Recap
Ron DeSantis announced his presidential bid in a glitchy, chaotic forum on Elon Musk’s Twitter.
Joe Biden commemorated the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, and called for gun control measures, one year after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school.
Meanwhile, in the Capitol, negotiations continue over raising the debt ceiling, with no breakthrough yet apparent.
Donald Trump’s lawyers have requested a meeting with attorney general Merrick Garland and aired a litany of grievances about special counsel Jack Smith and other prosecutors.
Texas’s Republican-dominated legislature appears to be moving to curb political power in its most-populous county, which is run by Democrats.
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Biden marked Uvalde anniversary with a call for gun control
In a brief speech at the White House, the president asked: “How many more parents will live their worst nightmare before we stand up to the gun lobby?”
He and first lady Jill Biden stood in front of 21 burning candles to honor the victims of the school shooting. “It’s time to make our voices heard, not as Democrats or as Republicans but as friends, as neighbors as parents, as fellow Americans,” he said.
The president offered his empathy to the friends and family of those who were killed. “While everyone’s pain is different, we like many of you have some understanding of what it’s like to lose a child – on more than one occasion,” he said. “They’ll never be gone from your heart, they’ll always be part of you.”
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And Elon Musk’s insistence that the glitches were due to DeSantis’s popularity has not been particularly convincing.
BuzzFeed exploding the watermelon hit 820,000 concurrent viewers in 2016 https://t.co/EKtwBBV2j6
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) May 24, 2023
We had more people join when I played Among Us 👾 https://t.co/zBoDCM0XmL
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 24, 2023
The launch is already being panned, including by Fox News and the Daily Mail.
Fox News, which was snubbed for the announcement, is going after DeSantis aggressively: pic.twitter.com/roObJO8Ac1
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) May 24, 2023
Daily Mail right now: pic.twitter.com/PNRMlsqJnu
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) May 24, 2023
Musk ended by welcoming any other candidates who want to go through the same rigamarole to come through. And that’s a wrap!
DeSantis is also expected on Fox News tonight. “PROGRAMMING ALERT: Want to actually see and hear Ron DeSantis? Tune into Fox News at 8pm ET,” the network splashed on its website.
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DeSantis ended by speaking about Bitcoin and ESG investments – niche topics that are likely to lose many followers.
Earlier this month, DeSantis signed a bill barring officials from investing public money to promote environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals. It was one of the farthest-reaching efforts by a Republican lawmaker to stop sustainable investing efforts.
DeSantis spoke on education and immigration – two realms in which he has pushed unprecedented, authoritarian measures as governor.
On education:
“There has not been a single book banned in the state of Florida,” said DeSantis, who often repeats this lie.
According to Pen America, “In 2023, to comply with new laws, some Florida schools were directed to empty libraries and cover classroom bookshelves. Teachers in Manatee county and Duval county were told they had to have each book in their classrooms reviewed before they could go back. Martin county removed dozens of books after they were objected to by one person.”
On immigration:
“You need to shut the border down,” DeSantis said, vowing to follow though on his anti-immigrant policies and go further than Donald Trump had been able to.
As my colleague Richard Luscome has reported, DeSantis has made hardline, anti-immigrant policies a cornerstone of his gubernatorial policy.
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David Sacks also asked DeSantis about Disney, which has become the Florida governor’s top foe.
Disney had “really been outed as trying to inject matters of sex in the programming for the youth”, DeSantis said. The governor’s beef with the corporation started when Disney, one of Florida’s biggest employers, publicly opposed his so-called “don’t say gay” ban. He retaliated by seizing control of Disney’s self-governing special district, and threatened to build a state prison near the area.
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This odd launch to DeSantis’s campaign has partly become an advertisement for Twitter.
Musk and Sacks played off the glitches on Twitter as DeSantis “breaking the internet”. It’s unclear why Twitter didn’t anticipate 500,000 listeners for a presidential announcement.
After taking swipes at the media and the NAACP (which recently issued a travel advisory for Florida under DeSantis’s leadership), the right-wing governor talked up Twitter.
“Part of what Twitter is standing for is people should be exposed to different viewpoints,” said DeSantis, who has been working to ban viewpoints in classrooms across his state. He signed a bill that prohibits public school teachers in Florida from holding classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity.
