Joe Biden just took the stage in Pueblo, Colorado, where he’s speaking about how his administration has helped businesses like CS Wind, a turbine manufacturer, shift jobs back to the United States.
“People seeing this on television may not be certain they used to make all their wind towers abroad,” the president said. “Then they decided to make them here in America as well. Today the CS Wing factory in Colorado is the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the entire world … has over 170 employees. As I said for a long time when I think climate, I mean this sincerely, I think jobs, jobs.”
Hello, US politics live blog readers, it’s been a lively day – and week so far – for news and there will be more action on Thursday as the House is due to vote on whether to expel New York Republican congressman George Santos. Do join us again then but, for now, this blog is closing. The Guardian’s global live blog on the war between Israel and Hamas continues, meanwhile, and you can follow it here.
How the day went:
Joe Biden attacked rightwing Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert as one of the “leaders of this extreme Maga movement”, upon visiting her district in Colorado to promote a factory there building equipment for offshore wind energy plants.
The president spoke in Pueblo about how his administration has helped businesses like CS Wind, a turbine manufacturer, shift jobs back to the United States.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leader of the far-right GOP bloc in the House, proposed once again that Congress should impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, homeland security secretary, for his handling of the US-Mexico border and migration.
Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said the chamber will vote on whether to expel George Santos on Thursday, and he is leaving it up to lawmakers to decide whether the New York congressman should be removed from office for embellishing his résumé and allegedly breaking federal law.
George Santos struck a defiant tone after House Democrats introduced a motion on Tuesday to expel him from Congress, insisting in a speech that he would not resign and saying to reporters “I don’t care” about the campaign against him.
Joe Biden said that raising $440bn over 10 years through his billionaire’s tax policy would strengthen programs such as social security and Medicare.
“Just by paying 25% instead of 8%. Imagine what we could do if we made billionaires pay their taxes like everyone else,” he said, during his speech in Colorado moments ago.
“We could strengthen the social security and Medicare systems, instead of cutting them like … Trump and Boebert want to do,” he said.
He said the extra revenue would help with government subsidies for childcare and senior care costs.
“This is not about help for poor folks, this is about smart economics,” he said. And such assistance allowed more carers to go out to work, generating economic growth, he said.
The president closed out his speech without any further digs at his Republican thorns, and has now departed the stage.
Joe Biden is touting his billionaire’s minimum tax policy and decrying that rightwing congresswoman Lauren Boebert, whose district he’s visiting in Colorado, and her ilk only want to cut taxes for the richest.
He said that prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, there were 750 billionaires in the US and “now there are 1,000” and typically, the president said, they pay income tax at 8%.
“Raise your hands if you pay more than 8%” Biden told the crowd, as a sea of hands were raised.
“That’s less than firefighters and teachers pay,” he said.
Biden said he wants a 25% tax for billionaires, projecting that would raise $440bn in revenue for the US over a decade.
He also complained about giant corporations paying no taxes on huge profits. “If anyone thinks the tax code is fair, raise your hand,” he said.
As he promoted the Inflation Reduction Act and other policies he said are helping communities across the country, Joe Biden singled out for criticsm Lauren Boebert, the rightwing congresswoman who represents the district containing Pueblo, Colorado, where he’s speaking.
“The historic investments we’re celebrating today is in Congresswoman Boebert’s district,” the president said.
“She’s one of the leaders of this extreme Maga movement. She, along with every single Republican colleague, voted against the law that made these investments in jobs possible. That’s not hyperbole. It’s a fact. And then she voted to repeal key parts of this loan. And she called this law, ‘a massive failure’. You all know you’re part of a massive failure?”
He then took credit for companies in Colorado hiring thanks to his administration, and asked the audience: “None of that sounds like a massive failure to me. How about you?”
Joe Biden just took the stage in Pueblo, Colorado, where he’s speaking about how his administration has helped businesses like CS Wind, a turbine manufacturer, shift jobs back to the United States.
