Evelyn Reynolds

On a day on which he emerged uninjured from an actual car crash in Tennessee, Ron DeSantis was reported to have made his most drastic attempt yet to turn round a presidential campaign seen as in danger of coming off the road itself, announcing a deep slashing of staff numbers.Politico said advisers to the Florida governor confirmed that more than a third of campaign staff were being cut, “a total of 38 jobs shed across an array of departments”, two senior advisers among them.DeSantis’s campaign manager, Generra Peck, said: “Following a top-to-bottom review of our organisation, we have taken additional, aggressive steps to streamline operations and put Ron DeSantis in the strongest position to win this primary and defeat Joe Biden.“Governor DeSantis is going to lead the Great American Comeback and we’re ready to hit the ground running as we head into an important month of the campaign.”With the first Republican debate a month away, DeSantis is still clearly the strongest challenger to Donald Trump.But the former president enjoys national and key-state polling leads of about 30 points, regardless of the 71 criminal charges against him and the prospect of more.No other candidate in the 13-strong field has made a significant move but DeSantis is widely held to be floundering, with donor sources maxed out and his policy proposals, often to the right even of Trump, falling flat with the public.Politico also reported new hires including a “top political adviser” to the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, a rising party figure who some Republican operatives have suggested could yet enter the primary.For Vanity Fair, the columnist Molly Jong-Fast gave voice to progressive glee over DeSantis’s struggles to connect with Republican voters.DeSantis, Jong-Fast wrote, “is a terrible politician with negative charisma, and the chances of him riding into the White House are looking less likely.“He is aggressively dull and wooden, making his interactions with voters border on painful to watch. His head bobs in a strange and unnatural way, and he wears high-heeled cowboy boots.”Referring to a previous high-profile Republican flop, the Wisconsin governor who wilted before Trump in 2016, Jong-Fast said DeSantis “makes Scott Walker look charming”.“Plus,” she added, “voters tend not to vote for people who seem like they’re screaming at them all the time. No amount of donor dollars can make DeSantis, a Maga marionette traipsing across Iowa and New Hampshire, seem like a real human boy.” More

A Republican-backed spending bill threatens to end national access to mail-order abortion pills and cut billions from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) that provides low-income families with food benefits.The legislation is part of a spate of appropriations bills that lawmakers will debate this month, and which Congress must reach a decision on by the end of September in order to pass a budget for the 2024 fiscal year and avoid a federal shutdown. It was already approved by a House appropriations subcommittee in May, while being condemned by Democrats and causing internal rifts among Republicans. Republicans have added several provisions to the bill that would have wide-ranging effects on reproductive rights, health policy and benefits.The food and agriculture spending bill is the latest front in the rightwing campaign against reproductive rights. In the year since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, Republicans have passed bills in more than a dozen states that ban or severely restrict abortion access. Ending access to mail-order pills that induce abortions would complicate and limit efforts from abortion rights groups and physicians to provide care for people in states with abortion bans.Specifically, the bill would reverse a 2021 Food and Drug Administration policy that allowed people to get the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone – which can be used up to 10 weeks after conception – through the mail rather than via in-person visits to providers. The FDA had temporarily lifted restrictions on the drug during the Covid-19 pandemic, before later making those changes permanent. But the drug, which is widely used for abortion and can also be used for managing miscarriages, has been the center of legal challenges and rightwing attempts to prevent its use ever since.House Republicans’ messaging on the bill claims that their provision “reins in wasteful Washington spending” and “protects the lives of unborn children”. The bill would also decrease the Snap benefit program – formerly known as food stamps – by $32bn compared with 2023 levels, as well as prevent the health and human services department from putting limits on the maximum amount of nicotine in cigarettes.The approaching fight over spending bills has echoes of the standoff over debt ceiling negotiations earlier this year, when Democrats accused Republicans of holding the government hostage in an attempt to exact sweeping cuts to federal programs. Hardline Republicans similarly pushed to shift their party towards far-right policies during those negotiations as well.Democrats are eager to prevent a government shutdown such as the one in 2018 during the Trump administration that left about 800,000 government workers without pay and lasted longer than any previous closure in US history. But some have called for establishing red lines around what compromises they are willing to make, with a number of House Democrats such as the Massachusetts representative Jim McGovern