The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said Wednesday that there was enough evidence to conclude that former President Donald Trump and some of his allies might have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result.

In a court filing in a civil case in California, the committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. They said they had accumulated evidence demonstrating that Trump, conservative lawyer John Eastman and other allies could potentially be charged with criminal violations including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people.

The filing also said the men might have broken a common law statute against fraud through Trump’s repeated lies that the election had been stolen.

The filing disclosed only limited new evidence, and the committee asked the judge in the civil case to review the relevant material behind closed doors. In asserting the potential for criminality, the committee largely relied on the extensive and detailed accounts already made public of the actions Trump and his allies took to keep him in office after his defeat.

The committee added information from its more than 550 interviews with state officials, Justice Department officials and top aides to Trump, among others. It said, for example, that Jason Miller, Trump’s senior campaign adviser, had said in a deposition to the committee that Trump had been told soon after Election Day by a campaign data expert “in pretty blunt terms” that he was going to lose, suggesting that Trump was well aware that his months of assertions about a stolen election were false.

The evidence gathered by the committee “provides, at minimum, a good-faith basis for concluding that President Trump has violated” the obstruction count, the filing, written by Douglas N. Letter, general counsel of the House, states, adding: “The select committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

The filing said that a “review of the materials may reveal that the president and members of his campaign engaged in common law fraud in connection with their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.”

Representatives of Trump and Eastman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The panel, which is controlled by Democrats, is a legislative committee and has no authority to charge the former president — or anyone else — with a crime.

But the filing contains the clearest indication yet about the committee’s direction as it weighs making a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Trump and his allies, a step that could put pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland to take up the case. The Justice Department has so far said little of substance about whether it might ultimately pursue a case.

The filing laid out a sweeping if by now well-established account of the plot to overturn the election, which included false claims of election fraud, plans to put forward pro-Trump “alternate” electors, pressure various federal agencies to find irregularities and ultimately push Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to exploit the Electoral Count Act to keep a losing president in power.

“As the president and his associates propagated dangerous misinformation to the public,” the filing said, Eastman “was a leader in a related effort to persuade state officials to alter their election results based on these same fraudulent claims.”

The court filing stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Eastman, who is trying to persuade a judge to block the committee’s subpoena for documents in his possession, claiming “a highly partisan” invasion of his privacy. The committee issued a subpoena to Eastman in January, citing a memo he wrote laying out how Trump could use the vice president and Congress to try to invalidate the 2020 election results.

As part of the suit, Eastman sought to shield from release documents he said were covered by attorney-client privilege. In response, the committee argued — under the legal theory known as the crime-fraud exception — that the privilege does not cover information conveyed from a client to a lawyer if it was part of furthering or concealing a crime.

Eastman then argued the committee had offered “no evidence” of the existence of a crime-fraud exception, prompting the committee’s latest filing.

“The evidence supports an inference that President Trump, plaintiff and several others entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort,” the filing states.

It also made reference to a recent ruling in a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., in which U.S District Judge Amit Mehta found that it was “plausible to believe that the president entered into a conspiracy with the rioters on Jan. 6, 2021.”

“In addition to the legal effort to delay the certification, there is also evidence that the conspiracy extended to the rioters engaged in acts of violence at the Capitol,” the filing said.

On Tuesday, the State Bar of California announced an investigation into Eastman over whether he engaged in conduct that violated California law and ethics rules.

Eastman’s memo to Trump suggested that Pence could reject electors from certain states. Eastman also participated in a briefing for nearly 300 state legislators, during which he told the group that it was their duty to “fix this, this egregious conduct, and make sure that we’re not putting in the White House some guy that didn’t get elected,” according to the committee.

He met with Trump and Pence to push his arguments, participated in a meeting of Trump advisers at the Willard Hotel and spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, before the Capitol assault. As violence broke out, he sent a message blaming Pence for not going along with his plan.

As a mob was attacking the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Eastman sent a hostile message to the vice president’s top lawyer, blaming Pence for the violence.

“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” he wrote to Greg Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel.

In a recent filing in his suit, Eastman said Trump had retained him “because of his election law and constitutional expertise” in the fall of 2020 for “federal litigation matters in relation to the 2020 presidential general election, including election matters related to the Electoral College.”

On Sept. 3, 2020 — two months before Trump lost the election — Eastman was invited by pro-Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell to join an Election Integrity Working Group to begin preparing for anticipated postelection litigation. Eastman said Trump had asked Mitchell to undertake the effort in August.

The judge in the case has already denied a request from Eastman to shield nearly 19,000 emails from the committee, saying congressional investigators have the authority to see the messages and that the First Amendment does not protect his communications. Eastman has so far turned over about 8,000 of the emails.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said Wednesday that there was enough evidence to conclude that former President Donald Trump and some of his allies might have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said Wednesday that there was enough evidence to conclude that former President Donald Trump and some of his allies might have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result. In a court filing in a civil case in California, the committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. They said they had accumulated evidence demonstrating that Trump, conservative lawyer John Eastman and other allies could potentially be charged with criminal violations including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people. The filing also said the men might have broken a common law statute against fraud through Trump’s repeated lies that the election had been stolen. The filing disclosed only limited new evidence, and the committee asked the judge in the civil case to review the relevant material behind closed doors. In asserting the potential for criminality, the committee largely relied on the extensive and detailed accounts already made public of the actions Trump and his allies took to keep him in office after his defeat. The committee added information from its more than 550 interviews with state officials, Justice Department officials and top aides to Trump, among others. It said, for example, that Jason Miller, Trump’s senior campaign adviser, had said in a deposition to the committee that Trump had been told soon after Election Day by a campaign data expert “in pretty blunt terms” that he was going to lose, suggesting that Trump was well aware that his months of assertions about a stolen election were false. The evidence gathered by the committee “provides, at minimum, a good-faith basis for concluding that President Trump has violated” the obstruction count, the filing, written by Douglas N. Letter, general counsel of the House, states, adding: “The select committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.” The filing said that a “review of the materials may reveal that the president and members of his campaign engaged in common law fraud in connection with their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.” Representatives of Trump and Eastman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The panel, which is controlled by Democrats, is a legislative committee and has no authority to charge the former president — or anyone else — with a crime. But the filing contains the clearest indication yet about the committee’s direction as it weighs making a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Trump and his allies, a step that could put pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland to take up the case. The Justice Department has so far said little of substance about whether it might ultimately pursue a case. The filing laid out a sweeping if by now well-established account of the plot to overturn the election, which included false claims of election fraud, plans to put forward pro-Trump “alternate” electors, pressure various federal agencies to find irregularities and ultimately push Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to exploit the Electoral Count Act to keep a losing president in power. “As the president and his associates propagated dangerous misinformation to the public,” the filing said, Eastman “was a leader in a related effort to persuade state officials to alter their election results based on these same fraudulent claims.” The court filing stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Eastman, who is trying to persuade a judge to block the committee’s subpoena for documents in his possession, claiming “a highly partisan” invasion of his privacy. The committee issued a subpoena to Eastman in January, citing a memo he wrote laying out how Trump could use the vice president and Congress to try to invalidate the 2020 election results. As part of the suit, Eastman sought to shield from release documents he said were covered by attorney-client privilege. In response, the committee argued — under the legal theory known as the crime-fraud exception — that the privilege does not cover information conveyed from a client to a lawyer if it was part of furthering or concealing a crime. Eastman then argued the committee had offered “no evidence” of the existence of a crime-fraud exception, prompting the committee’s latest filing. “The evidence supports an inference that President Trump, plaintiff and several others entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort,” the filing states. It also made reference to a recent ruling in a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., in which U.S District Judge Amit Mehta found that it was “plausible to believe that the president entered into a conspiracy with the rioters on Jan. 6, 2021.” “In addition to the legal effort to delay the certification, there is also evidence that the conspiracy extended to the rioters engaged in acts of violence at the Capitol,” the filing said. On Tuesday, the State Bar of California announced an investigation into Eastman over whether he engaged in conduct that violated California law and ethics rules. Eastman’s memo to Trump suggested that Pence could reject electors from certain states. Eastman also participated in a briefing for nearly 300 state legislators, during which he told the group that it was their duty to “fix this, this egregious conduct, and make sure that we’re not putting in the White House some guy that didn’t get elected,” according to the committee. He met with Trump and Pence to push his arguments, participated in a meeting of Trump advisers at the Willard Hotel and spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, before the Capitol assault. As violence broke out, he sent a message blaming Pence for not going along with his plan. As a mob was attacking the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Eastman sent a hostile message to the vice president’s top lawyer, blaming Pence for the violence. “The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” he wrote to Greg Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel. In a recent filing in his suit, Eastman said Trump had retained him “because of his election law and constitutional expertise” in the fall of 2020 for “federal litigation matters in relation to the 2020 presidential general election, including election matters related to the Electoral College.” On Sept. 3, 2020 — two months before Trump lost the election — Eastman was invited by pro-Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell to join an Election Integrity Working Group to begin preparing for anticipated postelection litigation. Eastman said Trump had asked Mitchell to undertake the effort in August. The judge in the case has already denied a request from Eastman to shield nearly 19,000 emails from the committee, saying congressional investigators have the authority to see the messages and that the First Amendment does not protect his communications. Eastman has so far turned over about 8,000 of the emails.

Jan 6 committee lays out potential criminal charges against Trump

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a bid by former president Donald&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;to block the release to a congressional committee of documents related to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Trump, citing executive privilege, had sought to prevent the documents held by the National Archives from being given to the committee investigating the assault on Congress by&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;supporters.

