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      in US Politics

      ‘They hate God’: US anti-abortion activists aim to fight back on 51st Roe anniversary

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      Within the subterranean levels of a fancy hotel in downtown Washington, just a few days before the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, the anti-abortion movement was trying to mount a comeback.Kevin Roberts stood on stage in a cavernous ballroom aglow with neon shades of blue, purple and pink. As president of the Heritage Foundation, Roberts leads one of the main thinktanks behind recent conservative attacks on abortion. And he is not happy with how things are going.“We meet today amid a pro-abortion media narrative of smug triumphalism,” Roberts told hundreds of young abortion foes, who had gathered in the ballroom from across the country to hear him and other anti-abortion leaders speak.“You’ve heard the story. Less than two years after the supreme court overturned Roe, the abortion-industrial complex is celebrating an unprecedented political winning streak. Across the country, pro-life bills have failed. Abortion referenda have passed. Democrat leaders are crowing while too many Republican leaders are cowering from the fight.”Roberts was speaking at the annual National Pro-Life Summit, a one-day organizing camp for high school- and college-aged anti-abortion activists. This year, the summit faced a monumental task: organizers and attendees alike hoped to reinvigorate a movement that, 18 months ago, soared to the height of its power with the overturning of Roe – and then, in the months that followed, has repeatedly crashed-landed back on earth.Since Roe’s demise, seven states have voted on abortion-related ballot referendums. In each case, voters have decisively moved to protect abortion rights, even in ruby-red states like Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.The stakes are even higher in 2024. Not only are roughly a dozen more states gearing up to potentially vote on abortion-related referendums, but the future of the White House is on the line. If abortion hurts Republicans the election – as it’s widely thought to have done in the 2022 midterms – anti-abortion activists may see the GOP brand their movement as ballot-box poison.The National Pro-Life Summit is generally a peek into what the anti-abortion movement is telling itself about itself – and at present, it is not happy with Republicans. For years, the anti-abortion movement has corralled voters for Republicans. On Saturday, they repeatedly condemned the GOP for failing to adequately support their cause.The last Republican president appointed the justices who overturned Roe, while red states have enacted more than a dozen near-total abortion bans since the ruling fell. But many Republicans have begun to back away from the issue. Before the 2022 elections, several quietly downplayed their stances, while dozens of House Republicans have delayed signing onto a bill to nationally ban abortions.“Our friends in the Republican party need to touch some grass,” said Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, the organization behind the summit. “Those who say now that we shouldn’t be talking, that Republican candidates, those seeking for office, should hide from the abortion issue – they continue to be wrong. We won’t win if we put our head in the sand.”Democrats are already attempting to use Roe’s impact on doctors to win votes, as Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has launched a blitz of events and ads timed to the Roe anniversary on Monday. Vice-President Kamala Harris will kick off a tour devoting to spotlighting abortion access, while Biden will assemble a meeting of his reproductive health taskforce.His administration has also announced plans to expand access to contraception under the Affordable Care Act as well as an initiative to spread information about a law that, the administration says, guarantees Americans’ legal rights to emergency abortions, even in states that ban the procedure.A thin lineThe mood on Saturday wasn’t totally dour.Attendees could buy baseball caps that read “I’m just out here saving babies,” sweatshirts that bore an image of a newspaper front page that proclaimed “ROE REVERSED”, as well as red hats adorned with the words “Make America Pro-Life Again” in the unmistakable style of Trump’s Maga hats. Young people excitedly posed for group photos in front of a backdrop that read, “EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE PREBORN!” An illustrated fetus was curled up in one corner.Yet, in speech after speech, activists told young people that they were the victims of vast forces arrayed against them. They accused abortion rights supporters of spreading misinformation about ballot referendums and said they were simply outspent by the opposition. In Ohio, abortion rights supporters reported receiving about three times as much money as a coalition that opposed abortion rights.“These people love chaos. That is the left. The left is inherently chaotic at its core,” said Will Witt, a conservative influencer who, like Roberts, spoke at the morning address to all attendees.After quoting from the Bible in an effort to demonstrate that God originated order, Witt continued: “This is why the left, this is why these pro-choicers, this is why they hate God. Because God represents order in the world, whereas they love chaos.”The summit speakers were attempting to walk a fine line. At the same time that they were attempting to convince attendees that they were the victims of a world turned against them, they also had to make the case that opposition to abortion is a majority view – and one issue that can get Republicans elected.“Our opinion on this issue, the issue, is not outside of the mainstream, no matter how many times ABC wants to try to tell me it is,” Hawkins told attendees at a workshop dedicated to understanding what went wrong with the abortion referendums. Most millennials and members of Gen Z, she added, “want some sorts of limits on abortion”.Polling on abortion is complex, since respondents’ answers can vary widely depending on how a question is asked or how much context is provided. Most Americans believe that abortion should be restricted after the first trimester of pregnancy, according to polling from Gallup. However, over the last two decades, more and more people have become open to keeping abortion legal later into pregnancy. Republicans in Virginia failed to take control of the state legislature last year after they ran on a promise of banning abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy.Gallup has also found that, since 2020, more Americans identify as “pro-choice” than “pro-life”. More people have started to call themselves “pro-choice” since the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.Hawkins is not in favor of only “some sorts of limits on abortion”.“I want to see no abortions be legal, ever,” she said in an interview. She rejected the notion that abortions performed to save women’s lives qualify as abortions. “When you’re looking at a case where a woman’s life is at risk, where the physician believes that she can no longer safely carry her child in her womb, or she may lose her life – we wouldn’t consider that an abortion unless the abortionist goes in with the intention to killing the child.”Instead, she said, it’s a “maternal-fetal separation”.Hawkins’ point was an effort to contend with a phenomenon that has been particularly damaging for the movement: stories from women who have sued after they said they were denied medically necessary abortions.Every state with an abortion ban has some kind of exception for cases of medical emergencies, but doctors in those states have widely said that the exceptions are so vague as to be unworkable. In a recent study of 54 OB-GYNs in states with post-Roe abortion restrictions, more than 90% said that the law prevented them from adhering to the best clinical standards of care.‘You vote pro-life’Last year, when the National Pro-Life Summit held a straw poll asking attendees about their preferred 2024 president candidate, Ron DeSantis won. This year, with DeSantis a day away from dropping out of the presidential primary, Hawkins cheerfully proclaimed the latest straw poll victor: Donald Trump.As much as their leaders may lock heads with Republicans or Trump – who has suggested that hardline abortion stances hurt Republicans – they are ultimately unlikely to withhold votes from the GOP. Even Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, who was a target of the January 6 riot and who spoke at the summit, indicated that people need to simply get on with it.“That’s why we have primaries. We sort ’em out at every level. But after the primary’s over, you vote pro-life,” Pence said. “You go get behind men and women who are going to stand for the right to life.”A booth for the Heritage Foundation was emblazoned with logos for its “Project 2025”, which includes a playbook for the next conservative president. It recommends that the US government stop funding or promoting abortion in international programs, turbocharge the government’s existing “surveillance” efforts to collect data about abortion, and enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion pills. That would effectively result in the removal of abortion pills from the market, which Hawkins said is a policy goal of hers.“If Donald Trump would be elected again, the people he would appoint to his presidential administration would not be abortion activists,” Hawkins said in an interview. “Hands down, that’s a guarantee. And they’re going to be coming to Washington to protect the people and the people includes the pre-born children.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump claims he prevented ‘nuclear holocaust’ in released deposition tapes – video

