Evelyn Reynolds

Donald Trump is officially backing the brash, longtime loyalist and founding member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, the Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, to succeed Kevin McCarthy as House speaker when voting takes place next week.“Congressman Jim Jordan has been a STAR long before making his very successful journey to Washington, DC, representing Ohio’s 4th Congressional District,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social social media platform, with his some of his signature inflammatory flourishes, early on Friday.He added: “He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House & has my Complete & Total Endorsement!”The announcement came hours after the Texas congressman Troy Nehls said on Thursday night that the former US president had decided to back Jordan’s bid and after Trump said he would be open to serving as interim leader himself if Republicans could not settle on a successor following McCarthy’s stunning ouster.Trump, the current Republican presidential frontrunner for the 2024 election, has used the leadership vacuum on Capitol Hill to further demonstrate his control over his party and drag it further to the right.House Republicans are deeply fractured and some have been asking him to lead them in the lower congressional chamber, a seemingly fanciful suggestion that he also promoted after inflaming the divisions that forced out McCarthy as speaker.“Just had a great conversation with President Trump about the Speaker’s race. He is endorsing Jim Jordan, and I believe Congress should listen to the leader of our party,” Nehls wrote late on Thursday on X, formerly known as Twitter.In an interview later with the Associated Press, Nehls, who had been encouraging Trump to run for the post himself, said the ex-president instead wanted Jordan.“After him thinking about it and this and that … he said he really is in favor of getting behind Jim Jordan,” Nehls said.Jordan is one of two leading candidates maneuvering for speaker along with the congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Both are trying to lock in the 218 votes required to win the job and need the support of both the far-right and moderate factions of the party. It’s unclear whether Trump’s endorsement will force Scalise, the current GOP majority leader, out of the race, or if either can reach the threshold.Indeed, Nehls said that if no current candidate succeeds in earning the support needed to win, he would once again turn to Trump. “Our conference is divided. Our country is broken. I don’t know who can get to 218,” he said in the interview.Trump earlier in the day had been in talks to visit Capitol Hill next week ahead of a speakership vote that could happen as soon as Wednesday, according to three people familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement. Trump confirmed the trip to Fox News Digital and said he would travel on Tuesday to meet with Republicans.The trip would have been Trump’s first to the Capitol since leaving office and since his supporters attacked the building in a bid to halt the peaceful transition of power on 6 January 2021. Trump has been indicted in both Washington DC and Georgia over his efforts to overturn the results of the election, which he lost to his Democratic party challenger, Joe Biden.Jordan is one of Trump’s biggest champions in Washington DC and has been leading spurious investigations into prosecutors who have charged the former president. He was also part of a group of Republicans who worked with Trump to overturn his defeat, ahead of January 6. Scalise has also worked closely with Trump over the years.Others are waiting in the wings potentially to contest for the speakership, including the Oklahoma representative Kevin Hern, who as chair of the Republican study committee leads the largest faction of Republicans in the chamber.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

What is Pepfar and why is it in the news?Pepfar is an acronym for the US “president’s emergency plan for Aids relief”. It was set up two decades ago by George W Bush to address the HIV epidemic.It’s the biggest government-run fund of its kind. Since 2003, the project has donated about $110bn (£90.5bn) to governments, universities and nonprofits in 50 countries, either directly or through agencies such as USAid.Until now Pepfar has been funded in five-year cycles. In the past the programme has had virtually unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats. But the next funding cycle (from 2023 to 2028) became ensnared in US abortion politics and the fallout contributed to Congress missing the 30 September deadline to allow another five-year funding cycle for the initiative.What’s the link between Pepfar and abortion?US laws already prevent Pepfar (or any state agencies) from paying for abortion services, according to the California-based policy research group, Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). But in May, a coalition of conservative thinktanks and lawmakers began to make waves with arguments that Joe Biden’s administration has “hijacked” Pepfar to promote abortion instead of treating and preventing HIV.That’s where the risk to Pepfar’s five-year budget emerged – because the Republican lawmakers then refused to sign off on a spending bill for Pepfar if there weren’t stricter rules in place to stop Pepfar funds from overlapping with abortion services in any way.According to Brian Honermann, deputy director of public policy at the US-based Foundation for Aids Research, the allegations that Pepfar has been usurped to push a “radical social agenda” overseas are “baseless” and “stitched together from unrelated policy speeches, documents and assertions about how those apply to Pepfar”.What will happen to Pepfar now?The multibillion-dollar health programme is a permanent part of US law. That means Pepfar funding will continue, but it will lose its favoured position of receiving five years of funding at a time.The failure to reauthorise Pepfar will mean some of its built-in rules will expire, including a guideline that requires 10% of Pepfar money to go to orphans and children in need.Will organisations and governments lose their Pepfar grants?The fund has enough money to pay governments and civil society organisations until September 2024 (about $6.8bn), but a state department spokesperson warns that Pepfar won’t escape unscathed in the long term.Moreover, getting funding for only one year at a time will make it harder for Pepfar to plan ahead and to source crucial