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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

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      Trump makes case for ‘big, beautiful bill’ and cranks up pressure on Republicans

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      Donald Trump convened congressional leaders and cabinet secretaries at the White House on Thursday to make the case for passage of his marquee tax-and-spending bill, but it remains to be seen whether his pep talk will resolve a developing logjam that could threaten its passage through the Senate.The president’s intervention comes as the Senate majority leader, John Thune, mulls an initial vote on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on Friday, before a 4 July deadline Trump has imposed to have the legislation ready for his signature.But it is unclear whether Republicans have the votes to pass it through Congress’s upper chamber, and whether any changes the Senate makes will pass muster in the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority passed the bill last month by a single vote and which may have to vote again on a revised version of the bill.Trump stood before an assembly composed of police and fire officers, working parents and the mother and father of a woman he said died at the hands of an undocumented immigrant to argue that Americans like them would benefit from the bill, which includes new tax cuts and the extension of lower rates enacted during his first term, as well as an infusion of funds for immigration enforcement.“There are hundreds of things here. It’s so good,” he said. But he made no mention of his desire to sign the legislation by next Friday – the US Independence Day holiday – instead encouraging his audience to contact their lawmakers to get the bill over the finish line.“If you can, call your senators, call your congressmen. We have to get the vote,” he said.Democrats have dubbed the bill the “big, ugly betrayal”, and railed against its potential cut to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income and disabled people. The legislation would impose the biggest funding cut to Medicaid since it was created in 1965, and cost an estimated 16 million people their insurance.It would also slash funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps Americans afford food.Republicans intend to circumvent the filibuster in the Senate by using the budget reconciliation procedure, under which they can pass legislation with just a majority vote, provided it only affects spending, revenue and the debt limit. But on Thursday, Democrats on the Senate budget committee announced that the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, had ruled that a change to taxes that states use to pay for Medicaid was not allowed under the rules of reconciliation.That could further raise the cost of the bill, which the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation recently estimated would add a massive $4.2tn to the US budget deficit over 10 years. Such a high cost may be unpalatable to rightwing lawmakers in the House, who are demanding aggressive spending cuts, but the more immediate concern for the GOP lies in the Senate, where several moderate lawmakers still have not said they are a yes vote on the bill.“I don’t think anybody believes the current text is final, so I don’t believe anybody would vote for it in it’s current form. We [have] got a lot of things that we’re working on,” the senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a top target of Democrats in next year’s midterm elections, told CNN on Wednesday.In an interview with the Guardian last week, the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski declined to say how she would vote on the bill, instead describing it as “a work in progress” and arguing that the Senate should “not necessarily tie ourselves to an arbitrary date to just get there as quickly as we can”.Democrats took credit for MacDonough’s ruling on the Medicaid tax, with the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, saying the party “successfully fought a noxious provision that would’ve decimated America’s healthcare system and hurt millions of Americans. This win saves hundreds of billions of dollars for Americans to get healthcare, rather than funding tax cuts to billionaires.” More

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      RFK Jr grilled on vaccine policies and healthcare fraud in bruising House hearing