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      Donald Trump says there would have been a ‘nuclear holocaust’ if he did not ‘deal’ with North Korea when he was president, in footage from his deposition last April and released this week by the New York State attorney general’s office. The former president called the fraud case against him ‘crazy’, insisting that banks ‘were fully paid’. Responding to a question about his 40 Wall Street office tower, across the street from the office of the attorney general, Letitia James, Trump insisted that somebody ‘open the curtain’ to look at the building More

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      in US Politics

      John Lewis review: superb first biography of a civil rights hero

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      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community chronicles one man’s quest for a more perfect union. An adventure of recent times, it is made exceptional by the way the narrative intersects with current events. It is the perfect book, at the right time.Raymond Arsenault also offers the first full-length biography of the Georgia congressman and stalwart freedom-fighter. The book illuminates Lewis’s time as a planner and participant of protests, his service in Congress and his time as an American elder statesman.Exemplary of Malcom X’s observation, “of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” Arsenault’s life of Lewis also brings to mind William Faulkner’s take on American life: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”John Robert Lewis was born into a poor family of sharecroppers in Alabama. Sharecropping amounted to slavery in all but name. White people owned the land and equipment. At the company store, seed and other supplies, from cornmeal to calico, were available on credit. The prices set for all this, and for the cotton harvest, were calculated to keep Black people in debt.Recalling his childhood, Lewis was not referring to material wealth when he wrote: “The world I knew as a little boy was a rich, happy one … It was a small world … filled with family and friends.”His school books made him aware of the unfairness of Jim Crow: “I knew names written in the front of our raggedy secondhand textbooks were white children’s names, and that these books had been new when they belonged to them.”His parents and nine siblings’ initial indifference to learning proved frustrating. They viewed his emergent strength, which would help him withstand a career punctuated by arrests and beatings, as a means to help increase a meager income. First sent into the cotton fields at six, Lewis was frequently compelled to miss class through high school.His political mission grew out of a religious calling. His was a gospel of justice and liberation. As a child he practiced preaching to a congregation of the chickens. In time, like Martin Luther King Jr, he was ordained a Baptist minister.Inspired by Gandhi and Bayard Rustin as well as by King, Lewis also embraced non-violence in emulation of Jesus. He took to heart Christ’s call to turn the other cheek: love your enemy and love one another. He called his modeling of Christ’s confrontation with injustice “getting into good trouble”.Education offered opportunities. In college, Lewis met and befriended likeminded young people. Helping form and lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he attracted others eager to take action, as Freedom Riders or whatever else gaining equal treatment might take.Lewis’s willingness to suffer attack while defending his beliefs gave him credibility like no other. The most remembered blow produced a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama. That barbaric 1965 assault against peaceful protesters came from authorities headed by George Wallace, the governor who said: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” A move to maintain white supremacy, the atrocity became known as “Bloody Sunday”.Time after time, Lewis found unity among colleagues elusive. In 1963, at the March on Washington, four higher-ups insisted on softening his speech. Even so, his radicalized passion shone through.Collaborating with Jack and Robert Kennedy, their self-satisfied delusion masquerading as optimism, was also problematic. Time and again, political expedience tempered the president and the attorney general in their commitment to civil rights. Sixty years on, among lessons Lewis attempted teaching was the inevitability of backlash following progress. If Barack Obama represented propulsion forward, the improbable installment of Donald Trump was like a race backward. Angering some, this was why, looking past Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Lewis endorsed for president the less exciting but more electable Joe Biden.Lewis’s ability to forgive indicates something of his greatness. Of George Wallace’s plea for forgiveness, in 1986, he said: “It was almost like someone confessing to a priest.”Rather like a priest, Lewis was admired across the House chamber. His moral compass was the “conscience of Congress”. Near the end of his life, in 2020, employing all his measured and collaborative demeanor, he exerted this standing in an attempt to restore the Voting Rights Act, gutted by a rightwing supreme court. Exhibiting what seemed to be endless resolve, he nearly succeeded.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI met Lewis in 1993, in Miami, at the conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The event’s theme, “cultural diversity”, got more dubious by the day. Only Black people attended excellent Black history workshops. Only rich white people toured Palm Beach houses.There were subsidized airfares, conference fees and accommodation for people of color. But I asked the Trust’s new president, Richard Moe, if it wouldn’t be good for the Trust to acquire Villa Lewaro, a house at Irvington, New York, once the residence of Madam CJ Walker, a Black business pioneer. Moe answered: “I intend to take the Trust out of the business of acquiring the houses of the rich.”I hoped Lewis’s keynote address would deem preservation a civil right. It didn’t. Instead, Lewis lamented how high costs made preserving landmarks in poor Black neighborhoods an unaffordable luxury. Moe heartily concurred. I stood to protest.Moe cut me off: “Mr Adams, you are making a statement, not asking a question. You are out of order!”“No,” Lewis said. “The young man did ask a question! He asked: ‘Why in places like Harlem, with abatements and grants, taxpayers subsidize destruction, instead of preserving Black heritage?’ I never thought of it that way. And he’s right.”In that moment, John Lewis became my hero. As a preservationist, I share his mission to obtain that Beloved Community. It is a place where inclusion is a right and where welcome is a given.
      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press
      Michael Henry Adams is an architectural-cultural historian and historic preservation activist More

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      in US Politics

      There is still a way to stop Donald Trump – but time is running out | Jonathan Freedland

