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Manchin rails against Biden’s clean energy plans as he faces tough political headwinds in West Virginia | CNN Politics

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West Virginia political observers were not surprised when Sen. Joe Manchin appeared on Fox News on Monday to make a stunning threat: He could be persuaded to vote to repeal his own bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, if the Biden administration pushed him far enough.

The conservative Democratic senator reiterated this to CNN, saying he would “look for every opportunity to repeal my own bill” if the administration continued to use the IRA to steer the US quickly towards the clean energy transition and away from fossil fuels.

The IRA, passed and signed into law last year, was a sweeping $750 billion bill that lowered prescription drug costs, raised taxes on large corporations, and invested $370 billion into new tax credits for cleaner energy. Even though Manchin carved out space for fossil fuels, the bill represents by far the biggest climate investment in US history.

From the start, Manchin has insisted the IRA was an “energy security bill,” rather than a clean-energy bill. Still, experts said he must be sensitive to the idea that he ushered in what ended up being the nation’s largest climate law, given he represents West Virginia – a state where coal and natural gas reign supreme.

Manchin’s repeal threat “was probably good politics,” West Virginia University political science professor Sam Workman told CNN. If he decides to seek reelection in 2024, the 75-year-old senator will face his toughest political fight yet, as popular West Virginia Republican Gov. Jim Justice jumped into the race this week.

Justice’s bid for the seat “doesn’t change anything at all,” Manchin told CNN. But political experts from his home state see a man who is gearing up for a fight.

Since delivering President Joe Biden one of his biggest legislative wins with the IRA last summer, Manchin has spent the last few months on a rampage against the administration, homing in on what he calls its “radical climate agenda.” Manchin has voted against Biden’s nominees for high-ranking administration positions, bashed new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency and Treasury Department and clashed with members of the president’s cabinet at Senate hearings.

Manchin’s appearance on Fox to slam Biden and threaten to repeal the law he had an outsized role in writing “is a pretty good indicator to me that he’s running,” said John Kilwein, chair of West Virginia University’s political science department.

Manchin has been silent on whether he’ll run for reelection, but as Justice announced his candidacy, Manchin expressed confidence. “Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter,” he said in a statement.

The Democrat beat his Republican challenger by just three percentage points in 2018. And though Justice still must get through a primary against Republican Rep. Alex Mooney, the governor is already backed by Senate Republicans’ electoral arm and many in the state think he will present a serious challenge to Manchin.

“Justice is a likable candidate – he takes that ‘aw shucks’ thing to the next level,” Kilwein said. “This is going to be [Manchin’s] toughest fight, but I think anyone who thinks this is going to be a piece of cake is wrong. I don’t think he’s going to be easy to beat.”

Manchin is “in danger” politically, his Democratic colleague Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told CNN.

“Joe Manchin is the last remaining statewide elected Democrat [in West Virginia], and we want [him] back in the United States Senate,” Blumenthal said, adding Manchin was a “pillar of strength to Democrats in the last session.”

Justice made little mention of Manchin during his official campaign launch but came out swinging against Biden and his agenda. On Friday, Justice told Fox News that Manchin “would be a formidable opponent” if he runs for reelection, but added that he’s “done some things that have really alienated an awful lot of West Virginians.”

There is no denying that West Virginia is incredibly conservative; the state went nearly 40 percentage points for Trump in the 2020 election. But even with those fundamentals, political experts said Manchin has had tremendous staying power through retail politics and argue he can deliver for the state while standing up to Biden.

“His whole appeal is a retail appeal; every blueberry festival, huckleberry festival, Joe Manchin’s there,” former West Virginia political science professor Patrick Hickey told CNN. “He’s a really smart and talented politician. He gets all the benefits that come from supporting (the IRA), but the next time he’s in West Virginia, he’ll be in a diner telling voters how terrible Biden is.”

Behind the political rhetoric, the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy provisions could be a windfall for West Virginia, and Manchin is walking a tightrope in his messaging around the law.

Despite blasting the Biden administration, Manchin has spent the past few months at home touting the benefits of the IRA and jobs it is already bringing to the state.

Several major clean energy companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build new manufacturing plants in the state: a battery factory, a new industrial facility totally powered by renewable energy, and a plant to make electric school buses.

“The way Manchin talked about those, he’s crediting the IRA and saying, ‘see, these are the good things that have happened,’” said Angie Rosser, executive director of environmental group West Virginia Rivers. “Those are hundreds of jobs reaching into the thousands, which for our small state is a big, big deal.”

The John E. Amos coal-fired power plant in Poca, West Virginia. Fossil fuel energy is still a mainstay in state.

Rosser and others pointed out that Manchin designed the IRA specifically to deliver money to West Virginia, designing tax credits to incentivize more manufacturing in coal country and funding to help these communities during the transition to clean energy.

Morgan King, a staff member of West Virginia Rivers, has been traveling across the state recently to talk to local officials about how they can apply for federal IRA funding. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, King told CNN.

“We’ve spoken with people of all parties,” she said. “People don’t care [about] the politics of how this bill was created so long as this funding can make it into their communities. West Virginia is set to disproportionately benefit from this bill more than any other state.”

Manchin has been at odds with the Biden administration on several fronts, but the administration’s climate policies and implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act seem to have struck a particular nerve – and Republicans have continued to heavily criticize the law.

A political ad from Republican dark money group One Nation is already circulating in the state, claiming that the IRA would kill 100,000 jobs in West Virginia.

“The notion that this is just a climate bill … it is damaging here in the state because we’re pretty far to the right on these issues, especially energy issues,” Workman said. “When you sell something as a climate bill, given the economic context here and our history, it’s somewhat harder for people to see indirect benefits like jobs.”

Manchin recently voted alongside Republicans on Congressional Review Act bills to undo EPA emissions rules for heavy-duty trucks as well as a climate-focused Labor Department rule (Biden has already vetoed one and promised to veto the other). In March, Manchin tanked top Interior Department nominee Laura Daniel-Davis, claiming she wasn’t upholding a part of the IRA that mandates offshore oil drilling in certain federal waters.

The dynamic has put Senate Democrats in a tough spot. Democrats have a slightly expanded Senate majority after the midterms, but the continued absence of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has been away from Washington as she recovers from shingles, has made for nailbiter votes.

“He’s one of the most independent US senators out there,” Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii told CNN. “When he is frustrated, he’s not going to be shy about it. And right now, he’s obviously extremely frustrated with the administration, and that has to get sorted.”

Manchin has also spent the last few months lobbing a steady stream of blistering statements aimed at Biden’s agencies. When the Environmental Protection Agency proposed strong new vehicle emissions regulations intended to push the US auto market towards electric vehicles in the next decade, Manchin said the agency was “lying to Americans” and called the regulations “radical” and “dangerous.”

And when the Treasury Department issued guidance on IRA’s new EV tax credits – which were written by Manchin – the senator called it “horrific” and said it “completely ignores the intent” of his law.

Some of his Democratic colleagues have panned his comments about repealing the IRA.

“Maybe he should run for president,” Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico told CNN. “He’s got one job; the president’s got another. The IRA is working.”

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April 12, 2021

DeSantis presidential countdown begins as Florida lawmakers put finishing touches on his contentious agenda | CNN Politics

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After 60 days of pushing through the priorities of Gov. Ron DeSantis – a contentious slate of policies that have established Florida as the vanguard of the conservative movement’s latest fascinations – state lawmakers will conclude their annual legislative session Friday.

Then, the countdown to DeSantis’ presidential campaign begins.

DeSantis has put off an announcement about his political future while lawmakers were at work, looking to rack up policy wins before jumping into the fray. The GOP-controlled legislature has largely delivered for him, handing DeSantis a potential platform for his White House run while reshaping Florida schools and society in immeasurable ways.

Abortion in Florida will be banned after six weeks with limited exceptions. Permits and training won’t be required to carry a concealed gun in public. A new law allows eight jurors to send someone to death row, the lowest threshold in the nation; another allows child rapists to be executed, in defiance of a US Supreme Court ruling. A bill headed to DeSantis’ desk prohibits undocumented individuals from becoming a lawyer in Florida. Banks can be punished for declining to lend to someone on moral or political grounds. Voter registration groups could face steep fines if they run afoul of strict new rules for signing up people to vote. It will be harder for teachers unions to organize and keep members. Universities will have to shutter diversity programs. Transgender children won’t be able to get gender affirming treatment nor can transgender teachers use their preferred pronouns at school. It will be easier to flag books to be pulled off school shelves and tougher to sue insurance companies. Almost $50 million will be pumped into the takeover of a small liberal arts university to transform it into DeSantis’ vision for a conservative college. Next school year, anyone can send their child to a private school with a taxpayer-funded voucher. And on Thursday, the state Senate passed a bill that would allow an appointed board to review and void previous land agreements in the state – a win for the governor in his feud with Disney.

DeSantis has touted many of these legislative victories in speeches around the country in recent weeks as he promotes his new book and lays the groundwork for a campaign that will contrast his record of conservative accomplishments against other GOP rivals, namely former president Donald Trump.

“We’ve been able to go on a historic run that has never been seen before in this state’s history,” DeSantis said Thursday. “And I guarantee you, you put us up against any state, you know, in modern times, and I don’t think you’re going to see the productivity and the boldness that you have seen in Florida across the board.”

Republican allies in the state House and Senate also cleared the way for DeSantis to run for president without resigning and voted to shield his travel records from public disclosure.

DeSantis didn’t get everything he wanted. Lawmakers softened his proposed crackdown on illegal immigration by eliminating provisions that block undocumented students from in-state tuition, and they balked at making it easier to sue media organizations for libel. But most of his wish list crossed the finish line.

The hard pivot right has provided DeSantis plenty of red meat to delight the sizable crowds he is drawing in early nominating states and the deeply red communities that make up Trump’s base. But his preoccupation with rooting out so-called “wokeness” from public institutions and even private businesses has left some would-be supporters concerned about his viability as he positions himself for a national campaign.

Major GOP financiers have lately expressed reservations about DeSantis’ agenda and wondered whether he has already alienated too many potential voters to seriously contend in a general election. Thomas Peterffy, a billionaire businessman who donated $570,000 to DeSantis’ political committee over the years, recently told the Financial Times he and other GOP donors were turned off by DeSantis’ stance on “abortion and book banning” and were “holding our powder dry.”

“If he’s the Republican nominee, I will strongly support him in 2024,” another billionaire, tech mogul Peter Thiel, said in a recent podcast interview, “but I do worry that focusing on the woke issue as ground zero is not quite enough.”

Others are anxious for him to signal when he is getting into the race to quiet some of the early negative attention about his political strategy and lack of personal touch.

“He’s raised the money. He had the book tour, the international trip,” one Republican fundraiser close to the campaign said. “It’s time to sh*t or get off the pot. Why stay on the sidelines and not be able to respond to these attacks?”

Trump and his allies are treating the Republican governor as if he is already a candidate. Make America Great Again, Inc., a Trump-aligned super PAC, has spent about $8.6 million on ads going after DeSantis. Current GOP primary polls continue to show Trump leading DeSantis by a healthy margin.

On a recent international trade mission, a reporter in Tokyo asked DeSantis about Trump polling ahead of him. DeSantis visibly clenched before responding, “I’m not a candidate, so we’ll see if and when that changes.”

Still, DeSantis does not appear to be in a rush to announce. On Thursday, DeSantis acknowledged “there’s only so much time” before a decision must be made, but he noted many bills passed this session by lawmakers remain unsigned and he has prioritized capitalizing on his historic 19-point reelection victory.

Next week, DeSantis will resume his political travel in the next week with visits to Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa.

“At the end of the day, these things will happen in relatively due course,” DeSantis said Thursday, adding: “I’m not going to short circuit any of the good work that we’ve done.”

Alex Conant, a top adviser to Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said there’s “no reason to launch before June,” and much of the chatter is noise that DeSantis should ignore.

“He was never going to stay as hot as he was after winning a historic landslide election,” Conant said, referring to DeSantis’ nearly 19-point victory in November. “He’s clearly the strongest positioned to defeat Trump right now. He has the most money, the most name ID and the most political support. But it’s early. He can either build on that or lose that depending on how his launch goes and his debate performance.”

Speculation about an official kickoff date has been rampant, covering much of the calendar between now and July 4 with potential locations ranging from his childhood hometown of Dunedin, Florida, to somewhere along the Rust Belt where his parents are from.

The conflicting reports suggest that DeSantis, who has maintained an insular circle of confidants, is playing his cards close to the vest as they finalize their plans. Some who are directly raising money for DeSantis or aiding in the organizational effort remain in the dark on the exact timing and mechanics.

The circle has expanded out of necessity as DeSantis builds out a nationwide campaign. Never Back Down, a super PAC expected to play an outsized role boosting DeSantis, has beefed up its staff and is already raising money and advertising on his behalf in the early primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. The Florida state GOP has also added staff who are expected to eventually shift to a DeSantis campaign.

But with the growth has also come more leaks about his operation. For DeSantis, who prizes confidentiality and has weaponized the element of surprise to keep political foes on their toes, information leaking from inside his orbit undermines his assertions that here is “no drama in our administration” and “no palace intrigue” – a clear contrast with Trump’s reality television White House.

One veteran Republican fundraiser said donors and GOP operatives have already sensed that there is tension between the super PAC, staffed with seasoned political hands, and the political operation DeSantis built in Tallahassee full of less inexperienced but fiercely loyal protectors of the governor’s political brand. There have been some disagreements about DeSantis’ best path forward, particularly in light of the Republican’s recent stumbles.

“There is some sniping,” the fundraiser said. “They’re going to go through growing pains. They have a team that has never done this before. And this is a normal thing you go through. And the question is how they handle it. A lot of people would be envious of where he is. He’s never run before and he’s already 25 percent in the polls. He’s got $100 million. But he’s got to execute better.”

Never Back Down spokeswoman Erin Perrine disputed there’s any tension because DeSantis isn’t a candidate “so this palace intrigue drama is way out of place.”

“Never Back Down continues to be a grassroots movement focused on getting Governor Ron DeSantis in the race to beat Joe Biden and become president,” she said. “The Governor has a great team in Florida that landed him a historic re-election victory, and we are hugely supportive of all the work they continue to do to help build momentum for DeSantis.”

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April 12, 2021

Thousands of Afghans escaped the Taliban with the help of private veteran groups. Today, many remain in limbo, held in a compound in the UAE | CNN Politics

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About 2,100 Afghan refugees remain held in a sprawling compound in the United Arab Emirates more than 18 months after they were evacuated from Afghanistan largely by private groups working with the State Department.

They are what’s left of as many as 20,000 Afghans who were hastily relocated to the camp during the chaotic weeks surrounding the US withdrawal after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Several thousand were brought there by the State Department directly from Kabul and have since been relocated to the US or Canada.

But thousands more, including those still stuck in the UAE, were evacuated weeks later, and sometimes from hundreds of miles away from Kabul, by private groups working to get as many out of Afghanistan as possible.

Sources familiar with the matter told CNN that the private evacuation efforts, though well-intentioned, contributed at times to an already chaotic situation – though they also say that the frenzy of the withdrawal created unclear communication and expectations.

Consequently, thousands of Afghans evacuated by private groups were left in a legal limbo with seemingly no clear path to the US – or anywhere else. And though the effort to resettle them has picked up in recent months, refugees inside the compound known as Emirates Humanitarian City, or EHC, are restless after almost two years of waiting inside a camp they are barred from leaving.

Without a visa, they’re not allowed inside the country.

When they first arrived in the UAE in August 2021, Afghan evacuees were housed across dozens of buildings in the gated compound. Afghans were separated in rooms with their families across multi-level buildings divided by a common outdoor space.

They were supposed to be there for a few days. But that’s now approaching two years for the more than 2,000 people who remain there. The State Department says it continues to process refugees out of EHC “on an ongoing basis.” One American Marine veteran closely involved said that a family or two leave each week, bound mostly for the US and Canada, as well as Australia, with some scattered across Europe.

At that pace it could still take more than a year to empty out the entire population of evacuees who remain at the compound.

Their plight has gained recent attention from human rights groups, who say the refugees are being held arbitrarily by the UAE and have been subject to a host of abuses, including poor medical care and being held in “prison-like” conditions.

A report put out by Human Rights Watch in March said Afghan asylum seekers have been “locked up for over 15 months in cramped, miserable conditions with no hope of progress on their cases” and are “facing further trauma now, after spending well over a year in limbo.”

In a statement to CNN, a UAE official said the refugees at EHC have “received a comprehensive range of high-quality housing, sanitation, health, clinical, counseling, education, and food services to ensure their welfare.”

The official said the UAE “continues to do everything it can to bring this extraordinary exercise in humanitarian resettlement to a satisfactory conclusion. We understand that there are frustrations and this has taken longer than intended to complete.”

“The UAE remains committed to this ongoing cooperation with the US and other international partners to ensure that Afghan evacuees can live in safety, security, and dignity,” the official added.

Allegations similar to those raised by the HRW report were described in an appeal to the United Nations submitted last fall by an independent American attorney, who alleged “widespread human rights abuses,” including inadequate health and mental health care, “constant” surveillance and “restricted access” to government officials working their cases.

In a statement to CNN, Mara Tekach, State Department coordinator for Afghan relocation efforts, said that while the department is aware of the Human Rights Watch report, the US government “is not aware of any verified allegations of human rights violations at EHC.”

CNN has not independently verified those allegations.

One refugee still stuck at EHC who spoke to CNN described extreme frustration over a seemingly hopeless situation. The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of safety concerns, said he worries about the effect the ordeal is having on his young daughter.

“My daughter, from months ago until now, sometime when she starts talking, I can feel the pain in her voice,” he said.

The man showed CNN what appeared to be documentation that he was recommended for a Special Immigrant Visa by a US contractor with whom he worked in Afghanistan for almost two years. It was unclear whether that documentation is sufficient for what the State Department has required. He told CNN his daughter is growing anxious to leave.

“She says, ‘You have [taken] me somewhere that I cannot see anywhere, I cannot go outside,’” the man said. “She’s asking me every time, frequently, ‘When are we going to get out of here?’”

During the chaotic weeks of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, thousands of American military veterans rushed to help evacuate as many Afghans as possible.

Among them was US Marine veteran Pete Lucier, who worked with a coalition of veterans’ groups known collectively as the #AfghanEvac coalition. Lucier said he is proud of much of the work that veteran and civilian volunteers did in helping Afghans flee the Taliban, which has since reinstated many of the draconian laws it had in place before the US and allied forces invaded after 9/11.

Afghans crowd at the tarmac of the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, to flee the Taliban which had gained control of Afghanistan

Still, Lucier admitted there have been shortcomings, telling CNN that even well-intentioned veterans’ groups and individuals ended up “sometimes, unfortunately, making things worse for vulnerable and at-risk people.”

Many of the individuals involved in evacuating Afghans had a “lack of familiarity with international law and the requirements of international travel,” Lucier said. “Broadly, I think EHC represents and embodies many of those challenges.”

Dina Haynes, an international human rights lawyer and a professor at New England Law school in Boston, echoed those thoughts, saying that what has happened at EHC is “not a surprise at all to anybody who has paid attention” to the US immigration system.

“The only people that it was a surprise to were those new people that showed up thinking that they could fly people out and land them somewhere and get the US government to help,” Haynes said.

EHC is one of a few locations around the world where evacuated Afghans are still waiting to be processed for visas to the US or elsewhere. There are Afghans in Albania and Pakistan who were relocated there by private groups, as well as Afghans who were evacuated by the US government and are still being processed at Camp As-Sayliyah in Doha, Qatar, according to the State Department.

Operated and funded by the UAE government, the EHC compound was first built in Abu Dhabi’s industrial Mussafah area to receive quarantine evacuees stranded in China following the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020. After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, thousands were evacuated to the compound as part of a wider regional humanitarian call to assist.

That was in part due to an agreement made in August 2021 between UAE officials and Joseph Robert III, a former US Marine and son of a wealthy real estate investor with connections in the country.

Robert’s group, the Black Feather Foundation, joined the #AfghanEvac coalition made up of roughly 200 nonprofits in November 2021. Robert told CNN that relationships with UAE officials who were close with his late father helped secure the agreement to bring Afghans to UAE, sealed by a memorandum of understanding, which, according to Robert, stated that the UAE would receive and temporarily house Afghan refugees until they were able to move on to a third country.

The EHC compound was not specifically part of the agreement, Robert told CNN, but was chosen by the UAE because of its capacity.

This undated photo from the Emirates News Agency, the official news agency of the United Arab Emirates, shows the Emirates Humanitarian City in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

CNN visited the compound in August 2021, during the first days when Afghans were arriving. Afghans awaiting security and medical screenings were kept in assigned rooms until they were called for processing.

UAE officials and US embassy personnel were present at the main center at EHC, where dozens of Afghan men and women sat awaiting information on their next destination. It was not immediately clear who was processing information from the evacuees.

Robert said he has seen no signs of the alleged abuse taking place at EHC, which, he said, he visits every few weeks. He blames the US for not swiftly processing people out of EHC despite originally taking advantage of the extra hands that brought them there.

“The US government was using us at every turn when it benefited them,” Robert said. “And then when it came time to do the work on the back end, to process them out, they tried to leave us high and dry.”

Before going to Afghanistan in August 2021, Robert said he first flew to the UAE, where he had several meetings with officials about lining up commitments to take in refugees, as well as provide planes. When he finally landed at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan on August 20, 2021, things began to change immediately.

“It became just an on-the-fly, ad hoc assistance operation,” Robert said, adding that, suddenly, “our planes were being loaded with just people from the airport that the US would have evacuated.”

Afghan refugees arrived at EHC in three distinct groups. The first two groups were evacuated from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul in August 2021 by both the State Department and private groups working independently. The third group of Afghans were brought to EHC over the next two months by private groups, including Robert’s Black Feather Foundation, from Mazar-i-Sharif, a city roughly 260 miles from Kabul.

The EHC resident who spoke to CNN said he was flown out of Mazar-i-Sharif with his family after attempting to get through crowds of people at the Kabul airport during the evacuation in August 2021. Despite concerns about traveling from Kabul, especially with the possibility of running into the Taliban on the way, the resident said he thought it might his best chance “to get myself and my family out of the danger zone.”

Robert told CNN the manifests for those flights were submitted by other organizations either directly to him or through other members of his team. Robert said he then submitted the manifests to the UAE government, which ran them through its own security systems.

It is almost entirely this group of people – those evacuated after August 2021 – that remains stuck at EHC, both the State Department and Robert said. In her responses to CNN, Tekach said the State Department “had limited information” about refugees who came on those separate flights. She also emphasized that that the place where people were evacuated from “is not a determining factor as to whether” they qualify for relocation and resettlement.

Toward the end of October 2021, Robert said it was clear to him that the State Department was “not going to continue processing” any more people brought to the UAE since the evacuation had ended.

“That’s where things with State Department started to unravel,” he said. “They processed only those that came on their aircraft, not even the ones that came on our aircraft alongside theirs during the [noncombatant evacuation]. As one State Department official told me, ‘Not our plane, not our problem.’”

Tekach told CNN that the State Department paused processing in November 2021 “in support of US public health priorities” and began relocating individuals in March 2022.

Still, Lucier told CNN that the US government and State Department likely were not clear enough in their communication about what private organizations could or could not do, leading to much of the confusion and at-times chaotic interference that occurred.

Robert expressed frustration over security concerns the State Department has raised about the Afghans at EHC, saying that for the most part the evacuees are “able to provide everything they needed” in terms of paperwork and documents, including reference letters from US employers while in Afghanistan.

While he acknowledged that there were shortcomings and mistakes made in the broader evacuation effort by private groups, Robert also said that was in part due to a “US government plan that was nonexistent.”

All in all, Robert said volunteers were still able to evacuate “tens of thousands of individuals, despite the US government’s inability to appropriately evacuate them in the first place.”

Joe Robert, lower left, sitting at EHC with Aziz, an interpreter, kicked off a group effort of US veterans to help evacuate Afghans to the UAE.

Asked how many State Department officials have access to EHC and how frequently they are at the compound working to process people out, the State Deaprtment’s Tekach said US officials have access to the compound “for a number of purposes, including gathering information to work on case processing and to support the well-being of the Afghan population at the facility.”

Robert said that over the past six months, an average of three to five State Department personnel have come to EHC twice a week. After early frictions, Robert said his relationship with US government personnel who deal with EHC is “in a much better place now.”

Despite the delays, Robert said they’re slowly making progress in resettling the Afghans still at EHC.

“Having 20,000 people pass through the walls of EHC, and we’re down to the last 2,000 – that’s a rather remarkable effort, although things didn’t go as smoothly as we’d planned or hoped,” he said.

“Even though everyone wants it to be faster, things are moving at a rather steady and consistent pace, and everyone’s still actively doing everything they can to find suitable pathways for people and accommodate families, and find other opportunities if a previous one falls through. Everyone is working tremendously hard to do what is right by these people,” Robert said.

As the US and others work to process Afghans out, Human Rights Watch is still trying to bring attention to their plight.

“They’re still in this facility, which was never designed to hold people for this long,” said Joey Shea, the lead researcher on HRW’s recent report. “And they’ve been effectively imprisoned after an extremely traumatic experience of fleeing a Taliban takeover.”

Shea said the clearest solution is through the US government.

“There just needs to be more resources put by the US government to make sure that these asylum and humanitarian parole and other applications are processed quickly,” she said.

At EHC, the current resident who spoke to CNN described how happy he was to have been evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021. Aside from marrying “the love of my life” and having children, he said that leaving Afghanistan was “the best day of my life.”

“When the plane took off, I couldn’t fit in my own skin because of the happiness that I had,” he said emotionally. “This is a new life that I began to live with my family. I was happy and proud I could do something for my wife, my kids.”

The recommendation letter he received from his US employer says he is “completely trustworthy, intelligent, and a faithful employee” and the “kind of person who will make a valuable contribution and service to the US, if allowed to immigrate.”

But the longer he and his family languish at EHC, he said, the harder it is to explain his work with the US.

“‘What will happen to us? Why are we abandoned by the US?’” he said his wife asks him. “My wife tells me that maybe it was not right that you worked for the US government.”

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April 12, 2021

Trump again refuses to concede 2020 election while taking questions from New Hampshire GOP primary voters | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, once again refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election and repeated false claims about it being stolen at a CNN town hall in New Hampshire on Wednesday.

Taking questions from GOP primary voters at the town hall moderated by “CNN This Morning” anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump remained defiant about the 2020 election as well as the myriad investigations into him – making clear that he’s sticking to the script he’s delivered over the past two years on conservative media.

The town hall at Saint Anselm College – his first appearance on CNN since 2016 – came as unprecedented legal clouds hang over him as he seeks to become only the second commander in chief ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms. New Hampshire, home to the first-in-the-nation GOP primary, is also home to many swing voters and is a state he lost in both 2016 and 2020 after winning the primaries.

The audience of Republicans and undeclared voters who plan to vote in the GOP primary cheered Trump throughout the evening, including when he attacked Tuesday’s jury verdict that found he sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. Trump mocked Carroll on Wednesday while downplaying the significance of the $5 million the jury awarded her for battery and defamation.

The former president said he would pardon “a large portion” of the rioters at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and even pulled out a printout of his own tweets from that day in an attempt to deflect blame as Collins pressed him on why he waited three hours before telling the rioters to leave the Capitol.

“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump said Wednesday night.

When Collins pressed Trump on the Manhattan federal jury finding Trump sexually abused Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in 1996, Trump suggested it was helping his poll numbers.

When asked if the jury’s decision would deter women from voting for him, the former president said, “No, I don’t think so.”

Trump insulted Carroll, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and even Collins when she pressed him on a question about why he hadn’t returned classified documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago.

“It’s very simple – you’re a nasty person, I’ll tell you,” Trump said on stage.

Trump also took questions from New Hampshire voters on the economy and policy issues, such as abortion. The former president, who solidified the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that struck down Roe v. Wade, repeatedly declined to say whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if he won a second term.

Trump suggested Republicans should refuse to raise the debt limit if the White House does not agree to spending cuts.

“I say to the Republicans out there – congressmen, senators – if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default, and I don’t believe they’re going to do a default because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave, will absolutely cave because you don’t want to have that happen, but it’s better than what we’re doing right now because we’re spending money like drunken sailors,” Trump said.

When Collins asked him to clarify whether the US should default if the White House doesn’t agree to cuts, Trump said, “We might as well do it now than do it later.”

Trump pleaded not guilty last month to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump also faces potential legal peril in both Washington, DC – where a special counsel is leading a pair of investigations – and in Georgia, where the Fulton County district attorney plans to announce charges this summer from the investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State.

Still, the twice-impeached former president has repeatedly said that any charges will not stop him from running for president, dismissing all of the investigations as politically motivated witch hunts. That’s a view many GOP voters share, according to recent surveys. Nearly 70% of Republican primary voters in a recent NBC News poll said investigations into the former president “are politically motivated” and that “no other candidate is like him, we must support him.”

Trump was pressed on the investigation into his handling of classified documents and why he didn’t return all of the documents in his possession after receiving a subpoena. He responded by pointing out the classified documents found at the homes of others – including President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. But they both returned the documents once they discovered they had them in their possession.

The FBI obtained a search warrant and retrieved more than 100 classified documents from Trump’s Florida resort in August 2022, which came after he had received a subpoena to return documents in June 2022 and after his attorney had asserted that all classified material in his possession had been returned.

