Deal reached with Republicans to repeal Iraq war authorizations, says Schumer – as it happened

The mystery of “Havana syndrome” continued, with US intelligence agencies concluding no foreign adversary was behind the debilitating attacks on its government officials overseas, but otherwise coming up with no answers for what so harmed their health. Meanwhile at the White House, Joe Biden introduced Julie Su, who he has nominated for a promotion to the labor department’s top post. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first Asian American cabinet secretary to serve since he took office two years ago.

Here’s what else happened today:

• The Senate will consider legislation to revoke the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force against Iraq, its Democratic leader said.

• FBI agents in Washington tried to slow down the investigation into Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

• Top Democrats want Fox News to stop promoting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

• Attorney general Merrick Garland got into it with rightwing senator Ted Cruz over security for supreme court justices.

• The mute people in straitjackets wandering around the Capitol? Adam Kinzinger sent them.

Elsewhere in the Capitol, things have gotten a bit weird:

That was from yesterday. Today, the white-clad performers were back, this time displaying a QR code that Axios used to figure out who was behind them: Adam Kinzinger. The retired House lawmaker was one of two Republicans to serve on the January 6 committee, but ultimately decided not to run for another term and left Congress at the end of last year.

Now, he’s helming a campaign against political extremism, and told the website the performers’ uniforms and straitjackets were meant to send a message. “We call them ‘drones’ … They’re just kind of droning around, they really don’t have a purpose at the moment… because they just feel unrepresented. They feel like government is just kind of going along.” The whole point of their presence in the halls of the Capitol offices were to grab attention, he said, and satirize the “desperate need of every lawmaker and staffer there” to go viral on social media or appear on TV.

Thus far, Kinzinger has spent $250,000 on the campaign’s launch, which also includes advertising on billboards and television. “I’m sure it’ll end up probably building to be even more,” Kinzinger told Axios.

The Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said a deal has been reached with the GOP to repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force against Iraq, which provided the congressional authority for America’s strikes against Saddam Hussein’s government, and the invasion that ultimately toppled him from power.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer said the foreign affairs committee would begin considering the measure next week.

“There’s support on both sides of the aisle for this proposal. Because both Democrats and Republicans have come to the same conclusion: we need to put the Iraq war squarely behind us once and for all. And doing that means we should extinguish the legal authority that initiated the war to begin with,” the New York lawmaker said.

Lawmakers from both parties have sought to repeal the authorizations for years, but never managed to do so. Punchbowl News reports that in the House, two of its most conservative Republican members are leading the charge to approve the repeals.

Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator whose hostility to aggressively fighting climate change and some social aid programs infuriated progressives, remains coy about whether he will stand for another term in 2024, Punchbowl News reports.

Try and decode this:

Love him or hate him, the truth is that Manchin’s presence has allowed Democrats to control the Senate since January 2021 – and few in the party believe that voters in red-state West Virginia would replace him with another Democrat if he does not run again.

As he testifies before the Senate judiciary committee, it’s become clear what Republicans are using as their attack line of the day against attorney general Merrick Garland.

GOP senators at the hearing are accusing him of ignoring the security concerns of conservative supreme court justices, who were the target of protests outside their homes, particularly around the time of their decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Case in point, here’s Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas’s exchange with Garland:

Last year, Congress agreed to pay for more security for supreme court justices and their families in a measure approved by bipartisan votes.

Our world affairs editor, Julian Borger, considers the state of US-China relations, and views about US-China relations from both sides of the aisle in DC, a day after the first hearing of the House China committee…

The Biden administration has settled on the ambiguous phrase “pacing challenge” to characterise Beijing’s place in its global outlook, but the newly formulated House China committee expressed impatience with such delicacy at its first hearing on Tuesday.

“We may call this a ‘strategic competition’,” said Mike Gallagher, the committee’s Republican chairman. “But this is not a polite tennis match. This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century, and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”

The ranking Democrat, Raja Krishnamoorthi, said both Republican and Democratic administrations had underestimated the threat posed by China and called for a policy built around deterrence.

“We do not want a war with the PRC [People’s Republic of China], not a cold war, not a hot war, we don’t want a ‘clash of civilizations’. But, we seek a durable peace. And that is why we have to deter aggression,” Krishnamoorthi said.

Here’s Lauren Gambino’s report on that first committee hearing:

Speaking of Trump’s election subversion and the events of January 6, Politico is first to report a new move by Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and member of GOP royalty who stood up to Trump, vice-chaired the House January 6 committee and lost her seat in Congress to a Trump loyalist as a result.

Cheney is joining the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia as a professor of practice, Politico reports, a move due to be announced today. The daughter of the former congressman, defense secretary and vice-president Dick Cheney will “offer guest lectures in classes and public events as well as participate in research”.

Liz Cheney said: “There are many threats facing our system of government and I hope my work with the Center for Politics and the broader community at the University of Virginia will contribute to finding lasting solutions that not only preserve but strengthen our democracy.”

The other Republican who sat on the January 6 committee, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, retired from Congress rather than face losing his seat to a Trumper.

Politico now reports that he is launching “a nationwide campaign urging voters to reject extreme candidates on both sides of the aisle ahead of the 2024 election”.

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The centerpiece of the campaign is a nearly six-minute-long video titled Break Free, inspired by Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad about escaping the conformity of non-Apple computers. In the political ad’s twist, people are forced to wear blue- and red-tinted goggles showing them divisive images and broadcasts from a Big Brother-type character until they take them off and escape. A monologue from Kinzinger urges Americans to reject political extremes.”

Here’s more about the 1984 Apple ad:

And here’s an interesting nugget about Cheney: her defiance of Trump was in part informed and inspired by her reading of Lincoln on the Verge, a 2020 book by the historian and sometime Guardian contributor Ted Widmer which you should definitely read. Here’s some lunchtime reading on that:

Donald Trump has responded to news of Rupert Murdoch’s extraordinary deposition in Dominion Voter Systems’ billion-dollar defamation suit against Fox News.

The deposition concerns the repetition by Fox News hosts of the lie spread by Trump and his advisers and allies that Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was the result of voter fraud, specifically voter fraud supposedly carried out using Dominion machines in extraordinarily outlandish ways.

The Trump response is, predictably, furious and filled with a characteristic disregard for the truth:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged & Stolen, then he & his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding & abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS. Certain BRAVE & PATRIOTIC Fox News Hosts, who he scorns and ridicules, got it right. He got it wrong. THEY SHOULD BE ADMIRED & PRAISED, NOT REBUKED & FORSAKEN!!!

That was delivered, of course, via Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform which he set up after being booted off Twitter for inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.

For some further and rather more temperate reading, here’s Charles Kaiser’s look at why the Dominion suit is such a serious problem for Murdoch and Fox News:

And here’s Ed Pilkington’s look at the Murdoch deposition … and why it is such a serious problem too:

The mystery of “Havana syndrome” continues, with US intelligence agencies concluding no foreign adversary was behind the debilitating attacks on its government officials overseas, but otherwise coming up with no answers for what so harmed their health. Meanwhile at the White House, Joe Biden introduced Julie Su, who he nominated for a promotion to lead the labor department. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first Asian American cabinet secretary to serve since he took office two years ago.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• FBI agents in Washington tried to slow down the investigation into Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

• Top Democrats want Fox News to stop promoting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

• Attorney general Merrick Garland got into it with rightwing senator Ted Cruz over security for supreme court justices.

Joe Biden is cheering news that drugmaker Eli Lilly will drop the price of insulin:

As is Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Thanks to the leadership of President Joe Biden, Americans across the country will no longer be forced to pay astronomical prices for the life-saving insulin they need. Make no mistake: Eli Lilly’s decision to cap its insulin prices at $35 a month is a direct result of President Biden calling on drug manufacturers to lower insulin prices for everyone else, after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act to cap insulin costs for seniors on Medicare, which every single Republican in Congress voted against. While Democrats’ fight to bring down costs for American families, MAGA Republicans have threatened to try and repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and raise drug prices for millions of Americans.”

Attorney general Merrick Garland usually presents a placid facade in public, but in today’s Senate judiciary committee oversight hearing, Republican Ted Cruz managed to get the top prosecutor’s back up.

The Texas lawmaker hammered Garland about why US Marshals did not stop protesters outside the homes of supreme court justices who voted last year to overturn Roe v Wade. Republicans have used the arrest of California man who allegedly plotted to murder conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh to argue that the demonstrators presented a threat to justices, and that the Biden administration did little to stop it.

Here’s the exchange: