Democratic Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee Says She Has Pancreatic Cancer

      by

      Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, said on Sunday that she has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer but plans to continue her work in Congress as she undergoes treatment.Ms. Jackson Lee, who at 74 has served nearly three decades in the House, said in a statement that she was undergoing a treatment plan mapped out by her team of doctors. She added that “the road ahead will not be easy” and would likely lead to occasional absences.The announcement comes as attendance in the House of Representatives has received more attention than previous years because of the historically slim majority Republicans hold over Democrats: They now hold 217 seats to Democrats’ 213. Both parties have stressed the importance of full attendance to do their best to drive their legislative agendas.In February, a Republican attempt to impeach Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, was defeated by a single vote when Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, surprised his colleagues with a dramatic arrival on the House floor in a hospital gown to cast the critical vote. The impeachment charges later passed by a single vote when another ailing member, Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and the House majority leader, returned to Washington after receiving treatment for blood cancer.Though pancreatic cancer is considered relatively rare, it has recently gained renewed attention after several high-profile people have been diagnosed and succumbed to the disease. They include Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights leader; the “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek; and the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.Treatment options for the disease can vary, and include surgical interventions, radiation therapy or chemotherapy. Often doctors will use a combination of treatments depending on the patient’s overall health and age. Ms. Jackson Lee did not disclose any information about her treatment plan but asked for supporters to keep her and her family in their prayers.“By God’s grace, I will be back at full strength soon,” she wrote.She also told her constituents in Texas’ 18th Congressional District, which includes Houston and surrounding left-leaning cities, not to expect any disruptions in the services her office provides.“As I pursue my treatments, it is likely that I will be occasionally absent from Congress, but rest assured my office will continue to deliver the vital constituent services that you deserve and expect,” she wrote in the statement.Ms. Jackson Lee is coming off an unsuccessful campaign for mayor in Houston last year. After the loss, she emerged from a Democratic primary in March with 60 percent of the vote in the solidly blue district. The general election in November is likely to be the easiest electoral challenge of the three contests. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s Harder Line on Immigration Appears to Resonate With Many Americans

      by

      As the 2024 presidential election ramps up, here is what polls say about public views on the growing number of migrants.Former President Donald J. Trump has described his plans to remove large numbers of unauthorized immigrants from the country if elected to a second term by citing the mass deportations under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.In that initiative, federal agents and law enforcement officers used military techniques such as sweeps, raids and surveillance checkpoints — as well as a blunt form of racial profiling — to round up undocumented workers and load them onto buses and boats. As many as 1.3 million people were expelled, mostly Mexican and Mexican American workers, some of whom were U.S. citizens. Critical to the initiative — named Operation Wetback, for the racial slur — was intense anti-immigrant sentiment. Officials at the time used that sentiment to justify family separations and overcrowded and unsanitary detention conditions — practices that the Trump administration would deploy decades later in its own immigration enforcement.As the 2024 presidential election heats up, some Latino advocacy and immigrant-rights groups are sounding the alarm that Mr. Trump’s tactics could amount to a repetition of a sordid chapter of American history. But recent polling shows that Mr. Trump’s position on immigration appears to be resonating. About half of Americans have said they would support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a CNN poll conducted by the research firm SSRS in January. Authorities have reported record numbers of migrant apprehensions at the southern border for three straight years, including 2.4 million apprehensions in the fiscal year that ended in September 2023. Although the numbers have dropped sharply in recent months, immigration remains an albatross for President Biden: Even some Democratic mayors have complained that they need help from the federal government to contend with the migrant populations in their cities.Americans’ views on immigration are complex and constantly changing. Here is a snapshot of where public attitudes on immigration stand now.Public support for more immigration has ebbed after rising under Trump.Mr. Trump’s restrictive approach to immigration, both legal and illegal, helped push Americans of various political stripes to support more permissive policies.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

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Announces $34.8 Million Fund-Raising Haul After Guilty Verdict

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign announced that he had raised $34.8 million in the wake of his felony conviction, shattering online records for Republicans and an early sign of the extent to which the base was rallying behind him.The campaign said in a statement that nearly 30 percent of the donors who gave online were new to the party’s online donating platform, WinRed, giving the former president an invaluable infusion of new contributions to tap in the coming months. The Trump campaign said the haul was double its previous best day ever on WinRed. And the one-day haul was nearly 10 times the $4 million Mr. Trump raised when his mug shot was released in 2023, after his booking in Atlanta for his indictment there.The figures will not be verifiable until the campaign committees and WinRed make their filings with the Federal Election Commission in the following months.Cash has been one of President Biden’s advantages so far in the race. His campaign has been advertising in key battleground states since Mr. Trump emerged as the Republican nominee while Mr. Trump has been absent from the airwaves. The post-conviction money will help Mr. Trump close the gap with the Democratic incumbent.The one-day haul was even greater than the $26 million that the Biden campaign had announced four years ago in the 24 hours after he had named Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential pick.“From just minutes after the sham trial verdict was announced, our digital fund-raising system was overwhelmed with support, and despite temporary delays online because of the amount of traffic, President Trump raised $34.8 million dollars from small-dollar donors,” said Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, in a joint statement. “President Trump and our campaign are immensely grateful from this outpouring of support from patriots across our country.” In April, Mr. Trump’s operation, working in concert with the Republican National Committee, announced that it had raised $76.2 million, beating for the first time what Mr. Biden’s shared operations with the Democratic National Committee, brought in — $51 million.The conviction appeared to be driving Democratic donations, as well, though to a much lesser extent.ActBlue, which processes online contributions for Democrats, registered three of its four biggest hours of donations in all of 2024 on Thursday evening in the wake of the conviction, topping out near $1.3 million in a single hour, according to its online ticker. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Underestimates How Much Black Americans Care About This Issue

      by

      Black voters will not only be a driving force in the 2024 elections; they will most likely be the driving force. Recent polls showed that roughly 20 percent of Black voters said they would probably vote for Donald Trump if the election were held today — the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the civil rights era. An additional 8 percent said they wouldn’t vote at all.Democratic campaign officials are rightly worried, but there’s still time for President Biden to make up the ground he has lost. One way he could do it is by talking to Black America, especially young Black voters, about a sleeper issue: the climate crisis.As an environment and climate researcher, I have found that despite the growing threat posed by climate change, politicians often seem to downplay the crisis when courting Black communities. Democratic strategists seem to see climate change as a key political issue only for white liberal elites and assume that other groups, like Black voters, are either unaware of or apathetic about it.In reality, Black Americans are growing increasingly concerned about climate change.An April poll from CBS News showed that 88 percent of Black adults said it was “somewhat” or “very important.” That makes sense: The most severe harms from climate change, from heat waves to extreme flooding, are already falling disproportionately on their communities. And it’s starting to be reflected in their political priorities. A poll conducted by the Brookings Institution last September showed that climate change is now a greater political concern for Black Americans than abortion or the state of democracy.If Democrats are serious about making inroads with some of the people they have lost in these communities, they should begin by talking to voters about what the climate crisis looks like for them. In major Democratic strongholds such as Cleveland, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, heat waves and flooding are driving up electricity bills and destroying homes. If Mr. Biden were to routinely speak about these challenges and commit to creating forums for Black Americans to discuss climate concerns with government officials, his administration could earn back some of the faith it has squandered.As a start, Mr. Biden could focus more intently on young Black people, a group passionate about climate change. Until May 19, when he gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, the president had largely refrained from direct engagement with young Black audiences on the campaign trail. When he speaks to Black voters, climate often is a footnote, or it’s mentioned in a policy buffet along with the economy, abortion and voting rights. During his speech at Morehouse, he mentioned the climate crisis explicitly only in a stray line about “heeding your generation’s call to a community free of gun violence and a planet free of climate crisis and showing your power to change the world.”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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Supreme Court Sides With Republicans Over South Carolina Voting Map

      by

      The case concerned a constitutional puzzle: how to distinguish the roles of race and partisanship in drawing voting maps when Black voters overwhelmingly favor Democrats.The Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that a lower court had deemed an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that resulted in the “bleaching of African American voters” from a district.The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., ruled in early 2023 that the state’s First Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.The panel put its decision on hold while Republican lawmakers appealed to the Supreme Court, and the parties asked the justices to render a decision by Jan. 1. After that deadline passed, the panel said in March that the 2024 election would have to take place under the map it had rejected as unconstitutional.“With the primary election procedures rapidly approaching, the appeal before the Supreme Court still pending and no remedial plan in place,” the panel wrote, “the ideal must bend to the practical.”In effect, the Supreme Court’s inaction had decided the case for the current election cycle.The contested district, anchored in Charleston, had elected a Republican every year since 1980, with the exception of 2018. But the 2020 race was close, with less than one percentage point separating the candidates, and Republican lawmakers “sought to create a stronger Republican tilt” in the district after the 2020 census, the panel wrote.The lawmakers achieved that goal, the panel found, in part by the “bleaching of African American voters out of the Charleston County portion of Congressional District No. 1.”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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Ohio Elections Official Threatens to Exclude Biden From the Ballot

      by

      The Ohio General Assembly adjourned on Wednesday without addressing an issue that the state’s top elections official said would prevent President Biden from being placed on the ballot there, escalating a partisan clash that could result in the president not being on the ballot in all 50 states in November.Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state, has said that he plans to exclude Mr. Biden from the ballot because he will be officially nominated after a deadline for certifying presidential nominees on the ballot. This is usually a minor procedural issue, and states have almost always offered a quick solution to ensure that major presidential candidates remain on the ballot.The Biden campaign is considering suing the state in order to ensure Mr. Biden is on the ballot, while also searching for some other way to resolve the issue without moving the date of the nominating convention, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations.A legal fight could be expensive and arduous. The Supreme Court recently ruled that states could not bar Mr. Trump from running for another term under a constitutional provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that prohibits insurrectionists from holding office. But it took six months of legal wrangling before the court put that issue to bed.Ohio is not considered a swing state — Mr. Trump won there with an eight-point edge in 2020 — but the Biden campaign could be drawn into a monthslong legal battle to ensure that the president is on the ballot in all 50 states.A legislative fix, which would have pushed back the certification deadline to accommodate the late date of the Democratic National Convention, stalled out this month as Republicans in the Ohio Senate tacked on a partisan measure that would ban foreign donations to state ballot initiatives. Mr. LaRose has previously said that passing the ban is the price that Democrats must pay to ensure that Mr. Biden is on the ballot, and that he would otherwise enforce the law as written.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

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Ocasio-Cortez Backs N.Y. Bill Limiting Donations to Israeli Settlements

      by

      Under the bill, New York nonprofits that provide financial support to Israel’s military or settlements could be sued for at least $1 million and lose their tax-exempt status.A long-shot effort by left-leaning New York state lawmakers to curtail financial support for Israeli settlements has drawn a big-name backer — but she doesn’t have a vote in Albany.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who rarely wades into state politics, publicly backed a bill on Monday that could strip New York nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if their funds are used to support Israel’s military and settlement activity. Her involvement underscores the extent to which the war in Gaza and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians more broadly have animated the left flank of the Democratic Party as a pivotal election approaches.“It is more important now than ever to hold the Netanyahu government accountable for endorsing and, in fact, supporting some of this settler violence that prevents a lasting peace,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said at a news conference. “This bill will make sure that the ongoing atrocities that we see happening in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the ongoing enabling of armed militias to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank, do not benefit from New York State charitable tax exemptions.”Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and State Senator Jabari Brisport introduced the bill, called the “Not on Our Dime” act, months before the Oct. 7 attack, saying it was an effort to prevent tax-exempt donations from subsidizing violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. It was widely criticized by Albany lawmakers and declared a “nonstarter.” Now its sponsors say they plan to revise the bill to prohibit “aiding and abetting” the resettling of the Gaza Strip or providing “unauthorized support” for Israeli military activity that violates international law.“There’s a newfound consciousness in our country with regards to the urgency of Palestinian human rights, and we have to propose and advocate for legislation that reflects public sentiment,” Mr. Mamdani said in a recent interview, referring to some of Israel’s violence toward people in Gaza and the West Bank as “war crimes.”The lawmakers announced the relaunch of the bill at an event at Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Bronx district office on Monday morning, surrounded by left-leaning elected officials from the City Council and State Legislature. Asked why she had chosen to endorse a state-level bill, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said that it was “politically perilous” to do so and that she had wanted to support her colleagues.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