Republican Liz Cheney endorses Michigan Democrat in midterm elections – as it happened

The pieces on the American political chess board continued moving today, with less than two weeks to go until the 8 November midterms. Donald Trump announced a slate of campaign rallies, including a visit to Florida, where he will not be joined by Republican governor Ron DeSantis. Meanwhile, Joe Biden traveled to a New York semiconductor factory to promote legislation boosting domestic technological competitiveness, with the greater goal of drumming up voter support for his handling of the economy. And Trump foe Liz Cheney bucked her hardcore Republican credentials to endorse a Democrat running for another term in the House.

Here’s what else happened today:

• A Capitol rioter was sentenced to seven-a-half years in prison for his part in the attack on Washington police officer Michael Fanone on January 6.

• Democratic lawmakers want the enhanced child tax credit restored in year-end legislation. During 2021, the program was credited with lowering child poverty.

• Democratic senator John Hickenlooper asked the Federal Reserve to hold off on increasing interest rates further. He is the second Democrat this week to urge the central bank exercise caution in its fight against inflation.

• Once a swing state, Democrats in Florida worry they are being pushed decisively into the minority, and could lose ground even in their strongholds in the upcoming elections.

• Call them the Arizona accords. A far-right Republican lawmaker invited the leaders of Russia and Ukraine to negotiate peace in the southwestern state. Don’t expect it to go anywhere.

Why are there always reporters following Joe Biden around? Because people tell him interesting things.

Such as top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer, who Fox News overheard giving Biden his assessment of how things are looking in two states crucial to determining Senate control:

Despite Democrat John Fetterman’s rocky performance on Tuesday, Schumer said, “looks like the debate didn’t hurt us too much in Pennsylvania.”

He can also be heard saying “we’re picking up steam in Nevada.” Polls in the western state have shown Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in a very tight race against her Republican opponent, Adam Laxalt.

Control of Congress isn’t the only thing voters will decide in the 8 November midterms. In five states, Americans will vote on whether or not to approve ballot measures removing laws that allow slavery and involuntary servitude for prisoners, the Associated Press reports.

The measures won’t immediately change conditions in state prisons, but could form the basis for future legal challenges over how convict labor is treated.

Here’s more from the AP’s report:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The effort is part of a national push to amend the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that banned enslavement or involuntary servitude except as a form of criminal punishment. That exception has long permitted the exploitation of labor by convicted felons.

“The idea that you could ever finish the sentence ‘slavery’s okay when … ’ has to rip out your soul, and I think it’s what makes this a fight that ignores political lines and brings us together, because it feels so clear,” said Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a criminal justice advocacy group pushing to remove the amendment’s convict labor clause.

Nearly 20 states have constitutions that include language permitting slavery and involuntary servitude as criminal punishments. In 2018, Colorado was the first to remove the language from its founding frameworks by ballot measure, followed by Nebraska and Utah two years later.

This November, versions of the question go before voters in Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont.

Sen. Raumesh Akbari, a Democrat from Memphis, was shocked when a fellow lawmaker told her about the slavery exception in the Tennessee Constitution and immediately began working to replace the language.

“When I found out that this exception existed, I thought, ‘We have got to fix this and we’ve got to fix this right away,’” she said. “Our constitution should reflect the values and the beliefs of our state.”

A judge in Washington has sentenced a Tennessee man who participated in the January 6 insurrection to seven-and-a-half years in prison for attacking police officer Michael Fanone, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Albuquerque Cosper Head, 43, was part of a group that overwhelmed Fanone as he tried to fend off the assault, dragging him into a mob and holding him down while he was tased by other rioters. Fanone, who resigned from the Washington police department last year, has become one of the most outspoken law enforcement figures who responded to the attack by supporters of Donald Trump.

Here’s more from the Journal:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Calling him one of the “most serious offenders” during the Capitol riot, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson imposed the 90-month sentence on Albuquerque Cosper Head during an emotional court hearing Thursday in the District of Columbia.

Mr. Head, a 43-year-old construction worker, pleaded guilty in May to participating in a group attack on Michael Fanone, a former Washington Metropolitan Police Officer. Mr. Fanone has spoken extensively about the attack and the injuries he sustained, including a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury.

According to a recent Justice Department court filing, Mr. Head “forcibly dragged Officer Fanone into the riotous mob” and “continued to restrain Officer Fanone while another rioter applied a Taser to the base of the officer’s skull.”

Judge Jackson called Mr. Head’s actions “some of the darkest acts committed on one of our nation’s darkest days,” adding that he went after the officer like he was “prey” and a “trophy.”

Mr. Head will receive credit for time spent in custody since his arrest in April 2021.

The Justice Department had asked Judge Jackson to impose the maximum potential sentence of 96 months, citing Mr. Head’s criminal history, which includes convictions for domestic violence and approximately 45 arrests.

Mr. Head’s lawyer, G. Nicholas Wallace, argued unsuccessfully for a 60-month sentence, saying his client was “embarrassed and remorseful” and has accepted responsibility for his actions.

Rightwing Republican congressman Paul Gosar has invited Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to Arizona to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.

In a letter posted on Donald Trump’s Truth social network, Gosar, who was censured and stripped of his committee posts last year for tweeting a violent anime sequence depicting him killing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Joe Biden, proposed talks in Phoenix to end a conflict he feared poses nuclear peril.

He described Arizona’s capital as “far enough away from the conflict, and away from the entities that are currently encouraging more war, to be a productive location.”

Here’s how he put it, on Twitter:

The letter is unlikely to amount to anything more than a stunt for the Trump acolyte representing the southwestern state. But it does point to a larger reality: some Republicans are growing wary of Washington’s continued backing of Kyiv, saying it’s getting too expensive. Top House Republican Kevin McCarthy, who is poised to lead the chamber if the GOP wins a majority in the upcoming elections, said as much in an interview last week.

Democrat woes deepen in New York

Much has already been made of the unusually tight race in New York state for the governor’s mansion, where Kathy Hochul only has a relatively narrow lead over her Republican challenger.

Now, adding to those New York woes, is evidence that other races are starting to look troublesome for Democrats, including the House Democratic campaigns chief Sean Patrick Maloney in the Hudson Valley.

Once thought safe, the race there has tightened considerably.

Politico has more:

Republicans first targeted House Democratic campaigns chief Sean Patrick Maloney’s blue district here in the Hudson Valley as an act of trolling their arch-nemesis. Now they’re taking their prospects seriously.

And so is Maloney. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair and his allies are answering the GOP’s escalation with millions of dollars from outside groups, while Maloney steps up his already grueling campaign schedule at home.

Swooping in to rescue their own campaigns chief is the last place Democrats wanted to be in the final days of the midterms. His struggles have led some in the party to rethink their tendency to elect swing-seat DCCC leaders, but for the moment Maloney’s just looking to hang on.

But also a note of optimism.

“This is nothing new for me,” [Maloney] claimed of the GOP onslaught after a Wednesday town hall to promote his work on lowering prescription drug prices. Indeed, in 2016 he won reelection even as most voters in his then-district picked Donald Trump for president

Joe Biden is undoing some of the Trump administration’s nuclear weapons policies, but critics want the White House to do more, The Guardian’s Julian Borger reports:

The Biden administration has confirmed it will cancel a submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile programme begun by Donald Trump, as part of its review of nuclear policy.

The administration will also retire a gravity bomb, the B63, from its arsenal as part of its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), but arms control advocates argued the changes from the Trump era did not go far enough.

The administration is retaining another weapon variant introduced by Trump, a low-yield warhead called the W76-2, intended to deter an adversary like Russia using a low-yield weapon. The Democratic party manifesto in 2020 had called the W76-2 “unnecessary, wasteful, and indefensible”.

The Biden NPR said that the “fundamental role of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the United States, our allies, and partners”. That declaratory policy stops sort of saying deterring nuclear attack is the sole purpose of the arsenal, which is what Biden promised in his election campaign. Instead, the NPR says that the US could strike back against “a narrow range of other high consequence, strategic-level attacks”.

Despite her fairly hard core conservative credentials, anti-Trump Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney has now endorsed a Democrat in the upcoming midterm elections.

Having used her position on the January 6 committee to bludgeon Donald Trump for his role in the insurrection and for seeking to overturn the 2020 election result, Cheney clearly feels her split with her own party is nearly complete.

Crossing America’s political divide and supporting a Democrat will infuriate the Trumpist-dominated Republican party.

AP has the details:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Thursday endorsed and plans to campaign for Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, the first time that the critic of former President Donald Trump who lost her GOP primary has crossed party lines to formally support a Democrat.

Cheney, of Wyoming, announced her support for the two-term House member from Holly, Michigan, in a statement by the Slotkin campaign that notes she plans to headline a campaign event with Slotkin in the Lansing-area district next Tuesday.

Slotkin is competing against Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. Their race is considered a toss-up by both sides and one of the Republicans’ chief targets in their campaign to win the House majority on Nov. 8.

