Liz Cheney has become the figurehead of the conservative Never Trumpers – but the Wyoming congresswoman was for the former president in the last election.
Related: Can ‘Never Trump’ Republicans gain party control – or is it a lost cause?
Continue reading...Lawmakers faced with choice between embarrassing Trump and ignoring insurrection
House Democrats are poised to adopt legislation to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack, in a move that will force Republicans to either embrace an inquiry that could embarrass Donald Trump – or turn a blind eye to a deadly insurrection.
Related: Liz Cheney: McCarthy should testify about Trump’s views on Capitol attack
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Joe Biden will also speak about gun violence during tonight’s speech, according to USAToday. On the presidential campaign trail, Biden pledged to reinstate the assault weapons ban and create a voluntary gun buyback program.
A White House official told the newspaper that Biden will talk about gun violence as an epidemic, which he has done in the past, and urge Congress to reinstate a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines.
The president’s plea appears to echo a similar one made by Obama at the State of the Union in 2013, two months after Sandy Hook, in which he told Congress victims of gun violence — many of whom were seated in the room — “deserve a vote.” Biden presided over the Senate chamber when a gun safety package failed to pass two months later.
Despite the uphill battle, Democrats are heeding the president’s call. Last week Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., reintroduced a bill to remove protections for manufacturers and sellers from consumer negligence lawsuits and allow victims of gun violence to pursue legal recourse. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a key Democrat leading gun control efforts, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week that he’s made calls to almost half the Republican caucus “asking them to keep an open mind.”
The Guardian’s voting rights reporter, Sam Levine, has an alarming story this morning on Republican efforts to make it harder to vote in Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office:
Even as attacks on voting rights have escalated in recent years, the Republican effort since January marks a new, more dangerous phase for American democracy, experts say.
Related: The Republicans’ staggering effort to attack voting rights in Biden’s first 100 days
Continue reading...Senate parliamentarian’s decision widens path for Democrats to enact Joe Biden’s sprawling infrastructure plan
A novel interpretation of an arcane parliamentary procedure has presented congressional Democrats with an unexpected – and tantalizing – new opportunity to advance some of their most ambitious legislative goals despite their slim majorities and fierce Republican opposition.
This week, the Senate parliamentarian determined that Democrats can employ a fast-track process known as budget reconciliation more times than previously understood, potentially allowing them to pass multiple legislative packages without any Republican support before next year’s midterm elections – if they can keep their own members in line.
Continue reading...The venture capitalist and author of Hillbilly Elegy hopes to take his place in a Republican party rebranding itself as the working-class party
As a prospective conservative candidate for the US Senate from Ohio, author JD Vance can claim a rarely authentic connection to the white working-class voters who helped make Donald Trump president.
In his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the tale of his escape from generations of poverty and addiction in the shadow of Appalachia, thanks to a fiercely loving grandmother and a stroke or two of lonesome luck. (The Netflix film adaptation was less well received than the book.)
Continue reading...The Sandy Hook shooting failed to convince Congress to enact more regulations. In the wake of recent shootings, calls for reform have begun
Within hours of 10 people being gunned down at the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado on Monday – the second such bloody rampage in seven days – the calls had begun for Congress to tighten up America’s notoriously slack firearms laws.
John Hickenlooper, a Democratic US senator from Colorado who was governor of the state at the time of the Aurora cinema shooting that killed 12 people in 2012, opined that “our country has a horrific problem with gun violence. We need federal action. Now.”
Continue reading...The Chinese threat to invade Taiwan is serious and more imminent than many understand, the US admiral chosen to lead the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific region has warned.
China considers recovering control over Taiwan its “No 1 priority”, Adm John Aquilino, nominated to become commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate armed services committee on Tuesday.
Continue reading...The Asian American lawmaker Grace Meng called out the violence and discrimination against her community at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday. 'Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year, we’ve been screaming out for help,' she said. She told a panel the rising tide of anti-Asian bigotry was fuelled in part by rhetoric from Donald Trump and his allies, who have referred to Covid-19 as the 'China virus' and 'kung flu'
Analysis: critics say the US Senate has become a firewall for a shrinking minority of white conservatives to block policies – could a breakthrough be ahead?
In the first 50 days of the Biden administration, the US House of Representatives has passed major legislation to strengthen voting rights, reform police departments, empower labor unions and tighten gun laws.
The public strongly supports each measure, and Biden is poised, pen in hand, to sign each bill into law. It could seem like the dawn of a new progressive era.
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It’s been a busy day in Washington ahead of Biden’s prime-time address this evening. Before we hand over the reigns to Maanvi Singh in California, here’s a look back at what happened on this unusually warm spring day in the nation’s capital.
In an astonishing piece of attempted backside-covering, former acting defense secretary under the outgoing Donald Trump, Chris Miller, tried to explain in an interview with Vice that the delay in National Guard troops deploying to the US Capitol on the afternoon of 6 January to help overwhelmed police was basically because “it’s complicated”.
Miller said: “It’s not like a video game” ie going up and down the chains of government and command to deploy troops is a complex process.
Chris Miller translator: " Hey, I had to take orders from the White House on this." https://t.co/ihRrvlvjGc
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By Jessica Goodheart for Capital and Main:
Sara Fearrington, a North Carolina waitress, joined the Fight for $15 campaign two years ago. A server at a Durham Waffle House, her take-home pay fluctuates between $350 and $450 a week, leaving her struggling to pay bills every month. She voted for Joe Biden, who had pledged to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. It was the first time Fearrington, who is 44, had ever voted in a presidential election.
Related: Senate minimum wage battle could play out in midterm elections
Continue reading...Joe Biden hailed “one more giant step forward on delivering on that promise that help is on the way”, after Democrats took a critical step towards a first major legislative victory since assuming control of Congress and the White House, with a party-line vote in the Senate to approve a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill.
Related: Biden urged to 'go big' on New Deal-like economic plan – but can he bridge left-right gap?
Continue reading...Biden’s $1.9tn relief package struggles through Senate but majority leaders vows passage ‘however long it takes’
A fiery speech and last-ditch effort by Bernie Sanders to secure a place for a federal minimum wage hike in the $1.9tn coronavirus relief package appeared as good as doomed on Friday, following a day that saw the flagship legislation hit grinding delays in the Senate.
Senate leaders and moderate Democratic senator Joe Manchin struck a deal late on Friday over emergency jobless benefits, breaking a nine-hour logjam.
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White House press secretary Jen Psaki rejected the notion that Joe Biden was “snubbing” lawmakers by delaying his first address to a joint session of Congress.
“It’s not a snubbing happening here,” Psaki said. “We are in the middle of a global pandemic.”
"It's not a snubbing," press sec. Psaki says when asked about Pres. Biden addressing Congress.
"We are in the middle of a global pandemic...We intend on the president delivering a joint session... but we don't have a date for that." pic.twitter.com/R89HWMj6Jp
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about whether Joe Biden would soon speak to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Psaki said the two leaders would speak “at some point,” but she did not give a clear sense of when that might happen.
Continue reading...Joe Biden’s nominee for budget director faced Republican opposition over old tweets but had also clashed with progressives
Neera Tanden’s decision to withdraw from consideration to serve as Joe Biden’s budget director marks the first major loss for the still young Biden administration, and sets off a scramble between various political factions to push through a new nominee.
Continue reading...FBI director Christopher Wray has said the bureau views the Capitol insurrection as a clear act of domestic terrorism. Speaking during a Senate hearing on the 6 January riots, Wray said: ‘That attack, that siege, was criminal behaviour, plain and simple, and it’s behaviour that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism’
Continue reading...A Senate official has ruled that the plan for a $15 minimum cannot be passed with only a simple majority but the fight is far from over
It was a major plank of the Democratic plan to “build back better” – raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour as a way of boosting the economy during the pandemic and tackling poverty and income inequality. But on Thursday the much-vaunted plan hit a roadblock in the US Senate, which has knocked the proposal sideways.
Related: 'We need $15': US minimum wage ruling a personal blow for millions of workers
Continue reading...True scope of the breach, which affected 100 companies and several federal agencies, is still unknown
Tech executives revealed that a historic cybersecurity breach that affected about 100 US companies and nine federal agencies was larger and more sophisticated than previously known.
Continue reading...The former Capitol police chief, Steven Sund, said during a joint hearing on security failures that the insurrectionists during the 6 January attack 'came prepared for war'.
Senators investigating the attack on the US Capitol last month heard testimony on training and equipping the Capitol police as the former police chief of that department and other security officials testified publicly for the first time Tuesday.
Continue reading...First congressional hearing on attack comes day after Merrick Garland said he would expand investigation into 6 January assault
Testifying on Tuesday in the first congressional hearing on the US Capitol attack, the chief of Capitol police who resigned over the riot said the pro-Trump mob which stormed the building “came prepared for war”.
Related: Ruling on Trump tax records could be costliest defeat of his losing streak
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