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Post by Webster on Jul 23, 2024 17:45:50 GMT -5
(The Guardian) At the Capitol, hundreds of protestors led by Jewish Voice for Peace are demonstrating against US support for Israel among its ongoing bombardment of Gaza. According to the organization, arrests are being made. Hundreds of protestors gathered today at the Capitol Hill Cannon Rotunda, to coincide with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to DC. He is scheduled to addresses a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday.
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Post by Webster on Jul 25, 2024 20:57:06 GMT -5
(The Guardian) House leaders condemn American flag burning during Netanyahu protests in WashingtonDuring yesterday’s protests in Washington DC as Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress, a group lit an American flag on fire outside Union Station, the main passenger rail hub in the city. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives who led the push to have Netanyahu speak, later that evening went to the station, which is right across from the Capitol, to restore the flags: This morning, Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, also condemned the flag burning in a statement: Defacing public property, desecrating the American flag, threatening Jews with violence and promoting terrorist groups like Hamas is not acceptable under any circumstance. There is a difference between lawful expression and disorderly conduct. Anyone who violates the law must be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.
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Post by Webster on Jul 25, 2024 21:05:48 GMT -5
(The Guardian) House passes factually wobbly Republican resolution condemning Harris's immigration policiesThe House just approved a Republican-backed resolution condemning Kamala Harris for her handling of immigration, and specifically her actions as the Biden administration’s “border czar” – despite the fact that she never really held that job. In the days since Joe Biden stepped aside and Harris announced her bid for the presidency, Republicans have sought to steer the ire of voters uncomfortable with undocumented migrants towards the vice-president, by saying she was given the job of securing the southern border. But as PolitiFact notes, the president in fact tasked Harris with addressing root causes of migration in Central American nations, not stopping migrants from entering the United States. From their fact check: The Republican National Committee said Biden appointed Harris “to be his border czar to deal with illegal immigration ... Harris was put in charge of stopping illegal immigration.”
Biden tasked Harris with addressing the root causes that drive migration to the United States. He did not task her with controlling who and how many people enter the southern US border. That’s the Homeland Security secretary’s responsibility.
Experts say that seeing the results of addressing root causes driving people out of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – violence, economic insecurity and corruption – takes time.
The statement contains an element of truth, but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.The resolution passed with 220 votes in favor and 196 opposed. Six Democrats voted for it, all of whom represent swing districts.
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Post by Webster on Aug 12, 2024 14:02:39 GMT -5
(The Guardian) McCarthy urges Trump to 'stop questioning' size of Harris’s crowdsKevin McCarthy, the former Republican House speaker, said Donald Trump should stop questioning the size of Kamala Harris’s crowds at her campaign rallies and instead focus on her as a candidate. As we reported earlier, Trump has falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to create a photo showing a large rally of supporters outside of her campaign plane. Trump shared a photo from a conspiracy theorist’s post to his millions of followers on Truth Social, claiming that a real image of a Harris event in Detroit was a “fake image”. “You’ve got to make this race not on personalities,” McCarthy said in an interview on Fox News today. -- Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position, when it comes to: What did she do as [California] attorney general on crime? … What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?
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Post by Webster on Sept 3, 2024 16:36:45 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, has warned his opposite number, the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, that history will judge him “poorly” because he paved the way to rightwing policies out of touch with the American people. In an interview with Punchbowl News conducted at the Democratic national convention in August but published on Monday, Schumer accused McConnell of enabling Donald Trump’s remaking of US politics and the judiciary. By helping to shift the supreme court sharply to the right through the former president’s three appointments to the top judicial bench, McConnell had played a part in abolishing the federal right to an abortion in the ruling ending Roe v Wade, and much more, Schumer contended. He said: Not just on Roe, but on issue after issue where they’re so far out of touch with the American people … Even when McConnell thought Trump was wrong, he went along with [Trump] too many times.He concluded that McConnell’s “role in history, in my opinion, will go down poorly”.
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Post by Webster on Sept 4, 2024 15:17:47 GMT -5
(The Guardian) A Republican-led House committee sent a subpoena to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, seeking documents and communications related to a vast fraud scheme conducted by a non-profit that used pandemic relief funds meant for feeding kids. NBC News first reported the subpoenas, which were sent to Walz; Minnesota’s commissioner of education, Willie Jett; the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack; and the agriculture inspector general, Phyllis Fong. The House committee on education and the workforce wrote to Walz to say it had been investigating the Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota department of education’s oversight of federal child nutrition programs and Feeding Our Future, the group that is alleged to have stolen more than $250m in pandemic funds. The subpoena does not seek an in-person appearance from Walz before the committee. It sets an 18 September deadline for turning over documents. Five of the people involved in the scheme were convicted for their roles earlier this year in a trial that included an attempt to bribe a juror with a bag full of $120,000 in cash left at her home. In total, 70 people have been charged in relation to the scheme. -Read more: www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/04/tim-walz-pandemic-fraud
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Post by Webster on Sept 9, 2024 16:18:44 GMT -5
(The Guardian) The statement of support for Kamala Harris by a group of retired top military officials comes a day before the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, will host a congressional gold medal ceremony honoring the 13 service members killed in the chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have tried to blame Harris for the Afghanistan pullout, including in a report by House GOP lawmakers today. The report claims that in the months before the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden administration officials “watered down” warnings about crumbling security and failed to launch an emergency evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies until it was too late, according to NBC News. Texas representative Michael McCaul, chair of the House foreign affairs committee, said: Our investigation reveals the Biden-Harris administration had the information and opportunity to take necessary steps to plan for the inevitable collapse of the Afghan government. At each step of the way, however, the administration picked optics over security.