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      The few Republicans who have not succumbed to the cult of Donald Trump cling to one last hope. They are crossing their fingers that on Tuesday night the ex-president’s march to his party’s nomination will be halted, or at least delayed, by a defeat in the New Hampshire primary at the hands of the former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley. But it is a thin hope.Even if Haley wins a famous victory in this snowbound state, the battles ahead are on terrain far more tricky for her and congenial to him. On Monday, Trump won his party’s contest in Iowa by a record-breaking margin, amassing more votes than all his rivals combined – and the primary electorates that come next look more like Iowa’s than New Hampshire’s, which, unusually, includes a big slice of Trump-sceptic independents. When you combine that with surveys that show Trump even – or better than even – with Joe Biden, making him many forecasters’ favourite to win the White House in November, it prompts a question that confounds blue-state America and baffles most of the rest of the world. Given all that he’s said and all that he’s done, given all that he is, why do so many Americans want Donald Trump to be their next president?Any answer to that question has to begin with the weakness of Trump’s opponents. When the New York Post branded Ron DeSantis “DeFuture” in 2022, hailing him as the man to push Trump aside and become the Republican standard bearer in 2024, it had not reckoned on the Florida governor being astonishingly awkward with the basics of retail politics: smiling, shaking hands, interacting with other people. It’s been painful to watch. (Seeing Nikki Haley flail as she defends her view that the US has “never been a racist country” is not much better.)More important, though, was the strategic miscalculation. DeSantis decided to offer Trumpism without Trump, picking fights with the same culture-war targets as the former president – migrants, the media, the “woke” – but without the chaos and lunacy. Trouble was, that made him too Trumpy for those Republicans eager to move on, and not Trumpy enough for the Maga hardcore. That latter group weren’t looking for Trump-lite, because they’re quite happy with the full-strength original.Still, the larger failure was shared by almost the entire Republican field, including Haley. Even though they were nominally running against Trump, only one of them – Chris Christie of New Jersey – dared make the direct case against him. They feared antagonising the (many) Republicans who love Trump, so tiptoed around his obvious and disqualifying flaws – including his support for a violent insurrection in 2021 that sought to overturn a democratic election. Each candidate hoped someone else would take on that task, knocking out Trump in a kamikaze mission that would leave the remaining contenders to scoop up his supporters.It was a classic collective action problem. Had they combined against Trump, they’d have all benefited. Between them, and in their own different ways, they could have devised what political pros say many Republicans needed in order to make the break from Trump: a permission structure. They could have told Republican voters that they did not make a mistake in choosing Trump back in 2016, but his record of broken promises – he never did build that wall – and association with serial electoral defeats, in midterm contests as well as in 2020, made him the wrong choice in 2024. Haley is edging towards that message now, but it has come as time is running out.Trump has been aided, too, by the opponent he hopes to face in November. Initially, many Republicans were wary of backing Trump because they feared he would lose (again) to Biden. But as the president’s numbers continue to bump along the bottom, that fear has receded. Biden’s parlous standing is not chiefly about his record, but something he can do nothing about: how old he is and, more important, how old he seems. One poll found that just 34% of Americans believe the 82-year-old Biden would complete a second term. Biden’s frailty has led Republicans to dismiss the electability argument that might have compelled them to look for an alternative to Trump.And yet, an uncomfortable truth has to be faced. That Donald Trump is very possibly set to return to the Oval Office is not only down to the weakness of others; it is also a product of his own political strengths. He has a skill lacking in every other major figure in the current US political landscape: the ability to craft a narrative that millions believe. He has, for example, turned what should have been a terminal blow – facing multiple prosecutions and 91 criminal charges – into a winning story, one in which he is a victim of, and courageous fighter against, a liberal establishment engaged in “lawfare”, confecting bogus allegations to keep him from power. That story is false, but it has persuaded nearly half the country.He is helped in that by a news environment in which Americans regard themselves as entitled not only to their own opinions but to their own facts, where their feeds and timelines confirm their prejudices and shield them from any unwelcome evidence to the contrary.But Trump is also helped by some actual facts. When he brags about the health of the economy when he was president, it’s not wholly spurious. During his first three years in office, before Covid-19 struck, the typical US household saw its standard of living go up – with a 10.5% real-terms increase in the median household income – only for that same measure to fall by 2.7% during Joe Biden’s first two years. In that period, inflation surged and Americans’ wages could not keep up with rising costs.Of course, it’s laughable for Trump to claim those healthy pre-Covid economic numbers were all down to him. But that doesn’t stop millions of US voters looking back fondly on, say, the low petrol prices of the Trump years. Meanwhile, memories of the daily mayhem, bigotry and creeping authoritarianism are fading.His opponents are weaker than they needed, and still need, to be; he is stronger than many can bear to admit; and the core issue of any election – the economy – may favour him. For all those reasons, Trump has a plausible, even probable, path back to the White House.The best chance to stop him has already passed. It came in February 2021, when the Senate could have convicted Trump on the “incitement of insurrection” charges levelled against him in his second impeachment following the 6 January riot. Had that happened, Trump would have been barred from public office for life. That was the moment, but Senate Republicans ducked it.Trump has benefited from that cowardice, from that perennial belief that someone else will deal with Trump, eventually. Well, eventually is now – and it may already be too late.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
      Jonathan Freedland is presenting three special episodes of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast from New Hampshire. You can hear the first episode here More

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      in US Politics

      US insists it’s trying to get aid into Gaza as UN warns millions ‘at risk of famine’

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      The US claims it is working “relentlessly” to get humanitarian aid into Gaza amid UN warnings that the territory’s 2.2 million people are “highly food insecure and at risk of famine”.Antony Blinken, speaking at Davos this week, called the situation in Gaza “gut-wrenching”. But the US secretary of state was unable to secure any major new gains on increasing the amount of assistance entering the territory during his recent visit to Israel, even as leaders of international organizations advocate for urgent access.United Nations special rapporteurs said this week that “every single person in Gaza is hungry” and that “Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people”. Israeli inspections have slowed the aid entering the territory, which is receiving just a tiny fraction of what experts say is needed.After months of backroom advocacy with Israel to increase the flow of food and humanitarian items through the south of Gaza, the US is “focused on trying to see what we can do to increase the volume and the speed with which those trucks are getting in”, according to the White House spokesperson John Kirby.Israel has allowed just under 8,500 trucks to enter Gaza through the two southern crossings over the past 85 days, according to the UN’s monitoring – an average of 100 trucks a day. Aid groups say 500 trucks a day are needed at minimum. “Everyone understands the need for inspections, but things like antibiotics or tent poles or sleeping bags with zippers are causing delay and rejection, and then the whole trucks – not just the items in question – are turned away,” Tom Hart, the CEO of the humanitarian group InterAction, said.“We need approval and inspection processes for aid to be faster and more efficient and more predictable,” Ricardo Pires, a communications manager with Unicef, said.The Biden administration credited its pressure on Israel for what has got into Gaza so far. “Despite the fact that what’s getting in isn’t sufficient to the needs right now, it is the United States that got anything in, in the first place,” Matt Miller, the state department spokesperson, has said.Some aid groups see things differently. “We know that they are doing a lot behind the scenes, but at the moment we are not seeing the results of what they are doing in the access and distribution of assistance on the ground,” Hart said.David Satterfield, the retired ambassador working as a state department humanitarian envoy focused on Gaza, has faced criticism for his effectiveness in the role. He joined Blinken on part of his recent Israel trip, though Satterfield had previously been on vacation and working remotely in Hawaii, where he owns property, over the holidays. “This was a long-planned vacation that was coordinated, and he immediately went back to Israel after that,” a state department spokesperson told the Guardian.“People in Gaza risk dying of hunger just miles from trucks filled with food,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the WFP, said in a statement. “Every hour lost puts countless lives at risk. We can keep famine at bay but only if we can deliver sufficient supplies and have safe access to everyone in need, wherever they are.”Some legislators have called on the Biden administration to do more, though a Senate vote which would require additional safeguards on aid to Israel only garnered 11 votes on Tuesday night, nowhere near the simple majority needed in the 100-person chamber to pass.Senator Chris Van Hollen voted in favor of the resolution, which was introduced by Bernie Sanders, after visiting the Rafah crossing that borders Egypt earlier in the month. Van Hollen called the Israeli government’s delays in inspecting trucks “purely arbitrary” in an interview with the New Yorker.An Israeli military spokesperson recently denied outright that there is hunger in Gaza, even as Human Rights Watch said last month that “the Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare”.In the absence of a ceasefire, it’s not clear whether a large influx of humanitarian aid could even be distributed effectively. The issue is not just getting into Gaza, but the safety and logistics once inside the territory. Electricity and communications blackouts, along with Israeli bombardments, make distribution dangerous and at times impossible. It’s likely in part for these reasons that the heads of the World Food Programme and Unicef, both of which were appointed to those roles by Joe Biden, have called for a ceasefire.But experts say that the US is more focused on the humanitarian crisis than the underlying political and military roots of the conflict. “They are in the weeds on humanitarian access issues, which is still uncomfortable for the Israelis, but far preferable to questions of ceasefire and future political arrangements, and it allows Israel to nickel-and-dime the US to death on the minutiae,” Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, says.Tania Hary, executive director of the Israeli non-profit Gisha focused on movement and access for Palestinians, says that Israel is facing more