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    Planned Parenthood CEO warns Trump bill will lead to $700m loss and ‘backdoor abortion ban’

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    Planned Parenthood stands to lose roughly $700m in federal funding if the US House passes Republicans’ massive spending-and-tax bill, the organization’s CEO said on Wednesday, amounting to what abortion rights supporters and opponents alike have called a “backdoor abortion ban”.“We are facing down the reality that nearly 200 health centers are at risk of closure. We’re facing a reality of the impact on shutting down almost half of abortion-providing health centers,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of Americas’s CEO, said in an interview Wednesday morning. “It does feel existential. Not just for Planned Parenthood, but for communities that are relying on access to this care.”Anti-abortion activists have longed to “defund” Planned Parenthood for decades. They are closer than ever to achieving their goal.That $700m figure represents the loss that Planned Parenthood would face from a provision in the spending bill that would impose a one-year Medicaid ban on healthcare non-profits that offer abortions and that received more than $800,000 in federal funding in 2023, as well as the funding that Planned Parenthood could lose from Title X, the nation’s largest family-planning program. In late March, the Trump administration froze tens of millions of dollars of Title X funding that had been set aside for some Planned Parenthood and other family-planning clinics.“Essentially what you are seeing is a gutting of a safety net,” said McGill Johnson, who characterized the bill as a “backdoor abortion ban” in a statement.Medicaid is the US government’s insurance program for low-income people, and about 80 million people use it. If the latest version of the spending-and-tax bill passes, nearly 12 million people are expected to lose their Medicaid coverage.Donald Trump has said that he would like the bill to be on his desk, ready for a signature, by 4 July.The provision attacking Planned Parenthood would primarily target clinics in blue states that have protected abortion rights since the overturning of Roe v Wade three years ago, because those blue states have larger numbers of people on Medicaid. Although not all Planned Parenthood clinics perform abortions, the reproductive healthcare giant provides 38% of US abortions, according to the latest data from Abortion Care Network, a membership group for independent abortion clinics.Among the clinics at risk of closure, Planned Parenthood estimated, more than 90% are in states that permit abortion. Sixty percent are located in areas that have been deemed “medically underserved”.In total, more than 1.1 million Planned Parenthood patients could lose access to care.“There’s nowhere else for folks” to go, McGill Johnson said. “The community health centers have said they cannot absorb the patients that Planned Parenthood sees. So I think that we do need to just call it a targeted attack because that’s exactly how it is.”Nationally, 11% of female Medicaid beneficiaries between the ages of 15 and 49 and who receive family-planning services go to Planned Parenthood for a range of services, according to an analysis by the non-profit KFF, which tracks healthcare policy. Those numbers rise in blue states like Washington, Oregon and Connecticut.In California, that number soars to 29%. The impact on the state would be so devastating that Nichole Ramirez, senior vice-president of communication and donor relations at Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties, called the tax-and-spending package’s provision “a direct attack on us, really”.“They haven’t been able to figure out how to ban abortion nationwide and they haven’t been able to figure out how to ban abortion in California specifically,” said Ramirez, who estimated that Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties stands to lose between $40m and $60m. Ramirez continued: “This is their way to go about banning abortion. That is the entire goal here.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post on X, the prominent anti-abortion group Live Action reposted an image of a Planned Parenthood graphic calling the provision “backdoor abortion ban”. “They might be onto us,” Live Action wrote.The Planned Parenthood network is overseen by Planned Parenthood Federation of America, but it also consists of dozens of independent regional affiliates that operate nearly 600 clinics across the country. In June, as the spending-and-tax bill moved through Congress, Autonomy News, an outlet that focuses on threats to bodily autonomy, reported that Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s accreditation board had sent waivers out to affiliates to apply for approval to cease providing abortions in order to preserve access to Medicaid funding. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that a memo sent to the leadership of one California affiliate suggests that leaders there had considered ending abortion services.McGill Johnson said that there have been discussions within Planned Parenthood’s network about what it would mean to stop offering abortions. But no affiliates, to her knowledge, are moving forward with plans to stop performing the procedure.“Educating our volunteers and teams around hard decisions to stand and understand the impact of that is different than weighing and considering a stoppage of abortion,” McGill Johnson said.The budget bill and Title X funding freeze aren’t the only sources of pressure on the group. The US supreme court last week ruled in favor of South Carolina in a case involving the state’s attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its state Medicaid reimbursement program – a ruling that will likely give a green light to other states that also want to defund Planned Parenthood.At least one other organization that provides abortion and family-planning services, Maine Family Planning, will be affected by the provision, according to the organization’s CEO, George Hill. Maine Family Planning directly operates 18 clinics, including several that provide primary care or are in rural, medically underserved areas. If the provision takes effect, Hill estimates, the organization would lose 20% of its operating budget.“It’s dressed up as a budget provision, but it’s not,” Hill said. “They’re basically taking the rug out from under our feet.” More

