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      US supreme court pursuing rightwing agenda via ‘shadow docket’, book says

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      Conservative justices on the US supreme court consciously broke with decades-old congressional rules and norms to shift laws governing religious freedom sharply to the right through a series of shadowy unsigned and unexplained emergency orders, a new book reveals.Five of the six conservatives who now command the majority on the US’s most powerful court have rammed through some of their most contentious and extreme partisan decisions using the so-called “shadow docket” – unsigned orders issued frequently late at night, in literal and metaphorical darkness. The orders do not reveal who voted for them or why, often providing one-line explanations of the legal thinking behind them.The switch from openly argued cases, aired in public, to the unaccountability of the shadow docket was made purposefully during the pandemic in cases dealing with religious liberty, concludes Stephen Vladeck, an authority on the federal courts at the University of Texas law school. He warns that the trend is merging with the current ethics scandals surrounding the conservative justice Clarence Thomas to damage the legitimacy of the court and threaten a full-blown constitutional crisis.Vladeck exposes the largely unnoticed shift towards furtive justice in his new book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. He shows how rightwing justices have abused the court’s emergency powers to run roughshod over the longstanding norm that shadow docket orders should be used sparingly and with extreme caution.Rightwing justices are now deploying such orders dozens of times each term. Over three terms alone, from 2019 to 2022, the court granted emergency relief in more than 60 cases: effectively overturning the considered decisions of lower courts through rushed, unexplained rulings.Among those orders were decisions that have had profound and nationwide impact over some of the most hotly disputed areas of public life, from abortion to immigration, voting rights, the death penalty and religious practices. Many appear to align more closely with Republican political priorities than with legal principles.One such order alone, the decision on the shadow docket to block the Biden administration’s January 2022 requirement that large employers mandate Covid vaccinations for their workforce, affected more than 83 million Americans – about a quarter of the US population.“The rise of the shadow docket reflects a power grab by a court that has, for better or worse, been insulated from any kind of legislative response,” Vladeck writes.The author chronicles how the most disturbing use of the shadow docket came with the rewriting of constitutional protections for religious liberty. The dramatic shift followed the death of the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement in 2020 with a devout Catholic rightwinger, Amy Coney Barrett.The switch gave the conservative majority sufficient votes to overcome all resistance to ramping up use of the shadow docket, including from the chief justice, John Roberts, who though conservative has expressed mounting unease about the practice.The change in tactics could be seen almost immediately. Within weeks of taking her seat, Barrett joined four other rightwingers – Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – to drive through a major change in the constitutional understanding of religious liberty, blocking New York state Covid restrictions on the numbers of worshippers allowed to gather in churches.The order was unsigned and gave virtually no explanation for a decision that profoundly changed the law of the land, rolling back government regulations where they touched upon religious practices. It was issued at four minutes before midnight on the day before Thanksgiving – a moment that would guarantee minimal media attention.The ruling was all the more extraordinary as by then New York had scaled back its Covid restrictions and churches no longer had to limit congregation sizes. So the court’s change in the law was moot.The same five rightwing justices went on to impose their will on religious liberty laws with similar late-night one-sentence rulings knocking back state Covid restrictions in California, New Jersey and Colorado. In total, the majority issued emergency injunctions against state Covid rules on religious grounds six times in four months.The sudden spate of shadow docket orders that followed Barrett’s arrival on the court was not accidental, Vladeck says. The justices could have taken up several pending cases in full court that would have addressed the issue of religious freedoms in open hearings on the merits, yet they chose to go the obscure shadow docket route.“Here we have the court not just using emergency applications to change substantive legal principles, but doing so even as they are considering requests to make the same changes through merits decisions,” Vladeck told the Guardian.Vladeck links the rise of the shadow docket to the increasing isolation of the supreme court and its disconnection from public opinion. The growing use of the shadow docket also mirrors the polarisation and toxification of American politics.Vladeck warns that the growing trend towards jurisprudence produced in darkness is endangering the legitimacy of the nation’s most powerful court. Public confidence in the court is already at a historic low, compounded by the recent revelations that Thomas accepted lavish gifts from the Republican billionaire Harlan Crow.“The shadow docket is a symptom of a larger disease,” Vladeck said. “The disease is how unchecked and unaccountable the court is today, compared to any of its predecessors.” More

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      Stark warning over Republicans’ ‘dehumanizing’ rhetoric on crime

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      Republican and rightwing rhetoric over the state of crime in the US could spark a rise in violent incidents and worsen the country’s mass incarceration problem, experts say, as “tough-on-crime” political ads and messaging seem set to play a large role in the 2024 election.Violent crime was a huge focus for Republican candidates during the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans spent about $50m on crime ads in the two months leading up to those elections, the ads pushing a dystopian vision of cities ridden by murder, robbery and assault, and of Democratic politicians unwilling to act.As the 2024 contest heaves into view, it is clear that Republicans plan to follow the same playbook.“Joe Biden and the defund-the-police Democrats have turned our once-great cities into cesspools of bloodshed and crime,” Trump said in a recent campaign video.Trump said if elected president he would order police forces to reinstate “stop and frisk” – a police tactic which has been shown to disproportionately target young Black men – and said he wanted to introduce the death penalty for drug dealers.Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is expected to be Trump’s closest rival for the Republican presidential nomination, has also leaned into tough-on-crime rhetoric and policy. Last month, DeSantis signed a law lowering the death penalty threshold in Florida, allowing people convicted of certain crimes to be sentenced to death if eight or more jury members recommend it.“They think that’s the way to score political victories,” said Udi Ofer, a professor at Princeton University and the former deputy national political director of the American Civil Liberties Union.“I think there’s a bit of a kneejerk, and, quite frankly, lazy attitude that tough-on-crime is the only way to win an election, despite the fact that we have so much evidence today that shows there are other ways.”There is also an element of Republicans, and, Ofer said, some Democrats, pouncing on an increase in violent crime during the Covid pandemic.The Brennan Center for Justice found that the number of murders per 100,000 people rose by nearly 30% nationwide in 2020, while aggravated assault rose by 11.4%. The rate of murder rose in big cities, which tend to vote Democratic and which are repeatedly demonized by Republicans and the rightwing media. But it also rose across the rest of the country.“So-called red states actually saw some of the highest murder rates of all,” the Brennan Center said.Since that peak, most types of violent crime have now dropped. Crime declined in 35 large cities in 2022, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, although rates remain higher than pre-pandemic levels. Still, the rate of homicide in major cities was about half that of historic peaks in the 1980s and early 1990s.The 1980s was when tough-on-crime rhetoric “exploded”, Ofer said. It culminated in the election of prosecutors who promised more convictions and longer sentences.The impact, Ofer said, was “an exponential growth in incarceration” in the US. About 300,000 people were in prisons and jails in 1973, but by 2009 that number had grown to 2.2m – making the US the largest incarcerator in the world.“This was a result of hundreds of new laws and practices at the local level, at the state level, at the federal level, including new mandatory minimum laws, more cash bail and pre-trial detention, and more aggressive prosecutorial and policing practices,” Ofer said.In this crime crackdown, not everyone was treated equally. Black people have been historically more likely to be arrested than white people, which led to higher rates of incarceration. A 2003 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that in 2001 “an estimated 16.6% of adult black males were current or former State or Federal prisoners”. Just 2.6% of adult white males had been incarcerated.Some progress has been made in the last two decades. By 2020 the number of people in jail or prison was down to 1.2 million – meaning the US still has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world – but the obsession with tackling crime, through measures including more arrests, more prosecutions and more imprisonments, could see a reversal.“We are on the verge again of seeing the types of policies that devastated particularly low-income communities of color grow again as it did in the 1980s and 1990s.”Republicans have led the charge on crime rhetoric, Ofer said. But now Democrats are getting in on the act – “we are seeing a growing movement within the Democratic party pushing for more tough-on-crime policies”, Ofer said.The rhetoric and fearmongering over crime has led, in part, to an expansion of “stand-your-ground” laws in the US. In the past 10 years, 14 states in the US have added some form of the law, which can rule that people determined to have acted in self-defense can escape prosecution for actions up to and including murder.A 2022 investigation by Reveal found that 38 states now have some version of “stand your ground” – and the laws have proved devastating: a study published in 2022 found that the legislation was linked with an 8-11% increase in homicides.Ironically, given the accusation from the right that Democrats are too soft on crime, it appears to be traditionally “red states” that have the more serious crime problem.“The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020,” Third Way, a US thinktank, reported in January. Third Way also found that in 2020 murder rates “were 40% higher in Trump-voting states than Biden-voting states”.Although Republicans harangued Democrats over crime in the 2020 midterms, the strategy seems to have had mixed success. Republicans largely underperformed in those elections, and Ofer pointed to the success of progressive prosecutors across the country as evidence that a tough-on-crime message is not always a successful route to take.As well as the impact on incarceration and violent offenses, the tough-on-crime approach can also lead to the demonization of certain communities, said Stephen Piggott, a researcher at Western States Center, a non-profit organization which works to strengthen democracy.Republican talking points about the danger of immigrants and people who live in inner cities could be behind an increase in attacks on minority groups. “In recent years, there’s been a real mainstreaming of both violent and dehumanizing rhetoric, and it’s espoused by elected officials and media personalities,” Piggott said.“And it’s really served to kind of normalize this political violence. When you have individuals with large platforms, like elected officials and media personalities, and they’re talking about things like an impending civil war, it could lead to folks kind of taking that to heart and then acting on it.”The number of hate crimes in the US increased by 12% in 2021, according to the FBI, although the true number is likely to be much higher, given data from some of America’s largest cities was not included in the FBI’s report.About 65% of the hate-crime victims were targeted because of their race, according to the report, while 16% were targeted over their sexual orientation and 14% of cases involved religious bias.“So there are direct consequences on the ground for people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community,” Piggott said.“There’s a lot of impact going on right now.” More

