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      It’s time for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to step down | Mehdi Hasan

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      In a recent podcast conversation, the former spokesperson for Jeb Bush sat down with the leader of the House Democrats. Guess which one of them endorsed the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York?“I was a Republican up until two minutes ago and I’m a capitalist, and I had Zohran on … it’s not really a close call, is it?” Tim Miller said to Hakeem Jeffries on his Bulwark podcast, to which a defensive-sounding House Minority leader replied: “What I can say is that he’s the only one I’m scheduled to talk to.”Time and time again, Jeffries has refused to endorse his own party’s official candidate for mayor in his own city, two months after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York by double digits – including Jeffries’ own congressional district by eight points.This is the same Democratic party leader who has insisted in the past that progressives should “vote BLUE (no matter who)”. But centrists? Apparently, they’re under no such obligation.Jeffries is not alone in his brazen hypocrisy. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader who represents the state of New York and lives in the city of New York, has also refused to endorse his own party’s official candidate for mayor of New York.If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.If you want to understand why 62% of Democratic voters say “the leadership of the Democratic party should be replaced with new people,” again, look no further than Jeffries and Schumer.Week after week, month after month, they embarrass themselves, undermine their colleagues and demoralize their voters. Theirs is a record of cowardice and capitulation.Let’s start with Jeffries. In February, the hapless House minority leader wondered aloud: “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. They control the House, the Senate. And the presidency. It’s their government. What leverage do we have?” It was a shrug of impotence; a sign of pre-emptive submission only weeks after Trump’s inauguration.That same month, just days before Bernie Sanders began his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in front of packed arenas across the country, Jeffries “quietly met with more than 150 Silicon Valley-based donors … in tony Los Altos Hills”, reported Politico, in order to “mend fences” with the billionaire big tech bosses.In April, when Democratic members of Congress such as Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Maxwell Frost were visiting El Salvador and raising the issue of Kilmar Ábrego García’s detention, the Bulwark reported: “The minority leader has discouraged further excursions to the country” (reporting that Jeffries later denied). Subsequent polling suggests those trips helped change public opinion on immigration and, especially, on the fate of Ábrego. Jeffries, though, can claim no credit for that shift in American sentiment.In June, in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to file ludicrous charges of assault against the Democratic congresswoman LaMonica McIver after a protest outside an immigration detention center, the dead-eyed Jeffries appeared on CNN with host Dana Bash.
      BASH: You previously warned that the administration charging members of Congress was a, quote, ‘red line’. What are you doing now that the red line you talked about has apparently been crossed?
      JEFFRIES: We will make that decision in a time, place and manner of our choosing. But the response will be continuous, and it will meet the moment that is required.
      BASH: What exactly does that mean? Have you not decided how to respond?
