Category: Wires

An attorney for Lindsay Clancy, the 36-year-old Massachusetts mother who admitted to killing her three children, said he hopes President Donald Trump would consider a pardon for his client after the high-profile murder case ended in a mistrial last week.

“Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady, the type of person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon,” Kevin Reddington said Tuesday on Good Morning America.

The president cannot pardon state-level crimes, and Clancy’s case is being tried in state, not federal, court.

Governors can grant clemency for state crimes; under pressure from Trump, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) in May reduced the state prison sentence of former county clerk and election conspiracy theorist Tina Peters, who was convicted for a scheme to copy her county’s election computer system.

Asked about the trial and pardon request, the White House referred the Washington Post to Trump’s comments on Friday in which he described the case as a “horrible tragedy.”

“It’s a terrible situation. Look, she did a horrible, horrible, thing. Can’t be worse,” he said. “But you’ll find out what the price to pay is. There’ll be a price. It’s going to be mental institution or jail or something.”

Reddington also said he hoped he would “be able to work something out that would be acceptable to both sides,” after a mistrial was declared on Friday. Prosecutors have not said whether they will seek another trial.

Clancy’s case captured the public’s attention and became a cultural touch point, putting postpartum mental health issues in the spotlight. She had said she killed her three children by strangling them at home in 2023, and the jury was asked to decide whether she should be held legally responsible for her actions. Reddington had argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time, which prosecutors disputed.

The jury was dismissed after failing to reach a unanimous decision after deliberations hit nearly 40 hours following a trial that stretched more than six weeks.

Veterans and Democrats are escalating efforts to prevent construction on President Donald Trump’s planned arch as the anticipated start of site work approaches, arguing the project is illegal and would diminish the experience of visiting nearby Arlington National Cemetery.

VoteVets, a political organization aligned with Democratic veterans, on Tuesday launched a new messaging campaign to mobilize more veterans against the planned 250-foot-tall arch.

In a 2½-minute video, which was first shared with the Washington Post, speakers call attention to the Trump administration’s stated plan to spend 20 hours per day building the arch over several years, which they note could conflict with military burials. The arch also would feature an observation deck for tourists to gaze at the city — and look out at the cemetery.

“We don’t need tourists overlooking funerals. I’m just appalled,” Karen Meredith, a Gold Star mother whose son is buried at Arlington, said in the video.

Home of the Brave, a political advocacy group whose leaders and advisers include prominent Trump critics such as commentator Bill Kristol and former Biden administration official Susan Rice, is also supporting the campaign. In an interview, people involved in the effort said they would start with social media posts this week and could expand to paid promotion.

Meanwhile, Rep. Chellie Pingree (D., Maine) on Tuesday urged House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) to sue and halt construction before it begins. Johnson and other Republican leaders have shown no interest to date in blocking Trump’s construction projects.

“Congress has neither appropriated funding nor granted authority for this project under the Commemorative Works Act. The Administration is building it anyway, betting this body will do nothing to stop it,” wrote Pingree, the top Democrat on a House subcommittee that oversees funding for the Interior department. “I am asking you to take all necessary steps to file suit immediately, while there is still ground left to save.”

Trump officials, emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling last week that allowed construction of the president’s ballroom to proceed, signaled Thursday that site work on the arch would begin this month.

The court’s decision, which found preservationists seeking to stop Trump’s planned ballroom likely lacked standing, has become part of the administration’s construction strategy. Justice Department lawyers cited the ballroom ruling in asking a federal judge to dismiss a legal challenge brought by three military veterans and a historic preservationist, who are seeking to halt the triumphal arch.

The high court’s ruling also sent advocacy groups scrambling to reconsider how to oppose the president’s construction projects. Some say they are reassessing whether they need to have other individuals or organizations join their challenges.

Several legal experts pushed back on the Trump administration’s efforts to invoke the Supreme Court’s ballroom ruling to dismiss the arch and other projects.

“The Justice Department would like to turn the ballroom decision into a universal immunity card for presidential construction projects,” said Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm that has advised preservation organizations. “But the Supreme Court decided one standing question involving one plaintiff, one project, one factual record.”

