Closing summary
House Republicans have succeeded in passing their proposal to both raise the debt limit and cut government spending, but the fundamental realities in Washington have not changed: Democrats and Joe Biden refuse to support the bill and insist the GOP increase the ceiling without preconditions. A potential June default looms if an agreement is not reached before then.
Here’s what else happened today:
Montana Republicans voted to bar the state’s sole transgender lawmaker, Democrat Zooey Zephyr, from the House chamber, so she’s doing her work outside its doors.
Senate Democrats seem divided over whether to subpoena supreme court chief justice John Roberts after he declined to testify about the court’s ethics.
Washington announced new measures to stem an expected flow of migrants to the southern border, including the opening of new immigration centers in Colombia and Guatemala.
Donald Trump’s campaign hired a second company to prove his allegations of fraud in the 2020 election, without success. The firm’s founder has since been interviewed by federal prosecutors.
More polls confirmed what we already know: Trump remains top among Republicans, and Biden the leader among Democrats.
The trial of advice columnist E Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuit alleging rape by Donald Trump continues in New York City this afternoon, with more cross examination from the former president’s lawyer Joe Tacopina.
Politico reported an intense exchange between Carroll and Tacopina, who demanded details about the claimed sexual assault:
Riveting moment between E. Jean Carroll & Trump lawyer Tacopina in court just now, when Tacopina pushed her repeatedly on why she says she didn't scream when Trump was allegedly raping her.
— erica orden (@eorden) April 27, 2023
Carroll: "I’m not a screamer. You can’t beat up on me for not screaming."
Tacopina: "I’m not beating up on you, I’m asking you questions."
— erica orden (@eorden) April 27, 2023
Carroll: "Women don’t come forward. One of the reasons they don't come forward is because they’re always asked, Why didn't you scream?" She raised her voice: "I’m telling you: He raped me whether I screamed or not."
"Do you need a minute, Ms. Carroll?" Tacopina asked.
— erica orden (@eorden) April 27, 2023
"No, go right on," she said. "I don’t need an excuse for not screaming."
Trump hired second firm to prove 2020 fraud allegations
The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020 hired a second firm to prove its claims of election fraud – and the founder of the company has since talked to federal prosecutors.
The investigation by Simpatico Software Systems could not substantiate the allegations of vote tampering and other misconduct that Trump started making after his loss to Joe Biden.
Ken Block, Simpatico’s founder, told the Post he spoke with prosecutors working for Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to investigate Trump over his attempts to overturn Biden’s win, among other matters.
Here’s more from their story:
Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.
“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he said. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
Block said he recently received a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith’s office and met with federal prosecutors in Washington, but he declined to discuss his interactions with them. Block said he contemporaneously sent his findings disputing fraud claims in writing to the Trump campaign in late 2020.
“I just don’t believe it’s appropriate at this point in time to discuss anything related to the grand jury process,” he said.
Prosecutors have obtained extensive information about Block’s efforts, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.
Federal records show the Trump 2020 campaign paid Block’s firm more than $750,000 in six different payments. The first for $390,000 came three days after the election, records show, and the final payment came around Thanksgiving of that year. The payments were labeled “Recount.”
Updated
Yesterday, the long-running feud between Disney and Ron DeSantis went to the courts, when the entertainment giant filed a lawsuit alleging “a targeted campaign of government retaliation” by the Florida governor.
It’ll be a big case to follow, particularly since DeSantis may soon be trying to sell Americans on his approach to governing as a GOP presidential candidate. In an interview with Fox News today, Florida’s Republican senator Marco Rubio sounded like he supported the lawsuit, but worried about what businesses may think of the spat in the Sunshine State:
"I do worry that if this happens too many times, businesses that are thinking about coming to Florida are saying, 'Maybe we don't want to go there.'"
— The Recount (@therecount) April 27, 2023
— Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on Gov. Ron DeSantis' (R-FL) legal battle with Disney and his clashes with the company pic.twitter.com/etsWYPkI28
On the third day of the trial of E Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuit against Donald Trump accusing him of rape, the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports that a lawyer for the former president accused her of filing the suit for her own gain:
The advice columnist E Jean Carroll has denied that she falsely accused Donald Trump of raping her in order to sell books and for political ends.
On the third day of Carroll’s civil suit against the former president for battery and defamation, Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, put it to her that she made her allegation the centrepiece of a book proposal she was trying to sell.
Carroll is seeking damages for the alleged rape in a New York department store changing room in the mid-1990s and for defamation after Trump accused her of lying when she went public with her accusations in the book.
Carroll said she was motivated to speak up after the New York Times’ exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes prompted women across the US to relate their own experiences of sexual assault and fired the #MeToo movement.
In the Senate, Democrats attempted to push through a measure that would remove the deadline for ratification of the Equal Rights amendment.
The resolution failed after most GOP lawmakers, with the exceptions of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted against it:
By a vote of 51-47, the #Senate did not invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to S.J.Res.4, Equal Rights Amendment.
— Senate Press Gallery (@SenatePress) April 27, 2023
Senators Collins and Murkowski voted YEA.
ML Schumer changed his vote to no in order to reconsider.
It’s common for the party in power to propose legislation they know won’t pass in order to put the opposition on the spot. And indeed, that’s what this was about; Republicans argue the amendment, which would put a guarantee of equality of all in the constitution and outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex, has been made redundant by other laws.
The Democrat’s majority whip Dick Durbin hit out at the GOP after the vote failed:
Today, Senate Republicans failed to secure the rights of every American by voting against the Equal Rights Amendment. Right now, women all across America are living with the reality that their fundamental freedoms are under attack. And without the ERA’s protections, even more rights could be on the chopping block. But Senate Democrats will not stop. We will continue to work to protect women’s rights in all facets of public life.”
With the debt limit bill behind it (for now), the House is today voting on a resolution that would remove US troops from Somalia.
The measure, proposed by rightwing Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, comes after Joe Biden ordered the hundreds of US troops training Somali forces to remain in the country, reversing a withdrawal order that Donald Trump made near the end of his presidency.
On the House floor, Gaetz cast the vote as part of his campaign to repeal US troop deployments worldwide. Here are his remarks:
It’s time to bring our troops home. Today, the House of Representatives will vote on my War Powers Resolution to remove U.S. troops from Somalia.
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) April 27, 2023
The future of Somalia must be determined by its people, not the United States.
We should not be engaged in nation-building in… pic.twitter.com/Bd7Ga3zeNg
Hours after Republicans voted their debt limit proposal through the House, CNN reports that top Democrats in the Senate remain hostile to the legislation, even as a potential debt default grows ever nearer:
So far, top Senate Ds standing by Biden's opposition to negotiations with McCarthy over debt ceiling, even as default looms.
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 27, 2023
"There will be conversation, and time for it. But the premise of the president's position I accept, and I think is the right way to go," Durbin told me.
Sen. Gary Peters, DSCC chairman, said: "We should never, never threaten to default on debt. That should not be something that's ever negotiated. ... Default is never something that should be discussed."
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 27, 2023
After declining an invitation to appear before the Senate judiciary committee about corruption allegations against members of his bench, US supreme court chief justice John Roberts has been sent a letter from the panel’s chairperson which demands more information on the high court’s ethics.
“It is noteworthy that no justice will speak to the American people after numerous revelations have called the court’s ethical standards into question, even though sitting justices have testified before Senate or House committees on at least 92 occasions since 1960,” Dick Durbin’s letter to Roberts read.
The letter from Illinois’s Durbin, the Senate majority whip, asked questions about “a statement of ethics and principles and practices to which all current members of the supreme court subscribe” that Roberts sent while declining an invite to testify on 2 May. Durbin’s reply to Roberts’s refusal to testify said that “the statement of principles raises more questions than it resolves”.
Durbin’s missive went on to ask five questions that the Democratic senator said were aimed at informing “the committee’s work on legislation that seeks to ensure that the ethical obligations and practices of the justices are at least on par with those that govern the rest of the federal judiciary and the federal government generally”.
Durbin’s invitation to Roberts came after ProPublica reported the close friendship between Clarence Thomas, the senior conservative on the court, and the Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow.
Without declaring them, Thomas received from Crow extensive gifts including luxury travel and resort stays. Crow also bought a home in which Thomas’s mother lives and donated money to groups connected to Ginni Thomas, the justice’s far-right activist wife.
Thomas and Crow have denied wrongdoing.
On Tuesday, Politico reported that another conservative, Neil Gorsuch, pocketed up to $500,000 from a property sale shortly after joining the court but did not disclose that the buyer was the chief executive of a law firm with business before the court.
Gorsuch did not comment. The firm executive, Brian Duffy, denied wrongdoing.
The supreme court’s conservative majority last year eliminated the federal right to abortion which had been established by Roe v Wade in 1973. Since then, public confidence in the high court has fallen to historic lows, according to recent polling.
Updated
Joe Biden, who declared his run for re-election on Tuesday, faces only two fringe candidates in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
A new poll from Emerson College Polling doesn’t suggest the self-help author Marianne Williamson or the Kennedy scion and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr can deny the president a chance for another four years in power.
But it might seem vaguely alarming to dispassionate observers that in the survey, 21% of respondents picked Kennedy and 8% Williamson, with Biden on a round 70%.
The same survey puts Biden’s job approval at 49%, down a tick from the last time out.
Among Republican candidates, declared and not, Emerson finds 62% support for the former president Donald Trump, ahead of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, on 16%, the former vice-president Mike Pence (7%) and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (3%).
The former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who like Trump and Haley has declared his run, is on 2%, behind the fringe candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (3%) and also that famous, perennial political contender Someone Else (4%).
Of hypothetical 2024 matchups, Emerson reports: “Biden narrowly leads Trump 43% to 41%, while 10% would vote for someone else and 6% are undecided. Against DeSantis, Biden holds 43% while DeSantis receives 37%, 12% would vote for someone else and 8% are undecided. Both races are within the poll’s margin of error.”
Here’s some further reading, about Biden and the media:
The day so far
House Republicans have succeeded in passing their proposal to both raise the debt limit and cut government spending, but the fundamental realities in Washington have not changed: Democrats and Joe Biden refuse to support the proposal and insist the GOP raise the limit without preconditions. A potential June default looms if an agreement isn’t reached before then.
There’s plenty more news happening elsewhere:
Montana Republicans voted to bar the state’s sole transgender lawmaker, Democrat Zooey Zephyr, from the House chamber, so she’s doing her work outside its doors.
Senate Democrats seem divided over whether to attempt to subpoena supreme court chief justice John Roberts after he declined to testify about the court’s ethics.
Washington announced new measures to stem an expected flow of migrants to the southern border, including the opening of new immigration centers in Colombia and Guatemala.
The Biden administration has announced new measures intended to stem the flow of migrants to the southern border caused by the impending end of pandemic-era restrictions, the Associated Press reports.
Among these are the opening of two processing centers in Colombia and Guatemala where would-be migrants can access information about applying for refugee or other immigration statues, according to the AP.
Here’s more from their report:
The migration centers are part of an intense effort to try to prevent thousands of people from making the often-dangerous journey to the southern border when the restrictions end May 11.
But it is unclear whether the processing centers and other measures, including expedited processing for asylum seekers and crackdowns on human smuggling networks, will do much to slow the tide of migrants fleeing from countries marred by political and economic strife.
“This is a hemispheric challenge that demands hemispheric solutions,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a news conference as he outlined upcoming steps ahead of the May 11 deadline.
Mayorkas also warned that migrants and the human smugglers should not interpret the upcoming deadline to mean that the border is wide open: ”Let me be clear, our border is not open and not will be open after May 11.”
The Biden administration, under attack by Republicans eager to paint the border as wide open under his leadership, has repeatedly warned that the end of the pandemic-era immigration restrictions does not mean that migrants should try to come to the US as they’ve also sought to open other avenues for migration.
Updated
Back to Montana for a minute, Zooey Zephyr, the transgender Democratic representative whom the state’s Republican's voted to keep off the floor of the state House of Representatives yesterday, remains in the building.
Montana Public Radio found her posted up outside the House chamber:
Rep. Zephyr is set up on a bench just outside the House chamber this morning, voting remotely. She’s barred from entering the chamber or debating on bills. #mtleg #mtpol pic.twitter.com/WkZ5NnVzH5
— Shaylee Ragar (@shay_ragar) April 27, 2023
Earlier this week, supreme court chief justice John Robert put the kibosh on Senate Democrats’ invitation for him to testify before the judiciary committee about the court’s ethics.
Their request came after a series of reports revealing links between justice Clarence Thomas and a Republican megadonor. So what can Democrats do now? Theoretically, they could subpoena the chief justice, but there seems to be debate within the party over doing that, as CNN reports:
Asked Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin why he didn't subpoena John Roberts to testify at his SCOTUS hearing.
