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      January 6 hearings: if Republicans did nothing wrong, why were pardons sought?

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      January 6 hearings: if Republicans did nothing wrong, why were pardons sought?Email from Alabama’s Mo Brooks potentially reveals what conduct by lawmakers he feared might be criminal When the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack revealed the evidence that showed Republican members of Congress sought preemptive presidential pardons after January 6, one of the most striking requests came from Congressman Mo Brooks.The request from Brooks to the Trump White House came in an 11 January 2021 email – obtained by the Guardian – that asked for all-purpose, preemptive pardons for lawmakers involved in objecting to the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.Brooks in the first instance sought preemptive pardons for “every Republican who signed the Amicus brief in the Texas lawsuit” that sued then-vice president Mike Pence to unilaterally decide whether to certify Biden’s win in certain battleground states.The Alabama congressman also recommended in the email to former Oval Operations coordinator Molly Michael that Donald Trump issue pardons for “Every Congressman and Senator who voted to reject the electoral college vote submissions of Arizona and Pennsylvania”.Brooks was one of at least a half dozen Republican congressmen who sought pardons immediately after the Capitol attack. It came after Trump “hinted at a blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 thing for anybody,” the head of White House presidential personnel John McEntee testified.But the request from Brooks stands out because he explicitly outlines two groups for whom he was seeking preemptive pardons, opening a window into his thinking and potentially revealing for what conduct he worried that they might have been guilty of a crime.The reference to the Texas lawsuit is revealing since that suit pushed Pence to commandeer the ceremonial congressional certification to overturn the results of the 2020 election – which the select committee has argued amounted to a violation of federal law.Meanwhile, the reference to Arizona and Pennsylvania is notable since the objections to those states occurred after the Capitol attack, which, seen with Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani asking senators to keep objecting to stop Biden’s certification, could suggest further corrupt intent.Brooks has rejected the notion that the pardon requests showed any consciousness of guilt, saying in a statement that he feared Democrats would prosecute and jail “Republicans who acted pursuant to their Constitutional or statutory duties under 3 USC 15”.The statement referred to the statute governing the congressional certification of the presidential election, at which members of Congress are permitted to raise objections to the results in any of the states.But the trouble with Brooks’s statement remains that if he truly believed that Republicans were engaging in only lawful activity on January 6, then he could defend that conduct in court – without the need for a pardon.The select committee at the hearing also showed testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who said House Republicans Louie Gohmert, Scott Perry, Andy Biggs and Matt Gaetz also expressed interest in pardons.Hutchinson recalled that House Republican Jim Jordan did not directly ask for a pardon but did ask whether Trump was going to give them to members of Congress, and that House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed interest to the White House counsel’s office.The testimony by Hutchinson and McEntee and other top White House aides showed that at the very least, Republican members of Congress were concerned about potential legal exposure over their roles in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.And the accounts, delivered under oath to the select committee, showed the extraordinary and brazen inquiries by some of Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill to use the power of presidential pardons for their own political and personal ends.“I think the American public understands folks asking for pardons generally feel they did something illegal,” select committee member Pete Aguilar told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning of the preemptive pardon requests.Gohmert had brought the Texas lawsuit while Perry had played a role in Trump’s efforts to pressure the justice department to reverse his election defeat in battleground states. Biggs and Gaetz had strategized with Trump about objecting to Biden’s certification.The Republican members of Congress accused of seeking preemptive pardons near-universally rejected the allegations.Gohmert denied making a request for a pardon. Perry said in a statement that he “never sought a presidential pardon for myself or other members of Congress”. Biggs said Hutchinson was “mistaken” and Greene accurately called Hutchinson’s testimony hearsay.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘They set a torch to it’: Warren says court lost legitimacy with Roe reversal

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      ‘They set a torch to it’: Warren says court lost legitimacy with Roe reversalTop Democrats again call for appointing additional justices to blunt conservative super-majority which made ruling possible Leading Democrats on Sunday continued calling the supreme court’s legitimacy into question after it took away the nationwide right to abortion last week, and some again called for appointing additional justices to the panel so as to blunt the conservative super-majority which made the controversial ruling possible.Abortion banned in multiple US states just hours after Roe v Wade overturnedRead moreThe Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren suggested to ABC’s This Week that there was urgency to do that because supreme court justice Clarence Thomas indicated within Friday’s decision to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade ruling that he’s open to reconsidering precedents guaranteeing contraception, same-sex marriage rights and consensual gay sex.“They have burned whatever legitimacy they may still have had,” Warren said of the supreme court. “They just took the last of it and set a torch to it.”Warren joined Georgia gubernatorial candidate and Democratic organizer Stacey Abrams in again lobbying to expand the supreme court in a way that balances the current makeup of six conservatives and three liberals.Joe Biden has rejected the strategy. But Abrams – who’s also previously served in Georgia’s house of representatives – said the president doesn’t have the final word on the matter, with legislators also having a potential say.“There’s nothing sacrosanct about nine members of the United States supreme court,” Abrams said on CNN’s State of the Union.Warren didn’t just once again mention the idea of abolishing the filibuster, a delaying tactic that both parties use to prevent legislative decisions, which Biden and centrist Democrats have also rejected.She also urged Biden to issue orders shielding medication abortions and authorizing the terminations of pregnancies on federal land.Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez argued that drastic measures were justified.Trying to avoid burn-out: a Colorado abortion clinic braces for even more patientsRead more“I believe that the president and the Democratic party needs to come to terms with is that this is not just a crisis of Roe – this is a crisis of our democracy,” Ocascio-Cortez said.The congresswoman also said the supreme court was undergoing “a crisis of legitimacy”, making it a point to allude to how Thomas’s wife, Ginni, emailed 29 Republican lawmakers in Arizona as she tried to help overturn Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.“The supreme court has dramatically overreached its authority,” Ocascio-Cortez said. “This is a crisis of legitimacy.”Speaking from a Republican point of view on another program, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem fawningly said it was “incredible” that reproductive laws had been returned to the states. South Dakota is one of 13 states where trigger laws banning most abortions came into effect after Friday’s decision.“The supreme court did its job: it fixed a wrong decision it made many years ago and returned this power back to the states, which is how the constitution and our founders intended it,” Noem told CBS’ Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan”.World leaders condemn US abortion ruling as ‘backwards step’Read moreSouth Dakota, she said, would ensure that “babies are recognized and that every single life is precious”.The governor said the state would move to block Democratic efforts to allow access to out-of-state telemedicine and the ability of health practitioners in legal abortion states to provide pills in the mail that would allow them to end a pregnancy.Noem voiced that abortion pills were “very dangerous medical procedures”, though Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan correctly pointed out that the pills were approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration.Nonetheless, Noem insisted, saying, “A woman is five times more likely to end up in an emergency room if they’re utilizing this kind of method for an abortion.“It’s something that should be under the supervision of a medical doctor and it is something in South Dakota that we’ve made sure happens that way.”The governor, a rising star in Republican circles, said that mothers would not be prosecuted for receiving abortions, rather the state planned to target illegal abortion providers.“We will make sure that mothers have the resources, protection and medical care that they need and we’re being aggressive on that. And we’ll also make sure that the federal government only does its job,” Noem added.TopicsUS politicsElizabeth WarrenAlexandria Ocasio-CortezRoe v WadeUS supreme courtnewsReuse this content More

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      Capitol attack hearings: if Republicans did nothing wrong, why were pardons sought?

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      Capitol attack hearings: if Republicans did nothing wrong, why were pardons sought?The email from Alabama’s Mo Brooks potentially reveals what conduct by lawmakers he feared might be criminal One of the most striking all-purpose, preemptive pardon requests that the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack has revealed came from Alabama’s Mo Brooks.In an email obtained by the Guardian, Brooks sought preemptive pardons for lawmakers involved in objecting to the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.The 11 January 2021 email requested pardons for “Every Republican who signed the Amicus brief in the Texas lawsuit” that sued then-vice-president Mike Pence to unilaterally decide whether to certify Biden’s win in certain battleground states.Brooks, who sent the email to former Oval Office Operations coordinator Molly Michael, also recommended that Donald Trump issue preemptive pardons for “Every Congressman and Senator who voted to reject the electoral college vote submissions of Arizona and Pennsylvania”.Brooks was one of at least a half dozen members of Congress who sought pardons from Trump in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack. The former president “had hinted at a blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 thing for anybody,” the head of White House presidential personnel, John McEntee testified, which appears to have elicited pardon requests from some of Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill.But the request from Brooks stands out because he explicitly outlines two groups for whom he was seeking preemptive pardons, opening a window into his thinking and potentially revealing for what conduct he worried that they might have been guilty of a crime.The reference to the Texas lawsuit is revealing since that suit pushed Pence to commandeer the ceremonial congressional certification to overturn the results of