Kevin McCarthy basks in rare win after Republicans unite to pass debt ceiling plan – as it happened | US politics

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House Republicans have succeeded in passing their proposal to both raise the debt limit and cut government spending, but the fundamental realities in Washington have not changed: Democrats and Joe Biden refuse to support the bill and insist the GOP increase the ceiling without preconditions. A potential June default looms if an agreement is not reached before then.

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Here’s what else happened today:

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• Montana Republicans voted to bar the state’s sole transgender lawmaker, Democrat Zooey Zephyr, from the House chamber, so she’s doing her work outside its doors.

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• Senate Democrats seem divided over whether to subpoena supreme court chief justice John Roberts after he declined to testify about the court’s ethics.

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• Washington announced new measures to stem an expected flow of migrants to the southern border, including the opening of new immigration centers in Colombia and Guatemala.

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• Donald Trump’s campaign hired a second company to prove his allegations of fraud in the 2020 election, without success. The firm’s founder has since been interviewed by federal prosecutors.

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• More polls confirmed what we already know: Trump remains top among Republicans, and Biden the leader among Democrats.

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The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020 hired a second firm to prove its claims of election fraud – and the founder of the company has since talked to federal prosecutors.

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The investigation by Simpatico Software Systems could not substantiate the allegations of vote tampering and other misconduct that Trump started making after his loss to Joe Biden.

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Ken Block, Simpatico’s founder, told the Post he spoke with prosecutors working for Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to investigate Trump over his attempts to overturn Biden’s win, among other matters.

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Here’s more from their story:

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Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.

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“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he said. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”

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Block said he recently received a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith’s office and met with federal prosecutors in Washington, but he declined to discuss his interactions with them. Block said he contemporaneously sent his findings disputing fraud claims in writing to the Trump campaign in late 2020.

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“I just don’t believe it’s appropriate at this point in time to discuss anything related to the grand jury process,” he said.

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Prosecutors have obtained extensive information about Block’s efforts, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.

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Federal records show the Trump 2020 campaign paid Block’s firm more than $750,000 in six different payments. The first for $390,000 came three days after the election, records show, and the final payment came around Thanksgiving of that year. The payments were labeled “Recount.”

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House Republicans have succeeded in passing their proposal to both raise the debt limit and cut government spending, but the fundamental realities in Washington have not changed: Democrats and Joe Biden refuse to support the proposal and insist the GOP raise the limit without preconditions. A potential June default looms if an agreement isn’t reached before then.

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There’s plenty more news happening elsewhere:

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• Montana Republicans voted to bar the state’s sole transgender lawmaker, Democrat Zooey Zephyr, from the House chamber, so she’s doing her work outside its doors.

n

• Senate Democrats seem divided over whether to attempt to subpoena supreme court chief justice John Roberts after he declined to testify about the court’s ethics.

n

• Washington announced new measures to stem an expected flow of migrants to the southern border, including the opening of new immigration centers in Colombia and Guatemala.

n

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Here’s what else is happening today:

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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Key events

Martin Pengelly

Joe Biden, who declared his run for re-election on Tuesday, faces only two fringe candidates in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A new poll from Emerson College Polling doesn’t suggest the self-help author Marianne Williamson or the Kennedy scion and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr can deny the president a chance for another four years in power.

But it might seem vaguely alarming to dispassionate observers that in the survey, 21% of respondents picked Kennedy and 8% Williamson, with Biden on a round 70%.

The same survey puts Biden’s job approval at 49%, down a tick from the last time out.

Among Republican candidates, declared and not, Emerson finds 62% support for the former president Donald Trump, ahead of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, on 16%, the former vice-president Mike Pence (7%) and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (3%).

The former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who like Trump and Haley has declared his run, is on 2%, behind the fringe candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (3%) and also that famous, perennial political contender Someone Else (4%).

Of hypothetical 2024 matchups, Emerson reports: “Biden narrowly leads Trump 43% to 41%, while 10% would vote for someone else and 6% are undecided. Against DeSantis, Biden holds 43% while DeSantis receives 37%, 12% would vote for someone else and 8% are undecided. Both races are within the poll’s margin of error.”

Here’s some further reading, about Biden and the media: