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      Biden urges Congress to reinstate assault weapons ban after latest shooting – live

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      A familiar cycle occurs after American mass shootings, and by all appearances, it’s happening again after the twin massacres in California.It goes something like this: multiple people are killed by a gunman, as happened in California’s Monterey Park on Saturday and Half Moon Bay on Monday. Joe Biden calls for new restrictions on gun ownership, arguing they could have prevented the killer from getting their hands on a weapon. He’s backed by most, if not all Democrats in Congress, but rejected by most, if not all, Republicans. The demand goes nowhere.The one exception to that came after last year’s shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, when Democrats managed to win enough Republican votes to get a package of modest gun control measures through Congress. But the legislation was not the ban on assault weapons Biden called on Congress pass, a demand he repeated in the months since, as mass shootings continued. With Republicans now controlling the House of Representatives, it seems even less likely such a measure will get approved.The Senate judiciary committee has begun a hearing on the live event ticketing industry, after Ticketmaster last year bungled sales of tickets to megastar Taylor Swfit’s latest tour.“The issues within America’s ticketing industry were made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase tickets for Taylor Swift’s new tour, but these problems are not new,” Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar said in a statement last week announcing the hearing. “For too long, consumers have faced high fees, long waits, and website failures, and Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company faces inadequate pressure to innovate and improve.”“American consumers deserve the benefit of competition in every market, from grocery chains to concert venues,” her Republican counterpart senator Mike Lee said.When ticket’s for Swift’s first tour in five years went on sale in November, Ticketmaster’s website crashed, leaving customers for “presale” tickets stranded in line and forcing the cancellation of its public sale. The justice department is reportedly investigating the company in an inquiry that started before the problems with the Swift tour. Ticketmaster meanwhile spent nearly $1.3m on lobbying in 2021, targeting the justice department and Congress’s efforts to regulate its business.You can watch the hearing live here.Donald Trump’s foe today – and potentially for many months to come – is an Atlanta prosecutor with a history of taking on organized crime, the Guardian’s Carlisa N. Johnson reports:An Atlanta prosecutor appears ready to use the same Georgia statute to prosecute Donald Trump that she used last year to charge dozens of gang members and well-known rappers who allegedly conspired to commit violent crime.Fani Willis was elected Fulton county district attorney just days before the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election. But as she celebrated her promotion, Trump and his allies set in motion a flurry of unfounded claims of voter fraud in Georgia, the state long hailed as a Republican stronghold for local and national elections.Willis assumed office on 1 January 2021, becoming the first Black woman in the position. The next day, according to reports, Trump called rad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, urging him to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes he needed to secure a victory and overturn the election results.The following month, Willis launched an investigation into Trump’s interference in the state’s general election. Now, in a hearing on Tuesday, the special purpose grand jury and the presiding judge will decide whether to release to the public the final report and findings of the grand jury that was seated to investigate Trump and his allies.Could Trump be charged for racketeering? A Georgia prosecutor thinks soRead moreToday may be a big day for Donald Trump, and not in a good way, the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports:A judge in Atlanta will hear legal arguments today to determine if he should make public a Georgia grand jury’s report into whether former president Donald Trump committed criminal offences when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state.Before the special purpose grand jury was dissolved two weeks ago after months of hearings, its members recommended releasing its findings while the Fulton county district attorney who launched the investigation, Fani Willis, decides whether to press charges against Trump.Legal scholars have said they believe Trump is “at substantial risk of prosecution” in Georgia over his attempts to strong-arm officials into fixing the election in his favour when it looked as if the state might decide the outcome of the presidential election. At least 18 other people have been told they also potentially face prosecution, including Trump’s close ally and lawyer, the former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani.The Fulton county superior court judge who oversaw the grand jury, Robert McBurney, will hear from Willis but not lawyers for Trump, who said on Monday that they will not participate in the hearing. They said that Willis had not sought to interview the former president for the investigation.“Therefore, we can assume that the grand jury did their job and looked at the facts and the law, as we have, and concluded there were no violations of the law by President Trump,” the lawyers said in a statement.Trump and allies face legal jeopardy in Georgia over 2020 election interferenceRead moreWhile mass shootings such as those that occurred over the past days in California may generate headlines and calls for action, the Guardian’s Oliver Holmes reports gun violence is distressingly common in the United States:Two horrific killings separated by just a few days have shaken California, but such nightmarish mass shootings cannot be considered abnormal in the US. With a week still left in January, this year there have already been 39 mass shootings across the country, five of them in California.Reports from the Gun Violence Archive, a not-for-profit research group, show the predictability of American mass shootings. Nearly 70 people have been shot dead in them so far in 2023, according to their data – which classifies a mass shooting as any armed attack in which at least four people are injured or killed, not including the perpetrator.Broadened out to include all deaths from gun violence, not including suicides, 1,214 people have been killed before the end of the first month of this year, including 120 children. That is likely to increase to tens of thousands by the end of 2023 – the figure for 2022 is 20,200.In comparison, the latest data from the UK showed that in the course of an entire year ending in March 2022, 31 people were killed by firearms. The UK’s population is 67 million to the US’s 333 million.‘Tragedy upon tragedy’: why 39 US mass shootings already this year is just the startRead moreA familiar cycle occurs after American mass shootings, and by all appearances, it’s happening again after the twin massacres in California.It goes something like this: multiple people are killed by a gunman, as happened in California’s Monterey Park on Saturday and Half Moon Bay on Monday. Joe Biden calls for new restrictions on gun ownership, arguing they could have prevented the killer from getting their hands on a weapon. He’s backed by most, if not all Democrats in Congress, but rejected by most, if not all, Republicans. The demand goes nowhere.The one exception to that came after last year’s shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, when Democrats managed to win enough Republican votes to get a package of modest gun control measures through Congress. But the legislation was not the ban on assault weapons Biden called on Congress pass, a demand he repeated in the months since, as mass shootings continued. With Republicans now controlling the House of Representatives, it seems even less likely such a measure will get approved.Good morning, US politics blog readers. Joe Biden has called for Congress to again pass a ban on assault weapons, after seven people were killed in a mass shooting on Monday on the outskirts of the California town of Half Moon Bay. That was just days after a separate shooter killed 11 people in Monterey Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. Congress passed an assault weapons ban in 1994 that expired 10 years later, and Biden has repeatedly called for renewing it, including after the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas last year. But many Republicans in Congress oppose such a measure, and just as in the aftermath of previous mass shootings, it seems unlikely to pass.Here’s what we can expect to happen today:
      A judge in Atlanta will at 12 pm eastern time convene a hearing to determine whether a special grand jury’s report into Donald Trump’s campaign to meddle in Georgia’s 2020 election outcome will be made public, upping the legal stakes for the former president.
