US Politics

In a TV speech on Tuesday Joe Biden pledged unwavering support for Israel after Hamas militants killed hundreds of civilians including US nationals on Saturday. More than 900 people in Gaza have been killed in retaliatory airstrikes by Israel, which has enforced a ‘blockade’ of the area, sealing off 2.3 million people from food, fuel and other supplies.
Despite some Democrats calling for de-escalation of the situation, Biden said Israel not only had the right to defend itself, but a ‘duty’ to do so. So how else might the US be able to influence the war? As some at home use this moment to blame Biden, what can his administration do to keep his foreign policy plans on track?
This week, Jonathan Freedland is joined by Aaron David Miller – who served for two decades as a state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues – to discuss what the US president should do next

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

The Republican congressman Steve Scalise is ending his bid to become the US House speaker after failing to secure enough votes to win the gavel.“I just shared with my colleagues that I’m withdrawing my name as a candidate for speaker-designee,” Scalise said as he emerged from the closed-door meeting at the Capitol, where he first informed fellow Republican colleagues of his decision.Scalise, a hardline conservative representing Louisiana, said the Republican majority “still has to come together and is not there”.“There are still some people that have their own agendas,” Scalise said. “And I was very clear, we have to have everybody put their agendas on the side and focus on what this country needs.”Next steps are uncertain as the House is now essentially closed, while the Republican majority tries to elect a speaker after a small number of them voted alongside Democrats to oust Kevin McCarthy from the job.The standoff over the speakership, which was sparked by the hard-right Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, has left congressional business at a standstill, with many Republican lawmakers furious at the degree of division within their party – and how voters are likely to judge them for their inability to govern.Scalise’s decision to end his bid followed a day of meetings that moved him no closer to overcoming the entrenched divisions imperiling his quest for the speakership.Scalise, who survived being wounded during the 2017 mass shooting targeting a Republican congressional baseball practice, made clear that the experience only deepened his commitment to protecting gun rights.He has been rising in Republican leadership ranks over the past decade, and was elected the House majority leader last year. Scalise has long been defended by his party despite reports that he compared himself to Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke early in his career, describing himself as “David Duke without the baggage”, and that he attended a white supremacist conference organised by Duke in 2002.Scalise has said that attending the conference “was a mistake I regret”, and that he “emphatically oppose[d] the divisive racial and religious views that groups like these hold”.House Republicans had raised a number of concerns with Scalise’s candidacy, among them that, as the No 2 House Republican, he doesn’t represent institutional change, that he lacks a unifying vision for the conference, or that his ​battle with blood cancer would make it difficult for him to lead the chamber.Supporters of the congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chair of the judiciary committee, said they would continue to push for his candidacy as speaker and called for other party members to rally around Jordan, who is a founding leader of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.“Make him the speaker. Do it tonight,” Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, said. “He’s the only one who can unite our party. It’s time to get behind him.”Other potential speaker nominees were being floated, including from the leadership team, but splitting the votes multiple ways would almost certainly only complicate the factional dynamics in the House majority.Asked if he would now throw his support behind Jordan, Scalise said: “It’s got to be people that aren’t doing it for themselves and their own personal interest.”McCarthy himself said today that Scalise would remain as majority leader, but had no other advice for his colleagues.“I just think the conference as a whole has to figure out their problems, solve it and select the leader,” he said.Many hardliners taking their cues from Donald Trump have dug in for a prolonged fight to replace McCarthy after his historic ouster from the job, saying Scalise is not the replacement they will support. They argued that he is no better choice than McCarthy and should be focusing on his health.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump, the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, had previously endorsed Jordan, and repeatedly discussed Scalise’s health during a radio interview that aired Thursday.“Well, I like Steve. I like both of them very much. But the problem, you know, Steve is a man that is in serious trouble, from the standpoint of his cancer,” Trump said on Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show.