the 2020 election – which the select committee has argued amounted to a violation of federal law.Meanwhile, the reference to Arizona and Pennsylvania is notable since the objections to those states occurred after the Capitol attack, which, seen with Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani asking senators to keep objecting to stop Biden’s certification, could suggest further corrupt intent.Brooks has rejected the notion that the pardon requests showed any consciousness of guilt, saying in a statement that he feared Democrats would prosecute and jail “Republicans who acted pursuant to their Constitutional or statutory duties under 3 USC 15”.The statement referred to the statute governing the congressional certification of the presidential election, at which members of Congress are permitted to raise objections to the results in any of the states.But the trouble with Brooks’ statement remains that if he truly believed that Republicans were engaging in only lawful activity on January 6, then he could defend that conduct in court – without the need for a pardon.The select committee at the hearing also showed testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who said House Republicans Louie Gohmert, Scott Perry, Andy Biggs and Matt Gaetz also expressed interest in pardons.Hutchinson recalled that House Republican Jim Jordan did not directly ask for a pardon but did ask whether Trump was going to give them to members of Congress, and that House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed interest to the White House counsel’s office.The testimony by Hutchinson and McEntee and other top White House aides showed that at the very least, Republican members of Congress were concerned about potential legal exposure over their roles in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.And the accounts, delivered under oath to the select committee, showed the extraordinary and brazen inquiries by some of Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill to use the power of presidential pardons for their own political and personal ends.Gohmert had brought the Texas lawsuit while Perry had played a role in Trump’s efforts to pressure the justice department to reverse his election defeat in battleground states. Biggs and Gaetz had strategized with Trump about objecting to Biden’s certification.The Republican members of Congress accused of seeking preemptive pardons near-universally rejected the allegations.Gohmert denied making a request for a pardon. Perry said in a statement that he “never sought a presidential pardon for myself or other members of Congress”. Biggs said Hutchinson was “mistaken” and Greene accurately called Hutchinson’s testimony hearsay.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS politicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Why is the US about to give away $52bn to corporations like Intel? | Robert Reich

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      Why is the US about to give away $52bn to corporations like Intel? Robert ReichThe Chips Act would provide an enormous subsidy to chipmakers for making their chips in the US. This is extortion Congress will soon put final touches on the Chips Act, which will provide more than $52bn to companies that design and make semiconductor chips.The subsidy is demanded by the biggest chipmakers as a condition for making more chips in America.It’s pure extortion.Fed chief vows to keep raising rates until ‘compelling evidence’ of falling inflationRead moreThe world’s biggest chipmaker (in terms of sales) is already an American corporation – Intel, based in Santa Clara, California.Intel hardly needs the money. Its revenue rose to $79bn last year. Its chief executive, Pat Gelsinger, got a total compensation package of $179m (which was 1,711 times larger than the average Intel employee).Intel designs, assembles, and tests its chips in China, Israel, Ireland, Malaysia, Costa Rica, and Vietnam, as well as in the US.The problem for the US is Intel is not helping America cope with its current shortage of chips by giving preference to producers in the United States. And it’s not keeping America on the cutting edge of new chip technologies.Obviously, Intel would like some of the $52bn Congress is about to throw at the semiconductor chip industry. But why exactly should Intel get the money?Among the other likely beneficiaries of the Chips Act will be GlobalFoundries, which currently makes chips in New York and Vermont – but in many other places around the world as well.GlobalFoundries isn’t even an American corporation. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Mubadala Investment Co.,the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates.The nation where a chipmaker (or any other high-tech global corporation) is headquartered has less and less to do with where it designs and makes things.Which explains why every industry that can possibly be considered “critical” is now lobbying governments for subsidies, tax cuts, and regulatory exemptions, in return for designing and making stuff in that country.It’s a giant global shakedown.India, Japan and South Korea have all recently passed tax credits, subsidies and other incentives amounting to tens of billions of dollars for the semiconductor industry. The European Union is finalizing its own chips act with $30bn to $50bn in subsidies.Even China has extended tax and tariff exemptions and other measures aimed at upgrading chip design and production there.