Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The left of the party is celebrating holding firm on insisting on both parts of Biden’s domestic agenda over centrist objections
When House Democrats were forced to delay their planned vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill earlier this month, the reaction from progressives was a bit surprising considering it is a key part of Joe Biden’s domestic agenda.
Rather than lamenting the delay of the vote, progressive groups praised the Democratic lawmakers who had demanded the scheduling change.
Steve Bannon has informed the House committee investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol that he will not be cooperating with their subpoena to provide related documents.
This comes after Politico reported yesterday that Donald Trump has directed Bannon and three other former aides - former social media czar Dan Scavino, former defense department official Kash Patel and former chief of staff Mark Meadows - to ignore the subpoena, likely because he will attempt to block their testimony in court.
Now almost a full year later, Republicans in several states are still continuing their partisan reviews of the 2020 election results
“They have slight differences tactically, but they all share the same strategic goals, which are primarily to continue to sow doubt about the integrity of American elections overall,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, and an election administration expert who has denounced the reviews. “I don’t know that there’s a word to describe how concerning it is.”
So now that the Democrats don’t have the 50 votes needed to make a change to the filibuster rules ahead of the debt ceiling vote today, they could always appeal to the Republicans...by not calling it a filibuster, or a change to filibuster rules with the debt ceiling, etc.
However, that route doesn’t look promising either, according to Republican senator Josh Hawley:
Another piece to the whole debt ceiling todo is the infrastructure bill and the $3.5tn reconciliation bill (also known as the Build Back BetterAct).
Republicans have long balked at the amount of spending proposed by the Democrats in each of these key pieces of legislation for the Biden administration and are using them to justify voting against raising the debt limit - they’re saying the Democrats are spending too much domestically.
The West Virginia and Arizona senators’ resistance threatens to upend Biden’s entire presidency – is self-preservation to blame?
Donald Trump’s favorite insult for political opponents inside his own party is “Rino” – Republican in name only. By such logic, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are the epitome of Dinos, two elected Democrats whose dogged resistance to Joe Biden’s social agenda threatens/threatened to upend his entire presidency.
Their standoff with the party’s progressive wing over the price tag of Biden’s ambitious reform package has become almost more of a hazard to his legacy than anything the Republicans, currently in a narrow minority in both chambers of Congress, can throw at it.
President meets Democrats for talks and insists ‘it doesn’t matter whether it’s six minutes or six weeks – we’re going to get it done’
Democrats returned to the Capitol on Friday deeply divided but determined to make progress on Joe Biden’s ambitious economic vision, after an embarrassing setback delayed a planned vote on a related $1tn measure to improve the nation’s infrastructure.
Biden on Friday made a rare visit to Capitol Hill to meet privately with House Democrats amid a stalemate that has put his sprawling domestic agenda in jeopardy. The visit comes after after the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, delayed a vote on part of his economic agenda, a bipartisan $1tn public works measure, on Thursday night after a frantic day of negotiations failed to produce a deal.
Democratic lawmakers including Missouri representative Cori Bush shared personal stories behind their decisions to have abortions during a House oversight committee meeting about reproductive rights on Thursday.
Representatives Barbara Lee of California and Pramila Jayapal of Washington also shared their stories during the committee hearing
House speaker Nancy Pelosi left her press conference by urging reporters to “think positively” about the negotiations over the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation package.
And yet, as Pelosi was making her comments, House majority leader Steny Hoyer said he was not confident that the infrastructure bill would pass today, as Democratic leadership had previously hoped.
Congress passed a bill to fund the government into December. But questions remain over the debt ceiling and Biden’s agenda
The US government went into Thursday embroiled in a game of three-dimensional chess with time running out and trillions of dollars at stake.
The first dimension was a must-do: fund the government by midnight to avoid it shutting down. In a typical shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal employees stop getting paid and many stop working; some services are suspended and numerous national attractions and national parks temporarily close.
