Politics
Twitter reacts to Warren stopping short of endorsing VP Harris for re-election: ‘Interesting word choice’
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sparked a flurry of hypothesis on social media over the weekend after she stopped wanting backing Vice President Harris as President Biden’s 2024 operating mate.
Throughout an interview on Boston Public Radio, Warren was requested if Harris ought to be Biden’s operating mate.
“I actually need to defer to what makes Biden snug on his crew,” she responded. “I’ve recognized Kamala for a very long time. I like Kamala. I knew her again when she was an lawyer basic, and I used to be nonetheless instructing and we labored on the housing disaster collectively, so we go method again.”
“However they want — they should be a crew,” she added, “and my sense is they’re — I don’t imply that by suggesting I feel there are any issues. I feel they’re.”
KAMALA HARRIS, GAFFE MACHINE: VP’S PUBLIC APPEARANCES MARKED BY AWKWARD MOMENTS, CONTROVERSIES
The Republican Nationwide Committee shared a clip of the feedback on Twitter Saturday night.
“Attention-grabbing phrase selection from Warren and telling she received’t again Harris,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz’s particular adviser of communications, Steve Visitor.
KAMALA DECLARES ‘BORDER IS SECURE’ AS THOUSANDS OF ILLEGALS FLOW INTO US EVERY DAY
A number of Republican operatives and conservative writers additionally shared the clip.
Warren was additionally requested in the course of the interview Friday whether or not Biden ought to run once more.
“Sure. He ought to run once more,” Warren mentioned. “And he’s operating once more.”
The president has not formally introduced his 2024 re-election bid however is extensively anticipated to announce subsequent month.
Warren mentioned throughout an interview with Politico that she was “very completely satisfied” about Biden’s re-election and mentioned he would probably not face a major problem.
“The circumstances are that Joe Biden is operating,” Warren mentioned. “I’m very completely satisfied about that. I’m not operating for president, I’m operating for Senate.”
Fox Information’ Hanna Panreck contributed to this report.
Politics
Republican makes major announcement in push to grow GOP support from once-solid Dem voting bloc
EXCLUSIVE: A Republican running for re-election in a race key to a possible GOP Senate majority made a major announcement Friday aimed at keeping a crucial voting bloc away from the Democrats.
Florida Sen. Rick Scott announced the latest ad installment of a multimillion-dollar investment in Hispanic outreach, one that his campaign hopes will continue the demographic’s swing toward the GOP and further solidify the state as deep red.
“As parents, we teach values to our children, the difference between right and wrong, truth and lies. But then we send our kids to school where some radical socialist teacher doesn’t teach them math or English. No, they’re taught that men can have babies and become women, and that we should worship the god of government, not the God who created us. That is socialism,” Scott says in the ad, titled “Verdad,” which will run in both Spanish and English.
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The ad will run in multiple TV and radio markets across Florida, as well as statewide on multiple digital platforms.
Socialism has been a major theme in Florida elections in recent years, especially considering the Hispanic population in the state has significant Cuban and Venezuelan heritage.
Some election experts argue that has been one of the major factors in the shift of Hispanics toward the Republican Party, which has expanded into other Hispanic groups, such as the Puerto Rican community.
According to the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, 55% of Florida’s Hispanics supported Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in his 2022 re-election bid, as well as Miami-Dade County — traditionally a Democratic stronghold that Hillary Clinton won by 29 percentage points in 2016.
Scott, who is expected to sail to victory in the Republican primary on Aug. 20, will likely face Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the former representative of Florida’s 26th Congressional District ousted in the 2020 election.
Elections analysts rate the race as either “likely” or “solid” Republican.
Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.
Politics
Six California House races that could help determine control of Congress
In a heavily agricultural San Joaquin Valley district that encompasses all of Merced County and parts of Fresno, Madera, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties, Republican Rep. John Duarte of Modesto will once again face off against Adam Gray after narrowly vanquishing the Democrat in 2022.
Two years ago, this was the second-closest House race in the nation, with Duarte winning by just 564 votes. It will be one of the most avidly watched races in the country again this year.
“Right now, the single most vulnerable Republican incumbent is John Duarte, in my view,” Wasserman said of the California races.
“Adam Gray came within a hair of winning the seat [in 2022]. Duarte is not yet as established a political brand as [David] Valadao,” Wasserman explained, comparing the freshman representative to his five-term GOP counterpart to the south. “And in a presidential cycle, this district ought to vote for a Democrat.”
The district had low Democratic turnout in 2022 but favored Biden by 11 points in 2020, according to data from California Target Book.
Wasserman stressed that there were still open questions about the strength of Biden’s support among Latino voters. A scenario where Trump manages to make inroads with those voters would favor Duarte, Wasserman said.
The district has a slight Latino majority, with white voters also accounting for nearly 40% of the electorate, according to data from California Target Book. It includes cities like Madera, Ceres and Merced and portions of Modesto and Turlock, as well as rural swaths of the San Joaquin Valley.
Despite Biden’s double-digit margin of victory in 2020, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Dahle beat Gov. Gavin Newsom by more than eight points in the district in 2022, a partisan see-sawing that speaks to the large number of independent voters in the district as well as strong Republican turnout in the 2022 midterms.
As of late February, Democrats held a 13-percentage-point registration advantage, while no party preference voters made up more than a fifth of the electorate.
Gray significantly outraised Duarte in the most recent filing period ending on March 31, but Duarte still has more cash on hand, with $1.8 million, to Gray’s $1.2 million reserve, according to federal filings.
Politics
A New Pacific Arsenal to Counter China
Since the start of his administration, President Biden has undertaken a strategy to expand American military access to bases in allied nations across the Asia-Pacific region and to deploy a range of new weapons systems there. He has also said the U.S. military would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.
On Wednesday, Mr. Biden signed a $95-billion supplemental military aid and spending bill that Congress had just passed and that includes $8.1 billion to counter China in the region. And Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken traveled to Shanghai and Beijing this week for meetings in which he planned to raise China’s aggressive actions around Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Earlier in April, the leaders of the Philippines and Japan met with Mr. Biden at the White House for the first such summit among the three countries. They announced enhanced defense cooperation, including naval training and exercises, planned jointly and with other partners. Last year, the Biden administration forged a new three-way defense pact with Japan and South Korea.
“In 2023, we drove the most transformative year for U.S. force posture in the Indo-Pacific region in a generation,” Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said in a statement following an interview.
The main change, he said, is having American forces distributed in smaller, more mobile units across a wide arc of the region rather than being concentrated at large bases in northeast Asia. That is largely intended to counter China’s efforts to build up forces that can target aircraft carriers or U.S. military outposts on Okinawa or Guam.
These land forces, including a retrained and refitted U.S. Marine littoral regiment in Okinawa, will now have the ability to attack warships at sea.
For the first time, Japan’s military will receive up to 400 of their own Tomahawk missiles — the newest versions of which can attack ships at sea as well as targets on land from over 1,150 miles away.
The Pentagon has also gained access rights for its troops at four additional bases in the Philippines that could eventually host U.S. warplanes and advanced mobile missile launchers, if Washington and Manila agree that offensive weaponry can be placed there.
The United States has bilateral mutual defense agreements with several allied nations in the region so that an attack on the assets of one nation could trigger a response from the other. Bolstering the U.S. troop presence on the soil of allied countries strengthens that notion of mutual defense.
In addition, the United States continues to send weapons and Green Beret trainers to Taiwan, a de facto independent island and the biggest flashpoint between the United States and China. Mr. Xi has said his nation must eventually take control of Taiwan, by force if necessary.
“We’ve deepened our alliances and partnerships abroad in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago,” Kurt Campbell, the new deputy secretary of state, told reporters last year, when he was the top Asia policy official in the White House.
What Deters China?
Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said in an interview in Taipei that the strengthened alliances and evolving military force postures were critical to deterring China.
“We are very happy to see that many countries in this region are coming to the realization that they also have to be prepared for further expansions of the P.R.C.,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
To some Chinese military strategists, the U.S. efforts are aimed at keeping China’s naval forces behind the “first island chain” — islands close to mainland Asia that run from Okinawa in Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines.
U.S. military assets along these islands could prevent Chinese warships from getting into the open Pacific waters farther east if conflict were to break out.
Leaders in China’s People’s Liberation Army also talk of establishing military dominance of the “second island chain” — which is farther out in the Pacific and includes Guam, Palau and West Papua.
But several conservative critics of the administration’s policies argue that the United States should be keeping major arms for its own use and that it is not producing new ships and major weapons systems quickly enough to deter China, which is rapidly growing its military.
Some American commanders acknowledge the United States needs to speed up ship production but say the Pentagon’s warfighting abilities in the region still outmatch China’s — and can improve quickly with the right political and budget commitments in Washington.
“We have actually grown our combat capability here in the Pacific over the last years,” said Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the incoming commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. “But our trajectory is still not a trajectory that matches our adversary. Our adversaries are building more capability and they’re building more warships — per year — than we are.”
