Democrats are ready to be done with Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump’s critics are starting to talk more openly about removing him from office, using impeachment or the 25th Amendment. They assert that his recent social media tirades against Iran and Pope Leo reveal he is unfit for office.

Democrats in Congress mostly “steered clear of threatening impeachment” since Trump’s return to the White House, said The New York Times. The president’s threat last week to wipe out Iranian civilization “dramatically” shifted their calculations, spurring dozens of “formerly hesitant” House Democrats to back articles of impeachment. Trump “seems to be taking us on a path to mass war crimes,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on X. The president’s recent “erratic behavior and extreme comments” have “turbocharged” discussion of his mental fitness, said the Times. The challenge: Removal efforts are “doomed to fail so long as Republicans control Congress,” said The Associated Press.

What did the commentators say?

The “fate of the Earth depends” on Trump’s removal from office, Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. The president’s growing list of “embarrassingly profane and unspeakably evil” social media posts demonstrates that he is “mentally and physically deteriorating,” a danger given his command of the “planet’s largest air force and a large cache of nuclear weapons.” The threat is too urgent to wait for Democrats to win control of Congress in November. Americans should join a May 1 general strike called for by the organizers of the “No Kings” protests to make their feelings clear. “It is a time for action.”

Democrats’ talk of impeachment “plays into Iran’s hand,” Peter Lucas said at The Boston Herald. Despite his words, Trump “will not end civilization in Iran.” But he will end Iran’s attempt to develop its own nuclear weapon. Democrats are looking for an excuse to “impeach him anyway if they gain control of the House in November.” They should instead acknowledge that Trump “saved the day” by taking action against Iran.

The 25th Amendment is “having a moment,” Ian Millhiser said at Vox, but it is unlikely to be used against this president. The constitutional provision would allow the White House cabinet to “temporarily prevent Trump from acting as president,” but the process is designed to replace an executive who is “physically or mentally incapacitated” rather than one who is “merely bad at being president.” Other democracies make it easier to remove an “incompetent, unfit or unpopular leader.” The United States should join their ranks.

What next?

Democratic leaders are trying to “shut down” impeachment talk, said Axios. That is not the “best use of our time” given that the effort would inevitably fall short, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said to the outlet. Dean and other senior Democrats want the party’s focus to be on “concrete issues like the war in Iran and affordability” as midterm elections approach, said Axios. An impeachment that fails to remove Trump, said Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), “is worse than no impeachment at all.”

What happened

Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) separately said Monday they will resign from Congress as both face House investigations into alleged sexual misconduct and growing calls to quit or face expulsion. Swalwell ended his campaign for California governor over the weekend after an unidentified former aide accused him of sexual assault and three other women said he had sexually harassed them. Gonzales dropped his reelection bid in March after admitting to a coercive relationship with a staffer who later died by suicide.

Who said what

The House Ethics Committee, which was already investigating Gonzales for violating rules prohibiting sexual relationships with subordinates, announced Monday it had opened an investigation into Swalwell. The Manhattan district attorney is also investigating the assault allegation, which Swalwell denied while apologizing for other past “mistakes in judgment.”

Ethics Committee investigations can take months, and House leaders had been “facing loud demands to hold votes to kick out Swalwell and Gonzales” after the House returned from recess Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal said. “Lawmakers had coalesced around the idea of an even trade — one Democrat for one Republican — to spread the ignominy across both parties and preserve the fragile balance of power” in the GOP-led House.

“Expelling anyone in Congress without due process, within days of an allegation being made, is wrong,” Swalwell said on X. “But it’s also wrong for my constituents to have me distracted,” so “I plan to resign my seat.” About an hour later, Gonzales announced that “when Congress returns tomorrow, I will file my retirement from office.”

What next?

Neither lawmaker gave a time frame for his departure. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.) said she would file a motion to expel Gonzales unless he resigned “effective immediately” by 2 p.m. Tuesday.

President Donald Trump loves raging against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, regularly chiding the military partnership for alleged financial delinquencies while at the same time boosting the interests of NATO’s primary antagonist, Russia. Now, as the U.S.’s war on Iran continues, NATO’s ostensible neutrality in that conflict has prompted him to renew his threat of leaving the organization altogether. Trump often tries to dictate reality by presidential fiat, but the legal process for leaving NATO is largely out of his hands and in Congress.’ The result is a Trump who’s more constrained on paper but not without a toolbox of other, less absolute options.

Why can’t Trump just leave NATO?

Trump has often threatened to leave the military alliance, but he has his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, to thank for the legal inability to do so. In 2023, Congress enacted what “appears to be the first statute prohibiting the president from unilaterally withdrawing from a treaty (specifically, the North Atlantic Treaty),” said the government’s Congressional Research Service in a February 2026 report. This “might be understood as a rejection” of the position that presidents possess “exclusive power over treaty withdrawal.”

The bill ensures presidents cannot exit NATO “without rigorous debate and consideration by the U.S. Congress with the input of the American people,” said co-sponsor Rubio in a statement on Senator Tim Kaine’s site; Kaine (D-Va.) was the amendment’s other sponsor. Before this, any member nation could exit the treaty one year after notifying the U.S., which would then “inform the governments of the other parties of the deposit of each notice of denunciation,” said the NATO charter.

Per the bill, a bipartisan effort for which Rubio partnered with Kaine and others from across the aisle, a president may only exit NATO “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the senators present concur or pursuant to an Act of Congress.” This is a virtual impossibility, given the Democrats’ current holdings in the upper chamber.

The 2023 effort was “spurred by worries that Trump, if he returned to power, might try to quit the alliance,” said The Washington Post. Fast forward three years, and Trump “insists he would be able to do it anyway,” said Deutsche Welle.

What can he do then?

While it’s possible a constitutional challenge to Rubio’s 2023 bill would “likely favor the power of a president,” there are still “plenty of ways” Trump could “kneecap” the treaty “without leaving” or complying with the congressional restrictions, said DW. Even without an “official exit,” Trump’s “increasingly hostile stance toward the alliance may leave it weakened,” said CBS News.

If other member nations “can’t trust” that the U.S. will honor the treaty’s Article 5 mutual defense pact, then the alliance is “already broken in the way that matters most,” said political scientist Ian Bremmer on X. As soon as the group’s mutual defense pact is “questioned,” NATO “loses its potency” as a Russian deterrent, said Politico. Trump has, in that respect, “turned doubting NATO into official policy.”

The president is also “considering a plan to punish” some NATO member nations he deemed “unhelpful” during the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, said The Wall Street Journal. This would involve relocating some of the 84,000 American troops stationed in Europe and deploying them to “countries that were more supportive,” including Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.

Trump could also withdraw American military assets entirely and shut off funding for NATO operations. Or if he wants to be “very dramatic,” he might even “decide not to staff the position of Supreme Allied Commander Europe,” a post traditionally reserved for American officers, said DW.

The president could “just downgrade our participation,” said Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon official who oversaw Europe and NATO policy, to Politico. He could skip summits, and the secretary of defense “won’t go to defense ministerials.”

With the “language” of its 2023 bill, Congress has “prevented” a “total” and “formal withdrawal from NATO,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to Politico. But the U.S. could “still be in NATO” with a president grasping “many different levers” so that the country’s impact would nevertheless be “diminished significantly.”

What happened

The Justice Department on Wednesday told the House Oversight Committee that ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi will not honor its bipartisan subpoena to sit for a deposition on her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, citing her firing last week. The notification “set off frustration” among lawmakers “clamoring for answers” about why she had not, “in their view, fully complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” USA Today said.

Who said what

Bondi “cannot escape accountability,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said on social media. The subpoena “was for Bondi by name, not by title.” If Bondi “defies the subpoena, we will begin contempt charges,” Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), the committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement. “The survivors deserve justice.”

Mace and four other Republicans “joined Democrats to force the subpoena” over the objection of committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), and lawmakers were “concerned” Bondi “would try to avoid the deposition” even before President Donald Trump fired her, The New York Times said. Comer last month promised to honor the subpoena, but according to sources, he and Bondi “had been quietly working together to avoid the deposition.”

What next?

The committee will contact Bondi’s “personal counsel” about “scheduling her deposition,” a spokesperson said.

Donald Trump’s political rivals have denounced him as an “unhinged madman” and a “dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual” after he directed a string of expletives at the Iranian regime. “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!” the US president said on his Truth Social platform .

But Trump is far from the only potty-mouthed politician, and trends suggest that swearing in politics is increasingly going from taboo to mainstream.

‘Profanity seal’

Woodrow Wilson “broke the profanity seal” in 1919, when the then president recalled a time he made a “conspicuous ass of himself”, said Joseph Phillips, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “Since then, presidents, their seconds-in-command, and presidential hopefuls have used profanity at least 692 times” – but the vast majority of curse words, 87%, occurred in the last 10 years.

We’ve “come a long way from our shock” at John Major, not knowing he was being recorded, using the word “bastards” while prime minister in 1993, said Robert Crampton in The Times. Although “tough talk is nothing new in politics”, leaders “long avoided flaunting it”, said The Independent. But now, public vulgarity is “in vogue”. During a political rally in 2025, Trump “used profanity at least four times”. J.D. Vance has also sworn publicly, and former vice president Kamala Harris “earned a roar of approval from her audience” last October when she said of the Trump administration that “these mother******* are crazy”.

Members of Congress and the Senate have also sworn as a “volley of vulgarities underscores an ever-coarsening political environment” on social media. Posts that “evoke the strongest emotions are rewarded with the most engagement”.

‘Anti-intellectualism’

There’s a “misguided belief” that “profanity is more ‘honest’ or ‘authentic’ than polite speech”, said Solomon D. Stevens in the Illinois paper the Journal-Courier. This suggests that politicians who swear are “telling it like it is” or “being real”, while those who don’t must be “holding back and not telling the truth”. But “politicians who swear are just politicians who swear. They can lie just as easily as those who don’t swear.”

There’s also “an anti-intellectualism at work”, as politicians who swear imply that those who don’t are “putting on airs”. While some intellectuals can “certainly be pretentious”, “refraining from coarse language” is not in itself a sign of that.

Trump’s “disinhibited language” sounded like a “tantrum”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. It “suggested that he’d lost self-control because Iran wouldn’t do what he wanted”. Swearing points to an “emotional release and thus a loss of reason”.

The president’s recent profanity also distracted from “the message itself”, said the Deseret News. A “rousing and well-crafted argument” could have “built a compelling case for ousting the country’s ruling regime”, because “when it comes to war, calm self-assurance speaks louder than ranting expletives”.

Politicians aren’t “bawling swear words because they can’t contain their outrage”, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. They do it because, “like preteen boys trying to sound tough”, they believe “the odd public expletive enhances their authenticity” and gives them “an air of pugnacity apropos to the moment”. But they are mistaken. “Most Americans still prefer their leaders to talk like grown-ups.”

Nevertheless, Democrats are pushing back against the right, using bad language themselves and embracing more confrontational and crass tactics. They see it as a way to beat Maga at its own game, attempting to “step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing”, said The New York Times.

What happened

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday defended an upcoming funding request to pay for the ongoing Iran war, as Congress balked at the reported $200 billion price tag. The global cost of the conflict rose again as oil prices surged above $119 a barrel before settling at just under $109 after a chaotic day of trading. Qatar’s state energy company said retaliatory Iranian strikes on its Ras Laffan energy hub had cut its natural gas capacity by 17%, costing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue and affecting deliveries to Europe and Asia.

Who said what

“Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth told reporters Thursday. “As far as the $200 billion, I think that number could move.” Trump called the unspecified funding request “a small price to pay to make sure that we stay tippy-top,” pointing to the “vast amounts of ammunition” needed. It “was not immediately clear” how long the $200 billion was intended to last or “what operations it would cover,” The New York Times said. But the “significant sum” suggests that the Pentagon is “preparing for a significant engagement.”

The funding request “met with stiff opposition” in Congress, Reuters said, “as Democrats and even some Republicans questioned the need for the money” after they “approved record funding for the military” over the past year. Republican leaders “do not believe they have the votes to fund the war even in their own party without far more detailed plans from the White House,” CNN said.

While some House Republicans “blanched” at the $200 billion price tag, others are “embracing the eye-popping number to help energize a stalled” effort to pass a second GOP-only reconciliation bill, Axios said. Senate Republicans are “decidedly cooler” on that plan. “The alternative — relying on a handful of Democrats to push it through the Senate — doesn’t look any more likely,” Politico said, as “energy prices rise and more Democratic lawmakers dig in against an unpopular war.”

What next?

The $200 billion funding fight “could turn into a referendum on the war in Congress,” Axios said, which could be harrowing for Republicans given the “unpopularity of the war” and “the Pentagon’s existing $1 trillion budget.” Already, “anxiety is creeping up in the GOP,” CNN said, as the war drags on and energy prices soar ahead of this fall’s “critical election.”

Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor are coming under renewed pressure to testify before US Congress over their links to Jeffrey Epstein.

Mandelson resigned his membership of the Labour party last night to avoid causing any “further embarrassment”. On Friday, newly released documents revealed a picture of the Labour grandee in his underwear, payments from Epstein to Mandelson, and email exchanges between the pair that appear to show Mandelson leaking confidential Downing Street documents to Epstein. The new batch of Epstein files also implicated Andrew, including a series of photos of the former prince kneeling on all fours over an unidentified woman lying on the floor.

Both men’s association with Epstein has wrecked their public reputation but, as the furore over the last few days has shown, they will find it hard to remain out of the spotlight.

What did the commentators say?

Keir Starmer has called on Andrew to cooperate with US authorities who are investigating Epstein. It is “rare for a prime minister to intervene on matters relating to the royal family”, said The Times’ editorial board, but “such is the anger and outcry” that – in an unusually “deft reading of the public mood” – Starmer hopes to pressure Andrew “into finally doing what he should have done" a long time ago. Unless he “fully explains his past actions and what he knew about Epstein’s lifestyle”, this will remain “a running sore for the royal family”.

A lawyer representing some of Epstein’s victims told ITV News that Andrew should be extradited and forced to testify. But US investigators “face a succession of legal obstacles which make” that “unlikely”, said Cahal Milmo in The i Paper.

US investigators may not have more luck with Mandelson. Congress is “poised to issue the peer with a demand to testify in Washington”, said Connor Stringer in The Telegraph, but it “cannot compel testimony from foreigners”, so “he is under no legal obligation to respond”. Of course, “he could be subpoenaed if he sets foot on US soil” and “if he were to ignore that request, he would be liable to arrest”.

What next?

“There will be a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill who want to exert as much pressure on this as possible,” The Spectator’s deputy political editor James Heale told Sky News. Some would like the US to invoke the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with Britain, under which each country can request cooperation to secure testimony, via court order if necessary, from witnesses abroad. But, given the Trump administration’s proximity to the scandal, few expect this to happen.

In Andrew’s case, what might eventually force his hand is not threats of legal action but rather “internal pressure from within the royal household”, royal historian and constitutional expert Ed Owens told The i Paper. “Prime ministers do not generally speak on these sorts of things without checking with the Palace first” so “I’m wondering whether, behind the scenes, there has been a changing of the wind”.

International law? No, “the only thing that can stop me” is “my own morality”, Donald Trump told The New York Times earlier this month.

