Intensified battles are expected in Washington this week over the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe and over lawmakers’ access to President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, Democrats are demanding disclosure on both fronts and encountering resistance from Republicans as well as attorneys for the president.
…

Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings, the silver-haired Democrat who helped shepherd South Carolina through desegregation as governor and went on to serve six terms in the U.S. Senate, has died. He was 97. 

 

Family spokesman Andy Brack, who also served at times for Hollings as spokesman during his Senate career, said Hollings died at his home on the Isle of Palms early Saturday.

Hollings, whose long and colorful political career included an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, retired from the Senate in 2005, one of the last of the larger-than-life Democrats who dominated politics in the South. 

 

He had served 38 years and two months, making him the eighth longest-serving senator in U.S. history.

Nevertheless, Hollings remained the junior senator from South Carolina for most of his term. The senior senator was Strom Thurmond, first elected in 1954. He retired in January 2003 at age 100 as the longest-serving senator in history. 

 

In his final Senate speech, made in 2004, Hollings lamented that lawmakers came to spend much of their time raising money for the next election, calling money “the main culprit, the cancer on the body politic.” 

‘Real, real trouble’

 

“We don’t have time for each other, we don’t have time for constituents except for the givers. … We’re in real, real trouble,” he said.

 

Hollings was a sharp-tongued orator whose rhetorical flourishes in the deep accent of his home state enlivened many a Washington debate, but his influence in Washington never reached the levels he hoped. 

 

He sometimes blamed that failure on his background, rising to power as he did in the South in the 1950s as the region bubbled with anger over segregation. 

 

However, South Carolina largely avoided the racial violence that afflicted some other Deep South states during the turbulent 1960s. 

 

Hollings campaigned against desegregation when running for governor in 1958. He built a national reputation as a moderate when, in his farewell address as governor, he pleaded with the legislature to peacefully accept integration of public schools and the admission of the first black student to Clemson University.  

“This General Assembly must make clear South Carolina’s choice, a government of laws rather than a government of men,” he told lawmakers. Shortly afterward, Clemson was peacefully integrated. 

 

In his 2008 autobiography, Making Government Work, Hollings wrote that in the 1950s “no issue dominated South Carolina more than race” and that he worked for a balanced approach. 

 

I was 'Mister-in-Between.' The governor had to appear to be in charge; yet the realities were not on his side,'' he wrote.I returned to my basic precept … the safety of the people is the supreme law. I was determined to keep the peace and avoid bloodshed.”

In the Senate, Hollings gained a reputation as a skilled insider with keen intellectual powers. He chaired the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and held seats on the Appropriations and Budget committees.

Troublesome remarks 

 

But his sharp tongue sometimes got him in trouble. He once called Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, the “senator from the B’nai B’rith,” and in 1983 he used a derogatory term for unlawful immigrants in referring to the presidential campaign supporters of former Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif.

Hollings began his quest for the presidency in April 1983 but dropped out the following March after dismal showings in Iowa and New Hampshire. 

 

Early in his Senate career, he built a record as a hawk and lobbied hard for military dollars for South Carolina, one of the poorest states in the nation. 

 

Hollings originally supported American involvement in Vietnam, but his views changed over the years as it became clear there would be no American victory. 

 

Hollings, who made three trips to the war zone, said he learned a lesson there. 

 

It's a mistake to try to build and destroy a nation at the same time,'' he wrote in his autobiography, warning that America is nowrepeating the same wrongheaded strategy in Iraq.” 

 

Despite his changed views, Hollings remained a strong supporter of national defense, which he saw as the main business of government.

In 1969 he drew national attention when he exposed hunger in his own state by touring several cities, helping lay the groundwork for the Women, Infants and Children feeding program. 

 

A year later, his views drew wider currency with the publication of his first book, The Case Against Hunger. 

 

In 1982, Hollings proposed an across-the-board federal spending freeze to cut the deficit, a proposal that was a cornerstone of his failed presidential bid.  

He helped create the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and write the National Coastal Zone Management Act. Hollings also attached his name to the Gramm-Rudman bill aimed at balancing the federal budget. 

 

Hollings angered many of his constituents in 1991 when he opposed the congressional resolution authorizing President George Bush to use force against Iraq. 

 

In his later years, port security was one of his main concerns. 

 

As he prepared to leave office, he told The Associated Press: “People ask you your legacy or your most embarrassing moment. I never, ever lived that way. … I’m not trying to get remembered.” 

After the Senate

 

He kept busy after leaving the Senate, helping the Medical University of South Carolina raise money for the cancer center that bears his name and lecturing at the Charleston School of Law. 

 

Hollings’ one political defeat came in 1962 when he lost in a primary to Sen. Olin Johnston. After Johnston died, Hollings won a special election in 1966 and went to the Senate at age 44, winning the first of his six full terms two years later. 

 

Ernest Frederick Hollings was born in Charleston, S.C., on Jan. 1, 1922. His father was a paper products dealer but the family business went broke during the Depression. 

 

Hollings graduated from The Citadel, the state’s military college in Charleston, in 1942. He immediately entered the Army and was decorated for his service during World War II. Back home, he earned a law degree from the University of South Carolina in 1947. 

 

The next year, he was elected to the state House at age 26. He was elected lieutenant governor six years later and governor in 1958 at age 36. 

 

As governor, he actively lured business, helped balance the budget for the first time since Reconstruction and improved public education. 

 

Hollings had four children with his first wife, the late Patricia Salley Hollings. He is survived by three of his four children. His second wife, “Peatsy,” died in 2012. 

 

A funeral home handling arrangements said that after a three-hour visitation April 14 in Charleston, the senator’s body will lie in repose April 15 at the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia, with a funeral to follow the next day at the Citadel in Charleston.
…

President Donald Trump warned on Saturday that a Democratic victory in 2020 could “leave Israel out there,” as he highlighted his pro-Israel actions in an effort to make the case for Jewish voters to back his re-election.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump touted his precedent-shredding actions to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and recognition last month of Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights, a strategic plateau that Israel seized from Syria in 1967.

“We got you something that you wanted,” Trump said of the embassy move, adding, “Unlike other presidents, I keep my promises.”

The group, backed by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, supported Trump’s 2016 campaign and is preparing to spend millions on his 2020 effort.

“I know that the Republican Jewish Coalition will help lead our party to another historic victory,” Trump said. “We need more Republicans. Let’s go, so we can win everything.”

​Adelson and standing ovations

Jewish voters in the U.S. have traditionally sided heavily with Democrats — and are often ideologically liberal — but Republicans are hoping to narrow the gap next year, in part as Trump cites actions that he says demonstrate support for Israel.

Trump earned standing ovations for recounting both the embassy move and the Golan Heights recognition.

Trump noted it had long been a priority for Adelson and his wife, Miriam.

“That is the most important thing that’s ever happened in their life,” Trump said. “They love Israel.”

​Attacking Dems, mocking Omar

Trump’s speech comes weeks after he suggested Democrats “hate” Jews. His remark followed an internal fight among Democrats over how to respond to comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., that some criticized as anti-Semitic.

Trump mockingly thanked Omar as he began his speech, before adding, “Oh, I forgot. She doesn’t like Israel, I forgot, I’m sorry. No, she doesn’t like Israel, does she? Please, I apologize.”

He also accused Democrats of allowing anti-Semitism to “take root” in their party.

Despite his criticism of Democrats, Trump has faced his own criticism from the Jewish community. Trump was slow to condemn white supremacists who marched violently in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. The previous year, he circulated an image of a six-pointed star alongside a photo of Hillary Clinton, a pile of money and the words “most corrupt candidate ever.”

When he addressed the RJC in 2015 he said he didn’t expect to earn their support because he wouldn’t take their money. 

“You want to control your politicians, that’s fine,” Trump said at the time. Ultimately, the group and many of its donors backed Trump.

Before Trump’s appearance, people assembled for the event carried signs with “We are Jews for Trump” and “Trump” written in Hebrew. Dozens of men and several women wore red yarmulkes with “Trump” in white that were distributed at the event.

​Israel’s election

Trump also took credit for eliminating hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians and for pulling the U.S. out of several U.N. organizations, the U.N. Human Rights Council and UNESCO, citing anti-Israel bias in their agendas.

Trump criticized some 2020 Democrats who have suggesting they would re-enter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, from which Trump withdrew the United States. The agreement was fiercely opposed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has cheered as Trump re-imposed stringent new sanctions on the country that Israel regards as an existential threat. Trump is closely aligned with Netanayu, who’s seeking to return power in Tuesday’s national election.

Trump predicted that election is “gonna be close,” adding it features “Two good people,” seemingly referring to Netanyahu and his chief threat to Netanyahu’s coalition, former Israeli army chief of staff, Benny Gantz.

Trump met privately with Adelson before speaking, according to an official. Adelson has cancer and has been in poor health, but he and his wife attended Trump’s remarks, receiving a standing ovation when they entered the ballroom.

The Adelsons gave Trump’s campaign $30 million in 2016. They followed that by contributing $100 million to the Republican Party for the 2018 midterm elections.

Introducing Trump, former Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., the chairman of the RJC, led the audience in an adapted version of the Passover reading “Dayenu,” as he recounted what Trump had done for Israel.

Jewish voters

Stuart Weil, a Jewish man from Fresno, California, said Americans have traditionally been very supportive of Israel but “the progressive, liberal wing of the Democratic Party” is changing that.

Weil, who wore a blue Trump-style hat that read, “Making Israel & America Great Again,” says he’s a Republican because of the party’s strong stance on Israel.

According to AP Votecast, a survey of more than 115,000 midterm voters and 3,500 Jewish voters nationwide, voters who identified as Jewish broke for Democrats over Republicans by a wide margin, 72 percent to 26 percent, in 2016.

Over the past decade, Jewish voters have shown stability in their partisanship, according to data from Pew Research Center. Jewish voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by a roughly 2-1 ratio.
…

Giving himself credit for tough diplomacy, President Donald Trump is describing a burst of activity by Mexican authorities to keep Central American migrants from getting to the U.S. border.

That’s an apparent mirage as Trump retreats from his latest threat to seal off the U.S. from Mexico.

Trump was wrong when he said last week that Mexico was doing “NOTHING” about migrants coming north. Mexico markedly tightened migration controls during the Obama administration and detained more than 30,000 foreigners in the first three months of this year.

And it’s not evident now that Mexico has suddenly cracked down as a result of his threat, “apprehending everybody” and making “absolutely terrific progress” in just a matter of days, as Trump put it Friday. Mexico’s apprehensions of foreigners have not surged.

During his visit to the border in Southern California Friday, Trump denounced a landmark immigration case he blamed on “Judge Flores, whoever you may be.” The case in question was named for Jenny Flores, a migrant teenager from El Salvador in the 1980s, not a judge.

Trump’s recent statements on border matters and how they compare with the facts:

Mexico

Trump, on why he is pulling back on sealing the border imminently: “Because Mexico has been absolutely terrific for the last four days. They’re apprehending everybody. Yesterday they apprehended 1,400 people. The day before was 1,000. And if they apprehend people at their southern border where they don’t have to walk through, that’s a big home run. We can handle it from there. It’s really good. … Mexico, for the last four days, it’s never happened like that in 35 years.” —remarks to reporters Friday.

Trump: “Mexico has brought people back, they’ve told people you can’t come in. And that’s happened really, they’ve done, as I understand it, over 1,000 today, over 1,000 people yesterday, over 1,000 people the day before that. Before that they never did anything.” — remarks to reporters Thursday.

The facts: This depiction of Mexico going from strikeout to home run is inaccurate at both ends.

Mexico reports that its interception and detention of migrants from the south are “about average” in recent months. Over the first three days of April, it apprehended 1,259 foreigners — not 1,000 or more a day, as Trump claimed.

“There is no very substantive change,” Mexico’s foreign secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, said this week. “There has not been a drastic change.”

“I don’t know what (Trump) was referring to,” he added.

Mexico is requiring migrants to register with authorities, but that’s been the case since President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office Dec. 1, Ebrard said. 

“What Mexico is doing as far as the review of the southern border — well, it’s the same thing it has been doing since this government began.” On Thursday, Mexico’s ambassador to the U.S., Martha Bárcena, told The Associated Press her country is working to make its own border “more orderly” but “migration will never be stopped.”

Mexico took a substantial step in 2014, implementing a “Southern Border Plan” that established checkpoints and raids to discourage migrants from riding trains or buses from Guatemala. Its detention of foreigners, almost all Central Americans, surged to 198,141 over the next year, from 127,149. Last year, it detained 138,612.

The White House has refused to substantiate Trump’s claim about Mexico’s migrant apprehensions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday credited Mexico with the “will” to help stem migration, but he did not cite results. Even as Trump claimed a Mexican crackdown, Pompeo said the U.S. needs to see action from Mexico, telling Fox News that it’s “one thing to talk about it.”

Trump has abandoned his vow to shut the border imminently. He now says that if Mexico does not continue cooperating on migrants, he will try to put heavy duties on autos from Mexico and revive his border-closure threat if that doesn’t work.

The Flores settlement

Trump: “The Flores decision is a disaster, I have to tell you. Judge Flores, whoever you may be, that decision is a disaster for our country, a disaster.” — remarks at a meeting with local officials in Southern California.

The facts: There’s no Judge Flores involved. Jenny Flores , a 15-year-old El Salvador native, was held in what her advocates said were substandard conditions, contending she was strip-searched in custody and housed with men. They launched a class-action lawsuit on behalf of migrant children in the country illegally. Her mother was a housekeeper in the U.S. who feared deportation if she picked up her daughter.

The case worked its way to the Supreme Court, which sided with the government and against the girl’s advocates. But the case gave rise to an agreement in 1997 setting conditions for the detention of migrant children and the codifying of those conditions in law a decade later. It generally bars the government from keeping children in immigration detention for more than 20 days and guides how they are to be treated.
…

Former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner has been ordered to register as a sex offender as he nears the end of a 21-month prison sentence for having illicit online contact with a 15-year-old girl. 

 

A New York City judge on Friday designated Weiner a Level 1 sex offender, meaning he’s thought to have a low risk of reoffending. 

 

Weiner must register for a minimum of 20 years. He’s required to verify his address every year and visit a police station every three years to have a new picture taken. 

 

Weiner didn’t attend Friday’s court hearing. He’s in a halfway house after serving most of his sentence at a prison in Massachusetts. He’s due to be released May 14. 

 

Before being sentenced, the Democrat said he’d been a “very sick man.”
…

Former CIA operative, author and activist Valerie Plame said Friday she is considering a 2020 run for an open U.S. congressional seat in New Mexico.

Plame told The Associated Press she is spending time with residents and will make a decision soon. The seat is currently held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Ben Rey Lujan, who is stepping down to run for U.S. Senate.

“Right now, I am going around and meeting with people,” said Plame, a Democrat. “I have a lot to learn and I would like another opportunity to serve my country.”

Plame became a national figure after her identity as a CIA operative was leaked by an official in President George W. Bush’s administration in 2003 in an effort to discredit her then-husband Joe Wilson.

Wilson is a former diplomat who criticized Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Plame left the agency in 2005.

Plame says she’d be honored to represent the sprawling district, which covers all of northern New Mexico, parts of the Navajo Nation and a large portion of state’s east side.

She would face several Democratic contenders if she decides to run. State Rep. Joseph Sanchez and businessman Mark McDonald have already announced they are candidates and Santa Fe District Attorney Marco Serna is considering a bid.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, however, was convicted of lying to investigators and obstruction of justice following the 2003 leak. President Donald Trump issued a full pardon to Libby last year.

In 2017, the Wilsons launched an unsuccessful crowdfunding effort to buy Twitter so Trump couldn’t use it. At the time, Plame said if she didn’t get enough to purchase a majority of shares, she would explore options to buy “a significant stake” and champion the proposal at Twitter’s annual shareholder meeting. Plame and Wilson divorced later that year.

Plame is the author of the memoir “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.”

The book was made into a 2010 movie starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
…

Sen. Bernie Sanders made a trip to the Apollo Theater in Harlem to pay tribute to Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett and the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but along the way slammed President Donald Trump as a racist.

The Democratic presidential contender was at the Jazz Foundation’s “A Great Night in Harlem” annual gala where Belafonte and Bennett were honored on Thursday night.

Sanders recounted the great strides King made toward racial harmony, but said that tolerance has lost steps over the past couple of years, and put the blame at the feet of Trump.

He said: “It’s hard to believe that we have a president of the United States who is, in fact, a racist.”

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

 
…

U.S. President Donald Trump plans to nominate former pizza chain executive and Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, where he will help set interest rates for the world’s biggest economy.

“I have recommended him highly for the Fed,” Trump said in a press conference Thursday. “I’ve told my folks that’s the man.”

Trump has been a vocal and strident critic of the Fed’s rate hikes under Jerome Powell, whom the president picked two years ago to chair the U.S. central bank. Trump’s other Fed appointees have also supported the Powell Fed’s rate hikes, which the president has said hurt the economy.