Asked during the town hall whether he showed the classified documents to anyone at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said, “Not really.”

The former president would not say whether he wants Russia or Ukraine to win the war during Wednesday’s town hall, instead saying that he wants the war to end.

“I don’t think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people,” he said.

When asked again whether or not the former president wants Ukraine to win, Trump did not answer directly, but instead claimed that he would be able to end the war in 24 hours.

“Russians and Ukrainians, I want them to stop dying,” Trump said. “And I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”

Trump said he thinks that “(Russian President Vladimir) Putin made a mistake” by invading Ukraine, but he stopped short of saying that Putin is a war criminal.

That’s something that “should be discussed later,” Trump said.

“If you say he’s a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to make this thing stopped,” he said.

While a handful of rivals have entered the Republican presidential primary – and Trump’s biggest potential rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has not yet officially launched a bid – Trump has maintained a healthy lead in early GOP primary polling. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday, 43% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents named Trump unprompted when asked who they would like to see the party nominate in 2024, compared with 20% naming DeSantis, and 2% or less naming any other candidate.

Trump’s participation in the town hall was indicative of a broader campaign strategy to try to expand his appeal beyond conservative media viewers, CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported earlier Wednesday. He’s surrounded himself with a more organized team and has been making smaller retail politics stops while scaling back larger rallies – signs of a more traditional campaign than his 2016 and 2020 operations. He lost that 2020 race by about 7 million votes, although he continues to falsely claim it was stolen from him – claims he stuck to on Wednesday night.

There have been warning signs for the GOP that the obsession with the 2020 election isn’t palatable beyond the base. Many of Trump’s handpicked candidates who embraced his election lies in swing states lost in last year’s midterm elections. And his advisers acknowledge he still has work to do to engage with Republican voters outside of his loyal base of supporters, multiple sources told CNN.

But that didn’t mean Trump was ready to acknowledge the reality that he lost the 2020 election. And if he becomes the GOP nominee in 2024, Trump said Wednesday he would not commit to accepting the results regardless of the outcome, saying that he would do so if he believes “it’s an honest election.”

“If I think it’s an honest election, I would be honored to,” he said.

This story has been updated with additional details from the town hall.

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April 12, 2021

Microsoft leaps into the AI regulation debate, calling for a new US agency and executive order | CNN Business

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CNN
—

Microsoft joined a sprawling global debate on the regulation of artificial intelligence Thursday, echoing calls for a new federal agency to control the technology’s development and urging the Biden administration to approve new restrictions on how the US government uses AI tools.

In a speech in Washington attended by multiple members of Congress and civil society groups, Microsoft President Brad Smith described AI regulation as the challenge of the 21st century, outlining a five-point plan for how democratic nations could address the risks of AI while promoting a liberal vision for the technology that could rival competing efforts from countries such as China.

The remarks highlight how one of the largest companies in the AI industry hopes to influence the fast-moving push by governments, particularly in Europe and the United States, to rein in AI before it causes major disruptions to society and the economy.

In a roughly hour-long appearance that was equal parts product pitch and policy proposal, Smith compared AI to the printing press and described how it could streamline policymaking and lawmakers’ constituent outreach, before calling for “the rule of law” to govern AI at every part of its lifecycle and supply chain.

Regulations should apply to everything from the data centers that train large language models to the end users such as banks, hospitals and others that may apply the technology toward making life-altering decisions, Smith said.

For decades, “the rule of law and a commitment to democracy has kept technology in its proper place,” Smith said. “We’ve done it before; we can do it again.”

In his remarks, Smith joined calls made last week by OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT and that Microsoft has invested billions in — for the creation of a new government regulator that can oversee a licensing system for cutting-edge AI development, combined with testing and safety standards as well as government-mandated disclosure rules.

Whether a new federal regulator is needed to police AI is quickly emerging as a focal point of the debate in Washington; opponents such as IBM have argued, including in an op-ed Thursday, that AI regulation should be baked into every existing federal agency because of their understanding of the sectors they oversee and how AI may be most likely to transform them.

Smith also called for President Joe Biden to develop and sign an executive order requiring federal agencies that procure AI tools to implement a risk management framework developed and published this year by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. That framework, which Congress first ordered with legislation in 2020, covers ways that companies can use AI responsibly and ethically.

Such an order would leverage the US government’s immense purchasing power to shape the AI industry and encourage the voluntary adoption of best practices, Smith said.

Microsoft itself plans to implement the NIST framework “across all of our services,” Smith added, a commitment he described as the direct outgrowth of a recent White House meeting with AI CEOs in Washington. Smith also pledged to publish an annual AI transparency report.

As part of Microsoft’s proposal, Smith said any new rules for AI should include revamped export controls tailor-made for the AI age to prevent the technology from being abused by sanctioned entities.

And, he said, the government should mandate redundant AI circuit breakers that would allow algorithms to be shut off by critical infrastructure providers or from within the data centers they depend on.

Smith’s remarks, and a related policy paper, come a week after Google released its own proposals calling for global cooperation and common standards for artificial intelligence.

“AI is too important not to regulate, and too important not to regulate well,” Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in a blog post unveiling the company’s plan.

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April 12, 2021

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin will decide on Senate run ‘before the Fourth of July’ | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said Sunday that he is “seriously considering” a bid for Senate and expects to announce a decision before July 4.

“I have not decided,” Raskin told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” when asked if he would seek the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin. “I love the House of Representatives, I love the people I serve with, and I love being in the People’s House. But, as some of my House colleagues have pointed out, these Senate seats only open up every 25 or 30 years. A lot of people are encouraging me to check it out.”

“I’m hoping, before the Fourth of July, I will have an answer for everybody,” said Raskin.

Cardin announced last month that he would not seek reelection in 2024 after three terms in the Senate. The field of Democrats looking to succeed him in deep-blue Maryland already includes US Rep. David Trone, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks and Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando.

Former House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer, the senior member of the Maryland congressional delegation, endorsed Alsobrooks last week. Asked by Bash if that would affect his decision to run, Raskin said: “Steny Hoyer is my friend, and so I have talked to him. I have talked to all of my colleagues about it.”

“We have got awesome political leaders in Maryland, and I would not run against anybody else,” Raskin said. “It’s totally based on the experience I have had trying to defend our democracy and our freedom and the Bill of Rights against the Trump movement, which I think is such a danger.”

Raskin, who disclosed a cancer diagnosis in December, said he has gotten a “clean bill of health” and is in remission following his treatment and “waiting for my hair and my eyelashes and everything to come back.”

On Monday, the Maryland Democrat and his GOP counterpart on the Oversight panel, Chairman James Comer, are expected to review an internal FBI document that some Republicans claim will shed light on an allegation that, as vice president, Joe Biden was involved in a criminal scheme with a foreign national.

Comer subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray for the document last month and has since said he plans to begin proceedings to hold Wray in contempt of Congress for failing to turn it over to the committee. Despite the FBI’s accommodation, Comer plans to move with forward with the contempt process, arguing it is not enough to satisfy the terms of his subpoena.

“That demonstrates to me what they’re really interested in is holding the FBI director in contempt, not getting a document they’ve already seen,” Raskin told Bash, adding, “I don’t know what this document is because the majority has closed us out, the Democrats”

“It’s all about the 2024 campaign,” Raskin said.

Asked about concerns surrounding 80-year-old Biden’s age as he seeks reelection next year, Raskin said the president “deserves to be judged by the results of his administration.”

“That’s what should matter to us as the people,” the congressman said.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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April 12, 2021

Biden and Sunak meet amid a turning point in the Russia-Ukraine war | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

When United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak visited the White House on Thursday, he hoped a shared perspective on Ukraine and a new push for economic partnership could reinforce what has been a steady, if rather business-like, working relationship.

For President Joe Biden and his team, a relatively low-key prime minister whose term has outlasted a wilting head of lettuce – unlike his predecessor’s – is reason enough for celebration.

“There is no issue of global importance, none, that our nations are not leading together and where we’re not sharing our common values to make things better,” Biden said at the start of a news conference, during which the leaders unveiled a new economic partnership that stopped short of a free trade agreement.

Stability in 10 Downing Street has allowed for better coordination on Ukraine, according to officials, and helped resolve a festering dispute over Northern Ireland trade rules. Sunak’s pragmatic approach in some ways mirrors Biden’s, even if they hold opposing ideological outlooks.

That made Thursday’s meeting in the Oval Office – Sunak’s first since taking office – a key moment for the men as they look to deepen their relationship.

As the meeting got underway, Biden thanked Sunak for his partnership on Ukraine, and hailed the relationship between their two countries.

“You know Prime Minister Churchill and Roosevelt met here a little over 70 years ago and they asserted that the strength of the partnership between Great Britain and the United States was strength of the free world. I still think there’s truth to that assertion,” Biden said.

The talks come at a turning point in the Russia-Ukraine war, following the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam and ahead of a widely expected counteroffensive meant to retake territory. The White House said Ukraine would be “top of mind” in Thursday’s meeting.

In his news conference, Biden said he was confident that Congress would continue providing support for Ukraine, despite a divide among Republicans.

“The fact of the matter is that I believe we’ll have the funding necessary to support Ukraine as long as it takes,” Biden said. “I believe that we’re going to get that support, it will be real.”

As he began his visit in Washington, Sunak said Wednesday it is “too early” to determine what caused the destruction of the dam in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region.

“Our military and security services are currently investigating it. But if it is intentional, it would represent an unprecedented level of barbarism,” he told Sky News in Washington.

The US and UK have been the leading contributors of military aid to Ukraine, and are coordinating on providing F-16 fighter jets to reinforce long-term deterrence against Russia.

At the same time, Sunak is coming into the meeting with major economic priorities, including a push for closer investment links and more resilient supply chains.

