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      The US supreme court has dismantled our rights but we still believe in them. Now we must fight | Rebecca Solnit

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      The first thing to remember about the damage done by the US supreme court this June and the June before is that each majority decision overturns a right that we had won. We had won a measure of student debt relief thanks to the heroic efforts of debt activists since 2011. We had won reproductive rights protection 50 years ago with Roe v Wade, and we won wetlands protection with the Clean Water Act around the same time. We had implemented affirmative action, AKA a redress of centuries of institutionalized inequality, step by step, in many ways over the past 60-plus years. We had won rights for same-sex couples and queer people in a series of laws and decisions.What this means is that the right wing of the US supreme court is part of a gang of reactionaries engaging in backlash. It also means we can win these things back. It will not be easy, but difficult is not impossible. This does not mean that the decisions are not devastating, and that we should not feel the pain. The old saying “don’t mourn, organize” has always worked better for me as “mourn, but also organize”. Defeat is no reason to stop. Neither is victory a reason to stop when victory is partial or needs to be defended. You can celebrate victories, mourn defeats and keep going.Each of those victories was hard-won, often by people who began when the rights and protections they sought seemed inconceivable, then unlikely, then remote, and so goes the road of profound change almost every time. To win environmental protections, the public had to be awakened to the interconnectedness, the vulnerability and the value of a healthy natural world and our inseparability from it. To win marriage equality for same-sex couples and equal protection for queer people involved changing beliefs, which was achieved not just by campaigns but by countless LGBTQ+ people courageously making themselves visible and audible in their communities.To recognize the power of this change requires a historical memory. A memory of rivers catching fire and toxic products being dumped freely in the 1960s. Of laws and guidelines treating queer people as criminal or mentally ill or both in ways that terrorized them and made them largely invisible to the public eye. Of women dying of or damaged by illegal abortions or leading the bleak lives to which unwanted pregnancies consigned them. Of the way the Ivy League universities in particular were virtually all white and all male into the 1970s. Of how inequality was so normalized that first people had to see and believe that women and Bipoc people should have equal rights and access to and a role in the places of power that decide the fate of each of us, the nation and the world. All that changed – not enough, of course, but a lot.Memory is a superpower, because memory of how these situations changed is a memory of our victories and our power. Each of these victories happened both through the specifics of campaigns to change legislation but also through changing the public imagination. The supreme court can dismantle the legislation but they cannot touch the beliefs and values. We still believe in these rights. We still recognize the harm and the destruction they were meant to prevent. If you didn’t believe that equal access and rights were wrong yesterday or last year, you don’t have to believe it now. Not just because those rights were denied by six justices, at least four of whom are so utterly corrupt in how they got their seats or what they’ve done while seated that they should be forced to resign.Last year’s attack on reproductive rights has produced its own backlash, with many states working to protect those rights, many elections seemingly pivoting on voter outrage about the Republican party’s brutality toward and hatred of women, and Republicans scurrying away from their own achievement and its hideous impacts. If the Republican party deserves admiration for anything, it’s for their long view, understanding of strategy and tenacity.The building up of an illicit rightwing supreme court took many years, and took fundamentalist Christians holding their noses to vote for Donald Trump because they understood that meant getting the justices to overturn Roe v Wade. It meant building power from the ground up to take state legislatures to gerrymander electoral maps and sticking vicious clowns like Jim Jordan into bizarrely tailored districts. It meant chipping away at voting rights, achieved in part by the supreme court’s attack on the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and its 2010 Citizens United decision that let a filthy tsunami of corporate dark money into electoral politics, thereby overturning two of its own earlier decisions.While each of the issues under attack need their own campaigns, voting rights and free and fair elections are crucial to all of them. Don’t forget that the only reason we have such a conservative government, including the supreme court, is voter suppression. If we truly had equal access to the ballot, American voters would choose more progressive candidates and pass more progressive legislation. That’s why what the public wants, believes and values so often differs from what the politicians chosen by dark money and voter suppression give us.One of the striking features of recent years is the baldfaced Republican effort to prevent Black people in particular, but also young, poor and other non-white demographics from voting. Baldfaced because it acknowledges that they are unpopular and that they’ve given up the goal of being in power because they represent the majority. As they become more marginalized through their own extreme and unpopular views, they have to use more extreme means – now including trying to steal and overturn elections – to hold onto power.This is as true of climate action as anything else: a new Yale 360 poll shows that “57% of registered voters support a US president declaring global warming a national emergency if Congress does not take further action” and “74% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.” The problem isn’t the people. It’s the power, and history shows us that when we come together with ferocious commitment to a shared goal we can be more powerful than institutions and governments. The right would like us to feel defeated and powerless. We can feel devastated and still feel powerful or find our power. This is not a time to quit. It’s a time to fight.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses More

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      Georgia elections official downplays cybersecurity threats despite report

