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      The Durham Fiasco Is a Warning of What’s to Come

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      Thank goodness Speaker Kevin McCarthy has created a House subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government!Last week, The New York Times reported on an outrageous example of such weaponization, the flagrant use of federal law enforcement powers to target an administration’s political enemies. I’m talking, of course, about the John Durham special counsel investigation, which was meant to root out the ostensibly corrupt origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and quickly came to embody the sins that Donald Trump and his allies projected onto the F.B.I.Trump’s circle insisted, falsely, that the Mueller inquiry was a hit job that employed Russian disinformation — via the Steele dossier — to frame Trump, all part of a plot cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Durham seems to have bought into this Trumpist conspiracy theory, and to help prove it, he tried to employ what appears to be Russian disinformation to go after the Clinton camp. More specifically, he used dubious Russian intelligence memos, which analysts believed were seeded with falsehoods, to try to convince a court to give him access to the emails of a former aide to George Soros, which he believed would show Clinton-related wrongdoing.Astonishingly, The Times found that while Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr and Durham were in Europe looking for evidence to discredit the Russia investigation, Italian officials gave them a “potentially explosive tip” linking Trump to “certain suspected financial crimes.” Rather than assign a new prosecutor to look into those suspected crimes, Barr folded the matter into Durham’s inquiry, giving Durham criminal prosecution powers for the first time.Then the attorney general sat back while the media inferred that the criminal investigation must mean Durham had found evidence of malfeasance connected to Russiagate. Barr, usually shameless in his public spinning of the news, quietly let an investigation into Trump be used to cast aspersions on Trump’s perceived enemies. (The fate of that inquiry remains a mystery.)This squalid episode is a note-perfect example of how Republican scandal-mongering operates. The right ascribes to its adversaries, whether in the Democratic Party or the putative deep state, monstrous corruption and elaborate conspiracies. Then, in the name of fighting back, it mimics the tactics it has accused its foes of using.Look, for example, at the behavior that gave rise to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump falsely claimed that Joe Biden, as vice president, used the threat of withholding American loan guarantees to blackmail the Ukrainian government into doing his personal bidding. Hoping to get Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to substantiate his lies, Trump tried to use the threat of withholding American aid to … blackmail the Ukrainian government into doing his personal bidding. The symmetry between accusations and counter-accusations, in turn, fosters a widespread cynicism about ever finding the truth.It’s important to keep this in mind because we’re about to see a lot more of it. Now that they control the House, Republicans have prioritized investigating their political opponents. McCarthy has stacked the Oversight Committee, central to the House’s investigative apparatus, with flame-throwing fantasists, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert. Further, as Politico reported in a “field guide” to the coming Republican inquiries, McCarthy has urged Republicans to treat every committee like the Oversight Committee, meaning all investigations, all the time.There are going to be investigations into Hunter Biden, and investigations into the origins of the pandemic. There will likely be scrutiny of the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago and Biden’s handling of classified documents. And, as my colleague David Firestone on the editorial board put it over the weekend, “Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt” for proof that the F.B.I. and other intelligence agencies were “weaponized” against conservatives.These all promise to be congressional equivalents of the Durham inquiry. Certainly, most if not all congressional investigations are politically motivated, but there is nevertheless a difference between inquiries predicated on something real, and those, like the many investigations in the Benghazi attack, meant to troll for dirt and reify Fox News phantasms. House Democrats examined Trump’s interference with the C.D.C. during the acute stage of the pandemic. House Republicans plan to look into what the Republican congressman Jim Banks termed the military’s “dangerous” Covid vaccine mandates. There might be an equivalence in the form of these two undertakings, but not in their empirical basis.It remains to be seen whether our political media is up for the task of making these distinctions. The coverage of Trump and Biden’s respective retention of classified documents offers little cause for optimism. Again and again, journalists and pundits have noted that, while the two cases are very different, there are seeming similarities, and those similarities are good for Trump. This is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since by speculating about political narratives, you help create them.“John Durham has already won,” said the headline of a Politico article from last year, noting his success in perpetuating the right’s fevered counter-history of Russiagate. Of course he didn’t win; he would go on to lose both cases arising from his investigation as well as the honorable reputation he had before he started it. What he did manage to do, however, was spread a lot of confusion and waste a lot of time. Now the Republican House picks up where he left off.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Manhattan district attorney to present Trump hush money case to grand jury – as it happened

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      Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg will soon start presenting testimony to a grand jury about Donald Trump’s effort to pay off the adult film actor and producer Stormy Daniels shortly before he won the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times reports.The case is yet another legal threat to the former president, who could face charges in Georgia over his campaign to overturn the state’s vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. An Atlanta-area district attorney is considering a grand jury’s report into the effort by Trump and his allies.According to the times, Bragg recently empaneled the grand jury and will soon begin presenting evidence. The paper said it spotted one witness, David Pecker, and his attorney entering the building where the grand jury sits. Pecker is the former publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid, which was involved in arranging the payment to Daniels.However the case is far from a slam dunk, the Times reports, and relies on a legal strategy that may not pan out. Here’s more from their report:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The prosecutors have also begun contacting officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, one of the people said. And in a sign that they want to corroborate these witness accounts, the prosecutors recently subpoenaed phone records and other documents that might shed light on the episode.
      A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would also rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.Donald Trump’s legal trouble have grown even more voluminous, after Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg convened a grand jury to look into the hush money payment made to the adult film actor and producer Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. It’s the latest threat to the former president as he pursues another campaign for the White House, joining the ongoing inquiry in Georgia over his attempts to overturn the state’s vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Meanwhile in Washington, top Republican investigator James Comer outlined his plans to hold the Biden administration to account, while the White House and its allies looked for ways to frustrate him.Here’s what else happened today:
      What does Daniels think of all this? Read her recent interview with the Guardian to get an idea.
      Memphis has relieved a sixth police officer of duty following the death of Tyre Nichols and the indictment of five former officers on murder charges.
      Trump spent the weekend campaigning and bashing his rivals, chief among them Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis.
      A Christian nationalist movement involved in Covid-19 and 2020 election conspiracy theories is expanding nationwide.
      As Democrats sought his tax returns, Trump’s attorneys filed unusual records requests with the Internal Revenue Service. Democrats say they were an attempt to delay the documents’ release.
