The Senate is set to debate President Biden’s nearly $2 trillion stimulus plan on Friday as Democrats prepare to barrel past widespread opposition from Republican lawmakers and approve billions of dollars in funding for unemployed Americans, vaccine distribution, small businesses, schools and hospitals.
Senators will reconvene with three hours of debate before engaging in a rapid-fire series of votes on proposed amendments. Some are likely to force lawmakers into casting politically tough votes, while others could draw enough support to further tweak the legislation. The vote-a-rama, as it is known, could stretch long past midnight as Republicans battle against a bill whose crafting they were cut out of.
The threat of yet another late night in the Senate comes after Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, demanded that a group of Senate clerks read all 628 pages of the legislation on the floor before debate could continue. The process began on Thursday at 3:21 p.m., and for 10 hours and 44 minutes, the clerks took turns reading passages to a virtually empty chamber. The Senate did not adjourn until 2:05 a.m.
But the efforts to slow action on the Senate floor to a crawl are expected to have little effect on the final legislation. Each party holds 50 seats in the chamber, giving Democrats a one-vote margin of control thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris’s power to break ties. Senate Democrats, having already made significant revisions to the text the House approved over the weekend, are working to remain united. Republicans are expected to oppose the bill en masse, arguing that it is too costly and not targeted enough.
If the sweeping pandemic relief package makes it to Mr. Biden’s desk, it will mark the first major legislative accomplishment of his administration. Democrats are racing to ensure that the bill becomes law before unemployment benefits begin to lapse on March 14.
A former House impeachment manager sued Donald J. Trump in federal court on Friday, attempting to move Congress’s case that the former president incited the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol into the justice system after his acquittal in the Senate last month.
The suit brought by Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, accuses Mr. Trump and key allies of inciting the deadly attack and conspiring with rioters to try to prevent Congress from formalizing President Biden’s election victory. And like the case laid out in the Senate trial, it meticulously traces a monthslong campaign by Mr. Trump to undermine confidence in the 2020 election and then overturn its results.
“The horrific events of January 6 were a direct and foreseeable consequence of the defendants’ unlawful actions,” asserts the suit, filed for Mr. Swalwell in Federal District Court in Washington. “As such, the defendants are responsible for the injury and destruction that followed.”
He wants the court to declare that in doing so, Mr. Trump violated federal civil rights law and terrorism and bias crime statutes in the District of Columbia and inflicted serious emotional distress — findings that could severely tarnish his legacy and political standing.
The congressman is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, but potentially more problematic for Mr. Trump and his allies would be an open-ended discovery process if the case goes forward that could turn up information about his conduct and communications that eluded impeachment prosecutors.
In addition to the former president, the suit also names as defendants his son Donald Trump Jr., his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, who led the effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s election defeat when Congress met on Jan. 6 to formalize the results. All three men joined Mr. Trump in promoting and speaking at a rally in Washington that day that Mr. Swalwell says lit the match for the violence that followed.
Read the Suit: Swalwell v. Trump
The suit from Representative Eric Swalwell accuses Mr. Trump and several allies of inciting the attack and conspiring with rioters to try to prevent Congress from formalizing President Biden’s victory.
Read DocumentA majority of the Senate, including seven Republicans, voted to find Mr. Trump “guilty” based on the same factual record last month, and even Republicans who voted to acquit him, like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, concluded that Mr. Trump was culpable for the assault. Many Republicans argued that the Senate simply lacked jurisdiction to punish a president no longer in office, and said the courts were the proper venue for those seeking to hold him accountable.
Philip Andonian, a lawyer representing the congressman, said that the lawsuit was an answer to that call.
“The fact that he seems to be made of Teflon cuts in favor of finding a way to pierce that because he hasn’t really been held fully accountable for what was one of the darkest moments in American history,” he said in an interview.
The lawsuit adds to Mr. Trump’s mounting legal woes. Prosecutors in New York have active investigations into his financial dealings, and in Georgia prosecutors are investigating his attempts to pressure election officials to reverse his loss. And another Democratic congressman, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, has already filed suit on similar grounds in recent weeks with the N.A.A.C.P.
Both Mr. Thompson’s suit and Mr. Swalwell’s rely on civil rights law tracing to the 19th century Ku Klux Klan Act, but their aims appear to differ. The earlier suit targets Mr. Trump’s association with right-wing extremist groups, naming several groups as defendants and explicitly detailing racialized hate it claims figured in the attack. Mr. Swalwell focuses more narrowly on the alleged scheme by Mr. Trump and his inner circle.
During the Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers flatly denied that he was responsible for the assault and made broad assertions that he was protected by the First Amendment when he urged supporters gathered on Jan. 6 to “fight like hell” to “stop the steal” underway at the Capitol.
The nine House managers argued that free speech rights had no place in a court of impeachment, but they may prove a more durable defense in a court of law. Though the suit targets them in their personal capacities, Mr. Trump may also try to dismiss the case by arguing that the statements he made around the rally were official, legally protected acts.
Hiring picked up last month as states lifted restrictions and stepped up vaccination efforts, with the government reporting on Friday that the American economy added 379,000 jobs last month.
The pace of hiring in February was an unexpectedly large improvement over the gains made in January. It was also the strongest showing since October.
But there are still about 9.5 million fewer jobs today than a year ago. Congress is considering a $1.9 trillion package of pandemic relief intended to carry struggling households and businesses through the coming months.
“What we’re seeing is broad, slow gains,” said Julia Pollak, an economist at the online job site ZipRecruiter. “It’s consistent with a slow reawakening of the labor market after a winter hibernation.”
Unemployment rate
By Ella Koeze·Seasonally adjusted·Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
The unemployment rate in February was 6.2 percent, down from the previous month’s rate of 6.3 percent. But as the Federal Reserve and top administration officials have emphasized, that number understates the extent of the damage.
Most of the February gains came in the leisure and hospitality industries, including restaurant and bars, which have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. “There’s still a long way to go,” Ms. Pollak said, “but thank goodness it’s moving in the right direction and not continuing to hemorrhage jobs. The industry is a first rung on the ladder and employs so many young people.”
The retail and manufacturing sectors posted small gains. Losses in employment by state and local governments — mostly in education — pared the overall increase, however.
Leisure and hospitality saw gains, but state and local governments lost jobs
Cumulative change in jobs since before the pandemic, by industry
By Ella Koeze·Seasonally adjusted·Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
More than four million people have quit the labor force in the last year, including those sidelined because of child care and other family responsibilities or health concerns. They are not included in the official jobless count.
The impact has also been uneven. The share of Black women who have left the labor force is more than twice as high as the share of white men.
“We’re still in a pandemic economy,” said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives and a former Federal Reserve economist. “Millions of people are looking for work and willing to work, but they are constrained from working.”
Millions of workers are still relying on unemployment benefits and other government assistance, and first-time jobless claims rose last week, but analysts have offered increasingly optimistic forecasts for growth later in the year.
Recruiting sites have had an increase in job postings in recent weeks. Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a Chicago staffing firm, said the employers he speaks to are “absolutely ready to hire.”
President Biden is enjoying a level of popularity his poll-obsessed predecessor never came close to achieving — a 60 percent approval rating — with 70 percent of Americans expressing support for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new poll.
Despite enduring and stark partisan divisions, 44 percent of Republicans approve of Mr. Biden’s actions prioritizing the fight against the virus, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released early Friday.
As a temperature check of the current national mood, the poll suggests that Republican lawmakers in Washington, who have united to oppose Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, are not swaying public opinion, despite their efforts to alter or delay its passage.
In all, 22 percent of Republicans approve of Mr. Biden’s performance, suggesting small but substantial gains among his most hard-core opponents that could give him added political leverage, paving the way for the possibility of a big bipartisan deal on infrastructure.
Mr. Biden’s overall approval among Democrats is a solid 94 percent, despite recent criticism from progressives.
Mr. Trump sustained a similar level of support from his base, but is the only president in the history of modern polling to never post an aggregate approval rating above 50 percent. His level of support has sunk, to an average of about 38 percent, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Friday’s poll is a bit sunnier than other recent national surveys that show a slight decrease in support for Mr. Biden as the fight over his relief package heats up on Capitol Hill. A RealClearPolitics aggregation of polls put his approval rating at 53.4 percent, not factoring in the A.P. poll.
Mr. Biden’s grades on the economy were lower than his ratings on other issues, the poll found. His approval on pocketbook issues was 55 percent. Only 17 percent of Republicans, a group that gave former President Donald J. Trump high marks for his handling of the economy even during the pandemic-related downturn, approved of Mr. Biden’s approach to the economy.
The A.P. poll, unsurprisingly, found that the atmosphere of hyper partisanship exacerbated by Mr. Trump’s four years of provocation is not subsiding under Mr. Biden, and that people in both parties tend to interpret fact through the filter of ideology.
Americans’ views on the economy have shifted dramatically even though many basic economic statistics have budged little, if at all.
In December, 67 percent of Republicans and just 15 percent of Democrats described the economy as “good,” according to an A.P. poll taken at the time. Now, 35 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats describe the economy in positive terms.
The poll, which surveyed 1,434 adults between Feb. 23 and March 1, has an overall sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
President Biden, faced with a decision about how to punish Saudi Arabia for its role in the assassination of a dissident journalist, gathered top national security officials in the Oval Office and pushed them at length about their recommended response. Then he sided with a majority of advisers who argued against the most severe action — a direct sanction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who American intelligence agencies say approved the killing.
That same week, Mr. Biden approved relatively modest airstrikes in retaliation against Iranian-backed militias who had attacked an American outpost in Iraq. This week, he matched modest European sanctions on Russia for its poisoning and jailing of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition politician, leaving room for what are expected to be harsher moves this month against Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.
And, to avoid being surprised, Mr. Biden is beginning to rein in the military’s freedom to use drone strikes outside of war zones.
The Biden foreign policy that emerges from these early weeks is one of restraint, caution and fast-paced deliberation. Decisions come more quickly than they did in the Obama administration, when Mr. Biden, as vice president, complained about the endless meetings.
Early evidence suggests that his judgments come with a harder edge than they did when he was one of many voices in the Situation Room, as indicated by Mr. Biden’s decision to cut off the American weapons that allowed the Saudis to prosecute the war in Yemen. It was President Barack Obama who first turned on that weapons spigot.
To Mr. Biden’s supporters, it is all a triumph of rationality. To his critics, Mr. Biden’s first few weeks on the world stage are a lost opportunity to penalize a murderous leader, end drone strikes altogether or flip the switch quickly to get back into the Iran nuclear deal.
The congressional inquiry into the security failures surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol assault has barely begun, but one outcome already seems certain: The Capitol Police Board, the secretive three-member panel that oversees protection of the complex where Congress meets, is headed for major changes, if not outright elimination.
Lawmakers of both parties in the House and the Senate, some previously unfamiliar with the sweeping authority of the board, have expressed astonishment at its lack of accountability and its inability to rapidly respond to the riot at the Capitol.
“It seems nonfunctioning to me,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut and chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, which controls money for Capitol security. “Nobody is in charge. When something goes wrong, no one has the ultimate responsibility.”
New tension over the board’s power emerged on Thursday as Yogananda D. Pittman, the acting chief of the Capitol Police, appealed to House and Senate leaders to intercede to persuade the panel to grant her department’s emergency request to extend the deployment of National Guard troops at the Capitol. After her letter to the leaders became public, the board gave its approval. But the episode was reminiscent of events in the run-up to Jan. 6, when the panel rebuffed a request from the Capitol Police for National Guard reinforcements to counter a threat that had been identified by intelligence, with disastrous consequences.
Like many things on Capitol Hill, the board is a remnant of the past that has survived in large part because it suits those who hold power in Congress. A long line of House and Senate leaders in both parties have favored its existence because they handpick two of its three voting members, giving them tremendous influence over security operations with little public scrutiny.
At House and Senate hearings in recent days, lawmakers have been struck by the fact that two days before the attack, members of the board dismissed the Capitol Police request for troops to be on hand on Jan. 6. They acted with no vote, little discussion or consultation with other authorities, and no involvement by the architect of the Capitol. Then on the day of the riot, board members struggled to connect and agree to declare an emergency so that troops who were standing by to assist could be summoned to the Capitol.
Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, the senior Republican on the Rules Committee, said the assault underscored longstanding problems with the police board that necessitate major changes.
“I don’t think it works well in the best of circumstances and I think it’s almost totally unworkable in crisis, and Jan. 6 was a great example of that,” Mr. Blunt said.
From a porch in Martin County, Ky., in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. Decades later, President Barack Obama dedicated millions of dollars to work force development projects in Appalachia. President Donald J. Trump even pledged the impossible: a revival of the region’s faltering coal industry.
President Biden is talking big, too, assuring residents that his climate plan will also create well-paying jobs there. But after generations of promises, communities once reliant on coal mining are skeptical.
In eastern Kentucky, the poverty rate in several counties exceeds 30 percent. Unemployment is among the highest in the nation. And an outward migration over several decades has cut the populations of some counties nearly in half, leaving local governments strapped for tax revenue and struggling to fund essential services.
“Fifty years from now, this could be a ghost town,” said former Gov. Paul E. Patton, an eastern Kentucky native. “That’s my prediction.”
Days after taking office, Mr. Biden signed an executive order on climate change that also promised a new focus on economic development in communities that have been reliant on coal mining and power plants. A committee tasked with wrestling with the problem was given 60 days to make a plan. “We’re never going to forget the men and women who dug the coal and built the nation,” the president said. “We’re going to do right by them.”
Without direct federal help, local residents and experts say, people living in those communities could suffer increasingly dire consequences as the nation moves away from coal for good — ending the boom-and-bust cycle that dominated their economies with a final and decisive bust.
How the new administration follows through on its promise could be a determining factor in whether some of these communities survive at all, local residents say.
Dan Mosley, the county judge executive of Harlan County, believes that the president should consider tax incentives for people who move to distressed Appalachian counties, a highway extension and the reduction of red tape for federal grants that fund economic development projects.
“I hope this plan that’s been written isn’t just some promise to get our hopes up here,” he said.
The F.B.I. said on Thursday that it had arrested a former State Department aide on charges related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, including unlawful entry, violent and disorderly conduct, obstructing Congress and law enforcement, and assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon.
The former midlevel aide, Federico G. Klein, who federal investigators said in court documents was seen in videos of the riot resisting officers and assaulting them with a stolen riot shield, is the first member of the Trump administration to face criminal charges in connection with the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
He worked on Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and began working at the State Department just days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, according to a financial disclosure form he filed as an executive branch employee.
Mr. Klein’s arrest was reported earlier by Politico.
The F.B.I. said in a court document that it received a tip about Mr. Klein in January, on the day after it included his image in a poster seeking information about several people seen in the crowd that had stormed the Capitol. A tipster provided investigators with Mr. Klein’s Facebook account, and a different witness later contacted them to say that he knew the man in the poster as “Freddie Klein,” according to the document.
Based on this information, the F.B.I. determined that when Mr. Klein allegedly attacked Congress on Jan. 6 to help Mr. Trump unlawfully maintain power, he was still employed by the State Department and possessed a Top Secret security clearance, the bureau said in the document.
Mr. Klein can be seen in video footage and other images dressed in a red “Make America Great Again” hat, slacks and a dress shirt as he tries to break past a line of Metropolitan Police officers in a tunnel near the west terrace, according to the document. “Klein quickly pushed his way to the front-left side of the crowd and to the doorway to the Capitol building, where he physically and verbally engaged with the officers holding the line,” the F.B.I. said.
He was part of a mob that tried to push through the doors despite warnings by an officer to back up, the F.B.I. said, and used a “riot shield that apparently had been taken from an officer” to prevent the closing of the doors.
Mr. Klein was seen in other videos “calling back to the crowd behind him, ‘We need fresh people, we need fresh people’ multiple times,” the F.B.I. said.
The Justice Department’s aggressive and sprawling investigation into the attack on the Capitol has led to criminal charges against more than 300 people, including dozens of far-right extremists who have been accused of conspiring to attack Congress in order to stop the final certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory.
Many defendants have said that they acted at the behest of Mr. Trump, who had falsely asserted that he won the November election.
In recent weeks, the investigation has edged closer to Mr. Trump. Last month, investigators began examining the communications of some right-wing extremists who had breached the Capitol to determine whether Roger J. Stone Jr., a close associate of the former president, had played any role in their plans to attack Congress. Mr. Stone has denied any wrongdoing.
In an attempt to prevent the detention of migrant families for weeks or months at a time, the Biden administration plans to release parents and children within 72 hours of their arrival in the United States, a new policy that already is being carried out along the Texas border.
The plan, confirmed on Thursday by three Homeland Security officials, marks a significant departure from the handling of migrant families under the Trump and Obama administrations, when children often showed symptoms of depression and trauma after spending long periods in custody with their parents.
The decision to avoid lengthy detention of families comes amid a significant spike in the number arriving at the southwestern border in recent months that has posed an early test of President Biden’s pledge to create a more humanitarian approach to immigration.
Former President Donald J. Trump had vowed to end what he called the “catch and release” policies of his predecessors and significantly increased the number of asylum-seekers who were held in detention facilities, rather than being allowed to settle around the country as they waited for the immigration courts to decide whether they could stay.
Under the latest plan, Immigration and Customs Enforcement will hold families only for the time required to schedule court dates, conduct Covid-19 tests and arrange for them to be transferred to shelters, where volunteers and aid workers help schedule their travel to join relatives already in the country.
It was not clear when the plan would be fully rolled out, according to the officials, who spoke under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
About 100 families per day would be processed and released from two existing family residential centers in Texas. Those who test positive for the coronavirus would remain in isolation at a border facility for 10 days.
As of Thursday, several dozen migrants traveling as families were being held at a facility in Karnes City, Texas, and more than 300 at another, in Dilley, Texas. The two detention centers have a combined capacity of 3,200.
Immigrant advocates said they welcomed the change, but insisted that families should not be detained for any period of time.
“The changes at the Karnes and Dilley family prisons are, at best, reversible operational changes that reduce the harm of long-term detention, and at worst, a temporary move to quell concern about this controversial immigration policy,” said Andrea Meza, director of family detention services at Raices, a nonprofit organization in Texas that represents immigrants. “Medical and mental health experts unilaterally agree that there is no safe way to detain a child.”
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