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      ‘A bully’: McCarthy accused of shoving Republican who helped oust him

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      A US radio reporter witnessed a remarkable altercation on Tuesday at the US Capitol between Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican speaker eight rightwingers including Burchett ejected from the role last month.Claudia Grisales, of NPR, said: “Have NEVER seen this on Capitol Hill: while talking to Tim Burchett after the GOP conference meeting, former speaker McCarthy walked by with his detail and McCarthy shoved Burchett. Burchett lunged towards me. I thought it was a joke, it was not. And a chase ensued.”According to Grisales, Burchett yelled, “Why’d you elbow me in the back, Kevin?! Hey Kevin, you got any guts!?” and called McCarthy a “jerk”.Grisales said: “I chased behind with my mic.”McCarthy, she said, told Burchett: “I didn’t elbow you in the back.”Burchett said: “You got no guts, you did so … the reporter said it right there, what kind of chicken move is that? You’re pathetic, man.”Telling Grisales he was “stunned”, Burchett said the clash was his first communication with McCarthy since he helped make him the first speaker ever removed by his own party.Last week, McCarthy told CNN Burchett’s vote to remove him was “out of nature” and accused him and his fellow rebels of “car[ing] a lot about press, not about policy, and so they seem to just want the press and the personality”.Burchett said then McCarthy was “bitter”.McCarthy has flirted with or reportedly indulged in physical confrontations before. In January, as rightwingers forced him through 15 votes to become speaker, he confronted Matt Gaetz of Florida on the House floor. Mike Rogers of Alabama, a McCarthy ally, had to be restrained. Gaetz eventually became the ringleader of McCarthy’s removal.In a new memoir, meanwhile, the retired anti-Trump Republican Adam Kinzinger, from Illinois, details two times he says McCarthy shoved him.Kinzinger says McCarthy “tried to intimidate me physically. Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber. As he passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.“If we had been in high school, I would have dropped my books, papers would have been scattered and I would have had to endure the snickers of passersby. I was startled but took it as the kind of thing Kevin did when he liked you.“Another time, I was standing at the rail that curves around the back of the last row of seats in the chamber. As he shoulder-checked me again, I thought to myself, ‘What a child.’”On Tuesday, McCarthy did not immediately comment. At the Capitol, Burchett spoke to CNN.“I was doing an interview with Claudia from NPR, a lovely lady,” he said. “And … at that time I got elbowed in the back. And it kind of caught me off guard because it was a clean shot to the kidneys. And I turned back and there was there was Kevin, and … it just happened and then I chased after him.“Of course, as I’ve stated many times, he’s a bully with $17m in a security detail, and he’s the type of guy that when you’re a kid would throw a rock over the fence and run home and hide behind his Mama’s skirt.“He hit me from behind … that’s not the way we handle things in East Tennessee. We have a problem, somebody’s gonna look him in the eye.”Being hit in the kidneys, Burchett said, was “a little different. You don’t have to hit very hard to cause a little bit of pain, a lot of pain. And so he … just denies it or blames somebody else or something. But I just backed off because … I wasn’t gaining anything from it, if everybody saw it.”Burchett said the incident was “symptomatic of the problems that [McCarthy’s] had in his short tenure as speaker … he wouldn’t turn around and face me. He kept scurrying and trying to keep people between me [to] handle it.” More

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      Republican praises January 6 attacker’s ‘good faith and core principles’

