Congress

“It’s an historic moment for the Congress. It’s an historic moment for the women of America. It is a moment for which we have waited over 200 years,” said United States Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi in January 2007, upon becoming the speaker of the US House of Representatives.

“For our daughters and our granddaughters, today we have broken the marble ceiling,” she added, addressing an applauding audience at the House in Washington, DC.

Pelosi, 85, who has served as the Democratic representative for California’s 11th Congressional District since 1987, made history when she was elected as the 52nd speaker of the House of Representatives – as the first-ever woman – and served from 2007 to 2011. She later served again from 2019 to 2023.

On Thursday this week, she announced her retirement from Congress as of January next year.

Paying tribute to her home city of San Francisco, she announced her decision in a video message, telling and citizens of the city: “It was the faith that you had placed in me and the latitude that you have given me that enabled me to shatter the marble ceiling and be the first woman speaker of the House, whose voice would certainly be heard.

“I want you, my fellow San Franciscans, to be the first to know I will not be seeking re-election to Congress,” Pelosi, 85, added.

“With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative.”

Seen as one of the most powerful figures in the modern Democratic Party and one of the most powerful women in US politics, Pelosi was re-elected as speaker of the House in 2019 and served until 2023.

At the end of her second tenure, she stepped down from House leadership for the Democratic Party but retained the honorary title of speaker emerita of the House.

Here’s what we know:

Who is Nancy Pelosi?

Nancy Patricia Pelosi was born on March 26, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, and is the only daughter and youngest of six siblings.

She comes from a family with political lineage. Her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr, was a congressman who served as mayor of Baltimore for 12 years. Her older brother, Thomas D’Alesandro III, also served as mayor of Baltimore.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Trinity College in Washington, DC in the 1960s, Pelosi started an internship with the Maryland senator at the time, Daniel Brewster.

In 1963, she married Paul Pelosi, an American businessman and San Francisco native, and the couple moved to the city six years later, with their six children.

In the 1980s, Pelosi began working with the Democratic National Committee in the state of California. Starting as a fundraiser, she progressed to become the chair of both the California Democratic Party between 1981 and 1983 and the host committee for the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

How long has Pelosi been in Congress?

In 1987, Pelosi was elected to Congress as a Democratic representative – a seat she campaigned for, promising action against AIDS, which was badly affecting people, especially from the LGBTQ+ community, in her city of San Francisco.

A national law addressing the epidemic emerged in the 1990s in the form of the Ryan White Care Act, and Pelosi, who was in Congress at the time, celebrated the moment. That law provided the largest funding programme for people with AIDS.

As a congresswoman for nearly 40 years, Pelosi has climbed through the ranks and, in 2001, became the first woman to hold the post of the House minority whip for the Democratic Party. In this post, it was her duty to advance the policies of her party.

In 2002, she became the House minority leader and, in 2007, she was elected speaker of the House when Republican George W Bush was in power.

“In this House, we may be different parties, but we serve one country,” she told the House while accepting the post in January 2007.

What does the House Speaker do?

According to the US Congress website, the Speaker of the House is elected either at the start of a Congress, which lasts for two years, or if there is a vacancy due to death or resignation.

The election takes place by “roll call vote, during which Members state aloud the name of their preferred candidate. If no candidate receives a majority of votes cast, balloting continues.” A speaker remains in office as long as he or she holds the House’s majority vote.

The speaker of the House symbolises “the power and authority of the House” and is tasked with maintaining decorum in the House, allowing members to speak, overseeing debates, and undertaking non-legislative tasks like controlling the Hall of the House.

The Speaker is also responsible for “defending the majority party’s legislative agenda” and also has a role of serving as a member of the House.

But the speaker cannot debate or vote on topics discussed in the House or sit on any standing committee in the House. These committees handle specific issues like overseeing government departments or analysing various financial issues.

What policies has Pelosi championed?

As a congresswoman and speaker of the House twice during her tenure, Pelosi has pursued left-of-centre policies and has been instrumental in passing several important laws and policies.

Climate

When she first took the gavel in 2007 as speaker of the House, she focused on climate policies and set up the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which held many hearings.

In 2015, she supported former US President Barack Obama in joining the Paris Climate Agreement.

In 2017, President Donald Trump ceased US participation, but when President Joe Biden came to power in 2021, climate was once again on the agenda.

As speaker of the House, Pelosi oversaw the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which also included policies to address climate change.

Women’s rights

As the first woman to hold the position of speaker of the House in the US, Pelosi has been seen as instrumental in advancing women’s rights.

When Obama came to power in 2008, with Pelosi as speaker, she ensured that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which addressed equal wages for men and women, was passed.

She also supported women’s reproductive rights, despite being a Catholic, and fought for Roe v Wade – a US law which established that women had a constitutional right to an abortion – when it was overturned during President Donald Trump’s first term.

Healthcare

During President Obama’s tenure, Pelosi was instrumental in ensuring his Affordable Care Act became a law in 2010.

The law lists guidelines to ensure federal subsidies to ensure every person in the US has access to medical care and services.

The law was initially unpopular in the House, but Pelosi held hearings and spoke to Democrats and Republicans to ensure the smooth passage of the bill.

Between 2021 and 2023, Pelosi was also able to help Democrats pass major bills to propel Biden’s agenda, which included a huge COVID-19 relief package.

Foreign policy

As a Congress member in 2003, she opposed the US’s war in Iraq. She has also voiced strong opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

However, when it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, Pelosi is a staunch supporter of Israel and has defended the US stance towards the war.

In 2024, however, she called on Biden to halt the transfer of arms to Israel.

Pelosi has also been hawkish towards China and triggered a controversy when she visited Taiwan in 2022.

What is her role now?

She currently serves as the Representative for California’s 11th Congressional District, which includes San Francisco, from where she focuses on employment rights.

After her second tenure as Speaker of the House ended in November 2023, Pelosi announced she would step down from the House’s leadership to make way for young members to take up the role.

The end of her tenure made headlines, and interviews with her focusing on her diet – which involved having “her daily hot dog” – also caught the media’s attention. Pelosi has often told reporters that she enjoys a hot dog with mustard for lunch every day, plenty of Ghirardelli chocolates, and a breakfast that generally includes ice cream.

After stepping down as speaker, Pelosi retained the title of Speaker Emerita of the House.

She is also renowned as a brilliant fundraiser for political campaigns. “I had to raise like a million dollars a day – well, at least five days a week,” she once told reporters.

Why is she retiring now?

Pelosi has not given the precise reason for her decision to retire now. But, according to US media reports, it was widely expected after close to 38 years of service.

“I say to my colleagues in the House all of the time, no matter what title they had bestowed upon me – speaker, leader, whip – there has been no greater honour for me than to stand on the House floor and say, ‘I speak for the people of San Francisco,’” she said in her video message announcing her retirement on Thursday.

How did Trump react to news of her resignation?

President Trump, who has clashed with Pelosi on numerous occasions, called her an “evil woman” following the news.

“I think she did the country a great service by retiring. I think she was a tremendous liability for the country,” he told reporters.

Pelosi and Trump are often referred to as adversaries by political commentators and US media outlets, due to their disagreements over policy.

In 2019, during Trump’s first term, Pelosi, Democrat Chuck Schumer – who is currently minority leader of the Senate – and Trump got into a heated argument over building a wall along the US border with Mexico. Trump threatened to shut down the government during the squabble, which was broadcast on television channels around the world.

That same year, Trump and Pelosi discussed the war in Syria, but their disagreements were made public by Trump himself, who tweeted a picture of Pelosi pointing a finger at him.

“Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!” he said.

Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown! pic.twitter.com/RDeUI7sfe7

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2019

In 2020, their rocky relationship once again made headlines when Pelosi tore up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech, calling it a “lie”. Trump said her actions were illegal since it was a government document, but, in fact, it was her own copy of the speech – not the official document.

Trump supporters who stormed into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to protest the 2020 presidential election results that Biden won, barged into Pelosi’s office looking for her but couldn’t find her.

In 2022, an assailant broke into Pelosi’s home in San Francisco and assaulted her husband with a hammer, fracturing his skull. The former House speaker was not at the house during the attack. Prosecutors believe the act was politically motivated.

In January 2023, Trump mocked her husband’s attack while addressing a California Republican party convention as he prepared to stand for the presidential race for a second time.

“We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco – how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” Trump said.

“And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house – which obviously didn’t do a very good job,” he added.

How have others reacted?

Many American politicians paid tribute to Pelosi on social media platforms this week.

Former Representative Democrat Gabby Giffords (Democrat-Arizona), who was shot in the head in 2011 by a gunman who also killed six others during a constituent event in Tucson in 2011, said in a press statement:  “As the first woman Speaker of the House, she inspired me and and at my bedside following the shooting that turned my life upside-down, she uplifted me.”

Former President Obama said on X: “For almost four decades, Nancy Pelosi has served the American people and worked to make our country better. No one was more skilled at bringing people together and getting legislation passed – and I will always be grateful for her support of the Affordable Care Act.”

Former President Biden called Pelosi “the best Speaker of the House in American history” and said it was the reason why he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US’s highest honour, in 2024.

“When I was President, we worked together to grow our economy, create millions of jobs, and make historic investments in our nation’s future. She has devoted much of her life to this country, and America will always be grateful,” he said on X.

Right-wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene also lauded Pelosi’s leadership. “She had an incredible career. I served under her speakership in my first term of Congress. And I’m very impressed at her ability to get things done. I wish we could get things done for our party,” she told CNN.

Which internet controversies has Pelosi been part of?

According to the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, while Pelosi has been lauded for her political achievements, she has also been mocked.

Some posts on the internet said she was removed from the House for being drunk many times. This is untrue.

A few other posts said she associated with Mexican drug lord El Chapo in 2016, when in reality she was at a meeting to discuss US-Mexico trade and security in the Pacific with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Representative Henry Cuellar from Texas, who internet users mistakenly identified as El Chapo.

Nov. 7 (UPI) — Republicans narrowly defeated a bipartisan bill in the Senate requiring congressional approval for military action against Venezuela as the Trump administration continues a military buildup in the region and attacks on alleged drug boats in nearby waters.

The GOP lawmakers rejected Senate Joint Resolution 90 in a 51-49 vote on Thursday evening, with Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska casting ballots in favor of the measure with their Democratic colleagues.

The resolution was introduced by Paul, and Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff of California and Tim Kaine of Virginia in response to reporting that President Donald Trump was considering military ground strikes against Venezuela.

Venezuela has long been a target of Trump, who, during his first administration, launched a failed multiyear pressure campaign to oust its authoritarian leader, President Nicolas Maduro.

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has used his executive powers to target drug cartels, including the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. Trump has claimed, without providing evidence, that TdA has “invaded” the United States at Maduro’s direction, despite his own National Intelligence Council concluding in May that the regime “probably does not have a policy of cooperating” with TdA.

The vote was held as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a 17th known military strike on an alleged drug trafficking boat in Caribbean international waters. Since Sept. 2, the United States has killed around 70 people in the attacks.

The attacks have drawn domestic and international criticism and allegations of war crimes, murder and extrajudicial killings. Some Democrats called on the Trump administration to answer questions over the legality of the strikes without gaining proper congressional approval.

Following the Thursday vote, Kaine said the Trump administration told some members of Congress that it lacked legal authority to launch any attacks into Venezuela. Some worry that an attack could devolve into a full-scale war.

“Trump’s illegal strikes on boats in the Caribbean and threats of land strikes in Venezuela recklessly and unnecessarily put the U.S. at risk of war,” Kaine said in a statement.

In a separate statement, he criticized his Republican colleagues, stating: “If the U.S. is going to put our nation’s sons and daughters into harm’s way, then we should have a robust debate in Congress in front of the American people.”

Sen. Todd Young, a Republican of Indiana, voted against the bill on Thursday, and explained in a statement that he has been informed of the legal rationale behind the strikes and does not believe the resolution is appropriate right now, but that could change.

