Closing summary
President Joe Biden struck a triumphant note in a Detroit speech where he promoted his administration’s efforts to revitalize manufacturing and get Americans behind the wheel of electric vehicles. Meanwhile, the January 6 committee has signaled it will resume public hearings later this month, and potentially share more of its evidence with justice department investigators looking into the attack on the Capitol.
Here’s what else happened today:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed optimism that Democrats would gain, not lose, seats in the chamber in the November midterms, despite widespread expectations that voters will elevate the Republicans into the majority.
Donald Trump disavowed his former vice-president Mike Pence, saying he would not choose him as a running mate again, according to a soon-to-be-published book obtained by The Guardian.
FBI agents paid a visit to prominent Trump ally and pillow mogul Mike Lindell, seizing his cellphone and questioning him in a fast food restaurant’s drive-thru lane.
Biden called Britain’s King Charles III and expressed condolences over the death of the queen. It remains unclear if the president will meet Charles III or new prime minister Liz Truss when he heads to London for the queen’s funeral.
Florida’s Republican senator Marco Rubio co-sponsored a bill to ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks, in what could help his Democratic challenger Val Demings as she looks to energize pro-abortion sentiment among voters.
Amtrak has begun canceling long-distance routes ahead of a possible rail strike that could begin within days, Axios reports.
Unions and freight rail companies are negotiating furiously to prevent the strike, which would be the first in three decades and worsen supply chains that have been plagued by delays and manpower and equipment shortages over the past two years as the United States has bounced back from the pandemic.
“While we are hopeful that parties will reach a resolution, Amtrak has now begun phased adjustments to our service in preparation for a possible freight rail service interruption later this week,” Amtrak said, according to Axios.
“Such an interruption could significantly impact intercity passenger rail service, as Amtrak operates almost all of our 21,000 route miles outside the Northeast Corridor (NEC) on track owned, maintained, and dispatched by freight railroads. These initial adjustments include canceling all Long Distance trains and could be followed by impacts to most State-Supported routes.”
The negotiations between the railroad companies and 12 unions are complex and have drawn in the Biden administration. Here’s the latest from the Associated Press:
Members of one union rejected a tentative deal with the largest U.S. freight railroads Wednesday while three other unions remained at the bargaining table just days ahead of a strike deadline, threatening to intensify snarls in the nation’s supply chain that have contributed to rising prices.
About 4,900 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 19 voted to reject the tentative agreement negotiated by IAM leadership with the railroads, the union said Wednesday. But the IAM agreed to delay any strike by its members until Sept. 29 to allow more time for negotiations and to allow other unions to vote.
Railroads are trying to reach an agreement with all their other unions to avert a strike before Friday’s deadline. The unions aren’t allowed to strike before Friday under the federal law that governs railroad contract talks.
Government officials and a variety of businesses are bracing for the possibility of a nationwide rail strike that would paralyze shipments of everything from crude and clothing to cars, a potential calamity for businesses that have struggled for more than two years due to COVID-19 related supply chain breakdowns.
Joe Biden’s inclination for optimism was on full display in Detroit, but he was outdone today by his Democratic colleague House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who insisted in an interview with Punchbowl News that the party was poised to gain – not lose – seats in the chamber in the midterms.
“Yes, indeed,” she told Punchbowl when they asked if she thought the party’s majority would grow in the November 8 election.
Let’s unpack the many reasons that statement appears improbably. First of all, it’s a reflection of how much the political climate is thought to have shifted in the Democrats’ favor over the past few months. Declining gas prices, the supreme court’s overturning of national abortion access and Biden’s legislative wins are all believed to have energized Democratic voters, while on their part, Republicans have chosen some weaker nominees for key races.
But history is against Pelosi. As The Guardian’s Joan E Greve has reported, the party holding the White House has only gained seats in the House in two midterms, and Pelosi personally experienced the ruinous 2010 election that saw Democrats lose 63 seats in the lower chamber and end her speakership for eight years. She may well be poised to endure that again – poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight gives the GOP a very good shot at returning to the majority next year in the House, though the Senate may be harder to conquer. Nonetheless, analysts generally believe that the political developments over the past few months are meaningful for Democrats, and while Republicans may win the House, their gains won’t be enormous, and certainly not comparable to 2010.
Here’s what Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel had to say about Biden’s visit to Detroit, which she described as a stop on his “failure tour”:
“Whether it’s handing out tax credits for luxury electric vehicles or bailing out the wealthy’s debts, Biden and Democrats are leaving hardworking Americans behind. Democrats will be driven out of office in November because they put their left-wing special interests ahead of Americans struggling to fill grocery carts and gas tanks.”
“American manufacturing is back, Detroit is back, America is back,” Biden declared at the conclusion of his speech in Detroit, where he touted the benefits of legislation passed to repair infrastructure and promote electric vehicles.
The speech at the Detroit Auto Show hit familiar talking points for the president as he attempts to convince voters to re-elect Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections and preserve their majorities in Congress. Among these were his recent legislative successes, including the $1 trillion measure Democrats and some Republicans in Congress approved last year to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure. In his speech, he announced that he had authorized funding from that law for 35 states to build electric vehicle charging stations.
Beyond being the center of the auto industry, Michigan is among the more crucial states to Biden’s political fortunes. It’s a perennial swing state that Biden narrowly won in the 2020 election, and its Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer will also be on the ballot in November as she stands for second term against Republican challenger Tudor Dixon.
Biden appeared at the show along with the governor, and spent much of his speech shouting out other Michigan Democrats, while closing on a note of triumph. “Folks, we’re proving it’s never, ever, ever a good bet to bet against the American people, never never, never. You just gotta remember who we are.”
In the ongoing legal wrangling over documents seized by the government from Mar-a-Lago, The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports that the justice department is sounding the alarm over an order preventing them from reviewing the materials.
Donald Trump’s lawyers are causing “irreparable harm” to the government and public by delaying the investigation into his hoarding of highly classified documents at his Florida mansion, the US Department of Justice said.
The claim came in a strongly worded court filing urging a district judge, Aileen Cannon, to reconsider her ruling last week granting Trump’s request for an independent “special master” in the case.
The Department of Justice argued that the order stops it continuing its review of thousands of documents, some reportedly containing details of a foreign power’s nuclear secrets, seized during an FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach last month.
Self-confessed “car guy” Joe Biden is about to take the podium at the Detroit motor show to tell Americans why they should be buying electric vehicles.
The president, who owns a vintage Corvette, has set what the White House calls “a bold goal” for electric vehicles to make up 50% of all vehicles sold in the US by 2030.
Biden is in Detroit touting the Inflation Reduction Act, the marquee spending bill he signed last month that includes incentives for buying electric vehicles, as part of a larger strategy to lower America’s carbon emissions.
President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act makes it easier and cheaper to purchase an electric or fuel-cell vehicle – new or used – through tax credits for consumers.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 13, 2022
Learn more at https://t.co/KTCwt5Tmue.
While we await Biden’s words, here’s the White House factsheet, which says that since Biden took office last year, companies have invested nearly $85bn in manufacturing electric vehicles, batteries, and EV chargers in the US.
The number of electric vehicles sold in that time has almost tripled, the handout claims.
But there are concerns that his plans to build a nationwide network of charging stations will leave behind disadvantaged and lower income areas and communities of color.
Read more:
Updated
Call it a magical mystery tour… migrants being sent on buses from Texas to New York by the lone star state’s governor Greg Abbott in protest at Joe Biden’s immigration policies are being moved on to Florida.
That’s according to Fox 5 New York, which interviewed the city’s commissioner of immigration Manuel Castro on its Good Day New York show on Wednesday.
New York City officials claim that many of the migrants who are being bused from Texas did not want to go to New York so they are helping them get to other states. https://t.co/KFbzJyMs4N
— Fox5NY (@fox5ny) September 14, 2022
Castro says many of those arriving from Texas don’t want to be there, and have ties elsewhere:
Many want to go to places like Florida, where the largest community of Venezuelans live.
We’re helping them get to their actual final destination. We’re doing our best.
The move probably isn’t going to go down too well with Florida’s hardline Republican governor and frequent Biden critic Ron DeSantis, who likes what he sees coming out of Texas and has been mulling his own plan to bus undocumented Cuban migrants from Florida to Washington DC.
“All states and all cities have a role to play here, not just New York and Chicago and other places,” Castro told Fox 5.
Biden to nominate first woman US ambassador to Russia
Joe Biden plans to nominate career diplomat Lynne Tracy, who is currently serving in Armenia, as the next US ambassador to Russia, CNN says.
Tracy has experience of Moscow, having served there as deputy ambassador from 2014 to 2017. She would be the first woman in the role, the network said.
The Biden administration hopes to get her in place swiftly to replace John Sullivan, who stepped down earlier this month.
But the timing of her arrival and official nomination will depend on Russia agreeing to accept her as ambassador at a time of huge tension between Washington and Moscow as the war in Ukraine continues.
Typically, the host country will approve the name of an ambassador pick before they are officially nominated through a process called agrément. The US has already given Tracy’s name to the Russians to begin that process, two sources told CNN.
While we’re on the subject of November’s midterm elections, Martin Pengelly has this look at how Democrats got the matchup they wanted – an extremist, Trump-supporting election denier – as their Republican opponent for a New Hampshire Senate seat:
A far-right Republican who backs Donald Trump’s election fraud lie and has vowed to decertify results in 2024 will be the GOP candidate for US Senate in New Hampshire.
Don Bolduc, a retired special forces general who has said he suffered from PTSD and a traumatic brain injury, edged out Chuck Morse, the state senate president, to face the incumbent Democrat, Maggie Hassan, in November.
Most if not all forecasters called the race for Bolduc before Morse conceded.
The primary was the last in a series that have seen Republicans select candidates aligned with Trump, causing some to fear damage to their chances of winning the Senate in November.
Bolduc, 61, has echoed Trump’s lie about election fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden. He has also questioned whether the FBI should be abolished following its search of Trump’s Florida estate, which turned up a cache of classified documents.
Though Bolduc has courted Trump, he has not won an endorsement. Trump did call Bolduc a “strong guy”.
Last October, Bolduc spoke to the New Yorker. He said he thought his “values and principles as an American, and the constitution, which I served for 33-plus years in the military, was safe with President Trump”, and that Trump’s appeal stemmed from the (notoriously reading-averse) former president’s reading and understanding of the constitution.
He also said “there was a tremendous amount of fraud” in 2020, adding: “I very much believe it and I think it exists, and I think it happens and it’s been happening for a long time in this country. When you try to steal the presidency, a lot of people are going to go, ‘OK, wait a minute. What the hell’s going on here?’”
Read more:
Florida Republican Marco Rubio has emerged as a co-sponsor of Lindsey Graham’s nationwide 15-week abortion ban bill, providing Democratic hopeful Val Demings new ammunition as she challenges for his Senate seat in November.
Rubio’s campaign has not said why he’s signed on to the controversial and extreme bill, which has confused and angered many congressional Republicans. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell says he’s sure his members would prefer to leave the issue to the states.
But Rubio’s overall position on abortion is clear. Talking to a Christian group in south Florida earlier this month, he said an unborn child’s rights outweighed those of the mother and that, in an apparent contradiction to his position on the Graham bill, “The state legislatures will decide [the] law.”
“I would rather be right and lose an election than [be] wrong,” he said, according to ABC10 Miami.
He may get his wish, at least the losing the election part, if Demings has her way. The former Orlando police chief and US congresswoman is a vocal pro-choice advocate and has slammed Rubio’s position.
“It’s outrageous to mandate what a woman can and can’t do with their bodies,” she says in a televised campaign message.
“I know something about fighting crime, Senator Rubio. Rape is a crime. Incest is a crime. Abortion is not.”
Polling by RealClearPolitics gives Rubio, a former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, a narrow lead over Demings.
Updated
The day so far
President Joe Biden is set to proclaim his administration’s efforts to boost the electric car business with a speech at the Detroit Auto Show set for 1:45 pm eastern time. Meanwhile, the January 6 committee has signaled it will resume public hearings later this month, and potentially share more of its evidence with justice department investigators looking into the attack on the Capitol.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Donald Trump disavowed his former vice-president Mike Pence, saying he would not choose him as a running mate again, according to a soon-to-be-published book obtained by The Guardian.
FBI agents paid a visit to prominent Trump ally and pillow mogul Mike Lindell, seizing his cellphone and questioning him in a fast food restaurant’s drive-thru lane.
Biden called Britain’s King Charles III and expressed condolences over the death of the queen. It remains unclear if the president will meet Charles III or new prime minister Liz Truss when he heads to London for the queen’s funeral.
Let’s check in with Joe Biden, who has arrived at the Detroit Auto Show.
He’s set to deliver “remarks highlighting the electric vehicle manufacturing boom in America" at 1:45 pm eastern time according to the White House, but is first getting a look at the latest models from America’s automakers.
Biden is a vintage Chevrolet Corvette owner, and CNN caught him behind the wheel of the latest model:
Biden at the Detroit Auto Show pic.twitter.com/54IMxuUnfO
— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) September 14, 2022
Here he is checking out Ford’s new electric offerings:
The Mustang Mach-E.
— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) September 14, 2022
“0 to 60 in three seconds,” Biden said.
“3.5, but who’s counting?” Bill Ford replied. pic.twitter.com/yctQP3c9LX
Why does Biden care so much about electric cars? In part because the Inflation Reduction Act, as the marquee spending bill he signed last month is known, includes incentives to try to get more Americans to buy the vehicles, as part of a larger strategy to lower America’s carbon emissions. The other reason is that Biden is a “car guy”, as he likes to describe himself.
A presidential run may be Mike Pence’s best hope of getting back into the White House. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that Donald Trump has thoroughly disavowed his former vice president:
Donald Trump will not pick Mike Pence as his running mate if he runs for the presidency again, according to an interview with the authors of a new book on his time in the White House.
“It would be totally inappropriate,” Trump told Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. “Mike committed political suicide” by refusing to reject electoral college votes in Trump’s 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, Trump said.
Baker, of the New York Times, and Glasser, of the New Yorker, are the husband-and-wife team behind The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, which will be published next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
The authors interviewed Trump twice for their book, in April and November last year.
While many Republicans attempted to distance themselves from senator Lindsey Graham’s proposal for national abortion restrictions yesterday, former vice-president Mike Pence, a longtime opponent of the procedure who is considering running for president in 2024, wholeheartedly embraced it.
“I welcome any and all efforts to advance the cause of life in state capitals or in the nation’s capital,” Pence said in an interview with RealClearPolitics. “And I have every confidence that the next Republican president, whoever that may be, will stand for the right to life.”
He also downplayed fears that after its decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the conservative-dominated supreme court could reverse rulings guaranteeing other rights, such as same-sex marriage. “I have enormous respect for Justice Clarence Thomas but the majority on the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case made it clear that their decision was about abortion,” Pence said. Thomas was the author of an opinion that mulled revisiting cases the court had previously decided.
Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposal to ban abortion after 15 weeks nationwide was excoriated by Democrats and downplayed by Republicans after it was introduced yesterday.
But pro-abortion sentiment isn’t unanimous among Democrats in the chamber. National Review reports that Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic senator representing West Virginia, reiterated his support for banning abortion after 20 weeks, noting he’d voted for such a measure in the past. As for Graham’s more stringent proposal, Manchin said he was “very interested” in it.
As long as Democrats control the Senate, Graham’s measure probably won’t even be put up for a vote. And even if Republicans did gain control, they’d need to find 60 votes to overcome an inevitable filibuster from Democrats before the bill could pass.
Yesterday should have been a rough day for the Biden administration. It started off with the government releasing new inflation data that was worse than expected, and ended with a massive sell-off on Wall Street.
Both developments should have been potent fodder for Republicans aiming to convince voters that inflation was the fault of Biden and the Democrats ahead of the November midterms. Instead, much of yesterday’s news cycle was dominated by Republican senator Lindsey Graham’s proposal for federal restrictions on abortion, which are controversial with many voters, including in the GOP.
Politico has published a rundown of the own goal scored by the senator and the unexpected reprieve it won for Democrats from the disquieting economic news:
So obvious was the apparent ill-timing of the bill’s introduction that one White House aide said a Republican lobbyist friend joked that Graham appeared to be working for the Biden administration. Other aides suggested that the comments continued a Democratic winning streak that started mid-summer and began to imagine holding onto both houses of Congress.
“Dems might need to send gift baskets and champagne to Graham and other Republicans for their selfless act of service today,” another Democratic official told POLITICO.
The immediate response to Graham’s legislation, which would not just establish a ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy but also allow states to keep and pass more restrictive laws, was a microcosm of the way abortion politics has wholly upended the midterm sprint.
It’s not as if the images out of the White House were pristine. Live TV coverage of Biden’s speech was bracketed by large red arrows signifying the stock market’s downward trajectory. The more Biden talked about how the legislation would help the economy, the more the markets tumbled. By the closing bell, Wall Street had suffered its worst day since June 2020, with the Dow dropping more than 1,250 points.
But Democrats, who have been on the defensive for months over stubbornly high inflation, felt once again revitalized in trying to fend off GOP-led initiatives to restrict abortion rights. Virtually every Senate candidate quickly issued statements excoriating Graham’s bill and asking their Republican opponents whether they would sign off on it.
Biden has said he will attend the funeral of Elizabeth II, but it remains unclear if he will meet with new prime minister Liz Truss or King Charles III.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre did not shed much light on the matter today, The Washington Post reports:
Asked if Biden will be meeting with new King Charles III or new British prime minister Liz Truss while he's in London, @PressSec says: "I don't have an update on who he's going to be meeting or anything like that." She notes this morning's call between the president and the king.