“People seeing this on television may not be certain they used to make all their wind towers abroad,” the president said. “Then they decided to make them here in America as well. Today the CS Wing factory in Colorado is the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the entire world … has over 170 employees. As I said for a long time when I think climate, I mean this sincerely, I think jobs, jobs.”
Speaking of international engagements, US prosecutors have accused an agent of India’s government of directing an attempted assassination of a Sikh activist on US soil. A similar accusation by Canada has led to a diplomatic spat with New Delhi, and the indictment from US prosecutors could complicate the Biden administration’s resolve to work with Narendra Modi’s government to build alliances against China. The Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Leyland Cecco are on the story:
US prosecutors have accused an agent of the Indian government of directing the attempted assassination of an American citizen on US soil, according to a superseding indictment released by the Department of Justice, which revealed new details about India’s alleged targeting of Sikh activists around the world.
The indictment made public on Wednesday also provided new evidence that the Indian agent – who is not named – ordered the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh activist who was shot dead outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia in June.
The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, announced in September that there were “credible allegations” that agents of the Indian government had carried out the assassination of Nijjar. The allegations were denied by India, which called the claim “absurd” and politically motivated.
The US indictment now appears to confirm, however, evidence of a global plot allegedly orchestrated in India to silence and kill vocal critics of the Indian government who support the creation of an independent Sikh state.
Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the target of the alleged assassination plot, told the Guardian that the indictment revealed a “blatant case of India’s transnational terrorism” – adding that the attempt on his life had only galvanized his efforts to pursue a symbolic referendum on an independent Sikh homeland, known as Khalistan.
“If death is the cost for running the Khalistan referendum, I am willing to pay that price,” he said in a statement. “First by assassinating Nijjar in Canada and then attempting to assassinate me on US soil, India under [prime minister Narendra Modi] has extended to the foreign soils its policy of violently crushing the Sikhs movement for right to self-determination.”
The White House has meanwhile confirmed that Kamala Harris will travel to Dubai on 1 and 2 December to represent the United States at the Cop28 conference on fighting climate change.
“Throughout her engagements, the vice-president will underscore the Biden-Harris Administration’s success in delivering on the most ambitious climate agenda in history, both at home and abroad. The vice-president will be joined by dozens of senior US officials representing more than 20 US departments and agencies,” Harris’s press secretary Kirsten Allen said in a statement.
Biden was expected to go, but canceled his travel plans earlier this week:
The man who nearly booted Lauren Boebert from office last year – and could succeed next year – is Adam Frisch, a Democrat and former council member in resort town Aspen. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly spoke to him last October about why he thinks voters in his western Colorado district are ready for change:
Adam Frisch is in his second congressional campaign, crossing and re-crossing Colorado’s third US House district, a space bigger than Pennsylvania. Thirteen months out from election day, time is one thing he does not lack. But Frisch has a unique way of counting it anyway: before and after Beetlejuice.
“Before Beetlejuice,” the Democrat says, of polling in his Republican-leaning district, “we were up by two points, Trump was up five.”
After Beetlejuice, the thinking goes, Frisch’s position may well improve further.
Frisch, 56 and a former banker who now lives in Aspen, is the Democratic candidate to challenge Lauren Boebert next year. Boebert, a former restaurant owner and proud grandmother at 36, is the far-right Republican who won the seat in 2020 and has proven relentlessly controversial since – so much so that last year, even in a conservative district, she survived Frisch’s first challenge by the skin of her teeth.
Boebert won after a recount, by just 546 votes, then went back to Washington DC to stoke the usual fires.
But last month a bigger blaze flared up, when the congresswoman was shown to have behaved outrageously during a performance of the musical Beetlejuice in Denver.
On security footage, Boebert sang and danced, took selfies, vaped and even appeared to grope her date as he fondled her in return. Both were ejected. For once, Boebert voiced something close to contrition. But to Frisch, the episode was just further proof that Boebert is there to be beaten.
“We’re resonating with a lot of people,” he said, by phone, during another day of meeting and greeting.
“In February of 22, when I first launched, there were two themes I started to work on. The Republicans laughed at me, the Democrats laughed at me, the media and the donor class laughed. But the themes are the people want the circus to stop, and they want someone to focus on the district.
