Georgia primaries deliver blow to Trump’s grip on Republican party – live

Thanks for following the US politics blog today. We’re closing down here, but you can keep up with developments in our live blog covering the Texas elementary school massacre here.

Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican party loosened with defeat for his “big lie” candidates in several key Georgia primary races. But the former president was more focused on his weekend appearance at the national rifle association’s weekend convention in Houston.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary from last week might not be settled until next month after the state’s elections chief said the deadlocked race between Trump’s pick, celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz, and David McCormick, was headed for a recount.

Here’s what else we followed:

• Joe Biden’s hopes of taming inflation before November’s midterm elections were dashed by an economic outlook released by the congressional budget office on Wednesday afternoon that says the crisis will persist into next year.
• Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats would not immediately bring gun legislation to a vote because of Republican opposition.
• Public approval of the supreme court dropped sharply to 44% following the leak of a draft opinion that would overturn the Roe v Wade decision guaranteeing abortion rights nationwide, according to a Marquette Law School poll.
• Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chair of the January 6 House panel investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection, has Covid-19.

Joe Biden’s hopes of taming inflation before November’s midterm elections look to have been dashed by an economic outlook released by the congressional budget office on Wednesday afternoon that says the crisis will persist into next year.

High prices and the soaring cost of gas threaten to derail Democrats’ hopes of retaining control of Congress in the fall, and Biden last week promised tackling them was his “top domestic priority”.

Wednesday’s report from the non-partisan agency predicts the consumer price index will rise 6.1% this year and 3.1% in 2023, the Associated Press said. This forecast suggests that inflation will slow from current annual levels of 8.3%, yet would still be dramatically above a long-term baseline of 2.3%.

The CBO cautions its numbers “are subject to considerable uncertainty, in part because of the ongoing pandemic and other world events,” including Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the committee for a responsible federal budget, told the AP ahead of the report’s release that the pandemic, war in Ukraine and other factors point to the importance of reducing the annual deficit.

“Unfortunately, the underlying story here is one of fiscally unsustainable positions and on top of that, we have this added challenge of inflation and a reminder that external shocks continue to come at us,” she said.

Joe Biden is about to sign an executive order increasing accountability in law enforcement and creating a national database of police misconduct.

In a statement from the White House, the president says the steps are needed following the killing two years ago of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Two years ago, the murder of George Floyd exposed for many what Black and Brown communities have long known and experienced – that we must do more to ensure that our nation lives up to its founding promise of fair and impartial justice for all.

The incident sparked one of the largest social movements this country has ever seen, with calls from all corners to acknowledge the legacy of systemic racism in our criminal justice system and in our institutions more broadly.

As well as creating the database, Biden’s order bans the use of chokeholds and carotid restraints unless deadly force is authorized, and restricts the use of no-knock entries, such as the one used by police in Kentucky who killed an unarmed Black woman, Breonna Taylor, at her home in March 2020.

It also requires new standards that limit the use of force and require de-escalation for all federal agencies, among other measures.

The Biden administration blames Republicans in the senate for blocking the George Floyd justice in policing act, forcing the president to take executive action.

Read more:

Pennsylvania’s top election official said Wednesday that last week’s Republican Senate primary is heading for a recount, with no winner likely until June.

Celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz is virtually deadlocked with former treasure official David McCormick in the hotly contested race to take on Democratic nominee John Fetterman in November’s election.

Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, said in a statement that the vote totals for the top two finishers fell well within the 0.5% margin for an automatic recount after the deadline for counties to report unofficial totals.

Oz, who is endorsed by Donald Trump, led McCormick by 902 votes, or 0.07% of 1,343,643 ballots reported by the state by Wednesday, the Associated Press reported.

The agency said it would not declare a winner until the recount is complete, possibly as late as 8 June.

Counties continued counting hundreds of ballots on Wednesday, including provisional, military and overseas absentee ballots.

He might have lost the endorsement of Donald Trump, but Republican Alabama congressman Mo Brooks’s challenge for a US Senate seat is very much alive, and heading for a June runoff.

Some analysts expected the loss of Trump’s backing, a revenge act for Brooks’s comments that he believed voters should look forward instead of dwelling on the 2020 election that the former president lost, would be fatal.

But Brooks, formerly a staunch Trump ally and mouthpiece, earned enough if the vote on Tuesday to secure a runoff with Katie Britt, former chief of staff to Senator Richard Shelby, whose retirement opened up the Alabama seat.

Trump initially endorsed Brooks, but pulled his backing in March.

“Mo Brooks of Alabama made a horrible mistake recently when he went ‘woke’ and stated, referring to the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, ‘Put that behind you, put that behind you,’ despite the fact that the Election was rife with fraud and irregularities,” Trump said in a statement.

In response, Brooks, a six-term congressman, issued an angry statement claiming Trump had asked him to “rescind” the 2020 election and remove Joe Biden from the White House.

Brooks was a prominent figure at the “Save America” rally at the Ellipse in Washington DC on 6 January 2021 that preceded the storming of the Capitol building by Trump supporters.

“Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” Brooks told the crowd before the riot.

It’s been a lively morning so far in US political news and there is more to come, so do stay tuned, Here’s where things stand:

• Texas Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar was still locked in a tight primary runoff race with progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros on Wednesday, but has already faced criticism from the party’s progressive wing in Congress due to his anti-abortion and pro-gun views.
• Senate Democrats declined on Wednesday to bring gun safety legislation to a vote right now, with leader Chuck Schumer saying that he knows that the bills will not pass due to Republican opposition.
• Public approval of the US Supreme Court has dropped sharply following the leak of a draft opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade.
• Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chair of the January 6 House panel investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection, has Covid-19.
• The former president faced a resounding setback as Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp won the state’s Republican primary, defeating former senator David Perdue, a Trump ally who embraced the myth of a stolen election.

Donald Trump released a statement on his social media platform, Truth Social, saying that he still plans on attending the NRA convention in Houston this weekend.

“America needs real solutions and real leadership in this moment, not politicians and partisanship,” the former president wrote. “That’s why I will keep my longtime commitment to speak in Texas at the NRA Convention and deliver an important address to America.”

In his statement, Trump made a peculiar stylistic choice and put the word massacre in quotes.

Anyway, an interesting twist of irony is that people won’t be able to carry firearms when attending Trump’s speech. It seems this rule is one made by the Secret Service, which told NPR that it has the “authority to preclude firearms from entering sites visited by our protectees, including those located in open-carry states”.

For all the live news on the school shooting in Texas, do head over to our other live blog currently running, here.

Texas Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar was still locked in a tight primary runoff race with progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros on Wednesday, but “the Squad” is already angry, regardless of the result.

New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among the most prominent of the party’s progressive wing in Congress, called out its leaders for backing the anti-abortion, pro-gun Cuellar over Cisneros.

“On the day of a mass shooting and weeks after news of Roe, Democratic Party leadership rallied for a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent under investigation in a close primary,” the politician known as AOC tweeted.

“Robocalls, fundraisers, all of it. Accountability isn’t partisan. This was an utter failure of leadership”.

Senior Democrats including Nancy Pelosi campaigned for Cuellar, a nine-term congressman, as he sought to fend off the challenge from Cisneros, a 28-year-old immigration attorney.

Cuellar has already declared victory, but according to the Associated Press on Wednesday, the race is still too close to call. Cuellar led Cisneros by 175 votes, or 0.38% of the 45,209 ballots counted by 2am.

The winner will face Cassy Garcia, who won the Republican runoff for the seat, in November’s midterm elections.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said on the chamber floor Wednesday morning that he will not be bringing any gun legislation to a vote in the immediate future, saying he knows that the bills will not pass due to Republican opposition.

Speaking after Tuesday’s massacre of 19 children and two teachers by a gunman at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Schumer said:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}I believe that accountability votes are important, but sadly this isn’t a case of the American people not knowing where their senators stand. Americans can cast their vote in November.

The Associated Press reported that Schumer swiftly set in motion a pair of firearms background-check bills in response to the school massacre, but acknowledged the unyielding rejection by Congress of previous legislation to curb the national epidemic of gun violence.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}If the slaughter of schoolchildren can’t convince Republicans to buck the NRA [national rifle association], what can we do?

But he said he would continue to work on advancing bipartisan legislation.

Follow our live blog on the Texas school shooting here.

From my colleagues Maanvi Singh and Joan E Greve, these are the Guardian’s main takeaways from primary night, which was understandably overshadowed by the massacre of elementary school children in Texas:

• Blow to Donald Trump as a political kingmaker
• Key race for Georgia secretary of state signals defeat for ‘big lie’ candidate
• But Trump acolytes performed better in Arkansas and Texas
• Elementary school shooting casts pall over the night
• Democratic races also hold interest

Read the full story here for their observations:

People who take part in insurrections against the US government can be barred from office, an appeals court said on Tuesday, reversing a ruling in favor of Madison Cawthorn, an extremist Republican politician from North Carolina.

Hailing a “major victory”, Free Speech For People, the group which brought the case, said: “This ruling cements the growing judicial consensus that the 1872 Amnesty Act does not shield the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021 – including Donald Trump – from the consequences of their actions.”

Cawthorn lost a primary this month and will not return to Congress in November. But Free Speech For People pursued an appeal.

It also brought cases against Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, two Arizona Republicans, Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, and an Arizona state representative, Mark Finchem. All have been unsuccessful.

The challenges cited the the 14th amendment to the US constitution, passed after the civil war.

It says: “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Cawthorn and the other Republicans were closely tied to events around the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. They have denied knowledge of plans for violence.

Read the full story:

Public approval of the supreme court has dropped sharply following the leak of a draft opinion that would overturn the Roe v Wade decision guaranteeing abortion rights nationwide, according to a new poll.

Disapproval of the nation’s highest court was especially pronounced among the roughly two-thirds of US adults who oppose overturning Roe, the Associated Press says, while support for the court was high among those in favor, according to the Marquette Law School poll, which also found increased partisan polarization in approval.

Approval fell to 44%, with 55% disapproving of how the court is handling its job, the sample of more than 1,000 adults between 9 and 19 May found.

In March, 54% approved and 45% disapproved, itself a massive drop from the 66% approval the panel enjoyed in September 2020, the month that long-serving justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

Approval was fairly steady among Republicans from March to May this year, but fell sharply among Democrats and slightly among independents.

Donald Trump’s big lie lost bigly in Georgia on Tuesday night. Some might take this as proof that his spell over the Republican party has finally been broken, but that is what the Republican party wants people to believe.

The former president had been waging a personal vendetta against Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger for failing to overturn the 2020 presidential election in his favor.

Trump handpicked former senator David Perdue and congressman Jody Hice to challenge Kemp and Raffensperger in the Republican primaries. Both parroted the big lie and both were soundly beaten. It was a tangible sign that even many Trump voters are now weary of “stop the steal” and eager to look forward. It was also a blow to Trump in a primary season where his scattergun endorsements have come up with a decidedly mixed win-loss record.

But studying Trump’s recent record as kingmaker misses the point. In fact, it actively helps Republicans create the illusion that they have moved on from “Make America great again” (Maga) even as they continue to push its radical rightwing agenda.

It all began with Glenn Youngkin, who last year won election as governor of Virginia as a Trump-lite Republican. He never campaigned alongside the ex-president but also took pains to avoid criticizing him and alienating his base. “Don’t insult Donald Trump but do everything to keep him away,” was how columnist Peggy Noonan put it in the Wall Street Journal.

Youngkin projected the image of a safe, sane, old school Republican who could win back suburban and independent voters. But he went Maga by pushing hot button issues such as coronavirus mask mandates, transgender bathrooms and “critical race theory” and portraying his opponent as a “woke” liberal. He flirted with, but did not embrace, Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.

The formula has been emulated in various ways by candidates facing extreme Trump-backed challengers. It worked for Brad Little, the governor of Idaho, and now for Kemp in Georgia. Neither should be mistaken for “NeverTrumpers” in the mould of Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger or Larry Hogan.

Read the full story:

Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chair of the 6 January House panel investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection, has Covid-19.

The Wyoming congresswoman and Republican party pariah made the announcement in a tweet that said she was fully vaccinated and boosted, and following federal guidelines.

She said she received a positive test this morning, and was “experiencing mild symptoms”.

