Rep. Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House, has been a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump and was a key congressional figure in the failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The Louisiana Republican was first elected to the House in 2016 and serves as vice chairman of the House Republican Conference, as well as GOP deputy whip, an assistant leadership role. An attorney with a focus on constitutional law, Johnson joined a group of House Republicans in voting to sustain the objection to electoral votes on January 6, 2021. During Trump’s first impeachment trial in January 2020, Johnson, along with a group of other GOP lawmakers, served a largely ceremonial role in Trump’s Senate impeachment team.
Johnson also sent an email from a personal email account in 2020 to every House Republican soliciting signatures for an amicus brief in the longshot Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate electoral college votes from multiple states.
After the election was called in favor of Joe Biden on November 7, 2020, Johnson posted on X, then known as Twitter, “I have just called President Trump to say this: ‘Stay strong and keep fighting, sir! The nation is depending upon your resolve. We must exhaust every available legal remedy to restore Americans’ trust in the fairness of our election system.’”
Although Trump said he wouldn’t endorse anyone in the speaker’s race Wednesday, he leant support to Johnson in a post on Truth Social.
“In 2024, we will have an even bigger, & more important, WIN! My strong SUGGESTION is to go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson, & GET IT DONE, FAST!” Trump posted.
Johnson serves on the Judiciary Committee and the Armed Services Committee. He is also a former chair of the Republican Study Committee.
After receiving a degree in business administration from Louisiana State University and a Juris Doctorate from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Johnson took on roles as a college professor and conservative talk radio host. He began his political career in the Louisiana legislature, where he served from 2015 to 2017, before being elected to Congress in Louisiana’s Fourth District.
Rep. Kevin Hern, an Oklahoma Republican who chairs the influential Republican Study Committee, dropped out of the race for speaker Tuesday evening and backed Johnson.
“I want everyone to know this race has gotten to the point where it’s gotten crazy. This is more about people right now than it should be,” he said. “This should be about America and America’s greatness. For that, I stepped aside and threw all my support behind Mike Johnson. I think he’d make a great speaker.”
Johnson’s win in the secret-ballot race for the House Republican Conference’s nominee for speaker followed Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer’s decision to drop out of the race hours after Republicans chose him to be the nominee following resistance from the right flank of the conference and a rebuke from Trump. Reps. Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan have also dropped out after earlier seeking the speaker’s gavel.
Johnson joined the speakership race in a Saturday post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“I have been humbled to have so many Members from across our Conference reach out to encourage me to seek the nomination for Speaker. Until yesterday, I had never contacted one person about this, and I have never before aspired to the office,” he said in a posted letter. “However, after much prayer and deliberation, I am stepping forward now.”
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Tom Emmer, a leading Republican candidate to be speaker of the House, baselessly said there were “questionable” practices in the 2020 presidential election.
Later, Emmer signed an amicus brief in support of a last-ditch Texas lawsuit seeking to throw out the results in key swing states.
Though he would vote to certify the results on January 6, 2021, the comments and actions show Emmer flirted with some of the same election denial rhetoric as far-right members of the Republican caucus.
Speaking with the radio show for the far-right publication Breitbart News 12 days after the election, Emmer baselessly suggested that mail-in ballots might have “skewed” the election against Trump.
“I think that you will see the courts, if nothing else, this president is making sure that he stays focused and his team stays focused on these questionable election practices,” Emmer said. “We’re gonna find out – if it’s accurate – how much they skewed the outcome of the election in Georgia and elsewhere.”
“I had one of my colleagues telling me in Georgia that where we got voter ID we’re doing great, where we can’t reasonably identify the voter, we’re getting killed,” he added, saying he hoped the state would restrict vote by mail in the then-upcoming January Georgia Senate runoff elections.
Emmer was quieter than many Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 election. But in interviews and public comments, reviewed by CNN’s KFile ahead of the speakership vote, Emmer refused to say Biden won the election and bashed the press for calling the race.
Speaking to local news outlets in early December 2020 – after results had been certified in all swing states – Emmer attacked the press for calling the race for Joe Biden.
“Everybody has the right to count every vote. Right now, we’re in a process where the media wants to call the race, the media wants to create this situation that they’re the ones that determine when people are done with the process,” Emmer said. “It’s about making sure that everybody – people that voted for Joe Biden, people who voted for Donald Trump, or people who voted for somebody else – that they know every legitimate vote is counted and they have confidence in the outcome.
“There’s a process,” Emmer added. “The process is the votes are cast, if there’s a question, there are recounts, there are signature verifications. This time across the country, mail-in ballots threw a whole new curveball into it. And then if you have specific areas where there’s more to be done, you do have the right to go to a court to have a difference of opinion result. That’s all following the process. It’ll be resolved soon.”
Emmer later defended signing the amicus brief in support of the Texas lawsuit filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton to invalidate 62 Electoral votes in swing states won by Biden – which would have effectively thrown the election to Trump. The lawsuit was rejected by the US Supreme Court.
“This brief asserts the democratic right of state legislatures to make appointments to the Electoral College was violated in several states,” Emmer said in a statement published in the local St. Cloud Times. “All legal votes should be counted and the process should be followed – the integrity of current and future elections depends on this premise and this suit is a part of that process.”
Speaking at a forum on Dec. 17, 2020, Emmer acknowledged Biden’s win was certified by the Electoral College days earlier but said the process still had yet to play out and declined to call Biden president-elect when prompted.
“The media would like to declare the ultimate end to this process. I think certain elected officials would like to declare the end of this process, but as someone who was in a recount himself 10 years ago, I know that we need to respect the process whether you agree with it or not,” Emmer said. “Because once it’s over you’ve got people that are going to be on one side or the other, and they’ve all got to be satisfied that our election was conducted in a fair and transparent manner.”
A judge has rejected three more attempts by former President Donald Trump and the Colorado GOP to shut down a lawsuit seeking to block him from the 2024 presidential ballot in the state based on the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”
The flurry of rulings late Friday from Colorado District Judge Sarah Wallace are a blow to Trump, who faces candidacy challenges in multiple states stemming from his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection. He still has a pending motion to throw out the Colorado lawsuit, but the case now appears on track for an unprecedented trial this month.
A post-Civil War provision of the 14th Amendment says US officials who take an oath to uphold the Constitution are disqualified from future office if they “engaged in insurrection” or have “given aid or comfort” to insurrectionists. But the Constitution does not spell out how to enforce the ban, and it has been applied only twice since the 1800s.
A liberal watchdog group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed the Colorado case on behalf of six Republican and unaffiliated voters. The judge is scheduled to preside over a trial beginning October 30 to decide a series of novel legal questions about how the 14th Amendment could apply to Trump.
In a 24-page ruling, Wallace rejected many of Trump’s arguments that the case was procedurally flawed and should be shut down. She said the key question of whether Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold has the power to block Trump from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment “is a pivotal issue and one best reserved for trial.”
Wallace also swatted away arguments from the Colorado GOP that state law gives the party, not election officials, ultimate say on which candidates appear on the ballot.
“If the Party, without any oversight, can choose its preferred candidate, then it could theoretically nominate anyone regardless of their age, citizenship, residency,” she wrote. “Such an interpretation is absurd; the Constitution and its requirements for eligibility are not suggestions, left to the political parties to determine at their sole discretion.”
Wallace also cited a 2012 opinion from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, when he was a Denver-based appeals judge, which said states have the power to “exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office.” She cited this while rejecting Trump’s claim that Colorado’s ballot access laws don’t give state officials any authority to disqualify him based on federal constitutional considerations.
Trump already lost an earlier bid to throw out the case on free-speech grounds.
The current GOP front-runner, Trump denies wrongdoing regarding January 6 and has pleaded not guilty to state and federal charges stemming from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. His campaign has said these lawsuits are pushing an “absurd conspiracy theory” and the challengers are “stretching the law beyond recognition.”
In a statement on Saturday, the Trump campaign criticized Wallace and her rulings, saying she “got it wrong.”
“She is going against the clear weight of legal authority. We are confident the rule of law will prevail, and this decision will be reversed – whether at the Colorado Supreme Court, or at the U.S. Supreme Court,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said. “To keep the leading candidate for President of the United States off the ballot is simply wrong and un-American.”
The 14th Amendment challenges in Colorado and other key states face an uphill climb, with many legal hurdles to clear before Trump would be disqualified from running for the presidency. Trump is sure to appeal any decision to strip him from the ballot, which means the Supreme Court and its conservative supermajority might get the final say.
In recent months, a growing and politically diverse array of legal scholars have thrown their support behind the idea that Trump is disqualified under the “insurrectionist ban.” The bipartisan House committee that investigated the January 6 attack recommended last year that Trump be barred from holding future office under the 14th Amendment.
The Colorado challengers recently revealed in a court filing that they want to depose Trump before trial. Trump opposes this request, and the judge hasn’t issued a ruling.
The escalating confrontation between Israel and Hamas is offering President Joe Biden a crucial opportunity to begin flipping the script on one of his most glaring vulnerabilities in the 2024 presidential race.
For months, polls have consistently shown that most Americans believe Biden’s advanced age has diminished his capacity to handle the responsibilities of the presidency. But many Democrats believe that Biden’s widely praised response to the Mideast crisis could provide him a pivot point to argue that his age is an asset because it has equipped him with the experience to navigate such a complex challenge.
“As you project forward, we are going to be able to argue that Joe Biden’s age has been central to his success because in a time of Covid, insurrection, Russian invasion of Ukraine, now challenges in the Middle East, we have the most experienced man ever as president,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. “Perhaps having the most experienced person ever to go into the Oval Office was a blessing for the country. I think we are going to be able to make that argument forcefully.”
Biden unquestionably faces a steep climb to ameliorate the concern that he’s too old for the job. Political strategists in both parties agree that those public perceptions are largely rooted in reactions to his physical appearance – particularly the stiffness of his walk and softness of his voice – and thus may be difficult to reverse with arguments about his performance. In a CNN poll released last month, about three-fourths of adults said Biden did not have “the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president” and nearly as many said he does not inspire confidence. Even about half of Democrats said Biden lacked enough stamina and sharpness and did not inspire confidence, with a preponderant majority of Democrats younger than 45 expressing those critical views.