“And every day since then, [Boebert] has just been one of the national leaders of the circus. And obviously, it’s just gotten worse and worse … it’s just a mess and people are sick and tired.”
Joe Biden arrived in Colorado yesterday, and spoke at a campaign reception where he made a point to criticize Lauren Boebert, the far-right Republican whose district he is visiting today.
The president’s itinerary will bring him to a wind turbine factory and see him tout his administration’s renewable energy investments, but its also a direct confrontation to Boebert, who barely won re-election in her district last year despite its Republican tilt, and is expected to face a tough race next year.
“With the progress we’ve made, we haven’t gotten a whole lot of help from the other side. Tomorrow, we’re going to be in … Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s district … one of the leaders of the extreme right, the Maga movement,” Biden told guests at the fundraiser.
He continued:
We’re going to a wind energy company that plans to invest an additional $200m to expand the facility in Colorado, double its production, add 850 new jobs – good-paying jobs, the governor will tell you.
But the congresswoman, along with every single one of her Republican colleagues, voted against the law I signed that made these investments possible. And then she vowed to repeal it. And she voted to repeal it, and she called it a massive failure. It’s in her district. She called it a massive failure.
And she went on and voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. She called it garbage. It’s building bridges, roads, Internet, et cetera. And she called it a scam. I find it pretty unbelievable.
Joe Biden will promote his economic and clean energy policies this afternoon in Colorado, while taking on rightwing Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert, a close ally of former president Donald Trump, Reuters reports.
Biden, who blamed Trump at a fundraising event in Denver on Tuesday for taking away US women’s right to an abortion, will visit a wind tower manufacturer in Pueblo, part of Boebert’s congressional district.
Biden has presided over a stronger-than-expected US economy and big federal investments in infrastructure and clean energy, but the clean energy industry is now struggling with high costs.
Facing weak opinion polls, Biden has turned in his re-election campaign to more directly taking on Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, as unfit for the presidency and a threat to American democracy.
Boebert, whom the White House calls a “self-described Maga Republican”, referencing Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda, is expected to become a default target for those attacks today.
Boebert faces a tough re-election battle herself against Democrat Adam Frisch, who has out-raised her in donations.
During his visit, Biden will speak about clean energy investments and “highlight how self-described Maga Republicans like Representative Lauren Boebert are threatening those investments, jobs, and opportunities,” the White House said.
Biden set a goal of deploying 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind along US coastlines this decade to fight climate change.
That may be unattainable due to soaring costs and supply chain delays, Reuters reported in September.
Former president Donald Trump’s lawyers have suggested their strategy in his election interference case in Washington involves distancing him from the horde of US Capitol rioters, whom he has embraced on the campaign trail, the Associated Press reports.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal investigation team has signaled it will make the case Trump is responsible for the chaos that unfolded on January 6, 2021, and point to the Republican ex-president’s continued support of the rioters, in order to help establish his criminal intent.
The competing arguments highlight the extent to which the insurrection will inevitably form the backdrop in a landmark trial set to begin March 4 in a courthouse just blocks from the Capitol.
Trump’s defense attorneys failed in an effort to strike references to that day’s violence from the indictment but have made clear their strategy involves distancing the former president from the horde of rioters, whom they describe as “independent actors at the Capitol”.
While Trump’s glorification of January 6 defendants, who have been arrested and charged by the hundreds, may boost him politically as he vies to retake the White House in 2024, his lawyers’ approach lays bare a concern that arguments linking him to the rioters could harm him in front of a jury.
Much may depend as well on the evidence permitted by federal judge Tanya Chutkan.
It’s impeachment season among House Republicans. Their leadership is pressing forward with their campaign to impeach Joe Biden for alleged corruption, while rightwing lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene has proposed a resolution to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, though the chamber turned down a similar attempt just a few weeks ago. The clock is also ticking down for George Santos, the New York congressman and admitted fabulist. House speaker Mike Johnson said the chamber will vote tomorrow on expelling him, and reports indicate the support is there to kick him out of office.