      It’s not just the properties of ex-presidents and -vice-presidents where classified documents are turning up.The Daily Beast reports that a retired air force lieutenant colonel pleaded guilty last August to charges related to keeping hundreds of classified documents at his Florida home.According to prosecutors, Robert Birchum kept material related to the National Security Agency (NSA) that “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States” if it had been made public. The air force works closely with the NSA, and the documents “concerned Department of Defense locations throughout the world, detailed explanations of the Air Force’s capabilities and vulnerabilities, and, among other things, the methods by which the Air Force gathers, transmits, and uses information observed by various Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms,” prosecutors said.Here’s more about the case, from the Daily Beast:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Birchum pleaded guilty to one count of willful retention of national defense information, a felony carrying up to 10 years in federal prison. It is unclear what, if anything, he was planning to do with the documents he had on hand …
      Cedric Leighton, a retired Air Force Colonel, was attached to the NSA and also spent time assigned to the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), of which JSOC—where Birchum worked toward the end of his career—is a subordinate command. Those assigned to JSOC handle “a great deal of extremely sensitive information,” with much of it at the Top Secret/SCI level, Leighton told The Daily Beast.
      “Additionally, much of the intelligence and operational information of these commands is within SAP (Special Access Program) channels, which means the handling requirements for this information are much stricter than they are for TS/SCI,” he said on Monday, noting that these materials are “exceptionally sensitive, from both an operational and an intelligence collection perspective.”
      “I noted with concern that he had briefing slides in his possession that detailed NSA’s special collection capabilities,” Leighton said. “I used to work with those. Revealing them could potentially cause grave damage to our capability to execute military operations and collect information vital to our national security.”During the years Democrats spent trying to access Donald Trump’s tax returns, his lawyers filed public record requests with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that appeared aimed at delaying the documents’ release, Bloomberg News reports.The technique was unusual, because federal law already gives the president access to some tax information, and also because Trump’s attorneys stated they would be willing to pay $30,000 in processing fees to get the documents, when the IRS usually charges $25.According to Bloomberg, the records requests were filed under the Freedom of Information Act around the time Democrats took control of the House in 2019 and set out to make public the tax returns Trump had refused to release ever since first running for office in 2016. Late last year and days before they ceded control of the chamber to the new Republican majority, Democrats made the returns public, while noting in an accompanying report that they believed the records requests were part of an effort to delay their release. Here more on what Trump’s lawyers were looking for:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}In response to a FOIA request from Bloomberg News to see Trump’s FOIA requests, the IRS turned over copies of two requests sent in June 2019, drafted for Trump by attorney William F. Nelson, a partner at Morgan Lewis and a former chief counsel at the IRS during the Reagan administration.
      The IRS withheld copies of additional FOIA requests Trump may have filed and declined to share the documents it produced for Trump, if any, on privacy grounds because it involved his tax information.
      Nelson didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
      In the first request, Lewis asked the IRS for a wide range of communications from IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, a Trump nominee, and other top IRS officials “in connection with the disclosure or potential disclosure of any taxpayer materials” related to the Democrats’ request.
      Trump’s lawyer also asked for any records the IRS gave to Senator Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, about a confidential draft memo the IRS prepared in anticipation of Congress’s requests for Trump’s tax returns. Wyden had earlier sent a letter to the IRS asking if the memo contradicted the Treasury’s Department’s position on disclosure requirements.
      Trump also sought all records from the IRS about a May 21, 2019, story in The Washington Post that first disclosed the existence of the draft memo.Congress may be just getting to work, but state legislatures are already well into their sessions nationwide, including Utah, where the Republican-led chamber passed a ban on young people receiving gender-affirming healthcare:Utah’s Republican governor on Saturday signed a bill that bans young people who are transgender from receiving gender-affirming healthcare as other states consider similar legislation.The governor, Spencer Cox, who had not taken a public position on the transgender care measure, signed it a day after the state legislature sent it to his desk. Utah’s measure prohibits transgender surgery for young people and disallows hormone treatments for minors who have not yet been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.Republicans controlling Utah’s legislature made the ban a priority and weighed a first draft of the measure less than two days after the state’s lawmakers opened this year’s legislative session on 17 January.Cox’s signing of the bill comes as lawmakers in at least 18 states consider similar legislation taking aim at young transgender people’s healthcare.In a statement, Cox said that he based his decision to sign the bill on a belief that the safest thing to do was halt “these permanent and life-altering treatments for new patients until more and better research can help determine the long-term consequences”.Utah bans gender-affirming surgery for young trans peopleRead more“It was the most terrifying experience of my life, and that’s saying something because I’ve seen Trump naked.”Readers, #ICYMI, Stormy Daniels did an interview with the Guardian the other day. Now she’s back in the hard news headlines as the scandal around hush money paid to her on behalf of Donald Trump during the 2016 election campaign goes to the next step. Daniels has long claimed she had sexual relations with that man, in the pre-Potus-past, which Trump denies.Daniels, who has said herself that she prefers her stage name to her government name of Stephanie Clifford, is the media gift that keeps on giving.Thank you for the awesome interview! I love pissing off my haters first thing in the morning! https://t.co/aJ3AgHJ4tR— Stormy Daniels (@StormyDaniels) January 27, 2023
      Remember the days of the Daniels-Avenatti double act? Look how that turned out for Michael.Michael Avenatti sentenced to four years for cheating Stormy DanielsRead moreDonald Trump’s legal trouble have grown even more voluminous, after Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg convened a grand jury to look into the hush money payment made to the adult film actor and producer Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. It’s the latest threat to the former president as he pursues another campaign for the White House, joining the ongoing inquiry in Georgia over his attempts to overturn the state’s vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Meanwhile in Washington, top Republican investigator James Comer outlined his plans to hold the Biden administration to account, while the White House and its allies looked for ways to frustrate him.Here’s what else is going on today:
      Memphis has relieved a sixth police officer of duty following the death of Tyre Nichols and the indictment of five former officers on murder charges.
      Trump spent the weekend campaigning and bashing his rivals, chief among them Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis.
      A Christian nationalist movement involved in Covid-19 and 2020 election conspiracy theories is expanding nationwide.
      A few thoughts on the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Donald Trump, from former US attorney and current MSNBC contributor Joyce Vance:4/ Neither a prosecution nor a conviction is a sure thing. Michael Cohen’s testimony will be essential but likely not sufficient to prove Trump’s guilt. Prosecutors would like cooperation from Trump’s CFO Alan Weisselberg, who has refused to implicate Trump personally so far.— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) January 30, 2023
      Allen Weisselberg was earlier this month given five months in jail for committing tax fraud, a short sentence that came about after he provided testimony that helped prosecutors secure a conviction of the Trump Organization itself on similar charges.Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg will soon start presenting testimony to a grand jury about Donald Trump’s effort to pay off the adult film actor and producer Stormy Daniels shortly before he won the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times reports.The case is yet another legal threat to the former president, who could face charges in Georgia over his campaign to overturn the state’s vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. An Atlanta-area district attorney is considering a grand jury’s report into the effort by Trump and his allies.According to the times, Bragg recently empaneled the grand jury and will soon begin presenting evidence. The paper said it spotted one witness, David Pecker, and his attorney entering the building where the grand jury sits. Pecker is the former publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid, which was involved in arranging the payment to Daniels.However the case is far from a slam dunk, the Times reports, and relies on a legal strategy that may not pan out. Here’s more from their report:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The prosecutors have also begun contacting officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, one of the people said. And in a sign that they want to corroborate these witness accounts, the prosecutors recently subpoenaed phone records and other documents that might shed light on the episode.
