(WASHINGTON) — With the fall of the Afghan government, the Biden administration has so far brought roughly 60,000 Afghans to the U.S., with plans for tens of thousands more to arrive in the next year.
But those high numbers belie a broken refugee resettlement program that has been struggling to bring new refugees to the U.S. — and now, new data shows just how bad the situation is.
In the 2021 fiscal year — from Oct. 1, 2020, through Sept. 30 of this year — the U.S. admitted its lowest number of refugees in the program’s over 40-year history: just 11,411, according to newly released State Department data.
That means that in the last year, including President Joe Biden’s first nine months, the U.S. resettled fewer refugees than former President Donald Trump’s final full fiscal year, when 11,814 total refugees were admitted. Biden had pledged to admit up to 62,500 refugees during his young term, while Trump’s administration took several steps to dismantle the refugee resettlement program and bring admissions to a halt.
The Afghans who have been brought to the U.S. in the last two months do not count toward this total because they were granted entry under “humanitarian parole” — a short-term legal status — given the urgency of the unprecedented U.S. airlift that evacuated them from Kabul.
Those Afghans will now have access to support and services usually given to refugees because of the federal government funding bill that passed last week, but their future legal status is in question, as a White House proposal to fast track them to receive a green card was left out.
Either way, they’re not legally considered refugees. Just 872 Afghans were admitted under that category in the 2021 fiscal year, according to the data.
Trump admitted 604 Afghans as refugees in his final full fiscal year.
Biden had vowed to boost refugee admissions during the 2020 campaign and in his administration’s earliest days, but in the spring, he signed a memo that kept Trump’s refugee cap of 15,000 — the program’s lowest — only to then backtrack and raise it to 62,500 after outrage among Democrats and refugee advocates.
But those Trump-era efforts to dismantle the program led to this small number, and now they endanger Biden’s promise to admit 125,000 refugees in the fiscal year of 2022, which runs through next Sept. 30.
There had been some uptick in the number of admissions under the Biden administration — climbing from 283 in March to 1,533 in June to 3,774 in September — but advocates say the administration didn’t do enough to make repairs and expand those numbers.
“If we are to reach President Biden’s goal of welcoming 125,000 refugees, the administration must be aggressive and innovative in ramping up processing,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the largest U.S. faith-based resettlement agency. “We urge the Biden administration to do everything in its power to align refugee admissions with our core values as a welcoming nation.”
There have been warnings for months now that the U.S. refugee resettlement program has not recovered from the previous four years. In particular, the major resettlement agencies in the U.S. had been forced to slash staffing as federal funds dried up, the pipeline of potential refugees had been blocked by new rules advocates have called onerous, and the pandemic meant the required in-person interviews weren’t happening.
While several resettlement agencies in the U.S. say the Trump-era damage is obvious, they expressed some disappointment that Biden’s team hasn’t done more to reverse that, saying responsibility now lies with them.
“The U.S. is taking in fewer refugees than ever at a time when there are more refugees in the world than at any point in recorded history, which is unacceptable. The Biden administration will need to prioritize creating more efficient and equitable methods of processing for refugees in order to reach the ceiling of 125,000 refugees for the fiscal year that’s just begun,” said Myal Greene, president and CEO of World Relief, another Christian humanitarian group.
In his executive order last February, for example, Biden directed the Departments of State and Homeland Security to “consider all appropriate actions” to permit virtual interviews between USCIS case officers and refugee applicants, as the pandemic makes in-person interviews still challenging.
But eight months later, no changes have been made in that process. The number of refugee interviews conducted in the first quarter of this fiscal year was zero, according to USCIS data, compared to 1,373 in all of fiscal year 2020 and 44,538 in FY 2019. Data from USCIS is so far only available for the first quarter of FY 2021.
(WASHINGTON) — Senate Democrats emerged from a closed door special caucus meeting on the debt ceiling on Wednesday and said they intend to take GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell up on his short-term debt ceiling increase.
Multiple senators and aides told ABC News Democrats are rejecting McConnell’s other offer that would have Republicans expediting Democrats passing a longer-term debt ceiling increase using the budget reconciliation process that they’re using to pass the multi-trillion dollar social spending bill.
“McConnell caved! McConnell caved,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told reporters with a fist raised.
“We intend to take this temporary victory and then try to work with the Republicans to do this on a longer-term basis,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., told CNN.
“There’s not going to be reconciliation,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told reporters emphatically, adding that the short term fix must pass as soon as possible.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., agreed, saying she was glad McConnell “folded“ and said Democrats would “never“ use reconciliation to increase the debt ceiling.
It’s unclear if a vote on the new proposal would occur Wednesday night or Thursday, though the latter appeared more likely.
As the U.S. barrels toward an unprecedented default in a game of brinkmanship on Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell offered Democrats two options to increase the debt ceiling on Wednesday. Both options require that Democrats increase the ceiling by a specific amount, which the party has not wanted to do, fearing political implications of an increase to the nation’s borrowing limit approved solely by Democrats.
Democrats rejected an offer for that Republicans to help Democrats expedite the budget process known as reconciliation to hike the debt limit by a specified amount but instead took a short-term increase of the debt ceiling to a specified amount for two months — until December.