“Other countries around the globe … are making major investment in innovation and chip production,” says Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer. “If we don’t act quickly, we could lose tens of thousands of good-paying jobs to Europe.”But who is “we,” senator?John Neuffer, the chief executive of the Semiconductor Industry Association (the Washington lobbying arm of the semiconductor industry) warns that chipmaking facilities are often 25 to 50% cheaper to build in foreign countries than in the United States.Why is that? As he admits, it’s largely because of the incentives foreign countries have offered.As capital becomes ever more global and footloose, it’s easy for global corporations to play nations off against each other. As the then-chief executive of US-based ExxonMobil unabashedly stated: “I’m not a US company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the US”People, by contrast, are rooted within nations, which gives them far less bargaining power.This asymmetry helps explain why Congress is ready to hand over $52bn to a highly profitable global industry but can’t come up with even $22.5bn the Biden administration says is necessary to cope with the ongoing public health crisis of Covid.If they are publicly owned, corporations must be loyal to their shareholders by maximizing the value of their shares. But over 40% of the shareholder value of American-based companies is owned by non-Americans.Besides, there’s no reason to suppose a company’s American owners will be happy to sacrifice investment returns for the good of the nation.The real question is what conditions the United States (or any other nation that subsidizes chipmakers) should place on receipt of such subsidies.It can’t be enough that chipmakers agree to produce more chips in the nation that’s subsidizing them, because chipmakers sell their chips to the highest bidders around the world regardless of where the chips are produced.If the US is going to subsidize them, it should demand chipmakers give highest priority to their American-based customers that use the chips in products made in the United States, by American workers.And Congress should demand they produce the highest value-added chipmaking in the US – design, design engineering, and high precision manufacturing – so Americans gain that technological expertise.What happens if every nation subsidizing chipmakers demands these for itself?Chipmakers will then have to choose. The extortion will then end.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      Why did they wait? Uvalde anger grows over bungled police response

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      Why did they wait? Uvalde anger grows over bungled police response Searing public testimony illustrates extreme reluctance of police chief to let his officers put a stop to the carnageRuben Ruiz, a school district police officer in Uvalde, Texas, was standing in a hallway outside the classroom where his wife taught fourth-graders a couple of days before summer break. His wife, Eva Mireles, had just called his cellphone, begging for help after an intruder had shot her and her students.Ruiz was among 18 officers who had rushed over to his wife’s school, Robb elementary, in response to reports of an active shooter. He was ready to charge in with a few of his fellow law enforcement officers, battle the 18-year-old rifleman who had invaded the campus, and hopefully save his wife and her students.But Ruiz’s fellow officers didn’t back him up when he began advancing toward Mireles’s classroom door. They stopped him, stripped him of his service gun and made him leave the campus.Uvalde shootings: police response an ‘abject failure’, Texas safety chief saysRead more“She had been shot and was dying,” Texas’s public safety chief, Steve McCraw, said of Mireles while speaking earlier this week to a panel of state lawmakers investigating the attack at Robb elementary on 24 May. “And what happened to [Ruiz] is he … was detained and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.”Ultimately, Mireles, a co-worker and 19 of their students – 10- and 11-year-olds – were murdered by the intruder at Robb elementary. Another 17 people at the campus were wounded before, 77 minutes after the first call to emergency operators reported the intrusion, police stormed Mireles’s classroom and killed the murderer.McCraw’s public testimony to Texas state senators about Ruiz and Mireles was only the latest in a growing mound of evidence illustrating the extreme reluctance the Uvalde school district police force’s chief showed before letting officers put a stop to the carnage at Robb elementary.News about the 21 children and teachers killed at the elementary school in a small town of 16,000 mostly Latino residents near the Mexican border was traumatic enough for a nation where deadly mass shootings occur with alarming regularity.Yet revelations in recent days about the exact number of well-equipped officers who essentially stood in place for more than an hour while an intruder murdered his victims have made the tragedy ever tougher to comprehend.Hopes for accountability that feels somewhat satisfying – let alone like justice – are waning. It took a month before the school district put its police force chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, on administrative leave, keeping him on the payroll but without him really working his position.Residents who had recently elected Arredondo to a city council seat were hoping to subject him to a recall election because it would have required fewer than 50 signatures. Yet laws prevent them from taking such a step until February next year.And legal precedent affords little hope that parents could sue authorities in Texas to collect civil damages for their failure to limit the carnage at Robb elementary despite a prime opportunity to do so, according to experts. It all made for a week that seemed to prove that, even with the unthinkable, it can always get worse.Arredondo’s continued leadership of the Uvalde school district police force seemed to become untenable after a Texas senate committee investigating the massacre at Robb heard McCraw’s testimony and published evidence to support it.A timeline that the committee pieced together in part by officers’ body-worn camera footage and radio transmissions showed that there were 11 officers positioned outside two classrooms under attack within seven minutes of the first 911 call about the intrusion. At least two of the officers had rifles, providing a force that was adequate to mount an assault against the intruder in an attempt to rescue those he was terrorizing, McCraw said.Police who respond first to so-called active shooters have been trained for at least two decades to confront the attackers as immediately as practical rather than wait for reinforcements, a painful lesson learned through countless mass killings across America over the years.But at that point, Arredondo had officers wait while he called the municipal police force for reinforcements.