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      Georgia’s top election official is disregarding a recently released report that identifies serious vulnerabilities in Georgia’s computerized election system, instead siding with a conflicting report and claiming that scientific findings about cybersecurity threats are no more than conspiracy theories.The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, charged with overseeing elections, announced that despite the report’s findings, he will not update software to protect against the vulnerabilities before the 2024 presidential elections.The dueling reports were released by a federal court as part of a lawsuit. One, a 96-page report prepared by J Alex Halderman, and Drew Springall, computer science professors at the University of Michigan and Auburn University, respectively, is based on tests of the equipment used in the increasingly important swing state. The report, which had been sealed for two years by the court, found “vulnerabilities in nearly every part of the system that is exposed to potential attackers” which could allow votes to be changed, potentially affecting election outcomes in Georgia, according to a summary by Halderman.The other was prepared by Mitre, a research and development company, and paid for by Dominion Voting Systems, manufacturer of the state’s electronic voting system. Mitre did not have the same access to test Georgia’s voting equipment, and claimed the vulnerabilities are unlikely to be exploited on a wide scale.In justifying his decision not to update the state’s voting system, Raffensperger pointed to the Mitre report, which says the potential attacks Halderman identifies are “operationally infeasible”.Halderman called Raffensperger’s decision not to address the system’s vulnerabilities “irresponsible and wrong”. Raffensperger has made several statements in recent weeks calling the computer scientists’ conclusions “theoretical and imaginary”, and conflating their warnings with “Stop the Steal” efforts post-2020 – leading Halderman to label the state’s officials as “vulnerability deniers”. Computer scientists from many of the US’s leading universities signed a letter decrying the standoff, and urging Mitre to retract its report.The scenario lands Georgia in a situation where top computer scientists and Trump-aligned election deniers appear to be sharing the same or similar concerns, even while one relies on groundbreaking research, while the other has been discredited by courts and election officials alike.US district judge Amy Totenberg had sealed the Halderman report since 2021 because of cybersecurity concerns, as part of a lawsuit that started before the most recent presidential election and rise of election deniers. But an agreement was reached earlier this month to release a redacted version, together with the Mitre report.Halderman, who has researched digital elections equipment for decades, said court-ordered access to Georgia’s election equipment, manufactured by Dominion, allowed them to do “the first study in more than 10 years to comprehensively and independently assess the security of a widely deployed US voting machine, as well as the first-ever comprehensive security review of a widely deployed ballot marking device”.“The most critical problem we found,” Halderman wrote, is a “vulnerability that can be exploited to spread malware from a county’s central election management system to every ballot-marking device in the jurisdiction. This makes it possible to attack the ballot-marking devices at scale, over a wide area, without needing physical access to any of them.”Mitre’s countering report not only lacks any testing of voting machines, it also relies on a key premise, stated in a footnote on the first page: that no one besides election workers have access to the state’s voting hardware and software.But records obtained by the Coalition for Good Governance – the group behind the ongoing lawsuit against Georgia’s election system – show that people associated with the effort to deny the 2020 election results visited rural Coffee county’s election department in early 2021, and the Trump attorney Sidney Powell was able to copy Dominion software and other data. These records, including surveillance video, were reported by the Washington Post and are now under investigation by the Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI).The Coffee county security breach and other issues led a group of 29 computer scientists from MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Georgia Tech and other US universities to write a letter last week urging Mitre to retract its report, calling the company’s conclusions a “dangerously misleading analysis”.“Mitre embarrassed themselves,” Richard DeMillo, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech and one of the letter’s signers, told the Guardian. The report is “based on representations from the secretary of state about physical security, when right before our eyes, we can see video of people marching into Coffee county’s election department”.Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Raffensperger, pointed to the GBI investigation when asked about the Coffee county incident and whether people other than election workers can access voting equipment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHassinger also said that the “vulnerabilities identified in a lab are not real vulnerabilities, and do not pose risks” to the state’s election system. But DeMillo, who has worked in cybersecurity at Hewlett-Packard and the US Department of Defense, said: “If Alex Halderman can discover the system’s vulnerabilities, then nation states like North Korea and Russia can as well.”DeMillo has testified as part of the lawsuit, now in its sixth year. In 2019, the Coalition for Good Governance’s efforts led Judge Totenberg to order the state to scrap its previous statewide computer election system, made by Diebold Election Systems, due to vulnerabilities – a first in election integrity court cases. Diebold no longer makes voting machines, and coalition plaintiffs have continued their efforts to force the state to use paper ballots filled out by hand for voting instead of touchscreens, as is done by nearly 70% of voters across the US, with computers available for people with disabilities.“Ballots filled out by pencil and paper are non-hackable,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the coalition. Georgia’s current system prints out a ballot after voters use touchscreens, and the ballot has a barcode that scanners read to record each voter’s choices.In the months leading up to Georgia’s 2019 decision to change its election system to Dominion’s machines, a committee formed to advise the state on the decision ignored the recommendations of its lone computer scientist, Georgia Tech’s Wenke Lee, who urged the state to move to paper ballots marked by hand.But the state ignored the recommendations and purchased machines from Dominion, another digital system, instead. “You can see that pattern of negligent, vulnerability denialism – of not facing facts,” Halderman said.In a statement released on 20 June, Raffensperger said that “critics of Georgia’s election security” are probably either “election-denying conspiracy theorists or litigants in the long-running … lawsuit. These two groups make ever-shifting but always baseless assertions that Georgia’s election system is at risk because bad actors might hack the system and change the result of an election.”The statement conflates conspiracists like Cyber Ninjas – the now-defunct company that performed discredited “audits” in Arizona after the 2020 presidential election – with cybersecurity experts who have decades of research to their names at leading universities. Asked about the researchers’ claims, Hassinger dismissed the line of inquiry as an “appeal to authority fallacy” and said in an email that “election denialism comes in many forms”, again conflating researchers with conspiracists.Halderman told the Guardian he found Raffensperger’s 20 June statement “offensive”.“Can they actually not tell the difference?” he asked. “Are they so incompetent? Scientists can’t sit quietly while a state like Georgia continues to ignore these issues.” More

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      White House condemns McCarthy for impeachment threats against Merrick Garland – as it happened