— Matt Viser (@mviser) September 14, 2022
President Joe Biden called Britain’s King Charles III today and offered his condolences on the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the White House announced.
Here’s the full readout from the Biden administration:
President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. spoke today with King Charles III to offer his condolences on the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. The President recalled fondly the Queen’s kindness and hospitality, including when she hosted him and the First Lady at Windsor Castle last June. He also conveyed the great admiration of the American people for the Queen, whose dignity and constancy deepened the enduring friendship and special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. President Biden conveyed his wish to continue a close relationship with the King.
Elizabeth II passed away last week, and her coffin has just arrived in the Palace of Westminster in London to lie in state. The Guardian is running a live blog with the latest events, which you can read below.
Updated
Busy times for the feds, it seems. FBI agents reported to the drive-thru lane of a Minnesota Hardee’s to question and seize the cellphone of Mike Lindell, a prominent Trump ally and 2020 election denier who is also known for his company MyPillow, which makes… pillows. The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe explains what they were looking for:
Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman who became an enthusiastic mouthpiece for Donald Trump’s lie about a stolen election, has said he was forced to hand his phone to FBI agents who surrounded him at a fast-food drive-through.
The incident happened on Tuesday as Lindell, chief executive of My Pillow, was in line at a branch of Hardee’s in Mankato, Minnesota, his home town, following a hunting trip.
“Cars pulled up in front of us, to the side of us, and behind us and I said those are either bad guys or the FBI,” the conspiracy theorist said on his internet show, the Lindell Report. “Well, it turns out they were the FBI.”
Lindell said the agents questioned him about Tina Peters, a fellow election denier facing criminal charges in Colorado for tampering with voting machinery as a county clerk, and who in June lost a Republican primary to become the state’s top election official.
In June, federal investigators issued a subpoena for surveillance footage from inside Mar-a-Lago and obtained a hard drive in response, according to a newly revealed portion of the warrant authorizing last month’s search of Donald Trump’s resort by the FBI.
The detail was redacted from the warrant released by a federal judge last month, but the Associated Press reports that the justice department asked for it to be released after Trump’s lawyers publicly revealed the subpoena’s existence.
Here’s more from the AP about the possible significance of the subpoena for surveillance footage:
The newly visible portions of the FBI agent’s affidavit show that the FBI on June 24 subpoenaed for the footage after a visit weeks earlier to Mar-a-Lago in which agents observed 50 to 55 boxes of records in the storage room at the property. The Trump Organization provided a hard drive on July 6 in response to the subpoena, the affidavit says.
The footage could be an important piece of the investigation, including as agents evaluate whether anyone has sought to obstruct the probe. The Justice Department has said in a separate filing that it has “developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”
The January 6 committee has accumulated reams of evidence and testimonies in its investigation into the attack on the Capitol, but one outstanding question has been what will happen to it all. Will the evidence be shared with federal prosecutors? What about the lawyers of people facing charges over the attack?
The lawmakers in the committee gathered behind closed doors yesterday for their first meeting in more than a month, and Politico has reported a few details about where they were on these questions. “I think now that the department of justice is being proactive in issuing subpoenas and other things, I think it’s time for the committee to determine whether or not the information we’ve gathered can be beneficial to their investigation,” the committee’s chair Bennie Thompson said.
Indeed, the justice department has recently issued a flurry of subpoenas to associates of Donald Trump as part of its investigation into the attack on the Capitol, and the January 6 committee seems to be aware that some of what it has found in its own, separate investigation could be useful to them. However, that could also open the door for attorneys of people defending charges over the attack to get access to the committee’s evidence as well.
Either way, expect to be hearing a lot more from the committee later this month. Thompson said the lawmakers are eyeing September 28 as the date to resume their hearings, according to Politico.
January 6 committee eyes September hearing, sharing evidence with justice department
Good morning, US politics blog readers. After weeks of quiet, congress members investigating the January 6 attack have reconvened with plans to hold a new public hearing later this month, and potentially share evidence with the justice department. That would set the stage for the insurrection at the Capitol to remain in the public eye in the lead up to the November midterms, where a slew of Trump-supporting Republicans are on the ballot.
Here’s what else is happening today:
President Joe Biden is traveling to Michigan for an appearance promoting electric vehicles at the Detroit auto show.
Federal health officials including CDC director Rochelle Walensky will testify about the response to Monkeypox before the Senate health committee.
Donald Trump has ruled out picking his former vice-president Mike Pence as his running mate, a soon-to-be published book obtained by The Guardian reveals.
