Closing summary
This brings our live coverage of the day in US politics to a close, but we will return on Friday when a vote on a stopgap Republican spending bill in the Senate will determine whether or not the government shuts down. Here are some of the day’s developments:
Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, said that he will vote to allow the deeply partisan Republican spending bill become law because a government shutdown would do more harm.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters that Senator Chuck Schumer’s statement was “a huge slap in the face, and I think that there’s a wide sense of betrayal.”
In a letter sent to the president of Columbia University and the co-chairs of its board of trustees on Thursday, the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force demanded nine specific changes to university policies and structures before negotiations over federal funding would begin.
Columbia announced the same day it received the letter that it had complied with item one on the list of demands: expelling and suspending pro-Palestinian student protesters who occupied a campus building last year or took part in a Gaza Solidarity encampment.
Representative Raúl Grijalva had died after a long battle with cancer, his office announced on Thursday. His seat will remain vacant until at least September.
In 1996 a federal judge found the legal provision now being used to target Mahmoud Khalil unconstitutional. She was Donald Trump’s sister.
Corks were not popping on Wall Street on Thursday, as stocks plunged again following Trump’s threat to impose a 200% tariff “on all wines, Champagnes, and alcoholic products” from European Union countries if the trading bloc makes good on its threat to retaliate for steel and aluminum tariffs announced by the US president by adding a 50% tariff on American products, including Kentucky bourbon.
The Trump administration has appealed to the supreme court to uphold the president’s executive order curtailing birthright citizenship.
The US Postal Service will reduce its staff by 10,000 through early retirements, and has signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge) to streamline its operations, postmaster general Louis DeJoy announced.
Trump administration demands radical overhaul of Columbia University before resuming federal funding
In a letter sent to the president of Columbia University and the co-chairs of its board of trustees on Thursday, the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force demanded nine specific changes to university policies and structures before negotiations over federal funding would begin.
The letter, which was posted online by the Free Press, a conservative news outlet founded by Bari Weiss, a former Columbia student who first claimed that the university intimidated Zionist students 20 years ago, demands the school’s “immediate compliance” with a list of actions. The first item on the list, “expulsion or multi-year suspension” for pro-Palestinian student protesters who occupied Hamilton Hall and took part in Gaza solidarity encampments was met by the university earlier on Thursday.
Among the other demands are a ban on mask-wearing on campus, sweeping changes in the university’s disciplinary policies, the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which casts criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and the “placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years.”
The letter was signed by Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, which oversees procurement and contracting for the entire federal government, and the acting general counsels of the departments of edutcation and health and human services.
Gruenbaum told Jewish Insider last week that he was determined to use government contracts as a way to fight antisemitism, as he defines it.
