Closing summary
Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
Joe Biden revealed a new $7.3tn federal budget proposal, offering tax breaks for families, lower healthcare costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. The document promises to cut annual deficit spending by $3tn over 10 years, slowing but not halting the growth of the $34.5tn national debt. Here’s what is in Biden’s budget proposal.
Biden travelled to the swing state of New Hampshire, as he tried to build on the energetic reboot of his presidency with his fiery state of the union speech last week. “Do you really think the wealthy and big corporations need another $2tn tax breaks, because that’s what he (Trump) wants to do,” Biden said of Donald Trump. “I’m going to keep fighting like hell to make it fair.”
House Republican leadership called Biden’s budget “yet another glaring reminder of this administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and the Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility”. It’s “a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline”, a statement by House majority leader Steve Scalise, speaker Mike Johnson, majority whip Tom Emmer and Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik said.
Marcia Fudge, the housing and urban development (HUD) secretary, resigned. Fudge, 71, announced she will step down from her post later this month “with mixed emotions” and intends to retire after decades of public service, as she called for more focus on homelessness and more affordable housing.
Donald Trump’s lawyers asked the judge overseeing his impending criminal trial in New York to delay the trial until the supreme court finishes reviewing his claim of presidential immunity. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsification of business records tied to a hush money payment to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election, and jury selection is due to start 25 March.
Trump risks another defamation lawsuit by E Jean Carroll after he once again repeatedly attacked her and denied her rape and defamation claims against him, despite facing nearly $90m in civil penalties over similar denials.
Peter Navarro, the former Trump adviser, must report to prison on 19 March to begin a four-month sentence for defying the House January 6 committee, his lawyers said.
Karla Jacinto Romero, the woman whose story of being sex trafficked as a child was used in Katie Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal speech said her horrific ordeal was misused by the Republican senator.
Kansas Republicans were condemned as “vile and wrong” after attendees at a fundraising event beat and kicked a martial arts dummy wearing a Joe Biden mask.
Updated
Biden's 2025 $7.3tn budget proposal: what's in it
The White House unveiled a new $7.3tn federal budget proposal on Monday, offering tax breaks for families, lower health care costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
The proposal is unlikely to pass the House and the Senate, but it represents Joe Biden’s policy vision for a potential second four-year term if he and enough of his fellow Democrats win in November.
Here’s what is in it:
Raising the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28%
Making billionaires pay at least 25% of their income in taxes
A 39.6% marginal rate applied to households making over $1m
Raising tax rate on US multinationals’ foreign earnings from 10.5% to 21%
Bringing back a child tax credit for low- and middle-income earners
Fund childcare programs for parents making under $200,000 annually
Funnel $258bn to building or preserving two million homes
Creating a new tax credit for first-time homebuyers of up to $10,000 over two years and providing a $5,000 annual mortgage relief credit for two years.
Provide 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave for workers
Eliminating origination fees on government student loans
Providing about $900bn for defense
Funding to expand personnel and resources at the US southern border, including
In addition, the president said in his State of the Union address that Medicare should have the ability to negotiate prices on 500 prescription drugs, which could save $200bn over 10 years. Aides said his budget does not specify how many drug prices would be subject to negotiations.
Biden’s proposed budget would raise tax revenues by $4.9tn over 10 years, including more than $2.7tn in tax hikes on businesses and nearly $2tn on wealthy individuals and estates, according to the US treasury.
Updated
A coalition of youth voters on Monday gave Joe Biden’s re-election campaign a welcome shot in the arm amid swirling concerns over the president’s age and mental acuity.
The endorsement from 15 groups of mostly gen Z and young millennial voters was announced to mark the launch of Students for Biden-Harris, an initiative from the campaign designed to recapture the support of younger voters who helped propel Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House in 2020.
Florida congressman Maxwell Frost, who at 27 is the youngest member of the House, will serve on its national advisory board and host its first meeting in Washington DC on Thursday. The organization will hold regular virtual and in-person meetings around the country as it seeks to build a network of chapters, many on university and college campuses. Frost said in a press release announcing the coalition:
Young voters were crucial in delivering the election for President Biden and Vice-President Harris in 2020, and they will be just as consequential in 2024.