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, faced a bruising day on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, including being forced to retract accusations against a Democratic congressman after claiming the lawmaker’s vaccine stance was bought by $2m in pharmaceutical contributions.In a hearing held by the House health subcommittee, Kennedy was met with hours of contentious questioning over budget cuts, massive healthcare fraud and accusations he lied to senators to secure his confirmation.Kennedy launched his attack on representative Frank Pallone after the New Jersey Democrat hammered him over vaccine policy reversals. “You’ve accepted $2m from pharmaceutical companies,” Kennedy said. “Your enthusiasm for supporting the old [vaccine advisory committee] seems to be an outcome of those contributions.”The accusation appeared to reference Pallone’s shift from raising concerns about mercury in FDA-approved products in the 1990s to later supporting mainstream vaccine policy – a change Kennedy suggested was motivated by industry money rather than science.After a point of order, the Republican chair ordered Kennedy to retract the remarks after lawmakers accused him of impugning Pallone’s character. But the pharma attack was overshadowed by accusations that Kennedy lied his way into office. Representative Kim Schrier, a pediatrician, asked Kennedy: “Did you lie to senator [Bill] Cassidy when you told him you would not fire this panel of experts?”Two weeks ago, Kennedy axed all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, despite assurances to Cassidy during confirmation hearings.“You lied to senator Cassidy. You have lied to the American people,” Schrier said. “I lay all responsibility for every death from a vaccine-preventable illness at your feet.”Kennedy denied making promises to Cassidy.The hearing exposed the deepening fractures in Kennedy’s relationship with Congress, even among Republicans who initially supported his confirmation. What began as a routine budget hearing devolved into accusations of dishonesty, conflicts of interest and fundamental questions about whether Kennedy can be trusted to protect public health.In one moment, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pressed Kennedy about his ignorance to the Trump administration’s reported investigation of UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest health insurer, for criminal fraud in Medicare Advantage plans.“You are not aware that the Trump Department of Justice is investigating the largest insurance company in America?” Ocasio-Cortez asked again after suggesting he couldn’t confirm that it was happening.When she said that for-profit insurers such as UnitedHealthcare defraud public programs of $80bn annually, Kennedy appeared confused about the scale: “Did you say 80 million or billion?”“80 with a ‘B’,” Ocasio-Cortez said.For Democrats, Tuesday’s performance confirmed their worst fears about a vaccine-skeptical activist now controlling the nation’s health agencies. For Kennedy, it marked an escalation in his battle against what he calls a corrupt public health establishment pushing back on his radical vision.But behind the political theater lay a fundamental reshaping of America’s public health architecture. Kennedy’s cuts have eliminated entire offices and centers, leaving them unstaffed and non-functional. While he defended the reductions as targeting “duplicative procurement, human resources and administrative offices”, he hinted that some fired workers might be rehired once court injunctions on the layoffs are resolved.Kennedy recently replaced the fired vaccine advisers with eight new appointees, including known spreaders of vaccine misinformation. The move alarmed even supportive Republicans such as Cassidy, who called Monday for delaying this week’s advisory meeting, warning the new panel lacks experience and harbors “preconceived bias” against mRNA vaccines.Kennedy has long promoted debunked links between vaccines and autism, raising fears his appointees will legitimize dangerous anti-vaccine theories.He also explained why he was pulling Covid-19 vaccine recommendations for pregnant women, claiming “there was no science supporting that recommendation” despite extensive research showing the vaccines’ safety during pregnancy.“We’re not depriving anybody of choice,” Kennedy insisted. “If a pregnant woman wants the Covid-19 vaccine, she can get it. No longer recommending it because there was no science supporting that recommendation.”In another sidebar, Kennedy unveiled his vision for America’s health future: every citizen wearing a smartwatch or fitness tracker within four years. The ambitious scheme, backed by what he promised would be “one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history”, would see the government promoting wearables as a possible alternative to expensive medications.“If you can achieve the same thing with an $80 wearable, it’s a lot better for the American people,” Kennedy said. More

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      Trump is not interested in listening to US experts on Iran’s nuclear program