It comes after Republicans have refused to allow Democrats to move forward on raising the debt ceiling with a simple majority vote, subsequently preventing the country from entering a self-inflicted financial crisis, potentially worse than the 2008 crisis.
“Republicans remain the only party with a plan to prevent default,” McConnell said, though he has maintained for weeks that Democrats should go the process alone. “We have already made it clear we would assist in expediting the 304 reconciliation process for stand-alone debt limit legislation. To protect the American people from a near-term Democrat-created crisis, we will also allow Democrats to use normal procedures to pass an emergency debt limit extension at a fixed dollar amount to cover current spending levels into December.”
While some Democrats took short-term extension as a win, Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii said McConnell’s two offers were “BS,” adding the GOP leader is “heartless” and, sarcastically, “He could give a rip.”
Asked by ABC News’ Mariam Khan if Schumer should accept one of McConnell’s options, given the nation is on a deadline, Hirono replied, “Why should we accept any part of a BS offer?”
Ahead of McConnell’s proposition, Senate Republicans had planned to filibuster a House-passed measure on Wednesday that would suspend the debt limit until December 2022. At least 10 Republicans would need to join all Senate Democrats to break the GOP filibuster and allow a simple majority vote to pass the bill — which President Joe Biden has called for, telling Republicans at a meeting with business leader earlier to “get out of the way.”
Without Republican support, Biden and other Democrats raised carving out an exception to ending the filibuster for the debt ceiling vote, which would take the support of all 50 Democratic senators — but it doesn’t seem to be a pathway forward either.
Moderate Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who along with fellow moderate Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., has balked at changes to the filibuster rules, dug into his position earlier, putting the responsibility of the economic crisis squarely on the shoulders of Senate leaders to solve.
“This should not be a crisis. I’ve been very, very clear where I stand, where I stand on the filibuster. I don’t have to repeat that. I think I’ve been very clear. Nothing change,” Manchin told reporters on Capitol Hill. “But the bottom line is we have a responsibility to be the adults. Our leadership has the responsibility to lead.”
“The only thing I can say at this time to Leader Schumer, and to Leader McConnell, please, lead, work together,” he added.
Schumer had said earlier on the floor that the Senate must move forward with “the responsible thing and vote to allow the U.S. to keep paying its bills.”
“Republicans’ obstruction on the debt ceiling over the last few weeks has been reckless and irresponsible but nevertheless, Republicans will today have the opportunity to get what they’ve been asking for,” Schumer said in the morning. “The first and easiest option is this: Republicans can simply get out of the way, and we can agree to skip the filibuster vote so we can proceed to final passage of this bill.”
But Republicans letting Democrats govern so easily, despite Democrats suspending the debt ceiling multiple times in a divided Washington under former President Donald Trump.
GOP leaders have maintained for months that Democrats must act to raise the federal debt limit on their own, because they have total control of Washington and are planning to pass a multi-trillion social and economic package without Republican support.
But Democrats and Biden have reiterated that paying off U.S. debt is a historically bipartisan measure and that the funds Congress would be approving were spent, in part, under then-Senate Majority Leader McConnell.
McConnell has said repeatedly that Democrats should have to hike the debt limit to cover the cost of potentially trillions in yet-passed parts of Biden’s agenda, though the debt limit must be raised to cover spending that already took place under the Trump administration with unified GOP support.
Amid Democrats’ calls for carving out the filibuster, McConnell told members in a lunch meeting about the two options: a short-term extension or an expedited reconciliation process — but those would also give Republicans exactly what they’re asking for politically: an increase to the nation’s borrowing limit approved solely by Democrats, for the GOP to seize on in midterms.
White House economists and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have warned that without action, Americans will feel the real-world effects of a self-inflicted economic crisis in the coming days. Consequences include delays to Social Security payments and checks to servicemembers, a suspension of veterans’ benefits, and rising interest rates on credit cards, car loans and mortgages.
(WASHINGTON) — A U.S. Supreme Court case about state secrets and brutal CIA black-site interrogations after 9/11 took an abrupt turn Wednesday when a trio of justices demanded answers from the Biden administration about why the plaintiff — Al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah — is still held without charges in a military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, even though the war in Afghanistan has concluded.
“I don’t understand why he’s still there after 14 years,” said a clearly exasperated Justice Stephen Breyer.
The controversial wartime detention of alleged terrorist combatants was not the immediate focus of the case but was raised after more than an hour of oral arguments by Breyer and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor.
The justices had all been wrestling with how to balance the government’s need to keep secret the foreign location of Zubaydah’s interrogation — in an effort to protect national security interests — and the detainee’s need to obtain testimony from two former CIA contractors about what happened when he was in their custody.
Zubaydah is pursuing a claim against Polish officials in Polish court for their alleged complicity in his harsh treatment at a CIA black site in the country, as outlined in a U.S. Senate report, and wants on-the-record testimony about what happened there. The U.S. government has never formally confirmed, nor denied, the existence of a site in Poland and contends testimony from the contractors could compromise secrets.
Justice Gorsuch suggested one “off-ramp,” or solution, to the entire case could be allowing Zubaydah to speak for himself about how he was treated, especially since many details have already been declassified in a 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, was waterboarded 83 times, spent 11 days in a coffin-size confinement box and was subjected to “walling, attention grasps, slapping, facial holds, stress positions and sleep deprivation,” according the report.
