Kevin McCarthy basks in rare win after Republicans unite to pass debt ceiling plan – live

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Back to Montana for a minute, Zooey Zephyr, the transgender Democratic representative whom the state’s Republican's voted to keep off the floor of the state House of Representatives yesterday, remains in the building.

Montana Public Radio found her posted up outside the House chamber:

Earlier this week, supreme court chief justice John Robert put the kibosh on Senate Democrats’ invitation for him to testify before the judiciary committee about the court’s ethics.

Their request came after a series of reports revealing links between justice Clarence Thomas and a Republican megadonor. So what can Democrats do now? Theoretically, they could subpoena the chief justice, but there seems to be debate within the party over doing that, as CNN reports:

For the Guardian, Lyz Lenz looks at the relationship between Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, and what the latter’s ouster from Fox News this week means for the former president’s latest campaign for the White House:

At an 18 February 2017 rally, Donald Trump railed against immigrants and violence. He was unusually focused on Sweden, warning the crowd about recent terrorist attacks in the country: “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” If a terrorist attack in Sweden seemed unbelievable, it’s because it was. There had been no attack by immigrants the night before Trump spoke. The most recent attacks on Sweden, at the time, were a series of bombings between November 2016 and January 2017 that were allegedly connected to the neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance.

People in Sweden shared photographs of their very un-bombed houses. Reporters did their due diligence and wrote stories about how nothing at all had happened in Sweden the previous night. It was a news cycle of nothing. But all that nothing could not persuade the president he was wrong. Trump repeated the story over and over. He was right, he insisted in multiple interviews: Sweden had been bombed by immigrant terrorists and he knew because he’d seen it on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

It seems possible that next year’s presidential election will occur without Tucker Carlson, the popular conservative commentator, on the airwaves. Fox News fired him earlier this week in a move few saw coming. Yesterday, he made his first public statement since his ouster, the Guardian’s Kari Paul reports:

Tucker Carlson has broken his silence for the first time since his abrupt departure from Fox News, posting a video to Twitter that did not directly address his reported firing.

Carlson was one of the network’s biggest stars, and gained a large following while spouting xenophobic and racist rhetoric on his show, Tucker Carlson Tonight. He left Fox News without explanation on Monday. News outlets have reported that Carlson was fired on the personal order of Fox owner Rupert Murdoch for, among other things, using vulgar language to describe a female executive.

On Wednesday, Carlson shared a cryptic two-minute video on his Twitter account that did not explain his exit, but offered sweeping complaints about the state of American discourse. He said what he noticed “when you step away from the noise for a few days,” is how nice some people are.

Rough poll numbers aren’t stopping Ron DeSantis from getting ready to launch a presidential campaign, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is quietly assembling a senior staff for an expected 2024 presidential campaign that will be headed by his top political adviser, Generra Peck, and around seven other Republican operatives serving as top advisers, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The leadership roster remains subject to change since the campaign – which could launch as soon as the start of next month – does not yet technically exist and most salaries are being paid, for the moment, through the state Republican party.

But some of the senior staff have started to move in recent weeks to the campaign’s base in Tallahassee, the people said, as DeSantis prepares to announce his presidential ambitions as perhaps the closest challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination.

In the polling released yesterday, Fox News also confirmed that the Republican primary field looks the same as it has for months.

Donald Trump is the frontrunner, with the support of 53% of those surveyed, according to the data. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who has yet to declare his candidacy but is widely expected to, comes in a distant second at 21%, about three percentage points lower than Fox’s previous survey in March. Over the same period, Trump’s number dropped by only a single point.

All other candidates, declared or not, are polling in the single digits. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has the support of 62% of Democratic voters, the survey said.

As Republican-led state legislatures move to crack down on drag shows and transgender rights, they may want to take heed of a Fox News poll released yesterday.

The survey found 57% of respondents think “attacks on trans families” is a “major” problem, while 60% thought the same of book banning, another priority of some Republican lawmakers. However, the poll confirmed public angst over transgender athletes in women’s sports, with 54% of respondents saying that was a “major” problem.

Also in Montana, Republican lawmakers voted yesterday to silence the state’s sole transgender lawmaker for the duration of the legislative session, the Guardian’s Dani Anguiano reports:

Montana Republicans have barred the transgender lawmaker Zooey Zephyr from the statehouse floor for the rest of the session after she told colleagues they would have “blood on your hands” if they voted to ban gender-affirming medical care for trans children.

Under the terms of the punishment, Zephyr will still be able to vote remotely but will be unable to participate in debates on the floor for the remainder of the 90-day legislative session. The Democratic representative had been forbidden from speaking for the past week over her comments, which Republicans said violated decorum.

The decision to silence Zephyr had already drawn protests that brought the statehouse to a halt on Monday as demonstrators demanded Zephyr be allowed to speak. Republicans accused Zephyr of placing lawmakers and staff at risk of harm for disrupting house proceedings by inciting protests in the chamber.

Elsewhere in the country, Montana’s Republican lawmakers have been busy passing legislation targeting transgender people, and the son of governor Greg Gianforte has asked his father to reject them, the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

The son of the Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, met his father in his office to lobby him to reject several bills that would harm transgender people in the state, the Montana Free Press reported.

David Gianforte told the paper he identifies as nonbinary and uses he/they pronouns – the first time they disclosed their sexuality publicly. They told the outlet they felt an obligation to use their relationship with their father to stand up for LGBTQ+ people in the state.

“There are a lot of important issues passing through the legislature right now,” they said in a statement. “For my own sake I’ve chosen to focus primarily on transgender rights, as that would significantly directly affect a number of my friends … I would like to make the argument that these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights.”

Here’s more from last night on the Republican-driven floor action that led to the passage of their debt limit proposal, from the Associated press:

House Republicans narrowly passed sweeping legislation on Wednesday that would raise the government’s legal debt ceiling by $1.5tn in exchange for steep spending restrictions, a tactical victory for the House speaker Kevin McCarthy as he challenges Joe Biden to negotiate and prevent a catastrophic federal default this summer.

Biden has threatened to veto the Republican package, which has almost no chance of passing the Senate in the meantime, where Democrats hold a slim majority.

The president has so far refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling which the White House insists must be lifted with no strings to ensure America pays its bills.

The real purpose of GOP debt limit bill: leverage

The Limit, Save, Grow Act House Republicans passed last night raises the debt ceiling through the end of March next year, at most, and also undoes a number of proposals enacted by Joe Biden. It would block his attempt to relieve some federal student loan debt, strip newly allocated funding from the Internal Revenue Service, add new work requirements to federal programs meant to help the poor and make broad cuts to government spending, ultimately lowering the federal budget deficit by an estimated $4.8tn over 10 years.

Democrats hate it, and have taken to calling it the Default on America Act, or DOA – which also stands for dead on arrival. The Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer says that’s what it will be when it arrives in his chamber, and even if it somehow made it out, Biden said he would veto it.

So why did Republicans bother? Because they want to get Biden to sit down with House speaker Kevin McCarthy and negotiate a deal to raise the debt ceiling – something the president has refused to do. House financial services committee chair Patrick McHenry said as much in an interview with CNN yesterday. And for the GOP, time is on their side. The clock is ticking towards early June, when the US government could potentially run out of cash and catastrophically default on its debt.

The gamble that McCarthy and his allies are making is that Biden will be forced to the table as that deadline nears, and the Limit, Save, Grow Act will represent their starting offer.

House passes debt ceiling bill in show of strength by McCarthy

Good morning, US politics blog readers. A few months ago, Kevin McCarthy appeared to be in a terrible position. He had been elected speaker of the House of Representatives, but only after an unprecedented 15 rounds of voting by his fractious Republican caucus, and it wasn’t hard to see a future where those same lawmakers lost patience with and ousted the Californian. But last night, McCarthy notched a victory when the House GOP passed its proposal to increase the US debt limit while also slashing government spending, despite several Republicans initially saying they wouldn’t support the bill. Democrats oppose the measure, and there’s no way Joe Biden signs it into law, at least not without significant changes. But for McCarthy, the fact that he got it passed with Republican votes alone despite their narrow majority in the House indicates he may be a more clever – and potentially durable – speaker than he’d been given credit for just a little bit ago.

Here’s what else is happening today:

• House Republicans are unveiling a proposal to address border security at 2:15 pm eastern time.

• White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at 1:45 pm and likely bash the GOP debt ceiling bill, as the Biden administration has been doing for days.

• West Virginia governor Jim Justice makes a “special announcement” at 5 pm that’s reportedly a campaign for Senate, potentially pitting the Republican against Democratic incumbent Joe Manchin in a contest that could decide which party controls the chamber.