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      House Republicans present Mayorkas impeachment articles to Senate

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      House Republicans on Tuesday formally presented articles of impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to the Senate, part of the party’s attempt to force an election-year showdown with the Biden administration over immigration and border security.In a ceremonial procession, 11 House Republican impeachment managers carried the two articles of impeachment across the rotunda of the US Capitol, where they informed the Senate they were prepared, for the first time in American history, to prosecute a sitting cabinet secretary for “willful and systemic refusal” to enforce border policies and a “breach of public trust”.Constitutional scholars, including conservative legal experts, have said the Republicans’ impeachment case is deeply flawed and fails to meet the high bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors” outlined in the constitution.Democrats, who control the Senate, have made clear their intention to quickly dispense with the articles, arguing that the politically charged proceedings amount to little more than a policy dispute with the administration. A two-thirds majority is needed to win an conviction in the Senate, an impossible threshold if all of the Democrats are united in favor of dismissing the charges against Mayorkas, who retains the support of Joe Biden.In February, House Republicans bypassed skepticism within their own ranks and unified Democratic opposition to approve by a one-vote margin two articles of impeachment against the secretary, who they have made the face of the Biden administration’s struggle to control record migration at the US-Mexico border.“Impeachment should never be used to settle a policy disagreement,” the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on Tuesday, adding: “Talk about awful precedents. This would set an awful precedent for Congress.”Schumer has said the Senate would convene on Wednesday as a “court of impeachment” and senators will be sworn in as jurors. Patty Murray, the Senate president pro tempore, a Democrat of Washington, presided over the chamber as the House homeland security chair, Mark Green of Tennessee, read the charges aloud.Schumer said he hoped to deal with the matter as “expeditiously as possible”. But Republicans are pressuring Democrats to hold a full trial.“We must hold those who engineered this crisis to full account,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said in a statement on Monday after signing the articles of impeachment. “Pursuant to the constitution, the House demands a trial.”Johnson initially delayed the delivery of the articles to focus on funding legislation to avert a government shutdown. Then the transmission was delayed again after Senate Republicans asked for more time to strategize ways to ensure a Senate trial.In remarks on Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell charged that it would be “beneath the Senate’s dignity to shrug off our clear responsibility” and not give thorough consideration to the charges against Mayorkas.“I will strenuously oppose any effort to table the articles of impeachment and avoid looking the Biden administration’s border crisis squarely in the face,” the Senate minority leader said.Mayorkas, the first Latino and first immigrant to lead the agency, has forcefully defended himself throughout the process, writing in a January letter to House Republicans: “Your false accusations do not rattle me.”Hours before the articles were delivered to the Senate, Mayorkas was on Capitol Hill, pressing Congress to provide his agency with more resources to enforce border policies and to pass legislation updating the nation’s outdated immigration laws.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our immigration system, however, is fundamentally broken,” he told members of the House homeland security committee on Tuesday morning. “Only Congress can fix it. Congress has not updated our immigration enforcement laws since 1996 – 28 years ago. And, only Congress can deliver on our need for more border patrol agents, asylum officers and immigration judges, facilities and technology.”Republicans seized on the opportunity to assail Mayorkas, blaming him for the humanitarian crisis at the country’s southern border.“The open border is the number one issue across America in poll after poll and that is exactly why this committee impeached you,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman, one of 11 House Republicans tapped to serve as an impeachment manager.Several Republican senators have expressed deep skepticism about the House’s impeachment effort, former secretaries of homeland security as well as conservative legal scholars have denounced the Republicans’ case against Mayorkas as deeply flawed and warned that it threatens to undermine one of Congress’s most powerful tools for removing officials guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”.A group of Republican senators are contemplating ways to slow-walk the process, suggesting they will deliver lengthy speeches and raise time-consuming procedural inquiries to keep the attention on immigration, one of Biden’s greatest political vulnerabilities.Americans broadly disapprove of the president’s handling of the border, now a top concern for many voters. Ahead of the 2024 election, Republicans have assailed Biden over the border while Donald Trump, the party’s likely presidential nominee, has again put immigration at the center of his campaign.An attempt to pass a bipartisan border bill – negotiated by Mayorkas and touted as the most conservative piece of immigration legislation in decades – was derailed by Republicans at the behest of Trump, who did not want Biden to notch a victory on an issue that plays to the former president’s political advantage.Biden has also asked Congress to approve requests for more border patrol agents and immigration court judges, but Republicans have refused, saying Biden should use his executive authority to stem the flow of migrants. Biden has said he is mulling a far-reaching executive action that would dramatically reduce the number of asylum seekers who can cross the southern border. More