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      House set to vote on Trump’s big bill as Johnson vows to ‘get it over the line’

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      Donald Trump’s signature tax-and-spending bill is hanging in the balance as Republicans struggle to muster sufficient votes in the US House of Representatives.A five-minute procedural vote remained open and tied for more than an hour on Wednesday as Republican leaders told members they could leave the floor, suggesting they still do not have the numbers they need.Trump, JD Vance and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, had spent much of the day trying to pressure conservatives to support the bill despite changes made by the Senate.A preliminary motion on the sweeping tax-and-spending bill did gain approval on party lines with 214 in favor and 212 against, setting the stage for another vote later on Wednesday afternoon to adopt the rule. If that is successful, the chamber will debate the bill, then vote on its final passage.But with the House at a standstill, the timing of the all-important rule vote was uncertain. “Either you vote on the rule or you go home,” said the conservative Tennessee representative Tim Burchett as he exited the Capitol.The Senate passed the bill, with Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, on Tuesday, after a record-setting all-night session. Now the chambers must reconcile their versions: the sprawling mega-bill goes back to the House, where Johnson has said the Senate “went a little further than many of us would have preferred” in its changes, particularly to Medicaid, a program that provides healthcare to low-income and disabled Americans.But the speaker vowed to “get that bill over the line”. Trump has set a Fourth of July deadline for Congress to send the bill to his desk.According to CNN, Johnson told reporters: “When you have a piece of legislation that is this comprehensive and with so many agenda items involved, you’re going to have lots of different priorities and preferences among people because they represent different districts and they have different interests.“But we can’t make everyone 100% happy. It’s impossible. This is a deliberative body. It’s a legislative process. By definition, all of us have to give up on our personal preferences. [I’m] never going to ask anybody to compromise core principles, but preferences must be yielded for the greater good, and that’s what I think people are recognizing and come to grips with.”Early on Wednesday morning, the House rules committee advanced the measure, sending it to the floor for consideration. On their way into the Capitol, two conservative Republicans signaled optimism that the bill would get through the House.Congresswoman Nancy Mace told reporters: “I think these votes will take a little bit or a lot longer than usual. But that’s Washington. You guys are watching how the sausage is made, and that’s how business is run.”Like several other members, Mace wound up driving from her South Carolina district to Washington after a flurry of thunderstorms yesterday prompted major flight delays and cancellations around the capital.Smoking a cigar, Congressman Troy Nehls of Texas said: “There’s things in the bill I don’t like, but would I change the bill because I didn’t get what I wanted? I don’t think that would be good for America.”The House approved an initial draft of the legislation in May by a single vote, overcoming Democrats’ unanimous opposition. But many fiscal conservatives are furious over cost estimates that project the Senate version would add even more to the federal deficit than the House-passed plan.But Johnson’s wafer-thin Republican majority risks losing decisive votes from rightwing fiscal hardliners demanding steep spending cuts, moderates wary of dismantling safety-net programs and Republicans from Democratic-led states expected to make a stand on a contentious tax provision. Any one of these groups could potentially derail the bill’s passage through a chamber where the GOP can afford to lose no more than three votes.Trump celebrated the Senate’s passage of the bill as “music to my ears”. He has described the bill as crucial to his second-term agenda, and congressional Republicans made it their top priority.The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill in its current form would add $3.3tn to the US budget deficit through 2034.It will extend tax cuts enacted during the president’s first term in 2017, and includes new provisions to cut taxes on tips, overtime and interest payments for some car loans. It funds Trump’s plans for mass deportations by allocating $45bn for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, $14bn for deportation operations and billions of dollars more to hire an additional 10,000 new agents by 2029.It also includes more than $50bn for the construction of new border fortifications, which will probably include a wall along the border with Mexico.To satisfy demands from fiscal conservatives for cuts to the US’s large federal budget deficit, the bill imposes new work requirements on enrollees of Medicaid. It also imposes a limit on the provider tax states use to fund their program, which could lead to reductions in services. Finally, it sunsets some incentives for green-energy technologies created by Congress under Joe Biden.In a floor speech on Wednesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, warned: “This bill is a deal with the devil. It explodes our national debt. It militarizes our entire economy, and it strips away healthcare and basic dignity of the American people.“For what? To give Elon Musk a tax break and billionaires, the greedy, taking of our nation. We cannot stand for it and we will not support it. You should be ashamed.”Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi said of the policy bill: “Well, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then you, GOP, you have a very blurred vision of what America is about.“Is it beautiful to cut off food from seniors and children? Is it beautiful to cut off 17 million people from healthcare? Is it beautiful to do this? To give tax cuts to billionaires in our country? Is it beautiful to take money from education and the rest? The list goes on and on.” More