pushing back against attempts to cut Snap funding and other conservative provisions in recent legislation. House Democrats previously tried to add two amendments to the food and agriculture spending bill that would have eliminated the anti-abortion provision, but both failed.Several Republicans have also spoken out against the food and agriculture bill, including the New York representative Marc Molinaro, who told Politico he will vote against the legislation if it comes to the floor. Molinaro, along with another New York Republican lawmaker, previously denounced a conservative Texas judge’s ruling that threatened to remove FDA approval of mifepristone.Molinaro’s opposition to the bill highlights a rift within the Republican party over just how far to push an anti-abortion agenda that has proven nationally unpopular and contributed to electoral losses in many states.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbortion policy has divided the GOP as hard-right Republicans, as well as powerful Christian conservative activist groups, have demanded far-reaching bans on abortion access. Others, such as the South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace, have warned that Republicans need to “read the room” on abortion or face defeat in elections.The Republican speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, has meanwhile been left scrambling to manage the different factions of his party as votes on must-pass appropriations bills loom. In addition to limiting abortion access and benefits, far-right Republicans have sought to use spending bills to greatly reduce military aid to Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion.An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll from earlier this year saw that support for abortion access was at an all-time high, and included a finding that about one-third of Republicans also broadly back the right to abortion access. More

A Colorado woman who claimed her state’s support for same-sex marriage barred her from designing wedding websites, fueling a case that last month delivered a major US supreme court blow to LGBTQ+ rights, appears to have designed at least one wedding website before it was scrubbed from her archive.The discovery, by the New Republic, followed reporting by that outlet and the Guardian which showed the request for a site for a same-sex wedding that lay at the heart of the 303 Creative v Elenis supreme court case appeared to have been a fabrication.Represented by the rightwing Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the web designer behind 303 Creative, Lorie Smith, argued that her right to free speech, regarding her opposition to same-sex marriage, was “chilled” by a Colorado anti-discrimination law.Claiming Smith was unable to design any wedding websites at all, for fear of falling foul of the state law, her attorneys told the supreme court: “For six years, she has been unable to speak in the marketplace.”The six conservative justices who dominate the court ruled for Smith, delighting rightwingers and faith groups but appalling LGBTQ+ groups and other advocates of equal treatment under the law.Questions over the supposed request for service have lingered. On Monday, the New Republic added to such disquiet.The progressive magazine said that by using the Wayback Machine, a service from the Internet Archive, a researcher found what appeared to be an image of a wedding website designed by Smith around 2015.The image, in a folder of “Recent Website Projects”, showed a couple walking on a beach, under a couple’s names and section headings including “You’re invited”, “Schedule”, “Accommodations” and “Travel Guide & FAQs”.The name of the woman in the couple on the site matched the name on another image, for “Healthy4LifeColorado.com”. Other images were for a church, a site about French bulldogs and a campaign site for a Republican state politician. The last image matched a site currently live.The apparent wedding site was found by Kate Redburn, a fellow at Columbia Law School in New York.They told the New Republic: “I couldn’t believe it. The idea that she hadn’t made any wedding websites for anyone was so baked into the narrative around this case.”The magazine said “a Colorado woman whose name matched the name of the bride” did not respond to requests for comment.Through the ADF, Smith “acknowledged she had made the website as a gift for a family member and had subsequently removed it from her online portfolio before the lawsuit was filed”.On Twitter, the ADF accused the New Republic of “manufacturing its fifth desperate attack” on Smith.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Why? To impugn Lorie and delegitimise the landmark supreme court ruling in 303 Creative that protects every American’s free speech rights.”Saying Smith had “nothing to hide”, the ADF said she designed the wedding site as a gift for her sister in 2014, around the time she “started exploring whether she could create custom wedding websites as part of her business consistent with her faith”.The New Republic said the ADF “did not answer our questions about what knowledge its lawyers had of the website on Smith’s site”.Jennifer Pizer, chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, who worked on the 303 Creative case, described why questions about its provenance and conduct remained important, in light of the ruling handed down last month.“I think the public reaction we’re seeing is probably a mix of surprise, shock and anger that this case seems to have been contrived, and probably also that such an important court ruling might well have been based on facts that were not entirely true,” Pizer told the New Republic.“People seem to be expressing understandable distress at the idea that this impactful case was won by people who might have misled the court – it’s alarming for multiple reasons.”The ADF, Pizer said, “has been gunning for this result – and not just this result, but has been gunning to win licenses to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people and ways to undermine civil rights laws more broadly for many years.” More

Donald Trump’s appeal has sunk among Republicans, a new poll has found.The former president, who faces criminal indictments in two cases and possibly a third, announced earlier this year that he is once again running for president in the 2024 election.Pew research found that 63% of Americans of all political affiliations have an unfavorable opinion of Trump – an increase from 60% last year.At 66%, the majority of those who identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning still view the former president in a favorable light, but that is 9 percentage points lower than last July’s 75%.Last July, about a quarter of those on the right viewed him as very or mostly unfavorably, but that figure has risen to 32%.Unsurprisingly, Democrats’ opinion of Trump is also low, though consistent with recent years. Ninety-one percent of Democrats polled viewed Trump unfavorably. Of that, 78% viewed him as very unfavorable.A mere 8% of Democrats view him favorably.By contrast, Biden’s popularity among the general popularity slipped about 4% since last year. Positive opinions of Vice-President Kamala Harris were worse, dropping from 43% to 36% since last year.Trump still remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, ahead of the far-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, according to FiveThirtyEight.It is unclear how Trump’s legal troubles will affect his campaign, if at all. This year, he was indicted on 37 counts for mishandling classified documents at Mar-A-Lago in Florida and on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in New York. Trial dates in both cases have been set for during the 2024 primary season.He could also face the music for his role in inciting the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC in 2021.The poll does not address why Trump fell in the eyes of his own party, but many within the GOP have not shied away from sharing their distaste for him as their 2024 candidate.Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told the Hill in May that she was “certainly” looking for an alternative to Trump and DeSantis.“If that is the face of the Republican party, if that’s the contest, Republicans are doomed,” she said.
This article was amended on 25 July 2023 to correct a typo concerning 91% of Democrats polled. More

Ron DeSantis, the rightwing governor of Florida and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was involved in a car crash on the campaign trail on Tuesday.In a statement to media, DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, said: “This morning, the governor was in a car accident while traveling to an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He and his team are uninjured.“We appreciate the prayers and well wishes of the nation for his continued protection while on the campaign trail.”DeSantis, 44, remains in second place in primary polling, albeit about 30 points behind Donald Trump, the multiply indicted former president, in most polling averages and in polls in early voting states.A month out from the first Republican debate, the governor has been reported to be seeking to reboot his campaign.On Tuesday, according to News Channel 9, a Chattanooga ABC affiliate station, the crash happened when “traffic slowed and four motorcade cars hit each other”.The outlet also said one DeSantis staff member “had minor injuries” but “went on to the campaign stop [to] be treated there”.DeSantis was in Tennessee for fundraising and other events. A spokesman told Florida media the governor would continue with his schedule. More

The US Department of Justice has sued the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, over his refusal to remove a floating barrier placed on the Rio Grande to stop migrants entering the US from Mexico.The move is the latest in a growing political spat between Abbott and the Biden administration, heightened by Republican attempts to scaremonger over immigration as the 2024 presidential election looms.The lawsuit filed by the federal government asks a court in Texas to force the state to remove the roughly 1,000ft line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys the Biden administration says raises humanitarian and environmental concerns.The suit also says Texas unlawfully installed the barrier without permission, near the border city of Eagle Pass.The suit was filed on Monday, after Abbott refused to comply with instructions to remove the barrier.“Texas will fully utilise its constitutional authority to deal with the crisis you have caused,” Greg Abbott wrote to Joe Biden in a letter reported by CNN and other outlets.