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January 6 Panel Requests Interview With Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy

The House panel investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection requested an interview and records from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday, shifting their investigation to a top ally of former President Donald Trump in Congress. 

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democratic chairman of the panel, requested that McCarthy provide information to the nine-member panel regarding the violence that took place last January and his communications with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days prior to the attack.

“We also must learn about how the President’s plans for January 6th came together, and all the other ways he attempted to alter the results of the election,” Thompson said in the letter. “For example, in advance of January 6th, you reportedly explained to Mark Meadows and the former President that objections to the certification of the electoral votes on January 6th ‘was doomed to fail.'” 

The request seeks information about McCarthy’s conversations with Trump “before, during and after” the riot, with lawmakers seeking a window into Trump’s state of mind from an ally who has acknowledged repeated interactions with the then-president.

The committee also wants to question McCarthy about communications with Trump and White House staff in the week after the violence, including a conversation with Trump that was reportedly heated. 

The committee acknowledged the sensitive and unusual nature of its request as it proposed a meeting with McCarthy on either February 3 or 4.

“The Select Committee has tremendous respect for the prerogatives of Congress and the privacy of its Members,” Thompson wrote. “At the same time, we have a solemn responsibility to investigate fully the facts and circumstances of these events. 

A request for comment from McCarthy’s office was not immediately returned.

McCarthy attracted the committee’s attention through his public characterizations after the riot of his private discussions with Trump. Thompson’s letter cites multiple statements and interviews in which McCarthy described his interactions with the president, including a CBS interview in which McCarthy said, “I was very clear with the president when I called him. This has to stop, and he has to go to the American public and tell them to stop this.” 

One of his Republican colleagues, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, has said McCarthy told her that Trump told him, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” 

The Republican leader is the third member of Congress the committee has reached out to for voluntary information. In the past few weeks, Republican Representatives Jim Jordan and Scott Perry were also contacted by the panel but have denied the requests to sit down with lawmakers or provide documents.

The panel, comprised of seven Democrats and two Republicans, has already interviewed more than 300 people and issued subpoenas to more than 40 as it seeks to create a comprehensive record of the January 6 attack and the events leading up to it.

The committee says the extraordinary trove of material it has collected — 35,000 pages of records so far, including texts, emails and phone records from people close to Trump — is fleshing out critical details of the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries, which played out on live television.

Thompson told The Associated Press in an interview last month that about 90% of the witnesses subpoenaed by the committee have cooperated, despite the defiance of high-profile Trump allies like Meadows and Steve Bannon.

Lawmakers say they have been effective at gathering information from other sources in part because they share a unity of purpose rarely seen in a congressional investigation. 

 
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White House Urges Continued Mitigation Efforts Amid Omicron Surge

The White House COVID-19 response team on Wednesday reminded Americans of the continued need to slow the omicron variant’s spread despite its decreased severity and announced new efforts to help keep schools open.

As the omicron variant sweeps across the U.S., Dr. Rochelle Walensky emphasized that wearing masks, getting vaccinated and undergoing COVID-19 testing when necessary are the best strategies to help lower cases of the virus.

Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the omicron variant accounted for 98% of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Earlier this week, the U.S. set a record for the number of daily infections at nearly 1.5 million, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

“All of us must do our part to protect our hospitals and our neighbors and reduce the further spread of this virus,” Walensky said.

The White House team also announced that the Biden administration would distribute 10 million tests to schools across the country each month to ensure they remain open, more than doubling the testing volume from last year.

Although the omicron variant is highly transmissible, it remains less severe than the delta variant, with a decreased risk of hospitalization and death.

Walensky, citing a recent study comparing the two variants, said omicron infections were associated with a 91% reduction in the risk of death and a 74% reduction in the risk of ICU admission.

She also said that infections with the variant had a 53% reduced risk of symptomatic hospitalization.

More hospitalizations

While the risk of hospitalization remains low, the “staggering rise in cases” has increased the country’s number of hospitalizations, according to Walensky.

Nonetheless, she said, patients infected with omicron are experiencing 71% shorter hospital stays than those infected with the delta variant.

On average, omicron patients are hospitalized for about 1.5 days and 90% are expected to be discharged in three days or less.

