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Category: National Politics

  • Trump tries new tack against birthright citizenship after Supreme Court snub

    Trump tries new tack against birthright citizenship after Supreme Court snub

    President Donald Trump took another stab at restricting automatic citizenship for people born in the United States after the Supreme Court rejected his earlier attempt.

    In two executive orders signed Thursday, Trump reached for different legal maneuvers to test the limits of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.

    The first order said children would be ineligible if born to “alien enemies,” members of foreign terrorist organizations, or foreign lobbyists. The second order said children of people who fraudulently request tourist visas for the purpose of giving birth in the U.S. would not become citizens.

    Trump harshly criticized the Supreme Court’s June decision reaffirming that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil, including the children of undocumented immigrants, striking down his executive order from the first day of his second term.

    The new orders marked a fresh effort to overcome that setback and deliver on a campaign promise by expanding the categories of people who the administration argues fall outside the constitutional guarantee. Constitutional scholars broadly agree that the president lacks the authority to eliminate birthright citizenship unilaterally.

    “We had a bad decision, very unfair decision,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “Our country suffers because of it, and we’re ending it a different way.”

    The new orders were certain to face legal challenges, and if they survive, would affect far fewer people than the original. An estimated 15 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., while only a few thousand people are foreign lobbyists registered with the Justice Department.

    No significant populations of U.S. residents are designated as alien enemies or foreign terrorists, making that provision largely symbolic. The administration faces ongoing litigation over whether it can deport alleged gang members by treating them as alien enemies.

    The second executive order draws on the president’s authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to control international travel, according to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who appeared with Trump at the signing.

    “People come here, pretend to be a tourist, pretend to be a visitor, say they want to go to Disneyland, they want to go visit a monument or go to a national park. But the real reason they’re here is to have a child, to make that child automatic citizen, leave our country and then have a U.S. citizen child,” said Miller, arguing that lying on a visa application amounts to fraud and invalidates the visa.

    There is no official data on “birth tourism.” In 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

    Trump’s initial executive order sought to deny automatic citizenship to children of unauthorized immigrants and foreigners on temporary work, student and tourist visas — a population that some studies found numbers more than 150,000 a year. That order was based on a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 and grants citizenship to those born on U.S. soil who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the federal government.

    Two coalitions of Democrat-led states and several immigrant rights groups filed more than half a dozen lawsuits against the Trump administration. Those challenges led multiple federal courts to temporarily halt the administration from implementing the citizenship ban.

    A divided Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in June in one of the most closely watched cases of the recently concluded term. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the framers of the 14th Amendment intended to extend citizenship to virtually all people born on U.S. soil with limited exceptions for the children of diplomats and others.

    “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Roberts wrote. “We keep that promise today.”

    The Trump administration had argued for a narrower reading of the amendment, saying its language did not apply to people who were here illegally or temporarily because they had not demonstrated the necessary political allegiance to the country.

    The Supreme Court’s ruling marked a major loss for Trump, who had attended the oral arguments at the high court in April, becoming the first sitting president to do so.

    Amanda Frost, an immigration law professor at the University of Virginia, said significant parts of Trump’s new executive orders appear largely unconstitutional and at odds with the Supreme Court’s decision.

    “This is my very clear legal take: He cannot issue an executive order that saying that children of birthright tourism — even if the mother violates immigration law to come to the United States — are not U.S. citizens,” Frost said.

    Likewise, David Bier, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, said Trump cannot credibly argue that undocumented immigrants in the U.S. who are declared by his administration as “enemies” of the country are not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. government.

    “None of the [Supreme Court] justices adopted the logic that illegal immigration is an invasion or any of those types of thing,” Bier said “None of the conservatives used that line of argumentation.”

    Bier added that the president’s efforts on birthright tourism are “pretty obviously contrary to what the Supreme Court just ruled and are likely to get no further than the prior order did.”

  • ICE will release body camera video only when seen in the agency’s ‘best interests,’ policy says

    ICE will release body camera video only when seen in the agency’s ‘best interests,’ policy says

    Immigration and Customs Enforcement is moving to equip officers with body cameras in the next two months but the agency’s policy gives it broad control over what footage will be made public by specifying any releases must be in its “best interests.”

    After years of delays, ICE said its field officers nationwide will have body-worn cameras by the end of September. The rollout comes after recent fatal shootings by officers enforcing President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown have intensified pressure for accountability that the cameras could provide.

    But the agency’s body-worn camera policy could mean taxpayers who are pitching in tens of millions of dollars to pay for the cameras may be kept in the dark about some high-profile confrontations, at least in their immediate aftermath.

    The policy says ICE will promptly release video of shootings and other encounters in which its agents cause death or serious injury only after determining “it is in the best interests of the agency” to do so. That gives its director discretion to release recordings that reflect well on the agency’s image while working to keep others secret, experts on body camera policies said.

    Such selective releases are routine in some law enforcement agencies but usually not so clearly contemplated in policy, according to professor Christopher Schneider of Brandon University in Canada, a co-author of the new book Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform.

    “In some ways, ICE is saying the quiet part out loud,” he said. “Body-worn cameras are being used as contemporary image-work tools to present the police to the public in the most favorable way possible.”

    Body camera policy allows withholding some video

    The policy requires officers to activate cameras during routine enforcement activities, including while making arrests, executing search warrants and responding to emergencies.

    After shootings or other serious confrontations, a committee that includes top ICE officials and lawyers will review footage and recommend whether to release it promptly, according to the body camera policy issued in February 2025.