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      Mike Johnson says he won’t resign as Republican anger grows over foreign aid

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      Defiant and determined, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, pushed back on Tuesday against mounting Republican anger over his proposed US aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other allies, and rejected a call to step aside or risk a vote to oust him from office.“I am not resigning,” Johnson said after a testy morning meeting of fellow House Republicans at the Capitol.Johnson referred to himself as a “wartime speaker” of the House and indicated in his strongest self-defense yet he would press forward with a US national security aid package, a situation that would force him to rely on Democrats to help pass it, over objections from his weakened majority.“We are simply here trying to do our jobs,” Johnson said, calling the motion to oust him “absurd … not helpful.”Tuesday brought a definitive shift in tone from both the House Republicans and the speaker himself at a pivotal moment as the embattled leader tries, against the wishes of his majority, to marshal the votes needed to pass the stalled national security aid for Israel, Ukraine and other overseas allies.Johnson appeared emboldened by his meeting late last week with Donald Trump when the Republican former president threw him a political lifeline with a nod of support after their private talk at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. At his own press conference on Tuesday, Johnson spoke of the importance of ensuring Trump, who is now at his criminal trial in New York, is re-elected to the White House.Johnson also spoke over the weekend with Joe Biden as well as other congressional leaders about the emerging US aid package, which the speaker plans to move in separate votes for each section – with bills for Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific region. He spoke about it with Biden again late on Monday.It is a complicated approach that breaks apart the Senate’s $95bn aid package for separate votes, and then stitches it back together for the president’s signature.The approach will require the speaker to cobble together bipartisan majorities with different factions of House Republicans and Democrats on each measure. Additionally, Johnson is preparing a fourth measure that would include various Republican-preferred national security priorities, such as a plan to seize some Russian assets in US banks to help fund Ukraine and another to turn the economic aid for Ukraine into loans.The plan is not an automatic deal-breaker for Democrats in the House and Senate, with leaders refraining from comment until they see the actual text of the measure, due out later on Tuesday.House Republicans, however, were livid that Johnson will be leaving their top priority – efforts to impose more security at the US-Mexico border – on the sidelines. Some predicted Johnson will not be able to push ahead with voting on the package this week, as planned.Representative Debbie Lesko, a Republican from Arizona, called the morning meeting an “argument fest”.She said Johnson was “most definitely” losing support for the plan, but he seemed undeterred in trying to move forward despite “what the majority of the conference” of Republicans wanted.When the speaker said the House GOP’s priority border security bill HR 2 would not be considered germane to the package, Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and a chief sponsor, said it was for the House to determine which provisions and amendments are relevant.“Things are very unresolved,” Roy said.Roy said Republicans want “to be united. They just have to be able to figure out how to do it.”The speaker faces a threat of ouster from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, the top Trump ally who has filed a motion to vacate the speaker’s office in a snap vote – much the way Republicans ousted their former speaker, Kevin McCarthy, last fall.While Greene has not said if or when she will force the issue, and has not found much support for her plan after last year’s turmoil over McCarthy’s exit, she drew at least one key supporter on Tuesday.Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, rose in the meeting and suggested Johnson should step aside, pointing to the example of John Boehner, an even earlier Republican House speaker who announced an early resignation in 2015 rather than risk a vote to oust him, according to Republicans in the room.Johnson did not respond, according to Republicans in the room, but told the lawmakers they had a “binary” choice” before them.The speaker explained they either try to pass the package as he is proposing or risk facing a discharge petition from Democrats that would force a vote on their preferred package – the Senate-approved measure. But that would leave behind the extra Republican priorities. More

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      The US isn’t just reauthorizing its surveillance laws – it’s vastly expanding them | Caitlin Vogus