      JEFFRIES: We will respond in a time, place, and manner of our choosing if this continues to happen.
      Bash looked bewildered. And we’re now coming up to three months since Jeffries made those bizarre, tone-deaf remarks. Has the time not arrived yet? Has he still not found the place?Last month, Jeffries refused, again, to endorse Mamdani but then went further, telling CNBC that Andrew Cuomo’s baseless attack on Mamdani’s rent-stabilized apartment was a “legitimate issue” and that his campaign was “going to have to address it”. Can you imagine a Republican leader in Congress going on live television to throw their party’s mayoral candidate under the bus in this way?Jeffries has become almost a parody of a weak, spineless Democratic leader. When he was asked recently about Trump’s fascistic deployment of troops to the streets of Washington DC, his response was to praise the DC attorney general’s “strongly worded letter”.Well, you know who else likes to bring a “strongly worded letter” to a gunfight with Republicans? Yep. You guessed it. Chuck Schumer. The Senate minority leader bragged to CNN earlier this year about how he had reacted to Donald Trump’s attack on US universities by sending him “a very strong letter just the other day”.To be clear: Schumer’s record on resisting Trump and fighting back against his authoritarian takeover of the US government has been as feeble and feckless as Jeffries’.Remember that cringe chant of ‘We will win’ and ‘We won’t rest’ that he led outside the Treasury building in February, as Elon Musk’s Doge teams rampaged through the federal government?Or when he shamefully backed down from a confrontation with Trump over a government shutdown in March and earned the scathing soubriquet “Surrender Schumer”? (One anonymous House Democrat joked at the time that the Senate minority leader’s popularity was “hovering somewhere between Elon Musk and the Ebola virus”.)How about when he told NPR that same month that accusing Israel of genocide – now the view of 77% of Democratic voters – was antisemitic, or when he declared to the neoconservative Brett Stephens that his job was “to keep the left pro-Israel”?Who can forget also his hawkish denunciation of “Taco Trump” in June for not being “tough” enough on the “terrorist government” of Iran, just weeks before Trump illegally bombed Iran?It makes no sense to me that Schumer is still the leader of the Democrats in the Senate. The party lost the upper chamber on his watch, under his leadership, but Schumer chose to stay on and his colleagues let him. But when you lead your party to defeat in an election, shouldn’t you … lose your job?As for Jeffries, the Democrats may win back the House of Representatives next November on the back of an anti-Trump wave, but what then? What vision will a Speaker Jeffries offer? What resistance will he provide to the wannabe dictator in the White House? What actual plan does he have to preserve and protect democracy in 2028?Since Trump was inaugurated for a second time in January, Jeffries and Schumer have demonstrated time and again that they are not built for this particular moment. While Trump seeds the ground for an American dictatorship, these two top Dems pine for bipartisanship. While millions of rank-and-file Democrats across the country say they want leaders who will fight, Jeffries and Schumer fold. While younger Democrats like Mamdani and AOC offer energy and charisma, these two lackluster leaders in the House and Senate offer cringe chants and even cringier photo ops.It is past time for both Jeffries and Schumer to step down and step aside. This fascist moment, this age of Trump, demands outspoken, unrelenting and fearless opposition. Whether you are a Democrat, or simply a democrat, we all deserve better.