    If the answer is yes, the recording could be released within 72 hours. But if the ICE director finds that “specific and compelling circumstances” justify withholding the video, they have the authority to block or indefinitely delay the release, the policy says.

    The policy does not elaborate on such circumstances, and ICE did not respond to a question from the Associated Press about how it would make such decisions.

    Practices vary widely in the U.S. In Chicago, a police watchdog agency routinely releases body camera video of shootings and other serious use-of-force incidents within 60 days. In Philadelphia, the police department very rarely uses its discretion to release video of specific incidents and has no policy for when to do so.

    Even when footage is released, ICE’s policy will require the redaction of all officers’ identifying features such as their faces, names, and badge numbers to preserve their privacy.

    Schneider, who has studied body cameras since their use began spreading a decade ago, said he does not expect ICE to release footage of fatal shootings like those last month in Houston and Maine.

    He noted ICE’s sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, has not released footage of the January shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis even though it was captured on agents’ cameras. CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott told lawmakers in February that the video and other materials were under investigation and would be made public “when it’s appropriate.”

    ICE says all officers will have cameras by end of September

    ICE spent $30.9 million in July to purchase body camera equipment from Axon, the Arizona-based company that also manufactures Tasers, federal spending records show.

    The spending began one day after the fatal shooting of a 25-year-old motorist in Maine by an ICE officer with a history of violent behavior. Days earlier, another ICE officer shot and killed a homebuilder in Houston who was driving to work.

    Neither shooting was recorded with body cameras. That news angered members of Congress, who had given ICE $20 million to purchase body cameras in a bill passed to end a partial government shutdown on April 30.

    ICE said body cameras have been sent to more than half its field officers and the rest will receive them by the end of September. That timeline pushes back estimates from earlier public statements. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who backed funding for cameras, said last month that the agency informed her they would be deployed by the end of August. ICE had said earlier that they would be issued by mid-September.

    ICE officers working in the Houston area, where the agency sent more than 800 cameras, are among those who have started training, according to U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat and member of the House Appropriations Committee.

    At least one member of every arrest team will be required to have a camera, the agency said.

    “I think the American people need to see what that officer sees and hears,” White House border czar Tom Homan said July 19 on CBS News’ Face the Nation. “And if you look at the data, body cameras actually exonerate agents more than they, you know, provide evidence of wrongdoing.”

    Schneider said he expects ICE to release recordings that promote the agency’s mass deportation program by portraying officers as brave and immigrants as dangerous criminals.

    “Much of what law enforcement does is convince the public that we need them and feel safe and they do all this good stuff for us,” he said. “The more bad stuff the public sees, the more angry the public gets. And this causes problems for the police brand.”

    ICE has taken years to adopt body cameras

    ICE began testing body cameras in 2021 during President Joe Biden’s administration and distributed 1,400 devices three years later, saying use would expand as funding became available.

    After returning to office in 2025, President Donald Trump rescinded a Biden order that required federal law enforcement agencies to use body cameras.

    ICE did not buy body cameras even after it received a historic $75 billion infusion in Trump’s signature policy bill in 2025 and began hiring thousands of new officers. The two July purchases from Axon were made through an existing government contract that began in 2023, records show.

    “This is not hard to deploy, but they’ve slow-rolled it,” said Jason Houser, who was ICE chief of staff under Biden and helped implement the agency’s pilot program.

    Houser said the Trump administration should have equipped officers with body cameras when it expanded mass arrests and traffic stops. Doing so only after several shootings and pressure from Congress “is clearly a political response” that will not make officers or the public safer, he said.

    “This doesn’t fix the problem of putting officers in a place where they’re not trained or equipped to carry out the style of operations that the administration is asking them to do,” he said.

  • The Trump administration has refunded $100 billion in tariffs. Will you get any of the money?

    The Trump administration has refunded $100 billion in tariffs. Will you get any of the money?

    The Trump administration has refunded about $100 billion in tariffs in response to the Supreme Court ruling that declared the tariffs illegal, according to a new court filing this week.

    Major corporations are getting huge refunds: $2.2 billion for Apple, $1.3 billion for Ford, $600 million for Amazon. (Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.)

    While some companies have said they will use the refunds to reduce their prices, experts say not to expect many price cuts. Kimberly Clausing, a UCLA professor who served as a tax policy official under the Biden administration, said some companies don’t feel confident enough to change their prices based on the revoked tariffs, since President Donald Trump has replaced those levies with others that are also likely to be partially or completely thrown out by courts.

    “If you’re a firm, you’re wondering what the tariff policy is,” Clausing said. “Some of that pass-through to consumer prices has been slower than you might think if it were really permanent policies. That’s good news in the short term for consumers, but it also means you won’t necessarily see as big a swing in the other direction.” She noted that some companies were simply “gambling” all along that the import taxes would be thrown out in court, rather than raising prices much in the first place.

    Even if they paid higher costs because of the now-invalidated tariffs, most American households won’t see any of the refund money directly.

    The Tax Foundation estimates that the average U.S. household spent an extra $1,000 as a result of the tariffs in 2025, most of it relating to the specific tariffs that have been overturned.

    Because Trump has since replaced most of those tariffs with new ones authorized in a different way, the organization estimates the average household will pay about $900 extra in 2026.

    So why aren’t many individual consumers getting compensated alongside big companies?

    In response to the Supreme Court ruling, U.S. Customs and Border Protection set up a process for requesting refunds. To use the system, the payers have to be registered with the government as an “Importer of Record” or an authorized Customs broker — in other words, not just someone who ordered an item on the internet that was made in a foreign country and ended up paying more for it.

    If you paid a tariff on something you had shipped to you by UPS or FedEx, you can look up your tracking number for the shipment on the companies’ websites. If the companies got money back for your shipment, they are supposed to send you the refund.

    Amazon said in a quarterly earnings call that it plans to send refunds to individual customers in limited cases for which it can identify customers who paid more due to tariffs. The company said it would “proactively contact” those customers but did not provide more information about how it would find them.

    Some other companies that raised prices to accommodate the tariffs are taking heat for not passing on the refunds. Customers are suing Ford and Costco, among others.

    Alan Sykes, a trade law expert at Stanford Law School, said he doesn’t think the customers have much to go on.

    “They willingly paid the higher price. Ford could have raised the price of the car for any arbitrary reason. … You don’t have a claim,” Sykes said. “Certain companies are saying they’re going to lower their prices going forward … not because of a legal imperative, but a public relations logic.”

    Matilde Bombardini, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, said she understands the logic of a customer who wants money back.

    She said research suggests that importers who paid 10% more because of the tariffs typically charged their customers about 3% more and absorbed the rest. “Costco’s getting back the whole 10%,” she said. “Conceptually, we could all agree that the 3% should go back to the consumers.”

    She noted that the refunds are likely unprecedented in scope. The tariffs that were invalidated applied to almost all categories of goods from every country in the world, though there were some exemptions.

    In the court filing this week, a Customs and Border Protection official said companies have filed more than 178,000 valid claims to refund tariffs on more than 25 million imports since the claim system opened in April, leading to more than $100 billion in refunds and interest so far.

  • Climate change created conditions for Canada fires, scientists say, as Trump blames mismanagement

    Climate change created conditions for Canada fires, scientists say, as Trump blames mismanagement

    Human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood of the tinderbox weather conditions that sparked Canada’s massive summer wildfires and in turn angered U.S. President Donald Trump, according to a study released Thursday.

    And fire and climate scientists said Trump, who has talked about punishing Canada for poor fire management and sending days of choking smoke across the border, should look more in the mirror than up north when it comes to blame. They point to the United States’ huge historical emissions of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

    The fire weather conditions in the Northwest Territories and northwestern Ontario, while unusual but not that rare, were still made twice as likely by global warming, said Thursday’s study by World Weather Attribution, a group of international scientists who examine extreme weather conditions to see if there are climate change fingerprints. It’s about the same as the team found for summer fires in France, but not nearly as clear a climate fingerprint as they calculated in Spanish fires, which the scientists said were 20 times more likely because of climate change.

    The study, which was done so quickly it has not been peer reviewed yet, looked at the weather conditions that are connected to large wildfires and the Canadian index for those conditions, which are heat, lack of rain, humidity and wind. The researchers found the doubling of frequency when — using scientifically accepted techniques to search for climate fingerprints — they compared current conditions to a world without the 2.5 degrees of warming that’s occurred since the industrial age and burning of fossil fuels started. The weeklong weather conditions that led to the fires in Ontario are now the type that can happen every six years or so, the report said.

    “In a pre-industrial climate this would have been much less likely to occur, maybe once in a lifespan. So climate change has made those events more likely,” said study co-author Jonathan Boucher, a fire scientist at Canada’s Forest Service.

    Hotter, drier conditions connected to burning

    Outside climate and fire scientists said the flash study made sense and reflects a world where hotter and drier conditions are making fires burn more often and more intensely.

    “Mother Nature’s been burning. Now she’s on amphetamines and she burns more and more,” said Thompson Rivers University fire scientist Mike Flannigan, a Canadian expert who wasn’t part of the study.

    Hazardous smoke spread across both the United States and Canada, choking large cities such as New York.

    By burning more and more fossil fuels, “we’re putting nails in our coffins,” Flannigan said.

    In the larger and remote Northwest Territories fires, where more than 5,000 square miles burned, it’s clear the spark was from lightning but it was the climate conditions that took that initial ignition and made the fire burn intensely and spread too fast to control, said Boucher and report lead author Theodore Keeping, a climate scientist at Imperial College in London.

    While people start about half of Canada’s wildfires — accidentally or on purpose — fires sparked by lightning are responsible for more than 90% of the land area burned in Canada, Flannigan said.

    “What we’re facing here is more of a climate related problem than a forest management problem,” Boucher said.

    That’s not how Trump sees it.

    Trump blames mismanagement, but scientists point to carbon

    “A lot of damage has been done. They’re not managing their forests properly,” Trump said July 21. “And the wind has a tendency to blow right over New York City, right over, you saw Detroit, they had to close the whole place. Michigan was really affected. They had to close businesses for four days. It’s very serious what they’re doing, and they don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. If they managed their forests, they wouldn’t have the fires.”

    When asked Sunday about punishing Canada, Trump on Air Force One told reporters he has decided on a punishment, adding “you’ll find out about it soon.”

    Canadian climate and fire scientists said Trump doesn’t understand the root causes.

    “Smoke does not carry a passport, but carbon pollution does have a history. That history shows that the United States contributed more than any other country,” said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver. “President Trump is pointing at the smoke while ignoring America’s fingerprints on the climate conditions behind it.”

    Study co-author Friederike Otto, an Imperial College London climate scientist, said, “if you care about anyone but the super rich, you have to stop burning fossil fuels because the impacts are here and they’re now and have huge consequences.”

    Canada has warmed 65% more than the United States in recent decades. In the past 30 years, the amount of land annually burned by Canadian wildfires has gone up by about 50% while the amount in the United States has more than doubled.

    A big problem that Trump doesn’t appear to understand is that much of Canada’s forests are remote, northerly and full of spruce and pine that burns hard and fast, all making it difficult to get a handle on, Boucher and Flannigan said.

    “In Canada, when things are extreme, you have about a 30-minute window to put that fire out,” Flannigan said. “If you don’t get there in 30 minutes, you’re out of luck. And many of the fires that start in Canada are northern remote areas that are more than 30 minutes away from an airport. So even with perfect detection systems, we would get there too late and these fires are going to burn.’’

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

  • Fauci contempt vote reflects the enduring politics of COVID

    Fauci contempt vote reflects the enduring politics of COVID

    NEW YORK — Dr. Anthony Fauci is sitting before Congress, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on TV debating COVID lockdowns, and Americans can’t agree on what science to trust.

    You might think it’s 2020 again.

    Six years after COVID-19 thrust the world into the fear and uncertainty of a global pandemic, Republicans in power aren’t leaving it in the past. Instead, they’ve returned its familiar political arguments to center stage for new scrutiny, demanding accountability for the scientists and media figures whom they feel deceived and mistreated Americans years ago.

    The efforts ramped up last week, when a Republican-led Senate committee chaired by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul subpoenaed the now-retired, 85-year-old Fauci to testify about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The former National Institutes of Health immunologist repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, after accusing the lawmakers of trying to coerce him to perjure himself to justify criminal charges. In response to his choice, on Thursday, the committee passed a vote to hold Fauci in contempt, a stunning move that could motivate the Justice Department to initiate an investigation.

    Separately, Kennedy, a politically independent former anti-vaccine activist who now serves as the Republican President Donald Trump’s health secretary, spent part of his weekend in a combative live debate with CNN host Dana Bash about the pandemic’s management and the media’s role.

    Political scientists and historians say the focus on COVID grievances half a decade after the virus’ peak demonstrates how some wounds it opened have never been closed. Democrats, meanwhile, have slammed the federal government’s blaming of Fauci as a performative distraction that’s not based in facts.

    While both Paul and Kennedy have spent years airing their frustrations about COVID, the Republican takeover of Congress and the White House last year created a new platform for them to steer how America remembers the pandemic, and who is held responsible for it, according to Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University.

    It’s also allowed them to use the administration’s resources to surface new information.

    “The response to COVID has become a touchstone for Trump’s Republican Party,” Dallek said. “They’re using their power now to argue they were right all along.”

    Pandemic grievances have simmered for years

    When the coronavirus began spreading widely in 2020, under Trump’s first administration, groups of Americans revolted against requirements imposed by local authorities and businesses telling people to wear masks and stay at home to control the spread of the virus.

    Vaccines supercharged those sentiments. Figures like Kennedy, then a leader of the anti-vaccine movement, accused the federal government of trampling on personal liberties by supporting vaccine mandates and social media takedowns of dissenting ideas.

    While Trump has long expressed pride in his first-term Operation Warp Speed effort to disseminate COVID-19 vaccines quickly, saving millions of lives, his second administration has taken a different tone.

    Under Kennedy’s leadership, U.S. regulators have limited the availability of COVID-19 vaccines for Americans. Kennedy on CNN on Sunday questioned whether the COVID-19 vaccines protected children, even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says on its website that they “help keep children from getting really sick from COVID-19.”

    Frances Lee, a Princeton University political scientist, said debates over COVID-19 have erupted on the fringes for years. Now that some of the leaders of those debates are in power, they’re hashing it out on the national stage — something she said needed to happen eventually.

    “There are aggrieved parties, people who have a sense that they were done wrong during the pandemic and that there’s never been an accounting for that,” Lee said. “Most people don’t want to think about this topic, but nevertheless there are constituencies – so Congress is speaking to those constituencies.”

    Lee said Kennedy’s decision to surface numerous diary entries that Fauci had made on a government computer – and Paul’s decision to publicize them last week – created an opening for “the first real showdown” in years around the pandemic’s handling.

    While some of the entries – including Fauci’s uncertainty in the pandemic’s earliest days about how best to curb the virus — already were reflected in a 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time, they have nonetheless drawn attention from people who blame Fauci for policies they believe infringed on their rights as hundreds of thousands of people were dying.

    Also discussed at Fauci’s hearing last week was whether NIH-funded research in China played a role in how the pandemic started. The day of the hearing, Trump’s White House also directed social media followers to a federal website that used to feature information on COVID vaccines, testing and treatment that now promotes the theory that the pandemic originated with a lab leak.

    Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, coming to light when it spread at a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. There’s no new scientific evidence supporting the theory that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul champions. A GOP-led subcommittee that studied the question in 2024 found no evidence linking Fauci to wrongdoing.

    Fauci has long said publicly that he was open to both theories but that there’s more evidence supporting COVID-19’s natural origins.

    Republican lawmakers aren’t stopping at the contempt vote. Sen. Ron Johnson said Thursday that Kennedy’s department had given a subcommittee he chairs a copy of Fauci’s cellphone from his time in government. Johnson indicated he intended to investigate it.

    “Hopefully, this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing,” he wrote on social media.

    Many doubt that Republicans’ COVID fact-finding is genuine

    As Republicans hold up scrutiny of Fauci as important accountability, Democrats have called it disingenuous. Paul said Thursday he’d invited Fauci to appear for a private, transcribed interview, but Democrats accused him of not allowing the full, bipartisan committee to be present for it.

    Paul also referred the committee’s contempt vote directly to the Justice Department, instead of to the full Senate. He said he did not “want to waste time” with that route, while Democrats insisted all senators should get a chance to vote.

    Last week’s hearing, at which Fauci pleaded the Fifth, came after the immunologist had repeatedly appeared before Congress over the years and talked about his thinking in the beginning of the pandemic and how it changed over time. Critics have raised concerns that the ordeal surrounding him will deter scientists from taking government jobs for fear of being similarly targeted.

    Paul has long argued that Fauci should be criminally investigated, based on his belief that the scientist has been dishonest to Congress about National Institutes of Health-funded research and COVID’s origins. Fauci’s attorney last week called Paul’s accusations about the scientist “false and disgraceful.” More than 150 infectious-disease experts also came to Fauci’s defense, writing that “no credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges.”

    Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said the hearing didn’t represent legitimate truth seeking.

    “They were looking for a platform in which they could attack him, and he would not respond, and he would say ‘plead the Fifth’ over and over again,” Ornstein said.

    He said while some Republicans are likely true believers that Fauci committed crimes, bringing him to the forefront serves a dual purpose in a midterm election year — distracting voters from less favorable headlines, including on the economy and foreign conflicts.

    Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said there are real lessons to learn from the pandemic, including more deeply examining which efforts to contain the virus worked and didn’t work. But he said Republicans in Congress aren’t chasing those.

    “A review of revisionist history will accomplish nothing,” he said. “We won’t be any better prepared for the next pandemic.”

  • Brian Fitzpatrick leads letter urging Trump’s DHS secretary to extend protected status for Ukrainians

    Brian Fitzpatrick leads letter urging Trump’s DHS secretary to extend protected status for Ukrainians

    U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Bucks) led a bipartisan group of lawmakers in a letter asking Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to extend and expand temporary protected status (TPS) for Ukraine ahead of its expiration this fall.

    The government status allows immigrants to live and work in the United States if conditions are unsafe in their home countries. For Ukraine, which has been in a war waged by Russia for nearly five years, TPS is set to expire on Oct. 19.

    “More than 250,000 Ukrainians have sought safety in the United States after fleeing Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion,” lawmakers wrote in the letter, dated Aug. 4. “These individuals have become valued members of our communities, contributing to our economy, workforce, and tax base while complying with U.S. laws and rebuilding their lives in temporary safety.”

    U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Philadelphia) was also among the 27 lawmakers to sign onto the letter, but only three other Republicans joined Fitzpatrick’s effort.

    President Donald Trump’s administration let TPS expire for Haiti and Syria late last month and has promised to deport individuals who lose their legal status, and Ukrainians who fled the war and live and work in the United States under TPS could face a similar fate this fall if the designation expires.

    Ukraine has become a defining issue for Fitzpatrick, who represents all of Bucks County, which is home to more than 12,000 people from Ukraine or of Ukrainian heritage. And it has become one of the areas where the moderate, who is running for reelection in the crucial Pennsylvania swing district against Democratic challenger Bob Harvie, has frequently strayed from Trump.

    In a statement to The Inquirer on Thursday, Casey-Lee Waldron, a spokesperson for Fitzpatrick — who is a cochair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus and was stationed in the country as an FBI agent in 2015 — said the lawmaker “urges the Secretary to act without delay.”

    “Putin’s brutal unprovoked war continues to destroy communities, endanger innocent lives, and make any safe return impossible for Ukrainian families,” Waldron said.

    On Haiti, Syria, and next month’s expiration for El Salvador, Fitzpatrick’s position appears to be more nuanced.

    Waldron said that Fitzpatrick believes “upholding the rule of law and acting with compassion are not competing obligations,” and that temporary protected status for the three countries should be independently evaluated.

    “And where the standard established by Congress continues to be met and a safe return remains impossible, those protections should remain in place,” Waldron said.

    Last year, the Bucks County Republican, without naming the president, slammed Trump’s criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Fitzpatrick also visited the country and met with Zelensky and soldiers on the front lines, and signed a missile to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    His support for Ukraine continued this week with the letter to Mullin, which argues that Ukraine continues to meet the statutory benchmarks for qualifying for a TPS designation. In addition to extending the Oct. 19 deadline, lawmakers are also calling on the DHS secretary to redesignate temporary protected status for Ukraine, meaning it would reset the country’s eligibility cutoff date, allowing more immigrants to apply for the protection.

    “Without both an extension and redesignation, many Ukrainians lawfully residing in the United States could be forced to return to a country where their lives and safety remain at serious risk,” lawmakers wrote.

    Iryna Mazur, an immigration attorney and honorary consul of Ukraine in Philadelphia, said it would be economically beneficial to the U.S. to extend and expand TPS for Ukrainians and emphasized the importance of the humanitarian efforts at the core of the law.

    She said that maintaining a united front among political parties on support for Ukraine is key.

    “I don’t think there would be anybody in their good mind with a good sense of justice in their heads who would say it’s a wrong thing to do right now under the circumstances,” Mazur said.

    “This is a very active phase of war, and it just would be inhumane not to extend this particular temporary measure.”

    Staff writer Jeff Gammage contributed to this article.

  • Senate committee votes to hold Fauci in contempt for refusing to answer COVID questions

    Senate committee votes to hold Fauci in contempt for refusing to answer COVID questions

    WASHINGTON — A Senate committee on Thursday voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress and refer him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution over his refusal to answer questions at a hearing last week focused on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The party-line vote approving the contempt resolution came a week after Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

    Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee chairman, said that constitutional protection did not apply since Fauci last year received a pardon from Democratic President Joe Biden and thus did not have to worry about the threat of prosecution. Fauci and Democrats who opposed the contempt resolution said he had a well-founded fear of self-incrimination given a public desire by Republicans to seek his prosecution.

    “Dr. Fauci faced no risk of federal prosecution,” Paul said at the outset of a hearing. ”All he had to do was tell the truth.”

    Paul noted that the vote had nothing to do with Fauci’s policies, opinions or anything he has said in previous congressional appearances.

    Fauci contempt vote reflects the enduring politics of COVID

    Instead, the senator said, “We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a sweeping pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence.”

    Fauci, in a statement explaining his decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, said he had good reason to fear the possibility of criminal charges given what he said was Paul’s determination “to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.”

    The pardon from Biden covered acts from 2014 through the January 2025 day it was issued. It does not shield Fauci from state-level prosecutions or from investigations into any testimony that he did give that lawmakers thought was false.

    The referral goes to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which will decide whether or not to investigate or potentially attempt to prosecute the doctor for contempt.

    Paul, who has previously sent referrals on Fauci on his own, acknowledged on Wednesday that contempt resolutions have often gone through the full Senate but said he did not “want to waste time” with that route. The resolution there would be unlikely to muster the required 60 votes needed to advance.

    No matter the outcome, the episode raises fresh and complicated questions about lawmakers’ ability to compel testimony from previously pardoned witnesses — and the outcome could resonate beyond Fauci given the possibility that Trump may also grant clemency to his own aides before leaving the White House.

  • Michigan Senate primary shows Democratic establishment has lost its grip

    Michigan Senate primary shows Democratic establishment has lost its grip

    Michigan’s bitter Senate primary was the clearest signal yet: The Democratic establishment is gasping.

    The narrow victory of former health official Abdul El-Sayed over four-term Rep. Haley Stevens, who had the near-unanimous backing of senior establishment figures in Washington and Michigan as well as a more than 8-to-1 television spending advantage, marked yet another stumble by the traditional power brokers.

    It also amplified how out of touch they have grown with the angry left that has become the party’s ascendant force.

    This time, the victory by a progressive insurgent happened not in a deep-blue enclave, such as New York City, where Democrats are pretty certain to win no matter what candidate they put up. It was in a statewide contest in Middle America. Donald Trump won Michigan twice, in 2016 and 2024.

    In 2026, the stakes could hardly be higher. Democrats currently hold the Michigan seat being vacated by the retirement of Sen. Gary Peters. Should El-Sayed lose in November against Republican nominee Mike Rogers — a former congressman who came within a third of a percentage point from winning Michigan’s other Senate seat in 2024 — the party’s uphill effort to win back control of the Senate will become even steeper.

    Much criticism has focused on how Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the campaign arm that he effectively steers, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, have attempted to orchestrate the primary process. They have boosted favored contenders in three primaries this year. Michigan marked the second one — the first having been Maine — in which Schumer’s anointed contenders were rejected by Democratic voters.

    “What voters have been screaming from the rooftops is they’re sick of the status quo. They’re sick of the establishment. They want something different,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic consultant who worked for Mallory McMorrow, a state senator who dropped out of the race after failing to gain traction in a middle lane.

    Nor were Democrats in a critical swing state persuaded by the argument that Stevens was more “electable.”

    “If you listen to focus groups or interviews with Michigan voters, they are very interested in winning,” former Obama White House official Dan Pfeiffer wrote Monday in his Substack. “They want to pick a winner; they just don’t trust Democratic politicians to tell them who can really win. This is a very understandable impulse after 2024 and every Democratic leader backing Biden when he clearly shouldn’t have run.”

    The stresses and divisions within the Democratic Party, including over support for Israel and the role of money in politics, were on full display in Michigan. El-Sayed rarely missed an opportunity to mention that Stevens had benefited from $62 million in advertising spending by outside groups, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the influential pro-Israel lobby.

    The entire race, El-Sayed argued in the candidates’ final debate, “really comes down to how you are funded.” Rarely has a candidate been so effective at that kind of political jujitsu, using the weight of campaign money against its intended beneficiary.

    Late polls that had El-Sayed comfortably ahead of Stevens were wrong. The race turned out to be a photo finish.

    The results also complicated any clean story about a party moving left. El-Sayed ran up his margins in the counties with the youngest and most highly educated voters. Stevens carried the poorest counties and the areas with the most Black residents — the parts of the Democratic coalition that have historically decided general elections in Michigan. An insurgent left that wins on campuses and in college towns but loses in Detroit’s suburbs and the state’s poorest counties has proved it can win a primary. It has not yet proved it can win a state.

    Stevens quickly endorsed El-Sayed after the race was called. “I spoke with Abdul a few moments ago to offer him my full support as we work to defeat Mike Rogers this November,” she posted on X. But given the acrimony of their battle, it is unclear whether Democrats can bind their wounds and regroup behind their new nominee.

    Progressives in Michigan notched other victories Tuesday: William Lawrence, co-founder of the climate action group Sunrise Movement, defeated two more moderate Democrats to win the Democratic nomination in a swing district that includes Lansing. And incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar lost to Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney, a democratic socialist.

    The implications could well extend beyond November. The Democratic National Committee has tentatively approved Michigan to vote fifth in the 2028 presidential primaries — making it the biggest prize on the early calendar.

    Should the progressives who were chosen Tuesday win this November, that may strengthen the hand of 2028 prospects who hew to the left. But if they lose, the party may be seeking a more centrist standard bearer.

    With the 2026 primary season coming to an end, more optimistic Democrats are hoping that raging battles over their party’s identity will move to the back burner as they refocus their energies on Trump and the Republicans.

    “We’re gonna have a great November. We’re gonna win the House, and I’m still bullish on the Senate,” former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who also chaired the Democratic National Committee, said in an interview. “This is going to be about the party in power, plain and simple.”

    Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

  • Why Republicans could still keep control of the House

    Why Republicans could still keep control of the House

    Democrats are favored to flip the House, but Republicans could still save their majority under the right conditions.

    Historically, midterm elections are a referendum on the party that holds the White House, which voters are prone to punish. This year, the Democratic Party is well positioned to win a House majority, buoyed by voters’ dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump and the war in Iran that he started.

    But Trump’s party could defy conventional wisdom and still eke out a win, election analysts say. Here’s how.

    Voters aren’t angry enough to vote blue

    Registered voters support Democrats over Republicans in Congress by five percentage points, according to a Washington Post average of July “generic ballot” polls that ask preferences for parties rather than individuals.

    Analysts estimate that Democrats need to win the national House vote by three to four points to win the majority. Democrats have a bigger advantage among highly motivated voters, who are more likely to turn out in November.

    But polls also show that the Democratic brand is bruised.

    The Democratic Party is less popular than before the 2018 midterm elections, when a blue wave delivered 41 new seats, according to a CNN poll released in late July.

    Just before that 2018 election, 46 percent of adults rated Democrats favorably while 45 percent rated them unfavorably. Now, 30 percent rate Democrats favorably while 51 percent rate them unfavorably, almost identical to ratings for the Republican Party.

    Much of that discontent comes from Democrats who are unhappy with their own party but unwilling to vote for Republicans.

    Democrats are counting on people who don’t like them but are fed up with a GOP-controlled Washington to vote blue. That might be a harder sell by November if voters aren’t as outraged.

    “Republicans have to hope that gas prices come down and that the war fades from the news a bit,” said David Wasserman, a senior elections analyst with Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan race handicapper.

    A redrawn map protects GOP majority

    A party needs 218 seats to control the House, and Republicans hold a razor-thin majority with several vacancies.

    Aggressive redistricting to favor parties in congressional elections has resulted in a smaller battleground for control of Congress.

    As of mid-July, Cook Political Report deemed 37 districts competitive. Eighteen were toss-ups, while 10 leaned Democrat and 9 leaned Republican.

    Republicans made it unusually hard for Democrats to win the majority by launching a national battle to redraw electoral maps mid-decade. While Democrats tried to gain their own seats, the redistricting gambit proved advantageous for the GOP.

    Because the two parties are competing on the new map, November’s results could be close even in a difficult year for Republicans, Wasserman said.

    If Democrats win all of the most competitive districts classified by the Cook Political Report, they would win 235 seats under the 2024 map. But under the current map, they would only win 223 seats.

    Big money saves vulnerable Republicans

    In June, a Supreme Court ruling granted Republicans financial leverage to spend big to boost their candidates.

    The high court lifted limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates, allowing the political parties’ national committees and their House and Senate campaign committees to funnel as much money as they want in coordination with candidates.

    This will allow political parties to boost their candidates with more ads, probably at lower costs because candidates get cheaper rates than parties and super PACs from the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the airwaves. Republican committees have more money to spend than Democrats on those efforts.

    Conservatives could also benefit from Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., which ended June with $400 million in the bank. It’s unclear whether that money will go toward midterm races.

    The Republican campaign committees have also not yet detailed how they will spend their money in the coming months but said after the Supreme Court ruling that they were “ready to fully support our candidates and put them in the strongest position possible.”

    The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats’ campaign operation, disputed that the GOP’s financial resources would sway the midterms out of Democrats’ reach. They pointed to special elections in which Democrats won despite being outspent by Republican opponents.

    “Donald Trump’s money won’t save the vulnerable Republicans who have spent the last two years making life worse for the American people,” DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton said.

    Weak candidates lose winnable races

    In past elections, Republicans lost competitive congressional races after more hard-line conservatives emerged from primaries. Now Democrats have a similar problem.

    Primary victories by several progressive candidates have made some in the party establishment worry about losing winnable seats.

    Most of these candidates have been in blue districts, but Matthew Dunlap in Maine and Randy Villegas in California beat more moderate, DCCC-endorsed candidates in primaries. Amish Shah, who lost a 2024 race in an Arizona battleground district, defeated a former Republican endorsed by the DCCC to run again.

    On Tuesday in Michigan, Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence, a progressive, bested two moderate Democrats in the battleground 7th Congressional District. The DCCC did not endorse any candidate before the primary.

    Manny Rutinel defeated a more moderate opponent in a beef-producing Colorado district where some Democrats fear his history of animal rights activism and liberal voting record in the state House could render him unelectable.

    Those districts could still go for Democrats, according to national analyses, and progressives argue that their preferred candidates are better at turning out voters even if they turn off some moderates.

    Doug Heye, a Republican strategist, said that while Republicans have a “very narrow” path to the majority, they could defy expectations if the party successfully casts its opponents as extreme and out of touch. They include candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, a growing political movement with far-left views.

    “With every candidate on the DSA side that succeeds, that makes that argument that much easier,” Heye said.

    In an analysis this week, the University of Virginia’s Center of Politics said “Democratic candidates flopping is integral to GOP chances” in several states.

    Scott Clement contributed to this report.

  • Jon Stewart presses John Fetterman on Israel and playing into ‘Republican caricatures’ when he attacks Democrats

    Jon Stewart presses John Fetterman on Israel and playing into ‘Republican caricatures’ when he attacks Democrats

    U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, in perhaps the most in-depth and toughest interview he has faced in recent memory, defended his unwavering support for Israel and his harsh criticisms of fellow Democrats when pressed by Jon Stewart in a podcast episode released Wednesday.

    The liberal comedian and political commentator repeatedly accused Fetterman (D., Pa.) of “caricaturing” the left wing of his party and the debate around Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza.

    “Jewish community and Israel are not the same thing, brother man. They’re not — that is not the same thing,” Stewart, who is Jewish, said at one point as Fetterman described his full-throated support for the war as being because of “the Jewish community.”

    Asked repeatedly about the United States’ moral obligations about backing the Israeli strikes that have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, Fetterman stood firm.

    He said — as he often has since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that sparked the conflict — that it was necessary to go after Hamas leaders. The killing of civilians was “terrible” and “collateral” damage but not a genocide, Fetterman said.

    Stewart continued to press — questioning why Fetterman was standing so firmly behind a foreign ally that was “dehumanizing” and slowly killing another population.

    “I don’t understand how you have no criticisms over their actions, over their increasingly messianic, ultra-right-wing government that seems to think relentless war is, like, that you can bomb people out of resistance,” Stewart said.

    The roughly 75-minute interview, on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, came a week after Fetterman once again met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington.

    Many other elected Democrats have distanced themselves from the Israeli government and criticized its tactics. Fetterman has acknowledged his position has hurt him politically. In the interview with Stewart, he echoed previous comments — which have also become evident in public polls — that he has lost the support of his former Democratic base as his and his party’s stances diverged.

    “I’m aware that if I happen to disagree with the party line, there’s a price to pay,” Fetterman said. “There’s a lot of stories of how I’ve become increasingly more unpopular with Democrats in my state. And I’m aware of it. But these were all very specific choices. … I would rather have people know what I happen to believe.”

    Stewart asked Fetterman several times about how he has voiced those disagreements.

    He said the senator has focused far more on arguing with his own party in a way that has further hurt its brand. And he has broken from the party’s ranks as Democrats try to use even an inkling of leverage that could impact Republicans’ agenda as the GOP controls both Congress and the White House, Stewart said. He pointed to issues like immigration enforcement reforms, which Democrats tried to enact by holding out support for a spending bill earlier this year. Fetterman said he supported the reforms but would not go along with letting part of the government shut down as a strategic move.

    Mark Twain Prize recipient Jon Stewart is introduced at the start of the 23rd annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, April 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf, File)Kevin Wolf

    Stewart also pressed Fetterman on how his approach to President Donald Trump has softened as he has ramped up his criticism of his own party.

    “You called President Donald Trump a jagoff in 2016,” Stewart said, prompting Fetterman to say that he put the phrase on shirts and sold them.

    “You put it on a shirt. And now you’ve been very complimentary to him. And if your concern with Graham Platner is you didn’t think he was very nice to women, you’re ignoring an awful lot of evidence for the current president about his relationship with women,” Stewart said, referencing Fetterman’s attacks on the Maine Democrat who dropped out after facing allegations of sexual assault. “So my point is, there seems like there’s a way to go about this that embraces, as you said, the 90% of things that you agree with, and try and utilize that energy to reform a party that has a worse public image than herpes in terms of getting things done. This feels like it’s playing into the hands of Republican caricatures.”

    Fetterman pushed back, saying he was trying to stop “extreme” elements of his party in a way that would lead to better success in battleground elections — like in Pennsylvania — after Democratic losses in 2024.

    “We keep losing, and now we keep returning back to some of the extreme things,” Fetterman said. “That’s not a caricature. That is a fair assessment of where we are with these kind of things.”

    Stewart, noting that Vice President Kamala Harris was not the most progressive Democratic option in 2024, rejected the idea that the party lost because of far-left views. In an extended conversation about capitalism and socialism, he also encouraged Fetterman to embrace new ideas presented by democratic socialist candidates who Fetterman, like many Republicans, refers to as communists.

    Fetterman, who frequently appears on Fox News but has not appeared on more liberal programs like Stewart’s Daily Show, described himself as a longtime fan of Stewart and said he believed the interview was “very fair.”

    At the end of the podcast, after Fetterman left, Stewart said he “wasn’t sure what to think” and was “weirdly thrown off right now.”

    “I feel like we all just got out of one of those movies. Do you know those movies where it’s like … there was a weirdly traumatizing scene in the movie,” Stewart said. “And now we’re all just, like, ‘Do you guys, um, do you want to go get something? I guess I’m just going to go get a slice and maybe go home.’”