Closing summary
We’re wrapping up this blog now but it will be back tomorrow and in the meantime please do follow developments in the Ukraine crisis as they happen, via our global, 24/7 news blog on Russia’s war. Please click here.
Here are the main events of the day in US politics:
- The White House said the world needed to be “clear eyed” about Russia’s announced scaling back of its offensive in Ukraine, and not to take the country’s president Vladimir Putin at his word, adding “no-one should be fooled”.
- Former US labor secretary, economist, academic and wildly popular Guardian columnist Robert Reich noted wryly how Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Fox foghorn Tucker Carlson all sound the same.
- Joe Biden and European allies intend to keep turning the financial screws on Russia as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine, the White House announced.
- Donald Trump is not out of the woods by any means in terms of his legal jeopardy, according to a number of new developments.
- The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a second coronavirus booster shot for American adults older than 50.
- Ketanji Brown Jackson should be confirmed to a seat on the US Supreme Court, almost half of US voters believe, with only around a quarter opposed, according to the latest Politico/Morning Consult opinion poll.
When the purse is political. US stocks rose today, with the Dow and S&P notching their fourth straight session of gains, on optimism some progress was being made toward a deal to resolve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Russia pledged to cut down on military operations around Kyiv and in northern Ukraine, while Ukraine proposed adopting a neutral status, the first sign of progress toward peace in weeks, Reuters reports.
Prices eased for oil and other commodities, helping calm concerns about rising inflation and the path of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, which has started hiking interest rates to combat rising prices. For the Guardian’s global live blog covering the war 24/7, please click here.
“If you look over the course of the month this war has been going on, the market has priced in much more bad news than good news,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at National Securities in New York.
“It certainly shows the market has a natural coiled spring that will be a reaction function to any good news and we saw a bit of that this morning, but everything will have to be taken with a grain of salt and we will have to see things actually play out versus being actually talked about.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 338.3 points, or 0.97%, to 35,294.19, the S&P 500 gained 56.08 points, or 1.23%, to 4,631.6 and the Nasdaq Composite added 264.73 points, or 1.84%, to 14,619.64.
After a dismal start to the year for stocks that saw the S&P 500 fall into a correction, commonly referred to as a drop of more than 10% from its most recent high, the benchmark index is now down less than 3% on the year.
Still, there were signs of market nervousness that the Fed could make a policy mistake that leads to a slowdown, or possibly a recession, in the economy as the widely tracked U.S. 2-year/10-year Treasury inverted for the first time since September 2019.
“While I think the ultimate result of an aggressive Fed tightening cycle is a recession, I do not expect it to occur quickly. Historically speaking, all recessions are preceded by 2s10s inversions, but not all inversions result in recessions,” said Ellis Phifer, managing director, fixed income research, at Raymond James in Memphis, Tennessee.
As the conflict in Ukraine has escalated in recent weeks, already rising prices saw more upward pressure on commodities such as wheat, energy and metals.
But even with the recent surge in inflation, data on Tuesday showed U.S. consumer confidence rebounded from a one-year low in March, while the current labor environment favors workers.
The final question of the White House briefing was if the Biden administration planned to take any action over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill, signed into law by the state’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis on Monday.
Both Biden and the education secretary Miguel Cardona have criticized the law, which prevents instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida’s classrooms through third grade.
“By signing this bill, the governor has chosen to target some of Florida’s most vulnerable students and families, all while under the guise of parents rights,” Bedingfield said.
“So the department of education will continue will monitor this law upon implementation to evaluate whether it violates the federal civil rights law.”
Bedingfield also stressed the White House still believes the conflict in Ukraine would likely be “a long slog.”
“Everyone should expect that we’re going to continue to see attacks across Ukraine,” she said.
“A key message the president delivered on his trip to Europe last week was that we are in for a long slog, that our allies and partners need to... remain strong and that we need to continue to execute on the strategy of of inflicting significant cost on the Russian economy and strengthening Ukraine on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.
