Closing summary
Women’s basketball star Brittney Griner is on her way back to the United States from a prison in Russia after the Biden administration brokered her release in exchange for convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout. While Joe Biden hailed the deal, Republicans condemned his failure to get Moscow to turn over Paul Whelan, another American jailed in the country. In Congress, the House passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex and interracial couples’ abilities to wed. It now heads to Biden for his signature.
Here’s what else happened today:
21 December is the day the January 6 committee plans to release its report, the bipartisan panel’s chair said.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE took credit for mediating the deal that led to Griner’s release, though the White House denied any such efforts.
Most House Republicans opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, but some broke with the party’s traditional hostility towards LGBTQ+ rights to vote for it.
Eric Holder, a former attorney general who oversaw Bout’s prosecution, said the prisoner exchange was the best deal possible in the circumstances.
Newly elected House Democrat Maxwell Frost tweeted that he’s having trouble finding somewhere to live in Washington DC, which highlighted both his modest means and the nationwide affordable housing crisis.
The big news on Tuesday was Democrat Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia’s run-off election for Senate, but that wasn’t the only race decided that day. Richard Luscombe reports on the 18-year-old who won election as mayor of a small town in Arkansas:
It is not even a year since Jaylen Smith was learning the power of the youth vote as a student government leader at his high school in Arkansas. Now the pioneering teenager is about to put his knowledge into practice as the youngest elected Black mayor anywhere in the US.
On Tuesday, as the Georgia Senate runoff was capturing the attention of the nation, Smith, 18, was steadily amassing the votes he needed to become the next leader of the small city of Earle, population 1,785.
“You have to start somewhere, you really do,” Smith, who graduated from Earle high school last summer after three years as Student Government Association president, told the Washington Post.
“I didn’t want to be 30 or 40 and become a mayor when I could be one right now.”
