Justices rule that federal law blocks state cases over label warnings on Roundup by people alleging it caused illnessUS politics live – latest updatesThe US supreme court has found in favor of the former Monsanto company in a ruling that is expected to block thousands of lawsuits filed by people alleging the key ingredient in the weed killer Roundup causes cancer.The decision was made in a 7-2 vote, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh offering the majority opinion and justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing the dissenting opinion, joined by justice Neil Gorsuch. Continue reading...
Passage of national concealed carry legislation has stalled as pro-Second Amendment organizations, the White House, and members of Congress have debated which version of competing bills to […]
Darializa Avila Chevalier, NYC congressional primary winner, reportedly founded a Columbia group that called for total eradication of Western civilization.
President Donald Trump's obsession with forcing Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act may have catastrophically backfired, by turning more Republicans he needs against him.The collapse manifested itself on Wednesday when Trump met with Senate Republicans behind closed doors for what was supposed to be a persuasion mission. Instead, he may have made matters worse for himself, reports Politico"The president came to the Capitol to do what he thinks Senate Republican leadership can't do: flip votes on SAVE and nuke the filibuster," a senior Senate GOP aide confided to Politico. "He left with the same number of votes that existed when he arrived—possibly fewer."The report notes that even symbolic victories are slipping away after Trump scrapped a planned signing of a major housing affordability bill—a move that infuriated GOP senators already stretched thin by the gridlock."I'd like to celebrate victories, not come up with reasons why we failed," Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) lamented while talking to reporters. "We've demonstrated a lot of dysfunction lately."According to Politico's Calen Razor, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), "has lost control of the floor as hard-liners demand the Senate pass the elections overhaul, " adding that, "... if Johnson and Trump can’t reach a compromise, GOP leadership may cancel all votes for the remainder of the week and next week, too."
President Donald Trump and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) "went at each other" during a Wednesday meeting with the Republican caucus. Trump was on Capitol Hill, where he was to sign a bipartisan bill that aimed to make housing more affordable. Trump was dismissive of it on Truth Social, calling it "of minor importance." He then announced he was canceling the bill signing altogether. "Trump and Cassidy just went at each other over Iran during the Senate GOP lunch, per [a] source in room," said Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio. "Trump was interrupting Cassidy as Cassidy was calling the war a 'blunder.' Other senators tried to jump in but Cassidy and Trump kept going back and forth, source said."The battle goes back to the years-old bad blood between the two men. Cassidy is one of the long-time Republicans who Trump ousted in a GOP primary despite placating Trump during confirmation hearings. However, Cassidy was one of very few Republican lawmakers in 2021 who believed that they should hold a trial in the Senate over the second impeachment of Trump, earning him Trump's permanent hostility. Since losing his primary, Cassidy has said publicly that he wouldn't turn against the president. His actions have proved otherwise, however. In the matter over Trump's nearly $1.8 billion Justice Department "slush fund," Cassidy was working up until the Homeland Security budget vote, "trying to perfect language to drive a stake through [it]," reported The Hill in early June.Explaining his convictions, Cassidy said, "I would like to fund control of the border but also do something about the weaponization fund. I’m trying to strike that balance."Last week, Cassidy scored Trump's 14-point proposed Iran peace agreement. "The details that I’ve seen so far look … awful," Cassidy told reporters. "This will go down as a tremendous foreign policy blunder."If the terms are accurate, Cassidy said that it would ultimately put Iran in a stronger position than it was before the war began. Meanwhile, it would leave allies in the Middle East weaker. “It’s clear that they [the administration] don’t have a plan. Or if this is the plan, it’s not a very good plan, and that’s because it’s now been five months,” Cassidy added. “So that’s why I think Congress needs the ability to be fully briefed and to weigh in. Not to be told kind of top line what’s going on, but to be fully briefed. And that’s my… goal right now. Let the American people, by their elected representatives, have input into what we’re doing, because it’s not going as we were promised that it would go.”
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump privately raged at Republican senators during a lunch on Wednesday. He declared he won’t sign a bill reducing housing costs for the American people until Republicans end the filibuster and pass a vile piece of voter suppression legislation first. This shocked Trump’s own advisors and angered Republicans who see it as undermining their hopes in the midterms.What’s striking about all this is that ordinarily a president would let members of his own party get distance from him in order to survive the elections. But he can’t do that. And he’s likely going to be the one who gets screwed by this. We’re talking about all of it with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a good piece digging deep into Trump’s narcissism as the through line to all his current foibles. Amanda, good to have you back on as always.Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So Trump was expected to sign this housing bill bringing down costs, and instead he tweeted the following: “Today’s housing news conference and signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE America Act, which I consider to be a national emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”Amanda, the SAVE Act would probably disenfranchise millions and millions of people. The real national emergency here is that Trump’s deep unpopularity will cost his party one or both chambers of Congress. This isn’t subtle, is it?Marcotte: No, not even slightly. I’m beginning to think he actually genuinely believes that the SAVE Act is what’s going to save the Republican Party in the midterm elections. And I don’t see that that’s necessarily true, because it’s got these voter ID restrictions that are so severe that it seems to me the only way you may even be able to successfully vote is if you have a passport, which I feel benefits college-educated urban voters the most of all—who tend to be Democrats.Sargent: Right. I mean, Republicans don’t want this thing to pass for a reason, and it’s not because they altruistically really want people to vote. Marcotte: We know for a fact that Republicans in the past have been all over the map when it comes to Trump’s fantasies about stealing elections. And he really—I think he doesn’t just want to steal elections because he thinks it’s the only way he’s going to win. I think he just really likes the idea of stealing elections. I think Donald Trump would rather cheat to win than just win outright. It just gets him off somehow.And so he’s gotten really fixated on the SAVE America Act, and he just cannot understand that it is not at all the slam dunk for Republicans that he thinks it is.Sargent: I agree. I think that Donald Trump sees cheating as another form of winning, as another form of getting over. But let’s put off that for a second. Again and again we’ve learned that Republicans simply did not have the votes to end the filibuster and pass this voter suppression bill. And yet, I want to highlight something from Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio. He reports that in this private meeting, Trump was in a sour mood throughout, and he again demanded that Republicans pass the so-called SAVE Act. And get this—according to this reporter, nobody pushed back.Amanda, just to reiterate, it’s typical for presidents who are this unpopular to let members of his party get some distance from him, but Trump won’t allow that because it would constitute an admission that he’s unpopular, and that can’t be allowed. And on top of that, these Republicans won’t challenge him on this. What do you make of that?Marcotte: It’s so ironic, isn’t it? He can’t admit he’s unpopular, but he’s still pushing legislation that’s premised on the idea that he’s so unpopular that he can’t win an election without it. But yes, I think it’s sad at this point in time that Republicans are afraid of at least being singled out as being anti-Trump. They voted in the Senate to stop his powers, to continue to fight the war in Iran—even though I think that’s kind of toothless at this point. But they do resist him sometimes, but always with this sort of eyeball towards never catching his evil eye, never being seen by him, or by the average Fox News viewer, as resisting Donald Trump. Because he still has this intense hold over the party even as he’s losing all of his power everywhere else in the American public. Sargent: It’s a really interesting dichotomy. And to go to your point—literally minutes before he tweeted this announcement that he won’t sign the bill until Republicans suppress millions of votes, he tweeted this: “My real poll numbers are the highest they have ever been.