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      Trump’s sweeping tax cut and spending bill heads to House – US politics live

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      CBS parent company Paramount on Wednesday settled a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump over an interview broadcast in October, in the latest concession by a media company to the US president, who has targeted outlets over what he describes as false or misleading coverage.Paramount said it would pay $16m to settle the suit with the money allocated to Trump’s future presidential library, and not paid to Trump “directly or indirectly”.“The settlement does not include a statement of apology or regret,” the company statement added.Trump filed a $10bn lawsuit against CBS in October, alleging the network deceptively edited an interview that aired on its 60 Minutes news program with then-vice-president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris to “tip the scales in favor of the Democratic party” in the election. In an amended complaint filed in February, Trump increased his claim for damages to $20bn.CBS aired two versions of the Harris interview in which she appears to give different answers to the same question about the Israel-Hamas war, according to the lawsuit filed in a federal court in Texas.CBS previously said the lawsuit was “completely without merit” and had asked a judge to dismiss the case.The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Edward A Paltzik, a lawyer representing Trump in the civil suit, could not be immediately reached for comment.Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics as Donald Trump’s sweeping tax cut and spending legislation is expected to head to the House after it cleared the Senate last night with the narrowest of margins.The Senate passed the measure in a 51-50 vote with Vice President JD Vance breaking a tie after three Republicans – Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky – joined all 47 Democrats in voting against the bill.It followed a long debate in which Republicans grappled with the so-called “one big beautiful” bill’s price tag – it is set to raise the deficit by $5 trillion – and its impact on the US healthcare system.The vote in the House, where Republicans hold a 220-212 majority, is likely to be close.Mike Johnson, the House speaker, said during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity that Republican leadership would seek to move the legislation through the Rules Committee this morning and get it before the entire House before Friday’s holiday, unless travel plans were upset by thunderstorms that have menaced the Washington area.“Hopefully we’re voting on this by tomorrow or Thursday at latest, depending on the weather delays and travel and all the rest – that’s the wild card that we can’t control,” Johnson said yesterday.A White House official told reporters that Trump would be “deeply involved” in pushing House Republicans to approve the bill. “It’s a great bill. There is something for everyone,” Trump said at an event in Florida. “And I think it’s going to go very nicely in the House.”Is Trump’s optimism misplaced? You can read our report on the bill’s progress so far and prospects for today here:Entertainingly at least, the bill has reanimated the much-missed Musk-Trump feud, with the tech billionaire calling the legislation “insane” and suggesting he could form a new political party if it passed.In response, Trump claimed he could “look into” deporting Musk. So stay with us for all the developments.In other news:

      Trump announced on his social media platform that Israel has agreed to a 60-day ceasefire in its war in Gaza and urged Hamas to accept the terms of the agreement. The news comes as Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is scheduled to visit the White House on 7 July.

      Trump toured “Alligator Alcatraz”, a controversial new migrant detention jail in the remote Florida Everglades, and celebrated the harsh conditions that people sent there would experience. Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, said detainees could arrive at the rapidly constructed facility as soon as tomorrow. Trump later revisited his idea of “renovating and rebuilding Alcatraz”, with a view to reopening the infamous island prison in San Francisco, which has been closed for over 60 years.

      The Pentagon has halted shipments of air defense missiles and other precision munitions to Ukraine over concerns that US stockpiles are too low. On Sunday, Moscow fired more than 500 aerial weapons at Ukraine overnight, in a barrage that Kyiv described as the biggest air attack so far of the three-year war.