      Biden will hold a White House meeting with Democratic congressional leaders at 3 pm, and a reception for new lawmakers at 5:20 pm.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre will brief reporters at 1:30 pm, who will likely ask her questions abut the Biden classified document scandal that she will not answer. More

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      Trump and allies face legal jeopardy in Georgia over 2020 election interference

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      Trump and allies face legal jeopardy in Georgia over 2020 election interferenceJudge considers releasing grand jury report as DA weighs pressing charges against former president and his ally Rudolph Giuliani A judge in Atlanta will hear legal arguments today to determine if he should make public a Georgia grand jury’s report into whether former president Donald Trump committed criminal offences when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state.Before the special purpose grand jury was dissolved two weeks ago after months of hearings, its members recommended releasing its findings while the Fulton county district attorney who launched the investigation, Fani Willis, decides whether to press charges against Trump.Arizona’s new attorney general to use election fraud unit to boost voting rightsRead moreLegal scholars have said they believe Trump is “at substantial risk of prosecution” in Georgia over his attempts to strong-arm officials into fixing the election in his favour when it looked as if the state might decide the outcome of the presidential election. At least 18 other people have been told they also potentially face prosecution, including Trump’s close ally and lawyer, the former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani.The Fulton county superior court judge who oversaw the grand jury, Robert McBurney, will hear from Willis but not lawyers for Trump, who said on Monday that they will not participate in the hearing. They said that Willis had not sought to interview the former president for the investigation.“Therefore, we can assume that the grand jury did their job and looked at the facts and the law, as we have, and concluded there were no violations of the law by President Trump,” the lawyers said in a statement.Willis’s office has not said what its position will be at the hearing, but the prosecutor may see an advantage in releasing at least part of the report if she intends to press ahead with charges.The rarely used special purpose grand jury cannot issue indictments; if it recommends prosecutions, Willis would be required to ask a regular grand jury to formalise the charges.McBurney is not expected to immediately rule on whether the report should be released.TopicsUS newsThe fight for democracyDonald TrumpRudy GiulianiGeorgiaRepublicansUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Kevin McCarthy reportedly ‘will never leave’ Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      Kevin McCarthy reportedly ‘will never leave’ Marjorie Taylor GreeneThe far-right Republican congresswoman was a fierce advocate of the House speaker during the 15-vote marathon for the office Kevin McCarthy reportedly said he would “never leave” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right, conspiracy theorist Republican congresswoman from Georgia, after she backed him through a rightwing rebellion and 15 rounds of voting for the position of US House speaker.Far-right Republicans Greene and Gosar restored to House committeesRead more“I will never leave that woman,” McCarthy told a friend, according to the New York Times. “I will always take care of her.”Elected to Congress in 2020, Greene quickly became a figurehead for the pro-Trump far right, particularly after Democrats then in control of the House ejected her from committees, citing her racist statements and encouragement of violence against political opponents. Eleven Republicans supported the move.Greene also voiced support for QAnon, the conspiracy theory which holds that Democratic leaders are pederastic cannibals; spoke at a white supremacist rally; criticised and contravened Covid-19 public health measures; and, among countless other controversies, suggested Jewish-controlled “space solar generators” were responsible for destructive wildfires.Recently, Greene said that if she had been in charge of Trump supporters who attacked Congress on 6 January 2021 – an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election win now linked to nine deaths and more than 900 charges – “we would have won”.In comments she later claimed were made in jest, Greene also said the protesters “would’ve been armed”.In a detailed examination of the emerging bond between McCarthy and Greene, the Times said the speaker’s remarks about the congresswoman’s support were made to a friend who wished to stay anonymous.But both politicians spoke to the paper of record.“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy said. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”Greene said that by sticking to his agenda as speaker, McCarthy would “easily vindicate me and prove I moved the conference to the right during my first two years when I served in the minority with no committees”.Greene told the paper McCarthy’s defense of her when Democrats removed her from her committee assignments in February 2021 “had a big impact on me”.Almost two years later, she and McCarthy were shown in regular and close contact during the 15-vote speakership marathon, a process covered by C-Span cameras and watched by a national audience.Last week, McCarthy assigned Greene to the homeland security and oversight committees, both set to be key engines of Republican attacks on the Biden administration over the next two years.Greene told the Times: “People need to understand that it isn’t just me that deserves credit. It is the will and the voice of our base that was heard, and Kevin listened to them. I was just a vehicle much of the time.”TopicsKevin McCarthyHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsRepublicansUS CongressDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Four Oath Keepers found guilty of seditious conspiracy in latest January 6 convictions – as it happened

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      Four members of the Oath Keepers extremis group have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy and other charges for the involvement in the January 6 insurrection, Politico reports:JUST IN: All four Oath Keeper defendants — Ed Vallejo, Roberto Minuta, Joseph Hackett and David Moerschel — have been found *guilty* of seditious conspiracy.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 23, 2023
      All four Oath Keeper defendants at this trial were also found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct Congress’ Jan. 6 proceeding and conspiracy to destroy federal property.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 23, 2023
      The verdict, handed down by a federal jury in Washington DC, comes after the group’s founder Stewart Rhodes and co-defendant Kelly Meggs were convicted of seditious conspiracy in November, however three other defendants were acquitted of the charge. Joe Biden is on the defensive again after investigators found more classified material at his Delaware home over the weekend, prompting some Democrats to express disappointment with the president. The House GOP is demanding information about visitors to Biden’s home from the Secret Service, though there are divisions within the party over how aggressive to be in their investigations.Here’s what else happened today:
      A jury found a January 6 rioter who kicked back at Nancy Pelosi’s desk guilty of all counts brought against him, while another defendant pleaded guilty to charges related to attacking police at the Capitol.