But the crisis in Israel shows the path Biden will probably need to follow if there’s any chance for him to transmute doubts about his age into confidence in his experience. Though critics on the left and right in American politics have raised objections, Biden’s response to the Hamas attack has drawn praise as both resolute and measured from a broad range of leaders across the ideological spectrum in both the US and Israel.
“Biden is in his element here where relationships matter and his team is experienced (meaning operationally effective) and thoughtful (meaning can see forests as well as trees),” James Steinberg, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and deputy secretary of state under former President Barack Obama, wrote in an email.
Similarly, David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel for then-President Donald Trump, declared late last week, on Fox News Channel no less, that “The Biden administration over the past 12-13 days has been great.”
These responses underscore the fundamental political paradox about Biden’s age, and the experience that derives from it. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that his age is increasing anxiety among Democrats about his capacity to serve as an effective candidate for the presidency in 2024; on the other, his experience is increasing Democratic faith in his capacity to serve as an effective president now.
While more Democrats have been openly pining for another, younger alternative to replace Biden as the party’s nominee next year, many party leaders argued that there was no one from the Democrats’ large 2020 field of presidential candidates, or even among the rising crop of governors and senators discussed as potential successors, that they would trust more at this moment than Biden.
“No one – not a one,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, an organization of centrist Democrats. “That is genuinely the case. And I get people’s uneasiness about him both because he’s old and he has low poll numbers. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t the best person for the job.”
Familiarity with an issue is no guarantee of success: Biden took office with a long-standing determination to end the American deployment in Afghanistan but still executed a chaotic withdrawal. But in responding to global challenges, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, is drawing on half a century of dealing with issues and players around the world; even George H.W. Bush, the last president who arrived in office with an extensive foreign policy pedigree, had only about two decades of previous high-level exposure to world events.
This latest crisis has offered more evidence that Biden is more proficient at the aspects of the presidency that unfold offstage than those that occur in public. It’s probably not a coincidence that the private aspects of the presidency are the ones where experience is the greatest asset, while the public elements of the job are those where age may be the greatest burden.
Biden’s speeches about Ukraine, and especially his impassioned denunciations of the Hamas attack over the past two weeks, have drawn much stronger reviews than most of his addresses on domestic issues. (Bret Stephens, a conservative New York Times columnist often critical of Biden, wrote that his first speech after the attack “deserves a place in any anthology of great American rhetoric.”) In Biden’s nationally televised address about Israel and Ukraine on Thursday, he drew on a long tradition of presidents from both parties who presented American international engagement as the key to world stability, even quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call during World War II for the US to serve as the “arsenal of democracy.”
But even when Biden was younger, delivering galvanizing speeches was never his greatest strength. No one ever confused him with Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama as a communicator and his performance as president hasn’t changed that verdict. Instead, Biden has been at his best when working with other leaders, at home and abroad, out of the public eye.
Biden, for instance, passed more consequential legislation than almost anyone expected during his first two years, but he did not do so by rallying public sentiment or barnstorming the country. Rather, in quiet meetings, he helped to orchestrate a surprisingly effective legislative minuet that produced bipartisan agreements on infrastructure and promoting semiconductor manufacturing before culminating in a stunning agreement with holdout Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to pass an expansive package of clean energy and health care initiatives with Democrat votes alone.
“He’s showed a degree of political dexterity in managing the coalition that would have been very challenging for anyone else,” said Rosenberg. “His years of actually legislating, where he learned how to bring people together and hash stuff out, was really important in keeping the Democratic family together.”
To the degree Biden has succeeded in international affairs, it has largely been with the same formula of working offstage with other leaders, many of whom he’s known for years, around issues that he has also worked on for years. In the most dramatic example, that sort of private negotiation and collaboration has produced a surprisingly broad and durable international coalition of nations supporting Ukraine against Russia.
Biden’s effort to manage this latest Mideast crisis is centered on his attempts through private diplomacy to support Israel in its determination to disable Hamas, while minimizing the risk of a wider war and maintaining the possibility of diplomatic agreements after the fighting (including, most importantly, a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia meant to counter Iranian influence). Administration officials believe that the strong support that Biden has expressed for Israel, not only after the latest attack, but through his long career, has provided him with a credibility among the Israeli public that will increase his leverage to influence, and perhaps restrain, the decisions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The president “wisely from the very moment of this horror show expressed unfettered solidarity with Israel and that allowed him to then go to Israel and behind closed doors continue the conversation, which I’m sure Secretary [Antony] Blinken started,” said one former senior national security official in the Biden administration, who asked to be anonymous while discussing the situation. That credibility, the former official said, allowed Biden to ask hard questions of the Israelis such as “‘Ok, you are going to send in ground troops and then what? We did shock and awe [in the second Iraq war] and then we found ourselves trapped without a plan. What are you doing? What’s the outcome? Who is going to control Gaza when you’re done whatever you are doing? At least stop and think about this.’”
In all these ways, the Israel confrontation offers Biden an opportunity to highlight the aspects of the presidency for which he is arguably best suited. In the crisis’ first days, former President Trump also provided Biden exactly the sort of personal contrast Democrats want to create when Trump initially responded to the tragic Hamas attack by airing personal grievances against Netanyahu and criticizing the Israeli response to the attack. For some Democrats, Trump’s off-key response crystallized the contrast they want to present next year to voters: “Biden is quiet competence and Trump is chaos and it’s a real choice,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, a liberal group that funds organizations and campaigns focusing on voters of color.
Ancona said Biden’s performance since the Hamas attack points to the case Democrats should be preparing to make to voters in 2024. “He’s been a workhorse not a show pony, but that’s something we can talk about,” she said. “You can show a picture of a president working quietly behind the scenes, you can tell a story of how he has your best interests at heart. It is what it is: he’s, what, 80? You can’t get around that. But I do think he has shown he has the capacity and strength and tenacity to do this job. He’s been doing it. So why shouldn’t he get a chance to keep doing it?”
Likewise, Rosenberg argues, “In my view you can’t separate his age from his successes as president. He’s been successful because of his age and experience not in spite of it, and we have to rethink that completely.”
Other Democrats, though, aren’t sure that Biden can neutralize concerns about his age by making a case for the benefits of his experience. One Democratic pollster familiar with thinking in the Biden campaign, who asked for anonymity while discussing the 2024 landscape, said that highlighting Biden’s experience would only produce limited value for him so long as most voters are dissatisfied with conditions in the country. “The problem with the experience side is that people feel bad,” the pollster said. “If people felt like his accomplishments improved things for them, they wouldn’t care about his age. … The problem with the age vs. experience [argument] is that experience has to produce results for them, but experience isn’t producing results.”
William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and long-time Democratic strategist, sees another limit to the experience argument. Like most Democrats, Galston believes that Biden’s response to the crisis has, in fact, demonstrated the value of his long track record on international issues. “This is where all of his instincts, honed by decades of experience, come into play,” Galston said. “He knows which people to call when; he knows whom to send where. As was the case in [Ukraine], this is the sort of episode where Biden is at his best.”
The problem, Galston argues, is that voters can see the value of Biden’s experience in dealing with world events today and still worry he could not effectively handle the presidency for another term. “It’s not a logical contradiction,” Galston said, for voters to believe that “‘Yes, over the first four years of his presidency, his experience proved its value, and he had enough energy and focus to be able to draw on it when he needed it’ and at the same time say, ‘I am very worried that over the next four years, in the tension between the advantages of experience and disadvantages of age, that balance is going to shift against him.’”
To assuage concerns about his capacity, Biden will need not only to “tell” voters about the value of his experience but to “show” them his vigor through a rigorous campaign schedule, Galston said. “The experience argument is necessary, but not sufficient,” Galston maintains. “In addition to that argument, assuming it can be made well and convincingly, I think he is going to have to show through his conduct of the campaign that he’s up for another four years.”
Biden’s trips into active war zones in Ukraine and Israel have provided dramatic images that his campaign is already using to make that case. As Galston suggests, the president will surely need to prove the point again repeatedly in 2024.
But most analysts agree that what the president most needs to demonstrate in the months ahead is not energy, but results. His supporters have reason for optimism that Biden’s carefully calibrated response to the Israel-Hamas hostilities will allow them to present him as a reassuring source of stability in an unstable world – in stark contrast to the unpredictability and chaos that Trump, his most likely 2024 opponent, perpetually generates. But Biden’s management of this volatile conflict will help him make that argument only if its outcome, in fact, promotes greater stability in the Middle East. If nothing else, Biden’s long experience has surely taught him how difficult stability will be to achieve in a region once again teetering on the edge of explosion.
House Republicans are once again scrambling with no clear path to elect a new speaker after voting to push Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan out of the race, the latest sign of the chaos and divisions that have engulfed the majority party and left the chamber in a state of paralysis.
In a dramatic turn of events, the House GOP conference voted by secret ballot on Friday to drop Jordan as their speaker designee after he failed to win the gavel for the third time in a floor vote earlier in the day.
The House remains effectively frozen as long as there is no elected speaker. The paralysis has created a perilous situation as Congress faces the threat of a government shutdown next month and conflict unfolds abroad. The battle for the speakership has now dragged on for more than two weeks with no end in sight.
Jordan’s exit from the race now sets the stage for more speaker hopefuls to emerge. Republicans are expected to hold a candidate forum Monday evening. But it appears increasingly uncertain whether any lawmaker can get the 217 votes needed to win the gavel while Republicans control such a narrow majority.
Jordan’s failure to win the gavel also highlighted the limits of former President Donald Trump’s influence in the speaker’s race after he endorsed Jordan.
Speaking to reporters after the vote to push him out, Jordan said, “We need to come together and figure out who our speaker is going to be,” and said he told the conference, “It was an honor to be their speaker designee.”
The move by Republicans against Jordan came after three failed floor votes for his speaker bid and vows from the Ohio Republican to remain in the race despite mounting opposition against him.
