‘Slap in the face’: AOC condemns Schumer over plan to vote for Republican funding bill – as it happened

This brings our live coverage of the day in US politics to a close, but we will return on Friday when a vote on a stopgap Republican spending bill in the Senate will determine whether or not the government shuts down. Here are some of the day’s developments:

• Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, said that he will vote to allow the deeply partisan Republican spending bill become law because a government shutdown would do more harm.

• Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters that Senator Chuck Schumer’s statement was “a huge slap in the face, and I think that there’s a wide sense of betrayal.”

• In a letter sent to the president of Columbia University and the co-chairs of its board of trustees on Thursday, the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force demanded nine specific changes to university policies and structures before negotiations over federal funding would begin.

• Columbia announced the same day it received the letter that it had complied with item one on the list of demands: expelling and suspending pro-Palestinian student protesters who occupied a campus building last year or took part in a Gaza Solidarity encampment.

• Representative Raúl Grijalva had died after a long battle with cancer, his office announced on Thursday. His seat will remain vacant until at least September.

• In 1996 a federal judge found the legal provision now being used to target Mahmoud Khalil unconstitutional. She was Donald Trump’s sister.

• Corks were not popping on Wall Street on Thursday, as stocks plunged again following Trump’s threat to impose a 200% tariff “on all wines, Champagnes, and alcoholic products” from European Union countries if the trading bloc makes good on its threat to retaliate for steel and aluminum tariffs announced by the US president by adding a 50% tariff on American products, including Kentucky bourbon.

• The Trump administration has appealed to the supreme court to uphold the president’s executive order curtailing birthright citizenship.

• The US Postal Service will reduce its staff by 10,000 through early retirements, and has signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge) to streamline its operations, postmaster general Louis DeJoy announced.

In a letter sent to the president of Columbia University and the co-chairs of its board of trustees on Thursday, the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force demanded nine specific changes to university policies and structures before negotiations over federal funding would begin.

The letter, which was posted online by the Free Press, a conservative news outlet founded by Bari Weiss, a former Columbia student who first claimed that the university intimidated Zionist students 20 years ago, demands the school’s “immediate compliance” with a list of actions. The first item on the list, “expulsion or multi-year suspension” for pro-Palestinian student protesters who occupied Hamilton Hall and took part in Gaza solidarity encampments was met by the university earlier on Thursday.

Among the other demands are a ban on mask-wearing on campus, sweeping changes in the university’s disciplinary policies, the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which casts criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and the “placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years.”

The letter was signed by Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, which oversees procurement and contracting for the entire federal government, and the acting general counsels of the departments of edutcation and health and human services.

Gruenbaum told Jewish Insider last week that he was determined to use government contracts as a way to fight antisemitism, as he defines it.

Several Democratic lawmakers have reacted to Chuck Schumer’s statement that he will vote to advance a partisan Republican bill to avert a government shutdown, which includes cuts to vital programs, by signaling their opposition to the stopgap measure.

“There are members of Congress who have won Trump held districts in some of the most difficult territories in the United States,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters, “who walked the plank and took innumerable risks in order to defend the American people … just to see some Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk. I think it is a huge slap in the face, and I think that there’s a wide sense of betrayal.”

“This continuing resolution codifies much of this chaos that Elon Musk is wreaking,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN. “It sacrifices and completely eliminates congressional authority… to review these impulsive Trump tariffs”, she added, “removes all of the guardrails, all of the accountability measures to ensure that money is being spent in the way that Congress has directed for it to be spent. This turns the federal government into a slush fund for Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”

Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota said she will be voting against the funding bill since “it does not continue the spending and policy law that Congress passed last year. Instead, it would slash support for fetal alcohol syndrome, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s at the National Institute of Health. It fails to pay for disaster relief or fund hundreds of millions of dollars for important community projects for Minnesota.”

“It would give President Trump vast discretion to allocate funds to reward his political friends and punish those he considers enemies,” she added. “From the beginning, President Trump and the Republicans set this up as an unprecedented power-grab.”

Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington thanked Smith “for standing up for the American people and refusing to vote for cloture or passage of a horrific Republican spending bill that gives the keys to Musk and Trump to steal from the American people and slash critical programs that people desperately need”.

“Respectfully, Senator Schumer, no,” Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman posted in response to the Democratic minority leader. “This Republican bill is bad for workers, bad for our veterans, bad for our seniors.”

“I’m a hard NO on the Republican spending bill,” Senator Adam Schiff posted. “When a wannabe dictator is trying to seize power, it must not be given to him. Not without a fight.”

Columbia University says it has expelled or suspended some students who took over a campus building for one day last April to protest the Israeli assault on Gaza.

A statement from the university did not provide the number of students who were expelled or suspended, but said the Columbia University Judicial Board had “issued sanctions to students ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions related to the occupation of Hamilton Hall last spring.”

The school’s action came days after a well-known Palestinian campus activist, Mahmoud Khalil, who had negotiated with the authorities on behalf of the protesters was arrested by federal immigration authorities and faces deportation, despite being a legal permanent resident on the United States married to an American citizen.

The New York Police Department charged 46 protesters, arrested during a raid on Hamilton Hall on 30 April 2024, with criminal trespass for their involvement in the brief occupation. The raid came on the 56th anniversary of a wave of arrests to end an occupation of Hamilton Hall by students protesting racism and the Vietnam War.

Last April, the police also arrested 108 people during an NYPD sweep of the on-campus “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”.

During the brief occupation, the pro-Palestinian protesters had renamed the campus building Hind’s Hall, in memory of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian child in Gaza City who had pleaded by phone for emergency workers to rescue her from a car riddled with bullets as her family tried to obey an Israeli order to evacuate their home. Her body was found two weeks later, on 10 February 2024, alongside the bodies of six of her family members.

Newsmax revealed in a regulatory filing related to its planned initial public offering that the far-right network had agreed to pay the the voting software company Smartmatic $40m and 2,000 shares of preferred stock, when it settled a defamation lawsuit in September.

The filing, which was dated 7 March, was first reported by the Independent on Thursday. It detailed that Newsmax Media had already paid out $20m as part of the settlement related to broadcasting baseless 2020 election conspiracy theories, and would pay the other half by the end of June.

The prospectus also explained that the company is still “vigorously defending” itself against a similar lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, the company Fox News paid $787.5m in a defamation settlement also related to broadcasting lies told by Donald Trump and his supporters to conceal the truth, that he lost the 2020 election.

In the Oval Office on Thursday, in remarks streamed or broadcast by multiple news outlets, Trump said that he would’ve made a deal with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to reduce nuclear weapon stockpiles after 2020 “had that election not been rigged”.

In remarks on the Senate floor, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, just indicated that he and other Democrats will vote for the continuing resolution passed by House Republicans, without Democratic input, to avoid a government shutdown.

“Republicans’ nihilism has brought us to the brink of disaster,” Schumer said. “The most vulnerable Americans,” he added, would suffer most from a government shutdown.

Schumer condemned the Republicans for refusing to work together on a funding bill, but said that: “It’s not really a decision. It’s a Hobson’s choice.”

“While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse,” Schumer said. “For sure, the Republican bill is a terrible option. It is not a clean CR. It is deeply partisan. It doesn’t address far too many of this country’s needs. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.”

“A shutdown would give Trump and Elon Musk carte blanche to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now,” he added.

“I believe it is my job to make the best choice for the country to minimize the harms to the American people,” Schumer said. “Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open and not shut it down.”

Representative Raúl Grijalva had died after a long battle with cancer, his office announced on Thursday.

Grijalva, who was 77, was the son of a Mexican immigrant and a former congressional Progressive caucus chair first elected to Congress in 2002.

He announced his cancer diagnosis 11 months ago, but was re-elected to Congress in November with 63% of the vote.

His colleagues mourned his death.

“A genuinely devastating loss,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wrote on social media. “Raúl Grijalva stood as one of the biggest champions for working people in all of Congress. His leadership was singular. He mentored generously and was an incredible friend. I will always be grateful for his lifelong courage and commitment.”

“Congressman Grijalva was not just my colleague, but my friend,” Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote. “As another Latino working in public service, I can say from experience that he served as a role model to many young people across the Grand Canyon State. He spent his life as a voice for equality.”

Grijalva represented the seventh district of Arizona in the closely divided House. The seat will now remain vacant until at least September.

As our colleagues Anna Betts and Erum Salam reported on Wednesday, a government charging document addressed to Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident and green card holder who is currently being held in a Louisiana detention center, said that secretary of state Marco Rubio “has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.

The phrase “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” is a direct reference to a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives the secretary of state the power to expel non-citizens deemed to be a threat.

As the New York Times reported this week, in 1996, when the Clinton administration tried to use this provision to deport a former Mexican government official, a federal judge ruled that this section of the law was “void for vagueness”, deprived the non-citizen of “the due process right to a meaningful opportunity to be heard”, and was “an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power”.

That judge was Maryanne Trump Barry, the president’s eldest sister, who was nominated to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1983, elevated to an appeals court by Bill Clinton, and passed away in 2023.

Although a three-judge appeals court panel later overturned her ruling on procedural grounds, in an opinion written by then-Circuit Judge Samuel Alito, the forceful language of her opinion still resonates with the arguments of Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers:

“Make no mistake about it. This case is about the Constitution of the United States and the panoply of protections that document provides to the citizens of this country and those non-citizens who are here legally and, thus, here as our guests”, Judge Barry wrote. “The issue before the court is not whether plaintiff has the right to remain in this country beyond the period for which he was lawfully admitted…[t]he issue, rather, is whether an alien who is in this country legally can, merely because he is here, have his liberty restrained and be forcibly removed to a specific country in the unfettered discretion of the Secretary of State and without any meaningful opportunity to be heard. The answer is a ringing ‘no’”.

Corks were not popping on Wall Street on Thursday, as stocks plunged again following Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 200% tariff “on all wines, Champagnes, and alcoholic products” from European Union countries if the trading bloc makes good on its threat to retaliate for steel and aluminum tariffs announced by the US president by adding a 50% tariff on American products, including Kentucky bourbon.

The sharp drop in the S&P 500 meant that a the index is now in “a correction” — a term used when when stocks falls 10 percent or more from their peak.

While the Wall Street Journal blamed the drop on “investors on edge over new tariff threats”, pro-Trump media outlets further to the right, like Newsmax, sought to play down the president’s role in the plunging markets. “This correction is overdue”, a guest on the far-right network assured viewers on Thursday. “Nothing to do with Trump. Nothing to do with tariffs”.

As the New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy noted in a podcast interview this week, the downturn began in the middle of February “when it became clear that Tump was serious about these tariffs, a lot of people on Wall Street thought he was bluffing”.

Cassidy went on to explain that Trump appears to be wedded to a dream of undoing globalization and returning to a period in the 19th century when the United States was closer to being an autarky, a self-sufficient country, closed off from the rest of the world.

That seems to jibe with Trump’s claim, in his announcement of the 200% tariff on Champagne, a form of sparkling wine that is only produced in the Champagne region of France, “This will be great for the Wine and Champagne businesses in the US”.

The Trump administration has appealed to the supreme court to uphold the president’s executive order curtailing birthright citizenship, Reuters reports.

Donald Trump signed the order shortly after taking office, but multiple federal judges have ruled against it in lawsuits filed by rights groups. Here’s more on the appeal, from Reuters:

The Justice Department made the request challenging the scope of three nationwide injunctions issued against Trump’s order by federal courts in Washington state, Massachusetts and Maryland.

The administration said the injunctions should be scaled back from applying universally and limited to just the plaintiffs that brought the cases and are “actually within the courts’ power.”

“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” the Justice Department said in the filing. “This court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”

Trump’s order, signed on his first day back in office on January 20, directed federal agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of U.S.-born children who do not have at least one parent who is an American citizen or lawful permanent resident.

The order was intended to apply starting February 19, but has been blocked nationwide by multiple federal judges.