It was the “most blunt acknowledgment yet” that the US president believes he has the “freedom to use any instrument of military, economic or political power to cement American supremacy”, said the paper. As Trump holds court in Davos today, Europe’s leaders should be in no doubt of his conviction that “national strength, rather than laws, treaties and conventions” will be the decider when “powers collide”.

Trump’s tariff-threatening show of strength in the Greenland row risks the collapse of Nato and the end of the international world order as we know it. Is there any way to counter the intimidating march of this emboldened president?

What did the commentators say?

Europe’s leaders have “responded to the latest escalation with steely unity”, said CNN’s Stephen Collinson. The EU is a “huge trade bloc” and any coordinated retaliation “could hammer US stock markets that Trump touts as a barometer of economic well-being”. But “trade reprisals” could also “end up damaging” Europe more than America.

Perhaps Trump could be made to stop short of fracturing the Nato alliance by Republican opposition in Congress or plummeting popularity with voters? “Dream on,” said Sarah Baxter, director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting, in The i Paper. It is not clear if there are enough Republicans willing to block a Greenland takeover or whether Trump would even change course under pressure. “Trump thinks he is unstoppable, and no longer cares what anybody thinks”, including the Maga movement “he created”. With three years left in office, he “is now more fixated on legacy than the needs of the electorate”.

The US Supreme Court is due to make a ruling on the legality of Trump’s imposition of tariffs. These conservative-majority judges have a decidedly mixed record so far in checking this administration’s executive overreach. But even if they do “attempt to curb Trump’s power”, it seems likely he’ll swerve the move. US trade negotiator Jamieson Greer has already said the administration will simply replace tariffs with other levies.

That leaves those in the president’s inner circle. Many had hoped that Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser Jared Kushner and Secretary of State Marco Rubio might be moderating forces in the White House. But there’s no evidence of that so far. Cue then the president’s trusted chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Some see the 68-year-old moderate Republican as “the only person capable of tethering Trump to reality”, said Alex Hannaford in The Independent. But “to others, she is the master enabler, standing by in the shadows as the norms of the presidency are dismantled one hand gesture at a time”.

What next?

Trump is making a “special address” to the World Economic Forum in Davos this afternoon, followed by a summit with CEOs and an interview with CNBC.

Last night he said that “things are going to work out pretty well, actually” but refused to say how far he is willing to go to seize Greenland. With Nato and transatlantic relations already “at a new nadir,” said Politico’s Sam Blewett and Bethany Dawson, “the question now is whether Trump kisses and makes up, or pours on more fuel”.

There is a political storm brewing in the US over the disclosure of the Epstein files and their link to President Donald Trump.

At least 13 files, including a photo containing Trump, were removed by the Department of Justice from the latest release of documents, only to be republished after a review following concerns over victim identification.

The evidence was reinstated without any “alteration or redaction”, said the DoJ, with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche explicitly stating on NBC News that “it has nothing to do with President Trump”.

What did the commentators say?

“The documents produced no major revelations,” said The New York Times. The photos in particular underlined how Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, “attracted a remarkably broad spectrum of famous people into his orbit”, with Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and Walter Cronkite appearing in the latest batch.

The redactions have caused the most controversy, said The Guardian. Blanche argued that the government “did not have time to review all the files to make redactions needed to protect victims”, with at least one victim claiming that she had been identified in the DoJ dump.

Conversely, in some areas, the redactions were “too aggressive”. For instance, a picture of Clinton, Michael Jackson and Diana Ross was also mistakenly redacted to obscure a child’s face. The child was Jackson’s son, with images “readily available” from commercial photo archives.

There is only one “unequivocal takeaway” from this latest episode, said CNN. The Trump administration’s efforts to “quell the storm have whipped up a new vortex of political energy” that could potentially harm the president.

The most recent release has exposed the “stunning revelation that there are 1,200 people identified as victims or their relatives”, with “materials from dozens of hard drives, old CDs and computers”. Though there is nothing to suggest any direct wrongdoing on Trump’s part, it fuels the “ever-deepening political storm” surrounding him.

There are “several possibilities” explaining the administration’s actions. The “sheer size” of the data could be posing “genuine issues” for officials. The department “may lack the competence” to do such a vast job “comprehensively and quickly”, following “purges of career officials by Trump’s aides”. Lastly, critics of the president “would not be surprised” if the DoJ was trying to brazenly “protect” Trump. Whatever the reason, this will cause a significant “headache” for him.

If Trump has tried to “deflect attention” away from himself, he “may have succeeded”, as the latest tranche of documents “shifted the spotlight” on to former Democrat president Bill Clinton, said the Financial Times. After eventually signing the legislation to release the files, Trump has recognised the “political benefit” of using the files to “tarnish the reputation of a prominent Democrat” and “one of his great ideological foes”.

This speaks to how the files have become a “weapon in America’s escalating ideological war”. On the left, politicians are employing the new information to “discredit” Trump, while the president and his administration are using them to “attack his adversaries”. The conflict continues, as the battles over the files “underscore the claims of Democrats and others that Trump is using the DoJ to pursue his political opponents”: a charge that Trump has “repeatedly levelled at the Biden administration”.

What next?

Representatives Ro Khanna (Democrat) and Thomas Massie (Republican) are seeking to find Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress, for not releasing more documents related to Epstein. Both were involved in the original drafting of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and Khanna now wants to see the “60-count federal indictment of Epstein from 2007 and the accompanying prosecution memo”, said The Washington Post.

In a statement, the justice department said that materials “will continue being reviewed and redacted” in line with legal requirements, exercising an “abundance of caution as we receive additional information”.

The US president has the absolute right to grant pardons. But Donald Trump’s spree of pardons for loyalists and business allies has raised not only political eyebrows but also legal questions about abuse of power.

Since he began his second term in January, Trump “has begun to expand the pardon power both in nature and in scale”, said Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker. He has issued nearly 2,000 presidential pardons and commutations, compared to 238 in his first term.

On his very first day back in the White House, Trump pardoned hundreds of people charged with and convicted of storming the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Last month, he pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and dozens of others accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election. “More than any previous president,” Trump has “systematically deployed” pardons to “reward loyalists” and reassure “associates that they can violate the law with impunity”, said Thomas B. Edsall in The New York Times.

‘Rewarding partisan allies’

Over the past decade, the presidential pardon power has been subject to “grotesque abuses”, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. In his first term, Trump pardoned “lackeys and war criminals”, then Joe Biden “issued blanket and pre-emptive pardons for his family”, and now Trump has “outdone” himself, pardoning “a rogue’s gallery of donors, partisan allies and people with business ties to him or his family”.

Take the recent pardoning of Changpeng Zhao. The crypto billionaire had allowed his Binance platform to be used by terrorists and criminal organisations and had pled guilty to money laundering. Yet he had “also worked assiduously to boost the Trump family’s crypto business, and it certainly appears that he got a pardon in exchange for services rendered”.

Trump is using his pardon power as “part of his effort to put the country on an authoritarian path”, Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University, told The New York Times. “He is rewarding his partisan allies”, instead of using the power “even-handedly, with a regular process that is available to all”.

‘Separate tier of justice’

It might be “quaint these days” to reference America’s founding fathers but, when they granted unlimited pardon power, “they anticipated at least a modicum of presidential restraint”, said The Wall Street Journal. As such, there are no provisions in the US Constitution to rein in a president who embarks on a pardoning spree.

Trump could still overreach. If, for example, he were to pardon his former friend Ghislaine Maxwell (currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors), it would highlight – in a much more public way – the “separate tier of justice” he has built “for his allies and investors”, said Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker.

Congress can’t remove the presidential power of pardon without changing the Constitution, but it could seek to “circumscribe” it “around a few basic principles”, said Bloomberg. These could include barring self-pardons and pardons given “in exchange for anything of value”. And pardons “issued in conjunction with a case involving presidents or their family members should trigger the release of all relevant investigative materials to Congress, to ensure greater public transparency”.

Seeking to impose these principles “will surely invite legal challenges”. But it would be difficult “to oppose them on the merits. More to the point: doing nothing would be unpardonable.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly flirted with the idea that he could run for a third term in 2028. “There are methods which you could do it,” the president said in an interview with NBC News earlier in the year. He declined to elaborate further, but last month, during his Asia tour, he told reporters it was “too bad” he was not allowed to seek a third term, adding cryptically: "We'll see what happens”.

While mainstream Republican politicians have generally shied away from the idea of a third Trump term, several leading Maga figures have jumped on the bandwagon. Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist turned influential podcaster, insisted: “Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there is a plan.”

What does the constitution say?

The original text does not impose any limits on how long a president can remain in office, but the notion that the presidency should be limited to two terms dates back to the Founding Fathers. George Washington, the first US president, set the pattern by stepping aside after two terms despite clear popular support for him to continue to serve. Thomas Jefferson, who saw “little distinction between a long-serving executive in an elective position and a hereditary monarch”, followed suit, said political scientist and term-limit scholar Michael J. Korzi, so cementing the tradition.

Since 1951, however, presidents have been limited to two terms by the 22nd amendment of the constitution, which states: “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice”.

Why was the amendment adopted?

Successive presidents continued to observe the two-term convention until Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to a third term in 1940 and had recently begun a fourth when he died in office in 1945.

When Congress convened for its 1947 session, imposing a constitutional term limit was high on the agenda. The debate was driven by the same “major concern” that motivated Jefferson: “to prevent a president from becoming a king”, said Mark Satta, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law, Wayne State University, on The Conversation. But the then-recent experience of the Second World War, which had made Americans acutely aware of the dangers of allowing a leader to concentrate their power over a long period, had turned the issue into a priority. One representative said that a presidential term limit would assure the electorate that “we shall never have a dictator in this land”.

Could it be changed?

Not without an extraordinary legislative effort. Amending the constitution would need the approval of two-thirds of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, followed by ratification by at least three-quarters of state legislatures. It is almost impossible to imagine a plan to scrap the two-term limit getting the necessary levels of support, particularly to facilitate a president as divisive as Trump.

That has left Trump supporters pinning their hopes on what they see as a loophole. Under the constitution, the vice-president automatically accedes to the top job in the event an incumbent president dies, resigns or becomes incapacitated.

Some have suggested that Trump could join the 2028 election ticket as the running partner to a presidential candidate, who would then immediately resign after being sworn in. Trump would then automatically step into the role of president.

Legal experts dispute this argument, however. Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told the BBC that the 12th amendment, which states “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States”, closed off that technicality. “I don’t think there’s any ‘one weird trick’ to getting around presidential term limits,” he said.

Would Trump likely try?

If the Supreme Court ruled that the wording of the 12th amendment did not preclude a two-time president serving as vice president, Trump could, in theory, “be president for life”, said Paul Gowder, Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, on FactCheck.org. It would just be a case of “finding people to occupy the top of the ticket”.

But Trump has downplayed the idea of acceding to the presidency by the back door, saying: “I think people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute. It wouldn't be right”.

A more likely avenue for Trump to retain his power and influence – if not legally his office and title as president – would be to get one of his family members to get elected in their own name, “and then serve as a figurehead president while Mr Trump makes the key decisions”, said The Telegraph.

The US government shutdown reached its 36th day yesterday, making it officially the longest in the nation’s history – and there’s no end in sight.

There have been 15 federal shutdowns – “the product of partisan standoffs” over government spending – since 1981, and these episodes have “become a recurring feature of US politics”, said Bloomberg.

Why do shutdowns happen?

The federal government budget is outlined over 12 appropriations bills, each covering a broad area, such as defence or agriculture. These are normally passed each year by Congress and then signed by the president. If all 12 bills aren’t adopted by October, the start of the US fiscal year, then short-term extensions of the existing funding arrangements are passed to minimise disruption. But if Congress refuses to agree to these extensions, that quickly leaves the government with a funding shortfall.

This year, at the end of September, Congress failed to pass a stopgap for the new fiscal year, triggering the latest shutdown. The stand-off centres around Covid-era healthcare subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year. Democratic lawmakers say millions will be left struggling to afford healthcare if they are not extended. Republicans have maintained that they will not discuss the subsidies until government is reopened.

What effect is it having?

Around 750,000 federal employees have been furloughed without pay, with almost as many continuing to work without receiving any money. Many are seeking temporary jobs, while others have been forced to resort to using food banks.

The shutdown is also affecting the 42 million Americans who receive benefits through Snap, a federal programme that provides food stamps to low-income families. Although the government said it will use an emergency fund to cover around half of the normal benefits, payments for November have already been delayed for millions. A programme that helps millions of low-income households with energy bills is “also taking a hit”, and centres for pre-school children have been cut off from federal funds, said Sky News.

Flight delays are also “piling up” due to shortages of federally employed air traffic controllers and security officers. More than 3.2 million passengers have had flights delayed or cancelled since the shutdown began, according to Airlines for America.

When will it end?

“Despite the punishing toll of federal closures on the country”, an imminent agreement remains unlikely, said The Associated Press. A string of Democrat victories in state elections on Tuesday – which Donald Trump blamed partly on the shutdown – has been seen by many Democrats as a “validation of their strategy” of holding out for a deal.

A “small bipartisan group of rank-and-file senators” are “in conversation” to try to end the shutdown, said ABC News, but a reopening of government is unlikely before the week of 17 November, say Democrat leaders in the House, according to Politico.

As President Donald Trump pushes Texas Republicans to adopt a controversial new redistricting plan to pad their congressional majority by up to five seats, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has begun to float a similar scheme of his own. He's considering redrawing his state's legislative districts to further benefit Democrats; as Newsom said on X, "two can play that game."

Newsom, who has spent much of the second Trump administration pitching himself as a party leader for Democrats, justified his California redistricting plan as necessary to reporters on Wednesday. The "existential threat of what Donald Trump and some of these Republican states are trying to do" necessitates equally drastic measures from liberals, Newsom said, framing himself and his plan as at the forefront of the Democrats' growing opposition to this White House.

While Newsom's blue gerrymandering plan has excited some in the party looking for a more aggressive response to the Trump administration, not all Democrats are eager to delve into the messy business of redistricting. As befits a plan as audacious and disruptive as the one Newsom has proposed, opinions vary.

'Not going to fight with one hand tied behind my back'

Democratic supporters of blue-state gerrymandering deem it an "essential offensive posture" that could "make the difference in reclaiming the House" next year, The Texas Tribune said. The party needs to "fight fire with fire," said one Democrat to the outlet. "I'm not going to fight with one hand tied behind my back," said another, adding that "we shouldn't be so nice" if Texas' redistricting moves forward. Voters are "looking for a fight from the Democratic Party," said former Biden administration official Neera Tanden to Politico. Newsom's "response to Texas is the kind of thing I think they are looking for."

For some Texas Democrats, there is even a hope that efforts to counter their state's potential redistricting with similar measures in blue states might "dissuade Republicans from going ahead with the plan" altogether, said the Tribune. The notion of "lowering themselves to Trump's level" has "some Democrats feeling uneasy," said Ja'han Jones at MSNBC. The "counterpoint" to that, though, is that no matter how "concerned about the civil rights implications of California's responsive gerrymander" one may be, the "implications of sitting idly as Texas implements its own are arguably worse."

Redrawing California's electoral maps to "squeeze between five and seven more Democratic seats" for the party is a "brazen political gamble," said Punchbowl News. It's also "exactly the kind of ploy that the Democratic Party base has been demanding," even though it will be "extremely hard to pull off."

