THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

U.S. Sen. Tim Scott has a message for the conservatives excoriating him for opposing Thomas Farr’s confirmation as a federal judge: They ought not challenge the conclusion of the Senate’s only black Republican that the one-time nominee has a troubling record on race.

Scott, R-S.C., is doubling down in his opposition to Farr over concerns about the Raleigh, N.C., lawyer’s history on race relations. He said his worries were not alleviated by a Wednesday meeting between the two men on Capitol Hill — convened as a courtesy to North Carolina Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Farr ally.

The meeting coincided with a letter that 31 conservative leaders, activists, elected officials and attorneys sent to Scott Tuesday in Farr’s defense. In the three-page memo, they urged Scott to reconsider his position, arguing a smear campaign was launched by “unprincipled left-wing activists who hate Tom” and suggesting Scott was complicit in the partisan attack.

“In these difficult days, when allegations of racism are carelessly, and all too often deliberately, thrown about without foundation, the result is not racial healing, but greater racial polarization,” they wrote. “Joining with those who taunt every political opponent a ‘racist’ as a partisan political tactic to destroy their reputations is not helpful to the cause of reconciliation.”

Scott fired back.

“For some reason the authors of this letter choose to ignore ... facts, and instead implicate that I have been co-opted by the left and am incapable of my own decision making,” Scott said in a statement to McClatchy, adding he votes for Republican judicial nominees “99 percent of the time.”

“Why they have chosen to expend so much energy on this particular nomination I do not know, but what I do know is they have not spent anywhere near as much time on true racial reconciliation efforts, decrying comments by those like (Republican U.S. Rep.) Steve King, or working to move our party together towards a stronger, more unified future,” Scott continued, referring to the Iowa congressman who recently suggested he was sympathetic to white supremacists in a New York Times interview.

// posted by montag @ 1:43 PM 0 Comments

Disaster recovery funds for victims of California’s wildfires and other natural disasters has emerged as a bargaining chip in the battle to build President Donald Trump’s border wall.

Members of Congress formally launched negotiations Wednesday on a spending deal to keep the government from shutting down against on Feb. 15, a discussion that hinges on Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion to build a wall — “or Physical Barrier,” as he tweeted Wednesday — on the southern border with Mexico.

But other less-controversial government funding is also tied up in the discussions, including as much as $14 billion for communities in California, North Carolina, Florida and Puerto Rico that have been pummeled by fires, flooding and hurricanes in the past two years.

“In the next 16 days, our task is clear: finalizing appropriations legislation that responsibly funds much of the federal government,” House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey of New York said in her opening remarks at the meeting to resolve the spending impasse. “We are very close to agreement on the other six appropriations bills,” aside from homeland security spending, Lowey said.

The House has twice passed disaster aid funding bills, once in December, when the chamber was controlled by Republicans, and once in January under Democratic control. The funding would go to government agencies like FEMA, the Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help communities rebuild from disasters, as well as funding for the U.S. Forest Service and Army Corps of Engineers to help prevent future fires and flooding. The Senate, however, has not passed its own disaster legislation.

California, alone, requested more than $9 billion for wildfire recovery in November to help with tasks like debris removal and rebuilding homes, schools and roads destroyed by the fires in Butte County and Southern California last year.

Aides in both chambers say the best hope for passing disaster aid is to tack the recovery money onto any spending deal that’s reached on homeland security, including money for a border wall or barrier.

Washington just emerged from its longest shutdown in history, which closed roughly a quarter of federal government from Dec. 22 to Jan. 25. President Trump finally agreed to sign short-term funding legislation that reopened the shuttered agencies for three weeks, while convening a congressional committee to hash out a deal on border security funds. Members of Congress from affected states are arguing the stalled disaster relief legislation needs to also be part of those discussions.

“I think there’s good consensus on both sides among my California colleagues” to move the disaster aid funding as part of the broader spending package, said Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa, whose Northern California district includes the town of Paradise and other communities devastated by the 2018 Camp Fire, the most deadly in state history.

// posted by montag @ 1:32 PM 0 Comments

In a series of Twitter posts the day after senior American intelligence officials briefed Congress and directly contradicted some of Mr. Trump’s rosier estimations, the president reasserted his own conclusions and trumpeted his accomplishments on critical national security matters. He said the Islamic State’s control in parts of Iraq and Syria “will soon be destroyed,” and that there was a “decent chance of Denuclearization” in North Korea.

On Tuesday, top intelligence officials described a different Iran, one that is not currently trying to make a nuclear bomb and appears to be complying with a 2015 agreement, even after Mr. Trump last year promised to withdraw from it.

On Syria, intelligence officials said the Islamic State would go on “to stoke violence” with thousands of fighters there and in Iraq, and with 12 networks around the world. Regarding North Korea, they said Pyongyang was not likely to permanently shed itself of nuclear weapons — contradicting a prediction Mr. Trump has made based on what he has called the “best” relationship the two nations have ever had.

“It’s deeply dangerous that the White House isn’t listening,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a Twitter post Wednesday morning.

The threat assessment — an annual report to Congress that ranks threats to American national security from around the world — provides the public with an unclassified and up-to-date summary of the most pressing national security threats to the United States.

Dan Coats, the national intelligence director, had told lawmakers that North Korea’s “leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival.” He said that there was “some activity that is inconsistent with full denuclearization” in the country and that most of what it had dismantled was reversible. Mr. Trump is expected to meet with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, next month.

Mr. Trump announced in December a plan to withdraw American troops from Syria after concluding that “we have won” against the Islamic State. Prominent members of his own party have denounced what Senator Mitch McConnell on Tuesday called “a precipitous withdrawal” of American troops from Syria and Afghanistan.

// posted by montag @ 1:46 PM 0 Comments

The battle over voting rights ahead of the 2020 election is officially on in Congress, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisting Democratic-led efforts to strengthen voting rights laws are no more than a partisan “power grab.”

Democrats are pushing a bill that among other things would repair the landmark voting rights law that the Supreme Court fractured in 2013 and that the previous Republican-controlled Congress appeared in no hurry to fix.

In the Senate, where Republicans still control the agenda, McConnell was adamant Tuesday that no fix is needed.

“The only common motivation running through the whole proposal seems to be this — Democrats searching for ways to give Washington politicians more control over what Americans say about them and how they get people elected,” the Kentucky Republican said in a Senate floor speech.

McConnell spoke as the House Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on the Democratic voting bill, designated HR 1 and called the “For the People Act of 2019.”

Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, said the changes are needed after the Supreme Court struck down key provisions in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required some or all of 15 states and jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination at the polls to get federal approval, or pre-clearance, before changing their rules regarding voting.

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia were subject to the pre-clearance provision as well as local jurisdictions in California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota.

“Predictably, some states wasted no time in enacting discriminatory voter suppression laws in the wake of the Shelby County decision,” Nadler said at Tuesday’s hearing. “It does not help that President Trump has encouraged conspiracy theories about massive voter fraud as a justification for voter identification laws, and other voter suppression tactics.”

Trump claimed that Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election by 3 million votes because of massive voter fraud. He formed a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017 and appointed a then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach its vice chairman, but the panel was later disbanded.

The 2018 elections were punctuated by allegations of voter suppression and election fraud. In Georgia, Democrats and voting rights advocates complained that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp aided his campaign by cutting hundreds of thousands of mostly-minority voters from the rolls as he oversaw elections as secretary of state.

Voters in the North Carolina’s 9th Congressional still do not have House representation because the election hasn’t been certified amid allegations of election fraud by Republican Mark Harris’ campaign.

The voting rights battle continues ahead of the 2020 elections in states such as Texas, where state election officials are preparing to identify and purge nearly 100,000 people registered to vote who may not be U.S. citizens.

Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, who has been designated chairwoman of a new House subcommittee on elections, plans to hold field hearings in states to build a “record” of elections violations necessary to update the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act.

She told McClatchy in December that those states include North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Ohio and North Dakota.

// posted by montag @ 1:28 PM 0 Comments

A new American intelligence assessment of global threats has concluded that North Korea is “unlikely to give up” all of its nuclear stockpiles, and that Iran is not “currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activity” needed to make a bomb, directly contradicting two top tenets of President Trump’s foreign policy.

Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, also challenged Mr. Trump’s insistence that the Islamic State had been defeated, a key rationale for his decision to exit from Syria. The terrorist group, the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment” report to Congress concluded, “still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria,” and maintains eight branches and a dozen networks around the world.

Mr. Trump is expected to meet next month with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, in a second round of direct negotiations aimed at ridding Pyongyang of its nuclear weapons.

But Mr. Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that “we currently assess North Korea will seek to retain its W.M.D. capability and is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capability.”

“Its leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival,” Mr. Coats said.

Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, said the North Korean government “is committed to developing a long-range nuclear-armed missile that would pose a direct threat to the United States.”

Under questioning by Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, Ms. Haspel said it was encouraging that North Korea had engaged in dialogue with the United States. But, she said, ultimately the diplomatic objective had to be to persuade Pyongyang to fully disclose its program and dismantle its weapons.

Former intelligence officials have expressed a degree of skepticism about the upcoming meeting, given the relatively modest steps North Korea has taken toward throttling back its nuclear program.

On Iran, Mr. Coats cited the nation’s continued support of terrorism in Europe and the Middle East, including sponsoring Houthis in Yemen and Shiite militants in Iraq. He also said that he believed that Iran hard-liners would continue to challenge centrist rivals.

“We do not believe Iran is currently undertaking the key activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device,” Mr. Coats said, but he added that Iranian officials have “publicly threatened to push the boundaries” of the nuclear deal it struck with world powers in 2015 if it did not see the benefits it expected.

Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from that agreement last year. He called it “defective at its core” and said if the deal remained in place, Iran would“be on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons.” The agreement still stands, largely with support from European capitals.

Senator Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, asked Ms. Haspel point-blank if Iran remained in compliance with the nuclear deal. She said it was

// posted by montag @ 1:57 PM 0 Comments

Hundreds of thousands of federal employees returned to work on Monday with a presidential promise of a paycheck “very quickly” but no guarantee that they will be working in three weeks, when a temporary stopgap of funding expires.

President Trump and congressional Democrats arrived at a short-term agreement late on Friday, reopening the government after 35 days and the longest government shutdown in history. Lawmakers have until Feb. 15 to reach a compromise on the Republican request for billions of dollars to be allocated for a border wall — a wall Democrats have refused to fund.

Referring to the odds that a deal could be struck over that time, Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, “I personally think it’s less than 50-50.” Mr. Trump said he would use emergency powers to fund the wall if an agreement could not be reached.

In a stark reminder that federal employees were returning to work with the knowledge that they might be forced to go without a paycheck once again next month, one federal agency, the Department of Agriculture, updated its employee information website and said, “We will also leave some of the shutdown-related material up for a period time, should you need to refer back to it.”

Aware of the looming Feb. 15 deadline, some lawmakers are trying to pass a law that would outlaw future government shutdowns.

“Shutting down the government should be as off limits in budget negotiations as chemical warfare is in real warfare,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, said on Friday.

// posted by montag @ 1:19 PM 0 Comments

The United States and the Taliban are closing in on a deal to end America’s longest war after six days of some of the most serious Afghan peace negotiations to date wrapped up on Saturday.

The talks in Doha, Qatar, lasted much longer than planned and longer than any previous attempt to end the 17-year conflict, and both sides publicly reported progress — a rarity. The chief American negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, said on Twitter that the talks were “more productive than they have been in the past” and he hoped they would resume shortly.

He also said he was flying to the Afghan capital, Kabul, for consultations with the government.

“We have a number of issues left to work out. Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, and ‘everything’ must include an intra-Afghan dialogue and comprehensive cease-fire,” he said.

Mr. Khalilzad’s comments suggested that the key sticking points were the terms of a Taliban cease-fire and getting the insurgents to give up their longstanding refusal to speak to the Afghan government, which they deride as an American puppet.

Still, this is the first time in nine years of intermittent peace efforts that all sides seem serious about reaching a deal that, in the first phase, would exchange a Taliban cease-fire for a phased withdrawal of American forces. The Taliban would also pledge not to allow international terror groups to use Afghanistan as a launching pad for attacks against the United States.

Then the Afghans and the Taliban would need to detail exactly what the peace will look like in terms of the Taliban sharing power in government and how that might affect an array of other issues, such as the status of women in the country.

“Since the United States started to engage the Taliban, this by far is the closest to a deal,” said Hekmat Khalil Karzai, a former Afghan deputy foreign minister who leads the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies and has been involved in the peace efforts for years.

“On both sides I sense there is seriousness, I sense there is commitment, and I feel there is resolve,” he said.

// posted by montag @ 1:19 PM 0 Comments

President Trump’s defeat in his border-wall standoff with Congress has clouded his already perilous path to a second term in 2020, undercutting Mr. Trump’s cherished image as a forceful leader and deft negotiator, and emboldening alike his Democratic challengers and Republican dissenters who hope to block his re-election.

The longest government shutdown in history inflicted severe political damage on the president, dragging down his poll numbers even among Republicans and stirring concern among party leaders about his ability to navigate the next two years of divided government. Mr. Trump, close associates acknowledge, appears without a plan for mounting a strong campaign in 2020, or for persuading the majority of Americans who view him negatively to give him another chance.