And this is likely the crucial detail.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Both [Cheney and Slotkin] have been vocal critics of House Republicans who have sought to downplay the siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Could Donald Trump soon return to Twitter? With Elon Musk on course to meet a Friday deadline to finish his acquisition of the company, chances are rising that the former president will make a return to the social network he used as a megaphone in his presidency. Here’s the latest on the deal from The Guardian’s Alex Hern:

Elon Musk has claimed he has “acquired Twitter” in a post to the social network reassuring advertisers it will stay a safe place for their brands, amid fears one of his first actions as chief executive will be to restore Donald Trump’s account.

After months of uncertainty over whether or not his $44bn acquisition of the social media platform would go through, the Tesla chief executive’s post is the strongest acknowledgment yet that the deal is expected to be sealed before its deadline of 5pm in Delaware on Friday.

Musk wrote in a statement attached to the tweet: “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”

He added: “That is why I bought Twitter. I didn’t do it because it would be easy. I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.”

Living in conservative-run states takes a toll on Americans, according to a new study that found a gap in life expectancies based on a state’s political orientation. Martin Pengelly reports:

Americans die younger in conservative states than in those governed by liberals, a new study has found.

The authors wrote: “Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.”

The study was published on Plos One, “an inclusive journal community working together to advance science for the benefit of society, now and in the future”.

The authors were from Syracuse University in New York, Harvard in Massachusetts, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Washington, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Western Ontario, in Canada.

They wrote: “Results show that the policy domains were associated with working-age mortality.”

From its central role in the disputed 2000 election to its more recent rightward shift under governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has long been one of the most politically interesting states in the union.

The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland traveled to the Sunshine State, seeking answers to one of the biggest questions of the upcoming midterms: will it keep trending Republican, or is a Democratic revival possible? Here’s what he found:

Donald Trump has announced a slate of campaign rallies in the last days before the 8 November midterm elections, including a visit to Florida, where he will not be joined by Republican governor Ron DeSantis. Meanwhile, Joe Biden will today travel to a semiconductor factory to promote legislation he supported to boost domestic technological competitiveness, with the greater goal of drumming up voter support for his handling of the economy.

Here’s what else is happening today:

• Democratic lawmakers want the enhanced child tax credit restored in year-end legislation. During 2021, the program was credited with lowering child poverty.

• Democratic senator John Hickenlooper wants the Federal Reserve to hold off on increasing interest rates further. He is the second Democrat this week to ask the central bank to exercise caution in its fight against inflation.

• Once a swing state, Democrats in Florida worry they are being pushed decisively into the minority, and could lose ground even in their strongholds in the upcoming elections.

White House chief of staff Ron Klain broke a federal law with a retweet from his official account, an investigation has found, according to the Associated Press.

The AP reports that Klain violated the Hatch Act when he retweeted from his White House account a message from Democratic group STRIKE PAC. The tweet was about deliveries of baby formula, but also included the message, “Get your Democrats Deliver merch today!”

That’s a violation of the act, which bars government officials from trying to influence elections in their official capacities, and Klain was issued a letter of warning, according to the AP.

Here’s more from their report:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Klain removed the retweet as soon as he was notified of the complaint. No disciplinary action will be pursued and the office, an independent government watchdog that monitors violations of the Hatch Act, considers the matter closed. Klain was warned to be more careful in the future.

The conservative legal group America First Legal, led by Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, complained about the tweet and sought an investigation.

Miller and at least a dozen other former Trump administration officials repeatedly violated that same law, without consequence and with Trump’s approval, as part of a “willful disregard for the Hatch Act,” the Office of Special Counsel found in 2021. The office investigated comments by Trump officials leading into the 2020 presidential election, including at the Republican National Convention, which was held at the White House in a major break from historical norms.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre often cites the Hatch Act in deflecting political questions during news briefings. Earlier this week she was asked whether Biden was doing everything he can possibly do to get Democrats across the finish line in the Nov. 8 elections.

“I have to be careful of what I say, because we do respect the Hatch Act here in this administration,” she said.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for Senate John Fetterman has meanwhile hit out at Shell for reporting massive profits, accusing the oil giant of gouging American consumers while raking in cash.

Here’s the statement from the candidate’s communications director:

The message that corporate profiteering is to blame for America’s ongoing inflation wave is one Democrats have pushed throughout this year, and polls indicate it has some resonance with voters.

The House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has joined in on criticizing Democrat John Fetterman for his performance in Tuesday night’s Pennsylvania Senate debate.

Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, is recovering from a stroke and at times spoke haltingly in his face-off against Republican Mehmet Oz. His performance raised concerns among Democrats that voters will view Fetterman as not fit for the job, depriving them of one of their best chances to win a Republican-controlled seat in Congress’ upper chamber this year.

Here’s what McCarthy had to say, on Fox News: