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      Benjamin Netanyahu set to address joint session of US Congress for fourth time

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      Benjamin Netanyahu is set to become the first foreign leader to address a joint session of the US Congress four times, despite deep differences with the Biden administration.The Israeli prime minister’s office said in a statement that a date for his address to Congress had yet to be set, but that it would not take place on 13 June as had been reported, due to a Jewish holiday.The formal invitation came from congressional leaders of both parties within hours of Joe Biden’s disclosure of the terms of a new peace proposal for Gaza endorsed by Israel. Over the weekend, however, Netanyahu played down the significance of any Israeli concessions in the new plan, and insisted that any proposal for a lasting ceasefire without the destruction of Hamas as a military and governing force would be a “non-starter”.He also has suggested that Israel was under obligation only to carry out the first of the peace plan’s three phases, which may increase Hamas’s reservations of a deal. The White House says it is waiting for an official response from Hamas on the proposal.Netanyahu had earlier defied Biden by adamantly opposing any steps towards the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and by pressing ahead with an offensive on the southernmost Gazan city of Rafah, despite repeated appeals not to from the Biden administration.Before this month’s scheduled appearance, Netanyahu was the only foreign leader apart from Winston Churchill to be accorded the honour of an address to a joint sitting of Congress three times. With his fourth address, he will outdo even Churchill in the record books.The invitation to Congress is a reminder than while Biden is seeking to influence Israeli politics to forge a peace agreement for Gaza and a broader long-term settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu also has the means to sway US politics – and possibly hurt Biden’s re-election chances if he were to accuse the president of being insufficiently supportive.Netanyahu used an address to Congress in 2015 to speak out against the efforts of then President Barack Obama to reach an agreement with Tehran on Iran’s nuclear programme. The Israeli prime minister was highly critical of Biden last month when the president stopped a delivery of heavy bombs to Israel forces. More

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      Stormy Daniels says Trump should be sentenced to jail – as it happened

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      Stormy Daniels said she believes Donald Trump should be jailed and required to do community service after he was convicted last week on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election.Daniels, in her first interview since the conviction, told the Daily Mirror:
      I think he should be sentenced to jail and some community service — working for the less fortunate or being the volunteer punching bag at a women’s shelter.
      She said she didn’t know what the sentencing could be, but compared Trump to a child that needed a punishment “that not just matches the crime”.Daniels also urged Melania Trump to leave her husband “not because of what he did with me or other women but because he is a convicted felon”. She added:
      It’s been proven he is abusive; he was found liable for sexual assault and tax fraud and is now a criminal.
      Dr Anthony Fauci, the face of the US government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, took questions from a Republican-led congressional committee about the origins of the virus and whether US-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started.Meanwhile, jury selection continues in Hunter Biden’s trial in Wilmington, Delaware, on three firearms-related charges brought by special counsel David Weiss, a Trump appointee. Joe Biden released a statement saying that he has “boundless love for my son, confidence in him, and respect for his strength”. Also:
      Stormy Daniels said she believes Donald Trump should be jailed and urged Melania Trump to leave her husband, in her first interview after Trump was convicted last week on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election.
      Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order allowing him to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers in a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year.
      Kevin McCarthy, former Republican House speaker, said Americans should accept the results of November’s presidential race amid rising political tensions in the aftermath of Trump’s campaign finance violation conviction.
      Trump called on the supreme court to step in and annul his guilty verdict in a hush-money trial that left him with the unwanted distinction of being the first former US president to be a convicted felon.
      Biden has congratulated Claudia Sheinbaum for her historic win after she was elected Mexico’s first female president on Sunday.
      Bob Menendez, the embattled Democratic senator charged with bribery, will reportedly enter the race today to seek re-election in New Jersey as an independent. Andy Kim, the Democratic congressman running to replace Menendez’s Senate seat, said Menendez “isn’t running for the people of New Jersey, he’s doing it for himself.”
      Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee revealed that she has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and said her treatment may require her to be “occasionally absent” from Capitol Hill.