In Friday’s floor vote, 25 House Republicans voted against Jordan – a higher number than in the two prior votes and far more than the handful of defectors Jordan could afford to lose and still win the gavel given the GOP’s narrow majority.
When the vote count against Jordan increased to 25 House Republicans, there were three new GOP votes in opposition – Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Tom Kean of New Jersey and Marc Molinaro of New York.
Kean said in a statement explaining his position, “it has become evident that Chairman Jordan does not and will not have the votes to become Speaker.”
Some Republicans who have oppose Jordan decried what they described as a pressure campaign against them by allies of the Ohio Republican. And several Republicans who opposed Jordan’s speakership bid have said they experienced angry calls, menacing messages and even death threats since casting their votes. Jordan has condemned the threats.
A closed-door House GOP conference meeting on Thursday turned heated, multiple sources told CNN. Some members encouraged Jordan to drop out of the race. There was also an emotional discussion over the threats some Jordan holdouts are facing. Later, members leaving the meeting described it as an airing of grievances with tensions running high.
Some Republicans looking for a way to break the impasse have suggested expanding the powers of interim Speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry – a controversial move that would put the House even further into uncharted territory. But there is widespread opposition within the Republican conference to the idea.
One of the pro-Donald Trump fake electors charged in Michigan has agreed to cooperate with state prosecutors in exchange for getting his case dismissed.
James Renner, 76, is the first defendant to strike a deal with prosecutors. Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, charged the group of 16 fake electors earlier this year.
This is the most significant development in the case since Nessel filed the charges in July. She was the first prosecutor in the nation to charge anyone in connection with the Trump-backed fake elector scheme.
As part of the deal, Renner agreed to provide “complete and truthful testimony whenever called upon” by prosecutors, at any hearings or trials related to the 2020 fake electors, according to court filings. This includes describing what happened in the room where he and others signed the sham certificate in December 2020.
Like all of the other defendants, Renner originally faced eight felony charges, including forgery and conspiracy to publish a false statement. If he provides misleading or false testimony at any future cases, prosecutors could refile the felony charges.
The fake GOP electors tried to subvert the Electoral College process in 2020 by signing illegitimate certificates falsely proclaiming that Trump won the presidential election in Michigan. This was part of the Trump campaign’s multi-state effort to overturn the election that he lost.
The remaining 15 defendants include current and former state GOP officials, a Republican National Committee member, a mayor from central Michigan and a Grand Blanc school board member. They have all pleaded not guilty.
Court filings indicate that Renner signed his deal with prosecutors on October 10. It only became public Thursday when Renner appeared at a brief hearing in Ingham County District Court.
“We are excited for this result,” Renner’s attorney Clint Westbrook said at the hearing.
Westbrook later told CNN in a statement that, “after conversations with the Attorney General’s office, all charges against our innocent client, Jim Renner, were dismissed.” A spokesperson for Nessel told CNN in a statement that, “we dismissed the case against James Renner under a cooperation agreement.”
According to documents obtained by CNN, Renner met with state investigators in September for a proffer interview, which is often a precursor to a plea deal or non-prosecution agreement.
Renner explained how he got involved in the post-election effort and identified eight of the other fake electors by name as attending the signing ceremony in December 2020, which could help prosecutors.
But some of his other comments could support the argument from defense attorneys in the case that their clients met as a legal “contingency” so Trump could continue contesting the election results.
He said the group of fake electors was “led to believe” that they needed to sign the faux Electoral College certificates because Michigan’s GOP-run legislature could still reject Joe Biden’s electors and recognize the pro-Trump slate instead. Some of the GOP officials running the meeting – which was conducted in private – also mentioned “ongoing lawsuits” related to the 2020 election, according to the document obtained by CNN.
Even though Trump lost Michigan in 2020 by more than 154,000 votes, Renner said “it was his belief Donald Trump may have the ability to win the election” when he signed the certificate, according to the document, which described Renner’s interview with state investigators.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
Democratic Sen. Laphonza Butler of California said Thursday that she would not run for a full term next year.
“I’ve spent the past 16 days pursuing my clarity – what kind of life I want to have, what kind of service I want to offer and what kind of voice I want to bring forward,” Butler said in a statement. “After considering those questions I’ve decided not to run for Senate in the upcoming election. Knowing you can win a campaign doesn’t always mean you should run a campaign.”
Butler told The New York Times, which first reported the news, that she would be the “the loudest, proudest champion of California” for the remainder of her term but that “this is not the greatest use of my voice.”
Prior to her appointment, Butler served as the president of EMILY’s List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights. She has a long history of working in California politics, including as an adviser to then-Sen. Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign.
Butler’s announcement comes as the California Senate race is shaping up to be among the most high-profile 2024 races. The state will hold two Senate elections next November: one for a full six-year term and a special election for the remaining months of Feinstein’s term until January 2025.
Several notable Democrats launched Senate campaigns earlier this year, including a trio of House members: Reps. Adam Schiff, a former House Intelligence chairman who is backed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Katie Porter, a former deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; and Barbara Lee, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a member of House Democratic leadership.
Other Democrats running include tech executive Lexi Reese and TV broadcaster Christina Pascucci, who joined the race this week. On the Republican side, retired baseball star Steve Garvey and lawyer Eric Early have announced bids. As of late September, Porter and Schiff led the pack in fundraising, with more than $20 million in contributions each.
Under California’s primary system, all candidates will run on the same ballot, with the top two candidates, regardless of party, advancing to the general election.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
Republican Rep. Jim Jordan again failed to win the House speaker’s gavel in a second vote on Wednesday, faring worse than he did during the first round of voting one day earlier. The loss raises serious questions over whether the Ohio Republican has a viable path forward as he confronts steep opposition and the House remains in a state of paralysis.
Despite the defeat, Jordan has vowed to stay in the race. The House is expected to hold a third speaker vote on Thursday at noon ET. Without a speaker, the chamber is effectively frozen, a precarious position that comes amid conflict abroad and a potential government shutdown next month.
The conservative Republican’s struggle to gain traction has also highlighted the limits of Donald Trump’s influence in the speaker’s race after the former president endorsed Jordan.
As pressure grows on Republicans to find a way out of the leadership crisis, some are pushing to expand the powers of the interim speaker, GOP Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, though such a move would not be without controversy and has divided Republicans.
During the first round of voting on Tuesday, 20 House Republicans voted against Jordan. On Wednesday, that number rose to 22, showing that the opposition against the candidate has grown. There were four new Republican votes against Jordan and two that flipped into his column. Given the narrow House GOP majority, Jordan can only afford to lose a handful of votes and the high number of votes against him puts the gavel far out of reach.
Following his second defeat on the floor, Jordan indicated that he is dug in on pressing ahead.
“We don’t know when we’re going to have the next vote but we want to continue our conversations with our colleagues,” he said, adding: “We’ll keep talking to members and keep working on it.”
Jordan is a polarizing figure in the speaker’s fight, a complicating factor in his effort to lock down votes. He is a staunch ally of Trump, has a longstanding reputation as a conservative agitator and helped found the hardline House Freedom Caucus. As the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, he has also been a key figure in House GOP-led investigations.
It took former Speaker Kevin McCarthy 15 rounds of voting in January to secure the gavel. But Jordan faces an uphill climb amid the deep divisions within the House GOP conference and the resistance he faces.
As the speaker battle drags on, tensions and frustration have risen among House Republicans. Some of the lawmakers who have voted against Jordan in the speaker’s race have railed against what they have described as a pressure campaign against them.
Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas derided what he called the “attack, attack, attack” tactics of Jordan allies against his Republican opponents.
“Frankly, just based on what I’ve been through – I can only speak to myself and what my staff has been through over the last 24 or 48 hours – it is obvious what the strategy has been: Attack, attack, attack. Attack the members who don’t agree with you, attack them, beat them into submission,” he said.
GOP Rep. Don Bacon’s wife received anonymous text messages warning her husband to back Jordan. Bacon has been a vocal holdout against Jordan and was one of the 20 Republican members that did not back Jordan on the floor in Tuesday’s vote.
“Your husband will not hold any political office ever again. What a disappointment and failure he is,” read one of the messages sent to Bacon’s wife and obtained by CNN through Bacon.
Bacon’s wife responded to that text saying, “he has more courage than you. You won’t put your name to your statements.”
GOP lawmaker voted for a congressman he didn’t want to be Speaker. Hear why
Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa said in a statement that she has “received credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls” after flipping her speaker vote Wednesday, instead casting a ballot for House Appropriations Chairwoman Kay Granger.
Russell Dye, a spokesman for Jordan, condemned the threats against Miller-Meeks, saying: “This is abhorrent and has no place in civil discourse. No one should receive threats and it needs to stop. We have condemned these actions repeatedly. It is important that Republicans stop attacking each other and come together.”
And Jordan wrote on X that “no American should accost another for their beliefs.”
“We condemn all threats against our colleagues and it is imperative that we come together. Stop. It’s abhorrent,” he added.
Opponents to the congressman’s bid so far have included centrist Republicans concerned that the face of the House GOP would be a conservative hardliner as well as lawmakers still furious at the small group of Republicans who forced out McCarthy and then opposed House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s bid for the gavel.
Scalise initially defeated Jordan inside the GOP conference to become the speaker nominee, but later dropped out of the race amid opposition to his candidacy.
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday that the US should not accept refugees from Gaza, as tens of thousands flee their homes following an evacuation warning from Israel ahead of a possible ground assault.
“I don’t know what (President Joe) Biden’s gonna do, but we cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees. I am not going to do that,” DeSantis, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination, said at a campaign stop in Creston, Iowa.
“If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all antisemitic. None of them believe in Israel’s right to exist,” he continued.
DeSantis argued that Arab states should accept refugees from Gaza, who are attempting to cross south into Egypt, rather than refugees being “import(ed)” to the United States.
DeSantis’ characterization of Gaza residents is not supported by public polling on the issue. In a July poll by the pro-Israel organization the Washington Institute, 50% of Gazans agreed that “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction and instead accept a permanent two state solution based on the 1967 borders.”
