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      Senate postpones hearing for Trump’s surgeon general pick after she goes into labor

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      The Senate hearing for Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, has been postponed after the nominee went into labor with her first child.Means had planned to make history as the first nominee to appear virtually before the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee due to her pregnancy on Thursday. The hearing was originally scheduled for two days after her due date, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. It remains unclear when the hearing will be rescheduled.In a statement shared with the Guardian, Emily Hilliard, press secretary for the department of health and human services (HHS), said: “Everyone is happy for Dr Means and her family. This is one of the few times in life when it’s easy to ask to move a Senate hearing.”Trump nominated Means in May to serve as US surgeon general, the president’s second pick for the role often referred to as “the nation’s doctor”. Means, a wellness influencer and physician with an inactive medical license, follows the abrupt withdrawal of Trump’s first nominee, Dr Janette Nesheiwat, whose confirmation hearing was canceled amid rightwing criticism and questions about her credentials.Means, 38, is a Los Angeles-based medical entrepreneur who rose to prominence in conservative wellness circles for her critiques of mainstream medicine and her advocacy for improving the nation’s food supply.She is the author of the bestselling book Good Energy and a leading figure in the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement. Her selection underscores the growing influence of the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, within the Trump administration.In a social media post, Trump said that Means “has impeccable ‘Maha’ credentials”.“Her academic achievements, together with her life’s work, are absolutely outstanding,” Trump said. “Dr Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest Surgeon Generals in United States History.”Asked about the nomination shortly after it was announced, Trump said: “I don’t know her. I listened to the recommendation of Bobby.”Means, through her book, blog and speaking appearances, has championed holistic health with a focus on whole and natural foods, exercise, and curbing pharmaceutical prescriptions for chronic ailments.The Stanford Medicine-trained doctor has also suggested that psychedelics such as psilocybin can be beneficial for mental health, decried broad pesticide use and warned against long-term use of hormonal birth control.Means and her brother, former lobbyist Calley Means, served as key advisers to Kennedy’s long-shot 2024 presidential bid and helped broker his endorsement of Trump last summer. The pair made appearances with some of Trump’s biggest supporters, winning praise from conservative pundit Tucker Carlson and podcaster Joe Rogan.Calley Means is now a White House adviser who appears frequently on television to promote restrictions on Snap benefits, removing fluoride from drinking water and other Maha agenda items. More

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      US could lose between $7bn and $14bn during shutdown, budget office says

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      The US is set to lose between $7bn and $14bn as a result of the ongoing federal government shutdown, according to the congressional budget office.On Wednesday, the nonpartisan federal agency released its estimates in a new report to the House budget committee as the government shutdown reaches four weeks.According to the report, the shutdown will also reduce the US’s GDP by one to two percentage points in the fourth quarter of 2025.In his report, Phillip Swagel, the CBO director, said: “In CBO’s assessment, the shutdown will delay federal spending and have a negative effect on the economy that will mostly, but not entirely, reverse once the shutdown ends.”“The effects of the shutdown on the economy are uncertain. Those effects depend on decisions made by the administration throughout the shutdown. In addition, how federal employees and contractors respond to the delay in compensation is uncertain,” Swagel added.The US government shutdown stretched into its 29th day on Wednesday with no sign of an end to the crisis. The Senate remained deadlocked over spending legislation and on Tuesday Senate Democrats blocked a Republican-backed bill that would have funded federal agencies through 21 November.Democrats have refused to support the bill to clear the 60-vote threshold for advancement in the Senate because it does not include funding for healthcare programs, or curbs on Donald Trump’s cuts to congressionally approved funding.According to the CBO report, economic activity at the end of 2025 will be lower as a result of the shutdown, with the decline being driven by three factors: fewer services will be provided by federal workers, federal spending on goods, services and food benefits will be temporarily lower and a drop in overall demand will temporarily decrease production from the private sector.The report laid out three loss estimates amid the government shutdown. If the government opens this week, a total GDP loss by the end of 2026 would be $7bn. If the shutdown lifts after six weeks, or around 12 November, the total GDP loss would be $11bn. The estimated losses after the eight-week shutdown scenario were projected to be $14bn.The CBO added that although a government shutdown lasting four weeks would not affect federal spending for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits, how a longer shutdown would affect Snap benefits is uncertain.The report comes as more than two dozen states – led by New York, California and Massachusetts – sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its decision to suspend food stamps amid the shutdown.Meanwhile, nearly 11,000 air traffic controllers, who are deemed essential workers, missed their first paycheck on Tuesday.With two weeks of unpaid work, as well as staffing issues being reported across major cities including Chicago, Dallas and Nashville, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, has warned that another missed paycheck would be financially “harder [for employees] … as expenses continue to roll [in]”. More