“My vote is not an endorsement of the administration’s current course in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. As a matter of policy, I am troubled by many aspects and assumptions of this operation and believe it is at odds with the majority of Americans who want the U.S. military less entangled in international conflicts,” he said.

When Nancy Pelosi first ran for Congress, she was one of 14 candidates, the front-runner and a target.

At the time, Pelosi was little known to San Francisco voters. But she was already a fixture in national politics. She was a major Democratic fundraiser, who helped lure the party’s 1984 national convention to her adopted home town. She served as head of California’s Democratic Party and hosted a salon that was a must-stop for any politician passing through.

She was the chosen successor of Rep. Sala Burton, a short-timer who took over the House seat held for decades by her late husband, Philip, and who delivered a personal benediction from her deathbed.

But at age 49, Pelosi had never held public office — she was too busy raising five kids, on top of all that political moving and shaking — and opponents made light of role as hostess. “The party girl for the party,” they dubbed her, a taunt that blared from billboards around town.

She obviously showed them.

Pelosi not only made history, becoming the nation’s first female speaker of the House. She became the party’s spine and its sinew, holding together the Democrat’s many warring factions and standing firm at times the more timorous were prepared to back down.

The Affordable Care Act — President Obama’s signature achievement — would never have passed if Pelosi had not insisted on pressing on when many, including some in the White House, wished to surrender.

She played a significant role in twice helping rescue the country from economic collapse — the first time in 2009 amid the Great Recession, then in 2020 during the shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic — mustering recalcitrant Democrats to ensure House passage.

“She will go down in history as one of the most important speakers,” James Thurber, a congressional expert at Washington’s American University, said. “She knew the rules, she knew the process, she knew the personalities of the key players, and she knew how to work the system.”

Pelosi’s announcement Thursday that she will not seek reelection — at age 85, after 38 years in Congress — came as no surprise. She saw firsthand the ravages that consumed her friend and former neighbor, Dianne Feinstein. (Pelosi’s eldest daughter, Nancy, was a last caretaker for the late senator.)

She was not about to repeat that final, sad act.

Pelosi, who was first elected in 1987, once said she never expected to serve in Congress more than 10 years. She recalled seeing a geriatric House member hobbling on a cane and telling a colleague, “It’s never going to be me. I’m not staying around that long.”

(She never used a cane, but did give up her trademark stiletto heels for a time after suffering a fall last December and undergoing hip replacement surgery.)

Pelosi had intended to retire sooner, anticipating Hillary Clinton would be elected president in 2016 and seeing that as a logical, and fitting, end point to her trailblazing political career. “I have things to do. Books to write; places to go; grandchildren, first and foremost, to love,” she said in a 2018 interview.

However, she was determined to stymie President Trump in his first term and stuck around, emerging as one of his chief nemeses. After Joe Biden was elected, Pelosi finally yielded the speaker’s gavel in November 2022.

But she remained a substantive figure, still wielding enormous power behind the scenes. Among other quiet maneuvers, she was instrumental in helping ease aside Biden after his disastrous debate performance sent Democrats into a panic. He was a personal friend, and long-ago guest at her political salon, but Pelosi anticipated a down-ticket disaster if Biden remained the party’s nominee. So, in her estimation, he had to go.

It was the kind of ruthlessness that gave Pelosi great pride; she boasted of a reptilian cold-bloodedness and, indeed, though she shared the liberal leanings of her hometown, Pelosi was no ideologue. That’s what made her a superb deal-maker and legislative tactician, along with the personal touch she brought to her leadership.

“She had a will of steel, but she also had a lot of grace and warmth,” said Thurber, “and that’s not always the case with speakers.”

History-making aside, Pelosi left an enduring mark on San Francisco, the place she moved to from Baltimore as a young mother with her husband, Paul, a financier and real estate investor. She brought home billions of dollars for earthquake safety, re-purposing old military facilities — the former Presidio Army base is a spectacular park — funding AIDS research and treatment, expanding public transit and countless other programs.

Her work in the 1980s and 1990s on AIDS funding was crucial in helping move discussion of the disease from the shadows — where it was viewed as a plague that mainly struck gay men and drug users — to a pressing national concern.

In the process, she become a San Francisco institution, as venerated as the Golden Gate Bridge and beloved as the city’s tangy sourdough bread.

“She’s an icon,” said Aaron Peskin, a former San Francisco County supervisor and 2024 candidate for mayor. “She walks into a room, people left, right and center, old, young, white, Black, Chinese stand on their feet. She’s one of the greatest speakers we have ever had and this town understands that.”

Pelosi grew up in Baltimore in a political family. He father, Tommy D’Alesandro, was a Democratic New Deal congressman, who went on to serve three terms as mayor. “Little Nancy” stuffed envelopes — as her own children would — passed out ballots and often traveled by her father’s side to campaign events. (D’Alesandro went on to serve three terms as mayor; Pelosi’s brother, Tommy III, held the job for a single term.)

David Axelrod, who saw Pelosi up close while serving as a top aide in the Obama White House, said he once asked her what she learned growing up in such a political household. “She didn’t skip a beat,” Axelrod said. “She said, ‘I learned how to count.’ ”

Meaning when to call the roll on a key legislative vote and when to cut her losses in the face of inevitable defeat.

Pelosi is still so popular in San Francisco she could well have eked out yet another reelection victory in 2026, despite facing the first serious challenge since that first run for Congress. But the campaign would have been brutal and potentially quite ugly.

More than just about anyone, Pelosi knows how to read a political situation with dispassion, detachment and cold-eyed calculation.

She knew it was time.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s signature plan to impose import taxes on products coming from countries around the world ran into sharp skepticism at the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Most of the justices, conservative and liberal, questioned whether the president acting on his own has the power to set large tariffs as a weapon of international trade.

Instead, they voiced the traditional view that the Constitution gives Congress the power to raise taxes, duties and tariffs.

Trump and his lawyers rely on an emergency powers act adopted on a voice vote by Congress in 1977. That measure authorizes sanctions and embargoes, but does not mention “tariffs, duties” or other means of revenue-raising.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said he doubted that law could be read so broadly.

The emergency powers law “had never before been used to justify tariffs,” he told D. John Sauer, Trump’s solicitor general. “No one has argued that it does until this particular case.”

Congress has authorized tariffs in other laws, he said, but not this one. Yet, it is “being used for a power to impose tariffs on any product from any country for — in any amount on any product from any country for — in any amount for any length of time.”

Moreover, the Constitution says Congress has the lead role on taxes and tariffs. “The imposition of taxes on Americans … has always been a core power of Congress,” he said.

The tariffs case heard Wednesday is the first major challenge to Trump’s presidential power to be heard by the court. It is also a test of whether the court’s conservative majority is willing to set legal limits on Trump’s executive authority.

Trump has touted these import taxes as crucial to reviving American manufacturing.

But owners of small businesses, farmers and economists are among the critics who say the on-again, off-again import taxes are disrupting business and damaging the economy.

Two lower courts ruled for small-business owners and said Trump had exceeded his authority.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal on a fast-track basis with the aim of ruling in a few months.

In defense of the president and his “Liberation Day” tariffs, Trump’s lawyers argued these import duties involve the president’s power over foreign affairs. They are “regulatory tariffs,” not taxes that raise revenue, he said.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan disagreed.

“It’s a congressional power, not a presidential power, to tax,” Sotomayor said. “You want to say tariffs are not taxes, but that’s exactly what they are.”

Imposing a tariff “is a taxing power which is delegated by the Constitution to Congress,” Kagan said.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch may hold the deciding vote, and he said he was wary of upholding broad claims of presidential power that rely on old and vague laws.

The court’s conservative majority, including Gorsuch, struck down several far-reaching Biden administration regulations on climate change and student forgiveness because they were not clearly authorized by Congress.

Both Roberts and Gorsuch said the same theory may apply here. Gorsuch said he was skeptical of the claim that the president had the power to impose taxes based on his belief that the nation faces a global emergency.

In the future, “could the President impose a 50% tariff on gas-powered cars and auto parts to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad of climate change?” he asked.

Yes, Sauer replied, “It’s very likely that could be done.”

Congress had the lawmaking power, Gorsuch said, and presidents should not feel free to take away the taxing power “from the people’s representatives.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she was struggling to understand what Congress meant in the emergency powers law when it said the president may “regulate” importation.

She agreed that the law did not mention taxes and tariffs that would raise revenue, but some judges then saw it as allowing the authority to impose duties or tariffs.

Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Samuel A. Alito Jr. appeared to be leaning against the challenge to the president’s tariffs.

Kavanaugh pointed to a round of tariffs imposed by President Nixon in 1971, and he said Congress later adopted its emergency powers act without clearly rejecting that authority.

A former White House lawyer, Kavanaugh said it would be unusual for the president to have the full power to bar imports from certain countries, but not the lesser power to impose tariffs.

Since Trump returned to the White House in January, the court’s six Republican appointees have voted repeatedly to set aside orders from judges who had temporarily blocked the president’s policies and initiatives.

Although they have not explained most of their temporary emergency rulings, the conservatives have said the president has broad executive authority over federal agencies and on matters of foreign affairs.

But Wednesday, the justices did not sound split along the usual ideological lines.

The court’s ruling is not likely to be the final word on tariffs, however. Several other past laws allow the president to impose temporary tariffs for reasons of national security.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court’s conservatives face a test of their own making this week as they decide whether President Trump had the legal authority to impose tariffs on imports from nations across the globe.

At issue are import taxes that are paid by American businesses and consumers.

Small-business owners had sued, including a maker of “learning toys” in Illinois and a New York importer of wines and spirits. They said Trump’s ever-changing tariffs had severely disrupted their businesses, and they won rulings declaring the president had exceeded his authority.

On Wednesday, the justices will hear their first major challenge to Trump’s claims of unilateral executive power. And the outcome is likely to turn on three doctrines that have been championed by the court’s conservatives.

First, they say the Constitution should be interpreted based on its original meaning. Its opening words say: “All legislative powers … shall be vested” in Congress, and the elected representatives “shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposes and excises.”

Second, they believe the laws passed by Congress should be interpreted based on their words. They call this “textualism,” which rejects a more liberal and open-ended approach that included the general purpose of the law.

Trump and his lawyers say his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs were authorized by the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA.

That 1977 law says the president may declare a national emergency to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat” involving national security, foreign policy or the economy of the United States. Faced with such an emergency, he may “investigate, block … or regulate” the “importation or exportation” of any property.

Trump said the nation’s “persistent” balance of payments deficit over five decades was such an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”

In the past, the law has been used to impose sanctions or freeze the assets of Iran, Syria and North Korea or groups of terrorists. It does not use the words “tariffs” or “duties,” and it had not been used for tariffs prior to this year.

The third doctrine arose with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and is called the “major questions” doctrine.

He and the five other conservatives said they were skeptical of far-reaching and costly regulations issued by the Obama and Biden administrations involving matters such as climate change, student loan forgiveness or mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for 84 million Americans.

Congress makes the laws, not federal regulators, they said in West Virginia vs. Environmental Protection Agency in 2022.

And unless there is a “clear congressional authorization,” Roberts said the court will not uphold assertions of “extravagant statutory power over the national economy.”

Now all three doctrines are before the justices, since the lower courts relied on them in ruling against Trump.

No one disputes that the president could impose sweeping worldwide tariffs if he had sought and won approval from the Republican-controlled Congress. However, he insisted the power was his alone.

In a social media post, Trump called the case on tariffs “one of the most important in the History of the Country. If a President is not allowed to use Tariffs, we will be at a major disadvantage against all other Countries throughout the World, especially the ‘Majors.’ In a true sense, we would be defenseless! Tariffs have brought us Great Wealth and National Security in the nine months that I have had the Honor to serve as President.”

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer, his top courtroom attorney, argues that tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security. And if so, the court should defer to the president.

“IEEPA authorizes the imposition of regulatory tariffs on foreign imports to deal with foreign threats — which crucially differ from domestic taxation,” he wrote last month.

For the same reason, “the major questions doctrine … does not apply here,” he said. It is limited to domestic matters, not foreign affairs, he argued.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh has sounded the same note in the past.

Sauer will also seek to persuade the court that the word “regulate” imports includes imposing tariffs.

The challengers are supported by prominent conservatives, including Stanford law professor Michael McConnell.

In 2001, he and John Roberts were nominated for a federal appeals court at the same time by President George W. Bush, and he later served with now-Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

He is the lead counsel for one group of small-business owners.

“This case is what the American Revolution was all about. A tax wasn’t legitimate unless it was imposed by the people’s representatives,” McConnell said. “The president has no power to impose taxes on American citizens without Congress.”

His brief argues that Trump is claiming a power unlike any in American history.

“Until the 1900s, Congress exercised its tariff power directly, and every delegation since has been explicit and strictly limited,” he wrote in Trump vs. V.O.S. Selections. “Here, the government contends that the President may impose tariffs on the American people whenever he wants, at any rate he wants, for any countries and products he wants, for as long as he wants — simply by declaring longstanding U.S. trade deficits a national ‘emergency’ and an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat,’ declarations the government tells us are unreviewable. The president can even change his mind tomorrow and back again the day after that.”

He said the “major questions” doctrine fully applies here.

Two years ago, he noted the court called Biden’s proposed student loan forgiveness “staggering by any measure” because it could cost more than $430 billion. By comparison, he said, the Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs will impose $1.7 trillion in new taxes on Americans by 2035.

The case figures to be a major test of whether the Roberts court will put any legal limits on Trump’s powers as president.

But the outcome will not be the final word on tariffs. Administration officials have said that if they lose, they will seek to impose them under other federal laws that involve national security.

Still pending before the court is an emergency appeal testing the president’s power to send National Guard troops to American cities over the objection of the governor and local officials.

Last week, the court asked for further briefs on the Militia Act of 1908, which says the president may call up the National Guard if he cannot “with the regular forces … execute the laws of the United States.”

The government had assumed the regular forces were the police and federal agents, but a law professor said the regular forces in the original law referred to the military.

The justices asked for a clarification from both sides by Nov. 17.

Richard B. Cheney, the former vice president of the United States who was the architect of the nation’s longest war as he plotted President George W. Bush’s thunderous global response to the 9/11 terror attacks, has died.

Vexed by heart trouble for much of his adult life, Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family. He was 84.

“For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States,” the statement said. “Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing. We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”

To supporters and detractors alike, Cheney was widely viewed as the engine that drove the Bush White House. His two-term tenure capped a lifetime of public service, both in Congress and on behalf of four Republican presidents.

It often fell to Cheney, not President Bush, to make an assertive, unapologetic case for the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and for the controversial antiterrorism measures such as the Guantánamo Bay prison. And after the election of President Obama, it was once again Cheney, not Bush, who stood among the new president’s fiercest critics on national security.

In an October 2009 speech — one emblematic of the role he embraced after leaving the White House — Cheney blasted the Obama administration for opening a probe of “enhanced” interrogations of suspected terrorists conducted during the Bush years.

“We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on our own guys,” he said. The rhetoric was textbook Cheney: blunt, unvarnished, delivered with authority.

While Cheney at the time was attempting to occupy the leadership vacuum in the GOP in the age of Obama, there was little doubt that he also was motivated to preserve a legacy that appears to be as much his as former President Bush‘s. For eight years, Cheney redrew the lines that defined the vice presidency in a way no predecessor had. His office enjoyed greater autonomy than others before it, while working to keep much of his influence from plain sight. That way of operating led to a challenge before the Supreme Court as well as a criminal investigation over a leak of classified information.

Moreover, the image of a powerful backroom operator managing the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” combined with his service as Defense secretary during the Persian Gulf War and his stint as a chairman of defense contracting giant Halliburton, made Cheney a towering bête noire to liberals worldwide. To them, he embodied a dangerous fusion of politics and the military-industrial complex — and they viewed his every move with deep suspicion.

To his champions, however, he was the firm-jawed, hulking, resolute defender of American interests.

Standing with the administration was more than a duty to Cheney; it was an article of faith. The invasion of Iraq “was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it over again, we’d do exactly the same thing,” Cheney said in a 2006 interview, even as the nation slowly learned that U.S. intelligence suggesting Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction was simply not true.

Three years earlier, Cheney had pledged that the U.S. would be greeted in Iraq as “liberators” — a comment that haunted him as insurgents in the country gained strength, killed thousands of allied troops and extended the conflict for years. The war in Afghanistan would drag on for 20 years, ending in 2021 as it had begun, with the Taliban back in control.

While Cheney will largely be remembered for his leading role in the response to the 9/11 terror attacks, he had long worked the corridors of power in Washington. He was a White House aide to President Nixon and later chief of staff to President Ford. As a member of the House from Wyoming, he rose quickly to become part of the Republican leadership during the 1980s. In the early ’90s, he ran the Pentagon during the Gulf War.

Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney was born in Lincoln, Neb., on Jan. 30, 1941, and spent much of his teenage years in Casper, Wyo. His father worked for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service.

As a young man, he was more interested in hunting, fishing and sports than in academics, and a stint at Yale University was short-lived. He eventually obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Wyoming and studied toward a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.

In 1964, he married Lynne Ann Vincent, who became a lifelong political partner while strongly influencing Cheney’s conservatism. Daughter Elizabeth, who was elected to Congress in 2017, was born in 1966 and her sister, Mary, arrived three years later. The sisters became embittered years later when Elizabeth — who preferred Liz — took a stance opposing same-sex marriage, which seemed a slap to Mary and her wife. Cheney, however, offered his support for such unions, an early GOP voice for same-sex marriage. Years later, he came to Liz’s defense when she broke with fellow Republicans and voted to impeach President Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In addition to his wife and daughters, Cheney is survived by seven grandchildren.

A fellowship sent Cheney to Washington, where he soon began working for a politically shrewd House member who also was a lifetime influence, Donald H. Rumsfeld. When Rumsfeld joined the Nixon administration, Cheney followed.

After Ford succeeded Nixon in the wake of Watergate, Rumsfeld served as chief of staff, with Cheney at his side. Ford eventually appointed Rumsfeld secretary of Defense, and Cheney, at 34, ran the White House. Even then, his calm reserve was a hallmark.

Although nearly everyone working for him was older, “He was very self-assured,” James Cannon, a member of Ford’s White House team, said years later. “It didn’t faze him a bit to be chief of staff.”

Ford lost a narrow election to Jimmy Carter in 1976, but Cheney’s Washington career was just getting underway. He headed back to Casper and in little more than a year was running for Congress.

His health, though, already was a factor. In 1978, at age 37 and in the midst of a primary election campaign, he had a heart attack, the first of several. He would undergo multiple surgeries, including a quadruple bypass, two angioplasties, installation of a heart pump and — in 2012 — a transplant. His frequent trips to the hospital and seeming indestructibility provided fodder for late-night talk show hosts during Cheney’s vice presidency.

With the help of television ads reminding voters that Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson had served full White House terms despite having had heart attacks, he narrowly won the Republican nomination and, in November 1978, secured election to the House of Representatives from Wyoming’s single district.

In Congress, he was known as a listener more interested in problem-solving than conservative demagoguery, even as he quietly built a voting record that left no doubt about where he stood on the political spectrum. He quickly moved into the ranks of GOP leadership.

Cheney stepped into the public spotlight after he was named Defense secretary by President George H.W. Bush in 1989. As the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War cooled, Cheney was charged with overseeing a Pentagon that was more fractious than usual. In a test of political and managerial will, he oversaw major reductions in the Defense budget, a profound downsizing of forces and the closing of obsolete military bases. He helped implement the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 to oust the country’s leader, Manuel Noriega, for drug trafficking and racketeering.

But Cheney — along with his hand-picked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell — made his mark in the American response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Cheney played a key role in persuading the Saudi royal family to allow American troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia to defend against a looming attack from Hussein’s forces.

The Cheney-led Pentagon then shifted to offense in 1991, amassing an enormous American force that totaled more than 500,000 soldiers, nearly twice the number employed in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The U.S. military, with help from allied countries, overwhelmed the Iraqi forces in Kuwait in only 43 days and easily entered Iraq.

Characteristically, Cheney would defend the then-controversial decision to halt the U.S. advance toward Baghdad, which left Hussein in power. “I would guess if we had gone in there, we would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country,” he said in a 1992 speech. “We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.”

Cheney’s efforts to station U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, considered critical to the push to repel Iraq, would have unforeseen ramifications. The military presence there helped radicalize young Islamic militants such as Osama bin Laden.

After President Clinton’s victory in 1992, Cheney left government service. Three years later, he assumed the helm of Halliburton, one of the world’s leading oil field companies and a prominent military contractor. The company thrived under Cheney’s leadership: Its relationship with the Pentagon flourished, its international operations expanded and Cheney grew wealthy.

In 2000, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican nominee for president, asked Cheney to head up the search for his running mate, then ultimately chose Cheney for the job instead. He brought to the ticket an element of maturity and Washington gravitas that the inexperienced Bush did not possess.

Cheney’s lack of design on the presidency, and his willingness to return to government 10 days shy of his 60th birthday, seemingly gave Bush the benefit of his experience and earned Cheney a measure of trust — and thus authority — commanded by few presidential advisors.

Once in office, Cheney, mindful of lessons learned in the Ford White House, sought to revitalize an executive office he believed had become too hemmed in by Congress and the courts. He termed it a “restoration.”

“After Watergate, President Ford said there was an imperiled president, not an imperial presidency,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek. Cheney, he said, felt “he badly needed to expand the powers of the presidency to assure the national security.”

In office barely a week, Cheney created a national energy policy task force in response to rising gasoline prices. A series of meetings with top officials from the oil, natural gas, electricity and nuclear industries were closed to the public, and Cheney refused to reveal the names of the participants. Cheney would exert similar influence over environmental policy and, with an office on Capitol Hill, forcefully advance the president’s legislative agenda.

A lawsuit seeking information about the task force made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the vice president’s favor in 2004. One of the justices in the majority was Antonin Scalia, who was a friend and, it was later revealed, had recently gone duck hunting with the vice president.

Another hunting trip gone awry earned Cheney embarrassing headlines in 2006 when he accidentally shot and wounded a member of the party with a round of birdshot while quail hunting on a Texas ranch.

More troubling to Cheney was a federal criminal probe in connection with the 2003 leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. The investigation resulted in the conviction four years later of Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. Libby was later pardoned by President Trump.

Cheney, however, will be largely remembered for his unwavering belief that the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — especially the latter — were essential, a stance he maintained even as the missions in both theaters evolved from rooting out suspected terrorists to nation-building, and even as the casualties skyrocketed and it became clear the 20-year mission was doomed.

When U.S. troops and civilians were pulled out of Afghanistan in a fraught and fatal departure in 2021, it was Cheney’s daughter who spoke up.

“We’ve now created a situation where as we get to the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we are surrendering Afghanistan to the very terrorist organization that housed al Qaeda when they plotted and planned the attacks against us,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R.-Wyo.) said.

The former vice president’s steely resolve was captured years later in “Vice,” a 2018 biographical drama in which Christian Bale portrayed Cheney as a brainy yet uncompromisingly uncharismatic leader.

It was Cheney who insisted early on that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us,” Cheney said in August 2002. The U.S. eventually determined that Iraq had no such weapons.

He argued forcefully that Hussein was linked to the 2001 terror attacks. When other administration officials fell silent, Cheney continued to make the connections even though no shred of proof was ever found. In a 2005 speech, he called the Democrats who accused the administration of manipulating intelligence to justify the war “opportunists” who peddled “cynical and pernicious falsehoods” to gain political advantage.

Cheney also frequently defended the use of so-called extreme interrogation methods, such as waterboarding, on al Qaeda operatives. He did so in the final months of the Bush administration, as both the president’s and Cheney’s public approval ratings plunged.

“It’s a good thing we had them in custody and it’s a good thing we found out what they knew,” he said in a 2008 speech to a friendly crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“I’ve been proud to stand by him, the decisions he made,” Cheney said of Bush. “And would I support those same decisions today? You’re damn right I would.”

Oliphant and Gerstenzang are former Times staff writers.

Staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this story.

Six years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld highly partisan state election maps in North Carolina and Maryland — ruling that federal courts cannot block states from drawing up maps that favor one party over the other — one of the court’s liberal justices issued a warning.

“If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government,” Associate Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent.

Kagan argued that Republicans in North Carolina and Democrats in Maryland — the two examples before the court — had rigged elections in a way that “deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights,” “debased and dishonored our democracy” and turned “upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”

“Ask yourself,” Kagan said as she recounted what had happened in each state: “Is this how American democracy is supposed to work?”

That’s the question Californians are now weighing as they decide how, or whether, to vote on Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to scrap congressional maps drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission and replace them with maps drawn by legislators to favor Democrats through 2030.

Democrats don’t deny that the measure is a deliberate attempt to dilute GOP voting power.

From the start, they’ve argued that the point of redistricting is to weaken Republicans’ voting power in California — a move they justify on the grounds that it is a temporary fix to offset similar partisan gerrymandering by Texas Republicans. This summer, President Trump upped the ante, pressing Texas to rejigger maps to shore up the GOP’s narrow House majority ahead of the 2026 election.

Experts say opponents of Proposition 50 have no viable federal legal challenge against the new maps on the basis that they disenfranchise a large chunk of California Republicans. Even since the 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision Rucho vs. Common Cause, complaints of partisan gerrymandering have no path in federal court.

Already, Proposition 50 has survived challenges in state court and is unlikely to be successfully challenged if passed, said Richard L. Hasen, professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law.

“If you’re a Republican in California, or you’re a Democrat in Texas, you’re about to get a lot less representation in Congress,” Hasen said. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that.”

If Californians vote in favor of the measure on Tuesday, the number of Republicans in the state’s House — nine of 52 total members — would likely be reduced by five. That could mean Republicans have less than 10% of California’s congressional representation even though Trump won 38% of the 2024 vote.

“All of this is unconstitutional, but the federal courts aren’t available to help,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School.

“Every time you redraw a district specifically to protect some candidates and punish others,” Levitt said, “what you’re basically saying is it shouldn’t be up to the voters to weigh in on whether they think the candidates are doing a good job or not.”

Possible legal avenues

But even if the issue of partisan gerrymandering is blocked in federal courts, there are other potential legal avenues to challenge California’s new legislative maps.

One route would be to claim that Proposition 50 violates the California Constitution.

David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law, said that if Proposition 50 passes, he expects a barrage of “see what sticks” lawsuits raising California constitutional claims. They stand little chance of success, he said.

“Voters created the redistricting commission,” he said. “What the voters created they can change or abolish.”

Attorneys might also bring racial discrimination claims in federal court alleging California lawmakers used partisan affiliation as a pretext for race in drawing the maps to disenfranchise one racial group or another, Carrillo said. Under current law, he said, such claims are very fact-dependent.

Attorneys are already poised to file complaints if the referendum passes.

Mark Meuser, a conservative attorney who filed a state complaint this summer seeking to block Proposition 50, said he is ready to file a federal lawsuit on the grounds that the new maps violate the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“We’re saying that race was a predominant factor in drawing the lines,” Meuser said. “When race is a predominant factor in drawing the lines without a compelling interest, strict scrutiny will mandate the maps be stricken.”

Some legal experts believe that would be a tricky case to prove.

“It sure seems like the new map was oriented predominantly around politics, not race,” Levitt argued. “And though they’d be saying that race was a predominant factor in drawing the lines, that’s very, very, very different from proving it. That’s an uphill mountain to climb on these facts.”

Some experts think the new maps are unlikely to raise strong Voting Rights Act challenges.

Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who specializes in elections, said the new districts appeared to have been carefully carved to preserve Latino- or Black-majority districts.

A successful challenge is possible, McGhee said, noting there are always novel legal arguments. “It’s just the big ones that you would think about that are the most obvious and the most traditional are pretty closed,” he said.

Supreme Court looms large

Ultimately, legal experts agree the fate of California maps — and other maps in Texas and across the nation — would depend on the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on a redistricting case from Louisiana.

Last month, conservative Supreme Court justices suggested in a hearing that they were considering reining in a key part of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.

“Whatever happens with Proposition 50 — pass or fail — almost doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” Carrillo said, noting that the Supreme Court could use the Louisiana case to strike Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. “There’s a big litigation storm coming in almost any scenario.”

Levitt agreed that the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act, which could come any time between now and June, could change current law. But he stressed it is impossible to predict how broad the ruling could be.

“Whether that leaves any of California’s districts vulnerable — either in the current map or in the map if Prop. 50 passes — depends entirely on what Scotus says,” Levitt argued. “There are only nine people who know what they’ll actually say, and there are a lot of possibilities, some of which might affect California’s map pretty substantially, and some of which are unlikely to affect California’s map at all.”

Will Congress intervene?

As the redistricting battle spreads across the country and Democratic and Republican states look to follow Texas and California, Democrats could ultimately end up at a disadvantage. If the overall tilt favors Republicans, Democrats would have to win more than 50% of the vote to get a majority of seats.

Congress has the power to block partisan gerrymandering in congressional map drawing. But attempts so far to pass redistricting reform have been unsuccessful.

In 2022, the House passed the Freedom to Vote Act, which would have prohibited mid-decade redistricting and blocked partisan gerrymandering of congressional maps. But Republicans were able to block the bill in the Senate, even though it had majority support, due to that chamber’s filibuster rules.

Another option is a narrower bill proposed this summer by Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley, who represents parts of the Sacramento suburbs and Lake Tahoe and could lose his seat if Proposition 50 passes. Kiley’s bill, along with similar legislation introduced by California Democratic representatives, would ban mid-decade redistricting.

“That would be the cleanest way of addressing this particular scenario we’re in right now, because all of these new plans that have been drawn would become null and void,” McGhee said.

But in a heavily deadlocked Congress, Kiley’s bill has little prospect of moving.

“It may have to get worse before it gets better,” Hasen said.

If the redistricting war doesn’t get resolved, Hasen said, there will be a continued race to the bottom, particularly if the Supreme Court weakens or strikes down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Another scenario, Hasen argued, is Democrats regain control of Congress and the presidency, overcome the filibuster rule and pass redistricting reform.

If that doesn’t happen, Levitt said, the ultimate power rests with the people.

“If we want to tell our representatives that we’re sick of this, we can,” Levitt said. “There’s a lot that’s competing for voters’ attention. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have agency here.”

The strange political bedfellows created by efforts to save spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest just got even stranger.

Already Republican members of Congress were allied with animal rights activists.
They don’t want trained shooters to kill up to 450,000 barred owls, which are outcompeting northern spotted owls, under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan approved last year that would unfold over three decades.

Now, timber interests are aligning with environmentalists in favor of culling the owls.

Some logging advocates are afraid nixing the plan will slow down timber harvesting. Roughly 2.6 million acres of timberlands in western Oregon managed by the Bureau of Land Management are governed by resource management plans contingent on the barred owl cull going forward, according to Travis Joseph, president and chief executive of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association representing mills, loggers, lumber buyers and other stakeholders in the region.

The area can produce at least 278 million board feet per year under current plans, “with the potential for significantly more,” Joseph said in a mid-October letter to Congress.

If the cull is scrapped, he said, the federal agency likely will need to restart Endangered Species Act consultation for the northern spotted owl, which is listed as threatened. It’s a process that could take years. According to the letter, it would create “unacceptable risks and delays to current and future timber sales.”

Timber production goals laid out by the Trump administration also could be jeopardized.

Momentum to stop the cull gained ground this summer when Sen. John Kennedy, a conservative from Louisiana, introduced a resolution to reverse the Biden-era plan.
That move reflected an unlikely alliance between some right-wing politicians and animal rights advocates who say it’s too expensive and inhumane. Some Democrats have also opposed the cull, and companion legislation in the House has bipartisan backers.

The stakes are high. Many environmentalists and scientists maintain that northern spotted owls will go extinct if their competitors aren’t kept in check. Barred owls — which originally hail from eastern North America — are larger, more aggressive and less picky when it comes to habitat and food, giving them an edge when vying for resources.

Last week, Politico’s E&E News reported that Kennedy said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asked him to stand down from his effort to stop the owl-killing plan. The legislator told the outlet he would charge ahead anyway.

“I don’t think the federal government ought to be telling God, nature — whatever you believe in — this one can exist, this one can’t,” Kennedy told E&E. “The barred owl is not the first species that has ever moved its territory and it won’t be the last.”

Kennedy did not respond to The Times’ request for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior said they could not respond to the inquiry because of the government shutdown.

“It’s strange that a Republican in the south is taking on the owl issue, specifically, when its consequences will impact western Oregon BLM timber sales,” Joseph said in an interview. “It will lead to lower revenues for counties, it will impact jobs and it will put the spotted owl on a trajectory towards extinction.”

The stance aligns in part with that of environmental groups like the Environmental Protection Information Center and Center for Biological Diversity, which have supported culling barred owls to help the beleaguered spotted owls in their native territory. It’s an unexpected overlap, given environmentalists’ long history of fighting to protect old-growth forests in the region the owls call home.

Tom Wheeler, chief executive of EPIC, said it’s possible that culling barred owls could lead to a bump in timber harvest on the BLM land in western Oregon but overall it would lead to more habitat being protected throughout the spotted owls’ expansive range. The presence of spotted owls triggers protections under the Endangered Species Act. If the cull boosts the spotted owl population as intended, it means more guardrails.

“It puts us in admittedly an awkward place,” Wheeler said. “But our advocacy for barred owl removal is predicated not on treating the northern spotted owl as a tool against the timber industry and against timber harvest. What we’re trying to do is provide for the continued existence of the species.”

Many Native American tribes support controlling barred owls in the region. In a letter to Congress last week, the nonprofit Intertribal Timber Council said barred owls threaten more than the spotted owl.

“As a generalist predator, it poses risks to a wide range of forest and aquatic species that hold varying degrees of social and ecological importance to tribes, including species integral to traditional food systems and watershed health,” wrote the council, which aims to improve the management of natural resources important to Native American communities.

Since 2013, the Hoopa Valley tribe in Northern California has been involved with sanctioned hunting of the owls and has observed the spotted owl population stabilizing over time, according to the letter.

However, groups like Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Human Economy argue that the plan to take out so many barred owls over a vast landscape won’t work, aside from the high owl death toll. More barred owls simply will fly into where others were removed, said Wayne Pacelle, president of both groups.

That makes habitat key — and the prospect of losing more to logging in western Oregon devastating, according to Pacelle.

To stop the owl-culling plan, both chambers of Congress would need to pass a joint resolution and President Trump would need to sign it. If successful, the resolution would preclude the agency from pursuing a similar rule, unless explicitly authorized by Congress.

The plan already faced setbacks. In May, federal officials canceled three related grants totaling more than $1.1 million, including one study that would have removed barred owls from over 192,000 acres in Mendocino and Sonoma counties

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Monday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to fire the director of the U.S. Copyright Office.

The administration’s newest emergency appeal to the high court was filed a month and a half after a federal appeals court in Washington held that the official, Shira Perlmutter, could not be unilaterally fired.

Nearly four weeks ago, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit refused to reconsider that ruling.

The case is the latest that relates to Trump’s authority to install his own people at the head of federal agencies. The Supreme Court has largely allowed Trump to fire officials, even as court challenges proceed.

But this case concerns an office that is within the Library of Congress. Perlmutter is the register of copyrights and also advises Congress on copyright issues.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer wrote in his filing Monday that despite the ties to Congress, the register “wields executive power” in regulating copyrights.

Perlmutter claims Trump fired her in May because he disapproved of advice she gave to Congress in a report related to artificial intelligence. Perlmutter had received an email from the White House notifying her that “your position as the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office is terminated effective immediately,” her office said.

A divided appellate panel ruled that Perlmutter could keep her job while the case moves forward.

“The Executive’s alleged blatant interference with the work of a Legislative Branch official, as she performs statutorily authorized duties to advise Congress, strikes us as a violation of the separation of powers that is significantly different in kind and in degree from the cases that have come before,” Judge Florence Pan wrote for the appeals court. Judge Michelle Childs joined the opinion. Democratic President Biden appointed both judges to the appeals court.

Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee, wrote in dissent that Perlmutter “exercises executive power in a host of ways.”

Perlmutter’s attorneys have argued that she is a renowned copyright expert. She has served as register of copyrights since then-Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed her to the job in October 2020.

Trump appointed Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche to replace Hayden at the Library of Congress. The White House fired Hayden amid criticism from conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.

Oct. 27 (UPI) — The White House asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to allow President Donald Trump to fire a top official in the Library of Congress after a lower court ruled against it.

Shira Perlmutter, director of the U.S. Copyright Office, was dismissed from her role by Trump just days after the president removed Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in May. Hayden was replaced by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on an interim basis.

In September, a federal appeals court ordered Perlmutter reinstated to her role under the legislative branch, not the executive branch, at the Library of Congress.

On Monday, the Trump administration told the high court in its appeal that the D.C. appeal circuit’s ruling contravened “settled precedent and misconceives the Librarian’s and Register’s legal status.”

“Treating the Librarian and Register as legislative officers would set much of federal copyright law on a collision course with the basic principle that Congress may not vest the power to execute the laws in itself or its officers,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in an emergency filing.

Meanwhile, Robert Newlen is listed as the acting Librarian of Congress.

WASHINGTON — The government shutdown, already the second-longest in history, with no end in sight, is quickly becoming an additional way for President Trump to exercise new command over the government.

It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it all started with an attempt to tighten Washington’s observance of federal law.

The modern phenomena of the U.S. government closing down services began in 1980 with a series of legal opinions from Atty. Gen. Benjamin Civiletti, who was serving under Democratic President Carter. Civiletti reached into the Antideficiency Act of 1870 to argue that the law was “plain and unambiguous” in restricting the government from spending money once authority from Congress expires.

In this shutdown, however, Trump has used the funding lapse to punish Democrats, as he tried to lay off thousands of federal workers and seized on the vacuum left by Congress to reconfigure the federal budget for his priorities.

“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” the Republican president posted on his social media platform at the outset of the shutdown.

Democrats have only dug into their positions.

It’s all making this fight that much harder to resolve and potentially redefining how Washington will approach funding lapses to come.

Why does the U.S. government even have shutdowns?

In the post-Watergate years, Civiletti’s tenure at the Department of Justice was defined by an effort to restore public trust in Washington, sometimes with strict interpretations of federal law.

When a conflict between Congress and the Federal Trade Commission led to a delay in funding legislation for the agency, Civiletti issued his opinion, later following it up with another that allowed the government to perform essential services.

He did not know that it would set the groundwork for some of the most defining political battles to come.

“I couldn’t have ever imagined these shutdowns would last this long of a time and would be used as a political gambit,” Civiletti, who died in 2022, told the Washington Post six years ago.

How shutdowns evolved

For the next 15 years, there were no lengthy government shutdowns. In 1994, Republicans retook Congress under House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and pledged to overhaul Washington. Their most dramatic standoffs with Democratic President Clinton were over government shutdowns.

Historians mostly agree the shutdowns did not work, and Clinton was able to win reelection in part by showing he stood up to Gingrich.

“The Republicans in the Gingrich era, they do get some kind of limited policy victories, but for them overall it’s really kind of a failure,” said Mike Davis, adjunct professor of history at Lees-McRae College.

There was one more significant shutdown, in 2013, when tea party Republicans sparred with Democratic President Obama. But it was not until Trump’s first term that Democrats adopted the tactic of extended government shutdowns.

How is this shutdown different?

During previous funding lapses, presidential administrations applied the rules governing shutdowns equally to affected agencies.

“A shutdown was supposed to close the same things under Reagan as under Clinton,” said Charles Tiefer, a former acting general counsel for the House and a professor emeritus at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He said that in this shutdown, the Trump administration has used “a kind of freewheeling presidential appropriation power, which is contrary to the whole system, the original Constitution, and the Antideficiency Act.”

The administration has introduced a distinctly political edge to the funding fight, with agencies updating their websites to include statements blaming Democrats for the shutdown. The Department of Defense has tapped research and development funds to pay active-duty service members. (And a private donor has helped out.) Trump has tried to initiate layoffs for more than 4,000 federal employees who are mostly working in areas perceived to be Democratic priorities.

During a luncheon at the White House with GOP senators last week, Trump introduced his budget director Russ Vought as “Darth Vader” and bragged how he is “cutting Democrat priorities and they’re never going to get them back.”

Democrats have only been emboldened by the strategy, voting repeatedly against a Republican-backed bill to reopen the government. They argue that voters will ultimately hold Republicans accountable for the pain of the shutdown because the GOP holds power in Washington.

Democrats are confident they have chosen a winning policy demand — opposing big rate hikes in healthcare plans offered under Affordable Care Act marketplaces — but there is an undercurrent that they are also fighting to halt Trump’s expansion of presidential power.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) acknowledged that his state has more to lose than perhaps any other due to the large number of federal employees and activity based there. But he argued that his constituents are fed up with a “nonstop punishment parade” from Trump that has included layoffs, cancellation of money for economic development projects, pressure campaigns against universities and the dismissal of the U.S. attorney for Virginia.

“It kind of stiffens folks’ spines,” Kaine said.

Democratic resolve will be tested in the coming week. Federal employees, including lawmakers’ own staffs, have now gone almost an entire month without full paychecks. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps about 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries, faces a potential funding cliff on Nov. 1. Air travel delays threaten to only grow worse amid air traffic controller shortages.

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said he hopes his colleagues start negotiating quickly to end the impasse.

He said he’s been one of the few members of the Democratic caucus to vote for ending the shutdown because “it empowers the president beyond what he would be able to do otherwise, and it damages the country.”

Groves writes for the Associated Press.

Oct. 24 (UPI) — Former special counsel Jack Smith wants to testify in open hearings before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees about his investigations of President Donald Trump.

On Thursday, Smith’s lawyers sent letters to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who lead the chambers’ panels. Trump was indicted in two cases: attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and possession of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.

On Oct. 14, Jordan demanded that he testify behind closed doors with a transcript available, writing “your testimony is necessary to understand the full extent to which the Biden-Harris Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement.” Jordan accused him of prosecutorial overreach and evidence manipulation.

But Smith, who resigned from his position before Trump returned to office in January, wants the hearings in public.

“Given the many mischaracterizations of Mr. Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Mr. Smith respectfully requests the opportunity to testify in open hearings before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees,” his attorneys, Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, wrote.

Smith will need approval from the Justice Department, where he was employed when Joe Biden was president.

Smith’s attorneys said he will need guidance so he won’t violate rules to guard jury testimony.

“He is prepared to answer questions about the Special Counsel’s investigation and prosecution, but requires assurance from the Department of Justice that he will not be punished for doing so,” the letter said.

Smith’s lawyers also asked for “access to the Special Counsel files, which he no longer has the ability to access.”

“Jack Smith certainly has a lot of answering to do, but first, Congress needs to have all the facts at its disposal,” Grassley told CNN in a statement. “Hearings should follow once the investigative foundation has been firmly set, which is why I’m actively working with the DOJ and FBI to collect all relevant records that Mr. Smith had years to become familiar with.”

Smith issued reports on both cases but the one on Trump’s handling of sensitive documents found at Mar-a-Lago hasn’t been released. Attorney General Merrick Garland, before leaving office, said he wouldn’t release the report because of a criminal case involving two of Trump’s co-defendants was ongoing. But when Trump was elected president again, both cases were dropped.

The president and Republicans in Congress have accused Smith of pursuing politically motivated cases against Trump in an effort to undermine his candidacy for a second term.

But Smith “steadfastly adhered to established legal standards and Department of Justice guidelines, consistent with his approach throughout his career as a dedicated public servant,” while leading the investigations, the letter said.

Rep. Jamie Raskkin, a Democrat serving a district in Maryland, told The Hill that Smith’s offer should be accepted.

“Mr. Smith has made clear that he is prepared to address those allegations publicly, and I can think of no reason to deny the American people the opportunity to hear his testimony, under oath and with questioning from Members of both parties, and to let all Americans judge for themselves the integrity of Mr. Smith’s investigations,” Raskin wrote Thursday.

“There is no reason his appearance should be in the shadows of a backroom and subject to the usual tiresome partisan tactics of leak-and-distort.”

This week, it was reported Trump is pressing for his Justice Department to pay roughly $230 million as a settlement for two investigations. One involved the documents case and the other was ties of his 2016 campaign to the Russian government, which was investigated by another special counsel, Robert Mueller. No charges in the latter were made because of the ability to indict a sitting president.

Smith hadn’t spoken much publicly about his office’s investigations or through case failings.

On Oct. 8, he was interviewed by Andrew Weissman at University College London. Weissman was part of Mueller’s investigations and is now an MSNBC analyst.

“The idea that politics played a role in who worked on that case, or who got chosen, is ludicrous,” Smith told Weissmann.

“The people on my team were similar to what I saw throughout the [Department of Justice] throughout my career,” he said. “Apolitical people who wanted to do the right thing and do public service.”

MEXICO CITY — The United States slapped sanctions on Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Friday and said it was sending a massive aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, a new escalation of what the White House has described as a war against drug traffickers in the region. Also Friday, the U.S. military conducted its 10th strike on a suspected drug-running boat, killing six people in the Caribbean Sea.

The Treasury Department said it was sanctioning Petro, his wife, his son and a political associate for failing to stop the flow of cocaine to the United States, noting that cocaine production in Colombia has risen in recent years. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accused Petro of “poisoning Americans.”

Petro denied those claims in a statement on X, saying he has fought to combat drug trafficking for decades. He said it was “quite a paradox” to be sanctioned by a country with high rates of cocaine consumption.

The sanctions put Petro in the same category as the leaders of Russia and North Korea and limit his ability to travel to the United States. They mark a new low for relations between Colombia and the United States, which until recently were strong allies, sharing military intelligence, a robust trade relationship and a multibillion-dollar fight against drug trafficking.

Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst for the Andes region at the International Crisis Group, a think tank, said that while Petro and the U.S. government have had disagreements over how to tackle trafficking — with the Americans more interested in eradicating coca fields and Colombians focused on cocaine seizures — the two countries have been working for decades toward the same goal.

“To suggest that Colombia is not trying is false and disingenuous,” Dickinson said. “If the U.S. has a partner in counternarcotics in Latin America, it’s Colombia. Colombian forces have been working hand in hand with the Americans for literally four decades. They are the best, most capable and frankly most willing partner the U.S. has in the region.

“If the U.S. were to cut this relationship, it would really be the U.S. shooting themselves in the foot.”

Many viewed the sanctions as punishment for Petro’s criticism of Trump. In recent days, Petro has accused the U.S. of murder, saying American strikes on alleged drug boats lack legal justification and have killed civilians. He has also accused the U.S. of building up its military in South America in an attempt to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The quickened pace of U.S. airstrikes in the region and the unusually large buildup of military force in the Caribbean Sea have fueled those speculations.

On Friday, a Pentagon official said the U.S. ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to U.S. Southern Command to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States.”

The USS Ford is currently deployed to the Mediterranean Sea along with three destroyers. It would probably take several days for the ships to make the journey to South America.

The White House has increasingly drawn a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug traffickers.

Trump this month declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and said the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with them, relying on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration after 9/11.

When reporters asked Trump on Thursday whether he would request that Congress issue a declaration of war against the cartels, he said that wasn’t the plan.

“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them, you know? They’re going to be like, dead,” Trump said during a roundtable at the White House with Homeland Security officials.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The government shutdown has reopened debate on what has been a central issue for both major political parties in the last 15 years: the future of health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Tax credits for people who get health insurance through the marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, expire at the end of the year.

Democrats say they won’t vote to reopen the government until Republicans negotiate an extension of the expanded subsidies. Republicans say they won’t negotiate until Democrats vote to reopen the government. Lawmakers in both parties have been working on potential solutions behind the scenes, hoping that leaders will eventually start to talk, but it’s unclear if the two sides could find compromise.

As Congress circles the issue, a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 6 in 10 Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about their health costs going up in the next year. Those worries extend across age groups and include people with and without health insurance, the poll found.

A look at the subsidies that are expiring, the politics of the ACA and what Congress might do:

Enhanced premium help during the pandemic

Passed in 2010, the ACA was meant to decrease the number of uninsured people in the country and make coverage more affordable for those who don’t have private insurance. The law created state by state exchanges, some of which are run by the individual states, to try to increase the pool of the insured and bring down rates.

In 2021, when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House during the COVID-19 pandemic, they expanded premium help that was already in the law. The changes included eliminating premiums for some lower-income enrollees, ensuring that higher earners paid no more than 8.5% of their income and expanding eligibility for middle-class earners.

The expanded subsidies pushed enrollment to new levels and drove the rate of uninsured people to a historic low. This year, a record 24 million people have signed up for insurance coverage through the ACA, in large part because billions of dollars in subsidies have made the plans more affordable for many people.

If the tax credits expire, annual out-of-pocket premiums are estimated to increase by 114% — an average of $1,016 — next year, according to an analysis from KFF.

Democrats push to extend subsidies

Democrats extended those tax credits in 2022 for another three years but were not able to make them permanent. The credits are set to expire Jan. 1, with Republicans now in full control.

Lacking in power and sensing a political opportunity, Democrats used some of their only leverage and forced a government shutdown over the issue when federal funding ran out on Oct. 1. They say they won’t vote for a House-passed bill to reopen the government until Republicans give them some certainty that the subsidies will be extended.

Democrats introduced legislation in September to permanently extend the premium tax credits, but they have suggested that they are open to a shorter period.

“We need a serious negotiation,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has repeatedly said.

Republicans try to scale the ACA back, again

The Democratic demands on health care have reignited longstanding Republican complaints about the ACA, which they have campaigned against for years and tried and failed to repeal in 2017. Many in the party say that if Congress is going to act, they want to scrap the expanded subsidies and overhaul the entire law.

The problem is not the expiring subsidies but “the cost of health care,” Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said Tuesday.

In a virtual briefing Tuesday, the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Paragon Health Institute branded the subsidies as President Joe Biden’s “COVID credits” and claimed they’ve enabled fraudsters to sign people up for fully subsidized plans without their knowledge.

Others have pitched more modest proposals that could potentially win over some Democrats. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has said he is open to extending the subsidies with changes, including lower income limits and a stop to auto-enrollment that may sign up people who don’t need the coverage.

The ACA is “in desperate need of reform,” Thune has said.

House Republicans are considering their own ideas for reforming the ACA, including proposals for phasing out the subsidies for new enrollees. And they have begun to discuss whether to combine health care reforms with a new government funding bill and send it to the Senate for consideration once they return to Washington.

“We will probably negotiate some off-ramp” to ease the transition back to pre-COVID-19 levels, said Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, the head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, during a virtual town hall Tuesday.

Is compromise possible?

A number of Republicans want to extend the subsidies. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said most people who are using the exchanges created by the ACA “don’t really have another option, and it’s already really, really expensive. So I think there are things we can do to reform the program.”

Hawley said he had been having conversations with other senators about what those changes could be, including proposals for income limits, which he said he sees as a “very reasonable.”

Bipartisan groups of lawmakers have been discussing the income limits and other ideas, including making the lowest-income people pay very low premiums instead of nothing. Some Republicans have advocated for that change to ensure that all enrollees are aware they have coverage and need it. Other proposals would extend the subsidies for a year or two or slowly phase them out.

It’s unclear if any of those ideas could gain traction on both sides — or any interest from the White House, where President Donald Trump has remained mostly disengaged. Despite the public stalemate, though, lawmakers are feeling increased urgency to find a solution as the Nov. 1 open enrollment date approaches.

Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire has been talking to lawmakers since the shutdown began, trying to find areas of compromise. On Tuesday, she suggested that Congress could also look at extending the enrollment dates for the ACA since Congress is stalled on the subsidies.

“These costs are going to affect all of us, and it’s going to affect our health care system,” she said.

Jalonick writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Joey Cappelletti in Washington and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.

To say that President Trump is unfazed by Saturday’s nationwide “No Kings” rally, which vies for bragging rights as perhaps the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, is the sort of understatement too typical when describing his monarchical outrages.

Leave aside Trump’s grotesque mockery of the protests — his post that night of an AI-generated video depicting himself as a becrowned pilot in a fighter jet, dropping poop bombs on citizens protesting peacefully below. Consider instead two other post-rally actions: On Sunday and Wednesday, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth announced first that on Trump’s orders the military had struck a seventh boat off Venezuela and then an eighth vessel in the Pacific, bringing the number of people killed over two months to 34. The administration has provided no evidence to Congress or the American public for Trump’s claims that the unidentified dead were “narco-terrorists,” nor any credible legal rationale for the strikes. Then, on Monday, Trump began demolishing the White House’s East Wing to create the gilded ballroom of his dreams, which, at 90,000 square feet, would be nearly twice the size of the White House residence itself.

As sickening as the sight was — heavy equipment ripping away at the historic property as high-powered hoses doused the dusty debris — Trump’s $250-million vanity project is small stuff compared to a policy of killing noncombatant civilian citizens of nations with which we are not at war (Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador). Yet together the actions reflect the spectrum of consequences of Trump’s utter sense of impunity as president, from the relatively symbolic to the murderous.

“In America the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote in 1776. Not in Trump’s America.

Among the commentariat, the president’s desecration of the East Wing is getting at least as much criticism as his extralegal killings at sea. Many critics see in the bulldozing of the People’s House a metaphor for Trump’s destructive governance generally — his other teardowns of federal agencies, life-saving foreign aid, healthcare benefits and more. The metaphor is indeed apt.

But what’s more striking is the sheer sense of impunity that Trump telegraphs, constantly, with the “je suis l’état” flare of a Louis XIV — complete (soon) with Trump’s Versailles. (Separately, Trump’s mimicry of French emperors now includes plans for a sort of Arc de Triomphe near Arlington Cemetery. A reporter asked who it would be for. “Me,” Trump said. Arc de Trump.)

No law, domestic or international, constrains him, as far as the convicted felon is concerned. Neither does Congress, where Republicans bend the knee. Nor the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 right-wing majority, including three justices Trump chose in his first term.

The court’s ruling last year in Trump vs. United States gives Trump virtual immunity from criminal prosecution, but U.S. servicemembers don’t have that protection when it comes to the deadly Caribbean Sea attacks or any other orders from the commander in chief that might one day be judged to have been illegal.

The operation’s commander, Navy Adm. Alvin Holsey, reportedly expressed concerns about the strikes within the administration. Last week he announced his retirement after less than a year as head of the U.S. Southern Command. It could be a coincidence. But I’m hardly alone in counting Holsey as the latest casualty in Trump and Hegseth’s purge of perceived nonloyalists at the Pentagon.

“When the president decides someone has to die, the military becomes his personal hit squad,” military analyst and former Republican Tom Nichols said Monday on MSNBC. Just like with kings and other autocrats: Off with their heads.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a rare maverick Republican, noted on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that in years past, the Coast Guard would board foreign boats suspected of ferrying drugs and, if contraband were found, take it and suspected traffickers into custody, often gleaning information about higher-ups to make a real dent in the drug trade. But, Paul added, about one in four boats typically had no drugs. No matter nowadays — everyone’s a target for deadly force. “So,” Paul said, “all of these people have been blown up without us knowing their name, without any evidence of a crime.” (Paul was the only Republican senator not invited to lunch with Trump on Monday in the paved-over Rose Garden.)

On Monday, Ecuador said no evidence connects a citizen who survived a recent U.S. strike to any crime. Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the United States of murdering a fisherman in a September strike, provoking Trump to call Petro a “drug leader” and unilaterally yank U.S. foreign aid. A Venezuelan told the Washington Post that the 11 people killed in the first known U.S. strike were fishermen; national security officials told Congress the individuals were headed back to shore when hit. Meanwhile, the three countries and U.S. news reports contradict Trump’s claims that he’s destroying and seizing fentanyl — a drug that typically comes from Mexico and then is smuggled by land, usually by U.S. citizens.

Again, no matter to America’s king, who said last week that he’s eyeing land incursions in Venezuela now “because we’ve got the sea very well under control.” Trump’s courtiers say he doesn’t need Congress’ authorization for any use of force. The Constitution suggests otherwise.

Alas, neither it nor the law limits Trump’s White House makeover. He doesn’t have to submit to Congress because he’s tapping rich individuals and corporations for the cost. Past presidents, mindful that the house is a public treasure, not their palace, voluntarily sought input from various federal and nonprofit groups. After reports about the demolition, which put the lie to Trump’s promise in July that the ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building,” the American Institute of Architects urged its members to ask Congress to “investigate destruction of the White House.”

Disparate as they are, Trump’s ballroom project and his Caribbean killings were joined last week. At a White House dinner for ballroom donors, Trump joked about the sea strikes: “Nobody wants to go fishing anymore.” The pay-to-play titans laughed. Shame on them.

Trump acts with impunity because he can; he’s a lame duck. But other Republicans must face the voters. Keep the “No Kings” protests coming — right through the elections this November and next.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
Threads: @jkcalmes
X: @jackiekcalmes

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Republican legislative leaders completed their remapping of the state’s U.S. House districts on Wednesday, intent on picking up one more seat to help President Trump’s efforts to retain GOP control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.

The new boundaries approved by the state House could thwart the reelection of Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis, who currently represents more than 20 northeastern counties. The state Senate already approved the plan in a party-line vote on Tuesday.

Republicans hold majorities in both General Assembly chambers, and Democratic Gov. Josh Stein is unable under state law to use his veto stamp on redistricting maps. So the GOP’s proposal can now be implemented unless likely litigation by Democrats or voting rights advocates stops it. Candidate filing for 2026 is scheduled to begin Dec. 1.

Republican lawmakers made the intent of their proposed changes crystal clear — it’s an attempt to satisfy Trump’s call for GOP-led states to secure more seats for the party nationwide, so that Congress can continue advancing his agenda. Democrats have responded with rival moves in blue states. A president’s party historically loses seats in midterm elections, and Democrats currently need just three more seats to flip House control.

“The new congressional map improves Republican political strength in eastern North Carolina and will bring in an additional Republican seat to North Carolina’s congressional delegation,” GOP Rep. Brenden Jones said during a debate that Republicans cut off after an hour.

Democratic state Rep. Gloristine Brown, an African American who represents an eastern North Carolina county, made an impassioned floor speech in opposition, saying “You are silencing Black voices and are going against the will of your constituents.”

“North Carolina is a testing ground for the new era of Jim Crow laws,” Brown said.

Republican-led Texas and Missouri already have revised their U.S. House districts to try to help Republicans win additional seats. Democratic-led California reciprocated by asking the state’s voters to approve a map revised to elect more Democrats, and Jones accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of ramping up the redistricting fight.

“We will not let outsiders tell us how to govern, and we will never apologize for doing exactly what the people of this state has elected us to do,” Jones said.

North Carolina’s replacement map would exchange several counties in Davis’ current 1st District with another coastal district. Statewide election data suggests this would favor Republicans winning 11 of 14 House seats, up from the 10 they now hold, in a state where Trump got 51% of the popular vote in 2024.