“We need to see what the Russians actually do before we trust solely what they’ve said. We saw from the outset that they made an aggressive push toward Kyiv and we have no reason to believe they have adjusted that strategy.
“Obviously we continue to do everything we can to impose costs for this decision. We will continue to execute on our strategy. But as you heard the president say, we are not going to take their word for it. We’re going to wait to see what their actions look like.”
World must be 'clear-eyed' about Russia moves – White House
Bedingfield also said the world needed to be “clear eyed” about Russia’s announced scaling back of its offensive in Ukraine, and not to take the country’s president Vladimir Putin at his word.
“We’ll need to watch and see if their actions meet their words,” she said.
“But I think we should be clear eyed about the reality of what’s happening on the ground, and no-one should be fooled by Russia’s announcements.
“We believe any movement of forces around Kyiv is a redeployment and not a withdrawal, and the world should be prepared for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine.”
She said Biden would be prepared to meet with Putin directly, as he suggested on Monday, but only if there were certain assurances beforehand.
“It would depend on what President Putin wanted to talk about,” Bedingfield said.
“We have been very clear that there needs to be tangible de-escalation from Russia and a clear, genuine commitment to diplomacy before the president would have that kind of conversation.”
Biden said on Monday that the question hanging over such a summit would be whether there was “anything to meet on that would justify him being able to end this war and be able to rebuild Ukraine.”
Updated
Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director, said Joe Biden’s weekend statement that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” in Russia was not discussed during the president’s call with European leaders earlier today.
“They did not,” she said when asked directly at the White House afternoon press briefing if the comments, which appeared to irk some European leaders, came up in discussions during the morning call.
“They were incredibly aligned and spoke to some of the key issues, supplying weapons to Ukraine increasing costs on Russia, continuing to increase sanctions, supporting stable energy markets and of course the state of diplomatic relations,” she said.
Pressed further if Biden regretted his choice of words, Bedingfield said he did not.
“The words of the president were incredibly powerful. He spoke personally about the moral outrage that he felt. It does not mean he’s articulating a change in US policy,” she added.
A Republican lawmaker in Nevada has apologised, after repeating a false claim that some schoolchildren identify as cats and dogs and want to be treated accordingly, particularly when it comes to going to the toilet.
“They meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion,” state senator Bruce Bostelman said during a televised debate. “And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?”
The claim has spread via social media.
When Bostelman found out it wasn’t true, he backed down, saying: “It was just something I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly.”
As the Associated Press puts it in the report that follows, “the furore over public school restrooms comes as a growing number of conservative states seek laws to ban transgender students from using bathrooms that match their gender identity”.
Reich: Why do Putin, Trump and Tucker sound the same?
To Vladimir Putin, the decadent force is the west. As he put it on Friday, “domestic culture at all times protected the identity of Russia”, which “accepted all the best and creative, but rejected the deceitful and fleeting, that which destroyed continuity of our spiritual values, moral principles and historical memory”.
Hence, a mythic justification for taking Ukraine back from a seductive but inferior western culture that threatens to overwhelm it and Russia.
The Donald Trump-Tucker Carlson-white nationalist narrative is similar: America’s dominant white Christian culture is endangered by Black people, immigrants and coastal elites who threaten to overwhelm it.
The culture wars now being orchestrated by the Republican party against transgender people, gay people, poor women seeking abortions, and schools that teach about sex and America’s history of racism, emerge from the same narrative as Putin’s culture war against a “decadent” west filled with “sociocultural disturbances.” As does the right’s claim that “secularists” have, in the words of former Trump attorney general William Barr, mounted “an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values”.
These tropes have served to distract attention from the systemic economic looting that oligarchs have been undertaking, leaving most people poor and anxious. Which is why the grievances that Putin, Trump, Carlson, and the Republican party use are unremittingly cultural; they are never economic, never about class, and most assuredly not about the predations of the super-rich.
Reduced to basics, today’s oligarchs and strongmen (along with their mouthpieces and lackeys) are trying to justify their wealth and power by attacking liberal values that have shaped the west, beginning with the enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries – the values of tolerance, openness, democracy, self-government, equal rights, and the rule of law. These values are incompatible with a society of oligarchs and strongmen.
Full column:
Biden and European allies unified over strategy to counter Russia
Joe Biden and European allies intend to keep turning the financial screws on Russia as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine, the White House announced after the US president spoke with various heads of state.
A readout from Biden’s call on Tuesday with, among others, the UK prime minister Boris Johnson, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz, the French president Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s prime minister Mario Draghi, indicated the leaders were in broad agreement on strategy.
“The leaders affirmed their determination to keep raising costs on Russia for its brutal attacks in Ukraine, as well as to continue supplying Ukraine with security assistance to defend itself against this unjustified and unprovoked assault,” a short White House statement said.
“They reviewed their efforts to provide humanitarian assistance to the millions affected by the violence, both inside Ukraine and seeking refuge in other countries, and underscored the need for humanitarian access to civilians in Mariupol.”
It concluded: “They also discussed the importance of supporting stable energy markets in light of current disruptions due to sanctions.”
As well as setting out the Nato allies’ unified approach to resisting Russia, the statement was symbolic in the aftermath of Biden’s comments over the weekend that the Russian president Vladimir Putin was “a butcher” who “cannot remain in power.”
Macron, in particular, appeared irked by Biden’s choice of words, and warned against the use of “inflammatory language” on Sunday, without referring directly to the US president’s comments.
Biden won't be drawn on Russia's new Ukraine gambit
The Associated Press asks Biden what is his view of Russia’s announcement it will scale back operations near Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine.
“We’ll see,” he says, “I don’t read anything into it until we see what their actions are.”
He says he has met with Nato leaders and there seems to be a consensus that “let’s just see what they have to offer”.
The western allies will keep strong with sanctions and aiding the Ukraine military, he says.
Prime Minister Lee is asked about what he just spoke about, which is the need for consensus in Asia-Pacific policy and the need for the US to engage China.
“I’m quite convinced that this administration is completely focused on achieving something lasting in Asia,” Lee says, adding that Singapore is committed to helping.
And that’s that.
Joe Biden is up now at the White House with Lee Hsien Loong, prime minister of Singapore, for remarks to the assembled press.
Biden begins with remarks about the need for “peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific” with particular reference to China and its expansionist aims and North Korea and its ballistic missile launches. He announces an Asian summit at the White House soon.
“We also discussed the war in Ukraine,” Biden says, praising the “unified resolve of the Nato alliance and the European Union” in the face of the Russian invasion. Singapore and the US are united in sending the message to all nations that they are “equal in their rights on the global stage”, rights which include territorial integrity.
“We have a large agenda, Mr Prime Minister,” Biden says. It’s about partnership on all issues, he says, finishing: “Both you and Singapore punch well above your weight.”
Prime Minister Lee responds, saying uncertainties and crisis underscore the need to work together as close friends and partners. The discussion with Biden was very good this morning, he says, going on to talk about US-Singapore co-operation on many levels.
Of Ukraine, Lee says Singapore is a staunch supporter of international law and the UN charter, which is why it has strongly condemned the Russian invasion. The unprovoked invasion of a smaller country is unacceptable, he says – a sentiment which would apply to any of China’s smaller neighbours, obviously.
The war in Ukraine has implications for the Asia-Pacific region, Lee says, making the comparison explicit as he discusses the need to avoid conflict through co-operation and diplomacy.
They will take one question each, Biden says.
The apparent parallels between Donald Trump’s missing phone logs and Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up – both situations enhanced by the presence of Bob Woodward’s reporting, as in today’s Washington Post exclusive (see post here) – was too enticing for commentators to ignore.
