Kemp then went on to compare the two states’ voting regulations, at times without crucial context.
Kemp first said that Delaware doesn’t have in-person early voting, but Georgia does. In 2019, Delaware enacted a law that established in-person early voting starting in 2022. The Georgia law did expand in-person weekend early voting.
Kemp then pointed out that Georgia has no-excuse absentee voting, while Delaware doesn’t. Kemp was correct on Delaware, but GOP lawmakers in Georgia did consider rolling back no-excuse absentee voting, but that ultimately didn’t make it into the law Kemp signed.
Kemp also claimed that Georgia allows drop boxes, while Delaware doesn’t. Georgia’s new law restricted drop boxes, requiring each county to have at least one but limiting any additional drop boxes based on the county’s population of registered voters. Delaware had drop boxes in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s unclear whether that will be the case in the future.
Georgia’s recently passed law will create a new ID requirement for voters wanting to cast their ballot absentee, shorten runoff length and effectively hand the election board to the Legislature, while limiting drop boxes. The changes come after Democrats won two key Senate runoff races in Georgia, giving Democrats control of the chamber.
GOP lawmakers in Georgia and elsewhere, especially backers of former President Donald Trump, have backed new voting restrictions in the name of “election integrity” despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Democrats have pushed back, calling the efforts “voter suppression,” with Biden among the voices not holding back in their opposition, with the president calling it an “atrocity” last week.
On Wednesday, Biden said he’d back moving MLB’s “Midsummer Classic” out of Atlantadue to the new law.
“I think today’s professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly,” Biden said in an interview with ESPN. “I would strongly support them doing that. People look to them. They’re leaders.”
In wake of the new law, Biden has pushed Congress to pass election reform legislation, namely H.R. 1, which would reform ballot access and campaign finance, as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore struck-down provisions of the Voting Rights Act. He’s also suggested he’s open to getting right of the filibuster for issues like voting rights.
Kemp has faced blowback from Biden and major Atlanta-based companies, including Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola. Kemp said Thursday that he wouldn’t bow to the corporate pressure, saying that corporations that have opposed the new law won’t get back on board due to activist pressure.
“There is nothing I can do about that,” Kemp said. “I not going be bullied by these people. But I’m also not running a public corporation. They’ll have to answer to their shareholders. There is a lot of people that work for them and have done business with them that are very upset.”
Kemp has been all over the airwaves after signing the law last week, saying Thursday that he’s done more than 20 interviews in the past 24 to 36 hours, “pushing the truth out.”
“We…want to make sure the election is secure and that all Georgians have confidence in it,” Kemp said.
WASHINGTON—Progressive Senate Democrats suggested that their new plan to tax unrealized capital gains at death should come with a $1 million per-person exemption, setting that line 10 times higher than an earlier Obama administration proposal and shielding a larger swath of upper income households.
A discussion draft released Monday by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) and others marks a first attempt to put details on an idea that President Biden endorsed during last year’s campaign. Capital-gains taxation is likely to spur significant debate in coming months as Democrats look to raise money from high-income households to pay for Mr. Biden’s proposed spending on infrastructure and social programs.
Under current law, someone who dies with appreciated assets— including homes and stocks in taxable accounts—doesn’t have to pay capital-gains taxes on that increase. Instead, the heirs have to pay capital-gains taxes only after they sell and only on gains after the original owner’s death. That “stepped-up basis” is a longstanding feature of the tax code, but it has come under increasing attacks from Democrats who see wealthy people’s profits escaping the income tax.
“The stepped-up basis loophole is one of the biggest tax breaks on the books, providing an unfair advantage to the wealthiest heirs every year. This proposal will eliminate that loophole once and for all,” Mr. Van Hollen said in a statement.
The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the current rule saves taxpayers more than $41 billion a year.
The family and friends of Sarm Heslop, a 41-year-old British woman who disappeared from a boat anchored in the U.S. Virgin Islands nearly two weeks ago, are pushing for authorities to conduct a new search the 47-foot catamaran.
The request comes after it was revealed that her American boyfriend, Ryan Bane, has acquired a lawyer and was not answering questions or making the boat available to investigators.
“Given that they lived on the boat, and that she’s gone missing on the boat, that’s a natural place for the police to search, and I just don’t understand why Ryan won’t allow that to happen to find Sarm. I don’t get it,” Andrew Baldwin, a close friend of Heslop’s, told Fox News on Saturday. “That’s the frustration more than anything else.”
Heslop’s family said they “would like assurance” that authorities “are doing everything possible to find her,” including “a comprehensive fingertip search of the boat.”
Sarm Heslop was last seen on Ryan Bane’s boat on the evening of March 7 in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Bane and Heslop returned to the boat after dinner around 10 p.m. March 7. Bane discovered she was missing around 2:30 a.m. March 8, then called 911 and “traveled to meet members of the VIPD to give a statement regarding Sarm,” according to his lawyer, David Cattie.
AMERICAN BOYFRIEND OF BRITISH WOMAN WHO WENT MISSING IN US VIRGIN ISLANDS WON’T LET COPS SEARCH BOAT: POLICE
Bane was instructed by VIPD officers to call the U.S. Coast Guard, which he did shortly before noon on March 8.
According to Bane’s lawyer, “multiple USCG officers boarded the vessel and interviewed Mr. Bane on the vessel.” According to the VIPD, the “Coast Guard conducted a search of the vessel for Ms. Heslop later that morning.”
Baldwin noted that it was unclear if the Coast Guard just “looked around the boat” or did a full “fingertip police investigation.”
Coast Guard responds
After being contacted by Fox News, a Coast Guard spokesman issued the following statement, confirming that Coast Guard personnel did board the vessel:
“On March 8, gthe Coast Guard received a report of a possible person in the water from the sailing vessel Siren Song,” says the statement from Lt. Cmdr. Jason Neiman, public affairs officer of the Seventh Coast Guard District.
“As part of the search and rescue effort, the Coast Guard went aboard the vessel to interview and gather information from the reporting source. Later, the Coast Guard returned to the vessel to conduct a standard vessel safety check to ensure proper equipment and compliance with applicable rules and regulations for vessel type and operation.
“After an extensive search, no sign of distress reported by aviation or marine units, no response to the urgent marine information broadcast, and no additional or correlating information to support further surface search efforts, the Coast Guard suspended the active search.”
The VIPD now says that Bane is not answering questions and will not allow authorities to search the boat.
“Soon after reporting Ms. Heslop missing, Mr. Bane acquired the services of an attorney,” a VIPD spokesperson said Friday. “Upon his attorney’s advice, Mr. Bane exercised his constitutional right to remain silent and denied officers’ requests to search the vessel.”
MASSACHUSETTS WOMAN LAST SEEN WALKING HER DOG PROMPTS POLICE SEARCH
Bane turned Heslop’s belongings, including her phone and passport, over to the Coast Guard.
“We have heard that Sarm’s phone, passport and all belongings were left on the boat, where she was living with Mr. Bane,” Baldwin said Saturday. “She would not just disappear, leaving no trace. She is savvy and sensible, it’s not like her at all, it just doesn’t add up.”
The boat was anchored in Frank Bay roughly 50 yards offshore at the time of Heslop’s disappearance.
Drone footage of the boat shows it in relatively shallow water, which Baldwin said was approximately 11 feet.
Baldwin also noted that Heslop was used to boats, having ventured across the Atlantic Ocean in January of 2020 and sailing around the Caribbean for six months.
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The VIPD is continuing the search for Heslop as time closes in on two weeks since her disappearance.
“VIPD continues efforts to locate Ms. Heslop, conducting multiple searches daily, speaking to potential witnesses, and combing through hours of surveillance video,” the department said Friday.
The consumer goods giant announced Tuesday that it would no longer use the term to describe certain physical characteristics on its packaging for beauty and personal care products, which include Rexona deodorants and Sunsilk shampoos.
The company says the move “comes as global research into people’s experiences of the beauty industry reveals that using ‘normal’ to describe hair or skin makes most people feel excluded.”
Unilever(UL) is one of the world’s biggest retail suppliers, with 2.5 billion customers in more than 190 countries.
in a statement, it said that a recent study it commissioned and conducted found that “seven in ten [respondents] agree that using the word ‘normal’ on product packaging and advertising has a negative impact. For younger people — those aged 18-35 — this rises to eight in ten.”