“I think it’s going to be very hard, maybe in either case, for somebody to get,” Trump said. “And then you end up in one of these crazy stalemates. It’s a very interesting situation.”Earlier on Thursday, Troy Nehls, a Republican congressman from Texas, had reaffirmed his support for Trump himself as speaker; the position does not need to go to a member of Congress.Scalise’s Thursday night announcement sent Republicans back to the drawing board, and some Republican members of Congress immediately started sparring on social media. When Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna tweeted out a list of potential candidates, after making headlines for changing her support for Scalise overnight, Georgia congressman Mike Collins responded: “We already did that,” and wrote that the real problem was that “it’s egos and TV time.”“We’re a ship without a rudder right now,” freshman Missouri congressman Mark Alford told reporters Thursday night. “And I’m thoroughly disappointed in the process. And I just pray to God that we find something.The House is entering its second week without a speaker and is essentially unable to function. The political pressure increasingly is on Republicans to reverse course, reassert majority control and govern.Action is needed to fund the government before a potential federal shutdown in a month. Lawmakers also want Congress to deliver a strong statement of support for Israel in the war with Hamas, but a bipartisan resolution has been sidelined by the stalemate in the House. The White House is expected to soon ask for money for Israel, Ukraine and the backfill of the US weapons stockpile.The situation is not entirely different from that of the start of the year, when McCarthy faced a similar backlash from a different group of far-right holdouts who ultimately gave their votes to elect him speaker, then engineered his historic downfall.Exasperated Democrats, who have been watching and waiting for the Republican majority to recover from McCarthy’s ouster, urged them to figure it out, warning the world is watching.“The House Republicans need to end the GOP civil war, now,” the New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries said.Lauren Gambino, Joan E Greve and Martin Pengelly contributed reporting More

From 4h agoSteve Scalise appears to be struggling to convince several hardline Republican holdouts to throw their support behind him for his House speaker candidacy.On Thursday, at least 19 Republicans, including Florida’s Anna Paulina Luna, whom Scalise is reported to have flipped yesterday, appears to have indicated they won’t vote for him. Luna told CNN’s Annie Grayer:
Yesterday when I talked to him, I wanted to see where he was at. But right now, again going back to the unification needed in the conference, we didn’t have that in that room right now. We need someone who can unify the party.
House GOP officials are continuing to meet behind closed doors to decide on the House speaker nomination.“I’m not cutting any deals, I want to meet in front of all our members, answer every question,” Steve Scalise said following a closed-door meeting with GOP officials.
“The good news is our support continues to grow. We’re continuing to work to narrow the gap and that’s going on and we’re going to continue the meetings. There are some other members that want to meet as a group, individually,” Scalise said.
“I’ve asked that we convene those groups as well as members who expressed individual concerns on the floor so that we can deal with those before we go to the floor…. I took every question that everybody brought and we’re going to continue to go through this process as we grow our support,” he added.
The Illinois governor JB Pritzker has denounced Donald Trump’s praise for Hezbollah, saying:
No true friend of Israel, the Jewish people, or of peace would praise Hezbollah just days after what President Biden and Jewish leaders have called the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Right now is the time to stand with Israel as they confront unimaginable loss and the ongoing threat from terrorists seeking to harm their people.
Donald Trump’s comments are disgusting, dangerous, and underscore a simple fact: he is unfit to lead our country and would make the United States and our allies around the world less safe.
On Wednesday, Trump called the Iran-aligned and pro-Hamas militant group Hezbollah “very smart” amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, prompting widespread criticism, including from the White House.Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator John Fetterman has called on the Senate to expel New Jersey’s Democratic senator Bob Menendez.After Menendez was charged by federal authorities on Thursday with being an unregistered agent of the Egyptian government, Fetterman said:
Senator Menendez should not be a US senator. He should have been gone long ago. It is time for every one of my colleagues in the Senate to join me in expelling senator Menendez.
He added:
We cannot have an alleged foreign agent in the United States Senate. This is not a close call.
