US Politics

President Joe Biden has announced that an additional 125,000 people have been approved of student debt relief in a total of $9bn.Biden’s latest approval brings the total approved debt cancellation under his administration to $127bn for nearly 3.6 million Americans, the White House said in a statement.The new approvals include $5.2bn in additional debt relief for 53,000 borrowers under Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs, nearly $2.8bn in new debt relief for nearly 51,000 borrowers through fixes to income-driven repayment, as well as $1.2bn for nearly 22,000 borrowers who have a total or permanent disability.In an address on Wednesday, Biden said that his administration’s efforts to relieve student debt is “not done yet”, adding: “My administration is doing everything we can to deliver student debt relief as many as we can, as fast as we can.”“While a college degree is still the ticket toward a better life, that ticket has become excessively expensive. Americans who are saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for a college degree has become norm,” he said.Biden went on to criticize the conservative-majority supreme court’s 6-3 decision earlier this year that ruled against his administration’s $430bn student debt forgiveness plan for 40 million borrowers.“Republican-elected officials and special interests stepped up and sued us and the supreme court sided with them, snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars of student debt relief that was about to change their lives,” he said of the decision.The education secretary, Miguel Cardona, hailed Biden’s decision on Wednesday, saying: “The Biden-Harris administration’s laser-like focus on reducing red tape, addressing past administrative failures, and putting borrowers first have now resulted in a historic $127bn in debt relief approved for nearly 3.6 million borrowers.”“Today’s announcement builds on everything our administration has already done to protect students from unaffordable debt, make repayment more affordable, and ensure that investments in higher education pay off for students and working families,” he added.Following the supreme court’s ruling earlier this year, the Biden administration launched Saving on a Valuable Education (Save) plan, which will go into full effect next July and increases the income exception from 150% to 225% of the poverty line.It also intends to reduce payments on undergraduate loans in half and ensure that borrowers “never see their balance grow as long as they keep up with their required payments”, the education department said. More

A broad coalition of opponents to the rightwing corporate agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) will hold a rally on Wednesday night outside a glitzy gala event to celebrate the secretive group’s 50th anniversary.Environmentalists, gun reform campaigners, union leaders and voting rights activists will protest outside the $750-a-ticket event at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, calling on corporations to cut ties with Alec . Alec is a tax-exempt group behind a slew of regressive state laws including the stand your ground gun legislation, right-to-work labor policies and so-called critical infrastructure protections that criminalize protest against fossil fuel polluters.“They design cookie cutter legislation to pass to state houses across the US, helping pass laws that make it harder to vote, harder to get healthcare, harder for workers to unionize, and harder to get dark money out of politics,” said Svante Myrick, CEO of People for the American Way, one of the rally organizers.“The model bills sound like they are protecting our country but are actually designed to protect corporate interests. We have to shine a light on this,” said Viki Harrison from Common Cause, a group which for years has pushed corporations to break ties with Alec over the racist impact of its legislation.Alec’s corporate members pay thousands of dollars to each year for access to friendly state legislators and a seat on policy groups such as the Energy, Environment and Agriculture task force, which has been a conduit for the fossil fuel industry to promote state-level policies that weaken environmental regulations and impede efforts to tackle the climate crisis.Membership dues from legislators, on the other hand, account for less than 1% of Alec’s annual revenues, according to tax filings uncovered by the Centre for Media and Democracy (CMD). The second-largest known donor to Alec is Charles Koch, whose foundations gave the organization just over $2m between 2017 and 2021, CMD found.Over the past five decades, Alec has secretly worked with corporate lobbyists, far-right groups and conservative state legislators to draft and promote hundreds of model bills that have affected almost every aspect of life in the US including tobacco advertising, prescription costs, access to higher education and abortion healthcare, consumer protections, voting rights, and environmental standards.“We’re exposing who is behind Alec … they are just a cover for corporations to use tax free money to undermine workers’ rights and give cover to polluters, extending the life of the fossil fuel industry,” said Tefere Gebre, chief program officer at Greenpeace USA. “Alec has provided cover for corporations to run our lives, and 50 years is enough.”Alec’s anniversary gala is sponsored by dozens of corporations, trade associations and rightwing thinktanks including Philip Morris International, The Heritage Foundation, US Chamber of Commerce and NetChoice, a tech industry group whose members include Amazon, Google, Meta and TikTok. Expected speakers include former corporate lobbyist and the current Alec CEO Lisa Nelson, and conservative political commentator Hugh Hewitt.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlec has been contacted for comment. More

