Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio among speakers on day two of the Republican national convention Welcome to our rolling coverage of US politics. The Republican national convention is now under way with Donald Trump as the party’s official presidential nominee and Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate. Tonight’s theme is “Make America Safe Once Again”. Speakers are expected to promote Trump’s vision for extreme crackdowns against immigrants at the US border, including mass deportations and detention camps. Tonight, a number of Trump’s former foes, including Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, will address supporters at the RNC as the party strives to show unity following the attempted assassination of the former president last weekend. Haley, who ran against Trump in the primaries and said the former president was unelectable and unfit for office, had not been expected to speak and two days ago said she had not been invited. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who was passed over to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee, will also be speaking at the convention today. The former first lady, Melania Trump, is expected to attend on Thursday, when her husband will formally accept his party’s presidential nomination, NBC reported, citing a senior Trump campaign official. She has been notably absent from the campaign trail, though she issued a statement on Saturday after the former president was shot in the ear in an assassination attempt. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is quietly moving ahead with plans to formally nominate Joe Biden as the party’s presidential candidate weeks before the Democratic national convention next month, according to a report. Party chiefs are moving to kill off efforts to force Biden from the party’s presidential ticket by rushing ahead with plans for convention delegates to vote electronically in a week-long roll call starting in late July, Axios reported. Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate, said he is interested in filling the Ohio Senate seat occupied by JD Vance, if the Trump-Vance ticket wins in the presidential election this November and Vance, a US senator from Ohio, has to relinquish his seat. He was a peer of Vance’s at Yale Law School. Robert F Kennedy Jr, running for the White House as an independent candidate, has apologized to Donald Trump after footage of a private phone call between the two was leaked online. In the video of RJK Jr standing with his phone talking to Trump, the former president can be heard discussing the assassination attempt on him at the weekend. Trump described the bullet that grazed his ear as feeling like “the world’s largest mosquito”. Trump can also be heard criticizing vaccines, with RFK Jr being known as a vehement anti-vaxxer, and telling Kennedy that “we’re going to win” the election in November. Follow along for live coverage. Several Republican Senate candidates in key battleground states -- including Kari Lake of Arizona, Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania and Eric Hovde of Wisconsin -- will deliver remarks at the Republican convention tonight. The candidates will play a crucial role in Republicans’ plan to regain control of the upper chamber of Congress, and Senate Democrats’ campaign arm is already out with a statement attacking tonight’s speakers. “Republicans’ roster of flawed Senate recruits offers something to repel every kind of voter,” said David Bergstein, communications director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Nothing these candidates say on stage will change the fact that their ever-growing list of scandals, baggage and vulnerabilities make them unelectable in their states.” A recent set of polls conducted by YouGov showed Democratic Senate candidates consistently running ahead of Joe Biden in battleground states, buoying the party’s hopes of maintaining their narrow majority in the upper chamber. Biden as reportedly consulted with Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School following the supreme court’s July ruling that Trump has “absolute immunity” for official acts. The Post confirmed that Tribe had spoken to Biden, but he did not confirm details of their discussion. Tribe did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for confirmation and comment. In a Guardian opinion piece, Tribe endorsed supreme court reforms: My main takeaways from this shameful decision are three: first, there is a compelling need for supreme court reform, including a plan to impose an enforceable ethics code and term limits and possibly create several added seats to offset the way Trump as president stacked the court to favor his Maga agenda; second, we should start planning for a constitutional amendment of the sort I have advocated in the New York Times to create a federal prosecutorial arm structurally independent of the presidency; and third, we need a constitutional amendment adding to article I, section 9’s ban on titles of nobility and foreign emoluments a provision expressly stating that nothing in the constitution may be construed to confer any immunity from criminal prosecution by reason of a defendant’s having held any office under the United States – and a provision forbidding use of the pardon power to encourage the person pardoned to commit a crime that the president is unable to commit personally. Amending the constitution to address problems the supreme court creates needn’t take long. When the court prevented Congress from lowering the voting age to 18 in state along with federal elections in Oregon v Mitchell, it took under seven months for us to adopt the 26th amendment to repair that blunder. And the court can overturn its own egregiously wrong decisions quickly, as it did in 1943 when it overturned a 1940 ruling letting states force children to salute the flag against their religious convictions in West Virginia state board of education v Barnette. As Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote: “Wisdom too often never comes, so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.” Trump v United States isn’t just unwise. It’s a betrayal of the constitution. Overturning it should be an issue in this November’s election. Biden is planning to announce his endorsement for supreme court term limits and other major reforms of the country’s highest courts, according to a report from the Washington Post. The president is expected to soon call for legislation to establish an enforceable ethics code for the supreme court, and will weigh whether to call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad immunity for presidents and other constitutional officeholders, the Post reports, citing anonymous sources. The report has not yet been independently verified by the Guardian. If Biden does announce support for such reforms, it would be a radical shift for a president who has previously resisted calls from progressive lawmakers to reform the supreme court. JD Vance’s close ties to the fossil fuels industry and eagerness to please Donald Trump pose a major threat to Americans and the planet, environmental advocates have warned. The Republican nominee for vice-president, a wealthy venture capitalist who was elected to the US Senate in 2022, went from voicing concern about the climate crisis before running for political office to voting to roll back environmental protections and to repeal landmark climate legislation boosting renewables and electric vehicles. “The selection of JD Vance as a potential vice-president is a dangerous step backward for climate action in the United States,” said Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for Fossil Free Media’s Make Polluters Pay campaign. “Senator Vance’s record shows a clear pattern of prioritizing fossil fuel interests over the urgent need to address the climate crisis.” The Ohio senator – who once was a strident critic of Trump – has received $340,289 from the oil and gas industry in campaign contributions since 2019 and is among the top industry benefactors so far this election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, a campaign finance watchdog site. “JD Vance not only flip-flopped on supporting Trump, he flip-flopped on climate,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, communications director for the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led environmental justice group. “Vance will empower Donald Trump to enact even worse damage on our planet in a second Trump administration.” The Ohio senator has questioned the role of humans and fossil fuels in global heating, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus. “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man,” Vance told the American Leadership Forum during the Senate race, as he sought Trump’s endorsement. In his home state, Vance has become an outspoken champion of hydraulic fracking, a highly polluting process that involves injecting water, sand and toxic chemicals into the ground to extract hard-to-reach oil and gas. On Tuesday, Republicans are expected to focus their attention on crime and immigration, as the theme of the day will be “Make America Safe Once Again”. Immigration reform has become a rallying cry for Republicans, with Trump and his allies repeatedly and falsely accusing Biden of supporting “open borders”. Trump has previously called for the deportation of 15 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants if he wins re-election, and Vance voiced his own support for mass deportation in an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday. “We have to deport people,” Vance told Hannity. “We have to deport people who broke our laws who came in here. And I think we need to start with the violent criminals.” Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio among speakers on day two of the Republican national convention Welcome to our rolling coverage of US politics. The Republican national convention is now under way with Donald Trump as the party’s official presidential nominee and Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate. Tonight’s theme is “Make America Safe Once Again”. Speakers are expected to promote Trump’s vision for extreme crackdowns against immigrants at the US border, including mass deportations and detention camps. Tonight, a number of Trump’s former foes, including Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, will address supporters at the RNC as the party strives to show unity following the attempted assassination of the former president last weekend. Haley, who ran against Trump in the primaries and said the former president was unelectable and unfit for office, had not been expected to speak and two days ago said she had not been invited. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who was passed over to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee, will also be speaking at the convention today. The former first lady, Melania Trump, is expected to attend on Thursday, when her husband will formally accept his party’s presidential nomination, NBC reported, citing a senior Trump campaign official. She has been notably absent from the campaign trail, though she issued a statement on Saturday after the former president was shot in the ear in an assassination attempt. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is quietly moving ahead with plans to formally nominate Joe Biden as the party’s presidential candidate weeks before the Democratic national convention next month, according to a report. Party chiefs are moving to kill off efforts to force Biden from the party’s presidential ticket by rushing ahead with plans for convention delegates to vote electronically in a week-long roll call starting in late July, Axios reported. Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate, said he is interested in filling the Ohio Senate seat occupied by JD Vance, if the Trump-Vance ticket wins in the presidential election this November and Vance, a US senator from Ohio, has to relinquish his seat. He was a peer of Vance’s at Yale Law School. Robert F Kennedy Jr, running for the White House as an independent candidate, has apologized to Donald Trump after footage of a private phone call between the two was leaked online. In the video of RJK Jr standing with his phone talking to Trump, the former president can be heard discussing the assassination attempt on him at the weekend. Trump described the bullet that grazed his ear as feeling like “the world’s largest mosquito”. Trump can also be heard criticizing vaccines, with RFK Jr being known as a vehement anti-vaxxer, and telling Kennedy that “we’re going to win” the election in November. Follow along for live coverage.