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      House showdown as Republicans try to escalate border and immigration issues

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      A partisan showdown was on display on Tuesday as House Republicans attempted to escalate immigration and border issues on two fronts.Republicans moved forward with efforts to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, as they lambasted the border deal recently brokered between the Joe Biden White House and a bipartisan group of senators, in a split-screen that Democrats criticized as hypocritical.A House committee convened on Tuesday to consider two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, who attacked Republicans’ accusations against him as “false”, “baseless” and “inaccurate”.In a letter sent to the Republican chair of the House committee on homeland security just hours before the markup hearing began, Mayorkas dismissed the impeachment process as “politically motivated”. House Republicans have presented no clear evidence that Mayorkas committed high crimes and misdemeanors, which is the requirement for impeachment, but their resolution accuses the cabinet secretary of refusing to comply with the law and breaching public trust.“I have been privileged to serve our country for most of my professional life. I have adhered scrupulously and fervently to the oath of office I have taken six times in my public service career,” Mayorkas wrote in his letter. “I assure you that your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me from the law enforcement and broader public service mission to which I have devoted most of my career and to which I remain devoted.”The Republican chair of the committee, Mark Green of Tennessee, criticized Mayorkas’s letter as a woefully inadequate response to concerns about the situation at the US-Mexican border, where arrests for illegal crossings have reached record highs.“This 11th-hour response demonstrates the lack of seriousness with which Secretary Mayorkas views his responsibilities,” Green said in his opening statement at the markup hearing. “We cannot allow this man to remain in office any longer. The time for accountability is now.”Democrats retorted that Republicans were making a farce out of the impeachment process by rushing to oust a cabinet official without evidence of wrongdoing.“We’re here based on two completely fabricated, unsupported and never used before articles of impeachment,” Dan Goldman, a Democrat of New York, said at the hearing. “This is completely debasing and demeaning the impeachment clause of the United States constitution, and it is a gross, gross injustice to the credibility of this institution.”The Republican-controlled committee is expected to advance the resolution, and the House speaker, Republican Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has indicated that the full chamber will vote on impeaching Mayorkas in the coming days. Even if the resolution passes the House, it will certainly fail in the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority.To demonstrate his scorn over the proceedings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, introduced several procedural motions to delay the progress of the hearing. Thompson accused Republicans of attempting to impeach Mayorkas to boost the political prospects of Donald Trump, who is widely expected to win his party’s presidential nomination.“If House Republicans were serious about improving conditions along the border, they would provide the department the funding necessary to do so. They have not,” Thompson said in his opening statement. “They don’t want progress. They don’t want solutions. They want a political issue. And most of all, they want to please their disgraced former president. The extreme Maga [‘Make America Great Again’] Republicans who are running the House of Representatives are deeply unserious people.”While the House moves forward with impeaching Mayorkas, Trump has called on Republicans to sink the bipartisan border and national security deal. Johnson has said that the proposal, which would grant Joe Biden the authority to shut down the border between ports of entry when attempted crossings increase to a certain level, would be “dead on arrival” in the House.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt a press conference held on Tuesday, Johnson dismissed claims that House Republicans were doing Trump’s bidding as “absurd” and insisted they were focused on addressing the situation at the border.“Our duty is to do right by the American people, to protect the people. The first and most important job of the federal government is to protect its citizens. We’re not doing that under President Biden,” Johnson said. “Our majority is small. We only have it in one chamber, but we’re trying to use every ounce of leverage that we have to make sure that this issue is addressed.”The White House then attacked Johnson for flip-flopping on the passage of a bipartisan immigration bill, noting that the speaker previously called on members of both parties to “come together and address the broken border”.“Today, Speaker Johnson claimed he believes action should be taken to secure the border,” said the White House spokesperson Andrew Bates. “That’s exactly what President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in the Senate are doing. Speaker Johnson should join them.”Speaking on the House floor, Jim McGovern, a Democrat of Massachusetts, mocked Republicans’ assertions that they were entirely focused on policy concerns and emphasized the challenges of the current divided Congress. While Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House, Democrats control both the Senate and the White House.“I will say to my Republican friends: you are not in control of everything. You don’t have a dictatorship,” McGovern said. “If you want to get something done, we’re going to have to compromise.” More