'Legitimizing the race to the bottom'

Newsom's plan is "all hat and no cattle," said the Los Angeles Times, using a Texas expression. To successfully redraw California's congressional districts, Newsom would have to break the state's 2010 law that left redistricting to a bipartisan commission, leading to an "inevitable lawsuit" in which he'd "prevail with a sympathetic ruling from the California Supreme Court." Alternately, Newsom could put the redistricting question back to voters "through a new constitutional amendment, in a hurried-up special election ahead of the 2026 midterms."

Ultimately, there is "no downside" for Newsom to try either method, said redistricting expert Paul Mitchell to the Sacramento Bee. Even if both fail, "maps that are really pretty good for Dems are still in place." But by "legitimizing the race to the bottom of gerrymandering, Democrats will ultimately lose," said California Assemblymember Alex Lee (D) at Politico. The "optics" of politicians retaking power formerly delegated to a non-partisan panel are "horrendous and indefensible," said an unnamed Democratic consultant to the outlet. "That's a crazy hill to die on."

As an "ambitious governor" who is ostensibly arguing that the state's constitutionally enshrined redistricting commission "ought to be ignored," Newsom risks "violating his oath," said the National Review. Doing so offers "ample justification for impeachment and removal from office."

Newsom's "inclination to want to retaliate" is understandable in the "national context," said Pomona College Politics Professor Sara Sadhwani to the San Francisco Chronicle. But the people of California have "made it clear at the ballot that the governor does not have that power."

The US Congress has passed Donald Trump's tax and spending legislation after a tense session in Capitol Hill.

The president said his so-called "big, beautiful bill" would "turn this country into a rocket ship" but critics say it will leave millions without health coverage and benefit the wealthy at the cost of those on lower incomes.

How did it get passed?

Following a "gruelling" session yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 218 to 214 after it was approved in the Senate on Tuesday with a tie-breaker vote from Vice President J.D. Vance, said the BBC.

The advancement of the sprawling bill has not been easy, and it was passed only after "intense negotiations" and a "marathon voting session" on amendments, said Al Jazeera.

But a triumphant Trump is expected to sign it into law at a ceremony later today, with fighter jets poised to fly over the White House as he puts pen to paper.

What's in it?

It's a "smorgasbord of policy", said Vox, and focuses mainly on tax cuts, healthcare coverage, security measures and reductions in benefits to clean energy programmes.

During his first term, Trump signed legislation that lowered taxes for corporations and for individuals across most income brackets. Significant parts of that law are set to expire in December, but the new bill aims to make those tax cuts permanent. It also ushers in new tax cuts and expands the child tax credit, benefiting 40 million families.

Overall, the legislation contains about $4.5 trillion (£3.2 trillion) in tax cuts, and to help finance them there will be new restrictions and requirements for Medicaid, the healthcare programme relied upon by millions of disabled and low-income Americans. There will also be cuts to food programmes.

The bill sets aside about $350 billion (£256 billion) for Trump's border and national security plans, including $46 billion (£33 billion) for the US-Mexico border wall. And a tax break for people who buy new or used electric vehicles will now expire in September this year, instead of at the end of 2032 under the current law introduced by Joe Biden.

What difference will it make?

"For decades", said The Guardian, Republicans have said that the US would be "better off if taxes were low", and programmes to help those on low incomes were "harder to access". Now the country will "find out what it's like to live under that sort of system".

Wealthier taxpayers are expected to gain more from this bill than lower-income Americans, said Yale University's Budget Lab, which estimated that people in the lowest income bracket will see their incomes drop by 2.5%, mostly due to the changes to health and food programmes. The highest earners are expected to see their incomes rise by 2.4%.

According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the bill could add $3.3 trillion (£2.4 trillion) to federal deficits over the next 10 years. The US government currently owes its lenders $36.2 trillion (£26.5 trillion). The CBO says the bill will leave millions without health coverage but the White House disputes this.

"Strategically", the bill is a "mammoth effort to consolidate the president's policy agenda and secure his legacy", said Sky News, but it has been "slammed" by "hawkish" Republicans and Trump's sometime backer Elon Musk because of its "boosts to government borrowing", said the Financial Times.

President Donald Trump's decision to attack Iran has renewed a long-running debate about war powers. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the authority to declare war. But presidents routinely wage war anyway, citing their role as commander-in-chief. Where does the power really reside?

Trump "faces bipartisan pushback" for authorizing the attack on Iran without congressional input, said ABC News. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced a resolution to restrain Trump from acting, saying there was "no imminent threat" to the U.S. that would justify attacking Iran without congressional approval. But Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Trump has all the authority he needs. Congress "can't be the commander-in-chief," he said.

Trump's decision to act unilaterally "comes at a uniquely volatile moment" both in America and around the world, said The Associated Press. The War Powers Act, a 1973 law, says the president should consult with Congress in "every possible instance" before authorizing an attack. But it has been "habitual practice" for presidents to "minimally" meet the requirements, said Scott Anderson of the Brookings Institution. The law is "so vague and open-ended" that it is difficult to enforce.

What did the commentators say?

Congress has "tried and failed" for two decades to have a meaningful voice in war-making decisions, said Paul Kane at The Washington Post. Presidents of both parties have sent American forces into battle "without any real constraint from Capitol Hill." Congress passed its last "use-of-force" authorization in 2002. Since then, presidents of both parties have ordered attacks on Islamic State forces in Syria and elsewhere. Before that, though, the legislative branch approved six different resolutions to cover every theater the United States fought in during World War II. The change demonstrates Congress' "slow and steady slide into irrelevance."

"Bypassing Congress weakens American democracy," said Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic. Earlier congressional debates "helped educate lawmakers and the public" about arguments for and against war and "left a record of who made claims that later proved incorrect." The process allowed citizens to lobby Congress, and later to "hold members of Congress accountable for their choices." Skipping that process "isn't merely anathema to a self-governing republic; it is dangerous."

What next?

Democrats in the Senate are still trying to "forge ahead" with a war powers vote, said The New York Times. But the resolution "stands little chance of approval" in the GOP-controlled Congress, and the shaky ceasefire between Israel and Iran may mean the moment for legislative action has passed. If the war really is over, the "resolution becomes a moot point," said Massie.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday he believes the War Powers Act is unconstitutional. "Many respected constitutional experts" say the law violates the president's constitutional authority as commander-in-chief, said The Hill. "I think that's right," Johnson said. Trump's decision to attack Iran's nuclear sites played out "as the framers of the Constitution intended."

It's being called President Donald Trump's "revenge tax." The GOP budget bill currently stuck in the Senate would create a new levy of up to 20% for some foreign companies operating in the U.S., a move critics say would deter foreign investment at a critical moment in American economic history.

Why is the provision called a "revenge" tax? Because it would be used to "punish companies based in countries that try to collect new taxes from American firms," said The New York Times. That includes nations that levy a 15% "global minimum tax" under an international agreement the Biden administration helped broker in 2021, as well as countries that tax digital services provided by U.S. tech companies. But foreign companies might decide not to put their money into America if it means they might run afoul of the revenge tax. That "directly contradicts the president's investment vision" of bringing jobs and manufacturing back to America, said Jonathan Samford, the CEO of the Global Business Alliance. Business lobbyists are in a "scramble" to kill the tax, said the Times.

What did the commentators say?

The purpose of the tax is to "intimidate, not to raise revenue," said The Economist. The effects would be counterproductive. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a watchdog group, found that the tax would actually cut into government revenues by "scaring off foreign investors and therefore lowering American asset prices." And it sends a signal. The Trump administration's "protectionist logic" does not just apply to goods and services provided by other countries but also to "capital flows." That is dangerous territory for a president who has "already made investing in America a riskier bet."

Foreign countries have been "seeking ways to pilfer our tax base" for years, said Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kan.) at Bloomberg Tax. The global minimum tax would "erode our tax base" while giving other countries the "ability to target and tax U.S.-owned companies." Taxing countries that take aim at U.S. companies "isn't 'revenge,'" but it does allow the federal government to "advocate for U.S. companies and workers."

Escaping the revenge tax "is simple," said The Wall Street Journal editorial board. If foreign governments do not like how the tax might affect their businesses and investors, they can "stop doing these things" that trigger its implementation. That would include "scrapping" the digital services tax and reforming the global minimum tax to exclude corporate revenue taxed by the United States. Foreign governments "know exactly what to do to spare themselves."

What next?

The budget measure would give the Trump administration new taxing authority just as "courts are already debating the legality of the sweeping tariffs" the White House has imposed on global trading, said MarketWatch. Some analysts say the logic of mutually assured destruction is at play. The hope behind creating a revenge tax is that it "will never be applied," said Morgan Stanley credit strategist Michael Zezas. But that hope may not be sound — after all, the White House, said MarketWatch, has already "proved willing to risk disrupting facets of the globalized economy."

Nestled deep within Republicans' massive budget reconciliation bill, unveiled this week, is a surprising measure advocates say is necessary to ensure American dominance in the growing field of artificial intelligence. The bill is designed to capitalize on the GOP's congressional majorities with provisions aimed at scaling back Medicaid and other conservative policy priorities. But it would also enact a full moratorium on any state-level AI regulation for the 10 years following the bill's enactment.

Supporters argue the measure aligns with the Trump administration's focus on American AI leadership. However, critics contend that the proposed legislation would allow a predatory tech industry to run roughshod over local efforts to grapple with the challenges of the still-developing field.

What did the commentators say?

The focus on state-level AI laws comes as AI regulation at the federal level "remains in limbo," The Hill said, leaving state legislatures to consider "nearly 700 AI bills" last year alone. "It's very difficult to imagine us figuring out how to comply with 50 different sets of regulation," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last week.

That patchwork of local legislation, Altman insisted, would "slow us down at a time when I don't think it's in anyone's interest for us to slow down." A "web of inconsistent laws" will "fragment national policy, delay innovation" and "create legal and technical barriers to scaling AI systems across state lines," said Center for Data Innovation director Daniel Castro.

But by establishing the federal government as the "sole regulator for U.S. tech firms in a booming industry," critics say, the bill represents a "giveaway" to an industry that will "enable harmful and discriminatory uses of the emerging technology," said The Washington Post. The push for reduced local regulatory authority "also stands in contrast to Republicans' advocacy of states' rights in education and abortion policies."

The language of the proposed legislation is "broad enough to cover relatively new generative AI tools," said Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media, while still applying to "technology that has existed for much longer." The result will be that it will become "impossible to enforce" laws designed to "protect people from and inform them about AI systems." Ten years of deregulation "isn't a path forward," said AI researcher Gary Marcus in an open letter signed by multiple state lawmakers. "It's an abdication of responsibility." The measure would be "deeply problematic under any circumstance," Marcus said, but it's "especially dangerous" given the way AI is already disrupting health, education, employment and other fields.

States have "quietly become the front line" in the tech regulation effort, said NYU Center on Technology policy director Scott Brennen and NYU Center for Social Media & Politics executive director Zeve Sanderson at the Post. Congress, meanwhile, has "puttered, backtracked and ultimately produced little AI regulation" and will "undermine the only concerted legislative effort aimed at balancing AI's myriad risks and benefits" without offering a solution of its own.

What next?

A state-level push for AI regulation may ultimately "force Washington to move," said the Financial Times — particularly as "some members of the MAGA crowd support a more interventionist approach." When even "anti-regulation evangelist" Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who cosponsored the bipartisan Take It Down Act to address AI-generated sexual imagery, has accepted the "necessity to act in certain cases," some form of AI regulation will likely be inevitable. This will lead to "strange alliances and unpredictable zigzags along the way."

As part of a reconciliation bill, the proposed limits on AI regulations cannot be filibustered, which could "ease their path to passage" in the broader legislation, said the Post. If the entire bill passes, the logic of including AI regulation in a bill ostensibly restricted to budgetary issues will "face scrutiny from the Senate parliamentarian."

It has been nearly impossible to go to an airport in the past few years without seeing signs about Real IDs. The updated identification card, required at the behest of Congress, has long been in the news, as the deadline to get one has approached (and been continuously pushed back). But the time has finally come, and anyone looking to board a plane will have to have a Real ID to do so as of this week. Some Americans may already be Real ID compliant, even if they aren't aware.

What is a Real ID?

It is a key part of the Real ID Act of 2005. Passed by Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the act "establishes minimum security standards for license issuance and production," according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The act also stops certain federal agencies from accepting certain forms of identification, such as a state driver's license or state identification card, because they don't meet these specific requirements.

Per the DHS, people without a Real ID-compliant form of identification cannot access certain federal facilities and military bases or enter nuclear power plants. The most pressing restriction for most Americans, though, is that people without a Real ID cannot board a commercial flight. Once the law goes into effect, a driver's license or state identification card without a Real ID seal will not be accepted at any airport security checkpoints.

It is unclear what exactly will occur if someone without a Real ID attempts to pass through security. But passengers who "present a state-issued identification that is not REAL ID compliant and who do not have another acceptable alternative (e.g., a passport) can expect to face delays, additional screening and the possibility of not being permitted," said the DHS.

Why is the Real ID program being implemented?

Following Sept. 11, the 9/11 Commission was established to investigate the causes of the attacks. In its official report, one of the commission's recommendations was to establish uniform federal standards for all forms of identification documents — particularly those involved in air travel.

"The federal government should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification, such as driver's licenses," the report said. "At many entry points to vulnerable facilities, including gates for boarding aircraft, sources of identification are the last opportunity to ensure that people are who they say they are and to check whether they are terrorists."

As a result, if someone wants to "use a state-issued ID for plane travel, you'll need to have an enhanced driver's license, an enhanced ID card or another type of state ID that is compliant with the federal Real ID Act," said Axios. However, there are some exceptions, as "passports, green cards, military IDs and certain other documents also will be accepted for air travel between U.S. states," meaning people without Real IDs will still be able to board planes if they have one of these.

How long do you have to get a Real ID?

Many people already have one, as the DHS reports that "81% of travelers at TSA checkpoints present an acceptable identification using a state-issued Real ID." Otherwise, the deadline to be Real ID compliant is May 7, 2025; on that day, travelers "must be Real ID compliant to board domestic flights and access certain federal facilities," said the DHS. This marks the final chapter in a series of setbacks for Real ID deadlines, largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic disrupting international travel. In 2022, the DHS pushed the deadline back from May 7, 2023, to the current date of May 7, 2025.

But again, experts say a Real ID is not technically necessary if you have a passport. According to Passport Health, a company that provides travel medicine and immunizations, "an official U.S. passport will get you through airport security and can be used in place of a Real ID. If you are only traveling domestically, you can use a Real ID or passport." This has been backed up by the DHS itself, which states, "The card, itself, must be Real ID compliant unless the resident is using an alternative acceptable document such as a passport."

Why is the Real ID program controversial?

It is largely based on the purported invasion of privacy. Real IDs will "facilitate the tracking of data on individuals and bring government into the very center of every citizen's life," said the American Civil Liberties Union. It will "definitively turn driver's licenses into a form of national identity documents," which will have a "tremendously destructive impact on privacy."

The debate about the Real ID program has been raging almost since Congress put pen to paper. The bill faced opposition from "hundreds of civil liberties groups, immigrant support groups, and government associations," said a 2005 Wired article, as "critics say it would produce a de facto national ID card, cost states millions of dollars and punish undocumented immigrants."