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      When Donald Trump ordered the US military to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend, the debate among intelligence officials, outside experts and policymakers over the status of Tehran’s nuclear program had largely been frozen in place for nearly 20 years.That prolonged debate has repeatedly placed the relatively dovish US intelligence community at odds with Israel and neoconservative Iran hawks ever since the height of the global war on terror.For nearly two decades, the US intelligence agencies have concluded that while Iran has a program to enrich uranium, it has never actually built any atomic bombs. It is an assessment that has been at the core of its intelligence reporting on Iran since at least 2007. This has led to constant debates over the years over the significance of Iran’s uranium enrichment program versus “weaponization” or bomb-building.Israel and the Iran hawks have repeatedly said that the debate over enrichment versus weaponization is not significant, because Iran could build a bomb relatively quickly. But Iran suspended its weaponization program in 2003 and hasn’t tried to build a bomb since; it’s been clear for decades that the Iranian regime has seen that its own interests are better served by maintaining the threat of having a nuclear weapon rather than actually having one.Iran’s reluctance to build a bomb while still maintaining the threat of a nuclear program has clear parallels with the way that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein handled his supposed weapons of mass destruction program. Hussein got rid of his programs to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the 1990s, following the first Gulf War, but never divulged that to the United States or the United Nations.He wanted other countries, particularly his regional enemy Iran, to think that he still had the weapons. US officials couldn’t understand that kind of thinking, and so badly miscalculated by assuming that Hussein still had a WMD program. That mindset led to the intelligence community’s greatest debacle – its false pre-war reporting that Hussen still had a WMD program, flawed intelligence which helped the George W Bush administration justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.In the past, the US intelligence community’s assessments on the state of the Iranian nuclear program – developed in the aftermath of its failures on the Iraqi WMD issue – acted as a restraint on the actions of successive presidents, from Bush through Obama and Biden. All of them faced pressure from Israel to take action against Iran, or at least to let Israel bomb the country.The difference today is not that the intelligence reporting has significantly changed.It is that Trump is now more willing to listen to Israel than his predecessors and is also deeply suspicious of the Central Intelligence Agency. And by firing so many staffers at the National Security Council and conducting an ideological purge throughout the rest of the national security community since he returned to office, Trump has made it clear that he is not interested in listening to the experts on Iran and the Middle East. Trump underscored his skepticism of the experts when he recently told reporters that “I don’t care” about the US intelligence community’s latest assessment that Iran still wasn’t building a bomb.Without any evidence that Iran has actually been “weaponizing”, the arguments over Iran’s nuclear program have descended over the last two decades into a series of almost theological disputes over the significance of each change in the Iranian uranium enrichment program.This debate first flared into the headlines in 2007, at a time when the Bush administration – already mired in wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan – was considering bombing Iran to halt its nuclear program. In the midst of this debate, the key findings of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program were made public. The NIE – a report designed to provide the consensus view of the US’s 18 spy agencies on a major subject – found that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and had never built a bomb. While it found that Iran could still develop a bomb by 2010, it determined that its commercial nuclear fuel cycle – its enrichment program – was not part of an ongoing nuclear weapons program.In 2011, the findings of another NIE were made public, which slightly altered the intelligence community’s assessment. It said that Iran’s uranium enrichment program was probably being upgraded and could eventually be used to create weapons grade uranium. But the NIE also found that Iran had still not tried to build a bomb. The 2011 NIE broke with the 2007 NIE by not making a distinction between Iran’s uranium enrichment for commercial purposes and potential nuclear weapons work. Still, the new NIE found that there was not enough evidence to show that Iran had made a decision to restart its nuclear weaponization program and build a bomb.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionToday, the US intelligence community is still basically in the same place: Iran has an enrichment program but has not built a bomb. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, testified to Congress in March that while Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was at its highest levels, the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and [Iran’s] supreme leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003”.(After Trump ordered the Iran bombing, Gabbard rushed to defend his actions, even though there had still been no change in the intelligence agencies’ assessments.)And while Israel and the hawks continue today to insist that Iran could build a bomb quickly, the US intelligence community has long maintained that it could detect the effort in its earliest stages, long before it succeeded.After the weekend strike, Congressional Democrats focused on the fact that there was no new intelligence to justify Trump’s action, and no new intelligence showing an imminent threat to the United States.Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said Trump had bombed Iran “without regard to the consistent conclusions of the intelligence community”. 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      WhatsApp messaging app banned on all US House of Representatives devices

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      The WhatsApp messaging service has been banned on all US House of Representatives devices, according to a memo sent to House staff on Monday.The notice to all House staff said that the “Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use.”The memo, from the chief administrative officer, recommended use of other messaging apps, including Microsoft Corp’s Teams platform, Amazon.com’s Wickr, Signal, Apple’s iMessage, and Facetime.Meta, which owns WhatsApp, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.The Signal app – which like WhatsApp uses end-to-end encrypted messaging – was at the center of a recent controversy in which Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, sent detailed information about planned attacks on Yemen to at least two private Signal group chats.One of the chats was created by Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, and included top US security officials as well as, inadvertently, the Atlantic magazine journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. The other Hegseth created himself, including his wife, his brother and about a dozen other people.The Pentagon had previously warned its employees against using Signal due to a technical vulnerability, according NPR, which reported that an “OPSEC special bulletin” seen by its reporters and sent on 18 March said that Russian hacking groups could exploit the vulnerability in Signal to spy on encrypted organizations, potentially targeting “persons of interest”.The Pentagon-wide memo said “third party messaging apps” like Signal are permitted to be used to share unclassified information, but they are not allowed to be used to send “non-public” unclassified information.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Pete Hegseth suggests he would disobey court ruling against deploying military in LA