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DeSantis also called making his Covid-era policies a ‘lonely’ time when he had to make different decisions than the rest of the country.
The governor went against public health guidance to end mask mandates early, surround himself with anti-vaccine advocates and other controversial stances. In 2021, Florida saw record-breaking surges in Covid infections, which DeSantis dismissed as “seasonal”. It was his aggressive defiance of pandemic policies that helped him rise to national prominence, as he capitalized on anti-mask and anti-vaccine fervor rising across the US.
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In a new Twitter Spaces stream, this one with notably fewer listeners, Ron DeSantis has finally begun to speak, reading off prepared remarks.
“I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback,” he said, reiterating lines from his announcement video. “There is no substitute for victory … we must look forward, not backwards,” he said.
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After Elon Musk laid off scores of employees who kept the social media platform running, glitches and errors have become somewhat commonplace on Twitter.
Ron DeSantis has yet to say a word, but amid all the feedback, Musk said, with more than 400,000 listeners on the stream: “The servers are straining somewhat.”
Joe Biden’s social media team seems to be having a bit of fun with it all:
This link works: https://t.co/9PzIJkseYI
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 24, 2023
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The event is off to a glitchy start …
The audio line has bad feedback. “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign,” said David Sacks, the Republican donor and friend of Elon Musk who is moderating the audio event.
Some have reported that their Twitter apps are crashing.
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Ron DeSantis is about to make his presidential announcement on Twitter
The Florida governor is about to join Twitter owner Elon Musk in a live audio event on the site, to officially announce his bid for president.
The conversation will be streamed on Twitter Spaces, a dedicated audio streaming feature on the social media platform. Ahead of the event, DeSantis is teasing a new slogan on his campaign website: “We’ve only just begun to fight for our Great American Comeback.”
I’m running for president to lead our Great American Comeback. pic.twitter.com/YmkWkLaVDg
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) May 24, 2023
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Meanwhile, at Capitol Hill, GOP House leader Steve Scalise told lawmakers they could go home for Memorial Day weekend, with no deal on increasing the debt limit yet.
Scalise said members should be ready to come back with 24hrs notice if a deal is reached. Kevin McCarthy, meanwhile, said that a compromise had yet to be reached.
If and when there is a debt-limit deal, members will get 72 hours to review legislative text before they have to vote on it.
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The Sierra Club Florida has joined in condemning Ron DeSantis, saying that he has “continuously failed Florida’s environment, residents, economy, and democracy”.
“Sierra Club Florida has consistently graded Governor DeSantis’ environmental record with “F’s’’ for good reason. Rather than prioritizing the wellbeing of our people and environment, the governor and his administration have focused on culture war signaling and spending taxpayer dollars on political stunts that harm real people,” said Emily Gorman, the Sierra Club Florida director. “DeSantis’ constant mismanagement and lack of leadership have had a devastating impact on our state.”
Earlier this month, DeSantis signed a bill barring officials from investing public money to promote environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals. It was one of the farthest-reaching efforts by a Republican lawmaker to stop sustainable investing efforts.
Despite initially signaling a pragmatic approach toward environmental protections when he took office, the Florida governor has also signed bills that blocked coral reef protections in Key West, prevented local electrification initiatives and defined natural gas as “renewable” energy.
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DeSantis changes law to ease White House run
Ron DeSantis has just taken a small but significant step to smooth his run at the White House: he’s signed a bill repealing an element of Florida’s “resign to run” law that would have prevented him continuing to serve as governor while campaigning for higher office.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, DeSantis put his signature on the bill just hours after filing the official paperwork earlier Wednesday formalizing his campaign for the Republican party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
Last month, compliant Republicans in the state legislature passed a measure that said the resign to run restriction would no longer apply to those running for president or vice-president.
DeSantis, who was reelected Florida’s governor in November, would otherwise have had to resign from that office because his term would have overlapped the start of the next presidential period beginning in January 2025.
.@GovRonDeSantis signs change to resign-to-run law the same day he launches presidential bid
— Florida Politics (@Fla_Pol) May 24, 2023
Reporting by @JacobOgleshttps://t.co/uzMvmPVvJi#FlaPol
It’s the second bill this month DeSantis has signed to ease himself into the campaign. On 11 May he signed a measure reducing transparency over political spending and his travel arrangements.
Republican lawmakers and DeSantis cited security concerns to justify the law. But Democrats and transparency advocates said it was a brazen effort to keep DeSantis’s travel secret.
“Where a governor goes, who travels with the governor, who the governor meets with is all information of critical importance to the public. Who is influencing the governor? We need to know that,” Barbara Petersen, executive director of the Florida center for government accountability, said at the time.
Read more:
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Here’s a bit of background on DeSantis, from my colleague Maya Yang:
DeSantis became a national figure when he aggressively opposed Covid measures
Throughout the pandemic, DeSantis remained staunchly opposed to Covid-19 precautionary measures including lockdowns and mask mandates. He has also widely spread Covid-19 vaccine denialism. In 2021, as Florida experienced record-breaking surges in Covid-19 cases, DeSantis dismissed the spikes as “seasonal” and called the growing struggle faced by state hospitals “media hysteria”. Earlier this year, DeSantis announced a proposal to permanently ban Covid-19 mandates in the state. The governor’s aggressive stance has since earned him a variety of nicknames online including the “Pied Piper”, “Deathsantis” and “DeSatan”.
DeSantis is waging a war against ‘woke’ culture, attacking minority groups in his state
Since becoming governor, DeSantis has launched a war against “woke” culture in Florida and signed into law a slew of bills that civil rights organizations have widely condemned as violations of individual freedoms. In 2022, DeSantis approved the so-called “don’t say gay” ban which prohibits discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools across all grade levels. In January, DeSantis banned African American studies from the state’s high schools, saying that the course “lacks educational value”. He also signed a bill approving a six-week abortion ban in the state and has announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory.
DeSantis, who got married at Disney World, is engaged in a legal feud with Disney
Following DeSantis’s fight against LGBTQ+ rights in Florida and pressure from its own employees, Disney – one of the state’s biggest employers – publicly opposed the so-called “don’t say gay” ban last year. DeSantis retaliated by seizing control of Disney’s self-governing special district near Orlando and assumed new powers which allow him to appoint members of the development board that supervises the theme park. DeSantis has proposed building low-income housing on land next to the theme parks and also touted building a state prison in the area.
DeSantis’s police program is luring officers with violent records
As an incentive to attract police officers from other states who are frustrated by Covid-19 vaccination requirements, DeSantis launched a new law enforcement relocation program on which he has spent $13.5m to date. The program offers a one-time $5,000 bonus for new recruits. However, a recent study of state documents found that among the nearly 600 officers who relocated to Florida, a “sizable number” have a slew of complaints against them or have since had criminal charges filed against them. Those charges include murder, as well as domestic battery and kidnapping.
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Earlier this week, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People civil rights organization issued a travel advisory over Ron DeSantis’s policies in Florida, but as the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports, it’s not stopping there:
Leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) say its travel advisory highlighting Florida’s “active hostility” to minorities is only the beginning of a campaign to engage voters in the state and nationally, as the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, prepares to launch his presidential run on Wednesday.
Leon Russell, chair of the NAACP, also told the Guardian that the group rejected calling for an economic boycott of the state similar to one that ended with South Carolina lowering the confederate flag in 2015.
“Very simply put, we questioned the effectiveness of a boycott,” Russell said. “In Florida, this is about the politics of the situation and so people need to buckle in and organize, and get themselves arranged to deal with elections and the consequences of the elections.
For four lonely years, Nikki Fried was the sole Democrat elected to a statewide position in Florida as its agricultural commissioner.
That gave Fried, now the state Democratic party chair, a unique view into DeSantis’s governorship, and she apparently did not think much of what she saw.
Here’s what she said after news broke of his presidential run:
Countdown until Ron bows out is on.
— Nikki Fried (@NikkiFried) May 24, 2023
But just who is Ron DeSantis? Many Americans will be asking themselves that question in the months to come, as the Florida governor embarks on what’s reported to be an aggressive campaign of outreach to voters, particularly in the states that vote first in the GOP’s nominating process. Here’s the Guardian’s David Smith with a look at what we know about DeSantis, and what he might do as president of the United States:
The official Florida governor’s website invites visitors to “Meet Governor DeSantis”. But anyone who clicks on that option is greeted with the message “Governor Ron DeSantis Biography – coming soon”, along with his photo and a big white space.
