Federal judge orders Florida to shut ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ in 60 days – as it happened

The White House has released a social media video highlighting the start of Donald Trump’s remarks to law enforcement officers and National Guard soldiers on Thursday, which begins with the president mocking his predecessor, Joe Biden, for once falling as he walked up a flight of stairs to Air Force One.

The video, which was recorded by Margo Martin, a special assistant to the president and communications advisor, captures the beginning of Trump’s rambling 12-minute speech in which he essentially congratulated himself on successfully walking down a single step as he began his remarks.

“You gotta be very careful; you don’t want to slip or fall like somebody else I know”, Trump said, to laughter from the officers. “We don’t want that to happen”.

The video then cuts, to omit the part of the original recording in which Trump turned to Martin and said, “Where are we going Margo, over here?”

The president then thanked the assembled officers, who are taking part in his federal takeover of policing in the district. “The numbers are down like we wouldn’t believe, but we believe it”, Trump added.

The administration has repeatedly suggested without evidence that data gathered by the DC police, and released by the justice department, showing that violent crime was at a 30-year low when Trump returned to office in January, and had declined by a further 26% since then, had been manipulated to hide what Trump has called a terrifying crime wave.

Video of Joe Biden falling, repeatedly, while boarding Air Force One in 2021, when he was 79, was widely seen and helped cement the idea that he was too old to be president.

In June, the week Trump turned 79, video of him stumbling and nearly falling while climbing the stairs to Air Force One was also widely seen.

The supreme court ruled by a 5-4 vote on Thursday that the Trump administration can cut $783m of research funding for health projects that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, what the government calls “gender ideology” and vaccine hesitancy, the supreme court decided on Thursday.

The court lifted a judge’s order blocking cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Donald Trump’s priorities.

The court split 5-4 on the decision. The chief justice, John Roberts, was among those who wouldn’t have allowed the cuts, along with the court’s three Democratic appointees. The high court did keep the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directive blocked for future funding with a key vote from justice Amy Coney Barrett, however.

The decision marks the latest supreme court victory for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while a lawsuit brought by 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups continues. The plaintiffs said the decision is a “significant setback for public health”, but keeping the directive blocked means the administration can’t use it to cut more studies.

The justice department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be “subject to judicial second-guessing” and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can “conceal insidious racial discrimination”.

The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12bn of NIH research projects that have been cut.

The plaintiffs unsuccessfully argued that defunding studies midway through halts research, ruins data already collected and ultimately harms the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’ work in the middle of their careers.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lengthy dissent in which she criticized both the outcome and her colleagues’ willingness to continue allowing the administration to use the court’s emergency appeals process.

“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: there are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins,” she wrote, referring to a fictional game in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes in which rules are made up on the fly.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed legislation on Thursday that will ask the state’s voters to decide in November if they approve of redrawn congressional districts that tilt heavily in favor of Democrats, as a way of neutralizing a similarly partisan map in Texas.

“They fired the first shot, Texas,” Newsom said before signing the bill, noting that California’s new map would only be used if Texas uses new maps tilted in favor of Republicans. “We wouldn’t be here had Texas not done what they just did; Donald Trump didn’t do what he just did. He went so far as to follow up and say that he didn’t just want those five seats, he said he’s, quote-unquote, entitled to those five seats. Just pause and reflect on that. Everything should have just stopped there. The president of the United States claiming he’s ‘entitled’ to five seats. That should put chills up your spine, every Republican, not just Democrat and independent, every American.”

Newsom also said that California would be “the first state in US history to, in the most democratic way, to submit to the people of our state the ability to determine their own maps”.

The map that could give California Democrats five more seats was drawn by Paul Mitchell, founder of Redistricting Partners, a nonpartisan local redistricting firm, who previously created maps for independent redistricting commissions across California.

“All of us support independent redistricting, here in California and in every state in this union” Mike McGuire, another Democratic state leader and senate president pro tempore, said. “One thing that we do not support is unilateral disarmament, when the fairness of the 2026 election is being threatened.”

