House Republicans purged Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from their leadership ranks on Wednesday, voting to oust their No. 3 for her refusal to stay quiet about Donald J. Trump’s election lies, in a remarkable takedown of one of their own that reflected the party’s intolerance for dissent and unswerving fealty to the former president.
The action came by voice vote during a brief but raucous closed-door meeting in an auditorium on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning, after Ms. Cheney made a defiant final speech that drew boos from her colleagues.
In her parting remarks, Ms. Cheney urged Republicans not to “let the former president drag us backward,” according to a person familiar with the private comments who detailed them on condition of anonymity. Ms. Cheney warned that Republicans were going down a path that would bring their “destruction,” and “possibly the destruction of our country,” the person said, adding that if the party wanted a leader who would “enable and spread his destructive lies,” they should vote to remove her.
Republicans did just that, after greeting her speech with boos, according two people present, speaking on the condition on anonymity to discuss an internal discussion. They ultimately opted not to hold a recorded vote, after Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, said that they should vote by voice to show unity.
Emerging from the meeting, Ms. Cheney remained unremorseful, and said she was committed to doing “everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets near the Oval Office.”
“We must go forward based on truth,” Ms. Cheney told reporters. “We cannot both embrace the big lie and embrace the Constitution.”
The action came the day after Ms. Cheney had delivered a broadside on the House floor against Mr. Trump and the party leaders working to oust her, accusing them of being complicit in undermining the democratic system.
In a scathing speech, Ms. Cheney said that the country was facing a “never seen before” threat of a former president who provoked the Capitol attack on Jan. 6 and who had “resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him.”
“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” she said. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”
Mr. Trump weighed in on Wednesday morning as lawmakers were gathering to force Ms. Cheney out, saying he was looking forward to the ouster of a woman he called “a poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger, and a person with absolutely no personality or heart.”
Top Republicans have labored to avoid talking about the Capitol riot and have painted Ms. Cheney’s removal as a forward-looking move that would allow them to move past that day.
Instead, the episode has only called attention to the party’s slavish devotion to Mr. Trump, its tolerance for authoritarianism, and internal divisions between more mainstream and conservative factions about how to win back the House in 2022. All of those dynamics threaten to alienate independent and suburban voters, thus undercutting what otherwise appears to be a sterling opportunity for Republicans to reclaim the majority.
As a replacement for Ms. Cheney, Republican leaders have united behind Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a onetime moderate whose loyalty to Mr. Trump and backing for his false claims of election fraud have earned her broad support from the party’s rank and file that Ms. Cheney, a lifelong conservative, no longer commands.
If Ms. Stefanik is elected this week to replace Ms. Cheney, as expected, the top three House Republican leadership posts will be held by lawmakers who voted not to certify President Biden’s victory in January. In recent days, however, some hard-right Republicans have attacked Ms. Stefanik as insufficiently conservative and suggested the party should consider someone else.
President Biden on Wednesday will meet with Republican and Democratic leaders from both houses of Congress for the first time since taking office, pressing them on his proposals to spend $4 trillion for infrastructure and families.
Mr. Biden is scheduled to meet with Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, and their counterparts in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, according to people familiar with the meeting. They will discuss the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which seeks to expand access to education, reduce the cost of child care and support women in the work force, and the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan, which is aimed at infrastructure spending.
Republicans have balked at the idea of spending an additional $4 trillion after they helped pass $1.9 trillion in stimulus spending at the start of Mr. Biden’s term. Some Republican members of Congress have proposed smaller packages aimed at more targeted improvements to infrastructure and have said that Mr. Biden’s proposals amount to a tax increase on middle class Americans.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that the president wants the meeting to be “a discussion about where we can find common agreement, where there’s an opportunity to work together moving forward.”
Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have toured the country in recent weeks arguing that the spending is necessary to create jobs and ensure that the economic recovery from one of the nation’s deepest recessions doesn’t lose momentum. They have defended the infrastructure proposal from criticism that it includes too much spending on social services programs unrelated to the traditional road-rail-and-sewer definition of infrastructure.
