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    Trump administration suspends $5bn electric vehicle charging program

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    The Trump administration has ordered US states to suspend a $5bn electric vehicle charging station program in a further blow to the environmental movement since the president’s return to the White House.In a memo issued on Thursday to state transportation directors, the transportation department’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) ordered states not to spend any funds allocated to them under the Biden administration as part of the national electric vehicle infrastructure (NEVI) program.“The new leadership of the Department of Transportation … has decided to review the policies underlying the implementation of the NEVI Formula Program,” Emily Biondi, the FHWA’s associate administrator for planning, environment and realty, wrote in the memo. “Accordingly, the current NEVI Formula Program Guidance dated June 11, 2024, and all prior versions of this guidance are rescinded,” Biondi added.“As result of the rescission of the NEVI Formula Program Guidance, FHWA is also immediately suspending the approval of all State Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment plans for all fiscal years. Therefore, effective immediately, no new obligations may occur under the NEVI Formula Program until the updated final NEVI Formula Program Guidance is issued and new State plans are submitted and approved,” she wrote.Biondi added that until new guidance is issued, reimbursements of existing obligations for designing and building charging stations will be allowed in order to prevent the disruption of current financial commitments.According to an existing page on the energy department’s website, the NEVI program provides funding to states to strategically deploy EV chargers. Funding is available for up to 80% of eligible project costs including the acquisition, installation and network connection of EV chargers, proper operation and maintenance of EV chargers, and long-term EV charger data sharing.Politico reports that as of Thursday, the FHWA removed several website pages that provided information on the NEVI program.In a statement to Politico, Andrew Rogers, a former deputy FHWA administrator under the Biden administration, said that the memo “appears to ignore both the law and multiple restraining orders that have been issued by federal courts”.The outlet further reports Roger saying that the memo appears to be “in direct violation” of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a law that restricts presidents from withholding congressionally approved funding.Currently, 14 states have at least one operational EV station, according to EV States Clearinghouse. As of last November, there are 126 public charging ports in operation across 31 NEVI stations in nine states, marking an 83% increase in open NEVI ports since last quarter, according to a NEVI report.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt added that a total of 41 states have released at least their first round of solicitations, with 35 having issued conditional awards or put agreements in place for more than 3,560 fast-charging ports across more than 890 charging station locations.Throughout his campaign, Trump railed against EVs, at one point saying that supporters of the vehicles should “rot in hell” and that Biden’s support of EVs would bring a “bloodbath” to the US’s automotive industry.Last month, as part of a flurry of executive orders he signed during his first days back in office, Trump revoked a Biden-era order from 2021 that had aimed to make half of all new vehicles sold in the US in 2030 electric. More

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      Biden must Trump-proof US democracy, activists say: ‘There is a sense of urgency’

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      The skies above the White House were cold and grey. Joe Biden greeted the championship winning Boston Celtics basketball team, quipping about his Irish ancestry and tossing a basketball into the crowd. But the US president could not resist drawing a wider lesson.“When we get knocked down, we get back up,” he said. “As my dad would say, ‘Just get up, Joe. Get up.’ Character to keep going and keep the faith, that’s the Celtic way of life. That’s sports. And that’s America.”Such events continue to be among the ceremonial duties of a “lame duck” president with waning influence. Biden has cut a diminished figure in recent months, first surrendering his chance to seek re-election, then finding himself sidelined by the doomed presidential campaign of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.But with his legacy imperiled by Donald Trump, the president is facing calls to mitigate the oncoming storm. Advocacy groups say Biden, who turned 82 this week, can still take actions during his final two months in office to accelerate spending on climate and healthcare, secure civil liberties, and Trump-proof at least some fundamentals of US democracy.Trump’s signature campaign promise was a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. He has nominated officials including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, architects of family separations at the southern border during his first term, and vowed to use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.The plans include mandatory detention, potentially trapping immigrants in inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading an opposition effort, urging Biden to halt the current expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities, especially those with records of human rights abuses.Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU national prison project, said Ice detention facilities “characterised by abusive conditions, pervasive neglect and utter disregard for the dignity of people in their custody” are key to Trump’s logistical plan.Dozens of people have died in Ice detention facilities – mostly owned or operated by private prison corporations – over the past four years, according to the ACLU, and 95% were likely preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided. Yet the Biden administration has backed new Ice detention facilities in states where they did not existed before, such as Kansas, Wyoming and Missouri.“We are calling on the Biden administration to take action now, in the final days of the administration, to halt any efforts to expand immigration detention and to shut down specifically abusive facilities once and for all,” Cho told reporters on a Zoom call this week. “We don’t need to put down runway for the Trump administration to put in place these mass detention and deportation machines.”She warned: “We know that the anti-immigrant policies of a second administration are going to be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and mass arrest and detention is going to become perhaps the norm to create and carry out these deportation operations unless we can do all we can to put a halt to them.”View image in fullscreenAnother crucial area for Biden to make a last stand is criminal justice. In his first term, Trump oversaw the execution of more people than the previous 10 presidents combined. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, then imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.Trump has indicated his intention to resume such executions and even expand the death penalty. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as Florida’s top law enforcement officer after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her re-election campaign.Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s capital punishment project, told reporters via Zoom that Trump said “he will work to expand the death penalty. He’s going to try to expand it to people who do not even commit killings. He’s called for expanding the death penalty to his political opponents.“But perhaps most dangerously in Project 2025 [a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation thinktank] – and we believe every word of it is this – he promised to try to kill everyone on death row, and the reason why we have to believe this and take it so seriously is the record that Donald Trump left where he, in a span of six months, carried out 13 executions.”The ACLU and other groups are therefore pressing Biden to commute the sentences of all individuals on federal death row to life in prison, fulfilling a campaign promise and preventing potential executions under Trump. Commuting “is really the thing that Biden can do to make it harder for Trump to restart executions”, Stubbs added.Pastor Brandi Slaughter, a board member of the pressure group Death Penalty Action, told reporters this week: “We know what the next president plans to do if any prisoners are left under a sentence of death under the Biden administration. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.”Biden has also received 8,000 petitions for clemency from federal prisoners serving non-death penalty sentences that he could either reduce or pardon. The former senator has long been criticised for his role in drawing up a 1994 crime law that led to the incarceration of thousands of Black men and women for drug offences.This week, members of Congress including Ayanna Pressley and James Clyburn led 64 colleagues in sending a letter to Biden urging him to use his clemency power “to reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our legal system and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration”.They were joined at a press conference on Capitol Hill by Maria Garza, 50, from Illinois, a prison reform advocate who spent 12 years in a state prison. She said in an interview: “There is a sense of urgency because a lot of the people that are sitting waiting for clemency are people that have de facto life sentences that will die in prison if they don’t [receive clemency]. A lot of their unjust sentencing was because of the 1994 crime bill that he was the founding father of.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitzi Wall, whose 29-year-old son Jonathan is incarcerated on a seven-and-a-half-year federal cannabis charge, called on Biden to keep a campaign promise to grant clemency to more than 4,000 people in federal prison for nonviolent cannabis crimes.“We voted for President Biden,” she said. “He gave us hope and we’re asking him to do nothing more than keep his promise.”Wall, 63, from Maryland, added: “President Biden was partly responsible for writing the 1994 crime bill that thrust families into abject poverty and pain. I know he feels bad about that and he can right that wrong with the power of the pen. I’m appealing to him as a father whose son [Hunter] could very possibly be going to prison.”In other efforts to protect civil liberties, the ACLU is recommending a moratorium on all federal government purchases of Americans’ personal data without a warrant. It is also asking Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act to prevent potential abuse of surveillance technologies under the Trump administration.Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare law and stop clean-energy development projects. White House officials are working against the clock to dole out billions of dollars in grants for existing programmes to minimise Trump’s ability to rescind or redirect these funds. Earlier this month, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced more than $3.4bn in grants for infrastructure projects across the country.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, notes that Trump will have the power of impoundment to stall the money flowing out of the government and can order rescissions to programmes funded by Congress.“The singular thing that Joe Biden can do is expedite the flow of federal dollars in all the programmes,” Schiller said.“Any money that is supposed to leave the treasury to go to schools, food safety, environmental protection – anything that is not yet distributed needs to get distributed. It’s like emptying literally the piggy bank before you go on a trip. President Biden needs to be literally getting as much money out the door in the hands of state, local and community organisations as he can.”Another priority for the White House is getting Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible, given the potential impact of the judiciary in challenging Trump administration policies. The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organisation, noted: “Federal judges restricted hundreds of Trump administration policies during his first term, and will likely play a significant role in determining the trajectory of his second.”Senate Republicans forced numerous procedural votes and late-night sessions this week in attempt to stall confirmations. Eventually a deal was struck that will bring Biden within striking distance of the 234 judicial confirmations that occurred in Trump’s first term – but four of Biden’s appellate court nominees will not be considered.The outgoing president could also engage with Democratic-led states and localities to bolster protections and establish “firewalls” against Trump’s agenda, particularly in areas such as immigration. These collaborations could involve reinforcing sanctuary city policies and providing resources to states that are likely to face pressure from the Trump administration.Chris Scott, former coalitions director for Harris, said: “What will be interesting is how or what can President Biden to work with states, especially where we have Democratic leadership in place, to be able to brace themselves and arm themselves with more protection. We already have places like a Michigan or Illinois where you have governors vowing to make sure that they have protections – even in the Trump presidency.”As Barack Obama discovered before handing Trump the keys to the Oval Office in 2017, however, lame duck presidents can only do so much. Trump will come into office with a flurry of executive orders, a supportive Congress and fewer guardrails than the first time around.Bill Galston, a former adviser in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “On January 20 Donald Trump will control all the instruments of government and, at that point, it’ll be up to the courts – and public opinion – to restrain him.” More

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      Biden pledges billions to rebuild cities ‘torn apart’ by highways decades ago

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      Joe Biden hailed the beginning of $3.3bn in infrastructure spending on US projects on Wednesday “to right historic wrongs” with efforts to reconnect city neighborhoods riven by interstate highways that plowed with particular impunity through many Black, brown, Asian American and Hispanic communities decades ago.The US president was in Milwaukee, where he traveled to announce new infrastructure investment and officially open his election campaign’s Wisconsin office in the vital swing state.Democratic party campaigns in Wisconsin are typically run from the state capital, Madison, whereas the Biden re-election campaign has picked Milwaukee, the more industrial and diverse city on Lake Michigan, where 40% of residents are Black. The Republicans will hold their convention in Milwaukee in July.Biden is striving to make an impact on the campaign trail in a number of swing states this week after his fiery State of the Union speech last week.He travels to Michigan on Thursday, part of the “blue wall”, along with Pennsylvania, where Biden was born and has made more campaign trips than any other state.Donald Trump flipped all three states to win the White House in 2016, but Biden took them back four years ago and almost certainly needs to hold them if he is to secure a second term.Biden and Trump unofficially clinched their parties’ respective nominations on Tuesday night after more primary wins, and expect to be officially anointed at their party conventions this summer.The rare presidential election rematch, the first since 1956, comes while Trump is due in court later this month for the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president, with more to come as he faces 91 criminal charges across four cases at federal and state levels.On Wednesday, the White House declared that $3.3bn in federal funding is being allocated in more than 40 states, originating from the Biden administration’s 2021 infrastructure legislation, to help areas “divided by transportation