Closing summary
We’re closing the US politics live blog for today, but we’ll be back tomorrow and will bring you all the most important news as it happens, including covering the next public hearing of the House committee investigating the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.
For those wishing to follow the news relating to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, our blog on the war can be found here.
Here’s where things stand:
- A federal judge has declined to delay the upcoming trial of Steve Bannon, an adviser to Donald Trump who faces contempt charges after refusing to cooperate with the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.
- Joe Biden is once again appealing to Congress to go further with gun safety legislation and ban assault weapons for the general public in the US. At an event at the White House he said: “We are living in a country awash in weapons of war.”
- The US president hailed the long-awaited gun safety legislation recently passed with bipartisan support but also said that the act was a call to action to do more, saying the slowness of the government to act had left “too much of a trail of bloodshed and carnage”.
- A strong majority of Democratic voters - 64% - want the party to nominate someone other than Joe Biden to stand for president in the 2024 election, according to a new opinion poll by the New York Times and Siena College. The survey added, however, that as a result of questioning a sample of people across the US they found that in another match-up between Biden and Donald Trump, Biden would once again triumph.
Updated
Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen America, traveled from Texas to participate in the group’s abortion rights protest outside the supreme court today.
Ramirez noted that her mother once obtained an abortion because her doctor warned of severe health risks if she carried her pregnancy to term.
“I am so grateful that she was able to have that because I would have likely grown up without a mother,” Ramirez said.
Gesturing toward the flowers representing the lives that will be lost because of the Roe reversal, Ramirez added, “Today my mom might be one of these flowers and one of these lives that will be lost in the coming years.”
NextGen President @cristinanextgen noted carrying a pregnancy to term is 33 times more dangerous than getting an abortion.
— Joan Greve (@joanegreve) July 11, 2022
She mentions that her mother once chose to have an abortion because of serious health concerns: “Today my mom might be one of these flowers.” pic.twitter.com/xfHxDFhmZT
Ramirez said NextGen members are now organizing in battleground states like Arizona and Michigan to ensure that abortion rights supporters are elected to office in November.
“Young people are pissed off, and they have every right to be, and we’re channeling their anger into power, into action,” Ramirez said.
“We need to take every single step necessary, and everything should be on the table to look at how we protect access to abortion and also make sure that the supreme court doesn’t take away the right to gay marriage, that it doesn’t take away our right to contraception. Because this wasn’t the end; this was the opening salvo.”
Updated
