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      Anti-Asian hate crimes bill passes Senate with bipartisan support

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      The US Senate has overwhelmingly passed a bill that would help combat the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, marking a bipartisan denunciation of the violence that has come into sharp focus during the coronavirus pandemic.The Senate passed the anti-Asian hate crimes bill on Thursday in a vote of 94 to 1, after the Democrat Mazie Hirono worked with some of her Republican colleagues to ensure bipartisan support for the legislation.Josh Hawley, a Republican of Missouri, was the only senator to vote against the bill.The bill now heads to the Democratic-controlled House, where it is expected to pass. Joe Biden has signaled he will sign the bill once it reaches his desk.The legislation would create a new justice department position to more quickly review hate crime reports linked to the coronavirus pandemic and provide support to state and local officials responding to hate crimes.The Senate passage of the bill comes amid an alarming increase in reports of hate crimes among Asian Americans. The shooting at three spas in Atlanta last month killed eight people, including six Asian women, intensifying calls to address the problem.A major survey by Stop AAPI Hate released in March found that Asian Americans had reported nearly 3,800 hate-related incidents during the pandemic, a number that is believed to be only a fraction of the true total.“This long-overdue bill sends two messages. To our Asian American friends, we will not tolerate bigotry against you,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said. “And to those perpetrating anti-Asian bigotry, we will pursue you to the fullest extent of the law.”Hirono, of Hawaii, the legislation’s lead sponsor, said the measure was incredibly important to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, “who have often felt very invisible in our country, always seen as foreign, always seen as the other”. She said the message of the legislation was as important as its content and substance.Hirono, the first Asian American woman in the Senate, said the attacks were “a predictable and foreseeable consequence” of racist and inflammatory language that has been used against Asians during the pandemic, including slurs used by Donald Trump.Republicans said last week that they agreed with the premise of the legislation and signaled they were willing to back it with minor changes. Hirono worked closely with Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, to incorporate some additional Republican and bipartisan provisions, including better reporting of hate crimes nationally and grant money for states to set up hate crime hotlines.The revised bill would also replace language in the original legislation that called for “guidance describing best practices to mitigate racially discriminatory language in describing the Covid-19 pandemic”. The legislation would require the government to issue guidance aimed at “raising awareness of hate crimes during the pandemic” to address some GOP concerns about policing speech.Republicans agreed to back the bill after the Senate also voted on and rejected a series of GOP amendments, including efforts to prevent discrimination against Asian Americans in college admissions and to require reporting about restrictions on religious exercise during the pandemic.Representative Grace Meng, a Democrat of New York, introduced a similar bill in the House, which she says is expected to be considered in May.“For more than a year, Asian Americans all across our nation have been screaming out for help,” Meng said, and the Senate showed that “they heard our pleas”. More

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      ‘It would be glorious’: hopes high for Biden to nominate first Black woman to supreme court

