Trump’s ‘troubling’ promise to foreign leader prompts House panel briefing – live | US news

Emily England Clyburn, the wife House majority Jim Clyburn, has died at the age of 80. They met after he was jailed in a civil rights protest and were married for nearly 60 years.

“Emily Clyburn was a champion of equality and opportunity who made a difference for countless young people in her beloved South Carolina,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. “As a librarian, she intimately understood the power of learning to transform lives, and dedicated decades to ensuring that every child, servicemember, veteran and worker could access a good education that would allow him or her to climb the ladders of opportunity in America. Her extraordinary leadership, together with Jim, to increase learning opportunities at their beloved alma mater South Carolina State will stand always as an enduring tribute to her beautiful life and legacy.”

As expected, the Trump administration said on Thursday that it would revoke California’s authority to set its own vehicle emissions standards and bar states from establishing their own regulations.

The decision is likely to set off a furious legal battle.

“No state has the authority to opt out of the nation’s rules and no state has the right to impose its policies on everybody else in our whole country,” Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said at a press conference. “To do otherwise harms consumers and damages the American economy.”

She argued the administration is “standing up” for the American worker and the American consumer.

California, no stranger to taking on the president, said it’s prepared to fight the administration. “We’re prepared to do whatever it takes to save California’s long-standing authority to set vehicle emissions standards,” said Xavier Becerra, the state’s attorney general.

Governor Gavin Newsom invited Trump to join California in the 21st Century.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/17/trump-california-vehicle-emissions-standards-auto-industry

Donald Trump said the White House is not ready to propose gun control legislation after a series of mass shootings in August that revived efforts to push for action in Congress.

“We’re not moving on anything,” Trump told Fox News’ Ed Henry in an interview at the US-Mexico border. “We’re going very slowly in one way cause we want to make sure it’s right. We’re doing a very careful job.”

In the clip released this morning, Trump singled out presidential hopefulhttps://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1174665740961701892, who has unapologetically called for the mandatory buyback of assault weapons.

After a mass shooting that targeted Latino immigrants in his hometown of El Paso, O’Rourke has made gun violence his campaign’s top priority. On Wednesday, his campaign announced that it was launching a five-state campaign to “activate the country’s next wave of gun safety advocates” in the lead up to the Giffords/March for Our Lives presidential forum on 2 October.

“It will take each and every one of us to meet the challenge of ending gun violence in this country,” said Beto for America Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon. “That is why our campaign will not wait until the election to seek real change – to inspire, engage, and train the next wave of gun safety advocates who can join Beto in fighting for what we know is right: ambitious solutions that meet the courage of the American people and the magnitude of this crisis.”

But O’Rourke’s blunt admission that as president he would require Americans to give up their assault weapons has sparked blowback from Republicans and some Democrats.

West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, who is leading a long shot, bipartisan effort to pass background check legislation told reporters on Capitol Hill yesterday: “I can tell you one thing: Beto O’Rourke’s not taking my guns away from me. You tell Beto that, OK?”

Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of politics. The temperature has finally dropped in Washington but expect a lot of heated exchanges on Capitol Hill where Donald Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, Eugene Scalia, the son of the late supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, appears today for his confirmation hearing. And that’s far from the only thing we’re watching today. Here’s what to expect.

• Late last night the Washington Post reported that at the center of a showdown between members of Congress and the US intelligence community was a whistleblower complaint asserting that Trump made a “troubling” promise with a foreign leader. The paper citied two former officials familiar with the matter and said it was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump had interacted with. In the weeks prior to the complaint, Trump held a call with Russian president Vladimir Putin and exchanged letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson is due to appear before the House intelligence committee for a closed-door briefing on the handling of the whistleblower complaint at 9am.

• Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, Al Sharpton, former tennis player James Blake and Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, who died after being placed in a police chokehold, will testify to House judiciary committee on policing practices at 10am. At the same time, the House oversight committee will hold a hearing on the District of Columbia’s decades-long quest for statehood to once and for all end the injustice of “taxation without representation” for more than 700,000 people. (Full disclosure: yours truly is a tax-paying resident of the nation’s capital.) Shortly afterward, House speaker Nancy Pelosi will hold her weekly press conference to unveil legislation to negotiate lower drug prices for Americans. She’ll likely be asked about fresh reporting on tensions within leadership over the handling of the “impeachment investigation”.

• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Transport are set to announce that they are revoking California’s waiver to set stricter car mileage standards than the federal government. EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler will testify before the House committee on science and tech at the EPA at 10am.

• As the White House defends its widespread attack on federal efforts to combat climate change, MSNBC hosts a climate forum at Georgetown University with several candidates aspiring to replace Donald Trump. Among those who will speak on day one of the two-day forum are Democratic presidential hopefuls Michael Bennet, Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, Bernie Sanders, John Delaney, Tim Ryan and Julián Castro. In the afternoon, Steve Bullock will hold a town hall with the American Federation of Teachers as part of a process to be considered for the union’s endorsement.

To top it off, Trump has no public events on his schedule. It’s a Washington cliché as old as covfefe, but when the president fades from public view, @realDonaldTrump springs to life.