Kamala Harris to castigate Trump in Florida speech as state’s strict abortion ban takes effect – live

Thousands of pro-choice activists and allies rally in Orlando, Florida, in April. Florida’s strict abortion ban went into effect on Wednesday

LIVE – Updated at 18:56

Vice-president traveling to Florida and is expected to say ‘extremists’ who wrote ban ‘don’t care’ how women’s bodies work.

18:56

Arizona Democrats are expected to make a final push to repeal the state’s near-total abortion ban, which dates back to 1864.

The Guardian and agencies report:

Fourteen Democrats in the state senate are hoping to pick up at least two Republican votes to win final approval for a bill repealing the ban, which narrowly cleared the Arizona house last week and is expected to be signed by the Democratic governor.

The near-total ban, which predates Arizona’s statehood, permits abortions only to save the patient’s life – and provides no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. The law had been on the books since 1864, but had been blocked since the US supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion nationwide.

In a ruling last month, however, the Arizona supreme court suggested that following the US supreme court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v Wade, doctors could be prosecuted under the civil war-era law. Under the law, anyone who assists in an abortion can be sentenced to two to five years in prison.

Read the full story here:

18:56

Joe Biden has announced the approval of $6.1bn in student debt cancellation for 317,000 borrowers who attended the Art Institutes, a private college system that was closed last year amid fraud claims.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Biden said:

This institution falsified data, knowingly misled students, and cheated borrowers into taking on mountains of debt without leading to promising career prospects at the end of their studies …

While my predecessor looked the other way when colleges defrauded students and borrowers, I promised to take this on directly to provide borrowers with the relief they need and deserve … And in total, we have approved debt cancellation for nearly 4.6 million Americans through various actions.

Today’s announcement builds on all we’ve done to fix broken student loan programs and bring higher education more in reach.

The day so far

18:18

A showdown is set to take place next week between Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is leading a charge to remove him as the chamber’s leader over his collaboration with Democrats. But, unlike the last time something like this happened, Democratic leaders say they will oppose Greene’s motion to vacate, and there are already signs that rank-and-file lawmakers will follow along. As for Greene, she only has two others on board with her ouster attempt – not exactly resounding numbers. We’ll see if anything changes in the days to come. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is set to speak at 2.45pm in Jacksonville, Florida, and blame Donald Trump for the state’s strict abortion ban, which went into effect today. We plan to cover that live.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

Johnson issued a brief response to Greene’s push to remove him as speaker, warning that it was “wrong for the country”.

The aftershocks from a violent night on college campuses continue to reverberate, with the University of California, Los Angeles, canceling classes following an attack by counter-protesters on a pro-Palestinian encampment. Follow our live blog for more.

Louisiana might not get another majority-Black congressional district after all, further complicating Democrats’ hopes of retaking the House majority in November.

‘There is one person responsible for this nightmare: Donald Trump,’ Biden says as Florida abortion ban takes effect

18:07

Earlier this morning, Joe Biden hammered Donald Trump as Florida’s strict abortion ban went into effect, saying the former president “ripped away the rights and freedom of women in America”.

“There is one person responsible for this nightmare: Donald Trump. Trump brags about overturning Roe v Wade, making extreme bans like Florida’s possible, saying his plan is working ‘brilliantly’. He thinks it’s brilliant that more than 4 million women in Florida, and more than one in three women in America, can’t get access to the care they need,” the president said in a statement released through his re-election campaign.

“Trump is worried the voters will hold him accountable for the cruelty and chaos he created. He’s right. Trump ripped away the rights and freedom of women in America. This November, voters are going to teach him a valuable lesson: don’t mess with the women of America.”

Harris in Florida to castigate Trump as state’s strict abortion ban goes into effect

17:40

Kamala Harris is traveling to Florida this afternoon to train voters’ ire on Donald Trump as the state’s ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy goes into effect.

“Today at the stroke of midnight, another Trump abortion ban went into effect here in Florida,” the vice-president will say in a speech in Jacksonville.

“This ban applies to many women before they even know they are pregnant – which tells us the extremists who wrote this ban don’t even know how a woman’s body works. Or they just don’t care.”

