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      Joe Biden tells Black voters ‘I need you’ to beat Trump in campaign rally in Philadelphia – as it happened

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      Joe Biden has wrapped up his speech in Philadelphia aimed at mobilizing Black voters, where he made plain that without their support, it was unlikely that he would return to the White House after November’s election.“I’m still optimistic, but I need you,” Biden said in his address, which was delivered at private preparatory school Girard College.His one question for Black voters: “Are you with me?”The crowd stood up as they shouted back: “Yes.”As he has done in many of his speeches since the start of the year, the president singled out Donald Trump for attack, accusing him of not believing in “honesty, decency and treating people with respect”. See the moment here:Winston Cameron, a registered independent, said that he came to the event to “hear from the horse’s mouth.”Cameron voted for Biden in 2020 and was uncertain if he would vote for him again. For Cameron, a 35-year-old student originally from Jamaica, immigration and the economy are the issues he’s most concerned about.“It could be better,” Cameron said about Biden’s accomplishments in those arenas. “I can see the positive changes that he’s trying to implement, but I think it’s still a weak stance.”Nevertheless, Cameron said, he was satisfied with Biden’s attention to Dreamers, immigrants who arrived to the US as children. Earlier this month, the Biden administration finalized a rule that would give healthcare coverage to Dreamers.Melissa Hellman was at the rally in Philadelphia and spoke to voters who were there:Zelma Carroll, a 57-year-old certified nursing assistant from Philadelphia, was grateful that Biden wiped away some of her daughter’s student loans from Penn State University. Carroll had canvassed for the Biden-Harris campaign four years ago and plans to do so again soon. “I just hope that they get in our neighborhoods and let people know where we’re going, where we need to be and we can’t go back,” Carroll said. “We can’t let Trump in.”Joe Biden and Kamala Harris held a joint rally in Philadelphia to mobilize Black voters behind their re-election campaign. The president laid in to Donald Trump, and told the audience “I need you”, in a sign of how important African-American support is to his chances of winning another four years in office. Speaking of Trump, the former president may soon be a convicted felon – or not. The New York city jury that has spent weeks hearing arguments from both sides over whether he is guilty of committing business fraud has begun their deliberations, and a verdict could come at any time.Here’s what else happened today:
      Samuel Alito, a conservative supreme court justice, refused to recuse himself from cases dealing with the 2020 election, despite demands from Democrats incensed at his display of flags associated with rightwing causes.
      The House ethics committee has opened an investigation of Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar, who was federally indicted on charges of accepting bribes.
      Trump praised Alito for refusing to step back from cases dealing with the 2020 election. The court is expected to in the coming weeks rule on his petition for immunity from charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election.
      Jill Biden predicted her husband’s poll numbers would improve as the election draws nearer.
      Abandon Biden, which is encouraging voters to deny the president a second term over his support for Israel’s war in Gaza, planned to protest his rally in Philadelphia.
      Biden and Harris got an enthusiastic reception in Philadelphia earlier today. Here’s a video of the crowd chanting “four more years” when Biden took to the podium:Here are some of the pictures from the Biden-Harris rally that have dropped on the newswires:The House ethics committee announced it has opened an investigation into Henry Cuellar, a Democratic congressman who was indicted earlier this month on charges related to receiving $600,000 in bribes.In a terse statement, Republican chair Michael Guest and Democratic ranking member Susan Wild said the committee had voted unanimously to establish a subcommittee to investigate Cuellar, in accordance with House rules. The committee “shall have jurisdiction to determine whether Representative Cuellar solicited or accepted bribes, gratuities, or improper gifts; acted as a foreign agent; violated federal money laundering laws; misused his official position for private gain; and/or made false statements or omissions on public disclosure statements filed with the House,” the statement said.Guest and Wild noted that they intended to avoid interfering with the justice department’s investigation of Cuellar:
      The Committee is aware of the risks associated with dual investigations and is in communication with the Department of Justice to mitigate the potential risks while still meeting the Committee’s obligations to safeguard the integrity of the House. No other public comment will be made on this matter except in accordance with Committee rules.
      Here’s more on the charges against Cuellar:In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump praised conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito, who announced this afternoon that he would not heed Democratic lawmakers’ demands to recuse himself from cases dealing with the 2020 election.Top Democrats, including House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin, had called on Alito to step back from cases, such as Trump’s petition for immunity from prosecution over attempting to overturn the 2020 election, after rightwing flags were found to have flown at two of his properties.Here’s what Trump had to say about Alito:
      Congratulations to United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for showing the INTELLIGENCE, COURAGE, and “GUTS” to refuse stepping aside from making a decision on anything January 6th related. All U.S. Judges, Justices, and Leaders should have such GRIT – Our Country would be far more advanced than its current status as A BADLY FAILING NATION, headed by the Worst President in American History, Crooked Joe Biden!