Mr. Paparo said new American warships were still more capable than the ones China is building, and the U.S. military’s “total weight of fires” continued to outmatch that of the People’s Liberation Army, for now.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Cold War-era arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, prohibited land-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between 311 miles and 3,420 miles. But after the Trump administration withdrew from the pact, the United States was able to develop and field a large number of small, mobile launchers for previously banned missiles around Asia.
Even with the deployment of new systems, the United States would still rely on its legacy assets in the region in the event of war: its bases in Guam, Japan and South Korea, and the troops and arms there.
All of the senior U.S. officials interviewed for this story say war with China is neither desirable nor inevitable — a view expressed publicly by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III. But they also insist that a military buildup and bolstering alliances, along with diplomatic talks with China, are important elements of deterring potential future aggression by Beijing.
Chen Jining, the Communist Party chief in Shanghai, told Mr. Blinken on Thursday that “whether China and the U.S. choose cooperation or confrontation, it affects the well-being of both peoples, of both nations, and also the future of humanity.”
Japan
The new deterrent effort is twofold for American forces: increasing patrolling activities at sea and the capabilities of its troop levels ashore.
To the former, the Pentagon has announced that U.S. Navy warships will participate in more drills with their Japanese counterparts in the western Ryukyu Islands near Taiwan and with Filipino ships in the South China Sea, where the Chinese coast guard has harassed ships and installations controlled by the Philippines.
To the latter, Marine Corps and Army units already in the Pacific have recently fielded medium- and long-range missiles mated to small, mobile trucks that would have been prohibited under the former treaty.
These trucks can be quickly lifted by Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft or larger cargo planes to new locations, or they can simply drive away to evade a Chinese counterattack. A new flotilla of U.S. Army watercraft being sent to the region could also be used to reposition troops and launchers from island to island.
In an interview last year with The New York Times, Gen. David H. Berger, then the Marine Corps’ top general, said the service had begun analyzing strategic choke points between islands where Chinese forces were likely to transit throughout the Pacific. He said the service had identified sites where Marine assault forces like the new Okinawa-based littoral regiment could launch attacks on Beijing’s warships using these new weapons.
Philippines
The Pentagon announced in February last year a new military base-sharing agreement with Manila, giving U.S. forces access to four sites in the Philippines for use in humanitarian missions, adding to the five sites previously opened to the Pentagon in 2014. Most of them are air bases with runways long enough to host heavy cargo planes.
Plotting their locations on a map shows the sites’ strategic value should the United States be called upon to defend their oldest treaty ally in the region, if the Philippines eventually agrees to allow the U.S. military to put combat troops and mobile missile systems there.
One, on the northern tip of Luzon Island, would give missile-launching trucks the ability to attack Chinese ships across the strait separating Philippines from Taiwan, while another site about 700 miles to the southwest would allow the U.S. to strike bases that China has built in the Spratly Islands nearby.
In 2023, the United States committed $100 million for “infrastructure investments” at the nine bases, with more funds expected this year.
Australia
The Pentagon has forged closer military ties with Australia and Papua New Guinea, extending America’s bulwark against potential attempts by the Chinese military at establishing dominance along the “second island chain.”
The Obama administration moved a number of littoral combat ships to Singapore and deployed a rotating force of Marines to Darwin, on Australia’s north coast, giving the Pentagon more assets that could respond as needed in the region.
Last year, the Biden administration greatly elevated its commitment to Australia, which is one of America’s most important non-NATO allies.
A new multibillion dollar agreement called AUKUS — for Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States — will permanently transfer some of the U.S. Navy’s newest Virginia-class attack subs to Canberra. The location of the new bases for those subs has not been announced, but the first group of Australian sailors who will crew them graduated from nuclear power training in America in January.
These stealthy submarines, which can fire torpedoes and Tomahawk missiles, will potentially add to the number of threats Beijing faces in case of a regional war.
Just north of Australia, an agreement in August gave U.S. forces more access to Papua New Guinea for humanitarian missions and committed American tax dollars to update military facilities there.
To Admiral Paparo, this growing network of partnerships and security agreements across thousands of miles of the Pacific is a direct result of what he calls China’s “revanchist, revisionist and expansionist agenda” in the region that has directly threatened its neighbors.
“I do believe that the U.S. and our allies and partners are playing a stronger hand and that we would prevail in any fight that arose in the Western Pacific,” the admiral said in an interview.
“It’s a hand that I would not trade with our would-be adversaries, and yet we’re also never satisfied with the strength of that hand and always looking to improve it.”
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