“Texas will see you in court, Mr President.”It was the latest confrontational move by a governor who for more than two years has escalated measures to stop migrants entering the US, pushing legal boundaries along the 1,200-mile border with Mexico.Blowback over the tactics is widening, including from within Texas and particularly in light of a state trooper’s account of razor wire leaving asylum seekers bloodied and officers denying migrants water in 100F (37.7C) heat and being told to push children into the river.Last week, the US justice department told Texas to remove the river barriers, citing federal laws against obstructing waterways and imposing a Monday deadline. On Monday, Abbott said that in refusing to comply, he was “assert[ing] Texas’s sovereign interest in protecting [its] borders” in his role as the “commander-in-chief of [the] state’s militia”.Repeating a common Republican talking point, the governor also wrote to Biden: “If you truly care about human life, you must begin enforcing federal immigration laws. By doing so, you can help me stop migrants from wagering their lives in the waters of the Rio Grande.”Saying migrants could attempt to use legitimate ports of entry, Abbott said: “While I share the humanitarian concerns noted in your lawyers’ letter, Mr President, your finger points in the wrong direction. Neither of us wants to see another death in the Rio Grande … Yet your open-border policies encourage migrants to risk their lives by crossing illegally through the water, instead of safely and legally at a port of entry. Nobody drowns on a bridge.”A White House spokesperson said Abbott’s behavior was “ making it hard for the men and women of border patrol to do their jobs of securing the border and putting both migrants and border agents in danger”.Biden’s border enforcement plan, the spokesperson added, had “led to the lowest levels of unlawful border crossings in over two years. Governor Abbott’s dangerous and unlawful actions are undermining that effective plan.“If Governor Abbott truly wanted to drive toward real solutions, he’d be asking his Republican colleagues in Congress why they voted against President Biden’s request to increase funding for the Department of Homeland Security and why they’re blocking the comprehensive immigration reform and border security measures that would finally fix our broken immigration system.”The White House also said Republicans “have no plan and are just playing political games”.Criticism of Abbott is growing within his own state.Speaking to the Associated Press, David Donatti, an attorney for the Texas American Civil Liberties Union, said: “There are so many ways that what Texas is doing right now is just flagrantly illegal.”Aron Thorn, a Texas Civil Rights Project attorney, described “a very strong correlation” between Abbott’s border policy and “the Trump and post-Trump era in which most of the Trump administration’s immigration policy was aggressive and extreme and very violative of people’s rights and very focused on making the political point.“The design of this is the optics and the amount of things that they sacrifice for those optics now is quite extraordinary.”In Eagle Pass, Jessie Fuentes, a kayaker, has filed his own lawsuit over work done on the river. On Monday that suit, Epi’s Canoe & Kayak Team v State of Texas, was cited in the suit filed by the federal government.Citing measures including floating barriers and shipping containers and razor wire placed along riverbanks cleared of vegetation, Fuentes recently told the Eagle Pass city council: “The river is a federally protected river by so many federal agencies, and I just don’t know how it happened.”A member of the Eagles Pass council, Elias Diaz, told the AP: “I feel like the state government has kind of bypassed local government … and so I felt powerless at times.”Hugo Urbina, a farmer whose land abuts the river, said he supported efforts to reduce border crossings via the Rio Grande. But Urbina said Abbott and his administration “do whatever it is that they want … breaking the law and … making your citizens feel like they’re second-hand citizens”.The Texas land office has said it will permit “vegetation management” on the banks of the river as part of anti-migration efforts. The state military department has cleared out carrizo cane, which the land office has called an invasive plant. Environmental experts are concerned changes to the landscape will affect the flow of the river.Tom Vaughan, co-founder of the Rio Grande International Study Center, said: “As far as I know, if there’s flooding in the river, it’s much more severe in Piedras Negras” – on the Mexican side – “than it is in Eagle Pass because that’s the lower side of the river.“And so next time the river really gets up, it’s going to push a lot of water over on the Mexican side, it looks like to me.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

From 5h agoA battle is brewing in Texas between its Republican governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration, which has demanded the state remove floating barriers placed in the Rio Grande to prevent people from crossing from Mexico.Today, Abbott vowed to defy the request from the justice department, potentially setting up a legal fight with the Democratic administration:As the Guardian’s Maya Yang reported last week, the deployment of the floating barriers comes amid reports that Texas authorities are mistreating migrants who cross into the state from Mexico:
Two pregnant migrant women who were trying to turn themselves in to US immigration authorities have alleged that Texas national guard soldiers refused to provide them with water.
Speaking to CNN at a shelter in Eagle Pass, Texas, the two women, identified as Carmen from Honduras and María from El Salvador, recounted their experiences at the border amid recent reports of “inhumane” behavior by American border authorities.
