(WASHINGTON) — Immigration and Customs Enforcement is ending the practice of deportation raids on worksites, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a memo on Tuesday.
“The deployment of mass worksite operations, sometimes resulting in the simultaneous arrest of hundreds of workers, was not focused on the most pernicious aspect of our country’s unauthorized employment challenge: exploitative employers,” Mayorkas wrote in the memo. “These highly visible operations misallocated enforcement resources while chilling, and even serving as a tool of retaliation for, worker cooperation in workplace standards investigations.”
He added the worksite operations go against the department’s civil rights code.
Mass worksite raids became more common after the first year of the Trump administration. One of the largest coordinated raid operations was conducted across multiple poultry plants in Mississippi in August 2019, resulting in the arrest of nearly 700 workers.
Four executives in charge of the poultry plants were indicted about a year after the raids.
Mayorkas said his department will “develop agency plans to alleviate or mitigate the fear that victims of, and witnesses to, labor trafficking and exploitation may have regarding their cooperation with law enforcement in the investigation and prosecution of unscrupulous employers.”
House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., applauded the DHS move.
“The previous Administration too often carried out raids that tore apart communities but allowed employers to continue exploiting workers,” he said in a statement. “Refocusing resources to counter exploitative employers is a necessary step in protecting the American labor market and workers. I appreciate the Department’s efforts to protect workers who sound the alarm on labor violations.”
The National Day Laborers Organizing Network agreed.
“By ending worksite raids and acknowledging that workers should not have to endure the threat of deportation when they courageously come forward to report labor violations, this policy begins to move the country in the right direction,” Nadia Marin-Molina, NDLON Co-Executive Director, said.
Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, who served as homeland security secretary under President Donald Trump, said the DHS should not be choosing to enforce the law against one group versus another. Wolf said that large-scale operations are not common and usually supported by federal prosecutors.
“Implying that past actions from ICE criminal investigators were wrong is not accurate and another shot at DHS law enforcement and continues the politicizing of DHS under this admin,” Wolf tweeted. “Instead of supporting professional agents, DHS is ending a perfectly legal tool in order to appease left wing progressives who want to abolish ICE.”
Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., accused President Biden of “weakening immigration law enforcement even further,” as a result of the DHS announcement on ICE raids. “American workers and their wages will suffer as a result.”
(WASHINGTON) — The House voted Tuesday to temporarily raise the debt ceiling by $480 billion after the Senate approved the stopgap measure late last week, putting off the risk of default until early December.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the lower chamber back to Washington from a two-week recess to pass the measure. The bill passed along party lines Tuesday evening in a 219-206 vote. It now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk for signature.
“A default would send shockwaves to global financial markets, and would likely cause credit markets worldwide to freeze up and stock markets to plunge. Employers around the world would likely have to begin laying off workers,” Pelosi told reporters during a press conference on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
The debt ceiling bill was packaged as part of a rule for floor debate of several other bills, meaning there was not a stand-alone vote on the debt limit measure. The bill was considered “deemed and passed” once the rule was adopted.
Pelosi staved off defections amid razor-thin margins in the House. She could have only afforded to lose three votes.
Republicans for months have said that Democrats would need to act on their own to raise the debt limit because they have total control of Washington and are planning to pass a multi-trillion social and economic package with zero input from Republicans.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said repeatedly that Democrats should have to hike the debt limit because of the high cost of Biden’s proposed agenda.
Democrats have argued that raising the debt limit is a bipartisan responsibility, in part because it covers spending that already took place under the Trump administration.
The House’s return Tuesday follows a chilling warning from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that if the House fails to act this week the U.S. is at risk of defaulting and will be unable to pay its bills.
Yellen warned on ABC’s “This Week” that McConnell and Republicans are playing with “catastrophe” over a pending fight to raise the debt ceiling.
“Fifty million Americans wouldn’t receive Social Security payments. Our troops won’t know when or if they would be paid. The 30 million families that receive a child tax credit, those payments would be in jeopardy,” Yellen said.
She said such a scenario “could result in catastrophe.”
President Joe Biden has said he will sign the bill into law once the House approves the measure Tuesday, but lawmakers will once again be at odds and at risk of fiscal calamity come December.
