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      Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis to face off in Iowa Republican debate

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      Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis will face off one-on-one in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday night in their fifth and most high-stakes attempt to take support away from Donald Trump before Monday’s Iowa caucus, the country’s first state primary election.The former president has repeatedly declined to debate his party’s opponents, and will again forgo this debate, instead participating in a town hall hosted by Fox News, also in Iowa.Unlike the prior debates, this one was not coordinated by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which decided in December to stop hosting GOP debates for the rest of the primary season.The RNC debates narrowed the field of Republican contenders to five, and CNN’s debate requirement that candidates poll at 10% in at least three national or Iowa-based surveys has left only Haley, DeSantis and Trump qualifying. Chris Christie, Trump’s most vociferous critic among the Republican contenders, did not make the cut, but will likely qualify in New Hampshire.Vivek Ramaswamy, the rightwing tech entrepreneur who has billed himself as a youthful Maga answer to Trump and has peddled in conspiracy theories, including claiming the January 6 Capitol riot was an “inside job”, did not qualify. Ramaswamy, who has spent the most time in Iowa out of all the candidates, has said he will instead participate in a Des Moines taping of a podcast with the rightwing commentator Tim Pool.Florida governor DeSantis has thrown his campaign resources into Iowa before the caucuses, including visiting each of the state’s 99 counties.“I’d be a better president as a result of going through this,” DeSantis said wearily during an Iowa press conference.Meanwhile, Haley, who garnered the endorsement of the heavy-hitting, Koch-backed conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, could see a boost in Iowa as well. (The organization has promised to knock on doors for the former US ambassador to the UN every day ahead of the 15 January caucuses.)skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf DeSantis and Haley are fighting neck and neck, it is likely for second place. Polls show Trump holding an increasingly commanding lead in Iowa in the weeks before the caucuses – despite putting fewer campaign resources into the early primary than his opponents.If DeSantis fails to eat into Trump’s share of Iowa voters, his campaign – which has faltered repeatedly among gaffes and staffing shakeups – could shutter before he sees another primary. More

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      House Republicans move forward to impeach homeland security head

