Closing summary
The Biden administration took advantage of a quiet week in Washington to lay the groundwork for the roughly two months of campaigning before the November midterm elections, when Democrats will have to fight for control of Congress.
Here’s what else happened today:
White House chief of staff Ron Klain gave an interview to Politico, where he promoted Biden’s legislative accomplishments and previewed Democrats’ message to voters.
A Georgia judge blocked senator Lindsey Graham’s attempt to quash a subpoena compelling his appearance before the special grand jury investigating election meddling in the state.
Democrats attacked Mike Pence’s trip to Iowa, as the former vice president continues exploring whether to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
An Ohio House Democrat criticized Biden in a television advertisement. She is fighting to keep her seat representing a district whose boundaries have been redrawn to include more Republican voters.
More LGBTQ politicians are holding elected office in America than ever before, according to a new survey.
The supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade may be causing a surge in women registering to vote, a political data firm has found.
“Joe Biden’s letting Ohio solar manufacturers be undercut by China.” Sounds like a Republican campaign advertisement. It’s not – instead, it’s a television spot from an Ohio House Democrat fighting for her seat in a newly redrawn district that’s become much more friendly to the GOP.
The New York Times reports that Marcy Kaptur has become the latest and most prominent Democratic lawmakers to publicly break with Biden with an ad that also highlights her collaboration with Rob Portman, Ohio’s retiring Republican senator. It’s a reversal from just last month, when she greeted the president at the airport in Cleveland during his visit to the city. However, such conduct is not unheard of for Democrats this election cycle. Maine representative Jared Golden aired an ad where he described himself as an “independent voice” that voted against “trillions of dollars of President Biden’s agenda because I knew it would make inflation worse,” according to the Times.
Then there are the somewhat bizarre actions of Carolyn Maloney of New York, who is fighting to keep her House seat against a challenge from Jerry Nadler, a fellow Democrat. She had to apologize after saying Biden wasn’t planning to stand for reelection in 2024, only to make the same comment again.
Republican House candidates who are facing close races are being advised not to talk too much about Donald Trump, but rather try to concentrate voters’ attention on the issues where they see an advantage over Democrats, CNN reports.
“I don’t say his name, ever. I just avoid saying his name generally,” a Republican lawmaker in a tight race told the network. “I talk about the policies of his that I like.”
The advice comes from Tom Emmer, a GOP House representative and chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is tasked with reclaiming Congress’ lower chamber in the November elections. While a spokesman for Emmer didn’t address the report about Trump, he told CNN, “Candidates know their districts best,” and “public and private polls show the midterms will be a referendum on Joe Biden and Democrats’ failed agenda that’s left voters paying record prices, dealing with soaring violent crime and facing billions in middle-class tax hikes.”
As the report notes, this strategy could become complicated if Trump opts to announce another campaign for the presidency before the November midterms. Earlier this week, The Guardian reported he was being counseled to do so to avoid an indictment by the justice department over his handling of classified material.
The investigation into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia was one of the earliest and most intense scandals of his presidency, and the legal wrangling over it still hasn’t finished.
The Associated Press reports that a federal court of appeals panel has found that William Barr, Trump’s attorney general in 2019, wrongly withheld a memo that he cited to say that Trump did not obstruct justice during in the investigation into his ties with Moscow.
Here’s more from the AP:
At issue in the case is a March 24, 2019, memorandum from the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, or OLC, and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation could support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.
Barr has said he looked to that opinion in concluding that Trump did not illegally obstruct the Russia probe, which was an investigation of whether his campaign had colluded with Russia to tip the 2016 election.
The Justice Department turned over other documents to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as part of the group’s lawsuit, but declined to give it the memo. Government lawyers said they were entitled under public records law to withhold the memo because it reflected internal deliberations among lawyers before any formal decision had been reached on what Mueller’s evidence showed.
But U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said last year that those arguments were disingenuous because the memo was prepared for Barr at about the same time as a separate Justice Department letter informing Congress and the public that Barr and other senior department leaders concluded that Trump had not obstructed justice.