HIV tools, such as condoms or medicine, at the best prices. This could ultimately imperil the people that rely on the fund’s support, the spokesperson warned.The symbolic power of a five-year commitment will also be lost, says Honermann. “It shows partner countries that the US is invested for a significant period of time and that Pepfar won’t just disappear.”The threat of a permanent ‘gag rule’Another factor has swirled around Pepfar’s funding drama: some lawmakers have said they’ll only agree to restart the five-year funding regime if the fund is once again subject to the “Mexico City policy”, also called the “gag rule”.The gag rule bans organisations and governments from providing or promoting termination of pregnancy services regardless of whose money they’re using to do it. It was expanded to apply to Pepfar for the first time in 2017. It is only ever enforced when there’s a Republican president in the White House, so is not currently in effect.And while there is no finalised legislation that would make a permanent gag rule a reality (and Honermann argues it would be unlikely to get past the Democrats), the threat of it may already have done some damage.Research conducted by Fòs Feminista, a global alliance that advocates for sexual and reproductive rights, found that the 2022 decision to roll back the national right to an abortion in the US had a contagious impact in a number of countries. In Nigeria, for instance, respondents told Fòs Feminista that local lawmakers were using the change in US abortion laws to push back on a more liberal law in their country. Terminations are legal in Nigeria only if carrying the foetus to term threatens the mother’s life.Recipients of US government funding are often so worried about losing it that they enforce abortion laws more harshly than is necessary. Research shows that confusion about whether the gag rule had been revoked at the start of the Biden administration resulted in the policy – and its harms – being in place for much longer in practice.And the Pepfar wrangling and attendant media coverage has already resulted in mixed messages reaching health advocates in Africa. Some South African activists told the Guardian they were concerned that the news would be calamitous for civil society in the country. Such organisations receive the most Pepfar dollars (44%) in South Africa according to 2020 tracking data. The government gets just under 1.5% of the money.Honermann says that there is an intentional political strategy to keep communication about the changes in restrictions vague. “It’s a way to encourage over-enforcement for fear of falling on the wrong side of this.”He adds: “For now, Pepfar will continue as long as funding is made available. But these political threats to the programme are ultimately playing with the lives of millions of people worldwide who rely on this programme.”What has the reaction been in Africa?Dave Clark is the chief operating officer at the Aurum Institute, a non-profit that works on HIV and tuberculosis (TB) projects in South Africa, Mozambique, Ghana, Lesotho and Eswatini.Aurum is a partner for Pepfar’s Dreams project which works towards an Aids-free future for girls and women aged 10 to 24 by providing HIV services, contraception and violence prevention support for women, adolescents and their sexual partners.One of the major strengths of Pepfar, Clark says, is that it’s a sure-fire source of carefully planned funding for global health in a world that is often more talk than action.He explains: “The debate in America should not throw us off saving lives. Pepfar is what it says on the label: president’s emergency plan for Aids relief. That’s its extraordinary power and legacy.” More

It’s simple math: when the score reads 210 to 8, the side with the much tinier number should lose.Yet that’s not how it works in the US House of Representatives.On Tuesday, a mutiny led by eight hardline conservatives toppled speaker Kevin McCarthy and plunged the House into chaos. Rattled financial markets declined steeply and the prospects for a government shutdown six weeks from now rose dramatically. The 15-round, days-long speaker battle that McCarthy finally won in January might seem like a short dash compared to the marathon to come.The unforgivable sin that led Representative Matt Gaetz and a small band of Republican insurgents to move on McCarthy now? The six-week, bipartisan compromise that the speaker brokered this weekend to prevent a government shutdown that would have further shaken markets, made air travel more dangerous, and halted paychecks for millions of workers, including in the military.Eight members shouldn’t have this outsized power. Leaders who recognize the reality of compromise under divided government shouldn’t be ousted for working toward an accord. Yet our system incentivizes extremism and anti-majoritarianism. It will only get worse until we change the rules and stop punishing what a functional democracy would reward.It’s true that McCarthy all but sealed his fate when he agreed to allow just one member of his caucus – in this case, Gaetz – to call a vote to vacate the chair. This condition of earning the Gaetz faction’s support back in January contained the seeds of his demise; as the principle of Chekhov’s Gun holds, a weapon introduced in the first act always returns before the end of the play.It’s also true that Democrats – every one of whom voted against the speaker – provided the bulk of the votes that deposed McCarthy, as more reasonable voices within both parties failed to chart a path together that did not empower extremists.“Now what?” cried one frustrated Republican after the vote. It’s a great question. There’s obviously no bipartisan consensus candidate. But which Republican could gain the trust and support of the majority of the caucus, and also the victorious far right? Who would take the job under the conditions forced on McCarthy? Why would Gaetz and his allies now settle for anything less? The entire incentive structure has gone berserk.There’s more than enough blame to go around. Yet none of the partisan finger-pointing will solve the problem. Anti-majoritarian rules brought us to this ungovernable place. Fixing them is the only way out.The good news is that’s actually not so hard. If the House elected leaders with ranked-choice voting (RCV), this debacle could have been avoided from the beginning. Imagine how different this would have been. The Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries would have led after the first round. McCarthy would have been second. And the Republican Freedom Caucus protest candidate would have finished a distant third. No one would have earned a majority, so an instant runoff would have kicked in.The Republican rebels would have been forced to make up their minds. When the options came down to McCarthy or Jeffries, they’d have to make a choice. Rather than being obstructionist kingmakers and winning concessions disproportionate to their numbers, Gaetz and his crew would have been heard – and that’s it. Under RCV, a gaggle of Gaetzes don’t get to run the show. They have a voice in line with their actual numbers. And then majorities prevail.If the House used ranked-choice voting, McCarthy would not have been forced into a deal that allowed any one member to call for a vote to vacate the chair. Gaetz and his allies might have been furious that the Republican speaker went around them to win overwhelming bipartisan majorities to keep the government open. But they would not have had the power to destabilize the entire institution. Eight renegades could have criticized the deal all they wanted. They wouldn’t get to win.Now what, indeed. By early November, the House will need to pass a funding package that keeps the government open. The deal this past weekend reflected the reality of a divided government. Cooler heads found a way toward an imperfect deal that reflected the best winnable compromise. That’s how divided government works.The cost of compromise cannot be that the furthest extreme gets to manipulate the game to bring down those who dare make a deal. That’s a recipe for permanent dysfunction – and deepening minority rule.After all, Matt Gaetz didn’t even win office with a majority. Gaetz won his seat in Congress in 2016 with just 36% of the vote – and merely 35,689 votes – in a crowded Republican primary. He has won re-election since then thanks to the power of incumbency and a district wildly gerrymandered to ensure a Republican victor.Gaetz, in other words, represents the fringe of the fringe – a plurality winner in a district rigged to be uncompetitive from the get-go. This is yet another problem that a ranked-choice election would solve. The Gaetz Caucus wouldn’t be able to win election simply by appealing to a far fringe that values confrontation and chaos without any concern for the consequences. We have a Congress filled with members responsive only to a radical minority. If we want a different Congress, one responsive to majorities, one where the people rule and not the far fringe, we need to remake the rules.In that Congress, the fairer one America deserves, forging consensus that Americans desire would be rewarded, not repudiated. Matt Gaetz might be one of 435 members, but his caucus of eight wouldn’t hold power over the rest of us. And those 36,000 primary voters who cast a ballot for Gaetz seven years ago wouldn’t get to call the shots for all 300 million of us.
David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote More

While those who follow politics closely are busy parsing what the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker might mean for Congress, those who don’t ⁠– meaning the bulk of the American people ⁠– could be forgiven for tuning much of the drama of the last few weeks out. Ordinary Americans have little faith in Congress as it stands: as substantively or strategically consequential as they might be, the battles between members of our most reviled class, politicians, seem to most like juvenile squabbles.Here’s a detail that might incense them further. For generations, members of the US Senate have carved and scrawled their names into their desks. This rite, the stuff of summer camp and grade school, is, to the peculiar mind of a US senator, something more profound ⁠– yet another tradition, as though they needed another, signifying their membership in an august and noble fraternity.The same can be said of the Senate’s dress code, which was unanimously rescued and formalized this past week after Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer relaxed the chamber’s rules, seemingly to accommodate the defiantly casual Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman. Men will be asked to wear full business attire from now on ⁠– a requirement that has its practical advantages. As Robert Menendez, the New Jersey senator, may allegedly know, a suit jacket is a fine place to stow wads of cash in a pinch and useful, in the abstract, for another reason ⁠– disguising, through costumes of respectability, how grubby, venal and unremarkable many of our politicians are.A group letter written in the defense of the dress code described the Senate as “a place of honor and tradition”. “The world watches us on that floor,” it reads, “and we must protect the sanctity of that place at all costs.” Of course, the world usually has better things to do than keep up with congressional proceedings on C-SPAN, but there are embarrassing exceptions, the latest dramas among Republicans in the House among them, though the fact that they’re taking place in the opposite chamber shouldn’t flatter the Senate and its defenders ⁠– “the world’s greatest deliberative body” is nothing more than the geriatric wing of one of the world’s most unserious legislatures.And while much due attention is given to the problem of money in politics and more and more conversations are being had about Congress’s structural defects ⁠– once the late Dianne Feinstein is replaced and California regains its full complement of senators, each of the state’s voters will still have just over one-sixtieth the representation in the chamber of a voter in Wyoming ⁠– we ought to have a conversation, too, about the culture of the place.The inescapable fact uniting so much that grates about Congress right now ⁠– Republican shenanigans in the House, the Democratic party’s sluggishness in handling an obviously corrupt, compromised and distracted Menendez, gerontocracy within both parties ⁠– is that we ask very little of our representatives. Being a member of Congress simply isn’t substantively demanding enough.The irony of all the talk about how elderly our leaders are, and the reality that, in fact, has allowed obviously infirm politicians like Feinstein and Mitch McConnell to retain their positions even as they go catatonic in public view, is that the halls and offices of the Capitol are absolutely teeming with unelected and invisible young staffers ⁠– many of whom are in their 20s and 30s, some of whom are constitutionally incapable of occupying the offices they serve ⁠– who do much of the actual work Americans