House GOP apathetic on Boebert’s Islamophobic remarks
WASHINGTON — Just a few days after Iowa Rep. Steve King made comments sympathetic to white supremacy in January of 2019, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other top Republicans decided he was not fit to serve on committees.
“We believe in swift action, because we do not believe in his words,” McCarthy, a California Republican, said at the time.
A video emerged last week of Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert calling Rep. Ilhan Omar a member of the “Jihad squad,” a pejorative reference to the Minnesota Democrat’s Muslim faith and her membership to a well-known group of progressives, known as the squad.
Boebert recounted a story — which Omar has said is false — in which the two members and a Boebert staffer were in a Capitol elevator. Boebert said a fretful Capitol Police officer ran toward the elevator as the door was shutting and she saw Omar to her left side and said, “well, she doesn’t have a backpack. We should be fine.”
McCarthy and his conference have been largely silent in publicly condemning Boebert’s comments. He did not respond to a question Thursday on whether her remarks were wrong. A McCarthy spokesperson did not respond to an email request for comment.
—CQ-Roll Call
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema won’t commit to voting for Biden’s big social spending package
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is still on the fence about Build Back Better.
The moderate holdout broke her silence on Friday about President Joe Biden’s $1.8 trillion social spending plan, saying only that she is still negotiating with fellow Democrats.
In a rare TV interview, the usually tight-lipped Sinema declined to back the bill, which the House of Representatives passed last month.
“We’re crafting legislation that truly represents the interests they want to achieve and that creates a benefit and helps people all across Arizona and the country,” Sinema said to CNN. “So that’s what I’m working on right now.”
Sinema also declined to say exactly what provisions she wants cut or modified, a practice that has infuriated progressives looking to win passage of the bill.
“When you negotiate directly in good faith with your colleagues, and don’t negotiate publicly, you’re actually much more likely to find that agreement,” Sinema said.
Biden has vowed to win over all 50 Democratic senators and Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., says he wants it done before Christmas.
Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., are the two high-profile Democratic holdouts in the evenly divided Senate on Build Back Better. Democrats need all their senators to support the bill to enable it to pass with Vice President Kamala Harris holding a decisive tie-breaking vote.
—New York Daily News
Number of US households with married couple and children falls to record low
WASHINGTON — The number of U.S. homes with a married couple and kids fell to a record low, according to new government data, as the pandemic further delayed weddings and more adults don’t plan to have kids at all.
The share of the U.S.’s 130 million households headed by married parents with children under age 18 fell to 17.8% in 2021 from 18.6% last year, according to the Census Bureau. That’s down from more than 40% in 1970.
By absolute numbers, there are just 23.1 million homes with nuclear families, the fewest since 1959, the data show.
The pandemic delayed many marriages over the past two years, adding six months to a woman’s age at first marriage — the most since 1987 — to now 28.6 years. In the 1950s and ‘60s, women typically married at 20.4 years of age and 22.8 years for men.
Births have generally been on the decline as Americans are marrying later in life, which has grown more pronounced in the pandemic. The U.S. fertility rate fell to 55.4 births per 1,000 in the second quarter from 58.5 in the same period of 2019, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed Friday.
—Bloomberg News
Iran adopted destructive stance in nuclear talks, EU diplomats say
VIENNA, Austria — Iran has taken a destructive stance in the recently re-initiated nuclear negotiations, according to high-ranking European diplomats.
"Iran is breaking with almost all the difficult compromises that were agreed as the result of several months of hard negotiations," German, French and British negotiators said on Friday.
The window of opportunity for a diplomatic solution in the nuclear dispute is getting smaller and smaller, they warned. The United States was also unimpressed with Iran's showing at the talks.
"The new Iranian administration did not come to Vienna with constructive proposals," Jen Psaki, press secretary for President Joe Biden, told reporters in Washington.
Much progress has been made in previous negotiations, but Iran was no longer concerned with resolving the remaining issues in dispute, she said.
After five days of talks in Vienna, the delegations returned to their countries and are to meet again next week in the Austrian capital.
—dpa