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      Seeking leniency for a January 6 rioter charged with assaulting police, the Louisiana Republican congressman Clay Higgins – a former law enforcement officer himself – saluted the man’s “good character, faith and core principles”.In video taken during the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, the rioter was seen to say: “It’s going to be violent and yes, if you are asking, ‘Is Ryan Nichols going to bring violence? Yes, Ryan Nichols is going to bring violence.’”Nichols, in an affidavit, admitted posting the video, attacking officers with pepper spray and urging rioters on with shouts including, “This is not a peaceful protest”.In court in Washington last week, Nichols, of Longview, Texas, pleaded guilty to two charges: obstruction and assaulting, resisting or impeding police and obstruction of an official proceeding.More than 1,000 arrests have been made over the attack and hundreds of convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy. Donald Trump, who incited the riot as he attempted to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat by Joe Biden, faces 17 charges related to his election subversion, four federal and 13 at state level in Georgia.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack staged by the former president’s supporters, including law enforcement suicides.Higgins’ own website describes him as having “spent much of his career dedicated to uniformed service [as] an army veteran and law enforcement officer”. It also says he is “widely regarded as one of the most conservative members of Congress”.Nonetheless, in a letter dated 7 November, he asked the US district judge in Nichols’s case, Royce C Lamberth, to show leniency when passing down sentence.“Sir,” Higgins wrote. “I submit to you this letter in support of Ryan Taylor Nichols. He is a man of good character, faith, and core principles.“I humbly ask that he receive fair consideration of the whole of circumstances regarding his case, condition, and background. He has already served nearly two years in the District of Columbia jail in pretrial confinement, which has been destructive to his physical (liver issues) and mental health (PTSD).”Nichols had been under house arrest since 22 November 2022 and had “not sought to flee nor shown any indication of dangerous activity”, Higgins said.He added: “Prior to his arrest, Mr Nichols had no criminal background and served honorably in the United States Marine Corps. He continued to serve domestically in a search and rescue capacity, even being publicly recognised for his heroic actions on national television.”That referred to Nichols’s commendation by the Louisiana-raised TV host Ellen DeGeneres – in 2018 – and in relation to his work to rescue people and animals stranded by Hurricane Florence.Nichols, Higgins said, “has already paid a tremendous price in time and treasure” for his actions on January 6.“His case must be considered fairly and thoroughly in line with his fundamental constitutional rights.”No date has been set for sentencing. More

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      US House votes to pause impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas

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      The US House of Representatives voted on Monday to pause the effort to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, halting a Republican campaign that alleges he has been derelict in his duty in managing the US-Mexico border.The articles of impeachment, introduced by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican representative, on Thursday, contend that Mayorkas, an appointee of Joe Biden, violated his oath of office by failing to constrain the record numbers of migrants arriving at the border.The House voted to refer the articles back to the House homeland security committee, which is carrying out its own investigation of Mayorkas’s alleged dereliction of duty.The move comes as Congress has less than five days to extend funding or send the US into its fourth partial government shutdown in a decade.The impeachment comes after months of threats from Republicans, who blame Biden’s administration for rolling back harsh restrictions on accepting migrants and asylum seekers put in place under Donald Trump, a Republican.If the Republican-controlled House impeaches Mayorkas, he will almost definitely be found innocent after a trial in the Senate, which Democrats control by a slim margin.In response to the initial impeachment motion, a US Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said lawmakers should stop “their reckless impeachment charades and attacks on law enforcement” and instead “deliver desperately needed reforms for our broken immigration system”.Since Biden took office in 2021, US border agents have made more than 5 million arrests of migrants making irregular crossings – that is, not through a controlled border station – over the US-Mexico border. Migrants have arrived from around the world; large numbers have fled economic and political turmoil in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBoth Biden and Trump are seeking another term in office in 2024, with Trump the leading candidate for the Republican nomination.House Republicans have also launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden. The probe is focused on the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and the White House has denied any wrongdoing. More

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      House to consider Mike Johnson’s unconventional bill to avert shutdown

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      The House of Representatives will on Monday begin considering an unconventional proposal by the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, to extend government funding into the new year and ward off a shutdown that would occur this weekend, but it’s unclear if the measure has the support to pass.Johnson’s bill is the latest attempt to resolve a complex standoff over funding the government that has pitted hardline Republicans against their moderate colleagues and the Democratic minority in Congress’s lower chamber, and also contributed to the chain of events that led to Kevin McCarthy’s overthrow as speaker of the House in October.The US government’s authorization to spend money expires at the end of the day on Friday, and Johnson, a rightwing lawmaker who the GOP elected as House speaker last month to replace McCarthy, unveiled over the weekend a proposal to keep some agencies functioning through 19 January and others through 2 February while long-term spending bills are negotiated.Congress has in recent decades enacted dozens of such short-term funding bills – known as continuing resolutions (CR) – but Johnson’s is unique because it proposes two different deadlines for the funding to run out.“This two-step continuing resolution is a necessary bill to place House Republicans in the best position to fight for conservative victories,” Johnson said in a statement.The White House immediately panned the proposal, which does not include funding for military assistance to Ukraine or Israel that Joe Biden is pushing Congress to approve – issues Johnson says he wants to handle in separate legislation.“This proposal is just a recipe for more Republican chaos and more shutdowns – full stop,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said. “With just days left before an extreme Republican shutdown – and after shutting down Congress for three weeks after they ousted their own leader – House Republicans are wasting precious time with an unserious proposal that has been panned by members of both parties.”The White House’s statement could also bode ill for the measure’s reception in the Senate, where Democrats hold the majority their leader Chuck Schumer is moving forward tentatively with a bill to continue government funding through 19 January.But before it even lands there, Johnson’s proposal will have to make it through the House. The rules committee will hold a key procedural hearing on the bill on Monday afternoon, and, if they move it forward, a source familiar with the legislation says the full House is expected to vote on the bill on Tuesday.Already, it has run into opposition from some conservative lawmakers, who say Johnson has proposed a “clean” CR that lacks the deep spending cuts they want to see come with any such bill.“It’s a 100% clean. And I 100% oppose,” tweeted Texas Republican Chip Roy.Scott Perry, the chair of rightwing Freedom Caucus, is also against it, saying he would “not support a status quo that fails to acknowledge fiscal irresponsibility, and changes absolutely nothing while emboldening a do-nothing Senate and a fiscally illiterate president”.At their current numbers, Republicans can afford to lose only three of their own members before they will have to rely on Democratic support to get legislation passed. That is a perilous calculus for Johnson, as McCarthy was ousted days after Democrats helped him pass a measure he proposed to prevent a government shutdown through 17 November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlready, powerful Democrats are signaling opposition to the speaker’s bill. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, objected to the lack of funding for Israel and Ukraine in the measure, and argued the Departments of Defense and State need long-term funding, not a two-month stopgap.“It is irresponsible to kick the can down the road for several months – keeping government services frozen – and hope that our challenges go away. We are nowhere closer to a full-year funding agreement than we were at the end of September,” DeLauro said. “Congress must avoid a shutdown and pass a CR that facilitates enacting full-year spending bills and emergency assistance as soon as possible.”More ominous for the bill were the comments by the Democratic minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, comments last week, when he called a continuing resolution that extended funding for different periods of time “another extreme rightwing policy joyride”.In an interview on Fox Business Network, the Florida Republican Carlos Giménez acknowledged “the dynamics are the same” for Johnson as they were for McCarthy, but predicted the speaker’s bill would receive support from both parties.“Even though you’ll get some Republicans not to vote for it, just like what happened under Kevin McCarthy where you had a bunch of Republicans not vote for a clean CR, most if not all, Democrats did vote for it, because the last thing we want to see is a government shutdown,” he said. More

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      ‘I’m more worried today than I was on January 6’: top conservative’s warning to America

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      Michael Luttig knows the eye of the storm. On the night of 4 January 2021, the retired federal judge advised Mike Pence, the vice-president, against trying to overturn the results of the presidential election. Last year on live television he delivered compelling testimony to the congressional panel investigating the January 6 insurrection.Now, with less than a year until the nation goes back to the polls, Luttig recognises that the battle to save the American republic from the demagoguery of Donald Trump is far from over – and he is more worried than ever before.“I am more worried for America today than I was on January 6,” he warns in a phone interview with the Guardian. “For all the reasons that we know, his election would be catastrophic for America’s democracy.”Luttig, 69, is an unlikely hero of the resistance. Born in Tyler, Texas, he was assistant counsel to the president under the Republican Ronald Reagan, and clerked for then judge Antonin Scalia and the supreme court justice Warren Burger. He served on the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit from 1991 to 2006 and was committed to an “originalist” interpretation of the constitution.He endorsed the George W Bush White House’s post-September 11 policy of declaring terrorism suspects “enemy combatants” so that they could be held by the military without charges. He was an advocate of the death penalty – including for the man who killed Luttig’s own 63-year-old father, John, in a carjacking outside his home.Luttig retired in 2006 and entered the private sector, working for Boeing and Coca-Cola before sliding into what seemed a quiet retirement. But at the dawn of 2021, America was on the brink of a constitutional crisis after Trump lost the election to Joe Biden and pressured Pence to reject the outcome.On the night of 4 January, Luttig received a call from old friend Richard Cullen, who was working as a lawyer for Pence. Cullen explained that John Eastman, who had previously clerked for Luttig, was making the claim that Pence had the constitutional authority to stop certification of the election results.Lutting told Cullen to advise Pence that this was flat wrong and further set out his views on Twitter: “The only responsibility and power of the Vice-President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast.”The vice-president duly stood his ground and spurned Trump, who reportedly branded Pence a “wimp” and complained: “I don’t want to be your friend any more if you don’t do this.” On January 6 a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol and demanded that Pence be hanged, leaving a trail of death, destruction and excrement, but the results got certified all the same.Testifying to the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee in an almost painfully slow and deliberate manner, Luttig recalled: “On that day, America finally came face to face with the raging war that it had been waging against itself for years. So blood-chilling was that day for our democracy, that America could not believe her eyes and she turned them away in both fear and shame.”As Biden was sworn in, proclaiming that “democracy has prevailed”, and Trump slinked back to his Mar-a-Lago redoubt in Florida, there were hopes that the worst of the storm had passed. But it soon became apparent that Trump wasn’t going anywhere. He continued to hold rallies, call the shots in the Republican party and push the “big lie” that he, not Biden, was the true winner in 2020.Now, despite 91 criminal indictments in four jurisdictions, many of which relate to the attempted coup, he is running to regain the White House in 2024. He is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination and, according to a recent New York Times and Siena College poll, leading Biden in five of the six most important battleground states.Should Trump win a second term, the Washington Post newspaper reported this week, he already has plans to use the federal government to investigate or prosecute perceived enemies including his former chief of staff John Kelly, former attorney general William Barr and Gen Mark Milley, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff.A presidency guided by such authoritarian impulses would be “ruinous” for democracy and the rule of law, Luttig predicts. “He did what he did on January 6. He’s continued to maintain for three years that the election was stolen from him. He’s done that with now complete and total support of the Republican party.“All that he has done beginning with January 6 has corrupted American democracy and corrupted American elections and laid waste to Americans’ faith and confidence in their democracy to the extent that today millions and millions and millions of Americans no longer have faith and confidence in their elections.“He’s the presumptive nominee of the Republican party in 2024 and indeed many people believe that he will be the next president.”Luttig, however, has a plan to stop him. In August he joined with the liberal constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe to publish an article in the Atlantic magazine under the headline “The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again”.The pair argued that section 3 of the 14th amendment automatically excludes from future office anyone who swears an oath to uphold the constitution and then rebels against it. Irrespective of criminal proceedings or congressional sanctions, they contended, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election are sufficient to bar him for life.Luttig elaborates by phone: “The former president is disqualified from holding the presidency again because he engaged in an insurrection or rebellion against the constitution of the United States when he attempted to remain in power, notwithstanding that the American people had voted to confer the power of the presidency upon Joe Biden.“That constituted a rebellion against the executive vesting clause of the constitution, which limits the term of the president to four years unless he is re-elected by the American people. I cannot even begin to tell you how that is literally the most important two sentences in America today.”Luttig draws a fine but important legal distinction between a rebellion against the constitution, as described by the 14th amendment section 3, and rebellion against the United States. He claims that groups that filed lawsuits in Colorado and elsewhere to bar Trump from the ballot are confused on this issue.“They do not yet understand what disqualifies the former president, namely an insurrection or rebellion against the constitution. They have argued the cases as if he is disqualified because he engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.“That’s why they have, unfortunately, focused their efforts on establishing or not that the former president was responsible for the riot on the Capitol. The riot on the Capitol is incidental to the question of whether he engaged in a rebellion against the constitution.”But he adds: “All of these cases – and there’ll be others in the states – is the constitutional process by which the American people decide whether the former president is disqualified from the presidency in 2024. All of these cases are going to roll up to the supreme court of the United States and it will be decided by the supreme court whether Donald Trump is disqualified.”Even some Trump critics, however, have argued that a legal ruling banning him from the race from the White House would enflame America’s divisions, whereas beating him at the ballot box would be more satisfying. Luttig naturally takes a lawyerly view: “The constitution tells us that it is not disqualification that is anti-democratic. Rather, it is the conduct that gives rise to disqualification that the constitution tells us is anti-democratic.”America’s founding document does not allow for second guessing about the political fallout, he adds. “It is the constitution that requires us to decide whether he is disqualified, whatever the consequences of that disqualification might be.”In the meantime Luttig this week helped form a new conservative legal movement, relaunching an organisation formerly known as Checks & Balances as the Society for the Rule of Law. The move was billed as a nationwide expansion aimed at protecting the constitution and defending the rule of law from Trump’s “Make America great again” movement. Its leadership includes Luttig, the lawyer George Conway and former Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock.“We believe that the time has come for a new conservative legal movement that still holds the same allegiances to the constitution and the rule of law that the original conservative legal movement held but has abandoned,” Luttig explains. “There’s a split in the conservative legal movement that mirrors the split in the Republican party about Donald Trump.”On other side of that split is the Federalist Society, a group that for decades has played a crucial role in grooming conservative judges – its prominent figures have included Leonard Leo, who advised Trump on his supreme court picks – but has said little about the threat posed by the former president to the constitutional order.Luttig, who, unlike Conway, has never been a member of the Federalist Society, said: “We believe that the Federalist Society has failed to speak out in defence of the constitution and the rule of law and repudiate the constitutional and legal excesses of the former president and his administration and, most notably, failed to repudiate the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.” More

