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    Biden says US needs fair tax code to ‘make this country great’ in speech on $7.3tn budget plan – as it happened

    Joe Biden is making a speech about taxes, healthcare and costs, on a visit to the swing state of New Hampshire this afternoon.The US president is sifting out some points that he hammered during his state of the union address last week and is expanding on them in public addresses and election campaign events, as he ramps up his reelection efforts with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump marching towards the nomination to run against him.“I’m a capitalist. Make all the money you want. Just begin to pay your fair share in taxes,” Biden told the crowd in Goffstown, on the outskirts of Manchester, New Hampshire.Biden wants to raise income taxes for those making over $400,000 a year, as well as raising corporation tax.“A fair tax code is how we invest in things that make this country great,” he said.He slammed “my predecessor” – Trump – for “making $2tr in tax cuts” during his single term and “expanding the federal deficit”.He aspires, he said, with a cooperative congress, to raise hundreds of billions of dollars by raising taxes on the very wealthiest Americans.He’s departing the stage now.Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
    Joe Biden revealed a new $7.3tn federal budget proposal, offering tax breaks for families, lower healthcare costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. The document promises to cut annual deficit spending by $3tn over 10 years, slowing but not halting the growth of the $34.5tn national debt. Here’s what is in Biden’s budget proposal.
    Biden travelled to the swing state of New Hampshire, as he tried to build on the energetic reboot of his presidency with his fiery state of the union speech last week. “Do you really think the wealthy and big corporations need another $2tn tax breaks, because that’s what he (Trump) wants to do,” Biden said of Donald Trump. “I’m going to keep fighting like hell to make it fair.”
    House Republican leadership called Biden’s budget “yet another glaring reminder of this administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and the Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility”. It’s “a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline”, a statement by House majority leader Steve Scalise, speaker Mike Johnson, majority whip Tom Emmer and Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik said.
    Marcia Fudge, the housing and urban development (HUD) secretary, resigned. Fudge, 71, announced she will step down from her post later this month “with mixed emotions” and intends to retire after decades of public service, as she called for more focus on homelessness and more affordable housing.
    Donald Trump’s lawyers asked the judge overseeing his impending criminal trial in New York to delay the trial until the supreme court finishes reviewing his claim of presidential immunity. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsification of business records tied to a hush money payment to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election, and jury selection is due to start 25 March.
    Trump risks another defamation lawsuit by E Jean Carroll after he once again repeatedly attacked her and denied her rape and defamation claims against him, despite facing nearly $90m in civil penalties over similar denials.
    Peter Navarro, the former Trump adviser, must report to prison on 19 March to begin a four-month sentence for defying the House January 6 committee, his lawyers said.
    Karla Jacinto Romero, the woman whose story of being sex trafficked as a child was used in Katie Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal speech said her horrific ordeal was misused by the Republican senator.
    Kansas Republicans were condemned as “vile and wrong” after attendees at a fundraising event beat and kicked a martial arts dummy wearing a Joe Biden mask.
    The White House unveiled a new $7.3tn federal budget proposal on Monday, offering tax breaks for families, lower health care costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.The proposal is unlikely to pass the House and the Senate, but it represents Joe Biden’s policy vision for a potential second four-year term if he and enough of his fellow Democrats win in November.Here’s what is in it:
    Raising the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28%
    Making billionaires pay at least 25% of their income in taxes
    A 39.6% marginal rate applied to households making over $1m
    Raising tax rate on US multinationals’ foreign earnings from 10.5% to 21%
    Bringing back a child tax credit for low- and middle-income earners
    Fund childcare programs for parents making under $200,000 annually
    Funnel $258bn to building or preserving two million homes
    Creating a new tax credit for first-time homebuyers of up to $10,000 over two years and providing a $5,000 annual mortgage relief credit for two years.
    Provide 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave for workers
    Eliminating origination fees on government student loans
    Providing about $900bn for defense
    Funding to expand personnel and resources at the US southern border, including
    In addition, the president said in his State of the Union address that Medicare should have the ability to negotiate prices on 500 prescription drugs, which could save $200bn over 10 years. Aides said his budget does not specify how many drug prices would be subject to negotiations.Biden’s proposed budget would raise tax revenues by $4.9tn over 10 years, including more than $2.7tn in tax hikes on businesses and nearly $2tn on wealthy individuals and estates, according to the US treasury.A coalition of youth voters on Monday gave Joe Biden’s re-election campaign a welcome shot in the arm amid swirling concerns over the president’s age and mental acuity.The endorsement from 15 groups of mostly gen Z and young millennial voters was announced to mark the launch of Students for Biden-Harris, an initiative from the campaign designed to recapture the support of younger voters who helped propel Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House in 2020.Florida congressman Maxwell Frost, who at 27 is the youngest member of the House, will serve on its national advisory board and host its first meeting in Washington DC on Thursday. The organization will hold regular virtual and in-person meetings around the country as it seeks to build a network of chapters, many on university and college campuses. Frost said in a press release announcing the coalition:
    Young voters were crucial in delivering the election for President Biden and Vice-President Harris in 2020, and they will be just as consequential in 2024.