DeSantis’s admirers project on to that blank page the ideal of a strong chief executive, “anti-woke” warrior and consistent election winner. His detractors fill the vacuum with warnings that the Florida governor represents “Trump 2.0”, “Trump with a brain” and “Trump without the circus”.
Six months ago DeSantis was being hailed as the future of a Republican party grown tired of former US president Donald Trump’s losing streak. He had offered blueprints for beating Democrats in elections and for exporting a rightwing agenda nationwide: “Make America Florida.”
But after filing papers with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday to seek the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, DeSantis still has everything to prove about his readiness for the ultimate stage.
Florida political insiders suggest that he is undercooked and will fail the “likability test” – which candidate would you rather have a beer with?
“I have been saying DeSantis was an overpriced political stock for a year and a half,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist who has been involved in more than 30 political campaigns in the state. “This guy is all hat and no cattle. He doesn’t have that natural verbal and political grace that you need to pull off a win against Trump, who is a powerful performer on stage.
Here’s more from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly about the rollout of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, and what we can expect in the days to come:
The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has officially declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president.
DeSantis filed paperwork on Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission, ahead of a planned Twitter event with the owner of the social media site, Elon Musk, and an interview with Fox News.
The announcement was long expected. DeSantis won re-election in a landslide last November, published a campaign-oriented memoir in February and was widely reported to be staffing up while visiting states that will vote early in the primary next year.
He retains support from powerful donors, has amassed significant campaign funds and is consistently a clear second to Donald Trump in polling of the Republican field.
Donald Trump has for months been hurling insults, accusations and invective at Ron DeSantis, and today is no different.
Much of the vitriol can be found on the former president’s Truth social account, where over the past hour he’s been sharing polls showing him beating DeSantis in support.
Here’s a typical Trump attack on DeSantis, from earlier today:
Ron DeSanctus can’t win the General Election (or get the Nomination) because he VOTED TO OBLITERATE SOCIAL SECURITY, EVEN WANTING TO RAISE THE MINIMUM AGE TO 70 (or more!), VOTED TO BADLY WOUND MEDICARE, AND FOUGHT HARD AND VOTED FOR A 23% “TAX ON EVERYTHING” SALES TAX. He was, and is, a disciple of horrible RINO Paul Ryan, and others too many to mention. Also, he desperately needs a personality transplant and, to the best of my knowledge, they are not medically available yet. A disloyal person!
We’ll hear more from Ron DeSantis later today when he officially announces his campaign on Twitter alongside Elon Musk.
Democrats, meanwhile, are reacting with dismay to DeSantis’s entrance into the race, though it’s far from a surprise. In a statement, Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said the governor “has pushed an extreme Maga agenda focused on ripping Floridians’ freedoms away and now he wants to take that agenda nationwide”.
Here’s more from Harrison:
DeSantis got his start as a co-founder of the ultra-right wing House Freedom Caucus where he supported Paul Ryan’s plan to end Medicare and Social Security as we know it, voted for national abortion bans, worked to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and supported Donald Trump’s tax giveaways to the biggest corporations. Now, as Floridians suffer under some of the highest housing and health care costs in the nation, DeSantis has tripled down on a MAGA agenda – including banning abortion, making it easier for criminals to carry guns, signing laws that allowed book bans, parroting Putin’s talking points, and bailing out huge corporations while Florida families foot the bill.
If there was any doubt – DeSantis’s announcement turns up the volume on an already messy Republican primary. One thing is guaranteed – whoever makes it out will only have done so by catering to the most MAGA, right-wing Republicans in the primary.
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DeSantis officially begins presidential campaign, election filing shows
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has formally filed paperwork to start his presidential campaign, the Associated Press reports, pitting him against Donald Trump and a host of other Republicans in the competition for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024.
Polls indicate DeSantis is in second place among Republican voters, but with a wide gulf between him and the former president. DeSantis is expected to publicly launch the campaign in an appearance later today on Twitter with its billionaire owner Elon Musk.
Nikki Haley will soon get a big opportunity to promote her candidacy to Republican voters and the American public at large: a CNN town hall.
The network announced today that it will hold an event with Haley, a former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations under Donald Trump, on 4 June in Iowa.
The big question here is whether the town hall will go any better than the event CNN hosted earlier this month with Trump, which ended with the network criticized even by its own employees for allowing the former president to make personal attacks and repeat a variety of debunked lies and accusations.
