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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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      Are US corporations really taking a stand for voting rights?

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      Despite a wave of public statements by corporations opposing legislation that would make it harder for people to vote, election reform advocates doubt American capitalism is really coming to the rescue of American democracy.Activists are welcoming corporate involvement in the fight against bills introduced by Republicans in state legislatures across the US to erect barriers to voting that disproportionately affect people of color and other groups that often vote Democratic.Hundreds of companies and business leaders lent their names this week to a two-page ad declaring “we must ensure the right to vote for all of us”, published in the country’s biggest papers.But past corporate interventions in social justice campaigns, including statements of solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters last summer, did not go far beyond words, activists say.The pursuit of lower taxes and lax regulations, meanwhile, has led corporations to continuously finance the Republican party’s most corrosive projects, from voter suppression to the takeover of the judiciary to the big election lie that led to the sacking of the Capitol in January, they say.“Of course we welcome corporate support against outrageous voter suppression efforts by GOP state legislatures that make it harder for voters, particularly from communities of color and other historically marginalized communities, to vote,” said Ben Jealous, president of People For the American Way.It does feel, on this one, that some of these companies are getting out ahead of a potential boycott from consumers“That reaction is no doubt driven by their fears of losing business from their customers in the midst of heated public anger over such aggressive and targeted voter suppression, and we hope they will put their money where their mouth is and take real action to stop such proposals.”Thenewspaper ad was organized by two African American business leaders – Kenneth Frazier, chief executive of Merck, and Kenneth Chenault, former head of American Express – who have said such bills are racially discriminatory, even as Republicans insist election security is their deepest concern.The corporate decision to speak out created a rare moment of discombobulation for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who warned chief executives to “stay out of politics” before clarifying a day later, with no hint of self-consciousness: “I’m not talking about political contributions.”But the surface friction between McConnell and his erstwhile patrons belies the mildness of most corporate criticism of anti-voter laws and obscures companies’ ambivalence when it comes to taking a stand on voting rights, activists said.Large Georgia-based companies including AT&T, Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola did not voice concerns last month about legislation to restrict voting in the state until they came under public pressure. Their eventual statements were measured.“We are working together with other businesses through groups like the Business Roundtable to support efforts to enhance every person’s ability to vote,” said AT&T’s chief executive, John Stankey. “In this way, the right knowledge and expertise can be applied to make a difference on this fundamental and critical issue.”The same three companies declined to sign the ad published in the New York Times and Washington Post last week, referring media to their statements about Georgia, though similar high-profile clashes are playing out in Michigan, Arizona, Texas and elsewhere.Walmart declined to sign the ad, with its chief executive, Doug McMillon, who chairs the Business Roundtable, telling employees: “We are not in the business of partisan politics.”Walmart’s reticence was spotlighted by LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright, co-founders of Black Voters Matter, in a statement that praised the newspaper ad as a “righteous decision to stand up to racism, disenfranchisement, and voter suppression” and criticized those who did not sign.“They – and all of these other companies – continue to issue misleading statements that create a false equivalency between securing elections and attacking voting rights,” Black Voters Matter said. “These corporations are pandering to a big lie that is being used to justify voter suppression. That’s partisan.”Michael Serazio, a professor of communications at Boston College, said corporations appeared to be taking a “proactive” approach on voting rights to protect their bottom lines.“It does feel, on this one, that some of these companies are getting out ahead of a potential boycott from consumers, before the boycott around the laws was going to kick off,” Serazio said.Corporations increasingly feel pressure from consumers and in some cases employees on social and political issues, Serazio said.“Without question, the broader trend over the last decade has been corporations responding to a perceived or real sense that consumers want them to take a stand on political issues that they wouldn’t have done before.”But corporations simultaneously shovel money into the coffers of the very politicians who engineer the policies the companies claim to detest.A report this month by Public Citizen, a government watchdog, found corporations had given more than $50m in campaign donations in recent years to legislators who advanced anti-voter laws and promoted Donald Trump’s big election lie.Josh Silver, director of Represent.us, a non-partisan elections reform group, said corporations have “an extraordinarily important role” to play in the struggle over voting rights and there was “cause for hope”.“But it’s also practical for them,” Silver said. “They have to choose whether to side with an increasingly authoritarian [Republican party], or the majority of their workers and their consumers.“This is not just altruism.” More

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      Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance quits AppHarvest board after voting law tweets

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      The author of Appalachian memoir Hillbilly Elegy, author JD Vance, has resigned from the board of a company that uses green technology to mass-produce food in the region, days after sending some controversial tweets.Vance was an early investor in AppHarvest, a mega-greenhouse company that produced its first tomatoes this year at a 300-employee facility in Morehead, Kentucky, the Herald-Leader reported.An AppHarvest spokesman, Travis Parman, said “it would not be appropriate for me to discuss his motivation” for leaving the board.But Vance is also being floated in Ohio as a Republican candidate for the US Senate, and he has drawn criticism in recent days for his opposition to corporate leaders who have stood up against anti-voting rights legislation brought by GOP legislators in several states.Last weekend, more than 100 CEOs joined a call to discuss how to respond to recent proposals in state legislatures to restrict voting rights, most notably in Georgia. Vance said in a recent tweet states should “raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons”.One recent proposal from the CEOs was to pull back donations for politicians who support such legislation. Republicans have been the overwhelming backers of anti-voting rights legislation and would disproportionately benefit from them. GOP legislators have often cited falsehoods about election fraud pushed by former president Donald Trump as justification for the new restrictions.Vance’s most monied donors are well-known Trump supporters. A super Pac supporting Vance’s US Senate bid received a $10m donation from Peter Thiel, his former employer and, at one time, an enthusiastic Trump supporter. The donation is Thiel’s largest ever political gambit.Vance has also received donations from the hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer. The billionaire Trump supporter is perhaps best known for backing uber-conservative Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, a firm embroiled in a controversial data-mining operation to manipulate voter sentiment.Vance also praised the Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Twitter, calling him “the only powerful figure who consistently challenges elite dogma on both cultural and economic questions”.Carlson has been recently embroiled in a battle with the Anti-Defamation League, which accused Carlson of using his show to mount, “an impassioned defense of the white supremacist ‘great replacement theory’”. After the letter from the ADL, Carlson again argued on his show that Democrats were, “importing a brand new electorate” through immigration. More

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      Warren Buffett, Amazon, Starbucks and others condemn voting restrictions in letter

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      Amazon, BlackRock, Google, Starbucks, billionaire investor Warren Buffett and hundreds of other companies published a letter on Wednesday condemning “discriminatory legislation” designed to hinder voting rights in the US.The letter – the biggest statement yet from corporate America – follows weeks of heated debate over corporate opposition to a series of Republican-sponsored bills that critics charge will restrict voting rights in states across the US.“We Stand for Democracy,” the double-page, centrefold advertisement published in the New York Times and Washington Post, begins. “Voting is the lifeblood of our democracy and we call upon all Americans to take a nonpartisan stand for this basic and most fundamental right of all Americans,” the statement reads.The statement was organized by two of the US’s most prominent Black executives, Kenneth Chenault, former chief executive of American Express, and Kenneth Frazier, the chief executive of Merck. Both executives have been prominent in opposition to restrictive voting laws and in leading a response from the business community.The statement does not address specific election legislation in states but it is the clearest indication yet that US corporations are looking to present a united front despite calls from several senior Republicans, including the former president Donald Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, to stay out of politics.In an interview with the Times, Chenault said: “It should be clear that there is overwhelming support in corporate America for the principle of voting rights.” Frazier added that the statement was intended to be non-partisan.“These are not political issues,” he said. “These are the issues that we were taught in civics.”The effort to rise above partisan politics comes after several companies, including Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, found themselves at the center of a dispute over voting rights legislation passed in Georgia. Lawmakers in the state threatened to withdraw tax breaks after the companies spoke out against the measures and others, including Trump, called for boycotts.The new statement comes after Chenault and Frazier convened a Zoom call of 100 CEOs over the weekend and is notable also for several companies that did not add their names, including Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot and JP Morgan.Coca-Cola and Delta declined to comment, according to the Times, while Home Depot said in a statement on Tuesday that “the most appropriate approach for us to take is to continue to underscore our belief that all elections should be accessible, fair and secure.”The JPMorgan Chase chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made a statement on voting rights before many other companies, saying: “We believe voting must be accessible and equitable.”Some signatories, including Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, elected to sign personally rather than on behalf of their companies. Buffett has previously stated that businesses should not be involved in politics but he did not put his personal political views “in a blind trust at all when I took the job”.The statement follows a declaration on Tuesday by automakers ahead of voting legislation hearings in Michigan that they oppose election laws that would inhibit voting.In a separate statement, GM posted on Twitter: “We are calling on Michigan lawmakers and state legislatures across the nation to ensure that any changes to voting laws result in protecting and enhancing the most precious element of democracy.“Anything less falls short of our inclusion and social justice goals,” the company said. More

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      Fight to vote: why US democracy is at a tipping point – video

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      The new Georgia voting rights law makes it harder to vote, especially for communities that tend to vote for Democrats – and that’s what Republicans want. But it’s not just Georgia: these restrictive voting laws are being considered in nearly every state in America, from Arizona to Texas to Florida.
      These efforts come on the heels of the 2020 presidential election, which Republicans lost by slim margins in several states. Many Republicans claimed they lost because of voter fraud – because people who were ineligible to vote found a way to skirt the rules and cast ballots. Election officials around the nation said there was no widespread fraud, but Republicans are using this argument to push for a wide array of laws that will skew election in their favor.
      If enacted, Americans will have to ask a hard question: is the US still a democracy?
      Alvin Chang and Sam Levine explain this Republican effort to suppress voting rights as part of the Guardian’s Fight to Vote series 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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      ‘Putin-style democracy’: how Republicans gerrymander the map

