WASHINGTON ― House Republicans may soon pull the trigger on the ultimate weapon they can wield against President Joe Biden: impeachment.
The party’s itch for revenge over the dualimpeachments of former President Donald Trump is leading them headlong toward pursuing the same thing, despite repeatedly failing to deliver evidence of Biden’s purported wrongdoing, and despite the risk of an electoral backlash.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suggested this week that Republicans would move forward with an impeachment inquiry after they return from their August recess next month.
“When you move to an impeachment inquiry, it empowers Congress, Republicans and Democrats, within their subpoena to be able to get the answers they need,” McCarthy said Monday in an interview on Fox News.
McCarthy has stressed that Republicans at this point only plan to pursue an impeachment inquiry, rather than an actual vote of impeachment on the House floor, as a means of escalating their investigations into the Bidens. But that distinction likely won’t appease House conservatives, many of whom already want to see Biden impeached.
“I personally intend on filing our own impeachment resolution just based on the corruption and bribery information that’s been brought forward to the House,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) said in a Tuesday interview with Fox News Business. “It is long past time to start the impeachment process.”
Democrats faced their own internal debates over whether to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump in 2019. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other Democratic leaders were initially hesitant to announce an impeachment inquiry, despite special counsel Robert Mueller all but asking them to. But the full House voted to authorize impeachment articles, on charges of abuse of power and obstructing a congressional investigation, just a few months after the impeachment inquiry began.
In theory, as McCarthy said, a House impeachment probe could both encourage executive branch agencies to cooperate with information requests, and make courts more amenable to ordering the executive branch to comply.
Republicans have claimed that the president is entangled in his son’s past business dealings with foreign nationals in Ukraine and China. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma at the same time that his father, as vice president during the Obama administration, pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor.
Trump pursued the same allegation against the Bidens in 2019, and even tried to coerce the government of Ukraine into announcing a sham investigation. During the subsequent impeachment proceedings against Trump, a parade of senior State Department officials testified that firing the prosecutor was a U.S. foreign policy priority, not something Biden came up with on his own.
Over the past few months, Republicans have routinely claimed that new evidence implicates the president, but a close reading of their material shows that it doesn’t. House oversight committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) claimed last week, for instance, that a former business partner of Hunter Biden testified that he witnessed Burisma honchos telling Hunter to make his father fire the prosecutor. The transcript revealed that Comer misrepresented the testimony.
Still, Republicans hope that keeping the Biden family in the news will drag down the president’s poll numbers and make it harder for the president to tout “Bidenomics” or low unemployment and declining rates of inflation.
“The more voters hear about the Biden family corruption scandal, the further you will see Biden’s trustworthiness rating slip,” a Republican strategist said, requesting anonymity to discuss party strategy. “It’s already torching Democrats’ ability to sell ‘Bidenomics’ or any other policy to the American people.”
Doug Heye, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, suggested that Republicans would be playing with fire by moving to impeach Biden right now. The party’s impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton famously backfired, boosting Clinton’s approval rating and helping Democrats in the 1998 midterms.
“It’s hard to see a scenario where focusing on something only a narrow part of the base wants to see, at the expense of all the things that have put Biden’s numbers so low, would help,” Heye told HuffPost.
While impeaching Biden might excite the party base, there’s no guarantee House Republicans would actually have the votes to pull it off. McCarthy can only lose four votes, and there are 18 Republicans who represent House districts that Biden carried in 2020.
That small margin for error is what the Congressional Integrity Project, a 501(c)4 political group formed to defend Biden from GOP investigations, is hoping to exploit. The group announced Monday that it’s launching a digital ad campaign calling out the 18 Republicans in their districts for failing to stand up to “bogus impeachment stunts.”
“Every Republican who fails to denounce these political stunts is complicit in using taxpayers’ money on behalf of Donald Trump,” said Kyle Herrig, the group’s executive director.
It’s hard to predict how impeachment would play out politically. Compared to the multiyear saga over Trump’s dealings with Russia and Ukraine, the GOP investigations into Biden have generated limited headlines. High-quality public polling on the question of impeachment is almost nonexistent.
Republicans predicted Democrats would suffer a backlash in 2020 after impeaching Trump in 2019. While Democrats did underperform at the House level, the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic downturn meant impeachment ultimately played little role in the day-to-day political fights leading up to the election.
Senate Republicans are wary of the idea of impeaching Biden, a risky move that could spoil their chance to capitalize on a once-in-a-generation map and take back control of the upper chamber next year. Although the decision whether to impeach a president ultimately rests with the House, top Republican senators have suggested proceeding with caution.
“Impeachment ought to be rare rather than common,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said at a weekly press conference last month. “And so I’m not surprised that having been treated the way they were, House Republicans… begin to open up the possibility of doing it again. And I think this is not good for the country, to have repeated impeachment problems.”
“We gotta do the hard work. They cheapened the process the last two [impeachments]. We don’t want to repeat that mistake,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), referring to the two Democratic-led impeachments of Trump.
McCarthy suggested Monday on Fox News that the Biden administration’s stonewalling was actually forcing Republicans to move toward impeachment.
“The actions of the Biden administration withholding information,” McCarthy said, “will rise to the level where we need [an] impeachment inquiry, to get the strength of the Congress to get the information that we need to give to the American public and follow through on our constitutional authority.”
The White House pointed out on Tuesday, however, that the Treasury Department has complied by giving Republicans access to “suspicious activity reports” that banks used to flag transactions connected to Hunter Biden. And in response to a subpoena, the Justice Department let the House oversight committee look at a raw FBI file containing an unverified bribe allegation from a Ukrainian oligarch.
“Speaker McCarthy has decided the truth should not get in the way of his and House Republicans’ relentless efforts to smear the President,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in an email. “They are prioritizing their own extreme, far-right political agenda at the expense of focusing on what really matters to the American people: working together to make their lives better.”
Pelosi may have summed up how Democrats feel about impeachment during a Friday appearance on MSNBC, calling it a “diversionary tactic” and predicting it would backfire on the GOP.
“If they want to subject their members who are in difficult districts, subject them to that, bring it on,” she said. “Just bring it on.”
WASHINGTON ― Republicans called new federal charges against Donald Trump an elaborate conspiracy to distract the public from President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
A grand jury on Tuesday indicted the former president in connection with several crimes related to the efforts to undo his 2020 election loss, which included schemes to change Electoral College votes in several states as well as obstructing the congressional certification of the election result.
But according to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the Department of Justice brought the charges on Tuesday partly because on Monday lawmakers had interviewed an obscure former business partner of Hunter Biden’s, whom Republicans claimed presented damning evidence against the president.
McCarthy also noted that on Monday a new poll showed that Trump is Biden’s leading Republican opponent.
“Everyone in America could see what was going to come next: DOJ’s attempt to distract from the news and attack the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, President Trump,” McCarthy said in a social media post. “House Republicans will continue to uncover the truth about Biden Inc. and the two-tiered system of justice.”
We’ve recently learned: • Hunter received money from China (contradicting President Biden’s claim) • President Biden spoke with Hunter’s business associates over 20 times (contradicting what Biden previously claimed) • Biden’s DOJ tried to secretly give Hunter broad immunity…
Never mind that literally every poll for months has shown Trump far ahead of his rivals in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, the idea that President Biden wields the Justice Department against his political enemies while protecting his son has become an unquestionable assumption among Republicans.
As Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) put it: “A sweetheart plea deal for Hunter Biden. Another sham indictment of Donald Trump. Anyone else seeing this two-tiered system of justice on full display?”
(Hunter Biden currently faces federal gun and tax charges that Republicans insist are far less severe than he deserves.)
Earlier this year, House Republicans created a “Weaponization of Government” committee entirely devoted to flogging Trump’s grievances, and at hearings this year several GOP lawmakers have suggested the federal government itself tricked Trump supporters into attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In truth, as the new indictment says, Trump and his co-conspirators “repeated knowingly false claims of election fraud to gathered supporters, falsely told them that the Vice President had the authority to and might alter the election results, and directed them to the Capitol to obstruct the certification proceeding and exert pressure on the Vice President to take the fraudulent actions he had previously refused.”
On Monday, Republicans conducted a closed-door interview with Devon Archer, a former associate of Hunter Biden’s, who told them that over their decade in business together, Hunter Biden would occasionally put his dad on speakerphone while Hunter Biden was with Archer and other business associates.
The older Biden has repeatedly said he never talked business with his son, who received millions of dollars over the years from foreign nationals, including in Ukraine and China. Republicans claimed Archer’s testimony contradicted the president’s past statements, though a Democratic lawmaker present for the interview said Archer testified that the elder Biden only exchanged pleasantries on the calls and never talked business.
House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Tuesday evening that the indictment against Trump ― his third so far this year ― was either an attempt to stop Trump from winning the next election or an effort to distract from his committee’s investigation of Hunter Biden.
“I think the American people see what’s going on, whether or not this is a weaponized Department of Justice trying to divert attention away from Biden corruption or whether they’re trying to take out their top political opponent in the upcoming election, the American people see through this,” Comer said on Fox News.
Comer has sought all year to tie President Biden to his son’s business deals, but he hasn’t been able to establish anything more than thin circumstantial evidence of a connection, much less an actual act of corruption. But Comer has remained unfazed about finding the missing link eventually.
“There’s a whole lot more evidence out there that would prove Joe Biden has committed crimes than there are of Donald Trump committing crimes,” Comer said.
During a routine Wednesday press conference, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, 81, left tongues wagging after he froze mid-sentence for nearly thirty seconds before aides escorted him away from the microphones.
It was just the latest in a string of health-related incidents the senator has suffered this year, which marked the longest-ever tenure of a Senate leader. In March, after McConnell tripped and fell at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, he spent five days in the hospital and more than a week in a rehab facility dealing with a concussion and broken rib. All in all, he spent nearly six weeks away from the Senate.
Also of note: Just days before the March incident, McConnell stumbled and fell in the snow on his way to a meeting with the Finnish President in Helsinki, CNN reported Thursday. And late Wednesday night, NBC News reported that McConnell tripped and fell again earlier this month while disembarking from a plane in DC. Both of these stumbles had previously gone unreported.
When McConnell returned to the podium Wednesday, he dodged a question about whether the most recent episode was related to his concussion, simply saying he was “fine” and that he was able to continue fulfilling his duties. His reticence on the subject of his own health is hardly surprising: One Republican senator, speaking anonymously to NBC News, said that McConnell “doesn’t address” his medical issues even in closed-door GOP meetings.
But there’s reason to believe the incident might point to something more serious. Two neurologists who spoke to The New York Times after the incident said the two most likely causes of the episode were a partial seizure or a kind of mini-stroke called a “transient ischemic attack.” McConnell aides have declined to say whether he’d been examined by a doctor.
McConnell’s health issues underscore the challenges faced by a rapidly aging Senate. This spring, California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who last month celebrated her 90th birthday, spent over two months away from her duties while recovering from a bout of shingles. At times, she has shown significant signs of possible cognitive impairment, leading to calls for her resignation.
