US Politics

Democrats moved on Tuesday to expel George Santos from Congress.The New York Republican won election in November last year but his résumé has been shown to be largely made up and his campaign finances and past behaviour, some allegedly criminal, have been scrutinised in tremendous detail.Last week, federal prosecutors indicted Santos on multiple counts of wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and lying to Congress. Appearing in court on Long Island, he pleaded not guilty and claimed to be the victim of a political witch hunt.Now, House Democrats have triggered a political manoeuvre designed to force Republicans to either break with Santos or publicly vote to defend him.To succeed, a privileged resolution introduced by Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, must attract two-thirds support in the House. The resolution could come to a vote within two days.On Tuesday, Garcia told reporters: “The Republicans in the House are actually going to have to go on record and make a decision about if they’re actually going to stand for truth and accountability, or if they’re going to stand with someone that’s clearly a liar.”Some Republicans have said Santos should quit but as yet party leaders have not broken with him, saying he has a right to seek acquittal while representing his district.Republicans control the House by just five seats – and Democrats would be favoured to win Santos’s seat should it fall vacant. In January, amid a far-right rebellion, Santos supported Kevin McCarthy through 15 votes for speaker.Garcia also said Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic minority leader, was “involved” in the process.McCarthy told reporters he would talk to Jeffries about referring the resolution to the House ethics committee, which he hoped would “move rapidly” despite rarely doing so or imposing heavy punishments.Only five members of the House have ever been expelled. Three were kicked out for fighting for the Confederacy in the civil war. Two were expelled after being convicted of crimes.The last, James Traficant of Ohio, was expelled in 2002. Like Santos, Traficant cut a somewhat picaresque path through the halls of power.Reporting his death in 2014, the New York Times said Traficant was known for his “colorful personality and wardrobe, his legislative theatrics and his wild mop of hair.“So it was something of a surprise when the hair turned out to be fake, a fact that was made clear when he had to remove his toupée during booking after his arrest on bribery and racketeering charges.”Traficant did not let his expulsion stop him running for re-election, as an independent and from federal custody in Pennsylvania. Though unsuccessful, he received more than 28,000 votes.Santos has announced a run for re-election. McCarthy has said he does not support such a move.On Tuesday, Garcia told MSNBC McCarthy had “lost all control of his caucus. He needs Santos for key votes on the on the deficit, on the budget, and so … he’s been working with literally a liar and a huge fraudster in the Congress.“So now McCarthy’s going to actually have to make a choice, if he will support George Santos … or if he’s actually going to listen to the American people.“And so we’re gonna continue to push this as best possible. We think it’s absolutely the right approach. And we’ve given plenty of time to George Santos to resign. We’ve been calling for his resignation for months and for months. It’s time for him to do the right thing.” More

A bizarre exchange with reporters has raised new questions about the return of Dianne Feinstein, California’s senior senator who has been absent from Washington for months due to shingles.Jim Newell, a reporter for Slate, ran into Feinstein shortly after the 89-year-old lawmaker voted on the Senate floor on Tuesday. When he and another journalist asked Feinstein how she has been received by her colleagues since returning to Washington, Feinstein appeared to insist that she had never left.“I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working,” Feinstein told Newell and another reporter, according to a Slate article published Tuesday. She was asked if she meant she had been working remotely, to which Feinstein responded: “No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting. Please. You either know or don’t know.”The exchange comes as Feinstein faces pressure to resign amid questions about her health.Now the oldest serving senator, Feinstein led the effort to pass a landmark 1994 assault weapons ban and fought for a full investigation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. But in recent years, media and Feinstein’s colleagues have increasingly questioned her fitness to serve as one of two senators representing the most populous US state.Her three-month absence from the Senate judiciary committee this year threatened to derail the confirmation of Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, at a time when 9% of district and appellate court seats remain vacant. And while Feinstein has managed to fulfil her committee duties since returning to Washington, questions remain about whether she can effectively govern. A San Francisco Chronicle report