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      Abortion rights are Biden’s most powerful re-election issue. He should act like it | Moira Donegan

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      For years, the beltway set had a standard line of advice for Democratic candidates: stick to the economy. The idea was that white, male, blue-collar voters – those magical creatures, somewhere out there in the windswept lands of the upper midwest, who always qualify in the pundit imagination as “real Americans” – would be turned off by so-called culture-war issues.These guys, we were told, didn’t want to hear about civil rights or social equality: they wanted to hear about economic growth. According to this advice, Democrats could be pro-choice, pro-racial justice, or pro-LGBTQ+ rights, but not openly, avowedly so. They had to play their progressive social positions in a minor key.It’s not clear that this advice ever really paid off for Democratic candidates. At any rate, you don’t hear it much any more. That’s because, for the past two years, Democratic electoral victories up and down the ballot have been driven disproportionately by one of those culture-war issues that candidates were typically told to avoid: abortion.American women’s anger over the US supreme court’s Dobbs ruling is the single most potent political force in America right now, and if Joe Biden wins re-election – a distinct if imperiled possibility – it will be because his campaign succeeded in making the election a referendum on Republicans’ abortion bans. There is no one issue with greater importance; there are few issues that have ever motivated voters so dramatically.You would think that this would be a gift to the Biden campaign. On paper, Republicans are almost solely responsible for the overturning of Roe and the draconian, morbid and dangerous abortion bans that have followed.Donald Trump continually brags about appointing three of the six justices who ruled to eliminate the abortion right; Republican politicians nationwide, not content with being able to ban abortion, have sought to eliminate life and health exemptions, to further restrict gestational age limits, and to impose criminal and civil penalties for things like advocating for abortion rights or transporting a patient across state lines. These are hateful, bigoted, invasive and lawless moves, ones that degrade women’s citizenship and are hated by the public. And they’re Republican moves.But the new prominence of abortion in electoral politics presents something of a conundrum for the Biden campaign: because while Republicans are vehemently anti-choice, Biden himself is not a particularly convincing abortion rights advocate.He is, at best, unenthused about the issue. Biden speaks of abortion in stilted, euphemistic terms, talking about “restoring the protections of Roe” or “a woman’s right to choose” more than “abortion”. (He did not use the word in public remarks until he was forced to after facing pressure from activists.) On the stump, he frequently ad libs, straying from prepared remarks to make his dislike of abortion clear. In one set of remarks last year, he unhelpfully offered that he was “not big on abortion”.In remarks this past week, he characterized his own position using anti-choice buzzwords, saying he was opposed to “abortion on demand”. Most of the campaigning on the issue has been passed off to Kamala Harris, admittedly a more comfortable messenger for a women’s rights platform. But outsourcing such a prominent issue to the vice-president is itself fraught with symbolic dangers: the campaign risks signaling that they consider abortion to be a second-tier issue by assigning it to their second-tier principal. And Harris is limited in what she can say by the somewhat narrow extent of the president’s comfort.And so Biden has taken on the task of marketing himself as a champion of abortion rights with all the relish of a third-grader told to eat his broccoli: he has been informed that doing so is good for him, but he really, really doesn’t want to. This week, as the Biden administration launched a series of policy and public relations efforts meant to frame the stakes of the elections for voters invested in reproductive freedom, things got off to something of a rocky start.Last Monday, on what would have been Roe’s 51st anniversary, Biden held a task force meeting in which he said that his administration would defend laws legalizing things like the FDA approval of mifepristone, which is being challenged by anti-choice lawyers in court. He said he would create a team to educate the public about when emergency abortions are legal in hospitals – a growing need in an era when more and more pregnant women are facing disastrous health risks because of abortion bans that prohibit the procedure from being used to spare them from catastrophic harm. He said he would encourage access to birth control.It was a tepid announcement, one where Biden seemed self-satisfied for doing the bare minimum. It was a policy agenda, too, that leaves all the agenda-setting power in the anti-choice movement’s hands: what the Biden campaign