Closing summary
The debt ceiling deadlock continued to loom over Washington, with little sign of progress made between Democrats and Republicans ahead of a potential government default on 1 June. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen appeared to rule out Joe Biden invoking the 14th amendment to order the government to keep paying its bills, but the president will meet with congressional leaders tomorrow in hopes of breaking the logjam.
Here’s what else happened today:
Biden will veto a Republican border security proposal, in the unlikely chance it makes it to his desk.
Despite the carnage in Texas, there’s little sign of a change in heart among House GOP leaders towards gun control.
A former official in Barack Obama’s administration backed Biden’s strategy of not negotiating over the debt ceiling.
Airlines could be forced to compensate passengers for cancelled or delayed flights under new rules the transportation department is considering.
Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, gave a preview of his strategy to regain the chamber’s majority next year.
A story to watch this week is the situation at America’s southern border, where asylum restrictions first imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic will be ending on Thursday.
Last week, Joe Biden ordered 1,500 national guard troops to the border to prepare for what some fear will be an influx of new asylum seekers. Immigration is one of the most contentious issues in Washington, and the GOP has in recent years been especially adroit at using it to rally their base, and as a cudgel against Democrats.
On the campaign trail, Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador under Donald Trump who is now facing off against him for the GOP’s presidential nomination, bashed both the Biden administration and Congress for failing to overhaul the US immigration system.
Here are her comments on Fox News:
“This is not a surprise that we suddenly woke up and Title 42 was ending ... Every single member of Congress, the president knew it ... They got on TV and complained about it, but nobody did anything.”
— The Recount (@therecount) May 8, 2023
— 2024 pres. candidate Nikki Haley (R) slams the impending end of Title 42 pic.twitter.com/OHFw1biaEX
In a speech at the White House, Joe Biden characterized the new rules on airlines as part of his campaign to rest power from large corporations, the Guardian’s David Smith reports:
Joe Biden: “I know how frustrated many of you are with the service you get from US airlines… That’s why our top priority has been to get airline passengers a better deal.” pic.twitter.com/qX6vbigj1S
— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) May 8, 2023
Biden: New rule will make it "mandatory" for all airlines to compensate your hotels, meals, transport on top of refunding the cost of your ticket when a flight is cancelled. "I know these things might not matter to the very wealthy but they matter most to middle class families."
— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) May 8, 2023
Biden: We're making progress but we have more to do to reverse decades of corporate power. "Let's finish the job."
— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) May 8, 2023
Biden administration eyes steps to hold airlines to account
After a winter where air travel was marred by bad weather and the total meltdown of one of the country’s major carriers Southwest, the Biden administration today announced it would consider imposing new rules to require airlines to compensate passengers for delays and cancellations.
The transportation department will consider rules governing when airlines must give passengers compensation, hotels or meal vouchers in instances where flights are cancelled or delayed.
“When an airline causes a flight cancellation or delay, passengers should not foot the bill. This rule would, for the first time in U.S. history, propose to require airlines to compensate passengers and cover expenses such as meals, hotels, and rebooking in cases where the airline has caused a cancellation or significant delay,” transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said.
You can read more about the transportation department’s plans here.
Even if Joe Biden wins re-election next year, the balance of power in Washington could shift dramatically by the time he begins his second term.
While it’s too soon to say what the race for the White House will look like by the time polls open in November 2024, the GOP is seen as having a good shot of retaking the Senate next year, since several Democrats representing states that supported Donald Trump in 2020 are up for re-election. Republicans need to win only two of those seats to gain a majority in the Senate, which, assuming the party maintains control of the House, would put them in control of Congress just as Biden begins his second term.
In an interview with CNN, the Senate’s top Republican Mitch McConnell confirmed that the party would look to oust Democratic senators from red states West Virginia, Montana and Ohio, as well as Pennsylvania, a swing state. But the Kentucky lawmaker said retaking the Senate majority was no sure thing.
“I just spent 10 minutes explaining to you how we could screw this up, and we’re working very hard to not let that happen. Let’s put it that way,” McConnell said.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
In Texas, authorities have named the driver suspected of killing eight people with a car yesterday.
The Guardian’s Joanna Walters is anchoring a live blog focused on the latest news from the tragic weekend in the state. Follow it below:
Ahead of the 2024 election, the Guardian’s Peter Stone reports that a rightwing lawyer tied to Donald Trump is urging the GOP to try to restrict college students’ access to the ballot box:
Rightwing election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a key ally of Donald Trump as he pushed bogus claims of fraud to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 win, is facing intense fire from voting watchdogs and bipartisan criticism for urging curbs on college student voting, same day voter registration and absentee voting.
