Senate to debate of Sanders' measure on Israel military aid
Debate is about to begin on a measure that would condition military aid to Israel on whether the Israeli war effort in Gaza is violating human rights and international accords.
Introduced by Bernie Sanders, the measure is unlikely to win approval. But it is one of several measures that progressives have proposed to raise concerns over Israel’s attacks on Gaza, where the death toll surpassed than 24,000. Israel’s bombardment since October has also displaced most of Gaza’s 2.4m residents, and created a humanitarian crisis.
The Senate will soon vote on my resolution directing the State Department to report on any human rights violations that may have occurred using U.S. equipment in the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
“To my mind, Israel has the absolute right to defend itself from Hamas’ barbaric terrorist attack on October 7, no question about that,” Sanders told AP in an interview.
“But what Israel does not have a right to do — using military assistance from the United States — does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people,” said Sanders, the independent from Vermont. “And in my view, that’s what has been happening.”
Donald Trump has won an overwhelming victory in the US’s first election contest of 2024, easily fending off a winnowed field of Republicans in the Iowa caucuses. The former president won 51% of the vote in Iowa, a 30-point lead over Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor. Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, trailed in third place with 19%.
Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses was heralded as an early beginning to the battle for the White House itself. Using an acronym for Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America great again”, Joe Biden told followers: “Here’s the thing: this election was always going to be you and me versus extreme Maga Republicans. It was true yesterday and it’ll be true tomorrow.”
Nikki Haley has said she will not appear on the debate stage without Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Ron DeSantishas confirmed he will be attending this week’s GOP presidential debates in New Hampshire. Trump has not participated in any of the Republican primary debates so far.
E Jean Carroll and Donald Trump faced each other in Manhattan federal courton Tuesday in her defamation trial against the ex-president. The trial started with jury selection. Before selection started, Trump’s lead lawyer on this case, Alina Habba, told the judge that his team intends to call him as a witness.
The former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, a stalwart conservative willing to sharply criticize Donald Trump, has suspended his beleaguered bid for the White House the day after he came in sixth place in Monday’s Iowa caucuses.
Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden by eight percentage points among registered voters in Georgia, according to a new poll. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll also showed nearly 20% of voters weren’t ready to support either candidate.
The Senate will vote on a resolution that would freeze military aid to Israel unless the Biden administration looks into potential human rights abuses in Gaza. The measure, forced to the floor by Senator Bernie Sanders, has little chance of passing given the overwhelming support for security assistance to Israel in Congress. The chamber is expected to debate and vote tonight.
The US supreme court has decided it will not hear a case centering on the debate over bathrooms for transgender students. The decision came on Tuesday despite an appeal from Indiana’s metropolitan school district of Martinsville.
Speaking on the Senate floor earlier, Republican senator Lindsay Graham said that Hamas has “militarized” schools and hospitals by operating amongst them.
Israel has blamed Hamas for using hospitals for military purposes, but has not provided definitive proof backing its claims that Hamas kept a “command center” under Gaza’s main al-Shifa hospital, which the Israeli Defense Forces raided in November. Two-thirds of Gaza’s hospitals have been closed amidst what Joe Biden has characterized as “indiscriminate bombings”, during a time of acute need.
Sanders himself has faced criticism for declining to endorse calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, as some of his progressive colleagues have done.
Amid anti-war protests across the US, progressive representatives including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Barbara Lee and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for a ceasefire. In a letter to Biden, many of these lawmakers stressed that thousands of children had been killed in Israeli bombings.
The measure that Bernie Sanders proposed uses a mechanism in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which allows Congress to provide oversight of US military assistance, which must be used in accordance with international human rights agreements.
The Senate will be voting on whether to ask the US state department to create a report on whether Israel has violated human rights accords using US military aid and equipment during its campaign in Gaza. If the measure passes, the state department will have to provide a report within 30 days – and aid to Israel would be cut off if human rights violations are found.
Both Democrats and Republicans in congress oppose any conditions on aid to Israel, and Joe Biden has staunchly stood by Israel throughout its campaign against Gaza, so the proposal is very unlikely to be implemented. By forcing senators to vote on the record about whether they are willing to condition aid to Israel, however, Sanders and others lawmakers hope to spark debate on the matter.
Progressives and Democrats have increasingly pushed to place conditions on aid to Israel, which has drawn international criticism for its offensive in Gaza.
“While it is clear that Israel has the right to go to war against Hamas. It does not have the right to go to war against the Palestinian people and innocent men, women and children in Gaza,” Sanders said, speaking on Senate floor last week.
Senate to debate of Sanders' measure on Israel military aid
Debate is about to begin on a measure that would condition military aid to Israel on whether the Israeli war effort in Gaza is violating human rights and international accords.
Introduced by Bernie Sanders, the measure is unlikely to win approval. But it is one of several measures that progressives have proposed to raise concerns over Israel’s attacks on Gaza, where the death toll surpassed than 24,000. Israel’s bombardment since October has also displaced most of Gaza’s 2.4m residents, and created a humanitarian crisis.
The Senate will soon vote on my resolution directing the State Department to report on any human rights violations that may have occurred using U.S. equipment in the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
“To my mind, Israel has the absolute right to defend itself from Hamas’ barbaric terrorist attack on October 7, no question about that,” Sanders told AP in an interview.
“But what Israel does not have a right to do — using military assistance from the United States — does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people,” said Sanders, the independent from Vermont. “And in my view, that’s what has been happening.”
During a rally earlier this month, Trump called on Joe Biden to “release the J6 hostages”, referring to the people imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection.
Trump’s comments were “grotesque and offensive”, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Tuesday.
It is offensive to compare those convicted of assaulting cops and attempting to overthrow the American government … to innocent Americans, Israelis and people of other nationalities who were abducted by Hamas on October 7.
Minutes after his second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses was confirmed, Ron DeSantis came onstage in a hotel ballroom to declare that everything was going according to plan in his campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination.
“They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us,” the Florida governor told a crowd of supporters who had made liberal use of a nearby cash bar on Monday evening, in the hours they waited for him to speak in West Des Moines. He said:
They were predicting that we wouldn’t be able to get our ticket punched here, out of Iowa. But, I can tell you because of your support, in spite of all of that they threw at us, everyone against us, we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa.
Ticket to where? The Florida governor did not say, and there are few indications he is primed to win, or even repeat his second-place finish, when New Hampshire Republicans hold their primary next week.
While DeSantis’s first runner-up status in Iowa is good enough for his campaign to continue, he finished 30 percentage points behind the victor, Donald Trump, and just two points ahead of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor whose campaign is hoping for a win in New Hampshire.
The Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, listens to a voter’s question during a rally on Tuesday, in Greenville, South Carolina Photograph: Jeffrey Collins/AP
DeSantis’s strategy called for victory in Iowa, and the governor campaigned in all 99 counties, won the endorsement of the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, and influential evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats and was supported by more than $33m in advertising.
None of that was enough to keep Trump from an overwhelming victory, and with the former president leading the polls of the other states that will vote in the coming weeks, it’s not clear where DeSantis can regain momentum.
Hundreds of people have gathered amid freezing temperatures outside a country club in Atkinson, New Hampshire, hours before Donald Trump is scheduled to speak.
People wait in line before the start of a campaign rally with Donald Trump in Atkinson, New Hampshire. Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
People wait to enter a Donald Trump campaign event during a winter snowstorm in Atkinson. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
People wait to enter a Donald Trump campaign event during a winter snowstorm in Atkinson. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
The US supreme court has decided it will not hear a case centering on the debate over bathrooms for transgender students.
The decision came on Tuesday despite an appeal from Indiana’s metropolitan school district of Martinsville.
Martinsville school district officials hoped the nation’s highest court would not require allowing transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choosing. But the supreme court rejected the case without comment.
Federal appeals courts are divided over whether school policies enforcing restrictions on which bathrooms transgender students can use violate federal law or the US constitution.
In the 2023 case court brought by the Martinsville metropolitan school district, the Chicago-based US seventh circuit court of appeals ruled in favor of transgender boys, granting them access to the boys’ bathroom.
The seventh circuit’s opinion, written by judge Diane Wood, said that she expected the nation’s highest court to eventually be involved. Wood wrote:
Litigation over transgender rights is occurring all over the country, and we assume that at some point the supreme court will step in with more guidance than it has furnished so far.
The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, also has ruled to allow transgender students to use the gendered bathroom with which they identify. But the US appellate court based in Atlanta ruled against granting that legal ability.
Court battles over transgender rights are ongoing across the country. And at least nine states are restricting transgender students to bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth.