last year described Feinstein suffering memory losses and relying heavily on her staff to fulfil job duties.The senator has said that doctors have asked her to maintain a lighter work schedule as she continues to recover, but has provided no details on what that means. She has continually dismissed reporters’ questions about her health and workload.Some fellow Democrats, including the California representative Ro Khanna, have called on her to resign. “Three months is a long time to be absent without any clarity,” he told Politico.Feinstein has said she wouldn’t seek re-election in 2024. Three California representatives – Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee – have already declared their candidacy. If Feinstein does decide to retire early, it would fall to Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, to appoint a temporary replacement.Still, because Feinstein holds seniority after 30 years of service in the Senate, if she did step down, her replacement would not automatically wield the same authority she does on the judiciary committee and the powerful appropriations committee. The situation has rankled Californians who had called for Feinstein to step down earlier, before this term. More

An 18-year-old man who stalked a New Mexico neighborhood, fatally shooting three people “at random” on Monday, armed himself with at least three guns, one of which was the style of powerful rifle used during many mass shootings, officials said, renewing calls for legislation to combat gun violence.The attack, which also left six people injured, came as the US is poised to see its worst year in recent history for mass killings.Police named the three dead victims as 97-year-old Gwendolyn Schofield, her 73-year-old daughter, Melody Ivie, and 79-year-old Shirley Voita.The deadly shooting erupted about 11am local time in Farmington, a city of about 50,000. “The suspect roamed throughout the neighborhood, up to a quarter of a mile,” Farmington’s police chief, Steve Hebbe, said.Authorities also named the shooter as local 18-year-old high school student Beau Wilson, but added they were still trying to determine a motive for the attack. Wilson lived in the Farmington neighborhood where he opened fire.Farmington deputy police chief Kyle Dowdy said there is nothing yet leading investigators to believe Wilson knew any of the people he shot. “We’re pretty confident in that is was completely random,” he said.Wilson legally purchased at least one of the guns he used in November.The gunman, who was confronted by police and killed, shot at least six houses and three cars during the attack. Authorities said that the gunman did not target any particular location – such as a school or church – nor people during the shooting.Some of the shootings were captured on video that was uploaded to TikTok, which police confirmed was authentic.The footage shows a man clad in black clothes pacing near a driveway outside the First Church of Christ, Scientist, with an apparent handgun. Later, the footage shows him being shot by police.Neighborhood resident Joseph Robledo, 32, hurried home after hearing that his wife and one-year-old daughter hid in their laundry room during the gunfire. A bullet went through his baby’s room and its window, but did not strike anyone.An older woman was in the street in front of his house. She had been shot while driving by and appeared to have fallen out of her vehicle, which kept going without her, Robles said.“I went out to see because the lady was just lying in the road, and to figure just what the heck was going on,” Robledo reportedly said. As he and others provided first aid, neighbors told a police officer where the shooter was.“We were telling [the officer], ‘He’s down there’ … The cop just went straight into action,” Robledo recalled.Middle school teacher Nick Atkins, who lives on a street locked down by police, said the neighborhood is largely calm. “You never think it’s going to happen here, and all of a sudden, in a tiny little town, it comes here,” Atkins reportedly said.After the shooting, New Mexico’s congressional delegation issued a statement that read: “One thing is clear: Congress needs to act on gun violence NOW.”The statement alluded to how the federal government last year enacted bipartisan congressional legislation that expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers while funding mental health and violence intervention programs. But, the statement added, Monday was “a painful reminder that we must do more”.