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      Joe Biden’s promise to nominate an African American woman to the supreme court for the first time holds broad symbolic significance for Darlene McDonald, an activist and police reform commissioner in Salt Lake City, Utah.But McDonald has specific reasons for wanting a Black woman on the court, too.When Chief Justice John Roberts asserted in 2013 that federal oversight of voting in certain southern states was no longer needed because “things have changed dramatically” since the civil rights era, McDonald said, he revealed a blindness to something African American women have no choice but to see.“I believe that if Chief Justice Roberts had really understood racism, he would never have voted to gut the Voting Rights Act,” McDonald said, adding that hundreds of voter suppression bills introduced by Republicans in recent months suggest things have not “changed dramatically” since 1965.“Myself, as an African American woman, having that representation on the supreme court will be huge,” McDonald said, “especially in the sense of having someone that really understands racism.”The gradual diversification of US leadership, away from the overwhelming preponderance of white men, towards a mix that increasingly reflects the populace, was accelerated by the election last November of Kamala Harris, a woman of color, as vice-president.Black women have been overlooked in terms of their values and what they have to bring to society as well as to the benchNow enthusiasm is building around a similarly historic leap that activists, academics and professionals expect is just around the corner: the arrival on the court of a justice who would personify one of the most historically marginalized groups.“Black women have been overlooked for decades and decades in terms of their values and what they have to bring to society as well as to the bench,” said Leslie Davis, chief executive of the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms. “We should be able to look at our highest court in the land and see the reflection of some of the folks who have made America great. And that absolutely includes Black women.”Out of 115 justices in its history, the supreme court has counted two African American justices, one Latina and just five women. The court has no vacant seats but calls are growing for Stephen Breyer, a liberal who turns 83 this year, to retire. Last month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden’s campaign commitment to nominating a Black woman “absolutely” holds.“This is a big moment in the making,” said Ben Jealous, president of People For the American Way, which recently launched the Her Fight Our Fight campaign to support and promote women of color in government and public service roles.“The presumption is that whomever Biden nominates, the first Black woman to the supreme court would be filling both the shoes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall,” said Jealous.The late Ginsburg, a pioneering lawyer for women’s rights, was succeeded last fall by the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett. Marshall was succeeded in 1991 by the George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas, who “is anathema to everything that the civil rights community stands for”, Jealous said.“It would be both glorious and a relief to have a Black woman on the supreme court who actually represents the values of the civil rights community, and the most transformative lawyers in our nation’s history.”Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a civil rights historian, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and professor of constitutional law, said having qualified federal judges who “reflect the broad makeup of the American public” would strengthen democracy and faith in the courts.“It’s an important historical moment that signifies equal opportunity,” Brown-Nagin said. “That anyone who is qualified has the chance to be considered for nomination, notwithstanding race, notwithstanding gender. That is where we are. In some ways, we shouldn’t be congratulating ourselves, right?”Brown-Nagin pointed out that a campaign was advanced in the 1960s to nominate Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to sit as a federal judge, but some Democratic allies of President Lyndon Johnson opposed such a nomination because they saw it as too politically risky.“This moment could have happened 50 years ago,” Brown-Nagin said.Daniel L Goldberg, legal director of the progressive Alliance For Justice, said to call the moment “overdue” did not capture it.“It is stunning that in the entire history of the republic, that no African American woman has sat on the highest court in the country,” Goldberg said. “For way too long in our nation’s history, the only people who were considered suitable and qualified for the court happened to be white males.”The first Black woman supreme court justice is likely to be nominated at a time when a renewed push for racial justice brings renewed focus on the court, which has played a key role in enforcing desegregation and reinforcing anti-discrimination laws.I would like to see someone like Sherrilyn Ifill or Lia Epperson – a woman who comes out of Thurgood Marshall’s old law firmThe killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, by a white police officer outside Minneapolis last weekend during the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin has sharpened cries for a national answer to serial injustice at the local level – precisely the kind of conflict that typically lands before the supreme court.“As we sit here today, and watch the trial of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, that precipitated a summer of protests for the lives of Black people to matter – it feels that it is time for there to be a Black woman on the supreme court, because of the moment that we are in right now,” said McDonald, the Utah activist.Davis said it was “imperative” the country make strides toward racial justice after the invasion of the Capitol in January by white supremacists intent on overturning the 2020 presidential election, goaded on by a former president.“That shows that there are folks who are intentional about not seeing diversity, equity and inclusion thrive,” Davis said. “Now is the time for us as a country to recognize that until we value the voices of everyone, including Black women, we are silencing a very important part of the fabric of America.”‘A significant pool’The percentage of Black women who are federal judges – a common stepping-stone to a high court nomination – is extraordinarily small.According to the federal judicial center, the US circuit courts count only five African American women among sitting judges out of 179. There are 42 African American women judges at the district court level, out of 677.Those numbers are partly owing to Republican obstruction of Black women nominated by Barack Obama, including former seventh circuit nominee Myra Selby. She was denied a hearing in the Senate for the entirety of 2016 – a year later Republicans filled the seat with Donald Trump’s nominee: Amy Coney Barrett.“There is a significant pool of lawyers, law professors, public officials who would be viable nominees for the federal courts,” said Brown-Nagin. “The problem is not the pool.”Last month, Brown-Nagin co-signed a letter to the Senate judiciary committee supporting the nomination of district court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the court of appeals for the DC district, sometimes informally referred to as the second-highest court in the land.“Her resumé virtually screams that she is an ideal nominee for an appellate court or even the supreme court, and that is because she has the combination of educational and professional experience on the federal courts that feasibly fits the mold of typical supreme court nominees,” Brown-Nagin said.“I would say it goes beyond what we’ve seen, frankly, in recent nominees to the court.”Jealous, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said he would like to see a nominee “who cut their teeth defending the people, not corporations”.“I would like to see someone like Sherrilyn Ifill or Lia Epperson – a woman who comes out of Thurgood Marshall’s old law firm, the NAACP legal defense fund, with a courageous commitment to defending the rights of all Americans,” he said.McDonald said having a Black woman on the supreme court would mean American history had “come full circle”.“I feel in my heart that it’s time,” she said. “Everything takes its time. And everything happens at its time. I was raised in a church, so I’m just going to say it like that.” More

