Labour’s election campaign received rousing support from American progressive champion Bernie Sanders on Thursday at the start of a three-day UK speaking tour which he hopes will help galvanise the British left.
Drawing parallels between anti-establishment anger at both ends of the political spectrum in Britain and the US, the former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination also applauded Jeremy Corbyn’s efforts to reshape the Labour party.
“What has impressed me – and there is a real similarity between what he has done and what I did – is he has taken on the establishment of the Labour party, he has gone to the grassroots and he has tried to transform that party … and that is exactly what I am trying to do,” said Sanders.
“I am also impressed by his willingness to talk about class issues,” he added during a sold-out speech at the Brighton festival. “Too many people run away from the grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality that exist in the United States, the UK and all over the world. We will never make the kind of changes we need unless we take on the levels of inequality that exist.”
The comments are the most extensive yet linking the two movements, though Sanders stressed that his remarks should not been seen as a formal endorsement, arguing that this would be inappropriate behaviour for a foreign politician at this time.
“I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn needs my advice,” said the Vermont senator. “I think he is doing quite well. Nor do the people of the UK need my advice on who to vote for. I think they understand. But I have been very impressed by the campaign that he has been running and I wish him the very best.”
“These problems are not unique to the US,” he said. “Globalisation has left far too many people behind. Workers all over the world are seeing a decline in their standard of living. Unfettered free trade has allowed multinational corporations to enjoy huge profits and make the very rich even richer while workers are sucked into a race for the bottom.”
“These are not American issues, or British issues – these are international issues,” Sanders went on. “Our job is to create economies that work for working people – that uplift the poor, not make the very richest almost unbelievably rich while leaving everyone else behind. This is a global issue and we must address it.”
The senator, who stepped off the plane only shortly before speaking, did not address UK policy issues directly, sticking mainly to the themes of his 2016 campaign speech, but he inadvertently struck a chord with many in the room by describing the problems of students in the US.
“How insane is it that we are telling people that they are going to have pay off debt for decades for the crime of getting an education?” said Sanders, without referencing Labour’s own plan to abolish tuition fees.
As he spoke, news of Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate change agreement was relayed to the audience, something Sanders described as an “international embarrassment”. “Trump’s views do not reflect the views of the majority of the people in the United States,” he said, trying to reassure the audience.
“What I think Brexit was about was a lot of people who felt left behind by the global economy and their voices and their pain was not being heard,” he said. “What upset me was the Democratic party more or less ignored that reality. What Democrats have got to do is to have the courage to look at that pain.
“Trump understood that reality and spoke to that reality. Unfortunately, he lied, but that reality exists. It wasn’t so much that he won the election; it was that the Democrats lost the election.”
Bernie Sanders has accused Hillary Clinton of encouraging Islamic extremism in Libya, in a prelude to a Democratic debate on Saturday during which he is expected to go on the attack for the first time over the unintended consequences of the former secretary of state’s more interventionist foreign policy.
Speaking to the Guardian in an extensive pre-debate interview, the senator from Vermont criticised Clinton for carelessly fomenting regime change in Libya “without worrying” about the ensuing instability that has helped Islamic Stateforces take hold in the country.
“Regime change without worrying about what happens the day after you get rid of the dictator does not make a lot of sense,” Sanders said.
“I voted against the war in Iraq ... Secretary Clinton voted for that war. She was proud to have been involved in regime change in Libya, with [Muammar] Gaddafi, without worrying, I think, about what happened the day after and the kind of instability and the rise of Isis that we have seen in Libya.”
Many of his supporters have become frustrated at what they see as a reticence by Sanders to attack Clinton’s record directly, particularly after he appeared to be a reluctant participant in foreign policy discussions that dominated the second debate, held in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks.
Though initially reluctant to let foreign policy distract from what he considers a more important domestic agenda, the Sanders campaign increasingly sees his opponent’s hawkishness as an opportunity for him to turn Saturday’s debate in New Hampshire into a clash on the best way of achieving lasting national security.
“We have to be smart and not just tough,” he said. “And that means it’s not just destroying Isis, it’s making sure we do it in a way that leads to a better future and more stability in that region. And that means, absolutely in my view, that it cannot simply be as we did in Iraq ... It cannot simply be unilateral American action. What it means is a broad coalition, in which the troops on the ground are Muslim troops.”
He also turned on Republicans and hawks in the Democratic party for not heeding the lessons of recent US intervention in the Middle East.
“Sometimes in our country, especially among our Republican friends who suffer from amnesia, we forget what happened yesterday,” added Sanders. “I can remember like it was yesterday, when we had a ‘tough’ president. George W Bush, and his vice-president was even tougher. So tough! And they went into Iraq, man, and they got rid of Saddam Hussein, terrible guy. But they forgot to be thinking about what happens the day after you get rid of Saddam Hussein. What has happened in that region, as everybody knows, is there is massive instability, human tragedies beyond belief: in terms of people in that region, in terms of American soldiers, there is PTSD, traumatic brain injury, 6,700 dying.”
Sanders concedes that his vision of the US playing a supporting role in the fight agaisnt Isis rather than leading intervention is close to that of President Obama, but argues a tougher approach with Arab allies in the region is needed.
“The area that I would be a little bit different from Obama is I would put more pressure on Saudi Arabia, on Qatar, which happens to be per capita the wealthiest country on earth,” he said during Tuesday’s interview in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
He also blasted the impatience among many to provide glib reassurance to Americans in the face of complex and unpredictable domestic terror threats.
“Any idiot, especially one who is prepared to die, who has a gun, can start shooting up people,” added the Vermont senator. “Can I guarantee you, can you guarantee me that this will not happen? Nobody can.”
Though foreign policy has become a growing part of the senator’s campaign stump speech in recent days, he has largely avoided talking about gun control – an area where Clinton argues his record as a rural state senator is weak.
“I happen to believe that certain types of assault weapons, which are manufactured and designed for military purposes to kill people very quickly, should not be used in civilian society,” he said.
“There is a gun show loophole, which says you can circumvent the background check by going to a gun show and getting guns. We have to deal with that ... I believe we have to deal with what is called the strawman provision, which means that you can walk in and legally buy a gun and then sell it to him who is a criminal.”
Though less sweeping than many in the party would like, Sanders argues there is more practical chance of achieving political support for such measures.
“That is a broad consensus,” added Sanders. “That is what I believe, what I have voted for. It is not very different from what Hillary Clinton or anybody else believes. But politics being what it is, they saw that as a vulnerability of mine because I come from a state that doesn’t have any gun control but I think we’re handling it fine now.”
On other issues, Sanders said that Clinton has reluctantly moved closer to his position – arguing his campaign has achieved significant progress regardless of how it now fares in the party primary.“I think we have shifted the debate ... You are seeing Hillary Clinton and others beginning to move in our direction,” he said.
Sanders insists the differences between them remain “very significant”: “I was from day one in opposition to the Keystone pipeline. It took her a long time to come about. Trade policy is the same thing. So I think the differences between Secretary Clinton and myself are pretty profound. She has a Super Pac. I don’t have a Super Pac.”
He also draws new parallels with her husband’s record on Wall Street, where he wants to break up big banks and Clinton does not.
“I believe, during the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and the Republicans fought very hard to deregulate Wall Street, I led the opposition to that,” he said. “I did not think it was a good idea to allow investment banks, commercial banks and insurance companies to merge. My view today is that we have got to break up these huge institutions that have so much political and economic power.”
And the Vermont senator now seems increasingly willing to draw a public line between Clinton’s fundraising on Wall Street and her policies toward the economy as a whole.
“Ultimately the real issue is which candidate is prepared, frontally, to take on the billionaire class,” he said. “Can you receive huge amounts of campaign contributions from Wall Street and the wealthiest people in this country and say ‘Well, I’m going to really take them on’? The answer is no, you are not going to do that.”
A US supreme court justice has suggested that black students may benefit from the end of affirmative action admissions policies in US universities because many are “pushed ahead too fast” and should go to “lesser schools” instead.
The comments by Antonin Scalia came as conservatives on the court gave a sympathetic hearing to a white student who claims she was deprived of a place at the University of Texas due to her race.
Abigail Fisher graduated two years ago from Louisiana State University instead, but the court was warned that the number of minority students on US college campuses could “plummet” if her appeal against UT is successful – something Scalia suggested could be no bad thing.
“There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school, where they do well,” he said.
“One of the [legal] briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.”
Justice Scalia made clear he shared this view and also suggested these “lesser schools” suffered by having minority students admitted to unsuitable elite institutions.
“I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer [black students if the admissions policy changes]. Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe, when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks, admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less,” he added. “I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.”
His claims were rejected by the university’s lawyer but received no comment from the rest of the bench, which includes one African American justice.
“I don’t think the solution to the problems with student body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools,” said Gregory Garre, lawyer for the University of Texas.
“If this court rules that the University of Texas can’t consider race, we know exactly what will happen: diversity will plummet, especially among African Americans,” warned Garre.
“Now is not the time and this is not the case to roll back student body diversity in America,” he added, in apparent reference to a recent surge of concern about racial attacks on campuses such as the University of Missouri.
But chief justice John Roberts made clear he was impatient with the continued need for affirmative action in admissions policies.
“What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?” asked Roberts when presented with the argument that diversity was necessary to providing a better educational experience for all students. He also dismissed surveys designed to ask students how they felt as “sophomoric”.
The supreme court has previously allowed affirmative action in limited cases though has said it wanted to phase out because it was a form of racial discrimination.
Such programmes date back to the 1960s when they were first used to try to reduce racial segregation, but strict quotas were ruled unconstitutional by the court in 1978. Since another test case in 2003, race may now only be used as a factor if it can be shown to be essential in creating educational diversity in class.
In oral arguments on Wednesday, a narrow majority of conservative justices appeared sympathetic to the arguments put forward by Fisher’s lawyer that she was discriminated against.
Only eight justices heard the case as liberal stalwart Elena Kagan had to be recused due to her involvement at an earlier stage when she was a lawyer for the government.
Samuel Alito pressed the university to explain how it would meet court demands for affirmative action to be gradually phased out: “Are you going to hit the deadline? Is this going to be done in 12 years?”
Some of liberals warned the case could have dire consequences for diversity. “People in the universities are worried that we will kill affirmative action through a death by a thousand cuts,” said Stephen Breyer, who argued it was necessary to have a critical mass of minority students on campus.
“They are having racial incidents on campuses where students of colour are complaining that they feel isolated. What more do they need?” added justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was the only justice to support UT in the last case, expressed concern that aspects of another programme it uses to encourage diversity by taking the top 10% of high school applicants provided a “disincentive for minority students to step out and attempt to get into integrated schools”.
Sotomayor agreed that if the court insisted upon an impractically high bar for the use of affirmative action, it would force other universities to adopt such a method of selection too.
“I have a worry that if you are needing a proof of compelling reason, will any holistic review ever survive?” she said. “Will every school have to use the 10% plan?”
But lawyers for Fisher argued it was not up to them to provide an alternative. “Strict scrutiny is a heavy burden. There is no question. That is why it is called strict scrutiny,” said Bert Rein. “This is not easy to do, and it’s not our job to show them how to do it.”
He also claimed that the combination of the two schemes at the University of Texas Austin campus had driven white students into a minority.
“Today they are a majority minority campus – they really are – just because of the demographics,” claimed Rein.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is likely to hold the swing vote when the eight justices consider their decision next year, worried that more information was necessary to move on from the court’s earlier indeterminate decision. “We are just arguing the same case, it’s as if nothing has changed,” he said.
triding on stage to the triumphant strains of Nessun Dorma, Donald Trump has a surprisingly humble confession to make for someone defying all the laws of political gravity.
“Unless we win, it doesn’t mean a damn thing,” the would-be Republican presidential nominee warns a campaign rally in South Carolina, despite finishing his fourth month in a row at the top of the polls – even given a drop of 12 points after his latest controversial comments.
“I want to pick my date for the election. I want it next Tuesday,” he confides to an 11,000-strong crowd typical of the grassroots support that needs to flourish well into March for him to win the Republican nomination, let alone November’s general election.
Such moments of self-doubt are fleeting, however, quickly replaced by the now familiar bombast of a billionaire whose status as a “winner” has become his defining policy platform.
“Nobody has crowds like we have crowds,” he continues, back on message. “It’s a movement. It’s beyond anything.”
Trump is not the only one beginning to wonder whether this improbable campaign can confound the pundits and go the distance, particularly after a burst of recent controversy only seemed to cement his polling lead over his bewildered rivals.
Conventional wisdom holds that any one of Trump’s many outbursts would have sunk most politicians without a trace by now.
If POWs, Fox News and women were not enemies enough, Trump has also accused Mexican immigrants to the US of being rapists; claimed that a Black Lives Matter protester who was violently ejected from a rally deserved to be “roughed up”; appeared to mock a New York Times journalist for his disability and then accused the journalist of “grandstanding” on that disability in his response; falsely accused Muslim Americans of cheering on the 9/11 attackers; and agreed with suggestions that all such Muslims should have their names tracked on a database.
Trump has complained that many of these incidents were exaggerated by the political media, 70% of whom he says are “scum”. But he has nonetheless refused to retract any of the comments.
“I could have said ‘Oh, I misspoke’, but I am not big on that,” he told the crowd in South Carolina. “You have to be wrong.”
Some rivals still hope that eventually even Trump’s supporters will tire of what critics view as his relentless attacks on minorities in particular. Ohio governor John Kasich, for example, is running attack ads drawing inspiration from anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, whose updated refrain might begin: “First they came for the Mexicans …”
Others question whether there is much over-arching political ideology to Trump at all, as opposed to simple opportunism and a relish for making waves.
“He is an egomaniac, he’s a narcissist, he’s not a conservative, he’s not a liberal, he believes in himself,” former presidential rival Bobby Jindal told the Guardian shortly before dropping out of the race. “He’s not reflective of a coherent ideology, he’s for himself. He took Reagan’s slogan about making America great again, [but] he’s about making Donald Trump.”
