A group of Senate Democrats announced late Tuesday they had reached a tentative agreement on a massive spending plan worth $3.5 trillion over the next decade.
The budget resolution, which Democrats will attempt to ram through the Senate with 51 votes via the parliamentary maneuver of reconciliation, is expected to be paired with a bipartisan infrastructure bill worth $1.2 trillion over eight years.
“The [Senate] Budget Committee has come to an agreement,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters. “The budget resolution with instructions will be $3.5 trillion. Every major program that President Biden has asked us for is funded in a robust way.”
Schumer announced the agreement following a two-hour evening meeting that capped weeks of bargaining among party leaders, progressives and moderates.
Boston’s Northern Avenue Bridge sits empty and rusting, as it has for nearly five years since being closed for safety reasons.Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has insisted for weeks that she will not bring the bipartisan legislation to the floor for a vote until the Senate passes a larger bill which is expected to include massive spending on social care programs and efforts to counter the effects of climate change. The budget resolution sets only broad spending and revenue parameters, leaving specific decisions about which programs are affected — and by how much — for later.
“We are very proud of this plan,” Schumer told reporters. “We know we have a long road to go. We’re going to get this done for the sake of making average Americans’ lives a whole lot better.”
The majority leader added that Biden himself would lunch with Senate Democrats Wednesday “to lead us on to getting this wonderful plan” enacted and noted that it includes expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing services, long a priority of Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insisted that she will not bring the bipartisan legislation to the floor for a vote until the Senate passes a larger bill.AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Elsewhere in the Senate, members from both parties worked to hammer out final details of the bipartisan bill, which Schumer has said he wants on the floor next week. Nearly two dozen senators involved in the effort met for more than three hours.
Republicans and moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia have expressed concern over how the spending in both bills should be paid for, with Manchin telling Politico earlier Tuesday: “I don’t think we need more debt.”
Members of the bipartisan group suggested Tuesday they hadn’t so much resolved the questions over how to pay for the package as moved past them — apparently accepting that some of the proposed revenue streams may not pass muster in formal assessments by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Manchin said Tuesday night that he hoped the CBO assessment — or “score” as it’s known — would show that “everything’s paid for. If not, we’ll have to make some adjustments.”
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a key negotiator in the infrastructure talks, is surrounded by reporters as he walks through the Capitol in Washington on July 13, 2021.AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Sources told The Post that the initial plan is to pay for the larger spending package with increases to the corporate tax rate. That could be an issue for Manchin, who has previously balked at making the rate too high. With the Senate split 50-50, Democrats cannot afford to lose a single member of their caucus.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said the measure would be fully paid for with offsetting revenue but provided no detail.
Sanders called the agreement “a pivotal moment in American history” and vowed that “the wealthy and large corporations are going to start paying their fair share of taxes, so that we can protect the working families of this country.”
In a federal lawsuit, the former president said the committee’s request in August was “almost limitless in scope” and sought many records that were not connected to the siege.
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon and other former top officials in the Trump administration are facing legal peril for defying subpoenas issued by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, as the panel prepares to pursue criminal referrals for non-compliance.
The legal jeopardy for Bannon is anticipated after it emerged in a letter to his attorney, obtained by the Guardian on Monday, that he had claimed executive privilege protections on materials unrelated to the executive branch.
What has Trump said in the papers he has filed? He called the request for records a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition” that was “untethered from any legitimate legislative purpose”.
What did Bannon’s final warning say? The House select committee chair considers Bannon as having violated federal law after he “wilfully failed to both produce a single document and to appear for his scheduled deposition”.
Tributes pour in for Colin Powell: the man who might have been America’s first Black president
Colin Powell with George W Bush in 2000. Photograph: David J Phillip/AP
Tributes are continuing to pour in for the former Republican secretary of state Colin Powell after the announcement of his death on Monday morning at the age of 84.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, eulogies for the former general were brusque and often unforgiving. “I am saddened by the death of Colin Powell without being tried for his crimes in Iraq,” said Muntader al-Zaidi, who famously threw his shoes at Bush at a press conference in Baghdad in 2008. “But I am sure that the court of God will be waiting for him.”
