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    Charles B. Rangel: A Life in Pictures

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    Charles B. Rangel died Monday at age 94, leaving behind a larger-than-life legacy in Harlem, his birthplace and longtime home, which he represented in Congress for more than four decades.To veterans, friends and Harlem residents who gathered on Monday for a Memorial Day lunch at American Legion Post 398, a few blocks from his home, he was just Charlie: a onetime member of the Legion post, a political powerhouse who always made himself accessible to his constituents.Nadine Pittman, a longtime American Legion Auxiliary member and a lifelong Harlem resident, described Mr. Rangel as “down-to-earth with the people.”“He’d take the time and talk to you,” Ms. Pittman said. “I loved him as a person.”Mr. Rangel retired as the ninth-longest continuously serving member of the House of Representatives in U.S. history. He was part of a quartet of venerable Harlem politicians known as the Gang of Four.Mr. Rangel was born and raised in Harlem and attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx until he dropped out to join the Army in 1948. He fought in the Korean War and was awarded a Bronze Star for valor after leading his all-Black unit to safety.Mr. Rangel was elected in 1966 to the State Assembly. In 1970, he was voted into Congress, unseating Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a longtime incumbent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republican Vote Against E.V. Mandate Felt Like an Attack on California, Democrats Say

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      For decades, California has been able to adopt its own emissions regulations, effectively setting the bar for carmakers nationally. And for just as long, Republicans have resented the state’s outsize influence.There is little question that California leaders already see fossil fuels as a relic of the past.At the Southern California headquarters of the state’s powerful clean-air regulator, the centerpiece art installation depicts in limestone a petrified gas station. Fuel nozzles lie on the ground in decay, evoking an imagined extinction of gas pumps.For more than half a century, the federal government has allowed California to set its own stringent pollution limits, a practice that has resulted in more efficient vehicles and the nation’s most aggressive push toward electric cars. Many Democratic-led states have adopted California’s standards, prompting automakers to move their national fleets in the same direction.With that unusual power, however, has come resentment from Republican states where the fossil fuel industry still undergirds their present and future. When Republicans in Congress last week revoked the state’s authority to set three of its mandates on electric vehicles and trucks, they saw it not just as a policy reversal but also as a statement that liberal California should be put in its place.“We’ve created a superstate system where California has more rights than other states,” Representative Morgan Griffith, who represents rural southwestern Virginia, said in an interview. “My constituents think most folks in California are out of touch with reality. You see this stuff coming out of California and say, ‘What?’”Federal law typically pre-empts state law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. But in 1967, the federal government allowed smoggy California to receive waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency to enact its own clean-air standards that were tougher than federal limits, because the state historically had some of the most polluted air in the nation. Federal law also allows other states to adopt California’s standards as their own under certain circumstances.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said last week that the state would fight in court to preserve its autonomy in setting emissions rules.Rich Pedroncelli/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the Ravages of Age Are Ravaging the Democratic Party

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      Now is the time for the Democratic Party to get serious about its oldsters problem.The furor over President Joe Biden’s cognitive issues is not going away any time soon. On Tuesday it bubbled up in the California governor’s race, when one candidate, Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles, accused two other Democrats eyeing the governor’s mansion — former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra — of participating in a “cover-up” of Mr. Biden’s fading fitness in office.“Voters deserve to know the truth. What did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” Mr. Villaraigosa fumed in a statement, spurred by tidbits from the new book “Original Sin,” which chronicles the efforts of Mr. Biden’s inner circle to conceal his mental and physical decline. Mr. Villaraigosa called on Ms. Harris and Mr. Becerra to “apologize to the American people.”Is Mr. Villaraigosa, who is 72 himself, exploiting the orgy of Biden recriminations for political ends? Probably. Does he have a point? Absolutely. Team Biden deserves much abuse for its sins. That said, last week also reminded us that the Democrats’ flirtation with gerontocracy is not confined to a single office or branch of government when, on Wednesday, the House was shaken by the death of Representative Gerry Connolly.Mr. Connolly, a 75-year-old lawmaker from Northern Virginia, had been in poor health. On Nov. 7 last year, two days after his re-election to a ninth term, he announced he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and would undergo treatments. Even so, in December he won a high-profile contest against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. The race was seen as a struggle over the future of the seniority system that has long shaped how Democrats pick committee leaders. Despite concerns about his health, seniority carried the day. On April 28, he announced that his cancer had returned and that he would not seek re-election next year. Less than a month later, he was gone.Washington being Washington, his death was greeted with sadness but also with chatter about the political repercussions in the narrowly divided House. It was not lost on Beltway pundits that if Democrats had had one more “no” vote in their deliberations over President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” Republicans would have had to sway another of their holdouts to ram it through the House last week.Mr. Connolly was the third House Democrat to die in recent months, after the deaths in March of Raúl Grijalva and Sylvester Turner, both septuagenarians. All three seats are vacant for now. Axios pointed out that eight members of Congress have died in office since November 2022. All were Democrats, with an average age of 75.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Frank Moore, a Top Aide to Jimmy Carter, Is Dead at 89

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      After serving as chief of staff when Carter was governor of Georgia, he followed him to Washington, where both men encountered a hostile political establishment.Frank Moore, who as President Jimmy Carter’s congressional liaison toiled with mixed results to sell the agenda of a self-professed outsider to veterans of Washington, died on Thursday at his home in St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 89.His son Brian confirmed the death.Mr. Carter was known for having a “Georgia Mafia” around him during his presidency. Mr. Moore was a leading member of that group, and the two men remained close until Mr. Carter’s death. According to the Georgia newspaper The Gainesville Times, Mr. Moore was the last living person to have worked for Mr. Carter for the entirety of his political career: as an aide from his days as a Georgia state senator all the way through his presidency.In Washington, the two men had what might have seemed like an ideal chance for legislative achievements. For all four years of the Carter administration, the Democrats controlled every branch of government, and from January 1977 to January 1979 they had supermajorities in the House and the Senate.Yet it was a less ideologically homogenous era for the party. The Democratic caucus in the Senate, for example, encompassed liberals like Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, staunch anti-Communists like Henry Jackson of Washington and conservative segregationists like John C. Stennis of Mississippi.These separate factions and their wily tacticians were relatively unfamiliar to Mr. Carter and Mr. Moore, who had first met far away from the nation’s capital — on a local planning panel in Georgia in the mid-1960s.In the 1970s, after Mr. Carter had been elected governor, he made Mr. Moore his chief of staff. During Mr. Carter’s presidential run, Mr. Moore, a soft-voiced 40-year-old who held the title of national finance chairman, was one of a few of Mr. Carter’s Georgia allies to set up his campaign office in Washington.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sleep-Deprived Lawmakers Stay Up All Night to Pass the ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill

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      Some napped, others pulled all-nighters, and most were bleary-eyed as they slogged to the end of a marathon House debate over President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation.As they arrived at the Capitol not long after dawn on Thursday to vote on a sweeping domestic policy bill to deliver President Trump’s agenda, members of the House of Representatives were divided by more than just partisan lines.The far more visible split was among those who had managed to get some sleep and those who hadn’t.“Here come the troops,” Representative Glenn Thompson, Republican of Pennsylvania, said cheerfully as he welcomed a bleary-eyed procession of lawmakers to the marble corridors just after 6 a.m.“Clock in on your left,” he added with a smile, gesturing toward the House chamber, where members would soon cast their votes on the wide-ranging bill overhauling key government programs.Many arrived clutching coffee cups or cans of energy drinks, struggling to stay alert after a week’s worth of all-night committee sessions capped off by an overnight floor debate that unfolded as House Republican leaders raced to deliver Mr. Trump a major victory on what he calls the “big, beautiful bill” before a self-imposed Memorial Day deadline.As party leaders delivered their final remarks, some lawmakers stood at attention, clapping and cheering the concluding arguments for and against the bill. Others slumped in peripheral seats or disappeared into the far corners of the chamber, barely awake and struggling to stay that way until the final vote.In a room near the floor, Republican leaders had laid out provisions — not the legislative kind — that would have to suffice for breakfast: dozens of boxes of pizza and a polished silver bowl of fruit snacks, pretzels and chips.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Throw Money at a Problem: Countering G.O.P. Clout Online

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      At private gatherings, strategists and donors are swapping ideas to help the party capture the digital mojo that helped President Trump win. Yes, there’s a price tag.Six months after the Democratic Party’s crushing 2024 defeat, the party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.” The proposals, the scope of which has not been previously reported, are meant to energize glum donors and persuade them that they can compete culturally with President Trump — if only they can throw enough money at the problem.Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump’s victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.The quiet effort amounts to an audacious — skeptics might say desperate — bet that Democrats can buy more cultural relevance online, despite the fact that casually right-leaning touchstones like Mr. Rogan’s podcast were not built by political donors and did not rise overnight.Wealthy donors tend to move in packs, and some jaded liberals worry that the excitement could cause money to flow into projects that are not fully fleshed out. They argue that the latest pitches on the left are coming from operatives who are hungry to meet donors’ demand for a shiny new object. In a break from the past, some of the Democrats’ new ventures are for-profit companies.And so far, there are still more ideas than hard, committed money: One Democratic operative described compiling a spreadsheet of 26 active projects related to creators, over a dozen of which are new since November. But a few of the efforts have ties to major donors that could give them liftoff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Senate Advances Crypto Regulation Bill With Bipartisan Support

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      Democrats who had sided with the rest of their party last week to block the measure over concerns that President Trump could benefit dropped their objections. They argued that regulating the industry was urgent.The Senate on Monday revived a first-of-its-kind bill to regulate parts of the cryptocurrency industry, after a small number of Democrats who had joined the rest of their party in blocking the measure joined Republicans in allowing it to advance.The vote was 66 to 32 to move forward with the legislation, which would create a regulatory framework for stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency tied to the value of an existing asset, often the U.S. dollar. Sixteen Democrats joined the majority of Republicans in support, acting over the opposition of most others in their party, who were concerned that President Trump and his family were inappropriately profiting from crypto.The vote was a victory for the cryptocurrency industry, which has made significant advances in Washington with the backing of Mr. Trump and a bipartisan group of lawmakers. It suggested that the measure would have enough support to pass the Senate and potentially make it to Mr. Trump’s desk in short order. A parallel effort in the House has faced similar backlash from Democrats, who earlier this month blocked a hearing on the legislation but are unlikely to have the votes to prevent it from passing.In the Senate, a bloc of Democratic supporters had pressed in recent days to include stronger consumer protections and transparency requirements in the legislation, as well as provisions aimed at combating money laundering and terrorism financing.But the most animating worry for Democrats was that the legislation could enable the president and his family to profit by issuing their own stablecoins. Concerns over the Trump family’s involvement in the industry intensified after reporting by The New York Times showed how a firm associated with the president had recently become one of the most influential players in the industry.In a prolonged round of bipartisan negotiations over the bill, Republicans steadfastly refused to consider adding any provision to rein in Mr. Trump’s involvement in the industry, or make any modification that could interfere with his or his family’s ability to benefit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Emil Bove, Top Justice Dept. Official, Is Considered for Circuit Court Nomination

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      Emil Bove III has emerged as a top contender to fill a vacancy on the appeals court covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, people familiar with the matter said.President Trump is considering nominating Emil Bove III, a top Justice Department official responsible for enacting his immigration agenda and ordering the purge of career prosecutors, to be a federal appeals judge, according to people familiar with the matter.Mr. Bove, 44, is a former criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump and a longtime federal prosecutor in New York. He was the Justice Department official at the center of the Trump administration’s request earlier this year to dismiss a corruption case against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams.One of the department’s most formidable and feared political appointees in the second Trump administration, he has emerged as a top contender to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, those people said.There are two vacancies on the court — one based in New Jersey and one in Delaware. It is not clear which seat Mr. Bove is under consideration for. He has a property in Pennsylvania, and some conservatives have called for moving the Delaware-based seat to Pennsylvania.The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal matter that has not yet been publicly announced. They cautioned that the timing remains unclear, and the intentions could still shift.If Mr. Bove is nominated for the post, Democrats are all but certain to use his Senate confirmation process to scrutinize his role in some of the Justice Department’s most contentious actions since Mr. Trump took office.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden’s Interview With Hur Confirms What Many Suspected

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      The former president’s halting responses to questions by a special counsel show him exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.For much of his time in the White House, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered a quick rebuttal to those raising concerns about his age: “Watch me,” he said.Yet, in the end, it may be the sound of Mr. Biden’s own voice that proves what his aides worked furiously, and spent hundreds of millions of campaign dollars, to try to keep the public from seeing with its own eyes.The five-hour-and-10-minute audio recording of a special counsel’s interview with Mr. Biden on Oct. 8 and 9, 2023, shows a president struggling to recall dates and details, whose thoughts seem jumbled as he tries to recreate events that had occurred just a few years earlier.The information in the audio recording, which Axios published on Saturday, is not new. The 258-page transcript of the interview of Mr. Biden by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents, was released in March 2024. His report set off a political firestorm in the midst of the president’s re-election campaign.But the sound of Mr. Biden’s fragile voice and unsteady responses offers a revelation of its own. The Hur tapes reveal the president exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.In the days after Mr. Hur released his report, Democrats fanned out across the news media to vouch for the president, assuring the public of their eyewitness vantage point on his deep knowledge and sure-handed command of the nation and the world. He was “sharp” and at the “top of his game,” they said almost in unison. He was “focused, impressive, formidable and effective,” as Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, one of the youngest leading Democrats, put it memorably. Biden administration officials declined to release the audio recording of his interview, asserting executive privilege.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More