infrastructure decades ago and [that] have long been overlooked”.Biden announced a $36.6m federal grant on his Milwaukee visit to upgrade sidewalks and create cycle lanes, greater access to mass transit and more greenery in the South 6th Street area of Bronzeville, a historic majority African American neighborhood.Biden said the construction of interstate highways there led to the demolition of roughly 17,000 homes and 1,000 businesses, disproportionately impacting Black and poor neighborhoods in the 1960s, with a losses of prosperity and opportunities “that still reverberate today”.He pledged “to right historic wrongs and, in the process, deliver environmental justice to disadvantaged neighborhoods”.The US transportation department estimates that at least a million people and businesses in the US were displaced by decades of harmful urban renewal projects in the buildout of the federal highway system, a statement from the White House said.Biden said: “The story of Bronzeville here in Milwaukee is one we see all across the country. Our interstate highway system laid out in the 1950s was a groundbreaking connection of our nation, coast to coast … but instead of connecting communities, it divided them.”He added: “These highways actually tore them apart … along with redlining, they disconnected entire communities from opportunities, sometimes, in an effort to reinforce segregation.”Biden also took a jab directly at Trump’s conduct in dealing with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when he was president.“My predecessor failed at the most basic duty any president owes the American people – the duty to care,” he said.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      ‘I’ve got to get out and tell people’: Pete Buttigieg on his road ahead

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      Interview‘I’ve got to get out and tell people’: Pete Buttigieg on his road aheadDavid Smith in Washington Can the US revitalise its infrastructure? Is the US ready for a gay president? And does Buttigieg still plan to run one day?From Pete Buttigieg’s old office in South Bend, Indiana, you could see the hospital where he was born, churches built for Irish and Polish immigrants and a factory that made cabinets for Singer sewing machines. “This was the Silicon Valley of its day,” the then mayor told the Guardian in February 2019.Nearly four years later, Buttigieg is occupying a loftier perch. As America’s transportation secretary, his framed photograph sits alongside those of Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris in the lobby of the Department of Transportation. The building is located in Navy Yard, a neighbourhood on the Anacostia River that is home to the Washington Nationals baseball team.Too much, too young? Mayor could become the first millennial presidentRead moreButtigieg has gone from running a city of 100,000 people to a department whose budget is bigger than the gross domestic product of most countries. “As mayor, of course, I worked on a broad range of issues – anything that happened in the city was my concern,” he recalls in a pre-Christmas interview with the Guardian in Washington.“But here you work with a daunting scope and scale. The scope ranges from commercial space travel to the oversight of our Merchant Marine Academy, so not just planes, trains and automobiles, but everything in between.”The meteoric rise helps explain why Buttigieg is widely seen as potential presidential material in 2024, 2028 or beyond. He speaks eight languages, had spells at Harvard, Oxford and McKinsey, became a mayor before he turned 30 and did military service in Afghanistan. He won the Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa in 2020 but, perhaps more importantly, knew when it was time to step aside so the party could unite around Biden.Now Biden is 80 and Buttigieg is 40, until his next birthday on 19 January. Some Democrats yearn to see generational change, especially if Republicans nominate Ron DeSantis, the 44-year-old governor of Florida, for president in 2024. The Politico website recently highlighted the activities of his allies in a “dark money” group and political action committee under the provocative headline “Pete’s campaign in waiting”.But part of Buttigieg’s formidable communication skills is a refusal to take such bait. He insists with AI-worthy precision: “I have my hands more than full with my day job and one job at a time is plenty. And it’s a great job and I have a great boss and I’m proud to be part of this team.”The day job undeniably offers a lot to chew on. American infrastructure ranked just 13th in the world in 2019, according to the World Economic Forum. This was the nation that erected the tallest and most beautiful skyscrapers, built an interstate highway system and put a man on the moon. But in recent decades there has been a sense of turning inward – of decline and neglect – as Asia and Europe raced ahead with gleaming airports and faster trains.Where did it all go wrong? One answer is President Ronald Reagan, an arch exponent of laissez-faire capitalism who memorably declared that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”Buttigieg, who is unapologetically from the government and here to help, says: “The beginning of the Reagan era brought about a vicious cycle of public trust, where resources were stripped away from the government. It became harder for government to deliver for people and then those policy failures reduced trust in government, which made people more reluctant to trust their taxpayer dollars to government, which meant even fewer resources and even worse results.