believe our elected officials do themselves.Policy research, drafting and reviewing legislative language, authoring speeches, drawing up the questions senators and congressmen ask at hearings, writing tweets and statements that go out under their bosses’ names, preparing talking points for media appearances, relaying directives from party leaders about how to vote and why ⁠– as a practical matter, the average politician in Washington today needn’t be more than a warm body with a pulse ready to cast a given vote.Of course, the late Senator Feinstein did her level best to test even that. But the fact that she, as one New York Times headline put it, “[Relied] Heavily on Staff to Function” was only partially a function of her age ⁠– the same is true of all but a relatively small and wonky contingent of unusually hard-working legislators.That’s not to say the rest don’t have concrete and vital responsibilities of their own ⁠– in 2013, the Huffington Post obtained documents from Democratic congressional campaign committee recommending that freshmen members of the caucus spend at least four hours every day calling donors for campaign contributions, more than the total amount of time recommended for visits with constituents and working in committees or voting on the House floor combined, a figure probably comparable to the number of hours spent dialing for dollars on the other side of the aisle.“After votes in the House, a stream of congressmen and women can be seen filing out of the Capitol and, rather than returning to their offices, heading to rowhouses nearby on First Street for call time, or directly to the parties’ headquarters,” Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui wrote. “The rowhouses […] are typically owned by lobbyists, fundraisers or members themselves, and are used for call time because it’s illegal to solicit campaign cash from the official congressional office.”Once call time is done, we might find our representatives making canned speeches prepared by dutiful staffers before a mostly empty chamber, some of which might find their way into campaign ads and materials later.It can’t really be a surprise, given this, that Congress attracts so many who have little fundamental interest in doing the work of governing themselves ⁠– or that it sustains the careers of even those who do well after they’re personally capable of doing it. In either case, the legislator is little more than a cog in a vast machine influenced variously by donors, interest groups, major leaders and figures in both parties, the media, primary voters, and, yes, somewhere in the mix voters in the general electorate, though it should be said that most legislators don’t have to sweat much for their approval come election time.In the 2022 midterms, 84% of House seats were either uncontested or decided in races where the victor won by more than 10 points, with the average margin of victory in all races working out to about 28 points. Nearly 95% of incumbents won reelection. On the Senate side, Cook Political Reports rated nine of the 35 races as potentially competitive; ultimately, all incumbents won their seats back.Congress, all told, isn’t a place most are ultimately forced to leave either by elections or as a matter of their age. Term limits and age limits have been floated as solutions to all this, but another complementary remedy, if we dare to dream, might be party leaders taking it upon themselves to work our representatives harder.The tasks of legislating are now well beyond the capacities of individual legislators alone, yes, but setting the expectation that they should shoulder more of the burdens now foisted upon their staffers would discourage older legislators and incumbents from sticking around too long ⁠– Feinstein might have retired long ago if she’d actually had to do more of her job herself ⁠– and help dissuade layabouts and grifters from seeking office.We’ll never be fully rid of them, of course, and we’d scarcely recognize Congress without them. But making the work of politics feel like work seems worth a try.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

The New York fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried kicked off this week. The 31-year-old former crypto billionaire faces two substantive counts of wire fraud, for acts allegedly perpetrated against the customers of FTX, the crypto-futures exchange he founded, and five related counts of conspiracy. If convicted on all charges, he faces up to 110 years in prison.As fate would have it, his case is being heard a few buildings away from where one Donald J Trump sits on trial for fraud. Like the 45th president – DJT, if you will – SBF has a tough row to hoe.Even if Bankman-Fried is acquitted, he stares at another trial, slated for March 2024, on five more counts of fraud. The men’s paths remain entwined. At that same moment, Trump will be both deep into the Republican primary and likely standing trial in connection with January 6.Furthermore, filings show that as of early August, Trump held $2.8m in a cryptocurrency wallet, with as much as $500,000 in ethereum, a cryptocurrency. On top of that, his collection of non-fungible tokens generated $4.87m in licensing fees. The NFTs are a collection of virtual trading cards, featuring illustrations of Trump as superhero, cowboy or astronaut. Really.Not that Trump has always been in favour of crypto.“I am not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he tweeted in 2019.Sound familiar? Prosecutors say Bankman-Fried relied on smoke and mirrors to gain access to political power. According to his indictment, he used customers’ assets “to lobby Congress and regulatory agencies to support legislation and regulation he believed would make it easier for FTX to continue to accept customer deposits and grow”.He is also alleged to have “misappropriated customer money to help fund over $100m in political contributions in advance of the 2022 election”, while seeking to “conceal the source of the funds used for the contributions”.Trump and his party, however, were not the chief recipients of such largesse. Bankman-Fried tended to donate to Democrats. Conservatives were therefore annoyed. They sought to portray Bankman-Fried as a leftist, on top of being a crook. Once upon a time, though, he met Ron DeSantis for no apparent reason other than the fact Florida’s hard-right governor wanted to meet. Now, as a presidential candidate, DeSantis has emerged as a crypto advocate. His campaign continues to sink, however.We know more about such meetings now, thanks in large part to Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, a new book by Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, The Big Short and other bestsellers about how capitalism works – and doesn’t.For instance, Jerry Jones, a Republican and owner of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team, showed up at a Beverly Hills party also attended by Hillary Clinton, a passel of Kardashians, Doug Emhoff, the husband of the vice-president, Kamala Harris – and Bankman-Fried.Bankman-Fried had allure. Exactly why continues to puzzle political players. His money doesn’t explain everything. But it does shed light on plenty.In summer 2022, Lewis writes, Bankman-Fried met Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, with the goal of stopping Trump-aligned extremists snagging Republican nominations. It was a high-level meeting – high enough that for one evening, Bankman-Fried even swapped his beloved cargo shorts for a suit.