pressure to let more goods into Gaza in part because of South Africa’s international court of justice case at the Hague. But she added, “I don’t think that they’re doing enough or that they’re moving fast enough, and they’re not even skimming the surface of their obligations to Gaza residents.”The US has found some creative pathways in its humanitarian efforts, including getting Israel to reopen the Kerem Shalom crossing on the southern Israel-Gaza border in mid-December. But in Hary’s assessment, those actions remain wholly insufficient. “We’re never going to see these needs being addressed without there being a ceasefire, and the US is of course not calling for that. So whatever it is trying to do on access for aid is undermined by support for the continued military operation,” she said.Kirby, the White House spokesperson, acknowledged that “a big hindrance” to getting more humanitarian items into Gaza “is the fighting itself”.Though the US Senate failed to pass the measure to condition military aid to Israel based on the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, advocates say there are other means available to the US within that law. For example, it contains a clause that bars security assistance when the recipient country “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance”, a point that a consortium of NGOs highlighted in a recent letter to the US defense secretary.“Israel as the occupying power and a side to the hostilities has obligations, not just to facilitate entry of goods but even to supply them,” Hary says. “And almost no one is talking about Israel supplying the food that Gaza needs, but that is its obligation.” More

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      in Elections

      Trump lawyers urge supreme court to reinstate him on Colorado ballot

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      Donald Trump’s lawyers urged the US supreme court on Thursday to reverse a judicial decision disqualifying the former president from Colorado’s Republican primary ballot as the justices prepare to tackle the politically explosive case.Trump’s lawyers in court papers presented the former US president’s main arguments against a Colorado supreme court ruling on 19 December barring him from the primary ballot over his actions around the January 6 Capitol attack, citing the 14th amendment of the US constitution.The justices have scheduled oral arguments in the case for 8 February.Trump’s lawyers urged the court to “put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts”, noting that similar efforts were under way in more than 30 states.The lawyers said the 14th amendment provision does not apply to presidents, that the question of presidential eligibility is reserved to Congress, and that Trump did not participate in an insurrection.The brief adheres to an accelerated schedule set by the justices on 5 January when they agreed to take up the case. Colorado’s Republican primary is set for 5 March.Trump is the frontrunner for his party’s nomination to challenge Joe Biden in the November 5 election.The plaintiffs – six conservative Republican or independent voters in Colorado – challenged Trump’s eligibility to run for office in light of his actions before the attack.They now have until 31 January to respond to Trump’s filing.The Colorado ruling marked the first time that section 3 of the 14th amendment – the so-called disqualification clause – had been used to find a presidential candidate ineligible.Section 3 bars from holding office any “officer of the United States” who took an oath “to support the constitution of the United States” and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.The Colorado lawsuit is part of a wider effort to disqualify Trump from state ballots under the 14th amendment, so the ruling by the justices may shape the outcome of that drive.For instance, Trump also has appealed to a Maine court a decision by that state’s top election official barring him from the primary ballot under the 14th amendment. That case is on hold until the supreme court issues its ruling in the Colorado case.The 14th amendment was ratified in the aftermath of the American civil war of 1861-65 in which southern states that allowed the practice of slavery rebelled in a bid for secession.The Capitol rampage was a bid to prevent Congress from certifying 2020 Biden’s election victory over Trump, who gave an incendiary speech to his supporters beforehand, repeating his false claims of widespread voting fraud.Trump also faces criminal charges in two cases related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election outcome.The Colorado plaintiffs have emphasized the lower court‘s findings that Trump’s intentional “mobilizing, inciting, and encouraging” of an armed mob to attack the Capitol meets the legal definition in section 3. “This attack was an ‘insurrection’ against the constitution by any standard,” they said in legal papers. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump lawyer: Ex-president not responsible for E Jean Carroll backlash because supporters were likely to believe him – live

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      On cross-examination, Donald Trump’s attorney Michael T. Madaio suggested that the ex-president was not responsible for backlash against Carroll – because supporters were likely to believe him, and his denials, anyway.Madaio asked whether people most likely receptive to Trump’s denials were most likely Trump supporters? Were Trump supporters more likely to believe him?“Wouldn’t you think that Trump supporters would have already thought Ms. Carroll a liar in her accusations?” he asked. “If they already had an opinion formed on this subject, and they already had an opinion of Ms Carroll, would President Trump have any affect on their opinion?”“Do you think that those same people would have been unlikely to believe Ms Carroll’s initial allegation?… You agree that people have confirmation bias, right?” he added.“I believe that confirmation bias can occur in many contexts, yes,” said Humphreys.Pressed on this, Humphreys said people are “more likely” receptive to information that easily “conforms to their views.”Here is a wrap-up of the day’s key events at E J Carroll’s defamation trial against Donald Trump:
      Trump’s lead attorney Alina Habba tried to cast doubt on the threats E J Carroll faced as a result of Trump’s public remarks about her. Citing derogatory tweets directed towards Carroll, Habba asked whether Carroll agrees that the tweets are “not necessarily tied” to Trump’s statements. Carroll said, “Some of the tweets are definitely tied to the president’s statement.”
      Cross-examination also took a turn for the absurd when Habba pointed to a 2013 tweet in which Carroll referred to penile functions. “You left that on your Twitter account as we stand here today, correct” asked Habba, to which Carroll answered in the affirmative.
      Habba also appeared to suggest that Carroll had not suffered as a result of Trump’s comments, pointing to TV appearances as an example. “So, your reputation in many ways is better today isn’t it Ms Carroll?” said Habba. “No, my status was lowered. I’m partaking in this trial to bring my old reputation and status back,” replied Carroll.
      Ashlee Humphreys, a Northwestern University marketing professor, also took to the witness stand today. She said that to restore E J Carroll’s reputation by putting out corrective messaging in relation to Donald Trump’s 2019 statements, Humphreys estimated, it could cost from $7.2m to $12.1m.
      On cross-examination, Trump’s attorney Michael T. Madaio suggested that the ex-president was not responsible for backlash against Carroll – because supporters were likely to believe him, and his denials, anyway. “Do you think that those same people would have been unlikely to believe Ms Carroll’s initial allegation?… You agree that people have confirmation bias, right?” he said. “I believe that confirmation bias can occur in many contexts, yes,” said Humphreys.– Maya Yang
      Meanwhile, the defamation trial has concluded for the day.Judge Lewis Kaplan has not spoken about plans for Monday.Here’s an update on another Trump case, from the AP: The judge overseeing the former president’s 2020 election interference case rjected his lawyers bid to hold special counsel Jack Smith’s team in contempt, after prosecutors turned over thousands of pages of evidence and filing a motion after the judge put the case on hold.US district judge Tanya Chutkan said in her rulingthat her pausing the case did not “clearly and unambiguously” prohibit the prosecutor’s those actions, but she said no further substantive filings should be submitted until the hold is lifted.A trial in that case is currently scheduled for 4 March, but will likely be delayed because Trump has appealed a ruling that rejected claims that he was immune to prosectution.Following the Senate’s passage of a stopgap funding bill shortly before a shutdown deadline on Thursday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer released the following statement in which he hailed the bill’s passage:
      “It’s good news for every American, especially our veterans, parents and children, farmers and small businesses, all of whom would have felt the sting of a shutdown.”
      With court currently on a break, here is another update in US politics: third-party centrists across the country have filed a formal complaint over an “alleged unlawful conspiracy” surrounding the 2024 presidential election.The Guardian’s David Smith reports:The centrist group No Labels has filed a formal complaint with the justice department, asking it to investigate an “alleged unlawful conspiracy” to shut down its effort to secure ballot access for the 2024 presidential election.No Labels has not yet decided whether it will run a third party against Joe Biden and the Republican nominee, widely expected to be Donald Trump, in November’s presidential election. Critics say the effort would have the unintended consequence of hurting Biden and helping Trump.Last week No Labels sent an eight-page letter to the justice department’s Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, and Nicole Argentieri, acting assistant attorney general for the criminal division, accusing its opponents of violating federal law including racketeering and a number of criminal civil rights provisions.For the full story, click here:On cross-examination, Donald Trump’s attorney Michael T. Madaio suggested that the ex-president was not responsible for backlash against Carroll – because supporters were likely to believe him, and his denials, anyway.Madaio asked whether people most likely receptive to Trump’s denials were most likely Trump supporters? Were Trump supporters more likely to believe him?“Wouldn’t you think that Trump supporters would have already thought Ms. Carroll a liar in her accusations?” he asked. “If they already had an opinion formed on this subject, and they already had an opinion of Ms Carroll, would President Trump have any affect on their opinion?”“Do you think that those same people would have been unlikely to believe Ms Carroll’s initial allegation?… You agree that people have confirmation bias, right?” he added.“I believe that confirmation bias can occur in many contexts, yes,” said Humphreys.Pressed on this, Humphreys said people are “more likely” receptive to information that easily “conforms to their views.”Court has resumed.Ashlee Humphreys is now under cross-examination.Joe Biden has released the following statement in response to a justice department report which found that the police response to the 2022 Uvalde school shooting in which 21 people were killed “was a failure”:
      Today’s report makes clear several things: that there was a failure to establish a clear command and control structure, that law enforcement should have quickly deemed this incident an active shooter situation and responded accordingly, and that clearer and more detailed plans in the school district were required to prepare for the possibility that this could occur.
      There were multiple points of failure that hold lessons for the future, and my team will work with the Justice Department and Department of Education to implement policy changes necessary to help communities respond more effectively in the future.
      Congress must now pass commonsense gun safety laws to ensure that mass shootings like this one don’t happen in the first place. We need universal background checks, we need a national red flag law, and we must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The families of Uvalde – and all American communities — deserve nothing less.
      Jerry Nadler, a Democratic congressman from New York, is in contact with the FBI and Capitol police about a reported death threat from Roger Stone, a staunch far-right Donald Trump ally.The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:“It was a surprise to me. I just found out a few days ago … I saw it on Mediaite,” Nadler told reporters, naming the website which said it obtained audio of the threat and saying he had been in touch with authorities.The reported threat also mentioned Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat who on Wednesday told CNN he also learned of the threat from the Mediaite report.Speaking before the 2020 presidential election to an associate who was then a serving New York police officer, Stone reportedly said: “It’s time to do it.“Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Nadler or Swalwell has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit any more.”For the full story, click here:Court is currently on break and will resume at around 1.50pm.We will bring you the latest updates once court is back in session.Ashlee Humphreys calculated that up to 24.7m of these impressions were associated with likely belief in Donald Trump’s statements.To restore Carroll’s reputation by putting out corrective messaging in relation to the 2019 statements, Humphreys estimated, it could cost from $7.2m to $12.1m.Attorney Shawn Crowley, who was questioning Humphreys, asked how a person’s reputation is impacted when the same negative claim is repeated – especially by a prominent source.Ashlee Humphreys said that she studied how many people Donald Trump’s June 2019 statements reached.She studied 47 online news articles that cited his 21 June and 22 June 2019 denials.Humphreys determined that these publications’ websites had 13.2m impressions – that is, unique visitors on a particular day – related to these articles.As for social media impressions, Humphreys said that her low estimate was just over 7 million and her high estimate was more than 25m. With television, Humphreys calculated that Trump’s statements reached 63.1m; print newspapers reached more than 2.83m.Humphreys estimated that the total number of times Trump’s statements were viewed ranged from some 85.8m to 104.1m.Ashlee Humphreys, a Northwestern University marketing professor, has taken the witness stand. Humphreys’ testimony could help put a dollar amount on the reputational harm Carroll endured because of Donald Trump’s comments. Humphreys provided testimony in Carroll’s first trial against Trump, but her presence in this trial could be quite perilous to him.She testified in two Georgia ex-election workers’ defamation trial against Trump’s crony, Rudy Giuliani.Those former election workers won $148m in the suit. Giuliani filed for bankruptcy protection following the conclusion of that case.Here are some court sketches coming through the newswires of E J Carroll’s defamation trial against Donald Trump:E J Carroll is now on redirect examination.Carroll’s lawyer is now asking her questions again.Cross-examination in E J Carroll’s defamation case against Donald Trump is now over. Here are the key developments from this morning:
      Trump’s lead attorney Alina Habba tried to cast doubt on the threats Carroll faced as a result of Trump’s public remarks about her. Citing derogatory tweets directed towards Carroll, Habba asked whether Carroll agrees that the tweets are “not necessarily tied” to Trump’s statements. Carroll said, “Some of the tweets are definitely tied to the president’s statement.”
      Cross-examination also took a turn for the absurd when Habba pointed to a 2013 tweet in which Carroll referred to penile functions. “You left that on your Twitter account as we stand here today, correct” asked Habba, to which Carroll answered in the affirmative.
      Habba also appeared to suggest that Carroll had not suffered as a result of Trump’s comments, pointing to TV appearances as an example. “So, your reputation in many ways is better today isn’t it Ms Carroll?” said Habba. “No, my status was lowered. I’m partaking in this trial to bring my old reputation and status back,” replied Carroll.
      Alina Habba concluded her cross-examination by suggesting that E J Carroll had not suffered because of Donald Trump’s comments – didn’t she have opportunities like having a Substack and TV appearances? Was she making more money? Was she better known?“So, your reputation in many ways is better today isn’t it Ms Carroll?” said Habba.“No, my status was lowered. I’m partaking in this trial to bring my old reputation and status back,” replied Carroll.“So, you sued Donald Trump to bring your old reputation back?” said Habba.“Yeah,” replied Carroll. More

