Senate Democrats will force war powers vote, says minority leader Chuck Schumer – US politics live

We’re about to hear from press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and we’ll bring you the latest lines as the media briefing starts.

Even though Trump has declared victory, after agreeing to a two-week ceasefire in the war on Iran, more Democrats are calling for his ouster via the 25th amendment. This is the constitutional provision which requires a majority of the president’s cabinet to remove him from office.

“I’m relieved Trump did not destroy an entire civilization last night, but his unhinged threat and illegal war make it clear he is unfit to serve as president,” said Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic representative from Washington state.

The congresswoman also said that Congress must reject the latest $1.5tn Pentagon budget request from Trump that he unveiled last week, and will be at the forefront of appropriation bill negotiations throughout the year.

In a press conference in New York today, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Democrats in the upper chamber would force a vote on a war powers resolution to limit the administration’s military campaign in Iran when Congress returns from recess next week.

Earlier, the Senate’s top Democrat called Donald Trump a “military moron” on social media.

Schumer noted that, despite the two-week ceasefire, the cost of the war, and the effect on gas prices, has made the US “worse off today than we were when [Trump] started it”.

“If he restarts this war we will be in even worse shape. We must pass our War Powers Resolution to end this war for good,” Schumer wrote.

A growing number of Democrats are calling for the 25th amendment to be invoked to remove Donald Trump from office, following the president’s genuinely shocking post yesterday morning in which he threatened to wipe out an entire civilization if Iran didn’t capitulate to his demands.

The extraordinary, violent outburst has raised questions about the president’s mental health, as well as spurring grave concerns about whether he would follow through on his threats to bomb Iran’s critical infrastructure – which would amount to war crimes under international law.

More than 70 lawmakers – mostly in the House but also a handful in the Senate – have made the demand. Some have called for his cabinet to invoke the amendment to declare him unfit for office, others have called for his impeachment and conviction – and some have called for both.

Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, told CNN on Tuesday that “no president in control of his senses would publicly promise to eradicate an entire civilization”.

That’s why I agree with Republicans who have put the 25th amendment on the table. Trump seems to be taking us on a path to mass war crimes. That’s a path we cannot accept.

Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, wrote on X:

The House and Senate must return to session. The House must pass articles of impeachment, and then the Senate must vote to convict and remove the President. Or, the cabinet and Vice President, with congressional concurrence, must invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump.

“We need to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump,” representative Ro Khanna, of California, wrote on Tuesday morning on X. “Threatening war crimes is a blatant violation of our constitution and the Geneva Conventions.”

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on X:

Donald Trump’s instability is more clear and dangerous than ever. If the Cabinet is not willing to invoke the 25th Amendment and restore sanity, Republicans must reconvene the Congress to end this war.

Representative Pramila Jayapal also said on X after the ceasefire announcement:

I’m relieved Trump did not destroy an entire civilization last night, but his unhinged threat and illegal war make it clear he is unfit to serve as president.

Trump needs to be removed from office. And we must oppose his new $1.5 trillion budget proposal for more war.

Illinois’s governor, JB Pritzker, a potential future presidential hopeful, also called for the 25th amendment to be invoked. He said on X of Trump’s post:

This is not foreign policy, it’s a deranged mad man threatening to wipe out an entire country. It’s past time. The 25th Amendment must be invoked.

Trump’s threat outraged even those who formerly made up his core Maga base, including former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and rightwing commentators and conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Candace Owens.

“25TH AMENDMENT!!!” Greene, formerly a staunch Trump ally turned critic, posted on X yesterday. “Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”

A handful of Republican lawmakers also expressed unease with threats to strike civilian targets, but by and large the party has remained silent.

The House oversight committee has signaled it will continue to seek testimony from former attorney general Pam Bondi after she was ousted last week.

She was subpoenaed for a 14 April deposition on the justice department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, but the date was never confirmed by her. A committee spokesperson said in a statement that the panel would continue to pursue scheduling a date for her testimony.

The Department of Justice has stated Pam Bondi will not appear on April 14 for a deposition since she is no longer Attorney General and was subpoenaed in her capacity as Attorney General. The Committee will contact Pam Bondi’s personal counsel to discuss next steps regarding scheduling her deposition.

Bondi was subpoenaed last month after five Republicans on the committee joined forces with Democrats to seek her testimony.

The top Democrat on the panel, Robert Garcia, said in a statement on Wednesday that Bondi was “trying to get out of her legal obligation to testify”.

Our bipartisan subpoena is to Pam Bondi, whether she is the Attorney General or not. She must come in to testify immediately, and if she defies the subpoena, we will begin contempt charges in Congress. The survivors deserve justices.

Under Lee Zeldin – the US environment secretary who spoke at the climate-skeptical Heartland Institute’s conference on Wednesday morning – the EPA has exempted polluting facilities from regulations, shuttered climate and environmental research offices, and shrunk its workforce. It has also rolled back dozens of environmental and climate protections.

“What we are doing in the last 14 months is no surprise,” he said. “It is what I pledged during my confirmation hearing, and it is what the American public voted for when they put Donald J Trump back in office. And thank God they did.”

Zeldin spoke about his most controversial environmental rollback: the shredding of the legal finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations, known as the “endangerment finding”.

Scientists and other experts widely condemned the repeal, but Heartland Institute has celebrated it; references to its rollback were met with cheers at the conference in Washington DC on Wednesday. Zeldin expressed “admiration” for the Heartland Institute’s advocacy against the endangerment finding in his speech.

He also criticized previous administrations for ignoring “what’s good and necessary about carbon dioxide for the life of the planet”.

There is scientific consensus that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet, resulting in dangerous increases in temperatures and in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Scientists have long warned that the world must quickly phase out fossil fuels in order to preserve a livable climate.

Donald Trump said that, moving forward, there might a “joint venture” between the US and Iran when it comes to charging tolls for all ships passing through the strait of Hormuz, in an interview with ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl earlier today.

“We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it – also securing it from lots of other people,” he told Karl. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

Earlier this week, Trump told reporters at the White House that he was unhappy with the idea of Iran charging tolls for passage of cargo ships and oil tankers through the waterway. He also said there is a “concept” where the US would charge tolls moving forward. “Why shouldn’t we? We’re the winner,” he said on Monday.

A reminder that Iran is ultimately still in control of traffic through the strait. The foreign minister said on Tuesday that safe passage will be allowed for the next two weeks under Iranian military management.

Donald Trump said in-person talks with Iran will happen “very soon”, the New York Post reported today.

In an interview with the Post, Trump said his vice-president, JD Vance, might not attend the talks due to security concerns.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said that the lower chamber should vote immediately on a war powers resolution to curb the Trump administration’s war on Iran.

“We need a permanent end to Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice,” Jeffries told CNN shortly after Donald Trump announced the two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday. “House Democrats have demanded that Speaker Mike Johnson immediately reconvene the House back into session so we can move a war powers resolution that will end this conflict permanently.”

A reminder that Democratic lawmakers led calls for Trump’s ouster after he threatened to wipe out an “entire civilization” if Iran did not reach a deal to reopen the strait of Hormuz. While Jeffries told CNN that the pause is “insufficient”, it’s not clear how this deal will ultimately affect Congress’s wider perception of Trump’s handling of the war. Republicans, including Johnson and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, were largely silent in the wake of Trump’s astonishing posts on social media in recent days.

The Heartland Institute has accepted money from big oil companies including Shell and ExxonMobil, and from the Mercers, a family of Republican mega-donors. It was a contributor to Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration.

Craig Rucker, the president of CFACT – a rightwing group which complains about “climate exaggeration,” introduced Zeldin at the conference as a “friend of sound science [and] climate realism, a real rockstar.”

“What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” Zeldin added in his remarks today. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave the keynote speech at a conference hosted by a prominent climate-denying thinktank on Wednesday morning.

“No longer are we going to rely on bad, flawed assumptions instead of accurate, present-day fact without apology or regret,” he said at the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change in Washington DC, referring to well-established climate science.

The Heartland Institute rejects the scientific consensus that the climate crisis is real, human-caused and urgent. Since the early 2000s, it has been a leading promoter of climate doubt, even branding climate science as “fake news“ and comparing people who believe in global heating to the Unabomber.

In his speech, Zeldin poked fun at the media for calling him “controversial” for not “following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom and gloom position of the day is from John Kerry or Al Gore or AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez].”

He said the EPA is “heeding the call of the American public” by enacting an anti-environment agenda. And he derided previous administrations’ heeding of climate scientists’ warnings about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions.

Donald Trump will be in Washington today. As of now, none of his meetings, including with the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, at 11.30am ET or with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, at 3.30pm ET, are open to the press. We will keep an eye on if that changes.

However, we are due to hear from the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, at 1pm ET, when she briefs reporters.

The defense secretary was resolute about Iran forfeiting its enriched uranium, and even suggested that US would conduct an operation to seize it.

“We know what they have, and they will give it up, and we’ll get it, and we’ll take it if we have to,” Hegseth said. “We can do it in any means necessary.”

When asked whether Donald Trump did, in fact, plan to follow through with his staggering threats that a “whole civilization will die” if Iran did not reopen the strait of Hormuz, Pete Hegseth said that had a target “set, locked and loaded” had a deal collapsed by Tuesday evening.

The defense secretary claimed that the Iranian regime had “dual use” for “infrastructure, bridges, power plants”, adding that they were used “to fund their military” and “to fund their terror campaign”.

A reminder, the administration came under wide-spread backlash on Tuesday after the president’s missive suggested that the US would violate the Geneva conventions to achieve its objective.

“We had a lot of legitimate targets. They knew exactly the scope of what we were capable of,” Hegseth said, defending Trump’s plans.

Taking questions from reporters, Hegseth said that the US will be “hanging around” to make sure “Iran complies with this ceasefire”.

He noted that the military presence in the region also serves as a force to ensure Iran “comes to the table” to make a deal.

“So we’ll we’ll stay put, stay ready, stay vigilant,” Hegseth added.

The US military is prepared to resume attacks on Iran if ordered by Donald Trump, the top US general says.

“Let us be clear, a ceasefire is a pause, and the joint force remains ready, if ordered or called upon,” Dan Caine tells the press conference.

Earlier, he said the US military has struck more than 13,000 targets since the war began on 28 February.

Caine assessed that about 90% of Iran’s navy fleet has been destroyed, as well as 95% of its naval mines.