Senators under time pressure to pass debt ceiling bill
Senators are facing time pressure Thursday as they pick up the debt ceiling bill that passed the House last night.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senate majority leader, was at his desk preparing its pathway soon after Wednesday’s 314-117 bipartisan House vote, and is warning any potential troublemakers to stand aside in order to get the measure approved swiftly and on to Joe Biden’s desk for signature to avoid a national default.
He told chamber colleagues on Wednesday:
Any needless delay, any last-minute brinkmanship at this point would be an unacceptable risk.
Moving quickly, working together to avoid default is the responsible and necessary thing to do.
In the House, McCarthy staved off a potential revolt by Republican colleagues to get the bill passed. In the senate, however, it’s Democrats who could yet throw a spanner in the works.
Progressives including Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, have indicated they plan to oppose the debt ceiling proposal, but the bill still appears likely to become law, my colleague Joan E Greve reports.
Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat and frequent thorn in Biden’s side during the early months of his administration, was another potential holdout. But he appears to have been appeased by a provision in the deal speeding up a controversial gas pipeline.
With senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell indicating he plans to support the proposal, and encourage colleagues to do so, it probably won’t matter if a small number of Democrats do decide to withhold their backing.
Treasury secretary Janet Yellen says the US will run out of money next week, meaning Biden must sign the bill raising the debt ceiling by Monday to keep paying the bills. Schumer says he wants it out of the chamber by tomorrow night.
Here’s a quick explainer of what to expect next, courtesy of ABC News.
Read more on the “dirty” pipeline deal:
Key events
Joe Biden has marked the beginning of Pride Month with a tweet denouncing “cruel attacks” on LGBTQ+ rights by Republican legislatures and politicians around the country.
“We celebrate the LGBTQI+ Americans who are fiercely and unapologetically fighting for freedom and equality – and reaffirm that their rights are human rights,” the president wrote.
Biden will be speaking shortly in Colorado when he delivers the commencement address to graduates of the US air force academy in El Paso county. His speech is scheduled to begin at 11.40am ET, and you can watch it here.
“Months of distrust” inside Donald Trump’s legal team led to the departure of one of the former president’s top lawyers, and weakens his defense against claims he illegally retained classified documents after leaving office, my colleague Hugo Lowell reports.
It comes just a day after details emerged of a recording of Trump “regretting” he didn’t declassify a secret military paper, contradicting his often voiced assertion that he declassified every paper he took with him from the White House.
The justice department is currently investigating Trump on two fronts, his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, and his hoarding of hundreds of classified documents found by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last year.
The frontrunner for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination is in Iowa today for a two-day trip, featuring a campaign rally at which he is all but certain to rail against what he calls a “witch hunt” against him by federal authorities.
He has already been indicted in New York over illicit payments to adult movie star Stormy Daniels
Read more:
In a decision seen as a setback to labor unions, the supreme court on Thursday made it easier for employers to pursue lawsuits against striking workers.
The opinion, written by justice Amy Coney Barrett and backed by conservative colleagues on the 6-3 bench, sided with a concrete business in Washington state that sued the union representing its truck drivers after a work stoppage.
Ketanji Brown Jackson, the panel’s most recent confirmation, by Joe Biden, was the lone dissenter.
As reported by Reuters, the decision in the case of Glacier Northwest Inc against a local affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters overturned a lower court’s ruling in the union’s favor.
Glacier had accused the union of intentional property destruction during a 2017 strike when a group of drivers went on strike while their mixing trucks were filled with concrete. The company had to force to discard the unused product at a financial loss.
The supreme court overruled the Washington state supreme court that the loss was incidental to a strike that could be considered arguably protected under federal labor law.
Biden’s administration urged the justices to reverse the lower court’s decision, Reuters reports. The decision allows Glacier’s lawsuit to proceed.
It also extends the panel’s recent trend of curtailing the power of labor unions. In 2021, justices struck down a California agricultural regulation aimed at helping unions organize workers, the agency said.
And in 2018 it ruled that non-members cannot be forced, as they are in certain states, to pay fees to unions representing public employees such as police and teachers that negotiate collective bargaining agreements with employers.
Here’s the full ruling on the Glacier v Teamsters case.
As we noted earlier, none of the bigger decisions we are expecting from the supreme court this decisions season came today. Those, covering affirmative action, LGBTQ+ equality and the future of Native American tribes, are now expected later this month.
Supreme court ‘defangs’ unions over rights to strike
The US supreme court has handed down a small number of opinions this morning, one of which appears to weaken unions’ rights to decide how and where to strike.
The ruling in the case of Glacier NW v International Brotherhood is “a massive change in labor law,” according to the high court analyst scotusblog.com.
“Unions just got defanged in a big way,” it said of the decision written by justice Amy Coney Barrett.
We’ll have more in depth analysis of the decision coming up shortly, but overall it seems to have been a quiet day for the court, with none of the bigger decisions we are expecting coming today.
Those, covering affirmative action, LGBTQ+ equality and the future of Native American tribes, are now expected later this month.
The race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is about to get even more crowded. Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and ex-New Jersey governor Chris Christie are both planning to launch their campaigns next week.
Pence is, of course, the man supporters of Donald Trump infamously wanted to hang during the January 6 riots when they overran the US Capitol attempting to keep the former president in office. Trump has said “maybe they were right” to do so.
Pence will announce his candidacy in Des Moines, Iowa, on 7 June, also his 64th birthday, two sources told the Associated Press.
He is also expected to release a video message that morning as part of the launch that, interestingly, is taking place in an early voting state rather than his home state of Indiana.
Christie, a former Trump advisor turned vocal critic, is set to launch his run the day before, as we reported yesterday. It will be the 60-year-old’s second attempt to win the nomination.
Trump, who is campaigning in Iowa today, dominates Republican primary polling, leading his closest challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, by more than 30 points in most polling averages.
DeSantis, who has also been in Iowa in recent days, announced his candidacy in a glitch-filled livestream event on Twitter last week.
Joe Biden’s status as “an apostle of bipartisanship” has been well and truly enhanced by the passage of the debt ceiling bill in the House, argues the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief David Smith in his analysis of this week’s developments.
The president, Smith says, can “claim vindication for the underlying theory of his presidency: that in the age of polarisation it takes an apostle of bipartisanship and a 36-year veteran of the Senate to reach across the aisle and make deals with his opponents”.
The bill that passed the House, he says, “could hardly have been more Bidenesque in hitting the sweet spot between left and right… Biden continues to exceed low expectations by finding common ground in the disappearing middle”.
Read the story:
Late-night votes, Republican holdouts, warnings from the US treasury about an impending national default, and games of brinkmanship between the White House and politicians from both parties in Washington DC haven’t exactly made developments in the debt ceiling story easy to follow.
What’s in the bill? What’s out? And who’s said what about whether they’re voting for or against it, and why?
Thankfully, we’ve got you. Here’s out handy explainer, with key takeaways, from the debt ceiling bill as it heads to the senate for approval:
Senators under time pressure to pass debt ceiling bill
Senators are facing time pressure Thursday as they pick up the debt ceiling bill that passed the House last night.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senate majority leader, was at his desk preparing its pathway soon after Wednesday’s 314-117 bipartisan House vote, and is warning any potential troublemakers to stand aside in order to get the measure approved swiftly and on to Joe Biden’s desk for signature to avoid a national default.
He told chamber colleagues on Wednesday:
Any needless delay, any last-minute brinkmanship at this point would be an unacceptable risk.
Moving quickly, working together to avoid default is the responsible and necessary thing to do.
In the House, McCarthy staved off a potential revolt by Republican colleagues to get the bill passed. In the senate, however, it’s Democrats who could yet throw a spanner in the works.
Progressives including Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, have indicated they plan to oppose the debt ceiling proposal, but the bill still appears likely to become law, my colleague Joan E Greve reports.
Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat and frequent thorn in Biden’s side during the early months of his administration, was another potential holdout. But he appears to have been appeased by a provision in the deal speeding up a controversial gas pipeline.
With senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell indicating he plans to support the proposal, and encourage colleagues to do so, it probably won’t matter if a small number of Democrats do decide to withhold their backing.
Treasury secretary Janet Yellen says the US will run out of money next week, meaning Biden must sign the bill raising the debt ceiling by Monday to keep paying the bills. Schumer says he wants it out of the chamber by tomorrow night.
Here’s a quick explainer of what to expect next, courtesy of ABC News.
Read more on the “dirty” pipeline deal:
Good morning US politics blog readers. Thursday’s going to be a busy day: The debt ceiling bill that passed the House on a bipartisan vote last night heads for the Senate, where it faces time pressure to get it approved and on to Joe Biden’s desk for signature to avoid a national default.
Republicans and the White House are both claiming Wednesday night’s 314-117 vote as a victory, to a degree. “This budget agreement is a bipartisan compromise. Neither side got everything it wanted,” the…