More than half of those surveyed also said that “they now pay more attention to a company’s stance on societal issues before buying products,” Unilever added.
“With one billion people using our beauty and personal care products every day, and even more seeing our advertising, our brands have the power to make a real difference to people’s lives,” Sunny Jain, Unilever’s president of beauty and personal care, said in the company’s statement.
“We know that removing ‘normal’ from our products and packaging will not fix the problem alone, but it is an important step forward.”
By the company’s own account, it still has more work to do.
Unilever also said Tuesday that it would no longer “digitally alter a person’s body shape, size, proportion or skin color in its brand advertising, and will increase the number of advertisements portraying people from diverse groups who are underrepresented.”
Businesses around the world have been increasingly rebranding in response to demands from customers to be more inclusive. Last year, many major companies renamed or retired products, including Quaker Oats with its Aunt Jemima brand in the United States and Nestlé with its Red Skins and Chicos sweets in Australia.
Unilever has been no exception. Last year, its Indian subsidiary, Hindustan Unilever, removed the word “Fair” from its “Fair & Lovely” skincare brand after complaints.
The company acknowledged in a statement at the time that it had previously played up “the benefits of fairness, whitening and skin lightening” while marketing its products. The brand is now called “Glow & Lovely.”
Competitors, including L’Oreal(LRLCF) and Johnson & Johnson(JNJ), also said they would rename or discontinue some of their skincare brands in India for similar reasons.
Unilever has worked to diversify its product lines by partnering with minority-run businesses in recent years. In 2017, for instance, the company made headlines for its acquisition of Sundial Brands, the Black-owned maker of SheaMoisture and other popular skin and hair care brands.
The top infectious disease expert in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, has warned it is too early to end Covid-19 restrictions, despite Texas and Mississippi having lifted mask mandates and business capacity limits this week.
States are easing restrictions after a drop in cases, though that decline is starting to plateau at a high rate of 60,000 to 70,000 infections per day.
“We’re going in the right direction but we just need to hang on a bit longer,” Fauci said on Sunday, to CBS’s Face the Nation.
Public health experts have warned that the US could undermine vaccine-related progress and allow for thousands of preventable deaths by lifting restrictions at the first sign of improvements. More than 524,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the US and January was its deadliest month of the pandemic so far.
Fauci, chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, said turning restrictions “on and off” risked another surge.
“This is not going to be indefinite. We need to gradually pull back as we get people vaccinated,” he said.
Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who advised Biden’s transition team, warned the US was still “in the eye of the hurricane”.
Osterholm told NBC’s Meet the Press the situation appeared to be improving, but said he was concerned the B117 variant, which is 50% more infectious than other variants in the US, could create a new surge.
“We do have to keep America as safe as we can from this virus by not letting up on any of the public health measures we’ve taken and we need to get people vaccinated as quickly as we can,” said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
On CNN’s State of the Union, the Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves, said he had lifted restrictions in his state because of declining rates of hospitalizations.
“Our objective in Mississippi has never been to rid ourselves of the virus … our goal is to make sure we protect the integrity of our healthcare system,” the Republican said.
Mississippi has seen an average of 461 cases per day, down 17% from the average two weeks ago, according to the New York Times. There were 1,240 deaths from Covid-19 in the state in January, the highest of any month since the pandemic began. About 16% of residents have received a first vaccine dose.
“The numbers in Mississippi don’t justify government intervention,” said Reeves, who encouraged residents to keep wearing masks in crowded settings.
Other governors have celebrated their state’s mask mandates and said they will remain in place until there is a substantial improvement in infection rates.
Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, told ABC’s This Week his state’s mask order was followed by a “significant drop in cases”.
“We’ve seen it throughout this last year – these masks really, really work,” DeWine said.
He said his state would drop health orders once it had 50 cases or fewer per 100,000 people for two weeks. Though rates were still high in Ohio, he said, the state’s vaccination distribution was getting better each day.
“But as we’re doing that, we can’t give up the defense,” DeWine said.
The dean of Brown University’s school of public health, Ashish Jha, said decisions such as those by Reeves and Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, to lift restrictions could slow the process of getting life back to normal and put residents at risk of infection and death.
