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    Without proof, top Trump adviser accuses January 6 committee of destroying evidence – as it happened

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    Jason Miller, a top adviser to Donald Trump, went on CNN earlier today to defend the president-elect’s assertion that the bipartisan House committee tasked with investigating the January 6 insurrection destroyed evidence.Trump used that claim to then argue that the lawmakers who took part in the investigation should go to jail. The assertion appears factually wobbly, since the committee’s report and its evidence remains easily accessible online.Asked in the CNN interview if Trump would have Kash Patel, his nominee to lead the FBI, go after the committee members, Miller responded:
    I do have to take issue with saying that the select committee didn’t go and destroy records. They have wiped everything out …
    Other committees have looked through and said that those records are gone, that they don’t exist, that they’re not there. Even Republicans who are now in charge have said that those records are gone, that they’re not there. So I would completely take issue with that. We’re going to have to agree to disagree, but they got rid of it.
    But he seemed to moderate Trump’s comments slightly, arguing that the president-elect expects Patel and Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, “to apply the law equally”:
    He wants everyone who he puts into key positions of leadership, again, whether that’s Pam Bondi as the AG, Kash Patel, the FBI, or anybody else, to apply the law equally to everybody. Now, that means, if you’re somebody who’s committed some very serious crimes, who’s committed very serious felonies, who’s, for example, leaked confidential information, in direct violation of laws that are in place, well, then, obviously, that sets you up for different things …
    But as far as the politics aspect, if you listen to the entire interview with President Trump, he said he’s going to leave that up to the law enforcement agents in charge, including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel.
    Donald Trump this weekend made clear he would pardon rioters facing charges or convicted of involvement in January 6, while saying members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the violence “should go to jail”. That prompted a response from its vice-chair, Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who rejected his criticism, saying: “Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power.” Meanwhile, the supreme court turned aside an effort by Trump’s attorneys to lift the gag order imposed on him in his hush-money case.Here’s what else happened today:

    Jason Miller, a top adviser to Trump, said the House committee that investigated January 6 destroyed evidence, but provided no proof for his claim. He also slightly walked back Trump’s quip that the lawmakers involved should be jailed.

    Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator, said the January 6 committee members do not “have a reason to be afraid now”, but that their work is worth of investigating.

    Jim Clyburn, a veteran Democratic congressman, warned that Trump’s comments should be taken seriously, adding that they were reminiscent of the rhetoric that led to the rise of Jim Crow.

    Two senators proposed a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on supreme court justices, but it faces long odds.

    Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who will chair the Senate judiciary committee next year, sent the FBI director and his deputy a letter saying they should resign for not cooperating with Congress and politicizing the bureau.
    Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary is back on Capitol Hill for more meetings with Republican senators, including Joni Ernst, whose views on him are seen as vital to his chances of confirmation.Ernst, a combat veteran and sexual assault survivor, has signaled hesitance with confirming Hegseth, after reports emerged of his excessive drinking and poor treatment of women, including a sexual assault allegation.Hegseth and Ernst met again today, but it wasn’t clear if the senator had made up her mind about Trump’s Pentagon pick. As he left her office, Hegseth said that it was a “very good meeting”, but little else.Chuck Grassley, the long-serving Iowa senator who will chair the chamber’s judiciary committee next year, has called for the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and his deputy to resign, saying they politicized the agency and refused to cooperate with him.Should Wray and his deputy FBI director, Paul Abbate, heed Grassley’s call, it would clear the way for Senate Republicans to confirm the former defense official Kash Patel to the job. Patel has drawn concern for calling for the imprisonment of journalists and vowing to radically downsize the FBI.In a letter sent to Wray, Grassley wrote:
    Rather than turn over a new leaf at the FBI, you’ve continued to read from the old playbook of weaponization, double standards, and a relentless game of hide-and-seek with the Congress. As your tenure as FBI director comes to an end, I want to take this opportunity to tell you where you went wrong, for the benefit of the bureau and that of your successor.
    Grassley went on to criticize Wray and Abbate for not being forthcoming enough on a range of matters, including sexual harassment claims made by female FBI employees, the vetting of evacuees from Afghanistan, and its agents’ search of Mar-a-Lago for classified materials Donald Trump was accused of hiding there.Grassley concludes:
    For the good of the country, it’s time for you and your deputy to move on to the next chapter in your lives. I’ve spent my career fighting for transparency, and I’ve always called out those in government who have fought against it. For the public record, I must do so once again now. I therefore must express my vote of no confidence in your continued leadership of the FBI. President-elect Trump has already announced his intention to nominate a candidate to replace you, and the Senate will carefully consider that choice. For my part, I’ve also seen enough, and hope your respective successors will learn from these failures.
    If they do not step down, Trump has the power to fire them.In his interview with NBC, Donald Trump also mulled putting his health secretary nominee, Robert F Kennedy Jr, in charge of researching the very vaccines he has pushed conspiracy theories against. Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Robert Tait:Donald Trump has said Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health secretary, may investigate a supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.In a wide-ranging interview with NBC, the US president-elect claimed an investigation was justified by the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said after the interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked him if he wanted to see some vaccines eliminated – a position for which Kennedy has argued.“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one out of every 36 children in the US were diagnosed with autism in 2020, compared with one in 150 in 2000.Kennedy, a noted vaccine sceptic, has repeatedly peddled discredited theories that the conditions is caused by childhood vaccinations.“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said in a 2023 Fox News interview in which he called for more vaccine testing.“We should have the same kind of testing place or control trials that we have for other every other medication. Vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing control trials, so that there’s no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products, or even the relative benefits of those products before they’re mandated. We should have that kind of testing.”Jason Miller, a top adviser to Donald Trump, went on CNN earlier today to defend the president-elect’s assertion that the bipartisan House committee tasked with investigating the January 6 insurrection destroyed evidence.Trump used that claim to then argue that the lawmakers who took part in the investigation should go to jail. The assertion appears factually wobbly, since the committee’s report and its evidence remains easily accessible online.Asked in the CNN interview if Trump would have Kash Patel, his nominee to lead the FBI, go after the committee members, Miller responded:
    I do have to take issue with saying that the select committee didn’t go and destroy records. They have wiped everything out …
    Other committees have looked through and said that those records are gone, that they don’t exist, that they’re not there. Even Republicans who are now in charge have said that those records are gone, that they’re not there. So I would completely take issue with that. We’re going to have to agree to disagree, but they got rid of it.
    But he seemed to moderate Trump’s comments slightly, arguing that the president-elect expects Patel and Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, “to apply the law equally”:
    He wants everyone who he puts into key positions of leadership, again, whether that’s Pam Bondi as the AG, Kash Patel, the FBI, or anybody else, to apply the law equally to everybody. Now, that means, if you’re somebody who’s committed some very serious crimes, who’s committed very serious felonies, who’s, for example, leaked confidential information, in direct violation of laws that are in place, well, then, obviously, that sets you up for different things …
    But as far as the politics aspect, if you listen to the entire interview with President Trump, he said he’s going to leave that up to the law enforcement agents in charge, including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel.
    The idea is not new. Similar bills, like the Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization Act of 2023, which was introduced in the US house of representatives and has more than 60 co-sponsors, also calls for 18-year terms for supreme court justices and the establishment of a process for the president to appoint a new justice every two years.Another bill introduced this year by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, called the Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act, also called for overhauling the supreme court. But unlike the amendment proposed by Welch and Manchin, this would not limit their terms, but rather the total number of justices, allowing for expanding the court from nine to 15.The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law says supreme court justices are getting appointed at younger ages and living longer than they used to, which means they are sitting on the court longer than usual.Donald Trump appointed more justices during his first term than Barack Obama or George W Bush did during each of their two-term presidencies respectively.About two-thirds of Americans support imposing term limits on the members of the nation’s highest court, according to the results of the the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey released in September.Although Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who co-authored the proposed amendment to limit the supreme court justice terms with Welch, is seen as an obstructionist by Democrats, this latest proposal is a popular idea within the party.The progressive House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last year said: “We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power in the supreme court [that] has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy.“And in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”Manchin left the party in May and registered as an independent after criticism for pushing against Joe Biden’s ambitious legislative goals, like those related to tackling the climate crisis or taxing the wealthy.Senator Pete Welch of Vermont took to X to announce his amendment to impose term limits on supreme court justices. He wrote:
    No other major democracy in the world gives lifetime seats to judges who sit on their highest court. It leads to divisive confirmation processes and reduced trust from the public.
    Donald Trump this weekend made clear he would pardon rioters facing charges or convicted of involvement in January 6, while saying members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the violence “should go to jail”. That prompted a response from its vice-chair, Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who rejected his criticism, saying: “Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power”. Meanwhile, the supreme court turned aside an effort by Trump’s attorneys to lift the gag order imposed on him in his hush-money case.Here’s what else has happened today so far:

    Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator, said the January 6 committee members do not “have a reason to be afraid now”, but that their work is worth of investigating.

    Jim Clyburn, a veteran Democratic congressman, warned that Trump’s comments should be taken seriously, adding that they were reminiscent of the rhetoric that led to the rise of Jim Crow.

    Two senators proposed a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on supreme court justices, but it faces long odds.
    The Democratic senator Peter Welch and independent senator Joe Manchin have proposed a constitutional amendment that would impose term limits on supreme court justices, saying such a move is necessary to restore faith in the nation’s highest court.“The current lifetime appointment structure is broken and fuels polarizing confirmation battles and political posturing that has eroded public confidence in the highest court in our land. Our amendment maintains that there shall never be more than nine justices and would gradually create regular vacancies on the Court, allowing the President to appoint a new justice every two years with the advice and consent of the United States Senate,” said Manchin, who is weeks away from concluding his 14 years of representing West Virginia.The senators cited one of many surveys that found dismal approval ratings for the court, where conservatives have a six-justice supermajority and liberals a three-justice minority. Welch, a recent arrival in the chamber who represents Vermont, said:
    Taking action to restore public trust in our nation’s most powerful Court is as urgent as it is necessary. Setting term limits for Supreme Court Justices will cut down on political gamesmanship, and is commonsense reform supported by a majority of Americans.
    Here’s how their proposal would work:
    The amendment would institute nonrenewable, 18-year terms for new U.S. Supreme Court Justices, with a new term starting every two years …
    The proposed amendment would not adjust the tenure of sitting Justices, but rather institute a transition period to maintain regular vacancies as current Justices retire. During that period, 18-year terms will begin every two years, regardless of when a current Justice leaves the bench. Once a current Justice retires, the newly appointed Justice will serve out the remainder of the next open 18-year term. The amendment would not change the overall number of Justices on the Court.
    It’s unlikely the idea will go far, particularly with Republicans in January assuming the majority in the chamber tasked with confirming the president’s appointments to the supreme court.It’s also proven difficult to win ratification of constitutional amendments. None has been approved since 1992, and the process typically requires the approval of supermajorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as the legislatures in three-fourths of states.Police in Pennsylvania are reportedly questioning a man in connection with the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, in New York City last week.News of Thompson’s murder was greeted with sympathy and cheers on some corners of social media, particularly from people who are critical of the insurer’s treatment of its customers. Over the weekend, the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reacted to that sentiment by saying it is a sign that the US healthcare system needs real reform. Here’s more:
    Progressive congressperson Ro Khanna has sympathy for the murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson – yet at the same time is not surprised that the killing reignited a national dialogue about inequities in the US healthcare system, he said in an interview on Sunday.
    ‘It was horrific,’ the California Democrat said on ABC This Week with respect to the slaying of Thompson, whose survivors include his widow and two sons ages 16 and 19. ‘I mean, this is a father we’re talking about – of two children, and … there is no justification for violence.
    ‘But the outpouring afterwards has not surprised me.’
    Khanna told the show’s host, Martha Raddatz, that he agreed with fellow liberal and US senator Bernie Sanders when he wrote recently on social media: ‘We waste hundreds of billions a year on health care administrative expenses that make insurance CEOs and wealthy stockholders incredibly rich while 85 million Americans go uninsured or underinsured. Health care is a human right. We need Medicare for all.
    ‘After years, Sanders is winning this debate,’ Khanna said, referring to the Vermont senator’s support for a single-payer national health insurance system seen in other wealthy democracies. More

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      How did transgender children in the US become so politicized? | Moira Donegan

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      The politicization of transgender children in the US is one of the most astounding coups of propaganda and organized animus in recent history. Rarely has so much attention and rage been directed at such a minuscule number of people, and more rarely, still, have those people been the most vulnerable and blameless among us: kids and teens.The first state to pass a ban on transition-related care for minors was Arkansas, in April 2021; less than four years later, more than half of states have such a ban on the books. In 2016, North Carolina lost an estimated $3.76bn in revenue following boycotts after they passed a law banning trans people, including transgender students, from using appropriate restrooms in public facilities; now, 14 states have such bathroom bans on the books, and the boycotts have receded.These changes in public attitudes towards trans youth – from a broad if imperfect sentiment of tolerance to a widespread and politically weaponized attitude of hostility toward a small minority of kids – did not emerge by accident. It was the product of a deliberate, conscious effort to radicalize large swaths of the United States, and significant chunks of state policy, into a hostility towards a few children.That effort seems set to bear fruit now, at the US supreme court, in US v Skrmetti, a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the Biden Department of Justice challenging Tennessee’s HB1, a sweeping ban on transition-related care for minors that was passed in 2023. The law prohibits any puberty blockers or hormones from being prescribed for the purposes of gender transition, but it does not prohibit these medications from being prescribed for any non-transition-related purpose. A minor can be prescribed puberty blockers, for instance, if their doctor believes they are experiencing early onset, or “precocious”, puberty; they cannot be prescribed puberty blockers to delay the onset of a puberty that may change their bodies in ways they do not desire for gender identity-related reasons.That means, too, that a child assigned male at birth could access, say, testosterone treatment, but a child assigned female at birth could not. In oral arguments on Wednesday, solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar and Chase Strangio of the ACLU – the first trans attorney to argue before the supreme court – explained that this was a straightforward case of sex discrimination, and hence needed to be subjected to a heightened standard of judicial review under the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause.It will not be. A majority of the court’s conservatives seemed poised to uphold the ban on transgender healthcare, though for a variety of different reasons. Brett Kavanaugh made his usual mealy-mouthed paean to states’ rights, an argument he always makes in questions of federally guaranteed equality provisions, but not before extolling the hypothetical suffering of teenagers who may access gender-affirming care but then later come to regret it. (One wonders if there are any choices from his own adolescence that Brett Kavanaugh has come to regret.) Clarence Thomas and chief justice John Roberts, meanwhile, both advanced the idea that the physiological differences between male and female bodies could moot the equal protection clause’s reach, giving states broad leeway to regulate medicine in ways that would uphold gender hierarchy.For his part, Samuel Alito also seemed interested in the idea that states might have a right to effect gender discrimination via their regulation of medicine. He repeatedly cited the 1974 case Geduldig v Aiello, in which the supreme court ruled that states could discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, and that pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination – because even though only female people become pregnant, not all of them are pregnant all of the time. (At the time, Congress found the outcome in Geduldig so egregious that it passed a law clarifying that pregnancy discrimination does count as sex discrimination for the purposes of federal civil rights law, and the precedent was largely mooted, but Alito’s controlling opinion in Dobbs has revived it.)But Alito, true to form, did not confine his opining to the notion that discrimination against trans people does not count as sex-based discrimination: he went on to suggest that trans people are not quite real, peppering Strangio, in a scene that seemed intended to humiliate the trans attorney, with questions about whether trans identity was truly an “immutable” characteristic. For his part, Strangio responded with a dignity and respect that Alito’s line of questioning did not merit.It was not the only low moment. James Matthew Rice, the Tennessee solicitor general who defended the ban in court, repeatedly compared gender affirming care with suicide, as well as to lobotomies and eugenics. During his time, justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, with occasional assists from Elena Kagan, tried to chase Rice down on the inconsistencies in his own argument.Tennessee claimed, after all, that the law did not discriminate on the basis of patients’ sex, but rather on the basis of the purpose of their treatment; when the liberal justices pointed out that this was a distinction without a difference, because the purpose of the treatment was dependent on the patients’ sex, Rice simply repeated his assertion that there was a difference, there, somewhere. Jackson, in particular, worked to get Rice to explain his position for some time. He declined to.To call the Tennessee ban sex-neutral is laughable, almost insulting. The statute itself makes gender conformity its explicit justification in its text, saying that it aims to prohibit “sex inconsistent treatment”, or anything that “might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex”. The law has long included sex role stereotyping within the purview of sex discrimination; Tennessee has sought to enforce sex roles, and sexed embodiment, with the force of the state. There is no good faith reading of the law that would allow it to withstand the scrutiny that the 14th amendment requires. But luckily for Tennessee, this is not a good faith court.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Hegseth vows to stay sober if confirmed as defense secretary; Trump signals pro-crypto stance with SEC pick Paul Atkins – live

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      Pete Hegseth is back on Capitol Hill as he seeks to reassure Republican senators of his ability to lead the defense department despite a steady trickle of troubling reports about his personal conduct.Over the weekend, the New Yorker reported that Hegseth, a former Fox News host, was known to drink excessively. It quoted a former staffer at a veterans non-profit that he led saying: “I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary.”The Hill reports that Hegseth told Roger Wicker, a Republican senator who will chair the armed services committee, that he will stay sober if he gets the defense secretary job. Speaking to reporters, Wicker said: “I think that’s probably a good idea.”Donald Trump will sit down for an interview with Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, for an interview that will air on 8 December, NBCUniversal announced in a press release on Wednesday. The interview will be filmed this Friday and will be the president-elect’s first network interview since the election, NBC’s press release added.Trump has been notoriously antagonistic toward mainstream American news networks like NBC in the past. In September 2023, he threatened to sue Comcast, NBC’s parent company, over what he described as “Country Threatening Treason”.In a post on Truth Social on 24 September 2023, Trump said:
      I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and event.
      Several people close to Donald Trump, including some he has chosen to serve in his cabinet, are encouraging the president-elect to pardon Edward Snowden, the Washington Post reports.A former National Security Agency contractor, Snowden fled to Hong Kong in 2013 and handed over tens of thousands of top-secret documents to media outlets, including the Guardian. He has since been in exile in Russia. Trump almost pardoned Snowden before leaving office in 2021, but ultimately decided not to.Here’s more on his latest thinking on the matter, from the Post:“I decided to let that one ride, let the courts work it out,” Trump said 10 months after leaving office, when asked about pardons for Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “I was very close to going the other way.”But advocates for clemency for Snowden, including several of Trump’s picks for top Cabinet posts, are hopeful that Trump is now closer to pardoning the former spy, who has been living in Moscow for more than a decade to avoid a 2013 Justice Department indictment.Matt Gaetz, the former congressman who withdrew last month as Trump’s nominee for attorney general, said the Snowden pardon has been a topic of discussion among people working on Trump’s presidential transition since the election, though he said he had not spoken about it with Trump during that time. Gaetz is hopeful that the future president will deliver.“I advocated for a pardon for Mr Snowden extensively. That did not give Mr Trump any apprehension in his nominating me. I would have recommended that as attorney general,” Gaetz said Monday. “I have discussed the matter with others in and around the transition, and there seemed to be pretty broad support for a pardon.”Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary pick, Robert F Kennedy Jr., campaigned for president on the promise of a “day one” pardon of Snowden and building a Washington monument in his honor. Director of National Intelligence pick Tulsi Gabbard sponsored a 2020 House resolution with Gaetz calling for the government to drop charges against Snowden.Kenneth Chesebro, a little-known lawyer who played a key role in developing the fake electors scheme, is asking a Georgia judge to withdraw his guilty plea in the wide-ranging election interference case filed by Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney.Chesebro pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to file false documents, agreeing to serve five years of probation, serve 100 hours of community service, pay $5,000 in restitution and write an apology to the citizens of Georgia. He also agreed to turn over all evidence in his possession and serve as a witness in the case.But in September, Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee threw out the charges that Chesebro had pleaded guilty to, which were related to filing false statements in federal court. State-level prosecutors did not have the authority to file those charges, McAfee ruled in September.“In Georgia, a defendant cannot plead guilty to a charge that does not constitute a crime,” Chesebro’s lawyer wrote in a court filing on Wednesday.The Georgia case has been on hold since earlier this year when the defendants in the case sought to have Willis removed from it over her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the case’s lead prosecutor. McAfee ruled that Willis could continue as long as Wade resigned, which he did. Trump and other defendants appealed that ruling.The case is not expected to go to trial any time soon and it is unclear whether it will be dismissed entirely after Trump won the presidency.Pete Hegseth’s chances of becoming defense secretary will likely be determined by Joni Ernst, a Republican senator from Iowa who is also the first female combat veteran to serve in the chamber, the New York Times reports.Hegseth is expected to meet today with Ernst, a victim of sexual assault who has supported a bill to change how the military handles such attacks.The former Fox News host was investigated in connection with a sexual assault in Monterey, California, in 2017. Though no charges were brought, it has been reported that he reached a financial settlement with his female accuser. Hegseth has also faced allegations of creating a hostile workplace environment for women when he was involved in veterans non-profits.Pete Hegseth is back on Capitol Hill as he seeks to reassure Republican senators of his ability to lead the defense department despite a steady trickle of troubling reports about his personal conduct.Over the weekend, the New Yorker reported that Hegseth, a former Fox News host, was known to drink excessively. It quoted a former staffer at a veterans non-profit that he led saying: “I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary.”The Hill reports that Hegseth told Roger Wicker, a Republican senator who will chair the armed services committee, that he will stay sober if he gets the defense secretary job. Speaking to reporters, Wicker said: “I think that’s probably a good idea.”Donald Trump has nominated cryptocurrency lobbyist Paul Atkins to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, a sign that his administration will take a friendlier approach to the digital assets that have boomed in value in recent years despite concerns about their financial risks.In a post on Truth Social announcing the appointment, Trump wrote:
      Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations. He believes in the promise of robust, innovative capital markets that are responsive to the needs of Investors, & that provide capital to make our Economy the best in the World. He also recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.
      Atkins served as an SEC commissioner during George W Bush’s presidency, and currently co-chairs the Token Alliance, an initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce intended to inform policymakers about digital assets. He also runs Patomak Global Partners, a risk management firm.Under Joe Biden, the SEC has been chaired by Gary Gensler, a critic of cryptocurrencies who will step down when Trump is inaugurated – a day the digital asset industry is very much looking forward to.Donald Trump announced Bill McGinley as White House counsel only three weeks ago, but today assigned him the new position in the “department of government efficiency”, swapping him for David Warrington instead. No reason was given for the switch-up.Warrington, a partner at Dhillon Law Group, represented Trump on cases such as those involving the effort to remove him from the ballot due to the role he played in the 6 Jananuary 2021 attack on the US Capitol.Warrington is the latest of Trump’s personal attorneys to take up a role in the administration. The veteran marine also led the Republican National Lawyers Association and worked on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.“He is an esteemed lawyer and Conservative leader,” Trump said.Trump appointed William “Bill” Joseph McGinley as counsel to a newly created non-government agency, the “department of government efficiency” (“Doge”), headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Doge, named after the Dogecoin meme cryptocurrency, is meant to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies”, according to Trump.McGinley was White House cabinet secretary during Trump’s first term, a role meant for coordinating policy and communications strategy.“Bill will play a crucial role in liberating our Economy from burdensome Regulations, excess spending, and Government waste,” Trump said in a statement announcing the new appointment. “He will partner with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget to provide advice and guidance to end the bloated Federal Bureaucracy. Bill is a great addition to a stellar team that is focused on making life better for all Americans. He will be at the forefront of my Administration’s efforts to make our Government more efficient and more accountable.”Adam Boheler will serve as lead hostage negotiator for the administration, a role which will come into focus during future conversations with Israel and Hamas.Trump said yesterday on Truth Social there will be “HELL TO PAY” if the hostages in Gaza are not released by the time of his inauguration.Negotiations over a ceasefire in Gaza have not been met with success. At least 44,466 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces, according to the Gaza health ministry, many of whom are women, children and elderly people.Donald Trump nominated healthcare executive Adam Boehler as special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, “with the personal rank of Ambassador”.“Adam worked for me as a Lead Negotiator on the Abraham Accords team. He has negotiated with some of the toughest people in the World, including the Taliban, but Adam knows that NO ONE is tougher than the United States of America, at least when President Trump is its Leader. Adam will work tirelessly to bring our Great American Citizens HOME,” Trump said in a statement.“Adam was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the first CEO of the United States Development Finance Corporation. He went to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.“Congratulations to Adam, his wife, Shira, and their four beautiful children, Ruth, Abraham, Esther, and Rachel!”The supreme court spent two and a half hours hearing oral arguments over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care, which members of the court’s six-justice supermajority appear inclined to uphold. An attorney for the state argued that the law protects “minors from risky, unproven medical interventions”, while the Biden administration’s top lawyer said: “Tennessee made no attempt to tailor its law to its stated health concerns.” The American Civil Liberties Union also spoke against the law, with its lawyer Chase Strangio making history as the first openly transgender person to argue before the supreme court. A decision is expected in the coming months.Here’s what else has gone on today so far:

      Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary is reportedly teetering amid reports of excessive drinking, financial mismanagement and a sexual assault allegation. Donald Trump is said to be considering Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, to replace him for the job of leading the Pentagon, but has announced no decision yet.

      Hegseth’s mother, Penelope Hegseth, defended her son in an interview with his former employer Fox News, saying: “He doesn’t misuse women.”

      Trump announced a slew of new appointments to top administration jobs, including army secretary and Nasa administrator. Among those picked was former federal inmate Peter Navarro, who will be a top White House trade adviser.
      Members of the supreme court’s conservative supermajority appeared willing to uphold Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors in just-concluded oral arguments.Biden administration solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar as well as American Civil Liberties Union attorney Chase Strangio argued that the Tennessee law, known as SB 1, ran afoul of constitutional protections against sex discrimination, and that it jeopardizes the mental health of minors by forcing them to go through puberty before they can access gender-affirming care once they turn 18.But conservative justices questioned whether by rejecting the law, they would create a situation whereby a young person would use the care to transition genders, then regret it later on. They also questioned whether the constitution addressed the sort of situation that the Tennessee law deals with.“You say there are benefits from allowing these treatments, but there are also harms, right, from allowing these treatments, at least the state says so, including lost fertility, the physical and psychological effects on those who later change their mind and want to detransition, which I don’t think we can ignore,” said Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative justice.Other members of the six-justice conservative bloc made similar points, which is more than enough to issue a ruling upholding Tennessee’s law, and likely those of the more than two dozen other states with similar measures on the books.As the arguments wrapped up, conservative supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Tennessee solicitor general Matthew Rice about how the state’s law should be viewed in the context of state’s rights.“You are not arguing that the constitution take sides on this question … you are arguing that each state can make its own choice on this question. So, from your perspective, as I understand it, it’s perfectly fine for a state to make a different choice, as many states have, than Tennessee did and to allow these treatments,” Kavanaugh asked.“That’s correct,” Rice replied, arguing that the question of how to regulate such care is one best left to legislatures to determine, not the courts.“We think that’s because of what your honor has pointed out, that no matter how you draw these lines, there are risk and benefit, potential benefits and harms to people on both sides, and the question of how to balance those harms is not a question for the judiciary, it’s a question for the legislature,” he said.Liberal supreme court justices were openly skeptical of the Tennessee law.The state’s solicitor general Matthew Rice began by arguing that there are risks to gender-affirming care, leading justice Sonia Sotomayor to cut in: “I’m sorry, councilor, every medical treatment has a risk, even taking aspirin. There is always going to be a percentage of the population under any medical treatment that’s going to suffer a harm.”Sotomayor argued that the law creates a “sex-based difference” in who can receive medical care, but Rice said he disagreed, arguing that the law is instead regulating different medical procedures.“We do not think that giving puberty blockers to a six-year-old that has started precocious puberty is the same medical treatment as giving it to a minor who wants to transition. Those are not the same medical treatment,” he said.Currently before the court is Tennessee’s solicitor general, Matthew Rice, who is arguing in favor of the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.“Tennessee lawmakers enacted SB 1 to protect minors from risky, unproven medical interventions. The law imposes an across-the-board rule that allows the use of drugs and surgeries for some medical purposes, but not for others. Its application turns entirely on medical purpose, not a patient’s sex. That is not sex discrimination,” he began.“The challengers try to make the law seem sex-based this morning by using terms like masculinizing and feminizing, but their arguments can … conflate fundamentally different treatments, just as using morphine to manage pain differs from using it to assist suicide, using hormones and puberty blockers to address a physical condition is far different from using it to address psychological distress associated with one’s body.”Back at the supreme court, liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she was concerned that if the court upheld the Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care, it would undermine decisions that outlawed forms of racial discrimination.She specifically cited the landmark Loving v Virginia decision of 1967, which found laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional.“We’re just sort of doing what the state is encouraging here in Loving, where you just sort of say, well, there are lots of good reasons for this policy, and who are we, as the court, to say otherwise? I’m worried that we’re undermining the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases,” Jackson said.“I share your concerns,” ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio replied. “If Tennessee can have an end run around heightened scrutiny by asserting at the outset that biology justifies the sex-based differential in the law, that would undermine decades of this court’s precedent.”Donald Trump has announced nominees for several top administration roles, including army secretary, Nasa administrator and advisers dealing with trade and hostages held overseas.Among those selected was Peter Navarro, who served four months in prison earlier this year after being convicted of contempt of Congress. Trump appointed Navarro as senior counsel for trade and manufacturing, a role similar to one he held during the first Trump administration. Here’s what the president-elect said in making the appointment:
      I am pleased to announce that Peter Navarro, a man who was treated horribly by the Deep State, or whatever else you would like to call it, will serve as my Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing. During my First Term, few were more effective or tenacious than Peter in enforcing my two sacred rules, Buy American, Hire American. He helped me renegotiate unfair Trade Deals like NAFTA and the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), and moved every one of my Tariff and Trade actions FAST …
      The Senior Counselor position leverages Peter’s broad range of White House experience, while harnessing his extensive Policy analytic and Media skills. His mission will be to help successfully advance and communicate the Trump Manufacturing, Tariff, and Trade Agendas.
      The president-elect announced three other appointments:

      Daniel Driscoll to serve as army secretary. An Iraq war veteran, Driscoll was most recently serving as an adviser to vice-president-elect JD Vance.

      Adam Boehler as special envoy for hostage affairs. Boehler was involved in negotiating the Abraham accords that normalized relations between Israel and some Arab states, and Trump said he “will work tirelessly to bring our Great American Citizens HOME”.

      Jared Isaacman as Nasa administrator. The billionaire was earlier this year the first private citizen to perform a spacewalk from a capsule from Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX.
      The justices are now hearing from Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union, who is also the first openly transgender attorney to argue before the supreme court.Strangio said that the court should rule against the Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Here’s his opening statement:
      On its face, SB 1 bans medical care only when it is inconsistent with a person’s birth sex. An adolescent can receive medical treatment to live and identify as a boy if his birth sex is male, but not female, and an adolescent can receive medical treatment to live and identify as a girl if her birth sex is female, but not male.
      Tennessee claims the sex-based line drawing is justified to protect children, but SB 1 has taken away the only treatment that relieved years of suffering for each of the … plaintiffs, and, critically, Tennessee’s arguments that SB 1 is sex-neutral would apply if the state banned this care for adults too, by banning treatment only when it allows an adolescent to live, identify or appear inconsistent with their birth sex. SB 1 warrants heightened scrutiny under decades of precedent because the sixth circuit failed to apply that standard, this court should vacate and remand. More

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      What is a presidential pardon and how has it been used in the US?

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      Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter on Sunday for any federal crimes “he committed or may have committed” between 1 January 2014 and 1 December 2024 has brought renewed focus on the expansive power the US constitution gives the president to grant official clemency.It’s a power that presidents have deployed since George Washington, who pardoned those involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, to Donald Trump, who pardoned his political allies.What is the pardon power?The presidential pardon power is explicitly outlined in the US constitution.Section 2 of article II says that the president has the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment”. The president’s power only applies to federal crimes, not state ones. It also does not apply to cases of impeachment.The founders took the pardon power from England, where there was a longstanding tradition of the king’s ability to issue mercy pardons. There was some debate about whether Congress should be required to give approval of pardons and whether there should be an exception for treason, but Alexander Hamilton pushed the constitutional convention to include a broad pardon power solely vested in the president. “As men generally derive confidence from their numbers, they might often encourage each other in an act of obduracy, and might be less sensible to the apprehension of suspicion or censure for an injudicious or affected clemency. On these accounts, one man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of government, than a body of men,” he wrote in Federalist no 74, one of a series of essays to promote the ratification of the constitution.When it came to treason, he argued that the president could deploy the pardon power as a tool to negotiate and unify the country. “In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall,” he wrote.Bernadette Meyler, a law professor at Stanford University who studies British and US law, described it as “the one emergency power written into the constitution, other than the suspension of habeas corpus.“It’s one thing that is a concession to the idea that there might be certain unforeseen circumstances that the president would have to intervene in,” she said. “It goes along with the president’s control also over the army and navy and military power because, in the context that it was being contemplated, it was really being thought about as another tool within the ability to control domestic unrest.” How has the pardon power been used?George Washington issued the first pardons in 1795 to two men who were involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, a violent uprising in Pennsylvania to protest a tax on whiskey and other alcohol products by the nascent federal government.A key moment in the pardon power came after the civil war, when president Andrew Johnson issued “a full pardon and amnesty” to any person “who, directly or indirectly, participated in the late insurrection or rebellion” during the civil war. This and similar pardons around the same time led the US supreme court to interpret the pardon power to allow the president to grant broad amnesty to a group of people and not just for specific crimes already committed, Meyler said.After Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in the 1970s after Watergate, Gerald Ford issued a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes.In 1977, Jimmy Carter issued a mass pardon for those who had dodged the draft for the Vietnam war. At the end of his term in 1992, George HW Bush pardoned six people involved in the Iran-Contra affair, including the former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger.In his last day in office in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother and gave an extremely controversial pardon to Marc Rich, a fugitive convicted of financial crimes whose ex-wife had been a major donor to Democrats and the Clinton campaign. Barack Obama granted clemency to more than 1,700 people while in office, including hundreds who had been convicted of non-violent drug offenses.Who did Donald Trump pardon?Trump did not hesitate to use the pardon power during his presidency to help political allies. He pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared. The elder Kushner had pleaded guilty years earlier to tax evasion and witness tampering (Trump has now tapped him to be ambassador to France).He pardoned his political adviser Steve Bannon, who faced charges of defrauding donors on a charity related to building a wall at the southern border. He also pardoned Paul Manafort, who served as a top official on his 2016 campaign, and Trump ally Roger Stone.Trump pardoned the former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, the conservative personality Dinesh D’Souza, and Elliott Broidy, a major Republican donor. He also pardoned the rapper Lil Wayne and Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who had spent decades in prison for drug offenses but earned considerable attention after Kim Kardashian took on her cause.Trump has said he will issue a mass pardon for those involved in the January 6 attacks, a move that would end years of work by the justice department to investigate and criminally prosecute those involved in the attacks.Do other countries have a pardon power?The power to pardon is one that widely exists around the world, said Andrew Novak, a professor at George Mason University who is the author of Comparative Executive Clemency: The Constitutional Pardon Power and the Prerogative of Mercy in Global Perspective.But the United States is somewhat unique in allowing its chief executive the ability to pardon without having to get input or sign-off from others.“Biden can grant a pardon without input from anybody, which is much more of like a medieval English king conception of the pardon power, which is kind of ironic,” he added. “We have kind of an old-fashioned conception of the pardon power, at least generally.”“Having this unlimited pardon power that’s more similar to like 1700s England than it is to the current state of affairs in the western world,” he added. “In most countries in Europe, and the comparators in the developed world, they require input from someone else.” That requirement for input, Novak said, can somewhat limit a pardon being used to serve political or personal interests, the way it can be used in the US.Many countries also don’t allow for a pardon before conviction, Novak said, and there has been a movement over the last few decades in other countries for more transparency to ensure that proper processes are followed.About half of constitutions around the world limit the pardon power to something that can only occur after conviction, are only for specified offenses, or require an executive to consult others, Novak said. It’s uncommon for countries to have a ban on self-pardoning or pardoning a family member, he added.“Maybe it’s not common because the circumstance doesn’t arise very often,” he said. “The pardon power has always been a corruption risk going back to medieval times and can be used for many forms of self-dealing, like shielding one’s close associates or supporters.”The US founders understood impeachment to be an important check on the pardon power, Meyler said. “As we’ve seen it’s extremely hard to actually convict on an impeachment so that has proved to be really a fictional limitation on the president’s power.” More

