From 8h ago
The Limit, Save, Grow Act House Republicans passed last night raises the debt ceiling through the end of March next year, at most, and also undoes a number of proposals enacted by Joe Biden. It would block his attempt to relieve some federal student loan debt, strip newly allocated funding from the Internal Revenue Service, add new work requirements to federal programs meant to help the poor and make broad cuts to government spending, ultimately lowering the federal budget deficit by an estimated $4.8tn over 10 years.
Democrats hate it, and have taken to calling it the Default on America Act, or DOA – which also stands for dead on arrival. The Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer says that’s what it will be when it arrives in his chamber, and even if it somehow made it out, Biden said he would veto it.
So why did Republicans bother? Because they want to get Biden to sit down with House speaker Kevin McCarthy and negotiate a deal to raise the debt ceiling – something the president has refused to do. House financial services committee chair Patrick McHenry said as much in an interview with CNN yesterday. And for the GOP, time is on their side. The clock is ticking towards early June, when the US government could potentially run out of cash and catastrophically default on its debt.
The gamble that McCarthy and his allies are making is that Biden will be forced to the table as that deadline nears, and the Limit, Save, Grow Act will represent their starting offer.
House Republicans have succeeded in passing their proposal to both raise the debt limit and cut government spending, but the fundamental realities in Washington have not changed: Democrats and Joe Biden refuse to support the bill and insist the GOP increase the ceiling without preconditions. A potential June default looms if an agreement is not reached before then.
Here’s what else happened today:
Montana Republicans voted to bar the state’s sole transgender lawmaker, Democrat Zooey Zephyr, from the House chamber, so she’s doing her work outside its doors.
Senate Democrats seem divided over whether to subpoena supreme court chief justice John Roberts after he declined to testify about the court’s ethics.
Washington announced new measures to stem an expected flow of migrants to the southern border, including the opening of new immigration centers in Colombia and Guatemala.
Donald Trump’s campaign hired a second company to prove his allegations of fraud in the 2020 election, without success. The firm’s founder has since been interviewed by federal prosecutors.
More polls confirmed what we already know: Trump remains top among Republicans, and Biden the leader among Democrats.
The trial of advice columnist E Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuit alleging rape by Donald Trump continues in New York City this afternoon, with more cross examination from the former president’s lawyer Joe Tacopina.
Politico reported an intense exchange between Carroll and Tacopina, who demanded details about the claimed sexual assault:
The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020 hired a second firm to prove its claims of election fraud – and the founder of the company has since talked to federal prosecutors.
The investigation by Simpatico Software Systems could not substantiate the allegations of vote tampering and other misconduct that Trump started making after his loss to Joe Biden.
Ken Block, Simpatico’s founder, told the Post he spoke with prosecutors working for Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to investigate Trump over his attempts to overturn Biden’s win, among other matters.
Here’s more from their story:
Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.
“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he said. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
Block said he recently received a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith’s office and met with federal prosecutors in Washington, but he declined to discuss his interactions with them. Block said he contemporaneously sent his findings disputing fraud claims in writing to the Trump campaign in late 2020.
“I just don’t believe it’s appropriate at this point in time to discuss anything related to the grand jury process,” he said.
Prosecutors have obtained extensive information about Block’s efforts, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.
Federal records show the Trump 2020 campaign paid Block’s firm more than $750,000 in six different payments. The first for $390,000 came three days after the election, records show, and the final payment came around Thanksgiving of that year. The payments were labeled “Recount.”
Yesterday, the long-running feud between Disney and Ron DeSantis went to the courts, when the entertainment giant filed a lawsuit alleging “a targeted campaign of government retaliation” by the Florida governor.
It’ll be a big case to follow, particularly since DeSantis may soon be trying to sell Americans on his approach to governing as a GOP presidential candidate. In an interview with Fox News today, Florida’s Republican senator Marco Rubio sounded like he supported the lawsuit, but worried about what businesses may think of the spat in the Sunshine State:
On the third day of the trial of E Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuit against Donald Trump accusing him of rape, the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports that a lawyer for the former president accused her of filing the suit for her own gain:
The advice columnist E Jean Carroll has denied that she falsely accused Donald Trump of raping her in order to sell books and for political ends.
On the third day of Carroll’s civil suit against the former president for battery and defamation, Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, put it to her that she made her allegation the centrepiece of a book proposal she was trying to sell.
Carroll is seeking damages for the alleged rape in a New York department store changing room in the mid-1990s and for defamation after Trump accused her of lying when she went public with her accusations in the book.
Carroll said she was motivated to speak up after the New York Times’ exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes prompted women across the US to relate their own experiences of sexual assault and fired the #MeToo movement.
In the Senate, Democrats attempted to push through a measure that would remove the deadline for ratification of the Equal Rights amendment.
The resolution failed after most GOP lawmakers, with the exceptions of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted against it:
It’s common for the party in power to propose legislation they know won’t pass in order to put the opposition on the spot. And indeed, that’s what this was about; Republicans argue the amendment, which would put a guarantee of equality of all in the constitution and outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex, has been made redundant by other laws.
The Democrat’s majority whip Dick Durbin hit out at the GOP after the vote failed:
Today, Senate Republicans failed to secure the rights of every American by voting against the Equal Rights Amendment. Right now, women all across America are living with the reality that their fundamental freedoms are under attack. And without the ERA’s protections, even more rights could be on the chopping block. But Senate Democrats will not stop. We will continue to work to protect women’s rights in all facets of public life.”
With the debt limit bill behind it (for now), the House is today voting on a resolution that would remove US troops from Somalia.
The measure, proposed by rightwing Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, comes after Joe Biden ordered the hundreds of US troops training Somali forces to remain in the country, reversing a withdrawal order that Donald Trump made near the end of his presidency.
On the House floor, Gaetz cast the vote as part of his campaign to repeal US troop deployments worldwide. Here are his remarks:
Hours after Republicans voted their debt limit proposal through the House, CNN reports that top Democrats in the Senate remain hostile to the legislation, even as a potential debt default grows ever nearer:
After declining an invitation to appear before the Senate judiciary committee about corruption allegations against members of his bench, US supreme court chief justice John Roberts has been sent a letter from the panel’s chairperson which demands more information on the high court’s ethics.
“It is noteworthy that no justice will speak to the American people after numerous revelations have called the court’s ethical standards into question, even though sitting justices have testified before Senate or House committees on at least 92 occasions since 1960,” Dick Durbin’s letter to Roberts read.
The letter from Illinois’s Durbin, the Senate majority whip, asked questions about “a statement of ethics and principles and practices to which all current members of the supreme court subscribe” that Roberts sent while declining an invite to testify on 2 May. Durbin’s reply to Roberts’s refusal to testify said that “the statement of principles raises more questions than it resolves”.
Durbin’s missive went on to ask five questions that the Democratic senator said were aimed at informing “the committee’s work on legislation that seeks to ensure that the ethical obligations and practices of the justices are at least on par with those that govern the rest of the federal judiciary and the federal government generally”.
Durbin’s invitation to Roberts came after ProPublica reported the close friendship between Clarence Thomas, the senior conservative on the court, and the Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow.
Without declaring them, Thomas received from Crow extensive gifts including luxury travel and resort stays. Crow also bought a home in which Thomas’s mother lives and donated money to groups connected to Ginni Thomas, the justice’s far-right activist wife.
Thomas and Crow have denied wrongdoing.
On Tuesday, Politico reported that another conservative, Neil Gorsuch, pocketed up to $500,000 from a property sale shortly after joining the court but did not disclose that the buyer was the chief executive of a law firm with business before the court.
Gorsuch did not comment. The firm executive, Brian Duffy, denied wrongdoing.
