossibly complex systems; and (2) a sincere effort to acknowledge the importance of texts in modern life, which has since curdled into mere referentiality. I submit that these themes are no longer limited to literature and have become defining aspects of the way we live now.I also submit that it’s kind of weird that we have identified our own time as “postmodern” for three generations running. In the same way that the term “modernism” tells you something about how people thought of themselves in the years after the first world war, the fact that we regard ourselves as “post-” suggests a certain mindset. In many ways, our culture thinks of itself as existing after the important part of history – increasingly, after the good part. Latter-days thinking prevails, particularly on social media and in the arts, which seems resigned to rearranging the material already provided to us.I don’t think many of us are delighted to see previous generations’ satires coming true. Stories about technology-driven anomie and lives that had become unmoored from meaningful values were thrilling to readers in the 1980s and 1990s, but to be a character in such stories is a different thing. At the same time, we aren’t kicking against it – at least not much. There is that postmodern sense that the systems governing our world are too big and complex to do anything about them. We are all in a self-driving car that is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go.The bad news is that the conspiracy theories are false, and the car keeps veering toward pedestrians not because California billionaires are secretly priming the public for mandatory bicycles, but rather because someone saved money by skimping on quality control. Incompetence is more common than malice, even though it makes for a less compelling plot. The good news is that the sense that our world has become a work of postmodern fiction is also false. If it sometimes feels unpleasant to believe that what is happening in the news is real, it is also vital to remember that we are not characters in a story. What happens next is not written, even in outline form.The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade. The end of the postmodern era will come not when the last Simpsons joke comes true, but when we realise the world imagined by the previous century is not enough for us – entertaining and fun to talk about, sure, but fundamentally less interesting than what we can come up with. Sooner or later, we must become authors again.

      Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana More

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      Washington insiders simulated a second Trump presidency. Can a role-play save democracy?