While DeSantis is still gearing up to announce his candidacy later today, his rival Nikki Haley is out and about in Manchester, New Hampshire, talking about her plans for a federal abortion ban.
The Republican pledged to sign a federal ban but suggested passing one would be highly unlikely without significantly more Republicans in Congress.
The former US ambassador to the United Nations said “no one has been honest” about how difficult a ban could be to achieve, according to AP.
The comments come amid a continuing debate over abortion among Republicans seeking their party’s presidential nomination.
As South Carolina governor, Haley signed a ban on abortions after about 20 weeks. On Tuesday, South Carolina’s Senate passed a ban on the procedure after about six weeks.
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My colleague Joan E Greve has the latest on the debt ceiling talks – and it’s not looking like an agreement is imminent.
She writes:
Debt ceiling talks between Joe Biden and the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, dragged on Wednesday, as negotiators met again to hash out the details of a potential deal.
“There’s a number of places that we’re still far apart,” McCarthy told reporters on Capitol Hill. “I think we can make progress today. I’m hoping that we can.”
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The pressure group Accountability.US is out with a stinging statement directed at John Roberts, over the chief justice’s contention in remarks in Washington last night that the supreme court is capable of regulating its own behaviour, even after a torrent of reports about Clarence Thomas and his friendship with, and acceptance of gifts from, the rightwing megadonor Harlan Crow.
Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, says:
“Chief Justice Roberts sat back and watched while the supreme court corruption crisis reached a fever pitch, causing public trust in his court to plummet. Now, he’s admitting more can be done – but keeps pretending he isn’t responsible for cleaning up his own court. Americans deserve more than a few noncommittal comments behind closed doors.
Chief Justice Roberts himself has the power to change the ethics standards of our nation’s highest court, but so far, he hasn’t shown the courage. Instead of preaching to a private crowd, he should take action.
The full story is here.
Here, meanwhile, is what the Rhode Island Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse had to say about the argument that Congress cannot investigate the supreme court, as Senate judiciary Democrats would like to do in the case of Thomas, because of the separation of powers in the US constitution – a concept cited both by Roberts and lawyers for Crow:
In a series of tweets, Whitehouse, a champion of the fight against dark money in politics, linked to Crow’s lawyers’ letter to Dick Durbin, the Senate judiciary chair, and said: “There’s a ritualistic quality to these ‘separation of powers’ claims that are being made to protect Justice Thomas’s ethics reporting problem from scrutiny.
“For instance, the reporting violations at issue violate a reporting statute passed by Congress, which the court has obeyed without complaint until now (see 2011 Thomas review by Judicial Conference to enforce that statute).
“More: review by the Judicial Conference is by a body created by statute by Congress. The notion that Congress has no business in the Thomas/billionaire reporting mischief is belied both by the law in question and the body in question.
“In all these pages of legal verbiage, the lawyers manage never to note either fact. Seriously?”
An “anti-fascist” group in Miami has been looking into the woman reportedly behind the banning of Amanda Gorman’s presidential inauguration poem from a Florida elementary school, and doesn’t like what it found.
The Miami Herald identified the woman who complained about The Hill We Climb as Daily Salinas, the parent of two students at the Bob Graham education center Miami Lakes, and, according to a Twitter thread posted by a group calling itself Miami Against Fascism, a supporter of white supremacist and far-right groups including the Proud Boys.
It posted screenshots allegedly of social media posts made by Salinas promoting antisemitism, a photograph of her at a Proud Boys rally in Miami last year, and video of her with members of the extremist Moms for Liberty group disrupting a meeting of the Miami-Dade school board last summer.
Moms for Liberty has been aggressively campaigning in several Florida school districts for certain books and materials it considers inappropriate for children to be censored, emboldened by Republican governor and upcoming presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis’s efforts to reshape education in the state.
Salinas, it said, has also shared QAnon propaganda on her own Twitter page.
Gorman, who delivered a much-applauded recital of The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, has also condemned the banning of her book of the same name containing the poem on Twitter:
So they ban my book from young readers, confuse me with @oprah [Winfrey], fail to specify what parts of my poetry they object to, refuse to read any reviews, and offer no alternatives,” she wrote on Twitter.
Unnecessary #bookbans like these are on the rise, and we must fight back.
