ВИБОРЧА ГАЗЕТА

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.”
…

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. 
…

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 
…

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.

 
…

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.
…

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. 

 
…

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. 

 
…

Silence Marks First Anniversary of January 6 Capitol Riot 

The one-year anniversary of the first attack on the U.S. Capitol in two centuries passed in silence Thursday as differences between congressional Democrats and Republicans about the deadly riot were on stark display.

Over the past year, the events of January 6 have furthered the divide between Democrats who see the day as an attempted coup and Republicans who have largely chosen not to discuss what happened beyond addressing security failures at the Capitol.

In an event from which Republicans were markedly absent, Democrats convened in the chamber of the U.S. House for a somber moment of remembrance honoring the five people who died after supporters of former President Donald Trump overwhelmed law enforcement and swarmed inside one of the world’s most secure buildings in their attempt to prevent the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

There were few public remarks from Republican lawmakers, many of whom still struggle with how they remember the legacy of that day. Many have argued that the rioters believed they were allowed inside the building to exercise their right to protest, and that the events of the day were primarily peaceful, denying graphic footage of rioters beating police and desecrating the Capitol.

In a statement Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged the gravity of January 6, calling it “a dark day for Congress and our country. The United States Capitol, the seat of the first branch of our federal government, was stormed by criminals who brutalized police officers and used force to try to stop Congress from doing its job.”

He did not address the role Trump may have played in the riot, and he criticized Democrats for trying “to exploit this anniversary to advance partisan policy goals that long predated this event.”

After the moment of silence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “When the violent assault was made on the Capitol, its purpose was to thwart Congress’ constitutional duty to validate the electoral count and to ensure the peaceful transfer of power. But the assault did not deter us from our duty.”

Pelosi, the third-highest official in the U.S. government, held several commemorative events Thursday along with other congressional Democrats. During the riot, she was rushed to an undisclosed secure location as members of her staff barricaded themselves in offices to hide from rioters. Members of both chambers eventually returned early the next morning to certify the election results.

McConnell was one of many Republicans to condemn Trump’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the riot. But rhetoric from the former president’s own party shifted as he faced an impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in February. Ultimately, most of the senators who condemned Trump’s actions on January 6 voted to acquit him of the charge of inciting an insurrection.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of the former president, voted to acquit. In a statement Thursday, he said, “Those who defiled the Capitol on January 6 are being prosecuted, as they should be. I have consistently condemned the attack and have urged that those involved be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I hold the same views of those who attacked the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, and committed other acts of violence throughout our nation.”

He also did not address Trump’s role in the events of that day.

Ten House Republicans voted to impeach Trump on charges of inciting the insurrection, including Representative Liz Cheney, vice chair of the House select committee currently investigating the Capitol attack. She tweeted Thursday, “Even in the aftermath of January 6th, the former President continues to make the same false claims that he knows caused violence. The Republican Party must reject his lies.”

Republicans stripped Cheney of her committee assignments for criticizing Trump’s actions in the aftermath of the riot, and her views are not largely accepted by most members of her party. Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene called for the rioters’ release as so-called political prisoners. Gaetz said Thursday on the Steve Bannon podcast, “We’re ashamed of nothing. We’re proud of the work we did on January 6 to make legitimate arguments about election integrity.”

For Democrats, January 6 remains a day of trauma that now marks their workplace and has altered their relationships with many of their Republican colleagues.

“For me personally, the path forward after January 6 has not been easy. It’s been made more painful, however, by the fact that most of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle continue to accommodate that big lie. That was the predicate for the attack on our country,” Democratic Representative Dan Kildee said Thursday at a forum for lawmakers to share their memories of the day of the riot.

He continued, “I know we can stop this ongoing effort to bend our democracy. Truly, truly protect our democracy. We need truth.”
…

On Anniversary of Capitol Siege, Biden Lays Blame on Trump

On the first anniversary of the deadly January 6 Capitol riot, U.S. President Joe Biden delivered a forceful speech in defense of American democracy. He laid blame for the insurrection squarely on former President Donald Trump and Republicans who continue to spread the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports.
…