It appears that Republicans have left today’s closed-door meeting unhappy as they continue to decide on the House speakership nomination.Alabama’s Republican representative Mike Rogers is reported to have left the meeting unsatisfied, saying that eight Republicans were “traitors”, a word NBC’s Sahil Kapur said he used four times.Other Republicans said Steve Scalise repeatedly refused to disclose what his plans were, with one telling Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman: “Just rambled and didn’t directly answer questions. No plan. Didn’t unify or inspire the conference.”The conflict-of-interest hearing on Stanley Woodward, the lawyer for Donald Trump’s valet Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case has been postponed.US district judge Aileen Cannon admonished prosecutors after they suggested Woodward should be precluded from making a closing argument to a jury, based on his prior defense of a trial witness.Cannon appeared furious, saying that prosecutors had suggested an “absolute bar” at the last minute – at the hearing itself – and had no case law authority from the southern district of Florida or eleventh circuit.“We cannot proceed with this Garcia hearing,” she said, referring to the name of a hearing that addresses conflict of interest.Here are the latest developments in the Donald Trump classified documents case in Fort Pierce, Florida, from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell:Trump co-defendant and Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira told a judge he wants to keep his lead lawyer, John Irving – who is being paid by Trump’s PAC.De Oliveira was asked whether he understood Irving’s potential conflicts arising from his prior representation of three people the special counsel could call as trial witnesses, and he said he would move forward with Irving anyway.De Oliveira, who did not complete high school and told the judge he could read English better than he could write, struggled to explicate the exact nature of the potential conflicts in his own words, though he affirmed repeatedly when the judge walked him through questions.The defendant’s grasp of English has been an issue that the former Trump lawyers discussed among themselves previously – they had wondered whether he even understood the questions from the FBI during the interviews where he’s alleged to have lied.Judge Aileen Cannon will run through the potential conflicts for Trump’s other co-defendant and valet, Walt Nauta.If the morning has been frantic for Steve Scalise and his supporters, as he tries to garner the Republican votes needed to become speaker of the House, for readers it’s been tense.The Louisiana congressman is, so far, getting nowhere fast amid deep divisions among the House GOP conference.Meanwhile, there’s court action involving Donald Trump. And overshadowing everything is the terrible conflict between Israel and Hamas in southern Israel and Gaza. We’re bringing you the main US developments in relation to the war here, but detailed live coverage is in our global blog, which is currently running around the clock and can be read here.Here’s where things stand:
Steve Scalise appears to be struggling to convince several hard-line Republican holdouts to throw their support behind him for his House speaker candidacy. His prospects at this moment look grim.
Texas Republican congressman Michael McCaul, who is chair of the House foreign affairs committee and on Sunday said the GOP conference was in a state of “civil war”, said today that the House speaker nomination process is a “dangerous game that we’re playing”.
New Jersey’s Democratic senator Bob Menendez has been further charged by federal prosecutors, this time with being an unregistered agent of the Egyptian government.
Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner said that his mother called him to say that the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer had upset her by telling her friends that Kushner would go to jail.
Florida’s Republican representative Matt Gaetz is joining Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene in her calls to move the House speaker discussions onto the House floor.
A federal judge was expected on Thursday to weigh whether the lawyers for Donald Trump’s two co-defendants charged with trying to obstruct the US justice department from retrieving classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago club had conflicts of interest and should be ordered off the case.
And, where we started today: Louisiana congressman and House majority leader Steve Scalise has a fierce battle on his hands among warring House Republicans as he tries to scramble enough support from his own party to be elected speaker.
Buckle in: House Republicans are going to be in turmoil and deadlock for a while longer.Donald Trump has demanded an apology from Forbes magazine after it removed him again from its list of the 400 richest people in the US.The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:“I hereby demand a full apology from the failing Forbes magazine,” the former president wrote on Wednesday on Truth Social, the reportedly struggling social media platform he set up after being expelled from mainstream platforms over the January 6 attack on the Capitol.Forbes released its Trump-free list last week, saying the his net worth was down $600m from a year before. Trump has been on the list since the 1990s, other than in 2021.In response, Trump complained about “really dumb writers assigned to hit me hard” and bragged about huge leads in Republican presidential polling he holds despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats.In that post from Monday, Trump concluded: “So much for Forbes!”For the full story, click here:According to Arkansas’ Republican representative Steve Womack, there are at least six hard no’s against Steve Scalise, Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman reports.“Based on what I’ve heard, I don’t [think] there’s going to be a vote this week,” Womack said, adding that the six hard no’s are the only people who spoke up during the GOP closed-door meeting today.“There are a lot of reasons for various members to be objecting to what the play call is for House Republicans. And the play call is Steve Scalise,” Sherman reports Womack as having said.New York’s Republican representative George Santos said he will not vote for Steve Scalise as speaker, telling C-Span that he isn’t voting for someone “who lacks fundamental leadership skills”.
It’s never Scalise. We’re going to have to find someone else in leadership that comes forward that’s going to be a compromise candidate.