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      From 5h agoAs he looks to promote his economic record and turn around negative public approval ratings, Joe Biden announced his administration would work to get all Americans access to low-cost high-speed internet by 2030.“We’re announcing over $40bn to be distributed to 50 states, Washington DC and territories to deliver high speed in places where there’s neither service or it’s too slow,” the president said.“Along with other federal investments, we’re going to be able to connect every person in America to reliable high-speed internet by 2030.”He compared his administration’s push to the rural electrification campaign of Democratic icon Franklin Delano Rosevelt in the 1930s.“Today, Kamala and I are making an equally historic investment to connect everyone in America, everyone in America to … affordable high speed internet by 2030. It’s the biggest investment in high-speed internet ever, because for today’s economy to work for everyone, internet access is just as important as electricity or water, or other basic services.”Joe Biden eased into his re-election campaign with the announcement of a nationwide push to expand high-speed internet, and plans for a speech on “Bidenomics” set for Wednesday. The president’s idea is to campaign for another four years in the White House not with promises of new policies, but rather with a reiteration of the proposals that got him elected in the first place. Meanwhile, Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy signaled an openness to impeaching the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, if the US attorney involved in prosecuting Hunter Biden doesn’t speak to the judiciary committee. The House is on recess for the next two weeks or so, but we’ll keep an eye on if that goes anywhere.Here’s what else happened today:
      A White House spokesman condemned McCarthy for threatening to impeach Garland.
      The supreme court ordered Louisiana to draw a new majority-Black congressional district as the fallout from a recent decision concerning the Voting Rights Act continues.
      A top Democratic senator thinks the supreme court’s conservatives know they’ve gone too far.
      The Biden administration plans yet another aid package for Ukraine, while the president said the US had “nothing to do” with the attempted mutiny in Russia over the past weekend.
      There is yet another balloon over Montana, but it’s not suspicious, Norad says.
      The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s trial in Florida on charges of conspiring to store classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, denied a request from the justice department to keep its witness list secret:The justice department can appeal the decision. The decision is one of several expected in the pretrial motions before the start of the proceedings, which are currently scheduled for the middle of August but likely to change.Appointed to the federal bench by Trump, Cannon faced criticism for decisions made in the case prior to his indictment that some analysts saw as partial to the former president.White House spokesman Ian Sams has released a statement criticizing Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy for threatening to impeach the US attorney general, Merrick Garland.Here’s what Sams had to say:
      Speaker McCarthy and the extreme House Republicans are proving they have no positive agenda to actually help the American people on the issues most important to them and their families. The President and his entire Administration are spending this whole week traveling the country to talk about the important economic progress we have made over the last two years – creating more than 13 million jobs as we’ve sparked the strongest recovery of any country in the world – and laying out the Biden plan to put the middle class ahead of those at the very top. Perhaps Congressional Republicans are desperate to distract from their own plan to give even more tax cuts to the wealthy and big corporations and add more than $3 trillion to the deficit, but instead of pushing more partisan stunts intended only to get themselves attention on the far right, they should work with the President to actually put the middle class and working Americans first and expand the historic progress to lower costs, create jobs, boost U.S. manufacturing and small businesses, and make prescription drugs more affordable.
      There is, once again, a balloon flying over Montana – but it’s not a spy balloon, Norad assures us.The US-Canadian air defense force, whose name is an acronym for North American Aerospace Defense Command, says it is aware of the balloon, but does not regard it as suspicious:There is, of course, a political angle to this. Matt Rosendale, a Republican senator from Montana, earlier today attempted to use the balloon’s presence to attack the Biden administration:Joe Biden’s approval rating has seen a slight uptick in recent weeks, but is still pretty bad, Gallup reports.In a survey conducted on 1-22 June, Gallup reports the president’s approval is at 43%, up from the 37% low that his presidency hit in April. That’s not a particularly high rating at all, and the survey also found 54% of American adult respondents disapproved of his job performance.The last time Biden’s approval was above 50% was in July 2021 – before the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Delta wave of Covid-19 that led many Americans to again don masks and avoid large gatherings. Another factor that pushed Biden’s approval lower and kept it there was the wave of inflation that intensified throughout 2021 and 2022, forcing Americans to pay higher prices for essentials like gasoline and food.According to NBC News, “five or six” US Secret Service agents have now testified before the January 6 grand jury.NBC cited two unnamed sources “familiar with testimony”.The special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 is a source of further legal jeopardy for Donald Trump.Twice indicted already, the former president and current Republican frontrunner is widely believed likely to face further indictment by Smith, who has already handed down charges over Trump’s handling of classified information.NBC said: “While the exact content of their subpoenas and appearances is not known, Secret Service agents who were close to Trump on January 6 may be able to confirm, deny or provide more details on a story first told by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to the … January 6 committee in Congress.