One of DeSantis’s 2024 rivals, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, agreed with the Florida governor that the US should not accept refugees from Gaza but warned against making generalizations about them.
“It’s a danger any time that you categorize a group of people as being simply antisemitic, but I’ve said it also that we should not have refugees in here from Palestine. That’s not our role. It’s the role of those countries surrounding there,” Hutchinson told reporters in Nashua, New Hampshire, on Saturday.
In the wake of the surprise attack on Israel last weekend by the militant group Hamas, DeSantis and other Republican presidential hopefuls have voiced strong support for Israel. DeSantis and others have used the attack to argue for hardline immigration policies and stronger border security in the US.
On Thursday, DeSantis pushed back when confronted by a voter at a market in Littleton, New Hampshire, who questioned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.
The voter said that he doesn’t condone what Hamas did or the “killing of any innocent civilians,” but that “Israel is doing the exact same thing with Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a radical, right-wing crazy person,” referring to the country’s prime minister.
“And I see hundreds of Palestinian families that are dead, and they have nowhere to go because they can’t leave Gaza, because no one’s opening their borders,” the voter said.
DeSantis said the voter made a “really good point” by bringing up neighboring countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
“Why aren’t these Arab countries willing to absorb some of the Palestinian Arabs? They won’t do it,” DeSantis said.
The pair continued to have a back-and-forth about the conflict. Before walking out of the market, the voter said: “You had my vote, but you don’t now.”
DeSantis has also taken steps as governor of Florida to evacuate state residents from Israel. He told reporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday that he anticipated the first evacuation flight would land in Florida on Sunday. The governor’s press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, confirmed to CNN that the first flight will depart on Saturday and land in Florida on Sunday.
DeSantis has also seized on former President Donald Trump’s criticism of Netanyahu, slamming the GOP front-runner repeatedly in media appearances and on the campaign trail.
“He attacked Bibi after the country suffered the worst attack it’s had in its modern history. … And he did that because Bibi did not – Bibi congratulated Biden in November. That’s why he did it. He hates Netanyahu because of that. That’s about him. That’s not about the greater good of what Israel is trying to do or American security,” DeSantis said Friday in New Hampshire.
With a two-letter word, Australiansstruck down the first attempt at constitutional change in 24 years, a move experts say will inflict lasting damage on First Nations people and suspend any hopes of modernizing the nation’s founding document.
Preliminary results from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) suggested that most of the country’s 17.6 million registered voters wrote No on their ballots, and CNN affiliates 9 News, Sky News and SBS all projected no path forward for the Yes campaign.
The proposal, to recognize Indigenous people in the constitution and create an Indigenous body to advise government on policies that affect them, needed a majority nationally and in four of six states to pass.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had championed the referendum and in a national address on Saturday night said his government remained committed to improving the lives of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders.
“This moment of disagreement does not define us. And it will not divide us. We are not yes voters or no voters. We are all Australians,” he said.
“It is as Australians together that we must take our country beyond this debate without forgetting why we had it in the first place. Because too often in the life of our nation, and in the political conversation, the disadvantage confronting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been relegated to the margins.”
“This referendum and my government has put it right at the center.”
Supporters of the Yes vote had hailed it as an opportunity to work with First Nations people to solve problems in their most remote communities – higher rates of suicide, domestic violence, children in out-of-home care and incarceration.
However, resistance swelled as conservative political parties lined up to denounce the proposal as lacking detail and an unnecessary duplication of existing advisory bodies.
On Saturday, leading No campaigner Warren Mundine said the referendum should never have been called.
“This is a referendum we should never have had because it was built on a lie that Aboriginal people do not have a voice,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
During months of campaigning, the No vote gained momentum with slogans that appealed to voter apathy – “If you don’t know, vote No” – and a host of other statements designed to instil fear, according to experts, including that it would divide Australia by race and be legally risky, despite expert advice to the contrary.
No shortage of high-profile voices lent their support to the Yes campaign.
Aussie music legend John Farnham gifted a song considered to be the unofficial Australian anthem to a Yes advertisement with a stirring message of national unity. But opinion polls continued to slide to No.
Objections came thick and fast from the leaders of opposition political parties, who picked at loose threads of the proposal. “Where’s the detail?” they asked, knowing that would be decided and legislated by parliament.
Some members of the Indigenous community said they didn’t want to be part of a settler document, demanding more than a body that gives the government non-binding advice. Other Australians were completely disengaged.
Yes campaigner Marilyn Trad told CNN that volunteers making calls to prospective voters had to break the news to some – this week – that there was indeed a referendum.
Kevin Argus, a marketing expert from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), told CNN the Yes campaign was a “case study in how not to message change on matters of social importance.”
“From a public relations perspective, what is proposed is quite simple – an advisory group to government. Not unlike what the business council, mining groups, banking groups and others expect and gain when legislation is being drafted that affects the people they represent,” he said.
Argus said only the No campaign had used simple messaging, maximized the reach of personal profiles, and acted decisively to combat challenges to their arguments with clear and repeatable slogans.
The result means no constitutional change, but the referendum will have lasting consequences for the entire nation, according to experts.
For First Nations people, it will be seen as a rejection of reconciliation by Australia’s non-Indigenous majority and tacit approval of a status quo that is widely considered to have failed them for two centuries.
Before the vote, Senator Pat Dodson, the government’s special envoy for reconciliation, said win or lose, the country had a “huge healing process to go through.”
“We’ve got to contemplate the impact of a No vote on the future generations, the young people,” he told the National Press Club this week. “We already know that the Aboriginal youth of this country have high suicide rates. Why? They’re not bad people. They’re good people. Why don’t they see any future?”
Maree Teesson, director of the Matilda Center for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use at the University of Sydney, told CNN the Voice to Parliament had offered self-determination to Indigenous communities, an ability to have a say over what happens in their lives.
“Self-determination is such a critical part of their social and emotional well-being,” she said.
Teesson said a No vote doesn’t just maintain the status quo, it “undermines the self-determination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”
“I do hope that we don’t lose the possibility of the hope that this gave our nation and that we somehow work to find another way to achieve that,” she said.
Some experts say more broadly the No outcome could deter future leaders from holding referendums, as it could indicate that the bar for constitutional change – written into the document in 1901 – is too high.
The last time Australians voted down a referendum was in 1999 when they were asked to cut ties with the British monarchy and become a republic – and little has changed on that front since then.
“The drafters of the constitution said this is the rulebook and we’re only going to change it if the Australian people say they want to change it – we’re not going to leave it up to politicians,” said Paula Gerber, professor of Law at Monash University.
“So that power, to change, to modernize, to update the constitution has been put in the hands of the Australian people. And if they are going to say every time, “If you don’t know, vote No,” then what politician is going to spend the time and money on a referendum that can be so easily defeated?”
Top officials from the campaigns of Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis made their case Friday to major Republican donors, as the two compete to position themselves as the most viable alternative to former President Donald Trump.
To a room of prospective top donors gathered in Texas, the DeSantis team argued that if Haley was out of the race, her ballot share would bounce around to candidates other than Trump, one attendee told CNN. But if DeSantis was no longer in the race, his campaign argued, his supporters would largely move to Trump, meaning the Florida governor’s presence in the race was a greater threat to Trump’s chances at the nomination.
DeSantis himself made that argument publicly while campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday, telling reporters, “If I wasn’t in the picture, most of those voters who are going to caucus for me would go to Trump, they would not go to Haley.”
“People can support who they want, but let’s just not kid ourselves that the nominee for the GOP is either going to be Donald Trump or it’s going to be me. There’s not a path for anybody else,” DeSantis added.
The DeSantis campaign also presented donors with Iowa polling that shows movement since the second debate.
“We are moving at the right time,” a DeSantis adviser told the group, according to a second attendee.
They also argued the best path to stopping Trump is in Iowa and said the DeSantis campaign is the one best positioned in the Hawkeye State, according to a person familiar with their pitch. The presentation also included an explanation about how their campaign is in better position financially than it was during the summer.
The campaign advisers for DeSantis and Haley were ushered in right before and out right after their respective presentations today, the second attendee added, so neither side could hear their rival’s specific argument.
A source familiar with the arguments from Haley’s camp said her team made the case that the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador is ahead of DeSantis in New Hampshire and South Carolina and tied in Iowa. “By every metric, Nikki is moving up and Ron is moving down,” the person said. “It is a two-person race: one man and one woman.”
Her camp also noted that Haley previously announced she ended the third quarter with $9 million in available cash for the primary, surpassing the $5 million in primary dollars that the DeSantis campaign said it had on hand. DeSantis has relied heavily on a super PAC to underwrite his advertising and campaign infrastructure.
The event was organized by the American Opportunity, a group whose members are among some of biggest names in Republican financial circles, including hedge fund billionaires Paul Singer and Ken Griffin, real-estate developer Harlan Crow and some members of the Ricketts family – whose patriarch, Joe Ricketts, founded the brokerage giant TD Ameritrade.
The meeting comes as some Republican donors voice growing concerns about Trump’s dominance over the rest of the Republican field and publicly fret he will lose the general election if the party nominates him next year.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise is scrambling to lock down the votes to become the next House speaker, but protracted opposition to the Louisiana Republican inside the GOP conference and the numerical realities of the narrowly divided chamber could ultimately derail his bid.
Several senior Republicans see little path to 217 votes, after Scalise won just 113 votes in the GOP conference, which includes three delegates who don’t have a vote on the House floor. Making up that deficit in just a matter of days is an extremely tall order – plus a number of hard-right Republicans say they are dead-set against Scalise, when he can only afford to lose four GOP votes on the floor. At least 12 GOP lawmakers have said publicly they’ll oppose Scalise’s nomination and more have expressed frustration or skepticism about his leadership, more than enough to sink his bid.
House GOP members will huddle behind closed doors Thursday afternoon, according to two sources familiar. No phones will be allowed in the meeting.
Republicans are worried that Scalise is facing grim prospects of becoming speaker, an impasse that threatens to prolong the GOP’s leadership crisis that has left the House paralyzed and unable to move on any legislation.