Read more:
The day so far
Democrats are calling on Congress – and specifically Republicans – to tighten firearm access one year after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Joe Biden will speak about the tragedy at 3.30pm this afternoon and also call on the GOP to support stricter gun regulations. Meanwhile, in the Capitol, negotiations continue over raising the debt ceiling, with no breakthrough yet apparent.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Donald Trump’s lawyers have requested a meeting with attorney general Merrick Garland and aired a litany of grievances about special counsel Jack Smith and other prosecutors.
Ron DeSantis will later today announce the start of his presidential campaign, and spend big on door-knocking in early voting states.
Texas’s Republican-dominated legislature appears to be moving to curb political power in its most-populous county, which is run by Democrats.
Uvalde, Texas is today peppered with memorials as the town marks the one-year anniversary of the elementary school shooting that killed 21 people:
Biden to call on GOP to 'help stop the epidemic of gun violence'
In his speech this afternoon marking one year since a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Joe Biden will call on Republicans to support measures to address gun violence, a White House official said.
“The president will remember those lost in Uvalde and reiterate his call for Republicans in Congress to act and help stop the epidemic of gun violence that has become the number one killer of kids in America,” the official said of Biden’s address, which is scheduled for 3.30pm today.
The official noted that since the shooting in Uvalde and another shortly before it in Buffalo, New York, the president has signed a modest gun control measure passed by Congress, and “continued to implement two dozen executive actions to help reduce gun violence and keep weapons of war out of dangerous hands – and he has consistently called on Republicans in Congress to take action.”
“From universal background checks, to requiring safe storage of guns, to ending immunity from liability for gun manufacturers, to banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, the President has called for Congress to enact commonsense policies that Americans support,” the official continued.
Kevin McCarthy is speaking to reporters at the Capitol about the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations, but the gist remains basically the same as it has for the past few days: no deal has been reached between the two sides.
“I think we can make progress today,” the Republican House speaker said, noting that talks were continuing. The deadline to reach a deal or face a potential US debt default remains 1 June.
With the executive and legislative branches locked in a standoff over raising the debt ceiling, let’s check on the third branch of government: the judiciary. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that supreme court chief justice John Roberts gave a speech in which he vowed that the court would maintain the highest ethical standards, despite allegations of improper ties between some justices and parties with interests in their cases:
The chief justice of the US supreme court, John Roberts, said he and the other justices were working to hold themselves to the “highest standards” of ethical conduct.
“I want to assure people that I am committed to making certain that we as a court adhere to the highest standards of conduct,” Roberts told an awards dinner in Washington on Tuesday.
He was speaking the same day lawyers for Harlan Crow said the Republican mega-donor would not cooperate with the Senate judiciary committee.
The panel asked for list of gifts Crow has given to the conservative justice Clarence Thomas and which Thomas mostly did not declare: the source of scandal and calls for Thomas to resign or be removed.
Congress, however, is preoccupied with the standoff over increasing the debt ceiling ahead of the 1 June deadline after which the US government could default for the first time in history.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy is leading the Republicans in negotiations with the Biden administration over raising the limit, and his office just announced he will speak with reporters at 11.45am. We’ll see what he has to say.
Harris, Jeffries call for gun control on anniversary of Uvalde shooting
Top Democrats including vice-president Kamala Harris and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries have called for stricter laws to address gun violence on the one-year anniversary of the killings of 21 students and teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
“Nevaeh. Jacklyn. Makenna. Jose. Eliahna. Uziyah. Amerie Jo. Xavier. Jayce. Tess. Maranda. Alithia. Annabell. Maite. Alexandria. Layla. Jailah. Eliahna. Rojelio. And their teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles. Nineteen children and two educators who should be here with us today. They should still have birthdays to celebrate, graduations to plan, careers and lives to look forward to. Instead, one year ago today, they were killed in their elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in a mass shooting carried out with a weapon of war,” Harris said in a statement.
“Over the past year, so many Uvalde families have channeled their anguish into advocacy,” she continued. “Together, they demand that we act to save lives. With their help, President Biden signed the most significant gun safety legislation in 30 years and implemented important executive actions in the months since. But more must be done. Today, Doug and I pray for the people of Uvalde. And we urge leaders in Congress and in state legislatures to meet this heartbreaking moment not just with words, but with action.”