As the surge continues, Walensky reiterated that cases of the variant are expected to peak in the coming weeks. She also said deaths have increased, with more than 2,600 reported by John Hopkins on Wednesday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious-disease expert, said the country would not be able to eliminate or eradicate COVID-19, but would “ultimately control it.” As the virus becomes endemic, it is likely that “virtually everybody is going to wind up getting exposed and likely get infected,” he said.

However, he added, this does not mean that vaccinations or preventative measures are ineffective or pointless. Fauci clarified that getting vaccinated and staying up to date with booster shots will prevent serious illness from the disease.

“If you’re vaccinated and if you’re boosted, the chances of your getting sick are very, very low,” Fauci said.

To help battle the current surge, the White House team stressed that mitigation efforts remain critical, including wearing a mask. While N95 masks have been shown to be the most effective in resisting airborne transmission of the virus, the CDC still recommends that, for the time being, people choose the mask that is right for them, and that wearing any well-fitting mask is better than no mask.

“We want to highlight that the best mask for you is the one that you can wear comfortably,” Walensky said.

Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, was asked about finding masks and said the administration is “strongly considering options to make more high-quality masks available to all Americans.”

As for schools, the team said that, along with increased testing, vaccination and other mitigation efforts are the keys to keeping students in the classroom.

Walensky stated that with pediatric vaccines now available, schools should be able to continue operating as planned. She also reminded reporters that 99% of schools remained open in the fall during a surge in the delta variant.

“One of the best things we can do is get our children and our teenagers vaccinated,” she said.
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Amid Partisan Rancor, US Looks to 2022 Midterm Elections

As of Wednesday, there were 300 days until the next federal election in the U.S., when voters will cast ballots for all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and one-third of the members of the Senate, with enormous consequences for the second half of President Joe Biden’s four-year term in office. 

While it may seem to people outside Washington that it’s too soon to begin thinking about an election that far away, there is little question that key figures in Washington are already weighing their every move with an eye on how it might affect voters’ feelings in November. 

That applies particularly to Biden, who is struggling with an approval rating that has been hovering between 40% and 45% for several weeks as the coronavirus pandemic rages and inflation drives up the cost of living for everyday Americans at a pace not seen in nearly four decades.

Called a “midterm election” because it takes place at the midpoint of the president’s four-year term, the results are usually affected heavily by public perceptions of the president.

“There’s no reason to think that the midterm elections in November of this year will be anything other than what they usually are, and that is a referendum on the performance of the president and the president’s party,” William A. Galston, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program, told VOA.

Control of Congress at stake

Control of both the House and Senate is very much in play. Democrats have nominal control of both chambers but are severely constrained in enacting their proposals because of a 50-50 split in the Senate. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris is able to cast tie-breaking votes, but the body’s filibuster rule allows Republicans to block most legislation from coming to a vote in the first place.

In the House, Democrats hold a slim 222-212 majority, with one seat vacant. Republicans are favored to win enough seats to take over the House in November.

In the Senate, the likely result is unclear. Of the 34 seats that are up for election this cycle, 20 are held by Republicans and 14 by Democrats. The overwhelming majority are considered “safe,” meaning that the incumbent is likely to be reelected. The six races generally considered competitive are split evenly, with three held by Republicans and three by Democrats.

As difficult as it presently is for Biden to force his agenda through Congress, the loss of control of either the House or the Senate to Republicans would all but guarantee a shutdown of his legislative agenda in the second half of his term.

Referendum on the president

Historically, midterm elections are tough on the party of the president. In all but three of the midterm elections since the 1861-65 Civil War, the party of the incumbent president has lost seats in the House.

“The best predictor of how a party is going to do is the incumbent president’s job approval rating,” Charlie Cook, the founder of the Cook Political Report, told VOA. “And the more under 50% it is, the tougher it is. So if you’ve got a president that’s at 42%, or 43%, as President Biden is, that’s not a good thing [for Democrats].”

“Sometimes you can oversimplify things in politics, but I think midterms benefit from oversimplification,” said Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“Historically speaking, unless there’s some sort of big outside circumstance or extraordinary circumstance, you would not expect an unpopular president’s party to do well in a midterm,” Kondik told VOA. “And so I think what we could say from the vantage point of January is that Biden’s numbers need to get better or Democrats are in real danger of losing particularly the House and also the Senate.”

Controversy possible

Absent some grand unifying event that inspires Americans to cross political boundaries, the 2022 election will take place in an atmosphere of extreme partisan rancor. After the 2020 election, in which former President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the presidency had been stolen from him, many states passed controversial new election laws that could make contested outcomes more likely and more challenging to resolve.

“If there’s a close election in a major race — let’s say it’s a Senate race that could determine control of the Senate — will the losing side be willing to accept the legitimacy of the outcome or be convinced that the process was rigged in some way against it?” asked Rick Pildes, an election law expert and the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law. “We’re in a culture of tremendous distrust in advance [of the election] on both sides of the spectrum.”

Pildes pointed out that the situation is exacerbated by one aspect of the U.S. election system that is notably different from most other democracies.

“In the U.S., we do not have independent institutions to oversee and administer our elections, unlike in a lot of democracies,” he told VOA. “We have partisan elected officials … administering most of the election process and there is great concern now that the losers will convince themselves — in a close election, particularly if the other party’s elected figures are in control of the process — that something about the process was corrupt.”

If there is controversy, it will most likely be in a small handful of races, said Galston of the Brookings Institution.

“At this point, so many of the elections occur in jurisdictions that are dominated by one party or the other that we may not see that many close elections, either at the congressional district level or at the state level,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to reach anything like the intensity that we saw after the presidential election of 2020.”

Abortion ruling as wild card

One event that could have a significant impact on the election is an anticipated ruling on a controversial state abortion law, expected from the Supreme Court in the early summer, according to Kondik of the University of Virginia. The ruling will decide if states are free to enact far more restrictive abortion laws than Supreme Court precedent has allowed.

“I think one big issue to watch is abortion — if, in fact, the Supreme Court allows states to heavily restrict abortion or restrict abortion more than they’re able to do now,” he said. “So, if you’re looking for an issue to come to the forefront in the 2022 election, that would be one to watch. Abortion is a very polarizing and important issue in American politics.”

With support for limiting or even abolishing abortion rights concentrated among Republicans, and most Democrats supporting expansive access to abortion services, a decisive ruling that moves the needle either way could galvanize voters, driving more voters from one or both parties to the polls in greater numbers.
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Former Senate Leader Harry Reid to Lie in State at Capitol

Former Sen. Harry Reid will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol as colleagues and friends pay tribute to a hardscrabble Democrat who rose from poverty in a dusty Nevada mining town to the most powerful position in the U.S. Senate. 

Reid will be honored Wednesday in the Capitol Rotunda during a ceremony closed to the public under COVID-19 protocols. He died last month at 82 after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer. 

The longest-serving Nevadan in Congress and the Senate majority leader alongside two presidents, Reid helmed the chamber during one of its more consequential legislative sessions — securing the economic recovery bill during the Great Recession and President Barack Obama’s landmark health care law.

President Joe Biden called Reid a “great American,” one who “looked at the challenges of the world and believed it was within our capacity to do good, to do right.” 

During a funeral service last weekend in Las Vegas, Biden, Obama and others recalled one of Reid’s best-known traits — abruptly hanging up on people, even presidents, rather than close with lengthy goodbyes. 

The few words Reid did say were often flinty and fiery, the senator unafraid to take on presidents (he called George W. Bush a “loser”), criticize the fossil fuel industry (“coal makes us sick”) or declare the war in Iraq “lost.” He titled his 2008 autobiography “The Good Fight.” 

Influential in retirement, Reid said Biden should give his new presidency just three weeks to try to work with Republicans. If not, Biden should force changes in the Senate’s filibuster rules to allow simple majority passage of elections and voting rights legislation and other priorities, Reid said. 

“The time’s going to come when he’s going to have to move in and get rid of the filibuster,” Reid told The Associated Press. 

Reid was born in the desolate mining town of Searchlight, Nevada, his father a hard-rock miner who later committed suicide, his mother doing laundry at home for bordellos. (He and other kids would swim in a brothel’s pool.) Searchlight was a place, he said, that “had seen its better days.” 

The town had no churches, his family no religion. But a picture of President Franklin D. Roosevelt hanging in the Reid home would influence his political career. 

Reid hitchhiked some 40 miles to attend high school and joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as he made his way through college and law school. An amateur boxer, he once leveled a punch at his future father-in-law after being denied a date with Landra Gould, who would become his wife. They were married for 62 years. 

First elected to the House in 1982 and reelected in 1984, Reid then served 30 years in the Senate, including a decade as the Senate Democratic leader. 

Along the way, Reid rewrote the map of Nevada by expanding public lands, halting the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste outside of Las Vegas; and securing national monument status around artist Michael Heizer’s “City” installation in the desert. He quietly ensured federal funding to research UFOs. 

A man of few words, Reid often wrote notes instead — to family, colleagues and a Nevada student advocate who had reached out on immigration law changes. He championed the Dream Act and Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to protect young immigrants in the U.S. without legal status from deportation. 

As his power rose, Reid engineered a Democratic legacy for his state with Nevada’s early presidential caucus. He left behind a state party apparatus that was sometimes referred to as the “Reid Machine” for its enduring political power seeking to elect the next generation of Democratic leaders. 

After suffering an exercise accident at home, and with Democrats back in the Senate minority, Reid announced he would not seek reelection in 2016. 

In his farewell address to the Senate, he acknowledged he had done things that “probably a lot of people wouldn’t do.” But he passed on his advice to those wondering how he made it from Searchlight to Washington. 

“I didn’t make it because of my good looks. I didn’t make it because I am a genius. I made it because I worked hard,” Reid said. “Whatever you want to try to do, make sure you work as hard as you can to try to do what you want to do.”
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January 6 Committee Subpoenas Trump Aide, 2 Republican Strategists 

The House panel investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection is demanding records and testimony from a former White House aide they say helped draft former President Donald Trump’s January 6 speech, along with two others it says were in communication with people close to Trump.

Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson, Democratic chairman of the panel, issued subpoenas on Tuesday to Andy Surabian and Arthur Schwartz, strategists who advised Donald Trump Jr., and Ross Worthington, a former White House official who the committee says helped draft the speech Trump gave at the rally directly preceding last year’s attack.

“We have reason to believe the individuals we’ve subpoenaed today have relevant information, and we expect them to join the more than 340 individuals who have spoken with the Select Committee as we push ahead to investigate this attack on our democracy and ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” Thompson said in a letter Tuesday.

Worthington is a former Trump White House and campaign aide who served as a speechwriter and policy adviser. He had previously worked for former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally.

Surabian is a GOP strategist who has worked with Trump’s eldest son, Trump Jr., former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and others within the Trump orbit. The committee alleges he and Schwartz, another strategist who has worked with Trump Jr. and Bannon, communicated with people, including Trump Jr. and his fiancée and Trump fundraiser, Kimberly Guilfoyle, regarding the January 6 rally on The Ellipse.

An attorney representing Surabian said his client will cooperate with the committee “within reason,” but does not understand why the subpoena was issued in the first place. 

“He had nothing at all to do with the events that took place at the Capitol that day, zero involvement in organizing the rally that preceded it, and was off the payroll of the Trump campaign as of November 15, 2020,” Daniel Bean said in a statement.

Schwartz had no comment when reached by The Associated Press on Tuesday, and Worthington did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Trump at the time was pushing false claims of widespread voter fraud and lobbying Vice President Mike Pence and Republican members of Congress to try to overturn the count at the January 6 congressional certification. Election officials across the country, along with the courts, had repeatedly dismissed Trump’s claims. 
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Biden Pushes Voting Rights Legislation Ahead of Vote

President Joe Biden is pushing legislation to prevent states from imposing laws that limit access to the vote, arguing that voting rights are a bedrock American value and need to be better protected. His Republican opponents want states to support more rigorous voter identification and ballot security measures to prevent voter fraud. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from the White House.

Produced: Bakhtiyar Zamanov 
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Biden Supports Changing Senate Rules to Pass Voting Rights Bills

U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were in the southern state of Georgia on Tuesday to promote voting rights legislation that would greatly expand federal influence over elections. 

The two bills are a top priority for many Democrats but have stalled in the Senate because of Republican opposition. 

“Today, we come to Atlanta, the cradle of civil rights, to make clear what must come after that dreadful day when a dagger was literally held at the throat of American democracy,” Biden said, invoking the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump attempting to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. 

With only 50 Democratic votes in the 100-seat Senate and no Republican ones, Biden threw his support behind the so-called filibuster carve-out: a one-time change in filibuster rules to pass the two voting rights bills. 

The filibuster is a Senate tradition that allows the minority party to prolong debate and delay or prevent a vote. A filibuster carve-out would allow Senate Democrats to pass legislation with a simple majority with Harris as the tiebreaker.

“Today I’m making it clear. To protect our democracy, I support changing the Senate rules whichever way they need to be changed to prevent a minority of senators from blocking action on voting rights,” Biden said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he will force a vote on changing those Senate rules no later than January 17, the day Americans commemorate the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights activist. 

Senator Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, lambasted the move.

“The Senate Democratic leader is trying to bully his own members into breaking their word, breaking the Senate, and silencing the voices of millions of citizens. So that one political party can take over our nation’s elections from the top down,” he said in a statement Tuesday. 

McConnell also blasted Biden’s rhetoric on voting rights. 

“A sitting president of the United States who pledged to lower the temperature and unite America now invokes the brutal racial hatred of Jim Crow segregation to smear states whose new voting laws are more accessible than in his home state of Delaware,” McConnell said. 

Republicans vs. Democrats on voting rights 

In the American federal system, rules on who can vote, how, when and where they can vote and how the votes are counted are determined at the state level. In general, Democrats want to make it easier for everyone to vote because a larger pool of voters tends to yield more Democratic votes. Republicans tend to support higher barriers to voting, focusing on voter identification to protect against fraud.

Data from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School show that in the last year at least 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 34 laws restricting access to voting.

The two bills Biden is advocating include the Freedom to Vote Act, which would, among other provisions, reduce the impact of Republican controlled state-led efforts to restrict voting and stop gerrymandering, the process in which state legislators redraw districts in a way that advocates say favors one party or class. The second is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore certain anti-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act that were weakened in a 2013 Supreme Court ruling. 

The prospects of passing the bills are dim. 

“It is hard to pass something, to say we’re going to standardize things across the country in a way that really only one party is for,” said John Fortier, a senior fellow focusing on elections at the American Enterprise Institute. 

Republicans in Congress have uniformly opposed the measures, contending that each of the 50 U.S. states should continue to set its own rules, including voting hours, how many days of early voting should be allowed before the traditional election day and the extent to which mail-in balloting is allowed.

Along with Biden’s Build Back Better, the $2 trillion social spending and climate change bill still stuck at the Senate, Democrats and the White House say passing voting rights legislation is a top priority.

“Right now, Democrats are so worried about the prospects of what could happen without essentially nationalizing voting rights issues, that I think they’re viewing this as, ‘We have to do this, otherwise we’ve lost everything else,'” said David Schultz, a professor at Hamline University specializing in election law. 

That may explain why Biden’s speech referred heavily to January 6 and “the Big Lie” — the baseless claim that Trump won the 2020 election — as a powerful argument to change the filibuster rules and pass voting rights measures.

Think of the scenes at the Capitol that day as the equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters being beaten as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, images that were crucial to passing voting rights legislation in the 1960s, Schultz said. 

“Biden needs an image to win over the public and Congress to support his legislation,” he added.

‘The Big Lie’ 

While Democrats routinely criticize Trump and his Republican allies for what they characterize as “the Big Lie,” McConnell has attacked Democrats over what he called “the left’s Big Lie” — the belief that “there is some evil anti-voting conspiracy sweeping America.”

In the 2020 election, Biden won some states where voting days were added, voting hours were extended and mail-in balloting was expanded to reduce the need for voters to go to polling places amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The legislation pushed by Democrats aims to codify many of those changes for future elections, including the 2022 elections in November, when all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and about a third of the Senate seats are up for grabs. Numerous Republican-controlled state legislatures in the past year have curtailed many of the changes enacted for the 2020 election, fearing that Democrats would gain a permanent electoral advantage if the rules were left in place.

At least two Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, remain opposed to changing the legislative filibuster rule, even for voting rights measures. 

“Unless they’ve changed their minds, unless the speech and other things going around change their minds, then it’s going to be almost impossible to pass this set of legislation at the federal level,” Fortier said. 

Biden, in his close to 40 years in the Senate, has resisted changes to the filibuster but now believes change is necessary.

“The president is coming to the realization right now that this is not the same Senate that he was in 20, 30 years ago where compromise was possible,” Schultz said. 

VOA’s Anita Powell contributed to this report.

 
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Biden to Push for Voting Rights Measures

U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are headed Tuesday to the southern state of Georgia to promote voting rights legislation that would greatly expand federal purview over elections but has stalled in the Senate. 

A White House official said Biden would use an address to advocate for the right to vote in free, fair and secure elections untainted by partisan manipulation, and say that the way to guarantee those rights is by enacting two pieces of voting legislation introduced by Democrats. 

“The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation,” Biden says, according to a White House excerpt of his remarks.  “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch. I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies foreign and domestic. And so, the question is where will the institution of United States Senate stand?” 

He later said on Twitter, “History has never been kind to those who have sided with voter suppression over voting rights. And it will not be kind to those who fail to defend the right to vote.”

But Republicans in Congress have uniformly opposed the measures, contending that each of the individual 50 U.S. states should continue to set their own rules, including on voting hours, how many days of early voting should be allowed ahead of the traditional early November election days and the extent to which mail-in balloting is allowed.

In the 2020 presidential election, Biden ousted former President Donald Trump after a single White House term. Biden won some states where voting days were added, voting hours extended and mail-in balloting expanded to limit the need for voters to go to traditional, crowded voting places on Election Day in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, Democrats, in the legislation Biden supports, want to codify many of those changes for future elections, including the 2022 elections next November, when all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and about a third of the Senate seats are up for grabs. Numerous Republican-controlled state legislatures in the last year have curtailed many of the changes enacted for the 2020 election, fearing that Democrats would gain a permanent electoral advantage if the rules were left in place.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is expected to force votes this week on both the Freedom to Vote Act, which would overhaul federal election rules, and separate voting legislation that would strengthen the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring federal approval of newly enacted state voting regulations.

But Senate Republicans are set to use the 60-vote legislative filibuster to block those bills from advancing. The 100-member Senate is evenly divided 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans and the entire Republican caucus opposes the Democratic election legislation, meaning Democrats can likely only pass their proposals if they carve out an exception to the filibuster rule for voting rights legislation and win approval on a 51-50 vote, with Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.

Schumer has vowed to hold a vote by next Monday to change the legislative filibuster rules, but at least two Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, remain opposed to changing the legislative filibuster rule, even for voting rights measures. 

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has adamantly opposed the Democratic election law legislation and changing the filibuster rule.

“No party that would trash the Senate’s legislation traditions can be trusted to seize control over election laws all across America,” McConnell told the Senate recently. “Nobody who is this desperate to take over our democracy on a one-party basis can be allowed to do it.”

Democrats routinely criticize Trump and his Republican allies for what they characterize as his “Big Lie” that he was cheated out of re-election. McConnell, in turn, attacked Democrats over “the left’s Big Lie,” what he said is the belief that “there is some evil anti-voting conspiracy sweeping America.”

In supporting greater federal control of elections, Schumer cited data from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School showing that in the last year at least 19 states have passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. One of the states enacting more restrictions is Georgia, where Biden and Harris won in 2020 and are visiting on Tuesday.

But Senate Democrats have no path forward unless they change filibuster rules that prevent contentious legislation from advancing without the support of at least 60 of the 100 senators.

The White House official said Biden would voice support for changing the rule in order to protect voting rights and make the drawing of geographical lines for congressional districts less partisan.
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Prospects Dim as US, Russia Prepare to Meet Over Ukraine

With the fate of Ukraine and potentially broader post-Cold War European stability at stake, the United States and Russia are holding critical strategic talks that could shape the future of not only their relationship but the relationship between the U.S. and its NATO allies. Prospects are bleak.

Though the immediacy of the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine will top the agenda in a series of high-level meetings that get underway on Monday, there is a litany of festering but largely unrelated disputes, ranging from arms control to cybercrime and diplomatic issues, for Washington and Moscow to overcome if tensions are to ease. And the recent deployment of Russian troops to Kazakhstan may cast a shadow over the entire exercise.

With much at risk and both warning of dire consequences of failure, the two sides have been positioning themselves for what will be a nearly unprecedented flurry of activity in Europe this week. Yet the wide divergence in their opening positions bodes ill for any type of speedy resolution, and levels of distrust appear higher than at any point since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

U.S. officials on Saturday unveiled some details of the administration’s stance, which seem to fall well short of Russian demands. The officials said the U.S. is open to discussions on curtailing possible future deployments of offensive missiles in Ukraine and putting limits on American and NATO military exercises in Eastern Europe if Russia is willing to back off on Ukraine.

But they also said Russia will be hit hard with economic sanctions should it intervene in Ukraine. In addition to direct sanctions on Russian entities, those penalties could include significant restrictions on products exported from the U.S. to Russia and potentially foreign-made products subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Russia wants the talks initially to produce formally binding security guarantees for itself with a pledge that NATO will not further expand eastward and the removal of U.S. troops and weapons from parts of Europe. But the U.S. and its allies say those are non-starters intentionally designed by Moscow to distract and divide. They insist that any Russian military intervention in Ukraine will prompt “massive consequences” that will dramatically disrupt Russia’s economy even if they have global ripple effects.

In a bid to forestall efforts by Russia to sow discord in the West, the Biden administration has gone out of its way to stress that neither Ukraine nor Europe more broadly will be excluded from any discussion of Ukraine’s or Europe’s security.

Biden administration officials allow that neither topic can be entirely ignored when senior American and Russian diplomats sit down in Geneva in Monday ahead of larger, more inclusive meetings in Brussels and Vienna on Wednesday and Thursday that will explore those issues in perhaps more depth.

Still, the mantras “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” and “nothing about Europe without Europe” have become almost cliche in Washington in recent weeks, and senior U.S. officials have gone so far as to say they expect Russia to lie about the content of Monday’s meeting to try to stoke divisions.

“We fully expect that the Russian side will make public comments following the meeting on Monday that will not reflect the true nature of the discussions that took place,” said one senior U.S. official who will participate in the talks. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

That official and others have urged allies to view with “extreme skepticism” anything Moscow says about the so-called Strategic Stability Talks and wait until they are briefed by the American participants to form opinions.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Russia of “gaslighting” and mounting a full-scale disinformation campaign designed to blame Ukraine, NATO and particularly the United States for the current tensions and undercut Western unity. He said Russian President Vladimir Putin is engaged in an all-out war on the truth that ignores Russia’s own provocative and destabilizing actions over the course of the past decade.

“Russia seeks to challenge the international system itself and to unravel our trans-Atlantic alliance, erode our unity, pressure democracies into failure,” Blnken said Friday, going through a list of offending Russian activity ranging from military intervention in Ukraine and Georgia to chemical weapons attacks on Putin critics to election interference in the U.S. and elsewhere, cybercrime and support for dictators.

Despite several conversations between President Joe Biden and Putin, including an in-person meeting last summer, Blinken said such behavior continues, at increasing risk to the post-World War II global order.

Thus, the intensified U.S. and allied effort to forge common positions on both the warnings and the “severe costs” to Russia if it moves against Ukraine. While expressions of unity have been forthcoming, Blinken was not optimistic about prospects for success in the talks.

“To the extent that there is progress to be made — and we hope that there is — actual progress is going to be very difficult to make, if not impossible, in an environment of escalation by Russia,” he said.

Russia, meanwhile, has spun a narrative that it is a threatened victim of Western aggression and wants quick results from the meetings despite what appear insurmountable differences.

Putin has repeatedly warned that Moscow will have to take unspecified “military-technical measures” if the West stonewalls Russia’s demands, and affirmed that NATO membership for Ukraine or the deployment of alliance weapons there is a red line for Moscow that it wouldn’t allow the West to cross.

“We have nowhere to retreat,” Putin said last month, adding that NATO could deploy missiles in Ukraine that would take just four or five minutes to reach Moscow. “They have pushed us to a line that we can’t cross. They have taken it to the point where we simply must tell them, ‘Stop!'”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who will lead Russia’s delegation at the Geneva talks across from U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, said last week that it will quickly become clear whether the talks could be productive.

“It will become clear after the next week’s events whether it’s possible to achieve quick progress, to quickly advance on issues that are of interest to us,” he said in an interview with the daily Izvestia.

“So far, we have heard some pretty abstract comment from the U.S., NATO and others about some things being acceptable and some not and an emphasis on dialogue and the importance for Russia to deescalate. There are very few rational elements in that approach due to the unstoppable and quite intensive military and geopolitical developments of the territories near Russian borders by NATO, the emergence of weapons systems there, activization of drills.”

On Sunday evening, Ryabkov and Shermana will meet over a working dinner to discuss topics for the next day’s talks, a U.S. official said. 

 
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Harry Reid Memorial in Vegas Drawing Nation’s Top Democrats

The life of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who rose from childhood poverty and deprivation in Nevada to become one of the nation’s most powerful elected officials, will be celebrated by two American presidents and other Democratic leaders on Saturday, a testament to his impact on some of the most consequential legislation of the 21st century.

President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are scheduled to speak Saturday during an invitation-only memorial for the longtime Senate leader who died Dec. 28 at home in Henderson, Nevada, at age 82 of complications from pancreatic cancer. Former President Barack Obama, who credits Reid for his rise to the White House, is scheduled to deliver the eulogy.

“The president believes that Harry Reid is one of the greatest leaders in Senate history,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday. “So he is traveling to pay his respects to a man who had a profound impact on this nation.”

Biden served with Reid in the Senate for two decades and worked with him for eight years when Biden was vice president.

Along with Obama, Elder M. Russell Ballard, a senior apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, will speak at the 2,000-seat concert hall about Reid’s 60 years in the Mormon faith. Vice President Kamala Harris also will attend.

“These are not only some of the most consequential leaders of our time — they are also some of Harry’s best friends,” Reid’s wife of 62 years, Landra Reid, said in a statement announcing plans for the Smith Center for the Performing Arts event. “Harry loved every minute of his decades working with these leaders and the incredible things they accomplished together.”

Reid’s daughter and four sons also are scheduled to speak.

Obama, in a letter to Reid before his death, recalled their close relationship, their different backgrounds and Reid’s climb from an impoverished former gold mining town of Searchlight in the Mojave Desert to leadership in Congress.

“Not bad for a skinny, poor kid from Searchlight,” Obama wrote. “I wouldn’t have been president had it not been for your encouragement and support, and I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.”

Reid served for 34 years in Washington and led the Senate through a crippling recession and the Republican takeover of the House after the 2010 elections.

He muscled Obama’s signature health care act through the Senate; blocked plans for a national nuclear waste repository in the Nevada desert; authored a 1986 bill that created Great Basin National Park; and was credited with helping casino company MGM Mirage get financial backing to complete a multibillion-dollar project on the Strip during the Great Recession.

Harry Mason Reid hitchhiked 64 kilometers to high school and was an amateur boxer before he was elected to the Nevada state Assembly at age 28. He had graduated from Utah State University and worked nights as a U.S. Capitol police officer while attending George Washington University Law School in Washington.

In 1970, at age 30, he was elected state lieutenant governor with Democratic Gov. Mike O’Callaghan. Reid was elected to the House in 1982 and the Senate in 1986.

He built a political machine in Nevada that for years helped Democrats win key elections. When he retired in 2016 after an exercise accident at home left him blind in one eye, he picked former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto to replace him.

Cortez Masto became the first woman from Nevada and the first Latina ever elected to the U.S. Senate.

“Most of all, you’ve been a good friend,” Obama told Reid in his letter. “As different as we are, I think we both saw something of ourselves in each other — a couple of outsiders who had defied the odds and knew how to take a punch and cared about the little guy.”

Singer-songwriter and environmentalist Carole King, and Brandon Flowers, lead singer of the Las Vegas-based rock band The Killers, are scheduled to perform during the memorial.

“The thought of having Carole King performing in Harry’s honor is a tribute truly beyond words,” Landra Reid said in her statement.

Flowers, a longtime friend, shares the Reids’ Latter-day Saints faith and has been a headliner at events including a Lake Tahoe Summit that Harry Reid founded in 1997 to draw attention to the ecology of the lake, and the National Clean Energy Summit that Reid helped launch in 2008 in Las Vegas.

Among other songs, Flowers was scheduled to sing the Nevada state anthem, Home Means Nevada.

Stephen J. Cloobeck, a close family friend and founder and former chief executive of a Las Vegas-based timeshare company, said he was sponsoring a gathering Friday for several hundred former Reid congressional staffers at the Bellagio resort on the Las Vegas Strip.

Those flying to Las Vegas will arrive at the newly renamed Harry Reid International Airport. It was formerly named for Pat McCarran, a former Democratic U.S. senator from Nevada who once owned the airfield and whose legacy is clouded by racism and antisemitism. 

 
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