“One year ago, Hutchinson told the committee she heard secondhand that Trump wanted Secret Service agents to drive him to the Capitol to join the rioters, tried to grab the car’s steering wheel and then reached for the ‘clavicles’ of the driver, Secret Service agent Bobby Engel. Trump later denied this account.”NBC also notes that agents may have been asked about what the agency knew and discussed leading up to and during the January 6 attack, in which Trump supporters sought to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election win.NBC said the agents who have testified could “inform the grand jury about the extent to which Trump knew about the potential for violence on January 6 and how he responded to threats made against then-Vice President Mike Pence”.Pence is now a competitor for the Republican presidential nomination.Joe Biden was asked earlier, by the Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, if he had ever lied about ever speaking to his son, Hunter Biden, about his business dealings (the subject of Republican attacks passim, and current musings about impeaching the attorney general, Merrick Garland).The president said: “No.”Video is here.Joe Biden has marked the concurrent anniversaries of three supreme court rulings which affirmed the right to same-sex marriage – a right some observers think will soon come under threat from a conservative-dominated court which removed the right to abortion.The president said: “Ten years ago today, the supreme court rulings in United States v Windsor and Hollingsworth v Perry made significant strides laying the groundwork for marriage equality in our country. They were followed two years later, to the day, by the ruling in Obergefell v Hodges, finally allowing millions of LGBTQ+ Americans to marry who they love.“These monumental cases moved our country forward, and they were made possible because of the courageous couples and unrelenting advocates in the LGBTQ+ community who, for decades, fought for these hard-won rights.“Last year, I was proud to build on their legacy by signing into law the Respect for Marriage Act … surrounded by many of the plaintiffs from these cases. But more work lies ahead, and I continue to call on Congress to pass the Equality Act, to codify additional protections to combat the increased attacks on the rights and safety of those in the LGBTQ+ community.”Further reading:Fox News announced earlier that Jesse Watters will move into the 8pm prime-time weeknight slot formerly filled by Tucker Carlson.Announcing the full shake-up, Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News, said: “The unique perspectives of Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld will ensure our viewers have access to unrivaled coverage from our best-in-class team for years to come.”Here’s some (possibly) unrivaled coverage of Watters’ many unique perspectives over the years, from the progressive watchdog Media Matters for America.It’s a long list, so I’ll just link to it here while listing the subheadings provided:In his own statement, the Media Matters president, Angelo Carusone, explained his group’s view of Watters:“After Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, [Fox Corp co-chair] Lachlan Murdoch said there would be ‘no change’ in the network’s programming strategy. Today, Fox is making good on that promise.“Crowning odious Jesse Watters as the new face of Fox News is a reflection of Fox’s dogged commitment to bigotry and deceit as well as an indication of their desperation to regain audience share. It won’t work, though. Fox’s audience abandoned the network post-Tucker, and those viewers never returned. Jesse Watters’ buffoonish segments of bigotry and culture war vitriol won’t fix that problem for Fox; he’s a liability and a ticking time bomb.“Dominion exposed Fox News for the partisan propaganda operation that it is. Instead of trying to adjust and attempt to establish a beachhead of credibility, the network is going back out to sea by leaning in on their most toxic personalities – like Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters. The network is transparently appealing to the fringes here.“Advertisers and cable providers beware: things at Fox News are about to get a whole lot worse.”Here’s some more reading on Fox News post-Tucker, with contributions from Brian Stelter, a seasoned Fox-watcher formerly of CNN:Joe Biden is easing into his re-election campaign with the announcement of a nationwide push to expand high-speed internet, and plans for a speech on “Bidenomics” set for Wednesday. The idea is to campaign for another four years in the White House not with new promises, but rather with a reiteration of the proposals that got him elected in the first place. Meanwhile, Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy signaled an openness to impeaching attorney general Merrick Garland if the US attorney involved in prosecuting Hunter Biden doesn’t speak to the judiciary committee. The House is on recess for the next two weeks or so, but we’ll keep an eye on if that goes anywhere.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      The supreme court ordered Louisiana to draw a new majority-Black congressional district as the fallout from a recent decision concerning the Voting Rights Act continues.
      A top Democratic senator thinks the supreme court’s conservatives know they’ve gone too far.
      The Biden administration plans yet another aid package for Ukraine.
      Joe Biden’s push for more affordable high-speed internet access comes as he plans to announce a major theme for his re-election campaign on Wednesday.The president is scheduled to travel to Chicago and speak about the employment and wage gains Americans have seen since he took office, which the White House is calling “Bidenomics”.According to Axios, Biden plans to focus his re-election campaign on the same promises he made when running for his first term in office, rather than announcing a new slate of policies. But the approach is risky, particularly since surveys indicate two-thirds of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track.As he looks to promote his economic record and turn around negative public approval ratings, Joe Biden announced his administration would work to get all Americans access to low-cost high-speed internet by 2030.“We’re announcing over $40bn to be distributed to 50 states, Washington DC and territories to deliver high speed in places where there’s neither service or it’s too slow,” the president said.“Along with other federal investments, we’re going to be able to connect every person in America to reliable high-speed internet by 2030.”He compared his administration’s push to the rural electrification campaign of Democratic icon Franklin Delano Rosevelt in the 1930s.“Today, Kamala and I are making an equally historic investment to connect everyone in America, everyone in America to … affordable high speed internet by 2030. It’s the biggest investment in high-speed internet ever, because for today’s economy to work for everyone, internet access is just as important as electricity or water, or other basic services.”The United States was not involved in the weekend mutiny by Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin against Russian president Vladimir Putin.“We made clear that we were not involved. We had nothing to do with it,” Biden said at the White House event on high-speed internet. “This was part of a struggle within the Russian system.”“We’re going to keep assessing the fallout of this weekend’s events and the implications for Russia and Ukraine. But it’s still too early to reach a definitive conclusion about where this is going.”The president added that, “We’re going to keep assessing the fallout of this weekend’s events and the implications for Russia and Ukraine. But it’s still too early to reach a definitive conclusion about where this is going.”Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are kicking off a speech where they’ll unveil tens of billions of dollars in investments to improve high-speed internet access across the United States.The Washington Post reports that the Biden administration will spend $42 bn to expand access to the internet, using funds made available by the infrastructure overhaul Congress approved two years ago:Follow along here for the latest on the speech. More

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      ‘Conservative justices? Yeah, in what way?’ Key senator on a supreme court in thrall to special interests

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      The conservative-dominated US supreme court may be undergoing a “course correction” after witnessing a public backlash to its extremist rulings and ethics scandals, Sheldon Whitehouse, chairman of the Senate judiciary subcommittee on the federal courts, has told the Guardian.America’s highest court has made a series of radical decisions, including in the Dobbs case that overturned the constitutional right to abortion one year ago on Saturday, while two rightwing justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have been exposed for failing disclose luxury gifts from billionaires.But with trust in the court collapsing, it has this month defended the Voting Rights Act by ruling in favor of Black voters in Alabama and preserved a law that aims to keep Native American children with tribal families. Both were unexpected victories for Democrats – and a sign that they might finally be awakening to public opinion.“Frankly, I think the recent Alabama decision would have gone the other way had it not been for the blowback on Dobbs,” Senator Whitehouse said in an interview. “The challenge that they’re not ‘conservative’ – they’re captured – and the preposterous behavior of Thomas. That was a pretty heavy course correction. Some of them said, ‘Oh, damn, looks like we’re going have to act like judges for a while. Till this blows over!’”Whitehouse found it strange that the Alabama voters decision rested so heavily on precedent – something that the current justices, three of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump, have often been content to ignore.He says: “Where was all that when you were throwing out Dobbs? They have not let precedent get in their way when they’ve wanted the result for quite a while and to have it pop up so flagrantly in the middle of the Alabama case? You guys, that’s funny.”The senator believes that the court’s new sensitivity to public opinion could extend to the upcoming case Moore v Harper, another gerrymandering case in which Republican legislators in North Carolina are asking the court to grant them unfettered power to set rules for voting and elections – a dangerous notion in the era of Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election.“I’ve always thought that was probably a throwaway case for them. If you look at the people who are pitching the case to them, so many of them are under investigation, under indictment, in disbarment proceedings. It’s the whole creepy ‘big lie’ apparatus that came in with that and I’m not sure the court wants to take a look at that crowd and say, yeah, we’re going with them to develop a completely wacky new argument that nobody’s ever accepted as being anything but a fever dream before. That’s just a bad combo.”Whitehouse, 67, has been a senator for Rhode Island, America’s smallest state, since 2007 and is currently chairman of the Senate budget committee. He has spent years delivering speeches on the Senate floor in two series: “Time to Wake Up”, about the climate crisis, and “The Scheme”, about a decades-long plot to remake the supreme court in service to shadowy billionaires and big special interests.One of his “The Scheme” speeches came to the attention of Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC host and former congressional aide, who suggested that the subject would make good podcast material. Whitehouse discovered that the Senate’s own studio could produce it. The first episode of Making the Case offers an accessible history lesson with Congressman Hank Johnson, Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick and Lisa Graves of True North Research.Whitehouse reflects on the new venture while sitting in an airy Capitol Hill office surrounded by photographs of himself with Democratic presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. There are also pictures of Bruce Sundlun, a former governor of Rhode Island and mentor, and President Franklin Roosevelt – with a hand-signed note to Whitehouse’s grandfather, also named Sheldon Whitehouse, who served as a foreign service officer.The senator is speaking just hours before the ProPublica website published an article raising questions about Alito’s failure to report taking a private jet to Alaska for a luxury fishing trip in 2008, provided by a billionaire hedge fund manager whose business interests have come before the court. Whitehouse will tweet in response: “This just keeps getting worse.”ProPublica previously reported that Thomas accepted decades of undisclosed trips from a longtime friend, the Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow, that included stays at Crow’s private resort, flights on his jet, and a vacation onboard Crow’s yacht in Indonesia. Crow also purchased property from Thomas and paid private school tuition for a Thomas great-nephew.Opinion polls show that such revelations have shaken public faith in the court as never before. A Quinnipiac poll published this week found that it has a 30% approval rating among registered voters – the lowest since Quinnipiac first asked the question in 2004. This mood has created an appetite for speeches, podcasts and journalistic investigations to lift the curtain on an institution that once seemed above the political fray and beyond reproach.Whitehouse, who wrote about Thomas’s relationship with Crow in a book about dark money and the supreme court, tells the Guardian: “A couple of things are happening and they interact with each other. One is that people are just grossed out by the Harlan Crow/Clarence Thomas revelations.“I checked: in Rhode Island, if you’re a municipal employee, you can have three lunches not exceeding $25 and they have to be reported, and here’s this guy who’s supposedly a judge going on quarter-million-dollar free vacations and not reporting it.”He added: “Then people are beginning to realise that this is not a conservative court. This is a special interests-captured court. But we don’t have a very ready narrative in American society for explaining the difference and we still get people who cover the court and know a fair amount about it saying the ‘conservative’ justices. Yeah, in what way?”In 2022 the court upended precedents at an astonishing clip, curtailing or revoking rights such as abortion and due process while expanding religious rights and rights to carry guns. It twice delivered blows to the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to combat pollution.Whitehouse believes that the term conservative has been “obsolete” since dark money began funding groups such as Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society to handpick justices for the court. “There’s nothing about the way they’re behaving as judges that meets any definition of small ‘c’ conservative.”He continues: “Little by little, the facts of the decisions they’ve been up to are beginning to break through with something more than just them being ‘conservative’. There’s this overlay of who’s in charge behind the scenes. Of course that pops up everywhere, in the amicus briefs, in the dark money behind their confirmations. You can’t make it stop. Harlan Crow intersects with it. And then Dobbs was a clang the gong moment where everybody realised, oh, this is a little not normal.”One fix might lie with Congress. Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, has announced plans to take up supreme court ethics legislation. But in April the chief justice, John Roberts, turned down an invitation from Durbin to testify, citing the “exceedingly rare” nature of such an appearance.Whitehouse comments: “I can understand that he had horrible questions he’d have to answer and, for that reason, he didn’t want to. I very much disagree that his separation of powers argument holds any water at all. That’s pure window dressing for, ‘I just don’t want to come over and have to explain what he did’ – thinking of Thomas. I have some human sympathy for him not wanting to come over and answer questions for his wayward colleague but he was very slippery about the way he did it,” he said.Whitehouse wants Roberts to demonstrate that he is taking the ethics issue seriously and believes he might be pushed to do so by the judicial conference, the policymaking body of the federal courts that has a code of conduct followed by lower court judges. At an awards ceremony last month, Roberts acknowledged that “we are continuing to look at things we can do” to adhere to the highest standards of conduct.But no action by the current court has been as tangible or devastating for millions of people as Dobbs, which resulted in the decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that had in effect legalised abortion nationwide. Alito’s majority opinion stated that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions”. The procedure is now almost completely banned in 14 states.Whitehouse naturally has a podcast episode marking the first anniversary. He reflects: “If you really are going to throw out a decision that stood for so long and matters so much to so many people, you expect that they try to keep within existing law. Instead, they make up a whole new analysis that allows them to get where they want to get – the whole ‘history and tradition’ shtick that they pulled together,” he said.The ruling was a prime example of the court being out of step with public opinion. Republicans paid the price in last year’s midterm elections. Now candidates for president in 2024 are tiptoeing around the issue, with Trump refusing to commit to a national abortion limit and rival Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, facing scrutiny over a six-week ban in his home state.Whitehouse comments: “There’s a huge liability that they’ve opened up for themselves in a party that has hung with the extremists.”The Dobbs decision galvanised activists to demand Thomas’s resignation, push for reforms such as expanding the number of justices and make the case to voters that the supreme court is a defining issue at the ballot box, not merely a nice-to-have.“A lot of the advocacy groups that work in this space – whether it’s environmental groups, civil rights groups, labour groups – have awakened to the nature of the problem at the supreme court and are now taking it on in a whole different way, looking at the dark money, looking at the capture, looking at the mischievous and mysterious briefing just prepared.“Looking at that whole scenario and realising, wow, we got outplayed for about 20 years now and we’re going to have to figure out how to fight back. This can’t be issue 15 for us any longer. This has to be right at the top across a whole array of advocacy areas.” More

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      The Movement Made Us: true story of family and the civil rights struggle