From 3h agoIn a speech at the White House, Joe Biden said that despite Kevin McCarthy’s removal as speaker of the House, Democrats were willing to work with the GOP to pass spending bills and avoid a government shutdown that will otherwise occur in November.“We cannot and should not again be faced with 11th-hour decision of brinksmanship that threatens to shut down the government,” Biden said.“More than anything, we need to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington,” he added. “You know, we have strong disagreements, but we need to stop seeing each other as enemies, need to talk to one another, listen to one another, work with one another.”Biden said he and the House’s top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, believe “our Republican colleagues remain committed to working in a bipartisan fashion. We were prepared to do it as well, for the good of the American people”.Republicans in the House were reeling after far-right insurgents yesterday orchestrated the removal of Kevin McCarthy as speaker. The majority leader Steve Scalise and the judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan have both announced they will run to replace him, while Donald Trump said he had nothing to do with McCarthy’s overthrow. At the White House, Joe Biden reiterated that House Democrats are willing to work with their GOP colleagues to prevent a still-looming government shutdown, while calling “to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington”.Here’s what else happened today:
The top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer warned the breakdown in the House threatens national security.
At least one GOP congressman wants the architect of McCarthy’s overthrow, Matt Gaetz, to be kicked out of the conference.
Will McCarthy’s downfall tip the scales of US politics ahead of next year’s elections? One analyst doesn’t think so, but warned it could nonetheless have unpredictable effects.
Republicans are so angry Democrats helped remove McCarthy that they are kicking veteran lawmakers Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer out of their Capitol offices.
Mitch McConnell says the next speaker of the House should change the rules so that what happened to McCarthy does not happen to them.
In New York City, Donald Trump returned for a third day of trial.Judge Arthur Engoron is determining how much in damages Trump and his family must pay after finding they fraudulently inflated their assets for years. Yesterday, the judge imposed a gag order on the notoriously loquacious former president after he attacked Engoron’s clerk on social media.Here’s the Guardian’s Dominic Rushe with the latest on the trial:Donald Trump returned to his New York civil fraud trial on Wednesday a day after running afoul of the judge by denigrating a key court staffer in a social media post.The former US president and Republican frontrunner in the 2024 presidential race is voluntarily taking time out from the campaign trail to attend the trial. New York attorney general Letitia James’s lawsuit accuses Trump and his business of deceiving banks, insurers and others by providing financial statements that greatly exaggerated his wealth.Judge Arthur Engoron already has ruled that Trump committed fraud by inflating the values of prized assets including his Trump Tower penthouse. The ruling could, if upheld on appeal, cost Trump control of his signature skyscraper and some other properties.Trump denies any wrongdoing. With familiar rhetoric, on his way into court Wednesday, he called James “incompetent”, portrayed her as part of a broader Democratic effort to weaken his 2024 prospects and termed the trial “a disgrace”.Trump has frequently vented in the courthouse hallway and on social media about the trial, James and Judge Engoron, also a Democrat.But after he assailed Engoron’s principal law clerk on social media on Tuesday, the judge imposed a limited gag order, commanding all participants in the trial not to hurl personal attacks at court staffers. The judge told Trump to delete the “disparaging, untrue and personally identifying post”, and the former president took it down.Here’s a story to watch.Politico reports that one House Republican, Mike Lawler, thinks Matt Gaetz should be expelled from the party’s conference for engineering Kevin McCarthy’s overthrow:As Punchbowl News points out, Gaetz’s foes may be able to clear that bar:In the Senate, minority leader Mitch McConnell advised the next speaker of the House to “get rid of the motion to vacate”.As part of the deal he struck with far-right holdouts to end their blockade that prevented him being elected to the speaker’s post in January, Kevin McCarthy agreed to lower the threshold for any House lawmaker to make the motion to one. Matt Gaetz, one of those who objected to McCarthy’s initial election, took it upon himself to on Monday make a motion to vacate, leading to McCarthy’s ouster the next day.Here’s more from McConnell, who also indicated his party was ready to work with Senate Democrats on passing bills to fund the government over the fiscal year:A Texas Republican congressman said that he would nominate ex-president Donald Trump to assume the position of the next speaker of the House following Republicans’ ouster of Kevin McCarthy. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:Troy Nehls said: “This week, when the US House of Representatives reconvenes, my first order of business will be to nominate Donald J Trump for speaker of the US House of Representatives.
