Republicans in the House of Representatives are drafting legislation offering Democrats an increase in the debt limit, coupled with discretionary spending caps, tighter work requirements for food stamps, repeal of unspent pandemic aid, and more. David Lerman of CQ Roll Call, Peter Cohn, and Lindsey McPherson outline the GOP game plan and assess how the battle for the debt ceiling could play out.
WASHINGTON (AP). Kevin McCarthy emerged from Dirty election of 15 ballots and climbed up home speakerHey what encouraged instead of being punished by wrestling, stating that his father taught him at an early age, “That’s not how you start; this is how you end up.”
But as the California Republican leader leads the first 100 days at the helm of a narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives, it’s getting hard to shake off the spectacle of the erratic launch that has become a defining backdrop for McCarthy. oratory.
So far, McCarthy has made unexpected strides in the new Congress: The Republican House has passed dozens of bills, many of them bipartisan, including politically powerful initiatives. crime prosecution and the COVID-19 pandemic, which left President Joe Biden with little choice but to sign bills into law.
McCarthy has opened the Capitol more fully to visitors, enjoying onlookers who stop to take selfies during his impromptu hallway press conferences. Hello received its first foreign leader, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.diplomatically leading a bipartisan coalition of anti-China lawmakers.
On Monday, McCarthy will give a speech at the New York Stock Exchange in another sign of his growing influence.
It’s been 100 days since the new Congress began, and McCarthy’s speakership is what one senior Democratic congressional aide likened to being the center of attention on a theater stage, waiting for the play to begin and then suddenly realizing there’s no script.
McCarthy fills the role of speaker – second in line to the presidency – but the Republican leader, an ally of Donald Trump, remains stubbornly limited in action by his awkward hammer grip. Any member can call to vote remove the speaker from office.
Thus, McCarthy was unable to sway Republicans in the House of Representatives into broader agendas—the GOP promises border security or budget cuts to avert debt ceiling crisis, for beginners. How he handles them will be the ultimate test that will decide or break him for the next 100 days.
“This is where McCarthy finds himself,” said Jeffrey A. Jenkins, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California who has written about House Speakers.
“The power of any individual speaker is endogenous,” he said. “In this Congress, McCarthy will always have room to maneuver. He will have to walk the tightrope.”
In many ways, it was inevitable that whoever succeeded the last speaker of the House of Representatives Rep. Nancy Pelosi, California., will act differently due to the over-the-top role she has played as one of the most powerful Congressional leaders in modern times. She often jokes that the number of speakers is declining under Republicans.
But McCarthy is remodeling the speaker’s office in his own image, including mastering a separate room a few steps from the floor of the house for meetings. The grey-haired father avoids many of the formal trappings of Congress – he may never return to the Capitol television briefing room for official press conferences – as he begins to exercise the vast powers at his disposal.
He often suggests that he is underestimated. House Republicans stunned Washington with several surprise victories when they took control for the first time in four years in January.
Republicans almost forced Biden to sign early bills, including legislation to repeal the D.C. Penal Code. Democrats were furious when the White House abandoned attempts to veto the measure and played along with the GOP’s tough rhetoric on crime.
Far-right critics, who did not support McCarthy during the agonizing 15 votes it took to become Speaker until he agreed to their demands, seem relatively satisfied with the outcome.
“He did better than I thought,” Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, a former chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said in an interview. “I can’t complain.”
To establish conservative observers, McCarthy’s House is a welcome contrast to the last two years of Democratic rule in Washington.
“Now there is actually a system of checks and balances,” said Eric Kantor, a former leader of the Republican Party. “He delivers this every day and is obviously very efficient at rallying his troops.”
But the fight to become Speaker is never far behind thanks to a Trump-aligned congressional power center that backed McCarthy and could just as easily push him back.
Both men said that Trump’s support secured McCarthy’s victory in the race for the speaker’s seat, but the former president’s support could easily be lost.
While McCarthy balances his own Reagan-style optimism with Trump’s more extremist populists at his conference, he keeps close to Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor GreenTrump’s main ally. She led efforts to alleviate the conditions of detention of defendants facing some of the harshest charges stemming from the Capitol uprising.