      Migration at the southern border surged to record numbers at the end of last year. Joe Biden’s expected executive order comes at a moment when the number of migrants crossing from Mexico is down in the past six months, a trend attributed to stronger enforcement on the part of the Mexican authorities but which is not expected to sustain itself.Biden initially rolled back Donald Trump’s restrictive border policies after taking office in January 2021, issuing orders to freeze his predecessor’s border wall construction and reissuing protections set up under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) scheme originally adopted by the Barack Obama White House.Biden suspended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy – whereby asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration claims were being considered – on the first day of his administration before the homeland security department formally cancelled it months later. The US supreme court subsequently upheld Biden’s approach following a lower court ruling against it.When Trump’s policy was in operation, Biden denounced it, saying:
      This is the first president in the history of the United States of America [under whom] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before.
      A recent Associated Press poll showed about two-thirds of voters, including 40% of Democrats, disapproved of Biden’s handling of the southern border.An attempt by the White House to cobble together legislation tightening US border restrictions by tying it to aid to Ukraine and Israel failed earlier this year after Republican lawmakers withdrew support, apparently at the urging of Donald Trump, who did not want Joe Biden to claim credit for resolving an issue he has attempted to make his own.Biden’s executive order will enable US immigration officials to quickly deport migrants who enter the country illegally without processing their asylum claims, according to CBS.Controversially, it will rely on a presidential authority known as 212 (f) which became infamous during Trump’s presidency because of its use to enforce certain immigration restrictions, including travel bans from Muslim countries.Like Trump’s restrictions, Biden’s order is likely to face legal challenges.Here’s more on the executive order that Joe Biden plans to sign to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers.Biden is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500. Mayors of several US border cities are expected to be present in the White House for Biden’s announcement.Biden’s move marks a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year. The order echoes a similar approach adopted by Donald Trump in 2018 when he was president and reverses Biden’s one-time philosophical opposition to his predecessor’s hostility to migrants.When he was a presidential candidate, Biden denounced Trump’s policy, saying it upended decades of US asylum law. He has been forced to change course as the number of asylum seekers coming through the US-Mexico border has surged during his presidency, with opinion polls consistently showing immigration to be at or near the top of voters’ concerns, ahead of inflation and the economy.Andy Kim, the Democratic congressman running to replace Bob Menendez’s Senate seat said the embattled New Jersey senator “isn’t running for the people of New Jersey, he’s doing it for himself.”As we reported earlier, Menendez is reportedly entering the race as an independent while he is on trial for allegedly accepting bribes.In a statement to the New Jersey Globe, Kim said:
      Americans are fed up with politicians putting their own personal benefit ahead of what’s right for the country. Everyone knows Bob Menendez isn’t running for the people of New Jersey, he’s doing it for himself. It’s beyond time for change, and I’m stepping up to restore integrity back into the U.S. Senate
      Donald Trump’s brazen pitch to 20 fossil-fuel heads for $1bn to aid his presidential campaign in return for promises of lucrative tax and regulatory favors is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat investigating the issue has said.“It certainly meets the definition of corruption as the founding fathers would have used the term,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said in an interview about Trump’s audacious $1bn request for big checks to top fossil-fuel executives that took place in April at his Mar-a-Lago club. He added:
      The quid pro quo – so called – is so very evident … I can’t think of anything that matches this either in terms of the size of the bribe requested, or the brazenness of the linkages.
      Whitehouse and his fellow Democrat Ron Wyden have launched a joint inquiry, as chairs of the Senate budget and finance panels respectively, into Trump’s quid-pro-quo-style fundraising, which already seems to have helped spur tens of millions in checks for a Trump Super Pac from oil and gas leaders at a 22 May Houston event.The two senators have written to eight big-oil chief executives and the head of the industry’s lobbying group seeking details about the Mar-a- Lago meeting, as has representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the oversight and accountability committee, who has begun a parallel investigation into the pay-to-play schemes that Trump touted to big oil leaders.Talking of lock him/her/them up, as Stormy Daniels would like the New York judge, Juan Merchan, to do with Donald Trump when he’s sentenced next month…There were chants of “lock him up, lock him up” at the annual convention of Massachusetts Democrats at the weekend, before attendees got down to the official business of nominating Elizabeth Warren to return to Washington as a US Senator for a third six-year term, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported.Warren said of Trump’s conviction: “The legal system worked. Donald Trump and his supporters were on attack against the courts, the judges, the juries, the witnesses. But the process worked as it is supposed to. The jurors listened to the evidence and they found him guilty; now he is a convicted felon.”She added that Trump can “cry, whine and lie, but he is a convicted felon.”Warren is also speaking out on X about reproductive rights.Meanwhile, Keith Boykin, film producer, political commentator and former aid in the Bill Clinton White House decided to fact check Trump on his past urging of the US justice system to lock up Hillary Clinton, and a few other things.How Trump’s deny-everything strategy could hurt him at sentencing is how the Associated Press headlines its latest analysis now that we’re in the sentencing phase following Donald Trump’s criminal conviction last Thursday.The news wire has a piece describing how the former US president and now felon has been on a rant and doesn’t seem any closer to taking responsibility for his actions in falsifying business records to cover up a fraud against the US electorate.The AP writes that he has not uttered any variation of the words that might benefit him most come sentencing time next month: “I’m sorry.”