      Mehdi Hasan is the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of the media company Zeteo and a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘He’s trying to rig the midterms’: Trump intervenes to protect his allies in Congress

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      They are more than a year away – a lifetime in today’s fast and furious political cycle. But one man is already paying attention, pulling the levers of power and trying to tip the scales of the 2026 midterm elections.Donald Trump has made clear that he is willing to bring the full weight of the White House to bear to prevent his Republican party losing control of the US Congress in the midterm elections next year, orchestrating a more direct and legally dubious intervention than any of his predecessors.The US president’s multipronged approach includes redrawing congressional district maps, seeking to purge voter rolls, taking aim at mail-in voting and voting machines, and ordering the justice department to investigate Democrats’ prime fundraising tool.“Nobody’s ever tried to do this,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “Most American presidents, Democratic or Republican, have basically played by the same rules and been careful of the constitution. But in his business career Trump never cared about whether he was doing something legal or not; he just went to court and same thing here.”Campaigning, not governing, has often been Trump’s comfort zone. He is constitutionally barred from running for president again but already has an eye on the November 2026 elections that will determine control of the House of Representatives and Senate.He senses that law and order, a populist cause long exploited by Republicans, could play to his advantage. Earlier this month Trump deployed the national guard to reduce crime in Washington DC and threatened similar federal interventions in other big cities. Fifty-three per cent of the public approve of how he is handling crime, according to an AP-NORC poll, higher than other issues.Trump told a cabinet meeting this week: “I think crime will be the big subject of the midterms and will be the big subject of the next election. I think it’s going to be a big, big subject for the midterms and I think the Republicans are going to do really well.”But this is no ordinary campaign. Trump said at the same marathon meeting: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”Taking a familiar political manoeuvre to new extremes, he has pushed Republican state legislators in Texas to redraw their congressional map because he claims “we are entitled to five more seats”, and he is lobbying other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to take similar steps to pad the margin even more.Other steps involve the direct use of official presidential power in ways that have no modern precedent. He ordered his justice department to investigate ActBlue, an online portal that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in small-dollar donations for Democratic candidates over two decades.The site has been so successful that Republicans launched a similar venture, called WinRed. But Trump did not order a federal investigation into WinRed.Trump’s appointees at the justice department have also demanded voting data from at least 19 states in an apparent attempt to look for ineligible voters. Earlier this year he signed an executive order seeking documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other changes, though much of it has been blocked by courts.Last week the president announced that lawyers were drafting an executive order to end mail-in balloting, a method used by nearly one in three Americans, and threatened to do away with voting machines. He claimed that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told him mail-in voting was responsible for his 2020 election loss.There is nothing remarkable about a sitting president campaigning for his party in the midterms and trying to bolster incumbents by steering projects and support to their districts. But Trump’s actions constitute a unique attempt to interfere in a critical election before it is even held, raising alarms about the future of democracy.Allan Lichtman, a distinguished history professor at American University in Washington, said: “We’re seeing a new concerted assault on free and fair elections, harkening back to the discredited efforts of the white supremacists in the Jim Crow south. He’s trying to rig the midterms and then of course beyond that the next presidential election in his political favour.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump previously attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in an insurrection by his supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. On that occasion, he was constrained by elected Republicans such as his then vice-president, Mike Pence, and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. This time he has locked down near-total loyalty from the party and assembled a cabinet that again this week offered an ostentatious display of fealty.His power grab will not go entirely unchallenged. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, signed legislation that will allow voters to decide in November on a redrawn congressional map designed to help Democrats win five more House seats next year, neutralising Republicans’ gerrymandering in Texas.But Democrats, activists and lawyers will have to find others ways to “fight fire with fire” when it comes to Trump’s more extreme meddling.Lichtman, author of a new book, Conservative at the Core, added: “Republicans have no principles; Democrats have no spine. Democrats need to grow a spine. They need to stop playing not to lose – that’s a sure way to lose. They need to respond to these outrages powerfully and aggressively by whatever means are possible or we’re going to lose our democracy.”Yet while Trump’s gambit is a flex of executive power, it could also be seen as an admission of potential weakness. The incumbent president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections. In 2018, Democrats won enough to take back the House, stymieing Trump’s agenda and leading to his impeachment.Only 37% of voters approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released on Wednesday, while 55% disapprove. House Republicans, who currently have just a three-seat margin, have faced a series of raucous town halls that bode ill for their fortunes.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “President Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to stack the deck if they didn’t think they were going to lose the hand. They are looking at poll numbers and they know midterms are bad to incumbent presidents over the last 60 years and it’s a very slim margin in the House.“In order for Trump to sustain the loyalty of the House – he’s already gotten everything he pretty much wants – he needs them to think he’s on their side so he’s going to go out and be very public about rigging the voting system to keep them in power.”But Schiller added: “Will that be enough to overcome general unhappiness at the moment that the voters seem to have with the economy, inflation, even Trump’s border policies? It’s not enough to keep the Republicans in line. You have to get independent voters to vote for you again and that’s at risk for the Republicans right now.” More

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      Bernie Sanders demands that RFK Jr step down as health secretary