“Given how close we are to the finish line, anybody who gets infected today and dies in three or four weeks is somebody who would have gotten vaccinated a month from now,” Jha told ABC. “This is why it’s urgent to just keep going for a little bit longer.”
It’s the sort of chance that comes along just once in a blue moon: a Japanese billionaire is throwing open a private lunar expedition to eight people from around the world.
Yusaku Maezawa, an online fashion tycoon, was announced in 2018 as the first man to book a spot aboard the lunar spaceship being developed by SpaceX.
Maezawa, who paid an undisclosed sum for the trip expected to launch in 2023 at the earliest, originally said he planned to invite six to eight artists to join him on the voyage around the moon.
But on Wednesday, in a video posted on his Twitter account, he revealed a broader application process. “I’m inviting you to join me on this mission. Eight of you from all around the world,” he said.
“I have bought all the seats, so it will be a private ride,” he added.
Maezawa, 45, said his initial plan of inviting artists had “evolved” because he came to believe that “every single person who is doing something creative could be called an artist.”
The Japanese entrepreneur said applicants would need to fulfil just two criteria: being ready to “push the envelope” creatively, and being willing to help other crew members do the same.
In all, he said around 10 to 12 people will be on board the spaceship, which is expected to loop around the moon before returning to Earth.
The application timeline for spots on the trip calls for would-be space travellers to pre-register by 14 March, with initial screening carried out by 21 March.
No deadlines are given for the next stages – an “assignment” and an online interview – but final interviews and medical checkups are currently scheduled for late May 2021, according to Maezawa’s website.
Maezawa and his band of astronauts will become the first lunar voyagers since the last US Apollo mission in 1972 – if SpaceX can pull the trip off.
Last month, a prototype of its Starship crashed in a fireball as it tried to land upright after a test flight, the second such accident, after the last prototype of the Starship met a similar fate in December.
But the company hopes the reusable, 394-foot (120-metre) rocket system will one day carry crew and cargo to the moon, Mars and beyond.
“I’m highly confident that we will have reached orbit many times with Starship before 2023 and that it will be safe enough for human transport by 2023. It’s looking very promising,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in Maezawa’s video posted Wednesday.
The mission will be the first private space flight beyond Earth’s orbit, Musk said.
Because it will not land on the moon, but loop behind it, “we expect people will go further than any human has ever gone from planet Earth,” he added.
Maezawa, known for his eccentric comments and extravagant lifestyle including a penchant for pricey art, was last year valued around $1.9 billion, making him one of Japan’s richest people.
He made his fortune as founder of online fashion store Zozo, which he sold to Yahoo! Japan in 2019.
Maezawa has previously made headlines with an online ad for a girlfriend to join him on his SpaceX flight – only to abruptly cancel the hunt, despite attracting nearly 30,000 applicants.
So far, the evidence suggests that the SolarWinds hack, named for the company that made network-management software that was hijacked to insert the code, was chiefly about stealing information. But it also created the capability for far more destructive attacks — and among the companies that downloaded the Russian code were several American utilities. They maintain that the incursions were managed, and that there was no risk to their operations.
Until recent years, China’s focus had been on information theft. But Beijing has been increasingly active in placing code into infrastructure systems, knowing that when it is discovered, the fear of an attack can be as powerful a tool as an attack itself.
In the Indian case, Recorded Future sent its findings to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-In, a kind of investigative and early-warning agency most nations maintain to keep track of threats to critical infrastructure. Twice the center has acknowledged receipt of the information, but said nothing about whether it, too, found the code in the electric grid.
Repeated inquiries by The New York Times to the center and several of its officials over the past two weeks yielded no comment.
The Chinese government, which did not respond to questions about the code in the Indian grid, could argue that India started the cyberaggression. In India, a patchwork of state-backed hackers were caught using coronavirus-themed phishing emails to target Chinese organizations in Wuhan last February. A Chinese security company, 360 Security Technology, accused state-backed Indian hackers of targeting hospitals and medical research organizations with phishing emails, in an espionage campaign.
Four months later, as tensions rose between the two countries on the border, Chinese hackers unleashed a swarm of 40,300 hacking attempts on India’s technology and banking infrastructure in just five days. Some of the incursions were so-called denial-of-service attacks that knocked these systems offline; others were phishing attacks, according to the police in the Indian state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai.
By December, security experts at the Cyber Peace Foundation, an Indian nonprofit that follows hacking efforts, reported a new wave of Chinese attacks, in which hackers sent phishing emails to Indians related to the Indian holidays in October and November. Researchers tied the attacks to domains registered in China’s Guangdong and Henan Provinces, to an organization called Fang Xiao Qing. The aim, the foundation said, was to obtain a beachhead in Indians’ devices, possibly for future attacks.
NEW YORK — One day after posting on social media that he would like to see the NBA logo changed from Jerry West’s silhouette to Kobe Bryant’s, Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving reaffirmed his stance and said he is OK if he’s a leader of the conversation.
“We want to set a standard and precedent, like this is excellence,” Irving said Thursday, after the Nets defeated the Orlando Magic 129-92. “Kobe Bryant. Logo. Yes. Needs to happen. I don’t care what anyone says.”
In an Instagram post Wednesday, Irving put up a photo of a modified NBA logo with Bryant swapped in as the figure in the middle with this caption: “Gotta Happen, idc what anyone says. BLACK KINGS BUILT THE LEAGUE.”
Vanessa Bryant, Kobe Bryant’s widow, shared Irving’s post to her Instagram story with the caption, “Love this. @KyrieIrving.”
Irving said Thursday night, “I want that to be something in history that is changed forever, that our generation was part of that change. And if that means that I have to lead that forward and get the conversation going, then great.”
In 2017, West said on ESPN’s The Jump that while it is “flattering” to be depicted as the symbol of the league, “I think if I were the NBA, I would be embarrassed about it. I don’t like to do anything to call attention to myself. If they would want to change it, I wish they would. In many ways, I wish they would.”
Irving said that he understands that his proposition doesn’t appeal to everyone.
“I know that it probably was met with some people that love it — that love the idea — and some people that don’t love it,” Irving said. “But, my thing is paying homage to the example that has been set by that man.”
Since Bryant’s death in a helicopter accident in January 2020, the idea of changing the logo to Bryant’s silhouette has gained traction. A change.org petition in support of the idea has gained 3.2 million signatures since early 2020. The creator of the NBA logo, Alan Siegel — current CEO and president of the brand identity and communications consultancy firm Siegelvision — told Newsweek at the time, “It’s quite clear that [Bryant] was a very respected figure by players and around the world and this is a really serious thing that should be considered by the league.”
Irving said Thursday that by advocating to make Bryant’s likeness the logo, he didn’t intend to disparage any of the other players who have had sizable impacts on the league.
“I think he deserves it,” Irving said. “I think his family deserves it. I think we deserve it as seeing greatness personified as Mamba. And anyone that’s coming into the league should know that that’s the example that was set.”
Republicans are criticizing President Biden’s move to give up on a Trump-era push to reimpose United Nations sanctions on Iran, as the administration takes a warmer tone toward Tehran.
“This is outrageous and dangerous. Biden just legalized Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping selling arms to Iran,” Rep Joe Wilson, R-S.C., said. “Why?”
POMPEO, OTHER CRITICS PAN BIDEN WH OFFER TO RESTART IRAN NUCLEAR TALKS
“I agree Joe,” responded Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., who is on the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees. “Why is Biden lifting U.N. sanctions banning Putin from selling arms to Iran? Seems to warrant an investigation…”
The reaction comes to a move by the Biden administration to end the Trump administration’s position on the “snackback” of U.N. sanctions on Tehran.
The Trump administration triggered the “snapback” mechanism in August, which would restore all U.N. sanctions that expired under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. That move came after a failed effort by the U.S. to extend an arms embargo on Iran that was set to expire in October as part of the 2015 deal and barred the regime from buying and selling arms from allies.
IRAN LEARNING IT CAN THREATEN BIDEN TO GET ITS WAY ON NUCLEAR TALKS: RIC GRENELL
However, that effort to snap back the sanctions was rejected by the U.N. Security Council, which said the U.S. had no authority to use the mechanism since it was part of the deal from which the U.S. had withdrawn.
Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismissed the U.N. arguments, claiming it was part of the accompanying U.N. resolution of which the U.S. was still a participant.
However, the Biden administration has sought to take a different approach to the Iranian regime and has sought to re-enter the Iran deal. As part of that, the State Department said a letter had been sent to the Council reversing the U.S. position on the snapback.
BIDEN TELLS EUROPEAN ALLIES ‘AMERICA IS BACK,’ SEEKS TO TURN PAGE ON TRUMP ERA
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., called Biden’s posture toward Iran “nothing short of reckless.”
“Not long after Iranian-backed forces attacked Americans in Iraq, President Biden is desperately trying to re-enter a failed deal and provide sanctions relief to the Iranian regime,” Rubio said in a statement. “The President must make clear that he understands that Khamenei cannot be trusted to honor international agreements, and that the United States will not play into the hands of the Iranians for the next four years.”
The move by the administration is one of a number of moves to reverse Trump-era foreign policy. Biden has re-entered the U.S. in the Paris climate deal and has halted the withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization (WHO).
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In a speech to European leaders on Friday, Biden indicated he was trying to turn the page on the Trump era.
“I’m sending a clear message to the world, America is back, the transatlantic alliance is back and we’re not looking backward, we’re looking forward together,” he said during a virtual address to the annual Munich Security Conference.
One of the most powerful prosecutions of former US president Donald Trump last week came from Stacey Plaskett of the US Virgin Islands, the first delegate from an American territory to hold the position of impeachment manager.
Yet Plaskett’s status meant that she was unable to vote for Trump’s impeachment because she has no vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. The US Virgin Islands has no representation at all in the Senate. Its residents cannot even vote for president.
The anomaly illuminates America’s long unaddressed colonial history that leaves five territories floating in constitutional limbo, their residents – most of them people of color – effectively treated as second-class citizens.
But with the impetus of last summer’s protests against racial injustice, and the election of a Democratic president, one of those territories – Puerto Rico – is aiming to become the 51st state of the union. A parallel effort by Washington, District of Columbia (DC), is also closer than ever to its similar goal.
‘It is incredibly important to take a step back and look at who actually has real representation in democracy,” said Stasha Rhodes, campaign manager of 51 for 51, an organization pushing for DC statehood. “If you think about all the players that you mentioned, they all have a common thread: they’re all people of color. Does America have a true democracy if so many people of color are standing outside looking in and are not able to fully participate?”
There are five inhabited US territories: American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Apart from American Samoa, people born in the territories are US citizens and pay federal taxes such as Medicare and social security, though not federal tax on locally sourced income. Each territory sends a delegate to the House who can debate legislation and sit on committees but is not able to actually vote.
Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony until 1898 when it fell under US control as part of the terms that ended the Spanish-American war. In 1917 the Jones Act granted Puerto Ricans US citizenship and in 1952 it became a commonwealth of the US – but still without voting rights in American presidential elections.
Over the past half century Puerto Rico has held six non-binding referendums on its status and last November voted 52%-47% in favor of statehood, a cause boosted by grievance over the federal government’s inadequate response to Hurricane Maria in 2017. In an interview last week with Axios on HBO, Governor Pedro Pierluisi said “Congress is morally obligated to respond” and predicted that a House bill will be introduced next month.
George Laws Garcia, executive director of the Puerto Rico Statehood Council, said: “You have a bunch of unelected individuals making decisions on behalf of the people of Puerto Rico over the desires and ideas and perspectives of the local elected officials, which I think is basically blatant colonialism.
“We had Hurricane Maria and the earthquakes and now Covid and, in all these instances when Puerto Rico needs federal resources, federal support, federal action, we don’t have the capacity to hold elected officials in Washington accountable for what they do because they don’t ever get any votes from Puerto Rico, and that includes the president as well as members of Congress.”
It is Congress that would have to approve the creation of any new state for the first time since Hawaii in 1959.
Republicans have cast the move as an unconstitutional power grab likely to give Democrats two extra seats in the Senate. Martha McSally, then a senator for Arizona, told NBC News last year that should Puerto Rico gain statehood, Republicans will “never get the Senate back again”.