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      In the crowded field of books about social activism, truth is the element that distinguishes good from great. In his first book, David Dennis Jr has mastered the process.The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and a Legacy of a Freedom Ride is written with his father, David Dennis Sr, a hero of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The book opens with raw truth and maintains that standard, never using ambiguity as a shield against accountability.Dennis Sr never intended to be involved in the movement. In fact, the life he dreamed of when he went to Dillard University in New Orleans had nothing to do with activism at all. He wanted to be an engineer.When he started attending meetings of the Congress of Racial Equality (Core, which he would direct in Mississippi), he did so not out of bravery, nor driven by a desire to fight for a better world for Black people. Nor was he driven by a refusal to stand idle against white nationalism. At first, he was driven by motives familiar to any freshman who finds himself the first in his family to attend college. He wanted to meet attractive girls, keep his head down, finish school and get a job.Whether you consider that selfish, or self-preservation, it is unmistakably human. The Movement Made Us never shies away from the humanity of our civil rights heroes and heroines and the truth about a country that forced even the least prepared “soldiers” to fight a war that still hasn’t ended.In a chapter entitled God and Fear, Dennis Sr and Jr invite readers to experience the tension in the room as figures including John Lewis, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Andrew Young, CT Vivian, Wyatt Tee Walker and the director of Core, James Farmer, discuss whether a freedom ride – an organized incursion into the south, by public transport and in support of voting rights – should be cancelled because of extreme threats and the promise of jail on arrival.King objects. Questions arise about whether he is too important to the movement to ride. “He ain’t special,” one attendee shouts. King’s commitment was never in question but something far worse was being projected to other leaders: his assumed “superiority”. Dennis Sr and Jr draw readers into such tensions, allowing them to sit with the fear, anger and authenticity of the moment.Describing pivotal historic moments, the authors use truth as their compass, unafraid of where it may lead. No subject is above examination. The truth of our country is far more brutal than many Americans want to believe.Americans often see their history through rose-colored glasses. The Movement Made Us holds history to the sun, willing to let the rays burn. In a chapter entitled A Weekend in Jackson, the young activist Joan Johnson is questioned by the police who want to know about the “leaders” of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.“Lil’ [n-word] you in the NAACP,” the cop spat.“Yes,” she declared.Her words met with a beating. She fell to the floor, tried to protect her head. The police kicked her and demanded to know “who runs the NAACP?”“The people.”Each time she was asked the same question, Johnson gave the same answer. She was beaten unconscious, left in a pool of her own blood. The authors reveal that she was 16 years old at the time. The rawness of the image leaves no room to pretend that such domestic terrorism precluded the torture of women and children.America and the police force it protects and serves are not alone in being held to the light. The authentic life of David Dennis Sr, college student turned civil rights veteran, is examined closely too.After his close friend Medgar Evers was shot dead on his own front lawn, Dennis Sr nearly succumbed to survivor’s guilt and grief. The trauma and turmoil he describes will pose questions in the mind of the reader. Questions like, “What becomes of those who survive when their fellow soldiers are murdered with impunity? Where do their bodies and minds store the pain from the emotional and physical violence inflicted? What happens to marriages and families when one spouse promises for ever but can barely imagine a world beyond tomorrow?”This book addresses these questions with truth. Father and son wrestle with their answers. There are no clear winners. Noting how the family became an unwilling casualty in the war, Dennis Jr shares what it was like to be the son of a civil rights legend who barely escaped his own share of assassination attempts:
      The white men who fired shots at your back may have missed you but they hit our lineage. They left bullet holes in the foundation upon which your future families are built.”
      The Movement Made Us is not for those unprepared for veracity. Readers will experience a father sometimes reluctant to revisit the past and a son navigating his identity as a griot, recording history while protecting the father he loves.At its core, The Movement Made Us is about legacy, leadership, healing and accountability. It is more than a story about a father and his son. It is more than a story about the civil rights movement. It is a master class on allowing truth to anchor you and finding the balance between accountability and honoring. This is a lesson that should be replicated in America as a whole.Dennis Jr states: “This is the part where we break and tear the things that have been fixed in place.” His words are directed towards his father, but for a country in need of real healing, it is an evergreen declaration.
      The Movement Made Us is published in the US by Harper More

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      Alarm after lawyer who aided Trump’s 2020 election lie attacks campus voting