“The cycle of disinvestment has been accumulating for essentially my entire lifetime and part of what’s so exciting about this moment is a chance to re-establish public trust by making big investments to get big results to build public confidence in the things we can do together through good public policy and good public investment.”Biden, openly critical of Reagan’s trickle-down economics, set about changing the paradigm. After long negotiations with Congress, including late-night phone calls and several declarations that the deal was dead, he last year signed a trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure law.‘Glad to have a president who can ride a bicycle’: Buttigieg dismisses Republican claims about Biden’s healthRead moreThe money is being – or will be – spent on rebuilding roads, bridges, ports and airports, upgrading public transit and rail systems, replacing lead pipes to provide clean water, cleaning up pollution, providing high-speed internet, delivering cheaper and cleaner energy – and creating thousands of jobs.One year in, the administration has announced more than $185bn (£154bn) in funding and more than 6,900 specific projects reaching more than 4,000 communities across the country. This includes 2,800 bridge repair and replacement projects and $3bn for 3,075 airport upgrades.The legislation handed the former “Mayor Pete” the biggest infusion of cash into the transport sector since the 1950s interstate highways. He understands how much is riding on it. “What’s at stake in this transportation legislation – and the president talks about it this way too – is more than just the nuts and bolts of it,” he says.“It really is a chance to vindicate the democratic system over some of the systems that are trying to challenge us right now in this century. It sounds a little bit cosmic but that really is part of what is on the table right now with our responsibility to deliver.”The bipartisan law allowed the White House to crow that while “infrastructure week” was a punchline under President Donald Trump, his successor is delivering an “infrastructure decade”. Buttigieg comments: “As you might imagine, I’m no fan of President Trump. I will say this is the one time I was fooled. I actually thought they were going to do it because he talked about it all the time.“It would have been good politics and everybody wanted it to happen, it would have benefited the economy, and they still couldn’t get it done. So after four years of chest thumping and big promises without results, this administration knew, this president knew, that it was long past time to do something and it turned out the public appetite was there, the deal space was there.”Even Republicans who voted against the law, branding it a “socialist wishlist”, are happy to reap the benefits. “It’s hard not to chuckle when I get a letter from some member of Congress, invariably a Republican member of Congress, who declared this legislation to be garbage or wasteful social spending or whatever now saying this is funding that really needs to come to my district for these needs. But at the end of the day, it vindicates our approach.”Buttigieg want to be “strategically shameless” in putting up signs on active projects to make sure that the law gets the credit it deserves. Infrastructure is not like tax policy where, at the stroke of a pen, people feel results instantly. “I often tell the team: part of what we’re doing is building cathedrals and the nature of cathedrals is the person who celebrates the opening may not have been there when the cornerstone was laid.“But because we’re doing so much at so many different scales and in so many different places, the truth is there’s a range of projects where we’ve already turned a spade, improvements that are going to be felt very quickly to some of the bigger cathedrals that will be years and years in the making.”Indeed, Democrats insist that some of the positive effects are being felt already. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia tweeted on 19 December: “Week after week, the infrastructure law is paying dividends. It’s expanding highways like I-64, upgrading airports, fixing crumbling bridges and building new bike paths. It’s revitalizing our communities and making every travel day better.The law’s provisions to tackle systemic racism have come under attack from Republicans and others on the right. Senator Ted Cruz tweeted with sarcasm: “The roads are racist. We must get rid of roads.” DeSantis remarked: “I heard some stuff, some weird stuff from the secretary of transportation trying to make this about social issues. To me, a road’s a road.”Buttigieg is ready to have that debate. He often notes that the phrase “on the wrong side of the tracks”, referring to the undesirable part of town, is indicative of how a railway or highway not only connects but also divides. “As I’ve had this conversation around the country, it’s striking how, wherever I am, I can see in the faces nodding when I bring this up that people are visualising their own community’s version of this.“I talk about this not to go around scolding anybody but precisely because we have the means to do better and that’s why it’s so perplexing to see the resistance to it, because, if you have a choice between having a place become more divided or less divided along racial lines through transportation infrastructure choices, why wouldn’t you want it to be less divided?”At least $1bn (£831m) will help reconnect cities and neighbourhoods that had been racially segregated or divided by road projects. But the legislation is also about including businesses and workers who have been left out in the past.