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      Bernie Sanders has joined in on growing public calls for Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to resign, after recent chaos across US health agencies.In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Saturday, the Vermont senator accused Kennedy of “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future”, adding: “He must resign.”“Mr Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr Kennedy have done exactly the opposite,” Sanders wrote.Sanders pointed to the White House’s firing of Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as four other top CDC officials who resigned in protest this week after Monarez “refused to act as a rubber stamp” for Kennedy’s “dangerous policies”.“Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts,” Sanders wrote.“Against the overwhelming body of evidence within medicine and science, what are secretary Kennedy’s views? … He has absurdly claimed that ‘there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective’… Who supports secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading ‘experts’ that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.”Sanders went on to add: “The reality is that secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of [the Department of Health and Human Services] he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.”Pointing to what he described as “our broken health care system”, Sanders said that Kennedy’s repeated attacks against science and vaccines will make it more difficult for Americans to obtain lifesaving vaccines.“Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs – if they can manage to get a vaccine at all,” he wrote.The senator warned that Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, which involves a list of recommended vaccines for children to protect them from diseases including measles, chickenpox and polio.“The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm,” Sanders said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn recent days, the Trump administration has faced rare bipartisan pushback following its firing of Monarez, which came amid steep budget cuts to the CDC’s work as well as growing concerns of political interference.Meanwhile, Kennedy has continued to make questionable medical and health claims – and has been lambasted in response by experts and lawmakers alike.Since he assumed leadership over the health department, Kennedy – a longtime anti-vaccine advocate – has fired health agency workers and entertained conspiracy theories. Last week, more than 750 current and former employees at US health agencies signed a letter in which they criticized Kennedy as an “existential threat to public health”.The health agency workers went on to accuse the health secretary of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information”.The letter comes after a deadly shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, when a 30-year-old gunman fired more than 180 rounds into the buildings, killing a police officer before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The shooter had been struggling with mental health issues and was influenced by misinformation that led him to believe the Covid-19 vaccine was making him sick, according to the gunman’s father. More

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      Republican senator Joni Ernst of Iowa will not run for re-election

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      The US Republican senator Joni Ernst of Iowa is not expected to seek re-election next year, according to multiple news reports, a move that could open a competitive seat in the high-stakes battle to control the chamber.CBS News was the first to report that Ernst had told confidantes that she intends to announce her decision not to seek re-election next week. Ernst’s office and campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Ernst, 55, became the first woman to represent Iowa in the US Senate when she was elected in 2014. Her decision follows an announcement by the Iowa governor, Republican Kim Reynolds, to not seek re-election. Earlier this week, a Democrat prevailed in a special election for a state senate seat in an Iowa district that voted heavily for Donald Trump in 2024. The victory raised Democrats’ hopes in a state that has drifted away from them over the past decade and where they haven’t won a statewide Senate race since 2008.Republicans currently control the US Senate by a 53-to-47 margin. Despite Trump’s low approval ratings, growing economic uncertainty and historical patterns that show the president’s party losing ground in the midterm elections, nonpartisan election analysts say Republicans are favored to keep control of the Senate.Ernst would be the second Republican senator to not seek re-election, after Thom Tillis, a two-term incumbent from North Carolina, announced his retirement a day after voting against Trump’s signature domestic policy bill. Of the 22 Republican seats up for election next year, only the North Carolina race is rated a toss-up, according to the Cook Political Report. It had ranked Ernst’s seat “likely” to remain in the Republican column.Earlier this summer, Ernst drew fierce backlash when she appeared to dismiss voter fears that Medicaid cuts in the Republican immigration and tax package would put lives at risk, telling a town hall audience: “We all are going to die.”Rather than backtrack or apologize, Ernst doubled down in a video. “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth,” she said. “So I apologize, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”Ernst had also faced sharp criticism from the president’s supporters when she expressed reservations with Pete Hegseth, then Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense who faced allegations of sexual assault – which he denied – and repeatedly expressed opposition to women in combat roles.Facing threats of a rightwing primary challenge, Ernst, a survivor of sexual assault who had become a champion of issues related to women in the military, caved to the pressure and ultimately voted to confirm Hegseth.Democrats celebrated Ernst’s prospective retirement. At least five Democratic candidates have announced they will run for the seat.“Joni Ernst is retiring because she knows that Iowans are furious at her and Washington Republicans for threatening our healthcare and spiking costs for families,” said Rita Hart, chair of the Iowa Democratic party. “Iowans continue to show that they are ready for change, and we will be working overtime to elect a Democrat to represent us in the Senate in 2026.” More

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      This Maine oysterman thinks Democrats are doing ‘jack’ about fascism. So he’s running for US Senate