Trump has spoken for nearly a year about his plans to build a triumphal arch that will honor the nation’s 250th anniversary, vowing that it will be the largest triumphal arch in the world — about 86 feet taller than France’s famed Arc de Triomphe. The administration plans to erect it on federal parkland in Memorial Circle, a traffic roundabout near Arlington National Cemetery and just inside the city’s boundaries.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last week that construction would soon begin.

“We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck,” Burgum wrote on X.

While Burgum’s announcement catalyzed a wave of new legal filings, Trump officials have argued that it is too soon for a federal judge to decide whether the project can be halted because Trump and other officials’ statements are not binding and the project has not been formally approved. The National Capital Planning Commission, a federal review panel that reviews the administration’s construction projects, has issued preliminary approval for the arch but has yet to award final approval.

Trump officials also said last week that the work they plan to do soon at the arch site is for informational purposes.

“This activity is not construction, or demolition in preparation for construction, of an arch,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in a court filing Friday.

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ordered that the administration provide her with 48 hours’ notice “before engaging in any activity on Memorial Circle” other than on-site information gathering.

Preservationists have stressed that an arch does not belong in the solemn corridor between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Charles Birnbaum, the founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a Washington-based advocacy organization, invoked 1916 comments by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., a landscape architect who helped design Washington.

Olmsted said that “to build a monumental feature such as an arch would be a ‘slap in the face’ to the Lincoln Memorial,” Birnbaum said in the VoteVets video.

Paul Eaton, a retired major general and VoteVets adviser, told the Post that he has heard from Republican veterans who are also opposed to a new structure towering over the cemetery. He called for veterans to submit comments to their lawmakers and to the National Capital Planning Commission.

“There’s nothing partisan about what we’re doing right now. It has everything to do with how the United States honors its dead,” said Eaton, whose father’s remains are interred at the cemetery. “That’s why we are so focused on this particular vanity project on the part of Mr. Trump.”

For decades, Washington has replayed the same fight over taming the soaring national debt: Democrats cite a need for more taxes. Republicans refuse. And anyone who suggests cutting the biggest source of spending — federal retirement benefits — gets attacked.

But a coming crisis in Social Security appears to be pushing at least a few Republicans off the GOP’s long-standing pledge never to raise taxes.

This summer, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) in proposing to raise the payroll tax cap so people with higher incomes pay more into the program. Now the idea is emerging as an acceptable fix among other GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Tom Cole (Oklahoma), the influential chairperson of the House Appropriations Committee.

“We’ve got too many people who say, ‘Well, we have to stay within the current income level or stay at the current tax rate,’” Cole said in an interview. “I’m willing to look at the tax rate. I am willing to raise the amount of income through tax.”

The rare GOP concessions on taxes come as lawmakers begin to confront a Social Security shortfall so large and so imminent that the party’s traditional demand for curtailing benefits is unlikely to suffice. In just six years, millions of Social Security recipients will absorb a 22% cut in benefits unless lawmakers provide an immediate infusion of nearly $500 billion.

“Twenty or thirty years ago,” when the shortfall was far in the future, “you could come up with a straight-faced solution” that solved the problem entirely by cutting future benefits, said Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center who served from 2010 to 2015 as the Republican public trustee for Social Security.

Now the problem is so big and urgent, Blahous said, “I don’t think you can look at it with a straight face and not do all of the above.”

Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the longtime enforcer of Republican anti-tax orthodoxy, dismissed the crack in party discipline, arguing that Republicans should stick to demanding spending cuts. Otherwise, he said, they risk infuriating voters already angry about the high cost of living.

“When Republicans say no to tax increases, they win. When they say yes to tax increases, they lose,” Norquist said. “They don’t get spending cuts — at all. And, they get smeared in the next election.”

But Cole, at least, said he thinks the political blowback from Social Security benefit cuts would be far worse than a comprehensive solution that includes raising taxes.

“I love Grover. But … you’ve got to deal with Social Security,” Cole said. “And believe me, you’ll have a lot bigger problem if it goes bankrupt than you’ll have keeping it whole, because people will feel cheated.”

Created during the Great Depression, Social Security provides monthly cash benefits to more than 70 million Americans. It is the single largest program in the $7.4 trillion federal budget, paying out $1.7 trillion this year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. (Medicare is a close second at $1.3 trillion.)

The program is funded by a payroll tax on wages up to a “cap” of $184,500 a year, with workers and employers each paying 6.2%. Workers who pay into the system can receive monthly checks as early as age 62, though the full retirement age is 67.

For years, annual tax collections exceeded the cost of benefits, allowing the program to amass a surplus known as the Social Security trust fund. As the baby boom generation retired, however, the math flipped: Social Security now pays out far more than it collects and is draining the trust fund to make up the difference.

The trust fund is projected to run dry in 2032. At that point, Social Security would have to rely solely on incoming tax collections — meaning monthly checks would shrink by $440 on average unless Congress acts, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Closing the shortfall would require $459 billion in cuts or fresh revenue in 2033 alone, according to the BPC — and the sum would grow larger every year.

That relentless math persuaded Moreno, a former car dealership owner who rode into office with President Donald Trump’s endorsement in 2024, to break ranks with his party on tax hikes. In his proposal with Warren, Moreno calls for eliminating the payroll tax cap so highly compensated workers pay the tax on their entire income.

“Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer?” Moreno and Warren wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times, noting that one recent poll found that 62% of Republicans support lifting the cap. “This is doubly unfair in an economy in which top earners’ wages, over time, have pulled far ahead of those of the average worker.”

Moreno declined an interview request. His spokesperson Reagan McCarthy said in an email: “Sen. Moreno promised Ohioans he would fight for them in DC and make sure they get the benefits they were promised and that’s exactly why he’s leading this effort.”

Removing the cap without increasing benefits for high-earning workers would close more than half the program’s shortfall, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group focused on deficit reduction. Blahous and others have cautioned against that approach, saying it would sever the connection between contributions and benefits that makes Social Security different from — and more popular than — other social welfare programs.

Uncapping the payroll tax alone would push the top marginal federal tax rate over 50%, according to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Some Democrats would go further. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) argues not only for lifting the payroll cap but also for taxing the investment income of wealthy households and closing a loophole that lets business owners shrink their personal tax bills.

That proposal, which would fall entirely on the backs of the wealthy, would raise enough cash to fully fund Social Security for at least 75 years, according to a 2023 estimate by the program’s chief actuary.

The historic link between contributions and benefits makes changing Social Security politically perilous. That’s why many in Congress want negotiations to be outsourced to a bipartisan commission or advisory board.

Cole has introduced one of several proposals to form such a panel. He argues that more tax revenue, including from raising the payroll tax cap, “ought to certainly be on the table” alongside adjustments that would reduce future spending, such as raising the retirement age.

A third GOP lawmaker, Rep. Lloyd K. Smucker of Pennsylvania, has also said he sees more tax revenue as part of a Social Security fix. “You’ll probably have to do something on the payroll half of the money being paid into the system,” Smucker told Roll Call last week.

Smucker said lawmakers should also consider means testing, so benefits are reduced for the wealthy while low-income retirees are protected. Smucker’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Though raising taxes is unpopular among Republicans, it has long been part of bipartisan plans to solve the Social Security puzzle. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, and House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, saved the program from its last bout with insolvency, agreeing to a mix of solutions that included increasing payroll taxes and gradually raising the retirement age.

In 2005, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) argued for raising the payroll cap and trimming benefits. Weeks later, President George W. Bush said he was open to a “variety of options,” though his plan to curtail future benefits for all but low-income retirees and divert some tax dollars to new private retirement accounts was dismissed by Congress.

And in 2010, several Republicans on a commission formed by President Barack Obama voted in favor of a debt-reduction plan that included raising the payroll cap, raising the retirement age to 69 and trimming benefits for wealthy retirees. The plan offered by the so-called Bowles-Simpson commission never received a vote in Congress.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho) was among the commission’s yes votes. Crapo now serves as chairperson of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over both taxes and Social Security.

At a committee hearing last month, Crapo said the Bowles-Simpson plan “has informed subsequent Social Security solvency discussions.” His office did not respond to questions about his current position on tax hikes.

Another hallmark of Social Security reform has been deep involvement by the White House. Cole said he has urged Trump to take on the hard work of fixing the program, calling it a potential “crowning achievement.” Since Trump is not running for office again, he could “do it with no political risk,” Cole said, adding, “I think he’ll get enormous political credit for it.”

But while Trump has warned Republicans not to cut “a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” he has not said how he would raise the vast sums needed to bolster the programs’ deteriorating finances.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston did not respond to questions about fixing the program, saying via email only that “there will be zero reductions to Social Security payments” under Trump’s leadership.