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      House Republicans barreled ahead with their effort to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for his handling of the US’s southern border, as their party attempts to make immigration a defining issue of this year’s presidential election.The House homeland security committee launched the impeachment proceedings on Wednesday, with Republicans charging that Mayorkas has been derelict in his duty to secure the US-Mexico border amid a sharp rise in migration while Democrats and administration officials assailed the inquiry as a “sham” and a “political stunt”.“This is not a legitimate impeachment,” said Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the panel. Echoing constitutional experts and conservative legal scholars, Thompson added: “You cannot impeach a cabinet secretary because you don’t like a president’s policy.”At Wednesday’s hearing, titled Havoc in the Heartland: How Secretary Mayorkas’ Failed Leadership Has Impacted the States, the panel’s chairman, Representative Mark Green, Republican of Tennessee, declared that he had a “duty” to pursue impeachment against Mayorkas, arguing in a combative closing statement that it was the appropriate punishment for the secretary’s “piss-poor performance” controlling the flow of migration and drugs into the US.He charged that Mayorkas, a former federal prosecutor, had “brazenly refused to enforce the laws passed by Congress” and has “enacted policies that knowingly make our country less safe”. As a result, Green said, Republicans were left with “no reasonable alternative than to pursue the possibility of impeachment”.The investigation into Mayorkas’s handling of the nation’s borders is being led by the House homeland security committee, as opposed to the House judiciary committee, which typically oversees impeachment proceedings but is presently consumed by Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.If Republicans are successful, Mayorkas would be the first cabinet secretary impeached in nearly 150 years.Yet across the Capitol, Mayorkas has emerged as a central figure in the bipartisan Senate negotiations over how to respond to the rise in migration at the US border with Mexico. It creates an odd juxtaposition in which House Republicans are trying to impeach an official with whom Senate Republicans are working to try to strike a border security deal.Record numbers of people are arriving at the southern US border each day, though crossings have recently fallen. The influx, as many as 10,000 arrivals on peak days, has strained border patrol resources as well as the public services in many cities and towns across the country.The situation at the US-Mexico border is an acute political vulnerability for the president, who has been unable to stem the flow of people from across the western hemisphere traveling north to escape violence, political upheaval, poverty and natural disasters.Unease among some House Republicans over their effort to impeach Biden despite a failure to uncover any evidence of misconduct has appeared to only strengthen the party’s appetite for bringing articles of impeachment against Mayorkas.In November, shortly after Republicans elected Mike Johnson as their new speaker after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia attempted to force a snap impeachment of Mayorkas. Eight House Republicans joined with Democrats to block the effort, instead sending her resolution to the House homeland security committee.Now, as the problems at the border deepen and polling shows Republicans with a clear advantage on the issue of immigration and border security, some of those Republicans appear newly willing to support the impeachment effort.Green has indicated that he hopes to move quickly with the impeachment proceedings. But with their razor-thin majority, House Republicans would need near-total unanimity to levy articles of impeachment against Mayorkas.If the House impeaches Mayorkas, it is extremely unlikely two-thirds of the Senate, narrowly controlled by Democrats, would vote to convict him.Austin Knudsen, one of three Republican state attorneys general who testified before the panel on Wednesday, said Montana was on the frontline of the fentanyl crisis, accusing the Biden administration’s border policies of having “poured gasoline on this fire”.Knudsen, along with Gentner Drummond of Oklahoma and Andrew Bailey of Missouri heralded the hardline enforcement actions taken by Donald Trump and blamed the current challenges on Biden’s decisions to stop future construction of his predecessor’s border wall and end of Covid-19 era policy to swiftly expel migrants. (Several miles of the border wall have been built since Biden took office.) Trump, the Republican frontrunner for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, has vowed even more draconian measures if he is elected to a second term.In her line of questioning on Wednesday, Greene, who sits on the homeland security panel, asked each Republican witness if he believed Mayorkas should be impeached. They agreed unequivocally that he should be.Representative Dan Goldman, a Democrat of New York who was the lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment, scoffed at their determination, arguing that the attorneys general were not experts on the matter of impeachment and all had joined a lawsuit suing the Biden administration over its border policies.“We have Republicans suing Secretary Mayorkas to stop him from implementing his policy to address the issues at the border. And now we’re going to impeach him because you say he’s not addressing the issues at the border,” Goldman said. “Which do you want?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFrank Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri school of law and author of the book High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump who counts Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, as a former student, was the lone voice of dissent on the panel. He argued that Mayorkas’s conduct did not rise to level of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, far from it.“If the members of the committee disapprove of the Biden administration’s immigration and border policies, the constitution gives this Congress a wealth of legislative powers to change them,” he said. “Impeachment is not one of them.”During the hearing, Democrats readily acknowledged the challenges at the border, but said impeaching Mayorkas was not the solution. They implored Republicans to work with them to overhaul the nation’s outdated immigration system, expand work permits and increase funding for border agents.Representative Delia Ramirez, a Democrat of Illinois, said it was Republicans, not Democrats, who were failing to take the “humanitarian crisis within our borders seriously”.“Impeachment will not make our borders any safer for our communities or for asylum-seekers and it will not address the conditions across Latin America that motivate families to migrate across the jungles and deserts to our southern border,” she said.Several conservative lawmakers are unhappy with the direction of the bipartisan Senate talks, demanding Congress go further to restrict asylum laws. Some are threatening to block a funding bill and risk a government shutdown if Congress fails to take up Republicans’ hardline border security demands.Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican of New York who represents a district carried by Biden in 2020, was emphatic that the proceedings were about accountability and not political theater. He cited comments by the Democratic leaders in his state who have pleaded for more federal help to deal with the migrant crisis in New York.“This isn’t a narrative,” he said. “It’s not one created by Republicans.”In a memo released ahead of the hearing, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) slammed the proceedings as a “baseless political attack” and a distraction from the efforts underway to find “real solutions” to fix the nation’s beleaguered immigration system.The agency highlighted comments made by Republican lawmakers and conservative legal scholars who disagreed that Mayorkas had committed impeachable offenses.And contrary to Republican claims of an “open” border, the DHS memo said that agents had removed or expelled more than 1 million individuals encountered at the border in both fiscal years 2022 and 2023, with more removals in 2022 than any previous year. It estimated that the annual rate of apprehensions under the Biden administration was 78%, “identical” to the rate under the Trump administration.They also noted increased efforts in stopping the flow of fentanyl, noting that the agency has “stopped more fentanyl and arrested more individuals for fentanyl-related crimes in the last two years than in the previous five years combined”.“This unprecedented process, led by extremists, is harmful to the Department and its workforce and undercuts vital work across countless national security priorities,” the memo said. “Unlike like those pursuing photo ops and politics, Secretary Mayorkas is working relentlessly to fix the problem by working with Republican and Democratic Senators to find common ground and real solutions.” More