“At that moment, Sam was planning to give $15m to $30m to McConnell to defeat the Trumpier candidates in the Senate races,” Lewis writes.Bankman-Fried also explored paying Trump $5bn not to run in 2024, Lewis writes. Nothing came of that.Now, as Bankman-Fried sits in court, McConnell, 81, remains in the minority, his health in public decline. But McConnell remains a reliable soldier, his hold on his caucus unchanged.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe crypto industry, meanwhile, scrambles to salvage its image from the damage done by Bankman-Fried.“The idea that one man and one company dictated an entire industry was frustrating for a lot of people,” Kara Calvert, head of US policy at Coinbase, recently told Politico. “At the end of the day, the industry is so broad-based. Nobody wants to let the whole future of technological development in the United States be dictated by a criminal.”Bankman-Fried has not been convicted of anything. But it does seem extraordinary that he rose so high so fast, and that so many political leaders were so eager to help.“From the beginning, I had thought that crypto was pretty dumb,” wrote Zeke Faux, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and a fellow at New America, in Number Go Up, his unflattering take on crypto and Bankman-Fried. “And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined.“There was no mass movement to actually use crypto in the real world … from El Salvador to Switzerland to the Philippines, all I saw were scams, fraud, and half-baked schemes.”In September 2021, El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender, the first country to do so. The rightwing Heritage Foundation ranks the country’s economy the 114th most free. Freedom House, more mainstream, rates El Salvador partly free. It’s not a flattering ad for crypto.In the US, major advocates include Eric Adams, the mayor of New York; Robert Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist and likely third-party presidential candidate; and Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican senator who opposed certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win just hours after the attack on Congress.Such names should tell us something – as should Trump’s crypto holdings mentioned above. But anyone who still believes might also care to recall Trump’s earlier words.“Unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity,” he tweeted, more than four years ago. “We have only one real currency in the USA … it is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”Strange as it seems to say it, the man had a point. More

In a public advisory, written back in the summer, Dr Vivek Murthy warned of a growing ‘epidemic of loneliness and isolation’, which he believes is not just destined to affect the physical and mental health of individuals but could end up being detrimental to democracy itself.
‘The nation’s doctor’ speaks to Jonathan Freedland about why some bad faith actors are choosing to manipulate this problem and how political leaders on all sides can address it before it gets worse

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

From 3h agoDonald Trump has filed a new motion to dismiss the special counsel’s 2020 election subversion case.In a new filing on Thursday, Trump’s lawyers argue that he has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”The motion states:
“Breaking 234 years of precedent, the incumbent administration has charged President Trump for acts that lie not just within the ‘outer perimeter,’ but at the heart of his official responsibilities as President.
In doing so, the prosecution does not, and cannot, argue that President Trump’s efforts to ensure election integrity, and to advocate for the same, were outside the scope of his duties.
Instead, the prosecution falsely claimsthat President Trump’s motives were impure— that he purportedly “knew” that the widespread reports of fraud and election irregularities were untrue but sought to address them anyway.
The full motion can be found here. As Republicans scramble to find a new House speaker, Donald Trump is mulling visiting the Capitol to weigh in on what the party should do next. Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy’s staffers are reportedly working to secure support for judiciary chair Jim Jordan to replace him. It’s unclear why, but it could have something to do with another report saying majority leader Steve Scalise began his campaign for the speakership before McCarthy had even been formally ousted.Here’s what else happened today:
Environmentalists are outraged after the Biden administration began constructing new border fencing. Joe Biden says he doesn’t think it will be effective, but federal law required him to do so. Meanwhile, his administration reportedly will resume deportation flights to Venezuela, a major source of migrants.
Trump for speaker of the House? It could theoretically happen, and one Republican wants it to, but it would probably be a bad idea for the GOP.
A Georgia judge rejected former Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s attempt to get charges against her related to trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election result dismissed.
George Santos’s former campaign treasurer pleaded guilty to an unspecified felony. It’s unclear what his means for the congressman and admitted fabulist, who is under federal indictment.
Alabama will get a second majority Black congressional district, despite the best efforts of state Republicans. A Democrat will likely represent it, bolstering their margins in the House.
Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, is facing criminal charges over her involvement in a scheme to breach election systems in a rural Georgia county. Her case is on course to continue after a judge today turned down an attempt to dismiss the charges.Brian Rafferty, Powell’s attorney, argued in a 213 page motion filed last week that the case should be thrown out because prosecutors had presented misleading evidence to the grand jury that indicted Powell, and failed to turn over exculpatory evidence. The central thrust of Powell’s defense in the case is that she was not involved in the voting machine breach. Will Wooten, a prosecutor in the Fulton county district attorney’s office, strongly disputed those claims during a brief hearing on Thursday, saying they were “absurd and unsupported.”Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the case, said that he had not heard anything meriting dismissal ahead of a jury trial scheduled to begin later this month. “Just purely on procedural grounds, I don’t believe that this motion to dismiss for misconduct … I don’t see that as clearing just the procedural bar of being something under the court’s authority,” he said. “It’s the jury’s role to decide contested issues.”McAfee also pressed Rafferty to give a concrete list of items he wanted prosecutors to ensure they wanted to turn over. Wooten said all relevant evidence had been turned over to Powell’s team, but agreed to have his office again review special grand jury transcripts and other materials to double check.Powell, who was one of Trump’s key lawyers as he sought to overturn the 2020 election, faces seven criminal charges in Georgia, including racketeering, conspiracy to commit election fraud, conspiracy to commit computer theft, and conspiracy to commit computer trespass. She is alleged to have helped facilitate a scheme in which a team gained access to Coffee county’s election equipment and copied sensitive information.Powell and Ken Chesebro, another Trump attorney who was the architect of the fake elector scheme, successfully severed their trial from Trump and the 17 other defendants, and will have the first trial of the group.The Biden administration will restart deportations to Venezuela, as it faces rising pressure to curb surging migrant flows on the southern border, CBS News reports:Deportations to the South American country have been paused for years due to Washington’s strained relations with Caracas, but CBS News reports Venezuelans who have entered the US illegally and lack a valid basis to stay will now be sent home.Last month, the homeland security department extended temporary permission for about 472,000 Venezuelans to live and work in the US:The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a judge has rejected Sidney Powell’s attempt to dismiss the charges filed against her by district attorney Fani Willis related to trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election.Powell acted as a lawyer for Donald Trump, during the period when he and his allies attempted to disrupt Joe Biden’s election victory in the swing state. She was indicted alongside the ex-president in August, and has pleaded not guilty to the charges:And in a taste of what the trials for the 19 defendants Willis charged will be like, an attorney for Powell’s co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro said he has been told nearly 180 witnesses who could potentially be called:Punchbowl News has obtained House Democratic whip Katherine Clark’s instructions to the party’s lawmakers ahead of the expected speakership election next week.There’s not much surprising here, and her instructions underscore that Democrats will do what they did in January, when Kevin McCarthy was elected as House speaker after a painful 15 ballots: repeatedly vote for minority leader Hakeem Jeffries:The big question thus remains: who will the GOP vote for?Should Donald Trump become the next speaker of the House? At least one Republican thinks so.Far-right fixture Marjorie Taylor Greene says she wants the ex-president and current frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination to take the chamber’s top post:Legally, it’s possible – the House speaker does not have to be an elected member of the chamber.But as Punchbowl News’s John Bresnahan – a veteran chronicler of Congress – observes, appointing Trump would … well, maybe you should just hear it from him:There’s no saying how a judge will rule on Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss the charges against him for trying to overturn the 2020 election, but the case has been slowly grinding towards trial. Here’s Hugo Lowell’s report from last week, when special counsel prosecutors asked the judge to issue a gag order against Trump:Special counsel prosecutors reiterated Friday to the federal judge overseeing the 2020 election interference prosecution against Donald Trump the need to impose a limited gag order against the former president to curtail his ability to attack them and potentially intimidate trial witnesses.The sharply worded, 22-page filing, submitted before a hearing scheduled for 16 October in federal district court in Washington, accused Trump of continuing to make prejudicial public statements even after they first made the request three weeks ago.“He demands special treatment, asserting that because he is a political candidate, he should have free rein to publicly intimidate witnesses and malign the court, citizens of this district, and prosecutors. But in this case, Donald J Trump is a criminal defendant like any other,” prosecutors wrote.The prosecutors said the need for a limited gag order had only increased in urgency since their initial request, filed under seal to the US district judge Tanya Chutkan on 5 September, as they cited several threatening statements from Trump that could affect their case and potential jurors.In particular, the filing highlighted Trump’s posts on his Truth Social platform that attacked his former vice-president, Mike Pence, saying without evidence that he had “made up stories about me” and had gone over to the “dark side” after he testified to prosecutors about Trump’s conduct.The filing also raised Trump’s post about Gen Mark Milley, the retiring chair of the joint chiefs of staff and another likely trial witness after he was cited in the indictment, that baselessly accused him of committing treason and suggested that he be executed.“No other criminal defendant would be permitted to issue public statements insinuating that a known witness in his case should be executed,” the assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote. “This defendant should not be, either.”Donald Trump has filed a new motion to dismiss the special counsel’s 2020 election subversion case.In a new filing on Thursday, Trump’s lawyers argue that he has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”The motion states:
“Breaking 234 years of precedent, the incumbent administration has charged President Trump for acts that lie not just within the ‘outer perimeter,’ but at the heart of his official responsibilities as President.
