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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Sam Levin and Lauren Aratani and Martin Pengelly

Biden signs order on declassification of FBI’s 9/11 documents – as it happened

Joe Biden speaks at the White House on Friday.
Joe Biden speaks at the White House on Friday. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Summary

That’s all for today, thanks for following along. Some key links from the day:

More on Biden’s visit to LaPlace, Louisiana, from the Associated Press:

Giant trees knocked sideways. Homes boarded up with plywood. Off-kilter street signs.

Less than a week after Hurricane Ida battered the Gulf Coast, President Joe Biden walked the streets of a hardhit Louisiana neighborhood on Friday and told local residents, “I know you’re hurting, I know you’re hurting.”

Biden pledged robust federal assistance to get people back on their feet and said the government already had distributed $100 million directly to individuals in the state in $500 checks to give them a first slice of critical help. Many people, he said, don’t know what help is available because they can’t get cellphone service.

Residents welcomed Biden’s presence, one of them drawing a sign with his last name and a heart for the dot on the “i.” They laughed and posed for selfies.

Joe Biden talks with a resident as he tours a neighborhood impacted by Hurricane Ida.
Joe Biden talks with a resident as he tours a neighborhood impacted by Hurricane Ida. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Updated

Uber and Lyft have said they would cover legal expenses of their drivers if they were sued under Texas’s new extreme anti-abortion law, which allows suits to be brought against people who transport patients to clinics.

Texas’s new anti-abortion law is purposefully broad and allows private citizens to bring suits against anyone who potentially “aided or abetted” someone accessing an abortion after six weeks, as my colleague outlined in an explainer. If plaintiffs are successful, they receive $10,000 and have legal fees reimbursed.

Lyft said in a statement:

Drivers are never responsible for monitoring where their riders go or why. Imagine being a driver and not knowing if you are breaking the law by giving someone a ride. Similarly, riders never have to justify, or even share, where they are going and why. Imagine being a pregnant woman trying to get to a healthcare appointment and not knowing if your driver will cancel on you for fear of breaking a law. Both are completely unacceptable.”

GoDaddy boots Texas abortion 'whistleblower' website

The new “whistleblower” website of the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life briefly went down today after GoDaddy, which was hosting the site, said it violated its rules:

My colleague Kari Paul reported on Thursday that pro-choice users on TikTok and Reddit had launched a guerrilla effort to fight Texas’s extreme new abortion restrictions by flooding the online tip website that encouraged people to report potential violations of the law.

GoDaddy said the “pro-life whistleblower” website violated numerous provisions of its terms of service, including the rule that says sites “will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any user content ... or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another user or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent”, the Verge reported.

The site was down earlier this afternoon. Visitors to the website saw an “Access Denied” page. A GoDaddy spokesperson told the New York Times that it had given the website a 24-hour notice about the takedown.

One TikTok user went viral after they said they had submitted 742 fake reports of the governor, Greg Abbott, getting illegal abortions. More on the digital campaign against the site and the new law here:

Updated

The Guardian’s Julian Borger has the full story on Biden’s order to declassify the FBI’s 9/11 records:

Joe Biden has announced the wholesale review and declassification of files from the investigation into the 9/11 attack, in response to intense pressure from Congress and victims’ families currently suing Saudi Arabia.

“As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the American people deserve to have a fuller picture of what their government knows about those attacks,” an executive order issued on Friday said.

It said the full record would be disclosed in tranches over the coming six months “except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise”.

The order said that while the “indiscriminate” release of information could jeopardise national security and the ability to prevent future attacks, a better balance had to be struck between transparency and accountability.

It said “information should not remain classified when the public interest in disclosure outweighs any damage to the national security”.

Updated

Two major US insurers have agreed to cover the living expenses for residents in Louisiana who evacuated their homes before they were under mandatory evacuation orders, according to CNBC:

The White House had urged the companies not to deny policyholders based on technicalities, and it appears that Allstate and USAA are confirming that they will cover the expenses.

The Guardian’s Gabrielle Cannon reports from the wildfires in northern California, where extreme conditions are making the blazes exponentially worse:

Before the ravenous Caldor fire laid siege to South Lake Tahoe, California’s top firefighting priority lay just to the north, where the Dixie fire scorched more land than any other single fire in state history. Together, the two behemoths have already blackened more than 1m acres (4,000 sq km) along the Sierra Nevada range. And fire season in the American west is just heating up.

The climate crisis has helped create extreme fire emergencies, with huge, rapid-moving blazes tearing through a hot, parched landscape at lightning speed. Fires have hopped granite summits firefighters had hoped would slow their spread. Blazes have displayed erratic burn behavior, making their movements hard to predict.

The extreme conditions raise fresh questions about the ability of the country’s firefighting forces to control an emergency that has grown exponentially bigger year after year.

Updated

Biden addresses hurricane relief efforts in Louisiana

Hi all - Sam Levin here in Los Angeles, taking over our live coverage for the day.

Biden is now in LaPlace, Louisiana, and has just spoken about the US response to Hurricane Ida. He said the disaster was a reminder of the worsening hurricane threats in the US:

Superstorms are going to come, and they are going to come more frequently and more ferociously.”

He said crews from 32 different states were working to restore power: “I know you’re all frustrated.” The president also said he was working to pressure the cellphone companies to restore service, noting that some residents were unaware of the services available to them due to lack of service.

The president further noted that some insurance companies were trying to unjustly deny claims of hurricane victims, based on technicalities:

I’m calling on private insurance companies: Don’t hide behind the fine print ... Pay what you owe your customers! Help those in need. That’s what we should all be doing now.”

Here’s the Guardian’s earlier coverage from New Orleans where residents have struggled without power for days:

Updated

A man in Mississippi who served 23 years in prison before charges were dropped is suing the district attorney who continued to prosecute his case despite multiple mistrials.

Curtis Flowers, 51, was released from prison in September after the attorney general of Mississippi dropped charges against Flowers after reviewing evidence from the case. Flowers was originally charged with murdering four people at a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. Flowers’ case was prominently featured in the investigations podcast “In the Dark”.

In 2019, the US Supreme Court ruled that the district attorney, Doug Evans, who continued to prosecute Flowers’ case made sure to keep African Americans off the jury of his trials.

A parent of an elementary school student in Tucson, Arizona threatened to call the local authorities and conduct a “citizen’s arrest” of the school’s principal because of the school’s virus protocols.

The principal of Mesquite Elementary School called the father on Thursday telling him his son was to stay home for at least a week to quarantine after coming in close contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19.

Later that morning, the man walked into the school with his son and two other mans carrying zip ties and confronted the principal on the quarantine policy.

The Tucson police department said that they responded to the incident, but it is unclear if any charges were made, according to the Washington Post.

“One of the most powerful tools as adults is the behavior that we model to young people – and the behavior that was modeled today makes me really sad,” John Carruth, the superintendent of the school’s district told the Post.

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

Civil rights groups have filed two new federal lawsuits challenging the sweeping new election restrictions Texas Republicans approved earlier this week.

One suit, filed by a coalition of Texas civic action groups as well as a former poll worker and Harris county election administrator, argues that the law is intentionally designed to discriminate against minority voters. It also says the law violates the First Amendment’s free speech protections as well as the equal protection guarantee of the 14th amendment along with the Voting Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A second federal suit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Texas Civil Rights Project, and Disability Rights Texas, makes similar claims.

Among the provisions the suit challenges are those that allow poll watchers increased movement at the polls, something it says could lead harassment of voters of color at the polls.

“Should poll watchers engage in behavior that intimidates or harasses voters or election workers, including hovering over them or trailing voters through the polling place, election workers run the risk of criminal prosecution if they attempt to stop such behavior. The risk of such intimidation has historically been and will continue to be higher for voters of color,” it says.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Antonio, also challenges provisions in the law that impose new requirements on those who assist voters, including an oath in which they are required to affirm the voter asked them for assistance and that they understand the voter’s ballot may not be counted if they are ineligible for assistance. Assistors may also swear that they did not “pressure” the voter for assistance.

“This additional language will cause assistors to question every voter’s ‘need’ for assistance, which further invades the voter’s privacy and opens assistors to the threat of prosecution for any misstep,” the suit says. “This additional language will cause assistors to question every voter’s “need” for assistance, which further invades the voter’s privacy and opens assistors to the threat of prosecution for any misstep.”

The groups are also challenging a new prohibition blocking election officials from soliciting vote by mail applications. The law, the suit says, chills the speech of officials like plaintiff Isabel Longoria, the Harris County election administrator, from encouraging people to vote by mail.

Several more suits are expected in the coming days.

Updated

Secretary of state Tony Blinken has been speaking to reporters about Afghanistan, once more defending the Biden administration’s record on the withdrawal, and in particular on the evacuation of Afghans who had worked with or for the US military or government and are entitled to special immigration visas (SIVs).

Earlier in the week, state department officials admitted that a majority of SIV applicants had been left behind. Blinken was less definitive on that.

“Of the roughly 124,000 people who’ve been evacuated, the vast majority, 75-80% are Afghans at risk. And of those, some significant number will be SIVs either people who already hold an SIV visa or those who are actually in the pipeline, some number will be potential P1 (first priority) or P2 refugees and some other number will be Afghans at risk, who may not fit into any of those categories,” Blinken said.

On Sunday, Blinken will fly to Doha and then to Ramstein Air base in Germany, to meet refugees and the US officials dealing with their processing.

In terms of getting vulnerable Afghans out of the country, he said the US had shared detailed “a tremendous amount of very detailed information” about Kabul airport with other capitals, with the aim of getting it back up and running as soon as possible, and was looking at land routes out of the country, “as well as making sure that we have very clear and precise plans to help people, as as necessary, use those routes.”

A judge in Buffalo, New York will allow Byron Brown to run in the city’s mayoral election, though he was defeated in the primary election by India Walton, a self-declared socialist candidate.