The scrutiny of Mitchell, who runs the Election Integrity Network at the pro-Trump Conservative Partnership Institute to which a Trump Pac donated $1m dollars, was sparked by recent comments Mitchell made to Republican donors, and a watchdog report criticizing her advisory role with a federal election panel.
Long known for advocating stricter voting rules that are often premised on unsupported allegations of sizable voting fraud, Mitchell last month promoted new voting curbs on students in a talk to a group of wealthy donors to the Republican National Committee, efforts that critics call partisan and undemocratic.
The day so far
The debt ceiling deadlock continues to loom over Washington, with little sign of progress made between Democrats and Republicans ahead of a potential government default on 1 June. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen appeared to rule out Joe Biden invoking the 14th amendment to order the government to keep paying its bills, while also being sued by a union that wants her to ignore the debt ceiling.
Here’s what else has happened today:
Biden will veto a Republican border security proposal, in the unlikely chance it makes it to his desk.
Despite the carnage in Texas, there’s little sign of a change in heart among House GOP leaders towards gun control.
A former official in Barack Obama’s administration backed Biden’s strategy of not negotiating over the debt ceiling.
The Associated Press reports that a union of government workers has sued Janet Yellen to force the Treasury secretary to continue paying the government’s bills, even if Congress does not increase the debt limit.
Here’s more about the suit:
The lawsuit, filed by the National Association of Government Employees, says that if Yellen abides by the debt limit once it becomes binding, possibly next month, she would have to choose which federal obligations to actually pay once the debt limit bars the government from further borrowing. Doing so, the lawsuit contends, would violate the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Some analysts have argued that in that case, the government could prioritize interest payments on Treasury securities. That would ensure that the United States wouldn’t default on its securities, which have long been regarded as the safest investments in the world and are vital to global financial transactions.
But under the Constitution, the lawsuit argues, the president and Treasury secretary have no authority to decide which payments to make because the Constitution grants spending power to Congress.
“Nothing in the Constitution or any judicial decision interpreting the Constitution,” the lawsuit states, “allows Congress to leave unchecked discretion to the President to exercise the spending power vested in the legislative branch by canceling, suspending, or refusing to carry out spending already approved by Congress.”
The NAGE represents 75,000 government employees that it says are at risk of being laid off or losing pay and benefits should Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling. The debt limit, currently $31.4 trillion, was reached in January. But Yellen has since used various accounting measures to avoid breaching it.
Biden threatens veto of GOP border security bill
Joe Biden will veto a border security proposal introduced by Republicans controlling the House of Representatives, the White House has announced.
The GOP last week introduced the Secure the Border Act of 2023, their attempt to break the long-running deadlock in Washington over reforming America’s immigration system. House speaker Kevin McCarthy says it would improve technology deployed to monitor the United State’s southern and northern borders and increase the number of Border Patrol officers, while also satisfying rightwing priorities such as restarting construction of Donald Trump’s border wall.
In a statement, the White House office of management and budget said the legislation would not improve border security:
The Administration strongly supports productive efforts to reform the Nation’s immigration system but opposes H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act of 2023, which makes elements of our immigration system worse. A successful border management strategy must include robust enforcement at the border of illegal crossings, deterrence to discourage illegal immigration, and legal pathways to ensure that those in need of protection are not turned away to face death or serious harm.
The Biden-Harris Administration’s approach to border management is grounded in this strategy – expanding legal pathways while increasing consequences for illegal pathways, which helps maintain safe, orderly, and humane border processing. However, the Administration is limited in what it can achieve by an outdated statutory framework and inadequate resources, particularly in this time of unprecedented global movement. H.R. 2 does nothing to address the root causes of migration, reduces humanitarian protections, and restricts lawful pathways, which are critical alternatives to unlawful entry.
While Republicans have the votes to pass the bill through the House, the Democratic majority in the Senate is unlikely to approve it. And even if they did, the White House says, “If the President were presented with H.R. 2, he would veto it.”
Texas is also reeling from the deaths of eight people killed when a car plowed into them outside a shelter for migrants, the Guardian’s Christian von Preysing-Barry reports:
Neighbors held a small vigil Sunday night on a dirt path along a busy road in Brownsville, at the eastern end of the US-Mexico border, where eight people were killed and 10 were injured at a bus stop that morning.