Late Wednesday, members of the conference were beginning to weigh how they would handle the potential collapse of his bid, with several GOP sources saying they believe they’d have to consider a new candidate who has yet to run for the speakership.
Scalise spent Wednesday after the vote meeting individually with GOP members as he and his whip operation tried to convince the holdouts to come around, the sources said. He found some success in the outreach, but it’s not yet clear whether he can win over enough Republicans to overcome the razor-thin GOP House majority.
Scalise or any other Republican candidate for speaker needs 217 votes to win the speaker’s gavel, a majority of the entire House, meaning they can only afford to lose four Republicans if every member is voting.
Rep. Jim Jordan, who lost the vote for speaker to Scalise on Wednesday, 113-99, said Thursday he wants Republicans to unite around Scalise. “I do and I’ve been clear about that since yesterday,” Jordan said.
But pressed on if he would rule out taking the job if Scalise can’t get there, Jordan didn’t give a clear answer. “I will nominate Steve on the floor and I hope we can unite around a speaker,” the Ohio Republican said.
The opposition to Scalise inside his party has thrown into doubt how Republicans will get out of their speaker conundrum that’s left them simply unable to govern.
While there was some belief on Capitol Hill that the brutal assault on Israel over the weekend might prompt Republicans to quickly select a leader – House lawmakers were given a classified briefing on Israel Wednesday before the conference vote for speaker – the deep divisions in the conference that led to Kevin McCarthy’s removal last week have now left the quest for a new speaker at a standstill.
Anger inside the conference is rising.
“These folks are destroying our conference and apparently want to be in the minority,” said Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a swing Nebraska district. “They don’t respect the customs of the House that have gone on for over two centuries.”
The House gavels back in at noon Thursday, but there’s no indication Republicans will be ready to vote on a speaker.
Scalise is facing broad skepticism inside the far-right House Freedom Caucus, a key bloc of Republicans who mostly supported the Trump-backed Jordan for speaker, multiple sources told CNN, citing a general lack of trust with Republican leadership. Scalise has been in leadership years, although he is more conservative than McCarthy.
Jordan, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, threw his weight behind Scalise following Wednesday’s vote, saying he was encouraging his supporters to do the same. “We need a speaker and Steve is the guy for that. Like I said, I have offered to give a nominating speech for him,” the Ohio Republican told reporters Wednesday afternoon.
But there was a cohort of lawmakers who expressed staunch opposition to voting for Scalise on the House floor.
“Well, Leader Scalise won, and it’s not over. I’m still throwing my support behind Jim Jordan for speaker. I’m not going to change my vote now or any time soon on the House floor,” said GOP Rep. Max Miller of Ohio.
Scalise’s individual outreach did peel off at least one holdout. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who initially said Wednesday that she would vote for Jordan on the floor, met with Scalise and said afterward she felt “comfortable” enough to support his speaker nomination.
While she said he did not make specific commitments, he did assure her that he’ll allow her to “aggressively” do her job on the Oversight Committee, which is part of the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
But Luna said she would only back Scalise for the speakership on the first ballot. If it went to multiple ballots, she said, “we must find a candidate” the conference can unite behind.
Still, a number of Republicans don’t think that Jordan could be a viable alternative given that he lost to Scalise in the nominating contest, and some Republicans were irritated when he didn’t immediately close ranks behind Scalise.
“If Scalise were not to make it, the next person got less votes,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida said of Jordan. “And by the way, I think, more controversial. So that would not be a good thing for this place.”
Rep. Erin Houchin of Indiana said she doesn’t know if “it will be Jordan or Scalise or even someone else at this point. … I think we’re in uncharted territory, and it’s gonna be very hard to predict.”
Another GOP member said that it would have to be a new candidate altogether, something that would take longer to sort out.
“Steve is nowhere near 217,” said the Republican member.
Leaving the floor without a vote Wednesday, interim Speaker Patrick McHenry tried to be optimistic the House GOP conference would solve the impasse soon.
Asked if there could be a floor vote Thursday, the North Carolina Republican said, “That’s the hope.”
Could anyone get the 217 votes required? He had the same response: “That’s the hope.”
This story and headline have been updated to include additional developments.
House Republicans are set to meet behind closed doors Wednesday to pick a nominee to be the next speaker – but it remains unclear whether any candidate will have enough the support to win the gavel following Kevin McCarthy’s abrupt ouster.
As of now, neither House Majority Leader Steve Scalise nor Rep. Jim Jordan – the two declared GOP candidates in the race – have locked down 217 votes, the necessary number to be elected speaker by a majority vote of the full chamber. The uncertain vote math has raised questions over how and when the GOP majority will be able to elect a new speaker, particularly as infighting continues to roil House Republican ranks.
Until a speaker is elected, the House remains effectively paralyzed following McCarthy’s ouster, an unprecedented situation that has taken on new urgency amid Israel’s war against Hamas. Raising the stakes further, the longer it takes Republicans to elect a new speaker, the less time lawmakers will have to try to avert a government shutdown with a funding deadline looming in mid-November.
Following a candidate forum Tuesday evening, Rep. Mike Garcia, a California Republican, said he thinks it’s “50/50” on whether the GOP will be able to elect a speaker Wednesday.
Asked whether anyone could get 217 votes, he said: “I think that’s a great question right now.”
GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky rated the odds even lower. “I’d put it at 2%,” he said when asked by a reporter what the chances are there will be a new House speaker by Wednesday.
After his removal as speaker in a historic vote last week, McCarthy announced he would not run again for the post. But allies of the former speaker could still nominate him during Wednesday’s closed-door meeting, though McCarthy has said he has told members not to do so.
Currently, a candidate needs only a simple majority of the conference – or 111 votes – to win the GOP nomination for speaker, a much lower threshold than the 217 votes needed to win the gavel on the House floor.
A number of Republicans now say that threshold is too low because it does not ensure that the nominee will be able to win the floor vote for speaker.
As a result, there has been a push to raise the threshold to secure the GOP nomination from a majority of House Republicans to a majority of the full House in a bid to avoid a protracted floor fight like the one in January when it took 15 rounds of voting for McCarthy to win the gavel.
House Republicans are expected to vote on whether to raise that threshold during Wednesday’s meeting.
Here’s how the meeting is expected to unfold:
Republican members will gather behind closed doors Wednesday morning.
First, they will vote on whether to change conference rules to raise the threshold to nominate a speaker and any other changes.
Then, members will stand up to formally nominate a candidate and give a short speech.
There will be a secret ballot and members can write in candidates. Results are counted by hand.
If there are more than two candidates, the candidate with the lowest number of votes gets knocked out. Republicans would then vote on the top two.
It’s not clear when the House will hold a vote of the full chamber to elect a new speaker. It could happen as soon as Wednesday – though only if Republicans pick a nominee for their conference first.
The timing of the House floor vote is technically up to Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry, who is serving in the top leadership spot on an interim basis. However, he is expected to defer to whoever the GOP nominee is, and the timing of the vote will be their call.
The governing party called it a ceremonial passing of the baton. But the opposition lambasted it as a “passing of the scepter.”
Constitutionally barred from running for reelection, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador sought to show last month, in a very public way, that presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum has his blessing. So he handed his hoped-for successor an actual baton, in a ceremony outside a Mexico City restaurant not far from the National Palace – the seat of the country’s executive power.
Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old former Mexico City mayor and longtime political ally of Lopez Obrador, hit all the right notes in thanking him. Accepting the baton along with the leftist Morena party’s presidential nomination, Sheinbaum said she would assume “the full responsibility of continuing the course marked by our people, that of the transformation initiated by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.”
When Mexicans go to the polls next June, they will choose between two women for president – a first in the country’s history. Only four days before Morena nominated Sheinbaum, Mexico’s opposition coalition Broad Front chose another formidable female candidate, former senator Xochitl Gálvez from the conservative PAN party.
It’s not the first time Mexico sees women running for the presidency; before Sheinbaum and Gálvez, were six other female presidential candidates. But with the two major political sides nominating women, this is the first time that it’s practically a given that starting in December 2024, Mexico, a country previously known for machismo, will be run by a woman.
Still, some critics say the outgoing Lopez Obrador’s shadow looms over the contest.
Meet the candidates: Sheinbaum and Galvez
Gálvez’s rise in Mexican politics has been meteoric; this spring, she said she wasn’t even the favorite of the PRI, PAN and PRD, the parties that now form the Broad Front coalition. It was a public spat with Lopez Obrador himself – who regularly attacked her as a “wimp,” “puppet,” and “employee of the oligarchy” in news conferences – that ultimately rocketed her into the spotlight.
In June, Gálvez went viral when she attempted to enter the National Palace with a judicial order that granted her the right to reply to the president, after successfully suing López Obrador. “This is not a show,” she told reporters at the doors of the National Palace. “The law is the law, period.”
The daughter of an indigenous father and a mixed-race mother, Gálvez served as the top official for indigenous affairs under former President Vicente Fox before becoming a senator. Unfiltered and irreverent, she described herself in an interview with CNN en Español as “an all-terrain, 4-by-4, kind of woman.”
In some respects, she appears progressive. Gálvez has advocated in the Mexican Congress for the rights and welfare of indigenous groups and Afro-Mexicans, and in a regional forum earlier this year in Monterrey, said that oil-rich Mexico should shift to renewable energy. “We haven’t done it because we are dumbasses,” Gálvez unapologetically said.
She has also said leftist Lopez Obrador’s pension for all senior citizens should continue, and proposes what she calls a “universal social protection system” of welfare programs for a large portion of the middle and lower classes.
But when it comes to security and the fight against organized crime, Gálvez’s three-pronged plan is muscular, based on what she describes as “intelligence, heart and a firm-hand”: strengthening local and state police and giving them access to intelligence, advocating for and protecting victims, and respecting the rule of law.