“We are committed to fighting for sensible gun safety measures that will keep New Mexicans safe,” the statement said.Numerous mass shootings have afflicted large cities and small towns, maiming and killing innocents in places ranging from schools to synagogues to shopping malls. But Congress and many state legislatures have done little beyond last year’s legislation, such as a measure that would raise the minimum age people must reach before being able to legally buy guns.Instead, many politicians continue trying to deflect discussions about gun control by saying the focus should be on praying for victims of violence or arming would-be bystanders such as schoolteachers and training them to confront mass shooters themselves.Some officials have even taken steps to insulate the gun industry from potential lawsuits. Several weeks after a shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee, school left six dead, among them three nine-year-olds, the Republican state governor signed legislation that provides additional legal protections for firearm and ammunition sellers, dealers, and manufacturers, ABC News reported.The killings in Farmington left the US with at least 225 mass shootings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines as a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are injured or killed.While Monday’s case wasn’t classified a mass murder, which is when four or more victims are slain, the US has been on pace this year to set the highest number of mass murders in recent memory, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. There have been 21 mass murders so far this year as of Tuesday. There were 31 mass killings in 2019, 21 in 2020, 28 in 2021 and 36 in 2022.Agencies contributed to this report More

A presidential run by the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is a “no-brainer”, according to one of the Democrat’s predecessors, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the film star and “governator” who ran the golden state for eight years from 2003.“I think it’s a no-brainer,” Schwarzenegger told the Hollywood Reporter in an interview published on Tuesday. “Every governor from a big state wants to take that shot.”Schwarzenegger also discussed his exercise regime and described how, at 75, he plans “to live forever”.Newsom, 55, is one of few names proposed as a credible alternative to Joe Biden, the 80-year-old Democrat in the White House – though such suggestions have quietened since Biden announced his re-election campaign.Shortly after election day next year, Biden will turn 82. Newsom can in all likelihood wait until 2028 to take his own tilt at the presidency, not least as his term in state office will end in 2027.First elected in 2018, Newsom steered California through the Covid pandemic but had to fight off a recall before winning re-election.Schwarzenegger, 75, said: “What do I think about his performance? When you become part of the club, you don’t criticise governors – because you know how tough the job is. It’s impossible to please everybody.“Before I ran for governor, I had an 80% approval rating. As soon as I announced, I had a 43% approval rating. Immediately, half of the people said, ‘Fuck him! I’m not going to see his movies anymore.’“I would run things differently [than Newsom], but I’m a Republican, so of course I would. I don’t criticise him for not doing it my way.”Schwarzenegger earned the “governator” nickname, based on his famous roles in the Terminator films, when he won election as governor in 2003. He left office in 2011, unable to run for president because he was born in Austria.Asked for his view of Ron DeSantis of Florida, the leading Republican challenger to Donald Trump for the GOP nomination next year, Schwarzenegger was mildly critical.“I was against some of the stuff he did with Covid,” Schwarzenegger told the Reporter, of the governor who moved against mask and vaccine mandates and other public health measures.“But who am I to judge? That’s for the people of Florida. My style is different. His is too conservative for me. That doesn’t mean I think he’s terrible. He’s just not my style.”In a passage of possible interest to Biden, the Reporter asked Schwarzenegger about his own battle against the effects of age.“I never had cosmetic surgery,” he said. “I never tried any gimmicks. Years ago, I [went to] UCLA, where they have world-renowned experts on ageing. I asked if anything has been created, or that is about to be available, that reverses ageing.“He says, ‘Absolutely nothing, end of story.’ The only thing you can do is the old-fashioned stuff. I could wipe out earlier because I smoke cigars, but then it gets counterbalanced by me eating well and then exercising.“… I still work out every day, I ride my bike every day, and I make movies – show business is another part of my life. I add in my life, I never subtract.“I don’t need money. I get money because you have to have a certain value and the agents negotiate. But I have a great time doing it. I love everything that I do. There’s no retiring. I’m still on this side of the grass, so I’m happy. My plan is to live forever – and so far, so good!” More