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      One of Graham Platner’s high school yearbooks shows him babyfaced with a buzzcut, holding a sign proclaiming, in part: “Free Palestine.” The image is accompanied by a superlative his classmates bestowed upon him: “Most Likely To Start A Revolution.”“Well see!” Platner wrote on X Thursday, posting a photo of the yearbook page, in a post that’s been viewed 4.5m times. Now bearded, burly and tattooed, with a sweep of dirty blond hair above a sunburnt face, Platner still believes in a free Palestine. He also thinks it’ll take something revolutionary to save the US, so earlier this week, when the oysterman announced his candidacy to be the next US senator from Maine, he pulled no punches.“I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps and the army. I’m not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it, the politicians who sell us out,” he said in a campaign launch video, showing him chopping wood and at the helm of a small fishing boat.“And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins. I’m not fooled by this fake charade of Collins’ deliberations and moderation.”Platner’s video went viral, his message punching through in a crowded field of Democratic primary candidates, all vying for the chance to defeat Collins. Despite her protestations of being a “moderate”, Collins, a 72-year-old Republican senator, has often aligned herself with Donald Trump’s far-right agenda.Democrats thought they had a real shot to unseat Collins in 2020. Sara Gideon raised $40m more than Collins, and polls showed Gideon in the lead, but she still lost by nine points in a state her fellow Democrat, Joe Biden, won handily.Now, the Democratic party is trying again, seeing Collins’s seat as crucial to their chances of taking back the US Senate in 2026. Establishment Democrats have eyed Maine governor Janet Mills as a potential candidate, but Mills has yet to jump into the race.Platner believes the party needs an outsider. He believes that pedigreed, establishment Democratic candidates have failed repeatedly to appeal to working-class Americans, hastening the rise of Maga.“Most Trump supporters I know think that the system is screwing them,” Platner says.View image in fullscreen“They think it is not working on their behalf. They think that they are being robbed by the ultra-wealthy. And these are all true statements. When I talk to them about these things, we are all in full agreement. And in many ways, this is at the core of why we are in the straits that we are in. The Democratic party has in many ways lost those people, not all of them, but some over the years, by not being clearly a party of the working class, representing the interests of the working class.”Platner’s populist brand of politics grew, in part, out of his experience in the military. He enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school and deployed to Iraq three times. When he returned home, he went to George Washington University on the GI bill, before deciding to enlist again, this time with the army national guard. He was deployed to Afghanistan.“I witnessed the just horrific human cost of those wars,” he says. “Both for the young American men and women who were deployed, but also the people in the countries that we invaded.”He grew disillusioned, eventually realizing that the US’s “military adventurism” was “a mechanism of moving taxpayer dollars into the private bank accounts of defense companies, all on the backs of frankly working-class men and women, and on the backs of the people living in societies that we took the wars to”.Platner went from Afghanistan back home to Sullivan, Maine, taking a job on an oyster farm – across Frenchman Bay from Acadia national park – which he now runs. He got married and seemed to be settling down for a quiet life, but says he saw his friends and neighbors struggle with rising healthcare costs, shuttered hospitals and housing prices that forced many to move away.“This isn’t a vanity project,” Platner says of his Senate campaign. If anything, he says, the campaign has thrown his life into “a bit of disarray”. He’s doing it because he cares about the community that has cared for him and believes in a type of politics that may have appeal across the political spectrum – one he believes has the ability to stop the rising tide of fascism in the US.“Government can provide good things for people like I have been provided – a good life by the support I get from the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs], both in healthcare and in housing, and I don’t think that people should have to go fight in foreign wars to get those things. I think they should get those things just by being an American,” he says.His policy proposals – Medicare for all, the return of “serious federal support for building housing” and a “billionaire minimum tax”, among others – may not sound too dissimilar from the platforms of progressive independents like Bernie Sanders. But Platner is wary of labels, eschewing words like “liberal” or “leftie”.It’s not only because he doesn’t present like your stereotypical progressive – he’s a veteran, an oysterman and a competitive shooter, spending his weekends at the local gunnery. He doesn’t like political labels, he says, because “we have far more in common with our neighbors than we do with anyone who’s up in the stratospherically wealthy elite … By trying to force people into these little holes, that keeps folks divided, and I don’t think there’s any value in that.”Similarly, Platner sees “culture war” issues as distractions. His campaign platform – unlike a lot of establishment Democrats – is unequivocal in its support of marginalized groups. On immigrants, he’s called out the government for “kidnapping people off the streets and imprisoning them in hellish conditions” and says he “will support a path to citizenship and an end to the mass deportation machine”.On queer people, his website states he’s tired of “politicians using small groups of people as a punching bag – be it race, or gender identity, or sexual orientation”.“I will support passing, at last, federal LGBTQ anti-discrimination legislation,” it says.As he surveys the American political scene, Platner is enraged by a Democratic party he sees as more interested in raising money than helping people, a party willing to appease Maga, to meet it in the middle, instead of fighting it.“Nothing pisses me off more than getting a fundraising text from Democrats talking about how they’re fighting fascism…,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “Because it’s such bullshit. We’re not idiots. Everyone knows most of them aren’t doing jack shit right now to fight back. People are being kidnapped into unmarked vans by masked police. There is a genocide happening in Palestine. Literal billionaires have taken over our government. And all Democratic leadership can do is send us another fundraising text?”For now, Platner is an oysterman and harbormaster in Sullivan, diving into the water to moor boats so they don’t float out to sea in a storm, but he believes his next job will be in Washington DC.“We need to give people hope,” he says. “We need to show them that there still is an element in American politics that wants to fight on their behalf and comes from them. That’s not something that comes from on high. We need to build the concept of working-class politics again, and I think that is very much the mechanism of how we move forward.” More