If you’re in leadership … you talk to everybody. I’ve reached out numerous times to congressman Scalise and me reaching out and asking him for his guidance in leadership and him not reaching back out, that’s a dereliction of his duty as a leader so I’m not voting for him,.
The conservative political advocacy group Faith and Freedom Coalition has issued a statement announcing its support for Steve Scalise’s House speakership.The group called Scalise “a solid champion for life, the family, religious liberty, and sound fiscal policy throughout his public life,” and went on to describe him as an “unapologetic defender of conservative principles from the moment he arrived in Congress.”
“We are grateful to our friend Jim Jordan for agreeing to nominate Speaker-designate Scalise as a gesture of unity. Now that Republicans have chosen a speaker-designate, it is time for the House to get back to work,” it said.
“Republicans need to unite behind Rep. Scalise so they can address the critical issues facing American families and our longtime allies. We strongly urge Republicans to vote posthaste to make Steve Scalise the next House speaker,” the group added.
Steve Scalise appears to be struggling to convince several hardline Republican holdouts to throw their support behind him for his House speaker candidacy.On Thursday, at least 19 Republicans, including Florida’s Anna Paulina Luna, whom Scalise is reported to have flipped yesterday, appears to have indicated they won’t vote for him. Luna told CNN’s Annie Grayer:
Yesterday when I talked to him, I wanted to see where he was at. But right now, again going back to the unification needed in the conference, we didn’t have that in that room right now. We need someone who can unify the party.
House GOP officials are continuing to meet behind closed doors to decide on the House speaker nomination.Texas’s Republican representative Michael McCaul said that the House speaker nomination process is a “dangerous game that we’re playing”.Speaking to C-Span on Thursday, McCaul said:
It just proves our adversaries right that democracy doesn’t work. Our adversaries are watching us and Israel is watching us. They need our help. I have my resolution condemning Hamas, supporting Israel. We can’t even vote on that until we put a speaker in the chair.
He went on to add:
If we don’t have a speaker, we can’t assist Israel in this great time of need … We need to stop playing games and politics with this and vote a speaker in.
New Jersey’s Democratic senator Bob Menendez has been charged by federal prosecutors with being an unregistered agent of the Egyptian government.“The new charge was included in a revised indictment filed against the Democratic senator for New Jersey in federal court in Manhattan. His trial on corruption charges will begin in May,” Reuters reported on Thursday.Last month, Menendez and his wife were charged with bribery offenses in connection with accepting various gifts including gold bars, cash and a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for protecting three businessmen and influencing the Egyptian government.Since then, Menendez has faced resignation calls from across the aisle. Following revelations of the charges, the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said that he was “disturbed” by them and said that Menendez “fell way, way below the standard”.Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner said his mother called him to say that the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer had upset her by telling her friends that Kushner would go to jail.The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:“My poor mom, I told her to stop, you know, reading whatever. I said, ‘I promise you, we didn’t do anything wrong, it’s good,’” Kushner told the Lex Fridman podcast. “But you know, she’d call me [to] say … ‘Our friends on the Upper East Side were talking with Chuck Schumer, who says Jared’s going to jail.’”Schumer, the senior senator from New York, was the Democratic minority leader in the US Senate during the presidency of Donald Trump, Kushner’s father-in-law and White House boss. Since 2021, Schumer has been the majority leader.Married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Kushner became his father-in-law’s chief adviser on the campaign trail and then in the White House.Trump’s first two years in power were dogged by investigations and speculation over his links to Russia and interference by Moscow in the 2016 US election.Kushner’s interactions with high-placed Russians were placed under the national spotlight.For the full story, click here:At the closed-door GOP meeting today, Steve Scalise is planning to deliver additional details on policy, Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman reports.Scalise is said to also reiterate that he has not made any side deals with individual Republicans.Texas’s Democratic representative Veronica Escobar announced that she would “welcome any Republican willing to join House Democrats to put our country ahead of petty politics.”Escobar, who represents the Texas’s 16th district, added in a tweet on Wednesday:
“We don’t have time for this. The American people and the global stage are looking to us for leadership…
With just over half of his party supporting him for Speaker, the only way [Steve] Scalise will win is by making concessions to the extremists and holdouts.”
Florida’s Republican representative Matt Gaetz is joining Marjorie Taylor Greene in her calls to move the House speaker discussions onto the House floor.