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      Rightwing election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a key ally of Donald Trump as he pushed bogus claims of fraud to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 win, is facing intense fire from voting watchdogs and bipartisan criticism for urging curbs on college student voting, same day voter registration and absentee voting.The scrutiny of Mitchell, who runs the Election Integrity Network at the pro-Trump Conservative Partnership Institute to which a Trump Pac donated $1m dollars, was sparked by recent comments Mitchell made to Republican donors, and a watchdog report criticizing her advisory role with a federal election panel.Long known for advocating stricter voting rules that are often premised on unsupported allegations of sizable voting fraud, Mitchell last month promoted new voting curbs on students in a talk to a group of wealthy donors to the Republican National Committee, efforts that critics call partisan and undemocratic.Mitchell’s private RNC address to rich donors zeroed in on curbing college campus voting rules, automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters and same-day voter registration, as the Washington Post first reported.The talk by Mitchell, who has done legal work for Republican committees, members of Congress and conservative groups such as the National Rifle Association, focused on college campuses in key swing states including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin, all of which have large college campuses.In an audio of her remarks obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor, Mitchell slammed college voting procedures.“What are these college campus locations? What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”Further in one part of her presentation cited by the Post, Mitchell charged blithely that “the Left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side … theirs. Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake.”It’s unclear if the RNC will back the latest proposals made by Mitchell, who the committee has worked with previously. But an RNC spokesperson offered effusive praise of Mitchell to the Post, saying: “As the RNC continues to strengthen our Election Integrity program, we are thankful for leaders like Cleta Mitchell who do important work for the Republican ecosystem.”But voting rights watchdogs voice alarm at Mitchell’s proposals to the RNC donor crowd.“Mitchell’s comments behind closed doors give up the game,” said Danielle Lang, the lead voting rights litigator with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “The current wave of additional voter restrictions is about only one thing: punishing disfavored populations of voters.”Lang added: “Sadly, we should not be surprised that Mitchell, who was central to attempts to overturn the will of the people in 2020, speaks so blithely about attacking voters she dislikes.”Similarly, Republicans and Democrats alike deplore Mitchell’s comments to the RNC contributors.“It’s absurd for Cleta Mitchell or others to suggest our path to victory is by making it harder for young people to vote,” said ex-Republican congressman Charlie Dent. “Republicans should not fear how people vote. Good candidates with good messages should resonate with voters.”Key Democrats agree.“Mitchell seems to have a very difficult time separating her partisan agenda from the responsibility we all have to uphold a basic democratic respect for the right to vote,” Democrat House member Jamie Raskin told the Guardian.Mitchell didn’t respond to a Guardian request for comment about her RNC remarks.Besides the firestorm over Mitchell’s RNC remarks, she is facing more heat related to other recent efforts she has made to restrict voting rights.Mitchell has served for over a year on a bipartisan advisory board for the federal Election Assistance Commission, a post that she’s used to promote curbs on mail in voting, voter registration and student voting, according to an April report from the watchdog group American Oversight.American Oversight’s study, which came after it obtained Mitchell emails from 2020- 2022 using the Freedom of information Act, included some exchanges where Mitchell suggested legal challenges to absentee voting rules and attacked a voting rights group while serving on the EAC advisory board.“Cleta Mitchell played a central role in former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” said American Oversight executive director Heather Sawyer “So it isn’t surprising that she has used her role as an advisor to the Election Assistance Commission to push an explicitly anti-voting agenda.”“She has disparaged voting rights organizations, called for challenging absentee voting procedures, and is urging new rules that would make voting harder for students and working people. Mitchell’s partisan and ideological commitment to restricting ballot access has no place at an agency tasked with helping states administer free and fair elections.”The fears over Mitchell’s blunt advocacy for curbing student and other voting rights, comes after her role advising Trump as he tried to overturn Biden’s win in 2020 has received legal scrutiny in Georgia. It also comes amid criticism of aggressive poll watching drives she pushed for in 2022 through her Election Integrity Network.Mitchell was subpoenaed last year, along with several other key Trump lawyers and allies including Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, by a special grand jury in Georgia in a wide ranging criminal probe by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis into efforts by Trump and his allies to thwart Biden’s win in the state.A major focus of that inquiry is Trump’s hour-long conference call on 2 January 2021, which Mitchell participated in, pressuring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to just “find” him 11,780 votes to block Biden’s win there.Trump falsely claimed that “we won by hundreds of thousands of votes” and vaguely warned Raffensperger of a “criminal offense” to which the Georgia official replied “the data you have is wrong”.The Fulton county inquiry is widely expected to lead to several indictments including quite possibly Trump, and Willis has said she will make final decisions about who will be charged this summer.Just days after the 2021 call with Raffensperger, Mitchell abruptly left her long time law firm Foley & Lardner, and soon joined the Conservative Partnership Institute as senior legal fellow, where she has led its self styled Election Integrity Network and advocated for curb voting rights.CPI has flourished financially since Mitchell and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, CPI’s senior partner, joined in early 2021.CPI’s tax filings for 2021 showed grants and contributions of $45m up from $7.1m the prior year.In other conservative circles, Mitchell wields considerable influence as a board member of the right wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and as chair of the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s board.Now though, Mitchell’s latest attacks on student voting rules are viewed by watchdog groups and some members of Congress as badly misguided, and emblematic of her partisan agenda.“We should applaud, not bemoan, equitable access to voting for students.Our young people will inherit our democracy but participate at some of the lowest rates,” Lang of the Campaign Legal Center said. “While that is improving, young people still face disproportionate burdens in voter registration and voter access.”In a similar vein, Raskin said: “Mitchell’s attacks on college student voting are directly reflective of the GOP’s increasing electoral losses among young people.”Mitchell and Republicans, he added, ought to focus on policies and candidates that “actually appeal to young voters, rather than a legislative program to stop them from voting.”. More

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      Far-right California county’s bid to hand count votes will cost millions

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      In Shasta county, a deep red enclave in far northern California, officials are intensifying their push to replace voting machines with a costly and experimental hand-count system that could cost an additional $4m over two years.The decision of the far-right majority on the region’s governing body, the Shasta county board of supervisors, to press ahead with the controversial plan comes as half the county’s workforce is preparing to strike over wages. Officials on the board recently said the county did not have enough money to pay requested wage increases for workers.The move has deepened divisions in a small county where public spending budgets are tight, with critics denouncing the price tag of an overhaul based on lies about election fraud.In a tense meeting that saw one county supervisor served with recall paperwork, the board’s ultra conservative majority renewed their support for a system that will cost three times more than the voting machines the county previously used.“We’re going to have free and fair elections in Shasta county,” said Patrick Jones, the chair of the board of supervisors, at a meeting on Tuesday. “Apparently money seems to be more important than making sure our elections are fair.”The board of supervisors has pushed the rural county of 180,000 people into the national spotlight with its decision this year to upend the county’s voting system without a replacement, and attempt to create a new system from scratch.Conspiracy theorists who believe that voting machines helped to steal the presidency from Donald Trump have seized on the county with high-profile figures in the movement, such as the MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, offering their support.Some in Shasta, which has became a hotbed for far-right politics in the pandemic years, have cheered the board’s decision.Since Trump’s loss, a group of residents had spoken regularly at county meetings, urging the board to cut ties with Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud. They argued that the machines were a threat to elections both nationally and locally.Their vision became a reality shortly after an ultra-conservative majority took hold of the board of supervisors and, against the advice of colleagues and elections staff, decided in a 3-2 vote to cut ties with Dominion and pursue a hand tally.“We have disenfranchised roughly 110,000 voters and that is truly the epitome of denying our residents their first amendment right and they should be outraged,” said supervisor Mary Rickert, who voted against the decision.Meetings on the matter have drawn large crowds, including election deniers and dozens of residents who begged the county not to do away with Dominion machines, pointing out that the supervisors themselves had been elected by voters using the technology.The official who oversees voting had warned against a hand-count system, arguing that it is “exceptionally complex and error prone” and could cause the county to miss state elections deadlines, and ultimately disenfranchise voters.Cathy Darling Allen, Shasta’s registrar of voters, told officials in March the new system would require at least 1,200 additional temporary employees, funding to pay them, and a space large enough to accommodate them.This week the county’s deputy executive told the board that moving to a hand-count would increase costs by a minimum of $3.8m in the fiscal year 2024-2025, which she described as a conservative estimate.But despite financial concerns and protests from residents, the county board has once again opted to move ahead with the effort, and this week agreed to fund seven new positions to implement it. Rickert, the supervisor, again urged the board to reverse its previous decision, which she deemed “reckless and irresponsible” and unsuccessfully tried to a call a vote to do so.Her constituents are deeply concerned, she said recently.“I’ve had many people come up to me and say ‘whats going on’? These are people that are rock solid conservative as you will find – ranchers and farmers,” she said. “Those are the people who are most upset, they see total fiscal irresponsibility with their tax dollars.” More

