Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the first Black leader of either major US political party, made his first speech as a part of the opening of the 118th Congress.
Saturday, January 7, 2023
FOCUS: Asawin Suebsaeng and Tessa Stuart | Sex Trafficking Row Helped Fuel Gaetz's Hatred for McCarthy
07 January 23
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The Florida congressman's opposition to the House Speaker hopeful's bid for the gavel is indeed personal, sources tell Rolling Stone
Among the major factors in McCarthy losing more than a dozen speakership ballots, people familiar with the matter say, was the severity of Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s enmity toward the Republican leader. Gaetz’s intense and personal distaste for McCarthy has been an open secret in Washington political circles for years, so much so that Gaetz and McCarthy’s colleagues would argue it isn’t even a “secret” at all.
But Gaetz’s hatred curdled into something even more powerful after it was revealed in early 2021 that the MAGA congressman was the target of a federal investigation into the sex trafficking of a minor. (No charges were filed against Gaetz, but his “wingman” Joel Greenberg was sentenced to 11 years in prison.) McCarthy, in Gaetz’s opinion, failed to mount a forceful enough defense on his behalf. According to two sources familiar with the matter, Gaetz has been furious at McCarthy for the perceived lack of support ever since — despite the fact that McCarthy did not strip him of any committee assignments during the probe.
The enmity between the two Republicans spilled into open view on the floor of the House during the 14th vote Friday night that McCarthy had bragged would finally put him over the top to secure the speaker’s gavel. Gaetz placed himself at the center of the drama. He skipped his turn in the alphabetical role call vote, setting himself up to vote at the end of the proceeding. With McCarthy needing one more yes vote, Gaetz instead voted “present” — leaving McCarthy with 50 percent of the vote, a hair short of victory. McCarthy strode up to Gaetz on the House floor, and a the foes had a heated exchange that did not change the total. McCarthy again was left hanging. (Gaetz again voted “present” along with the other Never Kevin rebels in the 15th vote that finally gave McCarthy the gavel.)
The original source of Rep. Gaetz’s acute loathing of McCarthy is less clear. Rolling Stone contacted members of Congress, sources on Capitol Hill, and activists in conservative organizations to ask what the root cause was. They all just knew Gaetz hated the House GOP leader. One Republican who knows both Gaetz and McCarthy says they even once asked the latter why Gaetz dislikes him so much. This source recalls McCarthy answering: “I don’t know.”
Gaetz’s animosity toward McCarthy was on full display throughout the week, as he stood to deliver nominating speeches on behalf of both Jim Jordan and Donald Trump. “Maybe the right person for the Speaker of the House isn’t someone who wants it so bad,” Gaetz said when nominating Jordan. “Maybe the right person for Speaker of the House isn’t someone who has sold shares of themself for more than a decade to get it.”
“We have to restore to the Speaker’s Office the actual person who ought to be in the Speaker’s Office, not the squatter who is currently there,” he later added while nominating Trump. “And if the Architect of the Capitol is listening — I sent a letter, and I would like to know what the basis is to allow someone to occupy the Speaker’s office who comes in second place ten straight times? Is there, like, some basis in law or rule or precedent for that?”
Both men nominated by Gaetz were working to whip votes for McCarthy. Jim Jordan nominated McCarthy in a forceful floor speech. Meanwhile, Trump made public call on Truth Social for Republicans to back McCarthy. Both the former president and his eldest son Donald Trump Jr. have also made phone calls in recent days to GOP members of Congress in support of McCarthy, two knowledgeable sources say. The former president’s recent whipping for McCarthy was described by one person with direct knowledge of one of the calls as “lackadaisical.”
Asked to comment on reports that he personally despises McCarthy — and that his loathing was intensified by McCarthy’s failure to aggressively stand up for him during the sex-crimes probe — Gaetz’s office did not deny it. Instead, they pointed Rolling Stone to a TV interview on Thursday in which the congressman said he would not vote for McCarthy “under almost any circumstance,” while insisting his motivation was principled, not personal.
“Kevin McCarthy is the masthead of the lobby core,” Gaetz told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham when asked point-blank if his grudge against McCarthy was personal. “I resent the extent to which Kevin McCarthy utilizes the lobbyists and the special interests to be able to dictate how political decisions are made, how policy decisions are made, and how leadership decisions are made. Kevin McCarthy has been in the leadership for 14 years, and he has sold shares of himself to special interests, to political action committees. And so that’s why I don’t think he is an appropriate choice.”
McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
By midday Friday, it became clear that McCarthy’s opponents with less intense feelings toward him were ready to accept his concessions, give in to the McC-mentum, and allow the House to begin its business. Fourteen of them changed their vote to McCarthy during the 12th ballot, with another, Andy Harris, relenting during the 14th. McCarthy crowed that he would have the votes to win the speakership Friday night. Gaetz seemed to acknowledge the inevitable, as well. “I think the House is in a lot better place with some of the work that’s been done to democratize power out of the speakership,” he said. “And that’s our goal.”
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Not to interrupt our Saturday coffee klatch, but …
Early this morning, Kevin McCarthy finally won on the 15th round of voting for Speaker. In return, the right-wing Freedom Caucus got a promise from McCarthy that he would not approve a simple increase in the debt ceiling unless spending was held back at 2022 levels — which, with more than 7 percent inflation, would require huge cuts in everything from defense spending to Social Security and Medicare. And if McCarthy breaks his promise, any member of the Freedom Caucus can move to remove him from the Speakership.
For years now, a major goal of the extreme right has been to undermine Social Security and Medicare, the most popular programs in the federal government. The extremists will not succeed. But the coming fight over raising the debt ceiling seems likely to become the defining battle over the next six months.
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As the news world was gripped this past week by the pathetic drama coming out of the United States House of Representatives, the spotlight naturally focused on Kevin McCarthy and the roughly 20 renegades in his caucus who were determined to debase him, the Republican Party’s nominal leader. We learned the names of the holdouts and analyzed their motives. We reached back to the lack of historic precedent. We considered the role of the former president.
(Here at Steady, we were among those watching and writing about the saga, posting “A Cyclone of Crazy” and “Burning Down The House.”)
Well, late last night, after more name-calling, and roll-calling, and almost fisticuffs, McCarthy finally attained the position for which he has long yearned. The dealmaking, dysfunction, and degradation that allowed him to reach the speakership come at great cost to the institution of the House and American democracy more broadly. The entire fiasco portends a 118th Congress of destructive and divisive chaos.
Sadly, this is a story that will not disappear. There will be plenty to say about who McCarthy is and what he surrendered to his hostage-takers as the full picture comes into focus. A broken House will define our lives in unknowable ways in the years to come. With this in mind, let us shift our gaze a bit today to the other side of the aisle.
As we watched McCarthy come up short in vote, after vote, after vote, after vote, after vote, the Democrats stood remarkably united. They stayed in the chamber, and they voted in unanimity for their new leader, Hakeem Jeffries. Here was a caucus — with its own divisions and disagreements — sticking together around a man who had himself just risen to the top of leadership.
Jeffries had been a trusted deputy of Speaker Nancy Pelosi for years. He learned from a woman who will go down in history for many reasons, including the effectiveness with which she wielded the gavel. But it is one thing to be the understudy and quite another to be the star.
Jeffries is himself historic, the first Black lawmaker to lead a party in Congress. But “historic” does not automatically translate into “effective.” In the face of what we saw from the Republicans, who is the man who will be leading the opposition? What will be his public persona and his backroom tactics? How will he take on this fraught moment in our history? And how will he try to hold his party’s many factions together?
Early this morning, Jeffries rose to the top of the dais in the House and addressed his party, his Republican colleagues, and the nation as a whole. He has of course given many speeches over the years, but this was something different. He was officially the House minority leader, and what he said would help define how he would embody this important role.
Let’s just say that Jeffries seized his moment and gave a speech in substance and tone that suggests the Democrats have a new and unique voice speaking for their party in the chamber. Rather than try to further characterize what he said and how he said it, we wanted to share the speech in full here for you to watch and then contribute your feedback in the Steady comments below.
James Risen | The GOP's Kevin McCarthy Debacle Is an Insurrection by Other Means
07 January 23
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ALSO SEE: McCarthy Wins Speakership on 15th Vote
After Concessions to Hard Right
Two years after January 6, Republicans are still locked in a battle for personal political power.
Rep. Jim Jordan, who Republican holdouts briefly tried to install as an alternative speaker this week, was also referred by the House January 6 Committee; so was McCarthy himself.
The intraparty battle for control of the House of Representatives is not a fight between pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps. There are no real anti-Trump moderates left in the Republican House caucus. This is not a matter of competing political ideologies.
The speaker’s battle would make a perfect “Seinfeld” episode: It is a fight about nothing.
And that’s what makes it so dangerous.
Neither the pro-McCarthy camp nor the anti-McCarthy insurgents have any real policy goals for how to make the government more effective. The goal of the insurgents is to stop the government from working at all. Yet that is true of McCarthy and his supporters as well.