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      CNN’s Trump debacle suggests TV media set to repeat mistakes of 2016

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      Donald Trump and CNN were in rare agreement: the former president’s hour of free prime-time television on Wednesday evening, dressed up as a “town hall” with Republican voters, was a triumph.“America was served very well by what we did last night,” CNN’s chief executive, Chris Licht, told skeptical members of his own staff at the network’s daily news conference the following morning.“You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them.”As it happens, quite a lot of people said that not only did CNN fail to get answers but it was repeating the terrible mistake of 2016 when it treated Trump as an entertainer not a hostile politician by giving him hours of airtime to spout freely because he was good for ratings, and therefore profits.One of CNN’s own reporters, Oliver Darcy, was less enthused than his boss.“It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” he said in his daily newsletter, Reliable Sources.Darcy then listed all that was wrong. The same old “professional lie machine” that is Trump ignoring the question, talking over the moderator, unleashing “a firehose of disinformation upon the country”.“And CNN aired it all. On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again,” he wrote.More than a few Republicans shared that view. Matthew Dowd, former chief strategist for the George W Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, condemned the news network.“CNN was completely unprepared to hold Trump accountable. CNN has done a complete disservice to our democracy,” he wrote. “CNN, you failed journalism and our country.”The New York Times said Trump’s advisers were delighted: “They can’t believe he is getting an hour on CNN with an audience that cheers his every line and laughs at his every joke.”Which raises the question of how television, in particular, should cover Trump as the next election comes into focus. It’s a question even Fox News, which has fallen out with the former president, is now grappling with.Ted Koppel, former anchor of ABC News’s Nightline, asked what the alternative is to television time for a leading contender for a return to the White House.“So no more live political events, because politicians can be nasty? Because politicians can tell lies?” he told the New York Times. “I’m not sure that news organisations should necessarily be in the business of making ideological judgments. Is he a legitimate object of news attention? You bet.”Bob Schieffer, the former CBS news anchor who moderated presidential debates, took much the same position.“We’re in the business of telling people who’s running for what and what they stand for,” he said.But many Americans wondered if it had to be in front of a supportive, jeering audience that evidently included a fair number of his “Make America great again” supporters with little to restrain his torrent of lies, distractions and evasions.Mark Lukasiewicz, former vice-president at NBC News, said of the programme that the mistake was to do it live: “Proving again: Live lying works. A friendly Maga crowd consistently laughs, claps at Trump’s punch lines – including re sex assault and January 6 – and the moderator cannot begin to keep up with the AR-15 pace of lies.”Even Fox News recorded its most recent interviews with Trump.Writing in the Washington Post, Perry Bacon said CNN’s mistake was to say, in the words of its political director, David Chalian, that is it going to “treat Trump like any other presidential candidate”.“CNN should, of course, treat Trump differently from other candidates. His record of anti-democratic behavior makes him a much more dangerous potential president than other candidates,” wrote Bacon.“In 2016, the media not only played down Trump’s chances of winning, but also suggested Trump would not pursue the outlandish and far-right ideas that he was running on if he won. This attitude was summed up by an Atlantic article titled ‘Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally’. This perspective was entirely wrongheaded.”Part of the problem is that few journalists in the US, striving for ill-defined objectivity and almost invariably deferential to present and former presidents, are a match for a man who views the established norms of interviewing and discussion as a provocation. As Kaitlan Collins proved, as she tried, and failed, to contain Trump, even as he called her a “nasty woman” on her own air.Bacon is not alone in worrying that Trump will continue to exploit CNN’s desperation to win back at least some of the Maga voters it lost when the former president led chants of “CNN sucks” at his rallies.That’s certainly how Trump saw it, writing on his Truth Social site shortly before the programme that CNN was “rightfully desperate to get those fantastic (TRUMP!) ratings once again.“Could be the beginning of a New & Vibrant CNN, with no more Fake News, or it could turn into a disaster for all, including me. Let’s see what happens?” he added.As it turned out, what was good for CNN and Trump was viewed by a large part of the rest of America as another disaster in the making. More

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      Trump rages after sexual abuse verdict but legal woes have only just begun

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      If the outcome of Donald Trump’s sexual assault trial wasn’t a foregone conclusion, his response to a jury finding he attacked the writer E Jean Carroll was all too predictable.The former president lashed out at the judge as biased and the jurors as “from an anti-Trump area”, meaning liberal New York, after they believed Carroll’s account of the millionaire businessman attacking her in a department store changing room in the mid-1990s. The jury ordered him to pay $5m in damages for “sexual abuse” and for defaming Carroll by accusing her of “a made-up SCAM” for political ends.Trump has taken a similar tack against the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, after pleading not guilty last month to 34 criminal charges over the payment of hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. Trump called Bragg, who is Black, an “animal” and a psychopath, and characterised the prosecution as purely political.All of this goes down well in sections of America.An audience of Republican voters at a CNN town hall with Trump on Wednesday laughed when he described his assault of Carroll as “playing hanky-panky in a dressing room” and called her a “whack job”.But in the coming months it’s going to get a lot harder for the former, and possibly future, American president to spin his legal problems as political persecution by Democratic elitists. Investigations against him are mounting, and even more troubled legal waters lie ahead for Trump – and some of his acolytes.Indictments in conservative Georgia are coming down the line and many of the key witnesses against Trump will be his fellow Republicans, including some who helped him try to rig the 2020 election.Similarly, investigations by a justice department special counsel into Trump’s actions leading up to the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol, and the stashing of classified documents at his Florida mansion, are being built on the accounts of aides and political associates who are potential witnesses against him.Norman Eisen, a former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, said that as a result Trump’s legal troubles have only just begun.“He’s running into a buzzsaw and it’s called the rule of law. So he can go on and rant and rave up to a point but the legal authorities are in the process of holding him accountable,” he said.Leading the way is a prosecutor in Atlanta who is stacking up witnesses against the former president, almost all of them Republicans, over his attempt to rig the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia. They include some who tried to help Trump steal the vote but who have been persuaded to give evidence against him to save their own necks.The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has spent more than two years investigating the “multi-state, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results”.Willis convened a special grand jury that sat for eight months and heard evidence from 75 witnesses before it recommended charges against more than a dozen people. The grand jury forewoman, Emily Kohrs, strongly hinted to the New York Times in February that Trump was on the list.Asked if the jurors recommended prosecuting the former president, Kohrs said: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.”“It is not going to be some giant plot twist,” she added. “You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.”Willis had been expected to charge Trump and others this month, but indictments are not now likely before mid-July as prosecutors put together immunity deals to lure the former president’s Republican co-conspirators to testify against him and his top aides. Kohrs said prosecutors offered one witness immunity from prosecution in return for cooperation right in front of the grand jury.Then there are the Republicans who do not have to be coerced to tell the truth in court.Willis’s investigation initially focused on a tape recording of Trump pressuring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” nearly 12,000 votes to cancel out Biden’s win in a state that, at the time, looked as if it might decide the outcome of the entire presidential election.Trump has called the Georgia official an “enemy of the people” because he wouldn’t commit electoral fraud. But a jury might find Raffensperger all the more credible because not only is he a Republican, but he voted for Trump.The Georgia secretary of state spoke to the special grand jury for several hours, including about a call he recorded from Trump at the beginning of January 2021 pressuring him to manipulate the vote. While he has not commented publicly on his testimony, Raffensperger wrote a book, Integrity Counts, in which he details Trump threatening him.Other witnesses are more reluctant but may be all the more credible for that reason, including Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, who also came under pressure from Trump and his allies to overturn the election result. One of those on the phone to Kemp was Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, who was also summoned to answer the grand jury’s questions.Willis expanded the investigation as more evidence emerged of Trump and his allies attempting to manipulate the results, including the appointment of a sham slate of 16 electors to replace the state’s legitimate members of the electoral college who do the formal business of selecting the president. The fake electors included the chair of the Georgia Republican party, David Shafer, and Republican members of the state legislature who have been warned that they are at risk of prosecution.Earlier this month it was revealed that at least eight of the fake electors have done a deal to give evidence in return from immunity from prosecution, although Shafer is not included.Eisen said the immunity deals are a sign that charges are in the offing.“We know that multiple fake electors have received immunity. That is another indication of trouble for Donald Trump because those deals are extended by prosecutors typically when they are preparing to bring a case, and they believe they have a case to bring,” he said.“So it’s a sign of prosecutorial seriousness. And it’s a sign that the district attorney can mount an effective case because these immunised fake electors can serve as tour guides for the jury into the plot, which we know ran all the way up to the Oval Office.”Ronald Carlson, a leading Georgia trial lawyer and professor at the University of Georgia’s law school, said prosecutors do not offer immunity lightly and any deal signals that witnesses will provide significant testimony against Trump and his team.“This is very, very much a straw in the wind. Immunity almost always comes with a requirement that the immunised witness provide testimony in a future criminal trial,” he said.“I think the electors will be very descriptive on how they were called together, what they did during their meeting, and then the end result, which was certifying a result for Trump.“Willis’s investigation also probed a seven-hour hearing at the Georgia state senate a month after the election orchestrated by Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump’s personal lawyer and adviser.In what Georgia Public Broadcasting called “a series of fantastical claims and statements from various and sundry people touted as experts”, Giuliani led the way in falsely claiming that the state’s voting machines were rigged, thousands of votes were illegally cast, and suitcases of fake ballots were used to tilt the count in favour of Biden.Giuliani also urged the Georgia legislature to create the slate of fake electors, providing a direct link between what prosecutors are expected to portray as a criminal attempt to steal the election and Trump. At the same time, Giuliani led a blitz of legal challenges to the election result in courts across the country, all of which failed.Kohrs said that when Giuliani appeared before the grand jury he invoked attorney-client privilege to avoid answering many questions.Another Trump lawyer, John Eastman, was called as a witness to a plan to pressure the then vice-president, Mike Pence, to block the declaration of Biden’s win by Congress. The grand jury also called Sidney Powell, a Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist who pushed false allegations that voting machines were rigged for which Fox News paid nearly $800m to settle a defamation suit.Several witnesses tried to avoid testifying. Senator Lindsey Graham went all the way to the US supreme court in a failed attempt to avoid appearing. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who attended meetings about invoking martial law and seizing voting machines, had to be ordered by a Florida judge to answer the grand jury’s questions.Carlson said that a parade of Republican witnesses, reluctant or willing, could prove very damaging to Trump.“As a prosecutor, if you can call witnesses who were close to the crown, so to speak, that impresses the jury,” he said.“What happens very, very frequently, especially in a mob case, is they’ll give immunity to one of the lower-echelon people to testify against the big boss. He doesn’t want to do it, but he’s got immunity and if he continues to resist, he can be held in contempt of court. Whether they want to do it willingly, or whether they are forced to do it under a grant of immunity, Willis is building a case that has a host of witnesses.”Eisen said the Georgia case is likely to be all the stronger for being largely built around the evidence of other Republicans.“The fact that his overtures were rejected by staunch Republican officials, Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, Brian Kemp, the governor, makes a difference. Just the sheer weight of the evidence of election interference in Georgia is material. The Georgia case is a very powerful one, the most powerful we’ve seen to date,” he said.Meanwhile, the special counsel appointed by the US justice department, Jack Smith, is conducting two criminal investigations involving Trump that again draw in Republicans whose testimony could be condemn the former president.The New York Times reported earlier this month that investigators probing Trump’s mishandling of classified documents have won the cooperation of someone who worked for him at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida.Like Willis, the justice department is using subpoenas to force grand jury testimony from those who witnessed Trump’s actions including whether he had classified documents moved in order to hide them once it because known they were illegally stored in Florida.Again, Trump’s team has dismissed the investigation as a “politically motivated witch-hunt” aimed at keeping him from returning to the White House. But the former president didn’t help himself at the CNN town hall when he undercut his own lawyers by claiming that he had “every right” to take the documents from the White House.“I didn’t make a secret of it,” he said.So will Trump be a convicted criminal by the time of the presidential election in November 2024?“That is entirely possible,” said Eisen. “It’s also possible that with court delays and appeals, he may not face incarceration until after the next election. But what matters is that the charges are being brought. And that cues the issue up for the jury of the American people in the primaries and then in the general election.” More

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      Oregon Republican boycott threatens key bills on abortion and gun control

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      Oregon Republicans boycotted the statehouse for a ninth day on Thursday, denying lawmakers the quorum necessary to pass legislation, in a protest that could derail hundreds of bills, including proposals on gun control and abortion rights.While Democrats control the capital in the Pacific north-west state, Republicans have leveraged rules requiring two-thirds of lawmakers be present to pass legislation, which means Democrats need a certain number of Republicans to be there too.Republicans walked out of the statehouse more than a week ago as the chambers prepared for a final vote on a bill that that would have expanded gender-affirming care and abortion protections, and have not returned. Their absence has thrown the capitol into disarray, and threatened Democrats’ legislative agenda.The boycotting lawmakers could face consequences for their protest. Lawmakers with 10 unexcused absences are not eligible for re-election under an initiative passed overwhelmingly last November by voters. Republican and Democratic leaders in the Oregon legislature met privately for a second day on Thursday to try to bridge the divide and agreed to cancel sessions planned for Friday through the weekend.Statehouses around the nation, including in Montana and Tennessee, have been ideological battlegrounds amid rising tensions over issues including gender-affirming care, abortion access and gun violence. Oregon – which pioneered marijuana decriminalization, recycling and protecting immigrants – is often viewed as one of America’s most liberal states. But it also has deeply conservative rural areas.That clash of ideologies has led to the senate being out of action since 2 May. Pending bills are stacked up and the state budget, which must be approved by both the house and senate by the end of June, is left undone.The office of Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, noted on Thursday night that there were many important bills at stake.“Oregonians are demanding that elected leaders deliver results on homelessness, behavioral health, education and other major issues right now,” Kotek’s spokesperson, Elisabeth Shepard, said.To give time for negotiations – and keep boycotters with nine unexcused absences from hitting that 10-day tripwire – Rob Wagner, the senate president, agreed to cancel senate sessions that were scheduled for the coming days. The statehouse is instead scheduled to reconvene on Monday.“I think people, at least people who observe politics, are going to have a pretty anxious weekend,” Priscilla Southwell, professor emerita of political science at the University of Oregon, said on Friday.About 100 people, including members of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group, protested against the walkout late on Thursday on the steps of the Oregon state capitol in Salem.“Get back to work,” they chanted.Republican lawmakers in Oregon have stymied several previous legislative sessions.This time, Republican senators insist their stayaway is mostly due to a 1979 law that requires bill summaries to be written at an eighth-grade level. Tim Knopp, the senate minority leader, said Republicans also want Democrats to set aside “their most extreme bills”.But to Democrats, it’s obvious the readability issue is just an excuse to prevent progress on Democratic-priority bills.“It is abundantly clear that there is a concerted effort to undermine the will of people and bring the legislature to a halt in violation of the constitution of the state of Oregon,” Wagner said as he gaveled closed the 5 May floor session because of the lack of quorum.A prolonged boycott by senate Republicans would throw into doubt not only the rest of the 2023 legislative session, which is supposed to end by 25 June, but could sow complications for next year’s primaries and general election.That’s because it is unclear how the boycotters would be disqualified from running again. The 2022 ballot measure is now part of the Oregon constitution, which disqualifies a lawmaker with 10 or more unexcused absences “from holding office” in the next term.An explanatory statement for Ballot Measure 113, signed by a former state supreme court justice and others, says a disqualified candidate “may run for office … and win, but cannot hold office”.But Ben Morris, spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said the secretary of state’s elections division would not put a disqualified lawmaker on the ballot.Disqualified Republicans are expected to file legal challenges. More

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      ‘The border is not open’: US immediately replaces Title 42 with strict new rules

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      The US late on Thursday ended pandemic-era restrictions at the US-Mexico border that blocked many migrants from their right to claim asylum in the US – but immediately replaced the so-called Title 42 restrictions with sweeping new policies designed to deter or even physically prevent people from crossing the border without permission.In an increasingly hard line from the Biden administration, the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, said on Thursday evening that 24,000 border patrol agents and officers had been sent to the border to enforce US laws, adding: “The border is not open.“Starting tonight, people who arrive at the border without using a lawful pathway will be presumed ineligible for asylum. We are ready to humanely process and remove people without a legal basis to remain in the US,” he said.The secretary added on Friday morning, appearing on CNN, of migrants arriving at the southern border: “We are taking them into our custody, we are screening and vetting them and if they do not have a basis to remain, we will remove them very swiftly.”Additionally, the state department announced a new website aimed at informing migrants how to access legal pathways into the US. The site, MovilidadSegura.org, was created with help from the UN Refugee Agency, the International Organization for Migration and other groups.In the hours before the new regulations went into effect, thousands of migrants waded through rivers, climbed walls and scrambled up embankments on to US soil, hoping to be processed before the new system went into effect at midnight US eastern time.In Matamoros, Mexico, at the eastern end of the border close to the Gulf of Mexico, groups crossed the Rio Grande river in chin-high water. Some carried tiny babies and bags of belongings above their heads to make it into Brownsville, Texas, to ask for refuge.They clutched cellphones above the water to light the way toward the US but, behind coils of razor wire, US authorities shouted for the migrants to turn back.As small children, tied together by their parents to stop them being washed to their deaths in the treacherous river, scrambled up the bank wearing brightly colored inflatable rings from the crossing, uniformed soldiers pointed back where they had come from and refused to part the wire to let them come in and exercise their right to seek asylum.“Be careful with the children,” an official shouted through a megaphone. “It is especially dangerous for the children.”The expired rule, known as Title 42, was in place since March 2020. It allowed border officials to quickly return asylum seekers back over the border on grounds of preventing the spread of Covid-19.While Title 42 prevented many from seeking asylum, it carried no legal consequences. After Thursday, migrants face being barred from entering the US for five years and possible criminal prosecution.In El Paso in west Texas, hundreds of migrants camped out on downtown streets trying to figure out where to go next after crossing the border from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.The first moments of the end of Title 42 in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican twin city to El Paso, were met with initial silence.It was almost as if nothing had changed for the 500 migrants hoping to turn themselves in to US authorities outside Door 42 between Juárez and El Paso, a gate in the tall border barrier.The group had been waiting since late afternoon, surrounded by Texas national guard and border patrol agents, and entrapped by barbed wire.Throughout the afternoon and into the night, small groups were slowly allowed into the country, while the rest stood by.The hot afternoon grew colder as soon as the sun set. With no belongings, many struggled to keep warm. Their only option: dust-filled blankets, jackets and sweaters that migration authorities provided from a dumpster.