      USAID will officially stop implementing foreign aid starting today, secretary of state Marco Rubio said. He added that the US’s assistance in the future will be targeted and limited, focusing on trade rather than aid.

      The Trump administration raised the possibility of stripping Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, of his US citizenship over his vocal support for Palestinian rights. Democrat senator Chris Murphy slammed the idea as “racist bullshit”. More

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      Thom Tillis won’t seek re-election after clash with Trump over ‘big beautiful bill’

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      Thom Tillis announced on Sunday that he will not run for re-election to the US Senate next year, one day after the North Carolina Republican’s vote against Donald Trump’s signature piece of domestic legislation prompted the president to launch a barrage of threats and insults – as well as promise to support a primary challenger to defeat him in their party’s 2026 primary.“In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species,” Tillis said in a statement sent to reporters.“As many of my colleagues have noticed over the last year, and at times even joked about, I haven’t exactly been excited about running for another term”, he added. “It’s not a hard choice, and I will not be seeking re-election.”Shortly after Tillis refused to support the massive package of tax and spending cuts, called the “one big beautiful bill”, in a procedural vote in the Senate on Saturday, Trump attacked the senator on his social media platform, Truth Social.The president accused Tillis of grandstanding “in order to get some publicity for himself, for a possible, but very difficult re-election”. He also wrote that Tillis is making a “BIG MISTAKE for America, and the Wonderful People of North Carolina!”In a subsequent post on Truth Social, Trump threatened Tillis by saying he would meet with potential candidates to challenge him in a Republican primary in the battleground state.“Numerous people have come forward wanting to run” against Tillis, Trump wrote Saturday night. “I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks, looking for someone who will properly represent the Great People of North Carolina and, so importantly, the United States of America.”Before Tillis announced his decision Sunday to retire from the Senate, Trump continued to attack him on social media, writing: “Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER! He’s even worse than Rand ‘Fauci’ Paul!”Tillis was one of two Senate Republicans, along with Rand Paul of Kentucky, to vote against the bill championed by the president. Dr Anthony Fauci was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during Trump’s first presidency, and once a key adviser on the Covid-19 pandemic whose support of lockdowns and vaccines made him a hate figure for Trump’s base.Trump’s attacks came hours after Tillis said in a statement that he “cannot support” the current form of the president’s spending bill. He pointed to expected cuts to Medicaid that he said would “result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities”.With Tillis out of the 2026 Republican Senate primary, a source “close to the Trump family” told an NBC News reporter that the president’s daughter-in-law, North Carolina native Lara Trump, is “strongly considering jumping in the race”.The retirement of Tillis, a swing state moderate, could make it easier for Democrats to flip the seat in 2026, with some in the party hoping to encourage former governor Roy Cooper to enter the race.A similar dynamic could be at play next year in Omaha, Nebraska, where the sitting Republican congressman and frequent Trump critic Don Bacon has reportedly decided that he will not run for re-election to the House.Trump has backed primary challenges against Republicans who clashed with him. Notably, he endorsed Harriet Hageman’s successful push to unseat Wyoming’s former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who served on a House congressional committee that investigated Trump supporters’ deadly US Capitol attack after he lost the 2020 presidential election.Trump’s team also recently launched a group to unseat Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, who opposed the US’s 22 June strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. Massie also formed an alliance with the California Democratic congressman Ro Khanna to introduce a war powers resolution meant to “prohibit involvement in Iran” as well as Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”.Chris LaCivita, senior Trump political adviser, has confirmed that he and Tony Fabrizio, another Trump adviser, would run an anti-Massie Super political action committee (Pac).Trump’s criticism of Tillis came as the Senate voted 51-49 in favor of passing a motion to advance the budget bill. It must now clear a formal Senate vote and be returned to the lower House for approval – which Trump wants done before the July 4th holiday.The legislation is a stuffed hamper of Republican priorities – making tax breaks from Trump’s first presidency permanent, and removing taxes on tips, to be paid for in part with cutbacks to Medicaid, food stamps and green energy investments. The bill also includes $175bn in additional funding for immigration enforcement, to implement the president’s mass deportation project. More

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      Fired federal workers lobby for help on Capitol Hill – is anyone listening?

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      The Tuesday Group was feeling something familiar as its members milled around a bank of elevators in the bustling basement of a Senate office building: rejection.They had often been told no over the past months – when the government moved to fire them with Donald Trump’s blessing, when judges rejected challenges to that decision and when the lawmakers who they have taken to tracking down on Capitol Hill once a week when Congress is in session would turn a deaf ear to their pleas.More than 59,000 federal workers have lost their jobs since Trump took office, according to government data, but those in power have not changed their tune.This Tuesday morning, it was staffers of Maine’s Republican senator Susan Collins who had told them no, even after they staged an impromptu sit-in in her office for the better part of a half hour. So they proceeded five floors down to the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, hoping that some senator – any senator – would give them a moment of their time.Then the elevator doors opened and who should come out but Collins. “Senator Collins!” someone in the group yelled. Another tried to introduce themselves: “I’m a fired federal worker.” But the senator began waving her hands in front of her in an unmistakable sign of: I don’t have time for this.“Thank you,” Collins said, as she made her way down the hall.“It’s somewhat typical,” observed Whitt Masters, a former USAID contractor who has been unemployed since the end of March, when the company employing him decided to file for bankruptcy after its client began to shut down.“You know, I don’t expect every senator to stop and speak with us. I wish she’d been a bit more approachable, especially since we had spent some time in her office earlier today.”What’s been dubbed the Tuesday Group has come around the Capitol since mid-February, as Trump and Elon Musk’s campaign to thin out the federal workforce began to bite. Some who show up have been fired, others are on paid leave while a judge considers whether it is legal to fire them, and those who work for USAID expect to officially lose their jobs next Tuesday, when the agency shuts down.Democrats often welcome them, but when it comes to the Republicans who control Congress – and are weighing legislation to codify some cuts and make deeper ones in the next fiscal year – the reception has been uneven. They’ve been ignored, blown off and belittled – all things they would experience last Tuesday, their 17th visit to the Hill.Their encounter with Collins fruitless, the group formed something of a gauntlet at the intersection of a hallway leading between office buildings and to the Senate subway, a place where lawmakers were sure to pass on a scorcher of a day.They would call out to any face they recognized, but the group of 10 was nothing a determined senator couldn’t handle. Montana Republican Tim Sheehy speed-walked by with a reporter and cameraman in pursuit; Washington Democrat Patty Murray pounded past in sneakers; and Arkansas Republican John Boozman ambled through alone, displaying no sign that he knew the group was even there.“Would you like to hear how we are impacting your constituents?” asked Stephie Duliepre, who was fired from her Science for Development fellowship program at USAID, when Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn came around the corner. The senator pushed on, the answer apparently being no.John Hoeven, a Republican from North Dakota, exited a stairwell that deposited him right in the middle of the group. He appeared to recognize them – on a previous visit, attendees said that Hoeven had discussed his support for folding a major USAID food assistance program into the state department. “I see you’re still working on it,” he quipped, before heading off.The Democrats they encountered uttered words of encouragement, and a few stopped to talk. “Don’t give up,” Dick Durbin of Illinois said when he encountered the group. “I’m with you,” Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin called out.South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham attempted the silent treatment as he came past, but Amelia Hertzberg, who was on administrative leave from her job in the Environmental Protection Agency, was not having it. She followed him down the hall, and started prancing around to get his attention.“You have a bright future,” Hertzberg recalls the senator saying. “Well, I was going to have a bright future, and then I was fired,” she replied.The group spotted Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican and prominent Trump ally. “Senator Hawley, these are fired federal workers. Do you have a second to talk to them?” asked Melissa Byrne, a community organizer who had put together the group.“No,” he replied.The group was aghast, but they’d been treated worse. When Mack Schroeder encountered Indiana Republican Jim Banks one Tuesday and introduced himself as having been fired from the Department of Health and Human Services, the senator replied, “You probably deserved it,” before calling him “a clown”.That was in April. The incident made the news, Banks refused to apologize, and the Tuesday Group kept showing up.“I’ve spoken to the media and been on the radio. I’ve called my senators, my representatives, and it feels a little bit like shouting into a void,” said Hertzberg, who has made about 12 visits to the Capitol now.“So it feels good to go into senator’s offices and be there and take up space for a while and make them see, or their staff see that there is a person behind all this.” More

