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.”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Kansas City Star editorial excoriates Republican as ‘laughingstock’ as memes based on January 6 video proliferate
Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator shown running from the mob he incited on January 6, is “a laughingstock” who should be afraid of what the Capitol attack committee might disclose next, a leading newspaper in his home state said.
Hawley was widely criticised for raising a fist to protesters outside Congress on 6 January 2021, then after the mob sent by Donald Trump failed to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election win, voting to object to results anyway.
Continue reading...Former president and his one-time wingman appear at rival events – and it’s all to play for as the US midterms approach
Eddie Palazuelos drove 200 miles and lined up for five hours under the baking sun to to see Donald Trump at a campaign event for candidates he is backing in the forthcoming Arizona Republican primaries.
It’s the fifth Trump rally the 27-year-old has attended since the former president lost the White House in 2020 – because Palazuelos vehemently believes the election was stolen. Any judge or lawmaker who concludes otherwise is “willfully ignorant”, he said, referring to the dozens of lawsuits and recounts nationwide which ruled out fraud.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Republicans are odds-on to take back the House and Senate in November, and the last thing the party needs, experts say, is a Trump distraction
On Thursday the Trump campaign sent out a begging-bowl email to hundreds of thousands of supporters, previewing the former president’s rally in Arizona this weekend and teasing the recipients with a portent of momentous things to come.
Donald Trump “wants to make sure it’s one of his best rallies yet”, his loyal followers were told. “He is preparing the speech that he will give in front of the American people.”
Continue reading...The Guardian’s Lois Beckett reports on an overlooked aspect of the bipartisan gun safety bill passed last month that will pay for efforts to reduce gun violence in neighborhoods across the country:
In 2013, a month after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a group of Black pastors and other activists visited the Obama White House to press the administration to do more to prevent gun violence in communities of color.
Continue reading...Republican senator claims Democrats’ proposal would encourage ‘abortion tourism’
Republican-led states are moving swiftly to ban abortion outright or retaliate against patients seeking the care and the doctors providing it to them. But the message of a new Morning Consult/Politico poll of voters gauging support for these policies might be: not so fast.
The survey found that of 13 state-level proposals, only two weren’t opposed by a majority of voters. Banning all abortions without exception is the most disliked, with 73 percent opposing it, while criminalizing abortion seekers and people who travel out of state for care both came in with 70-percent disapproval. Proposals to fine or criminalize abortion providers also polled poorly, as did the idea to allow people to sue anyone involved in abortions.
Continue reading...The sobering numbers, caused by high energy prices, will be top of the agenda as president visits the Middle East
Another searing inflation report yesterday underscored the deep challenges facing Democrats ahead of this year’s critical midterm elections, with widespread pessimism about the state of the US economy and Joe Biden’s stewardship of it.
Inflation soared 9.1% in June compared with the previous year, a new 40-year high. The rising cost of gas, fuel and rent squeezes American households and puts pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates further.
Continue reading...Analysis: Viewers learned of an ‘unhinged’ White House meeting and rioters ready for war – but will it close the case against Trump?
“We settle our differences at the ballot box.”
Bennie Thompson, chairman of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, emphasised this article of faith in his opening remarks on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Top Democrats ‘deeply troubled that gun manufacturers continue to profit from the sale of weapons of war’
Could Donald Trump have had the IRS carry out its most stringent audit on two of his political foes? That’s the question posed by a story published yesterday in The New York Times that says former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe were both selected for random audits by the tax authority, which is run by an appointee of the former president.
A spokesman for Trump denied knowing anything about the matter, and experts quoted in the story wondered whether it was even possible for a president to order the IRS to carry out such an action. The coincidence is nonetheless abnormal. Here’s how one former IRS official put it to the Times:
“Lightning strikes, and that’s unusual, and that’s what it’s like being picked for one of these audits,” said John A. Koskinen, the I.R.S. commissioner from 2013 to 2017. “The question is: Does lightning then strike again in the same area? Does it happen? Some people may see that in their lives, but most will not — so you don’t need to be an anti-Trumper to look at this and think it’s suspicious.”
Continue reading...Lawyer was subpoenaed last month by the House committee investigating the 2021 assault on the Capitol
A feud appears to be brewing between Biden and the top Democrats in Kentucky, including its governor Andy Beshear.
