President Biden on Tuesday threatened to veto legislation being pushed by House Republican leaders that would condition support for raising the debt ceiling on deep spending cuts, calling it “a reckless attempt to extract extreme concessions as a condition for the United States simply paying the bills it has already incurred.”

In a statement officially announcing its opposition to the bill, the White House said: “The President has been clear that he will not accept such attempts at hostage-taking.” It added that “House Republicans must take default off the table and address the debt limit without demands and conditions, just as the Congress did three times during the prior Administration.”

The House Rules Committee is preparing to consider the legislation on Tuesday afternoon. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is angling to bring the package to the floor as early as Wednesday.

The GOP proposal would slash federal spending dramatically and unwind some of Biden’s priorities, including student debt cancellation and efforts to address climate change. In exchange, Republicans would agree to increase the debt ceiling — the statutory cap on how much the U.S. government can borrow to pay its bills.

The second round of Disney layoffs once again hit ABC News on Tuesday, with Nate Silver’s data-driven politics and journalism brand FiveThirtyEight among those being impacted.

Silver told FiveThirtyEight employees in a Slack message that he expects to leave Disney when his contract is up, which he added would be “soon,” The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

ABC News is expected to keep the FiveThirtyEight brand name, with plans to streamline the site and make it more efficient.

“ABC News remains dedicated to data journalism with a core focus on politics, the economy and enterprise reporting — this streamlined structure will allow us to be more closely aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond,” an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement. “We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism.”

British households and businesses “need to accept” they are poorer and stop seeking pay increases and pushing prices higher, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, has said.

Pill said a game of “pass the parcel” is taking place in the economy – as households and companies try to pass on their higher costs.

Speaking on a podcast produced by Columbia law school, Pill said it’s natural for a household to seek higher wages in response to soaring energy bills, or for a restaurant to increase its prices.

However, he said the UK is a big importer of natural gas, and its price has gone up a lot compared with the exports, mainly services, which the UK sells to the rest of the world.

— Presidential approval is typically a good predictor of the share of the vote an incumbent president will receive.

— Recent presidents often ran a little ahead of their approval as opposed to a little behind, although the sample size is very small.

— Assuming President Biden’s approval, which is mired in the low-to-mid 40s, does not spike to 50% or better before Election Day, he is likely going to have to perform well with those who only “somewhat” disapprove of his job performance. Democrats held their own with these voters in 2022.

The Senate will vote on the Equal Rights Amendment this week — 100 years after it was first introduced in Congress — Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer said Monday.

Schumer, speaking at Hunter College in New York, argued that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and efforts to limit access to the abortion pill mifepristone, as well as state-level actions to roll back women’s rights, have made the ERA and its protections more critical than ever.

“In this ominous hour of American history, the Equal Rights Amendment has never been as necessary and urgent as it is today,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement Monday.

The proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution would guarantee equal rights under the law regardless of sex — meaning the Constitution would clearly state that women have equal rights as men. While the amendment was introduced in Congress in 1923 by leaders of the suffrage movement, it only passed in March 1972.

After months of legal battles, infighting between defense lawyers and dozens of rejected mistrial motions, the federal criminal trial against five Proud Boys accused of plotting to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, moved to its final stage Monday.

One prosecutor and two defense attorneys gave their closing arguments to the Washington, DC, jury tasked with deciding whether Enrique Tarrio, Dominic Pezzola, Zachary Rehl, Joseph Biggs and Ethan Nordean are guilty of several federal crimes, including seditious conspiracy.

The Justice Department’s Conor Mulroe argued that the defendants stirred fellow members of the far-right Proud Boys toward violence in the lead up to January 6 and directed them that day to attack the iconic building.

Far-right Proud Boys member Jeremy Joseph Bertino, second from left, joins other supporters of President Donald Trump who are wearing attire associated with the Proud Boys as they attend a rally at Freedom Plaza, Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington.

Attorneys for Nordean and Rehl repeatedly said that the mountains of evidence only showed vulgar, stupid messages from their clients and violence from others in the crowd on January 6 – none of which amounted to the seditious conspiracy charge their clients face.

Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley is seeking to differentiate herself from her GOP presidential rivals on the issue of abortion, stepping forward as a Republican urging her party to grapple now with the political challenge it faces after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Her pitch: Messenger and tone matter.

Haley is set to deliver a speech on abortion Tuesday at the headquarters of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America in Northern Virginia, aiming to put her stamp on the issue as an unapologetic antiabortion voice who can nonetheless win back moderate voters who were alienated by other Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. Her speech comes as Republican-led states have moved to restrict abortion access and the courts battle over access to a drug for medication-induced abortions.

The focus of the speech, according to a person briefed on the details, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them on the record, will be less about policy details — including the number of weeks in state bans, the exact federal role or the terms of exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. Rather, the person said, Haley wants to change the way abortion is discussed, returning to the less aggressive strategy adopted by the antiabortion movement in the late 1990s.

“Republicans won’t win the hearts and minds of Americans unless they’re able to address difficult and personal issues with compassion while sticking to our principles,” Haley campaign communications director Nachama Soloveichik said in a statement. “Nikki Haley is the only presidential candidate who demonstrates an ability to talk about abortion in a way that appeals to the swing voters Republicans need to win the general election.”