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      Why so many lobbyists are courting Senate Democrat Joe Manchin

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      An increasing large number of lobbyists and outside groups in America all have a similar target: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.And it’s understandable why. In a Senate where Democrats hold the slimmest of majorities a vote by Manchin, the most conservative Senate Democrat, can decide whether legislation is signed into law or left to meander in political purgatory in Congress.Manchin has also demonstrated a willingness to buck the majority of the party on priority proposals and key votes. He was one of the first senators to oppose Neera Tanden’s nomination to direct the Office of Management and Budget. He has vehemently resisted the idea of changes to the filibuster. He was also early out of the gate in opposing a minimum wage increase as part of Joe Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus bill.Many progressive Democrats see Manchin as a stubborn obstacle to their agenda. Others in the party afford him some slack. He’s managed to retain a Senate seat in West Virginia as the state has drifted away from electing Democrats and become more reliably Republican.But one thing is clear: Manchin is the Senate Democrat to lobby.The Service Employees International Union and Poor People’s Campaign met with him in February to try to move him on a $15 minimum wage. The liberal outside group Indivisible has been running radio ads in West Virginia, urging Manchin to support Washington DC becoming a state. According to lobbying disclosures Humanity Forward, a group aligned with Democratic mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, hired lobbyists to push the West Virginia senator on supporting “targeted installments of stimulus payments”.Earlier this month, The American Working Families Action Fund launched digital and TV advertising targeting Manchin and Senator Susan Collins of Maine on infrastructure.Manchin is one of the senators being targeted by a string of advocacy groups on voting rights. Part of a joint advocacy campaign by the End Citizens United political action committee, the Let America Vote Action Fund and the National Democratic Redistricting Fund to push key senators to support Democrats’ For the People Act.Conservative groups are also trying to push Manchin. The conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity is airing radio ads calling on Manchin not to shift his position on the filibuster or adding seats to the supreme court. Those ads on talk radio direct listeners to an AFP-backed site.Ken Cuccinelli, a former deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, is leading a group called the American Principles Project alongside the Susan B Anthony List to reinforce a set of conservative Senate Democrats’ opposition to overhauling the filibuster. The partnership is called the Election Integrity Initiative. Manchin is one of those senators being targeted.“When Manchin says good things about it we engage with positive reinforcement in West Virginia,” Cuccinelli said in an interview. “We haven’t been doing attacking on it.”Cuccinelli said his initiative have had events at all Manchin’s offices. “As between trying to drag him down now or support a path he’s on that’s a positive path, we’ve chosen to support a positive path,” Cuccinelli added.All the activism and lobbying might suggest Manchin is particularly malleable to pressure. If anything Manchin has fueled frustration – especially among progressives – for how firm he’s been on some issues.Nick Rahall, a former member of Congress for West Virginia said Manchin is not immovable. Rahall said Manchin just “needs his space”.“He needs his room to maneuver and Biden’s willing to give it to him, [Senate majority leader] Chuck Schumer’s willing to give it to him,” Rahall said.Rahall added that Manchin can be convinced to change his mind. Rahall pointed to Manchin, in the end, voting for the Biden administration’s huge coronavirus relief bill. “He had concerns about it, he got an amendment accepted and he voted for it. He came down on Biden’s side after appearing initially – not totally against the bill but having concerns,” Rahall said. More

