Politics Desk

FOR SIX YEARS, Gov. George Deukmejian has successfully run a state bigger than most nations. But to the po litical elite of his own country, he couldn’t be much less visible than if he were the mayor of California’s insular state capital.

Interviews with more than two dozen Republican political consultants, Reagan Administration officials, California congressmen, and independent national policy analysts found that Deukmejian, for the governor of the nation’s largest state, has a remarkably low profile in national political circles–even as his name appears on lists of potential running mates for George Bush. The Iron Duke to his supporters, Deukmejian is virtually the Invisible Duke in national political terms. At best, with Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis poised to accept the Democratic presidential nomination in Atlanta this month, Deukmejian has acquired an identity as the Other Duke.

“There are people I’ve run into in the higher reaches of the federal government who don’t even know who the governor of California is,” says Martin Anderson, former chief domestic policy and economic adviser to President Reagan and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “He is largely unknown in Republican circles,” agrees Republican political consultant John Buckley, press secretary for New York Rep. Jack F. Kemp’s presidential bid. “There is no perception of him,” says Roger J. Stone, another leading Republican political consultant.

Not all governors, of course, are national figures. But it has become increasingly common for the governors of major states to wield national clout. Many governors–from Republicans Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey and John H. Sununu of New Hampshire to Democrats Mario M. Cuomo of New York and Bill Clinton of Arkansas–are influential in shaping both the political agenda of their parties and the policy agenda of Congress, particularly on issues confronting the states.

By and large, Deukmejian hasn’t been among them. Deukmejian has not been a force on Capitol Hill. His relations with the California congressional delegation are cordial but distant, several members and aides say, and he has never testified before Congress. Nor has he been a significant participant in the Republican Party’s intramural ideological debates; he remained distant from the presidential primaries this year until the result was long decided. He rarely interacts with the national press corps or national conservative activists.

This parochialism is remarkable considering the lineage in which Deukmejian stands–one that traces back not only to such nationally prominent California governors as Ronald Reagan and Earl Warren, but also in a sense to New Yorkers Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas E. Dewey. In the first half of this century, when New York was the nation’s most populous and powerful state, its governors consistently shaped the national agenda. In the 12 presidential elections from 1904 to 1948, a New York governor headed the ticket for one or the other party nine times.

Since then, California has muscled its way to clear economic pre-eminence among the states, the economic boom fueling an explosion in population. Inexorably, if unevenly, political influence has followed. California now sends as many representatives to Congress as New York did at the height of its power; after the next congressional reapportionment (which will follow the 1990 Census), California will command a larger share of the Congress than any state in history. In the four decades before Deukmejian took office, every California governor save one made at least an exploratory run at the presidency. Earl Warren sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1948 and 1952. In 1960, Democrat Edmund G. (Pat) Brown seriously examined challenging John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and the rest of the Democratic field before deciding not to make the race.

Once California passed New York as the most populous state in 1964, it cemented its reputation as the launching pad for political trends, and its governors emerged as national figures almost as soon as they finished taking the oath of office. At the 1968 Republican convention, Ronald Reagan, just two years into his tenure as governor, offered himself for the presidency as the hero of the nascent anti-government conservative revolt. In 1976, Jerry Brown, also just two years into his term, declared the dawning of the “era of limits” and rocketed into the political stratosphere with a string of late primary victories over Jimmy Carter.

After Brown came Deukmejian, and as far as the spotlight of national attention was concerned, the heavy drapes fell around Sacramento. “I just sort of sensed the public at the time I came in was looking for a governor who would not be off running for some other office, and in fact, was going to be carrying a hands-on approach to state government,” Deukmejian says in a relaxed, wide-ranging interview in his small office in the state Capitol. “Also at the beginning we had some very severe financial difficulties (namely a $1.5-billion budget deficit he inherited from Brown). And when I won in my first election, it was by a very, very narrow margin, and I felt that I really had to concentrate on . . . what goes on in the state capital and building a much greater degree of support from the public before . . . taking some steps out toward more exposure on the national scene.”

Since then, though, Deukmejian has come a long way politically, which makes his low national profile remarkable for a second reason: None of his recent predecessors have been more popular or politically successful within the state than Deukmejian. His crushing reelection over Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley in their 1986 rematch was a more decisive victory than Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan or Jerry Brown ever managed. Two years into his second term–when most of his predecessors had been hobbled by nicks and bruises–Deukmejian’s job approval ratings from Californians remain buoyant; his latest numbers in the Field Institute’s California Poll exceed Reagan’s highest marks at any point during his two terms. “He’s been a far better governor than Reagan,” says conservative Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove).

Sometimes governors get into trouble for paying too much attention to Washington and the bright lights of national politics. But Deukmejian has so secured his position in the state that no one would be likely to grumble if he examined the national terrain more purposefully. If anything, some Republicans are puzzled about Deukmejian’s passivity in pushing the cause of the party, the state and, not incidentally, himself. “Deukmejian is the first governor of the state that is the largest who is not a national factor,” Dornan says.

Politics, as much as nature, abhors a vacuum that immense, and events may be pulling Deukmejian, inch by inch, toward the national stage. Even though most Republican leaders have only vague impressions of Deukmejian, the popular governor cannot entirely escape notice. When the party gathers for its convention Aug. 15-18 in New Orleans, Deukmejian is bound to appear on the short list of Republicans positioned to compete not only for the vice presidency in 1988, but also for the party’s presidential nomination in the 1990s. And for all of his reticence, Deukmejian in recent months has become more willing to expose himself to audiences outside of the state. It is much too early, many national Republicans agree, to write off George Deukmejian as a force in the future of his party, well beyond the borders of California.

TODAY, however, Deukmejian stands on square one in national Republican circles. “People have no sense of him,” says political consultant Edward J. Rollins, who ran Reagan’s presidential reelection campaign and served as his chief political adviser in the White House from 1981 to 1985. “There is no question when he was first elected six years ago the potential was there for him to have a very big national profile, and I think a lot of people turned to him. There were a lot of comparisons between him and (New York Gov.) Cuomo, who was elected the same year. But he has sort of stayed where he’s at, and Cuomo has gone on to be a big national player.”

Cuomo has emerged partly because of his restless ambition, but also because he seems genuinely fascinated with public debate over the most fundamental social and moral issues. That’s a fascination Deukmejian, the diligent manager, doesn’t appear to share. He has always operated on the assumption that politicians who seek attention often find problems instead.

Whether for lack of interest or lack of time–as aides note, a governor of California has more to manage than a small-state governor such as Sununu or Clinton–Deukmejian simply hasn’t done the drill necessary to achieve national notice for himself and for issues affecting the state. Not much for mingling with the media at home, he has been aloof from the national media. His June appearance on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley” was his first on one of the national Sunday-morning interview shows, and his lack of experience in the fast-moving format showed. “It has been a mystery to those of us who are national conservatives why he will turn down appearances on the ‘Today Show,’ ‘Good Morning America,’ ‘CBS Morning News’ (and) ‘Nightline,’ ” Dornan says.

Deukmejian says he considers it “important, particularly on issues that affect California” to influence national-policy debates. “That’s why we have become very, very active in areas” such as national trade policy, he says. “Little by little, but in a very determined way, we’ve been trying to indicate our presence in that field of trade policy.” But almost all the outside observers interviewed had difficulty naming a front-burner national issue–trade or otherwise–on which Deukmejian has been a force.

“He has not become a national spokesman for quality education as an investment of the foundations of our economy; he hasn’t become a national spokesman on our relationship with Asia, which as a California governor he could do,” says Derek Shearer, a professor of public policy at Occidental College who has advised several Democratic presidential candidates.

Similarly, Deukmejian has had relatively little contact with the Republicans in the California congressional delegation. He has occasionally offered them opinions on pending legislation–he opposed, for example, protectionist amendments in the recent trade bill–but “there aren’t many such examples,” acknowledges his chief of staff, Michael Frost.

One California Republican representative, who asked not to be identified, complains that Deukmejian has virtually ignored Washington. “He has no dynamic presence, he hasn’t really pitched for anything, he hasn’t testified on stuff, he hasn’t looked for a role to play,” the representative says. “There are things the governor could do if he was looking to build a national base. Instead he comes back here quietly, has a quiet dinner and then quietly slips out of town. There has never been a closed-door, discuss-the-issues meeting with him and the delegation. He has come back a couple of times, but they have been very formal, overly organized, stilted lunches.”

Rep. David Dreier (R-La Verne), by contrast, defends Deukmejian, noting that “it bodes well” that the governor nominated a member of the congressional delegation, Rep. Daniel E. Lungren (R-Long Beach), to replace the late state treasurer, Jesse M. Unruh.

Nor has the Deukmejian Administration unveiled the dramatic initiatives that would bring Washington to him. Although Frost cites programs to combat AIDS and to commercialize research performed in state university labs, Deukmejian hasn’t turned many heads among Washington’s policy junkies–the analysts, authors and think-tank fellows who watch new ideas percolating in the state and bestow intellectual credibility on the creative politicians in the provinces. “In the 1980s, California has been in a state of governmental stagnation compared with previous decades,” says Jerry Hagstrom, author of “Beyond Reagan,” a recent book examining politics and policies in the 50 states.

To the extent Deukmejian has a national reputation, it is as a steadfast fiscal conservative, a skilled and dogged manager. “On the state level,” Deukmejian says, “I think people first of all expect us to run government in an efficient manner.” In his first term, Deukmejian withstood pressure to raise general taxes and used his line-item veto repeatedly to resist spending increases. From 1982 to 1986, the share of personal income claimed by state taxes in California declined slightly, whereas it increased in the states overall. That resistance to spending provides the one hook on which many national Republicans hang their vague images of Deukmejian. “The perception I find in many of my colleagues (outside of California) is that George Deukmejian exudes a kind of quiet competence,” Dreier says.

Deukmejian’s hesitant response to the recent state revenue shortfall–first proposing revenue-raising measures, then dropping them after Republicans rebelled–may stain that image, particularly if budget problems continue through the remainder of his term. But Deukmejian’s decision to back away from his tax proposal also enabled him to loudly reaffirm his opposition to new taxes. And that should serve him well over the long haul since anti-tax sentiments remain strong not only in the GOP but throughout the electorate. “I don’t think the average person feels as though they are overtaxed now,” Deukmejian says, “but they also aren’t asking for a tax increase.”

THIS SPRING’ Spersistent discussion about Deukmejian as a potential running-mate for George Bush has provided the governor with his first serious national attention. No matter how the rumor mill treats his prospects in the weeks leading up to the Republican convention, some Republican strategists believe the importance of California–which alone provides 17% of the electoral votes needed for victory–guarantees that Deukmejian “is absolutely permanently fixed in the top three vice-presidential choices,” as conservative political consultant David M. Carmen put it.

In the fall campaign, California may be not only the largest prize, but the pivotal one. Since World War II, the Republicans have owned this state in presidential politics, losing only twice. But they have almost always had the advantage of a native son on their ticket. In eight of the past 10 campaigns, the Republicans have nominated a Californian for President or vice president: Earl Warren was the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee in 1948; Richard M. Nixon was the party’s vice-presidential choice in 1952 and 1956, and its presidential nominee in 1960, 1968 and 1972; Reagan carried the GOP banner in 1980 and 1984. Only Warren, running with Dewey against Harry Truman, failed to bring home the state for his party.

No Democrat has carried this state in a presidential campaign since Lyndon Johnson. (Even without a Californian on the ticket, Ford edged Carter in 1976.) But Bush faces a surprisingly uphill battle. Independent polls show Dukakis leading Bush by double digits in California–a spread slightly larger than Dukakis’ margin in most national surveys. If Bush continues to trail so badly by the time the Republicans gather in New Orleans, he will undoubtedly face pressure for a dramatic vice-presidential selection. Those options are few: his chief rivals, Kansas Sen. Robert Dole or New York Rep. Jack F. Kemp perhaps, a woman such as Elizabeth Dole or Kansas Sen. Nancy Kassebaum to fight the gender gap, or Deukmejian to try to sew up California and block the Democrats from assembling an electoral college majority.

Deukmejian has said repeatedly he couldn’t take the vice-presidential nomination because, if the ticket won, he would have to turn over the statehouse to Democratic Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy. Deukmejian has insisted about as firmly as he plausibly can that he does not want to take the job and hand over the reins to McCarthy. “I just can’t see any situation–I really can’t see any situation–where I would be able, even if I were asked . . . to accept it,” he says. “I honestly don’t expect to be asked. I really think he can carry California without . . . me on the ticket, and there will probably be either some other areas of the country Bush will want to shore up. I’ve said for a long time if they see there is a very major gender gap, he might very easily pick a woman.”

But Deukmejian’s certainty in June and July may be irrelevant in August. Even such a close adviser as former chief of staff Steven A. Merksamer agrees that, for all the governor’s firmness today, it is impossible to predict what Deukmejian would say if Bush actually offers him the position. If Bush’s advisers decide that he can win only by carrying California and only do that by picking Deukmejian, most national Republicans doubt that the governor would hesitate for long. In those circumstances, how could Deukmejian argue that maintaining control of the statehouse is more important than holding the White House? “It would be” difficult to make that case, Deukmejian acknowledges, “but I hope I don’t have to.”

Few analysts today expect it to come down to that. To some extent, Bush’s advisers have accepted the conventional wisdom that choosing Deukmejian would so roil local Republicans that his selection could hurt the campaign here. And if Deukmejian joined the ticket, his recent problems with an unexpected budget deficit would complicate Republican efforts to criticize Dukakis for the similar shortfall he faces in Massachusetts.

In all likelihood, though, neither of those arguments are compelling enough to disqualify Deukmejian. The Massachusetts revenue shortfall is unlikely to be a decisive issue in any case. And as Bush’s problems deepen, local opposition to Deukmejian as vice president diminishes. Instead, the key question is whether Deukmejian’s presence on the ticket really could ensure Bush victory in California. If Deukmejian can’t deliver California, there’s no reason to nominate him since he is unlikely to help much anywhere else.

Early polls differ on how much Deukmejian would help Bush. Pollster Mervin Field believes Californians are unlikely to vote for a ticket just because it has a local office-holder on it, though the state’s recent electoral history certainly suggests otherwise. On a more tangible level, Deukmejian may not have enough appeal for the crucial blue-collar suburban Democrats to put Bush over the top. “I think it is unlikely he will be chosen because I don’t think you would see any numbers where George Deukmejian would add that much to the ticket,” says one Bush adviser. Still, the talk of Deukmejian won’t die down soon because it may not take that much to turn the result in California–and the nation.

EVEN IF Deukmejian comes out of New Orleans with nothing on his plate but some gumbo and a return ticket to Sacramento, many local and national Republicans believe the governor could yet become a significant factor within the GOP, if he decides to work at it. As governor of a state this large, Deukmejian can always make himself heard. “It is inevitable,” predicts former Reagan aide Anderson, “that Deukmejian will become a major, if not the major, figure in the party in future years.”

If Bush doesn’t succeed this fall, and Deukmejian wins reelection in 1990, the objective factors for a Duke-in-’92 presidential bid are intriguing, some Republicans believe. Deukmejian’s name usually appears on the early lists of potential contenders, though admittedly more because of where than who he is. “He gets mentioned because The Great Mentioner turns to Republicans (and says) California is a big state and you have to mention Deukmejian,” says Washington-based Republican media consultant Mike Murphy.

In 1992, the Republican field mobilizing against a President Dukakis could be much like the Democratic field in 1988, with no clear front runner and no candidate with a deep national base of support. Texas-based Republican pollster V. Lance Tarrance, who advises Deukmejian, thinks that if Bush loses, some candidates (for example Sens. Phil Gramm of Texas and William L. Armstrong of Colorado) would run as issue-oriented ideological revolutionaries and another group would run as capable, tested administrators. As governor of this sprawling nation-state, Tarrance argues, Deukmejian brings to the table solid administrative credibility.

Deukmejian would bring another significant advantage to such a hypothetical nomination contest. As Dukakis demonstrated this year, in such a murky atmosphere, a candidate who can raise the large sums it takes to cut through the clutter is difficult to stop. With a huge and prosperous home state on which to draw, and a skilled team led by Karl M. Samuelian, Deukmejian’s fund-raising potential matches that of any Republican.

Before we pull this Deukmejian train out of the station, a few reality checks might be in order. Reality check No. 1: This is not a man who sets hearts aflutter. Deukmejian’s detractors–and even some of his friends–point out that as far as charisma goes, he makes “Dukakis look like the Beatles.” But if charisma was the key to national success, Dukakis and Bush would be looking for other work. Besides, Deukmejian’s campaign presence is usually underrated. It’s not hard to imagine Deukmejian performing at least at the level of this year’s nominees. Somewhat prosaic and uninspiring, Deukmejian is far from the best campaigner in the world, but he’s not the worst either–with an easygoing, unassuming amiability that wears well on voters. With the press he is personable and unaffected, and though he is sometimes defensive, Deukmejian can defuse tension with unexpected flashes of self-deprecating humor.

Second reality check: This is not a man who suffers from a visible need to make himself a household name. Deukmejian has always enjoyed governing more than campaigning, and many Republican strategists believe he lacks the fire to push himself through the demanding course that any effort to emerge nationally would require.”I just don’t know if the energy and the ideas and the intensity is there,” said an adviser to another Republican angling for the presidency in the 1990s.

While some of those around him would probably like the governor to seek the White House, Deukmejian clearly isn’t consumed with ambition to move up. Seeking the presidency someday now seems to him, “out of the question,” he says. “When I started in the Assembly and later in the Senate, I could say, yes, in my mind that if the opportunity presented itself I’d like to be governor. But I’ve never really had as a goal that I would want to seek the presidency.” He speaks with a combination of amazement and scorn of politicians “who seem to live and breathe and eat politics.”

On the other hand, Deukmejian only became governor by winning an arduous primary against Lt. Gov. Mike Curb, the choice of the California Republican establishment, and then hanging tough against Los Angeles’ popular Mayor Bradley. That is not the profile of a man impervious to ambition’s insistent tug. “He is modest in his demeanor,” says state Republican chairman Bob Naylor, “but there is ambition there.”

Midway through his second term, Deukmejian has shown flashes of interest in examining the world beyond Sacramento. The governor has not pursued opportunities as systematically as Kean and some others, and insists the recent increase in his out-of-state activity “has been primarily just to be of help to the national ticket.” Deukmejian denies any interest in raising his own profile for its own sake. “I’m not out looking for things to do,” he says, “but we do get requests, and I feel a little more comfortable in accepting some of those.” Whatever the motivation, his recent activity and upcoming schedule add up to a typically cautious effort to broaden his horizons.

In April, Deukmejian visited Texas to address a Republican party fund-raiser and drew high marks for a speech in which he gleefully bashed Dukakis. Deukmejian has scheduled four more out of state appearances at Republican fund-raisers through the campaign–including speeches in New York City and Florida. And in recent months he has become more active in governor’s activities. This winter, he assumed the chairmanship of a National Governors Assn. subcommittee on criminal justice–the first time he’s accepted such a responsibility. He’s currently vice chairman of the Western Governors Assn. and is scheduled to become chairman of the group next year. In the second term, he has also seasoned himself with international trade missions to Japan and Europe; later this month he’s scheduled to visit Australia, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Korea. He has formed a political action committee, Citizens for Common Sense, to build a statewide grass-roots political organization and fund his travel.

Deukmejian still isn’t looking for excuses to visit Washington. “I’m not anxious to make that trip back and forth anymore often than I have to,” he says. Earlier this year, he turned down an invitation to attend the Gridiron dinner, the annual closed-door gathering of the capital’s journalistic and political elite. But he did make a well-received address to the conservative Heritage Foundation last fall, and aides say his recent ABC appearance may signal a more open attitude toward the national press.

Third reality check: Even if he’s willing to hit the road, does Deukmejian have anything to say? Now that the Reagan era is ending, the GOP is groping for new direction. But unlike Reagan with his anti-government insurrection, or Kemp with his supply-side economic populism, or New Jersey’s Kean with his brotherly “politics of inclusion” aimed at broadening the party’s base, Deukmejian has offered no overarching vision of the Republican future. Asked to define the fundamental principles that have informed his administration, Deukmejian first listed “a common sense approach to running government.” Try constructing a banner around that. In Jesse Jackson’s terms, this is a jelly-maker not a tree-shaker.

The brightest ideological line running through Deukmejian’s politics is suspicion of government expansion. In that, he’s closer to Reagan than most of the emerging GOP leaders. In office, Deukmejian, like Reagan, has generally been more successful at saying no than yes. His first term, dominated by his unyielding resistance to Democratic spending, had a much sharper focus than his second term. That could be because the times are subtly changing. The polls have shifted, with more people demanding more services from government, and Deukmejian has been somewhat uncertain in his reaction– hesitancy demonstrated by his ultimately passive response to the revenue shortfall. (After he dropped his tax plan, the governor essentially told the Legislature to solve the problem.) He has pushed bond issues to pay for transportation and school construction needs, and increased education spending faster than his predecessors. But unmet needs are accumulating too; huge enrollment growth, for instance, is consuming the increases in school funding and driving the state back below the national average in per capita spending on elementary and secondary school education.

Those concerns about infrastructure and education, Deukmejian acknowledges, could threaten the state’s economic future. But so too, he maintained, would a tax hike that might make firms less likely to settle or expand here. “Our two main challenges are growth and the competition we’re faced with from other states for business investment,” he says. “So you have to try to strike a balance so you can meet the needs of the people in terms of growth, and at the same time be aware . . . that all the other states are out there competing very strongly for jobs, and foreign nations are out there competing.”

Democrats believe Deukmejian has struck too penurious a balance and hope the 1990 gubernatorial race will pivot on Deukmejian’s tough line against expanding government in a period of expanding needs. “They are too trapped in the present, worrying about this budget year, how much is it going to cost, and they are not thinking through in a systematic way how to plan for the future,” charges State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who may challenge Deukmejian in 1990 as a Democrat.

Those accusations may ultimately cause Deukmejian problems, and the law of political gravity–which holds that everyone eventually comes down–virtually guarantees that his approval ratings will sag at least somewhat. Some Democrats believe Deukmejian has never really been tested because in his 1978 election as attorney general and his two gubernatorial races he bested liberal black Democrats–a tough sell statewide. His opposition in 1990 should be more formidable, with Honig, Atty. Gen. John van de Kamp, former San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein and Controller Gray Davis all considering the race.

But his position is solid, especially for a governor so long on the scene. After the June defeat of the Honig-backed proposition to loosen restrictions on state spending, the Democrats may have trouble constructing a campaign around the argument “that the government isn’t spending enough tax dollars,” says chief of staff Frost. With the economy roaring, public opposition to taxes undiminished, and his government free from scandals, even many Democrats and independent analysts believe Deukmejian must be favored for a third term. He says he will decide whether to run again “by the end of this year or early next year.”

If Deukmejian punches through that historic third-term barrier–something only Earl Warren has done–he may be in a much better position to emerge as a national Republican leader than it now appears, particularly if Bush falls this November. Though Deukmejian hasn’t produced the bold initiatives that attract the national press and political elite, his political identity rests on positions consonant with the mainstream Republican electorate: a tough stand against crime, taxes and government spending. “He fits the Republican party like a glove,” says Anderson.

And he has, in California’s blistering economic performance, a powerful calling card. Dukakis’s experience may be suggestive of Deukmejian’s possibilities. Unlike his California counterpart, Dukakis had the advantage of some innovative policies (welfare reform, and a tax amnesty program) to sell, and much more exposure to the national elite, which gave him early credibility. But ultimately Dukakis based his presidential campaign on a story of state economic success. Deukmejian has at least as compelling an economic success story.

Deukmejian’s tough stand against taxes and conservative approach to government regulation may or may not explain California’s success, but questions about Dukakis’ role haven’t hurt his efforts to identify with the Massachusetts miracle. (In both places, Reagan’s defense build-up deserves a significant share of the credit.) And if Massachusetts is a miracle, what’s the right word to describe California, which created 2.1 million new jobs–almost five times as many as Massachusetts, and nearly one of every six non-agricultural jobs in the nation–from 1983 through 1987? In the last five years, California has created almost half of the nation’s new manufacturing jobs, according to the state Department of Commerce. For Deukmejian, the path to prominence could be built on nothing more complicated than promising “to do for the nation what he did for California,” insists pollster Tarrance.

True, Deukmejian faces the risk that the state’s problems in education, infrastructure and growth will tarnish that claim. But if this stubborn governor can demonstrate the flexibility to confront those challenges without violating his conservative principles–the key open question looming before him–he can convincingly hold up California as the prototype of a state that’s racing pell-mell into the future. In a recent speech before a business group, Deukmejian offered what might become his slogan: “Each day our state gives the rest of the nation a glimpse of tomorrow–of the progress that is within our reach.”

Although he’s done little to cultivate them, California’s success has placed possibilities within Deukmejian’s reach, too: Now the question is, does the Duke have the right stuff to reach out and grab them?

Marc Benioff has become the latest Silicon Valley tech leader to signal his approval of President Trump, saying that the president is doing a great job and ought to deploy the National Guard to deal with crime in San Francisco.

The Salesforce chief executive’s comments came as he headed to San Francisco to host his annual Dreamforce conference — an event for which he said he had to hire hundreds of off-duty police to provide security.

“We don’t have enough cops, so if they [National Guard] can be cops, I’m all for it,” he told The New York Times from aboard his private plane.

The National Guard is generally not allowed to perform domestic law enforcement duties when federalized by the president.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s use of National Guard soldiers in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act — which restricts use of the military for domestic law enforcement — and ordered that the troops not be used in law enforcement operations within California.

Trump has also ordered the National Guard to deploy to cities such as Portland, Ore., and Chicago, citing the need to protect federal officers and assets in the face of ongoing immigration protests. Those efforts have been met with criticism from local leaders and are the subject of ongoing legal battles.

President Trump has yet to direct troops to Northern California, but suggested in September that San Francisco could be a target for deployment. He has said that cities with Democratic political leadership such as San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles “are very unsafe places and we are going to straighten them out.”

“I told [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training for our military, our national guard,” Trump said.

Benioff’s call to send National Guard troops to San Francisco drew sharp rebukes from several of the region’s elected Democratic leaders.

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins said she “can’t be silent any longer” and threatened to prosecute any leaders or troops who harass residents in a fiery statement on X.

“I am responsible for holding criminals accountable, and that includes holding government and law enforcement officials too, when they cross the bounds of the law,” she said. “If you come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents, use excessive force or cross any other boundaries that the law prescribes, I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) also took to X to express indignation, saying “we neither need nor want an illegal military occupation in San Francisco.”

“Salesforce is a great San Francisco company that does so much good for our city,” he said. “Inviting Trump to send the National Guard here is not one of those good things. Quite the opposite.”

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office offered a more muted response, touting the mayor’s efforts to boost public safety in general, but declining to directly address Benioff’s remarks.

Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the mayor, noted that the city is seeing net gains in both police officers and sheriff’s deputies for the first time in a decade. He also highlighted Lurie’s efforts to bring police staffing up to 2,000 officers.

“Crime is down nearly 30% citywide and at its lowest point in decades,” Lutvak said. “We are moving in the right direction and will continue to prioritize safety and hiring while San Francisco law enforcement works every single day to keep our city safe.”

When contacted by The Times Friday night, the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who vociferously opposed the deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, did not issue a comment in response to Benioff.

Benioff and Newsom have long been considered friends, with a relationship dating back to when Newsom served as San Francisco’s mayor. Newsom even named Benioff as godfather to one of his children, according to the San Francisco Standard.

Benioff has often referred to himself as an independent. He has donated to several liberal causes, including a $30-million donation to UC San Francisco to study homelessness, and has contributed to prior political campaigns of former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Hillary Clinton.

However, he has also donated to the campaigns of former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain, both Republicans, and supported tougher-on-crime policies and reducing government spending.

Earlier this year, Benioff also praised the Elon Musk-led federal cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

“I fully support the president,” Benioff told the New York Times this week. “I think he’s doing a great job.”

Ubiquitous and almost uniformly dull, the year of dispiriting political advertising seems like it just won’t end. It’s not just voters who get tired of what’s turning up on TV.

A firm that tracks campaign ads finds “a painful proportion of them are all the same” — but plucks out five ads that is says are exceptions to the dull norm. That’s five offbeat, attention-grabbing ads that Kantar Media CMAG selected out of more than 6,000 that have aired this year — from local races all the way up to the scrum for the White House.

“These ads stand out because they’re unusually creative, personal or authentic,” said an article by Kantar Vice President Elizabeth Wilner for Ad Age.

That doesn’t mean they are particularly uplifting or nice. Just memorable. Among the ads singled out by Wilner:

–Rep. Allen West’s spot, comparing his preparations to deploy to Iraq in 2003 to the activities about that time of his Democratic opponent, who got arrested in a bar brawl. Even Democratic activists who loathed the content of the ad said it helped the Florida GOP lawmaker open up a lead over his opponent, Patrick Murphy.

–South Dakota U.S. Rep. Kristi Noem let her grandmother do the talking to describe the congresswoman’s position on Medicare and President Obama’s healthcare law. The result was a lot more engaging than it might sound.

–Alaska state Sen. Bettye Davis described her recipe for politics by mixing up a pot of gumbo like they do in her native Louisiana.

–U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, doesn’t want voters in that state to forget how her opponent, Rep. Todd Akin, talked about women’s bodies being able to somehow ward off pregnancy after “legitimate rape.” Her ad features an antiabortion Republican “and rape survivor” saying that Akin’s backward views and the possible “criminalizing” of abortion had her turning to McCaskill.

–An ad from conservative advocacy group Crossroads GPS went after Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio by mimicking the DirecTV ads—the ones that show consumers falling into dire straits because of their allegiance to cable TV. (“Don’t reenact scenes from ‘Platoon’ with Charlie Sheen.”) The spot captures some of the glow of the amusing DirectTV campaign.

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They had come to hear plans for the privately funded rebuilding of the Palisades Recreation Center that was badly damaged in the January fire that tore through Pacific Palisades.

Most of the hundreds crammed into the rec center’s old gym cheered about plans for new park space, pickleball courts and basketball hoops to be paid for by some of Los Angeles’ wealthiest and most prominent philanthropists.

But that Tuesday night — nine months to the day since the Palisades fire began — they were angry, too. With City Hall.

During public comments, Jeremy Padawer, whose home in the Palisades burned, said of the city-owned rec center: “We need this. We need churches, we need synagogues, we need grocery stores. We need hope.”

But he said he didn’t trust the municipal government to run the beloved rec center and reminded the crowd that the city, which is navigating the complex recovery from one of the costliest and most destructive fire in its history, is “a billion dollars in debt.”

Firefighters extinguish hot spots at the Community United Methodist Church of Pacific Palisades on Jan. 12.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

“What are they going to do with this brand new facility when [philanthropists] turn the keys over to them?” he asked. “Do we trust them?”

“No!” the crowd shouted.

He added: “Where is Mayor Bass?” The audience cheered. Someone hollered back: “Lost cause!”

Bass and other city leaders dispute they have neglected the fire-ravaged Palisades, but the scene encapsulated the anger and disappointment with City Hall that has been building in one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest neighborhoods. There, scores of yard signs depict the mayor wearing clown makeup à la the Joker. On one cleared lot, an enormous sign, roughly 7 feet tall, stands where a home once did, declaring: “KAREN BASS RESIGN NOW.”

Residents have blamed city leaders for a confusing rebuilding process that they say is being carried out by so many government agencies and consultants that it’s difficult to discern who is in charge. They also say that the city is moving too slowly — a charge that Bass and her team vehemently reject.

Kenny Cooper, special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, speaks during a news conference announcing the arrest of 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht in connection with the Palisades fire on Wednesday.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

On Wednesday, a day after the meeting at the rec center, federal prosecutors announced that the deadly Palisades fire was a flare-up of a small arson fire that had smoldered for six days, even after city firefighters thought they had it contained. Authorities said they had arrested Jonathan Rinderknecht, a 29-year-old Uber driver who is suspected of setting the initial fire on New Year’s Day.

Hours after the arrest was announced, the Los Angeles Fire Department — which failed to pre-deploy engines despite extreme wind warnings — released its long-awaited after-action report that said firefighters were hampered by an ineffective process for recalling them back to work, as well as poor communication, inexperienced leadership, and a lack of resources.

Many Palisadians had already suspected the fire was a rekindling of the smaller blaze, said Maryam Zar, who runs the citizen-led Palisades Recovery Coalition. But the onslaught of news landed “like a ton of bricks” in the frustrated community.

Zar got home late after attending the meeting at the rec center Tuesday night. Then, on Wednesday morning, her phone buzzed with text message chains from Palisadians telling one another to brace for a traumatic day — not necessarily because they would learn how the fire started, “but because we all knew that it was so unnecessary,” she said.

While people were happy there was “finally some accountability” with the arrest, she said, conversations in the Palisades quickly turned to: “Had the city been prepared, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Zar, who has spent more than a decade serving on and founding volunteer organizations and task forces in Pacific Palisades, said she was well accustomed to byzantine government processes.

“But for the first time, I’m worried because the wheels just aren’t turning,” she said.

A large sign on a fire-scorched lot at Alma Real Drive and El Cerco Place in Pacific Palisades calls on Mayor Karen Bass to resign.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

One project that has, for some, become surprisingly emblematic of working with the city is the promised-but-delayed installation of a small temporary space for the Palisades Branch Library, which stood next to the rec center campus before it was destroyed.

Cameron Pfizenmaier, president of the volunteer group Friends of the Palisades Library, said Los Angeles Public Library officials told her in July that the city would be placing a 60-by-60-foot prefabricated building — essentially a large trailer — on a grassy space at the entrance to the rec center.

It would include lockers for patrons to pick up books ordered online, computers, printers and scanners, and public meeting space. The building, she said she was told, would be up and running by August.

Then, she said, the building’s installation was delayed to October. And the location was changed, with the temporary space — which probably will stand for several years while the library is being rebuilt — now set to be placed atop two tennis courts at the rec center.

In an email to The Times this week, Bass’ office said that the building’s installation is expected to begin in November and that it should open by the end of January.

“The community is losing faith that the city is actually able to do anything,” said Pfizenmaier, who lost her home. “It’s such a missed opportunity for good news and hope.

“It’s not that hard to drop a bungalow and hook it into power. … The only thing that’s making it hard is the bureaucracy that’s preventing it.”

People play tennis at the Palisades Recreation Center on Oct. 5.

(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)

Yet Palisadeans themselves seem divided on the library, with some decrying the proposed use of the rec center’s grassy expanse, a rare green oasis in the charred neighborhood. Reality TV star Spencer Pratt, who lost his home, posted a photo of the space on Instagram, complaining that “Karen Bass and her city goons want to put a temporary library on top of it” and that he figured “the library will be designed in the shape of an empty water reservoir.”

Others have blasted the decision to place the structure atop the popular tennis courts.

In a statement to The Times, Bass’ office said the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks and the Los Angeles Public Library are gathering community feedback about the modular building, which the two agencies will share. They also are still determining how to hook up plumbing, sewage and electricity on site and are ordering books, computers, supplies and furniture, the mayor’s office said.

“This effort needed to be coordinated with and adjusted to the plans to redesign and rebuild the Palisades Rec Center to ensure the temporary site would not impede future construction,” Bass’ office said.

From the days just after the fire through July, the library lot on Alma Real Drive served as a staging area for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s emergency response, including distributing water and providing electric vehicle charging stations for Palisades residents, Bass’ office said.

Bass has issued a swath of executive orders to aid recovery, including providing tax relief for fire-affected businesses and streamlining permitting. And she has touted the speed with which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency, cleared debris from the library lot, citing her own “call to prioritize public spaces in the debris removal operation.”

The lot was cleared in April in six days — 24 days ahead of schedule.

Bass’ office said the L.A. Public Library is working to select an architect from a list of preapproved contractors through the Bureau of Engineering “to expedite the rebuilding of the permanent library.”

Joyce Cooper, director of branch library services for the library, said in an interview that the Palisades Branch Library held more than 34,000 items, including books, audiobooks, DVDs and CDs.

“Pretty much our entire collection — everything was lost,” Cooper said. “It was a community hub. When the fire destroyed the branch, it took that away from everybody.”

The city established limited library services in the nascent Pacific Palisades in the 1920s, and the community got its first branch library in 1952.

The most recent facility opened in 2003 and was damaged by a 2020 electrical fire that destroyed much of the children’s collection, said Laura Schneider, a board member and former longtime president for Friends of the Library.

After a long closure during the COVID-19 pandemic, volunteers worked hard to draw people back to the library, Schneider said. Children and teenagers competed in writing contests, volunteers hosted big weekend book sales, and older people sought help with computers.

Schneider — whose still-uninhabitable home was damaged by the January fire — was first drawn to the library as a young mom. She moved to the Palisades when her son, now 23, was 2 years old and was enchanted by the big, circular window with a window seat in the fairy-tale-themed children’s section.

“I really believe it’s the heart of the Palisades,” Schneider said. “It’s a place that welcomes everyone. … There’s no community center. There’s no senior center in the Palisades. The library is as close to that as it comes.”

At the start of Tuesday night’s meeting at the Palisades Recreation Center, Jimmy Kim, general manager of the city’s cash-strapped parks department, made clear that questions about the location of the temporary library were “outside the scope” of the gathering and would not be answered. Many in the audience groaned.

The recreation center will be rebuilt through a public-private partnership that Bass and her onetime political adversary, billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso, promoted in a joint appearance in the spring. There, Bass told reporters that the city’s job was to ensure the project was able to move quickly through the permitting process and that “the role of government is to get out of the way.”

Private donations from Caruso’s philanthropic group Steadfast LA will help pay for the roughly $30-million rebuilding of the rec center. Another major donor is LA Strong Sports, a group started by Lakers coach JJ Redick, a Palisades resident who coached a youth basketball team at the center and appeared at the Tuesday meeting.

Speaker after speaker praised the private donors for making speed a priority.

“I’m so grateful that this is going through private [development] and not city because otherwise it would not be up for another 10 years,” said one woman, who said she had lived in the Palisades for two decades and had an 8-year-old boy who used the park often.

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She added: “I just want to thank Rick Caruso for being the savior of our community.”

Caruso — who defeated Bass in the Palisades by wide a margin in the 2022 mayoral election — smiled and waved at her from the front of the room as the audience clapped.

A 15-year-old girl came to the microphone and said the rec center was where she learned to ride a bike and where her brothers played Saturday basketball games. Please, she pleaded with the donors in the room, hurry.

“Please don’t let us age out,” she said. “Please don’t let this take so long that kids never get to experience what I have. We’re ready to come back stronger. We just need help getting there.”

Caruso told the audience he expected construction to begin in January and for the center to reopen in January 2027. He said his group will not operate the space — the city will — but that he thought it would be in better hands if a community foundation took it over from the government.

At the end of the meeting, a City Hall staff member told the crowd that Bass had sent several staffers that night. The mayor, she promised, was listening.

PORTLAND, Maine — Maine’s two-term Democratic Gov. Janet Mills will run for the U.S. Senate seat held by veteran Republican Sen. Susan Collins next year, two people familiar with Mills’ plans said Friday.

The development sets up a potential showdown between the parties’ best-known figures in a state where Democrats see a chance to gain a seat in their uphill quest for the Senate majority.

Mills is tentatively expected to announce her candidacy Tuesday, according to the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss plans they were not authorized to share publicly.

Mills was the top choice of national Democrats who have long tried to unseat Collins, who has held the seat since 1997. She was urged to run by party leaders including New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader. And though she met only once with Schumer to discuss the race early this year, her decision is viewed as a recruiting win for Democrats, who also have well-known figures with statewide experience running for seats held by Republicans in North Carolina and Ohio.

Democrats see the Maine seat as especially important, considering it is the only one on the 2026 Senate election calendar where Republicans are defending an incumbent in a state carried last year by Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Still, a Democratic majority in the 100-member Senate remains a difficult proposition.

The party would need to gain a net of four seats, while most of the states with Senate elections next year are places where Republican Donald Trump beat Harris. Maine is an exception, while in North Carolina, where Trump narrowly won, Democratic former Gov. Roy Cooper is viewed as a contender, and Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown is running in Ohio, where Trump won comfortably and Brown was defeated in November.

Mills gained national attention in February during a White House meeting of governors with Trump when she announced to him, “We’ll see you in court,” over her opposition to his call for denying states federal funding over transgender rights.

In April, Maine officials sued the Trump administration in an effort to stop the federal government from freezing federal funding to the state in light of its decision to defy a federal ban on allowing transgender students to participate in sports.

Mills stoked Democratic enthusiasm in April when she said of the lawsuit, “I’ve spent the better part of my career listening to loud men talk tough to disguise their weaknesses.”

Mills, 77, is a former state attorney general who won the governorship in 2018 and again in 2022. Maine governors are barred from seeking a third term and, while Mills early this year seemed to dismiss a Senate campaign, she said she had rethought the notion and was “seriously considering” running.

She had set a November deadline for making a decision, though as of mid-September, she was interviewing prospective senior campaign staffers.

A campaign against Collins would pit her against a senator who has built a reputation as a moderate but who was a key supporter of Trump’s Cabinet and judicial nominations. A spokesperson for Collins declined to comment on the expected upcoming Mills announcement.

Collins, 72, has won all of her four reelection campaigns by double-digit percentages, except in 2020.

That year, Collins defeated Democratic challenger Sara Gideon, the former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, by more than 8 percentage points in a race Democrats felt confident could help them gain a seat in the Senate. Collins won in a year Democrats gained a net of three seats in the chamber. She won despite Trump losing Maine to Democrat Joe Biden by 9 percentage points.

Like Collins, Mills was born in rural Maine. She became Maine’s first female criminal prosecutor in the mid-1970s, and she would later become the state’s first elected female district attorney as well as its first female attorney general and governor. She served as attorney general twice, from 2009 to 2011 and from 2013 to 2019.

A few other challengers have declared candidacies for the Democratic nomination, including oyster farmer Graham Platner, who has launched an aggressive social media campaign. Platner has the backing of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who posted on social media on Thursday that Platner is “a great working class candidate for Senate in Maine who will defeat Susan Collins” and that it’s “disappointing that some Democratic leaders are urging Gov. Mills to run.”

Whittle and Beaumont write for the Associated Press and reported from Portland and Des Moines, respectively. AP writer Seung Min Kim in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), saying “the United States and this Administration have no trade policy,” Saturday called on the White House to impose restraints on shoe imports to help the suffering domestic footwear industry.

“It is time we got beyond simplistic catchwords that have immobilized us for so long,” he said in the Democratic response to President Reagan’s weekly radio address. “Free trade does not really exist in the modern market.”

“The U.S. shoe industry is literally withering on the vine due to a surge in footwear imports that reached 75% of the U.S. market in 1985,” Sasser said. In the senator’s home state, Tennessee, once the fifth-largest shoe-producing state in the country, 12 shoe factories have closed in the last 18 months.

Disarming in Trade War

“Far more is at stake here than the fate of a single industry. Frankly, we’re dealing with the credibility of our entire system of trade law,” Sasser said. “If the President fails to act here, where the evidence of import damage is truly extraordinary, we will be declaring unilateral disarmament in the intensifying battle for world trade.”

The President is required under law to act by next Sunday on a recommendation made by the International Trade Commission in June that he impose a novel shoe import quota system, in which the government would auction the right to import certain amounts of shoes.

“The International Trade Commission found that the shoe industry deserves and needs temporary relief, but the continued vacillation of the White House . . . only affirms what some of us have suspected for some time: that the United States and this Administration have no trade policy,” Sasser said.

“The belief that there is no middle ground between absolute free trade and absolute protectionism is largely responsible for the trade crisis we face today,” he added.

Trade Deficit Zooms

He said that the scope of that crisis is indicated by the growth of the nation’s trade deficit from $28 billion in 1981 to “the very real prospect of trade deficits that will have increased fivefold, to $150 billion” in 1985.

“For the first time in this century, the United States is now a debtor nation and our main export right now is American jobs,” Sasser said.

The problem, he said, is not with Japan or Canada or any other foreign nation. “The problem is ours and it’s a matter of gross inaction,” he said.

“The protectionist label is a red herring when virtually every government in the world seeks to assist its domestic industries with subsidies, with currency manipulation or with quotas,” he said.

A member of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners who led a nationwide search to hire a new LAPD chief and sparked condemnation from activists for his previous counterterrorism research is stepping down.

Erroll Southers confirmed his plans to resign through a spokesperson on Friday, ending a stormy two-year tenure on the influential civilian panel that watches over the LAPD.

The spokesperson said that Southers, 68, wanted to spend more time with his family and pursue other professional opportunities — something that wasn’t always allowed by the demands of serving as a commissioner. The officials often spend time outside their weekly meetings attending community events.

According to the spokesperson, Southers was not asked to submit his resignation, but she declined to say more about the timing of his departure.

Southers has been a member of the panel since 2023, when Mayor Karen Bass picked him to serve out the term of a departing commissioner.

Southers remained after serving out that term because of a bureaucratic loophole that allows new members to join any city commission if the City Council fails to vote on their appointment within 45 days. When the council members took no action on Southers earlier this month after his re-nomination by the mayor, a seat on the commission remained his by default.

His last commission meeting is expected to be Oct. 21 and he will step down at the end of that week. A replacement has not been announced by the mayor.

Southers had a long career in law enforcement before switching to academia and earning his doctorate in public policy. He worked as police officer in Santa Monica and later joined the FBI. He is currently a top security official in the administration at USC.

During this time on the commission, Southers pushed for changes to the way that the department hires and recruits new officers.

But more than any other commissioner, Southers has accumulated a loud chorus of detractors who point to his work on counterterrorism in the mid-2000s in Israel — which has especially become a lightning rod because of the ongoing crisis in Gaza.

Southers’ abrupt departure underscores the increasing difficulty in filling out one of the city’s most influential commissions. The panel was down a member for months after a former commissioner, Maria “Lou” Calanche, resigned so she could run for a City Council seat on the Eastside.

One previous candidate dropped out of the running after a disastrous hearing before the council, and another would-be commissioner quietly withdrew from running earlier this year.

Next Wednesday, a council committee will consider the nomination of Jeff Skobin, a San Fernando Valley car dealership executive and son of a former commissioner. Skobin’s move to the commission would still need approval from the full council.

Federal prosecutors sued Southern California Edison, saying its equipment ignited the 2019 Saddle Ridge fire, which burned nearly 9,000 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 100 homes in the San Fernando Valley.

The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday claims that Edison was negligent in designing, constructing and maintaining its high-voltage transmission line that runs through Sylmar. Equipment on the line is now suspected of causing both the 2019 fire as well as the Hurst fire on Jan. 7.

Edison has acknowledged that its equipment may have ignited the Jan. 7 fire, but it has been arguing for years in a separate lawsuit brought by Saddle Ridge fire victims that its equipment did not start the 2019 fire.

Lawyers for the victims say they have evidence showing the transmission line is not properly grounded, leading to two wildfires in six years. Edison’s lawyers call those claims an “exotic ignition theory” that is wrong.

In the new lawsuit, the federal government is seeking to recover costs for the damage the 2019 fire caused to 800 acres of national forest, including for the destruction of wildlife and habitats. The lawsuit also requests reimbursement for the federal government’s costs of fighting the fire.

“The ignition of the Saddleridge Fire by SCE’s power and transmission lines and equipment is prima facie evidence of SCE’s negligence,” states the complaint, which was filed by acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli.

“The United States has made a demand on SCE for payment of the costs and damages incurred by the United States to suppress the Saddleridge Fire and to undertake emergency rehabilitation efforts,” the complaint said. “SCE has not paid any part of the sum.”

David Eisenhauer, an Edison spokesman, said the company was reviewing the federal government’s lawsuit and “will respond through the legal process.”

“Our hearts are with the people and communities that were affected,” he said.

The 2019 wildfire tore through parts of Sylmar, Granada Hills and Porter Ranch, killing at least one person.

The fire ignited under a transmission tower just three minutes after a steel part known as a y-clevis broke on another tower more than two miles away, according to two government investigations into the fire. The equipment failure on that tower caused a fault and surge in power.

In the ongoing lawsuit by victims of the 2019 fire, the plaintiffs argue that the power surge traveled along the transmission lines, causing some of the towers miles away to become so hot that they ignited the dry vegetation underneath one of them. Government investigators also found evidence of burning at the base of a second tower nearby, according to their reports.

The lawyers for the victims say the same problem — that some towers are not properly grounded — caused the Hurst fire on the night of Jan. 7.

“The evidence will show that five separate fires ignited at five separate SCE transmission tower bases in the same exact manner as the fire that started the Saddle Ridge fire,” the lawyers wrote in a court filing this summer.

In that filing, the lawyers included parts of a deposition they took of an L.A. Fire Department captain who said he believed that Edison was “deceptive” for not informing the department that its equipment failed just minutes before the 2019 blaze ignited, and for having an employee offer to buy key surveillance video from that night from a business next to one of its towers.

Edison has denied its employee offered to buy the video. A spokeswoman said the utility did not tell the fire department that its equipment failed because it happened at a tower miles away from where the fire ignited.

Residents who witnessed both fires told The Times they saw fires burning under transmission towers on the evening of the 2019 fire and the night of Jan. 7.

Roberto Delgado and his wife, Ninoschka Perez, can see the towers from their Sylmar home. They told The Times they saw a fire on Jan. 7 under the same tower where investigators say the 2019 fire started.

The family had to quickly flee in the case of each fire.

“We were traumatized,” Delgado said. “If I could move my family away from here I would.”