      Four members of the Oath Keepers extremist group were convicted of seditious conspiracy by a jury in Washington DC.
      We may find out more tomorrow about the legal hot water Donald Trump is facing in Georgia, when a judge determines whether to make public a special grand jury’s report into his campaign to meddle in the state’s 2020 election result.
      Democrat Ruben Gallego announced he will run for the Arizona senate seat currently occupied by independent Kyrsten Sinema.
      House Republicans want to kick three Democratic lawmakers from committee posts, but their leader Hakeem Jeffries wants to know why the GOP won’t do the same to admitted liar George Santos.
      A familiar scene is playing out in the White House briefing room, as press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre bats away questions from reporters wanting to know more about the classified documents found at Joe Biden’s Delaware home and former Washington DC office.The Guardian’s David Smith is there to see it for himself. Here’s Jean-Pierre trying to divert the press’s attention:Jean-Pierre: “The American people heard directly from the president on this… He says, ‘I take this very seriously’.” It is going to be up to the American people as to how they see this president. “We’ve created nearly 11 million jobs. The unemployment rate is at a record low.”— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) January 23, 2023
      And responding to complaints from Democrats:Asked about criticism of Biden from Democrats, Jean-Pierre replies: “They also said the president is handling this in an appropriate fashion.”— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) January 23, 2023
      And generally not commenting:Jean-Pierre on Biden saying he has no regrets about classified documents: “I’m not going to go beyond what the president said and I think it speaks for itself.”— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) January 23, 2023
      Donald Trump’s attorneys have no plans to attend a hearing in Georgia tomorrow where a judge will determine whether to release a special grand jury’s report into the former president’s election meddling campaign in the state.“On behalf of President Trump, we will not be present nor participating in Tuesday’s hearing regarding the possible release of the special purpose grand jury’s report,” Trump’s attorneys Marissa Goldberg and Drew Findling said in a statement.“To date, we have never been a part of this process. The grand jury compelled the testimony of dozens of other, often high-ranking, officials during the investigation, but never found it important to speak with the President. He was never subpoenaed nor asked to come in voluntarily by this grand jury or anyone in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office. Therefore, we can assume that the grand jury did their job and looked at the facts and the law, as we have, and concluded there were no violations of the law by President Trump.”Tomorrow’s hearing will determine whether the report from the special grand jury tasked with looking into Trump’s attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win in Georgia is made public. The investigation is seen as potentially a major legal threat to the former president.Democrats have seized on the House GOP’s protection of admitted fraudster George Santos to argue that the Republicans have no standing to kick three lawmakers off committees.House speaker Kevin McCarthy has threatened to remove Democratic representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the intelligence committee, and representative Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee. According to Axios, Schiff earned McCarthy’s ire for promoting the “Steele dossier”, Swalwell for his association with a Chinese spy and Omar for comments that were seen as antisemitic.On Saturday, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries announced he would appoint Schiff and Swalwell back to their points on the intelligence committee, noting that McCarthy plans to seat Santos on unnamed committees in the House.“At the same time that Republicans have threatened to deny seats on the Intelligence Committee to clearly qualified democratic members, serial fraudster George Santos has been placed on two standing committees of the House and welcomed into your conference,” Jeffries wrote. “The apparent double standard risks undermining the spirit of bipartisan cooperation that is so desperately needed in Congress.”Because it’s a select committee, McCarthy can remove Schiff and Swalwell from the intelligence panel unilaterally. Ousting Omar from foreign affairs would require a vote in the House, and it’s unclear if that would be successful.Four members of the Oath Keepers extremis group have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy and other charges for the involvement in the January 6 insurrection, Politico reports:JUST IN: All four Oath Keeper defendants — Ed Vallejo, Roberto Minuta, Joseph Hackett and David Moerschel — have been found *guilty* of seditious conspiracy.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 23, 2023
      All four Oath Keeper defendants at this trial were also found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct Congress’ Jan. 6 proceeding and conspiracy to destroy federal property.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 23, 2023
      The verdict, handed down by a federal jury in Washington DC, comes after the group’s founder Stewart Rhodes and co-defendant Kelly Meggs were convicted of seditious conspiracy in November, however three other defendants were acquitted of the charge. Elsewhere in Washington, five members of the Proud Boys extremist group are in the middle of a trial over the January 6 attack that the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas reports is raising uncomfortable questions about the government’s strategy of seeking accountability for the insurrection:While federal prosecutors are casting the Capitol insurrection trial of five far-right Proud Boys leaders as an attempt to bring participants of an attack on US democracy to account, the members of the group are using the proceedings to ask one question even some of their opponents on the political left agree is valid.Why have prosecutors so far only focused their energy on the supporters of Donald Trump who are accused of a coordinated invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the congressional certification of his defeat to Joe Biden in the previous year’s presidential election? Is it because they regard the former Republican president himself – who urged his supporters to “fight like hell” that deadly day – as too formidable and them as easier targets?Attorneys for the ex-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four of his lieutenants have sought to ingrain that question in the minds of jurors chosen after a particularly turbulent selection process which began last month and gave way to opening arguments and witness testimony beginning 12 January.They do so even as the strategy has not proven effective in other cases where it has been suggested that it is really Trump who is culpable for the Capitol attack – not his less powerful sycophants and camp followers.Proud Boys on defensive at sedition trial haunted by absent TrumpRead moreHe’s an admitted liar, but House Republicans nonetheless refuse to dump newly elected representative George Santos. Why? The Guardian’s David Smith tries to figure it out:“He didn’t just steal from a service dog. He didn’t just steal from a dying service dog. He stole from a disabled homeless veteran’s dying service dog. Oh my God. You evil and stupid!”That was how Leslie Jones, guest host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, summed up just one of this week’s revelations about US congressman George Santos, whose shameless fabulism has stunned Washington, a capital that thought it had smelt every flavour of mendacity from politicians.