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      in Elections

      Trump fake-elector scheme: where do five state investigations stand?

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      After the 2020 election, a group of 84 people in seven states signed false documents claiming to be electors for Donald Trump. This year, despite the fact that four states have brought criminal charges against the fake electors, 14 of them will now serve as real electors for the president-elect.The 14 once-fake-and-now-real electors were selected by state Republican parties in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada. They will meet in their state capitols on 17 December to cast their ballots for Trump.Prosecutors in many of the states where fake electors signed false documents are moving forward with charges, as the federal charges against Trump for election subversion and other alleged crimes are up in the air after his re-election.Five of the seven states pursued charges related to the issue. Authorities in New Mexico and Pennsylvania did not pursue charges because the documents the false electors there used hedged language that attorneys said would likely spare them from criminal charges.The fake electors in some instances are high-profile Republicans: people in elected office, in official party roles, prominent members of external conservative groups.Here’s where the state cases stand.ArizonaKris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general for Arizona, said on Sunday that her office will not be dropping any charges related to the fake electors.A grand jury in Arizona charged 18 people involved in the fake electors scheme, including the 11 people who served as fake electors and Trump allies Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Christina Bobb and Mike Roman. Some of the fake electors are high profile: two state senators (Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern), a former state Republican party chair (Kelli Ward) and a Turning Point USA executive (Tyler Bowyer).“I have no intention of breaking that case up. I have no intention of dropping that case,” Mayes told MSNBC. “A grand jury in the state of Arizona decided that these individuals who engaged in an attempt to overthrow our democracy in 2020 should be held accountable, so we won’t be cowed, we won’t be intimidated.”Arizona charged people in April 2024, so the case is still in its early stages.GeorgiaGeorgia’s case will be the most watched, especially if all federal charges against Trump are dropped. It is the only state case where Trump himself is charged, though he will seek to have the charges dropped because of the supreme court’s presidential immunity ruling, or at least paused until he’s no longer in office. Several of the 19 people charged pleaded guilty and received probation and fines.Fake electors David Shafer, Cathleen Latham and Shawn Still were charged in the criminal racketeering case, but not all of the fake electors in Georgia were charged – many were granted immunity to cooperate with the case.The US supreme court rejected an attempt by Meadows on Tuesday to move the case to federal court.The next step is set for December: the Georgia court of appeals will hear arguments on whether prosecutor Fani Willis can continue on the case herself despite a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor on the case. A lower court previous ruled that she could continue.MichiganSixteen fake electors were charged in Michigan in mid-2023. One of them agreed to cooperate with the prosecution and had his charges dropped in return.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe case is working its way through the court process, with the last of the defendants sitting for examinations in October as the judge decides whether the case should go to trial.Six of those charged will serve as Trump’s actual electors this year. Attorneys for those fake and now real electors have said their role this year shouldn’t have any bearing on their legal cases.NevadaSix Trump electors in Nevada were charged at the end of 2023 with state forgery crimes for their roles in the scheme.In June, Clark county district court judge Mary Kay Holthu dismissed the case, saying it was in the wrong venue and should not have been filed in Las Vegas. Democratic attorney general Aaron Ford vowed to appeal the ruling, but defense attorneys have said the charges are now outside the statute of limitations.“My office’s goal remains unchanged – we will hold these fake electors accountable for their actions which contributed to the ongoing and completely unfounded current of distrust in our electoral system,” Ford said. “Our drive to seek justice does not change with election results. We are committed to see this matter through, either through winning our appeal or filing anew before the new year. This is not going away.”Two of the fake electors will again serve as Trump electors this year: Michael McDonald, the chair of the Nevada Republican party, and Jesse Law, chair of the Republican party of Clark county.WisconsinThe fake elector scheme allegedly began in Wisconsin, where pro-Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro is from.Those who served as fake electors did not get criminally charged in Wisconsin, though three people involved in the scheme – Chesebro, Roman, and James Troupis – were charged in June by the state attorney general for their role in orchestrating the scheme.The state’s fake electors settled a civil lawsuit in 2023 that required them to agree not to serve as electors when elections involve Trump and to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. Some of the electors have publicly claimed they were misled about the purpose of the alternate slates. More

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      Bernie Sanders says he opposes urging Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down

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      Bernie Sanders said he opposes any move to force Sonia Sotomayor, the senior liberal justice on the US supreme court, to step down so that Joe Biden could nominate a younger liberal replacement before he finishes his term as president.Sotomayor, 70, is known to suffer from health issues, and some Democrats fear a repeat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died during Donald Trump’s first term – giving him a third opportunity to nominate a new justice and further shore up the top court’s conservative bent.In his first term, Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to replace Antonin Scalia, Brett Kavanaugh to succeed Anthony Kennedy, and Amy Coney Barrett to take the place of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died less than two months before the 2020 election – leaving six largely conservative judges to just three liberals.Trump’s first-term appointees to the court were critical to overturning abortion rights and a series of other rulings that delighted conservative activists.In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sanders, a progressive senator who identifies as an independent but usually votes with Democrats, said it would not be “sensible” to ask Sotomayor to step down while Biden is still in office.He added he’d heard “a little bit” of talk from Democratic senators about asking Sotomayor, who is serving a lifetime appointment to the supreme court, to step aside.“I don’t think it’s sensible,” Sanders said, without elaborating further.No elected Democrat has so far publicly called on the justice to resign, but the idea comes amid a feverish effort by Democrats to “Trump-proof” their agenda before the Republican takes office in January.Supreme court justices are nominated by the sitting president but face an often grueling confirmation process in the Senate. With Democrats soon to lose control of the body, the opportunity for Biden to appoint – and for Democratic senators to confirm – a successor to Sotomayor is fast slipping away.Biden appointed Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson to the supreme court. She was confirmed in 2022. However, with just two months left in office, it is unlikely that Biden and a Democrat-controlled Senate would be able to nominate and confirm a new justice to the court in time.Democrats have previous floated the possibility of increasing the number of justices to counter the court’s political make-up. In July, Biden proposed term limits and a code of ethics for court justices, after a series of scandals relating to the conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito called into question their impartiality.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden said the court had “gutted civil rights protections, taken away a woman’s right to choose, and now granted Presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office”.In a second term, meanwhile, Trump could have the opportunity to further deepen the court’s conservative leaning, as Thomas and Alito are both in their mid-70s.Just as Democrats are considering whether Sotomayor should step down to install a replacement liberal justice, Republicans could do the same after they take power in January. “Alito is gleefully packing up his chambers,” Mike Davis, a conservative legal operative, predicted on social media this week.Although a Republican majority in the Senate refused to take up confirmation hearings in 2016 when Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia, protesting that to do so in an election year would be unfair, they had no such problems when Trump nominated Barrett to replace Ginsburg in 2020, also an election year. More

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      Effects of Republican Senate majority will reverberate through the courts

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      Democrats knew they faced an uphill climb in holding their 51-49 Senate majority on Tuesday, with a map that tilted heavily in Republicans’ favor.But as recently as Sunday, they held out hope that they could maintain control of the upper chamber. They offered cautious optimism that the Democratic incumbent Jon Tester could edge out the Republican Tim Sheehy in Montana, and they felt comfortable with the Democratic senator Sherrod Brown’s chances in Ohio.In the end, Tester and Brown both lost along with the Democrat Glenn Elliott in West Virginia, representing three pick-ups for Republicans. As of Wednesday afternoon, Republicans had secured at least 52 of the Senate’s 100 seats, with the possibility of additional wins in battleground states.Republicans’ new Senate majority will give the president-elect, Donald Trump, far more leverage to enact his legislative agenda and, crucially, confirm judicial and executive nominees.To be clear, Republicans’ legislative prospects will largely depend on whether they can win full control of Congress. The House was still too close to call on Wednesday and would probably remain so for days, as California began the long process of counting millions of mail ballots. If Democrats win a narrow majority in the House, their conference will almost certainly act as a blockade for much of Trump’s agenda.But even without a victory in the House, Trump and Senate Republicans’ partnership could have long-lasting impacts on the country’s courts and laws, given that the upper chamber confirms the president’s judicial nominees.Trump has already nominated three justices to the supreme court, where conservatives hold a six-three majority. With Trump in office, the two oldest conservatives on the court – Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74 – may choose to step down to give him the opportunity to fill their seats. In the event that Senate Republicans confirmed Trump’s nominees to replace them, he would become the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to successfully appoint five members of the supreme court.If he has the chance to select more supreme court justices, Trump would probably favor younger nominees who could sit on the bench for decades, given that justices serve lifetime appointments. That possibility underscores a chilling reality for many left-leaning Americans: even though Trump is limited to only serving two terms, the country may be dealing with the repercussions of his presidency far into the future.During his first term, Trump and Senate Republicans prioritized confirming as many conservative judges as possible. Over his four years in office, the Senate confirmed 220 of Trump’s judicial appointments, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation. In comparison, Barack Obama saw 160 judicial confirmations over his eight years in office.After Trump’s flurry of judicial nominations, Joe Biden made it a top priority to match his predecessor’s record. As of Wednesday, the Senate has confirmed 213 of Biden’s judicial appointments, with more possible in the final weeks before the new Congress is seated in January.Because of Trump and Biden’s track records, the new president will inherit the fewest number of federal judicial vacancies in more than three decades, NBC News has reported. But even if the pace of judicial confirmations slows during Trump’s second term, the Republican majority in the Senate will still provide a rubber stamp on other nominations.Trump has made clear that he intends to overhaul the federal government and perhaps even reclassify tens of thousands of non-partisan roles as political appointments. To get his cabinet members and lower-level administration officials confirmed, Trump will need the support of the Senate, and Republicans appear eager to help advance his plans.Although Senate Democrats have lost their majority, their decision to leave the filibuster intact may benefit them in the new session of Congress. During Biden’s early presidency, Democrats had considered amending the filibuster, a legislative mechanism that effectively raises the threshold for passing bills from 51 votes to 60 votes. If Republicans win the House and full control of Congress, Senate Democrats may need to rely on the filibuster to stymie Trump’s agenda.With their party shut out of power for at least the next two years, Senate Democrats will soon turn their attention to the 2026 midterms. But considering senators serve six-year terms, it could take far more than just two years to undo the damage that Tuesday wrought for Democrats.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      How can the candidate with most votes lose? The US electoral college explained

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      Even though the United States touts its status as one of the world’s leading democracies, its citizens do not get to directly choose the president. That task is reserved for the electoral college – the convoluted way in which Americans have selected their president since the 18th century.Contrary to its name, the electoral college is more a process than a body. Every four years, in the December following an election, its members – politicians and largely unknown party loyalists – meet in all 50 states on the same day and cast their votes for president. Then they essentially disappear.In recent years there has been growing criticism of the electoral college, accelerated by the fact that two Republican presidents – George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 – have been elected president while losing the popular vote. But there’s no sign that US elections will change any time soon.Here’s everything you need to knowWhat exactly is the electoral college?Article II of the US constitution lays out the process by which a president is elected.Each state has a number of electors that’s equal to the total number of representatives and senators it has in Congress. Washington DC gets three electoral votes. In total, there are 538 electors. A candidate needs the votes of 270 of them, a simple majority, to win.The constitution says that state legislatures can choose how they want to award their electors. All but two states have long chosen to use a winner-take-all system – the winner of the popular vote in their state gets all of the electoral votes.To complicate matters further, two states, Maine and Nebraska, award their electors differently. In both states, two electoral college votes are allocated to the statewide winner. Each state then awards its remaining electors – two in Maine and three in Nebraska – to the winner in each of the state’s congressional districts.Why does the US have an electoral college?When the founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia to draft the US constitution in 1787, they had a lot of trouble figuring out a system for choosing a chief executive. Initially, they proposed a plan that would have Congress choose the president. But that led to concerns that the executive branch, designed to be independent from Congress, would be subject to it.A contingent of the delegates also favored electing the president through a direct popular vote. But the idea never got broad support and was shut down repeatedly during the convention, the historian Alexander Keyssar wrote in his book Why do we still have the electoral college.There were a number of reasons the idea was not widely popular. First, the convention had adopted the racist three-fifths compromise in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for population purposes. This was a win for the southern states, in which slaves made up a sizable chunk of the population. A popular vote system would have disadvantaged the southern states because they had fewer people who could vote.There were also concerns about giving too much power to larger states and that voters would be unable to learn about the candidates from different states, according to Keyssar. It was a debate driven more about pragmatics than about political rights, he writes.Towards the end of the convention, a committee of 11 delegates was appointed to deal with unresolved matters and one of them was how to select the president. They proposed a version of what we have now come to understand as the electoral college.“This brief nativity story makes clear that the presidential election system enshrined in the Constitution embodied a web of compromises, spawned by months of debate among men who disagreed with one another and were uncertain about the best way to proceed,” Keyssar wrote. “It was, in effect, a consensus second choice, made acceptable, in part, by the remarkably complex details of the electoral process, details that themselves constituted compromises among, or gestures toward, particular constituencies and convictions.”What is a swing state?States that either presidential candidate has a good shot at winning are often called “swing states”.In the 2024 election, there are seven swing states: Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Michigan (15 electoral votes), Georgia (16 electoral votes), North Carolina (16 electoral votes), Arizona (11 electoral votes), and Nevada (six electoral votes). Whichever candidate wins the election must carry some combination of those states, which is why the candidates will spend the majority of their time and resources there. Joe Biden carried all of those states bar North Carolina in the 2020 election.The idea of a swing state can also change over time because of changing demographics. Until recently, for example, Ohio and Florida were considered swing states, but they are now considered pretty solidly Republican. Michigan was considered a pretty solid Democratic stronghold until Donald Trump won it in 2016.Does the electoral college allow for minority rule?There have been five elections in US history – in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 – in which the candidate who became the president did not win the popular vote. This has led to wider recognition of imbalances in the system and a push from some to abolish the electoral college altogether.The loudest criticism is that it’s a system that dilutes the influence of a presidential vote depending on where one lives. A single elector in California represents more than 726,000 people. In Wyoming, an elector represents a little more than 194,000 people.Another critique is that the system allows a tiny number of Americans to determine the outcome of the presidential election. In 2020, about 44,000 votes between Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona allowed Biden to win the electoral college. Such a slim margin is extraordinary in an election that 154.6 million people voted in.In 2016, about 80,000 combined votes gave Trump his winning margins in key swing states.Do electors have to vote for a specific candidate?State political parties choose people to serve as electors who they believe are party stalwarts and will not go rogue and cast a vote for anyone other than the party’s nominee. Still, electors have occasionally cast their votes for someone else. In 2016, for example, there were seven electors who voted for candidates other than the ones they were pledged to. That was the first time there was a faithless elector since 1972, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Many states have laws that require electors to vote for the candidate they are pledged to. In 1952, the US supreme court said that states could compel electors to vote for the party’s nominee. And in 2020, the court said that states could penalize electors who don’t vote for the candidate they’re pledged to.How has the electoral college remained in place for so long?Since almost immediately after the electoral college was enacted, there have been efforts to change it. “There were constitutional amendments that were being promoted within a little more than a decade after the constitution was ratified,” Keyssar said. “There have been probably 1,000 or more constitutional amendments to change it or get rid of it filed since 1800. Some of them have some close.” (There were more than 700 efforts as recently as 2019, according to the Congressional Research Service.)When the idea of a national popular vote was proposed in 1816, Keyssar said, southern states objected. Slaves continued to give them power in the electoral college, but could not vote. “They would lose that extra bonus they got on behalf of their slaves,” he said.After the civil war, African Americans were legally entitled to vote, but southern states continued to suppress them from casting ballots. A national popular vote would have diminished their influence on the overall outcome, so they continued to support the electoral college system.The country did get close to abolishing the electoral college once, in the late 1960s. In 1968, George Wallace, the southern segregationist governor, almost threw the system into chaos by nearly getting enough votes to deny any candidate a majority in the electoral college. The US House passed the proposed amendment 339 to 70. But the measure stalled in the Senate, where senators representing southern states filibustered.That led to continued objections to a national popular vote so that southern white people could continue to wield power, according to the Washington Post. President Jimmy Carter eventually endorsed the proposal, but it failed to get enough votes in the Senate in 1979 (Joe Biden was one of the senators who voted against it).“It’s not like we are suddenly discovering this system really doesn’t work,” Keyssar said.Is there any chance of getting rid of the electoral college now?The most prominent effort to get rid of the electoral college today is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The idea is to get states to agree to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the outcome in their specific state. The compact would take effect when states having a total of 270 electoral votes – enough to determine the winner of the election – join.So far 16 states and Washington DC – a total of 205 electoral votes – have joined the effort.But the path ahead for the project is uncertain. Nearly all of the states that haven’t joined have either a Republican governor or legislature. And legal observers have questioned whether such an arrangement is constitutional – something that would probably be quickly put to the US supreme court. More

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      US supreme court signals willingness to uphold regulation on ‘ghost gun’ kits

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      The US supreme court signalled a willingness to uphold the regulation of “ghost guns” – firearms without serial numbers that are built from kits that people can order online and assemble at home.The manufacturers and gun rights groups challenging the rule argued the Biden administration overstepped by trying to regulate kits.Justice Samuel Alito compared gun parts to meal ingredients, saying a lineup including eggs and peppers isn’t necessarily a Western omelet. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, though, questioned whether gun kits are more like ready-to-eat meal kits that contain everything needed to make a dinner like turkey chili.Chief Justice John Roberts seemed skeptical of the challengers’ position that the kits are mostly popular with hobbyists who enjoy making their own weapons, like auto enthusiasts might rebuild a car on the weekend.Many ghost gun kits require only the drilling of a few holes and removal of plastic tabs.
      “My understanding is that it’s not terribly difficult to do this,” Roberts said. “He really wouldn’t think he has built that gun, would he?”A ruling is expected in the coming months.As ghost guns were increasingly used in crimes – including 1,200 homicides and attempted homicides between 2016 and 2022, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – the Biden administration issued new rules regulating them in 2022. The new ATF rule classified ghost gun kits as firearms under the Gun Control Act of 1968, the US’s main firearms law – making them subject to the same regulations as all other guns.Since the rule went into effect, police departments in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia have all recovered fewer ghost guns at crime scenes.However, firearms manufacturers and gun-rights groups quickly sued to block the ATF rule. A federal district court judge in Texas ruled against the ATF in 2023 – but the Biden administration appealed the decision to the fifth circuit court of appeals. While that decision was pending, the supreme court intervened to keep the regulation in effect, by a narrow 5-4 vote. The fifth circuit ultimately ruled against the Biden administration, which then appealed the case to the supreme court.Garland v VanDerStok will require the supreme court to consider issues of firearm policy, but also the extent of federal regulatory powers. The court has been resistant to regulate guns in recent years, issuing decisions like a 2022 ruling striking down New York state’s ban on concealed carry firearms and a decision earlier this year overturning a ban on bump stocks.At the same time, the court has been wary of federal regulatory power, overturning a 40-year-old legal precedent known as Chevron deference, which allowed agencies like the ATF to broadly interpret the laws they are charged with implementing, earlier this year.The supreme court sided with the Biden administration last year, allowing the regulation to go. Roberts and Barrett joined with the court’s three liberal members to form the majority.Ghost guns, which can be assembled at home in under an hour to produce a fully functional weapon, used to be rare, except among hobbyists. In 2016, police recovered about 1,800 such firearms. But by 2021, that number had soared to nearly 20,000, according to the justice department. The weapons’ popularity was in part tied to the fact they were not regulated like already assembled firearms: they had no serial number, no sales records and did not require a background check.

      The Associated Press contributed reporting More