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Sen. Bernie Sanders announces a wealth tax that would hit multibillionaires like Jeff Bezos especially hard. Rival presidential candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has a plan that would impose a tax of 2% of wealth over $50 million and 3% on wealth over $1 billion. Sanders’ plan starts at a lower wealth level – taxing those worth $32 million at 1% – so his tax would hit about 180,000 families while Warren’s would affect about 75,000 households. The sliding scale of the Sanders plan quickly escalates for wealth over $500 million, which would be taxed at 4%. Here are estimates...

A Republican congressman introduced a resolution on Tuesday calling for the ouster of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., from his panel post for pursuing impeachment proceedings against President Trump. The proceedings were formally backed late Tuesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, said in a release that Nadler has acted against the will of the House of Representatives, which never gave his committee explicit authorization to begin impeachment proceedings. The body voted 332-95 in July to table an impeachment resolution from Rep. Al Green, D-Texas.

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky. While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family. Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset”...

The Democratic primary is a three-way race, at least among declared candidates. There is one battle-tested candidate still on the sidelines who could enter the race at any time and wrest her party's nomination from the likes of former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). Her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Recent developments suggest that such a scenario could be more likely than the so-called experts are willing to admit. For starters, the Daily Beast reports that former Hillary Clinton campaign aides are giving "advice" to the Biden campaign on how...

MPs and peers will return to Parliament later after the Supreme Court ruled that its suspension was unlawful. Boris Johnson is returning early from a UN summit in New York, while Labour cut its conference short in the wake of Tuesday's unanimous ruling. The PM, who has faced calls to resign, has said he "profoundly disagreed" with the decision but would respect it. Commons Speaker John Bercow has said there will be "full scope" for urgent questions and ministerial statements.

Hillary Clinton joined her fellow Democrats in calling for impeachment proceedings against President Trump on Tuesday. Clinton made the statement while speaking to People Magazine, saying the country is in a “crisis.” “I did not come to that decision easily or quickly, but this is an emergency as I see it,” she told the magazine. “This latest behavior around Ukraine, trying to enlist the president of Ukraine in a plot to undermine former Vice President Biden or lose the military aid he needs to defend against Trump’s friend Vladimir Putin — if that’s not an impeachable offense, I don’t know...

We don’t yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine’s president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. But if we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do. It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the...

Federal agents descended Tuesday on the home and offices of state Sen. Martin Sandoval as part of an ongoing criminal investigation, adding him to the growing list of city and state politicians facing serious scrutiny. Feds in suits could be seen lugging boxes, electronics and a bag marked “Evidence” from the state capitol building in Springfield. A similar scene played out at Sandoval’s Southwest Side home. And agents could be seen outside Sandoval’s political office in Cicero. FBI Special Agent John Althen confirmed the agency had personnel in the state capitol conducting “authorized law enforcement activity,” but he declined to...

"The question is will he be removed from office, and that's a separate question that Mitch McConnell can answer," Newsom said on 'The Daily Show.' California governor Gavin Newsom appeared as a guest on The Daily Show Tuesday, where he spoke with host Trevor Noah about the biggest political news of the day: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision to move forward with a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump. The probe centers on whether Trump sought help from a foreign government to undermine Democratic candidate Joe Biden and help his own re-election, an action that is, according to Pelosi, "a...

The US and India are two of the most populous and powerful democracies in the world. And they are both represented by far-right leaders. Even by the standards of the Trump era, the “Howdy Modi!” meeting in Houston, Texas, this Sunday was weird. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, had invited Donald Trump to be his guest at a massive rally in the American heartland. And, unsurprisingly, giving his submissive behavior towards authoritarian leaders, the president had accepted, happily playing second fiddle to a foreign leader on US soil. But beyond these remarkable details, the meeting was in many ways...

United States House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–N.Y.) announced the initiation of a formal impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump Tuesday afternoon. This launch of an impeachment inquiry comes after this weekend’s revelations that President Trump requested damaging information from the Ukraine government about presidential candidate Joe Biden, who is leading the race for the Democratic nomination in the majority of public opinion polls. Impeachment has “no legal standard,” according to Prof. David Bateman, government. The process is meant to be entirely political –– not “partisan or tawdry,” Bateman said, but considering if the “whether the president’s actions have...

Former Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday he would back impeaching President Donald Trump if the White House refuses to comply with congressional demands for information about his interactions with Ukraine’s president and other Democratic probes. “Congress should demand the information it has a legal right to receive,” Biden told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware. If he doesn’t, Biden said, “Donald Trump will leave Congress no choice but to initiate impeachment. It would be a tragedy, but a tragedy of his own making.” Biden’s remarks were his first extended comments about Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump...

For months, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned itchy Democrats against the perils of impeachment. She should have stuck to her guns. In surrendering to the radicals and the noisy drumbeat of their media handmaidens, Pelosi established a formal investigative process involving the top legislative committees. Yet she did something else, too, something far more monumental: She effectively committed House Dems to impeaching President Trump. Because of what she said and did, if the House doesn’t go all the way, it will be a political disaster. Either failing to take a vote on articles of impeachment, or failing to get enough...

In his opening monologue, Stephen Colbert didn’t get the chance on Tuesday to tell a lot of jokes about the news that the House of Representatives has launched a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. But his audience didn’t seem to care, because they were too busy celebrating with a standing ovation. On Tuesday’s “The Late Show,” Colbert began by rattling off numerous Donald Trump scandals, including “Russian collusion, obstruction of justice, saying Nazis are fine people, being an unnamed co-conspirator to campaign finance violations, lying about the Moscow Trump Tower, stealing money to pay for the border wall”...

The reviews are in, and critics have reached an unsurprising verdict: “Rambo: Last Blood” is not politically correct. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has scored what is presumably the final entry in the Rambo franchise at 27 percent positive based on 100 reviews from critics. In contrast, 85 percent of moviegoers gave it a thumb’s up on Rotten Tomatoes. Here is a sampling of headlines: ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ Is a Trumpian, Anti-Mexican Nightmare ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ Is A Rollicking Good Time Of Hyper-Violent Xenophobic Revenge Fantasies ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ Is An Ugly, Xenophobic Mess Right wing “Rambo” propaganda is alive and...

The anonymous U.S. intelligence official accusing President Trump of improperly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is represented by two lawyers who run a group that offers financial help to fired whistleblowers. Whistleblower Aid was launched in September 2017 — eight months after Trump's inauguration — with an advertising blitz that involved mobile billboards being driven close to the White House, Congress, outside the Pentagon, and around the headquarters of the CIA and National Security Agency. The group’s pledge of support, in addition to free legal representation including rent and mortgage assistance, media coaching, and doctor’s bills and counseling, is...

Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Khan of Pakistan Before Bilateral Meeting | New York, NY FOREIGN POLICY Issued on: September 23, 2019 InterContinental New York Barclay New York, New York 1:05 P.M. EDT PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you very much. It’s a great honor to be with my friend, the Prime Minister of Pakistan. And we have some great discussions going on with Pakistan about a lot of things, including the Taliban and Afghanistan, and many other things. And trade, I think, maybe is one of the most important. We’re going to increase trade with Pakistan by a tremendous...

There is a clear ideological split concerning the current kerfuffle over President Trump’s contact with the Ukrainian government. Liberals say that any effort by the president to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings there represents a violation of law that could lead to impeachment. We conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the president has wide-ranging powers in the area of foreign policy and any such inquiry on his part was well within those powers. But then there’s the Washington Post columnist who wrote that “if the facts point to corrupt behavior, impeachment will be a...

LOS ANGELES – A high-level member of a global drug ring arrived in Southern California last night after being extradited from Colombia on charges that he conspired to transport cocaine worth hundreds of millions of dollars from South America to Mexico for eventual sale in the United States. The extradition resulted from a coordinated, international law enforcement operation that has led to arrests of co-conspirators on three continents. In conjunction with the extradition, federal authorities on Thursday arrested seven defendants named in a 22-count indictment that outlines how the organization obtained ton-quantities of cocaine manufactured in South American labs; used...

Details from a phone call made by Donald Trump that has led the U.S. House of Representatives to launch a formal impeachment inquiry against the president isn’t likely to come from a recording or be verbatim, former White House and national security officials say. ... Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Obama presidency, said not only would any so-called transcript be based on notes, but it would also likely be incomplete because the note-takers usually do not include issues that could be controversial if they became public. “Typically a note-taker will write notes about what...