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      ‘Let’s have that fight’: McCarthy and Gaetz go to war over shutdown deal

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      Simmering hostility between Republicans over the bipartisan deal that averted a government shutdown descended into open political warfare on Sunday, a rightwing congressman saying he would move to oust Kevin McCarthy and the embattled House speaker insisting he would survive.“We need to rip off the Bandaid. We need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” the Florida representative Matt Gaetz told CNN’s State of the Union, saying he would file a “motion to vacate” in the next few days.McCarthy, Gaetz said, lied about “a secret deal” struck with Democrats to later pass money for Ukraine that was left out of the compromise agreement, and misled Republicans about working with the opposition at all.The bill keeping the government funded for 47 days passed the House on Saturday night 335-91, 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in support. It cleared the Senate 88-9 and was signed by Joe Biden.In remarks at the White House on Sunday, Biden said the measure extending funding until 17 November, and including $16bn in disaster aid, prevented “a needless crisis”.But, Biden said: “The truth is we shouldn’t be here in the first place. It’s time to end governing by crisis and keep your word when you give it in the Congress. I fully expect the speaker to keep his commitment to secure the passage of support needed to help Ukraine as they defend themselves against aggression.”Asked if he expected McCarthy to stand up to extremists, Biden replied: “I hope this experience for the speaker has been one of personal revelation.”McCarthy hit back at Gaetz, branding him a showman “more interested in securing TV interviews” than keeping government functioning.“I’ll survive,” McCarthy told CBS’s Face the Nation. “You know, this is personal with Matt. He wanted to push us into a shutdown, even threatening his own district with all the military people there who would not be paid.“… So be it. Bring it on. Let’s get it over with it, and let’s start governing. If he’s upset because he tried to push us into shutdown and I made sure the government didn’t shut down, then let’s have that fight.”Gaetz said he would no longer hold to an agreement made in January to support McCarthy in exchange for concessions including a hard position on federal funding. That deal included a loosening of rules to allow a single member to file a motion to vacate, the beginning of the process to remove a speaker.“The only way Kevin McCarthy is speaker of the House at the end of this coming week is if Democrats bail him out, and they probably will,” said Gaetz.“I’m done owning Kevin McCarthy. We made a deal in January to allow him to assume the speakership and I’m not owning him any more because he doesn’t tell the truth. And so if Democrats want to own Kevin McCarthy by bailing him out I can’t stop them. But then he’ll be their speaker, not mine.”McCarthy would need 218 votes to keep his job. Some senior Democrats said they would not vote to save him and would back the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, instead.“Kevin McCarthy is very weak speaker,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told CNN, saying she would support Gaetz’s motion.McCarthy “has clearly has lost control of his caucus. He has brought the US and millions of Americans to the brink, waiting until the final hour to keep the government open and even then only issuing a 4[7]-day extension. We’re going to be right back in this place in November.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to reporters on Saturday, Jeffries said the deal represented a “total surrender by rightwing extremists”.Republicans loyal to McCarthy also attacked Gaetz and the rightwing House Freedom Caucus for their “destructive” pledge to oust the speaker.“What I just heard was a diatribe of delusional thinking,” Mike Lawler of New York told ABC’s This Week. “They are the reason we had to work together with House Democrats. That is not the fault of Kevin McCarthy, that’s the fault of Matt Gaetz. He’s mealy mouthed and, frankly, duplicitous.”Relations between the speaker and Gaetz reached a new low with a testy confrontation in a meeting on Thursday. Gaetz accused McCarthy of orchestrating a social media campaign against him, the speaker saying he did not rate the congressman highly enough to do so.On Sunday, Gaetz insisted “this is about keeping Kevin McCarthy to his word, it’s not about any personal animosity”.Gaetz claimed McCarthy reached a “secret deal”, promising to introduce a standalone bill to continue funding Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russian invaders.A growing number of Republicans object to the US helping pay for the war. Gaetz said: “However you think about [Ukraine funding], it should be subject to open review [and] analysis, and not backroom deals, so I have to file a motion to vacate against speaker McCarthy this week.”On ABC, Gaetz said he did not expect to have enough votes to remove McCarthy immediately, “but I might have them before the 15th ballot”, an allusion to the time it took to elect the speaker in January.“I am relentless, and I will continue to pursue this objective,” Gaetz said. “And if all the American people see is that it is a uni-party that governs them, always the Biden, McCarthy, Jeffries government that makes dispositive decisions on spending, then I am seeding the fields of future primary contests to get better Republicans in Washington.”Shalanda Young, Biden’s budget director, blamed Republicans for bringing the government to the verge of a shutdown, and urged Congress to take a longer-term view.“We need to start today to make sure that we do not have this brinkmanship, last-minute anxiousness of the American people,” she told ABC. “Let’s do our jobs to not have this happen again. Let’s have full-year funding bills at the end of these 47 days.” More

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      Dianne Feinstein obituary

