‘I will not back down’: Biden vows executive action if Senate cannot pass climate bill – as it happened

In Riyadh, Joe Biden was also asked about Joe Manchin’s apparent torpedoing of Democrats’ attempt to pass spending legislation targeting the climate crisis, healthcare and other party priorities before the midterm elections.

Asked for “your message to those Americans right now who were looking for that relief that would have a wide impact as it affects the climate and energy specifically”, the president said: “I’m not going away. I’m using every power I have as president to continue to fulfill my pledge to move toward dealing with global warming.”

On his way out of the short and slightly testy briefing, Biden was asked if he thought Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who has nonetheless stymied his party’s agenda over and over again, had been “negotiating in good faith” over the spending deal and its climate-related provisions.

“I didn’t negotiate with Joe Manchin,” Biden said.

It’s true that Manchin has been talking to Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic Senate majority leader, this time.

It’s also true that Manchin has an outsized influence on Democratic policy priorities in the 50-50 Senate and has been at the centre of almost every legislative drama since Biden took back the White House.

In their book Peril, about the end of Trump and the beginning of Biden, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post devote considerable space to Manchin’s machinations around the $1.9tn Covid relief package Biden got through in March 2021.

At one point, they write, Biden told the senator: “Joe, please don’t kill my bill.”

He didn’t. That time.

More:

Speaking from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Joe Biden said he brought up the murder of Jamal Khashoggi when he met with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman earlier today.

“I made my view crystal clear. I said very straightforwardly, for an American president to be silent on an issue of human rights, is this consistent... with who we are and who I am? I will always stand up for our values,” Biden said.

Asked how the crown prince responded, Biden replied, “He basically said that he he was not personally responsible for it. I indicated I thought he was”.

The president has previously said he wanted to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state” for the murder, and was asked if he wanted to take those words back. “I don’t regret anything that I said. What happened to Khashoggi was outrageous,” Biden said.

The publisher of The Washington Post has condemned Joe Biden’s fist bump with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom US intelligence concluded ordered the operation that resulted in the murder of Jamal Khasshogi, a contributor to the newspaper.

Biden, who is visiting Saudi Arabia, will address the press in about 20 minutes, according to CNN. The event was not previously scheduled.

Joe Biden is making his controversial visit to Saudi Arabia, with an increase in oil production seen as the goal. The Guardian’s Bethan McKernan reports:

Three years after Joe Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state over the assassination of a prominent dissident, the US president greeted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump as his administration attempts to reset relations and stabilise global oil markets.

Whereas Donald Trump was personally welcomed to the conservative Gulf kingdom on his first presidential visit by King Salman, Biden was met on the tarmac on Friday evening by the governor of Mecca and the Saudi ambassador to the US in a subdued ceremony before travelling to the city’s al-Salam palace, where he held talks with the 86-year-old king and his powerful heir, Prince Mohammed, before a working meeting.

Last week, we learned that Herschel Walker, who’s the Republican nominee for a Senate seat in Georgia, lied to his own campaign team about how many children he had. This is not his only misstep, but the longtime friend of Donald Trump continues to have the support of Georgia Republicans. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland speaks to Roger Sollenberger of the Daily Beast about why Walker might prove a fatal blow for the GOP in November’s midterm elections.

The passage of two bills preserving the right to abortion is likely to temporarily buoy Democrats, even if both bills are extremely unlikely to pass the Senate.

One thing is clear though: the issue of abortion access is not going away.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Democrats are “increasingly talking about abortion in their midterm campaign advertising,” while Republicans are shying away from the issue.

In June the Supreme Court reversed the Roe v Wade ruling which enshrined the right to abortion in federal law.

On Friday almost all House Republicans voted against the bills which would restore and protect access to abortion – but the GOP is out of step with Americans, a majority of whom think abortion should be legal.

Ahead of the November mid-term elections, Democrats seem to be tying Republicans to the reversal of Roe v Wade, the WSJ reported:

[An analysis] of broadcast and national cable data from the ad-tracking firm AdImpact shows more than a third of all spots aired by Democrats and their allies in congressional and gubernatorial campaigns from July 1-12 have mentioned abortion.

Republicans are focusing their ads on inflation, which voters have consistently cited as their top concern heading into November’s elections. Less than 3% of all spots run by GOP candidates and their allies during that period included the abortion issue, the analysis showed.

House lawmakers have taken to the floor to speak for and against a proposal from the chamber’s Democratic leadership to protect abortion rights nationwide.

The speeches split along party lines, with Republicans decrying the bill and Democrats casting it as a necessary response to the supreme court’s decision last month overturning Roe v. Wade and handing states the power to ban the procedure outright.

California Democrat Barbara Lee condemned Republicans’ proposals to restrict abortion access, asking, “What in the world is this?”

Brian Mast, a Republican from Florida, put a $20 bill on the table and said to Democrats, “Any one of you or your colleagues wants to speak up and tell us when life begins, it’s sitting here for you.”

A Georgia district attorney has sent “target” letters to prominent Republicans in the state, warning them they could face indictments for their attempt to help Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election, Yahoo! News reports.

Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney for Fulton county, which includes the capital and largest city Atlanta, has sent the letters to Republicans including Burt Jones, a state senator who is standing as Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s running mate in this year’s election, and David Shafer, chair of the state’s Republican party, as well as state senator Brandon Beach.

According to the report:

Jones and Shafer were among those who participate in a closed-door meeting at the state Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, in which 16 Georgia Republicans selected themselves as the electors for the state, although they had no legal basis for doing so. Shafer, according to a source who was present, presided over the meeting, conducting it as though it was an official proceeding, in which those present voted themselves as the bona fide electors in Georgia — and then signed their names to a declaration to that effect that was sent to the National Archives.

In an interview with Yahoo! News, Willis said she was also considering asking Donald Trump to testify before the grand jury investigating the plot.

A colleague of Indiana doctor Caitlin Bernard, who provided the 10-year-old girl from Ohio with an abortion after her rape, has written an op-ed in The New York Times about how the episode, and the downfall of Roe v. Wade, has affected reproductive health.

Tracey A. Wilkinson, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, wrote:

Political attacks on abortion providers are, of course, nothing new. And that’s not all that providers and their staff face: They have been targeted, harassed and in some cases even murdered for providing legal health care to their patients; some types of attacks against them recently have increased. This moment, post-Roe v. Wade, feels particularly frightening and is chilling to anyone who cares for patients, especially those providing reproductive health care.

This saga has had real-world repercussions for Dr. Bernard. The local police have been alerted to concerns for her physical safety.

My colleagues and I have watched all this in horror. We are worried that this could happen to us, too. A law that recently went into effect in Indiana mandates that doctors, hospitals and abortion clinics report to the state when a patient who has previously had an abortion presents any of dozens of physical or psychological conditions — including anxiety, depression, sleeping disorders and uterine perforation — because they could be complications of the previous abortion. Not doing so within 30 days can result in a misdemeanor for the physician who treated the patient, punishable with up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Here’s more on the story, which has become an example of the real consequences of the supreme court’s landmark decision last month:

The depositions of Donald Trump and two of his children planned for Friday will be delayed following the death of Ivana Trump, his first wife and the childrens’ mother. “In light of the passing of Ivana Trump yesterday, we received a request from counsel for Donald Trump and his children to adjourn all three depositions, which we have agreed to,” the New York Attorney General’s Office said.

“This is a temporary delay and the depositions will be rescheduled as soon as possible,” the office also said. “There is no other information about dates or otherwise to provide at this time.”

Trump and his two eldest children, Ivanka and Donald Jr., were scheduled to give sworn testimony in the office’s three-year civil investigation into potential misconduct surrounding property values. The office is probing whether the Trump Organization provided inaccurate valuation to secure loans at favorable rates, or improperly claim tax breaks.

Trump’s attorney has reportedly indicated that the former president will invoke his constitutional right against self-incrimination and refuse to respond to questions. The Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, is facing a tax fraud trial amid a parallel investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

House Democrats will today make a renewed push to pass legislation protecting the right to abortion nationwide and the ability of Americans to cross state lines to seek the procedure. But the bills’ chances of passing the Senate are slim due to opposition from Republicans.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi just held an event with other Democrats prior to the vote, declaring, “As we pass his landmark legislation today, Democrats will not stop ferociously defending freedom for women and for every American. And we want everybody to know, women out there who are concerned about their own personal reproductive freedom and what it means to their health, that... the message from the House Democrats in our groups here today is, we are not going back”, sparking a chant that was joined by the lawmakers assembled behind her.

You can watch the full speech below:

The Guardian’s Lois Beckett reports on an overlooked aspect of the bipartisan gun safety bill passed last month that will pay for efforts to reduce gun violence in neighborhoods across the country:

In 2013, a month after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a group of Black pastors and other activists visited the Obama White House to press the administration to do more to prevent gun violence in communities of color.

Obama had just released his post-Newtown gun violence prevention plan, which did not include any funding for community violence prevention efforts, and which made no mention of the disparate impact of gun violence on Black Americans.

When the clergy members expressed their frustration at the White House’s lack of response, an Obama staffer told them that there was no support nationally to address urban gun violence, and that Americans’ political will was focused on “the issue of gun violence that affected suburban areas – schools where white kids were killed”.

Some of those same Black pastors who visited the White House in 2013 were invited back for a ceremony on the South Lawn earlier this week.

Peter Navarro, a former top trade adviser to Donald Trump who was indicted for failing to cooperate with the January 6 committee, today declined a plea deal, Reuters reports.

Last month, Navarro pleaded not guilty to two charges of contempt of Congress over his refusal to provide documents or testify to the House committee investigating the attack. According to Reuters, the lead prosecutor in the case Elizabeth Aloi said Navarro has now refused a deal that would see him plead guilty to one of those charges, and “comply with the January 6 committee subpoena to the satisfaction of the Justice Department.”

The Secret Service responded to the inspector general’s report in a statement released later yesterday evening, which you can read in full here.

The meat of it is that the deletion of text messages wasn’t intentional, but rather pre-planned and unrelated to the events of January 6:

The insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false. In fact, the Secret Service has been fully cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) in every respect – whether it be interviews, documents, emails, or texts.

First, in January 2021, before any inspection was opened by OIG on this subject, the Secret Service began to reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned, three-month system migration. In that process, data resident on some phones was lost.

DHS OIG requested electronic communications for the first time on Feb. 26, 2021, after the migration was well under way. The Secret Service notified DHS OIG of the loss of certain phones’ data, but confirmed to OIG that none of the texts it was seeking had been lost in the migration.

Yesterday, The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported that an inspector general found Secret Service agents erased text messages from when the US Capitol was attacked on January 6, and the day before:

Texts sent between US Secret Service agents on 5 and 6 January 2021 were erased after the agency’s oversight body sought the communications in a review into the Capitol attack, according to a letter from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).

The disclosure in the letter, sent on Thursday to the House homeland security and Senate homeland security and government affairs committees, marked the latest failure for the Secret Service amid increasing scrutiny for their actions over the attack.

Appearing to rebuke the erasure of the messages, the inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, decried the move and noted that the destruction came only after the body sought the communications as part of an internal investigation into the agency’s response to the January 6 events.

Joe Manchin cited inflation as one of the reasons why he won’t back measures to fight climate change or raise taxes on the rich.

“Political headlines are of no value to the millions of Americans struggling to afford groceries and gas as inflation soars to 9.1 percent,” his spokeswoman Sam Runyon said, according to The Washington Post. “Senator Manchin believes it’s time for leaders to put political agendas aside, reevaluate and adjust to the economic realities the country faces to avoid taking steps that add fuel to the inflation fire.”

Inflation is indeed high in the United States, but there’s evidence gas prices, one of the trend’s major components, are on the decline. Patrick de Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, has been monitoring their movements:

The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt has more on what Manchin’s decision means for Joe Biden’s agenda:

Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator who has repeatedly thwarted his own party’s legislation, refuses to support more funding for climate action and will also block tax raises for wealthy Americans, dealing a further stunning blow to Joe Biden’s agenda when the US president is struggling to notch up successes.

Manchin told Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, late on Thursday that he will oppose an economic measure he has been negotiating with Democratic leaders if it includes climate or green energy provisions, or higher taxes on the rich and corporations, a Democrat briefed on the conversations said.

The decision by Manchin, a West Virginian whose coal business has earned him millions of dollars over the past three decades, is a new shock to Democrats, who had made the sweeping package a top priority as midterm elections approach.

Let’s take a trip down the long and frustrating road Joe Biden’s marquee spending bill has journeyed over the past 14 months. Just over a year ago, Biden was fresh in the White House and proposed an expansive plan meant to fix many of the ills plaguing the United States: expensive housing costs, the lack of support for financially-strapped parents, dilapidated infrastructure, tax rates that favor the rich and, crucially for both the country and the world at large, climate change.

Months of talks ensued and Congress managed to pass the provisions overhauling the nation’s infrastructure, but negotiations over tax reform, social services and steps to mitigate rising temperatures stalled, in part due to the opposition of Joe Manchin, West Virginia’s Democratic senator who has extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry and is a crucial swing vote in the chamber that requires the agreement of all 50 Democratic lawmakers if the legislation was to pass (since no Republicans support it). By the end of 2021, he had rejected the legislation entirely - but Democrats weren’t finished.

Quietly, they have spent this year attempting to craft a bill that would pass his muster. But The Washington Post reported last night that Manchin has now said he won’t back any measures to combat America’s substantial greenhouse gas emissions, nor any changes to the tax code, citing the country’s high rate of inflation. He would, however, vote for lowering prescription drug and health care costs.

Varshini Prakash, executive director of climate change activist group the Sunrise Movement, described Manchin’s opposition as “nothing short of a death sentence”.

“Biden must declare a climate emergency, and do everything in his executive power to stop the climate crisis immediately. That’s the only way he can salvage his presidency and save our generation. And we must uproot this broken system and rebuild it to work for us,” Prakash said.