The judge, US district court judge John Sinatra, has ordered the Erie County Board of Elections to put Brown’s name on the ballot as an independent in the November general election. Brown has served as mayor for four terms.

Walton, a nurse and community organizer, said that is considering an appeal of the decision.

“Today’s ruling was a travesty and mockery of justice,” she told the Buffalo News. “The hearing should never have proceeded.”

Walton said that the lawsuit shows that Brown “is a true sore loser” and that she doesn’t think “voters are going to be fooled.”

With no Republican challengers in the race, Walton was sure to win the general election in November, which would have made her the first socialist mayor of a major US city in decades.

Biden orders declassification of documents from FBI 9/11 investigation

Joe Biden just announced that he signed an executive order today that will declassify documents related to the FBI’s investigation of 9/11, a little over a week before the 20th anniversary of the attack.

Biden said he is directing the justice department to oversee a declassification review of documents related to the investigation. The order requires the attorney general to release the declassified documents over the next six months.

Families of 9/11 victims are currently suing the Saudi Arabian government in a federal court in New York for alleged involvement in the attack and have indicated they want information about who financed and supported the attacks. They have said that an earlier offer from the FBI to release some documents from investigation have not gone far enough and demanded a more comprehensive declassification review.

Families of victims have put pressure on Biden to undergo a declassification review, saying that if he took no object, they would “publicly stand in objection to any participation by his administration in any memorial ceremony of 9/11”, the group said in a statement.

In a statement, Biden expressed sympathy for the families of victims, saying that the administration “will continue to engage respectfully with members of this community.”

“I welcome their voices and insight as we chart a way forward.”

Updated

A group of parents in Iowa are filing a lawsuit against the state for its ban on mask mandates, says the law discriminates against students with disabilities that make them more susceptible to Covid-19.

The plaintiffs in the case are asking the federal judge to block the ban on mask mandates and order to allow the states to allow mandates.

Like many Republican governors across the country, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds signed an order banning masks in May, arguing that she does not believe in government mandates.

Heather Preston, a mother in Des Moines whose child has a rare organ disorder who makes him at risk of serious illness if he gets Covid-19, said in a statement that the lack of a mandate is a serious safety threat.

“For my son, going to school where not everyone is wearing masks puts him at huge risk. Meanwhile, because of his needs, he needs to be learning in person.”

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal published yesterday, Democratic senator Joe Manchin said that he will not pass the $3.5tn spending bill that progressive members of the party want to pass through reconciliation.

Manchin said that Democrats looking to pass the bill have “no regard to rising inflation, crippling debt or the inevitability of future crises.”

Unsurprisingly, Manchin’s some of Manchin’s Democrats have not responded in kind.

“The Northeast is flooded after torrential rain. The West Coast is on fire. The Gulf is still reeling from the hurricane,” tweeted the House Progressive Caucus yesterday. “There is not time to pause or pull back.”

It seems that the White House is taking a less aggressive approach toward convincing Manchin and other moderate Democrats, saying in a statement that Manchin is “an important partner to our administration”.

“The president firmly believes that critical investment in our future should be paid for and if we do, economists tell us that they should not increase the inflation risk.”

This is Lauren Aratani taking over for Martin Pengelly.

Ethics watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint against House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene for allegedly violating House rules by threatening companies who comply with records requests issued by the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot.

“If these companies comply with Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” McCarthy wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget.”

Greene echoed this statement in an interview, saying that if companies “go along with this, they will be shut down and that’s a promise.”

In its complaint, CREW has asked the congressional ethics office whether McCarthy and Greene violated House rules by threatening companies

“McCarthy and Greene are transparently trying to thwart the Select Committee by illegally threatening companies with reprisals if they comply with the committee’s proper and lawful requests – quite possible to protect themselves,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of CREW, in a statement.

It was revealed on Monday that the House committee has asked telecommunication companies like AT&T and Verizon to preserve records of Republican House members, including Greene and McCarthy for the investigation.

Updated

Summary

This is Martin Pengelly, handing the controls to Lauren Aratani with a few highlights of the morning in US politics:

  • In remarks at the White House, Joe Biden said disappointing August job numbers were the result of the surge in cases of the Delta variant of the coronavirus. He also championed his infrastructure and budget plans, which must still find a way through Congress, as a way to ensure that the economic recovery from Covid does not falter.
  • The New York Times reported that senior US health officials have told the White House to scale back plans to offer vaccine booster shots this month, given a lack of relevant data.
  • Biden also attacked the stringent and controversial anti-abortion law passed in Texas and effectively OK-d by the supreme court as “almost un-American” and said he wanted to examine the “possibilities within the existing law, to have the justice department look and see whether are the things that can be done”.
  • In Congress, Democrats who control the Senate judiciary committee said they would investigate the growing use of the “shadow docket” by the conservative-run supreme court, to deal with rulings expeditiously and without full hearings.
  • The president then left for Louisiana, where he was scheduled to see damage done by Hurricane Ida last weekend and meet people still without power as a result of the historic storm. Entergy, a power supplier, said power would be restored for most but not all by midweek next week.
  • In the north-east, states continued to count the cost of flooding and tornadoes unleashed by the remnants of Ida on Wednesday night. The death toll nudged 50, or by some counts passed it. Leaders including New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and New York governor Kathy Hochul warned that such evidence of the quickening climate crisis meant much more needed to be done to cope with future floods.
  • Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, said the US expects to admit more than 50,000 people airlifted from Kabul after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban last month. At the same time, a new Washington Post poll showed Biden still underwater with the public about his handling of the US withdrawal, despite strong public support for ending the near-20-year war.

And finally…

  • From Iowa, a reporter released hidden-camera video of the Ohio congressman Jim Jordan telling Republicans: “President Trump, he’s gonna run again.”

Much more to come, no doubt. Stay tuned.

Some light reading in the meanwhile:

How does someone in Texas get an abortion now and what’s next?

The vast majority of people in Texas can effectively no longer access an abortion in the state after it banned the procedure except in the earliest weeks of pregnancy often before most know they are pregnant.

In a 5-4 vote on Wednesday, the US supreme court refused to block the law, which permits private citizens to enforce the ban and possibly collect $10,000 if they win a case against a person helping someone obtain the medical procedure.

Here’s what you should know about the most restrictive abortion law in the US:

The secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, said this morning the US expects to admit more than 50,000 people airlifted from Kabul after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.

The Biden administration has said around 124,000, including US citizens, permanent residents and Afghans who worked with the US and other countries after the invasion in 2001, were brought out of Kabul before the military withdrew.

Speaking to reporters, Mayorkas said more than 40,000 have arrived in the US so far, about 25% citizens or permanent residents and the rest special immigrant visa recipients or people considered “vulnerable” under Taliban rule. That group includes women, children, and members of civil society, Mayorkas said.

Mayorkas said all those entering the US were undergoing security screening and vetting and being tested for Covid-19 and offered a vaccine.

Amid political battle over the withdrawal from Afghanistan, some on the hard right of the Republican party have opposed admission to the US for Afghan refugees or claimed the Biden administration is not vetting such admissions properly.

A new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News on Friday put support for the US withdrawal at 78% but approval for Biden’s handling of it at 26%. That contributed to a slide in Biden’s overall job approval rating, which stood at 44% with 51% disapproving.

The poll also found that 68% of respondents approved of taking in refugees from Afghanistan after security screening. Among Republicans, 56% supported taking such refugees in.

Further reading:

Rebecca Solnit: Texas is part of a bigger Republican war

The American right has been drunk on its freedom from two kinds of inhibition since Donald Trump appeared to guide them into the promised land of their unleashed ids.

One is the inhibition from lies, the other from violence. Both are ways members of civil society normally limit their own actions out of respect for the rights of others and the collective good. Those already strained limits have snapped for leading Republican figures, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to Ted Cruz in the Senate and for their followers. We’ve watched those followers gulp down delusions from Pizzagate to QAnon to covid-denialism to Trump’s election lies. And rough up journalists, crash vehicles into and wave weapons at Black Lives Matter and other antiracist protestors at least since Charlottesville, menace statehouses, issue threats to doctors and school boards testifying about public health, and plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, for imposing Covid-prevention protocols.

The Texas abortion law that the rightwing supreme court just smiled upon, despite its violation of precedent, seethes with both violence and lies. The very language of the law is a lie…

The Capitol rioter known as the “QAnon Shaman” will plead guilty to charges stemming from his role in the 6 January assault, his attorney has said.

Jacob Chansley shot to a dubious sort of fame around the deadly attack by Trump supporters, after he was pictured inside the Capitol and the Senate chamber wearing cod-Native American headgear.

He is among more than 600 participants in the riot, around which five people died, to have been arrested and charged.

According to HuffPost, Chansley’s attorney, Albert Watkins, said he had reached a plea deal over charges which include obstructing an official proceeding and civil disorder.

Watkins also said Chansley had “genuine mental health issues” which “rendered [him] more vulnerable to the propaganda of the day”, but now sought “to be accountable for [his] actions”.

Jacob Chansley seen in Phoenix, Arizona last November.
Jacob Chansley seen in Phoenix, Arizona last November. Photograph: Cheney Orr/Reuters

QAnon is an antisemitic conspiracy theory which holds that the world is controlled by a cabal of cannibalistic paedophiles, against whom Donald Trump is waging a heroic battle.

In his statement to HuffPost, Watkins said Chansley was “a long-avowed and practicing shaman” who has now “repudiated the ‘Q’ previously assigned to him and requests future references to him be devoid of use of the letter ‘Q’.”

White House may scale back booster shot plans – report

On the subject of Covid-19, the Delta variant and booster shots, as Joe Biden was for a bit at the White House earlier, at least in blaming economic problems on Delta and unvaccinated people, the New York Times reports that top health officials have told the White House there may not be enough data to recommend booster shots just yet.

