Biden says debt limit must be raised because of ‘reckless’ policies under Trump – as it happened

We’re wrapping up our live US politics coverage a bit early today, as a massive outage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, affects an unknown number of users around the world.

An updated summary of today’s political news:

• Joe Biden lambasted Republicans on the debt limit, calling them “hypocritical” and “disgraceful” for using the filibuster to twice block efforts by the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling.
• With talks of the debt limit, focus on domestic spending around the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill have become intertwined, as progressives push for the two bills to be voted on together and centrist senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continue to hold up negotiations.
• Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham thinks Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024.
• Andrew Yang is leaving the Democratic party, but tweeted his “political homelessness” would not last long.
• Amid an unexplained global outage of its platforms, Facebook is facing sustained scrutiny from regulators as internal whistleblower Fraunces Haugen went public on Sunday with an interview saying that Facebook as it currently exists “is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world” and that its internal policies amounted to “a betrayal of democracy.”

Martin Pengelly

Donald Trump’s niece said on Monday she had been served with papers in a lawsuit over the leak of his tax information to the New York Times – and asked for her autograph at the same time.

Mary Trump is a trained psychologist who has written two bestselling books about her uncle and the effects of his four-year presidency.

The information she helped convey to the Times formed the basis of a blockbuster story which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019.

Today, Mary Trump was speaking to a Sirius XM host, Dean Obeidallah, in an interview which will broadcast in full this evening.

She said: “Donald is suing me, the New York Times and the three Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters who wrote that extraordinary piece of journalism in 2018, for $100m for reasons which don’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny, but obviously we’ll have to let the courts decide.

“But in an unusual move, a process server came to my home to serve me with papers – which typically doesn’t happen if you’re represented by counsel. It’s usually sent to the attorney’s office, so I’m guessing it was some kind of power play. But to lighten the mood, I guess, the process server also asked me to sign a copy of my first book which he had brought with him.”

That book, for the record, was released in 2020 and titled Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

“He had it with him and I asked him what his name was, and I signed the book for him,” Mary Trump said. “It’s a little weird – you’re serving me with a lawsuit and asking me to sign a book for you, but OK…”

Oliver Laughland

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana has called on the Biden administration to halt further proliferation of the petro-chemical industry in so-called “Cancer Alley”, adding to growing calls among advocate groups in the region for a moratorium on new polluting plants.

The heavily industrialised region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is lined with more than 100 plants, producing some of the most polluted air in America. According to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, certain census tracts in St John the Baptist parish have the highest risk of cancer due to airborne pollution in the US – more than 50 times the national average.

Joe Biden placed the region at the centre of his environmental justice policy platform during the 2020 election, and referenced “Cancer Alley” when signing new climate orders in February.

But campaigners have continued to urge the president to take targeted action to curb toxic emissions and end construction of new plants. In August, the administration paused the construction of a proposed gargantuan plastics complex in St James parish, which would emit a range of cancer causing pollutants and emit 13m tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, the equivalent of three coal-fired power plants.

Local organisers have long urged the EPA to regulate emissions of the likely cancer causing pollutant chloroprene, which has been emitted by a synthetic rubber plant, Pontchartrain Works, for more than half a century at dangerous levels.

“Cancer Alley” is also a region formerly littered with plantations once dependent on the labor of enslaved people.

On Monday, ACLU Louisiana executive director Alanah Odoms referenced such history in a video message.

“This sacred land should lawfully belong to the descendants of the Black men, women, and children who labored to their deaths as enslaved people,” Odoms said.

“Instead, the land has been exploited by dangerous plastic and chemical plants that have destroyed air quality, hastened climate change and exposed descendants to unconscionable rates of disease and cancer. The Biden administration has a duty to step in.”

The region was also hit hard by Hurricane Ida in August. Campaigners in both St John the Baptist parish and St James parish suffered significant damage to their homes.

More:

The Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, vetoed four election-related bills during a Sunday dinner hosted by the Detroit National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), saying the measures “would have perpetuated the ‘Big Lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote”, according to the Detroit Free Press.

One measure would have banned election equipment from being connected to the internet, something that does not happen during elections.

Another measure would have further regulated who could access the state’s qualified voter file, something Whitmer said inaccurately implied third parties had accessed it in 2020.

A third bill would have allowed local election officials to designate private facilities as poll places if other options weren’t available, something Whitmer said “would make it more difficult for seniors and persons living in large apartment complexes to vote”.

Whitmer did say she was open to reconsidering the fourth measure she vetoed, which would have required poll watchers to undergo mandatory training with the secretary of state. She said the measure must be coupled with appropriate funding.

Some Democrats in the state legislature backed the measures but a veto override is unlikely, the Detroit Free Press reported. The House Democratic caucus backed Whitmer’s decision to veto the bills.

Senate Republicans blasted the governor for blocking the measures, accusing her of grandstanding, the Associated Press reported.

Michigan Republicans are separately circulating a petition that would allow voters to bypass a gubernatorial veto and enact several new voting restrictions.

That measure would remove an option allowing people who don’t have ID to use an affidavit to affirm their identity, put an ID requirement on mail-in ballot applications, prohibit election officials from proactively sending out mail-in ballot applications, and bar private funding for elections.

• Joe Biden lambasted Republicans on the debt limit, calling them “hypocritical” and “disgraceful” for using the filibuster to twice block efforts by the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling.
• With talks of the debt limit, focus on domestic spending around the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill have become intertwined, as progressives push for the two bills to be voted on together and centrist senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continue to hold up negotiations.
• Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham thinks Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024.
• Andrew Yang is leaving the Democratic party.

There is no guarantee that Republicans will stop utilizing the filibuster to block Democrats and allow the debt limit to be raised.

But White House press secretary Jen Psaki pointed out that Congress has raised the debt limit 80 times before and not raising the debt limit is honestly just isn’t an option.

“There isn’t another option,” she said. “It has to pass legislatively. It has to happen.”

Let’s talk the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill. These two pieces of legislation are key to the Biden agenda, and Democrats are at an impasse.

Joe Biden was frank when he said just two members in the Senate – centrist senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema – are standing in the way of “closing the deal” among the Democrats. Manchin and Sinema, like their Republican colleagues, are balking at the large spending amount of the reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, the progressives of the Democratic party are arguing that infrastructure and reconciliation should be voted together to give reconciliation a better chance of passing as is.

“We have the American people very strongly on our side, we have the president of the United States on our side, we have 96% of the Democratic caucus of the House on our side, and we’ve got all but two senators on our side. We’re going to win this thing,” Senator Bernie Sanders said Sunday.

At today’s briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the president will be going into virtual meetings with progressive members of the House, with “the recognition that this package is going to be smaller than originally proposed.”

“What he wants to hear from them is what their priorities are, what their bottom lines are, so he can play a constructive role going forward,” Psaki said. “I would expect that later this week, he will have another virtual meeting with members who might consider themselves more moderate.”

She continued by saying that the administration’s main objective “is getting this done and delivering for the American people and we will continue pressing forward until we get it done.”

“Yes, it requires senator Sinema and senator Manchin moving forward and supporting a path forward and it also requires agreement on what a package would look like,” she said. “The president will continue to work with a range of members from across the Democratic caucus.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki is at the podium for today’s press briefing.

Politico is reporting that a senior State Department official is abruptly leaving his role, marking his departure with a scathing internal memo criticizing the Biden administration and its continued use of a Trump-era policy to expel migrants from the southern border as illegal,” “inhumane” and “not worthy of this administration that I so strongly support.”

The policy in question is Title 42, which allows the administration to bar people from entering the country during a health crisis. Harold Koh, a senior adviser, wrote in the memo that he believed that Title 42 authority “continues to violate our legal obligation not to expel or return (“refouler”) individuals who fear persecution, death, or torture, especially migrants fleeing from Haiti.”

“Title 42 permits customs officers, with supervisor approval, to identify persons who should be excepted from expulsion based on the totality of the circumstances, including consideration of significant law enforcement, office and public safety, humanitarian and public health interests,” Koh wrote. “But if Haiti is undeniably a humanitarian disaster area, the question should be: at this moment, why is this administration returning Haitians at all?

The Associated Press is reporting that Donald Trump has until 23 December to undergo questioning in a former Apprentice contestant’s defamation lawsuit over what he said in denying her sexual assault allegations.

Summer Zervos was one in a series of women who publicly accused Trump of sexual assaults or harassment years before in the runup to the 2016 presidential election. Zervos said that Trump subjected her to unwanted kissing and groping during meetings in 2007 at his New York office and at a California hotel where he was staying.

Trump retweeted a message that called her claims “a hoax” and described the women who accused him of sexual assault and harassment as “liars” trying to hurt his 2016 campaign’s chances.
Zervos sued, saying he hurt her reputation, and is seeking a retraction, an apology and unspecified damages.

Trump was weeks away from a January 2020 deposition deadline when he won a delay, arguing that sitting presidents couldn’t be sued in state courts.

After he left office this year, New York’s court of appeals said the question was moot. The case returned to a Manhattan trial court for both sides to continue gathering evidence.

Zervos, a California restaurateur, appeared on “The Apprentice” in 2006. Trump was then the host.

House majority leader Steny Hoyer issued a statement in support of Joe Biden and his rebuke on the Republicans over the debt limit:

“Preventing a senate vote on this critical legislation puts our economic recovery in jeopardy,” Hoyer said. “Americans across the country will suffer the consequences of Republican obstructionism if the United States defaults on its obligations by refusing to pay for what it has already bought. I call on Leader McConnell to allow a vote on cloture without delay so that Democrats can suspend the debt limit and prevent economic catastrophe.”

Speaking of senator Kyrsten Sinema, yesterday, Arizona activists followed her into a bathroom at Arizona State University, where Sinema is a lecturer, urging her to pass the $3.5tn infrastructure bill that she is holding up in negotiations.

Today, Sinema responded to the activists, saying it was “unacceptable”. “It is the duty of elected leaders to avoid fostering an environment in which honestly-held policy disagreements serve as the basis for vitriol — raising the temperature in political rhetoric and creating a permission structure for unacceptable behavior,” she said in a statement.”

Last week, activists in boats and kayaks paddled up to the yacht of senator Joe Manchin, another reconciliation bill holdout, to demand that he pass the bill.

When asked about what happened to Sinema at today’s address, Joe Biden said, “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody.”

“The only people it doesn’t happen to are people who have Secret Service standing around,” he quipped.