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush has accused his nemesis of living in an “alternate universe” designed to “prey on people’s fears”.
Trump, though, seems to prefer the famous political dictum: “Never apologise. Never explain. Just get the thing done and let them howl.” He revels in his poll lead over Kasich and Bush in their home states as if that is all the answer that is needed.
After several weeks of this, other mainstream politicians are beginning to wonder whether howling is going to be enough to stop the Trump juggernaut; whether what started as an extension of Trump’s reality TV fame and scratching an anti-establishment itch has morphed into something far more persistent.
Liz Mair, a Republican strategist who is organising an anti-Trump fundraising committee, worries that many of the comments seen as a gaffes by the liberal media are in fact carefully designed to boost his standing with his core constituency.
“I personally think it’s best that people who don’t like Trump and his policies – whether it’s libertarians like me, establishment Republicans or real, rock-ribbed conservatives – effectively take out an insurance policy and do some work to try to actively undercut him,” she said. “And not just pray for him to commit real political suicide.”
Another well-connected New Hampshire Republican marvels at the political controversies that Trump has weathered.
“Just one of these flips flops, gaffes or lies, would have killed a capable, competent campaign,” he said. But, he added, “if your campaign is based on jumping the shark, there’s no jumping the shark moment”.
Yet there is more to Trump than attention-grabbing outrage. As he delights in telling his supporters, the three issues he rails against most – immigration reform, free trade deals and Barack Obama’s national security policy – have become perhaps the defining issues of the election.
“Who’s going to be best? Trump, Trump, Trump,” he bragged, to an answering chant from supporters that did nothing to dispel the fascistic overtones of Tuesday’s rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
His policies for deporting every undocumented immigrant in the US and demanding Mexico pay for a border wall – “A real wall. A very tall wall, taller than that ceiling” – might sound unrealistic, but they have arguably destroyed the campaign hopes of Bush, who favours immigration reform.
So what might it take to stop Trump?
The biggest source of optimism among opponents is the increasing belief that the polling on which Trump draws his confidence is profoundly flawed.
For starters, there is strong evidence that simple polls this far away from election day can be an average of eight percentage points out, simply because most people have not made up their mind.
Hype has also consistently run ahead of reality, a crucial factor for a candidate who relies on relentless media coverage to overshadow his opponents.
Before announcing that he was running, Trump was polling at just 2% but receiving 4% of all media coverage. A small enough gap. But immediately after his announcement, while Trump’s support had climbed to 11%, the media was dedicating 20% to 30% of candidacy headlines to one candidate.
Polls that just ask whether people think Trump is likely to win, rather than whether they would actually vote for him, again show the gap between expectations and reality. Many surveys do not adjust for low turnout levels in primary elections either.
Among Americans who identify as Republicans, polls suggest Trump has 25% to 30% of the vote. A survey from Pew Research conducted at the end of September provided more detail about who those individuals are: they are likely to be less educated and less affluent compared to the support base of other candidates.
Yet Trump’s support base could be problematic on election day. In 2008, Americans who didn’t graduate from college were significantly less likely to register to vote compared to those who did graduate.
It does look like Trump supporters tend to be less educated. But the more detailed the demographic data, the less reliable it is, given that pollsters arestruggling to find representative samples of Americans to talk to them.
Those demographics might also explain why college-educated pundits underestimated Trump’s support. There is another cognitive bias, one called “the curse of knowledge”, whereby better informed people find it difficult to view problems from the perspective of others who don’t have the same information.
Converting such passionate supporters will be hard. To immediately blunt Trump’s lead, another candidate would need to tap into his support base without jeopardising their own. Polling experts believe this to be unlikely, as it is hard to imagine anyone doing Trump better than Trump, let alone anyone doing Trump without sacrificing their own support.
A far more likely outcome is that Trump’s base remains solid but his relative lead slowly declines as voters coalesce around candidates such Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Insiders will become clearer frontrunners and the outsiders will fall behind once the excitement of Iowa or New Hampshire fades, perhaps leaving the real-estate mogul from New York looking as forgotten as winners in these early states in past elections, from Pat Robertson in 1988 to Mike Huckabee in 2008.
This threat can be best understood by looking at responses to the question: “Are there any of these candidates you would definitely not support for the Republican nomination for president?”
While 20%-30% of voters say they would support Trump, another 20%-30% say they definitely would not. Other candidates, like Cruz, aren’t quite so divisive (only 5%-10% say they definitely wouldn’t vote for him).
That means undecided voters are more likely to drift towards candidates other than Trump – a trend likely to be helped by sceptical party leaders who make up 7% of the deciding votes at the GOP national convention.
Prominent Iowa conservative Steve Deace is one of many who think Trump’s ultimate appeal will prove limited.
“Trump’s got a locked-in base no matter what he does,” he said. Deace, a vocal supporter of Cruz, compared Trump to former Texas congressman Ron Paul in that both candidates had “a high floor and a low ceiling”.
Trump’s antics are “both a good and a bad thing”, he argued. “On one hand, it produces a loyal following that is attracted to that persona which will not leave you. On the other hand, it limits your ability to grow beyond that.”
This was echoed by a strategist familiar with Trump’s campaign who believes the trend will eventually lead to a “death by a thousand cuts”.
“He has stable base of support but he can’t expand it and his state polls are not that good,” the strategist said. “I think frankly this harms him from being able to expand his support.”
And even if Trump’s comments don’t impact his campaign’s fortunes, they could hurt the Republican Party as a whole. Ashley Bell, a prominent black Republicanwho chairs the 20/20 Leaders of America, a group which promotes criminal justice reform on a bipartisan basis, said Trump had already gone “too far to be considered someone that the party can get behind and lead this party with a bigger tent than today”.
For now though, Trump seems to be defying the laws of political gravity and consistently maintaining a lead over a deeply fragmented Republican field.
A win in the Republican primary is far from out of the question. Betting markets put this at 7/1 currently. With a year to go, anyone who calls a Trump general election victory “impossible” should be treated with caution.
Top Republican pollster Frank Luntz suggests that, at this point, the only thing which could hurt Trump is if he is “shown to have hurt people who have worked for him … but his comments, as radical as they may be, won’t have much of an impact since the people supporting him agree with him”.
Luntz believes Trump speaks for voters who for the first time feel like they have a mouthpiece and like the fact that they feel they are being heard. As the well-respected pollster noted: “Trump says what they’re thinking and the more outrageous he is, the more they agree with him. He’s saying what no politician would say and that’s another reason that they like him.”
That is certainly the feeling among ordinary supporters who have attended his increasingly packed campaign events in recent months.
“I like the way he speaks,” said Sandra Murray of Dubuque, Iowa. “He speaks the truth, he speaks what people need to hear. He may be a little bold but you can’t sugar-coat things anymore. This country is a huge mess and we need to get out of this and honestly he could be the man to do it.”
Other supporters have a simpler attraction.
“Oh, I wish I had big nuts like him,” said Dino Rossi of Newton, Massachusetts. “He’s not afraid of anybody or anything, that’s pretty cool.”
Barack Obama has rejected a proposal from TransCanada to build the Keystone XL pipeline through the American heartland, the Guardian has learned, ending years of uncertainty about the project.
The US president made the announcement from the White House flanked by both secretary of state John Kerry and vice-president Joe Biden, declaring that Keystone “would not serve the national interests of the United States”.
Keystone XL was designed to pump crude from the Alberta tar sands for 1,700 miles and across six states to refineries on the Gulf coast. Over the years, the project has become a symbol of the greater political struggle surrounding Obama’s efforts to move away from fossil fuels and fight climate change.
But Obama said the project was neither “a silver bullet for the economy” nor “an express lane to climate disaster”. It would not meaningfully boost jobs or cut gas prices for US motorists, he said. And in a sweeping statement which became a global call to arms ahead of the UN climate talks starting in Paris later this month, he said it was time to stop using the argument over Keystone as a political cudgel.
The proposed route for the Keystone XL pipeline. Photograph: The Guardian
Highlighting US progress in moving away from reliance on fossil fuels, he promised US global leadership in pursuit of an ambitious framework “to protect the one planet we have got while we still can”.
Earlier this week, TransCanada asked the State Department to put its US permit application on hold, which marked a shift for a firm that had spent seven years relentlessly pushing for approval of the project.
Prospects for Keystone XL have been receding over the last year because of low oil prices, which made the project uneconomical, and amid political shifts in the US and Canada.
Jane Fleming Kleeb, founder of the Bold Nebraska coalition of citizens, farmers and ranchers opposed to the pipeline, told the Guardian: “It’s a long time coming. I feel like, honestly, the boots have beaten the big oil suits for the first time in the country’s history on a big major infrastructure project.
“I’m just proud, I can’t even believe it’s finally happening. The difference this time around was that farmers and ranchers were unified and stood up against the project – that made a huge difference. Something which would normally be decided in the halls of Congress was actually influenced by farmers and ranchers this time around.”
The battle for labor movement support among Democratic presidential candidates broke into the open on Tuesday with the launch of legislation by Senator Bernie Sanders protecting employees who seek to form unions.
Though the Workplace Democracy Act stands little chance of passing the current Republican-controlled Congress, it marks a new phase in the Sanders campaign’s effort to paint itself as the natural champion of organized labor.
The proposals to prevent workers from being victimized for attempting to form unions come amid growing union endorsements for Hillary Clinton and ahead of a White House “Worker Voice” summit on Wednesday which is expected to be attended by Vice-President Joe Biden.
Sanders rejected criticism that his support among unions was lower than he would have hoped, saying that members were backing him even if their leaders were influenced by personal ties to Clinton.
“We have a number of locals, we have the national nurses union and we are going to have a number of more unions on our side – no doubt about it,” the Vermont senator told reporters after a press conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
“What sometimes happens is that Secretary Clinton has had a number of contacts with union leaders over the years, but I have zero doubt that we have massive rank-and-file support among trade unionists.”
But Sanders also insisted his support for the legislation, which would strengthen the role of the National Labor Relations Board in certifying unions, long predated his interest in running for president.
“This is legislation that I have supported since literally the first year that I was in the Congress,” he said. “It’s not a question of winning union support. What we are fighting for is the survival of the American middle class.”
Some of the activists present at the legislation’s launch, which was co-sponsored by congressman Mark Pocan, said they had suffered victimization for trying to form unions.
“I was trying to organize nurses at Huntington Memorial hospital in Pasadena and going over some of the issues for patients caused by hospital administration’s budget cuts,” nurse Allysha Almada, told the Guardian. “I was quoted in an article … and within a week I was taken off the floor in front of all my co-workers, taken to HR and put on suspension.”
“It was clear retaliation for me being an outspoken supporter of the National Nurses United,” she added. “It definitely has a huge impact on our organization efforts and nurses are very afraid.”
Bernie Sanders received his first endorsement from a national trade union on Monday, throwing significant new organisational muscle behind a Democratic presidential candidate who is challenging Hillary Clinton’s natural support in the labour movement but lags far behind her in campaign infrastructure.
National Nurses United, which has 185,000 members nationally and is the profession’s largest representative, announced its backing for Sanders at a rally with him in Oakland, California.
The decision of its executive council to announce a formal endorsement follows a poll of members said to show widespread backing for his more radical policies on healthcare and social inequality.
Although the union is well-known as one of the more leftwing labor groups, its leaders claim to be surprised at the depth of support among their largely female membership given Clinton’s chance of becoming America’s first female president.
“When the pollsters said there was a landslide for Bernie Sanders, that didn’t make a lot of sense to me initially given the fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman,” director RoseAnn DeMoro told the Guardian in an interview ahead of the announcement. “I thought it would be fairly balanced, and it’s not.”
DeMoro would not disclose the internal polling numbers but said the three recent surveys represented a “pretty significant sampling” of the union’s members and she was “stunned at the level and depth of enthusiasm for Bernie”.
Until now, only one other national union, the American Federation of Teachers, has endorsed any of the Democratic candidates – coming out for Clinton in July – although some smaller, local union groups have shown support for Sanders.
Sanders thanked the nurses gathered at NNU headquarters, drawing on their experience of health inequality to reinforce his call for universal and affordable medical insurance.
“I applaud you; you work hard every day but you understand that we have to do more to provide quality care that people need and for you to do your jobs in the way you want to see,” said Sanders. “You do not want to see patients not being able to afford the prescription drugs being written. You do not want to see people hesitating to walk into an office because they don’t have health insurance or because the deductibles are too high.”
But he also received loud applause for regaling the nurses with portions of his stump speech that point to much grander ambition.
“Our campaign is about creating a political revolution that says to the billionaire class they can’t have it all; this country, our government, belongs to all of us,” said Sanders. “It’s important that we think big.”
“We have to change boldly and fundamentally the priorities of our nation so that every American can experience the right to live with dignity and not so that almost all of our wealth and income is going to the top one per cent,” he added.
Richard Trumka, president of the national labor federation AFL-CIO, recently organised candidate interviews for union leaders to help shape their decision on an overall endorsement by the US labour movement, something many still expect to go to Clinton.
But this is unlikely to come until much later in the primary race and Sanders’s success in securing the backing of an individual union will be seen by some supporters as a demonstration that the labor movement’s backing for Clinton is not a forgone conclusion.
DeMoro said the support of Sanders by nurses was particularly a sign of how strongly they felt about his policies on expanding the Medicare system to provide so-called “single-payer” health insurance – a similar system to Canada’s – for all Americans.
But she insisted that her largely apolitical membership was also drawn to his policies to reduce income inequality and tackle the impact of money on American politics.
“Nurses are an interesting group. They are not political scientists. They want to be nurses,” said DeMoro. “But nurses see the fall out of all the bad decisions, because everything ultimately equates to health. If you are talking about income inequality, they see it. Health concerns and disparity among classes, joblessness; every social problem basically ends up presenting itself in a healthcare setting.”