is offering American women – the ones who are angry and distraught, the ones that have suffered a blow to their dignity and an endangering of their safety – is that his administration might be willing to make minimal efforts to stop the people who are working maximally hard to make it worse.At a rally in Wisconsin the next day, Harris seemed more interested in describing the post-Dobbs landscape as one of a “healthcare crisis” – emphasizing, as Biden has, the stories of women denied life – and health-preserving abortions in moments of medical emergency. And it is true that the post-Dobbs world is one where it has become dramatically more dangerous to be pregnant, one where a capricious law, or a doctor’s fear of one, could cost you your life, your health or your fertility in the event that something goes wrong. And it is true, too, as Harris told the crowd, that a Republican victory would almost certainly result in a national ban on abortion – something a Republican president could effect in practice even without a filibuster-proof majority in Congress.But the campaign’s focus on these aspects of the Dobbs catastrophe – the women suffering complications from wanted pregnancies, the potential that things could get worse – does too little to grapple with the harm that’s happening right now, to women who simply do not want to be pregnant, and who deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity of citizens, not talked down to like children who cannot be trusted to act as custodians of their own bodily functions.Biden was not wrong when he said that women who were forced to become sicker and sicker during miscarriages before they were allowed to obtain abortions were subjected to an indignity. But so, too, are those who the law treats as de facto incompetent or suspicious: those who want and deserve their abortions, in Biden’s contemptuous phrasing, “on demand”.If anything, Biden is talking like he believes that abortion remains a delicate issue, as if it is something he thinks he will lose by being too strong on. But that advice, which maybe never quite worked, was from another time. It is not advice for this moment. Biden needs to change his strategy on abortion, to bring it more in line with both the sentiments of voters and the demands of our era. It is time for him to grow up, and eat his vegetables.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Republicans unveil impeachment articles against head of homeland security

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      Republicans published two articles of impeachment against homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday, and plan to formally advance them on Tuesday towards a full House vote, despite two hearings failing to produce any evidence of his wrongdoing.The politically charged move comes amid a raging battle in Washington DC over immigration, with a senior Democrat announcing Sunday that senators had reached a bipartisan agreement to tighten border security, even as Donald Trump took credit for likely sinking it.The impeachment charges against Mayorkas allege, first, that he ignored laws passed by Congress and court orders, in order to pursue policies that led to a surge in illegal immigration; and second, that he breached the public trust by making false statements and obstructing oversight of the homeland security department.“Congress has a duty to see that the executive branch implements and enforces the laws we have passed. Yet Secretary Mayorkas has repeatedly refused to do so,” Tennessee Republican congressman Mark Green, chair of the House homeland security committee, said in a statement.A homeland security official responded by calling the charges “a sham” and a distraction from “other vital national security priorities”.“This markup is just more of the same political games from House homeland security committee Republicans,” the official said in a statement.“They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas.”Many Republicans have privately questioned the push to impeach Mayorkas, who would almost certainly be acquitted by the Democratic majority in the Senate, fearing it could negatively impact members of Congress running for re-election in marginal districts.No evidence was produced during two public House committee meetings to support Republicans’ allegations of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, while constitutional scholars have said the rare move to try to impeach a cabinet secretary for policy decisions was illegitimate.“If the members of the committee disapprove of the Biden administration’s immigration and border policies, the constitution gives this Congress a wealth of legislative powers to change them. Impeachment is not one of them,” Frank Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri school of law, testified to the panel this month.Mayorkas has been a key player in the months-long bipartisan negotiations in the Senate for a border deal. Joe Biden’s administration has made concessions to Republican hardliners in an effort to secure their support for US aid for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.On Friday, the president said he would not just sign the bill, but use the authority it would grant to close the southern border the day he signed it, in order to stem the flow of migrants.“What’s been negotiated would – if passed into law – be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” Biden said in a statement.Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Murphy, who led his party’s negotiating team, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that a bipartisan deal had been reached and could face a vote in the coming days.“We are finalizing last pieces of text right now and this bill could be ready to be on the floor of the Senate next week. But it won’t be if Republicans decide that they want to keep this issue unsettled for political purposes,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I am hopeful that we will still have enough Republicans in the Senate who want to fix the problem at the border rather than just do Donald Trump’s bidding, but we will see over the next 24 to 48 hours.”Murphy was referring to the former president’s attempts to derail the bill as he seeks to lock down the Republican 2024 White House nomination and run an election campaign themed around Democrats’ perceived failure to solve the border crisis.Last week, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader who has long supported the push for a deal, reportedly told colleagues in a closed-door meeting that the “politics on this have changed”, while Trump took credit for trying to blow up the agreement during a campaign speech in Nevada on Saturday.“A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s okay. Please blame it on me. Please,” he said.Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker and a staunch Trump ally, has said any deal passed by the Senate would be “dead on arrival” in the House. Johnson is also blamed by Democrats for reigniting the once-stalled push to impeach Mayorkas, after the speaker announced last week that he would make it a priority.In a statement, the Congressional Integrity Project took aim at Johnson and Trump for trying to block the deal while at the same time attempting to impeach Mayorkas for failing to solve the border crisis.“Let us be clear, this bogus impeachment is as wrong as it is immoral and it will blow up in their faces,” the group said in a statement.“And if Republicans from swing districts, and especially districts Biden won in 2020, think they can quietly support this nonsense without repercussions, they are as delusional as Donald Trump.” More

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      US supreme court allows border patrol to cut razor wire installed by Texas

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      The Biden administration is allowed to cut the razor wire deployed by Texas at the border with Mexico, the US supreme court ruled on Monday.The concertina wire, deployed at the direction of the Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, runs roughly 30 miles (48km) along the Rio Grande river, near the border city of Eagle Pass. It is part of Abbott’s broader fight with the Biden administration over immigration enforcement and what he calls “Biden’s reckless open-border policies”.It has also become a symbol of America’s broader political fight over the control of the nation’s border with many Republicans hailing it as tough, but necessary policy, and many Democrats decrying it as inhumane and cruel.Border security and immigration officially fall under the purview of the federal government, as decided in the 2012 supreme court case, Arizona v United States. The court held that federal immigration law preempted Arizona’s immigration laws.In a narrow 5-4 vote, the supreme court has now granted an emergency appeal from the Biden administration.The ruling now means the lone star state must comply with the Biden administration and allow federal authorities access to the border, contrary to recent actions taken by state.Texas officials have argued that federal agents cut the wire to help groups crossing illegally through the river before taking them in for processing. A federal appeals court last month forced federal agents to stop cutting the concertina wire.Texas officials earlier this month refused an order from the Biden administration to allow US border patrol agents access to a part of the US-Mexico border that is now under the state’s control. Last week, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton rejected orders for the state to stop controlling Shelby Park, a public park and entry point into the US.A number of migrants have crossed at Eagle Pass in recent months.“We are not allowing Border Patrol on that property anymore. We’re not going to let this happen anymore,” Abbott said at the time.The refusal to obey federal orders cost lives, the department of homeland security said. The agency reported three migrants, two of whom were two children, drowned near the park federal authorities were restricted from entering.In addition to wire, Abbott has also authorized installing floating barriers in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass and allowed state troopers to arrest and jail thousands of people suspected of migrating illegally on trespassing charges – initiatives taken under Operation Lone Star, a joint effort between the Texas department of public safety and the Texas military department that began in 2021 to curb illegal immigration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Biden administration is also challenging those actions in federal court.In court papers, the administration said the “fencing further restricts Border Patrol’s ability to reach the river in particular areas”.Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor sided with the administration. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas voted with Texas.No explanations for their vote were provided by any of the justices.
      The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Biden abortion ad marks campaign shift to emphasize reproductive rights

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      The Biden re-election campaign rolled out a new campaign ad Sunday, signaling a shift in emphasis to reproductive rights that the White House hopes will carry and define Democrats through the 2024 election cycle.The campaign ad, titled Forced, is designed to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue almost 18 months after his nominees to the supreme court helped to overturn a constitutional right to abortion enshrined in Roe v Wade, which would have turned 51 this week.Dr Austin Dennard, a Texas OB-GYN and mother of three tells the camera her story about traveling out of her state to terminate her pregnancy after learning her fetus had a fatal condition, calling her situation “every woman’s worst nightmare”.In Texas, she said, her choice “was completely taken away and that’s because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v Wade”.The launch of the ad comes as anti-abortion activists descended on Washington DC this weekend. One event, the National Pro-Life Summit, activists came to celebrate anti-abortion activism in the US. At another, the March for Life, marchers called for advocacy against abortion rights.Vice-President Kamala Harris is now being placed to the forefront of the administration’s messaging on reproductive rights, a position Biden has said he is not “big on” because of his Catholic faith, though he believes the landmark 1973 decision “got it right”.On Monday, Harris will embark on a nationwide tour to focus attention on the administration’s efforts to protect the right of women to choose. Her tour will start in Wisconsin, where abortion rights propelled a Democratic victory in a key state supreme court election.A statement from Harris’s office said the vice-president will “highlight the harm caused by extreme abortion bans and share stories of those who have been impacted in Wisconsin and across the country”.“She will also hold extremists accountable for proposing a national abortion ban, call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe, and outline steps the Administration is taking to protect access to health care,” the statement added.Democrats this year are hoping to emphasize that a second Trump presidency would establish new personal health restrictions.“Donald Trump is the reason that more than 1 in 3 American women of reproductive age don’t have the freedom to make their own health care decisions. Now, he and MAGA Republicans are running to go even further if they retake the White House,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden-Harris 2024 campaign manager, said in a statement to The Hill.On Sunday, the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, told CBS Face the Nation that “it would be good” if Biden talked about abortion more than he does. “I know that one tenet of his belief system is that women and only women with their families and healthcare professionals are the one who know what decision is right for them.”Asked if the president needs to take up that message more forcefully, Whitmer said: “I don’t think it would hurt. I think people want to know that this is president that is fighting … but maybe to use more blunt language would be helpful.” More

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      Texas officials block US border agents from helping three drowning migrants

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      A Texas congressman said Saturday that three people, including two children, who were seeking asylum in the US drowned while trying to reach the US near the border city of Eagle Pass, where the Biden administration says Texas has begun denying access to border patrol agents.Congressman Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, accused the state of failing to act amid escalating tensions between Texas and the US government over immigration enforcement.Cuellar said the people who drowned were a mother and her two children, an eight-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy.“This is a tragedy, and the state bears responsibility,” Cuellar, who is the top Democrat on the House appropriations committee’s subcommittee on homeland security, said in a statement.On Friday, the Justice Department told the US supreme court that Texas had taken control of an area known as Shelby park and were not letting border patrol agents enter.The park is in Eagle Pass, which is a major crossing point for migrants entering from Mexico and is the center of Republican governor Greg Abbott’s aggressive attempts to stop illegal crossings, known as Operation Lone Star. People crossing the river in that area have been killed when swept away by currents of the Rio Grande.Cuellar, whose district includes the Texas border, said Mexican authorities alerted border patrol of three people in distress struggling in the river late Friday.He said federal agents attempted to call and relay the information to Texas national guard members at Shelby park with no success.Border patrol agents then visited the entrance park, but were “physically barred by Texas officials from entering the area”, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement provided to CNN.“The Texas governor’s policies are cruel, dangerous, and inhumane, and Texas’s blatant disregard for federal authority over immigration poses grave risks,” DHS said.The 50-acre park is owned by the city, but it is used by the state department of public safety and the Texas military department to patrol border crossings. Although daily crossings diminished from the thousands to about 500, state authorities put up fences and stationed military vehicles by the entry to deny access to the public and border patrol agents this week, according to a court filing this week.On Saturday, Texas disputed claims that border patrol agents were denied access to the park. In a response to the court they argued border patrol had scaled down its presence since the summer, when the state moved their resources and manpower to the park.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Texas military department (TMD) said it had searched the river after being contacted by border patrol agents, but had not seen anyone in distress.TMD said officials saw Mexican authorities responding to an incident on the Mexican side of the river about 45 minutes later. At that point TMD ceased search operations after reporting their observations to the border patrol, it said. Border patrol then confirmed that the Mexican authorities did not require additional assistance, TMD said.“At no time did TMD security personnel along the river observe any distressed migrants, nor did TMD turn back any illegal immigrants from the US during this period,” TMD said in a statement.“Also, at no point was TMD made aware of any bodies in the area of Shelby Park, nor was TMD made aware of any bodies being discovered on the US side of the border regarding this situation.”On Saturday, members of the public held a ceremony at the park to mark the deaths of migrants in their region. Julio Vasquez, a pastor in attendance, said access was granted after making extended requests with the city and sharing pictures showing the entry still fenced up and guarded by members of the national guard and military vehicles.
      Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      John Kerry to leave White House to assist Biden re-election campaign

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      John Kerry, the United States’ special climate envoy and former secretary of state and presidential contender, plans to leave the Biden administration later this winter and switch to helping Joe Biden campaign to be re-elected to the White House, Kerry’s office said.Kerry informed his staff earlier on Saturday after speaking with Biden this week, a spokesperson for Kerry told Reuters.Politics news outlet Axios first reported the news about Kerry, 80, on Saturday.Kerry was instrumental is helping to broker the 2015 Paris climate agreement, as well as the UAE consensus that calls for the transition away from fossil fuels reached in December at Cop28 in Dubai.He believes that a second term in the White House for Biden would be the “single biggest” difference for progress in the climate crisis, Axios reported, initially citing a source close to the administration.Kerry and Biden talked in the Oval Office earlier this week, after Kerry had attended the Cop28 global climate summit in Dubai late last year, and the climate envoy wants to promote the president’s climate action with a major role on the campaign trail for the 2024 election, the outlet further reported.Kerry was named as a special envoy on the climate crisis soon after Biden won the 2020 presidential election, beating Donald Trump, and began forming his team during the transition period that November.At the time, the Biden transition team said Kerry would “fight climate change full time” in the role, which for the first time would include a seat on the national security council, in an elevation of the importance of tackling the climate crisis and global heating.As President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, succeeding Hillary Clinton in the role, Kerry played a prominent role in the international effort to craft the Paris climate agreement, which committed countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid disastrous storms, heatwaves, flooding and other looming climate threats.After leaving government in January 2017 as the Obama administration was replaced by the Trump administration, Kerry became sharply critical of President Trump’s dismantling of climate policies and the decision to remove the US from the Paris agreement. Biden re-entered the accord upon taking office in 2021.Kerry ran for president in the 2004 election and won the Democratic nomination but was beaten by George W Bush that November, with the Republican president winning a second term.His election campaign was badly damaged by a pro-Bush group that smeared Kerry’s military track record as a decorated Vietnam veteran who became an anti-war campaigner.The group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, emerged in August 2004 as Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was doing well in the polls against Bush, who had only a domestic spell in the Texas air national guard in comparison. The group set about trying to destroy Kerry’s reputation.A Republican strategist, Chris LaCivita, who orchestrated the so-called “swift-boating” of Kerry, is now a senior aide to the Trump re-election campaign.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Hunter Biden makes appearance at his own contempt of Congress hearing

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      Hunter Biden made a surprise appearance at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, as Republicans on the US House oversight committee convened to consider a resolution to hold the president’s son in contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply with a subpoena for testimony.Appearing with his attorney Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden sat silently in the front row as the committee chair and vice-chair delivered opening statements to a hearing that would be dominated by partisan bickering.“We will not provide Hunter Biden with special treatment because of his last name,” said James Comer, the Republican chair, from Kentucky. “All Americans must be treated equally under the law. That includes the Bidens.”Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the Democratic vice-chair, hit back by reminding Republicans Hunter Biden offered to testify in public. Raskin also noted that Republicans including the House judiciary chair, Jim Jordan, defied subpoenas issued by the January 6 committee.“We are here today because the chairman has bizarrely decided to obstruct his own investigation and is now seeking to hold Hunter Biden in contempt after he accepted the chairman’s multiple public offers to come answer the committee’s questions under oath before the American people,” Raskin said.The hearing descended into chaos as Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, called Hunter Biden “the epitome of white privilege” for, she said, “spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed”.