The memo noted that “Mueller had declined to accuse President Trump of obstructing justice but also had declined to exonerate him” and “recommended that Barr ‘reach a judgment’ on whether the evidence constituted obstruction of justice,” the panel wrote Friday. The memo also noted that “the Report’s failure to take a definitive position could be read to imply an accusation against President Trump” if the confidential report were released to the public, the court wrote.
Busy day for courts in Georgia. A federal judge in the state has just rejected another bid by Republican senator Lindsey Graham to quash a subpoena compelling his appearance before a special grand jury probing attempts to meddle in the 2020 elections by Donald Trump’s allies.
“Senator Graham raises a number of arguments as to why he is likely to succeed on the merits, but they are all unpersuasive, not least because they largely misconstrue the Court’s holdings,” judge Leigh Martin May wrote in denying the senator’s motion.
“A stay is not justified even assuming for the sake of argument that Senator Graham has shown ‘a substantial case on the merits.’”
Earlier this week, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani appeared before the panel, which has informed him he is a target of their investigation.
However in Georgia, a judge will allow a state law provision that bans giving food and water to voters standing in line to go into effect for the November midterm elections, though it is still subject to further legal challenges, the Associated Press reports.
The law, passed last year, was part of a Republican-backed effort to reform the state’s election system, which Democrats attacked as an attempt to make it harder for the poor and racial minorities to vote.
But as the AP notes, the legal battle isn’t over:
U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee said the voting rights groups may ultimately prevail on part of their challenge, but he agreed with the state that it’s too close to the election to block any part of the provision. He noted that requiring different rules for the general election than those in place for the primaries earlier this year could cause confusion for election workers.
Boulee said that voting rights groups had failed to show that prohibiting the distribution of food and drinks within 150 feet (45 meters) of a polling place violates their constitutional rights. But he said that another part of the provision that bars people from offering food and drink within 25 feet (7.6 meters) of any person in line is probably unconstitutional because that zone is tied to the location of voters and could stretch thousands of feet from the polling place.
Meanwhile in Florida, a federal judge has blocked a provision of the “Stop WOKE” Act that banned private employers from discussing “white man’s privilege” and other biases during diversity training.
Judge Mark Walker compared the law to the popular TV show Stranger Things in ordering the injunction, The New York Times reports. “In the popular television series ‘Stranger Things,’ the ‘upside down’ describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world. Now, like the heroine in ‘Stranger Things,’ this court is once again asked to pull Florida back from the upside down.”
The law bans Florida employers from forcing its workers to attend diversity trainings that would make them feel guilty or uncomfortable, and also regulates what can be said at such trainings. According to the Times, businesses have chafed at its restrictions, with Bill George, a professor of management at Harvard, describing it to the Times as “the No. 1 issue I hear about from C.E.O.s these days.”
Conservatives’ judicial losing streak continued today, when a Michigan judge blocked the state’s abortion ban from taking effect.
Here’s video of Jacob James Cunningham’s ruling:
Judge Jacob James Cunningham sides with abortion rights advocates and grants an injunction to block enforcement of Michigan’s 1931 law banning abortion:
— The Recount (@therecount) August 19, 2022
“The harm to the body of women … in not issuing the injunction could not be more real, clear, present, and dangerous.” pic.twitter.com/lnt59yEdoA
According to the Associated Press, the injunction will keep abortion legal in the state until this fall, when voters will decide whether to keep the ban on the books. It is also possible that the state supreme court will weigh in on the law around that time.
Details are out about what’s in the next package of military aid for Ukraine.
Here’s a taste from the Associated Press:
The United States is poised to announce it will provide Ukraine with nearly $800m in new military aid Friday, including at least a dozen Scan Eagle surveillance drones, according to several US officials.
Officials said the bulk of the aid package will be additional howitzers and ammunition, including Javelin missiles that the Ukrainian military has been using effectively to try and hold off Russian forces and take back territory Moscow has gained.
Two officials confirmed the new inclusion of the portable, long-endurance drones which are launched by a catapult and can be retrieved. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the aid ahead of its public release.
And here’s our latest reporting on the war in Ukraine:
Updated
Transgender children in Utah will be not be subjected to sports participation limits at the start of the new school year, after a judge delayed the implementation of a statewide ban.
The Associated Press has more:
Judge Keith Kelly’s decision Friday to put the law on hold until a legal challenges is resolved came after he recently rejected a request by Utah state attorneys to dismiss the case. Most Utah schools students head back to classes this month.
