Politics

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana’s top election official asked a federal judge on Tuesday to delay her order that the state come up with a new congressional district map.

Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin filed a motion in Baton Rouge saying the Legislature won’t be able to convene in special session and complete a new map by the June 20 deadline set by U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick in Monday’s order. The filing asks Dick to delay her order while Ardoin’s office appeals to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans

Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards said Monday he will soon call a special legislative session to draw new congressional boundaries. Edwards says the current maps crafted by the Republican-led Legislature should have included a second majority-Black district, noting the state’s population is almost one-third Black. He had vetoed the congressional map but lawmakers were able to muster the two-thirds Senate and House majorities needed to override the veto.

Edwards told reporters at a news conference Monday after the judge’s decision that redrawing the district lines is required by the court order, the Voting Rights Act and by “basic fairness and basic math.”

Ardoin’s lawyers said advance notice required for a special session, the number of days required for a bill to go through the legislative process and the likelihood of long debates and numerous amendments all mean the June 20 deadline cannot be met. In addition, they said they would likely win an appeal.

“The Court — after waiting more than three weeks from the preliminary injunction hearing before issuing its ruling — gave the Legislature only 14 days to enact a remedial plan,” Ardoin’s filing says. But he wrote it wouldn’t be possibel to comply by the deadline “even without the complexities inherent in redistricting.”

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By Richard Cowan and Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Democrats in the U.S. Senate said on Tuesday they were encouraged by talks with Republicans on gun-violence legislation, but warned that any compromise would fall short of the steps they say are needed to tackle the problem.

“Every day we get closer to an agreement, not farther away,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who working with Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas on a possible deal.

The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, said he hoped the two sides would find common ground after a wave of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York; Uvalde, Texas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and elsewhere.

“We’re hoping to actually get an outcome that will make a difference,” he said at a news conference.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said he would give negotiators until the end of the week to reach a deal.

The talks have raised hopes of a rare bipartisan agreement on gun-related issues in Congress, which has failed to act after similar mass shootings over the past decade. Most Americans support stronger gun laws, opinion polls show.

Democratic President Joe Biden last week called for banning assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, or at least raising the minimum age to buy those weapons from 18 to 21.

The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is expected to approve some of those proposals on Wednesday, but they are unlikely to clear the evenly divided Senate as many Republicans are opposed to tighter gun controls.

“Obviously, an agreement that we reach with the Republicans won’t come close to the full list of things that I think are necessary to curb this epidemic. But the Americans people are looking for progress,” Murphy said.

Instead, Murphy and Cornyn are considering more modest proposals: encouraging states to adopt “red flag” laws to deny firearms to people deemed a risk to public safety or themselves; upgrades to school security; strengthening mental health services; and doing more to keep guns out of the hands of people who are legally barred from owning them, such as felons.

Murphy met with Biden earlier in the day, the White House said.

The U.S. Supreme Court this month is expected to rule on a New York state case that could bring a sweeping expansion of gun rights.

Firearms ownership has been one of the most hotly contested issues in the United States. Gun rights advocates, including most elected Republicans, staunchly maintain that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms. Gun control supporters say permissive U.S. gun laws lead to needless deaths. More than 45,000 people were killed by firearms last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan, Andy Sullivan, Rami Ayyub and Steve Holland; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States faces “unacceptable levels of inflation” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told senators on Tuesday, adding that it was likely to remain high but that she hoped price increases would soon moderate.

At a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Yellen rejected Republican assertions that the highest inflation in 40 years was caused by Democratic President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) COVID-19 spending legislation last year.

“We’re seeing high inflation in almost all of the developed countries around the world. And they have very different fiscal policies,” Yellen said. “So it can’t be the case that the bulk of the inflation that we’re experiencing reflects the impact of the ARP.”

Yellen repeated her views that inflation was being fueled by supply-demand mismatches, including excessive demand for goods over services during the pandemic and severe supply chain disruptions. High energy and food prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also have pushed inflation higher, she said.

“I do expect inflation to remain high although I very much hope that it will be coming down,” she said.

She insisted that addressing inflation was Biden’s top priority and said that elements of the president’s proposed social and climate legislation could help lower costs for Americans, including for prescription drugs and clean energy technologies.

‘TRANSITORY’ WRONG WORD

Yellen has come under fire from Republicans after admitting she was “wrong” last year in forecasting that inflation would be transitory and quickly subside. She will face more tough questions on the issue in a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on Wednesday.

Yellen added that both she and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell both “probably could have used a better term than transitory” in describing inflation that they thought would fade quickly.

“When I said that inflation would be transitory, what I was not anticipating was a scenario in which we would end up contending with multiple variants of COVID that would be scrambling our economy and global supply chains, and I was not envisioning impacts on food and energy prices we’ve seen from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Yellen said.

U.S. Consumer Price Index inflation has been tracking above 8%. Another metric, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, which the Fed monitors for its 2% target, measured inflation at 6.3% in April. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, the PCE fell to 4.9% that month.

“To dampen inflationary pressures without undermining the strength of the labor market, an appropriate budgetary stance is needed to complement monetary policy actions by the Federal Reserve,” Yellen said in prepared remarks.

Her testimony came as the World Bank on Tuesday warned of a heightened risk of “stagflation” – the 1970s mix of feeble growth and high inflation – returning as it slashed its global growth forecast by nearly a third to 2.9% for 2022.

World Bank President David Malpass said the “huge expansion” of government spending by advanced economies during the pandemic had fueled demand and played a role in stoking inflation.

The Biden administration is still pushing for a scaled-back version of its stalled climate and social spending agenda, which would offer tax credits for clean energy technologies and reform prescription drug pricing.

OIL PRICE PRESSURES

Yellen said that even though the United States is a major energy producer and exporter it was “virtually impossible” for the United States to insulate itself from oil market price shocks and needed to press ahead with a transition to renewable energy sources.

Regarding efforts to increase economic pressure on Russia, she said the United States was “extremely active” in discussing with European countries ways to limit Moscow’s oil revenues.

Yellen also said she was “keenly focused” on proceeding with a global tax reform deal among 137 countries, including a 15% global minimum tax.

“I am hopeful that Congress will also implement this global minimum tax as part of its legislative agenda.”

(Reporting by David Lawder and Andrea Shalal;Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Jonathan Oatis and Andrea Ricci)

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette said Monday that he plans to travel to Africa just as the primary campaign season kicks into high gear, banking that his name recognition is so strong he can afford to leave the country with his job on the line.

La Follette told The Associated Press that he plans to leave on a trip to Kenya and Zimbabwe on Sunday and doesn’t plan to return to Wisconsin until “early July.” The 81 year-old Democrat said he booked the trip two years ago but had to postpone it due to the COVID-19 pandemic and doesn’t want to lose his down payment.

The trip comes as La Follette faces a challenge within his own party for his job and with Republicans targeting his office.

“It’s probably not the best time, but I had no choice unless I had to forfeit the payment I made for it,” he said. “So I decided that life has to go on.”

The stakes are high for the sleepy office because Republicans want to shift election oversight from the state elections commission to the secretary of state, following the model of more than 30 other states. Democrats fear that could allow Republicans to improperly influence certification of Wisconsin elections, particularly the 2024 presidential contest.

Worried that La Follette may lack the energy to compete, Dane County Democratic Party Chairwoman Alexia Sabor is challenging La Follette for the party’s nomination.

La Follette plans to stay in small lodges with a group of 10 to 15 people and spend his days on excursions looking at wildlife. Earlier this year, he said he was so scared of contracting the coronavirus he didn’t know how he would circulate his nomination papers across Wisconsin, although he ultimately did manage to secure the 2,000 signatures he needed to get on the ballot. He said he now feels the pandemic has subsided enough that it’s safe to travel overseas.

“I’ll wear my double mask and shield on the airplane,” he said.

La Follette — a distant relative of “Fighting” Bob La Follette, a progressive governor and 1924 presidential candidate — was first elected secretary of state in 1974. After a failed try for lieutenant governor in 1978, he won the office in 1982 and has won reelection nine times.

The Wisconsin primaries are Aug. 9. State Rep. Amy Loudenbeck, Jay Schroeder and Justin Schmidtka are running in a three-way Republican primary.

La Follette said he’s not particularly worried about not being able to campaign in the crucial weeks leading up to the primary. The lodges have internet service so he can stay in touch, he said, and he’s confidant that voters already know plenty about him.

“I’m sure my opponent will try to make hay out of it, but it’s not like I’m an unknown candidate,” he said. “People know who am I. The issues are simple. Who has the best chance of winning in November? I am that candidate. If my opponent tries to drag out any other issues like I’m too old or I’m in Africa, that doesn’t make any difference. The issue is the same. Who has the best chance to beat the Republican?”

Sabor accused La Follette of disengaging with voters.

“This trip demonstrates the same disrespect for voters that Doug has shown for taxpayers his entire 40-plus years in public office,” she said in a text her campaign consultant, Sachin Chedda, forwarded to the AP. “He couldn’t go out and get signatures but he can go on safari?”

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Follow Todd Richmond on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trichmond1

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By Rich McKay

(Reuters) – New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Monday signed a packet of 10 gun control bills into law, setting new limits on buying assault-style weapons and body armor, among other measures, in the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo and Texas.

The legislation, passed on Thursday by the state legislature, raises the age required to buy or possess a semiautomatic rifle from 18 to 21. New York already requires people to be 21 to possess a handgun.

The bill was signed by the Democratic governor after 10 people were slain last month at a supermarket in the western New York city of Buffalo by an 18-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle.

Days after that massacre, another 18-year-old fatally shot 19 students and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

“We cannot keep living like this,” Hochul said at a bill-signing ceremony in New York City.

“This is a moral moment for the people of New York but also the rest of the nation,” said Hochul. “Follow what we did here in New York and we’ll finally start to be at the beginning of the end of all this gun violence and the massacres that are occurring every day in our country.”

Another law signed by Hochul restricts the purchase of bullet resistant vests and body armor to law enforcement or related professions. The package also requires social media companies operating in New York to adopt transparent policies on how they respond to hate speech on their platforms.

The gunman in Buffalo wore body armor during his shooting spree, and shared his intention on social media to carry out such a rampage before the attack.

In most places in New York, people as young as 16 would still be allowed to have other types of rifles and shotguns.

New York now joins a handful of states — including Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Vermont, and Washington – that require buyers to be at least 21 to buy some types of long guns, media accounts say. Similar legislation has been proposed in Utah.

California’s attempt to raise the legal buying age for a semiautomatic weapons has been challenged in court.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)

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By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the right-wing group the Proud Boys, and four of his top lieutenants faced new federal charges of seditious conspiracy on Monday for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a court document.

Federal prosecutors investigating the attack filed the new charges against Tarrio, Dominic Pezzola, Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, according to the document. All five defendants have already pleaded not guilty to other criminal charges related to the attack.

The new indictment accuses the five men of plotting to prevent Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory over incumbent Republican Donald Trump. Trump has made false claims that he lost due to widespread voting fraud.

Prosecutors say Tarrio played a leading role even though he was not in Washington that day, having already been arrested for other charges.

Three members of another right wing group, the Oath Keepers, have already pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy charges. Several other members of that group, including leader Stewart Rhodes, have pleaded not guilty and are due to stand trial later this year.

About 800 people have been charged with taking part in the Capitol riot, with about 250 guilty pleas so far.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan and Timothy Ahmann; Editing by Leslie Adler and Alistair Bell)

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By Nathan Layne and Peter Eisler

LANSING, Michigan (Reuters) – State police in Michigan have obtained warrants to seize voting equipment and election-related records in at least three towns and one county in the past six weeks, police records show, widening the largest known investigation into unauthorized attempts by allies of former President Donald Trump to access voting systems.

The previously unreported records include search warrants and investigators’ memos obtained by Reuters through public records requests. The documents reveal a flurry of efforts by state authorities to secure voting machines, poll books, data-storage devices and phone records as evidence in a probe launched in mid-February.

The state’s investigation follows breaches of local election systems in Michigan by Republican officials and pro-Trump activists trying to prove his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

The police documents reveal, among other things, that the state is investigating a potential breach of voting equipment in Lake Township, a small, largely conservative community in northern Michigan’s Missaukee County. The previously unreported case is one of at least 17 incidents nationwide, including 11 in Michigan, in which Trump supporters gained or attempted to gain unauthorized access to voting equipment.

Many of the breaches have been inspired in part by the false assertion that state-ordered voting-system upgrades or maintenance would erase evidence of alleged voting fraud in 2020. State election officials, including those in Michigan, say those processes have no impact on the preservation of data from past elections.

The search warrants also authorized state police to seize election equipment in Barry County’s Irving Township and have it examined. Local officials acknowledged publicly last month that state police raided the township office on April 29, a day after the warrant was issued.

Additionally, the records shed new light on election-equipment breaches in Roscommon County. One official in the county’s Richfield Township told investigators that he gave two vote-counting tabulators to an unauthorized and unidentified “third party,” who kept them for several weeks in early 2021. The county’s clerk acknowledged that she, too, handed over her equipment to unauthorized people.

Taken together, these documents depict a statewide push by pro-Trump activists to access election machinery in search of evidence for debunked theories that equipment was rigged in a crucial swing state that voted for Trump in 2016 and for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told Reuters that the state is investigating whether the election-system breaches are coordinated.

“If there is coordination, whether it’s among those in our state or reaching up to a national level, we can determine that and then we can seek accountability for all involved,” Benson, a Democrat, said in an interview.

On Feb. 10, Benson announced that she had asked Michigan’s attorney general, Democrat Dana Nessel, to begin a criminal investigation, citing information that state authorities had received about unauthorized access to voting machines and data in Roscommon County. In separate inquiries, state or local law enforcement officials have investigated security breaches involving voting equipment in Cross Village Township in Emmet County and Adams Township in Hillsdale County last year.

Representatives of the state police and attorney general’s office declined to comment on the investigations detailed in this story.

Trump won all of the counties where breaches or attempted breaches in Michigan have been alleged. The results in those jurisdictions were affirmed by multiple audits and an investigation by the Republican-controlled state senate, which found no evidence of widespread fraud. But some activists and officials pushing election-fraud conspiracy theories claim that Trump’s margin should have been larger in these areas, and their efforts are roiling communities across the state.

In rural Barry County, Republican Sheriff Dar Leaf has teamed with proponents of the debunked claim that voting machines were rigged against Trump. Leaf is pursuing his own investigation, despite being urged last year by the Republican county prosecutor to suspend it for lack of evidence. Trump won the county by a 2-1 margin.

In recent weeks, Leaf’s office has sent expansive public records requests to the county’s township and city clerks, seeking an array of election-related records. The requests were condemned by clerks and local officials in Reuters interviews and public statements as baseless and burdensome. An editorial in the local newspaper, The Hastings Banner, called Leaf’s probe “a waste of time and an affront to our citizens.”

Leaf did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview with Reuters in February, he defended his investigation. He said he was “concerned” by theories that voting machines nationwide were rigged to favor Biden, and “we need to know if that happened in Barry County.”

‘INAPPROPRIATE ACCESS’

The records obtained by Reuters show that in Lake Township, a community of about 2,800 people in Missaukee County, state police obtained a warrant on April 22 to search the clerk’s office for evidence of potential violations of election law.

Township Clerk Korrinda Winkelmann, an elected Republican who oversees local voting, declined to comment.

Missaukee County, where Trump won in 2020 with 76% of the vote, is home to Daire Rendon, a Republican state lawmaker who has embraced the bogus claim that widespread fraud robbed Trump of victory in 2020. Rendon approached multiple clerks in her district, which includes Missaukee, Roscommon and other counties, asking them to give people seeking fraud evidence access to their voting equipment, Reuters previously reported https://www.reuters.com/world/us/michigan-pro-trump-state-lawmaker-sought-access-voting-machines-2022-05-20.

In December 2020, Rendon was one of two Republican members of Michigan’s House of Representatives who joined an unsuccessful federal lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden’s victory in five battleground states.

Rendon did not respond to requests for comment. In a May 25 interview with the Cadillac News, a local newspaper, she acknowledged contacting clerks but said she “never touched a voting machine” and did nothing wrong.

State police are also stepping up an examination of alleged breaches in Roscommon County. In February, Secretary of State Benson said unauthorized people “gained inappropriate access to tabulation machines and data drives” used in the county and in one of its townships, Richfield. Benson, however, didn’t name any suspects or provide other details.

The state police records show that investigators are probing allegations that the Richfield Township supervisor allowed a “third party” to take possession of the town’s two ballot tabulators for several weeks in early 2021. The records identify the supervisor only by title, not by name, but the county only has one person in that position, Republican John Bawol.

The records detail an interview with a “suspect.” The name and title is redacted but the suspect is described as an elected township official. The official told investigators he believed the tabulators were taken to “the northern suburbs of Detroit” in early February by an unidentified group of people driving a small SUV. The tabulators were not returned until March, the official added. The official said at one point he checked in with a woman, whose name is redacted, about when the machines would be returned, and “she advised they were almost done.”

State police found that both security seals on one machine indicated that it had been tampered with, the records show. The seals were intact on the other machine.

Greg Watt, the township clerk, whose job includes safeguarding election equipment, told investigators that he did not know the identity of the third party who accessed the voting machines, according to the records. Police documents identify Watt by name and call him a witness in the case.

Watt and Bawol did not respond to requests for comment.

The breaches are costing taxpayers money. The Richfield Township Board voted on May 25 to purchase two new vote tabulators and three memory devices at a cost of $8,763. The move was necessary to “ensure election integrity,” Watt said at the board meeting, according to an audio recording reviewed by Reuters.

State police have also sought to question the Roscommon county clerk in connection with a separate alleged voting system breach, the police records reveal. The county clerk, whose name is redacted in the documents, is Michelle Stevenson, a Republican.

In February, the county clerk acknowledged to a state election official that she had provided a data storage drive containing election information “for one or both” of Richfield Township’s vote tabulators to an unidentified third party, according to an email from the official to police, in which the name of the clerk was also redacted. She also gave the person access to one of Roscommon County’s vote-tabulating machines, according to the email.

When state investigators attempted to interview the county clerk on Feb. 17, she indicated a willingness to speak with police but declined to discuss the matter at that time, the police records show.

Two weeks later, on March 2, investigators executed a search warrant on Stevenson’s office, accompanied by representatives of Election Systems & Software LLC, the Nebraska-based manufacturer of voting machines used in Roscommon County, the records show.

Stevenson declined to comment. Election Systems & Software did not respond to requests for comment.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne and Peter Eisler; editing by Jason Szep and Brian Thevenot)

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(Reuters) – U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disclosed new stock market trades on Monday, showing purchases of options to buy shares of Apple Inc and Microsoft Corp.

In a periodic transaction report signed last Friday and appearing on the House of Representatives’ website on Monday, the senior Democrat disclosed that her husband, financier Paul Pelosi, on May 13 bought Apple call options for between $500,001 and $1 million.

On May 24, he bought more Apple call options, in an amount between $250,001 and $500,000, the disclosure https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2022/20021142.pdf shows. On the same day, Paul Pelosi bought Microsoft call options for as much as $600,000.

Users on social media platforms including Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and TikTok have scrutinized Pelosi’s trade disclosures in recent months, believing her position as House Speaker gives her and her husband an edge.