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      The US senator Dianne Feinstein, who has died aged 90, was long cherished by the CIA and others in the defence and intelligence community as someone whose staunch support they could rely on. Until one day they could not: on 11 March 2009 she launched an investigation into the CIA’s torture of detainees post-9/11.That investigation by the Senate intelligence committee, which she chaired, turned into a bitter struggle with the agency and it tried to block it. She did not buckle and finally, in December 2014, she published her report, revealing the scale and brutality of what the CIA had done and its repeated attempts to mislead Congress and the White House. On top of all that, the report found the torture had proved counter-productive in obtaining valuable intelligence.On the day of publication, she told the Senate: “There are those who will seize upon the report and say ‘see what Americans did’, and they will try to use it to justify evil actions or to incite more violence. We cannot prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again’.”Her fight was dramatic enough to interest Hollywood, and the film The Report was released in 2019, with Feinstein played by Annette Bening.What made her fight with the CIA so surprising was that it was out of kilter with her career before and after, as a Senate hawk. She voted for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – though she later expressed regret over the former – supported Republicans in defence procurement projects and defended the spy agencies in controversies such as illegal mass surveillance in 2013.Her reputation as a hawk frequently put her at odds with the Democratic left and this disillusionment with her grew rapidly in the latter part of her career.In February this year, facing calls to stand down as her physical and mental health declined, she said she would not seek re-election in 2024.There was much in her life she could look back on with pride: a trailblazer for women in politics; the calm leadership she displayed as mayor in San Francisco after the killings of her predecessor, George Moscone, and of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to an official position in the US; her success, albeit limited, in getting gun control through the US senate in 1994. But it was the torture report she cited as the achievement she was most proud.The first she heard of the torture was in September 2006, when Feinstein and other members of the intelligence committee were privately briefed by the then head of the CIA, Michael Hayden. Although Hayden played down what the CIA euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, Feinstein was troubled by what she heard.When she became chair of the intelligence committee in 2009 – its first female head – she launched the investigation. The final 6,700-page report remains classified, but she got around this by publishing a 500-page executive summary and that was damning enough.Between 2002 and 2008 the CIA had detained 119 men at “black sites” – secret locations around the world – and of these 39 had been subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions and “rectal rehydration”.In 2015, Feinstein worked with the Republican senator John McCain in steering through the Senate an amendment that reinforced a ban on torture. The McCain-Feinstein amendment was the kind of bipartisan consensus that Feinstein, a centrist, valued. But, as US politics became more polarised, her attempts to work with Republicans increasingly grated with fellow Democrats.When Donald Trump, as president, began to pack the supreme court with rightwingers, Democrats complained that Feinstein, who was the senior Democrat on the judiciary committee, did not put up enough of a fight. After the 2020 confirmation hearings of a Trump appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein left Democrats seething when she hugged the chair, Republican Lindsey Graham.Born in San Francisco, Dianne was the daughter of Betty (nee Rosenburg), a model, and Leon Goldman, a surgeon. Her family was affluent but she had a traumatic childhood: her mother was unstable and given to sudden rages due to an undiagnosed brain disorder. According to David Talbot, in his history of San Francisco in the 1960s through to the 80s, Season of the Witch (2012), Betty once chased her daughter with a knife around a dining table.Dianne attended a convent school before going to Stanford University, where she graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and history. She went on to secure a job on the state parole board. Although politics was overwhelmingly male-dominated, she was elected in 1969 on to the 11-member San Francisco board of supervisors, basically the city and county council. Runs for mayor in 1971 and 1975 proved unsuccessful.In 1976, she was the target of a bomb attack on her home claimed by a California-based leftwing terrorist group, the New World Liberation Front. The bomb was planted in a window flower box but failed to go off. A few months later, another group, the Environmental Life Force, claimed responsibility for shooting out the windows of her holiday home with a BB gun.She began to carry a concealed handgun for protection. In 1978, dispirited by the combination of the mayoral defeats and being targeted, she told a reporter she was on the verge of quitting politics.Only hours after this exchange, the mayor of San Francisco, Moscone, and Milk, a fellow supervisor, were shot dead in City Hall by a former supervisor. Feinstein was the first into Milk’s office. She told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “It was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life.” Checking Milk for a pulse, one of her fingers slipped into a bullet hole.As president of the board of supervisors at the time, she was well placed to take over as mayor, which she duly did, becoming the first female to occupy the post.She served until 1988. With Aids rampant, she supported many initiatives to help the gay community. She secured federal funding for an overhaul of the cable car network, which proved popular with residents and tourists.Influenced by seeing the damage to Milk’s body, she introduced in 1982 a local ordinance banning most residents from owning handguns. She had her own gun and 14 others that had been handed over in a buy-back scheme melted down and turned into a cross and given to Pope John Paul II on a visit to the Vatican.After an unsuccessful bid to become governor of California in 1990, she was elected as a US senator from California in 1992. She quickly made an impact, guiding through in 1994 the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, outlawing civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms, though with a proviso that it would expire in 2004 if not renewed, which it was not.She was ranked in 2018 as the second wealthiest senator, with her fortune estimated at about $88m (about £74m).Feinstein married three times: Jack Berman in 1956, with whom she had a daughter, Katherine, divorcing in 1959; Bertram Feinstein in 1962 until his death in 1978; and Richard Blum from 1980 to his death in 2022.She is survived by Katherine, three stepdaughters, and a granddaughter, Eileen. More

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      US House passes stopgap funding bill under the wire without funding for Ukraine

