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      Robert F Kennedy Jr announces independent run for president; siblings condemn his ‘perilous’ campaign – as it happened

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      From 5h agoRobert F Kennedy Jr has officially announced that he will be running for US president as an independent.“I’m here to declare myself an independent candidate for president of the United States,” Kennedy said to applause and chants.Before announcing his run, Kennedy thanked his wife and children, his campaign staff, and other members of his family.The 69-year old had previously been running for the Democratic nomination for president, the only person to challenge Joe Biden for the nomination.But over the weekend, Kennedy teased a “much-anticipated announcement” about his campaign.Kennedy, a member of the Kennedy political family, has received backlash for peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was designed to spare Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.That’s it for our US politics blog.Here’s what happened today:
      Robert F Kennedy Jr officially announced that he will be running for US president as an independent. “I’m here to declare myself an independent candidate for president of the United States,” Kennedy said during a campaign event in Philadelphia.
      The siblings of Kennedy Jr denounced their brother’s campaign, calling it “perilous” for the US. “Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today’s announcement is deeply saddening for us,” read the siblings’ statement in part.
      More centrist Republicans are already casting doubt on Representative Jim Jordan as a potential House speaker. Lawmakers passed around a mailer from Jordan’s campaign, raising concerns about his potential priorities as House speaker.
      At least nine US citizens have died in Israel amid Israel’s war with Hamas. US state department spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed the deaths on Monday, adding that some US citizens have not been accounted for.
      McCarthy has not ruled out a return to his former position of House speaker, if House lawmakers were still at a gridlock over the position.
      Republican House representatives faced mounting pressure to rally around a House speaker candidate after the ousting of former speaker Kevin McCarthy. Only two candidates have tossed their hat in the ring for the role: House majority leader Steve Scalise, a representative of Louisiana, and Ohio representative Jim Jordan, who is the judiciary chairman.
      Thank you for following our politics live blog.Stay tuned for more updates tomorrow.More on Tuberville blocking military promotions from the Guardian’s Oliver Milman:
      Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach turned Alabama senator, has indicated he will maintain the blockade even in the wake of the assault on Israel, in which at least 700 mostly civilians are thought to have died, including several hundred revelers killed at a music festival, while dozens more people are believed to have been taken hostage. Israel has responded with airstrikes on the Gaza Strip that authorities in the penned-in territory say has killed at least 493 Palestinian people, including entire families sheltering in their apartments.
      US military appointments currently in limbo include top officers slated to command American forces in the Middle East, and two picks for the joint chiefs of staff. Separately, the US also does not have an ambassador to Israel, its close ally; Democrats have called for a swift confirmation of the nominee, Jack Lew.
      Joe Biden has previously called Tuberville’s stance “totally irresponsible”, and the president accused him of undermining the strength and capabilities of the US military. But the Alabama senator said on Sunday that even the attack on Israel would not shift his position.
      “The Pentagon clearly thinks forcing taxpayers to facilitate abortion is more important than confirming their top nominees without a vote,” a Tuberville spokesperson told NBC. “They could end this situation today by dropping their illegal and immoral policy and get everyone confirmed rapidly, but they refuse.”
      Invoking a name Tuberville calls himself because of his prior job, the spokesperson added: “If the Biden administration wants their nominees confirmed then Senate Democrats can do what Coach just did in September and file a cloture petition to force a vote.”
      Military nominees are usually bundled together and confirmed by a voice vote in the Senate to speed along appointments, but under Senate rules a single senator can hold up this process. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, has said that individual votes on each of the nominees would eat up a huge amount of time, and urged Republicans to get Tuberville “in line”.
      Read the full article here.Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville appears to not be lifting holds on military promotions, despite fighting in Israel, the Hill reports.Tuberville has been criticized by other lawmakers who say that his hold on military promotions is affecting US readiness, especially in light of the Israel-Hamas war.Democratic senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island said in a Sunday interview that the recent escalation in fighting “underscores the foolishness” of Tuberville’s actions.Tuberville’s spokesperson Steve Stafford responded, saying in part:“The hold is still not affecting our readiness and it’s certainly not affecting the readiness of other countries.”Tuberville has held military promotions for seven months because of a Pentagon policy that covers travel for service members seeking abortion care.Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released a statement on Monday regarding the violence in Israel. She said: “Today is devastating for all those seeking a lasting peace and respect for human rights in Israel and Palestine. I condemn Hamas’ attack in the strongest possible terms. No child and family should ever endure this kind of violence and fear, and this violence will not solve the ongoing oppression and occupation in the region. An immediate ceasefire and de-escalation is urgently needed to save lives.”Cortez, along with other members of ‘the squad’ have long been vocal against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Others also further to the political left, including house representative Cori Bush also called for a ceasefire and condemned both Hamas militants and the Israeli military on the ongoing violence. Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian said she grieves the “Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day.” She did not outright mention Hamas.“As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”The US’s secretary of the army Christine Wormuth has called for more congressional funds to support Israel with munitions.In the annual meeting of the association of the US army held on Monday, Wormuth said: “To be able to increase our capacity… to expand production, and then to also pay for the munitions themselves, we need additional support from Congress.”Biden has already said Israel has “rock-solid and unwavering” support from the US and US defense secretary Lloyd Austin said the US will send munitions.Military ships and aircraft have already been ordered to move closer to Israel.The US contributes about $3bn annually to Israel, the largest current recipient of United States military aid.Biden is speaking with several US allies about the Israel-Hamas war, according to White House officials.Biden spent the morning being brief on the situation by his national security team.Remarks from Biden on the developing situation were expected Monday morning, but have been postponed after the White House announced a “lid” for the day.The White House has called a “lid” for the day, meaning Biden will not be delivering any remarks.The lid could be lifted if Biden decides to make remarks later on or attend an event.The decision to call a lid is surprising. The White House previously announced that Biden would speak about the Israel-Hamas war on Monday afternoon.Meanwhile, Republicans have condemned the decision to call a lid.Florida governor and US presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has criticized the White House and called for immediate steps, including shutting down the US southern border.From DeSantis campaign spokesperson Carly Atchison:The siblings of Robert F Kennedy Jr have denounced their brother’s campaign, calling it “perilous” for the US.The Kennedy siblings said that Robert’s announcement to run as a third party candidate was “dangerous to our country”, in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter.“Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today’s announcement is deeply saddening for us,” read the statement in part.Kennedy has largely embraced that his campaign and platform rejects dogmatism, arguing that people can have different opinions and still tolerate them.“People can disagree and still respect each other. You can be pro-choice and not think that pro-lifers are women hating zealots. You can support the second amendment and not think that gun control advocates are totalitarians who hate freedom.”“It’s more than being independent of two existing parties. It’s also independence from tribal thinking,” Kennedy said of his political philosophy.“It’s freedom from the reflex of having to take sides.”Kennedy is not the only candidate running as an independent in the US presidential election.Academic and activist Cornel West is also running in the US election as an independent.West previously ran for US president as a a Green party candidate, but dropped from the party last Thursday.Read a recent interview with West and Robert Tait for the Guardian, available here. More

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      Biden’s border wall won’t fix a broken immigration system – or deter migrants

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      The Biden administration’s plan to erect a new section of border wall is disappointing not only because it contradicts a campaign promise, nor just because physical barriers are a return to the same tired policy responses of the Trump era.Rather, this week’s news around the project – slated for a rural region along the Texas-Mexico border – is upsetting most of all because it stands in stark contrast to the solutions the US immigration system needs right now.Even the highest walls often do not deter desperate migrants and asylum seekers from trying to reach the US. That was true during the previous administration, and it remains true today. Instead, those barriers leave people who cross anyway at higher risk of injury and death, contributing to a growing list of casualties that has turned the US-Mexico border into the world’s most lethal land migration route.Already, blowback to renewed border wall construction has been swift and intense. Representative Henry Cuellar, Biden’s fellow Democrat whose large south Texas district includes the county with the new planned barriers, called it “a 14th-century solution to a 21st-century problem”. To conservation advocates, it means bulldozing “irreplaceable” habitats. Some of the local communities say it feels like “a slap in the face” that will “punish the most innocent”.And, for national immigration advocates, it is yet another letdown that demonstrates a disregard for human dignity within a larger broken immigration system.Given the absence of legislative reforms, and given pressure on the Biden administration to reduce irregular migration, the US-Mexico border is chaotic these days, though not necessarily in the way most Americans think.In the name of deterrence, people fleeing for their lives who might otherwise qualify for asylum are being presumed ineligible because of how they arrived, under a policy that has already been ruled unlawful yet remains in place. Many thousands of non-Mexicans are suddenly being sent back across the border to Mexico, a foreign country where they likely have next to no support or contacts, and where they face grave danger of sexual assault, kidnappings, extortion and other violence.In light of a humanitarian emergency and political repression in Venezuela, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has allowed Venezuelans who made it here by the end of July to access deportation protections and work authorization. Yet Venezuelans arriving today can be directly deported to the same authoritarian regime where US officials explicitly acknowledged a few weeks ago that people could not safely return.Similarly, the Biden administration continues to repatriate Haitians, even as it tells Americans and non-emergency government personnel to depart Haiti for security reasons.Meanwhile, DHS has removed or returned over 36,000 migrant family members in the last few months – more than in any previous full fiscal year. The unluckiest of asylum seekers, families included, are being put through particularly fast-tracked deportations, where they often confront a higher bar to qualify for protection and have almost no time to prepare their case.This tangle of convoluted policies demonstrates why more walls are not the answer that the US’s immigration policy strategy needs: it’s already a labyrinth. Barrier after barrier – some more visible than others, but all formidable – work together to confuse, limit and disqualify people trying to reach the US.Even so, the restrictions have not stopped newcomers.Border patrol documented over 181,000 migrant encounters between official ports of entry at the US-Mexico border in August. That number is expected to rise in September, with early estimates showing roughly 210,000 apprehensions last month, according to CBS News.To try to get here, little girls cry as they crawl beneath razor wire, and in some of the most tragic cases, kids are dying. Amid this humanitarian emergency, a sprawling border wall – to use Biden’s own words – “is not a serious policy solution”. Neither is the House GOP’s sweeping but specious legislative proposal, the Secure the Border Act, which continues to take an enforcement-only approach to immigration by gutting asylum, curtailing other existing lawful pathways, establishing new criminal penalties, and more.There’s so much work Democrats and Republicans – the White House and Congress – should take up. For one, the Biden administration could expand processing capacity at official ports of entry and let more migrants in there, even if they don’t have a pre-scheduled appointment through a government phone app, and without rendering them ineligible for asylum. That way, children and families could walk across an international pedestrian bridge with far less struggle than they can wade through a river or stumble through the desert.Ultimately, however, the buck stops with Congress. The best, most proactive way to keep many people from showing up at the US-Mexico border is to offer them a safer, more orderly pathway here, but such immigration avenues are in woefully short supply right now.It will take both parties working together in good faith to address border security and improve the legal immigration system, a compromise supported by the vast majority of American voters. Lawmakers can expand labor pathways, update the US’s humanitarian protections to meet 21st-century challenges, and offer permanent solutions for people who are already here contributing while stuck in a protracted legal limbo.In other words, they can fight arbitrary cruelty and chaos at the border by making our immigration system work again.
      Alexandra Villarreal is a policy and advocacy associate at the National Immigration Forum. More

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      Blinken: Republicans ‘playing politics’ by attacking Biden over Israeli crisis

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      US party leaders in Washington have wasted no time in turning the Middle East conflict into a domestic political dispute, with senior Republicans accusing both the Biden administration and each other of having triggered the violence.The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, charged top Republicans with exploiting the crisis for their own political ends after several Republican presidential hopefuls accused the Biden administration of effectively causing the conflagration. “It’s deeply unfortunate that some are playing politics when so many lives have been lost and Israel remains under attack,” Blinken told CNN’s State of the Union.The reported presence of US citizens among the dead and captured from the Hamas attack on Israel is likely to inflame the partisan mud-slinging between Republican leaders and the White House. Several presidential candidates accused Joe Biden of being partly responsible for the crisis, blaming him for appeasing Iran through the recent deal involving the return of five detained Americans in exchange for the release of $6bn in frozen Iranian funds for humanitarian use.Blinken insisted on Sunday that none of the $6bn had yet been liquidated. “Not a single dollar has been spent from that account. The account is closely regulated by the US treasury department, so it can only be used for things like food, medicine, medical equipment – that’s what this is about,” he told CNN.Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is vying for his party’s presidential nomination, went so far as to accuse Biden personally of being “complicit” in the Hamas attack. “Biden’s weakness invited the attack, Biden’s negotiation funded the attack,” he said on social media.Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former UN ambassador and another 2024 White House hopeful, also turned on the US president, saying that Blinken’s assurance that the $6bn had not yet been released was duplicitous. “Hamas knows, and Iran knows, they’re moving money around as we speak, because they know $6bn is going to be released. That’s the reality,” she said.The sniping was not limited to cross-party wrangling. Top Republicans also attacked each other over the Israeli crisis.The former vice-president and presidential hopeful Mike Pence seized the opportunity to take a pot shot at his former running mate Trump as well as two other rivals in the Republican presidential contest.Pence told CNN’s State of the Union that the Middle East violence was partly catalysed by their calls for America to withdraw from the world stage. He pointed his finger specifically at the former US president, the entrepreneur, and the Florida governor respectively who have raised doubts about US funding to support Ukraine.“This is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis signaling retreat from America’s role as leader of the free world. What happened in Ukraine was an unprovoked invasion by Russia, what happened this weekend was an unprovoked invasion by Hamas into Israel,” he said.Top Republicans also lambasted their party peers for the vacuum in leadership in the House of Representatives at such a critical moment. Last week Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the House by the hard-right flank of the party, and a replacement has yet to be found.Another presidential hopeful, the former governor of New Jersey Chris Christie, said that the outbreak of fighting in the Middle East had made a bad business on Capitol Hill worse. “The actions taken by some members of my party were wholly irresponsible without this going on, they’re now putting an even brighter light on the irresponsibility of not having someone in place,” he told ABC’s This Week.Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House foreign affairs committee, also lamented the absence of leadership. “It wasn’t my idea to oust the speaker,” he told CNN.“I thought it was dangerous. What kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern, when we are dysfunctional, when we don’t even have a speaker of the House. That’s a terrible message.” More

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      RFK Jr is poised for a 2024 run as an independent. Which side should be worried?

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      For months, Republicans have been reveling in Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential bid.Running in the Democratic primary against Joe Biden, the hope has been that Kennedy could weaken the president ahead of a presumed Biden-Trump match-up in 2024.But with Kennedy expected to announce that he will ditch the Democratic party and run as an independent, some commentators are suggesting that conservatives’ schadenfreude could come back to haunt them.That’s because of the curious case of Kennedy’s political appeal.It turns out that the son of Robert F Kennedy and nephew of John F Kennedy, Democratic giants who maintain widespread admiration in the party, is actually more popular among Republicans – including some of the most influential rightwing voices in the US.Kennedy, Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast in April, would be “an excellent choice” for Trump’s running mate.Charlie Kirk, founder of the rightwing Turning Point USA, has praised Kennedy. So has Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor and QAnon enthusiast.The noted rightwing crank Alex Jones added his endorsement on his InfoWars show.“I don’t agree with Robert F Kennedy Jr on some topics, but he’s a man of integrity that fights fluoride and poison shots and fentanyl and everything else. He’s a good man,” said Jones, who last year was ordered to pay nearly $1bn to relatives of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting victims, after he falsely claimed the shooting was a hoax.The support for Kennedy from fluoridated-water-lowers-IQ-and-or-causes-cancer Republicans makes sense. Kennedy, 69, is a man who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like.In the last few months alone, the former environmental lawyer has said that wifi causes “leaky brain”, and linked antidepressants to school shootings. In June Kennedy said chemicals in water are making kids transgender and and declared that US support for Ukraine to be “a setup by the neocons and the CIA”. He also has longstanding, and wrong, beliefs about apparently any and all vaccines.Kennedy first announced he was considering a run for the Democratic nomination in March, in a speech that, true to form, was banned from YouTube for violating the platform’s “medical misinformation” policies.In April, he announced his candidacy for real, in a video that has not yet been removed from YouTube, and soon some polls showed that up to 20% of Democratic primary voters would pledge for Kennedy.If, as expected, Kennedy is to run as an independent, those numbers would suggest he could strip votes from Biden.Not so, said Steffen Schmidt, professor emeritus in the department of political science at Iowa State University.“Kennedy is an IED – we don’t know [when] he’s going to blow and on whom,” Schmidt said.Schmidt said there may have been early “sentimental” appeal for Kennedy among Democrats, given his family’s history. Biden’s age – a recent poll showed a majority of Democrats believe the president is too old to be effective for four more years – might have also been a factor in liberals considering a different candidate.“And then they began to hear the menu of things, his conspiracy theories and all that, and they began to see him on Fox News and all kinds of other conservative media, and the honeymoon was over,” Schmidt said.That slew of appearances on conservative media, and at rightwing events – Kennedy has previously appeared at a show hosted by ReAwaken America, described by PBS as “a petri dish for Christian nationalism” – have made him popular among Republican voters, many of whom are still in thrall to Donald Trump, another noted conspiracy theorist.A FiveThirtyEight review of eight polls on Kennedy’s popularity in both parties found that he was actually better liked among Republicans than Democrats, which Schmidt attributed to his conspiratorial beliefs. (Kennedy has also said that 5G towers could “control our behavior” and suggested HIV is not the cause of Aids. He has been accused of racism and antisemitism over claims – partly withdrawn – that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, while in July the Congressional Integrity Project, a political watchdog, released a report that details Kennedy’s meetings with and promotion of racists, antisemites and extremist conspiracy theorists.“He has conspiracy theories, including his anti-vaccine position, which is very popular among conservative Republicans,” Schmidt said. “There’s a pretty formidable list of things that would appeal to a more fringy group on the Republican side.”Kennedy is already attracting Republican donors: in July Axios reported that a “small but growing number” of donors had given heavily to the presidential campaigns of both Kennedy – when he was still running as a Democrat – and Republican candidates.“Republicans put a lot of effort and money into getting visibility because they thought that was going to hurt Joe Biden and now it looks more like it’s going to backfire on them. I’m not a gambling man. But if I had to put $1,000 on the table in Las Vegas, I would put it on Republicans losing some votes in some states to him and not the Democrats,” Schmidt said.“Although with RFK Jr, there will be people who will lose some sleep on both sides. Biden supporters and staffers, as well as some of the Trump campaign people will be worried as to what’s going to happen.”For all the talk of Kennedy’s potential effect, there is near universal agreement that, as an independent, he will not win the presidential election.“Independent candidates typically will carve away support from one of the major parties,” said Emmitt Y Riley III, associate professor of political science and Africana studies at DePauw University and president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.“But the problem is most voters in the US will claim that they are independents, when in actuality they’re more partisan than people who identify with political parties. And people like the label ‘independent’, but their politics isn’t independent at all.”There is some precedent for independent and third-party candidates having an effect in presidential elections, including Ross Perot, who won 19% of the popular vote in the 1992 race between George HW Bush and Bill Clinton.In 2000, George W Bush beat Al Gore by 537 votes in Florida, which clinched Bush the presidency. Ralph Nader, running on the Green party ticket, won 97,421 votes in the state, and Democrats – including Joe Biden – blamed him for Gore’s loss.“Ralph Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors [of Congress]. Nader cost us the election,” Biden told the Guardian at the time.Similarly, a CNN analysis of Trump’s 2016 win found that Jill Stein, the Green party presidential candidate and Gary Johnson representing the Libertarian party, did well enough “in several states arguably to help elect Donald Trump”.The financial might of the Democratic and Republican parties, however, means independents or third party candidates will always face an uphill battle. The electoral college system, in which a successful candidate must win the vote in numerous states, is another obstacle.And while exposure hasn’t been a problem for Kennedy, at least among rightwing media, he will face difficulties making it into the presidential debates, which are watched by millions.Kennedy could also face an Icarus moment, should he be seen as drawing too much support from either of the main parties.“If he wants to run, run. Fine,” a source close to the Trump campaign told the Daily Beast after rumors of Kennedy’s independent effort began to circulate.“But if he chooses to run as an independent, then he’s our opponent.”Not everyone agrees that Kennedy’s campaign will be most damaging to Trump, however. Riley said that given the lack of enthusiasm for Biden at large – his public approval rating has been below 50% for more than two years – and continuing concerns over the economy, plus the enthusiasm of Trump’s base, Democrats should be more worried.“I’m not convinced that he will threaten Trump. I think the core supporters who support Donald Trump are typically rich white conservatives, and conservatives who have negative racial attitudes.“And as a result, the way in which he’s been able to prime support among these particular voters, I think Trump has a solid core of voters who will support him. I don’t think any of the voters who are voting for Trump are swing voters, or voters that are on the fence.”On Kennedy’s side, so far is a demonstrated ability to bring in lots of money, including $5m given to an affiliated Super Pac by a Trump donor. He’s not young, but he’s younger than Biden and Trump, in an election where age may become a factor.While Kennedy and his novel beliefs are mostly a benign fascination at the moment, the consequences of him forging a strong independent run could be serious.“I think if Trump wins the election, we’re gonna see the nation move more towards authoritarianism,” Riley said.“We’re going to see more erosion of our democratic norms, I think we’re going to be in trouble. America can no longer sell itself as a republic, or even as a democratic form of government – with a president who disrespects our democratic institutions.“I think that this is one of the most consequential inventions of our time.” More

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      The Republican party is at last paying the price of its Faustian pact with Trump | Michael Cohen

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      More than 11 years ago, before Donald Trump emerged from the primordial ooze of the far-right fever swamp, before the aborted January 6 insurrection and before the latest spasm of Republican extremism felled House speaker Kevin McCarthy, two renowned political scientists, Thomas Mann, and Norman Ornstein, put their finger on the essence of increasingly dysfunctional US politics: the Republican party. Mann and Ornstein argued that the Grand Old Party (GOP) had become an “insurgent outlier” that was “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”.Eleven years later, the enfant terrible of American politics has somehow got unimaginably worse. The GOP today is less a political party and more an inchoate mass of cultural grievances, conspiracy theories and lowest common denominator political slogans. Trump, for all his toxicity, is a symptom of the GOP’s decades-long descent into madness. Legislating is not seen as a tool for bettering the plight of the American people but rather an opportunity to troll Democrats and play to the perceived slights of the party’s rank-and-file supporters.But Republican indifference to governing is, perhaps, the least of the party’s pathologies. In slavishly supporting Trump and his Maga – Make America Great Again – supporters, they have empowered a political movement that is increasingly testing the limits of the US democratic experiment.McCarthy’s political trajectory tells the sorry tale. After January 6, McCarthy, who, along with his political colleagues, was forced to hide from the marauding insurrectionists, turned against the man responsible for the day’s violence. Privately, he told fellow Republicans: “I’ve had it with this guy”. But within weeks, he travelled to the ex-president’s palatial digs in South Florida and, on bended knee, pledged loyalty to the GOP’s orange god. He tried to block a bipartisan congressional committee to investigate January 6 and allied himself with conspiracy theorists who continued to spread lies about the 2020 election. Earlier this year, he gave in to Republican extremists and announced an impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden, even though there is no evidence that the president has committed any impeachable offences.McCarthy, like countless Republican supplicants over the past eight years, realised that his political aspirations were directly tied to his willingness to support Trump and the extremist forces within the party that have rallied around him. In a tale as old as time, he made a deal with the devil, only to be burned by the political forces he’d empowered. Trump’s hold over the Republican party is so complete that it borders on the pathological. Since March, he has been indicted four times and charged with 91 separate felonies. Yet his poll numbers among Republicans have dramatically improved. He enjoys a more than 45-point lead in the race for the party’s presidential nomination.There simply is no future in the GOP for an elected official who refuses to prostate themselves to Trump. Liz Cheney was the most vocal and impassioned Republican in speaking out against him after January 6. Her reward: McCarthy engineered her removal from the GOP House leadership. Then, in 2022, a Maga Republican challenged Cheney in a GOP primary and defeated her by nearly 40 points. Another Republican apostate, former presidential candidate and current Utah senator Mitt Romney, who twice voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trials, recently announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election.In a series of interviews with the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, he recounted how, “in public”, his fellow Republican senators “played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behaviour. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics and made incisive observations about his warped, toddler-like psyche.”Like other principled Republicans, Romney is choosing to walk away, and it’s hard to blame him. His criticisms of Trump have led to death threats and he is now spending an estimated $5,000 a day on private security. But the result is that the GOP’s ranks are now increasingly filled by those with bottomless reservoirs of ambition and empty cupboards of integrity. So for those hoping that a principled and mature Republican party will somehow emerge from this mess, think again. The political incentives in the GOP run in a singular direction – to the far right. If there is any silver lining, it is this: for all the Republican voters who love Trump, there is a larger mobilised group of voters who loathes him.Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about Trump is the static nature of his political support. In fact, if one compares his approval ratings from February 2020 – before the Covid pandemic ravaged the nation – to those in November 2020, when he ran for re-election, they were largely unchanged. Since leaving office, his approval numbers have also largely stayed the same. Americans have, by and large, made up their minds about Trump – and the verdict is: “We don’t like him.”The last three US elections prove the point. In what was largely seen as a rebuke to Trump, in the 2018 midterms, Democrats picked up more than 40 seats and control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, he lost re-election by at least 7m votes to Biden(4m more than he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016). In the 2022 midterms, the Democrats dramatically overperformed, picking up a seat in the Senate and barely losing the House of Representatives. So far this year, in dozens of special elections, Democrats are overperforming by a whopping 11 points. Part of this is a byproduct of the supreme court’s decision on abortion rights, but it’s also a backlash to the extremism that Trump has engendered.Of course, elections are tricky things and there is no guarantee that the unpopular Biden will emerge victorious next November. But take his current lousy polling with a grain of salt. It’s one thing to want a different Democratic nominee, as many Democrats do, but elections are about choices. That the likely option for voters in November 2024 will be Biden, or a deeply unstable opponent who could be a multiple convicted felon, has a way of narrowing one’s focus. But even if Trump loses, the problem of the Republican party will still be with us long after he’s left the political scene. More

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      Biden pledges to work with next House speaker as Jim Jordan welcomes Trump endorsement – as it happened

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      From 4h agoIn remarks at the White House, Joe Biden declined to comment on conservative stalwart Jim Jordan’s bid for speaker of the House, but said he would try to find ways to cooperate with whoever is chosen.“Whomever the House speaker is, I’m going to try to work with,” Biden said. “They control … half the Congress and I’m going to try to work with them. Some people, I imagine, it could be easier to work with than others, but whoever the speaker is I’ll try to work with.”Donald Trump has endorsed Jim Jordan, a prominent House conservative, to serve as the chamber’s next speaker. He made the decision public on social media, but only after a congressman’s indiscretion reportedly torpedoed a plan to do so in a far more public fashion. Trump is certainly influential, but the race is far from decided, and at the White House, Joe Biden said he would try to “work with” whoever sits in the speaker’s chair next.Here’s what else is happening today:
      Kevin McCarthy is considering resigning from Congress once the House elects a new speaker, Politico scoops.
      Top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries called on Republicans to work with his party to reform Congress’s lower chamber, but any such efforts’ prospects are unlikely.
      The US economy added far more jobs than expected last month, a sign that the labor market remains robust.
      Hunter Biden’s attorney has filed to dismiss the charges against the president’s son, arguing a plea deal that collapsed over the summer remains in effect.
      Two far-right Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy also reportedly believe the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden is not worth doing.
      Politico reports that Kevin McCarthy told House Republicans he may resign after they elect a new speaker.“I’m going to spend time with my family,” he told GOP lawmakers in a closed-door meeting, according to people familiar with what took place. “I might have been given a bad break, but I’m still the luckiest man alive.”However, later, KGET-TV reporter Eytan Wallace said on X – formerly Twitter – that he spoke directly to McCarthy and the congressman denied having any intentions of resigning. In fact, Wallace said McCarthy expressed an intention to run for re-election.McCarthy represents a California district centered on the city of Bakersfield and extending into the southern Sierra Nevada mountains and out into the Central Valley, where oil and gas and agriculture are major industries. He has been in office since 2007, representing a district considered the most-Republican leaning in the state.The Washington Post took a close look at the prospect of some kind of bipartisan coalition filling the power vacuum caused by Kevin McCarthy’s ouster.Their conclusion: not going to happen.While there’s only a four-seat difference in the chamber between Democratic and Republican control, existing ill will between the two parties doomed attempts by moderate GOP lawmakers to convince their counterparts on the other side of the aisle to save McCarthy. With many Republicans now furious at Democrats for their role in his ouster and the party’s right wing on the ascent, moderates have few incentives to attempt to build the sort of coalition that could get one of their own into the speaker’s chair, or carry out the sorts of reforms Jeffries envisioned in his op-ed.Here’s more, from the Post:
      As GOP lawmakers ducked in and out of meetings this week, making pitches to one another in initial bids to garner support for the top job, rank-and-file members ruled out the imminent possibility of a bipartisan effort to save them from their latest state of chaos.
      “I think the Republican conference will be stronger when we first work with ourselves,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-Tex.) said Wednesday on his way to a lunch with the Texas delegation where prospective speakers sounded out potential allies.
      Compromise, even among pragmatic members in swing districts, is a tall order in this political environment. Moderate Democrats and Republicans face the constant threat of primaries, and many live in fear of being targeted by powerful conservative media. Even members who represent swing districts fret about being punished by extreme voters in primary elections, a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus said.
      House rules adopted in a compromise that allowed McCarthy to win the job in January — after days of strife and 15 ballots — have also empowered individual members with outsize influence over the House GOP conference, exacerbating the party’s partisan polarization. A motion to vacate, for example, is a congressional procedure to remove a presiding officer from a position that can be triggered by just one House member. Once initiated, it takes priority on the House floor ahead of all other business. This week, the motion was moved by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump ally.
      In a column published in the Washington Post, the Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries called on the GOP to work with his party to reform the rules of the House and encourage more bipartisanship:
      House Republicans have lashed out at historic public servants and tried to shift blame for the failed Republican strategy of appeasement. But what if they pursued a different path and confronted the extremism that has spread unchecked on the Republican side of the aisle? When that step has been taken in good faith, we can proceed together to reform the rules of the House in a manner that permits us to govern in a pragmatic fashion.
      The details would be subject to negotiation, though the principles are no secret: The House should be restructured to promote governance by consensus and facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support. Under the current procedural landscape, a small handful of extreme members on the Rules Committee or in the House Republican conference can prevent common-sense legislation from ever seeing the light of day. That must change — perhaps in a manner consistent with bipartisan recommendations from the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.
      In short, the rules of the House should reflect the inescapable reality that Republicans are reliant on Democratic support to do the basic work of governing. A small band of extremists should not be capable of obstructing that cooperation.
      By all indications, leading House Republicans are furious at Democrats who voted to remove Kevin McCarthy, even though his overthrow was orchestrated by a small number of far-right GOP lawmakers. The acting speaker, Patrick McHenry, ordered Democratic veterans Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer out of their Capitol building offices hours after taking his post, while the two leading contenders to replace McCarthy are majority leader Steve Scalise and judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan, both deeply conservative.If the GOP is to take Jeffries up on his suggestions, it would probably happen at the behest of the party’s moderates – but unlike the party’s right wing, they have yet to show signs of uniting and making demands of the leadership.Democrats have scored a win in New Mexico, where a state judge turned down a challenge from Republicans to its congressional map, the Associated Press reports.The map is friendly to Democrats and will likely allow them to win all of the state’s three districts, as the Cook Political Report makes clear:Republicans had, in particular, taken issue with Democratic state lawmakers’ decision to split up an oil-producing region that skews conservative, according to the AP.Earlier in the day, Joe Biden provided more details on why his administration decided to begin building new border wall.His predecessor Donald Trump had made fortifying the frontier with Mexico a top priority, but Biden repudiated that in his first days in office. Yesterday, it was revealed his administration was building new barriers on the southern border, angering environmentalist, Indigenous rights and other activist groups who characterized the decision as a betrayal.Biden had previously said federal law obliged him to start the construction and, in response to a request for more details from a reporter today, elaborated on how that happened:United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain is scheduled to say soon whether recent intensified bargaining with the Detroit Three automakers has produced enough progress to forestall more walkouts, Reuters writes.A video address by Fain is scheduled for 2pm ET and will cover substantive bargaining updates, people familiar with the UAW’s plans said earlier.’That timing is a departure from the previous two Fridays in which Fain addressed union members at about 10am and ordered walkouts at additional factories to start at noon.Fain kept automakers Ford, GM and Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler and Jeep, guessing on Thursday.People familiar with the bargaining said talks have heated up this week after days of little movement.Ford, GM and Stellantis have made new proposals in an effort to end the escalating cycle of walkouts that threaten to undercut profits and cripple smaller suppliers already strained from months of production cuts forced by semiconductor shortages.The pressure is rising on the three automakers as EV market leader Tesla cut US prices of its Model 3 sedan and Model Y SUV, ratcheting up its price war and further pressuring profits on all EV models that are forced to match CEO Elon Musk’s aggression.Deutsche Bank estimated in a research note on Friday that the hit to operating earnings at GM, Ford and Stellantis from lost production has been $408 million, $250 million and $230 million, respectively.Meanwhile, Republican freshman Senator JD Vance swung by an Ohio picket line, only to get a dry burn from Toledo congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who’s served the district for 40 years.Why is Joe Biden campaigning for Donald Trump? The US president is helping to build Trump’s border wall. What is he thinking?The question sounds ludicrous, but how else would you characterize Biden’s latest pronouncement to build 20 new miles of Trump’s border wall along the southern border? This is like throwing red meat to Trump’s base, who will chomp and salivate over what they will portray as an admission of defeat by the Democrats on securing the border.And why wouldn’t they? Back when he was campaigning for president, Joe Biden promised “not another foot” of Trump’s border wall would be built. He halted construction of the wall on his first day in office with a proclamation stating that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution. It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.”Now, the government is poised to spend nearly $200m on 20 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley. The administration says it has been forced into this situation because Congress appropriated $1.375bn for such border barriers in 2019, and the funds that remain must be disbursed by the end of the fiscal year. But Democrats had control over Congress for the first two years of the Biden administration. They could have reallocated those funds. Instead, this Democratic administration is now sounding very Trump-like. “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries,” reads the notice in the Federal Register.This is a political failure by the Democrats on one of the most important issues of the looming 2024 election. And it’s a massive policy failure as well.The full op-ed will be published by Guardian US shortly.Donald Trump has endorsed Jim Jordan, a prominent House conservative, to serve as the chamber’s next speaker. He made the decision public on social media, but only after a congressman’s indiscretion reportedly torpedoed a plan to do so in a far more public fashion. Trump is certainly influential, but the race is far from decided, and at the White House, Joe Biden said he would try to “work with” whoever sits in the speaker’s chair next.Here’s what else is happening today:
      The US economy added far more jobs than expected last month, a sign that the labor market remains robust.
      Hunter Biden’s attorney has filed to dismiss the charges against the president’s son, arguing a plea deal that collapsed over the summer remains in effect.
      Two far-right Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy also reportedly believe the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden is not worth doing.
      In remarks at the White House, Joe Biden declined to comment on conservative stalwart Jim Jordan’s bid for speaker of the House, but said he would try to find ways to cooperate with whoever is chosen.“Whomever the House speaker is, I’m going to try to work with,” Biden said. “They control … half the Congress and I’m going to try to work with them. Some people, I imagine, it could be easier to work with than others, but whoever the speaker is I’ll try to work with.”Donald Trump’s plan to endorse Jim Jordan as speaker of the House was supposed to be done in a far more dramatic fashion, but a congressman’s announcement of the ex-president’s intentions torpedoed that plan, the Messenger reports.Trump was considering traveling to the Capitol where he would engage in something of a stunt intended to unite the fractious Republican conference around Jordan. That plan is now off, the Messenger reports:
      When House Republicans ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this week, Donald Trump began toying with the idea of heading to Washington, D.C. in a high-profile visit, briefly standing as a candidate for the post before dramatically delivering his support and his votes to an ally, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan.
      Trump outlined the spotlight-grabbing plan in calls to Republicans on Wednesday night, four sources familiar with the discussions tell The Messenger, which first reported Trump’s initial interest in visiting the paralyzed U.S. House.
      But Trump had one ask: “Keep this quiet.”
      Texas Congressman Troy Nehls either didn’t heed or didn’t hear that Trump request, blabbing about the once-private call on the social media platform X at 9:32 p.m.
      “Just had a great conversation with President Trump about the Speaker’s race. He is endorsing Jim Jordan, and I believe Congress should listen to the leader of our party. I fully support Jim Jordan for Speaker of the House,” Nehls wrote.
      The Nehls post appeared just as a Trump adviser was discussing the effort with a Messenger reporter about Trump’s idea of flirting with the speakership and then elevating Jordan instead.
      “Nehls just totally f—-d this up,” the adviser said, hanging up the phone. The four sources who described Trump’s thinking for this story all spoke with The Messenger on condition of anonymity over the past three days to describe private conversations.
      Less than three hours later, at 12:13 a.m., Trump publicly endorsed Jordan on his Truth Social media platform, saying the Ohio Republican, who is the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, would be “a great speaker of the House and has my complete and total endorsement.”
      Now Trump’s congressional travel plans are in doubt.
      Trump’s allies are discussing the utility of going at all because, for Trump, the plan revolved around secrecy. He wanted to stoke the coals of speculation about what he would do, thereby heightening the drama and attention, advisers said. His appearance and speech would have made a splash on Capitol Hill and sucked up all the media attention in the presidential primary, where he’s already leading by a forbidding margin.
      No travel decision has been made, advisers say, noting it’s up to Trump, who can change his mind on a whim – along with the flight plans for his Trump-branded 757 private aircraft.
      But everyone in his orbit agrees about one aspect of Trump’s mind.
      “Trump is pretty annoyed at Nehls,” said another Trump adviser.
      Mike Pence, the former vice-president who spent more than a decade representing an Indiana district in the House, again condemned the far-right revolt that remove Kevin McCarthy: More

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      Why is Joe Biden campaigning for Donald Trump? | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      The question sounds ludicrous, but how else would you characterize Biden’s latest pronouncement to build 20 new miles of Trump’s border wall along the southern border? This is like throwing red meat to Trump’s base, who will chomp and salivate over what they will portray as an admission of defeat by the Democrats on securing the border.And why wouldn’t they? Back when he was campaigning for president, Joe Biden promised “not another foot” of Trump’s border wall would be built. He halted construction of the wall on his first day in office with a proclamation stating that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution. It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.”Now, the government is poised to spend nearly $200m on 20 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley. The administration says it has been forced into this situation because Congress appropriated $1.375bn for such border barriers in 2019, and the funds that remain must be disbursed by the end of the fiscal year. But Democrats had control over Congress for the first two years of the Biden administration. They could have reallocated those funds. Instead, this Democratic administration is now sounding very Trump-like. “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries,” reads the notice in the Federal Register.This is a political failure by the Democrats on one of the most important issues of the looming 2024 election. And it’s a massive policy failure as well.For one thing, the border wall – what Trump called the “Rolls-Royce” of barriers – doesn’t even work. According to the Washington Post, the US Customs and Border Protection’s own records show that the wall has been breached more than 3,000 times, as it is easily hacked open by common power tools. And you know what else can breach a 30ft wall? A ladder. Smugglers also routinely hoist people over the wall and lower them down the other side with ropes. The Democratic Texas congressman Henry Cuellar was right when he said: “A border wall is a 14th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.”This newly announced policy by the Biden administration promises to be a devastating environmental failure as well. Why, exactly, has the administration waived 26 federal laws that include protections for the environment, clean air, safe drinking water and endangered species when building this policy failure? Who forced them to adopt that position? The ability to waive these protections, called the Secure Fence Act, was passed by Congress in 2006, but Biden will be the first Democratic president to use the law. And the effects could be unrecoverable.Starr county, Texas, the area designated for the new wall, is part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Refuge, home to endangered ocelots and at least two types of endangered plants, the Zapata bladderpod and prostrate milkweed. And while the steel barriers of the wall may be permeable to human smugglers, larger mammals will have their migration routes blocked by the barrier.Laiken Jordahl, south-west conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, stated that this new wall construction “will stop wildlife migrations dead in their tracks. It will destroy a huge amount of wildlife refuge land. And it’s a horrific step backwards for the borderlands.” Just last month, the US Government Accountability Office released a report detailing legions of harmful effects of the existing wall, from destruction of Indigenous burial grounds to damage to endangered wildlife and much more.This terrible new wall also represents a humanitarian failure from this administration. No serious person disputes that the numbers of people seeking refuge at the border is immense and that solving this issue constitutes a significant challenge to the government. But if we want to consider ourselves as a fair, just and humane society, the solution to this issue must also be fair, just and humane. What most people don’t realize is that so much of our larger border policy – including border walls, fast-track deportation flights, private immigration jails, keeping most asylum seekers from working and more – often enables smuggling and abuse more than curtails it.Greater attention must be paid to addressing root causes of human migration. Venezuelans now account for the second largest nationality group (after Mexicans) to cross the southern border, but rather than lifting punitive economic sanctions that the US has imposed on Venezuela since 2006, the administration has instead announced that it will resume deportation flights to Venezuela. But lifting sanctions would clearly help alleviate at least one important reason for migration while quickly deporting people, at best, merely treats a symptom.The Biden administration cannot have it both ways. It can’t be against the wall while arguing for its construction at the same time. This is not just bad policy. It’s bad politics, needlessly self-destructive at a time when the Republicans are willfully self-destructive. Such a policy certainly won’t win them more votes or get them re-elected. Rather, it’s like the Democrats are feeding their own flesh to Trump and his supporters, and asking us to watch the feast, proving that sometimes we truly are our own worst enemies.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is a contributing opinion writer at Guardian US More

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      Trump files motion to dismiss 2020 election subversion case – as it happened

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      From 3h agoDonald Trump has filed a new motion to dismiss the special counsel’s 2020 election subversion case.In a new filing on Thursday, Trump’s lawyers argue that he has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”The motion states:
      “Breaking 234 years of precedent, the incumbent administration has charged President Trump for acts that lie not just within the ‘outer perimeter,’ but at the heart of his official responsibilities as President.
      In doing so, the prosecution does not, and cannot, argue that President Trump’s efforts to ensure election integrity, and to advocate for the same, were outside the scope of his duties.
      Instead, the prosecution falsely claimsthat President Trump’s motives were impure— that he purportedly “knew” that the widespread reports of fraud and election irregularities were untrue but sought to address them anyway.
      The full motion can be found here. As Republicans scramble to find a new House speaker, Donald Trump is mulling visiting the Capitol to weigh in on what the party should do next. Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy’s staffers are reportedly working to secure support for judiciary chair Jim Jordan to replace him. It’s unclear why, but it could have something to do with another report saying majority leader Steve Scalise began his campaign for the speakership before McCarthy had even been formally ousted.Here’s what else happened today:
      Environmentalists are outraged after the Biden administration began constructing new border fencing. Joe Biden says he doesn’t think it will be effective, but federal law required him to do so. Meanwhile, his administration reportedly will resume deportation flights to Venezuela, a major source of migrants.
      Trump for speaker of the House? It could theoretically happen, and one Republican wants it to, but it would probably be a bad idea for the GOP.
      A Georgia judge rejected former Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s attempt to get charges against her related to trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election result dismissed.
      George Santos’s former campaign treasurer pleaded guilty to an unspecified felony. It’s unclear what his means for the congressman and admitted fabulist, who is under federal indictment.
      Alabama will get a second majority Black congressional district, despite the best efforts of state Republicans. A Democrat will likely represent it, bolstering their margins in the House.
      Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, is facing criminal charges over her involvement in a scheme to breach election systems in a rural Georgia county. Her case is on course to continue after a judge today turned down an attempt to dismiss the charges.Brian Rafferty, Powell’s attorney, argued in a 213 page motion filed last week that the case should be thrown out because prosecutors had presented misleading evidence to the grand jury that indicted Powell, and failed to turn over exculpatory evidence. The central thrust of Powell’s defense in the case is that she was not involved in the voting machine breach. Will Wooten, a prosecutor in the Fulton county district attorney’s office, strongly disputed those claims during a brief hearing on Thursday, saying they were “absurd and unsupported.”Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the case, said that he had not heard anything meriting dismissal ahead of a jury trial scheduled to begin later this month. “Just purely on procedural grounds, I don’t believe that this motion to dismiss for misconduct … I don’t see that as clearing just the procedural bar of being something under the court’s authority,” he said. “It’s the jury’s role to decide contested issues.”McAfee also pressed Rafferty to give a concrete list of items he wanted prosecutors to ensure they wanted to turn over. Wooten said all relevant evidence had been turned over to Powell’s team, but agreed to have his office again review special grand jury transcripts and other materials to double check.Powell, who was one of Trump’s key lawyers as he sought to overturn the 2020 election, faces seven criminal charges in Georgia, including racketeering, conspiracy to commit election fraud, conspiracy to commit computer theft, and conspiracy to commit computer trespass. She is alleged to have helped facilitate a scheme in which a team gained access to Coffee county’s election equipment and copied sensitive information.Powell and Ken Chesebro, another Trump attorney who was the architect of the fake elector scheme, successfully severed their trial from Trump and the 17 other defendants, and will have the first trial of the group.The Biden administration will restart deportations to Venezuela, as it faces rising pressure to curb surging migrant flows on the southern border, CBS News reports:Deportations to the South American country have been paused for years due to Washington’s strained relations with Caracas, but CBS News reports Venezuelans who have entered the US illegally and lack a valid basis to stay will now be sent home.Last month, the homeland security department extended temporary permission for about 472,000 Venezuelans to live and work in the US:The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a judge has rejected Sidney Powell’s attempt to dismiss the charges filed against her by district attorney Fani Willis related to trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election.Powell acted as a lawyer for Donald Trump, during the period when he and his allies attempted to disrupt Joe Biden’s election victory in the swing state. She was indicted alongside the ex-president in August, and has pleaded not guilty to the charges:And in a taste of what the trials for the 19 defendants Willis charged will be like, an attorney for Powell’s co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro said he has been told nearly 180 witnesses who could potentially be called:Punchbowl News has obtained House Democratic whip Katherine Clark’s instructions to the party’s lawmakers ahead of the expected speakership election next week.There’s not much surprising here, and her instructions underscore that Democrats will do what they did in January, when Kevin McCarthy was elected as House speaker after a painful 15 ballots: repeatedly vote for minority leader Hakeem Jeffries:The big question thus remains: who will the GOP vote for?Should Donald Trump become the next speaker of the House? At least one Republican thinks so.Far-right fixture Marjorie Taylor Greene says she wants the ex-president and current frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination to take the chamber’s top post:Legally, it’s possible – the House speaker does not have to be an elected member of the chamber.But as Punchbowl News’s John Bresnahan – a veteran chronicler of Congress – observes, appointing Trump would … well, maybe you should just hear it from him:There’s no saying how a judge will rule on Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss the charges against him for trying to overturn the 2020 election, but the case has been slowly grinding towards trial. Here’s Hugo Lowell’s report from last week, when special counsel prosecutors asked the judge to issue a gag order against Trump:Special counsel prosecutors reiterated Friday to the federal judge overseeing the 2020 election interference prosecution against Donald Trump the need to impose a limited gag order against the former president to curtail his ability to attack them and potentially intimidate trial witnesses.The sharply worded, 22-page filing, submitted before a hearing scheduled for 16 October in federal district court in Washington, accused Trump of continuing to make prejudicial public statements even after they first made the request three weeks ago.“He demands special treatment, asserting that because he is a political candidate, he should have free rein to publicly intimidate witnesses and malign the court, citizens of this district, and prosecutors. But in this case, Donald J Trump is a criminal defendant like any other,” prosecutors wrote.The prosecutors said the need for a limited gag order had only increased in urgency since their initial request, filed under seal to the US district judge Tanya Chutkan on 5 September, as they cited several threatening statements from Trump that could affect their case and potential jurors.In particular, the filing highlighted Trump’s posts on his Truth Social platform that attacked his former vice-president, Mike Pence, saying without evidence that he had “made up stories about me” and had gone over to the “dark side” after he testified to prosecutors about Trump’s conduct.The filing also raised Trump’s post about Gen Mark Milley, the retiring chair of the joint chiefs of staff and another likely trial witness after he was cited in the indictment, that baselessly accused him of committing treason and suggested that he be executed.“No other criminal defendant would be permitted to issue public statements insinuating that a known witness in his case should be executed,” the assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote. “This defendant should not be, either.”Donald Trump has filed a new motion to dismiss the special counsel’s 2020 election subversion case.In a new filing on Thursday, Trump’s lawyers argue that he has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”The motion states:
      “Breaking 234 years of precedent, the incumbent administration has charged President Trump for acts that lie not just within the ‘outer perimeter,’ but at the heart of his official responsibilities as President.
      In doing so, the prosecution does not, and cannot, argue that President Trump’s efforts to ensure election integrity, and to advocate for the same, were outside the scope of his duties.
      Instead, the prosecution falsely claimsthat President Trump’s motives were impure— that he purportedly “knew” that the widespread reports of fraud and election irregularities were untrue but sought to address them anyway.
      The full motion can be found here. Following federal judges setting a new congressional voting map in Alabama that could help Democrats achieve a majority in the US House next year, here is the Guardian’s Jewel Wicker and Sam Levine’s report on the story:The map was chosen from three proposals presented by the court-appointed Special Master Richard Allen. The new map adds a second congressional district to the state, allowing Black voters to choose their preferred candidate.Following the 2020 census, Republican lawmakers had enacted a congressional map that provided Black Alabamans with one majority district out of seven in the state. The three-judge panel found it violated section two of the Voting Rights Act, which bans race-based discrimination in voting procedures, and ordered lawmakers to create a map where Black Alabamans made up the majority of voters in two districts.For the full story, click here:Far-right Republican representative and staunch Donald Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that if Trump assumed the House’s vacant Speaker position, the “House chamber will be like a Trump rally everyday.”She added, “It would be the House of MAGA!!!”Earlier this week, following the ouster of former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, Greene announced that the only candidate she will support is Trump.“We can make him Speaker and then elect him President,” Greene tweeted. Here is video of president Biden’s full comments on Thursday in which he explains reasons why the Texas border wall construction has started after his administration waived 26 federal laws to allow for the construction.
      “The border wall money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t, they wouldn’t.
      In the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated for. I can’t stop that,” said Biden.
      As Republicans scramble to find a new House speaker, Donald Trump is mulling visiting the Capitol to weigh in on what the party should do next. Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy’s staffers are reportedly working to secure support for judiciary chair Jim Jordan to replace him. It’s unclear why, but it could have something to do with another report saying majority leader Steve Scalise began his campaign for the speakership before McCarthy had even been formally ousted.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Environmentalists are outraged after the Biden administration began constructing new border fencing. Joe Biden says he doesn’t think it will be effective, but federal law required him to do so.
      George Santos’s former campaign treasurer pleaded guilty to an unspecified felony. It’s unclear what his means for the congressman and admitted fabulist, who is under federal indictment.
      Alabama will get a second majority Black congressional district, despite the best efforts of state Republicans. A Democrat will likely represent it, bolstering their margins in the House.
      Former Democratic presidential candidate and independent New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said Democrats should have done more to stop Kevin McCarthy from being removed from office.He characterizes McCarthy as a conservative who had at least some interest in actually governing, but is now set to be replaced with a hardliner who will be even more difficult to work with. Writing in the Washington Post, Bloomberg says:
      McCarthy’s failure to reach out to Democrats was inexcusable, of course. But so too was Jeffries’ failure to extend an olive branch. Not only has it empowered the Republicans’ extreme right wing, but it also squandered an opportunity for Democrats to increase their influence.
      Jeffries had a chance to use the crisis to push for a more bipartisan governing model in the House, one that would have given Democrats more involvement in crafting legislation and conducting oversight. It could have been a transformative moment for Congress and the country. But if any informal Democratic overture occurred, it was too little, too late.
      It’s true that McCarthy gave no indication he would have had the good sense to accept a serious peace offering by Jeffries. But even if he had rejected it, Democrats could have shown voters that at least one party in Washington is serious about finding common ground. Their failure to make a peace offering falls heaviest on the party’s moderates, who speak of bipartisanship but, when push comes to shove, don’t practice it.
      Now, with the House paralyzed, not only is Congress failing to do the people’s business, but aid to Ukraine has been indefinitely paused, helping Russia’s war effort and costing people their lives.
      “There has to be an adult in the room,” McCarthy said over the weekend, after keeping the government from shutting down with the help of Democrats. He was right. Sadly, in the end, neither he nor Jeffries could do the adult thing, by reaching across the aisle to prevent Congress from sinking even deeper into dysfunction.
      Joe Biden explained that his administration was moving forward with building a wall on the US border with Mexico because federal law required it – even though he does not believe it will work.Here are comments he made to the press from the Oval Office:Environmental advocates are furious with Biden for waiving federal laws in order to move forward with the construction, even though his own administration said in its early days in office that such a barrier would not be effective. Here’s the latest on this story:For a sense of how the GOP is trying to spin this week’s theatrics in the House, take a look at this tweet from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is tasked with winning seats in the chamber:All the Democrats you see there represent swing or red districts, and many won re-election only narrowly last year, when Joe Biden’s allies overperformed expectations thanks to factors like the downfall of Roe v Wade and successful warnings about GOP extremism.The Democratic caucus was unanimous in voting to oust Kevin McCarthy, arguing that they were merely keeping with the common practice of the minority party in the House refusing to support the majority’s choice for speaker.Donald Trump is considering meeting with House Republicans at the Capitol next week, a source familiar with the former president’s plans tells the Guardian, as his party works to elect a new speaker following Kevin McCarthy’s overthrow.Trump is the frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination, and has been endorsed by several House lawmakers. He has denied involvement in congressman Matt Gaetz’s successful effort to remove McCarthy from power, and both lawmakers call themselves Trump allies.More hints of the dynamics of the speaker’s race within the House Republican Conference are emerging.The latest report is from the Messenger, which, citing unnamed sources, reports that Steve Scalise began campaigning to replace Kevin McCarthy even before he had been officially ousted.Scalise, the majority leader, is one of two major candidates who have declared their candidacy, along with judiciary chair Jim Jordan. Both are staunch conservatives, and the Messenger’s report may explain why McCarthy’s aides are reportedly encouraging lawmakers to support Jordan:
      Kevin McCarthy had just been ousted as speaker of the House. Republicans — and the entire Congress — were stunned. Yet McCarthy’s deputy, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., wasted no time, as he quietly launched a bid to become the next speaker, multiple sources tell The Messenger.
      Four Republican sources say Scalise started his campaign for speaker on Tuesday evening, moments after the House approved a far-right motion to vacate McCarthy from the speakership, before any other member had formally declared a candidacy.
      One House Republican who was lobbied by Scalise early Wednesday morning said the Louisiana Republican’s outreach was “was too early.”
      “The body wasn’t even cold,” the lawmaker, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the speaker’s race, told The Messenger. “It was bullsh–.”
      The race to replace McCarthy has just two declared candidates so far: Scalise, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. There is also Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., who has fielded support from members but has not yet formally announced a bid.
      Another thing that could prove pivotal to determining control of the House next year: the revolt that ousted Kevin McCarthy from office.His ouster was unprecedented, and the GOP is still digesting its implications for their broader campaign to hold onto the House, and regain the senate and White House next year. One lawmaker, Ohio’s Max Miller, told CNN it set the party back: More