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      ‘Totally baseless’: Trump denounced for Nikki Haley ‘birther’ lie

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      A leading professor of US constitutional law condemned Donald Trump for “playing the race card” by propagating the “totally baseless” claim that Nikki Haley, his surging rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is not qualified because her parents were not US citizens when she was born.“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, told NBC.“I can’t imagine what Trump hopes to gain by those claims unless it’s to play the race card against the former governor and UN ambassador as a woman of colour – and to draw on the wellsprings of anti-immigrant prejudice by reminding everyone that Haley’s parents weren’t citizens when she was born in the USA.”The term “birther” was coined to describe racist conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, the first Black US president, which Trump seized on as he established a presence on the political far right.In 2016, as he ran for president himself, Trump also attempted to raise doubts about Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who was then his chief rival.Obama’s father was Kenyan and his mother American. He was born in Hawaii. Cruz’s father was Cuban and his mother American. He was born in Canada and moved to Texas when young.The 14th amendment to the US constitution – the same text under which Colorado and Maine now seek to remove Trump from the ballot for inciting an insurrection – says “all persons born or naturalised in the United States” are citizens. It was introduced after the civil war, conferring citizenship on people once enslaved. The constitution requires that a presidential candidate must be a resident for 14 years, at least 35 years old, and a “natural-born citizen”.As described in Haley’s autobiography, her parents “were born in the Punjab region of India”. Haley was born in Bamberg, South Carolina, in 1972, a US citizen at birth. Her father became a US citizen in 1978, her mother in 2003. Haley was governor of her home state from 2011 to 2017, then ambassador to the United Nations when Trump was president.In the race for the Republican nomination, Haley has surged in polling. She has done particularly well in New Hampshire, cutting Trump’s lead to single digits. Trump still dominates in Iowa, the first state to vote next week.On Tuesday, Trump re-posted to his Truth Social platform a post from the Gateway Pundit, a far-right site, which cited Paul Ingrassia, a New York Young Republican and “constitutional scholar”, as saying Haley was disqualified.In his own post, Ingrassia cited “great investigative work by Laura Loomer, who uncovered that neither one of Haley’s parents were US citizens when she was born in 1972”. Loomer, a far-right, Islamophobic, white-supremacist Florida activist who has run unsuccessfully for Congress, is an ardent Trump supporter.Experts agree Haley is qualified to be president, simply because she was born on US soil. Campaigning on a virulently anti-immigrant platform, Trump has promised to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants.His post about Haley was condemned across the US media – and the political spectrum.Charles Gasparino, a Fox Business correspondent, said: “The problem with Donald is that he goes disgustingly low and not just against real enemies.”John Avlon, a CNN political analyst, said: “Trump’s lies are cut and paste: now he’s going birther on Nikki Haley – after trying the same attack on Obama, Harris and Cruz.”Kamala Harris, the first woman and woman of colour to be vice-president, was born in Oakland, California, in 1964, to parents from India and Jamaica. Trump sought to cast doubt on her eligibility for office during the 2020 election. More

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      Trump warns of ‘bedlam’ if criminal cases bar him from White House

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      There will be “bedlam” in the US if criminal cases deny Donald Trump a White House return, said the former president who incited the deadly January 6 attack on Congress but who is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination this year.“I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes,” Trump told reporters, referring to Joe Biden and Democrats, after a court hearing in Washington DC on Tuesday.“It’ll be bedlam in the country. It’s a very bad thing. It’s a very bad precedent. As we said, it’s the opening of a Pandora’s box.”Trump claims he is a victim of political persecution.Prosecutors say he committed 91 criminal offenses, regarding federal election subversion (four charges); state election subversion (13, in Georgia); retention of classified information (40, federal) and hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star who claimed an affair (34, in New York).Trump also faces civil trials over his business affairs and a defamation case arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Arising from his incitement of the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021 – an attempt to overturn his defeat by Biden now linked to nine deaths and more than 1,200 arrests – Trump also faces attempts to remove him from the ballot under the 14th amendment to the US constitution, introduced after the civil war to stop insurrectionists running for office.Trump has appealed removal in Maine in that state. An appeal against his removal in Colorado will be argued at the US supreme court.On Tuesday, Trump chose to attend an appeals hearing in his federal election subversion case, listening as his lawyers argued he enjoys immunity for anything done while president.One judge asked if a president would be immune to prosecution if he ordered Seal Team 6, an elite special forces unit, “to assassinate a political rival”.For Trump, D John Sauer, a former Missouri solicitor general, said a president “would have to be impeached and convicted” before being prosecuted for any such action.Trump was impeached (for a second time) for inciting the Capitol attack. Republicans in the Senate ensured he was acquitted.Representing Jack Smith, the special counsel, James Pearce said Trump’s lawyers were proposing “an extraordinarily frightening future”.Speaking to reporters, Trump referred to speeches by Biden around the January 6 anniversary, saying of the charges against him: “When they talk about threat to democracy, that’s your real threat to democracy.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClaiming he did “nothing wrong, absolutely nothing”, he nonetheless repeated his claim: “If it’s during the time [in office], you have absolute immunity.”A reporter asked: “You just used the word ‘bedlam’. Will you tell your supporters now, ‘No matter what, no violence’?”Trump walked away.Polling shows a criminal conviction may reduce Republican support for Trump. The trial in the federal election subversion case is due to begin on 4 March, in the middle of the GOP primary. As in other cases, Trump’s appeal is widely seen as an attempt to delay proceedings.His prediction of “bedlam” stoked widespread alarm.Maya Wiley, chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, alluded to Republican endorsements of Trump when she said his “warnings” were “heard by too many as calls to action. Every Republican should come forward and repeat these simple and unequivocal words: ‘Political violence is never acceptable … it has no place in the democracy. None.’ This isn’t a game.”Tim O’Brien of Bloomberg News, a longtime Trump-watcher, recapped remarks in court and added just one word: “Fascism”. More

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      Trump’s electoral and judicial calendars collide – but it does him little harm

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      Four candidates were on the campaign trail, meeting and greeting voters in frigid Iowa. A fifth was sitting in a courtroom in rainy Washington, trying to fend off a criminal case that might land him in jail.But in the upside-down, topsy-turvy world of American politics, it is Donald Trump – not Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson or Vivek Ramaswamy – who is expected to win the first Republican presidential nominating contest in a landslide next week.This is not despite but because of a host of legal woes that would have long buried a normal candidate in a normal time have become a feature, not a bug, of his 2024 presidential run. “Unprecedented” is the most overused word of the Trump era but this week really is, well, unprecedented as the collision of his electoral and judicial calendars gets real.On Tuesday he was in court as his lawyers tried to convince the three judges that a federal criminal case charging him with election subversion should be dismissed before it goes to trial. On Wednesday, Trump will sit for a Fox News town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, counterprogramming a CNN debate in the same city between DeSantis and Haley. On Thursday, expect to see Trump in New York for the closing arguments in a civil fraud trial. And on Saturday, he returns to Iowa for campaign rallies.The former president is picking and choosing when and where he shows up. In every case, the decision is calculated to maximise his chances of winning back the White House – and staying out of prison.He was not obliged to attend Tuesday’s proceedings at the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. In driving rain, few protesters bothered to show up outside the courtroom and there were no TV cameras allowed inside. Trump sat there with no opportunity to speak as lawyers jousted over claims that he is immune from criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election.Trump’s lawyer, D John Sauer, told a three-judge panel that prosecuting former presidents “would open a Pandora’s box from which that nation may never recover”. He argued that presidents must first be impeached and removed from office by Congress before they can be prosecuted. Judge Florence Pan reacted sceptically, asking Sauer: “You’re saying a president could sell pardons, could sell military secrets, could tell Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival?”Trump will probably lose this argument. But the real point of his rare return to Washington came after the hearing, when he spoke to reporters at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, formerly the Trump International hotel, calling it “a very momentous day” and insisting that he “did nothing wrong”.If the case is allowed to proceed, Trump claimed, that would potentially leave Biden open to prosecution once he left office. “When they talk about a threat to democracy, that’s your real threat to democracy,” he said. The remarks were transmitted live to the base on the conservative Fox News channel, guaranteeing more exposure than a typical rally.Meanwhile Trump’s fundraising campaign had kicked into gear. Before the hearing, he released a video in which he said he might prosecute Biden if he defeats him in the presidential election. “If I don’t get immunity then crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get immunity. Joe would be ripe for indictment,” he said.The campaign dates and court dates are now like two liquids mixed and impossible to separate. The trial in the federal election interference case is due to start on 4 March, one day before Super Tuesday, when 15 states will hold primaries or caucuses.The convergence has helped Trump break another American tradition. For half a century, Iowa has been a test of retail politics as diners, farms, hotel ballrooms, school gyms and a state fair play an outsized role in deciding who will become the most powerful person on the planet. The candidate with a winning smile and tireless handshake had a decent chance of working their way to the White House.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut data collected by the Des Moines Register newspaper shows that, between 1 January 2023 and 4 January 2024, Trump held only 24 events in 19 counties, far fewer than DeSantis (99 events in 57 counties), Haley (51 events in 30 counties) and Ramaswamy (239 events in 94 counties).Yet a recent poll put Trump 34 percentage points clear of DeSantis in Iowa. His campaign surrogates such as Ben Carson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kristi Noem often draw bigger crowds in the state than actual candidates.There are several reasons for Trump’s dominance but court appearances like Tuesday’s have not done him any harm. Any time his fortunes seemed in danger of flagging, for example after Republicans’ midterms flop, the justice department inadvertently gave him political rocket fuel. He played victim and martyr of a politicised system and Republicans – even his opponents – rallied around him.That will not necessarily work against Biden in November. A CBS News poll found that 64% of Americans do not think Trump should be immune from prosecution for actions he took as president, whereas just 34% believe he should be. Other surveys suggest that a criminal conviction – he is facing 91 criminal charges in Atlanta, Miami, New York and Washington – could deal him a big blow among moderates and independents.Two Republican candidates have been vocal in making that case. Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and federal prosecutor, and Asa Hutchinson, an ex-governor of Arkansas, have warned that Trump will be convicted and is unfit for office.Last month a Reuters/ Ipsos poll put Trump’s support among Republicans at 61%. Christie? He was at 2%. And Hutchinson? He was at 1%. More

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      Federal appeals judges begin hearing on Trump immunity arguments – live

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      Judge Karen Henderson gets into what the appeals court’s options are going forward.Trump attorney John Sauer says he thinks the judges should remand the case back to the lower district court, with instructions to go through the indictment and consider whether each alleged act is an official act, or private conduct.Sauer’s position is that private conduct can be prosecuted, but officials acts cannot, and that all the acts in the indictment are official acts.Judge Karen Henderson moved on to what acts are official acts for a president, saying, “I think it’s paradoxical to say his constitutional duty to say that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate the law”.Sauer replied that a president’s actions can never be examinable by the courts.Judges Karen Henderson and Michelle Childs pressed John Sauer on comments Donald Trump uttered while in office, when he conceded that no former officeholder is immune from investigation and prosecution.Senators might have relied on that to acquit Trump in the impeachment that followed the January 6 insurrection, Henderson said.Sauer replied that he disagrees with the judges’ interpretation of that line, which has been memorialized in the congressional record. He says the term “officeholder” would pertain to lesser government officials, not the president, and, in any case, Trump was referring to being investigated generally.Judge Florence Pan started off her questioning of Trump lawyer John Sauer by offering a novel scenario.“Could a president who ordered Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival and was not impeached, could he be subjected to criminal prosecution?” Pan asked.After some back and forth, Sauer said, “Qualified yes, if he’s impeached and convicted first.”Circuit judge Florence Pan is putting Trump lawyer John Sauer in a tough spot. After Sauer said that presidents can be prosecuted so long as there’s impeachment and conviction in the Senate, Pan asks if he is conceding that presidents actually do not have absolute immunity, and that if president can be prosecuted, don’t “all of your separation of powers and policy arguments fall away”?Live television cameras are not allowed in federal courtrooms.But live audio is, and you can listen to the back and forth between Donald Trump’s lawyers and the three judges at the top of the page. The former president is not expected to address the court.Donald Trump’s lawyers have begun making their arguments to a panel of three federal appeals judges that the former president cannot be prosecuted for trying to overturn the 2020 election because the events took place while he was president.The three federal judges hearing the case are now in the courtroom.They are Michelle Childs, who was appointed by Joe Biden, Karen Henderson, a George HW Bush appointee, and Florence Pan, another Biden appointee.Donald Trump’s lawyers have arrived in the courtroom where a federal appeals court will consider whether he is immune from charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election.Representing Trump today is former Missouri solicitor general John Sauer. Also in attendance for the former president are lawyers John Lauro, Greg Singer, Emil Bove and Stanley Woodward.There is at least one anti-Trump demonstrator waiting in the foul weather to greet the former president, WUSA9 reports:Since it’s 42 degrees Fahrenheit and raining in Washington DC today, do not expect the lively crowds that gathered for Donald Trump’s August arraignment to convene once again for his potentially pivotal immunity hearing.The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell, who is covering the hearing from within the E Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse, saw no supporters, protesters or lookie-loos outside, and this morning’s wire photos of the building show a pretty unremarkable scene:Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump is taking a break from the campaign trail today to appear in a Washington DC federal appeals court, where his lawyers will attempt to convince a three-judge panel that his “presidential immunity” prevents him from facing trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election. The stakes will be the highest of any court hearing for Trump since he was first indicted on the charges by special counsel Jack Smith in August, and if the former president prevails, Smith’s prosecution will end. We do not expect to get a decision today, and whichever way the three judges – two appointed by Joe Biden, and one by George HW Bush, rule, chances are the issue will go to the supreme court.Trump is not required to attend the hearing, but is using the proceedings as an opportunity to juice his claims of political persecution ahead of Monday’s Iowa Republican caucuses, which he is expected to win. “I was looking for voter fraud, and finding it, which is my obligation to do, and otherwise … running our Country”, the former president wrote yesterday on his Truth Social network. The hearing kicks off at 9.30am eastern time.Here’s what else is happening today:
      Nikki Haley’s support has peaked in New Hampshire, or perhaps not. Ahead of the state’s 23 January Republican primary, a Boston Globe/Suffolk University/USA Today poll reports she has 26% support compared with Trump’s 46%. But a CNN poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire shows a much closer race, with Trump at 39%, and Haley at 32%.
      The House returns today after the holiday break, and we get a better sense of whether rightwing lawmakers are prepared to reject a framework announced over the weekend to prevent a government shutdown.
      Joe Biden has no public events, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at 2pm. More

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      Biden assails Trump for trying to turn election ‘loss into a lie’

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      From the pulpit of a Black church that was the site of a racist massacre in 2015, Joe Biden cast this year’s presidential election as a battle for truth over lies told by those who seek to “whitewash” the worst chapters of American history – from the deadly assault on the US Capitol to the civil war.“This is a time of choosing,” Biden implored Americans during a visit to Mother Emanuel AME church, where nine Black worshippers were murdered by a white supremacist gunman who they had welcomed into their Bible study. Without mentioning Donald Trump by name, Biden assailed his predecessor and likely 2024 Republican opponent as a “loser” who sought to overthrow the will of the 81 million Americans who voted for the Democratic president.“In their world, these Americans, including you, don’t count,” Biden told supporters. “But that’s not the real world. That’s not democracy. That’s not America.”Biden’s remarks were briefly interrupted by protesters angry with the president’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “Ceasefire now,” they shouted from the pews. Their calls were drowned out by chanting from the president’s supporters: “Four more years.”“I understand their passion,” the president said. He then told them: “I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza.”The protest was a stark reminder of the challenges the 81-year-old president faces as he runs for re-election. Growing dissatisfaction with his handling of the war in Gaza has hurt Biden’s standing among key Democratic constituencies, as widespread unease with the economy and concerns about his age drive negative perceptions of his job performance and his re-election prospects.The Charleston speech came days after Biden delivered a scathing condemnation of Trump in a 31-minute address near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in which he excoriated the former president for fomenting the January 6 insurrection. Taken together, the speeches lay out what the president believes are the stakes of the 2024 election: American democracy itself.Biden is sharpening his campaign rhetoric as the electoral coalition he carried to defeat Trump in 2020 shows signs of fraying. Polling indicates an erosion of support among Black voters, a critical voting bloc for the party.The president was introduced by the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, a Democrat and prominent Black leader whose 2020 endorsement helped resurrect Biden’s flailing campaign and secured Biden’s primary victory in the state. Biden said it was the support of Black voters in South Carolina and Clyburn especially that allowed him to stand before them as president.“I owe you,” he said.Biden noted the record-low levels of Black unemployment since he took office, and touted the appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to the supreme court, as well as legislation that lowered the cost of prescription drugs and made 19 June, Juneteenth, a federal holiday. He praised Vice-President Kamala Harris’s efforts to secure votings rights, though legislation has stalled in the narrowly divided Senate.“Slavery was the cause of the civil war,” he declared to loud applause from the audience. Weeks earlier, the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, who initially failed to cite slavery as a cause of the civil war when asked by a voter in New Hampshire.Biden made no mention of the incident, but he connected efforts to rewrite the history of the civil war as a patriotic fight for “states’ rights” to the efforts to overturn the 2020 election and undermine democratic institutions.“We’re living in an era of a second Lost Cause,” he said. “There’s some in this country trying to turn a loss into a lie – a lie which if allowed to live will once again bring terrible damage to this country.”In a statement before Biden’s speech, Haley’s campaign accused Biden of “politicized racial speech” and noted that it was Haley who removed the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds after the Charleston massacre as the governor of South Carolina.The visit to South Carolina comes ahead of the 3 February Democratic presidential primary in the state, which launches the party’s nominating contest. At Biden’s urging, the Democratic National Committee put South Carolina first on the Democratic primary calendar as a reflection of how important Black voters are to the party.Biden faces only a nominal challenge for his party’s nomination.Biden spoke emotionally about the Charleston shooting, calling white supremacy a “poison” that “throughout our history has ripped this nation apart”. At Mother Emanuel, Biden said: “The word of God was pierced by bullets of hate, propelled not just by gunpowder, but by poison.”Biden recalled attending a memorial service in Charleston in the days after the attack. He said he came to grieve with the community, but he too found healing in those very pews. Weeks before, Biden had buried his eldest son, Beau Biden.“We prayed together,” Biden said, his voice stricken with emotion. “We grieved together. We found hope together.” More

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      Republican and Democrat leaders reach spending deal to fund US government

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      The top Democrat and Republican in the US Congress on Sunday agreed on a $1.59tn spending deal, setting up a race for bitterly divided lawmakers to pass the bills that would appropriate the money before the government begins to shut down this month.Since early last year, House of Representatives and Senate appropriations committees had been unable to agree on the 12 annual bills needed to fund the government for the fiscal year that began 1 October because of disagreements over the total amount of money to be spent.When lawmakers return on Monday from a holiday break, those panels will launch intensive negotiations over how much various agencies, from the agriculture and transportation departments to Homeland Security and health and human services, get to spend in the fiscal year that runs through 30 September.They face a 19 January deadline for the first set of bills to move through Congress and a 2 February deadline for the remainder of them.There were already some disagreements between the two parties as to what they had agreed to. Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement that the top-line figure includes $886bn for defense and $704bn for non-defense spending. But Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, in a separate statement, said the non-defense spending figure will be $772.7bn.Last month, Congress authorized $886bn for the Department of Defense this fiscal year, which Democratic president Joe Biden signed into law. Appropriators will also now fill in the details on how that will be parceled out.The non-defense discretionary funding will “protect key domestic priorities like veterans benefits, healthcare and nutrition assistance” from cuts sought by some Republicans, Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a joint statement.Last spring, Biden and then-House speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a deal on the $1.59tn in fiscal 2024 spending, along with an increase in borrowing authority to avoid an historic US debt default.But immediately after that was enacted, a fight broke out over a separate, private agreement by the two men over additional non-defense spending of around $69bn.One Democratic aide on Sunday said that $69bn in “adjustments” are part of the deal announced on Sunday.Another source briefed on the agreement said Republicans won a $6.1bn “recission” in unspent Covid aid money.The agreement on a top line spending number could amount to little more than a false dawn, if hardline House Republicans make good on threats to block spending legislation unless Democrats agree to restrict the flow of migrants across the US-Mexico border – or if they balk at the deal hammered out by Johnson and Schumer.Biden said on Sunday the deal moved the country one step closer to “preventing a needless government shutdown and protecting important national priorities”.“It reflects the funding levels that I negotiated with both parties,” Biden said in a statement after the deal was announced.Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell said he was encouraged by the agreement.“America faces serious national security challenges, and Congress must act quickly to deliver the full-year resources this moment requires,” he said on Twitter/X.Unless both chambers of Congress – the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-majority Senate – succeed in passing the 12 bills needed to fully fund the government, money will expire on 19 January for federal programs involving transportation, housing, agriculture, energy, veterans and military construction. Funding for other government areas, including defense, will continue through 2 February. More