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      It is the afternoon of 20 January 2025 and Donald Trump is in his White House dining room, glued to the same TV where he sat transfixed as the January 6 attack on the US Capitol unfolded four years ago. This morning, he completed one of the most spectacular political comebacks in US history, reciting the oath of office at the inauguration ceremony that returned him to the most powerful job on Earth.His political resurrection has caused turmoil in the transition period, and massive anti-Trump demonstrations have erupted in several big cities. In his inaugural address, the 47th president makes clear his intention to deal with his detractors: “They are rioting in the streets. We are not safe. Make our cities safe again!” he commands.The peaceful marches are portrayed on Fox News, the channel he is watching, as anarchic disorder. Trump grows increasingly incensed, and that evening calls his top team into the situation room with one purpose in mind: to end the demonstrations by any means necessary.“I need to make sure that our streets are safe from those who are running amok trying to overthrow our administration,” he tells the group of top law enforcement, national security and military officials. A flicker of alarm ripples through the room as the president cites the Insurrection Act, saying it allows him to call up the national guard in key states to suppress what he calls the “rebellion”.Discerning the concern among his top officials, Trump gives them an ultimatum. He is in no mood to compromise or stand down – he did that in his first term in the face of “deep state” opposition. “I have been charged by the American people to make this country great again,” he states, “and I need to know right now that everybody in this room is on board.”The scenario was imaginary, but the discussion around it was very real. Dozens of men and women in a Washington DC-area hotel conference center were seated at tables arranged to resemble the White House situation room, wearing name tags denoting their part in the role-play. Prominent people from both parties were in character as the president of the United States, AKA Trump; the joint chiefs of staff; Republican and Democratic governors; Congress members; federal prosecutors; religious and business leaders; and community organizers.About 175 people participated in five exercises, bringing to the process an extraordinary wealth of bipartisan institutional knowledge. Among the lineup were senior officials from successive administrations of both parties, including the Trump administration.They came with a mission: to wargame Trump acting out the most extreme authoritarian elements of his agenda and explore what could be done, should he win in November, to protect democracy in the face of possible abuses of power. What they discovered could be used to inform public debate and sound the alarm about what most participants agreed was a woeful lack of preparation.View image in fullscreenThe event was being held as part of the Democracy Futures Project, an ambitious series of nonpartisan tabletop exercises. Spearheaded by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, the role-playing games were staged in May and June amid tight security. A similar set of wargaming exercises, conducted under different leadership in 2020, pinpointed with uncanny precision Trump’s efforts to subvert that year’s presidential election.This year, the games included that imaginary scenario in which Trump, newly ensconced in the Oval Office, invokes the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces into American cities to fight supposed anarchy and crime.A second game looked at Trump’s threat to politicise federal agencies, including the justice department, and weaponise them against his political enemies. A third probed his immigration plans, which include dark warnings of mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and large-scale deportations.The Guardian attended two of the five exercises in the role of observers.The vocabulary of the exercises was that of the playground or sports field: the simulations were “games” revolving around “role-play”, with participants acting in the characters of Trump, his cabinet, military, law enforcement and congressional leaders, split into Trump’s “red” team and an oppositional “blue” team. Despite the linguistic levity, the purpose of the enactments could not have been more grave.“This is a pivotal moment for our democracy,” said Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who took part in the Insurrection Act simulation. “I believe very strongly that, should Trump be elected, we’re going to see a vast change and our democracy will not be what it looks like today.”The sense of urgency surrounding the gatherings has intensified dramatically as a result of recent events. Since the war games were staged, Trump has been emboldened by the attempt on his life at a Pennsylvania rally, Joe Biden has stepped out of the race, and Kamala Harris has shot up to become the presumptive Democratic candidate. The course of the election – and its outcome – is now deeply uncertain.Participants attended under the so-called Chatham House rule, meaning that what was said in the simulations could be reported publicly but not who said it. Some individuals agreed to be named, including Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee; Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Richard Danzig, the navy secretary under Bill Clinton.That so many prominent public figures were prepared to set aside entire days to delve deeply into a hypothetical was in itself a sign of these troubled and profoundly anxious times. “A lot of people are getting worried,” Whitman said, “and trying to figure out what guardrails are going to be left should Trump get in.”The danger with any attempt to role-play possible future scenarios is that it could sound paranoid or preposterous. Trump may say extreme things, but destroy democracy? Really? The co-founders of the project, who include Barton Gellman, the Brennan Center’s senior adviser and a former Atlantic journalist, and Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, can point to two powerful arguments in support of the project. The first is the accuracy of the 2020 wargaming.The Transition Integrity Project imagined the then far-fetched idea that Trump might refuse to concede defeat, and, by claiming widespread fraud in mail-in ballots, unleash dark forces culminating in violence. Every implausible detail of the simulations came to pass in the lead-up to the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.The second ballast for the Brennan Center’s exercises was provided by Trump himself. All of this year’s scenarios were based on explicit statements from Trump and his closest allies, laying out his intended executive actions during a second term.Take the scenario that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to go against street protests. The 1807 law gives presidents the power to deploy the US military to suppress insurrections and quell civil unrest. Trump already considered this in 2020, when White House aides drafted a proclamation order invoking the act in preparation for suppressing Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. According to the Washington Post, similar drafts have been drawn up recently by Trump associates. .“This wasn’t a fanciful or unrealistic scenario,” said Peter Keisler, former acting US attorney general under George W Bush, who participated in the simulation. “We know people associated with Trump have been looking into how to use the Insurrection Act to deploy military force domestically against protests.”Keisler said that taking part in the exercise brought home to him how hard it would be to stop such a move: “It confirmed for me that for an authoritarian-minded president, deploying the military domestically could be one of the easiest and fastest levers of power that could be pulled, given how vaguely written the statute is.”View image in fullscreenIn the course of the Insurrection Act tabletop exercise, the person role-playing Trump initially met resistance from senior military figures who tried to cling to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. As the scenario unfolded, Trump grew impatient and ended up firing the joint chiefs of staff, replacing them with military officers who would do his bidding and federalise the national guard.The way the exercise played out jibed with the fears of another of its participants, Paul Eaton, a former major general in the US army. “I’m not sure we can count on the military in a Trump world,” he said.Eaton pointed to a letter from May 2021 signed by 124 retired generals and admirals that propagated the lie that Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump. He added that studies had shown that almost one in seven of those prosecuted for storming the Capitol on January 6 had a military background.“When you have an armed force of 2 million-plus men and women who get a steady diet of lies from Fox News and social media, then you risk ending up with a military that’s going to question what is really true,” Eaton said.The second war game observed by the Guardian involved the scenario in which Trump, on day one, sets out to drain the swamp, free the January 6 “patriots”, and lock up his political enemies. “Let’s be an intelligent authoritarian,” the participant playing Trump told his red team allies, telling them to push the boundaries of what a president can do.Over the next few hours, the president sat on his phone firing off social media posts, while his cabinet executed his agenda. The justice department announced the investigation of Biden and others in his circle, and instructed the FBI to be very aggressive, to the extent of looking for even minor crimes.By the end of the day, they had arrested three of Biden’s grandchildren and, for good measure, Mike Pence’s daughter, “just to make sure Pence keeps his mouth shut”. They also withdrew all pending criminal charges against Trump.Trump’s team also prioritised schedule F: an effort to purge the civil service of people disloyal to the president. And they instructed the treasury department to look at tools at its disposal to withhold federal funding from top US universities under the guise that they were “harboring antisemitism”In response, the blue oppositional team called congressional hearings, tried to mobilize people across the country to protest against the president’s actions, staged acts of civil disobedience, and threatened lawsuits.At the end of the simulation, the consensus among many policy experts was that the blue team’s response felt weak and inadequate, with little agreement over message. “Blue has a catch-22 because they’re forces of normality, but all of this is not normal,” one participant said.Meanwhile, the red team’s efforts may have been alarming, but they didn’t get to even a fraction of what Trump has said he wants to accomplish in his first 90 days. “That is just the tip of the iceberg,” another participant said.As the Brennan Center has highlighted in its initial findings from the war games, participants came away from the simulations sobered by the experience. Above all, they discovered that there were far fewer effective restraints at their disposal than they had expected.Asked to identify the biggest lesson she had learned, Whitman said: “How little there is we can do.”Many of the attendees concluded that this time around, the courts cannot be relied upon as the primary means of staving off Trump’s attacks. In the thick of his 2020 “stop the steal” conspiracy to overturn the election results, courts did play a critical role, rejecting Trump’s claims of illegal voting in almost all cases.Trump’s many appointments to the federal judicial bench during his term, including his game-changing three appointments to the supreme court, have dented the hope that the judiciary will be a bastion against an authoritarian president.Participants also came away rattled by the thought that Trump and his associates are now much more experienced and adept at working the federal apparatus. As one of the Trump role-players put it: “This time around, they’re going to know where the door handles are.”Such apprehensions are disturbing. Yet the intention of the exercises was not to stun pro-democracy activists into depressed paralysis.Rather, it was, as Brennan put it, to show that “time is short, and the work of preparation demands more ambition and more hands on deck”.The exercises pointed to some positive guardrails that might still hold. State governors have their own reserves of independent authority, which, if combined with the capabilities of state attorneys general, could block, or at least slow down, federal abuses.Federal officials, who are in Trump’s sights as he threatens to politicise the top of the civil service in his attack on the “deep state”, also have the ability to safeguard the workings of democratic government. It may be easier said than done in the face of mass firings, but the Brennan Center is calling for a “well-resourced campaign” to persuade civil servants to stay the course and not resign, and provide them with legal support in case of retaliation.The last resort when all else fails, many participants suggested, would probably be the power of public protest. “Public opinion, mobilized by a powerful communications strategy, can help set boundaries on authoritarian behavior,” Brennan said in its initial findings.Keisler, the former acting US attorney general, said that the war game he attended shook him more than he had expected: “Do I think there’s a genuine jeopardy to our democracy? Absolutely. Do I think the country is ready for it? No. Do I think it’s guaranteed to end well? No.”He added: “And this was just a game. Then there’s real life, and that’s ahead of us.” More

