(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision later this month on a case that would decide the future of race-based affirmative action in high education across the country.
The nation’s highest court heard two major cases in October 2022 on affirmative action, one on race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private college, and one from the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest public university.
The legal battle over factoring race into admissions in higher education has been ongoing for decades.
The Supreme Court could decide to overrule a 2003 ruling and more than 40 years of precedent upholding affirmative action in higher education, reshaping the college admissions process.
Colleges and universities often want prospective students to submit high school transcripts, standardized test scores, letters of recommendation, personal essays and a list of extracurricular activities when considering admissions, but can have their own application requirements in place.
“Every college and university can have their own application, meaning their own questions, data, fields, etcetera, and then their own process whereby they review application,” Priscilla Rodriguez, the senior vice president of College Board, told ABC News. “So, it is race, ethnicity, that’s also socioeconomic status.”
Harvard, UNC and other schools have considered race as a factor in their admission processes, and that it’s an indispensable tool for creating a diverse campus.
“It’s diversity in every way possible that really does benefit students and create the rich learning environment that colleges really want to be,” Rodriguez said.
Black, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American student enrollment has surged since 1976, according to Department of Education data. Despite the gains, however, students of color remain underrepresented on campuses nationwide.
“If the court rules that race must be taken out of the consideration process, I worry that it will remove a valuable way that students who come from underrepresented, or I’ll call it, nontraditional backgrounds, are able to show or let colleges know that there’s a history and a background that they bring to college that may be different than other students,” Rodriguez said.
(WASHINGTON) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Tuesday night in what his campaign billed as a major foreign policy address for the long shot Democratic presidential candidate.
He told the crowd that he believes the U.S. government bears some responsibility for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a view rejected by America and many Western countries — and said that the “danger of reckless escalation and nuclear brinksmanship” was “real and present.”
The son of former New York senator and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and scion of one of the country’s most famous political families, the younger Kennedy has garnered widespread attention in recent months because of his bid to beat President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party’s 2024 primary.
In addition to a string of high-profile media appearances, Kennedy has also registered some support in early polls so far: One survey from Quinnipiac University this month showed him at 17% versus Biden at 70%.
Tuesday’s speech adds to Kennedy’s array of policy positions and beliefs.
While his economic and environmental platform broadly align with other Democrats, some of his other views put him at odds with the party and, in the case of his criticism of vaccines, a majority of the scientific and medical community.
Foreign policy
On Tuesday night, Kennedy took direct aim at U.S. foreign policy while laying out his own global vision, calling the war in Ukraine a “creation of a relentless mentality of foreign domination” on the part of the United States and accusing the West — without evidence — of intentionally sabotaging peace talks in the spring of 2022 and, more specifically, claiming the U.S. wants to remove Russia’s authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin.
“I abhor Russia’s brutal and bloody invasion of that nation,” Kennedy told the crowd. “But we must understand that our government has also contributed to its circumstances through repeated deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s.”
At times, he leaned heavily on the foreign policy legacy of former President John F. Kennedy, telling attendees that nuclear tensions are on the rise today as in the time of his uncle, but that there is an opportunity “to take a radically different path, a path towards peace.”
Kennedy has been a frequent critic of America’s involvement in supporting Ukraine from Russia’s invasion, which he has repeatedly referred to as a “proxy war” that he claims, as he wrote on Twitter this week, is being fought “all for the sake of U.S. (imagined) geopolitical interests.”
“They wanted war as part of their strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion,” Kennedy tweeted in May, launching into a critique of the Biden administration. “They only pretend to think it was unprovoked. They are lying to us, manufacturing consent for war.”
That view has been broadly rejected by leading politicians on both sides of the aisle as well as America’s military leaders.
“The United States continues to stand with the people of Ukraine, whose enduring courage and solidarity inspires the world,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement last week, adding, “Russia could end [the war] at any time by withdrawing its forces from Ukraine and stopping its brutal attacks against Ukraine’s cities and people.”
The economy
In a June interview on the “Breaking Points” podcast, Kennedy said that his “primary platform” on the economy would be cutting military spending and reinvesting that money into domestic spending and development.
“My primary platform is to cut the costs on the military,” Kennedy said on the show. “Again, what we were told was a peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union. … We were going to cut our military budget from about $600 billion a year to $200 billion a year.”
On his website, Kennedy lists rebuilding industrial infrastructure “ruined by forty years of off-shoring” among his top priorities, alongside “government assistance to the nation’s most vulnerable.”
He expressed hesitation, though, when asked if he would support a federal jobs guarantee or a universal basic income.
“I need to look at those things, you know, and see, and I need to talk to a lot of economists and talk about the ups and downs of those issues,” he said. “You know, I can see a lot of problems with those issues, which I think are obvious to anybody. And it’s a real departure from American free market capitalism. I’d like to try to give this system a chance to work.”
On raising the federal minimum wage, Kennedy said he did not have a specific number in mind but that “people should have a living wage in this country.”
“Thirty-five percent of Americans … are not making enough money to pay for basic human needs, and that means food, transportation and housing,” Kennedy said on the podcast. “And that means those Americans are sitting on the precipice of a cliff, that they’re inches away from, or on top of, becoming homeless.”
He has also expressed support for bolstering unions: “We need to build rebuild unions in this country, because it’s one of the key ways we can counterbalance … the domination of our government by corporate power.”
The environment
An environmental lawyer by trade, Kennedy has positioned environmental policy as a centerpiece of his presidential bid.
“In 100% of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy,” Kennedy told a crowd of supporters when announcing his presidential run in April. “If we want to measure our economy, this is how we ought to be measuring — based upon how it produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community.”
Kennedy has also promised, if elected, to protect wild lands by curbing logging, oil drilling and mining and containing suburban sprawl.
“We will become a global advocate for rainforest preservation and marine restoration,” his campaign website states. “We will rethink development policies that promised economic growth while ignoring ecological sustainability, and ended up delivering neither.”
Vaccines
In 2005, in a since-debunked story in Rolling Stone and Salon called “Deadly Immunity,” Kennedy falsely asserted a link between childhood vaccines and autism via a mercury-based compound called thimerosal, which the Food and Drug Administration phased out of nearly all vaccines in 2001. The article was amended with five separate corrections before being fully retracted.
Research has repeatedly shown that vaccines and their ingredients, including thimerosal, do not cause autism. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nine CDC-funded or conducted studies have “found no link between thimerosal-containing vaccines” since 2003.
Six years later, Kennedy founded the Children’s Health Defense, a prominent anti-vaccine nonprofit that has campaigned against immunizations and other public health measures like water fluoridation.
After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the group held rallies to protest temporary restrictions aimed at stemming the spread of the virus.
It was at one of those events where Kennedy, appearing alongside vaccine opponents and others in front of the Lincoln Memorial, compared the restrictions — like those on travel — to Nazi Germany: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”
He later apologized for the remark, saying, “My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.”His anti-vaccine views gained traction with some during the pandemic. Filings with charity regulators show Children’s Health Defense saw revenues double to $6.8 million in 2020.
Kennedy has also attracted a growing base of support among far-right figures like InfoWars host Alex Jones and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who have spread falsehoods about the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2020 election.
So far, the 69-year-old environmental lawyer has shown no sign of softening his views on the issue, often reposting articles from his nonprofit on Twitter and appearing as a guest on podcasts like “The Joe Rogan Experience,” where last week he falsely claimed that ivermectin, a de-worming drug, was suppressed by the FDA so that specialized COVID-19 vaccines could receive emergency use authorization.
Last week, he tweeted that as president he would “hold the agencies and individuals responsible, and we will compensate the vaccine injured.”
Some experts have expressed concern about Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism and misleading claims about COVID-19.
Dr. Nick Sawyer, an emergency medicine physician in Sacramento who founded No License for Disinformation, a group of doctors who came together during the pandemic to call on state medical boards to take disciplinary measures against doctors spreading misinformation, previously told ABC News that Kennedy represents “a huge threat.”
“He’s lying to people about critical things that have to do with our nation’s children’s health,” Sawyer said. “The health effects are incredibly dangerous and have already shown to be incredibly damaging.”
Meanwhile, Kennedy has largely shied away from addressing the issue of vaccines on the campaign trail. In his nearly two-hour-long campaign announcement, he made no explicit mention of them and told NBC News in a recent interview that while he’s not leading with the issue, “If anybody wants to talk to me about vaccines, I’ll talk to them.”
The border
On Twitter, Kennedy has billed himself as both in favor of immigration and “closing the border.”
Visiting Yuma, Arizona, in early June, Kennedy called the rate of unauthorized migration “not a good thing for our country” and said it was “unsustainable.”
“This is a humanitarian crisis because of the understanding across the globe that we now have an open border here,” he said in a video. “There are people being drawn here. They’re being abused. There’s all kinds of horrific, terrible, terrible stories.”
At the same time as Kennedy’s visit, the Department of Homeland Security reported on June 6 that unlawful entries along the southern border had decreased 70% from their record highs since the end of Title 42 on May 11.
“America should be a haven of freedom and prosperity, open to law-abiding migrants who will contribute to our society,” Kennedy said in May. “However, immigration must proceed in an orderly, lawful manner.”
(WASHINGTON) — A newly implemented Biden administration policy is significantly reducing the number of migrants at the southern border who can successfully seek asylum, a Department of Homeland Security official said in a recent court filing.
The policy established a higher standard for asylum eligibility and presumes, with some exceptions, that those who cross the southern border illegally are ineligible if they come from another country without first applying for legal entry there.
DHS officials say the rule is essential for managing the large number of people who might come to the U.S.
From mid-May to mid-June, the number of single adult migrants who passed an initial screening interview for asylum at the border declined from an average of 83% as recently as 2019 to 46% under the new policy, according to the court document, which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.
The vast majority of those migrants interviewed for asylum since May 12 — 88% — were presumed ineligible for asylum while 3% were able to qualify for an exception to the rule and another 8% were able to show that they hadn’t broke any of its requirements.
The tightened restriction was implemented immediately followed the end of fast-track border expulsion protocols under Title 42 of the U.S. code last month.
“I would attribute the lower pass rate to the higher bar set by the rule,” Migration Policy Institute analyst Kathleen Bush-Joseph told ABC News.
Advocates have sharply criticized the change, likening it to policies under former President Donald Trump that sought to cut back on the number of asylum claims. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are trying to block the restrictions in court.
The comments from Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy Blas Nuñez-Neto were filed Friday as part of a lawsuit against the Biden administration over the asylum rule change.
The plaintiffs argue it would “effectively eliminate asylum for nearly all non-Mexican asylum seekers” and would “bar vulnerable people from asylum for reasons wholly unrelated to the strength or urgency of their need for protection under our laws.”
Government officials have pushed back.
“The decline in encounters at the U.S. border … show that the application of consequences as a result of the rule’s implementation is disincentivizing noncitizens from pursuing irregular migration and incentivizing them to use safe and orderly pathways,” Nuñez-Neto wrote in the filing.
Some migrants will be able to challenge the rule and those who are rejected can apply for a lesser form of relief or seek to appeal the decision with an immigration judge, said Bush-Joseph with the Migration Policy Institute.
“There are thousands of people who have likely not received interviews because the administration doesn’t have the capacity to do the interviews for everyone,” she said.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Justice Samuel Alito on Wednesday issued a public rebuttal to a new report detailing a luxury vacation he took with a wealthy hedge fund manager who later had business before the Supreme Court.
According to ProPublica, Alito accompanied billionaire Paul Singer on a fishing trip in 2008. Alito was flown there on a private jet provided by Singer, which the investigative outlet said would have cost more than $100,000 one-way.
The trip went undisclosed on his financial disclosures for 2008, the report said, and Singer’s business later went before the court at least 10 times, including a 2014 case in which Alito sided with the majority in Singer’s favor — raising ethical concerns, ProPublica said.
Justice Alito declined to answer questions posed by ProPublica, the outlet said, and instead tried to rebut the report in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal before it was published. The title of the opinion column reads, “Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.”
“ProPublica has leveled two charges against me: first, that I should have recused in matters in which an entity connected with Paul Singer was a party and, second, that I was obligated to list certain items as gifts on my 2008 Financial Disclose Report,” Alito wrote in the editorial. “Neither charge is valid.”
Alito asserted he was not aware of Singer’s connection in the cases that went before the court, and that his conversations with Singer were limited and didn’t include his business or that of the court.
On the issue of not disclosing the trip and travel on his annual form, Alito argued the justices “commonly interpreted” rules regarding hospitality “to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts.”
When it came to the private jet travel, Alito said he accepted the offer because a seat would have otherwise gone vacant and had he taken a commercial flight it “would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals” who would’ve been required to accompany him.
A spokesperson for Singer told ABC News in a statement that “Mr. Singer did not organize the trip in question or invite Justice Alito, nor was he aware that Justice Alito would be attending when he accepted the invitation.”
“At the time of the trip, neither Mr. Singer nor any Elliott entities had any pending matters before the Supreme Court, nor could Mr. Singer have anticipated in 2008 that a subsequent matter would arise that would merit Supreme Court review,” the statement continued. “Additionally, Mr. Singer has never discussed his business interests with Justice Alito.”
ABC News has reached out to the Supreme Court and Justice Alito for any additional comment but has not gotten a response.
ProPublica has also reported on undisclosed trips taken by Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, courtesy of wealthy Republican donor Harlan Crow. It also reported Crow paid for school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew, who the justice was raising as a son.
Thomas, too, said he was advised personal hospitality from friends didn’t have to be included on the forms.
Earlier this year, the Judicial Conference of the United States outlined stricter rules for reporting “personal hospitality” gifts, stating the exemption doesn’t apply to non-commercial transportation and gifts extended at a commercial property.
The ProPublica reports on Justice Thomas sparked debate over Supreme Court ethics, and calls for the justices to adopt an enforceable code of conduct. But Congress is at an impasse when it comes to legislative remedies, and all nine justices have pushed back on calls for new guidelines.
Supreme Court justices recently released their financial disclosures for 2022, but those of Alito and Thomas were noticeably not available to view online.
Chief Justice John Roberts defended the court’s integrity in remarks last month at the American Law Institute gala in Washington.
“I want to assure people that I am committed to making certain that we as a Court adhere to the highest standards of conduct,” Roberts said.
(WASHINGTON) — Vivek Ramaswamy has emerged as one of the most vocal defenders of Donald Trump — which has some other Republicans scratching their heads, because Ramaswamy and Trump are technically rivals in the 2024 primary race.
Since launching his long shot presidential campaign in February, Ramaswamy, a biotech founder, has regularly rallied to Trump’s side, including issuing a challenge last week for his fellow GOP primary candidates to vow to pardon Trump if Trump is convicted of mishandling government secrets, an allegation he denies.
When heckled earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Ramaswamy said, “I love the man” — though, by way of differentiating himself from Trump, he argues that he would be more effective as president at building on Trump’s first-term policies.
That strategy has Republicans questioning the lack of a consistent contrast posed by Ramaswamy and wondering if he in fact has ambitions outside the Oval Office.
“He’s very much in the zeitgeist of some of the more esoteric cultural conversations happening in the party and in the country. But I don’t understand this strategy of running against Donald Trump while not running against Donald Trump,” said Iowa GOP strategist David Kochel. “If you think you’re gonna be a better president, then you have to make the case of why you’re going to be a better president. And if you’re not doing that, then what are you doing?”
Ramaswamy, who has written several books lamenting liberalism and what he sees as the decay of a national identity, has leaned deep into the culture wars in his campaign so far.
He has vowed to eliminate both the U.S. Department of Education and the FBI, use the military to stem illegal border crossings and ban gender-affirming care for minors. He has also supported raising the voting age to 25 — a pledge that would require amending the Constitution — with exceptions for those who serve in the military, for first responders and for those who pass the civics test used to grant citizenship.
In an interview with ABC News, Ramaswamy said he was running for the White House in part to fill a national “moral vacuum” that “the left” is seeking to fill with “a vision of identity grounded in race, sexuality, gender, climate.”