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      Shutdown stretches into 28th day as Senate again fails to pass spending legislation

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      The US government shutdown stretched into its 28th day with no resolution in sight on Tuesday, as the Senate remained deadlocked over spending legislation even as a crucial food aid program teeters on the brink of exhausting its funding.For the 13th time, Senate Democrats blocked a Republican-backed bill that would have funded federal agencies through 21 November. The minority party has refused to provide the necessary support for the bill to clear the 60-vote threshold for advancement in the Senate because it does not include funding for healthcare programs, or curbs on Donald Trump’s cuts to congressionally approved funding.The quagmire continued even after the president of the largest federal workers union called on Congress to pass the Republican proposal, citing the economic pain caused to government workers.“Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight. Today I’m making mine: it’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures, and no gamesmanship. Put every single federal worker back on the job with full back pay – today,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said in a statement released on Monday.But the top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer, signaled no change in his party’s strategy of holding out for concession from the Republicans, citing the imminent rise of premiums for Affordable Care Act health plans. Though tax credits that lower their costs expire at the end of the year, many enrollees in the plans have received notices of steep premium increases ahead of Saturday’s beginning of the open enrollment period.“Families are going to be in panic this weekend all across America, millions of them. How are they going to pay this bill? How are they going to live without healthcare? It’s tragic, and of course, it didn’t have to be, but Republicans are doing nothing,” Schumer told reporters at the US Capitol.The Republican Senate majority leader, John Thune, seized on the AFGE’s statement to argue that Democrats were being irresponsible for refusing to back the bill, which Republicans in the House of Representatives approved on a near party line vote last month before the speaker, Mike Johnson, ordered the chamber into a recess that has yet to end.View image in fullscreen“It’s not very often that I get a chance to say this, but I agree with the AFGE,” Thune said.He reiterated that he would negotiate with Democrats over the expiring tax credits, but not with “a gun to our heads”.“I sincerely hope, in the best interest of every American who is impacted by this shutdown, and particularly those who are going to be really adversely impacted come this weekend, that the enough Democrats will come to their senses and deliver the five votes that are necessary to get this bill on the president’s desk,” Thune said, adding that he planned to hold further votes on the spending legislation.Both parties traded blame for the imminent expiration of funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), also known as food stamps. The Department of Agriculture has announced that it does not have the money to continue providing the benefit after 1 November, though on Tuesday, more than two dozen states sued the Trump administration, arguing that funds are available for Snap benefits to continue.North Dakota senator Kevin Cramer said Democrats should either support a proposal from fellow Republican senator Josh Hawley to allow Snap to continue during the shutdown, “or they could just reopen the damn government, which is what they should be doing and should have been doing for the last month”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSouth Dakota senator Mike Rounds said the tax credits should be addressed by bipartisan action, but criticized the affordability of Affordable Care Act health plans. “The Obamacare product itself is fatally flawed. It continues to create a death spiral coming down with regard to the increasing costs. There are people out there, real people, that are going to get hurt because Obamacare is not working,” he said.In an interview, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren signaled no change in the party’s strategy for the shutdown, which began at the start of the month after Congress failed to pass legislation to continue funding that expired at the end of September.“Millions of people across this country are receiving their health insurance premium notices, and telling Democrats and Republicans, lower those costs,” Warren said. “Democrats are in there fighting to lower healthcare costs for millions of Americans. Donald Trump would rather shut down the government than help out these families.”Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine who has repeatedly broken with Trump as she faces what is expected to be a tough re-election contest next year, said she did not buy that the agriculture department lacked funding to continue Snap, but noted the money it had on hand was not enough to cover the program’s costs.However, Collins expressed concerns about the readiness of air traffic controllers, who did not receive a fully paycheck on Tuesday due to the shutdown. She noted that on two recent flights to Ronald Reagan Washington National airport, her plane had to divert at the last second.“I can’t help but think that reflects the strain on air traffic controllers,” she said. More

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      Leader of top federal worker union calls for end of US government shutdown

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      The head of America’s largest federal workers union says it is time to end the government shutdown, now the second-longest in US history, as hundreds of thousands of employees miss another round of paychecks.Everett Kelley, who leads the American Federation of Government Employees representing more than 800,000 workers, avoided assigning blame to either party in the Monday morning letter but said lawmakers must stop playing politics and pass a stopgap funding measure to reopen the government, its closure now eclipsing the four-week mark.“Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,” Kelley wrote in the statement. “Today I’m making mine: it’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures, and no gamesmanship.” NBC News first reported the letter.A “clean” continuing resolution is a temporary spending bill that keeps the government running at current funding levels without attaching other political demands. Republicans say they have offered that in their measure, but Democrats argue the bill shortchanges key services and are using their power in the Senate to push for a deal on health insurance subsidies that expire at year’s end.Because of this stalemate, hundreds of thousands of federal and Washington DC government employees are either working without pay or furloughed. The union represents workers across nearly every federal agency, from Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers and army nurses to food safety inspectors and veterans affairs staff, many of whom are now lined up at food banks after missing their second paycheck, Kelley said.“These are patriotic Americans – parents, caregivers, and veterans – forced to work without pay while struggling to cover rent, groceries, gas and medicine because of political disagreements in Washington,” Kelley said. “That is unacceptable.”But the crisis extends beyond federal workers: roughly 42 million Americans who receive food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program face losing their benefits as soon as 1 November if the shutdown continues, after the US agriculture department warned states it would run out of money to pay for the program.Senate Democrats have blocked a Republican-backed continuing resolution 12 times, demanding commitments on extending Affordable Care Act health subsidies. Three Democrats and one independent who caucus with the party have broken ranks to support the measure, but it remains short of the 60 needed to advance. The Republican senator Rand Paul is the sole Republican to defect on the measure.The AFGE is already suing the Trump administration over mass layoffs organized during the shutdown and over partisan emails sent from government accounts without employees’ knowledge.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKelley called for three immediate steps: reopening the government under a continuing resolution, ensuring full back pay for all affected workers, and addressing policy disputes through normal legislative debate rather than shutdown tactics.“When the folks who serve this country are standing in line for food banks after missing a second paycheck because of this shutdown, they aren’t looking for partisan spin,” he said. “They’re looking for the wages they earned. The fact that they’re being cheated out of it is a national disgrace.”The shutdown reaches the one-month mark this week, with no negotiations scheduled between the parties.The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, told CNN on Sunday that he and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, requested a meeting with Donald Trump to discuss the shutdown before he went out of the country but had been rebuffed. The president has said he will only meet with Democrats after they vote to reopen the government.“A strong America requires a functioning government – one that pays its bills, honors its commitments, and treats its workforce with respect by paying them on time,” Kelley wrote. “The government belongs to all of us. Let’s open it back up and keep America moving forward.” More

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      Republican senator calls Trump’s military airstrikes ‘extrajudicial killings’

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      The Trump administration’s military airtrikes against boats off Venezuela’s coast that the White House claims were being used for drug trafficking are “extrajudicial killings”, said Rand Paul, the president’s fellow Republican and US senator from Kentucky.Paul’s strong comments on the topic came on Sunday during an interview on Republican-friendly Fox News, three days after Donald Trump publicly claimed he “can’t imagine” federal lawmakers would have “any problem” with the strikes when asked about seeking congressional approval for them.US forces in recent weeks have carried out at least eight strikes against boats in the Caribbean off Venezuela’s coast, killing about 40 people that the Trump administration has insisted were involved in smuggling drugs.Speaking with Fox News Sunday anchor Shannon Bream, Paul asserted that Congress has “gotten no information” on the campaign of strikes from Trump’s administration – despite the president claiming the White House would be open to briefing the federal lawmakers about the offensive.“No one said their name, no one said what evidence, no one said whether they’re armed, and we’ve had no evidence presented,” Paul said of the targeted boats or those on board. He argued that the Trump administration’s actions bring to mind the way China and Iran’s repressive governments have previously executed drug smugglers.“They summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public,” Paul contended in his conversation with Bream. “So it’s wrong.”Paul’s comments separate him from other Republican members of Congress who have spoken in favor of the Trump administration’s offensive near Venezuela, including US House representative Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Senator Cynthia Loomis of Wyoming, as reported by the US news website Semafor.The Kentucky libertarian joined Democratic US senators Tim Kaine of Virginia and Adam Schiff of California in introducing a war powers resolution that would have blocked the Trump administration’s use of military strikes within or against Venezuela. But the measure failed to win a majority in the Senate.Trump on Friday told the media that his administration would be willing to brief lawmakers on the strikes but simply saw no reason to seek congressional authorization for them.“I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” Trump said. “We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be – like – dead.”Paul has had military-related disagreements with Trump before his Sunday interview on Fox.Trump telegraphed his intent to use the US military to support his administration’s goals of deporting immigrants en masse before he won his second presidency in the 2024 election. After Trump’s second electoral victory but before he retook the Oval Office in January, Paul said he believed using the military in support of deportation was “illegal” and a task better suited for US law enforcement. “It’s a terrible image, and I … oppose that,” Paul said at the time. More

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      Trump vows to ‘take care of Chicago’ after backing off plan to send troops to San Francisco – live

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      Donald Trump continued his threats to send the national guard to Chicago.“They don’t have it under control,” Trump said. “It’s getting worse, so we’ll take care of as soon as we give the go ahead.”This comes as the administration filed an emergency appeal to the supreme court after a federal judge blocked the administration’s from deploying troops to the Chicago indefinitely.Speaking to reporters at City Hall, San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie elaborated on his Wednesday evening call with Donald Trump.Lurie said he had not reached out to Trump but that the president “picked up the phone and called me”. During the call, Lurie said he told Trump that crime was falling in San Francisco and the city was “on the rise”. Pressed on whether Trump sought any concessions from the city in exchange for calling off the “surge” Lurie said he “asked for nothing”. Lurie said he did not know if Trump’s decision extended to the rest of the Bay Area and acknowledged that the mercurial president could yet change his mind.“Our city remains prepared for any scenario,” Lurie said. “We have a plan in place that can be activated at any moment.”Asked if other Democratic mayors could learn from his approach, which has been notably less antagonistic than the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, Lurie demurred, suggesting that was more a question for the political chattering class than for a mayor “laser-focused” on his city.“Every day I’m focused on San Francisco,” he said. “Heads down. How do we keep our city safe?”Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has condemned a racist AI-generated ad posted – and then deleted – by Andrew Cuomo’s campaign depicting “criminals for Zohran Mamdani”.On Thursday, De Blasio wrote on X: “This is disqualifying. No candidate who approves a racist, disgusting ad like this can be allowed to govern. Bye, @andrewcuomo.”The ad which was shared on Cuomo’s official account on Wednesday featured Mamdani, the popular democratic socialist state assemblyman, eating rice with his hands before being supported by a Black man shoplifting while wearing a keffiyeh, a man abusing a woman, a sex trafficker and a drug dealer.In June, Mamdani, who if elected would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, accused donors of Cuomo’s campaign of “blatant Islamophobia” after an altered image of him in a mailer to voters depicted him with a visibly darkened and bushier beard.Outside of San Francisco’s city hall on Thursday afternoon, local leaders and organizers were grappling with the whiplash.“At this time, do not know which federal agencies are being called off. We don’t know if that’s the National Guard. We don’t know if it’s ice, if it’s Border Patrol,” said Jackie Fielder, the San Francisco city supervisor representing parts of the city’s Mission neighborhood. “I also want to be clear that ICE, CBP, any federal agency deputized by Trump, to help him carry out his mass deportation plans, are absolutely not welcome in San Francisco.”Fielder also criticized Benihoff, Musk and other tech leaders who had voiced support for a National Guard deployment in the Bay Area. “I condemn every tech billionaire who supported this,” she said. “This city doesn’t belong to them.”Fielder and other leaders and organizers emphasized that even as the region awaits clarity on whether and where there will be a federal deployment, and the extent to which the administration plans to ramp up immigration enforcement in the city, local leaders are going to continue to mobilize rapid response networks, legal aid and other support systems for the residents most impacted.“We don’t need to get ready because we’ve been ready,” Fielder said. “This is not a time for panic. It is a time for power across this area.”Organizers urged residents to check in regularly with friends and family, and prepare for the possibility that they may be arrested by immigration officers, urging immigrants to entrust their full legal names and A-Numbers with trusted allies. “Without this information, it becomes very challenging, and it takes time to locate our loved ones,” said Sanika Mahajan, Director of Community Engagement and Organizing for the local advocacy group Mission Action. Organizers who had lent support during the militarized raids in Los Angeles this summer encouraged San Franciscans to store important documents at home, and let loved ones know where to find them.“Mexico is run by the cartels, I have great respect for the president”, Donald Trump just said near the end of the White House event to justify what he calls the success of his militarized war on drugs. “Mexico is run by the cartels and we have to defend ourselves from that”.After a first phase of the roundtable discussion, in which senior administration officials took turns praising Trump and claimed that the crackdown on drugs has been a spectacular success, the president then took questions from reporters invited to cover the event.Many of the correspondents he called on were from partisan, rightwing outlets who also laced their questions with praise for the president.Clearly aware that many of the correspondents he called on to ask questions were on his side, Trump even said “This is the kind of question I like” to Daniel Baldwin of the pro-Trump news channel One America News, before Baldwin even asked his question.When Trump did not recognize a correspondent, he asked them who they were with.And when he did call on a reporter he views as adversarial, Kaitlan Collins of CNN, he even made a point of joking that her question would be a bad one.No matter what the questions were, Trump repeated many of his familiar talking points, exaggerations, insults and lies, including that the Biden administration had “lost” hundreds of thousands of children.At one point, unprompted, he said: “Let me tell ya, Barack Hussein Obama was a lousy president.”Donald Trump was just asked about a call from Daniel Goldman, a Democratic congressman from New York, for the New York police department to arrest federal agents “who assault or detain New Yorkers without legal authority” during immigration raids or outside immigration courts in New York City.Goldman referred specifically to a woman who was hurled to the floor by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer outside a court.“Well, you know, I know Dan, and Dan’s a loser,” Trump replied. “It’s so ridiculous, a suggestion like that.”What Trump did not explain is that he no doubt knows Goldman primarily from his role as lead counsel in the first impeachment of Trump, over his attempt to force Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to open a sham investigation into Joe Biden in 2019 by withholding military aid.Rather than address the issue, Trump then pivoted to suggesting that Democrats were desperate for attention and even imitating him by cursing more in public. Goldman did not curse when he told reporters on Tuesday: “No one is above the law – not ICE, not CBP, and not Donald Trump. Federal agents who assault or detain New Yorkers without legal authority must be held accountable and the NYPD must protect our neighbors if the federal government refuses to.”Donald Trump was just asked by a French reporter about the vote in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on formal annexation of the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967, where hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers now live, in a violation of international law.He asked the reporter to repeat the question but louder. She did, in a distinct French accent.Trump asked Pam Bondi, seated next to him to answer, saying, “I cannot understand a word she’s saying”.When the question was then explained to him, the president told the reporter: “Don’t worry about the West Bank, Israel’s not going to do anything with the West Bank.”Earlier on Thursday, the vice-president, JD Vance, said that Israel would not annex the West Bank, the day after Israeli lawmakers voted to advance two bills paving the way for the territory’s annexation.“If it was a political stunt it was a very stupid political stunt and I personally take some insult to it,” Vance said on the tarmac as he wrapped up his visit in Israel.Israeli analysts have pointed out that Israel currently rules the entire West Bank, except for limited urban enclaves under Palestinian self-rule, as if it were formally part of its territory.As is customary of Trump’s public-facing events, he has spent much of his time speaking blaming the Biden administration for the country he inherited.“By the way, the cartels control large swaths of territory. They maintain vast arsenals of weapons and soldiers, and they used extortion, murder, kidnapping, to exercise political and economic control,” he said. “Thank you very much, Joe Biden, for allowing that to happen. Biden surrendered our country to the cartels.”Donald Trump continued his threats to send the national guard to Chicago.“They don’t have it under control,” Trump said. “It’s getting worse, so we’ll take care of as soon as we give the go ahead.”This comes as the administration filed an emergency appeal to the supreme court after a federal judge blocked the administration’s from deploying troops to the Chicago indefinitely.The president has spent his opening remarks claiming his administration’s efforts in curbing cartels had been successful.“These groups have unleashed more bloodshed and killing on American soil than all other terrorist groups combined. These are the worst of the worst. It should now be clear to the entire world that the cartels are the Isis of the western hemisphere,” he said.We’re waiting for Donald Trump to appear in the state dining room for an announcement on cartels and human trafficking. Several cabinet members are already seated. Including defense secretary Pete Hegseth, attorney general Pam Bondi, and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.It’s important to note that so far, Donald Trump has paid members of the military by ordering the Pentagon to use any unspent funds for the 2025 fiscal year. A move that experts and lawmakers alike say is squarely illegal.Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at Cato Institute, emphasized that Congress has the sole prerogative to authorize funding.“The executive can’t just look for money under the cushions. It’s not their money to spend,” Boccia said. “If Congress doesn’t step up and reclaim its spending authority, the administration here is potentially setting very dangerous new precedents for executive spending that was never envisioned by America’s founders.”She added that there is the option for the administration to repurpose “unobligated balances” using the rescissions process. However, this isn’t playing out in this case because it still requires Congress’s authorization.“What we’re witnessing is the executive taking unprecedented steps to repurpose funding unilaterally,” Boccia said.While today’s failed Senate vote might give Trump the “political justification” for inappropriate government spending, there was no “legal justification”.Pivoting back to the Senate, where lawmakers failed to pass a bill to keep certain government workers and members of the military paid during the government shutdown.As I noted earlier, only three Democrats broke ranks with their party to vote in favor of the legislation. Most Democratic lawmakers voted against the bill, arguing that it would give Donald Trump the ability to handpick which workers and departments get to receive paychecks. Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called the bill a “ruse” that “doesn’t the pain of the shutdown” but “extends it”.Democrats also offered alternative pieces of legislation. This included the True Shutdown Fairness Act, which would pay all roughly 700,000 furloughed federal employees, and inhibit the administration from carrying out any more mass layoffs while the government is shutdown. Senate Republicans, however, objected to their attempt to pass this bill by unanimous consent.John Thune, the upper chamber’s top Republican, said that Democrats are “playing a political game” by blocking today’s bill, in an attempt to appease their “far-left base”. On the Senate floor, Thune said that the failed legislation introduced by Republicans today would include the more than 300 federal workers at the Capitol who had to “work through the night and into the next day” during Oregon senator Jeff Merkley’s marathon speech lambasting the Trump administration, which lasted almost 23 hours. More