A small display of flowers and a row of candles grew as shaken people visited the dimly lit curb where the appalling crash occurred.
A car had plowed into a group waiting at a bus stop across from the Ozanam Center, an overnight shelter housing a growing migrant population, most fleeing crises in their home countries in Central and South America, Haiti and parts of Africa.
The victims have not yet been named but many are believed to be Venezuelan.
The hostility of many House Republicans to tighter gun control has remained a constant, even as America has been rocked by successive mass shootings.
The thoughts of House majority leader Steve Scalise, who was himself a victim of gun violence, are telling. Here’s what he had to say, in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt:
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who was shot during a mass shooting at the 2017 Congressional Baseball Hame, asked if he cares about what motivates mass shooters:
— The Recount (@therecount) May 8, 2023
“Not really ... This is not a moment for politics. It should be a time for prayer.” pic.twitter.com/a5VZE42bo2
Gun violence is again on the political agenda, after a gunman killed eight people in a mass shooting in Texas this weekend. Here’s the latest on the tragedy, from the Guardian’s Charlie Scudder:
Ashok Kolla walked past the news cameras at the Allen Premium Outlets on Sunday, phone to his ear, trying to find the woman from Hyderabad who was unaccounted for after the deadly mass shooting at the mall a day earlier.
“Can you tell me which hospital she is at?” Kolla said into the phone.
Kolla is a volunteer with the Telugu Association of North America, or Tana, an Indian American nonprofit. When Indian immigrants are hurt or killed, Kolla springs into action, tackling bureaucratic and logistical challenges to connect victims in the US with their families back in India.
He lives in Frisco, Texas, just a few miles from Allen. After a gunman killed eight people, injured seven others and was shot dead by police on Saturday, Kolla got word: at least two victims were members of his community.
The debt ceiling standoff may be consuming much of top lawmakers’ time, but Democrats aren’t relenting in their demands for more accountability for supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas reports:
US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas’s ties to conservative political figures is an American embarrassment, and the question is whether that is shameful enough to the country’s highest-ranking judge to do something about it, the Senate judiciary committee’s chairperson said on Sunday.
“This tangled web around justice … Thomas just gets worse and worse by the day,” Illinois’s senior Democratic senator, Dick Durbin, said on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t know what is going to come up next. I thought I heard it all, but disclosures about his activities just embarrass me.”
Durbin, who is also the majority whip in the upper congressional chamber, added: “The question is whether it embarrasses the supreme court and … chief justice [John] Roberts, [who] has the power in his hands to change this first thing tomorrow morning.”
The Guardian’s David Smith reports that Joe Biden is bracing for his own bout of legal trouble, in the form of potential charges against his son, Hunter:
The White House is bracing for political fallout from a looming decision by federal prosecutors over whether to charge Joe Biden’s son Hunter with tax crimes and lying about his drug use when he bought a handgun.
In a signal that the investigation is nearing completion, Hunter’s lawyers last month held a meeting with David Weiss, the top federal prosecutor in Delaware, at the justice department in Washington, the Washington Post said. A separate report by CNN noted that Hunter’s longtime lawyer Chris Clark was among those entering the department headquarters.
Republicans would be sure to seize on a high-profile criminal case against Hunter, 53, in an effort to inflict political damage on the US president, who last week announced his bid for re-election in 2024.
The big news in the debt ceiling negotiations will come tomorrow, when congressional leaders meet with Joe Biden at the White House. Today, there’s news of political import in New York City, where the civil trial of a rape allegation against Donald Trump is nearing its conclusion. The Guardian’s Chris McGreal has the latest:
The jury in E Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of rape and defamation is to hear closing arguments in New York on Monday.
The three women and six men who have listened to seven days of testimony, including three by Carroll herself, will then retire to consider whether they believe the advice columnist’s account of the alleged sexual assault in a New York department store dressing room in 1996.
Trump missed a Sunday afternoon deadline to notify the court if he wished to testify. During a visit to Ireland last week, the former president had threatened to turn up in court to confront Carroll after calling her a “disgrace” and a liar.
If a standoff over the debt ceiling sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Republicans used the issue as a bargaining chip twice during Barack Obama’s presidency, including in 2011, when the deadlock resulted in one of the major ratings agency’s downgrading the United States’s debt for the first time.
Daniel Pfeiffer was a senior advisor in Obama’s White House, and in a column for the New York Times today, he argued that Joe Biden’s strategy of refusing to negotiate with Republicans is wise. Here’s why:
The only politics that matter is avoiding default — and Mr. Biden’s approach is the best way to do that. It also offers Mr. Biden a chance to highlight two qualities that he will likely run on in 2024: He’s a man of principle, but he’s also a sensible man who can get things done.
The biggest impediment to negotiations is that, with Mr. McCarthy, the president faces a weak negotiating partner. That said, Mr. Biden should have two objectives. The first is to make sure the debt limit is extended through the election so that we are not right back in this precarious position next year.
To get that, he will need to work with Mr. McCarthy to find a framework for fiscal negotiations. Perhaps that means drawing Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, into the process. Mr. McConnell has repeatedly said he has no plans to get involved and that it was up to Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Biden to work out a deal. But in the past, deals with Mr. McConnell’s imprimatur were able to garner enough Republicans to succeed in the House and save face for a Republican speaker.
This will not be easy. The House Republicans might be too far right to be part of a deal. After all, any deal between the president and the speaker will still require a majority of the House and at least 60 Senate votes. It’s frankly very hard to see a deal or deals that could have Mr. Biden’s support as well as the support of a majority of House Republicans — especially since Mr. McCarthy has made it clear that, to continue his speakership, his strategy is to stay in the good graces of the Freedom Caucus and other MAGA Republicans.
Still, the most important reason to avoid entering into negotiations over the debt limit itself goes beyond politics. It is why, in 2011, Mr. Obama pledged never again after trying to negotiate with the Republicans. Allowing the Republicans to use the threat of default as extortion could cripple the remainder of Mr. Biden’s presidency.
This time it’s spending cuts and work requirements for Medicaid recipients. What happens when the debt limit comes up again next year? Will the Republicans demand a federal abortion ban? A pardon for the Jan. 6 perpetrators?
Pfeiffer closes with these words:
The 2023 debt ceiling crisis seems much more dangerous the ones President Obama dealt with when I worked in the West Wing. A lot is going to happen in the next few weeks, but if Democrats want to avoid default and once again save the nation from radical Republicans, their best bet is sticking with President Biden and calling the Republicans’ bluff.
Yellen shoots down invoking 14th amendment to solve debt crisis
The deadlock between Democrats and Republicans over raising the debt ceiling has gone on for months, and the stakes could not be higher. If an agreement is not reached by as soon as 1 June, the United States could default on its bond payments and other obligations, with potentially catastrophic implications for the economy.
There are plenty of issues in Washington over which the two parties cannot agree, but the high consequences of a failure to raise the debt limit has some scholars arguing that Biden should invoke the 14th amendment to order the Treasury department to continue paying its bills, even if the ceiling isn’t increased.
This weekend, prominent liberal constitutional scholar Laurence H Tribe wrote of his support for the solution in the New York Times:
The question isn’t whether the president can tear up the debt limit statute to ensure that the Treasury Department can continue paying bills submitted by veterans’ hospitals or military contractors or even pension funds that purchased government bonds.
The question isn’t whether the president can in effect become a one-person Supreme Court, striking down laws passed by Congress.
The right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding.
There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no.
And there is only one person with the power to give Congress that answer: the president of the United States. As a practical matter, what that means is this: Mr. Biden must tell Congress in no uncertain terms — and as soon as possible, before it’s too late to avert a financial crisis — that the United States will pay all its bills as they come due, even if the Treasury Department must borrow more than Congress has said it can.
In a Sunday interview with ABC, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen was pressed on whether Biden would consider following the advice of Tribe and others. The answer was pretty much no.
Here’s a clip of the exchange:
Updated
No path forward yet on debt ceiling as deadline grows near
Good morning, US politics blog readers. This week looks to be a crucial one for the long-running negotiations between Republicans and Democrats over increasing the debt ceiling, as a potential default on 1 June grows ever nearer. But things aren’t exactly looking good at the moment. Joe Biden and his Democratic allies continue to refuse to negotiate over an increase, saying the legal limit on how much debt the US government can accrue should be raised without preconditions. The GOP, meanwhile, wants the White House to agree to cut spending and implement conservative reforms to areas like permitting. The top leaders in Congress are meeting with Biden tomorrow in hopes of making some progress on the deadlock.
Here’s what else is going on today:
Biden will at 1.45pm eastern time announce new rules to compensate passengers when flights are delayed or canceled.
Closing arguments are expected to start today in advice columnist E Jean Carroll’s civil suit alleging rape by Donald Trump.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre briefs reporters at 2pm.