The median age in the Senate is currently 65.3, up from 62.4 in 2017 and over seven years older than the median House age, which has fallen in recent years. More than half of the Senate’s Republicans are older than 65, compared to 46 percent of Senate Democrats. In the United States, the full retirement age is 67.
As for McConnell, a number of pro-Trump conservative media figures and activists, who have long despised the Senate minority leader, called for his immediate resignation Wednesday. But the Kentucky Senator laughed off a question about his potential replacement.
Still, the senator’s obvious frailty means that a retirement or retreat from Senate leadership is certainly a possibility. That scenario would likely touch off a three-way succession race between Senate Republican Whip John Thune, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, and former Senate GOP whip John Cornyn. Barrasso, an orthopedic surgeon who helped escort McConnell back to his office on Wednesday, said the Senate GOP leader is “doing a great job leading our conference and was able to answer every question the press asked him today.” Cornyn likewise said Wednesday that he’d support McConnell “as long as he wants to remain as leader.”
Succession would be fairly simple in McConnell’s home state. In 2021, the GOP-dominated Kentucky legislature overrode Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s veto to pass a law mandating that McConnell’s replacement would have to come from his own party. McConnell publicly supported the bill, which prompted speculation that he was planning on leaving the Senate before the end of his current term, which runs until 2027.
“I’m not going anywhere. I just got elected to a six-year term, and I’m still the leader of my party in the Senate,” McConnell said at the time. “So, this is a hypothetical. But I had watched this over the years in the Senate, as various vacancies were filled, and I thought this was the best way to go.”
WASHINGTON ― Democrats want to eliminate the practice of legacy admissions at universities and colleges in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling overturning affirmative action, arguing that it unfairly benefits wealthy and often white families at the expense of lower-class applicants of color.
The idea is being well met by a surprising number of Republican lawmakers who cheered the high court’s decision last month, but they stopped short of endorsing federal legislation that would actually ban institutions of higher education from giving preference to students with legacy or donor status.
“I think legacy admissions, particularly at the super-elite universities, demonstrate even for them a large amount of hypocrisy, but I’m just not convinced we have the authority to tell them not to do it,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Wednesday.
Legacy-based admissions occur when a college or university gives a preference to applicants based on whether a family member graduated from that institution or is related to a donor or a faculty member. Being a legacy can provide a huge boost to one’s odds of acceptance. The admission rate for legacy applicants at Harvard, for example, is over five times that of non-legacies.
Legislation offered Wednesday by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oreg.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), which is called the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, would prohibit colleges and universities that participate in federal student aid programs from engaging in the practice. It would also give the Secretary of Education the ability to give certain exemptions to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
“In the wake of the Supreme Court’s shameful decision to end race-conscious admissions policies, we’re about to see colleges across the country get even richer and whiter than they already are,” Bowman said in a statement. “It’s now more urgent than ever that we take action to create and support diverse learning environments, including by passing our bill to ban legacy admissions and continuing the fight to bring back affirmative action.”
The bill has lots of Democratic support but no GOP co-sponsors. However, some Republicans echoed the critiques of legacy admissions.
“It’s a little bit interesting that the elite universities which have done so much virtue signaling with regard to addressing disparities have this by which to cultivate loyalty among its students,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the top Republican on the Senate Health and Education Committee, told HuffPost.
“Without taking a position, I can’t help but note that irony. If it turns out that that is a major contributor to inequality to our nation, I would expect them to voluntarily end it if they truly mean all those things for which they signal virtue,” he added of colleges and universities.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a Yale Law graduate, agreed and called for “fundamental reform.” He said that admissions decisions should be “based on merit, not on who you knew, who your parents were, and what your race is.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who graduated from Harvard Law, said that the idea of eliminating legacy admissions would be “certainly a reasonable policy to consider.” He added, “There’s no doubt that in the wake of the affirmative action decision… there are many ways to ensure diversity in university admissions short of discriminating based on race.”
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate and a 2024 GOP presidential candidate, also supports eliminating legacy programs at colleges, urging Harvard University to do so immediately after the Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action last month.
Bowman urged Scott to support his legacy admissions bill in a chance encounter at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, but the senator was noncommittal, saying only he would “look” at the proposal.
One argument that has been made against eliminating legacy admissions at top schools like Harvard is that they can also benefit minorities whose parents or grandparents are alumni.
A Harvard class of 2023 graduate who identified himself only as Wonuola told HuffPost that many of his classmates would be reluctant to give up the practice.
“As a member of the Black community at Harvard, I’ve talked to a lot of students who also would not want to see legacy admissions removed for their future children, and a lot of Black students from wealthy areas are legacy students,” he said at a Wednesday reception hosted by the Harvard Institute of Politics in downtown Washington, D.C.
He added: “Students who are admitted through legacy admissions are also qualified to be at Harvard. I think a lot of them would be admitted even if they weren’t legacies.”
But Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), another proponent of the bill, said that data shows that legacy admissions “overwhelmingly” disadvantage people of color.
Van Hollen also argued that Congress is well within its rights to legislate on the issue because of the billions of dollars it provides to colleges and universities, including students attending them. Although Harvard is a private institution, for example, nearly 20 percent of Harvard students receive federal Pell Grants.
“It’s interesting that Republicans who claim they want a fair process, equal admissions process, would be ducking with those kinds of excuses,” Van Hollen said. “I think it’s very clear that the current system is stacked against all students who are not part of that heredity privilege ― but the numbers show it’s especially stacked against students of color.”
Alabama Republicans passed a redrawn congressional map that appears to spurn a court-ordered mandate to create two majority-Black districts in the state “or something quite close to it.” The new map was quickly signed by Republican Governor Kay Ivey on Friday, who said the GOP-dominated legislature “knows our state, our people, and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups.”
The maps were approved just hours before the court-mandated deadline, which reduces the percentage of Black voters in Alabama’s sole majority-Black district, currently represented by Democratic Congresswoman Terri Sewell, from 55% to 51%. Conversely, it would boost the percentage of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white districts from about 30% to about 40%.
“This is the quintessential definition of noncompliance,” State Representative Chris England, a Democrat who represents Tuscaloosa, said after the vote.
The redistricting map comes a month after the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling on behalf of a group of Alabama voters who argued that the state’s congressional map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh sided with the liberals in the case, a major surprise after a decade in which the court’s conservative majority issued ruling after ruling watering down that law. The plaintiff in Shelby County v. Holder, the court’s landmark 2013 decision that deemed a different part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, was a county in Alabama.
But Alabama Republicans defended the redrawn lines as being in compliance with the court mandate. “I believe this map is an opportunity map and would comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” state House Speaker Pro Tempore Chris Pringle, who chaired the committee charged with redistricting, said Friday.
“Once again, the state supermajority decided that the voting rights of Black people are nothing that this state is bound to respect, and it’s offensive, it’s wrong,” State Representative Prince Chestnut said Wednesday after the House voted on its version of the maps. The process, he said, “shows Alabama still has the same recalcitrant and obstreperous mindset that it had 100 years ago.”
Speaking to reporters Friday, England said he thinks “the federal court is going to do what they’ve done for Alabama for decades and hopefully save us from ourselves and put us in compliance with their order to create a fair opportunity for African Americans.”
The federal court that originally ordered the state’s maps to be redrawn will hold a hearing in mid-August and could decide to appoint a special master to oversee the process.
How this plays out could have major implications for next year’s elections, with Republicans currently holding one of the smallest House majorities in U.S. history. And it’s not just in Alabama.
Several weeks after the Supreme Court ruled on behalf of Alabama voters, it also lifted a stay on a federal court order in Louisiana that similarly ordered the state’s legislature to redraw voting maps. In both states, redrawn maps could give Democratic-leaning Black voters a better chance to elect representatives in 2024 and could impact the composition of the tightly-divided House.
A Republican state senator toldThe New York Times that he’d spoken with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Friday, and that the House Speaker told him, “I’m interested in keeping my majority.”
Last month, during a meeting of Democrats in rural southwestern Iowa, a man raised his hand. “What are three noncontroversial issues that Democrats should be talking about right now?” he asked the evening’s speaker, Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor and a minor state celebrity.
I watched from the side of the room as Sand answered quickly. The first two issues Democrats should talk about are new state laws dealing with democracy and education, he told the man. And then they should talk about their support for abortion rights. “People in the Iowa Republican Party and their activist base” want to “criminalize abortion,” Sand said.
I registered this response with a surprised blink. Noncontroversial? Democrats in competitive states, and especially committed centrists like Sand, aren’t usually so eager to foreground abortion on the campaign trail. This seemed new.
Ascribing a narrative to some elections is easy. The past two midterm cycles are a case in point. The Democrats’ 2018 blue wave, for example, will go down as a woman-led backlash to a grab-’em-by-the-groin president. In 2022, Democrats performed better than expected, according to many analysts, because abortion rights were on the ballot. Now, a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats want to do it again.
They’re betting that they can re-create and even supercharge their successes last year by centering abortion rights in their platform once again in the lead-up to 2024. They want all of their elected officials—even state auditors—talking about the issue. “If we can do all that, we’re gonna be telling the same story in December 2024 that we told in 2022,” Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive political group Swing Left, told me.
But this time, Republicans might be better prepared for the fight.
After the leaked draft opinion before the Dobbs decision last May, many in Washington assumed that abortion would fade from voters’ minds by the time November rolled around. “As we get further away from the shock of that event, of Roe being overturned, you don’t think that … people will sort of lose interest?” CNN’s Don Lemon asked the Democratic political strategist Tom Bonier in September 2022. People did not. Two months later, Democrats celebrated better-than-expected results—avoiding not only the kind of “shellacking” that Barack Obama’s party had suffered in 2010, but the widely predicted red wave. The Democrats narrowly lost the House but retained control of the Senate, flipping Pennsylvania in the process. Abortion-rights campaigners won ballot measures in six states.
“The lesson has been well learned,” Bonier told me last week. “This is an issue that is incredibly effective, both for mobilizing voters but also for winning over swing voters.”
The latest polling suggests that the issue is very much alive. A record-high number of registered U.S. voters say that abortion is the most important factor in their decision about whom to vote for, and most of those voters support abortion rights, according to Gallup. Rather than growing less salient over time, abortion may even have gained potency: Roughly a quarter of Americans say that recent state efforts to block abortion access have made them more supportive of abortion rights, not less, according to a USA Today poll last week. Not only that, but recent data suggest that demand for abortion has not been much deterred, despite post-Dobbs efforts to restrict it.
Americans have watched as Republicans in 20 states restricted or banned abortion outright, and activists took aim at interstate travel for abortions and the pill mifepristone. Stories about pregnant women at risk of bleeding out or becoming septic after being denied abortions have lit up the internet for months. All of this attention and sentiment seem unlikely to dissipate by November 2024.
“Republicans ran races on this issue for decades,” the Democratic strategist Lis Smith told me. “You’re gonna see Democrats run on this issue for decades to come as well.”
