House votes to hold Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro in contempt – live

Pennsylvania may have voted narrowly for Joe Biden in 2020, but there are encouraging signs for Republicans in the state’s all-important Senate race this fall.

Reuters reports that the GOP is outpacing Democrats in voter registrations, part of a pattern seen in various other states.

Pennsylvania, however, is particularly important because it presents a rare chance for the Democrats to pick up a Senate seat rather than just holding one. The seat in question is being vacated by GOP Trump critic Pat Toomey, and the Republican primary was initially disrupted when candidate Sean Parnell was forced to withdraw over serious allegations of partner abuse.

Among the leading Republican candidates now he has gone is Dr Mehmet Oz, a longtime TV celebrity notorious for pushing dubious medical claims about substances including apple cider vinegar.

During a speech touting his proposal for a higher tax rate on the very wealthiest Americans – “for God’s sake, chip in and pay your fair share” – Joe Biden found a moment to dismiss Donald Trump to his audience’s amusement, referring to him as “the last guy”.

An insistence on traditional gender roles and identities has become a core part of the Republican culture war strategy, something that played out at Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination hearings as GOP Senators demanded that she explain what a woman was.

Ms Brown Jackson declined to elaborate, citing the fact that she’s not a biologist. This was mocked by many of the Judiciary Committee’s right-wingers, but when asked for their own definitions of what makes a woman, many of them struggled…

As the Biden administration prepares for the end of Title 42, a measure that effectively barred people from applying for asylum at their point of entry into the US, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is ramping up his attacks on the government’s immigration policy – and he’s now threatening to start shipping undocumented immigrants from his state to Washington, DC in protest.

Bevan Hurley has the story.

Steve Bannon was the first person held in contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the 6 January committee, and he is now fighting a legal battle to avoid a trial on the matter. That fight is not going well.

As NBC reports, a judge has ruled against Mr Bannon’s claim that he is not in contempt of Congress because he was acting on his lawyers’ instructions.

If convicted of contempt, Mr Bannon could face a year in jail and a fine of up to $100,000.

Republican Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar’s campaign has denied that he is speaking at a conference being held by the white nationalist American Populist Union – a group that among other things has recently praised Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban for building a “right-wing, Christian republic on the traditional foundations of western civilization”.

The conference is being held on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, 20 April, a date that many neo-nazis and far-right racists revere.

The group is promoting Mr Gosar’s apperance on the conference website, and according to the Tucson Sentinel, Mr Gosar shared it on his own Instagram page – but his campaign has now told the site that he will not be attending, and will instead be on a “farm tour”. He now appears to have been removed from the event’s online listing.

Mr Gosar recently sent a video address to the racist America First Political Action Conference; he has similarly claimed that that was a mistake, and has yet to face any consequences from the Republican leadership.

Joe Biden and other Democrats of his generation are often criticized by younger members of his party because of their nostalgia for a time when Capitol Hill was a more civil and comradely place, and their apparent determination to make it one again in spite of the behaviour of many Republicans.

Among those who view things differently is Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison, who ripped into Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton in a tirade on MSNBC yesterday, calling him “the lowest of the low” among the Senate’s right-wingers.

Mr Harrison was speaking specifically about Mr Cotton’s stance on the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. The Arkansas senator this week gave a Senate speech in which he suggested Ms Brown Jackson would probably have defended the Nazis during the Nuremberg Trials.

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While Republicans are signalling an interest in litigating Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, a key Senate Republican said newly obtained banking records raise similar concerns about the president’s first brother James Biden.

“We have people with the Biden name, dealing with Chinese business people that have a relationship to the Communist Party,” Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge.

“I think James Biden was very much a part of this.”

According to bank records released by Republican senators this week, James Biden’s company, the Lion Hall Group, received payments from a Chinese-financed consulting group in 2018, before his brother announced his bid for presidency.

Mr Grassley said it was in the same year that James Biden and the president’s son Hunter, received monthly retainers totaling $165,000 — $100,000 to Hunter and $65,000 to James.

“These records we got are the first records that have ever been made public on this issue. Nobody else has them,” Mr Grassley said.

The Independent’s John Bowden has more on the Republicans plan to litigate Hunter Biden:

While Sarah Palin has won the endorsement of former president Donald Trump in her campaign to represent Alaska in the US House of Representatives, her colleagues back home are not so happy.

Lisa Murkowski, the state’s senior senator said in a statement to CNN: “We’ve got 50 names that Alaskans will have the opportunity to choose from.

“A lot of really good qualified individuals that nobody else is talking about back here. Back home, they are. So this is your own kind of bubble. I’m just telling you: You are not in Alaska’s bubble, because Alaskans are talking about the others.”

“Many of the people that I know were very surprised because we didn’t realise that she was still a resident of the state,” said Nick Begich III, a Republican rival.

Ms Palin, however, has won the support of GOP hardliners who already plan to invite her to join their congressional caucus.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said on Wednesday he’s a “big fan” of hers.

The House of Representatives voted 220-203 to refer two more ex-Trump White House aides for prosecution on criminal contempt of Congress charges for defying subpoenas to produce documents and give evidence before the select committee investigating the 6 January insurrection.

Just two Republicans — select committee members Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — joined 218 Democrats on Wednesday to approve a resolution holding former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Daniel Scavino and ex-National Trade Council director Peter Navarro in contempt and recommending they be prosecuted for refusing to heed subpoenas issued as part of the nine-member panel’s probe into the worst attack on the US Capitol since Major General Robert Ross ordered British troops to it set ablaze in 1814.

Andrew Feinberg and Eric Garcia report from Washington, DC.