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      Congress Unveils Short-Term Spending Deal

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      Speaker Mike Johnson dropped his demands for proof-of-citizenship voting requirements to strike a deal that includes more money for the Secret Service and funds the government through Dec. 20.Congressional leaders from both parties unveiled a short-term agreement to fund the government on Sunday, after Speaker Mike Johnson abandoned demands for a longer-term deal that also included new proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration.The deal, which extends federal appropriations through Dec. 20, includes an additional $231 million to help the beleaguered Secret Service protect candidates during the upcoming presidential election and into next year. According to the Treasury Department, the United States has spent about $6.3 trillion in fiscal 2024, which ends on Sept. 30.The timeline of the deal allows Congress to sidestep a government shutdown during the campaign season, but it all but ensures that spending disputes will dominate the lame-duck period between the election and the inauguration of a new Congress in January.“While I am pleased bipartisan negotiations quickly led to a government funding agreement free of cuts and poison pills, this same agreement could have been done two weeks ago,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said in a statement heralding the temporary spending patch — known as a continuing resolution — and blaming Republicans for dragging their heels. “Instead, Speaker Johnson chose to follow the MAGA way and wasted precious time.”In a letter on Sunday to his colleagues explaining why he was forced to take the deal, Mr. Johnson wrote, “A continuing resolution is the only option that remains.” He promised to put it to a floor vote this week.Mr. Johnson had made it a personal crusade to include in the spending package legislation requiring people to prove their U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, arguing it was necessary to prevent fraud, despite scant evidence of noncitizens voting. That requirement, known as the SAVE Act, was also supported by the hard right and by former President Donald J. Trump, who called on Congress not to pass a spending plan without “every ounce” of the proposal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      MAGA Wants Transgression, and This Is What Comes With It

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      The North Carolina Republican Party is facing one of the most predictable crises in the history of party politics.Its primary voters enthusiastically supported a candidate for governor named Mark Robinson — voting for him by a more than 45-point margin over his closest rival (he won by 64.8 percent to 19.2 percent) — even though he had a remarkable record of deeply inflammatory and even unhinged statements.Last week, a comprehensive CNN report unearthed compelling evidence that Robinson had posted on a porn site called Nude Africa. I cannot possibly repeat the worst posts, but the less graphically obscene ones included statements like this: “I’m a Black Nazi,” and “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.”That’s not all. “I’m not in the K.K.K.,” he also said, according to the CNN report. “They don’t let Blacks join. If I was in the K.K.K. I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” He said he’d prefer Hitler to what he sees in Washington today.No one, however, should be surprised. Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Trump Can’t Shake Project 2025

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      In 2024, the deep state that defeats Donald Trump might be his own.That, after all, is what Project 2025 was actually meant to be. The 900-page tome that Democrats hoist in front of the cameras is a festival of policy options, detailed down to the sub-agency level. But options for whom? Not for Trump himself. Even the most wonkish of presidents can only engage on a small fraction of what the executive branch does. And Donald Trump was not the most wonkish of presidents. When he said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025 and has no intention of doing so, I believed him.But Project 2025 — and much else like it that has gotten less press — is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own. The presidency is not one man, Diet Coke in hand, Fox & Friends on TV, barking orders. It’s 4,000-or-so political appointees — nearer to 50,000 if Trump again uses Schedule F powers to strip civil-service protections from vast swaths of the federal government — trying to do what they think the president wants them to do or what they think needs to be done. They do that by setting policy for the more than two million civilian employees of the federal government and by writing regulations that the rest of society must follow.Veterans of Trump’s administration believe personnel was their biggest problem. They could not act ambitiously or swiftly enough because they were at constant war with the government they, in theory, controlled. Part of this reflected Trump’s erratic leadership style and the constant conflict between the warring factions inside his White House: the traditional Republicans clustered around Mike Pence and Reince Priebus; the MAGA types led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller; the foreign policy establishment that spoke through H.R. McMaster and Nikki Haley; the corporatists led by Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. Read any book on the Trump presidency, and you will be buried in examples of Trump’s top appointees trying to foil each other — and him.But some of it reflected a federal bureaucracy that resisted Trump and the people he appointed. In a presentation at the 2024 National Conservatism conference in Washington, Katy Talento, who oversaw health care policy on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, described the obstacles she faced:There’s like a handful of political appointees at an agency with hundreds of thousands of employees and maybe one or two of those appointees is sufficiently experienced to write regulations. They can’t seek any help from experienced but hostile bureaucrats that surround them, or those drafts get leaked, or bad advice gets provided, and poison pills get put into regs, drafts get slowed down or scuttled all together. So this dramatically limits the productivity potential of a Republican administration.This is the problem groups like Project 2025 set out to solve. Behind the policy playbook sits a database of around 20,000 applicants ready to be part of the next Trump administration. And that database is still growing. There is an online portal that, even now, invites applicants to apply for inclusion in “the Presidential Personnel Database.” It goes on to say that “with the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.”To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done.“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people,” writes Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, in one of its chapters. Victory will require the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At a Rally in North Carolina, Trump Avoids Topic A: Mark Robinson

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      Through an awkward quirk of scheduling former President Donald J. Trump found himself headlining a rally in North Carolina on Saturday just two days after the man he endorsed to become the state’s next governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, was accused of making a series of disturbing posts on a pornographic website.In the lead-up to the rally, there was a great deal of curiosity in political circles about how Mr. Trump, who had called Mr. Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids,” might react to an explosive CNN report that Mr. Robinson had once called himself a “black NAZI” and defended slavery years ago on a pornographic forum.The answer? He wouldn’t.Speaking for just over an hour at a boisterous rally on an airport tarmac in Wilmington, N.C., Mr. Trump made no mention of Mr. Robinson or the scandal surrounding him, even as he gave shout-outs to a number of the state’s officials and politicians. And Mr. Robinson, who has denied the accusations, was conspicuous by his absence.Instead, Mr. Trump delivered a fairly standard rally speech, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats on the economy and immigration while digressing to criticize Ms. Harris’s livestreamed event this week with Oprah Winfrey; to call her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, “weird”; to say that he would ask Elon Musk to help him send rockets to Mars; and to claim falsely that an Olympic boxer was transgender.One of the only speakers at Saturday’s rally to acknowledge the controversy engulfing Mr. Robinson was Representative Dan Bishop, the Republican candidate for state attorney general, who called the revelations “a meticulously timed and coordinated character assassination.”Building on his effort to make immigration, an area where voters are dissatisfied with Democrats, the central issue of the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump announced that he would push Congress to pass legislation outlawing so-called sanctuary cities, places that limit how local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration authorities. During his presidency, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that tried to withhold federal grants to such locales, an effort that was blocked by federal courts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Heads to North Carolina as Mark Robinson’s Campaign Reels

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      With somewhat awkward timing, former President Donald J. Trump plans to campaign in North Carolina on Saturday as his pick for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, faces accusations of making disturbing posts on a pornographic website.Mr. Trump’s visit to Wilmington, N.C., for a rally will take place two days after CNN reported that Mr. Robinson had once called himself a “black NAZI!” and defended slavery years ago on a pornographic forum.Mr. Robinson, whom Mr. Trump endorsed in March, has denied the report and vowed to stay in the race. But both parties are looking closely at the fallout, which could have a spillover effect in the presidential contest, given that North Carolina is a key battleground state that Mr. Trump won twice but that Democrats see as competitive.The lieutenant governor, who has a long history of making inflammatory and offensive remarks, is not expected to attend Mr. Trump’s rally on Saturday, according to a person familiar with the program’s details. Mr. Robinson was also absent when Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, visited the state on Wednesday, the day before CNN released its report.A spokesman for Mr. Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. The Trump campaign avoided weighing in on the controversy when asked for comment on Friday.Democrats, who last carried North Carolina in the 2008 presidential race, are seeking to remind voters in the increasingly competitive state about Mr. Trump’s past praise for Mr. Robinson. Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign released a television ad on Friday, “Both Wrong,” highlighting Mr. Trump’s past warm words for Mr. Robinson and some of Mr. Robinson’s past polarizing statements. At least nine electronic billboards around the state will display ads on Friday and Saturday paid for by the Democratic National Committee linking the two Republicans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How One Man’s Vote in Nebraska Could Change the Presidential Election

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      A single Republican state senator appears to be holding back a push by Donald J. Trump to net a potentially pivotal electoral vote even before ballots are cast.In Eastern Nebraska, far from the presidential battleground states, a drama is playing out that could, in a perfectly plausible November scenario, have history-altering repercussions for the nation’s future and the next president — and it may all come down to one man.A single Republican state senator from Omaha, Mike McDonnell, has so far stood firm against a push by former President Donald J. Trump, national Republicans and the Nebraska G.O.P. to change Nebraska from a state that divides its electoral votes by congressional district to one that awards all of them to the statewide winner. Maine is the only other state without a winner-take-all system.If Mr. McDonnell buckles, two other Republican senators in Nebraska’s unicameral legislature who have also not yet committed to changing Nebraska’s system are likely to follow his lead, according to a number of Republicans and Democrats involved in the discussions going on at the State Capitol.The tumbling dominoes would almost certainly give the single electoral vote of Omaha and its suburbs, which Vice President Kamala Harris is favored to win, to Mr. Trump.That might not sound like much, but if Ms. Harris were to win the so-called blue wall — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — while losing every other battleground state, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, that one electoral vote would be the difference between a 270-268 Electoral College victory for the vice president or a 269-269 tie. And in the event of a tie, the House of Representatives would determine the winner, not by raw votes of House members but by the support of each state delegation.With more delegations in Republican control, Mr. Trump would almost certainly win.As of Friday, Mr. McDonnell, who is barred by Nebraska’s term limits law from seeking re-election, had not changed his position.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court Won’t Restore Jill Stein to the Nevada Ballot

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      Democrats had argued that Ms. Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, was ineligible because the party had failed to submit a required statement.The Supreme Court said on Friday that it would not restore the Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein, to the Nevada ballot in the coming election. Democrats had challenged her eligibility, saying her party had submitted flawed paperwork.The court’s brief order gave no reasons, which is typical when it acts on emergency applications. There were no noted dissents.The Nevada Supreme Court ruled this month that the Green Party’s failure to submit a sworn statement required by state regulations meant that its candidates could not appear on the ballot. The party acknowledged the lapse but said it had relied on instructions from a state election official.The party was represented in the Supreme Court by Jay Sekulow, who has served as a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump.In response to an inquiry from the party in July, an official sent what she said were the required forms, saying “please use the documents attached to begin collecting signatures.”The party submitted the required number of signatures, and election officials placed its candidates on the ballot after they verified a sampling of the signatures. The Nevada Democratic Party sued, saying the Green Party had failed to supply a sworn statement that the signatures were believed to be from voters registered in the counties in which they lived.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