In doing so, the prosecution does not, and cannot, argue that President Trump’s efforts to ensure election integrity, and to advocate for the same, were outside the scope of his duties.
Instead, the prosecution falsely claimsthat President Trump’s motives were impure— that he purportedly “knew” that the widespread reports of fraud and election irregularities were untrue but sought to address them anyway.
The full motion can be found here. Following federal judges setting a new congressional voting map in Alabama that could help Democrats achieve a majority in the US House next year, here is the Guardian’s Jewel Wicker and Sam Levine’s report on the story:The map was chosen from three proposals presented by the court-appointed Special Master Richard Allen. The new map adds a second congressional district to the state, allowing Black voters to choose their preferred candidate.Following the 2020 census, Republican lawmakers had enacted a congressional map that provided Black Alabamans with one majority district out of seven in the state. The three-judge panel found it violated section two of the Voting Rights Act, which bans race-based discrimination in voting procedures, and ordered lawmakers to create a map where Black Alabamans made up the majority of voters in two districts.For the full story, click here:Far-right Republican representative and staunch Donald Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that if Trump assumed the House’s vacant Speaker position, the “House chamber will be like a Trump rally everyday.”She added, “It would be the House of MAGA!!!”Earlier this week, following the ouster of former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, Greene announced that the only candidate she will support is Trump.“We can make him Speaker and then elect him President,” Greene tweeted. Here is video of president Biden’s full comments on Thursday in which he explains reasons why the Texas border wall construction has started after his administration waived 26 federal laws to allow for the construction.
“The border wall money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t, they wouldn’t.
In the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated for. I can’t stop that,” said Biden.
As Republicans scramble to find a new House speaker, Donald Trump is mulling visiting the Capitol to weigh in on what the party should do next. Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy’s staffers are reportedly working to secure support for judiciary chair Jim Jordan to replace him. It’s unclear why, but it could have something to do with another report saying majority leader Steve Scalise began his campaign for the speakership before McCarthy had even been formally ousted.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Environmentalists are outraged after the Biden administration began constructing new border fencing. Joe Biden says he doesn’t think it will be effective, but federal law required him to do so.
George Santos’s former campaign treasurer pleaded guilty to an unspecified felony. It’s unclear what his means for the congressman and admitted fabulist, who is under federal indictment.
Alabama will get a second majority Black congressional district, despite the best efforts of state Republicans. A Democrat will likely represent it, bolstering their margins in the House.
Former Democratic presidential candidate and independent New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said Democrats should have done more to stop Kevin McCarthy from being removed from office.He characterizes McCarthy as a conservative who had at least some interest in actually governing, but is now set to be replaced with a hardliner who will be even more difficult to work with. Writing in the Washington Post, Bloomberg says:
McCarthy’s failure to reach out to Democrats was inexcusable, of course. But so too was Jeffries’ failure to extend an olive branch. Not only has it empowered the Republicans’ extreme right wing, but it also squandered an opportunity for Democrats to increase their influence.
Jeffries had a chance to use the crisis to push for a more bipartisan governing model in the House, one that would have given Democrats more involvement in crafting legislation and conducting oversight. It could have been a transformative moment for Congress and the country. But if any informal Democratic overture occurred, it was too little, too late.
It’s true that McCarthy gave no indication he would have had the good sense to accept a serious peace offering by Jeffries. But even if he had rejected it, Democrats could have shown voters that at least one party in Washington is serious about finding common ground. Their failure to make a peace offering falls heaviest on the party’s moderates, who speak of bipartisanship but, when push comes to shove, don’t practice it.
Now, with the House paralyzed, not only is Congress failing to do the people’s business, but aid to Ukraine has been indefinitely paused, helping Russia’s war effort and costing people their lives.
“There has to be an adult in the room,” McCarthy said over the weekend, after keeping the government from shutting down with the help of Democrats. He was right. Sadly, in the end, neither he nor Jeffries could do the adult thing, by reaching across the aisle to prevent Congress from sinking even deeper into dysfunction.
