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  • Democrats have been doing well in special elections in 2023 | CNN Politics

    Democrats have been doing well in special elections in 2023 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Democrat Jennifer McClellan easily won the special election for Virginia’s 4th Congressional District last week. The fact that a Democrat comfortably retained a Democratic seat in a district President Joe Biden would have won under its new lines by 36 points in 2020 is not surprising.

    What is notable is that McClellan didn’t just win, she outperformed Biden’s 2020 margin by 13 points. It’s part of a pattern in special elections this year that suggests that the national environment may be friendlier to Democrats than Biden’s sub-50% job approval rating would indicate.

    So far in 2023, besides McClellan’s race, there have been 12 special elections for state legislative seats in which at least one Democrat ran against at least one Republican. And in those 12 races, Democrats have been outperforming Biden’s 2020 margins by an average of 4 points.

    Now, 12 isn’t a particularly large sample size when examining special state legislative elections, so that 4-point average swing could shift somewhat as more special elections are held.

    Still, a sample size of 12 isn’t nothing, especially considering these elections have taken place in areas ranging from red to blue and across six states, from New Hampshire all the way down to Louisiana.

    And this 4-point swing to the Democrats is very much unlike what we saw in the state legislative special elections during the 2022 cycle before Roe v. Wade was overturned. In those elections, Democrats were underperforming Biden’s margin by an average of 4 points.

    The change in special elections reminds me of what happened in early 2019. Democrats were coming off a big 2018 midterm campaign in which the special elections leading up to it were the first indication that the party was in for a big night.

    In state special elections in the first half of 2019, Democrats continued to outperform the party baseline from the previous presidential election, but not by anywhere close to how well they had done in specials before the 2018 midterms. Sure enough, Biden would go on in 2020 to do better than Democrats had done in 2016, though not as well as Democratic House candidates had done in 2018.

    Also in the first half of 2019, House Republicans easily retained control of a very red district in Pennsylvania in the first special federal election of that cycle. The result was similar to how House Democrats did in Virginia last week – easily winning a very Democratic seat in the first congressional special election of 2023.

    That big Republican win in Pennsylvania in 2019 wasn’t surprising, but what was so out of character was how the result nearly matched the GOP baseline set in the previous presidential election. This was very unlike the vast majority of special federal elections in the 2018 cycle and presaged a tight 2020 presidential election.

    Let’s not forget, too, that Democrats did do better than the 2020 baseline in the special elections last year following the overturning of Roe v. Wade (though generally not by the same degree as the result in Virginia last week). This foreshadowed a stronger-than-expected midterm election for the party in control of the White House.

    Of course, it’s still very early in the current election cycle. There’s a lot of time for things to shift between now and the 2024 general election.

    But, for the moment at least, congressional and state legislative elections aren’t the only ones in which Democrats have been doing well.

    Indeed, if you want an idea of how the current political environment could make a difference in a swing state, look no further than one of the most important swing states: Wisconsin.

    The Badger State held a nonpartisan primary last week for a critical state Supreme Court seat. This race – to succeed a retiring conservative – will determine whether liberals or conservatives hold the majority on the bench and could affect rulings on abortion and gerrymandering, among other issues.

    Two liberals and two conservatives ran in the primary, which had an unusually high turnout. A liberal and a conservative have advanced to the April general election, but the two liberals combined beat the two conservatives combined by 8 points – in a state Biden won by less than a percentage point in 2020.

    Were that result to hold in April, it would mark one of the most important judicial election wins for liberals in the country this century.

    We’ll just have to wait to see if this blue tint we’re witnessing in a small cross-section of elections across the country continues to hold true as the year goes on.

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  • A new bipartisan push for paid family and medical leave | CNN Politics

    A new bipartisan push for paid family and medical leave | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A cocktail party on Capitol Hill is often hardly notable.

    But at one recent soiree, the clinking of glasses had a different ring. Members of both parties joined together to kick off a renewed effort to solve a uniquely American problem: no universal paid family and medical leave.

    It’s been 30 years since the Family and Medical Leave Act became law. It guaranteed workers the right to unpaid, job-protected time off.

    But the United States is one of only seven countries in the world without some form of universal paid family and medical leave.

    A bipartisan congressional duo is trying to change that.

    “We live in the greatest nation in the world, and we do so many things well, but when you’re talking about families, this is one area that we have struggled,” Republican Rep. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma told CNN during an interview in her Capitol Hill office last month.

    Sitting beside her, nodding, was Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania.

    “It’s frankly an embarrassment that we are one of the seven nations or so that doesn’t have this kind of focus on the family,” Houlahan said. “It’s really, really important that we lead by our example.”

    At the end of January, determined to find a solution to the lack of universal paid family and medical leave in America, the congresswomen officially launched their House Bipartisan Paid Family Leave Working Group.

    “We are action-oriented, and we are committed to having open eyes and ears,” Houlahan said, addressing policy advocates and politicians alongside Bice at the group’s launch party.

    Their task force is composed of six House members: three from each party, including Democrats Colin Allred of Texas and Haley Stevens of Michigan and Republicans Julia Letlow of Louisiana and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa. Such a partnership across the aisle, Bice insisted, is not that uncommon.

    “More of that happens than people realize back home,” the Oklahoma Republican told CNN. “There’s a lot of bipartisanship that goes on behind the scenes, trying to bring everyone together and move the country forward. And this is one way we’re doing that.”

    Houlahan represents a blue-leaning district in eastern Pennsylvania that includes parts of the Philadelphia suburbs. Bice represents a reliably red seat that includes parts of Oklahoma City. They’re both relatively new to Congress – elected in 2018 and 2020, respectively. They shared committee assignments – and previously a hallway in a House office building – and “just kind of connected,” said Bice.

    But the two have something else in common: They’re both mothers with daughters.

    Bice said she worked in the private sector when her daughters were born and had the ability to take paid family leave through her company. That was 20 years ago. “[It] was almost unheard of,” she shared. She said she doesn’t know what she would have done without that opportunity for paid time off.

    The Oklahoma native acknowledges that her circumstance was the exception, not the rule, when it came to paid family leave. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 1 in 4 workers had access to paid family leave in 2022.

    Families in the lowest 25% of wage earners had even less access. Only 13% of those low-income workers were eligible for paid family leave last year.

    “I was incredibly fortunate,” Bice said.

    Houlahan was an active-duty officer in the Air Force when her daughter was born 30 years ago. She recalled that the policy at the time was effectively six weeks of convalescence.

    “And I know, I remember acutely that the child care on the base was a six-month waiting list,” Houlahan said. “I couldn’t figure out how to make ends meet.”

    The veteran said she struggled to find a solution: Child care on the base was affordable but not accessible, and child care off base was the opposite.

    “To be really honest, it was one of the reasons that drove me to separate from the military,” she admitted. “These are choices that are being made by husbands and wives and families across the country.”

    A lack of paid family and medical leave doesn’t just create burdens for families, Houlahan said – it hurts the economy by taking women out of the workforce, causing what she called a “vicious cycle.”

    “The domino effect of all of this kind of thing is real,” the Pennsylvania Democrat said. “When we’re talking about these issues, it’s not just about the mom. It’s not just about the family. It’s about the infrastructure and the economy as well.”

    Bice and Houlahan face what many from the outside would call insurmountable odds: a deeply partisan and divided Congress, with narrow majorities in both chambers. But Houlahan said the razor-thin majorities present an opening.

    “We have an opportunity-rich environment right now, to use a military term, to make sure that we take advantage of this really special time, honestly, where the majorities and minorities are so small and so slim that it really requires that we work together,” she said.

    “We can pretty much assure that our far edges of both parties will not necessarily be interested in working collaboratively,” Houlahan added. “So we need to find that moderate middle.”

    Bice hopes the growing number of women in the House GOP Conference will make a difference, too. There are now 33 Republican women serving in the chamber – the highest number ever. It’s still small in comparison with the 91 female House Democrats (soon to be 92) across the aisle, but it’s momentum nonetheless.

    “Having that female conservative perspective, I think, is important to bring to the conversation,” Bice said. “Many of the women in the Republican Conference are young mothers. And so I think this conversation is ripe on our side of the aisle right now.”

    GOP Rep. Stephanie Bice, seen in Oklahoma City in 2020 before her election to Congress, says the issue of paid family leave is ripe among Republicans at the moment.

    Part of the frustration in Washington – and around the country – is that universal paid family and medical leave is quite popular across the political spectrum. A Morning Consult poll this past summer found that 85% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans supported congressional action on ensuring paid family leave.

    But the two parties have deep philosophical differences about how to pay for it. It’s part of the reason successful legislation has eluded Congress – and a big obstacle for Bice and Houlahan as they start their work.

    “We want to start with a clean slate,” Bice said. “Coming at this from maybe a new fresh perspective, looking at what’s been done in the past. What legislation currently in place isn’t working? And figuring out either do we expand on that or do we pull back and look at a new policy that would actually be much more effective?”

    They’re also realistic about what’s possible. Houlahan is prepared for incremental change.

    “If we’re able to give some family leave for benefits to our federal employees and then our uniform personnel and then this population and then that population, at least we’re making progress,” she said.

    Bice and Houlahan are certainly not the first lawmakers to try to tackle the issue in recent years.

    In 2021, House Democrats pushed to get 12 weeks of universal paid leave in the sweeping Build Back Better package. They eventually pared it down to just four weeks to get the necessary votes to pass in the House along party lines. But the $1.75 trillion social spending bill stalled in the Senate. Paid family leave was then left out of Democrats’ $750 billion climate, tax and health care package, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, that was enacted last summer.

    Houlahan told CNN that she and Bice “stand on the shoulders of great people, mostly women,” who have worked on the issue for decades and across the Capitol. Currently, New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand and Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy are among the senators working on solutions of their own in the upper chamber.

    The House working group co-chairs also acknowledge the importance of bringing men into the conversation. Their six-member task force includes Allred, who made headlines in 2019 when he became the first member of Congress to take paternity leave.

    “If we’re going to be pro-family, it’s going to be pro-family, Mom and Dad,” Bice said.

    This February marked three decades since the Family and Medical Leave Act became law.

    “We’ve been at this since I was pregnant,” Houlahan quipped at the launch party for their group, noting that her oldest daughter is 30 years old.

    “It’s time for there to be additional progress on this issue. It’s wonderful that you now can’t lose your job for taking time off, but that’s not enough for us to be a competitive nation. I don’t think that embodies the American values of the strengths of families as well,” she told CNN in the joint interview.

    Her Republican colleague agreed.

    “It’s time for us to find a solution and take action,” Bice said. “Thirty years is too long. You can’t sit back and watch. You got to move forward.”

    This headline has been updated.

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  • Incumbent Lightfoot fights to make runoff in Chicago mayoral primary | CNN Politics

    Incumbent Lightfoot fights to make runoff in Chicago mayoral primary | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is fighting for her political survival, seeking to finish in the top two in Tuesday’s crowded primary and advance to an April runoff in her quest for a second term.

    Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first out gay person to serve as mayor of a city often pilloried by conservatives in national debates over violence and gun control, rose to prominence as a pugnacious reformer promising a break from the corruption and clubby governance that had long marked Chicago politics.

    But years of contentious brawls over policing, teacher pay and Covid-19 public safety policies, as well as mounting complaints about long waits in Chicago’s public transit system, have left Lightfoot vulnerable, raising the prospect of the Second City ousting its Democratic mayor in the first round of voting.

    Voters on Tuesday will sort through the nine-candidate field – including eight Democrats and one independent. No candidate is expected to top 50% of the vote, which would mean the top two finishers will advance to an April 4 runoff.

    Campaigns and Chicago political observers describe the contest as wide open, with four candidates emerging at the top: Lightfoot; progressive US Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García; Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson; and Paul Vallas, a law-and-order candidate and a onetime head of schools in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans.

    If the outcome is close, it could take days to determine the top two finishers, as mail-in votes postmarked by election day get delivered.

    Powerful interests with which Lightfoot has at times brawled are split among her major challengers. Conservatives and the police have aligned behind one rival. Teachers have backed another. And many progressives are backing a third major contender.

    Above all else, concerns about crime and public safety have rattled Chicago. Violence in the city spiked in 2020 and 2021. And though shootings and murders have decreased since then, other crimes – including theft, car-jacking, robberies and burglaries – have increased since last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s 2022 year-end report.

    Lightfoot and her rivals have placed the issue at the forefront of their campaigns.

    “We absolutely need to hire more officers,” Lightfoot said at a WTTW mayoral forum earlier this month. “This is one of the toughest times in the country to recruit, and mayors all over the country are experiencing the difficulty.”

    Chicago’s municipal elections are nonpartisan, which means all voters – Democrats, Republicans and independents – can participate. However, Chicago is an overwhelmingly blue city, and all the major contenders say they are Democrats.

    Vallas, however, has attracted support from conservatives, and has described the Democratic Party as moving away from him in recent years on certain issues. Lightfoot, in an email to supporters, said Vallas “has so strongly aligned himself with Republican views that he can’t even be considered a moderate Democrat.”

    Vallas, who unsuccessfully ran for Illinois governor as a Democrat in 2002 and was the losing Democratic lieutenant governor nominee in 2014, was endorsed by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the same organization that hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in nearby Elmhurst earlier this week.

    “I have talked about the need to take our city back from the criminals that are preying on our residents and preying on our businesses,” Vallas told CNN in an interview.

    Johnson, meanwhile, has floated the idea in the past of diverting some funds from the police budget to alternate sources, saying he wants to “invest in people.”

    He has the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union, a powerful organization that has repeatedly clashed with Lightfoot – including over teachers’ pay and class sizes in 2019 that led to an 11-day strike and then last year as Lightfoot pushed teachers to return to classrooms at a time of rising Covid-19 cases.