The new deadline will coincide with the end of the stop-gap deal to fund the federal government.
Pelosi indicated an off-ramp on the debt ceiling drama is in the works. She told reporters that the Treasury Department should be able to lift the debt ceiling unilaterally, while Congress would maintain the power to overrule an increase to the debt limit.
“I’m optimistic that these decisions have to be made,” Pelosi said.
“We are not a rubber stamp or a lockstep party — we have a discussion, and other family values that all members have brought to the table,” Pelosi said.
The idea to give the Treasury the authority to lift the debt limit “seems to have some appeal on both sides of the aisle because of the consequences of not lifting it.”
Pelosi said she thinks the idea has “merit.”
“We’re just hoping that we can do this in a bipartisan way,” she added.
The speaker said she does not support raising the debt limit through the process of reconciliation, which would allow Democrats to pass any bill with just a simple majority. The process is time-consuming and Democrats have firmly said they oppose using the process.
In a letter to Biden, McConnell warned that come December he would be willing to allow the nation to default on its national debt rather than work with Democrats on a resolution.
“Your lieutenants on Capitol Hill now have the time they claimed they lacked to address the debt ceiling through standalone reconciliation, and all the tools to do it,” McConnell said in the letter. “They cannot invent another crisis and ask for my help.”
ABC News’ Allison Pecorin contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — In a private phone call Tuesday with the nation’s governors, the White House said states should prepare to begin vaccinating elementary-aged kids against COVID-19 in early November and that it would work with local health officials in the coming days to identify which sites will receive the first doses.
In audio obtained by ABC News, White House officials told the governors it had enough pediatric doses on hand for the 28 million children ages 5 through 11 expected to become eligible once federal regulators give the green light.
Once that happens, the pediatric Pfizer vaccine will be distributed in 100-dose packs. The doses, which are about a third of what is given to adults, will be sent to thousands of sites, including pediatricians, family doctors, hospitals, health clinics and pharmacies enrolled in a federal program that guarantees the shots are provided for free.
Some states are planning to provide the vaccine through schools as well.
“We’ve secured plenty of supply, and we’ll be putting in place an allocation, ordering and distribution system similar to what we’ve used for the other vaccines,” said President Joe Biden’s White House COVID coordinator, Jeff Zients, on the phone call to governors.
Zients said states should expect an initial rush for shots and ensure parents can easily schedule appointments.
“It’s important that all of us recognize that parents have been waiting for a pediatric vaccine for a long time so they will understandably be very eager to get their kids vaccinated or kids vaccinated right away,” he said.
Pfizer’s study on elementary-aged kids included 4,500 volunteers from the U.S., Finland, Poland and Spain. Precise details on the effectiveness of the vaccines in clinical trials involving kids has not been publicly released, although Pfizer says the study showed the smaller dosage was safe and effective.
Separate vaccine trials are under way for toddlers and preschoolers, with results expected by the end of the year. A Pfizer vaccine for kids under 5 is expected to become available in early 2022.
Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must agree the pediatric COVID vaccines are safe and effective before any shots are given to kids.
Key meetings with independent advisers to those agencies are scheduled for later this month and the first week of November.
In anticipation of the FDA and CDC authorizing the vaccine for kids, the federal government purchased 65 million pediatric two-shot doses from Pfizer. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 70% of providers who administer vaccines to kids are enrolled to offer COVID shots.
Whether parents will embrace the vaccines for their kids is still a question and could depend upon details released in coming weeks on the clinical trial. In a September poll, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that about a third of parents with kids ages 5-11 were willing to vaccinate their kids right away, while another third wanted to “wait and see.” The figures represented a slight uptick in vaccine acceptance among parents of elementary-aged kids since July.
Overall, children are still considered significantly less likely than adults to experience bad outcomes from COVID-19. According to an estimate by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, less than 2% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization.
Still, health officials warned that the sudden spike in COVID cases this summer and fall resulted in an alarming number of hospitalizations among kids. Since late August, the U.S. reported more than 1.1 million pediatric cases.
ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani face no criminal charges but their names will figure into the trial that starts Tuesday in Manhattan of Soviet-born and Florida-based businessman Lev Parnas, who has been associated with Giuliani and now stands accused of making unlawful campaign donations.
Before they hear any evidence, prospective jurors are being asked about the former president and his personal attorney since federal prosecutors have said Parnas allegedly shared photos of himself with Trump and Giuliani to raise his profile.
When asked about the extent to which their names were going to come up by Judge Paul Oetken during a recent court hearing, assistant U.S. attorney Hagan Scotten replied, “They will come up really only peripherally.”
Parnas, 49, allegedly made unlawful donations totaling more than $350,000 to two pro-Trump super PACs and former Texas Congressman Pete Sessions in 2018. Another part of the case involves Parnas and co-defendant Andrey Kukushkin being charged with acting as straw donors for a wealthy Russian who wanted to enter the burgeoning marijuana market in the United States.
Parnas and Kukushkin have each pleaded not guilty to all charges. Prosecutors have said the recipients of the donations did not know the source of those donations to be the wealthy Russian.
The alleged illicit donations overlapped with Giuliani’s quest in Ukraine to unearth information that could damage then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, an effort in which Parnas allegedly positioned himself as a middleman.
During Trump’s first impeachment, a defense attorney for Parnas cast him as someone who could shed light on the ousting of ex-ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Prosecutors have since eliminated allegations involving Yovanovitch’s firing to “streamline” the case, as they put it to the judge.
In recent weeks, Parnas has claimed he can no longer afford to travel to New York. The U.S. Marshals were ordered to send a plane to bring him Florida and taxpayers will pay his hotel bill for the duration of the trial.
Alliance for Women in Media Foundation/Getty Images for Alliance for Women in Media Foundation
(NEW YORK) — The United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton said Monday on The View.
“That gives me absolutely no satisfaction in saying this, because I think we’re at a very dangerous, continuing high-level attack on the legitimacy of our government and the election of our president. Obviously, our former president is not only behind it, he incited it, he encouraged it and he continues to do so,” Clinton said in reference to the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Clinton recently said new and often restrictive voting legislation enacted in Republican-led states is “like the frog dropped into the water. It’s boiling.”
“People are still arguing about stuff that is important, but not as fundamental as whether or not our democracy will be broken and then taken over and minority rule will be what we live under,” she added onstage at the Atlantic Festival.
The narrow Democratic majority in the United States Senate has proven to be a difficulty for President Joe Biden, whose agenda hinges on unanimous support from those in his party. The filibuster is preventing Democrats from passing legislation with a simple majority vote, and the party isn’t in agreement on whether or not the Senate rule needs to be reformed.
Clinton said she would “absolutely” end the filibuster to allow intervention against some of the actions taken in the states, like transferring some of the power of election administration to state legislatures.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — While the Capitol was under attack on Jan. 6, former President Donald Trump remained out of sight from the public and watched TV in the White House private dining room, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl revealed on ABC’s This Week.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., called Trump to ask him to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol, Karl reports in his new book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.
McCarthy allegedly told Trump, “I just got evacuated from the Capitol! There were shots fired right off the House floor. You need to make this stop.”
A source familiar with the call between McCarthy and Trump said the former president pushed back, saying, “They are just more upset than you because they believe it more than you, Kevin,” referring to the lie that the election had been stolen.
The former president liked what he saw, boasted about the size of the crowd and argued with aides who wanted him to tell his supporters to stop rioting, according to Karl’s sources.
Two hours after the riot started, Trump finally acquiesced to recording a video statement. In the message posted to Twitter, he asked his supporters to go home but also praised them. “We love you. You are special,” Trump said in the video.
An aide present for the recording said, “Trump had to tape the message several times before they thought he got it right.”
In earlier versions he neglected to tell his supporters to leave the Capitol, according to Karl.
Last week, a Senate report documented alarming new details about the way Trump attempted to use the Justice Department to overturn the presidential election. Attorney General Bill Barr refused to go along, infuriating Trump when he said in early December there was no widespread fraud.
After Barr left office in mid-December, the report said Trump pressured Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to help steal the election but he too refused.
Rosen told senators he informed Trump that the Justice Department “can’t and won’t just flip a switch and change the election.”
In response, Trump asked that the DOJ “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] congressmen.”
In late December, Trump turned to Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer with no experience in election law, but who promised to declare without evidence that there was widespread voter fraud and to pressure contested states to reverse President Biden’s victory.
Clark also brought a new conspiracy theory to the cocktail of falsehoods. Two sources familiar with Clark’s actions said Trump “believed that wireless thermostats made in China for Google by a company called Nest Labs might have been used to manipulate voting machines in Georgia. The idea was nuts, but it intrigued Trump, who asked Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to look into it.”
At a dramatic, three-hour Oval Office meeting on Jan. 3, Trump said he wanted to make Clark acting attorney general, according to Karl.
“One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election, Trump said, according to Rosen’s congressional testimony.
Trump was then told every senior DOJ official would resign if he went through with his plan, as well as White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who said Trump’s plan amounted to “murder-suicide pact,” according to Karl.
Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show will become available Nov. 16.
(WASHINGTON) — While national Democrats, including President Joe Biden, struggle with Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s positions in an evenly-divided Senate, progressives at home are launching campaigns to pressure the state’s senior senator, threatening a primary challenger in 2024.
But Arizona is far from a blue state, and some argue that Sinema’s opposition to parts of the Biden agenda are in line with what she campaigned on being: an independent, moderate voice to represent the often-quirky political leanings of Arizonans.
The former Green Party activist, who once criticized a presidential candidate for attempting to get Republican support, is now a moderate thorn in the president’s side.
Progressives are expressing frustration with Sinema, who they say is working against an already moderate president and making Democratic priorities more difficult to enact. And activists are ramping up the pressure on her with crowdfunding campaigns and protests, even following her into a bathroom while she was home in Arizona last week, an action widely condemned by leaders on both sides of the aisle.
Sinema also faced protesters at the airport last weekend, asking her why she is opposing Biden’s agenda in the Senate. On her flight, she was approached by a DACA recipient, who asked for a commitment from her to support a pathway to citizenship. Protestors say they have a difficult time getting meetings with Sinema, so they are turning to the airwaves and larger fundraising campaigns to up the pressure.
Common Defense, an organization run by progressive veterans, is placing a seven-figure ad buy to target Sinema and pressure her to help pass Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda.
“I do feel like she’s failing to deliver with us when part of her campaign was about lowering prescription drug costs, and that’s something that the Build Back Better Act does. And she has come out against it, and again, no real good reason why,” Naveed Shah of Common Defense told ABC News.
The opposition to Sinema did not begin with infrastructure. At least two new political action committees have launched in response to Sinema’s positions since Biden came into office, both seeking to bankroll a primary challenger if Sinema doesn’t change her mind on the filibuster.
Kai Newkirk, a progressive organizer who helped elect Sinema in 2018, is a part of the effort to pressure Sinema to fall in line with Biden’s agenda in the Senate by using one of the new political action committees to send a clear message: Move out of the way so Biden’s agenda can pass, or else Democrats will look elsewhere for a 2024 Senate nominee. He and other activists started a conditional crowd-sourcing campaign to fund a primary challenger to Sinema, which raised $100,000 in a week.
Arizona Democrats recently threatened a vote of no confidence if Sinema continued to stand in the way of filibuster reform that would help ensure passage of Biden’s agenda, an issue they single out as the biggest blockade to Democratic success in Washington.
“We are at a point where we need federal action and there is nothing happening there,” state Sen. Martín Quezada told a progressive news outlet. “I was expecting the Kyrsten Sinema that I had seen in the legislature. I was always impressed by her intelligence, her aggressiveness and her commitment to values that we supported. That’s what I was hoping we would get, but she hasn’t done that. She’s been the exact opposite of what we thought we were electing.”
Some of the dissatisfaction with Sinema comes from a lack of clarity on what exactly she wants. She initially ran for the state House in the 2000s as an independent and pushed for progressive agendas. As her political career developed and she gained larger constituencies, she’s continued to move to the center. Now, in the Senate majority for the first time, she’s been in and out of meetings with the White House and, along with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, is one of two Democrats blocking movement on Biden’s infrastructure package.
Even her colleagues are unclear on what exactly she and Manchin are angling for.
“Now it’s time, I would say for both senators, make your mark and close the deal,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois said last week. “What is it that you want? What is your final goal? It’s time to stop talking around it and speak directly to it.”
Aside from her lack of support on some aspects of Biden’s agenda, some Democrats argue her actions could harm freshman Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat, when he is up for reelection next year.
“I think the risk is that it’s going to be harder to reelect Kelly, for Democrats to keep their majorities in general, because we haven’t been able to deliver on what we were elected to do, if Sinema keeps doing what she is now,” Newkirk said. “You have to keep your promises, and make a difference in voters’ lives for them to put you back in office.
Groups that organized for her argue it is difficult to get a meeting with her or her office, and that when they do, they’re often met with nonanswers.
“She’s not explaining what she’s doing or where she really stands to her constituents. And it’s absurd and insulting….feeling that she doesn’t even have to explain to the people who elected her — that she’s there to represent — where she stands on these specific issues,” Newkirk said.
But all of that may not matter. While Arizona opted for Democrats at the top of their ballot in 2020 — in both the presidential and Senate races — only former President Bill Clinton and President Joe Biden have broken Arizona’s tendency to vote red for its presidential nominees. Biden only won the state by .3%, a reminder that some Democrats’ fantasy of a deep-blue Arizona could still be far off.
Samara Klar, an associate professor at the University of Arizona’s school of government and public policy, said that despite the fact that many Democrats are angry with Sinema, Arizona voters historically love a candidate who is willing to stick with their convictions, even if they aren’t popular within their own party at the time.
“Sinema and Mark Kelly both ran and won on this centrism thing. That’s who they are, they’re not going to be typical partisan politicians,” she said.
“Even among the Democrats, we tend to see a little more right-leaning issue positions and preferences for centrism and moderate candidates than what we tend to see nationally. In fact, I would say Kyrsten Sinema largely was elected thanks to that,” she added.
Sinema, who only won her 2018 election by just under three points, would still, however, need to win a Democratic primary, Newkirk argues.
“If she runs as an independent, she’s not some institution like John McCain. The votes are not there. She has to win the Democratic primary, and if she continues on this path, she’s not going to be able to, but she continues to dig in her heels,” Newkirk said.
Sinema has often said she sees Sen. John McCain as an inspiration, and is sometimes branded as a politician cut from the same cloth. But Chuck Coughlin, a GOP strategist in Arizona who has watched Sinema’s rise into national politics, told ABC News that those comparisons fall short.
“People knew who John McCain was — it’s not something that needed to be defined by anybody else,” Coughlin said. “And she does not have those types of depth of roots in the public consciousness. She’s being defined right now. This is a moment in her life that will define her going forward.”
(NEW YORK) — Snapchat is looking to help America’s youth become potential Washington, D.C., power players with its latest feature, Run for Office Mini.
The new, in-app feature helps Snapchat users navigate which offices they can run for in their local areas based on which issues they are most passionate about, Snap, the company behind Snapchat, said in a blog post announcing the feature.
Snapchat reaches 90% of 13- to 24-year-olds in the United States, according to the company.
Run for Office Mini uses data from BallotReady, which is described as providing “personalized, nonpartisan information to voters in all 50 states” on its website.
Narissa Ayoub, a 24-year-old law student at the University of Detroit Mercy and a legal intern with dreams to run for office one day, said she appreciates how the feature makes the process of looking into running for office more accessible.
“Having all the information there, in one place, and for it to be so easy and accessible, I think it will create a huge difference,” Ayoub said. “I think people don’t know exactly what [they] can run for, so it doesn’t have to be these big deal offices like mayor or state legislature or governor. There are things in your hometown that are open like precinct delegate, or city clerk or school board.”
Through the feature, Snapchat users can type in their ZIP code and select the issues that mean the most to them, such as education, civil rights and more. The app then narrow down the political offices that overlap with those issues and provides users with information about those offices, including who currently holds that seat, their background, age requirement to run for that seat and the upcoming election date for the position.
Snapchat users can sign up for a training session with several organizations it has partnered with including Run for Something, Run GenZ, LGBTQ Victory, New American Leaders and more, Snap said.
“Being the candidate yourself is something that’s super intimidating,” Ayoub said. “I think that this new Snapchat feature … to give people those tools that they need to run for office is absolutely invaluable.”
Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young candidates running for office, tweeted that the organization saw a record number of young people sign up for their training program to run for office.
