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      Progressive congressman’s personal blog promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories

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      The progressive US congressman Jamaal Bowman is seeking to distance himself from conspiracy theories about the deadly September 11 terrorist attacks which he published on a personal blog that he ran before his career in elected office.The New York representative was linked to the blog in question by the Daily Beast on Monday as he faces a substantial primary challenge from a fellow Democrat over his criticism of Israeli military strikes in Gaza in response to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack.Bowman was also grappling with the Daily Beast’s reporting after his 2023 fine and misdemeanor guilty plea for apparently pulling a fire alarm at the US Capitol shortly before the US House was supposed to vote on a government funding bill. Though he maintained that the fire alarm pull was accidental, the House censured Bowman, who was accused of trying to delay the funding bill vote.“I don’t believe anything that these cranks have said, and my life’s work has proved that,” said a statement that Bowman distributed to media outlets about the far-right conspiracy theories once featured on a blog.Bowman’s statement alluded to a resolution that condemned the racist white replacement theory that drove a gunman to murder 11 Black people in Buffalo in 2022 and said: “My life’s work has proved that … I’ve called out the endless bullshit of the far right.”The deactivated relentless-strongback.blogspot.com blog contained Bowman’s thoughts on the news and other topics when he was a New York City middle school principal. Some of the writings seemed to express doubts about the established history of the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001 after terrorists hijacked and crashed passenger planes into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon in Washington DC and a field in Pennsylvania.“Hmm … / Multiple explosions / Heard before / And during the collapse / Hmm … ,” one piece of writing, resembling free verse, at the blog said.Another piece read: “Allegedly / Two other planes / The Pentagon / Pennsylvania / Hijacked by terrorist / Minimal damage done / Minimal debris found / Hmm.”As the Daily Beast reported, those writings appeared to refer to the disproven fringe theory that one of the World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on 9/11 was actually felled by an intentional, controlled demolition. The writings also seemed to refer to the Pentagon strike that caused the facility’s outer wall to collapse while killing 184 people. And they also seemingly made short mention of the hijacking that ended in Pennsylvania with dozens of deaths and considerable debris.Bowman’s blog also suggested that readers watch Loose Change and Zeitgeist, films that propagated 9/11 conspiracies peddled among the far right. The Daily Beast noted that both were favored by the gunman who shot six people to death and wounded then congresswoman Gabby Giffords in 2011. Meanwhile, the Daily Beast added, Alex Jones has spoken flatteringly of Zeitgeist and served as an executive producer of the final cut of Loose Change – before the rightwing provocateur was hit with a $1.5bn judgment for spreading lies that the deadly 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax aimed at forcing Americans to accept gun control.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBowman’s statement maintained “few people ever read” his blog, parts of which can still be accessed through the Internet Archive. He added that some of its posts were inspired by research he conducted into “a wide range of books, films and articles” as he debated pursuing a doctorate.“I of course do not believe any of these conspiracy theories that are pushed by the same right-wing fanatics who have always been opposed to my candidacy and presence in Congress,” Bowman’s statement said.Since joining the House in 2021, Bowman’s brand of leftwing progressive politics has indeed been pilloried by conservatives, including some who tried to compare him to the Donald Trump supporters who attacked Congress on 6 January 2021.Bowman said his office was also inundated with angry calls after he joined a few House members who opposed a resolution supporting Israel’s ongoing strikes in Gaza. And by December, George Latimer, a pro-Israel Democratic politician from Westchester county, New York, announced he would run for Bowman’s seat as the incumbent seeks a third term in the House during the upcoming election cycle. More

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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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      Cori Bush confirms investigation as she rejects ‘false’ campaign spending claims

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      The congresswoman Cori Bush has confirmed that the US Department of Justice is investigating whether the Missouri Democrat misused campaign funds for security services, an accusation she denied as “simply false”.In a statement, Bush said her campaign was “fully cooperating” with the investigation and said she had always “complied with all applicable laws and House rules”.“I hold myself, my campaign, and my position to the highest levels of integrity. I also believe in transparency, which is why I can confirm that the Department of Justice is reviewing my campaign’s spending on security services,” said Bush, part of a progressive group of Democratic women known as “the Squad”.She added that the allegations were rooted in “baseless complaints” raised by rightwing organizations who have long made her a target.In a lengthy statement, Bush, a nurse and Black Lives Matter activist turned lawmaker who represents the St Louis area, said she has endured threats to her “physical safety and life” since before she took office in 2021.Bush said that as a rank-and-file member of Congress she is not entitled to receive security protection by the House and has instead used campaign funds to pay for security services.“I have not used any federal tax dollars for personal security services,” she said. “Any reporting that I have used federal funds for personal security is simply false.”At issue, the congresswoman continued, was her decision to hire her husband, Cortney Merritts, to provide her with security services. She paid a total of $62,359 to Merritts for security services in 2022 before the pair were married, according to the St Louis Post-Dispatch.“In particular, the nature of these allegations have been around my husband’s role on the campaign,” she said.“In accordance with all applicable rules, I retained my husband as part of my security team to provide security services because he has had extensive experience in this area, and is able to provide the necessary services at or below a fair market rate.”She said that the Office of Congressional Ethics had investigated the matter last year and voted to dismiss the allegations.“In September of last year, after conducting a months-long investigation, the Office of Congressional Ethics found no wrongdoing and voted unanimously to dismiss the case,” she wrote.“I look forward to this same outcome from all pending investigations.”The department has subpoenaed the House sergeant at arms, the chamber’s top law enforcement official, for records relating to the alleged misspending, according to six sources with knowledge about the investigation, Punchbowl reported.Bush became the first Black woman to represent Missouri in Congress, after her 2020 victory against the 10-term representative Lacy Clay. She held an event on Saturday to kick off her latest re-election campaign.Bush said: “I am under no illusion that these rightwing organizations will stop politicizing and pursuing efforts to attack me and the work that the people of St Louis sent me to Congress to do: to lead boldly, to legislate change my constituents can feel, and to save lives.” More

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      Pelosi condemned for suggesting pro-Palestinian activists have ties to Russia

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      Supporters of a ceasefire in Gaza condemned comments made by the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi as “downright authoritarian” after the California Democrat suggested, without offering evidence, that pro-Palestinian activists may have ties to Russia and president Vladimir Putin.In an interview on Sunday, Pelosi called on the FBI to investigate protesters involved in the progressive movement pressuring the Biden administration to support a ceasefire in Gaza.“For them to call for a ceasefire is Mr Putin’s message,” Pelosi said during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine. It’s about Putin’s message. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia.”Pressed for clarity on whether she believed the activists were “Russian plants”, Pelosi replied: “Seeds or plants. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.”The interview sparked a furious backlash among activists and anti-war protesters, who pointed to polling that shows strong shares of Democrats support calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and agree with the claim that Israel is committing a “genocide” against the Palestinian people.Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called the remarks an “unsubstantiated smear” that “echo a time in our nation when opponents of the Vietnam war were accused of being communist sympathizers and subjected to FBI harassment”.“Her comments once again show the negative impact of decades of dehumanization of the Palestinian people by those supporting Israeli apartheid,” Awad said in a statement. “Instead of baselessly smearing those Americans as Russian collaborators, former House Speaker Pelosi and other political leaders should respect the will of the American people by calling for an end to the Netanyahu government’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza.”Since the outbreak of war in October, Joe Biden has faced a groundswell of opposition to his policy in Gaza. Prominent Jewish, progressive and anti-war groups are among the many organizations involved in the ceasefire movement. In recent weeks, activists have interrupted major campaign events, including a speech on reproductive rights in Virginia where he was interrupted at least a dozen times.Biden has resisted calls to back an immediate ceasefire, even as his administration works to secure a temporary pause to the bloodshed in exchange for the release of nearly 100 hostages taken in the 7 October attack on Israel. The mounting Palestinian death toll, now estimated to have surpassed 26,000, and widespread suffering in Gaza, have infuriated key parts of his Democratic base.Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who supports a ceasefire and has been closely monitoring the US response to the war in Gaza, said Pelosi’s remarks amounted to an “unacceptable disinformation being spread by the most powerful Democratic party leaders”.“Democrats are most successful when they represent a broad coalition, but the party leadership has sabotaged itself by vigorously attacking the majority of their own Democratic voters who oppose the war,” he said.Pelosi, who led House Democrats for 20 years and served twice as House speaker, is apparently the first and most high profile US official to publicly accuse Russia of supporting pro-Palestinian activists in an effort to exacerbate divisions among Democrats over Israel’s war in Gaza.Pelosi made the comments in response to a question about whether opposition to Biden’s handling of the conflict could hurt the president’s re-election prospects in November.In a statement following Pelosi’s appearance on CNN, a spokesperson emphasized that the former speaker believes the “focus” should remain on strategies to end the suffering of the people in Gaza and secure release of the hostages held by Hamas.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe spokesperson continued: “Speaker Pelosi has always supported and defended the right of all Americans to make their views known through peaceful protest. Informed by three decades on the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker Pelosi is acutely aware of how foreign adversaries meddle in American politics to sow division and impact our elections, and she wants to see further investigation ahead of the 2024 election.”Brianna Wu, who created a pac to support progressive candidates called Rebellion, wrote on social media that Pelosi’s comments were inartful, but tracked with recent efforts by Russia to interfere in a US election.“Information warfare doesn’t invent new divisions. It finds existing divisions and exacerbates them,” Wu wrote. “Since Putin wants Trump to win, he will obviously be funding efforts to split the Democratic Party. Israel/Palestine is proving to be very effective at this.”Democrats in Michigan have warned the White House that dissatisfaction with Biden’s approach to the Israel-Gaza war may jeopardize his support among Arab Americans in a swing state that could determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a sizable Arab American population that helped seal Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, shared the results of a November poll that showed broad support for a permanent ceasefire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza.“So, based on Nancy Pelosi’s remarks, 76% of Democrats / 49% of Republicans / 61% of Americans are potentially paid operatives of Russia who are pushing Putin’s message of calling for a ceasefire??” he wrote.Hammoud, who last week joined a group of Arab and Muslim leaders in refusing to meet with Biden’s reelection campaign manager to discuss the administration’s approach to the war, concluded: “The Democratic party leadership is in disarray.” 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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      The Truce review: deep dive on Democrats’ dynamics and divisions