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the dark of the night, cellphones were alight as migrants attempted to book one of the few asylum appointments available online through an app administered by US federal authorities, called CBP One.Donald Trump, an anti-immigration hardliner, implemented the Title 42 public health rule in 2020 when the pandemic hit, but it was continued and even expanded by Joe Biden, despite campaign promises of a fairer and more humane system at the border. The policy has faced court battles and criticism from left and right.The order authorized border officials to immediately remove migrants, including people seeking asylum, overriding their normal rights. The Biden administration announced in January it was ending the declared national emergencies linked to the coronavirus spelling the end of using Title 42 to deal with immigration.Immigration advocates represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a legal challenge against the new asylum regulations on Thursday, minutes before they took effect.The groups said the Biden regulation “dramatically curtails the availability of asylum in the United States” and mirrored similar Trump-era policies blocked in court.Also on Thursday night, a federal judge in Florida blocked releases of migrants who have not yet got a date to appear in court, saying they were similar to a policy previously prohibited in March due to a failure to follow proper regulatory procedures. CBP did not respond to a request for comment.In a statement, Customs and Border Protection said it would comply with the court order, while the federal agency, echoed by Mayorkas on Friday morning, called it a “harmful ruling”.CBP said it “will result in unsafe overcrowding … and undercut our ability to efficiently process and remove migrants.”Judge Kent Weatherell blocked the releases for two weeks.Later on Friday it appeared that US authorities had taken up to 1,000 people who had been waiting to enter El Paso away for detention and processing in centers further along the border, to try to prevent a crush, CNN reported.Overcrowding fears are rising since the Florida court ruling will mean authorities having to hold many people for longer, until they have a court date. Processing under Title 42 was faster, with many quickly expelled, CNN reported.However immigration advocates worry that even the longer asylum processing in border facilities will be too hasty to be fair. More

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      There is a clear and present danger of a new Trump presidency. Democrats must act now to prevent it | Jonathan Freedland

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      We may come to remember this period as the interlude: the inter-Trump years. After the sigh of relief heard around the world when Donald Trump was defeated in November 2020, a grim realisation should be dawning: the threat of a Trump return to the White House is growing.His first task is to win the Republican party’s presidential nomination, but that hurdle is shrinking daily. Trump’s grip on his party remains firm, with none of his putative rivals coming close. Of course, the first round of primary voting is months away and much could change, but the shape of the race is already clear – and Trump is dominant. Witness the reaction to an event that would once have been terminal for any politician: this week’s civil court verdict that he had sexually abused the magazine writer E Jean Carroll in a New York department store in the 1990s, and then defamed her by branding her a liar.That “makes me want to vote for him twice”, said Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama of the jury’s decision, articulating the view held by many millions of Republicans that this judgment – and any other legal finding against the former president – proves only that the elites are out to get him.There was a similar Republican response in March when Trump was indicted, also in New York, over hush money paid to the former porn star Stormy Daniels. That saw his approval numbers among Republicans – the self-proclaimed party of family values – go up. For the believers, the indictment merely vindicated Trump’s claim that he is the martyred victim of a liberal deep state. The pattern is clear: what should kill him only makes him stronger.It means Democrats and those who wish to see Trump finished need to let go of the hope that the courts will dispatch him once and for all. There are multiple other cases pending, perhaps the most serious relating to his pressure on election officials in Georgia to “find” the votes that would overturn Joe Biden’s victory in that state. But on the current evidence, a slew of guilty verdicts would barely dent his standing with his own party. As Trump intuited back in 2016, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and Republicans would still vote for him.It helps that his most obvious challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is growing smaller in the spotlight. He is tetchy and struggles to connect: this week tape surfaced of advisers urging him before a TV debate to write the word “likable” at the top of his notes – just as a reminder. DeSantis’s failure to go after Trump directly makes him look like a coward. Above all, DeSantis is pursuing a flawed strategy. He is offering Trumpism without Trump. The trouble is, too many Republican primary voters like Trump, while DeSantis’s brand of Trumpism is a hard sell to the wider electorate who will vote in November 2024.Plenty of Democrats concede that Trump is likely to win his party’s nomination. Indeed, many want him to win, so sure are they that he will lose to Biden in a rematch of 2020. And he may. But that contest will be far too close for comfort, at least in the electoral college that decides the outcome. In 2020, just 44,000 votes in three states stood between a Biden victory and an electoral college tie. Now the polls look much worse for him.This week a Washington Post/ABC survey not only showed the president six points behind Trump, it also found 63% of Americans believe Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, lacks the mental sharpness to serve effectively, up from 43% in 2020. Put simply, it was a photo finish last time and Trump’s prospects are better now than then.What would a Trump restoration entail? He himself has promised “retribution”, and those who served under him warn that a returned Trump would be less chaotic, more focused, than he was first time around. His appearance at a CNN town hall event this week provided several clues. On policy, Ukraine should get ready to be abandoned, while the world should brace for a US prepared to default on its debts. Americans will once again be deluged with a torrent of lies, delivered so fast that by the time you’ve challenged one, there will have been four more. (That is one reason why the CNN broadcast was horribly misconceived: it failed to learn a key lesson of 2016, when the US media made itself a tool of misinformation.)Trump also called Carroll a “whack job” and dismissed the sexual abuse verdict because it had been delivered in a liberal state under a judge appointed by Bill Clinton. This too has become a pattern, casting the justice system as merely another theatre in the partisan culture wars. Not content with destroying Republicans’ faith in electoral democracy in order to divert