“Why not make the witness [Zubaydah] available? What is the government’s objection to the witness testifying to his own treatment and not requiring any admission from the government of any kind?” Gorsuch asked acting Solicitor General Brian Fletcher, representing the Biden administration.
“I understand there are all sorts of rules and protective orders,” he continued, “I’d just really appreciate a straight answer to this: will the government make Petitioner [Zubaydah] available to testify as to his treatment during these dates?”
Fletcher, apparently caught off guard, explained that he could not offer an answer without first consulting with the Defense Department. He pledged to comply with the justices’ request. Under terms of his detention, Zubaydah is allowed to communicate only with his legal team.
“Well, gosh,” replied Gorsuch, “this case has been litigated for years and all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, and you haven’t considered whether that’s an off-ramp that — that the government could provide?”
The exchange was a remarkable moment that united justices from across the ideological spectrum.
Justice Sotomayor joined Gorsuch’s argument, saying, “We want a clear answer. Are you going to permit him to testify, yes or no?”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was participating virtually in the argument because of a COVID-19 diagnosis last week, attempted to throw the government a lifeline. “Is the US still engaged in hostilities under the AUMF against Al-Qaeda?” he asked.
“That is the government’s position, that notwithstanding withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, we continue to be engaged in hostilities with Al Qaeda and therefore that detention under law of order remains proper,” Fletcher replied.
It is unclear whether the terms of his detention could or would be modified to allow him to testify publicly about his treatment in CIA custody.
The government insists any official testimony that implicates Poland as the location of a CIA black site would breach the trust of our allies and harm future intelligence agreements.
Zubaydah says his pursuit of a case in Polish court could benefit from an eyewitness account of what happened to him, even though many details are already in the public domain. “I want to shine a light on what happened,” said his attorney David Klein.
A majority of the justices appeared inclined to show deference to the government’s national security concerns about formally confirming Poland as a black site location, but they were also skeptical of a sweeping assertion of state secrets privilege that prevents Zubaydah from providing his own account in a court of law.
The justices are expected to hand down a decision in the case by the end of June 2022.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday will wrestle with the limits of the government state secrets privilege in a high-stakes case brought by the first al-Qaida suspect detained and harshly interrogated at a CIA “black site” after Sept. 11, 2001.
Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, was waterboarded 83 times, spent 11 days in a coffin-size confinement box and was subjected to “walling, attention grasps, slapping, facial holds, stress positions and sleep deprivation,” according to a declassified 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report.
He wants the U.S. government to publicly confirm that Poland was one of the locations of his interrogation and allow depositions of two CIA contractors involved with his treatment through the agency’s controversial rendition, detention and interrogation program, also known as the “torture program.”
Zubaydah and his legal team said the information is critical to a case they are pursuing overseas against Polish government officials for alleged complicity in his treatment.
The Biden administration said in court documents that revealing the information would “cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”
“We have a confrontation in this case between openness and secrecy — major principles that have so corrosively confronted one another during this entire era of modern American history,” said University of Chicago law professor and legal historian Farah Peterson.
Zubaydah, 50, has been detained at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without charge since 2006. For years, the government asserted that he was a plotter in the 9/11 attacks, but officials later acknowledged that he was not tied to the operation, according to the 2014 report.
Today, the Biden administration calls Zubaydah “an associate and longtime terrorist ally of Osama bin Laden.” His attorneys insist “none of these allegations has support in any CIA record.”
While many details of Zubaydah’s treatment in U.S. custody have been public for years — published in declassified congressional documents, media reports and other outside investigations — the American government has never formally confirmed, nor denied, the existence of a black site in Poland or that Zubaydah was held there for five months between 2002 and 2003.
The European Court of Human Rights, independent investigations by international advocacy groups and several former top Polish officials have each pointed to the existence of a CIA site in Poland and alleged that Zubaydah was held there.
“It’s [about] protecting whether the [U.S.] government has any official confirmation of what foreign country does, or does not, cooperate with them,” said Beth Brinkmann, a former deputy assistant attorney general for the Obama administration, at a recent event at William & Mary Law School. “There’s an interesting government interest in the government saying something and confirming something.”
“It might have a chilling effect on other countries being willing to cooperate with us if they know it might come out,” added Andrew Pincus, a Yale Law School professor, at the same event.
Zubaydah’s attorneys argue that because so many details of the CIA program are widely known, the government’s blanket assertion of the state secrets privilege is too broad and illegal.
“The two former CIA contractors who devised and implemented the torture program … have twice testified under oath about what they saw, heard and did at various black sites, including what they did to Abu Zubaydah and some of what they observed at the black site at issue in this litigation,” they wrote in court documents. “It is undisputed that this testimony contains no state secrets.”
Lower courts have split over the subpoenas for evidence in Zubaydah’s case. A federal district court sided with the government, but the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the decision.
“The district court erred in quashing the subpoenas in toto rather than attempting to disentangle nonprivileged from privileged information,” the panel wrote.
The Supreme Court will now parse whether sensitive information already in the public domain can be still subject to the state secrets privilege and to what extent information from government contractors may be protected for national security concerns.