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      Ted Cruz threatens to burn John Boehner’s book over criticisms

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      Republican senator Ted Cruz has responded to fiery criticism from John Boehner with a tactic beloved of authoritarian regimes: threatening to burn his book.In an email to supporters, the Texas politician said he also might machine-gun or chainsaw the memoir, depending on how much his supporters paid for the privilege to watch.Boehner, a Republican congressman from Ohio for 24 years and House speaker from 2011 to 2015, published his book On the House this week. It contains strong criticism of political figures from Donald Trump to Barack Obama but hits Cruz especially hard.The senator who drove a government shutdown in 2013 is “Lucifer in the flesh”, Boehner has said.On the page, he writes: “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”The book also contains a memorable sign-off: “PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.”But Cruz, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and may well do so again in 2024, is nothing if not a bomb-thrower himself, as well as a nimble opportunist.“John Boehner doesn’t like me much,” his fundraising email said. “That’s fine, I’m not a big fan of his either.”Calling the speaker-turned-lobbyist a “Swamp Monster” and accusing him of “an unhinged smear campaign”, the email told supporters Cruz had “put this trash right where it belonged, in my fireplace”.“But I didn’t finish it off just yet,” it added. Instead, the Texas senator announced a “72-hour drive to raise $250,000”, in which donors would “get to VOTE on whether we machine gun the book, take a chainsaw to it or burn the book to light cigars!”The email also said Cruz would livestream the evisceration or incineration.There is nothing new about American politicians shooting or eviscerating texts they don’t like in order to raise campaign dollars. Ask the Democratic senator Joe Manchin, who has both taken aim at Obamacare and fired his gun to defend it.But it could also be pointed out that Cruz’s attempt to stoke outrage – and dollars – might only succeed in bringing Boehner’s book to wider attention.As Ray Bradbury, author of the classic novel Fahrenheit 451, about a society which bans books, once said: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”On Thursday morning, On the House was the No 1 seller on Amazon. More

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      Clyburn offers Manchin history lesson to clear Senate path for Biden reforms