“What does this man have to do get thrown out of Congress?” Jones asked, echoing the thoughts of many. “He’s a fucking liar.”Yet the answer is that, far from being expelled from the House of Representatives, Santos, 34, was rewarded with assignments on two of its committees. The vote of confidence appeared to be an expedient calculation by the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, aware Republicans have such a slim majority that even losing one seat would make it much harder to pass legislation.But it was also a decision, critics said, that showed the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower has lost its moral compass. Stuart Stevens, a political consultant and author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, said: “Santos is a perfect example of the collapse of the Republican party.“It shows that the party stands for nothing. It seems like a million years ago but there was a time when we said character was destiny. Nobody even knows who this guy is. We literally don’t know his real name.”‘We don’t know his real name’: George Santos’s unravelling web of liesRead moreJoe Biden is on the defensive again after investigators found more classified material at his Delaware home over the weekend, prompting some Democrats to express disappointment with the president. The House GOP is demanding information about visitors to Biden’s home from the Secret Service, but there are divisions within the party about how aggressive to be with their investigations.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      A jury found a January 6 rioter who kicked back at Nancy Pelosi’s desk guilty of all counts brought against him, while another defendant pleaded guilty to charges related to attacking police at the Capitol.
      We may find out more about the legal hot water Donald Trump is facing in Georgia on Tuesday, when a hearing is held to determine whether to make public a special grand jury’s report into his campaign to meddle in the state’s 2020 election result.
      Democrat Ruben Gallego announced he will run for the Arizona senate seat currently occupied by independent senator Kyrsten Sinema.
      The Democratic leader in the House Hakeem Jeffries has weighed in on gun control following this weekend’s mass shooting in California that left 10 people dead:Weapons of war used to hunt human beings have no place in a civilized society.— Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) January 23, 2023
      Police today made public the identities of two victims of the shooting, but have yet to give a motive for attack.Another January 6 rioter has pleaded guilty to charges related to attacking the police, CBS News reports:NEW: Capitol riot defendant Jacob Therres has just pleaded guilty to assaulting/resisting police. He admits throwing 4×4 wooden plank and striking officer in the head. And he admits deploying chemical spray. Estimated sentencing range: 6-7 years in prison pic.twitter.com/WjZCqaaSlW— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) January 23, 2023
      Richard Barnett, who during the January 6 insurrection was pictured sitting in a chair with a foot on then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, has been found guilty of all charges against him, Politico reports:NEWS: Richard BARNETT has been *convicted* on all counts, including felony obstruction, civil disorder and theft of govt property (envelope from desk in Pelosi’s office. Total silence in courtroom as verdict was read. No visible reaction from Barnett.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 23, 2023
      As CBS News reports, Barnett testified in his own defense during the federal trial and directly addressed the jury, with no apparent effect:Bigo Barnett testified in his own defense. It was, at times, combative and there were some vulgarities. He directly addressed jurors during testimony.. with seeming attempts at humor & when seemingly caught in contradictionsJury returned guilty verdict with lightning speed— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) January 23, 2023
      Arrested two days after the insurrection, Barnett was often combative during his case’s lengthy journey through the court system. More

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      How the US far right and progressives ended up agreeing on military spending cuts

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      AnalysisHow the US far right and progressives ended up agreeing on military spending cutsJoan E GreveProgressives and ‘America first’ Republicans in Congress both want to re-examine US military budget – but for vastly different reasons Progressives have recently found themselves in an unfamiliar position: in agreement with members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.Some of the latter caucus’s members have recently called for re-examining the amount of money spent by the US military, echoing demands that progressives have issued for years. Although progressives are clear-eyed about their ideological differences with “America first” Republicans on foreign policy, they encourage a renewed debate over the Pentagon’s budget.McCarthy may be speaker, but Trump is the real leader of House RepublicansRead more“The idea that effective American foreign policy requires this [level of spending], I think, is not only wrong,” said Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to progressive senator Bernie Sanders, “it’s just absurd and unsustainable.”The Freedom Caucus reportedly pushed for spending cuts as part of their negotiations with Kevin McCarthy, who offered concessions to fellow Republicans to secure the House speakership earlier this month. One of those concessions involved a promise to cap fiscal year 2024 discretionary spending at fiscal year 2022 levels, after Republicans expressed outrage over the $1.76tn omnibus funding bill that Joe Biden signed into law last month.If such a fiscal policy were evenly applied to all federal agencies, the department of defense would see its budget cut by $75bn compared with this fiscal year.That possibility has simultaneously sowed division among House Republicans and attracted the interest of progressives. They hope the latest dust-up over the Pentagon’s budget will spark what they consider to be an overdue conversation over US defense spending, which will hit a record high of $858bn this fiscal year. Among House Republicans, the proposal to cut the Pentagon’s budget has won some support from far-right members who have embraced Donald Trump’s “America first” approach to foreign policy. Speaking to Fox News this month, Congressman Matt Gaetz, one of the Republican holdouts in the speakership battle, partly blamed the Pentagon’s large budget on America’s financial assistance to Ukraine amid its war against Russia.