A decision in favor of Zubaydah could help him expose more information about the now-defunct, secretive CIA program and advance his case against Polish officials overseas. A decision siding with the U.S. government could bolster the power of the state secrets privilege and limit future attempts at exposure of classified information related to national security.
The CIA did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment on the case.
Several family members of 9/11 victims have weighed in on the case at the Supreme Court in support of Zubaydah.
“The arc of the moral universe has been twisted and bent over the last 20 years, with justice sadly eluding both the families of the 9/11 dead and the accused, who were, like Mr. Zubaydah, tortured at government black sites,” said Adele Welty, the mother of New York City firefighter Timothy Welty, who was killed in the attack. “In the interest of justice so long denied, we implore the government to separate properly classified information from unclassified and release all relevant documents.”
(WASHINGTON) — Asked last week what the biggest sticking points were in the ongoing negotiations over the partisan budget reconciliation bill, California Rep. Ro Khanna, a member of the progressive caucus, texted ABC News one word: “climate.”
In television interviews since, several other progressive leaders have also been quick to underscore their commitment to the climate-related provisions in the sweeping budget package, suggesting the issues are top of mind as debate continues with key holdouts Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. Without Republican support around the budget proposals, Democrats cannot afford to lose either vote.
Although the White House is eager to strike a deal on the budget bill, the upcoming United National Climate Change Conference in Glasglow, Scotland, at the end of the month is adding pressure for the president to deliver on climate change.
In his recent public remarks to both domestic and foreign audiences, President Joe Biden has not only outlined bold benchmarks for dramatically reducing the United States’ total greenhouse gas emissions and dependency on fossil fuels over the next 10 years, but he has also leaned on other nations to up their commitments, too.
“The president cannot show up in Glasgow empty-handed,” Jamal Raad, co-founder and executive director of climate change advocacy group Evergreen Action, told ABC News. “The current budget reconciliation package includes major pieces of legislation that will drive down emissions and let us be taken seriously on the global stage.”
But Manchin has expressed skepticism around some of the energy proposals, including new tax incentives for renewable energy production and disincentives for utility companies that do not accelerate a transition to cleaner energy sources. From a state with deep roots in coal, Manchin has repeatedly indicated he is reluctant to support measures viewed as punishing fossil fuels.
On CNN’s State of the Union last month, Manchin expressed his support for many, if not all, of the social programs outlined in the current budget proposal, but when pressed on the climate and carbon emissions proposal he said, “The [energy] transition is happening. Now they’re wanting to pay companies to do what they’re already doing. Makes no sense to me at all for us to take billions of dollars and pay utilities for what they’re going to do as the market transitions.”
In a document obtained by ABC News showing negotiations on the budget from over the summer, Manchin also listed that he was not in favor of cutting subsidies for fossil fuels if energy companies were going to be given tax credits for the production of renewable energies.
Biden campaigned on eliminating tax subsidies for fossil fuel companies, and when asked about it by ABC News on Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said ending them was still the White House’s goal.
The president’s initial proposals for large-scale government spending to foster renewable energy production were scrapped and scaled back to pass the bipartisan infrastructure deal in the Senate in early August. Progressives were told at the time that many of the ideas would be salvaged and included in the partisan budget reconciliation package.
Currently, the budget includes over $300 billion in proposed clean energy tax credits intended to support energy companies’ work to ramp up the production of renewables, cleaner cars and greener buildings; incentives for consumers to buy electric vehicles; fees and stricter rules around methane leaks; and $150 billion for a Clean Electricity Performance Program designed to incentivize utility companies to supply at least 4% more clean energy year over year with the target of reaching 80% zero-emission electricity nationwide by 2030.
Speaking to Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation, progressive Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Sunday the climate provisions in the budget package were non-negotiable to her. She described a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a “code red for humanity.”
“I think some of the climate provisions that we have, we cannot afford to increase carbon or just fossil fuel emissions at this time. That is simply the science. That is not something we can kick down the line,” Ocasio-Cortez told Brennan.
“You’re going to run right into Sen. Joe Manchin on those issues though, you know that,” Brennan replied to Ocasio-Cortez, and the congresswoman did not disagree.
“Yes, and I think Sen. Manchin is going to run to the science,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.
On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, argued that on the issue of fighting climate change, the top-line spending totals for the entire budget package were probably too small.
“When we especially talk about the crisis of climate change, and the need to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, the $6 trillion that I had originally proposed was probably too little, $3.5 trillion should be a minimum,” Sanders told ABC’s Jonathan Karl.
Beyond climate provisions, the budget also includes funding for new social programs like universal pre-K, paid medical leave and free community college.
(WASHINGTON) — As the nation barrels toward default, Republicans are poised to sink a Democratic effort to suspend the federal borrowing limit.
Republicans in the Senate are filibustering a House-passed measure that would suspend the debt limit until December 2022. At least 10 Republicans would need to join all Senate Democrats to break a GOP filibuster and allow a simple majority vote to pass the bill.
Democrats argue that this would give Republicans exactly what they’re asking for: an increase to the nation’s borrowing limit approved solely by Democrats.
“Tomorrow’s vote is not a vote to raise the debt ceiling. It’s, rather, a procedural step to let Democrats raise the debt ceiling on our own,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday. “We’re telling Republicans that we’re not asking you to vote for it, just let us vote for it.”