Amid a Twitter blizzard, Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of the anti-Trump conservative website the Bulwark, compared the two presidents’ remarks, writing: “‘I have never obstructed justice … I am not a crook.’ – Richard M Nixon, Nov 17, 1973. ‘I have no idea what a burner phone is …” – Donald J Trump, March 29 2022.’ ”
Several people noted the disparity between the infamous 18-and-a-half minutes that were missing in White House tapes of conversations between Nixon and his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, and the vastly longer gap of more than seven hours in Trump’s phone logs.
The missing Nixon tapes were from 20 June 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in.
The constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted that Trump’s gap “makes the infamous 18-minute gap in Nixon’s tapes look like nothing in comparison”.
Full report:
Trump legal jeopardy latest
Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, has made a splash with a column for Bloomberg News.
O’Brien writes: “A federal judge thinks that former president Donald Trump likely committed fraud – and probably knew it – when he and one of his lawyers, John Eastman, plotted to block Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election so Trump could hold on to power.
“So how much longer will it take Attorney General Merrick Garland to draw the same conclusion about that attempted coup?”
The column is here and it’s worth a read.
Elsewhere in the world of Extensive Trump Legal Jeopardy And Reporting Upon It, lots of outlets have noticed a filing by the New York state attorney general, Letitia James.
The filing says James’s civil investigation has uncovered evidence the Trump Organization may have misstated the value of assets on financial statements for more than a decade.
As CNBC reported, one “glaring example” of such practices mentioned in the filing saw “financial statements for the Trump Organization from 2010 to 2012 ‘collectively value’ rent-stabilized apartment units it owned at $49.59m, which was ‘over 66 times the $750,000 total value the outside appraiser had assigned to these units’.”
CNBC also noted that the filing, which concerns James’s attempt to stop Trump avoiding deposition, says the man himself “personally certified the accuracy of the statements for the years prior to 2016, at which point his assets were placed in a revocable trust”, while Donald Trump Jr “was responsible for the statements for the years 2016 to 2020”, while his father was president.
Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, says he is filing a lawsuit against Joe Biden’s administration for extending the federal mask mandate on public transportation.
The action, which will further fuel speculation that DeSantis is lining up a run to challenge Biden in the 2024 presidential election, is the latest in a long line of anti-mask moves from the Donald Trump protégé and heir apparent.
Denouncing the mandate as “Covid theater”, a phrase the governor has coined to belittle Biden’s efforts to halt the spread of the pandemic, DeSantis announced the lawsuit at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
“It’s not something that’s grounded in any science,” DeSantis said of the mandate, without citing evidence and pointing out that somebody on an airplane can be “nibbling on peanuts for two and a half hours” with their mask down.
“It’s created a lot of unruly passenger situations because it’s so frustrating for people. We need to let people live their life.”
DeSantis, who has signed legislation banning mask mandates across Florida, and appointed the controversial mask and vaccine-skeptic Dr Joseph Ladapo as the state’s surgeon-general, has clashed frequently with Biden and the government’s leading infectious diseases expert Dr Anthony Fauci over their approach to the pandemic.
As DeSantis launched campaign merchandise mocking Fauci, Florida’s death rate from Covid-19 was steadily climbing, and is now the third-highest in the nation at more than 87,000, according to the New York Times.
Earlier this month, DeSantis, who calls Florida “the freedom state,” scolded students for wearing masks at a speaking engagement.
A North Carolina court has blocked a law prohibiting people with felony convictions from voting while they are not incarcerated, a move that could enfranchise an estimated 56,000 people in the state.
A panel of three superior court judges ruled 2-1 to block the law, which plaintiffs said was rooted in an effort to discriminate against Black people at the turn of the 20th century in the state. The panel said the statute violated the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under law and free elections.