Macario Schettino, a political analyst and Social Science professor at ITESM, a renowned Mexican university, describes Gálvez’s political momentum as impressive, considering that only a few months ago, she wasn’t even considered a candidate with a national profile. “She barely begun to register in political terms, and she’s already had great growth. Many people in Mexico still don’t know her. She is going to grow [..] in popularity,” Schettino said, “While Claudia Sheinbaum can no longer move from where she is because she is already known by most Mexicans.”
Sheinbaum, a physicist with a doctorate in environmental engineering, would also be the first president with Jewish heritage if she wins, although she rarely speaks publicly about her personal background and has governed as a secular leftist.
She is currently ahead in most polls, and will be a formidable opponent to beat. Not only does Sheinbaum have the full support of the governing party, she has also long enjoyed the spotlight as mayor of Mexico’s most important city for the last five years until her resignation in June to run for the presidency.
On policy, Sheinbaum has vowed to continue many of Lopez Obrador’s policies and programs, including a pension for all senior citizens, scholarships for more than 12 million students and free fertilizers for small farm owners. But the high-profile ex-mayor rejects criticism of her close political alignment with the president. “Of course we’re not a copy (of the president),” she said in July.
Still, she does not shy away from touting the principles they share: “For everybody’s good, let’s put the poor first. There cannot be a rich government if the people are poor. Power is only a virtue when it’s used to serve the people,” Sheinbaum said, repeating the same campaign slogans Lopez Obrador has used for years.
Schettino believes the immensely popularly Lopez Obrador views Sheinbaum as his extension in power. He points to their party Morena’s roots in the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party that governed Mexico for more than seven decades until 2000, which came to be known as “The Dinosaur,” and the Party of Democratic Revolution that branched off from it.
In 2012, Lopez Obrador created Morena as a political party. Schettino describes the party today as a “tyrannosaurus” under Lopez Obrador’s influence – representing what he says is the current leader’s desire for a successor to hew closely to his own agenda. “President López Obrador, a dinosaur who not only is a dinosaur, but also has the vocation of a tyrant. He doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay in power,” Schettino said.
“I believe that he built Claudia’s candidacy,” Schettino said.
López Obrador however has repeatedly dismissed accusations of authoritarian leanings or that he favors a candidate he will be able to control. Earlier this year, Lopez Obrador denied he had any favorites among his party’s hopefuls or that he was pushing for one candidate or another behind the scenes.
He has also said that he is going “retire completely” after his six-year term in office comes to an end. “I am retiring, I will not participate in any public event again, of course. I am not going to accept any position, I do not want to be anyone’s advisor, much less am I going to act as a chief. I am not going to have relations with politicians. I am not going to talk about politics,” the president told press in February.
Kevin McCarthy will not run for speaker again after the House ousted him from the top leadership post in a historic vote on Tuesday, a move that threatens to plunge House Republicans into even further chaos and turmoil.
The House will now need to elect a new speaker. There is no clear alternative to McCarthy who would have the support needed to win the gavel, but the race for a potential successor is already underway.
The vote to oust McCarthy and his decision not to run for the speakership again marks a major escalation in tensions for a House GOP conference that has been mired in infighting – and it comes just days after McCarthy successfully engineered a last-minute bipartisan effort to avert a government shutdown. No House speaker has ever before been ousted through the passage of a resolution to remove them.
“I don’t regret standing up for choosing governing over grievance. It is my responsibility. It is my job. I do not regret negotiating. Our government is designed to find compromise,” McCarthy said at a wide-ranging press conference Tuesday evening.
Dozens of his staffers were in the room listening with many emotional and hugging each other.
McCarthy told CNN’s Manu Raju he “might” endorse a successor and did not say whether he would remain in Congress. “I’ll look at that,” he said when asked.
McCarthy also unloaded on his critics. Asked by Raju if there’s anything he would have done differently with regard to the eight House Republicans who voted to oust him, McCarthy joked, “Yeah, a lot of them I helped get elected so I probably should have picked someone else.”
A number of House Republicans are said to be considering jumping into the race for speaker. It’s a scramble as House Republicans do not have a plan nor are they unified behind a candidate.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who has been the No. 2 Republican, has started reaching out to members about a potential speakership bid, according to a source familiar.
Immediately following the vote, GOP Rep. Patrick McHenry, a top McCarthy ally, was named interim speaker and the House went into recess as Republicans scrambled to find a path forward. The House is expected to stay out of session for the rest of the week, and Republicans are expected to hold a speaker candidate forum in a week.
The effort to oust the speaker was led by GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz and comes as a bloc of hardline conservatives continued to rebel against McCarthy, voting against key priorities of GOP leadership and repeatedly throwing up roadblocks to the speaker’s agenda.
The vote was 216 to 210 with eight Republicans voting to remove McCarthy from the speakership. The Republicans voting to oust McCarthy as speaker were: Gaetz, Eli Crane and Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ken Buck of Colorado, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Bob Good of Virginia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Matt Rosendale of Montana.
A number of House Republicans reacted with shock and frustration following the vote.
McCarthy ally and House Rules Chairman Tom Cole said, “Nobody knows what’s going happen next, including all the people that voted to vacate (they) have no earthly idea what, they have no plan. They have no alternative at this point. So it’s just simply a vote for chaos.”
House Democrats signaled ahead of the vote that they would not bail out McCarthy.
There is a significant amount of distrust and anger from House Democrats toward McCarthy, however, over his actions as speaker and the House GOP agenda.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a letter to his caucus that leadership planned to vote in support of removing McCarthy ahead of the final vote.
“It is now the responsibility of the GOP members to end the House Republican Civil War. Given their unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner, House Democratic leadership will vote yes on the pending Republican Motion to Vacate the Chair,” he wrote.
Prior to the final vote, the House failed to table – or block – the effort to oust McCarthy by a vote of 208 to 218 with 11 Republicans voting against the motion to table. The GOP no votes were Gaetz, Crane, Biggs, Buck, Rosendale, Good, Mace, Burchett, Cory Mills of Florida, Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Warren Davidson of Ohio.
McCarthy also told his members he will not cut a deal with Democrats, sources said.
Gaetz was directly pressed by his colleagues during a Tuesday party meeting for his grand plan, and who would replace McCarthy if he was ousted, sources said. Gaetz stood up and responded that there would need to be a new speaker’s election that plays out but didn’t name anyone he had in mind for the job.
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.
Top Senate Republicans look at the prospects of a Donald Trump primary victory with trepidation, fearful his polarizing style and heavy baggage may sink GOP candidates down the ticket as their party battles for control of the chamber.
The Montana Republican, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has spent the past year working to ensure Trump and Senate Republican leaders don’t clash about their preferred candidates in key primaries, after the 2022 debacle that saw a bevy of Trump-backed choices collapse in the heat of the general election and cost their party the Senate majority. So far, the two are on the same page.
Daines argues that Trump is “strengthening” among independent voters and that could be a boon for his Senate candidates – even in purple states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania. The senator says that his down-ticket candidates should embrace the former president, even as he’s facing four criminal trials with polls showing that he remains a deeply unpopular figure with wide swaths of voters.
“What’s key is we want to make sure we have high-quality candidates running with President Trump,” Daines said. “Candidates that can again appeal beyond the Republican base – that’s my goal.”
In an interview with CNN at NRSC headquarters, Daines detailed his latest thinking about the GOP strategy to take back the Senate, saying his candidates need to have a stronger position on abortion, signaling he’s eager to avoid a primary in the Montana race and arguing that neither Sens. Kyrsten Sinema nor Joe Manchin could hold onto their seats if they ran for reelection in their states as independents.
And as Kari Lake is poised to announce a Senate bid in Arizona as soon as next week, Daines has some advice for the former TV broadcaster, who falsely blamed mass voting fraud for her loss in last year’s gubernatorial race in her state.
“I think one thing we’ve learned from 2022 is voters do not want to hear about grievances from the past,” Daines said. “They want to hear about what you’re going to do for the future. And if our candidates stay on that message of looking down the highway versus the rearview mirror, I think they’ll be a lot more successful particularly in their appeal to independent voters, which usually decide elections.”
Daines, who called Lake “very gifted” and said he’s had “positive” conversations with her, added: “I think it’s just going to be important for her to look to the future and not so much the past.”
Asked if Trump’s repeated false claims of a “stolen” election could be problematic down-ticket, Daines instead pointed out that Trump was the last GOP president since Ronald Reagan to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2016, though he lost those states in 2020.
“As we continue to watch the president strengthen, we’ll see what happens here in ’24, but I’ll tell you he provides a lot of strength for us down ballot in many key states,” said Daines, who was the first member of Senate GOP leadership to endorse Trump.
Daines’ assessment comes as he is benefitting from a highly favorable map, with 23 Democrats up for reelection, compared to just 11 for the GOP. Democratic incumbents in three states that Trump won – Ohio, Montana and West Virginia – are the most endangered, while the two best Democratic pickup opportunities – Texas and Florida – remain an uphill battle.
“We’ll have to keep an eye on Texas – the Ted Cruz race,” Daines said. “Just because he’s Ted Cruz he’ll draw a lot of money from the other side to try to defeat Ted Cruz.”
Beating incumbents is usually a complicated endeavor, plus Republicans are facing messy primaries that could make it harder to win a general election, including in Daines’ home-state of Montana. There, Daines has gotten behind Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL who owns an aerial firefighting company. But there’s a possibility that Sheehy could face Rep. Matt Rosendale in the primary, something that Republicans fear could undercut their effort to take down 17-year incumbent Sen. Jon Tester.
Rosendale, a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, narrowly lost to Tester in 2018 and is considering another run in 2024.
“I’ve known Matt a long time. He’s a friend of mine. I like Matt Rosendale,” Daines said. “I think it’s best if he were to stay in the US House and gain seniority.”
Unlike in the last cycle when the NRSC stayed neutral under previous leadership, the campaign committee now is taking a much heavier hand in primaries, picking and choosing which candidates to endorse. While Daines declined to say how his committee would handle the Arizona primary, he indicated they would stay out of the crowded Ohio primary, arguing the three GOP candidates battling it out there are on solid footing in the race for Sen. Sherrod Brown’s seat.