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 27, 2023
“Check the history of subpoenaing Supreme Court justices. I can tell you. There's one attempt to do it in 1953, and the Justice didn't appear. That's the history.”
But Sen. Dick Blumenthal wants a more aggressive approach.
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 27, 2023
“In my view, we should consider issuing subpoenas for Supreme Court justices, whether it is Justice Thomas or someone else, but also for other evidence."
(Feinstein would need to be present to issue such a subpoena)
For the Guardian, Lyz Lenz looks at the relationship between Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, and what the latter’s ouster from Fox News this week means for the former president’s latest campaign for the White House:
At an 18 February 2017 rally, Donald Trump railed against immigrants and violence. He was unusually focused on Sweden, warning the crowd about recent terrorist attacks in the country: “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” If a terrorist attack in Sweden seemed unbelievable, it’s because it was. There had been no attack by immigrants the night before Trump spoke. The most recent attacks on Sweden, at the time, were a series of bombings between November 2016 and January 2017 that were allegedly connected to the neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance.
People in Sweden shared photographs of their very un-bombed houses. Reporters did their due diligence and wrote stories about how nothing at all had happened in Sweden the previous night. It was a news cycle of nothing. But all that nothing could not persuade the president he was wrong. Trump repeated the story over and over. He was right, he insisted in multiple interviews: Sweden had been bombed by immigrant terrorists and he knew because he’d seen it on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
It seems possible that next year’s presidential election will occur without Tucker Carlson, the popular conservative commentator, on the airwaves. Fox News fired him earlier this week in a move few saw coming. Yesterday, he made his first public statement since his ouster, the Guardian’s Kari Paul reports:
Tucker Carlson has broken his silence for the first time since his abrupt departure from Fox News, posting a video to Twitter that did not directly address his reported firing.
Carlson was one of the network’s biggest stars, and gained a large following while spouting xenophobic and racist rhetoric on his show, Tucker Carlson Tonight. He left Fox News without explanation on Monday. News outlets have reported that Carlson was fired on the personal order of Fox owner Rupert Murdoch for, among other things, using vulgar language to describe a female executive.
On Wednesday, Carlson shared a cryptic two-minute video on his Twitter account that did not explain his exit, but offered sweeping complaints about the state of American discourse. He said what he noticed “when you step away from the noise for a few days,” is how nice some people are.
Rough poll numbers aren’t stopping Ron DeSantis from getting ready to launch a presidential campaign, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is quietly assembling a senior staff for an expected 2024 presidential campaign that will be headed by his top political adviser, Generra Peck, and around seven other Republican operatives serving as top advisers, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The leadership roster remains subject to change since the campaign – which could launch as soon as the start of next month – does not yet technically exist and most salaries are being paid, for the moment, through the state Republican party.
But some of the senior staff have started to move in recent weeks to the campaign’s base in Tallahassee, the people said, as DeSantis prepares to announce his presidential ambitions as perhaps the closest challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination.
In the polling released yesterday, Fox News also confirmed that the Republican primary field looks the same as it has for months.
Donald Trump is the frontrunner, with the support of 53% of those surveyed, according to the data. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who has yet to declare his candidacy but is widely expected to, comes in a distant second at 21%, about three percentage points lower than Fox’s previous survey in March. Over the same period, Trump’s number dropped by only a single point.
All other candidates, declared or not, are polling in the single digits. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has the support of 62% of Democratic voters, the survey said.
As Republican-led state legislatures move to crack down on drag shows and transgender rights, they may want to take heed of a Fox News poll released yesterday.
The survey found 57% of respondents think “attacks on trans families” is a “major” problem, while 60% thought the same of book banning, another priority of some Republican lawmakers. However, the poll confirmed public angst over transgender athletes in women’s sports, with 54% of respondents saying that was a “major” problem.
Also in Montana, Republican lawmakers voted yesterday to silence the state’s sole transgender lawmaker for the duration of the legislative session, the Guardian’s Dani Anguiano reports:
Montana Republicans have barred the transgender lawmaker Zooey Zephyr from the statehouse floor for the rest of the session after she told colleagues they would have “blood on your hands” if they voted to ban gender-affirming medical care for trans children.