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      Joe Biden is more unpopular than Donald Trump. The Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition frays, riven by the Israel-Gaza war, crisis at the US-Mexico border and inter-generational tensions. The party convention in Chicago in August carries the potential for a repeat of 1968. Then, pandemonium in the Windy City helped cost Hubert Humphrey the White House.But for sustained Republican efforts to gut reproductive rights, a strong issue for Democrats to run on, Biden and Kamala Harris would be in even deeper trouble. Even on the economy: strong GDP numbers and an invigorated bull market have yet to yield political profit.After three years on the job, the 46th president is widely viewed as a back-slapping north-eastern pol and Hunter Biden’s dad – not the transformational figure he sees when he looks into the mirror. Worse for him, at 81, majorities say he’s just too old.With The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party, Hunter Walker and Luppe B Luppen cast a sympathetic eye toward the party of Biden, Barack Obama and the Squad, prominent progressives of color in the US House. Walker is an investigative reporter at Talking Points Memo who covered the White House for Yahoo News. Luppen is a lawyer with a social media presence. In the past, he has donated to Democrats including Obama and Hillary Clinton.Mindful of Democrats’ internal divisions, the authors warmly describe Biden’s shift left and the political cover conferred. Convincingly, Walker and Luppen argue that the tilt from the center united the party and helped Biden enact legislation – until the House was lost.“This rapprochement culminated in Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address,” Walker and Luppen write, of a speech that “leaned hard on progressive policy priorities from promoting organized labor to getting a handle on police violence”.Unfortunately, it failed to make Biden any more palatable to much of the public. On the one hand, 71% are sympathetic to unions, the highest level since 1965. On the other, Democrats remain seen as soft on crime. In 2020, protesters’ demands to “defund the police” were a boost only to Trump.“Bernie [Sanders] may have lost the election,” the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey reportedly told Ilhan Omar, a Squad member from Minnesota, after the State of the Union, referring to the Democratic primary in 2020. “But he won the speech.”Sanders, from Vermont, is the only socialist in the Senate. Biden also needed the centrists, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema but they were never his. To a point they gave him cover but they never embraced his agenda. Manchin, from West Virginia, now mulls a third-party White House run. Sinema became an independent.Walker and Luppen also describe the enthusiasm shown for Biden’s State of the Union by Jamaal Bowman, a New York congressman and Squad member.“Mr President, that was awesome – that was awesome!” Bowman is quoted as saying.“Did you write the speech?” he is shown asking Sanders.Bowman has attracted controversy of his own. In September, he pulled a fire alarm in a congressional office building, then denied doing so in an attempt to delay a crucial vote. He did plead guilty to a misdemeanor.More recently, Bowman praised Norman Finkelstein, an American academic who has accused Israel of using the Holocaust to justify its actions against Palestinians, who has said Holocaust deniers should be allowed to teach, and who on 7 October, the day Hamas fighters raped and murdered Israelis, wrote: “It warms every fiber of my soul [to see] the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.”Introducing Finkelstein at a panel session, Bowman said he was “starstruck” and had “watched him all the time on YouTube”. Under fire, Bowman said he had been “unaware of Norman Finkelstein’s completely reprehensible comments”.Encapsulating Democrats’ deepening divide over Israel, Bowman now faces a primary challenge from George Latimer, the Westchester county executive. Two months after that vote, the party will most likely face a convention fight fueled by the same issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDoubt also swirls around Biden’s vice-president. Walker and Lappen distill it. “Kamala is not ready for prime time”, a “senior White House aide” is quoted as saying, adding: “She ain’t made for this.” Fifty seven percent of registered voters concur. Walker and Luppen are not done. “This person should not be president of the United States,” a “top aide” to the former California senator’s 2020 campaign says.“The problems Harris and her team experienced on her campaign persisted during her time as vice-president,” Walker and Luppen write, adding that a source offered a damning assessment: “It was, they said, Game of Thrones.”HBO also aired Veep.The Truce also shines a light on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York and perhaps the most prominent Squad member. In the process, the book dishes on Corbin Trent, a former senior aide, and Riley Roberts, the congresswoman’s fiance.“I was hooked on fucking pain pills,” Trent acknowledges. Walker and Luppen stress that Ocasio-Cortez did not know. These days, Trent is back in the news for allegedly siphoning $140,000 in Pac money and for attempting to oust Biden as the nominee.As for Roberts, Walker and Luppen remind us of how his feelings for the police and his entrepreneurial spirit came to coincide. The authors recall a now-deleted site on which Roberts pushed the “Cop-Out Collective”, boasting, “High-end hemp t-shirts with our logo will be available for sale.”According to one poll, 47% of voters see the Democrats as too liberal, a seven-point swing since 2020. In another survey, only 57% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners expressed satisfaction with Biden as their nominee. More than seven-in-10 Republicans and allies are content with Trump.The Democrats have ceded economic policy to Sanders, their social agenda to Ivy League professors. When pivoting left on economics, it is imperative to remain in the cultural center. Democrats, including Biden, ignore this at their peril.
      The Truce is published in the US by WW Norton More

