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      Mark Green, Who Oversaw Mayorkas Impeachment, Will Not Seek Re-election

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      Representative Mark Green, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, announced he would retire from Congress, adding to the number of powerful G.O.P. chairmen who will not return.Representative Mark Green, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, announced on Wednesday that he would not run for re-election, just a day after the Tennessee Republican oversaw the impeachment of Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary.Mr. Green, a deeply conservative former Army Ranger medic who was elected in 2018, said that he had accomplished what he had come to Washington to do.“At the start of the 118th Congress, I promised my constituents to pass legislation to secure our borders and to hold Secretary Mayorkas accountable,” Mr. Green said in a statement. “Today, with the House having passed H.R. 2 and Secretary Mayorkas impeached, it is time for me to return home.”Mr. Green, 59, is the third committee chairman who would have been eligible to lead their panel next year to say they will leave Congress at the end of the year. Also this week, Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, 54, the chairwoman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, 39, who heads the select committee on China, announced they would not run for re-election.Taken together, they are striking decisions for relatively young members of Congress who won the gavels of powerful committees — coveted positions that lawmakers often wait years to receive — only a year ago.“This place is so broken, and making a difference here is just — you know, just it feels like a lot of something for nothing,” Mr. Green said in an interview with Axios.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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      Mike Johnson declares ‘no need for public alarm’ after national security warning, reports say – as it happened