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Post by Webster on Sept 9, 2024 16:44:03 GMT -5
(The Guardian) House clashes over Harris’s role in 2021 Afghanistan troop withdrawalPartisan divisions over the chaotic 2021 pullout of western forces from Afghanistan have burst into the open ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia after a Republican-led congressional report attempted to implicate Kamala Harris in the episode. A 250-page report from the House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee castigated the Biden administration for failing to anticipate the Taliban’s rapid takeover and neglecting to prepare for the orderly departure of non-combatant personnel. The report, written by the committee’s Republican chairman, Michael McCaul, zeroes in on the supposed role played by the vice-president, although no evidence has emerged that she was directly involved in the decisions leading to one of the most damaging foreign policy chapters of Joe Biden’s presidency. The report states: Vice President Kamala Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden made the decision to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan; a fact she boasted about shortly after President Biden issued his go-to-zero order.The report’s front page carries a picture of Harris prominently displayed below that of Biden, and above an image of Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who played a more prominent role in the withdrawal.
The report from the House foreign affairs committee released today castigating the Biden administration for the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal mentions Kamala Harris’s name 251 times. By contrast, a 115-page interim report issued by the committee’s Republican chairman, Michael McCaul, on the committee’s investigation in 2022 name-checked Harris just twice. Democrats seized on the contrast, accusing McCaul of inflating Harris’s part in the incident simply because she had replaced Biden as the party’s presidential nominee. Democrats accused the Republicans of trying to exploit the withdrawal for election purposes while overlooking the fact that the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, took the original decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan when he was president. Gregory Meeks, the Democrats’ ranking member on the committee wrote in a 59-page rebuttal to McCaul’s report: Republicans now claim [Harris] was the architect of the US withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts.
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Post by Webster on Sept 9, 2024 17:52:47 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Calling it “unserious and unacceptable,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries rejected on Monday a proposal from Speaker Mike Johnson that links continued government funding for six months with a measure to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The response frames the spending battle to come over the next weeks, the Associated Press reports, as lawmakers work to reach consensus on a short-term spending bill that would prevent a partial government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins 1 October. Lawmakers hope to avoid a shutdown just weeks before voters go to the polls. “There is no other viable path forward that protects the health, safety and economic well-being of hardworking American taxpayers,” Jeffries wrote in a letter to House Democrats released Monday. Lawmakers are returning to Washington this week following a traditional August recess spent mostly working in their home states and districts. They are not close to completing work on the dozen annual appropriations bills that will fund the agencies during the next fiscal year, so they’ll need to approve a stopgap measure.
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Post by Webster on Sept 10, 2024 16:41:03 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Trump calls on Congress Republicans to shut down governmentDonald Trump has called on Republicans in Congress to shut down the government as the House speaker Mike Johnson vowed to stay the course and put his government funding package on the House floor on Wednesday. Trump, posting to his Truth Social platform, urged GOP lawmakers not to vote for a six-month continuing resolution to avert a shutdown in three weeks, unless the bill is linked to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act. The Save Act would overhaul voting laws to require proof of citizenship in order to vote. Trump wrote: If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. ... CLOSE IT DOWN!!!Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the measure and the bill has very little prospect of passing the House.
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Post by Webster on Sept 10, 2024 16:53:43 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Tommy Tuberville, the Republican senator from Alabama, is blocking the promotion of an army general and top aide to Lloyd Austin, the US defense secretary, citing concerns about the military leader’s alleged role in the lack of transparency surrounding Austin’s hospitalization earlier this year. The army general in question, Lt Gen Ronald P Clark, has been nominated to become the four-star commander of all US army forces in the Pacific. But the Alabama senator and retired college football coach is holding up the promotion, according to the Washington Post. “Senator Tuberville has concerns about Lt Gen Clark’s actions during secretary Austin’s hospitalization,” a spokesperson for the senator, Mallory Jaspers, told the Post. Jaspers went on to say that Clark knew Austin was “incapacitated” and did not tell Joe Biden, breaking his oath to the president. The spokesperson said that Tuberville was waiting to review an inspector general’s report surrounding Austin’s handling of his hospitalization before Clark’s promotion.
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Post by Webster on Sept 16, 2024 14:50:52 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Amid calls from across the political spectrum to give the Secret Service more resources after a potential second assassination attempt yesterday targeting Donald Trump, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has hinted that the funds could be allocated as part of the latest round of spending negotiations. “We all must do our part to ensure an incident like this does not happen again. This means that Congress has a responsibility to ensure the Secret Service and all law enforcement have the resources they need to do their jobs,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor. “So, as we continue the appropriations process, if the Secret Service is in need of more resources, we are prepared to provide it for them, possibly in the upcoming funding agreement.” Congressional leaders are trying to pass some kind of funding agreement to keep the government running beyond 30 September, when the current authorizations expire. Democrats, who control the Senate, and Republicans, who hold a majority in the House, have not yet reached an agreement, with one of the sticking points being calls from Trump and some GOP lawmakers to also pass a bill that makes voting by non-citizens a federal crime.
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