“We don’t have enough firepower right now – it’s all pistol, and he has an AR-15,” Arredondo said, according to a committee transcript of that call.Since then, in one of the few media interviews he has granted, Arredondo told the Texas Tribune website that a factor costing him time was that the door to the classroom where the intruder was had potentially been locked, and he couldn’t immediately find its key.But, within a minute of his call for reinforcements, emergency dispatchers had asked officers by radio whether the door was locked. An officer accompanying Arredondo said he wasn’t sure, but those at the scene had with them a so-called hooligan tool that can pry locked doors open. On Tuesday, McCraw said the door had not in fact been locked.Seven minutes after that exchange, Ruiz – the husband of the teacher in charge of the classroom under attack – told fellow officers that his wife “says she is shot” inside. But, instead of going in, officers removed him from the scene and stayed put, with one suggesting that they needed the incoming backup to help with crowd control outside the building.Cellphone videos from the parking lot around that time showed officers holding back onlookers urging the cops to charge into the school, other parts of which were being evacuated.Soon, a member of the state public safety department who went to the scene began asking whether there were children still in the classroom. Another officer replied, “It is unknown at this time.”The public safety department officer then twice said, “If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there.” The timeline notes a radio transmission reminding officers at the scene that “it is critical” to let the local police take the lead on the situation.That transmission seems to contradict a prior statement in Arredondo’s limited media remarks that he was unsure who was in charge and assumed someone else was.In any event, 50 minutes after the transmission about letting the local police lead, Arredondo told officers to storm the classroom where the intruder was when ready. Officers did and killed the intruder.McCraw dismissed Arredondo’s handling of the response as “abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned” about mass shootings.A little more than a day after McCraw made that statement, the school district’s superintendent placed Arredondo on administrative leave.Police chief who led response to school shooting sworn in to Uvalde councilRead moreNeither Arredondo nor his attorney have responded to repeated requests for comment. Arredondo testified behind closed doors for a separate state house of representatives committee investigating the killings at Robb, but he hasn’t made any public statements about what he told that body.It’s clear that the loved ones of the killed children and teachers want more.Yet the prospects for a resounding civil lawsuit over the police failure to protect the victims seem unlikely. Ominously for the potential plaintiffs, in late 2020, a federal court of appeals left in place a lower court ruling that found police officers were not liable for various failures to protect students during the 2018 shooting that killed 17 at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida.“It’s very difficult to recover on those,” said Gary Bizal, a Louisiana-based attorney who often represents people accusing police of failing to uphold their duty. “You almost have to prove that you knew something would happen if you didn’t react, didn’t do anything – not that it was a possibility, but it was guaranteed.”So some of those in Uvalde still deep in their grief went to a Tuesday night meeting of the city council, the second in a row which Arredondo had missed.The council was considering a leave of absence for Arredondo, which would protect him from being possibly dismissed from the panel if he missed a third consecutive meeting. But residents spoke out against cutting Arredondo any sort of break, and the council voted the measure down.One of the speakers, Kim Hammond, said there was palpable momentum for a petition to make Arredondo face a recall election for the seat he won on 7 May. Because his election had quite a low turnout, such a petition would only need 45 signatures, or 25% of the total votes cast for the contest.But the law protects him from such a petition for the first eight months in office, and Hammond implored the council to make Arredondo either start attending meetings or risk losing his seat.“Don’t give him an out” with the leave of absence, Hammond said. “We don’t want him – we want him out.”The grandmother of 10-year-old Amerie Jo Garza, one of the students killed at Robb, implored the council to dismiss Arredondo if he missed the necessary number of meetings.“Make it right for everyone in here,” Berlinda Arreola said. “We deserve better. Our children deserve better. And those teachers deserve better. Please! Please! We’re begging – get this man out of our lives.”TopicsUS newsTexas school shootingUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The Observer view on Donald Trump’s influence on Roe v Wade ruling | Observer editorial

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      The Observer view on Donald Trump’s influence on Roe v Wade rulingObserver editorialThe US abortion ban is the ex-president’s legacy and he must face prosecution for abuse of power The baleful influence of Donald Trump continues to be felt in American life despite his decisive election defeat in 2020 and subsequent disgraceful behaviour. The supreme court’s regressive, dangerous and insulting decision to abolish a woman’s constitutional right to abortion was made possible by Trump’s appointment of three highly conservative justices who all voted for the change.This disaster is not all Trump’s doing. A noisy anti-abortion lobby of rightwing Republicans and evangelical Christians has fought for decades to scrap the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling giving women the right to choose. But they represent, at most, one-third of Americans. Trump adopted their minority view for the same reason he champions the gun lobby – for electoral advantage.Although the court’s decision was anticipated, it is still a tremendous shock – as ensuing nationwide protests suggest. The speed with which some Republican-controlled states are moving to outlaw or restrict abortion is also dismaying. The fear is that the other hard-won privacy rights and freedoms, such as the right to contraception and same-sex marriage, may be threatened.Seeking to limit divisions, the chief justice, John Roberts, had hoped to limit Roe v Wade rather than abolish it outright. The Trump justices’ willingness to take the most extreme option will further undermine public confidence in the court, damaged like other US institutions by the political partisanship of the “culture wars” era.President Joe Biden described the ruling as a “sad day”, while outraged Democrats say they will try to enshrine abortion rights in federal law. To do so, they need to win big in November’s congressional midterm elections. Abortion rights are thus certain to be a central issue in the autumn campaign and the 2024 presidential election.Trump will relish that. As is his wont, he claimed personal credit for the court’s decision, saying it was his “great honour” to have made it possible. Yet it has long been evident he lacks strong religious or moral convictions about abortion or anything else. As always, his motives are self-serving. Even erstwhile diehard supporters tire of such cynicism. There is evidence that Trump fatigue is setting in.Proof of that contention has been on display in recent days on Capitol Hill, where an investigation into the 6 January 2021 insurrection is providing jaw-dropping testimony about Trump’s undeniable criminal culpability. From the moment he realised Biden was winning on election night in November 2020, Trump began a concerted, deliberate and illegal effort to reverse the result.Abusing the power of his office, Trump intimidated officials in Georgia and other swing states in a move to fiddle the vote, knowingly disseminated false claims of fraud and conspiracy theories, and dangled promises of presidential pardons for those who supported his coup attempt. “Just say the election is corrupt and leave the rest to me,” senior justice department officials said Trump told them.When none of that worked, he openly incited white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys to attack Congress to prevent certification of Biden’s victory. When they threatened to hang his vice-president, Mike Pence, for refusing to invalidate the election outcome, he applauded. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he reportedly told aides. Pence “deserves it”.Like the abortion debate, this is not over. Clinging to his “big lie”, Trump claims everything else is a hoax. As ever, he subverts American democracy. But he has been weakened and now is not the time to let him off the hook. Trump plainly broke numerous laws. Most Americans agree: he must face criminal prosecution.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.ukTopicsRoe v WadeOpinionAbortionDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackWomenUS politicseditorialsReuse this content More

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      How the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed America

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      How the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed America Leaders of the movement understood very well that if you can capture the courts, you can change societyThe supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reverses the constitutional abortion rights that American women have enjoyed over the past 50 years, has come as a surprise to many voters. A majority, after all, support reproductive rights and regard their abolition as regressive and barbaric.Understood in the context of the movement that created the supreme court in its current incarnation, however, there is nothing surprising about it. In fact, it marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of the agenda this movement has in mind.At the core of the Dobbs decision lies the conviction that the power of government can and should be used to impose a certain moral and religious vision – a supposedly biblical and regressive understanding of the Christian religion – on the population at large.How did this conviction come to have such influence in the courts, given America’s longstanding principle of church-state separation? To understand why this is happening now, it’s important to know something about the Christian nationalist movement’s history, how its leaders chose the issue of abortion as a means of creating single-issue voters, and how they united conservatives across denominational barriers by, in effect, inventing a new form of intensely political religion.Christian nationalists often claim their movement got its start as a grassroots reaction to Roe v Wade in 1973. But the movement actually gelled several years later with a crucial assist from a group calling itself the “New Right”.Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Phyllis Schlafly and other leaders of this movement were dissatisfied with the direction of the Republican party and the culture at large. “We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo,” Paul Weyrich said. “We want change – we are the forces of change.”They were angry at liberals, who they believed threatened to undermine national security with their softness on communism. They were angry at establishment conservatives – the “Rockefeller Republicans” – for siding with the liberals; they were angry about the rising tide of feminism, which they saw as a menace to the social order, and about the civil rights movement and the danger it posed to segregation. One thing that they were not particularly angry about, at least initially, was the matter of abortion rights.New Right leaders formed common cause with a handful of conservative Catholics, including George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, who shared their concerns, and drew in powerful conservative preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones Sr. They were determined to ignite a hyper-conservative counter-revolution. All they needed now was an issue that could be used to unify its disparate elements and draw in the rank and file.Among their core concerns was the fear that the supreme court might end tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. Jerry Falwell and many of his fellow southern, white, conservative pastors were closely involved with segregated schools and universities – Jones went so far as to call segregation “God’s established order” and referred to desegregationists as “Satanic propagandists” who were “leading colored Christians astray”. As far as these pastors were concerned, they had the right not just to separate people on the basis of race but to also receive federal money for the purpose.They knew, however, that “Stop the tax on segregation!” wasn’t going to be an effective rallying cry for their new movement. As the historian and author Randall Balmer wrote, “It wasn’t until 1979 – a full six years after Roe – that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”In many respects abortion was an unlikely choice, because when the Roe v Wade decision was issued, most Protestant Republicans supported it. The Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions in 1971 and 1974 expressing support for the liberalization of abortion law, and an editorial in their wire service hailed the passage of Roe v Wade, declaring that “religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.” As governor of California, Ronald Reagan passed the most liberal abortion law in the country in 1967. Conservative icon Barry Goldwater supported abortion law liberalization too, at least early in his career, and his wife Peggy was a cofounder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.Yet abortion turned out to be the critical unifying issue for two fundamentally political reasons. First, it brought together conservative Catholics who supplied much of the intellectual leadership of the movement with conservative Protestants and evangelicals. Second, by tying abortion to the perceived social ills of the age – the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation – the issue became a focal point for the anxieties about social change welling up from the base.Over time, pro-choice voices were purged from the Republican party. In her 2016 book, How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life, Phyllis Schlafly details the considerable effort it took, over several decades, to force the Republican party to change its views on the issue. What her book and the history shows is that the “pro-life religion” that we see today, which cuts across denominational boundaries on the political right, is a modern creation.In recent decades, the religious right has invested many hundreds of millions of dollars developing a complex and coordinated infrastructure, whose features include rightwing policy groups, networking organizations, data initiatives and media. A critical component of this infrastructure is its sophisticated legal sphere.Movement leaders understood very well that if you can capture the courts, you can change society. Leading organizations include the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is involved in many of the recent cases intended to degrade the principle of church-state separation; First Liberty; Becket, formerly known as the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty; and the Federalist Society, a networking and support organization for rightwing jurists and their allies whose leader, Leonard Leo, has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to a network of affiliated organizations. This infrastructure has created a pipeline to funnel ideologues to important judicial positions at the national and federal level. Nearly 90% of Trump’s appellate court nominees were or are Federalist Society members, according to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and all six conservative justices on the supreme court are current or former members.The rightwing legal movement has spent several decades establishing a new regime in which “religious liberty” is reframed as an exemption from the law, one enjoyed by a certain preferred category of religion. LGBT advocacy groups are concerned that the supreme court’s willingness, in the next session, to hear the case of a Colorado website designer who wishes to refuse services to same-sex couples is a critical step to overturning a broad range of anti-discrimination laws that protect LGBT Americans along with women, members of religious minority groups and others.The legal powerhouses of the Christian right have also recognized that their efforts can be turned into a gravy train of public money. That is one of the reasons a recent supreme court decision, which ruled Maine must fund religious schools as part of a state tuition program, was predicted by observers of this movement. This decision forces the state to fund religious schools no matter how discriminatory their practices and sectarian their teachings. “This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.This supreme court has already made clear how swiftly our Christian nationalist judiciary will change the law to suit this vision of a society ruled by a reactionary elite, a society with a preferred religion and a prescribed code of sexual behavior, all backed by the coercive power of the state. The idea that they will stop with overturning Roe v Wade is a delusion.TopicsAbortionRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsReligionChristianityfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Democrats hope to tap anger over Roe in November midterms – will it work?