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      ‘Like a diary – only far more masculine’: what JD Vance’s blogs reveal about him | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Like many an elder millennial, JD Vance once had a blog. Two, actually. The lawyer turned writer turned senator turned venture capitalist turned Donald Trump’s running mate launched his first blog during his 2005 deployment to Iraq. It was called The Ruminations of JD Hamel, because that was the name he was ruminating under at the time. Vance has gone by a few names. He has also gone through a hell of a lot of political opinions.His second blog, called The Hillbilly Elite, was launched in 2010, when he was a 26-year-old at Yale Law School. It was meant to help him parse his feelings about being an “Appalachian white boy … training at the world’s premier center for elites”. When I say “feelings”, I don’t mean silly little girly feelings. This was serious stuff. “So it’s like a diary,” his first entry explained, “only far more masculine.”Vance may soon become one of the most powerful people in the world, so there is widespread interest in figuring out exactly who he is and what, if anything, he truly believes. His handful of blog posts have been picked through for clues. Do they tell us anything? Well, they certainly suggest that the man who has gone viral for railing against “childless cat ladies” has always had weird views about gender. In a 2005 post about leaving his family to go to Iraq, for example, Vance wrote the following: “Yesterday was incredibly emotional for me. I honestly can say that I felt more like a female than I think I ever have or will.” Females, eh? They are always so darn emotional!Despite him being so tough and masculine, you have to wonder if Vance may be feeling a tad emotional at the moment. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, has called the senator a weirdo and a bunch of his party colleagues have gleefully followed suit. His debut as Trump’s running mate has been a disaster and polls suggest nobody really likes him. His own party is second-guessing him and there have even been rumours Trump might dump Vance in favour of Nikki Haley. If politics is a bust, perhaps he can start blogging again. More