Attorneys representing the families of three transgender student-athletes filed the lawsuit challenging the ban last May, contending it violates the Utah constitution’s guarantees of equal rights and due process.
Similar cases are underway in states such as Idaho, West Virginia and Indiana.
The issue of whether transgender girls should be allowed to participate in female sports has become flashpoint across the US with Republican lawmakers passing legislation to block them based on the premise it gives them an unfair competitive advantage.
Transgender rights advocates counter that the rules aren’t just about sports, but another way to demean and attack transgender youth.
More:
A Republican candidate for Congress in New York said he was “being facetious” when, in the same interview, he said the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, should be executed for authorising the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida home.
The candidate, Carl Paladino, recently caused controversy when he praised Adolf Hitler, as “the kind of leader we need today”.
Paladino made his remark about the attorney general in an interview with the far-right site Breitbart. Paladino said: “So we have a couple of unelected people who are running our government, in an administration of people like Garland, who should be not only impeached, he probably should be executed.
“The guy is just lost. He’s a lost soul. He’s trying to get an image, and his image, his methodology is just terrible. To raid the home of a former president is just – people are scratching their heads and they’re saying, ‘What is wrong with this guy?’”
Asked to explain his “executed” remark, Paladino said: “I’m just being facetious. The man should be removed from office.”
More:
The day so far
The Biden administration is taking advantage of a quiet week in Washington to lay the groundwork for the roughly two months of campaigning before the November midterm elections, when Democrats will have to fight for control of Congress.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain gave an interview to Politico, where he promoted Biden’s legislative accomplishments and previewed Democrats’ message to voters.
Democrats attacked Mike Pence’s trip to Iowa as the former vice president continues exploring whether to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
More LGBTQ politicians are holding elected office in America than ever, according to a new survey.
The supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade may be causing a surge in women registering to vote, a political data firm has found.
Mike Pence’s visit to Iowa, which marks his fourth trip to the Hawkeye State since leaving office last year, has intensified speculation that he plans to run for president next year.
As the first caucus state on the presidential primary calendar, Iowa is a top destination for potential candidates, and Pence has also made recent appearances in other early voting states like New Hampshire and South Carolina.
While in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Pence made headlines by suggesting he was open to speaking to the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. Pence was on Capitol Hill as the insurrection started, and he had to be escorted out of the Senate chamber due to concerns for his safety.
“If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it,” Pence said Wednesday. “I would have to reflect on the unique role that I was serving as vice-president.”
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, did not address Pence’s potential appearance before the January 6 committee.
Harrison also deflected questions about whether Iowa would continue to serve as the first caucus state, after the disastrous handling of the Democratic results in 2020.
“The rules and bylaws committee will revisit the calendar in the coming days after the midterms,” Harrison said. “Our focus is primarily on winning these midterm elections, and then we’ll revisit where we are on the presidential calendar right after the midterms.”
Democrats attack Pence as the former VP heads to Iowa
Democratic leaders went on the attack against Mike Pence, as the former vice-president under Donald Trump heads to Iowa today amid increased speculation of a potential 2024 campaign.
Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, sharply criticized Pence’s repeated calls for a national abortion ban in the wake of the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
“Pence wants to criminalize abortion and further restrict access to reproductive health care for thousands of Iowans,” Harrison said on a press call today. “Mike Pence has been dreaming of the day abortion is outlawed. He’s been dreaming about it for years.”
While in Iowa, Pence is expected to appear alongside Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who is up for reelection in November, and Republican congressional candidate Zach Nunn.
“These candidates also support the most extreme anti-abortion policies that the Republican party is pushing,” Harrison said. “Republicans are more focused on taking us backwards on abortion than making progress on the issues that Iowans care about.”
Updated
More LGBTQ politicians than ever are holding public office in the United States, according to a new report that underscores the growing diversity of leaders nationwide.
As of June 2022, there are 1,043 known officials across the country who identify as LGBTQ, equal to about 0.2 percent of elected offices, the LGBTQ Victory Institute said in its annual data. That’s an increase of 5.8 percent overall from 2021, though the ranks of out politicians of color rose 12.3 percent compared to 1.3 percent for white politicians over the same period.