The meeting on Wednesday comes less than a week after a disappointing jobs report, which showed only 266,000 new jobs added in April. Republicans pointed to the data point as proof that Mr. Biden’s policies were creating a labor shortage and that his spending proposals threatened to stoke runaway inflation
When Joe Biden won the presidency, hopes rose that he might be the rare Democrat who could finally crack the code of Mitch McConnell and find bipartisan common ground based on their shared past as Senate deal makers.
Nearly five months into President Biden’s tenure, those aspirations have yet to materialize, and Mr. McConnell, the Republican leader, made plain last week that he had little interest in nurturing them, declaring himself to be “100 percent focused” on stopping Mr. Biden’s agenda.
With the top four congressional leaders scheduled on Wednesday to gather for the first time with Mr. Biden at the White House, Mr. McConnell’s stance has only underscored the obstacles ahead. The senator has intensified his attacks on Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda. His office accuses the president of mixing “centrist words, liberal actions.”
Mr. McConnell made his “100 percent” remark — a comment that was quickly compared with his 2010 declaration that he was determined to make Barack Obama a one-term president — last week during a trip back home to Kentucky.
Mr. McConnell quickly sought to walk back last week’s comment, claiming that it was taken out of context, but the narrative was set.
With attempts to reach bipartisan deals on infrastructure, police conduct, safety net programs and more entering a critical phase, Mr. McConnell and Mr. Biden couldn’t be further apart, indicating that if the White House is to successfully reach across the aisle for agreements, it is much more likely to be with a small group of Republicans absent Mr. McConnell and most of the rest of his members.
“We have a good personal relationship, but I will not be supporting the kind of things they are doing so far,” Mr. McConnell said of Mr. Biden in a recent interview.
Privately, White House officials argue that Mr. McConnell’s position will help Democrats justify using procedural tools to force through legislation without Republican votes should that become necessary, as most expect it will.
They believe that Mr. McConnell’s rigid defiance sets up a winning contrast for Mr. Biden as he continues to profess openness to working with Republicans. If such bipartisanship proves impossible, the officials argue, Democrats need only to point to the minority leader’s own words to explain why.
Christopher C. Miller, who was the acting defense secretary when rioters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, plans to testify before Congress on Wednesday that he worried that sending troops to the complex would contribute to perceptions of a “military coup” under President Donald J. Trump.
He will also blame Mr. Trump for encouraging the violent mob that overran the Capitol Police, according to written testimony submitted to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
Mr. Miller’s comments, part of the lengthy defense of the Pentagon’s actions before and during the mob violence, are the first he will make in sworn testimony as various committees investigate the largest attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. He is set to testify during an hourslong hearing before the committee at 10 a.m.
“I personally believe his comments encouraged the protesters that day,” Mr. Miller plans to say about Mr. Trump.
Fear of the appearance of a coup was not an explanation given by the Pentagon in the days after the riot. At the time, Defense Department officials said they largely held back because they were not asked to send troops. District of Columbia officials, the former chief of the Capitol Police and Maryland’s Republican governor have all said that they called for the National Guard to be deployed for hours on Jan. 6 before the Pentagon gave approval.
During the hearing, Democrats plan to press Mr. Miller and Jeffrey A. Rosen, the former acting attorney general, on what they believe is a “stark contrast” between how aggressively the Justice and Defense Departments responded to Black Lives Matter protests over the summer and the pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol, according to a committee aide. Democrats also plan to ask whether the Justice Department had a “blind spot to right-wing extremism” that prevented it from anticipating the potential for violence, the aide said.
The Biden administration and House Democrats have reached a tentative deal to allow President Donald J. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to testify before Congress about Mr. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia inquiry, according to a court filing late Tuesday.
The deal appears likely to avert a definitive court precedent that would draw a clear line in ambiguous areas: the scope and limits of Congress’s constitutional power to compel testimony for its oversight responsibilities, and a president’s constitutional power to keep secret conversations with a White House lawyer.
An appeals court had been set to hear arguments on the case next week, but lawyers for the Justice Department, which has been defending Mr. McGahn since 2019 against a House subpoena seeking to compel his testimony, and for the House of Representatives, asked the court in a joint letter to drop that plan.What to do about the subpoena case, which President Biden inherited from the Trump administration, has been a rare locus of institutional disagreement among Democrats in the two branches.
Lawyers in the Biden White House have been hesitant about establishing a precedent that Republicans might someday use to force them to testify about their own internal matters. House Democrats under Speaker Nancy Pelosi have been determined to push forward after frustration that the Trump administration’s uncompromising approach and litigation strategy ran out the clock, preventing any testimony by Mr. McGahn before the 2020 presidential election.
The two sides had been negotiating for several months, leading to delays in the appeals court case. The filing was terse and offered no details about the deal, including what limits, if any, there would be — like whether Mr. McGahn would testify in public and the scope of what lawmakers could ask him to disclose.
But the filing also flagged a potential wild card: “Former President Trump, who is not a party to this case, is not a party to the agreement in principle regarding an accommodation,” it said.
That absence leaves open the question of whether Mr. Trump could try to intervene to block Mr. McGahn from testifying by asserting executive privilege. An attempt to invoke it by Mr. Trump would raise novel questions about the extent to which a former president may assert the privilege when the incumbent president declines to do so.
President Biden took office in January with little interest in pursuing an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, for understandable reasons.
President Bill Clinton hosted an Israeli-Palestinian summit during his first year in the White House. President Barack Obama appointed a Middle East peace envoy on his second full day in office. And before his swearing-in, Donald J. Trump vowed to secure an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal “which no one else has managed to get.”
All of them failed to achieve a peace deal, as did President George W. Bush, who took up the cause later in his presidency.
Even before the recent explosion of violence in Israel and Gaza, analysts agreed that prospects for a successful negotiation continue to look hopeless in the near term, with neither side prepared to make concessions the other would demand.
Mr. Biden and his senior advisers have largely accepted that status quo. Determined to shift the focus of American foreign policy to China from the Middle East and seeing no reliable partner in an unstable Israeli government led by an embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has pursued hard-line positions toward the Palestinians, Mr. Biden has issued familiar endorsements of a two-state solution while making little effort to push the parties toward one.
But as spiraling riots, rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and airstrikes on Gaza threaten to escalate into a major conflict, calls are growing in the Democratic Party for Mr. Biden to play a more active role. Some liberals urge him to more firmly challenge Israeli settlement activity, which makes a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians harder to achieve.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained 178,622 people along the border with Mexico in April, the highest number of apprehensions in at least two decades.
About 63 percent of those who were detained trying to enter across the southwestern border were expelled from the United States, the agency said in a news release. The number of minors who were taken into custody dropped 12 percent to 13,962 from March, according to the agency.
The number of immigrants detained at the southwestern border has risen for 12 straight months, according to Customs and Border Protection data. President Biden promised a more humane approach to immigration than did President Donald J. Trump, giving some immigrants, many of whom are fleeing dire economic conditions in Mexico and Central America, hope that they might be able to enter the United States more easily.
While Mr. Biden promised to unwind some of Mr. Trump’s policies, he has urged immigrants to stay home and has given Customs and Border Protection agents more authority to send detained immigrants back under protocols in place to combat the coronavirus.
The latest data release comes after a significant rise in migrant children turned up at the U.S. border this year, raising questions about Mr. Biden’s immigration policies.
U.S. - Latest - Google News
May 12, 2021 at 08:43PM
https://ift.tt/3uGRDfP
The Latest on Liz Cheney's Removal: Live News Updates - The New York Times
U.S. - Latest - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ShjtvN
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "The Latest on Liz Cheney's Removal: Live News Updates - The New York Times"
Post a Comment