This year the Fed has put rate hikes on hold, citing a slowing economy and risks from overseas. Trump, meanwhile, has continued to rail against the Fed, even as he has said he will nominate conservative commentator Stephen Moore, a proponent of rate cuts, for a second vacant seat on the Fed Board.

Asked if he is sending a signal to the Fed with the pair of nominations, Trump said: “None whatsoever. He’s a highly respected man. He’s a friend of mine. He’s somebody that gets it, and I hope everything goes well — but Herman Cain is a very good guy.”

Board members have a vote on setting interest rates every time U.S. central bankers meet, making them among America’s most powerful officials for economic policy. At full strength there are 19 Fed policymakers, including 12 regional Fed bank presidents.

Cain in February told Fox Business Network he believed deflation is a bigger worry, a view that suggests he is not inclined to support rate hikes aimed at keeping inflation in check.

Still, Cain’s policy views are not entirely clear: in the same February interview, he said he wanted to use wages as a factor in deciding monetary policy, which in the context of recently rising pay could suggest he would support rate hikes.

Cain’s history

Cain, who is 73, has little direct experience with monetary policy, but what track record he does have suggests a penchant for tighter, not looser, policy.

In the 1990s he served as a director at the Kansas City Fed, one of the 12 regional Fed banks that help process payments in the U.S. banking system and whose presidents take turns voting on rate policy. He chaired the board from 1995 to 1996, when its president was the famously hawkish Thomas Hoenig.

Minutes of meetings during that period, obtained by Reuters from the Fed, show that the bank’s directors were among those who repeatedly asked the Washington-based Board of Governors to raise rates when most of the boards of directors for the other Fed banks opposed any hike. The concern, according to the minutes, was that continued economic growth could produce price pressures that needed to be contained by tighter policy.

Cain made his fortune as chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza before launching a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

He led opinion polls for a while during the Republican nominating contests, buoyed by his signature 9-9-9 tax proposal, which would have levied a flat 9 percent corporate, income and sales tax.

Romney criticism

But his popularity slipped amid sexual harassment allegations from several women, which he denied as “completely false.”

Cain’s likely nomination drew criticism from Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney.

“I doubt that will be a nomination,” Romney told Politico. “But if it were a nomination, you can bet the interest rates he would be pushing for. … If Herman Cain were on the Fed, you’d know the interest rate would soon be 9-9-9.” 
…

U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio on Thursday became the latest Democrat to jump into the race for the party’s presidential nomination, joining a crowded field vying to challenge Republican Donald Trump in 2020. 

The pool of Democratic candidates for the White House is among the largest and most diverse ever.

It includes female U.S. senators, a current and a former governor, African-Americans, a Hispanic and a young gay mayor, and is likely to grow before the U.S. primary season gets underway next year. 

 

The Democratic nominating convention opens on July 13, 2020, in Milwaukee, Wis. Here are the party’s main contenders vying to be on the ballot. 

Tim Ryan

Ryan, 45, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio in November 2002 at age 29. He has won re-election seven times and currently serves on the Appropriations Committee.

Ryan launched his campaign for president on a platform of investing in public education and providing affordable health care. 

A moderate Democrat, Ryan mounted an unsuccessful challenge in 2016 for the Democratic leadership of the House against Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California. 

Beto O’Rourke

During a frenetic if failed campaign for the U.S. Senate last year in Texas, O’Rourke, 46, used his youth, energy and camera-friendly looks to become a media darling while setting fundraising records and drawing support from a range of celebrities. 

 

Despite a reputation forged in his three terms in Congress as a pragmatic centrist, O’Rourke launched his campaign in Iowa on a decidedly left-leaning platform, calling for health and immigration reform, a higher minimum wage and an all-out battle to curb climate change. 

 

His resolutely positive message, with calls for “kindness and decency” — along with criticisms of an “unfair, unjust and racist capitalist economy” — have drawn large and often youthful crowds wherever he appears.

​Kirsten Gillibrand

The New York senator, 52, had made a name campaigning against sexual abuse, especially in the military, even before the #MeToo movement gained national prominence. A fierce Trump critic, Gillibrand is making gender and women’s issues a hallmark of her campaign. 

 

She has called for a more egalitarian society and wants to improve the nation’s health and education systems.

Bernie Sanders

The self-described democratic socialist, 77, was an outsider when the 2016 Democratic primaries began. But he gave favorite Hillary Clinton a run for her money with his calls for a “political revolution” and battled her down to the wire. 

 

Sanders won passionate support among young liberals with his calls for universal health care, a $15 minimum wage and free public university education.

​Amy Klobuchar

The 58-year-old granddaughter of an iron miner, Klobuchar is a former prosecutor with an unpretentious demeanor. 

 

She has quietly gained attention in Washington as a centrist. Klobuchar is known for putting partisanship aside to pass legislation, something that has earned her a devoted following in Minnesota. 

 

Klobuchar has promised more stringent gun laws and set a target of universal health care.

Elizabeth Warren

At 69, the U.S. Senate’s consumer protection champion from Massachusetts is on the party’s left flank. She built her reputation by holding Wall Street accountable for its missteps.  

 

Warren is considered to have one of the best campaign organizations of any Democrat. Her campaign has been dogged, however, by her past claims of Native American heritage, and Trump mockingly refers to her as “Pocahontas.”

Cory Booker

The New Jersey senator, 49, announced his candidacy Feb. 1, evoking the civil rights movement as he promised to work to unite a divided America. 

 

Often compared to former President Barack Obama, Booker began his career as a community activist and rose to prominence as mayor of Newark, N.J. 

 

A talented orator, Booker was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013, the first African-American senator from the Eastern state.

Kamala Harris

The barrier-breaking senator from California who aspires to be the nation’s first black female president announced her candidacy on a day honoring slain civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. 

 

The daughter of an Indian immigrant medical researcher mother and a Jamaican economist father, Harris, 54, began her career as a district attorney in San Francisco before serving as California’s attorney general.

​Pete Buttigieg

The South Bend, Ind., mayor, 37, joined the race with a resolutely forward-looking and optimistic message to counter Trump’s darker vision. 

 

A Rhodes Scholar, Buttigieg would be the first openly gay presidential nominee of either major party. 

 

A U.S. Navy Reserve officer, he put his mayoral duties aside to serve in Afghanistan in 2014.

Other candidates

Also in the race are former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, 44; U.S. Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, 55; U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, 37, of Hawaii; former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, 67; Jay Inslee, 68, the governor of Washington state; Wayne Messam, 44, the mayor of Miramar, Fla.; self-help author Marianne Williamson, 66; and technology executive Andrew Yang, 44.  

Waiting in the wings

Among the big Democratic guns who have yet to commit is former Vice President Joe Biden, who leads most surveys of Democratic voters. 

 

Biden, who combines experience and widespread popularity, would be expected to poll well in some of the blue-collar Midwestern states that propelled Trump to the presidency in 2016. 
…

President Donald Trump on Thursday retreated from his threat to immediately close the U.S. southern border with Mexico to thwart illegal migration, instead telling Mexico it has a year to curb the flow of illicit drugs and surge of migrants to the United States or he would impose tariffs on cars it was exporting to the U.S.

Trump backed off days of Twitter comments saying he was about to close the border after White House economic advisers and Republican lawmakers warned him that closing the border would significantly affect the U.S. economy, the world’s largest.

White House officials had tried to figure out a way that Trump could halt undocumented immigrants from entering the U.S. while not obstructing the flow of nearly $1.7 billion of goods and services crossing the border each day, along with nearly a half-million legal workers, students, shoppers and tourists.

Trump told reporters at the White House that Mexico “could stop” migrant caravans from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador “right at their southern border” to halt their passage through Mexico to the United States.

After often attacking Mexico as doing “nothing” to stem the surge of migrants heading to the U.S., Trump in recent days praised the southern U.S. neighbor for getting tougher in stopping them before they could get to the U.S. to file for asylum protection.

As for Mexico’s future action against migrants, Trump said, “If they don’t do it, we’ll tariff the cars.”

He said Mexico has a “one-year warning to stop incoming drugs; otherwise we’ll close the border.”

Trump’s walk-back on immediately closing the border was his second retreat on a major policy issue in the last week.

A week ago, he said Republican lawmakers would adopt a new plan to repeal and replace the national health care policies that were the signature domestic legislative achievement of his Democratic predecessor, former President Barack Obama.

But when Trump’s legislative supporters in Congress said they had no intention of considering a new health care overhaul before the 2020 presidential election 19 months from now, the president changed his mind and said there would not be a health care vote until 2021, by which time he hopes to have won a second term in the White House.

Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters defended his call for closing the U.S.-Mexican border this week, but lawmakers who normally back his policies were not among them.

“Closing down the border would have a potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said. “I would hope that we would not be doing that sort of thing.”

Economists outside the government also predicted economic havoc, with Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, saying “a full shutdown of the U.S.-Mexican border of more than several weeks would be the fodder for recessions in both Mexico and the U.S.”
…

It will be 10 months before U.S. voters begin the process of choosing a Democratic Party presidential nominee in the caucuses and primaries that start in February 2020. But already 15 or more Democrats are aggressively campaigning to be the one to take on President Donald Trump next year. The 2020 Democratic field is a diverse mix of women, men, minorities and contenders with varying levels of political experience. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.
…

Some investigators in the nearly two-year probe of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign say the findings in a report submitted by special counsel Robert Mueller are more damaging for the president than what has been suggested by Attorney General William Barr, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported late Wednesday.

Barr issued a four-page summary March 24 of the Mueller report and its investigation into allegations the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the election in Trump’s favor. Barr said Mueller’s team found no evidence that Trump or anyone associated with his campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia.

The attorney general also said Mueller did not conclude that the president illegally interfered with the investigation, but added that he was also not exonerated. Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided there was not enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.

But the Times and the Post say Mueller’s investigators have told associates that Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry. The Post says the members of Mueller’s team believe the evidence they gathered on obstruction was “alarming and significant.” The Times says in its report that the investigators are concerned that because Barr’s summary was “the first narrative” of the team’s findings, the public’s views will be fixed before the final report is released.

The attorney general has vowed to publicly issue the report by mid-April after he and his staff take out any sensitive information, such as grand jury testimonies. But the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee voted Wednesday along party lines to authorize Chairman Jerry Nadler to issue subpoenas to obtain the full copy of Mueller’s final report and its supporting evidence.

While Trump has left it to Barr to decide whether to release the complete report, the president is expected to assert what is known as executive privilege over some portions of records other congressional committees are seeking as part of their investigation of the administration. That has set the stage for a showdown between Democrats in Congress and the White House, raising the specter that the issue may ultimately end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The committee also authorized Nadler to subpoena documents and testimony from five of Trump’s former aides, including former political adviser Steve Bannon and former White House counsel Donald McGahn.

Despite Barr’s determination that he was not fully exonerated by Mueller’s report, Trump has boasted that he has been fully cleared of any wrongdoing in the probe.
…

A handful of Democratic presidential candidates are touting the amount of money they’ve raised in the first fundraising period of a 2020 primary fight that will last into next spring. The totals for the first quarter, which ran through March 31, are the first measure of how candidates are faring.

Details for the entire field won’t be known until candidates file their required disclosures with the Federal Election Commission by April 15, but here are some takeaways from what the campaigns have released so far:

BERNIE REALLY IS A FRONT-RUNNER

Bernie Sanders joins former Vice President Joe Biden atop many polls of prospective Democratic primary voters. But Sanders has something Biden doesn’t have (yet): a campaign operation raking in cash.

The senator from Vermont, who showed surprising fundraising heft in his upstart challenge to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton four years ago, raised more than $18 million in the 41 days between his official campaign launch and March 31, giving him $28 million cash on hand.

Those totals are expected to lead the Democratic field, putting pressure on other heavyweights, including Biden, who is still deciding whether to run and who is navigating accusations that he’s acted inappropriately toward women.

Besides Sanders, Sen. Kamala Harris of California put up an impressive $12 million haul. Former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas didn’t offer a fundraising total Tuesday, but aides said he raised more than $1 million over the weekend and previously said he raised more than $6 million in his first 24 hours as a candidate.

Sanders’ haul shows that his base is just as enthusiastic as it was four years ago. In fact, it may be growing. The senator’s campaign noted that of his 525,000 unique donors, about 20% are new, about 100,000 are registered independents and about 20,000 are registered Republicans.

As impressive as Sanders’ fundraising has been, it’s not as large as previous presidential contenders who were more reliant on big donors.

In her first quarter as a candidate ahead of 2016, Clinton topped $45 million. In 2007, when then-Sen. Barack Obama and Clinton were beginning their long battle for the 2008 nomination, the favored Clinton opened with an initial fundraising quarter of $36 million, while the underdog Obama pulled in $26 million.

EXPECTATIONS GAME: MAYOR PETE WINS

Sanders’ fundraising haul set the curve for all candidates and will give pause to some of the other perceived heavyweights in the field, particularly his fellow senators Harris, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. (Harris is the only candidate of that group to release her fundraising totals.)

But the biggest winner may be Pete Buttigieg, an unlikely headline-grabber even among a group of lesser-known candidates that includes governors and members of Congress.

The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, raised $7 million, calling it “a great look for our first quarter.” That might be an understatement.

Such a sum ensures Buttigieg can finance a legitimate campaign operation for months as long as he’s not a profligate spender. (Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker learned in the 2015-16 Republican presidential campaign that being an early fundraising leader is no guarantee of success; he spent big, ran out of money and dropped out before the Iowa caucuses.)

Just as important as the bottom line: Buttigieg said he has almost 160,000 unique donors, a mark that meets the new grassroots fundraising thresholds that the Democratic National Committee has set for candidates to qualify for the initial summer debates.

SMALL DONORS RULE THE DAY

It’s a new day in Democratic politics, with small donors carrying the day.

Sanders touts that he’s held zero traditional fundraisers and has an average donation of $20 — less than 1% of the $2800 maximum. Sanders’ campaign says the senator got 88% of his money from donors who contributed $200 or less.

Buttigieg said his average contribution is about $36, with 64% of his total coming from those donating $200 or less. Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur who’s never held political office, has raised just $1.7 million, but his campaign says it’s come from about 80,000 donors averaging less than $18 per contribution.

This shift largely reflects politicians reacting to a progressive base that looks with suspicion and distrust on big-money donors.

For example, Warren is among the perceived favorites in the field but has promised she’ll be financing her campaign without leaning on traditional donors.

Harris isn’t eschewing high-dollar fundraisers. In a recent stop in Atlanta, she held one small-dollar event but also a high-dollar gathering sponsored by bundlers who’d pulled together at least $28,000 for her campaign. Yet when her campaign aides released fundraising totals for the first quarter, it wasn’t the big checks they touted. Rather, they emphasized that 98% percent of her contributors gave less than $100.

Gordon Giffin, a former Canadian ambassador under President Bill Clinton, recently hosted a fundraiser for Klobuchar in his metro Atlanta home. Traditional fundraising isn’t going away, Giffin said in a recent interview, “but that grassroots money can more than make up for it, and candidates have to prove they can do that.”
…

Chicago Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot’s resounding victory was a clear call for change at City Hall and a historic repudiation of the old-style, insider politics that have long defined the nation’s third-largest city.

Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor who’d never been elected to public office, defeated Cook County Board President and longtime City Council member Toni Preckwinkle on Tuesday with backing from voters across the city. Late results showed Lightfoot, 56, winning every one of the city’s 50 wards.

Lightfoot also made history, becoming the first black woman and the first openly gay person to be elected Chicago mayor. Chicago will become the largest U.S. city to have a black woman serve as mayor when Lightfoot is sworn in May 20. She will join seven other black women currently serving as mayors in major U.S. cities, including Atlanta and New Orleans, and will be the second woman to lead Chicago.

“Out there tonight a lot of little girls and boys are watching. They’re watching us, and they’re seeing the beginning of something, well, a little bit different,” Lightfoot told a jubilant crowd at a downtown hotel. “They’re seeing a city reborn.”

She pledged to make Chicago “a place where your zip code doesn’t determine your destiny,” to address the city’s violence and to “break this city’s endless cycle of corruption” that allows politicians to profit from their office.

Lightfoot emerged as the surprising leader in the first round of voting in February when 14 candidates were on the ballot to succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who decided against running for a third term.

She seized on outrage over a white police officer’s fatal shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald to launch her reformer campaign. She got in the race even before Emanuel announced he wouldn’t seek re-election amid criticism for initially resisting calls to release video of the shooting.

Joyce Ross, 64, a resident of the city’s predominantly black West Side who is a certified nursing assistant, cast her ballot Tuesday for Lightfoot. Ross said she believes Lightfoot will be better able to clean up the police department and curb the city’s violence.

She was also bothered by Preckwinkle’s association with longtime Alderman Ed Burke, who was indicted earlier this year on charges he tried to shake down a restaurant owner who wanted to build in his ward.