“There’s some impressive – and sometimes moving – things taking place in the building trades, for example, that are in many places opening their doors to workers of colour and women who will make great skilled labourers and make good incomes to build their families around, who just never would have this opportunity in the last round of major infrastructure investment in this country.”Transport contributes more greenhouse gases to the US economy than any other sector; Buttigieg wants it to be part of the climate solution as the infrastructure law promises a national network of electric vehicle chargers. Road accidents kill about 40,000 people a year, comparable with gun violence and far worse than other countries; Buttigieg finds this unacceptable and hopes that self-driving cars might be part of the solution.The secretary, who speaks in paragraphs more polished than most people write, has been willing to make such arguments on Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Fox News network in a series of appearances that have gone viral. It is the kind of outreach to hostile territory that evokes comparisons with Biden’s spirit of bipartisanship – and fuels talk of a future White House run.He explains: “There are a lot of people who tune into ideological networks, as viewers in good faith who may never hear our administration’s perspective if we’re not out there. I’m not the only one doing it but I have been surprised to see it become something of a speciality.“You can’t blame somebody for rejecting our approach if they’ve literally never even heard us defend it, especially when it comes to transportation, where most of what we’re doing is actually broadly well-understood and popular but we’ve got to remind people of that.“It can be tough in a space – and Fox is an example – that tends to offer more coverage of some controversial angle around electric vehicles or racial justice than would offer any coverage of the thousands of specific projects that we’re investing in around the country. I’ve got to get out there and tell people. As long as they’ll have me, I’ll keep doing it.”Buttigieg recently moved from a red state, Indiana, to an increasingly blue one, Michigan, with his husband Chasten and their two young children. On 13 December the couple were on the White House south lawn to watch Biden sign the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex and interracial marriages under federal law.The secretary reflects: “To be sitting with Chasten and seeing the president make that into law was really moving and and reassuring. We shouldn’t have to depend on a one-vote margin on the supreme court to have something as important as millions of marriages be protected and I think Congress recognised that, and I think the American public recognised that.”The shift in public attitudes was illustrated in last month’s midterm elections, where for the first time LGBTQ+ candidates ran for election in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and where Oregon’s Tina Kotek and Massachusetts’ Maura Healey ensured that the US will have an out lesbian governor for the first time. Buttigieg himself was in demand as a campaign surrogate for various Democratic candidates.A New York Times article about him in June 2016 was headlined “The First Gay President?” So is America now ready? “I’m sure it’ll happen,” he says. “What we’re seeing right now is the good, the bad and the ugly. The good news is we have this progress on things like marriage and representation in senior leadership. The bad news is it’s coming in a climate of rights being withdrawn at the US supreme court, including potentially more of the hard-won rights of the LGBTQ+ community.“And the ugly is you see a level of targeting going on for political convenience, in my view, driven by a lot of figures who don’t want to talk about their lack of solutions on other issues, that can really be costly and even physically dangerous for vulnerable communities right now. You can connect the rhetoric we’ve seen, and some of the legislation we’ve seen in state legislatures, with the sometimes violent atmosphere -especially towards transgender youth but across the board for vulnerable people in this community.”The interview draws to a close in a meeting room where one wall is dominated by the faces of past transportation secretaries in neat rows. Biden’s Rooseveltian ambitions look set to make Buttigieg the most powerful holder of the office yet.“Good to see you – and different from the 14th floor in South Bend,” he says affably on his way out. “Who knows where I’ll see you next?”TopicsPete ButtigiegUS politicsInfrastructureBiden administrationUS domestic policyDemocratsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill threatened with retaliation