President Joe Biden has cancelled a visit to Australia, the second leg of his upcoming Asia trip, due to the slow-motion crisis building in Washington over the US debt ceiling.Biden is to attend a three-day summit of G7 leaders that starts on Friday in Hiroshima, Japan, and will return to the US on Sunday.He had been scheduled to make a brief, historic stop in Papua New Guinea, then travel to Australia for a meeting of the Japan, Australia, India and US grouping known as the Quad countries.Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said Biden had called him on Wednesday morning with the news.“The president apologised that he would now have to postpone this visit because of the unfolding difficulties he is facing in his negotiations with the US Congress over the US Government debt ceiling,” he said.“These negotiations are scheduled to enter their critical and concluding phase during the last week of May. Regrettably, this conflicts with the President’s visits to Sydney and Canberra – including the Quad Summit scheduled for 24 May.”They would reschedule his visit to Australia at the earliest opportunity, Albanese said. “I also look forward to visiting Washington later this year for a state visit to the United States.”Australia was talking to the leaders of Japan and India about their travel plans, he said. “In the meantime, I look forward to meeting with both prime ministers and the president at the G7 Summit in Hiroshima on 20-21 May.”John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, told reporters earlier on Tuesday that Australian stop was being re-evaluated.Biden had been due to address the Australian parliament, as the first US president in nearly 10 years to speak to a joint session of MPs and senators in Canberra.Officials had previously confirmed that Biden would make the speech on Tuesday 23 May, the day before he attended the Quad summit in Sydney.“These leaders, all leaders of democracies … they know that our ability to pay our debts is a key part of US credibility and leadership around the world,” Kirby said. “And so they understand that the president also has to focus on making sure that we don’t default.”The treasury department has estimated that the US will go into a crippling default as early as 1 June if Congress does not lift the debt ceiling. More

The CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for creating artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E 2, said “regulation of AI is essential” as he testified in his first appearance in front of the US Congress.Speaking to the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, Sam Altman said he supported regulatory guardrails for the technology that would enable the benefits of artificial intelligence while minimizing the harms.“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models,” Altman said in his prepared remarks.Altman suggested the US government might consider licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models. He proposed establishing a set of safety standards and a specific test models would have to pass before they can be deployed, as well as allowing independent auditors to examine the models before they are launched. He also argued existing frameworks like Section 230, which releases platforms from liability for the content its users post, would not be the right way to regulate the system.“For a very new technology we need a new framework,” Altman said.Both Altman and Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at New York University who also testified at the hearing, called for a new regulatory agency for the technology. AI is complicated and moving fast, Marcus argued, making “an agency whose full-time job” is to regulate it crucial.Throughout the hearing, senators drew parallels between social media and generative AI, and the lessons lawmakers had learned from the government’s failure to act on regulating social platforms.Yet the hearing was far less contentious than those at which the likes of the Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified. Many lawmakers gave Altman credit for his calls for regulation and acknowledgment of the pitfalls of generative AI. Even Marcus, brought on to provide skepticism about the technology, called Altman’s testimony sincere.The hearing came as renowned and respected AI experts and ethicists, including former Google researchers Dr Timnit Gebru, who co-led the company’s ethical AI team, and Meredith Whitaker, have been sounding the alarm about the rapid adoption of generative AI, arguing the technology is over-hyped. “The idea that this is going to magically become a source of social good … is a fantasy used to market these programs,” Whitaker, now the president of secure messaging app Signal, recently said in an interview with Meet the Press Reports.Generative AI is a probability machine “designed to spit out things that seem plausible” based on “massive amounts of effectively surveillance data that has been scraped from the web”, she argued.Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal said this hearing is just the first step in understanding the technology.Blumenthal said he recognized what he described as the “promises” of the technology including “curing cancer, developing new understandings of physics and biology, or modeling climate and weather”.Potential risks Blumenthal said he was worried about include deepfakes, weaponized disinformation, housing discrimination, harassment of women and impersonation frauds. “For me, perhaps the biggest nightmare is the looming new industrial revolution, the displacement of millions of workers,” he said.Altman said that while OpenAI was building tools that will one day “address some of humanity’s biggest challenges like climate changes and curing cancer”, the current systems were not capable of doing these things yet.But he believes the benefits of the tools deployed so far “vastly outweigh the risks” and said the company conducts extensive testing and implements safety and monitoring systems before releasing any new system.“OpenAI was founded on the belief that artificial intelligence has the ability to improve nearly every aspect of our lives but also that it creates serious risks that we have to work together to manage,” Altman said.Altman said the technology will significantly affect the job market but he believes “there will be far greater jobs on the other side of this”.“The jobs will get better,” he said. “I think it’s important to think of GPT as a tool not a creature … GPT 4 and tools like it are good at doing tasks, not jobs. GPT 4 will, I think, entirely automate away some jobs and it will create new ones that we believe will be much better.”Altman also said he was very concerned about the impact that large language model services will have on elections and misinformation, particularly ahead of the primaries.“There’s a lot that we can and do do,” Altman said in response to a question from Senator Amy Klobuchar about a tweet ChatGPT crafted that listed fake polling locations. “There are things that the model won’t do and there is monitoring. At scale … we can detect someone generating a lot of those [misinformation] tweets.”Altman didn’t have an answer yet for how content creators whose work is being used in AI-generated songs, articles or other works can be compensated, saying the company is engaged with artists and other entities on what that economic model could look like. When asked by Klobuchar about how he plans to remedy threats to local news publications whose content is being scraped and used to train these models, Altman said he hopes the tool would help journalists but that “if there are things that we can do to help local news, we’d certainly like to”.Touched upon but largely missing from the conversation was the potential danger of a small group of power players dominating the industry, a dynamic Whitaker has warned risks entrenching existing power dynamics.“There are only a handful of companies in the world that have the combination of data and infrastructural power to create what we’re calling AI from nose-to-tail,” she said in the Meet the Press interview. “We’re now in a position that this overhyped technology is being created, distributed and ultimately shaped to serve the economic interests of these same handful of actors.” More

Rupert Murdoch’s family has “wreaked havoc” on Fox News, said the widow of Roger Ailes, the network’s former chief executive, adding that the 92-year-old media baron would “never come close” to her late husband’s “genius”.Ailes died on 18 May 2017 at the age of 77. The former Republican operative built Fox News into a rightwing media giant but died less than a year after he was forced out over allegations of extensive sexual harassment.On Monday his widow, Elizabeth Ailes, a former producer and executive at NBC, issued a tweet to mark what would have been his 83rd birthday.“Happy Heavenly Birthday Roger Ailes,” she wrote. “It took you 20 years to build Fox News into the powerhouse that it was and only six years for the Murdochs to wreak havoc. Rupert thought he could do your job. What a joke. He has the checkbook but could never come close to your genius. RIP.”Rupert Murdoch’s chequebook has been strained of late. Fox agreed to pay $787.5m to settle a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud in his 2020 presidential election defeat.The network faces other potentially costly lawsuits.Another voting machine company, Smartmatic, has lodged a $2.7bn defamation suit, which Fox has called “a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs”. Another defamation suit was filed by Nina Jankowicz, a former head of a federal government group meant to combat misinformation.Last week, Fox reported a $54m loss for the first three months of the year.Elizabeth Ailes spoke to the Daily Beast after her tweet on Monday.“Roger never had his hand off the wheel when it came to Fox,” she said, adding that the Murdoch family, from Australia, “weren’t born here and don’t have the same pedigree”.She also mocked Rupert Murdoch’s sons, saying her husband used to call James and Lachlan Murdoch “Tweedle Dumb” and “Tweedle Dumber”.Of Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of his father’s News Corp, Ailes said: “I was told he’s a spear fisherman – I don’t know if he spends time in the office.”Ailes likened her husband’s fate to that of other big names at Fox News, saying the Murdochs “figured out how to chop off his head”.“That’s what the Murdochs did to Roger,” she told the Daily Beast, “Bill O’Reilly, Eric Bolling, and they did it to Tucker.”Bill O’Reilly and Eric Bolling were hosts forced out over alleged sexual misconduct. Tucker Carlson was the top-rated primetime host until he was fired in the aftermath of the Dominion settlement.The reason for Carlson’s firing remains unknown. Among Fox’s legal difficulties is a suit from Abby Grossberg, a former producer who alleges a hostile and misogynistic working environment, claims Fox has called “unmeritorious” and “riddled with false allegations”.In video leaked last week, referring to liberal attacks on Fox News, Carlson said Roger Ailes “would never put up with this shit”. Carlson has also said he now plans to broadcast on Twitter.Fox News did not comment on Elizabeth Ailes’s remarks.When Ailes died, Rupert Murdoch called him a “brilliant broadcaster”.He also said: “Roger and I shared a big idea which he executed in a way no one else could have. In addition, Roger was a great patriot who never ceased fighting for his beliefs … We will always be enormously grateful for the great business he built. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Elizabeth, and son, Zachary.”Elizabeth Ailes told the Beast: “As one empire falls, maybe another will rise.” More

You know what I love about living in the US? Freedom! You can choose between multiple overpriced insurance companies to provide you with healthcare, for example. The healthcare companies, in turn, can seemingly charge you whatever they like for their services. If they want to charge you $1,500 (£1,200) for some toenail fungus cream, that is their prerogative. That’s freedom, baby.As if this wasn’t glorious enough, the healthcare system in Florida has just had a new layer of freedom added to it. On 1 July, a new law goes into effect that means a doctor can look a potential patient up and down, decide they are giving off homosexual vibes and refuse to treat them because interacting with gay people goes against their personal beliefs. The doctor will not face any repercussions for denying care and has no obligation to refer the patient elsewhere.I wish I was exaggerating but I’m not. Last week, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the Protections of Medical Conscience (pdf) bill, which lets medical professionals and health insurance companies deny patients care based on religious, moral or ethical beliefs. While the new law doesn’t allow care to be withheld because of race, colour sex, or national origin, there are no protections for sexual orientation or gender identity. The only bright spot is that hospitals must still abide by federal laws that require them to stabilise a patient with an emergency condition. In other words, you can’t let a patient die just because they’re wearing a Drag Race T-shirt.At least, I don’t think you can: it is hard to say precisely what is allowed under this new law because, like a lot of regressive Republican legislation, the bill is deliberately vague. It does not list which procedures are acceptable to refuse and it doesn’t clearly define what constitutes a “sincerely held religious, moral, or ethical belief”. This lack of clarity is by design: Republicans love passing legislation with vague language because it creates confusion and is more difficult to challenge. It is also a lot scarier for the people affected when you don’t have a clear idea what is allowed and what isn’t. The journalist Mary C Curtis has called the tactic “intimidation by obfuscation”. The American Civil Liberties Union noted that the new law means “Floridians will have to fear discriminatory treatment from medical providers every time they meet a new provider, calling into question everyone’s trust in their medical care.”DeSantis has been a very busy man: in the brief moments he has not spent fighting with Disney, his state’s second-largest employer, he has been signing a flurry of regressive legislation. The day before he signed his bill attacking healthcare equality, he signed a draconian immigration bill that makes life for migrants in Florida very difficult. And, on Monday, he signed a bill that would ban Florida’s colleges and universities from spending state or federal money on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. It also limits how race can be discussed on many courses. In a speech after he signed the bill, DeSantis told prospective college students that if they want to study wacky things such as “gender ideology” they should get the hell out of Florida. “We don’t want to be diverted into a lot of these niche subjects that are heavily politicised; we want to focus on the basics,” said DeSantis. Sounds like a great advert for Florida’s educational institutions, doesn’t it? “Come here if you just want to learn the basics!” I’m not sure what “the basics” are but they clearly don’t include studying Michelangelo or watching animated films since, earlier this year, a Florida principal had to resign after parents were outraged that their kids were shown a picture of Michelangelo’s David and now a Florida teacher is being investigated for showing her class a Disney movie featuring a gay character.Having banned everything in sight, DeSantis’s next big project appears to be modifying Florida’s “resign-to-run” law so that he can run for president while still serving as governor. It’s not clear when he might finally announce his candidacy, but I will tell you this: it is looking very likely that the Republican nominee for 2024 is going to be either DeSantis, a man who has turned the sunshine state into a hotbed of bigotry, or Donald Trump, a fellow bigot who has been found to be a sexual predator by the law. Please feel free to scream. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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