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      ‘There’s an appetite for this brand of politics’: the independent politician making a bid for US Senate

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      Dan Osborn is a man who does not like to lose, and if you had asked him on election night last year whether he would run again as an independent for a US Senate seat representing the very Republican state of Nebraska, Osborn would have told you to, in his words, “pound sand”.Yet the results of his first bid for elected office were alluring, so much so that he has decided take another stab at becoming only the third current member of the US Senate who is not in either of the two parties. While he did not beat the Republican senator Deb Fischer last November, he did narrow her margin of victory to the single digits in a state that Donald Trump won by 20 points. Next year, Osborn will challenge the state’s other Republican senator, Pete Ricketts, in a contest he characterizes as a struggle between the working class and the wealthy.“I think there’s an appetite for this brand of politics,” Osborn told the Guardian by phone from Omaha. “It’s so important they see the value in having somebody like me, who knows what it’s like to put Christmas on a credit card, I suppose, versus somebody like Ricketts, who is probably just in it for himself.”Osborn’s campaign last year was a rare bright spot for many in an election that saw voters pummel candidates who were not on Trump’s team.Nebraska has only elected Republicans to the Senate since Democrat Ben Nelson’s victory in 2006, but Osborn managed to outperform Kamala Harris by more than any other non-Republican Senate candidate. In next year’s elections, Osborn may get a boost from the anti-incumbent sentiment that so often pervades midterms, but Ricketts, a former governor who is running for a full term after winning a special election last year, is one of the best-known Republicans in the state.“I do think he’s going to have a much tougher task this time around,” Dona-Gene Barton, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln who focuses on polling, said of Osborn. Compared to Fischer, Ricketts is “much more popular in the state. He has incredibly deep pockets, and he’s the sitting incumbent.”Osborn believes he has a compelling argument. As a union leader, he organized Nebraska workers during a nationwide strike at the cereal giant Kellogg’s, and now balances campaigning with his day job as an industrial mechanic. The working class may have broken for the real estate mogul Trump last year, but he believes that further down the ballot, they will vote for a candidate who is one of them.“Our government doesn’t look like me, so that’s certainly what I want to get in there and change. And I think that’s what’s on most people’s minds as well,” he said. Osborn draws a particular contrast to Ricketts, whose father founded stockbroker TD Ameritrade and whose net worth is estimated at $184m by the stock tracker Quiver Quantitative.View image in fullscreenAnother potential advantage: he’s not a Democrat. Last year, Osborn wrote in the United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain, on the presidential ballot, and said that if he was elected, he would not caucus with either party.Independent lawmakers are rare in Congress. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine are the only two in the Senate, and both caucus with the Democrats, while the House has not had one since 2021. The last time Nebraska elected an independent federal lawmaker was in 1936.Voters, Osborn believes, are looking for a candidate who will break the two-party logjam in Washington, stand up to the rich and not clash with Trump simply on principle.“I’ll work with anybody … the problem, I think, inherently, with our government right now, is they don’t seem to want to work together,” Osborn said. Though Trump has bashed him on social media repeatedly, Osborn said: “I’m not just going to be anti just for the sake of being anti.”He criticizes how Joe Biden handled the influx of immigrants during his presidency, and repeats Trump’s aphorism that “without a border, we don’t have a country”. Yet he does not like everything he sees from the new administration, such as the way it celebrates new detention centers for deportees, or how Elon Musk pirouetted with a chainsaw at the outset of his so-called “department of government efficiency” initiative.“I just don’t understand the whole bragging about hurting people,” Osborn said.While his relationship with the state Democratic party last year was touchy at times, this year, the party has decided to support his campaign, though a Democratic candidate could also still jump into the race. Jane Kleeb, the state party chair, said in an interview that they view Osborn as an ally for their causes.“On the vast majority of issues, like the core issues that matter to working- and middle-class families, Dan is on the same side of where I think any of those votes would be,” Kleeb said.“Protecting Medicaid, Medicare – he’s not going to side with Republicans on that. Middle-class tax cuts, bringing back childcare credits, making sure that our American energy is diversified … protecting unions, name the issue.”Ricketts’s campaign responded by arguing that Osborn was essentially a Democrat. “Fake Dan Osborn can continue pretending to be an independent, but he is endorsed by the Nebraska Democratic party, funded by Democrats, and backs Democrats’ most extreme policy positions,” said spokesperson Will Coup. (Kleeb said the Nebraska Democratic party does not endorse candidates, and had not endorsed Osborn.)Now, Osborn’s candidacy has prompted the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics to change its rating of the race from “Safe Republican” to “Likely Republican”. Another prominent forecaster, the Cook Political Report, kept their rating unchanged at “Solid Republican”, but noted they may re-evaluate “if Osborn’s blue-collar messaging gets some traction”.On the campaign trail last year, Osborn said he found himself appearing before crowds at campaign events where half of those in attendance were wearing Trump gear, and the other sported shirts from the Harris campaign. He sees recapturing that spirit as key to his victory.“I would see people with both style shirts, grabbing yard signs before they left,” Osborn said. “So I made it not about red versus blue. It’s about uplifting everybody in the communities.” More