The only thing they are really fighting over is personal political power. Nothing more. And that makes it very difficult for McCarthy to appease the Republicans who oppose him.
It is fitting that the battle for control of the House comes exactly two years after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. The speakership fight is a continuation of that struggle for personal power. This is an insurrection by other means.
Even if the speakership is decided in the coming days, this battle shows just how paralyzed Congress will be over the next two years.
This is the paralysis that the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress tried to prepare for in December, when the frenetic activity in the House gave off an apocalyptic vibe. Every move was hurried, with an eye on the clock and the knowledge that darkness was looming.
During the lame-duck session, the House Ways and Means Committee released a report about Trump’s long-hidden tax returns; the House January 6 Committee held its final hearing and voted to issue criminal referrals of Trump and others to the Justice Department; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed a joint session of Congress; and heavily bundled legislation that included continued funding for U.S. aid to Ukraine and new legal protections for the election of American presidents worked its way across Capitol Hill and was signed into law by Biden.
None of those things could wait any longer. The insurgents were about to take over the House.
In November, Republicans suffered some of the worst midterm results for an opposition party in modern American history, thanks to their turn toward right-wing extremism. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and many Republican candidates in key races were election deniers hand-picked by Trump. The Republican Party lacked a coherent policy agenda other than “owning the libs.” Voters were turned off, and, despite high inflation and a worsening economy, Democrats won key races around the country, retaining control of the Senate while losing the House by the narrowest of margins.
Yet the great irony is that the very narrowness of the Republican margin of victory in the House is what is now giving outsized influence to the extremist forces that cost the GOP so dearly.
Rather than fight back, McCarthy gave in to extremism years ago, and became one of Trump’s most prominent enablers. His craven willingness to appease the ex-president and the insurgents in the House means that no one fears him. He is the Neville Chamberlain of the House, and even if he ultimately becomes speaker, he will not really be calling the shots. The insurgents will be in charge, and no one else in the Republican caucus is likely to challenge them.
With de facto control over the House, they will focus on the right-wing political equivalent of performance art: a national abortion ban that will go nowhere, investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop, and other “anti-woke” ways to own the libs. They will not focus on governing.
So if Trump’s taxes, hidden throughout his presidency, were ever going to see the light of day, it had to be before the new Congress convened. It took years for the Ways and Means Committee to get the returns, and then only after a lengthy court battle, which ended in November when the Supreme Court refused to block the documents’ release. Once the committee prevailed in court, it had to release Trump’s taxes and related information before House Republicans had the chance to suppress them.
The committee voted to release Trump’s taxes and also offered some bombshells, revealing that the Internal Revenue Service did not audit Trump during the first two years of his presidency — and didn’t begin to do so until the day in 2019 when the House asked for his tax returns and questioned whether any audits of Trump had been conducted. The IRS had failed to audit the sitting president’s taxes even though it was mandated to do so, and even though it audited the taxes of both presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The committee also found that Trump paid no federal income tax in 2020, while he was president.
The House January 6 Committee also had to wrap up its business during the lame-duck session or see its work shut down after Republicans took over. In fact, rather than continue to investigate the insurrection, House Republicans are vowing to investigate the January 6 committee itself.
So after issuing criminal referrals for Trump and others, the January 6 committee released a final report and handed over all its evidence to the Justice Department and the special counsel investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Among the committee’s final disclosures was that its star witness, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, said that her former lawyer advised her not to tell the committee the whole truth.
The threats posed by House Republicans on so many fronts help explain why many Senate Republicans joined Democrats in December to pass a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package. That legislation included aid for Ukraine, which many right-wing House Republicans want to block or at least scale back, and changes to the electoral reform act, which governs how presidential elections are finalized and includes changes designed to make it harder for Trump or someone like him to overturn future elections.
Senate Republicans voted for the legislation in the face of furious opposition from their pro-Trump counterparts in the House, perhaps a sign that at least some Senate Republicans no longer fear Trump and his minions.
In fact, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has become more openly anti-Trump since the midterms, when Trump-backed fringe candidates lost key contests and cost the GOP control of the Senate. While McCarthy was fighting for the speakership in the House this week, McConnell made a move heavy with symbolism: He appeared in Kentucky with Biden to showcase a major federal infrastructure investment in a bridge across the Ohio River.
The question now is whether Biden can count on a relatively sane Senate to check the worst impulses of the unstable House.
