United States Politics and Government

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Why House Republicans Are Targeting China Weeks Before the Election

      by

      The G.O.P. pushed through an array of legislation to get tough on China, seeking to persuade voters that they are the party that will protect Americans from economic and military threats from Beijing.The House this week tackled a long-promised package of bills to get tough on China, but few if any have a chance of becoming law after Republicans opted to prioritize a handful of politically divisive measures that Democrats oppose.For months, House leaders had promised a bipartisan show of force against the United States’ biggest economic and military adversary, including curtailing investments in sensitive Chinese industries, clamping down on data theft and espionage, and ensuring more Chinese imports were subject to taxes and forced labor standards.But only some of those proposals made it to the floor this week. Instead, Republican leaders added a handful of partisan measures that appear to be aimed at portraying their party as stronger on countering China and Democrats, including the Biden administration, as weak.It comes weeks before the elections in which the White House and control of Congress are up for grabs.“Because the White House has chosen not to confront China and protect America’s interests, House Republicans will,” Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, told reporters on Tuesday.Here’s a look at what the House did, and why.Subjecting international pandemic agreements to Senate treaty approval.Republicans, who have castigated the World Health Organization for its response to the coronavirus pandemic, pushed through a bill that would require Senate ratification of any W.H.O. agreement on pandemic preparedness. The organization is exploring ways to streamline the international response to the next pandemic.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 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      If Harris Wins North Carolina, This County Will Be the Tipping Point

      by

      For 16 years, the state has been a heartbreaker for Democrats, and so has Mecklenburg County — a reliably blue area that just hasn’t been blue enough.Ask any Democrat knocking doors, hosting debate watch parties or making phone calls in the blue pockets of North Carolina over the last several weeks, and they’ll say 2024 feels a lot like 2008.That was the year Barack Obama became the first Democrat to win the state in more than three decades. No presidential candidate for the Democrats has managed it since, but an outpouring of excitement for Vice President Kamala Harris has gotten their hopes up.Democrats eager to avoid another disappointment point to the state’s biggest metropolitan area — and the source of the party’s biggest recent heartbreaks — as the key.Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte and its suburbs, is a reliably blue region that, in the 16 years since Mr. Obama’s first and only victory there, just hasn’t been blue enough. In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the state by under two percentage points, his narrowest losing margin that year, and a key culprit was low voter enthusiasm and an underfunded county party operation. Two years later, when Cheri Beasley fell short in her Senate bid, her Democratic allies pointed to Mecklenburg’s record low turnout.Ms. Harris will visit Charlotte and Greensboro on Thursday in a trip that underlines both her campaign’s increased confidence in their North Carolina prospects and serves as a soft endorsement of her party’s strategy there: run up the score on friendly turf.“To impact the state, Mecklenburg has to overperform,” said Aimy Steele, a veteran organizer who leads the New North Carolina Project aimed at mobilizing voters of color across the state. Democratic candidates in the past, she said, “have not nurtured their voters as much as they probably should or could over time and over time, some of those voters have fallen off and not voted regularly.”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 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Citing Gaza Help, Blinken Waives Human Rights Conditions on Aid to Egypt

      by

      Cairo will receive its full military aid allotment of $1.3 billion after the secretary of state also said it had made progress on releasing political prisoners and protecting Americans.For the first time under the Biden administration, the United States will send Egypt its full allotment of $1.3 billion in annual military aid, waiving human rights requirements on the spending mainly in recognition of Cairo’s efforts to reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza, U.S. officials said.The decision, which the State Department notified Congress of on Wednesday, marks a striking shift for the administration. President Biden came into office promising “no blank checks” that would enable Egypt’s rights abuses, and in each of the past three years, his administration had withheld at least some of the congressionally mandated aid to Cairo, a close American ally.But the decision shows how the administration’s calculus has changed as Mr. Biden prioritizes trying to halt the violence in Gaza, one of the key goals he has set for himself in his final months in office.In response to longtime concerns about human rights abuses in Egypt, U.S. law places conditions on about a quarter of the military aid to Egypt each year. To release it, the secretary of state must certify that Cairo has complied with a range of human rights requirements.A State Department spokesman said the secretary, Antony J. Blinken, had found that Egypt had only partly met the human rights requirements but had overridden them, employing a legally permitted waiver “in the U.S. national security interest.”Mr. Blinken’s decision was based on Egypt’s monthslong role as an intermediary between Hamas and Israel as the two sides try to negotiate a cease-fire deal that would free Israeli hostages in Gaza and allow more humanitarian aid into the territory, which borders Egypt’s Sinai Desert, the spokesman said.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 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Harris and Trump Bet on Their Own Sharply Contrasting Views of America

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump is gambling that Americans are as angry as he is, while Vice President Kamala Harris hopes voters are exhausted by the Trump era and ready to move on.Donald J. Trump’s America is a grim place, a nation awash in marauding immigrants stealing American jobs and eating American cats and dogs, a country devastated economically, humiliated internationally and perched on the cliff’s edge of an apocalyptic World War III.Kamala Harris’s America is a weary but hopeful place, a nation fed up with the chaos of the Trump years and sick of all the drama and divisiveness, a country embarrassed by a crooked stuck-in-the-past former president facing prison time and eager for a new generation of leadership.These two visions of America on display during the first and possibly only presidential debate between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump on Tuesday night encapsulated the gambles that each candidate is taking in this hotly contested campaign. Mr. Trump is betting on anger and Ms. Harris on exhaustion. Mr. Trump is trying to repackage and resell his “American carnage” theme eight years later, while Ms. Harris is appealing to those ready to leave that in the past.The question is who has a better read on the American psyche eight weeks before the final ballots are cast. For the past two decades, most Americans have told pollsters that they believe the country is on the wrong track, a prolonged period of national disenchantment that Mr. Trump has successfully channeled throughout his tumultuous political career. But Ms. Harris argues that Mr. Trump is the one who wants to take the nation back down a path to nowhere.“She’s destroying this country,” Mr. Trump declared at one point during the debate. It was a line he recycled in one form or another 13 times in all — she or the Democrats destroying the country, the economy, the energy industry.“Let’s turn the page and move forward,” Ms. Harris said for her part. She turned pages or moved forward at least five other times. “Frankly,” she added, “the American people are exhausted with this same old tired playbook.”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

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Taylor Swift Endorses Kamala Harris

      by

      Taylor Swift, one of America’s most celebrated pop-culture icons with a giant following across the world, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate on Tuesday.The endorsement by Ms. Swift, delivered mere minutes after Ms. Harris and former President Donald J. Trump stepped off the debate stage in Philadelphia, offers Ms. Harris an unrivaled validator in the world of celebrity.“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Ms. Swift wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.” More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Over 90 Minutes, Trump Descended to His True Self

      by

      For the first 10 minutes or so of Tuesday night’s debate, it looked like the restrained version of Donald Trump might have shown up in Philadelphia, the one who learned his lesson from his failure to curb his impulses in the 2020 debates with Joe Biden. He stayed silent while Kamala Harris ripped up his economic plan, which she correctly noted was based on a tax cut for the wealthy and a sales tax on all imported goods. When it was his turn to respond, he accurately pointed out that the Biden administration made no attempt to end the tariffs he imposed on China.But it didn’t last, and no one who has watched Trump over the last decade thought it could. Within minutes, he descended from a discussion of tariffs into a description of immigrants — one he returned to over and over again during the evening — that could only be described as a form of nativist hysteria.“They are taking over the towns,” he said. “They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country. They are dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.”This was the level of delusion that Harris and her campaign had clearly hoped Trump would demonstrate to voters, and it just got worse from there. “They’re eating the dogs,” he said, referring to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, a particularly heinous calumny that began on social media and was spread by his running mate, JD Vance. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” When the moderator David Muir pointed out that local officials had seen nothing of the kind, Trump said he heard about it on television.Throughout the evening, in moments just like that, Harris was able to do something that Biden had failed to do when he was campaigning for re-election: Push Trump in ways that exposed his spattering of lies and wild fantasies.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

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Repeats False Claim About Immigrants Eating Cats and Dogs

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump repeated a false and outlandish claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have abducted and eaten their neighbors’ pets.Mr. Trump made the comments on Tuesday early in his first debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, shortly after Ms. Harris mocked his rallies as so filled with fictions and fringe theories that attendees leave early. Mr. Trump responded by trying to pivot back to the subject under discussion, immigration.“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it,” he said. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, have amplified the internet rumor on the campaign trail this week. It stems from viral social media posts that have spread as Mr. Vance and others have sought to stir fears about the growing Haitian population in Springfield, though members of the community are living and working in the United States legally.Local officials have found no evidence, credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed by Haitian residents.When David Muir, a debate moderator, noted the lack of evidence, Mr. Trump said he had gotten his information from “the people on television saying my dog was taken and used for food.”Ms. Harris laughed. Mr. Trump’s “extreme” statements, she said, are one of the reasons she has the endorsements of 200 Republicans.Mr. Vance first made the claim about Haitian immigrants on Monday, saying “it’s coming to your city next.” A news release from the Trump campaign later recounted the falsehoods. Mr. Vance then appeared to backtrack on Tuesday morning in a social post, saying his office had “received many inquiries” about the false claims. But he added that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”That has not stopped the social media platforms from being awash with memes and AI-generated images of cats in support of Mr. Trump.Job opportunities in Springfield, a city of roughly 58,000 people between Columbus and Dayton, have attracted thousands of Haitians since the pandemic began, with city officials estimating that as many as 20,000 have arrived. By some accounts, the immigrant community has helped revitalize the town, though it has put pressure on housing, schools and hospitals. More