Under the terms of the punishment, Zephyr will still be able to vote remotely but will be unable to participate in debates on the floor for the remainder of the 90-day legislative session. The Democratic representative had been forbidden from speaking for the past week over her comments, which Republicans said violated decorum.
The decision to silence Zephyr had already drawn protests that brought the statehouse to a halt on Monday as demonstrators demanded Zephyr be allowed to speak. Republicans accused Zephyr of placing lawmakers and staff at risk of harm for disrupting house proceedings by inciting protests in the chamber.
Elsewhere in the country, Montana’s Republican lawmakers have been busy passing legislation targeting transgender people, and the son of governor Greg Gianforte has asked his father to reject them, the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:
The son of the Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, met his father in his office to lobby him to reject several bills that would harm transgender people in the state, the Montana Free Press reported.
David Gianforte told the paper he identifies as nonbinary and uses he/they pronouns – the first time they disclosed their sexuality publicly. They told the outlet they felt an obligation to use their relationship with their father to stand up for LGBTQ+ people in the state.
“There are a lot of important issues passing through the legislature right now,” they said in a statement. “For my own sake I’ve chosen to focus primarily on transgender rights, as that would significantly directly affect a number of my friends … I would like to make the argument that these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights.”
Here’s more from last night on the Republican-driven floor action that led to the passage of their debt limit proposal, from the Associated press:
House Republicans narrowly passed sweeping legislation on Wednesday that would raise the government’s legal debt ceiling by $1.5tn in exchange for steep spending restrictions, a tactical victory for the House speaker Kevin McCarthy as he challenges Joe Biden to negotiate and prevent a catastrophic federal default this summer.
Biden has threatened to veto the Republican package, which has almost no chance of passing the Senate in the meantime, where Democrats hold a slim majority.
The president has so far refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling which the White House insists must be lifted with no strings to ensure America pays its bills.
The real purpose of GOP debt limit bill: leverage
The Limit, Save, Grow Act House Republicans passed last night raises the debt ceiling through the end of March next year, at most, and also undoes a number of proposals enacted by Joe Biden. It would block his attempt to relieve some federal student loan debt, strip newly allocated funding from the Internal Revenue Service, add new work requirements to federal programs meant to help the poor and make broad cuts to government spending, ultimately lowering the federal budget deficit by an estimated $4.8tn over 10 years.
Democrats hate it, and have taken to calling it the Default on America Act, or DOA – which also stands for dead on arrival. The Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer says that’s what it will be when it arrives in his chamber, and even if it somehow made it out, Biden said he would veto it.
So why did Republicans bother? Because they want to get Biden to sit down with House speaker Kevin McCarthy and negotiate a deal to raise the debt ceiling – something the president has refused to do. House financial services committee chair Patrick McHenry said as much in an interview with CNN yesterday. And for the GOP, time is on their side. The clock is ticking towards early June, when the US government could potentially run out of cash and catastrophically default on its debt.
The gamble that McCarthy and his allies are making is that Biden will be forced to the table as that deadline nears, and the Limit, Save, Grow Act will represent their starting offer.
House passes debt ceiling bill in show of strength by McCarthy
Good morning, US politics blog readers. A few months ago, Kevin McCarthy appeared to be in a terrible position. He had been elected speaker of the House of Representatives, but only after an unprecedented 15 rounds of voting by his fractious Republican caucus, and it wasn’t hard to see a future where those same lawmakers lost patience with and ousted the Californian. But last night, McCarthy notched a victory when the House GOP passed its proposal to increase the US debt limit while also slashing government spending, despite several Republicans initially saying they wouldn’t support the bill. Democrats oppose the measure, and there’s no way Joe Biden signs it into law, at least not without significant changes. But for McCarthy, the fact that he got it passed with Republican votes alone despite their narrow majority in the House indicates he may be a more clever – and potentially durable – speaker than he’d been given credit for just a little bit ago.
Here’s what else is happening today:
House Republicans are unveiling a proposal to address border security at 2:15 pm eastern time.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at 1:45 pm and likely bash the GOP debt ceiling bill, as the Biden administration has been doing for days.
West Virginia governor Jim Justice makes a “special announcement” at 5 pm that’s reportedly a campaign for Senate, potentially pitting the Republican against Democratic incumbent Joe Manchin in a contest that could decide which party controls the chamber.