Despite some opposition, it is unlikely that the Real ID Act is going to go away, with DHS saying the program has "significantly improved the reliability and accuracy of state-issued driver's licenses and identification cards." The agency will "implement innovations to make the process more efficient," Former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in 2023, but current Secretary Kristi Noem has spoken little on Real IDs. She did, however, say that the new IDs will "make identification harder to forge, thwarting criminals and terrorists," on X.

Despite President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs causing economic calamity and potential harm to millions of Americans, his congressional backers remain in the White House's corner. But some Republican lawmakers are beginning to cautiously speak out.

What did the commentators say?

Republican lawmakers have expressed "varying degrees of shock and alarm" at the "scale" of Trump's sweeping global tariffs, The Hill said. Many of Trump's latest tariffs have been "met with skepticism from even his strongest allies on Capitol Hill," including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Worried about a "brutal week ahead," a "growing number" of Republican lawmakers are joining bills designed to "rebuke Trump's tariff strategy," said Politico. There is a brewing "backlash" among a "handful of Republicans in Congress, former Trump administration officials, conservative activists and other prominent supporters," said USA Today.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a "right-wing firebrand from a deep red state," has been "raking in surprising praise from his Democratic colleagues" for pushing back on Trump's apparent "overreach" into Congress' constitutionally allotted power of the purse, The Washington Post said. Nascent congressional efforts to curtail Trump's budgetary infringement are, meanwhile, a "win-win situation" for Democrats, said James Downie at MSNBC. If Republicans block those bills, Democrats can "hang those votes around GOP necks next fall." Conversely, if those votes "make GOP defections from Trump even a little regular," it threatens the narrow GOP majority's ability to govern entirely.

Already "unpopular with the American public in general," Trump's tariffs are "even more unpopular" with the 2024 voters who helped secure his electoral victory, said Vox. A "stark divide is emerging" between Trump's "core base" of MAGA voters and the "less ideological, more diverse (albeit smaller) group of Republican voters" who propelled Trump into office but don't consider themselves "MAGA-aligned." That divide has expanded to include the GOP's funding mechanism, as well: "I don't know if I would be this worried about what will happen to the economy if Bernie f---ing Sanders were president," said one "big Trump and Republican Party donor" to Rolling Stone. But, the donor said, "I am not willing to go public yet."

What next?

For many Republicans, Trump's tariffs are a "risk like no other," said The New York Times. If the "economic fallout" from these market-roiling measures is "bad enough," leading to previously safe red states looking "plausibly competitive" ahead of the midterms, GOP support for Trump "could be in jeopardy." Trump's tariffs are like a "long ball deep into the end zone," said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on his "Verdict" podcast this week. If the lasting impact is a "bad recession," then the 2026 midterms "in all likelihood politically, would be a bloodbath" for Republicans.

For now, however, GOP defections from Trump's tariff agenda are relatively rare. "If Republican members start drifting away from supporting President Trump," said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) to Politico, "everybody gets weaker." House Republicans are "going to give" Trump the "space necessary to do it," said Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to reporters. "We'll see how it all develops."

As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue to sideline Congress and the courts in remaking American government, some believe we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis. One camp argues the moment of reckoning has already arrived.

The constitutional crisis "is here," said Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic. A crisis sometimes arrives "revealing itself gradually," but Trump and Musk's unprecedented actions have made the stakes of this moment "dramatically" clear. Another camp is hedging, even while acknowledging the challenges. America is on "the cusp" of a constitutional crisis, said Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) Sunday on Meet the Press. The Trump administration's decision to block Congress' spending directives is "so clearly illegal," he said.

There is "no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis," said The New York Times. But such a moment generally occurs as the "product of presidential defiance of laws and judicial rulings." Under that standard, the answer to the question is clear to legal scholars. "We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now," said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

A 'three-alarm fire' for the Constitution

Trump is "trying to shove aside the other two branches of government," said The Washington Post. Presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan made "sweeping changes to government and society." But they mostly colored inside the lines even as they tested the boundaries, experts say. Presidents "don't just dispense with Congress or ignore laws that are on the books," said Georgia State University law professor Michael Anthony Kreis. If the Trump administration decides to ignore court rulings blocking the president's orders, that amounts to a "three-alarm fire," said Loyola Law School's Jessica Levinson.

If there is a constitutional crisis, "it's being caused by these judges" blocking Trump's orders, Scott Jennings said on CNN. It isn't the job of the courts to "tell us how to spend the money. They're not here to set broad federal policy," he added. If Trump believes that the courts are usurping his presidential authority, "he should absolutely defy" their decisions.

Seeking 'legitimate executive power'

The Trump administration has set the stage for that kind of defiance. The courts "aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power," said Vice President J.D. Vance on social media. But federal judges have traditionally determined "what counts as the 'executive's legitimate power,'" said Andrew Prokop at Vox. If their rulings are disregarded by the White House, "we'll be embroiled in a very serious constitutional crisis."

That may be the point. Vance "wants a constitutional crisis," said Kim Wehle at The Bulwark. The courts are the "last bulwark against Trump's assaults on the rule of law and constitutional order." Defy their rulings, and Trump will have fallen short of his oath of office to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." That's the crisis. "When a president fails to follow the law," Wehle said, "he is failing in that responsibility."

Elon Musk isn't just President Donald Trump's biggest financial backer and sidekick in the new administration. He's now putting his stamp on Trump's efforts to completely upend the U.S. government.

The world's richest man is "sweeping through Washington and answering to nobody," said MSNBC. Three recent developments reveal the breadth and depth of his power. Last week, Musk was reportedly behind a recent "buyout" email offer to millions of federal workers. On Monday, he announced the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which disburses American foreign aid around the world. And his team at the Department of Government Efficiency has been given access to the Treasury Department's payment system, potentially allowing him to squash funding for congressionally-approved programs that Trump doesn't like. The challenge is that Musk is a novice with "no experience with or demonstrable understanding of the government of the most powerful country in the world," said MSNBC.

'Never seen anything like this'

Musk is moving with "lightning speed to exert control over the government," said The Wall Street Journal. His moves are part of an effort to "upend the federal government agency by agency." His means of doing so are unorthodox and murky, as his operation is "run by individuals with ties to the tech sector who haven't been confirmed by the Senate" and who might have financial conflicts of interest in gutting government agencies. Musk's efforts have stunned even longtime veterans of government. "I've never seen anything like this before," said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer, to the Journal.

His efforts may cross legal lines. Musk's announcement of a USAID shutdown defies the "constitutional power of Congress to determine how money is spent," said NBC News. That is because the agency was created by an act of Congress, which also approved its roughly $40 billion budget. Federal law says the executive branch "generally cannot withhold funds" that Congress has approved. Because of that, it's unclear how Musk — or the White House — can take such unilateral action. The billionaire "did not say what legal authority" lets him or the White House do so, said NBC News.

Attacking 'massive unelected bureaucracy'

Americans "don't know the full extent of what Elon Musk is doing" as he entrenches himself in government operations, said Zachary B. Wolf at CNN. Musk said on X that he is moving to liberate Americans from the "massive unelected bureaucracy!" But Wolf said it's unclear what authority Musk, also unelected, has to make such sweeping changes. "Has he taken an oath, like the federal workers he apparently has plans to fire, to uphold the Constitution?"

Musk may be powerful, but he's not popular. One recent poll shows his "image deteriorating in recent months," said The Washington Post. Just 36% of Americans have a favorable opinion of him, down from 41% a month previously. American voters apparently "don't love the idea of the world's richest man throwing his weight around." Musk has the support of the one American who matters, though. "I think Elon is doing a good job," said Trump on Sunday night.

Congress is locked in a contentious funding battle with an overzealous president who has spent his first weeks in office working to make good on a campaign promise to "challenge the Impoundment Control Act in court, and if necessary, get Congress to overturn it," as he stated in a 2023 campaign video. Given this ongoing fight and its potential implications, impoundment is poised to remain in the spotlight in the coming months.

What are 'deferrals' and 'recessions'?

The year was 1974; Congress had a Richard Nixon problem. The White House was refusing to release funds the legislative branch had already allocated to an Environmental Protection Agency program that Nixon spurned. The president's impounding of congressionally approved money set up a separation of powers showdown that made its way to the United States Supreme Court, as lawmakers grappled with the implications of an executive branch undercutting their "power of the purse."

In response to Nixon's pernicious withholding, Congress in 1975 passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, a sweeping law that establishes the strict rules for if and how a president can prevent congressional funds from being dispersed.

As its name implies, impoundment is, fundamentally, when a president chooses to "withhold or delay the spending of funds that Congress has appropriated for the federal government to disburse," The New York Times said. While holding back some funds is "routine" in cases where an objective can be achieved with less money, the practice "becomes contentious" when a president withholds money from a program "because he objects" to the program.

But contentious need not mean impossible. The Impoundment Control Act lays out a very specific set of criteria a president must follow in order to "reduce, delay or eliminate funding in an account," the House Budget Committee Democratic Caucus said. Broadly, this happens in two ways: "deferrals" create a "temporary delay in spending certain funds with the intent to spend them before their expiration," said the Bipartisan Policy Center.

"Recessions," on the other hand, are a "formal request" from the White House to Congress to "cancel certain budget authority, meant to address differences in policy positions between the executive and legislative branches." In both cases, the president must not only notify Congress of the exact amount, reasons for and potential impact of the decision to withhold funds, but if certain conditions are not met within a specified timeframe, the impounded funds once again are set for dispersion as originally intended.

Why does this matter for the future?

While the Impoundment Control Act is a powerful governmental rule, it would be "contrary to legal precedent — and to the Constitution" to say that it is what prevents presidents from impounding congressional funds, said the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Rather, the constitutionally prescribed "power of the purse" afforded to Congress "precludes the President from unilaterally deciding not to spend money that Congress has provided."

The Impoundment Control Act was intended to "create a new restriction to impoundment" and instead provides a "specified, fast-track legislative process" for intra-governmental funding changes. The Impoundment Control Act's role in clarifying "existing restrictions" has been "backed up by the courts," Forbes said.

That said, the Supreme Court has not "evaluated the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act's deferral and recession provisions" said Mark Thomas at the Yale Journal on Regulation, although there are "strong indications that the Court would uphold them." The fight over impoundment ultimately raises a "fundamental question about the structure of our government," said Georgetown University Law professor Steve Vladeck at his One First newsletter. If a president has free reign to impound funds without limit or reason, then "there's not much point to having a legislature."

Confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees began this week. It won't be easy sledding for some of the candidates to lead America's government agencies.

Pete Hegseth, Trump's choice to lead the Defense Department, was first in dock on Tuesday morning. He told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that his focus would be on "warfighting and lethality," said CNN. His mission at the Pentagon will be to "bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense," he told the committee. But Hegseth is beset by questions regarding his past alcohol use, alleged mismanagement of nonprofit organizations and sexual assault allegations. Hegseth is not "qualified to meet the overwhelming demands of this job," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.).

Just a "small handful" of Trump's Cabinet choices are on track for a quick confirmation, said Politico. The problems aren't just political opposition. Trump and his allies want a large number of nominees "confirmed on Day One," but paperwork delays — FBI background checks, financial disclosures and other documents — are slowing down the process. Those issues are "sparking tensions" between Senate Republicans and Trump's team. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said the nominees should be approved quickly, but the "Senate has a role: advise and consent."

How will Democrats handle the confirmation hearings?

Senate Democrats will use their question time during the hearings to "rough up some of the nominees on their qualifications," Philip Elliot said at Time. Hegseth isn't the only nominee who will face tough opposition: Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's choice for director of national intelligence, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the pick for top health official, will both face heavy skepticism. Democrats don't expect to be able to "derail" all of Trump's nominees, Elliot said, but "do have reasonable expectations that they could ding a few" enough that the new president rethinks his choices.

But Trump's nominees have "good chances of winning confirmation" despite that opposition, said The Hill. Republicans, after all, have a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Cabinet nominees would have to lose the support of at least four GOP senators to be defeated, and that seems unlikely to happen. Those senators are inclined to "let the president have his team, absent some extraordinary circumstances," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).

Who will be quickly confirmed?

Thune is trying to "game out" which nominees he can help get confirmed and ready to go on Trump's first day in office, Politico said. Nominations for "national security space are awfully important," he said. That group includes Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Trump's pick for secretary of state, as well as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the choice to be ambassador to the United Nations. Those Day One confirmations are a "top priority," said Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.).

But the delays are mounting. A confirmation hearing for Doug Collins, Trump's pick to run the Veterans Affairs, was supposed to start on Tuesday, said Military Times. It was instead delayed to Jan. 21 because of "missing background paperwork." And Gabbard's nomination for DNI is "in limbo" because senators are still waiting on the necessary documents, said The Washington Examiner. For senators voting on the nominations, "it's critical that you have these documents," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

Republicans are poised to take control of the House of Representatives this month by the narrowest seat margin in nearly 100 years, with a 220-215 majority that will be thinned out even further in the coming weeks as two members take roles in the Trump administration. And if the drama on the floor of the chamber surrounding the election of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was any indication, Republicans might be in for a wild ride, including the possibility of losing their majority.

Republicans' challenge

Johnson's victory is a "chance for the Republican majority in the House to show the American people it can govern," said Roll Call. But the procedural struggle to choose Johnson as speaker "seems like a skirmish in a wider fight that will go on for the next two years," said David Dayen at The American Prospect. Republicans will have "no wiggle room to push their agenda through the House of Representatives," especially given a "rather unruly caucus that feuded bitterly in the past," said the New York Post. Johnson's job will be especially hard until special elections are held to fill the vacancy of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), as well as Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), who have been tapped for jobs in President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet.

If Trump "were to continue to raid" the narrow House majority to "fill out his White House and Cabinet, Republicans could lose their edge altogether," said The New York Times. If Democrats were to win all three of the special elections, control of the chamber would flip. It is also possible that unforeseen events could make the GOP's hold on the chamber more secure. The history of such narrow majorities may offer us some insight into what will unfold over the next two years.

Lessons from the past

The last time the House was this closely divided, the United States was in crisis. As the Great Depression deepened, it was not clear if Herbert Hoover's Republicans had maintained their majority in the 1930 elections. While Democrats gained 52 seats, when the dust settled Republicans still held a 218-216 majority, with one third-party lawmaker joining the minority. But a "truly insane thing happened" between the election in November 1930 and when Congress convened in March 1931, which is that 14 members-elect of the House died, said The Washington Post. After a series of special elections were held to fill the vacancies, Democrats emerged with a narrow majority for the remainder of the term. But with Republicans still in charge of the Senate, it is remembered as the "do-little Great Depression's 72nd Congress" that failed to address the horrors of the unfolding economic crisis, said The Hill.

Sixteen years earlier, Republicans won a 215-214 plurality of the chamber's 435 seats in the 1916 elections, but with neither party winning a majority, it gave enormous power to four third-party representatives who sided with Speaker Champ Clark's Democrats, "thus enabling the Democrats to — just barely — retain control of the chamber," said Pew Research Center. In April 1917, the House voted to declare war on the Central Powers by a 373-50 vote. While the narrow margin and coalition-government might have seemed like a recipe for gridlock, a rally-around-the-flag effect made the new Congress "remarkably productive," as the two parties worked together on several issues including alcohol prohibition, said the Post.

The House elections in 1848 resulted in neither Democrats nor their major-party counterparts the Whigs gaining an outright majority of seats in the House. The anti-slavery Free Soil Party won 9 seats but even adding them to the Whigs' 106 did not produce a majority. It therefore took 63 ballots to elect a speaker, Georgia Democrat Howell Cobb, who "played an important role in negotiating and securing the passage of the Compromise of 1850," which temporarily defused tensions that would later erupt in the Civil War, said The Miller Center.

The U.S. Constitution is more than two centuries old. It hasn't been amended for three decades. Is it finally time for a rewrite?

Some Republicans have been pushing for a new constitutional convention for "more than a decade," said NC Newsline. North Carolina legislators in December voted to ask Congress to convene a convention to address congressional term limits, adding to a "pile of requests" already in the hopper. A conservative group called Convention of States is pushing a broader effort to call a convention for amendments to "limit federal power and rein in reckless spending." That could put America in uncharted territory. Amendments have been passed over the years, but the convention method of changing the Constitution has "never been used," said NC Newsline.

Democrats worry about a "'runaway convention' where anything and everything is on the table," Hayes Brown said at MSBNC. There is a precedent, after all: The original Constitutional Convention in 1787 was called to amend the Articles of Confederation. The founders instead "abolished the articles" and came up with the Constitution instead.

How would a convention work?

"A simple line" in Article V of the Constitution lets Congress call a convention "if two-thirds of state legislatures have called for one," said The New York Times. It's possible the threshold has already been met. Scholars say most states have "long-forgotten requests on the books" that could trigger the provision if Congress chose to act. (Twenty-eight states have asked for a convention just to pass a balanced budget amendment, for example.) Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) has introduced a bill that would require the head of the National Archives to track already-passed applications. But it is "not clear how seriously Republicans would pursue a convention," said the Times.

An Article V convention is "one of the few provisions of the Constitution that has never been implemented," the Congressional Research Service said in a 2016 report. Because of that, there are no precedents to show how a gathering could and should work — instead, there is a "wide range of policy and procedural questions" that would have to be settled by Congress before the work begins. If a convention does occur, any amendments would have to be approved by 38 states. That "arguably acts as a deterrent" to any big changes.

What are the cases for and against a convention?

The Constitution needs "significant, even drastic, revision" to function properly in the modern era, University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson said in the Journal of Legislation & Public Policy. A convention would make it possible for Americans to "imagine what kind of system would make the most sense for 21st-century realities."

Many Democrats disagree. California State Sen. Scott Wiener (D) is sponsoring a bill to rescind his state's call for a convention. There's a danger Republicans could change the Constitution to "restrict voting rights, to eliminate reproductive health access and so forth," he said to the Los Angeles Times. The lack of clear guidelines poses a risk, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law School. "There's no way to know" what choices Congress might make about how a convention would work, "since it's never happened."

What happened

House Republicans abandoned a stopgap spending package Wednesday evening after President-elect Donald Trump told them to kill the bipartisan legislation and replace it with a more pared-down package that cut out Democratic priorities and also raised the debt ceiling. Trump's new demands, paired with threats of retribution, made a Christmastime government shutdown likely.

Who said what

The carefully negotiated spending package, introduced by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Tuesday, would have funded the government at current levels until March 14 and included $100.4 billion for natural disaster survivors. Johnson's late addition of $10 billion in aid to farmers "opened the door to a slew of unrelated demands by Democrats to ensure the bill could pass the House and Democratic-led Senate," The Washington Post said.

Trump's "opposition to what was considered must-pass legislation," and especially his "almost unrealistic" debt-ceiling demand, "reinjected a sense of chaos and political brinkmanship that was reminiscent of his first term in office," The Associated Press said. Trump weighed in after Elon Musk "used his social network X to stir Republicans into a frenzy," posting "100-plus tweets" attacking the legislation, often using "misleading or outright false claims," Politico said.

Democrats, whose votes are needed to pass any spending bill, "signaled they weren't in any mood to bail Republicans out," Politico said. "You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said.

What next?

Johnson "has not outlined a backup plan," and his "next step remains unclear," the Post said. Without a spending bill, "most federal operations would shut down" on Saturday. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) reportedly told Democrats last night that "we have a deal with Republicans and we're sticking with it."

Stop us if you've heard this before: The federal government could shut down sometime in the next few weeks if Congress can't agree to a new spending bill. It is a familiar scenario that has played out repeatedly in recent years. But the latest iteration of this story has a wrinkle — the shutdown could come right as the presidential campaign heads into the home stretch.

Negotiations are off to a tough start. A spending proposal from House Speaker Mike Johnson has already stumbled, "facing resistance from both parties," said The New York Times. His bill would extend federal funding through next March but would also include a provision "that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote" — an anti-immigration measure known as the SAVE Act. Hard-line Republicans on Johnson's right oppose the bill because it would continue funding at levels "they believe are too high." Even if passed, though, the bill would be "dead on arrival" in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Looming over these calculations is Donald Trump. The GOP presidential nominee is "pressuring Republicans" for a shutdown if they do not receive the SAVE Act as part of the spending bill, NBC News said. "I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don't get it," he said. 

What did the commentators say?

Republicans are threatening a shutdown "unless Congress makes it harder to vote," Ian Millhiser said at Vox. There is no evidence that undocumented migrants vote in "meaningful numbers" in American elections, nor that they have affected election outcomes, in large part because noncitizen voting already is "of course, illegal." But the SAVE Act would place "significant new administrative burdens" on state and local election offices during the two months before the 2024 election. That could cause "chaos" in voting. And the fight over the bill might well create a different kind of chaos whether or not it passes: "The SAVE Act could put the U.S. in danger of a government shutdown."

"Roughly 11 months have passed since former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's historic ouster in October 2023," Elizabeth Elkind said at Fox News. That removal came immediately after McCarthy negotiated a "clean" funding extension that dropped right-wing GOP demands in order to keep the government operating. Now Johnson, McCarthy's successor, also finds himself caught in the same "fraught political web" that ended McCarthy's career. One complication for the speaker: It is clear some House Republicans are not too concerned with blowback from a shutdown. "The legacy media makes these shutdowns worse than they are," said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).

What next?

"Johnson is vibing better with his members than McCarthy did a year ago," said Politico. And he has one advantage that McCarthy did not. With the election looming — and members of Congress desperate to get back on the campaign trail to keep their seats — "few House Republicans are going to want to be stuck on the Hill much past next week." 

It all feels like a "bad case of Groundhog Day," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in remarks quoted by The Hill. Democrats are counting on the threat of voter backlash to push Johnson and his fellow Republicans to meet them in the middle before Election Day. "The image of a shutdown of the government and turmoil in Congress," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), "does not help his party in November." Time is running out: The deadline to approve government funding is Sept. 30.

What happened

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a rare address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday amid ongoing protests over Israel's war in Gaza.

Who said what

Netanyahu lauded the U.S.-Israeli relationship while lambasting the large demonstrations across Washington, D.C. over his presence. "For all we know, Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests that are going on right now, outside this building," Netanyahu said. He earned his "biggest cheers" for calling protesters "Tehran's useful idiots," The New York Times said. 

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who is Palestinian American, attended Netanyahu's speech, holding a sign reading "war criminal" and "guilty of genocide." Many other high-profile Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), were not in attendance, with "around half" of each of the Democratic caucuses "absent," said Andrew Solender at Axios. 

Heading into his speech, Netanyahu had to contend with a "new balancing act, appealing to the new, potentially more progressive face of the Democratic Party while not antagonizing Trump," The Wall Street Journal said. 

What next?

Despite skipping his address on Wednesday, Harris is scheduled to join President Joe Biden for a bilateral meeting with Netanyahu today. Netanyahu will then meet Donald Trump on Friday. Their once-glowing relationship has "grown tense in recent years following the 2020 election," Politico said. 

America's longtime military support for Israel is suddenly in doubt. Following the deaths of World Central Kitchen aid workers in an Israeli attack in Gaza, said The Hill, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined 30 other Democrats in a letter asking President Biden to reconsider a recently authorized transfer of weapons to Israel. The flow of arms should be halted, the group said, "if Israel fails to sufficiently mitigate harm to innocent civilians in Gaza, including aid workers."

Military aid to Israel has become a "flashpoint for the Biden administration," said The New York Times. The United States has sent tens of thousands of weapons to the country following Hamas' Oct. 7 attack that started the war. Now, though, pressure to restrict or halt weapons transfers is coming from a "vocal minority of lawmakers in Congress." Biden, meanwhile, has been "sharply critical" of Israel's conduct of the war — but has also "resisted placing limits on U.S. military aid."

That may be changing. After the World Kitchen convoy attack, per The Associated Press, Biden warned Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu that continued American support "depends on the swift implementation of new steps to protect civilians and aid workers." Secretary of State Antony Blinken backed Biden's warning. "If we don't see the changes that we need to see," he said, "there will be changes in our policy."

What did the commentators say?

The United States backed — or, at least, didn't block — a cease-fire resolution at the United Nations last month. If that's the case, Julian Borger said at The Guardian,  "why do arms continue to flow" from the United States to Israel? Among the reasons: "Joe Biden's personal sense of commitment to Israel" has been honed over decades. So is a fear that holding back weapons might make Israel vulnerable to other enemies, like Hezbollah. But "the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza may be changing those calculations.

"Cutting off weapons to an ally in wartime would be the definition of betrayal," The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. Liberals in the U.S. have left its partners in the lurch before — cutting off aid to South Vietnam in 1975, and turning against the war in Iraq when "the going got tough." The willingness to end weapons transfers "must overjoy Hamas," but it's no surprise: "Democrats have a history of abandoning friends in hard times."

The debate in Washington means Israeli leaders are "rethinking" their country's dependence on U.S. weapons, Herb Keinon said at The Jerusalem Post.  A recent Gallup poll shows support among Americans for Israel is at 51% — the lowest point in 20 years. The number is even worse among the 18-34 demographic, "America's leaders tomorrow," where that support stands at just 38%. "No surprise, then, that reports are beginning to emerge about Israeli plans to start manufacturing more of its own arms."

What next?

The U.S. is Israel's biggest backer, but not the only one. Pressure is growing on other allies to stop their weapons transfers, as well. In the United Kingdom, more than 600 legal experts wrote to Rishi Sunak last week to warn the country risks breaking international law with its sales. And Nicaragua this week asked the International Court of Justice to order a halt to Germany's weapons sales to Israel, said the BBC.

Democrats in Congress could try to pass a "joint resolution of disapproval" of arms sales, Politico said, but that would have to pass both the House and Senate, and perhaps overcome a veto by Biden. That's a "high bar" to pass. And it seems unlikely: "The Senate almost never votes on resolutions to block U.S. military aid to Israel."

In the meantime, the clock is ticking. Before the World Central Kitchen attack, CNN said, the Biden administration was set to "greenlight" the $18 billion sale of fighter jets to Israel. The question now is how long American generosity will last, said one former defense official. "Who knows how long the barn doors will be open for?"

When President Joe Biden entered the United States Capitol building last week, he did so not only to fulfill a constitutional obligation to inform Congress on the state of the union, but with a keen understanding that his address was, in a way, one of the major campaign opportunities of his reelection bid. Here, in a major televised event, was a platform to speak expansively about his vision for the country, his hopes for the future, and his criticism of Republicans — including his conspicuously unnamed "predecessor," whom he will face once more in November. It was also an opportunity to assuage longstanding fears and criticism of his age and mental acuity, which has emerged as a major campaign concern in his race against former President Donald Trump. 

By the night's end, Biden's speech seemed to have accomplished many of those goals, prompting even arch-conservative pundit John Podhoretz to allow that if he'd been a Democrat "in a panic for three weeks" over Biden's campaign, he would be "feeling a lot better" after the president's performance that evening. But pacifying concerns on the left (and aggravating the right) is one thing, actually making an electoral difference is something else entirely. This State of the Union address may have reintroduced the public to a feistier, more animated Joe Biden than they'd seen lately, but did it succeed in moving the needle on behalf of his presidential campaign? 

'A wave of retractions from his doubters'

Among Democrats, it's "hard to exaggerate the psychological boost" they experienced after Biden's speech, New York Magazine's Ed Kilgore said. In his speech, Biden "chipped away at public skepticism about his record and identified Republicans with deeply unpopular policy positions" to the point where Alabama Sen. Katie Britt's much-mocked Republican response was simply "dessert" to Biden's "satisfying main course" of an address. Biden and his team are now "riding a wave of retractions from his doubters" agreed The Dispatch. Longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a frequent critic of Biden's age, ceded that while "no one speech changes the entire trajectory of a campaign" the president "did what he had to last night, capturing the moment" and forcing Republicans to confront the "reality that this is going to be a long, hard slog."

In a post-speech CNN instant poll, a decisive majority — 65% of respondents — gave the address high marks. What's more, and perhaps more important to Biden's campaign, respondents shifted nearly 20 points in favor of the sentiment that the country was headed in the right direction, from 45% before the president took the podium, to 62% once he was finished.

The Biden campaign is wasting little time capitalizing on that sentiment, with a battleground state tour that will "build momentum for his reelection campaign after a fiery State of the Union address last week," The Associated Press said. 

'A master class in how not to win an argument'

For as much as Biden may have "calmed — for the moment — Democratic bed-wetters," it is "far from clear" whether he changed the "fundamental concerns" that have dogged his campaign to date, former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove said in a Wall Street Journal editorial this week. Accentuating that point, The Washington Post said, the "65 percent" of CNN respondents who had a "positive view of the speech was actually lower than any such speech CNN has polled in the past quarter-century." Ultimately, concurred Kilgore, there's "simply not much evidence that it changed many minds about Joe Biden's job performance or flipped many votes from Republican to Democrat."

To the extent that there is polling data, it largely shows Biden's speech had minimal impact on the electorate overall. A Yahoo/YouGov survey taken in the days after the State of the Union saw "zero improvement in perceptions of the president — or in his standing against former President Donald Trump." If anything, Biden's address was a "master class in how not to win an argument" Republican adviser and CBS News analyst David Winston said in Roll Call. No matter his "theatrics," Winston continued, Biden simply tried to "sell the same statements that a majority of voters don’t believe."

The artificial intelligence boom of 2023 inspired more fear about how employers might use tech sophistication to monitor their employees further. "From algorithms firing staff without human intervention to software keeping tabs on bathroom breaks," The Guardian wrote, these technologies are "already upsetting workers and unsettling workplaces."

AI surveillance and spying software

Companies have long used technology to monitor productivity, surveil their employees and as a screening tool for potential future employees. A shift to virtual work during the pandemic and recent advancements in AI technology have led to worries about increased surveillance, with very few guidelines on how companies deploy the technology. The technology also isn't foolproof, which can be problematic. 

At some call centers, AI systems are used to "record and grade how workers handle calls," The Guardian explained, "often giving failing grades for not sticking to the script." Corporate software also monitors whether employees use the word "union" in their emails. As this type of corporate surveillance technology becomes more sophisticated, "many workplace experts say U.S. businesses, labor unions and government are not doing nearly enough to protect workers from tech's downsides," the outlet added. 

Employees are under constant surveillance, and these tools "can make mistakes that can translate into unfair pay cuts or firings," Virginia Doellgast, professor of employment relations at Cornell, told The Guardian. Transparency isn't always forthcoming, so workers don't always know "what data the tools are collecting or how that data is used to evaluate their performance,” Doellgast added. 

Employees worry about how AI and monitoring technologies in the workplace "may be negatively related to their psychological well-being and lead them to feel less valued," according to a 2023 survey from the American Psychological Association. About half of the workers surveyed, 51%, said they knew their employer was using monitoring technology. Of those who reported being monitored, 46% said they felt uncomfortable with how their employer tracked them with technology, compared to 23% of workers who did not report being monitored. 

How unions and lawmakers are preventing a 'dystopian workplace'

In terms of union intervention, Europe is ahead of the curve, where, unlike the U.S. and Canada, "many unions have been pushing for years for protections against some of the more intrusive ways that AI tools track and manage workers," The Guardian reported. The issue has yet to be as high a priority for North American unions, Valerio De Stefano, a labor law professor at York University in Toronto, told the outlet. "Unions in Europe are more aware of the uses of technologies from the surveillance standpoint." 

Europeans have "stronger rights to obtain information and participate in decision-making," Doellgast added. If they have no union in the U.S., "workers have no information rights, and all they see is the effects of the technologies on them."

With the downsides of "AI and algorithmic management" in mind, some U.S. labor unions are prioritizing a push for more protections, per The Guardian. The Communications Workers of America union, which represents some call centers, has secured policies that require employers to notify workers when their calls are being monitored, while guaranteeing that "management will only record calls for training purposes to help improve employee performance" and not for punitive measures. 

"Our goal is not to stop new technologies," Dan Reynolds, the Communications Workers' assistant research director, told the outlet, "but to make sure the gains of these new technologies are broadly and equitably shared."

The rise in AI tracking and evaluating tools has prompted "some lawmakers to act to curb its power in the workplace," Bloomberg Law reported. Last year, lawmakers on the federal level and in states such as California, New York and Washington have introduced measures to limit how large warehouse operators like Amazon use technology to "monitor and enforce productivity quotas."

In July, New York City passed a "first-in-the-nation" law targeting AI's role in hiring and promotions by requiring employers to "conduct an independent bias audit of their automated tools," Bloomberg Law continued. "AI observers say it's a blueprint for additional efforts at the state and federal level." The District of Columbia and New Jersey also have pending bills targeting discriminatory algorithms used in hiring and firing. Massachusetts has a bill called "An act preventing a dystopian work environment" that targets similar tech and limits how companies electronically monitor their employees. 

Pennsylvania Democrat Sen. Bob Casey has also been pushing for regulation on the federal level with his Stop Spying Bosses Act and No Robot Bosses Act. The bills require employers to disclose their monitoring and "prohibit data collection during employees' off-duty time," Bloomberg Law explained. 

Before this week's historic deposition of California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy, few people outside the cloistered world of congressional historians and parliamentary experts likely knew that when a person is elected speaker of the House, they create a secret list of potential replacements to assume the role in cases of emergency or incapacitation. That all changed this week, as Republicans ignominiously — and very publicly — booted McCarthy from GOP leadership, thereby revealing that the outgoing speaker had selected longtime ally Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) as his top choice to succeed him. 

Officially "speaker pro tempore," McHenry has emerged from the relative obscurity of the "proverbial smoke-filled rooms where legislative deals could be made" to fill an "uncomfortable and unexpected position" in the public eye — one he'd formerly eschewed, Roll Call reported. Though he'd stepped back from his own path through GOP leadership years earlier, the 10-term congressman now finds himself at the center of an unprecedented nexus of power and controversy, forced to preside over the selection of his requisite replacement from a caucus whose divisions have been on full, frequently unpleasant display. Thrust into the limelight under these fraught circumstances, McHenry's every move is sure to be scrutinized and dissected as Congress — and the country at large — treads carefully in these uncharted waters. 

Will this Republican insider become a pivotal figure at this historic political juncture, or will McHenry serve merely as a transitionary steward, facilitating a leadership change that downplays his own legislative imprimatur? 

What the commentators said

After texting with McHenry, North Carolina state Rep. Jason Saine (R), one of the congressman's constituents, told The Charlotte Observer that while he didn't believe McHenry wants to run for the full speakership, he would do so for the sake of "protecting the institution, Congress, the House and making sure that just because there is chaos today, doesn’t mean the chaos will reign supreme."

For now McHenry "appears to be playing it safe," The Washington Post reported, noting that his first few acts as interim speaker were to call multiple recesses "for the relative caucus and conferences to meet and discuss the path forward." In part, that relatively soft touch is a byproduct of the rules under which he must operate, which allow him to "only preside over floor debate and voting about the election" of his replacement, according to former House parliamentarian Charles Johnson. McHenry's is a position that's "temporary by the very name of it," agreed former House historian Ray Smock. 

Rules aside, McHenry's practical authority may ultimately extend to whatever "the majority party is willing to tolerate," Georgetown University Government Affairs Institute senior fellow Josh Huder speculated to The New York Times. As Brookings Institution scholar Molly Reynolds explained to Roll Call, McHenry's apparent reluctance to wield more expansive powers so far "might set the wrong precedent" for others in his situation moving forward, particularly if the transition process "takes longer than the week he's proposed."

This isn't to say that McHenry has been entirely hands-off when it comes to leaving his mark on Congress already. "One of the first actions taken by the new speaker pro tempore was to order me to immediately vacate my office in the Capitol," former speaker and current Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi told CNN, calling the eviction a "sharp departure from tradition" and probably "retaliation" for Democrats not supporting McCarthy's speakership. McHenry, who Roll Call dubbed the "GOP's attack dog-in-training" nearly two decades ago, may still have some teeth in his partisan bite, engaging in a "Republican revenge tour," according to the conservative National Review. 

What next? 

In spite of McHenry's accelerated timeline for electing a replacement, it's possible he could remain interim speaker for much longer than expected, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) told NPR, as "there is not a manual. There is not a book. This has never been done before."

No matter then if McHenry is interested in taking a more assertive stance in his inherently temporary role; the unprecedented nature of his ascension to the speaker's chair may ultimately force his hand to grasp the gavel even harder, whether he likes it or not. 

Analysts are considering the political and legal implications for Donald Trump as he faces criminal charges for efforts to overturn 2020 election.

The former president is accused of four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the US, tampering with a witness and conspiracy against the rights of citizens.

The indictment is “breath-taking” and historic, wrote Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, because “not since the framers emerged from Independence Hall on that clear, cool day in Philadelphia 236 years ago” has a former president been accused of “plotting to hold on to power” in an “elaborate scheme of deception and intimidation that would lead to violence in the halls of Congress”.

The indictment “instantly became one of the most consequential documents in American history”, said CNN, and its “harrowing details” of a “clear and chilling alleged plot” will “reverberate for years to come”.

Yet “even as the criminal proceedings against him pile up”, Trump is “betting that he can use them to his political benefit”, said the Financial Times, “at least in the race for the Republican presidential nomination”.

The indictments “could still strain his candidacy”, it added, “especially if he faces trials in several jurisdictions next year”. Democrats hope Trump’s legal problems will “alienate” the independent and swing voters who “turned their backs” on his preferred candidates in last November’s midterm elections.

Then there is the obvious legal peril itself. His “pettifoggery” is unlikely to work in a federal trial, wrote Jacob Heilbrunn for The Spectator, “where patience for his well-known antics will be at an all-time low”. So, as he campaigns for a “new term in the presidency” Trump “may discover that he can run but he can’t hide”, he added.

A former military officer testified to House representatives at the end of July that the military was withholding information regarding UFOs from Congress. The claims garnered bipartisan interest, sparking new conversations about what the officials know about possible alien sightings. However, this is not the first time the government has been interested in the topic of extraterrestrial life.

Why is the government interested in UFOs right now?

The House Oversight subcommittee had a highly anticipated meeting with retired military officer turned whistleblower, David Grusch, along with two other military veterans, to discuss UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). He alleged that the military hid evidence of non-human extraterrestrial life, claiming that non-human "biologics" were discovered at crash sites, per NPR. "My testimony is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country — many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony."

Grusch also claimed that the U.S. had likely been aware of "non-human" activity since the 1930s and had run a "multi-decade" program reverse-engineering crashed UFOs, which was promptly denied by the Pentagon, per The Associated Press. Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough said in a statement that they hadn't discovered "any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently." Grusch added that he faced retaliation for speaking out against the government, but did not elaborate on specifics.

"We're going to uncover the cover-up, said Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, per CBS News. "I hope this is just the beginning of many more hearings and many more people coming forward about this."

What have they said in the past?

There has been a marked increase in UFO sightings in the last couple of years, with over 350 new reports of UAPs since March of 2021, CNN wrote. More recently, there has also been an uptick in interest since the discovery of the Chinese surveillance balloon. While many UAPs have been debunked, "some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities and require further analysis," according to the 2022 annual UAP report.

Even those in the military, like Air Force General Glen VanHerck "haven't ruled out anything," according to Reuters. He added that he'll "Iet the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out." However, the government says it hasn't found any evidence of intelligent alien life. "I have not seen anything in those holdings to date that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation, an alien crash or anything like that," Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, told Reuters.

Despite this, many government leaders have voiced their support for further investigation of UAPs. "There's footage and records of objects in the skies…We can't explain how they moved, their trajectory," said former President Barack Obama in 2021. "And so, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is." Congress members also have concerns regarding UFOs. "If there aren't any UFOs, then why's the federal government spending so much time and effort to stop any kind of hearings, and why don't they release these files that they have? Every file I've seen is so redacted it looks like a piece of Swiss cheese," remarked Burchett. The recent hearing was the first to feature "public, unclassified testimony from servicemembers whose interest is in exposing what they believe they witnessed," according to the Los Angeles Times.

"If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem," Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot said during the hearing. "If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety."

A UFO “whistleblower” told Congress this week that the US government has uncovered extraterrestrial bodies and spaceships from crash sites.

David Grusch, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, told politicians that the White House has secretly been retrieving unidentified flying objects for decades, and claimed that “non-human biologics” have been found.

His testimony has been seen as a turning point in the question of extraterrestrial life. “Focusing on possible alien visitors has been the pursuit of a conspiracy-minded fringe,” said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. “But this week’s congressional hearing is a sign of its increased respectability.”

What did the papers say?

Grusch’s testimony “marks a significant turning point”, wrote Dani Di Placido for Forbes, as “decades of lore cultivated by the UFO community has spread from conspiratorial podcasts and UFO forums to Congress”.

Some viewers watched “slack-jawed” during the testimonies, wrote Tim Stanley for The Telegraph, but others were unconvinced. It was a “truly extraordinary claim, begging for extraordinary evidence”, wrote Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, for MSNBC. “But where is the evidence?”

“Admitting that aliens could be here is a far cry from claiming that they are here,” added Shostak. He wondered why such aliens “somehow manage to arrange things so that they’re exclusively met by government employees anxious to hide them”.

Stanley noted that the issue “goes back to at least the 1960s”, and former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford “claimed to have seen spaceships”. But the US is becoming more focused on the topic.

“Modern UFOmania began with a series of New York Times articles published in 2017,” wrote Jacob Aron for New Scientist. The pieces “detailed a defunct US Department of Defense programme, backed by top US senators, dedicated to investigating flying objects with no explanation”, he recalled. This combination of “military bigwigs, senior politicians and a normally sober newspaper opened the door to taking UFO claims seriously”, he wrote.

This modern acceleration of speculation across the US has been reflected in its political neighbourhood. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna said this week that the US government had been “gas lighting” ordinary Americans, while her fellow Republican Tim Burchett described it as a “cover up”. “In the Baptist church we’d say the devil’s been in our way… well the devil’s been in our way in this thing,” he said.

Robert Garcia, a Democrat, was “more moderate”, said Stanley, urging people to “come to this hearing with an open mind” as America has already been torn apart by “partisanship and alternative facts”.

Many are wondering why US politicians are becoming so increasingly engaged with the UFO question. Some have attributed the Pentagon’s “sudden interest of UFOs” as a “cynical effort to expand military funding”.

Others believe politicians see the issue as an opportunity to shine a light into corners that remain murky. “From the outset, both Republicans and Democrats invoked one word to highlight what the hearing was all about: transparency,” wrote Greg Eghigian for the Los Angeles Times.

The representatives “insisted on greater transparency from the military, from the intelligence community and from private defense contractors”, he noted.

Or was it just another opportunity for partisan point-scoring, he wondered. Two Republicans, Glenn Grothman and Virginia Foxx, used the occasion to “castigate” the Biden administration for its handling of the Chinese balloon incident back in February. “The call for openness is sometimes just partisan politics by other means,” he said.

What next?

There is now pressure to look into what Grusch told Congress and even some sceptics are in favour of such a step. “There’s nothing wrong with investigating these claims,” said Forbes’ Di Placido, and “if enough people believe that this is a phenomenon worth looking into, then by all means, the US government should look into it”.

However, he said he remains unconvinced much will be found because Grusch’s full story is a “wild ride, featuring Mussolini and the Vatican conspiring to cover up evidence of alien life”, before “the US supposedly took over and took care of all those alien crash landing sites in secret”.

There is a suspicion that some believers will never be satisfied. Across the globe countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand and Spain have released “thousands of pages of declassified UFO-related documents”, wrote Eghigian, including around 60,000 pages released by the UK between 2008 and 2013.

Yet “despite this”, UFO enthusiasts and researchers “have not always agreed on how to interpret the released documents and have continued to accuse officials of holding back key records”.

If the Pentagon “starts wheeling out alien bodies and downed spacecraft”, wrote Aron, “New Scientist will enthusiastically report on the most incredible find in human history.

“When the evidence changes, it’s only right to change your mind,” he said, but “until then, we will stick to writing about science.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is leading a group of lawmakers calling for an investigation into how some of the largest tax prep companies allegedly illegally shared sensitive customer data with Google and Meta, CNBC reported.

A seven-month congressional investigation found evidence that TaxSlayer, H&R Block, TaxAct, and other tax prep firms sent names, phone numbers, email addresses, and income tax information to Facebook and Google. Due to the tracking technology used by the companies, "every single taxpayer who used their websites to file their taxes could have had at least some of their data shared," the report said. The lawmakers presented their findings in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George. The investigation was opened after a joint story from The Markup and The Verge initially exposed the data sharing in November 2022.

Lawmakers allege that tax prep companies already shared the personal information of tens of millions of Americans without their consent. They also found they were sharing taxpayer data, such as their filing status, gross income, and tax refunds. "On a scale from one to 10, this is a 15," Georgetown University law professor David Vladeck told CNN. The allegations are "as great as any privacy breach" he'd ever seen and would be "a five-alarm fire" if proven true.

During the investigation, Meta admitted to using the taxpayer data it received to target third-party ads and train its algorithms, the report found. One of Warren's aides told CNN that it wasn't clear if the company behind Facebook knew it was inappropriately using data. A Meta spokesperson said the company prohibits using its tools to share sensitive information and that its systems are "designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect."

The US government risks beginning to run out of money in a matter of weeks unless Republicans in Congress reach a compromise with President Joe Biden that would avoid economic Armageddon.

Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, warned on Sunday that the US could hit its debt ceiling limit – the law that limits the total amount of money the government can borrow to pay its bills – as soon as 1 June.

Failure to extend the cap, which currently stands at around $31.4trn, would see the government unable to pay federal employees, the military, social security and Medicare, as well as interest on the national debt and tax refunds. The situation could spell “economic calamity” both domestically and around the world, Yellen said.

What did the papers say?

“Usually it’s a formality for Congress to raise the limit as needed but this time it can’t seem to agree on the terms,” said the BBC’s business reporter in New York, Natalie Sherman.

Republicans, who have a slim majority in the House of Representatives, have so far refused to approve a “clean” debt limit bill unless it also cuts future federal spending, reported Reuters. They have proposed limited spending growth for key agencies to 1% annually over the next decade, while also repealing key priorities of the Biden administration, such as student loan forgiveness and tax incentives for electric vehicles.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats and the president have rejected the proposals and accused Republicans of playing a dangerous game of economic brinkmanship for political gain.

“Plenty of scenarios are being publicly and privately gamed out, but no one knows for sure,” said The Independent. “The possibilities range from kumbaya to economic chaos with plenty of possibilities in between.”

According to NPR’s political correspondent Mara Liasson, possible outcomes could see leaders “negotiate a deal and claim a political victory, or decide to kick the can down the road with a temporary debt ceiling increase, which would have to be negotiated later this year and could risk a government shutdown”. The other option is that “they could stay at an impasse and let the country default, with what economists say will be disastrous consequences”, she added.

It is a “precarious moment”, said The New York Times. If a solution is not found before the government runs out of cash, “what is known as the X-date”, millions of Americans may “stop receiving government benefits, stock markets could plunge, and a constitutional crisis could ensue”, said the paper.

“Given the split control of Congress, and the slim majorities in both chambers, some sort of bipartisan compromise is inevitable if default is to be avoided”, said The Washington Post.

“The right-wing zealots who control the House Republican Conference are never going to agree to raise the debt ceiling without deep spending cuts and the unwinding of other Biden-era initiatives – demands that even the most centrist Democrats are unlikely to accept,” the paper added. “At the same time, leaders of both parties know that default is a lose-lose proposition, given the economic havoc that would surely follow.”

“There’s a lot at stake,” agreed Liasson and at present there is “no ‘face-saving off-ramp’ in sight”.

What next?

With only eight days left this month during which both the House and the Senate are scheduled to be in session at the same time, “time is running out to reach a deal”, CNBC reported. That makes this a “critical week”, said BBC North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher.

Biden is to host House and Senate leaders from both parties at the White House on Tuesday, with the president and Republicans still a long way apart and with no sign of a compromise on either side.

The clash between President Biden and House majority leader Kevin McCarthy over the US debt “will decide who is the most dominant figure in Washington for most of the next two years”, said CNN. “And a failure by the two men to come to terms by this time next month would result in a national default that could have a profound impact on the economy and the 2024 election.”

While most economists and political commentators believe, at the very least, that lawmakers would agree a short extension before the debt ceiling is reached, the chance of a default remains “the scariest possibility”, said The Independent.

It would, said CNN, be “felt by millions of Americans in lost jobs, benefits and an eroded sense of economic security”. Ratings agency Moody’s Analytics predicted that in a prolonged stand-off, stock prices would fall by almost a fifth and the economy would contract more than 4%, leading to the loss of more than seven million jobs.

An intentional default would also “shock the financial system where more than $500bn in US debt gets traded every day”, said the BBC’s Sherman.

“It’s this very threat of catastrophe that makes the debt ceiling showdown such an effective tool of political leverage,” said CNN. “Both sides in the standoff appear to believe that the other will blink to avoid the appalling consequences of going over the edge of a cliff. But worryingly, each party seems convinced the other will cave to avoid blame.”

Republican representative George Santos took his seat in the US Congress this month despite revelations that parts of his CV and personal history are “largely fiction”.

Santos was elected to Congress in the midterm elections this November after a campaign in which he sold himself as “the full embodiment of the American dream”. But his “victory lap” has been “short-lived”, said the BBC, as several major newspapers, led by The New York Times, revealed that large parts of his CV and personal biography were simply made up.

New revelations over Santos are emerging on an almost daily basis. He now faces serious questions over a number of other apparent fabrications, including the circumstances surrounding his mother’s death, his “questionable” campaign finances and “allegations of pilfering from a fundraising campaign for a dying dog”, said USA Today. He has insisted he will not resign from Congress despite facing several investigations as well as cross-party calls for him to go.

Who did Santos say he was?

When Santos won an eight-point victory in New York’s 3rd congressional district, an area which had previously favoured the Democrats, it was considered “a mild upset”, said The New York Times. He had lost “decisively” in the same district in 2020 to Democratic incumbent Tom Suozzi, and seemed to be “too wedded to former President Donald J. Trump and his stances to flip his fortunes”.

But running again in a redrawn district in 2022, he “recalibrated his far-right pitch, weaving themes into his campaign biography that might make him more acceptable to swing voters”, said Charles Lane in The Washington Post. Not only did Santos “play against type as a gay Republican” he also said he was “a grandson of Ukrainian Jewish Holocaust survivors” as well as having “9/11 victim status”, claiming variously that “his mother had died in the attacks or that both of his parents survived the ordeal”.

His apparently “fascinating and inspiring life story” really did seem to contain “something for everyone”, said The Times. He was a “proud American Jew” who had been raised by Catholic immigrant parents in New York, and also a school volleyball star, who graduated “near the top of his class” at Baruch College in Manhattan. He then went on to become “a seasoned Wall Street financier” at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, owned an extensive property portfolio and established a pet charity that rescued more than 2,400 animals. “At least, that was what he said,” wrote the paper.

But Santos was forced to apologise for, as he put it, “embellishing” his résumé when The New York Times investigated a number of claims he had made. The paper could find no record that he had ever attended Baruch College, while Citigroup and Goldman Sachs said they had no record of him ever working there. There was “little evidence” of his animal rescue charity, Friends of Pets United. Indeed, the IRS said it had no record of a charity registered with that name. The New York Times couldn’t find any record of his family’s property portfolio either, while his apparent “family firm”, Devolder, remains “something of a mystery”.

Since then, a litany of other embellishments and lies have been discovered, forcing Santos to backtrack on many of his claims. He confessed to the New York Post that he had “never worked directly” for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, calling the claim “a poor choice of words”. Nor had he graduated from Baruch College or any higher education institution, he admitted to the paper. And his family does not own 13 properties, as he had also claimed.

He told the paper he had “never claimed to be Jewish”. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish’.”

Santos has also responded to claims made by The New York Times that he had criminal charges filed against him in Brazil. “I am not a criminal here – not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” Santos said. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen,” he told the Post.

What do we know about the real Santos?

George Anthony Devolder Santos is “probably” 34, said The Times, and appears to have been born and raised in New York. He frequently visited the Brazilian city of Niteroi, near Rio de Janeiro, “where locals recall him performing as a drag queen in gay pride parades under the name Kitara Ravache”. Santos initially said it was “categorically false” that he had ever performed as a drag queen, but later said he had dressed up once during a festival. “I was young and I had fun at a festival – sue me for having a life,” he told ABC 7.

At the time he claimed to be working for investment firms Citibank and Goldman Sachs, Santos was actually working at the “customer care” desk of the Dish Network Centre, helping customers who had trouble with their satellite dishes, said The New York Times.

And according to court records, Santos also married a woman in 2012, who would file for divorce in 2019, and which he did not contest. He has described himself as “happily married”, although it is unclear if he is married to his partner Matheus Gerard. “I’m very much gay,” he told the Post in December. “I’m OK with my sexuality. People change. I’m one of those people who change.”

What next for Santos?

Santos now faces a slew of federal and local investigations, one of which will look in part into his financial dealings. Polling suggests that the majority of New Yorkers want Santos to resign from his congressional post, including some 49% of Republican voters, said Politico.

As the allegations against him have mounted, he has drawn “widespread condemnation from within his own party”, although Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has “largely ignored calls” for his resignation as he “needs to maintain his slim majority in the chamber”.

Santos himself has repeatedly refused to resign, stating he will do so only when the 142,000 people who voted him into office call for his resignation.

After finally being elected speaker of the US House of Representatives following a gruelling 15 rounds of voting, Kevin McCarthy joked: “That was easy, huh?”

Admittedly, that total falls far short of the record 133 ballots that were needed to elect a speaker back in 1855. But while McCarthy claimed that he wouldn’t “have a problem” with setting a new record for such votes, “one suspects he knows that needing several days and multiple votes to become speaker means he does indeed have a problem”, said NPR’s Washington correspondent Ron Elving.

“Governing by chaos is back,” said CNN’s White House reporter Stephen Collinson. Two years after “the master of political mayhem”, Donald Trump, “stormed out of Washington in disgrace”, the Republicans have “finally won back some power”. But if last week’s voting drama is anything to go by, “they still don’t know how to properly use it”.

The stand-off was the work of the Freedom Caucus, a group of ultra-conservative House Republicans who only finally, grudgingly, fell into line after extracting some serious concessions from McCarthy.

Amid “heated scenes in the chamber” during the votes, said the BBC, Freedom Caucus member Matt Gaetz had almost come to blows with fellow Republican Mike Rogers, a supporter of McCarthy. Rogers had to be “physically restrained by colleagues as he bellowed and jabbed his finger” at Gaetz.

For the House to be “mired in a stalemate over the speakership” is by no means unusual, wrote history professor Joan B. Freedman for The New York Times (NYT). In fact, there have been 15 such battles in Congress’s history. Each struggle has served as “a litmus test of the state of party politics and the state of the nation”, and “our recent contest was much the same, exposing party fractures and irreconcilable differences”.

Many analysts attribute those fractures to the presidency of Trump, who left the party with an “identity crisis”, said PBS NewsHour’s Daniel Bush.

Yet despite the influence that Trump continues to wield over the party, his power has been weakened first by a chastening mid-term election for the GOP and now this. The fact that party rebels opposed to McCarthy’s speakership ignored the former president’s pleas to back the California congressman is “just the latest sign that Trump’s once-iron grip on his party is weakening”, said The Hill. And that “raises questions about his 2024 presidential bid while giving rivals more confidence they can defeat him in a primary”.

More immediately, the rebellion also raises questions about how successfully House Republicans will be able to advance legislation over the coming months and years. It could even “threaten the health and legitimacy of the US government and economy”, said The Guardian’s Joan E. Greve, especially if the “dysfunction” displayed in McCarthy’s election is reproduced when it comes to “must-pass bills” such as a government funding package or a debt ceiling hike.

“It’s tempting to laugh at McCarthy’s struggles,” said Professor Freedman in the NYT, “but history shows that this type of chaos is not a joke.”

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The House on Thursday advanced what is known as the Puerto Rico Status Act, under which Puerto Rican voters would decide whether their territory should become a U.S. state, an independent country, or an independent country aligned with the U.S., The New York Times reports.

The bill, which would establish a process for Puerto Rico to hold a referendum on the matter, passed the lower chamber 233 to 191, with 217 Democrats and 16 Republicans voting in support.

"Today's historic vote is a key step toward ensuring that Puerto Rico's future is one of its own choosing," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. "With the Puerto Rico Status Act, the Democratic House has proudly voted to tear down the vestiges of colonialism."

"For far too long, the people of Puerto Rico have been excluded from the full promise of American democracy and self-determination that our nation has always championed," added House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who has long worked on the issue, per The Associated Press.

But the bill stands hardly a chance in the evenly-divided Senate, where it almost certainly lacks the votes to overcome a filibuster. Further, per Charles Venator-Santiago, director of the University of Connecticut's Puerto Rican Studies Initiative, the Senate has never before approved a piece of legislation pertaining to a change in Puerto Rico's territorial status, despite Congress having debated 145 bills on the matter in the past several decades, he told NBC News.

Either way, with the current congressional term coming to a close, any legislating must "essentially restart next year with the newly-elected Congress," NBC News writes.

Though Puerto Ricans living on the island are U.S. citizens, they are unable to vote for president and lack voting representation in Congress. They must also pay payroll taxes despite having "limited or no access" to the federal programs those taxes help run, NBC News notes.

While a formal vote has yet to happen, Democrats seem poised to elect Hakeem Jeffries as their new leader in the House.

The representative for New York launched his leadership bid last Friday, writing to colleagues and asking for support, saying his aim was to create “a better future for all Americans”. The 52-year-old is “a near certainty” to replace the outgoing House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, wrote Alexander Sammon at Slate, even before she had publicly backed him.

Jeffries has “long been seen as her heir apparent”, said Lauren Feder in the Financial Times, and he now “appears to be on a smooth path” to leadership thanks to Pelosi’s influence within the caucus.

The former lawyer has served as the caucus chairman, the fifth-highest-ranking leadership role, since 2019. If he does become leader, he will be the first black person in American history to lead a party in Congress.

The rising star

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Jeffries attended Midwood High School before graduating from Binghamton University with a BA in Political Science. In 1994 he graduated from Georgetown University with a Master of Public Policy degree, before studying and graduating from the New York University School of Law.

Jeffries then worked in corporate law before, after two attempts, entering politics in 2006 when he was elected to the New York State Assembly – a position he held until 2012. He gave up his seat in the assembly to run for Congress and was successfully elected from New York’s 8th congressional district.

In his time in Congress, Jeffries “pushed for policing reform”, said CNN, and has been “instrumental” in getting acts through the house. Jeffries has also been at “the forefront of efforts to fight racial injustice”, said The New York Times, and a “defender of bedrock liberal priorities”.

He was dubbed one of the party’s “rising stars” after his first year in Congress, according to Observer, and just six years after being elected he was voted House Chair, which “put him in Pelosi’s inner circle”, wrote Feder.

‘A Democratic Party stalwart’

Jeffries is “a tireless champion of incumbency” and his “devotion to keeping the already-elected in power” has made him a “Democratic Party stalwart”, said Sammon. He has “broad appeal in his party and displays maturity and focus”, said Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, but the key to his leadership will be his “ability to maintain unity”, particularly with the “left-leaning members” with whom he’s had conflict in the past.

The “party moderates have felt vindicated” however since the success of the midterm elections while Jeffries has also been “personally affirmed” by the results, wrote Zak Cheney-Rice in New York Magazine. But if the “biggest changes” to the Democrat policies have been a “leftward shift driven by younger and less white officials”, Jeffries has “not been a meaningful part of it”. His “rapid ascent” in the party, writes Cheney-Rice, is thanks to him “endearing himself to its elders” even as they’ve become “out of touch with their constituents”.

‘Navigating a Republican majority’

Jeffries biggest task as leader will be “navigating a Republican majority” in the house following the midterms, said Li Zhou at Vox. He has already said “he’d be open to working with Republicans when possible” and his party members believe he has the “willingness to confront Republicans and extremism within the party” when he needs to.

Despite the conflict with the progressives within his party, Jeffries remains in a stronger position than the likely new House Speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy, posited Rubin in The Washington Post. McCarthy “remains hostage to the Christian nationalist base and the MAGA members”, she wrote and he is “widely regarded as a weak leader”.

McCarthy’s leadership and the Republicans’ slim majority may help Jeffries find “unanimity” within his party “in opposition to a MAGA majority lacking a governing agenda”.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that congressional investigators working with the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack may access the phone records of key election denial figure Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican Party, and a stalwart ally of former President Donald Trump.