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      Mitt Romney: Trump’s call to stonewall Democrats on immigration ‘appalling’

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      Donald Trump’s directive to congressional Republicans to not agree to a deal with Democrats on immigration and border control is “appalling”, Mitt Romney said.“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” Romney, the Republican senator from Utah, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday.“And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame [Joe] Biden for it is … really appalling.”Having won in Iowa and New Hampshire and with only the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley still in the race, Trump is the clear favourite for the Republican presidential nomination to face Biden in November.His progress has not been impeded by 91 criminal charges, attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress and assorted civil trials.It was widely reported this week that Trump has sought to dynamite Senate talks for an immigration deal long linked to prospects of a new aid package for Ukraine.Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, reportedly acknowledged that Trump’s opposition makes it highly unlikely immigration talks will succeed, given hardline Republicans’ hold on the House and its speaker, Mike Johnson, a far-right congressman from Louisiana.Romney is a former Massachusetts governor who became the Republican nominee for president in 2012 before winning a Senate seat in Utah in 2018.Though he flirted with working for Trump when he won the White House, Romney has since emerged as a constant opponent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe sole Republican to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, for seeking political dirt in Ukraine, Romney was one of seven senators to find Trump guilty in his second such trial, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.On Thursday, Romney said: “The reality is that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border, and someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved, as opposed to saying: ‘Hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’” More