However, the proportion of elected officials that identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer is far from representative of the share of the overall population, which about 7.1 percent.
“Despite the fact the LGBTQ community has never had equitable representation in government – and we still have a long way to go – there are clear signs of progress. LGBTQ elected officials represent the strength and diversity of not only who we are as a society now, but also the America we aspire to build for future generations,” the institute’s president and CEO Annise Parker said in a statement accompanying the report.
The supreme court’s June decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and abortion rights nationally may be driving a surge of women registering to vote, according to a political data firm.
Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, has tweeted a few thoughts on what he has observed among voter registration data:
Wow. I've been sharing data showing a huge surge in women registering to vote since the 6/24 Dobbs decision. I just started to look at some age and party breakdowns of those new registrants, and the numbers are jaw-dropping.
— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 19, 2022
Starting in PA, where women have accounted for >56% of new registrants in that time period. Those women new registrants are 62%D to 15% R and 54% are under the age of 25. Compare that to men new registrants at 41% <25 and 43% D, 28% R.
— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 19, 2022
I've seen some noting that the number of new regs we've seen since Dobbs is small relative to the number of existing regs (presumably to minimize what we're seeing). That's accurate, but variations in new registrant patterns are indicative of changes in intensity overall.
— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 19, 2022
The firm has published a deeper dive into the data, with a focus on Michigan and Wisconsin, where the November elections could make a big difference on abortion care accessibility.
Remember Covid-19? The pandemic caused the United States’ biggest health and economic crisis in nearly a century and upended the 2020 election, but now appears forgotten in the public discourse – to many Americans’ chagrin, Maya Yang reports:
Despite signs that indicate the latest Covid-19 surge is slowing down, an average of 400 deaths in the US is still reported on a daily basis.
Various mask and social distancing mandates across the country are becoming anything but strictly enforced.
But as Americans and many of their elected officials go about their daily lives, many healthcare professionals still on the frontlines of the pandemic and severely affected Covid-19 patients are left wondering whether the rest of us are moving too quickly from the worst days of the pandemic.
Have we simply forgotten about Covid-19?
Data obtained earlier this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that the rate of new infections has been decreasing, with the country reporting an average of 107,000 new cases a day. This marks a 12% decrease compared to infection rates two weeks ago.
A major corporate lobbying group has tried to convince Americans that it cares about the environment and climate change. But as Adam Lowenstein reports, its actions are not matching its words:
Three years ago today, in a statement that would be described as “historic”, “monumental” and “revolutionary”, America’s most powerful and politically connected corporations promised to “protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses”.
The “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” came from the Business Roundtable, an influential Washington DC lobbying group whose 200-plus members include the chief executives of some of the world’s biggest companies, including Apple, Pepsi, Walmart and Google.
Today, on the statement’s third anniversary, the Business Roundtable and its member CEOs continue to issue earnest statements about the climate crisis. But the organization is also working diligently – and spending liberally – to weaken efforts that would enable investors to hold companies accountable for their climate promises.
Back on the topic of whether voters are beginning to drift towards Democrats despite Biden’s poor approval ratings, The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter has today published a piece that looks at just that question.
It confirms that there are signs of a shift in voters’ perceptions, but that has less to do with Democrats than Republicans. “It’s not that voters think Democrats are doing better; it’s that they think Republicans are as out-of-touch as as Democrats,” according to the report.
Here’s more from the story:
For the last six weeks or so, the media spotlight has been off of Biden and focused instead on issues that put Republicans on the defensive, like abortion, January 6th and Donald Trump. That has helped to erode Republicans’ previous advantage as the party that is more in tune with voters’ day-to-day concerns.
“Each week that goes by, more and more people see the GOP as increasingly focused on the wrong things,” veteran Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me. “They’re focused on what ignites right-wing social media and what pleases the former President, not on what matters to the American people. It’s like a CEO promising to rehab a company by focusing on renovating the executives’ parking spaces.”