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      RepublicansRepublicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill threatened with retaliationRightwingers in the party call for members who helped pass the bill to be stripped of their committee assignments Gloria Oladipo in New York@gaoladipoWed 10 Nov 2021 13.37 ESTLast modified on Wed 10 Nov 2021 14.03 ESTA group of congressional Republicans who helped pass the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill last Friday are facing calls for political punishment by their own party, including the threat of having their committee assignments stripped for supporting the president’s agenda, according to reports this week.Several hardline Republicans, including the Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert and former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, have publicly urged retaliation against party colleagues who voted for the $1tn bill. Some members who were among the GOP rank and file who helped the bill pass the House say they have received death threats.Many of the Republicans who backed the bipartisan bill have ranking positions on full committees or subcommittees, including the homeland security committee and the natural resources committee.The bill, which passed 228 to 206, would have failed if no Republicans voted for it in the House late last Friday, prompting widespread fury and intra-party threats, Punchbowl news reported.“That 13 House Republicans provided the votes needed to pass this is absurd,” the Texas representative Chip Roy said, and the Washington Post has reported.Florida’s Matt Gaetz had fumed early on Saturday, tweeting: “I can’t believe Republicans just gave the Democrats their socialism bill.”On Tuesday, Meadows said: “They stripped Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committees for not even voting against the Republican party.… These people voted for Joe Biden, for an infrastructure bill that will clear the way for more socialist spending that, quite frankly, gives Joe Biden a win.”Greene, a radical rightist from Georgia, was demoted earlier this year for promulgating conspiracy theories and untrue claims about issues including mass shootings. She has also been fined several times for refusing to wear a mask to help prevent the spread of coronavirus on Capitol Hill.Before the legislative vote, some Republicans threatened to mount primary challenges to any party members who supported the legislation, according to the Washington Post.“Vote for this infrastructure bill and I will primary the hell out of you,” said Representative Madison Hawthorn of North Carolina.Certain GOP divides in Washington have grown in recent weeks , especially in relation to the bipartisan committee investigating the Capitol insurrection of 6 January by extremist supporters of Donald Trump, and legislative battles on Biden’s agenda.On Tuesday evening, congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who is the leading Republican on that committee, gave a speech in New Hampshire, saying that the US was “confronting a domestic threat that we have never faced before” in the form of Donald Trump, who is “attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic” with his continued attempts to block the investigation of the insurrection and campaign to declare Biden’s 2020 victory fraudulent.Cheney added: “Political leaders who sit silent in the face of these false and dangerous claims are aiding the former president, who is at war with the rule of law, and the constitution.”She emphasized her Republican credentials by pointing out that she disagreed with almost everything Joe Biden has done since coming to power in January.But she added of her own party’s continued support of Trump that “when our constitutional order is threatened, as it is now, rising above partisanship is not simply an aspiration. It is an obligation.”Amid talk that her high-stakes strategy could break her career or set her on a path to run for the White House, observers noted the significance that she delivered her latest broadside in New Hampshire, the small New England state with outsize influence, as it holds the first primary contest in the country during presidential elections.TopicsRepublicansUS CongressInfrastructureUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats’ divisions could still derail infrastructure bills

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      US politicsDemocrats’ divisions could still derail infrastructure bills Pelosi and Schumer pledging to follow two-track strategy to pass a $3.5tn reconciliation bill first Hugo Lowellin WashingtonSun 15 Aug 2021 05.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 15 Aug 2021 05.01 EDTJoe Biden’s economic vision has taken a major step toward becoming reality after the US Senate passed two infrastructure measures, but widening political divisions within the Democratic party could yet derail the entire legislative package.The Senate last week advanced a sprawling $3.5tn budget blueprint for “soft” infrastructure projects to tackle climate change and health care, a day after approving a $1tr bipartisan infrastructure bill to rebuild the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges.But even as Senate Democrats congratulated themselves on pushing through both measures, the fate of Biden’s economic priorities rests on House Democrats clearing several more looming hurdles as well as uniting the party’s left and right.The challenges facing the two infrastructure measures reflects the difficulty in trying to force bipartisan compromise in a deeply divided House and Senate where the Democrats possess only narrow majorities.Liberal Democrats who have bristled at seeing their top climate and social priorities jettisoned as Biden sought an elusive bipartisan compromise with moderate Senate Republicans may seek to change elements of the package, which could upend the delicate legislation.At a minimum, progressives have insisted the House delay considering the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passes a far larger climate and health bill – something not expected until the fall, and against the hopes of centrist House Democrats.In order to deliver the president’s agenda, Democrats are pursuing a two-track approach that involves Congress passing both measures, starting with the $1tn bipartisan compromise that funnels $550bn of new money into traditional infrastructure projects.The second half of the strategy involves the House and Senate passing the climate and health bill, crafted on the basis of the $3.5tn budget blueprint, and passed using reconciliation, a fast-track process that allows Democrats to bypass a Republican filibuster – a procedural convention that can derail legislation.The Democrats’ plan is backstopped by an ironclad commitment from the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that the House will not take up the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate first passes the reconciliation bill, which will take weeks to hammer out in the 50-50 Senate.The move by Pelosi is aimed at trying to balance the competing demands between progressives demanding maximum spending and more fiscally conservative centrists – all while ensuring that both measures are in the end enacted.When the speaker navigated through a similar two-track strategy to approve the Affordable Care Act under President Barack Obama in 2010, the bill passed notwithstanding the defections of three Democrats in the Senate and three dozen in the House.Pelosi now holds such a razor-thin majority in the House that she can afford only three Democratic defections to pass the bipartisan bill and the reconciliation bill if the votes are along party lines. Protest votes from either faction could sink the entire effort.But growing discontent about the legislation on both sides on Capitol Hill signals the prospect of an even more bitter and protracted intra-party fight over the future of the legislation in the coming weeks and months.The speaker on Wednesday reaffirmed her position to House Democrats during a closed-door caucus meeting that the Senate would have to first pass the $3.5tr reconciliation bill before the House would move to consider the bipartisan bill.“The votes in the House and Senate depend on us having both bills,” Pelosi told House Democrats, referencing the thin majorities in both chambers, according to a source familiar with the speaker’s remarks.That means the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, will need his committee chairs to finalize the language for the reconciliation bill and gain the approval of centrist Senate Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin before the House can proceed.In an added complication, both Sinema and Manchin have sounded the alarm in recent days over the cost of the $3.5tr budget blueprint that will guide the reconciliation bill, though they joined their colleagues in voting to allow the framework to pass.The possibility that Democrats could get both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill has outraged Republicans, who have vowed to try to derail the $3.5tr package, which Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell likened to a “reckless tax-and-spending spree”.Challenges in the House also returned on Friday after a group of nine House Democratic moderates threatened in a letter to vote against the $3.5tn budget blueprint when the House returns the week of 23 August, if Pelosi didn’t pass the bipartisan bill first.The missive called on the speaker to abandon her two-track timetable so members vulnerable in 2022 could sell the bill to voters. “We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law,” the nine moderates wrote in a letter, which a House Democratic leadership aide described as “highly problematic”.Threats from moderates have infuriated progressive Democrats, who, emboldened by their successful effort to twist the Biden administration to introduce a new eviction moratorium, have repeatedly warned House Democratic leaders not to deviate from their original plan.In a letter to Pelosi on Tuesday, the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said a poll of their 96 members confirmed a majority would withhold their support for the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passed the reconciliation bill.White House officials have said that they remain closely attuned to the growing tensions in the House and Senate. Pelosi and Biden speak regularly, and aides have started holding thrice-weekly conference calls, according to sources familiar with the matter.But top Democrats in Congress see no alternative to the path they are headed down and are hopeful that the two-track strategy will prove successful as in 2010. “I am very pleased to report that the two-track strategy is right on track,” Schumer said.TopicsUS politicsUS CongressInfrastructureDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans join Democrats to advance $1tn infrastructure bill – video

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      Chuck Schumer warned that coming to a bipartisan compromise could be ‘hard’ as Republicans joined Democrats to advance a $1tn infrastructure bill in the US Senate, remaining in session over the weekend.
      The bill represents the biggest spending in decades on American infrastructure including roads, bridges, airports and waterways, in what Joe Biden has called a ‘historic investment’ in public works.

      Senate to resume infrastructure debate as Trump threatens Republicans who back bill More