The California legislature on Thursday approved a plan to hold a special election in November in which voters will be asked to approve new congressional districts, redrawn in favor of Democrats, as a means of nullifying a gerrymandered map on its way to final approval in Texas.

The effort in California is an answer to the Republican redistricting push in Texas, sought by Donald Trump and aimed at tilting the map in his party’s favor before next year’s midterm elections.

The nation’s two most populous – and ideologically opposed – states raced on parallel tracks to redistrict ahead of the 2026 midterms.

So far, what was billed as a “ride-along” with law enforcement on the streets of Washington DC, has turned out to be mostly Donald Trump giving a short rally-style address to about 300 officers from the DC Metropolitan Police, the FBI, the National Guard, homeland security investigations, the DEA, ATF and US Marshals service.

The president repeated his familiar attacks on renewable energy, telling the officers: “It’s it’s a very expensive form of energy, and we’re not doing the wind”.

He also boasted about his legal victory on Thursday, when a New York appeals court threw out a multi-million dollar financial penalty against him after his conviction for fraud. Although the fraud conviction remains in place, Trump falsely implied that the judges had overturned his conviction.

“We’re having a lot of victories. I had a victory today”, he said. “You know, they stole $550 million from me with a fake case, and it was overturned. They said this was a fake case. It’s a terrible thing, but it’s a nice victory, you know? I mean, it’s not bad, we all have, we all have our limits. But this was a terrible thing that it was a witch hunt”.

He then invited several cabinet members and aides, including the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, and the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, to make remarks, which were focused on praising the president.

Among Trump’s comments was a promise to clean up Washington DC, including its grass.

“One of the things we are going to be redoing is your parks. I’m very good at grass ‘cause I have a lot of golf courses all over the place. I know more about grass than any human being I think anywhere in the world”, the president told the officers.

“And we are going to be re-grassing all of your parks, all brand-new new sprinkler systems, the best that you can buy. Just like Augusta. No dead- it’ll look like Augusta. It will look like, more importantly, Trump national golf club, that’s even better”, he added, comparing his own golf course to the one in Augusta, Georgia where The Masters is held each spring.

“We’re going to have all brand-new, beautiful grass. You know, like everything else, grass has a life. Do you know that? Grass has a life. You know, we have a life, and grass as a life. And the grass here died about 40 years ago”, the president said.

He added that he had brought the officers “great hamburgers cooked by the White House” with him, as well as pizzas from a local chain, Wiseguy Pizza. “I’ll eat with you and we’re going to have a little fun, we’re going to celebrate, then we’re going to get back to work and we’re going to take care of these criminals”.

Donald Trump’s motorcade just arrived at the United States Park police headquarters in Anacostia, in south-east Washington DC.

He was handed a mic and boasted to assembled officers that his crackdown on crime in the capital has been a success and went on to repeat many of his familiar talking points, including the boast that his trip to Saudi Arabia was successful at bringing in investments and that he is building a ballroom at the White House.

Her also claimed that his federal takeover of Washington DC had encouraged people to go out to dinner again. In fact, restaurant owners have reported a sharp drop in reservations during the period.

Donald Trump’s motorcade has just left the White House, with the president expected to join an evening patrol of Washington DC’s streets by national guard troops and police officers he placed under federal control to fight a crime wave that statistics suggest is imaginary.

The president was joined by his attorney general, Pam Bondi, his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

Trump referred to the made-for-TV photo op as a “secret” in a radio interview earlier on Thursday, but the White House has invited journalists along and set up a YouTube live stream to allow the public to follow his performance in real time.

The staged event follows a similar outing on Wednesday by three top administration officials to visit national guard troops keeping the Shake Shack at Union Station safe.

The administration’s commitment to producing content on a daily basis seems to echo the satirical praise Stephen Colbert lavished on George W Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006 when he said:

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he has stood on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, has been unlawfully serving as the the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.

In his order disqualifying Habba from prosecuting three defendants who challenged her appointment, chief US district judge Matthew Brann wrote:

The Executive branch has perpetuated Alina Habba’s appointment to act as the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey through a novel series of legal and personnel moves. Along the way, it has disagreed with the Judges of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey and criminal defendants in that District about who should or may lead the office. Faced with the question of whether Ms. Habba is lawfully performing the functions and duties of the office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, I conclude that she is not.

The judge found that Habba’s term as the interim US attorney ended in July, and the Trump administration’s maneuvers to keep her in the role without getting confirmation from the US Senate did not follow procedures required by federal law.

Brann said he’s putting his order on hold pending an appeal.

Habba, the daughter of Iraqi immigrants who unsuccessfully defended Trump in his New York fraud trial, also served as a frequent campaign surrogate for him in 2024.

After being appointed to the interim role in March, she said the state could “turn red”, a rare, overt political expression from a prosecutor, and said she planned to investigate the state’s Democratic governor and attorney general.

She then brought a trespassing charge, which was eventually dropped, against Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, stemming from a confrontation with federal agents during his visit to an immigration detention center. Habba later charged a Democratic congresswoman, LaMonica McIver, with assault for resisting the detention of the mayor in the same incident, a rare federal criminal case against a sitting member of Congress other than for corruption. She denies the charges and has pleaded not guilty.

In late July her four-month temporary appointment was coming to a close and it became clear that she would not get support from home state senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both Democrats, meaning her chances of Senate approval were nil.

Trump then withdrew her nomination and federal judges in New Jersey exercised their power under the law to replace Habba with a career prosecutor when Habba’s temporary appointment lapsed. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, retaliated by firing that prosecutor and moved to re-install Habba as acting US attorney.

The California state assembly advanced the first in a series of three bills to temporarily suspend the state’s congressional boundaries, drawn by a voter-approved independent commission, and replace them with a map that creates five new Democratic seats.

The lower house, which has a Democratic supermajority, approved the measure 57-20 along party lines.

It now awaits a vote in the Senate where it’s likely to pass, and then will be put before voters in a special election on 4 November.

California’s aim – spearheaded by governor Gavin Newsom – is to offset Texas’s gains, after Republican lawmakers passed a gerrymandered map that nets five new GOP-house seats in 2026. An effort that came at Donald Trump’s behest, and has now escalated into a nationwide redistricting battle.

Donald Trump said that he will join federal law enforcement and National Guard troops in Washington DC on Thursday.

In an interview on the Todd Starnes Show, the president confirmed his plan to join patrol efforts:

I’m going out tonight, I’m going to keep it a secret. You’re the only one that knows. You and your lots of listeners…I’m going to be going out tonight I think with the police and with the military of course.

He didn’t provide any more details on the length of the patrol, or specific locations where he’d join the police and National Guard.

New York attorney general Letitia James announced that her office will appeal today’s decision to throw out the nearly half-billion-dollar penalty in the state’s civil fraud case against Donald Trump.

James wrote:

It should not be lost to history: yet another court has ruled that the president violated the law, and our case has merit. We will seek appeal to the Court of Appeals and continue to protect the rights and interests of New Yorkers.”

The court’s deeply-divided opinion ultimately let the lower court’s fraud verdict stand – providing James the ability to appeal today’s ruling to New York’s highest court.

The state department has fired a press officer responsible for drafting Trump administration talking points about policy toward Israel and Gaza after complaints from the US embassy in Jerusalem, the Associated Press reports.

Officials said Shahed Ghoreishi, a contractor working for the Bureau of Near East Affairs, was terminated over the weekend following two incidents last week in which his loyalty to Trump administration policies was called into question.

Ghoreishi was also targeted yesterday following his dismissal by far-right activist and Trump loyalist Laura Loomer, who accused him of not being fully supportive of the administration’s policies in the Middle East.

According to Ghoreishi and two current US officials, Ghoreishi drew the ire of a senior official at the embassy in Jerusalem and then top aides to secretary of state Marco Rubio for drafting a response to a query from AP last week. The question related to discussions between Israel and South Sudan about the possible relocation of Palestinian people from Gaza to South Sudan.

The draft response included a line that said the US does not support the forced relocation of Gazans, something that Donald Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff have said repeatedly.

However, according to Ghoreishi and the officials, that line was rejected by the embassy in Jerusalem, leading to questions about policy back in Washington.

Ghoreishi also said he questioned a statement from the embassy that referred to the (occupied) West Bank as “Judea and Samaria”, the biblical term for the Palestinian territory that some far-right Israeli officials prefer. Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel, also has repeatedly backed referring to the West Bank by Judea and Samaria.

Donald Trump has hailed an appeals court’s decision to throw out the nearly half-billion-dollar judgment against him in his New York civil fraud case as a “total victory” and called for the judge who imposed the fine to be “admonished for abuse”.

In a lengthy post on Truth Social, the president called the case a “political witch hunt” and claimed “everything I did was absolutely CORRECT and, even, PERFECT”.

Per my earlier post on this, it was far from a “total victory” for the president. The appeals court was splintered, with two judges finding that Trump was properly held liable, and the case “vindicated a public interest”, but found that the penalty was an excessive fine that violated the US constitution.

Two other judges also found there was authority to sue, but a new trial was necessary because the trial judge should not have held Trump liable for fraud at the outset. Only the fifth judge said the case against Trump should have been dismissed.

The justice department plans to investigate Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, with a top official informing Fed chair Jerome Powell of the probe and encouraging him to remove her from the board, Bloomberg News is reporting.

A letter to Powell from Ed Martin, a DOJ official who has led similar investigations into senator Adam Schiff of California and New York attorney general Letitia James, said Cook’s case “requires further examination,” according to Bloomberg’s report.

“At this time, I encourage you to remove Ms. Cook from your Board,” Martin wrote. “Do it today before it is too late! After all, no American thinks it is appropriate that she serve during this time with a cloud hanging over her.”

Asked about the report, a Fed spokesperson referred Reuters to Cook’s statement yesterday, when she said she had no intention of resigning after Donald Trump called for her to step down on the basis of allegations made by a member of his administration about mortgages she holds in Michigan and Georgia, intensifying Trump’s effort to gain influence over the US central bank.

The Federal Reserve Act provides no authority for a Fed chair to remove another member of the board of governors.

The president has repeatedly broken with precedent in recent months to demand the Fed cut rates and urge Powell to quit after disregarding such calls.

Cook, whose current term on the Fed’s board extends until 2038, previously served on the council of economic advisers under Barack Obama. When she took office in May 2022, she became the first black woman to sit on the central bank’s board.

A New York state appeals court has thrown out an approximately half-billion-dollar penalty that Donald Trump had been ordered to pay after a judge found the president fraudulently overstated the value of his properties and other assets to bolster his family business.

The decision by a five-judge panel of the appellate division in Manhattan represented a defeat for New York attorney general Letitia James, whose office brought the civil fraud lawsuit against Trump in 2022.

James’ case had been among Trump’s biggest legal losses in a slew of lawsuits against him in recent years.

Lawyers for Trump did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. James’ office did not immediately respond to similar requests.

The appeals court was splintered. Two judges found Trump was properly held liable, and James “vindicated a public interest” by pursuing her fraud case, but the penalty was an excessive fine that violated the US constitution.

Two other judges also found James had authority to sue, but a new trial was necessary because the trial judge should not have held Trump liable for fraud at the outset. The fifth judge said the case against Trump should have been dismissed.

Trump was appealing a judgment entered by Justice Arthur Engoron in a state court in Manhattan, following a three-month nonjury trial.