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      Anti-Trump conservative Don Bacon will not seek re-election to Nebraska congressional seat eyed by Dems

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      Republican congressman and vocal Donald Trump critic Don Bacon is reportedly not going to seek re-election during the midterm races in 2026.The conservative politician represents a swing district in Nebraska that includes Omaha, and word of his plans prompted Democratic figures to signal optimism that they could take the seat as the party tries to regain a House majority it has not had since 2023.Bacon’s decision was first reported on Friday by the outlets Punchbowl News and NOTUS before being confirmed on Saturday by the Washington Post. NOTUS and the Post cited anonymous sources familiar with the situation, with the former of those adding that Bacon would make a formal announcement in the coming days.While Bacon had not immediately commented on the reports, his verified social media account did engage with multiple posts expressing “good riddance” to him. He called the author of one such post “an idiot” and told another who claimed he was a thinly veiled Democrat that he was “the real Republican”, having supported the party since he was 13 in 1976.The second congressional district of Nebraska that Bacon represents voted for Kamala Harris when she lost to Trump during November’s White House race. It also voted for Joe Biden when he took the Oval Office from Trump four years earlier. And in May, Omaha elected its first-ever Black mayor: John Ewing Jr, who defeated three-term Republican incumbent Jean Stothert.Bacon’s politics have come to reflect those realities in his district to some extent. The retired US air force brigadier general in May demanded the removal of Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, after he shared information about military strikes on Yemen in a Signal messaging app group chat that inadvertently included the editor of the Atlantic.Though the president chose to keep Hegseth in place despite the so-called Signalgate scandal, Bacon told the Post in an interview that he “would have been fired” at any point in his military career for doing what Hegseth did.Separately, in a Post opinion column, Bacon criticized the brutal job and spending cuts that the Trump administration has inflicted within the federal government since the president retook office in January. He filed a bill aiming to hand Congress control over tariffs rather than continue leaving that power with the president as Trump upended financial markets by imposing substantial levies on some of the US’s largest trading partners.Furthermore, he stood as the lone House Republican to vote against a measure that would take Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” and make it law. “I’m not into doing silly stuff,” Bacon, who joined Congress in January 2017, wrote on social media. “It is sophomoric.”And he has said he and his family endured threats after he opposed Ohio Republican congressman Jim Jordan’s unsuccessful 2023 bid to become House speaker, which at the time had been endorsed by Trump in between his two presidencies.“I’d rather be a defender of the traditional conservative values than just be a team player,” Bacon said to Omaha’s KMTV news station in May. “I think – a team going in the wrong direction, you need somebody to speak up and try to stand for what’s right.”A statement distributed by Democratic congressional campaign committee spokesperson Madison Andrus on Friday said that Bacon’s foregoing re-election marked a “vote of no-confidence for House Republicans and their electoral prospects”.“The writing has been on the wall for months,” Andrus’s statement also said.In a separate statement, the Nebraska Democratic party’s chair, Jane Kleeb, said her party’s prospective candidates “truly represent the values of the district” Bacon’s seat is in.“We are ready for change,” Kleeb said. More

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      US Senate votes down resolution to restrict Trump from escalating Iran war

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      Senate Democrats failed on Friday to get a war-powers resolution passed to limit Donald Trump’s ability to single-handedly escalate the war with Iran. The resolution, “to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran”, was voted down 53-47.The vote on the resolution, introduced by the Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, split along mainly partisan lines. One Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted for it; one Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against it.“Congress declares war,” Kaine said in a speech on the Senate floor. He stressed that the framers of the US constitution in 1787 were so wary of giving the power to start wars to one person that they did not even entrust it to George Washington, the first commander-in-chief.“They decided that war was too big a decision for one person,” Kaine said. “And so they wrote a constitution that said the United States should not be at war without a vote of Congress.”The measure would have compelled Trump to seek authorization from Congress before taking any further military action.Trump ordered airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on 22 June. This directly followed Israel launching attacks on Iran, and Iran retaliating. Trump said that the US bombardment “totally obliterated” key nuclear enrichment facilities and deemed the mission a success, although some initial reports said the damage was minimal. Iran condemned the attacks.Trump claimed on Friday that Iran had halted its nuclear ambitions after the bombings. But, he said, he would “absolutely” continue to attack the country’s nuclear sites if he believed it was once again enriching uranium.“Time will tell,” Trump said at the White House. “But I don’t believe that they’re going to go back into nuclear anytime soon.”Later on Friday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, rebuked Trump on social media. “If President Trump is genuine about wanting a deal, he should put aside the disrespectful and unacceptable tone towards Iran’s Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, and stop hurting his millions of heartfelt followers”, Araghchi wrote on X.“The Great and Powerful Iranian People, who showed the world that the Israeli regime had NO CHOICE but to RUN to ‘Daddy’ to avoid being flattened by our Missiles, do not take kindly to Threats and Insults”, Iran’s top diplomat added, in something approximating Trump’s own social media style. “If Illusions lead to worse mistakes, Iran will not hesitate to unveil its Real Capabilities, which will certainly END any Delusion about the Power of Iran.” More