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      House speaker Mike Johnson has reportedly declared “no need for public alarm” regarding House intelligence committee chair Mike Turner’s national security warning. “Steady hands are at the wheel, we’re working on it, there’s no need for alarm,” Johnson told media on Wednesday afternoon.His comments come after Turner issued a statement that Congress had been made aware of a “serious national security threat” and called on Joe Biden to “declassify all information” related to it.During a press briefing, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said he planned to meet with members of the House intelligence committee on Thursday.“We scheduled a briefing for the for House members of the Gang of Eight tomorrow,” said Sullivan. “I am a bit surprised that Congressman Turner came out publicly today in advance of a meeting on the books for me to go sit with him alongside our intelligence and defense professionals tomorrow.”Turner’s concerns are reportedly related to Russian military capabilities.Thanks for following along today, live blog readers. As we close up for the day, here’s a quick summary of today’s developments in U.S. politics – including the fallout from Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment and cryptic warnings about a looming national security threat:
      Democrats reacted to the Tuesday vote to impeach Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas – the first time in nearly 150 years that a Cabinet secretary has been impeached. “History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship,” said Joe Biden, of the impeachment.
      The impeachment effort will almost certainly die in the senate, which would require a supermajority vote to impeach following a trial that begins in two weeks. Democratic senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has called the impeachment a “sham.”
      House intelligence committee chair Mike Turner warned in a cryptic statement of a national security threat, calling on Biden to “declassify all information related to this threat”. During a press briefing, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, declined to directly address the nature of the alleged threat and said he had “scheduled a briefing for House members of the Gang of Eight” on Thursday.
      The Washington Post reported that the security threat had been identified using surveillance permitted under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), a controversial provision that allows the government to surveil non-citizens abroad – but has also led to the surveillance of Americans’ phone calls, texts and emails. House Republicans are pushing to enact a version of Fisa that does not include a warrant requirement for the FBI – a reform critics of the legislation have long advocated.
      A Republican activist charged for his involvement in the fake elector scheme in Michigan testified today that he didn’t knowingly try to unlawfully subvert the results of the 2020 election. He was charged with creating a false public record.
      Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement on the topic of the alleged national security threat that the “most urgent national security threat facing the American people right now is the possibility that Congress abandons Ukraine and allows Vladimir Putin’s Russia to win”.The Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh reports on Nato’s secretary general responding to Donald Trump’s disparaging comments about Nato countries: Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general, has accused Donald Trump of undermining the basis of the transatlantic alliance as he announced that 18 Nato members were expected to beat the target of spending more than 2% of GDP on defence.It was the second rebuke by the Nato chief to the Republican frontrunner in less than a week, reinforced by a declaration that Germany was among the countries planning to spend over the threshold for the first time in a generation.“We should not undermine the credibility of Nato’s deterrence,” Stoltenberg said on Wednesday as he responded to comments made by Trump at a campaign rally at the weekend. “Deterrence is in the mind of our adversaries,” he added.On Saturday, Trump caused outrage in Europe when he said he would “not protect” any Nato member that had failed to meet the 2% target – and added that he would even encourage Russia to continue attacking them.A day later, Stoltenberg said Trump’s rhetoric “puts American and European soldiers at increased risk”, while on Wednesday, before a meeting of defence ministers, the normally diplomatic secretary general returned to the theme, arguing: “We should leave no room for miscalculation or misunderstanding in Moscow.”The Washington Post reports that the alleged security threat that House intelligence committee chairman Mike Turner warned about in a cryptic statement today was likely identified using surveillance permitted under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), a controversial provision that allows the government to spy on non-citizens living abroad – and has also led to the surveillance of Americans’ phone calls, texts and emails.House Republicans are pushing for a new version of the bill that does not include a warrant requirement for the FBI – a key reform critics of the legislation have pushed for.House speaker Mike Johnson has said there is “no need for public alarm” regarding the unconfirmed national security threat.In a statement, the chair of the Senate select committee on intelligence, Mark Warner, and the vice-chair of the committee, Marco Rubio, said the committee “has the intelligence” that House intelligence committee chair Mike Turner referred to in a Wednesday statement warning of a national security threat.According to the statement, the committee “has been rigorously tracking this issue from the start”. The statement warned against “potentially disclosing sources and methods that may be key to preserving a range of options for US action”.CNN has reported the alleged threat is related to Russian military capabilities.Nikki Haley blasted Donald Trump for his comments on her husband, who is currently deployed overseas. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly puts Haley’s remarks in context:Donald Trump is “unhinged” and “diminished”, said Nikki Haley, the former president’s last rival for the Republican presidential nomination, on Wednesday.“To mock my husband, Michael and I can handle that,” the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador told NBC News’s Today, referring to comments by Trump about Michael Haley, a national guard officer deployed in Djibouti.“But you mock one member of the military, you mock all members of the military … Before, when he did it, it was during the 2016 election, and everybody thought, ‘Oh, did he have a slip? What did that mean?’ The problem now is he is not the same person he was in 2016. He is unhinged. He is more diminished than he was.”In the 2016 campaign, Trump mocked John McCain, an Arizona senator and former nominee for president who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Having avoided the draft for that war, Trump was expected to pay a heavy political price but did not, going on to attract controversy in office for allegedly deriding those who serve.House speaker Mike Johnson has reportedly declared “no need for public alarm” regarding House intelligence committee chair Mike Turner’s national security warning. “Steady hands are at the wheel, we’re working on it, there’s no need for alarm,” Johnson told media on Wednesday afternoon.His comments come after Turner issued a statement that Congress had been made aware of a “serious national security threat” and called on Joe Biden to “declassify all information” related to it.During a press briefing, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said he planned to meet with members of the House intelligence committee on Thursday.“We scheduled a briefing for the for House members of the Gang of Eight tomorrow,” said Sullivan. “I am a bit surprised that Congressman Turner came out publicly today in advance of a meeting on the books for me to go sit with him alongside our intelligence and defense professionals tomorrow.”Turner’s concerns are reportedly related to Russian military capabilities.A Michigan Republican accused of participating in a fake elector plot after the 2020 presidential election testified on Wednesday that he did not know how the electoral process worked and never intended to make a false public record, the Associated Press reports.“We were told this was an appropriate process,” James Renner, 77, said during a preliminary hearing for a half-dozen other electors who face forgery and other charges.People who falsely posed as electors in a six-state scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election have been criminally charged in Georgia and Nevada. In Wisconsin, false electors agreed to a settlement in a civil case in December.“You have a majority of Americans who believe that we need to protect our democracy,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in response to a question about recent polling showing about 18% of Americans believe in the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift is part of a plot by Democrats to deliver the 2024 presidential election to Joe Biden. That poll also found people who believe the Taylor Swift theory are also more likely to doubt the validity of the 2020 presidential election.The United States expects Israel to meet its commitment to allow a shipment of flour to be moved into Gaza, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Wednesday, Reuters reports.Sullivan was responding to a question about an Axios report on Tuesday that said the Israeli government was blocking a US-funded flour shipment to Gaza.Jake Sullivan has finished taking questions from the media and has left the west wing now. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will now take the briefing onto more domestic matters in US political news.Meanwhile, Axios wrote:
      Israeli ultranationalist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is blocking a U.S.-funded flour shipment to Gaza because its recipient is the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), two Israeli and U.S. officials told Axios.
      U.S. officials said this is a violation of a commitment Benjamin Netanyahu personally made to President Biden several weeks ago and another reason the U.S. leader is frustrated with the Israeli prime minister.
      CNN reports the national security threat that Congressman Mike Turner called on Joe Biden to declassify is related to a “highly concerning and destabilizing” Russian military capability.During a press briefing, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, declined to comment on the specifics of the threat.“We scheduled a briefing for the for House members of the Gang of Eight tomorrow,” said Sullivan. “I am a bit surprised that Congressman Turner came out publicly today in advance of a meeting on the books for me to go sit with him alongside our intelligence and defense professionals tomorrow.”National security adviser Jake Sullivan was asked at the White House press briefing about efforts to secure a “temporary pause” in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, and how that might work.There are international talks under way in Egypt about a ceasefire in Gaza and a deal with Hamas to return hostages it took during its attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, which provoked a crushing Israeli military response in Gaza. Our colleague Bethan McKernan reports that mediators are struggling to make progress in the face of a threatened Israeli offensive on Rafah, the Palestinian territory’s last place of relative safety.Sullivan described that a plan could “start with the temporary pause … The idea is that we have multiple phases as part of the hostage deal and we move from phase 1 to the next and we can extend the pause [in fighting] as more hostages come out.”He added: “What we would like to see is that Hamas is ultimately defeated, that peace and security come to Gaza, and then we work towards a longer term, two-state solution, with Gaza’s security guaranteed.”Our colleague Léonie Chao-Fong wrote this explainer piece over the weekend about the latest US push for a solution in the Middle East that would result in Israel and Palestine coexisting in peace. You can read it here.In a statement, Republican congressman Mike Turner, who chairs the House intelligence committee, warned that Congress had been alerted to a “serious national security threat” and called on Biden to “declassify all information related to this threat”. During a press briefing, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, declined to directly address the nature of the alleged threat and said that he had plans to meet with congressional intelligence lawmakers tomorrow. More

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      in US Politics

      Mayorkas impeachment: petty, doomed … but still potentially damaging

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      In 1876, the last US cabinet official to be impeached, William Belknap, resigned before the House could vote on the matter. Ulysses S Grant’s secretary of war was tried in the Senate anyway, on charges of corruption, but escaped conviction.Nearly 150 years later, in the House on Tuesday and at the second time of asking, Republicans corralled just enough votes to ensure Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, suffered Belknap’s fate. But Mayorkas has not resigned – and nor is he likely to be convicted and removed.Democrats control the Senate, which means Mayorkas is all but certain to be acquitted at any trial, regardless of reported doubts among Republican senators about their party’s case.After the 214-213 vote to impeach, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, set out what will happen next. House managers will present the articles of impeachment after Monday’s President’s Day holiday. Senators will be sworn in as jurors. And Patty Murray of Washington state, the Democratic Senate president pro tempore, will preside thereafter.Schumer also issued a stinging statement.“This sham impeachment effort is another embarrassment for House Republicans,” the New Yorker said. “The one and only reason for this impeachment is for Speaker [Mike] Johnson to further appease Donald Trump.”The Mayorkas impeachment is of a kind with Senate Republicans’ decision last week to detonate their own hard-won border and immigration bill because Trump, their likely nominee for president, wants to campaign on the issue.Schumer continued: “House Republicans failed to produce any evidence that Secretary Mayorkas has committed any crime. House Republicans failed to show he has violated the constitution. House Republicans failed to present any evidence of anything resembling an impeachable offense. This is a new low for House Republicans.”Most observers agree that the charges against Mayorkas – basically, that he performed incompetently and violated immigration law regarding the southern border – do not remotely rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanours”, as constitutionally required for impeachment and removal.Perhaps with a nod to the unfortunate Belknap, the Biden White House weighed in, saying: “History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games.”But history also records that all impeachments (and impeachment efforts, such as that mounted by Republicans against Biden himself) are inherently political, so this one could prove as politically potent as did those of Trump. Both Trump impeachments concerned behaviour – blackmailing Ukraine for political dirt and inciting the January 6 attack on Congress – much closer by any standard to the status of high crimes and misdemeanours. Regardless, Republicans ensured Trump was acquitted in both and have since fed Trump’s fierce desire for revenge.The Mayorkas impeachment was driven by Trump-aligned extremists prominently including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.Speaking to reporters on the Capitol steps on Tuesday, the same day the Senate passed a $95bn national security package including funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia, Greene said she was “very thankful to our Republican Congress. We’re finally working together with the American people to send a message to the Biden administration that it’s our border that matters, not other countries’ borders. Our border matters.”Claiming Mayorkas was guilty of “willful betrayal of the American people and breaking federal immigration laws”, Greene also said the impeachment “sends a message to America that Republicans can get our job done when we work together and do what’s important and what the American people want us to do.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf there were any remaining doubt that Mayorkas was impeached in service of pure politics, Greene said senators set to sit as jurors should “look at the polling. They know that our border security is the No 1 issue in every single campaign in every single state, every single city, in every single community … They better pay attention to the American people.”It is not certain, however, that a trial will happen.Joshua Matz, a lawyer who has written extensively on impeachment and worked on both impeachments of Trump, recently told Politico: “Impeachment trials are meant to be deadly serious business for matters of state – not free publicity for the House majority to air policy attacks on the current administration.”The Mayorkas impeachment articles, Matz said, are “so manifestly about policy disagreement rather than anything that could arguably qualify as high crimes and misdemeanours, that it would be unwarranted to waste the Senate’s time with the trial on the matter.“The articles are formally deficient in so many ways that any trial would be flagrantly unfair and create such grave due process issues that it would be outrageous to even proceed.”Senate Democrats could bring up a simple motion to dismiss the Mayorkas charges, a gambit which would be likely to succeed, given indicated support from the West Virginia centrist Joe Manchin, a key swing vote in the narrowly divided chamber. Less starkly, Democrats could seek to tie proceedings up in procedure, options including sending the charges to a committee, there to sit in limbo throughout an election year.All choices carry political peril, however. On Wednesday, the news site Semafor quoted an unnamed Republican aide as saying: “If Democrats give Republicans the opportunity to say that they are sweeping this under the rug, we will gladly take it.“If this is the sham Democrats claim it is, why would they be afraid of holding a trial?” More

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      in Elections

      Mayorkas Was Impeached by the House. What Happens Next?

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      Republican members of the House impeached Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, with a simple majority vote on Tuesday. It sets off a series of choreographed rituals that dates back to the impeachment of former President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Here’s a look at what happens next.A ceremonial processionOnce the House approves two articles of impeachment laying out the accusations against Mr. Mayorkas as part of its oversight and investigatory responsibilities, they are then walked over to the Senate.The Senate as a court of impeachment for the trial of Andrew Johnson.Library of CongressThe day after President Johnson was impeached, in February 1868, the articles of impeachment were delivered to the Senate by Representative Thaddeus Stevens, Republican of Pennsylvania. Mr. Stevens was so ill that he had to be carried through the Capitol.Once the articles are delivered, the Senate, acting as a High Court of Impeachment, would schedule a trial during which senators would consider evidence, hear witnesses and, ultimately, vote to acquit or convict. They could also vote to dismiss the charges.The Senate trialThe House speaker names impeachment managers from the chamber who would be tasked with arguing the case against the impeached official, serving as the prosecution team in the Senate trial.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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      in US Politics

      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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      in Elections

      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