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      Senate confirms Trump ally Jeanine Pirro as top federal prosecutor for DC

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      The US Senate has confirmed Jeanine Pirro – a former Fox News host and staunch Donald Trump ally who boosted lies that he lost the 2020 presidential race because of electoral fraudsters – as the top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital.Pirro – a former New York state district attorney and county judge who joined Fox News in 2011 – was confirmed on Saturday in a 50-45 vote along party lines.In a statement issued by Pirro after the vote, the Republican said she was “blessed” to have been confirmed as the US attorney for Washington DC. “Get ready for a real crime fighter,” said Pirro’s statement, which called the US attorney’s office she had been confirmed to lead the largest in the country.Before her media career, Pirro spent over a decade as a Republican district attorney in Westchester county, New York, and also served as a county judge.She hosted her own Fox show Justice with Judge Jeanine. And more recently, she became a co-host on the Fox show The Five.Pirro used her time at Fox News in part to publicly support the baseless claims that Trump lost his first presidency to Joe Biden in 2020 because of voter fraud. In 2021, she was among several Fox News hosts named in the defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, which accused the network of knowingly airing false claims about the company’s voting machines after the previous year’s election.Fox ultimately settled the lawsuit for $787.5m and has acknowledged that the fraud claims were false.Pirro has been serving as the interim US attorney since May, when her fellow Republican Trump nominated her to the post months into his second presidency. She was nominated after Trump withdrew the nomination of conservative activist Ed Martin, his first choice for the role. A key Republican senator, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, had said he would not support Martin’s nomination.In announcing Pirro’s nomination in May, Trump praised her record, and said that she was a “powerful crusader for victims of crime” and someone who “excelled in all ways”.“Jeanine is incredibly well qualified for this position,” the president added.The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, on Saturday published a statement exalting Pirro as “a warrior for law and order”.At the end of his first presidency, Trump pardoned Pirro’s former husband, Albert Pirro Jr, after he had been convicted in 2000 on federal charges of fraud and tax evasion.Pirro is one of a number of Trump loyalists with ties to Fox who have joined the president’s administration. Other prominent ones include her fellow ex-Fox News host Pete Hegseth, the embattled defense secretary, and the former Fox Business personality Sean Duffy, the embattled transportation secretary.In June, US senator Adam Schiff accused Pirro of “blind obedience to Donald Trump is nearly unrivaled among his ardent supporters”.“For an important prosecutorial position like this one, the country has a right to demand a serious and principled public servant,” Schiff said. “Jeanine Pirro is not it.”Despite Pirro’s confirmation, the US Senate left Washington DC on Saturday night for its monthlong August recess without a deal to advance dozens of Trump nominees despite days of contentious, bipartisan negotiations.An irate Trump went on social media and told Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL!” More