Ward, who acted as one of the "fake electors" lined up by Trump and his allies to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, had petitioned the court to block a Jan. 6 committee subpoena issued in Jan. 2022, writing that "if Dr. Ward's telephone and text message records are disclosed, congressional investigators are going to contact every person who communicated with her during and immediately after the tumult of the 2020 election" — an act which would "chill [...] public participation in partisan politics." In response to Ward's petition, liberal Justice Elena Kagan had temporarily blocked the committee's subpoena, while the high court considered the case.

Those considerations came to an end on Monday, with the court's 7-2 decision to allow the subpoena to proceed, with conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas indicating they would grant Ward's request. Crucially, Justice Thomas' has not recused himself from this and other related cases despite his wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, also figuring prominently in the Jan. 6 committee's investigation.

Ward's earlier effort to quash the committee's subpoena had been rejected by both a district court judge, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which noted that "The [phone records requested] include metadata such as the time and duration of incoming and outgoing calls and the numbers involved; they do not include content or location information."

With Republicans still grappling with the party's lackluster performance in what was expected to be a "red wave" midterm election, questions about who will now lead the GOP have begun growing louder. Lawmakers are jockeying for influence and position ahead of the coming legislative term — and with an eye on 2024 as well. That dynamic, which has already complicated the formerly straightforward bid by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to become Speaker of the House under a pending Republican majority, now seems ready to spill into the Senate as well.

On Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) declared that "[t]he Senate GOP leadership vote next week should be postponed," adding that Republicans "need to make sure that those who want to lead us are genuinely committed to fighting for the priorities & values of the working Americans (of every background) who gave us big wins in states like #Florida."

Rubio's call to hold off voting on who will lead the Republican delegation in what increasingly seems will be a narrow GOP minority was echoed by his colleague Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) who argued it was premature to hold a leadership vote with the Georgia Senate race headed for a runoff.

The pair were joined by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) who have reportedly begun whipping their colleagues against holding a leadership vote next week.

Hawley's electoral caution notwithstanding, the objections to the scheduled vote to determine party leadership are indicative of a broader schism beginning to take shape across the GOP as a whole; middling midterm results have called into question whether former President Donald Trump's influence is — or should be — waning within the party, particularly in the face of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' ascendancy as an electoral winner. Rubio's invocation of Florida's unambiguously positive election night results for Republicans is a not-so-subtle reminder of this dynamic.

While the situation in the Senate has yet to reach the heightened pitch as a similar conflict in the House, it does suggest that longtime GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) ability to keep the caucus in line may be complicated by the shifting loci of conservative power outside his immediate control. Trump, long an antagonist toward McConnell's leadership, has continued to agitate his base against establishment Republican figures — meaning calls to delay the GOP leadership vote may offer lawmakers a chance to see which way the conservative winds are blowing, lest they cast a ballot that could find them afoul of whichever wing of the party ends up more influential.

After being bitten by a fox while walking on Capitol Hill, Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation that would reduce the cost of rabies vaccinations for uninsured Americans, The Washington Post reports.

"After being bit by a rabid fox, I was fortunate to have access to readily available and low-cost vaccines," Bera said in a statment released Wednesday, also World Rabies Day. "But for too many Americans, the costs of treatment would break their banks."

Bera encountered the rabies-stricken fox while walking near the Russell Senate Office Building back in April. After feeling a small animal lunging at the back of his leg, he expected to turn around a see a dog. Instead, he saw a fox, and began beating the animal back with his umbrella until it fled toward other Senate buildings, per the Post. After multiple sightings, animal control officials eventually caught a fox on U.S. Capitol grounds. It was unclear, however, whether the captured fox and the fox that bit Bera were the same.

Rabies can be potentially fatal, but a treatment known as post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) "is nearly 100% effective at preventing rabies if received before symptoms start," per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Bera's bill, The Affordable Rabies Treatment for Uninsured Act, would create a program to reimburse healthcare providers who provide PEP to uninsured patients.

"I encourage all Americans to remain vigilant around wild animals and to seek medical attention if bitten or scratched," Bera said. "Costs should never be a barrier for individuals seeking life-saving treatment."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hinted on Wednesday that a bill banning members of Congress and their immediate family members from trading individual stocks might finally be up for a vote sometime this month. The bills come after multiple allegations that legislators are financially benefiting from insider knowledge. Here's what you need to know about the movement to limit congressional stock trading:

What are lawmakers asking for in the proposed stock trading bans?

Over the last year, both the House and the Senate have attempted to push forward laws that would tighten the rules concerning stock trading by members of Congress. Public interest in the trading habits of legislators has been under renewed scrutiny recently.

A bipartisan coalition of six representatives collaborated to introduce a bill that would ban Congress members and their families from owning individual securities, stocks, bonds, and commodities in February. The proposed "Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act" would still allow legislators to hold mutual funds and EFTs. The suggested penalty for violating the proposed law would be $50,000.

Another proposal, co-sponsored by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), would require legislators to put assets belonging to them and their families in a blind trust while in office, in addition to prohibiting them from trading stocks.

These proposals aim to amend the limited restrictions put on Congress by an existing 2012 law called the STOCK Act. Though Congress created the law to prevent insider trading and force representatives to report their trading activity, Business Insider identified 72 members of Congress who have violated the act. Axios reports that violators include Reps. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) and Kevin Hern (R-Okla.); the three representatives are also part of the Top 10 Congress members trading stocks.

How many members of Congress own stocks influenced by their committees?

A recent in-depth analysis completed by The New York Times revealed that at least 97 members of Congress have engaged in buying or selling stock, bonds, and other financial assets that were directly affected by the committees they served on. Some of those transactions were completed by the representative, while others were reportedly the work of their spouse or a dependent child.

Times reporters reached their conclusions by analyzing transactions from 2019 to 2021 from a database of members' financial filings called Capitol Trades. They correlated the trades with related committed assignments, hearing dates, and congressional investigations.

According to the Times report, several legislators defended the trades by stating that a spouse or broker completed them without their knowledge or input. Two of them reported the transactions as accidental.

Who supports a ban on Congress trading stocks?

The sponsors of the proposed bills come from all over the ideological spectrum. In a statement about the trading ban bill submitted in February, sponsor Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said, "No one should ever have to wonder whether their member of Congress is working for the public interest or their own financial interest." Her co-sponsor, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), said, "Members shouldn't be able to make legislative decisions or use their platform and influence to benefit themselves personally, which is why it should be no question that owning and trading stocks should be banned."

During an interview with MSNBC, Rep. Spanberger stated that the bill she co-sponsored with Rep. Roy has garnered the support of "more than 67 co-sponsors, Democrats and Republicans, across the ideological spectrum."

As lawmakers anxiously awaited the opportunity to bring the bills to a vote, many of them levied their criticisms of the slow movement of the bills at House Speaker Pelosi. When asked whether Pelosi would bring the bills to a vote before Congress was out of session, Spanberger told MSNBC, "if the speaker wanted to bring it for a vote this week or this month, she certainly could. And so we've seen kind of stall tactics along the way".

Insider reports that 12 ideologically diverse public advocacy groups sent a letter of support for the stock trading bans addressed to Pelosi on Tuesday. The signees, which included conservative group FreedomWorks and progressive group MoveOn, stated that if the bills weren't presented for voting, "a true opportunity will have been lost, and the downward spiral of declining public trust and increasing cynicism will continue."

Though Pelosi does not trade herself, investments made by her husband, venture capitalist Paul Pelosi, recently made headlines. Before Wednesday, Pelosi had not made any announcements concerning the bans, despite expressing support for the bills in February.

What are people against the ban saying?

Lawmakers on either end of the ideological spectrum have vocalized support for imposing restrictions on stock trading. However, a small group of naysayers is speaking out in opposition to the proposed bills. Forbes reports that in response to February's proposal, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said, "This is a free country, last time I heard." The Times investigation identified Tuberville as one of the representatives who made trades that constituted a conflict of interest.

According to The Hil, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) told Punchbowl News she was against the ban "because ... why would you assume that members of Congress are going to be inherently bad or corrupt? We already have the STOCK Act that requires people to report stock trades."

Republican Liz Cheney has lost her seat in Congress after voters in Wyoming elected a Trump-backed candidate in the primary elections.

Cheney, who has been the representative for Wyoming since 2017, lost to Harriet Hageman, a candidate backed by former President Donald Trump, in the election.

The 56-year-old congresswoman has “paid the price” for her “staunch opposition” of Trump, wrote David Smith in The Guardian, losing the vote to a relative political newcomer.

Cheney has been an outspoken critic of the former president since the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol building, and was vice-chair of the House Select Committee investigating the event. She was one of two Republicans to join the committee and one of just ten to vote to impeach Trump.

Conceding defeat, Cheney said she could have “easily” won the election if she had been willing to side with the former president over claims the 2020 election was rigged. Instead, she declared that “no office in this land is more important than the principles that we are all sworn to protect” and said she would “do whatever it takes” to stop Trump from becoming president for a second term in 2024.

‘A rising Republican star’

Cheney was once seen as a “rising Republican star” but after becoming “her party’s most dogged Trump detractor” she has found herself as an outlier, wrote Shane Goldmacher in The New York Times (NYT).

Her landslide defeat shows the “remarkable degree” to which Donald Trump has control over the Republican Party, and is the most “revealing” indication so far of the “party’s realignment”.

The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, she has been part of “political royalty”, said Smith in The Guardian, and her defeat to a Trump-backed candidate is a “blow to the last vestiges of the Republican Party establishment”.

Cheney has been one of the “most conservative lawmakers in the US” and is “far from being moderate”, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times, voting with Trump 93% of the time during his stint in the White House. Her subsequent “fixation” with bringing about Trump’s downfall has seen her become “America’s most celebrated electoral suicide”, but her ousting “begs the question: what defines today’s Republican Party?”.

‘The new orthodoxy’

In the case of the current Republican Party “the extreme sets the narrative”, wrote Luce. The GOP is more “strongly motivated by what it hates than by admiration of Trump”.

Like Cheney, many anti-Trump Republicans have seen themselves alienated from the party in a “cleansing of Trump critics”, wrote Goldmacher in the NYT. Trump allies are working to “censure or oust those who break with the new orthodoxy”.

Despite her defeat, Cheney has “issued a rallying cry for the defence of democracy”, said The Guardian, and we should “not accept that her political career is over”. Many of those praising her are “advocating a presidential run in 2024” when it is strongly rumoured that Trump will stand.

The most significant piece of gun safety legislation in decades was sent to President Biden's desk on Friday, after easily passing the House 234-193. 14 Republicans joined all Democrats in supporting the bill, NBC News reports.

The bipartisan legislation, concocted by a group of senators in response to an influx of mass shootings nationwide (including those inside an elementary school in Texas and a supermarket in Buffalo), had cleared the Senate 65-33 the night prior.

"As I say to members all the time with legislation, do not judge it for what isn't in it. But respect it for what is." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday, before the vote. "And there's much to be respected in this legislation."

"To those who lacked the courage to join in this work, I say your political survival is insignificant compared to the survival of our children," she added.

The gun safety bill includes increased funding for mental health; incentives for states to pass so-called "red flag" laws, which allow law enforcement to temporarily confiscate guns from an individual deemed a danger to themselves or others; enhanced background checks; and the end of the "boyfriend loophole." Still, some Democrats criticized the legislation for not going far enough to address gun violence, Politico notes.

President Biden is expected to sign the bill immediately.

The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that would provide the family of Supreme Court justices with expanded security protections, sending the legislation to President Biden's desk.

The final vote came in at 396 to 27, with only Democrats objecting. Per The Washington Post, many of those objections were over the legislation's lack of protections for lower-court judges and their families. The House had also initially explored and passed a broader bill that offered protections to Supreme Court staff like judicial clerks if the court marshal believed it necessary, The Hill notes.

House passage comes over a month after the Senate unanimously approved the bill, a vote that arrived in the wake of a leaked draft opinion revealing the high court poised to overturn federal abortion rights under Roe v. Wade.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the lower chamber voted on the Senate bill because it's "the only thing that can pass, frankly, and we want to get it done." In the interim, Republicans had accused Democrats of holding up the security bill, while Democrats said they were holding out for broader protections.

Final approval of the legislation comes not long after an armed man was arrested outside of Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home and later charged with attempted murder.

Pandemic lulls aren't meant to last. There are new signs that the United States might — emphasis on might — be about to undergo another spike in COVID-19 cases. The CDC this week confirmed that wastewater sampling is showing increased amounts of virus in cities across the country, and a new Omicron subvariant is fueling a fresh wave of illness in Europe. Maybe we'll see a rise in hospitalizations and deaths again, maybe we won't, and it's pointless to panic. But this doesn't seem like a good moment to let our guard down too much.

Somehow, we're not prepared.

The White House and Congress are stuck in gridlock, haggling over a new COVID relief bill that would provide $15 billion in fresh funding for testing, stocks of antiviral drugs for those who need them, and free vaccines for those who want them. Without that money, officials warn those supplies and services will dry up very quickly.

"Time is not on our side," an administration official told ABC News. "We need the funding immediately."

So what's the holdup? Arguments over how to pay for the bill, and how long. The details of that debate are less interesting — and less important — than the clear need to be ready if and when the pandemic gets vicious again. Why can't the United States get this right, at long last? We've had enough practice by now, haven't we?

Maybe our attention is diverted: There's a war in Ukraine, after all, that has understandably sucked all the conversational oxygen out of the room. Maybe we've been comforted by the plunging hospitalizations and death rates following the quick-and-dirty Omicron wave. Or maybe we've simply decided that the virus is endemic, no longer worthy of emergency panic after two slogging years.

These are bad excuses. The virus isn't going away because of Russia's invasion — if anything, the war might serve as a breeding ground for COVID and other viruses. Coronavirus deaths are down, but they're still pretty high: 1,268 Americans died of the disease on Wednesday. (For comparison, the CDC says roughly 1,500 people have died of the flu this entire flu season.) And even if the virus has become endemic, that's no reason for federal government inaction. "An endemic threat isn't one that can be ignored but one that must be managed," The Atlantic's Ed Yong wrote Thursday.

The story of the coronavirus pandemic is one of American leaders getting caught with their pants down over and over again. The government wasn't ready for the original virus, prematurely celebrated right before the Delta variant struck, and was still slow to ramp up testing availability ahead of the Omicron spike that started late last year. It's a bipartisan problem. And it leaves us staring down the possibility of another COVID wave without our best defenses firmly in place.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will deliver a virtual address to U.S. Congress on Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced Monday, per CBS News.

Zelensky had previously spoken to members of Congress on a Zoom call earlier in the month, CBS News notes.

"The Congress, our country and the world are in awe of the people of Ukraine, who have shown extraordinary courage, resilience and determination in the face of Russia's unprovoked, vicious, and illegal war," the congressional leaders wrote. "As war rages on in Ukraine, it is with great respect and admiration for the Ukrainian people that we invite all Members of the House and Senate to attend a Virtual Address to the United States Congress delivered by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Wednesday, March 16th at 9:00 a.m."

Congress and President Biden last week approved $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, as the country continues to defend itself against a Russian invasion. Biden also recently announced a ban on the import of Russian oil and gas, in addition to a revocation of Moscow's "most favored nation" trade status.

Zelensky, meanwhile, has continued to call on both the U.S. and NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, a plea Western leaders have resisted for fear of further escalating the conflict, CBS adds.