Rep. Eric Swalwell said the House is acting like they are a ‘law firm with just one client’ – former President Donald Trump as he slammed Speaker Kevin McCarthy for barreling toward a government shutdown.

The Democratic lawmaker claimed that while McCarthy has the ‘title’ of Speaker, far-right factions of the Republican Party are really running the show in the House of Representatives.

His comments to MSNBC host Jen Psaki come just days before the House must reach a deal to avoid a government shutdown by passing all 12 appropriation bills for the annual funding of federal agencies.

‘The House, unfortunately, has become a law firm, with just one client, Donald Trump,’ Swalwell said in noting those running the lower chamber have their priorities elsewhere than avoiding a shutdown.

‘And, again, it’s at the expense of American people,’ he noted, adding that ‘people are going to feel the pain’ of a shutdown in coming weeks.

While the House needs to pass appropriations before September 30 to avoid a shutdown, Republicans have focused-in on other issues. Earlier this month, McCarthy announced when coming back into session after August recess an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said Sunday that he’s open to voting to oust Speaker McCarthy if he can’t reach a deal in time to prevent a shutdown.

Meanwhile, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) predicts the shutdown is inevitable at this point as Republicans refuse to band together behind a single deal – and a MAGA-arm of the Party persists in wanting Speaker McCarthy out.

‘Kevin McCarthy is a spectator speaker,’ Swalwell insisted. ‘He may have the title, but Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, they all share the job.’

‘And the problem is, is that McCarthy is only worried about his own job, and keeping it, and not the jobs of your viewers – the millions who would be affected if we don’t pay our troops, if we don’t pay border agents, if we don’t pay air traffic controllers,’ the lawmaker said during his MSNBC interview Sunday morning.

‘McCarthy could simply bring forward the same legislation that Senator Schumer and McConnell have worked on in the Senate, that President Biden would sign, and be an adult and put the country first, and we would fund the government before funding run out.’

‘But, instead, the House Republicans are failures.’

A government shutdown could be just days away as the spending bill for the last fiscal year runs out on September 30.

Meanwhile, McCarthy is having trouble juggingling the desires of moderate Republicans and hard-right factions of the Party, let alone deal with the flurry of deviating priorities of the Democrats.

Asked in a CNN State of the Union interview on Sunday morning whether he would support booting McCarthy from his speaker role, Rep. Burchett replied: ‘That would be something I would look strongly at.’

‘If we do away with our duty that we said we’re going to do,’ Burchett told CNN host Dana Bash. ‘They’re all talking about this promise that he made with Biden a year ago… What about the promise we made to the American public that we were going to be responsible Americans?’

‘We are going to be governing over a pile of rubble if we’re not careful,’ the Tennessee Republican added. ‘Our financial ship is sinking – and the American public needs to realize, all these fancy titles, C.R.s and omnibus, to confuse the American public is not working. The curtain’s off. We need to do our duty. We should be back in Washington right now and dealing with it. But what are we doing? Well, they sent us home.’

Despite the tightening deadline, the House recessed for a long weekend instead of staying in Washington, D.C. to advance at least some of the a dozen appropriation bills set forward to avoid a shutdown.

The government is funded each year by 12 appropriations bills, each covering different agencies or groups of agencies. In recent years, some or all of these bills have been rolled into a single ‘omnibus’ package and approved together.

Any parts of the government whose appropriations have not been approved and signed into law by midnight on September 30 could shut down. With less than a week until that deadline, it’s likely the federal government will go into at least a partial shutdown.

Rep. Waters says she’s sure a few agencies will need to close their doors until appropriations are approved for the next fiscal year.

‘We’re headed for a shutdown,’ Waters said in an interview with MSNBC’s the Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart.

She added: ‘The Republican Party is in complete disarray. It is chaotic.’

‘The Speaker is on his knees begging, but he sold his soul when we had 15 roll calls that was taken in order for him to get to be speaker, and now he has no control. We’re headed for a shutdown.’

Waters was referencing the fact that the House had to hold 15 separate votes to actually approve McCarthy as Speaker when Republicans gained control of the lower chamber in the 2022 midterms.

Now, that chaos is catching up with Waters’ California colleague.

Despite months of trying to get separate factions of the Party to work together, now the lawmakers are blaming their leader in the House for the inability to get legislation passed.

Manchester United receive offers from TWO Saudi Pro League sides over Eric Bailly… with the Red Devils looking to sell before they can sign Fiorentina midfielder Sofyan Amrabat 

• Bailly could be set to leave Manchester United after seven years at the club 
• His time at Old Trafford has been plagued by injuries and inconsistent form
• United are looking to raise funds towards Fiorentina midfielder Amrabat 

By Kieran Lynch For Mailonline

Updated: 02:03 EDT, 5 August 2023

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Winkle: The Extraordinary Life Of Britain’s Greatest Pilot  

by Paul Beaver (Michael Joseph £25, 544 pp)

Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown may not be a household name, but he certainly should be, and this thumping great biography by Britain’s leading aviation historian deserves to put that right.

In an enthralling career, Brown, a naval test pilot of exceptional skill and dedication, flew more hours (well over 6,000) than anyone else in 487 different planes and helicopters, numbers which will never be beaten.

His nerves of steel and limitless bravery in World War II, and later as a senior test pilot, will never be forgotten. 

It was an amazingly varied and busy life. He had a seemingly insatiable appetite for risk and, as an indefatigable senior aviator with the Fleet Air Arm, he helped to develop planes and aircraft carriers that proved crucial to winning the war.

A superb pilot and a pioneer of highly hazardous landings on the narrow deck of aircraft carriers (he still holds the world record for the most landings), he was, if you like, Britain’s very own Top Gun. 

He was showered with awards and accolades — the King, George VI, groaned: ‘What, you again?’ as he handed him yet another gong.

A fluent German speaker as well as a huge admirer of the German people, Brown — the ‘Winkle’ was an affectionate nickname for anyone in the Royal Navy on the shortish side; Brown was 5ft 7in — played a significant role in the final moments of the war.

Brown was able to identify a disguised Heinrich Himmler, head of Hitler’s SS, when he was taken prisoner in 1945. 

He was also called in to talk to Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, who told him he thought the Battle of Britain was ‘a draw’. Goering trusted and liked ‘Winkle’ as a fellow fighter pilot.

And he was needed when Belsen was liberated, to interrogate the commandants of the Nazi death camp. He later said Irma Grese, brutal head of the women’s camp, was ‘the worst human being I have ever met’.

He was a vital part of Churchill’s plan to test all the German experimental jets captured at the end of the war.

Later, he also found time to chew the fat with Yuri Gagarin, the pioneering Soviet cosmonaut and one of the early heroes of space exploration, and became a close friend of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. 

Gagarin told him that he considered himself to be a test pilot rather than a space pilot because ‘I feel I have greater control over my fate’.

The story was similar with Armstrong, and the two men were close for nearly five decades. 

When asked if he envied the U.S. astronaut going to the moon, Brown would reply: ‘Why would I want to fly in a machine controlled by a computer? That’s not a pilot’s job. Neil achieved far greater success closer to Earth.’

True enough: among his many exploits, in 1962, Armstrong test flew the X-15 rocket plane, the fastest machine on Earth, to a world record 207,000ft above sea level, a feat Brown would have loved to emulate. 

‘We were both naval aviators, rocket ship pilots, test pilots . . .’ said Armstrong. 

He was friends with industrialists, statesmen and politicians. He even challenged Denis Healey, Britain’s new secretary of defence, in 1964.

The Labour grandee was opposed to aircraft carriers, which is where Brown had spent most of his working life, and didn’t want to start building new aircraft and ships which would have enabled the Royal Navy to challenge the growing Soviet submarine threat.

At a fractious meeting on the future of carriers, Brown could hold his tongue no longer: ‘Are you still a Communist?’ he shouted at an astonished Healey.

Such was his standing that he even made it on to the 3,000th edition of BBC Radio’s prestigious Desert Island Discs in 2014. He was 95 and revealed that he had just bought himself a new sports car. 

The presenter, Kirsty Young, said Brown was a ‘real-life daredevil’ who ‘makes James Bond look like a bit of a slacker’. Which was putting it mildly.

Brown was adopted, a fact he kept secret from more or less everyone he knew, including his wife, childhood sweetheart Lynn. 

His parents, from Edinburgh, were devout Presbyterians, and his father Robert was briefly in the Royal Air Force in 1918.

It is this that maybe led to one of the most important moments in young Eric’s life: an invitation to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and to a series of aviation events. He was already an excellent linguist and had shown a keen interest in flying. 

Somehow, Eric and his father were invited into the inner circle of the legendary Ernst Udet, the highest-scoring surviving German fighter ace of World War I, and renowned for his aerobatics around the world.

Clearly the celebrated aviator had taken a bit of a shine to the plane-crazy young Scot and offered to take him for a flight in his two-seat training biplane. 

For the next 30 minutes the crowd below was thrilled — and Brown’s stomach severely tested — as Udet showed off with a series of aerobatic feats.

As the plane was coming into land, Udet still had one trick left to play: at 100ft he turned the plane upside down and continued until the top wings were just 50ft above the ground. 

Then, he again flipped the biplane and slid on to the runway. Eric emerged grinning from the cockpit: it had been the flight of a lifetime. A love affair was born.

Udet was delighted: he slapped Eric heartily on the back and exclaimed ‘Hals-und Beinbruch’, the traditional German fighter pilot greeting to celebrate some great achievement in the air. It means, ominously, ‘break a neck and a leg’. 

To the end of his life, Eric always said that Udet was the finest aerobatic flyer the world had ever seen.

The Battle of the Atlantic, where air and sea forces protected the convoys bringing supplies to Britain, was for Churchill the most important engagement of World War II. Otherwise, the country could not continue fighting. 

It also marked a momentous period for Brown. After innumerable brushes with death and disaster — including being trapped, underwater and upside down, in the cockpit after a training accident (his diminutive stature helped him break free in the confined space) — the bulk of Brown’s active war service came flying Martlet fighters from the aircraft carrier HMS Audacity, a converted merchant ship.

Brown was on board in December 1941 when Audacity was spotted by a German U-Boat and hit by a torpedo. 

The ship was cut in half and, as it sank, Eric managed to scramble into his life jacket before jumping into the freezing ocean. He survived overnight, one of only two who managed to withstand hypothermia.

The Battle of the Atlantic was as significant for Brown’s career as it was for the Allied cause.

He had gained a high reputation for his exceptional skills: now he was to turn to something even more hazardous than combat. 

He was to be the country’s most senior test pilot, mastering difficult machines with great skill and judgment, helping the Americans, and working as a naval attache in Germany at the height of the Cold War.

Honoured and feted in his lifetime, despite a somewhat prickly nature — even he admitted he was not necessarily a ‘people person’ — Brown was a national treasure with a unique and unrepeatable story.

But he has now been given due recognition by Paul Beaver. As he says, there will never be another like ‘Winkle’.

Eric Trump could not help himself and subtly raised his fist when supporters gathered outside his mother Ivana Trump’s funeral yelled ‘Trump 2024.’

The 45th President’s youngest child, 38, was standing outside the Frank E. Campbell funeral home with several members of the Trump clan when a woman yelled, ‘we love you! Trump 2024,’ to the family. 

Although his face remained grieving, Eric Trump discreetly raised his fist as he rested his other hand on his four-year-old son’s shoulder. 

Meanwhile, the former president made a hand gesture to the small crowd, seemingly discouraging the praise at such a somber ceremony, and gave a disheartened half-smile. 

By his side, grief-stricken Ivanka Trump remained undisturbed and lovingly caressed her six-year-old son Theodore’s cheek. 

Melania Trump, who assisted the service with Barron Trump, 16, also remained by her husband’s side. 

Donald Trump kept a stoic demeanor and stood by the funeral home’s doors as his children and grandchildren left to the St. Vincent Ferrer Church, where he later joined them. 

In recent months, reports have emerged that Trump is preparing to launch a third campaign for the White House as soon as this summer while he faces a flurry of investigations into his efforts to cling to power in 2020. 

While polls show Trump remains the overwhelming favorite in a hypothetical GOP primary, analysts warn that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be on the ballot two years from now.

Ivana Trump was remembered by her children as the ’embodiment of the American dream’ at the New York City funeral on Wednesday. 

Donald Trump Jr, Eric and Ivanka all spoke at the service at St. Vincent Ferrer Church on the Upper East Side in front of 100 mourners, including former President Donald Trump, his wife Melania and their 16-year-old son Barron.  

‘Growing up, my mother didn’t tell me a woman could do anything she wanted to — she showed me. 

‘She was a trailblazer by men and women alike. My mother once told me there was nothing she couldn’t do in heels. She taught us how to spear fish and then cook what we caught. My mom expanded our minds,’ she said. 

‘She had brains; she had beauty. She was the embodiment of the American dream … She was a force of nature, could beat any man down the slopes, any woman on the runway.

‘She ruled the three of us [kids] with an iron fist but also a heart of gold,’ said Eric. 

After the service, the family is expected to travel to New Jersey for a private reception at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster. 

Former President Donald Trump did not speak at the service but he appeared afterwards on the steps of the church with the rest of the family. 

Extravagant arrangements of red roses met mourners as they stepped into the church entrance which was lit by clusters of votive candles housed in glass holders.

The large floral displays – pom poms of red roses – were staged at the end of pews down the length of the aisle.

Next to the casket was a blown up print-out of a Vanity Fair cover featuring Ivana.  

Earlier, he and Melanie slipped in through a side door with Barron, waving to supporters in the streets who yelled ‘we love you!’ before making his way inside. 

Before the service, Don Jr. and his ex-wife Vanessa comforted their crying eight-year-old Chloe while Ivanka kept a protective hand over her youngest son, six-year-old Theo.

Eric Trump and his wife Lara brought their two young children, Eric, four, and Carolina, two, who watched in silence as their grandmother’s casket was brought past them.

A glamorous woman with a penchant for younger men, skiing and dancing, Ivana’s ‘Celebration of Life’ service on Wednesday attracted socialites from New York City, Palm Beach and Europe. 

The well-heeled crowd gathered outside St Vincent Ferrer Church on Lexington Avenue in sweltering heat, clutching their funeral invitations to present to police officers and Secret Service agents at the doors. 

The church is a stone’s throw from the townhouse on 64th Street where Ivana lived for 26 years and where she was discovered at the bottom of the stairs last week. 

NYPD barricades wreathed round the block between Lexington Avenue and East 65th and 66th on Wednesday while trucks from Greenscape Designs unloaded by the side entrance. 

Officers and secret service agents consulted with each other and paced the sidewalk as members of the church choir began to arrive shortly after 11am.

The first came bearing ID and printed-out forms that were carefully studied by a waiting agent before the barricades were opened just enough to let the two middle aged women in.

Two large police trucks were parked directly opposite the church’s imposing front doors to house the photographers who trained their lenses on the church entrance. 

Bit by bit, small groups of people gathered intrigued by the measures designed to keep at bay all but those who had received an invitation, featuring an image of Ivana in her heyday on the slopes. Still people stood and stared, sweating in the heat of the Manhattan sun.

Earlier in the day, Ivanka and Jared were spotted in Central Park, taking a break from their morning jog to admire Bethesda Fountain.

Former President Donald Trump flew in to New York from Florida with former First Lady Melania earlier this week after announcing Ivana’s death with a heartfelt statement on behalf of the family. 

In another touching tribute to his former wife last night, he told long-term friend Cindy Adams, a columnist for The New York Post: ‘She was outstanding. Beautiful inside and out. We began all of it, our lives together, with such a great relationship.’

The funeral service was billed as a ‘Celebration of Life’ to honor Ivana, a Czechoslovakian skier turned model who moved to America at the dawn of the 70s and became one of New York’s most iconic first wives.

Fury at BBC’s decision to restore statue by ‘evil’ paedophile Eric Gill, who sexually abused his own daughters and his dog

By Madeleine Ross

Published: 17:05 EDT, 15 May 2023 | Updated: 01:28 EDT, 16 May 2023