A dirty political fight roiled Washington on Tuesday as allies and officials rallied around Donald Trump and his controversial travel ban, while opponents escalated their tactics to thwart his administration at every turn.



Republicans defended the president’s ban on entry for people from seven Muslim-majority countries and his decision to fire the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, on Monday night for refusing to enforce it. Democrats boycotted votes on two of Trump’s cabinet nominees and braced for a long battle over his imminent pick for the supreme court.

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With both sides digging in, there seemed little prospect of an end to what former president Barack Obama once described as the “rancour and suspicion” of hyper-partisan politics in Washington. Trump campaigned on a pledge to fix a broken system.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Tuesday found that 49% either “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the executive order, with 41% “strongly” or “somewhat” against. However, 41% felt the US was setting a bad example in how to combat terrorism, versus 38% who said the opposite. And 56% disagreed that the country should “welcome Christian refugees, but not Muslim ones”.

On Tuesday morning Senate Democrats delayed the consideration of Tom Price, Trump’s pick for health secretary, and Steven Mnuchin, his choice for treasury secretary. Democrats refused to attend votes on the committees tasked with reviewing the two nominees, who rank among Trump’s more controversial selections, saying Price and Mnuchin had misled them in their confirmation hearings.

Democrats demanded that Price, a congressman from Georgia, and Mnuchin, a former partner of Goldman Sachs, appear before the committees for further questioning. The theatrics amounted to the only options at the Democrats’ disposal to block Trump’s cabinet appointees from their position in the Senate minority.



Republicans, who in 2013 boycotted a vote on Obama’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, lashed out at Democrats.



“I’m very disappointed in this kind of crap,” said Orrin Hatch, the Utah senator who chairs the Senate finance committee. “This is the most pathetic thing I’ve seen in my whole time in the United States Senate … I think they ought to stop posturing and acting like idiots.”



Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, branded the Democrats’ actions “embarrassing”. He told reporters at his daily briefing: “The mere idea that they’re not showing up to hearings is outrageous.”

Sixteen of Trump’s nominees for government agencies are still awaiting confirmation, Spicer said, whereas at the same stage in 2009, Obama only had nine yet to be approved.

It remained unclear when the votes might be rescheduled. Democrats could continue to stall indefinitely under rules requiring that at least one of them be present for the relevant committees to hold a vote.

Elaine Chao received confirmation from the Senate to become transportation secretary on Tuesday, however. The Senate energy and natural resources committee quickly approved former Texas governor Rick Perry as energy secretary by 16-7, and Representative Ryan Zinke to head the interior department by 16-6. They too await confirmation by the full Senate.

Also on Tuesday New York joined a lawsuit against Trump’s executive order brought by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the Urban Justice Center and others.

Eric Schneiderman, the New York state attorney general, described the order as “unconstitutional, unlawful, and fundamentally un-American”.

Later on Tuesday the state of Virginia became a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed over an incident on Saturday where two Yemeni brothers arrived at Dulles airport from east Africa with residency green cards, planning to join their father in Michigan, but were blocked by agents enforcing the travel ban and put on a flight back the way they had come. The lawsuit seeks to restore the immigration rights of the brothers and up to 60 others whom lawyers say suffered a similar fate at Dulles at the weekend.

Washington became the first state to sue the White House on Monday. Amazon, which is headquartered in Washington, pledged support.

At 8pm ET – prime time on US television – Trump is due to announce his nominee for the supreme court to fill a vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia almost a year ago.

Still bitter over Republicans’ refusal to consider Obama’s judicial nominee, Merrick Garland, last year, Democrats are now in a position to use the same tactics against Trump’s choice for the country’s highest court.

Since the death of Scalia, the eight-member court has steered clear of some major issues. Split between conservatives and liberals, it would swing back to the right if as expected Trump makes a conservative choice. Environmental regulation, union rights and healthcare could all be in the balance.

Jeff Hauser, director of Revolving Door Project, drew comparisons with the controversial 1991 hearing which saw the nominee accused of sexual harassment. “This is going to be the biggest nomination fight since Clarence Thomas – and that’s if the nominee comes through the door scrubbed and clean as possible,” he said

“Given the bad blood between the parties, the protests, the growing resistance to Trump, we’re going to see more activism, more money spent around this nomination. Records are going to be set by every metric.”

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The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, has vowed to fight “tooth and nail” to keep the vacancy open if Trump nominates a justice who is considered outside the “mainstream”.

Polarisation has intensified since Trump’s executive order, signed on Friday, that denies refugees, immigrants and travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries entry to the US, indefinitely closes US borders to refugees fleeing the humanitarian crisis in Syria, and prioritises refugee claims “on the basis of religious-based persecution”, a rule widely interpreted as being intended to favour Christians.

Paul Ryan, the House speaker, defended the move but conceded that it could have been better implemented. “The president has a responsibility to the security of this country,” he told reporters. “It’s regrettable that there was confusion on the rollout of this. No one wanted to see people with green cards or special immigrant visas, like translators, get caught up in all of this.”

The Republican said he spoke at length with US homeland security secretary, John Kelly, and was “confident that he is, on a going forward basis, going to make sure that things are done correctly”.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Kelly also gave full backing to Trump, insisting this is a “temporary pause” to allow a better review the refugee vetting system. “This is not, I repeat, not a ban on Muslims,” he said.

Kelly denied reports that the executive order had been rushed out without his knowledge. He had seen “at least two” drafts of the order, he said, although he did not see the final one that Trump signed on Friday. “We did know the executive order was coming. We had people involved in the general drafting of it. Clearly this whole approach was what candidate Trump talked about for a year or two … We knew it was coming, it wasn’t a surprise it was coming, and then we implemented it.”

But Kelly also said a figure pushed repeatedly by the White House on Monday – that only 109 travellers were “slowed down” on Saturday – was now out of date and too low.



Kevin McAleenan, acting commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection agency, admitted that communication broke down over the weekend, leading to some individuals being detained for hours and conflicting advice given to airlines. “I think it’s fair to acknowledge that communications, publicly and inter-agency, haven’t been the best in the rollout of this process,” he said.

McAleenan said 872 refugees will be allowed into the US this week despite the suspension of the refugee programme. He said this was allowed for under the order, in instances where refugees were ready for travel and stopping them would cause “undue hardship”.



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Amid a tremendous backlash in America and around the world, on Monday night Trump removed Yates after she told justice department lawyers not to defend his executive order. The White House said she had “betrayed” the department by refusing to enforce a legal order that was “designed to protect the citizens of the United States”.

At his briefing on Tuesday Spicer described Yates’s actions as “bewildering as well as defiant”. He said it was “a dereliction of duty” and backed the provocative use of the word “betrayal” in the White House statement announcing Yates had been fired.

David Perdue, senator for Georgia, Yates’s home state, backed the decision. “Like many Georgians, I have the utmost respect for Sally Yates, but I fully support President Trump’s right to make this type of personnel change in light of the fact that he is trying to protect Americans,” he said.

“Refusing to defend the United States is irresponsible. Under President Obama, our federal agencies were extremely politicised, and President Trump is trying to stop this trend. It is refreshing to see President Trump take action immediately instead of acting like a typical politician.”

Trump drafted in Dana Boente, US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, to replace Yates as acting attorney general. The president’s official appointee, anti-immigration hardliner Senator Jeff Sessions, is yet to be confirmed by the Senate.



At a Senate judiciary committee hearing for Sessions on Tuesday, Democrat Patrick Leahy said: “What we saw last night illustrates what is at stake with this nomination. The president’s decision to fire acting attorney general Sally Yates is shameful. And his accusation that she ‘betrayed the Department of Justice’ is dangerous. The attorney general is the people’s attorney, not the president’s attorney. He or she does not ‘wear two hats’.”

Analysts compared the firing to the 1973 “Saturday night massacre” when Richard Nixon sacked the special Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, prompting the resignation of Elliot Richardson as attorney general.

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show: “I think it’s historic. It certainly reminded me immediately of the Saturday night massacre. There are many differences but one is how quickly this has happened in the Trump presidency.

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“It’s as if history is being collapsed into a black hole and everything is happening faster than the speed of light.”

Spicer also denied to reporters that the travel ban was a “ban”, telling them plenty of others were entering the United States and “a ban means people can’t get in”. Trump described the decision as “a ban” himself in a tweet on Monday but Spicer insisted that the president was simply “using the words the media is using”.



Meanwhile Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, joined criticism of the order. “I have travelled across this country many times; it’s a very big country and we have a lot of room,” said the woman who arrived as a refugee from Czechoslovakia when her ambassador father defected to America. “I do think that it can be proven that refugees make very good citizens and work very hard.”

Albright was among more than 100 former US foreign policy and national security officials from both parties who signed an open letter urging Trump to withdraw his executive order, which she described as “a really badly handled operation”.

Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies thinktank in Washington, she added: “What has bothered me about this is that the Trump administration seems to have been unprepared for an executive order like this, in which there was not any kind of consultation with the departments that were really involved … which I think, if I might say, kind of reflects generally how the transition has worked.”

Additional reporting by Joanna Walters in New York