Senate

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      For Biden, Aid Package Provides a Welcome Boost on the World Stage

      by

      The congressional breakthrough on security assistance to Ukraine and Israel will let the president finally deliver arms to match his words. But it could be only a temporary respite.Finally, President Biden had good news to share with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. When Mr. Biden picked up the telephone at his home in Wilmington, Del., to call Mr. Zelensky on Monday, the two rejoiced over the congressional breakthrough that will result in the first significant new U.S. military aid for Ukraine in 16 months.Mr. Biden used the 30-minute call to “underscore the United States’ lasting commitment to supporting Ukraine” against Russian invaders and promise that arms will start flowing again “quickly,” according to a White House statement. For a grateful Mr. Zelensky, the timing was propitious. A Russian missile attack, he told Mr. Biden, had just destroyed the television tower in Kharkiv.The House passage of a landmark $95 billion foreign aid package gives Mr. Biden much-needed momentum at a time when his credibility and American leadership have been questioned on the world stage. For months, the president has vowed unstinting support for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan without being able to deliver on Capitol Hill. Now, at last, he has planeloads of artillery rounds, air defense missiles and other munitions to back up his words.“This was a historic win for President Biden and for America’s global leadership,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said in an interview. “This was a moment when both our allies and our adversaries were watching to see if we would deliver for the people of Ukraine in their moment of need.”Michael Allen, a former national security aide to President George W. Bush, said the aid would counter international worries about the United States for now but added that Mr. Biden should use it to press American allies to take more of a leadership role.“It’s a win for the U.S. after months of talk about America’s lost its way, beset by populism and isolationism,” he said. “Biden now has new political capital, if he’ll use it, to browbeat more Europeans into more assistance for Ukraine and NATO.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Boeing Defends Safety of 787 Dreamliner After Whistle-Blower’s Claims

      by

      After a Boeing engineer went public with safety concerns, the company invited reporters to its South Carolina factory and top engineers vouched for the plane.Boeing sought on Monday to reassure the public of the safety of its 787 Dreamliner plane days before a whistle-blower is scheduled to testify before Congress about his concerns regarding the jet’s structural integrity.In a briefing for reporters at the factory in North Charleston, S.C., where the plane is assembled, two top Boeing engineers said the company had conducted exhaustive tests, inspections and analyses of the plane, both during its development and in recent years, and found no evidence that its body would fail prematurely.The presentation came just under a week after The New York Times reported the allegations by the whistle-blower, Sam Salehpour, who works as a quality engineer at Boeing and is set to testify before a Senate panel on Wednesday. Mr. Salehpour said that sections of the fuselage of the Dreamliner, a wide-body plane that makes extensive use of composite materials, were not properly fastened together and that the plane could suffer structural failure over time as a result. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating his allegations.Mr. Salehpour’s claims instantly created another public-relations problem for Boeing, which has been facing intense scrutiny over its manufacturing practices after a panel came off a 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.Mr. Salehpour said that the gaps where sections of the Dreamliner’s fuselage were fastened together did not always meet Boeing’s specifications, something that he said could weaken the aircraft over time. The Boeing engineers disagreed with his assessment, without naming him. They said the plane had gone through extensive testing that showed that, in a vast majority of cases, the gaps met the specifications. Even if the gaps exceeded the specifications by a reasonable amount, they would not affect the plane’s durability, the engineers added.“Not only did we interrogate those airframes — we were taking out fasteners, we were looking for damage, we’re also doing the approval inspections to understand the build condition, and we didn’t find any fatigue issues in the composite structure,” said Steve Chisholm, a vice president and the functional chief engineer for mechanical and structural engineering at Boeing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Johnson Floats Voting on Senate Ukraine Bill, With Conservative Policies as Sweeteners

      by

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

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      WWII Rosie the Riveters Are Honored in Washington

      by

      Rosie the Riveters, American women who filled a crucial labor shortage during World War II and reshaped the work force, were honored at the Capitol.Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Marian Sousa moved to California to care for the children of her sister Phyllis Gould, who had gone to work as a welder in a Bay Area shipyard.Just a year later, Ms. Sousa, at 17 years old, joined the wartime work force herself, drafting blueprints and revising outdated designs for troop transports. Wearing a hard hat and with a clipboard in hand, she would accompany maritime inspectors on board ships she’d helped design and examine the product of her labors.She and her sister were just two of the roughly 6 million women who went to work during World War II, memorialized by the now iconic recruitment poster depicting Rosie the Riveter, her hair tied back in a kerchief, rolling up the sleeve of her denim shirt and flexing a muscle beneath the slogan, “We can do it!”More than eight decades later, Ms. Sousa, now 98, gathered at the Capitol on Wednesday with around two dozen other so-called Rosies — many of them white-haired and most wearing the red with white polka dots made famous by the poster — to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of their efforts.Marian Sousa, wearing a red shirt with white polka dots in a nod to the classic recruitment poster depicting Rosie, at the ceremony on Wednesday.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“We never thought we’d be recognized,” Ms. Sousa said in an interview. “Just never thought — we were just doing the job for the country and earning money on the side.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Nonprofit Theaters Are in Trouble. Lawmakers Are Proposing Help.

      by

      Proposed legislation would allocate $1 billion annually for an industry coping with rising expenses and smaller audiences.The financial crisis facing nonprofit theaters in America has captured the attention of Congress, where a group of Democratic lawmakers is introducing legislation that would direct $1 billion annually to the struggling industry for five years.That money could be used for payroll and workforce development, as well as other expenses like rent, set-building and marketing. But the legislation, which lawmakers plan to introduce on Tuesday, faces long odds at a time when a divided Congress — where Republicans control the House and Democrats lead the Senate — has had trouble agreeing on anything.Nonprofit theaters around the country have reduced their programming and laid off workers to cope with rising expenses and smaller audiences since the coronavirus pandemic began. There are exceptions — some nonprofit theaters say they are thriving — but several companies, including New Repertory Theater in suburban Boston, Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, and Book-It Repertory Theater in Seattle, have ceased or suspended operations in response to the crisis.“It hasn’t been a recovery for the nonprofits — they’re really lagging compared to many other sectors in the economy, and it’s for a lot of reasons,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, one of the legislation’s sponsors, said in an interview. “So they do need help.”Mr. Welch argued that the organizations merit government assistance because they strengthen communities and benefit local economies.The legislation, which is called the Supporting Theater and the Arts to Galvanize the Economy (STAGE) Act of 2024, is also being sponsored by Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon is sponsoring it in the House.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who is the majority leader and who led the fight to win government aid for performing arts organizations during the pandemic, is supportive of the proposed legislation and is also open to other ways to assist nonprofit theaters, according to a spokesman.The pandemic aid package that Mr. Schumer championed serves as a precedent: In 2020, Congress passed the Save Our Stages Act, which led to a $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program that made money available to a wide array of commercial and nonprofit performing arts organizations.Mr. Welch said the earlier aid program succeeded despite initial skepticism.“With everything else that was going on, the expectation was this would die on the vine, but it didn’t — as this started getting momentum, there was excitement about being about to do something concrete,” he said.The new legislation is narrower, benefiting only professional nonprofit theaters, and only those that have either seen a decline in revenues or that primarily serve historically underserved communities.“This is a beginning,” Mr. Welch said. “There are obstacles, but let the effort begin.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      New Jersey Ballot Ruling Applies Only to Democratic Race, Judge Says

