Biden to warn of ‘enormous stakes’ of election in speech at site of racist mass shooting in Charleston – live

This is Joe Biden’s second campaign speech of the year, and like his first, held on Friday in Pennsylvania, he took the stage to chants from the audience of, “Four more years!”

The president is also set to continue the change of tactics he debuted last week, when he directly attacked Donald Trump and his allies. Biden had in months prior generally focused on his administration’s accomplishments, while dedicating less of his rhetorical emphasis to the former president and his Maga movement.

Joe Biden is now speaking at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is expected to warn of the threat to American democracy posed by Donald Trump’s campaign for president.

Follow along here for live updates.

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In addition to taking a swipe at Donald Trump and the Republicans, Jim Clyburn also took a swipe at reporters.

After talking about how Joe Biden had followed through on efforts to provide student debt relief to public servants, Clyburn, who co-chairs the president’s re-election campaign, said, “For some strange reason, we don’t see reports about that.”

Biden’s public approval ratings have been underwater for more than two years, and some frustrated Democrats have blamed the news media, saying they aren’t giving the president the credit he deserves. Semafor reported yesterday that the Biden campaign is bringing reporters to their headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware for briefing focused both on their campaigns strategy, also to attempt to mold their coverage:

Joe Biden is now at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where long-serving Democratic congressman Jim Clyburn is introducing the president.

Clyburn has focused on Biden’s efforts to relieve some federal student loans, noting the roles Donald Trump and Republican attorneys general nationwide played in blocking his plan.

“Four years ago, this country was faced with a crisis. Four years ago, presidential candidate Joe Biden offered himself to the American people and he made a lot of promises and commitments. Among them he would bring relief to those who have become burdened with student loan debt. And he has done so,” Clyburn said.

He contrasted that with the Trump administration’s denial of student debt relief to public servants who would have been eligible for it under a law Congress approved.

“When I first became majority whip, we passed the law back in 2007 to give loan forgiveness to individuals who would work in public service for 10 years and paid their loans faithfully. When people started to hit that 10 year mark, it was 2017, and we know who occupied the White House. In 2017, people started to hit the 10-year mark Trump was president and implemented, the program was blocked and almost no one got loan forgiveness. Joe Biden took office in 2021 and changed that,” Clyburn said.

Joe Biden just landed in Charleston, South Carolina, where in about 20 minutes he will give a speech his campaign says will focus on the “enormous stakes” of the 2024 election.

The president’s address will take place at the Mother Emanuel Church, where, in 2015, a white supremacist murdered nine worshippers. Biden’s campaign announced his speech will focus on “Maga Republicans” and their efforts to undermine democracy and foment political violence.

“This year’s election will determine the fate of American democracy, our freedoms, and whether this country will stand up against hate and vitriol embodied by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans,” Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina Democratic congressman who co-chairs Biden’s re-election campaign, in a statement.

“Few places embody these stakes like Mother Emanuel AME – a church that has witnessed the horrors of hate-fueled political violence and a church that has spoken to the conscience of this nation and shown us the path forward after moments of division and despair. I have always said that South Carolina picks presidents and I know President Biden and Vice President Harris agree. We’re all proud to welcome President Biden to the church to remind the nation of what happened and that it is on all of us to fight back against this extremism.”

Donald Trump may get a welcome distraction from his legal troubles next week, when Iowa Republicans hold their caucuses. The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports the former president is tipped to win the first state to vote in the GOP’s presidential nomination process:

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign anticipates winning the Iowa state caucuses and advisers have suggested internally they would only be concerned about the former president being upstaged if another candidate started polling within five or 10 points, according to people close to the campaign.

The margin of the expected win has been an informal litmus test for several weeks, and with none of Trump’s rival candidates close to breaching that threshold, the campaign has been confident Trump will win the state’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest.

Victory for Trump in Iowa would give him crucial momentum that advisers hope will propel him to the Republican nomination for 2024, as well as the personal satisfaction of attaining what eluded him in 2016, when he finished second – after Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas – despite leading in the polls.

The confidence inside the Trump campaign is tempered mainly by the recognition that low turnout from supporters could undercut Trump’s commanding position, a situation he has attempted to address by scheduling a blitz of rallies before the 15 January caucuses.

Trump returned to Iowa on Friday to run through four campaign rallies in two days after visiting the state infrequently in recent months, at least compared to his main rivals, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, and Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor.

Attorneys for Donald Trump have filed to have his indictment on charges related to trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result dropped by a state court, the Messenger reports.

The former president was indicted in August by Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney in the Atlanta-area Fulton county. Here’s more from the Messenger on why Trump’s lawyers say the charges should be dropped:

Trump’s attorneys in a 34-page filing attacked the Fulton County indictment on due process grounds by arguing that “the alleged criminal conduct underlying this indictment consists entirely of core political speech at the zenith of First Amendment protections.”

Trump’s attorneys argued that none of the charges the former president faces in the Georgia case “have, in the in the history of Georgia, ever been utilized in a way to address the conduct alleged.”

“As a result,” they said, “President Trump did not have fair warning that his alleged conduct, pure political speech and expressive conduct challenging an election, could be criminalized, particularly since such actions have never before been prosecuted and no President has ever been criminally charged in the 234-year history of the United States of America,” Trump’s legal team argued.

“While the statutes underlying this indictment have been in existence for many years, the novel construction the State seeks to now employ violates all notions of due process, particularly since the indictment directly targets pure political speech,” Trump’s attorneys said in the motion to dismiss on due process grounds.

Despite their willingness to cooperate with Democrats on funding the government, many top House Republicans continue to believe in Donald Trump’s false claims that fraud played a role in his 2020 election loss. Case in point, Elise Stefanik, the fourth-highest-ranking Republican in the House. Here’s the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas on her latest bout of election denialism:

Leading US House Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik on Sunday declined to commit to certifying the results of the 2024 White House race no matter the outcome, three years and a day after a mob of Donald Trump supporters staged the January 6 Capitol attack while refusing to recognize that he had lost the presidency to Joe Biden.

Stefanik – a New York representative who serves as the House’s Republican conference chairwoman – was asked by Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press whether she would “vote to certify the results of the 2024 election, no matter what they show”.

The congresswoman replied: “We will see if this is a legal and valid election.”

Stefanik went on to criticize the Colorado legal ruling that removed Trump from the state’s ballot under the 14th amendment to the US constitution – which bars insurrectionists from taking office – and urged the federal supreme court to unanimously overturn that decision to let voters determine the former president’s electoral fate.

Welker said: “Just to be very clear, I don’t hear you committed to certifying the election results. Will you only commit to certifying the results if former president Trump wins?”

Stefanik said: “No, it means if they are constitutional,” before expressing her claim that the 2020 presidential race “was not a fair election” despite multiple legal reviews solicited by Trump and his allies confirming that it was.

Here’s more from Reuters on what we know about the plan to fund the government announced by Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress over the weekend:

The top Democrat and Republican in the US Congress on Sunday agreed on a $1.59tn spending deal, setting up a race for bitterly divided lawmakers to pass the bills that would appropriate the money before the government begins to shut down this month.

Since early last year, House of Representatives and Senate appropriations committees had been unable to agree on the 12 annual bills needed to fund the government for the fiscal year that began 1 October because of disagreements over the total amount of money to be spent.

When lawmakers return on Monday from a holiday break, those panels will launch intensive negotiations over how much various agencies, from the agriculture and transportation departments to Homeland Security and health and human services, get to spend in the fiscal year that runs through 30 September.

They face a 19 January deadline for the first set of bills to move through Congress and a 2 February deadline for the remainder of them.

There were already some disagreements between the two parties as to what they had agreed to. Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement that the top-line figure includes $886bn for defense and $704bn for non-defense spending. But Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, in a separate statement, said the non-defense spending figure will be $772.7bn.

Last month, Congress authorized $886bn for the Department of Defense this fiscal year, which Democratic president Joe Biden signed into law. Appropriators will also now fill in the details on how that will be parceled out.

The Republican-led House oversight committee has released its resolution holding Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress for not attending a behind-closed-doors deposition in December.

Despite receiving a subpoena, the president’s son demanded that any questioning by Congress be done in public, and instead made a brief statement to reporters outside the Capitol on the day the deposition was to occur. Hunter Biden is facing several federal charges related to lying in order to purchase a gun and failing to pay taxes. But Republicans have for years alleged he is at the center of a plot where his father Joe Biden benefited from corrupt business dealings overseas, even though they have turned up no proof of their allegations.

In a report accompanying the resolution, the committee makes clear they planned to use whatever was learned from questioning Hunter Biden as part of their ongoing impeachment inquiry into the president.

“Mr. Biden’s testimony is a critical component of the impeachment inquiry into, among other things, whether Joseph R. Biden, Jr., as Vice President and/or President: (1) took any official action or effected any change in government policy because of money or other things of value provided to himself or his family; (2) abused his office of public trust by providing foreign interests with access to him and his office in exchange for payments to his family or him; or (3) abused his office of public trust by knowingly participating in a scheme to enrich himself or his family by giving foreign interests the impression that they would receive access to him and his office in exchange for payments to his family or him,” the report reads.

“Mr. Biden’s flagrant defiance of the Committees’ deposition subpoenas—while choosing to appear nearby on the Capitol grounds to read a prepared statement on the same matters—is contemptuous, and he must be held accountable for his unlawful actions.”

The oversight and judiciary committees will consider the contempt resolution on Wednesday.

In a letter to colleagues announcing a tentative agreement with Democrats on government spending, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson noted that the deal “will not satisfy everyone”, while pointing out that it would cut the budget of the IRS tax authority as well as rescind aid money allocated to respond to Covid-19.

“After many weeks of dialogue and debate, we have secured hard-fought concessions to unlock the [fiscal year] 24 topline numbers and allow the Appropriations Committee to finally begin negotiating and completing the twelve annual appropriations bills,” the speaker wrote yesterday.

He noted, “the concessions we achieved will include an additional $10 billion in cuts to the IRS mandatory funding (for a total of $20 billion), which was a key part of the Democrats’ ‘Inflation Reduction Act.’ In addition, we will cut $6.1 billion from the Biden’s Administration’s continued COVID-era slush funds, which we achieved despite fierce opposition from the White House. The result is real savings to American taxpayers and real reductions in the federal bureaucracy.”

Joe Biden and congressional Democrats won approval for $80b in funding for the IRS in 2022, but Republicans have proposed rescinding it, even though doing so would increase the federal budget deficit.

“While work on finalizing appropriations must move quickly now, it is important to note that negotiations will be informed by the most robust House and Senate appropriations process we have seen in years, driven by the hard work and pressure exerted by this Republican Conference,” the speaker concluded.

The signs of trouble for the government funding agreement arrived not even two hours after its was announced, when the rightwing House Freedom Caucus called the proposal “even worse than we thought”:

The group of far-right Republicans referred to a late December letter in which they said, “Republicans must truly reduce programmatic spending” in the budget covering the 2024 fiscal year, which extends through September. While they didn’t outline exactly what spending cuts they wish to see, typical Republican targets include social aid programs such as Snap food benefits and early childhood education programs, as well as hiring for certain jobs and some federal government agencies.

Meanwhile, two of the eight members of Congress who voted to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House for, among other reasons, cooperating with Democrats on spending, tweeted their objections to the deal:

The government is currently funded under a short-term authorization Congress approved in mid-November, and which has two separate deadlines for when funding runs out. The first is 19 January for programs including agriculture, veterans affairs and energy, and the second is 2 February for defense, commerce and the justice department, among others.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. After what must have been an exhausting weekend for negotiators, Democratic and Republican leaders announced yesterday afternoon a framework to keep the government funded over the months ahead and avert shutdowns that would have begun as soon as 19 January. But almost immediately, rightwing Republican lawmakers, several of whom orchestrated the ousting of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House last year for agreeing to a similar deal with Democrats, objected. The proposed deal, which slashes some of Joe Biden’s budget priorities but doesn’t contain the deep cuts some conservatives would like to see, will probably win bipartisan support in the Senate and House of Representatives, but the rightwing opposition could potentially complicate its chances of passage. Over the course of today, we may find out more about how seriously the rightwing is in their opposition to the deal, and what other obstacles it may face to passage.

Here’s what else is going on today:

• Joe Biden will at 12.30pm eastern time deliver remarks at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a racist gunman killed nine worshippers in 2015.

• Nikki Haley will participate in a town hall hosted by Fox News beginning at 6pm eastern time in Iowa, one week before the state’s Republican caucuses.

• A civil corruption trial against the National Rifle Association opens in Manhattan. Over the weekend, a former top official in the powerful gun rights group admitted to wrongdoing in the case brought by New York attorney general Letitia James.