The Jan. 7 fire burned through 799 acres and required thousands of people to evacuate. Firefighters extinguished the blaze before it destroyed any homes.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Friday that he’s placing an additional 100% tax on Chinese imports starting on Nov. 1 or sooner, potentially escalating tariff rates close to levels that in April fanned fears of a steep recession and financial market chaos.

The president said on his social media site that he is imposing these new tariffs because of export controls placed on rare earth elements by China. The new tariffs built on an earlier post Friday on Truth Social in which Trump said that “there seems to be no reason” to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping as part of an upcoming trip to South Korea.

Trump said that “starting November 1st, 2025 (or sooner, depending on any further actions or changes taken by China), the United States of America will impose a Tariff of 100% on China, over and above any Tariff that they are currently paying.”

The announcement after financial markets closed on Friday risked throwing the global economy into turmoil. Not only would the global trade war instigated by Trump be rekindled at dangerous levels, but import taxes being heaped on top of the 30% already being levied on Chinese goods could, by the administration’s past statements, cause trade to break down between the U.S. and China.

While Trump’s wording was definitive, he is also famously known for backing down from threats, such that some investors began engaging in what The Financial Times called the “TACO” trade, which stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” The prospect of tariffs this large could compound the president’s own political worries inside the U.S., potentially pushing up inflation at a moment when the job market appears fragile and the drags from a government shutdown are starting to compound into layoffs of federal workers.

The president also said that the U.S. government would respond to China by putting its own export controls “on any and all critical software” from American firms.

It’s possible that this could amount to either posturing by the United States for eventual negotiations or a retaliatory step that could foster new fears about the stability of the global economy.

The United States and China have been jostling for advantage in trade talks, after the import taxes announced earlier this year triggered a trade war between the world’s two largest economies. Both nations agreed to ratchet down tariffs after negotiations in Switzerland and the United Kingdom, yet tensions remain as China has continued to restrict America’s access to the difficult-to-mine rare earths needed for a wide array of U.S. technologies.

Trump did not formally cancel the meeting with Xi, so much as indicating that it might not happen as part of a trip at the end of the month in Asia. The trip was scheduled to include a stop in Malaysia, which is hosting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit; a stop in Japan; and a visit to South Korea, where he was slated to meet with Xi ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

“I was to meet President Xi in two weeks, at APEC, in South Korea, but now there seems to be no reason to do so,” Trump posted.

Trump’s threat shattered a monthslong calm on Wall Street, and the S&P 500 tumbled 2.7% on worries about the rising tensions between the world’s largest economies. It was the market’s worst day since April when the president last bandied about import taxes this high. Still, the stock market closed before the president spelled out the terms of his threat.

China’s new restrictions

On Thursday, the Chinese government restricted access to the rare earths ahead of the scheduled Trump-Xi meeting. Beijing would require foreign companies to get special approval for shipping the metallic elements abroad. It also announced permitting requirements on exports of technologies used in the mining, smelting and recycling of rare earths, adding that any export requests for products used in military goods would be rejected.

Trump said that China is “becoming very hostile” and that it’s holding the world “captive” by restricting access to the metals and magnets used in electronics, computer chips, lasers, jet engines and other technologies.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment.

Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, said Beijing reacted to U.S. sanctions of Chinese companies this week and the upcoming port fees targeting China-related vessels but said there’s room for deescalation to keep the leaders’ meeting alive. “It is a disproportional reaction,” Sun said. “Beijing feels that deescalation will have to be mutual as well. There is room for maneuver, especially on the implementation.”

The U.S. president said the move on rare earths was “especially inappropriate” given the announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza so that the remaining hostages from Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack can be released. He raised the possibility without evidence that China was trying to steal the moment from him for his role in the ceasefire, saying on social media, “I wonder if that timing was coincidental?”

There is already a backlog of export license applications from Beijing’s previous round of export controls on rare earth elements, and the latest announcements “add further complexity to the global supply chain of rare earth elements,” the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said in a statement.

Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., said China signaled it is open to negotiations, but it also holds leverage because to dominates the market for rare earths with 70% of the mining and 93% of the production of permanent magnets made from them that are crucial to high-tech products and the military.

“These restrictions undermine our ability to develop our industrial base at a time when we need to. And then second, it’s a powerful negotiating tool,” she said. And these restrictions can hurt efforts to strengthen the U.S. military in the midst of global tensions because rare earths are needed.

Trump’s trade war

The outbreak of a tariff-fueled trade war between the U.S. and China initially caused the world economy to shudder over the possibility of global commerce collapsing. Trump imposed tariffs totaling 145% on Chinese goods, with China responding with import taxes of 125% on American products.

The taxes were so high as to effectively be a blockade on trade between the countries. That led to negotiations that reduced the tariff charged by the U.S. government to 30% and the rate imposed by China to 10% so that further talks could take place. The relief those lower rates provided could now disappear with the new import taxes Trump threatened, likely raising the stakes not only of whether Trump and Xi meet but how any disputes are resolved.

Differences continue over America’s access to rare earths from China, U.S. restrictions on China’s ability to import advanced computer chips, sales of American-grown soybeans and a series of tit-for-tat port fees being levied by both countries starting on Tuesday.

Nebraska Republican Rep. Don Bacon said “China has not been a fair-trade partner for years,” but the Trump administration should have anticipated China’s restrictions on rare earths and refusal to buy American soybeans in response to the tariffs.

How analysts see moves by U.S. and China

Wendy Cutler, senior vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said Trump’s post shows the fragility of the détente between the two countries and it’s unclear whether the two sides are willing to de-escalate to save the bilateral meeting.

Cole McFaul, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said that Trump appeared in his post to be readying for talks on the possibility that China had overplayed its hand. By contrast, China sees itself as having come out ahead when the two countries have engaged in talks.

“From Beijing’s point of view, they’re in a moment where they’re feeling a lot of confidence about their ability to handle the Trump administration,” McFaul said. “Their impression is they’ve come to the negotiating table and extracted key concessions.”

Craig Singleton, senior director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank, said Trump’s post could “mark the beginning of the end of the tariff truce” that had lowered the tax rates charged by both countries.

It’s still unclear how Trump intends to follow through on his threats and how China plans to respond.

“But the risk is clear: Mutually assured disruption between the two sides is no longer a metaphor,” Singleton said. “Both sides are reaching for their economic weapons at the same time, and neither seems willing to back down.”

Boak and Tang write for the Associated Press. AP writers Stan Choe in New York and Josh Funk in Omaha, Neb., contributed to the report.

On the campaign trail eight years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom famously promised to support the construction of 3.5 million new homes in California by the end of this year. He’ll probably fall short by millions, but his latest move reaffirms the effort.

Newsom signed Senate Bill 79 into law Friday. The historic bill, which looks to add density to transit hubs across California, is one of the most ambitious state-imposed housing efforts in recent memory.

“All Californians deserve an affordable place to live — close to jobs, schools, and opportunity. Housing near transit means shorter commutes, lower costs, and more time with family. When we invest in housing, we’re investing in people — their chance to build a future, raise a family, and be part of a community,” Newsom said in a statement.

The sweeping bill — which takes effect July 1, 2026 — upzones areas across California, overriding local zoning laws to allow taller, denser projects near transit hubs such as subway stops, light rail stops and bus stops with dedicated lanes.

Developers will be permitted to build up to nine-story residential buildings adjacent to subway stops, seven stories within a quarter-mile of them and six stories within a half-mile. The bill will also allow residential buildings that reach five to eight stories near light rail and dedicated bus lanes, depending on how close a piece of property is to a particular station or bus stop.

It’s the second major housing reform Newsom has greenlighted this year. In June, he signed a landmark bill that streamlines housing construction and cuts through the regulatory red tape brought by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

Newsom’s decision caps months of debate and weeks of pleas from residents, advocacy groups and cities imploring him to either sign or veto.

It’s a huge win for YIMBY groups and developers, who claim the quickest way to address California’s housing crisis is to build housing — especially near transit stops to encourage public transportation and cut down on car pollution.

“With his signature on SB 79, Governor Newsom cements his legacy as one of the most transformative pro-housing leaders in California history,” California YIMBY Chief Executive Brian Hanlon said in a statement. “Now we begin the work of making sure its provisions are fully and fairly implemented.”

It’s a blow for some cities, including Los Angeles, which claim that the bill brings a one-size-fits-all approach to a problem that needs local control. Mayor Karen Bass asked Newsom to veto the bill, and the L.A. City Council passed a motion opposing it.

Now, the chaotic scramble begins as cities, developers and residents try to figure out who is affected by the bill — and who is exempted.

Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced the legislation in January, emphasizing the need for immediate action to address the housing crisis. But as the bill wound its way through the Legislature, a host of amendments, exemptions and carve-outs were added in order to secure enough votes to pass through the Assembly and Senate.

What was left was a wordy, at-times confusing bill. Wiener’s spokesperson Erik Mebust acknowledged that it’s “incredibly challenging to visualize.”

First, the bill’s scope was narrowed from all of California to only counties with at least 15 passenger rail stations, leaving only eight: Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Sacramento.

The biggest impact will probably be felt in Los Angeles, which has an estimated 150 transit stops covered by the bill, according to the city’s preliminary assessment.

Transit hubs are being targeted for taller, denser housing

Senate Bill 79 would override local zoning laws, allowing buildings of five to nine stories in areas close to many public transit stops in Los Angeles, according to the city’s preliminary analysis. Still, some properties would be eligible for exemptions or a multi-year delay.

Distance from transit hub

Los Angeles Dept. of City Planning

Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES

Next, lawmakers added several deferral options, allowing cities to postpone implementation in selected areas until approximately 2030 — one year after they must submit their latest plan for spurring new housing construction and accommodating growth.

For the next five years, cities can exempt properties in high-risk fire areas, historic preservation zones and low-resource areas — an attempt to mitigate the bill’s effect on gentrification in low-income neighborhoods.

Transit stops and fire zones

Under Senate Bill 79, cities can seek a delay in upzoning for areas located in very high fire hazard severity zones. In northeast Los Angeles, these zones overlap with transit stops in multiple places.

Distance from transit hub

Los Angeles Dept. of City Planning, California Dept. of Forestry and Fire Protection

Sean Greene LOS ANGELES TIMES

In addition, to eke out votes from lawmakers representing smaller cities, SB 79 zones shrank to a quarter-mile in cities with fewer than 35,000 residents, compared with a half-mile everywhere else.

Known as the “Beverly Hills carve-out,” the amendment shrinks the upzoning responsibility for certain small, affluent cities around Southern California including Beverly Hills and South Pasadena. As a result, the eligibility map gets weird.

For example, the law will only affect a quarter-mile area surrounding South Pasadena’s Metro A Line station, but a half-mile in its adjacent communities — Pasadena and L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood. In L.A.’s Beverly Grove neighborhood, the law covers properties within a half-mile of the Metro D Line subway, but in Beverly Hills right next door, it only affects areas within a quarter-mile.

Before Newsom signed it into law, Los Angeles City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky called it unfair.

“Beverly Hills gets off the hook, and Los Angeles is left holding the bag,” she said in a statement.

Other oddities abound. For example, a city can exempt a particular property that is half a mile from a transit station as the crow flies but has physical barriers — railroad tracks, freeways — that make it more than a mile away on foot.

Several online maps attempted to show which areas would be upzoned under SB 79, but no one has produced a parcel-specific overview. L.A. planning officials recently published a draft map showing the places that they believe would be upzoned under SB 79. But they cautioned that the online tool is for “exploratory purposes only” — and that a binding eligibility map will eventually be published by the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Cities, developers and homeowners will have to wait for clarity until that map is published. In the meantime, YIMBY groups are hoping the bill spurs multi-family development in L.A., which has waned in recent years due to unprofitable economics and regulatory uncertainty.

“A lot of people don’t want California to change, but California is changing whether they want it to or not,” said Matt Lewis, spokesperson for California YIMBY, one of the bill’s sponsors. “The question is whether we allow those changes to be sustainable and affordable, or chaotic and costly.”

A judge temporarily blocked California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s attempt to take over Los Angeles County’s beleaguered juvenile halls on Friday, finding that despite evidence of a “systemic failure” to improve poor conditions, Bonta had not met the legal grounds necessary to strip away local control.

After years of scandals — including frequent drug overdoses and incidents of staff violence against youths — Bonta filed a motion in July to place the county’s juvenile halls in “receivership,” meaning a court-appointed monitor would manage the facilities, set their budgets and oversee the hiring and firing of staff. An ongoing staffing crisis previously led a state oversight body to deem two of L.A. County’s halls unfit to house children.

