From 2h ago
George Santos, who admitted to fabricating parts of his resume in his successful bid for a seat in the House of Representatives, announced he will stand for a second term representing his New York district:
Santos, a Republican whose district is focused on New York City’s suburbs, is the subject of an inquiry by the House ethics committee, as well as complaints alleging sexual harassment and campaign finance violations. Shortly after he admitted to lying during his election campaign last year, Santos stepped down from all committees. He is expected to face many challengers in the Republican primary for the district, which leans Democratic.
The center of US politics migrated temporarily to New York City, where Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy gave a speech reiterating his stance that Democrats need to agree to cut spending before the GOP will vote to raise America’s debt ceiling. That prompted Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democrats, to accused McCarthy and the Republicans of taking the US economy hostage. Meanwhile, the GOP-led House judiciary committee held a hearing on crime in New York City, in an attempt to tar Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who called the panel a “political stunt”. Why him? Probably because he indicted Donald Trump.
Here’s what else happened today:
The trial of Dominion Voting Systems’s lawsuit against Fox News was delayed for a day, in what could be an indication the two sides were working on reaching a settlement.
The justice department announced arrests and indictment related to China’s attempts to surveil and harass its diaspora.
Gun control advocates don’t think much of the GOP’s hearing on crime in New York City.
A judge turned down a request from an attorney for Trump, who asked for a delay in the trial of a defamation suit filed by a woman who says the former president raped her.
Even Clarence Thomas’s friends think the conservative supreme court justice should be investigated for failing to declare gifts from and other ties to a Republican megadonor.
George Santos has barely had a moment of peace since he arrived for his new job in the capitol in early January.
The Republican House lawmaker from New York has been followed around by reporters and hounded by his own constituents, who would like him to resign for the many lies he told when he ran for his seat last year. His presence in Congress helped Republicans retake the majority in the House of Representatives, but by a narrow margin. That may explain why the chamber’s leaders, such as Kevin McCarthy haven’t joined in calling for his ejection, though the House speaker did say he’d remove Santos if the House ethics committee determines he broke the law. That investigation is expected to take a while to resolve itself.
He faces peril elsewhere. Authorities in Brazil, for instance, are looking into allegations he used fake names and a stolen checkbook in the country. Perhaps more worrying to Santos is news that federal prosecutors are conducting their own inquiry into his campaign finances, among other issues.
George Santos, who admitted to fabricating parts of his resume in his successful bid for a seat in the House of Representatives, announced he will stand for a second term representing his New York district:
Santos, a Republican whose district is focused on New York City’s suburbs, is the subject of an inquiry by the House ethics committee, as well as complaints alleging sexual harassment and campaign finance violations. Shortly after he admitted to lying during his election campaign last year, Santos stepped down from all committees. He is expected to face many challengers in the Republican primary for the district, which leans Democratic.
The Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer turned Kevin McCarthy’s words against him earlier today, when he condemned the GOP House speaker for not offering a plan to raise the debt limit.
McCarthy spoke this morning at the New York Stock Exchange, where he called on Joe Biden to negotiate with Republicans who are demanding spending cuts in exchange for voting to raise the debt ceiling. But any deal will have to make it through the Democratic-controlled Senate, and while Biden hasn’t reacted to McCarthy’s speech yet, Schumer made it clear Democrats were not impressed. Heres’s what he said, courtesy of Politico:
Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has released a statement condemning today’s House judiciary committee hearing on crime New York City as a “political stunt”.
The statement released through a spokesman comes after House Republicans concluded their hearing, which featured testimony from victims of crime in America’s most-populous city and their relatives. The GOP convened the hearing after Bragg filed felony charges of falsifying business records against Donald Trump, which the former president traveled to the city earlier this month to answer.
Here’s the full statement from Bragg:
Ron DeSantis has unveiled the latest act of retaliation against Disney for daring to speak out against his Don’t Say Gay law: he’s threatening to build a new state prison next to the company’s central Florida theme parks.
