From 3h agoNew Jersey’s former Republican governor Chris Christie has officially filed to run for president, according to the Federal Election Commission, setting himself up to face off against Donald Trump and a host of other candidates for the party’s nomination to challenge Joe Biden in the general election next year.Christie will announce his candidacy at 6.30pm eastern time with a town hall in New Hampshire. This campaign will be a sort of rematch for Christie: he was among the slew of Republicans Trump defeated in 2016 to win the party’s nomination, and later that year, the White House.While Christie worked with Trump during his time in the White House, they later had a falling out, and Christie recently said Trump “needs to be called out and … needs to be called out by somebody who knows him. Nobody knows Donald Trump better than I do.”While Christie has insisted he is “not a paid assassin”, the 60-year-old is certainly a seasoned brawler.Christie’s claims to fame include leaving office in New Jersey amid a scandal about political payback involving traffic on the George Washington Bridge to New York, then leaving the Florida senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign in pieces after a debate-stage clash for the ages.Christie was quick to drop out of that campaign, then equally quick to endorse the clear frontrunner. He stayed loyal despite a brutal firing as Trump’s transition coordinator, fueled by old enmities with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and only broke from Trump after the January 6 Capitol attack.Recently, Christie has worked for ABC News as a political analyst, honing his turn of phrase. Speaking to Politico, he insisted he was serious about winning the primary.“I’m not a paid assassin,” he said. “When you’re waking up for your 45th morning at the Hilton Garden Inn in Manchester [New Hampshire], you better think you can win, because that walk from the bed to the shower, if you don’t think you can win, it’s hard.”He also said Trump “needs to be called out and … needs to be called out by somebody who knows him. Nobody knows Donald Trump better than I do.”Read more:Back in the Capitol, here’s more from Fox News on why rightwing lawmakers banded together to frustrate the chamber’s Republican leaders by blocking debate on legislation dealing with gas stoves and federal government rule-making.The revolt caused a vote to start debate on legislation to fail for the first time since 2002. It came after the far-right lawmakers joined with Democrats in what one of their members, Dan Bishop, told Fox was an expression of frustration with House speaker Kevin McCarthy:The Guardian’s Maanvi Singh is on deck now to run the blog through the evening’s news, including Chris Christie’s town hall kicking off his presidential campaign.Here’s more from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly on Chris Christie’s return to the presidential campaign trail and his primary rematch against foe turned friend turned foe Donald Trump:The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie has confirmed his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next year.Christie filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday afternoon. He was scheduled to announce his presidential run hours later in a town hall hosted at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester, New Hampshire.The pugilistic politician joins the primary as a rank outsider but promises a campaign with a singular focus: to take the fight to Donald Trump, the former president who left office in disgrace after the January 6 attack on Congress but who is the clear frontrunner to face Joe Biden again at the polls.A few hours ago, Donald Trump’s allies released a statement welcoming Chris Christie to the presidential race with a grin – a big, toothy, Cheshire cat grin.“Ron DeSantis’ campaign is spiraling, and President Trump’s dominance over the Republican primary field has opened a mad rush to seize the mantle for [a] runner-up. Ron DeSantis is not ready for this moment, and Chris Christie will waste no time eating DeSantis’ lunch,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Make America Great Again Inc Pac supporting the former president’s campaign.And now that Christie has announced his candidacy, the Democrats are out with their customary roast. Here’s Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison’s statement:
The American people still remember what happened the last time Chris Christie ran for president. After dropping his own bid in 2016 to wholeheartedly endorse Donald Trump, Christie served as head of Trump’s transition team, gave his presidency an ‘A,’ and used his position as chair of Trump’s Commission on Opioids to land a lucrative consulting contract with big pharma. A longtime champion of the MAGA agenda, Christie backed a federal abortion ban and helped coordinate efforts to restrict access in every state, called for cutting Medicare and Social Security, and vetoed minimum wage increases for working people.Nothing he says can change the fact that Chris Christie is just another power-hungry extremist in the rapidly growing field of Republicans willing to say anything to capture the MAGA base.
New Jersey’s former Republican governor Chris Christie has officially filed to run for president, according to the Federal Election Commission, setting himself up to face off against Donald Trump and a host of other candidates for the party’s nomination to challenge Joe Biden in the general election next year.Christie will announce his candidacy at 6.30pm eastern time with a town hall in New Hampshire. This campaign will be a sort of rematch for Christie: he was among the slew of Republicans Trump defeated in 2016 to win the party’s nomination, and later that year, the White House.While Christie worked with Trump during his time in the White House, they later had a falling out, and Christie recently said Trump “needs to be called out and … needs to be called out by somebody who knows him. Nobody knows Donald Trump better than I do.”An effort by House Republicans to stop the government from banning gas stoves and change the federal rule-making process has been blocked by a revolt from within the party.Rightwing GOP lawmakers just now joined with Democrats in voting down the rule that would kick off debate on the four bills, a key step before the chamber could vote on their passage:The Biden administration opposes the bills, and there was little chance they would be passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. We’ll let you know as soon as it becomes clear what fueled the conservative revolt.In other House shenanigans, you will recall that Republican congressman, admitted fabulist and potentially soon-to-be federal inmate George Santos tried and failed to keep secret the names of those who paid for his expensive bail.Reporters at the Capitol have been wondering why he didn’t want these people’s identities publicized, and did what they have done to Santos ever since he first showed up in Washington in January: chased him around while asking him questions. See the pursuit, and the little that he had to say, below, courtesy of CNN:Republicans control the House and should have no trouble voting to start debate on the bills intended to ensure gas stove access. But they are having trouble, and that says something about the state of the GOP today.As you can see in the tweet below from Axios, 10 GOP lawmakers are currently opposing the rule to start debate on the four bills that stop the government from banning gas stoves and also changing the federal rule-making process. That’s enough to stop the legislation from being debated by the House, a formal step that must be taken before the bills can be passed.Who’s doing the revolting? Rightwing members of the House Freedom Caucus, many of whom were behind the days of GOP infighting in January that delayed Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker of the House. We’ll let you know when we find out what the Freedom Caucus is mad about this time.The White House will “assess” whether an attack on a dam that flooded a swath of southern Ukraine amounts to a war crime, US national security council spokesman John Kirby said at the White House this afternoon.Follow the Guardian’s live blog for the latest on this developing story from Ukraine:The Biden administration has taken a look at the two Republican House bills advertised as protecting Americans’ access to gas stoves, and it does not like what it sees.In a statement, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said it “strongly opposes” the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Save Our Stoves Act, while adding: “The Administration has been clear that it does not support any attempt to ban the use of gas stoves.”Lawmakers are expected to today vote on passage of the former legislation, and consider the latter tomorrow. The OMB’s statement says the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act would undercut the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s job of using “the best available data to promote the safety of consumer products. This Administration opposes any effort to undermine the Commission’s ability to make science-based decisions to protect the public.”The OMB criticizes the Save Our Stoves Act for preventing the energy department from creating and enforcing new standards for stove and oven efficiency, denying “the American people the savings that come with having more efficient new appliances on the market when they choose to replace an existing appliance”.The two bills “would undermine science-based Consumer Product Safety Commission decision-making and block common sense efforts to help Americans cut their energy bills”. While the OMB doesn’t outright say Joe Biden would veto them, it’s hard to see the two pieces of legislation making it through the Democratic-led Senate, or even being considered.The House of Representatives will this week take up two pieces of legislation aimed at blocking new regulations on the use of gas stoves.On Tuesday, the House is expected to vote on the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act – a measure to prevent the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal regulatory agency, from taking steps to stop the sale of the appliances, including by labeling them as hazardous.And on Wednesday, representatives will vote on the Save Our Gas Stoves Act, which would bar the Energy Department from finalizing, implementing or enforcing a proposed rule setting efficiency standards for the appliances.If the House advances the Republican bills, they will likely face opposition from the Democratic-controlled Senate.Gas stoves have for months been the subject of ire for rightwingers, after a slew of studies showed that the appliances are damaging to the climate and public health. A recent report found that one in eight cases of childhood asthma in the US is due to the pollution given off by cooking on gas stoves – a level of risk similar to that of exposure to secondhand smoke – while an earlier study found that gas stoves each year pump out as much planet-warming pollution as 500,000 carsr.Late last year, a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission floated the possibility of banning gas stoves, but the agency quickly backtracked to clarify that no ban is currently under consideration. But US cities and counties are considering policies to limit or even phase out the use of the polluting appliances.Though it has recently become the topic of public concern, researchers and regulators have long suspected that gas stoves are dangerous. In 1973, the Environmental Protection Agency had preliminary evidence that exposure to gas stoves posed respiratory risks, and in 1985 the Consumer Product Safety Commission raised concerns about gas stoves’ nitrogen emissions.The murder rate in a number of large US cities has seen a “sharp and broad decline” this year, new research has found, even as the number of mass shootings around the country continues to climb.My colleague Richard Luscombe writes that statistics compiled by New Orleans-based AH Analytics show a 12.2% drop in murders in 90 US cities to the end of May over the same period last year, although the study notes there are places, such as Memphis and Cleveland, where the murder rate has actually increased.The report will do little to weaken calls by weapons control advocates and Joe Biden for Congress to pass meaningful gun reforms as the US remains on track for a record number of mass killings in 2023.A federal judge has granted media requests to release the names of people who co-signed George Santos’s $500,000 bond in his criminal fraud case, according to The Hill.Santos’s attorney had asked to keep those names secret and Joseph Murray said he feared “for their health, safety and wellbeing”.Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna has criticised what he called the Supreme Court’s partisan decision-making, saying it was a “crisis”.Speaking at the Indian Impact event in Washington, DC, he said: “What we have right now is a court that has lost the legitimacy of the American people.”Khanna was addressing the rulings on reproductive rights, affirmative action and other issues that the conservative majority has continued to push forward. Asking for term limits and more stringent ethical boundaries, he said the current court included “political hacks” and referenced times in history when presidents like Abraham Lincoln called for supreme court reform.“We need a mobilization that is much more explicit and harsh in calling out the supreme court,” he said. “We should get rid of the niceties.”The investigations into Donald Trump grind on, but one may be nearing a conclusion: the inquiry into the classified documents discovered last year at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. His attorneys met with the justice department yesterday, including special counsel Jack Smith, and the former president spent this morning angrily posting on Truth social about the alleged injustice he was facing. House Republicans are rushing to his defense, while also moving forward with a plan to hold FBI director Christopher Wray in contempt for not turning over a document alleging corruption by Joe Biden. The vote on that is set for Thursday.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
US intelligence knew of a Ukrainian plan to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline, though it’s unclear if Kyiv was actually behind its sabotage.
Trump has feuded with Fox News’s straight-news division, but will on 19 June sit down for an interview with them for the first time since his 2020 election defeat.
Federal investigators are looking into a swimming pool that was drained at Mar-a-Lago and into room full of servers containing surveillance footage of the resort, according to a report.
Punchbowl News reports that speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy also supports the push to hold FBI director Christopher Wray in contempt: More