L.A. County entered into a settlement with the California Department of Justice in 2021 to mandate improvements, but oversight bodies and a Times investigation earlier this year found the Probation Department was falling far short of fixing many issues, as required by the agreement.

On Friday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Peter A. Hernandez chastised Bonta for failing to clearly lay out tasks for the Probation Department to abide by in the 2021 settlement. Hernandez said the attorney general’s office’s filings failed to show that a state takeover would lead to “a transformation of the juvenile halls.”

The steps the Probation Department needs to take to meet the terms of the settlement have been articulated in court filings and reports published by the L.A. County Office of the Inspector General for several years. Hernandez was only assigned to oversee the settlement in recent months and spent much of Friday’s hearing complaining about a lack of “clarity” in the case.

Hernandez wrote that Bonta’s motion had set off alarm bells about the Probation Department’s management of the halls.

“Going forward, the court expects all parties to have an ‘all-hands’ mentality,” the judge wrote in a tentative ruling earlier this week, which he adopted Friday morning.

Hernandez said he would not rule out the possibility of a receivership in the future, but wanted more direct testimony from parties, including Probation Department Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa and the court-appointed monitor over the settlement, Michael Dempsey. A hearing was set for Oct. 24.

The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The Department remains fully committed to making the necessary changes to bring our juvenile institutions to where they need to be,” Vicky Waters, the Probation Department’s chief spokesperson, said in a statement. “However, to achieve that goal, we must have both the authority and support to remove barriers that hinder progress rather than perpetuate no-win situations.”

The California attorney general’s office began investigating L.A. County’s juvenile halls in 2018 and found probation officers were using pepper spray excessively, failing to provide proper educational and therapeutic programming and detaining youths in solitary confinement for far too long.

Bonta said in July that the county has failed to improve “75%” of what they were mandated to change in the 2021 settlement.

A 2022 Times investigation revealed a massive staffing shortage was leading to significant injuries for both youths and probation officers. By May of 2023, the California Board of State and Community Corrections ordered Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar shuttered due to unsafe conditions. That same month, an 18-year-old died of an overdose while in custody.

The county soon reopened Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, but the facility quickly became the site of a riot, an escape attempt and more drug overdoses. Last year, the California attorney general’s office won indictments against 30 officers who either orchestrated or allowed youths to engage in “gladiator fights.” That investigation was sparked by video of officers allowing eight youths to pummel another teen inside Los Padrinos, which has also been deemed unfit to house youths by a state commission.

In court Friday, Laura Fair, an attorney from the attorney general’s office, said that while she understood Hernandez’s position, she expressed concern that teens are still in danger while in the Probation Department’s custody.

“The youth in the halls continue to be in grave danger and continue to suffer irreparable harm every day,” she said.

Fair told the court that several youths transferred out of Los Padrinos under a separate court order in recent weeks showed up at Nidorf Juvenile Hall with broken jaws and arms.

She declined to comment further outside the courtroom. Waters, the Probation Department’s spokesperson, said she was unaware of the situation Fair was describing but would look into it.

Despite the litany of fiascoes over the last few years, probation leaders still argued in court filings that Bonta had gone too far.

“The County remains open to exploring any path that will lead to better outcomes. But it strongly opposes the DOJ’s ill-conceived proposal, which will only harm the youth in the County’s care by sowing chaos and inconsistency,” county lawyers wrote in an opposition motion submitted last month. “The DOJ’s request is almost literally without precedent. No state judge in California history has ever placed a correctional institution into receivership.”

Under the leadership of Viera Rosa, who took office in 2023, the Probation Department has made improvements to its efforts to keep drugs out of the hall, rectify staffing issues and hold its own officers accountable for misconduct, the county argued.

The department has placed “airport-grade” body scanners and drug-sniffing dogs at the entrances to both Nidorf and Los Padrinos in order to stymie the influx of narcotics into the halls, according to Robert Dugdale, an attorney representing the county.

Dugdale also touted the department’s hiring of Robert Arcos, a former high-ranking member of the Los Angeles Police Department and L.A. County district attorney’s office, to oversee security in the facilities.

The motion claimed it was the Probation Department that first uncovered the evidence that led to the gladiator fight prosecutions. Bonta said in March that his office launched its investigation after it reviewed leaked footage of one of the incidents.

WASHINGTON — The White House budget office said Friday that mass firings of federal workers have started in an attempt to exert more pressure on Democratic lawmakers in the ongoing government shutdown.

Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on the social media site X that the “RIFs have begun,” referring to reduction-in-force plans aimed at reducing the size of the federal government.

A spokesperson for the budget office said the reductions are “substantial” but did not offer more immediate details.

The Education Department is among the agencies hit by new layoffs, a department spokesperson said Friday without providing more details. The department had about 4,100 employees when Trump took office in January, but its workforce was nearly halved amid mass layoffs in the Republican administration’s first months. At the start of the shutdown, it had about 2,500 employees.

The White House previewed that it would pursue the aggressive layoff tactic shortly before the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, telling all federal agencies to submit their reduction-in-force plans to the budget office for its review. It said reduction-in-force plans could apply for federal programs whose funding would lapse in a government shutdown, are otherwise not funded and are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

This goes far beyond what usually happens in a government shutdown, which is that federal workers are furloughed but restored to their jobs once the shutdown ends.

Democrats have tried to call the administration’s bluff, arguing the firings could be illegal, and seemed bolstered by the fact the White House had yet to carry out the firings.

But President Trump had said earlier this week that he would soon have more information about how many federal jobs would be eliminated.

“I’ll be able to tell you that in four or five days if this keeps going on,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office as he met with Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney. “If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back.”

Meanwhile, the halls of the Capitol were quiet on Friday, then 10th day of the shutdown, with both the House and the Senate out of Washington and both sides digging in for a protracted shutdown fight. Senate Republicans have tried repeatedly to cajole Democratic holdouts to vote for a stopgap bill to reopen the government, but Democrats have refused as they hold out for a firm commitment to extend health care benefits.

There was no sign that the top Democratic and Republican Senate leaders were even talking about a way to solve the impasse. Instead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune continued to try to peel away centrist Democrats who may be willing to cross party lines as the shutdown pain dragged on.

“It’s time for them to get a backbone,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said during a news conference.

Kim and Groves write for the Associated Press. AP writer Collin Binkley contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump is undergoing what he has described as a “semiannual physical” at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday.

The visit, which the White House announced earlier this week, comes as Trump is preparing to travel to the Middle East on the heels of a ceasefire deal in the Israel-Hamas war. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described it as a “routine yearly checkup,” although Trump had his annual physical in April.

The White House declined to explain why Trump was getting a yearly checkup six months after his annual exam. But in an exchange with reporters Thursday, he said it was a “semiannual physical.”

“I’m meeting with the troops, and I’m also going to do a, sort of, semiannual physical, which I do,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I think I’m in great shape, but I’ll let you know.”

The president is scheduled to return to the White House after his visit to Walter Reed, which is located in Bethesda, Maryland.

Trump’s April physical found that he was “fully fit” to serve as commander in chief. The three-page summary of the exam done by his doctor, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, said he had lost 20 pounds (9 kilograms) since a medical exam in June 2020 and said he has an “active lifestyle” that “continues to contribute significantly” to the well-being of the president, who’s 79.

In July, the White House announced that Trump recently had had a medical checkup after noticing “mild swelling” in his lower legs and was found to have a condition common in older adults that causes blood to pool in his veins. Tests by the White House medical unit showed that Trump has chronic venous insufficiency, which occurs when little valves inside the veins that normally help move blood against gravity gradually lose the ability to work properly.

At the April physical, Trump also passed a short screening test to assess different brain functions.

Kim writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday despite jockeying from his fellow Republicans, various world leaders and — most vocally — himself.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honoring Machado “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

Machado, however, said she wanted to dedicate the win to Trump, along with the people of her country, as she praised the president for support of her cause.

The White House responded bitterly to the news of the award Friday, with communications director Steven Cheung saying members of “the Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace” because they didn’t recognize Trump, especially after the Gaza ceasefire deal his administration helped strike this week.

“He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will,” Cheung wrote on social media.

The White House did not comment on Machado’s recognition, but Trump on social media shared Machado’s post praising him.

Her opposition to President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela aligns with the Trump administration’s own stance on Venezuela, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously praised her as “the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism.”

Trump, who has long coveted the prestigious prize, has been outspoken about his desire for the honor during both of his presidential terms, particularly lately as he takes credit for ending conflicts around the world. The Republican president had expressed doubts that the Nobel committee would ever grant him the award.

“They’ll have to do what they do. Whatever they do is fine. I know this: I didn’t do it for that. I did it because I saved a lot of lives,” Trump said Thursday.

Although Trump received nominations for the prize, many of them occurred after the Feb. 1 deadline for the 2025 award, which fell just a week and a half into his second term. His name was, however, put forward in December by Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.

A long history of lobbying for the prize

Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the committee has seen various campaigns in its long history of awarding the peace prize.

“We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people wanting to say what for them leads to peace,” he said. “This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates, and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”

The peace prize, first awarded in 1901, was created partly to encourage ongoing peace efforts. Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that the prize should go to someone “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Three sitting U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Barack Obama in 2009. Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002, a full two decades after leaving office. Former Vice President Al Gore received the prize in 2007.

Obama, a Democrat who was a focus of Trump’s attacks well before the Republican was elected, won the prize early in his tenure as president.

“They gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country,” Trump said Thursday.

Wars in Gaza and elsewhere

As one of his reasons for deserving the award, Trump often says he has ended seven wars, though some of the conflicts the president claims to have resolved were merely tensions and his role in easing them is disputed.

But while there is hope for the end to Israel and Hamas’ war, with Israel saying a ceasefire agreement with Hamas came into effect Friday, much remains uncertain about the aspects of the broader plan, including whether and how Hamas will disarm and who will govern Gaza. And little progress seems to have been made in the Russia-Ukraine war, a conflict Trump claimed during the 2024 campaign that he could end in one day.

As Trump pushes for peaceful resolutions to conflicts abroad, the country he governs remains deeply divided and politically fraught. Trump has kicked off what he hopes to be the largest deportation program in American history to remove immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. He is using the levers of government, including the Justice Department, to go after his perceived political enemies. He has sent the military into U.S. cities over local opposition to stop crime and crack down on immigration enforcement.

He withdrew the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, dealing a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming. He touched off global trade wars with his on-again, off-again tariffs, which he wields as a threat to bend other countries and companies to his will. He asserted presidential war powers by declaring cartels to be unlawful combatants and launching lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean that he alleged were carrying drugs.

The full list of people nominated is secret, but anyone who submits a nomination is free to talk about it. Trump’s detractors say supporters, foreign leaders and others are submitting Trump’s name for nomination for the prize — and announcing it publicly — not because he deserves it but because they see it as a way to manipulate him and stay in his good graces.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who this summer said he was nominating Trump for the prize, on Friday reposted Cheung’s response with the comment: “The Nobel Committee talks about peace. President @realDonaldTrump makes it happen.”

“The facts speak for themselves,” Netanyahu’s office said on X. “President #Trump deserves it.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sent troops to Ukraine in 2022 and has sought to show alignment with Trump, told reporters in Taijikistan on Friday that it’s not up to him to judge whether Trump should have received the prize, but he praised the ceasefire deal for Gaza.

He also criticized the Nobel Committee’s prior decisions, saying it has in the past awarded the prize to those who have done little to advance global peace.

Putin’s remarks nearly echoed the comments Trump made about Obama, and the U.S. leader responded to his Russian counterpart’s praise by posting on social media: “Thank you to President Putin!”

Others who formally submitted a nomination for Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize — but after this year’s deadline — include Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Pakistan’s government, all citing his work in helping end conflicts in their regions.

Pesoli and Price write for the Associated Press. AP writers Chris Megerian in Washington, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — National Guard troops were seen patrolling in Memphis for the first time on Friday, as part of President Trump’s federal task force, which faces multiple legal challenges.

At least nine National Guard troops began their patrol at the Bass Pro Shops located at the Pyramid, an iconic landmark in Memphis. They were being escorted by a Memphis police officer and posed for photos with visitors who were standing outside.

It was unclear how many Guard members were on the ground or were expected to arrive later.

During an NAACP Memphis forum on Wednesday, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis said she hoped Guard personnel would help direct traffic and have a presence in “retail corridors,” but not be used to operate checkpoints or anything similar.

“From a public safety standpoint, we’re trying to utilize Guard personnel in non-enforcement types of capacities, so it does not feel like there is this over-militarization in our communities, in our neighborhoods, and that’s not where we’re directing those resources, either,” she said.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, said he never requested that the Guard come to Memphis. But after Trump made the Sept. 15 announcement and Republican Gov. Bill Lee agreed, Young and other officials said they wanted the task force to focus on targeting violent offenders rather than use their presence to scare, harass or intimidate the general public.

For years, Memphis has dealt with high violent crime, including assaults, carjackings and homicides. While this year’s statistics show improvement in several categories, including murders, many acknowledge that violence remains a problem.

Federal officials say hundreds of arrests and more than 2,800 traffic citations have been made since the task force began operating in Memphis on Sept. 29. Arrest categories include active warrants, drugs, firearms and sex offenses, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. Four arrests have been made on homicide charges, the Marshals Service said.

An ongoing legal battle

Friday’s development comes day after a federal judge in Illinois blocked the deployment of troops in the Chicago area for at least two weeks.

The on-again, off-again deployments stem from a political and legal battle over President Donald Trump’s push to send the National Guard to several U.S. cities. His administration claims crime is rampant in those cities, despite statistics not always backing that up.

If a president invokes the Insurrection Act, they can dispatch active duty military in states that fail to put down an insurrection or defy federal law, but the judge in Chicago said Thursday she found no substantial evidence that a “danger of rebellion” is brewing in Illinois during Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The ruling offered a victory for Democratic officials who lead the state and city.

“The court confirmed what we all know: There is no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois. And no place for the National Guard in the streets of American cities like Chicago,” Gov. JB Pritzker said.

The order in Illinois is set to expire Oct. 23 at 11:59 p.m. U.S. District Judge April Perry set an Oct. 22 hearing to determine if it should be extended for another 14 days.

In her ruling, she said the administration violated the 10th Amendment, which grants certain powers to states, and the 14th Amendment, which assures due process and equal protection.

It wasn’t clear what the 500 Guard members from Texas and Illinois would do next. They were mostly stationed at a U.S. Army Reserve Center in Elwood, southwest of Chicago. A small number on Thursday were outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Broadview, which for weeks has been home to occasional clashes between protesters and federal agents.

Officials at U.S. Northern Command directed questions to the Department of Defense, which cited its policy of not commenting on ongoing litigation. The troops are under the U.S. Northern Command and had been activated for 60 days.

U.S. Justice Department lawyer Eric Hamilton said Thursday that the Guard’s mission would be to protect federal properties and government law enforcers in the field, not “solving all of crime in Chicago.”

The city and state have called the deployments unnecessary and illegal.

Deployment in Portland remains on hold

A federal appeals court heard arguments on Thursday over whether Trump had the authority to take control of 200 Oregon National Guard troops. The president had planned to deploy them in Portland, where there have been mostly small nightly protests outside an ICE building.

A judge last Sunday granted a temporary restraining order blocking the move. Trump had mobilized California troops for Portland just hours after the judge first blocked him from using Oregon’s Guard.

Two dozen other states with a Democratic attorney general or governor signed a court filing in support of the legal challenge by California and Oregon. Twenty others, led by Iowa, backed the Trump administration.

The president previously sent troops to Los Angeles and Washington.

In a California case, a judge in September said the deployment was illegal. By that point, just 300 of the thousands of troops sent there remained and the judge did not order them to leave.

Sainz writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Ed White in Detroit, Geoff Mulvihill in Philadelphia, Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tenn., and Konstantin Toropin in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Heather Campbell lost her job working for a food bank over the summer because of federal funding cuts. Her husband serves as an officer in the Air Force, but now he’s facing the prospect of missing his next paycheck because of the government shutdown.

If lawmakers in Washington don’t step in, Campbell’s husband won’t get paid on Wednesday. Because the couple lacks the savings to cover all their expenses, they expect to survive on credit cards to pay the mortgage and feed their three children, racking up debt as the political stalemate drags on.

“You’re asking us to put our lives on the line or the people we love to put their lives on the line,” said Campbell, 39, who lives outside Montgomery, Alabama, near Maxwell Air Force Base. “And you’re not even going to give us our paycheck. What? There is a lot of broken trust there.”

The nation’s third shutdown in 12 years is once again raising anxiety levels among service members and their families because those in uniform are working without pay. While they would receive back pay once the impasse ends, many military families live paycheck to paycheck. During previous shutdowns, Congress passed legislation to ensure that troops kept earning their salaries, but time is running out before they miss their first paycheck in less than a week.

“There are so many things that Congress can’t agree on right now,” said Kate Horrell, the wife of a Navy veteran whose Washington, D.C., company provides financial advice to military families. “I don’t want to assume that they’re going to be able to agree on this.”

Paying the troops has support, but it’s unclear when a deal might pass

When asked if he would support a bill to pay the troops, President Donald Trump said, “that probably will happen.”

“We’ll take care of it,” Trump said Wednesday. “Our military is always going to be taken care of.”

Rep. Jen Kiggans, a Virginia Republican and former Navy helicopter pilot, has introduced a measure to maintain military and Coast Guard salaries, and it has bipartisan co-sponsors.

The House is closed for business until next week, leaving two days to take action before Wednesday’s payday. Missed paychecks for military service members are among the most serious pressure points in the shutdown, causing political pain for the lawmakers. Several proposals have been floated for voting on stand-alone legislation that would ensure no interruption in pay, but those are not expected to be brought up for consideration, for now.

Amanda Scott, whose husband is an Air Force officer in Colorado, said the uncertainty goes beyond the stress of just getting by — it chips away at the military’s ability to retain the best people and their readiness to fight.

“How ready and lethal are you if you don’t know if you can feed your family?” said Scott, 33, of Colorado Springs, who works for a defense contractor and volunteers as an advocate for military families. “A lot of these service members are highly skilled and can go out and make much more money in the civilian sector.”

Aid is available for service members, but it’s not enough for some families

Support is available for military families through nonprofits and charities. For example, some financial institutions are offering zero-interest loans, while each military branch has a relief organization.

But Campbell said she and her husband in Alabama can’t apply for a payday loan because they’re refinancing their house. They lack a substantial emergency fund because they were paying off student loans and moved several times in the last few years to military posts. It was often challenging for her to find steady work and child care.

“The opportunity to build up savings is really difficult on just one income,” Campbell said. “I don’t know many military families that have a month’s worth of income set aside just in case, let alone multiple months’ worth.”

Jen Cluff, whose husband recently left the Air Force, said her family was on a food aid program during the 2019 shutdown. But even the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, also known as WIC, which helps more than 6 million low-income mothers and young children, would run out of federal money within two weeks unless the shutdown ends, experts say.

“We made so little and had three young children,” said Cluff, 42, of San Antonio. “We were definitely a family that had very little buffer.”

If Congress had not passed legislation to pay troops during the last shutdown, missing more than two paychecks “would have been catastrophic for us,” she said.

“Resentment can grow quickly,” Cluff said of the shutdown, adding that “the general public, and many in government, truly don’t understand the daily sacrifices our military members and their families make for our country.”

Wider effects feared in military-heavy areas

The economic impact will ripple through regions with large military footprints, like coastal Virginia, home to the nation’s largest Navy base and several other installations. The area’s 88,000 active duty service members and their families likely have pulled back significantly on spending, said Rick Dwyer, executive director of the Hampton Roads Military and Federal Facilities Alliance, an advocacy group.

“Think about service members who are deployed right now around the world,” said Dwyer, who served in the Air Force during previous shutdowns. “They’re having to wonder if their families are going to be able to pay the rent, the child care bills, the car payments.”

A shutdown contingency plan posted on the Pentagon’s website cites the use of funds to continue military operations from Trump’s big tax and spending cut bill. The Congressional Budget Office has said money appropriated to the Defense Department under the new law could be used to pay active duty personnel.

It was not clear if the funding would be used for that. The Pentagon said Thursday that it could not provide information “at this time.”

Its contingency plan says it will “continue to defend the nation and conduct ongoing military operations” as well as activities “necessary for the safety of human life and the protection of property.”

Listed among the highest priorities are securing the U.S.-Mexico border, operations in the Middle East and the future Golden Dome missile defense program. The plan also noted that “child care activities required for readiness” would continue.

Raleigh Smith Duttweiler, chief impact officer for the National Military Family Association, said most child development centers on military bases are still operating. But she said most service members pay for child care off base.

“Last I checked, my kids’ babysitter doesn’t take an IOU from the federal government,” said Duttweiler, whose husband is a Marine.

Finley writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.

I was in San Francisco on election day and the fine Democrats I met could sense Arnoldism on the march and said they felt embarrassed by it all and I had to reassure them: A recall election is a beautiful thing. Chaos? What chaos? The voters got a chance to fast-forward to 2006 and click on Arnold. Why wait three years if you can cut to the chase?

Government can be such a dreary, drawn-out business, and an election is swift and dramatic. A few weeks of foofaraw and bluster and warmed-over wisdom and then the blessed day arrives and all the sweet rituals of voting and then, whammo, come the results, the shock and disbelief, the grinning and waving, and the next morning we’re on to something new.

Here in Minnesota we’re pleased that California has an action-hero governor, though there isn’t much similarity between Arnold and our man, Jesse (The Body) Ventura. Jesse was a lone ranger, a man on a horse, and Arnold is a whole posse of Republicans. He doesn’t look any more like a Republican than Barbara Boxer does, but the Republicans embraced him because he smelled like a winner, just as Time Warner embraced AOL. A merger — like the lady who went for a ride on the tiger and came back inside.

Arnold stretches the bounds of Republicanism so that it simply means the unDemocrats, the We Who Are Not Responsible for the Mess Party. This was good enough to get a man elected, but now comes the deluge. Now Arnold is saying that the state’s budget crisis may be worse than he had thought. Welcome to government. Success in this line of work is short-lived. Politics consists of mostly all gas, and gas evaporates or it cools, and the beautiful balloon gets wrinkly and descends. Arnold will need to act fast lest the crisis worsen and he be held responsible for it.

Californians are like anybody else in that they want a great four-course dinner for $8.95. They want to live in the Greatest State (Fine Roads, Excellent Hospitals, Best Parks, Great Schools in which All Children are Above Average), and they also want low taxes. God bless them. People in hell want ice water.

Arnold is going to have to put through an enormous tax increase while the bloom is still on his cheek, meanwhile decrying big government for all he’s worth. This is a good strategy for Republicans and has worked in the past. They have created a fine reputation as fiscal conservatives so that if they get lightheaded and throw money out the window, nobody holds them responsible. Leadership is not for the fainthearted. Sometimes a good leader has to charge courageously forward in full retreat. You get elected to office by telling wonderful stories and then you do what you have to do.

When Arnold takes office, he should do exactly what he promised not to do, and then smile and say that he didn’t really do it, and if he did do it, which he didn’t, he didn’t mean to do it, the thing that was not done, and will never do it again. We eat the cake and after we eat it, there is even more cake. Yes, we have no bananas, but we do have apples, which also are oranges. And if Arnold can be a Republican, then we’re all Republicans, and we Democrats are even more so.

Garrison Keillor’s latest novel “Love Me” (Viking Press) was published in August.

WASHINGTON — It has been four months since Elon Musk, President Trump’s bureaucratic demolition man, abandoned Washington in a flurry of recriminations and chaos.

But the Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle much of the federal government never ended. It’s merely under new management: the less colorful but more methodical Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.

Vought has become the backroom architect of Trump’s aggressive strategy — slashing the federal workforce, freezing billions in congressionally approved spending in actions his critics often call illegal.

Now Vought has proposed using the current government shutdown as an opportunity to fire thousands of bureaucrats permanently instead of merely furloughing them temporarily. If any do return to work, he has suggested that the government need not give them back pay — contrary to a law Trump signed in 2019.

Those threats may prove merely to be pressure tactics as Trump tries to persuade Democrats to accept spending cuts on Medicaid, Obamacare and other programs.

But the shutdown battle is the current phase of a much larger one. Vought’s long-term goals, he says, are to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and “deconstruct the administrative state.”

He’s still only partway done.

“I’d estimate that Vought has implemented maybe 10% or 15% of his program,” said Donald F. Kettl, former dean of the public policy school at the University of Maryland. “There may be as much as 90% to go. If this were a baseball game, we’d be in the top of the second inning.”

Along the way, Vought (pronounced “vote”) has chipped relentlessly at Congress’ ability to control the use of federal funds, massively expanding the power of the president.

“He has waged the most serious attack on separation of powers in American history,” said Elaine Kamarck, an expert on federal management at the Brookings Institution.

He’s done that mainly by using OMB, the White House office that oversees spending, to control the day-to-day purse strings of federal agencies — and deliberately keeping Congress in the dark along the way.

“If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we’re going to use that authority aggressively,” Vought said last month.

Federal judges have ruled some of the administration’s actions illegal, but they have allowed others to stand. Vought’s proposal to use the shutdown to fire thousands of bureaucrats hasn’t been tested in court.

Vought developed his aggressive approach during two decades as a conservative budget expert, culminating in his appointment as director of OMB in Trump’s first term.

In 2019, he stretched the limits of presidential power by helping Trump get around a congressional ban on funding for a border wall, by declaring an emergency and transferring military funds. He froze congressionally mandated aid for Ukraine, the action that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even so, Vought complained that Trump had been needlessly restrained by cautious first-term aides.

“The lawyers come in and say, ‘It’s not legal. You can’t do that,’” he said in 2023. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office over whether something is legal.”

Vought is a proponent of the “unitary executive” theory, the argument that the president should have unfettered control over every tentacle of the executive branch, including independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve.

When Congress designates money for federal programs, he has argued, “It’s a ceiling. It is not a floor. It’s not the notion that you have to spend every dollar.”

Most legal experts disagree; a 1974 law prohibits the president from unilaterally withholding money Congress has appropriated.

Vought told conservative activists in 2023 that if Trump returned to power, he would deliberately seek to inflict “trauma” on federal employees.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.”

When Vought returned to OMB for Trump’s second term, he appeared to be in Musk’s shadow. But once the flamboyant Tesla chief executive flamed out, the OMB director got to work to make DOGE’s work the foundation for lasting changes.

He extended many of DOGE’s funding cuts by slowing down OMB’s approval of disbursements — turning them into de facto freezes.

He helped persuade Republicans in Congress to cancel $9 billion in previously approved foreign aid and public broadcasting support, a process known as “rescission.”

To cancel an additional $4.9 billion, he revived a rarely used gambit called a “pocket rescission,” freezing the funds until they expired.

Along the way, he quietly stopped providing Congress with information on spending, leaving legislators in the dark on whether programs were being axed.

DOGE and OMB eliminated jobs so quickly that the federal government stopped publishing its ongoing tally of federal employees. (Any number would only be approximate; some layoffs are tied up in court, and thousands of employees who opted for voluntary retirement are technically still on the payroll.)

The result was a significant erosion of Congress’ “power of the purse,” which has historically included not only approving money but also monitoring how it was spent.

Even some Republican members of Congress seethed. “They would like a blank check … and I don’t think that’s appropriate,” said former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

But the GOP majorities in both the House and Senate, pleased to see spending cut by any means, let Vought have his way. Even McConnell voted to approve the $9-billion rescission request.

Vought’s newest innovation, the mid-shutdown layoffs, would be another big step toward reducing Congress’ role.

“The result would be a dramatic, instantaneous shift in the separation of powers,” Kettl said. “The Trump team could kill programs unilaterally without the inconvenience of going to Congress.”

Some of the consequences could be catastrophic, Kettl and other scholars warned. Kamarck calls them “time bombs.”

“One or more of these decisions is going to blow up in Trump’s face,” she said.

“FEMA won’t be capable of reacting to the next hurricane. The National Weather Service won’t have the forecasters it needs to analyze the data from weather balloons.”

Even before the government shutdown, she noted, the FAA was grappling with a shortage of air traffic controllers. This week the FAA slowed takeoffs at several airports in response to growing shortages, including at air traffic control centers in Atlanta, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In theory, a future Congress could undo many of Vought’s actions, especially if Democrats win control of the House or, less likely, the Senate.

But rebuilding agencies that have been radically shrunken would take much longer than cutting them down, the scholars said.

“Much of this will be difficult to reverse when Democrats come back into fashion,” Kamarck said.

Indeed, that’s part of Vought’s plan.

“We want to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself later in future administrations,” he said in April in a podcast with Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was slain on Sept. 10.

He’s pleased with the progress he’s made, he told reporters in July.

“We’re having fun,” he said.

Reporting from Washington and Honolulu — House Republican leaders, bowing to pressure from both the White House and their Senate colleagues, agreed to a stopgap measure that will forestall a tax increase on American workers that was scheduled to take effect Jan. 1.

The deal is expected to come to a vote Friday under procedures that would require all members in both chambers to agree. If any members object, Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) would call the House back into full session next week for a vote, he told reporters Thursday.

In addition to keeping Social Security payroll taxes at current levels for an additional two months, the deal would maintain unemployment insurance for people who have been jobless for an extended period and would block a cut in the payments doctors receive for treating Medicare patients. After Jan. 1, congressional negotiators would meet to decide how to extend the provisions for the rest of 2012.

Accepting the deal would mark a significant defeat for House conservatives, who in past confrontations have wrested major concessions from President Obama and congressional Democrats. Those previous standoffs, however, involved efforts to reduce spending. This time, the House was in the far trickier position of appearing to oppose a tax cut, and the deal almost entirely followed the terms negotiated in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Agreement came hours after Obama and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, adversaries who rarely agree, both urged House Republicans to accept a bill to keep payroll taxes at their current level.

“This is an issue where an overwhelming number of people in both parties agree. How can we not get that done?” Obama said at a White House event, where he read letters from workers who detailed the hardships that a tax increase would cause. “Enough is enough.”

Earlier in the day, McConnell split publicly from his House colleagues and issued a statement saying Americans “shouldn’t face the uncertainty of a New Year’s Day tax hike.” The House should accept the two-month extension that passed the Senate on Saturday, McConnell said.

The Senate had approved its stopgap measure with bipartisan support, 89 to 10. But when Boehner presented it to House Republicans last weekend, conservatives rebelled.

The impasse largely concerned how to pay for extending the tax cut for a full year. The House had rejected the Democrats’ idea to increase the income tax on millionaires, instead passing a one-year extension that covered the cost by spending cuts and new revenue. The Senate’s stopgap measure would raise fees on federally backed mortgages.

As Thursday wore on, House Republicans who had previously balked began to change their stance. One statement came from Rep. Sean Duffy, a tea party-backed freshman from Wisconsin, who said that he still didn’t like the two-month plan, but that the Senate had “left us with few other options.”

Failure to pass some payroll tax bill by Dec. 31 would mean an increase for the average family of about $40 per biweekly paycheck, or about $1,000 a year.

Conservatives disliked the payroll tax proposal for several reasons. It would increase the deficit and do little to help the economy, they said. And they raised concerns that because payroll taxes fund Social Security, any reduction would hurt that program’s long-term stability, even though the deal calls for the fund to be replenished. Many argued that their constituents would regard the tax increase as acceptable and would rather see taxes go up than give in to one of Obama’s legislative priorities.

But as the reality of a New Year’s tax increase began to sink in, the unpopularity of the idea became increasingly clear. Senior Republicans began warning that their party risked the kind of political damage it suffered 16 years ago with the Christmas-season shutdown of the government — a move that helped reelect then-President Bill Clinton.

Democrats were clearly enjoying the spectacle of Republicans trying to justify opposition to a tax cut. “This is a big moment,” said Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg, who was Clinton’s pollster. Republicans “put the spotlight on themselves” on an issue involving “money coming out of your pocket,” he said. “I don’t think it could be more powerful symbolically.”

Obama did his best to heighten Republican discomfort at his White House event, where he stood surrounded by ordinary citizens and read stories from people who had written to the White House about what a $40 cut in take-home pay would mean for them.

A teacher said she wouldn’t be able to go to the thrift store to buy pencils and books for her fourth-grade class, Obama said. A man from Rhode Island said that $40 buys three nights worth of home heating oil. A Wisconsin man wrote that he would have to give up some of the weekly 200-mile drives he makes to visit his father-in-law in a nursing home.

“What’s happening right now is exactly why people just get so frustrated with Washington,” Obama said. “This is it.”

Inside the White House, officials had believed all along that the payroll tax cut eventually would get renewed. Republicans would not be willing to be tagged as “the cause of taxes going up on 160 million Americans,” one senior White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

At the same time, “their handling of it seemed irrational, so it was hard to know what they were going to do,” the official added.

Republican officials rejected the “irrational” label, but agreed that their handling of the issue had damaged their cause. “It may not have been, politically, the smartest thing in the world,” Boehner told reporters, referring to his caucus’ opposition to the payroll tax bill. “Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing.”

In the end, however, the agreement came quickly, according to White House and congressional staff who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the negotiations publicly.

Thursday morning, Boehner called Obama and asked him to send members of his economic team to Capitol Hill for further negotiations. Obama declined, saying that the House would have to approve the Senate-passed bill first.

With his options running out, Boehner met with senior Republicans, who gave him approval to negotiate terms with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. All agreed that the time had come, aides said.

In the afternoon, Boehner’s aides contacted Reid’s staff. They offered to accept the Senate plan if Reid agreed to two minor matters. One would amend the Senate bill to avoid new tax-reporting requirements that the Senate language might have imposed. The other was an agreement by Reid to appoint Senate members to a conference committee to work out a full-year deal.

Reid, who had orchestrated the successful Democratic negotiating strategy, ratified the agreement in a brief statement: “I am grateful that the voices of reason have prevailed,” he said.

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Kathleen Hennessey in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

As California voters receive mail ballots for the November special election, which could upend the state’s congressional boundaries and determine control of the House, billionaire hedge-fund founder Tom Steyer said Thursday he will spend $12 million to back Democrats’ efforts to redraw districts to boost their party’s ranks in the legislative body.

The ballot measure was proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other California Democrats after President Trump urged Texas leaders to redraw their congressional districts before next year’s midterm election. Buttressing GOP numbers in Congress could help Trump continue enacting his agenda during his final two years in office.

“We must stop Trump’s election-rigging power grab,” Steyer said in a statement. “The defining fight through Nov. 4 is passing Proposition 50. In order to compete and win, Democrats can’t keep playing by the same old rules. This is how we fight back, and stick it to Trump.”

Steyer’s announcement makes him the biggest funder of pro-Proposition 50 efforts, surpassing billionaire financier George Soros, who has contributed $10 million to the effort.

Steyer founded a hedge fund whose investments included massive fossil fuel projects, but after he learned of the environmental consequences of these financial decisions, he divested and has worked to fight climate change. Steyer has spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Democratic candidates and causes and more than $300 million on his unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign.

Steyer plans to launch a scathing ad Thursday night that imagines Trump watching election returns on Nov. 4 and furiously throwing fast food at a television when he sees Proposition 50 succeeding.

“Why did you do this to Trump?” the president asks. The ad then shows a fictional TV anchor saying that the ballot measure’s success makes it more likely that Trump will be investigated for corruption and that the records of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein will be released. “I hate California,” Trump responds.

The advertisement is scheduled to start airing Thursday night during “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” The late-night show was in the spotlight after it was briefly suspended by Walt Disney Co.-owned ABC last month under pressure from the Trump administration because of a comment Kimmel made about the slaying of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The esoteric process of redistricting typically occurs once every decade after the U.S. Census to account for population shifts. The maps, historically drawn in smoke-filled backrooms, protected incumbents and created bizarrely shaped districts, such as the “ribbon of shame” along the California coast.

In recent decades, good-government advocates have fought to create districts that are logical and geographically compact and do not disenfranchise minority voters. At the forefront of the effort, California voters passed a 2010 ballot measure to create an independent commission to draw the state’s congressional boundaries.

But this year, Trump and his allies urged leaders of GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts to boost Republicans’ prospects in next year’s midterm election. The House is closely divided, and retaining Republican control is crucial to Trump’s ability to enact his agenda.

California Democrats, led by Newson, responded in kind. The state Legislature voted in August to call a special election in November to decide on redrawn districts that could give their party five more seats in the state’s 52-member congressional delegation, the largest in the nation.

Supporters of Proposition 50 have vastly outraised the committees opposing the measure. Steyer’s announcement came one day after Charles Munger Jr., the largest donor to the opposition, spoke out publicly for the first time about why he had contributed $32 million to the effort.

“I’m fighting for the ordinary voter to have an effective say in their own government,” Munger told reporters. “I don’t want Californians ignored by the national government because all the districts are fortresses for one party or the other.”

A longtime opponent of gerrymandering, the bow-tie-wearing Palo Alto physicist bankrolled the 2010 ballot measure that created the independent commission to draw California’s congressional districts.

Munger, the son of a billionaire who was the right-hand man of investor Warren Buffett, declined to comment about whether he planned to give additional funds.

“I neither confirm nor deny rumors that involve the tactics of the campaign,” Munger told reporters. “Talk to me after the election is over.”