It began last week when the Courier-Journal reported that Biden intended to nominate an anti-abortion judge to a federal district court, in an apparent deal with Mitch McConnell, the state’s Republican senator who leads the party in Congress’s upper chamber. Now, the Courier-Journal has managed to obtain emails between the White House and Beshear’s office that elaborate on the deal, which the Biden administration has declined to talk about.
The governor’s office also turned over a follow-up email from a White House official sent June 29 — five hours before The Courier Journal first broke the story on the pending nomination of attorney Chad Meredith — clarifying that the original email was “pre-decisional and privileged information.”
White House aide Kathleen M. Marshall, a former lieutenant governor in Nevada who joined the White House in August as senior adviser to governors in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, sent the June 23 email that stated: “To be nominated tomorrow: … Stephen Chad Meredith: candidate for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.”
Mr. Shapiro, the sitting attorney general, will roll out the endorsements of 10 Republicans on Wednesday as part of a continued effort to label his candidacy a reach-across-the-aisle aficionado who will unify the parties to get things done.
The list includes two former U.S. representatives, Charlie Dent and Jim Greenwood; former state House Speaker Denny O’Brien; former Lt. Gov. and longtime state Sen. Robert Jubelirer; and former state Supreme Court Justice Sandra Schultz Newman.
Continue reading...Suspect pre-planned Highland park attack and wore ‘women’s clothing’, police say
A new poll from Monmouth University has found that President Joe Biden remains unpopular, but for Democrats, that’s not its most troubling finding. The Biden administration has hoped that the supreme court’s recent rulings curtailing abortion access and expanding concealed weapons possession would fire up Democrats ahead of the midterm elections, but the poll instead shows that voters’ biggest issue remains the nation’s high rate of inflation - a trend that Biden has had little success in reversing.
First the bad news about Biden’s approval rating, which Monmouth reports actually worsened last month:
Continue reading...The ideologically driven conservative majority is likely to further weaken key civil rights legislation after a term of radical rulings
The final days of the US supreme court’s term offered a clear look at the way its new 6-3 conservative majority is bluntly using its power to reshape American life, but its next term is also set to hear cases that could prove equally, or even more, consequential.
“This really is the ‘Yolo’ [you only live once] court,” said Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan who closely follows the court. “I don’t think people fathom just how much more they will do.”
Continue reading...Ads like Eric Greitens’, in which he says ‘get a Rino hunting permit’, could lead people to rationalize violence – experts
Before the Capitol attack on 6 January, Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor, had studied political violence around the world but not in the United States because there had not been much to examine, he said.
Pape worries that could soon change because of politicians like Eric Greitens, a former Navy Seal from Missouri running for Senate, who recently released an advertisement in which he racked a shotgun and led a team of armed men as they stormed a house to hunt more moderate members of his own party, know derisively as Rinos, as in “Republicans in name only”.
Continue reading...In its second and final decision of the day, the Supreme Court on Thursday said Biden can terminate a controversial Trump-era immigration policy, known as Remain in Mexico. The ruling affirms a president’s broad power to set the nation’s immigration policy.
The ruling concludes the most consequential supreme court term in recent memory.
The case, which was backed by a host of other Republican-led states including Texas and Kentucky, was highly unusual in that it was based upon the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era strategy to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants that never came into effect. The Biden administration sought to have the case dismissed as baseless given the plan was dropped and has not been resurrected.
Not only was this case about a regulation that does not exist, that never took effect, and which would have imposed obligations on the energy sector that it would have met regardless. It also involves two legal doctrines that are not mentioned in the constitution, and that most scholars agree have no basis in any federal statute.
Continue reading...Adam Kinzinger says ‘no difference between this and the Taliban’ after Lauren Boebert’s call to end separation of church and state
A Republican congressman slammed GOP colleague Lauren Boebert’s recent call to end separation of church and state in the US, warning: “There is no difference between this and the Taliban.”
“We must opposed [sic] the Christian Taliban,” Adam Kinzinger, a US representative for Illinois, said on Wednesday. “I say this as a Christian.”
Continue reading...The Republican, a county clerk, is facing criminal charges for tampering with election equipment
Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk who is facing criminal charges for tampering with election equipment, lost the Republican nomination to be the state’s top election official on Tuesday. She was defeated by Pam Anderson, a former county clerk.
The race was among several closely watched contests this year in which Republicans who denied the election results are seeking key roles with oversight of elections.
Continue reading...