Davis is one of North Carolina’s three Black representatives. Map critics suggested this latest GOP map could be challenged as an illegal racial gerrymander in a district that has included several majority Black counties, electing African Americans to the U.S. House continuously since 1992.

Davis is already vulnerable — he won his second term by less than 2 percentage points, and the 1st District was one of 13 nationwide where both Trump and a Democratic House member was elected last year, according to the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Davis on Tuesday called the proposed map “beyond the pale.”

Hundreds of Democratic and liberal activists swarmed the legislative complex this week, blasting GOP legislators for doing Trump’s bidding with what they called a power grab through a speedy and unfair redistricting process.

“If you pass this, your legacy will be shredding the Constitution, destroying democracy,” Karen Ziegler with the grassroots group Democracy Out Loud, told senators this week. She accused the state GOP of “letting Donald Trump decide who represents the people of North Carolina.”

Democrats said this map is a racial gerrymander that will dismantle decades of voting rights progress in North Carolina’s “Black Belt” region. Republicans counter that no racial data was used in forming the districts, and the redrawing was based on political parties, not race.

Based on last week’s arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a Louisiana redistricting case, the Democrats may lose this line of attack. A majority of justices appears willing to neuter a key tool of the Voting Rights Act that has protected political boundaries created to help Black and Latino residents elect favored candidates, who have tended to be Democrats.

State GOP leaders say Trump won North Carolina all three times that he’s run for president — albeit narrowly last year — and thus merits more GOP support in Congress. Senate leader Phil Berger called it appropriate “under the law and in conjunction with basically listening to the will of the people.”

Robertson writes for the Associated Press.

SAN FRANCISCO — State Sen. Scott Wiener couldn’t wait any longer. The once-in-a-generation political opening he’d eyed for years had arrived, he decided — whether the grand dame of San Francisco politics agreed or not.

On Wednesday, Wiener, 55, a prolific and ambitious lawmaker, formally announced his candidacy for the San Francisco congressional seat held for nearly four decades by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, 85, who remains one of the party’s most powerful leaders and has yet to reveal her own intentions for the 2026 race.

“The world is changing, the Democratic Party is changing, and it’s time,” Wiener said in an interview with The Times. “I know San Francisco, I have worked tirelessly to represent this community — delivering housing, health care, clean energy, LGBTQ and immigrant rights — and I have a fortitude and backbone to be able to deliver for San Francisco in Congress.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) announced Wednesdat that he will run for the congressional seat currently held by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

(Josh Edelson/For The Times)

Wiener’s announcement — which leaked in part last week — caught some political observers off guard, given Wiener had for years seemed resigned to run for Pelosi’s seat only once she stepped aside. But it stunned few, given how squarely it fit within the broader political moment facing the Democratic Party.

In recent years, a long-simmering reckoning over generational power has exploded into the political forefront as members of the party’s old guard have increasingly been accused of holding on too long, and to their party’s detriment.

Long-serving liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruffled many Democratic feathers by declining to step down during Barack Obama’s presidency despite being in her 80s. She subsequently died while still on the court at the age of 87 in 2020, handing President Trump his third appointment to the high court.

Californians watched as the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, another D.C. power player from San Francisco, teetered into frailty, muddled through her final chapter in Washington and then died in office at 90 in 2023. The entire nation watched as President Biden, another octogenarian, gave a disastrous debate performance that sparked unrelenting questions about his age and cognitive abilities and cleared the way for Trump’s return to power last year.

Visitors walk past a bust of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein at San Francisco City Hall. The former mayor of San Francisco served in the Senate until she died in 2023 at age 90.

(Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

As a result, age has become an unavoidable tension point for Democrats heading into next year’s midterm elections.

It has also been an issue for Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), 83, the former Senate majority leader who has faced health issues in recent years and is retiring in 2026 after more than 40 years in the Senate. Other older Republicans are facing primary challenges for being perceived as too traditional or insufficiently loyal to Trump or the MAGA movement — including Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), 73 and in office since 2002, and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), 68 and in the Senate since 2015.

For decades, many conservatives have called for congressional term limits in opposition to “career politicians” who cling to power for too long. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and David Trone, a Maryland Democrat, renewed those calls on Wednesday, announcing in an op-ed published in the New York Times that they would co-chair a national campaign to push for term limits.

However, perhaps because they are in power, the calls for a generational shake-up in 2026 have not been nearly as loud on the Republican side.

Democratic Party activists have sounded the alarm about a quickening slide into gerontocracy on the political left, blamed it for their party’s inability to mount an energetic and effective response to Trump and his MAGA movement, and called for younger candidates to take the reins — while congressional leaders in their 70s and 80s have increasingly begun weighing their options in the face of primary challenges.

“It’s fair to say the political appetite for octogenarians is not high,” said Eric Jaye, a veteran Democratic strategist in San Francisco.

“The choice in front of people is not just age,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, a 39-year-old tech millionaire and Democratic political operative who is also running for Pelosi’s seat. “We need a whole different approach and different candidates.”

“There’s like this unspoken rule that you don’t do what we’re doing in this moment. You sit out and wait your turn,” said Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang, 40, who has launched a primary challenge to Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento), who is 81 and has been in Congress since 2005. “But I’m not going to wait on the sidelines, because there is an urgency of now.”

A national trend

The generational shift promises to reshape Congress by replacing Democrats across the country, including some who are leaving without a fight.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, 78 and a senator representing New Hampshire since 2009, said in March that it was “time” to step aside.

In Illinois, Sen. Richard Durbin, 80 and a senator since 1997, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, 81 and in the House since 1999, both announced in May that they would not run again. Durbin said it was time “to pass the torch,” while Schakowsky praised younger “voices” in the party as “so sharp.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, 78 and in the House since 1992, announced his retirement last month, saying that “watching the Biden thing really said something about the necessity for generational change in the party.”

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks at a news conference.

(Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Other older Democrats, meanwhile, have shown no intention of stepping aside, or are seeking out new roles in power.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills, 77, recently announced she is running to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who is 72 and has been in the Senate since 1997. Mills has tried to soften concerns about her age by promising to serve just one term if elected.

Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, 79 and in the Senate since 2013, has stiffly rebuffed a primary challenge from Rep. Seth Moulton, 46, accusing Moulton of springing a challenge on him amid a shutdown and while he is busy resisting Trump’s agenda.

In Connecticut, Rep. John Larson, 77, who has been in office since 1999 and suffered a complex partial seizure on the House floor in February, has mocked his primary challengers’ message of generational change, telling Axios, “Generational change is fine, but you’ve got to earn it.”

David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., speaks at the 2022 March for Our Lives.

(Leigh Vogel / Getty Images for March For Our Lives)

David Hogg, a 25-year-old liberal activist who was thrust into politics by the 2018 mass shooting at his Parkland, Fla., high school, is among the party’s younger leaders pushing for new blood. He recently declined to seek reelection as the co-vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to bring primary challenges to older Democratic incumbents with his group Leaders We Deserve.

When he announced that decision in June, Hogg called the idea that Democratic leaders can stay in power until they die even if they don’t do a good job an “existential threat to the future of this party and nation.” His group fundraises and disperses money to young candidates it backs.

When asked by The Times about Pelosi and her primary challengers, however, Hogg was circumspect, calling Pelosi “one of the most effective and consequential leaders in the history of the Democratic Party.”

A shift in California

Pelosi is not the only older California incumbent facing a primary challenge. In addition to Matsui, the list also includes Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Porter Ranch), who is 70 and has been in office since 1997, and Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena), who is 74 and has been in office since 1999.

But Pelosi’s challenges have attracted more attention, perhaps in part because her departure from Congress would be the clearest sign yet that the generational shift sought by younger party activists is fully underway.

Nancy Pelosi is sworn in as House speaker in 2007, surrounded by her grandchildren and children of other members of Congress.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

A trailblazer as the first female speaker of the House, Pelosi presided over two Trump impeachments. While no longer in leadership, she remains incredibly influential as an arm-twister and strategist.

She played a central role in sidelining Biden after his debate meltdown, and for the last couple months has been raising big money — a special skill of hers — in support of California’s Proposition 50. The measure seeks voter approval to redraw California’s congressional districts to better favor Democrats in response to Trump’s pressure campaign on Texas and other red states to redraw their lines in favor of Republicans.

Pelosi has used Prop. 50 in recent days to deflect questions about her primary challengers and her plans for 2026, with her spokesman Ian Krager saying she “is fully focused” on the Prop 50 fight and will be through Nov. 4.

Chakrabarti, who helped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) unseat a longtime Democratic incumbent in 2019, said he sees even more “appetite for change” among the party’s base today — as evidenced by “mainstream Democrats who have voted for Nancy Pelosi their whole life” showing up to his events.

And it makes sense, he said.

For decades, Americans have watched the cost of essentials skyrocket while their wages have remained relatively flat, Chakrabarti said, and that has made them desperate to support messages of “bold, sweeping economic change” — whether from Obama or Trump — even as long-serving, mainstream Democrats backed by corporate money have worked to maintain the status quo.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leaves a news conference at the Capitol in 2019. At left is Saikat Chakrabarti, who was her chief of staff and is now a candidate for the congressional seat held by Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag)

He said it is time for Democrats to once again push bold, big ideas, which he plans to do — including Medicare for all, universal child care, free college tuition, millions of new units of affordable housing, a new economy built around climate action, and higher taxes on billionaires and mega-millionaires like him.

Wiener, who also backs Prop. 50 and would be the first out gay person to represent San Francisco in Congress, said he cannot speak to Pelosi’s thinking — or to Politico reporting Wednesday that Pelosi is considering dropping out and backing San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan in the race — but is confident in his readiness for the role.

Wiener agreed with Chakrabarti that big ideas are needed from Democrats to win back voters and make progress. He also said that his track record in the state Legislature shows that he has “been willing to take on very, very big fights to make significant progressive change.”

“No one has ever accused me of thinking small,” he said — citing his success in passing bills to create more affordable housing, reform health insurance and drug pricing, tackle net neutrality, challenge telecommunications and cable companies and protect LGBTQ+ and other minority communities and immigrants.

“In addition to having the desire to make big progressive change, in addition to talking about big progressive change, you have to be able to put together the coalitions to deliver on that change, because words are not enough,” Wiener said. “I’ve shown over and over again that I know how to do it, and that I can deliver.”

Political analysts said a message of big ideas will clearly resonate with some voters. But they also said that Pelosi, if she stays in the race, will be hard to beat. She will also face more serious questions than ever about her age and “her ability to function at the extraordinarily high level” she has worked at in years past, Jaye said, and will “have to answer those questions.”

If Pelosi decides not to run, Chakrabarti has the benefit of self-funding and of the current party enthusiasm for fresh faces, they said, and anyone — Chan or otherwise — would benefit from a Pelosi endorsement. But Wiener already has a strong base in the district, a track record for getting legislation passed and, as several observers pointed out, a seemingly endless battery.

“Scott Wiener is an animal. The notion of work-life balance is not a concept he has ever had. He is just like a robotic working machine,” said Aaron Peskin, who served 18 years on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, some alongside Wiener.

Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Oakland) speaks to reporters at the Capitol in September.

(Kayla Bartkowski/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, which supports young progressive candidates, said there is pent-up demand for a new generation of leaders, and “older Democrats, especially those in Congress, need to ask themselves, ‘Am I the best person to lead this party forward right now?’”

Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Oakland), 48, won her seat in 2024 after longtime Rep. Barbara Lee, 79, who had been in the seat since 1998, decided to run for Oakland mayor. Simon said that to her, “it’s not necessarily about birthdays” but who can do the job — “who can govern, who can mentor and who can hold this administration accountable.”

As a longtime community activist who worked with youth, Simon said she is “extremely excited” by all the energy of young Democratic office seekers. But as a freshman in Congress who has leaned on Lee, Pelosi and other mentors to help her learn the ropes, she said it’s also clear Democrats need to “have some generals who are really, really tried and tested.”