Jeffries was more forceful, accusing Republicans in a statement of blocking meaningful action to stop mass shootings and gun violence at large.
“House Democrats will continue to fight for commonsense gun safety legislation, like universal criminal background checks and an assault weapons ban. Extreme MAGA Republicans have shown that they are willing to flood our communities with weapons of war that have been consistently used to shred innocent children, including in Nashville, Tennessee earlier this year. The gun violence epidemic is unacceptable, unconscionable and un-American,” he said.
Today is the first anniversary of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers. For the Guardian, Charlie Scudder reports that gun control advocates in the firearm-friendly state seemed to have score a rare victory a few weeks ago, only for it to suddenly fall apart:
Days after a deadly mass shooting in a Dallas suburb, families of another horrific killing gathered in the Texas capitol, demanding a change to the state’s famously lax gun laws.
It had been nearly a year since a gunman shot 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, with police waiting more than an hour to confront and kill him. Those children’s parents and relatives hadn’t stopped lobbying Texas lawmakers for stricter gun control.
And after eight others were killed at an Allen shopping mall on 7 May, the Uvalde families quickly descended to tell lawmakers to pass their number one priority: to raise the minimum age for Texans to purchase semi-automatic firearms from 18 to 21.
They lined the hallways as lawmakers walked through to the House chamber, holding signs and loudly chanting “raise the age”, which in part is an allusion to the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter.
“Had this bill been the law in the state of Texas one year ago, the gunman would not have been able to [buy] the semi-automatic weapon he used to murder our daughter,” Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter Lexi died at the Uvalde school, testified in a Texas house committee hearing. “Our hearts may be broken but our resolve has never been stronger.”
Updated
Let’s shift the focus for a minute away from Washington DC and to Texas, where the Guardian’s Kira Lerner reports the GOP is moving to strip political power away from Democratic authorities in Houston, the state’s most-populous city:
Republican lawmakers in Texas are targeting Houston, the state’s largest city and Democratic stronghold, with a series of bills that would limit local authority to administer elections and give that power to the state.
House Republicans on Tuesday gave final approval to two bills, both already passed by the senate in April, that would impact elections in Harris county, the third most populous county in the country. One bill, SB 1750, would get rid of the election administrator position in the county, eliminating a nonpartisan role, and give their authority to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector. Another, SB 1933, could give the Texas secretary of state, currently a Republican appointed by Greg Abbott, the governor, administrative oversight of a county office administering elections.
Trump lawyers request meeting with attorney general Garland over special counsel
Attorneys for Donald Trump have asked attorney general Merrick Garland for a meeting, saying the former president is being “treated unfairly” and accusing special counsel Jack Smith and other prosecutors of perpetrating “ongoing injustice”.
Garland last year appointed Smith to investigate Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection, the efforts to overturn the 2020 election result and the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Smith is finishing up his investigation into the government materials federal agents retrieved from Trump’s south Florida resort last August, and will recommend to Garland whether charges are warranted.
In the letter to the attorney general, Trump’s attorneys John P Rowley and James M Trusty take the tone of grievance and persecution familiar to anyone who has read the ex-president’s missives.
“No President of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such an outrageous and unlawful fashion,” it reads.
Part of Ron DeSantis’s pitch to Republican voters centers on being more electable than Donald Trump, who, despite his popularity, is in the center of a swirl of legal entanglements. One of those is the indictment filed by the Manhattan district attorney alleging Trump falsified business records, which the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports now has a trial date with potential significance to the presidential campaign:
Donald Trump’s trial in New York on criminal charges over hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels will begin on 25 March 2024, amid the Republican presidential primary and less than than eight months before the general election the former president hopes to contest.
The trial date was announced in a hearing in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday, Trump attending by video link from his Florida home.
The judge, Juan Merchan, advised the former president to cancel all other obligations for the duration of the trial, which could last for several weeks.
Trump was muted for most of the hearing, which lasted around 15 minutes. The video feed showed the former president sitting and conferring with his lawyer, Todd Blanche, in front of a backdrop of American flags.