Sanders has attracted record-breaking crowds among grass roots supporters since declaring his candidacy for the Democratic nomination – including 19,000 in Portland on Sunday night – but he is seen by many in the party mainstream as too radical to get elected.
But DeMoro insisted he had a meaningful chance of becoming president and dismissed the concerns as a “self-fulfilling prophecy” by Democratic party leaders.
“I am not worried about the electability of Bernie Sanders,” she said. “I am worried about where this country goes if he doesn’t get elected.”
She also expressed regret that there was not more alignment between her unions’ interests and the policies of Clinton.
“It’s so fundamentally disappointing that we can’t have a female presidential candidate lined up with our values,” she said. “[But] what Bernie represents is social change and we are organisation dedicated that.”
DeMoro also criticised the Clinton campaign, which she claimed was holding back her more radical tendencies.
“I wanted the Hillary before the consultants go ahold of her campaign,” she said. “I sat in the AFL-CIO meeting and trying to nail her down was extremely difficult,” added DeMoro.
“She is very sophisticated, she is polished, and she can speak to the issues. But in terms where the commitments resting behind the discussion, they weren’t there.”
Ather mass shooting, another round of arguments about why gun reform is doomed to fail. Turns out, most of those arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Myth #1: Gun control would never pass Congress.
A majority of US senators voted for a package of gun control measures only two years ago. The 54 who backed the bill, which was written by Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Joe Manchin, included three other Republicans.
But when four Democrats got cold feet about their electoral chances in the midterms, the legislation fell short of the 60 votes it needed to prevent a filibuster.
Heading into the 2016 election, however, there are many more moderate Republican seats up for grabs – and a meaningful opportunity for Democrats to take back control of the Senate.
A successful bipartisan Senate bill and more persuasive president could be enough to encourage a future House speaker to allow a vote, too. It might even pass if the House remained in Republican control.
Support for universal background checks skyrocketed after the December 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, with 90% of Americans behind the proposal at its peak. More than two years later, polls continue to show strong support for expanding background checks, averaging 80%.
As a successful 2014 ballot initiative in Washington state proved, if you leave the decision in the hands of voters, they are more likely than politicians to vote for universal background checks.
Ironically, when Congress was weighing airstrikes in Syria in August 2013, just four months after the failed background checks vote, one of the foremost reasons lawmakers cited in opposing the Obama administration’s plan was polling that showed 90% of Americans were against intervention. It was a classic example of how Congress selectively listens to the American people – as in, whenever it’s more convenient.
Myth #3: Gun control won’t stop gun violence.
There are more than three times as many Americans killed by guns per capita than in any other wealthy nation, and more than ten times the rate in comparable larger countries such as Britain, France and Japan.
Many of these countries have similar problems with crime, drugs, urban deprivation and youth violence, others are more peaceful, but there is one simple thing that countries with less gun violence have in common with each other: they have fewer guns.
No one can predict the future of a more gun-constrained America with certainty, but the evidence from dozens of comparable societies points to a clear causal relationship between access to firearms and how often they are used.
Myth #4: Switzerland and Israel seem to do OK without gun control
Proponents of unfettered gun ownership often point to the example of Switzerland, which has a tradition of more widespread firearms ownership than most other European countries but is not known for its gun-ravaged inner cities.
One problem is the trend is not that different: more guns still lead to more shooting, just less so than in America. Switzerland is actually second among wealthy nations in terms of annual gun deaths (0.77 per 100,000 of population in one recent survey , versus 2.97 in the US and just 0.07 in England and Wales) but has barely half as many guns per 100 people (45.7 versus 88.8 in the US).
But even this comparison gets weaker if you look at the way the Swiss keep their guns, which stems from a tradition of military service that has been considerably tightened over the years. One US study by the National Institutes of Health points out that both Switzerland and Israel (another alleged exception to the rule touted as proof that guns don’t kill) actually limit firearm ownership considerably and require permit renewal one to four times annually.
Those are just the kind of gun control measures, in fact, that second-amendment fans in the US claim wouldn’t make any difference to gun violence.
Myth #5: Other countries are different.
Further rejoinders to the international-comparison argument are less empirical still, tending to rely on a mixture of American cultural exceptionalism, pioneer spirit and a history of racial tension to explain why murder rates are so high without blaming gun ownership.
While it is true that US history differs greatly from European history, this theory is less effective at explaining similar disparities with Canada and Australia.
Comparisons between similar large cities also belie the argument that there is something uniquely violent about America’s urban poor. London has gang violence, drugs and recent riots that make Ferguson and Baltimore look tranquil, yet the Metropolitan police estimate criminals have access to barely 100 guns in a city only slightly smaller than New York. Cities like Glasgow and Liverpool can be shockingly violent places but victims of knife attacks and beatings tend to survive.
It may be true that the link between guns and a culture of violence goes both ways, but that’s hardly a reason not to try tackle both at the same time.
Myth #6: US borders are too open.
Amid widespread concern over illegal immigration, much attention has also focused on the unique geography of the United States. It is true that the country has among the longest land borders in the world and is a very open international trading nation.
It is hard to imagine, however, the weapons would be anywhere near as easy for criminals to obtain if they all had to be smuggled through ports, airports or across the Mexican border. Even a small reduction in weapons falling into the wrong hands would also reduce the incentive for homeowners to store guns for self-defense.
Whether US port security or land borders would really prove that much more porous than other countries with stricter gun laws is also open to question, but it is strange this argument is rarely offered as a reason to give up on drug interdiction, or intercepting terrorist bomb threats.
Myth #7: Guns are essential for self-defense.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun,” NRA president Wayne LaPierre infamously declared after the Newtown shooting.
According to the non-profit Violence Policy Center , there were just 258 “justifiable homicides” involving civilians using guns in 2012, as opposed to 8,342 criminal homicides committed with a firearm. “For every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 32 criminal homicides,” the group said in a report, which is based on data from the FBI and Bureau of Justice.
And those figures do not even include an estimated 22,000 suicides and accidental shootings annually where guns are involved.
After Newtown, anti-gun violence groups actually raised more money. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission in 2014, gun control groups declared $21.3m in contributions since the November 2012 election, whereas gun rights’ groups raised $16.3m in the same period.
Americans for Responsible Solutions, the anti-gun violence group co-founded by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, a Democrat who was shot in the head during the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, amassed a whopping $11 million in its first four months of existence.
Myth #9: Lawmakers will be voted out of office for supporting gun control.
In the 2014 elections, two governors who passed comprehensive gun control bills – Connecticut governor Dan Malloy and Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, both Democrats – were both re-elected despite the NRA’s best efforts to defeat them.
The gun control debate also had little effect on lawmakers who voted against stricter gun laws after Newtown. US senators Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mark Begich of Alaska – two of just four Democrats who joined Republicans in blocking a Senate bill to expand background checks – both lost their re-elections anyway.
Despite its pledge to reward politicians who stood up for gun rights, the NRA did nothing to help either senator. Money and grassroots support is also now on offer from groups like those backed by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, that support gun control.
Myth #10: Mass shootings still happen in areas with strict gun laws, so gun control doesn’t work.
When a mass shooting occurred in Septemberg 2013 at the Navy Yard compound in Washington, one of the first arguments made by activists for gun rights was that gun control is clearly ineffective because DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the US.
The problem with this theory is that criminals also have access to cars, and can easily obtain firearms in neighbouring states or counties.
In the Navy Yard incident, the shooter legally purchased firearms in neighboring Virginia despite a criminal record and mental health issues – exposing gaps in the current background checks system. And cities like Chicago are plagued by the illegal trafficking of firearms; there is no current federal law that defines gun trafficking or straw purchasing as a crime.
Myth #11: Universal background checks would create a federal database of gun owners.
One of the myths that ended the background checks bill in the Senate two years ago was the claim – perpetrated by the gun lobby and swallowed by most Republicans – was that it would create a national registry of gun owners. In fact, the Manchin-Toomey legislation explicitly barred the creation of a federal database in its text, but opponents insisted it would infringe on the liberties of gun owners in America.
Aside from that being a false claim, it was notable that just a couple of months later, when it was revealed that the NSA was spying on millions of Americans, the same lawmakers were overwhelmingly supportive of far more intrusive data-gathering.
A woman will soon feature on US bank notes for the first time in 150 years after a successful campaign to celebrate the centenary of female suffrage. But the surprise decision comes with a catch: whoever is chosen will have to share the honour with a man.
Treasury secretary Jack Lew announced the process of redesigning the $10 bill late on Wednesday – less than a week after a high-profile petition was handed to Barack Obama calling on him to pick African-American slavery abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
The public campaign, which nominated the civil war heroine from a shortlist of 15 women, had suggested she replace president Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.
But officials have opted to redesign the $10 bill instead, currently occupied by the first treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, and plan a public consultation exercise of their own before making a final decision on who should be the new woman on the note later this year.
Lew also revealed that when the first new bills are printed in 2020 – coinciding with the 100th anniversary of American women receiving the right to vote – they are likely to continue to feature Hamilton: either by also incorporating him in the new design, or by producing several versions.
Harriet Tubman won an online poll last month to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“It was personally very important to me to make sure that as we make this decision we continue to honour Alexander Hamilton who played such a formative role in the creation our country, the establishment of democracy as we know it and the principle of the soundness of our currency,” Lew told reporters.
Nonetheless, the administration insists its surprise announcement is a “historic decision” in the normally conservative world of US currency production.
There are notes with a face value of $1.3tn in circulation around the world and more than a billion $10 notes alone are printed each year.
“With such a wide reach America’s currency makes a statement about who we are and what we stand for as a nation,” said the treasury secretary.
He also paid tribute to the campaign, which he said was as a “happy coincidence” with a separate decision to redesign the $10 bill to introduce new security features.
“The Women on 20s campaign reflects the best tradition of American democracy where people care about something, band together and express their views,” said Lew.
The theme of the next series of notes will “focus on celebrating a champion for our inclusive democracy”, said Lew – a criteria that may favour Tubman, who famously organised the “underground railroad” to smuggle slaves out of the south during the American civil war.
But if the three rounds of informal voting carried out by Womenon20s.org are indicative, the choice is likely to be a complex one with strong historical claims made for Eleanor Roosevelt and suffrage campaigner Susan B Anthony.
Anthony was also the first woman to feature on American coins after Jimmy Carter introduced a shortlived $1 coin in 1978.
Martha Washington, wife of the first US president, was on a dollar silver certificate in circulation from 1891 to 1896 and the legendary native American, Pocahontas, featured in a picture on the $20 note from 1865 to 1869.
Women On 20s founder Barbara Ortiz Howard said: “While many women are worthy of being featured, when secretary Lew makes his choice we hope he will take into account that the winner of our online poll, Harriet Tubman, was the top vote-getter among more than 600,000 ballots cast.
At a turning point in history where most of the male members of the US supreme court seemed unsure which way to turn, one justice stood out during Tuesday’s hearing on the constitutionality of gay marriage for her spatial awareness.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has long been a liberal champion – dubbed ‘Notorious RBG’ by her younger fans – for her withering dissent from the court’s increasingly conservative consensus.
“Marriage today is not what it was under the common law tradition, under the civil law tradition,” said Ginsburg when Justices Roberts and Kennedy began to fret about whether the court had a right to challenge centuries of tradition.
“Marriage was a relationship of a dominant male to a subordinate female,” she explained. “That ended as a result of this court’s decision in 1982 when Louisiana’s Head and Master Rule was struck down … Would that be a choice that state should [still] be allowed to have? To cling to marriage the way it once was?”
“No,” replied John Bursch, the somewhat chastised lawyer for the states who are seeking to preserve their ban on gay marriage.
Bursch was similarly eviscerated by Ginsburg when he tried to argue that the sole purpose of marriage was to ensure a stable relationship for procreation.
“Suppose a couple, 70-year-old couple, comes in and they want to get married?” remarked the 82-year-old Ginsburg, to laughter, after a protracted debate over whether it was fair to ask couples if they wanted children before allowing them to wed.
“You don’t have to ask them any questions. You know they are not going to have any children.”
Conversely she came to the rescue of a lawyer for the petitioners when he floundered on the question of whether states that ban gay marriage should have to recognise weddings carried out in other states.
Would they be allowed to refuse recognition in other cases? Such as where another state allowed the marriages of children after puberty, Justice Alito wanted to know.
“I think, the presumption would be in such a state that someone age 13 can’t consent,” interjected Ginsburg helpfully.
In the end, her bottom line – rejecting the notion that extending marriage rights would somehow weaken the institution – was persuasive enough that even chief justice Roberts appeared sympathetic.
“All of the incentives, all of the benefits that marriage affords would still be available,” said Ginsburg. “So you’re not taking away anything from heterosexual couples. They would have the very same incentive to marry, all the benefits that come with marriage that they do now.”
If this has been a civil injury case, it might have been thrown out right then. Instead, campaigners for marriage equality will have to wait until June to see if Ginsburg’s colleagues see it that way too.
Barack Obama has insisted the US was not “cavalier” in its assessment of the risks to civilians as the accidental deaths of two hostages in a drone strike against al-Qaida overshadowed a planned pep talk for intelligence chiefs.
“Today, like all Americans, our thoughts and prayers continue to be with the families of Dr Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto,” the president told a group of intelligence officers gathered to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the office of the director of national intelligence.
“We are going to review what happened,” he added. “We are going to identify the lessons that can be learned and any improvement and changes that can be made and I know those of you who are hear continue to share our determination to continue to do everything we can to prevent the loss of innocent lives.”
But the president appeared keen to reassure those who may blame themselves for the incident that he felt their pain too.
“I was asked by somebody: ‘How do you absorb news like we received the other day?’ and I told the truth: it’s hard.