      A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would also rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.The justice department has again expressed its unwillingness to share details of ongoing investigations with the House GOP.Here’s the department’s letter, obtained by ABC News, in response to the demand for information from judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan and member Mike Johnson:DOJ responds to Chairman Jordan’s request for info on the Biden special counsel probe: “Disclosures to Congress about active investigations risk jeopardizing those investigations and creating the appearance that Congress may be exerting improper political pressure…” 1/2 pic.twitter.com/w5DAtTUuKG— Ben Siegel (@bensiegel) January 30, 2023
      In their letter sent 13 January, Jordan and Johnson requested a range of document from the justice department, including “all documents and communications referring or relating to the appointment of Robert K. Hur as Special Counsel, including but not limited to any memoranda regarding his appointment” – which is exactly the kind of thing the justice department is loath to discuss.The Memphis police department has relieved a sixth officer of duty following the beating death of Tyre Nichols, the Associated Press reports.A police spokeswoman confirmed officer Preston Hemphill was disciplined following Nichols’ 7 January beating, which resulted in his death three days later and the firing and indictment of five officers on murder charges. The city released videos of the attack last week, prompting nationwide protests.It was unclear what role Hemphill played in the assault, but family and community members say they want to know if prosecutors will pursue charges or discipline against other officers who responded when Nichols was beaten following a traffic stop.Christian nationalists who were involved in spreading Covid-19 misinformation and promoting Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have made a new push to win adherents nationwide, the Guardian’s Peter Stone reports:A far-right project that has helped spread Donald Trump’s false claims about voting fraud in 2020, and misinformation about Covid vaccines, is trying to expand its mission, while facing new criticism from scholars and religious leaders about its incendiary political and Christian nationalist messages.ReAwaken America, a project of the Oklahoma-based entrepreneur Clay Clark, has hosted numerous revival-style political events across the US after receiving tens of thousands of dollars in initial funds in 2021 from millionaire Patrick Byrne, and become a key vehicle for pushing election denialism and falsehoods about Covid vaccines.ReAwaken America also boasts close ties to retired Lt Gen Michael Flynn, who in December 2020 met with Trump, Byrne and others at the White House to plot ways to reverse Trump’s election loss. The meeting happened shortly after Trump pardoned Flynn, who was convicted for lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador before serving briefly as Trump’s national security adviser.Clark’s project also has links to Dr Simone Gold, who served a 60-day jail sentence for illegally entering the Capitol on 6 January and founded America’s Frontline Doctors, an anti-vaccine group that has also touted bogus cures.“Christian nationalism has deep roots in American history and has gained traction at different points,” said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. “The ReAwaken America Tour taps into the unholy well of Christian nationalism to sow doubt about the US election system and the safety of Covid vaccines while equating allegiance to Trumpism with allegiance to God.”Far-right project that pushed election lies expands mission as Trump ramps up 2024 campaignRead more More

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      House Republicans rebuffed in bid to access details of DoJ Biden investigation

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      House Republicans rebuffed in bid to access details of DoJ Biden investigationRepublican-controlled judiciary committee told that longstanding precedent prevents disclosures about active investigations The US justice department told top House judiciary committee Republicans on Monday that it would decline to produce confidential information about the special counsel investigation into the recent discovery of classified-marked documents at Joe Biden’s personal home and office.The department said in a letter to the committee reviewed by the Guardian that it would not provide details about the president’s documents case – or any other inquiry – because it could reveal the roadmap of the investigation and risk the appearance of political conflict.Republicans accuse Biden of hypocrisy over classified documents discoveriesRead more“Disclosures to Congress about active investigations risk jeopardizing those investigations and creating the appearance that Congress may be exerting improper political pressure or attempting to influence department decisions,” assistant attorney general Carlos Uriarte wrote.The department also noted that because the attorney general, Merrick Garland, had appointed a special counsel to oversee the Biden documents case, it was bound by the special counsel regulations that allow for certain communications at the start and at the end of investigations.“These regulations govern the department’s conduct in all special counsel investigations and will continue to govern our disclosures in this matter,” wrote Uriarte, a former top adviser to the deputy attorney general who currently leads the division which has been in touch with Congress.The clear refusal from the justice department to open its files to the judiciary committee sets up the prospect of a bitter fight with the new House Republican majority, which has made political investigations into the Biden administration a priority for the next two years.The justice department has come under increasing pressure from top lawmakers in both the House and Senate to brief them on details about the Biden case – as well as the parallel criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s retention of national security materials and obstruction of justice.Garland appointed top former prosecutor Robert Hur as special counsel to oversee the Biden case on 12 January, months after naming another top former prosecutor, Jack Smith, as special counsel to take charge of the January 6 Capitol attack and Mar-a-Lago documents investigations into Trump.The justice department has long refused to provide to Congress confidential information that could compromise investigations or grand jury secrecy rules, as well as deliberative communications like prosecution memos because of the risk of political interference in charging decisions.As the department explained in 2000 in a letter to the then-House rules committee chair, John Linder, its position has been upheld by the supreme court in United States v Nixon (1974) that recognized making such materials public could have an improper “chilling effect”.The so-called Linder letter noted the department had reaffirmed during the Reagan administration that providing congressional committees with briefings on criminal investigations would place Congress in a position to exert power – and undermine the integrity – of those inquiries.The Linder letter also raised the risk of inadvertent or deliberate leaks of materials that could reveal the roadmap of investigations to defendants, who could then use that information to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a potential prosecution.The spokesperson for the judiciary committee Russell Dye criticized the justice department’s response.“Our members are rightly concerned about the justice department’s double standard here,” Dye said in a statement about the Biden documents case. “It’s concerning, to say the least, that the department is more interested in playing politics than cooperating.”Uriarte’s response to the judiciary committee comes a day after he told top lawmakers on the Senate intelligence committee that the department would similarly decline to provide information about the classified-marked documents in the Biden case as well as in the Trump case.TopicsHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressJoe BidenDonald TrumpUS politicsBiden administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps rising in Republican ranks despite ‘loony lies’