This isn’t the first time the social media giant has worked to help youth get involved in the political process. With support from Turbovote and Ballot Ready, Snap helped more than 1.2 million Snapchat users register to vote; more than half were first-time voters, according to Snap.
(WASHINGTON) — The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot will “swiftly consider” holding one-time Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, and potentially others, in contempt of Congress for ignoring committee subpoenas, committee chairman Bennie Thompson vice-chair Liz Cheney said Friday.
The move came after Bannon formally advised the committee that he would be unable to comply with their requests, citing former President Donald Trump’s intention to invoke executive privilege. In a letter obtained by ABC News, Bannon’s lawyers said that until the matter is settled in court, they will not comply with the committee’s subpoena.
The committee last month issued subpoenas to Bannon and other top Trump aides Mark Meadows, Kash Patel and Dan Scavino, as part of its probe into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. An additional 11 subpoenas were issued last week to organizers of the pro-Trump rally that preceded the attack.
Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, and Patel, an ex-Pentagon official, are “engaging” with the committee, officials said. The committee had no update on the status of Scavino.
“While Mr. Meadows and Mr. Patel are, so far, engaging with the Select Committee, Mr. Bannon has indicated that he will try to hide behind vague references to privileges of the former President,” Thompson and Cheney said in a joint statement. “The Select Committee fully expects all of these witnesses to comply with our demands for both documents and deposition testimony.”
Sources confirm to ABC News that Trump’s lawyer sent a letter to several of those subpoenaed informing them that the former president wants the subpoenas ignored and that he plans to claim executive privilege. In the letter, Trump suggested he would be willing to take the matter to court to block their cooperation.
However in an interview earlier this week with right-wing commentator John Solomon, Trump suggested that he would have no problem with his confidants participating in the probe.
“I’m mixed, because we did nothing wrong,” Trump said. “So I’m sort of saying, ‘Why are we hiring lawyers to do this?’ I’d like to just have everybody go in and say what you have to say. We did nothing wrong.”
Committee officials said that those who ignore the subpoenas could be held in contempt.
“Though the Select Committee welcomes good-faith engagement with witnesses seeking to cooperate with our investigation, we will not allow any witness to defy a lawful subpoena or attempt to run out the clock, and we will swiftly consider advancing a criminal contempt of Congress referral,” the statement said.
Any motion of contempt would be passed along for the full House to consider. If passed, the matter would then be referred to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.
Democrats considered holding Bannon in contempt of a House Intelligence Committee subpoena in 2018, but ultimately declined to do so. The full House voted to hold former Attorney General Bill Barr and former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress in 2019 for ignoring House Oversight Committee subpoenas for records related to the 2020 census, but the Trump Justice Department ignored the requests.
Trump is also seeking to block the Jan. 6 committee from accessing selected documents held by the National Archives, which maintains control of White House records, including West Wing communications and visitor logs. On Friday he sent a letter to the agency asserting executive privilege over a tranche of documents that he said contain privileged presidential communications.
White House counsel Dara Remus said in an earlier letter to the agency that the White House “has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States,” but that they would “respond accordingly” if Trump asserts executive privilege over only a subset of the documents.
As of Friday, the committee has issued a total of 17 subpoenas, with most going to Trump associates and individuals linked to the rallies in Washington on the day of the Capitol riot.
The committee plans to schedule in-person depositions with cooperating witnesses in the coming weeks.
(WASHINGTON) — The Senate narrowly averted fiscal calamity Thursday evening in a late-evening vote to raise the federal borrowing limit, but the short-term solution has set the stage for a fierce political showdown in December.
While no Republicans voted to raise the debt ceiling, 11 Republicans voted with Democrats to break a Republican filibuster so that the measure could advance.
The kicked-can deal comes a little more than a week before Oct. 18 — the date Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pegged as when the U.S. may no longer be able to cover its debts.
But the short-term solution is still not yet totally secured. The House is expected to return to Washington from its recess on Tuesday to approve the measure, where it is expected to pass on party lines before heading to President Joe Biden’s desk.
When the $480 billion debt hike is exhausted, the political gamesmanship from both parties that made a short-term solution difficult to achieve will likely be on heightened display, as lawmakers aim to deal with the lapse of their short-term extension of federal government funding at the same time.