      The fact, I think, that he has no remorse – quite the opposite, he continues to deny is guilt – is going to hurt him at sentencing. It’s one of the things that the judge can really point to that everybody is aware of — that he just denies this — and can use that as a strong basis for his sentence,” said Jeffrey Cohen, an associate professor at Boston College Law School and a former federal prosecutor in Massachusetts.
      Jeremy Saland, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, weighed in.
      If he turns around and blames the court, attacks prosecutors, decries this as a witch hunt, lies — you should have no misgiving: There will be consequences and there should be consequences.”
      Trump’s constant attacks on the prosecutors, judge and court system and his aggressive trial strategy — outright denying both claims of an extramarital affair by porn actor StormyDaniels and involvement in the subsequent scheme to buy her silence — would make any change of tune at his sentencing seem disingenuous.Stormy Daniels is warming up on X in the wake of her post-Trump-conviction interview calling for him to be jailed.Daniels gets a lot of flak from MAGA world and she chooses to engage with some of it, while also flagging her interview in the Daily Mirror.Daniels, proud porn star.Life choices.A fan from the weekend.Dr Anthony Fauci, the face of the US government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, took questions from a Republican-led congressional committee about the origins of the virus and whether US-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started.Meanwhile, jury selection continues in Hunter Biden’s trial in Wilmington, Delaware, on three firearms-related charges brought by special counsel David Weiss, a Trump appointee. Joe Biden released a statement saying that he has “boundless love for my son, confidence in him, and respect for his strength”. Also:
      Stormy Daniels said she believes Donald Trump should be jailed and urged Melania Trump to leave her husband, in her first interview after Trump was convicted last week on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election.
      Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order as early as Tuesday allowing him to effectively shut down the US border with Mexico to asylum-seekers crossing illegally when a daily threshold of crossings is exceeded, according to multiple reports.
      Kevin McCarthy, former Republican House speaker, said Americans should accept the results of November’s presidential race amid rising political tensions in the aftermath of Trump’s campaign finance violation conviction.
      Biden has congratulated Claudia Sheinbaum for her historic win after she was elected Mexico’s first female president on Sunday.
      Bob Menendez, the embattled Democratic senator charged with bribery, will reportedly enter the race today to seek re-election in New Jersey as an independent.
      Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee revealed that she has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and said her treatment may require her to be “occasionally absent” from Capitol Hill.
      Stormy Daniels said she believes Donald Trump should be jailed and required to do community service after he was convicted last week on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election.Daniels, in her first interview since the conviction, told the Daily Mirror:
      I think he should be sentenced to jail and some community service — working for the less fortunate or being the volunteer punching bag at a women’s shelter.
      She said she didn’t know what the sentencing could be, but compared Trump to a child that needed a punishment “that not just matches the crime”.Daniels also urged Melania Trump to leave her husband “not because of what he did with me or other women but because he is a convicted felon”. She added:
      It’s been proven he is abusive; he was found liable for sexual assault and tax fraud and is now a criminal.