I agree with MTG. Let’s do the messy work of governing and leadership selection in front of the people,” Gaetz tweeted on Thursday.
Earlier this month, Gaetz filed a motion to remove former House speaker Kevin McCarthy from office.Gaetz’s motion came just days after McCarthy worked alongside House Democrats to pass a bipartisan bill at the eleventh hour that narrowly avoided a federal government shutdown. More

A contentious deal to unfreeze $6bn of Iranian oil revenues has been plunged into uncertainty amid reports that the Biden administration has persuaded Qatar to withhold the funds in breach of a previous agreement following the devastating attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Israel.There has been mounting pressure from both Democrats and Republicans for the White House to deny Iran access to the revenues in the face of speculation over how big a role Iran played in the weekend’s attack by Hamas, Tehran’s close ally and proxy.CBS reported that the US had reached a “quiet understanding” with Qatar – which played a mediating role in last month’s agreement that saw the release of five Americans imprisoned by Iran – to keep the funds locked in a bank account specially set up in the Gulf kingdom.“CBS News has learned that the US reached a ‘quiet understanding’ with Qatar not to release any of the $6bn in Iranian oil money that was transferred as part of a US-Iranian prisoner swap,” the network’s chief White House correspondent, Nancy Cordes wrote on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter.Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York city criticized any move to hold up the revenues, saying in a statement: “The US cannot renege on the agreement. The money rightfully belongs to the people of Iran, earmarked for the government to facilitate the acquisition of all essential and sanctioned requisites for Iranians.”The US deputy treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, had earlier told a behind-closed-door session of congressional Democrats on Capitol Hill about a “quiet agreement” to retain the cash, saying that it “isn’t going anywhere anytime soon”.The administration’s signals appeared designed to dampen controversy surrounding the funds – frozen as a result of sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in 2019 – after five Democratic senators demanded they be re-frozen in the wake of the Hamas assault, which has so far left 1,300 dead in Israel.The $6bn has also become a line of attack for Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, the former president and the party’s frontrunner for next year’s presidential nomination, who has mischaracterised the money as “US taxpayer dollars” which he said was used to finance Saturday’s attack.The White House national security council spokesman, John Kirby, declined to confirm any change in its status but repeatedly stressed that it had been untouched since the release of the five imprisoned Americans on September 18. “It’s still sitting in the Qatari bank account, all of it, every dime of it. None of it has been accessed by anybody,” he told a White House press briefing on Thursday, side-stepping questions about any new agreement to withhold it.“The [Iranian] regime was never going to see a dime of that money. This account was set up by the previous administration for this exact purpose. We have done nothing different. All that we have done is just moved the money from South Korea – where it was inaccessible – to Qatar, where it’s more accessible.”Under the terms of the agreement, he added, the money would not be accessible to Iranian regime officials but to “approved vendors” who would be allowed to use it for humanitarian and medical purposes. “We have always had the ability to provide oversight over the dispersal of these funds,” Kirby said.At the core of the controversy is speculation over what hand Iran’s theocratic rulers might have played in planning the attack by Hamas, an Islamist group which Tehran has financed over many years.Amid suggestions that the assault’s unprecedented magnitude and sophistication would surely have needed an Iranian hand, US intelligence agencies have said they have discovered no evidence of this. Instead, officials have cited early indicators that Iran had no advance knowledge of the attack and was taken by surprise, a view greeted by widespread scepticism among Republicans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCritics of the exchange deal contend that regardless of whether the $6bn – originally earned from oil sales to South Korea – is actually touched, the money is “fungible”, meaning Iran could still exploit it by re-allocating funds originally earmarked for other purposes.Trita Parsi, of the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said re-freezing the funds would signal acceptance of this argument and warned that it could kill any future US-Iran diplomacy. “This would be the second time in five years that the US has reneged on an agreement with Iran,” said Parsi. “But the last time was the Trump administration pulling out of the JCPA nuclear accords agreed with Barack Obama. This is very different – it’s Biden’s own deal that he made four weeks ago.“Even if we accept that the JCPA is dead, it doesn’t mean that some kind of agreement down the road cannot be pursued. However, reversing after four weeks on this issue makes it very difficult to have any diplomacy going forward, because the image in Iran is that the US is a serial betrayer of any agreement it signs.”Seasoned Iran watchers have reacted doubtfully to speculation that the country’s rulers played a decisive role in Hamas’s attack.“There’s definitely a convergence of interests between Hamas and Iran,” said Vali Nasr, a Middle East specialist at Johns Hopkins school of advanced international studies. “But that doesn’t mean that Iran directed this and Hamas said, OK we are going to do it. The truth is that Hamas would be in charge.“Where Iran comes in – and I don’t know how much planning they would be involved in – is that what we saw in this attack was an upgrade to the capabilities and sophistication of Hamas as a fighting force.” More

