‘Brazen attempt to seize control’: Democratic leader vows to fight Trump’s election commission firings – live

Earlier this morning, Donald Trump announced that ⁠he would not sign ⁠a major bipartisan housing affordability ​bill – but the measure can still become law without his signature.

“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in ⁠PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

The housing bill is set to become law at midnight if Trump doesn’t sign or veto it. It remains unclear if Trump plans to go as far as vetoing the bill.

House speaker Mike Johnson sent the bill to the White House on 29 June, several days after Trump abruptly canceled its signing ceremony in an bid to pressure lawmakers to pass his restrictive voting bill, which he was aware his party didn’t have the votes for.

Indeed, Trump has repeatedly diminished the housing bill’s importance, despite the cost-of-living consistently ranking as voters’ top concern – and polls finding many voters blame him for making matters worse – with the midterms a few months away. Last week he called it “a big yawn” compared to his voter ID legislation, on top of previously saying it was “of minor importance” in comparison.

The housing bill was a rare instance of bipartisan agreement on major legislation in ⁠a deeply divided Congress, and both parties are eager to use it to show voters they are tackling the cost-of-living ahead of November’s crucial midterms.

Johnson and other GOP leaders had previously expressed confidence that the president would sign it.

Donald Trump has said the United States had ⁠agreed to ⁠talks ​with Iran, claiming that Tehran asked to continue negotiations. The US president repeated yesterday’s emphasis that ⁠the June ceasefire was “over”.

“The Islamic Republic of ⁠Iran has asked us to continue ‘talks.’ We ​have agreed to ‌do so, ‌but the United States has stated to them, ‌in no uncertain terms, that the Cease Fire is OVER!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

There had been worries that the ceasefire was breaking down after the US and Iran traded tit-for-tat strikes this week. The US struck Iran’s southern coastal and eastern provinces and Iran retaliated by launching attacks on US military infrastructure in Gulf states. Iran also accused the US of striking near its sole civilian nuclear power plant in Bushehr province.

Tehran and Washington had signed a memorandum of understanding on 17 June aimed at extending the ceasefire and giving space for negotiations for a permanent truce.

Negotiations towards reaching a final deal had been intended to start after the conclusion on Thursday of former supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s seven-day funeral.

The Trump administration plans to erect new fences outside the White House, in the latest bid to boost presidential security, the Washington Post (paywall) reports, citing three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the plans.

According to the people, the White House and Secret Service would be able to close the new fences, planned where Pennsylvania Avenue intersects 15th and 17th streets NW, and prevent pedestrian access in front of the White House if they determine there are security risks.

The White House has long relied on temporary barriers, staffed by Secret Service personnel, to shut down Pennsylvania Avenue to pedestrians. Per the Post’s sources, previous administration’s have resisted suggestions from the Secret Service of permanent fencing, over the perception of restricting public access to the White House.

A White House official said told the Post that conversations about improving campus security were ongoing and that any proposed projects would go through a review process.

The Post previously reported (paywall) that the Trump administration also plans to build new permanent fencing around Lafayette Square, the public park across from the White House.

It comes as the Trump administration and the Secret Service conduct reviews of security risks after April’s shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner, as well as foiled plots including an alleged murder conspiracy to attack at Trump’s UFC cage-fighting show in June.

If you’re looking to catch up on US foreign policy, this week’s episode of Politics Weekly America dives into the issue.

The US launched airstrikes on Iran this week, with Trump saying the supposed ceasefire from last month is now over. He’s also again threatening to take over Greenland.

Host Jonathan Freedland speaks with Susan Glasser of the New Yorker about the Groundhog Day nature of Trump’s foreign policy, which you can watch on video or listen to here:

Democrats who run elections in their states are concerned over how the firings of Election Assistance Commissioners could affect their jobs and in turn, the voters. But, they emphasized, their offices are prepared and ready to administer elections regardless.

Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, said in a TV interview that the firings may look more long term like a “hair on fire moment,” those tasked with running elections across the country are ready.

“Right now, we’re going to do well with the folks that we have running elections,” Fontes said.

Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state in Nevada and the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement that the firings were “incredibly irresponsible”.

“The EAC plays a critical role in supporting state and local election officials, and it will again fall on Secretaries of State and other election administrators to fill the gap,” Aguilar said. “From cutting funding for cybersecurity to launching baseless investigations, this pattern of behavior from the Trump administration makes it harder for our election officials to do their work and does nothing to make elections more secure.”

Without commissioners, the Election Assistance Commission can still continue its core functions, with its executive director in charge, Just Security writes in a helpful breakdown of what the firings mean.

Taking a step back: The commission, created by the Help America Vote Act in 2002, is an independent, bipartisan body tasked with helping election officials improve election administration and helping Americans vote. It does not administer elections – elections in the US are administered by state and local jurisdictions, despite Trump’s frequent push to take control over more aspects of voting.

Effectively, without a board, the career staff at the agency are “frozen” at the point of whatever the commission last approved, Aaron Blacksberg, the Federal Policy Counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, wrote for Just Security.

And crucially, the staff can still disburse grant funds to states for election security and continue certifying voting systems, important pieces of keeping elections secure, he wrote.

“The President’s summarily firing the bipartisan EAC commissioners is unprecedented, but this action gives the federal government no more authority over elections than it had before,” Blacksberg wrote.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that promotes bipartisanship, noted that the Election Assistance Commission often has operated without a quorum, leaving it unable to exercise its full authority, but Trump’s move is still “unprecedented”.

“The removal of several of the Commissioners is a significant loss for one of the federal government’s few institutions explicitly designed around bipartisan governance,” said Matt Weil, the vice president of the center’s governance program. “The commission’s most recent members demonstrated that bipartisan collaboration on the practical work of election administration remained possible. The Commissioners nearly always voted unanimously.”

While commission staff can continue to operate crucial functions, the commission’s full authority requires three bipartisan members, Weil wrote.

“Yet even without a full set of commissioners, the EAC’s role sits on top of a federalist election system: states and localities run elections,” Weil said. “That means election officials will still be able to administer secure, accessible, and trustworthy elections this November. But they will do so without the full level of support that the EAC normally provides.”

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the US Senate, called Trump’s firing of the full Election Assistance Commission another step toward the president’s attempt to take over elections.

“Firing every remaining member of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission months before the midterms is a brazen attempt to seize control of our elections before a single vote is cast,” Schumer wrote on X. “He is gutting the independent agency that certifies voting systems and helps election officials run secure elections.”

Schumer said Senate Democrats will fight this move.

“The American people—not Donald Trump—will decide the 2026 election.”

The Trump administration has directly spent $2.7bn of taxpayer money on its crusade against wind power while pouring $1.125bn into boosting coal, which critics say is pushing up Americans’ bills.

They say the moves are evidence that the president aims to serve fossil-fuel companies like those which donated record sums to his presidential campaign, rather than the working-class Americans to whom he pledged to lower energy bills and other costs.

“Trump is getting Americans coming and going,” said Jay Inslee, the former governor of Washington state and a Trump detractor. “He’s forcing higher power bills on them by blocking clean energy, then he’s fattening the wallets of his cronies – all with billions of our tax dollars.”

The Department of the Interior has, since March, struck four deals with energy companies, paying them to cancel a total of eight offshore wind projects and pledge to invest in fossil-fuel power. The first such agreement was announced in March with the French energy company TotalEnergies, sparking a lawsuit from seven Democratic-controlled states that alleged it was an illegal use of taxpayer money.

The latest deal with Duke Energy was announced late last month.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man killed by federal immigration agents during a traffic stop in Houston this week, was not the intended target of the “enforcement operation”, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were reportedly seeking two people from Guatemala when they attempted to stop Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the United States for 35 years, the New York Times reported.

Salgado Araujo, who was on his way to work early on Tuesday morning, was driving three other people in a white van. After the shooting, the three men were taken into custody. One of the three men has been identified by advocates as Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, the brother of the victim. The New York Times reported that he was still in an immigration detention center.

In a statement provided to the Guardian, an unnamed DHS official said officers had received a tip from law enforcement partners about their target’s address and had previously spotted two white vans at that property.

“On July 7, officers were almost at the target’s address when they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target,” the official said.

The statement does not clarify what happened next. Salgado Araujo died in the hospital after being shot in the abdomen, according to accounts from local law enforcement officers. The officers involved were not wearing body cameras, DHS said.

“Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

These were the parting words of Richard Nixon after he was forced to resign the presidency over the Watergate imbroglio in 1974. For Graham Platner on Wednesday, the stakes were somewhat smaller. But when it came to suspending his Senate campaign in Maine, the Democrat had plenty of hate to go around.

The scandal-plagued Platner was forced to step down after a woman who dated him said he drunkenly forced her to have sex despite her telling him to stop, an allegation he denies. It spelled doom for an insurgent campaign that had begun 323 days earlier with a glossy horizontal video that showed Platner farming oysters, chopping wood and gruffly talking about “hardscrabble” folk in Maine.

On Wednesday the video was vertical and, according to the Politico news site, recorded at 4pm outside Platner’s home in Maine in the company of aides including Ben Chin and Morris Katz, a 27-year-old adviser to New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

“Several of [Platner]’s closest advisers pleaded with him Wednesday to strike a ‘conciliatory’ tone in the announcement terminating his Senate campaign,” Politico reported. “But the progressive bucked their advice and made it a condition of dropping out of the race that he get free rein to assail establishment Democrats and blame them for the ignominious end to his rapid political rise.”

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The Trump administration has been branded “irresponsible and dangerous” after the president terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission (EAC) that assists election administration officials nationwide.

Trump’s “deeply concerning” move comes just a few months before the midterm elections, with remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission forced out on Thursday in different ways.

The one Republican appointee resigned and the other ⁠two, Democratic appointees were notified of their terminations via email from ​the White House presidential personnel office.

“On ‌behalf of President ‌Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position ‌as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.

The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

“It is ⁠irresponsible and dangerous that this Administration remains dead set on ​causing chaos for ​our election officials across this ​country,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes said in a statement. “This ‌move undermines the integrity ​of nonpartisan ​election administration.”

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia posted on X that the dismissals “should concern every American regardless of party,” adding “removing every remaining commissioner just months before the 2026 midterm elections is an extraordinary step that demands an immediate explanation from the administration.”

The Brennan Center for Justice’s CEO Michael Waldman called the firings “deeply concerning in light of president Trump’s relentless efforts to try to interfere in elections.”

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In other developments:

• Victor Marx, a marines veteran, pastor and self-described “high-risk missionary”, whose extraordinary claims about his past have been disputed and mocked, won the Republican primary for Colorado governor. State senator Barbara Kirkmeyer conceded the race, despite losing by just fewer than 2,500 votes.

• Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said her government will ask state and federal prosecutors in the United States to file criminal charges against the people responsible for the deaths of 17 Mexican citizens targeted ⁠during anti-immigration operations or while in immigration detention centers.

• A Mexican immigrant who was fatally shot by a federal immigration agent during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday was not the man federal officers were searching for, the Department of Homeland Security said.

• Morris Katz, Zohran Mamdani’s 27-year-old media strategist, who has been blamed by many Democrats for helping to recruit Graham Platner to run for the US Senate in Maine and made ads for the campaign, distanced himself from the candidate.

• Troy Jackson, a former president of the Maine state senate who hopes to replace Graham Platner as the Democratic nominee for US Senate, if Platner makes good on his promise to formally withdraw by the Monday deadline, said in an interview with MS Now that Platner had lied to him.

• Dan Kleban, a co-founder of the Maine Beer Company, wrote on Substack on Thursday that he would not vote for Chuck Schumer as the party’s Senate leader next year should he win the nomination and be elected.