Trump, who has been accused of fomenting the assault on the Capitol, had asked the nation's highest court to stay a ruling this month by a federal appeals court which rejected his attempt to keep the documents and records secret.

But the Supreme Court, in an 8-1 vote, refused to issue a stay and upheld the appeals court ruling.

Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative, was the only justice in favor of issuing a stay.

Trump&nbsp;had sought to exercise his privilege as a former president to keep under wraps White House records and communications that might relate to the attack.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a bid by former president Donald Trump to block the release to a congressional committee of documents related to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a bid by former president Donald Trump to block the release to a congressional committee of documents related to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Trump, citing executive privilege, had sought to prevent the documents held by the National Archives from being given to the committee investigating the assault on Congress by Trump supporters. Trump, who has been accused of fomenting the assault on the Capitol, had asked the nation's highest court to stay a ruling this month by a federal appeals court which rejected his attempt to keep the documents and records secret. But the Supreme Court, in an 8-1 vote, refused to issue a stay and upheld the appeals court ruling. Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative, was the only justice in favor of issuing a stay. Trump had sought to exercise his privilege as a former president to keep under wraps White House records and communications that might relate to the attack.

US: Supreme Court rejects Trump bid to block Capitol attack document release

“How Civil Wars Start,” a new book by political scientist Barbara F. Walter, was cited all over the place in the days around the anniversary of last winter’s riot at the Capitol. The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and my New York Times colleague Michelle Goldberg all invoked Walter’s work in essays discussing the possibility that the United States stands on the edge of an abyss, with years of civil strife ahead.

The book begins with a story from the fall of 2020: the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, hatched by a group of right-wing militiamen who opposed Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions. Fortunately “the FBI was on to them” and foiled the plot — but the alleged kidnapping conspiracy, Walter argues, is a harbinger of worse to come. Periods of civil war often “start with vigilantes just like these — armed militants who take violence directly to the people.”

Here’s a skeptical question, though: When we say the FBI was “on to” the plotters, what exactly does that mean? Because at the moment the government’s case against them is a remarkable tangle. Fourteen men have been charged with crimes, based in part on evidence reportedly supplied by at least 12 confidential informants — meaning that the FBI had almost one informant involved for every defendant.

And according to reporting from BuzzFeed’s Jessica Garrison and Ken Bensinger, one of these informants, an extremely colorful convicted felon named Stephen Robeson appears to have been a crucial instigator of the plot. He is alleged to have used government funds to pay for meals and hotel rooms, encouraged people “to vent their anger about governors who enacted COVID-19 restrictions” and “to plan violent actions against elected officials and to acquire weapons and bomb-making materials,” and followed up aggressively, calling potential plotters “nearly every day.”

Robeson’s role has become enough of a headache for the prosecution, in fact, that they recently disowned him, declaring that he was actually a “double agent” (meaning&nbsp;triple&nbsp;agent, I think) who betrayed his obligations as an informant by trying to destroy evidence and seeking to warn one of the accused conspirators ahead of his arrest. Prosecutors had already ruled out testimony from an agent who ran one of their key informants, probably because he spent much of 2019 trying to drum up business for his private security firm by touting his FBI casework.

Presumably we’ll find out more about all this when the case comes to trial, but for now it’s reasonable to wonder whether Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers would have been prepared to go all the way with their vigilante fantasies, absent some prodding from the feds.

And those doubts, in turn, might be reasonably extended to the entire theory of looming American civil war, which assumes something not yet entirely in evidence — a large number of Americans willing to actually put their lives, not just their Twitter rhetoric, on the line for the causes that currently divide our country.

Overall, the academic and journalistic literature on America’s divisions offers a reasonably accurate description of increasing American division. The country is definitely more ideologically polarized than it was 20 or 40 years ago; indeed, with organized Christianity’s decline, you could say that it’s more metaphysically polarized as well. We are more likely to hate and fear members of the rival party, more likely to sort ourselves into ideologically homogeneous communities, more likely to be deeply skeptical about public institutions and more likely to hold conspiratorial beliefs — like the belief that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 election — that undercut the basic legitimacy of the opposition party’s governance.

At the same time, the literature suffers from a serious liberal-bias problem, a consistent naivete about the left and center’s roles in deepening polarization. For instance, in the Bush and Obama eras there were a lot of takes on the dangers of “asymmetric polarization” — the supposed ideological radicalization of the Republicans relative to the Democrats. Across most of the 2010s, though, it was clearly liberals who moved leftward much more rapidly, while Republicans basically stayed put — and yet somehow the perils of that kind of asymmetry get much less expert attention.

Likewise the drama of protest politics in 2020 is often analyzed in a way that minimizes the revolutionary symbolism of the left’s protests — the iconoclasm and the toppled statues, the mayhem around federal buildings and the White House, the zeal to rename and rewrite — and focuses intensely on the right’s response, treating conservative backlash as though it emerges from the reactionary ether rather than as a cyclical response.

The other bias in the civil-war literature is toward two related forms of exaggeration. First, an exaggerated emphasis on what Americans say they believe, rather than what (so far, at least) they actually&nbsp;do. It’s absolutely true that if you just look at polling data, you see a lot of beliefs that would seem to license not just occasional protest but some sort of continuing insurrection. This includes not only the Trumpist stolen-election theories but also popular beliefs about recent Republican presidents — that George W. Bush had foreknowledge and allowed Sept. 11 to happen or that the Russians manipulated vote tallies in order to place Donald Trump, their cat’s-paw, in the White House.

However, an overwhelming majority of people who hold those kinds of beliefs show no signs of being radicalized into actual violence. For all the talk of liberal “resistance” under Trump, the characteristic left-wing response to the Trump administration was not to join Antifa but to mobilize to elect Democrats; it took the weird conditions of the pandemic and the lockdowns, and the spark of the George Floyd killing, to transmute anti-Trumpism into national protests that actually turned violent.

Likewise, despite fears that Jan. 6 was going to birth a “Hezbollah wing” of the Republican Party, there has been no major far-right follow-up to the event, no dramatic surge in Proud Boys or Oath Keepers visibility, no campaign of anti-Biden terrorism. Instead, Republicans who believe in the stolen-election thesis seem mostly excited by the prospect of thumping Democrats in the midterms, and the truest believers are doing the extremely characteristic American thing of running for local office.

This has prompted a different liberal fear — that these new officeholders could help precipitate a constitutional crisis by refusing to do their duty in a close election in 2024. But that fear is an example of the other problem of exaggeration in the imminent-civil-war literature, the way the goal posts seem to shift when you question the evocations of Fort Sumter or 1930s Europe.

Thus we are told that some kind of major democratic breakdown is likely “absent some radical development” (as Beauchamp puts it); that we are already “suspended between democracy and autocracy” (as Remnick writes); that “the United States is coming to an end” and the only question “is how,” to quote the beginning of Stephen Marche’s new book, “The Next Civil War.” But then it turns out that the most obvious danger is an extremely contingent one, involving a cascade of events in 2024 — a very specific sort of election outcome, followed by a series of very high-risk, unusual radical choices by state legislators and Republican senators and the Supreme Court — that are worth worrying about but not at all the likeliest scenario, let alone one that’s somehow structurally inevitable.

Similarly, we are first told that “civil war” is coming, but then it turns out that the term is being used to mean something other than an actual war, that the relevant analogies are periods of political violence like the Irish Troubles or Italy’s “Years of Lead.” And then if you question whether we’re destined to reach even that point, you may be informed that actually the civil war is practically here already — because, Marche writes, “the definition of civil strife starts at twenty-five deaths within a year,” and acts of anti-government violence killed more people than that annually in the later 2010s.

That kind of claim strikes me as a ridiculous abuse of language. The United States is a vast empire of more than 330 million people in which at any given time some handful of unhinged people will be committing deadly crimes. And we are also a country with a long history of sporadic armed conflict — mob violence, labor violence, terrorism and riots — interwoven with the normal operation of our politics. If your definition of civil war implies that we are always just a few mass shootings or violent protests away from the brink, then you don’t have a definition at all: You just have a license for perpetual alarmism.

I am very aware that I’m always the columnist making some version of this calm-down argument, sometimes to a fault. So I want to stress that the problems that undergird the civil-war hypothesis are serious problems, the divisions in our country are considerable and dangerous, the specific perils associated with a Trump resurgence in 2024 entirely real.

But there are also lots of countervailing and complicating forces, and the overall picture is genuinely complex — at least as complex, let’s say, as the informant-riddled plot against Whitmer. And as with that conspiracy, it’s worth asking whether the people who see potential insurrection lurking everywhere are seeing a danger rising entirely on its own — or in their alarm are helping to invent it.

“How Civil Wars Start,” a new book by political scientist Barbara F. Walter, was cited all over the place in the days around the anniversary of last winter’s riot at the Capitol.

“How Civil Wars Start,” a new book by political scientist Barbara F. Walter, was cited all over the place in the days around the anniversary of last winter’s riot at the Capitol. The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and my New York Times colleague Michelle Goldberg all invoked Walter’s work in essays discussing the possibility that the United States stands on the edge of an abyss, with years of civil strife ahead. The book begins with a story from the fall of 2020: the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, hatched by a group of right-wing militiamen who opposed Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions. Fortunately “the FBI was on to them” and foiled the plot — but the alleged kidnapping conspiracy, Walter argues, is a harbinger of worse to come. Periods of civil war often “start with vigilantes just like these — armed militants who take violence directly to the people.” Here’s a skeptical question, though: When we say the FBI was “on to” the plotters, what exactly does that mean? Because at the moment the government’s case against them is a remarkable tangle. Fourteen men have been charged with crimes, based in part on evidence reportedly supplied by at least 12 confidential informants — meaning that the FBI had almost one informant involved for every defendant. And according to reporting from BuzzFeed’s Jessica Garrison and Ken Bensinger, one of these informants, an extremely colorful convicted felon named Stephen Robeson appears to have been a crucial instigator of the plot. He is alleged to have used government funds to pay for meals and hotel rooms, encouraged people “to vent their anger about governors who enacted COVID-19 restrictions” and “to plan violent actions against elected officials and to acquire weapons and bomb-making materials,” and followed up aggressively, calling potential plotters “nearly every day.” Robeson’s role has become enough of a headache for the prosecution, in fact, that they recently disowned him, declaring that he was actually a “double agent” (meaning triple agent, I think) who betrayed his obligations as an informant by trying to destroy evidence and seeking to warn one of the accused conspirators ahead of his arrest. Prosecutors had already ruled out testimony from an agent who ran one of their key informants, probably because he spent much of 2019 trying to drum up business for his private security firm by touting his FBI casework. Presumably we’ll find out more about all this when the case comes to trial, but for now it’s reasonable to wonder whether Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers would have been prepared to go all the way with their vigilante fantasies, absent some prodding from the feds. And those doubts, in turn, might be reasonably extended to the entire theory of looming American civil war, which assumes something not yet entirely in evidence — a large number of Americans willing to actually put their lives, not just their Twitter rhetoric, on the line for the causes that currently divide our country. Overall, the academic and journalistic literature on America’s divisions offers a reasonably accurate description of increasing American division. The country is definitely more ideologically polarized than it was 20 or 40 years ago; indeed, with organized Christianity’s decline, you could say that it’s more metaphysically polarized as well. We are more likely to hate and fear members of the rival party, more likely to sort ourselves into ideologically homogeneous communities, more likely to be deeply skeptical about public institutions and more likely to hold conspiratorial beliefs — like the belief that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 election — that undercut the basic legitimacy of the opposition party’s governance. At the same time, the literature suffers from a serious liberal-bias problem, a consistent naivete about the left and center’s roles in deepening polarization. For instance, in the Bush and Obama eras there were a lot of takes on the dangers of “asymmetric polarization” — the supposed ideological radicalization of the Republicans relative to the Democrats. Across most of the 2010s, though, it was clearly liberals who moved leftward much more rapidly, while Republicans basically stayed put — and yet somehow the perils of that kind of asymmetry get much less expert attention. Likewise the drama of protest politics in 2020 is often analyzed in a way that minimizes the revolutionary symbolism of the left’s protests — the iconoclasm and the toppled statues, the mayhem around federal buildings and the White House, the zeal to rename and rewrite — and focuses intensely on the right’s response, treating conservative backlash as though it emerges from the reactionary ether rather than as a cyclical response. The other bias in the civil-war literature is toward two related forms of exaggeration. First, an exaggerated emphasis on what Americans say they believe, rather than what (so far, at least) they actually do. It’s absolutely true that if you just look at polling data, you see a lot of beliefs that would seem to license not just occasional protest but some sort of continuing insurrection. This includes not only the Trumpist stolen-election theories but also popular beliefs about recent Republican presidents — that George W. Bush had foreknowledge and allowed Sept. 11 to happen or that the Russians manipulated vote tallies in order to place Donald Trump, their cat’s-paw, in the White House. However, an overwhelming majority of people who hold those kinds of beliefs show no signs of being radicalized into actual violence. For all the talk of liberal “resistance” under Trump, the characteristic left-wing response to the Trump administration was not to join Antifa but to mobilize to elect Democrats; it took the weird conditions of the pandemic and the lockdowns, and the spark of the George Floyd killing, to transmute anti-Trumpism into national protests that actually turned violent. Likewise, despite fears that Jan. 6 was going to birth a “Hezbollah wing” of the Republican Party, there has been no major far-right follow-up to the event, no dramatic surge in Proud Boys or Oath Keepers visibility, no campaign of anti-Biden terrorism. Instead, Republicans who believe in the stolen-election thesis seem mostly excited by the prospect of thumping Democrats in the midterms, and the truest believers are doing the extremely characteristic American thing of running for local office. This has prompted a different liberal fear — that these new officeholders could help precipitate a constitutional crisis by refusing to do their duty in a close election in 2024. But that fear is an example of the other problem of exaggeration in the imminent-civil-war literature, the way the goal posts seem to shift when you question the evocations of Fort Sumter or 1930s Europe. Thus we are told that some kind of major democratic breakdown is likely “absent some radical development” (as Beauchamp puts it); that we are already “suspended between democracy and autocracy” (as Remnick writes); that “the United States is coming to an end” and the only question “is how,” to quote the beginning of Stephen Marche’s new book, “The Next Civil War.” But then it turns out that the most obvious danger is an extremely contingent one, involving a cascade of events in 2024 — a very specific sort of election outcome, followed by a series of very high-risk, unusual radical choices by state legislators and Republican senators and the Supreme Court — that are worth worrying about but not at all the likeliest scenario, let alone one that’s somehow structurally inevitable. Similarly, we are first told that “civil war” is coming, but then it turns out that the term is being used to mean something other than an actual war, that the relevant analogies are periods of political violence like the Irish Troubles or Italy’s “Years of Lead.” And then if you question whether we’re destined to reach even that point, you may be informed that actually the civil war is practically here already — because, Marche writes, “the definition of civil strife starts at twenty-five deaths within a year,” and acts of anti-government violence killed more people than that annually in the later 2010s. That kind of claim strikes me as a ridiculous abuse of language. The United States is a vast empire of more than 330 million people in which at any given time some handful of unhinged people will be committing deadly crimes. And we are also a country with a long history of sporadic armed conflict — mob violence, labor violence, terrorism and riots — interwoven with the normal operation of our politics. If your definition of civil war implies that we are always just a few mass shootings or violent protests away from the brink, then you don’t have a definition at all: You just have a license for perpetual alarmism. I am very aware that I’m always the columnist making some version of this calm-down argument, sometimes to a fault. So I want to stress that the problems that undergird the civil-war hypothesis are serious problems, the divisions in our country are considerable and dangerous, the specific perils associated with a Trump resurgence in 2024 entirely real. But there are also lots of countervailing and complicating forces, and the overall picture is genuinely complex — at least as complex, let’s say, as the informant-riddled plot against Whitmer. And as with that conspiracy, it’s worth asking whether the people who see potential insurrection lurking everywhere are seeing a danger rising entirely on its own — or in their alarm are helping to invent it.

Let’s not invent a civil war

Hundreds of Trump supporters breached the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021 after false claims of election fraud. One year after the riots, what has changed in America? Is American democracy in a better place?

One year since the Capitol hill riots: In conversation with Nicholas Grossman

Political analysts from Jerusalem had predicted the Capitol riots two weeks before they happened. Watch our segment in conversation with the doomsday predictor.

Political analysts from Jerusalem had predicted the Capitol riots two weeks before they happened

One year since the Capitol hill riots: America still divided

On the eve of the capital insurrection anniversary, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recollected the trauma of that day.

US: The House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recollect the trauma of the Capitol insurrection

US President Joe Biden will call out former President Donald Trump for 'singular responsibility' in provoking the rioters on the 6th of January last year in Capitol riots.

President Biden will call out former President Trump for 'singular responsibility' in Capitol Riots

Metal detectors screen lawmakers for weapons at the doors of the House chamber. Staff members are frightened to come to work. Anxious police officers worry about a future attack, even as they relive the one that took place. The citadel of democracy is almost inaccessible to the public it is supposed to welcome and serve.

The January&nbsp;6, 2021, assault has shaken the foundations of the Capitol, a symbol of American strength and unity, transforming how lawmakers view their surroundings and one another. A dark mood lingers, and the scars will be long in healing.

“I have colleagues, to be honest with you, I can’t stand looking at, and I don’t want to get into an elevator with them when we are going to roll-call votes,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., referring to Republicans he considers complicit in the attack a year ago and unapologetic about it today.

The Capitol has been the site of significant violence over the centuries. There was its torching by British troops in 1814, the bloody caning of Sen. Charles Sumner in 1856, a spray of gunfire from the House spectator’s gallery by Puerto Rican nationalists that wounded five representatives in 1954, the murder of two Capitol Police officers standing guard in 1998, and the killing of another at a traffic barricade last April.

But the attack of a year ago was uniquely shattering in that it was a brutal effort by marauding Americans to keep former President Donald Trump in office despite his election loss by interrupting one of the nation’s essential civic functions: the tallying of the electoral votes for president. Lawmakers who were on hand are still struggling to comprehend it.

“That’s the difference,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who had argued that Congress should shut down Thursday to spare staff workers the trauma of reliving a horrific day. “The last time the Capitol was breached and taken over was in 1814 by British forces. Here, we had our fellow Americans storming the Capitol.”

The events of last year have turned everyday spaces in the Capitol into testaments to what transpired. Here is a spot where they fought their way into the building; there is a window they broke or a wall they scaled.

A heavily-trafficked marble staircase on the Senate side of the building is no longer just a way to reach the second floor. It is now etched in memory as the stairway where Officer Eugene Goodman, acting alone, diverted a mob away from a set of back stairs, allowing Vice President Mike Pence and senators to escape unharmed to a secure location before the intruders breached the Senate chamber.

Senators cannot help but look at the presiding officer’s desk in their inner sanctum and remember that it was roughly commandeered by Trump supporters — one shirtless and wearing horns on his head — who rifled through the historic desks in a chamber considered sacred by its usual occupants.

“Have you ever had your house broken into or been a victim of a burglary, and when you walked back into the house, it felt differently, it felt violated?” asked Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. “I felt that way for the longest time — and I still do.”

In the House, the speaker’s lobby, a narrow, portrait-lined hallway off the floor where lawmakers could relax and kibitz with reporters, is now the place where the mob tried to break through glass and a hastily erected barricade before one of them, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed.

McGovern, chair of the House Rules Committee, who was presiding over the chamber just moments before, was standing near the entryway as the intruders approached the door, putting them within reach of lawmakers.

“If you want me to describe what hate looks like, I tell you it is what I saw in the eyes of those people smashing the windows to try to get to us,” said McGovern. “I still have a tough time coming to grips with the fact that it happened. All of us have to walk through the speaker’s lobby every day and relive that day.”

For others, the ever-present reminders of the attack are the officers who were charged with repelling it as best they could, sustaining serious injuries as they did so.

“I remember them with their faces cut, and I see and talk to them every day,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who as chair of the Rules Committee was a central figure in the counting of electoral ballots. “It is the faces of the officers that trigger that day for me. It is a constant reminder of what they did and what they are still up against.”

One of the joys of the Capitol before the assault and the ongoing pandemic was its status as a working landmark, a place where nationally recognized political figures hurried through hallways crowded with school groups and awestruck tourists craned their necks to peer up at the dome from the Rotunda.

But continuing health and security concerns have kept the building mostly closed off, even after the National Guard troops summoned to secure the Capitol in the wake of the riot were sent home and the 7-foot-high, razor-wire-topped fence that ominously encircled the complex was removed.

Much of the time, the once-vibrant Capitol seems eerily empty and footsteps echo loudly off the marble floors.

“It is sad,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the House majority leader, who has spent countless hours in the Capitol over the last 40 years and said he hoped it could host visitors again at some point. “It is a stark change.”

In the ensuing 12 months, Democrats and Republicans have inhabited almost parallel universes when it comes to the assault.

Democrats, via a special House committee formed after the Senate rejected a bipartisan commission, continue to press for accountability for those who took part and those who instigated it, starting with Trump. Republicans have increasingly sought to play down or even deny the attack, characterizing it as little more than a routine protest.

It appears few Republicans will be on hand to commemorate the anniversary, with many senators scheduled to be at a funeral for a former colleague in Georgia. The only Republican lawmakers who have publicized an event are two far-right members of the House closely allied with Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who have promised to “expose the truth” about Jan. 6 during a news conference on Capitol Hill.

Republicans say they see partisanship at work, calling the metal detectors outrageous and accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats of trying to win political advantage by demonizing their party. On Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., one of the chief objectors to counting the electoral ballots a year ago, said in an op-ed for Fox News that the “day’s true legacy was the left’s attempt to use the Capitol unrest to foster a permanent climate of fear and oppression.”

Other Republicans have tried to deflect responsibility, faulting the Democratic speaker for the inadequate security preparations at the Capitol that allowed the breach to occur, or changing the subject altogether.

“I think we’ve gotten over it,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader, said in a recent interview. “We’ve gotten back to normal and are doing the people’s business and having raucous debates over how we see things.”

But to Democrats, there will not be any getting over it until Republicans disavow Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and acknowledge that the Jan. 6 assault was a criminal attempt to overturn legitimate election results.

“When there are people in the Senate who refuse to tell their supporters the truth about Donald Trump’s big lie, I think it has made it harder to work together,” said Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo. “They certainly know better, and it has created a real risk to democracy.”

But Hoyer still holds out hope.

“Ultimately, I believe democracy really works,” he said. “It doesn’t work overnight, and it doesn’t work perfectly. But ultimately, people get what they want over time.”

Metal detectors screen lawmakers for weapons at the doors of the House chamber. Staff members are frightened to come to work. Anxious police officers worry about a future attack, even as they relive the one that took place.

Metal detectors screen lawmakers for weapons at the doors of the House chamber. Staff members are frightened to come to work. Anxious police officers worry about a future attack, even as they relive the one that took place. The citadel of democracy is almost inaccessible to the public it is supposed to welcome and serve. The January 6, 2021, assault has shaken the foundations of the Capitol, a symbol of American strength and unity, transforming how lawmakers view their surroundings and one another. A dark mood lingers, and the scars will be long in healing. “I have colleagues, to be honest with you, I can’t stand looking at, and I don’t want to get into an elevator with them when we are going to roll-call votes,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., referring to Republicans he considers complicit in the attack a year ago and unapologetic about it today. The Capitol has been the site of significant violence over the centuries. There was its torching by British troops in 1814, the bloody caning of Sen. Charles Sumner in 1856, a spray of gunfire from the House spectator’s gallery by Puerto Rican nationalists that wounded five representatives in 1954, the murder of two Capitol Police officers standing guard in 1998, and the killing of another at a traffic barricade last April. But the attack of a year ago was uniquely shattering in that it was a brutal effort by marauding Americans to keep former President Donald Trump in office despite his election loss by interrupting one of the nation’s essential civic functions: the tallying of the electoral votes for president. Lawmakers who were on hand are still struggling to comprehend it. “That’s the difference,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who had argued that Congress should shut down Thursday to spare staff workers the trauma of reliving a horrific day. “The last time the Capitol was breached and taken over was in 1814 by British forces. Here, we had our fellow Americans storming the Capitol.” The events of last year have turned everyday spaces in the Capitol into testaments to what transpired. Here is a spot where they fought their way into the building; there is a window they broke or a wall they scaled. A heavily-trafficked marble staircase on the Senate side of the building is no longer just a way to reach the second floor. It is now etched in memory as the stairway where Officer Eugene Goodman, acting alone, diverted a mob away from a set of back stairs, allowing Vice President Mike Pence and senators to escape unharmed to a secure location before the intruders breached the Senate chamber. Senators cannot help but look at the presiding officer’s desk in their inner sanctum and remember that it was roughly commandeered by Trump supporters — one shirtless and wearing horns on his head — who rifled through the historic desks in a chamber considered sacred by its usual occupants. “Have you ever had your house broken into or been a victim of a burglary, and when you walked back into the house, it felt differently, it felt violated?” asked Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. “I felt that way for the longest time — and I still do.” In the House, the speaker’s lobby, a narrow, portrait-lined hallway off the floor where lawmakers could relax and kibitz with reporters, is now the place where the mob tried to break through glass and a hastily erected barricade before one of them, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed. McGovern, chair of the House Rules Committee, who was presiding over the chamber just moments before, was standing near the entryway as the intruders approached the door, putting them within reach of lawmakers. “If you want me to describe what hate looks like, I tell you it is what I saw in the eyes of those people smashing the windows to try to get to us,” said McGovern. “I still have a tough time coming to grips with the fact that it happened. All of us have to walk through the speaker’s lobby every day and relive that day.” For others, the ever-present reminders of the attack are the officers who were charged with repelling it as best they could, sustaining serious injuries as they did so. “I remember them with their faces cut, and I see and talk to them every day,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who as chair of the Rules Committee was a central figure in the counting of electoral ballots. “It is the faces of the officers that trigger that day for me. It is a constant reminder of what they did and what they are still up against.” One of the joys of the Capitol before the assault and the ongoing pandemic was its status as a working landmark, a place where nationally recognized political figures hurried through hallways crowded with school groups and awestruck tourists craned their necks to peer up at the dome from the Rotunda. But continuing health and security concerns have kept the building mostly closed off, even after the National Guard troops summoned to secure the Capitol in the wake of the riot were sent home and the 7-foot-high, razor-wire-topped fence that ominously encircled the complex was removed. Much of the time, the once-vibrant Capitol seems eerily empty and footsteps echo loudly off the marble floors. “It is sad,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the House majority leader, who has spent countless hours in the Capitol over the last 40 years and said he hoped it could host visitors again at some point. “It is a stark change.” In the ensuing 12 months, Democrats and Republicans have inhabited almost parallel universes when it comes to the assault. Democrats, via a special House committee formed after the Senate rejected a bipartisan commission, continue to press for accountability for those who took part and those who instigated it, starting with Trump. Republicans have increasingly sought to play down or even deny the attack, characterizing it as little more than a routine protest. It appears few Republicans will be on hand to commemorate the anniversary, with many senators scheduled to be at a funeral for a former colleague in Georgia. The only Republican lawmakers who have publicized an event are two far-right members of the House closely allied with Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who have promised to “expose the truth” about Jan. 6 during a news conference on Capitol Hill. Republicans say they see partisanship at work, calling the metal detectors outrageous and accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats of trying to win political advantage by demonizing their party. On Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., one of the chief objectors to counting the electoral ballots a year ago, said in an op-ed for Fox News that the “day’s true legacy was the left’s attempt to use the Capitol unrest to foster a permanent climate of fear and oppression.” Other Republicans have tried to deflect responsibility, faulting the Democratic speaker for the inadequate security preparations at the Capitol that allowed the breach to occur, or changing the subject altogether. “I think we’ve gotten over it,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader, said in a recent interview. “We’ve gotten back to normal and are doing the people’s business and having raucous debates over how we see things.” But to Democrats, there will not be any getting over it until Republicans disavow Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and acknowledge that the Jan. 6 assault was a criminal attempt to overturn legitimate election results. “When there are people in the Senate who refuse to tell their supporters the truth about Donald Trump’s big lie, I think it has made it harder to work together,” said Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo. “They certainly know better, and it has created a real risk to democracy.” But Hoyer still holds out hope. “Ultimately, I believe democracy really works,” he said. “It doesn’t work overnight, and it doesn’t work perfectly. But ultimately, people get what they want over time.”

One year later, assault still casts a pall over the Capitol and its occupants

Hundreds of people are still awaiting trial for their alleged role in the Capitol riots of January 6th last year, while over 150 others have pleaded guilty.

United States: Hundreds await trial for their role in Capitol insurrection

Infrastructure funding has traditionally been a broadly bipartisan issue on Capitol Hill, but President Joe Biden’s sweeping infrastructure bill passed Friday night mostly along party lines.

Only 19 members of Congress broke with their parties on the bill, which passed 228-206 with Democrats largely supporting the legislation and Republicans mostly opposed.

So who were those 19 lawmakers — 13 Republicans and six Democrats — who bucked their parties? They can be broken down roughly into three camps: Republicans who consulted with negotiators on the bill; Republicans who maintain the party’s traditional view that funding infrastructure is more important than fighting a president of a different party; and members of the liberal group known as the Squad.

The Squad

Six Democrats who are part of the progressive group known as “The Squad” — Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — voted against Biden’s plan to spend $550 billion in new funds over 10 years to shore up roads, bridges and highways, improve internet access and modernize the nation’s power grid.

The Squad has grown from four to six members since 2019, when Ocasio-Cortez, the highest-profile progressive on Capitol Hill, entered Congress. Its members were among the leading supporters of the strategy to use the infrastructure bill as leverage for passing Biden’s broader agenda: a $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate change bill.

Ocasio-Cortez has argued that the provisions in Biden’s bill to fight climate change are needed to offset the impact on the environment from a surge in funding for construction projects.

Passing the infrastructure bill without the larger domestic policy package “makes our emissions &amp; climate crisis worse,” she wrote on Twitter in October. “It keeps us in the emissions red.”

Her position was shared by the nearly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus until centrist Democrats who had been holdouts on the broader bill pledged Friday night that they would vote for it no later than the week of Nov. 15, unless the Congressional Budget Office determines its costs are “inconsistent” with the $1.85 trillion estimate put forth by Biden’s staff.

While most progressives then agreed to vote for the bill, members of the Squad did not view the centrists’ assurances as good enough and chose to stick with their position of demanding both bills pass at the same time. Bush said that passing the infrastructure bill alone “jeopardized our leverage” on the broader bill — which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, health care subsidies and a four-week paid family and medical leave program — and endangered progressives’ ability to “improve the livelihood of our health care workers, our children, our caregivers, our seniors, and the future of our environment.”

Still, Pressley cast her vote against the infrastructure bill after it had enough votes to pass.

That position infuriated some moderate Democrats. One of them, Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York, equated the opposition of left-leaning fellow New Yorkers like Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman with far-right Republicans like Lee Zeldin of New York for voting against a bill that would funnel billions of dollars into the state for subways, sewers and broadband.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Suozzi, who is contemplating a run for governor, told reporters at a New York political conclave in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Saturday. “These are two sides of the same coin: People so far out on the fringe instead of trying to get stuff done to help people and make people's lives better. That’s what people are sick and tired of.”

Republican ‘Problem Solvers’

Eight Republicans who voted in favor of the infrastructure bill — Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Andrew Garbarino of New York, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, John Katko of New York, Tom Reed of New York, Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey and Fred Upton of Michigan — were part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers who helped negotiate the infrastructure bill this summer, consulting with centrists in the Senate.

The group known as the Problem Solvers Caucus, including Fitzpatrick, the Republican co-chairman, had once hoped to deliver as many as 29 Republican House votes for the bill but saw members fall away once Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and other top Republicans opposed it as they ramped up their campaign against Biden’s agenda.

Still, with improvements to highways, bridges, dams, public transit, rail, ports, airports, water quality and broadband coming to the districts, eight members of the group cast their votes in favor of the plan.

Garbarino, who represents part of Long Island, cited the benefits for New York — including $24.9 billion for highways, bridges and transit; $15 billion to replace lead service lines for drinking water; and $470 million for New York’s Kennedy, La Guardia, MacArthur and Republic airports — among his reasons for embracing the bill.

The vote “was about roads, bridges, and clean water,” he said. “It was about real people, and the tangible action Congress could take to better their lives by rebuilding and revitalizing our nation’s crumbling infrastructure.”

The Republicans who voted in favor of the bill faced backlash from some hard-right members of their party. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted their office phone numbers on Twitter and accused them of handing over their “voting cards to Nancy Pelosi to pass Joe Biden’s communist takeover of America.”

Republican Traditionalists on Infrastructure

A final group of five House Republicans joined members of the Problem Solvers Caucus in bucking their party to support the bill. This group — Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Don Young of Alaska, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, David B. McKinley of West Virginia and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey — can be roughly defined as embracing the party’s traditionalist view of funding infrastructure.

Young, 88, is the Republican Party’s longest-serving member, having represented Alaska for 25 terms. He endorsed the bill in September, arguing the party has always supported funding roads and bridges and emphasizing that past infrastructure votes were “darn near” unanimous.

“We need infrastructure in this country now,” Young said. “This is the last opportunity we have to make sure those potholes are filled, those airports run right, that bridges are safe and our economy can continue to grow.”

Others, much newer to Congress, said they shared Young’s view on the issue.

Malliotakis, who is in her first term representing Staten Island, released a statement explaining her vote that listed various projects the funding could support in her community, including “completing the High-Occupancy Vehicles lane on the Staten Island Expressway,” fortifying coastal neighborhoods and expanding “our sewer systems to deal with the next Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Ida.”

“Simply put, it’s this type of investment that will not only save city residents’ time and money, but also their properties and lives,” she said.

Infrastructure funding has traditionally been a broadly bipartisan issue on Capitol Hill, but President Joe Biden’s sweeping infrastructure bill passed Friday night mostly along party lines.

Infrastructure funding has traditionally been a broadly bipartisan issue on Capitol Hill, but President Joe Biden’s sweeping infrastructure bill passed Friday night mostly along party lines. Only 19 members of Congress broke with their parties on the bill, which passed 228-206 with Democrats largely supporting the legislation and Republicans mostly opposed. So who were those 19 lawmakers — 13 Republicans and six Democrats — who bucked their parties? They can be broken down roughly into three camps: Republicans who consulted with negotiators on the bill; Republicans who maintain the party’s traditional view that funding infrastructure is more important than fighting a president of a different party; and members of the liberal group known as the Squad. The Squad Six Democrats who are part of the progressive group known as “The Squad” — Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — voted against Biden’s plan to spend $550 billion in new funds over 10 years to shore up roads, bridges and highways, improve internet access and modernize the nation’s power grid. The Squad has grown from four to six members since 2019, when Ocasio-Cortez, the highest-profile progressive on Capitol Hill, entered Congress. Its members were among the leading supporters of the strategy to use the infrastructure bill as leverage for passing Biden’s broader agenda: a $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate change bill. Ocasio-Cortez has argued that the provisions in Biden’s bill to fight climate change are needed to offset the impact on the environment from a surge in funding for construction projects. Passing the infrastructure bill without the larger domestic policy package “makes our emissions & climate crisis worse,” she wrote on Twitter in October. “It keeps us in the emissions red.” Her position was shared by the nearly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus until centrist Democrats who had been holdouts on the broader bill pledged Friday night that they would vote for it no later than the week of Nov. 15, unless the Congressional Budget Office determines its costs are “inconsistent” with the $1.85 trillion estimate put forth by Biden’s staff. While most progressives then agreed to vote for the bill, members of the Squad did not view the centrists’ assurances as good enough and chose to stick with their position of demanding both bills pass at the same time. Bush said that passing the infrastructure bill alone “jeopardized our leverage” on the broader bill — which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, health care subsidies and a four-week paid family and medical leave program — and endangered progressives’ ability to “improve the livelihood of our health care workers, our children, our caregivers, our seniors, and the future of our environment.” Still, Pressley cast her vote against the infrastructure bill after it had enough votes to pass. That position infuriated some moderate Democrats. One of them, Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York, equated the opposition of left-leaning fellow New Yorkers like Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman with far-right Republicans like Lee Zeldin of New York for voting against a bill that would funnel billions of dollars into the state for subways, sewers and broadband. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Suozzi, who is contemplating a run for governor, told reporters at a New York political conclave in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Saturday. “These are two sides of the same coin: People so far out on the fringe instead of trying to get stuff done to help people and make people's lives better. That’s what people are sick and tired of.” Republican ‘Problem Solvers’ Eight Republicans who voted in favor of the infrastructure bill — Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Andrew Garbarino of New York, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, John Katko of New York, Tom Reed of New York, Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey and Fred Upton of Michigan — were part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers who helped negotiate the infrastructure bill this summer, consulting with centrists in the Senate. The group known as the Problem Solvers Caucus, including Fitzpatrick, the Republican co-chairman, had once hoped to deliver as many as 29 Republican House votes for the bill but saw members fall away once Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and other top Republicans opposed it as they ramped up their campaign against Biden’s agenda. Still, with improvements to highways, bridges, dams, public transit, rail, ports, airports, water quality and broadband coming to the districts, eight members of the group cast their votes in favor of the plan. Garbarino, who represents part of Long Island, cited the benefits for New York — including $24.9 billion for highways, bridges and transit; $15 billion to replace lead service lines for drinking water; and $470 million for New York’s Kennedy, La Guardia, MacArthur and Republic airports — among his reasons for embracing the bill. The vote “was about roads, bridges, and clean water,” he said. “It was about real people, and the tangible action Congress could take to better their lives by rebuilding and revitalizing our nation’s crumbling infrastructure.” The Republicans who voted in favor of the bill faced backlash from some hard-right members of their party. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted their office phone numbers on Twitter and accused them of handing over their “voting cards to Nancy Pelosi to pass Joe Biden’s communist takeover of America.” Republican Traditionalists on Infrastructure A final group of five House Republicans joined members of the Problem Solvers Caucus in bucking their party to support the bill. This group — Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Don Young of Alaska, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, David B. McKinley of West Virginia and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey — can be roughly defined as embracing the party’s traditionalist view of funding infrastructure. Young, 88, is the Republican Party’s longest-serving member, having represented Alaska for 25 terms. He endorsed the bill in September, arguing the party has always supported funding roads and bridges and emphasizing that past infrastructure votes were “darn near” unanimous. “We need infrastructure in this country now,” Young said. “This is the last opportunity we have to make sure those potholes are filled, those airports run right, that bridges are safe and our economy can continue to grow.” Others, much newer to Congress, said they shared Young’s view on the issue. Malliotakis, who is in her first term representing Staten Island, released a statement explaining her vote that listed various projects the funding could support in her community, including “completing the High-Occupancy Vehicles lane on the Staten Island Expressway,” fortifying coastal neighborhoods and expanding “our sewer systems to deal with the next Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Ida.” “Simply put, it’s this type of investment that will not only save city residents’ time and money, but also their properties and lives,” she said.

In infrastructure votes, 19 members broke with their party

According to reports, the FBI and other key law enforcement agencies failed to act on a host of tips and other information ahead of January 6 that signaled a potentially violent event might unfold that day at the US Capitol.

Reports: FBI did not pay heed to mounting warnings of Jan 6 Capitol Riots

After a tumultuous week in Congress, during which deep divisions in the Democratic Party delayed progress on part of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, debate spilled over into the weekend as the party braced for intense negotiations in the weeks ahead.

Progressives on Sunday flatly rejected the latest demands from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a key swing vote for Democrats, to shrink Biden’s domestic policy agenda by more than half and to insert a provision to ensure that the federal government does not fund abortions.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said progressives would not agree to reduce Biden’s 10-year, $3.5 trillion social safety net and climate bill to $1.5 trillion, as Manchin requested.

“That’s not going to happen,” Jayapal said on CNN's “State of the Union.” “That’s too small to get our priorities in. It’s going to be somewhere between $1.5 and $3.5, and I think the White House is working on that right now. Remember: What we want to deliver is child care, paid leave, climate change.”

Manchin said in an interview with National Review last week that he was insisting that the legislation include the Hyde Amendment, which states that Medicaid will not pay for an abortion unless the woman’s life is in danger or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.

The Hyde Amendment has been reauthorized every year since 1976, but Biden did not include it in his latest budget proposal. During the presidential race, his campaign initially said he supported the amendment, but he later reversed course and condemned it.

Jayapal, who was one of three members of Congress who testified last week about their personal experiences of having an abortion, said she opposed Manchin’s demand.

“The Hyde Amendment is something the majority of the country does not support,” she said.

However, Jayapal and other progressives said they were willing to compromise on the package’s price tag. Several said they were discussing whether to cut certain programs from their agenda entirely or to reduce the duration of the bill’s funding — to five years from 10 years, for example.

“We can front-load the benefits and have less years,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Jayapal said that progressives were willing to explore shortening the length of some components of the funding bill to decrease its cost, but that new clean-energy standards needed to stay in the legislation for a decade.

“It takes time to cut carbon emissions,” she said.

Debate has raged on Capitol Hill over the past week over Biden’s domestic agenda. The nearly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus blocked a House vote on his $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which is favored by the Democrats’ centrist wing. The more liberal lawmakers sought leverage to secure passage of the president’s larger $3.5 trillion domestic policy bill, which some centrist Democrats have not endorsed.

With slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, nearly every Democratic vote is needed to pass both bills.

Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and majority leader, have assured the Congressional Progressive Caucus that both bills will advance as part of a “two-track” process.

“We’re trying to pass some of the most significant legislation to help working families — throughout New York and around the country — that’s been done since Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Schumer said at a news conference in New York City on Sunday. “It takes a little time. I believe we’re on track to pass both the bipartisan infrastructure bill as well as the reconciliation Build Back Better bill, and our goal is to get both bills done in the next month.”

In a letter to lawmakers Saturday, Pelosi urged passage of the infrastructure bill by the end of the month and signaled that Democratic leaders were continuing to negotiate the broader social policy and climate bill with Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., two party holdouts who are needed to pass legislation in the Senate.

“Again, we will and must pass both bills soon,” Pelosi wrote. “We have the responsibility and the opportunity to do so.”

Sinema on Saturday released a statement condemning the delay of the infrastructure vote, calling it a “failure” and “deeply disappointing for communities across our country.”

“Denying Americans millions of good-paying jobs, safer roads, cleaner water, more reliable electricity and better broadband only hurts everyday families,” she said.

But Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chair of the Budget Committee, expressed confidence in the progressives’ negotiating position, pointing to signals from the White House that their faction was right to push for a more ambitious legislative agenda.

“We’ve got the president of the United States on our side,” Sanders said on ABC's “This Week” on Sunday. “Got 96% of the members of the Democratic caucus in the House on our side. We got all but two senators at this point in the Democratic caucus on our side. We’re going to win this thing.”

Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser to Biden, predicted that both liberals and centrists would have to give some to reach a deal.

“People will be disappointed. People will not get everything we want,” he said on NBC's “Meet the Press.” “We’re going to fight until we get both bills.”

Speaking on “State of the Union,” Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Senate Democrat, agreed that some big choices lie ahead.

“We have to ask that very fundamental question,” he said. “Should we do everything to a limited degree, or should we really invest ourselves in the most important things?”

After a tumultuous week in Congress, during which deep divisions in the Democratic Party delayed progress on part of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, debate spilled over into the weekend as the party braced for intense negotiations in the weeks ahead.

After a tumultuous week in Congress, during which deep divisions in the Democratic Party delayed progress on part of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, debate spilled over into the weekend as the party braced for intense negotiations in the weeks ahead. Progressives on Sunday flatly rejected the latest demands from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a key swing vote for Democrats, to shrink Biden’s domestic policy agenda by more than half and to insert a provision to ensure that the federal government does not fund abortions. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said progressives would not agree to reduce Biden’s 10-year, $3.5 trillion social safety net and climate bill to $1.5 trillion, as Manchin requested. “That’s not going to happen,” Jayapal said on CNN's “State of the Union.” “That’s too small to get our priorities in. It’s going to be somewhere between $1.5 and $3.5, and I think the White House is working on that right now. Remember: What we want to deliver is child care, paid leave, climate change.” Manchin said in an interview with National Review last week that he was insisting that the legislation include the Hyde Amendment, which states that Medicaid will not pay for an abortion unless the woman’s life is in danger or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. The Hyde Amendment has been reauthorized every year since 1976, but Biden did not include it in his latest budget proposal. During the presidential race, his campaign initially said he supported the amendment, but he later reversed course and condemned it. Jayapal, who was one of three members of Congress who testified last week about their personal experiences of having an abortion, said she opposed Manchin’s demand. “The Hyde Amendment is something the majority of the country does not support,” she said. However, Jayapal and other progressives said they were willing to compromise on the package’s price tag. Several said they were discussing whether to cut certain programs from their agenda entirely or to reduce the duration of the bill’s funding — to five years from 10 years, for example. “We can front-load the benefits and have less years,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said on “Fox News Sunday.” Jayapal said that progressives were willing to explore shortening the length of some components of the funding bill to decrease its cost, but that new clean-energy standards needed to stay in the legislation for a decade. “It takes time to cut carbon emissions,” she said. Debate has raged on Capitol Hill over the past week over Biden’s domestic agenda. The nearly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus blocked a House vote on his $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which is favored by the Democrats’ centrist wing. The more liberal lawmakers sought leverage to secure passage of the president’s larger $3.5 trillion domestic policy bill, which some centrist Democrats have not endorsed. With slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, nearly every Democratic vote is needed to pass both bills. Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and majority leader, have assured the Congressional Progressive Caucus that both bills will advance as part of a “two-track” process. “We’re trying to pass some of the most significant legislation to help working families — throughout New York and around the country — that’s been done since Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Schumer said at a news conference in New York City on Sunday. “It takes a little time. I believe we’re on track to pass both the bipartisan infrastructure bill as well as the reconciliation Build Back Better bill, and our goal is to get both bills done in the next month.” In a letter to lawmakers Saturday, Pelosi urged passage of the infrastructure bill by the end of the month and signaled that Democratic leaders were continuing to negotiate the broader social policy and climate bill with Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., two party holdouts who are needed to pass legislation in the Senate. “Again, we will and must pass both bills soon,” Pelosi wrote. “We have the responsibility and the opportunity to do so.” Sinema on Saturday released a statement condemning the delay of the infrastructure vote, calling it a “failure” and “deeply disappointing for communities across our country.” “Denying Americans millions of good-paying jobs, safer roads, cleaner water, more reliable electricity and better broadband only hurts everyday families,” she said. But Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chair of the Budget Committee, expressed confidence in the progressives’ negotiating position, pointing to signals from the White House that their faction was right to push for a more ambitious legislative agenda. “We’ve got the president of the United States on our side,” Sanders said on ABC's “This Week” on Sunday. “Got 96% of the members of the Democratic caucus in the House on our side. We got all but two senators at this point in the Democratic caucus on our side. We’re going to win this thing.” Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser to Biden, predicted that both liberals and centrists would have to give some to reach a deal. “People will be disappointed. People will not get everything we want,” he said on NBC's “Meet the Press.” “We’re going to fight until we get both bills.” Speaking on “State of the Union,” Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Senate Democrat, agreed that some big choices lie ahead. “We have to ask that very fundamental question,” he said. “Should we do everything to a limited degree, or should we really invest ourselves in the most important things?”

Progressives stand firm on priorities as infrastructure debate continues

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

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

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

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

The US Capitol was on high alert on Saturday ahead of a rally in support of the Pro-Trump rioters who had ransacked the area during the infamous January 6 unrest.

Small group of Trump supporters rally in US Capitol amid high security

Seven US Capitol Police officers filed suit against former president Donald&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;and members of right-wing extremist groups on Thursday, accusing them of being directly responsible for the January 6 attack on Congress.

The lawsuit is one of several that have been filed against&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;over the attempt by thousands of his supporters to prevent the congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden's November 2020 presidential election victory.

The latest suit was filed in US District Court in Washington by The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights on behalf of seven Capitol Police officers who battled&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;loyalists at the Capitol.

ALSO READ | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/nigerian-gunmen-free-dozens-of-kidnapped-seminary-pupils-says-teacher-408677">Nigerian gunmen free dozens of kidnapped seminary pupils, says teacher</a>

Among those named in the lawsuit are&nbsp;Trump, the&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;Campaign,&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;associate Roger Stone and members of right-wing extremist groups the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.

The suit alleges they engaged in an "unlawful effort to use force, intimidation, and threats to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 Presidential election."

"Because of Defendants' unlawful actions, Plaintiffs were violently assaulted, spat on, tear-gassed, bear-sprayed, subjected to racial slurs and epithets, and put in fear for their lives," the complaint said. Five of the police officers filing suit are Black.

Damon Hewitt,&nbsp;president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee, said the January 6 attack "was a blatant attempt to stifle the votes and voices of millions of Americans, particularly Black voters."

ALSO READ |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/south-asia/will-hunt-you-down-joe-biden-warns-kabul-bombers-vows-to-avenge-deaths-of-us-soldiers-408665">'Will hunt you down': Joe Biden warns Kabul bombers, vows to avenge deaths of US soldiers</a>

"For months after the 2020 election had been officially called, former president&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;and his associates made coordinated and systematic attempts to lodge their false claims of election fraud," Hewitt said.

"The lies of this conspiracy intentionally energized white supremacists and violent extremist groups and actively encouraged them to coordinate the violent attack on the Capitol."

Trump&nbsp;has also been targeted in lawsuits filed by Democratic lawmakers over the January 6 attack and a House Select Committee has opened an inquiry into the assault on Congress.

The select committee issued a sweeping request on Wednesday to the National Archives and seven government agencies for records related to the attack, including communications from&nbsp;Trump, members of his family, his top aides and dozens of other former members of his administration.

Trump&nbsp;has consistently refused to acknowledge his defeat to Biden and continues to make unfounded claims that he won the election.

The real estate mogul was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House in January for inciting insurrection but was acquitted by the Senate.

Seven US Capitol Police officers filed suit against former president Donald Trump and members of right-wing extremist groups on Thursday, accusing them of being directly responsible for the January 6 attack on Congress.

Seven US Capitol Police officers filed suit against former president Donald Trump and members of right-wing extremist groups on Thursday, accusing them of being directly responsible for the January 6 attack on Congress. The lawsuit is one of several that have been filed against Trump over the attempt by thousands of his supporters to prevent the congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden's November 2020 presidential election victory. The latest suit was filed in US District Court in Washington by The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights on behalf of seven Capitol Police officers who battled Trump loyalists at the Capitol. ALSO READ | Nigerian gunmen free dozens of kidnapped seminary pupils, says teacher Among those named in the lawsuit are Trump, the Trump Campaign, Trump associate Roger Stone and members of right-wing extremist groups the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. The suit alleges they engaged in an "unlawful effort to use force, intimidation, and threats to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 Presidential election." "Because of Defendants' unlawful actions, Plaintiffs were violently assaulted, spat on, tear-gassed, bear-sprayed, subjected to racial slurs and epithets, and put in fear for their lives," the complaint said. Five of the police officers filing suit are Black. Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee, said the January 6 attack "was a blatant attempt to stifle the votes and voices of millions of Americans, particularly Black voters." ALSO READ | 'Will hunt you down': Joe Biden warns Kabul bombers, vows to avenge deaths of US soldiers "For months after the 2020 election had been officially called, former president Trump and his associates made coordinated and systematic attempts to lodge their false claims of election fraud," Hewitt said. "The lies of this conspiracy intentionally energized white supremacists and violent extremist groups and actively encouraged them to coordinate the violent attack on the Capitol." Trump has also been targeted in lawsuits filed by Democratic lawmakers over the January 6 attack and a House Select Committee has opened an inquiry into the assault on Congress. The select committee issued a sweeping request on Wednesday to the National Archives and seven government agencies for records related to the attack, including communications from Trump, members of his family, his top aides and dozens of other former members of his administration. Trump has consistently refused to acknowledge his defeat to Biden and continues to make unfounded claims that he won the election. The real estate mogul was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House in January for inciting insurrection but was acquitted by the Senate.

US Capitol Police officers sue Donald Trump over January 6 attack

District of Columbia police officer Michael Fanone described being pulled into the crowd of rioters, beaten, "electrocuted again and again and again with a Taser," and robbed of his badge.

US police officers recount horrors from Capitol riots

Former US President Donald Trump’s supporters who stormed the US Capitol building had clear plans to carry out&nbsp;coordinated attacks and "disrupt democracy", senior Democrat Bennie Thompson said on Tuesday after starting the congressional inquiry into the January 6 riots.

An inquiry was opened on Tuesday to investigate the attack of Trump supporters at the Capitol police and Capitol building on January 06.

Also read |&nbsp;<a data-ctorig="https://www.wionews.com/videos/us-capitol-riots-man-from-florida-sentenced-to-8-months-in-prison-in-first-felony-sentence-399140" data-cturl="https://www.google.com/url?client=internal-element-cse&amp;cx=006054055338965708568:09spwrlibei&amp;q=https://www.wionews.com/videos/us-capitol-riots-man-from-florida-sentenced-to-8-months-in-prison-in-first-felony-sentence-399140&amp;sa=U&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjs7IiBwIPyAhWUwTgGHcLvDT0QFjACegQIARAC&amp;usg=AOvVaw1jr2GccyTkQImgF-lbARz-" dir="ltr" href="https://www.wionews.com/videos/us-capitol-riots-man-from-florida-sentenced-to-8-months-in-prison-in-first-felony-sentence-399140" target="_blank">US&nbsp;Capitol&nbsp;Riots: Man from Florida sentenced to 8 months in prison</a>

Armed with video and picture evidence, Thompson claimed the Capitol riot was the most violent attack since the British assailed the US legislature in 1814.

"A violent mob was pointed toward the&nbsp;Capitol&nbsp;and told to win a trial by combat. Some descended on this city with clear plans to disrupt our democracy,"&nbsp;Thompson said. "We know there is evidence of a coordinated planned attack. We know that the men and women who stormed the Capitol wanted to derail the peaceful transfer of power in this country."

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/directionless-and-poor-management-senate-report-highlights-faulty-leadership-during-capitol-riots-390235">Directionless and poor management: Senate report highlights faulty leadership during Capitol riots</a>

On the first day of the hearing, the lawmakers will be hearing first-hand accounts of the Capitol police officers who were attacked mercilessly by the rioters, while hoping to find leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.

Four police officers, including Michael Fanone who was stun-gunned and brutally beaten by protestors, are scheduled to testify at the hearing today. One of the officers described this attack like a 'medieval battle’ and claimed he feared he would die.

It was "something from a medieval battle. We fought hand to hand, inch by inch, to prevent an invasion of the&nbsp;Capitol," said Aquilino Gonell, a Capitol police officer. He also added that at the moment all he could think was "this is how I'm going to die, defending this entrance".

The hearing chair said it is very clear that the Capitol attack was coordinated to derail the peaceful transfer of power. The attack took place on the same day when the certification process of Joe Biden’s November presidential election victory was taking place in the Capitol building.

Former US President Donald Trump’s supporters who stormed the US Capitol building had clear plans to carry out coordinated attacks and "disrupt democracy", senior Democrat Bennie Thompson said on Tuesday after starting the congressional inquiry into the January 6 riots.

Former US President Donald Trump’s supporters who stormed the US Capitol building had clear plans to carry out coordinated attacks and "disrupt democracy", senior Democrat Bennie Thompson said on Tuesday after starting the congressional inquiry into the January 6 riots. An inquiry was opened on Tuesday to investigate the attack of Trump supporters at the Capitol police and Capitol building on January 06. Also read | US Capitol Riots: Man from Florida sentenced to 8 months in prison Armed with video and picture evidence, Thompson claimed the Capitol riot was the most violent attack since the British assailed the US legislature in 1814. "A violent mob was pointed toward the Capitol and told to win a trial by combat. Some descended on this city with clear plans to disrupt our democracy," Thompson said. "We know there is evidence of a coordinated planned attack. We know that the men and women who stormed the Capitol wanted to derail the peaceful transfer of power in this country." Also read | Directionless and poor management: Senate report highlights faulty leadership during Capitol riots On the first day of the hearing, the lawmakers will be hearing first-hand accounts of the Capitol police officers who were attacked mercilessly by the rioters, while hoping to find leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. Four police officers, including Michael Fanone who was stun-gunned and brutally beaten by protestors, are scheduled to testify at the hearing today. One of the officers described this attack like a 'medieval battle’ and claimed he feared he would die. It was "something from a medieval battle. We fought hand to hand, inch by inch, to prevent an invasion of the Capitol," said Aquilino Gonell, a Capitol police officer. He also added that at the moment all he could think was "this is how I'm going to die, defending this entrance". The hearing chair said it is very clear that the Capitol attack was coordinated to derail the peaceful transfer of power. The attack took place on the same day when the certification process of Joe Biden’s November presidential election victory was taking place in the Capitol building.

US Capitol rioters had coordinated plans to disrupt democracy': Hearing chair

A Florida man was sentenced to eight months in prison for his role in the Capitol riots. This is the first sentencing of someone convicted for a felony over the attack.

US Capitol Riots: Man from Florida sentenced to 8 months in prison in first felony sentence

George Floyd's family met with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and congressional leaders on Tuesday, a year after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody.

US: George Floyd's family visits US Capitol, marks one year of Floyd's killing

US Capitol stood unprotected by National Guard for the first time in about five months on Monday. Last 2149 out of 26,000 troops departed on Monday their mission to protect Congress formally ended.

The troops were mobilized after hundreds of supporters of then-president Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, halting the joint session to confirm Trump's rival Joe Biden as winner of the presidential election.

Some broke into lawmakers' offices, and called for the killing of lawmakers and vice president Mike Pence, who was presiding over the session.

Amid fears of more threats around and following the January 20 inauguration of Biden, thousands of Guard troops were mobilized, patrolling the Capitol area day and night while a large fence encircled the grounds, making it appear a building under siege.

The troops remained in Washington for months after the inauguration as what many dubbed an insurrection was investigated.

Trump, who was impeached for encouraging the assault, later claimed the attackers were "zero threat" to lawmakers and downplayed the episode.

The FBI has arrested and charged about 440 people involved in January 6 attacks. Dozens of them are associated with armed militia groups.

(With inputs from agencies)

US Capitol stood unprotected by National Guard for the first time in about five months on Monday. Last 2149 out of 26,000 troops departed on Monday their mission to protect Congress formally ended.

US Capitol stood unprotected by National Guard for the first time in about five months on Monday. Last 2149 out of 26,000 troops departed on Monday their mission to protect Congress formally ended. The troops were mobilized after hundreds of supporters of then-president Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, halting the joint session to confirm Trump's rival Joe Biden as winner of the presidential election. Some broke into lawmakers' offices, and called for the killing of lawmakers and vice president Mike Pence, who was presiding over the session. Amid fears of more threats around and following the January 20 inauguration of Biden, thousands of Guard troops were mobilized, patrolling the Capitol area day and night while a large fence encircled the grounds, making it appear a building under siege. The troops remained in Washington for months after the inauguration as what many dubbed an insurrection was investigated. Trump, who was impeached for encouraging the assault, later claimed the attackers were "zero threat" to lawmakers and downplayed the episode. The FBI has arrested and charged about 440 people involved in January 6 attacks. Dozens of them are associated with armed militia groups. (With inputs from agencies)

National Guard troops exit US Capitol months after January 6 attack

US House of Representatives have narrowly approved $1.9 billion Capitol security bill. This bill aims to bolster security at the US Capitol. The bill has been passed with 213-212 votes.

US House of Representatives passes $1.9bn bill to bolster security at Capitol

Donald Trump encouraged the Capitol rioters and so earned his Facebook ban, but the social media giant's rules are in "shambles" and need fixing, the co-chair of the network's oversight panel said Sunday.

The panel agreed just days ago that Facebook was right to oust the ex-president for his comments regarding the deadly January 6 rampage, though it sidestepped an overall decision on whether he will ever be allowed back.

"He issued these statements which were just egging on -- with perfunctory asking for peace -- but mostly he was just egging them on to continue," oversight body co-chair Michael McConnell told Fox News Sunday.

Trump was suspended from Facebook and Instagram after posting a video during the attack by his fired-up supporters challenging his election loss, in which he told them: "We love you, you're very special."

"He (Trump) bears responsibility for his situation. He put himself in this bed and he can sleep in it," McConnell added.

However, the panel gave the company six months to justify why his ban should be permanent -- leaving a grenade in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's lap on the issue of free speech, and spotlighting weaknesses in the platform's plan for self-regulation.

"We gave them (Facebook) a certain amount of time to get... their house in order," McConnell said. "They needed some time because their rules are shambles... They are unclear, they are internally inconsistent."

McConnell, a constitutional law professor at Stanford, noted that the social media giant was not violating Trump's free speech rights.

- 'Facebook is not a government' -

"The simple willing answer is private companies are not bound by the First Amendment," he said referring to the US constitution. "He's a customer. Facebook is not a government, and he is not a citizen of Facebook."

In its ruling, the oversight board -- envisioned by Zuckerberg as the equivalent of a "supreme court" for thorny content decisions -- made additional recommendations on dealing with potentially harmful content from world leaders.

The panel "called on Facebook to address widespread confusion about how decisions relating to influential users are made" and said, "considerations of newsworthiness should not take priority when urgent action is needed to prevent significant harm."

Twitter has permanently suspended Trump after the Capitol riot, saying there was a risk he would further incite violence, due to his multiple tweets disputing Joe Biden's presidential election victory.

Twitter on Thursday confirmed that it had pulled the plug on several Trump-linked accounts trying to skirt the ban.

Social media had been key to Trump's political success, letting him fire off comments without having to explain or back claims.

At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, US lawmakers unleashed criticism at the leaders of the top social networks and promised new regulations.

Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, and Google's Sundar Pichai faced questions from lawmakers who blamed their platforms for political extremism, drug abuse, teen suicides and more.

Zuckerberg reiterated his belief that private companies should not be the judges of truth when it comes to what people say.

Donald Trump encouraged the Capitol rioters and so earned his Facebook ban, but the social media giant's rules are in "shambles" and need fixing, the co-chair of the network's oversight panel said Sunday.

Donald Trump encouraged the Capitol rioters and so earned his Facebook ban, but the social media giant's rules are in "shambles" and need fixing, the co-chair of the network's oversight panel said Sunday. The panel agreed just days ago that Facebook was right to oust the ex-president for his comments regarding the deadly January 6 rampage, though it sidestepped an overall decision on whether he will ever be allowed back. "He issued these statements which were just egging on -- with perfunctory asking for peace -- but mostly he was just egging them on to continue," oversight body co-chair Michael McConnell told Fox News Sunday. Trump was suspended from Facebook and Instagram after posting a video during the attack by his fired-up supporters challenging his election loss, in which he told them: "We love you, you're very special." "He (Trump) bears responsibility for his situation. He put himself in this bed and he can sleep in it," McConnell added. However, the panel gave the company six months to justify why his ban should be permanent -- leaving a grenade in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's lap on the issue of free speech, and spotlighting weaknesses in the platform's plan for self-regulation. "We gave them (Facebook) a certain amount of time to get... their house in order," McConnell said. "They needed some time because their rules are shambles... They are unclear, they are internally inconsistent." McConnell, a constitutional law professor at Stanford, noted that the social media giant was not violating Trump's free speech rights. - 'Facebook is not a government' - "The simple willing answer is private companies are not bound by the First Amendment," he said referring to the US constitution. "He's a customer. Facebook is not a government, and he is not a citizen of Facebook." In its ruling, the oversight board -- envisioned by Zuckerberg as the equivalent of a "supreme court" for thorny content decisions -- made additional recommendations on dealing with potentially harmful content from world leaders. The panel "called on Facebook to address widespread confusion about how decisions relating to influential users are made" and said, "considerations of newsworthiness should not take priority when urgent action is needed to prevent significant harm." Twitter has permanently suspended Trump after the Capitol riot, saying there was a risk he would further incite violence, due to his multiple tweets disputing Joe Biden's presidential election victory. Twitter on Thursday confirmed that it had pulled the plug on several Trump-linked accounts trying to skirt the ban. Social media had been key to Trump's political success, letting him fire off comments without having to explain or back claims. At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, US lawmakers unleashed criticism at the leaders of the top social networks and promised new regulations. Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, and Google's Sundar Pichai faced questions from lawmakers who blamed their platforms for political extremism, drug abuse, teen suicides and more. Zuckerberg reiterated his belief that private companies should not be the judges of truth when it comes to what people say.

Donald Trump 'egged on' US Capitol rioters: Facebook oversight panel co-chair

US President Joe Biden made his first joint address to Congress, outlining his vision for the country and speaking to what he sees as his administration's initial accomplishments as he nears 100 days in office.

Biden's delivers first address to Congress, says America is dreaming & leading the world again

us-capitol

Us Capitol, News on Us Capitol, stories on Us Capitol, articles on Us Capitol, Us Capitol stories at Wion, Us Capitol news, Us Capitol latest news

us capitol