Although Democrats control the House, a statehood bill would face a far tougher passage in the evenly divided Senate, where 60 votes are required to thwart the “kill switch” of a Republican filibuster. Despite progressives pointing to the racist history of the filibuster, key Democrats Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema have already indicating unwillingness to eliminate it.
Garcia added: “The prospects of statehood are incredibly challenging, but they’ve been challenging for every other territory that has ever been admitted as a state. In my lifetime, it’s certainly the best possible odds that we could have.”
Almost all of Puerto Rico’s residents are Hispanic while nearly half of DC’s are African American. But as the nation’s capital, DC comes from a different historical, economic and constitutional perspective.
Its 700,000-plus residents – higher than the populations of Vermont and Wyoming – pay more per capita in federal income taxes than any state. They gained the right to vote in presidential elections in 1961 but still lack a voting member in the House or a voice in the Senate.
The movement for DC statehood is bigger and better organized than ever before. Last June the House passed a bill that approved it, the first time a chamber of Congress had advanced a DC statehood measure. It never stood a chance in the Republican-controlled Senate but Black Lives Matter protests in Washington gave the cause added potency.
Rhodes of 51 for 51 said: “
A DC license plate reading ‘taxation without representation’. Photograph: Daniel Slim/AFP/Getty Images
Our most celebrated civil rights leaders were fighting for access to democracy. If you think about John Lewis and Martin Luther King, they were all fighting for access to voting and access to representation and so here in 2021 we’re still fighting in Washington DC for equal representation and a clear chance at participation in democracy.”
One key obstacle was removed when Trump, who had vowed “DC will never be a state” because it would be sure to elect Democratic senators, was beaten in the presidential election by Joe Biden, who has voiced support for the campaign.
Then came the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, told reporters earlier this month: “If the District of Columbia could operate as a state, (what) any governor can do is to call out the National Guard without getting the permission of the federal government. It shouldn’t have to happen that way.”
Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s nonvoting member in the House, reintroduced the statehood bill last month, while Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware reintroduced his companion statehood bill which currently has 39 Democratic cosponsors.
Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy for the grassroots movement Indivisible, said: “It’s an issue of basic fairness. DC is not all government bureaucrats and lawyers. There are actual real people who live here, many of whom were tasked with cleaning up the mess of the January 6th insurrection. Those are DC residents and they have no vote in Congress at all and so it would seem to me that it would be a pretty easy lift for every Democrat in the Senate to say that’s wrong.”
Hatcher-Mays, a former aide to Holmes Norton, added: “We need to eliminate the filibuster to make DC the 51st state. This is the closest we have ever been to getting DC statehood and, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen this Congress, and it really has to happen or otherwise the Senate is in trouble. It’s really unrepresentative of the country as a whole and making DC a state would go a long way towards fixing that problem.”
The issue has cast light on the democratic deficit of the Senate, where small predominantly white states get two seats each, carrying as much weight as vast, racially diverse states such as California. In 2018 David Leonhardt, an opinion columnist at the New York Times, calculated that the Senate gives the average Black American only 75% as much representation as the average white American, and the average Hispanic American only 55% as much.
Furthermore, in the 232-year history of the Senate there have only been 11 Black senators and Plaskett was the only elected Black woman at the impeachment trial. In such a context, Republicans’ opposition to statehood has been described as a bid to protect white minority rule.
LaTosha Brown, cofounder of Black Voters Matter, said: “At the end of the day, you have states from Utah to Montana to others that have gained statehood early on with less question, with less critique than DC and Puerto Rico. It is a fundamental democratic flaw and it reeks of hypocrisy. The only reason why it is a debate or even a question is because of who makes up the majority of both of those places.”
A previous bid for DC statehood was defeated in the Democratic-controlled House by an almost 2-1 margin in 1993 with President Bill Clinton reluctant to engage. This time, with Biden making racial justice a priority, the mood is different. There is a sense that Democrats’ control of the White House, Senate and House provides a historic opportunity.
Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “This is about making America a more perfect union. It’s the oldest constitutional democracy in the world and yet some of its citizens do not have all the full voting rights because of where they reside. If we’re going to end racial injustice in America and talk about a new beginning for the country, we can’t sidestep old issues.”