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      Tim Scott suspends presidential bid as Trump leads Republican pack

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      Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has suspended his presidential campaign, conceding that he does not see any path to the Republican nomination as Donald Trump maintains a significant lead in primary polling.Scott told Fox News in an interview on Sunday evening that he had suspended his campaign. His exit may provide a modest boost for other candidates trying to dislodge frontrunner Donald Trump from the top spot.“I think the voters, who are the most remarkable people on the planet, have been really clear that they’re telling me: ‘Not now Tim,’” he said.The news comes less than six months after Scott launched his White House bid with the promise of offering a more optimistic vision about America’s future, projecting the persona of a “happy warrior” ready to lead the Republican party into a new era. Scott, who is the only Black Republican serving in the Senate, used his own personal story as the child of a single mother to make an argument for America’s greatness, accusing Joe Biden and other Democrats of “attacking every rung of the ladder that helped me climb”.“We live in the land where it is absolutely possible for a kid raised in poverty in a single-parent household in a small apartment to one day serve in the people’s house and maybe even the White House,” Scott said as he announced his candidacy in May. “This is the greatest country on God’s green Earth.”But that positive messaging failed to sway Republican primary voters, and Scott struggled to gain traction with a party base that remains largely loyal to Trump, despite the 91 felony counts against the former president.In more recent months, Scott explored darker rhetoric on the campaign trial in an apparent attempt to bolster his dwindling hopes of capturing the nomination. During the second Republican primary debate in late September, Scott implied that slavery had been more bearable for Black Americans than the Great Society, President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty program that led to the creation of social welfare programs like Medicare and Medicaid. The comment won praise from Fox News commentators and sparked outrage among Scott’s critics, who accused Scott of downplaying the atrocities of slavery.Weeks after that incident, Scott lambasted Biden over his response to the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7 October, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis. Blasting Biden’s foreign policy agenda, Scott accused the president of inadvertently causing the violence.“While Hamas carried out these attacks, Joe Biden has blood on his hands,” Scott said. “His weakness invited the attack.”Scott later applauded the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for his “restraint” in his response to the Hamas attacks. At the time Scott made the comment, Israeli airstrikes in Gaza had already reportedly killed a large number of Palestinians.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite Scott’s pivot to more severe rhetoric, his level of support in national primary polls remained in the low single digits, leaving him with no path to the nomination. Scott announced in October that he would shift his campaign resources to Iowa, zeroing in on the first voting state in a last-ditch effort to revive his campaign.But that strategy failed to lift Scott’s polling numbers, and he has now formally suspended his campaign, as Trump cements his status as the clear frontrunner in the race. More

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      Newsom 2024: could the California governor be a rival to Joe Biden?

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      One of the strongest candidates for US president in 2024 may be one who’s not yet in the race. There’s growing evidence that Gavin Newsom, the charismatic and energetic Democratic governor of California, is running something of a shadow campaign to Joe Biden and ready to step up if, or when, the incumbent is out of the running.Several developments in recent days suggest Newsom, who romped to re-election a year ago without really campaigning, is ready to bring forward what was already expected to be a strong run for the presidency in 2028.There are mounting concerns inside the Democratic party, matching polling among voters, that Biden is too old for a second term, the start of which in January 2025 would see him two months past his 82nd birthday if re-elected. Some want him to stand down.Newsom, 56, is among a generation of younger, prominent and popular Democrats expected to emerge from the shadow of the old guard, and has stolen a march on his peers with a series of bold moves many analysts see as strategic.Even movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself a Republican former two-term governor of California, thinks a Newsom run at the White House is inevitable.“I think it’s a no-brainer. Every governor from a big state wants to take that shot,” Schwarzenegger said earlier this year.But not all Democrats appear thrilled at the prospect. Pennsylvania US senator John Fetterman, at a dinner in Iowa, connected Newsom with Dean Philips, a congressman who said he is challenging Biden.“[There are two] running for president right now,” he said. “One is a congressman from Minnesota, the other is the governor of California, but only one has the guts to announce it.”This week, Newsom made a financial donation to a Democratic mayoral candidate in Charleston, South Carolina, 2,800 miles from his governor’s mansion in Sacramento. Reaching into political elections in other states is, experts say, a sure sign of a potential presidential candidate wishing to raise their profile on the national stage.“South Carolina is an early state in the primary process for Democrats, and doing well in the early states is seen as momentum for later ones,” said Eric Schickler, professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of its institute of governmental studies.“In fact, Biden’s win in South Carolina is really what propelled him to the top 2020, so building connections to important politicians in the state can certainly be seen by potential candidates as an important step.”Newsom has publicly denied that he has sights on Biden’s job.“I’m rooting for our president and I have great confidence in his leadership,” he told Fox News earlier this year.But while Schickler believes Newsom’s own thinking about the timing of any White House run probably hasn’t changed, he says circumstances have.“The Democratic party’s nervousness about Biden has certainly increased, and with him polling behind Donald Trump in many states, his low approval ratings, young voters being especially disenchanted with Biden, all of that has heightened interest among a lot of party supporters in an alternative,” he said.That alternative might not be Kamala Harris, who as vice-president would usually be assumed Biden’s heir apparent. Her public approval is currently as low as the president’s.So a rising, often progressive-leaning politician such as Newsom, with a wealth of executive and legislative experience, and a willingness to counter head-on Republican policies and personalities, makes for an attractive proposition.“It’s not a situation where there’s like 20, or 50, or 100 Democratic leaders who could be viewed as legitimate. If there were such a group, Newsom has positioned himself pretty well and would be on a very short list along with [Michigan governor] Gretchen Whitmer and a couple others,” Schickler said.“The problem is the party. There’s just a lot of different voices, a lot of different constituencies, and not really anybody or any group that could authoritatively say, ‘Oh, it’s Newsom’.“[But] he would certainly be one of the most serious people. The things he’s doing now, it helps him for 2028, which still is the most likely scenario, and certainly doesn’t eliminate him if something crazy or unexpected were to happen in the next six months.”Other not so subtle clues that Newsom has sights on higher office include his $10m (£8.2m) investment earlier this year in a new political action committee designed to spread the Democratic party’s message in Republican-held states he said have “authoritarian leaders directly attacking our freedoms”.Among the targets is Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Florida governor and faltering candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The pair will debate each other on 30 November in a highly anticipated nationally televised event once billed as a clash of two leading White House contenders.“The idea of debating DeSantis was probably a lot more appealing when it really did look like he might actually defeat Trump. In that scenario, showing you can debate him and score a lot of points helps Newsom’s visibility with the party and makes his case that he would be an effective candidate,” Shickler said.“With DeSantis not doing so well, the upside for Newson is less, but there are still Democrats who would be happy to see him debate and defeat him. He only stands to benefit, it’s just the benefit will be smaller.” More