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      The House passed a bill Saturday to extend government funding for 45 days, sending the legislation to the Senate with just hours left to avert a federal shutdown. Unless Joe Biden signs a funding bill before midnight, the government will shut down.The bill passed the House in an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 335 to 91, with 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in supporting the legislation. Ninety Republicans opposed the bill.The bill – unveiled by the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, just hours before the final vote – would extend funding through 17 November and allocate $16bn for disaster aid. The House bill does not include additional funding for Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage among hard-right lawmakers.McCarthy introduced the bill under suspension of the rules, meaning he needed the support of two-thirds of House members to advance the proposal. Although Democrats criticized the bill’s lack of Ukraine funding, they ultimately provided McCarthy with the support needed to get the legislation across the finish line.Speaking after the vote, McCarthy expressed disappointment that a large share of his conference opposed the bill, but he said the intransigence displayed by hard-right Republicans left him with no other option.“It is very clear that I tried every possible way, listening to every single person in the conference,” McCarthy told reporters. “If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.”The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, celebrated the bill’s passage, saying: “[‘Make America Great Again’] Republicans have surrendered. All extreme rightwing policies have been removed from the House spending bill. The American people have won.”Prior to the House vote, the Senate had planned to hold a vote at 1pm ET on a separate stopgap spending bill, which would also keep the government open until 17 November and provide some funding for Ukraine’s war efforts as well as disaster relief aid.But the Senate vote was stalled after Republicans said they wanted to wait to see whether the House would be able to pass McCarthy’s proposal before the midnight deadline. In light of the movement in the House, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said he would not support advancing the Senate bill for the time being.“It looks like there may be a bipartisan agreement coming from the House,” McConnell told reporters at the Capitol. “Under these circumstances, I’m recommending a no vote, even though I very much want to avoid a government shutdown.”Now that the House has passed McCarthy’s bill, all attention turns to the Senate. Although Senate Democrats have voiced displeasure about approving a bill that does not include Ukraine funding, the House bill currently represents their only option to prevent a shutdown. Because of procedural hurdles, the Senate cannot hold a final vote on its own bill until Sunday at the earliest, when a shutdown would have already started.The rare weekend session came one day after the House failed to pass McCarthy’s initial stopgap bill, which would have extended government funding for another month while enacting steep spending cuts on most federal agencies.McCarthy’s proposal was rejected by 21 House Republicans, as hard-right members continued to insist they would not support a continuing resolution. Hard-right Republicans threatened to oust the speaker if he teamed up with Democrats to keep the government open, a viable threat when it only takes one member to introduce a motion to vacate the chair. Despite the criticism from his hard-right colleagues, McCarthy downplayed threats to his speakership on Saturday.“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it,” McCarthy told reporters. “There has to be an adult in the room. I am going to govern with what is best for this country.”As lawmakers made progress in their efforts to extend funding, the federal government was bracing for the possibility of the first shutdown in nearly five years. The White House has warned that a shutdown would force hundreds of thousands of government workers to go without pay, jeopardize access to vital nutritional programs and delay disaster relief projects.“Extreme House Republicans are solely – solely – to blame for marching us toward a shutdown. That is what we’re seeing right now,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Friday.Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, similarly blamed Republicans for a potential shutdown – although he used more colorful language to describe his congressional colleagues.“The damage to our nation’s reputation and critical programming, and chaos for America’s families is because of a small group of [Republican] peckerheads in the House,” Fetterman said on Saturday. “This national upheaval is inflicted by choice over nothing except Fox News face time and tributes to the lunatic fringe from their district.” More

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      The hidden cost of a shutdown: America’s battle with food insecurity

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      With 1 October 2023 looming, a US government shutdown appears imminent, and the farm bill is set to expire. Members of both the House and Senate have been drafting proposals for its renewal, which happens every five years. The bill is responsible for financing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that many Americans rely on to feed their families.Though hunger prevention advocates are calling for Congress to renew the bill before its expiration, the likelihood of a freshly revised iteration being near completion by the end of the day is low. Yet, food insecurity continues to rise in America.More than 34 million people, including nine million children, are struggling to put food on the table.In a recent household survey conducted by the US Census Bureau, more than 26 million Americans said they did not have enough to eat during the 12-day period of the study that concluded this month. That sample represents nearly a 50 percentage increase during a similar window from 2021. This upsurge is due to a number of factors, including the end of pandemic-era aid.Another study released this month by Feeding America reflected a similar finding, emphasizing the far-reaching consequences of hunger.That report underscored how the pandemic reshaped the landscape of food insecurity and its lingering effects, signaling one of America’s gravest growing crises. Approximately 80% of Americans experiencing hunger believe that inflation and rising food costs have worsened the issue of hunger nationwide and 93% of those surveyed expressed concern that the situation will deteriorate even more. They highlighted factors such as rising housing costs, job loss, unemployment, the presence of chronic health conditions or disabilities, and an abundance of low-paying jobs as significant contributors and interconnected root causes of their food vulnerability.“The pandemic not only put hunger in the spotlight, it also revealed just how many Americans were put in a situation that kept them from accessing the food they needed,” a spokesperson for Feeding America, a network of over 200 food banks nationwide, said. “And now, food prices and supply chain disruptions are affecting food banks, and households’ budgets for millions of families are tightening.”Another element of the rise in food insecurity, which saw almost 50 million Americans turning to food pantries and soup kitchens in 2022, is cuts to social assistance and fixed-income programs like food stamps, the child tax credit and pensions.“When someone is on a fixed income, it’s usually due to a disability, or that they are seniors,” said Marian Hutchins, executive director of the Father’s Heart Ministries. “Someone on disability is not allowed to work if they are receiving money for social security disability. So unless they can work and have it be off the books, they cannot get resources to match the rising cost of food.”Many who work on the front lines, like Hutchins, say the pandemic exacerbated this epidemic and exposed deep-seated vulnerabilities in our food systems and economic structures.At the non-profit Hutchins runs on the Lower East Side of New York, she said many keep returning because they tell her they simply can’t afford basic necessities, including food, on their own. And that number continues to be staggering, compounded by the end of the extra pandemic-era Snap – formerly the Food Stamp Program, which is still commonly referred to as just food stamps – benefits.Among their other food programs and services, the Father’s Heart Ministries, founded in 1997, hands out roughly 1,100 food pantry bags in a two-and-a-half hour window on Saturdays. Pre-pandemic, they averaged 560 guests in that same window. That’s a 96% increase. They’ve also seen a rise in new guest registration. Before the pandemic, they averaged 13 per Saturday – (during the pandemic, it was 43 per Saturday) – now, it’s closer to 20. That’s a 53% increase.Many reports and similar organizations echo this stark and steady increase, correlating it to the nearly 60% historic increase in poverty.“The Feeding America network of food banks distributed 5.3bn meals in fiscal year 2023,” the organization’s spokesperson said. “The latest Feeding America food bank pulse survey data shows that around 70% of responding food banks report seeing demand for food assistance increase or stay the same in July 2023 compared to June.”The CEO of City Harvest, New York City’s largest food rescue organization, Jilly Stephens, resonated those sentiments.“Average monthly visits to New York City food pantries and soup kitchens this year are up more than 60% compared to 2019,” she said. “City Harvest programs alone are seeing nearly 1m more visits each month than in 2019. In fact, the number of visits is nearly as high as at any point over the last three years. We know from previous crises that it can take years for food security levels to recover, and we expect the need to remain high for several years.”The pandemic has also particularly aggravated food insecurity among families with children and communities of color, who were already disproportionately affected by hunger before the outbreak. Many of these households don’t meet the eligibility criteria for federal nutrition programs, forcing them to turn to local food banks and other community food assistance programs for additional support. Research shows that there is a higher prevalence of hunger in African American, Latino and Native American communities that can be attributed to systemic racial injustices.Hutchins said food poverty is not as recognized of an issue as it once was because the glaring exigency of the pandemic has dwindled, so many Americans assume things are back to normal. But for many families struggling to feed their families, that’s far from the reality.“There was a lot of public awareness during the pandemic,” Hutchins said, “where media showed lines of people at soup kitchens and food pantries. People think it’s over now, but the same crazy food prices that we are all facing are being faced by those who have no alternatives but community food pantries. No one is talking about seniors or single-parent homes. Ignoring the problem could create more problems not only for our guests but for communities in general as people become desperate to survive.”That desperation to survive fueled by rising food costs is palpable. According to the Feeding America report, nearly 70% of Americans believe that the primary causes of hunger and food insecurity are inflation and increasing food prices.Food prices have been inflating in recent months due to factors such as supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index for food increased by 7.1% in July 2023 compared to the previous year.According to the recent food price outlook report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), it is expected that food prices will see a 5.9% increase this year.Specifically, prices for food at home – groceries from supermarkets – rose by 0.4% from June to July 2023 and were 3.6% higher compared to July 2022.The report also highlights expectations of continued price hikes across 10 food-at-home categories: beef and veal (4.2% increase), other meats (4.8%), poultry (3%), dairy products (4.1%), fats and oils (9.6%), processed fruits and vegetables (9.2%), sugar and sweets (9.3%), cereals and bakery products (9%), nonalcoholic beverages (7.6%) and other foods (7.4%).With no immediate end in sight, hunger prevention programs like the Father’s Heart Ministries have stepped in to fill the gap, turning to food organizations like City Harvest for ongoing support.Stephens said City Harvest supports grants and programs that provide funding and support for food access and justice solutions “led or informed by people with lived expertise, like the people that operate or participate in pantry services”.“Local food initiatives are critical to fighting food insecurity,” she continued, “because no one knows their neighborhood’s assets and challenges better than the people who live and work there.”Though many on the frontlines acknowledge there is no quick fix to food insecurity, they note that awareness is essential, and concerted efforts are needed to create lasting change and ensure that no one goes hungry. To address the widening gap of food deserts and overall insecurity in America, many advocates like Stephens and Hutchins are calling for increased Snap benefits, investing in workforce development and job training programs and initiatives, tackling the root causes of poverty and inequality through policy changes, and expanded access to food banks and other community-based food assistance programs.“One of the best ways to reduce food insecurity is a stronger farm bill,” Stephens said, “which is being reauthorized by Congress this year. The vast majority of the farm bill’s budget is devoted to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”While emphasizing the importance of transformative policy, Hutchins added that food insecurity is also a community-level issue.“Contributing and volunteering at places that are already providing food is the best way to start,” Hutchins said. “We can talk about the problem, but showing up to help is what our volunteers do.” More

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      House Republicans to meet after stopgap measure to avert shutdown fails by 232 to 198 votes – US politics live