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Rep.-elect Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) points to McCarthy holdout Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on the House Floor as voting continued for a new speaker on Thursday. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
The question is: At what point will they actually try to do something with it?
Democrats have largely played it cool when it comes to the possibility of striking some kind of bipartisan deal. This scenario has mostly been floated by Republican allies of would-be speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and mostly in the service of warning the Freedom Caucus against going too far.
The threat is that if the holdouts won’t comply, they might leave other Republicans with no choice but to go across the aisle. And at that point, the resulting speaker might be less conservative, Democrats could attain more power, and McCarthy’s concessions to the Freedom Caucus probably would be off the table.
It still seems unlikely; even the most moderate of House Republicans have all kinds of incentive to try just about everything else first. But it’s also possible that with a very narrow House and only four or five GOP votes to spare, getting a speaker with Republican votes alone could prove unattainable — either because the Freedom Caucus holdouts won’t budge or because getting them on board would require a level of concessions that goes too far for enough McCarthy allies.
(McCarthy gained votes in the 12th round of balloting on Friday, but he’s still confronting a potentially prohibitive bloc of Republicans who say they’ll never vote for him. Seven of his most hard line critics voted against him.)
Democrats appear content, for now, to refrain from feeding into the McCarthy allies’ nightmare scenario and to allow the GOP to flounder.
One of the few Democrats talking openly about this is Ro Khanna (Calif.). He suggested that Democrats could join with Republicans to elect someone in the mold of Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick — arguably the most moderate House Republican — Republican Mike Gallagher (Wis.) or Republican David Joyce (Ohio). But he said Republicans would need to agree not to have standoffs over the debt ceiling or threaten to shut down the government, and he wanted some kind of deal on subpoena power.
Democrat Marcy Kaptur (Ohio), who comes from a swing district, has even suggested that Democrats might help McCarthy get elected, if the terms are agreeable.
Others, though, are not so keen on talking about this — at least publicly.
“I don’t see us helping them. I think they need to help themselves, and I think they need to do their damn jobs,” Democrat Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.) told Politico. “I mean, what the hell? You were sent here to govern. What is this?”
Democrat Jason Crow (Colo.) said Thursday that there were no circumstances in which he would vote for even a Republican moderate as speaker.
Democrat Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), though, pointed to what the lack of public enthusiasm for cutting a deal might be about: gaining leverage over Republicans.
“They’re not desperate enough yet,” she told Politico.
“Yet” is the operative word here. Democrats have reason to play their intentions close to the vest. For one, talking about the possibility openly and making it seem more plausible could inject some urgency into the GOP conference to figure out its problems. And anyway, this probably could happen only when Republicans have exhausted their options — so why not wait it out and make a handful of Republicans more “desperate” to cut a deal?
But it would be political malpractice for Democrats not to at least privately entertain this eventuality.
As things stand, McCarthy or any other speaker elected only by Republicans would almost surely be agreeing to concessions that would significantly empower the Freedom Caucus to gum up the works. Even if we shouldn’t expect a GOP-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate to come together to pass a lot of major new legislation in the next two years, there are things Congress has to pass. Democrats could use this opportunity to extract an agreement that would guard against a government shutdown or a potential default on our nation’s debt brought on by a debt ceiling showdown.
And, even aside from whatever rules the chamber adopted, a speaker elected only with GOP votes would have to constantly mind that right flank. If Democrats do have any hope of passing major new legislation, it would definitely be better to have a speaker less beholden to that wing. (Congress over the past two years has shown some ability to pass bipartisan legislation, after all.)
Beyond that, Democrats could gain concessions that could hamstring GOP efforts to launch investigations on matters like Hunter Biden. This is what Khanna is pointing to when he says he wants a deal on subpoena power.
It’s too simple to say this could lead to some new, great era of bipartisan legislating — that we could truly see some kind of coalition government. But Democrats have plenty to gain, even by helping elect a Republican speaker. We might not get to that point any time soon — or at all — but the longer the process drags on, the more difficult it will be to avoid.
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Matt Gaetz. (photo: Jemal Countess/Redux)
Gaetz was speaking with the Fox News host Laura Ingraham and was asked about the possibility of Democratic representatives breaking ranks. Ingraham earlier Thursday night said on her show that there may be a scenario in which the Democratic Party helped elect Rep.-elect Kevin McCarthy or another Republican so that "both parties share power on the committees."
Gaetz disagreed.
"I'm on the floor, Laura. These 212 Democrats are going to vote for Hakeem Jeffries every single time," the Florida Republican told Ingraham. "He is a historic candidate for them. They are not going to cleave off under any circumstance. I assure you of that.
