ReportWire

Tag: political platforms and issues

  • Kevin McCarthy opens impeachment inquiry without passing budget despite once criticizing Democrats for the same | CNN Politics

    Kevin McCarthy opens impeachment inquiry without passing budget despite once criticizing Democrats for the same | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    In 2019, then-Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vehemently criticized Democrats for initiating an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump without first passing a budget and securing government funding to prevent a shutdown.

    Fast forward four years later and McCarthy, now the House Speaker, is pushing ahead with a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden while in the midst of another budget crisis and an unresolved looming government shutdown.

    McCarthy called for the inquiry, even as House Republicans have yet to prove allegations that Biden profited off of his son’s foreign business dealings, to appease far-right members of the Republican caucus who have threatened his speakership.

    In 2019, McCarthy said Democrats were prioritizing a politically-driven impeachment of Trump over the government’s basic responsibilities.

    “This is the day that Alexander Hamilton feared and warned would come,” he said at a news conference on December 5, 2019. “This is the day the nation is weaker because they surely cannot put their animosity or their fear of losing an election in the future in front of all the other things that the American people want.”

    “They don’t even have a budget,” he added. Congress passed a spending package two a few weeks later, averting a government shutdown.

    McCarthy did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    Now Congress faces a looming deadline at the end of the month to fund the government and some conservative members of the Republican caucus say they will not support a bill that doesn’t contain spending cuts.

    In comments made on radio shows and in press conferences in 2019 reviewed by CNN’s KFile, McCarthy repeatedly said Democrats’ actions demeaned the impeachment process to a point that every subsequent president could be impeached – something he said he hoped wouldn’t happen.

    “This is exactly what Alexander Hamilton warned us about, that with impeachment, that you would have a party actually grab it and, and not worry about the rule of law, but just the animosity that you have. And I’ve never seen the animosity in our lifetime,” said McCarthy to California local radio station KERN in late December 2019. “I’m sure there’s been animosity like this before, but not to this level. And maybe social media and other things drive it.

    “And if you, and if you lower it to this level, when they ended up with just those two articles, every president would’ve been impeached. And what does it mean for the future? Have we, have we now demeaned impeachment so low that everybody’s gonna have this?” he added.

    “Sometimes something happens so bad we need to learn from and come back from at this moment in time,” McCarthy continued. “I hope that’s the moment of where we are.”

    Trump was impeached for the first time by the House of Representatives in 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The impeachment proceedings were initiated after allegations that he solicited foreign interference from Ukraine to benefit his 2020 reelection campaign and obstructed the subsequent congressional investigation.

    Trump was acquitted by the Senate in early 2020.

    McCarthy made similar comments at a press conference in November 2019.

    “I think what Republicans are doing is standing up for the constitution,” said McCarthy. “I think it’s the same thing that Alexander Hamilton warned us about, that you would use it for political gain from the same basis of going forward.

    “I think what Republicans are standing up for is the idea of what they ran on. First thing, I think a majority should do is pass a budget, which the Democrats have not done. They should actually make sure that they fund the government, which we have not done. We’re working to now have another continuing resolution, so our troops are not being provided the resources they need or the pay raise that they have earned.”

    McCarthy also lamented that impeachment has “overtaken every single committee” and emphasized “what is not being done in Congress.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Supreme Court allows Biden administration to continue fully enforcing ghost gun regulations | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court allows Biden administration to continue fully enforcing ghost gun regulations | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Biden administration to continue regulating so-called ghost guns – untraceable homemade weapons – as firearms under federal law.

    The court’s brief order grants the Justice Department’s request to wipe away a lower court order and allow the regulations to remain in effect while a legal challenge brought by firearm manufacturers continues to play out in the lower courts.

    There were no noted dissents to the order.

    Ghost guns are kits that a user can buy online to assemble a fully functional firearm. They have no serial numbers, do not require background checks and provide no transfer records for easy traceability. Critics say they are attractive to people who are legally prohibited from buying firearms.

    In the Justice Department’s emergency application to the justices, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar pointed out that a district court judge had essentially ignored an order the Supreme Court issued just two months ago.

    Back in August, a 5-4 court sided with the Biden administration in a challenge brought by a group of manufacturers and allowed the regulations to remain in effect while legal challenges play out. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the liberal justices in the government’s favor.

    After the order was issued, however, a district court judge based in Texas stepped in to block the regulations as applied to two manufacturers. The injunction was then largely upheld by the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

    In an unusually sharp filing, Prelogar told the justices in an emergency application that the district court and the 5th Circuit “have effectively countermanded this Court’s authoritative determination about the status quo that should prevail during appellate proceedings in this case.”

    The court “should not tolerate that affront,” she wrote.

    “Although there’s no explanation for today’s ruling, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a repudiation of the lower courts for not correctly reading the tea leaves of the court’s August ruling that froze a similar injunction,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “In that sense, it’s just the latest in an increasing line of rulings by the Supreme Court pushing back against district courts in Texas and the 5th Circuit.”

    Prelogar called the lower court ruling “a grave threat to public safety because the lack of background checks makes ghost guns uniquely appealing to felons, minors, and other prohibited persons – and because when ghost guns are inevitably used in crime, they are essentially impossible to trace.”

    In 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives updated its regulations to define the kits as firearms under the law so that the government could more carefully track them.

    The rule does not prohibit the sale or possession of any ghost gun kit, nor does it block an individual from purchasing such a kit. Instead, it requires compliance with federal laws that impose conditions on the commercial sale of firearms. Those conditions include requirements that commercial manufacturers and sellers mark products with serial numbers and keep records to allow law enforcement to trace firearms used in crimes.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • House Republicans are making a gamble with a possible Jim Jordan speakership | CNN Politics

    House Republicans are making a gamble with a possible Jim Jordan speakership | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    If House Republicans elect hard-charging Jim Jordan as speaker on Tuesday, they will be picking an election denier who is known for working to shut down the government rather than running it.

    The party would be ending its two-week speakership debacle, but it’d be elevating a ringleader in former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election into a position that is second in the line of succession behind President Joe Biden.

    A Jordan speakership would represent a huge victory for Trump, given the Judiciary chairman’s record of using his power to target Democratic presidential candidates, including Biden and 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton. Before the midterm elections last year, for instance, Jordan said at the Conservative Political Action Conference that he’d use probes into the Biden administration to “frame up the 2024 race” for Trump.

    He has been as good as his word, working to highlight the ex-president’s claims that the federal government has been “weaponized” against him in an effort to distract from the four criminal trials the GOP front-runner is now facing. And Jordan has been a prominent player in the impeachment investigation opened against Biden, despite the failure of the GOP to provide evidence that the president personally profited from the business ventures of his son in places like China and Ukraine.

    Jordan’s hopes of becoming speaker increased dramatically over the weekend as he began to turn holdouts amid an intense lobbying campaign. Some key moderates who had previously said they wouldn’t back the Ohio Republican had changed course by Monday. But given the tiny House GOP majority, Jordan can only lose a small number of Republicans and still win the job in a vote in the full House, which is expected at noon on Tuesday. Florida Rep. Gus Bilirakis will be away from the Capitol on Tuesday, further complicating the vote math for Jordan, making it so that he can only lose three Republicans.

    But this is a temporary drop until the Florida congressman returns to Washington on Tuesday evening.

    Several high-profile dissidents still insist they will only vote for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy or are firmly against Jordan, who co-founded the conservative Freedom Caucus that was instrumental in the demise of the last three Republican speakers. Jordan’s opponents have cited his role in the run-up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection – when he discussed plans to object to the results – and have concerns that his hardline positions could alienate crucial swing voters next year.

    If Jordan wins the speakership, his reputation for resistance to compromise is likely to immediately fuel fresh fears of a government shutdown caused by Republican demands for massive spending cuts. Facing a right-wing revolt, McCarthy was forced to use Democratic votes to pass a stopgap funding measure. And he paid for his effort to stave off a national crisis, which could have hurt millions of Americans, with his job. Jordan has been among the right-wing Republicans who want to use their power to bulldoze through their agenda despite the fact that Democrats control the Senate and the White House.

    As speaker, Jordan would be in control of half of one of the three branches of the US government – a role that confers duties to the Constitution and the national interest far greater than those that weigh on individual members. By definition, he’d be an insider after years as an insurgent, a switch that could be a challenge. Fellow Ohioan and former Republican House Speaker John Boehner told CBS News in a 2021 interview referring to Jordan: “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart – never building anything, never putting anything together.”

    A Jordan victory would mark one of the most significant milestones in Washington Republicans’ embrace of an extreme right-wing populist, nationalist ideology that is more dedicated to tearing political institutions down than using them to forge change. And it would reward the eight Republicans who voted with Democrats to topple McCarthy. More broadly, it would remove power from the party’s traditional Washington, DC, political establishment, which many of the party’s grassroots voters despise, and place the Freedom Caucus at the pinnacle of power in the House.

    The shift toward Jordan over the weekend, however, may also reflect a realization by lawmakers that the optics of continued chaos in the House are disastrous for the party and sends a message of American weakness amid a raging crisis in the Middle East.

    New York Rep. Marc Molinaro, who represents a district Biden would have won in 2020 under redrawn lines, announced Monday evening that he’s backing Jordan. “What I care deeply about is getting back to governing. And having been home over the weekend, I can tell you that most people I talk to just want us to fight inflation, just want us to secure the border, just want us to govern on their behalf. And truly they just want this House to function,” he told CNN.

    And if there is anyone who could keep far-right flamethrowers in line, it is Jordan. After all, he’s one of them. If wins the speakership, he’d potentially face a choice whether to at least seek a modicum of governance to show voters that the GOP can get results ahead of the 2024 election. Just as President Richard Nixon had the political cover as a hardline anti-Communist to forge an opening to Maoist China, Jordan might have more leeway than other potential Republican leaders to make painful concessions and keep his hardliners in line.

    But choosing Jordan to end the impasse would also represent a huge risk for the GOP. His close alliance with Trump, who has endorsed the Ohio Republican for the top job, could alienate moderate voters in districts that paved the way to the party’s narrow majority in last year’s midterms. His record of full bore confrontation could exacerbate a showdown with the Democratic Senate and the White House over spending that could shut down the government by the middle of November and cause a backlash against Republicans.

    And the qualities that his supporters see in Jordan – the fearsome use of power to drum up investigations against political opponents and a pugilistic refusal to find middle ground – are not those traditionally associated with successful speakers. Jordan has no history of bringing disparate factions of his party together – quite the opposite. His brand of politics is built around his history as a champion wrestler in college. “I look at it like a wrestling match,” Jordan told the New York Times earlier this year, referring to his staccato interrogations of witnesses in hearings that made him a hero on conservative media and a Trump favorite.

    Another knock on Jordan is that he’s not known as a prolific fundraiser – one of the most important jobs of a party leader in the House. McCarthy was known for his lucrative hauls that he used to boost candidates and foster loyalty from his supporters. In fact, Jordan has actively worked against some fellow members in the past, with the political arm of the Freedom Caucus backing primary challengers to 10 GOP incumbents over the last few cycles.

    The job of the House has traditionally been to pass laws. And by that measure, Jordan is one of the least effective legislators of his generation, according to the Center For Effective Lawmaking, a joint project of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University.

    Still, Jordan’s supporters worked to mitigate his liabilities heading into a floor vote that would force opponents to publicly renounce him at the risk of drawing primary challenges. House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers of Alabama, who had been vehemently anti-Jordan, flipped after what he described as “two cordial, thoughtful and productive” conversations with the prospective speaker and securing his support for a strong defense bill. Sources familiar with Jordan’s pitch to the GOP conference told CNN’s Annie Grayer and Melanie Zanona Monday that the Ohio congressman had promised to fundraise hard for Republicans across the country and that he would also do what he could to protect moderates – potentially by ensuring that they don’t face primary challenges next year from hardline pro-Trump candidates.

    However, Zanona and Grayer also reported that some big GOP donors had vowed not to invest in the House majority under Jordan and would instead concentrate their resources on flipping the Senate next year. That GOP coolness highlights how a 2024 Republican slate featuring Trump, the front-runner for the presidential nomination, and Jordan as the most powerful Republican in Washington could delight Democrats campaigning in the battleground districts that could decide the election.

    Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a swing district in Nebraska, emerged from a meeting of Republican lawmakers on Monday evening resolved not to support Jordan, after expressing concerns that handing him the speaker’s gavel would represent a victory for the hardliners who ended McCarthy’s tenure. Bacon said he was inclined to vote for McCarthy even though the former speaker is not standing, at least in a first ballot. “I’m going to vote tomorrow and we’ll take it after that one at a time,” Bacon said.

    Another anti-McCarthy holdout is Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, who has said “part of” the reason he is opposed to Jordan is his behavior after the 2020 election. According to the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Jordan was a “significant player” in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and to block the certification of Biden’s victory in Congress, including in multiple conversations with Trump and senior White House officials.

    But some key lawmakers appear to have made their peace with Jordan’s potential speakership, partly because of the damage being done to the GOP and their potential reelection prospects by self-indulgent internal battles. New York Rep. Mike Lawler, a freshman who is one of the most endangered Republicans next year and has been a strong supporter of McCarthy, called on the House to get back to work. “At the end of the day, we need to get back to the work of the American people,” Lawler told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. He said he told Jordan on Friday that he was not a “hell no” and that he’d only back him if he had the votes to become speaker.

    He shrugged off attacks that are already coming from Democrats over his possible vote for Jordan.

    “They are going to attack me no matter what I do. That’s their job, that’s their objective. They want to get back into the majority,” Lawler told Tapper.

    “My constituents know who I am, they know where I stand on these issues,” Lawler said, noting how he had fought to raise the government’s borrowing limit earlier this year, averting a debt default, and to keep the government open.

    Lawler might be right. But the potential chaos and discord Jordan could sow may give voters fresh reasons to vote against Lawler by November of next year.

    This story has been updated with additional reporting.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • McCarthy says defense spending bill will get a vote this week ‘win or lose’ | CNN Politics

    McCarthy says defense spending bill will get a vote this week ‘win or lose’ | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Sunday that the Defense Department appropriations bill that was paused last week before it even made it to the floor for debate will come up for a vote this week “win or lose.”

    “We will do that this week,” McCarthy said on Fox News, adding “unfortunately I had a handful of members last week that literally stopped the Department of Defense appropriations coming forward,” referring to members of his right flank who have stymied two appropriations bills thus far.

    “I gave them an opportunity this weekend to try to work through this, and we’ll bring it to the floor win or lose,” McCarthy told Maria Bartiromo.

    House Republican leadership was hoping to put a series of standalone spending bills on the floor to try to build consensus and unite the conference, but it’s been a gamble. Leadership was left scrambling over the defense spending bill after one member of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, voted against the bill in the Rules Committee and another, Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina, told CNN he would vote against the rule on the floor.

    Both the debate and the scheduled votes were pulled minutes before the chamber was due to gavel in Wednesday.

    McCarthy on Sunday pointed a finger at the Senate, saying not only does the House have to work with the upper chamber, but that the Senate “blew up last week too. They couldn’t pass anything.”

    “And unfortunately on the Senate side, the Republicans and Democrats over there are writing bills to spend more money. Ours are the most conservative, but if we don’t ask them, we’re weaker in the negotiations. So anytime a Republican wants to hold back and stop the floor from working when Republicans have the majority, that puts us in a weaker position to win in the end of the day,” he said.

    But McCarthy said a government shutdown “would only give strength to the Democrats. It would give the power to Biden.”

    With no serious progress on Capitol Hill as Congress stares down a spending deadline at the end of the month, lawmakers are acknowledging that at this point a government shutdown is not only possible, but may soon be inevitable.

    That’s particularly true if the political dynamics at play among McCarthy, the hardliners in his conference and the US Senate don’t change fast.

    “I want to make sure we don’t shut down. I don’t think that is a win for the American public and I definitely believe that will make (Republicans’) hand weaker,” McCarthy said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Federal deficit effectively doubled in fiscal year 2023 | CNN Politics

    Federal deficit effectively doubled in fiscal year 2023 | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The US budget deficit soared in fiscal year 2023, which will likely complicate Congress’ efforts to come to a federal spending deal before government funding runs out next month.

    The deficit was $1.7 trillion for the most recent fiscal year, which ended September 30, according to Treasury Department data released Friday. That marks a $320 billion, or 23%, increase from the prior fiscal year.

    However, the deficit essentially doubled to about $2 trillion if the impact of President Joe Biden’s federal student debt cancellation plan – which the Supreme Court struck down before it took effect – is not included.

    The US Treasury Department listed the fiscal year 2022 deficit as $1.4 trillion because it took into account the cost of the president’s proposal. Without it, the deficit would have been closer to $1 trillion.

    The agency then logged the overturning of the cancellation plan as a savings for fiscal year 2023, which reduced the size of the deficit to $1.7 trillion.

    “We are a nation addicted to debt,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “With the economy growing and unemployment near record lows, this was the time to instill fiscal responsibility and reduce our deficits.”

    The nation’s hefty debt load will become even costlier in coming years as interest payments rise.

    “We are seeing in real time the painful combination of rising debt, inflation and interest costs, all leading to even more debt,” said Michael Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to raise awareness of the US’ long-term fiscal challenges. “Interest costs rose almost 40% last year, and soon we’ll spend more on interest than we do on national defense.”

    Also contributing to the growth in the deficit was a sizable drop in tax revenue.

    More than 40% of the jump was attributable to lower tax revenues, according to Bernard Yaros, lead US economist for Oxford Economics. Individual income tax receipts plummeted because a weak stock market in 2022 resulted in lower capital gains and because the Internal Revenue Service extended the tax deadlines for much of California and parts of Alabama and Georgia due to natural disasters.

    In addition, increased spending on entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare, as well as on Medicaid accounted for just over a quarter of the widening in the budget shortfall, Yaros said. The growing number of Social Security beneficiaries and the inflation-fueled 8.7% cost-of-living adjustment for 2023 contributed to the rise in expenditures.

    The annual deficit data will likely factor into Congress’ already-fraught negotiations over funding federal agencies for fiscal year 2024. Lawmakers passed a stopgap spending measure on September 30, just before the federal government was set to shut down. It extended federal funding until November 17.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • House Democrats weigh risky strategy: Whether to save McCarthy | CNN Politics

    House Democrats weigh risky strategy: Whether to save McCarthy | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    House Democrats have begun internal discussions about how to deal with the prospects of a chaotic situation: The possibility that Speaker Kevin McCarthy could lose his job in an unprecedented vote on the floor.

    While no decisions have been made, some of the party’s moderates are privately signaling they’d be willing to cut a deal to help McCarthy stave off a right-wing revolt – as long as the speaker meets their own demands.

    Publicly, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has not weighed in on how he’d want his members to manage a challenge to McCarthy’s speakership, saying it’s hypothetical at this point. But privately, Jeffries has counseled his members to keep their powder dry, according to multiple sources, a recognition it’s better for Democrats to keep their options open as the government funding fight plays outs.

    “If somehow Democrats are asked to be helpful, it’s not just going to have to be out of the kindness of our hearts,” Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan, told CNN. “If Kevin can’t govern with just his part – which clearly he can’t – and he wants to have a conversation with us about how to do that, we are going to have a policy conversation.”

    Asked recently by CNN if he would need to rely on Democrats to help save him, McCarthy would not say.

    “I am not worried about that,” he said.

    The private discussions have picked up steam in recent days, as a handful of hardline GOP members dig in against a series of spending bills – an effort that could catapult the government into a shutdown – and as any move the speaker takes to advance a short-term spending bill with Democrats could trigger the end of his speakership.

    If McCarthy’s position was threatened with a so-called motion to vacate, and there were five Republicans backing it, Democrats would have a major role in deciding McCarthy’s fate.

    But members who spoke to CNN made clear that any Democratic help would come at a cost. And their asking price for saving his speakership, Democratic members say, is a bipartisan deal to avoid a shutdown – a route McCarthy is not yet prepared to take, as Republicans are still trying to find consensus on a GOP plan to fund the government.

    “I think it is fair to say Democrats have a responsibility to be preparing for the possibility that there will be some sort of upheaval,” one Democratic member told CNN.

    One of the strategies being discussed by Democrats is to vote “present” or vote to kill it all together if a motion to oust McCarthy is brought to the floor. Voting present would change the threshold and make it harder for McCarthy’s critics to oust him, which would require a majority of those voting in order to succeed.

    It’s a complicated dance for Democrats, who don’t want to be seen as saving McCarthy – especially after he just launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden – and could open them up to backlash on the left. But some Democrats also fear the potential alternative: a government shutdown and the prospect of an even more right-wing lawmaker ascending to the speakership if McCarthy is ousted – or the House being paralyzed with no candidate able to win 218 votes to be elected speaker.

    “If he just jams us with something awful, and they still try to kill him, and that’s gonna be his approach to work with the Freedom Caucus, there’s less incentive (to help him),” said one Democrat. “Still, even then, you’re gonna have a lot of people who say: ‘Well I think what’s behind door No. 3 might be a lot worse.’”

    “I think if he’s willing to work together on things,” the member said, adding, “There will be enough of us to protect him.”

    It’s still not clear when or if McCarthy’s detractors would try and push the issue. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida – one of McCarthy’s most vocal critics – would not specify Wednesday when he would move to force a vote on removing McCarthy as speaker. But he warned McCarthy against working with Democrats, and said House Republicans who work with Democrats to avoid a shutdown would be signing their own “political death warrant.”

    “If Speaker McCarthy relies on Democrats to pass a continuing resolution, I would call the Capitol moving truck to his office pretty soon because my expectation would be he’d be out of the speaker’s office quite promptly,” said Gaetz, who privately told his colleagues Wednesday there are seven Republicans who would vote against any stop-gap measure, enough to kill it if all Democrats oppose a conservative plan.

    With less than two weeks before a government shutdown, Democrats are watching the speaker’s actions carefully on spending and taking whether McCarthy is willing to cut his right flank lose in pursuit of a bipartisan deal on spending – short-handed on Capitol Hill as a continuing resolution or a CR – into consideration for how they’d act on the floor if a motion to vacate were brought forward.

    “If we were actually part of the deal, like actually part of a commonsense agreement on CR and budget, I think you would find a significant group of people willing to vote present,” one Democrat said.

    Meanwhile, as frustration in the GOP has reached a fever pitch, private talks between moderate Democrats and Republicans about a bipartisan funding deal have grown more serious: the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus has developed a framework for a plan, and Jeffries stopped by their meeting on Wednesday.

    Leaving the meeting, Jeffries called for a bipartisan agreement in line with what was already negotiated in the debt ceiling package – a deal cut by McCarthy but later abandoned amid pressure from his right flank to seek deeper cuts.

    “We need to find a bipartisan agreement consistent with what was previously reached,” he said.

    But the mechanism for putting such a bill on the floor is complicated. One possible option is for GOP members of the group to sign onto a so-called discharge petition, a complicated and time-consuming procedural mechanism. If five Republicans did so, it would trigger a process that could force the bill onto the floor for a vote without McCarthy having to do it. But that process would likely take too long at this point to avert a shutdown.

    Members are also discussing other procedural options with the House parliamentarian, lawmakers told CNN.

    “Failure is not an option. We’re gonna do everything we can to prevent a shutdown,” said Republican Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a swing district in Nebraska.

    Bacon warned that he would cut a deal with Democrats if they reach an impasse with conservative hardliners.

    “Well, in the end, if not, we will have to work across the aisle and get it done. I think people got that message,” he said.

    But the growing consensus is that with time running out, the most viable path to avoid a government shutdown is for the speaker to cut his right flank loose and make a deal with the middle – and then Democrats could bail McCarthy out from the inevitable vote to oust him that would be triggered by that scenario.

    Democrats considering bailing out McCarthy say it wouldn’t necessarily stop there.

    “We are having pretty broad conversations about like, use your imagination in terms of how you re-envision … this place is not working,” the member said. “I don’t think it would ever be as transactional as ‘OK, I get a vote on my bill and I am done …’ because you can’t trust him. I think then it becomes everything from what is committee presentation to how bills get pulled to the floor and how are those decisions made?”

    An opportunity to extract concessions from McCarthy, however, likely would never be enough for some Democrats. For Democrats, extending a lifeline to McCarthy could mean facing a primary challenge back home, not to mention the fact that any goodwill McCarthy might have still had with some Democrats evaporated with his announcement he was launching an impeachment inquiry into Biden.

    “There is not a chance in hell I would vote for the speaker. I barely have words. What reasonable thing has he done? What demonstrable outreach has he made to try to bring the House together, to work together in a deliberative and cooperative way,” Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida told CNN. “The real answer is I don’t see a scenario right now in which he would warrant my support, but I also would never say never.”

    Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota recently said “right now, no,” he and other Democrats would not come to McCarthy’s rescue if he faced a motion to vacate from his own party.

    “If you’d asked about two months ago I would have said absolutely. But I think sadly his behavior is unprincipled, it’s unhelpful to the country,” he said.

    He continued later: “I understand the position he’s in but these are times when people have to make a choice. Do you pander to the few or do you take care of the many?”

    Several Democrats argued that past Republican speakers – like Paul Ryan or John Boehner – may have been worth saving. But McCarthy, they argue is different.

    If McCarthy were challenged, it may only take a handful of Democrats to save him. Aside from voting “present,” they could also just vote to table the resolution – a procedural workaround that would essentially kill the effort. But, letting members walk the plank alone could be politically dangerous for moderates. Voting in total Democratic unison could shield members from the base.

    “I think we need to have a party position on it. I don’t think that has been resolved yet. It is still evolving,” Democratic Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts told CNN.

    Many Democrats are still weighing their options.

    “You know there are so many variables right now, I really don’t have an answer,” Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania told CNN.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • How the ‘uniparty’ myth shut the House down | CNN Politics

    How the ‘uniparty’ myth shut the House down | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]

    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    Republicans’ House speaker morass continued Tuesday with a little help from former President Donald Trump.

    Yet another lawmaker with support from most House Republicans – Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who was picked as their party’s nominee – failed to get the support of nearly all Republicans. He dropped out of the running Tuesday afternoon, leaving Republicans again back at square one.

    Emmer, who supports military aid to Ukraine and who voted to certify the 2020 election, saw his chances fade in the most bizarre possible way hours after being picked.

    Trump lobbied against Emmer with a social media post that hit while Emmer was trying to convince a few dozen skeptics on Capitol Hill and Trump was inside a New York courtroom facing civil fraud charges. Trump later told reporters outside the courtroom, “It looks like he’s finished.”

    After one fired speaker and three failed candidates who got majority but not universal support, no one seems currently capable of uniting their tiny House majority – and the idea of getting help from Democrats remains, for now, unthinkable to both Republicans and Democrats.

    It’s a situation that highlights not only Republican divisions, but also the bright line between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

    But it’s important to note that it was born of a fringe protest meant to demonstrate there’s no difference at all between the two parties.

    The term “uniparty” has been a favorite of people like Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House official turned podcaster. He’s been using it for years in conjunction with the similarly cynical idea of Washington as a swamp that needs to be drained or the belief in a deep state that needs to be rooted out.

    Bannon’s goal is to mobilize support for dismantling the current version of the US government.

    The term also features prominently in the more-conservative-than-Fox-News media environment – networks like One America News, known as OAN, and Salem Radio.

    “Right now, we are governed by a uniparty,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican, told the former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka in a September interview on the right-wing Salem News Channel in which he argued then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy was in cahoots with President Joe Biden and the Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Gaetz posted the interview on his official House website.

    “You’ve got a small band of House conservatives who are fighting, really, in a lot of ways, a political guerrilla war against that uniparty,” Gaetz said. In early October, it was Gaetz who moved to successfully oust McCarthy from the speakership.

    It’s indisputable that government spending has ballooned in recent years and reasonably arguable that it is out of control. But blaming a perceived “uniparty” is oversimplified nonsense.

    Republicans under Trump passed a tax cut bill all by themselves. Democrats under Biden passed a spending bill without help from Republicans.

    Reforming costly programs seems impossible because the two parties rarely work together, not because they secretly collude.

    Multiple Republicans who supported McCarthy have argued Democrats are to blame for the current lack of a speaker because they did not break party ranks and support McCarthy.

    There has been no substantive movement toward a unity speaker of some sort, although it is becoming hard to imagine any Republican getting enough support to become speaker without help from some Democrats.

    The current math is that any Republican can lose the support of only four party comrades and become speaker without Democratic help.

    Another lawmaker who voted to oust McCarthy is Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, who argued back in September that allowing the government to run out of money would not be that bad.

    “Don’t let the DC uniparty scare you into thinking that a government shutdown is the end of the world,” Biggs said on social media in September, before McCarthy used Democratic votes to pass a funding bill.

    This is a line of thinking that will get more attention, perhaps, when the government again faces a funding lapse November 17.

    RELATED: The last time the government faced a funding lapse, just last month, CNN documented how a government shutdown could impact Americans.

    Any potential speaker must find a way to both get the support of people like Gaetz and figure out how to fund the government in a little more than three weeks.

    Emmer’s downfall is yet another cautionary tale. The majority of House Republicans backed Emmer, their fourth choice this year to be speaker, in both secret ballot voting and a behind-closed-doors roll call vote.

    He had been working to convince holdouts when the post opposing him hit Trump’s social media account. For the fringe of the party, counts against Emmer include that he is a supporter of additional funding for Ukraine to repel Russia’s invasion. Foreign aid is a chief target of those who believe there is a uniparty.

    Politico noted back in 2017 that the term has roots on the American left, in the rhetoric of Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate turned Green Party presidential candidate.

    While there is not much polling on the idea of a uniparty, there is a lot of polling about the two main political parties.

    In a Pew Research Center survey published in September, just 10% of Americans said they saw “hardly any” difference between the parties. A larger portion of the country – 25% – does not feel either party represents the interests of people like them, but that sentiment is held by roughly equal shares of Republicans and Democrats.

    Similarly, about a quarter of both Republican and Republican-leaning voters and Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters do not feel well-represented by their parties.

    Interestingly, despite gripes about a uniparty by the Republican fringe, Republicans are less likely than Democrats to express an interest in more party choices, according to Pew’s survey.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What could happen if the government shuts down | CNN Politics

    What could happen if the government shuts down | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The prospect of a US government shutdown grows more likely with each passing day as lawmakers have yet to reach a deal to extend funding past a critical deadline at the end of the month.

    Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle are hoping to pass a short-term funding extension to keep the lights on and avert a shutdown. But it’s not at all clear that plan will succeed amid deep divisions over spending between the two parties and policy disagreements over issues such as aid to Ukraine.

    Here’s what to know if the government shuts down and what’s driving the current state of play:

    Government funding expires at the end of the day on Saturday, September 30 when the clock strikes midnight and it becomes October 1, which marks the start of the new fiscal year. (As shorthand, the deadline is commonly described as September 30 at midnight.)

    If Congress fails to pass legislation to renew funding by that deadline, then the federal government will shut down at midnight. Since that would take place over the weekend, the full effects of a shutdown wouldn’t be seen until the start of the work week on Monday.

    In the event of a shutdown, many government operations would come to a halt, but some services deemed “essential” would continue.

    Federal agencies have contingency plans that serve as a roadmap for what will continue and what will stop. For now, agencies still have time to review and update plans and it’s not possible to predict exactly how government operations would be impacted if a shutdown were to take place at the end of the month.

    Government operations and services that continue during a shutdown are activities deemed necessary to protect public safety and national security or considered critical for other reasons. Examples of services that have continued during past shutdowns include border protection, federal law enforcement and air traffic control.

    Federal employees whose work is deemed “non-essential” would be put on furlough, which means that they would not work and would not receive pay during the shutdown. Employees whose jobs are deemed “essential” would continue to work, but they too would not be paid during the shutdown.

    Once a shutdown is over, federal employees who were required to work and those who were furloughed will receive backpay.

    In the past, backpay for furloughed employees was not guaranteed, though Congress could and did act to ensure those workers were compensated for lost wages once a shutdown ended. Now, however, backpay for furloughed workers is automatically guaranteed as a result of legislation led by Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, that was enacted in 2019. Employees deemed “essential” and required to work were already guaranteed backpay after a shutdown prior to the passage of that legislation.

    And federal employees aren’t the only ones who can feel the effects of a shutdown.

    During past shutdowns, national parks have become a major focal point of attention. Although National Park Service sites across the country have been closed during previous government shutdowns, many remained open but severely understaffed under the Trump administration during a shutdown in 2019. Some park sites operated for weeks without park service-provided visitor services such as restrooms, trash collection, facilities or road maintenance.

    “If you’re a government worker, it’s highly disruptive – whether you’re not going to work or whether you are,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. “If you’re somebody who wants to use one of the services that you can’t get access to … it’s highly disruptive. But for many people … all the things that they are expecting and used to seeing of government are still happening and the inconveniences and the kind of wasted time and wasted resources aren’t things that they see and feel directly.”

    There is a deep divide between the House and Senate right now over the effort to reach consensus on and pass full-year spending legislation as House conservative hardliners push for deep spending cuts and controversial policy add-ons that Democrats as well as some Republicans have rejected as too extreme.

    With the funding deadline looming, top lawmakers from both parties hope to pass a short-term funding extension known on Capitol Hill as a continuing resolution or CR for short. These short-term measures are frequently used as a stopgap solution to avert a shutdown and buy more time to try to reach a broader full-year funding deal.

    It’s not clear, however, whether there will be enough consensus to pass even a short-term funding bill out of both chambers before the end of the month as House conservatives rail against the possibility of a stopgap bill and have threatened to vote against one while demanding major policy concessions that have no chance of passing the Senate.

    A fight over aid to Ukraine could also take center stage and further complicate efforts to pass a short-term bill.

    Senate Democrats and Republicans strongly support additional aid to Ukraine, which could be included as part of a stopgap bill, but many House Republicans are reluctant to continue sending aid and do not want to see that attached to a short-term funding bill.

    The White House issued a stark warning this week that a shutdown could threaten crucial federal programs.

    In its warning, the White House estimated 10,000 children would lose access to Head Start programs across the country as the Department of Health and Human Services is prevented from awarding grants during a shutdown, while air traffic controllers and TSA officers would have to work without pay, threatening travel delays across the country. A shutdown would also delay food safety inspections under the Food and Drug Administration.

    “These consequences are real and avoidable – but only if House Republicans stop playing political games with peoples’ lives and catering to the ideological demands of their most extreme, far-right members,” the White House said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Latest wave of migrants at US-Mexico border puts Biden under renewed pressure | CNN Politics

    Latest wave of migrants at US-Mexico border puts Biden under renewed pressure | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A new surge of migrants at the US-Mexico border has placed immense pressure on federal resources and tested President Joe Biden’s border policies only months after going into place, prompting fresh criticism from Republicans and concern within the administration over a politically delicate issue.

    Biden has been plagued by issues on the border since his first months in office when the US faced a surge of unaccompanied migrant children that caught officials flatfooted. Over the last two years, his administration has continued to face fierce pushback from Republicans – and at times, Democrats – over his immigration policies.

    That complicated political landscape was put into sharp focus this week when administration officials were forced to contend with images of migrants crossing into the US in large groups, while also heralding a major move that will make hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans already in the US eligible to work, addressing a major sticking point with allies in New York.

    But the new wave of newcomers – many of whom are from Venezuela – paints a grim outlook for the fall as Biden ramps up his reelection campaign and Republicans continue to hammer the administration over its handling of the border.

    On Thursday, Biden blasted Republicans in Congress during remarks at the 46th Annual Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s Gala in Washington, DC, saying they “continue to undermine our border security” by blocking bipartisan efforts to pass immigration reform.

    “We need our colleagues to act – for decades, immigration reform has been bipartisan in this country,” he said.

    “Unfortunately, MAGA Republicans in Congress spent four years gutting the immigration system under my predecessor,” he added.

    In the absence of immigration reform, the administration has put in place a patchwork of policies to try to stem the flow of migrants journeying to the US southern border amid unprecedented mass migration in the western hemisphere.

    Earlier this year, the administration rolled out new and additional avenues for migrants to enter the US legally, like a mobile app, to keep people from crossing unlawfully. They have also stood up centers in the hemisphere to allow migrants to apply to come to the US.

    But desperation and disinformation from smugglers have prompted migrants to cross anyway. Homeland Security officials are monitoring the situation and while they gave no clear explanation for what prompted the latest surge, they cited poor economies, authoritarian regimes and the climate crisis as forces driving migration.

    This week, US Border Patrol apprehended more than 8,000 migrants daily, according to two Homeland Security officials. That’s up from around 3,500 daily border arrests after the Covid-era border restriction known as Title 42 expired in May and triggered more severe consequences for people who crossed the border illegally.

    The Department of Homeland Security has ramped up capacity in border facilities to accommodate the growing number of migrants, as well as continued to conduct deportation flights of migrants deemed ineligible to stay in the United States. US officials are also coordinating with Mexico to try to drive down crossings.

    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is set to travel to the border on Saturday, going to McAllen, Texas, for a meeting with President Xiomara Castro of Honduras.

    The Department of Defense, for its part, is sending 800 new active-duty personnel to the US-Mexico border, in addition to the 2,500 National Guard members already in place, to provide support to federal authorities.

    The arrival of migrants at the US southern border also affects inner cities, where asylum seekers usually reside as they go through their immigration proceedings, expanding the scope of the issue for the Biden administration.

    The administration addressed a major concern among Democrats this week by making more than 472,000 Venezuelans already in the US eligible for Temporary Protected Status, which provides deportation protections and allows them to work in the US. Democratic allies had urged the White House to speed up the ability for Venezuelans to obtain work authorization so they wouldn’t have to rely on social services.

    “As a result of this decision, immigrants will be temporarily allowed to work, fill needed jobs and support their families while awaiting an asylum determination. The decision will also substantially reduce the cost to New York taxpayers with respect to the sheltering of asylum-seekers,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of whom are New York Democrats, in a statement.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Manchin’s New Hampshire trip will leave Democrats shivering | CNN Politics

    Manchin’s New Hampshire trip will leave Democrats shivering | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin will be back driving Democrats to distraction Monday by appearing in New Hampshire with a group whose exploration of a third-party presidential ticket is stoking fears they could hand the White House to Donald Trump.

    The moderate Democratic senator will take part in a town hall hosted by the group No Labels to help launch a new “common sense” platform on immigration, health care, gun control, the economy and other issues that it believes are being ignored by what it views as two ideological and increasingly extreme main parties.

    Manchin – who’s facing reelection to the Senate next year but has not yet said whether he’ll run – will be in his familiar political sweet spot, staking out ground to the right of his party and attracting a political spotlight he uses to maximize his influence. Last year, for instance, Manchin’s initial refusal to back a massive climate, tax and social safety net planned forced President Joe Biden to scale back and renegotiate a huge piece of his domestic agenda.

    The West Virginia Democrat’s model has served him well with repeated statewide wins in one of the most conservative pro-Trump states in the nation. But he has Democrats doubly nervous – about how any presidential bid could roil Biden’s reelection and how a decision not to seek reelection himself would hand Republicans a Senate seat in 2024.

    Manchin told CNN’s Manu Raju last week that his appearance in the Granite State has nothing to do with any third-party presidential run but is merely about advancing a “dialogue for common sense.” But the senator – who has built a power base by keeping people guessing – added, “I’ve never ruled out anything or ruled in anything,” and he dodged a question about whether an independent ticket could hurt Biden in November 2024.

    No Labels says it is considering a third-party unity ticket with one Republican and one Democrat in November 2024 and will make a final decision next year based on whether its “insurance plan” has a viable chance of victory.

    For now, Manchin’s noncommittal answers are worrying some of his Democratic colleagues. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who represents a swing state Biden won by a sliver of just over 10,000 votes in 2020, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that he has raised the issue of potential third-party candidacies with Manchin.

    “I don’t think No Labels is a political party,” Kelly said. “I mean, this is a few individuals putting dark money behind an organization. And that’s not what our democracy should be about. It should not be about a few rich people,” Kelly said. “I’m obviously concerned about what’s going on here in Arizona and across the country.”

    CNN has reached out to No Labels, a registered non-profit that does not disclose its donors. The group has blasted previous efforts to dispute its right to participate in the political process as undemocratic.

    Democrats are also concerned about a planned third-party run by former Harvard professor and public intellectual Cornel West, who supported independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders during his 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential campaigns. Even if West were to take just a few thousand votes from Biden – for instance, in the key swing state of Georgia – he could still compromise the president’s hopes of victory.

    But West, who is running for the Green Party’s nomination, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday that it was “simply not true” that he could tip the election to Trump, should the ex-president become the GOP nominee. And he accused Democrats of failing to speak up for poor and working people and warned Biden was “leading us toward a Third World War,” in an apparent reference to US support for Ukraine’s attempt to repel Russia’s invasion.

    Doubts about the current 80-year-old president are also fodder for Robert Kennedy Jr.’s bid for the Democratic nomination. He has a history of repeating unfounded conspiracy theories about child vaccines or that man-made chemicals could be making children gay or transgender. Kennedy this weekend became embroiled in new controversy after falsely stating that “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people are “most immune” to Covid-19.

    Growing speculation about a potential third-party challenge in 2024 – despite the futile history of most previous such efforts – is being fueled by public dissatisfaction with the options. Polls show that both Biden and Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, are unpopular. In fact, a rematch between the two is the one race many voters don’t want to see. Anger at the political establishments in both parties – a defining factor of the politics of the first 20 years of the 21st century – is one reason why some political experts believe that there may be substantial running room for a third-party ticket this cycle, even if the obstacles for success are immense.

    The fresh intrigue over the 2024 election also comes as the pace of the campaign heats up. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has failed to meet expectations so far as the main GOP challenger to Trump, polling in second in most national polls but still well behind the former president. DeSantis is showing the classic signs of a pivot. His campaign has shed staffers (a spokesman told CNN the number was fewer than 10), and he’s venturing out of his safe zone of only engaging conservative media. On Tuesday, he will join CNN’s Jake Tapper for an exclusive interview after a campaign event in South Carolina.

    But Trump is upping his efforts to knock his former protege out of the race, even as he deals with the overhang of two criminal indictments. The ex-president claimed on Saturday he was “totally dominating” DeSantis in Florida polls and it was time for his rival to “get home.” Trump’s fundraising lead is cementing his front-runner status following new campaign finance data. An impressive $72 million haul by Biden and the Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, is not yet assuaging all of the Democratic concerns about the president’s reelection prospects.

    No Labels is laying out its platform in a new “Common Sense” booklet that Manchin and Utah’s former Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman will promote in a town hall at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. The platform contains multiple ideas splitting the difference between the Democratic and Republican position on key issues with bipartisan stances anchored to the political center ground.

    On immigration, for instance, the group calls for tighter border controls, a reform of asylum procedures and a path to citizenship for Dreamers, or undocumented migrants brought to the United States as children. On guns, the group wants to uphold the right to bear arms but calls for dangerous weapons to be kept out of the hands of “dangerous people,” including with universal background checks and by closing loopholes that make it easier to buy weapons at gun shows. No Labels also wants better community policing and crackdowns on crime.

    Given the gridlock, anger and dysfunction in Washington, it’s hard to argue that the current political system is working. But many of these solutions are familiar, having been tried by presidents in either party or groups of cross-party senators. Their failure to make it into law both encapsulates the rationale behind a third-party bid to smash Washington’s political deadlock, but also explains the institutional and political barriers to an independent president ever being elected or effective.

    “We think there is an opening today, and if it looks like this a year from now, there could be an opening,” said Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels, in an interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish in May. “To nominate a ticket, we’ve got to clear two pretty high bars, which is the major party nominees need to continue to be really unpopular, but a unity ticket needs to have an outright path to victory.”

    No Labels says it would draw supporters equally from Republicans and Democrats and argues that previous third-party candidacies – for instance, by Green Party nominee Jill Stein, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson – were unsuccessful because voters didn’t believe they could win. (Some Democrats accused Nader in 2000 and Stein in 2016 of siphoning away votes from Democratic nominees Al Gore and Hillary Clinton and opening the way for the GOP to claim the White House).

    The center-left think tank Third Way is warning that a No Labels candidate could be especially dangerous for Biden in the key states that will decide the election. It is highlighting research showing that in 2020, Biden won six of seven states where the margin of victory was three points or less. It argues, therefore, that 79 electoral votes are potentially at risk for Biden from the involvement of a third-party challenger.

    Such a challenger would also need to win states where Biden won big, and at least some conservative bastions. And given that Trump’s deeply loyal voters are unlikely to desert him, a third-party candidate seems more likely to pull from the same pool of anti-Trump Republicans and moderate and independent voters Biden is targeting with a campaign rooted in his warnings against the threat to democracy from Trump’s “Make America Great Again” populism.

    An analysis by CNN’s Harry Enten shows that voters who don’t have a favorable view of either Biden or Trump are more likely to side with the current president in the end. In an average of the past three Quinnipiac University polls, Biden leads Trump by 7 points among those who don’t have a favorable view of either man. A third name on the ballot could complicate this equation.

    There is also the question of whether No Labels – with its condemnation of “two major political parties dominated by angry and extremist voices driven by ideology and identity politics” – is drawing a false equivalency between Republicans and Democrats. Trump, for example, sought to overturn a democratic election in 2020 to stay in power, while Biden has enacted rare bipartisan legislation including over gun safety and infrastructure.

    Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is hoping to thwart Trump’s bid for a third consecutive GOP nomination, warned Sunday that a third-party candidacy could play directly into the former president’s hands. “There are only two people who will get elected president of the United States in November of ’24 – the Republican nominee for president and the Democratic nominee for president,” Christie said on ABC News’ “This Week.”

    “They think they know who they (are) going to hurt. They want to hurt Donald Trump if he’s the nominee. But. … you never quite know who you’re going to hurt in that process.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Federal judge rules Oregon gun law doesn’t violate Second Amendment | CNN Politics

    Federal judge rules Oregon gun law doesn’t violate Second Amendment | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge in Oregon ruled on Friday that a new state gun law does not violate the US Constitution, keeping one of the toughest gun laws in the country in place.

    US District Court Judge Karin Immergut ruled that Ballot Measure 114’s restrictions on large-capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds are constitutional because these magazines are “not commonly used for self-defense, and are therefore not protected by the Second Amendment.”

    “Even if LCMs are protected by the Second Amendment, BM 114’s restrictions are consistent with this Nation’s history and tradition of regulating uniquely dangerous features of weapons and firearms to protect public safety,” the ruling said.

    The law strengthens background checks and prohibits the sale and transfer of ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds. It also closes the “Charleston Loophole,” which allows gun purchases to move forward by default after three days even if a background check has not been completed. The law also requires state police to complete background checks on individuals before a gun sale or transfer is made.

    Since passing in November, the measure has faced a number of legal challenges, with the NRA’s legislative action arm lamenting it as “the nation’s most extreme gun control Initiative.”

    But Immergut’s ruling maintains that while the Second Amendment does protect against “bearable arms” as listed in the US Constitution, large-capacity magazines are a “subset of magazines” – and therefore, not considered a bearable arm.

    “Magazines are an accessory to firearms, rather than a specific type of firearm,” Immergut said. “At the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification through to the late nineteenth century, firearm accessories like cartridge boxes – which held ammunition but, unlike modern magazines, did not feed the ammunition into firearms – were not considered ‘arms’ but instead were considered ‘accouterments,’” the ruling said.

    The measure is one of several gun control laws that passed in 2022, the second-highest year for mass shootings in the United States on record.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Baltimore investigators searching for suspects in block party mass shooting that killed 2 and injured 28 others | CNN

    Baltimore investigators searching for suspects in block party mass shooting that killed 2 and injured 28 others | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Investigators in Baltimore are searching for multiple suspects in a mass shooting that turned a beloved annual neighborhood block party into chaos early Sunday, killing two people and injuring 28 others, most of whom were teens, officials said.

    The search for the shooters – investigators believe at least two were involved in the incident – is ongoing, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN Monday, vowing, “We will not rest until we find those who cowardly decided to shoot up this block party and carry out acts of violence which we know will be illegal guns.”

    Officials are combing through “every single lead, every minute, every second of footage, everything that we have to find out who decided to disrupt this peaceful event in this way,” Scott said on “CNN This Morning.”

    The gunfire erupted early Sunday in the south Baltimore neighborhood of Brooklyn, where community members were enjoying a yearly celebration dubbed Brooklyn Day.

    Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, whose surname police initially spelled ending with an ‘s,’ and Kylis Fagbemi, 20, were fatally shot, the Baltimore Police Department announced.

    The dozens of surviving victims all sustained gunshot wounds, according to acting Police Commissioner Richard Worley. Five of those injured were adults aged 20 or older and the remaining 23 were teenagers ranging in age from 13 to 19, police said.

    Seven of the wounded remain in hospitals, with four in critical condition and three in stable condition, the mayor noted.

    Investigators are scouring the sprawling crime scene – which spans several blocks – for evidence and are poring over hours of surveillance footage, the police commissioner said. Officials have also urged community members to come forward with any relevant information or video footage that may assist in the investigation.

    A reward for information leading to the capture of the suspects has been raised to $28,000, Worley said at a news conference Monday.

    Police began receiving calls reporting the shooting around 12:30 a.m. Sunday, according to Worley.

    As officers arrived on the scene, they found an 18-year-old woman – later identified as Gonzalez – dead, police said. A 20-year-old identified as Fagbemi was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

    An ice cream truck was parked directly across from where Gonzalez was shot and killed. The truck’s driver, Keith, who declined to give his last name, told CNN he watched her collapse on the stairs as hundreds of people ran for cover.

    Keith said he told his children to lay down on the floor of the truck and wait for the rounds of shooting to stop.

    “I walked over to [Gonzalez], checked her pulse, straightened her out, tried to start doing CPR but she was already dead,” he said.

    Some who suffered gunshot injuries took shelter inside the ice cream truck. On Monday morning, blood was still on the ground near the truck’s parking spot.

    Keith said he could not see where the gunshots were coming from. He said there were no disruptions at the block party before the shooting started.

    He said his two daughters, 13 and 18 years old, are “fine but extremely stressed out.”

    Investigators have yet to determine a motive in the attack and are still figuring out whether the victims were targeted or indiscriminately shot at, the police commissioner said. As officers canvassed the neighborhood during the day Sunday, K-9 units located additional shell casings that had not been found overnight, he said.

    Staff at MedStar Harbor Hospital were expecting a routine overnight shift when they were met with the arrival of several patients with traumatic gunshot wounds, Dr. Hania Habeeb, associate chair of the emergency department, said at a news conference Monday.

    Habeeb said the hospital received 19 patients within an hour, 14 of whom were teenagers. Many of the patients were minors, brought in by family and loved ones who were “appropriately concerned,” she said.

    “We didn’t know if we were safe. We didn’t know if the shooter or shooters were right outside of our hospital doors,” Habeeb said.

    The hospital went on immediate lockdown to ensure safety while staff performed lifesaving procedures to stabilize the victims. Habeeb added 10 patients were transferred to Baltimore trauma centers.

    The attack marks one of the latest acts of gun violence to thrust an American community into grief as they gather in everyday spaces, including parks, schools, shopping malls and grocery stores.

    “This was a reckless, cowardly act of violence that has taken two lives and altered many, many more,” Scott said. “This tragic incident is another glaring, unfortunate example of the deep issues of violence in Baltimore, in Maryland and this country and particularly gun violence and the access to illegal guns.”

    Just three days into the month, it is one of five mass shootings in July and one of 340 mass shootings in the US in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The archive, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter.

    “These weapons come from Virginia, they come from Texas, they come from Florida, they come from Alabama, they come from everywhere in this country,” Scott said.

    “We have to deal with this issue of guns and the flow of illegal guns into the hands of people who should not have them at the national level,” he added.

    The National Rifle Association sued Maryland Gov. Wes Moore after he signed the Gun Safety Act of 2023 and other gun safety measures into law in May, court documents show.

    Members of the Kingdom Life Church pray at the site of a mass shooting in the Brooklyn Homes neighborhood on July 2, 2023.

    The block party was held as an annual celebration of the Brooklyn neighborhood. Scott called on the public to think of the shooting as if it happened in a rural community. “When it happens in Baltimore, Chicago or DC it doesn’t get that same attention,” he said.

    “These Black American lives, children’s lives, matter just as anyone else,” he added.

    Scott described the Brooklyn neighborhood as a working-class community filled with “immense pride.”

    “It is a neighborhood that has had its troubles, but a neighborhood that has seen some folks in that community really determined to see it be successful and see things turn around,” he added.

    There were “at least a couple hundred people” at the event Saturday, Worley said at Monday’s news conference, describing it as “unpermitted,” emphasizing no organizers had filed paperwork with the city.

    Asked about whether police had been appropriately staffed for the event, Worley said the annual celebration happens on a different Saturday each year. In the past, law enforcement was able to discover the date of the event in advance to prepare resources.

    But this year, police did not learn of the event until the day of, Worley said. “As far as I know, no one notified BPD that Brooklyn Day was happening on July 1st.”

    “Unfortunately, we didn’t get there in time to prevent what happened.”

    Mayor Scott said Sunday his office is mobilizing every available resource to assist with the investigation, including distributing information about community-based services available to residents in the Brooklyn Homes area, which he described as a public housing facility.

    Yvonne Booker, a resident of Brooklyn Homes, told CNN affiliate WBAL she’s lived in the area for three decades and feels the gun violence has reached a breaking point.

    “It’s kind of hard for me. I’m a mother. They need to stop. It’s too much. I’ve been to so many funerals in this community,” Booker said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Federal judge slams Supreme Court in gun case while reluctantly ruling in favor of convicted felon | CNN Politics

    Federal judge slams Supreme Court in gun case while reluctantly ruling in favor of convicted felon | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge in Mississippi ruled in favor of a convicted felon in a gun case on Wednesday while simultaneously slamming a recent landmark Second Amendment decision that expanded gun rights and changed the framework lower courts must use as they analyze firearm restrictions.

    In his ruling, Judge Carlton Reeves, an Obama appointee who has previously been critical of the Supreme Court decision, dismissed a federal criminal case against a man prosecuted for possessing a firearm despite a past felony conviction prohibiting further gun ownership. The apparent reluctant decision announced by Reeves in his 77-page opinion included a blistering assessment of recent Supreme Court precedent pertaining to guns and public safety.

    At issue was a case involving Jessie Bullock, a Mississippi man who was previously imprisoned for approximately 15 years after being convicted for aggravated assault and manslaughter following a bar fight in 1992.

    Bullock was indicted 26 years later after being found to be a past felon in possession of a firearm, according to the ruling, but petitioned for his case to be dismissed following a landmark Supreme Court ruling last summer.

    That decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations and determined that modern-day laws restricting gun ownership are only constitutional if similar regulations were in place when the Constitution was drafted.

    Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

    Last November, Reeves released a scorching order expressing frustration with the high court’s new historical legal standard, insisting it had inflicted confusion upon lower courts, and ordered the Justice Department to brief him on whether he needs to appoint an historian to help him decipher the landmark opinion.

    “This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote last year.

    “The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he continued.

    “And we are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” he said.

    In response to Reeves’ request to the Justice Department for clarity, the Biden administration last year defended a federal statute barring felons from possessing firearms and urged the court not to hire an historian, arguing that the government should win the case without such an intervention.

    In his decision Wednesday dismissing the case against Bullock, Reeves acknowledged the government was in the “unenviable position” of pointing to certain past laws barring felons from possessing firearms, but nevertheless ruled that the Justice Department had not met the burden required to show laws barring felons from possessing firearms met the Bruen decision’s historical test.

    But Reeves repeated his past complaints blasting the entire process courts must now use to determine whether a present-day law had a historical analogue at the time of the founding of the nation.

    “Judges are not historians,” he once again wrote. “We were not trained as historians. We practiced law, not history. And we do not have historians on staff.”

    Reeves also appeared to criticize the very notion of deciding modern laws through the lens of colonial times.

    “Bruen shows us that originalism is now the Supreme Court’s dominant mode of constitutional interpretation,” he wrote. “This Court is not so sure it should be.”

    Reeves added, “This Court is also not sure that ceding this much power to the dead hand of the past is so wise.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Supreme Court rejects Texas and Louisiana challenge to Biden deportation priorities | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court rejects Texas and Louisiana challenge to Biden deportation priorities | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court, in an 8-1 ruling on Friday, revived the Biden administration’s immigration guidelines that prioritize which noncitizens to deport, dismissing a challenge from two Republican state attorneys general who argued the policies conflicted with immigration law.

    The court said the states, Texas and Louisiana, did not have the “standing,” or the legal right, to sue in the first place in a decision that will further clarify when a state can challenge a federal policy in court going forward.

    The ruling is a major victory for President Joe Biden and the White House, who have consistently argued the need to prioritize who they detain and deport given limited resources. By ruling against the states, the court tightened the rules concerning when states may challenge federal policies with which they disagree. The Biden administration policy was put on pause by a federal judge nearly two years ago and the Supreme Court declined to lift that hold last year.

    Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote Friday’s majority opinion in the case.

    “In sum, the states have brought an extraordinarily unusual lawsuit,” Kavanaugh wrote, in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “They want a federal court to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make more arrests. Federal courts have not traditionally entertained that kind of lawsuit; indeed, the States cite no precedent for a lawsuit like this.”

    Kavanaugh said that the executive branch has traditional discretion over whether to take enforcement actions under federal law. He said that if the court were to allow the states to bring the lawsuit at hand, it would “entail expansive judicial direction” of the executive’s arrest policy and would open the door to more lawsuits from states that think the executive is not doing enough to enforce the law in other areas such as drug and gun regulation and obstruction of justice laws.

    “We decline to start the Federal Judiciary down that uncharted path,” Kavanaugh said.

    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the administration welcomes the court’s ruling and that his department looks forward to using the immigration guidelines.

    The guidelines “enable DHS to most effectively accomplish its law enforcement mission with the authorities and resources provided by Congress,” Mayorkas said.

    Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, wrote a concurring an opinion that concluded that the states also lacked standing, but for different reasons than the majority opinion. Justice Samuel Alito dissented.

    At the heart of the dispute was a September 2021 memo from Mayorkas that laid out priorities for the apprehension and removal of certain non-citizens, reversing efforts by former President Donald Trump to increase deportations.

    In his memo, Mayorkas stated that there are approximately 11 million undocumented or otherwise removable non-citizens in the country and that the United States does not have the ability to apprehend and seek to remove all of them. As such, the Department of Homeland Security sought to prioritize those who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.  

    Kavanaugh’s opinion stressed that the standing doctrine “helps safeguard the Judiciary’s proper – and properly limited – role in our constitutional system.” He said that by ensuring a party has standing to sue, “federal courts prevent the judicial process from being used to usurp the powers of the political branches.”

    The majority did not address the underlying question of whether the administration had the authority to implement the policy.

    “We take no position on whether the executive branch here is complying with its legal obligations under §1226(c) and §1231(a)(2),” Kavanaugh wrote, referring to the relevant immigration statutes. “We hold only that the federal courts are not the proper forum to resolve this dispute.”

    Kavanaugh pointed out that five presidential administrations have determined that resource constraints necessitated prioritization in making immigration arrests.

    In his sole dissent, Alito wrote that this “sweeping executive power endorsed by today’s decision may at first be warmly received by champions of a strong Presidential power, but if presidents can expand their powers as far as they can manage in a test of strength with Congress, presumably Congress can cut executive power as much as it can manage by wielding the formidable weapons at its disposal.”

    “That is not what the Constitution envisions,” he wrote.

    Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst who filed an amicus brief in the immigration case, noted that Friday’s ruling was the second decision within the last week in which the court “held that red states lacked standing to challenge a federal policy – perhaps a signal of dissatisfaction with how liberally lower courts, especially the Fifth Circuit, have permitted these challenges to go forward.”

    “And it’s the second in the last two years in which it has reversed a nationwide injunction against a Biden immigration policy in a suit brought by Texas,” Vladeck said. “When states are the right plaintiffs to challenge federal policies is also one of the central issues before the court in the challenges to Biden’s student loan program – in which the court is expected to rule next week.”

    Kavanaugh’s opinion emphasized that, in “holding that Texas and Louisiana lack standing, we do not suggest that federal courts may never entertain cases involving the executive branch’s alleged failure to make more arrests or bring more prosecutions.”

    In court, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar stressed that Congress has never provided the funds to detain everyone, prompting different administrations to consider how to prioritize limited funds. She noted that the executive branch retains the authority to focus its “limited resources” on non-citizens who are higher priorities for removal and warned that if the states were to prevail, it would “scramble” immigration enforcement on the ground, leading to a totally unmanageable landscape. She said the states’ view in the case was a “senseless” way to run an immigration system.

    “I think that that is bad for the executive branch. I think it’s bad for the American public and I think it’s bad for Article Three courts,” she said.  

    The guidelines call for an assessment of the “totality of the facts and circumstances” instead of the development of a bright-line rule. The government lists aggravating factors weighing in favor of an enforcement action, including the gravity of the offense and the use of a firearm, but it also lists mitigating factors that include the age of the immigrant. 

    Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone, representing Texas and Louisiana, argued that the administration lacked the authority to issue the memo because it conflicts with existing federal law. He accused the government of treating immigration law in the area as “discretionary” and not “mandatory” and argued that the executive branch lacks the authority to “disregard” Congress’ instruction.

    “The states prove their standing at trial based on harms well recognized,” Stone said, emphasizing the costs incurred when the government “violates federal law.”

    A district court judge blocked the guidelines nationwide. “Using the words ‘discretion’ and ‘prioritization’ the executive branch claims the authority to suspend statutory mandates,” ruled Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee on the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas. “The law does not sanction this approach.” 

    A federal appeals court declined to issue a stay of the decision, prompting the Biden administration to ask the Supreme Court for emergency relief last July. A 5-4 court ruled against the administration, allowing the lower court’s decision to remain in effect while the legal challenge played out.

    Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined her three liberal colleagues in dissent without providing any explanation for her vote.  

    This story has been updated with additional details.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • 1 dead, at least 20 hurt in a shooting at a Juneteenth celebration in Willowbrook, Illinois, police say | CNN

    1 dead, at least 20 hurt in a shooting at a Juneteenth celebration in Willowbrook, Illinois, police say | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    At least 20 people were injured and one person has died in a shooting overnight, according to police, in what witnesses say was a Juneteenth celebration turned deadly.

    The shooting took place around 12:30 a.m. in a parking lot in Willowbrook, about 21 miles west of Chicago. Witnesses say people were gathered in the area to celebrate Juneteenth.

    Some of the injured were transported to hospitals by ambulance and others walked in, DuPage County Deputy Sheriff Eric Swanson told reporters Sunday.

    At least 12 ambulances responded to the scene, Ostrander said.

    Ten patients were transported to four hospitals with injuries ranging from graze wounds to more serious gunshot wounds, and two people were in critical condition, Joe Ostrander, battalion chief of the Tri-State Fire Protection District said earlier.

    The motive behind the shooting is unclear and it is still an active investigation, Swanson said.

    It joins a growing list of celebrations interrupted by gunfire, like the graduation ceremony in Virginia, the NBA championship celebration in Colorado and the birthday party in California, all in the last month.

    The incident is now one of 310 mass shootings in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

    After the 2022 shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, less than 40 miles from Willowbrook, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed into law a ban on assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines in the state. The ban faced immediate legal challenges, but the Supreme Court refused an emergency request from gun rights advocates to block the ban in May.

    “This shooting shows that even states with strong gun laws like Illinois are not immune from gun violence due to our incredibly weak federal laws and weak laws in neighboring states.” Kris Brown, president of Brady, the country’s oldest gun violence prevention organization, said in a statement.

    “Unfortunately, because of the gun industry’s influence on our lawmakers, there is no place in America that’s safe from gun violence,” Brown said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Takeaways from CNN’s town hall with Mike Pence | CNN Politics

    Takeaways from CNN’s town hall with Mike Pence | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Former Vice President Mike Pence staked out a series of clear differences with boss-turned-2024 rival Donald Trump, and needled other Republican contenders, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in a CNN town hall in Iowa on Wednesday night.

    Hours after he launched his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Pence broke with the former president on immigration policy, entitlement spending, US support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and more.

    He said he would not reinstate the policy of separating migrant families at the border – a widely criticized practice that Trump didn’t rule out reviving in his own CNN town hall last month.

    Pence also said that other Republican rivals were wrong to put changes to Social Security off the table, telling the crowd at Grand View University in Des Moines that seriously reducing federal spending will require changes to entitlement programs.

    He sharply rebuked Trump for describing Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “genius” for his invasion of Ukraine, while casting DeSantis as naive on the issue. And he continued to criticize the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

    Pence said he and Trump don’t just disagree about the past; the two have “a different vision for our party.”

    “I’m somebody who believes in American leadership in the world. Our party needs to lead on fiscal responsibility and stand without apology for life. We’ll have those debates,” he said.

    Still, Pence said, he will “support the Republican nominee in 2024,” a pledge he said he felt comfortable making because he doubted Trump would win the primary.

    “Different times call for different leadership,” Pence said. “The American people don’t look backwards; they look forward. … I don’t think my old running mate is going to be the Republican nominee for president.”

    Here are six takeaways from Pence’s CNN town hall:

    Pence urged the Justice Department not to indict his onetime boss, saying such an indictment would fuel division inside the country and “send a terrible message to the wider world.”

    While Pence said that “no one is above the law,” he said the DOJ could resolve its investigation into Trump’s potential mishandling of classified documents without resorting to an indictment, just as the department informed Pence’s attorney last week that there would be no charges brought in the case of the classified documents discovered in his home.

    But in Pence’s case, the former vice president immediately contacted the National Archives and the FBI to return his documents, while Trump resisted handing over his classified material and failed to return all classified documents after receiving a subpoena last May.

    Pence’s response underscores the tightrope the former vice president is walking when it comes to the numerous probes into his former boss. CNN reported Wednesday that the Justice Department had informed Trump he’s a target of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the mishandling of classified documents and possible obstruction, a sign that prosecutors may be moving closer to indicting the former president.

    While Pence criticized Trump for his actions on January 6 at his campaign kickoff Wednesday and at the town hall, he sought to distinguish those actions from the documents probe, protesting that there were “dozens” of better ways that the FBI could have handled Trump’s case before resorting to an unprecedented search the former president’s residence.

    So far, Pence’s sharpest criticism of Trump came when he was asked about the United States’ role in helping Ukraine in its efforts to repel Russia’s invasion.

    After arguing that the US should accelerate its support for the Ukrainian military, Pence pointed to Trump’s description of Putin in a February 2022 radio interview as a “genius” for his invasion of Ukraine.

    “I know the difference between a genius and a war criminal, and I know who needs to win the war in Ukraine,” Pence said. “And it’s the people fighting for their freedom and fighting to restore their national sovereignty in Ukraine. And America – it’s not our war, but freedom is our fight. And we need to give the people of Ukraine the ability to fight and defend their freedom.”

    Pence’s comments align him with Nikki Haley, Trump’s United Nations ambassador and a 2024 rival, and against their former boss and DeSantis, who entered the GOP race last month. The former vice president echoed Haley’s veiled shot at DeSantis – who described the war as a “territorial dispute” – casting such characterizations as naive.

    “Anybody that thinks Vladimir Putin will stop if he overruns Ukraine has what we say back in Indiana, another thing coming,” Pence said. “He has no intention of stopping. He’s made it clear that he wants to recreate that old Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.”

    Pence participates in a CNN Republican Presidential Town Hall on Wednesday.

    Pence repeatedly highlighted his support for “parents’ rights,” especially when it comes to schools. But he said the judgment of those same parents should not apply to situations when a minor is seeking gender transition care.

    “I strongly support state legislation, including, as we did in Indiana, that bans all gender transition, chemical or surgical procedures, under the age of 18,” he said – even when parents support their child’s decision to go forward.

    Republican presidential candidates have all railed against what Pence on Wednesday described as “radical gender ideology,” language that by definition falsely suggests there is a movement of people seeking to convince young people to change their gender identities.

    “However adults want to live, they can live,” Pence said. “But for children, we’re going to protect kids from the radical gender ideology and say no chemical or surgical transition before you’re 18.”

    Pressed on the age question, Pence compared gender transition to body art, saying, “There’s a reason why you don’t let kids get a tattoo before they’re 18.”

    When Bash asked what he would say to children and families who feel targeted by his position and those of his ideological allies, Pence offered an olive branch of sorts.

    “I’d put my arm around them and tell them I love ‘em,” he said, “but (tell them) ‘Just wait.’”

    Pence speaks during a CNN Republican Presidential Town Hall moderated by CNN's Dana Bash at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, on June 7.

    Pence has been a fierce anti-abortion advocate his entire adult life. On Wednesday night, he made clear he would not deviate from that position.

    “I couldn’t be more proud to be vice president in an administration that appointed three of the justices that sent Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history,” Pence said, “and gave America a new beginning for life.”

    On the question of a federal ban on the procedure, Pence said he supported exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. But he did not tap dance around the fundamental question, even as voters around the country – in the midterms and in referendums – have registered their anger over the Supreme Court’s decision and the subsequent passage of state laws to sharply restrict abortion rights.

    “We will not rest or relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in the country,” Pence said.

    Still, the former vice president acknowledged that his side had a “long way to go to win the hearts and minds of the American people” and encouraged his allies to show both “principle and compassion.”

    To that end, he offered qualified support for social spending programs to help support newborns and new parents.

    “We have to care as much about newborns and mothers as we do about the unborn,” Pence said. But he stopped short of specifically endorsing paid family leave for all Americans or subsidized child care.

    Pence said he would “take a step back” from the approach of the Trump-era landmark sentencing reform law, known as the First Step Act.

    “We need to get serious and tough on violent crime, and we need to give our cities and our states the resources to restore law and order to our streets. And I promise you, we’ll do that, if I’m your president,” Pence told Bash.

    Under the First Step Act, thousands of federal inmates, most of them serving sentences for drug offense and weapons charges, were released from prison early, either for good behavior or through participation in rehabilitation programs. The law also eased mandatory minimum sentencing for certain drug offenders.

    Asked about DeSantis’ promise to repeal the First Step Act if elected president, Pence again conceded that he would take a different approach than the First Step Act.

    “We ought to be thinking about how we make penalties tougher on people that are victimizing families in this country,” he said.

    Pence repeated the criticism he has leveled at his former boss for more than a year, insisting that Trump was wrong to ask his second-in-command to overturn some states’ 2020 Electoral College votes in his ceremonial role presiding over Congress as it counted those votes on January 6, 2021.

    Pence said he “frankly hoped the president would come around” since early 2021. Though he said he agreed that some states inappropriately changed their election procedures during the coronavirus pandemic.

    “But at the end of the day, I think the Republican Party has to be the party of the Constitution,” he said.

    Pence also broke with Trump over the legal fates of those who rioted at the US Capitol on January 6 – and have since faced criminal charges and convictions. Trump said he would consider pardoning many of those rioters, who he said were being treated “very unfairly.”

    Pence, though, said the United States “cannot ever allow what happened on January 6 to happen again in the heart of our democracy.”

    “I have no interest or no intention of pardoning those that assaulted police officers or vandalized our Capitol. They need to answer to the law,” he said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Freedom Caucus member says hard-line group ‘failed’ with passage of ‘Democratic’ debt limit bill | CNN Politics

    Freedom Caucus member says hard-line group ‘failed’ with passage of ‘Democratic’ debt limit bill | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ken Buck criticized the bipartisan debt ceiling deal reached between House Republicans and the White House as a “Democratic bill,” and said his hard-line, conservative group had “failed” in its efforts to influence legislation more to its liking.

    The caucus “still retains a lot of influence in the House,” the Colorado Republican told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday. “The key is that we use that influence in a way that brings conservative results. And I think that that’s what we tried to do with this case, and we failed, honestly.”

    “This bill is a Democrat bill. It is a bill that not only avoided a default but also locked in the progressive gains that the president made in the last two years,” he added.

    President Joe Biden signed into law Saturday the legislation to suspend the nation’s debt limit through January 1, 2025, helping avert a first-ever US default. The deal has faced backlash from conservatives and progressives but ultimately won support from a wide array of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, many of them moderates.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Sunday he felt good about Biden signing the agreement “because we’re finally spending less than we spent the year before.”

    “We actually got more than you thought in the process you could get at this point,” McCarthy, a California Republican, told Fox News.

    Meanwhile, in a separate interview on “State of the Union,” White House budget chief Shalanda Young, a top debt ceiling negotiator, declined to call the new law an outright win for the Democrats despite suggestions from some in the party that they downplayed their initial approval of the bill to garner more Republican support.

    Biden budget chief: McCarthy was ‘very professional’ in talks

    “At the end of the day, the long view, the short and the medium view is default was not an option. So, not who can win,” Young told Bash when asked about a Democratic congressman saying his party had “rolled” Republicans.

    “I have done this a long time, and we had to talk about the budget at some point this year. And this is about what you would expect to see out of a budget agreement with divided Congress,” Young said.

    Buck said Sunday that while he believes McCarthy has credibility issues following passage of the debt ceiling deal, he’s not sure a vote to oust the California Republican from his speakership – also known as a “motion to vacate” – would happen “right away.”

    “We continue to see the swamp, the folks in Washington, DC, who want to spend more money, winning, and we continue to see the folks who want to spend less money and really act responsibly losing. And so I think that Kevin McCarthy has an issue in a broader sense,” Buck said.

    Among the concessions agreed to by McCarthy to secure his speakership earlier this year was that any member can call for a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, making it easier to trigger what is effectively a no-confidence vote in the speaker.

    When asked by Bash what would lead him and his colleagues to employ such a move, Buck said that was something that should be done with “consensus” in the House Republican Conference.

    “I don’t think it can be used by just a few people,” he said. “I applaud Kevin McCarthy for saying he wants to bring people back together again. Let’s see if he does that in a way that involves spending responsibly in the future.”

    CNN has previously reported that while some of McCarthy’s fiercest critics have had private discussions about the motion to vacate, there is less appetite among the Freedom Caucus as a whole to go that route with the group’s chairman calling it “premature” in a caucus call earlier this week.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • In desperate bid for cash, the Treasury is auctioning one-day bills | CNN Business

    In desperate bid for cash, the Treasury is auctioning one-day bills | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Desperate times are calling for desperate measures at the Treasury Department.

    For the first time since 2007, the department is set to auction $15 billion worth of one-day cash management bills on Friday that will be issued on June 5.

    This comes as the Treasury’s cash balances hover around $37 billion, the lowest level since 2017. Since the debt ceiling was initially breached in January, the Treasury hasn’t been able to borrow more money to pay its bills. If lawmakers don’t raise the debt ceiling by June 5, the Treasury is poised to run out of funds to meet its full obligations, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned.

    Congress appears to be on track to avoid that scenario. The House of Representatives passed the debt deal House Speaker Kevin McCarthy cut with President Joe Biden on Wednesday. Now its fate rests in the hands of the Senate and Biden, who vowed to quickly sign it into law.

    Cash management bills mature in a relatively short time frame, ranging from a few days to a year, according to the Treasury. They’re used to help manage the Treasury’s short-term financing needs.

    Unlike Treasury bill auctions that occur on a weekly and monthly basis, cash management bill auctions are irregular, though not uncommon. For instance, last year the Treasury held more than 30 cash management bill auctions.

    It is, however, quite unusual for the department to auction debt that matures in just one day. Over the past 25 years, the Treasury held six one-day cash management bill auctions.

    Yields on cash management bills, which are determined by the auction process, tend to be higher than regular fixed maturity bills. On Thursday, the Treasury auctioned $25 billion of three-day cash management bills yielding 6.15%. That exceeds the yields almost all other Treasury bills are trading at.

    Friday’s auction is open to the public with a minimum $100 bid and can only be purchased in $100 increments.

    “There likely won’t be an issue for the Treasury to find bidders on the paper as maturities this short can fit well in money-market funds or other institutional buyers’ books that are looking to invest cash over the weekend,” said Charlie Ripley, senior investment strategist at Allianz Investment Management.

    It’s likely that yields on the one-day bills will end up mirroring yields of other bills that mature on June 6, he added, “but any negative headlines overnight indicating bottlenecks with the legislature getting through the Senate will impact the auction price.”

    Underscoring the uncertainty around the debt ceiling bill, the Treasury said plans to issue $65 billion of 13-week bills and $58 billion of 26-week bills on June 8 were “tentative.”

    The announcements “are conditional on enactment of the debt limit suspension because Treasury forecasts insufficient headroom under the current debt limit to issue securities in these amounts on June 8,” the Treasury said in a statement on Thursday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • 5 things to know for May 31: DeSantis, Artificial intelligence, Debt deal, UK, Ukraine | CNN

    5 things to know for May 31: DeSantis, Artificial intelligence, Debt deal, UK, Ukraine | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    One-time Silicon Valley darling Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison Tuesday to begin serving out her 11-year sentence after being convicted on multiple charges of defrauding investors. Her life in prison will be quite a change, with mandatory jobs, very early mornings and no black turtlenecks.

    Here’s what else you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day.

    (You can get “CNN’s 5 Things” delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up here.)

    Ron DeSantis officially kicked off his 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday in Iowa. While speaking to reporters after the event at an evangelical church outside Des Moines, the Florida governor leveled a series of shots at his rival, former President Donald Trump, painting him as selfish, unprincipled and petty. As the opening contest in the GOP nominating fight, Iowa holds a unique role in sizing up the presidential field. That’s especially important this election season since it’s the first time in over a century a former president is seeking to return to the White House. Meanwhile, Florida officials just changed state campaign finance guidelines in a very specific way to allow DeSantis’ allies to initiate a specific kind of transfer to move tens of millions of dollars to a super PAC supporting his campaign. The planned move has already drawn a watchdog complaint with the Federal Election Commission.

    Dozens of industry leaders and academics in the field of artificial intelligence have called for greater global attention to the possible threat of “extinction from AI.” A statement, signed by leading industry officials like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Geoffrey Hinton — the so-called “godfather” of artificial intelligence — highlights wide-ranging concerns about the ultimate danger of unchecked AI. Experts say humanity is still a ways off from the prospect of science-fiction-like AI overlords, but the flood of hype and investment into the AI industry has led to calls for regulation now before any major mishaps occur. The growing AI arms race has already generated more immediate concerns. Lawmakers, advocacy groups and tech insiders have raised alarms about the potential for AI-powered language models like ChatGPT to spread misinformation and displace jobs.

    AI developers are warning ‘risk of extinction’ to humans

    The House of Representatives is on track to vote today on a bill to suspend the nation’s debt limit through January 1, 2025. The bill already cleared a key hurdle Tuesday evening when the powerful House Rules Committee voted 7-6 to advance it to the floor. That’s a win for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was tasked with convincing members of the committee to vote in favor even though some fellow Republicans don’t approve of the bill and have vowed to sink it in the chamber. Still, it appears a wide range of House members on both sides of the aisle are poised to support the deal. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill would reduce budget deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years, and reduce discretionary spending by a projected $1.3 trillion from 2024 to 2033.

    exp debt limit bill rana foroohar intv 053102ASEG1 cnni us_00005607.png

    U.S. House to vote on debt limit bill amid criticism

    The UK’s inflation problems are getting so out of hand, officials are considering food price caps to curb the crisis. New data released this week shows the cost of store items, a metric known as shop price inflation, rose 9% through the year to May. That’s the highest it’s ever been since such stats were first recorded in 2005. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is considering asking retailers to cap the price of essential food items, something the UK government tried in the 1970s to tepid effect. Economists say capping prices leads to lower supply and higher demand, resulting in shortages. The enduring shadow of Brexit still looms large over Britain’s economy, and some experts say the government should be focused on shedding burdensome regulations that resulted from the move instead of trying to control prices. 

    Russia’s war on Ukraine is increasingly spilling into Russian territory. The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, said four people were recently injured in a “massive strike” there. This is the latest in a series of strikes against Russian targets by Ukrainian forces. Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the spate of attacks, saying Ukraine “chose the path of intimidation,” and is provoking Russia to “mirror actions.” Amid all the violence, scientists have another concern: International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi has outlined a plan to protect Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and asked that Russia and Ukraine observe them to ensure the plant’s safety and security. 

    exp russia ukraine drone strikes sam kiley FST 053112ASEG2 cnni world_00002524.png

    Russia blames Ukraine after drone strikes in Moscow

    Alleged Russian ‘spy’ whale now in Swedish waters

    Patiently waiting for a mystery novel series about spy whales. 

    Michael Jordan was a ‘horrible player’ and ‘horrible to play with,’ says former Chicago Bulls teammate Scottie Pippen

    Dang, Scottie. Tell us how you really feel!

    Venice authorities discover why canal turned fluorescent green

    Given all the fluorescent things it could have been, this is quite a relief.

    This is the world’s first 3D-printed, cultivated fish fillet

    Mmm, science is delicious.

    Air New Zealand to weigh passengers before they board the airplane

    What an innovative way to make air travel even more stressful! 

    1.4 million

    That’s about how many people have now been displaced in Sudan since a civil war erupted there in April, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says. Hundreds have been killed in the violence, and reports of sexual assault are increasingly common. 

    “I just tried to follow the police commands but I guess that didn’t work.”

    — Aderrien Murry, the 11-year-old boy who was shot in the chest less than two weeks ago by a Mississippi police officer after he called 911 for help. The boy said he prayed and sang in the moments after he was shot as his mother tried to stop the bleeding. Aderrien’s family wants the officer fired, and is seeking restitution from the state. 

    Check your local forecast here>>>

    A perfect day

    Bless people who put little collar cameras on their outdoor cats. These videos bring a type of peace I didn’t know existed. (Click here to view)

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • US oil prices sink below $70 on debt ceiling jitters and Russia-Saudi tensions | CNN Business

    US oil prices sink below $70 on debt ceiling jitters and Russia-Saudi tensions | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    US oil prices dropped below $70 a barrel Tuesday on concerns about whether the debt ceiling deal will make it through Congress and on reports of tensions between Saudi Arabia and Russia ahead of a key OPEC+ meeting.

    Crude slumped 4.4% to close at $69.46 a barrel, the lowest settlement price in nearly four weeks.

    The selloff marks one of the worst days of the year for the oil market and could help keep a lid on pump prices. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline is down by about $1 from a year ago.

    Oil market veterans blamed Tuesday’s decline in part on worries about whether conservatives in the House of Representatives will try to block the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling forged over the weekend by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

    “It’s not a layup that the debt deal is going to get done. That’s spooking the market, no doubt about that,” said Robert Yawger, vice president of energy futures at Mizuho Securities.

    Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, also pointed to “growing skepticism” about the debt ceiling agreement and the risk that a failure to raise the borrowing limit sets off a “deep recession” that curbs demand for oil.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned the government will not have enough funds to meet all of the nation’s obligations if Congress does not address the debt ceiling by June 5.

    Brent crude, the world benchmark, dropped by more than 4%, slipping below $74 a barrel.

    Meanwhile, there are new questions about the relationship between OPEC leader Saudi Arabia and Russia ahead of this weekend’s meeting of oil producers in Vienna.

    Saudi Arabia has expressed anger to Russia for failing to follow through on Moscow’s promise to cut production in response to Western sanctions, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. The apparent tensions raises uncertainty about the status of OPEC+, the alliance between OPEC members like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait and non-OPEC nations led by Russia.

    “There is starting to be chatter about the Russian and Saudis not being the best of friends,” said Yawger.

    [ad_2]

    Source link