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      House Republicans to meet after stopgap measure to avert shutdown fails by 232 to 198 votes – US politics live

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      From 4h agoThe House rejected a short-term spending bill aimed at averting a government shutdown, dealing a blow to Speaker Kevin McCarthy and likely cementing the chances of a shutdown less than 48 hours away.The bill, known as a continuing resolution, failed by a vote of 198 in favor to 232 opposed.Twenty one Republicans joined Democrats in voting against the bill. Hard-right members of McCarthy’s conference refused to support the bill despite its steep spending cuts of nearly 30% to many agencies and severe border security provisions, calling it insufficient.McCarthy is planning to meet with the GOP conference on Friday afternoon to discuss next steps. Ahead of the vote, he all but dared his hard-right colleagues to oppose the package. “Every member will have to go on record where they stand,” he said.Despite McCarthy’s concessions, members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus remained adamant on Friday that they would not support a continuing resolution.The Senate is scheduled to take another procedural vote at 1pm on Saturday to advance its stopgap bill to avert a government shutdown.Donald Trump plans to attend at least the first week of his $250m civil fraud trial brought by the New York attorney general Letitia James, according to court documents.James sued Trump and his adult sons last year, alleging widespread fraud connected to the Trump Organization and seeking $250m and professional sanctions. The trial is scheduled to start on 2 October.Trump’s plan to attend the trial was revealed in court filings in a separate lawsuit Trump filed against his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, according to a Politico report. The former president had been scheduled to undergo a deposition in the case on Tuesday in Florida, but the documents show that Trump’s attorneys “requested to reschedule his deposition so that he could attend his previously-scheduled New York trial in person.”The filings state:
      Through counsel, Plaintiff represented that he would be attending his New York trial in person—at least for each day of the first week of trial. He also stated that, because of the trial, he would be unavailable on any business day between October 2, 2023 and the end of his trial.
      US district judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled a 16 October hearing on federal prosecutors’ request for a limited gag order in the case charging Donald Trump with scheming to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.Special counsel Jack Smith had requested a gag order barring Trump from making inflammatory and intimidating public statements about potential witnesses, lawyers and other people involved in the case.Smith’s proposed order would bar “statements regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses” and “statements about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors that are disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating.”Trump’s lawyers earlier this week denounced the gag order request as a “desperate attempt at censorship”.National parks across the US will close to visitors as soon as Sunday if Congress is unable to avert a government shutdown, the Department of Interior has announced.“Gates will be locked, visitor centers will be closed, and thousands of park rangers will be furloughed,” the interior department wrote in a news release on Friday.
      Accordingly, the public will be encouraged not to visit sites during the period of lapse in appropriations out of consideration for protection of natural and cultural resources, as well as visitor safety.
      The plan, outlined in an updated National Parks Service (NPS) contingency plan, emphasizes the need to protect park resources and ensure visitor health and safety.The decision marks a notable departure from how the national park system was handled under the Trump administration during the last government shutdown. During a funding stalemate that stretched for 35 days through the end of 2018 into 2019, officials ordered parks to remain accessible to the public while they were without key staff, resources and services.That decision culminated in destruction and chaos at some of the country’s most cherished landmarks such as Joshua Tree national park, with high levels of vandalism, accumulation of human waste and trash and significant risks to ecosystems and unsupervised visitors.The US stands just days from a full government shutdown amid political deadlock over demands from rightwing congressional Republicans for deep public spending cuts.Fuelled by bitter ideological divisions among the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, funding for federal agencies will run out at midnight on 30 September unless – against widespread expectation – Congress votes to pass a stopgap measure to extend government funding.It is an event with the potential to inflict disruption to a range of public services, cause delays in salaries, and wreak significant damage on the national economy if it becomes prolonged.At the heart of the looming upheaval is the uncertain status of the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who is under fire from members of his own party for agreeing spending limits with Joe Biden, that members of the GOP’s far-right “Freedom Caucus” say are too generous and want to urgently prune.Here are seven things you should know about the looming shutdown.As part of his plea deal, Atlanta-area bail bondsman Scott Hall pleaded guilty to five counts of “conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties”, a misdemeanor.He will serve five years of probation as part of the sentencing agreement, Judge Scott McAfee said during a hearing in Fulton county superior court.He also agreed to a $5,000 fine, 200 hours of community service and a ban on polling and election administration-related activities, the judge said.Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area bail bondsman, pleaded guilty to multiple criminal charges in the Georgia election interference case, becoming the first defendant in the Fulton county case to take a plea deal.Hall was charged in relation to the alleged breach of voting machine equipment in the wake of the 2020 election in Coffee county.Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts as part of a negotiated deal. He appeared before Judge Scott McAfee on Friday afternoon after reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors.Addressing Hall, the judge asked:
      You understand that you’re pleading guilty today because you believe there exists a factual basis that supports the plea, and you are pleading guilty because you are, in fact, guilty?
      Hall replied:
      Yes sir.
      Back at the government shutdown, as it were, the National Organization for Women, or Now, has called for leaders in Washington to get their act together.In a statement, Christian F Nunes, Now’s national president, gets slightly ahead of events, presuming no solution will be found before midnight tomorrow, the final funding deadline.It’s a powerful statement, all the same:
      Congress has failed in its most basic function. The extremists who control the House of Representatives have shut down the government – out of incompetence, ignorance, and cruelty.
      “This is not just about politics – far from it. When you’re living day to day, paycheck to paycheck, wondering how you’ll cope with a shutdown is chilling to the core.
      “Real people will be harmed because of this inexcusable partisan gamesmanship. For weeks, they’ve been dreading this day – not knowing if they’ll be able to pay the rent, afford childcare, or feed their families.
      “Those who are responsible for today’s shutdown are causing fear and uncertainty to be felt not only by government workers and their families, but by millions more who are impacted by this crisis – starting with the 7 million women and children who rely on vital nutrition assistance, but will be turned away when the funds dry up just days from now.”
      The shutdown is being driven by hard-right House Republicans, opposing Kevin McCarthy, a speaker from their own party, and refusing to compromise on policy priorities including reducing funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia and advancing various “culture war” proposals also unacceptable to Democrats who control the Senate and the White House.Nunes continued:
      It couldn’t be clearer – these extremists are willing to cause such disruption, pain, and uncertainty because they’d rather tear down the government than make it work.
      “And now they’re holding every function of government hostage until their extremist demands are met—including more restrictions on abortion, cutting access to Social Security and Medicare, allowing discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and slashing funding for cancer research, safe and clean drinking water and making our elections less safe, and making it harder to vote.
      “Now members are calling on their representatives to shut off the shutdown. Not in months or weeks, but days or hours. They may not feel the pain they cause, but we know people who do.”
      Robert F Kennedy Jr is reportedly set to end his challenge to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination and run as an independent instead.According to Mediaite, Kennedy, 69 and a scion of a famous political dynasty – a son of the former US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, a nephew of President John F Kennedy – will announce his run in Pennsylvania on 9 October.“Bobby feels that the Democratic National Committee is changing the rules to exclude his candidacy so an independent run is the only way to go,” the website quoted a “Kennedy campaign insider” as saying.Kennedy is an attorney who made his name as an environmental campaigner before achieving notoriety as a prominent vaccine skeptic, particularly over Covid-19.He has often flirted with controversy, not least in a podcast interview released this week in which he repeated a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on New York.Polling has shown Kennedy performing relatively well against Biden, the incumbent president, in the Democratic primary, but not close to posing a serious threat.However, Biden aides are reportedly nervous about the possible impact of third-party candidates in a likely presidential election match-up with Donald Trump.Polling shows widespread