The House of Representatives remained without a speaker on Thursday, as the fractious Republican majority refused to unite behind their party’s chosen nominee, congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana.A day after narrowly becoming House Republicans’ candidate for speaker in a secret ballot vote, Scalise appeared no closer to overcoming the entrenched divisions imperiling his quest for the gavel.Expectations were low that the House would hold a floor vote for speaker on Thursday after an hours-long, closed-door meeting failed to sway Scalise’s many skeptics.Supporters of the congressman Jim Jordan, the chair of the judiciary committee, who challenged Scalise for the nomination, said they would continue to push for his candidacy, while other members fumed that their conference was once again consumed by the very chaos that led to the sudden and historic ousting of the former Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy last week.“Time is of the essence,” McCarthy told reporters upon arriving at the Capitol on Thursday. He added that Scalise, his former deputy, still faced a “big hill” in his quest to secure enough votes to win the gavel.Although some of McCarthy’s allies had suggested he should run again for the speakership, the California Republican has said he would support Scalise and encouraged his colleagues not to re-nominate him for the post.Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who was part of a hard-right coalition that forced 15 rounds of balloting to elect McCarthy as speaker, left a meeting with Scalise on Wednesday night saying he had won her vote after promising that her committee would be empowered to pursue its investigations into Biden. Hours later, during a private meeting with Republicans on Thursday, she said it had become clear Scalise could not form a consensus coalition and “no longer” had her vote.Among Scalise’s other detractors are South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace, one of the Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy. On Wednesday, she pointed to Scalise’s past as a reason she would not vote for him on the House floor.“I personally cannot in good conscience vote for someone who attended a white supremacist conference and compared himself to David Duke,” she said in an interview on CNN Wednesday. “I would be doing an enormous disservice to the voters that I represent in South Carolina if I were to do that.Scalise apologized in 2014 for attending the conference, saying he was unaware of the group’s political views. He represents the Louisiana congressional district once held by Duke, the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said concerns over Scalise’s health were the reason she would not support him. Scalise is undergoing chemotherapy treatment for blood cancer, but has insisted his prognosis is good and that he is well enough to serve.“I will be voting for Jim Jordan on the House floor,” Greene said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “I like Steve Scalise, and I like him so much that I want to see him defeat cancer more than sacrifice his health in the most difficult position in Congress.”Meanwhile, embattled congressman George Santos, of New York, who is now facing expulsion from Congress, said he would not vote for Scalise “come hell or high water”.The chaos has infuriated many House Republicans who feel Scalise’s objectors have not stated a clear rationale for their oppositions.“Your vote is for your constituents, not your personal grievances,” said Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas, who plans to vote for Scalise.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a gesture of goodwill, Jordan has encouraged his allies to support Scalise and offered to give his nominating speech on the House floor. So far those entreaties have done little to help Scalise persuade his skeptics, many of whom say they plan to vote for Jordan.Because of Republicans’ razor-thin majority, Scalise can only afford four defections within the conference and still win the speakership, assuming all 433 current House members participate in the vote. As of Thursday morning, more than a dozen House Republicans had signaled they would not support Scalise on the floor, with several more still undecided.The House gaveled into session midday on Thursday. With no clear path for Scalise to secure the 217 votes needed to claim the speakership, no votes were scheduled, and some members suggested the standoff could stretch into the weekend.The pressure is on for Scalise to show he has a viable path forward, and to do so quickly. Without a speaker, the House is effectively at a standstill. Democrats, many Republicans and the White House have implored the House GOP to move swiftly to elect a new speaker so Congress can resume consideration of pressing matters, among them providing support to Israel in its war with the Palestinian group Hamas, which has claimed thousands of lives on both sides, including 27 Americans.The minority leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Thursday that his caucus was willing “to find a bipartisan path forward out of the chaos and dysfunction”. But Democrats are unlikely to find either Scalise or Jordan palatable choices for speaker, as both voted against certifying the 2020 electoral college vote and are now using their House majority to pursue investigations into Joe Biden and his administration.