It is part of a wider White House outreach to younger voters, whose support for Biden, 81, and Harris has become more lukewarm as their first term has progressed, research suggests.
'A fair tax code is how we invest in things that make this country great' - Biden
Joe Biden is making a speech about taxes, healthcare and costs, on a visit to the swing state of New Hampshire this afternoon.
The US president is sifting out some points that he hammered during his state of the union address last week and is expanding on them in public addresses and election campaign events, as he ramps up his reelection efforts with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump marching towards the nomination to run against him.
“I’m a capitalist. Make all the money you want. Just begin to pay your fair share in taxes,” Biden told the crowd in Goffstown, on the outskirts of Manchester, New Hampshire.
Biden wants to raise income taxes for those making over $400,000 a year, as well as raising corporation tax.
“A fair tax code is how we invest in things that make this country great,” he said.
He slammed “my predecessor” – Trump – for “making $2tr in tax cuts” during his single term and “expanding the federal deficit”.
He aspires, he said, with a cooperative congress, to raise hundreds of billions of dollars by raising taxes on the very wealthiest Americans.
He’s departing the stage now.
Updated
Joe Biden has just taken the stage in Goffstown, New Hampshire, where he is about to speak about the economy, health care and prescription drug prices.
The address comes after he sent his aspirational 2025 budget to Congress, following his return on Monday morning to Washington from Delaware, and then flew to the New England swing state.
Biden is on a push to hit the campaign trail, trying to build on the energetic reboot of his presidency with his fiery state of the union speech last week, in the face of criticisms that he is too old and doddery to run for reelection.
Out of the gate he is hailing his plan, under the Inflation Reduction Act, to cap the total that seniors on Medicare pay for prescription drugs at $2,000 a head per year.
“We beat Big Pharma,” he said of the US pharmaceutical industry.
Updated
Interim summary
Hello, US politics blog readers, Joe Biden has arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire, shortly after presenting his desired budget to Congress. He’s due to make remarks at 2.30pm ET on, according to the White House, on “lowering costs for American families”. Later he has an election campaign event, as he continues with his plans to hit the campaign trail hard in the wake of his State of the Union speech last Thursday, as he tries to sell votes on his reection.
Here’s where things stand:
Housing and urban development (HUD) secretary Marcia Fudge, 71, has announced that later this month she will step down from her post “with mixed emotions” and retire after fighting for more affordable housing and reduced homelessness in the US.
Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge overseeing his impending criminal trial in New York to delay the trial until the US supreme court finishes reviewing his claim of presidential immunity. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsification of business records tied to a hush money payment to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election, and jury selection is due to start March 25.
House Republican leadership called Joe Biden’s budget, just presented to Congress, “yet another glaring reminder of this administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and the Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility”. It’s “a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline,” a statement by House majority leader Steve Scalise, Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Whip Tom Emmer and Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik said.
The US president unveiled a $7.3tn budget proposal offering tax breaks for families, lower health care costs and higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Biden’s 2025 fiscal year budget includes raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 from 21%, hiking rates on people making over $400,000 and effoprts to bring more drug costs down.
Donald Trump risks another defamation lawsuit by E Jean Carroll after he once again repeatedly attacked her and denied her rape and defamation claims against him, despite facing nearly $90m in civil penalties over similar denials.
Peter Navarro, a top former Trump administration official, has been ordered to report to a Miami prison on 19 March to begin serving a four-month sentence for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack. Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September 2023 of two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation.
Karla Jacinto Romero, the woman whose experience as a victim of human sex trafficking that Alabama Senator Katie Britt appeared to have shared in the GOP response to the State of the Union, slammed the lawmaker and accused her of inaccurately using her story to highlight the Biden administration’s border control policies, even though her plight was experienced during a previous, Republican administration.
Housing secretary Fudge to resign in 'crazy, silly' election season
Housing and urban development (HUD) secretary Marcia Fudge has announced that later this month she will step down from her post “with mixed emotions” and intends to retire after decades of public service, accompanying her news with a call for more focus on homelessness and more affordable housing.
She also appeared to time her announcement so that she could step away before the 2024 presidential election reaches its most intense phases this summer and fall, calling the election season, in an exclusive interview with USA Today “crazy, silly”.
Fudge, 71, intends to return to her home state of Ohio after 22 March and continue life as a private citizen, rather than running for any other public office, she told USA Today in an exclusive interview.
“It’s time to go home. I do believe strongly that I have done just about everything I could do at HUD for this administration as we go into this crazy, silly season of an election,” she told the outlet.
Fudge said affordable housing should be a nonpartisan focus.
It is not a red or blue issue. Everybody knows that it is an issue…an American issue.’’
She told USA Today that under her tenure at the agency, since the start of the Biden administration, she worked to improve its role in supporting families with housing needs, helping people experiencing homelessness and boosting economic development in communities.
Joe Biden issued a statement praising Fudge.
Over the past three years she has been a strong voice for expanding efforts to build generational wealth through homeownership and lowering costs and promoting fairness for America’s renters. Thanks to Secretary Fudge, we’ve helped first-time homebuyers, and we are working to cut the cost of renting. And there are more housing units under construction right now than at any time in the last 50 years.”
Updated
Joe Biden’s budget proposal for 2025 includes a $4.7bn emergency fund for border security to enable the department of homeland security to ramp up operations in the event of a migrant surge, NBC reported.
The contingency fund would allow the department to tap into funds as an as-needed basis when the number of undocumented migrants crossing the southern border tops a certain threshold, according to the report. That threshold is unspecified in the document.
The request is likely to fall on deaf ears among congressional Republicans, who have already refused to fund $13.6bn the Biden administration asked for in an emergency supplemental request aimed at responding to a record high number of migrants crossing the border.
Biden’s budget also asks for $405m to hire 1,300 more border patrol agents, $1bn for aid to Central America to address the root causes of migration, and nearly $1bn to address the backlog of over 2.4m pending cases in US immigration courts.
Updated
Trump asks to delay New York criminal trial until supreme court rules on presidential immunity
Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge overseeing his impending criminal trial in New York to delay the trial until the supreme court finishes reviewing his claim of presidential immunity.
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsification of business records tied to a hush money payment to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election.
Last month, prosecutors said they planned to introduce evidence of a “pressure campaign” by Trump in 2018 to ensure his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, did not cooperate with a federal investigation into the payment to Daniels. Cohen pleaded guilty that year to violating campaign finance law.
The trial is set to begin on 25 March in a New York state court in Manhattan.
In their court filing on Monday, Trump’s lawyers said the claim of a pressure campaign was “fictitious” and argued that prosecutors should not be allowed to present evidence about Trump’s public statements about Cohen from that year because he made those statements in his official capacity as president.
The supreme court last month agreed to take up the claim that Trump has absolute immunity from prosecution in the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. It is scheduled to hear arguments in that case during the week of 22 April.
Biden's budget 'a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline', says House Republican leaders
The House Republican leadership have issued a statement calling Joe Biden’s budget “yet another glaring reminder of this administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and the Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility”.
The president’s budget is “a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline,” a statement by House majority leader Steve Scalise, Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Whip Tom Emmer and Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik reads.
While hardworking Americans struggle with crushing inflation and mounting national debt, the President would increase their pain to spend trillions of additional taxpayer dollars to advance his left-wing agenda.
Updated
Biden aides said their budget was realistic and detailed while rival measures from Republicans were not financially viable.
“Congressional Republicans don’t tell you what they cut, who they harm,” AP reported White House budget director Shalanda Young as saying.
The president is transparent, details every way he shows he values the America people.
House Republicans voted on Thursday on their own budget resolution for the next fiscal year out of committee, saying it would trim deficits by $14tn over 10 years. But their measure would depend on rosy economic forecasts and sharp spending cuts. The White House called the plan unworkable.
Updated
Biden calls for higher taxes on corporations and wealthy as he unveils $7.3tn budget
Joe Biden unveiled a $7.3tn budget proposal aimed as election-year pitch to voters that would offer tax breaks for families, lower health care costs and higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Biden’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year that starts in October includes raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 from 21%, hiking rates on people making over $400,000, forcing those with wealth of $100m to pay at least 25% of their income in taxes, and letting the government negotiate to bring more drug costs down, Reuters reported.
Meanwhile, the government would bring back a child tax credit for low- and middle-income earners, fund childcare programs, funnel $258bn to building homes, provide paid family leave for workers, and spends billions on violent crime prevention and law enforcement.
The document promises to cut annual deficit spending by $3tn over 10 years, slowing but not halting the growth of the $34.5tn national debt. Biden also renewed his demand for funding on border security, Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and other national security issues that has been stalled by Republican congressional leadership for months.
White House budgets are always something of a presidential wishlist, and Biden’s proposal is unlikely to pass the House and Senate to become law. Biden and his aides previewed parts of his budget going into last week’s State of the Union address, and they provided the fine print on Monday, AP reported.
Updated
Kansas Republicans were condemned as “vile and wrong” after attendees at a fundraising event beat and kicked a martial arts dummy wearing a Joe Biden mask.
Footage posted to social media showed attendees at the Johnson county Republican event kicking and beating the dummy, which was wearing a Biden mask and a T-shirt displaying the slogan “Let’s Go Brandon”, a rightwing meme mean to disparage Biden.
Attendees at a Kansas Republican Party event on Friday paid to punched and kicked an effigy of President Biden on Friday.
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 11, 2024
This is not normal.
pic.twitter.com/IwnHMuzuZi
Dinah Sykes, the Democratic minority leader in the state Senate, told the Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news site:
Political violence of any kind is vile and wrong, and we cannot afford to brush it under the rug when others encourage it.
Sykes called for state Republican leaders to take action against those responsible. Mike Brown, the Kansas Republican party chair, told the Kansas City Star he was not at the event, which was not organised by the state party, though he sent emails to promote it. Mike Kuckelman, a former state Republican chair, condemned the event.
E Jean Carroll could sue Trump again over new attacks - report
Donald Trump risks another defamation lawsuit by E Jean Carroll after he repeatedly attacked her and denied her rape and defamation claims against him, despite facing nearly $90m in civil penalties over similar denials.
Trump, in an interview with CNBC, described the numerous judgments against him in New York as “the most ridiculous decisions … including the Ms Bergdorf Goodman, a person I’d never met.” He added:
I have no idea who she is, except one thing, I got sued. From that point on I said, ‘Wow, that’s crazy, what this is.
Trump was referring to Carroll, who in 2019 first publicly accused the former president of raping her in the changing room of Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury Manhattan department store.
On Saturday during a campaign rally in Georgia, Trump said Carroll “is not a believable person” and blamed the lawsuit on “Democratic operatives”. He said:
Ninety-one million based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn’t know, never heard of, I know nothing about her.
Carroll’s lawyer has raised the prospect of a new lawsuit, the New York Times reported. In a statement this morning, Roberta A Kaplan, said:
The statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years. As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client.
Updated
Donald Trump “will not give a penny” to Ukraine if he is re-elected US president, the far-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said after a controversial meeting with Trump in Florida.
“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told state media in Hungary on Sunday.
Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.
According to Orbán, Trump has a “detailed plan” to end the Ukraine war, which began two years ago when Russia invaded. Calling Trump “a man of peace”, Orbán said:
If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone can’t finance this war. And then the war is over.
This would likely mean Ukraine losing the war to Russia. Long seen to demonstrate deference towards and enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, Trump recently suggested that if re-elected he would encourage Russia to attack US allies he deemed not to contribute enough to the Nato alliance.
Orbán and Trump met at Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend.
Joe Biden is issuing a budget plan Monday aimed at getting voters’ attention: tax breaks for families, lower healthcare costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
Unlikely to pass the House and Senate to become law, the proposal for fiscal 2025 is an election-year blueprint about what the future could hold if Biden and enough of his fellow Democrats win in November. The president and his aides previewed parts of his budget going into last week’s State of the Union address, with plans to provide the fine print on Monday.
If the Biden budget became law, deficits could be pruned $3tn over a decade. Parents could get an increased child tax credit. Homebuyers could get a tax credit worth $9,600. Corporate taxes would jump upward, while billionaires would be charged a minimum tax of 25%.
Biden also wants Medicare to have the ability to negotiate prices on 500 prescription drugs, which could save $200bn over 10 years.
All of this is a chance for Biden to try to define the race on his preferred terms, just as the all-but-certain Republican nominee, Donald Trump, wants to rally voters around his agenda.
Biden to deliver remarks on lowering health care costs during New Hampshire visit
Joe Biden is heading to the competitive election state of New Hampshire today where he is expected to call on Congress to lower health care costs for American families before later participating in a campaign event.
The president is due to fly into Manchester this afternoon, and is scheduled to deliver a speech in Goffstown where he will call for lawmakers to apply his $2,000 cap on drug costs and $35 insulin to everyone, not just people who have Medicare, AP reported.
Biden will also seek to make permanent some protections in the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire next year, it said.
A coalition of progressive organizations has announced a fundraising, lobbying and organizing effort to counter the influx of spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) into primary campaigns against progressive Democrats.
The effort, called Reject Aipac, is in part a response to the ongoing congressional support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Among the groups involved in the campaign are the progressive group Justice Democrats, the advocacy arm of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Sunrise Movement climate organization.
“We have watched as Aipac has done everything it can to silence growing dissent in Congress against Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza,” said the coalition in a statement, “even as Democratic voters overwhelmingly support a ceasefire and oppose sending more blank checks to the Israeli military.”
Aipac has stayed out of the fray during election campaigns for most of its existence, focusing its efforts instead on shoring up bipartisan support for Israel in Congress – with a focus on military spending. That has changed in recent years. Now, the organization is expected to drop $100m during the 2024 election cycle in an effort to oust candidates it views as insufficiently pro-Israel.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in the US, poured more than $4.5m into an Orange county congressional race in hopes of keeping Dave Min from advancing to the November election.
But on Tuesday, the California state senator did exactly that – outpacing his Democratic competitor Joanna Weiss to come in second in the primary for the seat of Congresswoman Katie Porter.
The seat is crucial to Democrats hoping to wrestle control of the House of Representatives from Republicans. Come November, Min will face off with Republican Scott Baugh to represent the southern California district in the House.
But Aipac’s massive spending in Orange county has perplexed analysts and Min himself.
“Why the hell did you come in against me? We’re trying to understand why,” Min said in an interview with Semafor. “Maybe AIPAC wants a rubber stamp. I’m not going to be a rubber stamp.”
Aipac has spent millions of dollars against progressive candidates who have been critical of Israel this year and in recent election cycles. But the conflict in the Middle East was not a major issue in the primary race.
Donald Trump has confirmed that he met with Elon Musk, following a report that the former president was seeking a major cash infusion for his latest re-election campaign.
Trump was asked if he thought he would get the Tesla CEO’s support in an interview with CNBC this morning. Trump replied:
I don’t know. I’ve been friendly with him over the years. I’ve helped him. When I was president I helped him. I’ve liked him.
The New York Times reported last week that Trump and Musk held a private meeting in Palm Beach along with a few wealthy Republican donors. Musk later said he is not donating to either Trump nor Joe Biden.
Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2024
Updated
Ex-Trump adviser Peter Navarro ordered to prison on 19 March
Peter Navarro, a top former Trump administration official, has been ordered to report to a Miami prison on 19 March to begin serving a four-month sentence for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol attack.
Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September 2023 of two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation into the Capitol attack, claiming that executive privilege protections meant he did not have to cooperate.
The committee took a special interest in Navarro because of his proximity to Trump and his involvement in a series of efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including to have members of Congress throw out the results in a plot he named “the Green Bay Sweep”.
But Navarro’s subpoena defiance prompted a criminal referral to the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which brought the charges and ultimately asked for six months in jail because he brazenly ignored the subpoena even after being told executive privilege would not apply.
Navarro was the second Trump aide convicted of contempt of Congress charges. The former White House adviser Steve Bannon previously received a four-month sentence but is free pending appeal.
The Washington Post published a factcheck report which deemed that Senator Katie Britt had misled voters in her rebuttal speech to Joe Biden’s State of the Union.