Already, Democratic activists plan to engage swing voters by forcing the issue in as many states as possible. So far, legislators in New York and Maryland have introduced abortion-related ballot measures for 2024. Similar efforts are under way in other states, including Florida, Arizona, Missouri, South Dakota, and Iowa.
Smith and her fellow party operatives are confident that they’ve landed on a message that works—especially in purple states where candidates need to win over at least a few moderates and independents. The most successful Democrats last year anchored their abortion messages around the concept of personal liberty, Swing Left’s Radjy told me, because it was “the single issue that is equally popular among far left, far right, center left, and center right.” Radjy shared with me a research report that concluded: “With limited attention and resources, [candidates should] lead with the freedom to decide. Freedom is resonating with the base and conflicted supporters, as well as Soft Biden and Soft Trump women.”
Smith echoed this reframing. “Republican politicians want to insert themselves into women’s personal medical decisions,” she said, by way of exemplifying the message. “They want to take away this critical freedom from you.” In her view, that gives Democratic candidates a decisive advantage: They don’t even have to say the word abortion; they only have to use the language of freedom for people to be receptive.
Joe Biden has never been the most comfortable or natural messenger on abortion. But even he is giving the so-called freedom framework a try. Freedom is the first word in the president’s reelection-announcement ad. Republicans, he says in a voice-over, are “dictating what health-care decisions women can make”; they are “banning books, and telling people who they can love.”
It’s helpful, Democratic strategists told me, that the Republicans jockeying for the presidential nomination have been murky at best on the issue. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley held a press conference in April to explain that she sees a federal role in restricting abortion, but wouldn’t say what. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was foggy on his own commitments in interviews before appearing to support a 15-week national ban. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who recently signed a six-week limit on abortion, talks about that ban selectively. The leader of the primary pack, Donald Trump, has said that abortion laws should be left to the states, but told a reporter recently that he, too, is “looking at” a 15-week restriction.
Trump clearly wants to appease the primary base while keeping some room to maneuver in the general election. But if he’s the nominee, Democrats say, he’ll have to answer for the end of Roe, as well as the anti-abortion positions advocated by other Republicans. “When I worked for Obama in 2012, as rapid-response director, we tied Mitt Romney to the most extreme positions in his party,” Smith told me. If Trump is the abortion-banning GOP’s nominee, they will “hang that around his neck like a millstone.”
I found it difficult to locate Republican strategists willing to talk with me about abortion, and even fewer who see it as a winning issue for their party. One exception was the Republican pollster and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, who says that Republicans can be successful in campaigning on abortion—if they talk about it the right way. At a press conference celebrating the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, hosted by the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, Conway seemed to take a swipe at the former president—and the rest of the wishy-washy primary field. “If you’re running to be president of the United States, it should be easy to have a 15-minimum-week standard,” she said.
To win on abortion is to frame your opponent as more extreme, and Democrats have made that easy, says Conway, who also acts as an adviser to the Republican National Committee. Broad federal legislation put forward by Democratic lawmakers last year, in response to the Dobbs leak, would prevent states from banning abortion “after fetal viability” for reasons of the mother’s life or health. Republicans claim that this means that Democrats support termination at all stages of pregnancy. Voters may not like outright bans on abortion, but they also generally don’t support abortion without limits. Conway advises Republican candidates to explain to voters whether they support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, and get that out of the way—and then demand that their Democratic opponents define the time limits they favor. “I’d ask each and every one of them, ‘What are your exceptions? I’ve shown you mine,’” Conway told me.
Conway’s bullishness is belied by what some of her political allies are up to. While Democrats are pushing for ballot measures that will enshrine abortion rights into law, Republicans are trying to make it harder to pass state constitutional amendments. For example, after it became clear that a ballot measure could result in new abortion protections being added to the Ohio Constitution, state Republicans proposed their own ballot measure asking voters in a special election later this summer to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments.
This scheme does not demonstrate faith that a majority of voters are with them. But it does set up Ohio as the first practical test of abortion’s salience as a political issue in 2024. If Democrats can get their voters to show up this August in the name of abortion rights, maybe they can do it next year too.
WASHINGTON — Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) received a frosty reception Friday at a conservative confab after he criticized former President Donald Trump, one of his rivals in the 2024 White House race.
“I’m running because he’s let us down,” Christie told a crowd of several hundred social conservatives gathered at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference at the Washington Hilton hotel.
“He’s unwilling to take responsibility for any of the mistakes that were made, any of the faults that he has, and any of the things that he’s done.”
Several angry Trump supporters in the crowd jeered, and one woman yelled, “We love Trump!”
“You can boo all you want, but here’s the thing: Our faith teaches us that people have to take responsibility for what they do,” Christie said in response, drawing a smattering of applause from the audience.
Christie launched his presidential campaign earlier this month, positioning himself as someone who isn’t afraid to call out Trump over his actions as president, including his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The former governor had been an early supporter of Trump but has since said that he made a “fundamental judgment error.”
Moments after leaving the stage Friday, Christie walked into a lobby outside the hotel’s ballroom, where he was greeted by a small crowd loudly cheering him on.
“Christie! Christie! Christie!” chanted a group of about 10 people. It’s unclear if they were part of his team or just a random assemblage of supporters.
“My favorite governor!” one shouted.
“What’s wrong with you guys?” Christie joked, shaking their hands and posing for pictures.
HuffPost asked what he made of being booed for knocking Trump.
“That’s what happens when you tell the truth,” Christie replied. “It’s OK.”
When another person standing nearby told him to “stand your ground” on calling out Trump, Christie said, “I will.”
“It’s what happens when you tell the truth,” Christie says after being booed on stage for criticizing Trump.
Not everyone in the vicinity was a fan of Christie.
Mike, a 35-year-old small-business owner from New York, stood quietly as Christie posed for photos. So did 34-year-old Diana from Tennessee. (Both requested to have their full names withheld.)
“I’m still with Trump,” said Diana.
“I’m with Trump,” Mike said.
Diana said she thinks Trump is the best candidate when it comes to “international affairs, our economy, how it’s going. I look at our border crisis. I’m from Texas. That really does affect my family.”
Christie scores low marks with GOP primary voters. Before he announced his campaign, a Monmouth University poll found that the governor’s unfavorable rating was the highest of 10 potential2024 presidential hopefuls tested, underscoring the challenge he faces in mounting a bid for the White House.
Mike, for example, is still mad at Christie over Bridgegate, the 2013 political scandal involving the then-governor’s staff and political appointees colluding to create traffic jams in Fort Lee, New Jersey, by closing lanes at a major toll plaza. A federal investigation into the scheme, which came about as retribution for the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee not endorsing Christie in his gubernatorial reelection bid, resulted in multiple indictments against several of Christie’s staffers.
Mike said he still remembers being stuck in four hours of traffic during Bridgegate as part of his regular commute from New York to New Jersey.
As his state faced a dangerous heat wave this week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a broad new law that will nullify a wide range of local regulations, including mandated water breaks for construction workers, beginning Sept. 1, according to The Texas Tribune.
The new Republican-backed law strips the ability of local municipalities to enact certain regulations in favor of state authority, ostensibly to “provide statewide consistency.” It covers a wide range, including other worker protections, environmental protections, housing protections and more.
Critics dubbed it the “Death Star Bill.” The president of the NAACP’s Houston chapter, Bishop James Dixon, called it “a threat to civil rights and human rights,” according to local outlet KHOU11.
Among its supporters were several construction business associations.
Dallas and Austin currently require workers to be given at least 10 minutes to cool down and hydrate every four hours.
Abbott signed the legislation Tuesday. On Thursday and Friday, some areas of the state began setting new heat records, and others are expected to chart new highs as temperatures soar into triple-digits over the next several days.
Millions of people around the Houston region were issued an excessive heat warning on Friday, lasting through Sunday, with “feels like” temperatures potentially hitting 120 degrees. The National Weather Service also said that southern Texas and eastern Louisiana are at an increased risk of fires due to the heat, which will strain the state’s brittle power grid. Average temperatures in Texas have been rising for decades.
Texas is already the top state for worker deaths due to heat, according to the Texas Tribune.
The Tribune reported that heat-related deaths hit a two-decade high just last year when at least 279 people across Texas died by heat.
When Special Counsel Jack Smith dropped a 38-count federal indictment Friday afternoon against Donald Trump and a coconspirator, complete with shocking allegations of stashing nuclear secrets around Mar-a-Lago, it felt like everyone was holding their collective breath. Just like in the immediate aftermath of January 6, this was a moment when Republicans might finally decide to rid themselves of Trump.
Like so many aspects of the Trump era, this was historic—and not in a good way. Trump became the first former president in history to face federal charges, 31 of which were related to the Espionage Act. Even Richard Nixon wasn’t indicted! While one might argue the Stormy Daniels hush money indictment from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg was politically motivated (it wasn’t), or that it presents legal challenges (fair point), the gravity of the federal indictment against Trump was such that it would seem hard to simply shrug off. Here was a former president being portrayed as putting the nation’s security at risk. The filing includes photos of boxes allegedly filled with classified documents piled high in a strange chandelier-adorned marble bathroom, in office and storage rooms, and a ballroom which looks like it deeply missed the previous owner Marjorie Merriweather Post’s dulcet touch.
For a minute, it felt like this indictment might move the needle. It was, after all, so detailed, and perhaps most damning was Trump’s apparent admission of guilt. “As president, I could have declassified them, now I can’t,” Trump reportedly said in a recording. So it seems we know what the (former) president knew and when he knew it. Legal experts have spoken about how devastating the case looks for the 45th president, with Trump’s own former attorney general Bill Barrsaying that “if even half of it is true, then he’s toast.” The New York Times’ editorial board, arguing why Trump should never again be trusted with the nation’s secrets, noted that the potential prison sentences for these charges “add up to as much as 420 years.”
And yet, if one hoped sanity might return to the GOP, anyone who’s been writing about this Trump-ruled party the past seven years knew Republicans would treat this federal indictment like they did the Access Hollywood tape, the first impeachment, the January 6 insurrection, the second impeachment, and the earlier indictment: They would rally behind him.
If Republicans could stand up to Trump, they could start taking their party back from this lawless lunatic and signal a return to a Republican Party that operated within the normal bounds of the law. But the writing was already on the wall shortly after the indictment was unsealed, with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt brazenly tweeting, “First read of indictment and my reaction is ‘That’s it? The conspiracy is with the aide who moved the boxes? No documents were sold or given to third parties not in his close employ?’” The defense by a fairly mainstream GOP pundit—someone who has had a column in The Washington Post and stops on Meet the Press—was basically that if the former president hadn’t actually tried to sell the secrets, was it really so bad? This seems like a low standard even for Trump.
The post-indictment news cycle quickly devolved into silly season. The editorial page at theRupert Murdoch–owned Wall Street Journalproclaimed, “Do prosecutors understand the forces they are unleashing?” The editorial board continued, “The greatest irony of the age of Trump is that for all his violating of democratic norms, his frenzied opponents have done and are doing their own considerable damage to democracy.”
Republicans framed this meticulously detailed federal indictment as an affront to democracy, and not as the only way to keep a rogue ex-president in check. The backlash was swift and fierce and it has included cameos from typical Trump loyalists, like Representative Jim Jordan, who claimed on CNN that Trump declassified everything (which is contradicted by Trump’s own statement about not declassifying a document), and Senator Lindsey Graham, who snapped at ABC’s George Stephanopoulos while trying to turn the conversation to Hillary Clinton. South Dakota senator Mike Rounds, one of the few GOP lawmakers to call out Trump’s election lies, said, “The unprecedented action of indicting in federal court a former president, who is also a current candidate for president, cannot be taken lightly as it is inherently political and will have a lasting impact on our nation.”
Meanwhile, besides familiar Trump critic Senator Mitt Romney, the GOP messaging has been clear: Attempting to hold Trump accountable is worse than the former guy allegedly doing crimes. Sure, Scotland could arrest former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, France could send former president Nicolas Sarkozy to jail, and Italy could charge late prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in 35 criminal cases, but when it comes to Trump, that’s just American exceptionalism. The once Never Trump turned deeply Trumpy senator from Ohio, JD Vance,tweeted, “The question of whether Trump should have kept those documents is fundamentally a political question. Criticize it, attack it, vote against it. But prosecuting a president over his own government’s documents is turning a political issue into a legal one.”
Republicans are trapped in a Möbius strip of their own misery, a spin cycle of fuckery that they created and that they deserve. Republican elected officials are presumably so scared of alienating the base (and potentially becoming targets themselves) that they continue to support the albatross that is losing them elections and undermining our democracy. Trump has somehow managed to make supporting his fight against the law a litmus test for GOP candidates, so the already slim possibility of defeating him in a primary gets slimmer. He’s effectively being supported by the people who are supposed to be running against him.
With every indictment, the GOP base gets more activated by Trump, but the chasm between the base and the general electorate grows. Yes, the GOP is reaping what it sowed. But we all risk getting buried in the process.
Trumpism is about destruction, about burning it all down, about a kind of partisanship in which Republicans are unwilling or unable to make any kind of bipartisan compromise. And yet, even in a party consumed for years by Trumpism, 149 Republicans voted last week with 165 Democrats to raise the debt ceiling and spare the American economy an unprecedented meltdown. Clearly, the burn it all down wing isn’t going away, with Matt Gaetz,Andy Biggs, and Ken Buck among the 71 Republicans who voted “no.” And it’s not like all members of the “yes” group, which includes Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, are suddenly sane. But the vote signaled that a majority of Republicans could embrace bipartisan governing, or at least some version of what that looks like in 2023.
The 2024 Republican primary, however, is Trumpism run amok, with Donald Trump leading a pack of less charismatic mini-mes and little sign that the normal (a.k.a. pre-2016) GOP is coming back. Just head out to Iowa, where GOP candidates this past weekend were donning leather for Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride. The New York Timesnoted that presidential candidates “barely touched” the economy, a subject “many voters expressed concern about.” Instead, the GOP primary crew, which didn’t include the field’s front-runner, railed “against ‘deep state’ bureaucrats, ‘woke’ corporations, and liberals indoctrinating and confusing America’s children.” Ron DeSantis’s team is clearly banking that MAGA red meat is what GOP primary voters will eat up. “The fight for the soul of the party isn’t about tax cuts or trade deals,” Jeff Roe, a top adviser to pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down, told Axios. “It is this cultural combat that we have as a country.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise then to see even Republicans once considered more moderate diving headfirst into the culture wars. During a CNN town hall on Sunday, Nikki Haleyblamed teenage girls’ suicides on trans kids playing sports, a completely preposterous lie and the kind of unusual cruelty that is associated with Trumpism. In Rye, New Hampshire, Haley squandered her time with voters at a “No BS Barbecue” by making fun of transgender influencer and right-wing targetDylan Mulvaney. “Make no mistake, that is a guy dressed up like a girl making fun of women,” she said. “Women don’t act like that. And you’ve got companies glorifying that.” As Semafor’s David Weigelwrote, “The repeated riff was meant to be the applause line for one of the top candidates running on their ability to win back moderates in the suburbs who have fled the Republican Party in the Donald Trump era” and the best response the riff got was “a mixture of groans and murmurs.”
It’s baffling to me why Haley would want to mimic Trump’s cruelty, but she’s not the only one. The GOP primary field is beating upon transgender people in ways that are both morally wrong and wildly unpopular. According to Pew, “Roughly eight-in-ten US adults say there is at least some discrimination against trans people in our society, and a majority favor laws that would protect transgender individuals from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces.” Yet we find GOP candidates running as furious culture warriors targeting trans kids and bodily autonomy. Candidates Tim Scott, Haley, and Pence have expressedsupport forafederal abortion ban.
Few dare mention Trump’s name on the campaign trail. Instead, they make vague callouts to the man, speaking in code, saying things about “rejecting a culture of losing (DeSantis)” or “it’s time for a new generational leader (Haley).” Pence criticized his former boss for recently congratulating Kim Jong Un, but still refused to use Trump’s name. “Whether it’s my former running mate or anyone else, no one should be praising the dictator in North Korea—or praising the leader of Russia, who has launched an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine.” Haley refused to criticize Trump for his Kim Jong Un bromance.
Some Republicans are talking loudly about the need to defeat Trump, like New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, who at the same time announced Monday he wouldn’t be entering the 2024 race. Then there’s Chris Christie, who has been arguably the most critical of Trump so far and formally kicked off his bid Tuesday. But Christie has gone back and forth on Trump so many times he’s going to need his own lane on the George Washington Bridge. He took aim at Trump in 2016—and then endorsed him. Meanwhile, The Washington Postpoints out how Christie “is viewed negatively by many Republicans” and notes that “many prominent figures in the party who have vocally criticized Trump from a more traditional GOP posture in recent years have been rejected in party primaries.”
Another Republican candidate who has directly criticized Trump is former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who, following a jury in the E. Jean Carroll case finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, called the former president’s behavior “indefensible.” Hutchinson’s poll numbers are also low.
This year is starting to feel a lot like 2016, a primary field that contains Trump and all the other not-Trump candidates. The only difference between this contest and 2016 is that other candidates then ran (ostensibly, at least) as their own selves and not just lesser versions of the OG. Perhaps this is because the current crop of candidates have seen polling which shows the GOP base continues to struggle with a pronounced case of brain worms. They dismiss Trump’s critics out of hand and election denial runs deep, with 75% in one poll saying that Trump actually won the 2020 election. It’s possible that these 2024 candidates can’t figure out how to recon with a GOP base existing in a post-truth bubble, and are just trying to keep up with an electorate that’s completely lost its mind.
As Ron DeSantis kicked off his presidential campaign last week, Donald Trump was asked during a golf tournament about meeting the Florida governor on the debate stage. “They say he’s not a very good debater, but maybe he is,” Trump said of his acolyteturned adversary. “We’ll find out. Maybe we’ll find out. Because unless he gets close, why would anybody debate?”
The question posed by Trump only adds to the uncertainty around the Republican primary debates, which are supposed to begin this summer. The Republican National Committee announced in April that the first debate would take place in August in Milwaukee, hosted by Fox News, along with Rumble, the conservative streaming platform, and the Young America’s Foundation as partners. But the RNC has yet to publicly announce a specific date or venue, nor the criteria for candidates to qualify for them. (Fox News declined to provide any details beyond pointing to the RNC’s prior comments.) Even less information is known about the second debate, other than that it will take place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Southern California.
“It strikes me that they’re way behind schedule on everything,” said one media executive involved in discussions with the RNC. “I sort of expected by now that we would at least know the date of the first debate, and at least something of a schedule for the rest of the fall.”
Though the RNC has yet to put out the criteria for candidates hoping to debate, chair Ronna McDaniel has been in frequent communication with candidates and campaigns about the process, according to a source familiar with discussions. Still, by this time in 2015, the last presidential cycle with a wide open Republican primary, the date and venue for the first debate had already been reported, and the GOP, after streamlining the debate schedule, was wrestling with how to fit the robust 2016 field onstage.
Behind the scenes, networks have been pitching the RNC to host debates, with Axios reporting Friday that CNN chief Chris Licht told the RNC “that CNN would air the debate not just on its linear feed, but also potentially on the linear networks of other Warner Bros. Discovery channels.” In addition, the outlet noted that “Licht also has offered to partner with a conservative-leaning outlet on the debates,” which could “include giving a journalist from the partner outlet a co-moderator spot.” Meanwhile, NBC News is making its pitch with Lester Holt as moderator alongside colleagues from CNBC and Telemundo. According to Axios, DeSantis’s team has pushed back against the RNC about CNN or NBC hosting debates.
Low-polling candidates—like Asa Hutchinson, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Vivek Ramaswamy—would presumably jump at the chance to enter a nationally televised debate—and DeSantis, running well behind Trump in the polls, could surely benefit. Asked whether DeSantis plans to participate in the primary debates, a spokesperson for the campaign referred Vanity Fair to a quote he recently gave Ben Shapiro, in which he said, “Debates are an important part of the process” and that he “look[s] forward to participating in them.” (Still, DeSantis also recently toldGlenn Beck that “corporate media…shouldn’t be involved in our process because they’re hostile to us as Republicans.”)
By the time of the first debate, there could be several more declared candidates, like Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Chris Sununu. The show will likely go on even if Trump skips it. “If we get announced as a sponsor of a debate, we’ll have that debate whether or not candidates decide to show up,” said the media executive involved in discussions.
Trump is likely to opt out of “at least one of the first two debates of the 2024 Republican presidential nominating contest,” The New York Timesreported last month. The former president, per the Times, “has made it clear that he does not want to breathe life into his Republican challengers by sharing the stage with them.” Trump, who opted out of a primary campaign debate in 2016, suggested as much during a talk radio appearance in April, claiming, “People don’t debate when they have these massive leads” in polling. He has privately complained, per multipleoutlets, that the first debate is too early, and publicly grumbled about the setting of the second, the Reagan Library, where Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan is the longtime chairman of the board.
In 2011, John Boehner held the full faith and credit of the United States economy hostage—and it worked. The then House Speaker got billions of dollars of concessions from Barack Obama’s administration, helping set a precedent for future Republican leaders. So there has long been a concern that if Republicans take power back in the House, they could balk at raising the debt ceiling to pay the nation’s debts, and in the process, sabotage the economy under a Democratic president. Only compounding that anxiety has been the House Freedom Caucus’s “burn it down” ethos and the de facto head of the Republican party, Donald Trump,tellingKaitlan Collins at CNN’s recent town hall that “if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default.”
One can see how Trump might want to crash the Biden economy. Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDanielsuggested last week that the default could bode “very well for the Republican field,” and Trump is at the front of the pack. Of course, Trump has never shied away from chaos, which is what a default would be, as Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, told NPR: “The financial system freezes up. That means there’s no more borrowing, businesses stop investing and the markets go absolutely haywire.” In 2011, just the possibility of default caused America to lose its AAA credit rating; could a default today push America into recession?
That threat subsided Wednesday night as the House voted 314-117 in favor of a bill negotiated by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that would suspend the debt ceiling until early 2025. There remain some hurdles in the Senate, with Utah’s Mike Lee, for one, calling the deal a “fake response to burdensome debt.” But with both Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on board, the bill is expected to clear the Senate in the coming days.
McCarthy is takinga victory lap for holding off his party’s far-right flank to get a deal through the House. The big winner, however, is Biden, who prevailed in a standoff that could have sunk the economy—and his reelection chances. While Republicans seemed to dominate the airwaves leading to Wednesday night’s vote, the often underestimated Biden and his White House team negotiated, arguably, the best possible deal under very difficult circumstances.
Biden had some options in recent months, but none of them were tested. Theoretically, he could’ve minted a trillion-dollar coin. But you’d have to get Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on board, which appeared unlikely. “I’m opposed to it and I don’t think we should consider it seriously. It’s really a gimmick,” she told CNBC, adding: “It compromises the independence of the Fed, conflating monetary and fiscal policy.” There was talk about a discharge petition to bring a clean debt ceiling bill to the floor, but it would mean finding at least five sane Republican members of Congress who would risk a primary challenge by circumventing McCarthy. Then there was the untested theory that Biden could invoke the 14th Amendment, which Yellen believed could trigger a “constitutional crisis.” As she told ABC News, “There is no way to protect our financial system and our economy other than Congress doing its job and raising the debt ceiling and enabling us to pay our bills.”
So the Biden administration found itself without good options and needing desperately not to spook the markets. The White House had to prevent an economic meltdown while negotiating with economic terrorists. Enter the director of the US Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young, who, along with counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti and other White House officials, brokered the deal with Republicans. McCarthy had privately praised Young as “well respected” and “well liked,” according toThe Washington Post, while Republican senator Susan Collinstold CNN, “She can cut through all of the, as Joe Biden would say, ‘malarkey,’ and get to the heart of the issue.”
McCarthy held a lot of good cards, but is not much of a policy wonk and, per TheNew York Times, is still “a golden retriever of a man.” He insisted new work requirements for federal assistance programs were a “red line,” and indeed, new ones will be imposed as part of the deal. But McCarthy’s “red line” ended up being a starting line for expanding SNAP. As Axios noted, “the number of people eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will actually go up as a result of the agreement.” In the end, “the new SNAP work requirements do absolutely nothing when it comes to deficit reduction” but “do help veterans and the homeless.”
One big question emerging from this debt ceiling standoff is what does today’s Republican Party even stand for? Boehner and his successor, Paul Ryan, wanted to make the government smaller. But does Trump really want to do that? Trump says he doesn’t want to cut entitlement programs, yet he wants to cut taxes. This is not a recipe for financial solvency.
Trump, of course, was also fine with Congress lifting the debt ceiling three times while he was president without similar budgetary demands. When asked in last month’s CNN town hall about previously opposing using the debt ceiling in this manner, he responded, “Sure, that’s when I was president.” “So why is it different now that you’re out of office?” Collins asked, to which Trump replied: “Because now I’m not president.”
During this debt ceiling fight, likely due to pressure from Trump’s own agenda, McCarthy had to take cuts to Medicare and Social Security “completely off the table.” His party only seemingly stands united behind massive spending cuts when a Democratic president is in charge.
As could be expected, the deal had things for everyone to dislike. Republican representative Chip Roycalled it a “betrayal” and led the right-wing revolt against it. Fellow Republican Nancy Macetweeted that the party “got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants.” And part-time insurrectionist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called the deal “a shit sandwich,” though she still voted for it.
Progressives are also unhappy with the deal, which is very much the kind of agreement a divided government produces. Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal, who voted “no,” said that although “We appreciate the President and White House negotiating on behalf of the people given the circumstances,” Congress “must be clear that this hostage-taking is absolutely unacceptable and that there will be very real consequences for working people and poor people.” She added, “while the Biden Administration was able to walk back many of the extreme GOP’s worst ideas, we should never have gotten to this place.”
Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.
An item further down the list, however, revealed far more about the agreement—and about how committed modern-day Republicans really are to their party’s small-government principles. That bullet point noted that the bill would “ensure full funding for critical veterans programs and national defense priorities, while preserving Social Security and Medicare.” At the end of a weeks-long negotiation, Republicans were bragging that they had exempted as much as half of the federal budget from the spending cuts they had fought so hard to enact. What they didn’t say was that for all of their rhetoric about reducing spending, they didn’t actually want to cut that much of it.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which the House approved tonight on a vote of 314-117, will avert what would have been a first-ever national default, lift the debt ceiling through the next presidential election, and save Congress from a crisis of its own making. The bill, which is expected to clear the Senate in the next several days, is hardly what Democrats would have passed had they retained their House majority last fall. But in terms of “fiscal responsibility,” the proposal does vanishingly little. “It does nothing to change the unsustainability of the federal budget,” Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal-watchdog organization, told me. “It’s taken off the table everything that would have an effect.”
It’s not that Republicans lost the budgetary battle because of Biden’s tough negotiating. They didn’t even try for major spending cuts in this round of talks. McCarthy followed former President Donald Trump in abandoning the party’s long-standing push to tackle the biggest drivers of the national debt: Social Security and Medicare. Biden and the Democrats were willing to cut the Pentagon’s budget, which accounts for nearly half of all federal spending outside of entitlement programs. But the speaker nixed that idea too. “Spending cuts are very popular in the abstract, much less so in the specific,” Bixby said.
By the time McCarthy and Biden began negotiating in earnest, there wasn’t much left to cut. “You just can’t get major savings from the rest of what’s left,” Bixby told me. McCarthy was ultimately able to trim a few billion dollars from last year’s budget. That’s enough for him to claim that the Fiscal Responsibility Act cuts year-over-year spending for the first time in a decade, but in the context of the nearly $6 trillion that the federal government spent in 2022, it’s a pittance.
McCarthy succeeded in getting much of what he said he wanted, but that’s only because he didn’t ask for much. Congress will take back $28 billion in unspent COVID-relief funds, and Republicans chopped off as much as one-quarter of the $80 billion Democrats earmarked for the IRS as part of their Inflation Reduction Act last year. But the reduction in IRS funding could actually increase the deficit in the long term, because the purpose of the money was to secure higher revenue for the government by cracking down on tax fraud. The toughest provision for progressives to swallow is additional work requirements for childless adults ages 50 to 54 who receive food stamps and cash welfare. Other changes, however, will expand the food-stamp program to veterans and homeless people, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday estimated that the government will end up spending more money on food stamps, not less, as a result.
The CBO projected that the bill would save $1.5 trillion over the next decade. But its estimate assumes that Congress will stick to lower spending levels for far longer than the two years that the legislation requires. The speaker has touted other reforms in the bill, such as a requirement that the administration find cuts to offset expensive new rules or regulations, and a provision that calls for an across-the-board 1 percent cut in spending if Congress fails to pass the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government each year. But neither of these is guaranteed.
The best that fiscal hawks could say for the agreement was that it temporarily halted spending growth. Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me that the most significant part of the deal was the “change in behavior” it represented. In recent years, she said, “lawmakers have only added to the deficit. They haven’t had any bipartisan deals that have brought the deficit down in a decade.”
McCarthy and his allies have argued that he extracted as many concessions as he could, considering that Democrats control the White House and the Senate whereas Republicans barely have a majority in the House. As speaker, McCarthy must protect the members most vulnerable to defeat next year, and he evidently determined that demanding cuts to some of the government’s most popular programs—Social Security, Medicare, the military, and veterans—could threaten the GOP majority.
House conservatives were quick to denounce the agreement. To them, the cuts McCarthy secured were a woefully insufficient price for suspending the U.S. borrowing limit for the next year and a half. “Trillions of dollars of debt for crumbs,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chair of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters yesterday. “This deal fails, fails completely.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado noted that by only freezing rather than cutting spending, the legislation would “normalize” the growth of the federal government that happened during the coronavirus pandemic, even after most of the COVID-specific spending wound down.
A few conservatives accused McCarthy of betraying the commitments he made to the party when he narrowly won the speakership in January. But even the Freedom Caucus spared the Pentagon and the biggest safety-net programs in its own proposals.
Republicans have flinched on cutting spending before. Although the House GOP passed a debt-ceiling bill last month stuffed with conservative priorities, the party did not adopt a spending blueprint that would have detailed how it planned to balance the budget without raising taxes. And last week, Republicans abruptly postponed committee votes on four traditionally noncontroversial appropriations bills that contained spending cuts. GOP leaders cited the ongoing debt-limit talks as a reason, but congressional observers suspected that the party lacked the votes to advance the bills to the House floor.
The GOP’s supposed zeal for smaller government has long been inconsistent. Most Republican lawmakers were happy to support spending sprees led by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Only when Democrats have occupied the White House has the GOP demonstrated any interest in spending restraint.
But that may be changing. In the 2011 debt-ceiling talks, Republicans forced Barack Obama to bargain over entitlement programs and accept deep cuts that applied equally to the military and domestic programs. Now the GOP is poised to hand Joe Biden a debt-ceiling increase of roughly the same duration in exchange for hardly any spending cuts at all.
The party’s hardliners fought the deal but could not stop it. They appear unlikely to try to oust McCarthy over the agreement, and Republicans might not get another opportunity to force their agenda through for the rest of Biden’s term. That they chose to fight over so little represents a huge concession of its own, an acknowledgment that despite all their denunciations of out-of-control spending, Republican leaders recognize that what the federal government funds is more popular than they like to claim.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached an “agreement in principle” to raise the nation’s legal debt ceiling late Saturday as they raced to strike a deal to limit federal spending and avert a potentially disastrous U.S. default.
However, the agreement risks angering both Democratic and Republican sides with the concessions made to reach it. Negotiators agreed to some Republican demands for increased work requirements for recipients of food stamps that had sparked an uproar from House Democrats as a nonstarter.
Support from both parties will be needed to win congressional approval next week before a June 5 deadline.
The Democratic president and Republican speaker reached the agreement after the two spoke earlier Saturday evening by phone, said McCarthy. The country and the world have been watching and waiting for a resolution to a political standoff that threatened the U.S. and global economies.
“The agreement represents a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want,” Biden said in a statement late Saturday night. “That’s the responsibility of governing,” he said.
Biden called the agreement “good news for the American people, because it prevents what could have been a catastrophic default and would have led to an economic recession, retirement accounts devastated, and millions of jobs lost.”
McCarthy in brief remarks at the Capitol, said that “we still have a lot of work to do.”
But the Republican speaker said: “I believe this is an agreement in principle that’s worthy of the American people.”
With the outlines of a deal in place, the legislative package could be drafted and shared with lawmakers in time for votes early next week in the House and later in the Senate.
Central to the package is a two-year budget deal that would hold spending flat for 2024 and impose limits for 2025 in exchange for raising the debt limit for two years, pushing the volatile political issue past the next presidential election.
The agreement would limit food stamp eligibility for able-bodied adults up to age 54, but Biden was able to secure waivers for veterans and the homeless.
The two sides had also reached for an ambitious overhaul of federal permitting to ease development of energy projects and transmission lines. Instead, the agreement puts in place changes in the the National Environmental Policy Act that will designate “a single lead agency” to develop economic reviews, in hopes of streamlining the process.
The deal came together after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress that the United States could default on its debt obligations by June 5 — four days later than previously estimated — if lawmakers did not act in time to raise the federal debt ceiling. The extended “X-date” gave the two sides a bit of extra time as they scrambled for a deal.
Biden also spoke earlier in the day with Democratic leaders in Congress to discuss the status of the talks.
The Republican House speaker had gathered top allies behind closed doors at the Capitol as negotiators pushed for a deal that would avoid a first-ever government default while also making spending cuts that House Republicans are demanding.
But as another day dragged on with financial disaster looming closer, it had appeared some of the problems over policy issues that dogged talks all week remained unresolved.
Both sides have suggested one of the main holdups was a GOP effort to expand work requirements for recipients of food stamps and other federal aid programs, a longtime Republican goal that Democrats have strenuously opposed. The White House said the Republican proposals were “cruel and senseless.”
Biden has said the work requirements for Medicaid would be a nonstarter. He seemed potentially open to negotiating minor changes on food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, despite objections from rank-and-file Democrats.
McCarthy, who dashed out before the lunch hour Saturday and arrived back at the Capitol with a big box of takeout, declined to elaborate on those discussions. One of his negotiators, Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves, said there was “not a chance” that Republicans might relent on the work requirements issue.
Americans and the world were uneasily watching the negotiating brinkmanship that could throw the U.S. economy into chaos and sap world confidence in the nation’s leadership.
Anxious retirees and others were already making contingency plans for missed checks, with the next Social Security payments due next week.
Yellen said failure to act by the new date would “cause severe hardship to American families, harm our global leadership position and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests.”
The president, spending part of the weekend at Camp David, continued to talk with his negotiating team multiple times a day, signing off on offers and counteroffers.
Any deal would need to be a political compromise in a divided Congress. Many of the hard-right Trump-aligned Republicans in Congress have long been skeptical of the Treasury’s projections, and they are pressing McCarthy to hold out.
Lawmakers are not expected to return to work from the Memorial Day weekend before Tuesday, at the earliest, and McCarthy has promised lawmakers he will abide by the rule to post any bill for 72 hours before voting.
The Democratic-held Senate has largely stayed out of the negotiations, leaving the talks to Biden and McCarthy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has pledged to move quickly to send a compromise package to Biden’s desk.
Weeks of talks have failed to produce a deal in part because the Biden administration resisted for months on negotiating with McCarthy, arguing that the country’s full faith and credit should not be used as leverage to extract other partisan priorities.
But House Republicans united behind a plan to cut spending, narrowly passing legislation in late April that would raise the debt ceiling in exchange for the spending reductions.
With the outlines of a deal in place, the legislative package could be drafted and shared with lawmakers in time for votes early next week in the House and later in the Senate.
Central to the package is a two-year budget deal that would hold spending flat for 2024 and impose limits for 2025 in exchange for raising the debt limit for two years, pushing the volatile political issue past the next presidential election.
Negotiators agreed to some Republican demands for enhanced work requirements on recipients of food stamps that had sparked an uproar from House Democrats as a nonstarter.
Biden also spoke earlier in the day with Democratic leaders in Congress to discuss the status of the talks, according to three people familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The Republican House speaker had gathered top allies behind closed doors at the Capitol as negotiators pushed for a deal that would raise the nation’s borrowing limit and avoid a first-ever default on the federal debt, while also making spending cuts that House Republicans are demanding.
As he arrived at the Capitol early in the day, McCarthy said that Republican negotiators were “closer to an agreement.”
McCarthy’s comments had echoed the latest public assessment from Biden, who said Friday evening that bargainers were “very close.” Biden and McCarthy last met face-to-face on the matter Monday.
Their new discussion Saturday by phone came after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress that the United States could default on its debt obligations by June 5 — four days later than previously estimated — if lawmakers do not act in time to raise the federal debt ceiling. The extended “X-date” gives the two sides a bit of extra time as they scramble for a deal.
Americans and the world were uneasily watching the negotiating brinkmanship that could throw the U.S. economy into chaos and sap world confidence in the nation’s leadership. House negotiators left the Capitol at 2 a.m. the night before, only to return hours later.
Failure to lift the borrowing limit, now $31 trillion, to pay the nation’s incurred bills, would send shockwaves through the U.S. and global economy. Yellen said failure to act by the new date would “cause severe hardship to American families, harm our global leadership position and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests.”
Anxious retirees and others were already making contingency plans for missed checks, with the next Social Security payments due next week.
In a surprising turn of events—given Republicans’ longtime commitment to protecting their own no matter what—a GOP-led committee in the Texas House voted Thursday to recommend that the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, be impeached. That vote was preceded by testimony from committee investigators who, one day prior, detailed the many ways Paxton had allegedly committed felonies in service to friend and donor Nate Paul, a Texas real estate developer in a legal battle with an Austin nonprofit group. And what did Paxton get in return, besides the satisfaction of allegedly abusing his office to help out a pal? According to the committee, a “floor-to-ceiling renovation” of his Austin home, as well as a construction manager job for a woman he was said to be having an affair with; investigators say Paxton fired several staffers after they reported his actions to authorities.
For all of this, the bipartisan Committee on General Investigating recommended 20 articles of impeachment against the attorney general, which included allegations of abuse of public trust, unfitness for office, and bribery. A spokesman for the panel said the Texas House is expected to vote soon on whether to impeach Paxton. And perhaps not surprisingly, Paxton is not taking any of this well.
In a statement issued on Thursday, he insisted that the committee’s investigation was “based on hearsay and gossip, parroting long-disproved claims.” He added: “It’s a sad day for Texas as we witness the corrupt political establishment unite in this illegitimate attempt to overthrow the will of the people and disenfranchise the voters of our state.” Which is a pretty funny claim to make in light of the fact that Paxton played a not-insignificant role in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election; his effort included filing a lawsuit contesting the results of the election in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin and speaking at the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally, where he told those assembled not to “quit fighting.”
Meanwhile, the allegations that led to Thursday’s impeachment recommendation are far from the only legal issues Paxton has faced since becoming Texas’s AG. Per Vox:
In 2015, Paxton was accused by Byron Cook, a former Republican state legislator, and Florida businessman Joel Hochberg of encouraging them to invest $100,000 or more in a technology company called Servergy Inc., without notifying them that he would earn a commission if they did so. This is alleged to have happened in 2011, while Paxton was a member of the Texas House. The indictment in that case alleges that Paxton “intentionally fail[ed] to disclose” that he had been given compensation in the form of 100,000 shares of Servergy stock, charging him with two counts of securities fraud. He was also charged with a failure to register with the state securities board. Paxton has denied the allegations in the case, which is still making its way through the courts eight years later.
Paxton has also been the subject of an ethics complaint concerning his effort to overturn the 2020 election. Last year he used his wife as a decoy in an attempt to avoid being served a subpoena related to an abortion lawsuit.
She doesn’t know how much her student-loan bill will be when the years-long pandemic-era freeze on payments ends. Eminger’s loans were transferred during the pandemic to a new servicer, but she’s struggled to communicate with the organization, which could help her learn her monthly payment amount. She’s also rushing to take steps that could provide her access to a loan-forgiveness program for public servants.
“I am very nervous about them starting again,” Eminger, 37, who has about $175,000 in student debt, said of the loan payments. “There’s just a lot of uncertainty and murkiness around it, which for a loan amount of my size is pretty scary.”
After a more than three-year freeze, payments, collections and interest are scheduled to resume on federal student loans later this year. This is the ninth time — spanning two administrations — that the government has threatened to turn payments back on. Once again, borrowers, advocates and servicers are gearing up for a financial and operational headache.
“It’s going to be frustrating for everybody involved — borrowers, servicers, the Department of Education, advocacy organizations like ours,” said Betsy Mayotte, the president of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit that helps borrowers manage their student loans.
To advocates who pushed officials to delay restarting payments in the past, this moment in many ways looks similar to the months before the freeze was scheduled to end those eight other times. A challenging economy means borrowers’ budgets are still tight and promised fixes to the student-loan system that could help ensure a smooth transition to repayment and make borrowers’ bills more manageable still haven’t materialized.
But a few key factors are different, some of which are upping the pressure on the Biden administration to turn the student-loan system back on: the official end to the pandemic emergency, congressional Republicans taking aim at the payment pause in two pieces of legislation and multiplelawsuits challenging the freeze. Other elements unique to this moment are exacerbating the uncertainty and challenges related to restarting payments. Servicers will have fewer resources than in the past to handle a likely crush of calls.
“The Department remains focused on doing everything in its power to better serve students and borrowers, and we are fully committed to supporting student loan borrowers as they successfully navigate returning to repayment,” a Department of Education spokesperson wrote in an email. “The Department is deeply concerned about the lack of adequate annual funding made available to Federal Student Aid this year,” the spokesperson said, referring to Congress’s decision not to increase funding for FSA, despite the agency’s request. “As the Department has repeatedly made clear, restarting repayment requires significant resources to avoid unnecessary harm to borrowers.”
For Eminger, and other borrowers, part of the anxiety surrounding the restart to payments stems from major upheaval to the student-loan system that’s been announced during the pause that will make her loans more manageable. But accessing these benefits requires both diligence — staying on top of announcements and paperwork — and patience while she and others wait for the full implementation of these initiatives.
“The rules have been changing so much,” Eminger said. “Before the pandemic I felt like I very much understood what I was required to do. I always felt very on top of it. Now it just feels like a completely moving target.”
Kate Eminger says she’s nervous about the looming resumption of student-loan payments.
Courtesy of Kate Eminger
Compounding her uncertainty is a lack of clarity surrounding exactly when payments will resume. In November, President Joe Biden told borrowers they could expect the pause to end in the late summer, but he didn’t give an exact date. In addition, it’s hard for Eminger to see how this deadline for payments to restart is different from all the others, where student-loan bills never materialized. All of that has made it difficult for Eminger to figure out exactly when to take steps to make sure her student-loan payment can fit in with the rest of her budget such as the sale of her car.
“It does not feel real at all,” she said of the restart of student-loan payments. “It would be great to name a date. If they could name a date and if that date felt certain then you could plan.”
Tied up in court
The Biden administration has said that the freeze will end 60 days after litigation surrounding its plan to cancel up to $20,000 in debt for a wide swath of borrowers is resolved or 60 days after June 30, 2023, whichever comes first.
“When payments turn back on, it’s going to be a big problem,” said Eleni Schirmer, a researcher and organizer with the Debt Collective, a debtor activist group, “but to not even be granted the dignity of a clear date of when that happens just makes it even more of a problem.” She described providing a ballpark estimate for the restart of payments instead of an exact date as signaling an “almost cruel indifference” to how resumed monthly student-loan bills will impact borrowers.
That uncertainty could exacerbate the stress that student debt already places on borrowers, according to Daniel A. Collier, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Memphis, who is studying the impact of student debt on mental health. What he’s found is that people who are the most uncertain about what’s going on with their student loan have the highest rates of psychological distress and suicidal ideation. For example, these borrowers worry they’re not getting an accurate sense of their balance or the number of payments they need to make before qualifying for a forgiveness plan.
“People are concerned about the pause because they don’t know what a restart looks like, this has never been done before,” he said. In the past, when payments have resumed after more limited pauses, delinquencies and defaults spiked — part of the Biden administration’s legal rationale for tying mass debt cancellation to the restart of payments. Borrowers don’t know “when it’s going to start, what their repayments are actually going to be,” Collier added.
Kevin Noonan, who together with his wife has about $100,000 in student debt, said he’s benefited from the pause. The couple has used the extra room in their budget to pay down private student loans. Still, Noonan is “frustrated” with the lack of clarity surrounding the resumed payments and the status of the Biden administration’s loan-forgiveness plan.
“Not knowing is the hardest part,” he said. “I have a Google alert set up, every time student loans come up I check everything. You kind of just have to plan for the worst-case scenario.”
Megan and Kevin Noonan have about $100,000 in student debt.
Courtesy of Kevin Noonan
The decision to tie the resumption of payments to the court’s decision “added an element of unpredictability,” said Persis Yu, managing counsel and deputy executive director at the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group.
“There’s the choice to not land on a certain date, but there’s also the choice of 60 days,” Yu said, referring to the 60-day delay between the court’s decision and payments resuming.
“I really wonder whether or not 60 days is enough time for borrowers,” she said. “When we think about the amount of work that is really going to have to happen to effectively turn on this system, 60 days does not seem like a lot of lead time.”
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a congressional hearing this month that the agency is “preparing to restart repayment because the emergency period is over.” He told another congressional panel that the agency is “geared up and ready to go,” to resume payments.
Scott Buchanan, the executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, a trade group, said that 60 days should be enough time for student-loan servicers to implement the restart. In order to accomplish that, they’ll need to be able to communicate with borrowers in the coming weeks about the end of the payment pause and be allowed to offer flexibilities like forbearance and allowing borrowers to verbally recertify their income for payment plans.
When the end of the payment freeze loomed in the past, servicers didn’t have the go-ahead from the Department of Education to communicate with borrowers, Buchanan said. They still don’t, but servicers have been working closely with officials to discuss the “communication playbook” in recent weeks and hope to roll it out shortly.
The Department of Education “remains in constant contact with servicers,” the department spokesperson wrote in an email, and will be in “direct contact” with borrowers before the end of the payment freeze. “Engaging with servicers to ensure they are communicating directly with borrowers about successfully returning to repayment is an important part of the Department’s efforts to smoothly transition borrowers back into repayment,” the spokesperson wrote.
Still, the uncertainty surrounding exactly when payments will start could create an obstacle to a seamless return to repayment, Buchanan said.
“If you’re a family and you’re planning a budget you need to know what is the date that I need to be prepared to make this payment,” he said. “Having a fuzzy date doesn’t do anyone any good including servicers, but especially for borrowers.”
Borrowers will receive a bill at least 21 days before their payments are scheduled to resume and likely won’t end up having to make a payment until October, Politico reported last month. Officials are also considering offering borrowers a grace period when the freeze ends, according to the report.
Servicers will be implementing plans the department previously developed to restart payments, Buchanan said. But they’ll be working with fewer resources than previously anticipated. The Department of Education cut the amount it’s paying servicers to manage each account. The agency has said the cuts are due to lawmakers’ decision not to increase funding for the Office of Federal Student Aid for the 2023 fiscal year. The lack of funds will mean fewer customer-service representatives and reduced call-center hours, including none on weekends.
“What is the right level of resources? How many staff should you have? It’s not a definable thing,” Buchanan said. “What I can say is having fewer than we had before does not make it better.”
The department spokesperson said the agency will keep working with Congress to fully fund President Biden’s fiscal 2024 budget request. The department asked for a $620 million increase in funding for FSA.
“Restarting repayment requires significant resources to avoid unnecessary harm to borrowers,” the spokesperson wrote in the email.
Members of the Class of 2022 at the University of Delaware.
Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
In addition, the Department of Education recently announced an overhaul of the student-loan servicing system aimed at increasing accountability for servicers. For years, borrowers and advocates have complained that the firms don’t provide borrowers with enough information or the right information. Without that in place, Yu worries that ensuring borrowers have a truly affordable payment will be “a nightmare.”
“At this inflection point where you need the best servicing possible, we don’t have it,” she said. “It seems irresponsible to turn on the payment system into a broken servicing system and into a broken system overall.”
Though the new servicing system won’t go live until 2024, “our servicer contracts continue to include the same requirements that all vendors effectively serve our customers and still provide that servicers compete against each other to maintain low call-abandonment rates,” the department spokesperson wrote.
Fixing servicing is just one of many initiatives from the Biden administration aimed at overhauling the student-loan system in the process of being implemented and won’t be fully realized before the end of the summer.
For example, some borrowers have debts that should be wiped off the books, Yu said. The Biden administration has launched several initiatives over the past few years aimed at making it easier for borrowers to access the forgiveness already available to them under the law. So far, the department has announced more than $66 billion in discharges for nearly 2.2 million borrowers, including public servants, borrowers with severe disabilities and borrowers who were scammed by schools.
Still, there are more borrowers eligible to have their debt canceled under these programs who haven’t received relief, Yu said. “These borrowers are going to be thrown into a system to make payments on loans they shouldn’t be making payments on anymore,” she said.
In addition, a promise to make repaying student loans more manageable hasn’t fully materialized. At the same time that President Biden announced the mass debt-cancellation plan, he also unveiled sweeping changes to the repayment system aimed at making student-loan bills more affordable. But the program, which Biden called “a game changer” when he announced it in August, likely won’t be ready by the end of the summer. It’s also been a target for criticism by conservative advocacy groups and Republican members of Congress.
“The only way that that could be available to borrowers when payments resume is with another extension,” Yu said.
The proposed plan, which the department spokesperson described as “the most affordable student loan plan in history,” builds on an existing income-driven repayment plan called REPAYE. Eligible borrowers who enroll in REPAYE now will have their monthly payments automatically updated as the terms of the new plan are “finalized and implemented, starting later this year,” the spokesperson wrote.
‘Almost like a tax increase’
For many borrowers, the financial burden of resuming student-loan payments will be significant. Thomas Simons, a senior economist at Jefferies, estimates the return to repayment will cost borrowers about $18 billion per month.
“It’s almost like a tax increase for these people,” Simons said. “They have to pay it, [and] it doesn’t get them anything tangible right now.”
The amount borrowers are saving by not making student-loan payments accounts for about 2% of discretionary spending, Simons said. He sees the hit to borrowers’ wallets as analogous to the impact of a payroll-tax increase in 2013, which impacted a smaller share of discretionary spending for a larger number of Americans.
“‘It’s almost like a tax increase for these people. They have to pay it, [and] it doesn’t get them anything tangible right now.’”
— Thomas Simons, senior economist, Jefferies
“If you look at what happened in the economy in 2013 after those tax increases were announced, the first half of the year spending decelerated quite significantly,” he said. “It really didn’t recover until the latter part of the year.”
“I would be very surprised if we don’t see a similar slowdown in spending coming out of this,” Simons added.
And if payments resume in late summer or early fall, as planned, the hits to borrowers’ bank accounts will be arriving at “the worst possible time,” Simons said, when the labor market will likely start to feel the effects of the Federal Reserve’s battle against inflation.
“That could be a double whammy where people are starting to have significant questions about their income and then having a pretty significant expense,” Simons said.
Many borrowers will likely be juggling other bills, too. For one, the costs of rent, groceries and other basic needs have risen since the advent of the coronavirus pandemic. And borrowers’ other debt payments have actually become less manageable in the three years since the freeze was first implemented.
As of September of last year, about 7% of student-loan borrowers who were not in default on their student loans at the start of the pandemic were more than 60 days delinquent on other debt, compared with 6.2% at the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Their monthly payments on other credit products have also increased during the pause period — 46% of borrowers saw their monthly payments on credit cards and car loans increase by at least 10% since the start of the pandemic, the agency found.
For Kelly, a Charleston, W. Va., student-loan borrower and her husband, the freeze on student-loan payments created financial space to take care of emergency expenses, like a leaking roof. Kelly, who declined to use her last name in order to more freely discuss her financial circumstances, owes about $23,000 in student debt from studying to become a paralegal. Her husband owes about $20,000 from his nursing-school studies.
Kelly, 45, found a job in her field after graduating, but was laid off during the pandemic. She started working some side gigs and eventually launched a dog-grooming business. Despite the business’s success and her passion for it, it likely won’t be enough to cover her bills once she has to start paying on her student loan again. She’s considering getting a second job when the payment freeze ends.
“We’re dual-income, no kids. One car is paid off, the other one is modest — a Volkswagen VOW, -0.43%
VWAGY, +0.22%,
” she added. “We don’t finance things, we don’t live a high and mighty life, but it seems like every month we’re budgeting to the penny.”
“I don’t know how much we can cut back,” she added. “Our entertainment as it is, is Netflix NFLX, -1.60%,
or we go out to eat once a month or so. I guess we can cut back on that.
North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature has officially passed a 12-week abortion ban, after overturning Governor Roy Cooper’s veto. The Tuesday night vote served as a stunning final act to what has been a closely watched clash between Cooper, a Democrat, and North Carolina Republicans over the bill—including a recent Democrat-to-Republican convert, who, despite a long pro-abortion-rights record, voted for the ban. The conclusion—a cut to abortion access for not only North Carolinians, but also for the many women in neighboring states with even harsher restrictions—has re-emboldened Democrats nationally to bring a blue wave to the state.
“The dangerous antics by the North Carolina Republican Party are the national model for how to lose elections in 2023 and 2024,” Philip Shulman, a spokesperson for liberal super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, said. “As Republican legislators and the party’s top choice for governor, Mark Robinson, attack and take away people’s basic freedoms, voters have that much more reason to vote for Democrats up and down the ticket.”
“North Carolina is a battleground state for 2024,” Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic strategist tweeted after the vote. “GOP candidate is gonna own this.”
Going into Tuesday’s vote, it was unclear whether Republicans could garner enough votes to trump Cooper’s opposition to the bill. “This is a very purple state, every battle is won or lost on a very tiny, tiny number of votes,” Jenny Black, the CEO and president of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, told Vanity Fair Monday evening. This played out the same way. The Senate voted 30 to 20 along party lines to override Cooper’s veto and the House also voted to override the veto in a final vote of 72 to 48; four Republicans who had previously said they did not favor tighter abortion restrictions supported the ban.
“North Carolinians now understand that Republicans are unified in their assault on women’s reproductive freedom and we are energized to fight back on this and other critical issues facing our state,” Cooper said in a statement following the vote Tuesday night.
The political calculus around abortion rights in North Carolina changed last month when House member Tricia Cothamdefected from the Democratic ranks, providing Republicans with a slim supermajority. Previously an ardent supporter of abortion rights, Cotham voted for the 12-week ban. Her hypocrisy on the issue has been glaring. “My womb and my uterus is not up for your political grab,” she declared in a 2015 speech. Among the three other Republicans—House representatives Ted Davis and John Bradford, and state senator Michael Lee—who also staked out positions on the campaign trail against extreme abortion bans, two voted (Lee and Bradford) for the initial measure, and one (Davis) was absent. As Rolling Stonereported, just last year Bradford said he had “no intentions” of making North Carolina’s current 20-week abortion ban more restrictive. Similarly, in an op-ed, Lee staked out, “I am against bans in the first trimester.” And Davis said, “I believe in the [existing] law…. If a woman desires to have an abortion up to 20 weeks, which is the second trimester of pregnancy, she can have an abortion.”
Cooper has served as a bulwark against North Carolina Republicans’ conservative agenda for years now; the Democratic governor has vetoed more than 75 pieces of legislation since he took office in 2017. His veto, which he issued Saturday in Raleigh to a crowd of hundreds, was expected. “Standing in the way of progress right now is this Republican supermajority legislature that only took 48 hours to turn the clock back 50 years,” Cooper said. The governor spent the last week campaigning in Republican districts to urge constituents to sway their elected leaders.
Black was hoping the political pressures would work. “November wasn’t that long ago,” she said ahead of Tuesday. Instead, this episode once again thrust North Carolina into Democrats’ purview nationally. A Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t won the state since Barack Obama in 2008 (Mitt Romney won the state in 2012). And despite Cooper’s victory in 2016 and hopes that Donald Trump’s drag on the GOP would help Democrats claim a Senate seat—or two—Republicans have held a mostly firm grasp on the state federally. Still, abortion has proven to be a salient issue for voters, even in much redder states than North Carolina. With that and Joe Biden’s wider appeal in southern states, Democrats appear to be more hopeful about their prospects.
Republicans pitched the 12-week ban as something of a compromise on the abortion issue. For instance, Republican senator Phil Bergercharacterized the bill as “a mainstream approach to limiting elective abortions.” But Democrats and abortion rights activists have dismissed this line of argument. “Make no mistake: Your actions today will harm women,” Representative Julie von Haefen, a Democrat, said on the House floor. And a Meredith poll in February showed that 57% of respondents supported the state’s current 20-week ban or expanding access further.
The White House and Congress have not made much progress in their talks to avert an unprecedented, and potentially calamitous, national default that could occur as soon as early June. But on the most fundamental point of dispute, President Joe Biden has already caved: He’s negotiating with Republicans over the debt ceiling.
For months, the president’s ironclad position has been that the debt ceiling is not a bargaining chip. No longer would Democrats allow Republicans to hold hostage the nation’s creditworthiness and economic prestige. Paying the government’s bills by raising the U.S.’s statutory borrowing limit would be nonnegotiable. As recently as Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared without equivocation, “We are not going to negotiate over the debt limit.”
But Biden himself has dropped the pretense that his weeks-long budget discussions with the GOP have not revolved around the debt ceiling. Asked specifically about the debt ceiling on Sunday—in anticipation of a second White House visit by congressional leaders, planned for today—Biden told reporters, “Well, I’ve learned a long time ago, and you know as well as I do: It never is good to characterize a negotiation in the middle of a negotiation.”
So there you go: It’s a negotiation. Exactly what the two parties are discussing is only starting to become clear. According to variousreports, a deal to avert default could include some changes to permitting rules that would speed up domestic-energy production; a revocation of unused COVID funds; additional work requirements for some federal programs (although the president has ruled out any modifications to Medicaid); and, most significant, a cap on overall federal spending.
The Biden administration still claims to be haggling only over the budget, not the debt ceiling. “The president has been emphasizing for months that he’s eager to have budget negotiations,” a White House official, who requested anonymity to explain the administration’s somewhat tortured position, told me. “That’s of course different from avoiding default, which is nonnegotiable.”
Biden’s no-negotiation stance was born of past experience, when in 2011 Republicans dragged out debt talks with the Obama administration to the brink of default, resulting in a downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating. But Biden’s approach this time is proving to be neither realistic nor sustainable, especially after Speaker Kevin McCarthy defied expectations last month by getting a budget-slashing debt-ceiling bill through his narrow House majority.
Crucially, Biden failed to win strong support for his strategy from House centrists. Democrats had been hoping to persuade Republicans representing swing districts to buck McCarthy and help pass a debt-ceiling increase. But those lawmakers have stuck by the speaker. Complaining about a lack of outreach from the White House, they instead criticized Biden over his refusal—until recently—to negotiate. With Republicans unwilling to budge, Democratic centrists began to lose patience with Biden’s approach and conducted their own bipartisan negotiations.
“We believe it’s very important in general that both sides sit down and try to work this out,” Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, the Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told me before Biden’s first meeting last week with McCarthy and other top congressional leaders. “This can’t become a part of a political back-and-forth as the country drives off the cliff.”
Last month the Problem Solvers offered their own plan, which they presented as a fallback option that could win bipartisan support should Biden and McCarthy fail to strike a deal in time. The proposal would immediately suspend the borrowing limit through the end of the year to buy time for broader budget talks. If Congress agrees to unspecified budget limits and creates a fiscal commission to tackle the nation’s long-term deficits and debt, the plan stipulates that the debt ceiling would be increased through the 2024 elections.
The compromise has yet to gain momentum, but its release seemed to undermine the Biden administration’s insistence that Democrats would not tie a debt-ceiling increase to spending reforms. “We didn’t try to fill in every blank, but we thought this was a really good framework to become the meat of the deal,” Representative Scott Peters of California, a Democrat who helped write the Problem Solvers plan, told me.
It could still prove handy. Biden struck an optimistic note on Sunday, telling reporters, “I really think there’s a desire on [Republicans’] part, as well as ours, to reach an agreement, and I think we’ll be able to do it.” But McCarthy is sounding more dour. “I still think we’re far apart,” he told NBC News yesterday morning. The speaker said that Biden “hasn’t taken it serious” and warned that an agreement needed to happen by this weekend in order for the House and Senate to have time to debate and pass it by early June.
Whether a Biden-McCarthy deal could even get through the House is also in question. Democrats have largely stayed quiet on Biden’s evident capitulation to Republicans, and the talks initially did not stir a backlash. But that may be changing as the president openly considers concessions that would be anathema to progressives, such as the possibility of adding work requirements to social safety-net programs. Still, the lack of a credible primary challenge to Biden’s reelection has helped give him room to negotiate, as Democrats fret about the effect that a default could have on the president’s already tenuous public standing.
“As long as he continues to try to avoid default, and avoid the middle class having to pay the cost for it, then he’s in the position that the majority of the electorate wants him to be,” Jesse Ferguson, a longtime Democratic strategist, told me.
McCarthy has much more to worry about. He traded away his own job security to win the speakership in January, agreeing to rule changes that would make it easier for hard-right conservatives to depose him. A debt-ceiling deal that fails to secure deep enough spending cuts or policy concessions from Democrats could threaten his position. “Default can be avoided. The question is whether Kevin McCarthy could withstand putting that bill on the floor,” Ferguson said.
The speaker has secured no substantive commitments from Biden, nothing specific that he can sell to his party. But McCarthy has elicited one major concession from the president, which serves as a prerequisite for any others to come. Biden has come to the table with default in the balance, and he’s negotiating on the GOP’s terms.
Donald Trump’s defense of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in his televised CNN town hall left some Republicans on Capitol Hill again treading carefully at the risk of finding themselves at odds with the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination.
Among them: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
In the town hall Wednesday night, Trump declined to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal, despite voluminous reports of atrocities such as torture and the use of rape as a tool of war by Russians in Ukraine.
He also declined to say which side he supported, in comments reminiscent of his “very fine people on both sides” observation about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
“If you say he’s a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to make this thing stopped,” Trump said at the town hall. “If he’s going to be a war criminal, people are going to grab him and execute him. He’s going to fight a lot harder than he’s fighting under the other circumstance. That’s something to be discussed at a later day.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said a press conference Russian president Vladimir Putin and Russia were responsible for war crimes in Ukraine but declined to criticize Donald Trump for denying that.
The State Department has formally said war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed by Russians in Ukraine since the latest phase of the war began in February 2022.
The International Criminal Court at The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Putin, citing “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.”
Trump also declined to say he supported Ukraine or Russia, even though Russia’s main international support these days comes only from other authoritarian regimes in China, Iran and North Korea.
“Russians and Ukrainians, I want them to stop dying,” he said. Previously, Trump has said he would have considered not objecting to Russia retaining some portion of Ukrainian territory as a way to broker peace, an outcome many experts believe would be satisfactory to Putin.
McCarthy hedged Thursday when asked if he was concerned about Trump’s comments, saying Putin was responsible for “atrocities” but not criticizing Trump.
“I think we have been very clear about the atrocities that Russia and Putin have presented to this world. I think we have been very clear in our votes as well. I think we lead with exactly what we’ve been doing,” McCarthy said.
“I think we have been very clear about the atrocities that Russia and Putin have presented to this world. I think we have been very clear in our votes as well. I think we lead with exactly what we’ve been doing.”
“I do not support what your country has done to Ukraine. I do not support your killing of the children either,” McCarthy replied to a Russian reporter.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has gone beyond calling Russia’s actions in Ukraine war crimes or crimes against humanity, labeling them “genocide” as well.
“I had a hearing on war crimes with the [Ukrainian] prosecutor general. Bucha [Ukraine] grave sites, killing and raping little girls to death, bombing maternity hospitals, mobile crematoriums, I mean, it’s pretty bad stuff,” McCaul told HuffPost Thursday.
But McCaul stopped short of criticizing Trump for his comments.
“I know a lot of his top advisers advise him why Ukraine is important. I can’t speak for him,” McCaul said.
“I know a lot of his top advisers advise him why Ukraine is important. I can’t speak for him.”
– Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
Some Republicans are sympathetic to Trump’s view, though it’s unclear how big a proportion of the party they make up. A letter to President Joe Biden in April warned him against “unlimited” arms supplies garnered the signatures of only 19 GOP lawmakers out of 222 Republican House members and 49 senators.
Willingness to stick up for Ukraine is more pronounced among Senate Republicans. Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) said Thursday he would not support Trump to be the GOP’s presidential nominee, in part because of Trump’s stance on Putin.
“President Putin and his government have engaged in war crimes. I don’t believe that’s disputed,” Young told CNN.
“I think President Trump’s judgment is wrong in this case.”