      Democratic congressman Robert Garcia followed up his comments in the House hearing with a social media post criticizing Marjorie Taylor Greene for refusing to refer to Anthony Fauci as Dr Fauci.Greene is “totally insane” and a “national embarrassment”, Garcia posted to X. More

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      Bob Menendez: Democratic senator charged with bribery set to run as independent

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      Senator Bob Menendez has reportedly procured enough signatures to run for re-election as an independent, even while the incumbent Democrat faces bribery charges over his alleged work promoting the interests of the Egyptian government.NBC News reported on Thursday that Menendez secured the 800 signatures needed by 4 June to appear on the November ballot, although the senator’s team hopes to collect as many as 10,000 signatures before the Tuesday deadline.Menendez’s presence on the ballot could complicate Democrats’ efforts to hold on to the Senate seat, although Joe Biden won New Jersey by 16 points in 2020. New Jersey will hold its congressional primaries on Tuesday, and Congressman Andy Kim is expected to easily win the Democratic Senate primary. If Kim is victorious, he will face off against one of the four Republican Senate candidates in November.“People are fed up with a broken political system that only benefits the well-off and well-connected and fuels corruption,” Anthony DeAngelo, senior adviser to Kim, said in a statement. “Voters deserve better, and they’ll have a chance to vote for change next week and this November.”Menendez’s hopes for a victory in November appear bleak. A poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University last month showed Menendez receiving just 6% or 7% of the vote in hypothetical general election match-ups. But Menendez’s candidacy will allow him to fundraise for donations that can be used to help cover his lawyers’ bills, as campaign finance filings show the senator has already spent at least $2m on legal services.The news of Menendez’s candidacy comes as his bribery trial, which began this month, continues to unfold in Manhattan. Menendez has pleaded not guilty to charges that he accepted bribes – including gold bars, a luxury car and almost half a million dollars in cash – as he promoted Egypt’s interests in his influential role as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee.Following his indictment last year, Menendez stepped down as committee chair, but he has rejected demands for his resignation. More than 30 members of the Senate Democratic caucus, including fellow New Jerseyan Cory Booker, have now called on Menendez to resign.Menendez has maintained his innocence, but in a video shared in March, he acknowledged that the legal turmoil would prevent him from seeking the Democratic nomination in New Jersey’s Senate race.“Unfortunately the present accusations I am facing, of which I am innocent and will prove so, will not allow me to have that type of dialogue and debate with political opponents that have already made it the cornerstone of their campaign. New Jerseyans deserve better than that,” Menendez said.“I am hopeful that my exoneration will take place this summer and allow me to pursue my candidacy as an independent Democrat in the general election.” More

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      Only 1% of Americans serving in military is ‘problematic’, Democrat Pat Ryan says

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      The New York Democratic representative Pat Ryan said that having only 1% of Americans serving in the US military is “deeply problematic as a democracy”.In an interview with CBS’s Face The Nation ahead of Memorial Day, Ryan, who is a veteran of the US army, said: “When you lose touch between those that are fighting our wars and their families and everyone else, that’s something so essential that we have to figure out how to bring folks together, and get more folks serving.”Ryan, who did two tours in Iraq, said that he is working on recruiting more Americans to serve in the military.Speaking alongside Florida’s Republican representative and army veteran Mike Waltz, Ryan said: “A lot of the work we did … on the defense bill is recruiting. Every service has been challenged on recruiting numbers and we’ve been pushing a bunch of directions to say that is not acceptable to the department of defense. And we’re starting to see the numbers come up.”To Waltz, “service doesn’t just have to be in the military,” as he said that both he and Ryan are advocates of “getting us back to national service as a country”.“That’s not a draft, that doesn’t necessarily have to be in uniform,” he said, adding: “It could be with the national park, inner-city tutoring, elderly care. But how do we get young people out in an environment where they’re learning leadership, discipline, followership, serving a cause bigger than themselves and with fellow Americans who may not look or come from the same backgrounds as them.”The two representatives also spoke of the need for bipartisanship when it comes to supporting veterans. For Ryan, the “most powerful thing” he has done in his time in Congress since he assumed office in 2023 was cleaning the Vietnam Veterans Memorial alongside other veterans.“I mean, there’s so many divisive forces, and so to get together with fellow veterans, all services, all generations, and just actually do something with your hands that improves the world, that honors our veterans,” Ryan said.Waltz echoed Ryan’s sentiments, saying: “I saw the acrimony and the in-fighting and I said, ‘You know, let’s get a group of veterans together’… I think that’s important for the American people to see. To see us honoring our forefathers, to see us where Democrat, Republican, Black, white, brown, none of that matters. It just matters that we’re all Americans, we’re all veterans.”There are currently over 18 million veterans who represent 6% of the country’s adult population. According to the Pew Research Center, veterans who served in the last 30 years comprise the largest number of living veterans in the US.In 1980, approximately 18% of US adults were veterans. In 2022, that number dropped to 6%. The center cites the falling trend to a decrease in active-duty personnel following the end of the military draft in 1973.The center also reports that as the amount of veterans declines over the next 25 years, women, Hispanic and Black adults, and adults below the age of 50 will make up larger shares of the total US veteran population. More

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      Congress’s latest ‘antisemitism’ hearing was an ugly attack on Palestinian rights | Moira Donegan

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      If you didn’t know what was really going on at US college campuses, the congressional hearing on Thursday – in which the presidents of Northwestern and Rutger’s and the chancellor of UCLA were called to testify before a Republican-controlled House committee – would do little to inform you.The House committee on education and the workforce has held six – yes, six – public events to draw attention to the supposed crisis on campus in the months since the 7 October attack on Israel. They’ve hauled university presidents to Washington to harangue them, allegedly for not being sufficiently punitive toward pro-Palestinian students and faculty. These hearings have been used to belittle and antagonize university faculty and students and have fed racist and anti-intellectual moral panics that have led to the resignations of several of the university presidents who have been called to testify, notably including Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard.The hearings have aimed to pressure colleges and universities to crack down on a wide variety of politically disfavored speech, particularly pro-Palestinian and anti-war speech, and particularly that of students and faculty of color. In many cases, this pressure seems to have yielded the desired results: at Columbia, Minouche Shafik, the university president, twice ordered the NYPD onto campus to conduct violent mass arrests of anti-genocide student protesters; the first of these raids came the day after Shafik testified before the House committee and disparaged her own students in degrading terms.But on Thursday, at least, the university administrators seemed less nervous, a bit more subdued – even if they were not willing to defend the rights of their anti-war students or correct the Republicans’ lies about them.Michael Schill, president of Northwestern, Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers and Gene Block, chancellor of UCLA, were calm, if occasionally annoyed, as the Republicans on the committee told them they should be “ashamed” for using insufficient violence against protesters, called for the defunding of specific programs and the firing of individual faculty members, demanded that undergraduate students be expelled and compared pro-Palestinian demonstrators with Nazis and the segregationist George Wallace. At one point, a Republican congressman also digressed into a prolonged grievance over the firing of a Northwestern football coach.The Republican outrage at the college administrators is nominally due to what they say is a “scourge of antisemitism” on these campuses. That pretext is supported by the false conflation of anti-Zionism or simple concern for Palestinian life with antisemitic animus – a dangerous and insulting conflation that was made repeatedly and without contradiction throughout the hearing. In reality, the false equivalence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is belied by the reality on the ground, in the campus anti-war encampments that have sprung up across the country and in the burgeoning young Jewish anti-Zionist movement. In the real world, Jewish students are not only safe and welcome in the encampments and in the broader anti-war movement; they are frequently emerging as intellectual and organizing leaders.But this reality was not convenient for the Republicans, who hope to cynically use a fear of antisemitism to provide a shield of moral righteousness to their anti-education, anti-diversity, anti-intellectual and fundamentally racist project. The flimsy pretext of fighting antisemitism was required to provide a thin pretext for an effort that is at its core about rooting out and punishing disfavored ideologies and attempting to eliminate them from the public sphere. To say that this is an insult to the history of antisemitism would be an understatement.The attempt to paint the anti-war movement as violent and malicious veered, at times, into the absurd. In one prolonged exchange, the hearing was shown a viral video, produced by a young Zionist influencer at UCLA. In the video, the man is standing in a path on campus, facing a small group of silent pro-Palestinian protesters wearing keffiyehs. The young man declares that he wants to pass them to go into an academic building. The students are mostly silent; one seems to ask him to use a different entrance. “I want to use THAT door,” the man says, pointing, and looking back at the camera. The protesters are quiet; they do not move. No one is violent, or even particularly agitated. The Republican committee members referred to this video repeatedly and in dramatic terms throughout the hearing, claiming it represented an epidemic of Jewish students being violently refused access to campus facilities.Meanwhile, other events on UCLA’s campus went largely unremarked. For while a pro-Palestinian encampment was present on UCLA’s campus for some days, so were pro-Israel demonstrators, whose much better-funded demonstration featured large groups of Zionist protestors bussed in from off campus, along with a jumbotron that played pro-Israel propaganda at all hours. When they were there, the Zionist group jeered and taunted the anti-genocide protesters, allegedly yelling racial slurs and rape threats and even allegedly releasing rats into the encampment.On the night of 30 April, a large group from the pro-Israel camp, many of them wearing Halloween masks, violently attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment. They brought “knives, bats, wooden planks, pepper spray and bear mace”, according to one witness, and proceeded to beat the anti-genocide protesters, pushing many into the ground using barricades. The police, whom UCLA had summoned to campus to help maintain order, stood by and allowed the attack to continue for hours. They seem to have assessed, correctly, what they were there to protect, and who they weren’t.At the hearing on Thursday, the Republicans went to extensive lengths to criticize universities that have engaged in negotiations with their student protest encampments, calling these talks “capitulation” to “pro-terror” and “pro-Hamas” forces. Since the encampments sprung up at many campuses this spring, not all universities have chosen to disperse their students by having them beaten and arrested; some have engaged in dialogue – with varying degrees of good faith – and attempted to persuade the students to pack up the tents in exchange for material concessions.At Northwestern, the successful negotiations resulted in a pledge from the administration to include funding for five undergraduate students and two faculty members from Palestine to come to campus, as part of the university’s broader international programming. This promise to include Palestinian scholars in campus life seemed to particularly offend the Republicans, who demanded to know why Jewish affinity groups had not been consulted before the commitment was made.This is not typical of such university funding decisions: Why would a Russian-speakers’ club, say, be consulted before a scholarship was offered to a Ukrainian student? But the message from the outraged Republicans was clear: the inclusion of Palestinians in university life, they feel, should be subject to a Jewish person’s veto.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Senate Republicans block bipartisan border security bill for a second time

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      Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan border security bill for a second time, part of an attempt by Chuck Schumer to flip the script on immigration – a major political liability for Joe Biden and Democrats in this year’s election.The 43-50 vote was far short of the necessary 60 votes needed to advance the legislation. Republicans, who have repeatedly demanded Democrats act on the border, abandoned the compromise proposal at the behest of Donald Trump who saw it was a political “gift” for Biden’s re-election chances.In bringing the proposal to the floor, Democrats hoped the doomed effort would underline their argument that Republicans are not serious about addressing the situation at the US border with Mexico, an issue that polls show is a major concern among voters.“To those who’ve said for years Congress needs to act on the border,” said Schumer, the Senate majority leader, in a floor speech before the vote. “This bipartisan bill is the answer, and it’s time show we’re serious about fixing the problem.”Democrats had spent the days leading up to Thursday vote hammering the message that the president and his party are trying to solve the issue, but have been thwarted by Republicans following Trump’s lead.“Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system,” Biden said in a statement. “If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.”Biden trails Trump in national and battleground-state surveys. Voters trust the former president over Biden to tackle the border issue by a wide margin, according to several recent surveys, with immigration often ranking as a top concern.In February, after months of negotiations, a bipartisan group of senators had unveiled an immigration compromise – legislation Republicans said was necessary to unlock their support for a foreign aid package that included assistance to Ukraine.The legislation, which would have made major changes to immigration law and received endorsements from the National Border Patrol Council and the US Chamber of Commerce, initially appeared to have the support to pass. But then Trump denounced the plan as weak and demanded his allies in the Senate abandon it. They quickly followed his lead.When it came to the floor, the measure failed in a 50-49 vote, far short of the 60 ayes needed to move forward. All but four Republicans opposed it. They were joined by a group of liberal and Latino Democrats who argued that the approach was too punitive and failed to include relief for immigrants who have lived and worked in the US for years.“The Senate border bill once again fails to meet the moment by putting forth enforcement-only policies and failing to include provisions that will keep families together,” the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said in a statement this week, urging a vote against the bill, which none of its members were involved in negotiating. They called on Congress to pass legislation to protect Dreamers, immigrants who were brought to the US as children, and to expand work visas.No Republican voted for the bill this time around. Instead Republicans accused Schumer of holding a “show vote”, aimed at protecting Democrats’ narrow majority ahead of this year’s election.“This is not trying to accomplish something. This is about messaging now,” Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who helped negotiate the border deal, said earlier this week. “This is trying to poke Republicans rather than try to actually solve a problem.”Kyrsten Sinema, an independent from Arizona who negotiated the compromise with Lankford, also opposed Schumer’s move, which she called an act of “political theater”.“To use this failure as a political punching bag only punishes those who were courageous enough to do the hard work in the first place,” she said in a floor speech on Thursday.Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah, both Republican senators, also changed their vote, opposing the measure after supporting it in February. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the lone Republican senator to vote in favor of advancing the bill.But the bill also lost support from Democrats, among them Cory Booker, the senator of New Jersey, and Laphonza Butler of California. The liberal senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Alex Padilla of California again voted against it.In a statement, Booker said he voted for the bill in February in part because it included “critical foreign and humanitarian aid”, which was passed as a standalone package last month.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I remain committed to pursuing commonsense, bipartisan legislation to modernize our immigration system so that it aligns with our most fundamental values,” he said.The White House had lobbied Republicans in advance of the vote. Biden on Monday spoke to the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, urging them to “stop playing politics and act quickly to pass this bipartisan border legislation”, according to a White House summary of the conversations.“You caused this problem,” McConnell said he told Biden during their call, while urging the president to reinstate Trump-era immigration policies. “Why don’t you just allow what the previous administration was doing?” McConnell said he told the president.Since the bill’s failure in February, Biden has taken a series of executive actions to stem the flow of migration and speed up the asylum process, which can take months or even years. But the administration has maintained there are limits to what the president can do unilaterally.“Only Congress can fix our broken immigration system,” the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said in a statement after the vote. “I urge Congress to do so. In the meantime, we will continue to enforce the law with full force with the limited resources we have.”In advance of the vote, Schumer repeatedly acknowledged that he did not expect all 51 members of the Democratic caucus to support it. Johnson had already declared it “dead on arrival”.In a statement, the speaker called the procedural vote an “election year Hail Mary” by Democrats and said the onus was on the president to “use his executive authority to finally secure the border and protect American families”.The measure was designed to clamp down on illegal border crossings, which reached record levels last year, though the overall numbers have dropped in recent months. Among its provisions, the bill proposes provisions that would make it more difficult to seek asylum in the United States, while expanding detention facilities and speeding up the deportation process for those who enter the country unlawfully.It would also institute a new emergency authority that would in effect close the border if the number of migrants encountered by immigration officials averaged more than 4,000 people a day at the border over the course of one week. The authority would be triggered automatically if the average surpassed 5,000 a day or if 8,500 try to enter unlawfully in a single day.Democrats have emphasized the aspects of the bill they say would curtail fentanyl smuggling, which has led to a drug overdose epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of Americans each year. Despite Republican claims, illicit opioids are overwhelmingly smuggled over the border by US citizens, not migrants.The White House spokesman Andrew Bates wrote in a memo released on the eve of the vote: “Congressional Republicans have to choose: will they again decide that politics is more important than stopping fentanyl traffickers and saving the lives of innocent constituents? Joe Biden knows where he stands.” More

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      Leading Democrats demand Alito face investigation after second report of far right-linked flag

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      Leading Democrats are demanding that Samuel Alito recuse himself from election-related cases and also face investigation after a second report that a flag now associated with the far right was flying above one of his homes.Dick Durbin, the Senate judiciary chair, urged the US supreme court justice to step back from certain major cases and demanded John Roberts, the chief justice, implement an enforceable code of conduct on his bench, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded that the US Senate investigate.The demands follow a new report by the New York Times of a second incidence of flags flown at homes of Alito that are associated with the 6 January 2021 attack at the US Capitol.Durbin put out a statement late on Wednesday, saying: “This incident is yet another example of apparent ethical misconduct by a sitting justice, and it adds to the court’s ongoing ethical crisis. For the good of our country and the court, Justice Alito must recuse himself immediately from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection. And the chief justice must see how this is damaging the court and immediately enact an enforceable code of conduct.”Ocasio-Cortez also weighed in during an interview with the MSNBC host Chris Hayes late on Wednesday, calling on Senate Democrats to launch “active investigations”.The congresswoman said: “What we are seeing here is an extraordinary breach of not just the trust and the stature of the supreme court, but we are seeing a fundamental challenge to our democracy.”She added: “Samuel Alito has identified himself with the same people who raided the Capitol on January 6 and is now going to be presiding over court cases that have deep implications over the participants of that rally.“And while this is the threat to our democracy, Democrats have a responsibility for defending our democracy.”The New York Times reported that an “appeal to heaven” flag, which has been adopted by Christian nationalists, was flown at the summer home of Alito on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, last July and September. The flag was carried by some in the crowd during the far-right, violent insurrection at the US Capitol, where extremist supporters of Donald Trump broke in to try, in vain, to stop the US Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election over Trump.Also known as the pine tree flag, it was originally used on warships commanded by George Washington during the American revolutionary war against the ruling British. It has since been adopted by Christian nationalists who advocate for an American government based on Christian teachings.The second flag report comes after the paper also reported that an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia residence of Alito’s home shortly after the January 6 insurrection. Alito claimed his wife flew the flag briefly during a spat with neighbors over politics.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, posted on X: “Flying this flag is a political statement that is a clear and compelling reason for Alito’s recusal. He cannot responsibly sit on Trump-related cases when he has already signaled his sympathy with January 6th rioters. He owes the American people an explanation.”Sheldon Whitehouse also posted, with pictures of the offending flags.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Rhode Island Democratic senator said on X: “Did another neighbor make Alito’s wife mad? How many Maga battle flags does Alito need to fly for the court or the judicial conference to see there’s a problem?”Durbin has been pushing for regulation of the supreme court.He added: “This episode will further erode public faith in the court. The Senate judiciary committee has been investigating the ethical crisis at the court for more than a year, and that investigation continues. And we remain focused on ensuring the supreme court adopts an enforceable code of conduct, which we can do by passing the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act.”He has repeatedly called for the passing of legislation that the judiciary committee advanced last July. The supreme court has an internal, non-binding code of ethics.Neither the supreme court nor Alito had commented by Thursday morning. More

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      Mike Johnson’s woes continue after exodus of staff in run-up to elections

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      The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is reeling from a sudden staff exodus as he struggles to keep his position and the GOP’s tiny majority in the run-up to November’s elections.In the latest in a spate of resignations, Johnson’s well-connected communications director, Raj Shah, a former White House deputy press secretary under Donald Trump, has confirmed he is leaving, Axios reported. He is expected to depart by the end of the summer.News of his impending departure comes a day after it was announced that three top policy staff members, Brittan Specht, Jason Yaworske and Preston Hill, had quit and would leave by the end of May.All three worked for the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted in an internal party coup last October, but were retained by Johnson when he ascended to the speaker’s chair.The trio were reported to have committed to work for Johnson for six months and deemed valuable because they had served in top-table negotiations over budget and appropriations.Specht was McCarthy’s chief policy director, although Johnson replaced him with Dan Ziegler when he took office. Yaworske was the speaker’s key adviser on appropriations and budget issues, and had input into high-level haggling over spending bills.Hill oversaw House Republican policy on areas like artificial intelligence and on the education and the workforce committee, which has spearheaded high-profile hearings on antisemitism and free speech on university campuses.They are reported to be joining Michael Best Strategies, a lobbying group whose clients include T-Mobile and the confectionary giant Haribo, and whose senior staff include Reince Priebus, Trump’s former chief of staff.The mass departures from Johnson’s nine-member team follow the resignation last week of his office’s head of digital, Anang Mittal, who quit after superiors confronted him about colleague complaints about his work performance and allegedly “unprofessional outbursts”.Johnson’s office confirmed to Axios that a new digital director, Meredith Schellin, was expected to take over.The exit of Shah in particular is seen as a blow. With his White House experience, he was regarded as a link to Trump loyalists as Johnson has struggled to fend off attacks on his speakership from the far right.Johnson recently survived an attempt by the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to oust him, prevailing over her motion with the help of Democrats.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTaylor Greene, an outspoken opponent of aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia, accused Johnson of “passing the Democrats’ agenda” after he ushered a multibillion aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan through a House vote.Johnson put a brave face on Shah’s departure while paying generous tribute to his contribution.“Because of the unprecedented circumstances under which I became Speaker, I needed an experienced leader with talent and gravitas to build and drive our message,” Johnson told Axios. “I am grateful Raj agreed to step up and serve. He has become a trusted advisor and built an incredible communications team. Raj has fulfilled his commitment to us and I wish him continued success.”The praise echoed a tribute he had earlier paid to the staffers he inherited from McCarthy.“Because the 118th Congress became the first in history to vote to change Speakers midstream, these friends committed to assist us for the first six months of the transition, and through some of the most difficult policy challenges in decades,” he told Punchbowl in an emailed statement. “We are truly happy for them as they now pursue their new opportunities in the private sector, and we know they will be a great success.” More