BOSTON — State government officials are girding for the possibility of a federal government shutdown, and executive branch leaders have been instructed to summarize concerns about their ability to address payroll concerns and lay out their plans to protect Massachusetts residents and resources.
“We are asking departments for a quick turnaround, with responses to this memo due on Tuesday, September 30 by 5:00 pm.,” officials in the Office of the Comptroller and the Executive Office of Administration and Finance wrote Sept. 23 in a memo to state chief fiscal officers, budget directors and general counsels.
Thomas Smith-Vaughan, chief operating officer in the Office of the Comptroller, and Assistant Secretary for Budget Christopher Marino told state officials in the memo that with the federal fiscal year set to begin Oct. 1, Congress has not passed any of the 12 full-year appropriations bills needed to fund the government.
In the event of a shutdown, they wrote, federal agencies “must discontinue all non-essential discretionary functions until new funding legislation is passed and signed into law” but essential services will continue to function, as well as mandatory spending programs such as Social Security.
The warning comes as partisan gridlock paralyzes Congress, which has failed to agree on a short-term continuing resolution or full-year appropriations. According to ABC News, members of Congress are on recess until Monday, Sept. 29, giving them just two days to act before the Oct. 1 deadline. With control of the House and Senate split, any funding deal will require bipartisan support — at least 60 votes in the Senate — a threshold that has proven elusive amid disagreements over priorities between Democrats and Republicans.
The prospect of a shutdown comes as Massachusetts is navigating significant fiscal complexity. The Legislature passed a stream of funding bills earlier this year to address shortfalls in the fiscal 2025 budget, and the state’s $61 billion fiscal 2026 budget signed by Gov. Maura Healey this summer relies heavily on federal dollars.
About $15.6 billion of the fiscal 2026 budget comes from federal reimbursements and grants, the vast majority of which support MassHealth through Medicaid payments.
“A shutdown could create challenges for certain spending accounts in the General Federal Grants Fund, revenue collected through federal reimbursement, and for programs run and funded primarily by the federal government,” the memo says.
Among the programs flagged as vulnerable are Medicaid waiver services at MassHealth and the Department of Developmental Services, the federal highway capital project fund, and Federal Emergency Management Agency grants. These categories align closely with where the state receives the bulk of its federal support.
An analysis from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation recently estimated that federal cuts to Medicaid alone could have a $100 million impact on the state’s fiscal 2026 budget.
The memo also notes that “agencies should not assume that additional state funding will be available. Therefore, please identify any state funding that would be required for the state to take on responsibility for critical federal programs and indicate whether and when legislative authorization would be required,” the memo says.
Departments are being asked to assess their ability to cover bi-weekly payroll for employees currently paid through federal sources.
A hearing is planned at the State House on Tuesday, the day before the shutdown deadline, where state officials will hear from economists and policy experts about the implications of federal funding shifts on the state’s economy.
Real gross domestic product increased in the United States at an annual rate of 3.8% in the second quarter, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, after a 0.6% contraction in the first quarter — a sign of economic growth that has yet to resolve underlying fiscal tensions.
The potential shutdown coincides with a broader retrenchment in federal fiscal commitments, particularly in areas like health care and nutrition assistance, putting further pressure on state-level services.
Departments in Massachusetts have been through this before. According to the memo, agencies were asked to develop contingency plans in case of federal shutdowns in 2013, 2015, 2019, 2020, 2021, and most recently in 2024.
“Negotiations are ongoing to attempt to reach a budget deal before the October 1 deadline. However, we must be prepared for the possibility that federal government operations and/or federal funding for many purposes and programs will not be authorized beyond that date,” the memo says.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Sara Jane Moore, who was imprisoned for more than 30 years after she made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, has died. She was 95.
Moore died Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, according to Demetria Kalodimos, a longtime acquaintance who said she was informed by the executor of Moore’s estate. Kalodimos is an executive producer at the Nashville Banner newspaper, which was first to report the death.
Moore seemed an unlikely candidate to gain national notoriety as a violent political radical who nearly killed a president. When she shot at Ford in San Francisco, she was a middle-aged woman who had begun dabbling in leftist groups and sometimes served as an FBI informant.
Sentenced to life, Moore was serving her time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, when she was unexpectedly paroled Dec. 31, 2007. Federal officials gave no details on why she was set free.
She lived largely anonymously in an undisclosed location after that, but in broadcast interviews she expressed regret for what she had done. She said she had been caught up in the radical political movements that were common in California in the mid-1970s.
“I had put blinders on, I really had, and I was listening to only … what I thought I believed,”” she told San Francisco television station KGO in April 2009. “We thought that doing that would actually trigger a new revolution.”
Two would-be assassins
Moore was often confused with Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of cult murderer Charles Manson who aimed a semiautomatic pistol at Ford in Sacramento, California, on Sept. 5, 1975. A Secret Service agent grabbed the gun before any shots could be fired, and the president was unharmed.
Just 17 days later, on Sept. 22, Moore shot at Ford as he waved to a crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco’s Union Square. Oliver Sipple, a 33-year-old former Marine, knocked the .38-caliber pistol out of her hand as she fired, causing the shot to go astray and hit a building.
“I’m sorry I missed,” Moore said during an interview with the San Jose Mercury News seven years later. “Yes, I’m sorry I missed. I don’t like to be a failure.”
But in later interviews, before and after her release, she repeatedly said that she regretted her actions, saying she was convinced that the government had declared war on the left.
Asked by KGO in 2009 what she would say to Ford if that had been possible, she replied that she would tell him, “I’m very sorry that it happened. … I’m very happy that I did not succeed.” Ford died in 2006, about a year before her release.
Her family did not publicly comment on her death. Geri Spieler, who wrote a biography of Moore titled “Housewife Assassin,” said she had abandoned her children and was estranged from all her living relatives.
Multiples marriages, name changes, unclear motives
Moore was born Sara Jane Kahn on Feb. 15, 1930, in Charleston, West Virginia. Her confusing background, which included multiple failed marriages, name changes and involvement with both leftist political groups and the FBI, baffled the public and even her own defense attorney during her trial.
“I never got a satisfactory answer from her as to why she did it,” retired federal public defender James F. Hewitt once said. “There was just bizarre stuff, and she would never tell anyone anything about her background.”
Ford insisted that the two attempts on his life should not prevent him from having contact with the people, saying, “If we can’t have the opportunity of talking with one another, seeing one another, shaking hands with one another, something has gone wrong in our society.”
His other attacker, Fromme, also was freed from prison eventually. She had no comment as she left a federal lockup in Texas in August 2009 at age 60.
Working with leftist groups but also the FBI
It was in 1974 that Moore began working for People in Need, a free food program for poor people established by millionaire Randolph Hearst as ransom after his daughter Patty was kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army.
Moore soon became involved with leftists, ex-convicts and other members of San Francisco’s counterculture. At this time, she became an FBI informant.
Moore said she shot at Ford because she thought she would be killed once it was disclosed that she was an FBI informant. The agency ended its relationship with her about four months before the shooting.
“I was going to go down anyway,” she said in the 1982 interview with the San Jose Mercury News. “And if I was going to go down, I was going to do it my way. If the government was going to kill me, I was going to make some kind of statement.”
A failed prison escape
Moore was sent to a West Virginia women’s prison in 1977. Two years later she escaped but was captured several hours later.
She was later transferred to a prison in Pleasanton, California, before going to Dublin.
In 2000 she sued the warden of her federal prison to prevent him from taking keys given to inmates to lock themselves in as a security measure.
In an interview after the July 2024 assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, Moore told the Nashville Banner that part of what motivated her was that Ford, who became president after Richard Nixon resigned, was not elected president.
“He wasn’t elected to anything. He was appointed,” Moore said. “It wasn’t a belief, it was a fact. It was a fact that he was appointed.”
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will put import taxes of 100% on pharmaceutical drugs, 50% on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, 30% on upholstered furniture and 25% on heavy trucks starting on Oct. 1.
The posts on his social media site showed that Trump’s devotion to tariffs did not end with the trade frameworks and import taxes that were launched in August, a reflection of the president’s confidence that taxes will help to reduce the government’s budget deficit while increasing domestic manufacturing.
While Trump did not provide a legal justification for the tariffs, he appeared to stretch the bounds of his role as commander-in-chief by stating on Truth Social that the taxes on imported kitchen cabinets and sofas were needed “for National Security and other reasons.”
Under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the administration launched a Section 232 investigation in April about the impacts on national security from pharmaceutical drug and truck imports. The Commerce Department launched a 232 investigation into timber and lumber in March, though it’s unclear whether the furniture tariffs stem from that.
The tariffs are another dose of uncertainty for the U.S. economy with a solid stock market but a weakening outlook for jobs and elevated inflation. These new taxes on imports could pass through to consumers in the form of higher prices and dampen hiring, a process that economic data suggests is already underway.
“We have begun to see goods prices showing through into higher inflation,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned in a recent news conference, adding that higher costs for goods account for “most” or potentially “all” of the increase in inflation levels this year.
The president has pressured Powell to resign, arguing that the Fed should cut its benchmark interest rates more aggressively because inflation is no longer a concern. Fed officials have stayed cautious on rate cuts because of the uncertainty created by tariffs.
Trump said on Truth Social that the pharmaceutical tariffs would not apply to companies that are building manufacturing plants in the United States, which he defined as either “breaking ground” or being “under construction.” It was unclear how the tariffs would apply to companies that already have factories in the U.S.
In 2024, America imported nearly $233 billion in pharmaceutical and medicinal products, according to the Census Bureau. The prospect of prices doubling for some medicines could send shock waves to voters as health care expenses, as well as the costs of Medicare and Medicaid, potentially increase.
The pharmaceutical drug announcement was shocking as Trump has previously suggested that tariffs would be phased in over time so that companies had time to build factories and relocate production. On CNBC in August, Trump said he would start by charging a “small tariff” on pharmaceuticals and raise the rate over a year or more to 150% and even 250%.
According to the White House, the threat of tariffs earlier this year contributed to many major pharmaceutical companies, including Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Roche, Bristol Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly, among others, to announce investments in U.S. production.
Pascal Chan, vice president for strategic policy and supply chains at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, warned that the tariffs could harm Americans’ health with “immediate price hikes, strained insurance systems, hospital shortages, and the real risk of patients rationing or foregoing essential medicines.”
The new tariffs on cabinetry could further increase the costs for homebuilders at a time when many people seeking to buy a house feel priced out by the mix of housing shortages and high mortgage rates. The National Association of Realtors on Thursday said there were signs of price pressures easing as sales listings increased 11.7% in August from a year ago, but the median price for an existing home was $422,600.
Trump said that foreign-made heavy trucks and parts are hurting domestic producers that need to be defended.
“Large Truck Company Manufacturers, such as Peterbilt, Kenworth, Freightliner, Mack Trucks, and others, will be protected from the onslaught of outside interruptions,” Trump posted.
Trump has long maintained that tariffs are the key to forcing companies to invest more in domestic factories. He has dismissed fears that importers would simply pass along much of the cost of the taxes to consumers and businesses in the form of higher prices.
His broader country-by-country tariffs relied on declaring an economic emergency based on a 1977 law, a drastic tax hike that two federal courts said exceeded Trump’s authority as president. The Supreme Court is set to hear the case in November.
The president continues to claim that inflation is no longer a challenge for the U.S. economy, despite evidence to the contrary. The consumer price index has increased 2.9% over the past 12 months, up from an annual pace of 2.3% in April, when Trump first launched a sweeping set of import taxes.
Nor is there evidence that the tariffs are creating factory jobs or more construction of manufacturing facilities. Since April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that manufacturers cut 42,000 jobs and builders have downsized by 8,000.
“There’s no inflation,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “We’re having unbelievable success.”
Still, Trump also acknowledged that his tariffs against China had hurt American farmers, who lost out on sales of soybeans. The president separately promised on Thursday to divert tariff revenues to the farmers hurt by the conflict, just as he did during his first term in 2018 and 2019 when his tariffs led to retaliation against the agricultural sector.
A new Trump administration rule bars immigrants living in the United States under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) from buying health insurance from Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
The change, announced in June, took effect at the beginning of this month. It reverses a policy change enacted by the Biden administration for last November’s annual enrollment period.
DACA, which President Barack Obama established in 2012, applies to certain immigrants who are here illegally but were brought to the U.S. as children. The program was enacted to protect them from deportation and allows them to work for renewable two-year periods. To be eligible, an immigrant must have come to the U.S. at age 15 or younger before June 15, 2007. DACA participants also must be high school graduates, high school students or veterans of the U.S. military.
The oldest are now in their early 40s, some with children of their own.
Even though there are some 525,000 active DACA recipients, only about 10,000 were getting their health insurance from the marketplaces before the policy change, according to the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. However, critics of the new Trump administration rule say participation would have grown as more people became aware of their eligibility.
DACA recipients from 19 states were blocked from the marketplaces, though, because of pending litigation. More than 20% of all DACA recipients reside in just two of those states: Texas (17%) and Florida (4%).
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group that backs stricter immigration rules, said DACA was an “abuse of executive authority” and should not have entitled some immigrants to benefits. The rule change simply restores the status quo, Vaughan said.
“It was kind of an experiment or an end run around our legal immigration system that was set up by the rules that were set up by Congress to try to offer an amnesty to this particular group,” Vaughan said. “Because it’s not a legal status, these individuals are not, under the law, eligible for certain public benefits, and one of them is subsidized health insurance.”
But critics of the change say it’s cruel to cancel health care coverage for people who were brought to the country as children.
“Health care is a fundamental human right all of us, no matter where we were born, how much money we have, what we look like, what language we speak, we should be able to access quality and affordable care when we need it,” said Isobel Mohyeddin, a policy associate at the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for immigrants.
Mohyeddin and her colleagues surveyed 433 DACA recipients in 2024, before DACA recipients were eligible for the marketplace. Eighty-one percent had health coverage, the vast majority through their employer or a union or professional association. But nearly 20% lacked coverage, more than twice the national uninsured rate of 8%.
Mohyeddin said that many of the DACA recipients without coverage reported skipping recommended medical and dental appointments or declining to fill prescriptions, because they couldn’t afford it or were fearful of being targeted for their status.
“The stripping of eligibility is a devastating step backwards, not only for DACA recipients, but families and immigrant communities in general,” Mohyeddin said.
While DACA recipients were only recently allowed to purchase coverage on the marketplace, it was a huge step toward better health outcomes for them, said Arline Cruz Escobar, director of health programs at Make the Road New York, a group that provides legal and social services to immigrants.
“We see a lot of mixed-status households, and so I think people are just very confused about what this means for them, and what it means for their families,” Cruz Escobar said. “We already know that the immigrant community doesn’t access enough preventive care and screenings and so, I can only imagine that we will see an increase in a lot of chronic conditions, or undiagnosed chronic conditions that could have been prevented.”
The impact of the new Trump administration rule on DACA recipients will vary, as some states offer other health care options to noncitizens.
States are going to have to decide whether they can afford to offer state-subsidized health coverage to DACA recipients and other immigrants who are no longer eligible for federal help, said Jessica Altman, executive director of California’s marketplace exchange, Covered California.
California has the most DACA recipients, at 147,440. Altman said more than 2,300 of them have purchased plans on the California marketplace and will lose their coverage. She said many DACA recipients in the state were not aware of their eligibility, and more would have enrolled if the Trump administration hadn’t made the policy change.
California provides state-funded health coverage to all income-eligible immigrants, regardless of their legal status. But Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in June signed a budget that scales back that coverage because of budgetary issues.
In light of federal changes and financial obligations on states, Altman said, California will have to make the same choices as other states about how or whether to help DACA recipients with their health care.
“The hard part is, to actually make coverage affordable for the populations that we’re talking about, you have to fund financial assistance at least somewhat comparable to what’s available on the federal marketplace,” Altman said. “So the state dollars are really where the rubber meets the road.”
By PAUL WISEMAN, BARBARA ORTUTAY and PIYUSH NAGPAL, Associated Press
The Trump administration’s abrupt decision to slap a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas has stunned and confused employers, students and workers from the United States to India and beyond.
Since announcing the decision Friday, the White House has tried to reassure jittery companies that the fee does not apply to existing visa holders and that their H-1B employees traveling abroad will not be stranded, unable to re-enter the United States without coming up with $100,000. The new policy took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Sunday.
Despite the effort at reassurance, “there’s still some folks out there recommending to their H-1B employees that they not travel right now until it’s a little clearer,” Leon Rodriguez, a partner at the Seyfarth law firm who was director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Obama administration.
Other questions remain, some of them basic. “What actually is the process for paying this $100,000,” Rodriguez said. “Usually, when an agency is going to charge a fee, there’s a whole process. There’s the creation of forms for collecting that fee. … At this point, we don’t actually know what that process will be like.”
“Key questions remain, such as whether the new fee will apply to universities and nonprofit research organizations, employers that Congress has exempted from the annual limit on H-1B visas,” said Bo Cooper, partner at the immigration law firm Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy.
Here’s a look at what the H-1B visa program is and what the Trump administration is doing to it.
What are H-1B visas and who uses them?
Created by the 1990 Immigration Act, they are type of nonimmigrant visa, meant to allow American companies to bring in people with technical skills that are hard to find in the United States. The visas are not intended for people who want to stay permanently. Some eventually do, but only after transitioning to different immigration statuses.
An H-1B allows employers to hire foreign workers who have specialized skills and a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent. They are good for three years and can be extended another three years, suggesting that there are now “around 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the country and another half a million or so dependents,” economist Stephen Brown of Capital Economics wrote in a commentary Monday.
At least 60% of the H-1B visas approved since 2012 have been for computer-related jobs, according to the Pew Research Center. But hospitals, banks, universities and a wide range of other employers can and do apply for H-1B visas.
The number of new visas issued annually is capped at 65,000, plus an additional 20,000 for people with a master’s degree or higher. Those visas are handed out by a lottery. Some employers, such as universities and nonprofits, are exempt from the limits.
According to Pew, nearly three-quarters of those whose applications were approved in 2023 came from India.
What did Trump do?
The White House announced the $100,000 fee. The application fee is currently $215, plus other relatively nominal processing charges. It took effect barely 24 hours later.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the fee would be applied annually, for a total of $600,000 over the maximum number of renewals allowed. The White House clarified Saturday that it was a one-time fee and said it would not apply to current visa holders.
Trump also rolled out a $1 million “gold card” visa for wealthy individuals.
The moves are certain to draw lawsuits charging that the president was improperly sidestepping Congress with a dramatic overhaul of the legal immigration system.
Why target H-1B visas?
Critics say they undercut American workers, luring people from overseas who are often willing to work for less than American tech workers do. Staffing companies such as Tata Consultancy Services often supply Indian workers to corporate clients.
“To take advantage of artificially low labor costs incentivized by the program, companies close their IT divisions, fire their American staff, and outsource IT jobs to lower-paid foreign workers,” the White House said in its proclamation Friday.
In a 2020 report, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that 60% of the H-1B positions certified by U.S. Labor Department are assigned wages below the median for the job.
Brown at Capital Economics wrote that “it is hard to disagree with the administration’s argument that the program needs reform.”
Giovanni Peri, director of the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis, said that abuses of the program — such as bringing in mid-level coders to replace higher-paid Americans — do occur but are relatively rare.
Most H-1B visa holders, he said, really are highly skilled workers who are hard to find. “Most of these people come in, and they have helped the productivity of firms; they have helped innovation,” Peri said. “They have complemented the work of Americans, and they have allowed growth.’’
What impact will the H-1B crackdown have?
Brown said that many tech firms can probably afford to pay $100,000 to bring in skilled workers.
“Nonetheless,″ he wrote, “the upfront fee will clearly be too high for many companies to stomach. Last year, the healthcare, retail and accommodation & food services sectors accounted for a quarter of H-1B visas between them, and firms in those sectors will probably find it harder to afford the fee.″
The higher fee — along with other Trump administration attempts to curb immigration — is likely to reduce the U.S. labor supply and push wages higher, Brown said.
Foreign workers like Alan Wu are worried – and stunned by the speed with which Trump disrupted the H-1B process. “Can you release some policy which impacts tons of people just like that?” said Wu, who is working in Indianapolis as a data scientist for a pharmaceutical company.
He is working legally on his student visa after earning a doctorate. He’s failed to win the H-1B lottery for two consecutive years. And he’s now rethinking his plan to live permanently in the United States, where he’s lived for more than a decade. “I am definitely concerned about my job now that the cost and risk of hiring a foreigner is so high,” he said.
Navneet Singh, who runs a consultancy “Go Global Immigration” in India’s Punjab state, said changes to H-1B visa policies are likely to significantly impact future migration to the U.S., particularly from India.
“Trump is trying to suffocate new immigrants who are skilled, so that they won’t take the jobs away from the average American. But by doing so, they will be making (U.S.) production expensive,” Singh said.
He said the new policy is likely to create advantages for competitors in other countries. “Countries like France, Netherlands, Germany and Canada are set to gain from this move,” he added.
Some Indian students aspiring to pursue higher studies in the U.S. are disappointed. “It feels like a door closing,” said one aspiring student who requested anonymity.
What businesses will be hurt the most?
Greg Morrisett, dean and vice provost at Cornell Tech, said startups and small businesses are likely to be the most affected by the fees since there’s “no way they can” pay them. Cornell Tech, for instance, has launched about 120 startups and the “vast majority” have students coming from overseas. The result? “They’ll pick up and move to Europe or Asia, wherever they can find,” he said.
“The big tech companies will likely move a lot of operations and things into other countries. We saw this when, for example, you know, Ireland made it really attractive from a tax perspective. All of a sudden all the headquarters move to Ireland,” Morrisett said.
And startups, he added, “the next Amazon, the next Google will give up here and go somewhere else and then we won’t have that advantage in the next generation of tech leadership.”
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Barbara Ortutay reported from Oakland, California, and Piyush Nagpal from New Delhi, India.
Denver Public Schools has not complied with the Trump administration’s request that the district convert all multi-stall, all-gender bathrooms in its schools into separate facilities for female and male students by the agency’s Monday deadline.
In a five-page response dated Sunday, DPS general counsel Kristin Bailey accused the U.S. Department of Education’sOffice of Civil Rights of “intransigence,” a failure to adequately communicate and a “startling” lack of clarity surrounding the alleged Title IX violation levied against the school district.
“We write to rebut the stated presumption that the District and the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) are at an impasse,” Bailey wrote. “We are not. In fact, as the District has shared throughout this Directed Investigation, we want to discuss resolution options with OCR, and at this stage, the District remains interested in doing so.”
Education Department representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Denver Post on Monday.
DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero issued a statement the following day, vowing to protect Denver students and families from an administration hostile to the LGBTQ community.
The department’s Office of Civil Rights said DPS’s all-gender restrooms violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, enacted to allow girls and women to participate in educational activities in school, including sports, without sexual harassment.
The office gave the district 10 days to agree to a proposed resolution — which included converting all-gender restrooms back to single-sex facilities — or “risk imminent enforcement action.”
The findings come after the Education Department announced in January that it was investigating DPS over the East High’s conversion of a girls restroom into a bathroom for all genders last academic year.
The Denver high school created the gender-neutral bathroom at the request of students who wanted another facility, choosing to convert a girls bathroom because it was more cost-effective, district officials said.
The all-gender bathroom has stalls that offer more privacy than other facilities, with 12-foot walls that nearly reach the ceiling and metal blocks that prevent people from seeing through.
In response to the January investigation, East High recently renovated a boys bathroom into a second all-gender restroom — a move the district said it made to address any disparity. The district has two other all-gender facilities, at the Denver School of the Arts and the Career Education Center Early College.
In the federal agency’s letter alleging DPS violated Title IX, the Education Department also said the Denver district created “a hostile environment for its students by endangering their safety, privacy and dignity” through its use of all-gender restrooms.
The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to cut K-12 and higher education funding from schools with policies that the federal government calls discriminatory, particularly those that relate to gender identity, the LGBTQ community and race.
Bailey argued in Sunday’s response that the Office of Civil Rights failed to articulate what about the gender-neutral restrooms constituted a Title IX violation and what possible remedies existed despite multiple requests by the district for further discussion.
The accusation of a “hostile environment,” Bailey wrote, was new.
“This new and different allegation has never been discussed and raises a host of new questions in addition to those that have been unanswered throughout the process thus far,” Bailey wrote. “If OCR can provide a more precise articulation, based in fact, of the reasons it purports to have sufficient evidence to support a legal conclusion that the bathroom created a hostile environment, it may prompt an appropriate resolution to this matter.”
The district requested to engage in a 90-day resolution negotiation period.
OAKLAND — For nearly 20 years, Diane Williams has seethed whenever she walked by a street mural depicting the genocide of Ohlone people by Spanish colonizers — artwork she finds demeaning because the Native American men are depicted as fully nude.
Just this week, plans to remove the wall art were halted at the last minute, after tenants of the building’s apartments at 41st Street and Piedmont Avenue demanded that the history on display be left alone.
But on Friday morning, Williams finally had a reason to smile as she gazed at the mural. Someone had defaced it overnight with paper cutouts and red paint.
Now, the Franciscan missionaries oppressing the Native Americans in the painting had arrows piercing their heads and bodies. Blood spilled out of the white men. In the same red color, a declaration had been scrawled over the artwork: “THERE, I FIXED IT.”
It was the latest twist in a saga that in recent weeks has divided the North Oakland community surrounding Piedmont Avenue. On Friday, the debate shifted from online circles into public view, engulfing the sidewalk facing the mural.
These arguments mirror a broader discourse about artistic interpretations of history, with shared consensus about the horrors of Indigenous genocide, but more nuanced — and often fierce — disputes about how those stories are remembered, and who should be allowed to tell them.
The mural, painted by artist Rocky Rische Baird, is titled “The Capture of the Solid. The Escape of the Soul.” Baird, who completed the work in 2006 with help from a $5,000 city grant, at the time described the 25-by-10-foot display as a testament that the “spirit of a person can’t be boxed.”
At the center of the painting’s complex imagery are missionaries bringing traditional Western clothes — blue pants, brown boots and a belt with a buckle — to a naked Native man.
Alex Brand, left, Hong Nguyen, and their six month-old baby, Walker Brand, who lived accross the street and recently moved to Hayward, take a selfie with the mural “The Capture of the Solid, Escape of the Soul,” by artist Rocky Rische-Baird, as seen on 41st Street near the corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
The man stands just beyond a vivid swirl of similarly unclothed American Indians with discolored bodies, a jarring imagining of the senseless violence and disease that ravaged the Ohlone people, who first settled in the coastal Northern California land that now comprises much of the Bay Area.
Williams, a 77-year-old Alaskan Athabascan Indian who has lived in East Oakland since the early 1970s, finds plenty of reasons to despise the artwork, the most visceral being its nudity.
“I saw this big old life-sized penis on this Native American, and I was appalled,” said Williams, who often passes the mural on the way to breast cancer treatment at the nearby Kaiser medical centers.
“It’s just culturally inappropriate,” she said, “and historically inaccurate — those Indians weren’t frolicking around naked. Any man would take care to cover his penis.”
Williams, who insists she is “no prude,” reveled Friday in the newfound defacement, saying it retained the Indians’ agency, though she took no credit for the graffiti. The mural has been vandalized before, and already the Native man’s genitals were barely visible because someone had previously tried to obscure the paint.
“The Capture of the Solid, Escape of the Soul,” mural by artist Rocky Rische-Baird, was vandalized with red paint and paper arrows made r on 41st Street near the corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 5, 202. The mural, which was painted 20 years ago, depicts Spanish Franciscans clothing naked Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area for work in the mission fields. The building’s property manager plans to paint over the mural after receiving complaints from Ohlone native Diane Williams regarding its nudity. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
A woman strolling by on the sidewalk stopped to point a finger directly at Williams.
“The damage that they did now is inexcusable,” the woman, Julia, who provided only her first name, said in reference to the defacement. “Someone had had the guts to put this (mural) here for everyone to see — it should be an honor to you, as a Native!”
“I apologize that it upset you,” Williams responded, “but I’m the one who complained — and I wish we would have spoken when it was painted in 2006.”
Julia declined to give her age but described herself as the building’s oldest tenant. Indeed, many of the residents here had urged the property manager to cancel a planned removal of the mural.
Their anger carried over to the social media website Nextdoor, where in the heat of debate, Williams’ account was recently suspended.
The owner of the building, Albert Sarshar, had earlier been lobbied by Williams to get rid of the artwork but called off the paint-over job this week to give himself “more time to investigate.” Days later, he remains confused about what to do.
“I just want everyone to be happy,” he said.
The owner even consulted with City Councilmember Zac Unger, who declined to weigh in on the debate, telling this news organization, “I don’t think it’s the role of government to dictate speech on private property.”
Williams, meanwhile, insists that there were enough disgruntled Native Americans in the area to stage an upcoming boycott of the building’s primary tenant, a Japanese restaurant named Ebiko. But her earliest protest, in 2006, drew only a handful of people.
Jacqueline Hackle, left, expresses with Ohlone native and activist Diane Williams on “The Capture of the Solid, Escape of the Soul,” mural by artist Rocky Rische-Baird, which was vandalized with red paint and paper arrows on 41st Street near the corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 5, 2025. The mural, which was painted 20 years ago, depicts Spanish Franciscans clothing naked Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area for work in the mission fields. After complaints from Williams about the mural’s nudity, the building’s property manager plans to paint over it. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Reached this week, several officials at the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe seemed unaware of the mural or the debate surrounding it, even after being provided the Piedmont Avenue address.
“When art is offensive, it stimulates thinking, reflection and responses,” Alan Leventhal, the tribal archaeologist and ethnohistorian, said in an email.
“Although some of the images are indeed provoking,” Leventhal added, “it still sends a message that the history on the genocide of California Indians has been swept under the rug and rendered invisible.”
On the sidewalk, Williams found some allies Friday, including a woman passing by who called the artwork “problematic” and a man who said he had disliked the depiction of brutality since it was first painted two decades ago.
“If this were a picture of slaves and slave owners, what’s really the purpose of that?” said the man, Nedar B., who is Black and gave only the first initial of his last name. “Why does a white person want to put that on display?”
Baird, the original artist, did not respond to interview requests. While painting the mural, he consulted with Andrew Galvan, an Ohlone Indian and curator at the Old Mission Dolores Museum in San Francisco, who defends the advice he gave Baird originally.
“Art provokes conversation,” Galvan said in a statement. “The mural needs proper context. It doesn’t need to be defaced and destroyed.”
“The Capture of the Solid, Escape of the Soul,” mural by artist Rocky Rische-Baird, was vandalized with red paint and paper arrows on 41st Street near the corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 5, 202. The mural, which was painted 20 years ago, depicts Spanish Franciscans clothing naked Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area for work in the mission fields. The building’s property manager plans to paint over the mural after receiving complaints from Ohlone native Diane Williams regarding its nudity. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Others who engaged Williams on Friday shared that view, including Jacqueline Hackle, who arrived to retrieve a pair of scissors stashed in a newspaper distribution box on the sidewalk.
Earlier in the week, Hackle had cut and duct-taped a formal description of the mural to the wall below, where it identifies views held by Spanish soldiers that Native Americans “needed to be clothed and directed to work in the missions’ fields.”
At one point, several people were simultaneously engaged with Williams in a fierce debate, including neighborhood resident, Valerie Winemiller, who took matters into her own hands — manually ripping off the paper arrowheads while angrily telling Williams to “find another wall and paint your own mural.”
Winemiller had backup, calling to the scene Yano Rivera, a self-described “mural doctor,” who said he specializes in removing graffiti.
“We’re going to very selectively and carefully reunify the painting visually,” Rivera explained. And then he got to work, using cotton balls and varnish to clean up all the blood.
The East Palo Alto housekeeper with a chronic health condition who fainted while being arrested by ICE agents early this week has been discharged from Stanford Medical Center to a federal detention facility in Bakersfield, U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo said Saturday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had been posted at her hospital room since she was arrested with an expired visa Monday, and prohibited her family from visiting most of the week, even forbidding flowers with a notecard from her father. The agency did not respond to a request for comment Saturday morning, or earlier inquiries during the week.
Aleyda “Yeny” Rodriguez, in a photo from her family’s gofundme page, remains at Stanford Medical Center with ICE posted outside her door after being arrested in East Palo Alto with an expired visa. (Courtesy of Rodriguez family)
Aleyda “Yeny” Rodriguez, 47, has a blood disorder exacerbated by stress that causes her to faint, her family has said. They declined to comment Saturday.
Stanford wouldn’t disclose Rodriguez’s health condition when she was discharged, but said in a statement that “throughout the patient’s stay at Stanford Health Care, our clinicians provided all necessary care.”
Liccardo, a Democrat who represents much of Santa Clara and parts of San Mateo county and was participating in a Half Moon Bay beach cleanup Saturday, said he has been in touch with federal officials about her case. They told him that Rodriguez will have access to her phone Saturday to contact family.
“Yeny’s arrest, which may have been perfectly legal under existing laws, exemplifies the devastation and trauma that this deeply misguided and cruel immigration policy is wreaking throughout our country,” Liccardo said in an interview Saturday. “We need to persuade more Americans and the other half of Congress of the extraordinarily important role that millions of our neighbors like her play in our families and our communities.”
Rodriguez was arrested Monday morning while dropping off her husband at her brother’s East Palo Alto house to start his day as a gardener. Her husband, Oscar Flores, managed to run to a neighbor’s house, where ICE agents stopped their pursuit because without a warrant they are prohibited from stepping onto private property, immigration lawyers say. Their nephew, Dario Jasso, had been arrested earlier that morning while getting into his vehicle to head to his construction job.
Jasso, 29, had contacted his family earlier this week to say he was being held at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center, where his aunt now is being held. Flores videotaped the arrest of his wife, who was heard screaming while agents handcuffed her behind her back while on her knees. She fainted on the way to the ICE van, while her husband yelled in Spanish, “she’s sick! If she dies it’s your fault.”
Flores is in hiding, but told the Mercury News earlier this week that he and his wife had 10-year tourist visas that expired two years ago. They had no other criminal record, he said, not even a speeding ticket.
“I certainly heard that the target of her arrest was somebody else in the family,” Liccardo said, “and so we’re still trying to understand this and get more information.”
Rodriguez’s father, Armando Rodriguez Garcia, had told the Mercury News that he traveled from Mexico to California on a tourist visa several weeks ago intending to take his daughter back to Mexico with him because she was “tired here.” He said he hoped he could take her home instead of having her experience the stresses of ICE custody, which were life threatening. The trauma of the arrest itself, he said, led to her weeklong hospital stay.
The Trump Administration had once said its priority was arresting immigrants with criminal records, but has since expanded its operations over the past several months, hiring scores of agents to arrest those with expired visas. Federal agents only need probable cause to believe someone is in the U.S. illegally to make an arrest on public property.
Liccardo said that he said he and fellow Democrats are working with organizations “to see how we can start to rally employers in red states and red districts as we start to see the impacts of these immigration policies on our agricultural industry, on health care, on elder care, on tech, construction and many industries where we know immigrants are critical to the substance of our economy.”
He added that they are “working to essentially find allies who can communicate with Republicans who suffer from wobbly knees, if they can stiffen their spines.”
COLORADO SPRINGS — Administrators at the University of Colorado’s campus in Colorado Springs thought they stood a solid chance of dodging the Trump administration’s offensive on higher education.
Located on a picturesque bluff with a stunning view of Pikes Peak, the school is far removed from the Ivy League colleges that have drawn President Donald Trump’s ire. Most of its students are commuters, getting degrees while holding down full-time jobs. Students and faculty alike describe the university, which is in a conservative part of a blue state, as politically subdued, if not apolitical.
That optimism was misplaced.
An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of emails from school officials, as well as interviews with students and professors, reveals that school leaders, teachers and students soon found themselves in the Republican administration’s crosshairs, forcing them to navigate what they described as an unprecedented and haphazard degree of change.
Whether Washington has downsized government departments, clawed back or launched investigations into diversity programs or campus antisemitism, the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs has confronted many of the same challenges as elite universities across the nation.
The school lost three major federal grants and found itself under investigation by Trump’s Education Department. In the hopes of avoiding that scrutiny, the university renamed websites and job titles, all while dealing with pressure from students, faculty and staff who wanted the school to take a more combative stance.
“Uncertainty is compounding,” the school’s chancellor told faculty at a February meeting, according to minutes of the session. “And the speed of which orders are coming has been a bit of a shock.”
The college declined to make any administrators available to be interviewed. A spokesman asked the AP to make clear that any professors or students interviewed in this story were speaking for themselves and not the institution. Several faculty members also asked for anonymity, either because they did not have tenure or they did not want to call unnecessary attention to themselves and their scholarship in the current political environment.
“Like our colleagues across higher education, we’ve spent considerable time working to understand the new directives from the federal government,” the chancellor, Jennifer Sobanet, said in a statement provided to the AP.
Students said they have been able to sense the stress being felt by school administrators and professors.
“We have administrators that are feeling pressure, because we want to maintain our funding here. It’s been tense,” said Ava Knox, a rising junior who covers the university administration for the school newspaper.
Faculty, she added, “want to be very careful about how they’re conducting their research and about how they’re addressing the student population. They are also beholden to this new set of kind of ever-changing guidelines and stipulations by the federal government.”
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Misplaced optimism
Shortly after Trump won a second term in November, UCCS leaders were trying to gather information on the Republican’s plans. In December, Sobanet met the newly elected Republican congressman who represented the school’s district, a conservative one that Trump won with 53% of the vote. In her meeting notes obtained by the AP, the chancellor sketched out a scenario in which the college might avoid the drastic cuts and havoc under the incoming administration.
“Research dollars –- hard to pull back grant dollars but Trump tried to pull back some last time. The money goes through Congress,” Sobanet wrote in notes prepared for the meeting. “Grant money will likely stay but just change how they are worded and what it will fund.”
Sobanet also observed that dismantling the federal Education Department would require congressional authorization. That was unlikely, she suggested, given the U.S. Senate’s composition.
Like many others, she did not fully anticipate how aggressively Trump would seek to transform the federal government.
Conservatives’ desire to revamp higher education began well before Trump took office.
They have long complained that universities have become bastions of liberal indoctrination and raucous protests. In 2023, Republicans in Congress had a contentious hearing with several Ivy League university leaders. Shortly after, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned. During the presidential campaign last fall, Trump criticized campus protests about Gaza, as well as what he said was a liberal bias in classrooms.
His new administration opened investigations into alleged antisemitism at several universities. It froze more than $400 million in research grants and contracts at Columbia, along with more than $2.6 billion at Harvard. Columbia reached an agreement last month to pay $220 million to resolve the investigation.
When Harvard filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s actions, his administration tried to block the school from enrolling international students. The Trump administration has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
Northwestern University, Penn, Princeton and Cornell have seen big chunks of funding cut over how they dealt with protests about Israel’s war in Gaza or over the schools’ support for transgender athletes.
Trump’s decision to target the wealthiest, most prestigious institutions provided some comfort to administrators at the approximately 4,000 other colleges and universities in the country.
Most higher education students in the United States are educated at regional public universities or community colleges. Such schools have not typically drawn attention from culture warriors.
Students and professors at UCCS hoped Trump’s crackdown would bypass the school and others like it.
“You’ve got everyone — liberals, conservatives, middle of the road,” said Jeffrey Scholes, a professor in the philosophy department. “You just don’t see the kind of unrest and polarization that you see at other campuses.”
The purse strings
The federal government has lots of leverage over higher education. It provides about $60 billion a year to universities for research. In addition, a majority of students in the U.S. need grants and loans from various federal programs to help pay tuition and living expenses.
This budget year, UCCS got about $19 million in research funding from a combination of federal, state and private sources. Though that is a relatively small portion of the school’s overall $369 million budget, the college has made a push in recent years to bolster its campus research program by taking advantage of grant money from government agencies such as the U.S. Defense Department and National Institutes for Health. The widespread federal grant cut could derail those efforts.
School officials were dismayed when the Trump administration terminated research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation, emails show. The grants funded programs in civics, cultural preservation and boosting women in technology fields.
School administrators scrambled to contact federal officials to learn if other grants were on the chopping block, but they struggled to find answers, the records show.
School officials repeatedly sought out the assistance of federal officials only to learn those officials were not sure what was happening as the Trump administration halted grant payments, fired thousands of employees and shuttered agencies.
“The sky is falling” at NIH, a university official reported in notes on a call in which the school’s lobbyists were providing reports of what was happening in Washington.
There are also concerns about other changes in Washington that will affect how students pay for college, according to interviews with faculty and education policy experts.
While only Congress can fully abolish the U.S. Department of Education, the Trump administration has tried to dramatically cut back its staff and parcel out many of its functions to other agencies. The administration laid off nearly 1,400 employees, and problems have been reported in the systems that handle student loans. Management of student loans is expected to shift to another agency entirely.
In addition, an early version of a major funding bill in Congress included major cuts to tuition grants. Though that provision did not make it into the law, Congress did cap loans for students seeking graduate degrees. That policy could have ripple effects in the coming years on institutions such as UCCS that rely on tuition dollars for their operating expenses.
DEI and transgender issues hit campus
To force change on campus, the Trump administration has begun investigations targeting diversity programs and efforts to combat antisemitism.
The Education Department, for example, opened an investigation in March targeting a Ph.D. scholarship program that partnered with 45 universities, including UCCS, to expand opportunities to women and nonwhites in graduate education. The administration alleged the program was only open to certain nonwhite students and amounted to racial discrimination.
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news UCCS is included on the list” of schools being investigated, wrote Annie Larson, assistant vice president of federal relations and outreach for the entire University of Colorado system.
“Oh wow, this is surprising,” wrote back Hillary Fouts, dean of the graduate school at UCCS.
UCCS also struggled with how to handle executive orders, particularly those on transgender issues.
In response to an order that aimed to revoke funds to schools that allowed transwomen to play women’s sports, UCCS began a review of its athletic programs. It determined it had no transgender athletes, the records show. University officials were also relieved to discover that only one school in their athletic conference was affected by the order, and UCCS rarely if ever had matches or games against that school.
“We do not have any students impacted by this and don’t compete against any teams that we are aware of that will be impacted by this,” wrote the vice chancellor for student affairs to colleagues.
Avoiding the spotlight
The attacks led UCCS to take preemptive actions and to self-censor in the hopes of saving programs and avoiding the Trump administration’s spotlight.
Emails show that the school’s legal counsel began looking at all the university’s websites and evaluating whether any scholarships might need to be reworded. The university changed the web address of its diversity initiatives from www.diversity.uccs.edu to www.belonging.uccs.edu.
And the administrator responsible for the university’s division of Inclusive Culture & Belonging got a new job title in January: director of strategic initiatives. University professors said the school debated whether to rename the Women’s and Ethnic Studies department to avoid drawing attention from Trump but so far the department has not been renamed.
Along the same lines, UCCS administrators have sought to avoid getting dragged into controversies, a frequent occurrence in the first Trump administration. UCCS officials attended a presentation from the education consulting firm EAB, which encouraged schools not to react to every news cycle. That could be a challenge because some students and faculty are seeking vocal resistance on issues from climate change to immigration.
Soon after Trump was sworn in, for example, a staff member in UCCS’s sustainability program began pushing the entire University of Colorado system to condemn Trump’s withdrawal from an international agreement to tackle climate change. It was the type of statement universities had issued without thinking twice in past administrations.
In an email, UCCS’s top public relations executive warned his boss: “There is a growing sentiment among the thought leadership in higher ed that campus leaders not take a public stance on major issues unless they impact their campus community.”
—
AP Education Writer Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.
NEW YORK — Federal auto safety regulators are investigating why Tesla has repeatedly broken rules requiring it to quickly tell them about crashes involving its self-driving technology, a potentially significant development given the company’s plans to put hundreds of thousands of driverless cars on U.S. roads over the next year.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a filing on Thursday that Tesla’s reports on “numerous” incidents involving its driver assistance and self-driving features were submitted far too late — several months after the crashes instead of within five days as required.
The probe comes two months after the electric vehicle maker run by Elon Musk started a self-driving taxi service in Austin, Texas, with hopes of soon offering it nationwide. The company also hopes to send over-the-air software updates to millions of Teslas already on the road that will allow them to drive themselves.
Investors enthusiastic about such plans have kept Tesla stock aloft despite plunging sales and profits due to boycotts over Musk’s support for U.S. President Donald Trump and far-right politicians in Europe.
The safety agency said the probe will focus on why Tesla took so long to report the crashes, whether the reports included all the necessary data and details and if there are crashes that the agency still doesn’t know about.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment, but the agency noted that the company has told it the delays were “due to an issue with Tesla’s data collection,” which Tesla says has now been fixed.
The new investigation follows another probe that began in October into potential problems with Tesla’s self-driving technology in foggy weather and other low visibility conditions, which has been linked to several accidents including one death. That probe involves 2.4 million Tesla vehicles.
The crash reporting rule for vehicles using Level 2 driver-assistance software, or those that require drivers to pay full attention to the road, was implemented in 2021. Since then Tesla has reported 2,308 crashes when the software was used, the vast majority of the more than 2,600 reported by all automakers, according to agency data. The numbers are skewed by the fact that Tesla is by far the dominant maker of partial self-driving vehicles in the U.S.
The company has been offering robotaxi rides in Austin to only a select group of riders, but said it will allow any paying customer to hail its cabs starting sometime in September, according to a Musk post on X earlier this month. Tesla has also begun allowing limited robotaxi service in San Francisco with a driver behind the wheel as a safety check to conform with California rules.
Investors in Tesla were initially cheered after Trump won the presidency in hopes he would reward his biggest financial backer, Musk, by getting safety regulators to go easier on the company. Now that isn’t so certain given Musk’s falling out with the president in recent months after Musk called Trump’s budget bill an “abomination” that would add to U.S. debt and threatened to form a new political party.
Tesla stock fell less than 1% in afternoon trading Thursday to $321.
The conservative network Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of defaming a Denver-based voting equipment company by spreading lies about President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, according to documents filed Monday.
The settlement comes after Fox News Channel paid $787.5 million to settle a similar lawsuit in 2023 and Newsmax paid what court papers describe as $40 million to settle a libel lawsuit from a different voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, which also was a target of pro-Trump conspiracy theories on the network.
Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis ruled earlier that Newsmax did indeed defame Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems by airing false information about the company and its equipment.
But Davis left it to a jury to eventually decide whether that was done with malice, and, if so, how much Dominion deserved from Newsmax in damages. Newsmax and Dominion reached the settlement before the trial could take place.
The settlement was disclosed by Newsmax on Monday in a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It said the deal was reached Friday.
The disclosure came as Trump vowed in a social media post Monday to eliminate mail-in ballots and voting machines such as those supplied by Dominion and other companies. It was unclear how the Republican president could achieve that.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — George Washington. Benjamin Franklin. Betsy Ross. The two Founding Fathers and the seamstress of the American flag all once worshipped on the now centuries-old wooden pews of Christ Church.
It’s the site of colonial America’s break with the Church of England — and where the U.S. Episcopal Church was born.
Less than a mile south, past Independence Hall, Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church stands on the oldest parcel of land continuously owned by Black Americans. It’s the mother church of the nation’s first Black denomination.
Two churches, across the centuries. Generations after their birth in this nation first envisioned in Philadelphia, both churches continue to serve as the spiritual home for hundreds in the city.
Choir members sing hymns at Christ Church in Philadelphia at a service on Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
Church members see the role of their congregation as crucial, a beacon ahead of a contentious presidential election in Pennsylvania — the most pivotal of swing states. They also express concerns about political division that the Founding Fathers once feared could tear the nation apart.
“We’ve grown as a nation, but I think at this point, we’re at a standstill. We’re terribly divided,” said Christ Church parishioner Jeanette Morris. A registered Republican, she previously voted for former President Donald Trump, but plans to back Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5 because of her support for reproductive rights. Morris is concerned about health issues following the repeal of Roe v. Wade.
“Nothing is getting done in Washington because nobody can agree on anything,” she said after a recent service. “I pray every Sunday that we can get past this all.”
Mother Bethel AME Church member Donna Matthews, center standing, claps next to her husband, Keith Matthews, during a service in Philadelphia on Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
Today’s list of divisive issues is long: from abortion and immigration to taxes, climate change and the wars abroad. It’s also the first presidential election since an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, an act of political violence steeped in the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
“I think things have changed: Slavery is abolished. The Civil Rights Act was put in place. But still, deep down, the denizens of the United States haven’t really come together,” says Keith Matthews, 61, a Mother Bethel AME parishioner. “There’s still a lot of hatred and misunderstanding amongst the races.”
The nation’s church was at the center of it all
At its infancy, the United States of America also was deeply divided. And some members of Christ Church — from Washington to the parish rector — seemed to be at the center of it all.
“What we’re going through right now is certainly unprecedented politically. And there’s a huge amount of potential instability and concern that a lot of people have in this church and the United States,” says Zack Biro, executive director of the Christ Church Preservation Trust. “And Christ Church is a perfect example of kind of weathering that storm.”
The Christ Church steeple, financed and built through a lottery spearheaded by Benjamin Franklin, rises into the sky in Philadelphia on Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
The church was founded in 1695 by a group of Philadelphia colonists as the first parish of the Church of England in Pennsylvania. Congregants later included slaves and their owners, loyalists and patriots. They listened to sermons favoring and opposing independence.
Anglican clergy loyal to the British king led weekly prayers for the monarch. But on July 4, 1776, Christ Church’s vestry crossed out the king’s name from the Book of Common Prayer — a defiant act of potential treason. The book is preserved today in an underground museum, a testament to the church’s revolutionary spirit on Independence Day.
“We tend to think that the early American republic was a time of great unity, but, like today, the political culture was deeply polarized,” says John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah University in Pennsylvania.
Christ Church congregants sing during a service in Philadelphia on Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
During the 1780s, Fea said via email, debate raged about how to apply revolutionary-era principles such as liberty or freedom to all Americans. From the pulpit, the Rev. Jacob Duché, the church’s rector, was seen as a moderate and led prayers as the first chaplain of the Continental Congress. But then he sided with the loyalists.
When the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777, the rector wrote a letter to Washington urging him to surrender and reach a deal with the British. After the letter became public, Duché traveled to England. Pennsylvania officials later labeled him a traitor and banned his reentry. His successor, the Rev. William White, became the first presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. He’s praised for keeping the unity of his congregation during times of turmoil.
Christ Church’s current senior pastor is the Rev. Samantha Vincent-Alexander, the first woman to serve as rector in its more than 300-year history.
“The idea of what do we do in this political environment right now and how do we deal with that is an incredible challenge,” she says. “Most of our congregations are not a unified voting bloc. They represent different people much like at the time of the American revolution.”
“We had people who were loyalists and people who supported independence, and the clergy at the time had to find a way to keep the congregation together.”
Congregant Andy Halstead prays during a service at Philadelphia’s Christ Church on Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
Congregants remain proud of Christ Church’s crucial role in America’s freedom. But they also grapple with contradictions. Some church members traded slaves and are buried in the church yard near signers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin’s tomb is in the nearby Christ Church burial ground.
“While we’re very proud of our history, these people were not perfect. Sometimes we tend to think of them that way, but they weren’t,” says Harvey Bartle, a congregant for more than 30 years. “What they were doing is trying to promote democracy. … At least they advanced the ball beyond the divine right of kings, so that the society, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, could advance the system.”
Children look at the penny-covered gravestone of Benjamin Franklin at the Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia on Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
One church member, Absalom Jones, attended services at a sister congregation while enslaved to a man serving in the church leadership. Jones bought his freedom and eventually became ordained by the Christ Church rector as the first Black priest of the Episcopal Church. He also went on to co-create the Free African Society of Philadelphia, which Fea says “sought to apply the rights secured from the American Revolution to the 2,000 or so free Black men and women living in the city at the time.”
Methodism was the fastest growing denomination in America in the 1790s. But some Methodist Episcopal Churches still segregated Black worshippers during services to the upstairs galleries. This prompted free Black Americans to start their own congregation.
A framed portrait of the Rev. Absalom Jones, who became ordained as the first Black priest of the Episcopal church, is displayed at the Christ Church Neighborhood House in Philadelphia on Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
Mother Bethel AME fought for freedom from the start
Its founder, the Rev. Richard Allen, was born into slavery in Philadelphia in 1760 before buying his freedom in Delaware before he was 20. He returned to the city in the 1780s and became a minister.
After white leaders at a Methodist church segregated Allen, Jones and other Black worshippers to the upstairs galleries for a prayer service, the group left the church and formed what would eventually become Mother Bethel AME. The church became a place of refuge for Black people fleeing slavery along the Underground Railroad and later a major gathering point for the Civil Rights Movement.
By creating Mother Bethel, Allen “carved out a space where Black people could resist … at a time where during slavery in the Deep South, Black people could not even congregate without the presence of a white man in between them,” says Bethel AME’s pastor, the Rev. Mark Tyler.
Today, the AME Church has more than 2.5 million members and thousands of congregations in dozens of nations worldwide.
A statue of Mother Bethel AME Church founder stands on the oldest parcel of land continuously owned by Black Americans in Philadelphia on Oct 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
“Certainly, we’ve made progress,” says Tyler, citing Kamala Harris’ campaign to become the country’s first Black female president. But he also believes that much more needs to be done to bridge America’s racial inequality and he worries about the potential of another Trump presidency. The AME Church, he says, has not “outlived its usefulness.”
“The fact that we have a person who openly embraces white supremacists, who has been president once and potentially could be president again in the 21st century, is all the evidence that you need to know that we still need places for Black people to come together and organize like the Black Church,” he says.
During a recent Sunday service, Tyler encouraged his congregation to vote. Some members later reflected on America’s beginnings and its progress and shortcomings.
“Two things can be said at the same time: They were brilliant in the development of this nation. But they still carried slavery ideas, women were not allowed to vote, and that needed to be changed,” parishioner Donna Matthews said about the Founding Fathers.
“Who are ‘We the people’? I think people need to ask themselves that,” said Matthews, 63, who attended the service with her husband, Keith, and their young grandson, Ezekiel. “It’s everyone. And it’s the essence of why this church was started.”
At the end of the service, parishioner Tayza Hill, 25, led groups on a tour of the church’s museum. It preserves an original wooden pulpit used by the Rev. Allen and Black leaders including abolitionist Frederick Douglass and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois when they addressed the congregation.
Hill says she has been hearing the same question in radio shows as the election approaches: “Is the sun rising, or is the sun setting on democracy?” She remains hopeful and believes the continuity of her church is vital.
“Seeing that there’s still a building that has the history and is continuously being told is important because it’s refusing to be erased from history,” Hill says. “As a nation and as a church, it’s really up to us to defend the rights and the respectability of those who are withheld the full opportunity of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.”
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Election Day is right around the corner. With national polls pointing toward a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, all eyes are on a handful of swing states. However, the swing state roster has changed since the 2020 presidential election. So, what are the key states to watch come Election Day? Swing states are typically defined as areas that have similar levels of support for each political party’s candidate that can have a key role in the outcome of the presidential race.Seven states in two regions of the U.S. could have a major impact on the outcome of the 2024 election. The ‘Blue Wall’ statesThe so-called “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are on the list of swing states. Trump won all three states in 2016, but President Joe Biden gained them back in 2020. Wisconsin is specifically seen as one of the most competitive states, as President Joe Biden had previously won by fewer than 21,000 votes in the 2020 election.The Sun Belt statesThe Sun Belt states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina have also made it onto the list. This is due to a combination of an increase of Latino, Asian American and young Black voting demographics in the region. But North Carolina and Georgia could still be wild cards, as North Carolina has historically leaned Republican. Most notably missing from the list of swing states is the industrial midwest: Ohio and Iowa have recently leaned more Republican. According to an analysis by NPR, the change is due to the shift toward the GOP among white voters without college degrees. Prior to the Trump era, Ohio and Iowa were considered competitive for decades.Both presidential candidates have intensified their campaigns in key swing states in the past few months.As voters cast their ballots, watching these regions will be key to determining the electoral college winner in 2024.
Election Day is right around the corner. With national polls pointing toward a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, all eyes are on a handful of swing states.
However, the swing state roster has changed since the 2020 presidential election.
So, what are the key states to watch come Election Day?
Swing states are typically defined as areas that have similar levels of support for each political party’s candidate that can have a key role in the outcome of the presidential race.
Seven states in two regions of the U.S. could have a major impact on the outcome of the 2024 election.
The ‘Blue Wall’ states
The so-called “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are on the list of swing states.
Trump won all three states in 2016, but President Joe Biden gained them back in 2020.
Wisconsin is specifically seen as one of the most competitive states, as President Joe Biden had previously won by fewer than 21,000 votes in the 2020 election.
The Sun Belt states
The Sun Belt states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina have also made it onto the list.
This is due to a combination of an increase of Latino, Asian American and young Black voting demographics in the region.
But North Carolina and Georgia could still be wild cards, as North Carolina has historically leaned Republican.
Most notably missing from the list of swing states is the industrial midwest: Ohio and Iowa have recently leaned more Republican.
According to an analysis by NPR, the change is due to the shift toward the GOP among white voters without college degrees. Prior to the Trump era, Ohio and Iowa were considered competitive for decades.
The vice presidential candidates, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, on Tuesday engaged in a fast-moving, largely civil debate on a wide range of issues. Here’s a look at some false and misleading claims from the debate.
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Iran has not received $100 billion in unfrozen assets under the Biden-Harris administration
VANCE: “Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration. What do they use that money for? They use it to buy weapons that they’re now launching against our allies.”
THE FACTS: The Biden administration agreed last year to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian assets as part of a deal to free five U.S. citizens being held by Iran. But administration officials say not a dollar of that has yet been given to Iran. It was part of a deal negotiated by the Obama administration, before Biden and Harris took office, that could have allowed Iran to access frozen assets in exchange for accepting limits on its nuclear program.
In 2016, Iran said it had received access to more than $100 billion worth of frozen overseas assets following the implementation of a landmark nuclear deal with world powers. The money had been held in banks in China, India, Japan, South Korea and Turkey since international sanctions were tightened in 2012 over Tehran’s nuclear program. Then-Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told Congress that only about $50 billion of the frozen assets would actually be accessible by Iran.
Walz overstates the cost of insulin before cap
WALZ: “They were charging $800 before this law went into effect.”
THE FACTS: Walz overstated how much Americans were paying for insulin before a new law capped prices at $35 per month for millions of older Americans on Medicare. A December 2022 study found that people who were on Medicare or enrolled in private insurance paid $452 yearly on average before the new law took effect.
Vance links unaffordable housing to immigrants who have come into the country illegally
VANCE: “You’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”
THE FACTS: Most economists blame a long-term decline in the housing supply for the steady increase in home prices. The number of new homes under construction plunged from an annual pace of 1.4 million in April 2006 to barely above 400,000 in August 2011, and didn’t recover to 2006 levels until 2021.
Vance said at least one prominent economic analysis from the Federal Reserve supports his claims that immigrants are pushing up housing costs, but he didn’t provide details. He was likely citing a May 2024 blog post by Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Kashkari says immigration’s long-run effect on inflation is “unclear,” but immigrants need a place to live and their arrival has overlapped with higher prices.
There might be upward pressure on home prices in some markets because of immigrants arriving, but most economists say the issue is a lack of supply of homes on the market. Homebuilders say they need the immigrants to build the homes. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at a September news conference that high mortgage rates mean people aren’t listing their homes for sale and there has not been enough supply.
WALZ: “Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies.”
THE FACTS: That’s not true. The conservative initiative calls for the collection of “accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths,” but not a record of every pregnancy that occurs.
More specifically, Project 2025 proposes that the Department of Health and Human Services require all states to report detailed information about abortions that are performed within their borders, including the total number of abortions, the age and state of residence of the mother, the gestational age of the fetus, the reason for the abortion and the method used to perform the abortion. It suggests that this data be separated into categories such as spontaneous miscarriages, intentional abortions, stillbirths and other medical treatments that result in the death of the fetus, like chemotherapy.
Vance overstates immigration numbers
VANCE: “We’ve got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country.”
THE FACTS: That figure is highly inflated. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports more than 10 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico from January 2021 through September 2024.
That’s arrests, not people. Under pandemic-era asylum restrictions, many people crossed more than once until they succeeded because there were no legal consequences for getting turned back to Mexico. So the number of people is lower than the number of arrests.
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s latest available estimate, there were approximately 11 million people living illegally in the U.S. as of January 2022, 79% of whom entered prior to January 2010.
Vance distorts Minnesota abortion law
VANCE: “It says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”
THE FACTS: This claim misrepresents a bill Walz signed into law in 2023, updating language about the care of newborns.
The new language uses the phrase “an infant who is born alive” instead of “a born alive infant as a result of an abortion.” It states that medical personnel are required to “care for the infant who is born alive” rather than “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.”
Both the current version of the law and the 2015 version that was amended state that “an infant who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law.”
Infanticide is criminalized in every state, including Minnesota, and the bill does not change that.
Vance on Trump and Jan. 6, 2021
VANCE: “Remember he said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully.”
THE FACTS: It’s true that Trump told the crowd gathered near the White House, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
But Vance ignored the incendiary language Trump used throughout his speech, during which he urged the crowd to march to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to certify President Joe Biden’s victory. Trump told the crowd: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” That’s after his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, declared: “Let’s have trial by combat.”
Associated Press writers Melissa Goldin in New York, and Amanda Seitz, David Klepper, Chris Rugaber, Ellen Knickmeyer and Josh Boak in Washington contributed.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Tim Walz and JD Vance might have the chance to reshape the political landscape Tuesday in their first and only debate.
Vice presidential picks have traditionally taken on the role of political attack dog, laying into opponents so that their running mate can appear above the political fray. That’s generally been less true since former President Donald Trump scrambled political norms.
But Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, made it to national prominence by labeling rival Republicans “weird.” Vance, the Republican junior senator from Ohio, has torn into Vice President Kamala Harris ‘ party on immigration, notably by spreading a false story about Haitian immigrants in his home state that Trump then cited during his own debate with Harris.
Here’s a look at past vice presidential debates — and the larger role of the office Walz and Vance are both seeking.
What is the vice president’s job?
The vice president presides over the Senate and is empowered to break ties, as Harris has done a record 33 times. She exceeded the previous high mark last year, which had held since John C. Calhoun was vice president from 1825 to 1832. The officeholder also presides ceremonially in Congress over the certification of electoral results, which Vice President Mike Pence did even after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bid to halt the process and transition of power, with some chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
But the vice president’s main job is to be ready to take over if something happens to the president. Nine have done so following a president’s death or departure from office — the last being Gerald Ford, who became president when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974.
The Constitution’s 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, spelled out the succession rules, stating that the vice president becomes president “in case of the removal of the president from office or of his death or resignation.” It also allowed the president and Congress to nominate and approve a new vice president if that office is vacated.
Vice presidential historian Joel K. Goldstein said two recent assassination attempts against Trump raise “the saliency of succession.” But he added that many voters view vice presidential nominees as appendages of the candidates who selected them, not necessarily as potential future presidents themselves.
“People do look at somebody as, are they ready to be a heartbeat away?” Goldstein said. “But it is also a question of how good a decisionmaker is the person who chose them.”
Memorable vice presidential debates featured Palin, Bentsen — and Harris
In 1992, Adm. James Stockdale, running mate of third-party candidate Ross Perot, was going for breezy but seemed befuddled when he opened the debate by saying, “Who am I? Why am I here?” His later response to a question, “I didn’t have my hearing aid turned up,” only reinforced that perception.
The debate between No. 2s was highly anticipated in 2008 after Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate and saw a bump in the polls. But her showdown with then-Delaware Sen. Joe Biden is best remembered for Palin approaching him before the start and saying, “Can I call you Joe?” That was Palin attempting to keep from mistakenly calling her opponent “O’Biden,” conflating Biden’s name with that of his running mate, then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
FILE – Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas, left, shakes hands with Sen. Dan Quayle, R-Ind., before the start of their vice presidential debate at the Omaha Civic Auditorium, Omaha, Neb., Oct. 5, 1988. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File)
The vice presidential nominee and Texas Democratic senator, Lloyd Bentsen, offered a stinging rejoinder against his opponent, Republican Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana, in 1988. After Quayle compared himself to John F. Kennedy, Bentsen replied, “You’re no Jack Kennedy, senator.” But it was one of the Democratic ticket’s few high points in a race it lost handily.
In 2020, Harris faced off with Republican Vice President Mike Pence and declared when he tried to interrupt her, “I’m speaking,” a line she’s reprised in this campaign. But both candidates might have been overshadowed by a fly that perched on Pence’s hair for what felt like an eternity.
Will the debate affect the campaign?
A nominee’s choice of No. 2 has historically made little Election Day difference. This year could be different.
Historical analysis by Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston, suggests that voters aren’t really swayed by a candidate’s running mate. Even the idea of using a pick to balance a ticket — like pairing the first major party nominee who is a woman of color with a white male in the case of Harris selecting Walz — may also be overstated.
“The evidence we have is that they’re really voting for the presidential nominee,” Jones said of Americans through the decades.
A key caveat might be that, given just how close the current race is looking to be in swing states, “It’s always possible that, at the margins, it may matter,” Jones said.
One reason why the Walz-Vance debate might shift more opinions this year is that Harris and Trump shared a stage only once, in early September. That means Tuesday may be the last chance before Election Day for voters to see the two tickets square off directly.
But, more likely, both Walz and Vance will simply need to avoid memorable unforced errors that can be endlessly replayed. Jones said such a race-shifting gaffe is unlikely — but not impossible.
“They’re disciplined,” Jones said. “But all it takes is one.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — To many Democrats, Kamala Harris was everything Joe Biden was not in confronting Donald Trump on the debate stage: forceful, fleet of foot, relentless in going after her opponent.
In a pivot from Biden’s debate meltdown in June, Democrats who gathered in bars, watch parties and other venues Tuesday night found lots to cheer in her drive to rattle the Republican.
In a race for the White House that surveys say is exceptionally close, with both sides looking for an edge, it was the Democrats who came away more exuberant after the nationally televised debate.
“She prosecuted Donald Trump tonight,” said Alina Taylor, 51, a high school special education teacher who joined hundreds of people on a football field of the historically Black Salem Baptist Church of Abington in a suburb of Philadelphia, where people watched on a 33-foot (10 meter) screen.
As for Trump, she said, “I was appalled” by his performance. “People were laughing at him because he wasn’t making very much sense.”
People watch the ABC News presidential debate between Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump at a debate watch party at The Abbey on September 10, 2024 in West Hollywood, California. Harris and Trump are facing off in their first presidential debate of the 2024 presidential cycle. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In Seattle, people gathered at Massive, a queer nightclub where scores watched the debate on a projector set up in front of the club’s large disco ball. The crowd laughed and cheered when Trump branded Harris a Marxist. More cheers when the debate moderator called out Trump’s false claim that some states legalize the killing of babies after birth.
“He’s getting smoked,” one said.
But in Brentwood, Tennessee, Sarah Frances Morris heard nothing at her watch party to shake her support of Trump.
“I think he beat her on the border,” she said. “I think he also beat her on actually having plans and letting the American people know what those are. And I think that Kamala Harris likes to mention that she has plans for things, but she doesn’t actually ever elaborate on what those plans are.”
Morris conceded she was watching history being made, “because we have our first Black woman running for president.” But, she added, “I don’t think she delivered to get her to that place she needed to be.”
Harris supporter Dushant Puri, 19, a UC Berkeley student, said the vice president took command before the first words were spoken — when she crossed the stage to shake Trump’s hand. “I thought that was pretty significant,” Puri said. “It was their first interaction, and I thought Harris was asserting herself.”
At the same watch party, fellow student Angel Aldaco, 21, said that unlike Biden, Harris “came in with a plan and was more concise.”
People watch the presidential debate during a debate watch party at Penn Social on September 10, 2024 in Washington, DC. Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump face off in their first debate Tuesday evening at The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Aldaco was struck by one of the night’s oddest moments, when Trump “went on that rampage about eating pets.” That’s when Trump endorsed a baseless conspiracy theory that immigrants were stealing and eating people’s dogs ands cats. Harris was incredulous. “That was good,” the student said.
It’s questionable how much viewers learned about what Harris would do as president or whether she won over independents or wavering Republicans. But for some Democrats, despondent if not panicked after Biden’s fumbling debate performance, it was enough to see a Democratic candidate getting seriously under Trump’s skin.
“He is pretty incapable when he is riled up,” said Ikenna Amilo, an accountant at a Democratic watch party in a small concert venue in downtown Portland, Maine.
People watch the presidential debate during a debate watch party at Penn Social on September 10, 2024 in Washington, DC. Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump face off in their first debate Tuesday evening at The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“When you poke him, he is really reactive and he doesn’t show the temperament you want in a president, so I think Kamala has shown she’s doing a good job.”
Annetta Clark, 50, a Harris supporter from Vallejo, California, watched at a house party hosted by the Oakland Bay Area chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women. To her, the second presidential debate was a mighty relief from the one in June.
“I couldn’t stomach the first one, if I’m being honest,” Clark said. “I tried to watch it and it was a little too much. This one I was able to enjoy.” On Trump’s performance: “It was almost like talking to a child with him.” Harris? “Fabulous job.”
Democrat Natasha Salas, 63, of Highland, Indiana, saw the debate from an Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority watch party at a bistro in Markham, Illinois, and welcomed Harris’ call to cool the political temperature — even as the vice president denounced Trump at every turn.
“We all want the same things, Democrats and Republicans,” Salas said. “We are more alike than different. I want to see the country move forward and less divisiveness.”
Interest in the debate transcended national borders. From a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, where dozens watched a translated version of the debates on a television, Rakan al Muhana, 40, an asylum-seeker from Gaza, became animated when the candidates discussed Israel and Palestine.
“We are running from the war,” he said. “We are running from the Israeli bombs. He (Trump) doesn’t see us as human. My daughter, who is four months — for him, she’s a terrorist.”
Al Muhana has been on a four-month journey from Gaza to this border city, with his wife and four children. They left when both his mother and father were killed in a bombing.
Associated Press journalists Michael Rubinkam in Philadelphia; George Walker in Nashville; Robert Bukaty in Portland, Maine; Lindsey Wasson in Seattle; Godofredo Vasquez in Berkeley, California; and Gregory Bull in Tijuana, Mexico, contributed to this report.
By STEVE PEOPLES, JONATHAN J. COOPER and NICHOLAS RICCARDI
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump and Kamala Harris faced each other on the debate stage Tuesday night for the first and possibly the last time.
Harris, the Democratic vice president who is a former courtroom prosecutor, was eager to prosecute Trump’s glaring liabilities. But she also was tasked with re-reintroducing herself to voters, who are still getting to know her as the party’s presidential nominee.
Trump, a Republican now in his third presidential election, was set on painting Harris as an out-of-touch liberal. He also tried to win over skeptical suburban voters — many of them women — turned off by Trump’s brash leadership style and his penchant for personal insults.
The 90-minute debate played out inside Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center. In accordance with rules negotiated by both campaigns, there was no live audience and the candidates’ microphones were muted when it was not their turn to speak.
Some takeaways on a historic night:
From the opening handshake, Harris took the fight to Trump in a way that Biden could not
The vice president walked across the stage and introduced herself, “Kamala Harris,” before reaching out and grabbing Trump’s hand in the opening moments.
In her first answer, Harris said Trump’s trade tariffs would effectively create a sales tax on the middle class. She soon accused Trump of presiding over the worst attack on American democracy since the Civil War — the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. And she charged the former president with telling women what they could do with their bodies.
But Harris may have got under Trump’s skin the most when she went after his performance at his rallies, noting that many people often leave early.
Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris debate for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on September 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After earning the Democratic Party nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to leave the race, Harris faced off with Trump in what may be the only debate of the 2024 race for the White House. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, debates Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. president Donald Trump, for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on September 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After earning the Democratic Party nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to leave the race, Harris faced off with Trump in what may be the only debate of the 2024 race for the White House. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, debates Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on September 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After earning the Democratic Party nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to leave the race, Harris faced off with Trump in what may be the only debate of the 2024 race for the White House. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump is interviewed in the media center at the Pennsylvania Convention Center before the first presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After earning the Democratic Party nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to leave the race, Harris is facing off with Trump in what may be their only debate of the 2024 campaign for the White House. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
California Governor Gavin Newsom talks to journalists in the media center at the Pennsylvania Convention Center before the first presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After earning the Democratic Party nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to leave the race, Harris is facing off with Trump in what may be their only debate of the 2024 campaign for the White House. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Vivek Ramaswamy talks to journalists in the media center at the Pennsylvania Convention Center before the first presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After earning the Democratic Party nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to leave the race, Harris is facing off with Trump in what may be their only debate of the 2024 campaign for the White House. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Journalists and members of the media watch from the spin room as US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump participate in a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024. (Photo by MATTHEW HATCHER / AFP) (Photo by MATTHEW HATCHER/AFP via Getty Images)
The Democratic National Committee displays signage in support of Vice President Kamala Harris during the Presidential Debate outside of The National Constitutional Center on September 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for DNC)
A supporter of former US president and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump sits outside of the National Constitution Center, ahead of the presidential debate between US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Trump in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024. (Photo by andrew thomas / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW THOMAS/AFP via Getty Images)
People watch the ABC News presidential debate between Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump at a debate watch party at The Abbey on September 10, 2024 in West Hollywood, California. Harris and Trump are facing off in their first presidential debate of the 2024 presidential cycle. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
People watch the presidential debate during a debate watch party at Penn Social on September 10, 2024 in Washington, DC. Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump face off in their first debate Tuesday evening at The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
People watch the presidential debate during a debate watch party at Penn Social on September 10, 2024 in Washington, DC. Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump face off in their first debate Tuesday evening at The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
People watch the presidential debate during a debate watch party at Penn Social on September 10, 2024 in Washington, DC. Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump face off in their first debate Tuesday evening at The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris debate for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on September 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After earning the Democratic Party nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to leave the race, Harris faced off with Trump in what may be the only debate of the 2024 race for the White House. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Trump was largely calm when he defended himself against each charge, but he showed annoyance with her comment about his rallies. He insisted his events were larger than hers and he seemed to grow angrier at times as the debate continued.
Harris frequently shifted her message from Trump back to the American people.
“You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your needs and your desires,” Harris said of Trump’s rallies. “And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first.”
An early skirmish on the economy
The debate opened with an unexpectedly wonky exchange on the economy: Harris took on Trump for his plan to put in place sweeping tariffs and for the trade deficit he ran as president; Trump slammed Harris for inflation that he incorrectly said was the worst in the country’s history.
The exchange ended up with some of Trump’s traditional bombast. He said Harris was a “Marxist” even though she had just cited positive reviews of her economic plans from Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. But it was particularly notable for Harris’ effort to turn the tables on Trump.
Trump noted that people look back on his presidency’s economy fondly. “I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country,” he said. Harris flatly told viewers: “Donald Trump has no plan for you.”
Harris came out swinging in defense of abortion rights, perhaps the strongest issue for Democrats since Trump’s nominees created a Supreme Court majority to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. Her sharp arguments provided a vivid contrast to President Joe Biden’s rambling comments on the issue during his June debate with Trump.
“The government, and Donald Trump, certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said. She painted a vivid picture of women facing medical complications, gut-wrenching decisions and having travel out of state for an abortion.
Trump was just as fierce in defense, saying he returned the issue to the states, an outcome he said many Americans wanted. He struggled with accuracy, however, repeating the false claim that Democrats support abortion even after babies are born. He stuck to that even after he was corrected by moderator Lynsey Davis.
“I did a great service in doing that. It took courage to do it,” Trump said of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and its constitutional protections for abortion. “And the Supreme Court had great courage in doing it. And I give tremendous credit to those six justices.”
Polls has shown significant opposition to overturning Roe and voters have punished Republicans in recent elections for it.
Trump refused to say whether he would veto a bill banning abortion nationwide, saying such legislation would never clear Congress and reach the president. He also broke with his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, suggesting Vance spoke out of turn when he said Trump would veto a national abortion ban.
“I didn’t discuss it with JD,” Trump said.
Who’s talking now?
Trump objected when Harris interrupted him — an interjection that he could hear but viewers could not because her microphone was muted according to the rules of the debate.
“Wait a minute, I’m talking now,” Trump said. He was putting his spin on a line she used famously against Mike Pence in the 2020 vice presidential debate.
“Sound familiar?” Trump added.
Four years ago, Harris rebuked Pence for interrupting, saying: “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden announced Monday that he wants term limits for Supreme Court justices and to overturn the court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity that benefited former President Donald Trump.
“I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today. I have great respect for our institutions and separation of powers. What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms,” Biden wrote in part of an opinion piece shared in advance of publication. “We now stand in a breach.”
Specifically, Biden will use scheduled remarks at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, on Monday to call for overhauling the Supreme Court, including 18-year terms for justices (meaning that the president would appoint a new justice once every two years). He also wants a new binding code of ethics for the justices. Biden’s trip to Austin was originally scheduled while he was still an active candidate for president, but it was postponed after the attempted assassination of Trump.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who sponsored legislation on both Supreme Court ethics and on the length of terms for justices, was among the Democrats happy to hear reporting of the president’s planned announcement.
“I couldn’t be happier that they’re moving in this direction,” Whitehouse said, suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris, now the expected Democratic presidential nominee, “will be completely on board.”
Whitehouse declined to get into the specifics of his conversations last week ahead of he president’s speech, but he did say that he had been “in touch” with the administration about the topic of overhauling the Supreme Court.
In addition to the Supreme Court changes, Biden is backing a “No One Is Above the Law” constitutional amendment that, according to a White House fact sheet, “will state that the Constitution does not confer any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing by virtue of previously serving as President.” That would effectively overturn the recent presidential immunity ruling in Trump v. United States, in which the 6-3 majority found that “Congress may not criminalize the President’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the Executive Branch under the Constitution.”
The opinion, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., sent the case back for lower court review of which charges brought against Trump, who is now the Republican presidential nominee, are tied to official acts.
The White House noted that Biden has long experience with confirmation battles, including during his decades in the Senate, which included time as chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
“From his first day in office — and every day since then — President Biden has taken action to strengthen American democracy and protect the rule of law,” Monday’s fact sheet said. “In recent years, the Supreme Court has overturned long-established legal precedents protecting fundamental rights. This Court has gutted civil rights protections, taken away a woman’s right to choose, and now granted Presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office.”
WASHINGTON — While Republicans are looking forward to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Wednesday afternoon speech to a joint meeting of Congress, most Democrats are approaching the occasion with bated breath and dread — if they plan to attend at all.
The elected leader of Israel will arrive to a Capitol Hill complex with a significantly ramped up security presence and barricades to keep out the many different anti-war and religious groups planning to protest his speech, a sign of a remarkable change to the once-vaunted U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Congress has long led the way on that relationship, with both Democratic and Republican administrations repeatedly having to work to catch up with and implement many different pro-Israel policies. Those laws include generous weapons assistance, the location of the U.S. embassy and how the U.S. government is allowed to engage with and support the Palestinians.
But the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict has complicated things for Democrats. American and Israeli opponents of Netanyahu’s speech have derided it as a PR stunt, aimed at trying to improve his own sinking political fortunes back home.
Over the weekend, tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to protest his multiday trip to Washington. The Israeli protesters accused Netanyahu of wasting time with the U.S. visit and said he should be focusing instead on finalizing a ceasefire deal with the Palestinian group Hamas that could result in the release of all remaining Israeli hostages. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Netanyahu’s address would be a historic one at a pivotal moment in time.
“Our two nations are united in our common cause to bring the hostages home and we are united to stand against our common enemies,” Johnson said during a Tuesday press conference. “As Iran and its proxies, including Hezbollah and the Houthis, have become increasingly hostile… we have to be clear that Israel is not alone. It has never been more important than it is right now for us to stand with our closest ally in the Middle East.”
Invitations for foreign leaders to address Congress are a rare honor and a highly sought diplomatic prize for foreign governments. This will be Netanyahu’s fourth speech to Congress, more than any other world leader.
That includes former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who addressed joint meetings of Congress three times, with two of those speeches coming during the dark and perilous days of World War II. Netanyahu currently is one of the most unpopular leaders in the world.
Netanyahu’s long-running domestic corruption trial continues in fits and starts and he might be indicted soon by the International Criminal Court on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity over his handling of the nine-month war in Gaza.
The Hamas-run Health Ministry has said Israel has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians in the besieged territory. The ministry’s death toll, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in the war in Gaza, is widely accepted as accurate by international organizations and news outlets.
Harris not presiding
Notably, Vice President Kamala Harris — the presumed Democratic presidential nominee — will not preside with Johnson on the dais behind Netanyahu when he addresses Congress.
Instead, Harris will be in Indianapolis on Wednesday, giving a keynote speech at a conference of a historically Black sorority, Zeta Phi Beta. The decision not to attend the Netanyahu speech, which has been scheduled for weeks, is seen as a calculated statement by the White House, where relations with Netanyahu and his far-right government — already frosty prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel — have grown even more difficult.
A planned Tuesday meeting at the White House with President Joe Biden has been pushed back until Thursday, according to a U.S. official. The president is scheduled to return to Washington Tuesday afternoon after recovering from a recent COVID-19 infection.
Johnson said it was “outrageous to me and inexcusable” that Harris would not be attending Netanyahu’s speech.
While the White House is not describing Harris’ non-attendance as a boycott, many other Democrats have been open about their plans to boycott Netanyahu’s speech.
While a full tally of those lawmakers who have announced plans not to attend wasn’t readily available on Tuesday, some high-profile names include Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray, D-Wash.; Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.; Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and former No. 3 House Democratic leader James E. Clyburn, D-S.C.
During Netanyahu’s last address to a joint meeting of Congress in 2015, 58 Democratic lawmakers boycotted his speech, which they saw as an insulting and partisan attack on then-President Barack Obama’s efforts to finalize negotiations around the multinational nuclear agreement with Iran. It is likely that number will be much higher when he returns to the Hill on Wednesday given widespread Democratic anger with his government’s handling of the war in Gaza.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, said the invitation is “an act of political gamesmanship that is not really an act of statesmanship.”
“That’s what these speeches should be… it should be reserved for the Winston Churchills of the world in a moment of crisis,” Ben-Ami said. Netanyahu’s “track record and all of his activities suggest that the real motivation behind this is political, either to drive a wedge in the Democratic party or to give himself a boost back home.”
Other shows of support
Democrats keen to show their support for Israel but not Netanyahu are organizing alternative events Wednesday. That includes a meeting with the families of Israeli hostages organized by Clyburn, House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, House Rules ranking member Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, House Oversight and Accountability ranking member Jamie Raskin of Maryland, and House Veterans Affairs ranking member Mark Takano of California.
Additional lawmakers such as Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., also intend to meet with the Israeli family members.
“He and a bunch of other members are meeting with family members who were taken hostage, and his guest is a family member of a former hostage,” Matt Handverger, Pocan’s communications director, said.
As for Democrats who decide to attend the speech but choose to protest it in some way, Johnson has threatened to have them arrested.
“We’re going to have extra sergeants-at-arms on the floor. If anybody gets out of hand … we’re going to arrest people if we have to do it,” the speaker said last week at an event organized by the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Handverger called that a “a threat on the First Amendment.”
More centrist pro-Israel organizations such as Democratic Majority for Israel are urging Democratic lawmakers to hold their nose and just get through the speech to avoid deepening public perceptions about how large the divide has grown inside the party over support for Israel.
“Democrats sat and listened to what Donald Trump had to say over and over again when he came to speak before Congress (for his State of the Union addresses),” said DMFI President Mark Mellman. “I don’t think going to listen to him is endorsing him, either.”
Mellman said it would be a “serious mistake” for Netanyahu to use his speech to take “potshots” at Democrats, but he was hopeful the prime minister would instead strike a tone of unity and appreciation for the significant diplomatic and military assistance the Biden administration has provided to Israel.
(John T. Bennett and Justin Papp contributed to this report.)
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal gun control law that is intended to protect victims of domestic violence.
In their first Second Amendment case since they expanded gun rights in 2022, the justices ruled 8-1 in favor of a 1994 ban on firearms for people under restraining orders to stay away from their spouses or partners. The justices reversed a ruling from the federal appeals court in New Orleans that had struck down the law.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, said the law uses “common sense” and applies only “after a judge determines that an individual poses a credible threat” of physical violence.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the author of the 2022 Bruen ruling in a New York case, dissented.
Last week, the court overturned a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, the rapid-fire gun accessories used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The court ruled that the Justice Department exceeded its authority in imposing that ban.
Friday’s case stemmed directly from the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision in June 2022. A Texas man, Zackey Rahimi, was accused of hitting his girlfriend during an argument in a parking lot and later threatening to shoot her.
At arguments in November, some justices voiced concern that a ruling for Rahimi could also jeopardize the background check system that the Biden administration said has stopped more than 75,000 gun sales in the past 25 years based on domestic violence protective orders.
The case also had been closely watched for its potential to affect cases in which other gun ownership laws have been called into question, including in the high-profile prosecution of Hunter Biden. President Joe Biden’s son was convicted of lying on a form to buy a firearm while he was addicted to drugs. His lawyers have signaled they will appeal.
A decision to strike down the domestic violence gun law might have signaled the court’s skepticism of the other laws as well. But Friday’s decision did not suggest that the court would necessarily uphold those law either.
The justices could weigh in soon in one or more of those other cases.
Many of the gun law cases grow out of the Bruen decision. That high court ruling not only expanded Americans’ gun rights under the Constitution but also changed the way courts are supposed to evaluate restrictions on firearms.
Roberts turned to history in his opinion. “Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” he wrote.
Rahimi’s case reached the Supreme Court after prosecutors appealed a ruling that threw out his conviction for possessing guns while subject to a restraining order.
Rahimi was involved in five shootings over two months in and around Arlington, Texas, U.S. Circuit Judge Cory Wilson noted. When police identified Rahimi as a suspect in the shootings and showed up at his home with a search warrant, he admitted having guns in the house and being subject to a domestic violence restraining order that prohibited gun possession, Wilson wrote.
But even though Rahimi was hardly “a model citizen,” Wilson wrote, the law at issue could not be justified by looking to history. That’s the test Justice Thomas laid out in his opinion for the court in Bruen.
The appeals court initially upheld the conviction under a balancing test that included whether the restriction enhances public safety. But the panel reversed course after Bruen. At least one district court has upheld the law since the Bruen decision.
Advocates for domestic violence victims and gun control groups had called on the court to uphold the law.
Firearms are the most common weapon used in homicides of spouses, intimate partners, children or relatives in recent years, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Guns were used in more than half, 57%, of those killings in 2020, a year that saw an overall increase in domestic violence during the coronavirus pandemic.
Seventy women a month, on average, are shot and killed by intimate partners, according to the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety.
Gun rights groups backed Rahimi, arguing that the appeals court got it right when it looked at American history and found no restriction close enough to justify the gun ban.
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