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      Kamala Harris is the worst nightmare of America’s far right | Robert Reich

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      When Joe Biden stepped down in support of Kamala Harris, he didn’t just pass the torch to another generation. He passed it from old white men to America’s future.Consider that women now compose a remarkable 60% of college undergraduates. And that by 2050, it’s estimated that America will consist mostly of people of color – 30% more Black people than today, 60% more Latinos and twice the number of Asian Americans.The power shift has already started.Many of the people who have demanded accountability from Trump constitute a Trump nightmare of strong and able women, including several of color – Letitia James and Fani Willis – along with E Jean Carroll and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan, Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi.And now, Kamala Harris.In naming JD Vance as his vice-presidential candidate, Trump feinted a torch pass – but backwards. Vance’s white male belongs in the early 20th century.During Vance’s bid for the Senate in Ohio in 2021, he called Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies”, offering as examples Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.“How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” Vance asked, suggesting the only way to have a “direct stake” is by giving birth.Even before Vance said this, Harris was stepmother to two teenagers. Soon after, Buttigieg and his husband adopted infant twins.By this logic, no American male – including Vance and Trump – can have a “direct stake” in America.Trump himself – dog-whistling racist; alleged groper, fondler, and sexual harasser; and adjudicated rapist – is hardly respectful of women, especially women of color.Of Harris, he claimed: “They’re saying she isn’t qualified because she wasn’t born in this country.” (Harris was born in California.)Of Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, he charged – also without evidence – that “she ended up having an affair with the head of the gang or a gang member”.Trump has repeatedly denigrated women of color as “angry” or “nasty”.And he views female human beings as almost alien creatures. “There’s nothing I love more than women,” he has said, “but they’re really a lot different than portrayed. They are far worse than men, far more aggressive, and boy, can they be smart!” And, of course, his infamous: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”Trump misogyny has infected the entire Maga Republican party, whose recent convention was a celebration of testosterone – featuring the wrestling champ Hulk Hogan shouting: “Let me tell you something, brother … Trump is the toughest of them all, a gladiator!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo remind you, Hogan was the protagonist in a sex-tape video scandal. Hogan’s lawsuit over the circulation of the video, which put Gawker Media out of business, was underwritten by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel – the same man who gave JD Vance a lucrative venture-capital job, funded Vance’s senatorial campaign and introduced Vance to Trump.Other pop cultural “tough guy” icons at the Republican convention similarly attested to Trump’s virility. The conservative rocker/rapper Kid Rock performed his song American Badass.Instead of being introduced by his spouse, as have most candidates accepting their party’s nomination, Trump was introduced by Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship – known for its machismo culture and sanctioned violence.Trump, Vance, and their Maga allies are misogynists who want to control women by preventing them from controlling their own bodies – forcing them to have children. Vance is against abortion even in cases of rape or incest.Trump’s Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” chillingly recommends that the Department of Health and Human Services “ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method”.What’s the underlying goal here? The same as in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale – authoritarian fascism organized around male dominance.In this worldview, anything that challenges the traditional male roles of protector, provider and controller of the family threatens the social order. Strong women and LGBTQ+ people also weaken the heroic male warrior. Brutality, force and violence strengthen him.In their eyes, Kamala Harris could not pose more of a threat.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a 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 newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Harris’s VP list: Gretchen Whitmer and Roy Cooper say they’re not in running

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      Two lawmakers seen as strong contenders in the race to become Kamala Harris’s running mate have announced that they are not in the running. On Monday, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and North Carolina governor Roy Cooper both said that while they support the vice-president, they will be staying in their posts in their respective states.“This just wasn’t the right time for North Carolina and for me to potentially be on a national ticket,” Cooper said in a statement posted to Twitter/X on Monday. “As I’ve said from the beginning, she has an outstanding list of people from which to choose, and we’ll all work to make sure she wins.”In an interview with CBS, Whitmer said that she has not been vetted by Harris’s office and expects Harris’s to announce her pick within the week, which would confirm the Democratic ticket at least two weeks before the Democratic national convention begins on 19 August in Chicago.“I have communicated with everyone, including the people of Michigan, that I’m going to stay as governor until the end of my term at the end of 2026,” Whitmer said.Others rumored to be potential running mates are all white men who govern in swing states that can decide the 2024 election. They include: Kentucky governor Andy Beshear; Minnesota governor Tim Walz; Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro; and Mark Kelly, a US Senator in Arizona.While all four have been asked about their willingness to serve as Harris’s running mate if tapped, all have signaled that they would step up if asked but none have hinted at their engagements with her campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is not about me. But I’ve always, always said when I’ve had the chance to serve, I think that’s very important to do,” Kelly told reporters on 25 July.“Being mentioned is certainly an honor … I trust Vice-President Harris’s judgement, she’ll make the best choice she’s going to,” Walz told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “But one way or another, she’s going to win in November and that’s gonna benefit everyone … Either way it’s gonna be a win.”During a campaign stop for Harris in Pittsburgh, Shapiro said: “It’s a decision she needs to make who she wants to govern with, who she wants to campaign with, and who can be there to serve alongside her.”And Beshear, who has also been stumping for Harris in red and purple jurisdictions, told the Des Moines Register newspaper: “I’m honored to be considered and, regardless of what happens, I’m going to work every day between now and Election Day to make sure that Kamala Harris is the next president of the United States.” More

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      Biden calls for supreme court changes and decries Trump immunity ruling

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      Joe Biden, in a Monday address calling for sweeping reforms of the US supreme court, said the recent decision granting some immunity to presidents from criminal prosecution makes them a king before the law.Speaking in Austin at the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Biden said a president was no longer restrained by the law and that this was “a fundamentally flawed [and] dangerous principle”.The decision in Trump v United States, which gives broad immunity from later prosecution for a president exercising his authority in his official capacity, is one of several recent court rulings – from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to casting down Roe v Wade as the precedent on abortion rights – that stands in stark contrast to the era 50 years ago in which civil rights legislation passed, Biden said.“The extreme opinions that the supreme court has handed down have undermined long established civil rights principles and protections,” Biden said, invoking the specter of Project 2025 as a looming threat.“They’re planning another onslaught attacking civil rights in America,” he said.“For example, Project 2025 calls for aggressively attacking diversity, equity and inclusion all across all aspects of American life. This extreme Maga movement even proposes to end birthright citizenship. This is how far they’ve come.”Biden said he is proposing a new constitutional amendment that explicitly applies the criminal code to presidents. The conduct of Donald Trump demands legislative changes, he said.“No other former president has asked for this kind of immunity and none should have been given it,” Biden said. “The president must be accountable to the law … We are a nation of laws, not kings and dictators.”A constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of both the US House and Senate to agree to it, followed by the government of three-quarters of the states.Biden also said that the scandals involving supreme court justices have caused public opinion to question the court’s fairness and independence and impeded its mission.He said: “The supreme court’s current code of conduct is weak and even more frighteningly voluntary.”Biden called for a binding code of conduct for the supreme court and term limits for justices, noting that the United States was the only western democracy that gives lifetime appointments to its high court.The term limiting proposal would create staggered 18-year terms for justices, beginning with the next justice to leave the court.The idea for term limits and a binding code of ethics for the court is not new but has perhaps become more urgent. Biden’s proposal closely resembles legislation first proposed by Georgia representative Hank Johnson, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee and the likely banner carrier for legislative movement on this issue if he regains the committee chairmanship in a Democratic House.Johnson’s Term Act would apply term limits to existing supreme court justices, giving each president appointments in the first and third year of their administration.“Right now, three justices have already served in excess of 18 years,” Johnson said. “And so, those judges would be replaced over a six-year period.”Johnson described term limiting legislation as “important foundational, structural change that will prevent the court from becoming the kind of court that this one is; one that, because of tenure, has become unaccountable, arrogant, and destructive to our democracy.”Johnson also has proposed the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, legislation binding supreme court judges ethically.But what if the court rules that this legislation itself is unconstitutional?“There would be nothing that would stop them from ruling it unconstitutional,” Johnson said. “But if we get to that point, we could have we would say goodbye to the rule of law in this country.”Johnson likened the prospect to the reaction of President Andrew Jackson rejecting a supreme court ruling on Native American removals in Georgia nearly two centuries ago, with a federal government effectively ignoring the court. Ruling “something that’s clearly constitutional was unconstitutional would really be the end of our democracy, because there would no longer be respect for the rule of law”, he said. More

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      US elections live: Biden takes the stage to talk about supreme court reform in speech marking Civil Rights Act anniversary

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      Joe Biden is expected to announce three proposed reforms to the US supreme court.In an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Monday, the president called for three primary changes to the high court.

      Eighteen-year term limits

      A binding code of ethics

      A new constitutional amendment that would virtually reverse a supreme court decision in July granting former presidents broad immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office
      Biden’s speech comes on the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Hello, I’m Abené Clayton running the blog from Los Angeles. We’ll bring you the latest news and reaction.Biden just completed his speech and reaffirmed his proposed changes to the supreme court.One of his proposed changes is to reverse the recent immunity decision poses, which he says gives the president room to “violate our oath, flout our laws, and face no consequences”.On the issue of term limits, Biden argued that an 18-year cap would make the timing of nominations less “arbitrary” and limit the ability of the president to influence the makeup of the body.He is also seeking a new code of conduct that will replace the current one that is optional for justices. This new edict would require justices to disclose gifts, recuse themselves from cases that they or their spouses have an interest in, and “refrain from public political activity”, Biden said.Joe Biden is calling out supreme court decisions that he says have eroded civil rights.They include the 2013 Shelby County decision that gutted civil rights, the 2022 decision that overturned Roe v Wade, and most recently a decision that gives presidents broad immunity. These actions, Biden said, fly in the face of the notion that “there are no kings in America … No one is above the law.”“Extremism is undermining the public confidence in the court’s decisions,” Biden added.At the top of his speech Joe Biden emphasized his admiration for Lyndon B Johnson and reiterated the promises made by his signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.The president told the audience:
      In a great society no one should be left behind … It’s time for us to come to see that every American gets a decent break and a fair chance to make good.
      Joe Biden is now on the stage, he was introduced by Andrew Young, a former congressman and ambassador to the United Nations. Biden walked out to the song Glory, performed by John Legend and Common for the 2015 film Selma.The live stream is here.We are still waiting for Joe Biden to take the stage. Less than an hour ago, he arrived in Austin and was greeted by several local and state lawmakers.Currently, Mark Updegrove, the president and CEO of the Lyndon B Johnson Foundation, the group hosting the Civil Rights Act commemoration event, is giving a speech about the organization’s history and legacy.Watch the live stream here.As we await the arrival of Joe Biden on the stage, here are some of the images being sent to us on the newswires of the president arriving in Austin earlier today.He was met by Democratic state representatives Sheryl Cole and Donna Howard before heading to the LBJ library.There was music from the concert choir of Huston-Tillotson University, followed by the actor Bryan Cranston reading an excerpt from the 1964 Civil Rights Act.The event marking the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act is being held at the Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) library in Austin, Texas.It began with a short film showing previous presidents’ remarks on civil rights, including Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.Joe Biden is expected to announce three proposed reforms to the US supreme court.In an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Monday, the president called for three primary changes to the high court.

      Eighteen-year term limits

      A binding code of ethics

      A new constitutional amendment that would virtually reverse a supreme court decision in July granting former presidents broad immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office
      Biden’s speech comes on the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Hello, I’m Abené Clayton running the blog from Los Angeles. We’ll bring you the latest news and reaction.A trial looming in a lawsuit challenging North Dakota’s abortion ban was canceled Monday as the judge in the case, state district judge Bruce Romanick, weighs whether to throw out the lawsuit. It was not immediately clear why the trial was canceled.The notice comes nearly a week after the state and plaintiffs, who include the formerly sole abortion clinic in North Dakota, made their pitches to the judge as to why he should dismiss the two-year-old case, or continue to trial, the Associated Press reports. The trial was due to begin late August.North Dakota outlaws abortion as a felony crime for people who perform the procedure, but with exceptions to prevent the mother’s death or a “serious health risk” to her, as well as for cases of rape or incest within the first six weeks.The plaintiffs, which include the Red River Women’s Clinic and doctors trained in obstetrics, gynecology and maternal-fetal medicine, alleged the abortion ban violates the state constitution because it is unconstitutionally vague about its exceptions for doctors and that its health exception is too narrow. They wanted the trial to proceed.Kamala Harris highlighted endorsements from mayors of border towns in swing state Arizona today as she looks to blunt the impact of Republican criticism of her handling of illegal border crossings.Harris’s campaign for president said she was backed by the mayors of Bisbee, Nogales, Somerton, and San Luis, as well as by Yuma county supervisors Martin Porchas and Tony Reyes, the Associated Press reports.Republicans say Harris did not do enough as US vice-president to clamp down on illegal immigration.
      I trust her to meet the needs of border cities and towns without taking advantage of us for her own political gain, like her opponent,” the Somerton mayor, Gerardo Anaya, said in a statement. Somerton is a city of about 14,000 people in the state’s southwestern corner.
      As vice-president, Harris was tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders. The Biden administration wanted to develop and put in place a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries.Border arrests have fallen from record highs last December.Read my colleague Lauren Gambino’s piece on Harris’s record on immigration policy, here.The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, whose state borders Iowa, has also extended a welcome to Iowa residents who are in need of reproductive healthcare, as Iowa’s strict six-week abortion ban took effect on Monday.Walz, in a post to X, wrote:
      In Minnesota, we take care of our neighbors. It’s just what we do. As our neighbors in Iowa are stripped of their fundamental rights, my message is clear: Your reproductive freedom will remain protected in Minnesota.
      The House speaker, Mike Johnson, and minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, have announced the seven Republicans and six Democrats who will sit on the taskforce to investigate the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.The Republican chair of the panel will be the congressman Mike Kelly, who represents the Pennsylvania town of Butler where the shooting took place.The Democratic ranking member will be the Colorado congressman Jason Crow, who sits on the House intelligence and foreign affairs committee.Johnson, in a statement posted to X, said he and Jeffries “have the utmost confidence in this group of steady, highly qualified, and capable Members of Congress”.The Iowa ban, which takes effect today, permits abortions past six weeks in cases of rape or incest, or in medical emergencies.Fourteen other states, including much of the midwest, enacted near-total bans on abortion since the US supreme court overturned Roe.Three other states – Georgia, South Carolina and Florida – have banned abortion past about six weeks of pregnancy.Roe’s demise led to surge in support for abortion rights, even in red states. Sixty-one per cent of Iowans, including 70% of women, say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll found last year.A six-week abortion ban went into effect in Iowa on Monday, cutting off access to the procedure before many women know they are pregnant.The Republican-dominated Iowa state legislature passed the ban last year, but a lengthy court battle initially stopped it from taking effect. Last month, the Iowa supreme court ruled that the ban could be enforced, leading a lower-court judge to order the ban to take effect at 8am local time.Leah Vanden Bosch, development and outreach director of the Iowa Abortion Access Fund, said in a statement:
      The upholding of this abortion ban in Iowa is an absolute devastation and violation of human rights, depriving Iowans of their bodily autonomy. We know a ban will not stop the need for abortions.
      Up until Sunday, abortion had been legal in Iowa up to roughly 22 weeks of pregnancy. Now, abortion clinics in the state have indicated that they will continue offering the procedure to the legal limit.The closest options for Iowans who want abortions after six weeks of pregnancy will probably be Minnesota and Illinois, Democratic-run states that border Iowa and that have become abortion havens since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022.The Iowa ban permits abortions past six weeks in cases of rape or incest, or in medical emergencies.Two Democratic state governors who are being considered by Kamala Harris’s campaign as her potential running mate, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and JB Pritzker of Illinois, have criticized the strict six-week abortion ban that went into effect in Iowa today.Shapiro directly blamed Donald Trump for the Iowa law, and urged voters not to re-elect the Republican former president.Pritzker, whose state borders Iowa, welcomed Iowa residents to visit Illinois if the new law blocks their access to “whatever care they need”. He added:
      Please know – as you work to maneuver around this dangerous and unjust law – we are here for you.
      Questions continued to mount about the political transformation of Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, after the release of emails from a former friend in which Vance called Trump a “morally reprehensible human being” and said: “I hate the police.”The messages between Vance and Sofia Nelson, who sent them to the New York Times, were largely dated between 2014 and 2017. In one, Vance sent Nelson a section of Hillbilly Elegy, his bestseller about his Appalachian boyhood. Vance wrote:
      Here’s an excerpt from my book. I send this to you not just to brag, but because I’m sure if you read it you’ll notice reference to ‘an extremely progressive lesbian’. I recognise now that this may not accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that I am really sorry. I hope you’re not offended, but if you are, I’m sorry! Love you, JD.
      Read the full story here: JD Vance calls Trump ‘morally reprehensible’ in resurfaced emails More

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      in US Politics

      Former chief of staff says Democrats’ efforts to push out Biden were ‘nasty’

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      Senior Democrats’ successful efforts to push Joe Biden out of the presidential race were “unfortunate, nasty and public” and did the president a “disservice”, Biden’s former White House chief of staff said – even as the new nominee, Kamala Harris, continued to fundraise strongly, campaign vigorously and show signs of catching Donald Trump in polling.“I was disappointed that people in the party called for [Biden] to leave the race, and I thought they got out of control,” Ron Klain said.“I thought it was unfortunate, nasty and public, and shouldn’t have been … I thought they were doing him a disservice, but I think he handled it incredibly graciously and came up with a plan that is going to work for us in 2024.”The podcast host Kara Swisher released her conversation with Klain on Monday, a little over a week after Biden made history by saying he would relinquish power.Now 81, Biden was long subject to doubts about his fitness for office, but calls to quit accelerated after the first presidential debate in late June, during which Biden appeared frail and confused and failed to check Trump’s lies.Klain left the White House last year but helped Biden prepare to debate.He said: “I thought the debate was an opportunity for the president to put some of these questions [about his age and fitness] to rest, but obviously [it] did not go well that night and that is what it is. And so we took a gamble and the gamble didn’t work.“I thought it was a reasonable chance to take. I thought the president, as he showed in the days after the debate, was fully capable of making his case forcefully on the stump, fully capable of answering unscripted questions, as he did at his press conference [during a Nato summit in Washington]. I thought we would see that on debate night and we just didn’t, of course.”Klain said Biden had been “very kind” and “took responsibility in our conversations and said he’d had a bad night, and told me not to feel bad about it. I think … he just was off.”Few Democrats agreed. Amid sympathy for Trump after an assassination attempt, and with polling showing Biden in trouble in key states, calls for the president to stand aside surged, supported by party grandees including the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, who Biden served as vice-president.Eventually, Klain said, Biden “made a decision that he couldn’t keep the party unified” but also decided “to point the direction forward, and he pointed very clearly towards Vice-President Harris.“And so I think that was a wise decision, and I think he’s executed it extremely well. You see the vice-president emerging in very short order as the consensus nominee of our party with strong backing … I think that’s great.“… So I don’t really love how we got here, but I think we’re in a good place. We’re going to move forward. We’re going to win this year.” More