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      Democratic Lawmakers Denied Entry to the Department of Education

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      In a striking display of the limits being placed on congressional authority in the first weeks of the new administration, several Democratic lawmakers were denied entry to the U.S. Department of Education on Friday.“Get out of the way,” Representative Maxine Waters of California told a man blocking more than a dozen House Democrats from the doors at the department’s Washington offices. The man, who was not identified by name, said he was a federal employee working for the department.“Did Elon Musk hire you?” asked Representative Becca Balint of Vermont.“This is an outrage,” Representative Mark Takano of California shouted as he and his colleagues were physically blocked from entering the building. “We have oversight responsibilities,” he said during the unsuccessful attempt to enter.The clash, captured on video by multiple members, was yet another episode that became a flashpoint in the intensifying battle over the administration’s efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy.“They are blocking members of Congress from entering the Department of Education! Elon is allowed in and not the people? ILLEGAL,” Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida wrote in a post.It is unclear, however, if the federal employee violated any laws by refusing entry. While members of Congress do have an oversight role over federal agencies, that power is typically exercised through hearings and enforcement of 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

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      White House Forces Showdown Over Congress’s Power of the Purse

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      The confirmation of Russell T. Vought to lead the powerful White House budget office is likely to escalate the funding fights roiling Washington and the nation.Susan Collins was a Senate intern in 1974 when Congress, in response to President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to spend on projects he opposed, passed a sweeping budget law to bar presidents from overriding lawmakers when it came to doling out dollars.The resulting law, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, is “very clear, and it re-emphasizes the power of the purse that Congress has under the Constitution,” Ms. Collins, now a 72-year-old Republican senator from Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said in an interview this week.She and her fellow appropriators in both parties will have a fight on their hands if they hope to retain supremacy in federal spending. The question of who has the final word is emerging as a central point of contention between members of Congress and the White House, a clash that is likely to escalate after the confirmation on Thursday of Russell T. Vought as the director of President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.Mr. Vought has flatly declared that he — and Mr. Trump — consider the budget act to be unconstitutional. They contend that the White House can choose what gets money and what doesn’t even if it conflicts with specific directions from Congress through appropriations measures signed into law. Others on Capitol Hill, including some Republicans, vehemently dispute that idea.The disagreement is spurring the uproar over Mr. Trump’s move to suspend trillions of dollars in federal spending while the executive branch reviews it to determine whether it complies with the his newly issued policy dictates, as well as the president’s efforts to gut the United States Agency for International Development.Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, Democrats of Virginia, at a rally in support of U.S.A.I.D. at the Capitol on Wednesday. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesWe 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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      Federal Election Commission Chair Says Trump Has Moved to Fire Her

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      Ellen L. Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, said on Thursday that President Trump had moved to fire her.Ms. Weintraub, who has served as a Democratic commissioner on the bipartisan panel since 2002, posted a short letter signed by Mr. Trump on social media that said she was “hereby removed” from the commission effective immediately. She said in an interview that she did not see the president’s move as legally valid, and that she was considering her options on how to respond.“There’s a perfectly legal way for him to replace me,” Ms. Weintraub said on Thursday evening. “But just flat-out firing me, that is not it.”The F.E.C., the nation’s top campaign watchdog agency, is made up of six commissioners, three aligned with Democrats and three with Republicans. That structure has contributed to repeated partisan deadlocks over elections investigations that scrutinize one party or another. Ms. Weintraub’s term as commissioner expired in 2007, but she has continued to serve on the board. The position of chair rotates every year. Ms. Weintraub took up the post again in January.A commissioner is removed only after a replacement is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and Ms. Weintraub said that the president did not have the power to force her off the commission before that. Mr. Trump did not name a successor to Ms. Weintraub in his letter, and it would take weeks at least for his choice for commissioner to be approved by the Senate.Trevor Potter, a former commissioner and chairman of the commission nominated by President George H.W. Bush, denounced the move to fire Ms. Weintraub in a statement, saying that doing so would violate constitutional separation of powers.“Congress explicitly, and intentionally, created the F.E.C. to be an independent, bipartisan federal agency whose commissioners are confirmed by Congress,” said Mr. Potter, who is now the president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan campaign watchdog. He added: “As the only agency that regulates the president, Congress intentionally did not grant the president the power to fire F.E.C. commissioners.”The White House did not respond to requests for comment.Ms. Weintraub was the chief architect of a novel strategy to further paralyze the commission in partisan deadlocks in order to compel enforcement of the nation’s election laws through the courts. She previously described it as a last resort after years of enforcement efforts being stymied by the three Republicans on the commission.Ms. Weintraub on Thursday also pointed to her public statements about F.E.C. complaints focused on Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns as one reason she may have earned the president’s ire.“There have been dozens of complaints filed against the president,” Ms. Weintraub said, noting that the commission has not been able to pursue them because of the 3-to-3 partisan deadlock.She added, “I have pointed that out. I’ve written about this. So I’m not really surprised that I am on their radar.” More

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      Meet Rep. Greg Casar, the Texas Millennial Trying to Rebrand the Democrats

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      “We can’t bring a policy book to a gunfight,” said Representative Greg Casar of Texas, the incoming chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.Ever since they lost big in November, Democrats have talked about how much their party needs to change.Representative Greg Casar is living it.Last week, Casar, a 35-year-old Democrat from Austin, Texas, was elected as the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, becoming the youngest person ever tapped to lead the group of liberals at a moment when his party is struggling with younger voters. He’s also the first leader from Texas, a state Democrats find perennially vexing.Casar, a former union organizer, will be tasked with leading progressives through a challenging period, one that has some Democrats blaming them for tugging the party too far to the left. He believes it was centrists like Joe Manchin, the former Democrat and departing senator from West Virginia, who caused the party to water down policies that could have galvanized working-class voters. But he says progressives need to shift their message, too.I spoke by phone with Casar this week, for the second in my series of interviews with Democrats grappling with how to move the party forward. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.JB: Why should somebody from a red state lead progressive Democrats?GC: Right now, the Democratic Party is doing really important soul-searching. As we work to regain working-class voters’ trust, as we work to bring Democrats back into the fold that decided to vote for Trump this time, I think it’s really important that progressives build a big tent.It is important for the Democratic Party leadership to be as diverse as the voters that we’re trying to bring in. We need older leadership. We need younger leadership, leadership from the South. We need leadership from the coast, but we can’t have it all from the coast.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 Argue That the 2024 Election Actually Had Its Bright Spots

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      Some leaders have begun to put a sunnier spin on the November outcome by pointing to down-ballot victories — a possible sign that Democrats may not tear down their party after all.For most Democrats, losing to Donald J. Trump was a devastating gut punch that sent them hurtling into the political abyss.But to hear some party leaders and their allies talk, Democrats had plenty of November victories to be proud of.Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, wrote a 2,600-word memo to party members last week that pointed to down-ballot triumphs and declared, “Democrats beat back global headwinds that could’ve turned this squeaker into a landslide.”Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, wrote in a statement recently that his caucus had “defied political gravity,” a reference to the newly released “Wicked” movie that was soon echoed by Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat.And further down the ballot, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee wrote in its year-end report that the party’s successes in statehouse races represented “one of the most shocking election results in modern history” — even though Democrats lost majorities in chambers in Michigan and Minnesota.These sunny-side-up views of the election serve as something of an antidote to the notion that Democrats, humbled by their 2024 mistakes, are about to begin rebuilding their party from the ground up.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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      N.C. Elections Board Rejects G.O.P. Effort to Toss 60,000 Ballots

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      The ruling comes in a dispute over a State Supreme Court race that the Democratic incumbent won by 734 votes.The North Carolina State Board of Elections rejected on Wednesday a Republican bid to throw out more than 60,000 votes in a closely contested election for a State Supreme Court seat that an incumbent Democrat won by 734 votes.Two recounts showed that Associate Justice Allison Riggs, the incumbent, had eked out a slim victory out of some 5.5 million ballots that were cast. The losing judge, Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, argued that the state’s failure to enforce technical aspects of registration and election laws should disqualify scores of thousands of voters, most or all of whom cast otherwise legal ballots.The Democrat-controlled elections board disagreed, in a series of votes that went largely along party lines. Republicans on the board called for further hearings to gather more evidence on the issues.“The idea that someone could have been registered to vote, came to vote and then has their vote discarded is anathema to the democratic system,” the board’s Democratic chairman, Allan Hirsch, said at the meeting.The chairman of the state Republican Party denounced the decision, saying that “the board’s continued efforts to engineer political outcomes for Democrats is shameful.”Judge Griffin, who currently sits on the State Court of Appeals, could appeal the ruling to a State Superior Court, kicking off a legal process that could end at the same State Supreme Court where Justice Riggs sits. Republicans hold a 5-to-2 majority on the court, which has been bitterly divided along partisan lines in recent years.The ruling on Wednesday also rejected attempts by three Republican state legislators to overturn their narrow losses on the same grounds.In a protest against the election results filed last month, Judge Griffin argued that upward of 60,000 voters should be disqualified because the state failed to enact one part of a 2004 law requiring new voters to provide a driver’s license or Social Security number when applying to vote. Voters who failed to list numbers should be ineligible, he said, even if they were unaware of the requirement.His complaint also sought to disqualify overseas voters who failed to submit a photo ID with their ballots in accordance with a new voter ID law. Those overseas voters also were not told of the requirement.Lawyers for Justice Riggs, as well as the state Democratic Party, argued that federal law bars throwing out votes for lack of a driver’s license or Social Security numbers. They also said that state law setting out the rules for overseas votes does not require a photo ID. More

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      Trump and Harris Campaigns Met to Talk Tactics. It Wasn’t Pretty.

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      Leaders of the Trump and Harris campaigns met this week to talk tactics. It wasn’t pretty.Reader, we wrote you this newsletter in a tense room in Cambridge.The walls were covered in dark-wood paneling. A U-shaped conference table was elegantly draped with maroon tablecloths and decorated with little jars of roses and calla lilies.On one side of the table sat several senior staff members for the Biden-Harris campaign who looked a little bit as if they were undergoing a collective root canal without anesthesia. On the other side sat five leading Trump campaign staff members and allies who looked a little bit as if they were holding the dentist’s drill.After every presidential election, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School invites campaign strategists for both general-election candidates — as well as key staff members from losing primary campaigns — to unload about what happened. The discussions, which take place on panels moderated by journalists, can get heated, as they did in 2016. Maybe some years the event feels cathartic. This year, though, the big word was flawless.Sheila Nix, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chief of staff, used it on Thursday as each campaign outlined over dinner what had been its main strategy, saying Ms. Harris “ran a pretty flawless campaign.” And then Chris LaCivita, one of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign managers, lobbed the word back at Team Biden/Harris during one of the panels today.“Flawless execution,” he sarcastically interjected, after Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the chair of the Biden and then the Harris campaign, labored to answer a question about the fateful debate that ended President Biden’s campaign.LaCivita’s interruption got at a central tension in the aftermath of the election, one that has grated on Democrats outside the room and became a target of mockery from the Trump staff members inside it. For a campaign that lost, the Biden-Harris team has been reluctant to admit to specific mistakes — and that pattern continued today. They admitted they had lost, but their diagnosis was more about the mood of the country than tactical errors on their part. The ultimate answer may be a combination of both factors.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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      Sen. Laphonza Butler Discusses the Election During Her Last Days in Office

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      An interview with Senator Laphonza Butler, Democrat of California, during her final week in the Senate.Laphonza Butler will have served as a senator from California for only about 15 months. But she has been a close ally of Vice President Kamala Harris for 15 years.This week, I spoke with Butler, whose long partnership with Harris — they first met when Butler was a Los Angeles-based union leader — gives her an intriguing perspective on why her party lost the presidential election and how it might rebuild.Harris hasn’t said much publicly about why she lost. In Butler’s view, some of the fault starts with President Biden, who she believes broke what was a clear campaign promise by running for re-election. But just blaming Biden isn’t enough: Democrats, she says, must stop talking and start listening. Really listening.Butler was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to fill the U.S. Senate seat left open by the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein in September 2023. Because she decided not to run for re-election, this week is her last in the body: On Monday, Representative Adam Schiff will be sworn in as the state’s newest senator.This interview was edited for length and clarity.LL: Why do you think Harris lost?LB: The American people wanted a change. They wanted a candidate who they thought represented change. And I think that might simply be it.Should Biden not have run?President Biden said initially that he was going to be a transitional leader. I think that is the expectation that people had. So in that sense, I think that he probably would have been better to remain in that posture. We can’t deny the success of his presidency. When history looks back, his presidency will be one of the most impactful in my lifetime, for sure. But I think once you sort of create an expectation with people, there is the need to hold to that.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