That’s all from me on the west coast, here are some of the notable moments from throughout the day:
Kamala Harris visited southern California to spotlight a bevy of investments at the federal and state levels in wildfire preparedness, response, and recovery.
Mississippi’s Black senators walked out of legislature and withheld their vote in protest of a bill that would would ban schools from teaching critical race theory.
People are bracing for an anti-vaccine rally in Washington DC that has been largely organized on Facebook and is expected to draw tens of thousands of people.
Biden emphasized the need to pass Build Back Better, arguing it will help create a fairer tax system in the US. Speaking at the US Conference of Mayors’ meeting in Washington today, Biden said it was vital that the wealthiest Americans pay their “fair share” in taxes.
Democrats are attempting to revive their Build Back Better Act, a month after Senator Joe Manchin announced he would oppose the legislation. Joe Biden said on Wednesday, “I’m confident we can get pieces, big chunks of the Build Back Better law signed into law.” Manchin has indicated Democrats will be “starting from scratch” in their negotiations.
Anti-vaccine rally planned for this weekend in Washington DC
Thousands of protesters, including prolific anti-vaccine figures are expected to flood the streets of DC to protest vaccine mandates.
The event was primarily organized on the “Defeat the Mandates DC” Facebook group and on smaller far-right internet platforms. According to NBC News, hotels in Virginia are already fully booked and organizers have crowdfunded at least $200,000 ahead of the planned demonstration.
The permit for the rally was filed by the Children’s Health Defense an anti-vaccine nonprofit founded by Robert F Kennedy Jr. Dr Robert Malone, a virologist who has become a leading anti-vaccine voice is also slated to speak.
Read more ahead of the planned demonstration here.
A Texas man has been arrested and federally charged for allegedly threatening to kill Georgia election workers and other state officials. This is the first case brought by the Department of Justice’s election threats task force.
According to the indictment, Chad Christopher Stark, 54, posted a message on Craigslist on 5 January, 2021, with the title “Georgia Patriots it’s time to kill [Official A] the Chinese agent - $10,000,” according to an NPR report on the arrest.
These types of threats have been happening across the US since Donald Trump lost the the 2020 election and began pushing false claims that he was cheated out of a second term due to widespread election fraud.
Read the rest of NPR’s writeup of Stark’s case here.
Mississippi’s Black senators walked out of legislature and withheld their vote in protest of a bill that would would ban schools from teaching critical race theory.
The bill’s chief sponsor, Michael McLendon, a Republican senator says that constituents have heard about the theory in the news and don’t want it taught in schools, according to a Washington Post write-up of the Black senators’ walkout. But, the state superintendent has said that critical race theory is not being taught in public schools and no one has presented evidence indicating that it has been previously.
Still, Senate bill 2113 passed by a vote of 32-2. Watch footage of the senators’ walk out below.
Kamala Harris has just wrapped up her remarks on the federal government’s investment in wildfire preparedness and recovery in California and throughout the west.
In addition to highlighting the promise of satellites to understand and respond to blazes, and increasing pay for federal firefighters, the vice-president underscored the following:
$600m of a $1.3bn federal grant for disaster relief will go to California
$1bn in wildfire prevention grants that were recently approved by state lawmakers
$5bn in wildfire preparation and response earmarked in Biden’s infrastructure bill
Harris also emphasized the need for federal, state and local collaboration to deal with fires that are increasing in frequency and intensity each season.
“We cannot respond only in reaction to a moment of harm or danger ... we are our best when local, state and federal work together, hand in hand, unencumbered by partisanship or politics,” Harris said.
Ahead of Kamala Harris’ statements, Governor Gavin Newsom expressed his gratitude for the current administration’s willingness to support California’s wildfire mitigation and recovery efforts.
This is a profound, existential moment ... but it’s also a moment of optimism ... These efforts means nothing without the support – not just financial – from the Biden-Harris administration,” Newsom said at San Bernardino county’s Del Rosa fire station.
He also acknowledged Greenville and Paradise, two California cities that were all but obliterated by wildfires in 2021 and 2018 respectively.
My colleague Dani Anguiano recently wrote about where things stand in Greenville. Read her coverage here.
As we await Kamala Harris’ remarks here is some background on the setting she is in:
San Bernardino County in California’s Inland Empire is notoriously fire-prone and has been especially hard hit by blazes including the 2020 El Dorado fire that was sparked by a pyrotechnic device used during a gender-reveal party and burned for more than three weeks.
Read my west coast colleague Gabrielle Cannon’s coverage of that incident here:
Kamala Harris goes to San Bernardino to promote Biden administration wildfire response efforts
The vice-president came to southern California to give remarks on a $600m federal investment meant to help the state recover from unprecedentedly devastating wildfires over recent years.
Harris joined California governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Alex Padilla and secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack.
Watch the livestream here:
LIVE NOW: Vice President Kamala Harris is in San Bernardino, California, to deliver remarks on the administration’s efforts to combat wildfires https://t.co/7nwP9qLw2r
Good afternoon, this is Abené Clayton blogging from sunny Los Angeles.
Kamala Harris is in Southern California today with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to promote the Biden administration’s $3 billion investment in wildfire preparedness and response.
I’ll have more on the vice president’s remarks later in the day.
That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Abené Clayton, will take over the blog for the next few hours.
Here’s where the day stands so far:
Democrats are attempting to revive their Build Back Better Act, a month after Senator Joe Manchin announced he would oppose the legislation. Joe Biden said on Wednesday, “I’m confident we can get pieces, big chunks of the Build Back Better law signed into law.” Manchin has indicated Democrats will be “starting from scratch” in their negotiations.
Biden emphasized the need to pass Build Back Better, arguing it will help create a fairer tax system in the US. Speaking at the US Conference of Mayors’ meeting in Washington today, Biden said it was vital that the wealthiest Americans pay their “fair share” in taxes.
Politico published a draft executive order from the Trump administration that outlines a plan to seize voting machines in battleground states. The order, which was never sent, was part of a collection of documents turned over to the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection after the supreme court rejected Trump’s efforts to block the documents’ release.
The US said Biden is “fully prepared” to hold a summit with Vladimir Putin, as fears intensify over a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. US secretary of state Antony Blinken met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Geneva today to continue the two countries’ discussions over Ukraine.
Biden delivered remarks on the need to boost US production of semiconductors, which power everything from cell phones to electrical grids. During the event, the CEO of Intel announced his company would invest more than $20bn to build a semiconductor production facility in Ohio.
And the Manhattan US attorney’s office, which is investigating Rudy Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine, has now received thousands of documents from the Trump lawyer’s devices, which were seized by investigators last April.
The retired federal judge assigned to review the contents of 18 electronic devices seized from Rudolph W. Giuliani’s home and offices in Manhattan last spring has withheld about half of what former president Donald Trump’s personal lawyer argued should be kept out of the hands of investigators because it was privileged.
More than 3,000 communications were released to prosecutors on Wednesday, an action reflected in a four-page report submitted to a judge overseeing litigation on the FBI’s April 28 seizure of Giuliani’s phones and computers. The contents of the devices were not disclosed.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has been investigating Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine while he was representing Trump. Prosecutors have said Giuliani might have acted as an unregistered foreign agent, which was the basis for the agents’ search. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York who also once headed the prosecutor’s office that now has him under a microscope, has denied any wrongdoing.
Giuliani has also attracted the attention of the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection, which issued a subpoena to the Trump ally this week.
In his statement announcing the subpoena of Giuliani and three other Trump lawyers, committee chairman Bennie Thompson said each person had “advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results, or were in direct contact with the former President about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes”.
Meanwhile, the National Archives has turned over hundreds of pages of documents from the Trump administration to the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection, per Guardian contributor Hugo Lowell.
Just in: National Archives confirms they released hundreds of pages of Trump White House documents to the Jan. 6 committee yesterday evening after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s executive privilege claim
The news comes two days after the US supreme court rejectedDonald Trump’s request to block the release of the documents based off claims of executive privilege.
The newly released documents are expected to include call logs, daily presidential diaries, handwritten notes and memos from Trump’s top aides.
Draft Trump order told defense chief to seize voting machines
Ed Pilkington
In the heady days between Donald Trump’s defeat in November 2020 and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, an executive order was prepared. It commanded the defense secretary to seize voting machines in battleground states, as part of Trump’s “big lie” that the vote was rigged.
The draft executive order, obtained and published by Politico, was never sent and its author is unknown.
It was part of a cache of documents handed over to the House committee investigating the 6 January violence, after the supreme court ruled this week that Trump could not shield himself from oversight on grounds of executive privilege.
The disclosure of the draft order adds to evidence of the lengths to which Trump and his close advisers were prepared to go to keep him in the White House, against the will of the American people.
Under the draft order, the defense secretary would have been required to carry out an assessment of the voting machines “no later than 60 days from commencement of operations”.
In case you missed it yesterday: the US supreme court declined to expedite the case over Texas’ abortion law, which bans the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy.
Over dissents from the three liberal justices, the court declined to order a federal appeals court to return the case to a federal judge who had temporarily blocked the law’s enforcement. The court offered no explanation for its action.
The Texas ban is thus likely to remain in effect for the foreseeable future, following a decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans to send the case to the Texas Supreme Court, which is entirely controlled by Republican justices and does not have to act immediately.
The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, also marked the 49th anniversary of Roe v Wade during her daily briefing this afternoon.
“Reproductive health care has been under extreme and relentless assault ever since [Roe was decided], especially in recent months,” Psaki said.
.@PressSec on 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade ruling: "Reproductive health care has been under extreme & relentless assault ever since, especially in recent months...We're deeply committed to making sure everyone has access to care and we will defend it with every tool we have." pic.twitter.com/hQ3m8pL6wG
The press secretary noted it had been nearly 150 days since the Texas abortion law, which bans the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy, went into effect.
“We’re deeply committed to making sure everyone has access to care and we will defend it with every tool we have,” Psaki said.
Psaki added that the Biden administration is continuing its efforts with Congress to codify Roe v Wade into law, but that goal will be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to achieve with Democrats’ current narrow majorities in the House and Senate.
The theme of this year’s March for Life was “equality begins in the womb.” Organizers wrapped their speeches in the rhetoric of the social justice movement, arguing that abortion was anathema to racial and gender equality.
Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, decried Roe v Wade decision handed down by an all-male majority on the supreme court in 1973.
“Murder is not a women’s right,” read one sign carried by a young man in a Donald Trump beanie. Another popular sign read “BLM = Babies Lives Matter.”
A memo by reproductive rights organization Naral accused the anti-abortion movement of “co-opting social justice rhetoric in order to make its extreme agenda appear more palatable.”
“In this critical moment for the future of reproductive freedom, we must call out the anti-choice movement’s fake ‘feminism’ for what it is: a tactic for maintaining white, patriarchal control,” it read.