Had Powell been vaccinated? He was fully vaccinated against coronavirus but had a compromised immune system, having been treated for blood cancer.
Was he still a Republican when he died? By the end of his life, Powell, who previously voted Republican in seven consecutive presidential elections, had endorsed Democrats in the past four.
Bill Gates reportedly advised to end inappropriate emails with female employee in 2008
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, left his role with the company in 2020. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
Bill Gates was allegedly advised in 2008 by executives at the company to halt inappropriate communication with a female employee, according to a report.
The claims, published by the Wall Street Journal, are the latest to shed light on potential misconduct by Gates while he was working at Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal had previously revealed claims Gates left the company’s board in 2020 amid an investigation into a past affair with a staffer.
Gates said at the time he was stepping down to focus on his philanthropic endeavors. However, the Journal report revealed board members at Microsoft pushed Gates out as they investigated an allegedly inappropriate relationship he had with a female employee.
The Wall Street Journal’s most recent coverage now says that more than a decade before Gates’s departure from Microsoft, executives had discovered emails between him and a female mid-level staffer.
A spokesperson for Gates denied he had been involved in inappropriate email communications.
What was inappropriate about the emails? The report alleges that Gates was flirtatious and propositioned the female employee by email. At the time, he was married and the board chair at Microsoft.
Covid pandemic has spurred engagement in online extremism, say experts
‘What we’ve seen is evidence of spikes of online activity in a wide range of extremist issues during lockdown,’ says the ISD’s Jacob Davey. Photograph: Alamy
Eighteen months of intermittent global lockdowns have led to growing engagement in extremist material ranging from terrorist content to conspiracy theories and disinformation, say experts.
Jacob Davey, the head of research and policy of far-right and hate movements at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which studies extremism worldwide, said studies had shown “there has been a proliferation of harmful and troubling activity online” during the pandemic, with an impact that was impossible to predict.
The coronavirus crisis has been punctuated by outbursts of online hate that have had real-world consequences. The most alarming examples are the 6 January Capitol riot in Washington, which was spurred by rightwing groups organising online, and the racist abuse of England footballers during Euro 2020.
Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a US- and UK-based campaign group, says the pandemic has “driven all types of movements which are based on protection of identity groups”.
An ISD study showed that content on rightwing extremist pages and groups in Canada increased by 33.7% on Facebook last year, while postings on the 4chan bulletin board were up by 66.5%.
In other news …
None of the US’s thousands of Dollar General stores are unionized. Photograph: Erin Scott/Reuters
Dollar General workers are pushing to unionize amid alleged hostility from senior staff. Employees have alleged intimidation at the low-cost retailer, which has more than 17,600 stores in 46 states and reported billions in sales last year.
Amid an unprecedented surge in opioid overdoses, harm-reduction groups are reporting shortages in naloxone, a usually affordable and easy-to-use medication that reverses overdoses and has been credited with saving lives.
The Biden administration has asked the supreme court to block Texas’s extreme abortion ban. The justice department wrote in its plea that the law defied the supreme court’s major decisions on abortion rights.
A sword believed to have belonged to a crusader who sailed to the Holy Land almost a millennium ago has been recovered from the Mediterranean seabed thanks to an eagle-eyed amateur diver, the Israel Antiquities Authority has said.
Don’t miss this:can the morning routines of the rich and famous make me a better person?
‘My minds churns like a cement mixer’: Emma Beddington tries early-morning meditation in her garden. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer
Morning people have a reputation for getting stuff done. Early rising is associated with energy, optimisation and efficiency; it is a foundational principle of all manner of self-help programmes. “If you look at many of the most productive people in the world, they will have one thing in common: they were early risers,” says one zealot in the trailer for the motivational guru Hal Elrod’s movie about his “miracle morning”, as Oprah Winfrey, Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Einstein flash past. “What if you could change anything about your life just by changing the way you start your day?” asks Elrod’s movie. Time to find out.
Or this: the women who live without love
Women may find it harder to find a partner they are attracted to as they get older. Illustration: Nathalie Lees
When a woman named Alana coined the term “incel” in the late 90s, she could not have predicted the outcome. What started as a harmless website to connect lonely, “involuntary celibate” men and women has morphed into an underground online movement associated with male violence and extreme misogyny. Meanwhile, a far greater number of women live unintentionally celibate lives, although they would not describe themselves as “femcels”. What is it like to go without a partner when you long for one – and when even a fleeting sexual connection feels impossible?
Climate check: US and China urged to find way to work together before Cop26
Ban Ki-moon said current pledges on cutting emissions from leading economies were insufficient to hold global heating at 1.5C. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock
Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, have been urged to meet before the UN Cop26 climate talks to search for common ground by the former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and other prominent global voices. “We are appealing to the leaders of the US and China to see their common interest and find a way to work together. We need an ambitious 2030 [carbon] target from China and the US to deliver what they have pledged,” said Ban, speaking on behalf of the Elders group of former world statespeople and prominent community and business leaders.
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Last thing: Indian couple float to their wedding in a cooking pot along flooded streets
A waterlogged street in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where at 26 people have been killed after heavy rain and flooding. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock
An Indian couple have arrived for their wedding in unusual style after sailing through the flooded streets of their town in a cooking pot after heavy rain wrecked havoc in the southern state of Kerala. Footage shared on social media showed the pair squeezed inside the aluminium vessel while two men and a photographer paddled them down a submerged street. Undeterred by the flooding and landslides, which killed at least 27 people across the state, the couple were unwilling to postpone their big day.
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The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is postponing its third hearing, which was scheduled on Wednesday and was expected to detail how former President Donald Trump allegedly pushed the Department of Justice to spread his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and ex-DOJ officials Richard Donoghue and Steve Engel were expected to testify in person at the hearing, NBC News reported, citing Rosen’s attorney.
The committee hasn’t set a new date for the hearing, but it’s already scheduled to hold a separate hearing on Thursday, the committee said.
It was unclear from the panel’s statement whether those witnesses will be moved to Thursday or another date, and a spokesperson for the committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The committee kicked off a series of seven hearings Thursday detailing its initial findings from an almost yearlong investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, when a violent mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The riot sent members of Congress fleeing for safety and delayed lawmakers from confirming President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
The nine-member panel seeks to show that Trump is chiefly to blame for the riot by placing him at the center of a multi-pronged conspiracy to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
On Monday, the committee released details that focused heavily on the wide array of election-fraud conspiracies that Trump and some of his allies seized on and spread widely to try to convince the public that the election was stolen.
The committee played a lengthy series of clips from interviews with former Trump officials, including former Attorney General William Barr, who repeatedly told the former president that he lost to Biden legitimately and warned Trump against making meritless claims of fraud.
“I told him that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that and it was doing a grave disservice to the country,” Barr told investigators.
“I was somewhat demoralized, because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with — he’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr said at another point. “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
The now-postponed hearing on Wednesday was supposed to show how Trump tried to “corruptly” wield the DOJ as part of his bid to challenge the 2020 election, and how the agency’s leaders pushed back on him, committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said last week.
Cheney, one of two Republicans on the panel, suggested that hearing would detail Trump’s attempt to install Jeffrey Clark, a DOJ lawyer, as acting attorney general and have him send letters to key states falsely claiming that the government has found evidence that could impact the election results.
The hearing would reveal how top officials in the DOJ threatened to resign and confronted Trump and Clark in the Oval Office, Cheney said.
She also suggested that the hearing would shed new light on efforts by some Republican lawmakers to secure presidential pardons “for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.” She has already named Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., who allegedly tried to get Clark promoted. Perry has refused to testify before the committee.
It is unclear whether the topic at Thursday’s hearing will be the DOJ, or whether the committee will move on to its next scheduled area of focus: how Trump pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject Electoral College votes.
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