“My momma always said birds of a feather flock together,” Ross said.

Preckwinkle said she called Lightfoot Tuesday night to congratulate her on a “hard-fought campaign.”

“While I may be disappointed I’m not disheartened. For one thing, this is clearly a historic night,” she told a crowd gathered in her South Side neighborhood. “Not long ago two African American women vying for this position would have been unthinkable. And while it may be true that we took two very different paths to get here, tonight is about the path forward.”

That path will have major challenges. Chicago has been losing population, particularly in predominantly African American neighborhoods hit hardest by violence and a lack of jobs.

The new mayor will take over a city that faces massive financial problems. She will have just a few months to prepare a new budget, which in 2020 is expected to have a roughly $250 million deficit. Lightfoot also will take over the worst-funded public pensions of any major U.S. city. Chicago’s annual payments to the retirement systems are slated to grow by $1.2 billion by 2023.

She has expressed support for a casino in Chicago and changing the state’s income tax system to a graduated tax, in which higher earners are taxed at a higher rate — two measures lawmakers have tried for unsuccessfully for years to pass.

Violence and policing will also continue to be an issue, and one that has proven to be politically difficult.

The Chicago Police Department must implement a federally monitored consent decree approved in January. It followed the McDonald killing and a U.S. Justice Department review that found a long history of excessive use of force and racial bias by officers.

While voters also elected several newcomers over City Council veterans, Lightfoot will have to work with a council that has a sizable number of members who are the type of politicians she railed against during her campaign.
…

The Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee is set to vote Wednesday to authorize subpoenas to obtain the full report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election from special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as the testimonies of five former White House officials interviewed by the special counsel.

Lawmakers were expected to vote along party lines to authorize Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler to subpoena documents and testimony from five former Trump aides, including former political advisor Steve Bannon and former White House Counsel Donald McGahn.

While Trump has left it to Attorney General William Barr to decide whether to release the complete report, the president is expected to assert what is known as executive privilege over some portions of records other congressional committees are seeking as part of their investigation of the administration. That has set the stage for a showdown between Democrats in Congress and the White House, raising the specter that the issue may ultimately end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

But if the past is any indication, the coming battle is likely to be fought — and eventually settled — through political give and take between the executive and legislative branches of government rather than the courts, said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of an acclaimed book on executive privilege.

“Historically, I found in my studies on executive privilege that presidents and Congress have done a good job of engaging in a negotiating process and settling these matters because they both understood that they had a real incentive not to let this go into the courts and not to let these matters drag on,” Rozell said.

Executive privilege

Executive privilege is the right of the president and his senior advisers to protect certain communications from disclosure to Congress and the courts. While the courts have long recognized that power, as well as Congress’ authority to investigate the executive branch, they’ve been reluctant to decide disputes over access to records between the two branches of government. 

“Courts have typically required the executive and the legislative branches to engage in a good faith back-and-forth accommodation process about the information before the court will ultimately decide the issue of whether certain documents or testimony are required to be provided to the Congress,” said Margaret Taylor, a senior editor at the popular Lawfare legal blog and a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. 

Short of serving a subpoena, Congress has other tools it can use to seek access to information from the executive branch, including the power of appropriation and the power to confirm senior administration officials, Taylor said.

“These are other tools that Congress can use to hasten … the provision of information from the executive branch to the Congress,” Taylor said.

Congress’ power to investigate

While not enshrined in the Constitution, Congress’ power to investigate and obtain confidential information from the executive branch is “extremely broad” and has been recognized as essential to its legislative function, according to the Congressional Research Service.

To obtain information or testimony from executive branch officials, congressional committees initially submit a request. When that fails, Congress can resort to another means of compulsion: subpoenas.

Failure to comply with a congressional subpoena can lead to a vote by the full House or Senate holding the person in contempt of Congress and referring him or her to the Department of Justice for prosecution. If the Justice Department is unwilling to bring charges, Congress can seek a civil judgment from a federal court compelling the individual to respond.

WATCH: Request for Mueller report

​With the power of executive privilege, presidents have wide latitude to refuse to fully comply with congressional subpoenas. While there is no consensus on the scope of executive privilege, Taylor said presidents have claimed executive privilege over several categories of information — sensitive or classified information; presidential deliberations with advisers; attorney-client communications; law enforcement investigations and national security matters.

“These claims of executive privilege aren’t always successful,” Taylor said. “Sometimes the president ends up waving the privilege and going ahead and sharing the information.”

While presidents going back to Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s have asserted executive privilege, previous presidents “exercised various forms of presidential secrecy that are consistent with what we today call executive privilege,” Rozell said.

Past examples

But it was during the 1970s Watergate scandal that the concept became firmly established when the Nixon administration unsuccessfully fought a grand jury subpoena to turn over secret recordings of White House conversations between President Richard Nixon and his aides.

“The Supreme Court in that case said there is a principle of executive privilege, but it does not apply in this particular instance because there are allegations of wrongdoing, and criminal justice requires access to as much information as possible in order to get the facts,” Rozell said.

Since Nixon, American presidents have invoked executive privilege to varying degrees of success.

In 2001, President George W. Bush asserted executive privilege over internal Justice Department deliberations regarding the FBI’s handling of confidential informants in the 1960s. Turning over the documents, Bush wrote, would “inhibit the candor necessary” to the deliberative process and would be “contrary to national interest.” Congress fought back and eventually reached an agreement with the Justice Department to receive the documents.

On occasion, presidential claims of executive privilege have ended up in court, although by the time a court has issued a verdict, the issue has become moot.

In 2011, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed internal Justice Department communications and other records as part of its investigation of “Operation Fast and Furious,” a federal gun-running program run amok. Then-President Barack Obama invoked executive privilege to deny the committee access to the records. Three and half years later, a federal court rejected Obama’s assertion of privilege while recognizing that some records were protected and ordering the two sides to negotiate an agreement. 

The Supreme Court has never considered a case over a congressional subpoena versus executive privilege. But given the apparent unwillingness of both the administration and congressional Democrats to compromise, experts say the possibility the issue will land before the high court can’t be discounted.

“I don’t think it’s likely that a subpoena dispute will end up before the Supreme Court,” Rozell said. “Usually, it would be a lower level federal court that would get involved. But it could conceivably be a battle that goes all the way to the United States Supreme Court.”
…

Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner faced little scrutiny on his way to becoming one of America’s most powerful people. But now a row over White House security clearances is pushing the president’s publicity-shy favorite into unwelcome limelight.

Unlike his can’t-get-enough-exposure father-in-law, Kushner is a discreet presence.

He’s virtually a ghost on social media, where he has 77,000 Twitter followers but doesn’t tweet.

And in the White House, he may be a fixture at high-level meetings, but he’ll rarely speak if the press corps is present, waiting until journalists leave the room.

So it was a measure of the White House’s need for damage control that Kushner went on the Trump go-to channel Fox News late Monday to dismiss concerns over his security access.

“I’ve been accused of all different types of things, and all of those things have turned out to be false. We’ve had a lot of crazy accusations,” Kushner said on Fox’s “The Ingraham Angle.”

Controversy over Kushner’s access to top secrets has been brewing since the start of the Trump presidency. After all, he was a relatively unknown quantity in Washington — a man with no political or diplomatic experience, or previous vetting, but a ton of potentially tangled business dealings at home and abroad.

This week the issue blew up when a veteran White House bureaucrat told Congress that her department had been overruled by higher-ups to grant passes to 25 people initially rejected due to worries over conflicts of interest, foreign influence and personal problems.

Among the names that the Democrat-led congressional committee investigating the issue suggests may be on that list: Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump.

Riches to power

Kushner was just another privileged New York business scion until his father-in-law and fellow real estate dealer unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016.

The change of address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2017 catapulted him into the smallest of presidential inner circles.

Kushner’s title in the Trump administration is a vague “senior advisor.”

In reality, the youthful-looking 38-year-old, who married Ivanka Trump in 2009, has the president’s ear on everything from US drug addiction to selling Saudi Arabia weapons.

An Orthodox Jew who is part of what Trump proudly calls the “most pro-Israeli” US government in history, Kushner is also tasked with presenting a new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.

Generations of seasoned US diplomats have already failed there and expectations are low that Kushner’s as yet hidden plan will do better.

With Ivanka Trump also tagged as an adviser to her father, critics say the White House has sunken into the kind of nepotism few would have thought possible anymore.

“Not since JFK — more than 50 years ago — have family members of the president served in policy positions,” Mark Carl Rom, associate politics professor at Georgetown University, said.