In the weeks leading up to Thursday’s vote, Senate leadership was locked in a political staring contest over which party ought to bear responsibility for raising the limit.
Republicans for months said that Democrats would need to act on their own to raise the debt limit because they have total control of Washington and are planning to pass a multi-trillion social and economic package with zero input from Republicans. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said repeatedly that Democrats should have to hike the debt limit because of the high cost of Biden’s proposed agenda.
But Democrats have argued raising the debt limit is a bipartisan responsibility, in part because it covers spending that already took place under the Trump administration with unified GOP support.
Republicans blocked an earlier effort by Democrats to suspend the limit partially because they want Democrats to be forced to raise the limit by a specific dollar amount using a fast-track budget process budget tool called reconciliation. It would allow the majority to break a filibuster to pass certain legislation, but use of this arcane process is cumbersome, could take weeks and opens up Democrats to a series of potentially politically painful votes.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected the reconciliation option, arguing it would take too much time.
The stalemate was temporarily broken on Thursday when 11 Republicans, including McConnell, joined all Senate Democrats in casting a procedural vote to break a filibuster on the debt limit. Ten GOP votes were necessary to clear the way for a second, simple majority vote to raise the debt limit by $480 billion. No Republicans voted with Democrats in a subsequent vote on the debt hike.
McConnell offered the deal to allow Democrats additional time to use reconciliation to pass a more permanent debt limit fix without GOP support.
“This will moot Democrats’ excuses about the time crunch they created and give the unified Democratic government more than enough time to pass standalone debt limit legislation through reconciliation,” McConnell said in a statement Wednesday.
But Democrats have said they’re no more prepared to use reconciliation in December than they were this month.
“There’s not going to be reconciliation,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told reporters emphatically on Wednesday.
Following Thursday’s vote, Schumer took to the floor to lambast Republicans for holding the debt limit hostage, further committing that Democrats would not budge on reconciliation.
“Let me say that again. Today’s vote is proof positive that the debt limit can be addressed without going through the reconciliation process, just as Democrats have been saying for months,” Schumer said on the floor. “The solution is for Republicans to either join us in raising the debt limit or stay out of the way and let Democrats address the debt limit ourselves.”
Some Republicans, and a visibly frustrated Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., were miffed by Schumer’s victory lap.
“I was not in the chamber when he spoke, so I didn’t hear it first hand,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Thursday evening. “But I heard from others there was a fair amount of frustration.”
Republican Whip Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said he told Schumer personally he was frustrated with his tone, calling it “out of line” and an “incredibly partisan speech after we had just helped him solve a problem.”
Many rank-and-file Republicans were also frustrated with McConnell for even offering Democrats a way to kick the can down the road on dealing with the debt limit.
“I believe it was a mistake to offer this deal. Two days ago Republicans were unified, we were all on the same page, we were all standing together and making clear that Democrats had complete authority to raise the debt ceiling, and to take responsibility for the trillions of debt that they are irresponsibly adding to this country,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said. “We were winning that fight and Schumer was on the verge of surrender. And unfortunately, the deal that was put on the table was a lifeline for Schumer. And I disagree with that decision.”
Discontent with the deal was on full display Thursday, as McConnell stood on the floor and counted his Republican “yes” votes to ensure the necessary 10 votes to proceed would be cast.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., gave a dramatic thumbs down at his turn — just steps away from McConnell.
McConnell had arrived on the floor moments after the vote began — a rare, early appearance for the leader who usually waits until later in the vote series to cast his. But this time clearly wanted his presence known. Rather than giving a thumbs up on his vote, he gave a bellowing and affirmative “aye” and stood in the well with other “yes” voters as they amassed, leaning over the center table as votes rolled in.
Rankling in the lower ranks of the GOP all but assures there won’t be a similar compromise coming in December when the parties will almost certainly find themselves in a similar stare down.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the Senate’s action Thursday “welcome steps forward” on the debt limit but reiterated the Democratic view that it should be a “shared responsibility” to raise the limit in December.
“We cannot allow partisan politics to hold our economy hostage, and we can’t allow the routine process of paying our bills to turn into a confidence-shaking political showdown every two years or every two months,” Psaki said.
