Biden signs bill protecting same-sex and interracial marriage rights – as it happened

It’s been a lively though unusual day in US politics. We’re ending this live blog now and we’ll be back on Wednesday morning to bring you all the day’s developments as they happen.

Here’s where things stand:

• Joe Biden signed the Respect For Marriage Act into law, in a joy-filled ceremony on the south lawn at the White House.

• The US president noted that: “Racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia – they are all connected. But the antidote is love.”

• The January 6 House select committee will on 19 December vote on referring people they believe broke the law to the justice department, Politico reports, citing committee chair Bennie Thompson.

• Carolyn Maloney, chair of the oversight committee in the House wrote to the National Archives asking for a review of what’s been discovered at a storage unit at Donald Trump’s Florida residence, the Washington Post reported.

• Government energy officials announced that the US has taken “the first tentative steps towards a clean energy source that could revolutionize the world” through a successful fusion experiment.

• Biden cheered government data released today that showed inflation declining by a greater amount than expected in November, calling it proof that his economic policies were delivering Americans relief from the price increase wave battering the economy.

• Samuel Bankman-Fried is not testifying before Congress, because he was arrested in the Bahamas yesterday. Instead, the newly appointed CEO of FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Bankman-Fried founded, is being grilled by lawmakers alone.

• Reforms to the Electoral Count Act intended to stop another January 6 may end up being included in year-end spending legislation Congress is negotiating.

• It’s official: rightwing lawmaker Lauren Boebert has been re-elected, after winning her unexpectedly close House race.

Under sunny skies, the ceremony for Joe Biden to sign the Respect for Marriage Act was a lively one, just wrapping up now.

The bill’s primary driver, Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, can be seen smiling broadly, just behind a beaming Nancy Pelosi.

Joe Biden has signed the legislation into law, in a joy-filled ceremony on the south lawn at the White House.

In attendance were the first lady, Jill Biden, as well as the vice-president, Kamala Harris, the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, and hundreds of LGBTQ+ couples, senior members of Congress, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and gay lawmakers looking on.

Here’s the Guardian’s Washington Bureau chief, David Smith, who has witnessed the event:

Biden made a short but spirited speech.

Biden pays tribute to many of those activists and campaigners gathered.

Here’s the president on Twitter:

Joe Biden says love is the antidote to discrimination.

“Racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, they are all connected. But the antidote is love,” Biden just said at the White House, as he prepares to sign the Respect for Marriage Act into law.

Biden reminds those gathered that the legislation was spurred by the signal made by supreme court justice Clarence Thomas that, having overturned Roe v Wade, access to contraception and the right to same sex marriage could be next on the conservative bench’s agenda.

Joe Biden is now speaking and thanking the lawmakers who drove the legislation that he is about to sign into law as the Respect for Marriage Act.

He thanks, to a huge cheer from those gathered, Wisconsin’s Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin, the first out gay person ever to serve in the US Senate, who introduced the legislation and helped steer it to victory.

The US president thanked Maine Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, who joined Baldwin in pushing the bill forward and garnering bipartisan support.

Biden is celebrating the new law that protects not just same sex marriage but also interracial marriage, which have federal protections via the US Supreme Court but are not codified in US legislation.

As the nation saw when the right-wing supermajority on the supreme court in June ditched the federal abortion legalization afforded by Roe v Wade in 1973, without congressional support in the form of legislation, rights can be taken away overnight by the court.

Biden just quoted the great Edie Windsor’s words about gay marriage: “Don’t postpone joy.”

“The road to this moment has been long,” Biden said. He tips his hat to those who “put their jobs on the line” to fight for the rights “I’m about to sign into law.”

Kamala Harris is speaking at the White House ceremony, and she recalls Valentine’s Day, 2004, when she performed some of the US’s first same sex marriages, in San Francisco city hall, when she was the district attorney in that city.

She quotes the late Harvey Milk in saying: “Rights are won by those who make their voices heard.”

The vice president talks of marrying friends, the tears of joy, and also recalls the victory, ultimately, over the ban on marriage equality in California that had been passed in 2008, known as Proposition 8.

Kamala Harris is about to speak ahead of the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act, with Joe Biden right behind her.

The White House has a live stream of event ongoing, and you can watch it below:

Nancy Pelosi, in her final weeks as House speaker, was up next to cheer the Respect for Marriage Act’s passage:

Joe Biden will soon sign the Respect for Marriage Act in a ceremony on the White House’s chilly south lawn.

The Guardian’s David Smith is there for the event, which has kicked off with remarks from Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader:

Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s departure from the Democratic party last week took some of the wind out of the sails of Joe Biden’s allies, but their leader in Congress’s upper chamber isn’t looking for revenge – yet.

The Washington Post reports that the Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer dodged a question about whether he’d support only a Democrat to serve as senator from Arizona, instead reiterating that he expects Sinema to continue working with the party:

The question is important because, by leaving the Democratic party, Sinema has negated a primary challenge she was likely to face in 2024 if she ran for the party’s Senate nomination in Arizona.

The senator has irritated many Democrats by objecting to the Biden administration’s priorities over the past two years, but now the party will have to decide whether to run a candidate against her in two years and risk splitting their vote, or continue pursuing her cooperation.

The White House has kicked off its daily briefing with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who has been joined today by a special guest: Cyndi Lauper.