"If Democrats join up to elect a moderate Republican, I will resign from the House of Representatives. That is how certain I am. I can assure your viewers: That won't happen," Gaetz added.
Gaetz was referring to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who will become the first Black congressional party leader when he's sworn in. Jeffries secured all 212 votes from his party for the 11 speakership ballots held as of Thursday.
McCarthy is vying for the speakership but has failed 11 consecutive times to secure the 218 votes needed. He now needs to convince the 20 hardliners — dubbed "Never Kevins," a crew of congresspeople blocking his speakership bid — that he's the man for the job.
Gaetz might have some cause for confidence. On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was spotted speaking with Gaetz on the House floor. The Democratic congresswoman told The Intercept that during that conversation, she assured Gaetz that her party would not help McCarthy get the votes he needed.
"McCarthy was suggesting he could get Dems to walk away to lower his threshold," Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept of her conversation with Gaetz. "And I fact-checked and said absolutely not."
Other Democrats also struck a similar tone, making it clear that they would not throw McCarthy a lifeline.
"At the end of the day, this is a Republican mess," Democratic Rep.-elect Ro Khanna told CNN earlier in the week. "This is a failure of them to govern. This is their problem to fix."
Gaetz is a prominent figure in the "Never Kevin" movement. Before the first speakership vote Tuesday, he delivered a scathing rebuke of the California congressman.
"If you want to drain the swamp, you cannot put the biggest alligator in charge of the exercise," Gaetz said. "I'm a Florida man and I know of what I speak."
The Florida congressman has also been trolling McCarthy and mocking him for his consistent failures. On Tuesday, Gaetz posted on Twitter a letter to J. Brett Blanton, the architect of the Capitol, asking why McCarthy was allowed to work from the speaker's suite despite not yet landing the job.
"What is the basis in law, House rule, or precedent to allow someone who has placed second in three successive speaker elections to occupy the Speaker of the House Office?" Gaetz wrote in his letter. "How long will he remain there before he is considered a squatter?"
Gaetz has over the past three days consistently voted to block McCarthy from securing the speakership. On Thursday, Gaetz voted for former President Donald Trump to be speaker, even after McCarthy made significant concessions to the "Never Kevin" camp.
McCarthy was initially confident in his bid for speaker after winning the nomination at a House GOP leadership meeting in November, following the midterm elections.
But members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus threw a wrench into McCarthy's campaign, saying they wouldn't support his bid unless he committed to less government spending and agreed to give the party more power to remove the speaker.
Representatives for Gaetz and McCarthy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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A Russia missile. (photo: Getty Images)
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has triggered one of the most deadly wars in Europe since World War Two and the deepest crisis in Moscow's relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
"The main gift for the New Year with an ammunition package of Zircon missiles left yesterday for the shores of NATO countries," Medvedev said, referring to President Vladimir Putin's deployment of a warship with hypersonic cruise missiles to the Atlantic.
Medvedev said the missiles could be placed 100 miles (160 km) off the U.S. coast, adding: "So rejoice! It will bring to their senses anyone who poses a direct threat to Russia and our allies."
He was speaking after the U.S. embassy to Russia released a video that it called an "an appeal to the people of Russia". The 50-second video included images of the impact of bombing in Ukraine, saying what was happening there "is not worthy of you".
"We stand in solidarity with each of you who are striving to create a more peaceful future," the video said, showing an image of the slogan "No to war" in Russian sprayed on a wall.
"Throughout history, our countries have been united by the commonality of cultures and our achievements," the video said, adding that Russia and the United States had "competed and collaborated" for decades.
The video showed images of Soviet cosmonauts, writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Putin was not included.
Medvedev, a close Putin ally, lashed out at the video, describing the U.S. government as cynical "freaks" and "sons of bitches" who he said were using the tricks of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Since the war began, Medvedev's rhetoric has become increasingly vitriolic though his published views sometimes chime with thinking at the top levels of the Kremlin elite.
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Akayla Jacksons reads a book in her grandmother's dining room after a day of online classes. (photo: Rory Doyle/Guardian UK)
Jackson is suffering from its third water outage in two years, but neighbors and family lend one another a helping hand
The faucets ran dry again. The showers produced nothing. The city of Jackson, Mississippi, plunged into its third major water outage in less than two years, crippled, leaking infrastructure withering before another bout of extreme weather.
For many here the latest crisis reinvigorated feelings of abandonment and anger that had barely dissipated from the last major outage, just a few months earlier.