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      From 4h agoThe House rejected a short-term spending bill aimed at averting a government shutdown, dealing a blow to Speaker Kevin McCarthy and likely cementing the chances of a shutdown less than 48 hours away.The bill, known as a continuing resolution, failed by a vote of 198 in favor to 232 opposed.Twenty one Republicans joined Democrats in voting against the bill. Hard-right members of McCarthy’s conference refused to support the bill despite its steep spending cuts of nearly 30% to many agencies and severe border security provisions, calling it insufficient.McCarthy is planning to meet with the GOP conference on Friday afternoon to discuss next steps. Ahead of the vote, he all but dared his hard-right colleagues to oppose the package. “Every member will have to go on record where they stand,” he said.Despite McCarthy’s concessions, members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus remained adamant on Friday that they would not support a continuing resolution.The Senate is scheduled to take another procedural vote at 1pm on Saturday to advance its stopgap bill to avert a government shutdown.Donald Trump plans to attend at least the first week of his $250m civil fraud trial brought by the New York attorney general Letitia James, according to court documents.James sued Trump and his adult sons last year, alleging widespread fraud connected to the Trump Organization and seeking $250m and professional sanctions. The trial is scheduled to start on 2 October.Trump’s plan to attend the trial was revealed in court filings in a separate lawsuit Trump filed against his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, according to a Politico report. The former president had been scheduled to undergo a deposition in the case on Tuesday in Florida, but the documents show that Trump’s attorneys “requested to reschedule his deposition so that he could attend his previously-scheduled New York trial in person.”The filings state:
      Through counsel, Plaintiff represented that he would be attending his New York trial in person—at least for each day of the first week of trial. He also stated that, because of the trial, he would be unavailable on any business day between October 2, 2023 and the end of his trial.
      US district judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled a 16 October hearing on federal prosecutors’ request for a limited gag order in the case charging Donald Trump with scheming to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.Special counsel Jack Smith had requested a gag order barring Trump from making inflammatory and intimidating public statements about potential witnesses, lawyers and other people involved in the case.Smith’s proposed order would bar “statements regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses” and “statements about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors that are disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating.”Trump’s lawyers earlier this week denounced the gag order request as a “desperate attempt at censorship”.National parks across the US will close to visitors as soon as Sunday if Congress is unable to avert a government shutdown, the Department of Interior has announced.“Gates will be locked, visitor centers will be closed, and thousands of park rangers will be furloughed,” the interior department wrote in a news release on Friday.
      Accordingly, the public will be encouraged not to visit sites during the period of lapse in appropriations out of consideration for protection of natural and cultural resources, as well as visitor safety.
      The plan, outlined in an updated National Parks Service (NPS) contingency plan, emphasizes the need to protect park resources and ensure visitor health and safety.The decision marks a notable departure from how the national park system was handled under the Trump administration during the last government shutdown. During a funding stalemate that stretched for 35 days through the end of 2018 into 2019, officials ordered parks to remain accessible to the public while they were without key staff, resources and services.That decision culminated in destruction and chaos at some of the country’s most cherished landmarks such as Joshua Tree national park, with high levels of vandalism, accumulation of human waste and trash and significant risks to ecosystems and unsupervised visitors.The US stands just days from a full government shutdown amid political deadlock over demands from rightwing congressional Republicans for deep public spending cuts.Fuelled by bitter ideological divisions among the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, funding for federal agencies will run out at midnight on 30 September unless – against widespread expectation – Congress votes to pass a stopgap measure to extend government funding.It is an event with the potential to inflict disruption to a range of public services, cause delays in salaries, and wreak significant damage on the national economy if it becomes prolonged.At the heart of the looming upheaval is the uncertain status of the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who is under fire from members of his own party for agreeing spending limits with Joe Biden, that members of the GOP’s far-right “Freedom Caucus” say are too generous and want to urgently prune.Here are seven things you should know about the looming shutdown.As part of his plea deal, Atlanta-area bail bondsman Scott Hall pleaded guilty to five counts of “conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties”, a misdemeanor.He will serve five years of probation as part of the sentencing agreement, Judge Scott McAfee said during a hearing in Fulton county superior court.He also agreed to a $5,000 fine, 200 hours of community service and a ban on polling and election administration-related activities, the judge said.Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area bail bondsman, pleaded guilty to multiple criminal charges in the Georgia election interference case, becoming the first defendant in the Fulton county case to take a plea deal.Hall was charged in relation to the alleged breach of voting machine equipment in the wake of the 2020 election in Coffee county.Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts as part of a negotiated deal. He appeared before Judge Scott McAfee on Friday afternoon after reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors.Addressing Hall, the judge asked:
      You understand that you’re pleading guilty today because you believe there exists a factual basis that supports the plea, and you are pleading guilty because you are, in fact, guilty?
      Hall replied:
      Yes sir.
      Back at the government shutdown, as it were, the National Organization for Women, or Now, has called for leaders in Washington to get their act together.In a statement, Christian F Nunes, Now’s national president, gets slightly ahead of events, presuming no solution will be found before midnight tomorrow, the final funding deadline.It’s a powerful statement, all the same:
      Congress has failed in its most basic function. The extremists who control the House of Representatives have shut down the government – out of incompetence, ignorance, and cruelty.
      “This is not just about politics – far from it. When you’re living day to day, paycheck to paycheck, wondering how you’ll cope with a shutdown is chilling to the core.
      “Real people will be harmed because of this inexcusable partisan gamesmanship. For weeks, they’ve been dreading this day – not knowing if they’ll be able to pay the rent, afford childcare, or feed their families.
      “Those who are responsible for today’s shutdown are causing fear and uncertainty to be felt not only by government workers and their families, but by millions more who are impacted by this crisis – starting with the 7 million women and children who rely on vital nutrition assistance, but will be turned away when the funds dry up just days from now.”
      The shutdown is being driven by hard-right House Republicans, opposing Kevin McCarthy, a speaker from their own party, and refusing to compromise on policy priorities including reducing funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia and advancing various “culture war” proposals also unacceptable to Democrats who control the Senate and the White House.Nunes continued:
      It couldn’t be clearer – these extremists are willing to cause such disruption, pain, and uncertainty because they’d rather tear down the government than make it work.
      “And now they’re holding every function of government hostage until their extremist demands are met—including more restrictions on abortion, cutting access to Social Security and Medicare, allowing discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and slashing funding for cancer research, safe and clean drinking water and making our elections less safe, and making it harder to vote.
      “Now members are calling on their representatives to shut off the shutdown. Not in months or weeks, but days or hours. They may not feel the pain they cause, but we know people who do.”
      Robert F Kennedy Jr is reportedly set to end his challenge to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination and run as an independent instead.According to Mediaite, Kennedy, 69 and a scion of a famous political dynasty – a son of the former US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, a nephew of President John F Kennedy – will announce his run in Pennsylvania on 9 October.“Bobby feels that the Democratic National Committee is changing the rules to exclude his candidacy so an independent run is the only way to go,” the website quoted a “Kennedy campaign insider” as saying.Kennedy is an attorney who made his name as an environmental campaigner before achieving notoriety as a prominent vaccine skeptic, particularly over Covid-19.He has often flirted with controversy, not least in a podcast interview released this week in which he repeated a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on New York.Polling has shown Kennedy performing relatively well against Biden, the incumbent president, in the Democratic primary, but not close to posing a serious threat.However, Biden aides are reportedly nervous about the possible impact of third-party candidates in a likely presidential election match-up with Donald Trump.Polling shows widespread belief that at 80, Biden is too old to serve an effective second term in the White House. Trump is only three years younger – and faces 91 criminal charges, including for election subversion, and assorted civil threats – but polls show less concern among the public that he could be unfit to return to office.Whether Kennedy, the Green Party pick, Cornel West, or a notional nominee backed by No Labels, a supposedly centrist group, a third-party candidate is widely seen to be likely to peel more support from Biden than Trump, thereby potentially handing the presidency to the Republican.Rightwing figures (prominent among them Steve Bannon, formerly Trump’s White House strategist) have encouraged Kennedy to run against Biden or as an independent.As cited by Mediate, in July the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said: “I think he should run as a third-party candidate because I do think he should, he would win … because his party’s radical elements, what we call the woke, have embraced this fascist clampdown on language.”On Friday, as observers digested news of Kennedy’s imminent change of course, the author Michael Weiss referred to infamous electoral sabotage carried out by Roger Stone and other Republican operatives when he said: “The ratfuckery was self-evident from day one.”But not everyone thought Kennedy’s move would be bad for Biden.Joe Conason, editor of the National Memo, said: “Go Bobby! Running ‘independent’ means you’ll draw more voters from the candidate you resemble most in political ideology, personal conduct, and narcissistic mentality. (That’s Trump, not Biden.)”More:Retiring as chair of the joint chiefs of staff, the army general Mark Milley directed a parting shot at Donald Trump, the president he served but who he seemed to call a “wannabe dictator”.Speaking at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia, this morning, Milley said of the US armed forces: “We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion.“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or tyrant or a dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.“We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”Trump, who nominated Milley in 2019, did not immediately comment. But Milley’s struggles to contain Trump, particularly in 2020, the tumultuous final year of his presidency, have been long and widely reported.Such struggles concerned foreign policy, as Milley and other officials sought to stop the erratic president provoking confrontations with foes including China and Iran.But Milley and others also had to keep the US military out of domestic affairs, as Trump chafed against nationwide protests for racial justice, openly yearning to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and thereby call in the army.Last week saw publication of an in-depth profile by the Atlantic, in which Milley again expressed his regret over an infamous appearance with Trump in June 2020, when the president marched from the White House to a historic church, slightly damaged amid the protests, in an attempt to project a strongman image.The Atlantic profile prompted Trump to rail at Milley again, calling a widely reported conversation in which the general sought to reassure his Chinese counterpart that Trump would not order an attack “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”Milley has said he has taken “adequate safety precautions” against potential threats from Trump supporters perhaps also encouraged by the words of Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican congressman who told supporters Milley should be hanged.Full story:The House GOP leadership have made the following changes to the House floor schedule:Members are advised that votes are now expected in the House tomorrow, Saturday 30 September 2023.This is a change from the House GOP leadership’s previously announced schedule.House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called on Republicans to work with Democrats to avert a shutdown by putting a bipartisan stopgap funding bill on the House floor for a vote when the measure arrives from the Senate, according to a Washington Post report.“Republicans face a clear choice: put the bipartisan continuing resolution on the floor of the House for an up-or-down vote and we can avoid the extreme Maga Republican shutdown and end this nightmare,” Jeffries said.
      Or fail to put the bipartisan continuing resolution sent over from the Senate on the floor of the House for an up-or-down vote because your objective, apparently, as extreme Maga Republicans is to shut the government down.
      The top three House Democrats held a last-minute press conference after the vote on a stopgap funding measure failed.House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters that House Democrats met this morning and are “unified in the position that we support” the Senate’s bipartisan continuing resolution.From the Hill’s Mychael Schnell:The House GOP conference will meet at 4pm ET after a measure on a stopgap funding bill that would have averted a federal shutdown failed.Jeffrey Clark, the former justice department lawyer who schemed with Donald Trump and others to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and other states, has been denied in his attempt to move his case from state court to federal court. More

