Lee Jae-myung, leader of South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party, was attacked on Tuesday (Jan 2) during a visit to the southeastern port city&nbsp;of Busan, the Yonhap News Agency reported.

As per reports, Lee was stabbed on the left side of his neck with a weapon.

His attacker, identified as a 1957-born&nbsp;man surnamed Kim, was subdued and arrested at the scene.&nbsp;

The man, who has confessed that he wanted to kill Lee,&nbsp;reportedly used an 18-centimeter-long knife he&nbsp;purchased online.

In a statement, NPA Commissioner General Yoon Hee-keun said he has ordered the police to establish an investigation headquarters to probe the incident.&nbsp;

The Busan Metropolitan Police Agency said in a statement it plans to charge Kim with attempted murder.

<h2>How the attack unfolded</h2>

The attack, as per Yonhap, happened at 10:27 am local time as the opposition party chief who was touring the site of a proposed airport in Busan's Gadeok Island was engaged in a&nbsp;question-and-answer session with reporters.

The assailant, who based on videos of the incident appeared to be a man in his 50s or 60s, wore a paper crown with Lee's name on it.&nbsp;

He reportedly&nbsp;approached Lee asking for an autograph, before suddenly lunging forward and attacking him, news reports said.&nbsp;

A video of the attack is going viral on social media. It shows&nbsp;the attacker lunging at Lee with his arm stretched out, and the leader grimacing and collapsing to the ground, as people in the crowd grab the assailant.

&nbsp;You can see the video here. Viewer discretion is advised.

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Footage showing the Stabbing Attack earlier against the Leader of the Democratic Party of South Korea, Lee Jae-myung while he was Speaking to a Crowd in the Southeastern City of Busan. <a href="https://t.co/uEAabsxzmX">pic.twitter.com/uEAabsxzmX</a>
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) <a href="https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1742003417411727760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 2, 2024</a></blockquote>
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The attack, as per YTN television, has left Lee with a gash of about 1 cm on his neck. While&nbsp;the wound is not life-threatening, the 59-year-old was airlifted to Seoul for surgery amid fears of additional bleeding.

Photographs of the incident show the opposition leader lying on the ground with his eyes closed, as&nbsp;people around him press a handkerchief against the bleeding wound at the side of his neck.

He remained conscious after the stabbing and was transported to a hospital.

(With inputs from agencies)

Lee Jae-myung, leader of South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party, was attacked on Tuesday (Jan 2) during a visit to the southeastern port city of Busan, the Yonhap News Agency reported.

Lee Jae-myung, leader of South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party, was attacked on Tuesday (Jan 2) during a visit to the southeastern port city of Busan, the Yonhap News Agency reported. As per reports, Lee was stabbed on the left side of his neck with a weapon. His attacker, identified as a 1957-born man surnamed Kim, was subdued and arrested at the scene. The man, who has confessed that he wanted to kill Lee, reportedly used an 18-centimeter-long knife he purchased online. In a statement, NPA Commissioner General Yoon Hee-keun said he has ordered the police to establish an investigation headquarters to probe the incident. The Busan Metropolitan Police Agency said in a statement it plans to charge Kim with attempted murder. How the attack unfolded The attack, as per Yonhap, happened at 10:27 am local time as the opposition party chief who was touring the site of a proposed airport in Busan's Gadeok Island was engaged in a question-and-answer session with reporters. The assailant, who based on videos of the incident appeared to be a man in his 50s or 60s, wore a paper crown with Lee's name on it. He reportedly approached Lee asking for an autograph, before suddenly lunging forward and attacking him, news reports said. A video of the attack is going viral on social media. It shows the attacker lunging at Lee with his arm stretched out, and the leader grimacing and collapsing to the ground, as people in the crowd grab the assailant. You can see the video here. Viewer discretion is advised. Footage showing the Stabbing Attack earlier against the Leader of the Democratic Party of South Korea, Lee Jae-myung while he was Speaking to a Crowd in the Southeastern City of Busan. pic.twitter.com/uEAabsxzmX — OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) January 2, 2024 × The attack, as per YTN television, has left Lee with a gash of about 1 cm on his neck. While the wound is not life-threatening, the 59-year-old was airlifted to Seoul for surgery amid fears of additional bleeding. Photographs of the incident show the opposition leader lying on the ground with his eyes closed, as people around him press a handkerchief against the bleeding wound at the side of his neck. He remained conscious after the stabbing and was transported to a hospital. (With inputs from agencies)

Watch the moment South Korean oppn politician Lee Jae-myung is stabbed in neck by attacker

Robert F Kennedy Jr., the son of assassinated 1968 US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, has announced that he will make bid for White House in 2024. By throwing his hat in the ring, he has become the second long-shot Democratic Party candidate to challenge US President Joe Biden in his expected run for re-election.

Kennedy (69) filed papers with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday.

Marianne Williamson, the self-help guru who warned of the "dark psychic force" unleashed by Republican President Donald Trump, launched a Democratic presidential bid for 2024 in March, calling for "justice and love".

Kennedy Jr is longtime vaccine skeptic. He was tapped in 2017 to oversee a presidential panel to review vaccine safety and science at the request of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, a move that drew immediate criticism from scientists and public health experts who feared it would legitimise skeptics of childhood immunisations.

Instagram removed Kennedy's account in 2021 after he repeatedly shared debunked claims about Covid. Instagram said that it was violation of its policies of the coronavirus pandemic.

The environmental lawyer, a member of the storied American political dynasty, is a nephew of assassinated president John F Kennedy.

Kennedy hinted at his presidential ambitions in a Twitter post last month asking for help in deciding whether he should run for the White House.

"If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilise enough people to win, I’ll jump in the race," he wrote.

"If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children and robbed us of our values and freedoms."

(With inputs from agencies)

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Robert F Kennedy Jr., the son of assassinated 1968 US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, has announced that he will make bid for White House in 2024. By throwing his hat in the ring, he has become the second long-shot Democratic Party candidate to challenge US President Joe Biden in his expected run for re-election.

Robert F Kennedy Jr., the son of assassinated 1968 US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, has announced that he will make bid for White House in 2024. By throwing his hat in the ring, he has become the second long-shot Democratic Party candidate to challenge US President Joe Biden in his expected run for re-election. Kennedy (69) filed papers with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday. Marianne Williamson, the self-help guru who warned of the "dark psychic force" unleashed by Republican President Donald Trump, launched a Democratic presidential bid for 2024 in March, calling for "justice and love". Kennedy Jr is longtime vaccine skeptic. He was tapped in 2017 to oversee a presidential panel to review vaccine safety and science at the request of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, a move that drew immediate criticism from scientists and public health experts who feared it would legitimise skeptics of childhood immunisations. Instagram removed Kennedy's account in 2021 after he repeatedly shared debunked claims about Covid. Instagram said that it was violation of its policies of the coronavirus pandemic. The environmental lawyer, a member of the storied American political dynasty, is a nephew of assassinated president John F Kennedy. Kennedy hinted at his presidential ambitions in a Twitter post last month asking for help in deciding whether he should run for the White House. "If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilise enough people to win, I’ll jump in the race," he wrote. "If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children and robbed us of our values and freedoms." (With inputs from agencies) You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here. WATCH WION LIVE HERE ×

Robert Kennedy Jr to challenge Biden for 2024 Democratic presidential bid

Democratic US Senator and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to open an investigation into a company marketing JR-15 child-size rifle.

US Senate Democrats call for probe into 'JR-15' child-size rifle

The cash-for-favours scandal has left European Union to be a swamp of staggering corruption and hypocrisy. EU can no longer be a preacher to the world on ethics, transparency and accountability.

Gravitas: EU scandal weakens Italy's Democratic Party

The Democratic Party in the United States was dealt a massive blow just days after securing majority in the senate. Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema announced on Friday that she will be switching her political affiliation to independent – meaning that the number of Democratic senators will go down to 50. However, she made it clear that she will not&nbsp;be supporting the Republican Party directly.

“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington. I registered as an Arizona independent,” Sinema wrote in an op-ed for Arizona Central, a local media outlet.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/india-russia-summit-to-not-happen-this-year-due-to-scheduling-issues-541617">India-Russia summit to not happen this year due to 'scheduling issues'</a>

Previously, the Democrats had a 50-50 control of the Senate with vice president Kamala Harris holding the veto power. While Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia gave them a definitive majority this year, this decision by Sinema poses a major threat to their standing.

Bernie Sanders and Angus King are also independent senators but they support the Democrats.

Sinema told the Politico in an interview that she did not identify with a fixed ideology and from now on, she will be voting in the Senate depending on her stance in particular situations.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/basketball-star-brittney-griner-arrives-home-in-us-after-russia-prisoner-swap-541616">Basketball star Brittney Griner arrives home in US after Russia prisoner swap</a>

“Like a lot of Arizonans, I have never fit perfectly in either national party,” she said.

Sinema, who is up for re-election in 2024, did not say anything about her plans of running for senate once again but told CNN that she will “continue to do what is right for my state”.

“I’m not worried about folks who may not like my approach, I’m going to continue to do what is right for my state,” she said. “I’m doing something that comports with my values.”

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="350" loading="”lazy”" src="https://www.wionews.com/live-tv/embed?autoplay=1&amp;mute=1" width="100%"></iframe>

The Democratic Party in the United States was dealt a massive blow just days after securing majority in the senate. Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema announced on Friday that she will be switching her political affiliation to independent – meaning that the number of Democratic senators will go down to 50.

The Democratic Party in the United States was dealt a massive blow just days after securing majority in the senate. Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema announced on Friday that she will be switching her political affiliation to independent – meaning that the number of Democratic senators will go down to 50. However, she made it clear that she will not be supporting the Republican Party directly. “I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington. I registered as an Arizona independent,” Sinema wrote in an op-ed for Arizona Central, a local media outlet. Also read | India-Russia summit to not happen this year due to 'scheduling issues' Previously, the Democrats had a 50-50 control of the Senate with vice president Kamala Harris holding the veto power. While Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia gave them a definitive majority this year, this decision by Sinema poses a major threat to their standing. Bernie Sanders and Angus King are also independent senators but they support the Democrats. Sinema told the Politico in an interview that she did not identify with a fixed ideology and from now on, she will be voting in the Senate depending on her stance in particular situations. Also read | Basketball star Brittney Griner arrives home in US after Russia prisoner swap “Like a lot of Arizonans, I have never fit perfectly in either national party,” she said. Sinema, who is up for re-election in 2024, did not say anything about her plans of running for senate once again but told CNN that she will “continue to do what is right for my state”. “I’m not worried about folks who may not like my approach, I’m going to continue to do what is right for my state,” she said. “I’m doing something that comports with my values.”

Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema leaves Democratic Party, registers as an independent

The Democratic Party has elected Hakeem Jeffries as the new leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Who exactly is the man set to replace Nancy Pelosi? Priyanka Sharma tells you more.

Gravitas: Hakeem Jeffries elected Democrat House Leader

The Republican Party went into the United States midterm elections full of confidence and with the dream of controlling both branches of the Congress – House and Senate. With President Joe Biden’s popularity going down and the country going through one of the worst inflations in recent times, it looked like an easy path for them, but the results have been less than satisfactory till now.

When it comes to the House, the Republicans were projected to cross the necessary 218-mark, but the lead was far less than predicted. Without a comfortable cushion of at least 10 seats, the Republicans will once again be forced to look for bipartisan support on certain key promises.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-midterm-elections-2022-live-updates-voting-begins-with-experts-favouring-republicans-532269" hreflang="en">US midterms LIVE | No Republican 'red wave', Democrats do better than expected</a>

The story is even worse when it comes to the Senate race as the battle seemed for a close finish with Democratic candidate John Fetterman pulling off a sensational win over Dr Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. The loss means that once again, the Senate can be headed for a 50-50 split and that means that the Vice President Kamala Harris will continue to tilt the scale in the Democrats’ favour.

The defeat of Dr Oz was also a signal of a bigger concern – the performance of the candidates handpicked by former President Donald Trump. The scene was not much different in Arizona where Kari Lake, a vocal denier of the 2020 election results, seemed all set to lose to Katie Hobbs in the governor’s race while in Michigan, Trump-endorsed Republican Tudor Dixon faced a similar fate.

WATCH |&nbsp;Donald Trump eyes 2024 Presidential race, touts large voter turnout

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The other Trump-backed candidate in Arizona – Blake Masters – was also trailing in the Senate race and while JD Vance successfully defeated Democratic candidate Tim Ryan in a much-publicised senate race in Ohio, the numbers are not looking good to justify Trump’s endorsements.

With the Republican Party not performing as well as the projections, a dark shadow has currently settled over Trump’s expected presidential campaign announcement. With a slim lead in the House and a potential loss in the Senate, the Republican Party has placed themselves in a tricky situation and with Trump’s endorsements under the scanner, the Democrats will have a lot to take from the polls.

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="350" loading="”lazy”" src="https://www.wionews.com/live-tv/embed?autoplay=1&amp;mute=1" width="100%"></iframe>

The Republican Party went into the United States midterm elections full of confidence and with the dream of controlling both branches of the Congress – House and Senate.

The Republican Party went into the United States midterm elections full of confidence and with the dream of controlling both branches of the Congress – House and Senate. With President Joe Biden’s popularity going down and the country going through one of the worst inflations in recent times, it looked like an easy path for them, but the results have been less than satisfactory till now. When it comes to the House, the Republicans were projected to cross the necessary 218-mark, but the lead was far less than predicted. Without a comfortable cushion of at least 10 seats, the Republicans will once again be forced to look for bipartisan support on certain key promises. Also read | US midterms LIVE | No Republican 'red wave', Democrats do better than expected The story is even worse when it comes to the Senate race as the battle seemed for a close finish with Democratic candidate John Fetterman pulling off a sensational win over Dr Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. The loss means that once again, the Senate can be headed for a 50-50 split and that means that the Vice President Kamala Harris will continue to tilt the scale in the Democrats’ favour. The defeat of Dr Oz was also a signal of a bigger concern – the performance of the candidates handpicked by former President Donald Trump. The scene was not much different in Arizona where Kari Lake, a vocal denier of the 2020 election results, seemed all set to lose to Katie Hobbs in the governor’s race while in Michigan, Trump-endorsed Republican Tudor Dixon faced a similar fate. WATCH | Donald Trump eyes 2024 Presidential race, touts large voter turnout The other Trump-backed candidate in Arizona – Blake Masters – was also trailing in the Senate race and while JD Vance successfully defeated Democratic candidate Tim Ryan in a much-publicised senate race in Ohio, the numbers are not looking good to justify Trump’s endorsements. With the Republican Party not performing as well as the projections, a dark shadow has currently settled over Trump’s expected presidential campaign announcement. With a slim lead in the House and a potential loss in the Senate, the Republican Party has placed themselves in a tricky situation and with Trump’s endorsements under the scanner, the Democrats will have a lot to take from the polls.

US midterm elections: Tight race makes life uncomfortable for Republicans and Donald Trump

It is not every day that Barack Obama gets heckled during a public meeting, but this is exactly what happened during a recent event in Michigan. The former United States President was giving a speech during a Democratic campaign rally when he was interrupted by a protestor.

Obama was talking about the changing situation in US politics and said that there were certain politicians at the moment who are trying to create division by pushing a “rhetoric”.

“If our rhetoric about each other gets that mean, when we don’t just disagree with people, but we start demonizing, making wild, crazy allegations about them, that creates a dangerous climate.”

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva-the-newly-elected-president-of-brazil-with-a-chequered-past-529734" hreflang="en">Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva: The new president of Brazil with a chequered past</a>

“If elected officials don’t do more to explicitly reject that kind of rhetoric, if they tacitly support it or encourage their supporters to stand up outside voting places armed with guns and dressed in tactical gear, more people can get hurt,” Obama said according to Reuters.

“Sometimes it can turn dangerous,” he concluded.

During this point of the speech, a man from the crowd shouted “Mr President” at Obama. While the unidentified man was escorted out of the venue, Obama responded to the interruption.

“Sir, this is what I mean,” the former president responded.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/violent-clashes-break-out-between-students-and-security-forces-in-iran-report-529754" hreflang="en">Violent clashes break out between students and security forces in Iran: Report</a>

“Sir, we’ve got a — there is a process that we set up in our democracy. Right now, I’m talking. You’ll have a chance to talk sometime soon,” Obama continued.

“We don’t have to interrupt each other. We don’t have to shout each other down,” he said according to New York Times.

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It is not every day that Barack Obama gets heckled during a public meeting, but this is exactly what happened during a recent event in Michigan. The former United States President was giving a speech during a Democratic campaign rally when he was interrupted by a protestor.

It is not every day that Barack Obama gets heckled during a public meeting, but this is exactly what happened during a recent event in Michigan. The former United States President was giving a speech during a Democratic campaign rally when he was interrupted by a protestor. Obama was talking about the changing situation in US politics and said that there were certain politicians at the moment who are trying to create division by pushing a “rhetoric”. “If our rhetoric about each other gets that mean, when we don’t just disagree with people, but we start demonizing, making wild, crazy allegations about them, that creates a dangerous climate.” Also read | Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva: The new president of Brazil with a chequered past “If elected officials don’t do more to explicitly reject that kind of rhetoric, if they tacitly support it or encourage their supporters to stand up outside voting places armed with guns and dressed in tactical gear, more people can get hurt,” Obama said according to Reuters. “Sometimes it can turn dangerous,” he concluded. During this point of the speech, a man from the crowd shouted “Mr President” at Obama. While the unidentified man was escorted out of the venue, Obama responded to the interruption. “Sir, this is what I mean,” the former president responded. Also read | Violent clashes break out between students and security forces in Iran: Report “Sir, we’ve got a — there is a process that we set up in our democracy. Right now, I’m talking. You’ll have a chance to talk sometime soon,” Obama continued. “We don’t have to interrupt each other. We don’t have to shout each other down,” he said according to New York Times.

Barack Obama interrupted by heckler while addressing US Democratic Party rally

Former US president Barack Obama said on Friday (October 29) that democracy was at stake in upcoming midterm elections due to take place in November. Obama hit his first stop on the campaign trail on Friday.

Obama, who remains popular figure from the Democratic Party, addressed a rally in Georgia. He told the crowd that everyone had to get out and vote to stop election conspiracy theorists.

"It's not enough to elect Democrats at the top of the ticket," a fired-up Obama told the crowd in the suburbs of Atlanta.

"We need to elect good people up and down the ballot. Across the country, some of the folks who tried to undermine our democracy are running for offices that will oversee the next election.&nbsp;

"And if they win, there's no telling what might happen."

Obama has kept a relatively low profile since leaving office in 2017. He was guest of honour at Georgia rally. Georgia is witnessing two extremely close contests.

Democrat Raphael Warnock, the first Black US senator elected in the southern state with a long history of segregation, is seeking re-election against Herschel Walker, a former American football star backed by Donald Trump.&nbsp;

The contest could well decide which party gets control of the US Senate -- and the ability to advance or frustrate President Joe Biden's agenda.&nbsp;

There is also a fierce battle for the governor's office, where Republican Brian Kemp is up against influential Democratic figure Stacey Abrams.&nbsp;

(With inputs from agencies)

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Former US president Barack Obama said on Friday (October 29) that democracy was at stake in upcoming midterm elections due to take place in November. Obama hit his first stop on the campaign trail on Friday.

Former US president Barack Obama said on Friday (October 29) that democracy was at stake in upcoming midterm elections due to take place in November. Obama hit his first stop on the campaign trail on Friday. Obama, who remains popular figure from the Democratic Party, addressed a rally in Georgia. He told the crowd that everyone had to get out and vote to stop election conspiracy theorists. "It's not enough to elect Democrats at the top of the ticket," a fired-up Obama told the crowd in the suburbs of Atlanta. "We need to elect good people up and down the ballot. Across the country, some of the folks who tried to undermine our democracy are running for offices that will oversee the next election. "And if they win, there's no telling what might happen." Obama has kept a relatively low profile since leaving office in 2017. He was guest of honour at Georgia rally. Georgia is witnessing two extremely close contests. Democrat Raphael Warnock, the first Black US senator elected in the southern state with a long history of segregation, is seeking re-election against Herschel Walker, a former American football star backed by Donald Trump. The contest could well decide which party gets control of the US Senate -- and the ability to advance or frustrate President Joe Biden's agenda. There is also a fierce battle for the governor's office, where Republican Brian Kemp is up against influential Democratic figure Stacey Abrams. (With inputs from agencies) You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here. WATCH WION LIVE HERE ×

Democracy is at stake in US midterms, says Obama at Georgia rally

Husband of Nancy Pelosi, the top Democratic Party member who is also Speaker of US House of Representatives, was assaulted by an intruder who broke into their house in San Francisco. The attack, which took place on Friday (October 28) left him in need of hospital treatment.

"Early this morning, an assailant broke into the Pelosi residence in San Francisco and violently assaulted Mr. Pelosi," the spokesman of Democratic leader&nbsp;Nancy Pelosi's office, Drew Hammill, said in a statement.

"The assailant is in custody and the motivation for the attack is under investigation. Mr. Pelosi was taken to the hospital, where he is receiving excellent medical care and is expected to make a full recovery."

It was not immediately clear if the attack on Mr Pelosi was politically motivated. Nancy Pelosi was not in San Francisco when the attack occurred.

The attack caps a tumultuous year for her 82-year-old venture capitalist husband, who was convicted of drunk driving after an accident in May and sentenced to five days in jail.

"The speaker and her family are grateful to the first responders and medical professionals involved, and request privacy at this time," Hammill said.

(With inputs from agencies)

You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us <a href="https://www.wionews.com/content-contribution-registration-form">here</a>.

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Husband of Nancy Pelosi, the top Democratic Party member who is also Speaker of US House of Representatives, was assaulted by an intruder who broke into their house in San Francisco.

Husband of Nancy Pelosi, the top Democratic Party member who is also Speaker of US House of Representatives, was assaulted by an intruder who broke into their house in San Francisco. The attack, which took place on Friday (October 28) left him in need of hospital treatment. "Early this morning, an assailant broke into the Pelosi residence in San Francisco and violently assaulted Mr. Pelosi," the spokesman of Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi's office, Drew Hammill, said in a statement. "The assailant is in custody and the motivation for the attack is under investigation. Mr. Pelosi was taken to the hospital, where he is receiving excellent medical care and is expected to make a full recovery." It was not immediately clear if the attack on Mr Pelosi was politically motivated. Nancy Pelosi was not in San Francisco when the attack occurred. The attack caps a tumultuous year for her 82-year-old venture capitalist husband, who was convicted of drunk driving after an accident in May and sentenced to five days in jail. "The speaker and her family are grateful to the first responders and medical professionals involved, and request privacy at this time," Hammill said. (With inputs from agencies) You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here. WATCH WION LIVE HERE ×

Top US Democrat Nancy Pelosi's husband attacked with hammer at home

Former US Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday announced her exit from the Democratic Party, blaming the party for racializing every issue in the nation.

Tulsi Gabbard quits US Democratic party, accuses DEMs for 'serving the elite'

Former US Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday announced she was quitting the Democratic Party and urged fellow 'independent-minded' Democrats to join her.

Former US Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday announced she was quitting the Democratic Party and urged fellow 'independent-minded' Democrats to join her. Gabbard, who incidentally was the first Hindu-American to run for the Presidential race, took to her social media accounts to post the announcement. In the 30-minute video, she did not hold back and took the Democrat Party to the cleaners by referring to it as an 'elitist cabal of warmongers'. "I can no longer remain in today's Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism," she said. Read more: Hinduphobia is very real, I've experienced in each of my campaigns: Tulsi Gabbard Gabbard added that the so-called woke Democratic Party ideologues were taking over the US and that her former party undermined the basic freedom of people. "I believe in a government that is of, by, and for the people. Unfortunately, today's Democratic Party does not. Instead, it stands for a government of, by, and for the powerful elite." I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are… pic.twitter.com/oAuTnxZldf — Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 11, 2022 × The former Congresswoman, who made history in 2012 by becoming the first American Samoan and practicing Hindu to win election to Hawaii's 2nd district and enter the US House of Representatives, also took on President Joe Biden. “President Biden campaigned on a message of unity, healing the partisan divide bringing the country together. He just gave a big speech saying supporters of President (Donald) Trump are the most extremist group in our country and a threat to our democracy. That’s half the country,” she said. Read more: Tulsi Gabbard condemns Durga Puja violence in Bangladesh "I’m calling on my fellow common sense independent minded Democrats to join me in leaving the Democratic Party. If you can no longer stomach the direction that so-called woke Democratic Party ideologues are taking our country, I invite you to join me," Gabbard signed off as saying. In another post, Gabbard mentioned that the decision to quit the Democratic Party was not made in a haste. She discussed the possibility with Joe Rogan on his famous 'The Joe Rogan Experience' podcast. (With inputs from agencies) WATCH WION LIVE HERE:

Tulsi Gabbard leaves Democratic Party, calls it an 'elitist cabal of warmongers'

Signing a second executive order aimed at protecting abortion rights, US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the Supreme Court and Republicans are clueless about the power of American women.

Asking the federal health department to consider allowing Medicaid funds to be used to help facilitate out-of-state travel for abortions, the order is meant to address the recent Supreme Court decision to ban abortion across the US.

As Republicans in US states push a wave of laws restricting abortion the executive order is expected to have a limited impact.

Ahead of November's midterm elections, voters rejected a measure that would have made it easier to restrict abortion rights in red-state Kansas.

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Since the Supreme Court's decision to rescind the 1973 Roe v. Wade verdict that made abortion legal throughout the country, this was the first major test of voter sentiment.

With an unusually heavy turnout, a bid to remove abortion rights from the Kansas constitution was rejected by 59 to 41 percent despite being a Republican stronghold.

Calling on voters to keep up the momentum into the midterms, Planned Parenthood said the Kansas vote "a clear warning to anti-abortion politicians."

Democrats are forecast to lose at least the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate in the November midterms due to soaring inflation and widespread pessimism in the messy aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The midterms are shaping up as rough for Democrats, who even now only control the legislature by a few votes, as it will decide which party controls Congress for the last two years of Biden's first term.

(With inputs from agencies)

Watch WION's live TV here:

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Signing a second executive order aimed at protecting abortion rights, US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the Supreme Court and Republicans are clueless about the power of American women.

Signing a second executive order aimed at protecting abortion rights, US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the Supreme Court and Republicans are clueless about the power of American women. Asking the federal health department to consider allowing Medicaid funds to be used to help facilitate out-of-state travel for abortions, the order is meant to address the recent Supreme Court decision to ban abortion across the US. As Republicans in US states push a wave of laws restricting abortion the executive order is expected to have a limited impact. Ahead of November's midterm elections, voters rejected a measure that would have made it easier to restrict abortion rights in red-state Kansas. × Since the Supreme Court's decision to rescind the 1973 Roe v. Wade verdict that made abortion legal throughout the country, this was the first major test of voter sentiment. With an unusually heavy turnout, a bid to remove abortion rights from the Kansas constitution was rejected by 59 to 41 percent despite being a Republican stronghold. Calling on voters to keep up the momentum into the midterms, Planned Parenthood said the Kansas vote "a clear warning to anti-abortion politicians." Democrats are forecast to lose at least the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate in the November midterms due to soaring inflation and widespread pessimism in the messy aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. The midterms are shaping up as rough for Democrats, who even now only control the legislature by a few votes, as it will decide which party controls Congress for the last two years of Biden's first term. (With inputs from agencies) Watch WION's live TV here: ×

'Republicans are clueless about the power of American women': Biden signs second abortion order

A Democratic Party politician from Texas on Wednesday disrupted state's Governor Greg Abbott's remarks about latest incident of mass shootout in the state. Striding down from auditorium seats, Beto O'Rourke pointed at Abbott's face and accused him of doing "nothing" to reduce violence involving guns.

Latest mass shootout in the small Texas town of Uvalde has left 19 children and two teachers dead.

"This is on you!" O'Rourke fumed at the governor, who was seated at a table on the stage and surrounded by officials including Texas's senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, two longstanding pro-gun lawmakers.

"This is totally predictable when you choose not to do anything for the kids of this state," O'Rourke said. "I'm standing up for the kids of this state to stop this from happening again."

Watch | Texas School Shooting: Tributes pour in for the young victims

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Beto O'Rourke has been vocal about gun violence in America over the years. He has routinely attacked his opponents for inaction.

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Angry exchanges

O'Rourke's startling interruption plunged the meeting into chaos and put security officials on high alert.

Abbott sat stone-faced just a few feet away as O'Rourke, a 2020 US presidential candidate who is challenging Abbott for his job this year, confronted him.

"Sir, you are out of line," someone yelled loudly from the stage at O'Rourke.

As he refused to step away, police intervened and voices rose.&nbsp;

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/is-it-still-wild-west-us-school-shooting-gunman-shared-intentions-on-social-media-before-attack-482208">Is it still wild west? US school shooting gunman shared intentions on social media before attack</a>

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, a Republican, shouted at him "you're a sick son of a bitch (to) come to a deal like this to make a political issue."

"Why are we letting this happen in this country? Why is this happening in this state, year after year, city after city?" O'Rourke asked reporters after leaving the auditorium.

(With inputs from agencies)

You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us <a href="https://www.wionews.com/content-contribution-registration-form">here</a>.

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&nbsp;

A Democratic Party politician from Texas on Wednesday disrupted state's Governor Greg Abbott's remarks about latest incident of mass shootout in the state. Striding down from auditorium seats, Beto O'Rourke pointed at Abbott's face and accused him of doing "nothing" to reduce violence involving guns.

A Democratic Party politician from Texas on Wednesday disrupted state's Governor Greg Abbott's remarks about latest incident of mass shootout in the state. Striding down from auditorium seats, Beto O'Rourke pointed at Abbott's face and accused him of doing "nothing" to reduce violence involving guns. Latest mass shootout in the small Texas town of Uvalde has left 19 children and two teachers dead. "This is on you!" O'Rourke fumed at the governor, who was seated at a table on the stage and surrounded by officials including Texas's senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, two longstanding pro-gun lawmakers. "This is totally predictable when you choose not to do anything for the kids of this state," O'Rourke said. "I'm standing up for the kids of this state to stop this from happening again." Watch | Texas School Shooting: Tributes pour in for the young victims × Beto O'Rourke has been vocal about gun violence in America over the years. He has routinely attacked his opponents for inaction. Angry exchanges O'Rourke's startling interruption plunged the meeting into chaos and put security officials on high alert. Abbott sat stone-faced just a few feet away as O'Rourke, a 2020 US presidential candidate who is challenging Abbott for his job this year, confronted him. "Sir, you are out of line," someone yelled loudly from the stage at O'Rourke. As he refused to step away, police intervened and voices rose. Also Read | Is it still wild west? US school shooting gunman shared intentions on social media before attack Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, a Republican, shouted at him "you're a sick son of a bitch (to) come to a deal like this to make a political issue." "Why are we letting this happen in this country? Why is this happening in this state, year after year, city after city?" O'Rourke asked reporters after leaving the auditorium. (With inputs from agencies) You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here. WATCH WION LIVE HERE ×

US gun terror: Democratic Party politician publicly confronts rival about Texas violence

When some two dozen New Yorkers filed into a Manhattan courthouse this week to finish out their grand jury service, the case against a man who would have been the world’s most prominent criminal defendant was no longer before them.

That man, Donald Trump, was facing potential criminal charges from the grand jury this year over his business practices. But in the weeks since the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, stopped presenting evidence to the jurors about Trump, new signs have emerged that the former president will not be indicted in Manhattan in the foreseeable future — if at all.

At least three of the witnesses once central to the case have either not heard from the district attorney’s office in months or have not been asked to testify, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

In recent weeks, a prosecutor at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who played a key role in the investigation has stopped focusing on a potential case against Trump, other people with knowledge of the inquiry said — a move that followed the resignation earlier this year of the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.

And the remaining prosecutors working on the Trump investigation have abandoned the “war room” they used to prepare for their grand jury presentation early this year, the people said, leaving behind an expansive office suite and conference room on the 15th floor of the district attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan.

The grand jury’s expiration at the end of the month does not preclude prosecutors from impaneling another jury, but the developments underscore the reduced possibility that Trump will face charges under Bragg, who along with several other prosecutors had concerns about proving the case. Some people close to the inquiry believe that it will not result in an indictment of the former president unless a witness cooperates unexpectedly — a long shot in an investigation that has been running for more than three years.

In recent weeks, Bragg’s prosecutors have issued a few additional subpoenas that indicate they are continuing to investigate but have not found a new path to charging Trump. The previously unreported subpoenas, people with knowledge of the matter said, appear to focus on the same topic that has long been the subject of the investigation: whether Trump falsely inflated the value of his assets in annual financial statements.

The subpoenas suggest that, rather than pursuing a new theory of the case, Bragg is looking at additional entities that received Trump’s financial statements as he sought loans and pursued other business, and that the prosecutors are seeking potential victims of the former president.

One of the subpoenas went to a major financial institution that may have received Trump’s financial statements. A second subpoena sent to the Trump Organization largely followed up on an earlier demand to the company for records related to the value of his properties. And the third went to the New York City agency that tracks municipal vendors, including Trump, who has done business with the city for years, operating a golf course in the Bronx and an ice rink in Central Park.

In an interview this month, Bragg said that his prosecutors were interviewing new witnesses and looking at additional evidence. He declined to provide details, citing grand jury secrecy law, but said that the inquiry must be allowed to run its course.

“It’s a work in progress,” Bragg said, adding later, “We’ve got seasoned prosecutors working every day. It’s not going to be on a timeline.”

But impaneling a new grand jury could create challenges for any potential case. Trump’s lawyers could argue — and a judge might agree — that prosecutors were inappropriately hunting for a more favorable group of jurors.

It would also take time to prepare a new presentation of evidence and months to lay out a case to jurors.

Bragg’s office does not have unlimited time to charge Trump. Witnesses could forget key information. Prosecutors would also face a deadline to file the charges within five years of any crimes being committed, although there are some exceptions that extend the deadline. And were Trump to announce another presidential run, Bragg would be likely to face political pressure not to indict a leading contender for the White House.

But even as the criminal investigation fades from public view, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, appears poised to take action against Trump as part of her inquiry into whether he falsely inflated the value of his assets in annual financial statements — the same conduct at the center of the criminal investigation.

At a court hearing Monday — during which a judge held Trump in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with a subpoena for records from James — a lawyer from her office said that the attorney general would probably take action against the former president in the near future. Because her investigation is civil, James can bring a lawsuit but not criminal charges.

Trump has long denied wrongdoing and accused James and Bragg, both of whom are Black and Democrats, of being politically motivated “racists.” If he ultimately is sued or indicted, his lawyers would be likely to point toward the disclaimer that his financial statements were not audited by his accountants and that they were submitted to sophisticated financial institutions that conducted their own due diligence.

James’ office is also participating in the district attorney’s criminal investigation, opened by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., more than three years ago.

In December, Vance directed the two senior prosecutors leading the criminal inquiry, Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, to present evidence to a grand jury with the goal of seeking an indictment of Trump.

But when Bragg took office this year, he and several of his aides raised concerns about the strength of the case, questioning whether they could prove that Trump intended to break the law. Other prosecutors in the office had raised similar concerns, people with knowledge of the matter said. In the final months of Vance’s tenure, three assistant district attorneys stopped working on the investigation, concerned about how rapidly it was proceeding and what they felt were gaps in the evidence against the former president.

Bragg eventually decided to halt the grand jury presentation, prompting the departure of Dunne and Pomerantz, who stated in his resignation letter that he believed Trump was “guilty of numerous felonies.”

Just weeks after their departure, Solomon Shinerock, one of the key prosecutors on the team, stopped investigating Trump. Shinerock, who for years was the lead assistant district attorney in the investigation, pulled back in part because it appeared to be winding down, two of the people familiar with the inquiry said.

The Daily Beast first reported that Shinerock was no longer actively involved in the investigation.

While Shinerock is not investigating Trump, he is still working on a Trump-related case. In July, Manhattan prosecutors indicted the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, accusing them of a yearslong tax evasion scheme.

Shinerock is playing a central role in preparing for that trial, and, given that role, is participating in meetings in which the investigation into Trump is discussed, a person with knowledge of the meetings said.

In the interview this month, Bragg said that no one had left the Trump team since Dunne and Pomerantz. Asked this week to clarify his remarks, Bragg’s spokesperson stood by them, saying that there was one “dedicated team working on the indicted tax case and the Trump investigation.”

The team is led by Susan Hoffinger, an experienced prosecutor whom Bragg appointed to lead the office’s investigations division.

The spokesperson, Danielle Filson, said in a statement that the team included “lawyers who have worked on the case for years and skilled new prosecutors with decades of experience and fresh eyes.”

She declined to say how many prosecutors and other staff are assigned to the team investigating Trump, but said it was “actively probing unexplored avenues.”

In the early days of Bragg’s tenure, the core members of the Trump team took over a 15th-floor conference room as they pushed ahead with the presentation of evidence about the former president to a grand jury. But since the resignations of Pomerantz and Dunne, the team has abandoned that room — an indication, veterans of the office say, that the case is not headed toward a grand jury anytime soon. The team members are now sitting in offices in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau.

Bragg has told aides that the inquiry could move forward if a new piece of evidence is unearthed, or if a Trump Organization insider decides to turn on the former president, people with knowledge of the conversations said. Under Vance, the prosecutors tried for months to secure the cooperation of Weisselberg and were unsuccessful.

Pomerantz and Dunne had been considering charging Trump with the crime of falsifying business records, a low-level felony. Asked if he was still considering that charge, or charges relating to the possibility that Trump had inflated the value of his assets on his financial statements, Bragg said that prosecutors were looking at new evidence and seeing how it fit into the overall picture.

But Pomerantz warned in his resignation letter that time was of the essence, noting, “These facts are already dated, and our ability to establish what happened may erode with the further passage of time.” 
&nbsp;

When some two dozen New Yorkers filed into a Manhattan courthouse this week to finish out their grand jury service, the case against a man who would have been the world’s most prominent criminal defendant was no longer before them.

When some two dozen New Yorkers filed into a Manhattan courthouse this week to finish out their grand jury service, the case against a man who would have been the world’s most prominent criminal defendant was no longer before them. That man, Donald Trump, was facing potential criminal charges from the grand jury this year over his business practices. But in the weeks since the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, stopped presenting evidence to the jurors about Trump, new signs have emerged that the former president will not be indicted in Manhattan in the foreseeable future — if at all. At least three of the witnesses once central to the case have either not heard from the district attorney’s office in months or have not been asked to testify, according to people with knowledge of the matter. In recent weeks, a prosecutor at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who played a key role in the investigation has stopped focusing on a potential case against Trump, other people with knowledge of the inquiry said — a move that followed the resignation earlier this year of the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation. And the remaining prosecutors working on the Trump investigation have abandoned the “war room” they used to prepare for their grand jury presentation early this year, the people said, leaving behind an expansive office suite and conference room on the 15th floor of the district attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan. The grand jury’s expiration at the end of the month does not preclude prosecutors from impaneling another jury, but the developments underscore the reduced possibility that Trump will face charges under Bragg, who along with several other prosecutors had concerns about proving the case. Some people close to the inquiry believe that it will not result in an indictment of the former president unless a witness cooperates unexpectedly — a long shot in an investigation that has been running for more than three years. In recent weeks, Bragg’s prosecutors have issued a few additional subpoenas that indicate they are continuing to investigate but have not found a new path to charging Trump. The previously unreported subpoenas, people with knowledge of the matter said, appear to focus on the same topic that has long been the subject of the investigation: whether Trump falsely inflated the value of his assets in annual financial statements. The subpoenas suggest that, rather than pursuing a new theory of the case, Bragg is looking at additional entities that received Trump’s financial statements as he sought loans and pursued other business, and that the prosecutors are seeking potential victims of the former president. One of the subpoenas went to a major financial institution that may have received Trump’s financial statements. A second subpoena sent to the Trump Organization largely followed up on an earlier demand to the company for records related to the value of his properties. And the third went to the New York City agency that tracks municipal vendors, including Trump, who has done business with the city for years, operating a golf course in the Bronx and an ice rink in Central Park. In an interview this month, Bragg said that his prosecutors were interviewing new witnesses and looking at additional evidence. He declined to provide details, citing grand jury secrecy law, but said that the inquiry must be allowed to run its course. “It’s a work in progress,” Bragg said, adding later, “We’ve got seasoned prosecutors working every day. It’s not going to be on a timeline.” But impaneling a new grand jury could create challenges for any potential case. Trump’s lawyers could argue — and a judge might agree — that prosecutors were inappropriately hunting for a more favorable group of jurors. It would also take time to prepare a new presentation of evidence and months to lay out a case to jurors. Bragg’s office does not have unlimited time to charge Trump. Witnesses could forget key information. Prosecutors would also face a deadline to file the charges within five years of any crimes being committed, although there are some exceptions that extend the deadline. And were Trump to announce another presidential run, Bragg would be likely to face political pressure not to indict a leading contender for the White House. But even as the criminal investigation fades from public view, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, appears poised to take action against Trump as part of her inquiry into whether he falsely inflated the value of his assets in annual financial statements — the same conduct at the center of the criminal investigation. At a court hearing Monday — during which a judge held Trump in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with a subpoena for records from James — a lawyer from her office said that the attorney general would probably take action against the former president in the near future. Because her investigation is civil, James can bring a lawsuit but not criminal charges. Trump has long denied wrongdoing and accused James and Bragg, both of whom are Black and Democrats, of being politically motivated “racists.” If he ultimately is sued or indicted, his lawyers would be likely to point toward the disclaimer that his financial statements were not audited by his accountants and that they were submitted to sophisticated financial institutions that conducted their own due diligence. James’ office is also participating in the district attorney’s criminal investigation, opened by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., more than three years ago. In December, Vance directed the two senior prosecutors leading the criminal inquiry, Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, to present evidence to a grand jury with the goal of seeking an indictment of Trump. But when Bragg took office this year, he and several of his aides raised concerns about the strength of the case, questioning whether they could prove that Trump intended to break the law. Other prosecutors in the office had raised similar concerns, people with knowledge of the matter said. In the final months of Vance’s tenure, three assistant district attorneys stopped working on the investigation, concerned about how rapidly it was proceeding and what they felt were gaps in the evidence against the former president. Bragg eventually decided to halt the grand jury presentation, prompting the departure of Dunne and Pomerantz, who stated in his resignation letter that he believed Trump was “guilty of numerous felonies.” Just weeks after their departure, Solomon Shinerock, one of the key prosecutors on the team, stopped investigating Trump. Shinerock, who for years was the lead assistant district attorney in the investigation, pulled back in part because it appeared to be winding down, two of the people familiar with the inquiry said. The Daily Beast first reported that Shinerock was no longer actively involved in the investigation. While Shinerock is not investigating Trump, he is still working on a Trump-related case. In July, Manhattan prosecutors indicted the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, accusing them of a yearslong tax evasion scheme. Shinerock is playing a central role in preparing for that trial, and, given that role, is participating in meetings in which the investigation into Trump is discussed, a person with knowledge of the meetings said. In the interview this month, Bragg said that no one had left the Trump team since Dunne and Pomerantz. Asked this week to clarify his remarks, Bragg’s spokesperson stood by them, saying that there was one “dedicated team working on the indicted tax case and the Trump investigation.” The team is led by Susan Hoffinger, an experienced prosecutor whom Bragg appointed to lead the office’s investigations division. The spokesperson, Danielle Filson, said in a statement that the team included “lawyers who have worked on the case for years and skilled new prosecutors with decades of experience and fresh eyes.” She declined to say how many prosecutors and other staff are assigned to the team investigating Trump, but said it was “actively probing unexplored avenues.” In the early days of Bragg’s tenure, the core members of the Trump team took over a 15th-floor conference room as they pushed ahead with the presentation of evidence about the former president to a grand jury. But since the resignations of Pomerantz and Dunne, the team has abandoned that room — an indication, veterans of the office say, that the case is not headed toward a grand jury anytime soon. The team members are now sitting in offices in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau. Bragg has told aides that the inquiry could move forward if a new piece of evidence is unearthed, or if a Trump Organization insider decides to turn on the former president, people with knowledge of the conversations said. Under Vance, the prosecutors tried for months to secure the cooperation of Weisselberg and were unsuccessful. Pomerantz and Dunne had been considering charging Trump with the crime of falsifying business records, a low-level felony. Asked if he was still considering that charge, or charges relating to the possibility that Trump had inflated the value of his assets on his financial statements, Bragg said that prosecutors were looking at new evidence and seeing how it fit into the overall picture. But Pomerantz warned in his resignation letter that time was of the essence, noting, “These facts are already dated, and our ability to establish what happened may erode with the further passage of time.”

Likelihood of Trump indictment in Manhattan fades as grand jury wraps up

The number of competitive congressional districts is on track to dive near — and possibly below — the lowest level in at least three decades, as Republicans and Democrats draw new political maps designed to ensure that the vast majority of House races are over before the general election starts.

With two-thirds of the new boundaries set, mapmakers are on pace to draw fewer than 40 seats — out of 435 — that are considered competitive based on the 2020 presidential election results, according to a New York Times analysis of election data. Ten years ago that number was 73.

While the exact size of the battlefield is still emerging, the sharp decline of competition for House seats is the latest worrying sign of dysfunction in the U.S. political system, which is already struggling with a scourge of misinformation and rising distrust in elections. Lack of competition in general elections can widen the ideological gulf between the parties, leading to hardened stalemates on legislation and voters’ alienation from the political process.

“The reduction of competitive seats is a tragedy,” said former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “We end up with gridlock, we end up with no progress, and we end up with a population looking at our legislatures and having this feeling that nothing gets done.” He added: “This gridlock leads to cynicism about this whole process.”

Both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for adding to the tally of safe seats. Over decades, the parties have deftly used the redistricting process to create districts dominated by voters from one party or to bolster incumbents.

It’s not yet clear which party will ultimately benefit more from this year’s bumper crop of safe seats, or whether President Joe Biden’s sagging approval ratings might endanger Democrats whose districts haven’t been considered competitive. Republicans control the mapmaking for more than twice as many districts as Democrats, leaving many in the GOP to believe that the party can take back the House majority after four years of Democratic control largely by drawing favorable seats.

But Democrats have used their power to gerrymander more aggressively than expected. In New York, for example, the Democratic-controlled Legislature on Wednesday approved a map that gives the party a strong chance of flipping as many as three House seats currently held by Republicans.

That has left Republicans and Democrats essentially at a draw, with two big outstanding unknowns: Florida’s 28 seats, increasingly the subject of Republican infighting, are still unsettled, and several court cases in other states could send lawmakers back to the drawing board.

“Democrats in New York are gerrymandering like the House depends on it,” said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization. “Republican legislators shouldn’t be afraid to legally press their political advantage where they have control.”

New York’s new map doesn’t just set Democrats up to win more seats, it also eliminates competitive districts. In 2020, there were four districts where Biden and former President Donald Trump were within 5 percentage points. There are none in the new map. Even the reconfigured district that stretches from Republican-dominated Staten Island to Democratic neighborhoods in Brooklyn is now, at least on paper, friendly territory for Democrats.

Without that competition from outside the party, many politicians are beginning to see the biggest threat to their careers as coming from within.

“When I was a member of Congress, most members woke up concerned about a general election,” said former Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who led the House Democrats’ campaign committee during the last redistricting cycle. “Now they wake up worried about a primary opponent.”

Israel, who left Congress in 2017 and now owns a bookstore on Long Island, recalled Republicans telling him they would like to vote for Democratic priorities like gun control but feared a backlash from their party’s base. House Democrats, Israel said, would like to address issues such as Social Security and Medicare reform, but understand that doing so would draw a robust primary challenge from the party’s left wing.

Republicans argue that redistricting isn’t destiny: The political climate matters, and more races will become competitive if inflation, the lingering pandemic or other issues continue to sour voters on Democratic leadership.

But the far greater number of districts drawn to be overwhelmingly safe for one party is likely to limit how many seats will flip — even in a so-called wave election.

“The parties are contributing to more and more single-party districts and taking the voters out of the equation,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, who led the House Republicans’ campaign arm during the 2001 redistricting cycle. “November becomes a constitutional formality.”

In the 29 states where maps have been completed and not thrown out by courts, there are just 22 districts that either Biden or Trump won by 5 percentage points or less, according to data from the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute.

By this point in the 2012 redistricting cycle, there were 44 districts defined as competitive based on the previous presidential election results. In the 1992 election, the margin between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush was within 5 points in 108 congressional districts.

The phenomenon of parties using redistricting to gain an edge is as old as the republic itself, but it has escalated in recent decades with more sophisticated technology and more detailed data about voter behavior. Americans with similar political views have clustered in distinct areas — Republicans in rural and exurban areas, Democrats in cities and inner suburbs. It’s a pattern that can make it difficult to draw cohesive, competitive districts.

No state has quashed competition ahead of the midterm elections like Texas. In the 2020 election, there were 12 competitive districts in the state. After redistricting, there is only one.

Though Trump won 52% of the vote in Texas in 2020, Republicans are expected to win roughly 65% — 24 of the state’s 38 congressional seats. (Texas gained two seats in the reapportionment after the 2020 census.)

The Texas state legislators who control redistricting shored up Republican incumbents including Reps. Dan Crenshaw, Beth Van Duyne and Michael McCaul, but in doing so also drew safer districts for Democrats such as Reps. Colin Allred and Lizzie Fletcher.

“The fact that it’s going to be harder for us to pick up congressional seats is a big concern,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, chair of the Texas Democratic Party. “That doesn’t mean that we think that it’s not important to mount challengers; it’s just a reality that it’s going to be harder.”

Democrats did the same where they could. Oregon legislators took the state’s competitive 4th District and turned it into a seat that strongly favors their party.

The change was so dramatic that Rep. Peter DeFazio, an 18-term Democrat, told reporters last year that he chose to retire because the district is now “winnable by another Democrat.”

Redrawing DeFazio’s district enraged Oregon Republicans.

“Competitive districts benefit all of us,” said Shelly Boshart Davis, an Oregon state representative who was the former Republican co-chairwoman of the state House’s redistricting committee. “We hear voters that feel marginalized all the time, that say, ‘I don’t feel my voice gets heard.’ ”

A lack of competition has unintended consequences. Without a competitive race at the congressional level, local parties are deprived of an infusion of money and organizing. Candidates for governor or Senate don’t benefit from being able to piggyback on the energy and activity at the local level.

“Anybody running statewide has to pull the wagon entirely themselves because you don’t have competitive races going on locally,” said Matt Angle, a Democratic activist in Texas.

It can sometimes take years to see the full effect of eliminating a competitive district.

Ten years ago, North Carolina Republicans took a battleground district in the state’s western tip and, by slicing off a piece of the liberal city of Asheville, turned it into a district that John McCain would have carried by 18 points in the 2008 presidential election. The incumbent centrist Democrat, Heath Shuler, retired rather than seek reelection in a district he had little shot at winning.

He was replaced by Mark Meadows, who went on to be a founding member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus before becoming the last White House chief of staff for Trump and a central figure in Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The number of competitive congressional districts is on track to dive near — and possibly below — the lowest level in at least three decades, as Republicans and Democrats draw new political maps designed to ensure that the vast majority of House races are over before the general election starts.

The number of competitive congressional districts is on track to dive near — and possibly below — the lowest level in at least three decades, as Republicans and Democrats draw new political maps designed to ensure that the vast majority of House races are over before the general election starts. With two-thirds of the new boundaries set, mapmakers are on pace to draw fewer than 40 seats — out of 435 — that are considered competitive based on the 2020 presidential election results, according to a New York Times analysis of election data. Ten years ago that number was 73. While the exact size of the battlefield is still emerging, the sharp decline of competition for House seats is the latest worrying sign of dysfunction in the U.S. political system, which is already struggling with a scourge of misinformation and rising distrust in elections. Lack of competition in general elections can widen the ideological gulf between the parties, leading to hardened stalemates on legislation and voters’ alienation from the political process. “The reduction of competitive seats is a tragedy,” said former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “We end up with gridlock, we end up with no progress, and we end up with a population looking at our legislatures and having this feeling that nothing gets done.” He added: “This gridlock leads to cynicism about this whole process.” Both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for adding to the tally of safe seats. Over decades, the parties have deftly used the redistricting process to create districts dominated by voters from one party or to bolster incumbents. It’s not yet clear which party will ultimately benefit more from this year’s bumper crop of safe seats, or whether President Joe Biden’s sagging approval ratings might endanger Democrats whose districts haven’t been considered competitive. Republicans control the mapmaking for more than twice as many districts as Democrats, leaving many in the GOP to believe that the party can take back the House majority after four years of Democratic control largely by drawing favorable seats. But Democrats have used their power to gerrymander more aggressively than expected. In New York, for example, the Democratic-controlled Legislature on Wednesday approved a map that gives the party a strong chance of flipping as many as three House seats currently held by Republicans. That has left Republicans and Democrats essentially at a draw, with two big outstanding unknowns: Florida’s 28 seats, increasingly the subject of Republican infighting, are still unsettled, and several court cases in other states could send lawmakers back to the drawing board. “Democrats in New York are gerrymandering like the House depends on it,” said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization. “Republican legislators shouldn’t be afraid to legally press their political advantage where they have control.” New York’s new map doesn’t just set Democrats up to win more seats, it also eliminates competitive districts. In 2020, there were four districts where Biden and former President Donald Trump were within 5 percentage points. There are none in the new map. Even the reconfigured district that stretches from Republican-dominated Staten Island to Democratic neighborhoods in Brooklyn is now, at least on paper, friendly territory for Democrats. Without that competition from outside the party, many politicians are beginning to see the biggest threat to their careers as coming from within. “When I was a member of Congress, most members woke up concerned about a general election,” said former Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who led the House Democrats’ campaign committee during the last redistricting cycle. “Now they wake up worried about a primary opponent.” Israel, who left Congress in 2017 and now owns a bookstore on Long Island, recalled Republicans telling him they would like to vote for Democratic priorities like gun control but feared a backlash from their party’s base. House Democrats, Israel said, would like to address issues such as Social Security and Medicare reform, but understand that doing so would draw a robust primary challenge from the party’s left wing. Republicans argue that redistricting isn’t destiny: The political climate matters, and more races will become competitive if inflation, the lingering pandemic or other issues continue to sour voters on Democratic leadership. But the far greater number of districts drawn to be overwhelmingly safe for one party is likely to limit how many seats will flip — even in a so-called wave election. “The parties are contributing to more and more single-party districts and taking the voters out of the equation,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, who led the House Republicans’ campaign arm during the 2001 redistricting cycle. “November becomes a constitutional formality.” In the 29 states where maps have been completed and not thrown out by courts, there are just 22 districts that either Biden or Trump won by 5 percentage points or less, according to data from the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute. By this point in the 2012 redistricting cycle, there were 44 districts defined as competitive based on the previous presidential election results. In the 1992 election, the margin between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush was within 5 points in 108 congressional districts. The phenomenon of parties using redistricting to gain an edge is as old as the republic itself, but it has escalated in recent decades with more sophisticated technology and more detailed data about voter behavior. Americans with similar political views have clustered in distinct areas — Republicans in rural and exurban areas, Democrats in cities and inner suburbs. It’s a pattern that can make it difficult to draw cohesive, competitive districts. No state has quashed competition ahead of the midterm elections like Texas. In the 2020 election, there were 12 competitive districts in the state. After redistricting, there is only one. Though Trump won 52% of the vote in Texas in 2020, Republicans are expected to win roughly 65% — 24 of the state’s 38 congressional seats. (Texas gained two seats in the reapportionment after the 2020 census.) The Texas state legislators who control redistricting shored up Republican incumbents including Reps. Dan Crenshaw, Beth Van Duyne and Michael McCaul, but in doing so also drew safer districts for Democrats such as Reps. Colin Allred and Lizzie Fletcher. “The fact that it’s going to be harder for us to pick up congressional seats is a big concern,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, chair of the Texas Democratic Party. “That doesn’t mean that we think that it’s not important to mount challengers; it’s just a reality that it’s going to be harder.” Democrats did the same where they could. Oregon legislators took the state’s competitive 4th District and turned it into a seat that strongly favors their party. The change was so dramatic that Rep. Peter DeFazio, an 18-term Democrat, told reporters last year that he chose to retire because the district is now “winnable by another Democrat.” Redrawing DeFazio’s district enraged Oregon Republicans. “Competitive districts benefit all of us,” said Shelly Boshart Davis, an Oregon state representative who was the former Republican co-chairwoman of the state House’s redistricting committee. “We hear voters that feel marginalized all the time, that say, ‘I don’t feel my voice gets heard.’ ” A lack of competition has unintended consequences. Without a competitive race at the congressional level, local parties are deprived of an infusion of money and organizing. Candidates for governor or Senate don’t benefit from being able to piggyback on the energy and activity at the local level. “Anybody running statewide has to pull the wagon entirely themselves because you don’t have competitive races going on locally,” said Matt Angle, a Democratic activist in Texas. It can sometimes take years to see the full effect of eliminating a competitive district. Ten years ago, North Carolina Republicans took a battleground district in the state’s western tip and, by slicing off a piece of the liberal city of Asheville, turned it into a district that John McCain would have carried by 18 points in the 2008 presidential election. The incumbent centrist Democrat, Heath Shuler, retired rather than seek reelection in a district he had little shot at winning. He was replaced by Mark Meadows, who went on to be a founding member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus before becoming the last White House chief of staff for Trump and a central figure in Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

‘Taking the voters out of the equation’: How the parties are killing competition in US

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday that she plans to run for 19th term in office. The Democratic Party leader said she was determined to stay on to fight existential threats to democracy.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who turns 82 in March, had been expected to step down, with her party bracing for a possible heavy defeat in this year's midterm elections.

Despite dire predictions of a Democratic wipeout in November, Pelosi is likely to win her liberal San Francisco district comfortably -- but she did not reveal whether she intended to keep her leadership role.

"Our democracy is at risk because of the assault on the truth, the assault on the US Capitol and the state-by-state assault on voting rights," Pelosi said in a video announcement.&nbsp;

"This election is crucial. Nothing less is at stake than our democracy. But as we say, we don't agonize, we organize, and that is why I am running for reelection to Congress and respectfully seek your support."

Pelosi, the only female speaker in US history, first took up the gavel in 2007 and returned to the role when the Democrats retook the House in the 2018 midterm elections.

After securing her party's nomination to lead the House in 2020, Pelosi suggested it would be her last term in the job.

The job places her second in line to the presidency behind Vice President Kamala Harris.

"When people ask me, 'What are the three most important issues facing the Congress?' I always say the same thing: our children, our children, our children... That is why I am in Congress, for the children," she said.

(With inputs from agencies)

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday that she plans to run for 19th term in office. The Democratic Party leader said she was determined to stay on to fight existential threats to democracy.

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday that she plans to run for 19th term in office. The Democratic Party leader said she was determined to stay on to fight existential threats to democracy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who turns 82 in March, had been expected to step down, with her party bracing for a possible heavy defeat in this year's midterm elections. Despite dire predictions of a Democratic wipeout in November, Pelosi is likely to win her liberal San Francisco district comfortably -- but she did not reveal whether she intended to keep her leadership role. "Our democracy is at risk because of the assault on the truth, the assault on the US Capitol and the state-by-state assault on voting rights," Pelosi said in a video announcement. "This election is crucial. Nothing less is at stake than our democracy. But as we say, we don't agonize, we organize, and that is why I am running for reelection to Congress and respectfully seek your support." Pelosi, the only female speaker in US history, first took up the gavel in 2007 and returned to the role when the Democrats retook the House in the 2018 midterm elections. After securing her party's nomination to lead the House in 2020, Pelosi suggested it would be her last term in the job. The job places her second in line to the presidency behind Vice President Kamala Harris. "When people ask me, 'What are the three most important issues facing the Congress?' I always say the same thing: our children, our children, our children... That is why I am in Congress, for the children," she said. (With inputs from agencies)

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says will run for reelection

Harry Reid, the Democrat who rose from childhood poverty in the rural Nevada desert to the heights of power in Washington, where he steered the Affordable Care Act to passage as Senate majority leader, died Tuesday in Henderson, Nevada. He was 82.

Reid had been treated for pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 2018, but lived to see the Las Vegas airport renamed for him this month. His death was confirmed in statements from Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader.

Even by the standards of the political profession, where against-the-odds biographies are common and modest roots an asset, what Reid overcame was extraordinary. He was raised in almost Dickensian circumstances in tiny Searchlight, Nevada: His home had no indoor plumbing, his father was an alcoholic miner who eventually committed suicide, and his mother helped the family survive by taking in laundry from local brothels.

After two decades of campaigns in Nevada marked by success, setback and recovery, Reid was elected to the Senate in 1986. He became the chamber’s Democratic leader after the 2004 election.

But it was not until his colleague Barack Obama was elected president four years later that Reid was able to meld his deep knowledge of congressional rules, his facility with horse-trading and his cussed determination to unify his 60-seat majority and pass landmark legislation.

“If Harry said he would do something, he did it,” President Joe Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, said in a statement Tuesday evening. “If he gave you his word, you could bank on it. That’s how he got things done for the good of the country for decades.”

Pushing through a sweeping economic stimulus after the Great Recession, a new set of rules governing Wall Street, and the most significant expansion of health care coverage since the Great Society of the 1960s — all with scant Republican support — Reid became, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the indispensable lawmakers of the Obama era.

“The records will be written about the eight years of Obama and Reid,” Reid boasted shortly after he announced in 2015 that he would not seek reelection the following year.

Yet the three-decade Senate tenure of this soft-spoken yet ferociously combative Nevadan, a middleweight boxer in his youth, also traced the chamber’s evolution from a collegial and consensus-oriented institution to the partisan and fractured body it has become. Republicans placed some of the blame on Reid for this change, pointing to his 2013 decision to upend Senate rules by doing away with the filibuster on most nominations by a president.

Reid, though, reflected the broader leftward shift of his party and his state. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, when Nevada finally grew large enough to require a second seat, he arrived in the capital as a moderate western Democrat: opposed to abortion rights, largely supportive of gun rights and uneasy about immigration.

But as Nevada grew from an overwhelmingly rural, white redoubt of ranches and mines to a polyglot gambling mecca in which 70% of voters live in the Las Vegas area, Reid adapted as a matter of necessity. He won his final reelection in 2010, a dismal year for Democrats nationally, thanks in part to an outpouring of support from his state’s rapidly growing Hispanic and Asian communities after his popularity among many other Nevadans had plummeted in the economic collapse.

“I may have won without them, but I doubt it,” Reid said in a later interview about his support among immigrants in his 2010 campaign.

But after Democrats lost the Senate majority in 2014, and after he had lost nearly all the sight in his right eye the next year in a serious accident in his home during a workout, Reid decided not to run for a sixth term. He said he did not want to be one of those senators who served well into old age.

While he was willing to adjust with the times politically, he remained a stylistic throwback. A Mormon who neither drank nor smoked, he also shunned his state’s principal industry, claiming with his characteristic bluntness that “the only people who make money from gambling are the joints and government.”

Prone to ‘Reidisms’

Reid was a meandering and awkward public speaker, far more comfortable plotting strategy beneath the imposing portrait of Mark Twain in his Capitol office than he was making the case for his party on a Sunday news show, much less at a political rally.

In private, he wielded an irreverent sense of humour, but could be brusque, often not even saying goodbye to colleagues at the end of a phone call. When he did speak publicly or to the press, he was often given to verbal miscues that came to be known as “Reidisms.”

He deemed President George W. Bush “a loser” while addressing a group of high school juniors in Nevada in 2005, mused about the body odour of Washington’s tourists a few years later and, when Obama first ran for president, in 2008, said the country’s first Black president could be elected because he spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” (Reid telephoned Obama to apologize after the comments were made public; Obama issued a statement calling the remarks “unfortunate,” but added, “I know what’s in his heart.”)

It was Reid who saw Obama’s potential for a successful run at the White House when many Democrats were rallying behind Hillary Clinton. Recognizing that the young Illinois senator had little affection for the Senate’s byzantine ways, Reid in 2006 privately urged him to mount a bid for the Democratic nomination. “I am one of the reasons he’s president,” Reid told The Washington Post after announcing his retirement.

Obama confirmed as much Tuesday evening, when he posted on Twitter a letter he had recently written to Reid.

“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,” Obama wrote.

Reid was as shrewd a tactician as he was poor a communicator, and nowhere was that more evident than in Nevada, where he became the state’s dominant political figure for the final two decades of his life — “a Machiavelli with malaprops,” as the Las Vegas-based journalist Jon Ralston called him.

Reid used his position on the Senate Appropriations Committee and his eventual majority leadership to block nuclear waste from being deposited in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, a decades-long fight, while relentlessly earmarking spending for his state, where 85% of the land was federally owned when he left office. He also helped create Nevada’s Great Basin National Park, ensured that millions of acres in the state were protected as national parks or monuments, and made sure that federal funds were directed to cleaning and preserving Lake Tahoe, which straddles Nevada’s border with California.

Reid ran Nevada’s Democratic Party in the manner of an old-style political boss, determining which candidates would run up and down the ballot, arranging his own succession and even remaining in charge after his cancer diagnosis and through the 2018 midterm elections, nearly two years after his retirement from the Senate.

He also used his clout to elevate his state’s role in the presidential nominating process, moving Nevada’s caucuses up to become one of the early voting states in the Democratic primaries, and in 2016 he quietly helped Hillary Clinton salvage her nomination there.

A Difficult Start

Harry Mason Reid Jr. was born on Dec. 2, 1939, in Searchlight, a mining outpost that had about 200 residents in his youth. One of four sons of Harry Sr. and Inez (Jaynes) Reid, he grew up in privation. His father suffered from depression and was often unemployed. Harry worked at a gas station in high school, earning enough money to purchase his mother a new set of false teeth.

Boxing metaphors about Reid would eventually become clichéd — he even named his memoir “The Good Fight” — but he was quite the pugilist. He got into physical altercations with his father (when his father would become violent toward his mother) and with his future father-in-law (who was uneasy about his daughter marrying Reid).

To attend high school, he would hitchhike 40 miles to Henderson, near Las Vegas, where he had relatives. And it was there that his political career effectively began. He had a teacher and boxing coach named Mike O’Callaghan, who would be elected governor in 1970 with Reid as his running mate.

With financial assistance from Nevada businessmen, Reid graduated from Utah State University, where he converted to Mormonism. He then attended law school at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., moonlighting as a Capitol Police officer to pay his way through.

With his law degree, he returned to Nevada and became the local prosecutor in Henderson. He was elected to the Nevada state Assembly in 1968. Two years later, he and O’Callaghan were elected statewide.

Then, unexpectedly, Sen. Alan Bible, a Democrat, announced in 1974 that he would not run for reelection. Reid won his party’s nomination but lost in the general election to Paul Laxalt, a popular former Republican governor, by fewer than 700 votes. It was the only Democratic Senate seat in the country that year that Republicans picked up.

In an early demonstration of his political pugnacity, Reid had demanded during the campaign that Laxalt release his family’s financial interests.

“One problem,” Reid recalled with a chuckle years later. “His sister was a nun. I got killed on that.”

After an ill-fated bid for the Las Vegas mayoralty in 1975, Reid’s career was floundering. But O’Callaghan again came to his aid, making Reid chair of the Nevada Gaming Commission at a moment when state officials were trying to root out the mob from Las Vegas’ casinos.

It was only then that Reid realized how entrenched the mob still was on the city’s famous Strip. “That was a real eye-opener for me,” he said later, “because I thought I knew the state very well, but I didn’t.”

As gaming commissioner he was offered bribes and participated in FBI stings. Near the end of his tenure his wife, Landra Reid, came out of their house one day to find a bomb attached to the family’s station wagon.

Landra Reid, who was his closest adviser, survives him, as do his children, Rory, Lana Reid Barringer, Leif, Josh and Key, and 19 grandchildren.

Following the 1980 census, Nevada, for the first time in its history, had a large enough population to merit a second House seat, representing the Las Vegas area. Reid won the new district, but after two terms a Senate seat again opened up, thanks to Laxalt’s retirement.

Reid again benefited from running in a good Democratic year, in 1986, and this time his bare-knuckled tactics paid off as he handily defeated Laxalt’s handpicked successor, former Rep. Jim Santini.

He won a coveted seat on the Appropriations Committee in his first term and spent much of the first part of his career looking out for the needs of Nevada, which was beginning to boom as a global hospitality capital.

After another agonizingly close race in 1998 — he won by fewer than 500 votes following a recount — Reid was elected minority whip, the second-ranking Senate Democrat. Though still not a prominent figure in Washington, he was pivotal in wooing Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont to leave the Republican Party in 2001 and caucus with the Democrats, a move that gave Reid’s party control of the narrowly divided Senate.

After Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, was defeated in 2004, Reid effectively secured the commitments he needed to take over the caucus by the next day.

The Majority Leader

A fierce critic of George W. Bush — he called him “a liar” as well as a loser — Reid became a beneficiary of the president’s unpopularity in 2006, when Democrats took back control of the Senate and Reid became majority leader. He played a key role in passing the bank bailout after the stock market collapsed in the fall of 2008. Later that year, when Obama was elected, Democrats made even more gains, giving Reid a filibuster-proof majority.

But the Democratic caucus included senators across the ideological spectrum and, with few moderate Republicans left, it took all of Reid’s legislative acumen, doggedness and even shamelessness to win some close votes. On the health law, for example, he offered Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska a generous expansion of Medicaid funding in his state, a deal that critics called “the Cornhusker Kickback.”

Reid’s hard-nosed tactics handed Democrats a series of major achievements, but he enraged Republicans and was vulnerable to defeat entering what would be his final reelection campaign in 2010.

He overcame his own unpopularity by meddling in the Republican primary, as his allies undermined a potentially strong candidate and helped lift a far-right conservative, Sharron Angle, who was herself as gaffe-prone as Reid. He won the general election comfortably even as the rise of the Tea Party movement propelled Republicans to victory across the country.

That same single-mindedness and indifference to criticism, however, embarrassed even some of his allies two years later when he sought to undermine Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy in 2012 by repeatedly, and without evidence, claiming that Romney had gone a decade without paying income tax.

Reid was even more contemptuous of former President Donald Trump, calling him “a racist” and “sexual predator” who achieved prominence only because of the fortune he had inherited.

Being born into wealth was, of course, alien to Reid. At the end of his career — after great financial and political success and raising five children, one of whom became an elected official in Las Vegas — he relished showing visitors his dusty hometown. But he recalled that it was not until he saw Alex Haley give a talk about his book “Roots” that he stopped feeling ashamed by his impoverished background.

“He said be proud of who you are, you can’t escape who you are,” Reid said in his Senate farewell speech, adding that at that point he proudly became “Harry Reid, the guy from Searchlight.”

Harry Reid, the Democrat who rose from childhood poverty in the rural Nevada desert to the heights of power in Washington, where he steered the Affordable Care Act to passage as Senate majority leader, died Tuesday in Henderson, Nevada.

Harry Reid, the Democrat who rose from childhood poverty in the rural Nevada desert to the heights of power in Washington, where he steered the Affordable Care Act to passage as Senate majority leader, died Tuesday in Henderson, Nevada. He was 82. Reid had been treated for pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 2018, but lived to see the Las Vegas airport renamed for him this month. His death was confirmed in statements from Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader. Even by the standards of the political profession, where against-the-odds biographies are common and modest roots an asset, what Reid overcame was extraordinary. He was raised in almost Dickensian circumstances in tiny Searchlight, Nevada: His home had no indoor plumbing, his father was an alcoholic miner who eventually committed suicide, and his mother helped the family survive by taking in laundry from local brothels. After two decades of campaigns in Nevada marked by success, setback and recovery, Reid was elected to the Senate in 1986. He became the chamber’s Democratic leader after the 2004 election. But it was not until his colleague Barack Obama was elected president four years later that Reid was able to meld his deep knowledge of congressional rules, his facility with horse-trading and his cussed determination to unify his 60-seat majority and pass landmark legislation. “If Harry said he would do something, he did it,” President Joe Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, said in a statement Tuesday evening. “If he gave you his word, you could bank on it. That’s how he got things done for the good of the country for decades.” Pushing through a sweeping economic stimulus after the Great Recession, a new set of rules governing Wall Street, and the most significant expansion of health care coverage since the Great Society of the 1960s — all with scant Republican support — Reid became, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the indispensable lawmakers of the Obama era. “The records will be written about the eight years of Obama and Reid,” Reid boasted shortly after he announced in 2015 that he would not seek reelection the following year. Yet the three-decade Senate tenure of this soft-spoken yet ferociously combative Nevadan, a middleweight boxer in his youth, also traced the chamber’s evolution from a collegial and consensus-oriented institution to the partisan and fractured body it has become. Republicans placed some of the blame on Reid for this change, pointing to his 2013 decision to upend Senate rules by doing away with the filibuster on most nominations by a president. Reid, though, reflected the broader leftward shift of his party and his state. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, when Nevada finally grew large enough to require a second seat, he arrived in the capital as a moderate western Democrat: opposed to abortion rights, largely supportive of gun rights and uneasy about immigration. But as Nevada grew from an overwhelmingly rural, white redoubt of ranches and mines to a polyglot gambling mecca in which 70% of voters live in the Las Vegas area, Reid adapted as a matter of necessity. He won his final reelection in 2010, a dismal year for Democrats nationally, thanks in part to an outpouring of support from his state’s rapidly growing Hispanic and Asian communities after his popularity among many other Nevadans had plummeted in the economic collapse. “I may have won without them, but I doubt it,” Reid said in a later interview about his support among immigrants in his 2010 campaign. But after Democrats lost the Senate majority in 2014, and after he had lost nearly all the sight in his right eye the next year in a serious accident in his home during a workout, Reid decided not to run for a sixth term. He said he did not want to be one of those senators who served well into old age. While he was willing to adjust with the times politically, he remained a stylistic throwback. A Mormon who neither drank nor smoked, he also shunned his state’s principal industry, claiming with his characteristic bluntness that “the only people who make money from gambling are the joints and government.” Prone to ‘Reidisms’ Reid was a meandering and awkward public speaker, far more comfortable plotting strategy beneath the imposing portrait of Mark Twain in his Capitol office than he was making the case for his party on a Sunday news show, much less at a political rally. In private, he wielded an irreverent sense of humour, but could be brusque, often not even saying goodbye to colleagues at the end of a phone call. When he did speak publicly or to the press, he was often given to verbal miscues that came to be known as “Reidisms.” He deemed President George W. Bush “a loser” while addressing a group of high school juniors in Nevada in 2005, mused about the body odour of Washington’s tourists a few years later and, when Obama first ran for president, in 2008, said the country’s first Black president could be elected because he spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” (Reid telephoned Obama to apologize after the comments were made public; Obama issued a statement calling the remarks “unfortunate,” but added, “I know what’s in his heart.”) It was Reid who saw Obama’s potential for a successful run at the White House when many Democrats were rallying behind Hillary Clinton. Recognizing that the young Illinois senator had little affection for the Senate’s byzantine ways, Reid in 2006 privately urged him to mount a bid for the Democratic nomination. “I am one of the reasons he’s president,” Reid told The Washington Post after announcing his retirement. Obama confirmed as much Tuesday evening, when he posted on Twitter a letter he had recently written to Reid. “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,” Obama wrote. Reid was as shrewd a tactician as he was poor a communicator, and nowhere was that more evident than in Nevada, where he became the state’s dominant political figure for the final two decades of his life — “a Machiavelli with malaprops,” as the Las Vegas-based journalist Jon Ralston called him. Reid used his position on the Senate Appropriations Committee and his eventual majority leadership to block nuclear waste from being deposited in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, a decades-long fight, while relentlessly earmarking spending for his state, where 85% of the land was federally owned when he left office. He also helped create Nevada’s Great Basin National Park, ensured that millions of acres in the state were protected as national parks or monuments, and made sure that federal funds were directed to cleaning and preserving Lake Tahoe, which straddles Nevada’s border with California. Reid ran Nevada’s Democratic Party in the manner of an old-style political boss, determining which candidates would run up and down the ballot, arranging his own succession and even remaining in charge after his cancer diagnosis and through the 2018 midterm elections, nearly two years after his retirement from the Senate. He also used his clout to elevate his state’s role in the presidential nominating process, moving Nevada’s caucuses up to become one of the early voting states in the Democratic primaries, and in 2016 he quietly helped Hillary Clinton salvage her nomination there. A Difficult Start Harry Mason Reid Jr. was born on Dec. 2, 1939, in Searchlight, a mining outpost that had about 200 residents in his youth. One of four sons of Harry Sr. and Inez (Jaynes) Reid, he grew up in privation. His father suffered from depression and was often unemployed. Harry worked at a gas station in high school, earning enough money to purchase his mother a new set of false teeth. Boxing metaphors about Reid would eventually become clichéd — he even named his memoir “The Good Fight” — but he was quite the pugilist. He got into physical altercations with his father (when his father would become violent toward his mother) and with his future father-in-law (who was uneasy about his daughter marrying Reid). To attend high school, he would hitchhike 40 miles to Henderson, near Las Vegas, where he had relatives. And it was there that his political career effectively began. He had a teacher and boxing coach named Mike O’Callaghan, who would be elected governor in 1970 with Reid as his running mate. With financial assistance from Nevada businessmen, Reid graduated from Utah State University, where he converted to Mormonism. He then attended law school at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., moonlighting as a Capitol Police officer to pay his way through. With his law degree, he returned to Nevada and became the local prosecutor in Henderson. He was elected to the Nevada state Assembly in 1968. Two years later, he and O’Callaghan were elected statewide. Then, unexpectedly, Sen. Alan Bible, a Democrat, announced in 1974 that he would not run for reelection. Reid won his party’s nomination but lost in the general election to Paul Laxalt, a popular former Republican governor, by fewer than 700 votes. It was the only Democratic Senate seat in the country that year that Republicans picked up. In an early demonstration of his political pugnacity, Reid had demanded during the campaign that Laxalt release his family’s financial interests. “One problem,” Reid recalled with a chuckle years later. “His sister was a nun. I got killed on that.” After an ill-fated bid for the Las Vegas mayoralty in 1975, Reid’s career was floundering. But O’Callaghan again came to his aid, making Reid chair of the Nevada Gaming Commission at a moment when state officials were trying to root out the mob from Las Vegas’ casinos. It was only then that Reid realized how entrenched the mob still was on the city’s famous Strip. “That was a real eye-opener for me,” he said later, “because I thought I knew the state very well, but I didn’t.” As gaming commissioner he was offered bribes and participated in FBI stings. Near the end of his tenure his wife, Landra Reid, came out of their house one day to find a bomb attached to the family’s station wagon. Landra Reid, who was his closest adviser, survives him, as do his children, Rory, Lana Reid Barringer, Leif, Josh and Key, and 19 grandchildren. Following the 1980 census, Nevada, for the first time in its history, had a large enough population to merit a second House seat, representing the Las Vegas area. Reid won the new district, but after two terms a Senate seat again opened up, thanks to Laxalt’s retirement. Reid again benefited from running in a good Democratic year, in 1986, and this time his bare-knuckled tactics paid off as he handily defeated Laxalt’s handpicked successor, former Rep. Jim Santini. He won a coveted seat on the Appropriations Committee in his first term and spent much of the first part of his career looking out for the needs of Nevada, which was beginning to boom as a global hospitality capital. After another agonizingly close race in 1998 — he won by fewer than 500 votes following a recount — Reid was elected minority whip, the second-ranking Senate Democrat. Though still not a prominent figure in Washington, he was pivotal in wooing Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont to leave the Republican Party in 2001 and caucus with the Democrats, a move that gave Reid’s party control of the narrowly divided Senate. After Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, was defeated in 2004, Reid effectively secured the commitments he needed to take over the caucus by the next day. The Majority Leader A fierce critic of George W. Bush — he called him “a liar” as well as a loser — Reid became a beneficiary of the president’s unpopularity in 2006, when Democrats took back control of the Senate and Reid became majority leader. He played a key role in passing the bank bailout after the stock market collapsed in the fall of 2008. Later that year, when Obama was elected, Democrats made even more gains, giving Reid a filibuster-proof majority. But the Democratic caucus included senators across the ideological spectrum and, with few moderate Republicans left, it took all of Reid’s legislative acumen, doggedness and even shamelessness to win some close votes. On the health law, for example, he offered Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska a generous expansion of Medicaid funding in his state, a deal that critics called “the Cornhusker Kickback.” Reid’s hard-nosed tactics handed Democrats a series of major achievements, but he enraged Republicans and was vulnerable to defeat entering what would be his final reelection campaign in 2010. He overcame his own unpopularity by meddling in the Republican primary, as his allies undermined a potentially strong candidate and helped lift a far-right conservative, Sharron Angle, who was herself as gaffe-prone as Reid. He won the general election comfortably even as the rise of the Tea Party movement propelled Republicans to victory across the country. That same single-mindedness and indifference to criticism, however, embarrassed even some of his allies two years later when he sought to undermine Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy in 2012 by repeatedly, and without evidence, claiming that Romney had gone a decade without paying income tax. Reid was even more contemptuous of former President Donald Trump, calling him “a racist” and “sexual predator” who achieved prominence only because of the fortune he had inherited. Being born into wealth was, of course, alien to Reid. At the end of his career — after great financial and political success and raising five children, one of whom became an elected official in Las Vegas — he relished showing visitors his dusty hometown. But he recalled that it was not until he saw Alex Haley give a talk about his book “Roots” that he stopped feeling ashamed by his impoverished background. “He said be proud of who you are, you can’t escape who you are,” Reid said in his Senate farewell speech, adding that at that point he proudly became “Harry Reid, the guy from Searchlight.”

Harry M Reid, a power in the Senate, dies at 82

Democrats privately conceded Wednesday that they were all but certain to delay consideration of President Joe Biden’s $2.2 trillion social policy bill in the Senate until 2022, missing a self-imposed Christmas deadline as negotiations with a key centrist holdout, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, sputtered.

Private talks this week between Biden and Manchin, who is pushing to curtail the scope of the package and shrink its price tag, have failed to resolve crucial differences, according to White House officials and congressional aides. And leading Democrats have yet to complete work on the complex social safety net, climate and tax package.

Many White House aides have grown frustrated with the pace of the discussions, although still optimistic that the bill will pass next year. Administration officials had expressed confidence earlier this month that an agreement with Manchin was close, but their enthusiasm had faded by Wednesday, after two days of calls between Biden and the senator produced no breakthroughs.

Asked if the legislation could be finished this year, Biden told reporters Wednesday: “I hope so. It’s going to be close.”

Several administration officials said privately this week that they now expect the legislation, which passed the House earlier this year, to slip into next year, perhaps into the spring.

“It’s our long-standing rule not to discuss the specifics of private discussions with lawmakers, but the president and Sen. Manchin have had productive and friendly conversations,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, who denied that Biden was frustrated with the process.

A senior administration official said White House aides continued to push hard to secure a deal on the legislation and predicted that Biden would ultimately find a way to pass the bill — as he did with an economic stimulus measure in March and a bipartisan infrastructure bill this fall.

While final decisions have not yet been made, party leaders have quietly backed away from their Christmas deadline in recent days. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the Senate majority leader, said Wednesday that Democrats “continue working on getting the Senate into a position where we can vote on the president’s ‘Build Back Better’ legislation,” without a mention of the holiday or any timetable for doing so.

With hopes of a quick victory on the social policy bill fading, Democrats were weighing a renewed push to prioritize voting rights legislation, long stalled by Republican opposition, before the end of the year.

“I would like to see ‘Build Back Better’ dealt with as quickly as possible, but if we can’t deal with it right now, it’s far more important that we deal with the voting rights issue,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chair of the Budget Committee.

But the prospect of a delay frustrated liberal Democrats, who had already been wary that centrist Democrats would dash their ambitions for passage of the bill after shepherding through a bipartisan infrastructure measure.

It was a scenario that several Democrats had sought to avoid: that after allowing the infrastructure bill to pass and agreeing to substantially pare down their marquee domestic policy bill to appease Manchin and other centrists, they would come away empty-handed. With Republicans united in opposition to the package, Democrats cannot move forward in the evenly divided Senate without the support of all 50 lawmakers who caucus with them.

“I’m still hopeful that it will pass. I’m not going to have a post-mortem on something that hasn’t died,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said at her weekly news conference. “I think we will have legislation and it will pass. I hope the sooner the better, especially since we had certain deadlines.”

The most notable dispute between Manchin and Biden, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions, remains a proposal to extend an expanded $300 monthly payment to families with children for another year. Manchin voted in March to expand the payments, a signature component of the $1.9 trillion pandemic aid bill that has helped reduce child poverty, and Democrats hoped to expand the payments for another year.

One person briefed on the talks between Biden and Manchin said the senator had proposed outright eliminating the expanded payment, which would jeopardize the support of other liberal Democrats. Other officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose details of private conversations, said that Manchin had raised concerns about exacerbating inflation trends, the lack of a work requirement to qualify for the payments and additional costs should the subsidy be expanded beyond the current one-year timeline.

Manchin grew irritated Wednesday when pressed on whether he supported the expanded credits, offering a profane denial that he opposed the provision and dismissing what he called “bad rumors.”

The final payments of the year were sent to families Wednesday, and administration officials had cautioned that the extension needed to become law before the end of the month to avoid a lapse.

Outside of Manchin’s concerns, Democrats were still scrambling to finalize the legislation and resolve outstanding policy differences, including an unfinished compromise on raising the cap on state and local tax deductions.

Because the package is being muscled through Congress using the fast-track budget reconciliation process, which shields fiscal legislation from a filibuster, it is subject to strict rules governing what can be included. Democrats are still working feverishly to ensure that every provision can pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian. Guidance has yet to be issued on a number of key proposals, including immigration provisions, as Republicans seek to challenge their inclusion under the rules.

But Democrats have focused on Manchin, whose concerns have already prompted them to drop or modify several of the measure’s key components, including jettisoning anti-climate change provisions and dropping a federal paid and family medical leave benefit.

Having pushed for a lower price tag, he also repeatedly raised concerns about how the package would affect inflation and the economy.

“He has made some dramatic changes in this bill and its contents and its total,” Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, told reporters earlier this week. “I’ve told him, ‘Joe, you’ve got your mark on this bill, now close the deal.’ I still feel that way.”

Democrats privately conceded Wednesday that they were all but certain to delay consideration of President Joe Biden’s $2.2 trillion social policy bill in the Senate until 2022, missing a self-imposed Christmas deadline as negotiations with a key centrist holdout, Sen.

Democrats privately conceded Wednesday that they were all but certain to delay consideration of President Joe Biden’s $2.2 trillion social policy bill in the Senate until 2022, missing a self-imposed Christmas deadline as negotiations with a key centrist holdout, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, sputtered. Private talks this week between Biden and Manchin, who is pushing to curtail the scope of the package and shrink its price tag, have failed to resolve crucial differences, according to White House officials and congressional aides. And leading Democrats have yet to complete work on the complex social safety net, climate and tax package. Many White House aides have grown frustrated with the pace of the discussions, although still optimistic that the bill will pass next year. Administration officials had expressed confidence earlier this month that an agreement with Manchin was close, but their enthusiasm had faded by Wednesday, after two days of calls between Biden and the senator produced no breakthroughs. Asked if the legislation could be finished this year, Biden told reporters Wednesday: “I hope so. It’s going to be close.” Several administration officials said privately this week that they now expect the legislation, which passed the House earlier this year, to slip into next year, perhaps into the spring. “It’s our long-standing rule not to discuss the specifics of private discussions with lawmakers, but the president and Sen. Manchin have had productive and friendly conversations,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, who denied that Biden was frustrated with the process. A senior administration official said White House aides continued to push hard to secure a deal on the legislation and predicted that Biden would ultimately find a way to pass the bill — as he did with an economic stimulus measure in March and a bipartisan infrastructure bill this fall. While final decisions have not yet been made, party leaders have quietly backed away from their Christmas deadline in recent days. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the Senate majority leader, said Wednesday that Democrats “continue working on getting the Senate into a position where we can vote on the president’s ‘Build Back Better’ legislation,” without a mention of the holiday or any timetable for doing so. With hopes of a quick victory on the social policy bill fading, Democrats were weighing a renewed push to prioritize voting rights legislation, long stalled by Republican opposition, before the end of the year. “I would like to see ‘Build Back Better’ dealt with as quickly as possible, but if we can’t deal with it right now, it’s far more important that we deal with the voting rights issue,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chair of the Budget Committee. But the prospect of a delay frustrated liberal Democrats, who had already been wary that centrist Democrats would dash their ambitions for passage of the bill after shepherding through a bipartisan infrastructure measure. It was a scenario that several Democrats had sought to avoid: that after allowing the infrastructure bill to pass and agreeing to substantially pare down their marquee domestic policy bill to appease Manchin and other centrists, they would come away empty-handed. With Republicans united in opposition to the package, Democrats cannot move forward in the evenly divided Senate without the support of all 50 lawmakers who caucus with them. “I’m still hopeful that it will pass. I’m not going to have a post-mortem on something that hasn’t died,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said at her weekly news conference. “I think we will have legislation and it will pass. I hope the sooner the better, especially since we had certain deadlines.” The most notable dispute between Manchin and Biden, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions, remains a proposal to extend an expanded $300 monthly payment to families with children for another year. Manchin voted in March to expand the payments, a signature component of the $1.9 trillion pandemic aid bill that has helped reduce child poverty, and Democrats hoped to expand the payments for another year. One person briefed on the talks between Biden and Manchin said the senator had proposed outright eliminating the expanded payment, which would jeopardize the support of other liberal Democrats. Other officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose details of private conversations, said that Manchin had raised concerns about exacerbating inflation trends, the lack of a work requirement to qualify for the payments and additional costs should the subsidy be expanded beyond the current one-year timeline. Manchin grew irritated Wednesday when pressed on whether he supported the expanded credits, offering a profane denial that he opposed the provision and dismissing what he called “bad rumors.” The final payments of the year were sent to families Wednesday, and administration officials had cautioned that the extension needed to become law before the end of the month to avoid a lapse. Outside of Manchin’s concerns, Democrats were still scrambling to finalize the legislation and resolve outstanding policy differences, including an unfinished compromise on raising the cap on state and local tax deductions. Because the package is being muscled through Congress using the fast-track budget reconciliation process, which shields fiscal legislation from a filibuster, it is subject to strict rules governing what can be included. Democrats are still working feverishly to ensure that every provision can pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian. Guidance has yet to be issued on a number of key proposals, including immigration provisions, as Republicans seek to challenge their inclusion under the rules. But Democrats have focused on Manchin, whose concerns have already prompted them to drop or modify several of the measure’s key components, including jettisoning anti-climate change provisions and dropping a federal paid and family medical leave benefit. Having pushed for a lower price tag, he also repeatedly raised concerns about how the package would affect inflation and the economy. “He has made some dramatic changes in this bill and its contents and its total,” Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, told reporters earlier this week. “I’ve told him, ‘Joe, you’ve got your mark on this bill, now close the deal.’ I still feel that way.”

Democrats ready to punt social policy bill to 2022 as Manchin balks

I take no joy in sounding the alarm, but I do so as a proud Democrat who has won three statewide races in a rural, red state — the Democrats are in trouble in rural America, and their struggles there could doom the party in 2022.

The warning signs were already there in 2020 when Democrats fell short in congressional and state races despite electing Joe Biden president. I know because I was on the ballot for U.S. Senate and lost. In the last decade and a half, we’ve seen Senate seats flip red in Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, and more. Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats around the country since 2008. And in this year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, we saw the Democratic vote in rural areas plummet, costing the party one seat and nearly losing us the other. It was even worse for Democrats down ballot, as Democrats lost state legislative, county, and municipal seats.

The core problem is a familiar one — Democrats are out of touch with the needs of the ordinary voter. In 2021, voters watched Congress debate for months the cost of an infrastructure bill while holding a social spending bill hostage. Both measures contain policies that address the challenges Americans across the country face. Yet to anyone outside the Beltway, the infighting and procedural brinkmanship haven’t done a lick to meet their needs at a moment of health challenges, inflation and economic struggles. You had Democrats fighting Democrats, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and desperately needed progress was delayed. It’s no wonder rural voters think Democrats are not focused on helping them.

I was re-elected as Montana’s governor in 2016 at the same time Donald Trump took our state by more than 20 points. It’s never easy for Democrats to get elected in Montana, because Democrats here are running against not only the opponent on the ballot, but also against conservative media’s (and at times our own) typecast of the national Democratic brand: coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.

To overcome these obstacles, Democrats need to show up, listen, and respect voters in rural America by finding common ground instead of talking down to them. Eliminating student loans isn’t a top-of-mind matter for the two-thirds of Americans lacking a college degree. Being told that climate change is the most critical issue our nation faces rings hollow if you’re struggling to make it to the end of the month. And the most insulting thing is being told what your self-interest should be.

Get out of the cities and you will learn we have a libertarian streak, with a healthy distrust of government. We listen when folks talk about opportunity and fairness, not entitlements. We expect government to play a role in our having a fair shot at a better life, not solve all our problems.

We need to frame our policies, not in terms of grand ideological narratives, but around the material concerns of voters. Despite our differences and no matter where we live, we generally all want the same things: a decent job, a safe place to call home, good schools, clean air and water, and the promise of a better life for our kids and grandkids.

For me, that meant talking about Obamacare not as an entitlement, but as a way to save rural hospitals and keep local communities and small businesses afloat. It meant talking about expanding apprenticeships, not just lowering the costs of college. It meant framing public lands as a great equalizer and as a driver for small business. It meant talking about universal pre-K not as an abstract policy goal, but being essential for our children and for keeping parents in the work force. It meant talking about climate change not just as a crisis, but as an opportunity to create good jobs, preserve our outdoor heritage, and as a promise not to leave communities behind.

These lessons apply broadly, not just to swing states. We need to do the hard work of convincing voters that we are fighting for every American, regardless of party or where they live, or it’ll only get worse for us in the 2022 midterms and beyond.

It’s in the void of inaction and failure to solve problems real people face that racially tinged cultural fights, like we saw in Virginia, take hold. My children are in high school and have never heard of critical race theory — nor have their teachers. What voters want to know is that Democrats will fight for racial justice and to improve the lives of rural Americans, no matter the color of their skin. After all, that’s what we’ve always done.

In the parts of America that are completely rural, there are nine infants and toddlers for every day care slot, one in eight lacks health insurance, and for one in four, over half of income goes to rent. High-speed internet has eluded many parts of our country. Voters in my state may have grown cynical about the legislative process, infighting and eye-popping price tags in Washington, but enacting the Build Back Better bill, along with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, gives Democrats something to run on: proof that we have voters’ backs, including those who live in rural America.

It’s time for Democrats to get uncomfortable and go beyond friendly urban and suburban settings to hear directly from folks in small towns who are trying to run a business, pay the bills, and maintain access to health care. They have stories to tell and ideas to share, and we should listen. When then-candidate Barack Obama spent the Fourth of July 2008 in Butte, Mont., he didn’t go there because Butte was suddenly key to winning in November, but showing up there sent a loud and clear message to places like Butte all across our country that he gives a damn about us.

Butte and Scranton may be a long way from each other geographically, but they’re not that far apart in terms of working-class roots, values and attitudes. President Biden can help rural Americans know and believe Democrats are tackling the challenges they face. Democrats need to get off the polling and consultant calls, get into the community and engage voters directly: Do you have a decent job that covers the bills and leaves a little left over? Can you afford your home and pay for health care? Do you feel safe? Do you believe we are doing right for your kids, educationally, environmentally and economically? Do you see a path forward toward a better life for you and your family?

Fighting for every American means that, whether you live in Manhattan, N.Y. or Manhattan, Mont., you have an opportunity to climb the economic ladder and a temporary safety net to catch you if you stumble. Too often the Democratic Party comes off as a buffet line of policies, each prepared for a different group of voters. If we talk about — and work to address — the issues that people discuss around their kitchen table or at the fence line, the issues that fill endless hours of cable television become a hell of a lot less relevant. Our kitchen tables might look and feel different, but we need to learn to talk in a way that makes sense around everyone’s table.

Voters are facing real challenges — and so is our country. They need to know that Democrats are listening, working, and fighting for them. The voters deserve that level of respect and need to know we have their back.

I take no joy in sounding the alarm, but I do so as a proud Democrat who has won three statewide races in a rural, red state — the Democrats are in trouble in rural America, and their struggles there could doom the party in 2022.

I take no joy in sounding the alarm, but I do so as a proud Democrat who has won three statewide races in a rural, red state — the Democrats are in trouble in rural America, and their struggles there could doom the party in 2022. The warning signs were already there in 2020 when Democrats fell short in congressional and state races despite electing Joe Biden president. I know because I was on the ballot for U.S. Senate and lost. In the last decade and a half, we’ve seen Senate seats flip red in Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, and more. Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats around the country since 2008. And in this year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, we saw the Democratic vote in rural areas plummet, costing the party one seat and nearly losing us the other. It was even worse for Democrats down ballot, as Democrats lost state legislative, county, and municipal seats. The core problem is a familiar one — Democrats are out of touch with the needs of the ordinary voter. In 2021, voters watched Congress debate for months the cost of an infrastructure bill while holding a social spending bill hostage. Both measures contain policies that address the challenges Americans across the country face. Yet to anyone outside the Beltway, the infighting and procedural brinkmanship haven’t done a lick to meet their needs at a moment of health challenges, inflation and economic struggles. You had Democrats fighting Democrats, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and desperately needed progress was delayed. It’s no wonder rural voters think Democrats are not focused on helping them. I was re-elected as Montana’s governor in 2016 at the same time Donald Trump took our state by more than 20 points. It’s never easy for Democrats to get elected in Montana, because Democrats here are running against not only the opponent on the ballot, but also against conservative media’s (and at times our own) typecast of the national Democratic brand: coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to. To overcome these obstacles, Democrats need to show up, listen, and respect voters in rural America by finding common ground instead of talking down to them. Eliminating student loans isn’t a top-of-mind matter for the two-thirds of Americans lacking a college degree. Being told that climate change is the most critical issue our nation faces rings hollow if you’re struggling to make it to the end of the month. And the most insulting thing is being told what your self-interest should be. Get out of the cities and you will learn we have a libertarian streak, with a healthy distrust of government. We listen when folks talk about opportunity and fairness, not entitlements. We expect government to play a role in our having a fair shot at a better life, not solve all our problems. We need to frame our policies, not in terms of grand ideological narratives, but around the material concerns of voters. Despite our differences and no matter where we live, we generally all want the same things: a decent job, a safe place to call home, good schools, clean air and water, and the promise of a better life for our kids and grandkids. For me, that meant talking about Obamacare not as an entitlement, but as a way to save rural hospitals and keep local communities and small businesses afloat. It meant talking about expanding apprenticeships, not just lowering the costs of college. It meant framing public lands as a great equalizer and as a driver for small business. It meant talking about universal pre-K not as an abstract policy goal, but being essential for our children and for keeping parents in the work force. It meant talking about climate change not just as a crisis, but as an opportunity to create good jobs, preserve our outdoor heritage, and as a promise not to leave communities behind. These lessons apply broadly, not just to swing states. We need to do the hard work of convincing voters that we are fighting for every American, regardless of party or where they live, or it’ll only get worse for us in the 2022 midterms and beyond. It’s in the void of inaction and failure to solve problems real people face that racially tinged cultural fights, like we saw in Virginia, take hold. My children are in high school and have never heard of critical race theory — nor have their teachers. What voters want to know is that Democrats will fight for racial justice and to improve the lives of rural Americans, no matter the color of their skin. After all, that’s what we’ve always done. In the parts of America that are completely rural, there are nine infants and toddlers for every day care slot, one in eight lacks health insurance, and for one in four, over half of income goes to rent. High-speed internet has eluded many parts of our country. Voters in my state may have grown cynical about the legislative process, infighting and eye-popping price tags in Washington, but enacting the Build Back Better bill, along with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, gives Democrats something to run on: proof that we have voters’ backs, including those who live in rural America. It’s time for Democrats to get uncomfortable and go beyond friendly urban and suburban settings to hear directly from folks in small towns who are trying to run a business, pay the bills, and maintain access to health care. They have stories to tell and ideas to share, and we should listen. When then-candidate Barack Obama spent the Fourth of July 2008 in Butte, Mont., he didn’t go there because Butte was suddenly key to winning in November, but showing up there sent a loud and clear message to places like Butte all across our country that he gives a damn about us. Butte and Scranton may be a long way from each other geographically, but they’re not that far apart in terms of working-class roots, values and attitudes. President Biden can help rural Americans know and believe Democrats are tackling the challenges they face. Democrats need to get off the polling and consultant calls, get into the community and engage voters directly: Do you have a decent job that covers the bills and leaves a little left over? Can you afford your home and pay for health care? Do you feel safe? Do you believe we are doing right for your kids, educationally, environmentally and economically? Do you see a path forward toward a better life for you and your family? Fighting for every American means that, whether you live in Manhattan, N.Y. or Manhattan, Mont., you have an opportunity to climb the economic ladder and a temporary safety net to catch you if you stumble. Too often the Democratic Party comes off as a buffet line of policies, each prepared for a different group of voters. If we talk about — and work to address — the issues that people discuss around their kitchen table or at the fence line, the issues that fill endless hours of cable television become a hell of a lot less relevant. Our kitchen tables might look and feel different, but we need to learn to talk in a way that makes sense around everyone’s table. Voters are facing real challenges — and so is our country. They need to know that Democrats are listening, working, and fighting for them. The voters deserve that level of respect and need to know we have their back.

Democrats are in trouble in rural America. But there’s a way out

On a Wednesday night in September, while President Joe Biden backslapped in the Republican dugout during the annual congressional baseball game, Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat nearby, sober-faced and wagging her finger while speaking into her cellphone, toiling to salvage her party’s top legislative priority as it teetered on the brink of collapse.

On the other end of the line was Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a crucial swing vote on Biden’s sweeping social policy bill, and Pelosi, seated in the VIP section behind the dugout at Nationals Park, was trying to persuade him to embrace $2.1 trillion in spending and climate change provisions she considered essential for the legislation.

In a moment captured by C-SPAN cameras that went viral, Pelosi appeared to grow agitated as Manchin, according to sources apprised of the call, told her that he could not accept more than $1.5 trillion — and was prepared to provide a document clearly laying out his parameters for the package, bench marks that House Democrats had been clamoring to see.

The call reflected how Pelosi’s pivotal role in shepherding Biden’s agenda on Capitol Hill has reached far beyond the House that is her primary responsibility and into the Senate, where she has engaged in quiet and little-noticed talks with key lawmakers who have the power to kill the package or propel it into law.

Her efforts — fraught with challenges and littered with near-death experiences for the bill — finally paid off Friday with House passage of the $2.2 trillion social policy and climate change package.

Along the way, Pelosi, who is known for delivering legislative victories in tough circumstances, was forced repeatedly to pull back from a floor showdown on the bill as she labored to unite the feuding liberal and moderate factions in her caucus. A crucial but less-seen part of her task was sounding out and cajoling a pair of Democratic holdouts in the Senate, Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who were opposed to major elements of Biden’s plan and had the power to upend whatever delicate deal Pelosi was able to strike.

It was only after her call with Manchin at the baseball game that Pelosi discovered that the West Virginian’s demands were contained in a sort of makeshift contract he had delivered to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and the majority leader, in late July. The document, which was signed by both men, had been kept secret — including from her — for months.

“I would have liked to have known that,” Pelosi said Friday, recounting how she felt blindsided. “However, it was what it was.”

Manchin’s insistence on holding down the cost of the package threw a wrench into Pelosi’s plan to quickly advance the monumental social policy bill, sending it instead through a series of tortuous twists and turns until Friday morning, when she finally managed to pass it.

She is still not done, with the Senate now getting a chance to reshape the measure in the hope of eventually sending it back for final House approval and Biden’s signature. Manchin is still demanding major changes, such as the jettisoning of a new four-week paid family and medical leave program that Pelosi has made a top priority.

But in the weeks since their call, Manchin has privately expressed an openness to embracing a costlier plan than the one he initially insisted upon, and the speaker now says she is confident that the measure approved by the House will reemerge from the Senate mostly intact.

“They may want to hone or sharpen this or that, and that’s a negotiation,” Pelosi said of the Senate. “But 90-some percent of that bill is what it is.”

Initial approval of the legislation in the House was a considerable achievement in itself, considering unanimous Republican opposition and the deep Democratic divisions over the package. And it came despite whispers in the corridors of the Capitol that lawmakers no longer feared Pelosi as much as they had in the past, since she is believed to be nearing the end of her tenure.

In the end, as she did with the financial bailout in 2008, the Obama-era stimulus plan in 2009 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010, among others, Pelosi found a way to win when it appeared she could lose. This time, she did so with a bill that contains history-making initiatives for the environment and substantial health care, child care, family leave and educational programs that she and her Democratic colleagues have sought for decades.

Pelosi, 81, acknowledged Friday that it was a legacy piece of legislation, even if she was not willing to entertain questions about her own future.

“We must pass it, and then we have to see it for me to have an almost religious experience of appreciating what it is,” Pelosi said in her Capitol office, not long after the vote to approve the bill, which was delayed until Friday morning by an angry eight-hour stemwinder from Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader. “But it’s a big deal.”

While her main responsibility was wrangling the House, Pelosi devoted considerable time to Manchin and Sinema, both of whom hold the power to scuttle the deal in the evenly divided Senate if they balk.

Pelosi has ties to both. She has bonded with Manchin, who like Pelosi grew up in a political family, over their shared Italian heritage and Catholicism and her work on health and pension benefits for coal miners, represented in her office by a statue of a miner gifted to her by Manchin.

When Pelosi wanted to send a message to Manchin about voting rights this year, she had it delivered on a literal silver platter given to her by Robert C. Byrd, the former Senate leader from West Virginia whom Manchin often cites as a guiding star. The tray, which is warmly inscribed in appreciation for Pelosi’s fundraising work on delivering a Democratic Senate majority in 1987, was a reminder for Manchin of the speaker’s past relationship with his predecessor.

“I thought he should see it,” Pelosi said with a chuckle.

Pelosi knew Sinema as an activist in Arizona even before she was elected to the House, where they developed a mutual respect and rapport. It was warning signs from Sinema in late September that led Pelosi to begin the delicate task of separating the social policy bill from a bipartisan infrastructure measure that had already passed the Senate with Sinema as a main author.

Progressives were adamant that they would only back the public works bill after they were assured that Senate Democrats, notably Manchin and Sinema, were committed to voting for the social policy bill — an assurance that did not, and still does not, exist.

With the deadline for a vote approaching, Pelosi opened a back channel to Sinema through former Rep. Joe Kennedy III, a friend of Sinema’s who entered the House with her in 2013.

He reported back that Sinema was ready to abandon the social spending bill entirely if she did not quickly see the House developing a path forward on the public works measure. In response, Pelosi sent a letter to her colleagues Sept. 26 saying the House would take up the infrastructure bill the next day, a plan that drew vehement opposition from progressives and led to a stalemate for weeks.

As for Manchin, Pelosi intensified her outreach to him following a Sept. 16 video conference call she had with Biden and Schumer. The three Democrats, who have been friends and colleagues for decades, deepened their bond during the talks, ribbing and encouraging each other in their vastly varying styles.

During that particular call, according to people with direct knowledge of it, Biden told the two congressional leaders that he had been encouraged by his discussions with Sinema and Manchin, though they agreed it might be to their benefit to have Pelosi talk to Manchin as well.

“I’m with ya,” Biden told Pelosi and Schumer of their plans.

“Put an F-word in front of that,” Schumer said enthusiastically.

“Now that you’ve resorted to that language, I’m going to thank you, Mr. President,” retorted the speaker, who frowns on profanity.

“Nancy does not allow me to curse,” Schumer responded. “I try to curb my foul mouth in front of her, with some degree of success.”

“Every time I look at Nancy, I think of myself as some altar boy,” said the president.

When she went back to Manchin, he had a reassuring message.

“There is a place we can come together,” he told Pelosi, according to people with knowledge of the conversation. “I feel quite certain. I always want to make a deal.”

As attention now pivots to the Senate, Pelosi said Manchin should embrace the reductions he had already won in the social spending plan rather than pursue additional ones.

“Take pride in what you have already done,” she said she had advised Manchin, then quickly pivoted to the argument she has been making to Democrats who wanted a more generous bill: “It’s still a gigantic number.”

In reaching for such an ambitious measure, Republican critics charge that Pelosi is placing Democrats in political peril — “marching them right off a cliff,” in the words of Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader — as she prepares to leave Congress. Pelosi dismissed the criticism, but refused to address her own plans.

“The first to ask is the last to know,” she warned.

Pelosi credits Biden with the vision and persistence to pursue the social safety net and climate legislation, and he gave her and her colleagues credit of their own when he called Friday to congratulate her after the vote.

He ended the conversation with what has become a routine expression of his regard for Pelosi, according to people with knowledge of the exchange.

“All right, love you,” Biden told her.

“Love you, too,” Pelosi responded.

On a Wednesday night in September, while President Joe Biden backslapped in the Republican dugout during the annual congressional baseball game, Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat nearby, sober-faced and wagging her finger while speaking into her cellphone, toiling to salvage her party’s top legislative priority as it teetered on the brink of collapse.

On a Wednesday night in September, while President Joe Biden backslapped in the Republican dugout during the annual congressional baseball game, Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat nearby, sober-faced and wagging her finger while speaking into her cellphone, toiling to salvage her party’s top legislative priority as it teetered on the brink of collapse. On the other end of the line was Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a crucial swing vote on Biden’s sweeping social policy bill, and Pelosi, seated in the VIP section behind the dugout at Nationals Park, was trying to persuade him to embrace $2.1 trillion in spending and climate change provisions she considered essential for the legislation. In a moment captured by C-SPAN cameras that went viral, Pelosi appeared to grow agitated as Manchin, according to sources apprised of the call, told her that he could not accept more than $1.5 trillion — and was prepared to provide a document clearly laying out his parameters for the package, bench marks that House Democrats had been clamoring to see. The call reflected how Pelosi’s pivotal role in shepherding Biden’s agenda on Capitol Hill has reached far beyond the House that is her primary responsibility and into the Senate, where she has engaged in quiet and little-noticed talks with key lawmakers who have the power to kill the package or propel it into law. Her efforts — fraught with challenges and littered with near-death experiences for the bill — finally paid off Friday with House passage of the $2.2 trillion social policy and climate change package. Along the way, Pelosi, who is known for delivering legislative victories in tough circumstances, was forced repeatedly to pull back from a floor showdown on the bill as she labored to unite the feuding liberal and moderate factions in her caucus. A crucial but less-seen part of her task was sounding out and cajoling a pair of Democratic holdouts in the Senate, Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who were opposed to major elements of Biden’s plan and had the power to upend whatever delicate deal Pelosi was able to strike. It was only after her call with Manchin at the baseball game that Pelosi discovered that the West Virginian’s demands were contained in a sort of makeshift contract he had delivered to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and the majority leader, in late July. The document, which was signed by both men, had been kept secret — including from her — for months. “I would have liked to have known that,” Pelosi said Friday, recounting how she felt blindsided. “However, it was what it was.” Manchin’s insistence on holding down the cost of the package threw a wrench into Pelosi’s plan to quickly advance the monumental social policy bill, sending it instead through a series of tortuous twists and turns until Friday morning, when she finally managed to pass it. She is still not done, with the Senate now getting a chance to reshape the measure in the hope of eventually sending it back for final House approval and Biden’s signature. Manchin is still demanding major changes, such as the jettisoning of a new four-week paid family and medical leave program that Pelosi has made a top priority. But in the weeks since their call, Manchin has privately expressed an openness to embracing a costlier plan than the one he initially insisted upon, and the speaker now says she is confident that the measure approved by the House will reemerge from the Senate mostly intact. “They may want to hone or sharpen this or that, and that’s a negotiation,” Pelosi said of the Senate. “But 90-some percent of that bill is what it is.” Initial approval of the legislation in the House was a considerable achievement in itself, considering unanimous Republican opposition and the deep Democratic divisions over the package. And it came despite whispers in the corridors of the Capitol that lawmakers no longer feared Pelosi as much as they had in the past, since she is believed to be nearing the end of her tenure. In the end, as she did with the financial bailout in 2008, the Obama-era stimulus plan in 2009 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010, among others, Pelosi found a way to win when it appeared she could lose. This time, she did so with a bill that contains history-making initiatives for the environment and substantial health care, child care, family leave and educational programs that she and her Democratic colleagues have sought for decades. Pelosi, 81, acknowledged Friday that it was a legacy piece of legislation, even if she was not willing to entertain questions about her own future. “We must pass it, and then we have to see it for me to have an almost religious experience of appreciating what it is,” Pelosi said in her Capitol office, not long after the vote to approve the bill, which was delayed until Friday morning by an angry eight-hour stemwinder from Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader. “But it’s a big deal.” While her main responsibility was wrangling the House, Pelosi devoted considerable time to Manchin and Sinema, both of whom hold the power to scuttle the deal in the evenly divided Senate if they balk. Pelosi has ties to both. She has bonded with Manchin, who like Pelosi grew up in a political family, over their shared Italian heritage and Catholicism and her work on health and pension benefits for coal miners, represented in her office by a statue of a miner gifted to her by Manchin. When Pelosi wanted to send a message to Manchin about voting rights this year, she had it delivered on a literal silver platter given to her by Robert C. Byrd, the former Senate leader from West Virginia whom Manchin often cites as a guiding star. The tray, which is warmly inscribed in appreciation for Pelosi’s fundraising work on delivering a Democratic Senate majority in 1987, was a reminder for Manchin of the speaker’s past relationship with his predecessor. “I thought he should see it,” Pelosi said with a chuckle. Pelosi knew Sinema as an activist in Arizona even before she was elected to the House, where they developed a mutual respect and rapport. It was warning signs from Sinema in late September that led Pelosi to begin the delicate task of separating the social policy bill from a bipartisan infrastructure measure that had already passed the Senate with Sinema as a main author. Progressives were adamant that they would only back the public works bill after they were assured that Senate Democrats, notably Manchin and Sinema, were committed to voting for the social policy bill — an assurance that did not, and still does not, exist. With the deadline for a vote approaching, Pelosi opened a back channel to Sinema through former Rep. Joe Kennedy III, a friend of Sinema’s who entered the House with her in 2013. He reported back that Sinema was ready to abandon the social spending bill entirely if she did not quickly see the House developing a path forward on the public works measure. In response, Pelosi sent a letter to her colleagues Sept. 26 saying the House would take up the infrastructure bill the next day, a plan that drew vehement opposition from progressives and led to a stalemate for weeks. As for Manchin, Pelosi intensified her outreach to him following a Sept. 16 video conference call she had with Biden and Schumer. The three Democrats, who have been friends and colleagues for decades, deepened their bond during the talks, ribbing and encouraging each other in their vastly varying styles. During that particular call, according to people with direct knowledge of it, Biden told the two congressional leaders that he had been encouraged by his discussions with Sinema and Manchin, though they agreed it might be to their benefit to have Pelosi talk to Manchin as well. “I’m with ya,” Biden told Pelosi and Schumer of their plans. “Put an F-word in front of that,” Schumer said enthusiastically. “Now that you’ve resorted to that language, I’m going to thank you, Mr. President,” retorted the speaker, who frowns on profanity. “Nancy does not allow me to curse,” Schumer responded. “I try to curb my foul mouth in front of her, with some degree of success.” “Every time I look at Nancy, I think of myself as some altar boy,” said the president. When she went back to Manchin, he had a reassuring message. “There is a place we can come together,” he told Pelosi, according to people with knowledge of the conversation. “I feel quite certain. I always want to make a deal.” As attention now pivots to the Senate, Pelosi said Manchin should embrace the reductions he had already won in the social spending plan rather than pursue additional ones. “Take pride in what you have already done,” she said she had advised Manchin, then quickly pivoted to the argument she has been making to Democrats who wanted a more generous bill: “It’s still a gigantic number.” In reaching for such an ambitious measure, Republican critics charge that Pelosi is placing Democrats in political peril — “marching them right off a cliff,” in the words of Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader — as she prepares to leave Congress. Pelosi dismissed the criticism, but refused to address her own plans. “The first to ask is the last to know,” she warned. Pelosi credits Biden with the vision and persistence to pursue the social safety net and climate legislation, and he gave her and her colleagues credit of their own when he called Friday to congratulate her after the vote. He ended the conversation with what has become a routine expression of his regard for Pelosi, according to people with knowledge of the exchange. “All right, love you,” Biden told her. “Love you, too,” Pelosi responded.

In the House and the Senate, Nancy Pelosi Gets Democrats to Play ball

The election results from last week reconfirmed a basic reality about American politics: For either party, holding the White House comes with significant power, but in off-year elections, it is often a burden.

Democrats hoped that this year would be an exception. By trying to focus the electorate on Donald Trump, they sought to rouse the Democratic base. This approach would also avoid making elections a referendum on President Biden and his approval ratings, which have sagged after months of struggles with the Afghanistan exit, Covid, gas prices, inflation and congressional Democrats.

In other words, Democrats hoped that the usual rules of political gravity would not apply. But we should not be surprised that the familiar force endured.

Republicans performed well in races across the country — most notably in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, states that Mr. Biden won by double digits in 2020. Vote counts are still being finalized, but it appears they shifted almost identically toward the Republicans compared with 2017, the last time those governorships were on the ballot — margins of about 11 points. Virginia provides a striking example of how often the presidential party does poorly — the White House party candidate has now lost the gubernatorial race in 11 of the past 12 elections.

Unfortunately for Democrats, political gravity is also likely to act against them in 2022 — and they face real limits on what they can do about it.

There were signs of Democratic decline in all sorts of different places. The suburban-exurban Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is an example. Terry McAuliffe carried it, but his Republican rival in the governor’s race, Glenn Youngkin, campaigned aggressively there on education issues and basically cut the margin compared with 2017 in half. Places like Loudoun are where Democrats made advancements in the Trump years. To have any hope of holding the House next year, the party will have to perform well in such areas.

Turnout in terms of raw votes cast compared with the 2017 gubernatorial race was up all over Virginia, but some of the places where turnout growth was smallest included Democratic urban areas and college towns.

But Republicans had no such trouble: Their turnout was excellent. In New Jersey, the county that saw the biggest growth in total votes compared with 2017 was Ocean, an exurb on the Jersey Shore, which Gov. Phil Murphy’s Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, won by over 35 points.

Democrats have also struggled in rural areas, and the results last week suggest that they have not hit bottom there yet. In the Ninth Congressional District in rural southwestern Virginia, Mr. Youngkin performed even better than Mr. Trump did in 2020.

This combination — even deeper losses in rural areas paired with fallout in more populous areas — would be catastrophic for Democrats, particularly in the competitive Midwest, where Mr. Biden in 2020 helped arrest Democratic decline in many white, rural areas but where it is not hard to imagine Democratic performance continuing to slide.

Like this year, the fundamentals for the 2022 midterms are not in the Democrats’ favor. Midterms often act as an agent of change in the House. The president’s party has lost ground in the House in 37 of the 40 midterms since the Civil War, with an average seat loss of 33 (since World War II, the average is a smaller, though still substantial, 27). Since 1900, the House has flipped party control 11 times, and nine of those changes have come in midterm election years, including the last five (1954, 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018). Given that Republicans need to pick up only five seats next year, they are very well positioned to win the chamber.

It is not entirely unheard-of for the presidential party to net House seats in the midterms. It happened in 1998 and 2002, though those come with significant caveats. In ’98, President Bill Clinton had strong approval in spite of (or perhaps aided by) his impeachment battle with Republicans and presided over a strong economy; Democrats had also had lost a lot of ground in the 1994 midterm (and made only a dent in that new Republican majority in 1996). They gained a modest four seats.

In 2002, Republicans were defending a slim majority, but they benefited from President George W. Bush’s sky-high approval rating following the Sept. 11 attacks and decennial reapportionment and redistricting, which contributed to their eight-seat net gain.

So against this political gravity, is there anything Democrats can do? The passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill as well as the possible passage of the party’s Build Back Better social spending package could help, though there is likely not a significant direct reward — new laws aren’t a magic bullet in campaigning. But a year from now, Democrats could be coming into the election under strong economic conditions and no longer mired in a high-profile intraparty stalemate (the McAuliffe campaign pointed to Democratic infighting as a drag).

Factors like gas prices and the trajectory of Covid may be largely beyond the Democrats’ influence, but it is entirely possible that the country’s mood will brighten by November 2022 — and that could bolster Mr. Biden’s approval rating.

When parties have bucked the midterm history, they’ve sometimes had an unusually good development emerge in their favor. If there is any lesson from last week’s results, it is that the circumstances were ordinary, not extraordinary. If they remain so, the Democratic outlook for next year — as it so often is for the presidential party in a midterm election — could be bleak.

The election results from last week reconfirmed a basic reality about American politics: For either party, holding the White House comes with significant power, but in off-year elections, it is often a burden.

The election results from last week reconfirmed a basic reality about American politics: For either party, holding the White House comes with significant power, but in off-year elections, it is often a burden. Democrats hoped that this year would be an exception. By trying to focus the electorate on Donald Trump, they sought to rouse the Democratic base. This approach would also avoid making elections a referendum on President Biden and his approval ratings, which have sagged after months of struggles with the Afghanistan exit, Covid, gas prices, inflation and congressional Democrats. In other words, Democrats hoped that the usual rules of political gravity would not apply. But we should not be surprised that the familiar force endured. Republicans performed well in races across the country — most notably in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, states that Mr. Biden won by double digits in 2020. Vote counts are still being finalized, but it appears they shifted almost identically toward the Republicans compared with 2017, the last time those governorships were on the ballot — margins of about 11 points. Virginia provides a striking example of how often the presidential party does poorly — the White House party candidate has now lost the gubernatorial race in 11 of the past 12 elections. Unfortunately for Democrats, political gravity is also likely to act against them in 2022 — and they face real limits on what they can do about it. There were signs of Democratic decline in all sorts of different places. The suburban-exurban Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is an example. Terry McAuliffe carried it, but his Republican rival in the governor’s race, Glenn Youngkin, campaigned aggressively there on education issues and basically cut the margin compared with 2017 in half. Places like Loudoun are where Democrats made advancements in the Trump years. To have any hope of holding the House next year, the party will have to perform well in such areas. Turnout in terms of raw votes cast compared with the 2017 gubernatorial race was up all over Virginia, but some of the places where turnout growth was smallest included Democratic urban areas and college towns. But Republicans had no such trouble: Their turnout was excellent. In New Jersey, the county that saw the biggest growth in total votes compared with 2017 was Ocean, an exurb on the Jersey Shore, which Gov. Phil Murphy’s Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, won by over 35 points. Democrats have also struggled in rural areas, and the results last week suggest that they have not hit bottom there yet. In the Ninth Congressional District in rural southwestern Virginia, Mr. Youngkin performed even better than Mr. Trump did in 2020. This combination — even deeper losses in rural areas paired with fallout in more populous areas — would be catastrophic for Democrats, particularly in the competitive Midwest, where Mr. Biden in 2020 helped arrest Democratic decline in many white, rural areas but where it is not hard to imagine Democratic performance continuing to slide. Like this year, the fundamentals for the 2022 midterms are not in the Democrats’ favor. Midterms often act as an agent of change in the House. The president’s party has lost ground in the House in 37 of the 40 midterms since the Civil War, with an average seat loss of 33 (since World War II, the average is a smaller, though still substantial, 27). Since 1900, the House has flipped party control 11 times, and nine of those changes have come in midterm election years, including the last five (1954, 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018). Given that Republicans need to pick up only five seats next year, they are very well positioned to win the chamber. It is not entirely unheard-of for the presidential party to net House seats in the midterms. It happened in 1998 and 2002, though those come with significant caveats. In ’98, President Bill Clinton had strong approval in spite of (or perhaps aided by) his impeachment battle with Republicans and presided over a strong economy; Democrats had also had lost a lot of ground in the 1994 midterm (and made only a dent in that new Republican majority in 1996). They gained a modest four seats. In 2002, Republicans were defending a slim majority, but they benefited from President George W. Bush’s sky-high approval rating following the Sept. 11 attacks and decennial reapportionment and redistricting, which contributed to their eight-seat net gain. So against this political gravity, is there anything Democrats can do? The passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill as well as the possible passage of the party’s Build Back Better social spending package could help, though there is likely not a significant direct reward — new laws aren’t a magic bullet in campaigning. But a year from now, Democrats could be coming into the election under strong economic conditions and no longer mired in a high-profile intraparty stalemate (the McAuliffe campaign pointed to Democratic infighting as a drag). Factors like gas prices and the trajectory of Covid may be largely beyond the Democrats’ influence, but it is entirely possible that the country’s mood will brighten by November 2022 — and that could bolster Mr. Biden’s approval rating. When parties have bucked the midterm history, they’ve sometimes had an unusually good development emerge in their favor. If there is any lesson from last week’s results, it is that the circumstances were ordinary, not extraordinary. If they remain so, the Democratic outlook for next year — as it so often is for the presidential party in a midterm election — could be bleak.

How likely is a Democratic comeback next year?

At the White House, Biden called on lawmakers to pass the legislation.

“I’m asking every House member, member of the House of Representatives, to vote yes on both these bills right now,” the president said.

Spooked by Tuesday’s electoral drubbing, Democrats labored to overcome concerns among moderates about the cost and details of a rapidly evolving, $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate plan and push it through over unified Republican opposition. They also hoped to clear a Senate-passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — the largest investment in the nation’s aging public works in a decade — for Biden’s signature.

Top Democratic officials said they were confident they could complete both measures by day’s end, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and her team continued to haggle with holdouts.

Several moderates were pushing for more information about the cost of the sprawling plan, including a nonpartisan analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper responsible for calculating the fiscal impact of the 2,135-page legislation.

“I think everyone’s waiting for the CBO to do their job,” said Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, speaking to reporters Friday morning as he left Pelosi’s office, where White House officials were also meeting on next steps.

But Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, said the cost estimate would not be ready by the end of the day, and a person familiar with the discussions said a score from the budget office was weeks away from completion.

“We’re working on it,” Hoyer said.

Pelosi spent much of the day Thursday buttonholing lawmakers on the House floor to try to corral support for the social policy bill, which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, a four-week paid family and medical leave program, health care subsidies and a broad array of climate change initiatives. Biden and members of his Cabinet worked the phones to win over Democratic skeptics.

With Republicans united in opposition, Democrats could afford to lose as few as three votes from their side. As Democrats labored to unite their members behind the bill, Republicans sought to wreak procedural havoc on the House floor, forcing a vote to adjourn the chamber that leaders held open for hours to buy time for their negotiations.

While the Senate approved the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in August, the measure has stalled as progressives have repeatedly refused to supply their votes for it until there is agreement on the other bill.

But the election results from Tuesday confirmed the worst fears of Democrats — who are already worried about losing their slim majorities in the midterms next year — about what would happen if they failed to deliver for voters while controlling the White House and both houses of Congress.

“What I heard loud and clear — and I was walking around with candidates all weekend — was that people want us to act,” said Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, where Republicans made surprising gains in races Tuesday. “They want us to get things done for them.”

At the White House, Biden called on lawmakers to pass the legislation. “I’m asking every House member, member of the House of Representatives, to vote yes on both these bills right now,” the president said.

At the White House, Biden called on lawmakers to pass the legislation. “I’m asking every House member, member of the House of Representatives, to vote yes on both these bills right now,” the president said. Spooked by Tuesday’s electoral drubbing, Democrats labored to overcome concerns among moderates about the cost and details of a rapidly evolving, $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate plan and push it through over unified Republican opposition. They also hoped to clear a Senate-passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — the largest investment in the nation’s aging public works in a decade — for Biden’s signature. Top Democratic officials said they were confident they could complete both measures by day’s end, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and her team continued to haggle with holdouts. Several moderates were pushing for more information about the cost of the sprawling plan, including a nonpartisan analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper responsible for calculating the fiscal impact of the 2,135-page legislation. “I think everyone’s waiting for the CBO to do their job,” said Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, speaking to reporters Friday morning as he left Pelosi’s office, where White House officials were also meeting on next steps. But Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, said the cost estimate would not be ready by the end of the day, and a person familiar with the discussions said a score from the budget office was weeks away from completion. “We’re working on it,” Hoyer said. Pelosi spent much of the day Thursday buttonholing lawmakers on the House floor to try to corral support for the social policy bill, which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, a four-week paid family and medical leave program, health care subsidies and a broad array of climate change initiatives. Biden and members of his Cabinet worked the phones to win over Democratic skeptics. With Republicans united in opposition, Democrats could afford to lose as few as three votes from their side. As Democrats labored to unite their members behind the bill, Republicans sought to wreak procedural havoc on the House floor, forcing a vote to adjourn the chamber that leaders held open for hours to buy time for their negotiations. While the Senate approved the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in August, the measure has stalled as progressives have repeatedly refused to supply their votes for it until there is agreement on the other bill. But the election results from Tuesday confirmed the worst fears of Democrats — who are already worried about losing their slim majorities in the midterms next year — about what would happen if they failed to deliver for voters while controlling the White House and both houses of Congress. “What I heard loud and clear — and I was walking around with candidates all weekend — was that people want us to act,” said Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, where Republicans made surprising gains in races Tuesday. “They want us to get things done for them.”

House Democrats push toward votes on infrastructure and social spending

House Democrats are scrambling to line up the votes needed to push through a $1.85 trillion social safety net, climate and tax bill, as moderate Democrats, spooked by Tuesday’s electoral drubbing, have raised concerns about the cost and details of the rapidly evolving plan.

Late Thursday night, Democratic leaders postponed a vote on the measure to Friday, when they also hoped to clear a Senate-passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill for President Joe Biden’s signature. A senior aide who disclosed the update on the condition of anonymity said they were confident they could complete the measures by Friday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California had previously privately told her top deputies that she had hoped to hold a vote on the social policy bill Thursday night, with the vote on the infrastructure measure Friday morning, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

With Republicans united in opposition, Democrats could afford to lose as few as three votes from their side. Among the biggest issues were the cost and economic effects of the social safety net bill.

A few centrists were also balking at supporting the package — which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, a four-week paid family and medical leave program, health care subsidies and a broad array of climate change initiatives — before evaluating the fiscal impact of the latest, hastily assembled 2,135-page version of the legislation.

“There is certainly a lack of trust among some of the moderates,” Rep. Henry Cuellar, a conservative Democrat from South Texas, told reporters. “I want to move the ball forward. But I mean, I still want to know, what are the differences?”

Biden made personal calls Thursday, as did Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, who reached out to at least one Democrat facing a tough reelection.

Yet final sticking points continued to crop up throughout the day. Working to appease Democrats who wanted the bill to grant a pathway to citizenship for millions of people living in the country illegally, leaders included a compromise proposal to instead give them work permits and protection from deportation, a status that would eventually allow the immigrants access to some federal benefits.

But some Democrats in swing districts, worried about their party’s deteriorating political fortunes, resisted allowing them access to any benefits, worried that it might be used by Republicans as an election cudgel.

House Democrats are scrambling to line up the votes needed to push through a $1.85 trillion social safety net, climate and tax bill, as moderate Democrats, spooked by Tuesday’s electoral drubbing, have raised concerns about the cost and details of the rapidly evolving plan.

House Democrats are scrambling to line up the votes needed to push through a $1.85 trillion social safety net, climate and tax bill, as moderate Democrats, spooked by Tuesday’s electoral drubbing, have raised concerns about the cost and details of the rapidly evolving plan. Late Thursday night, Democratic leaders postponed a vote on the measure to Friday, when they also hoped to clear a Senate-passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill for President Joe Biden’s signature. A senior aide who disclosed the update on the condition of anonymity said they were confident they could complete the measures by Friday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California had previously privately told her top deputies that she had hoped to hold a vote on the social policy bill Thursday night, with the vote on the infrastructure measure Friday morning, according to two people briefed on the discussions. With Republicans united in opposition, Democrats could afford to lose as few as three votes from their side. Among the biggest issues were the cost and economic effects of the social safety net bill. A few centrists were also balking at supporting the package — which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, a four-week paid family and medical leave program, health care subsidies and a broad array of climate change initiatives — before evaluating the fiscal impact of the latest, hastily assembled 2,135-page version of the legislation. “There is certainly a lack of trust among some of the moderates,” Rep. Henry Cuellar, a conservative Democrat from South Texas, told reporters. “I want to move the ball forward. But I mean, I still want to know, what are the differences?” Biden made personal calls Thursday, as did Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, who reached out to at least one Democrat facing a tough reelection. Yet final sticking points continued to crop up throughout the day. Working to appease Democrats who wanted the bill to grant a pathway to citizenship for millions of people living in the country illegally, leaders included a compromise proposal to instead give them work permits and protection from deportation, a status that would eventually allow the immigrants access to some federal benefits. But some Democrats in swing districts, worried about their party’s deteriorating political fortunes, resisted allowing them access to any benefits, worried that it might be used by Republicans as an election cudgel.

House Democrats hunt for votes to pass Biden's domestic agenda

Democrats met privately on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as they searched for an elusive compromise on a domestic policy and climate package, pressing to resolve crucial disagreements over health benefits, paid leave, environmental provisions and how to pay for the entire plan.

As Democrats seek to pacify key centrist holdouts balking at central pieces of the bill, party leaders are lobbying rank-and-file lawmakers, particularly liberals, to accept a measure that will be far smaller than an initial $3.5 trillion blueprint that passed Congress earlier this year. House Democrats huddled Tuesday morning to discuss the negotiations at their weekly caucus meeting, while Senate Democrats were expected to continue privately meeting throughout the day on climate and tax provisions.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California told Democrats they were on “the verge of something major,” according to two people familiar with her comments, who disclosed the private remarks on condition of anonymity. She called the legislation “transformative, historic and bigger than anything else.”

Leaving the caucus meeting, Pelosi said “there’s not that much more time — we have to have decisions largely today, a little bit into tomorrow, so we can proceed.” Asked about what was left on the negotiating table, she said, “I think it’s pretty self-evident.”

The caucus concluded shortly before 10:30 a.m. Pelosi and Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, were set to meet Tuesday afternoon as talks continue over the plan, according to an aide.

The White House and congressional leaders hope for a deal on the expansive plan this week, before President Joe Biden leaves Thursday for a trip that includes a United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, where he is expected to call for stronger international action to counter to the toll of climate change. His case could be bolstered by an agreement on a new social policy bill that includes strong new climate programs.

“It changes the lives of the American people,” Biden said of the proposed legislation during an appearance at a transit maintenance facility in Kearny, New Jersey, on Monday, where he promoted the plan’s payments to families with children and child care assistance. “So let’s get this done — let’s move.”

But with Republicans uniformly opposed to the bill, Democrats cannot afford to lose even a single vote in the evenly divided Senate, giving any senator outsized power to sink the plan over a single provision. That has further complicated the effort to muscle the bill through Congress using a special budget process known as reconciliation that shields it from a filibuster.

The emerging compromise could spend around $1.75 trillion over 10 years, though leading Democrats were trying to nudge Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key centrist, closer to $2 trillion. Manchin and other moderates have resisted significant pieces of the plan, including environmental provisions, health care expansions and tax increases designed to pay for the spending.

Manchin, in particular, has balked at multiple climate provisions, in part as a defense of his coal-heavy state. He has effectively jettisoned a proposed $150 billion program that would replace coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind and solar power, and is now pushing to remove or modify a provision that would impose a fee on emissions of methane, commonly produced in coal mining.

He is also facing pressure from his colleagues over his resistance to two key expansions of health care benefits and a new paid leave program. He has so far opposed a push, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, chair of the Budget Committee, to expand Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing benefits, citing the program’s financial instability.

And he has also expressed concerns about a push to cover a Medicaid expansion for the dozen states whose leaders have refused to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act. West Virginia is among the states that expanded Medicaid and pay 10% of the cost, and Manchin has said the proposal would in essence reward states for holding out.

The Senate Finance Committee is readying the details of a billionaires’ tax, an entirely new approach to taxing wealth, and other tax provisions that will help pay for the bill without increasing the corporate or individual tax rates. While House Democrats were expressing concerns about the details of the plan, which is largely being crafted by their Senate counterparts, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a key holdout on the bill, has remained opposed to those rate increases.

Democrats met privately on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as they searched for an elusive compromise on a domestic policy and climate package, pressing to resolve crucial disagreements over health benefits, paid leave, environmental provisions and how to pay for the entire plan.

Democrats met privately on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as they searched for an elusive compromise on a domestic policy and climate package, pressing to resolve crucial disagreements over health benefits, paid leave, environmental provisions and how to pay for the entire plan. As Democrats seek to pacify key centrist holdouts balking at central pieces of the bill, party leaders are lobbying rank-and-file lawmakers, particularly liberals, to accept a measure that will be far smaller than an initial $3.5 trillion blueprint that passed Congress earlier this year. House Democrats huddled Tuesday morning to discuss the negotiations at their weekly caucus meeting, while Senate Democrats were expected to continue privately meeting throughout the day on climate and tax provisions. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California told Democrats they were on “the verge of something major,” according to two people familiar with her comments, who disclosed the private remarks on condition of anonymity. She called the legislation “transformative, historic and bigger than anything else.” Leaving the caucus meeting, Pelosi said “there’s not that much more time — we have to have decisions largely today, a little bit into tomorrow, so we can proceed.” Asked about what was left on the negotiating table, she said, “I think it’s pretty self-evident.” The caucus concluded shortly before 10:30 a.m. Pelosi and Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, were set to meet Tuesday afternoon as talks continue over the plan, according to an aide. The White House and congressional leaders hope for a deal on the expansive plan this week, before President Joe Biden leaves Thursday for a trip that includes a United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, where he is expected to call for stronger international action to counter to the toll of climate change. His case could be bolstered by an agreement on a new social policy bill that includes strong new climate programs. “It changes the lives of the American people,” Biden said of the proposed legislation during an appearance at a transit maintenance facility in Kearny, New Jersey, on Monday, where he promoted the plan’s payments to families with children and child care assistance. “So let’s get this done — let’s move.” But with Republicans uniformly opposed to the bill, Democrats cannot afford to lose even a single vote in the evenly divided Senate, giving any senator outsized power to sink the plan over a single provision. That has further complicated the effort to muscle the bill through Congress using a special budget process known as reconciliation that shields it from a filibuster. The emerging compromise could spend around $1.75 trillion over 10 years, though leading Democrats were trying to nudge Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key centrist, closer to $2 trillion. Manchin and other moderates have resisted significant pieces of the plan, including environmental provisions, health care expansions and tax increases designed to pay for the spending. Manchin, in particular, has balked at multiple climate provisions, in part as a defense of his coal-heavy state. He has effectively jettisoned a proposed $150 billion program that would replace coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind and solar power, and is now pushing to remove or modify a provision that would impose a fee on emissions of methane, commonly produced in coal mining. He is also facing pressure from his colleagues over his resistance to two key expansions of health care benefits and a new paid leave program. He has so far opposed a push, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, chair of the Budget Committee, to expand Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing benefits, citing the program’s financial instability. And he has also expressed concerns about a push to cover a Medicaid expansion for the dozen states whose leaders have refused to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act. West Virginia is among the states that expanded Medicaid and pay 10% of the cost, and Manchin has said the proposal would in essence reward states for holding out. The Senate Finance Committee is readying the details of a billionaires’ tax, an entirely new approach to taxing wealth, and other tax provisions that will help pay for the bill without increasing the corporate or individual tax rates. While House Democrats were expressing concerns about the details of the plan, which is largely being crafted by their Senate counterparts, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a key holdout on the bill, has remained opposed to those rate increases.

Democrats meet to discuss deal on social policy bill

After months of fierce political wrangling, House speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that she expects agreement on a huge social spending package and a vote on a major infrastructure package this week, adding, "We're almost there."

US President Joe Biden had been intent on securing passage of the two packages -- which Democrats see as vital to their political hopes in midterm elections next year -- before he leaves for a climate summit in Glasgow that opens October 31.&nbsp;

Asked on CNN's "State of the Union" whether the agreement on the spending package and votes on infrastructure could come next week, Pelosi replied, "That's the plan."

And on the spending package specifically, which has divided progressive and moderate Democrats, she said: "I think we're pretty much there now... We're almost there. It's just the language of it."

Pelosi's comments came as Biden was to meet at his home in Delaware with Joe Manchin, one of the two Senate Democrats whose resistance to the president's big Build Back Better social program had proved a major stumbling block.&nbsp;

Biden himself had expressed optimism on Thursday during a televised town-hall appearance, saying, "I do think I'll get a deal."

Biden said his feuding Democratic party was "down to four or five issues" but "I think we can get there."

Democrats have razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress. However, internal divisions are preventing passage of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure revamp and the huge separate social spending bill that Biden says will transform finances and fairness for ordinary Americans.

With pressure growing on the party not to come away empty-handed, Biden has stepped up efforts to broker a truce between more conservative members like Manchin and the left-leaning progressive wing.

He originally pushed for $3.5 trillion in spending on the social support bill -- including an array of benefits for students, families and the elderly -- but the latest figure under consideration is about $2 trillion.

Pelosi told CNN on Sunday that "we have 90 percent of the bill agreed to and written, we just have some of the last decisions to be made.&nbsp;

"It is less than was projected to begin with but it is still bigger than anything we have ever done in terms of addressing the needs of American families."

After months of fierce political wrangling, House speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that she expects agreement on a huge social spending package and a vote on a major infrastructure package this week, adding, "We're almost there.

After months of fierce political wrangling, House speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that she expects agreement on a huge social spending package and a vote on a major infrastructure package this week, adding, "We're almost there." US President Joe Biden had been intent on securing passage of the two packages -- which Democrats see as vital to their political hopes in midterm elections next year -- before he leaves for a climate summit in Glasgow that opens October 31. Asked on CNN's "State of the Union" whether the agreement on the spending package and votes on infrastructure could come next week, Pelosi replied, "That's the plan." And on the spending package specifically, which has divided progressive and moderate Democrats, she said: "I think we're pretty much there now... We're almost there. It's just the language of it." Pelosi's comments came as Biden was to meet at his home in Delaware with Joe Manchin, one of the two Senate Democrats whose resistance to the president's big Build Back Better social program had proved a major stumbling block. Biden himself had expressed optimism on Thursday during a televised town-hall appearance, saying, "I do think I'll get a deal." Biden said his feuding Democratic party was "down to four or five issues" but "I think we can get there." Democrats have razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress. However, internal divisions are preventing passage of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure revamp and the huge separate social spending bill that Biden says will transform finances and fairness for ordinary Americans. With pressure growing on the party not to come away empty-handed, Biden has stepped up efforts to broker a truce between more conservative members like Manchin and the left-leaning progressive wing. He originally pushed for $3.5 trillion in spending on the social support bill -- including an array of benefits for students, families and the elderly -- but the latest figure under consideration is about $2 trillion. Pelosi told CNN on Sunday that "we have 90 percent of the bill agreed to and written, we just have some of the last decisions to be made. "It is less than was projected to begin with but it is still bigger than anything we have ever done in terms of addressing the needs of American families."

Pelosi says 'we're almost there' on huge US legislative bills

The quickening pace of Democratic retirements in the House may be the clearest indication yet that the party’s hopes of maintaining its narrow majority are fading amid President Joe Biden’s sagging approval ratings, ongoing legislative struggles and the prospect of redrawn congressional districts that will put some seats out of reach.

In recent days, Reps. John Yarmuth, D-Ky.; David E. Price, D-N.C.; and Mike Doyle, D-Pa., have announced they will not seek reelection. In all, a dozen House Democrats have said they will retire or seek other offices next year, including powerful lawmakers like Yarmuth, chair of the Budget Committee, and members from the most politically competitive districts, such as Reps. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and Ann Kirkpatrick D-Ariz.

In interviews, the three representatives who most recently announced their retirement said personal issues were paramount in their decisions; they have served 72 years in the House between them. But they also cited three political factors: redistricting before the 2022 elections, Donald Trump’s continued power over Republicans and the rising balkanization of the Democratic Party that they said had made governance increasingly difficult and frustrating.

None of the three expressed concern about any particular bloc in their fractious party, which includes a growing progressive wing, an ardent group of moderates and the pro-business “New Democrats.” Rather, they said they were worried that none of the groups was willing to compromise, leaving two vital pieces of Biden’s agenda — a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and an ambitious social policy and climate change measure — in limbo.

“That’s the danger I see for our party — these absolute positions emerging,” Doyle said. “It used to be you fought those fights in caucus, but when the caucus made a majority opinion, you moved forward.”

Price, a former political science professor at Duke University, agreed.

“I have a concern that we will have the ability to pull ourselves together, and not fracture among the caucuses the way the Republicans have,” he said.

Democrats face an uphill battle to retain control of Congress. They cannot afford to lose a single seat in the Senate, but they do not face gerrymandered maps there, and vulnerable Republican seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio make Democratic gains possible.

In the House, Democrats can afford to lose only three or four seats. The party holding the White House almost always loses seats in midterm elections, and with Biden’s approval rating well under 50%, the historical headwinds look strong. While 10 Republicans have said they will not seek reelection, the GOP sees the recent retirement announcements of prominent and long-serving Democrats as an acknowledgment of defeat.

“These Democrats spent decades accumulating power and seniority in Congress. They wouldn’t give up that power if they felt Democrats were going to hold the majority,” said Mike Berg, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Redistricting will make the Democratic road steeper. David Wasserman, who tracks new district maps for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said so far, Democratic fears look somewhat overblown; Republican state legislatures have already gerrymandered their maps so severely that they can only go so much further. Republicans appear more intent on shoring up their vulnerable incumbents than destroying Democratic seats, he said.

In contrast, Democratic legislatures, especially in New York and Illinois, may actually produce more partisan maps than their GOP brethren. In all, Wasserman said, Republicans could net up to five seats from new district lines, possibly enough to win the majority but far fewer than the 10-15 seats some Democrats fear.

Nonetheless, the new maps are pushing Democrats toward retirement. Doyle said he expects his district, which was once dominated by the city of Pittsburgh, to expand into more Trump-friendly counties to allow some of his Democratic voters to shore up the swing district now held by Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa., who is running for the state’s open Senate seat.

He could still win, Doyle said, but he would have a whole new set of constituents, staff to hire, offices to open and hands to shake. After 26 years in the House, retirement was logical.

Republicans toyed with breaking Yarmuth’s Louisville district into three Republican parts, but that idea is meeting resistance, even from the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Price also did not personally see a threat, since the Republican Legislature redrawing North Carolina’s map will likely dump more Democratic voters into his district straddling the Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill to make surrounding districts more Republican.

But as those maps become more partisan, the prospect of polarization grows, Price said. Doyle’s retirement opened the door for a considerably more liberal Democrat, Summer Lee, to jump into the race Tuesday, with the backing of Justice Democrats, which has pushed the Democratic Party to the left. An even more Democratic district in the Research Triangle could elect a Democrat to the left of Price.

As for the right, Price said, the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 “has scarred the House and raised serious questions that I never thought would be raised, about the future of the rule of law, the acceptance of election results, the peaceful transfer of power and the very future of democracy.”

With far-right Republicans such as Reps. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., already calling for Biden’s impeachment, Yarmuth said, “the prospect of serving in the minority is horrifying.”

Still, Yarmuth reserved some of his harshest words for newcomers in his own party. Older members who helped draft the Affordable Care Act; the Dodd-Frank banking regulations in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; and even President Barack Obama’s climate change bill, although it ultimately failed in the Senate, knew how to compromise, he said.

“The people in the House who have been drawing all the lines are people who have not served in a governing majority,” he said. “They all have come since 2010.”

And all of the newly announced retirees warned their colleagues that failure to pass the infrastructure bill and social policy “reconciliation” measure would be politically disastrous for the Democrats.

“We’re not having trouble getting reconciliation done because of Republicans; it’s because of ourselves,” Doyle said. “While people say they don’t like to watch sausage made, they like to eat the sausage in the end.”

The quickening pace of Democratic retirements in the House may be the clearest indication yet that the party’s hopes of maintaining its narrow majority are fading amid President Joe Biden’s sagging approval ratings, ongoing legislative struggles and the prospect of redrawn congressional districts that will put some seats out of reach.

The quickening pace of Democratic retirements in the House may be the clearest indication yet that the party’s hopes of maintaining its narrow majority are fading amid President Joe Biden’s sagging approval ratings, ongoing legislative struggles and the prospect of redrawn congressional districts that will put some seats out of reach. In recent days, Reps. John Yarmuth, D-Ky.; David E. Price, D-N.C.; and Mike Doyle, D-Pa., have announced they will not seek reelection. In all, a dozen House Democrats have said they will retire or seek other offices next year, including powerful lawmakers like Yarmuth, chair of the Budget Committee, and members from the most politically competitive districts, such as Reps. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and Ann Kirkpatrick D-Ariz. In interviews, the three representatives who most recently announced their retirement said personal issues were paramount in their decisions; they have served 72 years in the House between them. But they also cited three political factors: redistricting before the 2022 elections, Donald Trump’s continued power over Republicans and the rising balkanization of the Democratic Party that they said had made governance increasingly difficult and frustrating. None of the three expressed concern about any particular bloc in their fractious party, which includes a growing progressive wing, an ardent group of moderates and the pro-business “New Democrats.” Rather, they said they were worried that none of the groups was willing to compromise, leaving two vital pieces of Biden’s agenda — a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and an ambitious social policy and climate change measure — in limbo. “That’s the danger I see for our party — these absolute positions emerging,” Doyle said. “It used to be you fought those fights in caucus, but when the caucus made a majority opinion, you moved forward.” Price, a former political science professor at Duke University, agreed. “I have a concern that we will have the ability to pull ourselves together, and not fracture among the caucuses the way the Republicans have,” he said. Democrats face an uphill battle to retain control of Congress. They cannot afford to lose a single seat in the Senate, but they do not face gerrymandered maps there, and vulnerable Republican seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio make Democratic gains possible. In the House, Democrats can afford to lose only three or four seats. The party holding the White House almost always loses seats in midterm elections, and with Biden’s approval rating well under 50%, the historical headwinds look strong. While 10 Republicans have said they will not seek reelection, the GOP sees the recent retirement announcements of prominent and long-serving Democrats as an acknowledgment of defeat. “These Democrats spent decades accumulating power and seniority in Congress. They wouldn’t give up that power if they felt Democrats were going to hold the majority,” said Mike Berg, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee. Redistricting will make the Democratic road steeper. David Wasserman, who tracks new district maps for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said so far, Democratic fears look somewhat overblown; Republican state legislatures have already gerrymandered their maps so severely that they can only go so much further. Republicans appear more intent on shoring up their vulnerable incumbents than destroying Democratic seats, he said. In contrast, Democratic legislatures, especially in New York and Illinois, may actually produce more partisan maps than their GOP brethren. In all, Wasserman said, Republicans could net up to five seats from new district lines, possibly enough to win the majority but far fewer than the 10-15 seats some Democrats fear. Nonetheless, the new maps are pushing Democrats toward retirement. Doyle said he expects his district, which was once dominated by the city of Pittsburgh, to expand into more Trump-friendly counties to allow some of his Democratic voters to shore up the swing district now held by Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa., who is running for the state’s open Senate seat. He could still win, Doyle said, but he would have a whole new set of constituents, staff to hire, offices to open and hands to shake. After 26 years in the House, retirement was logical. Republicans toyed with breaking Yarmuth’s Louisville district into three Republican parts, but that idea is meeting resistance, even from the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Price also did not personally see a threat, since the Republican Legislature redrawing North Carolina’s map will likely dump more Democratic voters into his district straddling the Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill to make surrounding districts more Republican. But as those maps become more partisan, the prospect of polarization grows, Price said. Doyle’s retirement opened the door for a considerably more liberal Democrat, Summer Lee, to jump into the race Tuesday, with the backing of Justice Democrats, which has pushed the Democratic Party to the left. An even more Democratic district in the Research Triangle could elect a Democrat to the left of Price. As for the right, Price said, the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 “has scarred the House and raised serious questions that I never thought would be raised, about the future of the rule of law, the acceptance of election results, the peaceful transfer of power and the very future of democracy.” With far-right Republicans such as Reps. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., already calling for Biden’s impeachment, Yarmuth said, “the prospect of serving in the minority is horrifying.” Still, Yarmuth reserved some of his harshest words for newcomers in his own party. Older members who helped draft the Affordable Care Act; the Dodd-Frank banking regulations in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; and even President Barack Obama’s climate change bill, although it ultimately failed in the Senate, knew how to compromise, he said. “The people in the House who have been drawing all the lines are people who have not served in a governing majority,” he said. “They all have come since 2010.” And all of the newly announced retirees warned their colleagues that failure to pass the infrastructure bill and social policy “reconciliation” measure would be politically disastrous for the Democrats. “We’re not having trouble getting reconciliation done because of Republicans; it’s because of ourselves,” Doyle said. “While people say they don’t like to watch sausage made, they like to eat the sausage in the end.”

House Democratic retirements pile up as party fears losing majority

Democrats prepared legislation Wednesday to avert a government shutdown this week, but they were desperately trying to salvage President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda as conservative-leaning holdouts dug in against an ambitious $3.5 trillion social safety net and climate bill that carries many of the party’s top priorities.

Congressional leaders moved to address the most immediate threat, working to complete a bill to prevent a government funding lapse at midnight Thursday. Yet after days of intensive negotiations to bridge bitter differences in their party over Biden’s two biggest legislative priorities, the president and top Democrats appeared as far as ever from an agreement on their marquee social policy package, which the White House calls the Build Back Better plan.

That, in turn, was imperiling a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that was scheduled for a House vote Thursday.

The fate of the two measures could define the success of Biden’s presidency, and the intense negotiations surrounding them have posed a test of his skills as a deal maker, which he highlighted as a calling card during his campaign for the White House. But after days of personal meetings with lawmakers in the Oval Office and phone calls to key players, Biden remained far short of a deal.

Dramatizing the challenge, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a leading holdout on the social policy bill, issued a lengthy and strongly worded statement Wednesday evening reiterating his opposition to the proposal as currently constituted, saying it amounted to “fiscal insanity.”

“While I am hopeful that common ground can be found that would result in another historic investment in our nation, I cannot — and will not — support trillions in spending or an all-or-nothing approach that ignores the brutal fiscal reality our nation faces,” Manchin wrote, denouncing an approach that he said would “vengefully tax for the sake of wishful spending.”

The statement was the polar opposite of what Biden and top Democrats had hoped to extract from Manchin and other centrist critics of the bill by week’s end — a firm public commitment to eventually vote for the social policy measure, in order to placate liberals who want to ensure its enactment.

Instead, it further enraged progressives who were already promising to oppose the infrastructure bill until Congress acted on the larger social policy plan, which Democrats plan to push through using a fast-track process known as budget reconciliation to shield it from a filibuster. They have been pressing to push off the infrastructure vote until after votes on the reconciliation bill — or, at the very least, after the centrist holdouts provided a firm sense of what they would accept in that package.

“I assume he’s saying that the president is insane, because this is the president’s agenda,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said of Manchin. “Look, this is why we’re not voting for that bipartisan bill until we get agreement on the reconciliation bill. It’s clear we’ve got a ways to go.

“I tell you, after that statement, we probably have even more people willing to vote ‘no’ on the bipartisan bill,” she added.

The impasse left unclear the fate of the infrastructure measure. While a handful of centrist Republicans plan to support it, GOP leaders are urging their members to oppose it, leaving Democrats who hold a slim majority short of votes to pass the bill if progressives revolt.

“The plan is to bring the bill to the floor,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters, returning to Capitol Hill after huddling at the White House with Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader. Asked whether she was concerned about the votes, she added, “One hour at a time.”

She spoke shortly after the House passed legislation lifting the statutory limit on federal borrowing until Dec. 16, 2022, an effort to avert a catastrophic federal debt default next month when the Treasury Department says it will breach the current cap.

Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic effort to pair the increase with a spending bill to keep the government funded and are likely to oppose the House-passed bill, which was approved on a nearly party-line vote of 219-212 on Wednesday.

But even as the debt ceiling remained unresolved, Senate leaders scheduled a series of votes for Thursday morning on legislation that would keep the government open through early December and provide crucial aid for disaster relief efforts and Afghan refugees. The House is expected to take up the legislation soon afterward to avoid a shutdown Thursday night.

But much of the urgency Wednesday was focused on salvaging the president’s agenda, after Biden and his aides cleared his schedule Wednesday in an attempt to broker a deal among Democrats.

Some Democrats have complained this week that the president has not engaged in talks to their satisfaction. He welcomed groups of progressives and moderates to the White House last week, for example, but met with each separately, as opposed to holding a group negotiating session.

And efforts by Biden and his team to pressure Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another Democratic holdout on the reconciliation bill, appear to have fallen flat. Officials have been working for days to persuade the pair to specify how much they would be willing to spend on the package, calculating that such a commitment would allay the worries of progressives now refusing to support the infrastructure bill.

“Joe Biden is the only president in American history to have passed a relief package of the significance of the American Rescue Plan with zero margin for error in the Senate and three votes to spare in the House,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for the White House, referring to the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package that became law in March. “He knows how to make his case, he knows how to count votes, and he knows how to deliver for the American middle class.”

Both Sinema and Manchin visited the White House on Tuesday, but after their meetings, neither they nor White House officials would enumerate the contours of a bill they could support. Top White House officials also trekked to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to huddle privately with Sinema for more than two hours.

“The president felt it was constructive, felt they moved the ball forward, felt there was an agreement, that we’re at a pivotal moment,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters Tuesday, characterizing the meetings. “It’s important to continue to finalize the path forward to get the job done for the American people.”

Biden held conversations with various lawmakers throughout the day Wednesday and planned to continue them Thursday, White House officials said.

Privately, administration officials said Biden was continuing to take an encouraging role with Manchin and Sinema, and not demanding they agree to anything immediately. Both senators have yet to publicly do so, even as liberal Democrats continue to publicly fume over the reticence.

In his statement Wednesday, Manchin said he wanted to set income thresholds for many of the social program expansions Democrats have proposed. He suggested that he would be open to undoing some components of the 2017 tax cut.

Moderate House Democrats, who helped secure a commitment for a vote this week on the infrastructure bill, warned that a failed vote would worsen the already deep mistrust between the two factions of the party.

“If the vote were to fail tomorrow or be delayed, there would be a significant breach of trust that would slow the momentum in moving forward on delivering the Biden agenda,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, one of the moderates who sought to decouple the two plans.

Even as they labored to work out philosophical differences in their party on the bill, Democrats suffered yet another setback Wednesday when the Senate’s top rules enforcer rejected a second proposal to include in the reconciliation bill a path to legal status for about 8 million immigrants living in the country illegally.

In a memo obtained by The New York Times, Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, wrote that the policy change “vastly outweighs its budgetary impact,” effectively disqualifying it from inclusion in a measure whose contents must have a direct impact on the federal budget.

In their latest effort, Democrats had proposed moving up the date for a process known as immigration registry, which allows otherwise law-abiding immigrants who have been in the United States continuously since a certain date to adjust their status and gain a pathway to citizenship. The current date, established in 1986, is set at Jan. 1, 1972. Democrats had sought to change that date to Jan. 1, 2010.

Last week, MacDonough rejected Democrats’ initial proposal to grant legal status to several categories of people in the country illegally, including those brought to the United States as children, known as Dreamers; immigrants who were granted Temporary Protected Status for humanitarian reasons; people working in the country under nonimmigrant visas; close to 1 million farmworkers; and millions more who are deemed “essential workers.”

She said those changes to immigration law could not be included, under the Senate rules, in the reconciliation package because they represented a “tremendous and enduring policy change that dwarfs its budgetary impact.”

Democrats said they would continue to look for alternative strategies to aid immigrants through the reconciliation process.

Democrats prepared legislation Wednesday to avert a government shutdown this week, but they were desperately trying to salvage President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda as conservative-leaning holdouts dug in against an ambitious $3.

Democrats prepared legislation Wednesday to avert a government shutdown this week, but they were desperately trying to salvage President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda as conservative-leaning holdouts dug in against an ambitious $3.5 trillion social safety net and climate bill that carries many of the party’s top priorities. Congressional leaders moved to address the most immediate threat, working to complete a bill to prevent a government funding lapse at midnight Thursday. Yet after days of intensive negotiations to bridge bitter differences in their party over Biden’s two biggest legislative priorities, the president and top Democrats appeared as far as ever from an agreement on their marquee social policy package, which the White House calls the Build Back Better plan. That, in turn, was imperiling a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that was scheduled for a House vote Thursday. The fate of the two measures could define the success of Biden’s presidency, and the intense negotiations surrounding them have posed a test of his skills as a deal maker, which he highlighted as a calling card during his campaign for the White House. But after days of personal meetings with lawmakers in the Oval Office and phone calls to key players, Biden remained far short of a deal. Dramatizing the challenge, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a leading holdout on the social policy bill, issued a lengthy and strongly worded statement Wednesday evening reiterating his opposition to the proposal as currently constituted, saying it amounted to “fiscal insanity.” “While I am hopeful that common ground can be found that would result in another historic investment in our nation, I cannot — and will not — support trillions in spending or an all-or-nothing approach that ignores the brutal fiscal reality our nation faces,” Manchin wrote, denouncing an approach that he said would “vengefully tax for the sake of wishful spending.” The statement was the polar opposite of what Biden and top Democrats had hoped to extract from Manchin and other centrist critics of the bill by week’s end — a firm public commitment to eventually vote for the social policy measure, in order to placate liberals who want to ensure its enactment. Instead, it further enraged progressives who were already promising to oppose the infrastructure bill until Congress acted on the larger social policy plan, which Democrats plan to push through using a fast-track process known as budget reconciliation to shield it from a filibuster. They have been pressing to push off the infrastructure vote until after votes on the reconciliation bill — or, at the very least, after the centrist holdouts provided a firm sense of what they would accept in that package. “I assume he’s saying that the president is insane, because this is the president’s agenda,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said of Manchin. “Look, this is why we’re not voting for that bipartisan bill until we get agreement on the reconciliation bill. It’s clear we’ve got a ways to go. “I tell you, after that statement, we probably have even more people willing to vote ‘no’ on the bipartisan bill,” she added. The impasse left unclear the fate of the infrastructure measure. While a handful of centrist Republicans plan to support it, GOP leaders are urging their members to oppose it, leaving Democrats who hold a slim majority short of votes to pass the bill if progressives revolt. “The plan is to bring the bill to the floor,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters, returning to Capitol Hill after huddling at the White House with Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader. Asked whether she was concerned about the votes, she added, “One hour at a time.” She spoke shortly after the House passed legislation lifting the statutory limit on federal borrowing until Dec. 16, 2022, an effort to avert a catastrophic federal debt default next month when the Treasury Department says it will breach the current cap. Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic effort to pair the increase with a spending bill to keep the government funded and are likely to oppose the House-passed bill, which was approved on a nearly party-line vote of 219-212 on Wednesday. But even as the debt ceiling remained unresolved, Senate leaders scheduled a series of votes for Thursday morning on legislation that would keep the government open through early December and provide crucial aid for disaster relief efforts and Afghan refugees. The House is expected to take up the legislation soon afterward to avoid a shutdown Thursday night. But much of the urgency Wednesday was focused on salvaging the president’s agenda, after Biden and his aides cleared his schedule Wednesday in an attempt to broker a deal among Democrats. Some Democrats have complained this week that the president has not engaged in talks to their satisfaction. He welcomed groups of progressives and moderates to the White House last week, for example, but met with each separately, as opposed to holding a group negotiating session. And efforts by Biden and his team to pressure Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another Democratic holdout on the reconciliation bill, appear to have fallen flat. Officials have been working for days to persuade the pair to specify how much they would be willing to spend on the package, calculating that such a commitment would allay the worries of progressives now refusing to support the infrastructure bill. “Joe Biden is the only president in American history to have passed a relief package of the significance of the American Rescue Plan with zero margin for error in the Senate and three votes to spare in the House,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for the White House, referring to the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package that became law in March. “He knows how to make his case, he knows how to count votes, and he knows how to deliver for the American middle class.” Both Sinema and Manchin visited the White House on Tuesday, but after their meetings, neither they nor White House officials would enumerate the contours of a bill they could support. Top White House officials also trekked to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to huddle privately with Sinema for more than two hours. “The president felt it was constructive, felt they moved the ball forward, felt there was an agreement, that we’re at a pivotal moment,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters Tuesday, characterizing the meetings. “It’s important to continue to finalize the path forward to get the job done for the American people.” Biden held conversations with various lawmakers throughout the day Wednesday and planned to continue them Thursday, White House officials said. Privately, administration officials said Biden was continuing to take an encouraging role with Manchin and Sinema, and not demanding they agree to anything immediately. Both senators have yet to publicly do so, even as liberal Democrats continue to publicly fume over the reticence. In his statement Wednesday, Manchin said he wanted to set income thresholds for many of the social program expansions Democrats have proposed. He suggested that he would be open to undoing some components of the 2017 tax cut. Moderate House Democrats, who helped secure a commitment for a vote this week on the infrastructure bill, warned that a failed vote would worsen the already deep mistrust between the two factions of the party. “If the vote were to fail tomorrow or be delayed, there would be a significant breach of trust that would slow the momentum in moving forward on delivering the Biden agenda,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, one of the moderates who sought to decouple the two plans. Even as they labored to work out philosophical differences in their party on the bill, Democrats suffered yet another setback Wednesday when the Senate’s top rules enforcer rejected a second proposal to include in the reconciliation bill a path to legal status for about 8 million immigrants living in the country illegally. In a memo obtained by The New York Times, Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, wrote that the policy change “vastly outweighs its budgetary impact,” effectively disqualifying it from inclusion in a measure whose contents must have a direct impact on the federal budget. In their latest effort, Democrats had proposed moving up the date for a process known as immigration registry, which allows otherwise law-abiding immigrants who have been in the United States continuously since a certain date to adjust their status and gain a pathway to citizenship. The current date, established in 1986, is set at Jan. 1, 1972. Democrats had sought to change that date to Jan. 1, 2010. Last week, MacDonough rejected Democrats’ initial proposal to grant legal status to several categories of people in the country illegally, including those brought to the United States as children, known as Dreamers; immigrants who were granted Temporary Protected Status for humanitarian reasons; people working in the country under nonimmigrant visas; close to 1 million farmworkers; and millions more who are deemed “essential workers.” She said those changes to immigration law could not be included, under the Senate rules, in the reconciliation package because they represented a “tremendous and enduring policy change that dwarfs its budgetary impact.” Democrats said they would continue to look for alternative strategies to aid immigrants through the reconciliation process.

Democrats move to avert shutdown, but divisions imperil Biden's agenda

As Democratic leaders struggle to unite their caucus behind a sprawling domestic policy package, it is increasingly clear the $3.5 trillion in spending and tax increases will have to be pared back, possibly by a lot, to make it to President Joe Biden’s desk.

That will involve difficult choices for a party fractured by mistrust and competing priorities. But in a package that is intended to shape every facet of American life, including public education, health care and the environment, there is room for agreement, even in a thinly divided Congress.

Here are three possible scenarios for how to structure a final deal.

A slightly scaled-back plan that uses budget tricks to hold down the cost.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chair of the Senate Budget Committee, initially urged his colleagues to embrace spending as much as $6 trillion over 10 years as they began drafting the bill.

To narrow the scope to its current price tag of $3.5 trillion over 10 years, aides said, Sanders and his colleagues employed budget gimmicks such as setting earlier end dates on programs or narrowing their proposed size to lower their cost.

In essence, rather than sacrificing entire programs, Democrats opted to shave down the amount of money devoted to some of them. It is a tactic they could use again to further scale back the package.

Democrats have said they want to extend the refundable child tax credit, which was expanded as part of the $1.9 trillion pandemic aid bill enacted in March and now provides benefits to more than 93% of children — 69 million — by sending monthly checks of up to $300 per child to families. They could lower the overall cost of the package by extending it until 2024 instead of 2025.

Similarly, a proposed expansion of Medicare benefits to cover dental, vision and hearing provisions could be phased in more slowly, reducing its cost in the bill’s official 10-year time frame.

House Democrats have proposed giving seniors access to vision benefits immediately, hearing benefits in 2023 and a dental program in 2028. Some top Senate Democrats say they want to see the dental benefit established sooner. Although rolling it out slower would be cheaper, Democrats would most likely fail to reap an immediate political benefit.

A lowest-common-denominator $900 billion package that extends existing health and child care benefits.

The easiest fallback for Democrats might be to extend the generous tax credits and other benefits created for a single year in the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief law, known as the American Rescue Plan. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, that skinny option would total $900 billion, still more than President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan, which, when it passed, was considered huge.

The expansion of the child tax credit has already been hailed as a sea change in anti-poverty policy. Right now, the House is planning to extend it through 2025 at a cost to the Treasury of around $500 billion.

The law also greatly expanded subsidies for the purchase of health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and extended those subsidies further into the middle class through 2022. Extending them for 10 years would cost $210 billion.

For workers without children, the pandemic relief law raised the maximum earned-income tax credit, which supplements the income of the working poor, from about $540 to about $1,500 and raised the income cap to qualify from about $16,000 to about $21,000, while letting adults as young as 19 access the program for the first time. Extending that would cost $135 billion. Another popular but temporary provision — a much larger child and dependent care tax credit — could be extended by a decade for $95 billion.

Politically, this skinny option should not be a heavy lift, since the House and Senate have already passed both programs. Extending the child tax credit out a full decade would push the price tag to $1.5 trillion.

The cost of such a plan could be covered by proposals drafted by the House Ways and Means Committee to raise taxes on the wealthy and increase the corporate income tax rate.

A middle-ground $1.5 trillion bill that invests huge resources in programs to combat climate change.

Progressive Democrats have indicated that they will not vote for the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that has already passed the Senate and would fund new roads, bridges and tunnels without ensuring passage of the climate change and social welfare bill, which would push the country’s fleet of cars, trucks and buses more toward electric power, supported by electric utilities fortified to handle all those vehicles and fueled by solar, wind and other renewable sources. To pass the former without the latter could actually make global warming worse, they argue.

To answer those concerns, Democrats could include the social welfare components of the lowest-common-denominator option — extending the temporary benefits of the American Rescue Plan — while going big on climate change. Those climate provisions would cost $585 billion over 10 years, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

They would push utilities away from coal and natural gas-fired power plants with a $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, fund renewable-energy deployment with tax credits worth more than $100 billion and offer $42 billion worth of tax credits for the purchase of electric cars, trucks and buses, while also pumping billions into home and commercial energy efficiency.

Those efforts, with a full, 10-year extension of the child credit, would push the total to $2.1 trillion.

Adding the remainder of the international corporate and business tax changes drafted by the House Ways and Means Committee to the higher corporate tax rate and increased taxes on the rich would just about pay for this option.

As Democratic leaders struggle to unite their caucus behind a sprawling domestic policy package, it is increasingly clear the $3.5 trillion in spending and tax increases will have to be pared back, possibly by a lot, to make it to President Joe Biden’s desk.

As Democratic leaders struggle to unite their caucus behind a sprawling domestic policy package, it is increasingly clear the $3.5 trillion in spending and tax increases will have to be pared back, possibly by a lot, to make it to President Joe Biden’s desk. That will involve difficult choices for a party fractured by mistrust and competing priorities. But in a package that is intended to shape every facet of American life, including public education, health care and the environment, there is room for agreement, even in a thinly divided Congress. Here are three possible scenarios for how to structure a final deal. A slightly scaled-back plan that uses budget tricks to hold down the cost. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chair of the Senate Budget Committee, initially urged his colleagues to embrace spending as much as $6 trillion over 10 years as they began drafting the bill. To narrow the scope to its current price tag of $3.5 trillion over 10 years, aides said, Sanders and his colleagues employed budget gimmicks such as setting earlier end dates on programs or narrowing their proposed size to lower their cost. In essence, rather than sacrificing entire programs, Democrats opted to shave down the amount of money devoted to some of them. It is a tactic they could use again to further scale back the package. Democrats have said they want to extend the refundable child tax credit, which was expanded as part of the $1.9 trillion pandemic aid bill enacted in March and now provides benefits to more than 93% of children — 69 million — by sending monthly checks of up to $300 per child to families. They could lower the overall cost of the package by extending it until 2024 instead of 2025. Similarly, a proposed expansion of Medicare benefits to cover dental, vision and hearing provisions could be phased in more slowly, reducing its cost in the bill’s official 10-year time frame. House Democrats have proposed giving seniors access to vision benefits immediately, hearing benefits in 2023 and a dental program in 2028. Some top Senate Democrats say they want to see the dental benefit established sooner. Although rolling it out slower would be cheaper, Democrats would most likely fail to reap an immediate political benefit. A lowest-common-denominator $900 billion package that extends existing health and child care benefits. The easiest fallback for Democrats might be to extend the generous tax credits and other benefits created for a single year in the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief law, known as the American Rescue Plan. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, that skinny option would total $900 billion, still more than President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan, which, when it passed, was considered huge. The expansion of the child tax credit has already been hailed as a sea change in anti-poverty policy. Right now, the House is planning to extend it through 2025 at a cost to the Treasury of around $500 billion. The law also greatly expanded subsidies for the purchase of health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and extended those subsidies further into the middle class through 2022. Extending them for 10 years would cost $210 billion. For workers without children, the pandemic relief law raised the maximum earned-income tax credit, which supplements the income of the working poor, from about $540 to about $1,500 and raised the income cap to qualify from about $16,000 to about $21,000, while letting adults as young as 19 access the program for the first time. Extending that would cost $135 billion. Another popular but temporary provision — a much larger child and dependent care tax credit — could be extended by a decade for $95 billion. Politically, this skinny option should not be a heavy lift, since the House and Senate have already passed both programs. Extending the child tax credit out a full decade would push the price tag to $1.5 trillion. The cost of such a plan could be covered by proposals drafted by the House Ways and Means Committee to raise taxes on the wealthy and increase the corporate income tax rate. A middle-ground $1.5 trillion bill that invests huge resources in programs to combat climate change. Progressive Democrats have indicated that they will not vote for the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that has already passed the Senate and would fund new roads, bridges and tunnels without ensuring passage of the climate change and social welfare bill, which would push the country’s fleet of cars, trucks and buses more toward electric power, supported by electric utilities fortified to handle all those vehicles and fueled by solar, wind and other renewable sources. To pass the former without the latter could actually make global warming worse, they argue. To answer those concerns, Democrats could include the social welfare components of the lowest-common-denominator option — extending the temporary benefits of the American Rescue Plan — while going big on climate change. Those climate provisions would cost $585 billion over 10 years, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. They would push utilities away from coal and natural gas-fired power plants with a $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, fund renewable-energy deployment with tax credits worth more than $100 billion and offer $42 billion worth of tax credits for the purchase of electric cars, trucks and buses, while also pumping billions into home and commercial energy efficiency. Those efforts, with a full, 10-year extension of the child credit, would push the total to $2.1 trillion. Adding the remainder of the international corporate and business tax changes drafted by the House Ways and Means Committee to the higher corporate tax rate and increased taxes on the rich would just about pay for this option.

How Democrats could shrink their $3.5 trillion budget bill

US lawmakers on Thursday gave a go-ahead to USD 1 billion funding to resupply Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system. The funding was passed separately after provision for it was removed from another bill that addressed a possible government shutdown.

The funding was passed by House of Representatives by a comfortable 420-9

"Passage of this bill reflects the great unity in Congress... for Israel's security," Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House Democrats, said in a speech on the chamber floor.&nbsp;

"Assistance to Israel is vital, because Israel's security is an imperative for America's security."&nbsp;

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-huddles-with-democrats-as-divisions-threaten-his-agenda-415220">Biden huddles with Democrats as divisions threaten his agenda</a>

Iron Dome missile defense system has till now destroyed thousands of short-range rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza before they struck populated areas of Israel. The system was launched a decade ago and has been backed by the US.

Provision for fresh funding was initially removed from the legislation addressing government shutdown after section of Democratic Party lawmakers threatened to oppose the legislation unless Iron Dome funding was removed from the wording

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/harvard-poll-reveals-donald-trump-has-higher-positive-rating-than-biden-415194">Harvard poll reveals Donald Trump has higher positive rating than Biden</a>

This elicited disapproving remarks from several lawmakers from both parties.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy termed it a Democratic capitulation to "the anti-Semitic influence of their radical members."

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-to-crack-down-on-potent-class-of-greenhouse-gases-415169">US to crack down on potent class of greenhouse gases</a>

Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, tweeted he was "incredulous" that colleagues would object to defending "one of our most important allies and only Jewish nation in the world" from Hamas rockets.

Israel's Prime Minister Naftali Bennett thanked both parties for their commitment to the country's security and the American people for their "steadfast friendship."

(With inputs from agencies)

US lawmakers on Thursday gave a go-ahead to USD 1 billion funding to resupply Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system. The funding was passed separately after provision for it was removed from another bill that addressed a possible government shutdown.

US lawmakers on Thursday gave a go-ahead to USD 1 billion funding to resupply Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system. The funding was passed separately after provision for it was removed from another bill that addressed a possible government shutdown. The funding was passed by House of Representatives by a comfortable 420-9 "Passage of this bill reflects the great unity in Congress... for Israel's security," Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House Democrats, said in a speech on the chamber floor. "Assistance to Israel is vital, because Israel's security is an imperative for America's security." Also Read | Biden huddles with Democrats as divisions threaten his agenda Iron Dome missile defense system has till now destroyed thousands of short-range rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza before they struck populated areas of Israel. The system was launched a decade ago and has been backed by the US. Provision for fresh funding was initially removed from the legislation addressing government shutdown after section of Democratic Party lawmakers threatened to oppose the legislation unless Iron Dome funding was removed from the wording Also Read | Harvard poll reveals Donald Trump has higher positive rating than Biden This elicited disapproving remarks from several lawmakers from both parties. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy termed it a Democratic capitulation to "the anti-Semitic influence of their radical members." Also Read | US to crack down on potent class of greenhouse gases Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, tweeted he was "incredulous" that colleagues would object to defending "one of our most important allies and only Jewish nation in the world" from Hamas rockets. Israel's Prime Minister Naftali Bennett thanked both parties for their commitment to the country's security and the American people for their "steadfast friendship." (With inputs from agencies)

US House greenlights $1 billion for Israel's Iron Dome

House Democratic leaders on Tuesday introduced a much-anticipated package of proposed new limits on executive power, launching a post-Trump push to strengthen checks on the presidency that they hope will compare to the overhauls that followed the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War.

Democratic lawmakers have been negotiating with the Biden White House to refine their broad set of proposals, which amount to a point-by-point rebuke of the ways that President Donald Trump flouted norms.

The legislation, called the Protecting Our Democracy Act, would make it harder for presidents to take a series of actions, including offering or bestowing pardons in situations that raise suspicion of corruption; refusing to respond to oversight subpoenas; spending or secretly freezing funds contrary to congressional appropriations; firing inspectors general or retaliating against whistleblowers; and taking “emoluments” or payments while in office, including from commercial transactions.

At a news conference Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said executive power had been gradually growing for years but that threats to the system of separation of powers seriously “picked up steam” during the Trump administration. She portrayed the bill as an “inoculation” against future abuses of presidential authority.

Pelosi had directed Democrats to compile various bills containing ideas for curbs into the package, which is chiefly sponsored by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

The two appeared at an event with lawmakers who chair several committees that contributed pieces, including two New York representatives, Jerrold Nadler of the Judiciary Committee and Carolyn Maloney of the oversight committee, and Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, chair of the Budget Committee.

Pelosi has not announced a timeline for when the bill might come to the floor, although Schiff has said he hopes the House will pass the package “this fall.”

It is expected to face headwinds in the Senate, where it would need the support of at least 10 Republicans to bring it to a vote. There, supporters say, the package is likely to be broken into pieces that will be attached to other bills.

House Democratic leaders on Tuesday introduced a much-anticipated package of proposed new limits on executive power, launching a post-Trump push to strengthen checks on the presidency that they hope will compare to the overhauls that followed the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War.

House Democratic leaders on Tuesday introduced a much-anticipated package of proposed new limits on executive power, launching a post-Trump push to strengthen checks on the presidency that they hope will compare to the overhauls that followed the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. Democratic lawmakers have been negotiating with the Biden White House to refine their broad set of proposals, which amount to a point-by-point rebuke of the ways that President Donald Trump flouted norms. The legislation, called the Protecting Our Democracy Act, would make it harder for presidents to take a series of actions, including offering or bestowing pardons in situations that raise suspicion of corruption; refusing to respond to oversight subpoenas; spending or secretly freezing funds contrary to congressional appropriations; firing inspectors general or retaliating against whistleblowers; and taking “emoluments” or payments while in office, including from commercial transactions. At a news conference Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said executive power had been gradually growing for years but that threats to the system of separation of powers seriously “picked up steam” during the Trump administration. She portrayed the bill as an “inoculation” against future abuses of presidential authority. Pelosi had directed Democrats to compile various bills containing ideas for curbs into the package, which is chiefly sponsored by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. The two appeared at an event with lawmakers who chair several committees that contributed pieces, including two New York representatives, Jerrold Nadler of the Judiciary Committee and Carolyn Maloney of the oversight committee, and Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, chair of the Budget Committee. Pelosi has not announced a timeline for when the bill might come to the floor, although Schiff has said he hopes the House will pass the package “this fall.” It is expected to face headwinds in the Senate, where it would need the support of at least 10 Republicans to bring it to a vote. There, supporters say, the package is likely to be broken into pieces that will be attached to other bills.

House Democrats introduce the ‘Protecting Our Democracy Act’