    It is part of a wider White House outreach to younger voters, whose support for Biden, 81, and Harris has become more lukewarm as their first term has progressed, research suggests.Joe Biden is making a speech about taxes, healthcare and costs, on a visit to the swing state of New Hampshire this afternoon.The US president is sifting out some points that he hammered during his state of the union address last week and is expanding on them in public addresses and election campaign events, as he ramps up his reelection efforts with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump marching towards the nomination to run against him.“I’m a capitalist. Make all the money you want. Just begin to pay your fair share in taxes,” Biden told the crowd in Goffstown, on the outskirts of Manchester, New Hampshire.Biden wants to raise income taxes for those making over $400,000 a year, as well as raising corporation tax.“A fair tax code is how we invest in things that make this country great,” he said.He slammed “my predecessor” – Trump – for “making $2tr in tax cuts” during his single term and “expanding the federal deficit”.He aspires, he said, with a cooperative congress, to raise hundreds of billions of dollars by raising taxes on the very wealthiest Americans.He’s departing the stage now.Joe Biden has just taken the stage in Goffstown, New Hampshire, where he is about to speak about the economy, health care and prescription drug prices.The address comes after he sent his aspirational 2025 budget to Congress, following his return on Monday morning to Washington from Delaware, and then flew to the New England swing state.Biden is on a push to hit the campaign trail, trying to build on the energetic reboot of his presidency with his fiery state of the union speech last week, in the face of criticisms that he is too old and doddery to run for reelection.Out of the gate he is hailing his plan, under the Inflation Reduction Act, to cap the total that seniors on Medicare pay for prescription drugs at $2,000 a head per year.“We beat Big Pharma,” he said of the US pharmaceutical industry.Hello, US politics blog readers, Joe Biden has arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire, shortly after presenting his desired budget to Congress. He’s due to make remarks at 2.30pm ET on, according to the White House, on “lowering costs for American families”. Later he has an election campaign event, as he continues with his plans to hit the campaign trail hard in the wake of his State of the Union speech last Thursday, as he tries to sell votes on his reection.Here’s where things stand:
    Housing and urban development (HUD) secretary Marcia Fudge, 71, has announced that later this month she will step down from her post “with mixed emotions” and retire after fighting for more affordable housing and reduced homelessness in the US.
    Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge overseeing his impending criminal trial in New York to delay the trial until the US supreme court finishes reviewing his claim of presidential immunity. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsification of business records tied to a hush money payment to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election, and jury selection is due to start March 25.
    House Republican leadership called Joe Biden’s budget, just presented to Congress, “yet another glaring reminder of this administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and the Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility”. It’s “a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline,” a statement by House majority leader Steve Scalise, Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Whip Tom Emmer and Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik said.
    The US president unveiled a $7.3tn budget proposal offering tax breaks for families, lower health care costs and higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Biden’s 2025 fiscal year budget includes raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 from 21%, hiking rates on people making over $400,000 and effoprts to bring more drug costs down.
    Donald Trump risks another defamation lawsuit by E Jean Carroll after he once again repeatedly attacked her and denied her rape and defamation claims against him, despite facing nearly $90m in civil penalties over similar denials.
    Peter Navarro, a top former Trump administration official, has been ordered to report to a Miami prison on 19 March to begin serving a four-month sentence for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack. Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September 2023 of two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation.
    Karla Jacinto Romero, the woman whose experience as a victim of human sex trafficking that Alabama Senator Katie Britt appeared to have shared in the GOP response to the State of the Union, slammed the lawmaker and accused her of inaccurately using her story to highlight the Biden administration’s border control policies, even though her plight was experienced during a previous, Republican administration.
    Housing and urban development (HUD) secretary Marcia Fudge has announced that later this month she will step down from her post “with mixed emotions” and intends to retire after decades of public service, accompanying her news with a call for more focus on homelessness and more affordable housing.She also appeared to time her announcement so that she could step away before the 2024 presidential election reaches its most intense phases this summer and fall, calling the election season, in an exclusive interview with USA Today “crazy, silly”.Fudge, 71, intends to return to her home state of Ohio after 22 March and continue life as a private citizen, rather than running for any other public office, she told USA Today in an exclusive interview.
    “It’s time to go home. I do believe strongly that I have done just about everything I could do at HUD for this administration as we go into this crazy, silly season of an election,” she told the outlet.
    Fudge said affordable housing should be a nonpartisan focus.
    It is not a red or blue issue. Everybody knows that it is an issue…an American issue.’’
    She told USA Today that under her tenure at the agency, since the start of the Biden administration, she worked to improve its role in supporting families with housing needs, helping people experiencing homelessness and boosting economic development in communities.Joe Biden issued a statement praising Fudge.
    Over the past three years she has been a strong voice for expanding efforts to build generational wealth through homeownership and lowering costs and promoting fairness for America’s renters. Thanks to Secretary Fudge, we’ve helped first-time homebuyers, and we are working to cut the cost of renting. And there are more housing units under construction right now than at any time in the last 50 years.”
    Joe Biden’s budget proposal for 2025 includes a $4.7bn emergency fund for border security to enable the department of homeland security to ramp up operations in the event of a migrant surge, NBC reported.The contingency fund would allow the department to tap into funds as an as-needed basis when the number of undocumented migrants crossing the southern border tops a certain threshold, according to the report. That threshold is unspecified in the document.The request is likely to fall on deaf ears among congressional Republicans, who have already refused to fund $13.6bn the Biden administration asked for in an emergency supplemental request aimed at responding to a record high number of migrants crossing the border.Biden’s budget also asks for $405m to hire 1,300 more border patrol agents, $1bn for aid to Central America to address the root causes of migration, and nearly $1bn to address the backlog of over 2.4m pending cases in US immigration courts.Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge overseeing his impending criminal trial in New York to delay the trial until the supreme court finishes reviewing his claim of presidential immunity.Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsification of business records tied to a hush money payment to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election.Last month, prosecutors said they planned to introduce evidence of a “pressure campaign” by Trump in 2018 to ensure his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, did not cooperate with a federal investigation into the payment to Daniels. Cohen pleaded guilty that year to violating campaign finance law.The trial is set to begin on 25 March in a New York state court in Manhattan.In their court filing on Monday, Trump’s lawyers said the claim of a pressure campaign was “fictitious” and argued that prosecutors should not be allowed to present evidence about Trump’s public statements about Cohen from that year because he made those statements in his official capacity as president.The supreme court last month agreed to take up the claim that Trump has absolute immunity from prosecution in the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. It is scheduled to hear arguments in that case during the week of 22 April.The House Republican leadership have issued a statement calling Joe Biden’s budget “yet another glaring reminder of this administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and the Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility”.The president’s budget is “a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline,” a statement by House majority leader Steve Scalise, Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Whip Tom Emmer and Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik reads.
    While hardworking Americans struggle with crushing inflation and mounting national debt, the President would increase their pain to spend trillions of additional taxpayer dollars to advance his left-wing agenda.
    Biden aides said their budget was realistic and detailed while rival measures from Republicans were not financially viable.“Congressional Republicans don’t tell you what they cut, who they harm,” AP reported White House budget director Shalanda Young as saying.
    The president is transparent, details every way he shows he values the America people.
    House Republicans voted on Thursday on their own budget resolution for the next fiscal year out of committee, saying it would trim deficits by $14tn over 10 years. But their measure would depend on rosy economic forecasts and sharp spending cuts. The White House called the plan unworkable.Joe Biden unveiled a $7.3tn budget proposal aimed as election-year pitch to voters that would offer tax breaks for families, lower health care costs and higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.Biden’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year that starts in October includes raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 from 21%, hiking rates on people making over $400,000, forcing those with wealth of $100m to pay at least 25% of their income in taxes, and letting the government negotiate to bring more drug costs down, Reuters reported.Meanwhile, the government would bring back a child tax credit for low- and middle-income earners, fund childcare programs, funnel $258bn to building homes, provide paid family leave for workers, and spends billions on violent crime prevention and law enforcement.The document promises to cut annual deficit spending by $3tn over 10 years, slowing but not halting the growth of the $34.5tn national debt. Biden also renewed his demand for funding on border security, Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and other national security issues that has been stalled by Republican congressional leadership for months.White House budgets are always something of a presidential wishlist, and Biden’s proposal is unlikely to pass the House and Senate to become law. Biden and his aides previewed parts of his budget going into last week’s State of the Union address, and they provided the fine print on Monday, AP reported.Kansas Republicans were condemned as “vile and wrong” after attendees at a fundraising event beat and kicked a martial arts dummy wearing a Joe Biden mask.Footage posted to social media showed attendees at the Johnson county Republican event kicking and beating the dummy, which was wearing a Biden mask and a T-shirt displaying the slogan “Let’s Go Brandon”, a rightwing meme mean to disparage Biden.Dinah Sykes, the Democratic minority leader in the state Senate, told the Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news site:
    Political violence of any kind is vile and wrong, and we cannot afford to brush it under the rug when others encourage it.
    Sykes called for state Republican leaders to take action against those responsible. Mike Brown, the Kansas Republican party chair, told the Kansas City Star he was not at the event, which was not organised by the state party, though he sent emails to promote it. Mike Kuckelman, a former state Republican chair, condemned the event.Donald Trump risks another defamation lawsuit by E Jean Carroll after he repeatedly attacked her and denied her rape and defamation claims against him, despite facing nearly $90m in civil penalties over similar denials.Trump, in an interview with CNBC, described the numerous judgments against him in New York as “the most ridiculous decisions … including the Ms Bergdorf Goodman, a person I’d never met.” He added:
    I have no idea who she is, except one thing, I got sued. From that point on I said, ‘Wow, that’s crazy, what this is.
    Trump was referring to Carroll, who in 2019 first publicly accused the former president of raping her in the changing room of Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury Manhattan department store.On Saturday during a campaign rally in Georgia, Trump said Carroll “is not a believable person” and blamed the lawsuit on “Democratic operatives”. He said:
    Ninety-one million based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn’t know, never heard of, I know nothing about her.
    Carroll’s lawyer has raised the prospect of a new lawsuit, the New York Times reported. In a statement this morning, Roberta A Kaplan, said:
    The statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years. As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client.
    Donald Trump “will not give a penny” to Ukraine if he is re-elected US president, the far-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said after a controversial meeting with Trump in Florida.“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told state media in Hungary on Sunday.
    Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.
    According to Orbán, Trump has a “detailed plan” to end the Ukraine war, which began two years ago when Russia invaded. Calling Trump “a man of peace”, Orbán said:
    If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone can’t finance this war. And then the war is over.
    This would likely mean Ukraine losing the war to Russia. Long seen to demonstrate deference towards and enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, Trump recently suggested that if re-elected he would encourage Russia to attack US allies he deemed not to contribute enough to the Nato alliance.Orbán and Trump met at Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend. More

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    Biden gets campaign boost from coalition of youth voters

    A coalition of youth voters on Monday gave Joe Biden’s re-election campaign a welcome shot in the arm amid swirling concerns over the president’s age and mental acuity.The endorsement from 15 groups of mostly gen Z and young millennial voters was announced to mark the launch of Students for Biden-Harris, an initiative from the campaign designed to recapture the support of younger voters who helped propel Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House in 2020.Florida congressman Maxwell Frost, who at 27 is the youngest member of the House, will serve on its national advisory board and host its first meeting in Washington DC on Thursday. The organization will hold regular virtual and in-person meetings around the country as it seeks to build a network of chapters, many on university and college campuses.“Young voters were crucial in delivering the election for President Biden and Vice-President Harris in 2020, and they will be just as consequential in 2024,” Frost said in a press release announcing the coalition.It is part of a wider White House outreach to younger voters, whose support for Biden, 81, and Harris has become more lukewarm as their first term has progressed, research suggests.A Harvard Youth poll in the fall found that only 49% of respondents aged 18 to 29 “definitely” planned to vote in the 2024 election, down from 57% at the same point four years ago; and that Biden’s approval rating among that group stood at only 35%.On the issues that concern young voters most, including the climate emergency, gun violence, abortion, education and protecting democracy, a plurality of voters said they trusted neither Biden nor Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee.Speculation that young voters may abandon Biden this time around has prompted action. A partially self-mocking $30m TV and digital ad blitz was launched at the weekend, featuring Biden talking up his experience as an asset.“Look, I’m not a young guy. That’s no secret. But I understand how to get things done for the American people,” the president said in one ad, which also included an outtake of Biden laughing and calling himself “young, energetic, and handsome”.In a controversial move last month, the Biden campaign joined TikTok, the social media platform among the most used by younger generations. The controversy centered on the subject of potential security concerns over the app’s Chinese ownership.Later this month, Harris will talk about the administration’s efforts to combat gun violence during a visit to Parkland, Florida, birthplace of the March for Our Lives youth movement following the 2018 murders of 17 students and staff in one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings.“Gen Z has grown up hiding under desks, looking for the nearest exits in movie theaters, and worrying about being shot in our neighborhoods,” Aaliyah Eastmond, a Parkland survivor and co-founder of Team Enough, the youth-led arm of gun control advocacy group Brady, said in a press release.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Fearing our lives could be cut short by gun violence is our daily reality, and this has long been the reality for Black and Brown youth. We need elected officials who will take on the [National Rifle Association], put our lives before gun lobby profits, and end the gun violence epidemic that is killing our youth.”Most of the 15 groups, which also include College Democrats of America, Dream For America, the Newtown Action Alliance, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Students Demand Action and Voices of Gen-Z, offered Biden and Harris ringing endorsements.Notably, even some that expressed reservations said they were still willing to support Biden’s re-election.“Young Americans know that while no candidate is perfect, progress will be possible under a second term of the Biden-Harris administration,” said Sam Weinberg, executive director of Path to Progress.“While we endorse President Biden and vice-president Harris, and want to see them remain in the White House, we also pledge to continue demanding justice here, at home, and around the world, and to push the administration to live up to the values of our generation.” More

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    Trump asks to delay hush-money trial until supreme court weighs immunity claim

    Donald Trump on Monday asked the New York judge overseeing his criminal case on charges stemming from hush money paid to a porn star to delay the trial until the US supreme court finishes reviewing his claim of presidential immunity in a separate case.The hush money trial is set to begin on 25 March in a New York state court in Manhattan.Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsification of business records.Prosecutors say he directed his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, to pay porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she says they had a decade earlier, and then falsely recorded his reimbursement to Cohen as legal expenses.Trump denies the encounter with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.Last month, prosecutors said they planned to introduce evidence of a “pressure campaign” by Trump in 2018 to ensure Cohen did not cooperate with a federal investigation into the payment to Daniels. Cohen pleaded guilty that year to violating campaign finance law.In their court filing on Monday, Trump’s lawyers called prosecutors’ claim of a pressure campaign “fictitious”. They said prosecutors should not be allowed to present evidence about Trump’s public statements about Cohen from that year because he made those statements in his official capacity as president.“Without immunity from criminal prosecution based on official acts, the President’s political opponents will seek to influence and control his or her decisions via de facto extortion,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.A spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the charges, declined to comment.The case is one of four federal and state criminal indictments the presumptive Republican presidential nominee faces. Firm trial dates have not yet been set in the other three cases, which stem from his efforts to reverse his 2020 loss to Democratic president Joe Biden, and his handling of government documents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe supreme court on 28 February agreed to decide Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution in his federal case in Washington DC, over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, delaying a potential trial. The supreme court set the case for oral arguments during the week of 22 April.Trump has pleaded not guilty in all criminal cases, which he has termed “election interference”. More

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    Ex-Trump adviser must report to prison on 19 March for defying January 6 panel

    Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro must report to prison on 19 March to begin a four-month sentence for defying the House January 6 committee, his lawyers said.Navarro, 74, is an economist turned trade adviser who became closely involved in attempts to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, attempts that culminated in the deadly attack on Congress of 6 January 2021.Navarro openly boasted of his role in an election subversion plot he called the “Green Bay Sweep”. The House committee subpoenaed him. He refused to co-operate, claiming executive privilege covered interactions with Trump as president.Held in contempt by the House, Navarro was charged by the Department of Justice and found guilty last September. He was sentenced in January this year.“You are not a victim, you are not the object of a political prosecution,” the judge in the case said then. “These are circumstances of your own making.”Navarro asked to be spared jail while appealing his sentence, a request the judge denied.Late on Sunday, an attorney for Navarro said in court papers he had been “ordered to report to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, FCI Miami, on or before 2pm ET on March 19, 2024”.The lawyer referred to his client as “Dr Navarro”, highlighting an academic career which saw Navarro rise to prominence as a China hawk but also be exposed for extensively quoting a source, Ron Vara, that turned out to be an anagram of his own name.The lawyer wrote: “Dr Navarro respectfully reiterates his request for an administrative stay … should this court deny Dr Navarro’s motion, he respectfully requests an administrative stay so as to permit the supreme court review of this court’s denial.”The filing said Navarro was still citing executive privilege as reason not to comply with Congress. The justice department has called his arguments “meritless”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf Navarro does report to prison, he will be the most senior aide to Trump – who faces 91 criminal charges himself – yet to sit behind bars.The former Trump campaign chair and White Houses strategist Steve Bannon was given his own four-month sentence for contempt of Congress, for refusing to co-operate with the January 6 committee.A fedeal court is considering Bannon’s appeal. More

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    Kansas Republicans criticized for ‘vile’ stunt with dummy in Biden mask

    Kansas Republicans were condemned as “vile and wrong” after attendees at a fundraising event beat and kicked a martial arts dummy wearing a Joe Biden mask.Dinah Sykes, the Democratic minority leader in the state senate, told the Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news site: “Political violence of any kind is vile and wrong, and we cannot afford to brush it under the rug when others encourage it.”Footage posted to social media showed attendees at the Johnson county Republican event kicking and beating the dummy, which was wearing a Biden mask and a T-shirt displaying the slogan “Let’s go Brandon”, a rightwing meme mean to disparage Biden.Sykes called for state Republican leaders to take action against those responsible.Mike Brown, the Kansas Republican party chair, told the Kansas City Star he was not at the event, which was not organised by the state party, though he sent emails to promote it.Mike Kuckelman, a former state Republican chair, condemned the event.“This conduct is shameful, and it is WRONG,” Kuckelman wrote on Facebook. “Brown and [Johnson county GOP chair Maria] Holiday must resign. Republicans, especially elected Republicans, must demand [this]. Silence is complicity in this case.”Citing Republican uproar in 2017 when the comedian Kathy Griffin posed with an effigy of Donald Trump’s severed head, Kuckelman added: “I don’t agree with President Biden’s policies, but he is a fellow human being. No one should condone or defend this horrific and shameful conduct.“We are Republicans, and we are better than this.”Holiday told the Star the dummy was part of a booth run by a karate school, promoting self-defence. She also said Kuckelman’s post was inaccurate but did not explain how, the Star said.Kuckelman told the Star the stunt was “just gross”. The paper’s editorial board agreed, but took issue with his claim that Republicans were “better” than the behaviour displayed in Johnson county.“That’s unfortunately no longer true,” the Star said, citing Trump’s campaign-trail mockery of Biden’s stutter; his refusal to stop attacking the writer E Jean Carroll, who he was ordered to pay $83.3m for defamation arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”; and his advocacy of violence against migrants, protesters and political opponents.“So while it’s great that there are still Republicans out there who expect better,” the paper said, “it’s their own leader who encourages worse …“If more Republicans in Kansas and beyond really believed that juvenile, disrespectful behavior were inexcusable, Donald Trump would not be running their party, and bringing out the worst in their partisans.” More

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    ‘New text, same problems’: inside the fight over child online safety laws

    Sharp divisions between advocates for children’s safety online have emerged as a historic bill has gathered enough votes to pass in the US Senate. Amendments to the bill have appeased some former detractors who now support the legislation; its fiercest critics, however, have become even more entrenched in their demands for changes.The Kids Online Safety Act (Kosa), introduced more than two years ago, reached 60 backers in the Senate mid-February. A number of human rights groups still vehemently oppose the legislation, underscoring ongoing divisions among experts, lawmakers and advocates over how to keep young people safe online.“The Kids Online Safety Act is our best chance to address social media’s toxic business model, which has claimed far too many children’s lives and helped spur a mental health crisis,” said Josh Golin, the executive director of the children’s online safety group Fairplay.Opponents say alterations to the bill are not enough and that their concerns remain unchanged.“A one-size-fits-all approach to kids’ safety won’t keep kids safe,” said Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “This bill still rests on the premise that there is consensus around the types of content and design features that cause harm. There isn’t, and this belief will limit young people from exercising their agency and accessing the communities they need to online.”What is the Kids Online Safety Act?Sponsored by the Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal and the Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn, Kosa would be the biggest change to American tech legislation in decades. The bill would require platforms like Instagram and TikTok to mitigate online dangers via design changes or opt-outs of algorithm-based recommendations, among other measures. Enforcement would demand much more fundamental modifications to social networks than current regulations require.When it was first introduced in 2022, Kosa prompted an open letter signed by more than 90 human rights organizations united in strong opposition. The groups warned the bill could be “weaponized” by conservative state attorneys general – who were charged with determining what content is harmful – to censor online resources and information for queer and trans youth or people seeking reproductive healthcare.In response to the critiques, Blumenthal amended the bill, notably shifting some enforcement decisions to the Federal Trade Commission rather than state attorneys general. At least seven LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations that previously spoke out against the bill dropped their opposition citing the “considerable changes” to Kosa that “significantly mitigate the risk of it being misused to suppress LGBTQ+ resources or stifle young people’s access to online communities”, including Glaad, the Human Rights Campaign and the Trevor Project.To the critics who now support Kosa, the amendments by Blumenthal solved the legislation’s major issues. However, the majority of those who signed the initial letter still oppose the bill, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, and the ACLU.“New bill text, same problems,” said Adam Kovacevich, chief executive of the tech industry policy coalition the Chamber of Progress, which is supported by corporate partners including Airbnb, Amazon, Apple and Snap. “The changes don’t address a lot of its potential abuses.” Snap and X, formerly Twitter, have publicly supported Kosa.Is Kosa overly broad or a net good?Kovacevich said the latest changes fail to address two primary concerns with the legislation: that vague language will lead social media platforms to over-moderate to restrict their liability, and that allowing state attorneys general to enforce the legislation could enable targeted and politicized content restriction even with the federal government assuming more of the bill’s authority.The vague language targeted by groups that still oppose the bill is the “duty of care” provision, which states that social media firms have “a duty to act in the best interests of a minor that uses the platform’s products or services” – a goal subject to an enforcer’s interpretation. The legislation would also require platforms to mitigate harms by creating “safeguards for minors”, but with little direction as to what content would be deemed harmful, opponents argue the legislation is likely to encourage companies to more aggressively filter content – which could lead to unintended consequences.“Rather than protecting children, this could impact access to protected speech, causing a chilling effect for all users and incentivizing companies to filter content on topics that disproportionately impact marginalized communities,” said Prem M Trivedi, policy director at the Open Technology Institute, which opposes Kosa.Trivedi said he and other opponents fear that important but charged topics like gun violence and racial justice could be interpreted as having a negative impact on young users, and be filtered out by algorithms. Many have expressed concern that LGBTQ+-related topics would be targeted by conservative regulators, leading to fewer available resources for young users who rely on the internet to connect with their communities. Blackburn, the bill’s sponsor, has previously stated her intention to “protect minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence”.An overarching concern among opponents of the bill is that it is too broad in scope, and that more targeted legislation would achieve similar goals with fewer unintended impacts, said Bhatia.“There is a belief that there are these magic content silver bullets that a company can apply, and that what stands between a company applying those tools and not applying those tools is legislation,” she said. “But those of us who study the impact of these content filters still have reservations about the bill.”Many with reservations acknowledge that it does feature broadly beneficial provisions, said Mohana Mukherjee, visiting faculty at George Washington University, who has studied technology’s impact on teenagers and young adults. She said the bill’s inclusion of a “Kosa council” – a coalition of stakeholders including parents, academic experts, health professionals and young social media users to provide advice on how best to implement the legislation – is groundbreaking.“It’s absolutely crucial to involve young adults and youth who are facing these problems, and to have their perspective on the legislation,” she said.Kosa’s uncertain futureKosa is likely to be voted on in the Senate this session, but other legislation targeting online harms threatens its momentum. A group of senators is increasingly pushing a related bill that would ban children under the age of 13 from social media. Its author, Brian Schatz, has requested a panel that would potentially couple the bill with Kosa. Blumenthal, the author of Kosa, has cautioned that such a move could slow the passage of both bills and spoke out against the markup.“We should move forward with the proposals that have the broadest support, but at the same time, have open minds about what may add value,” he said, according to the Washington Post. “This process is the art of addition not subtraction often … but we should make sure that we’re not undermining the base of support.”The bill’s future in the House is likewise unclear. Other bills with similar purported goals are floating around Congress, including the Invest in Child Safety Act – a bill introduced by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and the representatives Anna G Eshoo and Brian Fitzpatrick – which would invest more than $5bn into investigating online sexual abusers.With so much legislation swirling around the floors of Congress, it’s unclear when – or if – a vote will be taken on any of them. But experts agree that Congress has at least begun trying to bolster children’s online safety.“This is an emotionally fraught topic – there are urgent online safety issues and awful things that happen to our children at the intersection of the online world and the offline world,” said Trivedi. “In an election year, there are heightened pressures on everyone to demonstrate forward movement on issues like this.” More

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    Mitch McConnell loathes Trump more than most, but he’s been his top enabler | Sidney Blumenthal

    The convergence on 28 February of Mitch McConnell’s retirement announcement as the Republican Senate leader with the supreme court’s order to accept Donald Trump’s appeal to consider his immunity from prosecution was a bitter irony for McConnell and triumph for Trump. It is a telltale subplot in Trump’s theater of humiliation in which the supreme court is playing a starring role as his best supporting actor.On 4 March came another supreme court-delivered victory for Trump. “A big win for America,” tweeted Trump. In a spray of divided opinion the court’s overturning of the state of Colorado’s ruling that Trump was disqualified from the ballot for being an insurrectionist under the 14th amendment section 3 enhanced his impunity and encouraged his grasp for absolute power.McConnell, the partisan architect of the partisan supreme court majority, could, if he wished to boast, rightly claim credit for those justices staging the timely rescue of his nemesis. Putting in place justice after justice, breaking precedent after precedent, he is the father of this court’s majority. He considers it his greatest accomplishment.McConnell’s cold arrangement with Trump was strictly business: McConnell protected Trump in exchange for Trump packing the court. While few truly deeply loathe Trump more than McConnell, nobody has been a more consequential enabler or fatally miscalculated the spread of his stain. But their unholy alliance cannot be mistaken for a Faustian bargain; neither was selling his soul.McConnell made plain the purely transactional basis of the relationship when he endorsed Trump after Super Tuesday, citing how “we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people … a generational change of our federal judiciary – most importantly, the supreme court”.In the Trump disqualification case, a conservative majority of five on the supreme court effectively engaged in a nullification of the 14th amendment. The court ignored or warped the history of the 14th amendment, which was conceived and enacted to prevent insurrectionists from holding federal offices. To defend Trump, the conservative majority threw overboard originalism and textualism, the alpha and omega of its contrived legal ideology, as an obstacle to the desired result. Through a bizarre concatenation of historical falsehoods and legal contrivances, they refused to define whether Trump is an insurrectionist, or mention the word, which is the essence of the relevant section 3.Instead they went to an extreme edge to justify maintaining Trump’s place on the ballot, inventing a remedy that will never be applied, that only congressional legislation can determine disqualification of a person for federal office. In short, they granted Trump immunity from disqualification for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States.Unanimity was a thin illusion of consensus. Justice Amy Coney Barrett uncomfortably filed her own opinion to dissent from the other conservatives’ overreaching. The three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in their separate concurrence, systematically knocked down every specious claim in the majority opinion – the false precedents cited, the false notion that disqualification is not self-executing, the bowdlerized quotes to achieve a false conclusion – yet signed on to avoid “a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles”, though that supposition is both narrow and vague.Then they flayed the majority for straying from the “fundamental principle of judicial restraint [that] is practically as old as our Republic”.They stated that by resolving “many unsettled questions about Section 3 the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President”. But their opinion did not stop there. They charged that “the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office”. The category of “all alleged insurrectionists” encompasses the Republican members of the Congress who were involved in Trump’s coup attempt. The reference to “future challenges” applies first and foremost to Donald Trump. The liberal concurrence is a fierce dissent from the majority’s manufacture of an insurrectionist protection act. The decision has exposed a splintered court and left to the immunity case the outstanding issue of “an oathbreaking insurrectionist … becoming President”.In the immunity case the court has declined to let it go forward after a three federal judge panel ruled on all the questions at its heart and special counsel Jack Smith urged deliberate speed. Instead, the court scheduled to hold a hearing during the week of 22 April, in the full knowledge that every delay makes Trump’s escape from justice more possible and that postponement serves Trump’s strategy.View image in fullscreenThe immunity case will not reach trial, if there is one, until months after the court’s eventual ruling on whether a president is an absolute dictator. Given the calendar, it appears highly unlikely the trial will be concluded by election day. The court’s charade of taking on the decision as a matter of prudence is a transparent stalling tactic to deny the voters the test of the evidence in a court of law so they could make a fully informed decision of their own. Slow-walking the January 6 prosecution of Trump, the court has granted him de facto immunity for the course of the campaign. Tick, tock.With its aid and comfort to Trump in both the disqualification and immunity cases, the Roberts court (or, if one prefers, the Thomas court) has shown itself to be the most politically driven since the Taney court that decided the Dred Scott case (or, if one prefers, the Rehnquist/Scalia court that brutally decided Bush v Gore).On the disqualification case, Trump skates scot-free. On the immunity case, the court kicks the can as far into the future as it benefits him. For these gifts from this court, Trump owes a debt of ultimate gratitude to Mitch McConnell.McConnell had many reasons for declaring he has reached the twilight of his career, even though the Republicans may gain control of the Senate after the election and he would be leader again. His health, after all, is fragile. He froze speechless twice in press conferences. He has suffered a terrible personal tragedy, the accidental drowning of his wife’s sister. But approaching the promised land once more, which might be his culmination, he restrained himself from entering. He announced he would relinquish the enormous power he has accumulated over a lifetime because he could see it ebbing away to his worst enemy. That very worst enemy is not Joe Biden, who he likes and would destroy out of cold partisanship, but Trump, who he hates with a white-hot passion, but whom he has safeguarded and would help become “dictator for a day”.“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular time,” said McConnell in his Senate speech announcing his retirement. “I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them.” Believe him, he can count.On 13 February, two weeks earlier, he helped engineer Senate passage of a compromise bill wrapping a package of policies on the border and immigration with funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. He was particularly intent on providing aid to beleaguered Ukraine, where he has traveled to express his support directly to President Zelensky. The bill passed with 71 votes, clearing the hurdle of an obstructionist filibuster, McConnell’s blunt instrument of choice. Yet he could muster only 22 Republican votes. It was his Pyrrhic victory. He lost a majority of his conference, nearly all those elected since 2018 and under 55 years old. His iron grip faltered from Trump’s pressure.McConnell’s bleak persona had no popular appeal. His influence has always been achieved through cash. As party boss, like party bosses of the past, he rewarded regularity from his members. He was shocked to discover the cult of personality that altered the base of the party. “Things are changing just not fast enough,” tweeted Senator Eric Schmitt, a Trump zealot explaining his and others’ vote against the omnibus bill as a vote of no confidence in McConnell’s leadership. He had always assumed that dark money talks and senators walk. But he now encountered a greater motivating fear.McConnell’s enforcement of the party line made him appear like Senate leaders before him. His acolytes praise him as an “institutionalist”. He basks in presenting himself as a “constitutionalist”. But to build his power McConnell has subverted constitutional norms and standards, corroded and corrupted checks and balances, and drastically weakened the Senate through his explosive abuse of filibusters to transfer power to the federal courts, which he stuffed with Federalist Society cadres. He has been more than a great anti-institutionalist; he has been an anti-constitutionalist.McConnell’s great crusade was to tear down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (the so-called McCain-Feingold bill) and open the sluice gates for dark money. The year after its passage he filed his opposition in a case that made its way to the supreme court, McConnell v Federal Election Commission, which he lost in a 5-4 ruling upholding the bill. Still, he persisted.In 2006, far-right Samuel Alito was nominated to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the court. She was a moderate Republican of the old school, who upheld abortion rights and campaign finance reform. When 25 Democrats attempted a symbolic filibuster against Alito, McConnell took the floor to denounce the effort as unconstitutional: “Mr President, we stand today on the brink of a new and reckless effort by a few to deny the rights of many to exercise our constitutional duty to advise and consent, to give this man the simple up or down vote he deserves. The Senate should repudiate this tactic.”In 2010, with Alito on the court, it ruled 5-4 in Citizens United v FEC that restrictions on independent campaign funds – dark money – were violated free speech. “So, all Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech,” said McConnell. It was his emancipation proclamation; he freed the dark money.In 2014, McConnell filed an amicus brief in McCutcheon, et al v FEC, a case he inspired that was backed by the Republican National Committee, challenging aggregate limits on campaign contributions as “a severe infringement on the rights of speech.” The supreme court ruled for McCutcheon in a 5-4 decision.With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, McConnell laid down the Republican line. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he ordered. His tactic was the filibuster that he had decried. During the Obama presidency, McConnell held up 517 Senate debates through filibusters. The Senate Republicans successfully filibustered 79 Obama federal judicial nominees during his first five years, compared to 68 in entire previous history. After the Republicans gained control of the Senate in 2015, they blocked 50 of 70 nominations to federal judgeships.Through dark money and filibusters, servicing corporate interests, McConnell built a new political machine at the expense of paralyzing and diminishing the Senate. He capped his obstructions after the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. If Obama were to succeed in seating his appointment on the supreme court the majority would tilt 5-4 against the conservatives.McConnell refused to allow even a single committee hearing for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a highly regarded judge of the most moderate temperament on the DC district court. McConnell asserted a novel doctrine that a nomination to the supreme court could not be considered in a president’s last year and that the vacancy must be filled by the next president. He dubbed his gambit “a constitutional right”. “One of my proudest moments,” he said after killing the Garland nomination, “was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr President, you will not fill the supreme court vacancy.’” When Sean Hannity later asked McConnell wondered why Obama left so many vacancies on the federal courts, McConnell replied: “I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”In the 2016 campaign, McConnell backed Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, an acolyte, in the primaries. After Trump bulldozed his way to the nomination, McConnell expected him to be a dead weight on Republican Senate candidates. He suggested that they could separate themselves by running negatives ads against him. “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” he said.McConnell remained complacent that he was the enduring Republican standard and Trump the blip. “My view is that Trump will not change the Republican party,” he said. “If he brings in new followers, that’s great, and well worth the effort, but he will not change the Republican party … I think he’d be fine.” He added as an additional note of reassurance that the constitution “constrains all of us, members of Congress and the president as well”.Watching Trump’s win on election night, McConnell said: “The first thing that came to my mind was the supreme court.” He was soon in touch with Leonard Leo, chairman of the Federalist Society, who described McConnell as his “vigilant and irrepressible” partner in gaining control of the federal courts. Leo was an octopus of dark money operations, his tentacles reaching far and wide. After Citizens United, he sat atop hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars to promote his causes and McConnell’s candidates.A week after the election, Leo carried a list of court nominees into a meeting with Trump at Trump Tower. Trump’s first supreme court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, was on the list. His second and third nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were on Leo’s next list. Leo sent more lists to the White House, rubber-stamped by White House counsel Don McGahn, a Federalist Society stalwart, and McConnell would process them through the Senate. Eighty-five per cent of Trump’s court appointees were Federalist Society members. He was entrenching conservative power in the courts for a generation to come. Trump remarked privately, “Mitch McConnell. Judges. Judges. Judges. The only thing he wants is judges.” McConnell told Trump: “MrPresident, when are you going to thank me for that?”Six weeks before election day, on 18 September 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. As soon as McConnell heard the news he called Trump: “First, I’m going to put out a statement that says we’re going to fill the vacancy. Second, you’ve got to nominate Amy Coney Barrett.” McConnell’s doctrine that a president could not fill a supreme court vacancy in an election year suddenly evaporated. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” Barrett was sworn in on 26 October. McConnell’s relationship with Trump got him what he wanted. The conservative majority on the court was now seven to three.Then, on January 6, McConnell hid in a corner of the Capitol, fearing for his life and quaking with rage. He recovered his equanimity within hours when he thought the event would destroy Trump. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” McConnell told Jonathan Martin, then a reporter at the New York Times. “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Couldn’t have happened at a better time.” Trump was a “despicable person” whose influence he would finally end by defeating his candidates in the 2022 midterms. “We crushed the sons of bitches,” he told Martin, “and that’s what we’re going to do in the primary in 22.”McConnell had shielded Trump from removal in the Senate during his first impeachment for seeking to blackmail the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in exchange for fabricated political dirt on Joe Biden. In Trump’s second impeachment for the insurrection, McConnell protected him again. In his floor speech explaining why he voted against Trump’s removal, he made the case that Trump’s actions properly belonged to the criminal justice system: “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen, unless the statute of limitations has run, still liable for everything he did while in office, didn’t get away with anything yet – yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”After Trump left office, he blamed McConnell from not protecting him enough. “The old crow is a piece of shit,” he told Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. He was especially angry that McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who had been Trump’s secretary of transportation, quit in protest after January 6. In 2022, Trump tweeted a thinly disguised death threat against McConnell and a racist slur against Chao. “He has a DEATH WISH. Must immediately seek help and advise [sic] from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!”The conservative Wall Street Journal editorialized: “Mr. Trump’s apologists claim he merely meant Mr McConnell has a political death wish, but that isn’t what he wrote. It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Mr Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill Mr McConnell. Many supporters took Mr Trump’s rhetoric about former Vice-President Mike Pence all too seriously on Jan 6.”McConnell has a decades-long history in the Senate from intern to dinosaur, from minion to overlord, but his overweening pride in his shrewdness, his inner hackery, has prevented him from learning any larger lessons of history that explain his fall. He cannot dispense with his ingrained belief that he remains the true Republican and that there is an invisible Republican party that belongs to him, not Trump.Like so many presumptive adults in the room, he has operated on the logic of Franz von Papen, the former German chancellor, who convinced President Paul von Hindenburg in January 1933 to appoint Hitler chancellor, with himself as vice-chancellor, on the assumption that he would control him. “We’ve hired him,” said Von Papen. After the Night of the Long Knives, the Junker aristocrat was shipped off to Vienna as ambassador. Not that Trump is Hitler, of course, just that the book of Hitler’s table conversation is the only book Trump is known to have kept on his nightstand.Even as McConnell announced his retirement, his aides were negotiating his endorsement of Trump. McConnell could justify the hypocrisy of supporting a figure he considers an enemy of constitutional government as a last act of selfless sacrifice to help elect a Republican majority in the Senate. It would be his final performance as Trump’s enabler for which, like everyone else who enables Trump, he would inevitably receive ashes. In their mutual contempt, the psychopath has the advantage over the cynic.
    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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    Republican senator renews push to make daylight savings permanent

    As Americans pushed their clocks forward an hour Sunday to implement daylight savings, US senator James Lankford doubled down on his commitment to eliminating seasonal time changes, saying he wanted to abandon what he described as an antiquated first world war convention.The Republican lawmaker from Oklahoma said he was devoted to proverbially locking the clock through his Sunshine Act, which unanimously passed in the Senate but was not taken up by the House. Speaking with CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper on Sunday, Lankford said he wanted to “start the dialogue” back up partly because of an encounter with a military veteran who seemed to view ending daylight savings time as a dying wish.“As funny as this sounds, several years ago, I was walking in a Veterans Day parade, and a veteran … that was watching the parade, an older gentleman, gets up from his lawn chair – he actually walks into the parade route, shook my hand and said: ‘Before I die, would you end daylight savings time?’” Lankford recounted.“Of all the things I thought you would say to me today, that is not what I thought you would say,” Lankford recalled telling the veteran. “He said: ‘I hate it. I’m in my 80s. I want you to get rid of daylight savings time before I die.’”The politician said he assured the veteran he had a bill with fellow Republican US senator Marco Rubio to eliminate a time change that he said was “a relic” of the first world war, when the government wanted to add daylight hours to conserve energy.“We want to be able to lock this clock,” Lankford said to Tapper. “A lot of people are annoyed by it … Let’s actually flick our lights on, and we can do this.”Lankford alluded to how Arizona had chosen to stop moving its clocks up an hour in the spring and then back an hour in the fall. “They have done this for years, and, somehow, their kids are still getting to school on time, commerce is still happening,” Lankford said. “And today, in Arizona, they’re not – they’re not waking up with a clock that’s messed up.”Lankford’s comments come amid renewed discussion of daylight savings time and health. The American Heart Association recently said that there’s a “marked increase” in strokes and heart attacks in the days after clocks are set one hour ahead of standard time.The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has also called for abolishing seasonal time-changes due to its impact on circadian rhythms. “Mounting evidence shows the dangers of seasonal time changes, which have been linked to increased medical errors, motor vehicle accidents, increased hospital admissions and other problems,” the academy’s president, license clinical pscyhologist Jennifer Martin, said in a statement.Lankford’s criticism of the time-change came as he faced scrutiny from his own party over his efforts to secure passage of a failed bipartisan border security agreement. The Oklahoma county’s Republican party censured him Saturday, the Oklahoman reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe proposed measure would have meant the hiring of 1,500 more border security officers and agents, along with 100 more immigration judges as well as 4,300 more asylum officers to address a backlog of about 2m cases, the newspaper explained.When Joe Biden mentioned the proposed legislation during the State of the Union address on Thursday, Republicans booed. But Lankford appeared to mouth “that’s true” as the US president recounted what the bill would have accomplished. More