Compounding the harm to Mr. Trump on Friday was the indictment of Roger Stone, his political adviser for several decades, on charges of lying to investigators and obstructing the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The indictment was taken by some Republicans as the surest sign yet that Mr. Mueller’s investigation is likely to grow more painful to Mr. Trump and his associates before it wraps up.

Mr. Trump still commands the loyalty of a passionate electoral base that has rallied to him in trying moments, and advisers believe he will have room to right himself while Democratic presidential candidates are mired in a long nomination fight. Yet they are also growing anxious that he could face a draining primary of his own next year.

Several prominent Trump antagonists are actively urging other Republicans to take on the president, and a popular governor, Larry Hogan of Maryland, has indicated he is newly open to their entreaties.

In a sign of the White House’s determination to project party unity, a top Trump campaign official, Bill Stepien, traveled to the Republican National Committee meeting in New Mexico this week to orchestrate an ornamental resolution of support for the president. It passed unanimously on Friday afternoon, hailing Mr. Trump for his “effective presidency” even as his shutdown strategy collapsed.

David Winston, a Republican pollster, said the burden was now on Mr. Trump to restore his stature as a leader by forging some kind of border-security deal with Democrats, and to deliver a stronger message on the economy.

“Leadership means results,” Mr. Winston said. “When you have a shutdown, people look at it, basically, as: the political system has failed.”

For now, Mr. Trump remains wholly focused on appeasing his conservative base, comprising perhaps a third of the electorate, despite private G.O.P. polling suggesting that his agenda on immigration has failed to move the country in his favor, Republicans who work closely with the president said.

But Mr. Trump emerged from the shutdown with nothing to show for it, having angered swing voters with his intransigence, while disappointing hard-line supporters by failing to secure any funding for a border wall.

Conservatives still believe that Mr. Trump cannot afford to abandon his crusade for a barrier. Not long before Mr. Trump agreed to reopen the government, Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a White House ally who leads the hard-line Freedom Caucus, argued that the wall fight was vital to the president’s re-election hopes.

“It’s not lost on any of us that a central component of what he said when he ran in 2016 has to be addressed in a meaningful way,” he said in a recent interview.

Privately, some of Mr. Trump’s 2016 aides have said they are pessimistic about his path to 270 electoral votes after his party’s midterm defeats in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. An Associated Press poll on Wednesday showed that Mr. Trump’s overall approval rating had fallen to 34 percent, with his support among Republicans dipping below 80 percent — a startling turn for a president who strives for total control of the G.O.P., and has usually achieved it.

// posted by montag @ 1:35 PM 0 Comments

Significant flight delays were rippling across the Northeast on Friday because of a shortage of air traffic controllers as a result of the government shutdown, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The delays were cascading along the Eastern Seaboard, reaching as far north as Boston. But La Guardia was the only airport that had been closed off to departing flights from other cities because it was so crowded with planes taking off and landing on a weekday morning. Delays on flights into La Guardia were averaging almost an hour and a half, the F.A.A. said.

The delays seemed to be easing late Friday morning. But the disruption was significant and could ratchet up the pressure on political leaders because it showed how the shutdown can reverberate far beyond government workers and affect a large number of people.

The F.A.A. said it was slowing traffic in and out of the airports because of staffing problems at two of its air-traffic control facilities on the East Coast, one near Washington and one in Jacksonville, Fla. Those facilities manage air traffic at high altitudes.

The agency said there had been a slight increase in the number of controllers calling in sick at those facilities on Friday morning.

The control towers at the airports that serve New York City and the central air-traffic control facility on Long Island that monitors those airports were fully staffed, said a person who had been briefed on the situation.

// posted by montag @ 1:32 PM 0 Comments

As a self-described political conservative, Reagan Larson might seem to be a natural fit for the Republican Party. The 19-year-old college student from South Dakota grew up in a Catholic household that objected to same-sex marriage, and she remains firmly opposed to abortion.

But in many ways, that is where the ideological similarities end. Ms. Larson, a dual major in biology and Spanish at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., does not oppose the legalization of marriage equality. She views climate change as undeniable, believes “immigrants make our country richer,” and disagrees with her parents on the need for a border wall.

Ms. Larson is part of Generation Z, one of the most ethnically diverse and progressive age groups in American history. People born after 1996 tend to espouse similar views to the age cohort just ahead of them, the Millennials, but they are far more open to social change than older generations have been, according to the findings of a new report by the Pew Research Center. The findings mark a shift that could substantially reshape the nation’s political and economic landscape.

According to the study — which was based on online surveys of 920 youths aged 13 to 17 and nearly 11,000 adults 18 or older — only 30 percent of Generation Z respondents said they approved of President Trump’s performance; more than half believed humans were fueling climate change; and 70 percent said they wanted the government to do more to solve the nation’s problems. Those views roughly mirror attitudes held by Millennials, and together, the two age groups may add up to a powerful voting bloc at odds with Republican orthodoxy, political scientists say.

“This should be an alert to the Republican Party as they think about generational replacement,” said Elizabeth Bennion, a professor of political science at Indiana University South Bend.

Each succeeding generation of Americans tends to be more progressive than those that came before, Ms. Bennion noted, a trend that potentially poses a long-term threat to the Republican Party’s power.

// posted by montag @ 1:41 PM 0 Comments

Holding, a Raleigh Republican, filed a resolution last week seeking a constitutional amendment limiting the terms of representatives and senators to 12 years in each chamber. Holding’s resolution is one of at least nine filed by Republicans in the first weeks of the new Congress hoping to alter the constitution to restrict the terms of representatives and senators.

“The problem here that we’re trying to address is folks don’t have a limited horizon. They don’t have a deadline. If you watch Washington, things are always done on a deadline. Whether it’s a cliff or expiration date, that’s when things get done,” Holding said in an interview with The News & Observer. “That would keep people focused and it would remove the folks who’ve kind of lost track and are more about staying in office rather than about being effective.”

Critics contend that term limits, especially short ones, could give unelected people on the Hill — like lobbyists and staff members — more power than elected officials. But they are popular among the public. A February 2018 poll found that 82 percent of Americans back term limits for Congress.

With public approval of Congress hovering near 20 percent and a partial government shutdown now the longest in history, lawmakers can easily back popular term limits — especially given the long odds that any proposal makes it through the amendment process.

The Constitution was last amended in 1992 (deferring congressional pay changes until the next Congress) and before that 1971 (setting the voting age at 18).

Holding’s bill, like most of the others, would not be retroactive, meaning any member’s service time would begin after the amendment was ratified.

Reps. Mark Meadows, Ted Budd and Richard Hudson are co-sponsors for Rep. Francis Rooney’s term limits measure in the House. It calls for a maximum of three terms in the House and two terms in the Senate.

Sen. Thom Tillis is one of seven co-sponsors on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s proposal to limit representatives to three two-year terms and senators to two six-year terms.

“It is past time for members of Congress to amend the Constitution and impose long-needed term limits on its members,” Tillis said in a statement.

While the proposals vary in specifics — one calls for four terms in the House, one calls for 12 years total in Congress, one would just give Congress the power to set term limits without a specific number — they share a common goal: limiting the time people can serve in D.C.

// posted by montag @ 1:19 PM 0 Comments

Some of the drugs were hidden in passenger cars, concealed in trucks in cans of jalapeños or stashed in tanker trains with ordinary loads of cooking oil. Others were sent beneath the border in sophisticated tunnels.

The 10 weeks of testimony at the trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo, have revealed that his innovative smuggling network typically went through legal checkpoints — not isolated stretches of the border where a wall might be an obstacle.

President Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southwestern border has not been mentioned at the trial, but it has lurked in the background of Mr. Guzmán’s prosecution, a watershed moment in America’s war on drugs.

The trial, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, is the first time that American federal prosecutors have publicly revealed the inner workings of Mr. Guzmán’s Sinaloa drug cartel, offering the most extensive details yet on the organization’s structure, financing and distribution methods. In doing so, prosecutors have relied on firsthand experts: a long list of Mr. Guzmán’s own former underlings and allies.

Though Mr. Trump has primarily pitched his border wall as a way to stop illegal immigration, he has recently suggested that it would also help allay the cross-border drug trade.

“If we build a powerful and fully designed see-through steel barrier on our southern border, the crime rate and drug problem in our country would be quickly and greatly reduced,” he said on Saturday. “Some say it could be cut in half.”

He added, “We can stop heroin.”

But the Guzmán trial has indicated that stopping the flow of drugs into the United States might be more complicated than that. Through the testimony of people who worked with Mr. Guzmán, prosecutors have shown that his cartel for decades was endlessly creative, constantly inventing new methods to circumvent detection.

“What you’re hearing in this trial is what front-line border workers observe throughout,” said Doris Meissner, who served as the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000 and now works at the Migration Policy Institute, an advocacy group.

Ms. Meissner added, “The idea that people are walking drugs across the border as though they are illegal immigrants who would then be stopped by a wall across the border, that is not the pattern.”

// posted by montag @ 1:47 PM 0 Comments