Speaker says she will work to build consensus on Biden’s separate $3.5tn social agenda, which has caused division within the party
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Sunday Democrats will pass a $1tn bipartisan infrastructure bill this week.
Related: ‘We couldn’t be more inconsistent’: discordant Democrats imperil Biden’s agenda
Continue reading...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.
Related: ‘We couldn’t be more inconsistent’: discordant Democrats imperil Biden’s agenda
Continue reading...Top voting official Brad Raffensperger dismayed that the former president uses his lies to fundraise
The top election official in Georgia, a Republican, said Donald Trump unequivocally lost the state in 2020, a day before a rally there on Saturday night at whih Trump is set to repeat baseless accusations of voter fraud.
Related: Arizona Republican ‘audit’ finds even bigger lead for Biden in 2020 election
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Joe Biden meets leaders of Australia, India and Japan in latest effort to cement US leadership in Asia
US president Joe Biden and the leaders of Australia, India and Japan highlighted their Quad group’s role in safeguarding a stable, democratic Indo-Pacific in a veiled dig at rival China.
The first in-person summit of the Quad held on Friday marked Biden’s latest effort to cement US leadership in Asia in the face of a rising China.
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An extraordinary confrontation outside the Capitol today, between the Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far right Republican from Georgia.
As reported by Ben Siegel of ABC News, the confrontation developed as Democrats prepared to host a press conference on the Capitol steps about abortion rights, after voting to protect them in the face of concerted assault from Republican-run states.
Greene and Rep. Dingell are now shouting at each other.
“You should practice the basic thing you’re taught in church: respect your neighbor!”
Greene: “Church?! Are you kidding me? Try being a Christian!”
Dingell: “You try being a Christian and treat your colleagues decently.” pic.twitter.com/5aXtaU1dNK
Related: House Democrats vote to establish federal right to abortion
Here’s where the day stands so far:
Continue reading...Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon and Dan Scavino among advisers called to testify over president’s connection to 6 January events
The House select committee scrutinizing the Capitol attack on Thursday sent subpoenas to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and a cadre of top Trump aides, demanding their testimony to shed light on the former president’s connection to the 6 January riot.
The subpoenas and demands for depositions marked the most aggressive investigative actions the select committee has taken since it made records demands and records preservation requests that formed the groundwork of the inquiry into potential White House involvement.
Continue reading...Analysis: Joe Biden has cleared the decks to focus on China. But how imminent is the danger?
It may have been an inelegantly, even ineptly, executed pivot, gratuitously alienating key allies, but by leaving Afghanistan and forming the Australian, US and UK security pact in the Indo-Pacific, Joe Biden has at least cleared the decks to focus on his great foreign policy challenge – the systemic rivalry with China.
Yet the concern now is how quickly this rivalry could escalate, especially in Taiwan. The linchpin of the US alliance system in south-east Asia, Taiwan is the biggest island in the “first island chain”, the group of islands that keeps China blocked in. It is China’s next target, and as the former British prime minister Theresa May pointed out, no one quite knows if the west is prepared to fight to save Taiwan or whether the new tripartite pact in some way places a new obligation on the UK to come to the country’s defence.
Continue reading...Dr Joseph Ladapo attacked concern over the pandemic as ‘Covid mania’
A medical professor who is opposed to mask and vaccine mandates, attacked concern over the pandemic as “Covid mania” and likened the eating of fruit and vegetables to the benefits of vaccination has been named as Florida’s new surgeon general.
Dr Joseph Ladapo has been appointed to the role by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor who has railed against restrictions placed upon day-to-day life to dampen the Covid-19 pandemic and has sought to block funding for schools in the state that have attempted to make students wear masks to stop the spread of the virus that has killed more than 675,000 people in the US since the pandemic began.
Continue reading...Lawsuit alleges Mary Trump and NYT ‘were motivated by personal vendetta’ against him and a desire to push political agenda
Former US president Donald Trump has sued his estranged niece and The New York Times over a 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices that was partly based on confidential documents she provided to the newspaper’s reporters.
Trump’s lawsuit, filed in state court in New York on Tuesday, accuses Mary Trump of breaching a settlement agreement by disclosing tax records she received in a dispute over family patriarch Fred Trump’s estate.
Continue reading...Leaders scrambling to get infrastructure bill and the $3.5tn spending plan to Biden’s desk while trying to avoid a shutdown and raise the debt ceiling
House Democrats are moving forward with their plan to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill next week, despite pushback from progressive lawmakers.
House majority leader Steny Hoyer confirmed this morning that the vote on the infrastructure bill will happen next Monday or Tuesday.
Vaccine mandates for the US military are meant to identify “sincere Christians … free thinkers” and “men with high testosterone levels”, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed on Monday night.
Related: Tucker Carlson claims US military vaccine mandate a ‘purity test’ for ‘men with high testosterone’
Continue reading...Press secretary Jen Psaki says ahead of general assembly meeting: ‘Our relationship with China is one not of conflict but of competition’
• US to lift travel ban for vaccinated travelers from UK and most of EU
• Joe Biden: fate of spending plan with show extent of power
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
Biden departs for New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly. pic.twitter.com/Fn0BdGP2dx
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.
Related: Biden’s UN speech is an opportunity to show ‘America is back’
Continue reading...The president is about to embark on a legislative push with almost no room for error
In what could be the most consequential stretch of his presidency, Joe Biden faces an autumn sprint to advance a once-in-a-generation expansion of the social safety net.
Related: House Democrats are scared to tax billionaires – that’s a costly mistake | Robert Reich
Continue reading...One of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial warned on Sunday that the former president’s “bullying” of the party would lead to electoral defeat in next year’s midterms and beyond.
Related: Beto O’Rourke set to run against Greg Abbott for Texas governor – report
Continue reading...The former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke is set to mount a third campaign for major political office with a run for governor in Texas, Axios reported on Sunday.
Related: Beto O’Rourke on Texas: ‘I don’t know that we’re a conservative state’
Continue reading...A decision not to recommend third-shot booster vaccinations for most Americans is “not the end of the story”, White House chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci insisted on Sunday, two days after a scientific panel appeared to turn the Biden administration’s plan for combating coronavirus on its head.
Related: Tate Reeves: Biden vaccine mandate an ‘attack on hardworking Americans’
Continue reading...Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccination mandate for federal workers is a tyrannical “attack on hardworking Americans”, Tate Reeves insisted on Sunday, even as the state he governs reeled under a death rate that if Mississippi were a country would make it the second worst-hit in the world, after Peru.
Related: Covid vaccinations among US Latinos are rising thanks to community outreach
Continue reading...Pre-emptively branding as rigged an election you are likely to lose risks turning off GOP voters and undermining democracy
It was a pre-emptive strike against truth by some of the biggest names on the American right wing.
Former president Donald Trump warned that the ballot would be “rigged”. The Republican candidate Larry Elder predicted “shenanigans”. The conservative media star Tomi Lahren suggested that “voter fraud” was inevitable.
Continue reading...Police prepared for trouble at event near Capitol but only a few hundred attended as politicians and pro-Trump groups did not
Any passing American might have been forgiven for thinking they had stumbled on one of the great human rights struggles of our time.
Related: Peril review: Bob Woodward Trump trilogy ends on note of dire warning
Continue reading...Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker of the US Congress, has likened the 6 January attack to 9/11, saying one had been an assault on US democracy from within and the other from the outside. Speaking at a Chatham House seminar in London on Friday, she also claimed the Republicans had been hijacked by a cult that believed neither in science nor government, making it hard for the US to be governed
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