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      The US House of Representatives agreed to reauthorize a controversial spying law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last Friday without any meaningful reforms, dashing hopes that Congress might finally put a stop to intelligence agencies’ warrantless surveillance of Americans’ emails, text messages and phone calls.The vote not only reauthorized the act, though; it also vastly expanded the surveillance law enforcement can conduct. In a move that Senator Ron Wyden condemned as “terrifying”, the House also doubled down on a surveillance authority that has been used against American protesters, journalists and political donors in a chilling assault on free speech.Section 702 in its current form allows the government to compel communications giants like Google and Verizon to turn over information. An amendment to the bill approved by the House vastly increases the law’s scope. The Turner-Himes amendment – so named for its champions Representatives Mike Turner and Jim Himes – would permit federal law enforcement to also force “any other service provider” with access to communications equipment to hand over data. That means anyone with access to a wifi router, server or even phone – anyone from a landlord to a laundromat – could be required to help the government spy.The Senate is expected to vote on the House bill as soon as this week, and if it passes there, Joe Biden is likely to sign it. All Americans should be terrified by that prospect.Section 702 is supposedly a foreign intelligence tool that allows the US government to surveil the communications of non-US citizens abroad without a warrant. But as many civil liberties groups have pointed out, intelligence agencies like the FBI also use it as a warrantless spying tool against Americans. The FBI abused its authority under the law no fewer than 300,000 times in 2020 and 2021, according to a ruling from a Fisa court judge. In arguing for the reauthorization of Section 702 late last year, Turner, chair of the House intelligence committee, shockingly suggested in a closed-door briefing that the law could be used to spy on Americans protesting against the war in Gaza.It’s not supposed to be that way. In most cases, the fourth amendment requires the government to have a court-approved warrant to obtain an American’s communications. But intelligence agencies have used Section 702 as a loophole that allows them to vacuum up and comb through communications between an American and a foreigner who can be targeted under the law – all without a warrant.The House didn’t just fail to reform Section 702. It voted to grant intelligence agencies expansive new surveillance powers. The Turner-Himes amendment would allow them to deputize ordinary Americans and businesses as government spies. When privacy advocates raised alarms about the Stasi-like powers this would create, lawmakers like Himes brushed them off without a substantive response. The proposed expansion deserves an explanation. The US government has a long history of abusing its existing surveillance powers. It would be naive to think it wouldn’t abuse new ones.While the Turner-Himes amendment lists some business types that are excepted from the requirement to help spy – like dwellings and restaurants – an almost limitless number of entities that provide wifi or just have access to Americans’ devices could be roped into the government’s surveillance operations. Using the wifi in your dentist office, hiring a cleaner who has access to your laptop, or even storing communications equipment in an office you rent could all expose you to increased risk of surveillance.The Turner-Himes amendment would also make it harder to push back on abusive surveillance practices, including those targeting first amendment rights. Take, for example, the surveillance of journalists. Big tech companies may sometimes resist government orders to spy on news outlets. They command armies of lawyers, receive Section 702 orders frequently, and have a commercial incentive to at least appear to care about their customers’ privacy concerns. But what hope could a news organization have that its cleaning crew, for instance, will want to take on the federal government on its behalf?The FBI’s abuses of Section 702 violate Americans’ privacy and often threaten their first amendment rights. A declassified report from 2023, for example, revealed that the FBI had used Section 702 to investigate Black Lives Matter protesters. Section 702 has also been used to spy on American journalists, weakening their first amendment right to report the news by undermining their ability to speak with foreign sources confidentially – something reporters must do frequently.In response to these and other abuses, many reformers argue that Section 702 should be reauthorized only with real reforms that would rein in government spying, such as requiring the government to get a warrant before it can access Americans’ communications. Johnson himself initially attempted to weaken Fisa’s surveillance provisions in an effort to satisfy the hardline rightwingers in his caucus and Donald Trump. He did not succeed. The House voted to reauthorize Section 702 without adding a warrant requirement.The fact that Section 702 has been used so often against the exercise of first amendment rights – including those of journalists – makes it both shocking and inexplicable that so many news outlets continue to support it. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune have all published editorials in recent days cheering the demise of the warrant requirement and urging Congress to reauthorize the law. But the House vote wasn’t just a reauthorization. It was a drastic, draconian expansion of the government’s surveillance powers.Some of these editorials scoff at Trump’s recent nonsensical social media post criticizing Section 702 and frame the anti-surveillance crowd as a ragtag bunch of fringe rightwingers, ignoring that lawmakers and civil liberties organizations across the political spectrum opposed extending Fisa without reforming it. They also ignore the real threats Section 702 poses to Americans’ privacy rights and first amendment interests, especially if a future administration is determined to surveil and chill its opponents.Thankfully, it’s not too late for the Senate to prevent these future abuses. In the face of the pervasive past misuse of Section 702, the last thing Americans need is a large expansion of government surveillance. The Senate should reject the House bill and refuse to reauthorize Section 702 without a warrant requirement. Lawmakers must demand reforms to put a stop to unjustified government spying on Americans. More

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      Mike Johnson unveils complex plan for Israel and Ukraine aid as pressure rises

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      Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, has unveiled a complicated proposal for passing wartime aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, rejecting pressure to approve a package sent over by the Senate and leaving its path to passage deeply uncertain.The Republican speaker huddled with fellow GOP lawmakers on Monday evening to lay out his strategy to gain House approval for the funding package. Facing an outright rebellion from conservatives who fiercely oppose aiding Ukraine, Johnson said he would push to get the package to the House floor under a single debate rule, then hold separate votes on aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and several foreign policy proposals, according to Republican lawmakers.However, the package would deviate from the $95bn aid package passed by the Senate in February, clouding its prospects for final passage in Congress.Johnson has faced mounting pressure to act on Joe Biden’s long-delayed request for billions of dollars in security assistance. It’s been more than two months since the Senate passed the $95bn aid package, which includes $14bn for Israel and $60bn for Ukraine.The issue gained new urgency after Iran’s weekend missile and drone attack on Israel. Congress, however, remains deeply divided.Johnson has declined to allow the Republican-controlled House to vote on the measure. The senate passed it with 70% bipartisan support and backers insist it would receive similar support in the House, but Johnson has given a variety of reasons not to allow a vote, among them the need to focus taxpayer dollars on domestic issues and reluctance to take up a Senate measure without more information.As the House has struggled to act, conflicts around the globe have escalated. Israel’s military chief said on Monday that his country will respond to Iran’s missile strike. And Ukraine’s military head over the weekend warned that the battlefield situation in the country’s east has “significantly worsened in recent days”, as warming weather has allowed Russian forces to launch a fresh offensive.Meanwhile, Joe Biden, who is hosting Petr Fiala, the Czech prime minister, at the White House, called on the House to take up the Senate funding package immediately. “They have to do it now,” he said.Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, also put pressure on Johnson and pledged in a letter to lawmakers to do “everything in our legislative power to confront aggression” around the globe, and he cast the situation as similar to the lead-up to the second world war.“The gravely serious events of this past weekend in the Middle East and eastern Europe underscore the need for Congress to act immediately,” Jeffries said. “We must take up the bipartisan and comprehensive national security bill passed by the Senate forthwith. This is a Churchill or Chamberlain moment.”In the Capitol, Johnson’s approach could further incite the populist conservatives who are already angry at his direction as speaker.Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, is threatening to oust him as speaker. As she entered the closed-door Republican meeting on Monday, she said her message to the speaker was: “Don’t fund Ukraine.”The GOP meeting was filled with lawmakers at odds in their approach to Ukraine: Republican defense hawks, including the top lawmakers on national security committees, who want Johnson to finally take up the national security supplemental package as a bundle, are pitted against populist conservatives who are fiercely opposed to continued support for Kyiv’s fight.On the right, the House Freedom Caucus said Monday that it opposed “using the emergency situation in Israel as a bogus justification to ram through Ukraine aid with no offset and no security for our own wide-open borders”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Johnson Says the House Will Vote on an Israel Bill in the Coming Days

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      Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday after Iran’s overnight attack on Israel that the House would vote in the coming days on aid for Israel, and he suggested that aid for Ukraine could be included in the legislation.“House Republicans and the Republican Party understand the necessity of standing with Israel,” Mr. Johnson said on Fox News, noting that he had previously advanced two aid bills to help the U.S. ally. “We’re going to try again this week, and the details of that package are being put together. Right now, we’re looking at the options and all these supplemental issues.”U.S. funding for both Israel and Ukraine has languished in Congress; Mr. Johnson initially refused to take up a $95 billion aid package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan passed by the Senate, and the Senate refused to take up a House Republican proposal that conditioned aid to Israel on domestic spending cuts.In recent weeks, Mr. Johnson has repeatedly vowed to ensure that the House moves to assist Ukraine. He has been searching for a way to structure a foreign aid package that could secure a critical mass of support amid stiff Republican resistance to sending aid to Kyiv and mounting opposition among Democrats to unfettered military aid for Israel.But the attacks from Iran have ratcheted up the pressure on Mr. Johnson to bring some kind of package to the floor this week, potentially forcing him to make a decision he has been agonizing over for weeks.He left it unclear on Sunday whether the legislation he said the House would advance this week would also include aid for Ukraine.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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      Lawmaker Presses Loro Piana on Reports of Exploiting Indigenous Workers in Peru

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      A freshman congressman is demanding answers from the fashion house Loro Piana, which sources wool from his native Peru and faces accusations of exploiting workers there. A $9,000 designer sweater made out of the ultrarare fur of a South American animal called a vicuña is not exactly a typical area of focus for a member of the U.S. Congress.But when Representative Robert Garcia, a first-term California Democrat and the first Peruvian-born person to serve in the House, saw reports that the luxury design house Loro Piana was not fairly compensating Indigenous workers in Peru who source the rare wool in some of its priciest knit clothing, he decided to use his position to make some noise.“As the first Peruvian American member of Congress and co-chair of the Congressional Peru Caucus, I write regarding concerning reports about the sourcing of vicuña wool by Loro Piana, a subsidiary of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton,” he wrote to company executives last month.He demanded that the fashion house — whose products including shirts, scarves and coats can cost anywhere from $500 to $30,000 — explain how it could raise its prices so steeply while steadily reducing the amount it was paying the people who harvest the raw materials for it.“While Loro Piana’s prices have increased, the price per kilo for fibers paid to the Lucanas community has fallen by one-third in just over a decade; and the villages’ revenue from the vicuña has fallen 80 percent,” Mr. Garcia wrote.A member of the Totoroma community in Puno, Peru, during a vicuña roundup and shearing in 2021.Carlos Mamani/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe 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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      Johnson Floats Voting on Senate Ukraine Bill, With Conservative Policies as Sweeteners

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      The Republican speaker has weighed bringing up a $95 billion Senate-passed bill to aid Ukraine and Israel in tandem with a separate package geared toward mollifying G.O.P. critics.Shortly after congressional leaders met with Japan’s prime minister in Speaker Johnson’s ceremonial office in the Capitol on Thursday morning, the conversation turned to Ukraine aid.Mr. Johnson was in the middle of another agonizing standoff with the ultraconservatives in his conference, after they had blocked legislation to extend a major warrantless surveillance law that is about to expire. His chief Republican antagonist, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, had intensified her threat to oust him. But on Ukraine, he offered his counterparts an assurance.“We’re going to get this done,” he vowed.His comments, confirmed by multiple people familiar with the meeting, were consistent with what Mr. Johnson has been saying for weeks, both publicly and privately: that he intends to ensure the House will move to assist Ukraine, a step that many members of his party oppose.Even as right-wing Republicans have sought to ratchet up pressure on their speaker, Mr. Johnson has continued to search for a way to win the votes to push through a Ukraine aid. He is battling not only stiff resistance to the idea among House Republicans, but also mounting opposition among Democrats to sending unfettered military aid to Israel given the soaring civilian death toll and humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.Mr. Johnson has yet to make any final decisions on how he plans to structure a new round of American military assistance to Ukraine.Some Republicans have increasingly expressed interest in structuring the aid as a loan, an idea that Mr. Johnson has publicly floated and that former President Donald J. Trump previously endorsed. Mr. Trump raised again the idea again after a private meeting with Mr. Johnson at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Friday.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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      What is FISA, and What Does It Mean for U.S. Surveillance and Spying?

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      Under Section 702, the government is empowered to collect, without a warrant, the messages of Americans communicating with targeted foreigners abroad.The House on Friday passed a two-year reauthorization of an expiring warrantless surveillance law known as Section 702, reversing course after the bill collapsed days earlier when former President Donald J. Trump urged his allies to “kill” it.But disappointing privacy advocates, the House narrowly rejected a longstanding proposal to require warrants to search for Americans’ messages swept up by the program.Here is a closer look.What is Section 702?It is a law that allows the government to collect — on domestic soil and without a warrant — the communications of targeted foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans.Under that law, the National Security Agency can order email services like Google to turn over copies of all messages in the accounts of any foreign user and network operators like AT&T to intercept and furnish copies of any phone calls, texts and internet communications to or from a foreign target.Section 702 collection plays a major role in the gathering of foreign intelligence and counterterrorism information, according to national security officials.Why was Section 702 established?After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush secretly ordered a warrantless wiretapping program code-named Stellarwind. It violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, which generally required a judge’s permission for national security surveillance activities on domestic soil.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