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, called the Republicans’ struggle to elect a speaker “shambolic chaos” and said the American people have never seen a majority party “behave this way”. The White House is expected to soon ask Congress to appropriate additional funds for Israel and Ukraine, while the threat of a government shutdown looms next month if lawmakers fail to act.Donald Trump, who had endorsed Jordan for speaker, also weighed in against Scalise on Thursday, arguing that instead of pursuing the gavel he should focus on recovering from cancer. More

Cenk Uygur, founder and outspoken host of the progressive Young Turks TV show, said he could win the Democratic nomination for president despite obstacles including his own overseas birth in Istanbul seemingly rendering him unqualified under the US constitution.Joe Biden “is not going to win”, Uygur, 53, said on his show on Wednesday, announcing his extremely long-shot primary campaign to challenge the sitting president.“It should not have been me, it should have been somebody else, but unfortunately it was not anyone else. There’s only four months left [until the primaries begin]. We must change course. He has at best a 10% chance of winning. I’m running as a proxy. I am running to win. But I am also running as a proxy for any other candidate.”Majorities of Americans think Biden is too old, at 80, to serve an effective second term in office. But even though the president seems likely to face a re-match with Donald Trump – his 77-year-old, twice-impeached, 91-times charged, adjudicated rapist, alleged fraudster, election-denying predecessor – no serious candidate has emerged to challenge Biden for the Democratic nod.This week, the environmental lawyer and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr switched his Democratic nomination campaign into an independent run for the White House. Marianne Williamson, a self-help author who has denied allegations of bullying from campaign staffers, is still seeking the Democratic nomination.Uygur said he had “nothing but respect for [Williamson’s] courage and her policies but at this point we’re not at ‘progressives versus establishment’. We’re at four months left, and things must change. Otherwise, we’re almost definitely going to lose to Trump.”Uygur came to the US from Turkey at eight years old. Article II, section I, clause 5 of the US constitution says only “natural born citizens” – defined by the Harvard Law Review as “citizen[s] from birth with no need to go through naturalisation proceedings” – can be president.Uygur said he could beat that standard in court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I have lawyered up,” he said. “I have the same lawyer [Bernie Sanders] used in both of his presidential runs [in 2016 and 2020, mounting strong progressive campaigns].“I’m going to the supreme court. Either I’m going to win or I’m going to lose. Now this case is on our side. The precedent is definitely on our side.” More

Federal prosecutors on Thursday filed a superseding indictment against the Democratic senator Bob Menendez, charging him with being an unregistered agent of the Egyptian government, a court filing showed.The New Jersey senator has thus far resisted calls for his resignation. His trial on corruption charges will begin next May.The superseding indictment, filed in Manhattan federal court, accuses Menendez of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires people to register with the US government if they are acting as “an agent of a foreign principal”. As a member of Congress, Menendez was prohibited from being an agent of a foreign government, even if he did register as one.Messages left with Menendez’s Senate staff and attorney were not immediately answered.The indictment says the conspiracy occurred from January 2018 to June 2022. It alleges that in May 2019, Menendez, his wife and a business associate, Wael Hana, met an Egyptian intelligence official in Menendez’s Senate office in Washington.During the meeting, they allegedly discussed a US citizen who was seriously injured in a 2015 airstrike by the Egyptian military using a US-made Apache helicopter, the indictment says.Some members of Congress objected to awarding certain military aid to Egypt over that episode and the perception that the Egyptian government was not willing to fairly compensate the injured American, according to the indictment.Shortly after the meeting in Washington, the Egyptian official texted Hana that if Menendez helped resolve the matter, “he will sit very comfortably”.Hana, the indictment says, replied: “Orders, consider it done.”The new charge comes weeks after Menendez and his wife were accused of accepting bribes of cash, gold bars and a luxury car from three New Jersey businessmen who wanted the senator to help and influence over foreign affairs. The couple have pleaded not guilty.Hana, the business associate, pleaded