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      Judge in Trump case sets hearing over Fani Willis conflict-of-interest claims

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      The Georgia judge overseeing the racketeering case charging Donald Trump and allies with attempting to overturn the 2020 election results in the state has scheduled a hearing for February to weigh whether the Fulton county district attorney should be disqualified from prosecuting the charges.In a one-page order, the Fulton county superior judge Scott McAfee set an evidentiary hearing for 15 February to address allegations raised by Trump’s co-defendant Michael Roman that the district attorney Fani Willis had an improper romantic relationship with one of her prosecutors.The judge also ordered the district attorney to file a response to the allegations by 2 February. Earlier this week, Willis’s office had privately told at least two lawyers involved in the case that they intended to submit their written response by that date, people familiar with the matter said.The case is unlikely to be dismissed outright even if the allegations are proven true. But that could result in the disqualification of Willis, which, under Georgia caselaw, would necessitate the disqualification of the entire Fulton county district attorney’s office, as well.At issue is an explosive complaint from Roman – director of Trump’s 2020 election-day operations – that Willis should be relieved of bringing the case because of conflicts of interests arising from her ongoing relationship with a lawyer named Nathan Wade, whom she hired as a special prosecutor.The filing claimed Willis personally profited from the contract. Wade was paid at least $653,000 and potentially as much as $1m for legal fees as one of the lead prosecutors on the Trump case, and the filing alleged Wade then paid for trips he took with Willis to Napa Valley and the Caribbean.The filing included no proof of the allegations. Roman’s lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, a respected local attorney who publicly endorsed Wade when he ran to be a Cobb county superior judge 2016, has said the claims were based on sources and records from Wade’s divorce proceeding that remains under seal.Wade started divorce proceedings the day after he was hired as a special prosecutor on the Trump case. According to court records, the divorce case has been contentious, and Joycelyn Mayfield Wade wrote that her husband had failed to disclose his finances, including from his Fulton county work.For his part, Wade has repeatedly insisted in court filings that he had complied with the discovery obligations and accused his wife of being “stubbornly litigious and dragging the matter out for no stated reasons”.Three days after Trump was indicted in Atlanta last August, the presiding Cobb county superior court judge Henry Thompson held Wade in contempt for failing to disclose financial statements, including bank and credit card statements.Weeks later, Joycelyn Mayfield Wade said in a filing in September that she would be forced to subpoena records to obtain her husband’s earnings from legal work done for the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Fulton county in November and December respectively.Willis herself was subpoenaed for testimony on 8 January, just hours before Roman filed his motion seeking dismissal of the charges and disqualification. The subpoena ordered her to appear for a 23 January video-taped deposition.Willis has not directly addressed the allegations, and a spokesperson has said it would all be addressed in court filings.Roman’s allegations threaten to upend one of the most consequential criminal cases against Trump, who pleaded not guilty to charges that he and his co-defendants violated the Georgia Rico statute through his efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat.Whether Willis, and therefore the district attorney’s office, can be disqualified from prosecuting the Trump case turns less on Wade’s credentials and more on the extent of a potential conflict of interest, legal experts said.The standard for disqualification does not turn on whether Willis made prosecutorial decisions to benefit Wade, the experts said, but whether she made decisions to extend a criminal investigation actually benefited Wade, who was also paying for travel and vacations.In 2022, the chief Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney disqualified the Fulton county district attorney’s office from prosecuting the Republican lieutenant governor Burt Jones after Willis endorsed his political opponent, Charlie Bailey.The order from McBurney found that there was an “actual” conflict of interest because even though Jones might not have had definitive proof that “an investigative decision was made to benefit Bailey … any public criminal investigation into Jones plainly benefits Bailey’s campaign”.Should McAfee ultimately decide to disqualify Fulton county, the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia would be tasked with deciding where the case would be transferred to. It could pursue the case itself, or give it to another district attorney’s office, which could choose to drop the charges. More