“Section 13-1’s denial of the franchise to people on felony supervision has the intent and effect of discriminating against African Americans, and unconstitutionally denies substantially equal voting power on the basis of race,” superior court judges Lisa Bell and Keith Gregory wrote in the majority opinion. “There is no evidence to demonstrate that N.C.G.S. § 13-1 would have been enacted without a motivation impermissibly based on race discrimination, and the Court concludes that it would not have been.”
North Carolina Republicans are likely to quickly appeal the ruling. In 2020, an appellate court granted a request to block a preliminary order from the same court allowing people on felony probation or parole to vote.
In a dissenting opinion, superior court judge John Dunlow wrote that people convicted of felonies were not entitled to the same constitutional protections as other North Carolinians.
“The Free Elections Clause of the North Carolina Constitution mandates that elections in North Carolina faithfully ascertain the will of the people. The people whose will is to be faithfully ascertained are the persons who are lawfully permitted to vote in North Carolina elections,” he wrote.
“Because convicted felons, who have not had their citizenship rights restored, are not lawfully permitted to vote in North Carolina elections, the Free Elections Clause has no application to those persons.”
Arguably the second most notable fact about the late Alaska congressman Don Young, whom Joe Biden was honoring this morning as he lies in state in the Capitol, is that his 49 years in the House made him the longest serving Republican in history.
According to the former House speaker John Boehner, Young - who died on 18 March aged 88 - was also the only one to pin him up against a wall with a 10in knife at his throat.
Boehner recalled the episode in a 2017 interview with Politico, stating that it occurred during a lively debate with his fellow Alaskan over his efforts to eliminate earmarks, the political maneuver that allowed politicians to add financial requests for pet projects to otherwise unrelated legislation.
Young, a gruff, veteran congressman with a liking for earmarks that sent money to his state, was apparently angered by a speech the younger Boehner made on the House floor speaking out against them.
As Politico tells it:
Boehner never accepted an earmark in Congress - and he enjoyed railing against those who did. His heckling once provoked Don Young, an Alaskan himself, to pin Boehner against a wall inside the House chamber and hold a 10-inch knife to his throat.
Boehner says he stared Young in the eyes and said, ‘Fuck you.’ (Young says this account is ‘mostly true,’ but notes that the two became good friends, with Boehner later serving as his best man).
Biden was among those paying respects to Young in person on Tuesday. In a statement released after Young’s death, the president recalled: “Few legislators have left a greater mark on their state. Don’s legacy lives on in the infrastructure projects he delighted in steering across Alaska. In the opportunities he advanced for his constituents. In the enhanced protections for Native tribes he championed.”
Updated
Donald Trump has claimed to have hit a hole-in-one at his golf course in Florida while playing with a former world No1, Ernie Els.
The former president released a lengthy statement about the shot, which was said to have happened on Saturday, late on Monday.
Earlier, a federal judge said Trump likely committed felonies during his attempts to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden and the January 6 committee recommended criminal contempt charges for two aides, Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro.
If the hole-in-one statement that followed was meant to change the conversation, it was not Trump’s first such gambit.
It was however marginally less dramatic than his move last week, when a prosecutor who resigned from an investigation of Trump’s business affairs said he believed the former president committed “numerous” felonies.
Trump followed that with a 108-page lawsuit alleging a vast conspiracy to delegitimise his presidency, led by Hillary Clinton.
Trump said he scored his hole-in-one on the par-three 7th at Trump International, West Palm Beach. He said there was both a “slight wind” and a “rather strong wind”, as he hit a five iron. The ball, he said, “bounced twice and then went clank, into the hole.”
A video accompanied the statement. It showed Trump picking a ball out of the hole, but not the shot he said put it there.
Referring to Trump’s status as the 45th president, Els tweeted: “Great shot on Saturday 45! Fun to watch the ball roll in for a hole-in-one.”
It has been widely reported that Trump cheats at golf. In 2019, the golf writer Rick Reilly published a book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.
