Biden news – live: President promises Kentucky more aid, calling floods part of ‘dangerous’ climate crisis

A moment from Senator Bernie Sanders has been compared to music album covers and more after he was photographed sitting on the steps of the US Capitol.

The Vermont senator was taking a break from a marathon 27-hour voting session on Saturday when he was caught by Los Angeles Times photojournalist Kent Nishimura.

Mr Sanders, who has previously been at the centre of viral internet memes, appeared exhausted in the photo, which was taken in the 13th hour of the Senate’s “vote-a-rama”, which ended with the passing of the $430bn Inflation Reduction Act.

Gino Spocchia reports:

Not as robust as the proposal President Joe Biden once envisioned to rebuild America’s public infrastructure and family support systems, the Democrats‘ compromise of health care, climate change, and deficit-reduction strategies is still a substantial undertaking.

The estimated $740 billion package — passed Sunday by the Senate and heading to the House — is full of party priorities.

Lt Gov Molly Gray and Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint are the leading candidates in a Democratic US House primary that could make either of them the first female member of Vermont’s congressional delegation.

Gray has the backing of the centrist lane of the party, with endorsements from former Govs. Madeline Kunin and Howard Dean. Retiring US Sen Patrick Leahy donated $5,000 to her campaign and cast a ballot for her.

Balint has been endorsed by an all-star list of progressive leaders, including the state’s other US senator, Bernie Sanders; Rep Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of Vermont’s famously progressive ice cream company, Ben & Jerry’s.

With a willingness to broker politically unpleasant compromises and a New Yorker’s drive to keep pestering his colleagues, Schumer is using his party’s fragile control of the Senate to substantive, sizable accomplishments unseen in recent years.

“Persistence. I persist,” Schumer said in an interview late Sunday evening after the round-the-clock session and Senate passage of Biden’s bill.

The US unemployment rate dropped to 3.5 per cent last month as the US economy added 528,000 jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Friday.

Despite persistent inflation, the Department of Labor said job growth in the US was “widespread” in July, with “leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, and health care” sectors all adding jobs.

The department also said the number of employed non-farm workers and the US unemployment rate are now at the same levels they were in February 2020, before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The number of “long-term unemployed” — meaning persons without a job for more than six months — also decreased to pre-pandemic levels with a drop of 269,000 last month.

The US economy shrank by 0.9 per cent during the second quarter of the year, further stoking fears the country is heading into a recession.

Thursday morning’s data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, part of the Commerce Department, posted a second straight quarterly contraction in gross domestic product – the broadest measure of economic output.

Back-to-back negative GDP quarters constitute an informal definition of recession, but most economists point to a still-robust labour market, with 11 million job openings and an uncommonly low 3.6 per cent unemployment rate. They argue that a recession, if one were to occur, is still a way off.

Over five decades in Washington, Joe Biden knew that the way to influence was to be in the room where it happens. But in the second year of his presidency, some of Biden’s most striking, legacy-defining legislative victories came about by staying out of it.