attention from the fact he lost an election, Trump is now doing the same to his followers’ trust in the law, this time to distract from the fact that he is a sexual predator.A second-term Trump would set about finishing what he started, breaking any institution that might stand in his way, whether that be the ballot box or the courts. As Senator Mitt Romney, a rare Republican voice of dissent, put it after the CNN show: “You see what you’re going to get, which is a presidency untethered to the truth and untethered to the constitutional order.”None of this is certain, but all of it is possible. Democrats need to snap out of the complacency brought by victory in 2020 and work as if they are in a race against the devil and lagging behind – because they are. They need to address the Biden age issue fast: several party veterans urge the president to get out more, recommending the kind of closeup encounters with the public at which he thrives. They need to sell their achievements, not least a strong record on jobs. And they have to sound the alarm every day, warning of the danger Trump poses. Because it is clear and it is present.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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      ‘This was my last try’: dismay at US border as Title 42 ends and little changes

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      “My plan is to give up,” Fernando Jesús Manzano, 32, from the state of Falcón, Venezuela, said dejectedly as he gazed at the hundreds of fellow migrants waiting to turn themselves in to US migration authorities as Thursday turned into Friday and a new policy era at the US-Mexico border.Manzano arrived at “Door 42”, a gate along the border barrier in El Paso, west Texas, shortly before the expiration of Title 42, a Trump-era rule implemented during the coronavirus pandemic that allowed the US to turn away migrants at its border with Mexico without allowing them to exercise their right to seek asylum.The man was too late. US Customs and Border Protection, as well as Texas national guard soldiers, had already set up concertina wire and were heavily patrolling the area where Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, meets its twin city across the border, El Paso, by the time he arrived.The troops in camouflage, holding their rifles across their bodies in an intimidating stance, were not allowing him or any other migrants to approach the gate to request asylum.The crowd of about 500 people at this one site was neatly organized into two groups: single men in one and families in the other. Separating them were 15 portable restrooms and two large dumpsters where all of their belongings had been discarded.The US authorities expect migrants being processed at the border not to be encumbered by the small pieces of luggage many may have carried for months on dangerous overland trips from Central and South America, through Mexico to the border.“This was my last try. I’ll have to find a job in Juárez to save for a ticket back home, and return defeated,” Manzano said.Manzano, a professional barber, said that two months ago he fled Venezuela, which has been abandoned by more than 7 million of its citizens in the last eight years amid the political and economic crisis of Nicolás Maduro’s regime.He came desperately seeking better opportunities for himself, his wife and two infant children, in contrast to growing poverty in Venezuela where money, he said, was never enough no matter how hard he worked.Frustrated, he fought back tears as he recalled the two times he previously crossed the US border with Mexico in the last month without permission and was expelled back to Mexico by the authorities.The last time, he found a lawyer in the US to help him and was on his way to New York, when agents at a migration checkpoint told him the forms he had filled out were not valid.At the border more people arrived as the night progressed. On the bank of the Rio Grande 30 more people sat quietly, all hoping authorities would let them in last minute.“No pueden entrar [you can’t come in],” a Texas national guard soldier shouted across as he adjusted a coil of the concertina razor wire marking the line between the waiting people and America. At first his action prompted some to believe they would be let in, but then they all listened and sat back down.When the clock struck 10pm local time, midnight on the US east coast, the exact moment Title 42 expired, the atmosphere at the gate in the tall border barrier remained tensely silent.Only sporadically, when small vans arrived at the gate from the US side to pick up migrants who had been allowed through and take them elsewhere for processing, would migrants clap and cheer for a few seconds.But as the night progressed, the cold did too. Temperatures dropped enough for those waiting at the gate to want a second layer of clothing. The most readily available were the sweaters, jackets and blankets in the two dumpsters where migrants had discarded all of their belongings earlier in the evening.Some grabbed the items but shook them repeatedly to get rid of the thick layer of dust and debris covering them before putting them on.“They’re not letting us in, I don’t know why,” said Oscar Adrián Izaguirre Brito, 20, a mechanic from Caracas, Venezuela.Izaguirre Brito arrived at the gate thinking the end of Title 42 meant he would be able to cross to the US that night but was met with disappointment when he arrived.“I’m tired and I want to cry, I can’t keep talking,” Izaguirre Brito said.After describing himself as desperate, he explained that he was the oldest of 10 siblings and that his parents rely on him for support.He’s made multiple attempts at crossing the border, but this was the first time he had planned to turn himself in. The last time he was expelled for going across without permission, he said, was Wednesday night and then, when border patrol agents released him back into Mexico, three armed men robbed him and took his cellphone, he said. His parents still don’t know he’s in Mexico again, he added.Because he has a permit to work in Juárez, Izaguirre Brito will go back to the car repair shop he had been working at before crossing the border last week, trying to save money to buy a new phone. With it, he would be able to try to get one of the very limited appointments for an asylum interview through the US’s CBP One app.Joe Biden’s new hardline border policies, heavily criticized by immigration advocates and progressives, were starting to bite.“If I am given the opportunity, I will take it and take full advantage of it,” Izaguirre Brito said. More