Ron DeSantis’s presidential run is no surprise, but his decision to kick the campaign off with a Twitter event certainly is. Politicians announcing a bid for office typically do so with speeches surrounded by allies, family and wellwishers. The Florida governor will instead hang out with Elon Musk and whoever else tunes in to the live Twitter Spaces event. So what’s in it for Musk, the Twitter owner and Tesla CEO whose star has lately been on the rise in conservative circles? Let the Guardian’s Kari Paul, Johana Bhuiyan and Maanvi Singh tell you:
The news that Ron DeSantis will launch his presidential campaign during a live Twitter appearance with Elon Musk marks the tech billionaire’s latest attempts to shore up engagement with the social network at a moment of crisis for the company.
The event – which will take place Wednesday on Twitter Spaces, a live stream feature that is often broadcasted at the top of Twitter’s feed – was confirmed by Musk on Tuesday afternoon. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, Musk called the Florida governor’s decision “ground breaking” and said it won’t be the last political event that Twitter will host.
When asked if Musk plans to interview other candidates, particularly Democrats, he said “absolutely”.
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DeSantis plans door-knocking surge in early primary states – report
Backed by a Super Pac and its $200m budget, the New York Times reported today that Ron DeSantis’s campaign will deploy thousands of workers to knock on doors in early Republican primary voting states – repeatedly.
The plan is for these workers to visit the doors of every potential DeSantis voter in South Carolina, Nevada and New Hampshire at least four times, and five times in Iowa, whose caucuses typically kick off the Republican nomination process. The campaign is going as far as to set up a boot camp on the outskirts of Iowa’s capital, Des Moines, to train volunteers, as Ted Cruz did when he defeated Trump in the 2016 Republican contest in the state.
Here’s more from the Times’s report:
Top officials with the pro-DeSantis group, a super PAC called Never Back Down, provided their most detailed account yet of their battle plan to aid Mr. DeSantis, whom they believe they can sell as the only candidate to take on – and win – the cultural fights that are definitional for the Republican Party in 2024.
The group said it expected to have an overall budget of at least $200 million, including more than $80 million to be transferred from an old DeSantis state political account, for the daunting task of vaulting the Florida governor past former President Donald J. Trump, who has established himself as the dominant early front-runner.
Mr. DeSantis is set to enter the presidential race on Wednesday in a live audio conversation on Twitter, and the super PAC’s enormous cash reserves are expected to be among the few advantages that Mr. DeSantis has in the race.
The group is already taking on many tasks often reserved for the campaign itself: securing endorsements in early primary states, sending mailers, organizing on campuses, running television ads, raising small donations for the campaign in an escrow account and working behind the scenes to build crowds for the governor’s events. Hiring is underway in 18 states and officials said plans were in the works to assemble various pro-DeSantis coalitions, such as for voters who are veterans or those focused on issues like abortion, guns or agriculture.
“No one has ever contemplated the scale of this organization or operation, let alone done it,” said Chris Jankowski, the group’s chief executive. “This has just never even been dreamed up.”
In Iowa, the group has opened a boot camp on the outskirts of Des Moines, giving the facility the code name “Fort Benning,” after the old Army training outpost, with 189 graduates of an eight-day training program the first wave of an organizing army to follow. Door knocking begins on Wednesday in New Hampshire.
The endeavor echoes the “Camp Cruz” that Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign set up near Des Moines.
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DeSantis's well-funded, coordinated presidential campaign to get underway
Good morning, US politics blog readers. The biggest presidential campaign announcement since Donald Trump’s entry to the race will happen this evening, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis officially throws his hat into the ring for the Republican nomination. He’s chosen an unusual venue to make the bid official: Twitter, where he will appear at 6pm Eastern Time in a live event alongside the social media network’s owner and budding conservative maven Elon Musk. He’ll do an interview with Fox News after that.
DeSantis has been building up to this moment for months by raising funds – a super Pac supporting his campaign plans to work with a $200m budget, the New York Times reported today – egging on GOP lawmakers in Florida to pass laws that he’s sure to campaign on and insinuating that he’s a better bet to beat Joe Biden than Trump. If polls are to be believed, voters do not believe him. The former president is far and away the leader in most surveys, with DeSantis a distant second. He still has time to turn it around, and you can bet that will be his first priority after today.
Here’s what else is going on:
Debt ceiling negotiations between Biden and Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy are continuing. The situation remains broadly the same as yesterday: the two sides have yet to come to a deal, and the US government could default on its debt by as soon as 1 June.
Biden will at 3.30pm deliver a speech marking the one-year anniversary of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre briefs reporters at 2.15pm.
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