Here’s an interview with Reilly, by Donald McRae:
FDA recommends second Covid booster shot
A second coronavirus booster shot for American adults older than 50 was approved by the US food and drug administration (FDA) on Tuesday in a widely expected move.
The decision to authorize additional shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines no earlier than four months after a previous booster must still be signed off by the federal centers for disease control and prevention (CDC).
But it opens the door to millions more shots being administered, which officials hope will lead to further declines in Covid-19 rates across the country. The daily average of new cases in the US has fallen from a peak of more than 800,000 in January to below 30,000, according to data collated by the New York Times.
Today, we authorized a second booster dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for older people and certain immunocompromised individuals. https://t.co/4wDhSDiUa8 pic.twitter.com/Xc86hCfoF8
— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) March 29, 2022
Concerns are growing, however, about the global spread of the highly contagious sub-variant BA.2, which is now dominant worldwide, according to Reuters, and estimated by some health experts to be at least one and a half times more transmissable than the Omicron variant.
Previously, the FDA had recommended a second booster only for those older than 12 with severely compromised immune systems.
The New York Times reported last week that the strategy of the Biden administration is to offer the second booster shot without specifically recommending that adults should take it. The decision follows debate among health officials of the benefits of providing a fourth shot, as well as the cost to the US government of making it available.
Updated
House speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly let slip her frustration at supreme court justice Clarence Thomas - and his wife’s alleged role in the 6 January Capitol insurrection - at a Democratic caucus meeting on Tuesday.
According to Punchbowl News’s managing editor Heather Caygle, Pelosi was “fired up” as she answered a question from the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about any action, including possible impeachment, the House could take.
The Washington Post previously reported that Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, exchanged more than two dozen texts with then-president Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on the day of the insurrection, urging him to pursue efforts to overturn Trump’s election defeat.
The revelation piqued the interest of the congressional committee investigating the deadly attack on the Capitol incited by Trump, the New York Times reported, and sparked calls for Thomas to resign or recuse himself, after he was the only supreme court justice who later voted to shield White House documents that reportedly included details of his wife’s alleged communications with Meadows.
“It’s up to an individual justice to decide to recuse himself if his wife is participating in a coup,” Pelosi told Democratic House members Tuesday, Caygle’s tweet said, noting that it was up to justices to hold themselves accountable.
Updated
The first lady Jill Biden was prevented from attending her regular Tuesday teaching engagement at Nova community college by a bomb threat at its Alexandria campus, officials said.
A tweet from Northern Virginia college officials said that all classes and activities were canceled for the day, and the campus was evacuated amid a code red alert.
#NOVAAlert: CODE RED Alexandria Campus is closed today due to a bomb threat and the college has evacuated the area. Follow instructions of authorities and avoid area. pic.twitter.com/ZMDi8IckjH
— NOVAcommcollege (@NOVAcommcollege) March 29, 2022
Called “the teacher-in-chief”, Biden spends Tuesdays and Thursdays at the college, lecturing in English, the Washington Post reported last year.
CNN’s Washington DC correspondent Kate Bennett tweeted that Biden was never in any danger, and was warned of the bomb threat before departing the White House this morning.
Officials are investigating the threat.
White House records provided to the congressional inquiry into the deadly 6 January insurrection show a gap of more than seven hours in then-president Donald Trump’s communications, according a report published Tuesday by the Washington Post.
The “silent” period of 7hr 37min covers the time when the Capitol building came under sustained attack from supporters of Trump, who earlier in the day had urged them to “fight like hell” at a rally prior to lawmakers certifying his election defeat to Joe Biden, the Post reports.
According to the article, the 457-minute gap in the official communication log raises suspicions that Trump, who has embraced the big lie that the election was stolen from him, may have been communicating instead with aides, supporters and Republican politicians through alternative, undocumented backchannels, including disposable “burner” phones.
The Post says the House committee declined to comment, but quotes anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation.
One lawmaker on the panel said the committee is investigating a ‘possible coverup’ of the official White House record from that day. Another person close to the committee said the large gap in the records is of “intense interest” to some lawmakers on the committee, many of whom have reviewed copies of the documents. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal committee deliberations.
The development will be of significant interest to the bipartisan committee looking into the events surrounding the insurrection, and comes one day after a judge declared that Trump likely committed multiple felonies as he attempted to illegally overturn Biden’s victory and return himself to power.
In another noteworthy move on Monday night, the panel voted to recommend the prosecution of two key former Trump aides, Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino, who had both defied subpoenas to testify.
The Post’s article on Tuesday, co-written by the newspaper’s chief election correspondent Robert Costa and executive editor Bob Woodward, notes that the lengthy gap in Trump’s 6 January communications log came at a time when lawmakers were locked in the chamber with rioters attempting to attack them, and then-vice-president Mike Pence fleeing for his life.
The 11-page call log was among numerous documents handed over to the panel from the national archives in January after the US supreme court refused to back Trump’s legal efforts to shield them.
The Democratic speaker of the US House, Nancy Pelosi, “fears for democracy” if Republicans retake the chamber in November.
“It is absolutely essential for our democracy that we win,” Pelosi said in an interview during the 2022 Toner Prizes for political journalism on Monday night.
“I fear for our democracy if the Republicans were ever to get the gavel. We can’t let that happen. Democracy is on the ballot in November.”
Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, told Punchbowl News last week: “We’re going to win the majority, and it’s not going to be a five-seat majority.”
But Pelosi said: “I don’t have any intention of the Democrats losing the Congress in November.”
Full story:
Joe Biden’s pick for the vacancy on the US supreme court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, has the backing of almost half of American voters, according to a Politico poll released Tuesday. It shows that 47% want the US senate to confirm her nomination, with 26% opposed, and the other 27% having no set opinion.
Unsurprisingly, Jackson is overwhelmingly backed by Democratic voters in the Politico/Morning Consult poll, with 75% in favor. Among Republicans, only 21% are positive, and she earns the support of 39% of independents.
The senate judiciary committee is expected to vote on her nomination next Monday, with a full floor vote before Easter. Jackson endured an often abrasive grilling from Republican senators at last week’s confirmation hearings, who accused her of being soft on crime, yet she is still on “a glidepath to confirmation” according to the Associated Press.
Assuming all Democratic senators vote for her - and one possible holdout, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has already signaled his support - Jackson is expected to become the first Black woman on the country’s highest judicial panel.
With all Democrats on board, just one Republican backing her would negate the need for vice-president Kamala Harris to cast a tie-breaking vote. The Utah senator Mitt Romney told CNN on Monday that he hasn’t reached a decision, while the moderate Maine senator Susan Collins will talk to Jackson again this week before making up her mind, according to The Hill.
Poll shows public support for Ketanji Brown Jackson
Good morning, happy Tuesday, and welcome to the US politics live blog. There’s welcome news for Joe Biden from a Politico/Morning Consult poll that shows almost half of American voters, 47% to be precise, want the US Senate to confirm his pick Ketanji Brown Jackson to the supreme court, with 26% opposed. The Senate judiciary committee is set to vote on her nomination on 4 April.
There are also fast-moving developments in the Ukraine-Russia war, which can be found in the Guardian’s rolling coverage of the conflict here.
Also happening today:
- The White House says Biden will speak with European leaders, including the UK prime minister Boris Johnson, this morning to discuss developments in Ukraine.
- The president also welcomes Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong for a White House visit this morning, with the pair making statements around 12.45pm. So it’s not certain Biden will take reporters’ questions.
- Shortly after, the president will pay his respects to the former Arizona congressman Don Young, lying in state at the Capitol. Young, who died on 18 March, served 49 years in Congress, the longest of any Republican in history.
- At 4pm, Biden, accompanied by vice-president Kamala Harris, is scheduled to sign the Emmett Till anti-lynching bill into law.