“The Trump presidency is a throwback: he is making America 18th century again.”

Everything ‘turned to gold’

Naturally, Trump does not see things that way.

He seems not only to rely heavily on Kushner but genuinely to like and appreciate him.

At a big event Monday celebrating prison reform — an issue Kushner says he was inspired to work on due to seeing his own father serve 14 months behind bars for financial crimes — Trump singled out his son-in-law for lavish praise.

“You know,” Trump told the audience in the ornate East Room, “Jared has had a very easy life. He was doing phenomenally in New York and everything he touched has turned to gold.”

“Then, one day, he said,’I want to come down and I want to have peace in the Middle East. And I want to do criminal justice reform. And I want to do all these wonderful things.'”

Finally, the punchline: “And his life became extremely complex.”

In a presidency defined by all-out fights with the opposition Democrats, accusations of administrative chaos, and the morass of the Russia collusion investigation, Trump is believed to value Kushner and his daughter as among the few people he knows he can always rely on.

That’s understandable but will depending on family bring Trump more trouble down the road?

“The question is: Is their primary loyalty to the constitution of the United States of America, or to their father?” Rom asked.

 

 

 
…

Republicans started a long-shot drive Tuesday to force a House vote on a measure that could imprison doctors for five years if they don’t try saving the life of infants born during attempted abortions.

Their effort seems likely to fail in the Democratic-controlled House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has refused to allow a vote on the bill. But Republicans hope it will be politically damaging for Democrats from moderate districts who oppose the GOP move, and see it as a way to energize conservative anti-abortion voters.

“How is it legal in America to kill a baby after it’s been born alive outside the womb?” said No. 2 House GOP leader Steve Scalise, R-La., who’s pushing the effort along with Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo.

“That’s not an accurate statement,” Dr. Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California at San Francisco, said of Scalise’s remark. “Any infant born alive during an abortion or otherwise needs to be treated as any live human.”

Opponents say such births are extremely rare, generally occurring when doctors determine that a child won’t survive and parents opt to spend time with it before death.

Republicans have been pushing the issue since it arose earlier this year in Virginia and New York.

Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, spoke favorably in January about state legislation to ease restrictions on late-term abortions. He said “a discussion would ensue” between doctors and the family over next steps if an infant is born who is badly deformed or incapable of living.

President Donald Trump has criticized a new abortion law in New York that permits abortions of a viable fetus after 24 weeks of pregnancy if the mother’s life is in danger — codifying conditions specified by U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

House Republicans are utilizing a seldom used procedure that forces a vote on a measure once 218 lawmakers, a majority, sign a petition. Aides say all 197 Republicans are expected to sign. A few Democrats will probably join, but not the 21 Democrats that Republicans will need to succeed.

Senate Democrats blocked a GOP effort in February to force debate on a similar bill.
…

The chairman of North Carolina’s Republican Party and a secretive big-money donor are facing federal bribery and wire fraud charges accusing them of trying to sway regulatory decisions in favor of the donor’s insurance companies, according to indictments unsealed Tuesday.

State GOP Chairman Robin Hayes and investment firm founder Greg Lindberg are among four people charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud. Hayes faces additional counts of making false statements. The four defendants appeared Tuesday before a federal magistrate.

Federal prosecutors said Hayes, Lindberg and two Lindberg associates promised or gave Republican Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey millions of campaign dollars to do things Lindberg wanted, such as seek the removal of a deputy insurance commissioner responsible for examining Lindberg’s Durham-based insurance business. Prosecutors allege that the scheme ran from April 2017 through August 2018.

Prosecutors said in a news release that Causey, who wasn’t charged in the indictment, voluntarily reported the scheme.

Lindberg’s company, Global Bankers Insurance Group, is the parent or management company for a number of insurance businesses around the country. Lindberg also is the founder and chairman of the investment company Eli Global LLC.

“The indictment unsealed today outlines a brazen bribery scheme in which Greg Lindberg and his coconspirators allegedly offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in exchange for official action that would benefit Lindberg’s business interests,” Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski said in a statement.

Hayes didn’t respond to a message left on his cell phone, and a Lindberg spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a phone message. A spokesman for the state GOP also didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Hayes, a 73-year-old former congressman, had announced Monday that he wouldn’t seek re-election to his post with the state party. A news release from the party cited health reasons including a recent hip surgery as the reason for the decision.

Lindberg has given more than $5 million in political donations to North Carolina candidates, party committees and independent expenditure groups.
…

As he threatens to shut down the southern border, President Donald Trump is considering bringing on a “border” or “immigration czar” to coordinate immigration policies across various federal agencies, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

Trump is weighing at least two potential candidates for the post: Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli — two far-right conservatives with strong views on immigration, according to the people, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the conversations publicly.

The planning comes as Trump is threatening anew to close the U.S.-Mexico border as soon as this week if Mexico does not completely halt illegal immigration into the U.S. And it serves as the latest sign that the president plans to continue to hammer his hardline immigration rhetoric and policies as he moves past the special counsel’s Russia investigation and works to rally his base heading into his 2020 re-election campaign.

Aides hope the potential appointment, which they caution is still in the planning stages, would be the administration’s new “face” of the immigration issue and would placate both the president and his supporters, showing he is serious about the issue and taking action.

White House press aides, Kobach and Cuccinelli did not immediately respond Monday to requests for comment. Kobach previously served as vice chair of the president’s short-lived election fraud commission, which was disbanded after finding little evidence of widespread fraud.

Trump has often complained, both publicly and privately, about how he has not been able to do more to stop the tide of illegal immigration, which he has likened to an “invasion” and labeled a national security crisis. Arrests along the southern border have skyrocketed in recent months and border agents are now on track to make 100,000 arrests or denials of entry there this month. More than half are families with children.

Trump in December forced a government shutdown to try to pressure Congress to provide more money for his long-promised border wall and eventually signed an emergency declaration to circumvent them. He also moved Saturday to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where citizens are fleeing north and overwhelming U.S. resources at the southern border.

That focus on immigration has touched on numerous government agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State, Defense and Justice. But not all of those departments are always on the same page.

One of the most glaring examples came last summer, when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions instituted a “zero tolerance” policy at the border without consulting others that caused a spike in the number of migrant children separated from their families.

The separated children were placed in HHS custody, but there was no tracking system in place to link parents with their children until a federal judge ordered one, causing widespread fear and concern about whether families would ever see each other again. Homeland Security also has to coordinate with the Pentagon on space to detain migrants as well as on wall funding.

It has yet to be decided whether the czar position, if Trump goes through with the plan, would be housed within Homeland Security or within the White House, which would not require Senate confirmation.

A person positioned within the White House could coordinate immigration policy across various agencies, working closely with aides who are deeply involved in immigration policy, including Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, national security adviser John Bolton and Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary.

Appointing a person who is based within Homeland Security could be trickier because the department’s agency heads are all Senate-confirmed positions and, in the case of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, are longtime immigration officials with decades of experience dealing with the border.

While immigration officials would welcome an adviser focused specifically on policy across the varying agencies, the names being floated are likely to spark backlash and criticism.

Kobach, an immigration hardliner, ran a failed bid for governor promising to drive immigrants living in the U.S. illegally out of the country and has recently been working for a nonprofit corporation, WeBuildtheWall Inc., which has been raising private money to build Trump’s wall. Cuccinelli, meanwhile, has advocated for denying citizenship to American-born children of parents living in the U.S. illegally, limiting in-state tuition at public universities only to those who are citizens or legal residents, and allowing workers to file lawsuits when an employer knowingly hires someone living in the country illegally for taking a job from a “law abiding competitor.”

Thomas Homan, the former acting ICE director, has also been mentioned as a potential pick, according to one of the people familiar with the talks.
…

Aides to Joe Biden struck a more aggressive tone on Monday as the former vice president faced scrutiny over his past behavior toward women.

In a statement, Biden spokesman Bill Russo blasted “right wing trolls” from “the dark recesses of the internet” for conflating images of Biden embracing acquaintances, colleagues and friends in his official capacity during swearing-in ceremonies with uninvited touching. 

The move came on a day in which a second woman said Biden had acted inappropriately, touching her face with both hands and rubbing noses with her in 2009. The allegation by Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Hines of Connecticut, followed a magazine essay by former Nevada politician Lucy Flores, who wrote that Biden kissed her on the back of the head in 2014.

Affectionate mannerisms

The developments underscored the challenge facing Biden should he decide to seek the White House. Following historic wins in the 2018 midterms, Democratic politics is dominated by energy from women. The allegations could leave the 76-year-old Biden, long known for his affectionate mannerisms, appearing out of touch with the party as the Democratic presidential primary begins.

Lappos told The Associated Press that she and other Himes aides were helping out at a fundraiser in a private home in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2009 when Biden entered the kitchen to thank the group for pitching in. 

“After he finished speaking, he stopped to talk to us about how important a congressional staff is, which I thought was awesome,” Lappos said.

She said she was stunned as Biden moved toward her. 

“He wrapped both his hands around my face and pulled me in,” said Lappos, who is now 43. “I thought, `Oh, God, he’s going to kiss me.’ Instead, he rubbed noses with me.” Biden said nothing, she said, then moved off. She said the experience left her feeling “weird and uncomfortable” and was “absolutely disrespectful of my personal boundaries.” 

The Hartford Courant first reported Lappos’ assertion. 

Russo didn’t directly respond to Lappos, instead referring to a Sunday statement in which Biden said he doesn’t believe he has acted inappropriately during his long public life. The former vice president said in that statement: “We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will.”

Biden hasn’t made a final decision on whether to run for the White House. But aides who weren’t authorized to discuss internal conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity said there were no signs that his team was slowing its preparations for a campaign.

Light response from rivals 

Biden’s potential Democratic rivals haven’t rushed to back him up. Over the weekend, presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand came closest to calling out the former vice president. Warren said Biden “needs to give an answer” about what occurred. Gillibrand said, “If Vice President Biden becomes a candidate, this is a topic he’ll have to engage on further.”

Ultraviolet, a women’s advocacy group, tweeted: “Joe Biden cannot paint himself as a champion of women and then refuse to listen and learn from a woman who says his actions demeaned her. Good intentions don’t matter if the actions are inappropriate. Do better, Joe. And thank you (at)LucyFlores for coming forward.”
…

When Kamala Harris made her much-heralded arrival in Washington as California’s first black U.S. senator, she made a curious early decision.

 

Within months of her swearing-in, she sponsored a bill urging states to eliminate cash bail, denouncing the system as a scourge on the poor and communities of color.

 

That position would become a key part of her criminal justice reform platform. But her choice surprised some bail reform advocates back in California. In her seven years as a district attorney, and then six as attorney general, Harris was absent on the issue, they say. In fact, less than a year earlier, her office defended the cash bail system in a pair of federal court cases, shifting course only weeks before she entered the Senate.

 

“For her entire career she used some of the highest money bail amounts in the country to keep people in jail cells and saddle poor families with financial debt,” said Alec Karakatsanis, an attorney who has brought several legal challenges to California’s bail system, “and as soon as she had no influence on that issue practically, she announces she has a different view on it.”

 

Now a presidential candidate, Harris is casting herself as a progressive who consistently leveraged her power in the justice system to further civil rights causes and advocate for the disadvantaged. She has pledged a wholesale overhaul of the country’s fractured criminal justice system, arguing for marijuana legalization, bail reform and a moratorium on the death penalty.

 

But when she had a chance to take a bold stand on these issues as a top law enforcement officer, Harris often opted for a careful approach or defended the status quo. Observers of her career note some of her key positions, like her opposition to cash bail, came at politically opportune moments, after public views had shifted on race, inequality and bias in the justice system.

 

“I never had a sense she was forward thinking or reforming,” said John Raphling, a bail reform advocate and senior researcher at Human Rights Watch who faced off against Harris’s state Justice Department as a criminal defense attorney. “Bail reform is a trendy issue, and a lot of politicians are jumping on it and saying this is unfair. I don’t have any evidence that Harris was seeing that unfairness back when she was attorney general — but to her credit, we evolve, we learn, we see things.”

California Attorney General

 

Harris’ supporters say as a prosecutor she was tasked with upholding the law and, as attorney general, defending the state, not making policy. She had limited ability to effect change within the rigid structure of the courts, they argue.

 

“Everyone who has experienced the criminal justice system knows it’s broken,” said Lateefah Simon, a civil rights activist who worked for Harris in San Francisco. “She would say, ‘we’re confined by the rules of the law, and in the areas where we have discretion, we are going to work to try to move justice.'”

 

“I deeply know her convictions about what could be possible and what we needed to do, but also what the boundaries and limitations were,” she said.

 

Simon said Harris worked to hire more people of color as prosecutors. In her first year as San Francisco district attorney, she launched a re-entry program designed to keep low-level drug offenders from returning to prison. That same year she refused to seek the death penalty for a man who killed a police officer, infuriating the Bay Area political establishment and creating friction with the law enforcement community.

 

But in many cases throughout her career Harris embraced the traditional role of prosecutor.

 

Her office defended wrongful convictions, fighting to keep behind bars those who judges determined should go free. She refused to take a position on a pair of sentencing reform ballot measures, arguing she must remain neutral because her office was responsible for preparing ballot text. She defended the death penalty in court, setting aside her personal opposition to capital punishment.

 

In response to critics who’ve pushed her to use her power in the courts to usher in change, she told The New York Times in 2016, “I have a client, I don’t get to choose my client.”

Moratorium on Death Penalty, Criminalizing Truancy

 

Harris says she would call for a federal moratorium on the death penalty if elected president.

 

Harris’ law enforcement approach has at times put her out of step with California’s activist community. When she pushed a controversial policy that criminalized truancy, threatening to jail parents of children who missed too much school, even Harris’ staff “winced at the plan,” she wrote in her first book released just in time for her campaign for attorney general in 2010.

 

The program has since become a source of tension with criminal justice advocates, who see it as sign of Harris’ outdated approach to dealing with problems that stem from poverty.

 

In a recent NPR interview, Harris said her truancy initiative was not designed to punish vulnerable families, but “put a spotlight” on the problem and direct resources to needy families. Her campaign hails the effort as a success, and supporters have lauded Harris for prioritizing a child’s education.

 

“As a result of our initiative, which never resulted in any parent going to jail — never — because that was never the goal,” Harris said.

 

But Harris’s legacy remains on the state’s books: She authored a state-wide truancy law modeled after her San Francisco program. It has resulted in hundreds of parents in often less affluent and less politically liberal California counties being prosecuted.

 

Harris’ approach at the time was considered smart politics for a politician seeking to run statewide. Throughout her career, Harris worked to win over powerful police unions. She refused to support a bill requiring her office to investigate shootings involving law enforcement officers. In 2015, she declined to back statewide standards for body cameras, arguing that individual departments should decide how to use the technology.

 

“If you offend all the police chiefs and sheriffs of California, you’re probably not going to get re-elected as the attorney general of California, and if you’re not elected, how do you engage in any of the reforms you want to do?” said Jim Bueermann, a former California police chief who worked on Harris’ transition to the attorney general’s office.

From Law Enforcement to Legislating

 

As Harris transitioned from law enforcement to legislating, the politics of criminal justice issues were changing fast.

 

The deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police in 2014 and 2015 prompted outcry and spawned the Black Lives Matter movement. Democrats began rethinking their tough-on-crime strategies, focusing more on inequality and abuse in the system. Prosecutors and police came under increasing scrutiny for their roles.

 

Harris’ views appear to have been changing, too.

 

In 2014, she was opposed to legalizing recreational marijuana, and when she ran against a Republican challenger for re-election as attorney general she took the more conservative view: He wanted to legalize. Harris laughed at the idea in a local television interview.

 

But Harris’s public tone changed as speculation grew about her running for president in 2020. Last year, Harris endorsed Democratic Rep. Cory Booker’s bill for federal legalization of marijuana. She argued on Twitter that “making marijuana legal at the federal level is the smart thing to do and it’s the right thing to do.” She released a video declaring that “marijuana laws are not applied and enforced in the same way for all people.”

 

Last month, she went as far as acknowledging to a pair of morning radio hosts that she’s used recreational marijuana: “I have, and I did inhale; that was a long time ago.”

 

For Ron Gold, the Republican who ran against her in 2014 and who supported recreational legalization when she did not, Harris’ stance on marijuana is indicative of her tendency to take a position “that’s popular, but not necessarily held strongly by the candidate, it’s a position that curries favor with a segment of the population,” he said.

 

Some see a similar pattern when it comes to the call for bail reform.

 

Shortly after announcing her presidential bid in January, Harris declared on Twitter: “It’s long past time to address bail reform across the country.”

 

“This is a serious injustice,” she wrote.

 

Three years earlier, Harris’s office was defending cash bail in a federal case.

 

“Neither the bail law nor the bail schedule discriminate on the basis of wealth, poverty, or economic status of any kind,” she wrote. In response to the notion that money bail schemes unfairly punish low-income defendants, Harris wrote, “the state is not constitutionally required to remove obstacles not of its own creation.”