But that doesn’t mean the potent forces working against Biden have gone anywhere, or that voters are necessarily getting over the inflation wave that’s pushed costs up across the economy. It concludes with an anecdote:
Earlier this week, I was able to see how this match-up of messages might play out with voters this fall. At a focus group of white male swing voters, the moderator presented a list of Democratic accomplishments, including things like the infrastructure bill, the Recovery Act, and, of course, the newly passed Inflation Reduction Act. Also noted were low unemployment and strong job growth. When asked to respond, a man from Georgia replied, “I don’t disagree with anything here. But, I am paying double for lumber and groceries than I was three years ago.”
The Associated Press reports that Biden plans a summit next month to address gun violence and racism:
Joe Biden will host a White House summit next month aimed at combating hate-fueled violence.
The White House announced on Friday that Biden will host the United We Stand Summit on 15 September, seeking to highlight the “corrosive effects” of violence on public safety and democracy.
Advocates pushed Biden to hold the event after 10 Black people were killed at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in May, aiming as well to address hate-driven violence in cities including El Paso, Texas, Pittsburgh and Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
“As President Biden said in Buffalo after the horrific mass shooting earlier this year, in the battle for the soul of our nation ‘We must all enlist in this great cause of America,’” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
The Democratic spending bill Biden signed into law last week to fight climate change and lower health care costs also reversed years of underfunding at the Internal Revenue Service. The Guardian’s Joan E Greve reports on the Republican counterattack to the money, which relies on claims that are more or less false:
The picture that the top Republican painted was both vivid and terrifying. He warned that additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service would lead to armed auditors banging down front doors to squeeze hard-earned dollars from working Americans.
“Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa with these?” Senator Chuck Grassley said on Fox News last week.
The Orwellian image conjured up by Grassley bears little resemblance to reality. Democrats have indeed directed nearly $80bn to the IRS over the next 10 years as part of their climate and healthcare spending package, the Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law on Tuesday.
Here’s the meat of White House chief of staff Ron Klain’s argument to American voters, as he put it to Politico:
“Elections are choices, and the choice just couldn’t be any clearer right now. Democrats have stood up to the big special interests. They stood up to the big corporations and insisted that all corporations pay minimum taxes, stood up to the big oil companies and passed climate change legislation. They stood up to Big Pharma and passed prescription drug legislation. They stood up to the gun industry and passed gun control legislation. Things that this city [was] unable to deliver on for decades because the special interests had things locked down, Joe Biden and his allies in Congress have been able to deliver on.”
The point of interviews like these is to get the administration’s message out ahead of November’s midterms, when voters will get a chance to decide which lawmakers they want representing them, and ultimately which party controls Congress. Considering Biden’s low approval ratings, the base case now is that Republicans have a good shot at taking the House, while Democrats seem favored to narrowly keep the Senate, though anything could happen.
The White House would, of course, prefer Democrats hold onto both chambers. If one falls into the hands of the GOP, the prospects for any major legislation getting through Congress become dramatically slimmer for the next two years. Klain and others seem to be hoping that two things will happen: either enough voters change their minds about Biden, or they divorce their dislike of the president from their opinions of Democrats on the ballot. It may be premature to say whether the latter is happening, but when it comes to the former, polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight does show the president’s approval rating recovering from something of a nadir reached in mid-July.
In closing, Klain offered this comment on Biden’s public profile, as compared to the previous White House occupant:
“I don’t think it’s true he’s out there less than his predecessors. I just think Donald Trump created an expectation of a president creating a shitstorm every single day.”
White House sees Biden accomplishments as historic. Will Americans agree?
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Over the past year and a half of his presidency, Joe Biden has signed legislation to intended to curb gun violence, fight climate change, lower health care costs, promote semiconductor production and revamp the nation’s infrastructure. He’s also presided over the highest inflation rate since the 1980s and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, cratering his approval ratings. But to White House chief of staff Ron Klain, the focus should be on the former, not the latter. In an interview with Politico published this morning, he argues that Biden has made a historic impact comparable to Democratic predecessors like Franklin D Roosevelt and Lyndon B Johnson. Come November, we’ll see if voters believe him.
Here’s a look at what to expect today:
Biden remains on vacation, and is currently in Delaware.
Mike Pence, the Republican former vice-president, is visiting Iowa, an early kingmaker for presidential contenders.
If you’re wondering why it’s so quiet, Washington DC is usually this way in August. Not only is the president on vacation, but Congress is in recess and most lawmakers are back in their districts. They should return around the first week of September.
