Democrats celebrate as climate bill moves to House – and critics weigh in

Bernie Sanders calls climate measures a ‘very modest step forward’ and Republicans denounce the bill altogether

Democrats celebrated the much-delayed Senate passage of their healthcare and climate spending package, expressing hope that the bill’s approval could improve their prospects in the crucial midterm elections this November.

The bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, passed the Senate on Sunday in a party-line vote of 51-50, with Vice-President Kamala Harris breaking the tie in the evenly divided chamber.

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Senate passes $739bn healthcare and climate bill after months of wrangling

Inflation Reduction Act will reduce planet-heating emissions and lower prescription drug costs – and give Biden a crucial victory

Senate Democrats passed their climate and healthcare spending package on Sunday, sending the legislation to the House and bringing Joe Biden one step closer to a significant legislative victory ahead of crucial midterm elections in November.

If signed into law, the bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, would allocate $369bn to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and investing in renewable energy sources. Experts have estimated the climate provisions of the bill will reduce America’s planet-heating emissions by about 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels.

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Senate Democrats given green light to vote on $430bn climate and tax bill

Senate arbiter rules bill can bypass filibuster and be passed with simple majority, setting stage for ‘vote-a-rama’ next week

US Senate Democrats on Saturday were set to push ahead on a bill that would address key elements of President Joe Biden’s agenda, tackling climate change, lowering the cost of energy and senior citizens’ drugs and forcing the wealthy to pay more taxes.

A Senate rulemaker determined that the lion’s share of the $430bn bill could be passed with only a simple majority, bypassing a filibuster rule requiring 60 votes in the 100-seat chamber to advance most legislation and enabling Democrats to pass it over Republican objections, majority leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.

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Democrats reach deal to pass major climate bill after Sinema says yes – as it happened

Amy Weirich, a Memphis prosecutor with a checkered record who is best known for cracking down on a woman just for trying to register to vote, has lost her re-election bid. As Sam Levine reports:

Amy Weirich, the Memphis prosecutor who stirred national outrage for bringing criminal charges against a Black woman for trying to register to vote, has lost her re-election bid.

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Hungary’s far-right PM Viktor Orbán speaks at CPAC summit – as it happened

Griner has been sentenced to nine years in prison, Bloomberg reports:

A court in Russia has found Brittney Griner, an Americans women’s basketball star, guilty of drug smuggling, Reuters reports.

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Kansas’s vote to protect abortion rights upends US midterm elections – as it happened

Following her visit to Taiwan and China’s furious response, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reiterated her commitment to standing up for the country and said it’s shared by lawmakers across the US Congress.

“Our Congressional delegation’s visit should be seen as a strong statement that America stands with Taiwan. We came to Taiwan to listen to, learn from and show our support for the people of Taiwan, who have built a thriving Democracy that stands as one of the freest and most open in the world,” Pelosi said in a statement after the trip.

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Democrats prepare for showdown over key spending and climate bill – as it happened

Antony Blinken, secretary of state, said at global nonproliferation discussions at the United Nations today that a return to the 2015 nuclear deal remains the best outcome for the United States, Iran and the world.

Reuters is reporting that Blinken made a point to repeat a warning from the US that North Korea is preparing to conduct its seventh nuclear test.

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How Bernie Sanders and conservatives united against US semiconductor bill

Vermont senator opposed ‘corporate welfare’ to firms paying huge salaries to executives – but Chips and Science Act passed Congress

When it comes to alliances in Washington, few are as unlikely as the common ground the democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders briefly found with the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity, two architects of conservative policies across the United States.

Yet that is what happened this week when Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats, made a lonely and unsuccessful stand against a $280bn bill funding scientific research and, controversially, giving computer chip manufacturers financial incentives to build more production in the United States – one that rightwing groups also encouraged lawmakers to make.

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Lucas Kunce: ‘Populism is about everyday people coming together’

Former US Marine with a progressive take on identity and masculinity hopes Missouri Democrats will pick him as their nominee for US Senate

Lucas Kunce thinks populism has been given a bad name. “It’s outrageous,” he says, “that people call the Josh Hawleys, the Eric Greitens, the Donald Trumps of the world populist. Populism is about everyday people coming together to have power in a system that’s not working for them. So do that, Josh Hawley. I mean, good Lord, what a charlatan.”

Kunce is running for the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Missouri, in the fight to take the state’s second seat in Washington, alongside Hawley. The primary is on Tuesday.

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House-passed assault weapons ban appears to be doomed in the Senate

Bill would require support from at least 10 Senate Republicans, and it isn’t certain that all 50 Democratic senators are onboard

The assault weapons ban in America passed by the House appears set to be doomed in the Senate amid implacable Republican opposition to gun reform, even in the wake of a series of mass shootings in the US.

The legislation in the House, which would ban assault weapons for the first time since 2004, is interpreted as a sign that Democrats plan more aggressive gun violence prevention after a series of mass shootings using the military-derived weapons, including in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.

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DoJ reportedly preparing court fight to get Trump insiders to testify – live

Prosectors expect former president to try to invoke executive privilege to prevent his ex-officials from speaking

An impassioned plea from a 12-year-old girl has gone viral after she spoke to West Virginia Republican lawmakers during a public hearing for an abortion bill that would prohibit the procedure in nearly all cases.