not guilty last month to charges including conspiracy to commit bribery.The indictments said that while Menendez was chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, he took several steps to secretly aid Egyptian officials. They included ghostwriting a letter to fellow senators encouraging them to lift a hold on $300m in aid. He was also accused of passing along information about employees at the US embassy in Egypt and transmitting nonpublic information to Egyptian officials about military aid.Menendez, 69, has insisted that he did nothing unusual to assist Egypt and that prosecutors misunderstood the work of a senator involved in foreign affairs.Authorities who searched Menendez’s home last year said they found more than $100,000 worth of gold bars and over $480,000 in cash – much of it hidden in closets, clothing and a safe.More than 30 Senate Democrats – including his home state colleague, Cory Booker – have called on Menendez to resign. Menendez has remained defiant, telling his colleagues in a closed-door luncheon two weeks ago he will not leave the Senate.Menendez has not said if he will run for reelection next year. The congressman Andy Kim has jumped into the primary, and the head of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, Gary Peters of Michigan, has called on Menendez to resign, signaling that he may not receive campaign assistance. More

Congressional Republicans are hoping to elect a new speaker to the House of Representatives after days of furious behind-the-scenes politicking after last week’s brutal ousting of the previous incumbent, Kevin McCarthy.After nominating Louisiana congressman Steve Scalise on Wednesday, the Republican party is hoping to build consensus before heading to a final vote.The ballot comes amid fierce criticism – including from some Republicans – that the GOP’s bitter internal divisions has left Congress’s lower chamber rudderless at a time when urgent decisions are needed regarding US emergency funding for Israel after Saturday’s deadly attack by the Palestinian group Hamas.How has the House been left without a speaker?In brief, because McCarthy made history in an unwanted way by becoming the first speaker ever to be voted out of the role, thanks to a rebellion from his own side.Having only assumed his post last January after undergoing an agonising 15 ballots, he lost the speaker’s gavel when one of his fiercest critics from his own party, Matt Gaetz, made good on multiple threats to remove him by forcing a vote on a motion to vacate the speaker’s office. Gaetz, a congressman from Florida and member of the pro-Donald Trump far-right Freedom Caucus, was acting in protest against McCarthy’s last minute deal with Democrats to avert a government shutdown.Although most Republicans supported McCarthy – with only eight of his own party members, including Gaetz, voting against – he lost his post because Democrats opted to remain unified in voting against him.Trump, the former president and Republican frontrunner for next year’s presidential election, was reportedly instrumental in the efforts to remove McCarthy.What happens next?The GOP held an internal party ballot on Wednesday to decide which candidate would be proposed before a vote on the floor of the House in which Scalise prevailed against Ohio congressman Jim Jordan.But there are still many holdouts – including Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina that are blocking Scalise’s path to speakership. Some say they will still vote only for Jordan, the Trump-backed candidate. Scalise spent Wednesday evening meeting them one by one to try and make progress.Republicans are hoping to avoid the long, drawn-out drama of McCarthy’s election by only voting when there’s near-certainty of choosing a successor.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWho is Steve Scalise?Steve Scalise is the No 2 ranking Republican in the House. The 57-year-old Louisiana congressman and former chief whip has the merits of an inspiring personal backstory. He overcame serious gunshot wounds suffered in a 2017 shooting, when a gunman angered by Trump’s 2016 election opened fire on a Republican congressional baseball team practice. More recently, he has undergone chemotherapy.A noted conservative and ally of the fossil fuel industry, he was overshadowed by controversy after it was revealed that in 2002 he spoke at a meeting of a white nationalist group founded by David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Separately, he was quoted as referring to himself as “David Duke without the baggage”.When will the full House vote on a new speaker?Still unknown. The Republicans’ goal is to pick a candidate whom the entire group can coalesce around without a repeat of the multiple-ballot saga that ushered in – and, ultimately, fatally undermined – McCarthy’s speakership. This will not be easy and may even prove impossible.As a result, no formal House vote on the speakership has yet been scheduled on the calendar.Why does this affect aid to Israel?Because the current temporary speaker, Patrick McHenry, put the House into recess last week – before Hamas’s weekend attack – to enable the Republican conference to thrash out who should be McCarthy’s successor, thus putting other issues on hold. Hence accusations – from one of the GOP’s own number, Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, in comments to CNN – that removing the speaker has “paralysed democracy … when we have these hotspots all over the world”. More