 

Harris appears to have shifted her stance 10 months later. In December of 2016, Harris filed a motion in a case challenging the application of California’s money bail laws saying the system is deserving “of intense scrutiny.” She pledged not to defend any bail scheme that fails to take into account a defendant’s ability to pay. Three weeks later she was sworn in to the Senate.

 

Still, she asked the judge to toss the case, arguing that the laws were constitutional even if the way some counties implemented those laws was not.

 

“The bail system at issue here does not categorically deny bail to any group of individuals,” she wrote.

 

The move perplexed bail reform advocates who say she could have used her position of power to do more as the top law enforcement official in the state, overseeing thousands of prosecutors who each day requested cash bail for those they charged with crimes.

 

“I’m glad she’s come to the right position now, but it’s too late for tens of thousands of Californians, real human beings who have been detained in jail every day in California throughout the whole state, that the attorney general could have stopped,” said Phil Telfeyan, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys in the bail cases.

 

Harris’ campaign declined to answer questions about when and why Harris’ views on marijuana and bail reform shifted.

 

Campaign spokesman Ian Sams noted the political arena, not the courtroom, is the appropriate place to address policy problems.

 

“As senator,” he said, “she has aggressively confronted the policy question by proposing a bipartisan federal law to end cash bail.”

 

Simon, the civil rights advocate who worked with Harris, said she often say Harris spoke, privately, in frustration about cash bail and other elements of the criminal justice system while she was a prosecutor. But still, Harris had to work within its confines, Simon said.

 

“Prosecutors and lawmakers are different,” she said, “as a lawmaker, you actually get to make laws. As a prosecutor, you must follow them.”

 

Advocates say they’re cautiously optimistic about Harris’ legislative efforts, and are glad to see the issue in the political spotlight. But they note her bill, which she co-wrote with Republican Sen. Rand Paul, endorsed the use of controversial risk-assessment tools to determine who should be released from jail and who should remain behind bars.

 

Raphling said Harris’ office has been receptive to feedback. Still, he said she never indicated a progressive stance on the issue before and her commitment remains to be seen.

 

“I give her credit for wanting to tackle bail reform, and people are listening,” Raphling said. “The question is, and this is an open question, what kind of reform is she going to push?”
…

After losing in Congress, President Donald Trump is counting on the courts to kill off “Obamacare.” But some cases are going against him, and time is not on his side as he tries to score a big win for his re-election campaign.

Two federal judges in Washington, D.C., this past week blocked parts of Trump’s health care agenda: work requirements for some low-income people on Medicaid, and new small business health plans that don’t have to provide full benefits required by the Affordable Care Act.

But in the biggest case, a federal judge in Texas ruled last December that the ACA is unconstitutional and should be struck down in its entirety. That ruling is now on appeal. At the urging of the White House, the Justice Department said this past week it will support the Texas judge’s position and argue that all of “Obamacare” must go.

A problem for Trump is that the litigation could take months to resolve — or longer — and there’s no guarantee he’ll get the outcomes he wants before the 2020 election.

“Was this a good week for the Trump administration? No,” said economist Gail Wilensky, who headed up Medicare under former Republican President George H.W. Bush. “But this is the beginning of a series of judicial challenges.”

It’s early innings in the court cases, and “the clock is going to run out,” said Timothy Jost, a retired law professor who has followed the Obama health law since its inception.

“By the time these cases get through the courts there simply isn’t going to be time for the administration to straighten out any messes that get created, much less get a comprehensive plan through Congress,” added Jost, who supports the ACA.

In the Texas case, Trump could lose by winning.

If former President Barack Obama’s health law is struck down entirely, Congress would face an impossible task: pass a comprehensive health overhaul to replace it that both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Trump can agree to. The failed attempt to repeal “Obamacare” in 2017 proved to be toxic for congressional Republicans in last year’s midterm elections and they are in no mood to repeat it.

“The ACA now is nine years old and it would be incredibly disruptive to uproot the whole thing,” said Thomas Barker, an attorney with the law firm Foley Hoag, who served as a top lawyer at the federal Health and Human Services department under former Republican President George W. Bush. “It seems to me that you can resolve this issue more narrowly than by striking down the ACA.”

Trump seems unfazed by the potential risks.

“Right now, it’s losing in court,” he asserted Friday, referring to the Texas case against “Obamacare.”

The case “probably ends up in the Supreme Court,” Trump continued. “But we’re doing something that is going to be much less expensive than Obamacare for the people … and we’re going to have (protections for) pre-existing conditions and will have a much lower deductible. So, and I’ve been saying that, the Republicans are going to end up being the party of health care.”

There’s no sign that his administration has a comprehensive health care plan, and there doesn’t seem to be a consensus among Republicans in Congress.

A common thread in the various health care cases is that they involve lower-court rulings for now, and there’s no telling how they may ultimately be decided. Here’s a status check on major lawsuits:

‘Obamacare’ repeal

U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, ruled that when Congress repealed the ACA’s fines for being uninsured, it knocked the constitutional foundation out from under the entire law. His ruling is being appealed by attorneys general from Democratic-led states to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

The challenge to the ACA was filed by officials from Texas and other GOP-led states. It’s now fully supported by the Trump administration, which earlier had argued that only the law’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions and its limits on how much insurers could charge older, sicker customers were constitutionally tainted. All sides expect the case to go to the Supreme Court, which has twice before upheld the ACA.

Medicaid work requirements

U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington, D.C., last week blocked Medicaid work requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas approved by the Trump administration. The judge questioned whether the requirements were compatible with Medicaid’s central purpose of providing “medical assistance” to low-income people. He found that administration officials failed to account for coverage losses and other potential harm, and sent the Health and Human Services Department back to the drawing board.

The Trump administration says it will continue to approve state requests for work requirements, but has not indicated if it will appeal.

Small-business health plans

U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates last week struck down the administration’s health plans for small business and sole proprietors, which allowed less generous benefits than required by the ACA. Bates found that administration regulations creating the plans were “clearly an end-run” around the Obama health law and also ran afoul of other federal laws governing employee benefits.

The administration said it disagrees but hasn’t formally announced an appeal.

Also facing challenges in courts around the country are an administration regulation that bars federally funded family planning clinics from referring women for abortions and a rule that allows employers with religious and moral objections to opt out of offering free birth control to women workers as a preventive care service.
…

Washington is focused yet again on immigration and border security after President Donald Trump threatened to close America’s southern border with Mexico and declared he wants U.S. aid terminated to three Central American nations. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, Trump’s moves come amid a continuing surge of undocumented migrant arrivals that have strained federal resources and personnel along the U.S.-Mexico border.
…

Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, a possible Democratic challenger to President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, denied Sunday that he “acted inappropriately” in the face of allegations from a Nevada lawmaker that he unexpectedly  touched her shoulders and kissed her hair at a 2014 political rally.

Lucy Flores, a former Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in the western state of Nevada, recalled the incident on CNN, saying that “very unexpectedly and out of nowhere, I feel Joe Biden put his hands on my shoulders, get up very close to me from behind, lean in, smell my hair and then plant a slow kiss on the top of my head.”

She called the moment “shocking,” adding, “You don’t expect that kind of intimacy from someone so powerful and someone who you just have no relationship (with) whatsoever to touch you and to feel you and to be so close to you in that way.”

Biden said: “In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once – never – did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention.”

Political surveys show the 76-year-old Biden leading a long list of Democrats seeking the party’s nomination to oust Trump from the White House, but he has not yet formally declared his candidacy even as he has made frequent speeches at campaign-style rallies in recent weeks.

He has twice unsuccessfully sought the party’s presidential nomination, before serving for eight years as vice president under former President Barack Obama, ending in early 2017.

In the lead-up to his presumed candidacy, Biden has faced new questions about his public hands-on attention to women in public settings over the years and notably his 1991 treatment of Anita Hill when Biden, as a U.S. senator, chaired the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Hill is a college law professor who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment when they worked together at a U.S. government agency, but the all-male panel headed by Biden largely dismissed her allegations, with Thomas winning narrow confirmation to the country’s highest court, where he still sits.

Biden in recent days has said he regretted that he “couldn’t come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved,” even though he led the committee.

Biden is not believed to have apologized personally to Hill in the nearly three decades since the hearing. But as he seemingly moves toward another presidential candidacy in an era of new accountability for men in powerful positions of their treatment of women in years past, Biden is facing new calls for further explanation of his role in the Thomas confirmation hearings.
…