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      Republicans believe they have a great chance to win control of the US House of Representatives in 2022, needing a swing of about six seats to depose Nancy Pelosi as speaker and derail Joe Biden’s agenda.To help themselves over the top, they are advancing voter suppression laws in almost every state, hoping to minimize Democratic turnout.But Republicans are also preparing another, arguably more powerful tool, which experts believe could let them take control of the House without winning a single vote beyond their 2020 tally, or for that matter blocking a single Democratic voter.That tool is redistricting – the redrawing of congressional boundaries, undertaken once every 10 years – and Republicans have unilateral control of it in a critical number of states.“Public sentiment in 2020 favored Democrats, and Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives,” said Samuel Wang, a professor of neuroscience and director of the Princeton gerrymandering project. “[But] because of reapportionment and redistricting, those factors would be enough to cause a change in control of the House even if public opinion were not to change at all.”While redistricting gives politicians in some states the opportunity to redraw political boundaries, reapportionment means there are more districts to play with. After each US census, each of the 50 states is awarded a share of the 435 House seats based on population. States gain or lose seats in the process.The threat of extreme gerrymandering is more acute today than it has ever beenOwing to population growth, Republican states including Texas, Florida and North Carolina are expected to gain seats before 2022, although the breakdown has not been finalized, with the 2020 census delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.Republican-controlled legislatures will have the power to wedge the new districts almost wherever they see fit, with a freedom they would not have enjoyed only 10 years ago, owing to a pair of controversial supreme court rulings.“The threat of extreme gerrymandering is more acute today than it has ever been because of the combination of an abandonment of oversight by the courts and the Department of Justice, combined with new supercomputing powers,” said Josh Silver, director of Represent.us. The non-partisan group issued a report this month warning that dozens of states “have an extreme or high threat of having their election districts rigged for the next decade”.“Frankly,” Silver said, “what we’re seeing around gerrymandering by the authoritarian wing of the Republican party is part of the Putin-style managed democracy they are promoting – that combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering.”Rules for who controls redistricting vary from state to state. The process can involve state legislatures acting alone, governors or independent commissions. Maps are meant to stand for 10 years, although they are subject to legal challenges that can result in their being thrown out.The new Republican gerrymandering efforts are expected to focus on urban areas in southern states that are home to a disproportionate number of voters of color – meaning those voters are more likely to be disenfranchised.In Texas, mapmakers could try to add districts to the growing population centers of Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth without increasing representation of the minority and Democratic voters who account for that growth. In Florida they might add Republican voters to a growing Democratic district north of Orlando. In North Carolina, where the Democratic governor is shut out of the process, Republican mapmakers might seek to add a district in the Democratic-leaning Research Triangle, in a way that elects more Republicans.Republicans could also seek to repay voters of colors in Atlanta who boosted Biden to victory and drove the defeat of two Republican senators in special elections in Georgia in January, by cracking and packing those voters into new districts.“Republicans could net pick up one seat by rearranging the lines around Black people and other Democrats in the Atlanta area,” Wang said.Racial gerrymandering – or using race as the central criterion for drawing district lines, as opposed to party identification or some other signifier – remains vulnerable to federal court challenges, unlike gerrymandering along partisan lines, which was declared “beyond the reach of the federal courts” by the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, in 2019.A separate decision by Roberts’s court, in Shelby County v Holder from 2013, is seen as adding to the likelihood of gerrymandering. The ruling released counties with acute histories of racial discrimination against voters from federal oversight imposed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That means that in 2021, some southern legislators will draw district boundaries without such oversight for the first time in 50 years.‘Much more national awareness’Potential legal challenges aside, the success of Republican mapmakers is not a given. Turnout in future elections – higher or lower – could foil expectations based on historic patterns. The partisan mix of voters in any district can change unpredictably. And stretching a map to wring out an extra seat could leave incumbents vulnerable.Public awareness of such anti-democratic efforts has grown, said Wang, since a 2010 Republican effort called Redmap harvested dozens of “extra” seats.“There’s much more national awareness of gerrymandering,” Wang said. “And citizen groups are now much more in the mix than they were 10 years ago.”Silver said the gerrymandering threat has redoubled the urgency of advancing voting rights legislation that passed the US House but has stalled in the Senate.“This is why we have to pass the For the People Act, which is federal legislation that with one pen stroke by the president would create independent commissions in all 50 states, end voter suppression and restore representative democracy in the United States,” he said.“We have to stop gerrymandering, or there will be no representative democracy in America, period – only preordained and symbolic election results.” 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