“We all grieve when we lose an American life; we all grieve when any innocent life is taken. We don’t take this work lightly and I know that each and everyone of you understand the magnitude of we do and the stakes that are involved. These aren’t abstractions; we are not cavalier. And we understand the solemn responsibilities that are given to us.”
Meanwhile one of the architects of Obama’s legal rationale for drone strikes called on the administration to release the full details behind the CIA’s decision to attack two sites in Pakistan resulting in the accidental deaths of the two hostages.
“I left the administration in January 2013 and know nothing about how this recent case unfolded,” Harold Koh, a former legal adviser to the State Department, told the Guardian in an email, “but yes, plainly, the Obama administration should release the factual record regarding the January 2015 strikes that killed two hostages.”
A controversial figure for his role in devising the US justification for the targeted killing of an American member of al-Qaida, Koh is now a law professor at New York University.
As Obama grapples with his role in the deaths revealed on Thursday of Weinsteinand Lo Porto, both killed by drones in Pakistan this January, his administration faces renewed questions about “signature strikes” and what could be fundamental flaws in its legal justification for them.
The “factual record” Koh refers to could be the difference between legal strikes and violations of the administration’s rules or worse, said Christopher Swift, a professor of national security studies at Georgetown University.
Swift and manyothers agree the strikes appear legal. “This looks like it’s in the realm of a horrible mistake rather than the violations of the Geneva Conventions,” he said. “It’s not the platform; it’s whether it was unlawful killing.
“If it’s completely accidental, as it appears, then it’s a horrible tragedy; it’s not necessarily an unconstitutional undertaking. There’s no clear law that’s going to tell you right or wrong here.”
But he noted that it was exceedingly difficult to judge the legality of such strikes because of the secrecy surrounding operations. Obama has ordered the episode declassified, but Swift noted that “all the facts are subject to the CIA’s black highlighter”.
“We have hundreds of hours of surveillance prior to the strike and we have continuous surveillance in the days afterward,” he said. “It doesn’t look like the administration knew the particular identities of the people they were hitting, so to the extent there was a failure it seems less a matter of the legal justification as it is on the intelligence side.”
The admission suggests that “signature strikes” – lethal strikes launched without necessarily knowing who is in the crosshairs – have continued despite the president’s 2013 announcement that new rules would govern strikes. The order mandates that the CIA can authorize strikes only if it knows with “near certainty that the terrorist target” is present.
“Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set,” Obama said in a 2013 speech.
A Guardian analysis of what drone strike data is available found that, although only 41 men were targeted between January 2006 and November 2014, an estimated 1,147 people had been killed by strikes. According to estimates by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 415 strikes have killed at minimum 2,500 people, 423 of whom were civilians, and at maximum nearly 4,000 people, including 962 civilians.
In theory, the rule should have curbed signature strikes, which by definition cannot justify the killing of a “high-value target” since they do not necessarily target a specific person. Instead the administration deems some people “associated forces” of al-Qaida targets by dint of their behavior or other details gleaned through surveillance – where they congregate, who they meet, etc – and it is here that facts become key.
“It’s the idea that anyone in al-Qaida is going to be caught up in the same circumstances [as its leaders],” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at Notre Dame. “That they might in some point in the future be part of an attempt to attack.”
The CIA had “fallen back” to signature strikes, O’Connell said: “Not knowing who the people were they were killing doesn’t meet their own criteria of facts, and facts must be present to kill even under their own very loose set of rules.”
Another argument made by the Department of Justice (DoJ) also raises lawyers’ hackles: that associated forces and high-value targets both constitute an “imminent threat” to the US. The administration laid out this argument in a 2013 white paper justifying the killing, without trial, of American al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki.
“The DoJ memorandum’s approach to imminence makes a mockery of the concept,” Swift said. “If you don’t have imminence, you’d have to show that you’d have due process,” he continued, adding that while the administration could have a legitimate due process procedure, secrecy clouds the process from public view.
A former chairwoman of the Use of Force Committee of the International Law Association, O’Connell takes issue with the entire scope of the drone program.
“They cobbled together its own set of international law rules,” especially for the al-Awlaki case, she said. “They didn’t want to live in the real house of rules, so they built their own house of cards, and now they’ve started to knock it down.”
The Weinstein family released a statement to Buzzfeed addressing the issue of whether a ransom was paid to his captors. “Over the three-and-a-half-year period of Warren’s captivity, the family made every effort to engage with those holding him or those with the power to find and rescue him,” they wrote. “This is an ordinary American family and they are not familiar with how one manages a kidnapping.”
Obama’s talk to US intelligence chiefs also came after two years of public criticism following surveillance revelations to the Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, but Obama said he trusted them to do right thing and was committed to persuading the public of their value.
“Our first job is to make sure that we protect the safety of the American people but there is not a person who I talk to who is involved in the intelligence community who doesn’t understand that we have to do so while upholding our values and our ideals, and our laws, and our commitment to democracy,” the president said.
“This is hard stuff. Everyone here is committed to doing it the right way. I am absolutely committed to making sure the American people understand all that we do to make sure we do it right.”
Decades of punitive US sanctions on Cuba will be rolled back as early as Friday, in a move to swiftly normalise relations between the long-estranged countries.
From reversing the ban on foreign ships entering American waters, to allowing travellers to return with $100 worth of cigars, the new guidelines published by the US Treasury department go as far as possible to uphold Barack Obama’s pledge in December.
Though still constrained by legislation prohibiting fully liberalised tourism and free trade, several newly announced measures suggest a deliberate attempt to flood the communist economy with American technology and money in a bid to weaken its government’s grip on power and political dissent.
The steps include raising the limit on remittances from Cubans living abroad to up to $10,000, allowing internet and mobile phone companies to export equipment and relaxing almost all banking restrictions between the two countries.
Personal travel is still restricted to 12 designated categories, ranging from professional meetings through to educational activities, but removing the need to seek a licence for these suggests determined US tourists will find it much easier to make visits.
The new rules, which come into effect on Friday, follow Cuba’s recent decision to release political prisoners as part of the historic deal brokered with help from the Vatican in December.
The scope of the Treasury and Commerce department regulations, however, is likely to rekindle opposition among critics in Congress who say that encouraging trade and travel will only bolster the Cuban regime’s grip on power with little political reform promised in return.
The White House argues the reverse is true. “These changes will immediately enable the American people to provide more resources to empower the Cuban population to become less dependent upon the state-driven economy, and help facilitate our growing relationship with the Cuban people,” said Obama press secretary Josh Earnest.
“The policy of the past has not worked for over 50 years, and we believe that the best way to support our interests and our values is through openness rather than isolation.”
“Cuba has real potential for economic growth and by increasing travel, commerce, communications and private business development between the United States and Cuba, the United States can help the Cuban people determine their own future,” added Treasury secretary Jack Lew.
US officials also hinted at the imminent possibility of direct scheduled flights between American airports and Cuba once further regulatory reviews are carried out by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.
“I think you can expect further clarification from those agencies about the next step,” one senior administration official said during a background call for reporters when asked about regularly scheduled flights.
“This does change the travel restrictions dramatically,” the official added. “Over time, as the Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security are able to implement their required steps, it is possible under these changes that we could have regularly scheduled air travel and that could mean that you as a traveller could go online to buy a ticket. You would still need to certify that you fall within one of the existing categories, but this could simplify things.”
Officials warned however it would be still be against the law for US citizens to travel directly or indirectly without proving they fall within the recently expanded categories, and they would be required to keep documents showing how they fit within them for five years or face penalties.
Ten Democratic senators have voted with Republicans to allow the progress of a bill to extend the Keystone oil pipeline, placing more political pressure on the White House to reconsider its proposed veto of the legislation.
The procedural motion was passed by 63 votes to 32, comfortably clearing the three-fifths majority needed to avoid a filibuster and falling just short of the two-thirds majority that would be needed to overcome a presidential veto when it comes to a final vote.
But some of the Democrats, who were also joined by Maine independent Angus King, may switch votes in future to avoid embarrassing Barack Obama who has said he is opposed to Congress interfering in a long-running administration review of the pipeline extension.
Keystone has become a symbolic battlefield for the administration’s climate change policy, with critics insisting that it will encourage the exploitation ofheavily-polluting Canadian tar sands and supporters claiming it will createthousands of jobs.
The bill will now see various amendments added over the coming weeks, a process which could ultimately decide on its level of support among Democrats.
The Obama administration has stood by its decision to reject the bill, even though a Nebraska court decision in favour of the Keystone route removed one of its remaining objections.
The Democrats who joined senator King in voting for cloture on the motion to proceed included: Michael Bennet of Colorado, Tom Carper of Delaware, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Tom Udall of New Mexico and Mark Warner of Virginia. King has said he would vote against final passage, and five senators have not voted at all yet.
The US defense secretary has been fired after less than two years in office as the White House re-orders a national security strategy upended by the Islamic State (Isis).
Chuck Hagel, Barack Obama’s third Pentagon chief and a former Republican senator, will leave the Department of Defense just weeks after his spokesman said Hagel was looking forward to serving “for the remainder” of the Obama administration.
Two senior administration officials told the Guardian on Monday that a New York Times report of his exit was “correct”, and said more details would be announced shortly by the White House.
Obama confirmed his defense secretary’s departure in a “personnel announcement” in the State Dining Room. It was not clear if Obama would announce another change to his Iraq-Syria war strategy to correspond with Hagel’s departure.
The first national security casualty of Obama’s midterm elections defeat was one who, despite his Capitol Hill pedigree and Republican registration, never won the confidence of the congressional GOP, who considered him a water-carrier for the administration.
Before Obama’s announcement, a senior administration official praised Hagel as “a steady hand,” and said Hagel had been speaking with Obama in October about leaving “given the natural post-midterms transition time.” Hagel’s spokesman, Rear Admiral John Kirby, told Pentagon reporters on November 7 that Hagel expected to stay on.
Hagel was out of step with the administration on Isis, having urged the White House to clarify its stance on ushering Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad out of power and bizarrely inflating the threat Isis posed, calling it “an imminent threat to every interest we have” in an August press conference. While the administration has publicly ruled out using US ground forces in combat in Iraq, Hagel and particularly the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, floated precisely that as an option in testimony earlier this month.
A man who never quite found his footing as Pentagon chief, Hagel also testified that the US strategy against Isis – which focuses on Iraq primarily and Syria peripherally – was working, even as it undergoes frequent adjustment and revision.
Yet the strategy has come under criticism from hawks as well as doves. Hawks want a deeper US commitment of air as well as ground forces to beating Isis back, while doves are alarmed at the shifting of US war aims and commensurate resources. The next chairman of the Senate armed services committee, Arizona Republican John McCain, wants a more forceful US response to Isis and had long fallen out with his former friend Hagel.
In the five months since Isis seized Mosul, Obama has authorized 3,000 new troops to advise and train Iraqis, and expanded an air war into Syria. Pentagon efforts to field a Syrian proxy force have barely begun and are expected to take a year before yielding the first capable units.
Hagel, a Vietnam combat veteran and a non-commissioned army officer, was not expected to be a wartime defense secretary, instead brought in to manage the downsizing of US ground forces and shore up the administration’s at-times uneasy relationship with the military. His Senate confirmation hearing saw the former senator rambling and unfocused; he mischaracterized the administration’s position on Iran. Amongst Hagel’s more forceful positions early in office was to warn against US involvement in the Syrian civil war.
Several oft-mentioned names to replace Hagel have already surfaced. Former defense policy chief Michele Flournoy, a figure deeply identified with the troop surge in Afghanistan, would be the first woman to run the Pentagon. The Times reported that Rhode Island Senate Democrat Jack Reed is in the running, as is Ashton Carter, a senior official noted for his management and budgetary skills who was Robert Gates’ acquisitions chief and Leon Panetta’s deputy secretary.
The senior official said a successor would be nominated in “short order” and Hagel will serve until his successor’s confirmation.
Three security guards working for the private US contractor Blackwater have been found guilty of the manslaughter of a group of unarmed civilians at a crowded Baghdad traffic junction in one of the darkest incidents of the Iraq war.
A fourth, Nicholas Slatten, was found guilty of one charge of first-degree murder. All face the likelihood of lengthy prison sentences after unanimous verdicts on separate weapons charges related to the incident. Lawyers for the guards say they plan to appeal.
The Nisour Square massacre in 2007 left 17 people dead and 20 seriously injured after the guards working for the US State Department fired heavy machine guns and grenade launchers from their armoured convoy in the mistaken belief they were under attack by insurgents.
But attempts to prosecute the guards have previously foundered because of a series of legal mistakes by US officials, and the case had attracted widespread attention in Iraq as a symbol of apparent American immunity.
Now, after a 10-week trial and 28 days of deliberation, a jury in Washington has found three of the men – Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard – guilty of a total of 13 charges of voluntary manslaughter and a total of 17 charges of attempted manslaughter.
The fourth defendant, Slatten, who was alleged to have been first to open fire, was found guilty of a separate charge of first-degree murder. Slough, Liberty and Heard were found guilty of using firearms in relation to a crime of violence, a charge which can alone carry up to a 30-year mandatory sentence.
Prosecutors had claimed Slatten, the convoy’s sniper, viewed killing Iraqis as “payback for 9/11” and often “deliberately fired his weapon to draw out return fire and instigate gun battles” or tried to smash windscreens of passing cars as his convoy rolled through Baghdad.
Jeremy Ridgeway, another member of the convoy known as Raven 23, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in 2008 and agreed to testify against his colleagues in exchange for a more lenient sentence.
Although jurors failed to reach a verdict on three of the manslaughter and attempted manslaughter charges relating to Dustin Heard, he was found guilty of the remaining 17, and the near clean-sweep will be seen as overwhelming endorsement of the government’s case that the massacre was unlawful.
Prosecutors told the jury that Slatten triggered the incident by shooting the occupants of a civilian car during a traffic jam at a busy roundabout in Baghdad. As the car rolled forward, other members of the convoy of three armoured vehicles opened fire indiscriminately with heavy weapons claiming they thought they were under attack from an attempted car bombing.
Their lawyers focued on the allegedly erratic behavior of one of the vehicles at the junction and evidence of AK-47 bullet casings found nearby, which some witnesses claimed they heard being fired toward the convoy.
Nevertheless, during the trial’s emotional closing arguments, jurors were told of the “shocking amount of death, injury and destruction” that saw “innocent men, women and children mowed down” as they went about their business in downtown Baghdad.
Federal prosecutor Anthony Asuncion said: “These men took something that did not belong to them: the lives of 14 human beings. They were turned into bloody bullet-riddled corpses at the hands of these men.”
“It must have seemed like the apocalypse was here,” said Asuncion in his closing argument, as he described how many were shot in the back, at long range, or blown up by powerful grenades used by the US contractors.
“There was not a single dead insurgent on the scene,” claimed the prosecutor. “None of these people were armed.”
After he described at length the harrowing fate of individual Iraqi civilians attacked by the Blackwater convoy, Asuncion’s voice was shaking, and he was asked to repeat a key line for the court stenographer to hear. “[The witness] opened the door and his son’s brains fell out at his feet,” Asuncion shouted the second time. “As [the witness] put it, ‘the world went dark for me’.”
Dozens of witnesses and relatives from Iraq were flown over for the trial, some showing jurors the scars on their bodies and giving evidence that caused one juror to be recused after she said she could no longer sleep at night.
Prosecutors also recapped evidence from Blackwater colleagues who testified against the accused, claiming they acted with contempt for Iraqi civilians and boasted of turning “a guy’s head into a canoe” and “popping his grape”.
Earlier in the trial, these witnesses had spoken of telling the accused to “cease-fucking-fire” after the attack, which one described as “the most horrible botched thing I have ever seen in my life”.
But defence attorneys argue the men were acting in legitimate self-defence after suspecting a car that was rolling toward them at a busy traffic intersection could contain a bomb.
Blackwater – renamed first Xe Services and then Academi after the incident saw it thrown out of Iraq and dubbed a mercenary force by a United Nations report – reached a civilian settlement on behalf of six of the victims in 2012 and paid an undisclosed sum in compensation.
FBI investigators who visited the scene in the following days described it as the “My Lai massacre of Iraq” – a reference to the infamous slaughter of civilian villagers by US troops during the Vietnam war – in which only one soldier convicted.
Nevertheless, the first attempt to bring the case to trial was thrown out by a judge after it emerged that State Department investigators had promised the defendants that statements made after the attack and leaked to the media would not be used against them in court.
In an unusual political intervention, vice-president Joe Biden promised the US would pursue a fresh prosecution during a trip to Iraq and an appeal court later ruled these errors in witness interviews did not sufficiently taint the evidence to prevent a trial.
Nevertheless, prosecutors were still forced to drop manslaughter charges against Slatten because they had mistakenly exceeded the statute of limitations during the wrangling, and had to pursue tougher charges against him instead because there was no time limit for murder.
The 14 victims killed by the Blackwater guards on trial were listed as Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia’y, Mahassin Mohssen Kadhum Al-Khazali, Osama Fadhil Abbas, Ali Mohammed Hafedh Abdul Razzaq, Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, Qasim Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, Sa’adi Ali Abbas Alkarkh, Mushtaq Karim Abd Al-Razzaq, Ghaniyah Hassan Ali, Ibrahim Abid Ayash, Hamoud Sa’eed Abttan, Uday Ismail Ibrahiem, Mahdi Sahib Nasir and Ali Khalil Abdul Hussein.
One of the darkest days of the US occupation of Iraq was relived in a Washington courtroom on Wednesday as the prosecution of four Blackwater security contractors accused of killing 14 civilians in a mistaken attack in Baghdad reached an emotional and legal climax.
Seven years after the bloody shooting in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that left a total of 17 Iraqis dead and more than 20 seriously wounded, jurors were told of the “shocking amount of death, injury and destruction” that saw “innocent men, women and children mowed down” by private guards working for the US State Department.
In closing arguments, assistant US attorney Anthony Asuncion claimed three of the four defendants were guilty of manslaughter and a fourth of murder for showing extreme disregard for human life in retaliating against what they mistakenly believed was a car bomb attack on their convoy.
But the defence summed up its case with a blistering attack on the government for ignoring evidence of alleged incoming machine gun fire at the convoy, which it also accused Iraqi police of helping to cover up.
The controversial case, which will go to the jury next week, is one of the few in which US forces have been tried for civilian deaths in Iraq and has already been abandoned once after an earlier judge questioned the way evidence was gathered.
But federal prosecutors pulled no punches on Wednesday as the closing stages of the second trial, which has lasted for 10 weeks, saw emotional scenes from attorneys on both sides.
Pointing at the four accused – Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard – Asuncion said: “These men took something that did not belong to them; the lives of 14 human beings ... they were turned into bloody bullet-riddled corpses at the hands of these men.”
After he described at length the fate of individual Iraqi civilians attacked by the Blackwater convoy, Asuncion’s voice was shaking, and he was asked to repeat a key line for the court stenographer to hear. “[The witness] opened the door and his son’s brains fell out at his feet,” Asuncio told the jury a second time. “As [the witness] put it, ‘the world went dark for me’.”
Dozens of witnesses and relatives from Iraq have been flown over for the trial, some showing jurors the scars on their bodies and giving evidence that caused one juror to be recused after she said she could no longer sleep at night.
“It must have seemed like the apocalypse was here,” said Asuncion in his closing argument, as he described how many were shot in the back, at long range, or blown up by powerful grenades used by the US contractors.
“There was not a single dead insurgent on the scene,” claimed the prosecutor. “None of these people were armed.”
He also recapped evidence from Blackwater colleagues who testified against the accused, claiming they acted with contempt for Iraqi civilians and boasted of turning “a guy’s head into a canoe” and “popping his grape”.
Earlier in the trial these witnesses had spoken of telling the accused to “cease-fucking-fire” after the attack, which one described as “the most horrible botched thing I have ever seen in my life”.
But defence attorneys argue the men were acting in legitimate self-defence after suspecting a car that was rolling toward them at a busy traffic intersection could contain a bomb.
Brian Heberlig, lawyer for Paul Slough, said the ensuing “hectic firefight” was heightened by an earlier car bomb attack on another Blackwater convoy and accused prosecutors of ignoring witnesses who had spoken of hearing AK-47 fire from possible insurgents in the area.
“I felt I was in the wrong courtroom, he said. “The argument was long on emotion and rhetoric but short on citation of the evidentiary record.”
Heberlig acknowledged that fears of a bomb attack were ultimately misplaced but said the defendants responded with an appropriate escalation of force given what they suspected was happening.
“Perhaps their perception was erroneous, perhaps the [Iraqi police] was trying to help,” he said. “It does appear that this was not a [car bomb], it does appear that this was a medical student and his mother, but our clients did not know that.”
However he ridiculed the prosecution’s suggestion that AK-47 shell casings found near the scene were normal on the streets of the Baghdad – “as common as finding cigarette butts in the streets of a US city or finding sea shells at the beach,” claimed Asuncion – and therefore not necessarily proof of any incoming fire.
“If these were just ‘sea shells’ why, four days later, were the shells no longer there?” asked Herberlig. “We will never know how much [Iraqi police] scrubbed the scene after the attack; what else was gone”.
US District Judge Royce Lamberth told jurors he would probably send them out to consider the case on Tuesday after a day or two more of closing arguments.
Blackwater, which settled a separate civilian claim following the attack, has since been renamed Xe and then Academi in efforts to improve its reputation.
A fifth security guard in the convoy, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty to manslaughter before the trial in exchange for a more lenient sentence and was one of two contractors to give evidence against his former colleagues.
Political donations to groups supporting gun control have overtaken money raised by the National Rifle Association and its allies in the 16 months since the Newtown school shooting, according to latest filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Though campaign finance experts say officially-declared money is the tip of the iceberg for both sides, the limited public figures available suggest recent efforts to build grassroots organisations to rival the political clout of gun rights advocates may be further advanced than previously thought.
The hopes of gun control advocates to overturn the long-held financial dominance of the gun lobby received a boost earlier this month when former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged to spend at least $50m over the coming year supporting campaigns for enhanced background checks and other gun control measures.
Yet the NRA, which hosted an estimated 70,000 visitors at its annual conference in Indianapolis at the weekend, has long dismissed Bloomberg as an east coast billionaire lacking popular support.
Now, however, FEC figures show that other groups, such as the one run by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Arizona, are out-raising the NRA through funding committees set up to gather small donations too.
The Americans For Responsible Solutions political action committee (Pac), set up by Giffords and her husband after she was shot in 2011, has so far raised more than $15m in the 2013/14 political cycle compared with $14.9m by the NRA's Pac over the same time.
Hundreds of small donations received by Americans For Responsible Solutions include $500 given in February by William Begg, a Connecticut doctor who runs the medical centre that treated many of the children shot at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown in December 2012.
In total, gun control groups declared $21.3m in contributions since the November 2012 election, versus $16.3m raised by gun rights groups, which include Gun Owners of America, Safari Club International, the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the National Association for Gun Rights.
Independence USA, Bloomberg's Super Pac – which is not subject to individual donor limits – has recorded donations of $6.2m from him during the same timeframe, but is likely to absorb the bulk of his promised $50m in the run-up to November's midterm elections – further widening the overall gap in future.
Its analysis focused on their contributions to candidates, which are limited this early in the 2014 cycle, rather than the money they raised from donors, and indicates how one-sided fundraising has been in the past.
But Kathy Kiely, a campaign finance expert with the Sunlight Foundation, an independent Washington research group, noted that publicly declared money is only one part of the power of the gun lobby. “The NRA gives money and buys ads, but their real strength is in grassroots organising,” she said. “This is the big challenge for the gun control groups.”
Fear of negative advertising funded by independent issues groups, which do not have to be declared to the FEC in the same way, is credited with helping block efforts to pass a bill to introduce background checks on gun buyers last April.
But perhaps the clearest example of this came last September in a recall election in Colorado, which was prompted by a petition against Democrats who had voted for similar laws in the state senate.
John Morse, who lost his seat in what became a heated battle between competing gun lobby groups, says the power of the NRA is often exaggerated, but said it played an important part in his defeat, particularly in paying for campaign leaflets during the gathering of petition signatures.
“They bashed me right from the get-go that I was a puppet of Michael Bloomberg, but he didn't contribute a dime to this effort until 34 days before the election,” said Morse. “With all due respect, by that time, the horse was out of the barn, and the election was lost.”
Morse compared the challenge of motivating supporters of gun reform – who, polls show, heavily outnumbered the smaller but more passionate gun-rights activists – to the Mothers Against Drunk Driving (Madd) campaign in the 1980, which took a generation to shift public attitudes.
“It is difficult to get people to think about something until it hurts them personally,” said Morse. “We had a fair amount of passion on our side, but we couldn't ignite the people.”
Those involved in the increasingly well-funded gun control groups are actively modelling themselves on Madd in a bid to match the passion of the NRA's loyal core.
Mark Glaze, the director of Everytown for Gun Safety, the new umbrella group backed by Bloomberg, said: “You ultimately win these things not just through money and ads on the television; you win these things by getting more people to want what you want than the other side want – and that's a long process of going out into the country with clipboards and grinding it out.”
He added: “After Newtown, people are more aware, but most of them have never been asked to help. That's why we're going out there with moms with clipboards, stroller jams and lemonade stands.”
Everytown's predecessor groups have received donations from 1.5m people in total, averaging $53 per contribution. On the day of Everytown launch earlier in April, it had received $85,000 by 4pm, averaging $100 per donor.
“[The NRA] like to talk about this [Bloomberg] money, but the truth is we have lots of donors around the country who give an average of $54 per piece, and that funds much of our operation,” Glaze added. “But the NRA does not complain when Smith & Wesson hands them a $600,000 cheque to promote policies that sell more guns.”
Nevertheless, he paid a backhanded tribute the effectiveness of his opponents, particularly at convincing politicians of their power – real or imagined. “They were the only game in town, which is very motivating for congressmen in states where every dollar has to matter," said Glaze. “They are still the ones who can motivate a small but passionate group of people to vote for and against you.”
“We don't have to match them dollar for dollar, but members [of Congress] have to know that if they are going to face a $100,000 independent expenditure, we are going to have their backs,” he added.
In this battle, much of the money both raised and spent by both sides of the gun lobby will never appear in FEC data, which excludes so-called "independent expenditure" by issues groups rather directly going to political candidates, but Glaze insisted the fight is more evenly matched than ever before.
“The [published] numbers, which are purely about political money, vastly understate both the raising and spending,” he admits. “I operate on the assumption that it's a very large part of the NRA's spending, if not the bulk, and the same is true of us and the other gun groups.”
The NRA declined several requests to comment on the figures, but launched its conference on Friday with the slogan: "Bloomberg is one guy with millions; we are millions with $25."
A ban on affirmative action policies that favour minority students has been upheld by the US supreme court, in a ruling that racial equality campaigners claim is as significant a setback for the civil rights movement as the court's recent reversal of the Voting Rights Act.
Six justices ruled on Tuesday in favour of a ballot initiative narrowly passed by Michigan voters in 2006 that banned the state's public universities from using race as a factor when deciding which students to admit, arguing that doing so discriminated against white students.
The ban had been ruled unconstitutional by a lower appeals court, but the supreme court overturned the earlier decision and upheld the Michigan law on the grounds that it was up to voters in each state to decide whether to allow affirmative action.
The majority argued the case was not about the merits of the policy itself, but whether states should be left free to decide on this vexed political issue rather than the courts.
The court’s conservatives – and swing vote Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the decision – were joined in the ruling by liberal justice Stephen Breyer, who emphasised in a concurring opinion that he believes “the constitution permits, though it does not require, the use of the kind of race-conscious programs that are now barred by the Michigan constitution,” but added, “the constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs.”
However, opponents of the Michigan law argued that a majority of white voters should not be allowed to prevent universities from seeking to adjust for social and economic factors that they say unfairly hold minority students back.
“We are fortunate to live in a democratic society. But without checks, democratically approved legislation can oppress minority groups,” wrote justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissent in which justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined her.
“For that reason, our constitution places limits on what a majority of the people may do. This case implicates one such limit: the guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Although that guarantee is traditionally understood to prohibit intentional discrimination under existing laws, equal protection does not end there … to know the history of our nation is to understand its long and lamentable record of stymieing the right of racial minorities to participate in the political process.”
Justice Elena Kagan, another of the court’s liberals, sat out of the case due to conflicts of interest.
Although a majority of supreme court justices argued their Michigan decision should not be viewed as a blow for affirmative action in general, it follows a similar ruling in June that also raised the bar for those remaining universities that seek to apply such policies.
The conservative-dominated court has also been heavily criticised by racial equality campaigners for overturning parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act last June on similar constitutional arguments in favour of states' rights.
“This is as bad as the voting rights decision,” said Detroit lawyer George Washington, who represented the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action in the latest Michigan case.
“These are major attacks on the civil rights movement that will lead to a re-segregation of universities,” he told the Guardian.
But justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the court's majority decision, insisted it was wrong to read this much into the case.
“[I]t is important to note what this case is not about,” he said. “It is not about the constitutionality, or the merits, of race-conscious admissions policies in higher education …The question here concerns not the permissibility of race-conscious admissions policies under the constitution but whether, and in what manner, voters in the States may choose to prohibit the consideration of racial preferences in governmental decisions, in particular with respect to school admissions.”
A new gun control campaign backed by $50m from former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged on Wednesday to focus its efforts outside Washington, claiming to be the first nationwide movement to rival the National Rifle Association.
Despite initial attention on wealthy backers such as Bloomberg and Warren Buffett, leaders of the group, Everytown For Gun Safety, insisted their strategy differs from previous attempts at reform because they would seek to influence politicians through grassroots campaigning rather than primarily by lobbying Congress.
“Everytown will continue to push for change in Washington, but will also move beyond Congress and bring the fight for commonsense gun policies to state capitals, to corporate boards, and to state and federal elections,” said its president John Feinblatt.
“These are fields of play formerly occupied almost solely by the gun lobby,” he added in a conference call with reporters.
But Feinblatt, who is also a policy adviser to Bloomberg, bristled at the media focus on the former mayor's involvement after he announced the initiative in an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday.
The two groups merging to form Everytown – Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America – already have 34,000 smaller donors, insisted Feinblatt, who rejects the top-down characterisation of the group by its opponents.
Everytown aims to grow the groups' combined membership from 1.5m to 2.5m over the next year, through a range of initiatives from a traditional political action committee through to "stroller jams” and “diaper-dumps” outside city hall offices, said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action.
“This is the first time there has ever been a grassroots network in the states, on the ground,” said Watts, whose group started as a Facebook page after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
“We can get people to act not just online, but offline as well. That has never happened in the history of this country.”
The tension between challenging the NRA's giant membership with grassroots political activism and countering its money by relying on divisive corporate donors like Bloomberg and Buffett is seen at the heart of the dilemma now facing the US gun control movement.
A year ago on Thursday, attempts to pass limited background checks on gun buyers fell five votes short of the 60 needed to make progress in the US Senate despite a wave of national revulsion following the Newtown shooting.
All but three of the 45 senators who blocked passage of the bill had received campaign contributions from firearms lobbyists, and they raised record sums from their members and gun manufacturers in the months following Newtown.
Bloomberg's latest pledge to spend at least $50m will go a long way to countering such money spent directly by the NRA and other pro-gun groups.
Latest election disclosures by the NRA for the 2014 midterm election cycle shows it has just $13.7m cash on hand and has only spent $241,000 so far on directly supporting candidates.
But senators who voted against last year's background check bill, particularly four rebel Democrats, fear the negative political consequences of crossing the NRA far more than direct campaign contributions.
Some of this is due to spending on attack ads against reformers running in conservative states, but Everytown concedes much of it is also due to the effective political mobilisation of gun rights campaigners.
“This is a battle for the hearts and minds of Americans,” Bloomberg told NBC on Monday.
The NRA has not issued a formal response to the new initiative, and did not respond to requests for comment, but its supporters have been quick to point out the challenge facing Bloomberg in matching their passionate campaign base.
“He’s got the money to waste,” Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, told the New York Times. “So I guess he’s free to do so. But frankly, I think he’s going to find out why his side keeps losing.”
The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, on Tuesday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of a catalogue of cover-ups, intimidation and smears aimed at investigators probing its role in an “un-American and brutal” programme of post-9/11 detention and interrogation.
In a bombshell statement on the floor of the US Senate, Feinstein, normally an administration loyalist, accused the CIA of potentially violating the US constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to obstruct her committee’s investigations into the agency’s use of torture. She described the crisis as a “defining moment” for political oversight of the US intelligence service.
Her unprecedented public assault on the CIA represented an intensification of the row between the committee and the agency over a still-secret report on the torture of terrorist suspects after 9/11. Resolution of the crisis, Feinstein suggested, may come this week at the White House.
Feinstein, who said she was making her statement “reluctantly”, confirmed recent reports that CIA officials had monitored computer networks used by Senate staff investigators. Going further than previously, she referred openly to recent attempts by the CIA to remove documents from the network detailing evidence of torture that would incriminate intelligence officers.
She also alleged that anonymous CIA officials were effectively conducting a smear campaign in the media to discredit and “intimidate” Senate staff by suggesting they had hacked into the agency’s computers to obtain a separate, critical internal report on the detention and interrogation programme.
Staff working on the Senate investigation have been reported to the Department of Justice for possible criminal charges by a lawyer at the CIA who himself features heavily in the alleged interrogation abuses. The CIA’s inspector general has another inquiry open into the issue.
Feinstein said this was a possible attempt at “intimidation” and revealed that CIA officials had also been reported to the Department of Justice for alleged violations of the fourth amendment and laws preventing them from domestic spying.
“This is a defining moment for the oversight role of our intelligence committee ... and whether we can be thwarted by those we oversee,” said Feinstein in a special address on the floor of the the US Senate.
“There is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime... this is plainly an attempt to intimidate these staff and I am not taking it lightly.”
Last week, CIA director John Brennan, a former White House counterterrorism aide to President Obama, issued a rare scathing public statement on the deepening crisis, suggesting that unspecified “wrongdoing” had occurred in “either the executive branch or legislative branch.”
Brennan, who initially withdrew from consideration as CIA director in 2008 out of allegations he did not consider torture to be a serious offence, said last week he was “deeply dismayed that some members of the Senate have decided to make spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.”
The committee’s report is still classified, and several of its conclusions are sharply contested by the CIA.
Feinstein said that she would immediately appeal to the White House to declassify the report’s major findings. The White House, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, is formally on record as supporting the declassification, which the president has the power to order.
The CIA had no immediate comment on Feinstein’s remarks. Brennan was scheduled to give a speech reflecting on the first year of his tenure later on Tuesday morning.
Patrick Leahy, chairman of the senate judiciary committee and the longest serving US senator, described Feinstein’s speech at the most important he had witnessed in his time in Congress.
“I cannot think of any speech by any member of any party as important as the one the senator from California just gave,” Leahy said.
Feinstein described repeated attempts by the CIA to frustrate the work of Senate investigators, including providing the committee staff with a “document dump” of millions of non-indexed pages, requiring years of work to sort through – a necessity, Feinstein said, after former senior CIA official Jose Rodriguez destroyed nearly 100 videotapes showing brutal interrogations of detainees in CIA custody.
“We are not going to stop our investigation and have sent our report to the president in the hope it can be declassified and published for the American people to see,” Feinstein said on the Senate floor.
She said the goal of declassifying the report, exposing the “horrible details of a CIA programme that never, never should have existed,” was to prevent torture from ever again becoming American policy.
Zeke Johnson of Amnesty International called on the White House to publish the committee’s report. “President Obama, who has claimed to have the most transparent administration in history, should move immediately to declassify and release the report. Otherwise, the legacy of torture he inherited will become his own,” he said.
Younger workers struggling to live independently from their parents will be targeted for extra support by Barack Obama in new budget proposals that extend the president’s inequality drive to the so-called ‘lost generation’.
Though likely to become quickly mired in Washington’s now-traditional budget deadlock, the proposed extension of benefits to childless workers, including those under 25, is a centrepiece of the 2015 budget unveiled on Tuesday and marks a departure from the usual focus on help for families.
Officials said their suggested expansion of the so-called Earned Income Tax Credits would add 3.3 million people between ages 21 and 24 to the programme and lift an extra half million childless adults above the official poverty line.
“Current age restrictions prevent workers younger than 25 from claiming the childless worker EITC, excluding young workers living independently from their parents from its pro-work effects,” said a White House report.
“This represents an important missed opportunity. For individuals at this formative stage of life, encouraging employment and on-the-job experience could help establish patterns of labor force attachment that would persist throughout their working lives.”
The president’s $4tn budget is seen as even more symbolic than usual this year after it dropped a proposed trim in welfare inflation for retired workers that was previously designed to act as compromise gesture for fiscally conservative Republicans.
But even though Congress is unlikely to take up the budget, several of its measures do still chime with ideas under consideration by the House of Representatives and may help shape the growing bipartisan debate on income equality.
Obama, for example, targets the same “carried income” loopholes used by private equity partners and other high earners on Wall Street that were the subject of tax reform proposals last week by Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House ways and means committee.
Budget committee chairman Paul Ryan is also thought to be drawing up benefit reforms to improve incentives to find work in his proposals for federal spending in 2015, although these are likely to take the form of cuts rather than extensions of existing programmes.
At a launch event on Tuesday morning, officials claim Obama “will show how to achieve real, lasting economic security and expand opportunity for all so that every American who is willing to work hard can get ahead.”
“The president’s budget will show in real terms the choices we can make to expand economic opportunity and strengthen the middle class, like closing unfair tax loopholes so we can invest in the things we need to help the middle class and those striving to get into it, grow our economy, and provide economic opportunity for every American,” said a White House statement.
“It invests in infrastructure, job training, and preschool; cuts taxes for working Americans while closing tax loopholes enjoyed by the wealthy and well-connected; and reduces the deficit.”
A former rising star of the Republican party was charged on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy on Tuesday, in a dramatic escalation of a long-running corruption scandal in which his family was showered with gifts and loans by a struggling local tobacco entrepreneur.
Bob McDonnell and his wife insist they gave no political favours to Jonnie Williams, who paid for their daughter's wedding, a Rolex watch, a Louis Vuitton handbag, Oscar de la Renta dresses and loaned them a jet, Ferrari, beach home and $120,000 in cash.
But less than two weeks after leaving the governor's mansion in Richmond, the couple face one of the biggest corruption trials in recent political history after federal prosecutors alleged they promoted Williams' business, Star Scientific, in direct return for the gifts.
Bob and Maureen McDonnell were charged on 13 counts each by federal prosecutors on Tuesday after a grand jury heard allegations they asked Williams to bankroll their lavish lifestyle after running into real estate difficulties.
Twelve of the counts are punishable by up to 20 years in prison each, and two are punishable up to 30 years. Fines can range from $250,000 to $1m.
Both have firmly denied wrongdoing, and Bob McDonnell repaid thousands to Williams while he was still in office. Limited to a single term by state law, McDonnell left the executive mansion earlier this month in disgrace, his approval numbers low and his political future in tatters.
At one time, McDonnell was seen as a potential running mate for Mitt Romney. He delivered the 2010 Republican response to the State of the Union address, and became chairman of the Republican Governors Association in 2011.
The 43-page indictment portrays a cozy relationship between the McDonnells and Williams that began before he took office, with many of their interactions initiated by Maureen McDonnell.
“I need to talk to you about inaugural clothing budget,” reads one email from Maureen McDonnell to Williams in 2009. “I need answers and Bob is screaming about the thousands I'm charging up in credit card debt. We are broke, have an unconscionable amount in credit card debt already and this Inaugural is killing us!! I need answers and I need help, I need to get this done.”
The indictment alleges that Maureen McDonnell cut a deal with Williams about two years later: if he bought her dresses and accessories for her daughter's wedding and the couple's anniversary, she would make sure he had a prime seat next to her husband at a political event in New York City.
Williams paid her nearly $20,000 tab at stores such as Oscar de la Renta and Louis Vuitton, the indictment says. As promised, Williams was seated next to the governor at the event on 13 April, 2011.
The indictment also details a succession of gifts, ranging from golf trips to iPhones, which followed after the governor allegedly said he would put Williams in contact with Virginia's secretary of health and spoke in support of Star Scientific at a doctors' conference.
Williams, a former cigarette manufacturer, was struggling to promote the health-giving effects of an ingredient derived from tobacco plants, and has since left Star.
Prosecutors allege that for two years the McDonnells concealed a “scheme to use Robert McDonnell's position as governor of Virginia to enrich the defendants and their family members by soliciting and obtaining payments, loans, gifts and other things of value from JW and Star Scientific in exchange for ... performing official actions ... to legitimise, promote and obtain research studies for Star Scientific's products".
In a statement, McDonnell insisted he broke no laws by accepting the gifts and attacked prosectors for “unjust overreach of the federal government”.
“I deeply regret accepting legal gifts and loans from Mr Williams, all of which have been repaid with interest, and I have apologised for my poor judgment for which I take full responsibility,” he said.
“However, I repeat emphatically that I did nothing illegal for Mr Williams in exchange for what I believed was his personal generosity and friendship. I never promised – and Mr Williams and his company never received – any government benefit of any kind from me or my administration.”
The scandal first came to light in the Washington Post after a chef at the governor's mansion was accused of stealing food and turned on the couple by revealing how Williams had paid for much of their daughter's wedding.
Republican negotiators have reined in funding for Wall Street regulators as part of agreeing a $1.1tn federal budget, but dropped demands for further reductions in federal food stamp programmes that would have hit America's poorest families.
The measures are among thousands of spending items contained in theso-called omnibus appropriations bill published on Monday night in a bipartisan effort to avoid another government shutdown when current authorisation expires on Friday.
The House of Representatives is due to vote on the measure on Wednesday. If passed, it would be the first time since 2011 that Congress has agreed a detailed budget and builds on negotiations by senator Patty Murray and congressman Paul Ryan before Christmas to set broad tax and spending parameters.
However, the final text, which runs to more than 1,500 pages, contains scores of politically contentious measures that may yet cause backlash among Democrats and Republicans.
Hal Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House appropriations committee, singled out the budget for the Securities and Exchange Commission in a press release, which received $324m less than it requested and $25m taken from reserves he called “a slush fund”.
Wall Street lobbyists have been pressing Congress to curb the growing power of regulators like the SEC in the wake of the financial crisis and Rogers said the spending bill had also designating $44m to an economic review of its rule-making process.
This decision, and similar cuts to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, brought an angry response from Wall Street campaigners.
“It is shameful that Wall Street’s allies in Congress have again failed to fund the very agencies that are charged with protecting Main Street and preventing another financial crisis,” said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, an independent nonprofit organisation that promotes the public interest in the financial markets.
“The only reason not to fully fund the CFTC and the SEC is to protect Wall Street profits, bonuses and reckless trading. This rewards Wall Street’s lobbyists and campaign cash while endangering American families,” he added.
But Republicans appear to have dropped contentious proposals to force further cuts to food stamps, known as Snap, as part of agreeing farm spending.
Barbara Mikulski, the Democratic senator who chairs the Senate appropriations committee, said the bill includes $82bn in mandatory funding for the Snap program which would “fully fund the program and reflects the administration’s latest estimates”.
Rogers said Republicans had instead demanded “oversight and monitoring requirements to weed out waste and abuse in nutrition programs”
The bill will also fund Obama's Affordable Care Act implementation, despite earlier Republican threats to defund it.
“This agreement shows the American people that we can compromise, and that we can govern. It puts an end to shutdown, slowdown, slamdown politics,” said Mikulski in a statement.
“I’m pleased that this agreement includes all 12 appropriations bills. For the first time since 2011, no mission of our government will be left behind on autopilot.”
The Obama administration placed itself firmly back in the battle to extend gay marriage rights across the US on Friday, announcing that the federal government would recognise same-sex unions that took place when a ban was temporarily lifted in the conservative state of Utah.
Holder’s announcement was welcomed by campaigners in Utah, a state dominated by the Mormon church, which opposes gay marriage. The move puts the Obama administration back at the heart of the fight to extend same-sex marriage rights across the United States.
"In the days ahead, we will continue to co-ordinate across the federal government to ensure the timely provision of every federal benefit to which Utah couples and couples throughout the country are entitled – regardless of whether they are in same-sex or opposite-sex marriages," Holder said in a video on the Justice Department's website.
A flurry of same-sex weddings took place in Utah during a 2.5-week period in December, after a federal judge ruled that the state’s voter-approved gay marriage ban violated the US constitution. Several attempts by state authorities to have the ruling put on hold were rejected. A stay was eventually granted by the supreme court, which sent the matter back to the lower appeal courts.
Holder’s announcement bolsters their position, announcing the government will recognise the marriages, including for the purposes of benefits, federal employment rights and immigration.
“I am confirming today that, for purposes of federal law, these marriages will be recognised as lawful and considered eligible for all relevant federal benefits on the same terms as other same-sex marriages,” said Holder in an unusual video statement. “These families should not be asked to endure uncertainty regarding their status as the litigation unfolds.”
Holder said his decision stemmed from a crucial test case before the supreme court last year, which overturned the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and secured equal legal treatment for married gay couples.
"Last June, the supreme court issued a landmark decision – in United States v Windsor – holding that Americans in same-sex marriages are entitled to equal protection and equal treatment under the law,” explained Holder.
“This ruling marked a historic step toward equality for all American families. And since the day it was handed down, the Department of Justice has been working tirelessly to implement it in both letter and spirit, moving to extend federal benefits to married same-sex couples as swiftly and smoothly as possible.”
Although he described the recent supreme court stay as an “administrative step”, Holder's decision comes as the White House attempts to extend the principle that national rights should trump the desire of conservative states like Utah to resist a growing trend toward legal recognition.
Same-sex couples in Utah were delighted by the announcement. Moudi Sbeity, one of the plaintiffs in the legal action against the state, said: "It gives me hope moving forward in the appeals process."
"It shows that there really is a social and cultural shift in viewpoints and mindsets toward marriage equality."
Supporters of same-sex marriage planned a rally at the Utah state capitol on Friday afternoon. They planned to deliver a petition to the governor and state attorney general asking them to let the federal judge's December ruling stand and allow gay marriages to continue.
Tim Wagner of Salt Lake City, one of the organisers of the rally said Holder's announcement was "pretty amazing" and a great thing for the newly-married couples.
"It sounds like our national attorney general actually sees the law in the way it should be acknowledged," Wagner told the AP. "The law is on the side of rights and the people who want to love the people they love."
Strained relations between the White House and its military leaders have been laid bare by former US defense secretary Robert Gates, who accuses President Barack Obama and his top civilian advisers of lacking faith in their own strategy for conducting the war in Afghanistan.
In a forthcoming memoir leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post that threatens to exacerbate current criticism of US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gates – who was first appointed to his post by former President George W Bush – reveals, in a series of swipes that are surprisingly combative coming from such a senior former official, problems between the White House and the Pentagon that have made for troubling relations at the very highest levels.
“All too early in the administration,” adds Gates, “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials – including the president and vice-president – became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders.”
Perhaps most damagingly, he also alleges that Obama did not believe in his own strategy for ending the war in Afghanistan, which he was “skeptical if not outright convinced ... would fail,” and that he was skeptical at best about the leadership of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai.
“The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out,” writes Gates.
Obama's policies toward both Afghanistan and Iraq are under fresh scrutiny this month, as Karzai has refused to sign a deal to retain a US military presence after the bulk of troops are withdrawn this year, andIraq has faced renewed al-Qaida militancy.
On Tuesday, the White House defended its strategy, insisting it was up to both countries to ensure their own future stability. And in a statement released about the book, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said:
Deliberations over our policy on Afghanistan have been widely reported on over the years, and it is well known that the President has been committed to achieving the mission of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda, while also ensuring that we have a clear plan for winding down the war... As has always been the case, the President welcomes differences of view among his national security team, which broaden his options and enhance our policies. The President wishes Secretary Gates well as he recovers from his recent injury, and discusses his book.
In a short essay based on the book and published on Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal, Gates endorses Obama's troop surge in Afghanistan but casts doubt over the president's overall commitment to the fight there.
“[Obama's] fundamental problem in Afghanistan was that his political and philosophical preferences for winding down the US role conflicted with his own pro-war public rhetoric (especially during the 2008 campaign), the nearly unanimous recommendations of his senior civilian and military advisers at the Departments of State and Defense, and the realities on the ground,” he says.
Gates, who is the only person to have served as defense secretary in both a Democratic and a Republican administration, contrasts the attitudes of his two former bosses towards the military in ways that may provide ammunition to Obama's critics, while at the same time heartening supporters anxious about Pentagon influence on policy-making.
“The relationship between senior military leaders and their civilian commander in chief is often tense, and that was certainly my experience under both Bush and Obama,” he concludes in the WSJ. “Bush was willing to disagree with his senior military advisers, but he never (to my knowledge) questioned their motives or mistrusted them personally. Obama was respectful of senior officers and always heard them out, but he often disagreed with them and was deeply suspicious of their actions and recommendations.”
According to descriptions of the book published by the Times and Post ahead of its publication on January 14, Gates is particularly scathing toward vice-president Joe Biden.
Gates does call Biden a “man of integrity,” but says he “poison[ed] the well” in the Obama administration against military leaders, and writes, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
He also says he ordered Pentagon officials to hide information from Samantha Power, the current US ambassador to the United Nations, who was then working as a national security council adviser. “Don’t give the White House staff and [national security staff] too much information on the military options,” he writes, according to the Post. “They don’t understand it, and ‘experts’ like Samantha Power will decide when we should move militarily.”
Clashes between the White House and Pentagon are far from unknown, although Gates insists military relations with the Obama administration were particularly bad.
“The White House tightly controls every aspect of national security policy and even operations,” he claims. “His White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.”
Edward Snowden, the former security contractor who leaked a trove of National Security Agency documents, welcomed a court ruling on Monday that declared the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records to be a likely violation of the US constitution.
Snowden said the ruling, by a US district judge, justified his disclosures. “I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts," he said in comments released through Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who received the documents from Snowden.
"Today, a secret program authorised by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many,” said Snowden, whose statement was first reported by the New York Times.
Judge Richard Leon declared that the mass collection of so-called metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, relating to unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope.
He also expressed doubt about the central rationale for the program cited by the NSA: that it is necessary for preventing terrorist attacks. “The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack,” wrote Leon, a US district judge in the District of Columbia.
“Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation – most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics – I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.”
Leon granted a preliminary injunction sought by plaintiffs Larry Klayman and Charles Strange, concluding that their constitutional challenge was likely to be successful. In what was the only comfort to the NSA in a stinging judgment, he put the ruling on hold, pending an appeal by the government.
Senator Mark Udall, a leading critic of the dragnet collection, welcomed the judgment. "The ruling underscores what I have argued for years: [that] the bulk collection of Americans' phone records conflicts with Americans' privacy rights under the US constitution and has failed to make us safer," said Udall, a Democrat.
Senator Ron Wyden, another NSA critic, also welcomed the ruling. "Judge Leon’s ruling hits the nail on the head. It makes clear that bulk phone records collection is intrusive digital surveillance and not simply inoffensive data collection as some have said."
He went on: “Significantly, the judge also noted that he had ‘serious doubts about the efficacy of the program.’ The reason that he and many others have these doubts is that the executive branch’s claims about this program’s effectiveness are now crumbling under public scrutiny. Protecting the country from terrorism is obviously vitally important but the government can do this without collecting the phone records of massive numbers of law-abiding men, women and children.”
At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney said he had no comment on the on the case, saying he had not heard of the decision when the press briefing started and referred reporters to the Justice Department for reaction.
“We’ve seen the opinion and are studying it. We believe the program is constitutional as previous judges have found. We have no further comment at this time," said Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames.
The US supreme court will hear a fresh legal challenge to President Obama's troubled healthcare reforms after justices agreed on Tuesday to take up two cases brought by companies refusing to provide contraception to employees.
In a major test of the rights of corporations over individuals, the court will hear arguments that a provision in the Affordable Care Act requiring emergency contraception to be part of qualifying health insurance plans infringes on the religious freedoms of employers who oppose such drugs as a form of abortion.
Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based chain of craft stores, won a lower court appeal against the law after judges in Denver ruled that corporations should have freedom of religious expression in such circumstances.
A subsequent appeal of this ruling by the Department of Justice will now be heard by the supreme court in Washington alongside a similar case brought by a Mennonite-owned wood manufacturer in Pennsylvania, which was originally rejected by a lower court there.
The two cases represent the latest high-profile legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, which only went ahead after the supreme court rejected arguments that its core requirement mandating individuals to have insurance cover infringed the constitution.
But this new supreme court challenge, though less central to the effectiveness of the wider reforms, could go against the administration if justices follow similar logic to that applied when they were asked to rule on the political freedoms of companies to make campaign contributions.
Judges in the 10th circuit appeals court that upheld Hobby Lobby's original complaint said the same rationale used to protect corporate donations in the so-called Citizens United case should now extend to religious freedoms.
“We see no reason the supreme court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression,” judge Timothy M Tymkovich wrote for the majority.
The Affordable Care Act already exempts religious organisations and charities from the birth control requirements, but the DOJ argues it should not extend to for-profit companies that happen to be owned by people with strong religious beliefs.
The White House defended the Act in a statement on Tuesday: "As a general matter, our policy is designed to ensure that healthcare decisions are made between a woman and her doctor. The president believes that no one, including the government or for-profit corporations, should be able to dictate those decisions to women."
The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, said: "When the supreme court hears this case, the choice must be clear: health care decisions should be made by a woman and her doctor, not by her boss, by insurance companies, or by Washington politicians. Women's health should never be dictated by a third party and should always be left in the hands of America's women and their families."
Not many political "rock stars" inspire audience members to knit, but, even by Washington's sedate standards, the darling of America's new left is a quiet revolutionary.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard professor turned Wall Street scourge, is one of a clutch of unlikely radicals giving hope to those disenchanted with mainstream Democrats.
Hours before a rare public appearance last week, one of the largest rooms in Congress begins slowly filling up with an odd mix of groupies: policy wonks, finance geeks, Occupy activists, and, yes, the type of political conference attendee who brings their knitting in.
Warren proceeds to calmly recite numbers that could inspire even librarians to storm a few barricades. The Wall Street crash has cost the US economy $14tn, she says, but its top institutions are 30% larger than before, own half the country's bank assets and are in receipt of an implicit taxpayer subsidy of $83bn a year because they are deemed too big to fail.
"We have got to get back to running this country for American families, not for its largest financial institutions," concludes Warren, before noting how little President Barack Obama has done to achieve that.
When the same message was delivered to union leaders in September, she had them standing on their chairs. But for the first time since the banking crash, the argument is connecting at the ballot box too. Mayoral elections in Boston and New York two weeks ago saw leftwing candidates with similar messages about economic inequality win by surprising landslides.
Meanwhile, Terry McAuliffe, the former Clinton fundraiser who epitomises the business-friendly Democrat mainstream, saw his substantial poll lead in Virginia all but evaporate under attack from populists on the right.
Whereas the Tea Party has worked relentlessly since the financial crash to recast the Republican party as a perceived challenger to Wall Street, Democrats such as Obama and his potential successor Hillary Clinton rely heavily on financial donors and have veered away from confrontation. But the popularity of senators such as Warren in Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown in Ohio has combined with recent mayoral election wins by Bill de Blasio in New York and Marty Walsh in Boston to raise hopes that the left could yet exert the same pull on Democrats.
"The challenges the Democratic party has faced since 2009 have largely been a result of the public's perception that the party isn't clearly enough on their side," argues Damon Silvers, policy director for union umbrella group AFL-CIO. "Republicans have exploited that very skilfully, even though Republicans are totally owned by the financial class."
"What's happening now is the emergence of politicians – De Blasio and Walsh being recent examples – that are just not interested in that type of politics," adds Silvers. "And those people are being successful. They are stepping into a political vacuum that is all about authenticity in relationship to issues of inequality and the power of financial interests."
Though the similarity only goes so far, the shared interest of America's new left and Tea Party conservatives in challenging the economic status quo also shows how figures such as Warren might attract broader support beyond traditional Democrat voters.
One self-confessed Warren groupie is David Collum, a Cornell University chemistry professor and amateur investor, whose enthusiasm for free market economics previously led him to endorse libertarian Republican candidate Ron Paul. Collum has been exchanging regular emails with Warren since before the crash and says she captured his imagination because her brand of intelligent populism transcends traditional political boundaries.
"If you look at her and Ron Paul, it's the same thing: they appear to speak from the heart," he explains. "Here you have Warren saying the banks are thugs, she supports the consumer which has a natural leftwing sound to it, but I don't think it's putty-headed liberalism, I think she is just an advocate for the small person."
But the question of whether it is Warren or one of the other emerging leftwingers who challenges the Clinton orthodoxy in 2016 may prove besides the point if even the talk of her running causes Team Hillary to reassess its rumoured dependence on Wall Street fundraising and helps pull the party away from big business.
Political pundits in the media have often been slow to capture public mood changes, ignoring the Occupy Wall Street movement for months, for example, and were also caught by surprise by de Blasio's win in New York.
In the end, de Blasio won the support of 73% of New York's voters with an unapologetically leftwing campaign: arguing for tax increases on the rich to pay for better schools and using his afro-haired son to promote a campaign against police harassment of young black men.
The scepticism among political elites that such policies will translate outside liberal bastions like New York may be warranted. Howard Dean, the last such candidate seen as a serious presidential candidate, crashed and burned when he was seen as too "shouty". Ralph Nader, who ran to the left of John Kerry as an independent candidate in 2004 arguably cost him the election that made way for George W Bush.
But what has changed is that mainstream Democrats and Republicans in Washington seem even less popular today than the perceived outsiders on the left and right.
Both Obama and the Republican party hit record lows in the polls recently after the government shutdown and botched launch of healthcare reforms exacerbated a national feeling that Washington is broken.
"I think the lesson that we have to draw from [these polls] is that the American people are not satisfied," said White House spokesman Jay Carney. "[Not satisfied] that we're, all of us, focused on the things that matter to them, and we're not getting the results that they want."
In this atmosphere, anyone who doesn't appear part of the Washington mainstream is by definition a populist.
But whereas rightwing challengers in the Tea Party can lump public dissatisfaction with Washington, Wall Street and the government into one big anti-establishment message, radicals on the left have a finer line to tread, especially after Obama's botched healthcare launch led to such mistrust of their preferred public sector solutions.
Warren does it by pointing out the need for more regulation, both to save capitalism from itself and re-engage the social mobility of the American dream.
The former mayor of Baltimore, said to be one of the inspirations for the Tommy Carcetti character in The Wire, has introduced gun control legislation, abolished the death penalty and legalised same-sex marriages, all while successfully increasing government spending on areas such as transport.
Nonetheless, compared with Hillary Clinton, both O'Malley and Warren remain virtual unknowns on the national stage and would face a huge challenge to win the Democratic primary let alone the White House.
Warren describes her battle with the banks as a "David and Goliath struggle". Whether David can take on the Goliaths of the Democratic party is a whole other matter.
Republican leaders conceded defeat in their two-week battle to derail Barack Obama's healthcare reforms on Wednesday, agreeing to a series of votes that were likely to re-open the government and avert a looming debt default.
With just hours until a deadline set by the US Treasury for extending the debt limit, House speaker John Boehner signalled he was ready to accept a Senate-drafted peace deal that contained almost no concessions to conservatives who had driven the country the brink of a new financial crisis.
Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, announced the deal on the the floor of the Senate just after midday. He called for all sides to work together to implement the deal. "Now is not the time for pointing fingers," he said.
Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, acknowledged the fight was over and said the shutdown and debt crisis should be over later on Wednesday.
"This has been a long, challenging few weeks," McConnell said. "This is far less than many of us had hoped for, but it is far better than some had sought."
The deal crafted by Reid and McConnell will fund the government until 15 January and lift the debt ceiling until 7 February. It will force both sides into a formal budget conference to try to reach a longer-term deal by 13 December.
The only apparent change to the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans had targeted in their budget standoff, involves asking the Obama administration to carry out better checks on the incomes of those applying to take part in new insurance exchanges.
A senior Republican aide told the Guardian that Boehner had agreed to allow the House to vote on the deal, which in practice means it would pass with support from Democrats and moderate Republicans, although it was still unclear when this would happen.
Recriminations among Republicans flew thick and fast, with moderates accusing House conservatives of trashing the party's reputation in pursuit of an impossible ambition to repeal Obamacare entirely.
Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, said this had "been the best two weeks for the Democratic party in recent times".
"When we evaluate the last couple of weeks, it should be entitled the time of great lost opportunity. If we had been focused on the rollout of Obamacare and its confusion, public support would have diminished. Instead, our numbers have gone down, Obamacare has mysteriously gone up, and other than that, this has been great."
He was scathing about the influence of conservative advocacy groups such as Heritage Action, which torpedoed a deal on Tuesday when it threatened to withdraw support from Republicans who backed it, but blamed lawmakers for listening to them.
"Every member of Congress gets hit by groups like this right and left. I am not mad at a group for wanting their way; I am focusing on trying to get the Republican party to chart a better way. The way we are behaving and the path we have taken the last couple of weeks leads to a marginalised party in the eyes of the American people. A form of conservatism that is probably beyond what the market would bear. "
If, as expected, the House votes on the new deal first, it would prevent Cruz from delaying its passage through the Senate and could herald an end to the crisis by Wednesday night.
A leading ratings agency put the the US on notice of a downgrade on Tuesday amid political turmoil in Washington over how to resolve the budget crisis less than a day before the country's borrowing requirement expires.
Fitch warned that the political battle "risks undermining confidence in the role of the US dollar as the pre-eminent global reserve currency, by casting doubt over the full faith and credit of the US."
The White House seized on the announcement, saying that it demonstrated the urgency of reaching a deal.
But senior Republicans in the House of Representatives inched further to the brink on Tuesday night when they abandoned a planned vote on a so-called continuing resolution, which would have extended the debt ceiling and reopened the federal government.
It became clear that John Boehner, the House speaker, could not muster enough votes to push through the plan. In an attempt to placate the conservative wing of his caucus, Boehner added a provision that would have stripped members of Congress, the president and their staffs of their employer-provided health insurance.
But after conservative lobby groups came out against the plan, Boehner could not attract a majority of Republican votes.
A day that ended in turmoil began with recriminations when the House rejected a fragile bipartisan deal that emerged from the Senate on Monday night. That deal would have extended the debt limit and authorised government spending with only one token concession over healthcare.
Boehner then floated an alternative compromise that would have, in addition, delayed a new tax on medical devices designed to help pay for the Affordable Care Act and deprive lawmakers of any personal health insurance subsidies. That succeeded only in inflaming conservatives in his own party, who regard the House and Senate compromises as surrender, and Democrats who accused Boehner of introducing unacceptable new "ransom demands".
The Republican leadership dropped the medical device tax provision, but pushed on with a plan to cut healthcare from congressional and White House staff, which amounted to an $18,000-a-year pay cut for most staffers. The resolution got as far as being published on the House rules committee website, before a vote was postponed. It was unclear what the next political moves would be.
Shortly before 6:30pm, with House Republicans in disarray, a succession of GOP leaders arrived for crisis talks in Boehner's office. It looked set to be a long meeting; congressional staffers were spotted delivering boxes of pizza.
Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader in the House, earlier held the speaker personally to blame for bowing to pressure from his conservative wing. "I am very disappointed with John Boehner, who is trying to preserve his role at the expense of the country," he said.
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said the Republican plan "sabotages a good-faith, bipartisan effort by the Senate and is a luxury our country cannot afford". Her chief whip Steny Hoyer claimed Republicans wanted to "snatch confrontation from the jaws of reasonable agreement".
The White House also emphatically rejected the new Republican approach.
"The president has said repeatedly that members of Congress don't get to demand ransom for fulfilling their basic responsibilities to pass a budget and pay the nation's bills. Unfortunately, the latest proposal from House Republicans does just that, in a partisan attempt to appease a small group of Tea Party Republicans who forced the government shutdown in the first place," spokeswoman Amy Brundage said in a statement.
"Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have been working in a bipartisan, good-faith effort to end the manufactured crises that have already harmed American families and business owners," she continued. "With only a couple days remaining until the United States exhausts its borrowing authority, it's time for the House to do the same."
As the wrangling continued in Washington, Fitch said it had reached its conclusion because of the increased possibility that the US will not reach a deal on its debt ceiling before 17 October, when Treasury secretary Jack Lew has said the US will run out of cash. "Although Fitch continues to believe that the debt ceiling will be raised soon, the political brinkmanship and reduced financing flexibility could increase the risk of a US default," said Fitch.
The agency's move came as US investors appear to be increasingly nervous that the impasse in Washington could lead the US to default on its obligations for the first time in history. The Dow fell 133.25 points or 0.87% to end the day down after a brief rally when it appeared a breakthrough had been made.
In 2011, Standard & Poor's downgraded US debt as Democrats and Republicans argued once more about the debt ceiling. The move came amid sharp selloffs on stock markets around the world.
"The repeated brinkmanship over raising the debt ceiling also dents confidence in the effectiveness of the US government and political institutions, and in the coherence and credibility of economic policy. It will also have some detrimental effect on the US economy," said Fitch.
A fragile deal to end the US budget crisis collapsed on Tuesday when Democrats accused conservative Republicans of sabotaging the bipartisan proposals less than two days before the country's borrowing authority expires.
A proposal by a group of Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate fizzled when GOP leaders in the House of Representatives failed to get their rank-and-file members to back a revised version.
But just as the embattled House GOP leadership attempted to muster support for a deal by adding new clauses picking away at Barack Obama's healthcare reforms, it was rejected by Democrats. "It can't pass the Senate and won't pass the Senate," said Harry Reid, the majority leader.
The latest tussle began when House Republicans met at 9am to consider a deal reached on Monday between Senate leaders that would have extended the debt limit and authorised government spending with only one token concession over healthcare.
Speaker John Boehner floated an alternative that, in addition, would delay a new tax on medical devices designed to help pay for Obamacare and deprive lawmakers of any personal health insurance subsidies.
That succeeded only in inflaming conservatives in his own party, who regard both House and Senate compromises as surrender, and Democrats, who accused Boehner of introducing unacceptable new "ransom demands".
House Republican leaders emerged from their bruising encounter with conservatives without announcing whether they would even try to stage a vote on their new proposal. "There is no decision about what exactly we will do," Boehner told reporters. "We are talking with our members and both sides of aisle to try to find a way forward today."
It was not clear if Boehner's proposals, which were strongly opposed by the White House and Senate Democrats, even carried the support of conservative members of his own party. The Republican House meeting began with a rendition of the Christian hymn Amazing Grace, but quickly descended into lively, and at times fiery, debates, according to some of those present.
Texas congressman Michael Burgess said that reaction to the Senate's bipartisan proposal was "not good", while there was only a "mixed reaction" to Boehner's plan. Jeff Fortenberry, from Nebraska, said there has been a robust discussion in the room, but he hoped the threat of default would eventually lead to a deal being passed.
A number of House Republicans were unable to explain their conference's current strategy, speaking in vague terms about coming up with a deal to "counter" the Senate plan and remaining non-committal on whether they would vote in favour of Boehner's proposals until they saw a detailed bill.
But the merest hint of fresh threats to Obamacare was enough to send Democrats into a fury.
Senator Reid held the speaker personally to blame for bowing to pressure from his conservative wing. "I am very disappointed with John Boehner, who is trying to preserve his role at the expense of the country," he said, saying the move threatened to "torpedo" the deal that was previously struck with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said the new Republican plan "sabotages a good-faith, bipartisan effort by the Senate, and is a luxury our country cannot afford", while her chief whip Steny Hoyer claimed Republicans wanted to "snatch confrontation from the jaws of reasonable agreement".
A visibly angry Chuck Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said Boehner had killed the momentum that had gathered behind their bipartisan deal. "We're at the 11th hour. The train to avoid default was smoothly heading down the tracks and picking up speed, and at the last minute, speaker Boehner decides to throw a log on those tracks. Enough already."
The White House also emphatically rejected the new Republican approach."The president has said repeatedly that members of Congress don't get to demand ransom for fulfilling their basic responsibilities to pass a budget and pay the nation's bills," spokeswoman Amy Brundage said in a statement.
"Unfortunately, the latest proposal from House Republicans does just that in a partisan attempt to appease a small group of Tea Party Republicans who forced the government shutdown in the first place.
"Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have been working in a bipartisan, good-faith effort to end the manufactured crises that have already harmed American families and business owners," she continued.
"With only a couple days remaining until the United States exhausts its borrowing authority, it's time for the House to do the same."