If Brian Kemp’s obliteration of David Perdue’s challenge wasn’t bad enough for Donald Trump, the failure of the former president’s pick Jody Hice to topple Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger might have stung even more.

Raffensperger was, of course, the recipient of Trump’s infamous call following the 2020 election asking him to “find” the votes he needed to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, which is now the subject of a criminal probe.

The refusal of Georgia’s Republican officials to bend to Trump’s will resulted in his furious campaign of vengeance, which fell flat on Tuesday when voters soundly rejected the “big lie” candidates he wanted to install.

Raffensperger’s victory wasn’t as sizeable as Kemp’s, but he still achieved more than 50% of the vote, enough to avoid a run-off and win him the Republican nomination outright.

My colleague Sam Levine has taken a look at Raffensperger’s victory and how it was, arguably, the biggest blow yet to Trump’s efforts to install compliant officials in positions of authority:

It was supposed to be the moment of Donald Trump’s triumphant revenge over Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp and the other RINOs (Republicans in name only) he excoriated for rebuffing his big lie of a stolen presidential election.

But as his chosen candidates fell one by one in Tuesday’s primary elections, a new reality was dawning over the former president: the total control the self-appointed kingmaker believed he still wielded over the Republican party is no longer intact.

Reaction to last night’s events was coming in on Wednesday, although, notably, nothing yet from the former president himself, who put his reputation and – for once his money – behind former senator David Perdue’s doomed attempt to unseat Kemp.

But others had plenty to say.

Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who was among a number of senior Republicans, including ex-vice president Mike Pence, to back Kemp, celebrated the demise of Trump’s “vendetta tour” in a tweet.

Kemp goes on to face Democrat Stacy Abrams – who won her party’s primary Tuesday unopposed in November in a rematch of their 2018 battle, which Kemp won narrowly.

Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who memorably denied Trump’s request that he “find” votes in 2020, secured the Republican nomination for re-election against the Trump-backed congressman Jody Hice.

The state’s Republican party was quick to celebrate:

And Georgia’s Republican attorney general Chris Carr beat back a challenge from John Gordon, who made Trump’s stolen election myth a central plank of his campaign.

Not all Trump-aligned candidates in Georgia fell: his pick for Senate, former NFL star Herschel Walker, cruised home. And congresswoman Marjory Taylor Greene won her race at a canter.

But Republican leaders will worry that Walker, who has a history of domestic violence, is the wrong candidate to be taking on Democratic senator Raphael Warnock in the fall. And that Greene’s extremism will turn off independent voters.

My colleague Lauren Gambino has this look at how Trump’s chosen candidates went down, and how Kemp’s victory marks a “resounding setback” for the former president’s quest to punish those who dared to cross him:

Good morning and welcome to the midweek edition of the US politics blog.

Donald Trump is facing a cold new reality this morning: the total power he thought he still held over the Republican party is no longer a thing.

Resounding defeats for his “big lie” candidates David Perdue, Jody Hice and John Gordon in Tuesday’s primaries in Georgia were a stunning rebuke for what critics have called Trump’s “vendetta tour” – his plan to take out the state’s top officials who rebuffed his efforts to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.

Former senator Perdue was trounced by incumbent governor Brian Kemp, Hice failed to topple secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, and Gordon fell to attorney general Chris Carr.

It wasn’t a total blowout for Trump-aligned candidates in Georgia: his pick for Senate, former NFL star Herschel Walker, cruised home. And congresswoman Marjory Taylor Greene won her race at a canter.

But that in itself is alarming Republican leaders, who worry that Walker, who has a history of domestic violence, is the wrong candidate to be taking on Democratic senator Raphael Warnock in the fall, and that Greene’s extremism will turn off independent voters.

• In Alabama, Republican congressman Mo Brooks lost Trump’s endorsement, but won enough votes to reach a run-off to hold on to his seat.
• In Texas, attorney general Ken Paxton, who spoke at Trump’s 6 January Washington rally that preceded the Capitol insurrection, saw off a challenge from George P Bush, grandson of former president George HW Bush.
• And the only anti-abortion Democrat in the House, Henry Cuellar, has declared victory over progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros in their Texas district.

We’ll have lots more reaction coming up to the primary elections in Georgia and other states that voted Tuesday, so please stay with us.