“They told us it was a crime to cross into the US and that we should return to Mexico,” Carmen, who said she is six months pregnant, told CNN. She added that she and her husband had initially tried to cross the Rio Grande on 12 July but were stopped by Texas national guard soldiers.
Election day 2024 is still a long way off, but we’re getting closer to 23 August, when Republican presidential candidates will have their first debate. Most of the big names have qualified, but Donald Trump says he might not attend, while his former vice-president, Mike Pence, is struggling to qualify, as are Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson. We’ll see if these candidates can turn it around in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the White House expressed alarm at the latest news from Israel, where the far-right government has won passage of a key part its judicial overhaul. Opponents of the move say it could threaten the country’s democracy.Here’s what else happened today:
Texas’s Republican governor has rejected a justice department demand that the state remove floating barriers intended to stop migrants entering from Mexico.
Mitt Romney says donors should cut off support to Republican presidential contenders who have no hope of winning the nomination, in an effort to winnow the race to two candidates and defeat Trump.
House Republicans may decide to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt.
Special counsel Jack Smith has obtained documents from Bernie Kerik, who advised the Trump campaign’s attempt to prove fraud in the 2020 election.
Alabama Republicans are resisting a supreme court order to draw a second majority Black congressional district.
Mitt Romney, the Utah senator who was the Republican nominee for president in 2012 but lost to Barack Obama, has proposed a strategy to unite the current crop of GOP contenders for the White House against Donald Trump.Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Romney, one of Trump’s most outspoken opponents in Congress, calls on donors backing Republican presidential candidates to withdraw their support once it becomes clear that their choice can’t win. The goal is to winnow the field to a two-person race, in hopes the other candidate can keep Trump from returning to office.Here’s more of what he has to say:
Despite Donald Trump’s apparent inevitability, a baker’s dozen Republicans are hoping to become the party’s 2024 nominee for president. That is possible for any of them if the field narrows to a two-person race before Mr. Trump has the nomination sewn up. For that to happen, Republican megadonors and influencers – large and small – are going to have to do something they didn’t do in 2016: get candidates they support to agree to withdraw if and when their paths to the nomination are effectively closed. That decision day should be no later than, say, Feb 26, the Monday following the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
There are incentives for no-hope candidates to overstay their prospects. Coming in behind first place may grease another run in four years or have market value of its own: Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum got paying gigs. And as former New Hampshire Gov John H Sununu has observed, ‘It is fun running for president if you know you cannot win.’
Left to their own inclinations, expect several of the contenders to stay in the race for a long time. They will split the non-Trump vote, giving him the prize. A plurality is all that is needed for winner-take-all primaries.
…
Our party and our country need a nominee with character, driven by something greater than revenge and ego, preferably from the next generation. Family, friends and campaign donors are the only people who can get a lost-cause candidate to exit the race. After Feb 26, they should start doing just that.
CNN has reported new details of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2022 election loss, including that Bernie Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who worked with the Trump campaign to uncover fraud, has turned over a trove of documents to the prosecutor.The materials include research and witness statements produced by the team, which was led by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani. CNN reports that Kerik will meet with Smith’s prosecutors next month for an interview.Here’s more from CNN’s story:
Former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik was part of the team led by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani trying to uncover fraud that would swing the election in favor of Trump.
For months, Kerik had tried to shield some of the documents from investigators, citing privilege.
But in recent weeks, Kerik gave the documents to the Trump’s 2024 campaign to review. After that review, the campaign declined to assert privilege, according to Kerik’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who turned over the documents to Smith’s office on Sunday.
“I have shared all of these documents, approximately 600MB, mostly pdfs, with the Special Counsel and look forward to sitting down with them in about 2 weeks to discuss.” Parlatore said.
Kerik is scheduled to sit down for an interview with the special counsel’s office next month, CNN has learned.
Among the materials now in Smith’s possession are witness statements, research and other documents produced by Giuliani’s team.
When the January 6 congressional committee subpoenaed Kerik for documents, he provided a log of his communications that he said he was withholding due to privilege. Those communications have never been disclosed publicly, as the committee did not challenge Kerik’s privilege claims in court.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax authority today announced it would end the practice of sending its employees on unannounced visits of the homes of people who owed taxes.The IRS received a major infusion of funds to modernize its systems under last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, but wound up in the crosshairs of Republicans, who claimed, without evidence, that the money would pay for armed agents.In a statement, IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said the decision to end the decades-old practice of dispatching unnamed agents to homes and businesses was part of its modernization plan.“We are taking a fresh look at how the IRS operates to better serve taxpayers and the nation, and making this change is a common-sense step. Changing this long-standing procedure will increase confidence in our tax administration work and improve overall safety for taxpayers and IRS employees,” Werfel said. The IRS added that the change in policy was supported by its employee union.In an interview with CNN, a top official with the NAACP civil rights group explains the problems with Alabama’s new congressional maps: Nonetheless, the GOP-led state has gone ahead with maps that appear to violate a supreme court ruling ordering lawmakers to draw a second majority African-American congressional district.Israel’s far-right government today won a battle in their case to reform the judiciary, but as the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports, American Jews opposed to the government’s policies against Palestinians say they are feeling optimistic about changing minds in the United States:Mike Levinson has been pushing back for 40 years and finally thinks he might be getting somewhere.“There’s a change and the politicians see it. I think it scares them,” said Levinson, holding a sign demanding “Stop Israeli settler violence” as he marched through New York on Thursday.“There’s a tremendous change going on in the American Jewish community. There are a lot of Jews, especially young people, who are not so quick to automatically and unconditionally support everything that Israel does. People are accepting the fact that it’s OK to be Jewish and criticise Israel.”Levinson, a Jewish New Yorker, began protesting against Israeli government policies during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It’s been a long and often lonely road since then as he has sought to get his fellow Americans to pay attention to decades of Israeli occupation, military assaults on the West Bank and Gaza, and the unrelenting expansion of Jewish settlements.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was seen joining striking writers and actors on a picket line outside Netflix’s Manhattan offices today.An overwhelming majority of voters in Ohio support a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee access to abortion in the state, according to a new poll. A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed 58% of Ohio voters backed the amendment enshrining abortion rights. Among those who backed the amendment included a third of Republicans and 85% of independent women.The proposed amendment states that:
Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.
Under this proposal, abortion could still be banned after “fetal viability”, or whether it can live outside the womb.Republican congressman of Florida Matt Gaetz has been defending his decision to introduce legislation to defund investigations into Donald Trump led by special counsel Jack Smith.Gaetz made the announcement last week, just hours after the former president said he had received a letter identifying him as a target of the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, led by Smith.In an interview with Newsmax, Gaetz said he didn’t “need Jack Smith to tell me what happened on January 6”. He said:
I was there. I saw President Trump encourage people to peacefully and patriotically go into places where permits had been reserved with city government for lawful protest activity.
A key group of Senate Democrats have urged the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to pressure Senator Tommy Tuberville to end his “reckless, dangerous” hold on military nominations.The letter, led by armed services committee member Senator Mazie Hirono and obtained by NBC, calls on McConnell to “exercise your leadership to protect the readiness of our military”.Tuberville, who for months has been blocking military nominations in protest of the Pentagon’s policy to reimburse travel expenses for those seeking reproductive care, including abortions, across state lines, has been “threatening our national security”, the letter says. It continues:
We know you share our concerns about the consequences of this hold on our Armed Services, and as the leader of your conference, we urge you to take stronger action to resolve this situation.
The Democratic signatories to the letter all serve on the Senate armed services committee with Tuberville.Election day 2024 is still a long way off, but we’re getting closer to 23 August, when Republican presidential candidates will have their first debate. Most of the big names have qualified, but Donald Trump says he might not attend, while his former vice-president Mike Pence is struggling to qualify, as are Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson. We’ll see if these candidates can turn it around in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the White House has expressed alarm at the latest news from Israel, where the far-right government has won passage of a key part its judicial overhaul. Opponents of the move say it could threaten the country’s democracy.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Texas’s Republican governor has rejected a justice department demand that it remove floating barriers intended to stop migrants entering from Mexico.
House Republicans may decide to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt.
Alabama Republicans are resisting a supreme court order to draw a second majority Black congressional district.
Republicans have hammered Joe Biden over migration at the southern border ever since he took office, but over the weekend, one GOP lawmaker said he believed both state and federal authorities had mishandled the crisis, the Guardian’s Maya Yang reports:A Texas Republican representative, Tony Gonzales, has called the current tactics used to deter migrants at the US-Mexico border “not acceptable” and urged the Biden administration and Congress to focus more heavily on legal immigration.In an interview with CBS’s Face The Nation on Sunday, Gonzales, whose 23rd district in Texas includes 800 miles of the US-Mexico border, said that the border crisis “has been anything but humane” and called recent reports of Texas troopers allegedly pushing small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande “not acceptable”.“It’s not acceptable and it hasn’t been acceptable for two years … Everything that is happening along the border is just adding fuel to the fire,” Gonzales said. He went on to say that Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who has come under fire from human rights groups over his controversial Operation Lone Star border security program, “is doing everything he can to secure the border”.A battle is brewing in Texas between its Republican governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration, which has demanded the state remove floating barriers placed in the Rio Grande to prevent people from crossing from Mexico.Today, Abbott vowed to defy the request from the justice department, potentially setting up a legal fight with the Democratic administration:As the Guardian’s Maya Yang reported last week, the deployment of the floating barriers comes amid reports that Texas authorities are mistreating migrants who cross into the state from Mexico:
Two pregnant migrant women who were trying to turn themselves in to US immigration authorities have alleged that Texas national guard soldiers refused to provide them with water.
Speaking to CNN at a shelter in Eagle Pass, Texas, the two women, identified as Carmen from Honduras and María from El Salvador, recounted their experiences at the border amid recent reports of “inhumane” behavior by American border authorities.
“They told us it was a crime to cross into the US and that we should return to Mexico,” Carmen, who said she is six months pregnant, told CNN. She added that she and her husband had initially tried to cross the Rio Grande on 12 July but were stopped by Texas national guard soldiers. More

The US-led United Nations Command has initiated talks with North Korea about the American soldier who ran into that country and crossed one of the most militarized borders in the world, according to an official.But a British lieutenant general who helps lead the UN command stopped short of saying exactly when talks about Travis King began, whether they have been constructive or how many exchanges there have been. The lieutenant general, Andrew Harrison, also would not address any known details about King’s health condition.“None of us know where this is going to end – I am, in life, an optimist, and I remain optimistic,” Harrison told reporters at a news conference in the South Korean capital, Seoul. “But … I will leave it at that.”Harrison added that the communications between the UN Command and North Korea about King kicked off through mechanisms which were set up under a 1953 armistice that halted fighting during the Korean war.He did not elaborate, but the Associated Press reported that Harrison may have been referring to a telephone line between the UN Command – which was created to fight that war – and the North Korean People’s Army at Panmunjom, the border truce village where King crossed on 18 July.Harrison’s comments about the beginning of a dialogue centering on King’s fate came about four days after the US said North Korea had been unresponsive to its attempts to start talks.King was supposed to be heading to Fort Bliss, Texas, after finishing a prison sentence in South Korea for assault. Potentially facing discipline from the army as well as discharge from the service, he took a civilian tour of Panmunjom on Tuesday and ran into North Korea.He was reportedly laughing as he bolted across the border separating the Koreas, which technically remain at war because no treaty was ever signed.King, 23, is the first known American to be held in North Korea in nearly five years.The US fought alongside the South during the Korean war and has never set up a diplomatic relationship with the North. The two countries sometimes talk through the armistice telephone line, but North Korea could be reluctant to release King quickly to the US given the political history lurking over the situation, according to experts in some quarters.The last three known American detainees in North Korea were released in 2018. Back then, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, engaged in nuclear diplomacy with the Donald Trump White House.But just a year earlier, the American student Otto Warmbier died within days of his being released in a coma after 17 months in captivity.Warmbier and other American detainees in North Korea were imprisoned over various accusations, including of subversion, anti-state activities and spying.King had served in South Korea as a cavalry scout with the US army’s 1st Armored Division. A court in Seoul sentenced him to prison and fined him 5m won (about $3,900) for assault on an unidentified person as well as damaging a police vehicle.His relatives have said he may have been overwhelmed by his legal issues and potential discharge from the army when – like many tourists do – he programmed a tour of Panmunjom, an area without civilian residents that is jointly overseen by the UN Command and North Korea.King’s detention in North Korea came at a particularly fraught time in that region politically speaking. North Korea on Monday fired two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast, the latest in a recent streaks of weapons testing which is apparently meant to protest against naval assets which the US sent to South Korea.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More