TV News LIES

Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) was officially sworn in to office Wednesday, more than seven weeks after she won her special election.

Grijalva was elected to represent Arizona’s 7th Congressional District on Sept. 23, but House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refused to swear her in, saying he’d wait until the House was back in session during the longest government shutdown in history.

Johnson previously swore in two Republican House members when the lower chamber was out of session.

During remarks after being sworn in, Grijalva called her delayed swearing-in “an abuse of power.”

“It has been 50 days since the people of Arizona’s 7th Congressional District elected me to represent them,” Grijalva said. “Fifty days that over 800,000 Arizonans have been left without access to the basic services that every constituent deserves. This is an abuse of power. One individual should not be able to unilaterally obstruct the swearing in of a duly-elected member of Congress for political reasons.”

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Democrats are seething after news emerged on Sunday that eight members of their Senate caucus had collaborated with Republicans on crafting a compromise to end the longest government shutdown in US history, without winning any healthcare concessions that they had sought.

But one name is coming in for more opprobrium than any other: Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader who had led the Democrats’ weeks-long stand against reopening the government without an extension of tax credits that lower premiums for Affordable Care Act (ACA) health plans.

If the results of the crucial Sunday vote are any indication, the outcome Democrats fought so hard against is now set to happen, potentially in the next few days. And though Schumer does not publicly support the compromise, lawmakers and Democrat-affiliated groups have turned on him, criticizing his leadership and calling for his ouster.

“Last night, eight ‘moderate’ Democrats got played. Conned. Rooked. Pantsed. Pumped and dumped. Rode hard and put away wet,” Rick Wilson, the ex-Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, wrote in a piece titled “Schumer and the Hateful Eight Betray America”.

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The US Senate on Sunday took a key vote on a bill that would end the record-setting federal government shutdown without extending the healthcare subsidies that Democrats have demanded.

Senators began voting on Sunday night to advance House-passed stopgap funding legislation that Senate majority leader John Thune said would be amended to combine another short-term spending measure with a package of three full-year appropriations bills.

The package would still have to be passed by the House of Representatives and sent to Donald Trump for his signature, a process that could take several days.

Senate Democrats so far have resisted efforts to reopen the government, aiming to pressure Republicans into agreeing to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans, which expire at the end of the year. Thune said that, per the deal under consideration, the Senate would agree to hold a separate vote later on the subsidies.Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, told reporters that he would vote against the funding measure but suggested there could be enough Democratic support to pass it.

“I am unwilling to accept a vague promise of a vote at some indeterminate time, on some undefined measure that extends the healthcare tax credits,” Blumenthal said.

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Nancy Pelosi, a California Democratic representative and the first woman to serve as speaker, announced on Thursday she will retire from Congress, two years after stepping down from House leadership.

Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco in Congress for nearly 40 years, said in a video address to her constituents that she would “not be seeking re-election”. Smiling as the music swelled over footage of a storied 20-term congressional career that saw Pelosi rise to the apex of American politics, she said she would finish out her final year in office.

“I was able to represent our city and our country around the world with patriotism and pride,” she said. “I say to my colleagues in the House all the time, no matter what title they have bestowed upon me, there has been no greater honor for me than to stand on the House floor and say, ‘I speak for the people of San Francisco.’”

A force on Capitol Hill for decades, Pelosi will leave Washington as one of the most consequential figures in modern congressional history and as a trailblazer who expanded the boundaries of power for women in US politics. As speaker, she shepherded the major legislative accomplishments of Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s presidencies.

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Senate Democrats are furious that the Trump administration held a briefing for lawmakers on Wednesday about U.S. military strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and only invited Republican senators to attend.

“What the administration did in the last 24 hours is corrosive not only to our democracy but downright dangerous for our national security,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Thursday, warning that the move set a “troubling precedent” that had trampled on the longheld bipartisan tradition of bipartisan briefings of Congress on U.S. military activities abroad.

“They know they screwed up,” Warner added of Trump’s White House. “And where in the hell were my Republican senators, whom we have worked on everything [with] in a bipartisan fashion? Why didn’t they say, ‘Isn’t this a little bit weird they don’t have any Democrats in the room?’”

The U.S. military killed 14 people in missile strikes against alleged drug cartel boats in the Eastern Pacific earlier this week, part of nearly a dozen attacks on vessels off the coast of Venezuela in recent months. Critics have called the use of force unconstitutional since it lacks congressional authorization. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have pressed for more information about the strikes, including their legal justification.

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Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive candidate for Congress, has been indicted on federal charges related to her participation in protests outside an ICE processing facility near Chicago in September.

The indictment, filed last week, alleges that the 26-year old Palestinian American candidate and five other individuals “physically hindered and impeded” a federal agent who was “forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed to avoid injuring any of the conspirators”.

Abughazaleh, who is running for Illinois’s ninth congressional district to replace the outgoing Democrat Jan Schakowsky, was charged with conspiracy to forcibly impede or injure a federal agent, and assaulting or impeding the agent while they were performing official duties.

According to the indictment, the group “conspired with one another and others, known and unknown, to prevent by force, intimidation, and threat, Agent A, a United States law enforcement officer, from discharging the duties of his office”.

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