He’s also expected to deliver a pitch on making Britain a world leader on developing and regulating artificial intelligence – an area that a British official said was “very much on the prime minister’s mind” and that Biden’s aides are also watching closely. Because of Britain’s exit from the EU, the country has been left out of talks with the US and Europe on the emerging technology. Sunak, who studied in Silicon Valley and views tech as a key issue, is proposing a summit meeting in the fall to discuss AI.

Biden said he was looking at “watermarks on everything that has to do with, produced by AI,” and acknowledged the technology’s potential for both good but also “great damage.”

Ahead of the visit, Sunak cast his economic objectives as directly linked to the security agenda.

“The UK and US have always worked in lockstep to protect our people and uphold our way of life. As the challenges and threats we face change, we need to build an alliance that also protects our economies,” he said. “Just as interoperability between our militaries has given us a battlefield advantage over our adversaries, greater economic interoperability will give us a crucial edge in the decades ahead.”

Not on the agenda, according to US and UK officials, is a new bilateral trade deal, which had been discussed under former President Donald Trump but now remains on ice.

The broad agenda reflects the typically extensive list of issues between the two nations, whose partnership is nearly always described by their leaders as a “special relationship.” Indeed, officials in London and Washington both describe the bond between Biden and Sunak as warm and friendly, as would be expected between the leaders of two countries so closely aligned.

When Biden met Sunak in San Diego earlier this year, he made reference to the condo the Stanford MBA graduate maintains in California.

“That’s why I’m being very nice to you, maybe you can invite me to your home,” Biden said, perhaps unknowingly raising what has been a controversial issue for the prime minister.

Still, there are undeniable differences between the two men, not least on issues of government economic intervention and the complicated exit of Britain from the European Union.

Few see Biden and Sunak developing a transatlantic friendship akin to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, or Barack Obama and David Cameron (who called each other “bro”).

While the two men have encountered each other several times over the past year, including last month at the Group of 7 summit in Japan, it will be Sunak’s first time at the White House for formal talks since he assumed the premiership in October.

Sunak traveled to San Diego in March for a three-way defense summit and met with Biden in Belfast during the president’s visit to Northern Ireland in April. Yet that meeting was only a brief chat over tea; Biden spent most of his visit to Ireland exploring his ancestral roots.

There is little question the two men hold very different political ideologies, even if they share a pragmatic, low-drama style – at least compared with their predecessors.

Some members of Sunak’s government have openly criticized Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, calling green subsidies included in the package protectionist and warning they would harm American allies. And Sunak has voiced a more limited view of government’s role in the economy, akin to his ideological predecessor Thatcher.

Biden’s intense interest in resolving a long-festering dispute in Northern Ireland over trade rules has also caused tension. He said after visiting the island in April his trip was intended “to make sure the Brits didn’t screw around” with the region’s peace structure – a comment that only intensified views among unionists of his pro-Irish allegiances.

There are also generational differences; at 43, Sunak is the youngest leader in the G7 club of industrial democracies while Biden is the oldest at 80.

Still, Sunak has acted as a stabilizing force at 10 Downing Street after a tumultuous period that saw three prime ministers take the job over the course of two months.

Biden and his aides made little attempt to disguise their frustrations with Boris Johnson, a top Brexit proponent. His successor, Liz Truss, was barely in office long enough for Biden to form a full opinion.

By comparison, Sunak has sought to resolve some of the sticky issues that felled his predecessors. He did strike an agreement with the European Union on trade rules in Northern Ireland, though the deal wasn’t enough to bring unionists back to a power sharing government

And he has been a staunch proponent of economic and military support for Ukraine, most recently in a pledge to help train Ukrainian pilots on western fighter jets.

One area of discussion likely to arise will be NATO’s next secretary general. Sunak has been lobbying for the British defense secretary Ben Wallace, but other candidates are also thought to be under consideration. The job is typically reserved for a European but would require Biden’s sign-off.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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April 12, 2021

‘Serious concerns’: Top companies raise alarm over Europe’s proposed AI law | CNN Business

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Dortmund, Germany
CNN
—

Dozens of Europe’s top business leaders have pushed back on the European Union’s proposed legislation on artificial intelligence, warning that it could hurt the bloc’s competitiveness and spur an exodus of investment.

In an open letter sent to EU lawmakers Friday, C-suite executives from companies including Siemens

(SIEGY), Carrefour

(CRERF), Renault

(RNLSY) and Airbus

(EADSF) raised “serious concerns” about the EU AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI rules.

Other prominent signatories include big names in tech, such as Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist of Meta

(FB), and Hermann Hauser, founder of British chipmaker ARM.

“In our assessment, the draft legislation would jeopardize Europe’s competitiveness and technological sovereignty without effectively tackling the challenges we are and will be facing,” the group of more than 160 executives said in the letter.

They argue that the draft rules go too far, especially in regulating generative AI and foundation models, the technology behind popular platforms such as ChatGPT.

Since the craze over generative AI began this year, technologists have warned of the potential dark side of systems that allow people to use machines to write college essays, take academic tests and build websites. Last month, hundreds of top experts warned about the risk of human extinction from AI, saying mitigating that possibility “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

The EU proposal applies a broad brush to such software “regardless of [its] use cases,” and could push innovative companies and investors out of Europe because they would face high compliance costs and “disproportionate liability risks,” according to the executives.

“Such regulation could lead to highly innovative companies moving their activities abroad” and investors withdrawing their capital from European AI, the group wrote.

“The result would be a critical productivity gap between the two sides of the Atlantic.”

The executives are calling for policymakers to revise the terms of the bill, which was agreed upon by European Parliament lawmakers earlier this month and is now being negotiated with EU member states.

“In a context where we know very little about the real risks, the business model, or the applications of generative AI, European law should confine itself to stating broad principles in a risk-based approach,” the group wrote.

The business leaders called for a regulatory board of experts to oversee these principles and ensure they can be continuously adapted to changes in the fast-moving technology.

The group also urged lawmakers to work with their US counterparts, noting that regulatory proposals had also been made in the United States. EU lawmakers should try to “create a legally binding level playing field,” the executives wrote.

If such action isn’t taken and Europe is constrained by regulatory demands, it could hurt the region’s international standing, the group suggested.

“Like the invention of the Internet or the breakthrough of silicon chips, generative AI is the kind of technology that will be decisive for the performance capacity and therefore the significance of different regions,” it said.

Tech experts have increasingly called for greater regulation of AI as it becomes more widely used. In recent months, the United States and China have also laid out plans to regulate the technology. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has used high-profile trips around the world in recent weeks to call for co-ordinated international regulation of AI.

The EU rules are the world’s “first ever attempt to enact” legally binding rules that apply to different areas of AI, according to the European Parliament.

Negotiators of the AI Act hope to reach an agreement before the end of the year, and once the final rules are adopted by the European Parliament and EU member states, the act will become law.

As they stand now, the rules would ban AI systems deemed to be harmful, including real-time facial recognition systems in public spaces, predictive policing tools and social scoring systems, such as those in China.

The Act also outlines transparency requirements for AI systems. For instance, systems such as ChatGPT would have to disclose that their content was AI-generated and provide safeguards against the generation of illegal content.

Engaging in prohibited AI practices could lead to hefty fines: up to €40 million ($43 million) or an amount equal to up to 7% of a company’s worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

But penalties would be “proportionate” and consider the market position of small-scale providers, suggesting there could be some leniency for startups.

Not everyone has pushed back on the legislation so far. Earlier this month, Digital Europe, a trade association that counts SAP

(SAP) and Ericsson

(ERIC) among its members, called the rules “a text we can work with.”

“However, there remain some areas which can be improved to ensure Europe becomes a competitive hub for AI innovation,” the group said in a statement.

Dragos Tudorache, a Romanian member of parliament who led the bill’s drafting, said he was convinced that those who signed the new letter “have not read the text but have rather reacted on the stimulus of a few.”

“The only concrete suggestions made are in fact what the [draft] text now contains: an industry-led process for defining standards, governance with industry at the table, and a light regulatory regime that asks for transparency. Nothing else,” he said in a statement.

“It is a pity that the aggressive lobby of a few is capturing other serious companies in the net, which unfortunately undermines the undeniable lead that Europe has taken.”

Brando Benifei, an Italian member of parliament who also led the drafting of the legislation, told CNN “we will listen to all concerns and stakeholders when dealing with AI regulation, but we have a firm commitment to deliver clear and enforceable rules.”

“Our work could positively affect the global conversation and direction when dealing with artificial intelligence and its impact on fundamental rights, without hindering the necessary pursuit of innovation,” he said.

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April 12, 2021

Former Rep. Mondaire Jones announces new election bid in New York | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

Former Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones announced Wednesday that he is running for Congress in New York’s 17th District, the seat he previously represented before redistricting thwarted his reelection plans last year.

“I’ve never been Washington’s choice. It’s because I stand up to corruption. I battle with Republicans trying to overthrow our democracy and ban abortion, even as I push my party to fight harder for working people. I’m running to finish the work I began,” Jones said in a tweet accompanying his campaign launch video.

“Most people in Washington didn’t grow up like me. They have no idea what it’s like to struggle. We got to get Washington back on the side of working people. I know we can do better. For me, this is personal,” he said.

Jones’ bid will pit him against Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of Rockland County and sets up a potentially brutal Democratic primary in the swing district.

Westchester residents Liz Whitmer Gereghty, the sister of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who previously served on the district’s school board, and MaryAnn Carr have also declared their candidacies for the 17th District. Gereghty is planning to run as a more moderate candidate in her bid to flip the seat.

Jones became one of the first two openly gay Black men elected to Congress when he first won the race to succeed former Democratic Rep. Nita Lowey in 2020. He served as a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and was elected unanimously by his colleagues to serve as the freshman representative to House Democratic Leadership.

Jones was seen as a rising star in the party for his positions on expanding the size of the Supreme Court and supporting the “Green New Deal” while also voting for the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure deal and increased police funding.

Jones chose not to run for reelection for his old seat after redistricting placed him in the same district as former Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the then-chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He instead ran in New York’s 10th District, and ultimately lost to Dan Goldman in the Democratic primary. Goldman went on to win the race, but Maloney ultimately lost his election to Lawler.

Democrats are now eager to flip the 17th District seat and ensure a Democrat succeeds in the 2024 congressional race.

Jones was an on-air CNN political commentator for several months earlier this year before leaving the network.

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April 12, 2021

McCarthy told Trump he backed expunging impeachments but there’s no vote being scheduled | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

In a private call with former President Donald Trump, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he personally backed the idea of expunging Trump’s two impeachments and would bring it up to the conference to gauge support, a source said. He did not promise to bring it to the floor, the source added.

McCarthy, a California Republican, has been working overtime to try and placate Trump after an interview last month, in which McCarthy said he thinks the former president can win in 2024, but did not know if he was the “strongest” candidate, prompting outrage from Trump advisers and allies. The speaker’s perceived transgression once again raised questions from Trump and his inner circle as to why he had not yet endorsed the former president in his 2024 presidential bid.

McCarthy called Trump to apologize after the interview, claiming he misspoke on CNBC, sources told CNN at the time. It is unclear what, if any, other promises were made on this call.

Politico first reported the endorsement of the position made by McCarthy to Trump, but McCarthy disputed the assertion in the Politico reporting that he had promised to hold the vote.

“No,” McCarthy told reporters Thursday when asked if he had promised to hold the expungement vote. When pressed on if he would commit to not holding a vote, he said it should “go through committee like anything else.”

Multiple sources tell CNN that calling a House vote to expunge the two impeachments against the former president would be a fool’s errand, as leadership does not have the votes to pass this. So even if McCarthy indicated to Trump he’d do it, it’s unlikely votes would be there – likely further inflaming tensions. Additionally, it is unclear if expunging an impeachment is possible and it has never been done before.

There is no clear procedural consequence of a resolution that portends to “expunge” Trump’s impeachment, according to guidance from the House Parliamentarian’s office. Efforts that have been discuss include a non-binding House resolution expressing the sense of the House, or “expresses the sentiments of one chamber.” Not only would that measure not expunge the impeachment, the effort also cannot undo the two votes that were taken in 2019 and 2020 that impeached the former president. Those votes would still exist in the Congressional Record.

Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill, including GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have pushed McCarthy to call a House vote to expunge the two impeachments.

GOP Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Friday that he would vote to expunge Trump’s impeachment if McCarthy were to bring it to the floor but added that it wouldn’t be “wise” for the speaker to do so “in terms of precedent that it sets.”

“It’s probably wise for the Republican base. It’s not wise in terms of constitutional history,” Buck said on “The Source,” adding that “the Senate expunged when they voted not to impeach.”

Hours after McCarthy’s CNBC interview last month and after he had called the former President to clean up his remarks, Trump said “they better do it” when asked by a supporter at the opening of his New Hampshire campaign office about the House of Representatives expunging his two impeachments.

“If McCarthy does his job, they’ll expunge both of those crappy impeachments,” a supporter said as Trump signed hats and mingled with voters at his new New Hampshire office.

“I understand they’re working on that,” Trump said. “They better do it.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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April 12, 2021

Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping | CNN Business

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CNN
—

Ellen Min doesn’t go to the grocery store anymore. She avoids bars and going out to eat with her friends; festivals and community events are out, too. This year, she opted not to take her kids to the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Min isn’t a shut-in. She’s just a Korean American from central Pennsylvania.

Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.

“You can’t avoid paying attention to the rhetoric, because it has a direct impact on our lives,” Min said.

That rhetoric surged again this week as a hostile House committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew for more than five hours on Thursday about the app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”

Chew had taken pains to distance TikTok from China, going so far as to anglicize his name for American audiences and to play up his academic credentials — he holds degrees from University College London and Harvard Business School. But it was not enough to prevent lawmakers from blasting TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party” and as “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” all while mangling pronunciations of Chew’s name and the names of other officials at its parent company, ByteDance. After Chew’s testimony, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said the CEO should be “deported immediately” and banned from the United States, saying his defense of TikTok was “beneath contempt.”

There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws. (TikTok has failed to assuage concerns the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to improperly access the data, despite a plan by TikTok to “firewall” the information.) And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article.

But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association. Moreover, politicians’ increasingly strident tone is creating conditions for new discriminatory policies at home and the potential for even more anti-Asian violence, civil rights leaders said.

“We are afraid that, more and more, the actions and the language of the government is premised on the assumption that just because we are Chinese or have cultural ties to China that we could be disloyal, or be spies, or be under the influence of a foreign government,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, an organization co-founded by the late architect IM Pei, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and other prominent Chinese Americans. “We want to deliver the message: Not only are we not a national security liability — we are a national security asset.”

But as the country wrestles with China’s influence as a competitive global power, caught in the middle are tens of millions of Americans like Min who, thanks to their appearance, may now face greater suspicion or hostility than they experienced even during the pandemic, according to Asian American lawmakers, civil society groups and ordinary citizens.

The heated rhetoric surrounding China has undergone a shift from the pandemic’s early days, when xenophobia linked to Covid-19 was unambiguous.

At the time, Asian Americans feared an uptick in violence inspired by derogatory phrases such as “Kung-flu” and “China virus.” That language had emerged amid then-President Donald Trump’s wider criticisms of China, which had led to a damaging trade war with the country. It was against that backdrop that Trump first threatened to ban TikTok, a move some critics said was an attempt to stoke xenophobia.

In recent years, criticism of China has significantly expanded to encompass even more aspects of the US-China relationship. Concerns about China have gone mainstream as US national security officials and lawmakers have publicly grappled with state-backed ransomware attacks and other hacking attempts. The Biden administration has sought to confront China on how the internet should be governed, and like the Trump administration, it’s now taking aim at TikTok, again.

As that shift has occurred, criticism of China has stylistically evolved from blatant name-calling to the more clinical vocabulary of national security, allowing an undercurrent of xenophobia to lurk beneath the respectable veneer of geopolitics, civil rights leaders said.

In January, House lawmakers stood up a new select committee specifically focused on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” At its first hearing, the panel’s chairman, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, said: “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”

A week later, US intelligence officials warned that the Chinese Communist Party represents the “most consequential threat” to US global leadership. An unclassified intelligence community report released the same day said China views competition with the United States as an “epochal geopolitical shift.” (Even so, the report maintained that the “most lethal threat to US persons and interests” continues to be racially motivated extremism and violence, particularly by White supremacy groups.)

While some policymakers have added that their issue is with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people or Asians in general, leaders of Asian descent say the caveat has too often been a footnote in debates about China and not emphasized nearly enough. Leaving it unsaid or merely implied creates room for listeners to draw bigoted conclusions, critics said.

“That can’t be a footnote; it can’t be an afterthought,” said Charles Jung, a California employment attorney and the national coordinator for Always With Us, a nationwide memorial event to remember the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. “I’m speaking specifically, directly to both GOP and Democratic politicians: Be mindful of the words that you use. Because the words you use can have real world impacts on the bodies of Asian American people on the streets.”

The current climate has led to at least one US lawmaker directly questioning the loyalty of a fellow member of Congress.

California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden. Gooden’s remarks were swiftly condemned by his congressional colleagues. But to Chu, the incident was an example of the way politics surrounding China, technology and national security have fueled anti-Asian sentiment.

“Rising tensions with China have clearly led to an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia that has real consequences for our communities,” Chu told CNN.

Concerns about xenophobia are bipartisan. Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican, told CNN there is “no question” that anti-Asian hate crimes have risen since the pandemic.

California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden.

“This is unacceptable,” said Kim. “Asian American issues are American issues, and all Americans deserve to be treated with respect. We can treat all Americans with respect and still be wary of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”

But even in discussing the Chinese government’s real, demonstrated risks to US security, the way that some Americans describe those dangers is counterproductive, needlessly provocative and historically inaccurate, said Rep. Andy Kim, a New York Democrat and a member of the House select committee. Even the name “Chinese Communist Party” can itself prime listeners to adopt a Cold War mentality — a framework whose analytical value is dubious, Kim argued.

“A lot of my colleagues, especially on the select committee, use rhetoric like, ‘This is a new Cold War,’” said Kim. “First of all, it’s not true: The Soviet Union was a very different competitor than China. And it’s framed in a very zero-sum way … It’s very much being talked about as if their entire way of life is incompatible with ours and cannot coexist with ours, and that heightens the tension.”

In a November op-ed, Gallagher and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio directly linked that rhetoric to TikTok, calling for the app to be banned due to the United States being “locked in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party, one that senior military advisers warn could turn hot over Taiwan at any time.”

Just because China may view its dynamic with the United States as an epic struggle does not mean Americans must be goaded into doing the same, Kim argued. Beyond the violence it could trigger domestically, a stark confrontational framing could cause the United States to blunder into poor policy choices.

For example, he said, the right mindset could mean the difference between legally fraught “whack-a-mole” attempts to ban Chinese-affiliated social media companies versus passing a historic national privacy law that safeguards Americans’ data from all prying eyes, no matter what tech company may be collecting it.

Security researchers who have examined TikTok’s app say that the company’s invasive collection of user data is more of an indictment of lax government policies on privacy, rather than a reflection of any TikTok-specific wrongdoing or national security risk.

“TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” said Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”

Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.” Instead, some policymakers appear to have run in the opposite direction.

Anti-China sentiment has already led to policies that risk violating Asian-Americans’ constitutional rights, several civil society groups said.

John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pointed to the Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” a Trump-era program intended to hunt down Chinese spies but that produced a string of discrimination complaints and case dismissals involving innocent Americans swept up in the dragnet. The Biden administration shut down the program last year.

More recently, Yang said, proposed laws in Texas and Virginia aimed at keeping US land out of the hands of those with foreign ties would create impossible-to-satisfy tests for Asian-Americans, showing how anti-China fervor threatens to infringe on the rights of many US citizens.

“National security has often been used as a pretext specifically against Asian-Americans,” Yang said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the racial profiling of Muslim-Americans following Sept. 11. “We should remember that many Chinese-Americans came to this country to escape the authoritarian regime of China.”

Though he fears the situation for Asian-Americans will get worse before it gets better, Yang and other advocates called for US policymakers to stress from the outset that their quarrel lies with the Chinese government and not with people of Chinese descent.

“We know from experience in the United States that once you demonize Chinese people, all Asian people living in this country face the brunt of that rhetoric,” said Jung. “And you see it not just in spy balloons and the reactions surrounding it and TikTok and Huawei, but also in modern-day racist alien land laws.”

Growing up in Pennsylvania, Min was no stranger to racially motivated violence: Her home was regularly vandalized with eggs, tomatoes and epithet-laden graffiti (“Go home, gooks”); her father once discovered a crude homemade explosive stuffed in his car.

But fears of racism stoked by modern US political rhetoric has forced Min to change how her family lives in ways they never had to during her childhood.

Last year, amid another spate of assaults targeting elderly Asian-Americans, Min said her mother sold the family dry-cleaning business and moved to Korea, following Min’s father who had moved the year before.

“It was a sad reality to say that as much as we want our family close to us and their grandchildren, they will be safer in Korea,” Min said.

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April 12, 2021

Lawmakers reluctant to pursue gun control measures following Nashville school shooting | CNN Politics

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Monday’s deadly school shooting in Nashville has sparked a familiar cycle of condolences and calls to action among lawmakers in Washington, but both sides of the aisle have been quick to concede that the recent violence is probably not enough to sway a divided Congress to move substantive gun control efforts forward.

After three children and three adults were killed in a shooting at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville on Monday, President Joe Biden asserted that he’s done all he can do to address gun control and urged members on Capitol Hill to act. But the shooting, so far, has not compelled lawmakers in Washington – particularly Republican leadership and some members representing Tennessee – to push forward gun control, signaling no end to the impasse within the GOP-controlled House and nearly deadlocked Senate.

The Nashville incident was just among the latest in 130 mass shooting incidents so far this year, according to data from the national Gun Violence Archive.

White House officials are not currently planning a major push around gun safety reform in the wake of the deadly Nashville school shooting, three senior administration officials said. But Biden and White House officials will continue to urge Congress to act.

Biden on Tuesday told CNN’s MJ Lee, “I can’t do anything except plead with the Congress to act reasonably.”

“I have done the full extent of my executive authority – to do on my own, anything about guns …The Congress has to act. The majority of the American people think having assault weapons is bizarre, it’s a crazy idea. They’re against that. And so I think the Congress could be passing an assault weapon ban,” he added.

Biden has taken more than 20 executive actions on guns since taking office, including regulating the use of “ghost guns” and sales of stabilizing braces that effectively turn pistols into rifles. He also signed a bipartisan bill in 2022 which expands background checks and provides federal funding for so-called “red flag laws” – although it failed to ban any weapons and fell far short of what Biden and his party had advocated for.

White House officials have been sober about the political realities Democrats face with the current makeup of Congress, where Republicans in control of the House have rejected Biden’s calls for an assault weapons ban. Even when both chambers of Congress were controlled by Democrats during the first two years of Biden’s term, an assault weapon ban gained little traction, in part because of a 60-vote threshold necessary for passage.

Many Republicans in Congress, including those in positions of leadership and in the Tennessee delegation, have either been reluctant to use the deadly violence in Nashville as a potential springboard for reform or they’ve outright rejected calls for additional action on further regulating guns, arguing that there isn’t an appetite for tougher restrictions.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy would not answer questions on whether any congressional action should be taken on guns after the shooting in Nashville. And House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana who survived being shot in 2017, demurred when asked if the most recent school shooting in Nashville would move Congress to address any sort of reforms.

“I really get angry when I see people try to politicize it for their own personal agenda, especially when we don’t even know the facts,” he said when asked if his conference was prepared to do anything to address the spate of mass shootings, mentioning only improving mental health and securing schools.

“Let’s get the facts. And let’s work to see if there’s something that we can do to help secure schools,” he added. “We’ve talked about things that we can do and it just seems like on the other side, all they want to do is take guns away from law abiding citizens. … And that’s not the answer, by the way.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, a key GOP negotiator in last year’s bipartisan gun legislation, said on Tuesday that he doesn’t see a path forward on new gun legislation. Instead, he believes that lawmakers need to focus on implementing what has already been signed into law.

“The full implementation is going to take months and years,” Tillis said of the gun bill that passed last summer. “There is a lot of unimplemented or to be implemented provisions in there. Let’s talk about that first.”

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican whose committee has jurisdiction over gun policy, said Tuesday that he doesn’t think Congress should take action to limit assault weapons, though he declined to say why it’s okay to ban fully automatic rifles but not semi-automatic weapons.

“The Second Amendment is the Second Amendment,” he continued. “I believe in the Second Amendment and we shouldn’t penalize law-abiding American citizens.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has been involved in past negotiations on gun legislation, said: “I don’t know if there’s much space to do more, but I’ll certainly look and see.”

Graham said he is opposed to a ban on AR-15s – which was one of the weapons the Nashville suspect used during Monday’s shooting – noting that he owns one himself and arguing that it would “be hard to implement a national red flag law.”

Asked by CNN’s Manu Raju why he wouldn’t support a ban of AR-15s, Andy Ogles, who represents the district where Monday’s shooting took place, replied, “Why not talk about the real issue facing the country – and that’s mental health.” And Sen. Bill Hagerty, the Tennessee Republican, refused to discuss calls to ban AR-15s after the Nashville shooting.

“The tragedy that happened in my state was the result of a depraved person and somebody very very sick. And the result has been absolutely devastating for the people in my community. Right now with the victims, the family and the people in my community – we are all mourning right now,” Hagerty told CNN.

Asked about banning those weapons, he added: “I’m certain politics will wave into everything. But right now I’m not focused on the politics of the situation. I’m focused on the victims.

Tennessee GOP Rep. Tim Burchett told reporters that “laws don’t work” to curb gun violence.

“We want to legislate evil – it’s just not gonna happen,” he said. “If you think Washington is going to fix this problem, you’re wrong. They’re not going to fix this problem. They are the problem.”

Asked by CNN why private citizens need AR-15s, Burchett pointed to self-defense. He also argued that even though other countries don’t observe the United States’ high frequency of shootings, “other countries don’t have our freedom either … And when people abuse that freedom, that’s what happens.”

Meanwhile, some Democrats in Congress are slamming House Republicans for their disinterest.

“As a country and as a Congress, we can do better and we know that, so shame on Speaker McCarthy for not bringing something up, for not announcing that we can and do more. All we’re going to get are thoughts and prayers out of their Twitter accounts, and that’s not enough” Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar of California said during a press conference.

On the other side of the Capitol, however, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin told reporters that he is “not very hopeful” that the Senate can pass gun legislation this Congress.

“I’m not very hopeful, yet we have to try,” he said.

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to force a vote on a semi-automatic weapons ban to put Republicans on the record.

“We need a fight in Congress, and I’m prepared to conduct that fight, others are as well,” he told CNN. “And ultimately the American people deserve to know where each of us stands on common sense gun violence prevention.”

Schumer would not say whether he intends to put legislation banning assault weapons on the Senate floor for a vote this Congress. There is nowhere close to enough support to overcome a legislative filibuster.

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April 12, 2021

2024 Presidential Candidates Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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Here’s a look at the 2024 presidential candidates and key dates in their campaigns.

Republican Candidates

Donald Trump – 45th president of the United States
Primary Campaign Committee – Donald J. Trump for President 2024, Inc.
Website – https://www.donaldjtrump.com/
November 15, 2022 – Trump announces that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, aiming to become only the second commander-in-chief ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms.

Nikki Haley – Former governor of South Carolina and former US ambassador to the United Nations
Primary Campaign Committee – Nikki Haley for President Inc.
Website – https://nikkihaley.com/
February 14, 2023 – Haley announces in a video that she will run for president in 2024.

Vivek Ramaswamy – Entrepreneur and author
Primary Campaign Committee – VIVEK 2024
Website – https://www.vivek2024.com/
February 21, 2023 – Ramaswamy announces that he’s running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Asa Hutchinson – Former governor of Arkansas
Primary Campaign Committee – America Strong and Free
Website – https://www.asfpac.com/
April 2, 2023 – Hutchinson announces that he’s running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination during an interview on ABC News.

Democratic Candidates

Marianne Williamson – Author and activist
Primary Campaign Committee – Marianne Williamson for President
Website – https://www.marianne2024.com
March 4, 2023 – Williamson formally announces that she’s running for president in 2024, her second bid for the White House following an unsuccessful campaign in 2020.

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April 12, 2021

The Tennessee expulsions reveal the core divide in US politics. Here’s why. | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Rarely have the tectonic plates of American politics collided as visibly and explosively as they did earlier this month in Tennessee.

The procession of predominantly middle-aged or older White Republicans who rose almost two weeks ago in the Tennessee House of Representatives to castigate, and then expel, two young Black Democrats crystallized the overlapping generational and racial confrontation that underpins the competition between the political parties.

The Republican vote to expel those Black Democratic representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, encapsulated in a single moment the struggle for control over America’s direction between the nation’s increasingly diverse younger generations and its mostly White older cohorts. While kids of color now comprise just over half of all Americans younger than 18, Whites still constitute about three-fourths of the nation’s seniors, according to Census data analyzed by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro.

That stark division – what Frey terms “the cultural generation gap” and I’ve called the competition between “the brown and the gray” – has become a central fault line in the nation’s politics. Particularly in the Donald Trump era, the Republican coalition has grown increasingly reliant on older Whites, while younger people of color are evolving into a critical component of the Democratic voting base.

The priorities and values of these two giant cohorts often clash most explosively in red states across the South and Southwest, like Tennessee, where Republicans now control state government. In those states, Republicans are moving aggressively to lock into law the policy preferences of their older, predominantly White and largely non-urban and Christian electoral coalition. That agenda often collides directly with the views of younger generations on issues including abortion, LGBTQ rights, limits on classroom discussion of race, gender and sexual orientation, book bans, and gun control.