Joe Biden explained that his administration was moving forward with building a wall on the US border with Mexico because federal law required it – even though he does not believe it will work.Here are comments he made to the press from the Oval Office:Environmental advocates are furious with Biden for waiving federal laws in order to move forward with the construction, even though his own administration said in its early days in office that such a barrier would not be effective. Here’s the latest on this story:For a sense of how the GOP is trying to spin this week’s theatrics in the House, take a look at this tweet from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is tasked with winning seats in the chamber:All the Democrats you see there represent swing or red districts, and many won re-election only narrowly last year, when Joe Biden’s allies overperformed expectations thanks to factors like the downfall of Roe v Wade and successful warnings about GOP extremism.The Democratic caucus was unanimous in voting to oust Kevin McCarthy, arguing that they were merely keeping with the common practice of the minority party in the House refusing to support the majority’s choice for speaker.Donald Trump is considering meeting with House Republicans at the Capitol next week, a source familiar with the former president’s plans tells the Guardian, as his party works to elect a new speaker following Kevin McCarthy’s overthrow.Trump is the frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination, and has been endorsed by several House lawmakers. He has denied involvement in congressman Matt Gaetz’s successful effort to remove McCarthy from power, and both lawmakers call themselves Trump allies.More hints of the dynamics of the speaker’s race within the House Republican Conference are emerging.The latest report is from the Messenger, which, citing unnamed sources, reports that Steve Scalise began campaigning to replace Kevin McCarthy even before he had been officially ousted.Scalise, the majority leader, is one of two major candidates who have declared their candidacy, along with judiciary chair Jim Jordan. Both are staunch conservatives, and the Messenger’s report may explain why McCarthy’s aides are reportedly encouraging lawmakers to support Jordan:
Kevin McCarthy had just been ousted as speaker of the House. Republicans — and the entire Congress — were stunned. Yet McCarthy’s deputy, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., wasted no time, as he quietly launched a bid to become the next speaker, multiple sources tell The Messenger.
Four Republican sources say Scalise started his campaign for speaker on Tuesday evening, moments after the House approved a far-right motion to vacate McCarthy from the speakership, before any other member had formally declared a candidacy.
One House Republican who was lobbied by Scalise early Wednesday morning said the Louisiana Republican’s outreach was “was too early.”
“The body wasn’t even cold,” the lawmaker, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the speaker’s race, told The Messenger. “It was bullsh–.”
The race to replace McCarthy has just two declared candidates so far: Scalise, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. There is also Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., who has fielded support from members but has not yet formally announced a bid.
Another thing that could prove pivotal to determining control of the House next year: the revolt that ousted Kevin McCarthy from office.His ouster was unprecedented, and the GOP is still digesting its implications for their broader campaign to hold onto the House, and regain the senate and White House next year. One lawmaker, Ohio’s Max Miller, told CNN it set the party back: More

Lawyers for Donald Trump are asking a federal judge for a second time to postpone until after the 2024 election his trial on charges that he illegally retained dozens of national defense documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and conspired to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them.The request, made in a 12-page court filing to US district judge Aileen Cannon on Wednesday night, proposed delaying the start of the trial from May until at least mid-November – leaning into the justice department’s complaint last week that Trump was trying to “re-litigate” the trial date.Trump has tried to delay the classified documents trial ever since he was charged by prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith, including asking to postpone setting a trial date indefinitely as they worked through complex procedural and evidentiary rules in the case.The efforts are the result of Trump’s bet that if he were to win the election and the trials were delayed, he could direct his attorney general to drop the cases. Even if he lost, the closer the trials were to the election, the more he could allege the prosecutions were politically motivated.The dueling complaints from both sides set up another test for Cannon, a Trump appointee who came under widespread criticism last year during the criminal investigation after she issued a series of favorable decisions to the former president before her rulings were struck down on appeal.In their renewed attempt to push back the trial date, Trump’s lawyers accused prosecutors of failing to meet their statutory obligations to turn over nine of the 32 documents Trump was charged with retaining, in violation of the Espionage Act, as part of the discovery process.The filing argued that the delay in getting access to those documents, which prosecutors said last week were so sensitive that they could not be stored in a special facility in Florida to review such materials and were removed to Washington, necessitated revising the schedule for the case.Trump’s lawyers added that they needed to push back the trial schedule because the secure facility being constructed for the judge to review the classified documents in Fort Pierce, where her courthouse is located, was running more than three months behind schedule.“The special counsel’s office has failed to make very basic arrangements in this district for the handling of the relevant classified information,” wrote Trump’s lawyers Chris Kise and Todd Blanche. “The requested adjournments are necessary to allow time for these facilities to be established.”Trump’s lawyers also hit back at prosecutors for previously suggesting that the former president was trying to weaponize the complex procedures for using classified information at trial – known as Cipa, short for the Classified Information Procedures Act – to buy time.In particular, and previewing a potential defense at trial that some of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago could not be charged because they were not “closely held” materials, Trump’s lawyers argued prosecutors needed to say whether they had tangential information that could be exculpatory.The materials are known as “prudential search requests”, a process where national security prosecutors check with the US intelligence community about the nature of sensitive documents they are considering charging.“Because some of the documents at issue address topics that are covered in open-source materials,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, “it is extremely likely that some USIC holdings undercut the Office’s contention that documents dating back to 2017 contain information that was closely held.”The Trump legal team also cited Trump’s increasingly crowded courtroom calendar as a further reason why the classified documents trial needed to be delayed, arguing that neither they nor the former president could be in two places at once.The issue stems from Trump’s other federal trial, in which he is accused by special counsel prosecutors of conspiring the subvert the 2020 election results, being scheduled to start on 4 March. But delays in that case could lead to overlap with the start of the classified documents trial set for 20 May. More