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      Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, said on Sunday he intends to give Joe Manchin a lesson in US history as he attempts to clear a path for Joe Biden on voting rights and infrastructure.Manchin, a moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia, has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president’s ambitious proposals by insisting he will not vote to reform or end the Senate filibuster, which demands a super-majority for legislation to pass, to allow key measures passage through the 50-50 chamber on a simple majority basis.His stance has drawn praise from Republicans: Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, hailed Manchin as the politician “almost singlehandedly preserving the Senate”.But Democrats appear to be losing patience – and none more vociferously than Clyburn.“I’m going to remind the senator exactly why the Senate came into being,” Clyburn, from South Carolina, told CNN’s State of the Union, refreshing criticism of Manchin that has included saying he feels “insulted” by his refusal to fully embrace voting rights reform.“The Senate was not always an elective office. The moment we changed and made it an elective office [was because] the people thought a change needed to be made.“The same thing goes for the filibuster. The filibuster was put in place to extend debate and give time to bring people around to a point of view. The filibuster was never put in place to suppress voters … It was there to make sure that minorities in this country have constitutional rights and not be denied.”Clyburn has assailed Manchin for promoting a bipartisan approach to voting rights and refusing to endorse the For the People Act, a measure passed by the US House and intended to counter restrictive voting laws targeting minorities proposed by Republicans in 47 states and passed in Georgia last month.“You’re going to say it’s more important for you to protect 50 Republicans in the Senate than for you to protect your fellow Democrat’s seat in Georgia? That’s a bunch of crap,” Clyburn told Huffpost this month, referring to Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election battle that supporters feel has become much harder due to the new voting laws.On Sunday Clyburn also reached into history to repeat his contention that the Georgia law is “the new Jim Crow”, a claim repeated by Biden but which Republicans say is unfair.“When we first started determining who was eligible to vote and who was not,” Clyburn said, “they were property owners. They knew that people of colour, people coming out of slavery did not own property.“…And then they went from that to having disqualifiers. And they picked those offences that were more apt to be committed by people of colour to disqualify voters.“The whole history in the south of putting together those who are eligible to vote is based upon the practices and the experiences of people based upon their race. So, I would say to anybody, ‘Come on, just look at the history … and you will know that what is taking place today is a new Jim Crow. It’s just that simple.”Despite the urging of Clyburn and others, Manchin remains steadfast in his belief bipartisanship is Biden’s best path to implementing his agenda. In a CNN interview last week, the senator said the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol “changed me”, and said he wanted to use his power as a swing vote in the 50-50 Senate “to make a difference” by working with Republicans and Democrats.“Something told me, ‘Wait a minute. Pause. Hit the pause button.’ Something’s wrong. You can’t have this many people split to where they want to go to war with each other,” he said, of watching a riot mounted by supporters of Donald Trump seeking to overturn his election defeat on the grounds it was caused by voter fraud – a lie without legal standing.Manchin said he had a good relationship with the White House and wanted to meet Warnock and Georgia’s other Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, to discuss voting rights.On Sunday, Clyburn said the riot also had “a tremendous effect” on him.“When I saw that Capitol policeman complain about how many times he was called the N-word by those people, who were insurrectionists out there, when I see [the civil rights leader] John Lewis’s photo torn to pieces and scattered on the floor, that told me everything I need to know about those insurrectionists, and I will remind anybody who reflects on 6 January to think about these issues as well,” he said.Clyburn was among the first major figures to endorse Biden last year, helping nurse him through bleak times after rejections in early primaries.The congressman has Biden’s ear and in an interview with the Guardian in December promised to keep pressure on his friend to fulfill a promise in his victory speech directed to African Americans: “They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.”“I think he will,” Clyburn said. “I’m certainly going to work hard to make sure that he remembers that he said it.” More

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      in Elections

      ‘Dumb son of a bitch’: Trump attacks McConnell in Republican donors speech

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      Donald Trump devoted part of a speech to Republican donors on Saturday night to insulting the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. According to multiple reports of the $400,000-a-ticket, closed-press event, the former president called the Kentucky senator “a dumb son of a bitch”.Trump also said Mike Pence, his vice-president, should have had the “courage” to object to the certification of electoral college results at the US Capitol on 6 January. Trump claims his defeat by Joe Biden, by 306-232 in the electoral college and more than 7m votes, was the result of electoral fraud. It was not and the lie was repeatedly thrown out of court.Earlier, the Associated Press reported that it obtained a Pentagon timeline of events on 6 January, which showed Pence demanding military leadership “clear the Capitol” of rioters sent by Trump.Trump did nothing and around six hours passed between Pence’s order and the Capitol being cleared. Five people including a police officer died and some in the mob were recorded chanting “hang Mike Pence”. More than 400 face charges.In his remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday, amid a weekend of Republican events in Florida, some at Trump properties, the former president also mocked Dr Anthony Fauci.“Have you ever seen somebody who is so full of crap?“ Trump reportedly said about the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Joe Biden’s top medical adviser who was a key member of Trump’s coronavirus taskforce.Trump also said Covid-19 vaccines should be renamed “Trumpcines” in his honour.According to Politico, the attack on McConnell concerned the senator’s perceived failure to defend Trump with sufficient zeal in the impeachment trial which followed the Capitol riot.Trump, who told supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell”, was charged with inciting an insurrection. He was acquitted when only seven Republican senators voted to convict, not enough to reach the super-majority needed. McConnell voted to acquit, then excoriated Trump on the Senate floor.Of the certification of the election result on 6 January, according to the Washington Post, Trump said: “If that were [Chuck] Schumer [the Democratic Senate leader] instead of this dumb son of a bitch Mitch McConnell, they would never allow it to happen. They would have fought it.”Trump also attacked McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who was transportation secretary until she resigned over the Capitol riot, just before the end of Trump’s term.“I hired his wife,” Trump said, according to the Post. “Did he ever say thank you?”He also ridiculed her decision to resign – “She suffered so greatly,” the Post reported him saying, his “voice dripping with sarcasm” – and said he had won her husband’s Senate seat for him.Trump has attacked McConnell before, in February calling him a “dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack”. On Saturday night he also reportedly called him a “stone cold loser”. McConnell did not immediately comment.The former president remains barred from social media over the Capitol riot but he retains influence and has begun to issue endorsements for the 2022 midterms. Most have been in line with the party hierarchy, including backing Marco Rubio, a Florida senator and former presidential rival many expected would attract a challenge from Trump’s daughter Ivanka.Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment left him free to run for the White House. He regularly tops polls of Republican voters regarding possible candidates for 2024. On Saturday night, he reportedly left that possibility undiscussed.On Sunday morning, the Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson was asked if Trump’s remarks – and their reported enthusiastic reception by party donors and leaders – helped or hindered the Republican cause.“Anything that’s divisive is a concern,” Hutchinson told CNN’s State of the Union, “and is not helpful for us fighting the battles in Washington and at the state level.“In some ways it’s not a big deal what he said. But at the same time whenever it draws attention, we don’t need that. We need unity, we need to be focused together, we have … slim numbers in Washington and we got battles to fight, so we need to get beyond that.”At Mar-a-Lago, the Post said, the former president told Republicans to stick together.“We can’t have these guys that like publicity,” he said. More

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      Republican ‘attacks’ on corporations over voting rights bills are a hypocritical sham | Robert Reich