With another gesture towards his right flank, McCarthy released thousands of hours of footage of the riots to Tucker Carlson of Fox Newswhich fanned false conspiracy theories about the attack. McCarthy was among those members of Congress who on January 6, 2021 voted against confirming Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.
Last week, the House Democratic campaign headquarters released a memo saying the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives is “too extreme to lead.”
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., and longtime leader of the Asia-Pacific American Caucus of Congress, said in an interview that the drawn-out election to make McCarthy Speaker “was the most awkward week in the history of Congress — and I don’t think the situation has become much better”.
Even the house investigations in Biden and his family, who were supposed to be the cornerstone of the new Republican majority, turned into a free for all with several committees studying all aspects of the federal government.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican member of the Freedom Caucus who was among the opponents during the weekly presidential election, said all this could make McCarthy the “best speaker” of his life.
“We’re proud of him,” said Clyde, whose crime bill was the first piece of legislation Biden signed into law.
“I mean, he proved he could fight. He has proven that he can handle it. Well, that should scare the White House and scare the Senate. House under control.
Earlier this month, Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign touted spectacularNumber: A press release says the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the UN has raised more than $11 million in the six weeks since launching her campaign for the Republican nomination.
But documents filed Saturday with the Federal Election Commission show her campaign grossly exaggerated its earnings. The campaign appears to have double-counted the money it moved between various committees.
The filings, covering the first three months of the year, show that the three committees associated with Haley collectively raised about $8.3 million.
Fundraising is one measure of the enthusiasm of presidential candidates, and both major political parties closely monitor quarterly results as a metric used to gauge campaign strength. Applicants often advertise their fundraising amounts before they are disclosed to the FEC, previewing data that will later be made available to the public.
Hailey raised money through three committees. She has a main election committee. She has a committee set up before her launch in February that has been used to advance her agenda and support other candidates. And she has a joint fundraising committee that sends funds to both.
Haley’s joint fundraising committee raised about $4.4 million, his documents show.
The campaign committee’s revenue of approximately $5.1 million included a transfer of $1.8 million from the joint fundraising committee.
And Haley’s other committee, known as the leadership PAC, reported about $1.5 million in profits, including a transfer of almost $900,000 from the joint fundraising committee.
At $11 million, Haley’s campaign appears to have summed up the cash injections of the three committees, although two of them took a significant portion of the money from the third.
Nahama Soloveitchik, Haley’s campaign communications director, defended the reporting, saying it mirrored how other campaigns have explained fundraising.
But the arithmetic was very unusual. For example, the Trump campaign on Saturday said the former president raised about $14.5 million for his main campaign committee and another $4.3 million for his leadership’s PAC. About $14 million of the $14.5 million raised for the campaign came through the joint fundraising committee, according to Trump’s FEC report. As per standard practice, the Trump campaign did not add $14 million to $14.5 million to reach the announced amount for the first quarter of the year.
Also, not all of the $8.3 million reported by Haley’s various groups can be used for her campaign. Money in the leadership of Hayley PAC, a group often used to support allies or promote a particular message, cannot be used to fund her own campaign.
The catch promoted by Haley’s team prior to filing her filings with the Federal Election Commission impressed donors, who said the number was a sign of the strength of Haley’s campaign.
“I think $11 million in six weeks speaks volumes and shows that she is a candidate that people should be looking at,” Eric Tanenblatt, former financial co-chair of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said ahead of filing with the FEC.
Tanenblatt did not immediately respond to a request Saturday evening for the newly released figures.
Tanenblatt has previously said the $11 million claimed proves Haley has “established herself as an alternative” to former President Donald Trump and Florida’s governor. Ron DeSantis. In March, he organized a fundraiser for Hailey in Georgia, and he and his wife have already raised the maximum donations for Hailey and plan to donate exclusively to her.
“The fight for the presidency is a kind of war of attrition,” Republican strategist Kevin McLaughlin said in an interview before the FEC report was released. “And one imperative so early, I would say, is resources.”
Mark Morial (center), President and CEO of the National Urban League, speaks to reporters outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, July 8, 2021, after meeting with President Joe Biden and senior human rights leaders. (Photo by AP/Susan Walsh, file)
The extremist views of some local, state and federal political leaders who are trying to limit the teaching of history in schools and undermine the way black officials do their jobs are one of the main threats to democracy for black Americans.National Urban Leaguespeaks.
Mark Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans who heads a civil rights and urban advocacy organization, gave the most recent example: this month’s voteRepublican-controlled Tennessee Houseexpel two black representatives for violating a rule of law. The couple participated in a protest against gun control inside the cell aftershootingwhich killed three students and three school staff in Nashville.
“We have censorship and suppression of black history and now this,” Morial said in an interview. “This is another fruit of the same poisonous tree, an attempt to suppress and contain.”
Both Tennessee legislatorswere quickly reinstated by the leaders in their respective districts and returned to work in the home after the outrage that spread far beyond the state.
The Urban League’s annual State of Black America Report, released Saturday, is based on data and polls from a range of organizations, including UCLA Law School, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The collective findings show an increase in recent years of hate crime and efforts to change school programs, attempts to make voting difficult, and the normalization of extremist views in politics, the military, and law enforcement.
One of the most notable areas of research is the so-calledcritical race theory. Scholars developed it as an academic framework in the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they saw as a lack of racial progress following the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. The theory is based on the idea that racism is a systemic phenomenon in national institutions and that they function to maintain white dominance in society.
The project website shows that since September 2020, 209 local, state, and federal governments have introduced more than 670 bills, resolutions, orders, written opinions, statements, and other measures against critical racial theory.
The anti-critical racial theory is “a living organism in itself. It is always evolving. There are always new targets to attack,” Alexander said.
She said that expanding the scope of some of these laws, which have a chilling effect on the teaching of certain aspects of racial conflicts in the country, will lead to serious gaps in the understanding of history and social justice.
“This campaign against the CRT will undermine our ability to realize our full potential as a multi-racial democracy” because future leaders will lack information they can use to solve problems, Alexander said.
She said one example is rewriting Florida elementary school material about a civil rights activist.pink parksand her refusal to give up her seat to a white racer on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, an incident that sparked a bus boycott there. Mention of race was dropped entirely in one revision, a change first reported by The New York Times.
“Things that happened in Florida were replicated, or governors in similarly placed states said they would do the same,” Alexander said.
In Alabama, a proposal to ban “divisive” concepts was passed by a legislative committee last week. Last year, the Virginia State Administration Governor. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, responded to a range of policies, memos and other resources related to diversity, equality and inclusion, which he described as“discriminatory and divisive concepts”in the public education system.
Oklahoma public school teachers are prohibited from teaching certain concepts of race and racism under a Republican bill.government Kevin Stitt signedwill enter into force in 2021.
On Thursday, the Llano County Court of Commissioners in Texas held a special session toconsider closing the entire public library systeminstead of following the order of a federal judge to return to the shelves a list of books on topics ranging from teenage sexuality to bigotry.
After listening to public comments for and against the closure, the committee members decided to remove the issue from the agenda.
“We will close your books. We will suppress talk of race and racism, and we will suppress your story, your AP course,” Morial said. “He is unique in his efforts to suppress blacks.”
Other questions in his group’s report are addressedextremism in the armylaw enforcement, energy and climate change, and how current attitudes could affect public policy. Predominantly white legislatures inMissourianotherMississippithere are proposals that would shift certain government powers from some black-majority cities to the states.
Forty percent of voters in last year’s election said their local K-12 public schools didn’t teach enough about racism in the United States, while 34% said it was already too much, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive poll of the American electorate. Twenty-three percent said the current curriculum was correct.
About two-thirds of black voters said the subject should be taught more, compared to about half of Hispanic voters and about one-third of white voters.
Violence is one of the major areas of concern highlighted in the Urban League report, especially in light of2022 grocery store mass shootingin Buffalo, New York. The accused shooter left a manifesto raising“Great replacement theoryas a motive for the murders.
Data released this year by the FBI showed thathate crimesincreased between 2020 and 2021. African Americans were disproportionately represented, accounting for 30% of incidents in which bias was known.
By comparison, the second largest racial group targeted by individual incidents were white victims, who accounted for 10%.
Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research at the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Alleviation Center, said that when all the activities, including hate crimes, rhetoric, incidents of discrimination and online disinformation, are tabulated, “we see a very clear and disturbing a threat to America and a disproportionate impact on black Americans.”