While West Virginia remains perhaps the best pickup opportunity for the GOP, the NRSC will have a much harder time if Manchin decides to run for reelection. In an interview, Manchin signaled that if he runs again, it may be as an independent – not a Democrat.
“I think everyone thinks of me as an independent back home,” Manchin told CNN. “I don’t think they look at me as a big D or a big R or an anti-R or anti-D or anything. They say it’s Joe, if it makes sense, he’ll do it.”
Daines said that wouldn’t make much of a difference.
“It’d be very difficult for Joe to get reelected in West Virginia based on looking at the numbers,” Daines said, pointing to Manchin’s support for the Inflation Reduction Act.
Similarly, Daines said that if Sinema runs in Arizona, he doesn’t believe she can win as a third-party candidate, as she faces a GOP candidate and the likely Democratic nominee, Rep. Ruben Gallego.
“I think Sinema will have a difficult path if she gets in the race,” he said.
In addition to facing weaker candidates last cycle, many Republicans continue to sidestep questions on their positions over abortion – a potent issue in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
But Daines says he doesn’t think abortion will be “as potent this cycle,” indicating he is pressing candidates to do a “better job” messaging on the issue to suburban women. He said that Republicans need to impress upon voters that they support limits on late-term abortions, with exceptions for rape, incest or life of the mother, arguing that’s a “more reasonable position” in line with most Americans – all the while rejecting calls for a national ban on all abortions.
“I think we actually had candidates who just kind of ran away from the issue and kind of hoped it went away,” Daines said. “And when you do that, if you don’t take a position, the Democratic opponents there will define the issue for them. And that’s a losing strategy.”
Daines is also in the middle of another internal party war – between Trump and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, as the two men have been at sharp odds since the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Asked if he believed the two could work with each other if Trump is president again and McConnell returns as Republican leader, Daines said: “It’d be a privilege to have a Republican president and a Republican majority leader working – that’d be a nice problem to have.”
Opposition candidate Mohamed Muizzu has won the Maldives presidential election, beating incumbent President Ibrahim Solih in a second-round runoff that could herald a pro-China shift for the Indian Ocean archipelago from traditional partner India.
With nearly all votes counted, the Elections Commission of the Maldives said on its website that Muizzu had received 54% of the ballots in Saturday’s vote, with 46% for Solih.
About 85% of 282,000 eligible voters in the Maldives, known for its pristine beaches and high-end resorts, turned up at more than 586 polling stations across 187 islands.
“I congratulate Muizzu for winning the election and thank the people for their exemplary democratic spirit,” Solih said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Solih, who championed an “India First” policy during his time in power, will remain as president until Muizzu’s inauguration on Nov. 17.
The coalition backing Muizzu has supported Chinese loans and investment projects in the past.
Former President Abdulla Yameen, who has close links to Muizzu, is serving an 11-year prison term for corruption and money laundering. Yameen’s supporters say the charges against him were politically motivated.
“Today the people made a strong decision to win back Maldives independence,” Muizzu told reporters in the capital, Male.
“All of us, working together with unity, Insha Allah, we will be successful.”
Muizzu also called on President Solih to release Yameen to house arrest.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent a congratulatory message to Muizzu following the announcement of his victory.
“India remains committed to strengthening the time-tested India-Maldives bilateral relationship and enhancing our overall cooperation in the Indian Ocean Region,” Modi said on X.
Rishi Sunak will gather with members of his governing Conservative Party on Sunday for what is likely to be their final party conference before the UK’s next general election, which Sunak is currently projected to lose.
The Conservatives come together for their annual meeting with little good news to celebrate. The party is trailing the opposition Labour Party in the polls by a significant distance.
Sunak has been criticized by moderates in the party for tacking to the right on key issues like immigration and commitments to reducing carbon emissions. He is also being attacked from the party’s right for what they perceive to be an anti-conservative approach to taxation and public debt.
As if Sunak’s job uniting his party this week wasn’t hard enough, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the leading economic research institute in the UK, published a report projecting that taxes will account for around 37% of national income by the next election – the highest level since World War II.
Party conference season is an important date fixture in the annual British political calendar. Taking place in the early fall, these jamborees are the principal forums for each party to outline its priorities for the next 12 months.
For the governing party, conference is typically a time when members rally around the leadership and unite against the opposition, insulated from whatever is happening in the wider world of politics.
This should be especially true as an election approaches. However, Sunak, who wasn’t even the Conservatives’ leader this time last year, has inherited a broken party that has been in power for so long it seems out of ideas and already preparing for the post-mortem and blame game that follows any election loss.
And factions on both the left and right of the party are already publicly criticising Sunak on a range of issues.
Examples coming into this year’s conference:
Former cabinet minister Priti Patel told British channel GB News on Friday that the tax burden was “unsustainable” before unfavourably comparing Sunak to tax-cutting former PM, Margaret Thatcher.
The Conservative-supporting Daily Mail newspaper ran a column titled: “Didn’t the Tories used to be party of tax CUTS?”
Sunak can also expect vocal criticism from the environmental wing of his party after a significant U-turn last week on climate policy. Sunak delayed a planned moratorium on the sale new gasoline and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035 and pushed back on plans to phase out gas boilers in homes.
Some Conservatives who support action on the climate crisis, not least former PM Boris Johnson, criticised Sunak, saying the UK “cannot afford to falter now” or “lose our ambition.”
Such a direct criticism of a sitting PM by a former PM is highly unusual. What makes it particularly painful for Sunak is that Johnson is at the heart of perhaps the most crucial internal battle within the Conservative Party.
Johnson was forced to resign from office because of a range of scandals last summer. However, Johnson’s most loyal acolytes believe that Sunak’s decision to quit as Johnson’s finance minister was the straw that broke the camel’s back and made Johnson’s position untenable. They believe he was motivated by the opportunity to take a run at the top job himself, something Sunak denies.
This battle between Sunak and Johnson has created a very strange dynamic within the party.
Johnson, darling of the Conservative right since the Brexit referendum, is in many ways politically to the left of Sunak. However, his pragmatism over Brexit and cautious economics has led to his allies painting Sunak as a Conservative sellout.
They also believe that Sunak’s betrayal of Johnson and apparent wish-washy centrism is what will ultimately cost the Conservative Party the next general election – ignoring the damage that Johnson did to the party and its standing in the polls through his scandal-ridden premiership.
Sunak has made attempts to counter these attacks by throwing red meat at Conservative MPs and voters. The U-turn on climate policies is just the most recent example. He’s made a crackdown on immigration – particularly the route across the English Channel from France in so-called small boats – a key plank of his agenda since taking office.
He’s been accused of sowing division over over the complex issue of trans rights in attempts to win over his own MPs and has leant into the Johnsonite position of attacking “lefty lawyers” over opposition to his plans, including those on immigration.
His hard-line shift doesn’t necessarily resonate with the public, most polls show. Which is why experts believe that Sunak is doubling down on his Conservative base, which might be his only real path to retaining power at the next election.
“Sunak’s strategy of taking on issues like net zero and small boats is very much a ‘core vote’ strategy, aimed at securing the Conservative base,” says Will Jennings, professor of politics at the University of Southampton.
“This is not without risk – firstly because it’s not clear how large that core vote is without Boris Johnson, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn (the controversial, hard-left former Labour leader) and also because voters have other concerns right now – most notably the economy,” he adds.
If you talk to senior Conservatives right now, there is a quiet acceptance that a loss is the most likely result of the next election. Most agree that not only does this look like a government in its death throes, but also that everyone is already thinking about who will replace Sunak after his defeat. Factions on the right and left of the party are already forming and people on both sides are already talking about how to win the battle for the soul of their party.
While the next election may not be a foregone conclusion, the next few months will be critical if Sunak is to start turning the polls around and make the comeback of all comebacks. All of that starts this week in Manchester: a good conference could lift the mood and rally the troops; a bad conference could be the kiss of death to any hope his party had left.
Built on the land of the Wakka Wakka people, Cherbourg’s modern motto of “many tribes, one community” reflects the varied origins of its 1,700 residents, descendants of people once forced to live there under laws of segregation.
Between 1905 and 1971, more than 2,600 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were forcibly moved from their land to Cherbourg, then known as Barambah, according to the Queensland government.
Some were marched barefoot through the Australian bush by colonial settlers under a law that called for the removal of Indigenous people from their traditional lands to be housed and educated in colonial ways.
Today residents live in neat rows of single story houses, their rent paid to a council that’s determined to turn the former government reserve into a thriving community where people want to live – and it seems to be working.
“We’ve got around 260 people waiting on our waiting list,” said Cherbourg Council CEO Chatur Zala. “There’s a huge demand for social housing because our rent is pretty reasonable.
“The rent in the big cities is so expensive, people can’t afford it.”
Life has changed for people in Cherbourg, but a divide still exists in Australia between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people on a whole range of measures – from infant mortality to employment, suicide and incarceration.
Indigenous people have proposed an idea they say may help close the gap, and on October 14 the entire country will vote on it.
A Yes vote would recognize First Nations people in the constitution and create a body – a Voice to Parliament – to advise the government on issues that affect them. A No vote would mean no change.
So how does Cherbourg, a community created from policies of segregation andassimilation, feel about what’s being billed as an historic step forward for Indigenous reconciliation?
“My community is very, very confused,” said Mayor Elvie Sandow, from her air-conditioned office in the center of Cherbourg. “They’re confused with the Voice, and then the pathway to [a] treaty.”
The mayor said residents will vote because if they don’t, they’ll be fined under Australia’s compulsory voting laws, then she immediately corrects herself.
“Well, they probably won’t vote,” she said. “They’ll just go out and get their name ticked off the [electoral] roll, so that avoids them getting a fine.”
A record number of Australians – some 17.67 million of a population of 25.69 million – have registered to vote in the country’s first referendum in almost 25 years, according to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).
Early voting has already started in remote communities, with AEC staff traveling vast distances by 4WDs, helicopters, planes and ferries to reach them.
