Biden aims for victory lap as he signs Inflation Reduction Act – live

The Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas spoke with the mother of a man who shot himself after driving into a barricade at the US Capitol. She attributed his actions not to politics, but rather brain trauma from playing football:

The mother of a Delaware man who shot himself to death after driving into a US Capitol barricade over the weekend says she believes he was struggling with brain trauma from growing up playing football.

Richard Aaron York III’s mother, Tamara Cunningham, said she suspects his past as a high school football player left him with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain condition colloquially known as CTE. Some football players develop CTE because of repeated head blows that are common to the sport.

“Something was going on for a while,” Cunningham told the Guardian in an interview Tuesday. “And it was progressively getting worse.”

The Biden White House has plans for capitalizing on both the defeat of the anti-abortion ballot initiative in Kansas this month and the supreme court’s June decision overturning Roe v Wade, Reuters reports.

The campaign is targeted at both women and men, and among its goals is getting Americans to better understand the economic and mental health effects abortion bans can have. The justice department also plans to use two laws to sue states that try to crack down on access to the procedure, as well as on abortion pills.

“The idea is to be much more disciplined and consistent in messaging to break through to the everyday American,” a source with direct knowledge of the plans told Reuters.

Meanwhile in Kansas, abortion foes have apparently not given up on the state’s ballot initiative to allow lawmakers to restrict the procedure, which voters resoundingly rejected earlier this month.

The Associated Press reports that an anti-abortion activist and an election conspiracy promoter have teamed up to coordinate a recount of the ballots in nine of the state’s counties, which accounted for more than half of the votes cast on the initiative and all but one of which rejected it. According to the report, the abortion foe, Mark Gietzen put almost all of the $120,000 cost on his credit card to pay for the recount.

Under Kansas law, a recount that changes the outcome is paid for by the counties, but otherwise, the costs are covered by whoever is requesting it. The AP reports that there is no chance this recount changes the result of the ballot initiative.

It’s not just celebrity Republican candidates who may be in trouble.

A University of North Florida poll released today showed Val Demings, a Democratic House lawmaker who is considered the frontrunner for the party’s Senate nomination, beating incumbent Republican Marco Rubio with 48 percent of the vote compared to his 44 percent. Democrats have struggled to win statewide office in Florida lately, and unseating Rubio could help them maintain control of the Senate in the November midterms.

However, Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor who is considered a potential candidate for president, maintains an advantage in his battle to lead the state. He wins the support of 50 percent of registered voters against both Democratic frontrunners for the party’s nomination to challenge him.

With several Republican Senate candidates stumbling, Adam Gabbatt looks into the party’s strategy of nominating celebrities to Congress – which they may come to regret:

In Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker and JD Vance, the Republican party has three celebrities running for Senate in November.

The only problem? At the moment, each of them looks as though they might lose.

Oz, a television stalwart better known as Dr Oz to millions of Americans, is trailing his opponent in Pennsylvania by double digits.

Vance, a bestselling author and conservative commentator, is behind in his race in Ohio, an increasingly red state that many expected Republicans to win. So far the most notable point of his campaign was when Vance appeared to suggest women should stay in violent marriages.

Also on Thursday, the Trump administration’s finance chief may plead guilty to charges related to an investigation of its business practices, the Associated Press reports:

Donald Trump’s longtime finance chief is expected to plead guilty as soon as Thursday in a tax evasion case that is the only criminal prosecution to arise from a long-running investigation into the former president’s company, three people familiar with the matter told the Associated Press.

Allen Weisselberg, CFO of the Trump Organization, was scheduled to be tried in October on allegations he took more than $1.7m in off-the-books compensation from the company, including rent, car payments and school tuition.

The judge overseeing the case, Juan Manuel Merchan, scheduled a hearing for Thursday but did not say why. The people who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity said the purpose of Thursday’s hearing was for Weisselberg to enter a guilty plea, but cautioned that plea deals sometimes fall apart before they are finalized in court.

The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that a federal magistrate will on Thursday hold a hearing over whether to release the affidavit justifying the Mar-a-Lago search last week:

The justice department opposes releasing the affidavit, arguing it would reveal too many details of their investigation into Donald Trump’s allegedly unlawful retention of government secrets.

Perhaps the biggest critic of the Inflation Reduction Act on the left is Bernie Sanders, who nonetheless voted for it when it came before the Senate. In an interview with Lauren Gambino, he discussed how the major priority of the Biden White House was likely to leave voters disappointed:

As Democrats celebrate the long-sought passage of Joe Biden’s sweeping health, climate and economic package, Bernie Sanders is not ready to declare victory. Instead, the Vermont senator is sounding the alarm that Congress has failed to meet the moment, with potentially grave consequences for American democracy.

“We are living in enormously difficult times,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “And I worry very much … that people are giving up on democracy because they do not believe that their government is working for them.”

The legislation, which Biden is expected to sign into law next week, is but a sliver of the ambitious domestic policy initiative that Sanders, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, helped draft last year. The original proposal was, in his view, already a compromise. But he believes it would have gone a long way in addressing the widespread economic distress that is undermining Americans’ faith in their government.

Jill Biden’s positive Covid-19 test means president Joe Biden will be wearing a mask around other people for the next week-and-a-half, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said:

Jill Biden tests positive for Covid-19

The Inflation Reduction Act is the the type of law Democrats have been trying to pass for years, if not decades. It also could have been so much more.

Take a look at the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, two documents the Biden administration issued in the opening months of his administration, which outline a host of ideas they hoped to realize. These include raising taxes on the rich, making community college and pre-school free and offering paid family and medical leave.

Some of these programs they managed to enact via last year’s trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. But many others were stripped out in the months of negotiations between Democratic leaders and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two of the party’s conservative lawmakers whose votes were essential to getting any of their legislation through Congress.

Considering that there were moments when it looked like the negotiations would amount to naught, the Inflation Reduction Act is a political accomplishment, even if its attempts to address climate change have already been criticized as insufficient, and it lacks much of what Democrats and the Biden administration promised. Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s Democratic leader, appeared to recognize this. In an interview last week, he pleaded with voters to elect more Democrats, promising that if they do, they will pass the rest of the programs Joe Biden promised to voters when he took office.

Biden aims for victory lap as he signs climate, healthcare bill