Category: News

They’re weary of the incessant conflicts. The inability to get past the 2020 election results. An endorsement strategy seemingly driven by a bruised and restless ego, rather than the party’s best interests. Channeling growing fatigue among rank-and-file Republicans, some of the GOP’s best-known heavyweights are increasingly defying former President Donald Trump in the wake of internecine conflicts from Georgia to Pennsylvania. Bold-face Republican names have never been so comfortable crossing Trump as in recent weeks. Former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former New Jersey Gov.…

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When Janet Yellen was tapped to join the Biden administration as Treasury secretary, she came with celebrity status — one of the world’s preeminent economists and the first woman to have led the Federal Reserve. More than a year later, as Democrats are grappling with decades-high inflation, stock market turmoil and rising recession fears, Yellen is rarely on center stage. She has surprised supporters by wielding less influence in the West Wing than her recent predecessors did in the job, which is often considered an administration’s chief economic policymaking post,…

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Here’s some good news on the gloomy international scene: Tensions will ease significantly between the U.S. and China soon, as the Biden administration slashes consumer tariffs and Beijing welcomes the move, at least privately. Expect a new round of trade negotiations too. The thaw comes after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen makes a big push for change, and as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, long dismissed as an also-ran, becomes a key player. President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping reluctantly go along. At least that’s the surprising outcome of a…

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Texas leaders strained to determine what went wrong after 19 students and two teachers died this week in the state’s latest mass shooting. But Republican Gov. Greg Abbott asserted the killer’s access to assault weapons wasn’t the problem. Abbott and top officials are instead revisiting efforts to bolster mental health services and harden school security as families grieve the tragic attack at Robb Elementary School, renewing a debate that last rocked Texas when a 2018 high school massacre killed 10 people. The state approved new laws in 2019 to arm…

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On Thursday, Senate Republicans are set to block legislation intended to combat domestic terrorism. And they’re all over the place on whether homegrown extremism even needs more federal attention. In the wake of a recent racist shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will hold a vote on House-passed legislation that would set up offices at the Justice Department, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to focus on domestic terrorism. The bill is expected to get few if any Republican votes, as the GOP widely views…

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During the day, the SSGT Willie de Leon Civic Center in Uvalde, Texas, served as a polling place for voters casting ballots in Texas’ primary runoff election. At night, parents filed into the building to learn if their children were still alive. The massacre of 19 children and two adults at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School on Tuesday turned Election Day in Texas and a handful of Southern states into a familiar ritual of sorrow, outrage and partisan bickering. Candidates took time from monitoring turnout to issue statements of condolence on…

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Nineteen children are dead after a gunman opened fire at a Texas elementary school on Tuesday, Texas officials said. The mass shooting comes less than two weeks after a man, who authorities say was motivated by racist ideology, shot and killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket, targeting a predominantly Black community. The latest tragedy once again horrified the country and sparked outrage, particularly from gun safety advocates who said the nation could no longer hide behind old excuses for these horrific killing sprees. The shooting happened at Robb Elementary…

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When Brian Kemp’s top donors huddled with the Georgia governor and his lieutenants at Atlanta’s Capital City Club earlier this year, they had reason to worry that his political career was about to come to an end. Former President Donald Trump had spent the previous year savaging the Republican governor for refusing to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, and he was bent on ousting the governor from office, recruiting and endorsing Kemp’s primary opponent. Few Republicans in recent years had survived Trump’s wrath. But the Kemp team reassured the nearly…

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After two strikeouts, don’t expect Senate Democrats to immediately swing for the fences again. There’s little appetite in the Democratic majority to publicly fall short on high-profile priorities so soon after the party’s failures to both weaken the filibuster to pass election reform and to approve President Joe Biden’s $1.7 trillion social spending bill. Instead, many Democrats are itching to get back to voting on bills that have plenty of GOP support, such as a new deal to fund the government or changing antitrust laws. Sure, Democrats will try to…

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As Capitol attack investigators dig into efforts by state-level Republicans to send Congress “alternative” slates of 2020 presidential electors, they’re zeroing in on the involvement of Donald Trump’s White House and campaign operations. As presidential electors gathered in December 2020 to affirm Joe Biden’s victory, the Republicans who would have been Trump’s electors in several states that Biden won gathered anyway to cast unofficial votes. In five of those states — Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia — those electors then signed certificates claiming they were “duly elected and qualified”…

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As we approached the 15th anniversary of POLITICO, I plunged into old files expecting to find a lot that would make me cringe. Cringe, I did, looking at some of the early stories, replete with typos, clunky writing, strained premises. More cringing: The first edition of our publication — January 23, 2007 — with its high school newspaper design and a red-black logo announcing the arrival of “THE POLITICO.” Just like in the early days of “TheFacebook,” we soon dropped the “THE.” I was ready to flinch, but did not,…

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It’s almost conventional wisdom right now that the news media is a fast-moving crisis, with mainstream news sources collapsing and Americans increasingly divided not only in what they read, but even what facts they choose to believe. How much worse will it get? Or is there a way out? The changes in the media industry make it nearly impossible to guess. When POLITICO was born 15 years ago, a digital-first politics site was considered downright disruptive in Washington, D.C. Today, that sounds almost quaint compared to what was on the…

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Late last year, tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his protégé, Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, together devised a new way to raise big bucks for the 2022 campaign. Thiel had already cut a huge check funding a pro-Masters super PAC, but they came up with an unusual plan to put money directly into Masters’ campaign. They would create a non-fungible token — better known as an NFT, an exclusive, one-of-a-kind digital reproduction of a collectible item — of “Zero to One,” the bestselling business book the two published in 2014,…

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LOS ANGELES — The Omicron surge is depleting California teachers and keeping students home in unprecedented numbers, but political leaders aren’t yet willing to broach the most obvious alternative: distance learning. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic leaders who allowed school shutdowns early in the pandemic are holding firm on keeping classrooms open. They’ve had support from the California Teachers Association despite some educators on the ground saying that working conditions are untenable due to staff shortages. And school districts are going to extreme lengths to keep students in classrooms, pulling…

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Americans across the country were buzzing about a hot new website on Tuesday. The whiz kids behind it? The U.S. government. The Biden administration had launched the sign-up website for its initiative to send four free Covid tests to every U.S. household, a day earlier than expected. The news quickly spread everywhere, from the savvy precincts of Twitter to the group texts of ordinary senior citizens. The new site surged into the two top spots for page views on analytics.usa.gov immediately, and still occupied them Thursday morning. And people —…

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When Donald Trump was at the helm, America’s allies were deeply critical of his administration’s foreign policies. On the plus side, the freewheeling White House gave them wide-ranging access to top officials. After one year with President Joe Biden in charge, friendly nations say they’re much happier with U.S. foreign policy, but they’re frustrated by the lack of high-level access and plodding decision-making. In particular, many feel shut out of the national security policy process — but hope efforts to deter another Russian invasion of Ukraine could mark a turning…

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Some Democrats are balking at suggestions by the White House that they may have to drop their bid to revive their signature Child Tax Credit plan. One day after President Joe Biden appeared ready to concede it may fall by the wayside, some lawmakers said they are not giving up on the proposal, which is included in a sweeping spending package stalled in the Senate. “I certainly am not ready to throw in the towel,” said House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.). Sen. Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)…

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Republican mapmakers in Missouri weren’t expecting an intra-party fracas when they unveiled a redistricting proposal that would help the GOP maintain their lock on six of the state’s eight congressional seats. The chief source of the backlash, which is powered by the secretary of state and two Senate candidates: Why not gerrymander more to relegate Democrats to only one district? “We’re moving down the route of appeasement of the minority in our state,” said GOP state Sen. Bill Eigel, who has mounted a pressure campaign that could culminate in a…

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Donald Trump started his time as an utterly unprecedented former president before he was even technically a former president. On the morning of his last day in office, in the hours before the inauguration of Joe Biden, Trump left the White House and Washington, becoming the first president in 152 years to shun the swearing in of his successor, opting instead at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland for a militaristic send-off that included a 21-gun salute and a poke-in-the-eye playing of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” He made it clear in…

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