Campaigners for both sides – Yes and No – have also been traversing the same routes, speaking to locals, organizing rallies and spending millions of dollars on radio, television and online advertising to win their votes.
“I think this is one of the most important events of my life,” said Erin Johnston, who was among thousands of people marching at a recent Yes rally in Brisbane, organized by the charity Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition.
“We have an opportunity to right a big wrong,” Johnston said.
But with two weeks to go before the vote, polls are showing that the referendum is on track to fail, a potential blow for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who made it an election pledge.
The prime minister has stressed that the Voice is not his idea but a “modest request” made by representatives of hundreds of Aboriginal nations who held meetings around the country in 2017.
Together they agreed a one-page statement called the Uluru Statement from the Heart which calls for “a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.”
“We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country,” it said.
Aunty Ruth Hegarty remembers her early days as a child in Cherbourg. There, children did not flourish, they did not walk in two worlds, and their culture was not seen as a gift but something to be erased.
Now 94, Aunty Ruth has written an award-winning book about growing up in the settlement. She was just a baby when her parents moved there from the Mitchell district in southwest Queensland looking for work during the Great Depression.
On arrival, the family was separated into different areas of the settlement. Then they realized they couldn’t leave.
Aunty Ruth was allowed to stay with her mother in the women’s section of a crowded dormitory until she was 4-and-a-half years old.
But after her first day at school, she was told she wouldn’t be living with her mother anymore. “You’re a schoolgirl now,” she was told, before being directed to the girls’ section where she shared beds, baths, towels and meals with other students.
“We were not allowed to cry,” Aunty Ruth wrote. “Crying always resulted in punishment.”
Punishment meant being caned, having their heads shaved, or being locked alone in a wooden cell at the back of the property, she wrote.
Mothers were sent to work as domestic staff for settlers while the men did manual labor, and when she was 14, Ruth was also sent away to earn money. At 22 she applied for permission from the state to marry, and when restrictions eased in the late 1960s, she moved with her husband and six children to Brisbane to start a new life outside the settlement.
“We escaped all right. But we had to convince my husband,” she told CNN at her home in Brisbane. “I said to him, there’s no jobs for the kids. Even if they went through high school, they wouldn’t get a job in our town. Every office in Cherbourg had White people working in it, so there’d be no jobs for them. So I had to tell him, we’re going,” she said.
Sitting beneath a pergola surrounded by flowers in her garden, Ruth still has the energy of an activist who has spent much of her life working to improve the lives of her people.
She wears an orange Yes badge and says she hopes the referendum will produce change.
“All I want is my constitutional recognition for me and my kids,” she said, leaning forward. “We need a change. We need change.”
Sitting to her right, her daughter Moira Bligh, president of the volunteer Noonga Reconciliation Group,said, “We’ve overcome disadvantage, but unless we’re all at our stage, we won’t stop.”
“I won’t stop,” Aunty Ruth added, “because I think it’s the right thing for us to do.”
Across town on a Wednesday night, an audience of No voters at an event organized by conservative political lobby group Advance gives an indication of why this referendum is so contentious.
Wearing No caps and T-shirts handed out at the door, they cheer loudly as the leaders of the No camp urge them to reject division.
“The Yes campaign focuses on the past. We focus on the now and the future, the making of Australia the envy of the world,” said Nyunggai Warren Mundine, a member of the Bundjalung, Gumbaynggirr and Yuin people.
Sitting in the back row, carpenter Blair Gilchrist says Indigenous people wouldn’t need a Voice if politicians were doing their jobs properly and spending money where it was needed. He’s not a fan of Albanese’s Labor government.
“Money has got to be scrutinized better. I think that’s probably the main thing. That the money is spent well,” he said.
Successive governments have spent billions of dollars to close the persistent gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in national health and welfare statistics, yet many targets aren’t being met. And on some measures, the gap is widening – including rates of incarceration, suicide and children in care.
The Voice seeks to give non-binding advice to government about what might work to end the disparity – but critics say it’s not needed.
“Infant mortality has dropped, life expectancy has increased, it might not be at the levels we need it, but it’s heading in that direction,” Northern Territory Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a descendant of the Warlpiri people, told the audience.
The death rate for Indigenous children ages 0-4 was 2.1 times as high as the rate for non-Indigenous between 2015 and 2019, according to government figures. On average, non-Indigenous men live 8.6 years longer than Indigenous men – for women it’s 7.8 years. The gap’s even wider in remote communities, statistics show.
“The Voice, it suggests that Indigenous Australians … are inherently disadvantaged, for no other reason but because of our racial heritage,” Price said. “It’s suggested that every one of us needs special measures and [to be] placed in the constitution. That again is another lie. I mean, look at me and Warren, we’re doing all right, aren’t we?” she said.
Boththe Yes and No camps want more accountability – some proof that the billions of dollars spent each year on Indigenous programs are being used to help the most vulnerable. And both want a brighter future for the most disadvantaged Indigenous people, though they disagree about how to get there.
Many in the Yes camp say that future needs to start with recognition that, as the world’s oldest continuous civilization, First Nations people occupied the land for 60,000 years before the arrival of British settlers just over 200 years ago.
The official No camp believes nothing separates Australians – from First Nations people to new migrants – and changing the constitution embeds division. For the Yes camp, Indigenous people do hold a special place in the country’s history and their existence must be acknowledged, along with a permanent body that can’t be dissolved on the political whim of future governments.
Other Indigenous people are voting No because it’s not enough – they want treaties negotiated between the land’s traditional owners and those occupying it.
Back in Cherbourg, visitors walk through the old ration shed, where people from hundreds of Aboriginal nations once queued for their weekly allowance of tea, sugar, rice, salt, sago, tapioca, slit peas, porridge, flour and meat.
It’s now a museum, where elders share stories of life in those days.
Zala said Cherbourg Council has made gains in recent years, since Mayor Elvie was elected in 2020. The number of council jobs has doubled to 130, mostly filled by local staff, Zala said.
“The highest employment rate of any Indigenous community,” he boasted.
They’ve opened the first recycling center in an Indigenous community, which handles waste from surrounding areas; and the first Digital Service Center staffed by Indigenous workers, who gain experience and qualifications.
Plans are afoot to expand the water treatment plant beyond upgrades unveiled last year. But most of all, the council is working on ways to provide new homes for the hundreds of people wanting to move there.
It’s a tough task – Cherbourg still operates as a Deed of Grant in Trust (DOGIT) community, meaning it relies on government funding. There’s very little private ownership – almost all homes there are owned and maintained by the council.
For years, the council has encouraged residents to buy the homes their families have lived in for decades, but few financial incentives exist – there’s no market for houses, meaning no capital gains, and some prospective homeowners balk at the cost of private upkeep after so many years of council support, Zala said.
As a lifelong resident, Mayor Elvie knows the issues well. Her mother lived in the Cherbourg dormitory until she was old enough to marry. By the time the future mayor was born in the 1970s, restrictions were being phased out.
She is not afraid of change, but she doesn’t see how a Voice to Parliament in Canberra is going to help address the daily challenges she faces to keep her community employed, housed and educated.
For that reason, she’s going to vote No.
“I don’t make my decision lightly,” she said.”I have had a number of conversations with different mayors and communities and some mayors are for the Yes vote. It’s very divided right up the middle.
“I’m going No because I just feel it’s a duplication. At the end of the day, I am the voice of Cherbourg because I’m the elected mayor for this community.”
Zala is one of the newer Australians the No camp says would be done a disservice if the country’s Indigenous population was given special recognition in the constitution. Born in Gujarat, India, he moved to Australia in 2006 and has been working to close the gap in Cherbourg since 2011.
“That’s still my motivation every day when I come here. I don’t accept why we have to be different than any other community. I always believed that we don’t want to create a community which is so much behind,” he said.
Of the Voice, he said he’ll be voting Yes.
“At least by voting Yes, you have hope. We don’t know the detail [of] what’s going to happen after the Voice, but it’s best to get it through and see if there might be something good come to the community,” he said. “And I think lots of people are going to do the same.”
Early 1960s – Joins Sinn Fein, which supports the reunion of British-ruled Northern Ireland with the rest of Ireland.
1972 – Suspected of being an Irish Republican Army leader, Adams is interned without trial.
July 1972 – Is released to participate in secret peace talks with the British government.
1973-1977 – After peace talks fail, Adams is imprisoned again.
1978 – Elected vice president of Sinn Fein.
1983 – Elected president of Sinn Fein.
1983-1992 – Is the elected representative for West Belfast in the British House of Commons. Following Sinn Fein policy, Adams never takes his seat in order to avoid taking the obligatory oath of loyalty to the Queen of England.
1984 – Is shot and seriously wounded during an assassination attempt.
1988 – Begins talks with John Hume, the leader of Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party.
1993 – Adams and Hume issue a statement suggesting ways to peacefully settle the conflict in Northern Ireland.
February 10, 2018 – Steps down as president of Sinn Fein.
July 13, 2018 – An explosive device is thrown at Adams’ home in Belfast, and at the home of Bobby Storey, another Sinn Fein leader. An arrest is made on July 17 in connection to the attacks.
October 2018 – “The Negotiator’s Cook Book,” which contains recipes Adam’s calls “the best-kept secrets” behind the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, is published.
October 17, 2019 – A Belfast court dismisses a case against former IRA member Ivor Bell, also clearing Adams of any links to the murder of McConville.
February 2020 – The Guardian reports that Adams is part of Sinn Fein’s government formation negotiating team, according to a leaked brief. His name does not appear on the list of the negotiating team released by the party. This follows Sinn Fein’s win of a number of seats during Ireland’s general election earlier in the month. In his blog, Adams writes the that the party has always had additional advisers.
May 13, 2020 – The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court rules that Adams was unlawfully imprisoned in the 1970s and overturns two convictions against him for trying to escape from prison.
April 28, 2023 – Belfast’s high court rules that Adams was wrongly denied compensation after his convictions were overturned in 2020.
July 4, 2023 – The House of Lords announces amendments to the government’s legacy bill which would deny compensation to Adams and others who were imprisoned without trial in the 1970s.