The pop legend is set to perform at the 3:30 pm signing ceremony for the Respect for Marriage Act, which will protect same-sex and interracial marriage rights.

Here’s the scene in the White House briefing room, as relayed by the Guardian’s David Smith:

The January 6 committee will on 19 December vote on referring people they believe broke the law to the justice department, Politico reports, citing committee chair Bennie Thompson.

Lawmakers haven’t yet named who they will refer, but Donald Trump and former top officials in his administration, as well as in Congress, could be among their targets.

The referrals are among the committee’s outstanding business before its mandate expires at the end of the year, which also includes a report into the insurrection at the Capitol and Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election.

Here are more details from Politico:

Also happening in Washington this week: the White House is hosting the leaders of 49 African countries as it looks to bolster its standing on the continent, with an eye towards countering Russia and China, Jason Burke reports:

Dozens of African leaders have assembled in Washington to attend a major summit aimed at rebooting US relations on the continent which have languished in recent years.

The US-Africa summit, the first since 2014, will be the biggest international gathering in Washington since the pandemic and the most substantial commitment by a US administration to boosting its influence in the region for almost a decade.

The summit comes amid the sharpest great power rivalry for many decades, worsening security problems and acute economic problems in Africa.

All three challenges are sometimes blamed on the US, which has been pushed on to the defensive in many areas by determined and often unconventional strategies adopted by strategic rivals such as Russia and China.

In all, 49 leaders and heads of states have been invited to the summit, and the guest list underlines the difficulty faced by President Joe Biden and secretary of state Antony Blinken in balancing values with pressing demands of power politics.

Carolyn Maloney, chair of the oversight committee in the House has written to the National Archives asking for a review of what’s been discovered at a storage unit at Donald Trump’s Florida residence, the Washington Post is reporting this hour.

The House committee wants to know if there are any other presidential records stashed there in addition to those recently disclosed. As the Post notes, the letter “follows a report from The Washington Post that at least two items marked classified were found by an outside team hired by Trump to search a storage unit, along with at least two of his properties, after his legal team was pressed by a federal judge to attest that it had fully complied with a May grand jury subpoena to turn over all materials bearing classified markings.

Today’s letter has been obtained by the Post and notes that Maloney raises concerns with Debra Steidel Wall, acting archivist at the National Archive in Washington, and says that Trump’s storage unit at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach “and other properties” might “contain presidential records that were not the focus of the search and therefore have not been turned over to the federal government.”

The committee notes that this latest question is separate from the Department of Justice “ongoing criminal investigation” into Trump’s actions, which is being overseen recently-appointed special counsel Jack Smith.

Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has been a spark of excitement on Twitter today as she fronted the government’s announcement of a “major scientific breakthrough” with a US lab’s successful fusion reaction.

She called the scientific advance “game-changing, world-improving, lives-saving history unfolding in real time”.

Then, hinting at some other government priorities in play today, she added the announcement of the nuclear fusion breakthrough to a day in which Joe Biden will sign into law the Respect for Marriage Act passed in the House last week after making it through the US Senate. It codifies the right to same-sex marriage and interracial marriages in the US in legislation. Her tweet also highlighted other good developments, in economic news.

The energy department made public their success in creating a fusion reaction that produced more energy than was put in, though any practical application of the breakthrough could be decades away. More immediately, inflation may finally be declining in the United States, which was welcome news for Joe Biden, who will later this afternoon put his signature on a bill to protect same-sex and interracial marriage rights.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• Samuel Bankman-Fried is not testifying before Congress, because he was arrested in the Bahamas yesterday. Instead, the newly appointed CEO of FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Bankman-Fried founded, is being grilled by lawmakers alone.

• Reforms to the Electoral Count Act intended to stop another January 6 may end up being included in year-end spending legislation Congress is negotiating.

• It’s official: rightwing lawmaker Lauren Boebert has been re-elected, after winning her unexpectedly close House race.

Meanwhile in Congress, lawmakers are working through a heap of legislation that both parties would like to get passed before the year ends and the new Congress begins.

Of particular importance to the waning Democratic majority is a measure to reform the Electoral Count Act and stop the type of legal plot attempted on January 6, and a White House request for tens of billions of dollars more in aid to Ukraine.

Politico reports that Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer says both could be included in a massive government funding bill the two parties are inching towards an agreement on:

Now that they’ve made the news public, the Department of Energy has released a brief video showing how their successful fusion experiment worked.

You can watch it below:

Joe Biden cheered government data released today that showed inflation declining by a greater amount than expected in November, calling it proof that his economic policies were delivering Americans relief from the price increase wave battering the economy.

“In a world where inflation is rising at double digits in many major economies around the world, inflation is coming down in America,” Biden said in a speech at the White House. “Make no mistake: prices are still too high. We have a lot more work to do, but things are getting better, headed in the right direction.”

In particular, he pointed to the decline in gas prices last month, which fell 2%, while noting that food price increases slowed, albeit very slightly. All told, prices rose 7.1% last month compared to November 2021, and just 0.1% compared to October. That was their smallest year-on-year increase since December of last year, but nonetheless a high rate and well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% yearly inflation target.

“It’s going to take time to get inflation back to normal levels, as we make the transition to a more stable and steady growth,” Biden said. “We could see setbacks along the way, as well. We shouldn’t take anything for granted. What is clear is my economic plan is working and we’re just getting started.”