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      Briefing on Iran strikes leaves senators divided as Trump threatens new row

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      Republican and Democratic senators have offered starkly contrasting interpretations of Donald Trump’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities after a delayed behind-closed-doors intelligence briefing that the White House had earlier postponed amid accusations of leaks.Thursday’s session with senior national security officials came after the White House moved back its briefing, originally scheduled for Tuesday, fueling Democratic complaints that Trump was stonewalling Congress over military action the president authorized without congressional approval.“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said following the initial postponement, which he termed “outrageous”.Even as senators were being briefed, Trump reignited the row with a Truth Social post accusing Democrats of leaking a draft Pentagon report that suggested last weekend’s strikes had only set back Iran’s nuclear program by months – contradicting the president’s insistence that it was “obliterated”.“The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information on the PERFECT FLIGHT to the Nuclear Sites in Iran. They should be prosecuted!” he wrote.The partisan divisions were on display after the briefing, which was staged in the absence of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who previously told Congress that Iran was not building nuclear weapons, before changing her tune last week after Trump said she was “wrong”.Instead, the briefing was led by CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who had publicly assailed journalists over their reporting on the strikes at a Pentagon press conference.With intelligence agencies apparently in open dispute over the strikes’ effectiveness, Thursday’s briefing did little to clear up the clashing interpretations on Capitol Hill.Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator and close Trump ally, said “obliteration” was a “good word” to describe the strikes’ impact.“They blew these places up in a major-league way. They set them back years, not months,” he said. “Nobody is going to work in these three sites any time soon. Their operational capability was obliterated.”But he warned that Iran would be likely to try to reconstitute them, adding: “Have we obliterated their desire to have a nuclear weapon? As long as they desire one, as long as they want to kill all the Jews, you still have a problem on your hands. I don’t want the American people to think this is over.”But Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Trump was “misleading the public” in claiming the program was obliterated and questioned why Gabbard had not attended the briefing.His skepticism was echoed by Schumer, who said the briefing gave “no adequate answer” to questions about Trump’s claims.“What was clear is that there was no coherent strategy, no endgame, no plan, no specific[s], no detailed plan on how Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon,” he said, adding that Congress needed to assert its authority by enforcing the War Powers Act.Gabbard and Ratcliffe had scrambled on Wednesday to back Trump, with Gabbard posting on X: “New intelligence confirms what POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed.”The ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Jim Himes, dismissed the destruction claims as meaningless. “The only question that matters is whether the Iranian regime has the stuff necessary to build a bomb, and if so, how fast,” he posted.The destruction response has also rankled Republican senators in the anti-interventionist wing of the party such as Rand Paul, who rejected claims of absolute presidential war powers.“I think the speaker needs to review the constitution,” said Paul. “And I think there’s a lot of evidence that our founding fathers did not want presidents to unilaterally go to war.”The Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution requiring congressional approval for future military action against Iran, though the measure appears unlikely to pass given Republican control of the chamber.The White House also admitted on Thursday to restricting intelligence sharing after news of the draft assessment leaking.Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the administration wants to ensure “classified intelligence is not ending up in irresponsible hands”. Leavitt later said the US assessed that there “was no indication” enriched uranium was moved from the nuclear sites in Iran ahead of the strikes.Trump formally notified Congress of the strikes in a brief letter sent on Monday, two days after the bombing, saying the action was taken “to advance vital United States national interests, and in collective self-defense of our ally, Israel, by eliminating Iran’s nuclear program”.The administration says it remains “on a diplomatic path with Iran” through special envoy Steve Witkoff’s communications with Iranian officials. More