Politics
G.O.P. Congress Struggles to Do the Basics Amid Party Infighting
Representative Tom Cole, the Oklahoma Republican who leads the Appropriations Committee and is a longtime party political strategist, observed on Wednesday that congressional majorities are typically lost either through overreach or dysfunction.
Congressional Republicans seem to be opting for the latter.
“Right now we don’t look as functional as we need to look,” Mr. Cole acknowledged as the House and Senate strained to get some of their most basic work done in the face of bitter internal divisions and increased finger-pointing among Republicans.
With midterm elections approaching and control of both chambers at real risk, Republicans are struggling to pass essential legislation, let alone the political messaging bills typical of the months running up to Election Day.
The House floor was frozen on Tuesday and ground to a standstill for several hours on Wednesday as Republican leaders pleaded for votes and cut side deals. Two of those hours were spent laboring to win a preliminary vote to begin debate on a series of bills — what used to be considered a routine step until the current Republican majority assumed power and rank-and-file lawmakers, noting their party’s vanishingly slim margin of control, latched on to such moments as leverage.
Now the routine step has become an extraordinary travail for Speaker Mike Johnson, who is constantly toiling to please various Republican factions, cognizant that a misstep, or any reliance on Democratic votes to pass bills, could draw a challenge that could cost him his job.
“We live in a period where leaders are afraid of their members, and members are afraid of their voters,” said Mr. Cole.
On Wednesday, heated discussions were prevalent on the Republican side of the aisle. Lawmakers shouted at each other across the House floor. Mr. Johnson huddled with holdouts and defectors, beseeching them to get in line. Deals were cut, then reneged on and renegotiated, and even the G.O.P. budget plan — normally a unifying measure — stalled for more than five hours as unrelated disputes were hashed out behind closed doors.
“Guys, this is why they say lawmaking is like watching sausage be made,” a beleaguered Mr. Johnson told reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday evening.
Some Republicans even accused their colleagues of being in the pocket of the pesticide industry — the sort of pointed critique usually aimed at members of the opposing party if made at all, since lawmakers do not like to remind voters about the influence of political contributions.
Other Republicans shrugged off the escalating political combat as the way business is done these days.
“It should be a fist fight on everything,” said Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee. “It shouldn’t be easy.”
But the congressional temperature was rising high enough that one former Republican House member from Texas, Mayra Flores, urged her ex-colleagues to take it behind closed doors.
“There is no reason to turn every issue into a public spectacle online,” Ms. Flores wrote on X, saying she was “honestly embarrassed” by the conduct of some of her former colleagues. “The country is facing real challenges, and constant public infighting only makes the work harder.”
Republican leaders, trying to break a logjam that threatened to derail their entire immediate agenda, relented on Wednesday and agreed to rework a major farm policy measure that is historically one of the more popular bills before Congress. But its path remained unclear because of a dispute over ethanol tax credits and opposition from a handful of Republican lawmakers who opposed a liability shield for pesticide producers that has outraged the Make America Healthy Again movement.
“This is causing cancer and it is making people sick,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, said as she urged reporters to investigate members of the Agriculture Committee and the donations they get from pesticide producers.
After sundown, Republicans got stuck on the budget resolution providing the framework for $70 billion in funding for President Trump’s immigration crackdown as they tried to quell protests over Mr. Johnson’s handling of the farm bill. The budget outline finally passed on a party-line vote, but it was a mark of the G.O.P. difficulties that a surge of money for tough immigration enforcement embraced by nearly all Republicans was almost sidelined by the farm bill furor.
The House voted to extend a surveillance law that the intelligence community says is critical to identifying potential terrorist attacks, but the Senate almost immediately said the House bill was unacceptable and that it would be sending back an alternative with barely 24 hours left before the statute was set to lapse.
What lawmakers were not talking about was how to break loose bipartisan legislation, passed in the Senate but stalled in the House, that would fund most of the Department of Homeland Security after a more than 70-day shutdown, as the administration warned that funding for paying workers was again about to run out.
Top House Republicans blamed Senate Republican leaders for mishandling the legislation and then trying to jam it down the throat of the House. They said the fact that the measure explicitly says that “zero” dollars should be expended for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol is untenable for some Republicans, who fear they could be attacked for defunding the police.
Mr. Cole said the House wants changes, which could again slow the bill in the Senate.
“All of this is created by bad management in the Senate and by not being open and transparent with us in the House,” he said.
But Senate Republicans believe they had a deal with Mr. Johnson to pass the spending bill weeks ago, when he publicly endorsed it.
The standoff has tested the patience of the usually even-tempered Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, who reacted testily this week when Mr. Johnson suggested that his chamber wanted unspecified modifications.
“You’d have to figure out what they were doing and whether or not it materially affects in any way the bill that we passed not once, but twice, by unanimous consent,” Mr. Thune said, noting that he and Mr. Johnson jointly announced an agreement to pass the funding legislation on April 1, and that it still had not reached the House floor.
Should it get there, it would likely attract sufficient Democratic support to offset any Republican defections. But that is one of the reasons Mr. Johnson has been reluctant to move forward, since turning to Democrats to help pass legislation can upset his right wing and lead to a challenge to his leadership.
As he assessed the situation, Mr. Cole said that splintered Republicans had a clear choice: put aside their differences and move ahead, or face the consequences.
“You can either be part of a functional majority and get almost everything you want,” he said, “or you can hold out and get nothing and be in the minority next time.”
Megan Mineiro and Michael Gold contributed reporting.
A splintered Supreme Court on Thursday declined to rule in a case dealing with how states should assess the intellectual disabilities of capital defendants to determine if they should be spared the death penalty.
Two decades ago, the court barred the execution of people with mental disabilities as a violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
That ruling, in Atkins v. Virginia, gave states leeway to determine their own processes for deciding who was intellectually disabled. It led to follow-up cases from Florida and Texas in which the court further limited capital punishment.
Twenty-seven states permit the death penalty, but they differ in how they determine intellectual disability.
On Thursday, a majority of justices took a pass on deciding how states and lower courts should resolve cases in which defendants had taken I.Q. tests multiple times and received varying results, as well as the extent to which states must consider a broader evaluation of evidence beyond I.Q. test scores in deciding if a person is disabled.
The case involved Joseph Clifton Smith, an Alabama man, who was sentenced to death after being convicted of murdering a man he planned to rob in 1997. In the years before and after the murder, Mr. Smith took five I.Q. tests with scores ranging from 72 to 78.
The state sought to execute Mr. Smith, noting that the key part of Alabama’s law on mental disability turned on whether defendants had scored 70 or lower on the test. But a lower court found Mr. Smith was intellectually disabled, in part because the tests had a margin of error. Alabama asked the Supreme Court to weigh in.
The court’s brief unsigned order dismissed the case as “improvidently granted,” meaning the justices punted, and sent the matter back to the lower courts.
As a result, Mr. Smith will be spared the death penalty and resentenced, his lawyer said on Thursday.
“The District Court listened carefully to experts on all sides and concluded that Mr. Smith is intellectually disabled. The Supreme Court declined to disturb that finding,” his attorney Kacey L. Keeton, of the Federal Defender office for the Middle District of Alabama, said in a statement. “For Mr. Smith and his family, today brings profound relief.”
The Alabama attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Although the Supreme Court did not resolve the key question in Mr. Smith’s case, it prompted several separate opinions.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the record in Mr. Smith’s case was incomplete and the court could not use it to “provide any meaningful guidance” on how lower courts should assess multiple I.Q. scores.
“Proceeding without a more developed record or lower court opinions is especially perilous. That is because the differences between methods used to assess multiple I.Q. scores raise complicated questions on which even experts may disagree,” she wrote, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Four justices dissented, saying the court had failed to address a recurring question that has “led to confusion and unsound analysis in lower courts.”
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the majority “shies away from its obligation to provide workable rules for capital cases,” doing a disservice to state criminal justice systems and “victims of horrific murders.”
Without clear rules, court hearings over multiple I.Q. scores will be “little more than battles of experts” and “whether a defendant lives or dies will hinge on which expert a judge finds more credible,” he wrote, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.
Writing only for himself, Justice Thomas said the court should go even further and overturn its decision in the landmark Atkins case — a move that would significantly scale back protections against executing the mentally disabled.
Nothing in the nation’s history, he wrote, “suggests that there is anything unlawful about executing murderers now protected by Atkins — let alone one such as Smith who reads at an 11th-grade level and has never scored below 71 on a single I.Q. test.”
Medical and disability groups have warned that a narrow, test-focused approach conflicts with previous Supreme Court rulings and could increase the risk that people with intellectual disabilities are executed.
The Trump administration, which lifted a moratorium on the federal death penalty last January, supported the state’s position in part. D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said states had discretion to determine whether a defendant was intellectually disabled and urged the court to defer to Alabama’s assessment.
Under Alabama law, to avoid execution, defendants like Mr. Smith are required to show “significant subaverage intellectual functioning at the time the crime was committed, to show significant deficits in adaptive behavior at the time the crime was committed, and to show that these problems manifested themselves before the defendant reached the age of 18.”
After lengthy litigation in state and federal court, a district court judge found in 2021 that Mr. Smith should have the opportunity to show he was intellectually disabled. When a score is close to but higher than 70, the judge said he “must be allowed to present additional evidence of intellectual disability.”
The judge noted that even one score of 72 could mean Mr. Smith’s I.Q. was actually as low as 69 because of the standard error of measurement. The district court judge also found Mr. Smith deficient in social and interpersonal skills, self-direction, independent living and academics.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed the ruling, citing two Supreme Court decisions that said that when a test score, adjusted for the margin of error, is 70 or less, the defendant must be able to provide additional evidence of intellectual disability.
In response to an earlier request from the Supreme Court in the matter, the 11th Circuit said its finding was based on a “holistic approach” and review of evidence, not just a single low score.
Politics
Senate GOP erupts over Trump DOJ ‘anti-weaponization’ fund, punts ICE, Border Patrol funding
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Senate Republicans are pressing pause on their push to fund immigration enforcement after a tense, closed-door meeting.
But it’s not over internal divisions. This time, the fury is directed toward the Trump administration and the surprise “anti-weaponization” fund created by the Department of Justice (DOJ). It comes as Republicans were near the finish line for their $72 billion package to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.
For now, Republicans are calling it a day and leaving Washington, D.C.
“We will pick up where we left off,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said.
REPUBLICANS RECOIL AS TRUMP’S BILLION-DOLLAR DOJ ‘SLUSH FUND’ FOR ALLIES THREATENS ICE, BORDER PATROL PLAN
Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate GOP leaders are pushing forward with budget reconciliation to fund the final piece of government that had been shut down by Senate Democrats’ opposition to President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu)
That makes President Donald Trump’s June 1 deadline effectively impossible to meet, but Republicans contend that it’s the administration’s actions that have further complicated an already rocky process.
“The message to the administration is this: we were on a glide path to passing this bill until these announcements,” a top Republican aide told Fox News Digital.
The timing of the settlement between Trump and his family and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the subsequent creation of the fund derailed Republicans’ sprint to the finish line.
“We don’t know where the votes are on reconciliation right now,” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said.
SENATE REPUBLICAN THREATENS TO DERAIL ICE, BORDER PATROL PACKAGE OVER TRUMP’S BILLION-DOLLAR REQUEST
The White House referred Fox News Digital to Trump’s comments Thursday when asked if he would be amenable to no ballroom security funding and restrictions on the DOJ’s nearly $1.8 billion fund, or veto the package outright.
“I don’t need money from the ballroom,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, and touted that the actual construction was being done through private funding.
“But this is being made as a gift from me and other people that are great patriots that spent a lot of money,” he continued. “We’re building what will be the finest ballroom anywhere in the world. If they want to spend money on securing the White House, I think it would be very — very much a good expenditure. But the ballroom is being built.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was dispatched to the Hill Thursday morning to tamp down lawmakers’ concerns over the “anti-weaponization” fund, which several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have dubbed a “slush fund.” But instead, he was berated behind closed doors.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department told Fox News Digital that Blanche had a “healthy discussion on the settlement.”
“He made clear that the Anti-Weaponization Fund announced Monday has nothing to do with reconciliation. Indeed, not a single dime from the money the president is seeking in reconciliation would go toward anything having to do with the fund,” the spokesperson said. “We will continue to work with the Senate to get critical reconciliation funds approved.”
TRUMP DEMANDS SENATE PARLIAMENTARIAN’S OUSTER FOR AXING BALLROOM SECURITY FUNDING
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was dispatched to the Hill Thursday morning to tamp down lawmakers’ concerns over the “anti-weaponization” fund. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Sources told Fox News Digital that over two dozen Republicans demanded answers from Blanche on what kind of guardrails could be put into the fund, and specifically if those convicted for assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, riots could be excluded.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., erupted at Blanche, and Thune was uncharacteristically frustrated by the situation.
Several Republicans leaving the meeting had little to say about what happened inside, while others reiterated that they were focused on funding ICE and Border Patrol and nothing else.
Those concerns were validated with several people who were pardoned by Trump earlier this year, including former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who declared that he would make a claim this week.
There have been discussions of including those guardrails into the reconciliation package, given that the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the DOJ, is a major part of the process.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
“I did raise that issue, and that seemed to be what [Blanche] was saying, but you know, we haven’t seen language,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said.
Further complicating matters are plans Senate Democrats had for the package with their flurry of amendment votes.
Sources told Fox News Digital that one of the first amendments in the pipeline would have prevented any of the DOJ’s funds from going to convicted rapists and forced the package to be sent back to committee, sending the GOP back to square one on a politically perilous vote.
“This was all 100% avoidable,” a senior Republican aide told Fox News Digital.
President Trump, it’s well known, is into gold. Every day brings new evidence that he’s thoroughly enjoying the “golden age” he pronounced in his inaugural address — as few other Americans are — with stock trades, crypto profiteering and much more, even a new taxpayer-financed slush fund to reward his allies.
As for me, I’ve gone into silver. That is, I constantly look for the silver linings in Trump’s heinous acts.
One silver lining, of course, is his cratering job-approval numbers in the polls, especially among the young and Latino voters who made his reelection possible. But here’s another: By his humiliating failure to bring Iran to heel, nearly three months after starting a war that he said would last weeks at most, Trump has brought new, more positive attention to what he again this week derided as “Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.” (The emphasis on “Hussein” is Trump’s, always.)
The president, along with his Republican cheerleaders, counts his first-term abrogation of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as a signature achievement. This week, yet again, he falsely claimed that had he not done so, Iran would have a nuclear weapon. In fact, his action in 2018 taking the United States out of the multinational deal subsequently led to Iran’s rebuilding of its nuclear program, the emboldening of the Iranian hard-liners now in power and the Middle East morass in which the United States is now mired.
That quagmire has left Trump seeming desperate for a deal — almost certainly a worse deal than the one Obama struck. Call it JCPOA Lite.
If he were able to get Iran’s sign-off on the sort of detailed, restrictive agreement that Obama and other world leaders won 11 years ago, he’d be trumpeting himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker. (He does that anyway, but his record proves otherwise.) Instead, by his own failure to date, Trump has invited reconsideration of the very agreement he decried as the “worst deal ever” on his march to election and reelection.
No sooner was the 2015 deal signed than Trump and Republicans succeeded in defining it as a giveaway to Iran that assured, not hindered, its development of a nuclear weapon to threaten Israel and the world. Opponents condemned the agreement for not addressing Iran’s other threats, notably its support for militant proxies throughout the Mideast. Some Democrats, notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, were among the foes. Other Democrats, cowed by opposition to the agreement by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government and pro-Israel lobbyists, were all but mute in the pact’s defense.
Now some Democrats are belatedly finding their voice (and, post-Gaza, some willingness to defy Israel). Along with nonpartisan experts, those Democrats are drawing comparisons between the 2015 agreement, flawed yet successful, and Trump’s promised yet ever-elusive alternative. What’s ironic for Israel and Netanyahu, still implacably against negotiating with Tehran, is that they could end up, under Trump, with a nuclear deal that gives Iran more leeway than the hated JCPOA did.
As Americans are being reminded, the 2015 deal wasn’t just between Iran and Obama, as Trump has long suggested; other signatories were China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the 27-nation European Union. Reconstituting that group would be all but impossible today.
The pact’s 159 highly technical pages and five appendices — a far cry from the short-lived one-pager that Trump officials teased earlier this month — required Iran for 15 years to limit its nuclear program to civilian purposes, forfeit more than 97% of its enriched uranium and submit to intrusive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure compliance. In return, Iran gradually got relief from some, but not all, international economic sanctions and access to Iranian funds that were frozen after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Presumably, after 15 years, the agreement would have been extended somehow.
By all accounts, including those of Trump’s first-term intelligence and national security officials, Iran was complying when he abandoned the deal. Its “breakout time” for building a nuclear weapon was about a year — time enough for the world to intervene — instead of two to three months. Now, though the president boasts he barred Iran from having that weapon by breaking the Iran nuclear deal, he incessantly tells Americans that he went to war against Iran on Feb. 28 because it was on the brink of a bomb — never mind that he also said he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last summer, a program that was in a well-monitored box until he first took office.
If you’re confused, you’re paying attention.
A month ago, Trump posted online that he was close to a deal “FAR BETTER” than the 2015 accord. “I am under no pressure whatsoever, although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!” To several reporters, he suggested he in fact had a deal and that Iran had agreed both to suspend its nuclear activities and to forfeit all of its enriched, near-weapons-grade uranium.
Preposterous claims, given Iran’s current government, and Tehran promptly denied them. It was a sign of Trump’s squandered credibility that few, if anyone, believed him in the first place. Nor have folks believed his more recent talk of imminent success; oil markets, too, have learned not to trust the president, as prices at the pumps attest.
On Tuesday at the White House, amid a noisy tour of the billion-dollar-ballroom construction site, Trump told reporters he’d been “an hour away” from striking Iran again that very day but Mideast leaders asked for more time for negotiations.
Don’t hold your breath.
But for the tragic consequences, Obama might be enjoying some justifiable schadenfreude about Trump’s travails.
“We pulled it off without firing a missile. We got 97% of the enriched uranium out,” he told Stephen Colbert in an interview last week. Both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agreed that Iran was abiding by the nuclear limits, Obama added, “and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.”
That sure doesn’t sound like the “worst deal ever.” It wasn’t.
Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
Threads: @jkcalmes
X: @jackiekcalmes
-
Florida16 seconds agoFlorida officials to pay $485,000 settlement to fired FWC biologist over Charlie Kirk post after his death
-
Georgia6 minutes agoGeorgia town display of military banners raises funds for new veterans memorial
-
Hawaii12 minutes agoHong Kong outrigger canoeists pass Kaiwi Solo test – and aim to tackle it again
-
Idaho18 minutes agoIdaho Rivers United Highlights Year-Round Efforts to Protect the Boise River
-
Illinois24 minutes agoBears bill to keep team in Illinois faces major obstacles, including Mayor Johnson peeling support
-
Indiana30 minutes ago
Bears reiterate Chicago stadium options are ‘exhausted,’ focused on suburban Illinois and Indiana
-
Iowa36 minutes agoDozens of Iowa lawmakers ask federal regulators to reject transmission competition pause
-
Kansas42 minutes agoFormer Kansas City PTA treasurer facing up to 30 years in prison for bank and wire fraud