The Republican governor, who insists he has a thick skin, dropped the suggestion at a hastily convened Monday lunchtime press conference, at which he laid out steps the state legislature would take to try to regain control over the corporate behemoth, Florida’s largest private employer.
To recap the feud, DeSantis attempted to seize power over Disney in February by firing its controlling board and installing a hand-picked board of Republican allies, including one who helped craft the education bill dubbed Don’t Say Gay that outlawed classroom discussions of sexual preference and gender identity.
But the hard right governor, a likely candidate for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, found himself humiliated in March when it emerged the outgoing board, in a final act of defiance, made an agreement to hand over control to the company itself.
Smarting from that move, DeSantis on Monday denounced the agreement as a legally unsound “sham”, and announced measures expected to be in upcoming legislation. They include passing authority for the inspection of theme park rides and transportation to the state, increasing Disney’s tax burden and allowing his board of loyalists what to do with land near the parks:
What should we do with this land? Maybe create a state park, maybe try to do more amusement parks? Someone even said, ‘Maybe you need another state prison?’ Who knows? I just think that the possibilities are endless.
Critics were quick to condemn DeSantis’s latest proposals. Brandon Wolf, press secretary for Equality Florida, said it was a “truly unhinged display of ego”.
State representative Anna Eskamani pointed out areas of south Florida were still under water from last week’s floods while DeSantis was creating “more Disney drama”.
The supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must be investigated over allegations of corruption, his friend, the Fox News analyst Juan Williams, wrote today.
Williams, who said he enjoyed a close multi-decade friendship with the controversial conservative justice, wrote that Thomas “always represented the best ideals of what Black men … could achieve in modern America” but that growing scandal over his relationship with the rightwing mega-donor Harlan Crow was worthy of investigation.
In a column for the Hill, Williams added: “There is an old Latin saying [corruptio optimi pessima] that translates into English as ‘Corruption of the best is worst of all’.
“That’s how I feel about my old friend.”
As reported by ProPublica, Thomas accepted from Crow – and largely failed to declare – lavish gifts including luxury travel and resort stays.
ProPublica also reported how Crow, a collector of far-right memorabilia including statues of dictators and paintings by Adolf Hitler, purchased property from Thomas, who did not disclose the sale.
Read on…
The Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina had another uncomfortable experience in front of a judge today, as his request for a one-month delay in the former president’s looming New York rape trial was denied.
The writer E Jean Carroll says Donald Trump raped her in a department store in New York in the mid-1990s. Trump denies it. Carroll filed a civil suit, for defamation. She has also brought a civil suit under a New York law that gives alleged victims of historic sexual assaults a window in which to sue.
Trial in the first case has been postponed. The trial set to begin on 25 April concerns the second case.
As the Associated Press reports, Tacopina – who attracted national attention through his work for Trump in the hush money case which led to Trump’s indictment in New York earlier this month – argued today that the first case created such negative publicity that the Carroll trial should be held for a month. The judge, Lewis A Kaplan, disagreed:
“There was, of course, a great deal of media coverage – some of it invited and, indeed, provoked by Mr Trump – first of the apparently impending indictment, then the indictment itself, and finally the arraignment. But the connection that Mr Trump seeks to draw between that coverage and either the need for or the effectiveness of a ‘cooling off’ period is unsupported by any evidence.”
Kaplan also said a portion of coverage of Trump’s indictment was “of his own doing” as Trump made public statements on his social media platform, in press conferences and in interviews.
“It does not sit well for Mr Trump to promote pretrial publicity and then to claim that coverage that he promoted was prejudicial to him and should be taken into account as supporting a further delay,” the judge said, adding that he was also concerned that the request was a “delay tactic by Mr Trump”.
He noted that it was not necessary to find jurors who had never heard of Trump’s legal woes as long as jurors agreed to be fair and impartial.
“There is no justification for an adjournment. This case is entirely unrelated to the state prosecution.”
Tacopina did not comment to the AP, which also noted the deadline for Tacopina to say whether Trump will attend the Carroll trial falls this Thursday.
Trump was in New York again last week, for a deposition in a civil suit brought by the state attorney general, Letitia James, over his business and tax affairs.
He also faces a justice department investigation concerning his handling of classified documents, the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress; and an investigation into his election subversion in Fulton county, Georgia.
The justice department on Monday announced a crackdown on China’s efforts to surveil and harass its diaspora in the United States, with the arrests of two men accused of running a Chinese police station in New York City and the indictment of dozens of others on charges of surveilling Chinese citizens in the US.
New York City residents Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping were arrested on allegations that they ran an illegal police station connected to the Fuzhou branch of the Ministry of Public Security in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, the justice department said.
“The PRC, through its repressive security apparatus, established a secret physical presence in New York City to monitor and intimidate dissidents and those critical of its government. The PRC’s actions go far beyond the bounds of acceptable nation-state conduct. We will resolutely defend the freedoms of all those living in our country from the threat of authoritarian repression,” Matthew G. Olson, an assistant attorney general in the justice department’s national security division said.
Separately, prosecutors announced indictments against 44 people for harassing Chinese nationals in the United States through social media. All of the suspects remain at large in China, the justice department said.
The center of US politics has migrated temporarily to New York City, where Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy gave a speech reiterating his stance that Democrats need to agree to cut spending before the GOP will vote to raise America’s debt ceiling. Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democrats, accused McCarthy and the Republicans of taking the US economy hostage. Meanwhile, the GOP-led House judiciary committee was holding a hearing on crime in New York City, in an attempt to tar Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. Why him? Probably because he indicted Donald Trump.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
The trial of Dominion Voting Systems’s lawsuit against Fox News was delayed for a day, in what could be an indication the two sides were working on reaching a settlement.
The justice department will soon announce arrests in a “significant national security matter”.
Gun control advocates don’t think much of the GOP’s hearing on crime in New York City.
You’ve probably heard of progressive demands for a $15 minimum wage, but in a column for the Guardian’s opinion pages, senator Bernie Sanders argues that a fair minimum wage is actually $17 an hour. Don’t expect a minimum wage increase to pass Congress anytime soon, but Sanders’s proposal may prove influential at the state and local level, where activists have had success in raising wages. Have a read of the senator’s argument:
Congress can no longer ignore the needs of the working class of this country. At a time of massive and growing income and wealth inequality and record-breaking corporate profits, we must stand up for working families – many of whom are struggling every day to provide a minimal standard of living for their families.
One important way to do that is to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage. In the year 2023, nobody in the US should be forced to work for starvation wages. It should be a basic truism that in the US, the richest country on earth, if you work 40 hours a week you do not live in poverty. Raising the minimum wage is not only the right thing to do morally. It is also good economics. Putting money into the hands of people who will spend it on basic needs is a strong economic stimulant.
Hanging over American politics this week is the fate of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion that narrowly survived being taken off the shelves by the order of a conservative judge last week. But as the Guardian’s Maya Yang reports, the supreme court could again upend abortion access this week by allowing the ruling to go forward, and Democrats are furious:
Top Democratic senators across the US are pushing back after a federal judge in Texas decided to block the FDA-approved abortion drug mifepristone.
On Sunday, the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand criticized as an “outrage” Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision, which is currently halted until at least Wednesday 19 April by the supreme court.
Speaking to CNN, Gillibrand said: “To take away the right to have medicine is an extension of taking away this right to privacy, to say we can’t have medicine sent by doctors by mail to people across the country is further invading into this right to privacy, where the court and government has a right to what’s in your mail, and who you’re talking to and what communications you’re having. It’s an outrage.”
Top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries accused Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans of orchestrating a “hostage situation” with the debt ceiling, after the House speaker’s speech in which he said spending would need to be cut before his lawmakers would agree to raise the US government’s borrowing limit.
Here’s Jeffries’s full statement:
A speech is not a plan. Extreme MAGA Republicans continue to treat the full faith and credit of the United States as a hostage situation while their so-called budget proposal remains in the witness protection program. As always, we will evaluate any legislative text when and if House Republicans can ever agree with themselves about how much they want to devastate American families in order to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, well-off and well-connected.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
