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      Republicans’ topsy-turvy take on aid for Ukraine reveals party in thrall to Trump

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      Nearly a decade ago, as Russian troops entered the Crimean peninsula, congressional Republicans were in uproar, blaming Moscow’s land grab on what they claimed was a retreat from American leadership by then president Barack Obama. Loudest among the Republican critics was the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who assailed Obama as a “weak, indecisive leader”.In a pre-dawn vote on Tuesday, Graham joined the majority of Senate Republicans in opposing a foreign aid package that would rush wartime assistance to Ukraine as it approaches the second anniversary of Russia’s full invasion.It was a shocking – if not entirely surprising – turn for one of the chamber’s leading defense hawks and a steadfast Russia critic. But these days Graham has another distinction: he is one of Donald Trump’s most loyal allies on Capitol Hill, where the former president – and likely Republican nominee – has been whipping up opposition to Ukraine’s war effort.Just 22 Republican senators broke with Trump to approve the aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other US allies – yet another sign of how thoroughly the former president’s America First vision has supplanted the party’s consensus toward internationalism and interventionism.There has long been an isolationist strain among hardline Republicans who contend that investment in foreign entanglements risks bringing the US closer to war and diverts money away from domestic challenges. But then Trump came to power and sidelined the defense hawks, ushering in a dramatic shift in Republican sentiment toward America’s allies and adversaries.Nearly half of Republicans and right-leaning independents said the US was providing too much aid to Ukraine, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center conducted late last year. This share rose sharply from the early stages of the war following Russia’s invasion in February 2022.In his statement on Monday night, Graham insisted that he still supported Ukraine but said unless and until lawmakers turn the $95bn military assistance package into a “loan instead of a grant”, he would oppose it.It echoed comments Trump made over the weekend, in an all-caps social media post addressed to the US Senate, in which he said foreign aid should be structured as a loan, not a “giveaway”. Later in a campaign speech, Trump rattled American allies in Europe when he claimed that he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who did not pay enough to maintain the security alliance.But in Washington, most Republicans dismissed or downplayed the remark.“I was here when he was president. He didn’t undermine or destroy Nato,” senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who sponsored legislation to block a US president from unilaterally withdrawing from Nato, told reporters. The senator, who built a reputation as a defense hawk, voted against the military assistance measure on Tuesday.The bill, which includes $60bn for Ukraine, divided the Senate Republican leadership. From the Senate floor, Senator Mitch McConnell, the top Republican, delivered increasingly urgent pleas for his conference to rise to the occasion and support America’s allies, even after his plan to tie border security to foreign aid collapsed, torpedoed by Trump’s opposition.“This is about rebuilding the arsenal of democracy and demonstrating to our allies and adversaries alike that we’re serious about exercising American strength,” McConnell said. “American assistance with these efforts is not charity. It’s an investment in cold, hard US interests.”McConnell’s deputy, John Thune of South Dakota, voted for the measure, while John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No 3 Senate Republican, opposed it. Barrasso has endorsed Trump for president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a floor speech, Senator Rand Paul, who led the effort to delay the measure, accused McConnell, a fellow Republican from Kentucky, of collaborating with Democrats to “loot the Treasury”. He panned McConnell’s argument that bolstering Ukraine’s defense was critical to American national security as “ludicrous”.The Ohio senator JD Vance, another Trump loyalist, claimed the effort to replenish Ukraine’s war chest was a “plot” by the Republican establishment to “stop the election of Donald Trump”. Meanwhile, some arch-conservatives suggested it was time for McConnell to step down.Now the bill goes to the House, where the speaker, Mike Johnson, must tread carefully not to meet the same fate as his prematurely deposed predecessor. Johnson indicated that he was unlikely to bring the measure to the floor for a vote because it lacks border enforcement measures. But just last week he announced that he would refuse to bring a version of the bill that included a border security deal because the Trump-allied hardliners who hold outsized power over his thin majority were wary of handing Joe Biden anything that resembled a political victory.House Democrats and the remaining pro-Ukraine House Republicans are casting about behind the scenes for a solution. But there are many political and logistical hurdles to overcome before a majority bloc not accustomed to working together in the tribal House comes together to circumvent Johnson – and by extension Trump.“If it were to get to the floor, it would pass,” congressman Andy Biggs, a member of the hardline House Freedom caucus and a staunch opponent of the aid package, told a conservative radio host on Tuesday morning. “Let’s just be frank about that.”But until the bill reaches Biden’s desk, Biggs’s admission is cold comfort to American allies waiting for Congress to act. More

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      US House to vote again on impeaching Biden’s homeland security secretary

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      The US House of Representatives could vote on Tuesday on whether to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, on explicitly political charges related to deteriorating conditions at the southern border and Republican attempts to capitalise on the issue in an election year.Tuesday’s vote has been threatened by winter weather conditions, forcing Republicans to first hold a lower-stakes vote on a different issue to find out if they have enough members present to impeach Mayorkas. The impeachment vote would follow an embarrassing failure for the House speaker, Mike Johnson, last week, when Republican absences and defections contributed to defeat in a first vote.If Republicans are successful, the effort to remove Mayorkas – for allegedly refusing to enforce immigration law – would move to the Senate, where it has next to no chance of producing a conviction.Last weekend, Mayorkas told NBC that Republicans’ allegations against him were “baseless … and that’s why I’m really not distracted by them.“I’m focused on the work of the Department of Homeland Security. I’m inspired every single day by the remarkable work that 216,000 men and women in our department perform on behalf of the American public.”Conditions at the border with Mexico, where numbers of undocumented migrants remain high, “certainly” represented “a crisis”, Mayorkas said.But he said the Biden administration did not “bear responsibility for a broken system. And we’re doing a tremendous amount within that broken system. But fundamentally, Congress is the only one who can fix it.”Last week, Republicans in the Senate abandoned and sank an immigration and border deal, reached after extensive negotiations with Democrats, after Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee, made his opposition clear.After the failure of the first Mayorkas impeachment vote, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, a Republican who voted no and was subjected to intense pressure to change his mind, said he would not seek re-election in November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGallagher, until now a rising star in the party, said: “The proponents of impeachment [of Mayorkas] failed to make the argument as to how his stunning incompetence meets the impeachment threshold.”Such a purely political impeachment, he added, would “set a dangerous new precedent that will be weaponized against future Republican administrations”.Another Republican who opposed the first vote, Tom McClintock of California, said his party was seeking to “stretch and distort the constitution in order to hold the administration accountable for stretching and distorting the law”. More

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      US Senate moves forward $95bn Ukraine and Israel aid package

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      After many setbacks and much suspense, the Senate appeared on track this week to approve a long-awaited package of wartime funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, as Republican opponents staged a filibuster to register their disapproval over a measure they could not block.The Senate voted 66-33, exceeding a 60-vote margin, to sweep aside the last procedural hurdle and limit debate on the measure to a final 30 hours before a vote on passage that could come on Wednesday.Senators had worked through the weekend on the roughly $95bn emergency spending package, which cleared a series of procedural hurdles as it moved toward final passage. The chamber voted on the legislation on Monday night following hours of debate and a talking filibuster led by Republican senator Rand Paul and joined by a coterie of Donald Trump’s allies in the chamber.On Monday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said the weekend votes demonstrated “beyond doubt that there’s strong support” for advancing the foreign aid package.Schumer said: “These are the enormously high stakes of the supplemental package: our security, our values, our democracy. It is a down payment for the survival of western democracy and the survival of American values.”He continued: “The entire world is going to remember what the Senate does in the next few days. Nothing – nothing – would make Putin happier right now than to see Congress waver in its support for Ukraine; nothing would help him more on the battlefield.”If the bill passes the Senate as expected, the bill would next go to the Republican-led House, where next steps are uncertain. Though a bipartisan majority still supports sending assistance to Ukraine, there is a growing contingent of Republican skeptics who echo Trump’s disdain for the US-backed war effort.“House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border,” read a statement from House speaker Mike Johnson.The Republican speaker said the package lacked border security provisions, calling it “silent on the most pressing issue facing our country”. It was the latest – and potentially most consequential – sign of opposition to the Ukraine aid from conservatives who have for months demanded that border security policy be included in the package, only to last week reject a bipartisan proposal intended to curb the number of illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border.“Now, in the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters,” Johnson said. “America deserves better than the Senate’s status quo.”The measure includes $60bn in funding for Ukraine, where soldiers are running out of ammunition as the country seeks to repel Russian troops nearly two years after the invasion. Much of that money would go toward supporting Ukraine’s military operations and to replenishing the US supply of weapons and equipment that have been sent to the frontlines. Another $14bn would go to support Israel and US military operations in the region. More than $8bn would go to support US partners in the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan, as part of its effort to deter aggression by China.It also allots nearly $10bn for humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, where nearly a quarter of residents are starving and large swaths of the territory have been ravaged.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNot included in the package is a bipartisan border clampdown demanded by Republicans in exchange for their support for the foreign aid package. But after months of fraught negotiations, Republicans abandoned the deal following Trump’s vocal opposition to the border-security measure.Though its Republican defenders argued that it was the most conservative immigration reform proposal put forward in decades, Trump loyalists on Capitol Hill deemed it inadequate amid record levels of migration at the US southern border. Others were more explicit, warning that bipartisan action to address the situation could help Joe Biden’s electoral prospects in the November elections.Border security is top of mind for many Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom disapprove of the president’s handling of the issue.After the Senate failed to advance the border security measure, Schumer stripped it out and moved ahead with a narrowly-tailored foreign aid package. In floor speeches on Monday, several Republican senators lamented the absence of border enforcement policies, though all had voted to reject the bipartisan immigration deal last week.“Open the champagne, pop the cork! The Senate Democrat leader and the Republican leader are on their way to Kyiv,” Paul said, launching the filibuster. He continued: “They’re taking your money to Kyiv. They didn’t have much time – really no time and no money – to do anything about our border.” More

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      Congressman Who Broke With G.O.P. on Mayorkas Vote Will Not Seek Re-election

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      Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, once seen as a rising star, made the announcement just days after voting against impeaching the homeland security secretary.Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, announced on Saturday that he would not run for re-election, just days after breaking with his party to cast a decisive vote against impeachment charges for Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary.Mr. Gallagher, who is in his fourth congressional term, is joining dozens of other lawmakers who have decided to call it quits. But the timing of his decision was striking nonetheless, coming on the heels of his impeachment vote — which had already earned him a primary challenger — and his relative youth, compared with others who are planning to retire from Congress.“Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old,” Mr. Gallagher, 39, said in a statement, adding that he had made the decision not to run “with a heavy heart.”Mr. Gallagher, a Marine Corps veteran and a former congressional staffer, was an influential voice in the House when it came to matters of national security and the military. He was particularly outspoken about the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine, as well as cybersecurity, having co-chaired an intergovernmental commission on the issue early in his congressional career.Last year, when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy selected him to lead a new committee tasked with investigating threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party, he was the youngest Republican wielding a panel chairman’s gavel.Mr. Gallagher also caught the eye of Senate Republican recruiters, who attempted last year to convince him to run against Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin. But Mr. Gallagher decided against that bid, announcing at the time that he would seek re-election to the House.His standing in the G.O.P. appeared to have shifted earlier this week, however, after he became the third House Republican to refuse to back the impeachment effort against Mr. Mayorkas. The charges, of refusing to uphold the law and breaching the public trust, were widely dismissed by legal experts as not meeting the constitutional threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors.The effort to impeach Mr. Mayorkas failed by just one vote.“The proponents of impeachment failed to make the argument as to how his stunning incompetence meets the impeachment threshold,” Mr. Gallagher said in a statement this week defending his decision, arguing that impeaching Mr. Mayorkas would “set a dangerous new precedent that will be weaponized against future Republican administrations.”The House is expected to try to impeach Mr. Mayorkas again next week, once Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House’s No. 2 Republican who has been absent while undergoing treatment for blood cancer, returns to Washington.Mr. Gallagher did not say precisely what he planned to do next, though he indicated that his next role would also be in the national security space.“Though my title may change, my mission will always be the same,” he said in a statement. “Deter America’s enemies and defend the Constitution.” More

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      Republican lawmaker who voted against impeaching Mayorkas to retire

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      A Republican congressman who broke with his party colleagues and refused to vote to impeach Democratic homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is retiring from his elected office, he announced Saturday.The announcement from Wisconsin representative Mike Gallagher that he won’t run for a fifth term means his time spearheading the US House’s pushback against the Chinese government will come to an end in early 2025.Gallagher’s refusal to impeach Mayorkas drew anger from his fellow Republicans, who have been looking to oust Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary as a way to punish the president over his administration’s handling of the US-Mexico border crisis.A House impeachment vote Tuesday fell just one vote short. Gallagher was one of three Republicans who opposed impeachment.His fellow Republicans surrounded him on the House floor in an attempt to change his mind, but he refused to switch his vote.Record numbers of people have been arriving at the southern border as they flee countries around the globe. Many claim asylum and end up in US cities that are ill-prepared to provide for them while they await court proceedings. The issue is a potent line of attack for Donald Trump as he works toward retaking the presidency from Biden in November’s elections.Gallagher wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion column published after the vote that impeachment wouldn’t stop migrants from crossing the border and would set a precedent that could be used against future Republican administrations. But the impeachment vote’s failure was a major setback for Republicans.Party officials in Wisconsin in recent days mulled whether Gallagher should face a primary challenger.Gallagher did not mention the impeachment vote in a statement announcing his retirement, saying only that he doesn’t want to grow old in Washington.“Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old,” Gallagher said. “And so, with a heavy heart, I have decided not to run for re-election.”He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the backlash over the impeachment vote did not play a role in his decision.“I feel, honestly, like people get it, and they can accept the fact that they don’t have to agree with you 100%,” he told the newspaper, adding later in the interview: “The news cycle is so short that I just don’t think that stuff lasts.”Gallagher, a former Marine who grew up in Green Bay, has represented north-eastern Wisconsin in Congress since 2017. He spent last year leading a new House committee dedicated to countering China.During the committee’s first hearing, he framed the competition between the US and China as “an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century”.Tensions between the US and China have been high for years. Both sides enacted tariffs on imports during Trump’s presidency. Beijing’s opaque response to Covid-19, aggression toward Taiwan and the discovery of a possible spy balloon floating across the US only intensified lawmakers’ intent to do more to block China’s government.Gallagher was one of the highest-profile Republicans considering a run for the US Senate this year against incumbent Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin. But he abandoned the idea in June, saying he wanted to focus on China during his fourth term in Congress.
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Hospitalized lawmakers showing up for last-minute votes? Not as rare as you’d think

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      The US House of Representatives was on edge on Tuesday night: would the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, be impeached? The Republicans’ mission looked likely to succeed, just barely, when a lone Democrat in a wheelchair and a hospital outfit emerged and put a stop to it.That man was Al Green – not that Al Green, but a representative from Texas who’d taken an Uber from the hospital to make his views known. In a line perfectly tailored to a scene the New York Times compared to a political thriller, Green told the paper: “I came because it was personal.” He had undergone emergency abdominal surgery days before and was back in his hospital bed when he spoke to the reporter, Kayla Guo.It’s not the first time the US Capitol has played host to such a dramatic vote. Lawmakers have always had to balance their physical health with the demands of the job – and on occasions from the passage of the Civil Rights Act to the near-death of Obamacare, the results have been momentous.Green was the latest politician to make such a memorable entrance. “I had to cast this vote because this is a good, decent man whose reputation should not be besmirched,” he said of Mayorkas, who Republicans, in a partisan effort, accused of purposely failing to enforce immigration laws. Signs suggest they may attempt the process again – but for now, Green’s last-minute rush to the chamber prevented the first impeachment of a cabinet member since 1876.A comparable moment in recent memory came in 2017. After he was diagnosed with brain cancer, John McCain returned to the Senate to weigh in on the future of the Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare, travelling across the country from his home in Arizona. And that wasn’t the most surprising part: with Republicans only slightly outnumbering Democrats in the Senate, 52-48, there was little wiggle room in their effort to undo the health law.McCain’s return could have helped his party undermine legislation that members had been whining about for almost a decade – and which McCain himself opposed. But his views on the “skinny” repeal were more complicated. On 25 July, he voted to begin debate on the bill but expressed his reservations about it, calling it a “shell of a bill” and condemning the process that created it.A few nights later, with a scar over his left eyebrow, he told reporters to “wait for the show”. When it came time to vote, he gave a thumbs down, casting a decisive vote that salvaged the healthcare reform he had campaigned against; gasps could be heard in the chamber. “I was thanked for my vote by Democratic friends more profusely than I should have been for helping save Obamacare,” he later wrote. “That had not been my goal.” Still, the healthcare act lived on.Another historic piece of US legislation, the Civil Rights Act, benefited from the heroics of a single lawmaker in poor health. In 1964, the law had passed the House and was facing a Senate vote – but 18 senators were determined to filibuster it. Senator Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat, said he and his allies would “resist to the bitter end” efforts “to bring about social equality” in the south. The chamber needed 67 votes to end the filibuster, and Senator Clair Engle, a California Democrat, was in the hospital with a brain tumor.View image in fullscreenOn the day of the vote, as Colin Son recounted in the journal Neurosurgical Focus, an ambulance carried Engle to the chamber. In a wheelchair, he struggled to speak; instead, he pointed to his eye, mouthing the word “aye”. Some colleagues were said to be in tears. The vote counted, and the measure passed, allowing the bill to move forward. Engle returned to the chamber for the last time nine days later, on 19 June, when the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act.Other instances of rushed trips to the Capitol have had somewhat lower stakes. In 1985, for instance, Pete Wilson of California arrived in the Senate in a wheelchair and a bathrobe at 1.32am after getting his appendix out. According to a Times report, he asked colleagues: “What was the question?” and then voted to pass Ronald Reagan’s 1986 budget, prompting cheers. And across the ocean, Westminster has seen its share of politicians overcoming illness to cast votes: in 2018, for instance, the Labour MP Naz Shah discharged herself from a hospital and traveled four hours to London for a vote on a Brexit amendment. “I was standing next to Laura Pidcock [the Labour MP for North West Durham], who is eight months pregnant and in agony,” she told the Guardian at the time.Shah called the voting process archaic; similar arguments have been made about the US system. Last year, several House Democrats introduced a bill to allow voting by proxy, which was permitted early in the pandemic but shut down when Republicans took control of the House. “Of course we’re going to try to get here no matter what, but we have medical emergencies, just like our constituents do,” Representative Deborah Ross told CQ Roll Call.Then again, some perfectly healthy US lawmakers have done the opposite. On multiple occasions, senators have had to be essentially hauled on to the chamber floor.In 1988, the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms was ordered to arrest no-shows – it was the only way to halt a filibuster. According to the chamber’s official history, he “led a ‘posse of six Capitol police officers’ in a post-midnight search” of their offices. Senator Robert Packwood, an Oregon Republican, had jammed a chair against his door, but officers finally managed to get him to the chamber.“By prearrangement, Senator Packwood collapsed into the arms of the officers who then transported him feet-first into the Chamber,” the history says. “On his feet again, he announced: ‘I did not come fully voluntarily.’” More

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      Who Will Replace George Santos? Takeaways From the Pilip-Suozzi Debate

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      Five days before a special House election in New York, Tom Suozzi and Mazi Pilip traded blows in the race’s lone debate.The candidates vying to replace George Santos in a special House election squared off on Thursday in an exceedingly bitter debate, tangling over the roots of New York City’s migrant crisis, abortion rights and, at one point, the definition of “assault weapon.”The face-off on Long Island was the only chance for voters to see the candidates debate, and each sought to smear the other at close range. Mazi Pilip, the Republican nominee, claimed that her opponent, Tom Suozzi, “opened the border.” He called her wholly unprepared for Congress.The Feb. 13 election is considered a tossup. A victory by Mr. Suozzi would narrow Republicans’ paper-thin House majority at a time when they are already struggling to govern. If he loses, it could signal trouble for Democrats ahead of November’s elections.Here are five takeaways from the debate, hosted by News 12.The migrant crisis is dominating the race.New York is almost 2,000 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, but it is clear the race has become a referendum on the influx of migrants trying to get across it. The only question is who will take the blame in the eyes of frustrated voters.Ms. Pilip, a Nassau County legislator who immigrated from Israel, offered spare details about her own prescriptions to secure the border (she supports a wall and more border agents). But she repeatedly accused Mr. Suozzi, a moderate former three-term congressman, of siding with President Biden and far-left members of the House “squad” to encourage illegal immigration.“Tom Suozzi opened the border. Tom Suozzi funded the sanctuary city. Tom Suozzi kicked I.C.E. from Nassau County,” she said. Addressing Mr. Suozzi, she added, “This is absolutely you; you have to own it.”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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      Leading Republican Steve Scalise back at work after blood cancer treatment

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      The Republican House majority leader, Steve Scalise, will return to work in Washington after receiving autologous stem cell treatment for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.Scalise announced he was diagnosed with the disease in August. His cancer treatment represents the second serious health scare for the representative since he took office to represent Louisiana in 2008. In 2017, Scalise was one of four people shot during practice for a congressional baseball game.“Leader Scalise has successfully completed his autologous stem cell treatment and has been medically cleared to resume travel,” a statement from Scalise’s office said on Thursday.“He is in complete remission and will be returning to Washington next week for votes. He is thankful for his positive prognosis, and for the support of his medical team, family, colleagues and fellow Louisianans.”Autologous stem cell treatment uses stem cells from a person’s own body to restore the body’s ability to create normal blood cells, and is often used in treatment for blood cancers such as myeloma, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.Despite controversy tied to a past speech at a white supremacist conference (a speech he later called a “mistake”) and ties to racist leaders such as fellow Louisianan David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, Scalise has risen through the Republican ranks.After being shot, Scalise said the experience strengthened his support for gun rights and the second amendment. In part, he said, because he was “saved by people who had guns”. The gunman who shot Scalise during baseball practice was shot and killed by police. More