Trump delivers first rally-style speech since election win as he threatens to retake Panama Canal: Live

Robert F Kennedy Jr came to prominence and broke away from just being his famous father’s namesake on the back of his promotion of the idea that vaccines cause autism.

Kennedy has met with multiple Republicans throughout the week about his confirmation to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. This also came the week that President-elect Donald Trump said “There’s something wrong” about the increase in autism rates and that “we’re going to find out about it.”

That earned a rebuke from Sen Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician who will be chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“It’s not true and it’s been widely shown that it’s not true,” he told The Independent on Tuesday.

Eric Garcia has the story.

The Senate is headed for a long night.

The upper chamber is expected to pass the government spending bill that cleared the House earlier today, but they have yet to vote on it.

Asked about whether the Senate will vote before midnight, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer didn’t quite give a straight answer.

Here’s what he said, courtesy of CSPAN.

Donald Trump has transferred all 114.75 million of his shares in the parent company that runs his Truth Social platform into a revocable trust before he returns to the White House.

His shares in Trump Media & Technology Group are currently worth roughly $4 billion, representing the lion’s share of his roughly $6 billion net worth. He is the group’s largest shareholder.

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show the president-elect transferring the stake into the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust earlier this week. His oldest son Donald Trump Jr is the sole trustee, and has sole voting and investment power over securities held by the trust, according to filings.

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The Senate just voted to confirm the Biden administration’s 235th federal Article III judge, one more judicial nomination than the previous Trump administration was able to get through.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries celebrated the lower chamber’s passage on Friday of a spending bill to avert a government shutdown, just a crucial midnight deadline.

Jeffries said the package, which passed the House without any Democratic opposition, helped ensure the “future of working class Americans” and pointed to provisions like $100 billion in disaster assistance.

The leader also said the bill, which will keep the government funded through mid-March, was a rebuke to the “billionaire boys club” of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who pushed to scuttle a bipartisan spending plan earlier in the week, and considered a plan that would suspend the debt ceiling to further enable the Trump administration’s plans.

Get all the details on the House version of the spending plan.

With a month to go before he officially becomes the 47th president of the United States, Donald J Trump is already causing mayhem. His rejection of a bipartisan budget deal in Congress has threatened a federal shutdown and triggered huge anxiety for employees and those dependent on public services just before Christmas.

It’s not the first such game of fiscal “chicken” indulged in by America’s politicians – but it serves as a pointed reminder, were it needed, of what may be expected in the coming four years or so.

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House members voted 366-34, with one member voting present.

Those 34 votes were all Republicans.

A bill to fund the government through mid-March marked a third attempt within two days to avert a shutdown, after Donald Trump and Elon Musk commanded Congress to ditch the original bipartisan framework and left congressional Democrats and even some Republicans exhausted with the growing political influence of the world’s wealthiest person.

The funding battle glimpsed how Democrats are approaching the incoming Trump-Musk administration and how they will navigate Trump’s agenda with an extremely slim Republican majority.

Full story here:

The latest package resembled a bipartisan plan that was abandoned earlier this week after an online fusillade from Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, who said it contained too many unrelated provisions.

That bill would have kept the government agencies operating at current levels, provided an additional $100 billion in disaster aid for storm-hit states and another $10 billion for farmers. It also would extend farm and food aid programs due to expire at the end of the year.

Trump demanded a rewrite to also lift the nation’s debt ceiling, but that was resoundingly rejected by the House - including 38 Republicans - on Thursday.