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      The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, suggested on Wednesday that he would not obey a federal court ruling against the deployments of national guard troops and US marines to Los Angeles, the latest example of the Trump administration’s willingness to ignore judges it disagrees with.The comments before the Senate armed services committee come as Donald Trump faces dozen of lawsuits over his policies, which his administration has responded to by avoiding compliance with orders it dislikes. In response, Democrats have claimed that Trump is sending the country into a constitutional crisis.California has sued over Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles, and, last week, a federal judge ruled that control of soldiers should return to California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. An appeals court stayed that ruling and, in arguments on Tuesday, sounded ready to keep the soldiers under Donald Trump’s authority.“I don’t believe district courts should be determining national security policy. When it goes to the supreme court, we’ll see,” Hegseth told the Democratic senator Mazie Hirono. Facing similar questions from another Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, he said: “If the supreme court rules on a topic, we will abide by that.”Hegseth was confirmed to lead the Pentagon after three Republican senators and all Democrats voted against his appointment, creating a tie vote on a cabinet nomination for only the second time in history. The tie was broken by the vice-president, JD Vance.There were few hints of dissatisfaction among GOP senators at the hearing, which was intended to focus on the Pentagon’s budgetary needs for the forthcoming fiscal year, but Democrats used it to press for more details on the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, as well as the turmoil that has plagued Hegseth’s top aides and the potential for the United States to join Israel’s attack on Iran.The Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin asked whether troops deployed to southern California were allowed to arrest protesters or shoot them in the legs, as Trump is said to have attempted to order during his first term.“If necessary, in their own self-defense, they could temporarily detain and hand over to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. But there’s no arresting going on,” Hegseth said. On Friday, marines temporarily took into custody a US citizen at a federal building in Los Angeles.The secretary laughed when asked whether troops could shoot protesters, before telling Slotkin: “Senator, I’d be careful what you read in books and believing in, except for the Bible.”An exasperated Slotkin replied: “Oh my God.”Trump has publicly mulled the possibility that the United States might strike Iran. Slotkin asked if the Pentagon had plans for what the US military would do after toppling its government.“We have plans for everything,” Hegseth said, prompting the committee’s Republican chair, Roger Wicker, to note that the secretary was scheduled to answer further questions in a behind-closed-doors session later that afternoon.In addition to an aggressive purge of diversity and equity policies from the military, Hegseth has also ordered that military bases that were renamed under Joe Biden because they honored figures in the Confederacy to revert to their previous names – but officially honoring various US soldiers with the same name.The Virginia senator Tim Kaine said that in his state, several bases had been renamed under Biden in honor of accomplished veterans, and their families were never officially told that the names would be changed back.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You didn’t call any of the families, and I’ve spoken with the families, and the families were called by the press. That’s how they learned about this. They learned about it from the press,” Kaine said,He asked Hegseth to pause the renaming of these bases, which the secretary declined to do, instead saying: “We’ll find ways to recognize them.”Democrats also criticized Hegseth for turmoil in the ranks of his top aides, as well as his decision to name as the Pentagon’s press secretary Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared on social media an antisemitic conspiracy theory.The Pentagon head had a sharp exchange with the Democratic senator Jacky Rosen, who asked whether he would fire Wilson. “I’ve worked directly with her. She does a fantastic job, and … any suggestion that I or her or others are party to antisemitism is a mischaracterization.”“You are not a serious person,” the Nevada lawmaker replied. “You are not serious about rooting out, fighting antisemitism within the ranks of our DOD. It’s despicable. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”Rosen then asked if the far-right activist Laura Loomer was involved in the firing of a top national security staffer. Hegseth demurred, saying the decision was his to make, but the senator continued to press, even as the committee chair brought down his gavel to signal that she had run out of time for questions.“I believe your time is up, senator,” Hegseth said. A furious Rosen responded: “It is not up to you to tell me when my time is up. And I am going to say, Mr Secretary, you’re either feckless or complicit. You’re not in control of your department.” More