“We can defend this country and project power more efficiently and more effectively than we do,” Gaetz said. “How about we start with Ukraine?”McCarthy himself previously promised that Republicans would not provide a “blank check” to Ukraine if they won back the House. But aid to Ukraine has continued to win bipartisan support in Congress.“I do not see that money getting taken away from us,” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said earlier this month. “It is there. It is rock solid through nearly all or all of 2023.”McCarthy has expressed openness to examining the Pentagon’s budget, but the proposal has stoked outrage among many of the more hawkish members of his conference. Republican congressman Tony Gonzales of Texas cited the potential cuts to explain his opposition to the House rules package, saying he thought the proposal was a “horrible idea”.“How am I going to look at our allies in the eye and say, I need you to increase your defense budget, but yet America is going to decrease ours?” Gonzales told CBS News.Republicans’ dysfunction over speaker threatens the health of US governmentRead moreWhile a number of House Democrats have joined Gonzales in rejecting the idea of defense spending cuts, the idea of reconsidering the Pentagon’s budget has long held sway with progressives. When Biden called for an increase in funding for the defense department last year, leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus attacked the proposal as “simply unacceptable”. Progressive activists and their congressional allies note that the US military has a larger budget than the next nine largest militaries combined and urged lawmakers to reallocate some of that funding to other needs, such as healthcare or education.“For far too long, we have blindly and excessively pumped money into the Pentagon, which – despite its massive budget – has yet to pass an audit,” said the progressive congresswoman Barbara Lee, who has long championed fiscal reform at the defense department. “Imagine what we could do with even a fraction of [the Pentagon’s funding]. We need to rethink our foreign policy priorities and invest in diplomacy first and defense second.”Ro Khanna, a progressive congressman from California, said he would welcome a bipartisan conversation about the Pentagon’s budget, but he rejected Republicans’ efforts to tie spending cuts to the looming fight over the debt ceiling. The US hit its debt limit this month, and the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has warned that the government is at risk of defaulting this summer if Congress does not increase its borrowing capacity – a move that would have catastrophic effects on the US economy. Democrats fear that House Republicans will attempt to extract concessions on government spending in exchange for helping to raise the debt ceiling.“I do not support any debate on spending demands that threaten a debt-ceiling showdown. If Republicans want to have conversations about future defense cuts that are strategic, then I am open to that,” Khanna told the Guardian. “While I support the funding for Ukraine’s defense, we need to take ourselves off the path to a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.”Progressive advocates similarly rejected the notion that the US must choose between cutting the Pentagon’s budget and supporting Ukraine. Stephen Miles, president of the progressive group Win Without War, blamed the Pentagon’s ballooning budget on ineffective weapons systems and excessive contracts to private companies, which have accounted for as much as half of US defense spending in recent years.“The spending on Ukraine is not what’s driving the Pentagon’s growth,” Miles said. “We’re talking about major weapon systems procurement; we’re talking about private service contracting. We’re talking about a lot of things that aren’t being driven by Ukraine.”Duss, now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the war in Ukraine should not prevent any debate over defense spending. He noted that politicians like Sanders and Lee have demanded reductions in the Pentagon’s budget for years, long before the war in Ukraine began.“There’s always going to be some crisis of the moment that prevents us from thinking about how to spend less on defense,” Duss said. “But this is a conversation that we absolutely have to have.” As of now, the prospects for enacting Pentagon budget cuts appear bleak. Even some of the House Republicans who, like Gaetz, initially opposed McCarthy’s speakership bid have downplayed the possibility. Congressman Chip Roy of Texas, a key negotiator in the talks between McCarthy and his Republican detractors, claimed that “cuts to defense were NEVER DISCUSSED” during the speakership fight.“In fact, there was broad agreement spending cuts should focus on NON-DEFENSE discretionary spending,” Roy’s office said on Twitter.US heads for debt-ceiling standoff as House Republicans refuse to budgeRead moreA funding bill that solely cut non-defense discretionary spending would almost certainly be rejected by Democrats, who still control the Senate and the White House. In addition to the procedural hurdles of Roy’s proposal, Miles mocked the idea of excluding defense spending from potential cuts as utterly unrealistic.“You can’t look at the level of spending that the US government is doing and say we’re going to exempt more than half of discretionary spending,” Miles said. “When you have the Pentagon taking up as much money as it is now, there’s no way to look at cutting government spending without it.”Even if Congress could somehow reach an agreement on the need to reduce the Pentagon’s budget, conservatives would inevitably clash with progressives over what programs to cut and how to reallocate that funding.“The reason Matt Gaetz wants to cut defense spending is not the reason why I would,” Duss acknowledged.Still, Duss argued that progressives and some lawmakers on the right have a “shared interest” in starting a reinvigorated conversation over defense spending. That communal goal could work to progressives’ advantage.“If Republicans want to prize this open and look inside this budget … that’s a debate I think everyone should welcome,” Duss said. “And I think it’s quite telling who’s not welcoming it.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansUS CongressUS militaryJoe BidenDemocratsUS national securityanalysisReuse this content More

