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  • ‘This is the last thing we need:’ Millions of businesses hammered by the pandemic need to start paying back Covid loans | CNN Business

    ‘This is the last thing we need:’ Millions of businesses hammered by the pandemic need to start paying back Covid loans | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    At Teddy & The Bully Bar restaurant near downtown Washington, DC, business has never been the same since the pandemic hit.

    “It’s very challenging,” owner Alan Popovsky said. “I’m still going to be climbing the hill for quite some time. Probably for the rest of my life.”

    The pandemic closed two of Popovsky’s four restaurants in the area. He said government loans saved the other two. But with city centers struggling to bring back commuters and foot traffic, he said revenue is still down more than 45%, and they’re fighting to stay open.

    To make matters worse, it’s time to start paying back those loans.

    “We just got over paying back the landlord,” Popovsky said. “It’s really a feeling that you’re just a hamster spinning on a wheel.”

    At the start of the pandemic, as business stalled, nearly 3.8 million small business owners took out Economic Injury Disaster Loans (known as EIDL loans) from the federal government, averaging roughly $100,000 per loan, according to the Small Business Administration. Unlike some other pandemic programs, these 30-year loans, carrying an interest rate of 3.75% for businesses, were intended to be paid back.

    After more than two years of deferrals, the first EIDL loan monthly payments have started to come due. Around 2.6 million businesses across the country will owe money by the end of January.

    Popovsky said he owes the federal government roughly $780,000, and started receiving monthly bills for more than $3,700 in October.

    “We can’t afford anything, but what we’re doing is paying the interest only right now,” he said. “We have not made a dent on the principal.”

    A new survey from the National Federation of Independent Business found only 36% of their small business members have reached their pre-pandemic sales levels, while 31% of businesses are still below 75% of their pre-crisis sales.

    Coming out of the pandemic, small businesses have faced difficult hurdles, like staffing shortages, supply chain issues and inflation.

    Now add a possible looming recession, just as these EIDL loans come due.

    “The challenges are immense for many of them and they’re having to navigate a lot of those headwinds,” said Holly Wade, executive director of the NFIB Research Center. “It is one more cost that they’re going to have to deal with, and some small business owners, unfortunately, are going to struggle with meeting those obligations.”

    Lisa Klein, who owns a physical therapy practice in the Washington, DC, area, said Covid-19 is still keeping some patients away.

    Lisa Klein, who owns and operates an outpatient physical therapy practice with offices in Virginia and in Washington, DC, said her practice is still trying to claw its way back after Covid-19, which is keeping some patients away or forcing costly last-minute cancellations.

    “The costs of everything have gone up,” Klein said. “The whole business is still suffering, and this is just kind of adding insult to injury.”

    Klein took out a $200,000 EIDL loan at the start of the pandemic but returned half of it after a year as the interest began piling up. The SBA estimates that businesses have accrued between $32 billion and $34 billion in interest over the 30-month deferment period.

    She’s now paying nearly $1,000 a month, with a total balance of just under $80,000.

    “It’s like you’re swimming and trying to catch up and get your head above water, and you just keep getting hit by something else,” Klein said. “But we have no choice, because if we don’t keep paying it, it’s going to accrue more interest.”

    Struggling businesses can declare hardship and make partial payments of 10% of the regular monthly payment with a minimum of $25 for six months, according to the SBA. But interest will keep accruing, forcing owners like Klein to weigh short-term protection against a big bill further down the line.

    Borrowers are still responsible for repaying loans even if their business closes, unless the debt has been discharged in bankruptcy, according to the SBA. For EIDL loans over $200,000, a personal guaranty was required for individuals with 20% or more ownership in the business.

    Popovsky said he has considered shutting down Teddy & The Bully Bear but has felt inspired to keep fighting by the memory of his father as well as his co-founder, Melvyn, who passed away in 2014, just one year after the restaurant opened.

    “I feel them saying keep pushing on, Alan, keep pushing on,” he said. “I feel like they’re the wind beneath my wings.”

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  • ‘Victory smoke in the Capitol, boys,’ Proud Boys member said on Jan. 6, prosecutors say as trial begins | CNN Politics

    ‘Victory smoke in the Capitol, boys,’ Proud Boys member said on Jan. 6, prosecutors say as trial begins | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Dozens of messages, social media posts and videos show that leaders of the far-right Proud Boys not only planned for the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack but recruited others to help stop Joe Biden from becoming president, federal prosecutors said Thursday during opening statements in the seditious conspiracy trial.

    “Let’s bring this new year with one word in mind…revolt,” defendant and then-Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio wrote to others in the group on January 1, 2021, according to prosecutors. “New year’s revolution.”

    Prosecutor Jason McCullough told the jury that Proud Boys leaders were afraid a Biden presidency would mean the end of the organization and that, after President Donald Trump infamously said in a presidential debate in 2020, to “stand back and stand by,” the organization reached a turning point.

    “In that moment, some battle lines were drawn. President Trump was for the proud boys, and Joe Biden was for antifa,” McCullough said.

    “The defendants’ mission threatened the very foundations of our government,” McCullough told the jury. “These five defendants had agreed – by any means necessary including use of force – to stop Congress” from certifying the election for Biden.

    The defendants – Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola and Ethan Nordean – have all pleaded not guilty to charges, including seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct and obstructing an official proceeding.

    According to McCullough, the five defendants planned to stop the transfer of power to Biden that day and communicated and organized through messaging apps. McCullough played video of several defendants allegedly tearing down police barricades, attacking officers and ultimately being the first to break into the Capitol, celebrating along the way.

    Why did some Proud Boys dress up like Antifa on January 6?


    09:50

    – Source:
    CNN

    “Victory smoke in the Capitol, boys,” Pezzola, who prosecutors say was the first to break into the Capitol using a riot shield he stole from a police officer, said inside the building, according to a video shown in court. “This is f**king awesome. I knew we could take this mother**ker over [if we] just tried hard enough. Proud of your motherf**king boy.”

    “Don’t f**king leave,” Tarrio allegedly wrote in a public post during the riot.

    Prosecutors played a video of Nordean allegedly celebrating the riot.

    “I was part of f**king storming the Capitol of the most powerful country in the f**king world,” Nordean said.

    On January 7, Rehl allegedly wrote to other Proud Boys: “I’m proud as f**k at what we accomplished yesterday.”

    In their opening statements, defense attorneys repeatedly told jurors that the Proud Boys had no plan to storm the Capitol building on January 6, and were instead caught up in a mob mentality.

    “You will see at trial no evidence that supports the government’s conspiracy claim that these defendants plotted before January 6 to do what the government alleges,” Nordean’s attorney Nick Smith told the jury.

    “It’s only human to say something phenomenal must have caused this,” Smith said of the deadly riot. “But as we often see, that’s not true.”

    But because it is “emotionally unsatisfying” to admit that a mob mentality took over, Smith said, prosecutors “selectively presented messages” to make the Proud Boys a “scapegoat.”

    Tarrio’s attorney Sabino Jauregui also said that his client, who was not in Washington, DC, on January 6, is being blamed for other people’s actions.

    “You see Trump, President Trump, told them the election was stolen,” Jauregui said. “It was Trump that told them to go [to the Capitol]. And it was Trump that unleashed them on January 6. He’s the one that told them to march over there and ‘fight like hell.’”

    He continued: “It’s too hard to blame the politicians on the left and on the right, the ones that use us for their fundraising and their reelection., the ones that pit us against each other… Instead, they go for the easy target, they go for Enrique Tarrio.”

    Jauregui highlighted for the jury that Tarrio, according to Jauregui, had no communication with members of the group that were at the Capitol and never called for attacking the building.

    Rehl’s attorney, Carmen Hernandez, implored the jury to forget everything they had heard about the Proud Boys’ reputation, including allegations that the group is violent or racist.

    “Americans express a lot of opinion about politics, about politicians, about elections, about other public issues,” Hernandez said. “The fact that we state these opinions, I would submit to you, isn’t evidence of a crime.”

    “You all swore to the court that you would put aside any theories, any views you had about the Proud Boys,” Hernandez said, adding, “I am dependent on that.”

    Smith, Jauregui and Hernandez all said that the government has spoken to FBI informants and cooperating Proud Boys who were at the Capitol on January 6. Those witnesses repeatedly emphasized the group had no plan, the attorneys said.

    While several defense attorneys condemned the Capitol riot, Pezzola’s attorney, Roger Roots, used his opening statement to downplay the attack, repeatedly saying that the Proud Boys case is simply about a six-hour delay of Congress.

    “The government makes a big deal of this six-hour recess, from about two o’clock to eight o’clock,” Roots said of Congress’ forced recess on January 6 as rioters stormed the Capitol.

    “Some have called it an attack or even an insurrection,” Roots continued. “The evidence will show that if it was an attack, it might have been one of the lamest attacks that you can imagine.”

    Roots also said his client didn’t “steal” a riot shield from a police officer, as prosecutors have alleged, and suggested that “someone chose not to” fortify the Capitol windows, one of which Pezzola allegedly broke open with the shield.

    Roots closed by asking the jury to question whether Pezzola’s motivation that day was truly to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election, and to look closely at what his client saw as the “victory” that day.

    “Mr. Pezzola described victory, simply, as taking this motherf**ker,” Roots said.

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  • Google claims a Supreme Court defeat would transform the internet — for the worse | CNN Business

    Google claims a Supreme Court defeat would transform the internet — for the worse | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    An unfavorable ruling against Google in a closely watched Supreme Court case this term about YouTube’s recommendation engine could have sweeping unintended consequences for much of the wider internet, the search giant argued in a legal filing Thursday.

    Google, which owns YouTube, is fighting a high-stakes court battle over whether algorithmically generated YouTube recommendations are exempt from Big Tech’s signature liability shield, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

    Section 230 broadly protects tech platforms from lawsuits over the companies’ content moderation decisions. But a Supreme Court decision that says AI-based recommendations do not qualify for those protections could “threaten the internet’s core functions,” Google wrote in its brief.

    “Websites like Google and Etsy depend on algorithms to sift through mountains of user-created content and display content likely relevant to each user,” the company wrote. “If plaintiffs could evade [Section 230] by targeting how websites sort content or trying to hold users liable for liking or sharing articles, the internet would devolve into a disorganized mess and a litigation minefield.”

    In the face of such a ruling, websites could have to choose between intentionally over-moderating their websites, scrubbing them of virtually everything that could be perceived as objectionable, or doing no moderation at all to avoid the risk of liability, Google argued.

    Driving the case are claims that Google violated a US antiterrorism law with its content algorithms by recommending pro-ISIS YouTube videos to users. The plaintiffs in the case are the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris.

    In the filing, Google said “YouTube abhors terrorism” and cited its “increasingly effective actions” to limit the spread of terrorist content on its platform, before insisting that the company cannot be sued for recommending the videos due to its Section 230 liability shield.

    The case, Gonzalez v. Google, is viewed as a bellwether for content moderation, and one of the first Supreme Court cases to consider Section 230 since its passage in 1996. Multiple Supreme Court justices have expressed interest in weighing in on the law, which has been broadly interpreted by the courts, defended by the tech industry, and sharply criticized by politicians in both parties.

    The Biden administration, in a legal brief last month, argued that Section 230 protections should not extend to recommendation algorithms. President Joe Biden has long called for changes to Section 230, saying tech platforms should take more responsibility for the content that appears on their websites. As recently as Tuesday, Biden published a Wall Street Journal op-ed that urged Congress to amend Section 230.

    But in a blog post Thursday, Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado argued that narrowing Section 230 would increase the threat of litigation against online and small businesses, chilling speech and economic activity on the internet.

    “Services could become less useful and less trustworthy — as efforts to root out scams, fraud, conspiracies, malware, violence, harassment, and more are stifled,” DeLaine Prado wrote.

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  • US government has received more than 350 new UFO reports | CNN Politics

    US government has received more than 350 new UFO reports | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The US government has received over 350 new reports of what the US government terms “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” commonly known as UFOs, since March of 2021 – roughly half of which are so far unexplained, according to a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released on Thursday.

    According to the report, the Pentagon office responsible for tracking and studying the sightings has preliminarily identified 163 of the reports as “balloon or balloon-entities.” A handful of other reports have been attributed to drones, birds, weather events or airborne debris like plastic bags.

    But “initial characterization does not mean positively resolved or unidentified,” the report cautioned. And the remaining 171 reported sightings of UAPs or UFOs continue to be unexplained by the US government.

    “Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities and require further analysis,” the report found.

    In short, the intelligence community and the Pentagon still appear to have no explanation for at least some of a series of mysterious flying objects that have been seen moving through restricted military airspace over the last several decades. The majority of the new reports came from US Navy and Air Force pilots and operators “who witnessed UAP during the course of their operational duties and reported the events,” according to the report.

    Although the report warned that UAP “pose a safety of flight and collision hazard to air assets” that could require pilots to “adjust flight patterns,” the report stated that there have been no reported collisions between US aircraft and UAP to date.

    The Defense Department, under pressure from Congress to investigate so-called UFO or UAP sightings, has actively encouraged pilots and other personnel to report unexplained sightings. The intelligence community released its first report on the matter in 2021.

    That report examined 144 reports of UAPs, only one of which investigators were able to explain by the end of the study. Investigators found no evidence that the sightings represented either extraterrestrial life or a major technological advancement by a foreign adversary like Russia or China, but acknowledge that is a possible explanation.

    Congress in its year-end defense spending bill then required the Pentagon and the intelligence community to study and report on the matter.

    The Thursday report showed a dramatic increase in reported incidents since the 2021 report was issued, an increase that investigators attribute in part to “a better understanding of the possible threats that UAP may represent, either as safety of flight hazards or as potential adversary collection platforms” and in part due to “reduced stigma surrounding UAP reporting.”

    Although some of the 366 newly identified reports cover incidents that occurred in the 17 years prior to March of 2021, 250 of the recorded sightings have taken place since that date.

    The Thursday report acknowledged the ongoing possibility that the sightings may represent a foreign intelligence-collection platform, but investigators do not appear to have amassed any evidence to support that conclusion.

    “UAP events continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity,” the report said. “We continue to assess that this may result from a collection bias due to the number of active aircraft and sensors, combined with focused attention and guidance to report anomalies.”

    The Pentagon and the intelligence community “will continue to investigate any evidence of possible foreign government involvement in UAP events,” the report said.

    California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the former House Intelligence Committee chair, welcomed the release of the report.

    “I appreciate the effort undertaken by the ODNI to study and characterize unidentified aerial phenomena reports, and their commitment to ensuring transparency by releasing an unclassified summary to the American public. … Unidentified aerial phenomena remain a national security matter, and I will continue to support thorough investigations of all UAP reports and oversight by the Congress.”

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  • Paul Ryan says he ‘had too much power’ as House speaker | CNN Politics

    Paul Ryan says he ‘had too much power’ as House speaker | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that he believes he “had too much power” when he wielded the gavel.

    “I think I had too much power as speaker,” Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead,” adding that what bothered him “most” were omnibus bills – massive spending packages that are put to a single vote rather than individual appropriations measures voted on separately.

    “The problem is, no four people should be doing all of that, making those decisions,” Ryan added, referring to House leadership at the time. “I was making decisions on composition of spending bills.”

    House Republicans on Monday passed a rules package for the 118th Congress, in what marked the first test of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ability to navigate his slim GOP majority. In it, McCarthy made a number of concessions in order to gain the support of conservative holdouts, including lowering the threshold needed to trigger a vote to oust a speaker.

    Ryan, though, warned against some members potentially looking to take advantage of that concession, recalling advice former House Speaker John Boehner gave him upon winning the gavel in 2015.

    “The last thing John Boehner – the last words John Boehner said to me as he walked out of the room of his smoke filled office that I took over – don’t forget your number one job is to preserve the institution, defend the institution,” Ryan said.

    “I never really thought most members don’t think about the institution,” he added.

    Weighing in on the current state of the Republican Party, Ryan on Thursday joined the chorus of those calling for freshman Republican Rep. George Santos’ resignation after he admitted to lying about parts of his resume. Santos has so far been defiant, pushing back on calls for his resignation, and House GOP leadership has not called on him to do so.

    “It’s a fraudulent candidacy – this isn’t an embellished candidacy, it’s a fraudulent candidacy. He hoaxed his voters, so of course he should step down,” Ryan told Tapper.

    Asked about his relationship with former President Donald Trump and his recently announced presidential bid, Ryan cast doubt that Trump could win the White House again in 2024.

    “He’s fading fast. He’s a proven loser,” Ryan said. “He cost us the House in ’18. He cost us the White House in ‘20. He cost us the Senate again and again, and I think we all know that, and I think we’re moving past Trump.”

    “I can’t imagine him getting the [Republican] nomination, frankly,” he added.

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  • US rolls out tool for Afghans in US to reunify with family members | CNN Politics

    US rolls out tool for Afghans in US to reunify with family members | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The US State Department rolled out a tool for Afghans in the US under parolee status to begin the process of reunifying with their family members on Thursday, a State Department spokesperson told CNN.

    During the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 many Afghans fled the country on evacuation flights, fearful of the Taliban takeover. Due to the chaotic rush out of the country, which proved deadly for many Afghans, many families were separated from their loved ones.

    With this new form tens of thousands of Afghans who came to the US around that time are eligible to apply for reunification with their immediate relatives. This specifically includes an Afghan’s spouse and unmarried children under the age of 21, according to the State Department.

    “In November, the Department of State announced the launch of a new resource for individuals in the United States who are seeking to reunify with their family members, depending on their immigration status or method of entry to the United States. Today, we launch Form DS-4317 for parolees to file to seek family reunification, including those subsequently granted temporary protected status,” the department spokesperson said.

    The new form has been posted by the State Department.

    Until now these Afghans in the US did not have a legal way to bring their family members into the country to join them.

    “The purpose of these reunification resources, including the parolee form is to help those families that are still separated,” the spokesperson said.

    The announcement was welcomed by an organization that supports Afghans settling in the US.

    “This impacts every Afghan the US brought here under parole status who still has family in Afghanistan eligible for reunification. Afghans who fit that description should complete the form now and Afghans in other categories should visit the family reunification landing page and follow the instructions there,” said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and founder of #AfghanEvac.

    “It took longer to get this done than anyone would have liked, but #AfghanEvac is proud to have worked tirelessly with the State Department to bridge the gap in the interim through our grassroots efforts,” VanDiver added.

    It is unclear how long it will take for family reunifications to happen once the Afghans fill out these forms, but VanDiver told CNN that it is proof that interagency efforts can come to fruition.

    One primary concern going ahead is the departure flights from Afghanistan that enable relocation to begin. While those flights have resumed this month – after being halted during the World Cup last year in Qatar – there are concerns among those involved in the effort that the flights could be halted by the Taliban in the future.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • FAA is years away from upgrading the system that grounded all US flights | CNN Business

    FAA is years away from upgrading the system that grounded all US flights | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Federal Aviation Administration software that failed Wednesday causing thousands of flight delays and cancellations is 30 years old and at least six years away from being updated, a government source familiar with the situation tells CNN.

    The Notices to Air Missions (NOTAM) database failure triggered the FAA to implement the first nationwide stop of air traffic in more than 20 years.

    Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has held multiple meetings with top FAA officials since Wednesday’s meltdown and “has made it very clear” he wants the NOTAM database updated much faster than the FAA’s planned timeline, the source tells CNN.

    “The core operating system for the database has been around since the 1990s,” the source said. “Regardless of the improvements made to the system in recent years, it still has the heart of an 89-year-old man.”

    In its budget estimate for 2023, the FAA requested $29.4 million for its Aeronautical Information Management Program, which includes the NOTAM system. Describing the system, the administration said it needs to “eliminate the failing vintage hardware that currently supports that function in the national airspace system.”

    Meanwhile, the FAA is stuck addressing new technology, including drones and electric helicopters, with its outdated technology, the source said.

    “We need to bring equipment online a lot faster than we are,” the source said, noting a big investment is required because it’s far more complicated than an over-the-air iOS update. “It’s gone on for years.”

    CNN has reached out to the FAA for comment on updates to the NOTAM system to date and its modernization timeline.

    Late Wednesday, the FAA continued to downplay the possibility of a cyberattack as the root cause of the system failure. Instead, It pointed to a damaged database file. The FAA says it is “working diligently to further pinpoint the causes” to avoid a repeat.

    An investigation at the direction of Secretary Buttigieg has still not determined the origin of the corrupted file, the government source told CNN.

    The failure is expected to be a main sticking point as the FAA enters its federal funding reauthorization process — especially with the GOP now in control of the House. The FAA is already taking criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

    Airlines, fielding their own share of government criticism for schedule collapses, have also sounded the alarm about a lack of funding, limited staffing, and outdated FAA technology.

    During a September US Chamber of Commerce event, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told CNN’s Pete Muntean that the aviation industry should rally around the FAA following a summer marred by flight cancelations and delays.

    “The FAA needs more funding,” Kirby said in an on-stage interview before aviation leaders. “They need more investment for technology.”

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  • McCarthy stands by Santos despite growing calls for resignation from other GOP lawmakers | CNN Politics

    McCarthy stands by Santos despite growing calls for resignation from other GOP lawmakers | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Rep. George Santos, the recently elected GOP congressman from New York who has admitted to lying about parts of his resume, is facing escalating backlash from his own party as a growing number of House Republican lawmakers call for him to resign or say he can’t serve effectively even as Speaker Kevin McCarthy has stood by the embattled congressman.

    Santos has so far been defiant, pushing back on calls for his resignation – and House GOP leadership has not called on him to do so. Instead, McCarthy, a Republican from California, has indicated he will not join demands from New York GOP leaders, and others, for Santos’ resignation – and has indicated that Santos is on track to still receive committee assignments.

    McCarthy told reporters on Thursday that Santos has “a long way to go to earn trust” and that concerns could be investigated by the House Ethics Committee, but emphasized that Santos is a part of the House GOP conference.

    “The voters of his district have elected him. He is seated. He is part of the Republican conference,” he said at a news conference on Capitol Hill.

    The controversy surrounding Santos is presenting an early test of McCarthy’s leadership as speaker and has created a major issue for the new GOP majority.

    Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, echoed McCarthy, saying, “Obviously, you know, we’re finding out more, but we also recognize that he was elected by his constituents.”

    House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who endorsed Santos in his race, would not call on the embattled freshman to resign on Thursday.

    “It will play itself out,” she told CNN. “He’s a duly-elected member of Congress. There have been members of Congress on the Democrat side who have faced investigations before.”

    But the embattled congressman faces growing condemnation from rank-and-file Republicans as new and damaging revelations come out about his past.

    Two New York Republican lawmakers — US Reps. Marc Molinaro and Mike Lawler — told CNN on Thursday morning they don’t believe Santos can serve his district effectively.

    “There’s no way I believe he can fully fulfill his responsibilities,” Molinaro said.

    “I think it’s clear, like I said, he has lost the confidence of people in his own community, so I think he needs to seriously consider whether or not he can actually do his job effectively and right now it’s pretty clear he can’t,” Lawler told CNN.

    Lawler later said in a statement, “I believe he is unable to fulfill his duties and should resign.”

    Santos refused to address any of the allegations of lying about his resume or his colleagues’ calls for his immediate resignation on Thursday morning, saying only “I was elected by the people” before ducking into his office.

    Leaders of the Nassau County Republican Party on Wednesday called for Santos to resign from office over his lies to voters and fabrications about his personal life. Santos, however, swiftly rejected the calls to resign.

    “Today, on behalf of the Nassau County Republican Committee, I’m calling for his immediate resignation,” chairman Joseph G. Cairo said at a news conference on Long Island, adding that the congressman’s campaign was made up “of deceit, lies and fabrication.”

    Cairo was joined by a slate of local party officials and, remotely from Washington, DC, by Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, who also called for Santos to step down. D’Esposito was joined later Wednesday in calling for Santos’ resignation by four more in the US House GOP conference: New York Reps. Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy and Brandon Williams, as well as South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace.

    Santos has faced growing criticism from congressional Democrats, and a growing number of Republicans, after he admitted to fabricating sections of his resume – including his past work experience and education.

    CNN reported last month that federal prosecutors in New York are investigating Santos’s finances. Separately, CNN has reported that Santos’s campaign finances show dozens of expenses just below the FEC’s threshold to keep receipts.

    In a separate matter, CNN reported that law enforcement officials in Brazil will reinstate fraud charges against Santos. Prosecutors said they will seek a “formal response” from Santos related to a stolen checkbook in 2008, after police suspended an investigation into him because they were unable to find him for nearly a decade.

    Santos admitted to stealing a man’s checkbook that was in his mother’s possession to purchase clothing and shoes in 2008, according to documents obtained by CNN.

    CNN’s KFile uncovered even more falsehoods from Santos, including claims he was forced to leave a New York City private school when his family’s real estate assets took a downturn and stating he represented Goldman Sachs at a top financial conference.

    This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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  • First weeks of Proud Boys sedition trial marked by courtroom drama and fighting | CNN Politics

    First weeks of Proud Boys sedition trial marked by courtroom drama and fighting | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The preliminary stage of the trial of five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy related to the 2021 US Capitol attack has been a chaotic wind-up that included contentious fights during jury selection, debates over evidence and defense lawyers threatening to withdraw from the case.

    But while opening arguments are expected Thursday, the bickering in the courtroom is likely to continue.

    Tensions between federal prosecutors, defense lawyers and the judge have grown increasingly hostile and confrontational over the past three weeks, and the judge has repeatedly pushed back the start of the trial to deal with the endless fighting.

    District Judge Timothy Kelly delivered a stark warning to all the lawyers on Wednesday: “Everyone take note – you talk over me, and contempt will be coming down the line. It’s going to be a long trial.”

    The five defendants – Enrique Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Dominic Pezzola and Joseph Biggs – have all pleaded not guilty.

    The three weeks of courtroom drama began before Christmas with the jury selection process, which was plagued by a constant struggle for prosecutors and defense attorneys to agree on jurors who didn’t have strong opinions on the far-right Proud Boys group.

    Some defense attorneys, like Rehl’s lawyer Carmen Hernandez, fought for the dismissal of nearly every potential juror who mentioned previous knowledge, however slight, of the Proud Boys. Other attorneys, including Tarrio’s lawyers Nayib Hassan and Sabino Jauregui, said they were suspicious that people who claimed to not know much about the Proud Boys could be lying so they can get on the jury and find their client guilty.

    Wednesday, Kelly mediated fights over potential exhibits. During one heated moment, Hernandez said she would withdraw from the case if Kelly allowed prosecutors to show the jury a specific video.

    The video has not been shown publicly, but Hernandez said it was taken before January 6, 2021, and was “highly prejudicial.”

    Kelly was not pleased by the inference the lawyer would quit.

    “You, Ms. Hernandez, had said something like you were going to withdraw from the case if I didn’t make certain decisions,” Kelly said. “And I want to make it clear that I don’t really care about that… it’s not even clear if I would let you out of the case.”

    “It isn’t a threat,” Hernandez replied. “I’m not in the habit from threatening to withdraw from a case.”

    Another defense attorney, Nick Smith, said that he too would leave the case over a video the government wants to play for the jury, though Kelly did not address his threat.

    Kelly did allow prosecutors to use video of a 2020 presidential debate when then-President Donald Trump said the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” The comments, Kelly said, showed “an additional motive to advocate for Mr. Trump (and) engage in the charged conspiracy” to keep Trump in power.

    Roger Roots, a defense lawyer who joined Pezzola’s legal team just before the trial, also got in hot water with the judge. Roots suggested that he planned to tell the jury Pezzola was acting in self-defense on January 6 against police officers who were high on pepper spray.

    “I know you just joined the case last week but there is no evidence of that,” Kelly said, telling Roots the time had passed to make any self-defense arguments.

    Meanwhile, Biggs’ attorney Norman Pattis had his law license suspended last week for six months.

    Pattis, representing right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in the defamation case brought by parents of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, had improperly released court documents.

    The files included two years of Jones’ text messages, medical records from some of the Sandy Hook families and other confidential discovery items.

    Kelly has not yet ruled on Pattis’ status, but he did allow two other attorneys who had defended other Proud Boys and therefore had potential conflicts to serve on the case.

    Pattis, however, tweeted Wednesday that “six months off sounds good about now.”

    The constant turmoil has left some defense attorneys repeatedly asking for the trial to be moved to a different courthouse or further delayed, though they don’t all agree (Smith said he wouldn’t consent to delaying the trial for any reason “up to and including a zombie apocalypse”).

    Prosecutors have not been saved from the judge’s scrutiny either – most notably when they claimed they couldn’t provide evidence binders to defense lawyers because their office had run out of dividers, and they hadn’t been authorized to buy new ones.

    In the past three weeks, lawyers for the five defendants have repeatedly criticized government lawyers for how they have handled the case.

    Hernandez said the prosecutors were acting “immature” and said, “it reminds me of when my kids were little.”

    Roots told Kelly that the department was using “cutthroat strategies.”

    By Wednesday evening, Assistant US Attorney Jason McCullough asked the judge to reiterate his “order on decorum” in the courtroom.

    “We are going to be in front of a jury soon and we need to take this up a couple levels,” McCullough said.

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  • Nebraska Gov. Pillen appoints Pete Ricketts to Sasse’s Senate seat | CNN Politics

    Nebraska Gov. Pillen appoints Pete Ricketts to Sasse’s Senate seat | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen on Thursday said he is appointing former Gov. Pete Ricketts to fill the Senate seat left vacant by Republican Ben Sasse’s resignation.

    Ricketts, a Republican who completed his second term as governor earlier this month, will hold the seat until a special election in 2024. The seat will then be on Nebraska’s ballot again in 2026 for a full six-year term.

    Pillen and Ricketts appeared together at a joint news conference at the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, where Pillen described the selection of Ricketts as “very, very obvious.”

    Sasse officially resigned on Sunday to become the president of the University of Florida, a job he will begin next month.

    Ricketts’ support in last year’s Republican gubernatorial primary helped Pillen emerge at the top of a packed GOP field. Pillen took office last week.

    He said Ricketts was “committed to the long haul” to attempting to keep the seat.

    “I don’t believe in placeholders. I believe that every day matters,” Pillen said.

    This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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  • How much should people worry about Covid’s newly-dominant XBB.1.5 variant? Our medical analyst explains | CNN

    How much should people worry about Covid’s newly-dominant XBB.1.5 variant? Our medical analyst explains | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A new Covid-19 variant, XBB.1.5, is spreading rapidly throughout the United States. In December 2022, the proportion of new Covid-19 infections due to this Omicron offshoot have increased from 4% to 18%, according to a January 6 release from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is projected to rise further still. In some parts of the country, it constitutes more than half of all new infections. According to the World Health Organization, XBB.1.5 is the most transmissible form of Omicron yet.

    What should people know about XBB.1.5? Do vaccines and treatments work against it? Can tests pick it up? Will hospitals become overwhelmed again? Should kids wear masks to school again? And could there be even more worrisome variants that emerge in the future?

    To guide us through these questions, I spoke with CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician, public health expert and professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. She is also author of “Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health.”

    CNN: What should people know about the latest Covid-19 variant, XBB.1.5?

    Dr. Leana Wen: People should not be surprised that there is a new variant. The more viruses replicate, the more they mutate. Most mutations do not confer evolutionary advantage and won’t spread further, but some do.

    There are three key questions to ask about new variants. First, is it more contagious? Second, does it cause more serious disease? And third, is it more immune-evasive, meaning it undercuts the protection of existing vaccines and treatments?

    The mutations XBB.1.5 has acquired have made it more contagious. A more transmissible strain has the evolutionary advantage that it will spread faster than others, and therefore could displace other strains. This is a trend seen throughout the coronavirus pandemic — new, even more transmissible strains replacing their predecessors and becoming dominant.

    The good news is that, thus far, this strain does not appear to cause more severe disease. Like other Omicron descendants, it probably causes milder illness compared with the Delta variants that predated Omicron.

    There are some studies that suggest XBB.1.5 is more immune-evasive compared with previously dominant Omicron strains. Further research is underway to identify the degree of immune protection afforded by existing vaccines; the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said that “data suggests that if you’ve been vaccinated, if you’ve gotten that updated bivalent booster, you’re still going to have a good amount of protection,” during an interview Friday with CNN’s Kate Bolduan.

    But even if it turns out these vaccines don’t hold up as well against infection with XBB.1.5, they will probably protect well against severe illness — which underscores the need for people to receive the updated booster if they are eligible.

    CNN: Can tests pick up this new variant?

    Wen: PCR tests definitely can, and there’s no reason to think that this variant won’t be picked up by rapid home antigen tests. If you have symptoms or are exposed to someone with the coronavirus, you should certainly get tested. The tests won’t show you which strain you picked up, but they should detect circulating variants.

    CNN: Do existing treatments work against XBB.1.5?

    Wen: Antiviral treatments like Paxlovid should work against XBB.1.5. Unfortunately, monoclonal antibody treatments probably don’t. In November, the US. Food and Drug Administration withdrew their authorization of the last remaining monoclonal antibody because of its lack of efficacy against new variants. And on January 6, the agency issued a statement that the preventive antibody Evusheld may be ineffective against XBB.1.5.

    On a policy level, it’s critical there are urgent investments into better treatments. There are many people vulnerable to severe outcomes due to Covid-19, and we need to have a wider range of effective treatments available for them.

    CNN: Could hospitals become overwhelmed again?

    Wen: Covid-19 infections could rise in the coming weeks due to a combination of this new variant and the fact that many people will have traveled and gathered over the holidays. I don’t think the surge will be nearly as bad as the initial Omicron wave in early 2022, though, because of the large proportion of Americans who have by this point already contracted Covid-19 and have some baseline immunity to it.

    If you have symptoms or are exposed to someone with the coronavirus, you should certainly get tested, says Dr. Leana Wen.

    Increasing booster rates, particularly among the elderly, will help blunt the rise in hospitalizations. It’s a major problem that only about a third of Americans ages 65 and older have received the updated bivalent booster, which has been shown in a recent study to reduce hospitalization by 73% in this age group.

    CNN: How much should people worry about XBB.1.5?

    Wen: It depends on the individual. There are many people who are not concerned about contracting Covid-19. They may be young and healthy and unlikely to become severely ill due to the coronavirus. Maybe they have just recovered from a previous infection and are protected against serious illness for several months. Or maybe the downside of continuing precautions is significant to them. I don’t think it’s wrong for people to proceed with their pre-pandemic routines, considering that XBB.1.5 is not likely to be the last variant of concern we see — and that it doesn’t appear to cause more severe disease.

    On the other hand, there are many people who are worried about becoming severely ill from Covid-19. People who are elderly or who have underlying health conditions should speak with their physician about their risk of severe illness due to Covid-19. If they are at high risk even after getting the bivalent booster, they should consider additional precautions to avoid infection while this highly transmissible variant is circulating. That includes asking others to take a rapid test prior to socializing and wearing a high-quality N95 or equivalent mask while in crowded indoor places.

    CNN: Some school districts are bringing back mask mandates. Should kids wear masks to schools again?

    Wen: This will depend on the family. If everyone is generally healthy, the parents or caregivers are going to work without a mask and all members are socializing freely with others outside of school, then it wouldn’t add much more protection to mask in the classroom.

    On the other hand, families that are still taking many precautions because of, for example, a severely immunocompromised household member might decide to all mask while in in crowded indoor spaces.

    My children have not been masking in school since the beginning of this school year, and I don’t currently plan for this to change. We would reconsider if a new variant emerges that causes much more severe disease, but that does not appear to be the case with XBB.1.5.

    CNN: Could there be even more worrisome variants that emerge in the future?

    Wen: Yes. This is the reason why genomic surveillance is so important. We need to identify and study new variants as they emerge. This is part of our “new normal”— there will be new variants that, from time to time, lead to surges of infections. The key is to make sure people are still protected against severe disease and to keep hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. And we must make sure everyone makes use of the tools we have available, including vaccines.

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  • Another ‘radical’ change to the Voting Rights Act could reach the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

    Another ‘radical’ change to the Voting Rights Act could reach the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal appeals court appears open to further shrinking the scope of the Voting Rights Act in a case that could lead to another major Supreme Court showdown over voting rights.

    The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals at a hearing on Wednesday considered whether private entities – and not just the US Justice Department – can bring lawsuits under a key provision of the law. Two of the three members of the appellate panel asked questions suggesting they were leaning against the idea that the provision, known as Section 2, could be enforced with private lawsuits.

    If those seeking a narrowing of the VRA are successful, it would significantly diminish the use of the law to challenge ballot regulations and redistricting maps that are said to be racially discriminatory.

    A vast majority of the cases that are brought under the Voting Rights Act – which prohibits election rules that have the intent or effect of discriminating on the basis of race – are brought by private plaintiffs, with the Justice Department facing strained resources and other considerations that limit the number of VRA cases it files to, at most, a few each year.

    Last year, however, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas – running counter to decades of legal practice – said that private parties do not have the ability to sue under the Section 2.

    During arguments Wednesday about whether the judge’s ruling should be upheld, Circuit Judges Raymond Gruender and David Stras questioned the attorney arguing in favor of a so-called private cause of action whether the parts of Supreme Court and 8th Circuit opinions that her clients were leaning on were “dicta,” i.e. statements that are not binding on lower courts.

    “I am dubious whether that is a holding,” Gruender, an appointee of former President George. W. Bush, said of an 8th Circuit case that ACLU attorney Sophia Lin Lakin argued pointed to the more robust interpretation of VRA enforcement.

    Stras, a Trump-appointee, grilled Lakin on more recent cases from the Supreme Court that scaled back private causes of action in other laws.

    A decision that blocked private parties’ path to court under the VRA would be a “radical” one, said David Becker, an alum of the Justice Department’s voting section who now leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

    “It absolutely means it’s more likely that there will be potential partisan mischief that could negatively impact the voters who are protected by the Voting Rights Act,” Becker, who signed a friend-of-the court brief favoring the broader interpretation, told CNN.

    A decision from the 8th Circuit is unlikely to come for at least several weeks.

    The February 2022 ruling by US District Judge Lee Rudofsky that private parties could not sue under Section 2 is believed to be a first-of-its-kind decision. It emerged from a VRA challenge brought by the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP to Arkansas’ state House map.

    Critics of Rudofsky’s ruling noted that it flew in the face of decades of judicial practice – including in multiple Supreme Court cases – where courts considered and decided Section 2 cases brought by private parties. They point to a 1996 Supreme Court case where five justices sanctioned the practice. They also stress that, since it was passed in 1965, the Voting Rights Act has been reauthorized and amended numerous times, and never once has Congress weighed in to say that courts were getting it wrong by hearing Section 2 lawsuits brought by private individuals and organizations.

    However, those in favor of reading the VRA more narrowly have seized on a concurrence by Justice Neil Gorsuch in a 2021 VRA case that called it an “open question” whether the provision has a private cause of action. Only Justice Clarence Thomas signed on to Gorsuch’s concurrence, but it provided Rudofsky with a jumping off point to conclude the answer was no.

    The office of Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who is defending Rudofsky’s ruling, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Her briefs argue that Congress intended only for attorney general to bring Section 2 lawsuits and there is a lack of textual support in the Voting Rights Act for a private cause of action for the provision.

    “Despite what the practice has been, when you look at the text of the statute there is a real question as to whether there is a private right of action,” Jason Torchinsky – a GOP election law attorney who represented Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton in a friend-of-the-court brief arguing against a private cause of action – told CNN.

    At Wednesday’s 8th Circuit hearing, Circuit Judge Lavenski Smith – a George W. Bush appointee who is the chief judge of the appellate court – showed the most skepticism of Arkansas’ arguments against a private cause of action, though Stras also pushed back on some of the more sweeping claims made by Arkansas Solicitor General Nicholas Bronni.

    Those against a private cause of action argue the current interpretation of the law has spawned an ever-increasing amount of private VRA litigation that is overburdening election administrators and injecting chaos into their planning.

    “Courts have essentially assumed that there is this private right of action,” Honest Election Project executive director Jason Snead told CNN.

    “But it’s never actually been determined that there is, and in the absence of the expressed decision by Congress to create a private right of action and put it in the text of the law, courts are not empowered to create one,” said Snead, whose group favors stricter voting laws and filed a friend of the court brief supporting Arkansas.

    Without a private cause of action, enforcement of the Voting Rights Act would shrink drastically. Over the last four decades, private litigation has consistently made up the bulk of the successful Section 2 lawsuits, according to briefs filed in the case, and the number of Section 2 cases brought by the DOJ has trended downward, with the Trump administration bringing just one new lawsuit under the provision.

    Even as the judiciary – and particularly the US Supreme Court – was yanked further to the right under Trump’s makeover of the federal bench, many legal experts are viewing Arkansas’ arguments as a longshot. That the argument is being put forward is nonetheless a sign of how far conservative opponents of the VRA are willing to push the envelope in this legal environment, according to Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA School of Law.

    “In any fair reading of the Voting Rights Act, this argument is an easy loser, but we’ll see,” Hasen told CNN. “I don’t count anything out these days.”

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • 5 reasons why the Republican claim about 87,000 new IRS agents is an exaggeration | CNN Politics

    5 reasons why the Republican claim about 87,000 new IRS agents is an exaggeration | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    In its first vote on legislation, the new Republican-controlled House approved a bill Monday that would rescind nearly $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service – with key GOP lawmakers making the exaggerated claim that the money would be used to hire 87,000 auditors who will target hardworking Americans.

    “House Republicans just voted unanimously to repeal the Democrats’ army of 87,000 IRS agents,” tweeted speaker Kevin McCarthy after the vote.

    “This was our very first act of the new Congress, because government should work for you, not against you,” he added.

    But Democrats approved the $80 billion in funding last year as part of the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act, intending to support the troubled IRS crack down on tax cheats and provide better service to taxpayers.

    The bill to rescind the funding, which passed along party lines, has little chance of becoming law, given the Democratic majority in the Senate and a pledge from President Joe Biden to veto the bill if it ever reaches his desk.

    But the vote highlights how funding for the IRS has become a political football. The issue is sure to come up when Daniel Werfel, Biden’s nominee for IRS commissioner, gets a confirmation hearing.

    Here’s why the Republicans’ oft-repeated claim about new IRS agents is exaggerated:

    The 87,000 figure comes from a 2021 Treasury report that estimated the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees over the course of a decade with a nearly $80 billion investment – not solely enforcement agents.

    And all those new employees can’t be hired overnight. The money will flow to the IRS over a 10-year period.

    “The reality is the $80 billion boost would be spread throughout the agency, with money flowing to enforcement, taxpayer services, operations, and modernization,” wrote Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

    The Inflation Reduction Act dictates that about $45.6 billion will go toward strengthening enforcement activities – including collecting taxes owed, providing legal support, conducting criminal investigations and providing digital asset monitoring. But the IRS has not specified how many auditors will be hired.

    More than $25 billion is allocated to support IRS operations, including expenses like rent payments, printing, postage and telecommunications.

    Nearly $4.8 billion can be used for modernizing the agency’s customer service technology, like developing a callback service.

    Roughly $3 billion is allocated for taxpayer assistance, filing and account services.

    Many of the new hires will be replacing staff that the IRS has already lost or is expected to lose through attrition in coming years.

    Last year, then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told lawmakers that staffing has shrunk to 1970s levels and that the IRS would need to hire 52,000 people over the next six years just to maintain current staffing levels to replace those who retire or otherwise leave.

    The IRS is already using the new funds to ramp up hiring for work outside of its audit operations.

    In October, the IRS announced it had hired 4,000 customer service representatives to answer phones and provide other taxpayer assistance. At the time, the agency said it intended to hire another 1,000 staffers by the end of 2022.

    Many of the new staff will be in place at the start of the 2023 tax season, and nearly all are expected to be trained by Presidents’ Day in February, which is traditionally when the agency sees the highest call volumes.

    National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins expects IRS services for taxpayers to improve this year – in part due to the funding increase.

    Taxpayer service, like answering the phones and processing returns in a timely manner, has suffered as the IRS’ budget has shrunk by more than 15% over the last decade. Collins, who heads the independent watchdog organization within the IRS, last year called the IRS service “horrendous.”

    Only about one in eight calls from taxpayers got through to an IRS employee last year, according to her annual report released Wednesday.

    The IRS struggled significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing backlogs of millions of tax returns to pile up in the past two years.

    “The majority of new hires the IRS makes will be those who answer the phones, work on processing individual tax returns or go after high-end taxpayers or corporations who are avoiding their taxes,” wrote Rettig in an op-ed published by Yahoo!Finance in August.

    A Trump appointee, Rettig called the claim that the IRS is hiring 87,000 agents to harass taxpayers “absolutely false.”

    While audit rates are expected to go up for some taxpayers as the new funding flows to the IRS, the rates have also been declining for some time.

    Audit rates of individual income tax returns decreased for all income levels between tax years 2010 to 2019, according to the Government Accountability Office. They decreased the most for taxpayers with incomes of $200,000 and above, which are generally more complex.

    The Inflation Reduction Act says that the new investment in the IRS is not “intended to increase taxes on any taxpayer or small business with a taxable income below $400,000.”

    Still, there is some uncertainty about how exactly the IRS will decide how to ramp up audits.

    In an effort to shed some clarity, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen affirmed the Biden administration’s commitment to not target low- and middle-income taxpayers.

    “I direct that any additional resources – including any new personnel or auditors that are hired – shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” she wrote in a six to Rettig in August.

    Yellen also directed the IRS to produce an operational plan within six months to detail how the new funding will be spent.

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  • House Oversight chairman seeks Biden family financial transaction data | CNN Politics

    House Oversight chairman seeks Biden family financial transaction data | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Rep. James Comer, in one of his first moves as House Oversight Chairman, is seeking information from the Treasury Department about the Biden family’s financial transactions and calling on a handful of former Twitter executives to testify at a public hearing.

    The new round of letters from the committee come as House Republicans are looking to flex their investigative might and make good on promises to delve into the Biden family finances and alleged political influence over technology companies after Twitter temporarily suppressed a 2020 story about Hunter Biden and his laptop.

    “Now that Democrats no longer have one-party rule in Washington, oversight and accountability are coming,” Comer said of his panel’s investigation into Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s business dealings. “This investigation is a top priority for House Republicans during the 118th Congress.”

    Comer requested Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen provide his panel with bank activity reports for Hunter Biden, President Biden’s brother James Biden and several Biden family associates and their related companies.

    “The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating President Biden’s involvement in his family’s foreign business practices and international influence peddling schemes,” Comer wrote to Yellen.

    Comer tried to acquire these bank activity reports, known as Suspicious Activity Reports, repeatedly when Republicans were in the minority but was largely unsuccessful. Comer has said he has only seen two and did not reveal the source of those reports.

    Comer has previously pointed to the bank activity reports – known as Suspicious Activity Reports – as evidence of potential wrongdoing by Joe Biden’s family members. But such reports are not conclusive and do not necessarily indicate wrongdoing. Each year, financial institutions file millions of suspicious activity reports and few lead to law enforcement inquiries.

    The White House accused Republicans of engaging in “political stunts” following Comer’s request Wednesday.

    “In their first week as a governing majority, House Republicans have not taken any meaningful action to address inflation and lower Americans’ costs, yet they’re jumping out of the gate with political stunts driven by the most extreme MAGA members of their caucus in an effort to get attention on Fox News,” Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s office, said in a statement. “The President is going to continue focusing on the important issues the American people want their leaders to work together on, and we hope House Republicans will join him.”

    Comer also is seeking communications within the Treasury Department, its financial crimes enforcement division and the White House regarding those family members and related businesses and associates, all of which he wants to be returned by January 25.

    The letters to former Twitter officials offer a path to Comer’s investigative schedule ahead. The letters to former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde; former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth; and former deputy general counsel James Baker call on the trio to appear in a public hearing the week of February 6. They come after Comer sent an earlier round of letters in December requesting their testimony.

    “Your attendance is necessary because of your role in suppressing Americans’ access to information about the Biden family on Twitter shortly before the 2020 election,” each of the letters to the former Twitter employees states.

    Republicans have seized on the so-called Twitter files as evidence of government censorship, although none of the messages released so far show the FBI explicitly telling Twitter to suppress a story that included material from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. An FBI agent at the heart of the controversy as well as several federal officials and tech executives have all denied there was any such order, CNN previously reported.

    Roth, meantime, has said publicly that the Hunter Biden story appeared as though it could be the product of a hack-and-leak operation, but he has denied that he personally tried to censor the story.

    “It’s widely reported that I personally directed the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. That is not true. It is absolutely, unequivocally untrue,” Roth told tech journalist Kara Swisher in a podcast interview last year.

    Comer’s demands come as both he and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan have vowed to investigate the federal government’s influence over tech companies.

    In an interview with CNN earlier this week, Comer suggested that Judiciary staff could sit in on some of his committee’s interviews if there are common areas of interest, like with Twitter.

    “There is some overlap but that won’t be a problem for Jim and I,” Comer said in the interview. “He knows who we’re bringing in. We know who he’s bringing in.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments Wednesday.

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  • Yellen will remain Treasury secretary heading into the Biden administration’s third year | CNN Politics

    Yellen will remain Treasury secretary heading into the Biden administration’s third year | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen plans to stay in her Cabinet role heading into the third year of the administration, a decision she conveyed to President Joe Biden during a December conversation, according to two White House officials.

    Biden welcomed Yellen’s desire to stay, which comes as the administration enters the critical moment of implementing Biden’s sweeping legislative wins of his first two years.

    Yellen, in the final months of last year, repeatedly expressed her desire to oversee Treasury’s central role in that effort – a process that officials say Biden has repeatedly stressed to senior officials inside his administration must be carried out successfully in the months ahead.

    Still, as Biden’s top economic official, Yellen drew some of the criticism for the soaring inflation that plagued much of the administration’s second year in office, leading some to believe she would be among the officials to depart during a period that historically lends itself to turnover in the first term of an administration.

    Yet along with Biden’s legislative success has come the first clear signs that inflation’s grip is starting to ease – at the same moment the US economy’s strength has remained durable despite rapid Federal Reserve interest rate increases and signs of fragility in the global economy.

    Biden’s Cabinet and senior team has been defined in part by its stability over his first two years in office. Still, Biden’s top advisers have been planning for departures in the weeks ahead as the administration enters the period between the midterm elections and Biden’s State of the Union address when past administrations have seen notable departures.

    Asked about reports she had informed the White House she wanted to stay into next year, Yellen told CNN in October it was “an accurate read.”

    “I feel very excited by the program that we talked about,” Yellen said at the time. “And I see in it great strengthening of economic growth and addressing climate change and strengthening American households. And I want to be part of that.”

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  • Progressive Rep. Katie Porter launches bid for Feinstein’s California Senate seat | CNN Politics

    Progressive Rep. Katie Porter launches bid for Feinstein’s California Senate seat | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    California Rep. Katie Porter announced a 2024 Senate bid on Tuesday, launching her campaign for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat in what could be a bruising Democratic primary.

    The 89-year-old Feinstein, a member of the Senate since 1992, has not yet made public her own plans for 2024, and her office did not respond to a request for comment on Porter’s announcement. However, many Democrats believe she is likely to retire rather than seek a sixth full term.

    Porter, a former law professor who has proven to be a prolific fundraiser since first winning her Orange County-area House seat in 2018, survived a tough reelection bid in 2022, when the redistricting process placed her home in Irvine within a 47th District in which she had to newly introduce herself to about two-thirds of voters.

    Porter, who studied under future Sen. Elizabeth Warren at Harvard Law School, is best known nationally for her sharp questioning in House oversight committee hearings. She is also a leading progressive, serving as deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

    “California needs a warrior in the Senate – to stand up to special interests, fight the dangerous imbalance in our economy, and hold so-called leaders like Mitch McConnell accountable for rigging our democracy,” Porter said Tuesday in a tweet accompanied by a video announcing her candidacy.

    If Feinstein were to retire, it would likely set off a crowded scramble for the high-profile Senate seat in the country’s most populous state.

    Other potential contenders could include Rep. Adam Schiff, Lt. Gov Eleni Kounalakis, Attorney General Rob Bonta and US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, a former longtime member of Congress.

    Schiff, who views the senator as a mentor, went to see Feinstein in December to tell her that he was thinking about running, in what a source familiar with the meeting said was intended to show her due respect.

    Feinstein has filed 2024 reelection paperwork with the FEC, but has faced criticism recently about her fitness for the job. She rejected those suggestions, telling CNN last year that she feels “absolutely” able to serve fully in her position, adding: “I think that’s pretty obvious.”

    This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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  • Musk’s Twitter restores accounts of prominent election deniers two years after Jan. 6 attack | CNN Business

    Musk’s Twitter restores accounts of prominent election deniers two years after Jan. 6 attack | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Elon Musk’s Twitter has restored the accounts of two prominent election deniers who were banned from the platform following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

    “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander’s account was restored on Monday. Alexander assumed a leadership role in the movement that discredited the 2020 election in the weeks leading up to January 6.

    Asked by the January 6 Committee what platform he used to promote events in the lead-up to that day, Alexander responded, “Primarily Twitter,” according to his deposition to the committee made public last month. He has not been charged with a crime.

    In the months since Musk took ownership of Twitter, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” has restored the accounts of high-profile figures who were banned from the platform following the January 6 attack, including former President Donald Trump, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and others.

    As unrest unfolded in Brazil on Sunday, Alexander appeared to cheer on the attack, posting on his Truth Social account a Brazilian flag emoji and the message, “I do NOT denounce unannounced impromptu Capitol tours by the people.”

    Overnight on Monday, Twitter also restored the account of Ron Watkins – a prominent conspiracy theorist who then-President Trump retweeted multiple times in the days before the assault on the Capitol.

    Watkins played a central role in spreading conspiracy theories about voting machine and the 2020 election.

    Watkins’ father, Jim, is the owner of the hate-filled online message board 8kun that is home to the QAnon conspiracy theory. An HBO documentary in 2021 identified Ron as potentially being the anonymous figure behind the conspiracy theory, an assertion that Ron has denied.

    Jim Watkins was interviewed by the January 6 committee last year, where he denied under oath that he or his son Ron posed as “Q.”

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  • GOP leaders and McCarthy holdouts defend deals as some Republicans complain they’re in the dark | CNN Politics

    GOP leaders and McCarthy holdouts defend deals as some Republicans complain they’re in the dark | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House GOP leaders and key negotiators won’t commit to publicly releasing details about the side deals Kevin McCarthy cut in order to secure the speakership, undercutting the Republican pledge to run their chamber openly and transparently and as some rank-and-file members call for more information about the promises that were made.

    While some of the concessions were spelled out in the House rules package, which passed with support of all but one Republican on Monday night, other promises – such as adding more members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus to committees and putting conditions on raising the national debt ceiling – were made through a handshake deal, leaving some lawmakers in the dark about the full extent of what McCarthy agreed to.

    “Operating in a vacuum doesn’t feel good,” one GOP member told CNN. “We’ve been loyal and it’s a slap in the face.”

    Rep. Nancy Mace, who represents a swing district from South Carolina, said, “It is essential” that members and the public hear from the GOP leadership about what those promises were, expressing frustration about learning about some of the promises through the press.

    “We know that there were certain members of that faction that were trying to get committee chairmanships or special committee assignments. We won’t know how that shakes out until (the House GOP Steering Committee) does its thing,” Mace told reporters, referring to the panel that sets committee assignments and will make those decisions in the coming days. “There’s still some questions that I think many of us have about what side deals may or may not have been made, what promises are made, what handshakes are made.”

    Further adding to the frustration and confusion, there was another document flying around K Street listing out all the alleged McCarthy concessions even as House GOP Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota asserted that the document is not completely accurate.

    On Monday night, McCarthy didn’t say whether he planned to release more details of the deals when asked by CNN. On Tuesday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana would not explicitly promise to divulge the information. And Texas Rep. Chip Roy – who spent hours negotiating the agreement with McCarthy – and helped bring along the votes to get him the speakership, told CNN that much of what has been revealed has been publicly reported, contending that “there is no official list.”

    “Everything in life is about – how do you come to terms and agree?” Roy said. “You look somebody in the eye and you shake their hands and you move forward, and that’s precisely what happened.”

    At a closed door meeting on Tuesday, GOP leaders walked members through a slide presentation, detailing some of their budget and spending priorities. According to a screenshot of the presentation, which was obtained by CNN, the spending agreement includes vague promises, such as “reforms” to the budget process and mandatory spending programs, which could potentially include Social Security and Medicare.

    Also, the other concessions include capping federal spending at fiscal 2022 levels, something defense hawks fear could slash Pentagon programs. Also, there’s a promise to reject “any negotiatons with the Senate” on government funding bills if they don’t meet the terms of the forthcoming House GOP budget resolution and don’t cut domestic spending. Those demands will almost certainly be a non-starter in the Democatic-led Senate, raising the prospects of a government shutdown in the fall or stop-gap measures to keep agencies funded.

    In one of the biggest concessions with major economic ramifications, the slide presentation said House Republicans “will not agree” to a raising the nation’s borrowing limit “without budget agreement or commensurate fiscal reforms.” That demand already has drawn sharp pushback from Senate Democrats and could prompt a huge fight with the White House with the prospect of a first-ever default looming sometime this year.

    In the Tuesday meeting, McCarthy walked members through the concessions that were included in the rules package, such as restoring the ability of any single member to call for a vote ousting the sitting speaker – a demand from the hard right and something that could threaten his speakership. But there are other deals, such as committee assignments for the holdouts and giving the hard right members more sway over the legislative process, that have yet to be publicly released. McCarthy has also agreed to hold votes on some of the Freedom Caucus’ legislative priorities, such as a border security bill, imposing term limits on members and a balanced budget amendment, according to lawmakers.

    Asked by CNN if the American people deserve to know the side-deals that were cut to secure the speakership for McCarthy, especially given the GOP’s claims of supporting transparent government, Scalise was non-committal.

    “The speaker talked about that today, and some of the things involved making sure that our committees are represented by a full swath of our membership,” Scalise said at a news conference. “It wasn’t any person was committed a committee.”

    The Louisiana Republican added that committee assignments have yet to be doled out, which are part of the agreement. “The committees have to produce bills that come out of committee that represent the full swath of our conference,” Scalise said. “And so that’s something the steering committee is going to take up, and those decisions haven’t been finalized yet.”

    But he still wouldn’t commit to releasing the information about McCarthy’s side deals after the committee assignments are set, which will happen over the next few weeks. Once the committees are populated, then the chairs get to pick their subcommittee chairs.

    McCarthy sought to quell some of the concerns of members, telling them during a closed-door conference meeting on Tuesday that there is no secret “three-page addendum” to the rules package, even as some lawmakers have said they have seen such a document, according to sources in the room.

    Roy insisted to reporters that all is on the up-and-up, pointing to a December proposal he and others released about their demands for more say in the legislative process. He was less clear on which of those proposals McCarthy has signed off on.

    “There’s no back room deals … there’s no three-page addendum … there’s no official list,” Roy said. “Do you ever write down notes? Do you ever sit down and talk through like, say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do to agree on spending?’”

    As McCarthy was laboring to get the votes last week and faced demands from 20 GOP holdouts, the negotiations happened behind closed doors and were spread out among multiple rooms, leaving some to wonder if it was done so by design as many have said they have not seen the full extent of the promises made.

    Roy defended their closed-door negotiations and said everything McCarthy agreed to has come out publicly, and he ticked off some of those items – including promises to vote on bills to impose congressional term limits, secure the border and balance the budget.

    “Of course you have to go sit down behind closed doors and not debate this stuff in front of the cameras,” Roy said. “There’s nothing, to the best of my knowledge, nothing that has been part of all that that isn’t very public – including, by the way, a commitment by the speaker to work with us about how the committees are represented.”

    Rep. Don Bacon, a moderate who represents a Biden-won district in Nebraska, said he has only been briefed verbally by one of the negotiators about the additional concessions, but said he feels comfortable with what he has heard.

    “They were at least verbally briefed to me,” Bacon said. “I feel comfortable with the rules that were presented.”

    Yet the rules package adopted by the House on Monday doesn’t include some of the other deals.

    Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, another one of the McCarthy holdouts, defended the handling of the situation, arguing that some of the deals McCarthy cut weren’t included in the House rules package because they don’t pertain to the rules, which specifically operates how the House governs.

    He told CNN, “There’s no secret deal,” but acknowledged he does not know the full extent of promises the speaker made in order to secure the gavel.

    “All of this stuff is a moving target and there’s nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing clandestine about it.”

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  • Fed Chair Powell: Bringing down inflation requires ‘measures that are not popular’ | CNN Business

    Fed Chair Powell: Bringing down inflation requires ‘measures that are not popular’ | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Investors shifted their focus Tuesday from the stock market to Stockholm as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell made his first public appearance of the year.

    Powell participated in a panel discussion on central bank independence at an event hosted by Sweden’s central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank.

    The painful rate hikes the Fed is implementing to try to bring down inflation don’t make officials particularly popular, Powell admitted.

    “Restoring price stability when inflation is high can require measures that are not popular in the short term as we raise interest rates to slow the economy,” he said, before adding that it’s important not to succumb to the need to liked.

    “We should ‘stick to our knitting’ and not wander off to pursue perceived social benefits that are not tightly linked to our statutory goals and authorities,” Powell said.

    He highlighted climate change as a prime example of this.

    “Today, some analysts ask whether incorporating into bank supervision the perceived risks associated with climate change is appropriate, wise, and consistent with our existing mandates,” he said. “in my view, the Fed does have narrow, but important, responsibilities regarding climate-related financial risks. These responsibilities are tightly linked to our responsibilities for bank supervision. The public reasonably expects supervisors to require that banks understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change.”

    US inflation rates (as measured by the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index) have been steadily falling for the past five months. That has enabled the Fed to start easing back on the size of its historically high rate hikes meant to cool the economy and fight rising prices.

    Inflation in the Eurozone, meanwhile, remains at an eye-popping 9.2% — though it eased between November and December. ECB president Christine Lagarde said last month she expects interest rate hikes to rise “significantly further, because inflation remains far too high and is projected to stay above our target for too long.”

    “If you compare with the Fed, we have more ground to cover. We have longer to go,” she added.

    The Bank of England, meanwhile, has also warned that inflation, still at its highest level since the 1980s, isn’t going anywhere. The BoE’s chief economist Huw Pill said this week that inflation could persist for longer than expected despite recent falls in wholesale energy prices and an economy on the brink of recession.

    These three central banks are fighting in different conditions, but they share a similar battle strategy: Keep tightening.

    The central bankers defended the importance of independence and credibility for their institutions, which has come under fire as policymakers are accused of having let surging inflation go unchecked for too long.

    December meeting minutes from the Fed, released last week, noted that the policymaking committee would “continue to make decisions meeting by meeting,” leaving options open for the size of rate hikes at the next monetary policy decision on February 1. No policymakers have forecast that it would be appropriate to reduce the bank’s benchmark borrowing rate this year. And while officials welcomed the recent softening in inflation, they stressed that “substantially more evidence” was required for a Fed “pivot.”

    Last week’s jobs report further muddied the picture, showing that employment remained strong while wage growth eased.

    Thursday’s CPI for December — which will be the new year’s first check on inflation — will also provide helpful clues to investors about whether US price hikes are sufficiently cooling.

    Encouraging data could bolster consensus estimates that call for a quarter-percentage point interest rate hike in February, a shift lower from December’s half-point hike and the four prior three-quarter-point hikes.

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  • Here’s how the House GOP majority will try to curb federal spending and taxes | CNN Politics

    Here’s how the House GOP majority will try to curb federal spending and taxes | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    In adopting their rules package Monday, the new House Republican majority has made it clear that they want to rein in federal government spending and keep a lid on taxes.

    The package, which governs how the chamber will operate for the next two years, lays out several measures aimed at making it harder to hike spending and to increase taxes to pay for it. Some of the provisions have been in effect previously when the GOP has controlled the House.

    The measures, several of which raised concerns even among cost-conscious Republican lawmakers, are sure to lead to battles later this year with the Democratic-led Senate and President Joe Biden that could have severe consequences for the nation.

    If the two parties can’t work out an agreement to fund the government for fiscal year 2024, which starts October 1, it could result in a shutdown. And if a war over spending cuts prevents Congress from raising the $31 trillion debt limit this summer or fall, it would risk a default on US debt that would roil the national and global economies.

    “I’m worried about the types of fiscal goals that they’re setting, that they’re not going to be achievable, and they’re setting themselves up for failure,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “I’m also worried that instead of both parties negotiating in good faith, we’ll be stuck in one of these dangerous standoffs.”

    The package swaps the pay-as-you-go rule for a cut-as-you-go requirement, as existed the last time the GOP ran the House.

    The former mandates that any new spending or tax cuts have to be paid for by spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere. But the latter requires only new spending be paid for, making it easier to cut taxes, said Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    Another provision would restore the requirement that tax rate increases be approved by a 60% supermajority vote, making such efforts harder to pass and limiting lawmakers’ options to reduce the deficit or raise spending.

    Plus, the package makes it harder for House members to game the system by proposing legislation that would not raise spending in the first decade, the typical time frame Congress considers, but would in subsequent years. It does so by establishing a point of order, or an objection, against consideration of such a bill.

    What may prompt even more chaos on Capitol Hill are the side deals that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made with conservative members of his party last week to secure their support for his leadership. The details of those agreements have yet to be made public, which has annoyed more than a few GOP lawmakers.

    McCarthy signed off on a pledge that the Republican-led House would pair any debt ceiling increase to spending cuts, which would add even more complexity to what’s expected to be difficult negotiations within the GOP and between the two parties.

    What’s more, McCarthy agreed to approve a fiscal year 2024 budget capping discretionary spending at fiscal year 2022 levels. That would require cutting all domestic discretionary spending by roughly 25% in inflation-adjusted dollars if defense funding is protected, Akabas said.

    Just how wed to these measures conservative Republicans are will determine the depth of the dysfunction in Congress this year. McCarthy’s slim majority in the House means he needs the support of nearly everyone in the party to pass any legislation.

    “It has yet to be seen whether these are immovable policy positions or policy preferences that are the starting point for negotiations,” Akabas said.

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