After raising doubts on U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's G-7 deal to impose a global minimum corporate tax and allow more countries to tax big multinational firms, several top Senate Republicans have rejected the deal.

US Republicans to oppose G7 tax deal

Republicans in US Senate derailed an inquiry into deadly Capitol riots that took place in January this year.&nbsp;

Democrats along with some moderate Republicans had sought a commission to probe events leading up to the US Capitol attack. The measure failed by a vote of 54 to 35, short of the 60 votes needed to advance the legislation in the 100-member Senate. The 35 no votes were all Republicans.

It was the first time this year that Republicans were able to use the 60-vote hurdle, known as a filibuster, to defeat legislation.

The vote underscores the steep challenges for Democrats in the evenly divided chamber, as they will have to win at least some Republican support in order to pass policing reforms, voting-rights legislation and other priorities.

Hundreds of Trump supporter had stormed the Capitol building on January 6 as US Congress was in session. The rioters fought with police, urging violence against lawmakers and delaying the formal certification of President Joe Biden's election victory.&nbsp;

The violence left five people dead including a Capitol Police officer.

(With inputs from agencies)

Republicans in US Senate derailed an inquiry into deadly Capitol riots that took place in January this year. Democrats along with some moderate Republicans had sought a commission to probe events leading up to the US Capitol attack.

Republicans in US Senate derailed an inquiry into deadly Capitol riots that took place in January this year. Democrats along with some moderate Republicans had sought a commission to probe events leading up to the US Capitol attack. The measure failed by a vote of 54 to 35, short of the 60 votes needed to advance the legislation in the 100-member Senate. The 35 no votes were all Republicans. It was the first time this year that Republicans were able to use the 60-vote hurdle, known as a filibuster, to defeat legislation. The vote underscores the steep challenges for Democrats in the evenly divided chamber, as they will have to win at least some Republican support in order to pass policing reforms, voting-rights legislation and other priorities. Hundreds of Trump supporter had stormed the Capitol building on January 6 as US Congress was in session. The rioters fought with police, urging violence against lawmakers and delaying the formal certification of President Joe Biden's election victory. The violence left five people dead including a Capitol Police officer. (With inputs from agencies)

Senate Republicans block bill on probe of deadly Capitol riot

A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.&nbsp;

The May 17-19 national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party's nominee, is the “true president” now, compared to 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.&nbsp;

About one-quarter of adults believe the Nov. 3 election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from November 13-17, which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.&nbsp;

A Democrat, Biden won by more than seven million votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets.&nbsp;

The Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 61% of Republicans believe the election was "stolen" from Trump. Only about 29% of Republicans believe he should share some of the blame for his supporters' January 6 deadly riot at the US Capitol.&nbsp;

Still, 67% of overall respondents say they trust election officials in their town to do their job honestly, including 58% of Republicans, according to the poll.&nbsp;

The November and May polls were both conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. The May poll gathered responses from 2,007 adults, including 909 Democrats and 754 Republicans. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points. &nbsp;

A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll. The May 17-19 national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party's nominee, is the “true president” now, compared to 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans. About one-quarter of adults believe the Nov. 3 election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from November 13-17, which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way. A Democrat, Biden won by more than seven million votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets. The Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 61% of Republicans believe the election was "stolen" from Trump. Only about 29% of Republicans believe he should share some of the blame for his supporters' January 6 deadly riot at the US Capitol. Still, 67% of overall respondents say they trust election officials in their town to do their job honestly, including 58% of Republicans, according to the poll. The November and May polls were both conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. The May poll gathered responses from 2,007 adults, including 909 Democrats and 754 Republicans. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points.

53% of Republicans still view Trump as true US president, months after his defeat: Poll 

US politician Elise Stefanik began her Washington career as a moderate, but has changed tack and surged in influence to likely become the most powerful Republican woman in Congress -- a trajectory she owes entirely to her staunch defense of Donald Trump.

Stefanik, just 36 and in Congress for six years, is aiming to oust principled conservative Liz Cheney as House Republican conference chair, a dramatic change of course that concedes the extraordinary shift that is shaping the party's future around the defeated ex-president.

Political scion Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, is on the verge of being punished for refusing to buy into what she calls Trump's "BIG LIE" that election fraud caused his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden.

The Wyoming conservative's adherence to election truth appears to be apostasy in Trump's remade Republican Party, and its members are expected to vote her out of her number three leadership post as early as Wednesday during a scheduled meeting.

Their argument: The party requires solidarity rather than Cheney's persistent public denunciations of Trump as it seeks to win back the House and Senate majorities in next year's midterm elections.

Stefanik, a Harvard graduate representing an upstate New York district, has stressed party unity and her unstinting loyalty to Trump as she campaigns for the powerful role.

She ticks several important boxes: Aside from being a woman, she can connect with millennials and voters on the US East Coast, demographics with which Republicans have traditionally struggled.

Trump himself has endorsed her for the post, as has number two House Republican Steve Scalise, making her the clear frontrunner.

"My vision is to run with support from the president and his coalition of voters," Stefanik told Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House aide, on his Thursday radio show when asked about her plans for helping the GOP win in 2022.

"We are going to run as an alternative to the Biden agenda," she added.

"I'm committed to being a voice and sending a clear message that we are one team, and that means working with the (former) president and working with all of our excellent Republican members of Congress."

Stefanik's rise is emblematic of how advancing in the party no longer requires adherence to fiscal conservative values or muscular foreign policy, but fealty to a controversial former president who still drives the direction of the Republican Party.

<h2>'New Republican star'&nbsp;</h2>

Stefanik, who worked in George W Bush's White House, won her first House race in 2014 at age 30, becoming the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time.

She earned plaudits for her centrist positions and efforts at bipartisanship.&nbsp;

In 2017 she voted against Trump's controversial tax cuts, and her 2019 support for legislation that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation riled some conservatives.

She even told Cheney she was "very proud" to have nominated her for conference chair.

But Stefanik also began recognizing that her own district's voters were becoming increasingly enamored with Trump, and she made a shrewd political calculation to join them.

She rose to national prominence in late 2019 when she fiercely defended Trump during his first impeachment hearings.

Trump took notice and trained a spotlight on Stefanik, hailing her as "a new Republican star."

Even though she drew a determined Democratic effort to unseat her, Stefanik handily won reelection in November 2020.

Weeks later her fidelity was complete, as she announced in January that she would oppose the Electoral College certification in some swing states that voted for Biden.

She told Bannon she "fully" supports an ongoing, unofficial election recount in Arizona, a process apparently intended to legitimize Trump's false claims of voter fraud.

The majority of Republican lawmakers have been loath to publicly deny Trump's fraudulent election claims, but on Sunday Congressman Adam Kinzinger, siding with Cheney, told CBS that the 74 million people who voted for Trump "weren't disenfranchised, they were simply outnumbered."

"You cannot unify truth with lies. The lie is that the election was stolen, the truth is Joe Biden beat Donald Trump," he said.

While Stefanik may satisfy a pro-Trump litmus test, conservative organizations have raised concerns about her voting record.

Stefanik "is a liberal" with just a 35 percent lifetime rating, "4th worst in the House GOP," the Club For Growth tweeted as it opposed her for conference chair.

"House Republicans should find a conservative to lead messaging and win back the House majority."

Cheney is far more likely than Stefanik to adhere to traditional Republican positions. According to an index by nonpartisan public policy think tank the Lugar Center, Stefanik was ranked as the 13th most bipartisan member of Congress from 2019 to 2020.&nbsp;

Cheney ranked 421st on the index out of the House's 435 members.

US politician Elise Stefanik began her Washington career as a moderate, but has changed tack and surged in influence to likely become the most powerful Republican woman in Congress -- a trajectory she owes entirely to her staunch defense of Donald Trump.

US politician Elise Stefanik began her Washington career as a moderate, but has changed tack and surged in influence to likely become the most powerful Republican woman in Congress -- a trajectory she owes entirely to her staunch defense of Donald Trump. Stefanik, just 36 and in Congress for six years, is aiming to oust principled conservative Liz Cheney as House Republican conference chair, a dramatic change of course that concedes the extraordinary shift that is shaping the party's future around the defeated ex-president. Political scion Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, is on the verge of being punished for refusing to buy into what she calls Trump's "BIG LIE" that election fraud caused his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden. The Wyoming conservative's adherence to election truth appears to be apostasy in Trump's remade Republican Party, and its members are expected to vote her out of her number three leadership post as early as Wednesday during a scheduled meeting. Their argument: The party requires solidarity rather than Cheney's persistent public denunciations of Trump as it seeks to win back the House and Senate majorities in next year's midterm elections. Stefanik, a Harvard graduate representing an upstate New York district, has stressed party unity and her unstinting loyalty to Trump as she campaigns for the powerful role. She ticks several important boxes: Aside from being a woman, she can connect with millennials and voters on the US East Coast, demographics with which Republicans have traditionally struggled. Trump himself has endorsed her for the post, as has number two House Republican Steve Scalise, making her the clear frontrunner. "My vision is to run with support from the president and his coalition of voters," Stefanik told Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House aide, on his Thursday radio show when asked about her plans for helping the GOP win in 2022. "We are going to run as an alternative to the Biden agenda," she added. "I'm committed to being a voice and sending a clear message that we are one team, and that means working with the (former) president and working with all of our excellent Republican members of Congress." Stefanik's rise is emblematic of how advancing in the party no longer requires adherence to fiscal conservative values or muscular foreign policy, but fealty to a controversial former president who still drives the direction of the Republican Party. 'New Republican star' Stefanik, who worked in George W Bush's White House, won her first House race in 2014 at age 30, becoming the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time. She earned plaudits for her centrist positions and efforts at bipartisanship. In 2017 she voted against Trump's controversial tax cuts, and her 2019 support for legislation that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation riled some conservatives. She even told Cheney she was "very proud" to have nominated her for conference chair. But Stefanik also began recognizing that her own district's voters were becoming increasingly enamored with Trump, and she made a shrewd political calculation to join them. She rose to national prominence in late 2019 when she fiercely defended Trump during his first impeachment hearings. Trump took notice and trained a spotlight on Stefanik, hailing her as "a new Republican star." Even though she drew a determined Democratic effort to unseat her, Stefanik handily won reelection in November 2020. Weeks later her fidelity was complete, as she announced in January that she would oppose the Electoral College certification in some swing states that voted for Biden. She told Bannon she "fully" supports an ongoing, unofficial election recount in Arizona, a process apparently intended to legitimize Trump's false claims of voter fraud. The majority of Republican lawmakers have been loath to publicly deny Trump's fraudulent election claims, but on Sunday Congressman Adam Kinzinger, siding with Cheney, told CBS that the 74 million people who voted for Trump "weren't disenfranchised, they were simply outnumbered." "You cannot unify truth with lies. The lie is that the election was stolen, the truth is Joe Biden beat Donald Trump," he said. While Stefanik may satisfy a pro-Trump litmus test, conservative organizations have raised concerns about her voting record. Stefanik "is a liberal" with just a 35 percent lifetime rating, "4th worst in the House GOP," the Club For Growth tweeted as it opposed her for conference chair. "House Republicans should find a conservative to lead messaging and win back the House majority." Cheney is far more likely than Stefanik to adhere to traditional Republican positions. According to an index by nonpartisan public policy think tank the Lugar Center, Stefanik was ranked as the 13th most bipartisan member of Congress from 2019 to 2020. Cheney ranked 421st on the index out of the House's 435 members.

Republicans seek to oust Liz Cheney from key role in  House as ex-centrist Stefanik rises on embrace of Trump

The United States House of Representatives has narrowly voted to make Washington DC the 51st state. House voted 216-208 in favor of the bill. The democratic-controlled house has approved it without republicans support so far.

US lower house votes on making Washington DC the 51st state

Democrats have spent the last several years clamoring to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, seeing that as a necessary antidote to widening economic inequality and a rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s signature tax cuts.

Now, under President Joe Biden, they have a shot at ushering in the largest federal tax increase since 1942. It could help pay for a host of spending programs that liberal economists predict would bolster the economy’s performance and repair a tax code that Democrats say encourages wealthy people to hoard assets and big companies to ship jobs and book profits overseas.

The question is whether congressional Democrats and the White House can agree on how sharply taxes should rise and who, exactly, should pay the bill. They widely share the goal of reversing many of Trump’s tax cuts from 2017 and of making the wealthy and big businesses pay more. But they do not yet agree on the details — and because Republicans are unlikely to support their efforts, they have no room for error in a closely divided Senate.

For Biden, the need to find consensus is urgent. The president is set to travel to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to unveil the next phase of his economic agenda: a sprawling collection of programs that would invest in infrastructure, education, carbon-reduction and working mothers and cost $3 trillion to $4 trillion.

The package, which follows on the heels of Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid bill, is central to the president’s long-term plan to revitalize American workers and industry by funding bridges and roads, universal prekindergarten, emerging industries like advanced batteries, and efforts to invigorate the fight against climate change.

Biden plans to finance that spending, at least in part, with tax increases that could raise upward of $2.5 trillion in revenue if his plan hews closely to what he proposed in the 2020 presidential campaign. Aides suggest his proposals might not be entirely paid for, with some one-time spending increases offset by increased federal borrowing.

“I think what you’re going to see is the administration is going to put a pay-for on the table for at least some and maybe all of the infrastructure plan,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. “If Team Biden makes a proposal, I’m sure we’ll make adjustments, but that’s a good way to start.”

Others in his party, including his own transportation secretary, have pushed Biden to explore tax plans he did not campaign on, like taxing consumption, wealth or vehicle miles traveled. (A Transportation Department spokesperson said Saturday that there would be no vehicle-miles-traveled tax in the infrastructure proposal.) Biden has stressed his broad-brush desire to increase the tax burden on wealthy Americans who largely earn their money through inheritance or investment, to fund spending programs meant to help people who earn their money primarily through wages.

“I want to change the paradigm,” Biden said Thursday during a news conference. “We start to reward work, not just wealth.”

Democratic lawmakers have promised for decades to raise taxes on companies and the wealthy, a desire that kicked into overdrive after Trump signed a tax-cut package that delivered an outsize share of its benefits to corporations and high earners. But they have struggled to muster the votes for large tax increases since President Bill Clinton signed a 1993 law that included a variety of hikes intended to help reduce the budget deficit. Business groups, conservative activists, lobbyists and donors across the ideological spectrum have largely blocked such attempts.

President Barack Obama campaigned on ending tax cuts for the rich signed into law by President George W. Bush, but after the 2008 financial crisis, he cut deals with Republicans to extend those cuts before allowing some of them to expire at the end of 2012.

Liberal economists say this year could be different, thanks to the unique political and economic circumstances surrounding the recovery from the pandemic recession. With Biden’s signing of a $1.9 trillion economic relief bill, financed entirely by federal borrowing, forecasters now expect the economy to grow this year at its fastest annual clip since the 1980s. Republicans and some economists have begun to warn of overheating growth spurring runaway inflation, which could reduce the salience of warnings that tax increases would cause growth to stall.

Public polling shows broad support, even among many Republican voters, for raising taxes on large corporations and high-income individuals. The most conservative Democrats in the Senate, who hold great sway over Biden’s legislative agenda, say they favor trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending, so long as there is a plan to pay for it.

That includes Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who told reporters this week that Biden’s infrastructure plan was “going to be enormous” and that its costs needed to be covered. He signaled openness to making changes to the 2017 tax overhaul, adding that the benefits in that legislation were “weighted in one direction to the upper end.”

“Where do they think it’s going to come from? How are they going to fix America?” he said, when asked about Republican resistance to tax increases. “I don’t think that’s reasonable.”

Democrats widely share a desire to raise the corporate income tax rate after it was cut to 21% in 2017. And they want to raise the top marginal rate for individuals back to 39.6% from 37%.

But there are disputes in the rank and file, with some favoring Biden’s plan to set the corporate rate at 28% and others preferring a lower one, like 25%. There are also questions over which high-earning individuals should see a tax increase.

Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000. Some of his progressive allies, including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have advocated raising taxes on a broader group. Democrats like Manchin have pushed him to consider additional tax plans that do not solely target the rich, like a European-style tax on consumption, though that type of tax could fall more heavily on low-income Americans than wealthy ones.

Republicans are unlikely to support any plan to raise taxes, leaving administration officials and leading congressional Democrats to hammer out a plan on their own. But absent Republican support in the Senate, where both parties hold 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties, Democrats would need to secure total consensus within their caucus to pass the legislation and use a fast-track budget process known as reconciliation to bypass the 60-vote threshold for ending a filibuster.

Business groups and Republican lawmakers, who supported the 2017 tax cuts, predict that any tax increase will slow economic growth and undermine the competitiveness of U.S. companies. They contend that the economic and wage growth in the run-up to the pandemic prove that Trump’s tax cuts worked, an argument Biden’s advisers reject, citing research from the International Monetary Fund and others.

“He wants a massive tax increase, and he wants to allocate the tax responsibility in this country on the basis of class,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “That’s a hell of a way to make tax policy. Sound tax policy is made on the basis of economics.”

Republicans who favor some form of an infrastructure bill have struggled to offer alternative ways to fund such an undertaking, which they argue should be significantly smaller than what Biden has floated. Some, however, are noodling on tax changes should a bipartisan plan emerge. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said this past week that her committee would examine changes to the gas tax or a related tax that also charges a fee to users of electric vehicles as discussions continue about a funding mechanism.

Many liberal economists say there are good reasons to raise taxes, starting with using those funds to invest in workers and help build economic opportunity. Spending on physical infrastructure, like roads and water pipes, or on programs like education and child care that are meant to help people earn more money could help curb persistent inequalities in income and wealth. The economists also say that tax increases that are properly set up would provide incentives for multinational companies to keep jobs in the United States and not shift profits to lower-tax foreign countries.

Key Democrats are trying to bring the party to consensus. The top tax writer in the Senate, Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is drafting a series of bills to raise taxes, many of them overlapping with Biden’s campaign proposals.

“I’ll be ready to raise what the Democratic caucus decides is required to move forward,” Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said in an interview.

Democrats have spent the last several years clamoring to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, seeing that as a necessary antidote to widening economic inequality and a rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s signature tax cuts.

Democrats have spent the last several years clamoring to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, seeing that as a necessary antidote to widening economic inequality and a rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s signature tax cuts. Now, under President Joe Biden, they have a shot at ushering in the largest federal tax increase since 1942. It could help pay for a host of spending programs that liberal economists predict would bolster the economy’s performance and repair a tax code that Democrats say encourages wealthy people to hoard assets and big companies to ship jobs and book profits overseas. The question is whether congressional Democrats and the White House can agree on how sharply taxes should rise and who, exactly, should pay the bill. They widely share the goal of reversing many of Trump’s tax cuts from 2017 and of making the wealthy and big businesses pay more. But they do not yet agree on the details — and because Republicans are unlikely to support their efforts, they have no room for error in a closely divided Senate. For Biden, the need to find consensus is urgent. The president is set to travel to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to unveil the next phase of his economic agenda: a sprawling collection of programs that would invest in infrastructure, education, carbon-reduction and working mothers and cost $3 trillion to $4 trillion. The package, which follows on the heels of Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid bill, is central to the president’s long-term plan to revitalize American workers and industry by funding bridges and roads, universal prekindergarten, emerging industries like advanced batteries, and efforts to invigorate the fight against climate change. Biden plans to finance that spending, at least in part, with tax increases that could raise upward of $2.5 trillion in revenue if his plan hews closely to what he proposed in the 2020 presidential campaign. Aides suggest his proposals might not be entirely paid for, with some one-time spending increases offset by increased federal borrowing. “I think what you’re going to see is the administration is going to put a pay-for on the table for at least some and maybe all of the infrastructure plan,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. “If Team Biden makes a proposal, I’m sure we’ll make adjustments, but that’s a good way to start.” Others in his party, including his own transportation secretary, have pushed Biden to explore tax plans he did not campaign on, like taxing consumption, wealth or vehicle miles traveled. (A Transportation Department spokesperson said Saturday that there would be no vehicle-miles-traveled tax in the infrastructure proposal.) Biden has stressed his broad-brush desire to increase the tax burden on wealthy Americans who largely earn their money through inheritance or investment, to fund spending programs meant to help people who earn their money primarily through wages. “I want to change the paradigm,” Biden said Thursday during a news conference. “We start to reward work, not just wealth.” Democratic lawmakers have promised for decades to raise taxes on companies and the wealthy, a desire that kicked into overdrive after Trump signed a tax-cut package that delivered an outsize share of its benefits to corporations and high earners. But they have struggled to muster the votes for large tax increases since President Bill Clinton signed a 1993 law that included a variety of hikes intended to help reduce the budget deficit. Business groups, conservative activists, lobbyists and donors across the ideological spectrum have largely blocked such attempts. President Barack Obama campaigned on ending tax cuts for the rich signed into law by President George W. Bush, but after the 2008 financial crisis, he cut deals with Republicans to extend those cuts before allowing some of them to expire at the end of 2012. Liberal economists say this year could be different, thanks to the unique political and economic circumstances surrounding the recovery from the pandemic recession. With Biden’s signing of a $1.9 trillion economic relief bill, financed entirely by federal borrowing, forecasters now expect the economy to grow this year at its fastest annual clip since the 1980s. Republicans and some economists have begun to warn of overheating growth spurring runaway inflation, which could reduce the salience of warnings that tax increases would cause growth to stall. Public polling shows broad support, even among many Republican voters, for raising taxes on large corporations and high-income individuals. The most conservative Democrats in the Senate, who hold great sway over Biden’s legislative agenda, say they favor trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending, so long as there is a plan to pay for it. That includes Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who told reporters this week that Biden’s infrastructure plan was “going to be enormous” and that its costs needed to be covered. He signaled openness to making changes to the 2017 tax overhaul, adding that the benefits in that legislation were “weighted in one direction to the upper end.” “Where do they think it’s going to come from? How are they going to fix America?” he said, when asked about Republican resistance to tax increases. “I don’t think that’s reasonable.” Democrats widely share a desire to raise the corporate income tax rate after it was cut to 21% in 2017. And they want to raise the top marginal rate for individuals back to 39.6% from 37%. But there are disputes in the rank and file, with some favoring Biden’s plan to set the corporate rate at 28% and others preferring a lower one, like 25%. There are also questions over which high-earning individuals should see a tax increase. Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000. Some of his progressive allies, including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have advocated raising taxes on a broader group. Democrats like Manchin have pushed him to consider additional tax plans that do not solely target the rich, like a European-style tax on consumption, though that type of tax could fall more heavily on low-income Americans than wealthy ones. Republicans are unlikely to support any plan to raise taxes, leaving administration officials and leading congressional Democrats to hammer out a plan on their own. But absent Republican support in the Senate, where both parties hold 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties, Democrats would need to secure total consensus within their caucus to pass the legislation and use a fast-track budget process known as reconciliation to bypass the 60-vote threshold for ending a filibuster. Business groups and Republican lawmakers, who supported the 2017 tax cuts, predict that any tax increase will slow economic growth and undermine the competitiveness of U.S. companies. They contend that the economic and wage growth in the run-up to the pandemic prove that Trump’s tax cuts worked, an argument Biden’s advisers reject, citing research from the International Monetary Fund and others. “He wants a massive tax increase, and he wants to allocate the tax responsibility in this country on the basis of class,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “That’s a hell of a way to make tax policy. Sound tax policy is made on the basis of economics.” Republicans who favor some form of an infrastructure bill have struggled to offer alternative ways to fund such an undertaking, which they argue should be significantly smaller than what Biden has floated. Some, however, are noodling on tax changes should a bipartisan plan emerge. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said this past week that her committee would examine changes to the gas tax or a related tax that also charges a fee to users of electric vehicles as discussions continue about a funding mechanism. Many liberal economists say there are good reasons to raise taxes, starting with using those funds to invest in workers and help build economic opportunity. Spending on physical infrastructure, like roads and water pipes, or on programs like education and child care that are meant to help people earn more money could help curb persistent inequalities in income and wealth. The economists also say that tax increases that are properly set up would provide incentives for multinational companies to keep jobs in the United States and not shift profits to lower-tax foreign countries. Key Democrats are trying to bring the party to consensus. The top tax writer in the Senate, Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is drafting a series of bills to raise taxes, many of them overlapping with Biden’s campaign proposals. “I’ll be ready to raise what the Democratic caucus decides is required to move forward,” Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said in an interview.

Under Biden, Democrats are poised to raise taxes on business and the rich

Even as Americans across the country hunt for a lifesaving shot in a bid to get back to a semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy, more than a quarter of members of Congress, just a phone call away from receiving a coronavirus vaccine, have turned it down.

Lawmakers who have continued to meet in person during the pandemic, often in violation of public health advice, have had access to the Pfizer vaccine since late December. But in the House, about 25% of lawmakers have not received a vaccination, the top Republican wrote this week to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, citing data from the Office of the Attending Physician. It is unclear how many senators have been vaccinated, although a handful of Republicans have said they do not intend to get one.

The hesitance around receiving the vaccine mirrors a broader trend across the United States, where there are differing degrees of opposition to being inoculated against the coronavirus, but polling suggests that Republicans are far more skeptical. Because vaccinations are confidential health information, there is no breakdown of which lawmakers have received one or what their party affiliations are. But in recent weeks, several Republicans have publicly rejected the idea of being vaccinated.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a former ophthalmologist, said he was “going with the science on this one” in refusing a vaccine.

“I have not chosen to be vaccinated because I got it naturally,” Paul, who tested positive for the virus last March, recently told reporters. (The science says the opposite; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people get vaccinated even if they have already had the coronavirus.)

“I had COVID,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. “I think that probably provides me the best immunity possible actually having the disease.”

The reluctance is just the latest barrier that Congress is confronting as leaders consider how to begin reinstating a sense of normalcy on Capitol Hill, where partisanship has become inextricably tied to health decisions and offices amount to their own fiefs, each with their own rules and perceptions of risk. It is emerging at a time when many aides on Capitol Hill — some of whom work for lawmakers who expect them to show up in person to the office — are themselves struggling to find a vaccine dose amid uneven policies about who should get one.

Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters Friday that the House should be aiming for “100%” of members to be vaccinated but lamented that she could not force anyone to accept a shot. If Republicans refused, she said, it would simply take longer to get the House back to normal, as members of that party have been pushing to do.

“You can’t tell anybody to do anything, least of all around here,” Pelosi said. “The more people who get vaccinated, the shorter time we have to stay separated on the floor.”

Lawmakers appear to have varying rationales for declining the vaccine, with some in both parties feeling uneasy about obtaining one at a time when many of their constituents are unable to do so. But Republicans have been particularly vocal in expressing misgivings about the vaccine and other virus precautions.

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a first-term Republican who has styled herself in former President Donald Trump’s image and proudly carries her pistol through the halls of Congress, has said it is “not the proper role of government to force injections of any kind in anyone.”

On Thursday, Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., a former obstetrician-gynecologist, stood maskless in the Senate basement and read Dr. Seuss’ “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” aloud in an apparent attempt to call attention to his argument that people who have been vaccinated should not have to wear masks.

His choice of children’s book also reflected how many Republicans have taken to deriding coronavirus precautions as part of what they call liberal hysteria run amok. Marshall appeared to be tying them to a recent decision by author Theodor Geisel’s estate to stop selling works he wrote that include racist material, which conservatives complained was a symptom of “cancel culture.”

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who tested positive for the coronavirus in October, has taken to wearing a mesh mask to demonstrate his disdain for the safety measure.

Some Democrats and Republicans have publicly and privately said they were uncomfortable about the optics of getting vaccinated before their constituents could and would refrain from it until access was more widespread.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., argued on Twitter that lawmakers “are not more important” than teachers and other front-line workers and should not be able to skip the line.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., became an unwitting example of the political downside of accepting the shot after he posted a photograph on Twitter of himself getting one in December, a move intended to bolster public confidence in the vaccine. Instead, critics on Twitter piled on, accusing him of playing down the threat of the virus only to rush to protect himself before others had the chance.

“There were some genuine internal struggles by some members of Congress who had the vaccination,” said Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., an emergency medicine physician. “Guilt of being vaccinated when others in their district weren’t able to get vaccinated.”

Even ensuring that lawmakers’ aides have access to the vaccine has been a charged proposition. Members of Congress were initially told that only two staff members from each office could receive the jab, setting off an uncomfortable round of actuarial calculations and decisions.

One office sent around a Google document to gauge interest; others wrestled with whether to prioritize vaccinating lower-level aides who had been working from home but had health conditions that made them more vulnerable to the virus, or more senior aides who wanted to come in to the office.

This week, the Capitol physician announced a significant expansion of vaccine availability, saying that each member’s office would be able to obtain shots for six aides. That prompted a flood of calls from hopeful congressional staff members, with multiple aides reporting listening to hold music — a medley of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail to the Chief” on repeat — for one to two hours as they waited to schedule their appointments.

The scattershot approach reflects the lack of consistent procedures for protecting Congress from the coronavirus, a challenge that has persisted throughout the pandemic. While Democratic leaders in the House have imposed a series of strict guidelines governing the use of masks on the floor and have pivoted to proxy voting and remote hearings, there are no requirements for how each office should function.

Dr. Brian Monahan, the attending physician, urged lawmakers in a memo late last month to continue teleworking, saying remote work would “continue indefinitely for significant numbers of staff” and pleading with lawmakers to avoid in-person meetings whenever possible.

But congressional offices have largely patched together a case-by-case set of rules guiding their transitions back to work. While many Republican offices have brought staff back, Democratic offices have largely maintained skeleton crews, and some aides returning to the Capitol complex said they were appalled to see staff from neighboring offices walking through the halls without masks.

House Republicans, who have been impatient to return to work as normal, argue that because lawmakers have been granted the special dispensations afforded to essential workers, they should be required to show up to perform their jobs in person.

They have been particularly alarmed by what they see as bipartisan abuse of telework that they fear could become the new status quo. Lawmakers in recent weeks have appeared remotely during hearings from trains, boats and, in one case, an automobile they were operating on what appeared to be a freeway; a group of Republicans used proxy voting to cast their votes from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida.

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, said that the report that 75% of all House members had been vaccinated was an argument for a return to normalcy and that “there is a strong desire to get back to a regular schedule here on the floor.”

Democratic leaders are not so convinced. Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat, told reporters this week that leaders wanted to be careful not to “put the cart before the horse” and return to normal operations before it was fully safe. He pointed to variants of the virus spreading around the world and suggested that even if most lawmakers were vaccinated, they could still pose a risk to the thousands of staff who work in the Capitol complex who may not be.

“At some point in time, it will come to an end, but I don’t know the timeline and I don’t think anyone knows the timeline,” Hoyer said. “What we don’t want to risk is that happening, a third sort of surge of the virus and its mutations, its variants.”

Marissa Baker, a professor at the University of Washington’s public health school who specializes in occupational health, said that Congress was a particularly difficult workplace to protect because of the large number of in-person interactions across the nation that constitute lawmakers’ routines.

“It’s not really a light switch where we can pretend it's 2019 again,” Baker said. “It needs to be considered more as a gradual return to baseline.”

Ruiz said a “hybrid model” would most likely persist for some time.

“We’re not going to be back to normal, where we’re taking public meetings in our office, where people are touring the Capitol — like the hustle and bustle of Capitol Hill was prior to the pandemic — for a very long time,” he said.

Even as Americans across the country hunt for a lifesaving shot in a bid to get back to a semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy, more than a quarter of members of Congress, just a phone call away from receiving a coronavirus vaccine, have turned it down.

Even as Americans across the country hunt for a lifesaving shot in a bid to get back to a semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy, more than a quarter of members of Congress, just a phone call away from receiving a coronavirus vaccine, have turned it down. Lawmakers who have continued to meet in person during the pandemic, often in violation of public health advice, have had access to the Pfizer vaccine since late December. But in the House, about 25% of lawmakers have not received a vaccination, the top Republican wrote this week to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, citing data from the Office of the Attending Physician. It is unclear how many senators have been vaccinated, although a handful of Republicans have said they do not intend to get one. The hesitance around receiving the vaccine mirrors a broader trend across the United States, where there are differing degrees of opposition to being inoculated against the coronavirus, but polling suggests that Republicans are far more skeptical. Because vaccinations are confidential health information, there is no breakdown of which lawmakers have received one or what their party affiliations are. But in recent weeks, several Republicans have publicly rejected the idea of being vaccinated. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a former ophthalmologist, said he was “going with the science on this one” in refusing a vaccine. “I have not chosen to be vaccinated because I got it naturally,” Paul, who tested positive for the virus last March, recently told reporters. (The science says the opposite; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people get vaccinated even if they have already had the coronavirus.) “I had COVID,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. “I think that probably provides me the best immunity possible actually having the disease.” The reluctance is just the latest barrier that Congress is confronting as leaders consider how to begin reinstating a sense of normalcy on Capitol Hill, where partisanship has become inextricably tied to health decisions and offices amount to their own fiefs, each with their own rules and perceptions of risk. It is emerging at a time when many aides on Capitol Hill — some of whom work for lawmakers who expect them to show up in person to the office — are themselves struggling to find a vaccine dose amid uneven policies about who should get one. Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters Friday that the House should be aiming for “100%” of members to be vaccinated but lamented that she could not force anyone to accept a shot. If Republicans refused, she said, it would simply take longer to get the House back to normal, as members of that party have been pushing to do. “You can’t tell anybody to do anything, least of all around here,” Pelosi said. “The more people who get vaccinated, the shorter time we have to stay separated on the floor.” Lawmakers appear to have varying rationales for declining the vaccine, with some in both parties feeling uneasy about obtaining one at a time when many of their constituents are unable to do so. But Republicans have been particularly vocal in expressing misgivings about the vaccine and other virus precautions. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a first-term Republican who has styled herself in former President Donald Trump’s image and proudly carries her pistol through the halls of Congress, has said it is “not the proper role of government to force injections of any kind in anyone.” On Thursday, Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., a former obstetrician-gynecologist, stood maskless in the Senate basement and read Dr. Seuss’ “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” aloud in an apparent attempt to call attention to his argument that people who have been vaccinated should not have to wear masks. His choice of children’s book also reflected how many Republicans have taken to deriding coronavirus precautions as part of what they call liberal hysteria run amok. Marshall appeared to be tying them to a recent decision by author Theodor Geisel’s estate to stop selling works he wrote that include racist material, which conservatives complained was a symptom of “cancel culture.” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who tested positive for the coronavirus in October, has taken to wearing a mesh mask to demonstrate his disdain for the safety measure. Some Democrats and Republicans have publicly and privately said they were uncomfortable about the optics of getting vaccinated before their constituents could and would refrain from it until access was more widespread. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., argued on Twitter that lawmakers “are not more important” than teachers and other front-line workers and should not be able to skip the line. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., became an unwitting example of the political downside of accepting the shot after he posted a photograph on Twitter of himself getting one in December, a move intended to bolster public confidence in the vaccine. Instead, critics on Twitter piled on, accusing him of playing down the threat of the virus only to rush to protect himself before others had the chance. “There were some genuine internal struggles by some members of Congress who had the vaccination,” said Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., an emergency medicine physician. “Guilt of being vaccinated when others in their district weren’t able to get vaccinated.” Even ensuring that lawmakers’ aides have access to the vaccine has been a charged proposition. Members of Congress were initially told that only two staff members from each office could receive the jab, setting off an uncomfortable round of actuarial calculations and decisions. One office sent around a Google document to gauge interest; others wrestled with whether to prioritize vaccinating lower-level aides who had been working from home but had health conditions that made them more vulnerable to the virus, or more senior aides who wanted to come in to the office. This week, the Capitol physician announced a significant expansion of vaccine availability, saying that each member’s office would be able to obtain shots for six aides. That prompted a flood of calls from hopeful congressional staff members, with multiple aides reporting listening to hold music — a medley of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail to the Chief” on repeat — for one to two hours as they waited to schedule their appointments. The scattershot approach reflects the lack of consistent procedures for protecting Congress from the coronavirus, a challenge that has persisted throughout the pandemic. While Democratic leaders in the House have imposed a series of strict guidelines governing the use of masks on the floor and have pivoted to proxy voting and remote hearings, there are no requirements for how each office should function. Dr. Brian Monahan, the attending physician, urged lawmakers in a memo late last month to continue teleworking, saying remote work would “continue indefinitely for significant numbers of staff” and pleading with lawmakers to avoid in-person meetings whenever possible. But congressional offices have largely patched together a case-by-case set of rules guiding their transitions back to work. While many Republican offices have brought staff back, Democratic offices have largely maintained skeleton crews, and some aides returning to the Capitol complex said they were appalled to see staff from neighboring offices walking through the halls without masks. House Republicans, who have been impatient to return to work as normal, argue that because lawmakers have been granted the special dispensations afforded to essential workers, they should be required to show up to perform their jobs in person. They have been particularly alarmed by what they see as bipartisan abuse of telework that they fear could become the new status quo. Lawmakers in recent weeks have appeared remotely during hearings from trains, boats and, in one case, an automobile they were operating on what appeared to be a freeway; a group of Republicans used proxy voting to cast their votes from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, said that the report that 75% of all House members had been vaccinated was an argument for a return to normalcy and that “there is a strong desire to get back to a regular schedule here on the floor.” Democratic leaders are not so convinced. Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat, told reporters this week that leaders wanted to be careful not to “put the cart before the horse” and return to normal operations before it was fully safe. He pointed to variants of the virus spreading around the world and suggested that even if most lawmakers were vaccinated, they could still pose a risk to the thousands of staff who work in the Capitol complex who may not be. “At some point in time, it will come to an end, but I don’t know the timeline and I don’t think anyone knows the timeline,” Hoyer said. “What we don’t want to risk is that happening, a third sort of surge of the virus and its mutations, its variants.” Marissa Baker, a professor at the University of Washington’s public health school who specializes in occupational health, said that Congress was a particularly difficult workplace to protect because of the large number of in-person interactions across the nation that constitute lawmakers’ routines. “It’s not really a light switch where we can pretend it's 2019 again,” Baker said. “It needs to be considered more as a gradual return to baseline.” Ruiz said a “hybrid model” would most likely persist for some time. “We’re not going to be back to normal, where we’re taking public meetings in our office, where people are touring the Capitol — like the hustle and bustle of Capitol Hill was prior to the pandemic — for a very long time,” he said.

As Republicans shun vaccines, Congress toils to return to normal

There are plenty of numbers in the $1.9 trillion relief plan signed into law by President Joe Biden this past week. $1,400 for stimulus checks. $130 billion for schools. $350 billion for state and local governments.

But the most politically significant number might just be zero.

Yes, zero. That is the number of congressional Republicans who supported the legislation.

Looking at the lack of GOP support, you might assume the bill was unpopular, at least with Republican voters. You would be wrong. Americans overwhelmingly support the package, including a significant portion of the Republican base. According to some analysts, the bill is the most popular piece of major legislation in over a decade.

So Republicans will definitely pay a political price for opposing a measure that the country, including a large portion of their base, seems to want, right?

Well, it is complicated.

We are now in the post-passage phase of the American Rescue Plan, a battle likely to last through the midterm elections next year.

During the weeks of negotiations over the legislation, Republicans were unable to coalesce around a comprehensive argument against the bill. Instead, they offered a scattershot list of complaints. After the legislation passed, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s main argument seemed to be that the economic recovery would have happened anyhow.

“We’re about to have a boom,” said McConnell, the minority leader. “And if we do have a boom, it will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion.”

Others seemed far more focused on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, culture war bait that fires up their conservative base. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, even took the issue to the House floor.

“First they outlaw Dr. Seuss, and now they want to tell us what to say,” he said during a debate over a Democratic voting rights bill. (It was the company overseeing the author’s estate, not any Democrats, that recently chose to stop publishing several of his works. And Republicans’ focus on Dr. Seuss did deliver some economic benefit: More than 1.2 million copies of stories by the children’s book author sold in the first week of March — more than quadruple from the week before.)

The Republican predicament is simple: People like getting money, especially when they are struggling, and this bill will deliver. Roughly 90% of U.S. households will be eligible for stimulus checks. More than 93% of children — 69 million — will receive what is essentially a guaranteed income for families. Even those who do not receive a payment will benefit from new funding for reopening schools and vaccine distribution.

Former President Donald Trump taught Republican voters to love that kind of government spending by championing stimulus measures that were even larger than this bill. That makes it difficult for GOP lawmakers who backed those measures to argue against the cost of this legislation without facing charges of hypocrisy or possible pushback from portions of their base.

To shift public opinion, Republicans will have to settle on a clear argument against the legislation and find the party discipline to drive it. To that end, they will be keeping a close eye on how the money is distributed, hoping to find examples of waste or fraud that they can highlight to undercut Biden’s policy agenda. One area ripe for discontent is the aid to state and local governments, which polls significantly lower among Republicans than Democrats. But it will not be easy; Republicans are already struggling to overcome deep divides in their ranks.

Biden, acutely aware of the potential pitfalls, wants to ensure that Americans understand the benefits of this bill — and that they give him credit. His address Thursday evening was the start of an administrationwide push to promote the legislation across the country. It is a strategy to avoid the struggles of former President Barack Obama, who some Democrats believe was not aggressive enough in selling his 2009 stimulus package to voters.

The situation is not exactly the same: Unlike Obama, who faced the challenge of a slow recovery, Biden is likely to benefit from a quickly expanding economy, with forecasters predicting growth to speed up in the coming months as more Americans get vaccinated. He also starts his campaign with more goodwill. Biden’s legislation is roughly 20 percentage points more popular than the 2009 bill was immediately after passage.

Still, the 2009 stimulus package provides an instructive example on how quickly public opinion can change. No House Republicans voted for that $787 billion package, and only three moderate Republicans in the Senate backed it, even as nearly 2 in 3 Americans supported the bill.

Republicans calculated that they could make the bill a centerpiece of their efforts to win control of Congress in the 2010 midterm elections. They began arguing that the legislation was “chock-full of wasteful government spending” and failed to create jobs, even as dozens also trumpeted the federal dollars flowing into their states. Voters conflated the stimulus bill with the bailouts of the banking and auto industries, confusion that helped incite some of the fiercest opposition to Obama in the form of the tea party movement.

By January 2010, about 75% said half or more of the stimulus money had been wasted. Three months later, 62% said the legislation had not created jobs. And in exit polls after the 2010 midterms, only about one-third of voters said the package had actually helped.

White House officials eventually conceded that they had made mistakes in framing the public discussion of the measure. But by then, it was too late: Republicans won control of the House and gained six seats in the Senate.

There are plenty of numbers in the $1.9 trillion relief plan signed into law by President Joe Biden this past week. $1,400 for stimulus checks. $130 billion for schools.

There are plenty of numbers in the $1.9 trillion relief plan signed into law by President Joe Biden this past week. $1,400 for stimulus checks. $130 billion for schools. $350 billion for state and local governments. But the most politically significant number might just be zero. Yes, zero. That is the number of congressional Republicans who supported the legislation. Looking at the lack of GOP support, you might assume the bill was unpopular, at least with Republican voters. You would be wrong. Americans overwhelmingly support the package, including a significant portion of the Republican base. According to some analysts, the bill is the most popular piece of major legislation in over a decade. So Republicans will definitely pay a political price for opposing a measure that the country, including a large portion of their base, seems to want, right? Well, it is complicated. We are now in the post-passage phase of the American Rescue Plan, a battle likely to last through the midterm elections next year. During the weeks of negotiations over the legislation, Republicans were unable to coalesce around a comprehensive argument against the bill. Instead, they offered a scattershot list of complaints. After the legislation passed, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s main argument seemed to be that the economic recovery would have happened anyhow. “We’re about to have a boom,” said McConnell, the minority leader. “And if we do have a boom, it will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion.” Others seemed far more focused on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, culture war bait that fires up their conservative base. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, even took the issue to the House floor. “First they outlaw Dr. Seuss, and now they want to tell us what to say,” he said during a debate over a Democratic voting rights bill. (It was the company overseeing the author’s estate, not any Democrats, that recently chose to stop publishing several of his works. And Republicans’ focus on Dr. Seuss did deliver some economic benefit: More than 1.2 million copies of stories by the children’s book author sold in the first week of March — more than quadruple from the week before.) The Republican predicament is simple: People like getting money, especially when they are struggling, and this bill will deliver. Roughly 90% of U.S. households will be eligible for stimulus checks. More than 93% of children — 69 million — will receive what is essentially a guaranteed income for families. Even those who do not receive a payment will benefit from new funding for reopening schools and vaccine distribution. Former President Donald Trump taught Republican voters to love that kind of government spending by championing stimulus measures that were even larger than this bill. That makes it difficult for GOP lawmakers who backed those measures to argue against the cost of this legislation without facing charges of hypocrisy or possible pushback from portions of their base. To shift public opinion, Republicans will have to settle on a clear argument against the legislation and find the party discipline to drive it. To that end, they will be keeping a close eye on how the money is distributed, hoping to find examples of waste or fraud that they can highlight to undercut Biden’s policy agenda. One area ripe for discontent is the aid to state and local governments, which polls significantly lower among Republicans than Democrats. But it will not be easy; Republicans are already struggling to overcome deep divides in their ranks. Biden, acutely aware of the potential pitfalls, wants to ensure that Americans understand the benefits of this bill — and that they give him credit. His address Thursday evening was the start of an administrationwide push to promote the legislation across the country. It is a strategy to avoid the struggles of former President Barack Obama, who some Democrats believe was not aggressive enough in selling his 2009 stimulus package to voters. The situation is not exactly the same: Unlike Obama, who faced the challenge of a slow recovery, Biden is likely to benefit from a quickly expanding economy, with forecasters predicting growth to speed up in the coming months as more Americans get vaccinated. He also starts his campaign with more goodwill. Biden’s legislation is roughly 20 percentage points more popular than the 2009 bill was immediately after passage. Still, the 2009 stimulus package provides an instructive example on how quickly public opinion can change. No House Republicans voted for that $787 billion package, and only three moderate Republicans in the Senate backed it, even as nearly 2 in 3 Americans supported the bill. Republicans calculated that they could make the bill a centerpiece of their efforts to win control of Congress in the 2010 midterm elections. They began arguing that the legislation was “chock-full of wasteful government spending” and failed to create jobs, even as dozens also trumpeted the federal dollars flowing into their states. Voters conflated the stimulus bill with the bailouts of the banking and auto industries, confusion that helped incite some of the fiercest opposition to Obama in the form of the tea party movement. By January 2010, about 75% said half or more of the stimulus money had been wasted. Three months later, 62% said the legislation had not created jobs. And in exit polls after the 2010 midterms, only about one-third of voters said the package had actually helped. White House officials eventually conceded that they had made mistakes in framing the public discussion of the measure. But by then, it was too late: Republicans won control of the House and gained six seats in the Senate.

Will Republicans pay a price for opposing the stimulus?

US lawmakers belonging to Democratic Party on Friday said that they will begin working on legislation to overhaul use of military force for attacking overseas targets.

With the goal to implement it in a few weeks, the legislation would end military forces being used overseas, a tactic employed by both Democrat and Republican presidents over the years.

Gregory Meeks, a US representative and Chair of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee said that they would begin debating repealing the Authorization For the Use of Military Force (AUMF) which sanctioned the Iraqi war which took place in 2002.

"I intend to mark up legislation in the Foreign Affairs Committee in the coming weeks to repeal it," Reuters cited Meeks as saying during a video news conference.

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Recently, senators have been pushing for the return of the power to declare war to US Congress from the White House. After President Joe Biden authorised airstrikes on Syria, a bipartisan group on March 3 introduced legislation to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF, along with the one passed in 1991.

Last year, the Democratic-led House repealed the 2002 AUMF, a measure which was never taken up by the Senate - which was under Republican control then. Currently, the Senate has a Democratic majority.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-admin-to-reconsider-objections-to-h1b-visas-during-trump-regime-370100" hreflang="en">Biden admin to reconsider objections to H1B visas during Trump regime</a>

The US Constitution gives war declaration powers to Congress, not the president. But after the Congress passed non-expiring AUMFs, the authority shifted.

"It's time we end these forever wars," Reuters quoted representative Barbara Lee said. Lee shed light on how AUMFs have been used over 40 times to justify attacks in 19 countries.

Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee Chairman said that all authorisations should have end dates, should be applicable on specific countries, and should require consultation with, and while reporting to Congress.

US lawmakers belonging to Democratic Party on Friday said that they will begin working on legislation to overhaul use of military force for attacking overseas targets.

US lawmakers belonging to Democratic Party on Friday said that they will begin working on legislation to overhaul use of military force for attacking overseas targets. With the goal to implement it in a few weeks, the legislation would end military forces being used overseas, a tactic employed by both Democrat and Republican presidents over the years. Gregory Meeks, a US representative and Chair of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee said that they would begin debating repealing the Authorization For the Use of Military Force (AUMF) which sanctioned the Iraqi war which took place in 2002. "I intend to mark up legislation in the Foreign Affairs Committee in the coming weeks to repeal it," Reuters cited Meeks as saying during a video news conference. Also read: New York governor faces more serious accusation from the sixth woman Recently, senators have been pushing for the return of the power to declare war to US Congress from the White House. After President Joe Biden authorised airstrikes on Syria, a bipartisan group on March 3 introduced legislation to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF, along with the one passed in 1991. Last year, the Democratic-led House repealed the 2002 AUMF, a measure which was never taken up by the Senate - which was under Republican control then. Currently, the Senate has a Democratic majority. Also read: Biden admin to reconsider objections to H1B visas during Trump regime The US Constitution gives war declaration powers to Congress, not the president. But after the Congress passed non-expiring AUMFs, the authority shifted. "It's time we end these forever wars," Reuters quoted representative Barbara Lee said. Lee shed light on how AUMFs have been used over 40 times to justify attacks in 19 countries. Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee Chairman said that all authorisations should have end dates, should be applicable on specific countries, and should require consultation with, and while reporting to Congress.

US lawmakers mulling legislation to end 'forever wars' overseas

The United States President Joe Biden said that three-quarters of Americans and about 60% of the Republicans support the proposed $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill.

US Senate nears vote on Biden's COVID-19 aid bill

Trump-chella: CPAC 2021 sees huge crowds, amid surge in coronavirus cases

The golden statue of the former president being wheeled through the halls of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday may have been a touch on the nose, considering the obvious Old Testament allusion.

But if you were looking for clues about the direction of the Republican Party after the Trump years, an effigy of <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a> in an American flag bathing suit may be as symbolic as any golden calf.

In recent years, CPAC has evolved from a family reunion of Republican libertarians, social conservatives and a hawkish foreign policy establishment into Trump-chella.

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This year has been no exception, with speaker after speaker focusing on the pet issues of the former president. “Are your votes being distorted?” one ominous video asked, flashing photos of President Joe Biden on the big screen. Trump plans to address the crowd Sunday, and anything he says about his future political ambitions will inevitably overshadow the entire event.

The former president may not end up running again — continuing legal issues could kill his bid — but there is little question that he leaves the party reshaped in his image. Even though Trump often failed to articulate a comprehensive policy doctrine, he has fundamentally remade what being a Republican means.

That shift was made strikingly clear in the remarks of politicians who hope to lead their party into the future — with or without Trump.

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Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a rock star in conservative circles right now, laid out a pretty concise summary of the new conservatism in his speech Friday: Anti-“adventurism” abroad, anti-big technology companies, anti-immigration, anti-China and anti-lockdowns.

“We cannot — we will not — go back to the days of the failed Republican establishment of yesteryear,” he said, proclaiming Florida to be an “oasis of freedom” in a country suffering from the “the yoke of oppressive lockdowns.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who opened his remarks with a joke about his much-criticized trip to a Cancún, Mexico, resort, cast conservatives as Jedi “rebels” against the “rigid conformity” of the socialist left — a call to arms at an event steeped in complaints of cultural victimhood. This year’s conference is titled “America Uncanceled.”

But Cruz also had a message for members of his own party.

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“There’s a whole lot of voices in Washington that want to just erase the past four years, want to go back to the world before,” he said. “Let me tell ya right now: Donald J. Trump ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., after defending his efforts to contest the election results as “taking a stand,” proclaimed a “new nationalism” that included breaking up technology companies, standing up to China and tightening borders. The “oligarchs” and “corporate media,” he said, want to divide Americans with “lies” like systemic racism. Hours before his speech, Hawley announced legislation requiring a $15 minimum wage for corporations with revenues of more than $1 billion.

None of the men, it is worth noting, made any reference to Biden, a sign that the party continues to lack any cohesive line of attack against the new administration.

But what was equally striking is how far the speeches differed from traditional Republican ideology. A party that has defined itself as defenders of the free market now believes big technology companies wield too much power and the government needs to put more restrictions in place. Concerns about interventionism abroad have replaced hawkish doctrine as the driving foreign policy force. Nativism has gone mainstream, and the politics of cultural grievance, focused heavily around race, dominate among conservatives that once delighted in mocking sensitive liberal “snowflakes.”

Of course, some of this rhetoric is not quite accurate. Although pandemic rules vary across the country, stay-at-home orders are lifted in all states, and businesses are largely open in most. Even as Republicans fret about being “canceled” by liberals, local parties in recent weeks have censured members of Congress who strayed from overwhelming support of Trump.

But Cruz is correct that there are some Republicans who hope that the party will revert to its pre-Trump policies and rhetoric. After watching the speeches at CPAC, it is hard to imagine how the party could have once rallied around a fiscally conservative, hawkish on foreign policy Republican like Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, their 2012 nominee.

Back then, Romney used the conference to burnish his conservative bona fides during the primary, declaring himself “severely conservative.” But unlike nine years ago, the Republican Party of today is firmly behind Trump and his brand of populist politics. In a recent Suffolk University/USA Today poll, nearly half of Trump voters said they would abandon the GOP completely and join a Trump party if the former president decided to create one.

In interviews with Republican voters this past week, many showed little interest in returning to the conservative principles of the past — expressing support for policies like stimulus checks, concern about socialism and a desire for less intervention abroad. Many wanted Trump to run again. But even those who preferred someone new said they wanted to continue pushing his “America first” agenda.

Tim Faulkner, a retired park supervisor from Elgin, Arizona, said he believed that any potential candidate would have to earn the former president’s support and be able to carry his movement forward.

“There’s a new generation coming up that needs to take the torch, and I think Trump’s role would be helping to secure that foundation,” he said.

The golden statue of the former president being wheeled through the halls of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday may have been a touch on the nose, considering the obvious Old Testament allusion.

The golden statue of the former president being wheeled through the halls of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday may have been a touch on the nose, considering the obvious Old Testament allusion. But if you were looking for clues about the direction of the Republican Party after the Trump years, an effigy of Donald Trump in an American flag bathing suit may be as symbolic as any golden calf. In recent years, CPAC has evolved from a family reunion of Republican libertarians, social conservatives and a hawkish foreign policy establishment into Trump-chella. Also read| Trump to announce himself 'presumptive 2024 nominee' for President soon: Report This year has been no exception, with speaker after speaker focusing on the pet issues of the former president. “Are your votes being distorted?” one ominous video asked, flashing photos of President Joe Biden on the big screen. Trump plans to address the crowd Sunday, and anything he says about his future political ambitions will inevitably overshadow the entire event. The former president may not end up running again — continuing legal issues could kill his bid — but there is little question that he leaves the party reshaped in his image. Even though Trump often failed to articulate a comprehensive policy doctrine, he has fundamentally remade what being a Republican means. That shift was made strikingly clear in the remarks of politicians who hope to lead their party into the future — with or without Trump. Also read| Donald Trump preferred candidate for 2024 presidential election: Poll Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a rock star in conservative circles right now, laid out a pretty concise summary of the new conservatism in his speech Friday: Anti-“adventurism” abroad, anti-big technology companies, anti-immigration, anti-China and anti-lockdowns. “We cannot — we will not — go back to the days of the failed Republican establishment of yesteryear,” he said, proclaiming Florida to be an “oasis of freedom” in a country suffering from the “the yoke of oppressive lockdowns.” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who opened his remarks with a joke about his much-criticized trip to a Cancún, Mexico, resort, cast conservatives as Jedi “rebels” against the “rigid conformity” of the socialist left — a call to arms at an event steeped in complaints of cultural victimhood. This year’s conference is titled “America Uncanceled.” But Cruz also had a message for members of his own party. Also read| Donald Trump to appear for first post-White House speech in CPAC “There’s a whole lot of voices in Washington that want to just erase the past four years, want to go back to the world before,” he said. “Let me tell ya right now: Donald J. Trump ain’t goin’ anywhere.” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., after defending his efforts to contest the election results as “taking a stand,” proclaimed a “new nationalism” that included breaking up technology companies, standing up to China and tightening borders. The “oligarchs” and “corporate media,” he said, want to divide Americans with “lies” like systemic racism. Hours before his speech, Hawley announced legislation requiring a $15 minimum wage for corporations with revenues of more than $1 billion. None of the men, it is worth noting, made any reference to Biden, a sign that the party continues to lack any cohesive line of attack against the new administration. But what was equally striking is how far the speeches differed from traditional Republican ideology. A party that has defined itself as defenders of the free market now believes big technology companies wield too much power and the government needs to put more restrictions in place. Concerns about interventionism abroad have replaced hawkish doctrine as the driving foreign policy force. Nativism has gone mainstream, and the politics of cultural grievance, focused heavily around race, dominate among conservatives that once delighted in mocking sensitive liberal “snowflakes.” Of course, some of this rhetoric is not quite accurate. Although pandemic rules vary across the country, stay-at-home orders are lifted in all states, and businesses are largely open in most. Even as Republicans fret about being “canceled” by liberals, local parties in recent weeks have censured members of Congress who strayed from overwhelming support of Trump. But Cruz is correct that there are some Republicans who hope that the party will revert to its pre-Trump policies and rhetoric. After watching the speeches at CPAC, it is hard to imagine how the party could have once rallied around a fiscally conservative, hawkish on foreign policy Republican like Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, their 2012 nominee. Back then, Romney used the conference to burnish his conservative bona fides during the primary, declaring himself “severely conservative.” But unlike nine years ago, the Republican Party of today is firmly behind Trump and his brand of populist politics. In a recent Suffolk University/USA Today poll, nearly half of Trump voters said they would abandon the GOP completely and join a Trump party if the former president decided to create one. In interviews with Republican voters this past week, many showed little interest in returning to the conservative principles of the past — expressing support for policies like stimulus checks, concern about socialism and a desire for less intervention abroad. Many wanted Trump to run again. But even those who preferred someone new said they wanted to continue pushing his “America first” agenda. Tim Faulkner, a retired park supervisor from Elgin, Arizona, said he believed that any potential candidate would have to earn the former president’s support and be able to carry his movement forward. “There’s a new generation coming up that needs to take the torch, and I think Trump’s role would be helping to secure that foundation,” he said.

CPAC and the new Republicanism

Despite being impeached twice and charges of leading an insurrection on the Capitol Hill - Donald Trump still remains the favourite of republicans. More than 50% of the republican voters want him back in the White House. WION's Palki Sharma tells you how.

Gravitas: More than 50% of the Republicans will vote for Trump

The family of a Republican congressman has&nbsp;accused him of joining the "devil's army" in the aftermath of him voting to impeach former United States President Donald Trump.

On Monday, the New York Times published a letter penned by Adam Kinzinger's relatives after he voted to accuse Trump of inciting the riot which shook the US Capitol on January 6.&nbsp;

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/republican-and-democrats-are-proposing-for-fresh-enquiry-in-case-of-donald-trump-363893/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

"Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and the Lord!" the handwritten letter claims "You go against your Christian principals and join the 'devil's army' (Democrats and the fake news media)", the letter went on to say.

Many supporters of Trump have expressed anger with fellow Republicans for attempting to break with him. In the letter, the family claimed to be ''embarrassed", while accusing Kinzinger of falling for the Democratic Party's "socialism ideas".

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/independent-911-style-commission-needed-to-investigate-trump-and-capitol-riots-pelosi-363900" hreflang="en">'Independent, 9/11-style commission' needed to investigate Trump and Capitol riots: Pelosi</a>

Kinzinger, in conversation with NYT said that the two-page letter was written by his cousin Karen Otto, and signed by 11 relatives.

"I wanted Adam to be shunned," Otto told NYT.

Kinzinger was among 10 Republicans who voted in the House of Representatives to impeach Trump. In the Senate, seven Republicans voted to impeach Trump. He is not the only Republican facing backlash for supporting Trump's impeachment. Many of those who voted against Trump are now facing backlash in their home constituencies.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/toings-froings-and-kerfuffle-uk-pm-boris-johnson-reacts-to-trumps-impeachment-trial-363685" hreflang="en">'Toings, froings and kerfuffle': UK PM Boris Johnson reacts to Trump's impeachment trial</a>

Former US President Donald Trump was acquitted by US Senate in the impeachment trial on February 14.&nbsp;

Majority of Senate republicans closed ranks to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial. During the five-day trial, Democratic Senators argued strongly in favour of impeaching Donald Trump who is the only US President to have been impeached twice.&nbsp;

(With inputs from AFP)

The family of a Republican congressman has accused him of joining the "devil's army" in the aftermath of him voting to impeach former United States President Donald Trump.

The family of a Republican congressman has accused him of joining the "devil's army" in the aftermath of him voting to impeach former United States President Donald Trump. On Monday, the New York Times published a letter penned by Adam Kinzinger's relatives after he voted to accuse Trump of inciting the riot which shook the US Capitol on January 6. "Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and the Lord!" the handwritten letter claims "You go against your Christian principals and join the 'devil's army' (Democrats and the fake news media)", the letter went on to say. Many supporters of Trump have expressed anger with fellow Republicans for attempting to break with him. In the letter, the family claimed to be ''embarrassed", while accusing Kinzinger of falling for the Democratic Party's "socialism ideas". Also read: 'Independent, 9/11-style commission' needed to investigate Trump and Capitol riots: Pelosi Kinzinger, in conversation with NYT said that the two-page letter was written by his cousin Karen Otto, and signed by 11 relatives. "I wanted Adam to be shunned," Otto told NYT. Kinzinger was among 10 Republicans who voted in the House of Representatives to impeach Trump. In the Senate, seven Republicans voted to impeach Trump. He is not the only Republican facing backlash for supporting Trump's impeachment. Many of those who voted against Trump are now facing backlash in their home constituencies. Also read: 'Toings, froings and kerfuffle': UK PM Boris Johnson reacts to Trump's impeachment trial Former US President Donald Trump was acquitted by US Senate in the impeachment trial on February 14. Majority of Senate republicans closed ranks to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial. During the five-day trial, Democratic Senators argued strongly in favour of impeaching Donald Trump who is the only US President to have been impeached twice. (With inputs from AFP)

Republican accused of joining 'devil's army' for voting to impeach Donald Trump

Donald Trump's defenders in the Senate on Sunday rallied around the former president before his impeachment trial, dismissing it as a waste of time and arguing that the former president's fiery speech before the US Capitol insurrection does not make him responsible for the violence of January 6.

''If being held accountable means being impeached by the House and being convicted by the Senate, the answer to that is no,'' said Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, making clear his belief that Trump should and will be acquitted. Asked if Congress could consider other punishment, such as censure, Wicker said the Democratic-led House had that option earlier but rejected it in favour of impeaching him.

The Senate is set to launch the impeachment trial Tuesday to consider the charge that Trump's fighting words to protesters at a Capitol rally, as well as weeks of falsehoods about a stolen and rigged presidential election, provoked a mob to storm the Capitol. Five people as a result of the melee, including a police officer.

Many senators including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell immediately denounced the violence and pointed a finger of blame at Trump.

Following the riot, Wicker said Americans ''will not stand for this kind of attack on the rule of law''&nbsp;and without naming names, said ''we must prosecute''&nbsp;those who undermine democracy.

But with Trump now gone from the presidency, Republicans have shown little political appetite to take further action, such as an impeachment conviction that could lead to barring him from running for future office.

Those partisan divisions appear to be hardening ahead of Trump's trial, a sign of his continuing grip on the GOP.

On Sunday, Wicker described Trump's impeachment trial as a ''meaningless messaging partisan exercise."

When asked if Trump's conduct should be more deserving of impeachment than President Bill Clinton's, whom Wicker voted to impeach, he said: ''I'm not conceding that President Trump incited an insurrection.''

Clinton's impeachment, in 1998, was sparked by his false denial in a deposition of a sexual relationship with a White House intern.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky dismissed Trump's trial as a farce with ''zero chance of conviction,''&nbsp;describing Trump's words to protesters to ''fight like hell''&nbsp;as Congress was voting to ratify Joe Biden's presidential victory as ''figurative''&nbsp;speech.

''If we're going to criminalise speech, and somehow impeach everybody who says, Go fight to hear your voices heard,' I mean really we ought to impeach Chuck Schumer then,? Paul said, referring to the now Democratic Senate majority leader and his criticisms of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

''He went to the Supreme Court, stood in front of the Supreme Court and said specifically, Hey Gorsuch, Hey Kavanaugh, you've unleashed a whirlwind. And you're going to pay the price.'' 
Paul noted that Chief Justice John Roberts had declined to preside over this week's impeachment proceeding because Trump was no longer president.

Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy will preside over the trial as Senate president pro tempore.

''It is a farce, it is unconstitutional. But more than anything it's unwise, and going to divide the country,''&nbsp;Paul said.

Last month, Paul forced a vote to set aside the trial as unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office, which legal experts say is disputable. But the vote suggested the near impossibility in reaching a conviction in a Senate where Democrats hold 50 seats but a two-thirds vote&nbsp;or 67 senators&nbsp;would be needed to convict Trump.

Forty-four Republican senators sided with Paul and voted to oppose holding an impeachment trial at all.

Five Republican senators joined with Democrats to reject Paul's motion: Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

Some Republicans have said the vote doesn't ''bind''&nbsp;them into voting a particular way on conviction, with Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy on Louisiana saying Sunday he would listen carefully to the evidence. But even Trump's sharper GOP critics on Sunday acknowledged the widely expected outcome.

''You did have 45 Republican senators vote to suggest that they didn't think it was appropriate to conduct a trial, so you can infer how likely it is that those folks will vote to convict,''&nbsp;said Toomey, who has made clear he believes Trump committed ''impeachable offenses.''

''I still think the best outcome would have been for the president to resign''&nbsp;before he left office, he said. ''Obviously he chose not to do that.''

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of Trump's ardent defenders, said he believes Trump's actions were wrong and ''he's going to have a place in history for all of this,''&nbsp;but insisted it's not the Senate's job to judge.

''It's not a question of how the trial ends, it's a question of when it ends,''&nbsp;Graham said.

''Republicans are going to view this as an unconstitutional exercise, and the only question is, will they call witnesses, how long does the trial take.&nbsp;But the outcome is really not in doubt.''

Donald Trump's defenders in the Senate on Sunday rallied around the former president before his impeachment trial, dismissing it as a waste of time and arguing that the former president's fiery speech before the US Capitol insurrection does not make him responsible for the violence of January 6.

Donald Trump's defenders in the Senate on Sunday rallied around the former president before his impeachment trial, dismissing it as a waste of time and arguing that the former president's fiery speech before the US Capitol insurrection does not make him responsible for the violence of January 6. ''If being held accountable means being impeached by the House and being convicted by the Senate, the answer to that is no,'' said Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, making clear his belief that Trump should and will be acquitted. Asked if Congress could consider other punishment, such as censure, Wicker said the Democratic-led House had that option earlier but rejected it in favour of impeaching him. The Senate is set to launch the impeachment trial Tuesday to consider the charge that Trump's fighting words to protesters at a Capitol rally, as well as weeks of falsehoods about a stolen and rigged presidential election, provoked a mob to storm the Capitol. Five people as a result of the melee, including a police officer. Many senators including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell immediately denounced the violence and pointed a finger of blame at Trump. Following the riot, Wicker said Americans ''will not stand for this kind of attack on the rule of law'' and without naming names, said ''we must prosecute'' those who undermine democracy. But with Trump now gone from the presidency, Republicans have shown little political appetite to take further action, such as an impeachment conviction that could lead to barring him from running for future office. Those partisan divisions appear to be hardening ahead of Trump's trial, a sign of his continuing grip on the GOP. On Sunday, Wicker described Trump's impeachment trial as a ''meaningless messaging partisan exercise." When asked if Trump's conduct should be more deserving of impeachment than President Bill Clinton's, whom Wicker voted to impeach, he said: ''I'm not conceding that President Trump incited an insurrection.'' Clinton's impeachment, in 1998, was sparked by his false denial in a deposition of a sexual relationship with a White House intern. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky dismissed Trump's trial as a farce with ''zero chance of conviction,'' describing Trump's words to protesters to ''fight like hell'' as Congress was voting to ratify Joe Biden's presidential victory as ''figurative'' speech. ''If we're going to criminalise speech, and somehow impeach everybody who says, Go fight to hear your voices heard,' I mean really we ought to impeach Chuck Schumer then,? Paul said, referring to the now Democratic Senate majority leader and his criticisms of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. ''He went to the Supreme Court, stood in front of the Supreme Court and said specifically, Hey Gorsuch, Hey Kavanaugh, you've unleashed a whirlwind. And you're going to pay the price.'' Paul noted that Chief Justice John Roberts had declined to preside over this week's impeachment proceeding because Trump was no longer president. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy will preside over the trial as Senate president pro tempore. ''It is a farce, it is unconstitutional. But more than anything it's unwise, and going to divide the country,'' Paul said. Last month, Paul forced a vote to set aside the trial as unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office, which legal experts say is disputable. But the vote suggested the near impossibility in reaching a conviction in a Senate where Democrats hold 50 seats but a two-thirds vote or 67 senators would be needed to convict Trump. Forty-four Republican senators sided with Paul and voted to oppose holding an impeachment trial at all. Five Republican senators joined with Democrats to reject Paul's motion: Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Some Republicans have said the vote doesn't ''bind'' them into voting a particular way on conviction, with Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy on Louisiana saying Sunday he would listen carefully to the evidence. But even Trump's sharper GOP critics on Sunday acknowledged the widely expected outcome. ''You did have 45 Republican senators vote to suggest that they didn't think it was appropriate to conduct a trial, so you can infer how likely it is that those folks will vote to convict,'' said Toomey, who has made clear he believes Trump committed ''impeachable offenses.'' ''I still think the best outcome would have been for the president to resign'' before he left office, he said. ''Obviously he chose not to do that.'' Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of Trump's ardent defenders, said he believes Trump's actions were wrong and ''he's going to have a place in history for all of this,'' but insisted it's not the Senate's job to judge. ''It's not a question of how the trial ends, it's a question of when it ends,'' Graham said. ''Republicans are going to view this as an unconstitutional exercise, and the only question is, will they call witnesses, how long does the trial take. But the outcome is really not in doubt.''

Republicans in US Senate back former President Trump on eve of impeachment trial

The top House Republican refused to punish Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for spreading false and bigoted conspiracy theories and endorsing political violence against Democrats, condemning the Georgia freshman’s previous comments but declining to take away her posts on influential congressional committees.

Republicans choose not to punish provocateur Greene

The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday (February 4) to strip Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of two high-profile committee assignments, over her incendiary remarks including support for violence against Democrats.

US House strips Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene of committee assignments

President Joe Biden met with 10 moderate Republican senators on Monday (February 01) to discuss their proposal to shrink his sweeping $1.9 trillion U.S. COVID-19 relief package, even as Democrats prepare to push legislation through Congress without Republican support.

Biden meets Republicans as Dems push ahead on aid

As a second impeachment trial for Donald Trump approaches next month, Republicans in states across the country are lining up behind the former president with unwavering support.

Perhaps no state has demonstrated its fealty as tenaciously as Pennsylvania, where Republican officials have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep Trumpism at the center of their message as they bolster the president’s false claims of a “stolen” election.

Eight of nine Republicans in Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation voted to throw out their state’s own electoral votes for President Joe Biden on Jan. 6, just hours after a mob had stormed the Capitol.

A majority of Republicans in the state Legislature had endorsed that effort.

And one House member from the state, Scott Perry, was instrumental in promoting a plan in which Trump would fire the acting attorney general in an effort to stay in office.

In the weeks since the Nov. 3 election, Republicans in Pennsylvania have made loyalty to the defeated ex-president the sole organizing principle of the party, the latest chapter in a rightward populist march repeated across other states. As elsewhere, the Pennsylvania GOP was once led by mainstream conservatives, but it is now defined almost exclusively by Trumpism. It faces major statewide races in 2022, for offices including governor and the Senate, with an electorate that just rejected Trump in favor of Biden.

Far from engaging in self-examination, Pennsylvania Republicans are already jockeying before the 2022 primaries to prove that they fought the hardest for Trump, who, in spite of the losses by his party in the White House, the Senate and the House, still exerts a strong grip over elected Republicans and grassroots voters.

As the Republican base has shifted — suburbanites leaning more Democratic and rural white voters lining up behind Republicans over culture-war issues — GOP leaders recognize the extent to which the former president unleashed waves of support for their party. In Pennsylvania, just as in some Midwestern states, a surge of new Republican voters with grievances about a changing America was triggered by Trump, and only Trump.

“Donald Trump’s presidency and his popularity has been a big win for the Republican Party of Pennsylvania,” said Rob Gleason, a former chair of the state GOP. Even though numerous state and federal courts rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of voter fraud, Gleason said the belief that the voting was rigged “lingers in the minds of a lot of people.”

He predicted it would drive Republican turnout in upcoming races. He said he had met this week with a prosecutor who “feels the election was stolen” and was pondering a run for a statewide judgeship this year.

Other Republicans are more skeptical that lock-step support of the former president is the best path forward in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state that is likely to be up for grabs in the next several election cycles.

“We have become, over four years, the party of Trump, and it has been one test after the other,” said Ryan Costello, a former GOP House member from the Philadelphia suburbs who has been critical of Trump and is exploring a run for Senate. “It is not a sustainable growth strategy to double and triple and quadruple down on Trump when he gets divisive.”

Despite Costello’s apprehension, most Republicans thought to be mulling runs for Senate or governor have made it clear that they are prepared to pass a Trump loyalty test.

They include members of the Republican congressional delegation, hard-line members of the Legislature, and even Donald Trump Jr. The president’s oldest son is the subject of persistent rumors that he will run for high office in the state — mostly because of his ties to Pennsylvania, where he went to prep school and college. The Trump family spent an enormous amount of time campaigning in Pennsylvania in 2020, and as it seeks its next political stage, the state remains a big one.

The transformation of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania has been stark. Less than two decades ago, it was led by political centrists such as former Sen. Arlen Specter and former Gov. Tom Ridge, who became the first secretary of homeland security.

Now it is embodied by Perry, a member of the hard-line Freedom Caucus who won a fifth term in November for his Harrisburg-area seat. His Democratic opponent, Eugene DePasquale, said he lost the race “fair and square.” But he called the Republican congressman’s efforts on behalf of Trump in a scheme involving the Justice Department “a radical attempt to overthrow the election.”

Perry, a purveyor of misinformation about the presidential election, acknowledged Monday his role in introducing Trump to an official in the Justice Department. That official, Jeffrey Clark, was willing to abet Trump in pressing Georgia to invalidate its electoral votes for Biden.

The plan never unfolded. But Perry, a retired National Guard general who dodged the new metal detectors in the Capitol, rejected calls by Democrats to resign.

Just as resolute in their defense of Trump were the other Pennsylvania House Republicans who voted to reject the state’s electoral votes for Biden on Jan. 6. Rep. Conor Lamb, a Democrat from western Pennsylvania, said on the House floor that his Republican colleagues should be “ashamed of themselves” for spreading lies that led to the breach of the Capitol. His impassioned speech nearly precipitated a fistfight.

“The Trump people were putting out a message: ‘We better see you publicly fighting for us,’” Lamb said in an interview this week. “The 2022 midterm is shaping up to be choosing the candidate who loves Trump the most,” he said of GOP primary contests.

But he called that an opportunity for Democrats to talk about issues affecting people’s lives, such as the economy and the pandemic, while Republicans remain fixated on the 2020 election. “They’re making their main political argument at this point based on a fraud; they’re not making it based on real-world conditions,” he said. “The election was not stolen. Biden really beat Trump.”

Lamb, who has won three races in districts that voted for Trump, has been mentioned as a contender for the open Senate seat. “I would say I will be thinking about it,” he said.

Apart from the House delegation, much of the Trumpist takeover in Pennsylvania has occurred in the Legislature, where Republicans held their majorities in both chambers in November (a result that the party fails to mention in its vehement claims of election fraud in the presidential race).

In contrast to states such as Georgia and Arizona, where top Republican officials debunked disinformation from Trump and his allies, in Pennsylvania no senior Republicans in Harrisburg pushed back on false claims about election results, some of them created by lawmakers themselves or by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

A majority of Republicans in the General Assembly urged the state’s congressional delegation in December to reject the state’s 20 electoral votes for Biden after the results were legally certified. Such was the pressure from grassroots Trump supporters that the majority leader of the state Senate, Kim Ward, said in an interview last month that if she refused to sign on to such an effort, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

The full embrace of Trump’s lies about a “stolen” election followed months of Republican lawmakers’ echoing his dismissals of the coronavirus threat. Lawmakers who appeared at “ReOpen PA” rallies in Harrisburg in May, flouting masks and limits on crowd sizes, morphed into leading purveyors of disinformation about election fraud after Nov. 3.

One state senator, Doug Mastriano, who is widely believed to be considering a run for governor, paid for buses and offered rides to the “Save America” protests in Washington on Jan. 6 that preceded the breach of the Capitol. Mastriano has said he left before events turned violent.

As the Legislature convened its 2021 session, Republicans recommitted to a hard-line agenda. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat, was removed by the Republican majority as president of the state Senate at a legislative session Jan. 5. Fetterman had strenuously objected to Republicans’ refusal to seat a Democratic lawmaker whose narrow victory had been officially certified.

Republicans in the state House are seeking to change how judges are elected to ensure a Republican majority on the state Supreme Court, after the current court, with a Democratic lean, ruled against claims in election fraud cases last year.

Republican lawmakers have also plunged into a lengthy examination of the November election, even though no evidence of more than trivial fraud has surfaced, and courts rejected claims that election officials overstepped their legal mandates.

Republicans announced 14 hearings in the House. Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, was grilled in the first one last week. Dismissing the series of hearings as a “charade,” she called on Republicans not to sow further distrust in the integrity of the state’s election, which drew a record 71% turnout despite a pandemic.

“We need to stand together as Americans,” Boockvar said in an interview, “and tell the voters these were lies, that your votes counted, they were checked, they were audited, they were recounted many places, and the numbers added up and they were certified.”

As a second impeachment trial for Donald Trump approaches next month, Republicans in states across the country are lining up behind the former president with unwavering support.

As a second impeachment trial for Donald Trump approaches next month, Republicans in states across the country are lining up behind the former president with unwavering support. Perhaps no state has demonstrated its fealty as tenaciously as Pennsylvania, where Republican officials have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep Trumpism at the center of their message as they bolster the president’s false claims of a “stolen” election. Eight of nine Republicans in Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation voted to throw out their state’s own electoral votes for President Joe Biden on Jan. 6, just hours after a mob had stormed the Capitol. A majority of Republicans in the state Legislature had endorsed that effort. And one House member from the state, Scott Perry, was instrumental in promoting a plan in which Trump would fire the acting attorney general in an effort to stay in office. In the weeks since the Nov. 3 election, Republicans in Pennsylvania have made loyalty to the defeated ex-president the sole organizing principle of the party, the latest chapter in a rightward populist march repeated across other states. As elsewhere, the Pennsylvania GOP was once led by mainstream conservatives, but it is now defined almost exclusively by Trumpism. It faces major statewide races in 2022, for offices including governor and the Senate, with an electorate that just rejected Trump in favor of Biden. Far from engaging in self-examination, Pennsylvania Republicans are already jockeying before the 2022 primaries to prove that they fought the hardest for Trump, who, in spite of the losses by his party in the White House, the Senate and the House, still exerts a strong grip over elected Republicans and grassroots voters. As the Republican base has shifted — suburbanites leaning more Democratic and rural white voters lining up behind Republicans over culture-war issues — GOP leaders recognize the extent to which the former president unleashed waves of support for their party. In Pennsylvania, just as in some Midwestern states, a surge of new Republican voters with grievances about a changing America was triggered by Trump, and only Trump. “Donald Trump’s presidency and his popularity has been a big win for the Republican Party of Pennsylvania,” said Rob Gleason, a former chair of the state GOP. Even though numerous state and federal courts rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of voter fraud, Gleason said the belief that the voting was rigged “lingers in the minds of a lot of people.” He predicted it would drive Republican turnout in upcoming races. He said he had met this week with a prosecutor who “feels the election was stolen” and was pondering a run for a statewide judgeship this year. Other Republicans are more skeptical that lock-step support of the former president is the best path forward in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state that is likely to be up for grabs in the next several election cycles. “We have become, over four years, the party of Trump, and it has been one test after the other,” said Ryan Costello, a former GOP House member from the Philadelphia suburbs who has been critical of Trump and is exploring a run for Senate. “It is not a sustainable growth strategy to double and triple and quadruple down on Trump when he gets divisive.” Despite Costello’s apprehension, most Republicans thought to be mulling runs for Senate or governor have made it clear that they are prepared to pass a Trump loyalty test. They include members of the Republican congressional delegation, hard-line members of the Legislature, and even Donald Trump Jr. The president’s oldest son is the subject of persistent rumors that he will run for high office in the state — mostly because of his ties to Pennsylvania, where he went to prep school and college. The Trump family spent an enormous amount of time campaigning in Pennsylvania in 2020, and as it seeks its next political stage, the state remains a big one. The transformation of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania has been stark. Less than two decades ago, it was led by political centrists such as former Sen. Arlen Specter and former Gov. Tom Ridge, who became the first secretary of homeland security. Now it is embodied by Perry, a member of the hard-line Freedom Caucus who won a fifth term in November for his Harrisburg-area seat. His Democratic opponent, Eugene DePasquale, said he lost the race “fair and square.” But he called the Republican congressman’s efforts on behalf of Trump in a scheme involving the Justice Department “a radical attempt to overthrow the election.” Perry, a purveyor of misinformation about the presidential election, acknowledged Monday his role in introducing Trump to an official in the Justice Department. That official, Jeffrey Clark, was willing to abet Trump in pressing Georgia to invalidate its electoral votes for Biden. The plan never unfolded. But Perry, a retired National Guard general who dodged the new metal detectors in the Capitol, rejected calls by Democrats to resign. Just as resolute in their defense of Trump were the other Pennsylvania House Republicans who voted to reject the state’s electoral votes for Biden on Jan. 6. Rep. Conor Lamb, a Democrat from western Pennsylvania, said on the House floor that his Republican colleagues should be “ashamed of themselves” for spreading lies that led to the breach of the Capitol. His impassioned speech nearly precipitated a fistfight. “The Trump people were putting out a message: ‘We better see you publicly fighting for us,’” Lamb said in an interview this week. “The 2022 midterm is shaping up to be choosing the candidate who loves Trump the most,” he said of GOP primary contests. But he called that an opportunity for Democrats to talk about issues affecting people’s lives, such as the economy and the pandemic, while Republicans remain fixated on the 2020 election. “They’re making their main political argument at this point based on a fraud; they’re not making it based on real-world conditions,” he said. “The election was not stolen. Biden really beat Trump.” Lamb, who has won three races in districts that voted for Trump, has been mentioned as a contender for the open Senate seat. “I would say I will be thinking about it,” he said. Apart from the House delegation, much of the Trumpist takeover in Pennsylvania has occurred in the Legislature, where Republicans held their majorities in both chambers in November (a result that the party fails to mention in its vehement claims of election fraud in the presidential race). In contrast to states such as Georgia and Arizona, where top Republican officials debunked disinformation from Trump and his allies, in Pennsylvania no senior Republicans in Harrisburg pushed back on false claims about election results, some of them created by lawmakers themselves or by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. A majority of Republicans in the General Assembly urged the state’s congressional delegation in December to reject the state’s 20 electoral votes for Biden after the results were legally certified. Such was the pressure from grassroots Trump supporters that the majority leader of the state Senate, Kim Ward, said in an interview last month that if she refused to sign on to such an effort, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.” The full embrace of Trump’s lies about a “stolen” election followed months of Republican lawmakers’ echoing his dismissals of the coronavirus threat. Lawmakers who appeared at “ReOpen PA” rallies in Harrisburg in May, flouting masks and limits on crowd sizes, morphed into leading purveyors of disinformation about election fraud after Nov. 3. One state senator, Doug Mastriano, who is widely believed to be considering a run for governor, paid for buses and offered rides to the “Save America” protests in Washington on Jan. 6 that preceded the breach of the Capitol. Mastriano has said he left before events turned violent. As the Legislature convened its 2021 session, Republicans recommitted to a hard-line agenda. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat, was removed by the Republican majority as president of the state Senate at a legislative session Jan. 5. Fetterman had strenuously objected to Republicans’ refusal to seat a Democratic lawmaker whose narrow victory had been officially certified. Republicans in the state House are seeking to change how judges are elected to ensure a Republican majority on the state Supreme Court, after the current court, with a Democratic lean, ruled against claims in election fraud cases last year. Republican lawmakers have also plunged into a lengthy examination of the November election, even though no evidence of more than trivial fraud has surfaced, and courts rejected claims that election officials overstepped their legal mandates. Republicans announced 14 hearings in the House. Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, was grilled in the first one last week. Dismissing the series of hearings as a “charade,” she called on Republicans not to sow further distrust in the integrity of the state’s election, which drew a record 71% turnout despite a pandemic. “We need to stand together as Americans,” Boockvar said in an interview, “and tell the voters these were lies, that your votes counted, they were checked, they were audited, they were recounted many places, and the numbers added up and they were certified.”

Why Pennsylvania Republican leaders are all-in for Trump more than ever

United States' Ex-President Donald Trump is likely to be acquitted in the Senate impeachment trial as Democrats struggle to gain enough support from Republicans.

Democrats need 17 Republican votes to convict Donald Trump

Arizona Republicans issued rebukes to three of the party’s most prominent figures Saturday, approving resolutions to censure Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, the widow of former Sen. John McCain.

Though largely symbolic, the political scolding during a meeting of the state GOP underscored a widening rift in Arizona between party officials who have made clear that their loyalty lies with former President Donald Trump and those in the party who refused to support him or his effort to overturn the election results in Arizona, which President Joe Biden won.

And, well beyond Arizona, the rift reflects the stark divisions in the Republican Party nationally in the wake of Trump’s tumultuous departure from office.

The party cited McCain’s and Flake’s criticisms of Trump and Ducey’s use of emergency orders related to the pandemic, which gave him broad control to enact policies without the Legislature’s approval such as closing “nonessential” businesses in the spring.

Both Flake and Cindy McCain endorsed Biden leading up to the November election. Though Ducey continually made it clear that he backed Trump, he drew ire from some Republicans by defending the state’s election process, rather than supporting efforts to challenge the November results in court.

John McCain was censured by the state party in 2015 over his voting record, which some Republican officials there perceived as not sufficiently conservative.

The censures came at the end of a raucous seven-hour meeting. Kelli Ward, the state party chair who has long been a Trump loyalist and a polarizing figure in Arizona politics, was reelected Saturday after playing a recorded phone call of Trump enthusiastically endorsing her.

A few Republicans speaking out in support of Ducey were booed, and nobody spoke in favor of McCain. The resolutions were approved by a wide margin.

“These resolutions are of no consequence whatsoever, and the people behind them have lost whatever little moral authority they may have once had,” Sara Mueller, Ducey’s political director, wrote in a statement issued minutes after the vote.

The party also approved resolutions staking out hard-right positions such as calls for revoking birthright citizenship, ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, and one that “stands firm on the principles of only two genders.”

The vote to censure comes 2 1/2 months after Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Arizona in more than two decades, and only the second Democrat in 50 years. For decades, Republicans controlled both U.S. Senate seats, but lost the first in 2018 and the second last year. Ducey, who was easily reelected in 2018, is the most prominent Republican still in office who has won statewide.

McCain, Flake and Ducey each attended Biden’s inauguration Wednesday and McCain served on the president’s transition advisory board. She has responded to the threat of censure with a sense of both annoyance and amusement, joking that she was in “good company” with her husband.

The censure resolution against McCain cited her support for “leftist causes such as gay marriage and growth of the administrative state,” and her endorsement of Biden, which was described as “in direct opposition to Republican values, the interests of the American people and the Constitution of the United States.”

On Twitter, McCain replied: “It is a high honor to be included in a group of Arizonans who have served our state and our nation so well...and who, like my late husband John, have been censured by the AZGOP. I’ll wear this as a badge of honor.”

In an earlier interview with The Arizona Republic, McCain had blasted the state party chair, Ward, for pushing for the rebukes. She said that as the chairman of the party, Ward “managed to turn Arizona blue in November for the first time since 1996.” She added: “Maybe she should be reminded that my husband never lost an Arizona election since his first win in 1982.”

Ward’s representative declined to respond to a request for comment.

The party’s resolution against Flake said that he “once was a true Conservative, who supported freedom, Republican values, Republican candidates, and Americanism” but has since “abandoned true Republican values by professing support for progressive and globalist politicians.

Flake wrote on Twitter that he, too, was unconcerned with the rebuke.

“If condoning the president’s behavior is required to stay in the party’s good graces, I’m just fine being on the outs,” he wrote.

Ducey, in an interview Friday, said he has given “little to no time to think” about the vote.

“I think we’re better and stronger as a party when we’re adding people rather than the alternative,” he said.

None of the three Republicans plan to object to the censure.

Many moderate Republican officials have dismissed the resolutions as a distraction, saying they will largely serve to alienate other moderates in a state where independent voters make up nearly one-third of the electorate.

Like other Republicans who voted against the censures, Trey Terry, a state committeeman, laid the blame with Ward.

“She has set the party up for failure,” Terry said. “It’s her circus now, and the clowns have come out.”

Next year will bring a test of the state party’s might post-Trump — a U.S. Senate seat and all statewide offices will be up for grabs.

Arizona Republicans issued rebukes to three of the party’s most prominent figures Saturday, approving resolutions to censure Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, the widow of former Sen.

Arizona Republicans issued rebukes to three of the party’s most prominent figures Saturday, approving resolutions to censure Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, the widow of former Sen. John McCain. Though largely symbolic, the political scolding during a meeting of the state GOP underscored a widening rift in Arizona between party officials who have made clear that their loyalty lies with former President Donald Trump and those in the party who refused to support him or his effort to overturn the election results in Arizona, which President Joe Biden won. And, well beyond Arizona, the rift reflects the stark divisions in the Republican Party nationally in the wake of Trump’s tumultuous departure from office. The party cited McCain’s and Flake’s criticisms of Trump and Ducey’s use of emergency orders related to the pandemic, which gave him broad control to enact policies without the Legislature’s approval such as closing “nonessential” businesses in the spring. Both Flake and Cindy McCain endorsed Biden leading up to the November election. Though Ducey continually made it clear that he backed Trump, he drew ire from some Republicans by defending the state’s election process, rather than supporting efforts to challenge the November results in court. John McCain was censured by the state party in 2015 over his voting record, which some Republican officials there perceived as not sufficiently conservative. The censures came at the end of a raucous seven-hour meeting. Kelli Ward, the state party chair who has long been a Trump loyalist and a polarizing figure in Arizona politics, was reelected Saturday after playing a recorded phone call of Trump enthusiastically endorsing her. A few Republicans speaking out in support of Ducey were booed, and nobody spoke in favor of McCain. The resolutions were approved by a wide margin. “These resolutions are of no consequence whatsoever, and the people behind them have lost whatever little moral authority they may have once had,” Sara Mueller, Ducey’s political director, wrote in a statement issued minutes after the vote. The party also approved resolutions staking out hard-right positions such as calls for revoking birthright citizenship, ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, and one that “stands firm on the principles of only two genders.” The vote to censure comes 2 1/2 months after Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Arizona in more than two decades, and only the second Democrat in 50 years. For decades, Republicans controlled both U.S. Senate seats, but lost the first in 2018 and the second last year. Ducey, who was easily reelected in 2018, is the most prominent Republican still in office who has won statewide. McCain, Flake and Ducey each attended Biden’s inauguration Wednesday and McCain served on the president’s transition advisory board. She has responded to the threat of censure with a sense of both annoyance and amusement, joking that she was in “good company” with her husband. The censure resolution against McCain cited her support for “leftist causes such as gay marriage and growth of the administrative state,” and her endorsement of Biden, which was described as “in direct opposition to Republican values, the interests of the American people and the Constitution of the United States.” On Twitter, McCain replied: “It is a high honor to be included in a group of Arizonans who have served our state and our nation so well...and who, like my late husband John, have been censured by the AZGOP. I’ll wear this as a badge of honor.” In an earlier interview with The Arizona Republic, McCain had blasted the state party chair, Ward, for pushing for the rebukes. She said that as the chairman of the party, Ward “managed to turn Arizona blue in November for the first time since 1996.” She added: “Maybe she should be reminded that my husband never lost an Arizona election since his first win in 1982.” Ward’s representative declined to respond to a request for comment. The party’s resolution against Flake said that he “once was a true Conservative, who supported freedom, Republican values, Republican candidates, and Americanism” but has since “abandoned true Republican values by professing support for progressive and globalist politicians. Flake wrote on Twitter that he, too, was unconcerned with the rebuke. “If condoning the president’s behavior is required to stay in the party’s good graces, I’m just fine being on the outs,” he wrote. Ducey, in an interview Friday, said he has given “little to no time to think” about the vote. “I think we’re better and stronger as a party when we’re adding people rather than the alternative,” he said. None of the three Republicans plan to object to the censure. Many moderate Republican officials have dismissed the resolutions as a distraction, saying they will largely serve to alienate other moderates in a state where independent voters make up nearly one-third of the electorate. Like other Republicans who voted against the censures, Trey Terry, a state committeeman, laid the blame with Ward. “She has set the party up for failure,” Terry said. “It’s her circus now, and the clowns have come out.” Next year will bring a test of the state party’s might post-Trump — a U.S. Senate seat and all statewide offices will be up for grabs.

Arizona republicans rebuke 3 influential figures

A group of Republican senators on Wednesday called on newly sworn-in President Joe Biden to submit his plan to re-engage the United States in the Paris climate agreement to lawmakers for "review and consideration," moments after Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the accord.

Republicans call for Senate review before US re-enters Paris climate deal

The only American President to be impeached twice- Donald Trump is charged with "willful incitement of insurrection". The historic Bipartisan condemnation includes 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. Republican Party members explain their reasons.

10 house Republicans voted to impeach Trump

Three US house republicans have declared that they will support the impeachment of outgoing President Donald Trump. After a violent mob attack at the Capitol Hill last week.

3 GOP leaders support impeachment of outgoing President Trump

Democrats and the US house representatives planned to start the impeachment proceedings of Wednesday unless outgoing President Donald Trump steps down or is removed.

Democrats plan to start impeachment procedure on Wednesday

This week's Congress joint session and the followed riots crate opened Donald Trump's republican support and exposed the fault lines in the relationship

Republicans confront Donald Trump's effect on party

House Democrats are prepared to impeach President Donald Trump if he doesn’t immediately resign, as the president came under increasing pressure from members of both parties for encouraging a mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol.

House Democrats readying for unprecedented second impeachment

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the chamber will hold a recorded vote on the stimulus-check increase on Monday.

US lawmakers block Trump’s requested changes on Covid-19 relief bill

Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate have struck a late-night compromise to clear one of the final hurdles, a dispute over Federal Reserve pandemic lending authorities.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a vote on the $900 billion package is now expected on Sunday.

Congressional leaders plan to attach the coronavirus aid package, which includes $600 direct payments to individuals and a $300 per week unemployment compensation supplement, to a $1.4 trillion spending bill funding government programmes through September 2021. A 48-hour funding extension expires at midnight on Sunday (0500 GMT Monday), after which the government would shut down.

Republicans had said the programmes are an unnecessary government interference in private business that politicises the Fed. They accused Democrats of seeking to extend them into 2021 as a backdoor way to provide unchecked funds for state and local governments controlled by members of their party.

Democrats in turn accused the Republicans of trying to tie the Fed's hands in order to limit Democratic President-elect Joe Biden's options for boosting the flagging economy after he takes office on January 20.

The Senate had adjourned a rare Saturday session with a call from Republican leader Mitch McConnell to avoid last-minute disagreements that could delay new funding for Americans and small businesses.

In the 11 months since the first cases of the new coronavirus were documented in the United States, COVID-19 has killed 311,000 Americans, by far the most in the world.

(with inputs)

Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate have struck a late-night compromise to clear one of the final hurdles, a dispute over Federal Reserve pandemic lending authorities.

Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate have struck a late-night compromise to clear one of the final hurdles, a dispute over Federal Reserve pandemic lending authorities. According to the Wall Street Journal, a vote on the $900 billion package is now expected on Sunday. Congressional leaders plan to attach the coronavirus aid package, which includes $600 direct payments to individuals and a $300 per week unemployment compensation supplement, to a $1.4 trillion spending bill funding government programmes through September 2021. A 48-hour funding extension expires at midnight on Sunday (0500 GMT Monday), after which the government would shut down. Republicans had said the programmes are an unnecessary government interference in private business that politicises the Fed. They accused Democrats of seeking to extend them into 2021 as a backdoor way to provide unchecked funds for state and local governments controlled by members of their party. Democrats in turn accused the Republicans of trying to tie the Fed's hands in order to limit Democratic President-elect Joe Biden's options for boosting the flagging economy after he takes office on January 20. The Senate had adjourned a rare Saturday session with a call from Republican leader Mitch McConnell to avoid last-minute disagreements that could delay new funding for Americans and small businesses. In the 11 months since the first cases of the new coronavirus were documented in the United States, COVID-19 has killed 311,000 Americans, by far the most in the world. (with inputs)

US Congress to vote on virus stimulus deal after lawmakers reach agreement

The US Supreme Court denied a last-minute attempt by President Donald Trump’s allies to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania, a blow to the president’s continuing efforts to reverse his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Scotus denies Trump allies' attempt to overturn results

ATLANTA — Some of the biggest names in national politics jumped into the fiercely contested runoffs for two Georgia Senate seats Friday, even as a second recount showed that Joe Biden had maintained his lead in the state and Republicans braced for a visit by President Donald Trump, who has railed against his loss there with baseless claims of fraud.

With Trump set to campaign for the two Republican incumbents, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, on Saturday, Vice President Mike Pence and former President Barack Obama held dueling events to underscore the vital stakes in the special elections: If both Republicans are defeated, control of the Senate will shift to Democrats just as Biden moves into the Oval Office.

Watch |&nbsp;

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Obama appeared virtually at a turn-out-the-vote event for Jon Ossoff, the Democrat facing Perdue, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, Loeffler’s opponent, and spoke of his frustration in seeing his initiatives blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate when he was in office. “If the Senate is controlled by Republicans who are interested in obstruction and gridlock, rather than progress and helping people, they can block just about anything,” Obama said.

Pence — with Perdue and Loeffler by his side — received a COVID-19 briefing at the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and said later at a rally for the Republican candidates that “we’re going to save the Senate, and then we’re going to save America.”

A second recount of the presidential vote in Georgia has finished, according to the Secretary of State website, showing Biden ahead by about 12,000 votes with 100% of the counties reporting.

New campaign financial reports filed late Thursday showed a staggering influx of money into the state in the first days of runoffs that were expected to set spending records, with more than $300 million booked in television, radio and digital ads, according to data from AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm. Media buyers said the price of ads was soaring, especially for super PACs, to unseen heights.

The Senate races are playing out at a hyperpartisan moment in American politics that has led to a civil war among Georgia Republicans divided over whether to support Trump as he persists with false assertions that the election was stolen from him. In Georgia and elsewhere, the president’s lawyers remain engaged in a failing, last-minute effort to throw the election to Trump.

Even as he tweeted this week that he wanted “a big David and Kelly WIN,” Trump called Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, “hapless” for failing to work to overturn the election results, while also criticizing Georgia’s top election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. His sustained assault on Georgia’s voting system prompted an extraordinary rebuke this week from another high-ranking elections official, who warned of violent threats against poll workers and publicly pleaded with the president to cool down his conspiratorial rhetoric.

On Friday, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat on the judiciary subcommittee, which met Thursday, said that she had been the target of violent, anonymous threats that appeared on a public internet chat room.

The president’s appearance in Valdosta, near the Florida border, on Saturday evening comes after a concerted campaign by his advisers and Republican lawmakers to convince him that his presence is vital to increasing turnout among his supporters. Initially reluctant, the president agreed to hold the rally after being told that victories by the Republican Senate candidates would help prove his contention that his own win in Georgia was stolen from him, according to aides familiar with the conversations.

But some Republicans in Georgia and Washington are fearful that Trump will go off-script and potentially attack Kemp or Raffensperger. Party officials also worry that the president’s claims of fraud could backfire, undermining turnout by convincing Republican voters that the special elections are rigged against them anyway.

L. Lin Wood, a lawyer and Republican supporter of Trump, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who has filed lawsuits on the president’s behalf, urged Georgians on Wednesday not to vote “unless your vote is secure.”

That same day, a number of prominent Georgia Republicans, including former Gov. Nathan Deal, signed an open letter in which they warned that “the debate surrounding the state’s electoral system has made some within our party consider whether voting in the coming runoff election matters.”

The leaders said that the party needed to focus on winning the two Senate seats or risk turning the Senate over to a Democratic Party that “wishes to fundamentally alter the fabric of our nation into something unrecognizable.”

Some senior Republicans in Washington are doing little to hide their concern about the damage that they believe Wood and Powell are inflicting.

“It’s encouraging the president is going down there to rally the troops, because I know there’s some inconsistent messages being sent to his base supporters,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.

Chip Lake, a Georgia-based Republican strategist who most recently worked for Rep. Doug Collins — who unsuccessfully vied in November for Loeffler’s Senate seat — said Friday that Trump was facing “one of the biggest political speeches the president’s ever had to make, because the stakes are that high.”

“If we have any portion of our base that might decide to boycott this election for any reason whatsoever, then we might be handing over the Senate to Democratic control,” Lake said.

Although a hand-recount of the state’s 5 million votes reaffirmed that Biden had indeed won the Georgia election, Trump’s campaign demanded a second machine recount. Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta and is the state’s most populous, certified its results Friday. As of Friday evening, state election officials had not responded to queries about when they would officially announce the results of the recount or recertify Biden as the winner.

The urgency of the Senate races was reflected in the huge amounts of money pouring into the four campaigns in recent weeks: about $187 million just in online donations from Oct. 15 to Nov. 23, according to federal records from the donation-processing sites ActBlue and WinRed.

In that 40-day period, both Democratic challengers outraised their Republican opponents every day from online contributions and surpassed the previous Senate fundraising record for a full quarter. Warnock raised $63.3 million in online donations, and Ossoff raised $66.4 million.

In that time, the two Republicans raised $58.2 million.

But well-heeled Republicans have erased much of the Democrats’ financial advantage with giant donations to a super PAC that raised $70 million in less than three weeks from a who’s who of Republican megadonors, including Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone ($15 million) and Ken Griffin of Citadel ($12 million). Media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave $1 million, as did his son, Lachlan, the chief executive of the Fox Corp.

Loeffler, one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, put $23 million of her own money into her campaign to get to the runoff, and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, has donated an additional $10 million to a pro-Loeffler super PAC.

Big contributions from Democratic donors are lagging the Republicans. The leading Senate Democratic super PAC raised a little more than $10 million in the 20 days after the general election, records show. The biggest donation — $2.5 million — came from the organization that Stacey Abrams created, Fair Fight, after her narrow loss in 2018 for the governor’s race.

As Abrams’ star power has increased, Fair Fight itself has emerged as a major magnet for Democratic giving, pulling in nearly $35 million in 40 days that ended Nov. 23. Abrams, widely credited with leading the Democratic renaissance in Georgia, also appeared in the virtual rally Friday for the two Democratic candidates.

“We won this election decisively, and, despite the number of recounts, it keeps giving us the same answer: that Georgia Democrats showed up, that Georgians showed up and that we decided that we wanted to move this nation in the right direction,” Abrams said.

Ossoff voiced a major theme that both Democratic candidates were seeking to exploit: allegations that Loeffler and Perdue benefited from questionable stock trades as they learned about the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic. “We’re running against, like, the Bonnie and Clyde of political corruption in America, who represent politicians who put themselves over the people,” he said. Perdue and Loeffler have denied any inappropriate financial dealings.

On Friday, Pence rallied on behalf of Loeffler and Perdue in Savannah, where he warned that Democrats would advance a liberal, big-government agenda if they were allowed to seize control of the Senate.

“If you don’t vote, they win,” Pence told the small but enthusiastic crowd at the Savannah airport. “If you don’t vote, there could be nothing to stop Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi from cutting our military, raising taxes and passing the agenda of the radical left.”

Pence was joined at the airport by Perdue but not Loeffler, who returned to Atlanta after a young man on her campaign staff was killed Friday afternoon in a traffic accident.

Before the rally, Pence attended the CDC briefing with the Republican candidates, saying the nation is facing a “challenging time” but also “a season of hope,” with the likely approval of the first coronavirus vaccine coming as soon as next week.

ATLANTA — Some of the biggest names in national politics jumped into the fiercely contested runoffs for two Georgia Senate seats Friday, even as a second recount showed that Joe Biden had maintained his lead in the state and Republicans braced for a visit by President Donald Trump, who has railed against his loss there with baseless claims of fraud.

ATLANTA — Some of the biggest names in national politics jumped into the fiercely contested runoffs for two Georgia Senate seats Friday, even as a second recount showed that Joe Biden had maintained his lead in the state and Republicans braced for a visit by President Donald Trump, who has railed against his loss there with baseless claims of fraud. With Trump set to campaign for the two Republican incumbents, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, on Saturday, Vice President Mike Pence and former President Barack Obama held dueling events to underscore the vital stakes in the special elections: If both Republicans are defeated, control of the Senate will shift to Democrats just as Biden moves into the Oval Office. Watch | Obama appeared virtually at a turn-out-the-vote event for Jon Ossoff, the Democrat facing Perdue, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, Loeffler’s opponent, and spoke of his frustration in seeing his initiatives blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate when he was in office. “If the Senate is controlled by Republicans who are interested in obstruction and gridlock, rather than progress and helping people, they can block just about anything,” Obama said. Pence — with Perdue and Loeffler by his side — received a COVID-19 briefing at the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and said later at a rally for the Republican candidates that “we’re going to save the Senate, and then we’re going to save America.” A second recount of the presidential vote in Georgia has finished, according to the Secretary of State website, showing Biden ahead by about 12,000 votes with 100% of the counties reporting. New campaign financial reports filed late Thursday showed a staggering influx of money into the state in the first days of runoffs that were expected to set spending records, with more than $300 million booked in television, radio and digital ads, according to data from AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm. Media buyers said the price of ads was soaring, especially for super PACs, to unseen heights. The Senate races are playing out at a hyperpartisan moment in American politics that has led to a civil war among Georgia Republicans divided over whether to support Trump as he persists with false assertions that the election was stolen from him. In Georgia and elsewhere, the president’s lawyers remain engaged in a failing, last-minute effort to throw the election to Trump. Even as he tweeted this week that he wanted “a big David and Kelly WIN,” Trump called Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, “hapless” for failing to work to overturn the election results, while also criticizing Georgia’s top election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. His sustained assault on Georgia’s voting system prompted an extraordinary rebuke this week from another high-ranking elections official, who warned of violent threats against poll workers and publicly pleaded with the president to cool down his conspiratorial rhetoric. On Friday, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat on the judiciary subcommittee, which met Thursday, said that she had been the target of violent, anonymous threats that appeared on a public internet chat room. The president’s appearance in Valdosta, near the Florida border, on Saturday evening comes after a concerted campaign by his advisers and Republican lawmakers to convince him that his presence is vital to increasing turnout among his supporters. Initially reluctant, the president agreed to hold the rally after being told that victories by the Republican Senate candidates would help prove his contention that his own win in Georgia was stolen from him, according to aides familiar with the conversations. But some Republicans in Georgia and Washington are fearful that Trump will go off-script and potentially attack Kemp or Raffensperger. Party officials also worry that the president’s claims of fraud could backfire, undermining turnout by convincing Republican voters that the special elections are rigged against them anyway. L. Lin Wood, a lawyer and Republican supporter of Trump, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who has filed lawsuits on the president’s behalf, urged Georgians on Wednesday not to vote “unless your vote is secure.” That same day, a number of prominent Georgia Republicans, including former Gov. Nathan Deal, signed an open letter in which they warned that “the debate surrounding the state’s electoral system has made some within our party consider whether voting in the coming runoff election matters.” The leaders said that the party needed to focus on winning the two Senate seats or risk turning the Senate over to a Democratic Party that “wishes to fundamentally alter the fabric of our nation into something unrecognizable.” Some senior Republicans in Washington are doing little to hide their concern about the damage that they believe Wood and Powell are inflicting. “It’s encouraging the president is going down there to rally the troops, because I know there’s some inconsistent messages being sent to his base supporters,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. Chip Lake, a Georgia-based Republican strategist who most recently worked for Rep. Doug Collins — who unsuccessfully vied in November for Loeffler’s Senate seat — said Friday that Trump was facing “one of the biggest political speeches the president’s ever had to make, because the stakes are that high.” “If we have any portion of our base that might decide to boycott this election for any reason whatsoever, then we might be handing over the Senate to Democratic control,” Lake said. Although a hand-recount of the state’s 5 million votes reaffirmed that Biden had indeed won the Georgia election, Trump’s campaign demanded a second machine recount. Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta and is the state’s most populous, certified its results Friday. As of Friday evening, state election officials had not responded to queries about when they would officially announce the results of the recount or recertify Biden as the winner. The urgency of the Senate races was reflected in the huge amounts of money pouring into the four campaigns in recent weeks: about $187 million just in online donations from Oct. 15 to Nov. 23, according to federal records from the donation-processing sites ActBlue and WinRed. In that 40-day period, both Democratic challengers outraised their Republican opponents every day from online contributions and surpassed the previous Senate fundraising record for a full quarter. Warnock raised $63.3 million in online donations, and Ossoff raised $66.4 million. In that time, the two Republicans raised $58.2 million. But well-heeled Republicans have erased much of the Democrats’ financial advantage with giant donations to a super PAC that raised $70 million in less than three weeks from a who’s who of Republican megadonors, including Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone ($15 million) and Ken Griffin of Citadel ($12 million). Media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave $1 million, as did his son, Lachlan, the chief executive of the Fox Corp. Loeffler, one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, put $23 million of her own money into her campaign to get to the runoff, and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, has donated an additional $10 million to a pro-Loeffler super PAC. Big contributions from Democratic donors are lagging the Republicans. The leading Senate Democratic super PAC raised a little more than $10 million in the 20 days after the general election, records show. The biggest donation — $2.5 million — came from the organization that Stacey Abrams created, Fair Fight, after her narrow loss in 2018 for the governor’s race. As Abrams’ star power has increased, Fair Fight itself has emerged as a major magnet for Democratic giving, pulling in nearly $35 million in 40 days that ended Nov. 23. Abrams, widely credited with leading the Democratic renaissance in Georgia, also appeared in the virtual rally Friday for the two Democratic candidates. “We won this election decisively, and, despite the number of recounts, it keeps giving us the same answer: that Georgia Democrats showed up, that Georgians showed up and that we decided that we wanted to move this nation in the right direction,” Abrams said. Ossoff voiced a major theme that both Democratic candidates were seeking to exploit: allegations that Loeffler and Perdue benefited from questionable stock trades as they learned about the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic. “We’re running against, like, the Bonnie and Clyde of political corruption in America, who represent politicians who put themselves over the people,” he said. Perdue and Loeffler have denied any inappropriate financial dealings. On Friday, Pence rallied on behalf of Loeffler and Perdue in Savannah, where he warned that Democrats would advance a liberal, big-government agenda if they were allowed to seize control of the Senate. “If you don’t vote, they win,” Pence told the small but enthusiastic crowd at the Savannah airport. “If you don’t vote, there could be nothing to stop Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi from cutting our military, raising taxes and passing the agenda of the radical left.” Pence was joined at the airport by Perdue but not Loeffler, who returned to Atlanta after a young man on her campaign staff was killed Friday afternoon in a traffic accident. Before the rally, Pence attended the CDC briefing with the Republican candidates, saying the nation is facing a “challenging time” but also “a season of hope,” with the likely approval of the first coronavirus vaccine coming as soon as next week.

A gathering political storm hits Georgia, with Trump on the way

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