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      US Senate fails to pass bill to pay federal essential workers and troops through shutdown

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      The Senate failed on Thursday to pass legislation that would keep federal workers deemed essential and troops paid throughout the ongoing government shutdown, which stretched into its 23rd day with no end in sight.The upper chamber held a vote on Republican senator Ron Johnson’s “shutdown fairness act”, which would guarantee pay for certain federal employees even when government funding lapses.“With Democrats continuing the Schumer shutdown, they should at least agree to pay all the federal employees that are forced to continue working,” Johnson said when he introduced the bill last week.But Democrats opposed the legislation, arguing that it would just give Donald Trump more power by letting the president choose which employees receive pay.“The bill, the Republican bill, is a ruse. It’s nothing more than another tool for Trump to hurt federal workers and American families and to keep this shutdown going for as long as he wants,” Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, said.The bill did not receive the 60 votes necessary to advance, with only three Democratic senators – John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and the Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff – breaking with their party to support it.Congress has been paralyzed since the start of the month, after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach an agreement on extending government funding beyond the end of September. The ensuing shutdown has led to an estimated 700,000 federal workers being furloughed, while hundreds of thousands of others are working without pay.Last week, Donald Trump authorized the defense department to pay US military personnel, using funds meant for research and development. Budget experts who spoke to the Guardian have described the move as likely illegal.The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has kept his chamber out of session since 19 September, in a bid to pass a Republican-backed government funding bill that cleared the House along near party lines.Democrats have rejected the measure, which would extend funding through 21 November, and instead demanded that Republicans extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans that are set to expire at the end of the year. They also want curbs on Trump’s use of rescissions to slash funding that Congress has approved, and the reversal of cuts to the Medicaid program for poor and disabled Americans.The Senate’s Republican leader, John Thune, has said he is willing to negotiate over the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but only once the government reopens. He has held 12 votes on the Republican spending bill, which has yet to receive enough Democratic support to advance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Thursday, Democratic senators debuted two counterproposals to pay federal workers. The “military and federal employee protection act” proposed by Michigan’s Gary Peters would provide a one-time payment to federal workers from the start of October to the date the bill is enacted.The “true shutdown fairness act”, proposed by Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, would pay all federal workers during a shutdown, whether they are furloughed or required to continue working.Neither received a vote in the Senate.Fetterman, whose state broke for Trump last November, released a video after the Senate vote in which he urged his fellow Democrats to change their approach.“Reopen this government and have an earnest conversation about extending those tax credits,” he said, standing alongside Dave McCormick, a Republican who is Pennsylvania’s junior senator. More

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      Democratic senator’s anti-Trump floor speech ends after nearly 23 hours

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      Oregon’s Jeff Merkley gave a marathon, nearly 23-hour speech on the Senate floor that began on Tuesday and ended late Wednesday, pressing the case that Donald Trump is acting as an authoritarian by prosecuting political enemies and deploying the military into Merkley’s home town of Portland.The 68-year-old senator began speaking around 6.20pm on Tuesday evening and continued until just after 5pm on Wednesday. Standing continuously on the Senate floor alongside placards that read “authoritarianism is here now!” and “Trump is violating the law”, Merkley paused only to take questions from fellow Democratic senators who joined him in the chamber to make their own points about the president’s conduct.“I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the biggest threat to our republic since the civil war. President Trump is shredding our constitution,” Merkley said as he began his speech.He repeated those words as he finished speaking just before sunset the following day, and thanked the No Kings protesters who had filled the streets of American cities in anti-Trump demonstrations the prior weekend.“They were ringing the alarm bells. They were saying that it is absolutely unacceptable to have an authoritarian government,” Merkley said.The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said the Oregonian delivered an “amazing tour de force over these many hours. Jeff Merkley has been the Paul Revere of 21st-century America, literally, figuratively, riding from one corner of this country to the other, alerting people to the danger.”Republican whip John Barrasso followed him up by saying Merkley’s speech was “what I can only describe as rubbish” and noting it did nothing to resolve the deadlock over government funding that has forced a shutdown.Merkley spoke a day after a federal appeals court had allowed the president to send the national guard into Portland over the objections of local leaders, who say there is no merit to the president’s claim that the city is a “war zone”. Trump has also ordered a similar deployment of troops into Chicago, where federal agents are carrying out an aggressive crackdown targeting people they believe to be undocumented immigrants. The supreme court is poised to consider a legal challenge to that move.The senator touched on those deployments to cities that are overwhelmingly Democratic, as well as other instances where the president is seen as retaliating against his political enemies, including the charges a handpicked US attorney has filed against the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, and former FBI director James Comey.“Equal justice under law – that’s the vision here in America. Not unequal injustice, which is what the president is pursuing by taking the power of the government and going after individuals that he does not like or perceives to be political opponents,” Merkley said.“That’s what you read about in authoritarian governments far away, and you go, that would never happen in the United States of America, but it is happening right here, right now.”Merkley’s address is the second instance this year in which a Democratic senator has staged a lengthy floor speech to condemn Trump’s policies. About two months after Trump’s inauguration, Cory Booker of New Jersey spoke for 25 hours and five minutes, setting a new record for the longest speech ever by a solo senator.On Wednesday morning, the Oregon senator stood speaking from a lectern where he had placed a small glass of water and a copy of How Democracies Die, a 2018 book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt detailing how representative governments around the world have been dismantled.Among those who joined him on the floor was Booker, who said: “We are seeing a time now that if we do not ring the alarm bells, more and more Americans will be hurt by a president who is acting more like an authoritarian leader than a democratically elected executive.”Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal likened Trump’s partial demolition of the White House East Wing to layoffs and funding cuts he has ordered across the government.“This destruction that Donald Trump is doing to the White House is emblematic of the wrecking ball he is taking to our democracy. Put aside the waste of money that could be used to improve our education system, solve food insecurity, guarantee the election integrity of this nation – the damage that he’s doing to this iconic symbol of America is so costly to our image and esteem around the world,” Blumenthal said.Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior senator, said in an interview that his counterpart was “making some particularly, relevant and important points about the threat”.Asked if other Senate Democrats were planning such lengthy speeches, Wyden said: “You take them one at a time, but I think what Senator Merkley is doing is very important.”The speech comes on the 22nd day of the government shutdown that began at the start of the month, when Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on legislation to extend funding beyond the end of September.The Senate has held 11 unsuccessful votes on a Republican-backed bill to extend funding through 21 November, which Democrats have blocked because it does not including healthcare funding that they are demanding, as well as curbs on Trump’s use of rescissions to slash funding approved by Congress.After Merkley finished his speech, the Senate’s Republican leaders moved to hold a 12th vote on the funding bill. 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