Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, sought to fight his way out of a corner on Friday by releasing an angry letter in which he blamed Democrats for the impasse over the debt ceiling he broke by ending a refusal to co-operate he had said was absolute.
In the letter to Joe Biden, McConnell complained about a speech in which the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, attacked Republicans for their behaviour.
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.”
Agreement would extend US borrowing authority into December but larger disputes remain
The US Senate has approved a deal to extend the government’s borrowing authority into December. The compromise between Republican and Democratic leaders would temporarily avert an unprecedented federal default that experts say would have devastated the economy.
With a 50-48 vote, senators agreed to increase the borrowing limit by $480bn, sufficient to prevent the US government from defaulting by keeping debt payments up until 3 December.
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:
Frances Haugen, who came forward accusing the company of putting profit over safety, will testify in Washington on Tuesday
A former Facebook employee who has accused the company of putting profit over safety will take her damning accusations to Washington on Tuesday when she testifies to US senators.
Frances Haugen, 37, came forward on Sunday as the whistleblower behind a series of damaging reports in the Wall Street Journal that have heaped further political pressure on the tech giant. Haugen told the news program 60 Minutes that Facebook’s priority was making money over doing what was good for the public.
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.
Party locked in a bitter struggle over two massive legislative bills that could make or break the Biden presidency
Bernie Sanders, the leftwing firebrand who has drawn the fight against poverty and inequality into the mainstream of American politics, issued a call to arms on Sunday for fellow progressives to stand firm in the intensifying battle over the future of Joe Biden’s economic and social policy agenda.
With the Democratic party locked in a bitter struggle over two massive legislative bills that could make or break the Biden presidency, Sanders said the outcome of the next few weeks would be critical not just for the future of American working families but also for the country’s political future.
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.
Two massive economic and social packages have reached an impasse, threatening to derail Biden’s first term in office
Warring factions of the Democratic party are bracing themselves for a potentially bruising month of negotiations over the two massive economic and social packages that have reached an impasse in Congress threatening to derail Joe Biden’s first term in office.
With Democratic leaders racing against a new 31 October deadline to pass the legislation, and with pressure building on the White House from both centrist and progressive wings of the party, the centerpiece of Biden’s agenda now hangs in the balance. Democratic prospects in next year’s midterm elections are also at stake.
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.
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.
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 [...]
General and other military leaders in heated cross-examination
Milley defends loyalty to country and rejects suggestion to quit
The withdrawal from Afghanistan and the evacuation of Kabul was “a logistical success but a strategic failure,” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has told the Senate.
Gen Mark Milley gave the stark assessment at an extraordinary hearing of the Senate armed services committee to examine the US departure, which also became a postmortem on the 20-year war that preceded it.
Mark Milley poised for tense cross-examination after book said he took steps to prevent Trump from starting a war
The top US general will appear before Congress on Tuesday in what is expected to be the most heated cross-examination of a senior US military officer in over a decade.
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, can expect a hostile interrogation from Republicans on the Senate armed services committee after accounts in a recent book that he carried out acts of insubordination to prevent Donald Trump from starting a war as a diversion from his election defeat last year.
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.
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.