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      House speaker unveils Republican plan to avert government shutdown

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      US House speaker Mike Johnson unveiled a Republican stopgap spending measure late Saturday aimed at averting a government shutdown in a week, but the measure quickly ran into opposition from lawmakers from both parties in Congress.Unlike ordinary continuing resolutions that fund federal agencies for a specific period, the measure announced by Johnson would fund some parts of the government until 19 January and others until 2 February. House Republicans hope to pass the measure Tuesday.“This two-step continuing resolution is a necessary bill to place House Republicans in the best position to fight for conservative victories,” Johnson said in a statement after announcing the plan to House Republicans in a conference call.The House Republican stopgap contained no supplemental funding such as aid for Israel or Ukraine.The House and Democratic-led Senate must agree on a spending vehicle that President Joe Biden can sign into law by Friday. Otherwise, they risk a fourth partial government shutdown in a decade that would close national parks, disrupt pay for as many as 4 million federal workers and disrupt a swath of activities from financial oversight to scientific research.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a release that the proposal was “just a recipe for more Republican chaos and more shutdowns”. She said: “House Republicans are wasting precious time with an unserious proposal that has been panned by members of both parties.“Johnson, the top Republican in Congress, unveiled his stopgap a day after Moody’s, the last major credit rating agency to maintain a top “AAA” rating on the US government, lowered its outlook on the nation’s credit to “negative” from “stable”. Moody’s cited political polarization in Congress on spending as a danger to the nation’s fiscal health.The Louisiana Republican appeared to be appealing to two warring House Republican factions: hardliners who wanted legislation with multiple end-dates; and centrists who had called for a “clean” stopgap measure free of spending cuts and conservative policy riders that Democrats reject.The legislation would extend funding for military construction, veterans benefits, transportation, housing, urban development, agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and energy and water programs through 19 January. Funding for all other federal operations would expire on 2 February.But members of both parties aimed political fire at the plan quickly.“My opposition to the clean [continuing resolution] just announced by the speaker … cannot be overstated,” Chip Roy, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, said on the social media platform X.The Republican Roy had called for the new measure to include spending cuts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocratic senator Brian Schatz called Johnson’s measure “super convoluted”, adding that “all of this nonsense costs taxpayer money”.“We are going to pass a clean short term [resolution]. The only question is whether we do it stupidly and catastrophically or we do it like adults,” Schatz wrote on X.A stopgap measure would give lawmakers more time to implement full-scale appropriations bills to fund the government through 30 September.Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted from the House speakership by eight hardline fellow Republicans after he moved a bipartisan measure to avert a shutdown on 1 October. McCarthy opted for the bipartisan route after hardliners blocked a Republican stopgap measure with features intended to appease them. More