The supreme court’s conservative majority last year eliminated the federal right to abortion which had been established by Roe v Wade in 1972. Since then, public confidence in the high court has fallen to historic lows, according to recent polling.
Joe Biden, who declared his run for re-election on Tuesday, faces only two fringe candidates in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
A new poll from Emerson College Polling doesn’t suggest the self-help author Marianne Williamson or the Kennedy scion and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr can deny the president a chance for another four years in power.
But it might seem vaguely alarming to dispassionate observers that in the survey, 21% of respondents picked Kennedy and 8% Williamson, with Biden on a round 70%.
The same survey puts Biden’s job approval at 49%, down a tick from the last time out.
Among Republican candidates, declared and not, Emerson finds 62% support for the former president Donald Trump, ahead of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, on 16%, the former vice-president Mike Pence (7%) and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (3%).
The former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who like Trump and Haley has declared his run, is on 2%, behind the fringe candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (3%) and also that famous, perennial political contender Someone Else (4%).
Of hypothetical 2024 matchups, Emerson reports: “Biden narrowly leads Trump 43% to 41%, while 10% would vote for someone else and 6% are undecided. Against DeSantis, Biden holds 43% while DeSantis receives 37%, 12% would vote for someone else and 8% are undecided. Both races are within the poll’s margin of error.”
Here’s some further reading, about Biden and the media:
House Republicans have succeeded in passing their proposal to both raise the debt limit and cut government spending, but the fundamental realities in Washington have not changed: Democrats and Joe Biden refuse to support the proposal and insist the GOP raise the limit without preconditions. A potential June default looms if an agreement isn’t reached before then.
There’s plenty more news happening elsewhere:
Montana Republicans voted to bar the state’s sole transgender lawmaker, Democrat Zooey Zephyr, from the House chamber, so she’s doing her work outside its doors.
Senate Democrats seem divided over whether to attempt to subpoena supreme court chief justice John Roberts after he declined to testify about the court’s ethics.
Washington announced new measures to stem an expected flow of migrants to the southern border, including the opening of new immigration centers in Colombia and Guatemala.
The Biden administration has announced new measures intended to stem the flow of migrants to the southern border caused by the impending end of pandemic-era restrictions, the Associated Press reports.
Among these are the opening of two processing centers in Colombia and Guatemala where would-be migrants can access information about applying for refugee or other immigration statues, according to the AP.
Here’s more from their report:
The migration centers are part of an intense effort to try to prevent thousands of people from making the often-dangerous journey to the southern border when the restrictions end May 11.
But it is unclear whether the processing centers and other measures, including expedited processing for asylum seekers and crackdowns on human smuggling networks, will do much to slow the tide of migrants fleeing from countries marred by political and economic strife.
“This is a hemispheric challenge that demands hemispheric solutions,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a news conference as he outlined upcoming steps ahead of the May 11 deadline.
Mayorkas also warned that migrants and the human smugglers should not interpret the upcoming deadline to mean that the border is wide open: ”Let me be clear, our border is not open and not will be open after May 11.”
The Biden administration, under attack by Republicans eager to paint the border as wide open under his leadership, has repeatedly warned that the end of the pandemic-era immigration restrictions does not mean that migrants should try to come to the US as they’ve also sought to open other avenues for migration.
Back to Montana for a minute, Zooey Zephyr, the transgender Democratic representative whom the state’s Republican’s voted to keep off the floor of the state House of Representatives yesterday, remains in the building.
Montana Public Radio found her posted up outside the House chamber:
Earlier this week, supreme court chief justice John Robert put the kibosh on Senate Democrats’ invitation for him to testify before the judiciary committee about the court’s ethics.
Their request came after a series of reports revealing links between justice Clarence Thomas and a Republican megadonor. So what can Democrats do now? Theoretically, they could subpoena the chief justice, but there seems to be debate within the party over doing that, as CNN reports:
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