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps rising in Republican ranks despite ‘loony lies’ The extremist who has supported QAnon is firmly on her way to becoming a senior figure in the party as a key ally of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthyWhen Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to America’s House of Representatives in 2020, she became one of the most visible of a wave of extremists to enter the Republican party whose often bizarre utterings stretched the bounds of what had previously been the norm of US politics.The Georgian congresswoman, who has suggested Jewish space lasers are responsible for wildfires, speculated whether 9/11 was a hoax and supported the QAnon conspiracy theory, was part of a new wave of Trumpian Republicans and was mocked, ridiculed and reviled in equal measure – including by some in her own party.‘We don’t know his real name’: George Santos’s unravelling web of liesRead moreBut in 2023, Greene is now firmly on her way to becoming one of the senior figures in the Republican party. She has become a favorite, and key ally, of Kevin McCarthy, the new House speaker, and preparing to take up assignments on some of Congress’s most prominent committees.It’s been a remarkable rise that few could have seen coming during a checkered first half of 2021, when Greene was making her name known through her penchant for unhinged conspiracy theories and strange remarks, but her ascension to the upper echelons of the GOP was confirmed this week by McCarthy, in an interview with the New York Times.“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy said.“When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”This apparent fondness for a tussle has seen Greene rewarded with positions on the homeland security committee, despite her previously musing that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, and on the oversight committee, where she is expected to be part of a subcommittee investigating the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.If the latter seems problematic, given Greene’s loudly stated suspicions and conspiracy theories about the pandemic – in January she was permanently banned from Twitter for repeatedly violating rules about Covid-19 misinformation – then that’s only because lots of things Greene has said and done are problematic.In 2021 Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, condemned Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” in relation to Greene having claimed support for executing Democratic politicians and harassing the survivor of a mass school shooting.Later that year McCarthy himself, who had earlier attempted to avoid conflict, felt compelled to step in after Greene compared Covid masking rules to the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” McCarthy said.“The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling,” he said.The multiple rebukes, and the egregiousness of Greene’s beliefs – whether disavowed or not – make her rise to prominence, as she takes up her seat on some of Congress’s most powerful committees, all the more remarkable.Greene’s rapid recent rise began when she backed McCarthy for the House leadership, two months ahead of the ultimately farcical vote that saw him elected after 15 ballots. Greene had got in early, declaring her support in November on Steve Bannon’s podcast.For McCarthy, who has been an unpopular figure among far-right voters and politicians – it was a selection of the latter that meant the manner of his ascension to speaker was embarrassing at best, it was a boost he needed.McCarthy and Greene had spent months forging a working relationship they believed could be beneficial for both, with Greene placating the zaniest wing of both Republicans in the House and voters at home, and McCarthy providing relevance to someone who had been stripped of her committee assignments in 2021, leaving her, essentially, having nothing to do in Washington.The New York Times reported that McCarthy, as he prepared to take up the speakership, had been mindful of the problems his centrist predecessors, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, faced in dealing with their furthest-right colleagues.Both Ryan and Boehner – who would later describe some of his rightwing colleagues as “assholes” – endured battles with the Freedom Caucus, a conservative and often obstructionist group of GOP congressmen, when trying to pass legislation.Greene remains one of the most popular figures among Trump supporters and believers, evidenced by her 758,000 followers on Trump’s Truth Social website – McCarthy has 113,000, Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, has 109,000 – and enjoys a close relationship with the former president, even calling Trump from the House floor during the debacle of January’s leadership vote.Greene is also a successful fundraiser, bringing in $12.5m in the 2021-22 election cycle, the fifth most of any Republican representative, her popularity among the base and alignment with Trump making her the model of the new Republican politician.On Greene’s part, she has sought to sanitize, somewhat, the ill-informed, conspiracy-minded viewpoints that have characterized her political career. In early 2022 Greene began a deliberate, “methodical” reinvention, a confidante told the Washington Post.From her position on the sidelines, with a congressional office but no meaningful role in the House, she began to think of the future. Greene, like most observers, believed McCarthy would be the next House speaker, and saw a role for herself as a bridge between the far right and the less kooky Republicans, the Post reported.As she tried to make herself palatable to a wider audience, Greene set about trying not to speak at any more white nationalist rallies, or discuss the “gazpacho police” who are apparently patrolling the US Capitol. (Her remark was widely understood to mean Gestapo.) She is also yet to repeat her 2018 claim that the Clinton family orchestrated the plane crash that killed John F Kennedy Jr more than two decades ago.In addition to this new reserve, Greene hired a new aide with a track record in conventional conservative politics, and eventually began meeting with McCarthy once a week, as the pair forged a close bond, each aware of the potential benefits.McCarthy would go on to win the speakership. But his concessions to the right, personified by his promotion of Greene, have come at a cost. Already McCarthy has pursued Greene-backed, far-right strategies on vaccines and treatment of January 6 perpetrators, something that has left Greene delighted.“People need to understand that it isn’t just me that deserves credit,” Greene told the New York Times.“It is the will and the voice of our base that was heard, and Kevin listened to them. I was just a vehicle much of the time.”If Greene was displaying an amount of faux humility, her conviction that she is channeling the will of the people and willingness to make it heard are a warning as to the level of influence she now wields.In her new roles Greene said she will be investigating: “How many of our enemies got pallets of cash!?” from Covid-19 unemployment benefits, a question she posed without any context or explanation, and has pledged to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for his perceived failures in handling immigration.From Greene’s political position in February 2021, when she was removed from her committee assignments by Democrats – and some Republicans – in a rebuke over incendiary and racist statements, which included her posting a mocked-up image of her holding a gun next to three Democratic lawmakers, all women of color, on Facebook, it has been a remarkable turnaround.Less than two years on, Greene has taken up positions on two of the most prominent committees in the House. She has a metaphorical seat at the House speaker’s right hand, and will enjoy the visibility that all this brings.It’s a testament to how quickly things can change in politics, but also a very visible reminder of what the Republican party increasingly stands for.Greene may have sought to sanitize her image, but it is clear that her brand of populism, outrage and misinformation is not the embarrassment it once was to the party leadership: this is the modern version of the Republican party.TopicsRepublicansKevin McCarthyHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsThe far rightfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Biden speaks with Tyre Nichols’s parents ahead of video release – latest updates

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      Joe Biden spoke with the parents of Tyre Nichols, according to the Washington Post.The paper released a brief clip of the conversation, where the president mentions how Nichols’ father is “devastated” by the death of his son, and invokes his own experience of losing a child:🚨President Biden just called Tyre Nichols’ parents. He talked to them for more than 10 minutes.”He actually tattooed my name on his arm,” his mom told Biden.”That’s what you call something special,” Biden replied. We were in the room for the call. Here’s a snippet. pic.twitter.com/0gpfU1wmv6— Emily Davies (@ELaserDavies) January 27, 2023
      Earlier, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Biden had been briefed on the video of Nichols’ beating that will be released later today, but has not seen it:.@PressSec on Tyre Nichols video expected to be released tonight says @POTUS has “been briefed, but he has not seen the video, nor has anyone at the White House seen the video.”— Allie Raffa (@AllieRaffa) January 27, 2023
      Acclaimed author and anti-racism activist Ibram X Kendi has condemned the beating and death of Tyre Nichols while criticizing police brutality on Friday.In a statement on Twitter, Kendi wrote:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}“Tyre Nichols should be with us skateboarding and looking up and admiring the sunset. But instead the sadistic scourge of police violence claimed its latest innocent victim.
      “The history of the police is the racist history of violence. Cops of all races have been empowered and socialized to brutalize and terrorize and exploit and sexually assault and harass and lynch people, particularly Black people with near total impunity.
      “There’s no reforming an inherently violent institution with a pervasively violent history. How many more Black people have to be brutally killed before we realize the obvious? How many more? How many more?”Several groups are organizing rallies across the country tonight as Memphis police prepares to release footage of Tyre Nichols this evening. According to the Instagram accounts of various chapters of the political party PSL, or Party for Socialism and Liberation, rallies titled “Justice for Tyre Nichols” are scheduled in major cities including New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Asheville and Chicago. Meanwhile, the Youth Communist League is scheduled to host a rally in Philadelphia tonight. Other rallies are set to be held in Dallas and Washington DC. The White House has released more details of Joe Biden’s call with the family of Tyre Nichols.“President Biden spoke with Mrs RowVaughn Wells and Rodney Wells, Tyre Nichols’ mother and stepfather, this afternoon to directly express his and Dr Biden’s condolences for Tyre Nichols’ death. During the conversation, the president commended the family’s courage and strength,” a readout of the call said.The Guardian’s Maya Yang is now taking over this blog to cover the latest developments in this story.Former vice-president Mike Pence said he takes “full responsibility” for the secret materials found at his residence, CNN reports:Former Vice President Mike Pence, speaking to a crowd in Miami, says he was not aware classified documents were at his house. But he adds: “Those classified documents should not have been in my personal residence. Mistakes were made. And I take full responsibility.”— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 27, 2023
      Pence’s disclosure this week that documents dating from his time in the White House under Donald Trump were discovered in his Indiana home came after both Joe Biden and Trump were found to have similar materials in their possession. Attorney general Merrick Garland has appointed two special counsels to handle the investigations of the current and ex-presidents’ documents, but hasn’t done the same for Pence.A network of racial justice activist groups is asking the public not to share footage of Tyre Nichols’ fatal beating at the hands of police, which is scheduled for release at 6 pm eastern time.Here is the message from Movement for Black Lives:Today a video of Tyre Nichols’ murder will be released. Do not share it. Do not traumatize our people further by putting it in front of us. We feel the overwhelming rage and grief without subjecting ourselves to a video of his life being taken.To protect yourself online: ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/EytQUlWvQ0— Movement 4 Black Lives (@Mvmnt4BlkLives) January 27, 2023
      Separately, the Republican National Committee re-elected Ronna McDaniel as its chair, overcoming concerns about her leadership after the party underperformed in last November’s midterm elections.McDaniel’s main challenger was Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer for Donald Trump who handled his challenge to a subpoena from the January 6 committee. Conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell and former congressman Lee Zeldin were also on the ballot, which McDaniel won easily:RNC Chair Election First Ballot Results:167 votes cast. 84 needed to win. Ronna McDaniel – 111Harmeet Dhillon – 51 Mike Lindell – 4Lee Zeldin – 1Ronna McDaniel reelected RNC Chair.Watch LIVE on C-SPAN2 https://t.co/uYWdF9rUK2— CSPAN (@cspan) January 27, 2023
      Joe Biden spoke with the parents of Tyre Nichols, according to the Washington Post.The paper released a brief clip of the conversation, where the president mentions how Nichols’ father is “devastated” by the death of his son, and invokes his own experience of losing a child:🚨President Biden just called Tyre Nichols’ parents. He talked to them for more than 10 minutes.”He actually tattooed my name on his arm,” his mom told Biden.”That’s what you call something special,” Biden replied. We were in the room for the call. Here’s a snippet. pic.twitter.com/0gpfU1wmv6— Emily Davies (@ELaserDavies) January 27, 2023
      Earlier, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Biden had been briefed on the video of Nichols’ beating that will be released later today, but has not seen it:.@PressSec on Tyre Nichols video expected to be released tonight says @POTUS has “been briefed, but he has not seen the video, nor has anyone at the White House seen the video.”— Allie Raffa (@AllieRaffa) January 27, 2023
      From the Capitol, Punchbowl News reports Nancy Pelosi told journalists she will not be watching the video of the attack on her husband:Nancy Pelosi says “she has absolutely no intention” of watching the attack on Paul Pelosi pic.twitter.com/vG5HMkb3XQ— Max Cohen (@maxpcohen) January 27, 2023
      The top Democrat in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, reacted to the release of video showing the attack on Paul Pelosi.Jeffries took over from Nancy Pelosi as the party’s leader in Congress’s lower chamber at the start of this year. Here’s what he had to say:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The violent attack on Paul Pelosi was unconscionable and his assailant must be brought to justice. We live in dangerous times of unprecedented extremism and political violence which have no place in our democracy or in the everyday lives of elected officials and their loved ones. The prayers of the Caucus, the Congress and the Country are with Paul, Speaker Emerita Pelosi and their wonderful family. May God watch over Paul in his continued recovery.Hello US live blog readers, we are continuing to follow developments in the news relating to the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis after a fatal encounter with the police – and political reaction to that and related developments in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. Please stick around as we take you into the afternoon and evening, ahead of the release later tonight of police video of what’s described as a brutal police beating of Nichols.Here’s where things stand:
      Tyre Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, said at a press conference in Memphis that ended a little bit ago that she has not been able to bring herself to watch the video of her son’s beating by five police officers earlier this month, following which he died in hospital, but she’s been told it’s “very horrific” and she urged carers not to let children watch it when police release footage tonight.
      FBI director Christopher Wray said he was “appalled” by video of Nichols’s beating at the hands of Memphis police, and that the bureau has opened a civil rights investigation into the fatal incident.
      Footage was released of the brutal hammer attack last year on Paul Pelosi, the husband of California congresswoman and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last October. A right-wing, allegedly politically-motivated intruder broke into their home in San Francisco, with the stated intent of kidnapping Nancy, who was in Washington, DC. Instead he found Paul and attacked him.
      Joe Biden sent condolences to the family of Tyre Nichols in a statement released yesterday, while issuing a vague call for “meaningful reform” of policing, an issue on which he has had mixed success during the first two years of his presidency. The US president appealed for calm at protests that are expected in several cities tonight after the video of Nichols’s beating is released.
      Police body-camera video was released on Friday afternoon of the brutal hammer attack last October on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Democratic congresswomen and then House speaker Nancy Pelosi.The shocking footage shows officers arriving at the front door of the Pelosi residence in San Francisco and knocking loudly on the door.Paul Pelosi opens the door and can be seen with an intruder as the two wrestle over a hammer. Police can be heard asking “What’s going on, man?”, then they tell the suspect to drop the hammer. But he says “Nope”, then manages to grab it and swing it and, just off camera, hits Pelosi in the head.Police charge in to find Pelosi collapsed on the floor, unconscious and struggling to breathe, as they grapple with the suspect, who has fallen on the floor partially on top of Pelosi, then arrest him.Pelosi, 82, suffered a skull fracture and injuries to his hand and arm in the attack, requiring him to undergo surgery. He remained hospitalized for nearly a week as he recovered.The video was released Friday, after a state judge dismissed efforts by the San Francisco district attorney’s office to keep the footage sealed from the public. The suspect in the attack, David Wayne DePape of Canada, faces state and federal criminal charges of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, among others. DePape has pleaded not guilty to the charges.DePape’s comments to authorities in the wake of the attack indicated that his actions were politically motivated. In court testimony last month, a San Francisco police investigator recounted how DePape claimed there was “evil in Washington” and described his initial plans to kidnap the House speaker.She was in Washington, DC, at the time and swiftly flew back to California to be with her husband.Democrats performed better than expected last November’s midterm elections, but Republicans narrowly won control of the House of Representatives and, after a fraught election earlier this month at the start of the 118th Congress, California congressman Kevin McCarthy took over the speakership.Pelosi had announced after the midterms that she would step down from her leadership role while continuing to represent her district in Washington, and she effectively handed the baton to New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, who became House minority leader in the new congress.Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis explained that the decision to release the video of Tyre Nichols on Friday evening is to reduce the impact it may have on the surrounding communities and schools. “Friday evening will be a good time to try to get people home, try to have our children safe and have a means of being able to manage any type of response,” Davis told NBC. She added that police will be monitoring parts of Memphis and that they have increased their staffing. “We don’t want to overreact. But the reality is, is that there are individuals that may want to exercise their First Amendment right and come out and protest,” she told the outlet. “My son is looking down smiling because, you know, it’s funny, he always said he was going to be famous one day. I didn’t know this was what he meant,” RowVaughn Wells, Tyre Nichols’s mother said.“I‘ve never seen the video. But what I’ve heard is very horrific, very horrific. And any of you who have children, please don’t let them see it,” she added.“To the five police officers that murdered my son, you also disgraced your own families when you did this but … I’m going to pray for you and your families, because at the end of the day, this shouldn’t have happened. This just shouldn’t have happened. We want justice for my son, justice for my son,” she added.“We’re very satisfied with the charges,” said Tyre Nichols’s stepfather, Rodney Wells, referring to the second-degree murder charges against the five officers.“More importantly, we want peace. We do not want any type of uproar, we do not want any type of disturbance. We want peaceful protests. That’s what the family wants, that’s what the community wants,” Wells said ahead of the planned protests across the country later today as the footage of Tyre Nichols gets released.“We want to know, where are the unions? Where does the fraternal order of police unions stand on this? We want to hear…that you condemn the savagery…heinousness…brutality of this attack?” said Antonio Romanucci, one of the attorneys representing the family of Tyre Nichols. Romanucci also called upon Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis to disband the specialized police unit known as the ‘Scorpion’ unit which the five police officers were a part of. “The intent of the Scorpion unit has now been corrupted. It cannot be brought back to center with any sense of morality and dignity, and most importantly, trust in this community. How will the community ever, ever, trust a Scorpion unit?” he said. “Officers have a duty to intervene in crimes being committed, even if it’s intervening with their own officers,” Crump said, calling for legislation to be passed which would require police officers to intervene when they see their colleagues exercising excessive force.“We have never seen swift justice like this,” said Crump, referring to the five officers who have since been charged with murder. “We want to proclaim that this is the blueprint going forward for any time any officers, whether they be Black or white, will be held accountable. No longer can you tell us we got to wait six months to a year,” he added. “It is the culture that allows them to think that they can do this to Tyre,” Crump said, saying that it does not matter if the officers were Black, Hispanic or any other ethnicity. “Call out the culture, call out the culture,” he said, as family members of Nichols chanted back. “It is the institutionalized police culture that is on trial today,” he added. More

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      Florida Republican sends welcome grenades to fellow Congress members

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      Florida Republican sends welcome grenades to fellow Congress membersInert projectiles came with a note that among other things said ‘let’s come together and get to work on behalf of our constituents’ A newly elected Florida Republican sent grenades to fellow members of Congress, prompting one aghast Democrat to say “not even George Santos could make this stuff up”.US voting rights champion Jasmine Crockett: ‘I need everyone to feel a sense of urgency’Read moreSantos is the scandal-plagued New York congressman whose largely made-up résumé and questionable finances have threatened to blow a hole in House Republicans’ narrow majority.The grenades were sent by another freshman, Cory Mills, a member of the armed services and foreign affairs committees.Stamped with a Republican elephant, the inert projectiles came with a letter in which Mills said: “It is my pleasure to give you a 40mm grenade, made for a Mk19 grenade launcher. They are manufactured in the Sunshine State and first developed in the Vietnam war.“Let’s come together and get to work on behalf of our constituents.”As pictures of the grenades spread online, a spokesman for Mills told the Washington Post: “Per the letter, the grenades are inert, and were cleared through all security metrics. I just wish they tagged our official account.”The comparison to Santos was made by congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, a member of the House intelligence committee.Mills, 42 and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, won the contest to succeed the Democrat Stephanie Murphy in Florida’s seventh district last year.Murphy was a member of the House January 6 committee. Mills is endorsed by the man who incited that deadly insurrection, Donald Trump, and supports Trump’s lie that Joe Biden won the 2020 election thanks to electoral fraud.A defense and security contractor before entering Congress, he has boasted about selling teargas used against protesters for racial justice.Weapons are banned in Congress and subject to strict restrictions in Washington DC. There is, however, an exception for members, under federal law.A spokesman for Mills told Florida media “Capitol police even escorted staff into the building” as they carried the grenades.After January 6, amid fears of congressional violence unmatched since the years before the civil war, metal detectors were installed outside the House chamber.Republicans chafed at the security measure. Andy Harris of Maryland was found to be carrying a gun near the House chamber.In 2020 a Republican from Colorado, Ken Buck, made waves when he said advocates of an assault weapons ban would have to forcibly remove an AR-15-style rifle he kept in his Washington office.Buck’s hardline posturing was undercut, however, when reporters dug up a 2015 interview in which he described the bureaucratic hoops he jumped through to have the gun in his office.“I went to the ethics committee,” he told the Post, “I got permission to accept the gift. I went to Capitol Hill police; I got permission to bring it into my office.“They went to the DC police; they got permission for me to transport it into the District [of Columbia]. I went to [the Transportation Security Administration], and followed all of the regulations in getting it on to the plane and getting it here.”The brightly painted rifle was unloaded and carried a trigger lock, even though it lacked a bolt carrier assembly and thus could not be fired.“Putting a trigger lock on an inoperable gun is like putting a chastity belt on a eunuch,” Buck said. “The only dangerous thing about that gun is if someone took it off the wall and hit somebody else over the head with it.”TopicsHouse of RepresentativesRepublicansFloridaDemocratsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      US voting rights champion Jasmine Crockett: ‘I need everyone to feel a sense of urgency’

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      InterviewUS voting rights champion Jasmine Crockett: ‘I need everyone to feel a sense of urgency’Kira LernerThe congresswoman reflects on a whirlwind rise from Texas politics to Washington, and her hopes of passing a critical bill In July 2021, Jasmine Crockett entered the US Capitol for the first time. Then a state representative, Crockett was a lead architect of Texas Democrats’ unprecedented plans to board a flight and travel to Washington to break quorum in Texas and block Republicans from enacting the voting restrictions they were steamrolling in the state.Less than two years later, Crockett came back to the Capitol, this time to be sworn in to the House of Representatives – one of 22 women and 13 women of color in the class of 74 new freshmen.Back in her district in Dallas for the first time since officially becoming a member of Congress, Crockett has had to hit the ground running. “I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” she told the Guardian in a phone interviewy. “Everybody wants to get their meetings in, and I’m like, ‘Guys, we have a full two years. And it’s not like we’re going to be that legislatively aggressive this season, so we’ve got time.’”Will this Ohio judge’s retirement spell the end of fair elections in the state?Read moreCrockett saw her opening to join Congress in November 2021, when the Dallas Democratic congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson announced her retirement after almost three decades. Four days later, Crockett announced she would run for her seat, with Johnson’s support. She won the primary in May by over 20 points thanks to the name recognition and political prominence she earned by leading the plans to break quorum. Supporting a range of progressive policies from healthcare to workers’ rights, she went on to easily secure the seat in the solidly Democratic district in November.Coming into a chamber with a slim Republican majority, Crockett said she knows it will be important to keep the pressure on voting rights reform.A civil rights attorney and former public defender, Crockett was labeled the most liberal member of the Texas house in her freshman year. In her first year, she introduced more than 60 bills, including measures to create online voter registration and same day voter registration, increase ballot drop boxes, permanently allow drive-thru voting, and allow voters to vote in primaries if they turn 18 in time for the general election.None of her bills passed, but she made a name for herself as a defender of voting rights, which she has called the “modern-day civil rights movement”.Crockett said she came to voting rights accidentally. When she was a student at the University of Houston Law Center, she was late to sign up for a seminar class “so all of the ‘good ones’ were gone”, she said. She ended up in an election law seminar, and remembers thinking: “What am I going to do with this?”“Little did I know,” she said. “I always tell people that God had this amazing, beautiful plan that I was definitely not clued in on.”She wrote her final paper on felony disenfranchisement laws and their Jim Crow-era roots, a topic that got her thinking about the racist history of US voting policy. After law school, she volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign and was inspired to become engaged beyond her work as a public defender. “Obama made me feel like we could all fly,” she said. She became chair of the Democratic party in Texarkana, Texas, and worked to make sure that people waiting for trial in jail knew they were eligible to vote.Her next foray into voting rights came after she was elected to the Texas legislature and assumed office in January 2021. That session, Republicans prioritized pushing through legislation to protect “election integrity”, capitalizing on former president Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud. Crockett quickly found herself on the defensive, given the importance of defending Texans’ voting rights.But she would soon meet the legislative brick wall that was state representative Briscoe Cain, a conservative attorney who helped Trump attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Cain chaired the House’s elections committee in 2021 and blocked Democratic-sponsored bills.When asked what it was like to propose dozens of bills to protect voting but to watch them all fail, Crockett laughed. “Is this your way of asking me what it feels like to be a loser?“No, listen,” she said. “I went in and I told people all the time that I was green and I was excited and I was believing, and the Texas house has a way of showing you the realities of what it is to be in Texas.”After Republicans initially failed in an attempt to pass a sweeping bill they said would protect against widespread voter fraud, Governor Greg Abbott called a special session for July to address voting. Crockett said she knew then that it was time to take extreme action on behalf of her majority non-white constituents.“I always describe the Texas house as a kind of abusive relationship, and there are those that have gotten used to the abuse and conditioned – meaning senior members – and then there’s me, who’s hit over the head for the first time,” she said. She described Republicans’ effort to pass an omnibus restrictive voting bill as “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.Though getting a large enough group of colleagues in agreement to take action took some time and negotiating, Crockett said she was grateful that the conversations happened. According to Texas House rules, at least two-thirds of the chamber’s 150 members must be present to conduct business – Crockett said they reached a point where there was enough interest to officially break quorum.Eventually, Crockett and a group of Democratic lawmakers chartered the plane to take them to Washington, where they held protests and met with members of Congress. Crockett spent weeks in the capital, refusing to return to Austin even as some of her colleagues struck deals to come back home.Now back in Washington, Crockett has no illusions about the possibility of passing an omnibus voting rights bill in this Congress. Despite the Democrats controlling the House for the last two years, their efforts to enact voting rights legislation were blocked in the Senate, where the party didn’t have a filibuster-proof majority.But she does see some room for compromise.“I am going to try to attack this from a very simple, singular, non-omnibus way,” she said. “Something simple like online voter registration is where I’m going to start.”Currently, 42 states and Washington DC allow people to register to vote online, but Texas is one of the small number that still don’t allow it, though lawmakers of both parties have shown support of moving it through the legislature. She said the infrastructure exists nationally to expand online voter registration across the nation. “We wouldn’t be burdening the states,” she said.She also said she plans to introduce legislation to allow young people to vote in primaries if they turn 18 by the time of the general election.While Crockett is in DC now, she’s still worried about what her former colleagues are doing in the legislature. Texas Republicans have introduced dozens of bills that would make voting more difficult, including one proposal that would give the attorney general power to prosecute alleged instances of voter fraud.“There is no reason for the AG’s office to handle these cases,” she said, adding that she knew it was part of a larger plan to “specifically target the large urban centers and those areas that make up the majority of the color in the state of Texas”.“They will pick on them and they will try to make sure that they’ve got an example so that more people of color are intimidated and afraid to go to the polls because even if they make a mistake, they can potentially go to prison,” she said.Crockett often compares the modern-day struggle for voting rights with the civil rights era. A few days after Martin Luther King Day, she lamented that there’s no one figure right now organizing people and pushing them to fight for their rights.“I need everybody in this country to feel a sense of urgency,” she said, especially during elections. “I need you to say, ‘I know I’m standing here for hours, but I have to because John Lewis marched and almost died just so I can have a chance to stand here.”TopicsUS newsThe fight for democracyUS politicsTexasDemocratsHouse of RepresentativesinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Biden Hammers Republicans on the Economy, With Eye on 2024

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      The president has found a welcome foil in a new conservative House majority and its tax and spending plans, sharpening a potential re-election message.WASHINGTON — President Biden on Thursday assailed House Republicans over their tax and spending plans, including potential changes to popular retirement programs, ahead of what is likely to be a run for re-election.In a speech in Springfield, Va., Mr. Biden sought to reframe the economic narrative away from the rapid price increases that have dogged much of his first two years in office and toward his stewardship of an economy that has churned out steady growth and strong job gains.Mr. Biden, speaking to members of a steamfitters union, sought to take credit for the strength of the labor market, moderating inflation and news from the Commerce Department on Thursday morning that the economy had grown at an annualized pace of 2.9 percent at the end of last year. In contrast, he cast House Republicans and their economic policy proposals as roadblocks to continued improvement.“At the time I was sworn in, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” Mr. Biden said before ticking through the actions he had taken to aid the recovery. Those included $1.9 trillion in pandemic and economic aid; a bipartisan bill to repair and upgrade roads, bridges, water pipes and other infrastructure; and a sweeping industrial policy bill to spur domestic investment in advanced manufacturing sectors like semiconductors and speed research and development to seed new industries.Republicans have accused the Biden administration of fanning inflation by funneling too much federal money into the economy, and have called for deep spending cuts and other fiscal changes.Mr. Biden denounced those proposals, including a plan to replace federal income taxes with a national sales tax, curb safety net spending and risk a government default by refusing to raise the federal borrowing limit without deep spending cuts. Why, he asked, “would the Americans give up the progress we’ve made for the chaos they’re suggesting?”Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans have not yet released a detailed or unified economic agenda.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“I will not let anyone use the full faith and credit of the United States as a bargaining chip,” Mr. Biden said, reiterating his refusal to negotiate over raising the debt limit. “The United States of America — we pay our debts.”But the president also sought to reach out to working-class voters — in places like his native Scranton, Pa. — who have increasingly voted for Republicans in recent elections. Mr. Biden said those voters had been left behind by American economic policy in recent years, and he tried to woo them back by promising that his policies would continue to bring high-paying manufacturing jobs that do not require a college degree to people who feel “invisible” in the economy.“They remember, in my old neighborhoods, why the jobs went away,” Mr. Biden said, vowing that under his policies “nobody’s left behind.”The Biden PresidencyHere’s where the president stands as the third year of his term begins.State of the Union: President Biden will deliver his second State of the Union speech on Feb. 7, at a time when he faces an aggressive House controlled by Republicans and a special counsel investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information.Chief of Staff: Mr. Biden plans to name Jeffrey D. Zients, his former coronavirus response coordinator, as his next chief of staff. Mr. Zients will replace Ron Klain, who has run the White House since the president took office two years ago.Voting Rights: A year after promising a voting rights overhaul in a fiery speech, Mr. Biden delivered a more muted message at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.The speech built on a pattern for Mr. Biden, who has found the new and narrow Republican majority to be both a political threat and an opportunity.Republicans in the chamber have begun a series of investigations into Mr. Biden, his family and his administration. They have also demanded deep cuts in federal spending in exchange for raising the borrowing limit, a position that risks an economic catastrophe given the huge sums of money that the United States borrows to pay for its financial obligations.The president has refused to tie any spending cuts to raising the debt limit and has called on Congress to increase the $31.4 trillion cap so the nation can continue paying its bills and avoid a federal default..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.But Mr. Biden, who is facing a divided Congress for the first time in his presidency, is increasingly acting as if the newly empowered conservatives have given him a political opening on economic policy. As he prepares for a likely re-election bid in 2024, he is seizing on the least popular proposals floated by House members to cast himself as a champion of the working class, retirees and economic progress.Mr. Biden’s speech on Thursday waded deep into policy details, including the acreage of western timber burned in fires linked to climate change, the global breakdown of advanced chip production and the average salary of new manufacturing jobs, as he recounted his legislative accomplishments.House Republicans have not yet released a detailed or unified economic agenda, and they have not made a clear set of demands for raising the debt limit, though they largely agree that Mr. Biden must accept significant spending curbs.But members and factions of the Republican conference have pushed for votes on a variety of proposals that have little support among voters, including raising the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare and replacing the federal income tax with a national sales tax.Mr. Biden has sought to brand the entire Republican Party with those proposals, even though it is not clear if the measures have majority support in the conference or will ever come to a vote. Former President Donald J. Trump, who has already announced his 2024 bid for the White House, has urged Republicans not to touch the safety-net programs. Other party leaders have urged Republicans not to rule out those cuts. “We should not draw lines in the sand or dismiss any option out of hand, but instead seriously discuss the trade-offs of proposals,” Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News, in which he called for Mr. Biden to negotiate over raising the debt limit.Representative Kevin Hern, Republican of Oklahoma, who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, told a tax conference in Washington this week that there are “lots of problems” with the plan to replace the income tax with a so-called fair tax on consumption. Those include incentives for policymakers to allow prices to rise rapidly in the economy in order to generate more revenue from the sales tax, he noted.“Let’s just say it’s going to be very interesting,” Mr. Hern said at the D.C. Bar Taxation Community’s annual tax conference. “I haven’t found a Ways and Means member that’s for it.”Despite those internal disagreements, Mr. Biden has been happy to pick and choose unpopular Republican ideas and frame them as the true contrast to his economic agenda. He has pointedly refused to cut safety-net programs and threatened to veto such efforts.“The president is building an economy from the bottom up and the middle out, and protecting Social Security and Medicare,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters this week. “Republicans want to cut Social Security, want to cut Medicare — programs Americans have earned, have paid in — and impose a 30 percent national sales tax that will increase taxes on working families. That is what they have said they want to do, and that is clearly their plan.”The focus on Republicans has allowed Mr. Biden to divert the economic conversation from inflation, which hit 40-year highs last year but receded in the past several months, though it remains above historical norms. On Thursday, he chided Republicans for a vote to reduce funding for I.R.S. enforcement against wealthy tax cheats — a move the Congressional Budget Office says would add to the budget deficit, and which Mr. Biden cast as inflationary.“They campaigned on inflation,” Mr. Biden said. “They didn’t say if elected, they planned to make it worse.”Progressive groups see an opportunity for Mr. Biden to score political points and define the economic issue before the 2024 campaign begins in earnest. That is in part because polls suggest Americans have little appetite for Social Security or Medicare cuts, and have far less focus on the national debt than House Republicans do.“It is a political gift,” said Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal nonprofit in Washington. More