As she sat on her deep brown sofa, Anita Carter recalled the realization her water was gone with calm indignation. She scrapped plans for Christmas dinner. Found the bottles she keeps in reserve. Left buckets in the yard to collect rainwater. But, two weeks later, there is still next to nothing as pressure failed to return to the pipes in her home and boil-water advisories remain in many parts of the city.
“It seems like you have to be without it longer every time,” she said, as her eight grandchildren scampered around the home in the suburb of south Jackson. “There’s so much stress.”
With water outages and boil advisories becoming increasingly familiar to Jackson’s 150,000 residents – caused by an aging and underfunded system that routinely fails to withstand extreme cold – Carter and her family invited the Guardian to spend a day with them as they entered their third week without water.
It underlined the daily struggle faced by thousands in this predominantly Black city, where poorer neighborhoods have routinely borne the brunt of the ongoing disaster. Simple tasks become complex or insurmountable. Greater burdens are placed on those living farther from resources. And, for many, the days are centered around an often frantic search for clean and fresh water.
Thursday was supposed to be the first day back at school for Carter’s grandchildren. But with low water pressure throughout the city, all 33 of Jackson’s schools remained closed, sending pupils to virtual learning at home.
As morning broke, and her grandchildren arrived from their mother’s home, Carter was faced with a multitude of tasks intensified by empty pipes: cooking a meal for a family of 10, washing the pile of dishes from last night, making sure her grandchildren were paying attention to their lessons.
The household relies on two large stock pots to boil water on the electric coil stove, and Carter carried a heavy case of bottles into the kitchen, pouring dozens into the pot. The sheer volume means it takes more than 30 minutes to bring it to boil before any dishwashing or food prep can commence.
“There’s never enough,” she said, as her 10-year-old granddaughter Miracle fetched more bottles in between virtual classes. “We’re always looking for more water.”
They stockpile cases of water around the living room, and tuck non-potable water for flushing the toilet into cupboards. Mark Jackson, her 32-year-old son, who lives at home, is often tasked with finding more.
He arrives early at the distribution locations around the city where queues can sometimes wind for hours. On other occasions he has driven to the neighboring city of Ridgeland, which has a separate water system, equipped with empty bottles and jugs that he fills at motels or fast food restaurants to bring home.
He has lived with sickle cell anemia all his life, and he needs to remain constantly hydrated to ward off pain crises. But on New Year’s Eve he found himself bed-bound in pain.
“It makes you mad sometimes,” he said, watching over his twin six-year-old nieces Akayla and Ma’kayla as they completed their math class online. “But it doesn’t work to dwell on it.”
The same morning, Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Lumumba, held a press conference to discuss plans to drastically overhaul the city’s crumbling water infrastructure. In November last year the entire system was taken under federal government oversight after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found the city in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The move followed a hellish summer in Jackson, after heavy flooding and power outages resulted in severe water shortages for weeks.
After years of chronic underfunding by the Republican-led state government, the US Congress apportioned $600m to pay for the redevelopment as part of the government spending package signed in December.
Four Republicans from Mississippi’s congressional delegation, Representatives Michael Guest, Trent Kelly and Steven Palazzo and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, voted against the bill.
None responded to repeated requests for comment from the Guardian.
As he addressed the press on Thursday, and despite the boil notices and low pressure in parts of the city, Mayor Lumumba struck a tone of cautious optimism.
“We did not get here overnight, and our full recovery will take many years, but we are well on our way,” he said. “I look forward to better days.”
The mayor was flanked by Ted Henifin, the city’s new third-party water system administrator appointed by the federal government, and, according to local reports, neither would say when the funding would become available or what the order and process of the repairs would be.
Henifin said that pressure was being restored throughout the city and anticipated a lifting of the boil advisory in the near future. But, he added, “even if we have just one person without water, that is too many”.
In the neighborhood of Queens-Magnolia Terrace, in the city’s north-west, most households were still without pressure.
April Jackson, Anita Carter’s daughter and the mother of her eight grandchildren, was at work for the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign – which is preparing to file a series of lawsuits alleging constitutional violations and breaches of the Fair Housing Act on behalf of the city’s residents – going door to door and dropping off bottled water to residents who had requested help from the city. The group is part of a rapid response coalition, consisting of around 30 volunteers who make deliveries every day. But need has surpassed resources every day since Christmas.
At one doorstep, 73-year-old David McGowan spoke of how, for three days during Christmas, he had no access to bottled water at all, and relied on rationed water from buckets and jugs he had filled before the water went out. Both his cars weren’t running and he had no way of reaching the local church where bottled water was being distributed.
“I just feel let down,” he said. “This is no way to live.”
A few blocks away Theresa Rattler, 45, stood in her doorway in a bright pink dressing gown, another neighbor with no water pressure since Christmas. Her bottled stocks had gotten so low she had begun skipping her diabetes medication.
As she finished her drop-offs for the day, in the mid-afternoon, Jackson headed back to her mother’s home where her eldest sons, Jacob and Jamaris, bounded out of the house to help carry in more cases of water.
All four burners were set to boil as Anita and Mark prepared cooking and bathing water for the children.
Anita recalled how the family had moved from the town of Louisville in the state’s north-east so Mark could receive the regular blood transfusions he needed to treat his sickle cell anemia.
“If I could go back, I would,” she said. “There’s water in other places. I just don’t understand why we can’t have it here, in a city.”
With the meal almost ready – spaghetti, boiled broccoli, corn on the cob and baked chicken – she moved to the bathroom carrying a small pan of boiling water from the stove.
She poured it gently into the small bathroom sink until half full and measured the heat with her fingertips as cold water from another bottle was added.
She lowered her youngest grandchild, five-month-old McKensleigh, into the sink, protecting her head from the taps.
“Hey little lady,” she said as the baby smiled. “I think she’s happy.”
It was a small moment of joy, before she thought again: would there be enough for everyone else?
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A U.S. Border Patrol agent checks the passports of immigrants after they crossed the border with Mexico on May 18, 2022, in Yuma, Arizona. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The U.S. border regime is cruel whether it is enforced by a president spewing racist slurs or one appealing to “safe and orderly processing.”
There’s no doubt that a gleeful viciousness attended the Trump administration’s decisions to round up, cage, and expel desperate, nonwhite migrants.
Cruelty is, however, more than an affect.
The United States border regime is cruel whether or not its maintenance is enforced by a president spewing racist slurs or a president appealing to the need for “safe and orderly processing” while he announces a plan to turn away thousands of migrants en masse — as President Joe Biden did on Thursday.
The Biden administration unveiled a blanket policy to immediately eject asylum-seekers from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua who cross the border from Mexico without having previously applied for asylum in a third country — which means obtaining a financial sponsor in the U.S. and going through a background check.
The same “transit ban” policy is already in place for migrants from Venezuela, an extension of the Title 42 measure deployed by the Trump administration in the first year of the pandemic as a way to turn away migrants under the guise of public health. In some nine months under Trump, nearly half a million people were removed under the law; keeping the law around for two years, the Biden administration has already used it to deport over 2 million.
Biden’s border regime would be no more acceptable if it were a political ploy aimed at insulating Democrats from “law and order” attacks by the right, but it isn’t even that: Republicans have made clear that they will paint Biden as an “open border” president, regardless of how harshly Trumpian his border policies remain. It should be obvious that no amount of anti-immigrant policy will be enough for the white supremacist right.
Yet it would be misplaced to understand anti-immigrant moves made by the Biden White House as simply failed efforts to appease the right. Democratic presidents, particularly so-called deporter-in-chief Barack Obama, have long opted for hard-line border rule.
Democrats couch their border logics in the neoliberal language of management and order, rather than explicitly racist “America First” slogans. The maintenance of the border as a racist, spatial fix for capital, though, has the same disastrous, deadly effects no matter the rhetoric with which it’s justified.
On Thursday, Biden pitched his border plan as a way to bring order to chaos, with between 7,500 to 8,000 refugees crossing the U.S.-Mexico border every day in December. The wealthiest country in the world could respond to this mass movement by working with direct service providers on the ground and providing sufficient resources to swiftly resettle those fleeing political turmoil — turmoil for which the U.S. carries significant historic responsibility.
Instead, the burden of this order is being placed on those fleeing for their own survival, with the alleged right to claim asylum at port of entry reserved only for those with the ability to apply and secure a U.S. sponsor before they reach the border.
“The right to asylum should not hinge on your manner of flight from danger or your financial means,” said Mary Miller Flowers, the senior policy analyst at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, in a statement. “Yet, for far too long, seeking safety is treated as a privilege for a select few, and the Biden administration’s cherry-picking of who can and cannot access protection proves this.”
The White House’s latest policy does include some carrot alongside the stick of mass, immediate expulsions. The U.S. will offer humanitarian parole for up to 30,000 asylum-seekers per month from Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela who have already applied for asylum while crossing Mexico, before reaching the border; gone through a background check; and secured a U.S. fiscal sponsor.
As Jonathan Blazer, the American Civil Liberties Union’s director of border strategies, put it in a statement on Thursday: “There is simply no reason why the benefits of a new parole program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians must be conditioned on the expansion of dangerous expulsions.”
The Biden administration continues to claim to stand against Title 42. Within minutes of announcing his latest Title 42-based expulsion plan, Biden told reporters on Thursday, “I don’t like Title 42.” The government has also fought to end the measure in court — an effort that was most recently rejected by the Supreme Court at the end of December.
At the same time, however, the administration has deployed and continued to expand Title 42’s use to expedite migrant expulsion.
“The Supreme Court’s decision on Title 42 last week did not direct the Biden administration to apply the Title 42 expulsions to more people,” noted immigrant rights group Freedom for Immigrants, calling out the administration’s “Title 42 hypocrisy.”
Such hypocrisy has been the modus operandi when it comes to Biden and his Democratic predecessors’ approach to the border, and hypocrisy in and of itself is not the problem here.
The danger in the administration’s border policy lies in what it serves: an ideological commitment to immigration deterrence — not a prevarication over legal process, but a choice to condemn millions of predominantly Black and brown people to suffering and proximity to death. Cruelty is the constant.
READ MORE 
A polar bear navigates the Arctic climes of Greenland. (photo: Keith Ladzinski/NatGeo)
Eighty-three percent of the world’s glaciers might disappear by the year in question, new research shows.
But if the world can limit future warming to just a few more tenths of a degree and fulfil international goals – technically possible, but unlikely, according to many scientists – then slightly less than half the globe’s glaciers will disappear, the study concluded. Mostly small but well-known glaciers are marching towards extinction, its authors said.
In a worst-case scenario of several degrees of warming, 83 percent of the world’s glaciers would likely disappear by the year 2100, the researchers said.
The study published in the journal Science on Thursday examined all of the globe’s 215,000 land-based glaciers – not counting those on ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica – in a more comprehensive way than past studies. Scientists then used computer simulations to calculate, using different levels of warming, how many glaciers would disappear, how many trillions of tonnes of ice would melt, and how much it would contribute to sea level rise.
The world is now on track for a 2.7-degree Celsius (4.9-degree Fahrenheit) temperature rise since pre-industrial times, which means, by the year 2100, losing 32 percent of the world’s glacier mass or 48.5 trillion metric tonnes of ice, as well as 68 percent of the glaciers disappearing.
That would increase sea level rise by 115 millimeters (4.5 inches) in addition to seas already getting larger from melting ice sheets and warmer water, said the study’s lead author David Rounce.
“No matter what, we’re going to lose a lot of the glaciers,” said Rounce, a glaciologist and engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “But we have the ability to make a difference by limiting how many glaciers we lose.”
“For many small glaciers, it is too late,” said study co-author Regine Hock, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Oslo in Norway. “However, globally our results clearly show that every degree of global temperature matters to keep as much ice as possible locked up in the glaciers.”
Projected ice loss by 2100 ranges from 38.7 trillion metric tonnes to 64.4 trillion tonnes, depending on how much the globe warms and how much coal, oil and gas is burned, according to the study.
More than projected
The study calculates that all that melting ice will raise the world’s sea level anywhere from 90mm (3.5 inches) in the best-case scenario to 166mm in the worst case, for an increase of four percent to 14 percent more than previous projections.
That 4.5 inches of sea level rise from glaciers would mean more than 10 million people around the world – and more than 100,000 people in the United States – would be living below the high tide line when they would otherwise would be above it, said sea level rise researcher Ben Strauss, CEO of Climate Central.
Twentieth-century sea level rise from climate change added about four inches to the surge from 2012 Superstorm Sandy. That alone cost about $8bn in damage, he said.
Scientists say future sea level rise will be driven more by melting ice sheets than glaciers.
But the loss of glaciers is about more than rising seas. It means shrinking water supplies for a big chunk of the world’s population, more risk from flood events, and losing historic ice-covered spots from Alaska to the Alps to the area near Mount Everest’s base camp, scientists told The Associated Press.
“For places like the Alps or Iceland … glaciers are part of what makes these landscapes so special,” said US National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serreze, who wasn’t part of the study but praised it. “As they lose their ice in a sense they also lose their soul.”
Hock pointed to Vernagtferner glacier in the Austrian Alps, which is one of the best-studied glaciers in the world, but said that glacier “will be gone”.
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