On Wednesday, Addison Gardner of Buffalo middle school in Kenova, West Virginia, was among several people who spoke out against a bill that would not only ban abortions in most cases but also allow for physicians who perform abortions to be prosecuted.

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Biden hails ‘most significant legislation to tackle climate crisis’ after Manchin says yes – live

Joe Biden “was not involved” in negotiations over the newly announced Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Manchin has said, claiming credit instead for himself and his own aides.

In a press call Thursday morning that shed a little more light, but not very much, on how the bill came to be, the Democratic West Virginia senator said:

It was me and my staff. And then we worked with [Senate majority leader Chuck] Schumer’s staff. My staff was driving it. We wrote the bill. Schumer’s staff would look at it and we would negotiate, and we worked that through them.

President Biden was not involved.

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Manchin announces deal with Democrats on major tax and climate bill

News of agreement breaks deadlock two weeks after conservative Democrat had appeared to kill off Biden’s climate agenda

Democrat Joe Manchin announced on Wednesday afternoon that he has reached a deal with the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, on a domestic policy bill that would pay down national debt, cut energy costs and lower the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs, while supporting a “realistic” climate policy.

The development came almost two weeks after the West Virginia conservative senator had appeared essentially to kill off flagship climate action legislation when he came out against raising taxes on wealth Americans and refused to support more funding for climate action.

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‘Nancy, I’ll go with you’: Trump allies back Pelosi’s proposed Taiwan visit

Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper support visit to ‘freedom-loving Taiwan’ but Biden concerned any trip would antagonise Beijing

Plans for Nancy Pelosi, the US House speaker, to visit Taiwan have prompted opposition from China and the American military but support from Republicans in Washington, including former members of the Trump administration.

Trump’s second secretary of defense, Mark Esper, told CNN: “I think if the speaker wants to go, she should go.”

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Trump speaks in Washington DC for first visit since leaving office – as it happened

Joe Biden’s daily health bulletin is a good one, as he continues to recover from the Covid-19 infection announced last week.

The president has improved enough to be able to resume his regular exercise routine, according to a Tuesday morning update from physician Dr Kevin O’Connor, reported by the Associated Press.

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How a Trump-backed ‘QAnon whack job’ won with Democratic ‘collusion’

Republican Dan Cox won nomination for Maryland governor, but current governor says that was thanks to Democrats promoting extremist opponents they think will be easier prey

Dan Cox, an extremist pro-Trump Republican, won his party’s nomination for governor in Maryland last week thanks to “collusion between Trump and the national Democrats”, the current Republican governor said.

“I don’t think there’s any chance that [Cox] can win,” Larry Hogan added, speaking to CNN’s State of the Union.

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Biden ‘doing just fine’ after testing positive for Covid, White House says

Ashish Jha, coronavirus response coordinator, and physician Kevin O’Connor say president contracted BA.5 variant

Joe Biden is “feeling well” and “doing just fine” after testing positive for Covid, the White House coronavirus response coordinator said.

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Ashish Jha said: “So it is the BA.5 variant, which is about 80% of infections. But thank goodness, our vaccines and therapeutics work well against it, which is why I think the president’s doing well.

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January 6 panel says Bannon conviction is a ‘victory for the rule of law’ – as it happened

The former Trump adviser was charged with two counts of criminal contempt for refusing to appear before the House committee

If voters were to elect Donald Trump to another term in the 2024 presidential election, he is considering using bureaucratic maneuvers to remove potentially tens of thousands of civil servants across the US government and replace them with people who adhere to his ideology, according to a report from Axios.

That Trump expects his deputies to be unfailingly loyal to him is no secret, but during his time in the White House, they didn’t always do what he wanted. He intends to change that dramatically in a second term, according to the report, appointing staunch cabinet members and changing civil service regulations to allow him to dismiss up to 50,000 employees. He would replace these bureaucrats, who typically hold onto their jobs through presidential administrations, with people handpicked to support his “America first” ideology.

Trump signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.

Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.

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Bipartisan Senate group reaches deal to reform Electoral Count Act

Lawmakers agreed to two bills that will overhaul federal law and prevent presidential candidates from overturning election results

A bipartisan group of senators reached a deal on Wednesday to reform a federal law and prevent a future presidential candidate from overturning the will of the people and the result of a valid presidential election.

The lawmakers have agreed to two bills that would reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which governs how electoral votes are counted following a presidential election. Citing ambiguities in the law, Donald Trump and his attorneys pushed his vice-president, Mike Pence, to disrupt the counting of electoral votes that showed he lost the 2020 election, escalating calls for the 135-year-old law to be reformed. Even before the election, experts warned the law was ambiguous and could be exploited.

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Aipac hails Democrat’s defeat for not being sufficiently pro-Israel

Donna Edwards, leading contender in Maryland primary for safe seat, lost after pro-Israeli groups poured millions to block her

Pro-Israel groups have heralded the defeat of a leading Democratic contender for Congress after pouring millions of dollars into blocking her election, for failing to be sufficiently supportive of Israeli government policies.

Donna Edwards, who was for months the favourite to win the primary for a safe seat in Maryland, lost to Glenn Ivey on Tuesday after the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and allied groups waded into the race.

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