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      House votes against stopgap bill in blow to McCarthy as shutdown highly likely

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      The House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, suffered another embarrassing defeat on Friday, after hard-right lawmakers tanked his stopgap funding bill that would have averted a federal shutdown on Sunday morning.McCarthy’s proposed stopgap measure, which would have funded the government for another month while enacting severe spending cuts on most federal agencies, failed in a vote of 198 to 232, as 21 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the legislation.With less than 36 hours left before government funding lapses, McCarthy appeared to be out of options to prevent a shutdown. Speaking to reporters before the vote, McCarthy tried to pitch the stopgap proposal as a means of buying time to continue negotiations over longer-term spending bills.“We actually need a stopgap measure to allow the House to continue to finish its work – to make sure our military gets paid, to make sure our border agents get paid as we finish the job,” McCarthy said.But that argument failed to sway the hard-right members of McCarthy’s conference, who have insisted for weeks that they would not back any short-term spending bill, known as a continuing resolution. With such a narrow House majority, McCarthy could only afford to lose a handful of votes within his conference to pass the continuing resolution without any Democratic support. The bill cleared a key procedural hurdle on Friday afternoon, but the proposal could not garner enough support for final passage.Republican leaders informed members that votes were now expected in the House on Saturday, suggesting McCarthy may try again to pass a continuing resolution, but expectations for some kind of breakthrough were low on Friday afternoon.In an attempt to appease the holdouts heading into the Friday vote, McCarthy has worked to advance a series of longer-term appropriations bills that include some of the steep spending cuts demanded by hard-right Republicans. On Thursday night, the House successfully passed three of those bills, but an agricultural funding proposal failed amid criticism from more moderate Republicans.Despite McCarthy’s concessions, members of the hard-right House freedom caucus remained adamant on Friday that they would not support a continuing resolution.“The continuing resolution being offered today is a bad deal for Republicans,” the congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of the leaders of the holdouts, said in a floor speech before the final vote. “That’s why I’m voting against it.”The unrelenting blockade staged by Gaetz and his allies has enraged some of the more moderate members of the House Republican conference – including Congressman Mike Lawler, who represents a New York district that Joe Biden won in 2020.“There’s only one person to blame for any potential government shutdown and that’s Matt Gaetz,” Lawler told reporters. “He’s not a conservative Republican; he’s a charlatan.”McCarthy’s continuing resolution also included severe spending cuts for most of the federal government, sparking impassioned criticism among House Democrats. Every member of the House Democratic caucus opposed the continuing resolution, leaving McCarthy with no option for passing the bill.“Once again, extreme Republicans in the House have demonstrated their complete and utter inability to govern,” the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said after the vote. “We are in the middle of a Republican civil war that has been ongoing for months and now threatens a catastrophic government shutdown that will hurt everyday Americans.”Meanwhile, the Senate continued to work on its own bipartisan spending proposal, advancing the bill in a vote of 76-22 on Thursday. That measure would keep the government funded until 17 November, and it includes roughly $6bn in funding each for disaster relief efforts and aid for Ukraine.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut House Republicans have roundly rejected that bipartisan bill, denouncing the additional funding for Ukraine and arguing it does not go far enough to curtail government spending. After the failed vote on Friday, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, called on McCarthy to face the reality of the situation.“The speaker has spent weeks catering to the hard right, and now he finds himself in the exact same position he’s been in since the beginning: no plan forward, no closer to passing something that avoids a shutdown,” Schumer said in a floor speech. “The speaker needs to abandon his doomed mission of trying to please Maga extremists, and instead, he needs to work across the aisle to keep the government open.”With each chamber rejecting the other’s proposal, it remained highly unclear on Friday afternoon how lawmakers could reach an agreement to keep the government open. As the federal government braced for a shutdown, the White House lambasted McCarthy for conceding to hard-right Republicans, after the speaker reneged on a funding deal he had struck with Joe Biden this spring.“Extreme House Republicans are solely – solely – to blame for marching us toward a shutdown. That is what we’re seeing right now,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Friday.Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, also mocked McCarthy for promising to go without pay during a shutdown, which could furlough hundreds of thousands of federal workers.“That is theater,” Young said at the White House. “I will tell you: the guy who picks up the trash in my office won’t get a paycheck. That’s real. And that’s what makes me angry.”With less than two days left before government funding lapses on Sunday morning, a shutdown appeared to be a virtual certainty. More

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      What does a US shutdown mean? Seven things you should know

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      The US stands just days from a full government shutdown amid political deadlock over demands from rightwing congressional Republicans for deep public spending cuts.Fuelled by bitter ideological divisions among the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, funding for federal agencies will run out at midnight on 30 September unless – against widespread expectation – Congress votes to pass a stopgap measure to extend government funding.It is an event with the potential to inflict disruption to a range of public services, cause delays in salaries, and wreak significant damage on the national economy if it becomes prolonged.At the heart of the looming upheaval is the uncertain status of the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who is under fire from members of his own party for agreeing spending limits with Joe Biden, that members of the GOP’s far-right “Freedom Caucus” say are too generous and want to urgently prune.What happens when a US government shutdown takes place?Thousands of federal government employees are put on furlough, meaning that they are told not to report for work and go unpaid for the period of the shutdown, although their salaries are paid retroactively when it ends.Other government workers who perform what are judged essential services, such as air traffic controllers and law enforcement officials, continue to work but do not get paid until Congress acts to end the shutdown.Depending on how long it lasts, national parks can either shut entirely or open without certain vital services such as public toilets or attendants. Passport processing can stop, as can research – at national health institutes.The Biden administration has warned that federal inspections ensuring food safety and prevention of the release of dangerous materials into drinking water could stop for the duration of the shutdown.About 10,000 children aged three and four may also lose access to Head Start, a federally funded program to promote school readiness among toddlers, especially among low-income families.What causes a shutdown?Simply put, the terms of a piece of legislation known as the Anti-Deficiency Act, first passed in 1884, prohibits federal agencies from spending or obligating funds without an act of appropriation – or some alternative form of approval – from Congress.If Congress fails to enact the 12 annual appropriations bills needed to fund the US government’s activities and associated bureaucracy, all non-essential work must cease until it does. If Congress enacts some of the bills but not others, the agencies affected by the bills not enacted are forced to cease normal functioning; this is known as a partial government shutdown.How unusual are US government shutdowns?For the first 200 years of the US’s existence, they did not happen at all. In recent decades, they have become an increasingly regular part of the political landscape, as Washington politics has become more polarised and brinkmanship a commonplace political tool. There have been 20 federal funding gaps since 1976, when the US first shifted the start of its fiscal year to 1 October.Three shutdowns in particular have entered US political lore:A 21-day partial closure in 1995 over a dispute about spending cuts between President Bill Clinton and the Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich, that is widely seen as setting the tone for later partisan congressional struggles.In 2013, when the government was partially closed for 16 days after another Republican-led Congress tried to use budget negotiations to defund Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare.A 34-day shutdown, the longest on record, lasting from December 2018 until January 2019, when Donald Trump refused to sign any appropriations bill that did not include $5.7bn funding for a wall along the US border with Mexico. The closure damaged Trump’s poll ratings.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat is triggering the latest imminent shutdown?In large part, the crisis is being driven by the relatively weak position of McCarthy, the Republican speaker in the House of Representatives. Working with a wafer-thin majority in the 435-seat chamber, McCarthy needed a record 15 ballots to ascend to his position last January, a position earned only after tense negotiations with a minority of far-right Republicans.Those same rightwingers are now in effect holding McCarthy hostage by refusing to vote for the appropriations bills on the basis of spending guidelines the speaker previously agreed with Biden. McCarthy could, theoretically, still pass the bills with the support of Democrats across the aisle. But rightwingers, notably the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, have vowed to topple him as speaker in such a scenario.Is there a way out of the current impasse?Time is running out. McCarthy and other Republican leaders have been trying to deploy a stopgap spending measure called a continuing resolution (CR) that would keep the government open until 31 October, while efforts continue to agree to final spending bills for 2024.However, multiple attempts have failed to win approval of Freedom Caucus members, who are refusing to vote for it unless it has more radical conservative policies attached, such as language to address “woke policies” and “weaponization of the Department of Justice”. A list of amendments from the rightwing Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene includes a resolution preventing funds being used to aid Ukraine and a ban on funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates.How could a shutdown affect the wider economy?According to the congressional budget office, the 2018-19 shutdown imposed a short-term cost of $11bn on the US economy, an estimated $3bn of which was never recovered after the stoppage ended.Economists have warned the effects now could be compounded by other unrelated events, including the lingering impact of inflationary pressures and the United Auto Workers strike against America’s three biggest car manufacturers, which union leaders have threatened to expand if their demands remain unmet.How has Joe Biden reacted?The president has tried to use the bully pulpit to put the spotlight on the GOP holdouts, emphasizing that they should be blamed if a shutdown does go ahead.“Let’s be clear. If the government shuts down that means members of the US military are going to have to continue to work but not get paid,” Biden said at a dinner hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation at the weekend. “Funding the government is one of the most basic responsibilities of Congress. It’s time for Republicans to start doing the job America elected them to do.”Fearing the worst, however, the White House has published a set of blueprints for how government agencies should operate if a shutdown ensues and funds run out. More

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      A look back at the political career of the Dianne Feinstein – video obituary

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      Dianne Feinstein, the oldest serving member of the US Senate and longest-serving female senator, has died aged 90. Feinstein’s trailblazing career was full of firsts. She was the first female head of the San Francisco board of supervisors, first female mayor of San Francisco and the first female senator to represent California when she was elected in 1992. From there her career spanned the administrations of five US presidents over three decades. During her time in office, Feinstein distinguished herself as a vocal advocate for gun control. Joe Biden led tributes, calling Feinstein a ‘pioneering American’ More