      Verna Hutchinson-Toler, a 75-year-old voter from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, said that she came out in support of Biden because she’s passionate about “voter registration as a social determinant of health.”As a chaplain at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Hutchinson-Toler has seen patients who are the victims of gun violence, which has fueled her advocacy for gun control.“Personally I feel his track record has been amazing,” she said about Biden’s crack down on unserialized firearms known as ghost guns.Joe Biden has wrapped up his speech in Philadelphia aimed at mobilizing Black voters, where he made plain that without their support, it was unlikely that he would return to the White House after November’s election.“I’m still optimistic, but I need you,” Biden said in his address, which was delivered at private preparatory school Girard College.His one question for Black voters: “Are you with me?”The crowd stood up as they shouted back: “Yes.”As he has done in many of his speeches since the start of the year, the president singled out Donald Trump for attack, accusing him of not believing in “honesty, decency and treating people with respect”. See the moment here:Biden vows to put racial equality at the center of everything and have an administration “that looks like America”.He lists the things he’s done to achieve this, including:
      appointing the first Black supreme court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson
      appointing more Black women to the federal circuit courts than all other presidents combined
      keeping unemployment and the racial wealth gap at a record-low
      Cutting the gap of home appraisals between communities of color and white communities
      removing lead pipes and the legacy of pollution in communities adjacent to industrial facilities, which are disproportionately inhabited by people of color
      increasing access to affordable high-speed internet
      protecting and expanding Obamacare
      ‘Do you remember when the pandemic hit?’Biden calls on the crowd to recount the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic when “20 million people were out of work, when businesses and schools shut down, and emergency rooms were overwhelmed. Black folks were hit harder than anyone else.”Biden took a jab at former president Trump, who he said absolved himself of responsibility for the pandemic and how it was handled.“When I came to office, I promised we’d do everything we can to get us through that pandemic. And that’s what we did. That folks, was a promise made and a promise kept.”Biden has taken the stage.“It’s good to be almost home,” the president told the crowd. “I used to live down the road a little bit,” referencing his former home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he grew up.“Because Black Americans voted in 2020, Kamala and I are president and vice-president of the United States. Because you voted, Donald Trump is the defeated former president,” Biden said.His next line was met with cheers from the crowd: “With your vote in 2024, we’re going to make Donald Trump a loser again.” More

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      Ohio governor calls special legislative session to include Biden on election ballot

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      Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has called an emergency legislative session to put Joe Biden’s name on the presidential ballot after what he called an “absurd” threat from the state’s top election officer to remove the president for missing its deadline.For weeks, Ohio’s secretary of state, Frank LaRose, has been at loggerheads with the Democrats over how to put Biden and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, on the ballot given that their official nomination comes after the expiry of the state’s deadline of 90 days before the November election.The Biden-Harris ticket is scheduled to be certified after its official coronation on the final day of the Democratic national convention on 22 August in Chicago, 15 days after Ohio’s 7 August cutoff date.LaRose, also a Republican, warned this week that current rules would force him to exclude Biden’s name from ballot papers, denying voters in the state a full choice of presidential candidates.He wrote to the chair of the Ohio Democratic party, Elizabeth Walters, saying the onus was on the party to change its nominating arrangements because the state legislature had ruled out amending Ohio law to accommodate Biden.In a news conference, DeWine overrode that decision, calling the situation “simply unacceptable”.“Ohio is running out of time to get Joe Biden, the sitting president of the United States, on the ballot this fall,” he said. “Failing to do so is simply not acceptable. This is a ridiculous – this is an absurd situation.”Posting on X, LaRose – who first raised the issue last month – had earlier said he was “duty bound to follow the law as Ohio’s chief elections officer”.“As it stands today, the Democratic Party’s nomination will not be on the Ohio election ballot,” he wrote. “That is not my choice. It’s due to a conflict in the law created by the party, and the party has so far offered no legally acceptable remedy.”The Democrats had earlier suggested resolving the problem by offering a “provisional nomination” of Biden and Harris, a solution LaRose said fell short of the state’s legal standard. Democrats countered that this view was contradicted by the experience of the 2020 election when, they argued, several other states accepted a similar resolution to incompatible deadlines for both parties.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDeWine’s decision potentially saves the Democratic party from filing a lawsuit to force Biden’s name on to the ballot.A similar possible deadlock situation arose in Alabama, but state legislators resolved it by pushing back the certification date, with the governor quickly signing it into law.The imbroglio has come against a backdrop of mistrust between Democrats and Republicans over elections, fuelled by Donald Trump’s relentless peddling of a lie that Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was “stolen”.Ohio was once viewed as a swing state but has recently trended solidly Republican, with Trump triumphing over Biden by eight percentage points four years ago, and beating Hillary Clinton by a similar margin in 2016. More

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      Kamala Harris drops F-bomb as she urges young to break barriers