Joe Biden’s re-election campaign hopes to benefit from voters’ concerns over abortion bans, which the supreme court made possible with its 2022 ruling overturning Roe v Wade. Trump appointed three of the five conservative justices who signed onto that decision.

Florida was once considered a swing state, but Democrats have struggled there in recent years, and the state voted for Trump in past two presidential elections. The Biden campaign says it hopes to win Florida again, aided by a measure set to be on the November ballot that would protect access to abortion up to around 24 weeks of pregnancy, and when necessary to protect a woman’s health. Here’s more on that:

Signs emerge rank-and-file Democrats will not support Greene’s ouster attempt at Johnson

17:40

The top three Democratic lawmakers in the House, including minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, say they will not support far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to boot her fellow Republican, Mike Johnson, from the speaker’s post.

The next question is whether other Democrats will go along with them. Leadership’s position can be influential on lawmakers, but it’s ultimately up to each member of Congress to decide. In the days to come, we can expect to hear from various House representatives about where they fall on this issue.

Fox News reports that Jamaal Bowman, a progressive Democrat from New York, says he is no fan of Johnson, but nonetheless plans to reject Greene’s motion to vacate when it comes up for a vote:

17:00

Here’s more from the Guardian’s Joan E Greve on far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s vow earlier this morning to force a vote next week on removing Mike Johnson as House speaker. As things stand right now, it does not seem to have the support to succeed:

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Wednesday that she would move to force a vote next week on removing her fellow Republican Mike Johnson as House speaker, even though the measure appears certain to fail.

“I think the American people need to see a recorded vote,” Greene said at a press conference. “And so next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate – absolutely calling it. I can’t wait to see Democrats go out and support a Republican speaker and have to go home to their primaries and have to run for Congress again.”

The news came one day after House Democratic leaders issued a statement indicating they would vote to table, or kill, Greene’s motion to vacate if it came up for a vote. In the statement, Democratic leaders cited Johnson’s successful effort to shepherd a foreign aid package through the House last month to justify blocking Greene’s motion.

“At this moment, upon completion of our national security work, the time has come to turn the page on this chapter of pro-Putin Republican obstruction,” the leaders said. “We will vote to table Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate the chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed.”

16:41

Control of the House will also be up for grabs in the November election, and a crucial aspect in determining which party has the advantage is how congressional district lines are drawn at the state level. Under a judge’s ruling, Louisiana was set to get a second Black-majority district, likely giving Democrats the advantage, but the Associated Press reports an appeals court has just forbidden that map from going into effect:

A new congressional map giving Louisiana a second majority-Black House district was rejected on Tuesday by a panel of three federal judges, fueling new uncertainty about district boundaries as the state prepares for fall congressional elections.

The 2-1 ruling forbids the use of a map drawn up in January by the legislature after a different federal judge blocked a map from 2022. The earlier map maintained a single Black-majority district and five mostly white districts, in a state with a population that is about one-third Black.

“We will of course be seeking supreme court review,” the state attorney general, Liz Murrill, said on social media. “The jurisprudence and litigation involving redistricting has made it impossible to not have federal judges drawing maps. It’s not right and they need to fix it.”

The governor, Jeff Landry, and Murrill had backed the new map in a January legislative session after a different federal judge threw out a map with only one mostly Black district.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by former attorney general Eric Holder, said backers of the new map will probably seek an emergency order from the supreme court to keep the new map in place while appeals are pursued.

16:23

The nationwide protests at college campuses were sparked by Israel’s invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’s 7 October attack. But as the Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt reports, all signs point to them emerging as significant issue for Joe Biden as he pursues re-election in November:

The policies of Joe Biden and Democrats towards Israel, which have prompted thousands of students across the country to protest, could affect the youth vote for Biden and hurt his re-election chances, experts have warned, in what is already expected to be a tight election.

Thousands of students at universities across the US have joined with pro-Palestine rallies and, most recently, encampments, as Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 people.

Some of the protests began as a call to encourage universities to ditch investments in companies that provide weapons and equipment to the Israeli military. But as the Biden administration has continued to largely support Israel, the president has increasingly become a focus of criticism from young people. Polling shows that young Americans’ support for Biden has been chipped away since 2020.

With Biden narrowly trailing Trump in several key swing states, it’s a voting bloc the president can ill afford to lose.

“The real threat to Biden is that younger voters, especially college-educated voters, won’t turn out for him in the election,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I wouldn’t expect that the protesters on campuses today are going to vote for Trump, almost none of them will. That’s not the danger here. The danger is much simpler: that they simply won’t vote.”

16:07

In addition to the police’s dispersal of protesters at Columbia University, yesterday saw violent clashes break out at the University of California, Los Angeles, involving pro-Israel counterprotesters.

We have a separate live blog following the latest in the demonstrations, which you can read here:

15:48

Police moved in yesterday evening to clear a Columbia University building that had been taken over by protesters, making dozens of arrests. Here’s what happened at the college that has become a flashpoint for the nationwide wave of protests against Israel, from the Guardian’s Diana Ramirez-Simon, Jonathan Yerushalmy, Edward Helmore and Erum Salam:

Dozens of students have been arrested after hundreds of New York City police officers entered Columbia University on Tuesday night to clear out an academic building that had been taken over as part of a pro-Palestinian protest.

Live video images showed police in riot gear marching on the campus in upper Manhattan, the focal point of nationwide student protests opposing Israel’s war in Gaza. Police used an armoured vehicle with a bridging mechanism to gain entry to the second floor of the building.

Officers said they used flash-bangs to disperse the crowd, but denied using teargas as part of the operation.

Before long, officers were seen leading protesters handcuffed with zip ties to a line of police buses waiting outside campus gates. An NYPD spokesman, Carlos Nieves, said he had no immediate reports of any injuries following the arrests.

15:42

Punchbowl News reports that the House oversight committee will be paying a visit to George Washington University in Washington DC to see the encampment set up by pro-Palestinian protesters:

The visit by the GOP-led committee, which has spent much of the past nearly year and a half investigating the Biden administration, comes as Republicans turn up the heat on administrators of universities where protests against Israel’s invasion of Gaza are taking place.

Just a few minutes ago, Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who is a high-ranking member of House leadership, called on the trustees of Columbia University, one of the campuses at the center of the protest wave, to remove Minouche Shafik as president, citing the recent storming of a university property by demonstrators:

This violence is a direct result of the appeasement policies president Minouche Shafik has used to address antisemitism on campus. President Shafik has allowed campus to be taken by mob rule, and she must immediately be removed so this occupation can be met with swift and overwhelming response to retake campus, restore order and protect Jewish students.

Johnson says ouster attempt ‘wrong for the country’

15:38

In a brief statement released shortly after Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie finished their press conference in which they announced they would attempt to remove Mike Johnson from his leadership post next week, the speaker issued a brief statement about their plans:

This motion is wrong for the Republican Conference, wrong for the institution, and wrong for the country.

15:31

Greene wrapped up the press conference by demanding, essentially, that Mike Johnson resign or be fired:

What I’m calling on is, like my colleague here said, Mike Johnson … can pray about it, think about it all weekend, do the right thing and resign, giving our conference time to elect a new leader, a new speaker of the house. He should reject the endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries and the entire Democrat leadership team. That is not an endorsement that any Republican speaker should ever want or embrace. And this vote will be called next week, and I would just want to urge all our colleagues to prepare for it. It’s the right thing to do for America. It’s time to clean house and get our conference in order and get ready to support President Trump’s agenda. God willing, he wins in November and we take back full power here in Washington in January.

The problem Greene faces is she does not have appear to have the votes to boot Johnson from the speaker’s chair. Besides herself and Thomas Massie, the only other lawmaker publicly supporting the ouster attempt is Arizona’s Paul Gosar, who was not at the press conference. Asked by a reporter about his absence, Greene said Gosar supports the effort but “he had another thing he had to attend to”, without elaborating.

How does the speaker of the House lose his job?

15:13

The mechanism in the House of Representatives to remove the speaker from his leadership post is called the motion to vacate.

The chamber’s current rules allow any one member, Democrat or Republican, to introduce the motion. If it is introduced as a “privileged” resolution, the House must consider it at some point, although it could be delayed with procedural votes.

It only needs a simple majority to pass.

The procedure was last used to remove Johnson’s predecessor Kevin McCarthy just six months ago – the only time in US history a House speaker has been ousted.

14:47

Greene has cast herself as a devoted acolyte of Donald Trump.

But Trump has spoken highly of Mike Johnson, even after Greene announced her push to remove him from office. A reporter asked Greene why she is continuing with her campaign against Johnson, given that the former president appears to support him. “I’m the biggest supporter of President Trump and that’s why I proudly wear this Maga hat,” the congresswoman replied as she donned the distinctive red cap.

Greene continued:

I fight for his agenda every single day, and that’s why I’m fighting here against my own Republican conference, to fight harder against the Democrats.

14:35

A reporter asked Greene why she wanted to wait until next week to vote on the motion to vacate.

“Everybody needs the weekend to prepare,” Greene replied. “I’m not irresponsible. I care about my conference. I have been measured, I have given this time. I have given warning after warning after warning. And that’s why we don’t have to rush. We can do it next week.”

Massie chimed in, “I think this is a somber decision for Mike Johnson. He deserves a weekend to think about it. He should resign because he knows what’s coming next week.”

He added:

I’m actually not going to concede that the vote will fail.

14:34

Greene said she thought voting on the motion to remove Johnson, which at this point does not appear to have enough support to succeed, would help Republicans maintain their slim majority in the House after the November elections:

I’m gonna tell you, at over $34tn in debt, with millions and millions of people invading our country and an economy that I don’t even know how is staying afloat because every business owner I know has been suffering, and people fed up with the drama on television and fed up with the fighting and fed up with the bullshit from Washington DC, are ready for a Republican majority that’s ready to support President Trump and his agenda in January of 2025. And I’m happy to deliver that vote for everyone next week.

14:32

Greene then yielded to Thomas Massie, one of two fellow Republicans publicly supporting her effort.

The Kentucky lawmaker elaborated on why they will press on with their effort to remove Mike Johnson, despite Democratic leaders’ intervention to protect his job, and an apparent lack of enthusiasm among the GOP:

Now, you may say … congressman Massie, Hakeem Jeffries just told you, he’s gonna save Mike Johnson’s bacon. So why go through with it? It’s a futile exercise … Why would you go through with this? Look, we didn’t get elected to make excuses. We didn’t get elected to say we shouldn’t even try. We got elected to come here and give it our best and also to impose transparency. What we’ve seen here is the coming out of the uniparty, and it will be consolidated and it will be transparent and apparent next week to all Americans when this vote happens. Too many of our colleagues have thrown up their hands in frustration and apathy. ‘Oh, we shouldn’t even try. Let’s just coast this one out’. I tell you what, it’s too dangerous to coast this one out. We cannot coast this one out. Hakeem Jeffries knows if we coast this one out, we lose the majority.

Greene says she’ll demand vote on removing Johnson next week

14:27

After a lengthy denunciation of Mike Johnson, Majorie Taylor Greene said she will call for a vote on her motion to remove him as speaker of the House next week.

“Next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate, absolutely calling it,” Greene said.

She indicated she thought the vote would hurt vulnerable Democrats:

I can’t wait to see Democrats go out and support a Republican speaker, and have to go home to their primaries and have to run for Congress again, having supported our Republican speaker, a Christian conservative, I think that’ll play well. I’m excited about it.

And also be a pain for Republicans she disagrees with:

[I] also can’t wait to see my Republican conference show their cards and show who we are. Because voters deserve it. Is the Republican party … have they finally learned their lesson? Have they finally heard the message from voters back at home? Are they willing to actually fight? Are they going to just keep going along to get along? Because it’s really easy to do that in Washington DC.

Marjorie Taylor Greene to announce next move after Democrats intervene to protect speaker Mike Johnson

14:21

Good morning, US politics blog readers. We’re kicking the day off with a press conference from far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who yesterday suffered a serious setback in her campaign to remove Mike Johnson as speaker of the House. The chamber’s top Democrats announced that they would oppose Greene’s effort, a reversal from just a few months ago, when the party was more than happy to lend its votes to the GOP insurgency that booted Kevin McCarthy from the speaker’s chair. But even before Democrats moved to protect Johnson – a staunch conservative who has lately worked with the minority party to pass bills dealing with foreign aid, government spending and a controversial surveillance law – Greene only had two known co-signers of her motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, which isn’t much. She yesterday accused Johnson of making a “slimy back room deal” for Democratic support, and hinted she might put her motion up for a vote anyway. The speaker, meanwhile, has said little about the drama.

Greene’s press conference is scheduled for 9am ET outside the Capitol, and the Georgia lawmaker will be joined by Thomas Massie, one of her two colleagues supporting the effort. We’ll tell you what they have to say.

Here’s what else is going on:

Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy – when many women do not yet realize they are yet pregnant – goes into effect today, and Kamala Harris is traveling to Jacksonville for a 2.45pm speech on the administration’s fight to protect reproductive rights.

Protests against Israel continue at college campuses nationwide, with police clearing demonstrators from Columbia University last night, and clashes breaking out at the University of California, Los Angeles. Follow our live blog for more.

Joe Biden announced his administration had canceled $6.1b in debt for students who attended the Arts Institutes, a for-profit college accused of fraud.

14:17

Greene recounted how she went from supporting Mike Johnson as speaker to threatening to remove him from office.

She blamed Johnson for the passage of a March government funding bill that “fully funded Joe Biden’s agenda”:

So, I entered a motion to vacate but I didn’t call it for a vote. I was controlled. I was responsible. I was being conscious and caring about my conference in our majority. It was a warning to stop serving the Democrats. And support our Republican conference and support our agenda. And he didn’t do it.

She then railed against Johnson for allowing a vote on the foreign aid package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan:

What’s when Mike Johnson fully joined the disgusting business model of Washington DC, to fund forever wars. Yeah, that’s what this is. The uniparty is make ‘Ukraine great again’. The uniparty is all about funding every single foreign war. They think this is the business model that needs to be done … Americans do not want to spend their hard-earned tax dollars to fund the murder and killing in foreign countries. They’re fed up with it, and they’re screaming it as loud as they possibly can.

14:13

Marjorie Taylor Greene has begun her press conference outside the US Capitol, where she is expected to announce whether she will press on with her campaign to remove fellow Republican Mike Johnson as speaker of the House.

She started off by reminding everyone of her affinity for Donald Trump:

I was one of the Americans in 2016 that looked at a presidential stage of 17 Republican candidates, and the only one that stood out to me was Donald John Trump. The very man that stood out and represented Republican voters and Americans all over the country, that we’re sick and tired of a Republican establishment failing us over and over again. That’s why I supported him in 2016, that’s why I supported him in 2020, and that’s why I support him now.

To make her point that the speaker is insufficiently loyal, the Georgia lawmaker spoke before photos of Johnson with Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader.

Far-right lawmakers accuse Johnson of belonging to ‘uniparty’

14:05

In the below tweet, Thomas Massie, one of two other House representatives known to be backing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate, accuses speaker Mike Johnson of belonging to the “uniparty”:

Uniparty is a term that has become popular on the far right to describe Republicans working with Democrats – the allegation being that the two parties are essentially the same. Lawmakers like Massie would prefer that Johnson hold fast and reject compromises with Democrats, like the foreign aid bill that funded Ukraine’s defense, or the government funding legislation enacted in March that Greene seized on to begin her push to remove Johnson as speaker.

Of course, there would have been consequences to holding up those two bills that could have harmed the GOP overall. If the government funding bills did not pass, Washington would have shut down, while if Ukraine did not receive more support, Russia could have made further battlefield gains. That could blow back on Republicans, particularly lawmakers in vulnerable seats – a group that does not include Greene or Massie.

Massie goes on to accuse Johnson of receiving the endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader. Here’s more from him: