Category: Politics

With Sen. Bernie Sanders’ decision to drop out of the race, Joe Biden has become the presumptive nominee to lead the Democratic Party into the November Elections in the US. By adding some of the policies advocated by Sanders, the former Vice President Biden  is seeking to win over his rival’s loyal band of progressive supporters, many of whom lack enthusiasm for the former vice president and his establishment brand of politics.

Joe Biden, faced with the daunting task of uniting and energizing a party that has been through a long, divisive primary, and is now distracted by the fears and daily challenges of a global pandemic and world economic collapse, said, .“It’s time to come together and unite around our presumptive nominee,” Democratic Party Chairman Tom Perez said Wednesday.

Biden issued a statement last week that praised the Vermont senator’s leadership and welcomed his followers to his camp, and invoked Sanders’ campaign slogan. “I’ll be reaching out to you. You will be heard by me. As you say: Not me. Us,” Biden said.

In his efforts to win over the supporters of Sanders, Former Vice President Joe Biden released plans to expand Medicare eligibility and forgive some student debt as he works to unite a fractured Democratic base behind his presumptive 2020 presidential nomination.

Progressives say Biden will have to do far more — by way of policy, personnel and choice of vice president — to broaden his support on the left, especially among young people.

“They are looking for something more than just, ‘We have to stop Trump,’” said Ben Wessel, executive director of NextGen America, a progressive super PAC that is on track to register 300,000 young voters in 11 battleground states this election cycle. “He has to recognize the new reality we are in right now, especially with coronavirus. We have a bunch of young people feeling like their economic future is completely screwed.”

Sanders’ exit now allows Biden to work with the Democratic National Committee to raise money. They have plans to launch a joint fundraising committee that can solicit checks from donors in the tens of thousands of dollars. Contributions to the campaign itself have a $2,800 federal limit.

One avenue for Biden to energize and unify the party could be his choice of a running mate. He’s committed to picking a woman, and his campaign is expected to set up an operation for vetting candidates as soon as next week.

If Biden chooses a progressive like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a former rival, it could help fire up the left and young people. He is also under pressure from some quarters to pick a woman of color. Other Democrats believe a strong progressive on the ticket could be a liability in a general election and would favor a more centrist woman like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or another former rival, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll illustrated the political risk to Biden if he does not bring Sanders supporters into the fold between now and election day. The poll found that if Biden were the Democratic nominee, 80% of Sanders supporters would vote for Biden, and 15% would go to Trump. That would be a slightly higher rate of defection than in 2016, when post-election analysis found that 12% of those who voted for Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the primary went with Trump in the general election.

Biden, however, is drawing support from the anti-Trump wing of the GOP: The Lincoln Project, an organization of disaffected Republicans, endorsed Biden. At a virtual fundraiser, Biden invited former GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel to headline the event with him. That won’t go over well with some progressives and young people who think his call for bipartisanship is naive.

Senior Biden aides have been opening lines of communication with progressive groups, including old-line organizations such as Planned Parenthood and activist start-ups like Indivisible.

But many other Sanders supporters are more wary. A letter to Biden from several large progressive advocacy groups including NextGen, Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement urged Biden to quickly pivot off a “return to normalcy” campaign theme. “For so many young people, going back to the way things were ‘before Trump’ isn’t a motivating enough reason to cast a ballot in November,” the letter said.

Biden announced last week that he would lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and forgive federal student debt for low-income and middle-class people who attended public colleges and universities, historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), and underfunded minority-serving institution (MSI).

The proposals mark an initial olive branch to supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), some of whom have expressed skepticism at Biden’s centrist brand of politics and were dismayed when the Vermont progressive withdrew from the race Wednesday. Biden specifically referenced Sanders’s advocacy for the two issues in a Medium post announcing his plans.

“I believe that as we are being plunged into what is likely to be one of the most volatile and difficult economic times in this country’s recent history, we can take these critical steps to help make it easier for working people to make ends meet,” Biden wrote. “Senator Sanders and his supporters can take pride in their work in laying the groundwork for these ideas, and I’m proud to adopt them as part of my campaign at this critical moment in responding to the coronavirus crisis.”

Under Biden’s plan, Americans would have the option of opting into Medicare when they are 60 or stick with the plans provided by their employers. The proposal is intended to complement Biden’s overall health care plan to provide a public option to any American who wants it while expanding the Affordable Care Act.

Biden’s student debt plan calls for forgiving all federal undergraduate student loans from two- and four-year public colleges and universities and any private HBCUs or MSIs for debt-holders earning up to $125,000. The plan builds on Biden’s existing student loan plan to cancel $10,000 of student debt per person, forgive federal student loans after 20 years and more.

A Biden administration would pay for the student debt plan by repealing the “excess business losses” tax cut in the recently passed $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package. The former vice president said in a statement he will be releasing further details for his proposals “in the future.”

In the crowded field of June 9 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate from Maine, Indian American Sara Gideon, the current State House Speaker, seems to be raising hope for winning the primary and ultimately claiming the US Senate seat in the general election from incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins.

The 47-year-old daughter of an Indian immigrant father and a second-generation Armenian mother wants to change what she believes are too many politicians in Washington focused more on the special interests than the interests of those they represent.

Senator Susan Collins’ hard-won reputation as an independent-minded Republican moderate devoted to Maine — an image that enabled her to continue on as New England’s last surviving GOP senator — is being put to the test this year in the most difficult reelection race of her career. And with control of the Senate at stake, it’s become one of the highest-profile Senate races in the country, already prompting millions of dollars in spending by outside political groups.

Susan Collins — one of the few remaining senators on either side of the aisle willing to buck their party on key votes — objects to the idea that she has changed. Six years ago, Collins won more than two-thirds of the vote. But a Colby College poll of Maine voters last month found a statistical dead heat between Collins and Gideon, with 56% of women reporting an unfavorable opinion of Collins, likely a result of her support for Bret Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court seat.

“One of the most surprising findings is how poorly Senator Collins is doing with women,” Dan Shea, Colby College professor of government and the lead researcher on the poll, was quoted as saying in Sun Journal.

“She had a 42 percent approval rating overall but that drops to 36 percent for women. Further yet, it drops to 25 percent for women under 50. My best guess is this is residual impact on her vote for (U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett) Kavanaugh.”

Sara says, she is running for U.S. Senate because she believes too many politicians in Washington are focused more on the special interests than the interests of the people they’re supposed to serve. Besides Gideon, other democrats in the fray are Michael Bunker, Bre Kidman, Ross LaJeunesse and Betsy Sweet.

Sara is a leading voice in the legislature to draw attention to and deliver resources to combat Maine’s opioid epidemic. Sara’s work has been credited with giving law enforcement and families the tools they need to help save lives. And when former Governor LePage vetoed Sara’s opioid legislation and mocked those suffering from the crisis, Sara did not back down. Instead, she brought Democrats and Republicans together and defeated the veto from the Governor.

Sara has prioritized listening to Mainers and then working with others to get things done. And under Governors of both parties, Sara has shown an ability to deliver results while standing up for Democratic Whether as a member of her local town council, as a State Representative and now Speaker of the House, Sara has focused on trying to use her office to improve the lives of Maine

Democrats are building a case that Collins — despite her support for abortion rights and vote to uphold Obamacare — is following her party’s rightward shift. In particular, they point to her refusal to stand up to President Trump and her siding with the party on the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. Many legal experts expect Kavanaugh to support efforts to undermine Roe vs. Wade, though he’s never directly ruled on the issue and Collins has said she is confident he won’t.

“In Maine, Senator Collins’ race is very important for Democrats. Her vote for Kavanaugh confirmation made them really angry, and Maine obviously is one of the key races for them, if the Democrats have to take back the senate. Naturally, the Democrats have targeted the seat in a big way and there is a lot of money and energy that are going to come in. This will be one of the prime races that needs to be watched,” Sanjay Puri, chairman and founder of U.S.-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC), a bipartisan, political organization representing the interests of more than 3.2 million Indian Americans, told this correspondent.

“To win the Senate, the Democrats need to win three important seats and this one is the potential pick-up along with Colorado and Arizona where they won the last cycle and Colorado is going to be a close race. Democrats have a good chance of taking the Senate if they win in these three key Senate races,” Puri said.

In light of those votes, Gideon suggested that Collins hasn’t kept up with a changing political environment. “Wherever we have been in the state, people will come up to us and say, what do you think happened to Susan Collins?” Sara Gideon, the Democratic front-runner in the Senate race, told a crowd in Maine. “We really hear that question posed in that way all of the time. It feels like she is making decisions that are in somebody else’s interest, not in ours.”

Collins predicts she will prevail after a tough race — citing Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) interest in unseating her as a way to regain Democratic control of the chamber.

In late February, six labor unions announced their endorsement of Gideon in the Maine U.S. Senate race, highlighting her record of fighting for Maine’s working families and her commitment to supporting them in the Senate.

In January Planned Parenthood endorsed Gideon, saying Collins “turned her back” on women and citing her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court as well as other judicial nominees who oppose abortion.

On the face of it, the battle for Gideon may be an uphill one, despite the fact that Collins has disappointed those on the left since Trump took office by voting for the Republican tax bill, and by voting to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Maine’s politics have a decidedly anti-Establishment bent. As Gideon pointed out in her campaign ad that Collins has been in the Senate for 22 years and voters might be ready for a fresh, and more progressive, approach.

In June last year. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, Chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, endorsed Gideon, saying she has proven that she will listen to and fight for all Mainers by bringing people together to lift up hardworking families and refusing to let partisanship and politics stand in the way of progress.

“In the Senate, Sara will build on her impressive record to bring down health care costs, combat the opioid epidemic, and boost economic opportunities — and she’ll always answer to her constituents. Mainers can trust Sara to fight for them, and we look forward to supporting her campaign,” DSCC said in a statement.

Puri said the USINPAC is keeping a close eye on the Maine race. “She (Gideon) has a good background and she’s getting a lot of support from the people and her polls are good showing her neck to neck with Collins. I think she really has good opportunity, but it is too early at this stage to say anything about the outcome.”

Gideon supports Medicaid expansion and expanded health care for women and has vowed to continue the fight to protect and expand reproductive rights. “Reproductive health care is under assault by the Trump Administration and far-right judges, and Senator Collins has sided with Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump on nearly every judicial nominee,” her campaign said March 4 in a press statement. “From birth control to cancer screenings to abortion, Mainers and Americans rely on organizations like Planned Parenthood for essential health care — and as Maine’s Senator, I will always defend their reproductive rights.”

A couple of week ago, former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign was on life support. On Saturday, February 29^th, Biden won a commanding victory in the South Carolina primary, a state whose demographic makeup truly reflects the diversity of the Democratic Party base, gave him a boost that he badly needed.

South Carolina was always at the heart of Biden’s electoral strategy — his first opportunity to establish himself as the clear choice of the party, positioned right before the critical delegate binge of Super Tuesday.

Joe Biden reclaimed his status as a Democratic front-runner with stunning victories on Super Tuesday and opened a clear path to amassing enough delegates to clinch the nomination by the Democratic National Convention.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders had an advantage on Super Tuesday he will not see again: many early votes cast before moderates coalesced around one candidate. Bernie Sanders, the left wing’s champion, has dodged a knockout blow for now. While he has lost his lead in pledged delegates, he remains competitive and he has probably stopped Biden well short of an overall majority of delegates awarded on Super Tuesday.

But the results nonetheless leave reason to doubt whether Sanders can fare well enough to amass a majority of pledged delegates by the convention without yet another big turn in the race, this time in his favor. He was largely swept in the Eastern half of the country, where most of the delegates awarded after Super Tuesday are at stake. And in many states he was assisted by large numbers of early voters who cast ballots before the South Carolina race, when the party’s moderate voters were still divided. He will no longer have that advantage.

Biden swept the South with expected, overwhelming support among African-American voters, who backed him by a margin of 56 percent to 19 percent across the Super Tuesday states, according to exit polls. His success among white voters was less expected and allowed him to extend his strength well beyond the South.

He ran even or ahead among white voters in every state east of the Mississippi River, except for Sanders’s home state of Vermont, according to the exit polls, and won decisive victories in the affluent suburbs around Boston, Washington and Minneapolis. He even carried much of the old, moderate rural vote that Sanders swept four years earlier.

Biden rapidly consolidated moderate-leaning voters in the days after his landslide victory in the South Carolina primary. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar left the race and endorsed him, with the result that he appeared to add nearly all their former supporters. His strength across the rural North and in affluent suburbs mirrored their strengths in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

Biden got an additional lift as his leading moderate rival, Mike Bloomberg, dropped out of the race, and it seems Bloomberg will be willing to use his considerable wealth to support him.

Texas offered a different test. The state’s Democratic electorate is a mix of African-Americans and more conservative and affluent white voters who tend to back Mr. Biden, and younger, urban and Latino voters who tend to back Mr. Sanders. According to the exit polls, Mr. Sanders won Latinos by a margin of 50 percent to 24 percent across the Super Tuesday states, with a margin of 41 percent to 24 percent in Texas.

In an election night count that reflected the shift in the national political environment over the last week, Biden eventually overtook Sanders in the Texas returns, with a wide advantage among late-deciding voters who cast their ballots on Election Day. In a telling indication of how quickly moderate voters had coalesced behind Biden, the exit polls across the Super Tuesday states found that among voters who decided in just the last few days, Biden won by a margin of 48 percent to 21 percent.

Sanders denied Biden a more sweeping victory because of the West, where Sanders can count on his strengths among Latinos, liberals and younger, urban voters without fully facing his weakness among African-American voters and conservative rural whites. The West also has the highest rate of early voting in the country, which helped blunt Biden’s surge.

Buttigieg and Klobuchar combined for 22 percent support in the exit poll in Colorado, where advance voters represented the largest share of the vote of any state on Tuesday. Their support was not recorded in the election night tabulation because they withdrew from the race, but both candidates routinely breached 10 percent in early voting elsewhere in the country, including in California.

The large early and absentee vote in some of the states most favorable to Sanders helped him in the delegate count. Over all, Biden holds only 45 percent of pledged delegates after Super Tuesday, according to preliminary Upshot estimates, while Sanders is expected to finish with around 39 percent. These tallies could change depending on the eventual result in California (which might not become official for weeks), but if they hold, Biden’s delegate lead would be far from irreversible. In fact, Sanders would need to defeat Biden by only three points in the remaining two-thirds of the country to overtake him.

A three-point deficit is not a daunting handicap, certainly not when Biden was polling 20 points lower just a few days ago. But the Super Tuesday results do not augur well for Sanders’s odds of pulling it off. He remained so competitive on Super Tuesday in part because of the large number of early and absentee voters who cast ballots before it became apparent that Biden was the viable moderate candidate.

The rest of the country may not be so favorable to Sanders, either. With Texas and California off the board, most of the remaining populous states lie in the East, where Sanders tended to lose, often badly. They also tend to have a below-average Latino share of the vote.

The states where Latino voters do represent roughly an average share of the electorate do not seem likely to be as favorable to Sanders as California or Texas. Arizona, New Mexico, New York and Florida allow only registered Democrats to vote, and therefore exclude a disproportionate number of young Hispanic voters — many of them registered as independents — who are likeliest to back Sanders. These closed primaries will exclude many young non-Latino voters as well, posing a broader challenge to Sanders that he did not overcome in 2016 and has not yet had to face in 2020.

Biden, in contrast, will continue to find many states in the next few weeks where black voters represent an average or above-average share of the population. He needs somewhere around 54 percent of the remaining delegates to claim a majority heading into the Democratic nomination, and his path to accomplishing this might be as simple as repeating the same outcome as Super Tuesday under a more favorable set of states, without the burden of early votes cast long before he emerged as the top rival to Sanders.

A decision by Elizabeth Warren on whether to stay in the race will affect whether it becomes easier for Biden or Sanders to amass a delegate majority, just as Bloomberg’s decision to drop out already has. Each was on track to win about 14 percent of the national vote, enough to often cross the 15 percent threshold for viability and therefore win delegates that might have otherwise gone to the front-runners. In doing so, they dragged both Biden and Sanders farther from 50 percent of pledged delegates.

It is hard to evaluate how much Biden or Sanders will be helped or hurt if Warren is out of the race. One thing was clear Tuesday night: The longer she stayed in the race, the more likely it was that no candidate would win a majority of delegates before the convention.

Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York who had hoped to self-fund his way to the Democratic presidential nomination but was spurned by voters in Tuesday’s balloting, dropped out of the race Wednesday. Bloomberg endorsed Joe Biden, saying the former vice president had the best chance to win in November.

“I’ve always believed that defeating Donald Trump starts with uniting behind the candidate with the best shot to do it. After yesterday’s vote, it is clear that candidate is my friend and a great American, Joe Biden,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

Justice Sri Srinivasan has taken charge as the Chief Justice of U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, the nation’s second highest court on February 13, after Judge Merrick Garland, 67, the Chief Judge of this influential court, completing his seven year term, formally stepped down and passed on the gavel to Srinivasan, making him the first South Asian American to lead a powerful federal circuit court.

Ascension to the post was based on age and years of service on the bench. Srinivasan will turn 53 on Feb. 23. Srinivasan, who was also Obama’s shortlist for the Supreme Court, according to the Washington Post, “shares Garland’s moderate style in his rulings and in his demeanor in questioning lawyers who argue before the court.” It said that Srinivasan “is similarly well-liked by colleagues and is viewed as slow to talk but quick to listen on a court known for its collegiality.”

The Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court John Roberts was sworn in as the presiding officer and senators swore to do “impartial justice,” as the Senate opened the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history.

The United States Senate formally opened the impeachment trial of President Trump on Thursday, January 16^th as the Senators accepted the promise to deliver “impartial justice” and installed Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. as the presiding officer.

The steps marked the official start of the trial, only the third such proceeding against a president in U.S. history. At least two-thirds of the senators would have to vote to convict Mr. Trump to remove him from office.

In a somber ceremony that has happened only twice before in the nation’s history, Chief Justice Roberts vowed to conduct Trump’s impeachment trial “according to the Constitution and the laws.” He then administered the same, 222-year-old oath of impartiality and adherence to the Constitution to the senators, setting in motion the final step in a bitter and divisive effort by the president’s adversaries to remove him from office.

Even as the antiquated ritual unfolded, with senators signing their names one by one in an oath book near the marble Senate rostrum, new evidence was trickling out about Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine that is at the heart of the charges against him.

House managers, who will act as prosecutors during the trial, arrived at the ornate doors of the Senate at noon. They walked in two-by-two, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.). Freshman Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D., Texas) trailed as the seventh. A Democratic aide said the order was chosen according to seniority.

All managers carried large blue folders containing their own copy of the articles of impeachment passed by the House last month and the resolution passed on Jan 15th authorizing them as managers. They were followed by Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green, who has been a longtime voice in calling for Mr. Trump’s removal from office. He wasn’t an official part of the procession.

Silence fell and phones disappeared as the House sergeant at arms warned senators to keep quiet “on pain of imprisonment.” Then Mr. Schiff, the lead manager, began reading the articles aloud from a podium in the well of the Senate. “Resolved, that Donald John Trump, president of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said.

“President Trump,” Mr. Schiff said, “warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.”

The charges detailed the case against the president: that Mr. Trump pressured Ukraine for investigations into his political rivals, withholding $391 million in military aid as leverage, and that he obstructed Congress by blocking the inquiry into his conduct.

Meanwhile, a trove of newly released texts, voice mail messages, calendar entries and other records handed over by Lev Parnas, an associate of the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, offered new details about the scheme. And the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog, found that Mr. Trump’s decision to withhold nearly $400 million in military aid from Ukraine was an illegal breach of a law that limits a president’s power to block the spending of money allocated by Congress.

Two hours before the oath-taking on the Senate floor, seven House members made a solemn march to the chamber to read aloud the charges against Mr. Trump. His words echoing from the well of the Senate, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California accused the president of abusing the power of his office and obstructing Congress by trying to cover up his actions.

The evidence provided by Mr. Parnas adds significant new detail to the public record about how the pressure campaign played out. On Wednesday, Mr. Parnas told The New York Times that he believed Mr. Trump knew about the efforts to dig up dirt on his political rivals.

Just hours before the formal start of the trial, the Government Accountability Office said the decision by the White House Office of Management and Budget to withhold the aid violated the Impoundment Control Act, concluding that “faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law.” Mr. Trump directed the freeze on the Ukraine aid, and administration officials testified during the course of the impeachment inquiry that they had repeatedly warned that doing so could violate the law, but their concerns were not heeded.

And the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog, said Thursday that the Trump administration violated the law when it withheld Ukraine security aid that Congress has appropriated.

That evidence is likely to be incorporated into the House Democratic case against the President, which they will begin presenting next Tuesday when the substance of the trial gets underway. Democrats charge that Trump withheld the security aid and a White House meeting from Ukraine while pushing for an investigation into the Bidens.

The trial began this week after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi withheld the formal sending of the articles for four weeks while Democrats pushed for Republicans to agree to calling witnesses and obtaining new documents for the trial.

Pelosi said at her weekly press conference Thursday that Senate Republicans are “afraid of the truth,” when asked what her response is to Senate Republicans who say they shouldn’t have to consider new evidence like the Parnas material because it wasn’t included in the House investigation.

The outcome of the trial is all but determined, as the two-thirds vote required to remove the President would need 20 Republican senators to break ranks. But that doesn’t mean the trial itself won’t have twists and turns — and potentially some surprises — as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell navigates the demands of his Senate conference, pressures from Democrats and the whims of Trump and his Twitter account.

The US assassination of Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani, has escalated a “shadow war” in the Middle East between the US and Iran. US President Donald Trump authorized the airstrike against Soleimani without congressional approval, citing “imminent and sinister attacks.”

Soleimani was killed in a targeted, Jan. 3 airstrike near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. His death has brought about massive demonstrations against the US and a warning that Iran will retaliate. The incident has led to raising the stakes in its conflict with Washington amid concerns of a wider war in the Middle East.

The assassination of Major General Qassem Suleimani, arguably Iran’s second most powerful figure, by an order by Donald Trump, has marked a major escalation in the long-simmering conflict between the Iran and the United States. and sparked fear of turmoil throughout the region.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addressing a gathering of Iranians chanting “Death to America,” says the attacks are a “slap on the face” of the United States and that US troops should leave the region.

Tehran’s foreign minister says Iran took “proportionate measures” in self-defense and did not seek to escalate the confrontation. “God the Almighty has promised to take martyr Soleimani’s revenge,” Gen. Esmail Ghaani, Soleimani’s successor as commander of the Quds Force, told Iranian state television. “Certainly, actions will be taken.”

While Republicans largely united behind the president’s actions, many Democratic politicians raised concerns over what consequences the assassination will have, particularly the threat to Americans abroad and the likelihood of sparking another war in the Middle East.

The United States has no plans to pull its troops out of Iraq, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Monday, following reports by Reuters and other media of an American military letter informing Iraqi officials about repositioning troops in preparation for leaving the country.

Longtime foes Tehran and Washington have been in a war of words since the assassination of the Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, widely seen as Iran’s second most powerful figure behind Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s demand for US forces to withdraw from the region gained traction on Sunday when Iraq’s parliament passed a resolution calling for all foreign troops to leave the country.

The leaked American military letter said US-led coalition forces would use helicopters to evacuate. Several were heard flying over Baghdad on Monday night, although it was not immediately clear if that was related.

How did we get here, and what’s happening next? The World is tracking recent developments in this timeline, which will continue to be updated.  Despite some periods of cooperation, the US and Iran have long been in conflict. Indeed, the longest currently active US national emergency concerns sanctions on Iran issued by former President Jimmy Carter in 1979. But significant US involvement dates back to 1953, when the US orchestrated a coup to overthrow Iran’s prime minister. Here’s a brief timeline of major events in US-Iranian relations.

This escalation doesn’t come without a backstory. The US-Iran relationship has faced many ups and downs over the past century. More recent tensions have risen after Trump walked away from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed crippling sanctions on the country in 2018. The United States has also grown increasingly concerned about Iran’s influence in Iraq, the government of which has faced months of popular protest.

Iran’s U.S.-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has been denied a visa by the United States to attend a United Nations Security Council meeting this week. Last April, he appeared at Asia Society New York for a wide-ranging conversation with Asia Society President and CEO Josette Sheeran.

Less than a year after President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Iran Nuclear Deal, Zarif told Sheeran that he did not think the president wanted conflict — but that Trump was mistaken if he thought his “maximum pressure” approach to Iran would work.

Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence commander and arguably the country’s second-most powerful leader after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed last week at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq by a U.S. drone strike. The attack — to which Tehran vowed to retaliate — marks a striking escalation in the long-simmering conflict between Iran and the United States.

In May 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, which mandated that Iran curtail its nuclear weapons program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.

Last April, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif appeared at Asia Society New York for a conversation with Asia Society President and CEO Josette Sheeran. In an excerpt embedded above, Zarif explains why Trump’s attempt to maximize pressure on Iran won’t work:

“I doubt that President Trump wants conflict. He ran on a campaign promise — and it seems to me that he’s very careful to at least try to implement his campaign promises — not to waste another $7 trillion in our region in order to make the situation even worse. So, I guess he wants to stick to that commitment.

He thinks through further pressure on Iran — the so-called “maximum pressure” policy — he can bring us to our knees. He’s mistaken. We have 7,000 years of history. We’ve had battles. We’ve had losses. We’ve had victories. Usually, we haven’t come to our knees. And this won’t be an aberration of that.

“We don’t look at history in terms of two, four, and six years, as [Americans] usually do with congress, or in the administration, or in the senate. We look at history in millennia. And our dignity is not up for sale. We have 7,000 years of history,” Zarif said. “We’ve had battles. We’ve had losses. We’ve had victories. Usually, we haven’t come to our knees. And this won’t be an aberration of that.”

A new CNN poll shows that half the country believes that President Donald Trump should be not only impeached by the House, but also removed from office by the Senate. 50% of the public believes Trump should be impeached and removed — almost double the amount who have said that about any of his three most recent predecessors, including one who was actually impeached by the House.

With growing public support, the House Judiciary Committee has invited President Donald Trump or his counsel to participate in the panel’s first impeachment hearing next week as the House moves another step closer to impeaching the President.

The committee announced that it would hold a hearing December 4 on the “constitutional grounds for presidential impeachment,” with a panel of expert witnesses testifying.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler sent a letter to Trump on Tuesday notifying him of the hearing and inviting the President or his counsel to participate, including asking questions of the witnesses.

“I write to ask if … you or your counsel plan to attend the hearing or make a request to question the witness panel,” the New York Democrat wrote.

In the letter, Nadler said the hearing would “serve as an opportunity to discuss the historical and constitutional basis of impeachment, as well as the Framers’ intent and understanding of terms like ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ ”

“We expect to discuss the constitutional framework through which the House may analyze the evidence gathered in the present inquiry,” Nadler added. “We will also discuss whether your alleged actions warrant the House’s exercising its authority to adopt articles of impeachment.”

Under the House resolution passed last month setting the rules of the impeachment proceedings, the President’s counsel can question witnesses and raise objections, though Nadler has plenty of discretion in the proceedings as chairman.

The resolution states that should the Trump administration refuse to cooperate in the impeachment proceedings — such as denying witnesses, which it has done — Nadler can “impose appropriate remedies, including by denying specific requests by the President or his counsel under these procedures to call or question witnesses.”

The Judiciary Committee hearing is the latest sign that House Democrats are moving forward with impeachment proceedings against the President following the two-month investigation led by the House Intelligence Committee into allegations that Trump pushed Ukraine to investigate his political rivals while a White House meeting and $400 million in security aid were withheld from Kiev.

The hearing announcement comes as the Intelligence Committee plans to release its report summarizing the findings of its investigation to the House Judiciary Committee soon after Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess next week.

Democratic aides declined to say what additional hearings they will schedule as part of the impeachment proceedings.

The Judiciary Committee is expected to hold multiple hearings related to impeachment, and the panel would debate and approve articles of impeachment before a vote on the House floor.

The aides said the first hearing was a “legal hearing” that would include some history of impeachment, as well as evaluating the seriousness of the allegations and the evidence against the President.

Nadler asked Trump to respond by Sunday on whether the White House wanted to participate in the hearings, as well as who would act as the President’s counsel for the proceedings. The letter was copied to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley left the door open to running for the White House in 2024 after vowing to stump across the country to help re-elect President Trump next year. Haley, who also served as the Republican governor of South Carolina, made it clear that she has Trump’s back in 2020.

Haley, who discussed her book “With All Due Respect” at the 92nd Street Y Tuesday night,  sought to deflect the question when asked by Fox News’ Dana Perino about a 2024 candidacy. “A year is a lifetime in politics,” Haley said. “It would be a waste of time to think about 2024 at this point.” But Haley then added, “Instead I want to do everything I do really well now and just see if doors open.”

In a well-thought out, strategic attempt to raise her profile even more nationally, coinciding with the release of her book on Nov. 12, Haley has engaged in a flurry of television interviews with networks and cable news anchors. She sought to endear herself further to Trump’s base by strongly defending her rationale for remaining loyal to the President against the apparent machinations of President Trump’s most senior aides — former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and erstwhile White House chief of staff John F. Kelly — who allegedly sought to recruit her to work around and subvert Trump. It is a clear attempt to make sure Trump’s cult-like support base will be in her corner in 2024 when she’s most likely to go toe to toe with Vice President Mike Pence in the GOP primary.

When Haley resigned in December last year, unlike the departure of other administration officials, either by firing or of their own volition, Haley’s departure was announced by Trump at an Oval Office meeting with them seated side by side with the White House press pool invited for what could only be described as a veritable love-fest between the President and Haley, where each lavished effusive praise on each other.

Both in her book and in all of her media interviews, Haley also burnished her foreign and security policy credentials, particularly her strong pro-Israel stand, claiming that she was the point person when it came to moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and tearing up the Iran nuclear deal — a major priority for the Israeli government and a campaign promise made by Trump — even as Tillerson and Kelly sought to undermine these efforts.

All of this, including her taking the lead in cutting U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority for its “hostile rhetoric and even more hostile actions toward the United States,” as she states in her book, could only enhance her support and love she enjoys from the powerful AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and major GOP donors like billionaire Sheldon Adelson, whose support was always conditioned on the moving of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and is said to be an avid fan of Haley.

Although, Haley continues to decline to predict her political future or her White House ambitions, she told The Washington Post, “I’m not even thinking that way. I’m thinking more of, we need to do all we can to get the president reelected. And then from there, deciding how I will use the power of my voice,” Haley said, adding, “I know I’m too young to stop fighting, I know that. And I know that I need and want to be involved in some way that’s helpful.”

In her book, Haley wrote, “I realize there are many who will think this book is motivation for something in the future. I can’t help that. I can only say that facts are remembered and emotions fade, but it is the emotions that dictate the lessons we learn. I wanted all of you to know what I felt as I went through these times in my life. I don’t know what’s next, but I’ve learned some things along the way that will help me find it,” she said.

Talking about her UN tenure, she said, “My time at the UN certainly made me wiser about the world and sadder about parts of it. But it also made me more grateful about our country.”

“At the UN, I worked alongside the ambassadors of dictators and strongmen. I traveled to places most Americans will never go, and I saw things most Americans will never see.What I saw cut through the loud and polarizing voices in our country. I saw what sets America apart — what we must protect and preserve.”

Haley said, “People from all over the world are drawn to the United States by our exceptionalism — our freedom, our opportunity, and our belief in human dignity. My parents were among them.They came from India to rural South Carolina in the 1960s.My mother wore a sari. My father wore a turban. He still does today. We were different. We stood out. And my family felt the pain of being judged by our difference.”

Haley said, “Immigration is a source of American strength when it is conducted in accordance with our principles. But it must be a two-way street.We welcome immigrants who come to America in accordance with the rule of law.And we must call upon those immigrants to embrace our values and respect our laws in order to become Americans.”

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, has expressed his intention to a 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, warning that the current field of candidates is ill equipped to defeat President Donald Trump.

Bloomberg, according to media reports, is considering mounting a 2020 Democratic campaign, starting with at latest one state contest on Super Tuesday, March 3. Bloomberg has said in the past that if he ran for president he would be willing to spend $100 million of his own money. As of Friday, he was No. 8 on the Forbes billionaires list, with a net with a net worth of over $52 billion.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and billionaire businessman, has been privately weighing a bid for the White House for weeks and has not yet made a final decision on whether to run, an adviser said. But in the first sign that he is seriously moving toward a campaign, Mr. Bloomberg has dispatched staffers to Alabama to gather signatures to qualify for the primary there. Though Alabama does not hold an early primary, it has a Friday deadline for candidates to formally enter the race.

Bloomberg and his advisers called a number of prominent Democrats on Thursday to tell them he was seriously considering the race, including former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the retired majority leader who remains a dominant power broker in the early caucus state. Aides to Mr. Bloomberg also reached out to Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

Bloomberg, who initially ruled out a 2020 run, has not made a final decision on whether to jump into the race. If he were to launch a campaign, it could dramatically reshape the Democratic contest less than three months before primary voting begins.

The 77-year-old has spent the past few weeks talking with prominent Democrats about the state of the 2020 field, expressing concerns about the steadiness of former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign and the rise of liberal Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, according to people with knowledge of those discussions. In recent days, he took steps to keep his options open, including moving to get on the primary ballot in Alabama ahead of the state’s Friday filing deadline.

In a statement on Thursday, Bloomberg adviser Howard Wolfson said the former mayor believes Trump “represents an unprecedented threat to our nation” and must be defeated. “But Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that,” Wolfson said.

Bloomberg’s moves come as the Democratic race enters a crucial phase. Biden’s front-runner status has been vigorously challenged by Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who are flush with cash from small-dollar donors. But both are viewed by some Democrats as too liberal to win in a general election faceoff with Trump.

Despite a historically large field, some Democrats anxious about defeating Trump have been looking for other options. Former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick have quietly had conversations with supporters urging them to consider a run, but neither appears likely to get in the race.

Bloomberg, a Republican-turned-independent who registered as a Democrat last year, has flirted with a presidential run before but ultimately backed down, including in 2016. He endorsed Hillary Clinton in that race and, in a speech at the Democratic Party convention, pummeled Trump as a con who has oversold his business successes.

Bloomberg plunged his efforts — and his money — into gun control advocacy and climate change initiatives. He again looked seriously at a presidential bid earlier this year, traveling to early voting states and conducting extensive polling, but decided not to run in part because of Biden’s perceived strength.

Biden did not address Bloomberg’s potential candidacy at a fundraiser Thursday night in Boston. With immense personal wealth, Bloomberg could quickly build out a robust campaign operation across the country. Still, his advisers acknowledge that his late entry to the race could make competing in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, which have been blanketed by candidates for nearly a year, difficult. Instead, they previewed a strategy that would focus more heavily on the March 3 “Super Tuesday” contests, including in delegate-rich California.

Some Democrats were skeptical there would be a groundswell of interest in the former New York mayor. “There are smart and influential people in the Democratic Party who think a candidate like Bloomberg is needed,” said Jennifer Palmieri, who advised Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “But there is zero evidence that rank-and-file voters in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire feel the same.”

Still, others credited Bloomberg with taking on “some of America’s biggest challenges” and finding success. “While this is not an endorsement, Michael Bloomberg is a friend and I admire his track record as a successful business leader and Mayor who finds practical solutions to some of America’s biggest challenges, from creating good jobs to addressing the opioid crisis and fighting for common-sense gun safety,” said Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat.

Bloomberg reached out to several prominent Democrats on Thursday, including Raimondo. One Democrat Bloomberg hasn’t spoken to as he’s reconsidered his run is former President Barack Obama. Bloomberg would pose an immediate ideological challenge to Biden, who is running as a moderate and hopes to appeal to independents and Republicans who have soured on Trump. But the billionaire media mogul with deep Wall Street ties could also energize supporters of Warren and Sanders, who have railed against income inequality and have vowed to ratchet up taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

Since the US House Vote on Party Lines to begin the process of Impeachment on Donald Trump,  the president has shown how he and his allies intend to fight impeachment: with a blitzkrieg aimed at deflecting, distracting and discrediting. What he lacks in coherent strategy, he makes up for in shock and awe. Trump will send in the tanks and take no prisoners.

It appears that most Republicans are still willing to march behind him, not by defending what many see as indefensible – the president’s offer of a quid pro quo to Ukraine – but by throwing sand into the gears of the impeachment process. With the help of Fox News, they are set to intensify attacks on the legitimacy of the inquiry itself, demonising its leaders and sowing doubt wherever possible.

The great unknown is whether the approach will prove as effective as their efforts to undermine the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, potentially boosting Trump in the 2020 election, or the case against him will be so compelling that he will be removed from office or defeated at the polls.

The Democratic allegations at the heart of the ongoing impeachment inquiry are pretty simple: that Donald Trump used the power of the presidency to pressure a foreign government to improperly investigate Joe Biden. Or as Democrat Eric Swalwell of California summarized it on Nov. 7, “Defense dollars for dirt.”

The Republican response, by contrast, has been less straightforward. In the weeks since Sept. 24, when the White House released a rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky, the Republican defense has shifted dramatically, from denying the charges and then dismissing that they would be impeachable if true, to denigrating witnesses and evidence and attacking the impeachment process.

Democrats paint the changing defense as evidence of its weakness. Republicans attribute it to another source: disorganization. So far, they say, there’s been little coordination between the White House and Trump’s nominal allies on the Hill about a messaging strategy.

Here’s a look at how the defense of Donald Trump has changed since the impeachment proceedings began.

Since the moment he authorized the release of a transcript, Trump has maintained there was no quid pro quo in his withholding military aid from Ukraine while pushing the country to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. In a tweet announcing the decision to publish the call, Trump said his conversation with President Zelensky was “totally appropriate,” that he applied “no pressure,” and that there was “NO quid pro quo.”

Trump has continued to chant this mantra at rallies, on Twitter and in interviews — a blanket defense of the core issue at the center of Democrats’ investigation. And it has been echoed by other top members of his Administration. “The transcript of the President’s phone call with President Zelensky… there was no quid pro quo,” Vice President Mike Pence said on Oct. 3. “There was no pressure.” Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, Larry Kudlow, Trump’s chief economic advisor, Steve Mnuchin, Treasury secretary, and others of Trump’s top allies have all repeated this line as well.

But this stance has become more complicated in recent days as witnesses have asserted explicitly to House investigators that there was, in fact, a quid pro quo.

“That was my clear understanding,” Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, testified last month. “Security assistance money would not come until the president [of Ukraine] committed to pursue the investigation,” Taylor continued, according to the transcript of his testimony. On Nov. 5, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, revised his original testimony to include that he had passed along such a message to a Zelensky advisor. “I said that resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Sondland said in a written statement. Some aides have since adjusted their strategy, and been backing away from an unequivocal “no quid pro quo” defense.

Islamic State has confirmed the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and named Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi as his replacement.

Baghdadi and the terror organisation’s spokesman, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, were both killed in US operations in northern Syria at the weekend.

The group’s media arm, Amaq, made the announcements in an audio recording released on Thursday.

News of Baghdadi’s successor had been widely anticipated among the ranks of the terror organization following the weekend raid that traced Baghdadi to a remote corner of northern Syria after a hunt spanning more than half a decade.

The fugitive leader of the Islamic State (IS) group killed himself during a US military operation in north-west Syria, President Donald Trump has said. Speaking from the White House, Trump said Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated his suicide vest after fleeing into a tunnel, chased by US military dogs.

Baghdadi came to prominence in 2014, when he announced the creation of a “caliphate” in areas of Iraq and Syria. IS carried out multiple atrocities that resulted in thousands of deaths.

The jihadist group imposed a brutal rule in the areas under its control and was behind many attacks around the world. Although the US declared the “caliphate” defeated earlier this year, IS militants remain active in the region and elsewhere.

Baghdadi’s death is a major victory for Trump as he faces heavy criticism for his decision to pull US troops out of northern Syria and fights an impeachment inquiry launched by Democrats.

In an unusual Sunday morning statement, Trump described the night-time operation in extraordinary detail, saying Baghdadi ran into a dead-end tunnel, “whimpering and crying and screaming”, while being chased by military dogs.

Baghdadi killed himself and three of his children by igniting his suicide vest, Mr Trump said, causing the tunnel to collapse. No US personnel were killed but one of the dogs was seriously injured in the explosion.

The blast mutilated Baghdadi’s body but, according to the president, an on-site DNA test confirmed his identity. The special forces spent two hours in the area and gathered “highly sensitive material”.

“The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him,” Mr Trump said.

Also on Sunday, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said IS spokesman Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir, described as Baghdadi’s right-hand man, had been killed in a separate joint operation with the US military near the northern Syrian town of Jarablus.

What is known about the Baghdadi operation?

The location – the village of Barisha in Idlib province near the Turkish border – was far from where Baghdadi had been thought to be hiding along the Syria-Iraq border. Many parts of Idlib are under the control of jihadists opposed to IS but rival groups are suspected of sheltering IS members.

Baghdadi had been under surveillance for “a couple of weeks” and “two or three” raids had been cancelled because of his movements, Trump said, describing the IS leader’s move to Idlib as part of a plan to rebuild the group.

An undisclosed number of forces targeted the compound using eight helicopters, which were met with gunfire, Trump said. The commandos managed to land safely and entered the building by blowing holes in the wall, avoiding the main door which was believed to be booby-trapped. “He was a sick and depraved man,” Trump said. “He died like a dog, he died like a coward.”

US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien said Baghdadi’s remains should be given the same treatment applied to those of former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, whose body was buried at sea after he was killed in a raid in 2011.

A “large number” of Baghdadi’s followers also died while others were captured, the president said. The dead included two of Baghdadi’s wives who were both found wearing explosive vests that were not detonated. Eleven children were removed, uninjured, from the compound.

Senator Elizabeth Warren‘s slow but steady rise through the 2020 ranks has officially put her at the top of the pack—albeit by a very small margin. The Massachusetts lawmaker officially overtook former Vice President Joe Biden in RealClearPolitics’ 2020 polling average, polling at 26.6% as compared with Biden’s 26.4%. Warren is also notably the only candidate whose polling has steadily gone up throughout the primary, while Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who holds a 14.6% polling average, have seen their popularity fluctuate and go down from their starting highs.

Warren’s new lead in national polls comes on the back of a Quinnipiac poll, released on last week, which shows her leading the Democratic field: 29 percent of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters said they would vote for her if the primary were held today. Former Vice President Joe Biden, now in second place, received 26 percent of the vote in the same poll. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), typically considered the other frontrunner in the race, had 16 percent.

The poll’s questions about the Democratic primary had a margin of error of 4.7 percentage points, so Biden and Warren are in a very close race. Notably, Warren also appears to be the only candidate with a steady upward trend in the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Warren has led in four of the five most recent polls averaged by RealClearPolitics, although in many cases her lead is still within the margin of error.

Warren is outpacing Biden in the polls just as she’s also gaining a significant fundraising lead on the former vice president. In the third quarter of 2019, Warren raised just shy of $25 million dollars, placing her slightly behind Sanders’s fundraising total for the quarter and well ahead of Biden’s haul of only $15.2 million.

About six in 10 likely Democratic voters or caucusgoers say it’s more important to nominate a candidate with a strong chance of beating President Donald Trump than it is to nominate one who shares their views on the issues. And in both states, the group that is focused on beating Trump is more apt to favor Biden over Sanders. In Nevada, they are also more apt to favor Warren than are those focused on issues, her numbers are about the same across those groups in South Carolina.

Regardless of how they rate the importance of a candidate’s positions on the issues, Nevada and South Carolina Democrats seem to differ over who can best handle the top issues facing the field. On health care, South Carolina’s likely voters favor Biden — 34% say he’d do the best job on it vs. 17% for Sanders and 16% for Warren — while those in Nevada give Sanders an edge — 32% say the Vermonter would do the best job on health care, 25% Biden, 17% Warren.

Warren’s ascendance to front-runner status has spurred an uptick in criticism against the unabashed progressive in recent weeks, as Warren has started to face attacks on her policies from 2020 rivals like Yang and Pete Buttigieg, as well as mounting opposition from the factions her campaign is targeting. (Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg vowed to “fight” Warren’s plans to break up Big Tech, while Wall Street donors have threatened to sit out the election if she’s the nominee.)

But Warren has so far been uniquely able to use her detractors to her advantage, turning the corporate criticism against her into evidence of her progressive bona fides. “I’m not afraid of anonymous quotes, and wealthy donors don’t get to buy this process,” Warren tweeted in response to the Wall Street donors report.

Faced with new allegations against President Trump and his administration stonewalling, Democrats have ended months of caution with the US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announcing on Tuesday, September 25^th that the House would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump, charging him with betraying his oath of office and the nation’s security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain.

The US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday launched a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, over a whistleblower allegation that he pressured Ukraine’s President into opening an enquiry on the son of a leading 2020 presidential hopeful from the Democratic Party.

Pelosi’s declaration, after months of reticence by Democrats who had feared the political consequences of impeaching a president many of them long ago concluded was unfit for office, was a stunning turn that set the stage for a history-making and exceedingly bitter confrontation between the Democrat-led House and a defiant president who has thumbed his nose at institutional norms.

“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” Ms. Pelosi said in a brief speech invoking the nation’s founding principles. Mr. Trump, she added, “must be held accountable — no one is above the law.” She said the president’s conduct revealed his “betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump, in a phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, urged him to open an investigation into the son of former Vice President and 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, over the latter’s businesses in Ukraine. The report came days after the Washington Post reported that a whistleblower from the US intelligence agencies had made a formal complaint over impropriety of phone call Trump had with a foreign leader. Joe Biden’s son Hunter is a director in a gas company in Ukraine. Later it was reported that Trump withheld a $391 million military aid the US grants to Ukraine a week or so before the phone call with Zelensky.

The reports once again raised the spectre of foreign influence into the US election, after the much-discussed Russian disinformation campaign over social media during the 2016 election. The stark difference here is Trump is alleged to have pressure a foreign leader into investigating a rival’s son. Trump’s lawyer had previously alleged that Biden’s son had improper business dealings in Ukraine, as Biden strengthened his position among other Democratic Party presidential hopefuls.

Transcript released: Trump on Tuesday tweeted that the inquiry is a “Presidential harassment” — in block letters. The White House later released the transcript of the phone call Trump had with Zelenksy, and it showed Trump did ask the Ukrainian President to “look into” the Biden case, as well as say his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, will call to discuss it. Read the full transcript here. Trump has nevertheless defended his actions.

The US Congress has the power under the Constitution to remove a sitting president if enough lawmakers vote to say that they committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Only two Presidents have been impeached before — Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 — but both survived and completed the term after the Senate acquitted them. In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned to avoid being impeached.

Usually, the House Judiciary Committee first holds an investigation, and recommends impeachment to the House. And then the House votes to impeach. This was the process followed during Clinton case and Nixon case. Here, speaker Pelosi launched the inquiry. That is so because various House committees were already investigating Trump over impeachable offenses, a result of the allegation that Trump colluded with Russia in 2016. Note: Pelosi may still call on the House to vote on an inquiry, though experts are divided if that vote is mandatory or not.

The six House committees are expected to continue their probes, but with a focus on Ukraine. They will then submit their findings to the House Judiciary Committee. If the findings determine Trump committed an impeachable offence — treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors — the House will hold a vote. Currently, the Democratic party holds a majority in the House. If they impeachment vote is passed, it is then up to the Senate to hold a trial. After trial, Senate votes to convict the President. If two-thirds of Senate votes to convict, the President is removed from office. Currently, the Republican Party holds a majority in the Senate.

Ms. Pelosi’s decision to push forward with the most severe action that Congress can take against a sitting president could usher in a remarkable new chapter in American life, touching off a constitutional and political showdown with the potential to cleave an already divided nation, reshape Mr. Trump’s presidency and the country’s politics, and carry heavy risks both for him and for the Democrats who have decided to weigh his removal.

The Democratic candidates met in Houston on Thursday night for a third round of televised debates. This time the format was limited to a single night with 10 participants, which meant that for the first time, all the top-tier candidates were onstage together.

At the third Democratic party presidential candidates debate, the sparred over hot-button issues such as health care and immigration. Aside from Biden’s generally strong performance, he compellingly and convincingly delivered his core message of restoring, protecting and rebuilding the Obama-Biden record.

This was the first time that frontrunners Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden shared the debate stage. At the end of the night, Joe Biden emerged as the winner and Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders were the surprise losers, according to many analysts.

Warren and Biden exhibited stark differences on style, policy and vision for the Democratic Party, embodying two opposing theories of what the party should be. This divide was apparent during an explosive debate over health care, during which Biden went on the attack against Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for the hidden costs associated with their “Medicare-for-all plans.”

Warren deflected when asked if middle-class taxes will go up to pay for “Medicare for all,” saying total costs would go down – but not explicitly stating whether taxes for middle-class families would increase. “What we’re talking about here is what’s going to happen in families’ pockets,” Warren said. “This is about candor, honesty,” Biden retorted. “There will be a deductible – in your paycheck … someone making 60 grand with three kids, they’re going to end up paying $5,000 more.”

Though many were watching Warren expecting her to deliver a knockout performance, the senator fell somewhat short of that expectation. While this will likely not impact Warren’s standing in the presidential race at this early stage – which according to most polls is a close second behind Biden – she did not have the debate moment that many were anticipating. She was a surprise loser when the evening was over.

Unlike prior debates, where Biden struggled for words and seemed surprised by criticism from fellow Democrats, he largely delivered crisp, aggressive responses. He called Sanders “a socialist,” a label that could remind voters of the senator’s embrace of democratic socialism. And Biden slapped at Warren’s proposed wealth tax.

A two-term vice president under Barack Obama, Biden unequivocally defended his former boss, who came under criticism from some candidates for deporting immigrants and not going far enough on health care reform.

“I stand with Barack Obama all eight years, good, bad and indifferent,” Biden declared. His vulnerabilities surfaced, however, in the final minutes of the debate, when he was pressed on a decades-old statement regarding school integration. Biden rambled in talking about his support of teachers, the lack of resources for educators and at one point seemed to encourage parents to play records for their children to expand their vocabulary before segueing into talk of Latin America.

Sen. Kamala Harris pointed to her many uphill battles on her way to becoming a U.S. Senator: “I was the only black elected — woman black elected attorney general in the state, in the country. And each time, people would say, it’s not your time, it’s not your turn, it’s going to be too difficult, they’re not ready for you, and I didn’t listen.”

But most of the candidates in the field seem to be acting as if there’s some law of nature that will magically cause him to lose even without anyone really going after him in a persuasive way. The voters’ current views, however, seem very clear. A large minority of them want a left-winger like Sanders or Warren but the majority do not, and that more moderate majority sees Biden as their champion. Sanders or Warren could change that dynamic by trying to assuage Democrats worries that they are too far left, but currently they are too locked in a Cold War with each other to do that.

And, crucially, the Democratic Party primary electorate as a whole is more moderate than Biden’s two main rivals, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Warren and Biden used their stage time Thursday to remind voters of this, flanking Biden to his left — and left of the typical primary voter. The rest of the field by and large didn’t even bother to attack him.  If these dynamics hold, Biden could easily cruise to victory.

In preparation for the US general elections 2020, to choose a successor to President Donald Trump, the first round of the Democratic debates featured twenty candidates and six moderators, spread across two nights of primetime TV last week. One of the remarkable visual aspects of the debate was the diversity of candidates on the stages: six women, five people of color, a member of the LGBTQ community, and an age range from 37 to 77. And the most historic part of the debates was the success of women in different roles and on different nights. The story, however, was not that women excelled. The story was that the three individuals excelled, and they happened to be women.

California Senator Kamala Harris was the third-highest-polling candidate in the second night of the debate and emerged the most potent. She spoke thoughtfully and passionately about topics ranging from health care to immigration to race to climate change, which she called a “climate crisis”. And Senator Harris was effectively able to bridge a gap in the party that few have been able to do—she showed herself to be a progressive without labeling herself a socialist. She showed that while she agrees with Bernie Sanders on some ideas, she is not beholden to his ideology. She used her background as a prosecutor effectively. What we saw was someone in tune with the average Democratic voter: an independent individual with a diverse set of views.

Ultimately, three individuals showed their colleagues—candidates and journalists alike—what a stellar performance looks like. Those individuals performed well because they were prepared, thoughtful, and connected well with the constituencies with whom they needed to connect. They showed why they deserved to be on that stage—on either side of the dais. They provided key voices in the most important decision over the next 17 months—the choice over our next president. And as a tribute to how far we have progressed as a society and a culture, it is almost a footnote that those individuals are women. And all those men on stage better have been taking notes.

Rival Democratic presidential contenders pummeled former vice president Joe Biden with searing, emotional critiques Thursday at their first debate — denouncing his record on racial issues and calling on him to pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.

In one of the most dramatic moments of the campaign season, Biden found that his long-held stature as a beloved party leader offered him no respite at the center of a crowded debate stage, given his early domination of national polling in the race.

While candidates debated whether “socialism” was a term to eschew or embrace, Sen. Harris spoke about policies and ideas while leaving her colleagues—most of them male—in the dust. As a woman of color she experiences a high level of scrutiny. Yet, she effectively balanced what was necessary to show herself to be a serious player and a top-tier candidate in the Democratic primary: strength, resolve, compassion, and detail.

And finally, Kamala Harris took the hardest and most effective hit at the Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden. In an exchange over the issue of race, Kamala Harris got the better of the former Vice President when she asked about his position against school busing in the 1970s.  Decades later, the party has a different perspective on race.  Harris gave voice to that better than anyone else and instead of making a clumsy reference to Biden’s age (as Congressman Eric Swalwell did early on), she reminded voters that Biden sometimes seems to be from a different era.

Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, who commanded the event at several points in the night, led the charge. “I do not believe you are a racist. I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground,” Harris said. “But I also believe, and it’s personal . . . it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on segregation of race in this country.”

She accused him of opposing policies that allowed black girls like her to attend integrated schools. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” she said. “That little girl was me.”

Harris was not the only one to set her sights on Biden. Sen. Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) attacked him for striking a deal with Republican leaders to keep some of George W. Bush’s tax cuts. And Rep. Eric Swalwell (Calif.), 38, opened a generational front, calling Biden, 76, to “pass the torch” to a new generation of leaders.

Trump, who was attending the Group of 20 summit in Japan, was paying attention to the debate and weighed in after all 10 Democrats raised their hands to declare that they would support providing health care for undocumented immigrants.

“All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited health care,” Trump said on Twitter during the debate. “How about taking care of American Citizens first!? That’s the end of that race!”

Asked if they believed crossing the border into the United States without proper documentation should be downgraded from a criminal offense to a civil offense, almost every candidate again raised their hand.

The display, which Republicans seized on as evidence of Democratic support for “open borders,” came a day after the issue of decriminalizing undocumented migrants emerged as a flash point during the first round of the debate. Former housing and urban development secretary Julián Castro sharply criticized former congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas for opposing legislation to repeal part of U.S. immigration law that allows for criminal prosecution of migrants who come to the United States without proper documentation

Health care dominated the early portion of the debate, with the candidates discussing ideas for moving toward universal coverage. Sanders and Harris were the only two candidates to raise their hands when asked if they would eliminate private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan, echoing similar pledges Wednesday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Harris, one of only two people of color on the stage, asked to speak, positioning herself as the candidate best qualified to handle racial tension — and therefore, best able to stage what amounted to a personal attack on the former vice president.

It was one of many authoritative moments for Harris, who channeled the forceful prosecutor approach that earned her national attention in Senate hearings with Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Attorney General William P. Barr and others. Since drawing 22,000 people to her January campaign launch in Oakland, Calif., Harris has failed to seize a place in the top three in early polls, hovering just outside the tier consistently occupied by Biden, Sanders and, more recently, Warren.

Harris began making a case against Biden by offering delicate criticism of former president Barack Obama’s record of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants — saying that while she respected Obama, she disagreed with his deportation policy.

She went in for the more direct hit on Biden’s record on race, which ended with her asking if Biden stands by his position on busing today.

Elizabeth Warren on night #1

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren opened the first night blending a strong opening statement and an answer to the actual question asked. She showed confidence, knowledge, and preparedness. She was calm and put forth policy ideas without being boring and trapped in the weeds. She appealed to a wide range of people—from the white working-class voters believed to be ignored by Democrats in the last election to women to young people to the LGBTQ community.

Of those on the stage, Warren had the most to lose; she was polling highest among the 10 candidates on that stage. She didn’t stumble. There were few attacks on her, and none that was direct. But she also didn’t commit an error that opened her up to attack or broad criticism. Instead, she spoke about gun control, immigration, and health care—issues that can be controversial even within the party—without striking a negative tone with her Democratic colleagues.

In the second hour of the debate, Warren sank back into the shadows without being overshadowed. As Democratic candidates—particularly those polling poorly—became feisty in an effort to make their mark and become a cable news clip, Sen. Warren was quieter. But she also wasn’t a target. Sniping happened more in the second hour but throughout the debate, there were attacks. Julian Castro leveled Beto O’Rourke on immigration. Tulsi Gabbard made Tim Ryan look unprepared on foreign policy. Amy Klobuchar effectively injected the issue of gender by rebutting Jay Inslee on the issue or reproductive rights. But Elizabeth Warren was never a target. Through it all, she was the most effective candidate on the stage on the first night.

Savannah Guthrie, a model of moderation on night #2

Both debate nights featured six moderators peppering the candidates with questions. One individual stood out as a model of who a moderator should be. She held candidates to account, asking tough questions and posed pointed follow-ups. I wrote this spring about the need for better moderators in this year’s debates, and while some, particularly Chuck Todd, did not meet that call, Savannah Guthrie made her profession proud.

She asked specific, well-informed questions that did not pander to candidates’ lofty rhetoric, but asked them to discuss their ideas within the realities of politics. She was able to control the debate without shouting any of the candidates down nor excluding candidates from the conversation. Ms. Guthrie was not a candidate for president, but the moderator can have as powerful of an effect on public understanding as the candidates, and she played an effective role in the debates.

This debate may not be the last time Ms. Guthrie has a hand in a debate featuring presidential candidates. (It should not be.) But what she did over the course of two summer nights among 20 Democrats was to show future moderators how to do their job.