belief that at 80, Biden is too old to serve an effective second term in the White House. Trump is only three years younger – and faces 91 criminal charges, including for election subversion, and assorted civil threats – but polls show less concern among the public that he could be unfit to return to office.Whether Kennedy, the Green Party pick, Cornel West, or a notional nominee backed by No Labels, a supposedly centrist group, a third-party candidate is widely seen to be likely to peel more support from Biden than Trump, thereby potentially handing the presidency to the Republican.Rightwing figures (prominent among them Steve Bannon, formerly Trump’s White House strategist) have encouraged Kennedy to run against Biden or as an independent.As cited by Mediate, in July the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said: “I think he should run as a third-party candidate because I do think he should, he would win … because his party’s radical elements, what we call the woke, have embraced this fascist clampdown on language.”On Friday, as observers digested news of Kennedy’s imminent change of course, the author Michael Weiss referred to infamous electoral sabotage carried out by Roger Stone and other Republican operatives when he said: “The ratfuckery was self-evident from day one.”But not everyone thought Kennedy’s move would be bad for Biden.Joe Conason, editor of the National Memo, said: “Go Bobby! Running ‘independent’ means you’ll draw more voters from the candidate you resemble most in political ideology, personal conduct, and narcissistic mentality. (That’s Trump, not Biden.)”More:Retiring as chair of the joint chiefs of staff, the army general Mark Milley directed a parting shot at Donald Trump, the president he served but who he seemed to call a “wannabe dictator”.Speaking at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia, this morning, Milley said of the US armed forces: “We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion.“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or tyrant or a dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.“We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”Trump, who nominated Milley in 2019, did not immediately comment. But Milley’s struggles to contain Trump, particularly in 2020, the tumultuous final year of his presidency, have been long and widely reported.Such struggles concerned foreign policy, as Milley and other officials sought to stop the erratic president provoking confrontations with foes including China and Iran.But Milley and others also had to keep the US military out of domestic affairs, as Trump chafed against nationwide protests for racial justice, openly yearning to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and thereby call in the army.Last week saw publication of an in-depth profile by the Atlantic, in which Milley again expressed his regret over an infamous appearance with Trump in June 2020, when the president marched from the White House to a historic church, slightly damaged amid the protests, in an attempt to project a strongman image.The Atlantic profile prompted Trump to rail at Milley again, calling a widely reported conversation in which the general sought to reassure his Chinese counterpart that Trump would not order an attack “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”Milley has said he has taken “adequate safety precautions” against potential threats from Trump supporters perhaps also encouraged by the words of Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican congressman who told supporters Milley should be hanged.Full story:The House GOP leadership have made the following changes to the House floor schedule:Members are advised that votes are now expected in the House tomorrow, Saturday 30 September 2023.This is a change from the House GOP leadership’s previously announced schedule.House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called on Republicans to work with Democrats to avert a shutdown by putting a bipartisan stopgap funding bill on the House floor for a vote when the measure arrives from the Senate, according to a Washington Post report.“Republicans face a clear choice: put the bipartisan continuing resolution on the floor of the House for an up-or-down vote and we can avoid the extreme Maga Republican shutdown and end this nightmare,” Jeffries said.
      Or fail to put the bipartisan continuing resolution sent over from the Senate on the floor of the House for an up-or-down vote because your objective, apparently, as extreme Maga Republicans is to shut the government down.
      The top three House Democrats held a last-minute press conference after the vote on a stopgap funding measure failed.House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters that House Democrats met this morning and are “unified in the position that we support” the Senate’s bipartisan continuing resolution.From the Hill’s Mychael Schnell:The House GOP conference will meet at 4pm ET after a measure on a stopgap funding bill that would have averted a federal shutdown failed.Jeffrey Clark, the former justice department lawyer who schemed with Donald Trump and others to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and other states, has been denied in his attempt to move his case from state court to federal court. More

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      Robert Kennedy Jr to run for president as independent in 2024 – report

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr is reportedly set to end his challenge to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination and run instead as an independent candidate, in a move that could upset the 2024 race for the White House.Kennedy, 69 and a scion of a famous political dynasty – a son of the former US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, a nephew of President John F Kennedy – will announce his run in Pennsylvania on 9 October, according to Mediaite.“Bobby feels that the Democratic National Committee is changing the rules to exclude his candidacy so an independent run is the only way to go,” the website quoted a “Kennedy campaign insider” as saying.Whether Kennedy, the Green party pick, Cornel West, or a notional nominee backed by No Labels, a supposedly centrist group, a third-party candidate is widely seen to be likely to peel more support from Biden than the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, thereby potentially handing the presidency to the Republican.Kennedy is an attorney who made his name as an environmental campaigner before achieving notoriety as a prominent vaccine sceptic, particularly over Covid-19. His campaign has been rife with controversy, not least in a podcast interview released this week in which he repeated a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on New York.His campaign has also been roiled by an antisemitism scandal after Kennedy told reporters at a press dinner that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people had greater immunity. The false claim was embraced by neo-Nazi groups and condemned by scientists and Jewish organizations.Kennedy’s remarks echoed antisemitic tropes that circulated widely during the pandemic which portrayed the coronavirus as a global Jewish plot and caused members of his own family to denounce him for “deplorable and untruthful” comments.Polling has shown Kennedy performing relatively well against Biden, the incumbent president, in the Democratic primary, but not close to posing a serious threat.However, Biden aides are reportedly nervous about the possible impact of third-party candidates in a likely presidential election match-up with Trump.Polling shows widespread concerns, including among Democrats, that at 80, Biden is too old to serve an effective second term in the White House. Trump is only three years younger – and faces 91 criminal charges, including for election subversion, and assorted civil threats – but polls show less concern among his fervent Republican base that he could be unfit to return to office.Rightwing figures – prominent among them Steve Bannon, formerly Trump’s White House strategist – have encouraged Kennedy to run against Biden or as an independent.As cited by Mediate, in July the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said: “I think he should run as a third-party candidate because I do think he should, he would win.”But not every observer thought Kennedy’s move would be bad for Biden.Joe Conason, editor of the National Memo, said: “Go Bobby! Running ‘independent’ means you’ll draw more voters from the candidate you resemble most in political ideology, personal conduct, and narcissistic mentality. (That’s Trump, not Biden.)” More

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      House votes against stopgap bill in blow to McCarthy as shutdown highly likely

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      The House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, suffered another embarrassing defeat on Friday, after hard-right lawmakers tanked his stopgap funding bill that would have averted a federal shutdown on Sunday morning.McCarthy’s proposed stopgap measure, which would have funded the government for another month while enacting severe spending cuts on most federal agencies, failed in a vote of 198 to 232, as 21 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the legislation.With less than 36 hours left before government funding lapses, McCarthy appeared to be out of options to prevent a shutdown. Speaking to reporters before the vote, McCarthy tried to pitch the stopgap proposal as a means of buying time to continue negotiations over longer-term spending bills.“We actually need a stopgap measure to allow the House to continue to finish its work – to make sure our military gets paid, to make sure our border agents get paid as we finish the job,” McCarthy said.But that argument failed to sway the hard-right members of McCarthy’s conference, who have insisted for weeks that they would not back any short-term spending bill, known as a continuing resolution. With such a narrow House majority, McCarthy could only afford to lose a handful of votes within his conference to pass the continuing resolution without any Democratic support. The bill cleared a key procedural hurdle on Friday afternoon, but the proposal could not garner enough support for final passage.Republican leaders informed members that votes were now expected in the House on Saturday, suggesting McCarthy may try again to pass a continuing resolution, but expectations for some kind of breakthrough were low on Friday afternoon.In an attempt to appease the holdouts heading into the Friday vote, McCarthy has worked to advance a series of longer-term appropriations bills that include some of the steep spending cuts demanded by hard-right Republicans. On Thursday night, the House successfully passed three of those bills, but an agricultural funding proposal failed amid criticism from more moderate Republicans.Despite McCarthy’s concessions, members of the hard-right House freedom caucus remained adamant on Friday that they would not support a continuing resolution.“The continuing resolution being offered today is a bad deal for Republicans,” the congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of the leaders of the holdouts, said in a floor speech before the final vote. “That’s why I’m voting against it.”The unrelenting blockade staged by Gaetz and his allies has enraged some of the more moderate members of the House Republican conference – including Congressman Mike Lawler, who represents a New York district that Joe Biden won in 2020.“There’s only one person to blame for any potential government shutdown and that’s Matt Gaetz,” Lawler told reporters. “He’s not a conservative Republican; he’s a charlatan.”McCarthy’s continuing resolution also included severe spending cuts for most of the federal government, sparking impassioned criticism among House Democrats. Every member of the House Democratic caucus opposed the continuing resolution, leaving McCarthy with no option for passing the bill.“Once again, extreme Republicans in the House have demonstrated their complete and utter inability to govern,” the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said after the vote. “We are in the middle of a Republican civil war that has been ongoing for months and now threatens a catastrophic government shutdown that will hurt everyday Americans.”Meanwhile, the Senate continued to work on its own bipartisan spending proposal, advancing the bill in a vote of 76-22 on Thursday. That measure would keep the government funded until 17 November, and it includes roughly $6bn in funding each for disaster relief efforts and aid for Ukraine.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut House Republicans have roundly rejected that bipartisan bill, denouncing the additional funding for Ukraine and arguing it does not go far enough to curtail government spending. After the failed vote on Friday, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, called on McCarthy to face the reality of the situation.“The speaker has spent weeks catering to the hard right, and now he finds himself in the exact same position he’s been in since the beginning: no plan forward, no closer to passing something that avoids a shutdown,” Schumer said in a floor speech. “The speaker needs to abandon his doomed mission of trying to please Maga extremists, and instead, he needs to work across the aisle to keep the government open.”With each chamber rejecting the other’s proposal, it remained highly unclear on Friday afternoon how lawmakers could reach an agreement to keep the government open. As the federal government braced for a shutdown, the White House lambasted McCarthy for conceding to hard-right Republicans, after the speaker reneged on a funding deal he had struck with Joe Biden this spring.“Extreme House Republicans are solely – solely – to blame for marching us toward a shutdown. That is what we’re seeing right now,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Friday.Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, also mocked McCarthy for promising to go without pay during a shutdown, which could furlough hundreds of thousands of federal workers.“That is theater,” Young said at the White House. “I will tell you: the guy who picks up the trash in my office won’t get a paycheck. That’s real. And that’s what makes me angry.”With less than two days left before government funding lapses on Sunday morning, a shutdown appeared to be a virtual certainty. More

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      What does a US shutdown mean? Seven things you should know

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      The US stands just days from a full government shutdown amid political deadlock over demands from rightwing congressional Republicans for deep public spending cuts.Fuelled by bitter ideological divisions among the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, funding for federal agencies will run out at midnight on 30 September unless – against widespread expectation – Congress votes to pass a stopgap measure to extend government funding.It is an event with the potential to inflict disruption to a range of public services, cause delays in salaries, and wreak significant damage on the national economy if it becomes prolonged.At the heart of the looming upheaval is the uncertain status of the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who is under fire from members of his own party for agreeing spending limits with Joe Biden, that members of the GOP’s far-right “Freedom Caucus” say are too generous and want to urgently prune.What happens when a US government shutdown takes place?Thousands of federal government employees are put on furlough, meaning that they are told not to report for work and go unpaid for the period of the shutdown, although their salaries are paid retroactively when it ends.Other government workers who perform what are judged essential services, such as air traffic controllers and law enforcement officials, continue to work but do not get paid until Congress acts to end the shutdown.Depending on how long it lasts, national parks can either shut entirely or open without certain vital services such as public toilets or attendants. Passport processing can stop, as can research – at national health institutes.The Biden administration has warned that federal inspections ensuring food safety and prevention of the release of dangerous materials into drinking water could stop for the duration of the shutdown.About 10,000 children aged three and four may also lose access to Head Start, a federally funded program to promote school readiness among toddlers, especially among low-income families.What causes a shutdown?Simply put, the terms of a piece of legislation known as the Anti-Deficiency Act, first passed in 1884, prohibits federal agencies from spending or obligating funds without an act of appropriation – or some alternative form of approval – from Congress.If Congress fails to enact the 12 annual appropriations bills needed to fund the US government’s activities and associated bureaucracy, all non-essential work must cease until it does. If Congress enacts some of the bills but not others, the agencies affected by the bills not enacted are forced to cease normal functioning; this is known as a partial government shutdown.How unusual are US government shutdowns?For the first 200 years of the US’s existence, they did not happen at all. In recent decades, they have become an increasingly regular part of the political landscape, as Washington politics has become more polarised and brinkmanship a commonplace political tool. There have been 20 federal funding gaps since 1976, when the US first shifted the start of its fiscal year to 1 October.Three shutdowns in particular have entered US political lore:A 21-day partial closure in 1995 over a dispute about spending cuts between President Bill Clinton and the Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich, that is widely seen as setting the tone for later partisan congressional struggles.In 2013, when the government was partially closed for 16 days after another Republican-led Congress tried to use budget negotiations to defund Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare.A 34-day shutdown, the longest on record, lasting from December 2018 until January 2019, when Donald Trump refused to sign any appropriations bill that did not include $5.7bn funding for a wall along the US border with Mexico. The closure damaged Trump’s poll ratings.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat is triggering the latest imminent shutdown?In large part, the crisis is being driven by the relatively weak position of McCarthy, the Republican speaker in the House of Representatives. Working with a wafer-thin majority in the 435-seat chamber, McCarthy needed a record 15 ballots to ascend to his position last January, a position earned only after tense negotiations with a minority of far-right Republicans.Those same rightwingers are now in effect holding McCarthy hostage by refusing to vote for the appropriations bills on the basis of spending guidelines the speaker previously agreed with Biden. McCarthy could, theoretically, still pass the bills with the support of Democrats across the aisle. But rightwingers, notably the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, have vowed to topple him as speaker in such a scenario.Is there a way out of the current impasse?Time is running out. McCarthy and other Republican leaders have been trying to deploy a stopgap spending measure called a continuing resolution (CR) that would keep the government open until 31 October, while efforts continue to agree to final spending bills for 2024.However, multiple attempts have failed to win approval of Freedom Caucus members, who are refusing to vote for it unless it has more radical conservative policies attached, such as language to address “woke policies” and “weaponization of the Department of Justice”. A list of amendments from the rightwing Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene includes a resolution preventing funds being used to aid Ukraine and a ban on funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates.How could a shutdown affect the wider economy?According to the congressional budget office, the 2018-19 shutdown imposed a short-term cost of $11bn on the US economy, an estimated $3bn of which was never recovered after the stoppage ended.Economists have warned the effects now could be compounded by other unrelated events, including the lingering impact of inflationary pressures and the United Auto Workers strike against America’s three biggest car manufacturers, which union leaders have threatened to expand if their demands remain unmet.How has Joe Biden reacted?The president has tried to use the bully pulpit to put the spotlight on the GOP holdouts, emphasizing that they should be blamed if a shutdown does go ahead.“Let’s be clear. If the government shuts down that means members of the US military are going to have to continue to work but not get paid,” Biden said at a dinner hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation at the weekend. “Funding the government is one of the most basic responsibilities of Congress. It’s time for Republicans to start doing the job America elected them to do.”Fearing the worst, however, the White House has published a set of blueprints for how government agencies should operate if a shutdown ensues and funds run out. More

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      Joe Biden says ‘Maga movement’ is endangering US democracy – video

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      Joe Biden has dramatically raised the ante in the forthcoming US presidential election campaign with an impassioned warning that US democracy is being imperilled by a vengeful Donald Trump, his likely opponent next year. ‘There is something dangerous happening in America,’ he told an audience in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday. ‘There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy: the Maga movement.’ He said he did not think all Republicans ascribed to the Maga agenda, but added: ‘There is no question that today’s Republican party is driven and intimidated by Maga Republican extremists’ More

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      Trump gets done for fraud as GOP candidates vie for attention – podcast

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      Wednesday was debate night for almost all the Republican candidates for the White House, but once again, the man who chose not to turn up was stealing the headlines for yet another legal issue that went against him.
      Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and the others had ample opportunity to bring up the fact that a judge in New York ruled that Donald Trump had committed fraud for years while building a real estate empire. But they didn’t focus on that or any of the other court cases set to interrupt his campaign next year. So what did they all have to say? Did they manage to steal any of the limelight?
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Bill Kristol, the former chief of staff to the vice-president Dan Quayle and top conservative commentator, to get his take on the Republican field

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Biden warns voters a second Trump presidency will threaten democracy

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      Joe Biden dramatically raised the ante in the forthcoming US presidential election campaign on Thursday with a stark and impassioned warning that American democracy is imperiled by a vengeful Donald Trump, his likely opponent next year.Faced by stagnant approval ratings and worries about his advanced age, the US president attempted to stir his dormant supporters and animate the undecided by spelling out the dangers he insisted a second Trump presidency would pose to the US’s status as the world’s leading beacon of democratic government.Declaring US history at “an inflexion point”, Biden, 80, said the country’s character and future was threatened by the authoritarian values of Trump’s self-styled Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.“There is something dangerous happening in America,” he told an audience in Phoenix, Arizona. “There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy: the MAGA movement … History has brought us to a new time of testing.“All of us are being asked right now: What will we do to maintain our democracy?”His voice at times falling to little more than a whisper to stress his message, Biden invoked the late John McCain, a former Republican senator with whom he had a close relationship, to emphasize what he said were the selfless virtues of democracy.He was forced to pause early in his speech when a heckler interrupted to demand why he had not declared a climate emergency, according to reporters in the auditorium.“If you shush up, I will meet with you immediately after this, OK?” the president responded. He then added pointedly: “Democracy never is easy – as you just demonstrated.”Referring to Trump by name just once in his half-hour speech, Biden nevertheless set out to contrast democratic norms and traditions with conduct that appeared to characterize his predecessor.Democracy, he said, “means rule of the people, not rule of the monarchy, not rule of money, not rule of the mighty.“Regardless of party, that means free and fair elections, respecting the outcome, win or lose. It means you cannot love your country only when you win.“Democracy means rejecting and repudiating political violence. Regardless of party, such violence is never, never, never acceptable in America. It’s undemocratic and it must never be normalized to gain political power.”The last comments were an apparent reference to the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6 when a Trump-inspired mob tried to stop the ratification of Biden’s presidential election victory by the US congress.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite Trump’s failure to overturn the 2020 election result, Biden warned that the danger had not passed. “Today, democracy is still at risk. This is not hyperbole. It’s a simple truth,” he said.The threat of violence continued unabated, he said, most recently aimed at general Mark Milley, the chair of the US armed forces joint chiefs of staff, whom Trump recently said in a social media post was guilty of “treason”.“Frankly, these MAGA extremists have no idea what the hell they’re talking about,” Biden said.The pro-democracy speech was delivered at an event honoring the memory of McCain, one of Biden’s political adversaries and twice a GOP presidential candidate, who frequently criticized Trump before his death in 2018.Biden depicted his relationship with McCain as a fitting paean to American democracy because the two men frequently engaged in across-the-aisle bipartisan cooperation when they were US senators despite being from different parties, a feature the president said the character of today’s Republican party has all but precluded.“There is no doubt that today’s Republican party is driven and intimidated by MAGA extremists,” he said. “Their extreme agenda, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the institutions of American democracy as we know it.”Biden has reportedly been regularly portraying Trump as a threat to democracy to donors at events to raise funds for next year’s election. Thursday’s speech was the first time he had done so publicly since before last year’s congressional mid-term elections and indicated that he intended to make the theme a central presidential campaign issue. More

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      The Biden impeachment hearing was a fishing expedition – no one took the bait

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      There was a commonsense question at the heart of Thursday’s congressional hearing on whether to launch a formal impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden that Republicans are counting on Americans to ask themselves. Would any foreign business hire the president’s son, Hunter, if it were not for his father?Out of that, Republicans on the House of Representatives oversight committee spun a vision of Biden Sr sitting atop a sprawling crime family that would be the envy of the mafia. But, as so often in modern American politics, the spectre of Donald Trump was lurking in the shadows.This was not an impeachment hearing. It was a hearing to decide if there is enough evidence to merit an impeachment inquiry into the president.But it was clear from the moment the Republican committee chair, James Comer, banged his gavel to launch more than six hours of accusation, distraction, attacks on witnesses and grandstanding that, for his party at least, the matter was already settled.Comer promised “a mountain of evidence, revealing how Joe Biden abused his public office for his family’s financial gain”. If so, it wasn’t immediately evident amid the endless flashing of documents and emails on to the committee’s screens, and the convoluted attempts to make connections through supposition and suspicion.At the heart of the Republican case is that foreign business interests in Ukraine, China and beyond only hired Hunter Biden, described by one congressman as a man “addicted to drugs who frequented prostitutes”, because he offered the reward of “influence peddling” with his father going back years to when he was vice-president.Comer then made the leap to claim that, therefore, Joe Biden must have been on the take.“For years, President Biden has lied to the American people about his knowledge of and participation in his family’s corrupt business schemes. The door was wide open to those who purchased what a business associate described as the Biden brand,” he told the hearing.“These business targets include foreign oligarchs who sent millions of dollars to his family. It also includes a Chinese national who wired a quarter of a million dollars to his son.”A YouGov poll last month found that nearly three-quarters of Americans do think Hunter used his father’s position to make money. A little more than half of Democrats agreed, although the findings were blunted by the fact that the poll also said a majority of Americans think the children of all US presidents profit from their parents.But most Americans did not agree that meant Joe Biden was being paid off, although the fact that 43% do and 28% are not sure should worry the White House as evidence that the Republican accusations have some traction.There’s little doubt that Hunter made millions from foreign business deals. In June, he agreed a plea deal admitting that he failed to pay taxes on millions in 2017 and 2018, although that agreement fell apart after a judge blocked it. In August, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed a special counsel to investigate Hunter’s finances.But even the Republicans’ own witnesses would only go so far as to say that, while there was enough evidence for an investigation, it was not enough to establish the president’s guilt.The Republicans called on law professor and Fox News legal analyst, Jonathan Turley, to explain why an impeachment inquiry could not be avoided. He stated as fact that Hunter Biden was corrupt and said the country needed to know if the president was in on it.“The question is, did the president know? Did he encourage this type of corruption? And the key here once again … you have to begin with a recognition that what Hunter Biden and his associates were doing was corrupt. That’s what influence peddling is,” said Turley.Asked if, in that case, Congress was “obligated to have this inquiry”, Turley agreed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I believe it’s your duty to determine if the president is involved in what is a known form of corruption,” he said.Still Turley acknowledged that, as things stand, the evidence is not there.“I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment. That is something that an inquiry has to establish, but I also do believe that the House has passed the threshold for an impeachment inquiry into the conduct of President Biden,” he said.That would make any impeachment inquiry a fishing expedition. Or at least a distraction from what the Democrats say is really going on.The lone witness for the Democrats, Michael Gerhardt, a professor of jurisprudence at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the committee that the evidence did not show that the president was, in effect, in the pay of his son.“There have been lots of assumptions, lots of accusations. But the dots have not been connected,” he said.The Democratic congresswoman Melanie Ann Stansbury connected other dots. She said the hearing wasn’t really about Biden at all but a “chilling” attempt to make the dozens of pending criminal charges against Trump seem “like they’re not serious crimes”.“What is this hearing actually about? It’s a campaign strategy. It’s a misuse of official resources. It is this committee and loyalists of Donald Trump doing his bidding to bolster his chances of winning back the White House and securing their majority in the next election,” she said.“I think it’s obvious who the grand puppet master is here.” More