“What is not helpful to me in this moment,” Simon said, “is for the Democrats to be a circular firing squad.”

RALEIGH, N.C. — Democrats rallying Tuesday against a new U.S. House map proposed by North Carolina Republicans seeking another GOP seat at President Trump’s behest acknowledged they’ll probably be unable to halt the redraw for now. But they vowed to defeat the plan in the long run.

The new map offered by Republican legislative leaders seeks to stop the reelection of Democratic Rep. Don Davis, one of North Carolina’s three Black representatives, by redrawing two of the state’s 14 congressional districts. Statewide election data suggest the proposal would result in Republicans winning 11 of those seats, up from the current 10.

The proposal attempts to satisfy Trump’s call for states led by Republicans to conduct mid-decade redistricting to gain more seats and retain his party’s grip on Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. Democrats need to gain just three more seats to seize control of the House, and the president’s party historically has lost seats in midterm elections.

With Republicans in the majority in both General Assembly chambers and state law preventing Democratic Gov. Josh Stein from using his veto stamp against a redistricting plan, the GOP-drawn map appeared headed to enactment after final House votes as soon as Wednesday. The state Senate gave its final approval early Tuesday on a party-line vote. A House redistricting committee debated the plan later Tuesday.

Still, about 300 protesters, Democratic Party officials and lawmakers gathering outside the old state Capitol pledged repeatedly Tuesday that redrawing the congressional map would have negative consequences for the GOP at the ballot box in 2026 and beyond. Litigation to challenge the enactment on the map also is likely on allegations of unlawful racial gerrymandering.

“We know we may not have the ability to stop the Republicans in Raleigh right now … but we are here to show that people across this state and across this nation are watching them,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said to cheers.

The gathering served Democrats to censure state Republicans they accuse of agreeing to kneel to Trump through a corrupt redrawing of district lines to target Davis.

State GOP leaders defended their action, saying Trump has won the state’s electoral votes all three times that he’s run for president — albeit narrowly — and thus merits more potential support in Congress.

The national redistricting battle began over the summer when Trump urged Republican-led Texas to reshape its U.S. House districts. After Texas lawmakers acted, California Democrats reciprocated by passing their own plan, which still needs voter approval in November.

Republicans argue that other Democratic-leaning states had already given themselves a disproportionate number of seats well before this national redistricting fight started.

“It is incumbent upon us to react to this environment, to respond to this environment, and not let these tactics that have happened in blue states dominate the control of Congress,” state Sen. Ralph Hise, the map’s chief author, said during Tuesday’s Senate debate.

Seminera and Robertson write for the Associated Press.

Nancy Pelosi’s plan to seek reelection extends one of San Francisco’s longest-running, most-fevered political guessing games: Who will succeed the Democrat when she finally does step aside?

The announcement Tuesday by the 81-year-old congresswoman was utterly predictable. Her decision augurs an election that will be thoroughly pro forma.

Pelosi will attract, as she always does, at least one candidate running to her left, who will insist — in true San Francisco fashion — that she is not a real Democrat. There will also be a Republican opponent or two, who may raise many millions of dollars from Pelosi haters around the country acting more out of spite than good sense.

And then, in just about nine months, she will be handily reelected to Congress for an 18th time.

Nob Hill may crumble. Alcatraz may tumble. But Pelosi, who hasn’t bothered running anything remotely resembling a campaign in decades, will not be turned out by her constituents so long as she draws a breath and stands for election.

There was speculation she might step aside and not run again. But Pelosi knows better than anyone the power and influence — not to mention prodigious fundraising capacity — that would diminish the moment she indicated the rest of the year would be spent marking time to her departure.

In an October 2018 interview, while campaigning in Florida ahead of the midterm election that returned her to the speakership, Pelosi allowed as how she didn’t envision staying in office forever. (It was a signal to those impatient Democrats in the House that their aspirations wouldn’t die aborning and helped her secure the votes she needed to retake the gavel.)

“I see myself as a transitional figure,” Pelosi said at a downtown Miami bistro. “I have things to do. Books to write; places to go; grandchildren, first and foremost, to love.”

But, she quickly added, she wasn’t imposing a limit on her tenure. “Do you think I would make myself a lame duck right here over this double espresso?” Pelosi said with a raised eyebrow and a laugh.

She won’t, of course, live forever, and so for many years there has been speculation — and some quiet jockeying — over who will eventually take Pelosi’s place.

To say her seat in Congress is coveted is like suggesting there’s a wee bit of interest in the city in a certain sporting event this weekend. (For those non-football fans, the San Francisco 49ers will be playing the Rams in the NFC championship game for a ticket to the Super Bowl.)

In nearly 60 years, just three people have served in the seat Pelosi now holds. Two of them — Phil Burton and Pelosi — account for all but a handful of those years. Burton’s widow, Sala, served about four years before, as she lay dying, she anointed Pelosi as her chosen replacement.

So succeeding Pelosi could be the closest thing to a lifetime appointment any San Francisco politician will ever enjoy. And given all the pent-up ambition, there is no shortage of prospective candidates.

One of the strongest contenders is state Sen. Scott Wiener, 51, who has built an impressive record in Sacramento in a district that roughly approximates the current congressional boundaries.

Another prospect is Christine Pelosi, 55, the most politically visible of the speaker’s five children and a longtime activist in Democratic campaigns and causes. If she ran, to what length — if any — would the speaker go in hopes of handing off the seat to her daughter?

Republicans seem exceedingly likely to win control of the House in November. It seems exceedingly unlikely that Pelosi would happily settle into the role of minority leader, much less fall back as a workaday member of a shrunken, enfeebled Democratic caucus.

Would she time her departure to benefit her daughter by, say, requiring a snap election that would take advantage of Pelosi’s brand name? Or would she avoid choosing sides and allow the election to play out in San Francisco’s typically brutal, free-for-all fashion?

The intrigue continues.

WASHINGTON — President Trump is showing little urgency to broker a compromise that would end the government shutdown, even as Democrats insist no breakthrough is possible without his direct involvement.

Three weeks in, Congress is at a standstill. The House hasn’t been in session for a month, and senators left Washington on Thursday frustrated by the lack of progress. Republican leaders are refusing to negotiate until a short-term funding bill to reopen the government is passed, while Democrats say they won’t agree without guarantees on extending health insurance subsidies.

For now, Trump appears content to stay on the sidelines.

He spent the week celebrating an Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal he led, hosted a remembrance event for conservative activist Charlie Kirk and refocused attention on the Russia-Ukraine war. Meanwhile, his administration has been managing the shutdown in unconventional ways, continuing to pay the troops while laying off other federal employees.

Asked Thursday whether he was willing to deploy his dealmaking background on the shutdown, Trump seemed uninterested.

“Well, look, I mean, all we want to do is just extend. We don’t want anything, we just want to extend, live with the deal they had,” he said in an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office. Later Thursday, he criticized Democratic health care demands as “crazy,” adding, “We’re just not going to do it.”

Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that Democrats must first vote to reopen the government, “then we can have serious conversations about health care.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune echoed that approach before leaving for the weekend, saying Trump is “ready to weigh in and sit down with the Democrats or whomever, once the government opens up.”

Thune said he’d also be willing to talk, but only after the shutdown ends.

“I am willing to sit down with Democrats,” Thune posted on social media Friday.

“But there’s one condition: End the Schumer Shutdown. I will not negotiate under hostage conditions, nor will I pay a ransom,” he added.

Frustration is beginning to surface among rank-and-file Republicans, with bipartisan conversations breaking out on the Senate floor as members look for ways to move things forward. Still, even those Republicans admit little happens in Congress without Trump’s direction.

Leaving the Capitol on Thursday, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said, “We’re not making much headway this week.” For things to progress, Murkowski acknowledged Trump may need to get more involved: “I think he’s an important part of it.”

“I think there are some folks in his administration that are kind of liking the fact that Congress really has no role right now,” she added. “I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.”

Trump has not been slowed by the shutdown

While Congress has been paralyzed by the shutdown, Trump has moved rapidly to enact his vision of the federal government.

He has called budget chief Russ Vought the “grim reaper,” and Vought has taken the opportunity to withhold billions of dollars for infrastructure projects and lay off thousands of federal workers, signaling that workforce reductions could become even more drastic.

At the same time, the administration has acted unilaterally to fund Trump’s priorities, including paying the military this week, easing pressure on what could have been one of the main deadlines to end the shutdown.

Some of these moves, particularly the layoffs and funding shifts, have been criticized as illegal and are facing court challenges. A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked the administration from firing workers during the shutdown, ruling that the cuts appeared politically motivated and were carried out without sufficient justification.

And with Congress focused on the funding fight, lawmakers have had little time to debate other issues.

In the House, Johnson has said the House won’t return until Democrats approve the funding bill and has refused to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva. Democrats say the move is to prevent her from becoming the 218th signature on a discharge petition aimed at forcing a vote on releasing documents related to the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.

So far, the shutdown has shown little impact on public opinion.

An AP-NORC poll released Thursday found that 3 in 10 U.S. adults have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of the Democratic Party, similar to an AP-NORC poll from September. Four in 10 have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of the Republican Party, largely unchanged from last month.

Democrats want Trump at the table. Republicans would rather he stay out

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries have said Republicans have shown little seriousness in negotiating an end to the shutdown.

“Leader Thune has not come to me with any proposal at this point,” Schumer said Thursday.

Frustrated with congressional leaders, Democrats are increasingly looking to Trump.

At a CNN town hall Wednesday night featuring Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, both repeatedly called for the president’s involvement when asked why negotiations had stalled.

“President Trump is not talking. That is the problem,” Sanders said.

Ocasio-Cortez added that Trump should more regularly “be having congressional leaders in the White House.”

Democrats’ focus on Trump reflects both his leadership style — which allows little to happen in Congress without his approval — and the reality that any funding bill needs the president’s signature to become law.

This time, however, Republican leaders who control the House and Senate are resisting any push for Trump to intervene.

“You can’t negotiate when somebody’s got a hostage,” said South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, who added that Trump getting involved would allow Democrats to try the same tactic in future legislative fights.

Trump has largely followed that guidance. After previously saying he would be open to negotiating with Democrats on health insurance subsidies, he walked it back after Republican leaders suggested he misspoke.

And that’s unlikely to change for now. Trump has no plans to personally intervene to broker a deal with Democrats, according to a senior White House official granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. The official added that the only stopgap funding bill that Democrats can expect is the one already on the table.

“The President is happy to have a conversation about health care policy, but he will not do so while the Democrats are holding the American people hostage,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Thursday.

A product of the Congress Trump has molded

In his second term, Trump has taken a top-down approach, leaving little in Congress to move without his approval.

“What’s obvious to me is that Mike Johnson and John Thune don’t do much without Donald Trump telling them what to do,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.

His hold is particularly strong in the GOP-led House, where Speaker Mike Johnson effectivelyowes his job to Trump, and relies on his influence to power through difficult legislative fights.

When Republicans have withheld votes on Trump’s priorities in Congress, he’s called them on the phone or summoned them to his office to directly sway them. When that doesn’t work, he has vowed to unseat them in the next election. It’s led many Democrats to believe the only path to an agreement runs through the White House and not through the speaker’s office.

Democrats also want assurances from the White House that they won’t backtrack on an agreement. The White House earlier this year cut out the legislative branch entirely with a $4.9 billion cut to foreign aid in August through a legally dubious process known as a “pocket rescission.” And before he even took office late last year, Trump and ally Elon Musk blew up a bipartisan funding agreement that both parties had negotiated.

“I think we need to see ink on paper. I think we need to see legislation. I think we need to see votes,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “I don’t accept pinky promises. That’s not the business that I’m in.”

Both parties also see little reason to fold under public pressure, believing they are winning the messaging battle.

“Everybody thinks they’re winning,” Murkowski said. “Nobody is winning when everybody’s losing. And that’s what’s happening right now. The American public is losing.”

Cappelletti and Kim write for the Associated Press. AP writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.