Gershkovich was arrested in March on espionage charges, which both he and his employer, the Wall Street Journal, deny
The US House of Representatives voted unanimously on Tuesday for a resolution calling for the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been imprisoned in Russia for three months.
The vote was 422-0 in favor of the nonbinding measure.
Continue reading...House speaker says he isn’t worried the agreement will fail as prominent rightwinger Chip Roy calls it a ‘turd sandwich’
The Republican speaker of the US House, Kevin McCarthy, insisted on Tuesday that supporting the debt ceiling deal would be “easy” for his party and it was likely to pass through Congress despite one prominent rightwinger’s verdict that the proposed agreement is a “turd sandwich”.
Amid loud denunciations from the Republican right and also from closer to the centre, McCarthy said he was not worried the agreement would fail, or that it would threaten his hold on the speaker’s gavel.
Continue reading...Some members of Congress question if they received enough concessions in Biden and McCarthy’s agreement
US political leaders appeared bullish on Monday that they can sell a bipartisan compromise debt ceiling deal to enough mainstream lawmakers – overcoming boisterous criticism from left and right – urgently enough to avert a first-ever national default on the $31.4tn the US owes creditors.
Despite a lot of diplomacy and even arm-twisting still to come on Capitol Hill in the next few days, Joe Biden left the White House to head to Delaware on Monday afternoon smiling and teasing reporters as he took questions, while the first lady, Jill Biden, waited on the lawn.
Continue reading...President says deal struck with Kevin McCarthy protects ‘historic economic recovery’ but it needs approval from a divided Congress
Joe Biden has said a bipartisan deal to raise the $31.4tn US debt ceiling and avoid a default is ready to move to Congress and urged lawmakers to pass the agreement he struck with Kevin McCarthy.
“This is a deal that’s good news for ... the American people,” the president said at the White House on Sunday night after a call with McCarthy to put the final touches to a tentative deal struck the previous day. “It takes the threat of catastrophic default off the table, protects our hard-earned and historic economic recovery,” he said.
Continue reading...Lawmakers on call over Memorial Day weekend as treasury secretary revises estimate of when US will run out of money
Unless Congress raises the debt ceiling, the US will run out of money to pay its bills by 5 June, the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said on Friday as Democratic and Republican negotiators struggled to reach a deal.
Failure to raise the debt celling could trigger a default that could wreak havoc on the economy and global markets. Yellen’s announcement gives negotiators a little more time to come to an agreement.
Continue reading...House adjourned for holiday weekend, but lawmakers could be recalled to vote on deal if agreement is reached
Joe Biden and Republican lawmakers on Thursday appeared to be nearing a deal to cut spending and raise the debt ceiling, with little time to spare to avoid a potential default that could wreak havoc on the economy and global markets.
The deal under consideration by negotiators would raise the government’s $31.4tn debt ceiling for two years while capping spending on most items, a US official told Reuters. It would also increase funding for discretionary spending on military and veterans while essentially holding non-defense discretionary spending at current year levels, the official said.
Continue reading...Republican gives positive remarks to reporters as 11 Democratic senators sign letter to Biden urging him to use 14th amendment to avoid default
Eleven Democratic senators have signed a letter to Joe Biden urging him to consider invoking the 14th amendment to prevent the United States from defaulting if the debt ceiling is not raised.
The letter, which first became public yesterday, was signed by Democrats Tina Smith, Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Ed Markey, Mazie Hirono, Peter Welch, Richard Blumenthal, Jack Reed, Sheldon Whitehouse, John Fetterman and Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats.
Continue reading...Members voted along party lines to refer a resolution to remove the lying congressman to the House ethics committee
Republicans successfully sidestepped an effort to force them into a vote to expel George Santos, the New York representative, from Congress, which could have narrowed their already slim four-seat majority.
The House voted along party lines, 221-204, to refer a resolution to expel the congressman to the House ethics committee, with Santos himself joining his Republican colleagues in voting to do so.
Continue reading...Virginia congressman Gerry Connolly condemns ‘devastating and unconscionable’ assault on two staffers
Police in Virginia on Monday named the suspect in an attack in which two staffers at the district office of a Democratic congressman were assaulted with a metal baseball bat and required hospital treatment.
Xuan Kha Tran Pham, 49, was arrested after the attack at Gerry Connolly’s office in Fairfax. Held without bond, Pham faced charges of malicious wounding and aggravated malicious wounding.
Associated Press contributed to this report
Continue reading...Supreme court justice did not report Crow’s tuition payments on his annual financial disclosures, ProPublica reports
A new investigation by ProPublica revealed that billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow paid the tuition of Mark Martin, a grandnephew of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas.
According to ProPublica, Mark Martin, whom Thomas obtained legal custody over when Martin was 6-years old, attended a private boarding school in northern Georgia called Hidden Lakes Academy for about a year.
“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth… he and his wife have supported many young Americans through scholarship and other programs at a variety of schools…
Harlan and Kathy have particularly focused on students who are at risk of falling behind or missing out on opportunities to better themselves… Tuition and other financial assistance is given directly to academic institutions, not to students or to their families. These scholarships and other contributions have always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business.”
A New York judge has thrown out Donald Trump’s 2021 lawsuit that accused the New York Times of an “insidious plot” to obtain his tax records.
Vice president Kamala Harris will meet with Google and Microsoft CEOs today to discuss AI risks.
Iowa lawmakers have passed a Republican-led bill that allows teenagers to work longer hours and take previously banned jobs.
Continue reading...For the Guardian, Lyz Lenz looks at the relationship between Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, and what the latter’s ouster from Fox News this week means for the former president’s latest campaign for the White House:
At an 18 February 2017 rally, Donald Trump railed against immigrants and violence. He was unusually focused on Sweden, warning the crowd about recent terrorist attacks in the country: “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” If a terrorist attack in Sweden seemed unbelievable, it’s because it was. There had been no attack by immigrants the night before Trump spoke. The most recent attacks on Sweden, at the time, were a series of bombings between November 2016 and January 2017 that were allegedly connected to the neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance.
Continue reading...Oldest president to seek re-election tackles issue a day after officially kicking off his 2024 bid
Senate Democrats have demanded answers from the supreme court after a series of reports indicating at least two justices have relationships with parties interested in the court’s decisions that they did not disclose.
But the Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, said on the floor today that the court continues to have his confidence:
Continue reading...The Democratic chair of the Senate judiciary committee has asked chief justice John Roberts to testify on 2 May about the court’s ethics, following revelations of undisclosed links between a Republican megadonor and conservative justice Clarence Thomas.
In a letter to Roberts, judiciary committee chair Richard Durbin did not mention those reports about Thomas specifically, but noted that since he last addressed the court’s ethics in 2011 “there has been a steady stream of revelations regarding Justices falling short of the ethical standards expected of other federal judges and, indeed, of public servants generally. These problems were already apparent back in 2011, and the Court’s decade-long failure to address them has contributed to a crisis of public confidence. The status quo is no longer tenable.”
Continue reading...Media empire still faces defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic as shareholders reportedly considering trip to the courts
A top House Republican has signaled that the party will indeed try to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the New York Times reports.
Mark Green, the chair of the House homeland security committee, told donors this weekend that the effort would kick off this week when the secretary testifies before his committee, which happened Tuesday. The Times, citing a recording of a House Freedom Caucus fundraiser it obtained, said the case would focus on Mayorkas’s “dereliction of duty and his intentional destruction of our country through the open southern border.”
Continue reading...Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Jack Teixeira ‘white, male, Christian and anti-war’ as Tucker Carlson says his sin was ‘telling the truth’
Washington lawmakers have written off Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman accused of being behind the worst US intelligence leak in a decade, as an “alleged criminal” after his arrest yesterday, but that hasn’t stopped him from winning praise from the political right.
“He revealed the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal. That’s how Washington works. Telling the truth is the only real sin,” declared the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson on Thursday evening in the opening monologue of his show, which is the most watched on cable television. “The news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine. They are treating him like Osama bin Laden,” the late al-Qaida terrorist leader.
Continue reading...Former New Jersey governor, who pledged his allegiance to Trump during 2016 election, says: ‘I can’t help him. No way’
Donald Trump’s expected indictment over his hush money payment to the adult film maker and actor Stormy Daniels may be delayed for a month, Politico reports, because of a scheduled hiatus for the grand jury in the case in Manhattan.
The site’s report is based on an anonymous source “familiar with the proceedings”.
Continue reading...Steven van Zandt, the musician and actor who starred as Silvio Dante in The Sopranos and plays guitar as Little Steven in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, called Jamie Raskin his “brother from another mother” today, in a message of support for the Maryland Democrat’s fight against cancer.
Raskin, 60, is undergoing chemotherapy for large B-cell lymphoma, a process which causes hair loss, and has taken to wearing bandannas. Van Zandt is known for wearing such headgear on stage.
Continue reading...App’s future in doubt as Biden administration threatens to ban it entirely in the country
Representative Diana DeGette is bringing up the WSJ report again and asking Chew for comment. He said that he’d have to get back to them because whether ByteDance would be forced to sell TikTok is still developing so he doesn’t have specifics but that Project Texas would protect US users no matter what.
“Does TikTok share user information … overseas?” Degette asked. Chew said in the past, yes but with Project Texas that would no longer be the case. He reiterated that the efforts to protect user data through Project Texas is more than any other company has done.
Representative Richard Hudson asked Chew about the reports that ByteDance employees have accessed user data of US journalists in order to investigate an internal leak of information. Chew says TikTok condemns this behavior.
Continue reading...Likely contender’s statement read on air by Fox News host Tucker Carlson aligns him with rival Donald Trump
Here’s Ron DeSantis’s full statement outlining his position on Ukraine, as posted by Tucker Carlson:
Other big Republican names responded to the Fox News commentator’s questionnaire, including Texas governor Greg Abbott, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, former vice president Mike Pence and, of course, Donald Trump.
Continue reading...Georgia Republican Barry Loudermilk denied giving tours related to the January 6 riots until video was released
Barry Loudermilk, the Republican representative from Georgia who has been accused of giving tours of the Capitol building days before the January 6 insurrection, will lead a new House committee that will investigate the Democratic-controlled January 6 select committee.
On Tuesday, Loudermilk criticized the select committee, saying: “The J6 committee chose to ignore the facts and pursue a particular political narrative. I will not do this.”
Continue reading...