When given the opportunity to go after Trump on policy, Ramaswamy took his shots, suggesting he would go “further” in office than Trump did during his four years in the White House and that the former president has veered from his initial appeal.
“I’m taking the ‘America first’ agenda further than Donald Trump did, far further than Donald Trump, because I’m doing it based on, first, principles and moral authority, not just vengeance and grievance,” he said. “That’s the case I make to our base is, it’s not diet Donald Trump or Trump without the drama. There are others making that case. My case is bolder than that.”
“I think Trump is not the same person today that he was eight years ago,” he added. “I’m closer to Trump in 2015 than Trump today is to Trump in 2015. I’m 37. I’ve got fresh legs. I’m not yet jaded and cynical and tired and defeated. Maybe I will be, in some ways, eight years from now. Trump made his contributions.” (A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this criticism from ABC News.)
On personality, though, Ramaswamy was more equivocal. On top of vowing to pardon Trump if elected president, Ramaswamy suggested the allegations about Trump’s handling of sensitive documents were reflective of possible bad judgement but not criminal offenses.
“I’m especially skeptical here,” he said of the 37-count indictment against Trump. “If the facts described in there are true, I think this is reflective of very poor judgment on President Trump’s part. I would have made different judgments than he made. But a bad judgment is not the same thing as breaking the law.”
Prosecutors describe their case very differently. The indictment describes in detail how Trump allegedly held onto government secrets after leaving office and refused to return them, even, prosecutors claim, disclosing some of the classified information to unauthorized people.
On the campaign trail, Ramaswamy and his allies don’t see a contradiction between his jabs on Trump’s policy and defense of Trump himself.
“It’s not a matter of taking a position for President Trump, it’s taking a position on the rule of law and the fact of how this is all transpiring. So, he states his position clearly, and it’s not coddling to President Trump or coddling to the Trump’s voters. He speaks what he believes is the truth,” said New Hampshire state Rep. Fred Doucette, who is a strategist for Ramaswamy’s campaign in the state.
While early polls show Ramaswamy is not receiving anywhere near the same GOP voter support as Trump, the front-runner, or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, he is around the same level as former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of surveys.
At Pence’s campaign launch this month in Iowa, several attendees organically brought up Ramaswamy in conversations with ABC News.
What’s more, Ramaswamy claims to have already clinched a spot on the debate stages later this year by getting the necessary donors: at least 40,000 national contributors and at least 200 unique donors per state or territory in no fewer than 20 states or territories — a threshold other candidates are anticipated to struggle to meet. (Ramaswamy’s fundraising will not be publicly verified until after his campaign’s first Federal Election Commission filings are due on July 15.)
“I think it’s going great for someone who has basically zero name recognition to be polling where he is because of his voice, his positions,” Doucette said. “I think we’re in a really great spot.”
Ramaswamy’s strategy has also won fans among Trump’s supporters — even if they’re still pulling for the former president.
“I think Vivek has been the best messenger to the base of the non-Trump candidates in this race,” said one GOP operative who is supporting Trump and asked not to be quoted by name.
Still, this person conceded, “I don’t know that it actually matters in the end, because I think the race is so baked in for Trump right now.”
Other Republicans question the philosophy of flicking at differences with Trump in one sentence while supporting him in another.
“They may have a great plan that they’re not talking about, they may have thought this through, but it’s hard to be the biggest cheerleader in the race for President Trump and somehow get votes,” New Hampshire-based GOP strategist Dave Carney said. “From the non-Trump people, it’s not gonna happen, and from the Trump people, it’s not gonna happen.”
“Trump’s appeal is his personality,” Carney added. “It isn’t based on policy. You’re not going to out-Trump Trump. The inconsistencies that people point out, this isn’t The Oxford Union where you can score points.”
That view, which is shared by a half-dozen Republican strategists who spoke with ABC News for this story, has led some to think Ramaswamy’s ambitions actually lie in some future Cabinet position or media role.
One source familiar with Ramaswamy’s campaign told ABC News that “he’s a true believer in what he thinks” but scoffed at the idea that Ramaswamy would ever occupy the Oval Office.
“I think he’s running to be Tucker Carlson’s replacement,” the source said, “not Donald Trump’s replacement.”x
(WASHINGTON) — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has told his members to vote against the resolution brought forward by Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., that would impeach President Joe Biden when it comes to the floor later this week.
“I just think running something on the floor isn’t fair to the American public without making the case and making the argument,” McCarthy said of Boebert’s resolution, suggesting that bringing the resolution to the House floor for a vote at this time could serve to discredit the ongoing GOP investigations.
Boebert sits on the powerful House Oversight Committee and McCarthy said she should be working through that committee given the panel has been investigating matters associated with the Biden administration.
“She’s on Oversight. She should work through Oversight and this investigation. I think we’re much stronger when we work as a team,” he said.
McCarthy said, “We won’t use impeachment for political purposes. We will follow our investigations exactly as we say we would. We’re uncovering something new every day.”
McCarthy repeated these sentiments earlier Wednesday morning to his conference and according to several members in the meeting, McCarthy acknowledged impeachment could pose a threat to the GOP’s slim majority.
“What majority do we want to be? Give it right back in two years or hold it for a decade and make real change?” McCarthy said at the meeting, according to one member.
Several Republicans left the meeting Wednesday morning unhappy with the resolution and with Boebert, who did not attend the conference meeting Wednesday morning.
“We should get to the facts of that [impeachment]. But just doing a privilege motion is wrong. And it’s not right for the country. It’s not right for the House. We, I think that people deserve better,” Rep. Don Bacon told ABC News.
Bacon said he thinks a large majority of Republicans think the move to vote on impeachment is “wrong” and “impeachment is a very serious thing as you go through committee.”
“Impeachment shouldn’t be something that is frivolous and treated in that way,” Bacon said.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who herself has introduced impeachment articles against Biden and has a contentious relationship with Boebert, criticized Boebert’s resolution, calling her a “copycat” but saying she will “of course” support the resolution. Greene said she addressed the conference about impeachment, saying it’s the “right thing to do” and pledged to convert all her articles of impeachment to privileged resolutions.
The White House blasted Boebert’s impeachment effort.
“Instead of working with [the president] on the issues that matter most to Americans, like jobs and inflation and health care, extreme House Republicans are staging baseless political stunts that do nothing to help real people, just to try to get attention for themselves,” Ian Sams, White House spokesman for oversight and investigations, tweeted in response to Boebert.
Boebert’s two articles of impeachment, introduced earlier this month, accuse Biden of “unconstitutional dereliction of duty at the southern border” and abuse of power. She revealed Tuesday her intent to bring the articles to the floor for a vote via a privileged motion.
While McCarthy has poured cold water on Boebert’s proposal, he has used Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s resolution to censure Schiff as an example of how Republicans should be holding Democrats accountable.
Although Luna’s first effort to censure Schiff for what she said was his “egregious abuse of the trust of the American people” failed when 20 Republicans joined Democrats in voting to table the resolution, she announced earlier this week her intent to revive the effort, this time stripped of a provision that would have fined Schiff $16 million.
Both McCarthy and Luna have said they expect the revised resolution to pass.
“A majority of 20 are switching their vote to support the new resolution and some members who were out of town will be voting with us. Based on our count, Adam Schiff will be investigated by ethics and censured,” she tweeted Tuesday.
The conference took a key step in its consideration of the Schiff censure resolution Wednesday afternoon, when the House voted 218-208 to strike down a motion to table the resolution.
(WASHINGTON) — The Equality Act, which would protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, has been reintroduced by four Democratic legislators.
Several representatives – including Representatives Mark Takano and Hakeem Jeffries and Senators Jeff Merkley, Tammy Baldwin, and Cory Booker – are behind the bill, which comes amid a nationwide rise in anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment that has led to an increase in violence and threats against the queer community.
“When I was elected in 2012, I became the first openly gay person of color to serve in Congress,” said Takano at a Wednesday press conference. “Now, we’ve come a long way since then, and the progress towards equality that we’ve made is the result of battles that have been fought for the civil rights of our community over the course of decades.”
He continued, “Yet today, we face a wave of backlash in response to that progress.”
The bill would expand federal civil rights law to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in areas such as public facilities, education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit, and the jury system.
Almost 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced so far this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. This includes restrictions on LGBTQ+ content in schools, gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and more.
“The purpose of these laws is to facilitate a rise in political extremism by alienating and isolating LGBTQ+ Americans, and the impact of these laws is alarming,” said Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign.
Robinson continued, “It has been nearly a decade since this bill was first introduced … It is time for Congress to catch up with our country and pass the Equality Act.”
The HRC, one of the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organizations, declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States earlier this month.
The organization cited the record-breaking wave of legislation targeting the LGBTQ+ community and an increasingly hostile environment.
The news follows warnings from the Department of Homeland Security about growing threats of violence and extremism against LGBTQ+ people.
“President Lyndon Johnson said that ‘freedom is a right to share. fully and equally in American society,’ ‘the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others,'” Merkley said at the press conference.
He continued, “We are here at this moment when that is not the case in America.”
(WASHINGTON) — Congress is in a race against the clock to regulate artificial intelligence and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is unrolling the early-stage steps that the chamber will take to try to get a handle on the rapidly evolving technology.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, poses potential peril to humankind, science and technology experts warned last month, writing in a statement posted on the Center for AI Safety’s website that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Now, Congress is wading into the regulatory space, with leaders from both parties leading efforts to educate their members on and draft legislation around regulating artificial intelligence.
Schumer outlined early steps Wednesday for how Congress can rise to the challenge of regulating the industry before it’s too late.
“We have no choice but to acknowledge that AI’s changes are coming, and in many cases are already here. We ignore them at our own peril,” his prepared remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies read. “Many want to ignore AI because it’s so complex. But when it comes to AI, we cannot be ostriches sticking our heads in the sand. The question is: what role does Congress and the federal government have in this new revolution?” Schumer said.
Schumer’s SAFE Innovation framework, unveiled Wednesday, outlines four pillars that he hopes will guide future bipartisan collaboration on legislation governing AI: security, accountability, protecting our foundations and explainability. Lawmakers, Schumer said, should focus their efforts on ensuring U.S. security pertaining to AI and accountability to ensure issues like misinformation and bias are addressed. AI should also uphold democratic values, and lawmakers should understand why it chooses certain outputs, Schumer said.
The framework is not legislative text, and it’s not clear how long it will take for Congress to begin putting together legislative proposals. There has not yet been any legislation introduced in Congress to deal with regulating AI, though a bicameral group of lawmakers introduced a proposal earlier this week that would create a blue-ribbon commission to study AI’s impact.
Schumer is encouraging his committee chairs to work with top committee Republicans to begin drafting regulatory proposals.
To aid in that effort, he’s calling in the experts. In addition to the new framework, Schumer announced plans Wednesday to convene a series of forums this fall that will bring together industry leaders to discuss with one another and educate members on AI.
The goal, Schumer said, is to put Congress in a position to regulate before AI presents serious issues. It’s a relatively new approach for Congress, which typically reacts to issues as they bubble up.
“By the time we act, AI will have evolved into something new,” Schumer will say “AI is evolving so quickly — but also has such complexity — that a new approach is required.”
Schumer isn’t the only leader convening experts to discuss the subject. Earlier this year, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted two AI experts from MIT for an all-member session, Fox News reported. The Senate heard from one of those professors, Antonio Torralba, at a separate session earlier this month.
The administration is also turning its attention to AI.
President Joe Biden appeared at a roundtable event focused on AI in California on Tuesday, describing artificial intelligence as something that has “enormous promise and its risks.”
The president added that next month, Vice President Kamala Harris will lead a meeting of “civil rights leaders of America, consumer protection groups and civil society to continue our administration’s ongoing engagement on AI.”
ABC News’ Fritz Farrow contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — House Republicans, who have made one of their top priorities this session probing Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s business dealings, still say they plan to continue their investigations despite Hunter Biden’s plea deal with prosecutors.