But Republicans aren’t backing down. They’ve maintained for months that Democrats must act to raise the federal debt limit on their own, because they have total control of Washington and are planning to pass a multi-trillion social and economic package with zero input from Republicans.
“They said they’re perfectly prepared to do the job themselves,” Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell insisted to reporters Tuesday. “The easiest way to do that is through the reconciliation process as I pointed out for two months.”
McConnell, R-Ky., has said repeatedly that Democrats should have to hike the debt limit to cover the cost of potentially trillions in yet-passed parts of President Joe Biden’s agenda, though the debt limit must be raised to cover spending that already took place under the Trump administration with unified GOP support.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told ABC News on Tuesday he won’t support moving forward on a vote.
“We are not going to empower a radical march toward socialism,” Graham, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Senate budget committee chairman, floated a potential solution that would involve temporarily suspending the chamber’s filibuster rules that require 60 votes for most legislation.
“Where it may come down to is a demand that at least for the debt ceiling that we end the filibuster … and pass it with 51 votes,” Sanders suggested.
But the 50-member Democratic caucus would have to remain unified to do this, and both moderates Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have balked at any changes to the filibuster rules.
No Republican has yet gone on the record to say he or she is prepared to join Democrats to clear the way for a final vote on the debt limit Wednesday, though moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, opened the door to potentially joining the majority.
“I want to make sure we are doing everything that we can to not send us into a situation of default, and I don’t even want to get close,” Murkowski said. “We have to make sure. We just have to ensure.”
The nation technically hit the debt ceiling Aug. 1, with the Treasury Department using extraordinary measures to pay the nation’s bills. But Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that by Oct. 18, her department’s efforts would be fully exhausted and default would be all but certain.
Pressure is mounting alongside partisan gridlock, with no backup plan emerging.
McConnell and his conference are insisting that Democrats use a fast-track budget tool called reconciliation that allows the majority to break a filibuster to pass certain legislation. Use of this arcane process is cumbersome, could take weeks and opens up Democrats to a series of potentially politically painful votes.
But there could be an added political benefit for Republicans in insisting that this process be used. It would put Democrats on the record raising the debt ceiling by a hefty dollar amount, whereas Wednesday’s vote — simply suspending the debt limit by no specified amount — does not. That would feed into the GOP narrative that Democrats are out-of-control spenders.
“We’re very interested in a specific dollar amount,” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said Tuesday. “They’re going to have to come before the American people and say, ‘We’re going to increase the debt ceiling by X amount, because this is the amount we intend to spend’, and one way or another, it puts them on the record as to their spending proposals.”
Some Democrats say they’d support using reconciliation if it meant a swift resolution of the debt limit issue. Manchin said the process should be considered, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told reporters that “everything should be on the table” when pressed on whether the fast-track budget tool should be considered.
But each passing day limits the time Democrats would have to fast track a debt ceiling increase through the multi-step process to final passage, and Democrats tell ABC News that no work has begun on the reconciliation process, even behind the scenes.
“No, not at the moment,” Sanders told ABC News.
Some Democrats were more emphatic.
“Reconciliation was never on the table,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said. “There’s not enough time to make reconciliation work.”
But on Tuesday, Schumer did not expressly rule it out.
When asked if he was ruling out using the budget process, Schumer repeatedly referenced the Wednesday vote as the preferred way to go about hiking the debt cap.
“Reconciliation is a drawn out, convoluted process. We’ve shown the best way to go. We’re moving forward in that direction,” Schumer said, refusing to entertain a Plan B.
If the nation defaults, the results are sure to be catastrophic. The White House has warned that an unprecedented default could send shockwaves through the global economy and trigger a recession. The political implications for both parties are unclear.
(WASHINGTON) — Days after the Biden administration reimbursed two Florida school districts whose board members lost their salaries for mandating masks for students, the state’s top education official is trying to strip the districts of the money.
In a series of memoranda, Florida Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran recommended Monday that the Florida Board of Education, which meets Thursday, withhold “state funds in an amount equal to any federal grant funds awarded” to districts that defy Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ban on school mask requirements.
Corcoran said he found probable cause that 11 school districts, including Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, violated state laws by implementing a mask mandate.
He also recommended that the Board withhold the salaries of the board members in each district, a punishment already handed down in late August to officials in Alachua and Broward counties.
In response to that crackdown, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the Alachua and Broward districts hundreds of thousands of dollars to make up for the lost paychecks. The money was issued through the Project SAFE grant program, which was created last month to reimburse school districts that lose state money for implementing coronavirus mitigation strategies.
The Florida Department of Education has not announced that it has begun withholding salaries from school board members in other districts requiring masks.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona indicated in August that districts punished by Florida for requiring masks for students would be eligible for grant money. “I want you to know that the U.S. Department of Education stands with you,” he wrote in a letter to superintendents.
The 11 districts that Corcoran said violated the law will be under the microscope Thursday, when the Board of Education meets to decide whether to implement the commissioner’s recommendations and punish them.
District officials in Alachua and Broward counties questioned the legality of blocking federal funding on Tuesday.
“We’re always concerned when funds are withheld from public education, but we’re particularly concerned about the state interfering with federal funding. This will almost certainly have to be settled in court,” Dr. Carlee Simon, superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools, said in a statement to ABC News.
Dr. Rosalind Osgood, chair of the school board in Broward County, called Corcoran’s recommendations to the Board of Education “extremely displeasing” and said her district was complying with the law “and saving lives.”
“Our students and staff need academic support, mental health support and job security. The way that the Governor and Commissioner of Education have handled this issue has caused added trauma, unemployment and a major disruption in school board operations,” Osgood said in a statement to ABC News.
(OAKWOOD, Texas) — As voters across Texas submitted voter registration applications on Monday, Oct. 4, ahead of the Nov. 2 statewide election, 82-year-old Elmira Hicks was left out.
The Oakwood, Texas, native hasn’t been able to renew her voting license for more than a year because she has been unable to present the required birth certificate needed to verify her identity.
In the Lone Star State, election laws require voters to present a driver’s license, passport, military identification card, citizenship certificate, state election identification certificate or a personal identification card to cast a ballot or register to vote.
Hicks does not have a passport and without her driver’s license or the other approved documents, she said she will face obstacles that will make it difficult for her to participate in state and federal elections as a rural resident with limited transportation.
“My ability to get a license is completely impossible. They’ve completely shut me down,” Hicks told ABC News. “I can’t vote without proper identification. My voice does not count. It’s very important. People have died just to vote, people have stood in line, in the rain, women fought to vote and now I can’t vote,” Hicks added.
Like many Black elders in the South, Hicks was born with the help of a midwife, at a time when records weren’t kept. She never had a birth certificate. Her daughter, Jonita White, has helped her apply for one. The pair battled in court over the issue. A judge even ruled in their favor. Still, they said the Office of Vital Statistics has rejected Hicks on a technicality.
“I do feel like the laws right now are targeting my mother and other African Americans in this country,” White said.
Eight constitutional amendments ranging from taxes to judicial eligibility will be up for a vote on Nov. 2, an election Hicks will not be able to participate in.
Advocates warn that potentially thousands of predominantly minority voters could be disenfranchised due to voter identification requirements, which could have a large implications during next year’s midterm elections for state and congressional races.
“It’s often very common for people of a certain age not to have a birth certificate. I want to emphasize it’s not as uncommon as people might believe,” said Franita Tolson, the vice dean for faculty and academic affairs and a professor of law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
“In this country, race correlates to a lot of different characteristics. So, for example, if you take voter identification laws … people of color, so African Americans, Latinos, will be less likely to have the underlying documents that you need in order to get the ID in the first place in order to get a driver’s license,” Tolson continued.
Texas recently passed the Election Integrity Protection Act, one of the most restrictive voting laws in the country. It bans drive-thru voting, enlists new regulations for early voting and enacts new ID requirements for mail-in voting.
While Tolson does not believe all voter identification requirements are discriminatory, she called Texas’ voter ID measures “racist” during a Congressional Subcommittee hearing, because she believes they disproportionately impact voters of color.
“Texas has a very restrictive voter ID law,” Tolson said. “If you read it, it doesn’t seem racist on its face, but if you think about how it operates in practice, as well as the intent behind it, it is fairly racist. For example, Texas’ law only allows voters to have a certain limited amount of IDs. You have to have a driver’s license, you can have a hand handgun license, you can have a military ID, but you can’t have a federal ID, or you can’t have a student ID, which are the types of IDs that people of color are more likely to have.”
Rep. Steve Toth R-Texas, vehemently disagreed with Tolson’s claim that the state’s election laws are discriminatory, telling ABC News that the latest legislation makes it easier for people to vote and harder to commit fraud.
“We expanded the number of hours for people to vote, we expanded the number of days so people could vote. We added criminal penalties to people that want to shut voting locations down early or open late. We made sure that employers had to allow people to leave early to vote,” Toth said, calling Tolson’s charge offensive.
Nationally, there is bipartisan support for voter identification requirements among the majority of Americans, and 62% of Democrats support photo ID requirements, along with 87% of Independents and 91% of Republicans, according to a Monmouth poll.
Toth told ABC News that voters like Hicks have recourse.
“If they can’t get a driver’s license, go to DPS {Department of Public Safety], with a social security card, or some other ID, and to get an ID [election identification card] so that you can vote. It’s free,” Toth said, acknowledging that most people vote using their driver’s license.
White said obtaining an election identification is not so easy for an 82-year-old woman who lives in a rural area without the convenient ability to drive herself to the Department of Public Safety.
“My challenge is it’s taking so long to get this done,” White said. “And to send my mother through all of these hoops at this age to go get documents notarized, to go get her Social Security application, We’re having to look for high school records and baptism information…To send her through such a process, it is really is ridiculous.”
(WASHINGTON) — Stephanie Grisham, one of former President Donald Trump’s most senior and longest-serving advisers, says she is “terrified” that her former boss may run for office again.
“I am terrified of him running in 2024,” Grisham, who served as both Trump’s press secretary and first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff, told “Nightline” co-anchor Juju Chang in a wide-ranging exclusive interview on the eve of the publication of Grisham’s new book.
“I don’t think he is fit for the job,” Grisham said. “I think that he is erratic. I think that he can be delusional. I think that he is a narcissist and cares about himself first and foremost. And I do not want him to be our president again.”
Asked by Chang what scares her the most, Grisham painted a grim picture of what could happen if Trump ends up running again in 2024.
“I think he would foment more violence,” she said. “He won’t have consequences. He won’t need to be reelected again.”
“I think he will line his pockets,” she added. “I think his family will line their pockets. I believe that he wanted to help the country in the beginning; I believe he wants to help himself now.”
In her new book, titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” out this Tuesday, Grisham describes a White House in perpetual chaos, where she says “casual dishonesty” flowed through the air “as if it were in the air conditioning system.” The book is filled with accusations about the former president, and includes a host of alleged wrongdoings that range from downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus to making sexual comments about a young female White House staffer.
But amid all the turmoil laid out in the book, Grisham remained by the former president’s side for nearly his entire four-year term in the White House, before resigning after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
“How did you go from one of the loyalist loyals to one of their fiercest critics, seemingly overnight?” Chang asked Grisham, who responded, “Definitely not overnight. It’s kind of a journey.”
Grisham, who is perhaps best known for never holding a televised press briefing during her time as White House press secretary, has faced a barrage of criticism for speaking out now, nearly a year after leaving the White House.
The former president and his family have forcefully responded to the latest tell-all book by a former close ally, with Melania Trump’s office saying in a statement, “The author is desperately trying to rehabilitate her tarnished reputation by manipulating and distorting the truth about Mrs. Trump. Ms. Grisham is a deceitful and troubled individual who doesn’t deserve anyone’s trust.
“Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” former President Trump said in a statement. “Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”
Grisham has also received harsh pushback from some former colleagues, including former Trump White House Director of Communications Alyssa Farah, who responded to the book live during her guest-host appearance on “The View” Monday.
“First and foremost, I don’t believe in profiting off of public service. I had a chance to write my White House tell-all and declined. The American people, the taxpayers paid my salary. I’m not going to go write a book and cash in,” said Farah, who resigned from the White House in December following the election.
“Reading some of the reviews, some of the critics are saying, you know, if you’re admitting to lying then, what makes us think that you’re not lying now?” Chang asked Grisham about her role as press secretary.
“Well, I don’t think I’m admitting to lying at all,” Grisham responded. “I tried to give the press the most honest answers I could, and there were oftentimes I was given information that I knew to be true that perhaps wasn’t true.”
But Chang pushed back, pointing out that Grisham had already admitted that a 2019 tweet she posted targeting former Chief of Staff John Kelly had been untrue.
“To be fair, you did say that the John Kelly tweet was not sincere,” Chang said to Grisham, who acknowledged, “That was not sincere,” and added, “And I regret and apologize for so much.”
“But you said that, ‘I never lied?'” Chang followed up. “Oh no,” Grisham said. “I would s– I– I just would say I– I tried my best.”
Beyond not holding a press briefing, Grisham writes in the book that she was once tasked by the former president with figuring out how to completely ban members of the media from the White House grounds. “I researched different places we could put them other than the press briefing room. Each time the president asked me about my progress on the matter, I let him know I was still working on options,” she writes.
“Should the American public believe what you’re saying now when you, in many ways, were non-responsive and not communicating transparently or honestly during — by your own admission?” Chang asked.
“Fair question — the fact is, the president never wanted me to do a briefing,” said Grisham who added that “I was glad that that was something he didn’t want from me, because I didn’t want to have to go out there and say something dishonest.”
Farah, however, pushed back on Grisham’s claim that Trump told her not to hold press briefings.
“That would surprise me,” Farah said. “When I worked for him, it was, ‘Go get out on TV, Alyssa. Kayleigh, go give a briefing.’ He wanted people out.”
“She could have done backgrounders in her office,” Farah said of Grisham. “But it seemed like she was largely MIA on the job.”
Grisham also claims in the book that she observed the former president, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 18 women, develop an “unusual interest” and behave “inappropriately” toward a young female staffer during his time as president, including during one trip where he summoned the unnamed aide to his cabin on Air Force One, allegedly telling other staffers, “Let’s bring her up here and look at her ass.”
“What I do know is that he behaved inappropriately. And since the woman worked for me, I tried to protect her and keep his unusual interest in her under wraps,” Grisham writes. “If the president didn’t see her with the press corps, he would ask me where she was. He would ask me if she were coming with us on foreign trips. When she did come along on trips, he often asked me to bring her to his office cabin in the aircraft, which he’d rarely done with anyone else.”
“I wouldn’t leave her in the cabin with him. I always sat there,” Grisham told Chang. “And he would just talk to her about, you know, ‘Did you see my speech? What did you think?’ You know, I think have her compliment him.”
But Chang challenged Grisham, asking, “And yet in many ways were you helping in some ways normalizing his other inappropriate behavior and enabling in some way this behavior?”
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Grisham replied. “At the White House, it’s not like there’s a human resources office that you can go to say, ‘Hey, the president of the United States is acting inappropriately.'”
Grisham’s claims about the staffer were corroborated by Farah, who said on “The View” that “I was aware of the situation and of the female and I did report it to the chief of staff.”
“It was a challenging situation I don’t know if anything was done,” she said.
“What were you worried that might happen?” Chang asked Grisham.
