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Democratic US Senator’s Stroke Stalls Biden Agenda

A U.S. senator was resting in the hospital Wednesday after suffering a stroke from which he is expected to recover fully, although it poses problems for the Democrats’ agenda until his return. 

Ben Ray Lujan, 49, underwent brain surgery to relieve swelling late last week and remains hospitalized, according to his office, which added that he was expected back at work in four to six weeks “barring any complications.” 

As he recovers, Democrats effectively lose their advantage in the Senate, which is split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris wielding the tie-breaking vote. 

Unlike in the House, senators must vote in person.  

Party rank-and-file members fear that advancing White House priorities such as a stalled social spending bill and a Supreme Court justice confirmation on a party-line vote may now prove complicated.  

A brain bleed in 2006 took Democrat Tim Johnson out of Senate action for around nine months when he was 59 years old, while Republican Mark Kirk’s stroke in 2012 laid him low for a full year at age 52.  

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer paid tribute to “one of the most beloved members of this body” and said senators were hopeful the freshman member from New Mexico would be “back to his old self before long.” 

Lujan’s chief of staff, Carlos Sanchez, said in a statement the senator began experiencing dizziness and fatigue on Thursday last week and checked himself into the hospital, where the stroke was identified.  

‘Life is precious’

“As part of his treatment plan, he subsequently underwent decompressive surgery to ease swelling,” Sanchez said. 

President Joe Biden plans to announce his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer by the end of this month and has vowed to pick a Black woman. 

The first Senate confirmation hearings would not likely take place until several weeks later, with a vote expected in late March at the earliest. 

But Biden will need at least one Republican vote if Lujan’s recovery takes more than a few weeks. 

Ketanji Brown Jackson, the early favorite to replace Breyer, won support from three Republican senators last year when she moved up to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

In the meantime, Schumer will likely focus on judicial nominations or legislation with clear cross-party backing. 

A government funding deal or a Russian sanctions package would likely be unaffected, but without Lujan, the planned resurrection of the Build Back Better social welfare and environment spending package appears dead.  

And the prospects for legislation aimed at ending supply chain woes and countering competition from China in the next month are also on shaky ground. 

According to the Congressional Research Service, the average age of senators at the beginning of the year was 64 years and four months, making it the oldest in history. 

The White House was asked in a news conference for Biden’s thoughts on trying to pass legislation with a majority so precarious that any senator falling sick can upend his plans. 

“Life is precious, as we know. You’re … familiar with the average age of senators in the Senate, but that is true on both sides of the aisle,” Biden press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. 

“So, I would just say we spend most of our time engaging in good faith about the president’s agenda and not making those calculations.”
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US Lawmakers Nearing Agreement on Russia Sanctions

U.S. lawmakers are nearing a deal on sanctions aimed at deterring Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. Several lawmakers who recently returned from a trip to Kyiv told VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson there is broad bipartisan unity on confronting Russia.

Camera: Russian Service Produced by: Katherine Gypson
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Out of Office, Trump Still the Center of Attention, Investigations

Former U.S. President Donald Trump left office more than a year ago, but his conduct in the waning weeks of his presidency as he tirelessly sought to remain in power and his reported role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, remain a focal point of the American political scene and multiple investigations. 

Trump, with a wide base of Republican voter support, is teasing another run for the presidency in 2024 after losing in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden, now the 46th U.S. president. Both men are in their 70s, but an electoral rematch in two years is possible. 

Trump is already assailing Biden’s performance during his first year in office, while Biden and his aides attack Trump, zeroing in on his baseless claims that he was cheated out of a second term by electoral fraud. 

But for the moment, the focus is not on 2024 or the nationwide congressional elections coming up in nine months. The current focus is on how the Trump presidency ended. 

Special grand jury 

A prosecutor in the southern city of Atlanta, Georgia, has convened a special grand jury to investigate Trump’s phone call to the top Georgia election official, Brad Raffensperger, in early 2021 asking him to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in the state.

“So, look. All I want to do is this,” Trump said in a recording of the call to Raffensperger. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”

Meanwhile, several U.S. news outlets reported Tuesday that aides to Trump drafted orders, which apparently were never issued, calling on the Defense and Homeland Security departments to seize voting machines in key political battleground states in hopes of proving electoral fraud.

Trump lost one court challenge after another in states that Biden won. William Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, declared that federal investigators had not found evidence of fraud that would have changed the election outcome.

Undaunted, Trump turned his attention to the congressional certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021, imploring then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the Biden electors from several key battleground states that the Democrat had won.

Shortly before Congress convened that day, Trump staged a rally near the White House in front of several thousand of his supporters, urging them to “fight like hell” to block certification of Biden’s win.

Hundreds of Trump supporters stormed into the U.S. Capitol, smashing windows and doors, ransacking offices and scuffling with police, injuring 140 of them. Five people died that day or in the immediate aftermath, with one Trump protester shot dead by a police officer. 

To this point, 768 people have been charged with criminal offenses during the chaotic melee at the Capitol, many with minor trespassing charges but some with assaulting police. A total of 178 have pleaded guilty, with many receiving a sentence of a few weeks in jail, although some facing assault charges have been sentenced to more than four years. The rest of the cases remain unresolved as investigators pore through vast video footage of the mayhem to identify the rioters. 

Congressional investigation 

A select committee in the House of Representatives — seven Democrats and two vocal anti-Trump Republicans — has been investigating the events leading up to the January 6 riot, interviewing more than 300 witnesses, including Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff. 

Other key witnesses, including Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, have refused to testify, but the committee expects to reach conclusions by midyear about how the riot unfolded, Trump’s role in fomenting it and why for three hours he declined to call off his supporters from the ensuing riot. 

Trump has belittled the investigation, issuing a statement saying, “The January 6th Unselect Committee composed of Radical Left Democrats and a few horrible RINO Republicans is looking to hold people in criminal contempt for things relative to the Protest, when in fact they should hold themselves in criminal contempt for cheating in the Election.”

Trump’s RINO reference — Republicans in Name Only — derisively referenced the two Republicans on the committee: Congresswoman Liz Cheney and Congressman Adam Kinzinger. 

This past weekend at a political rally in Texas, Trump spoke up for the rioters arrested at the Capitol, saying, “So many people have been asking me about it. If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.” 

But Trump faced immediate blowback for his pardon suggestion, drawing a rebuke from Cheney and other Republicans. 

“Trump uses language he knows caused the Jan 6 violence; suggests he’d pardon the Jan 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy; threatens prosecutors; and admits he was attempting to overturn the election,” Cheney said on Twitter. “He’d do it all again if given the chance.” 

A close political ally of Trump’s, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, rejected pardons as “inappropriate.” Graham told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” show, “I don’t want to send any signal that it was OK to defile the Capitol. There are other groups with causes that may want to go down the violent path if these people get pardoned.” 

White House press secretary Jen Psaki also assailed Trump, saying, “You know, his remarks this weekend, he defended the actions of his supporters who stormed the Capitol and brutally attacked the law enforcement officers protecting it. 

“I think it’s important to shout that out and call that out. He even attacked his own vice president for not, in his words, having ‘overturned the election.’ And it’s just a reminder of how unfit he is for office,” Psaki said. 

 
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In One Small Prairie Town, Two Warring Visions of America

“In rural Minnesota we still have a work ethic, and I’ll call them Christian values, and that’s not reflected in our local newspaper,” said Al Saunders, a farmer and friend of Wolter’s who graduated from Benson High School a couple years after Anfinson.

“I just can’t stomach it anymore,” said Saunders, whose family settled on part of his sprawling farm more than a century ago, and who speaks almost lovingly about the rich brown soil. Anfinson’s editorials on farm subsidies and politics leave him fuming. “Trash gets thrown at you so many times and eventually you just give up.”

He grudgingly subscribes to the Monitor-News, which has a circulation of roughly 2,000. But just to follow local politics.

Anfinson does cover Swift County intensely — the city council, the county commissioners, the school board and nearly every other gathering of consequence. He’s there for school concerts, community fund-raisers, elections and livestock judging at the county fair. His white Jeep is often spattered with mud from the county’s dirt roads.

He works relentlessly. Wednesday afternoons, after he gets that week’s edition ready for printing the next morning, often count as his weekend.

Anfinson is 67 but looks at least a decade younger. A contemplative man who casually quotes Voltaire, he loves newspapers deeply, and mourns the hundreds of small-town papers that have gone under in recent years.

Still, Anfinson sometimes is surprised to find himself in Benson.

Family is a powerful force here, and this town is knitted together in ways that few Americans understand anymore. His grandfather, a poetry-loving plumber and child of Norwegian immigrants, came to Benson as a child. His father came home from World War II, became a reporter at the Monitor-News and eventually bought the newspaper with a partner.

Anfinson grew up planning on a journalism career somewhere beyond small-town Minnesota. But he found those plans upended when his father’s health began declining in the late 1970s.

“I thought I’d come back here just for a little while,” he said. “It turned into the rest of my life.”

Not that he regrets it.

He’s proud that his reporting means something here, whether it’s a high-school student getting an award or an expensive building project the community rejected after he wrote about it.

Still, there are times when it’s exhausting. And expensive. With declining circulation and ads, he estimates his three little local newspapers are worth at least $1 million less than a decade ago.

“The easy part is speaking truth to power. The hard part is speaking truth to your community. That can cost you advertisers. That can cost you subscribers,” he said.

It can be easy, looking around Benson, to think it is a land that time forgot.

Bartenders often greet customers by name. The town’s cafes feel like high school lunchrooms, with people wandering between tables to say hello. Those in search of solitude go to the Burger King, where they sit alone at plastic tables, staring out the windows.

Benson was built in the 1870s as railways reached this part of the prairies, and trains remain the town’s background music. In the cafes, people barely look up when mile-long trains roar through downtown. Few people stop talking. They’ve been hearing those trains for generations.

Many farms and businesses have been owned by the same families for decades: through the droughts of the 1930s; through the thriving years around World War II; to the population decline that began in the 1950s.

But plenty has changed.

Stores closed. Little farms were bought up by more successful farmers. Families left. Swift County’s population has dropped about 30 percent since 1960, and now has about 10,000 residents. Meanwhile, a county that was 98% white in 1990 has seen a stream of new minority residents, particularly Latinos. The county is now 87% white – far whiter than much of America, but far more diverse than a generation ago.

Today, longtime locals can sometimes feel unmoored.

“There are a lot of people coming through that I don’t recognize,” said Terri Collins, Benson’s cheerful mayor, whose family has been in Benson for five generations. “I used to know all of my neighbors and now that’s different. And I don’t know what to blame for that.”

Once, neighborliness and good manners were near-commandments here. Now anger is on the rise.

Neighborhood shouting matches are more common, a local official’s car was vandalized, and a “F— Biden” flag now flies along a school bus route. Collins and the town police chief both say they sometimes worry about Anfinson’s safety.

“Ten years ago I don’t think anything like this would happen,” she said.

But that was then. Travel across the plains of western Minnesota and you’ll find plenty of people who are bestirred by a new and often dark vision of America.

They are not on the fringes, at least by current standards. They are, for the most part, mainstream conservatives who see a nation that barely exists in traditional newspapers and mainstream TV news broadcasts.

People like the store manager, sitting at an American Legion bar drinking $3 cocktails, who calls the billionaire financier George Soros, a Jewish survivor of the Nazis and a powerful backer of liberal causes, “one of the most evil men I’ve ever heard of.” And the semi-retired nurse who fears teams of sex traffickers she says operate freely in countless small towns.

But it would be a mistake to think they can be categorized easily.

Some desperately want Trump to run again; others pray he won’t. One farmer quietly admits he worries about the growing numbers of racial minorities; another enjoys hearing new accents at the grocery store. Many are nearly as dismissive of conservative media as they are of traditional news outlets.

While social conservatism has long run deep in Swift County — even the former, longtime Democratic congressman was anti-abortion and pro-gun rights — many say the presidency of Barack Obama marked a change.

Gay marriage was legalized and identity politics took hold. Growing calls for transgender rights seemed like an issue from another planet. The sometimes-violent racial justice protests that followed police killings of Black men had some here stocking up on ammunition.

Trump’s cries that he loved America resonated in an area where new approaches to teaching U.S. history, with an increased focus on race, were confounding.

So in a county where Obama won with 55% of the vote in 2008, Trump won with 64% percent in 2020.

“We’ve seen a shift here in Swift County,” said Al Saunders. “But you won’t see that in the newspaper.”

Anfinson’s weekly column, where he writes about everything from political divisions to rural housing shortages, is a local lightning rod.

He sighed: “That editorial page will have people hate me.”

Across the U.S., many smaller newspapers, already facing economic decline with the rise of the internet, have cut back or completely stopped running editorials, trying to hold onto conservative readers who increasingly see them as local arms of a fake news universe.

But Anfinson won’t consider that, even if sometimes he feels like he’s tilting at angry, small-town windmills. He says it’s his duty to expose people to new ideas, even unpopular ideas like stricter gun control.

The editorial page is, he says “the soul of a newspaper in a way.”

“I would be a traitor to the cause of journalism, of community newspapers,” by giving up on editorials, he said. “I would be cowardly.”

Some would call him stubborn, and his wife and business partner, Shelly, would not disagree. It can be complicated being married to Reed Anfinson.

Like the day last spring, when Anfinson was in the bar next to the office and a man loudly told a friend that Anfinson was a communist and “somebody should do something about that guy.”

Anfinson knows the man. So does Shelly. A longtime dental hygienist, she cleaned his teeth for 20 years. She still says hello when she passes the man on the street.

“I try not to create a bigger divide,” said Shelly, who, after a series of intensive classes on the newspaper business, began running another of the couple’s weekly papers two years ago.

“I’ve definitely lost sleep over some confrontations that he’s had,” she said. “But do you let that stand in the way of reporting the facts?”

Shelly is warm and gregarious and easy to like. And when it comes to politics, she’s not who you’d expect to be married to the man often tagged as Benson’s best-known liberal.

She’s a pro-life Republican who voted for Trump, at least the first time. It annoys her when news outlets talk down to conservatives. She worries that there are too few Republican journalists.

She and Reed married 20 years ago, after both had been divorced. She moved in across the street and soon he was walking her home.

She is often torn between support for Reed and worries over subscriber loss.

Still, she’s been pressing him to tone down the politics.

“It is a struggle. I can tell these things to my business partner. It’s harder to tell them to my husband.”

In the custom of small-town Minnesota, the Anfinson and Wolter families get along, at least outwardly. They wave when they see each other. When one family is out of town, the other will sometimes watch their home.

“We’re still personable,” Wolter says. “I just don’t trust him.”

“He’s not going to come to church and I’m not going to buy his newspaper. But we can still treat each other as neighbors.”

While he believes Anfinson is sincere in what he publishes, he does not believe his neighbor has a monopoly on truth.

Wolter also knows that plenty of people would write him off as just another conspiracy monger. But he’s far more complicated.

He worries his conservative opinions color what he believes: “There are times when I’ve thought: ‘Well, what if all my angst over this is misplaced?’” he said. “Maybe everyone else is right?”

But he worries more about America: “This is a dark time.”

He criticizes conservative politicians for trying to make it illegal to burn the American flag, but worries about far-right accusations that U.S. soldiers are hunting down American conservatives.

“Maybe five or 10 years ago, I would have said ‘That’s crazy!’” he said. “Now I acknowledge it might be possible. I’m not saying I think it’s happening, but at least I don’t dismiss it the way that I would have.”

Wolter, whose home library includes everything from Sophocles to “The Grapes of Wrath,” is a careful reader, in his own way. He’s wary of conservative news sites like Breitbart, believing it shapes its reporting to please conservative readers. Instead, he finds his news farther off the beaten path, like on Gab, a Twitter-like social media platform that has become home to many on America’s far right.

“For better or for worse I don’t really trust anything I read,” he says. The answer, he said, is research, probing the farthest corners of the internet.

The answers are not to be found, he insists, in the Swift Country Monitor-News.

Anfinson, for his part, doesn’t want to talk about Wolter, at least not directly. He’s watched Benson’s fragile web of community fray too much.

Instead, he talks proudly about the Monitor-News: how it prints letters to the editor that are harshly critical of it; how he reports the truth even if it costs him; how his coverage of the pandemic goes to the heart of journalists’ responsibility to keep their communities safe.

He mourns how some people see him as an enemy. His newspaper should bind people together, he says. Instead, America and Benson are growing angrier. Contentious midterm elections loom.

“It’s kind of sad,” he said. “But it would be foolish of me not to be aware of (my safety) with the sentiments out there.”

Does he carry a weapon? This soft-spoken man says he does not.

“But I know where one is if I need it.”
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