“President Trump, the greatest president of my lifetime, has a proven record of putting America first and will make the House great again.”
The speaker does not have to be a member of Congress, though no speaker has ever assumed the role without holding a seat.Trump’s name has been floated before, including during the 15-vote marathon rightwingers put McCarthy through in January before allowing him to take up the gavel.On Tuesday, Nehls was not among the rightwingers who voted to remove McCarthy. Another congressman, Greg Steube of Florida, also said he would back Trump for speaker.For the full story, click here:Ohio’s far-right congressman Jim Jordan, who confirmed his run for House speaker, tweeted the following on Wednesday:“Secure the border. Get spending under control. Fix the institution. Unify the party,” he wrote.Jordan’s tweet follows his public plea for support for the House speaker position that he issued earlier today:
We are at a critical crossroad in our nation’s history. Now is the time for our Republican conference to come together to keep our promises to Americans. The problems we face are challenging, but they are not insurmountable. We can focus on the changes that improve the country and unite us in offering real solutions. But no matter what we do, we must do it together as a conference. I respectfully ask for your support for Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Jim Jordan, the Ohio congressman who has confirmed a run for House speaker, is a celebrity on the far right of US politics – and a magnet for controversy whom a former speaker from his own party once called a “political terrorist”.The full extent of Jordan’s involvement in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, leading up to the deadly attack on Congress, remains unknown.In the last Congress, when Democrats controlled the gavel, Jordan refused to cooperate with the House January 6 committee, despite being served with a subpoena.Joe Biden was asked what his advice would be for the next House speaker, to which he laughed before replying:
That’s above my pay grade.
Here’s House majority leader Steve Scalise’s full letter to colleagues announcing his decision to run to succeed Kevin McCarthy as speaker.Republicans in the House are reeling after far-right insurgents yesterday orchestrated the removal of Kevin McCarthy as speaker. The majority leader Steve Scalise and the judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan have both announced they will run to replace him, while Donald Trump said he had nothing to do with McCarthy’s overthrow. At the White House, Joe Biden reiterated that House Democrats are willing to work with their GOP colleagues to prevent a still-looming government shutdown, while calling “to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington”.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
The top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer warned the breakdown in the House threatens national security.
Will McCarthy’s downfall tip the scales of American politics ahead of next year’s elections? One analyst doesn’t think so, but warned it could nonetheless have unpredictable effects.
Republicans are so mad Democrats helped remove McCarthy that they are kicking veteran lawmakers Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer out of their Capitol offices.
The House majority leader, Steve Scalise, has officially announced that he will run to succeed Kevin McCarthy as speaker.The Louisiana congressman currently occupies the No 2 role among the chamber’s Republicans, and in a letter to colleagues, he cast himself as a leader who would rededicate the GOP to the work its lawmakers were elected to do.“We all came here to save this country from being taken down a dangerous path of destruction. We don’t sacrifice time with our families to come to Washington to fight over the small things – we are here because we care about our children’s futures and the kind of country they will grow up in. Under the failed leadership of President Biden, our country is being pushed to the brink,” his letter began.Scalise is a survivor of a 2017 mass shooting at a baseball game practice in Virginia, a fact he mentioned in his pitch to Republicans:
God already gave me another chance at life. I believe we were all put here for a purpose. This next chapter won’t be easy, but I know what it takes to fight and I am prepared for the battles that lie ahead. I humbly ask you for your support on this mission to be your Speaker of the House.
In a speech at the White House, Joe Biden said that despite Kevin McCarthy’s removal as speaker of the House, Democrats were willing to work with the GOP to pass spending bills and avoid a government shutdown that will otherwise occur in November.“We cannot and should not again be faced with 11th-hour decision of brinksmanship that threatens to shut down the government,” Biden said.“More than anything, we need to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington,” he added. “You know, we have strong disagreements, but we need to stop seeing each other as enemies, need to talk to one another, listen to one another, work with one another.”Biden said he and the House’s top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, believe “our Republican colleagues remain committed to working in a bipartisan fashion. We were prepared to do it as well, for the good of the American people”.Larry Sabato, a prominent University of Virginia political analyst, has weighed in with some thoughts about the wider ramifications of Kevin McCarthy’s ouster.As dramatic as yesterday’s events may have been, Congress’s inner workings are not exactly the sort of thing most Americans pay daily attention to. When they cast ballots in November 2024 to decide whether Joe Biden gets a second term, and which party controls Congress, issues like the state of the economy and perceptions of crime and candidates’ fitness to serve are instead expected to be among the many things voters weigh.Thus, in Sabato’s crystal ball newsletter, he concludes that McCarthy’s removal won’t necessarily tip the political scales by itself, but could spark chains of events that affect the fortunes of both parties:
We doubt there is much actual political fallout here, but one thing to monitor going forward is how much more dysfunctional the House becomes. The chances of a shutdown, which McCarthy narrowly avoided thanks to Democratic votes over the weekend, just shot up, as we are going to be doing the shutdown dance again in November and the new GOP speaker (assuming there is one) may need to take a harder line in an attempt to satiate his most insatiable members. It may be that this speaker gets a reprieve from some of the hardliners simply because he or she is not McCarthy. Democrats, meanwhile, declined to throw McCarthy a lifeline during the motion to vacate, opting en masse to vote with the Republican rebels. The Democrats seemed legitimately angry at McCarthy for offering them less than nothing for their support, which he clearly needed (or he just needed some Democrats to vote present on the motion to vacate, allowing loyal Republicans to deliver a majority of those voting).
Democrats also will likely relish the continued turbulence on the Republican side. That said, there are risks to them, too. Yes, it would probably be easy to blame Republicans for a future shutdown, but an extended one that has an impact on the economy could have repercussions for the president, too, as Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher argued when he suggested that Democrats bail out McCarthy. The Democrats voting for the motion to vacate is somewhat reminiscent of how their campaign arms, and their associated PACs, backed weak MAGA candidates in GOP primaries last year — perfectly defensible politically but also not the sort of thing that is likely to elevate the more reasonable Republicans that Democrats often claim to want. That said, the readily apparent lack of discipline on the Republican side is not the fault of Democrats, and it’s natural for any political party to want to exacerbate the other side’s fissures and problems.
One final point: Despite his rocky rise to the top and short tenure as Speaker, McCarthy had been a prodigious fundraiser for House Republicans. Over the last several cycles, Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC he was aligned with, emerged as one of the most formidable outside spending groups in House races. With McCarthy out, there may be some negative effects on GOP fundraising.
A couple of other GOP old hands got into it over whether Democrats bore any responsibility for the downfall of Kevin McCarthy.It began when Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary under George W Bush, accused Democrats of collaborating with Matt Gaetz to remove the speaker:That prompted a riposte from Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, who is an outspoken Donald Trump foe. Steele noted that McCarthy’s problems became apparent at the start of the year when lawmakers from his own party blocked his election as speaker for days, and only relented when McCarthy made the concessions that led to his downfall:Here’s a view from within the GOP on what just happened yesterday.This CNN guest is Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and consultant who has been involved for decades in Washington politics. He’s clearly not pleased with Kevin McCarthy’s removal from the speaker’s chair, and raises the prospect that the effort’s architect, Matt Gaetz, could soon be revealed to have committed serious ethical infractions.McCarthy and his allies referenced the ongoing ethics investigation against Gaetz yesterday, about which few details are known, but the lawmaker denied it had anything to do with his campaign to remove the speaker.Here’s Luntz’s interview, on CNN:Donald Trump said he was not involved in rightwing congressman Matt Gaetz’s motion that led to Kevin McCarthy’s ejection as House speaker yesterday.Here’s what the former president had to say as he departed the courtroom in New York where a judge is considering what damages he and his family must pay after being found civilly liable for fraud:Trump is broadly popular among House Republicans, many of whom have endorsed his attempt to return to the White House in next year’s presidential election. Gaetz is among the many lawmakers who have made names for themselves defending Trump, while McCarthy is also seen as an ally. As House minority leader in 2020, he signed on to a baseless effort to get the supreme court to block Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden.Also speaking from the Senate floor, the chamber’s top Republican Mitch McConnell gave something of a eulogy for Kevin McCarthy’s speakership: More

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, told reporters on Wednesday that “the Trump show is over” as the third day of the former US president’s civil fraud trial wrapped up in Manhattan.James and Trump both returned to the trial a day after Trump ran afoul of the judge by denigrating a key court staffer in a social media post.Outside court, James called Trump’s appearance at the civil trial – which he is not required to attend – a “political stunt” and a “fundraising stop”.Trump has spent the first three days of the trial attacking James and Judge Arthur Engoron in press gatherings outside court. He is expected to return to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday.“I will not be bullied,” James said. “Justice will be served.”The former US president and Republican frontrunner in the 2024 presidential race is voluntarily taking time out from the campaign trail to attend the trial. James’s lawsuit accuses Trump and his business of deceiving banks, insurers and others by providing financial statements that greatly exaggerated his wealth.Trump formally appealed a judge’s refusal to dismiss James’s civil fraud lawsuit against him and his family business on Wednesday. The appeal was filed as Trump sat in a the courtroom, watching an accountant who used to work for him testify as the state’s first witness.Engoron already has ruled that Trump committed fraud by inflating the values of prized assets including his Trump Tower penthouse. The ruling could, if upheld on appeal, cost Trump control of his signature skyscraper and some other properties.Trump denies any wrongdoing. With familiar rhetoric, on his way into court on Wednesday, he called James “incompetent”, portrayed her as part of a broader Democratic effort to weaken his 2024 prospects and termed the trial “a disgrace”.Trump has frequently vented in the courthouse hallway and on social media about the trial, James and Judge Engoron, also a Democrat.But after he assailed Engoron’s principal law clerk on social media on Tuesday, the judge imposed a limited gag order, commanding all participants in the trial not to hurl personal attacks at court staffers. The judge told Trump to delete the “disparaging, untrue and personally identifying post”, and the former president took it down.The non-jury trial concerns six claims that remained in the lawsuit after Engoron’s pretrial ruling, and the trial is to determine how much Trump might owe in penalties. James is seeking $250m and a ban on Trump doing business in New York.On Wednesday, an accountant who prepared Trump’s financial statements for years was to continue testifying as a witness for the state. James’s lawyers are trying to show that Trump and others at his company had full control over the preparation of the statements.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe accountant, Donald Bender, told the court on Tuesday that the Trump Organization didn’t always supply all the documents needed to produce the statements, despite attesting in letters to the accounting firm that the company had provided all financial records and hadn’t “knowingly withheld” relevant data.During cross-examination, Bender acknowledged he missed a change in information about the size of the Trump Tower apartment.The defense lawyer Jesus Suarez seized on that, telling Bender that Trump’s company and employees were “going through hell” because “you missed it”.Bender responded: “We didn’t screw it up. The Trump Organization made a mistake, and we didn’t catch it.”Trump plans to testify later in the trial.Agencies contributed to this article More

Jim Jordan of Ohio and Steve Scalise of Louisiana announced Wednesday that they would seek to succeed Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the US House of Representatives, after the Californian was brutally removed by his own Republican party on Tuesday.Jordan is chair of the powerful judiciary committee, while Scalise is the majority leader. Both had been named as potential successors to McCarthy, and they confirmed their intentions to run for the top House job a day after the speakership was declared vacant.Pitching his candidacy in a “Dear Colleague” letter, Jordan pledged to unify his fractious conference, which has repeatedly stumbled under the weight of a razor-thin majority.“We are at a critical crossroad in our nation’s history. Now is the time for our Republican conference to come together to keep our promises to Americans,” Jordan said. “No matter what we do, we must do it together as a conference. I respectfully ask for your support for speaker of the House of Representatives.”But Scalise argued he had the experience needed to unite the conference, after serving as part of the House Republican leadership team for the past decade.“I have a proven track record of bringing together the diverse array of viewpoints within our Conference to build consensus where others thought it impossible,” Scalise said in his own “Dear Colleague” letter. “We have an extremely talented Conference, and we all need to come together and pull in the same direction to get the country back on the right track.”Weighing in on the speakership race, Joe Biden expressed concern over the “dysfunction” in the House and emphasized the importance of continuing funding to Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage among hard-right lawmakers.Asked for his advice to the next House speaker, Biden laughed and said: “That’s above my pay grade.”Ukraine could become a central focus of House Republicans’ speaker candidate forum, which is scheduled for next Tuesday. Asked about his stance on approving more funding for Ukraine, Jordan said: “I’m against that … The most pressing issue on Americans’ mind is not Ukraine. It is the border situation, and it is crime on the streets.”Another sticking point for Republicans involves the mechanism that Matt Gaetz used to oust McCarthy, the motion to vacate. Under current House rules, any single member can force a vote on removing the speaker, and some of the more moderate House Republicans want to raise that threshold to avoid a repeat of Tuesday’s spectacle.“The ability for one person to vacate the speaker of the House will keep a chokehold on this body through 2024,” the Republican Main Street caucus, representing the the more centrist House Republicans, said in a statement. “Personal politics should never again be used to trump the will of 96% of House conservatives. Any candidate for speaker must explain to us how what happened on Tuesday will never happen again.”Jordan and Scalise are both hardline conservatives who may struggle to attract support from moderates – a fact not lost on observers after Gaetz and seven other hard-right Republicans chose to make McCarthy the first speaker ever removed by his own party.Scalise’s hard-right views – which have even seen him linked to the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke – and his personal health could pose challenges as he seeks the gavel. Scalise, 57, walks with a cane, having survived a shooting at congressional baseball practice in 2017. He is also in treatment for mutliple myeloma, an aggressive form of cancer. He has said the treatment is going well.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Republicans weigh their options, hard-right lawmaker Andy Harris of Maryland suggested Byron Donalds as the next speaker, but it is unclear whether the Florida congressman will throw his hat in the ring. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, chair of the Republican study committee, was named as another potential candidate.“I didn’t volunteer to do this,” Hern told reporters on Capitol Hill. “People have asked me about looking at an alternate choice. And so I’m going around talking about this issue with other groups of people and see if their votes are there.”Three House Republicans and Fox News host Sean Hannity have pitched a different wildcard option: elect Donald Trump as speaker. The speaker does not have to be a member of Congress, though no speaker has ever filled the role without holding a seat. But House Republican rules say anyone indicted and facing two years or more of prison time cannot hold a leadership role, which would render Trump ineligible.Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Trump, who is in New York for a trial involving allegations of massive fraud at his company, said he was keeping his focus on his presidential campaign. He also denied encouraging Gaetz to push for McCarthy’s removal.In the Senate, the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, urged the next speaker to embrace bipartisanship, even though hard-right Republicans will probably feel emboldened following McCarthy’s ouster.“You cannot allow a small band of [‘Make America Great Again’] extremists, which represent just a very small percentage of the views of the country, to tell the overwhelming majority of Americans what to do,” Schumer said in a floor speech on Wednesday. “Maga extremism is a poison that the House GOP has refused to confront for years, and until the mainstream House Republicans deal with this issue, chaos will continue.” More

Stunning. Unprecedented. Uncharted territory. A first in American history. Kevin McCarthy’s removal as speaker of the House of Representatives on Tuesday was a startling moment. But it only confirmed that the predictable thing about American politics is now its unpredictability. Chaos and dysfunction increasingly look not anomalous but characteristic. The Biden administration’s aura of calm stewardship can only go so far, because the saboteurs hold significant chunks of government machinery. The bitter divisions within the Republican party keep the rest of the country captive.A party once known for its ruthless discipline is obviously unmanageable; Donald Trump piously bemoaned the infighting of a party he has done more than anyone to break. Mr McCarthy’s removal by a handful of his own party’s lawmakers came on the same day that the former president, and likely Republican presidential nominee, was in court on fraud charges – only one of the multitude of civil and criminal cases bearing down on him, none of which have dented his popularity. Stories that would once have dominated the news for a week or more now jostle for coverage. In another courtroom, Hunter Biden became the first child of an incumbent president to be criminally prosecuted, pleading not guilty to federal gun charges.It is less than three years since an armed mob stormed the Capitol. Six in 10 Republicans still don’t believe that Joe Biden won legitimately in 2020. Last week, House Republicans launched a confected impeachment inquiry – equal parts fishing expedition and misinformation exercise. Threatening to shut down the government and leading the country to the brink of default on its debt has become almost routine for them.It took Mr McCarthy 15 roll-call votes to become speaker in the first place, and he only succeeded after agreeing to make it easier to remove him. He held the post for less than a year before far-right Republicans moved against him, apparently motivated largely by ego, spite and anger that he had worked with Democrats to pass a short-term funding bill to avert shutdown. (It is, perhaps, another sign of the times that the ringleader, Matt Gaetz, is under investigation by the House ethics committee over allegations of sexual misconduct and misuse of funds.) Mr McCarthy gave Democrats little reason to back him on Tuesday. Quite apart from a shameful record which includes voting to overturn the 2020 election results, he attacked Democrats for “trying to shut down the government” after relying on their votes for the funding bill, and offered them nothing.It is entirely possible that his successor may be worse. The frontrunners are Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, who reportedly once called himself “David Duke [the former Ku Klux Klan leader] without the baggage”. Whoever wins will have to contend with the same ultraconservatives. Partial government shutdown looms again, with a 17 November deadline to provide more money. And Mr McCarthy’s departure is felt far from Washington: Democrats backed the spending bill shorn of funding for Ukraine, believing he would help to see it through separately. Beyond Kyiv’s immediate need lies the necessity of firming up longer-term support in the west.Democrats may benefit from the infighting of the Republicans, who look increasingly self-obsessed and extreme. But voters could also conclude that the political class as a whole is failing – and perhaps, as Mr Trump must hope, that it will take a disruptive strongman to get things done. It’s their party, but the rest of the world has to live with it.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

Timothy Garton Ash’s plea for Joe Biden to step aside reveals the hollowness at the core of much of centrist ideology (Unless Joe Biden stands aside, the world must prepare for President Trump 2.0, 29 September).Garton Ash is wholly correct in pointing out that concerns about Biden’s age and fitness have played a meaningful role in his dismal approval ratings heading into next year’s presidential election. However, his emphasis on youth, absent anything of actual substance, betrays the centrist obsession with narratives and optics that artificially inflated the failed presidential primary campaigns of figures such as Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg.The three contenders that Garton Ash puts forward as potential replacements for Biden – governors Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom – are united only by their youth relative to Biden. While age certainly appears to be an issue to US voters, it is hard to see how simply having a younger Democratic candidate for president would have the impact that Garton Ash imagines. How would Shapiro, Whitmer or Newsom “rejuvenate the image of the US in the world”? Garton Ash doesn’t say. Public opinion of the US, especially in the global south, is based largely on what the country does, not the identity of the person occupying the Oval Office.Biden stepping down would probably be in the best interests of the Democratic party and the country. As a Canadian, I know all too well the global implications of who the US president is, but a candidate with little to offer beyond being younger than Biden is not the answer that the US or the world needs. David BeamishBonn, Germany Like Timothy Garton Ash, I spent two months this summer in the US, and sadly can echo most of what he writes about President Biden. I would add two points, however.First, Donald Trump’s support in the states I visited – Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas – is visceral and implacably opposed to liberal outreach. They will not be persuaded by better arguments. They cannot be swayed by a buoyant economy. They will vote for Trump and they must therefore be defeated. This reality has to be recognised if the Democratic candidate is to win in November 2024.Second, the possible Democratic candidates that Garton Ash mentions – Shapiro, Whitmer and Newsom – cannot defeat the Trump campaign: they have no national profile, they have no political base outside their states, and they show no stomach for the vicious fight that awaits them. No liberal does.There is a Democrat who can win, if she can be persuaded to run again: Hillary Clinton. She commands nationwide support, retains international recognition and won’t be cowed by Trump. But, most of all, Clinton will fight relentlessly. Consensus building can wait for 2028. Only political conflict will save us from Trump 2.0 in 2024.Dr Gareth JonesHong Kong Unusually, Timothy Garton Ash has gotten this completely wrong. Joe Biden stepping aside would start a frenzied fight within the party for the nomination for an election only a year away, generating hard feelings and attack lines for Republicans to use in the election. Taking Mr Garton Ash’s advice is the surest way for Donald Trump to win.Lee HartmannAnn Arbor, Michigan, US More

The worst job in America has just become available. On Tuesday, after a weeks-long struggle with his caucus to fund the government and avert a government shutdown had proved fruitless and Kevin McCarthy had at last conceded to compromise with the Democrats, Republicans, led by Florida’s Matt Gaetz and other members of the far-right, Trumpist Freedom Caucus, voted McCarthy out of the House speakership.He is the first speaker of the House to ever be removed from his post by a vote – a technique that was only possible because McCarthy had made so many procedural concessions to get the speakership in the first place. It took McCarthy 15 votes to achieve the speakership when the Republicans took control of the House back in January; it took him 269 days to lose it. Now, the job will be someone else’s problem.McCarthy’s ouster comes as House Republicans confront a caucus that is increasingly nihilistic, intent on obstructionism, chaos and pulling the kind of public stunts that make for good fundraising emails. Much of the party’s congressional delegation is in thrall to Donald Trump – or at least, they feel that their seats depend on convincing their primary electorate that they are. And his is not a faction much concerned with coalition building, difficult choices or the hard work of actually governing.If anything, that’s what they seem to have ousted McCarthy for doing. Late last week, the Republicans seemed poised to tip the country over into a government shutdown, suspending crucial services like food stamps and suspending pay for everyone from soldiers to air traffic controllers to national parks rangers. This was because when it came time to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government, the far-right Republican caucus couldn’t take yes for an answer. McCarthy had agreed to more and more cuts to social spending, more and more cuts to Ukraine aid, and more and more money for the sadistic and strategically pointless militarization of the border. None of it was enough: the Republicans in his caucus kept demanding more and more, contradicting each other and taking every opportunity to say something nonsensically self-righteous into a camera.The simple fact is that last week, as the clock dwindled down to a government shutdown, Republicans weren’t accepting any of the deals that he offered them because making an actual deal to keep the government running is not in the interests of Republican congressmen – interests which they seem to understand as encompassing little more than maximizing attention to themselves. Unable to pass a resolution with only Republican votes, McCarthy crossed the Rubicon of Republican politics: he compromised with the Democrats. And in so doing, he sealed his fate: he gave attention-hungry members of his caucus a chance to demonstrate that they were more rightwing than he is.Could Democrats have voted to uphold McCarthy’s speakership, and averted the disaster that now surely will follow? Maybe. But it’s not clear why they would. There is no love lost for McCarthy on the Democratic side. Democrats have soured on the onetime Republican House leader at least since the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, when McCarthy, like many Republicans, initially condemned the riots, only to eventually walk back his condemnation of the violence and eagerly seek to repair his relationship to Donald Trump.They have not exactly been more endeared to him by the events of the past week. McCarthy insisted over and over that he would only accept a strictly Republican continuing resolution, and then folded when he needed Democrats’ help; by way of thanks, he went on the Sunday shows this weekend to blame them for the shutdown’s near-miss. Why should they have voted for him to remain speaker? They have neither the incentive nor the obligation to save him from his own mistakes.McCarthy’s ouster is a symptom of Republican dysfunction. To many of his Republican foes, notably Gaetz, the dislike of McCarthy appears to be intensely personal, ascending beyond policy differences or factional loyalties into a contempt of character. Mitch McConnell has clashed with him over Ukraine; other members of the Freedom Caucus have cast him as soft and untrustworthy. Republicans have descended into backbiting, disunity and petty competitions of egos. The party is beholden to a base that it has fed misinformation and trained to view politics as high-stakes entertainment. If they were women, we would call this a catfight. But they’re men, at least for the most part, and so we call it politics.The Republicans cannot govern and it remains to be seen whether they will even be able to elect a new speaker. Their internal dissent is not compatible with governing, with democratic aspiration, with the dignity or responsibility of power. But to them, that might not matter. Their nihilistic, sadistic and exclusionary worldview does not really need to govern, or build a coalition, or make things better for Americans: it just needs to stop the other party from being able to do so. In this sense, they’re getting exactly what they want: a fight. Meanwhile, there are those on Capitol Hill acting in unison, with uncanny discipline, allowing their opponents to destroy one another without so much as lifting a finger: the House Democrats.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More