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      For four decades, the basic deal between big American corporations and politicians has been simple. Corporations provide campaign funds. Politicians reciprocate by lowering corporate taxes and doing whatever else corporations need to boost profits.The deal has proven beneficial to both sides, although not to the American public. Campaign spending has soared while corporate taxes have shriveled.In the 1950s, corporations accounted for about 40% of federal revenue. Today, they contribute a meager 7%. Last year, more than 50 of the largest US companies paid no federal income taxes at all. Many haven’t paid taxes for years.Both parties have been in on this deal although the GOP has been the bigger player. Yet since Donald Trump issued his big lie about the fraudulence of the 2020 election, corporate America has had a few qualms about the GOP.After the storming of the Capitol, dozens of giant corporations said they would no longer donate to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to the certification of Biden electors on the basis of the big lie.Then came the GOP’s wave of restrictive state voting laws, premised on the same big lie. Georgia’s are among the most egregious. The chief executive of Coca-Cola, headquartered in the peach tree state, calls those laws “wrong” and “a step backward”. The chief executive of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer, says they’re “unacceptable”. Major League Baseball decided to take its annual All-Star Game away from the home of the Atlanta Braves.The basic deal between the GOP and corporate America is still very much aliveThese criticisms have unleashed a rare firestorm of anti-corporate Republican indignation. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, warns corporations of unspecified “serious consequences” for speaking out. Republicans are moving to revoke MLB’s antitrust status. Georgia Republicans threaten to punish Delta by repealing a state tax credit for jet fuel.“Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations and antitrust?” asks the Florida senator Marco Rubio.Why? For the same reason Willie Sutton gave when asked why he robbed banks: that’s where the money is.McConnell told reporters corporations should “stay out of politics” but then qualified his remark: “I’m not talking about political contributions.” Of course not. Republicans have long championed “corporate speech” when it comes in the form of campaign cash – just not as criticism.Talk about hypocrisy. McConnell was the top recipient of corporate money in the 2020 election cycle and has a long history of battling attempts to limit it. In 2010, he hailed the supreme court’s Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on corporate political donations, on the dubious grounds that corporations are “people” under the first amendment to the constitution.“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” McConnell said at the time. Hint: he wasn’t referring to poor Black people.It’s hypocrisy squared. The growing tsunami of corporate campaign money suppresses votes indirectly by drowning out all other voices. Republicans are in the grotesque position of calling on corporations to continue bribing politicians as long as they don’t criticize Republicans for suppressing votes directly.The hypocrisy flows in the other direction as well. The Delta chief criticized the GOP’s voter suppression in Georgia but the company continues to bankroll Republicans. Its Pac contributed $1,725,956 in the 2020 election, more than $1m of which went to federal candidates, mostly Republicans. Oh, and Delta hasn’t paid federal taxes for years.Don’t let the spat fool you. The basic deal between the GOP and corporate America is still very much alive.Which is why, despite record-low corporate taxes, congressional Republicans are feigning outrage at Joe Biden’s plan to have corporations pay for his $2tn infrastructure proposal. Biden isn’t even seeking to raise the corporate tax rate as high as it was before the Trump tax cut, yet not a single Republicans will support it.A few Democrats, such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, don’t want to raise corporate taxes as high as Biden does either. Yet almost two-thirds of Americans support the idea.The basic deal between American corporations and American politicians has been a terrible deal for America. Which is why a piece of legislation entitled the For the People Act, passed by the House and co-sponsored in the Senate by every Democratic senator except Manchin, is so important. It would both stop states from suppressing votes and also move the country toward public financing of elections, thereby reducing politicians’ dependence on corporate cash.Corporations can and should bankroll much of what America needs. But they won’t, as long as corporations keep bankrolling American politicians. More

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      JD Vance eyes Ohio’s Senate seat as a working-class man – with millions in tech funds