Engoron found Trump had inflated his wealth over several years before first becoming president in 2017, to dupe lenders and insurers into providing better terms to the Trump Organization.

Trump has denied wrongdoing. His lawyers argued that the penalty was too high and that James had overreached.

In February 2024, the judge ordered Trump to pay $454.2m in penalties plus interest, which has continued to accrue.

Trump was personally liable for nearly 98% of the judgment, with his eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, and former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg responsible for the remainder.

Referring to Trump and other Trump Organization figures, Engoron said their “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological”.

Engoron also banned Trump and the Trump Organization from applying for loans from banks registered in the state for three years, and effectively barred Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump from running the business for two years.

The appeals court put these restrictions on hold during the appeals process, while letting a court-appointed monitor for the Trump Organization continue her work.

Donald Trump again called for the release of a former election clerk in Colorado who was convicted for her role in breaching election data in a quest to find fraud, threatening he would take “harsh measures” if she wasn’t let out of prison.

“FREE TINA PETERS, a brave and innocent Patriot who has been tortured by Crooked Colorado politicians, including the big Mail-In Ballot supporting the governor of the State,” Trump said on Truth Social. “Let Tina Peters out of jail, RIGHT NOW. She did nothing wrong, except catching the Democrats cheat in the Election. She is an old woman, and very sick. If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”

Peters did not find evidence of Democrats cheating in the election.

She was charged for allowing access to county voting equipment by an outside election activist, who was given security credentials under a different name. Materials and passwords were then published online on Telegram and on the rightwing outlet the Gateway Pundit.

Peters was found guilty by a jury in Mesa county in 2024 of seven counts related to misconduct, conspiracy and impersonation, four of which were felony charges. She was sentenced later that year to nine years in prison. Her attorneys had argued for probation instead of prison time.

Donald Trump intends to leave Russia and Ukraine to organize a meeting between their leaders without directly playing a role for now, according to administration officials familiar with the situation, taking a step back from the negotiations to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The next stage in Trump’s eyes to end the war in Ukraine remains a bilateral meeting between Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, the officials said.

Trump has told advisers in recent days that he intends to host a trilateral meeting with the two leaders only after they have met first, although whether that initial conference takes place remains unclear and Trump does not intend to become involved in that effort.

Attorney general Pam Bondi said that there have been 630 arrests since the beginning of the federal law enforcement surge in the nation’s capital earlier this month. In her post on X, she added that agents have also seized 86 illegal guns in this period.

When Donald Trump’s administration escalated immigration raids in Los Angeles earlier this summer, protest organizers responded with actions staged in an unusual setting: the hotels where immigration officers were staying.

Protests took place at several southern California hotels where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents had been spotted. Some activists launched “No sleep for Ice” rallies, with chants and music blaring through the night, in hopes of pressuring the hotels to kick agents out.

Now, public records shared with the Guardian show that the protests indeed sent federal agencies scrambling to find hotels for their officers in LA where they would not be “harassed”.

A 16 June email from the US marines shows that military officials made a list of “LA Hotels to Avoid”. The information came from multiple law enforcement agencies who were tracking the community backlash to Ice and the border patrol, the marines said. The list was written by Army North, the domestic defense command deployed on the ground during the protests, and reviewed by the navy’s south-west division.

On Wednesday night, the California state supreme court declined an emergency request by Republican lawmakers, which sought to block the Democratic plan to temporarily get rid of the maps drawn by a voter-approved independent redistricting commission.

Now the California legislature will vote today on three bills that would allow for a November special election to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries – creating five new Democratic House seats in the process.

The aim is to offset Texas’s gains, after Republican lawmakers passed a gerrymandered map that nets five new GOP-house seats in 2026. An effort that came at Donald Trump’s behest, and has now escalated into a nationwide redistricting battle.

The new Texas map now heads to the state senate today for approval – where it is sure to advance – before being signed into law by the governor, Greg Abbott.

Meanwhile, Democrats have a supermajority at the Sacramento capitol, and will probably pass the new maps. It’s important to note that California’s proposed legislation has language that stipulates it only goes into effect if Texas’s new GOP-drawn map is approved.

My colleague Lauren Gambino has been covering the latest and notes that California’s redistricting counter-effort, spearheaded by Governor Gavin Newsom, has “caused angst among some Democrats and independents who have fought for years to combat gerrymandering”.

The California state legislature was poised on Thursday to vote on a plan to redraw its congressional boundaries and create five potential new Democratic House seats – an answer to the Republican redistricting push in Texas, sought by Donald Trump, aimed at tilting the map in his party’s favor ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The nation’s two most populous – and ideologically opposed – states were racing on parallel tracks toward consequential redistricting votes, potentially within hours of each other. As Democrats in Sacramento worked to advance a legislative package that would put their “election rigging response act” before voters in a special election this fall, Republicans in Austin were nearing a final vote on their own gerrymandering pursuit.

Approval by the Texas senate, which is expected as early as Thursday, would conclude a dramatic showdown with the state’s outnumbered Democratic lawmakers whose two-week boycott captured national attention and set in motion a coast-to-coast redistricting battle.

The California plan, led by the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, is designed to flip as many as five Republican-held seats in California – the exact number of additional GOP seats Trump has said he is “entitled to” in Texas.

“This is a new Democratic party, this is a new day, this is new energy out there all across this country,” Newsom said on a call with reporters on Wednesday. “And we’re going to fight fire with fire.”

The redistricting tit-for-tat is an extraordinary deviation from the norm. Traditionally, states redraw congressional maps once a decade based on census data, with both the Texas and California maps originally intended to last through 2030.

The California state legislature, where Democrats have a supermajority, is expected to easily approve new congressional maps despite sharp Republican objections. Newsom’s signature would send the measure to the ballot in a special election this November.

The California changes would only take effect in response to a gerrymander by a Republican state – a condition that would be met when the Texas legislatures sends the maps to the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, for his promised signature.

Barack Obama waded into states’ efforts at rare mid-decade redistricting efforts, saying he agreed with California governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to counter the new Texas congressional map by launching an effort to redraw his own state’s map and create more Democratic-friendly districts, calling it “a responsible approach”.

“I believe that governor Newsom’s approach is a responsible approach. He said this is going to be responsible. We’re not going to try to completely maximize it,” Obama said at a Tuesday fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. “We’re only going to do it if and when Texas and/or other Republican states begin to pull these maneuvers. Otherwise, this doesn’t go into effect.”

Obama also called Newsom’s strategy “measured”, as it only temporarily grants the California legislature the ability to redraw maps mid-decade.

While noting that “political gerrymandering” is not his “preference,” Obama said that, if Democrats “don’t respond effectively, then this White House and Republican-controlled state governments all across the country, they will not stop, because they do not appear to believe in this idea of an inclusive, expansive democracy”.

According to organizers, the event raised $2m for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and its affiliates, one of which has filed and supported litigation in several states over Republican-drawn districts. The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Eric Holder, who served as Obama’s attorney general and heads up the group, also appeared.

Most Americans believe that efforts to redraw U.S. House of Representatives districts to maximize partisan gains, like those under way in Texas and California, are bad for democracy, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

More than half of respondents - 57% - said they feared that American democracy itself was in danger, a view held by eight in 10 Democrats and four in 10 in president Donald Trump’s Republican party.

The six-day survey of 4,446 US adults, which closed on Monday, showed deep unease with the growing political divisions in Washington - where Republicans control both chambers of Congress - and state capitals.

The poll found that 55% of respondents, including 71% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans, agreed that ongoing redistricting plans - such as those hatched by governors in Texas and California in a process known as gerrymandering - were “bad for democracy.”

At Trump’s urging, Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott has called a special session of the state legislature to redraw the state’s congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, aiming to help Republicans defend their 219-212 US House majority.