G.O.P. senator says she won't vote for Trump and declines to rule out leaving the party. – The New York Times
Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, expressed confidence in a CBS interview that Black voters whom polls show turning away from President Biden would turn back by November as they concluded they had a “binary choice.” He added: “The more Donald Trump talks, the better our fortunes will be.”
Ronna McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said in an interview on NBC News — which just hired her — that it was fine for a fund-raising agreement between Donald Trump and the R.N.C. to send donations to a super PAC covering the former president’s legal bills “as long as the donors know that that’s what they’re doing.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said on CNN that she would not be inclined to vote to save Mike Johnson’s speakership if his far-right opponents brought a vote to oust him. “For any Democrat inclined, I don’t think we do that for free, and I don’t think that we do that out of sympathy for Republicans,” she said. “We want to make sure that governance continues and that responsible governance continues, and that generally tends to happen under a Democratic majority.”
Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said on Fox News Sunday that the ISIS attack on a Moscow theater that killed more than 130 people is “the unfortunate echo of President Biden’s chaotic and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.” The New York Times reported earlier that the group behind the attack, ISIS-K, is responsible for a suicide bombing in the Kabul airport in August 2021 that killed 13 U.S. troops.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said on ABC that he believed the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan under President Biden had allowed ISIS-K to strengthen its capabilities and enabled the terrorist attack in Moscow on Friday.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said in an interview released on Sunday that she would not vote for former President Donald J. Trump. She also did not rule out the possibility of leaving the Republican Party.
In the interview, which Ms. Murkowski gave to CNN, she said that she would “absolutely” not support Mr. Trump in the general election in November. She said that she wished Republicans had nominated someone whom she could vote for, but that she “certainly can’t get behind Donald Trump.”
Asked whether she might leave the party and become an independent, she said that she considered herself “very independent-minded” and added, “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.” But she did not give a yes-or-no answer, saying: “I am navigating my way through some very interesting political times. Let’s just leave it at that.”
If Ms. Murkowski left the Republican Party, it would be welcome news for Democrats facing a brutally difficult map in the Senate elections in November. Three of their current seats are up for election in red states, and several more are up for election in swing states. There are almost no opportunities to pick up seats currently held by Republicans, and there’s no room for error, given their very narrow majority.
Ms. Murkowski, who has served in the Senate for more than 20 years, has long been more moderate than many Republicans. Among other positions that are rare in her party, she supports abortion rights, and she has long been critical of Mr. Trump, including in voting to convict him in his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
But most elected Republicans, even those who denounced Mr. Trump after Jan. 6, have fallen back in line behind him as it has become clear that he will be the party’s nominee for president.
Ms. Murkowski’s declaration that she will not vote for Mr. Trump puts her in the company of a small number of prominent anti-Trump Republicans, among them Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
“No, no, no, absolutely not,” Mr. Romney said last month when asked by CNN whether he would vote for Mr. Trump.
Former President Donald J. Trump, with a deadline fast approaching to secure a roughly half-billion-dollar bond in his civil fraud case in New York or risk seizure of his assets and flagship properties, sent an email on Saturday morning to his campaign’s supporters.
The subject line — “Keep your filthy hands off Trump Tower” — was repeated at the start of the email in bold, italics and all caps, even as the message was clearly intended not for his backers but for New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who brought the case.
Mr. Trump told his supporters that Ms. James “wants to SEIZE my properties in New York,” adding, “THIS INCLUDES THE ICONIC TRUMP TOWER!” He then exhorted them to donate money to his presidential campaign as a show of strength against the web of legal troubles he faces, which he has broadly cast as a political witch hunt.
With the deadline for Mr. Trump to post an appeals bond on Monday, the Trump campaign has sent at least 10 similar fund-raising solicitations since Wednesday accusing Ms. James and Democrats of trying to seize Mr. Trump’s marquee property, Trump Tower.
Last month, a New York judge imposed a $454 million penalty on Mr. Trump in the civil fraud case after concluding that the former president had fraudulently inflated the value of his company’s properties and his net worth to obtain favorable loans and other benefits from banks.
Mr. Trump has appealed the judgment, and was given until Monday to either write a check to the state court system for the full amount or obtain an appeal bond. But his lawyers said last week that he had been unable to secure the bond, raising the prospect that Ms. James could move to collect the money and try to seize some of the properties involved in the case.
Ms. James, a Democrat, has signaled that she is prepared to do so, and Mr. Trump’s campaign has made that contention a focal point of its fund-raising emails. On Wednesday, in an email with the subject line “Hands off Trump Tower!,” Mr. Trump accused her of trying to “go after the ICONIC Trump Tower.”
In another email, Mr. Trump claimed that “maniacs” were trying to seize the property.
Trump Tower, which is on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, holds a central place in Mr. Trump’s celebrity and political rise. In 2015, he descended an escalator in the building to announce his first run for president.
In an email sent on Friday, Mr. Trump emphasized that centrality. “Our movement started on the golden escalator in Trump Tower!,” he wrote in all caps. “Now Democrats want to seize it!” In another message, on Thursday, he insisted that “Trump Tower is mine!” and accused Ms. James of being a “rabid Trump-hating Democrat.”
Mr. Trump repeatedly suggested in emails over the past week, as he often does on the campaign trail, that President Biden had coordinated Ms. James’s lawsuit, a baseless claim for which there is no evidence.
Mr. Trump has treated his legal woes, including four criminal cases and civil litigation, as political fund-raising opportunities, using them to tap his loyal base of donors. Last year, after the release of his booking photo from his indictment in Georgia, Mr. Trump raised $4.2 million online.
But the past week’s Trump-Tower-focused fund-raising blitz comes as the Trump campaign stares at a sizable cash gap with the Biden campaign. Mr. Biden and his joint operations with the Democratic Party reported having $155 million in cash on hand at the end of February. The Trump campaign said it had $42 million across its accounts, while the Republican National Committee reported another $11.3 million.
Last year, committees backing Mr. Trump spent at least $50 million on legal expenses, filings show. And in February, the political action committee that he has used to pay his legal fees spent nearly $5.6 million on bills to the legal teams defending him in court.
Those fees are likely to continue to rise. Mr. Trump also has a critical hearing on Monday in his Manhattan criminal case, in which he is accused of covering up a sex scandal involving a porn star during his 2016 campaign.
That trial was originally scheduled to start on Monday, which would have made it the first of the former president’s four criminal cases to proceed to trial. But it was delayed after the disclosure of more than 100,000 pages of records.
Monday’s hearing is being held to decide whether the trial should be delayed further, and to rule on Mr. Trump’s motion to dismiss the case based on the new documents.
On the 14th anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act on Saturday, President Biden sought to put health care at the center of his re-election campaign, releasing a video featuring former President Barack Obama and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The three highlighted key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which provides subsidies for millions of Americans to buy health insurance, allows people to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26 and stops insurers from denying or charging more for coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
And they emphasized that former President Donald J. Trump, if re-elected, could get rid of it. He tried to do so in his first term, and in November he said Republicans should “never give up” on repealing it.
“Republicans have voted, it’s hard to believe, 50 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” Mr. Biden said at Saturday’s event. “Fifty times. And now Donald Trump and his MAGA extremists are determined to try again.”
He added: “Folks, we simply can’t let that happen. We won’t let that happen. We’re determined, we’re determined as ever to defend and strengthen the Affordable Care Act, and to make health care a right, not a privilege.”
The event also featured Ashleigh Ewald, an activist from Georgia who emphasized the significance of the ability to stay on a parent’s plan until age 26, and Tyra Bryant-Stephens, a pediatrician from Pennsylvania who treats children with asthma and spoke to the significance of protections for pre-existing conditions.
Mr. Biden signed legislation expanding the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies through 2025 so that people with household incomes over 400 percent of the federal poverty level would be eligible if the premium for a standard plan would otherwise exceed 8.5 percent of their income. Under his administration, enrollment in plans sold through the public exchanges created under the law has reached a record of more than 21 million people.
Mr. Obama suggested that a re-elected President Biden could expand the law further.
“Now we have a chance to do even more,” he said, “but that only happens if we send Joe and Kamala back to the White House in November.”
Ms. Pelosi declared that “the fate of the A.C.A. is on the ballot this year,” and Mr. Biden sought to broaden that statement by connecting the Affordable Care Act to other health-related policies — including Social Security, Medicare and abortion rights.
“Health care’s at stake in this election,” he said.
Reporting from Washington
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the liberal judge who retired from the Supreme Court in 2022, said in an interview aired on Sunday that he would be open to supporting an age limit for the justices.
“Human life is tough, and moreover, you get older,” Justice Breyer, 85, said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “When you’ve been there quite a while, other people also should have a chance to do these jobs. And at some point, you’re just not going to be able to do it.”
Justice Breyer suggested that an 18- or 20-year term could dissuade members of the court from “thinking about the next job” just as effectively as a lifetime appointment does now. He retired reluctantly in 2022 after mounting calls from liberals who wanted to ensure that the 6-to-3 conservative majority on the court did not get larger after an untimely death or resignation. President Biden then appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson, once a law clerk for Justice Breyer, to the Supreme Court that same year.
An age limit “would have avoided, for me, going through difficult decisions on when you retire and what’s the right time,” Justice Breyer said.
He also reiterated his criticism of the conservative Supreme Court majority and its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, referring to his dissent in the 2022 case. Justice Breyer — along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — said in the dissent that the majority’s opinion that a right to terminate pregnancy was not “deeply rooted” in the history and tradition of the United States would mean “all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure.”
Justice Breyer said on Sunday that such a reading of the Constitution, which focuses on the text and the original intent of its writers — a legal doctrine often referred to as originalism — “doesn’t work very well” because it prevents judges from doing what they think is right and forces them to “be bound by the text.”
In a forthcoming book, Justice Breyer calls originalists on the Supreme Court stunningly naïve in their claim that overturning Roe v. Wade would simply return the question of abortion to the political process. He said on Sunday that he had tried to warn the conservative majority that Roe’s demise would lead to more lawsuits challenging state-level abortion bans.
“What’s going to happen when a woman’s life is at stake, and she needs the abortion?” Justice Breyer asked during the interview. “Do you think if a state forbids that, then that won’t come to the court? We thought it probably would. And we thought there will be a lot of issues coming to the court coming out of the decision to overrule Roe v. Wade.”
The retired justice’s new book is set to be published on Tuesday, the day the Supreme Court hears a major case on access to pills used to terminate pregnancies.
In a carefully worded interview broadcast on ABC News on Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris declined to provide details on how the Biden administration would respond if Israel invaded the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, if Congress continued to refuse to pass border-security legislation and if TikTok’s Chinese parent company refused to sell the service.
Ms. Harris reiterated the administration’s previously stated position that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel should not order an invasion of Rafah, where more than a million people have sought refuge from Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground operations throughout the rest of Gaza.
“We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” she said. “Let me tell you something. I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go, and we’re looking at about 1.5 million people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there, most of them.”
But she did not answer when the interviewer, Rachel Scott, asked whether there would be “consequences” if Israel invaded Rafah anyway. Ms. Scott noted that Mr. Netanyahu had shown no inclination to follow the advice of the United States.
“Well, we’re going to take it one step at a time, but we’ve been very clear in terms of our perspective on whether or not that should happen,” Ms. Harris said, adding, after Ms. Scott repeated the question, “I am ruling out nothing.”
Asked about TikTok — which, under legislation that passed the House this month and is awaiting a Senate vote, would be banned in the United States unless the service’s Chinese owner agreed to sell it — she said the administration did not want to ban it but simply had “national security concerns about the owner,” ByteDance.
“We have no intention to ban TikTok,” she said. “In fact, what it serves in terms of, it’s an income generator for many people, what it does in terms of allowing people to share information in a free way and a way that allows people to have discourse, is very important.”
But she did not say that Mr. Biden would veto the bill if it passed the Senate.
Turning to immigration, Ms. Scott showed a video of migrants clashing with Texas National Guard troops along the border in El Paso and asked whether that conveyed to Americans “that the border is secure.”
“We are very clear, and I think most Americans are clear, that we have a broken immigration system and we need to fix it,” Ms. Harris said, criticizing Senate Republicans for, in the face of pressure from former President Donald J. Trump, backing away from a bipartisan border-security deal that some of their members had negotiated.
“They’re refusing to put it up for a vote, and in large part because we know the former president would prefer to run on a problem instead of fix a problem,” she said.
Asked about the possibility of executive action, which Republicans in Congress are demanding, she indicated that it was an option on the table but said, “That does not absolve the fact that the real fix is going to be when Congress acts.”
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