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      ‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964

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      ‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964Bill Moyers was there when Lyndon Johnson made his memorable assessment of the Civil Rights Act’s effects The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history, giving protections and rights long denied to Black Americans. Like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Medicare for senior citizens, it was a pillar of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.LBJ OK? Historian Mark Lawrence on a president resurgentRead moreThe Civil Rights Act also had a profound effect on the American political landscape, triggering a reshaping that still influences the fortunes of Democrats and Republicans, particularly in the south.A brilliant political analyst, Johnson foresaw the consequences of his civil rights legislation on the day he signed it into law. He is said to have remarked: “We’ve lost the south for a generation.”Indeed, the south has become steadily more Republican since then, the victories of Joe Biden and two Democratic senators in Georgia in 2020 and 2022 rare blue successes in a Republican stronghold.But did Johnson really say it? He didn’t mention it in his memoir – and he died 50 years ago on Sunday, aged just 64. In his absence, historians debate and write.So the Guardian went to the source: the legendary journalist Bill Moyers. Now 88, he was Johnson’s special assistant when the Civil Rights Act passed.Moyers responded with a detailed e-mail.On 2 July 1964, “the president signed the Civil Rights Act around 6.45pm. Before he went into a meeting in his office with some civil rights leaders and [the deputy attorney general] Nick Katzenbach, he pulled me aside and said, sotto voce, ‘Bird [Johnson’s wife] and I are going down to the Ranch. I’d like you to come with us … I practically ran to my office to pack.’”Moyers made it to the airport in time.“When I boarded the Jet Star, the president was reading the latest edition of the Washington Post. We took off around around 11pm … I sat down across from him. Lady Bird was in the other seat by him … the papers were celebrating what they described as a great event.“I said, ‘Quite a day, Mr President.’ As he reached a sheaf of the wire copy he tilted his head slightly back and held the copy up close to him so that he could read it, and said: ‘Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.’“It was lightly said. Not sarcastic. Not even dramatically. It was like a throwaway sidebar.”To Moyers, “all these years later”, Johnson’s remark seems “maybe … merely a jest, lightly uttered and soon forgotten”. But after Moyers “repeated it publicly just once, it took on a life of its own.“Unfortunately, various versions appeared: ‘for a generation’, ‘once and for all’. I couldn’t keep up. I finally stopped commenting.”And so a legend grew.As Moyers pointed out, in summer 1964, Johnson’s “immediate concern was to carry the south in his own election for president”, against the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, a hard-right senator from Arizona.“He briefly threatened not to go to the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, because he was very tense and uneasy about the fight over seating the Mississippi delegation, and especially the role of Fannie Lou Hamer.”Hamer was a legendary civil rights activist, beaten and shot at for registering Black voters in Mississippi. At the convention, she mesmerized a national audience when she testified in an unsuccessful effort to get the new Freedom Democratic Party seated as the official delegation from Mississippi.“As we all know,” Moyers wrote, “Johnson went on to the convention and lapped his nomination … Now he seemed fully in the game and determined to carry the south.“He called meetings with his campaign team, over and again. He talked often to our people on the ground, from Louisiana to North Carolina. He made the campaign south of the Mason-Dixon Line his personal battlefield. He wanted to win there. And he did – in five states.”Johnson won in a landslide. In the south, he took Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.Moyers remembered that “on election night, as the results rolled in, [Johnson] was elated. His dreaded private vision of losing the south … would have cost [him] the election.“I think he had doubled down on not handing Republicans the south. That would come with [Richard] Nixon’s southern strategy, four years later. For now, [Johnson] was spared what would have humiliated him.”TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsUS domestic policyRaceDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘We don’t know his real name’: George Santos’s unravelling web of lies

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      ‘We don’t know his real name’: George Santos’s unravelling web of lies ‘Nobody even knows who this guy is,’ critics say, but he was still awarded with House panel assignments – showing the party ‘stands for nothing’“He didn’t just steal from a service dog. He didn’t just steal from a dying service dog. He stole from a disabled homeless veteran’s dying service dog. Oh my God. You evil and stupid!”That was how Leslie Jones, guest host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, summed up just one of this week’s revelations about George Santos, a US congressman whose shameless fabulism has stunned Washington, a capital that thought it had smelt every flavour of mendacity from politicians.Serial liar George Santos is the politician Americans deserve | Moira DoneganRead more“What does this man have to do get thrown out of Congress?” Jones asked, echoing the thoughts of many. “He’s a fucking liar.”Yet the answer is that, far from being expelled from the House of Representatives, Santos, 34, was rewarded with assignments on two of its committees. The vote of confidence appeared to be an expedient calculation by the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, aware Republicans have such a slim majority that even losing one seat would make it much harder to pass legislation.But it was also a decision, critics said, that showed the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower has lost its moral compass. Stuart Stevens, a political consultant and author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, said: “Santos is a perfect example of the collapse of the Republican party.“It shows that the party stands for nothing. It seems like a million years ago but there was a time when we said character was destiny. Nobody even knows who this guy is. We literally don’t know his real name.”Indeed, as recently as four years ago, Santos was introducing himself publicly as “Anthony Devolder” – a combination of his middle name and his mother’s maiden name. It is just one strand in a web of deceit that makes the protagonists of Catch Me If You Can, The Talented Mr Ripley and Pinocchio look as honest as the day is long.That web went mostly unnoticed during Santos’s election campaign in New York last year but has unravelled with dizzying speed in the past few weeks, forcing him to run a daily gauntlet of reporters on Capitol Hill and to admit lying about his family heritage, college education and job experience.For instance, Santos made the false and offensive claim that his maternal grandparents escaped from the Holocaust. In fact, they were born in Brazil, and he has now been forced to acknowledge that he was raised Catholic.But when Santos was caught falsely claiming to be Jewish, he told the conservative Fox News network that he was not actually lying because he had merely referred to himself as “Jew-ish” – presumably unaware that he was borrowing an old joke from the British polymath Jonathan Miller, who once declared: “I’m not really a Jew; just Jew-ish.”Santos wrote on Twitter that his mother was killed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York but subsequently said she died on 23 December 2016. A review of his mother’s employment record found no evidence of her ever working at or near the World Trade Center, while her immigration history suggests that she was not even on American soil on 9/11.Last October, Santos told the USA Today newspaper: “I am openly gay, have never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade, and I can tell you and assure you, I will always be an advocate for LGBTQ+ folks.” It subsequently emerged that he had been married to a woman, whom he divorced in 2019.Santos claimed to have briefly attended Horace Mann, an elite private preparatory school in New York, but the school has no record of him. He said he has academic degrees from New York University and New York’s Baruch College and was even a star player on the Baruch volleyball team – again, there is no record of him having studied at either institution or playing volleyball.Santos also said he had worked for the top Wall Street firms Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither company could find any records verifying this. In an interview with the New York Post newspaper, Santos said: “My sins here are embellishing my résumé. I’m sorry.”Santos portrayed himself as a successful property investor whose family owned several buildings. But court records indicate that Santos was the subject of three eviction proceedings in Queens, New York, between 2014 and 2017 because of unpaid rent.In 2020 Santos was hired by Harbor City Capitol Corp, an investment firm based in Florida. The company ceased operating in 2021 after it was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of being a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.The scandals keep coming. On Wednesday Santos was accused of taking $3,000 from an online fundraiser intended to help save the life of a sick dog owned by Richard Osthoff, a disabled military veteran. Santos called “reports that I would let a dog die … shocking and insane” – but did not directly deny them.On Thursday old acquaintances of Santos said he had competed as a drag queen in Brazilian beauty pageants 15 years ago, opening him to charges of hypocrisy: he has endorsed Florida’s hardline “don’t say gay” bill and aligned himself with far-right Republicans hostile to transgender rights. Again he issued an angry denial, saying the media “continues to make outrageous claims about my life”.And on top of everything, law enforcement authorities in Brazil have said they intend to reinstate fraud charges against Santos relating to a case involving a stolen chequebook in 2008. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman from California, has branded him “a wanted international criminal”.Even seasoned observers are aghast at the outlandishness. Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York, said: “This goes beyond anything I believe I’ve ever seen. We see a fair share of dissembling or chest beating in various ways but to outright lie about your résumé and continue to do so even once caught in such lies really takes a certain amount of courage – let’s call it that.”Democrats have asked the House ethics committee to investigate Santos. State and local Republican leaders in New York have called on him to resign after lying to the voters who elected him. But the congressman has dug in his heels and refused.McCarthy and Republican leaders in Washington have said they will handle the situation internally. But they know the political stakes. They hold just a 10-seat majority and know that Santos represents a district that could flip to Democrats in a special election.McDermott added: “It’s all in the numbers. I don’t see how they can do anything about this without risking their slim majority in the House and so they’re going to have to stand behind him as much as they can. At this point they’re unlikely to do anything about it.”Notably, while some congressional Republicans have given Santos the cold shoulder, he appears to have found comfort with the House Freedom Caucus and extremist Maga (Make America Great Again) wing.Zac Petkanas, senior adviser to the House Accountability War Room, a rapid-response watchdog, said: “People are rightly focusing on the lies he’s told about his résumé, where he got his money from, where he went to school and all of that but he’s also someone who participated in the January 6 rally.“He’s not just a random member of Congress; he’s in the Maga contingent that has taken control. He’s in the Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert cabal. The lies, the conspiracy theories, the encouragement of political violence is part of the brand of this breed of politicians that is wielding such influence over the new Congress.”Some see Santos not as an outlier or unicorn but the natural culmination of the Republican party’s descent over the past decade. Donald Trump, who burst into political prominence with the racist lie that Barack Obama has been born outside the US, made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency, according to the Washington Post.One of his senior advisers, Kellyanne Conway, infamously coined the phrase “alternative facts”. Some 147 Republicans voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election; McCarthy was among them. And during last year’s midterm elections, Republican candidates such as Herschel Walker were caught in numerous falsehoods.In this sense Santos represents a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “There isn’t a better living mascot for what the Republican party is turning itself into than George Santos – one that is completely divorced from truth and reality, one that openly embraces conspiracy theory, one that time and again rejects fact and science.“When you have the standard bearer for your party be someone like Donald Trump, who lies about everything from classified documents to the crowd size of his inauguration and everything in between, it’s only a matter of time before people emerge who completely bathe themselves in lies.”Bardella, a former senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, added: “It’s hardly surprising that someone like Santos has emerged and successfully conned his way into elected office and the Republican party leadership’s refusal to do anything or say anything about it only encourages copycats to follow.”TopicsGeorge SantosRepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Trump is trying to make a comeback. It’s not working | Lloyd Green

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      Trump is trying to make a comeback. It’s not workingLloyd GreenHis ‘campaign event’ this week was a dud, his legal woes are growing and his cronies are viciously infighting Once again, the legal pitfalls and enthusiasm deficit that plague Donald Trump’s bid for the 2024 Republican nomination are on display. On Thursday, a federal judge imposed $938,000 in sanctions on Trump and his lawyers. Meanwhile, an appearance touted by Trump as a major campaign event was nothing more than a closed-door speech to deep-pocketed election-deniers at a Trump property.For those looking for uplift from a Trump campaign, those days are over. Rather, personal grievance and claims of a stolen 2020 election will likely be his dominant themes. For the 45th president, that may bring catharsis. For everyone else in the Republican party, that spells chaos, headache and the possibility of another Trump defeat at the hands of Joe Biden and the Democrats.Trump, Bankman-Fried and Musk are the monsters of American capitalism | Robert ReichRead more“Mr Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” the court thundered in its ruling. “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.”Judge Donald Middlebrooks shredded Trump and his lawyers for bringing a failed and frivolous racketeering lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, her political allies and a passel of ex-government officials. In the judge’s eyes, the lawsuit was little else than a repackaged Trump campaign stump speech.A day later, Trump dropped a separate lawsuit filed against Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. That case too was pending before Middlebrooks, who similarly viewed that matter as “vexatious and frivolous”. The threat of sanctions hung in the air.As for the Trump speech the public never heard, it now is another self-inflicted nothingburger, up there with his much-touted Trump NFT superhero trading cards – a waste of time and attention, a lost opportunity.Earlier in the day, Trump had vowed to deliver a major political announcement later that night. He also promised to resume his signature rallies. Instead, he spoke behind closed doors at Trump Doral, his resort in Miami, to Judicial Watch, a tax-exempt group ostensibly dedicated to promoting “integrity, transparency and accountability in government and fidelity to the rule of law”.That is the line Judicial Watch feeds the IRS. Reality is different. Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch’s president, pushed Trump to declare victory early on election night 2020 and stop counting ballots. Fitton also argued that White House records were Trump’s to keep.Rule of law? Not so much, actually.To be sure, Trump still leads the pack of prospective Republican presidential nominees. No other Republican contender possesses the same rapport with the party’s white working-class base; no one else is owed so much by Kevin McCarthy, the beleaguered speaker of the House.By the numbers, Trump retains a double-digit advantage over Ron DeSantis, Florida’s spite-filled but mirthless governor. So far, the 45th president’s mounting legal woes, listless campaign and friction with the evangelical leadership have not displaced him from his perch.At the same time, the Republican field appears poised for a growth spurt, and if 2016 teaches anything, it is that more actually is merrier from Trump’s vantage point. It dilutes the opposition.Kevin McCarthy’s debt ceiling standoff is yet more Republican madness | Richard WolffeRead moreRight now, anyway, Trump’s prospective challengers are running in place or forming circular firing squads. Mike Pence, his vice-president, hawks So Help Me God, a memoir. His numbers last hit double digits in June 2022. Candidates in retrograde usually lose.Apparently, Pence is betting that abortion and the supreme court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade may get him to the promised land. Or not. In case Pence forgot, voters in otherwise reliably conservative Kansas and Kentucky rejected abortion bans.Meanwhile, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, and Nikki Haley, his one-time UN ambassador, are publicly engaged in a personal spat. In Never Give an Inch, his soon-to-be released memoir, Pompeo trashes Haley for “abandoning” Trump and being less than consequential.Celebrity Apprentice is back. “Haley has become just another career politician whose ambitions matter more than her words,” Taylor Budowich, a former Trump spokesman who sued the January 6 committee, has since chimed in.To be sure, Haley gives as good as she gets. She accuses Pompeo of peddling “lies and gossip to sell a book” – arguing that Pompeo “is printing a Haley anecdote that he says he doesn’t know for certain happened this way”, to quote Maggie Haberman.Yet for all of his would-be opponents’ missteps, Trump’s road to re-nomination won’t be a coronation. His mojo is missing, his aura of inevitability damaged, if not gone. In the two months since Trump announced his candidacy, he has barely ventured from the confines of Mar-a-Lago, his redoubt by the Atlantic.There is also the primary calendar. Trump could well face Chris Sununu, New Hampshire’s popular governor, in the state’s primary. A Trump loss in the Granite State would be monumental. He won that contest seven years ago. And down in Georgia, governor Brian Kemp may be aching for revenge.Beyond that, Trump has suffered a series of recent legal setbacks. Last month, a Manhattan jury convicted the Trump Organization on tax and fraud charges. As a coda, the court imposed $1.6m in fines, the maximum allowed under state law.After Brexit and Trump, rightwing populists cling to power – but the truth is they can’t govern | Jonathan FreedlandRead moreThen there is the pending sexual assault and defamation litigation brought by E Jean Carroll. At a rage-filled deposition, the ex-reality show host flashed moments of verbal incontinence. There, he confused the plaintiff with Marla Maples, his second wife. In that split second, his much-hyped “she’s not my type” defense may have vanished.The near future does not appear much brighter. A trial is set for later this spring.Meanwhile, the special counsel moves ahead and the Manhattan district attorney reportedly shows renewed interest in Trump Organization payments to Stormy Daniels. Along the way, Michael Cohen has resurfaced. The circus is back.To top it off, in Georgia, a Fulton county court will hear arguments this coming week on whether to release a grand jury report on the 2020 election. If indicted, Trump’s fate on extradition could well rest with DeSantis. Now that’s ironic.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
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