Here’s what else is going on today:
House Democrats say the GOP is doing Donald Trump’s bidding with its impeachment inquiry into Biden.
Mourners gathered in Plains, Georgia for the funeral of former first Rosalynn Carter. Her husband Jimmy Carter was in attendance.
Mike Pence’s son played a role in convincing his father to stand up to Trump on January 6, according to a report.
In Georgia, mourners are attending the funeral of former first lady Rosalynn Carter, including her husband Jimmy Carter:
Joe and Jill Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Melania Trump and Michelle Obama were among the dignitaries who traveled to Atlanta yesterday for a tribute to Carter, a noted advocate for mental health and the eradication of diseases worldwide:
On the House floor, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leader of the far-right GOP bloc, again proposed impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas for his handling of security at the southern border and the inflow of migrants into the United States:
Republicans have made Mayorkas into the public face of what they call the “Biden Border Crisis”, and earlier this year were mulling impeaching the secretary. However, impeachments of cabinet secretaries are exceedingly rare – the last time one happened was 1876 – and party leaders appear to be focusing instead on their slow-moving impeachment inquiry of Biden for alleged and thus far unproved corruption.
Last month, a small group of Republicans joined with Democrats to halt an earlier attempt by Greene to impeach Mayorkas, who would likely be acquitted in the Democratic-controlled Senate anyway. Tom McClintock, one of the eight GOP lawmakers who opposed the attempt, said he did so because it could backfire on the party:
If Greene is successful in redefining impeachment, then the next time Democrats have the majority, we can expect this new definition to be turned against the conservatives on the Supreme Court and any future Republican administration. And there will be nobody to stop them, because Republicans will have signed off on this new and unconstitutional abuse of power.
One of the reasons Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election failed was because of the resistance of Mike Pence, his vice-president who recently abandoned his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. As the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports, Pence’s son played a role in convincing his father to say no to Trump:
Mike Pence reportedly decided to skip the congressional certification process for Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, because to preside over it as required by the constitution would be “too hurtful” to his “friend”, Donald Trump. He was then shamed into standing up to Trump by his son, a US marine.
“Dad, you took the same oath I took,” the then vice-president’s son Michael Pence said, according to ABC News, adding that it was “an oath to support and defend the constitution”.
Ultimately, Pence did supervise certification, even as it was delayed by the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.
Trump incited the attack by telling supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” in his cause – the lie that Biden’s win was the result of electoral fraud.
Some chanted for Pence to be hanged. Nine deaths have been linked to the riot, more than a thousand arrests made and hundreds of convictions secured.
Throughout the investigation of January 6 by a House committee, Pence was praised for standing up to Trump and fulfilling his constitutional duty. He later released a memoir, So Help Me God, about his time as Trump’s No 2.
But according to ABC, which on Tuesday cited sources familiar with Pence’s testimony to the special counsel Jack Smith, investigating Trump’s election subversion, Pence offered details not included in his book, including how he had to be prodded into doing his duty.
Before he was House speaker, Mike Johnson was the architect of a brief signed by dozens of Republican lawmakers that supported Donald Trump’s failed attempt to convince the courts to disrupt Joe Biden’s election win. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that in her new book, Liz Cheney, the Wyoming congresswoman who lost her seat last year in large part due to opposing the former president, accuses Johnson of duping his allies about the effort:
In a new book, the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney accuses the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, of dishonesty over both the authorship of a supreme court brief in support of Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election and the document’s contents, saying Johnson duped his party with a “bait and switch”.
“As I read the amicus brief – which was poorly written – it became clear Mike was being less than honest,” Cheney writes. “He was playing bait and switch, assuring members that the brief made no claims about specific allegations of [electoral] fraud when, in fact, it was full of such claims.”
Cheney also says Johnson was neither the author of the brief nor a “constitutional law expert”, as he was “telling colleagues he was”. Pro-Trump lawyers actually wrote the document, Cheney writes.
As Trump’s attempts to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden progressed towards the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, Cheney was a House Republican leader. Turning against Trump, she sat on the House January 6 committee and was ostracised by her party, losing her Wyoming seat last year.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
