The Latest: Buttigieg: It's urgent to fight white supremacy
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Latest on the 2020 presidential campaign (all times local):
1 p.m.
Pete Buttigieg says he’d use the “symbolic powers of the presidency” to call out and reject anti-Semitism, saying it's urgent to confront white supremacy.
Buttigieg said at a Las Vegas town hall Tuesday that white supremacy has come closer than any foreign nation or terrorist group to destroying the United States, a reference to the Civil War fought over slavery.
He says Donald Trump’s presidency has seen the rise of bigotry that has been simmering beneath the surface. And he criticized the president’s response to deadly violence by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, when Trump said there are “very fine people on both sides.”
“I think we might live to see which side wins,” Buttigieg said. “The American dream, the American project -- or these forces of white supremacy, of white nationalism."
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9:45 a.m.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is jabbing the Democratic candidates for president, saying their health insurance proposals would hurt business owners.
At a speech in Louisville, Kentucky, on Tuesday during a conference for the Distilled Spirits Council, McConnell said he's “never seen a Democratic party like we’re confronted with today.” He said even the centrist Democrat candidates who support a “public option” are supporting government-based insurance.
He said he is “hoping the Senate will still be in Republican hands after this election. If the worst were to happen, if the president were not re-elected and the House were not to become Republican, we (the Senate) would be the firewall.”
McConnell said that any public option or “Medicare for All” proposal would not make...