“What are you afraid of?” Mace said. “You have no balls. I think that Hunter Biden should be arrested right here right now and go straight to jail.”The notion of Biden being “afraid” to face House Republicans struck Democrats as absurd, given his presence in the room. Jared Moskowitz, from Florida, interrupted Mace to say: “If the gentlelady wants to hear from Hunter Biden, we can hear from him right now, Mr Chairman. Let’s take a vote and hear from Hunter Biden. What are you afraid of?”Jasmine Crockett of Texas, a Black Democrat, took issue with Mace’s invocation of white privilege.“I can’t get over the gentlelady from South Carolina talking about white privilege,” Crockett said. “It was a spit in the face, at least of mine as a Black woman, for you to talk about what white privilege looks like, especially from that side of the aisle.”Mace pointed to a previous role as the ranking Republican on the civil rights subcommittee and said she took “great pride as a white female Republican to address the inadequacies in our country”.As Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican from Georgia, was speaking, Hunter Biden left the room. Greene, who in a previous hearing showed what appeared to be a sexually explicit picture of Biden, claimed he was “afraid of my words”.Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, defended Biden, saying: “I think it’s really interesting to hear the gentlelady from Georgia speak about Hunter Biden leaving, when she is the person that showed nude photos of Hunter Biden in this very committee room.”When Greene attempted to enter evidence into the record, Raskin protested that Democrats had not seen it, saying: “In the past, she’s displayed pornography. Are pornographic photos allowed to be displayed in this committee room?”Greene said her evidence was not pornographic. Raskin said: “OK, well, you’re the expert.”Outside, Lowell told reporters: “Republican chairs … are commandeering an unprecedented resolution to hold somebody in contempt who has offered to publicly answer all their proper questions. The question there is, what are they afraid of?”Republicans are targeting Biden as part of attempts to portray his father as corrupt and secure his impeachment, as an expected election rematch with Donald Trump looms. Republicans have however presented no evidence that Joe Biden profited from his son’s dealings.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn early December, Hunter Biden, 53, defied a subpoena for testimony in private, instead appearing in front of reporters on Capitol Hill.“Republicans do not want an open process where Americans can see their tactics, expose their baseless inquiry, or hear what I have to say,” Biden said then. “What are they afraid of? I am here.”On Monday, Comer and Jordan released their contempt resolution and an attendant report. They said Biden’s “willful refusal to comply with our subpoenas constitutes contempt of Congress and warrants referral to the appropriate United States attorney’s office for prosecution.”Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanour criminal offence. As described by the Congressional Research Service, “a witness suffers no direct legal consequence from House or Senate approval of a contempt citation, though a variety of political consequences may [follow]. If the individual is prosecuted and convicted, violations … are punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 and imprisonment ‘for not less than one month nor more than 12 months’.”Hunter Biden is already in extensive legal jeopardy. In September, he was indicted in Delaware on three federal charges related to his purchase and ownership of a handgun while experiencing (and lying about) addiction. Facing a sentence of up to 25 years, he pleaded not guilty.In December, he was indicted in California on nine tax charges carrying a maximum sentence of 17 years. Arraignment is scheduled for Thursday.Democrats have attempted to make news of their own, releasing a report detailing at least $7.8m in payments from 20 countries to Trump business concerns during his four years in power. Comer called that report “beyond parody” and said: “Former President Trump has legitimate businesses but the Bidens do not.”In December, Hunter Biden said: “There is no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business because it did not happen …“I have made mistakes in my life and wasted opportunities and privileges I was afforded. For that, I am responsible. For that, I am accountable. And for that, I am making amends.” More