The administration had planned to offer booster shots to the general public later this month but the Times reported that on Thursday, the officials advised a delay.

Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reportedly told White House Covid co-ordinator Jeffrey Zientz their agencies may be able recommend boosters by late September – but only for certain recipients of the FDA-approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Updated

The Associated Press has increased its death toll from Hurricane Ida in the north-eastern US to 49 – various counts are difficult to monitor, and some sources have put it well above 50.

Joe Biden is on his way to Louisiana, where Ida made landfall last weekend as one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the US. Power remains out there for millions – and won’t be back, and then not for all, until the middle of next week, power supplier Entergy said on Friday.

In the north-east, remnants of Ida arrived with torrential rain on Wednesday night. At least 25 people died in New Jersey and 16 in New York, with deaths also recorded in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, has said at least six people are missing in the state.

Further reading:

Updated

Jordan: Trump 'about ready to announce' 2024 run

Lauren Windsor, a reporter who specialises in catching conservatives in unguarded moments, has posted video of a conversation with the Ohio Republican Jim Jordan in Iowa this week, in which he indicates that Donald Trump will soon announce a run for president in 2024.

In the shaky video, Jordan is seen to say: “President Trump, he’s gonna run again.”

Asked, “You think so?” Jordan says: “I know so. Yeah, I talked to him yesterday. He’s about ready to announce after all of this craziness in Afghanistan...”

Jordan agrees with a questioner who says Biden should “fucking resign, pardon my French”, as the president is “really bad, really bad, so … thank you for coming”.

A spokesman for Jordan denied that he made the remarks. Here’s the video:

A Trump run would seem to have a decent chance of success, given his domination of the Republican party, which has taken up his lies about electoral fraud causing his defeat by Joe Biden, and which has put its shoulder to the wheel against investigations of Trump supporters’ deadly assault on the US Capitol on 6 January.

Other claimants to the throne, should all this prove to be bluff and bluster, include the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, once UN ambassador under Trump but someone who seems to go in and out of favour with the former president – as he has also noticed.

Biden: Texas abortion law 'un-American', DoJ will study response

A reporter catches Biden at the podium with a question about the assault on abortion rights in Texas, via a new law which the conservative-dominated US supreme court allowed to stand.

“I’m going to talk about these things from Louisiana,” Biden says.

“I have continued to be a strong supporter of Roe v Wade, No1,” he says, referring to the 1973 supreme court ruling which safeguards the right to abortion.

“And the most pernicious thing about the Texas law is it sort of creates a vigilante system where people get rewards to go out [and sue people for aiding or arranging abortions].

“I know this sounds ridiculous, it is almost un-American.”

Biden also says he wants to examine the “possibilities within the existing law, to have the justice department look and see whether are the things that can be done, that can limit the independent action of individuals and enforce federal and state law.

“I don’t know enough to give you an answer yet,” he says. “I’ve asked that to be checked.”

And with that the president is off to Louisiana to tour the damage done by Hurricane Ida, shouted questions about the withdrawal from Afghanistan following in his wake.

It’s not always easy, this presidenting lark.

Biden continues to describe his wish for the wealthy to “just pay a fair share”, while continuing to do well as the economy recovers, and for “Congress to finish the job and come through for the American people”.

His final appeal is for Americans to “stick together” while pursuing economic growth, and to make a “giant step forward in the fight against climate change, a crisis made more evident than ever by the death and destruction caused by extreme weather just these past few days”.

He’s heading for Louisiana, where power remains out to millions after Hurricane Ida hit last weekend, and leaving the north-east coast, where the death toll from the storm’s remnants, which hit on Wednesday, is approaching or even past 50, depending on who’s count you use.

Biden: 'no question' Delta variant behind poor jobs numbers

Speaking about the disappointing jobs numbers for August – as America prepares for the Labor Day holiday – Joe Biden insists: “What we’re seeing is an economic recovery that is durable and strong. The Biden plan is working.”

As Graeme Wearden of the Guardian business desk reported earlier: “The US added just 235,000 new jobs in August, a sharp and disappointing slowdown in hiring. That’s much weaker than expected, as the Delta variant of Covid-19 hit America’s economy last month.”

On Wall Street, in the aftermath of the jobs report, markets opened poorly.

Biden adds: “While I know some want to see a larger number today and so did I, what we’ve seen this year is a continued growth, month after month in job creation.”

He does admit that work needs to be done, including on combating the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which has driven a surge in cases and deaths from Covid-19 widely seen to have contributed to the disappointing jobs numbers.

Biden thinks so: “There’s no question the Delta variant is why today’s jobs report isn’t stronger,” he says.

He also says too many people are still unvaccinated. The vast majority of hospitalisations and deaths in states struggling with Delta are among the unvaccinated. Many such states are run by Republicans opposed to public health measures and mandates.

Biden also calls for Congress to “finish the job of passing my economic agenda”. There are all sorts of roadblocks in the way of his infrastructure and budget plans, which are caught in crossfire between progressives and moderates in the Democratic party and, in the case of the budget plan, uniform opposition from Republicans.

“This is about good paying jobs for ordinary people,” Biden says. “Blue collar workers, jobs at a prevailing wage not $15 an hour but 20 or 30, but for the carpenters and pipe fitters, plumbers, electrical workers and so many others.”

“We’ll combat climate change by building our clean energy future,” Biden adds, topically as he prepares to visit Louisiana to meet victims of Hurricane Ida, promising to create “millions of jobs and building windmills and solar panels all around the country and transferring that energy transmitted to parts that don’t have that capacity”.

He also promises taxes will not go up on ordinary Americans, and that big corporations should “pay their fair share … and it comes up to billions of dollars if they pay”.

“The wealthy people aren’t paying taxes they owe,” Biden says, after briefly evoking the spectre of “the other guy”, meaning Donald Trump, his predecessor in the Oval Office. “We’re gonna change that.”

“Somebody’s gotta pay,” he says, hoping through such forceful words, of course, not to pay too heavily politically if the economic recovery should falter.

New Orleans will have power back by Wednesday, says supplier

In Louisiana, which Hurricane Ida hit first as one of the most powerful storms ever to make landfall in the US, power supplier Entergy has said power should be restored to almost all of New Orleans by Wednesday, 10 days after Ida destroyed the city’s electric gird.

The Associated Press reports:

Not every customer will have power back, Entergy said. Customers with damage where power enters their home will need to fix it themselves, and there could be some smaller areas that take longer. And there still is no concrete promise of when the lights will come back on in the parishes east and south of New Orleans, which were battered for hours by winds of 100mph or more.

The company asked for patience, acknowledging the heat and misery in Ida’s aftermath.

In New York City, Bill de Blasio has been addressing the fallout from flooding in which 11 people died as the remnants of Ida battered the north-east on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Many of those killed were in basement apartments, unable to get out as flash floods hit.

De Blasio observed a moment of silence, thanked everyone who has worked to recover, then stressed again that “no one projected” the record rainfall in an hour that hit the city, smashing a record set only weeks before during Tropical Storm Henri.

“Things we are told will happen once a century are now happening regularly and they are getting worse,” De Blasio said, pointing an acceptance of the reality of the climate crisis in states like New York which is not necessarily shared elsewhere.

Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for Joe Biden. He’s due to speak about the disappointing jobs report, which seems a result of the pandemic and the Delta variant surge, before he flies out to Louisiana to visit people hit by Hurricane Ida.

And here he comes…

Updated

As the last of the US troops took off from Kabul on Tuesday, Jonathan Freedland spoke to Thomas Kean. Kean co-wrote the 9/11 commission report, detailing who was to blame for the events of September 11, and making recommendations to prevent a subsequent attack.

In the latest episode of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast, Kean shares his thoughts on the end of America’s longest war:

Tucker Carlson: 'tyrants' force people to make fake vax cards

The act of buying a fake vaccination card, according to Tucker Carlson of Fox News, is “an act of desperation by decent, law-abiding Americans who have been forced into a corner by tyrants”.

Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

As opposed to an act to get round vaccination requirements at businesses including Fox News which do not wish to help spread the coronavirus and add to a US death toll of more than 643,000.

In New York, 15 people were charged this week over a scheme to make and sell fake vaccination ID and to fraudulently enter people into the New York vaccinations database.

Cyrus Vance Jr, the Manhattan district attorney, said: “The stakes are too high to tackle fake vaccination cards with whack-a-mole prosecutions … Making, selling, and purchasing forged vaccination cards are serious crimes with serious public safety consequences.”

Carlson disagrees. On his primetime show on Thursday night, he said: “These arrests will be used to justify digital health passports for the entire American population.”

As opposed to that section of the American population which works for Fox News, which as was widely reported in July, has “developed a secure, voluntary way for employees to self-attest their vaccination status”.

Carlson said Vance was lying.

“Buying a fake vaccination card is not a, quote, ‘serious crime,’” he said. “It’s not even close to a serious crime. Buying a fake vaccination card is an act of desperation by decent, law-abiding Americans who have been forced into a corner by tyrants.

“You know what’s a serious crime? Forcing Americans to take drugs they don’t need or want. That’s a very serious crime. And let’s hope, in the end, someone is punished for it, severely.”

Carlson also said health workers who have refused to be vaccinated had “in good conscience … risked their careers to preserve their right to bodily autonomy and now they’re in jail for that.”

Carlson is of course a controversy magnet by design. Here’s more:

Of interest in the case of the Texas abortion law, an amicus brief filed with the supreme court in the case of a restrictive Mississippi law yet to be considered is co-signed by all the usual suspects when it comes to possible 2024 ambitions – bar one.

The brief was filed by Henry McMaster, governor of South Carolina, and co-signed by Kay Ivey of Alabama, Doug Ducey of Arizona, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, Ron DeSantis of Florida, Brian Kemp of Georgia, Brad Little of Idaho, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, Michael Parson of Missouri, Greg Gianforte of Montana, Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, and Greg Abbott of Texas.

Missing from that list – some of whom, looking at you, Ron DeSantis, seem more likely to run for the Republican presidential nomination if Donald Trump doesn’t than others – is Kristi Noem of South Dakota.

Noem is being advised by none other than Corey Lewandowski, once Trump’s campaign manager and still someone close to the Trump inner circle. Noem is someone very much mentioned whenever speculation about 2024 raises its ugly head. This blogger wonders, apropos of Jim Jordan’s mention of Reynolds of Iowa as a possible Trump running mate yesterday, whether Noem might be a prospective VP pick too.

Republican governors who did not sign the brief in the Mississippi case include Phil Scott of Vermont, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland – popular governors in charge of blue or Democratic states. Hogan is very much considering a run in 2024 … if it would in all likelihood be a run, in a party fully prostrate before Trump, wildly unlikely to succeed.

Durbin: Senate panel will investigate supreme court 'shadow docket'

News from the Senate, where Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the judiciary committee, has announced a hearing on the supreme court’s use of the “shadow docket” to rule on hugely consequential cases as if by stealth, “particularly its order permitting Texas’s extreme new abortion restrictions to take effect this week”.

For more on the shadow docket, see block published at 8.40am.

There’s no date for a hearing yet, but in a statement from Democrats on the judiciary committee, Durbin said: “The supreme court must operate with the highest regard for judicial integrity in order to earn the public’s trust. This anti-choice law is a devastating blow to Americans’ constitutional rights – and the court allowed it to see the light of day without public deliberation or transparency.

“At a time when public confidence in government institutions has greatly eroded, we must examine not just the constitutional impact of allowing the Texas law to take effect, but also the conservative court’s abuse of the shadow docket.

“The supreme court’s midnight order calls into question the consequences of the conservative majority’s increased use of the ‘shadow docket’ in judicial review, which can hinder public confidence and leave lower courts in the dark about how to apply the court’s precedent.

“As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent, ‘the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this court’s shadow docket decision-making – which every day becomes more un-reasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.’”

Jordan hints Trump will announce 2024 run soon

Donald Trump will announce a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 “any day now”, the Ohio congressman and prominent Trump supporter Jim Jordan reportedly said in Iowa on Thursday.

A spokesman for Jordan denied he made the comment to The Undercurrent, a liberal website.

The reporter who said he did, Lauren Windsor, tweeted a still of Jordan talking and wrote: “We can’t both be right. See for yourself, video coming tomorrow … stay tuned.”

The still was taken from a similar angle to that with which Windsor recently caught the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson admitting there was no voter fraud in his state at the 2020 election, and that Trump simply lost.

Still, Trump refuses to admit that and while repeatedly lying about electoral fraud has repeatedly stoked speculation that he will mount an attempt to take back the White House. In his first four-year term, he was impeached twice amid unprecedented scandal, rancour, chaos and, at its end, outright insurrection against the peaceful transfer of power.

Jordan, as it happens, is one of a number of senior Republicans sweating over moves by the House committee investigating the deadly 6 January assault on the US Capitol, including a request that phone companies preserve records which may shed definitive light on who talked to Trump and when that day. Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, is also under scrutiny – and has threatened phone companies with retribution if they comply.

As it also happens, Jordan hinted at an imminent Trump announcement elsewhere during his Iowa trip. Speaking at a Dallas county Republican party dinner in West Des Moines on Thursday night, KCCI Des Moines reported, Jordan said he spoke to Trump on Wednesday.

“I’m convinced he’s going to, you know, he’s thinking about this fine governor you have [Kim Reynolds] as part of that amazing ticket,” Jordan said.

A GOP official later said Trump would travel to Iowa, the first state to vote, very soon. Earlier this week, Trump told rightwing radio host Todd Starnes he would soon stage more political rallies, adding: “We’re going to Iowa. We’re going to Georgia. We’re going to some others.”

Such is Trump’s grip on the Republican party, a second presidential candidacy would likely blow other hopefuls, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Trump UN ambassador Nikki Haley prominent among them, out of the political water.

Trump’s supporters are doing their best to be prepared. On Thursday, ProPublica came out with a striking report about efforts, driven by former White House strategist and far-right gadfly Steve Bannon to “seize control of the GOP from the bottom up”.

In short, Bannon, who Trump pardoned on federal fraud charges, thinks Trump lost to Joe Biden “because the Republican party sold him out” and is therefore pushing a takeover of precinct-level Republican operations by Trump supporters.

Such workers can have an outsized effect on how elections are run, including playing a role in polling day operations.

ProPublica said it “contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.”

Here’s more on Trump’s plans:

Updated

Per the disappointing jobs report (see block at 8.55am), and ahead of Joe Biden’s remarks on the subject at 10am ET, I should add that the Guardian’s Graeme Wearden knows a lot more about all this than me and is running our business blog, here:

Ida death toll in north-east nears 50

The Associated Press puts the death-toll in the north-east from Hurricane Ida at 48, two higher than I had in my intro.

Two more deaths are reported in New Jersey, the state which has paid the highest price in lives after being hit by tornadoes at one end and flooding at the other.

Late on Thursday, Joe Biden declared federal disasters for New Jersey and New York, freeing up aid.

Authorities in all affected states said the search for victims and the process of identifying the dead was not over.

New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul, came into the job in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Henri, which was briefly a hurricane, and now continues in the aftermath of Ida.

She said on Thursday the region should follow extensive work in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, which battered the north-east in 2012, with more work to prepare for more frequent flash-flooding inland, as the climate crisis takes hold.

“One thing I want to make clear,” she said. “We’re not treating this as if it’s not going to happen again for 500 years.”

The August jobs numbers are out and they are not as good as expected. As I am not in any even remote meaning of the term a business journalist I will note that Biden is due to make remarks about the numbers at 10am ET, then offer you Reuters’ take:

US job growth slowed more than expected in August amid a softening in demand for services and persistent worker shortages as Covid-19 infections soared, but the pace was enough to sustain the economic expansion.

Non-farm payrolls increased by 235,000 jobs last month after surging 1.053m in July, the US labor department said in its closely watched employment report on Friday.

The unemployment rate fell to 5.2% from 5.4% in July. It has, however, been understated by people misclassifying themselves as being “employed but absent from work”.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast non-farm payrolls increasing by 728,000 and the unemployment rate falling to 5.2%. Payrolls estimates ranged from as low as 375,000 to as high as 1.027m.

The initial August payrolls print has undershot expectations and been slower than the three-month average job growth through July over the last several years, including in 2020. August payrolls have been subsequently revised higher in 11 of the last 12 years.

CNN’s Reliable Sources has a handy roundup of headlines in the Texas press concerning the draconian anti-abortion law passed in the state and, via the Jack Ryan-esque Shadow Docket, not stopped by US supreme court.

The Austin American-Statesman went with “Texas abortion ban uses harassment to bypass the rule of law”; the Houston Chronicle opinion pages plumped for, “Hello, Texas? The Wild West called, they want their laws back”; and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram chose “Conservatives used to hate frivolous lawsuits. Now, Texas abortion law invites them.”

In the words of a far greater man than me, Chris Morris: “Those are the headlines. God I wish they weren’t.”

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the Shadow Docket, which it says is made up of “emergency petitions that often yield late-night decisions issued with minimal or no written opinions”, thereby departing from usual practice including oral arguments before the court, and which the conservative-dominated panel is using with increased frequency to decide matters of huge importance.

In her dissent to the unsigned opinion on the Texas abortion law, the liberal justice Elena Kagan said the practice “every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend”.

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied the Shadow Docket and testified about it, told the Times: “If they are going to issue rulings that profoundly change the law, I think they have an obligation to write and to explain why they are doing it.”

This law has set off a five-alarm fire among liberals and supporters of women’s right to choose.

Axios reports that the Biden White House is ready to go into battle, seeing a hot issue for the midterms next year. Referring to the portions of the Texas law which allow people to sue anyone they suspect of even aiding an abortion, a senior White House aide said: “I want to see the GOP defend the idea that your nosy neighbour can sue your aunt for driving you to the hospital.”

Here’s Hugo Lowell on how Congress sees the issue:

Good morning…

… and welcome to another day’s coverage of politics in the US, which means the politics of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the Texas anti-abortion bill and more but also of course means coverage of the ongoing fallout from Hurricane Ida.

One of the most powerful storms ever to hit the US hammered New Orleans and left people dead in Louisiana and Mississippi, then drenched the north-east on Wednesday, killing as many as 46 people, predominantly in flash-floods. Reports out of New York, a city of basement apartments which some found impossible to escape, were appalling and moving both.

Joe Biden will visit Louisiana today, touring and talking in LaPlace and Lafourche. Millions are still without power.

The nearest deaths to Washington on Wednesday were in Maryland – New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania suffered most – but Biden is, obviously, keenly aware of the national picture.

At the White House on Thursday, he said: “The past few days of Hurricane Ida and the wildfires in the west and the unprecedented floods in New York and New Jersey is yet another reminder that the climate crisis is here.”

Someone should probably tell Fox News.

Biden will leave the White House for Louisiana at 10.30am – after giving remarks about the latest jobs numbers – and he’ll speak again at 2.35pm.

Brian Stelter of CNN, meanwhile, makes a reasonable point about media focus on the storm in the north-east: “National news outlets based in NY and DC are often accused of an east coast bias. And those complaints have a lot of merit. But not on Thursday. Ida’s aftermath was deadlier in the north-east than the south, so the extensive coverage was entirely warranted...”

There’s plenty more going on, of course, so stay with us.

Further reading, about where Biden’s going:

Updated

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