    “The reason we don’t have enough police officers is because we are asking them to be social workers, therapists and marriage counselors,” Johnson said at the WTTW forum. “I’m actually investing in actually having social workers, therapists to show up on the front line, to actually free up law enforcement to deal with the more severe crime that happens in the city of Chicago.”

    García – a former Cook County commissioner who in 2015 forced then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff – has sounded similar themes.

    “Hiring more civilians to free up more police officers with their guns and badges to walk the walk, to talk to people, rebuild trust is the most important. The other important element is investing in communities and investing in violence prevention programs,” he told CNN.

    Vallas, whose message has revolved around a tough-on-crime message, said Chicago needs more police on “L” station platforms and on trains as part of a push to place more officers on local beats.

    He said combating violent crime is the “first, second and third priority” of his campaign.

    “Everything becomes undermined if you can’t provide public security,” Vallas told CNN.

    Lightfoot in recent days has lambasted Vallas after he told a crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.”

    The mayor told reporters that Vallas was “blowing the ultimate dog whistle.”

    “Take our city back, meaning what? To what time? And take our city back from whom?” she said.

    When pressed by CNN, Vallas said he was referring to criminals in his remark that Lightfoot has criticized.

    “I have talked about the need to take our city back from the criminals that are preying on our residents and preying on our businesses,” he said.

    For her part, Lightfoot has touted Chicago’s lawsuit against an Indiana gun store – part of an effort to demonstrate that the influx of firearms into the city isn’t a result of Chicago’s gun policies, but rather neighboring states with more lax laws.

    She has also touted her administration’s efforts to hire nearly 1,000 additional police officers, put privatized, unarmed security on public transit and create teams and task forces focused on car-jacking, halting the flow of guns into the city and more.

    The Chicago Tribune, the city’s largest newspaper, has endorsed Vallas. The newspaper’s editorial board credited Lightfoot’s financial management of the city and her navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic and said it hopes the mayor will advance to face Vallas one-on-one in the runoff.

    “Vallas has the ear of rank-and-file police officers on the street. We will expect him to use that trust to improve police conduct and the abysmal clearance rate for violent offenses,” the editorial board said.

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  • Tester to run for reelection in 2024, providing boost to Democrats’ Senate hopes | CNN Politics

    Tester to run for reelection in 2024, providing boost to Democrats’ Senate hopes | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Montana Sen. Jon Tester announced Wednesday morning that he will seek reelection in 2024, providing a boost to Democrats’ hopes of retaining the Senate.

    “It’s official. I’m running for reelection,” Tester tweeted. “Montanans need a fighter that will hold our government accountable and demand Washington stand up for veterans and lower costs for families. I will always fight to defend our Montana values. Let’s get to work.”

    Tester is one of several Democratic senators in red and purple states who are likely to face competitive challenges this cycle. Along with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, Tester was one of the top incumbents being urged by party leadership to seek reelection.

    Reacting to the announcement, the National Republican Senatorial Committee swiftly moved to tie Tester to President Joe Biden in the deep-red state, calling him the president’s “favorite senator.”

    Democrats have a difficult road to maintain their slim 51-49 majority, with 23 seats to defend compared to just 11 for the GOP.

    Plus, they’ll have to hold onto Democratic seats in GOP terrain, such as in Ohio and West Virginia – not to mention keep their seats in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. The map provides them with scant pickup opportunities, since Republican incumbents are mostly running in ruby-red states or states that have trended to the GOP, like Florida.

    Tester has nearly $3 million in his Senate campaign account as he gears up for the campaign.

    This story has been updated with additional background information.

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  • How an old debate previews Biden’s new strategy for winning senior voters | CNN Politics

    How an old debate previews Biden’s new strategy for winning senior voters | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    In pressing Republicans on Social Security and Medicare, President Joe Biden is reprising one of the most dramatic moments of his long career.

    During the 2012 vice-presidential debate, Biden engaged in a nearly 11-minute exchange with GOP nominee Paul Ryan over Republican plans to reconfigure the two massive programs for the elderly, several of which Ryan had authored himself.

    Biden and many Democrats felt he had won the argument on stage. Yet on Election Day, Ryan and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney routed Biden and President Barack Obama among White seniors, and beat them soundly among seniors overall, exit polls found.

    That outcome underscores the obstacles facing Biden now as he tries to recapture older voters by portraying Republicans as threats to the two towers of America’s safety net for the elderly. While polls consistently show that voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to safeguard the programs, GOP presidential nominees have carried all seniors in every presidential election back to 2004 and have reached at least 58% support among White seniors in each of the past four contests, exit polls have found. Democrats have likewise consistently struggled among those nearing retirement, older working adults aged 45-64.

    Those results suggest that for most older voters, affinity for the GOP messages on other issues – particularly its resistance, in the Donald Trump era, to cultural and racial change – has outweighed their views about Social Security and Medicare. Those grooves are now cut so deeply, over so many elections, that Biden may struggle to change them much no matter how hard he rails against a range of GOP proposals that could retrench or restructure the programs.

    Biden’s charge that Republicans are threatening the two giant entitlement programs for the elderly – which triggered his striking back and forth exchanges with GOP legislators during the State of the Union – fits squarely in his broader political positioning as he turns toward his expected reelection campaign.

    As I’ve written, the 80-year-old Biden, at his core, “remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands.” As president he’s expressed that inclination primarily through what he calls his “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” – the planks in his economic plans, such as generous incentives to revive domestic manufacturing, aimed at creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree. Politically, Biden’s staunch defense of Social Security and Medicare, programs critical to the economic security of financially vulnerable retirees, represents a logical bookend to that emphasis.

    “We all know that whose side you are on is a critical debate point for every election and this debate over Social Security and Medicare really helps crystallize whose side Biden is on versus whose side Republicans are on in a very effective way for him,” said Democratic pollster Matt Hogan, who helped conduct an extensive series of bipartisan polls during the 2022 campaign measuring attitudes among seniors for the AARP, the giant lobby for the elderly.

    From Franklin Roosevelt through Hubert Humphrey and Tip O’Neill, generations of Democrats have framed themselves as the defenders of the social safety net for seniors against Republicans who they say would unravel it. Biden showed how comfortable he was stepping into those shoes during his 2012 vice-presidential debate with Ryan, then a young representative from Wisconsin who Romney had selected as his running mate.

    Nearly 30 years Biden’s junior, Ryan was an unflinching advocate of restructuring Social Security and Medicare to reduce costs over time. In particular, Ryan was the principal supporter of a conservative plan to convert Medicare, the giant federal health insurance program for the elderly, into a system called “premium support.” Under that proposal, Medicare would be transformed from its current structure, in which the government directly pays doctors and hospitals who provide care for beneficiaries, into a voucher (or “premium support”) system, in which the government would provide recipients a fixed sum to purchase private insurance. Ryan had also drafted proposals to partially privatize Social Security by allowing workers to divert part of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts, a change that would have reduced the tax dollars flowing into the system and eventually required substantial cuts in guaranteed benefits.

    For nearly 11 minutes during the debate in October 2012, moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC skillfully guided Biden and Ryan through a heated, but civil and substantive, discussion of Social Security and Medicare’s future. Ryan insisted that changes were needed to preserve the programs’ long-term viability and that current seniors and those near retirement would not see their benefits reduced.

    Biden appealed openly to the Democrats’ historic image as the programs’ protectors and condemned Ryan and the GOP for wanting to partially privatize them. At one point in the debate, Biden declared: “we will be no part of a [Medicare] voucher program or the privatization of Social Security.” A few moments later, he insisted: “These guys haven’t been big on Medicare from the beginning. And they’ve always been about Social Security as little as you can do. Look, folks, use your common sense. Who do you trust on this?”

    At the time, Democrats felt Biden had at least held his own, restoring the party’s momentum after Obama’s surprisingly listless performance eight days earlier in his first debate against Romney. And Democrats through the rest of the campaign railed against the Republican ticket as a threat to Social Security and Medicare.

    But on election day, those arguments did not translate into gains for Obama and Biden among seniors or the older working adults (aged 45-64) nearing retirement. As Hogan noted, the newly passed Affordable Care Act, which generated some of its funding through savings in Medicare, was extremely unpopular at the time among older voters. Obama and Biden not only lost seniors and the older working age adults, but actually ran slightly more poorly among both groups in 2012 than they did in 2008.

    In fact, no Democratic presidential nominee since Al Gore in 2000 has carried most seniors in a presidential campaign; Obama in 2008 was the only one since Gore to carry most of the older working age adults. Among older Whites, the Democratic deficit is even more pronounced: the Republican presidential nominee has carried around three-fifths of both White seniors and those nearing retirement in each of the past four elections. Biden in 2020 slightly improved on Hillary Clinton’s anemic 2016 performance with both groups, but still lost to Trump by 15 percentage points among White seniors and by 23 points among the Whites nearing retirement, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. Biden performed especially poorly among older Whites without a college degree – an economically stressed group heavily reliant on the federal retirement programs.

    Estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, and the Pew Research Center likewise found that Trump in both 2016 and 2020 beat his Democratic opponents among both seniors and the older working adults. Like the exit polls, the Catalist data show the Republican nominees carrying about three-fifths of White seniors and older working adults in each of the past three presidential elections.

    The story is similar in congressional contests. In House elections, the exit polls found Republicans winning all seniors and older working adults comfortably in the 2014 and 2022 midterm campaigns and narrowly carrying them even in 2018 when Democrats romped overall. In all three of those midterm congressional elections, Republicans carried about three-fifths of the near retirement White adults, while they also reached that elevated threshold among White seniors in both the 2014 and 2022 campaigns.

    Republicans have maintained these advantages with older voters despite polls showing that most Americans trust Democrats more than the GOP to protect Social Security and Medicare, and that most Americans, especially seniors, oppose the intermittently surfacing GOP proposals to partially privatize both programs.

    Politically, “Democrats have used Social Security and Medicare really a lot over the past two or three decades, maybe four decades,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “The payoff has been a lot less than Democrats have generally thought it would be.”

    Could this time be different for Biden and the Democrats? Congressional Republicans have certainly provided plenty of evidence for his claim that they still hope to restructure the programs. The proposed 2023 budget by the Republican Study Committee, the members of which include about three-fourths of House Republicans, reprises the ideas of converting Medicare into a premium support system and establishing private investment accounts under Social Security, while also raising the retirement age for both programs and reducing Social Security benefits over time. And although Florida Sen. Rick Scott renounced the idea late last week, his “Rescue America” agenda did include a proposal to require Congress to reauthorize all federal programs, including Social Security and Medicare, every five years.

    These ideas have precipitated an unusual degree of open Republican dissension. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell repeatedly, and unreservedly, denounced the Scott plan until the Florida senator backed off. Trump recently released a video in which he declared the GOP should not cut “a single penny” of Social Security or Medicare benefits – which put him directly at odds with the three-fourths of House Republicans in the Republican Study Committee. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, bending more toward Trump’s position, seems unlikely to incorporate into the GOP budget plans the RSC’s most sweeping changes in Social Security and Medicare.

    Kessler believes Biden may succeed where other Democrats have failed at hurting the GOP with the issue, and he argued that the conspicuous Republican infighting demonstrates they share that concern. “We are watching a high-profile battle that I’ve never really seen before on these issues in the Republican Party,” Kessler said. “And part of it is clearly they think it’s a problem when they didn’t years ago. If they think it’s a problem, maybe it’s a problem.”

    Stuart Stevens, who served as Romney’s chief strategist in the 2012 campaign but has since become a fierce critic of the Trump-era GOP, also believes the party could face more risk over its entitlement agenda than it did back then. The reason is that he thinks the idea of sunsetting Social Security and Medicare every five years, even if Scott is trying to jettison it, may prove more immediately tangible and understandable to voters than Ryan’s complex ideas of partially privatizing both programs.

    “The question I always ask myself in campaigns is ‘are you talking about something the other side doesn’t want to talk about?’” Stevens said. “That’s probably a good sign that they are losing on the issue.”

    Whether Biden proves more effective than other recent Democrats at attracting older voters around Social Security and Medicare will likely pivot on whether seniors believe the GOP genuinely would cut the programs if given the power to do so, argued Robert Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, who specializes in public attitudes about the social safety net. “If the senior community actually believes that it’s being threatened it really would affect their votes,” he predicted. But, he added, “as long as they are not threatened, the other values of seniors on top issues more and more correspond with Republicans.”

    There’s no doubt about the second half of that equation. Polling has consistently found that older Whites, in particular, are more receptive than their younger counterparts to hardline Trump-era GOP messages around crime, immigration and the broader currents of racial and cultural change: for instance, about half of Whites older than 50 agree that discrimination against Whites is now as big a problem as bias against minorities, a far higher percentage than among younger Whites, according to a new national survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Older Whites are also more likely than younger generations to lack a college degree or to identify as Christians, attributes that generally predict sympathy for GOP cultural and racial arguments.

    Through the 21st century, those cultural and racial attitudes among older White voters have consistently trumped any concerns they may hold about the Republican commitment to Social Security and Medicare. Despite Biden’s impassioned articulation of the case against the GOP, that didn’t change even in 2012 when Republicans placed on their national ticket a vice presidential nominee who directly embodied the GOP aspirations to reconfigure and retrench those programs.

    Even small changes in seniors’ preferences could have a big impact in closely balanced states with a large retiree population like Arizona and Pennsylvania. But the entrenched GOP advantage among older voters over the past two decades suggests Biden’s hopes in 2024 may pivot less on improving with the “gray” than maximizing his vote among the “brown”: the diverse, younger generations that recoil from the same Republican messages on culture and race that electrify so many older Whites.

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  • Key senators torn over retirement decisions as party leaders try to fortify 2024 standing | CNN Politics

    Key senators torn over retirement decisions as party leaders try to fortify 2024 standing | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Sen. Joe Manchin, torn over whether to run for reelection, says he’s “given everything I possibly can” over four decades of holding public office. Sen. Jon Tester is close to making his final decision on a 2024 bid and concedes there’s a risk of his seat flipping next year.

    “It’s a commitment,” the Montana Democrat said of another run.

    They’re not the only ones in a tough spot.

    Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, is weighing health considerations after treatment for prostate cancer. Sen. Bernie Sanders, 81, says he’ll make a decision about whether to run for a fourth Senate term in Vermont “at the appropriate time.”

    And Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican who has gone to battle with former President Donald Trump, says he’ll decide whether to run for a second term by mid-April, sounding ready to take on his party’s MAGA wing if he runs again.

    “People understand that every action has a consequence, and you accept the consequences for the actions that you think are right,” Romney, 75, said of potentially facing a stiff challenge from the right. He then added bullishly: “If I run, I’ll win.”

    As the 2024 landscape begins to take shape, the senators’ decisions about their political futures will dramatically alter the map and hold major ramifications for the makeup of the institution itself.

    For Democrats, the concern is the most acute. They already have a difficult road to maintain their slim 51-49 majority, with 23 seats to defend compared to just 11 for the GOP.

    Plus they’ll have to hold onto Democratic seats in GOP terrain, such as in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia – not to mention keep their seats in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. The map provides them with scant pickup opportunities, since Republican incumbents are mostly running in ruby-red states or states that have trended to the GOP, like Florida.

    Then there’s the complicated dance for both parties in Arizona, if Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, now an independent, decides to run again for a seat that would put her up against a Republican and Democrat in a messy, three-way race. For Republicans, fear is growing that the hard-right Kari Lake may mount a bid and put their hopes for a pickup in jeopardy.

    And with few pickup chances, Senate Democrats recognize they’ll have to limit losses – and prevent retirements – in order to cling to power.

    “I’m doing everything I can to help Manchin in West Virginia,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told CNN when asked if he were concerned that the conservative Democrat might hang it up, referring to legislative actions.

    After Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow announced she’d retire, Schumer and his top deputies are hoping to prevent others from following suit, recognizing that an open seat would give Republicans an even better chance of seizing control of the chamber they lost in the 2020 elections. The exception is California, where the 89-year-old Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement this week, something widely expected, as Democrats are expected to keep the seat in their control in the blue state.

    In particular, Democratic leaders are urging Tester and Manchin to run again, knowing full well that finding another Democrat to win in those conservative battlegrounds will be an extremely tall order in 2024.

    “Clearly, it’s important for them to run,” said Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate Democratic campaign arm, when asked about Tester and Manchin. “I don’t know where they are. I’ve talked to them, but they’re just working through issues, personal issues for themselves as to what they want to do. So we just have to give them time to think that through and I look forward to their answers.”

    Peters acknowledged that his party’s effort to keep the Senate will grow bleaker if either or both men retire.

    “Those are states that are very Republican,” Peters told CNN, referring to Montana and West Virginia. “And I know they can win again, but they’re without question the strongest candidates in those states. It’d be more difficult without them running.”

    Democrats acknowledge they have close to no backup plans in Montana or West Virginia. But they have been heartened by the polls that are being released publicly by Republican groups in those states, showing their numbers have been better than expected – and perhaps encouraging – for the incumbents.

    But neither Manchin nor Tester seem concerned that the seat could turn red if they retire.

    “That’s not my factor,” Manchin said in the interview. “I’m not weighing that because of my, what it might do to the numbers as far as up here. No, I’ve been at this for quite some time. This term being up, there’ll be 42 years I’ve been in public service so I’ve given everything I possibly can.”

    Several Democratic operatives involved in planning for Senate races tell CNN they expect that ultimately, Tester will run and that Casey will as well after his successful surgery this week. Manchin has them more on edge, and they anticipate that’s how they’ll remain for almost a year: the West Virginia filing deadline isn’t until next January.

    That, after all, is what he did in 2018.

    Manchin, a former governor and state legislator who has served in the Senate since 2010, insists he’s not concerned about the prospects that the GOP governor, Jim Justice, is strongly considering a run against him, though Justice would have to escape a difficult primary against Rep. Alex Mooney and potentially the state’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, who may run as well. He has acknowledged that Justice would be the toughest candidate to face, though he insists he could still pull off a victory.

    Manchin, 75, just doesn’t know if he wants to do it again as he looks back at the last several years – especially in the 50-50 Senate in the last Congress where he was at the peak of his power in the chamber and played a central role shaping major laws. The question Manchin is weighing: whether he’ll have the same kind of impact with another six years.

    “I make a decision based on if I’ve been able to deliver for the state, have I been able to support the Constitution and the oath I’ve taken, I think I have,” Manchin said, confirming he’s been urged by Biden and Schumer both to run. “Is there more I can do in different, other areas? I don’t know.”

    Tester, who also said Schumer has been urging him to run, conceded that his seat could flip if he bows out.

    “Oh, absolutely there’s a risk of flipping there’s no doubt about that but so are all of them,” Tester said.

    But he contended other Democrats could mount a vigorous challenge for the seat.

    “Actually, we’ve got some really good folks in the wings that can run,” Tester, 66, said before he noted that things have gotten dire for Democrats in recent cycles. “We haven’t had the best of luck the last few cycles in Montana but I think that’s as much self-inflicted as it is the state turning red.”

    But Tester pointed to key positions he holds – chairing a subcommittee on Pentagon spending and running the veterans panel – as he weighs another run.

    “I’m at a point and time where we can get a lot of good things done because of my position on Veterans Affairs and defense chairman but it’s just something where I think you just need to take the time to think over,” he said.

    Yet Democrats could benefit from a potentially divisive GOP primary in Montana – with the possibility of candidacies from two House members, the governor and the state attorney general. That will put the other Montana senator, Republican Steve Daines, to the test as he plans to use his National Republican Senatorial Committee to be more assertive in GOP primaries to root out lackluster general election candidates, though it’s unclear how he would handle his home state.

    In an interview, Daines was noncommittal when asked about one candidate in particular – Rep. Matt Rosendale – a hard-right Republican who lost to Tester in 2018 and is considering running again. He said “it’s early” since candidates have yet to declare and that the field will get “sorted out,” contending the race is “winnable.”

    “These are three red states where the only statewide elected official left that’s a Democrat is a US Senator. That’s Montana, it’s West Virginia, it’s Ohio,” Daines said. “These are going to be spirited races.”

    And after last cycle’s GOP debacle, where several Donald Trump-aligned candidates petered out in the general election and effectively cost them winning the majority, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is determined not to allow that to happen again.

    “I just think we need to focus on candidates who can win in the general election,” said Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas and close McConnell ally. “We had some great primary candidates, but that won’t get the job done. You got to have somebody who can have a broader appeal than just the base. That was one of the most important lessons of this last cycle.”

    Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, at left, is challenging Sinema, at right, for her US Senate seat in 2024.

    Senate leaders in both parties see Arizona as the biggest wildcard – depending on what Sinema decides to do and which Republican decides to run.

    Lake, the Trump-aligned Republican who lost one of the nation’s premier governor’s races last fall, recently met with officials at NRSC headquarters – even though many Republicans are nervous about her potential candidacy and one GOP strategist called the potential of a Lake Senate run “disastrous.”

    As she made the rounds in Washington, Daines told CNN that he spoke with Lake.

    “I want to see a candidate who can not only win a primary, but can win a general election,” Daines said when asked about that visit, not commenting on Lake directly.

    Other top Republicans are unnerved about Lake – and her evidence-free claims of widespread election fraud – and are pushing for other candidates to jump into the race.

    “I’ve just said to any of our candidates or potential candidates in 2024, that you got to talk about the future, not the past,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican. “And I think if you’re building your campaign around the theme of a stolen election, that’s not a winning strategy. We’ve seen that. So if she does decide to do it again, I think she’s gonna have to talk about the things that are on the hearts and minds of American people.”

    Schumer and Democratic leaders, themselves, are in a bind in the state, refusing to say if they’ll back their party’s nominee with Sinema still undecided on a run. The reason: They need Sinema to continue to organize with them in order to maintain their 51-49 majority and are in no mood to alienate her.

    But some Democrats are angry at their leaders for refusing to say if they’ll back their nominee, especially backers of Rep. Ruben Gallego, the party’s leading candidate in the race.

    “At some point, they’re going to have to endorse a Democrat,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, a fellow Arizona Democrat who backs Gallego, noting it would be “problematic” if party leaders didn’t dump huge resources to help their party’s nominee win a general election.

    “If they don’t, that would be an insult at many levels,” Grijavla said.

    While some Democrats are nervous that Gallego and Sinema would split the vote and give Republicans a victory, Gallego dismisses the possibility and says only a “strong Democrat” can win.

    “No matter what happens, Kyrsten Sinema is always going to be in third place,” Gallego said. “I also doubt she fully runs.”

    As she’s grown more alienated from her former party, Sinema has grown closer to Republicans, including one – Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – who told CNN she would endorse the senator if she ran again.

    “I absolutely support Sen. Sinema,” Murkowski said, noting she’s also backing Manchin. “She’s not afraid to take on hard things, and I’m gonna be supporting her too.”

    Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan speaks to members of the media at the U.S. Capitol on August 03, 2022 in Washington, DC.

    Even in safe Democratic seats, there’s the potential for a shakeup that could bring more diversity and younger members into the ranks, including in Maryland and Delaware where Sens. Ben Cardin and Tom Carper, respectively, have not made a final decision to run yet.

    Cardin, 79, who hasn’t spent much time fundraising yet, said he would make his decision sometime in the spring, while Carper, 76, said he’d be ready to run but noted that campaigns are “way too long.”

    In Hawaii, Sen. Mazie Hirono said she plans to run again, as did Maine’s Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats.

    “There’s only two ways to run: Scared or unopposed,” King said.

    In more contested states, Nevada’s Jacky Rosen said she is running, as did Ohio’s Sherrod Brown. And in Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin said she’d make her announcement about her plans in the spring after upcoming elections in the state.

    In Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz has announced plans to run for a third Senate term, and Democrats are weighing whether to mount a serious effort to try to unseat him in the red state – with a focus on whether Democratic Rep. Colin Allred will try to mount an upset bid against the conservative senator.

    In Michigan, where Stabenow’s retirement is leaving Democrats with an open seat in a swing state, Rep. Elissa Slotkin is eying a run and could get some implicit help from the outgoing senator herself. Stabenow has spoken by phone with several prominent Michigan Democrats, and while some have perceived that as dissuading some weaker candidates from running, a Stabenow spokesperson says she’s just been giving everyone advice on the challenges of running statewide in Michigan and not trying to clear the field.

    Republican recruitment efforts in the state are also up in the air, with a push for newly elected Rep. John James, who has lost two previous bids for the Senate. If he passes, GOP leaders believe other contenders will emerge, potentially former Rep. Peter Meijer and even some current members of the House delegation or local officials.

    While several potential Democratic candidates have decided not to run, other political players in the state remain unsure about Slotkin’s statewide strength and have continued talking privately about finding an alternative.

    Given how much Democrats in the state rely on high turnout in heavily African-American Detroit, finding a candidate who could run strong there has been a major topic in those discussions. Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, who got his start in Detroit politics is “very seriously thinking about making a run” and is expected to make a decision over the next month, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

    Meanwhile, several Democrats in Michigan tell CNN they have been surprised by outreach they’re getting from “The Good Doctor” actor Hill Harper, whose political experience mostly relates to being Barack Obama’s law school roommate, but who owns a coffee shop in Detroit and has gotten involved with the local business community there. Harper did not return a request for comment.

    Stabenow said she’s not endorsing any candidate in the primary to replace her.

    “What I’m saying to folks is that I want somebody that is strong, effective, who can raise money, who can win,” Stabenow said. “But I’m talking to everybody.”

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  • Joe Biden hates when people talk about his age. A looming reelection run is making it ‘omnipresent.’ | CNN Politics

    Joe Biden hates when people talk about his age. A looming reelection run is making it ‘omnipresent.’ | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    When President Joe Biden sets out for his annual physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Thursday morning, he’ll be setting a new record – as he does every morning – as the oldest US president ever.

    Biden’s age is “omnipresent” in nearly every conversation, one person involved told CNN, at a time when he’s preparing for a reelection announcement that would try to extend his time in the Oval Office until he is 86 years old.

    Biden hasn’t officially decided to run again, though he’s said he intends to and his campaign infrastructure is largely in place. Even though aides say the president has told them that his age will not be the determining factor in his final decision about running for reelection, conversations about it are shaping everything from planning anticipated campaign schedule logistics to calibrating Vice President Kamala Harris’ role as his running mate. White House spokesman Andrew Bates disputes how much of a factor the president’s age is in conversations: “That’s simply not true, and makes one think they aren’t involved in many conversations here.”

    That is leading to a focus on events that try to play up the president’s vitality, while trying to strike a balance in the schedule of a man who tends to make more blunders when tired.

    It also underscored the importance of a State of the Union address advisers viewed as Biden at his best, from cadence and delivery to his off-script sparring with Republicans in the House chamber. The speech served as a prime-time moment, in front of tens of millions of viewers, to lay out for the country the scale of his accomplishments and vision for the path ahead.

    And, at least implicitly, it also represented a window into why his age shouldn’t be viewed as detriment to his efforts to lead the country down that path.

    The effect was immediate with at least one group watching: quietly anxious Democratic officials. More than a dozen of acknowledged after the fact it was a night that either put to rest or went a long way in assuaging their lingering concerns about the party’s leader.

    That Biden repeatedly went back to the phrase “finish the job” roughly a dozen times during the speech “wasn’t exactly subtle,” one of those Democrats said.

    Though advisers say Biden would keep to the standard of not starting daily campaigning for at least a year, just as President Barack Obama did in 2011, they’re already looking for low impact ways to maximize keeping him in the public eye. To some extent it would track and build on the oft-criticized formula deployed in the lead up to the midterms, where Biden eschewed a road warrior, rally heavy strategy and tailored and targeted events – and smaller crowds – instead.

    “Funny that we didn’t hear much from the critics about that strategy after November 8,” one adviser said sarcastically of the Democrats’ precedent-busting performance on Election Day last year.

    Among the possible strategies are having him keep up the kind of news-making appearances he’s been doing in and around Washington and preparing for what they’re hoping will be the most extensive digital effort of a presidential campaign ever.

    Top surrogates deployed at a regular clip would include a roster populated by a younger generation of politicians, people familiar with the matter say, even as one pointed out that given Biden’s age, that’s to some degree an inevitability.

    “Like we did in 2020, if he runs in 2024 there will be a range of surrogates that show the diversity of the party, across all ages, from Maxwell Frost to Bernie Sanders,” a Biden adviser said, referencing the 26-year-old freshman congressman from Florida and the independent Vermont senator.

    To many top Democratic operatives and officials looking ahead, Biden’s age is the top issue of his reelection campaign – in essence, what he’s running against, at least until a Republican nominee emerges, according to CNN’s conversations with three dozen White House aides, elected officials, leading Democratic operatives and others beginning to prepare for the race ahead.

    “It’s part of who he is – as much a part as his record of legislative accomplishments in the last two years, as much a part as his empathy and his connection with people,” said a senior Biden adviser.

    The adviser went on to spell out a theory of the case Biden’s team believes will outweigh any concerns, no matter how persistent they appear in public polling.

    “At the end of the day, people are going to say, ‘Who’s on my side?’” the adviser said. “‘Who’s fighting for me? Who’s getting things done and making a material difference in my life?’”

    That’s how Mitch Landrieu, the White House infrastructure coordinator, made the case to the antsy Democratic mayors he joined for a political meeting in January at a hotel a few blocks from the White House.

    “People want to focus on one number – the president’s age, 80,” he said, and let the words linger for just a moment.

    The mayors looked around uncomfortably, according to two people in the room. They’d been thinking about Biden’s age themselves, constantly hearing doubts he could or would run constantly from back home. They were startled to hear it said out loud by a White House official.

    “But,” Landrieu said, as he started to tick through stats around Covid-19 shots, jobs created, unemployment rates, “there are a whole lot more important numbers out there.”

    Still, voters bring Biden’s age up constantly in focus groups. Many veer toward assuming he must be ineffective or being puppeteered: “‘brain dead,’ ‘mush’ – ‘dementia’ is a word that comes up all the time,” said one person who observed multiple focus group sessions during campaigns last year.

    More than a dozen Democratic operatives and officials told CNN they’re worried that Donald Trump – himself a septuagenarian who is facing calls for new leadership from younger politicians in his party – or another much younger Republican who may emerge as the nominee could make a show of seeming more energetic just by keeping a pace of two or three events each day. A number of prominent figures in the Democratic Party are privately questioning the president’s ability to keep up an active travel schedule.

    A handful of ambitious Democrats have already quietly prepared rudimentary contingency plans in case Biden has a change of heart and decides against running for reelection, people familiar with the efforts told CNN. Those plans span everything from thinking through top donors to eyeing potential core campaign staff, should Biden reassess his ability to serve another four years or has an unexpected health problem, sparking a short fuse primary.

    And while top White House aides bristle at any suggestion that the president’s age is a liability, others in the building quietly worry that this may be actively underplaying underplaying the concerns that they’re hearing from their own friends and family members.

    Other Democratic operatives preparing for a campaign worry about letting suspicions fester, comparing them to the conspiracies about hidden conditions that trailed Hillary Clinton throughout 2016.

    “They’re going to be talking about it,” said one top Democrat working on planning ahead for the reelection campaign. “So, we’ve got to talk about it.”

    The president’s opponents are talking about it. Right-wing media coverage of the classified documents found in Biden’s former office and garage made him out to be either senile – to explain why he hadn’t remembered what happened to the documents – or at the center of a conspiracy theory about a controversy manufactured by Democrats to ease him into retirement.

    Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told CNN with a sorrowful tone in an interview last month, “He’s plainly diminished, far below the threshold needed to be a functioning and effective president.” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union used the line, “At 80, he’s the oldest president in American history.”

    “They attacked him over age before he beat them in 2020. They attacked him over age as he built the best legislative record in modern history,” said Bates. “They did the same before he beat them 2022. I’m not sure what they think they’re accomplishing. The trend is not good for them. Maybe they forgot?”

    It’s not just them. Voters young and old often say they can’t really believe he’s going to run. Mocking him as ancient or asleep has become an easy joke for late night comedians. Many prominent Democrats privately say some panicky version of what Robert Reich, the 76-year-old former secretary of labor, wrote recently: Biden’s age is “deeply worrying, given what we know about the natural decline of the human brain and body.”

    Biden advisers argue that most of the people making those kinds of comments are partisan Republicans, and that this is just another instance of a hyperpolarization in politics. They point to Biden’s previous physicals and assessments by outside experts who say that he has no physical or mental competence issues at all.

    Sure, there has been a noticeably increased stiffness to his walk since he’s been in office, aides say, so much so that the White House physician, brought in a team to assess Biden’s gait during his last physical in 2021. They concluded it was the result of normal “wear and tear” of his spine.

    They acknowledge there are days where his energy levels at public events can appear less vigorous. But they are unequivocal about their view that Biden wouldn’t green light another run if he didn’t think he could do it – and they wouldn’t support one either.

    And they say these doubts are just the latest way of underestimating the president, pointing out that age concerns also dogged his 2020 campaign – even though some of those same advisers confided to others at the time that they believed his age was his biggest liability when he was four years younger.

    Asked what the argument will be for a 2024 campaign, the Biden senior adviser snapped: “I’ve got two words for you: Wisdom and experience.”

    Those words, and an overall emphasis on Biden as an embodiment of reassuring routine and normalcy, pop up repeatedly among aides who are starting to look ahead.

    They are also quietly reframing a key moment at the end of the 2020 primary campaign, when Biden was endorsed in March 2020 by the much younger Harris, Booker and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and described himself “as a bridge” to the next generation.

    Many at the time took that to mean a four-year bridge, an implicit one-term promise that acknowledged his age. Advisers point out he’d previously rejected a one-term pledge.

    But people around Biden suggest, what he was talking about was not just getting Donald Trump out of the White House but getting past Trump and Trumpism. Advisers say that is what the logic around a 2024 run boils down to: Making the case that the only thing worse than an 82-year-old president is a Republican one.

    Biden advisers also argue that the president’s persona as an elder statesman could help Democrats hold onto voters who see the party as changing too quickly and veering too far left.

    “People feel like it’s a turbulent world that we’re living in, and it is a strength for Joe Biden to be able to point to not just years of experience in government up to this point, but more immediately his last two years in the White House being able to get things done, despite the turbulence,” said a second Biden adviser. “And what we’re seeing from Republicans in the House in terms of chaos and extremism is an incredibly powerful contrast too, that underscores the idea that his experience – and yes, age – is a benefit.”

    Although there are clear moments when Biden is visibly slower physically than he was, dozens of aides, administration officials and members of Congress who’ve actually spent time with him have relayed stories to CNN about how thorough and demanding he is in meeting after meeting.

    “There’s a confidence that comes from knowing what you’re doing,” Ted Kaufman, one of Biden’s closest friends and advisers since his first campaign, told CNN late last year.

    Biden likes to talk and keep talking, but he did spend 36 years in the Senate. He sometimes rambles, but he rambled long before his hair went gray.

    He often gets stuck on, or mispronounces, names on his teleprompter, but that’s far more connected to a convergence of wanting to get the name correct while not encountering a block tied to the childhood stutter he worked intensively and successfully to overcome, but still surfaces in certain moments.

    Several prominent Democratic officials told CNN that they worry even so, every stumble now will be viewed through the prism of age. Biden’s advisers are keenly aware of what they view as a perception – or in some cases, in the words of one person close to Biden, “the bull— caricature” – that they say doesn’t match the reality they see.

    They say he’s the one constantly adding to his schedule, pushing for photo lines with local politicians and extra time to greet crowds after his events, or making meetings run over by peppering policy aides with questions.

    “The energy is higher now than maybe when I first met him, and I really believe that that’s inspired by the work,” said Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who as a Delaware Democrat has known and worked with Biden much of her life.

    There is perhaps no better window into the public perception versus private reality advisers try to convey than a 15-hour stretch in Bali, Indonesia, at the Group of 20 meeting last November.

    Nearing the end of a grueling six-day, three-country trip to Asia that also included his first face-to-face meeting as president with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Biden chose to skip the gala dinner and went back to his hotel. Whispers went around that Biden was too tired, unable to keep going.

    Just a few hours later, he was sitting across from national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken trying to head off a spiraling international crisis.

    Biden, wearing khakis and a gray T-shirt from a Delaware-based tractor and garden supply center, was on the phone with the Polish president over the missile that had landed in Polish territory and killed two people, raising the possibility that Russia’s unrelenting attacks on Ukraine had finally spilled into a NATO ally.

    There were calls with the NATO secretary general and constant communication with his military leadership. Aides discussed an emergency call with G7 and NATO leaders. Biden said that wasn’t enough.

    “We’re all here,” Biden told his senior team of the leaders scattered across nearby hotels. “Bring them here.”

    An hour later, Biden himself walked the 10 leaders who came to the Grand Hyatt through early intelligence that the missile likely was not of Russian origin. Fears of dramatic escalation quickly dissipated. Thirty minutes later, Biden was walking through mangrove trees telling French President Emmanuel Macron and other leaders stories from his Senate days.

    Aides said Biden didn’t skip the gala because he was tired, though they never explained further. The truth, two people familiar with the matter said, was he wanted some time to focus on preparation for his granddaughter’s wedding that weekend at the White House, rather than have more generic conversations with counterparts over another meal. He was ready, however, when a crisis moment arrived, they said. And he drove the response.

    White House aides clock mentions of Biden’s age in the media – with particular attention to those that happen to leave out the ages of similarly aged politicians like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is a year older, and Trump, who is 76.

    They quickly shoot down what they see as sneering insinuations, like when reporters ask why the president has a light public schedule on the days back from overseas trips – though that has been standard practice for multiple recent presidents, including Obama. They insist that his midterm travel schedule proves how robust a presence he can be on the road, even though Biden rarely appeared at more than a few events each week through the fall.

    Biden hated people talking about how old he was when he was younger. He hates it even more now.

    “Do I wish he was 10 years younger? Yeah. So does he!” said one Biden donor. “But there is nothing to me, beyond his chronological age, that would lend itself to the argument he shouldn’t seek reelection.”

    Aides laugh at how often his reaction to seeing news mentions of his age is to do a little jog in or out of his next public event. Friends say he’s taken to making sarcastic references to his age, even as he speaks proudly about all he’s been able to accomplish.

    Or there was his move three weeks ago in the State Dining Room, when he pretended to wobble as he got back up from taking a knee for a photo with the NBA champion Golden State Warriors, taking a moment to make fun of the crowd’s shock.

    “I wanted to get up there and actually give him an arm and help him up, but I didn’t know if I’d get in trouble for that, so I just kinda stood back,” star forward Draymond Green told CNN afterward. “To see him in that physical condition at his age, to get up and down like that, was absolutely incredible.”

    A number of younger Democratic politicians and operatives tell CNN they’re ready to embrace the idea of Biden as a grandfatherly figure, continuing to be a source of comfort and calm for a battered nation, even capitalizing on a specific sort of nostalgia for a pre-Trump time in politics. and the news.

    Of course, that would take Biden himself buying in. Even his grandkids don’t call him grandpa – they call him Pop.

    “He doesn’t want to be a grandpa,” said one person who knows him. “He wants to be a bro.”

    Aftab Pureval, the Cincinnati mayor who just turned 40 in September, said a visit from the president last month left him with the impression that Biden has more than enough left in the tank.

    Pureval saw a man who laughed hard when the mayor deliberately used a famous Biden interjection – one that contains a four-letter word that starts with F – to describe what a big deal the bipartisan infrastructure money was in helping rebuild the local Brent Spence Bridge.

    There were the fist bumps with the crowd at the barbecue spot in town they went to afterward. There was the way the president immediately flashed the fraternity hand sign when a young black man mentioned that he was a member of Phi Beta Sigma.

    “When you’re with him, age was never really on my mind. What was on my mind was the president provided the single biggest grant in our nation’s history to our bridge,” Pureval said.

    “His age is his age, but you can’t argue with the results.”

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  • McCarthy leans on ‘five families’ as House GOP plots debt-limit tactics | CNN Politics

    McCarthy leans on ‘five families’ as House GOP plots debt-limit tactics | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The White House and Senate Democrats have calculated that Speaker Kevin McCarthy won’t have enough votes to raise the national borrowing limit and will end up caving to their demands to avoid a first-ever debt default – with no strings attached or any conditions whatsoever.

    House Republicans are trying to prove them wrong.

    Behind the scenes, McCarthy is beginning to chart out a new strategy to ensure the House GOP can muster 218 votes to raise the national debt ceiling and tie that to an array of cuts to federal spending, as the standoff with the White House shows no signs of easing.

    In the speaker’s office last week, leaders of the so-called “five families” of the House GOP – representing the various ideological wings of the conference – met for the first time to discuss the range of possibilities and to kick around ideas about raising the debt limit, according to multiple attendees. McCarthy didn’t attend the session but enlisted a close confidant, Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves, to lead the discussions, with top committee chairmen and other members of leadership also participating. Talks are expected to pick up when the House returns from a two-week recess after the Presidents Day holiday.

    The goal, according to multiple Republicans, is to begin to develop a consensus about a proposal that can pass the House with GOP votes and strengthen their conference’s negotiating position as Washington stares into a looming debt default this summer. The belief among Republicans is such a plan would force the White House and Senate Democrats to back off their insistence that they will only accept a “clean” debt ceiling increase without any spending cuts attached.

    The move gives a window into McCarthy’s management of his razor-thin majority, allowing his most conservative members to try to find consensus with more moderate lawmakers – replicating a dynamic that ultimately allowed him to win the speakership after a messy, 15-ballot fight. But it also is a break to how one of his predecessors, John Boehner, dealt with the debt limit the last-time the country nearly defaulted – in 2011 when many of the decisions were made by the leadership, prompting a revolt among the rank-and-file.

    The private GOP talks have been positive so far, attendees said, even as they acknowledged they are in the very early stages, weighing a range of potential budget cuts and not nearing any agreement yet.

    Rep. Patrick McHenry, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said the meeting amounted to a “healthy discussion” that showed “goodwill” in an effort “to come up with an approach that unifies Republicans and enables us to unlock the rest of the legislative year.”

    “That’s the purpose of the conversation: How do you move the debt limit out of the House of Representatives?” McHenry told CNN.

    The discussions are expected to run parallel to talks between McCarthy and President Joe Biden, with the speaker making clear he believes the next step will be to continue discussions with Biden. The group could potentially help McCarthy present a GOP proposal to the president in future conversations and help vet any White House offer.

    But despite both Biden and McCarthy sounding positive after their first face-to-face encounter earlier this month, there’s been little tangible progress toward finding a deal as Democrats continue to hold firm to their demands to raise the borrowing limit with no horse-trading with Republicans.

    Republicans believe that the White House is slow-rolling Biden’s discussions with the speaker in order to ratchet up pressure to pass a clean debt ceiling increase, something McCarthy has publicly and privately rejected.

    “They say they don’t want to put the economy in jeopardy,” McCarthy told CNN when asked about the lack of progress with Biden since the last White House meeting. “I think that would be the wrong approach.”

    Behind the scenes, McCarthy has been proactive in ensuring regular communication between the five families, a nickname from the “The Godfather” of warring New York mob families who tried to maintain the peace.

    “There’s a level of trust and engagement within the five families that I have not seen in the previous four years,” said South Dakota Rep. Dusty Johnson, chairman of the Main Street Caucus, a center-right group. “We’re working really well together.”

    Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio, who leads the pragmatic-minded Republican Governance Group, said the group meeting with Graves was “very productive, and we will continue to have those until we come up with something.”

    Another reason Republicans are eager to outline their vision: Democrats have hammered them for not having a plan – and have tried to speak for them. Indeed, perhaps the most memorable moment of Biden’s State of the Union address was when the president suggested Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare, eliciting jeers and boos from GOP lawmakers in the audience.

    “It’s intellectually dishonest,” Joyce said, noting that McCarthy has said repeatedly that Medicare and Social Security cuts are off the table.

    Some Democrats have speculated that they could peel off at least six House Republicans to back a so-called discharge petition – a lengthy process that forces a bill to the floor if 218 lawmakers sign on – once they get closer to a debt default and still don’t have a resolution.

    But moderate Republicans are ruling out using the discharge petition for a clean debt ceiling hike and are insisting on extracting spending cuts in exchange for raising the nation’s borrowing limit – a sign that the conference is in lockstep with McCarthy’s negotiating strategy.

    “If it’s tied to a clean debt ceiling, I wouldn’t do that,” said Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a Biden-won district in Nebraska. “The President’s got to give us some compromise.”

    The hardline House Freedom Caucus, which ended up forcing McCarthy to make key concessions to win the speakership, is one of the five groups taking part in the debt ceiling talks.

    Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the group and attended the five families meeting, said there’s a consensus on this point: “We’re not going to accept ‘no negotiation,’” a reference to the White House’s position. “And there’s not going to be a clean debt ceiling, alright?”

    South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, also a member of the hardline group, agreed.

    “We got to get 218,” he said of the early talks. “We’re trying to get the framework. We want all buy in.”

    Norman argued that it didn’t make sense for the groups to publicly float competing proposals, even though one of the so-called families, the Republican Study Committee, has outlined its preferred approach, although the group did not lay out specific cuts or spending proposals.

    “There’s no sense in us, one group putting something out, another group puts something out,” Norman said.

    Norman, who initially opposed McCarthy’s speakership bid but ultimately backed him, said the California Republican’s effort to build consensus has helped his standing within the conference.

    “To his credit, Kevin has done a good job of getting us all together and getting us on the same page,” Norman said.

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  • New GOP-led panel to hold first public hearing Thursday on alleged ‘weaponization’ of federal government | CNN Politics

    New GOP-led panel to hold first public hearing Thursday on alleged ‘weaponization’ of federal government | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The GOP-led House committee on the alleged “weaponization” of the federal government kicks off Thursday with its first public hearing with a witness list that suggests Republicans on the committee will push a popular narrative among conservatives that has been disputed by federal officials.

    The hearing will be split into two sessions, featuring a swath of current and former lawmakers, former FBI officials and legal experts. They plan to discuss allegations of how the government has been weaponized against Republicans, as well as the general belief among some conservatives that federal officials and mainstream media have been working to silence the right.

    “We’re focused on the whole weaponization of government, and the idea that the government is not working for the American people,” subcommittee chairman Jim Jordan told CNN. “The government is supposed to protect the First Amendment, not have, as Mr. (Jonathan) Turley said, ‘censorship by surrogate,’” he said, referencing one of the witnesses slated for Thursday’s hearing who is a George Washington University Law Center professor.

    The Ohio Republican continued, “I’m sure those will be some of the things that will come up in the course of the hearing,” he added, referencing a line from one of the witnesses GOP members have called.

    Democrats on the panel, however, tell CNN they reject the premise of the weaponization subcommittee itself – and much of their time will be spent disputing GOP messaging.

    “We have an overall strategy, which is to debunk the misrepresentations that are sure to be coming from it,” said Rep. Dan Goldman, a freshman Democrat from New York. “My understanding is that Sens. Grassley and Johnson are going to speak, and I’m glad they are. I hope they talk about how they used their Senate committees to weaponize Russian propaganda and disinformation in 2020.”

    “I think our intention is to make sure that the American people are aware of the actual truth of the matter, and not whatever partisan misinformation that Republicans are going to peddle,” Goldman added.

    Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is being called as one of the Democrats’ witnesses. He told CNN that “one basic question is whether weaponization is the target of the committee or if weaponization is the purpose of the committee” – previewing a potential line of attack.

    In a new memo released Thursday ahead of the subcommittee’s first hearing, the White House called the subpanel a “Fox News reboot of the House Un-American Activities Committee” and “a political stunt that weaponizes Congress to carry out the priorities of extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress.”

    White House Oversight spokesman Ian Sams writes that the committee “plans to weaponize the MAGA agenda against their perceived political enemies” and is “choosing to make it their top priority to go down the rabbit hole of debunked conspiracy theories about a ‘deep state’ instead of taking a deep breath and deciding to work with the President and Democrats in Congress to improve Americans’ everyday lives.”

    The first panel of witnesses to testify before the committee include GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as well as former congresswoman from Hawaii and ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.

    The lawmakers are only slated to deliver opening statements and are not expected to answer any questions while testifying, sources familiar with the committee’s plans tell CNN.

    Gabbard has regularly appeared on Fox News since leaving Congress and frequently uses the network to accuse the FBI and the Justice Department of targeting political opponents of the Biden administration.

    Grassley and Johnson have both previously attacked the Justice Department for how it has handled its investigation into Hunter Biden and its approach to addressing threats against school administrators.

    Grassley has also accused the Justice Department of seeking to criminalize the First Amendment right of parents to protest school policies. The Justice Department has denied doing so, pointing to a line in the memo acknowledging that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under or Constitution.”

    The witnesses’ previous comments regarding the politization of the Biden Justice Department suggest that the committee plans to push a narrative that is popular among the right, but has been publicly disputed by the FBI. There is little public evidence supporting such claims, which Jordan says are backed up by unnamed whistleblowers. Some allegations have been debunked by fact-checkers or news reports, and Jordan has falsely claimed for years that there is an anti-GOP “deep state” within the FBI.

    Democrats, meanwhile, plan to showcase Raskin’s testimony, who is the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee – which is investigating a series of polarizing issues such as Hunter Biden and the former and current presidents’ possession of classified documents. Raskin, a former member of the House select committee on the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection, and a key fixture in both of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trials, has been a crucial messenger for the left in pushing back against the GOP’s claims and controversial probes.

    The second panel of witnesses will feature former FBI special agents Nicole Parker and Thomas Baker, as well as Turley and the Raben Group’s Elliot Williams.

    Parker wrote an op-ed last month detailing how she left the bureau after over 10 years of service because she believed it became “politically weaponized.”

    Baker, meanwhile, published a book in December 2022 titled, “The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy.”

    Turley was a prominent figure during Trump’s impeachment trials often referenced by the right.

    Williams, a CNN analyst, is appearing on behalf of the Democrats. Williams previously served as deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Department of Justice, where worked to secure Senate confirmation for both Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

    Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democratic member of the subcommittee, cast doubt on the effectiveness of Republicans’ strategy, telling CNN, “I fail to see what they think they’re going to accomplish by those kinds of witnesses. … I don’t know that that adds anything to their credibility or making their case. I’ll leave it at that.”

    But Democrats are also cognizant of one potential disadvantage ahead of Thursday’s hearing – the fact they have not yet met as a group while the Republicans have. Connolly told CNN that, given they were just named as member of the panel last week, they have not yet had the opportunity to begin preparing for the onslaught of investigations GOP members have planned.

    GOP subcommittee members told CNN the purpose of the first hearing is largely to outline the panel’s investigate plans in the months ahead, and set the stage for what viewers should anticipate from the weekly-hearings the committee is hoping to hold.

    “Chairman Jordan wants to introduce people to what the committee hopes to accomplish, and the scope of the problem. Having these senators speak with authority helps set it. They won’t be questioned as witnesses, but they are testifying as to their observations,” GOP Rep. Darrell Issa said.

    “I’m not sure we’re going to learn what we need to learn about what has happened inside government agencies in sufficient detail with these witnesses, but I think they can kind of cast the vision,” Republican subcommittee member Dan Bishop of North Carolina told CNN.

    Bishop said he hopes the work of this panel will pave the way for legislation to address what he claimed were agencies “going off rogue.”

    Jordan and House Judiciary Committee staff have met with series of whistleblowers behind closed doors this week for transcribed interviews regarding claims about the politicization of the Justice Department. The interviews will serve as the basis for much of the subcommittee’s probe, sources with direct knowledge of the interviews tell CNN.

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  • Democrats approve shake-up of 2024 calendar but it’s far from a done deal | CNN Politics

    Democrats approve shake-up of 2024 calendar but it’s far from a done deal | CNN Politics

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    Philadelphia
    CNN
     — 

    The Democratic National Committee on Saturday approved a plan to shake up the 2024 presidential primary calendar and demote longtime early voting states Iowa and New Hampshire, but significant questions remain about how the new order will be implemented.

    The new calendar upends decades of tradition in which Iowa and New Hampshire were the first two states to hold nominating contests and moves up South Carolina, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan. President Joe Biden has argued the new nominating order would better reflect the diversity of the nation and the Democratic Party.

    But the party’s early nomination calendar, which was approved Saturday at the DNC’s winter meeting in Philadelphia, is facing opposition from some impacted states and could remain unsettled for months.

    Under the new calendar, South Carolina would hold the first primary on February 3, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on February 6, Georgia on February 13, and Michigan on February 27. Any state can hold a nomination contest starting March 5.

    The changes reflect longstanding concerns from party leaders that the previous calendar, which featured Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina in early voting, prioritized two states that are largely White and don’t represent the diversity of the party. Iowa has gone first in the nominating process since 1972, while New Hampshire has held the first primary in the process since 1920.

    “This calendar reflects the best of who we are as a nation, and it sends a powerful message all across the country,” DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said Saturday. 

    The calendar passed with overwhelming support. However, while the DNC sets the rules for the party’s nominating process, state governments (or state parties) ultimately set the dates of their contests, and New Hampshire and Georgia likely won’t be able to comply with the assigned dates.

    The chairs of the Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic parties objected to the calendar at Saturday’s meeting, noting that Democrats did not have the power in those states to unilaterally change their state laws. Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire control the office of the governor and both chambers of the state legislature.

    Rita Hart, the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, argued, “Iowa has been put in a position that makes it impossible to comply with both DNC rules and our own state law, which has exactly zero chance of being changed by the Republican legislature.”

    Hart said, “Democrats cannot forget about entire groups of voters in our part of the Midwest without doing significant damage to the party.”

    Ray Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said the DNC rules committee “knew that Republican leaders in the state would not bend to their will, and even knowing this, the RBC still decided that New Hampshire Democrats should be set up for failure,” referring to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.

    “Every vote matters in New Hampshire,” Buckley said. “Victories are determined by a small number of independent swing voters. Those voters are already being bombarded by the Republicans, who are saying that Democrats have abandoned New Hampshire.”

    New Hampshire has a state law that protects its first-in-the-nation primary status, while Georgia’s primary date is set by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and an early primary would open Peach State Republicans up to sanctions from their own national party.

    New Hampshire and Georgia now have until June to take steps toward scheduling their contests on the assigned dates. If they don’t, they won’t be able to hold primaries before March 5 without being penalized by the DNC.

    While Georgia would likely just hold its primary once any state is allowed to do so, a New Hampshire primary scheduled for “7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election,” as state law requires, could lead to delegate penalties for the state party.

    Additionally, any candidate who campaigns in or even has their name on the ballot in a noncompliant primary would be unable to receive delegates from that state and could face other penalties.

    Despite the implementation hurdles ahead, the calendar passed with overwhelming support, and several officials spoke in support of the new order. Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, who has been a leading advocate for her state to join the early-voting calendar, gave a fiery speech Saturday in support of the proposal, saying it would reflect the diversity of the country.

    “We are overdue in changing this primary calendar to ensure it reflects the range of ideas, thoughts and hopes of Americans throughout this country,” Dingell said.

    While the Democratic rules drop New Hampshire from the second contest (and first primary) into a tie for the second primary, fellow longtime early state Iowa has been removed from the early set entirely.

    Like New Hampshire, Iowa is largely White, but it’s also far less politically competitive – then-President Donald Trump won it by 8 points in 2020 – and uses a complex and less accessible caucus format.

    Iowa’s early caucuses are also protected by state law, and then-Iowa Democratic Party Chair Ross Wilburn said in December that the party would follow that law when planning its contest while also pledging to reform the process.

    The other three early states shouldn’t have a problem complying with the new schedule. In South Carolina, each state party chair has the ability to set the date of their presidential primary. Nevada’s new date matches the one set by state law in 2021, and Michigan this week enacted a law to schedule their primary for February 27 (although the state legislature will have to end its session a few weeks early for it take effect in time).

    The calendar approved Saturday applies only to the Democratic party’s nominating process. Republican early-voting states will be unchanged from recent years, with Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

    “The [Republican National Committee] unanimously passed its rules over a year ago and solidified the traditional nominating process the American people know and understand,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement Saturday. “The DNC has decided to break a half-century precedent and cause chaos by altering their primary process, and ultimately abandoning millions of Americans in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

    The DNC changes could affect Republicans, especially in Michigan, where the new primary date violates national GOP rules. To avoid a delegate penalty, Michigan Republicans could use a party-run process at a later date.

    Ultimately, if Biden seeks a second term, he’s unlikely to face serious opposition, and the order of states would be largely irrelevant. However, the changes demonstrate that the party won’t be permanently attached to the traditional set of early states, and party leaders have already started to prepare to reexamine the schedule again after the 2024 election.

    In her speech, Dingell backed that idea: “No one state should have a lock. We do need to revisit this every four years.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Democrats in Connecticut want to ban state agencies from using ‘Latinx’ | CNN Politics

    Democrats in Connecticut want to ban state agencies from using ‘Latinx’ | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Several state Democratic lawmakers in Connecticut are seeking to ban state agencies from using “Latinx,” – the latest example of political backlash against the term.

    Members of the Connecticut state House introduced a bill last month that would prohibit state agencies and employees acting on behalf of state agencies from using “Latinx” in official communications.

    Rep. Geraldo Reyes, one of the primary sponsors of the bill, told CNN on Thursday that he and his colleagues behind the bill are Puerto Rican and consider the term offensive.

    “It’s a term that we believe is unnecessary because the Spanish language, which is 1,500-plus years old, already identifies male, female and neutral,” Reyes said on “CNN Newsroom,” adding that “Latin” and “Latino” were both gender-neutral options.

    Reyes told CNN that a state House committee is screening the bill, and that he hopes it will soon receive a public hearing. If the committee approves the bill, it would need to pass the state House and Senate and be signed by the governor before it becomes law. Democrats have full government control in Connecticut.

    Some activists, academics, companies and progressive groups have adopted “Latinx” in an effort to include those who fall outside the male/female gender binary. But many Hispanics and Latinos take issue with the term, calling it clunky and nonsensical for Spanish speakers.

    The term has also been swept up into the nation’s culture wars. In one of her first acts as Arkansas governor, Republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders barred the use of “Latinx” in official state documents and ordered a review of state agencies’ past usage of the term. GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz of Texas, meanwhile, mocked the term during her victory speech last November, characterizing her win as “a victory for every single Hispanic who loves the Spanish language and does not want to be called Latinx.”

    While “Latinx” is often derided by those on the right, politicians from both parties have expressed opposition to the term. Aside from the state lawmakers in Connecticut, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said in 2021 that he had instructed his office not to use the term in official communications.

    “Look y’all. Hispanic, Latin American are gender neutral. So we have already gender neutral options to describe the Latino community. Adding an x and creating a new word comes off as performative,” Gallego tweeted at the time. “It will not lose you an election but if your staff and consultants use Latinx in your mass communication it likely means they don’t understand the Latino community and is indicative of deeper problems.”

    Data suggests that “Latinx” is not widely used among the people it is meant to describe.

    A Pew Research Center survey published in 2020 found that only about one in four adults in the US who identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard the term “Latinx,” while just 3% say they use it to describe themselves. Those who used the term tended to be younger, US-born and Democratic-leaning. They were also more likely to be bilingual or predominately English speakers and were more likely to have gone to college.

    Similarly, a 2021 Gallup poll found that just 4% of Hispanic and Latino Americans prefer the term “Latinx” over “Hispanic” and “Latinx,” though a majority of respondents said it didn’t matter to them which term was used.

    Other surveys point to divides along cultural lines. An Axios-Ipsos Latino poll in partnership with Telemundo from last year found that a majority of Mexican Americans surveyed were comfortable with the term “Latinx,” while around just one in three Central Americans were.

    Critics of “Latinx” have noted that the term falls outside the bounds of Spanish grammar and is difficult for Spanish speakers to pronounce. And given its popularity among predominately English speakers, some also feel that the term imposes English conventions upon Spanish speakers.

    In recent years, others have opted for new alternatives such as “Latiné,” which is gender-neutral and more consistent with the way Spanish is spoken.

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  • Video of Nichols’ beating prompts renewed calls for police reform | CNN Politics

    Video of Nichols’ beating prompts renewed calls for police reform | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    New York to San Francisco. Baltimore to Portland. Boston to Los Angeles, and countless cities in between.

    Protesters once again took to the streets over the weekend to decry police brutality after the release of video capturing the violent Memphis police beating that led to the death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols.

    On Sunday morning, Nichols’ family attorney made note of the outrage as he aimed a simple but pointed message at Washington.

    “Shame on us if we don’t use [Nichols’] tragic death to finally get the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed,” Ben Crump said on CNN’s “State of Union.”

    President Joe Biden referenced the failed legislation in his statement about Nichols on Friday, and many leaders – from the chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio – are acknowledging a potential role for federal legislation.

    The Congressional Black Caucus is requesting a meeting with Biden this week to push for negotiations. “We are calling on our colleagues in the House and Senate to jumpstart negotiations now and work with us to address the public health epidemic of police violence that disproportionately affects many of our communities,” CBC Chair Steven Horsford, a Nevada Democrat, wrote in a statement on Sunday.

    Gloria Sweet-Love, the Tennessee State Conference NAACP president, called on Congress to step up during a Sunday evening news conference in Memphis. “By failing to craft and pass bills to stop police brutality, you’re writing another Black man’s obituary. The blood of Black America is on your hands. So stand up and do something.”

    But with Congress as divided as ever, it appears public outrage is once again on a collision course with Washington partisanship.

    Here’s what you need to know about the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, why it failed, and what chances it stands in the current political climate.

    The legislation, originally introduced in 2020 and again in 2021, would set up a national registry of police misconduct to stop officers from evading consequences for their actions by moving to another jurisdiction.

    It would ban racial and religious profiling by law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels, and it would overhaul qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that critics say shields law enforcement from accountability.

    According to a fact sheet on the legislation at the time, the measure would also allow “individuals to recover damages in civil court when law enforcement officers violate their constitutional rights by eliminating qualified immunity for law enforcement.”

    The fact sheet also states that the legislation would “save lives by banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants” and would mandate “deadly force be used only as a last resort.”

    The bill twice cleared the House under Democratic control – in 2020 and 2021 – largely along party lines. But it never went anywhere in the Senate, even after Democrats won control in 2021, in part, because of disagreements about qualified immunity, which protects police officers from being sued in civil court.

    Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina spent some six months trying to hash out a deal that could win 60 votes in the Senate, but talks were stymied by a number of complicated issues.

    “It was clear at this negotiating table, in this moment, we were not making progress,” Booker told reporters in the spring of 2021. “In fact, recent back-and-forth with paper showed me that we were actually moving away from it. The negotiations we were in stopped. But the work will continue.”

    With the legislation stuck, Biden signed a more limited executive order to overhaul policing on the second anniversary of Floyd’s death. It took several actions that can be applied to federal officers, including efforts to ban chokeholds, expand the use of body-worn cameras and restrict no-knock warrants, among other things.

    But the president cannot mandate that local law enforcement adopt the measures in his order; the executive action lays out levers the federal government can use, such as federal grants and technical assistance, to incentivize local law enforcement to get on board

    And since then, little has happened on the federal legislative front.

    Here’s the reality: the road for police reform has only become more challenging in the new Congress now that House Republicans, who have placed their priorities elsewhere, are in the majority.

    Senate Democrats picked up one more seat in last year’s midterm elections to pad their majority, but they’re still far short of the 60 votes that would be need for such an effort to succeed. That means any policing overhaul that can find meaningful support in Congress will likely be stripped of the kind of measures that protesters are calling for.

    State officials have been initiating investigations into local police departments, recognizing that the federal government can’t take on every case nationwide.

    And, in some cases, local governments have taken their own steps. In the year after Floyd was killed, at least 25 states had considered some form of qualified immunity reform. In 2021, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law a series of police reforms that created a system to decertify law enforcement officers found to have engaged in serious misconduct – joining the majority of states that have similar decertification authorities.

    But, for many, it’s not nearly enough. Read this CNN Opinion piece from Sonia Pruitt, a retired Montgomery County, Maryland, police captain:

    “Many have noted the police assault on Nichols is reminiscent of that on Rodney King, a Black man whose beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers in 1991 was captured on video. But the beating of Nichols is actually much worse because it shows that after nearly 32 years, the needle of police reform has barely moved, and seemingly minor traffic violations continue to lead to the deaths of Black and other minority men and women in police encounters.”

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  • House Democrats targeted by McCarthy defend their committee assignments | CNN Politics

    House Democrats targeted by McCarthy defend their committee assignments | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The trio of Democrats whom House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has targeted for removal from committee assignments offered a unified rebuke in a joint interview on CNN that aired Sunday.

    Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, who were stripped of their positions on the House Intelligence Committee, and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, whom McCarthy is seeking to oust from the House Foreign Affairs panel, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” that the California Republican’s actions were nakedly partisan.

    “This is some Bakersfield BS,” Swalwell said in the interview, referring to the speaker’s hometown. “It’s Kevin McCarthy weaponizing his ability to commit this political abuse, because he perceives me, just like Mr. Schiff and Ms. Omar, as an effective political opponent.”

    Schiff similarly cast their ouster as “all pretextual” and a result of McCarthy “catering to the most extreme members of their conference.”

    “And I don’t accept the premise that this has anything to do with the conduct of any of the Democratic members. This is merely the weakness of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, that he’s so reliant on these extreme members,” Schiff said.

    McCarthy has cited a “new standard” from Democrats for why he was stripping Schiff and Swalwell, both fellow Californians, of their Intelligence Committee assignments.

    The speaker said in a letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that it was his “assessment that the misuse of this panel during the 116th and 117th Congresses severely undermined its primary national security and oversight missions – ultimately leaving our nation less safe.” He said he wants the panel to be one of “genuine honesty and credibility that regains the trust of the American people.”

    McCarthy specifically targeted Schiff over his handling of the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump. Among other things, McCarthy said: “Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistleblower.”

    Yet there is no evidence for McCarthy’s insinuation that Schiff lied when he said he didn’t know the anonymous whistleblower who came forward in 2019 with allegations – which were subsequently corroborated – about how Trump had attempted to use the power of his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, then a looming rival in the 2020 election.

    “Apparently he believes I was very effective in exposing his misconduct, Donald Trump’s misconduct. And that’s what they’re trying to stop,” Schiff told Bash. “So, I think that he benefits from having these smears repeated. And that’s part of what he gains from it. But this is a pretext, and nothing more.”

    Swalwell, meanwhile, rebuffed GOP claims that he shared sensitive information with a suspected Chinese spy – a charge McCarthy has repeatedly put forward.

    “There’s nothing there,” the California Democrat said, noting that the FBI has relayed that “all I did was help them, and, also, I was never under any suspicion of wrongdoing.”

    McCarthy was able to use his authority as speaker to unilaterally keep Schiff and Swalwell off the Intelligence panel because it is a select committee. Ousting Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee would require a vote of the full House. If all Democrats vote to oppose the move, it would only take a handful of GOP critics to block McCarthy from moving forward, given House Republicans’ razor-thin majority.

    Asked Sunday about her past comments, which were condemned by both sides of the aisle as antisemitic, Omar noted that she had apologized and said she’s hopeful that any vote against her as a result of those comments will fall short.

    “I might have used words at the time that I didn’t understand were trafficking in antisemitism. When that was brought to my attention, I apologized, I owned up to it. That’s the kind of person that I am,” the Minnesota Democrat said.

    “What I do know is that the two Republicans that have been public and some that have privately said that they are not going to vote to remove me are doing so because they don’t want to be seen as hypocrites,” she added.

    Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana said last week that she opposed the push to strip the three Democrats of their committee assignments, stressing the importance of ethics probes before taking disciplinary action against any elected member of Congress. South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace has said she has concerns about the resolution to oust Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee. A third Republican, Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, has told NBC News he was “opposed to … the removal of Congresswoman Omar from committees.”

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  • Court releases video of attack on Paul Pelosi | CNN Politics

    Court releases video of attack on Paul Pelosi | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The San Francisco Superior Court on Friday released video and audio recorded during last year’s attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, including police body-cam footage depicting the moment of the attack and the alleged assailant’s police interview where he admitted he wanted to hold the then-House speaker hostage.

    The video and audio files were released after a California court ruled the district attorney’s office must make the materials public.

    One of the videos shows body-cam footage from officers who arrived at Pelosi’s home on October 28, 2022, when he was attacked. The footage shows the chaos of the moment in which alleged assailant David DePape attacked.

    In the video, which includes graphic and violent content, Paul Pelosi and DePape both appear to have a hand on the hammer and DePape is holding Pelosi’s arm when the officers opened the door.

    “Drop the hammer,” the officer says.

    “Uh, nope,” DePape responds.

    DePape then grabbed the hammer out of Pelosi’s hand, lunged toward him while striking him in the head. The officers rushed into the home, subduing DePape and handcuffing him.

    Court releases video of attack on Paul Pelosi

    In addition to the body-cam footage, the files include audio from a police interview with DePape, the 911 call Paul Pelosi made while DePape was in the home and surveillance video showing DePape breaking into the home.

    The files were exhibits in a preliminary court hearing. The court’s decision mandating the public release of the materials came following a motion by a coalition of news organizations, including CNN, arguing that the circumstances involving the residence of the then-speaker of the House demanded transparency.

    Lawyers for DePape argued against the public release of the audio and footage, writing it would “irreparably damage” his right to a fair trial. DePape has pleaded not guilty to a litany of state and federal crimes related to the attack, including assault and attempted murder.

    Speaking briefly to reporters Friday afternoon, Nancy Pelosi said she had “absolutely no intention of seeing the deadly assault on my husband’s life.” She said that Paul Pelosi is “making progress, but it will take more time” and that she would not be making additional public comments about the case.

    In the audio recording of a San Francisco police officer’s interview of DePape following his October arrest, DePape admitted to attacking Paul Pelosi and described his plans to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage when he broke into the couple’s San Francisco home.

    “Yeah, I mean, I’m not trying to, like, get away with this, so, you know, I know exactly what I did,” DePape said toward the beginning of the 17-minute audio clip.

    “Well, I was going to basically hold her hostage, and I was going to talk to her,” DePape said of Nancy Pelosi. “If she told the truth, I’d let her go scot-free. If she f**king lied, I was going to break her kneecaps.”

    In the interview, DePape embraced conspiracy theories about Democrats and Pelosi, complaining about a Democratic “crime spree” and baselessly claiming that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats had spied on former President Donald Trump’s campaign.

    “They are the criminals,” DePape said.

    The officer walked DePape through his break-in of the Pelosi house and his encounter with Paul Pelosi. When he was asked why he didn’t leave after Paul Pelosi called the police, DePape compared himself to the Founding Fathers’ fighting the British.

    “When I left my house, I left to go fight tyranny. I did not leave to go surrender,” he said.

    DePape explained why he attacked Paul Pelosi after the police arrived, when they both were holding onto a hammer. “He thinks that I’ll just surrender, and it’s like, I didn’t come there to surrender,” DePape said. “And I told him that I would go through him. And so I basically yank it away from him and hit him.”

    In the 911 call audio, Pelosi seemed to be subtly attempting to tell the dispatcher he was in danger while DePape was listening in. CNN has previously reported Pelosi made the call when he went into his bathroom, where his cell phone was charging.

    “There’s a gentleman here just waiting for my wife to come back, Nancy Pelosi. He’s just waiting for her to come back, but she’s not going to be here for days, so I guess we’ll have to wait,” Pelosi said to the dispatcher.

    “He thinks everything’s good. I’ve got a problem, but he thinks everything’s good,” Pelosi said at another point in the 2-minute, 56-second recording.

    The dispatcher asked Pelosi if he knew who the man was, and Pelosi said he did not. “He’s telling me to put the phone down and just do what he says,” Pelosi said.

    “Who is David?” the dispatcher asked.

    “I don’t know,” Pelosi said.

    DePape then spoke up on the call. “I’m a friend of theirs,” he said.

    “He says he’s a friend. But as I said …” Pelosi said.

    “But you don’t know who he is?” the dispatcher responded.

    “No ma’am,” Pelosi said.

    In the surveillance footage, DePape is seen breaking into the Pelosi home. The scene was captured by a US Capitol Police security camera installed at Pelosi’s San Francisco residence.

    The attack on Paul Pelosi was a factor in Nancy Pelosi’s decision to step back from House Democratic leadership, she has said previously.

    nancy pelosi anderson cooper intvu solo 1107

    Exclusive: Pelosi recounts moment she learned that her husband was attacked

    Court documents revealed DePape allegedly woke Paul Pelosi shortly after 2 a.m., carrying a large hammer and several white zip ties, and demanded: “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?” He then threatened to tie up Paul Pelosi and prevented him from escaping via elevator, according to the documents. DePape later allegedly told him, “I can take you out.”

    Following the attack, Paul Pelosi underwent surgery “to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands,” a spokesman for Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi said her husband’s recovery was “one day at a time.” She said she didn’t know if she would see the video when it was released.

    This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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  • GOP-led committees plan to issue subpoenas in Biden probes without consulting Democrats | CNN Politics

    GOP-led committees plan to issue subpoenas in Biden probes without consulting Democrats | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee and select subcommittee on the so-called weaponization of the federal government plan to adopt a rule that will allow Republican members to issue subpoenas without consulting Democrats days ahead of time, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

    The plan, articulated to GOP members of the select subcommittee by its top Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio during their first meeting Friday, will expedite the subpoena process as both panels move forward with probes of the Biden administration, two of the sources said.

    It reflects the “urgency” of Republican plans to investigate the Biden administration on several fronts, the sources added.

    A third source told CNN that the move will effectively allow Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee and select subcommittee to unilaterally issue subpoenas.

    In doing so, Republicans are taking a page from Democrats and former Oversight Committee chairman, Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who previously waived rules that required members of the opposite party be consulted before subpoenas were issued.

    At the time, Republicans slammed the decision by Democrats as a violation of the bipartisan agreement that governs the subpoena process for certain House committees.

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  • McCarthy officially denies Schiff and Swalwell seats on House Intelligence Committee | CNN Politics

    McCarthy officially denies Schiff and Swalwell seats on House Intelligence Committee | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday officially denied seats on the House Intelligence Committee to Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff, the former chairman of the panel.

    The decision reflects the increasingly politicized nature of one of Congress’ most important national security committees and was swiftly met with outrage by the two California Democrats, both of whom played key roles in the impeachments of former President Donald Trump.

    “I cannot put partisan loyalty ahead of national security, and I cannot simply recognize years of service as the sole criteria for membership on this essential committee. Integrity matters more,” McCarthy wrote in a letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that he posted on Twitter Tuesday night.

    McCarthy has cited a “new standard” from Democrats for why he would strip Schiff and Swalwell, both of California, of their committee assignments. The Democrat-led House in 2021 removed GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona from their committees for inflammatory rhetoric, including support for violence against Democratic members of Congress.

    In the letter, McCarthy added that “it is my assessment that the misuse of this panel during the 116th and 117th Congresses severely undermined its primary national security and oversight missions – ultimately leaving our nation less safe,” and that he wants the panel to be one of “genuine honesty and credibility that regains the trust of the American people.”

    “It’s political vengeance,” Swalwell said following the decision on Tuesday. “It’s too bad because that committee has always been a bipartisan committee, and he’s taking one of the most precious pieces of glassware in the congressional cabinet and smashing it, and the damage is going to be irreparable.”

    He added that “if a Democrat advocated for violence against another member of Congress, I would support getting rid of them.”

    Schiff told reporters that “if McCarthy thinks this is going to stop me from vigorously pushing back against his efforts to tear down these institutions, he’s going to find out just how wrong he is.”

    “I think this is a terrible move on his part and once again, showing McCarthy just catering to the most extreme elements of this conference,” he added.

    Schiff will sit on the Judiciary Committee, according to a Democratic aide, while Swalwell told CNN he will sit on the Judiciary and Homeland Security panels.

    Some House Republicans have criticized McCarthy’s move ejecting Democrats from the intelligence panel. GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana said in a statement that she opposes the push to remove the Democrats.

    “I appreciate these Republican members speaking out against what McCarthy is doing,” Schiff later told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “AC360.”

    “I think it does show that there are Republicans who understand this is very ill considered. It’s just going to damage the institution, it’s not justified,” he added. “These efforts are not at all bipartisan. Indeed, the opposition to it is bipartisan.”

    The three Democrats whom McCarthy ousted or plan to oust stood in unity at a Capitol Hill news conference Wednesday.

    “The three of us have chosen to stick together because this isn’t about any individual committee assignments, and this is about an institution where the speaker of the House is using his power to go after his political opponents, and to pick them off the field,” Swalwell said.

    They all seemed in agreement that the “destructive move” was especially hypocritical, given embattled Rep. George Santos has been seated on committees. Democrats and Republicans have called on Santos, a freshman Republican from New York, to resign following a series of false statements he has made including misrepresenting parts of his identity and his resume.

    “This is a Republican speaker who is seating a human fraud, George Santos, on committees, a serial fabricator about every part of his existence. He’s perfectly comfortable with it,” Schiff said.

    McCarthy on Tuesday also announced the list of GOP members he is appointing to serve on the select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, with Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan to serve as its chair.

    GOP Reps. Dan Bishop of North Carolina and Chip Roy of Texas, who were part of the initial holdouts against McCarthy in the speakership race, also gained spots on the panel. Democrats will have the opportunity to appoint members as well.

    The speaker also announced appointments to the select subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic, with Greene among the members chosen.

    McCarthy expanded both of the select committees, naming more people to the rosters than initially expected due to “overwhelming interest” from members, according to a GOP source familiar. House Republicans will have to put forward a floor resolution to formally amend the ratios, the source added, but doesn’t anticipate it will be an issue.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • CNN Poll: Broad majority of Americans approve of appointment of special counsel to investigate Biden documents | CNN Politics

    CNN Poll: Broad majority of Americans approve of appointment of special counsel to investigate Biden documents | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    More than 8 in 10 Americans approve of the appointment of a special counsel to investigate classified documents found at President Joe Biden’s Delaware residence and an office he used after serving as vice president, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS.

    The poll finds broad approval across party lines for the appointment, with 88% of Republicans, 84% of independents and 80% of Democrats saying they approve of it.

    About two-thirds of Americans consider the discovery of classified documents in a Washington, DC, office used by Biden as well as at his residence in Wilmington to be a serious problem (67% consider it very or somewhat serious), and nearly 6 in 10 (57%) say they disapprove of the way the Biden White House has handled the situation.

    There are broad partisan gaps on both of those questions. Democrats (74%) largely approve of how Biden’s administration has handled the discovery of classified documents, while most Republicans (85%) and independents (62%) disapprove. And Republicans are more likely to call the unearthing of the documents a serious problem – 89% say so, including 56% who consider it a “very serious” problem, compared with just 46% of Democrats who say it is serious, including just 10% who call it very serious.

    Only about 1 in 6 Americans (18%) consider Biden to be blameless in the situation involving these classified documents, with 81% saying he has at least done something unethical. But fewer say he acted illegally (37%) than say that he acted unethically but not illegally (44%). That isn’t the case in perceptions of former President Donald Trump’s actions around classified material found at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. The poll finds a majority of Americans believe Trump did something illegal in that situation.

    Most Democrats say Biden’s actions were unethical but not illegal (55%), while most Republicans say he’s acted illegally (64%). Independents tilt toward saying it was unethical rather than illegal (47% unethical, 39% illegal, 14% nothing wrong).

    But the poll also suggests that news about the discovery of the documents has had little impact thus far on baseline views of the president. Biden’s approval rating in the new survey stands at 45% approve to 55% disapprove, little changed from CNN’s December poll, in which 46% approved of his handling of the presidency.

    And overall views of Biden personally also haven’t shifted much. The new poll pegs his favorability rating at 40% favorable to 54% unfavorable, about the same as the 42% favorable to 52% unfavorable read in December.

    The survey was conducted largely before it was revealed Saturday evening that the FBI searched Biden’s Wilmington home on Friday and found additional classified materials. It was fully completed before CNN first reported Tuesday that lawyers for former Vice President Mike Pence had discovered classified documents at his home in Indiana.

    About half of Americans overall (51%) are following news about the classified documents found at Biden’s office and residence at least somewhat closely, with Republicans far more likely to say they are tuned in to news about this story than are Democrats or independents. Among Democrats (46%) and independents (45%), less than half say they are following closely. Among Republicans, though, 62% are following closely, including 20% who say they are following very closely.

    Among both Republicans and independents who say they are following at least somewhat closely, impressions that Biden has done something illegal are more widespread than among those paying less attention, while there is little difference among Democrats in views on Biden’s behavior relative to how closely they are following the story. About three-quarters of Republicans following at least somewhat closely say Biden has done something illegal (75%) compared with about half of those who say they are not as closely following the story (47%). Likewise, more independents who are closely attuned to the news about the Biden documents say they feel the president has done something illegal (50%) than do those independents who are less closely following it (31%). Among Democrats, 10% of those following at least somewhat closely say Biden has acted illegally, not significantly different from the 6% of Democrats following less closely who feel the same way.

    More Americans overall say that Trump acted illegally in the situation involving classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago than say the same of Biden. All told, 52% say Trump has done something illegal, 32% that he acted unethically but not illegally and 15% that he did nothing wrong. The FBI obtained a search warrant to search his Florida resort in August because federal investigators believed Trump had not turned over all classified material despite a subpoena and were concerned records at Mar-a-Lago were being moved around.

    The 84% overall who believe Trump engaged in at least unethical behavior suggests a broader consensus about his actions than existed in the immediate aftermath of the FBI search of his property last year, when an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that only about 6 in 10 Americans believed Trump had acted unethically or illegally. That poll did not specify that any of the documents found were classified.

    A broad 82% overall in CNN’s latest poll approve of the decision to appoint a special counsel to investigate the documents found at Trump’s resort. There is a wider partisan divide over approval of the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the former president than there is over the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Biden – 95% of Democrats approve of the special counsel investigating Trump, compared with 68% of Republicans, with independents squarely in between partisans at 82% approval.

    The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS from January 19 through 22 among a random national sample of 1,004 adults drawn from a probability-based panel. Surveys were either conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results among the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.0 points; it is larger for subgroups.

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  • House Democratic whip’s daughter arrested at protest and charged with assaulting police officer | CNN Politics

    House Democratic whip’s daughter arrested at protest and charged with assaulting police officer | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark’s daughter was arrested during a protest in Boston and has been arraigned on charges including assault on a police officer.

    Riley Dowell, 23, was found by police tagging the Parkman Bandstand monument “NO COP CITY” and “ACAB,” according to a press release from the Boston Police Department. “ACAB” is commonly known as an acronym for the anti-police slogan “All Cops Are Bastards.”

    While police tried to arrest Dowell, protesters surrounded officers and one was hit in the face and bleeding, according to the press release. The release referred to Dowell by her birth name.

    Dowell has now been arraigned and charged with assault of a police officer, according to a news release from Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden’s office.

    “Riley Dowell, 23, was arraigned in the Central Division of Boston Municipal Court today on charges of assault and battery on a police officer, vandalizing property, tagging property, vandalizing a historic marker/monument, and resisting arrest,” the release obtained by CNN affiliate WCVB said. “Judge James Coffey set bail at $500 and ordered Dowell to stay away from Boston Common.”

    Dowell is represented by attorney Chris Dearborn, according to the release. Dearborn had no comment when reached by CNN. Dowell’s next court appearance is scheduled for April 19, the release said.

    Dowell posted bail and is no longer in police custody, the Boston Municipal Court told CNN in an email Tuesday.

    Clark commented on the news in a tweet Sunday.

    “Last night, my daughter was arrested in Boston, Massachusetts. I love Riley, and this is a very difficult time in the cycle of joy and pain in parenting,” Clark wrote. “This will be evaluated by the legal system, and I am confident in that process.”

    Clark began serving as minority whip in the 118th session of Congress after House Democrats elevated her to the position.

    Clark is only the second woman after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve in one of the top two party leadership positions in Congress.

    Previously, the congresswoman served in the leadership role of assistant speaker.

    This story is breaking and has been updated.

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  • GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz opposes McCarthy’s push to oust Democrats from committees | CNN Politics

    GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz opposes McCarthy’s push to oust Democrats from committees | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana announced on Tuesday that she opposes House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s push to remove three Democrats – Reps. Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar – from committees.

    The new House GOP majority is gearing up for a showdown with Democrats over the issue, but pushback from within the House GOP has the potential to complicate an effort to oust Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, in particular. Spartz is the second Republican to suggest she’d vote against such a move. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina signaled to CNN earlier this month she’d be unlikely to back a measure to oust Omar if it came to the floor.

    McCarthy has cited a “new standard” from Democrats for why he would strip them of their committee assignments after the Democrat-led House in 2021 removed GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona from their committees for inflammatory rhetoric and posts.

    In her statement, Spartz referenced the previous move by House Democrats, saying that “two wrongs do not make a right.”

    “Speaker Pelosi took unprecedented actions last Congress to remove Reps. Greene and Gosar from their committees without proper due process. Speaker McCarthy is taking unprecedented actions this Congress to deny some committee assignments to the Minority without proper due process again,” Spartz continued.

    “As I spoke against it on the House floor two years ago, I will not support this charade again,” the congresswoman said.

    Democratic leaders have officially renominated Schiff and Swalwell to the House Intelligence Committee. And Omar has officially requested to have a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

    McCarthy has the power to unilaterally block Schiff and Swalwell from serving on the House Intelligence Committee because it is a select committee. In a letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday night, McCarthy officially denied the California Democrats seats on the panel.

    Ousting Omar, however, from the House Foreign Affairs Committee would require a vote of the full House of Representatives. Democrats would oppose and it would only take a handful of GOP members to block McCarthy from moving forward given that Republicans control only a razor-thin majority in the House.

    Omar told reporters that Pelosi had been “very clear” on why Greene and Gosar had been removed.

    “It was because they threatened the lives of their colleagues,” she told reporters. “They posed danger to folks that they would serve on committees with, to the actual institution they were sworn to protect. Unless McCarthy can say how myself, Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell are a danger to the institution and our colleagues, then he’s not following the example that was set by Speaker Pelosi.”

    Spartz voted “present” during several rounds of votes as McCarthy was trying to lock up the support to win the speakership at the start of the new Congress. Ultimately, however, the congresswoman voted for McCarthy in the final round in which he secured the gavel.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Fact check: McCarthy’s false, misleading and evidence-free claims since becoming House speaker | CNN Politics

    Fact check: McCarthy’s false, misleading and evidence-free claims since becoming House speaker | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Since winning a difficult battle to become speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy has made public claims that are misleading, lacking any evidence or plain wrong.

    Here is a fact check of recent McCarthy comments about the debt ceiling, funding for the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s resort and residence in Florida, President Joe Biden’s stance on stoves and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

    McCarthy has cited the example of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, his Democratic predecessor as House speaker, while defending conservative Republicans’ insistence that any agreement to lift the federal debt ceiling must be paired with cuts to government spending – a trade-off McCarthy agreed to when he was trying to persuade conservatives to support his bid for speaker. Specifically, McCarthy has claimed that even Pelosi agreed to a spending cap as part of a deal to lift the debt ceiling under Trump.

    “When Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s what transpired. To get a debt ceiling, they also got a cap on spending for the next two years,” McCarthy told reporters at a press conference on January 12. When Fox host Maria Bartiromo told McCarthy in a January 15 interview that “they” would not agree to a spending cap, he responded, “Well Maria, I don’t believe that’s the case, because when Donald Trump was president and when Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s exactly what happened for them to get a debt ceiling lifted last time. They agreed to a spending cap.”

    Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are highly misleading. The deal Pelosi agreed to with the Trump administration in 2019 actually loosened spending caps that were already in place at the time because of a 2011 law. In other words, while congressional conservatives today want to use a debt ceiling deal to reduce government spending, the Pelosi deal allowed for billions in additional government spending above the pre-existing maximum. The two situations are nothing alike.

    Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said when asked about the accuracy of McCarthy’s claims: “I’m going to steer clear of characterizing the Speaker’s remarks, but as an objective matter, the deal reached in 2019 increased the spending caps set by the Budget Control Act of 2011.”

    The 2019 deal, which was criticized by many congressional conservatives, also ensured that Budget Control Act’s caps on discretionary spending – which were created as a result of a 2011 debt ceiling deal between a Democratic president and a Republican speaker of the House – would not be extended past 2021. Spending caps vanishing is the opposite of McCarthy’s suggestion that the deal “got” a spending cap.

    Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email that McCarthy is “trying to rewrite history.” Bennett said, “As Republicans in Congress and in the Administration noted at the time, in 2019, Speaker Pelosi and Democrats were eager to reach bipartisan agreement to raise the debt limit and, as part of the agreement, avert damaging funding cuts for defense and domestic programs.”

    In various statements since becoming speaker, McCarthy has boasted of how the first bill passed by the new Republican majority in the House “repealed 87,000 IRS agents” or “repealed funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.”

    Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are false. House Republicans did pass a bill that seeks to eliminate about $71 billion of the approximately $80 billion in additional Internal Revenue Service funding that Biden signed into law in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act – but that funding is not going to hire 87,000 “agents.” In addition, Biden has already made clear he would veto this new Republican bill even if the bill somehow made it through the Democratic-controlled Senate, so no funding has actually been “repealed.” It would be accurate for McCarthy to say House Republicans “voted to repeal” the funding, but the boast that they actually “repealed” something is inaccurate.

    CNN’s Katie Lobosco explains in detail here why the claim about “87,000 new IRS agents” is an exaggeration. The claim, which has become a common Republican talking point, has been fact-checked by numerous media outlets over more than five months, including The Washington Post in response to McCarthy remarks earlier this January.

    Here’s a summary. While Inflation Reduction Act funding may well allow for the hiring of tens of thousands of IRS employees, far from all of these employees will be IRS agents conducting audits and investigations. Many other employees will be hired for the non-agent roles, from customer service to information technology, that make up the vast majority of the IRS workforce. And a significant number of the hires are expected to fill the vacant posts left by retirements and other attrition, not take newly created positions.

    The IRS has not yet released a detailed breakdown of how it plans to use the funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s impossible to say precisely how many new “agents” will be hired. But it is already clear that the total won’t approach 87,000.

    In his interview with Fox’s Bartiromo on January 15, McCarthy criticized federal law enforcement for executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in Florida, which the FBI says resulted in the recovery of more than 100 government documents marked as classified and hundreds of other government documents. Echoing a claim Trump has made, McCarthy said of the documents: “They knew it was there. They could have come and taken it any time they wanted.”

    Facts First: It is clearly not true that the authorities could somehow have come to Mar-a-Lago at any time, without conducting a formal search, and taken all of the presidential records they were seeking from Trump. By the time of the search, the federal government – first the National Archives and Records Administration and then the Justice Department – had been asking Trump for more than a year to return government records. Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May and served Trump’s team with a subpoena for the return of all documents with classification markings, Trump’s team returned only some of these documents. In June, a Trump lawyer signed a document certifying on behalf of Trump’s office that all of the documents had been returned, though that was not true.

    When FBI agents and a Justice Department attorney visited Mar-a-Lago without a search warrant on that June day to accept documents the Trump team was returning in response to the subpoena, a Trump lawyer “explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room,” the department said in a court filing after the August search. In other words, according to the department, the government was not even allowed to poke around to see if there were government records still at Mar-a-Lago, let alone take those records.

    In the August court filing, the department pointedly called into question the extent to which the Trump team had cooperated: “That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”

    McCarthy wrote in a New York Post article published on January 12: “While President Joe Biden wants to control the kind of stove Americans can cook on, House Republicans are certainly cooking with gas.” He repeated the claim on Twitter the next morning.

    Facts First: There is no evidence for this claim; Biden has not expressed a desire to control the kind of stove Americans can cook on. McCarthy was baselessly attributing the comments of a single Biden appointee to Biden himself.

    It is true that a Biden appointee on the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., told Bloomberg earlier this month that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and said, “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the day before McCarthy’s article was published by the New York Post, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”

    To date, even the commission itself has not shown support for a ban on gas stoves or for any particular new regulations on gas stoves. Commission Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric said in a statement the day before McCarthy’s article was published: “I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Rather, he said, the commission is researching gas emissions in stoves, “exploring new ways to address health risks,” and strengthening voluntary safety standards – and will this spring ask the public “to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks.”

    Trumka told CNN’s Matt Egan that while every option remains on the table, any ban would apply only to new gas stoves, not the gas stoves already in people’s homes. And he noted that the Inflation Reduction Act makes people eligible for a rebate of up to $840 to voluntarily switch to an electric stove.

    Defending his plan to bar Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff from sitting on the House Intelligence Committee, a committee Schiff chaired during the Democratic majority from early 2019 to the beginning of this year, McCarthy criticized Schiff on January 12 over his handling of the first impeachment of Trump. Among other things, McCarthy said: “Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistleblower.”

    Facts First: There is no evidence for McCarthy’s insinuation that Schiff lied when he said he didn’t know the anonymous whistleblower who came forward in 2019 with allegations – which were subsequently corroborated – about how Trump had attempted to use the power of his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden, his looming rival in the 2020 election.

    Schiff said last week in a statement to CNN: “Kevin McCarthy continues to falsely assert I know the Ukraine whistleblower. Let me be clear – I have never met the whistleblower and the only thing I know about their identity is what I have read in press. McCarthy’s real objection is we proved the whistleblower’s claim to be true and impeached Donald Trump for withholding millions from Ukraine to extort its help with his campaign.” Schiff also made this comment to The Washington Post, which fact-checked the McCarthy claim last week, and has consistently said the same since late 2019.

    The New York Times reported in 2019 that, according to an unnamed official, a House Intelligence Committee aide who had been contacted by the whistleblower before the whistleblower filed a formal complaint did not inform Schiff of the person’s identity when conveying to Schiff “some” information about what the person had said. And Reuters reported in 2019 that a person familiar with the whistleblower’s contacts said the whistleblower hadn’t met or spoken with Schiff.

    McCarthy could have fairly repeated Republican criticism of a claim Schiff made in a 2019 television appearance about the committee’s communication with the whistleblower; Schiff said at the time “we have not spoken directly with the whistleblower” even though it soon emerged that the whistleblower had contacted the committee aide before filing the complaint. (A committee spokesperson said at the time that Schiff had been merely trying to say that the committee hadn’t heard actual testimony from the whistleblower, but that Schiff acknowledged his words “should have been more carefully phrased to make that distinction clear.”)

    Regardless, McCarthy didn’t argue here that Schiff had been misleading about the committee’s dealings with the whistleblower; he strongly suggested that Schiff lied in saying he didn’t know the whistleblower. That’s baseless. There has never been any indication that Schiff had a relationship with the whistleblower when he said he didn’t, nor that Schiff knew the whistleblower’s identity when he said he didn’t.

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