“I was worried that a young, impressionable girl would be put into a situation that made her uncomfortable,” said Grisham, who also admitted that she now believes “most” of the women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, including former porn star Stormy Daniels. “I was worried he would sexually harass her.”
As the first lady’s chief of staff, Grisham had an up-close look at the woman she says Secret Service agents referred to as “Rapunzel.” Regarding the #FreeMelania hashtag that became a rallying cry for those who theorized online that the first lady didn’t want to be in the White House, Grisham said that idea was misguided.
“The #FreeMelania hashtag I think was people hoping that she wanted to leave,” Grisham said. “The truth is, she liked it there. I think there was a rumor for years that she had a whole separate house somewhere, which was not true. We would laugh about the #FreeMelania hashtag all the time.”
Grisham also described what it was like to be the person to inform the first lady that her husband was being accused of an extramarital affair and was being sued by Daniels.
“That was tough. As a woman, I’ve been cheated on before, so that was painful for me,” Grisham recalled. “It was very, very awkward. I’ve never had to do anything like that before.”
Grisham also claimed that staffers had a secret nickname for the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, who both held senior positions in the White House, referring to the pair as “the interns.”
“We called them the interns because as interns usually are, they come into places and think they know everything,” Grisham said.
In the book, which publisher HarperCollins calls “the most frank and intimate portrait of the Trump White House yet,” Grisham also claims Trump had an infatuation with dictators and writes how the former president allegedly sought to cozy up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin during an overseas trip for the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019. Grisham alleges that during a private meeting before the press was brought into the room, Trump told Putin, “Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave we’ll talk. You understand.”
“Putin was coughing. He kept coughing, kept clearing his throat, and I did find it odd that he wouldn’t just take a drink of water … and he knows ways to get in someone’s head,” Grisham told Chang.
As one of Trump’s longest-serving political aides, Grisham’s time working for the former president dates back to his 2016 campaign when she served as a press wrangler before moving deeper into the Trumps’ inner circle. As other top aides resigned or were forced out — with some even speaking out against Trump while he was still in office — Grisham continued to stand by the president.
Grisham told Chang that one of her biggest regrets was not doing more from inside the White House during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when, as she alleges, Trump was thinking more about getting reelected than how to get the virus under control.
“It was about having him look presidential for reelection. I wish I would have told him he needs to wear a mask. I wish I could’ve been louder with that,” she said.
“Do you think that misinformation or dishonesty cost lives?” Chang asked about the White House’s response to the pandemic.
“Yes,” Grisham replied. “I will always think that, and I don’t know that I — you can ever forgive yourself fully for being a part of that.”
(WASHINGTON) — Sen. Krysten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, is clapping back after she was videotaped and chased into a school bathroom over the weekend by a group of pro-Biden agenda activists, confronting her over her objections holding up Democratic efforts on Capitol Hill.
President Joe Biden has also weighed in on the encounter, when asked on Monday, calling it not appropriate but also “part of the process” for someone without Secret Service protection.
Sinema, in a new statement on Monday, called the display caught on video and posted online “no legitimate protest” and “wholly inappropriate.”
She claimed activists entered Arizona State University, where she was teaching, using “deceptive” and “unlawful” means.
“After deceptively entering a locked, secure building, these individuals filmed and publicly posted videos of my students without their permission — including footage taken of both my students and I using a restroom,” the statement said.
While she wrote she supports the First Amendment, she shunned the protest — by a group she doesn’t name but claims to have met with several times since she was elected to the Senate.
“Yesterday’s behavior was not legitimate protest. It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom,” she wrote.
Video posted to Twitter on Sunday by the organization Living United for Change in Arizona or LUCHA, showed people chanting at and chasing the first-term senator into a bathroom, pressing her to support Biden’s Build Back Better agenda and progressive immigration policy.
ABC News has reached out to LUCHA for comment.
The confrontation comes as the moderate Democratic senator, along with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., continue intra-party negotiations on the topline number for a larger social spending package to accompany the already Senate-passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.
“In the 19 years I have been teaching at ASU, I have been committed to creating a safe and intellectually challenging environment for my students. Yesterday, that environment was breached. My students were unfairly and unlawfully victimized. This is wholly inappropriate,” Sinema continued.
Her statement ended by putting the onus also on elected officials to foster a healthy environment for politics.
“It is the duty of elected leaders to avoid fostering an environment in which honestly-held policy disagreements serve as the basis for vitriol — raising the temperature in political rhetoric and creating a permission structure for unacceptable behavior,” she wrote.
Biden was asked about the recent protests facing both Sinema and Manchin in his remarks on Monday about the debt ceiling.
“Joe Manchin had people on kayaks show up to his boat to yell at him. Senator Sinema last night was chased into a restroom. Do you think that those tactics are crossing a line?” a reporter asked.
“I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody,” Biden replied. “The only people it doesn’t happen to are people who have Secret Service standing around them. So it’s part of the process.”
Asked if Sinema has given the White House a topline number for the social package — somewhere between $1.5 trillion and $3.5 trillion — Biden said “I’m not going to negotiate in public.”
As the video went viral on Twitter over the weekend, accumulating more than five million views by Monday, pundits of all parties united in agreement that the behavior crossed a privacy line.