Pelosi says talks moving ‘in positive direction’ as series of legislative and fiscal deadlines loom for Biden’s $1tn public works measure
With the fate of Joe Biden’s domestic agenda on the line, Democrats searched furiously for a path forward after negotiations over a once-in-a-generation expansion of the social safety net neared collapse and a vote on a smaller public works measure appeared increasingly unlikely.
With almost no margin for error and little time left to break an impasse that threatens to imperil its passage – and possibly the entirety of the president’s program – Democrats charged ahead on Thursday, even as a crucial Democratic holdout called for shrinking the $3.5tn plan in half. But assurances of progress offered little comfort to nervous Democrats on Capitol Hill, where a series of legislative and fiscal deadlines loom.
The southern US state of Alabama, which has the highest death rate from Covid-19 in America, is planning to use Covid relief funds to help construct three large prisons and renovate several others.
As Democrats remain at an impasse over the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation package, some have expressed concern that the American public could have been better informed about what the latter bill actually aims to achieve.
The White House has packaged the wide range of initiatives under the loose slogan of “Build Back Better,” but the bill has more commonly been labelled in the media by its headline price tag - $3.5 trillion - with Democrats also unable to say definitively what would be in it.
The package, now the subject of furious negotiations on Capitol Hill, would fundamentally transform the government’s relationship with its citizens and dramatically expand the social safety net.
It sets out to broaden well-known programs for example, adding dental vision and hearing aid benefits to Medicare and continuing the Obama-era health law’s temporary subsidies that helped people buy insurance during the pandemic [...]
In the midst of the point-scoring and blame-shifting on display in the senators’ questions to the nation’s military leadership, it was clear that it was a contest to apportion shares in failure.
Earlier, the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, pleaded with healthcare workers to get vaccinated against Covid-19 before an end-of-day deadline which could bring staff shortages at hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities.
The Biden administration’s announcement of a new approach to protecting Dreamers from deportation is meant to “bulletproof” existing measures guarding against litigation, a leading expert said.
“Dreamers” are undocumented migrants living in the US who were brought to the country as children. Their fate has long been held in limbo by deadlock in Congress over immigration reform.
Speaker sends letter to party at mercy of warring factions
One reporter observes: ‘Well, this is raising the stakes’
In a letter to Democrats on Saturday the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, set her sights high, saying Joe Biden’s $3.5tn spending package, a bipartisan infrastructure deal worth $1tn and a measure to expand government funding “must pass” next week.
Divisions between progressives and moderates in Congress are threatening to scuttle a $3.5tn social spending program and a $1tn infrastructure bill
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cannot have been surprised that wearing a “Tax the Rich” dress to New York’s Met gala would trigger performative outrage from the right. But it also earned blowback from closer to home.
Eric Adams, a Black police veteran who won the party’s mayoral primary by appealing to its centre, argued that “when you talk about just blanketly saying ‘tax the rich’ in this city”, it would potentially drive away firefighters, teachers and other taxpayers on whom the city depends. He advocated cutting wasteful spending instead.
Hi all – Sam Levin in Los Angeles taking over our live coverage for the rest of the day.
Covid has now killed roughly as many US residents as the 1918-19 Spanish flu did – approximately 675,000 people. More from the AP:
The US population a century ago was just one-third of what it is today, meaning the flu cut a much bigger, more lethal swath through the country. But the COVID-19 crisis is by any measure a colossal tragedy in its own right, especially given the incredible advances in scientific knowledge since then and the failure to take maximum advantage of the vaccines available this time.
“Big pockets of American society — and, worse, their leaders — have thrown this away,” medical historian Dr Howard Markel of the University of Michigan said of the opportunity to vaccinate everyone eligible by now.
COVID-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic did — approximately 675,000. The 1918-19 influenza numbers are rough guesses. The population of the U.S. at the time was about one-third the size of what it is today. https://t.co/07AY1140fQ
Joe Biden will make his first speech to the United Nations as president on Tuesday, seeking to “close the chapter on 20 years of war” and begin an era of intensive diplomacy, our worlds affairs editor Julian Borger writes.