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      Twelve minutes into a health forum discussion for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander organizations, Kamala Harris on Monday offered a punchy piece of advice to younger members of the audience.“We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open,” the US vice-president said. “Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that fucking door down.”Harris, who is out front for the Biden-Harris re-election campaign on women’s and reproductive rights, made the remarks at a leadership summit at which she also described how her parents had met at a civil rights march.Harris’s remark came as she was describing the importance of breaking down barriers and being the first to do it.“Here’s the thing about breaking down barriers. It does not mean that you start on one side of the barrier and end up on another,” she said. “There’s breaking involved. And when you break things you get cut and you may bleed. And it is worth it every time.”But while presidents and vice-presidents do not customarily use profanity, it is becoming more common, though often in private or leaked conversations. Joe Biden recently referred to rival Donald Trump as “a sick fuck”, and to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as a “bad fucking guy” and an “asshole.”Harry Truman once explained his firing of the insubordinate but popular Gen Douglas MacArthur by saying, “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals.”Lyndon Johnson swore so much that it would be impossible to document all of it, according to a recent essay by the historian Tevi Troy in the City Journal, including the lament: “I don’t know what the fuck to do about Vietnam.”According to the survey, US presidential cursing is common when referring to Netanyahu. In 1996, Bill Clinton once fumed, “Who’s the fucking leader of the free world?” Trump said “fuck him”, after Netanyahu acknowledged Biden’s election victory in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut few of those were meant as calls to action, leaving Harris, as she said in her discussion, “breaking down barriers”. More

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      Kamala Harris visits Atlanta to tout investments in minority communities

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      Kamala Harris once again visited Atlanta to tout investments made by the Biden administration in minority and underserved communities, highlighting $158m in infrastructure spending on a project to build a cap over Atlanta’s most traveled highway, the Downtown Connector.The vice-president’s appearance is the continuation of a full court press in Georgia to solidify support among Democrats – and specifically Black Democrats – for the administration.Harris has visited Atlanta repeatedly since winning office, acting as one of the administration’s primary surrogates to the Black community, keenly aware that Georgia remains in play and that perceptions of flagging support among African American voters could be the difference between a win and a loss.Harris kicked off a nationwide tour discussing economic opportunities for minority voters with this visit, she said.The Atlanta project, which local planners call the Stitch, would build parkland and mixed-use buildings including affordable housing and is meant to address the intentional destruction of Black communities by highway construction in the 60s, Harris said.“There was this whole policy push called urban renewal,” Harris said. “It was supposed to be about making life easier for people … but essentially it was about making it easier for folks who had wealth and means to move to the suburbs and still have access to downtown. It ended up decimating these communities for years.” Harris said the Stitch project would create an estimated 13,000 jobs and help reconnect a community bifurcated by the highway.Harris spoke on Monday at the Georgia International convention center near Atlanta’s airport in a conversation moderated by Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings, hosts of the financial podcast Earn Your Leisure. She emphasized the work the Biden administration has been doing to expand access to capital for communities of color.Black entrepreneurs do not have access to the capital needed to launch capital-intensive companies, Bilal said. “Especially when we look at the next generation of unicorn companies – billion-dollar companies – they’re tech companies,” Bilal said.That access is often about relationships that Black business owners often do not have. But federal spending can provide a base from which a business can grow and ultimately build those relationships, Harris said. Home ownership is also critical for building intergenerational wealth and entrepreneurial opportunities, as a source of equity for startups.“To achieve true equality, we must have an economic agenda,” Harris said. “That agenda must mean speaking to people’s economic ambitions.”Harris’s message sharply contrasts with increasing rhetoric from Republicans decrying diversity, equity and inclusion programs. “In spite of those who want to attack DEI, you can’t truly invest in the strength of our nation if you don’t pay attention to diversity, equity and inclusion.”Among other programs and spending made by the federal government since 2021, Harris presented the Stitch as an example of what the Biden administration has accomplished.After federal courts struck down zoning laws that segregated housing, federal legislators responded with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Massive highway projects like Atlanta’s Downtown Connector were deliberately driven through Black neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal”. In Atlanta’s case, the connector – which brings I-75 and I-85 together – displaced residents and businesses around Auburn Avenue, which was the heart of Atlanta’s Black middle class.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMartin Luther King Jr grew up a five-minute walk from where the connector splits the city today, a massive highway with more than 300,000 cars passing through every day. Similarly, the construction of I-20 decimated the Summerhill neighborhood, once home to many of Atlanta’s Black doctors. Summerhill has only recently recovered its economic vibrancy. But even as much of the rest of Atlanta experiences gentrification, the area around Auburn Avenue is poor.The representative Nikema Williams and the senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff addressed attendees briefly before the main event, each extolling the virtues of infrastructure investments in Georgia from the infrastructure bill. The Stitch received outsized attention by all three in their remarks.Williams is in her sophomore term as a congresswoman representing much of Atlanta, and sits on the House transportation committee. She and Warnock worked closely together to draw funding on the Stitch project, which eight years ago was little more than a twinkle in the eye of AJ Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress, a non-profit civic group for downtown businesses which is leading the design process on the Stitch.“We are truly a model for the world,” Williams said, describing the investments by the Biden administration in the Black community as “unprecedented”.Warnock has a particularly high political stake in the Stitch. The cap stands to transform the area around Auburn Avenue, famed home of Martin Luther King Jr and Ebenezer Baptist church, where Warnock is now senior pastor. The church is two blocks east of the Connector, which decimated the once-vibrant street after its construction about 60 years ago.“Let’s be very clear, today is a day of celebration,” Warnock said. “Because at last, we start repairing and revitalizing and reconnecting neighborhoods in the heart of the Black neighborhoods that have been historically torn apart by highway construction … This happens in every community in America.” More

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      How did Kamala Harris go from being a rising star to a damp squib?

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      Remember Kamala Harris? Just a few years ago the first female vice-president of the US was surrounded by fanfare, splashed on the cover of Vogue and being feted as the future of the Democratic party. For a brief moment, it seemed plausible that Joe Biden, the oldest inaugurated president in history, might serve just a single term and then gracefully hand the reins over to his VP. “Ms Harris now finds herself the most clearly positioned heir to the White House,” the New York Times mused after the 2020 election.Four years on and Harris’s position is a lot less clear. Indeed, you could be forgiven for forgetting that the vice-president even exists. And, to be fair, that’s because part of her job is ensuring she doesn’t steal the spotlight from her boss. Very few vice-presidents shine in the role; there is a reason Teddy Roosevelt once opined that the position “is not a stepping stone to anything except oblivion”. Biden, of course, was an exception to that. Still, he jokingly complained that being number two was “a bitch” back in 2014, when he was VP.Even bearing in mind the inherent limitations of the position, however, Harris’s vice-presidency has been a damp squib. Not even Harris’s inner circle seem enthused by the 59-year-old: the early days of her vice-presidency were plagued with headlines about dysfunction and infighting in her office. Harris may have had a trailblazing career, but few people seem to take her seriously – not even allies dependent on US government aid. A recent report by the Washington Post, for example, suggests that the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was irritated when Harris recently asked him to stop attacking oil refineries in Russia, and proceeded to ignore her because he wasn’t sure she (the vice-president!) actually reflected the Biden administration’s views.The bad press has been accompanied by even worse polls. Indeed, an NBC News poll from last June found Harris had the lowest net-negative rating for any vice-president in the survey’s history – 49% had a negative view while 32% had a positive view. With the election drawing closer, the situation hasn’t much improved.And while Harris has insisted she is prepared to serve as president “if necessary”, she is not widely seen as a shoo-in in the unlikely case that the Democrats replace Biden as the 2024 nominee. Rather, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, and Michelle Obama have been floated as more electable replacements.So what went so terribly wrong? How did Harris go from being a rising star to something of an embarrassment?Racism and misogyny obviously play some part. Trump has referred to Harris as “this monster” and the right have always been desperate to paint Harris in the most dehumanising light. It hasn’t helped, of course, that Biden gave Harris the impossible task of dealing with migration and border security, which put her even more firmly in the right’s firing line.Still, it would be disingenuous to say that bigotry is at the heart of Harris’s image problem. Yes, the right automatically see the worst in her – but a hell of a lot of people on the left have been desperate to see the best in her. You did not have to be a Harris fangirl (and many progressives, alienated by her record as a prosecutor, were not) to want to see the first female vice-president, the first woman of colour vice-president, succeed.Now, however, as one of the faces of Biden’s heartless policy towards Gaza, she has alienated many of the people who thought she represented a more inclusive future. “Can we really celebrate Black women in power who can’t use said power to prevent death and starvation inflicted on a stateless people?” the Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah wrote last month. “I – like an increasing number of voters – don’t think so.”Ultimately, however, the problem with Harris isn’t so much her stance on Gaza so much as the fact that she doesn’t seem to have a genuine stance on anything. Throughout her career, Harris has been characterised by what the New York Times called a “lack of ideological rigidity”. Which is a polite way of saying she seems to believe in little except her own advancement. It’s been a successful strategy so far, but it may have finally come to an end. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Democrats bank on abortion in 2024 as Arizona and Florida push stakes higher

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      Kamala Harris’s Friday visit to Arizona was planned before the state’s top court upheld a 160-year-old law that bans almost all abortions. But the news galvanized the vice-president’s message, one that has already yielded stunning victories for liberals since Roe v Wade fell nearly two years ago.That message is simple: abortion bans happen when Republicans are in charge.“Women here live under one of the most extreme abortion bans in our nation. … The overturning of Roe was without any question a seismic event, and this ban here in Arizona is one of the biggest aftershocks yet,” Harris said at the Tucson event. “Overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy to take women’s rights and freedoms … We all must understand who is to blame. Former president Donald Trump did this.”The ruling from the Arizona supreme court arrived on Tuesday, just days after a Florida supreme court ruling cleared the way for a six-week abortion ban, a decision that will cut off access to the procedure before many women even know they are pregnant. These back-to-back rulings roiled the United States, raising the already high stakes of the 2024 elections to towering new heights. Activists in both states are now at work on ballot measures that would ask voters to enshrine abortion rights in their states’ constitutions in November.Democrats are hopeful these efforts – and the potential threat of more bans under a Trump administration – will mobilize voters in their favor, because abortion rights are popular among Americans, and Republicans have spent years pushing restrictions. Democrats have made abortion rights a central issue of their campaigns in Arizona, which was already expected to be a major battleground, and Florida, a longtime election bellwether that has swung further to the right in recent years.For Joe Biden, who is struggling to generate enthusiasm among voters, turning 2024 into a referendum on abortion may be his best shot at defeating Donald Trump. But it remains an open question whether the backlash to Roe’s overturning will continue to drive voters in a presidential election year, when they may be more swayed by concern over the economy and immigration.“In public polls that might just ask: ‘What’s your most important issue?’ You’re going to see abortion in the middle, maybe even towards the bottom,” said Tresa Undem, a co-founder of the polling firm PerryUndem who has studied public opinion on abortion for two decades. “But when you talk to core groups that Democrats need to turn out, it’s front and center.”A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump held double-digit leads when swing state voters were asked who would best handle the economy, inflation and immigration, but they trusted Biden more on abortion. A Fox News poll in March found that most voters in Arizona believe Biden will do a better job handling the issue of abortion, but it was less of a priority than the economy, election integrity and foreign policy.For Biden, abortion is “the best issue for him right now”, Undem said. “All of the data I’ve seen on this upcoming election, young people are not nearly as motivated to vote as they were in 2020. And so in places like Arizona, the total ban – and I don’t make predictions ever – I do think it is going to turn out young people, especially young women.”The Biden campaign has released two abortion-focused ads this week, including one that features a Texas woman who was denied an abortion after her water broke too early in pregnancy. (She ended up in the ICU.) Indivisible, a national grassroots organization with a local presence in states across the country, said volunteer sign-ups to knock on doors in Arizona spiked 50% following the state supreme court’s ruling. Its members in Arizona are helping to organize rallies in support of reproductive rights as well as events to collect signatures for the ballot measure.When Roe fell, abortion rights’ grip on voters was far from guaranteed. Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans’ longtime leader and an architect of the conservative supreme court majority that overturned Roe, brushed off outrage over its demise as “a wash” in federal elections. Although most Americans support some degree of access to the procedure, anti-abortion voters were more likely to say the issue was important to their vote than pro-abortion rights voters.The fall of Roe changed that. Anger over Roe was credited with halting Republicans’ much-promised “red wave” in the 2022 midterm elections, while pro-abortion rights ballot measures triumphed, even in crimson states such as Kansas and Kentucky. Last year, when Virginia Republicans tried retake control of the state legislature by championing a “compromise” 15 week-ban, they failed. Democrats now control both chambers in the state.“When Republicans offer compromises, I think a lot of voters are inclined not to see those as what the Republican party really wants long-term but what the Republican party thinks is necessary to settle for in the short term,” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California at Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. “They know that Republicans are aligned with the pro-life movement and the pro-life movement wants fetal personhood and a ban at fertilization.”In the hours after the Arizona decision, several Republican state lawmakers and candidates with long records of opposing abortion rushed to denounce the near-total ban (which has not yet taken effect). The Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, who once called abortion the “ultimate sin” and said Arizona’s impending near-total abortion ban was “a great law”, attempted to clarify her position on the issue in a meandering, five-minute-plus video. The ban she once favored – which passed in 1864, before Arizona even became a state or women gained the right to vote – is now “out of line with where the people of this state are”, Lake said.“The issue is less about banning abortion and more about saving babies,” she said, as instrumental music swelled against images of pregnant women and pregnancy tests. She repeatedly stressed the importance of “choice” – language associated with people who support abortion rights – while simultaneously invoking the value of “life”.Lake also emphasized that she “agrees with President Trump” on abortion. Over the course of his campaign, Trump has alternated between taking credit for overturning Roe – since he appointed three of the justices who ruled to do so – toying with the idea of a national ban, and insisting that states can decide their own abortion laws, as he did in a video this week.In that video, released on Monday, Trump declined to endorse a federal ban on the procedure, after months of teasing his support. On Wednesday, Trump criticized the Arizona law and predicted that state lawmakers would “bring it back into reason”. Florida’s six-week ban, he suggested, was “probably, maybe going to change”. He reiterated his criticism on Friday, posting on his social media platform that the Arizona supreme court went “too far” in upholding an “inappropriate law from 1864” and calling on the Republican-led state legislature to “ACT IMMEDIATELY” to remedy the decision. “We must ideally have the three Exceptions for Rape, Incest, and Life of the Mother,” he wrote. (The 1864 ban only includes an exception to save the life of the pregnant person.)“He’s simply trying to have it, I think, both ways,” Ziegler said of Trump.Come November, Democrats are counting on the real-world consequences of the bans overriding other concerns. “The economy is still important. Immigration is still important, but this is immediate,” said Stacy Pearson, an Arizona-based Democratic strategist.“A woman just wants to be in her OB-GYN’s office, having a conversation with her doctor about her medical care without concerns about whether or not old white men in cowboy hats were right in 1864,” Pearson added. “It’s nuts.” More

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      Donald Trump and Mike Johnson hold ‘election integrity’ press conference – live

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      Donald Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that he would “absolutely” testify at his New York criminal trial, which is set to start next week. It is not, however, clear if he will actually do so.Asked if it was “risky” for him to testify, the former president responded, “I tell the truth.” Trump’s testimony has previously hurt him in court, and he was ordered by a jury earlier this year to pay millions to E Jean Carroll for defamation.Trump shared familiar grievances about his various criminal ongoing criminal trials before his “election integrity” press conference with House speaker Mike Johnson came to an end.Vice president Kamala Harris is now speaking in Tucson, Arizona to condemn the 1800s-era ban supported by the state supreme court this week:Donald Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that he would “absolutely” testify at his New York criminal trial, which is set to start next week. It is not, however, clear if he will actually do so.Asked if it was “risky” for him to testify, the former president responded, “I tell the truth.” Trump’s testimony has previously hurt him in court, and he was ordered by a jury earlier this year to pay millions to E Jean Carroll for defamation.Trump shared familiar grievances about his various criminal ongoing criminal trials before his “election integrity” press conference with House speaker Mike Johnson came to an end.Donald Trump, speaking at Mar-a-Lago, was asked why voters should trust that he won’t sign a federal abortion ban, when he had previously indicated support. He responded:
      We don’t need it any longer, because we broke Roe v Wade … and we gave it back to the states.”
      He claimed he does not support the unpopular Arizona state supreme court ruling this week supporting a near total abortion-ban dating back to 1864. When asked whether he is “pro-life” or “pro-choice”, he did gave a meandering, unclear response.House speaker Mike Johnson says Republicans are introducing legislation to “require proof of citizenship to vote” despite the fact that it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote and there is no evidence of widespread migrant voting (or even many specific examples of this happening).Johnson hasn’t shared a ton of details about the mechanics of the legislation, but claimed that if “hundreds of thousands” of migrants cast votes, it could impact the result of the elections. Research has repeatedly shown that the systems in place have not allowed non-citizens to register or cast ballots.The former president has started his presser with his signature xenophobic rhetoric on immigration, which has become increasingly dehumanizing and viscous on the campaign trail. He has frequently called migrants “animals” and has said they are “poisoning the blood” of the US, echoing Nazi speech and the racist, far-right Great Replacement Theory suggesting the left is promoting migration to replace white people.Trump’s introductory remarks included misinformation tying migrants to crime.As we await the joint press conference of Donald Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson at Mar-a-Lago, here’s a refresher on some of the misleading and false information they have been promoting about non-citizens and voting:
      The two have said they are pushing legislation to ban non-citizens from voting – despite the fact that it is already illegal under federal law for people without US citizenship to cast a ballot.
      Trump has spread racist conspiracy theories on the campaign trail – claiming without evidence that migrants will try to illegally vote and steal the election for him, saying, “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”
      As the Guardian’s democracy reporter Rachel Leingang reported: “There is no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting, nor are there even many examples of individual instances of the practice, despite strenuous efforts in some states to find these cases.”
      A study by the Brennan Center of the 2016 election found just 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with 23.5m votes, were suspected to be non-citizens voting, 30 incidents in total.
      The press conference is scheduled for 4.30pm local time. For more background, check out Leingang’s coverage from earlier this week:Donald Trump is set to meet House Republican speaker Mike Johnson in Mar-a-Lago on Friday where the two will hold a press conference on “election integrity”.Earlier on Friday, Johnson told reporters, “I don’t ever comment on my private conversations with President Trump, but I’m looking forward to going to Florida and spend some time with him.”Meanwhile, a senior Trump adviser told CNN that the two will “draw attention to” state proposals and lawsuits that would allow non-citizens to vote.Johnson’s meeting with Trump comes after the Republican speaker secured a crucial win in the House earlier on Friday after the Republican-led chamber voted to pass Fisa reauthorization. The legislation, which allows for warrantless surveillance of Americans by intelligence officials, is supported by Johnson but heavily opposed by hard-right Republicans and Democrats alike.The Wyoming Republican representative Harriet Hageman has also released a video address following the House’s passage of Fisa’s reauthorization.In her address, Hageman, who voted no, said:
      I was a no vote for the reason that the amendment that would have required the intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant to search the records of American citizens was not adopted.
      I truly believe that as members of Congress, it is our responsibility to ensure that all of these agencies are following the constitution and the protecting the civil liberties of American citizens yet that’s not what happened today.
      The Colorado Republican representative Lauren Boebert has released a video address following the House’s passage of Fisa’s reauthorization.In her address, Boebert said:
      … 86 Republicans betrayed you, the American people, today, saying the federal government does not need a warrant to start a query or illegally spy on you or tap your phones or whatever they want to do.
      Boebert went on to point to the Florida Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna, who objected to the legislation’s passage and requested a vote to reconsider the legislation. As a result, the bill will not be able to head to the Senate until the House votes on the motion.
      That bill cannot be sent to the Senate until we take another vote on the warrant amendment for Fisa on Monday. That means we need you, the American people, putting pressure on these 86 Republicans who sold you out today,” said Boebert.
      Here is the list of the 86 House Republicans who voted against Arizona’s Republican representative Andy Biggs’ amendment to Fisa’s section 702 which called for the prohibition of warrantless surveillance:The Minnesota Democratic representative Ilhan Omar has criticized the House’s passage of the reauthorization of Fisa.In a series of tweets on Friday, Omar, who voted against the legislation, wrote:
      Section 702 still allows the government to collect communications of non-Americans abroad without a warrant. This has enabled warrantless surveillance that disproportionately targets Muslim Americans, African Americans, and other minority communities.
      She went on to add:
      True reform of surveillance powers needs warrants for searches of Americans, strict rules against racial and religious profiling [and] oversight to protect civil liberties.
      Anything less continues a system used to unfairly target Americans under the guise of counterterrorism.
      The 273-147 bipartisan vote reauthorizing Fisa is a win for the embattled House speaker, Mike Johnson, and comes at a time when he faces direct challenges to his leadership.Johnson was seen on the House floor speaking to the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who last month filed a motion to remove Johnson from the speakership.Greene later told reporters she and Johnson spoke about “all sorts of things”, CNN reported.Johnson said he and Greene “agree on our conservative philosophy”, adding:
      We just have different ideas sometimes on strategy. The important part of governing in a time of divided government like we have is communication with members and understanding the thought process behind it, that they have a say in it.
      Johnson is also scheduled to meet with Donald Trump in Florida later on Friday.The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or Fisa, which gives the government expansive powers to view emails, calls and texts, has long been divisive and resulted in allegations from civil liberties groups that it violates privacy rights.Section 702 has faced opposition before, but it became especially fraught in the past year after court documents revealed that the FBI had improperly used it almost 300,000 times – targeting racial justice protesters, January 6 suspects and others. That overreach emboldened resistance to the law, especially among far-right Republicans who view intelligence services like the FBI as their opponent.Debate over Section 702 pitted Republicans who alleged that the law was a tool for spying on American citizens against others in the GOP who sided with intelligence officials and deemed it a necessary measure to stop foreign terrorist groups.One proposed amendment called for requiring authorities to secure a warrant before using section 702 to view US citizens’ communications, an idea that intelligence officials oppose as limiting their ability to act quickly.Another sticking point in the debate was whether law enforcement should be prohibited from buying information on American citizens from data broker firms, which amass and sell personal data on tens of millions of people, including phone numbers and email addresses.House conservatives who had blocked the Fisa bill earlier this week amid a push from Donald Trump allowed it to move forward on Friday after striking a deal with the speaker, Mike Johnson.Under the agreement, the new version of the bill would be a two-year reauthorization of section 702 of Fisa, cut down from the original proposed five years.This would mean that if Trump won the presidential election this year, the legislation would be up in time for Trump to overhaul Fisa laws next time around.The far-right Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, speaking to CNN earlier today, said:
      We just bought President Trump an at bat. The previous version of this bill would have kicked reauthorization beyond the Trump presidency. Now President Trump gets an at bat to fix the system that victimized him more than any other American.
      The House passed a two-year reauthorization of the nation’s warrantless surveillance program that had stalled earlier this week amid Republican resistance and after Donald Trump had urged GOP members to “kill” the law.In a 273 to 147 vote, lawmakers renewed section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), which is set to expire on 19 April, through 2026. The bill now heads to the Senate, which is expected to give it bipartisan approval.Section 702 allows the US government to collect the communications of targeted foreigners abroad by compelling service providers to produce copies of messages and internet data, or networks to intercept and turn over phone call and message data.But the law is controversial because it allows the government to incidentally collect messages and phone data of Americans without a court order if they interacted with the foreign target, even though the law prohibits section 702 from being used by the NSA to specifically target US citizens.The White House, intelligence chiefs and top lawmakers on the House intelligence committee have warned of potentially catastrophic effects of not reauthorizing the program.Friday’s vote marks the fourth attempt to pass the bill, which was blocked three times in the past five months by House Republicans bucking their party. Earlier this week, House conservatives refused to support the bill that the speaker, Mike Johnson, put forward.The Republican Ohio congressman Warren Davidson, has responded to the House vote to reauthorize Fisa, calling it a “sad day’.From Punchbowl news’ Mica Soellner:The House’s vote to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Service Act has passed.Following days of Republican infighting that has put House Republican speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership in a precarious position, Fisa passed with a vote of 273 yays and 147 nays in the Republican-led chamber.The vote marks a win for Johnson who has come under fire from hard-right Republicans including Georgia’s representative Marjorie Taylor Greene over his support for Fisa. Greene, who is opposed to Fisa, has repeatedly threatened to oust Johnson as he has “not lived up to a single one of his self-imposed tenets”.With the vote’s passage, the reauthorization of Fisa, specifically its amendments to section 702, allows for intelligence officials to extend their warrantless surveillance on electronic communications between Americans and foreigners abroad.Despite intelligence officials including the FBI director, Christopher Wray, arguing that a warrant requirement would “blind ourselves to intelligence in our holdings”, civil rights organizations such as the ACLU have criticized the legislation.“Given our nation’s history of abusing its surveillance authorities, and the secrecy surrounding the program, we should be concerned that section 702 is and will be used to disproportionately target disfavored groups, whether minority communities, political activists, or even journalists,” it said.A vote to amend Fisa’s section 702 to update the definition of foreign intelligence to help target international narcotics trafficking has passed.The amendment, introduced by Texas Republican representative Daniel Crenshaw, passed after 268 yays and 152 nays.A vote to amend Fisa’s section 702 to require the FBI to report to Congress on the number of queries conducted on Americans has passed.The amendment, introduced by Texas Republican representative Chip Roy, passed after 269 yays and 153 nays. More

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      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris says Israel assault on Rafah ‘would be a huge mistake’

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      Senior US Democrats on Sunday increased pressure on Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to abandon a planned offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering.Two days after a similar call by US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was rejected by the Israeli leader, vice-president Kamala Harris said that the Joe Biden White House was “ruling out nothing” in terms of consequences if Netanyahu moves ahead with the assault.Harris said that Washington had been “very clear in terms of our perspective on whether or not that should happen”.“Any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris said on ABC’s This Week. “I have studied the maps – there’s nowhere for those folks to go. And we’re looking at about a million and a half people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there.”Harris declined to say if she, like Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, the most senior politician of the Jewish faith in the US, believed that Netanyahu is an obstacle to peace. But she said: “We’ve been very clear that far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.“We have been very clear that Israel and the Israeli people and Palestinians are entitled to an equal amount of security and dignity.”Her remarks came as political figure from progressive elements of the Democratic political established added their voices to the growing opposition to the humanitarian costs of Israel’s five-month military campaign on the Palestinian territory.That air and ground campaign began after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing more than 1,100 and taking hostage. The offensive has killed more than 30,000 people and pushed Gaza to the brink of famine.On Friday, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused the Jewish state of committing “genocide” against the Palestinians and called on the US to suspend military aid to Israel.She went further Sunday, saying that Israel had “crossed the threshold of intent” in blocking humanitarian aid from reaching starving Gazans.“Multiple governments [and other entities] have stated themselves plainly that the Israeli government and leaders in the Israeli government are intentionally denying, blocking and slow-walking this aid and are precipitating a mass famine,” she told ABC News.“It is horrific. What we are seeing here, I think, with a forced famine, is beyond our ability to deny or explain away. There is no targeting of Hamas in precipitating a mass famine of a million people, half of whom are children.”Netanyahu responded to US pressure on Friday by issuing a statement saying that he told Blinken there was no way to defeat Hamas without going into Rafah.“And I told him that I hope we will do it with the support of the US, but if we have to – we will do it alone,” Netanyahu said.Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday dismissed Netanyahu’s position, saying: “The actions of Hamas do not justify forcing thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to eat grass as their bodies consume themselves.“We are talking about collective punishment, which is unjustifiable.”Separately on Sunday, senator Ralph Warnock of Georgia – a key Black Democrat in Biden’s political coalition for re-election – was asked by CBS’s Face the Nation why the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had become a key issue for African American voters amid a broader discussion around US values.“We in the African American community understand human struggle. We know it when we see it,” Warnock said. While the US cannot forget or turn away from the 7 October attack by Hamas, he said, “we cannot turn away from the scenes of awful suffering and human catastrophe in Gaza”.“For Mr Netanyahu to go into Rafah, where some 1.4 million Palestinians are now sheltering, would be morally unjustifiable,” Warnock added. “It would be unconscionable. And I hope that at the end of the day, cooler heads will prevail.”Asked if continuing to transfer military supplies to Israel was a sacrifice of US moral authority, Warnock instead acknowledged that “Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood, and its enemies are more than just Hamas”.“But look, we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Warnock said. “We can be consistent in our support of Israel’s right to defend itself – and at the same time, be true to American values, and engage this catastrophic humanitarian situation that’s on the ground.” More