“This does nothing to our investigation,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy said outside his office Tuesday morning following news of the plea deal. “It actually should enhance our investigation because the DOJ should not be able to withhold any information now, saying there’s a pending investigation. They should be able to provide [House Oversight] Chairman [James] Comer with any information that he requires.”
While a Tuesday morning statement from U.S. Attorney David Weiss indicates that “the investigation is ongoing,” that statement appears at odds with a statement from Hunter Biden’s attorney that said, “It is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.”
It is standard for federal prosecutors to say criminal investigations are ongoing even when they appear to be near a resolution. The resolution agreed to by Weiss and Hunter Biden still needs the approval of a federal judge.
Though Tuesday’s deal may end probes into Hunter Biden on the legal front, Republican-controlled committees like House Oversight claim their investigations are far from over.
Since clinching the majority, House Republicans have held numerous hearings looking into Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Congressional investigators haven’t yielded much new information throughout the course of their investigation, but it will remain a significant talking point given the chairs of the largest congressional committees have already vowed to continue investigating.
Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, slammed what he termed the “sweetheart” plea deal and vowed it will have no impact on the Oversight Committee.
“These charges against Hunter Biden and sweetheart plea deal have no impact on the Oversight Committee’s investigation,” Comer said in a statement Tuesday.
Comer also alluded to allegations against what the GOP has termed the “Biden crime family.” Republicans have produced no evidence to back up their claims.
“We will not rest until the full extent of President Biden’s involvement in the family’s schemes are revealed,” Comer’s statement continued.
The White House has maintained that President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden have never discussed the latter’s business dealings.
Comer’s team has collected suspicious activity reports, or SARs, on Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family from the Treasury Department. SARs are reports filed by financial institutions to flag questionable banking transactions, but they do not amount to allegations of crimes.
And just last week, the committee subpoenaed former Hunter Biden associate Devon Archer to appear for a deposition because he “played a significant role in the Biden family’s business deals abroad, including but not limited to China, Russia, and Ukraine,” according to the subpoena.
Republicans’ continued efforts to investigate Hunter Biden are not without some pushback.
The Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, called out the House GOP for politicizing the Department of Justice’s investigation into the president’s son.
“Oversight Committee Republicans have advanced debunked conspiracy theories about President Biden and are now, again, wailing about the work of a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney,” Raskin said in a statement.
Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty to two tax-related misdemeanor charges and enter a pretrial diversion program that would enable him to avoid prosecution for one felony county related to the illegal possession of a firearm, according to court documents filed Tuesday. Federal authorities with the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware, led by Weiss, had been investigating Hunter Biden since 2018, but the probe was paused for several months ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
McCarthy ignored questions from ABC News about whether Congress wants to hear directly from Weiss, who is a Trump appointee.
(ARKANSAS) — A federal district court judge on Tuesday struck down an Arkansas law that banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
The judge said the law violates the constitutional rights of transgender youth, their parents and their medical providers.
“I’m so grateful the judge heard my experience of how this health care has changed my life for the better and saw the dangerous impact this law could have on my life and that of countless other transgender people,” Dylan Brandt, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Arkansas and plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement.
He continued, “Transgender kids across the country are having their own futures threatened by laws like this one, and it’s up to all of us to speak out, fight back, and give them hope.”
At least 17 other states have passed similar laws, several of which are under preliminary injunctions.
The Arkansas law also barred state funds and insurance coverage for gender-affirming care and allowed private insurers to refuse to cover such care for people of any age.
The law was vetoed by then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, citing the potentially dangerous consequences for trans youth in the state and calling it “a vast government overreach” and “a product of the cultural war in America.” His veto was overturned by state lawmakers.
Republicans who backed the bill said they want young people to wait until they are older to begin gender-affirming care.
National medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, argue that gender-affirming care is safe, effective, beneficial and medically necessary.
Transgender youth are more likely to experience anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation and attempts, health experts say. Gender-affirming hormone therapy has been proven to improve the mental health of transgender youth, according to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The restrictions were challenged in a lawsuit backed by four families of transgender youth, two doctors, the American Civil Liberties Union and the law firms of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, Gill Ragon Owen and the Walas Law Firm.