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      As a prospective conservative candidate for the US Senate from Ohio, author JD Vance can claim a rarely authentic connection to the white working-class voters who helped make Donald Trump president.In his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the tale of his escape from generations of poverty and addiction in the shadow of Appalachia, thanks to a fiercely loving grandmother and a stroke or two of lonesome luck. (The Netflix film adaptation was less well received than the book.)Even if Vance, 36, were a Democrat, his life story – the Marines, Yale law school, venture capital, national renown – would make for political biography gold.But as the Republican party embarks on a highly tenuous makeover, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, from being “the party of the country clubs” to the party of the working class, Vance and his political fortunes have attracted a disproportionate share of excitement in conservative circles – and a mounting pile of actual gold.Before he has even confirmed that he will run for office, Vance has built a campaign slush fund worth at least $10m on the strength of donations from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a formerly ardent Trump supporter, and the hedge fund heiress-slash-Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, Forbes magazine first reported.The new working-class face of the Republican party, it seems, will be rolled out on a distinctly ruling class budget.But a successful Vance candidacy might be worth a very large sum indeed for Republicans, who could see a rare opportunity to confer blue-collar legitimacy on the tricky project of sweeping decades of hostility on workers’ issues – from wages to unions to health care to the giant economic relief package signed into law by Joe Biden just last month – behind a red curtain.“They’re not going to get there on the standard worker issues,” said David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic party, of the Republican attempt to rebrand. “There’s no way.”The conventional wisdom among political strategists has long been that the Republican party, whose supporters are disproportionately white, faces a demographic timebomb as the US electorate diversifies. Trump knocked down the theory a bit last year by making inroads among Latinos and, to a lesser extent, African American men.The “working-class” pitch is partly an appeal to those new Republican-curious voters. But Trump also pointed to another, powerful way for the Republican party to extend its reach: by winning an ever-greater share of working-class white voters, the kind who might have once belonged to a union and voted Democratic, but who backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 by a margin 40 points greater than the national spread.Republican strategists are brainstorming about how to retain those voters. An internal Republican memo revealed this week by Axios, called Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party, advised that “House Republicans can broaden our electorate, increase voter turnout, and take back the House by enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class.”Plutocrats inside the party who might disagree are keeping mum for now, or placing their bets discreetly, while the party’s leading firebrands in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election – senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – have taken up the message and are running with it.“The Republican party is not the party of the country clubs, it’s the party of hardworking, blue-collar men and women,” Cruz hypnotically declared in February, in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).“We are a working-class party now,” Hawley tweeted a day after the November election. “That’s the future.”Democratic partisans snipe that a half-century long commitment by Republicans to increasing the comfort of America’s wealthiest combined with a more recent strategy of trying to prevent voters from voting cannot be erased with simple assertions of newborn political intent.But unfortunately for Democrats, in a world where politics has largely come detached from policy – taken over by culture wars and other more sinister currents roiled by Trump, including racist resentments and the scapegoating of immigrants – the Republican strategy is not dead on arrival, as top Democratic strategists themselves admit.“The Democratic party envisions themselves as the party of working people,” said David Axelrod, former Barack Obama adviser, in a debrief of the 2020 election, “but it doesn’t feel that way to a lot of working people, and the party needs to figure that out.”Both sides acknowledge that branding is important, and in 2022 in Ohio, that could be where Vance comes in. The Senate seat in play unexpectedly opened earlier this year, when incumbent Republican Rob Portman, a mild-mannered Trump skeptic who nevertheless supported the former president, indicated he had had enough of Washington.Older-style conservatives, who dislike Trump but might nod knowingly at the scenes in Vance’s book describing people who “gamed the welfare system”, have encouraged him to get in the race.“I hope Vance will run for Ohio Senator Rob Portman’s seat in 2022,” tweeted Rod Dreher, senior editor of the American Conservative magazine. “He is exactly the kind of new Republican we need.”Assuming that Vance’s Yale law degree or Silicon Valley money would not torpedo his working-class credibility with Ohio voters, however, he could face a second crisis of authenticity, one that could stop his candidacy short before he gets to face a single Democratic opponent.To get to the general election, if he runs, Vance must first survive a Republican primary race – and in the cutthroat world of base Republican politics, where fealty to Trump is all-important, Vance is distinctly vulnerable.“I think that I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance told NPR on book tour in 2016. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”Perhaps even worse, Vance wrote admiringly of Barack Obama in the New York Times in 2017, saying he would “miss” the former president “and the example he set”.His primary opponents would hammer him relentlessly on plentiful past statements such as those, and in recent months a new version of JD Vance has been scrambling furiously away from the old JD Vance. He has tweeted broadsides against the “ruling class”; suggested that immigrants represent a pandemic threat; appeared on Fox News to trash Meghan and Harry, and bash Biden on immigration; gone after big tech, as he takes Silicon Valley money; and even played Twitter footsie with QAnon.“He’s clearly trying to mimic this Trump genuflection that we’re seeing from some of the other candidates, which is kind of embarrassing for JD Vance, because his brand was very different just a couple years ago,” said Pepper, the former Democratic party chair.It remains to be seen whether the internal tensions – not to say hypocrisies – of a Vance candidacy funded by coastal cash, or of the greater Republican rebranding project, will prove too great to sustain in real life. For now, they are both untested political theories.But with a $10m war chest, Vance has enough to get in the game.“That’s a lot of money, that will help him a lot,” said Pepper, adding that Vance’s popularity as an author belied a low name-recognition, for now, among Ohio voters. “But if the only reason he’s in the game is because of coastal big tech, it kills the ‘I’m-a-Trump-guy’ narrative – but it also kills his narrative about representing the working man.” More