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      Guiliani admits using ‘dirty trick’ to suppress Hispanic vote in mayoral race

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      Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has admitted to a “dirty trick” that his campaign used to suppress the Hispanic vote during the city’s 1993 mayoral race.On Tuesday, Giuliani revealed his voter suppression tactics to the far-right Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon and Arizona’s defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake during a discussion on his America’s Mayor Live program.In the conversation, Giuliani – who was central to Trump’s efforts to subvert the result of the 2020 presidential election – lamented that he had been “cheated” during the 1989 mayoral race in which he lost before explaining his 1993 campaign strategy, saying: “I’ll tell you one little dirty trick,” to which Lake replied: “We need dirty tricks!”“A dirty trick in New York City? I’m so shocked,” Bannon sarcastically responded. Giuliani then interrupted the former Trump adviser, saying: “No, played by Republicans!”“Republicans don’t do dirty tricks,” Bannon said before Giuliani enthusiastically said: “How about this one?” Bannon replied: “Okay give it to me.”Giuliani explained that he spent $2m to set up a so-called Voter Integrity Committee which was headed by Randy Levine, current president of the New York Yankees baseball team, and John Sweeney, a former New York Republican congressman.“So they went through East Harlem, which is all Hispanic, and they gave out little cards, and the card said: ‘If you come to vote, make sure you have your green card because INS are picking up illegals.’ So they spread it all over the Hispanic …” said Giuliani, referring to the now defunct US Immigration and Naturalization Service before trailing off.“Oh my gosh,” Lake replied as she raised her eyebrows.Following its closure in 2003, the INS transferred its immigration enforcement functions to other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Giuliani went on to reveal that following the election, which he won against then incumbent mayor David Dinkins by around 53,000 votes, then president Bill Clinton’s justice department launched an investigation into him.“[Then-attorney general] Janet Reno is coming after us, we violated civil rights,” Giuliani recalled his lawyer Dennison Young telling him. Giuliani then reassured Young, saying: “What civil rights did we violate? They don’t have civil rights! All we did was prevent people who can’t vote from voting. Maybe we tricked them, but tricking is not a crime.”“In those days, we didn’t have crazy prosecutors. Nowadays, they’ll probably prosecute you for it … and that’s the way we kept down the Hispanic vote,” Giuliani said.“Not the legal vote, the illegal vote,” Lake interjected.“Of course! The Hispanic illegal vote, which takes away the Hispanic legal vote,” Giuliani responded.The Huffington Post compiled a handful of media reports from the time which collectively point towards Giuliani’s voter suppression tactics during the election.A 1993 New York Times article published at the time of the election reported that Dinkins had called for a news conference to “accuse the Giuliani camp of waging ‘an outrageous campaign of voter intimidation and dirty tricks’”.One of the charges included English and Spanish pro-Dinkins posters that were allegedly put up at the time in Washington Heights and the Bronx, predominantly Hispanic and Black areas. “The posters suggested that illegal immigrants would be arrested at the polls and deported if they tried to vote,” the New York Times reported.An article published in the socialist journal Against the Current months after the election also mentioned the posters.“Cops put up phony Dinkins posters in mostly Dominican Washington Heights, saying the INS would be checking voters’ documents at the polls. In some cases police themselves asked Latino voters for their passports,” wrote labor and social activist Andy Pollack.Similarly, a Washington Post report published days after the election cited complaints surrounding voter suppression in the city.“Among the complaints are the placing of signs on telephone poles and walls in Latino areas warning that ‘federal authorities and immigration officials will be at all election sites … Immigration officials will be at locations to arrest and deport undocumented illegal voters,’” the Post reported.A statement issued by the then justice department on 2 November 1993 said: “The Department of Justice is aware that posters have been placed throughout New York City misinforming voters about the role of federal officials in today’s elections … Federal observers are in New York to protect the rights of minority voters. They are not there to enforce immigration laws.”Speaking to the Huffington Post, Sweeney dismissed Giuliani’s claims as “nonsense” and said that he ran a “legitimate” operation alongside Levine. Levine echoed similar sentiments to the outlet, explaining that the purpose of the operation was “getting poll watchers and attorneys when there was a dispute”.He added that he had “no knowledge” of the trick Giuliani described.Since the 1993 mayoral elections, voter suppression tactics have continued to be carried out in various ways across the city.In December 2021, the New York City council approved a bill that would have allowed for non-US citizens to vote in local elections. However, the law was struck down months later in June 2022 after state supreme court judge Ralph Porzio of Staten Island ruled the law “unconstitutional”.The same month Porzio struck down the law, the Democratic New York governor Kathy Hochul signed the John R Lewis Voting Rights Act into law, which seeks to prevent local officials from enacting rules that may suppress voting rights of individuals as a result of their race.In addition to local governments or school districts with track records of discrimination now being required to obtain state approval before passing certain voting policies, the new law expands language assistance to voters for whom English is not a first language, as well as provides legal tools to fight racist voting provisions.“We’re going to change our election laws so we no longer hurt minority communities,” Hochul said as she signed the bill into law. More