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      Democrats hope to tap anger over Roe in November midterms – will it work?Analysts say more voters should turn out in the wake of the supreme court ruling – but that could help Republicans too “This fall, Roe is on the ballot,” Joe Biden told American voters in the wake of the US supreme court’s decision to scrap abortion rights.The US president was merely echoing a chorus of Democrats urging voters to elect pro abortion-rights lawmakers in November’s midterm elections in a bid to wrest greater control of Congress and perhaps allow abortion rights to be enshrined in legislation.Contraception, gay marriage: Clarence Thomas signals new targets for supreme courtRead moreBut it is also a tactic to try and inject Democratic voters with a sense of urgency and activism as the midterms approach, as currently the political establishment expect Biden and the Democrats to face a defeat at the hands of a resurgent Republican party.Until Roe fell – triggering a slew of Republican-led states to immediately move to ban abortion – Biden and his party have appeared moribund, and down in many polls. Buffeted by immense trouble passing a domestic agenda and hit by soaring inflation, Biden’s popularity has plummeted.But will the fall of Roe help Democrats reverse course on what looks like their current path to defeat? Or could the decision also help motivate the Republican base as the supreme court’s decision revealed the benefits to them of using power?Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democrat strategist, said it was too soon to know how far the court’s momentous decision to return the abortion issue to individual US states would go toward shaping voter’s priorities in November.“In states that Democrats do well generally, this will motivate turnout. In states where they do not do well, it will also motivate turnout – but not for the Democrats,” he says. “The issue is purple states, like Michigan, Georgia and Nevada, where you have equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans.”Four months out from November, voters are signaling that their priorities are rising crime, and inflation that has seen basic living costs shoot up for money, especially when it comes to gas prices.“If the question is will abortion help swing the election, the answer is probably not, though it could help in states where there’s a reasonable balance between Democrats and Republicans,” Sheinkopf says.“The presumption is that more women will turn out – but that depends on what’s going in those states at the time. People will make their decisions based on what’s most personal to them,” he adds. “Six or seven dollars a gallon of gasoline, a sense that things are out of control as the Democrats run the country, an increase in homicides nationally, may be better motivators for a majority of voters than Roe v Wade.”Sonia Ossorio, the president of Now [National Organization for Women] New York, said: “I don’t see how this cannot energize voters. Women are fed up. Formula shortages, childcare shortages, gas prices, losing their jobs in unprecedented numbers during the pandemic, and now having our reproductive freedom gutted by the supreme court.“The response we’re getting is unprecedented in my two decades in the women’s rights movement.”The court’s decision establishes political battlegrounds for abortion across the 50 states. Already, many with conservative-leaning legislatures are banning or poised to ban many or most abortions. Nearly 400 abortion-related laws have been passed across US states since 2009, with 85% designed to restrict, regulate or oppose access, according to a Bloomberg News analysis.Kelsy Kretschmer, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author of a study examining women’s voting patterns, says it’s not clear that the decision will be help Democrats in a measurable way.“A significant proportion of white women are conservative and form the backbone of the pro-life movement and this is the thing they often care the most about. For Democrats, if you lose half of white women, you don’t have a winning majority of women,” she said.There are splits, too, over abortion rights even within Democrat-aligned voters, where conservative Democrats may oppose federal funding for abortion.At the same time, Kretschmer says, abortion rights have always been part of the Democratic platform. “It’s a core tenet of the Democratic party and most understand that outlawing abortion completely is a non-starter.”But predicting how Friday’s ruling will affect November’s vote is outside the scope of prior experience. When Roe v Wade was decided in 1971, abortion did not play the public role in plays now.“The research is quite clear that people don’t make voting decisions about abortion rights. People tend to have strong opinions one way or the other, but it doesn’t tend to affect their vote choice,” Kretschmer says.But she points out that this was prior to this moment in which Roe vs Wade may only be among the first of the women’s rights dominos to fall or could open the way to repealing rights around contraception and marriage equality. “The hope is among Democrats and the feminist movement in general, this time will be different and enough to shake people out of complacency about it,” she said.She added: “We’ve never really had a moment like this, where something so woven into basic political and civic life was ripped out all at once. That moment for abortion is now and we’ve just never seen it before. So the hope is just that – that this is a watershed moment.”Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, certainly sees it that way. Voting for Democrats in November, she said, is the only way to try and reverse the fall of Roe – or prevent even worse things happening.“Be aware of this: The Republicans are plotting a nationwide abortion ban. They cannot be allowed to have a majority in the Congress to do that,” Pelosi said. “A woman’s right to choose, reproductive freedom, is on the ballot in November.”TopicsUS newsUS politicsDemocratsUS midterm elections 2022newsReuse this content More