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      Irate Trump tells Schumer to ‘go to hell’ after Senate standoff over confirmations

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      The US Senate left Washington DC on Saturday night for its monthlong August recess without a deal to advance dozens of Donald Trump’s nominees, calling it quits after days of contentious bipartisan negotiations and the president taking to social media to tell Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL!”Without a deal in hand, Republicans say they may try to change Senate rules when they return in September to speed up the pace of confirmations. Trump has been pressuring senators to move quickly as Democrats blocked more nominees than usual this year, denying any fast unanimous consent votes and forcing roll calls on each one, a lengthy process that can take several days per nominee.“I think they’re desperately in need of change,” Senate Republican majority leader John Thune said of the chamber’s rules on Saturday after negotiations with Schumer and Trump broke down. “I think that the last six months have demonstrated that this process, nominations is broken. And so I expect there will be some good robust conversations about that.”Schumer said a rules change would be a “huge mistake”, especially as Senate Republicans will need Democratic votes to pass spending bills and other legislation moving forward.“Donald Trump tried to bully us, go around us, threaten us, call us names, but he got nothing,” Schumer said.The latest standoff comes as Democrats and Republicans have gradually escalated their obstruction of the other party’s executive branch and judicial nominees over the last two decades, and as Senate leaders have incrementally changed Senate rules to speed up confirmations – and make them less bipartisan.In 2013, Democrats changed Senate rules for lower court judicial nominees to remove the 60-vote threshold for confirmations as Republicans blocked then president Barack Obama’s judicial picks. In 2017, Republicans did the same for supreme court nominees as Democrats tried to block Trump’s nomination of justice Neil Gorsuch.Trump has been pressuring Senate Republicans for weeks to cancel the August recess and grind through dozens of his nominations as Democrats have slowed the process. But Republicans hoped to make a deal with Democrats instead and came close several times over the last few days as the two parties and the White House negotiated over moving a large tranche of nominees in exchange for reversing some of the Trump administration’s spending cuts on foreign aid, among other issues.The Senate held a rare weekend session on Saturday as Republicans held votes on nominee after nominee and as the two parties tried to work out the final details of a deal. But it was clear that there would be no agreement when Trump attacked Schumer on social media Saturday evening and told Republicans to pack it up and go home.“Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL!” Trump posted on Truth Social.Thune said afterward that there were “several different times” when the two sides thought they had a deal, but in the end “we didn’t close it out”.It’s the first time in recent history that the minority party hasn’t allowed at least some quick confirmations. Thune has already kept the Senate in session for more days, and with longer hours, this year to try and confirm as many of Trump’s nominees as possible.But Democrats had little desire to give in without the spending cut reversals or some other incentive, even though they too were eager to skip town after several long months of work and bitter partisan fights over legislation.“We have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified as we have right now,” Schumer said. More