Today's politics recap
- The Senate officially took up Democrats’ voting rights bill, which passed the House in a party-line vote last week. The proposal is expected to fail in the Senate after Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema made it clear that they would not support changing the filibuster to allow for the bill’s passage.
- Despite the bill’s likely failure, Chuck Schumer said the Senate would vote on the legislation “win, lose or draw”. “Members of this chamber were elected to debate and to vote, especially on an issue as vital to the beating heart of our democracy as voting rights,” the majority leader said in a floor speech. “The public is entitled to know where each senator stands on an issue as sacrosanct as defending our democracy.”
- Secretary of state Antony Blinken is traveling to Kyiv this week, amid heightened concerns of a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. Blinken will meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy before traveling on to Berlin to discuss potential responses to Russian aggression. “We’re now at a stage where Russia at any time could launch an attack on Ukraine,” White House spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said.
- The White House launched the “beta” version of its website to order free at-home coronavirus tests. The site, CovidTests.gov, includes a link to a US Postal Service form that allows Americans to request four tests to be shipped to their homes. The site will officially launch tomorrow morning, the White House said.
- Two more House Democrats announced they will not seek reelection in November. The announcements from Jim Langevin and Jerry McNerney bring the total number of retirements among House Democrats to 28, as the party braces for the possibility of widespread losses in the midterm elections.
- The US congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack has issued a blitz of subpoenas to some of Donald Trump’s top lawyers – including Rudy Giuliani. Subpoenas went out to Giuliani and his associate Boris Epshteyn, as well as Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, who all defended Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims as he attempted to overturn the election result.
- More than 1,200 students in Oakland, California, signed a petition saying they would stay home starting today over coronavirus safety concerns. The protest is one of several student-led efforts around the country, indicating growing frustrations amid public school children even as the Biden administration and state governments push to keep campuses open amid the latest pandemic surge.
– Guardian staff
US Capitol attack committee subpoenas Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers
The US congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack has issued a blitz of subpoenas to some of Donald Trump’s top lawyers – including Rudy Giuliani – as it examines whether the former president oversaw a criminal conspiracy on 6 January 2021.
The House panel subpoenaed four of Trump’s legal team on Tuesday: the former president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his associate Boris Epshteyn, as well as Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, who all defended Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims as he attempted to overturn the election result.
Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the select committee, said in a statement that the panel issued the subpoenas to the four Trump lawyers because they were “in direct contact with the former president about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes”.
The move by the select committee amounts to another dramatic escalation in the investigation, as the orders compel Trump’s lawyers to produce documents and testimony, suggesting the panel believes the lawyers may have acted unlawfully.
In its most aggressive move, the select committee ordered Giuliani to testify under oath about his communications with Trump and Republican members of Congress regarding strategies for delaying or overturning the election results.
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