Ron DeSantis ‘to announce presidential run on Twitter with Elon Musk’ – live | Kevin McCarthy

Martin Pengelly

Lawyers for Harlan Crow, the rightwing billionaire whose friendship with and gifts to the conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas are the focus of swirling scandal, have rejected Senate Democrats’ request for answers about the relationship.

In a letter first reported by Bloomberg News, lawyers for Crow said the Senate judiciary committee, which requested a list of gifts to Thomas, had not “identified a valid legislative purpose for its investigation and is not authorised to conduct an ethics investigation of a supreme court justice”.

Democrats who control the committee, the lawyers said, were “targeting Justice Thomas for special and unwarranted opprobrium”.

In response, the committee chair, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said: “Harlan Crow believes the secrecy of his lavish gifts to Justice Thomas is more important than the reputation of the highest court of law in this land. He is wrong.”

Thomas’s relationship with Crow, and his failure to declare many gifts, has long been known. But in April, the nonprofit news site ProPublica released a series of bombshell reports.

It said Thomas took and failed to declare gifts including luxury travel and stays at properties owned by Crow; that Crow bought property from Thomas, in which Thomas’s mother still lives; and that Crow paid for private schooling for Thomas’s great-nephew, who the justice has said he raised “as a son”.

Observers said Thomas has clearly broken the law.

Thomas said he did not declare gifts from Crow because he had been advised he did not need to do so, but would do so in future.

Crow has said he has never discussed politics or business before the court with Thomas or his wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas.

Johana Bhuiyan

My colleague Johana Bhuiyan is at a Wall Street Journal event with Musk, where he had the following to say about DeSantis’s campaign launch on Twitter:

“I’m not at this time going to endorse any particular candidate but I am interested in X/Twitter being somewhat of a public town square where more and more organizations … make announcements.”

Musk was asked what he’s looking for in a president.

He said:

I’ve said publicly that my preference and the preference for most Americans is really to have someone fairly normal in office. I think we’d all be quite happy with that actually. Someone who is representative of the moderate views that most of the country holds in reality.

“The way that it’s set up is we have … people who push people to the edge … that causes a swing to the left or right during the primaries. And a shift toward the center for the general election. A fairly normal and sensible to be the president, that would be great.”

Martin Pengelly

Ron DeSantis has offered a taste of what we might expect from a Ron DeSantis presidency, telling a Christian audience in Orlando on Monday night how he would plan to reshape – or further reshape, given the lasting effect’s of Donald Trump’s three appointments in four years – the US supreme court.

Speaking to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, DeSantis said: “I think if you look over the next two presidential terms, there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito and the issue with that is, you can’t really do better than those two.”

But DeSantis also alluded to a chance to replace Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal appointed by Barack Obama who is now 68, or perhaps Elena Kagan, another Obama appointee who is now 63, should he win the White House and serve two full terms.

He said: “So it is possible that in those eight years, we have the opportunity to fortify justices … Alito and Thomas as well as actually make improvements with those others, and if you were able to do that, you would have a 7-2 conservative majority on the supreme court that would last a quarter-century.”

According to the Washington Post, DeSantis’s comments met with “raucous applause”.

The governor also took a shot at John Roberts, the conservative chief justice who has sided with liberals on key decisions, including the one last year which eliminated federal abortion rights.

“If you replace a Clarence Thomas with somebody like a Roberts or somebody like that,” DeSantis said, “then you’re gonna actually see the court move to the left, and you can’t do that.”

It is safe to say that under Roberts, the court has moved firmly right.

Just last year, Alito wrote the opinion in Dobbs v Jackson, which removed abortion rights. Thomas wrote the opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, striking down a gun control law in place since 1911.

More:

Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis will tomorrow evening officially announce his presidential campaign in a virtual appearance with Elon Musk, NBC News reports, citing three sources familiar with the plans.

The kickoff will take place at 7pm eastern time on Twitter Spaces, which is part of the social media platform Musk bought last year. DeSantis has been expected for months to launch a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, which will put him up against Donald Trump, the current frontrunner in the race.

Musk, meanwhile, is the CEO of Tesla and one of the world’s richest people. He’s exhibited a conservative streak in recent years, particularly after his acquisition of Twitter and decision to unban a number of controversial accounts, including Trum’p’s.

Here’s more from NBC about the launch:

Musk and DeSantis will host an event on Twitter Spaces, the site’s platform for audio chats, on Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET. It will be moderated by David Sacks, a tech entrepreneur who is a Musk confidant and DeSantis supporter.

That same evening, the campaign will release a launch video, and DeSantis will begin visiting several early states after Memorial Day.

The relationship could be a significant boost for DeSantis by giving him an introduction to, and credibility with, Musk’s massive following — including his 140 million Twitter followers. But it could prove a burden should DeSantis become distracted by the tycoon’s many controversial comments.

Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy said a deal on raising the debt ceiling is possible before 1 June, Politico reports:

The upbeat assessment comes after he earlier this morning said a deal is “nowhere near”.

The clock is ticking on the high-stakes debt limit negotiations ahead of the 1 June default deadline, after which the United States could face an economic calamity in the form of missed bond payments and other obligations. But the top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, does not sound worried.

Here’s what he had to say, from CNN:

McConnell has largely stayed out of the talks, leaving the bargaining to Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy. That said, the Senate will have to approve whatever deal the two sides reach – should they indeed reach one – and at that point, McConnell will play a key role in getting the GOP to support the bill.

Joan E Greve

Several House Democrats called on the more centrist members of the Republican conference to denounce the proposed spending cuts that have been championed by the far-right Freedom Caucus.

“Where are all of those reasonable moderate Republicans today?” said Congresswoman Susan Wild of Pennsylvania. “They must be there. We think they’re there, but they are not speaking up and speaking out.”

Congressman Pete Aguilar of California, the House Democratic caucus chair, criticized Republicans for not intervening earlier to prevent the budget proposal from passing the lower chamber.

“They could have voted with the American people to protect seniors and veterans and school teachers And instead they joined hands with Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos,” Aguilar said, referring to two of the far-right members of the House Republican conference.

Joan E Greve

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House appropriations committee, attacked House Republicans’ proposed budget cuts as unrealistic.

“They cannot govern,” DeLauro said at the press conference on Capitol Hill this morning. “Because you can’t go back to 2022 and apply those numbers to the 2024 budget. It just doesn’t work.”

DeLauro warned the proposed cuts would limit childcare access, slash nutrition benefits and threaten veterans’ healthcare if they were implemented equally to all non-defense discretionary spending.

“House Republicans did not release any 2024 spending bills until after they passed their ‘Default on America Act,’” DeLauro said. “And they now have to come to the realization that their default plan is unworkable.”

Joan E Greve

This morning, leading House Democrats spoke at a press conference on Capitol Hill hosted by the left-leaning group Courage for America to denounce Republicans’ proposed spending cuts as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling.

“The [Make America Great Again] majority wants the American people to make an impossible choice: accept devastating cuts or a devastating default,” said Congresswoman Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the House Democratic whip.

“They manufactured a crisis so they can bully and threaten the very people they were sent to Washington to represent.”

Congressman Joe Neguse of Colorado, co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, warned House Republicans’ debt ceiling proposal “would impose draconian and cruel cuts that would harm everyday Americans”.

“The consequences of this manufactured crisis — a crisis of their own invention — would be catastrophic for the American people,” Neguse said.

“We intend to do the right thing by the American people, to do what we have done time and time again: pay our bills and avoid a disastrous default and put people over politics.”

Negotiations between Joe Biden’s team and deputies of Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy are continuing in the shadow of a warning from Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, who confirmed that 1 June remains the deadline to raise the borrowing limit or spark a default. There are no signs yet that a deal is at hand, but things could always change, and this blog will let you know if they do.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• Donald Trump will later today appear virtually in a New York City courtroom, where a judge will read out an order preventing him from attacking witnesses in his case over allegedly falsifying business records.

• Special counsel Jack Smith may soon wrap up his investigation of the classified documents Trump kept at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and recommend whether to charge the former president or his allies, according to a report.

• House Republicans auctioned off chapstick used by McCarthy. No idea why they did this. Rightwing representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was the winner, after paying $100,000 for it.