      by

      A federal judge who tossed out the state’s unique ballot design said his ruling would affect only the Democratic primary.New Jersey moved a step closer last week toward overhauling its unique-in-the-nation election ballots, in a decision that could reshape party politics in the state for years to come.But not — at least not immediately — for both major parties.On Saturday, the federal judge who ordered the redesign, in response to a lawsuit filed in February by three Democratic candidates, said in a statement that only the Democratic primary, which includes the race to replace Senator Robert Menendez, would have to use the new ballot. The Republican ballot, he wrote, can stay the same, though he said his order did not prohibit Republican leaders from choosing to alter their party’s ballot.The clarification is the latest twist in a long legal battle in New Jersey to shift the balance of electoral power away from party-backed candidates and open the door for newcomers in both parties. But if the decision stands, Republicans, too, may soon be forced to change their ballot, though perhaps not in time for the June 4 primary, said Julia Sass Rubin, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University who was an expert witness in the lawsuit.“It’s just a hiccup,” Dr. Rubin said. “If this decision holds, it will completely upend New Jersey politics.”On Friday, the federal judge, Zahid N. Quraishi of U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, ruled in favor of changing the format of primary election ballots used in 19 of 21 counties in New Jersey, which have historically favored candidates put forward by party bosses.The so-called county-line ballot, in which local political leaders’ preferred candidates are grouped together in a prominent position, is an anomaly in the United States, with only New Jersey using the system, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The U.S. Investors Caught in the Scrum Over TikTok

      by

      Major U.S. investment firms such as General Atlantic, Susquehanna and Sequoia Capital own stakes in ByteDance, the parent of TikTok. Their investments are increasingly under fire.For years, the U.S. investors who backed ByteDance, the Chinese internet company that owns TikTok, have wrestled with the complexities of owning a piece of a geopolitically fraught social media app.Now it’s gotten even more complicated.A bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok is winding its way through the Senate after sailing through the House this month. Questions about whether TikTok’s Chinese ties make it a national security threat are mounting. And U.S. investors including General Atlantic, Susquehanna International Group and Sequoia Capital — which collectively poured billions into ByteDance — are facing increased pressure from state and federal lawmakers to answer for their investments in Chinese companies.Last year, a House committee began examining U.S. investments in Chinese companies. The Biden administration has curbed U.S. investments in China. In December, a Missouri pension board voted to divest from some Chinese investments, following political pressure from the state treasurer. And Florida passed legislation this month to require the state’s Board of Administration to sell off its stakes in China-owned companies.All of this comes on top of existing issues with owning a piece of ByteDance. The Beijing-based company has grown into one of the world’s most highly valued start-ups, worth $225 billion, according to CB Insights. That’s a boon, at least on paper, for U.S. investors who put money into ByteDance when it was a smaller company.Yet in reality, these investors have an illiquid investment that is hard to spin into gold. Since ByteDance is privately held, investors cannot simply sell their stakes in it. A confluence of politics and economics means ByteDance is also unlikely to go public soon, which would enable its shares to trade.Even if a sale of TikTok was easy to pull off, the Chinese government appears reluctant to relinquish control of an influential social media company. Beijing moved to stop a deal for TikTok to American buyers a few years ago and recently condemned the congressional bill that mandates ByteDance divest the app.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Leaders Release $1.2 Trillion Spending Bill as Congress Races to Avert Shutdown

      by

      The bipartisan bill emerged one day before the federal funding deadline, and it was not clear whether Congress could complete it in time to avoid a partial shutdown after midnight on Friday.Top congressional negotiators in the early hours of Thursday unveiled the $1.2 trillion spending bill to fund the government through September, though it remained unclear whether Congress would be able to complete action on it in time to avert a brief partial government shutdown over the weekend.Lawmakers are racing to pass the legislation before a Friday midnight deadline in order to prevent a lapse in funds for over half the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon and health agencies. They are already six months behind schedule because of lengthy negotiations to resolve funding and policy disputes.Now that they have agreed on a final package, which wraps six spending bills together, passage could slip past 12:01 on Saturday morning because of a set of arcane congressional rules. House Republican leaders were signaling that they intended to hold a vote on the bill on Friday, bypassing a self-imposed rule requiring that lawmakers be given at least 72 hours to review legislation before it comes up for a vote.There could be additional hurdles in the Senate, where any one lawmaker’s objection to speedy passage of legislation could prolong debate and delay a final vote.Democrats and Republicans both highlighted victories in the painstakingly negotiated legislation. Republicans cited as victories funding for Border Patrol agents, additional detention beds run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a provision cutting off aid to the main United Nations agency that provides assistance to Palestinians. Democrats secured funding increases for federal child care and education programs, cancer and Alzheimer’s research.“We had to work within difficult fiscal constraints — but this bipartisan compromise will keep our country moving forward,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More