US Politics

Texas is challenging federal control of policy on the US-Mexico border by exploiting what it sees as a constitutional loophole around the definition of an “invasion” but that migrants rights activists see as dangerously ramping up fears with racist language.Immigration policy has long been under the purview of the US federal government – not individual states – since the US supreme court ruled so in a landmark United States v Arizona case in 2012.But in November of 2022, rightwing Republican governor Greg Abbott invoked the “invasion” clauses found in the Texas and US constitutions, likening migrants at the border to a public foreign enemy that therefore gave him the power to enact his own border policies.The Texas Civil Rights Project called the move a “political ploy”.“Calling immigrants an invasion is extremely dangerous,” said Roberto Lopez, senior advocacy manager for the organization’s “Beyond the Border” program.Lopez added: “We have seen so many shootings and more rise in hate crimes [against migrants.] This is all connected to this rhetoric of associating people who are trying to seek safety with being like a literal attack on the United States. That is just giving a lot of fire and energy to militia groups and people who are filled with hate.”Abbott is already seeking to take Texas border control into his own hands, as evidenced by the state’s recent announcement of a new “border force” that could allow its agents to “arrest, apprehend or detain persons crossing the Texas-Mexico border unlawfully”, if it gets past the state legislature. And with a conservative-majority in both the Texas state house and senate, that likelihood is high.Abbott has made his interpretation of the “invasion clauses” clear. At the time of announcing his border force, Abbott said: “I invoked the Invasion Clauses of the US and Texas Constitutions to fully authorize Texas to take unprecedented measures to defend our state against an invasion.”“I’m using that constitutional authority, and other authorization and Executive Orders to keep our state & country safe.”But the legal language Abbot is citing is not that simple, according to Barbara Hines, a law professor at the University of Texas and founder of its law school Immigration Clinic.Hines called the state’s justification for creating its own immigration laws “unprecedented and extreme”.“Federal immigration law is a federal issue. It’s not based on the Texas constitution,” Hines said.Article four of the Texas constitution states: “[The governor] shall be Commander-in-Chief of the military forces of the State, except when they are called into actual service of the United States. He shall have power to call forth the militia to execute the laws of the State, to suppress insurrections, and to repel invasions.”Abbott argues the increase of migrants at the border merits drastic actions such as establishing a state police force specifically to rein in immigration.Migrant rights groups say people crossing the border – many of whom are seeking to legally claim refugee status – does not constitute an invasion. Instead, they say such language is racist and inflammatory. In 2019 a white supremacist attacked a Walmart in El Paso, seeking to kill Latinos and fueled by anti-immigration rhetoric. The gunman killed 23 people.Many legal scholars believe rightwing arguments over the invasion clause in the Texas constitution are neutralised by the supremacy clause in the US constitution. That states that “the federal constitution, and federal law generally, take precedence over state laws, and even state constitutions,” according to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute.But in the US constitution, the word “invasion” is mentioned twice: once in article one, section 10 and again in article four, section four. That gives Abbott, and some rightwing activists, hope that their arguments might prevail on a conservative supreme court.In the first instance, the US constitution specifically limits the power of states to keep troops, like Operation Lone Star a border force, unless invaded..
“No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”
When invasion is mentioned for the second time, the constitution more broadly says that the federal government is responsible for protecting its states against an invasion.
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”
Hines explained that although the word “invasion” is mentioned twice in different contexts, “there’s this theory of law that the same term or word in the constitution, should mean the same thing [if repeated].” The key question is likely to be whether or not “invasion” in this context means solely by another state or armed force.Abbott’s policies, like his potential border force and the existing initiative Operation Lone Star, are already being questioned as illegal by civil rights groups others. They have faced legal challenges by civil rights advocacy groups and an investigation by the US Department of Justice.If such a case against Texas materializes and moves up through the courts – especially all the way up to the US supreme court – it’s possible the US will have to revisit the question of who gets to control the border.Some say that’s exactly what Texas lawmakers in favor of state control of the border want, especially as the current supreme court is dominated by hardline conservative judges.Texas’s far-right attorney general Ken Paxton said as much in a senate committee hearing on the subject:“We’re in unchartered territory as far as knowing what states can do because states have never had to wonder or really test this,” Paxton said. “So, I think part of this is going to be, we’re going to have to figure out where are the areas that we want to test. And that’s part of why I’ve been saying for two years, we should test U.S. v Arizona. We should test to see if the states can protect themselves, given the circumstances we’re in that we’ve never been in before.”Hines said: “This supreme court has not respected precedent in other situations, for example, in the abortion case. And this state legislature has been willing to pass unconstitutional laws to test them.”“I am hopeful that as conservative as the supreme court is that they’re going to respect precedent. It is unheard of that states could enforce federal law as to who is entering the United States without permission and who is not, and to create a state trespass law for people entering the United States that has been in sole federal power since the late 1800s.” More

Rumman Chowdhury often has trouble sleeping, but, to her, this is not a problem that requires solving. She has what she calls “2am brain”, a different sort of brain from her day-to-day brain, and the one she relies on for especially urgent or difficult problems. Ideas, even small-scale ones, require care and attention, she says, along with a kind of alchemic intuition. “It’s just like baking,” she says. “You can’t force it, you can’t turn the temperature up, you can’t make it go faster. It will take however long it takes. And when it’s done baking, it will present itself.”It was Chowdhury’s 2am brain that first coined the phrase “moral outsourcing” for a concept that now, as one of the leading thinkers on artificial intelligence, has become a key point in how she considers accountability and governance when it comes to the potentially revolutionary impact of AI.Moral outsourcing, she says, applies the logic of sentience and choice to AI, allowing technologists to effectively reallocate responsibility for the products they build onto the products themselves – technical advancement becomes predestined growth, and bias becomes intractable.“You would never say ‘my racist toaster’ or ‘my sexist laptop’,” she said in a Ted Talk from 2018. “And yet we use these modifiers in our language about artificial intelligence. And in doing so we’re not taking responsibility for the products that we build.” Writing ourselves out of the equation produces systematic ambivalence on par with what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” – the wilful and cooperative ignorance that enabled the Holocaust. “It wasn’t just about electing someone into power that had the intent of killing so many people,” she says. “But it’s that entire nations of people also took jobs and positions and did these horrible things.”Chowdhury does not really have one title, she has dozens, among them Responsible AI fellow at Harvard, AI global policy consultant and former head of Twitter’s Meta team (Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability). AI has been giving her 2am brain for some time. Back in 2018 Forbes named her one of the five people “building our AI future”.A data scientist by trade, she has always worked in a slightly undefinable, messy realm, traversing the realms of social science, law, philosophy and technology, as she consults with companies and lawmakers in shaping policy and best practices. Around AI, her approach to regulation is unique in its staunch middle-ness – both welcoming of progress and firm in the assertion that “mechanisms of accountability” should exist.Effervescent, patient and soft-spoken, Chowdhury listens with disarming care. She has always found people much more interesting than what they build or do. Before skepticism around tech became reflexive, Chowdhury had fears too – not of the technology itself, but of the corporations that developed and sold it.As the global lead at the responsible AI firm Accenture, she led the team that designed a fairness evaluation tool that pre-empted and corrected algorithmic bias. She went on to start Parity, an ethical AI consulting platform that seeks to bridge “different communities of expertise”. At Twitter – before it became one of the first teams disbanded under Elon Musk – she hosted the company’s first-ever algorithmic bias bounty, inviting outside programmers and data scientists to evaluate the site’s code for potential biases. The exercise revealed a number of problems, including that the site’s photo-cropping software seemed to overwhelmingly prefer faces that were young, feminine and white.This is a strategy known as red-teaming, in which programmers and hackers from outside an organization are encouraged to try and curtail certain safeguards to push a technology to “do bad things to identify what bad things it’s capable of”, says Chowdhury. These kinds of external checks and balances are rarely implemented in the world of tech because of technologists’ fear of “people touching their baby”.She is currently working on another red-teaming event for Def Con – a convention hosted by the hacker organization AI Village. This time, hundreds of hackers are gathering to test ChatGPT, with the collaboration of its founder OpenAI, along with Microsoft, Google and the Biden administration. The “hackathon” is scheduled to run for over 20 hours, providing them with a dataset that is “totally unprecedented”, says Chowdhury, who is organizing the event with Sven Cattell, founder of AI Village and Austin Carson, president of the responsible AI non-profit SeedAI.In Chowdhury’s view, it’s only through this kind of collectivism that proper regulation – and regulation enforcement – can occur. In addition to third-party auditing, she also serves on multiple boards across Europe and the US helping to shape AI policy. She is wary, she tells me, of the instinct to over-regulate, which could lead models to overcorrect and not address ingrained issues. When asked about gay marriage, for example, ChatGPT and other generative AI tools “totally clam up”, trying to make up for the amount of people who have pushed the models to say negative things. But it’s not easy, she adds, to define what is toxic and what is hateful. “It’s a journey that will never end,” she tells me, smiling. “But I’m fine with that.”Early on, when she first started working in tech, she realized that “technologists don’t always understand people, and people don’t always understand technology”, and sought to bridge that gap. In its broadest interpretation, she tells me, her work deals with understanding humans through data. “At the core of technology is this idea that, like, humanity is flawed and that technology can save us,” she says, noting language like “body hacks” that implies a kind of optimization unique to this particular age of technology. There is an aspect of it that kind of wishes we were “divorced from humanity”.Chowdhury has always been drawn to humans, their messiness and cloudiness and unpredictability. As an undergrad at MIT, she studied political science, and, later, after a disillusioning few months in non-profits in which she “knew we could use models and data more effectively, but nobody was”, she went to Columbia for a master’s degree in quantitative methods.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the last month, she has spent a week in Spain helping to carry out the launch of the Digital Services Act, another in San Francisco for a cybersecurity conference, another in Boston for her fellowship, and a few days in New York for another round of Def Con press. After a brief while in Houston, where she’s based, she has upcoming talks in Vienna and Pittsburgh on AI nuclear misinformation and Duolingo, respectively.At its core, what she prescribes is a relatively simple dictum: listen, communicate, collaborate. And yet, even as Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI, testifies before Congress that he’s committed to preventing AI harms, she still sees familiar tactics at play. When an industry experiences heightened scrutiny, barring off prohibitive regulation often means taking control of a narrative – ie calling for regulation, while simultaneously spending millions in lobbying to prevent the passing of regulatory laws.The problem, she says, is a lack of accountability. Internal risk analysis is often distorted within a company because risk management doesn’t often employ morals. “There is simply risk and then your willingness to take that risk,” she tells me. When the risk of failure or reputational harm becomes too great, it moves to an arena where the rules are bent in a particular direction. In other words: “Let’s play a game where I can win because I have all of the money.”But people, unlike machines, have indefinite priorities and motivations. “There are very few fundamentally good or bad actors in the world,” she says. “People just operate on incentive structures.” Which in turn means that the only way to drive change is to make use of those structures, ebbing them away from any one power source. Certain issues can only be tackled at scale, with cooperation and compromise from many different vectors of power, and AI is one of them.Though, she readily attests that there are limits. Points where compromise is not an option. The rise of surveillance capitalism, she says, is hugely concerning to her. It is a use of technology that, at its core, is unequivocally racist and therefore should not be entertained. “We cannot put lipstick on a pig,” she said at a recent talk on the future of AI at New York University’s School of Social Sciences. “I do not think ethical surveillance can exist.”Chowdhury recently wrote an op-ed for Wired in which she detailed her vision for a global governance board. Whether it be surveillance capitalism or job disruption or nuclear misinformation, only an external board of people can be trusted to govern the technology – one made up of people like her, not tied to any one institution, and one that is globally representative. On Twitter, a few users called her framework idealistic, referring to it as “blue sky thinking” or “not viable”. It’s funny, she tells me, given that these people are “literally trying to build sentient machines”.She’s familiar with the dissonance. “It makes sense,” she says. We’re drawn to hero narratives, the assumption that one person is and should be in charge at any given time. Even as she organizes the Def Con event, she tells me, people find it difficult to understand that there is a team of people working together every step of the way. “We’re getting all this media attention,” she says, “and everybody is kind of like, ‘Who’s in charge?’ And then we all kind of look at each other and we’re like, ‘Um. Everyone?’” More

Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy have reached an agreement to lift the US debt ceiling and avoid a disastrous and unprecedented default. Prior to the details being presented to lawmakers, ahead of an expected vote on Wednesday, here is what sources familiar with negotiations have revealed:Cap on discretionary spendingThe deal would suspend the $31.4tn debt ceiling until January 2025, allowing the government to pay its bills. In exchange, non-defense discretionary spending would be “roughly flat” at current year levels in 2024, “when factoring in agreed-upon appropriations adjustments”, a source said. It would increase by only 1% in 2025.Republicans have told their members that non-defense discretionary spending, apart from military veterans’ healthcare, would be cut to 2022 levels.What about the 2024 presidential election?The debt limit extension schedule means Congress would not need to address the deeply polarizing issue again until after the November 2024 election. This would prevent another political showdown that rattles global investors and markets until after either a Republican is elected president or Biden wins a second term.Increased defense spendingThe deal is expected to boost defense spending to around $885bn, in line with Biden’s 2024 budget spending proposal, an 11% increase from the $800bn allocated in the current budget.Special IRS funding for federal tax authoritiesBiden and Democrats secured $80bn in new funding for a decade to help the Internal Revenue Service enforce the tax code for wealthy Americans in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans and Democrats had battled over moving that funding, which was allocated under the act as “mandatory spending” to keep it from the political fighting of the annual budgeting process, to “discretionary spending” to be allocated by Congress.Covid clawback, cuts for the CDCBiden and McCarthy are expected to agree to claw back unused Covid-19 relief funds as part of the budget deal, including funding that had been set aside for vaccine research and disaster relief. The estimated amount of unused funds is between $50bn and $70bn. The bill will also cut $400m from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) global health fund “that sends taxpayer money to China”, Republicans told members, despite the risks of future pandemics.Work requirementsBiden and McCarthy battled fiercely over imposing stricter work requirements on low-income Americans who benefit from federal food and healthcare programs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNo changes were made to Medicaid health insurance in the deal, but the agreement would impose new work requirements on low-income people who receive food assistance, up to age 54, instead of 50.Student loansRepublicans said that they ensured borrowers would have to repay their student loans. However, other sources say the deal codifies relief from student loan payments while Biden’s executive action providing up to $20,000 of debt relief for each borrower is under review by the US supreme court, with a decision expected next month.‘Pay-go’Republicans said they secured a budgeting mechanism known as “pay-go”, short for “pay-as-you-go”, that says new legislation or executive orders affecting revenues and spending on Medicare, social security and other key programs must be budget-neutral.Energy permittingThe two leaders agreed to new rules to make it easier for energy projects – including fossil fuel-based ones as well as renewable energy – to gain permit approval. More

Legislation was being urgently worked on in Washington on Sunday to spell out the details of the tentative deal to raise the US debt ceiling struck between President Joe Biden and House speaker Kevin McCarthy, with the aim of putting it before Congress and avoiding a catastrophic and unprecedented default in early June.Members of Congress expect to be shown the details of the deal on Sunday evening and McCarthy wants the forthcoming bill to be voted on in the House on Wednesday, he indicated in a press conference on Capitol Hill on Sunday mid-morning, noting that negotiators had been up all night.Biden on Sunday afternoon told reporters when arriving back at the White House, after attending the high school graduation of one of his granddaughters in Delaware, that there were no sticking points before finalizing the agreement with McCarthy and, when asked if he was confident the deal would be voted through Ccongress and reach his desk, replied “yes”.He and the speaker were due to speak again to, as Biden put it: “Make sure all the Ts are crossed and the Is are dotted,” adding, “I think we’re in good shape.”Biden and McCarthy had held a 90-minute phone call earlier on Saturday evening to discuss the deal before the outline agreement was first announced that night, with the Democratic US president joining the call from the Camp David retreat and the Republican speaker in the nation’s capital.Biden had said after that: “The agreement represents a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want. That’s the responsibility of governing,” while calling the pact “an important step forward”.McCarthy will have to get the legislation through the Republican-controlled House, where his party holds only a five-seat majority. He faces hostility from his far-right wing members who are expected to balk at spending cuts that they deem not deep enough, while progressives may be more likely to choke down cuts and benefits restrictions that they loathe in order to pass the deal.Earlier on Sunday morning, McCarthy boasted on Fox News Sunday that “there’s not one thing in the bill for Democrats” even though Biden achieved his fundamental goal of persuading the Republican to agree to a debt ceiling increase. McCarthy predicted House GOP members will support the deal.McCarthy added at the press conference later: “We are going to put the bill on the [House] floor in 72 hours and pass it.”To reduce spending, as Republicans had insisted, the package includes a two-year budget deal that would hold spending flat for 2024 and impose limits for 2025. That’s in exchange for raising the debt limit for two years, until after the next election.It also expands some work requirements for certain food-stamp recipients and tweaks an environmental law to try to streamline reviews to build new energy projects.Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the United States could default on its debt obligations by 5 June if lawmakers do not act in time to raise the federal debt ceiling.Democratic and Republican negotiators ironed out the final details of an agreement to suspend the federal government’s $31.4tn debt ceiling in time to promise to present the legislation to lawmakers before the Memorial Day holiday on Monday.A failure by Congress to deal with its self-imposed debt ceiling before 5 June could trigger a default that would shake financial markets and send the US into a deep recession.House minority leader and Democratic New York representative Hakeem Jeffries said in a letter: “I am thankful to President Biden for his leadership in averting a devastating default,” the letter said.Washington state Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal, chair of the congressional progressive caucus, told CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday morning that she did not yet know if she would vote for the deal as she needed to see “the exact legislative text”.She said the notion of tightening conditions for hungry families to claim food stamps was “absolutely terrible policy”.But she warned: “The American people have to understand that we are on the brink of default” after House Republicans forced a negotiation, while further warning that Republicans want to cut “basic spending on things like healthcare, education, child care, all of the things you care about”.South Dakota Republican congressman Dusty Johnson, who was involved in the behind-the-scenes negotiations prior to the leaders agreeing, cheered “a fantastic deal” on Sunday morning, also talking to CNN.Johnson noted he is the leader of the mainstream Republican caucus in the House and said he believes there are freedom caucus members who will vote for it, though maybe not the most “colorful” ones.Republicans control the House by 222-213, while Democrats control the Senate by 51-49. These margins mean that moderates from both sides will have to support the bill, as any compromise will almost definitely lose the support of the far left and far right wings of each party.To win the speaker’s gavel, McCarthy agreed to enable any single member to call for a vote to unseat him, which could lead to his ousting if he seeks to work with Democrats. On Sunday, he said he was “not at all” worried that could happen.Some hardline Republicans balked at McCarthy cooperating with the White House.“If Speaker’s negotiators bring back in substance a clean debt limit increase … one so large that it even protects Biden from the issue in the presidential [election]…it’s war,” representative Dan Bishop, a member of the right wing Freedom Caucus, tweeted.The deal does just that, sources briefed on it said.The deal would boost spending on the military and veterans’ care, and cap it for many discretionary domestic programs, according to sources familiar with talks. But Republicans and Democrats will need to debate, as the deal doesn’t specify them. More

Less than two months after he pleaded guilty to storming the US Capitol on January 6 2021, Texas resident Daniel Goodwyn appeared on Tucker Carlson’s then Fox News show and promoted a website where supporters could donate money to Goodwyn and other rioters whom the site called “political prisoners”.The justice department now wants Goodwyn to give up more than $25,000 he raised – a clawback that is part of a growing effort by the government to prevent rioters from being able to personally profit from participating in the attack that shook the foundations of American democracy.An Associated Press review of court records shows that prosecutors in the more than 1,000 criminal cases from January 6, are increasingly asking judges to impose fines on top of prison sentences to offset donations from supporters of the Capitol rioters.Dozens of defendants have set up online fundraising appeals for help with legal fees, and prosecutors acknowledge there’s nothing wrong with asking for help for attorney expenses. But the justice department has, in some cases, questioned where the money is really going because many of those charged have had government-funded legal representation.Most of the fundraising efforts appear on GiveSendGo, which bills itself as “The #1 Free Christian Fundraising Site” and has become a haven for January 6 defendants barred from using mainstream crowdfunding sites, including the more widespread GoFundMe, to raise money. The rioters often proclaim their innocence and portray themselves as victims of government oppression, even as they cut deals to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors.Their fundraising success suggests that many people in the US still view the rioters as justified and cling to the baseless belief that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump. The former president himself has fueled that idea, pledging to pardon rioters if he is elected again.Markus Maly, a Virginia man scheduled to be sentenced next month for assaulting police at the Capitol, raised more than $16,000 from an online campaign that described him as a “January 6 POW” and asked for money for his family. Prosecutors have requested a $16,000-plus fine, noting that Maly had a public defender and did not owe any legal fees.“He should not be able to use his own notoriety gained in the commission of his crimes to ‘capitalize’ on his participation in the Capitol breach in this way,” a prosecutor wrote in court papers.So far this year, prosecutors have sought more than $390,000 in fines against at least 21 riot defendants, in amounts ranging from $450 to more than $71,000, according to the AP’s tally.Judges have imposed at least $124,127 in fines against 33 riot defendants this year. In the previous two years, judges ordered more than 100 riot defendants to collectively pay more than $240,000 in fines.Separately, judges have ordered hundreds of convicted rioters to pay more than $524,000 in restitution to the government to cover more than $2.8m in damage to the Capitol and other January 6-related expenses.More rioters facing the most serious charges and longest prison terms are now being sentenced. They tend to also be the prolific fundraisers, which could help explain the recent surge in fines requests.Earlier this month, the judge who sentenced Nathaniel DeGrave to more than three years in prison also ordered him to pay a $25,000 fine. Prosecutors noted that the Nevada resident “incredibly” raised over $120,000 in GiveSendGo fundraising campaigns that referred to him as “Beijing Biden’s political prisoner” in “America’s Gitmo” – a reference to the Guantánamo Bay detention center.“He did this despite seeking to cooperate with the government and admitting he and his co-conspirators were guilty since at least November 2021,” a prosecutor wrote.Lawyer William Shipley, who has represented DeGrave and more than two dozen other January 6 defendants, said he advises clients to avoid raising money under the auspices of being a political prisoner if they intend to plead guilty.“Until they admit they committed a crime, they’re perfectly entitled to shout from the rooftops that the only reason they’re being held is because of politics,” Shipley said. “It’s just first amendment political speech.”Shipley said he provided the judge with documentation showing that DeGrave raised approximately $25,000 more than what he paid his lawyers.The government’s push for more fines comes as it reaches a milestone in the largest federal investigation in American history: over 500 defendants have been sentenced for January 6 crimes.A jury convicted romance novel cover model John Strand of storming the Capitol with Simone Gold, a California physician who is a leading figure in the anti-vaccine movement. Now prosecutors are seeking a $50,000 fine on top of a prison term for Strand when a judge sentences him on Thursday.Strand has raised more than $17,300 for his legal defense without disclosing that he has a taxpayer-funded lawyer, according to prosecutors. They say Strand appears to have “substantial financial means”, living in a home that was purchased for more than $3m last year.Goodwyn, who appeared on Carlson’s show in March, will be sentenced next month. More

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden reached a deal last night to raise the debt ceiling and prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations.Is it a good deal? Who will bear the burden? Should it have ever gotten to this point? Did Biden blow it?These questions will be debated endlessly over the next weeks and perhaps months, but one of them is relevant right now.The only relevant question is whether Republican McCarthy and Democrat Biden, the US president, along with House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic congressman from New York, can cobble together a majority to pass it before 5 June.That’s when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the US will run out of funds to pay its bills.I believe they can, because they must. There’s no time for further negotiations, and neither side would give anything else away. The deal is done.But the Maga right crazies in the House – anywhere from 28 to 123 by my measure – may not go along, especially if former US president Donald Trump says it’s a bad deal. Which means additional House Democrats will have to agree to it.Will they? Here’s where the asymmetry between House Republicans who don’t believe in government and House Democrats who do comes into play.Progressive Democrats will object to the freeze on certain domestic discretionary spending programs and additional work requirements on the recipients of food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families as unfair and unnecessary.But most House Democrats will go along with the deal because they believe in government, and they don’t want the US to default – with potentially cataclysmic consequences domestically and internationally.Many in the House Maga crowd, on the other hand, will see this vote as an opportunity to show their supporters that they’re willing to blow up the system, because they were voted in on their promise to blow up the system.Whether the deal is good or bad is irrelevant. It’s the only deal. The alternative is chaos.Republicans have succeeded in holding the nation hostage, and now we must pay the ransom that’s been negotiated.What happens from here depends on how many members of the House prefer governing to chaos. More

Joe Biden and the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, have reached a deal “in principle” to raise the federal government’s $31.4tn debt ceiling, potentially averting an economically destabilising default on 5 June.With any new agreement still required to pass through a divided Congress, the risk that the Treasury department runs short of money to cover all its obligations does however remain.Without raising the debt limit, the US government would default on its bills, a historic first that would likely carry catastrophic consequences. Federal workers would be furloughed, global stock markets would crash and the US economy would probably drop into a recession.As details of the deal begin to come to light, here is a quick guide on the debt ceiling and what it means for the US government and people across the country:What is the debt ceiling?The debt ceiling is the limit on the amount of money the US government can borrow to pay for services, such as social security, Medicare and the military.Each year, the government takes in revenue from taxes and other streams, such as customs duties, but ultimately spends more than it takes in. This leaves the government with a deficit, which has ranged from $400bn to $3tn each year over the last decade. The deficit left at the end of the year ultimately gets tacked on to the country’s total debt.To borrow money, the US treasury issues securities, like US government bonds, that it will eventually pay back with interest. Once the US government hits its debt limit, the treasury cannot issue more securities, essentially stopping a key flow of money into the federal government.Congress is in charge of setting the debt limit, which currently stands at $31.4tn. The debt ceiling has been raised 78 times since 1960, under both Democrat and Republican presidents. At times, the ceiling was briefly suspended and then reinstated at a higher limit, essentially a retroactive raising of the debt ceiling.What happens if the US defaults?The US has never defaulted on its payments before, so exactly what would happen is unclear. It’s not likely to be good.“Failure to meet the government’s obligation would cause irreparable harm to the US economy, the livelihoods of all Americans and global financial stability,” the US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said in a letter to Congress in January.Investors would lose faith in the US dollar, causing the economy to weaken quickly. Job cuts would be imminent, and the US federal government would not have the means to continue all its services. Mortgage rates would probably soar – tanking the housing market.Why is the US debt so high?The US debt grows when the government is spending more money or when its revenue is lower.Throughout its history, the US has had at least some amount of debt. But the debt really started to grow in the 80s, after Ronald Reagan’s huge tax cuts. Without as much tax revenue, the government needed to borrow more money to spend.During the 90s, the end of the cold war allowed the government to cut back on defense spending, and a booming economy led to higher tax revenues. But then, in the early 2000s, the dotcom bubble burst, leading to a recession. George W Bush cut taxes twice, in 2001 and 2003, and then the US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan increased spending by as much as nearly $6tn over the course of the war.When the 2008 Great Recession started, the government had to bulk up spending to bail out banks and increase social services as the unemployment rate hit 10%.When the unemployment rate returned to its pre-recession levels, in 2017, a major tax cut was passed under Donald Trump. The debt rose by $7.8tn while he was in office.And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The US government passed a series of stimulus bills to offset the worst of the pandemic’s impacts that ultimately totaled $5tn.What are the main contributors to federal government spending?The biggest chunk of US government spending goes to mandatory programs, such as social security, Medicaid and Medicare, which comprise nearly half of the overall annual budget. Military spending takes up the biggest chunk of discretionary spending, taking up 12% of the budget. Other big-ticket items include spending on education, employment training and services and benefits for US veterans. More

Joe Biden and the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, have reached a deal in principle to raise the federal government’s $31.4tn debt ceiling, with just days left before America was expected to default.Biden on Saturday called the agreement “an important step forward,” and characterised it as a compromise that nevertheless protected Democrats’ key priorities.“The agreement represents a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want,” he said in a statement. “That’s the responsibility of governing.”McCarthy said there was still “a lot of work to do”, but called it an agreement “worthy of the American people”.Biden and McCarthy held a 90-minute phone call earlier on Saturday evening to discuss the deal.Full details of the agreement remained unconfirmed, but it was reported that the deal would raise the debt limit for two years, averting any further standoffs until after the 2024 presidential election.“It is an important step forward that reduces spending while protecting critical programs for working people and growing the economy for everyone”, Biden said, saying the legislative text was still being finalised, while urging congress to pass the bill. According to McCarthy there are no new taxes and the bill includes “historic reductions in spending, consequential reforms that will lift people out of poverty and into the workforce.”“I expect to finish the writing of the bill, checking with the White House and speaking to the president again tomorrow afternoon, and then posting the text of it tomorrow, and then we vote on it on Wednesday,” McCarthy said.The deal still needs to receive approval from the divided Congress, and McCarthy will probably need some support from Democratic members to get the proposal through the House, given Republicans’ narrow majority in the lower chamber.The deal would avert an economically destabilising default which the Treasury Department warned would occur if the debt ceiling was not raised by 5 June.Republicans who control the House of Representatives have pushed for steep cuts to spending and for funds to be stripped from the Internal Revenue Service, the US tax agency.Both sides have suggested one of the main holdups had been a Republican effort to boost work requirements for recipients of food stamps and other federal aid programs, a longtime Republican goal that many Democrats have strenuously opposed.Exact details of the final deal were not immediately available, but negotiators have agreed to cap non-defence discretionary spending at 2023 levels for two years, in exchange for a debt ceiling increase over a similar period, sources told Reuters earlier.The two sides have to carefully thread the needle in finding a compromise that can clear the House, with a 222-213 Republican majority, and Senate, with a 51-49 Democratic majority.The long standoff spooked financial markets, weighing on stocks and forcing the United States to pay record-high interest rates in some bond sales. A default would take a far heavier toll, economists say, likely pushing the nation into recession, shaking the world economy and leading to a spike in unemployment.Biden for months refused to negotiate with McCarthy over future spending cuts, demanding that lawmakers first pass a “clean” debt-ceiling increase free of other conditions, and present a 2024 budget proposal to counter his issued in March. Two-way negotiations between Biden and McCarthy began in earnest on 16 May.Democrats accused Republicans of playing a dangerous game of brinkmanship with the economy. Republicans say recent increased government spending is fueling the growth of the US debt, which is now roughly equal to the annual output of the economy.McCarthy has vowed to give House members 72 hours to read the legislation before bringing it to the floor for a vote. That will test whether enough moderate members support the compromises in the bill to overcome opposition from both hard-right Republicans and progressive Democrats.Then it will need to pass the Senate, where it will need at least nine Republican votes to succeed. There are multiple opportunities in each chamber along the way to slow down the process. More