Across the red states, the conditions are coalescing for years of escalating conflict between these divergent generations. From one direction, the Republicans controlling these states are applying increasingly hardball tactics to advance their policy agenda and entrench their electoral advantage. That strategy includes severe gerrymanders that dilute the influence of urban areas where younger voters often congregate, laws that create obstacles to registering and voting, and extreme legislative maneuvers such as the vote to expel Pearson and Jones. What Republicans in Tennessee and other red states “are trying to do is minimize the voices – minimize the sound, minimize the protest, and continue to oppress folks who do not agree,” says Antonio Arellano, vice president for communications at NextGen America, a group that organizes young people for liberal causes.

From the other direction, the youngest Millennials and first representatives of Generation Z moving into elected office are throwing themselves more forcefully against these GOP fortifications – just as Jones and Pearson have done. These young, elected officials have been shaped by the past decade of heightened public protests, many of them led by young people, particularly around gun safety, climate change, and racial equity. And more of them are bringing that ethos of direct action into the political arena – as Jones and Pearson did by leading a gun control protest on the floor of the Tennessee legislature. “This generation of politicians have been socialized through the crucible of Black Lives Matter and the [Donald] Trump era and political polarization,” says Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta who studies race and politics. “So it’s not surprising that they are usually going to be confrontational.”

In the red states, this rising wave of urgency and militancy among younger progressives is crashing headlong into the fortifications Republicans are erecting to solidify their control. Even with the ardor evident from Jones, Pearson and their supporters in Tennessee, most observers agree it will be very difficult any time soon for “the brown” to loosen the grip of “the gray” over political power in almost any of the red states. “In the short term there isn’t a risk” to the GOP’s hold on the red states, said Gillespie, “which is why you see these legislators flexing their power in the way they are.” And that could be a recipe for more tension in those places as the diverse younger generations constitute a growing share of the workforce and tax base, yet find their preferences systematically denied in the decisions of their state governments.

Like many analysts, Melissa Deckman, chief executive officer of the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, predicts that “what we saw in Tennessee was the first salvo” of escalating conflict as older white conservatives, especially in the red states, resist the demands for greater influence from the emerging younger generations. “An overwhelmingly White conservative legislature taking this remarkable and drastic step of expelling the two young African-Americans,” she says, “is a taste of what we are going to see in the future driven by those demographic changes.”

Those demographic changes are rooted in the generational transition rumbling through American life. Though the tipping point has drawn little attention, Frey has calculated that a majority of the nation’s population has now been born after 1980. And those younger generations are kaleidoscopically more diverse than their older counterparts.

The change is most visible on race. Because the US essentially shut off immigration between 1924 and 1965, nearly three-fourths of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) are White, as are more than three-fourths of the remaining seniors from the older generations before them, according to Frey’s figures. By contrast, Frey has calculated, people of color comprise well over two-fifths of Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), just under half of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) and slightly more than half the youngest generation born since 2012. That youngest generation (sometimes called Generation Alpha) will be the first in American history in which racial “minorities” constitute the majority.

The transition extends to other dimensions of personal identity. The Public Religion Research Institute has calculated that while just 17% of Americans aged 65 or older and 20% of those aged 50-64 do not identify with any organized religion, the share of those “seculars” rises to 32% among those aged 30-49 and 38% among adults 18-29. In turn, while White Christians constitute about half of all adults aged 50-64 and three-fifths of seniors, they comprise only about one-third of those aged 30-49 and only one-fourth of the youngest adults.

Gender identity and sexual orientation follow the same tracks. Gallup has found that while less than 3% of baby boomers and only 4% of Generation X (born 1965-1980) identify as LGBTQ, that figure jumps to nearly 11% among Millennials and fully 21% among Generation Z. In all these ways, says Deckman, who is writing a book on Gen Z, “you have a younger group of Americans who are more diverse, less religious, care passionately about the rights of marginalized groups, and are watching rights taken away that they thought would always be there.”

Though the pace and intensity varies, these changes are affecting all corners of the country. Even in states where the GOP has consistently controlled most state offices such as Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, the share of adults younger than 45 who are unaffiliated with any religion now equals or exceeds the share who are White Christians, according to detailed results PRRI provided to CNN. By contrast, in those states’ over-45 population, White Christians are at least twice, and often three times, as large a share of the population as seculars.

Frey has found that in every state the youth population 18 and younger is now more racially diverse than the senior population 65 and older. From 2010 to 2020, in fact, every state except Utah and North Dakota (as well as Washington, DC) saw a decline in their total population of White kids younger than 18. Kids of color now comprise a majority of the youth population in 14 states and at least 40% in another dozen, Frey has found.

States on that list include many of the places where Republicans have been most forcefully imposing a staunchly conservative social agenda. Kids of color already represent about half or more of the youth population in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina and Arizona and about two-fifths or more in several others, including Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. In many of those states the share of seniors who are White is at least 20 percentage points higher than the share of young people.

A similarly large “cultural generation gap” is also evident in many blue states, including Nevada, California, Colorado, Washington and Minnesota. The difference is that in states where Democrats are in control, the diverse younger generations are, however imperfectly, included in the political coalition setting state policy. Political analysts in both parties – from Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson to Democratic strategist Terrance Woodbury – point out that Democrats have their own problems with younger voters, who have never been enthusiastic about President Joe Biden, and are expressing disappointment that the party hasn’t made more progress on issues they care about. But in blue states the direction of policy on most key social issues, such as abortion, gun control and LGBTQ rights, aligns with the dominant views among younger generations. And in most blue states, Democrats have prioritized increasing youth turnout and, in many cases, reformed state election laws to ease registration and voting.

But in the red states, younger voters, especially younger voters of color, are largely excluded from the ruling Republican coalitions, which revolve preponderantly around Whites, especially those who are older, Christian, non-college and non-urban. In 2022, for instance, 80% of younger non-white voters (aged 45 or less) voted against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia, 65% voted against GOP Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, and 55% opposed Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, according to exit poll results provided by Edison Research. Yet all three men won decisive reelections, in large part because each carried about seven-in-ten or more of Whites older than 45.

In some ways, the generational tug of war between the brown and the gray symbolized by the Tennessee expulsions represents the classic collision between an irresistible force and an immovable object. In this case, the irresistible force is the growth in the electorate of the diverse younger generations. In 2020, for the first time, Millennials and Generation Z constituted as large a share of eligible voters nationwide as did the Baby Boom and its elders – though those older generations, because they turned out at much higher rates, still represented a larger percentage of actual voters. In 2024, Frey has projected, Millennials and Gen Z will comprise a significantly larger share of eligible voters than the boomers and their elders – enough that they will likely equal them as a share of actual voters. Already in several states, kids of color comprise a majority of those who turn 18 each year and become eligible to vote; Frey projects that will be true for the nation overall by 2024.

The immovable object is the GOP control over the red states. That’s partly because of the changes in electoral rules Republicans have imposed that create obstacles to registration or voting, but also because of their dominance among older Whites and their inroads into culturally conservative Latino voters in some of these states, particularly Texas and Florida.

Another challenge for Democrats is that youth turnout is often lowest in red states. Though youth turnout also lagged in some blue states including New York and Rhode Island, in an analysis released earlier this month the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University found that red states comprised all nine states where the smallest share of eligible adults aged 18-29 cast a ballot; Tennessee ranked the lowest of the states for which CIRCLE has data. Red states also have erected many of the most overt obstacles to youth participation. Eight Republican-controlled states, including Tennessee, Texas and recently Idaho, have sent a clearly discouraging signal to young voters by declaring that student IDs cannot be used as identification under state voter ID laws. A Texas Republican state legislator this year has proposed banning polling places on college campuses.

Abby Kiesa, CIRCLE’s deputy director, says that in both blue and red states, laws and social customs act in reinforcing ways to either promote or discourage youth voting. “The infrastructure and the state laws” in states that encourage youth voting like Michigan, Oregon and Colorado “create a stronger culture of engagement,” she said. “Because more people are voting, it is more of a norm, people are talking about it more, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” In states with pronounced barriers to voting, she notes, an opposite cycle of disengagement can take hold.

The unlikelihood of overcoming the GOP’s red state electoral defenses in the near term will probably encourage more younger progressives to emphasize public protests, like the raucous rally for gun control that began the Tennessee confrontation, predicts Nse Ufot, who formerly led the New Georgia Project launched by Stacey Abrams.

“The young people in Tennessee … went to their legislators and said enough, and they had accountable, accessible leaders who heard what their demands were and took it to their colleagues and their colleagues didn’t like it,” says Ufot, who has now founded the New South Super PAC, designed to elect progressive candidates in the 11 states of the old confederacy.

Ufot uses a striking analogy to express her expectation of how this struggle will unfold in the coming years across the red states. Her mother, she explained, ran a shelter for battered women, and even as a young girl, she came to recognize “that the most dangerous time for victims of abuse is when they are preparing to leave, when they have made up their minds that they are done and they are making their exits. That when we see their abusers escalate to crazy tactics.”

Ufot sees the Tennessee expulsions, like the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and Trump’s broader effort to overturn the 2020 result, as evidence that those “who are afraid of what a diverse, reflective, democracy looks like” will likewise turn to more extreme responses as the challenge to their position grows more acute. But she also sees the movement that erupted around Pearson and Jones as a preview of how younger generations may resist that offensive. “Instead of responding with resignation like people who have come before them, [the two expelled representatives] have chosen to do something about it,” she said. “And that’s what happens when you are forged in the fire of protest and are accountable to the people [you represent].”

As the Republicans now running the red states race to the right, and younger generations lean harder on direct protest, more forging fires across this contested terrain appear inevitable.

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April 12, 2021

Tag: iab-politics

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Republican Candidates

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The Tennessee expulsions reveal the core divide in US politics. Here’s why. | CNN Politics