The Post concluded that while the story of Karla Jacinto Romero is “tragic and may be evocative of other Mexican girls trapped in the sex trade in that country”, adding:
But she was not trafficked across the border – and her story has nothing to do with Biden.
The report also pointed out that Donald Trump, when president, had made similar misleading claims that “thousands of young girls and women” were being trafficked across the border.
In an investigation, the Post found that most sex trafficking cases involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and air travel, rather than people smuggled across the border.
‘Not fair at all’: Sex trafficking victim says Katie Britt distorted her story for political purposes
Karla Jacinto Romero, the woman whose story Katie Britt appeared to have shared in the GOP response to the State of the Union, slammed the Alabama senator for inaccurately using her story to highlight the Biden administration’s border control policies.
Asked if she felt her story had been used for “political purposes” in the US, Romero told CNN on Sunday:
I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo – and that to me is not fair.
She confirmed that she was never trafficked in the US, as Britt appeared to suggest, and that she was not trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, but by a pimp who operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls to force them into prostitution.
Romero said she was kept in captivity from 2004 to 2008, when George W Bush was in office. She added that Mexican politicians had taken advantage of her by using her story for political purposes, and that it had happened again in the US.
People who are really trafficked and abused, as [Britt] mentioned. And I think she should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.
Updated
On Sunday, Republican senator Katie Britt addressed the story she told during her rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, in which she invoked a story about child rape that she implied resulted from the president’s handling of the ongoing crisis at the southern US border.
In her first interview since her widely ridiculed response, Britt refused to apologize for the story even though the abuse occurred years earlier in Mexico while her party controlled the White House. Appearing on Fox News, she denied hiding the fact that the rape and sex trafficking case to which she referred had actually occurred during the presidency of George W Bush.
Asked whether she intended to give the impression that the abuse occurred under the Biden administration’s watch, she said:
I very specifically said … I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn’t say a teenager – I didn’t say a young woman. [It was] a grown woman … trafficked when she was 12.
She added:
To me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked.
Britt’s guest spot on Fox News Sunday came hours after the actor Scarlett Johansson stood in a kitchen portraying the Alabama senator and satirized the latter’s State of the Union rebuttal on Saturday Night Live’s cold open. Among other things, Johansson said sarcastically:
I’ve invited you into this empty kitchen because Republicans want me to appeal to women voters and women love kitchens.
“Tonight I’ll be auditioning for the part of scary mom.” Scarlett Johansson nails creepy Katie Britt on SNL. (Video: NBC) pic.twitter.com/l84i0YcQu9
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) March 10, 2024
Katie Britt’s SOTU story about child sex abuse criticized by victim
Good morning US politics readers. A sex trafficking victim has criticized the Republican senator Katie Britt after the lawmaker inaccurately used her story in her rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as part of an attack on his border control policies.
In that speech, Britt described traveling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and cited the case of a woman who had been sex-trafficked at age 12 and raped multiple times. The senator implied these were a direct result of the ongoing crisis at the border, which Republicans have sought to exploit as a campaign issue.
Britt’s communications director confirmed that she was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who has publicly recounted her experiences on numerous occasions at the hands of sex traffickers in her native Mexico. In May 2015, Romero testified to a congressional subcommittee describing her experiences at the hands of a trafficker who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16, before she was eventually rescued.
Romero, in an interview with CNN on Sunday, said legislators lack empathy when using the issue of human trafficking for political purposes. She said:
I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo – and that to me is not fair.
On Sunday, Britt sought to defend her comments, arguing that she had not intended to suggest that the trafficking and rape in question had happened Biden’s watch. The senator told Fox News she had recounted the victim’s story to “bring some light to” sex trafficking by cartels.
Here’s what is happening today:
11am. Joe Biden will deliver remarks to the National League of Cities at the Marriott Marquis in DC.
11.45am. Biden will depart DC for Manchester, New Hampshire
2.30pm. The Senate intelligence committee has an open hearing on worldwide threats. The House rules committee will meet to prepare several measures for floor consideration.
2.30pm. Biden will deliver remarks on lowering costs for American families in Goffstown, New Hampshire.
3.35pm. Biden will participate in a campaign event in Manchester.