A 2012 law makes it illegal for lawmakers to use information from their work in Congress for their personal gain. The law requires them to disclose stock transactions by themselves or family members within 45 days.

Pelosi in January signaled that she might be willing to advance legislation to completely ban stock trading by lawmakers. That was a reversal from her previous position defending lawmakers’ right to trade stocks.

Proposals by Democrats in Congress this year to prohibit stock trading by lawmakers have yet to pass.

Pelosi’s stock trading performance ranked sixth-best in Congress in 2021, with Republican Congressman Austin Scott leading the way, according to an analysis https://unusualwhales.com/i_am_the_senate/full by Unusual Whales, a service selling financial data.

Paul Pelosi’s purchases of Apple and Microsoft options in May followed a steep Wall Street selloff this year related to worries about inflation and rising interest rates.

So far in 2022, Pelosi has filed six transaction reports, disclosing several trades in Apple, the world’s most valuable company. She has also disclosed trades in Walt Disney Co, Tesla Inc, PayPal Holdings and other widely held stocks.

The Justice Department ended investigations of stock trades by at least three senators ahead of the 2020 market slump, caused by the coronavirus pandemic, without filing charges.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — When leaders gather at the Summit of the Americas this week, the focus is likely to veer from policy issues — migration, climate change and galloping inflation — and instead shift to something Hollywood thrives on: the drama of the red carpet.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed Monday that he will not show up, dealing a blow to the event hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden.

López Obrador said it was concerns over the guest list that led him to skip. He wanted Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to be invited, but Washington did not want to include autocratic governments. Other leaders also have indicated they’ll stay away if not all are invited.

Experts say the event could turn into a embarrassment for U.S. President Joe Biden.

Even some progressive Democrats have criticized the administration for bowing to pressure from exiles in the swing state of Florida and barring communist Cuba, which attended the last two summits.

“The real question is why the Biden administration didn’t do its homework,” said Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister who now teaches at New York University.

While the Biden administration insists the president in Los Angeles will outline his vision for a “sustainable, resilient, and equitable future” for the hemisphere, Castañeda said it’s clear from the last-minute wrangling over the guest list that Latin America is not a priority for the U.S. president.

“This ambitious agenda, no one knows exactly what it is, other than a series of bromides,” he said.

The U.S. is hosting the summit for the first time since its launch in 1994, in Miami, as part of an effort to galvanize support for a free trade agreement stretching from Alaska to Patagonia.

But that goal was abandoned more than 15 years ago amid a rise in leftist politics in the region. With China’s influence expanding, most nations have come to expect — and need — less from Washington.

As a result, the premier forum for regional cooperation has languished, at times turning into a stage for airing historical grievances, like when the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez at the 2009 summit in Trinidad & Tobago gave President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic tract, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”

The U.S. opening to former Cold War adversary Cuba, which was sealed with Obama’s handshake with Raul Castro at the 2015 summit in Panama, lowered some of the ideological tensions.

“It’s a huge missed opportunity,” Ben Rhodes, who led the Cuba thaw as deputy national security advisor in the Obama administration, said recently in his “Pod Save the World” podcast. “We are isolating ourselves by taking that step, because you’ve got Mexico, you’ve got Caribbean countries saying they’re not going to come — which is only going to make Cuba look stronger than us.”

To bolster turnout and avert a flop, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris worked the phones in recent days, speaking with the leaders of Argentina and Honduras, both of whom initially expressed support for Mexico’s proposed boycott. Former Sen. Christopher Dodd crisscrossed the region as a special adviser for the summit, in the process persuading far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and hasn’t once spoken to Biden, to belatedly confirm his attendance.

Ironically, the decision to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela wasn’t the whim of the U.S. alone. The region’s governments in 2001, in Quebec City, declared that any break with democratic order is an “insurmountable obstacle” to future participation in the summit process.

The governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela aren’t even active members of the Washington-based Organization of the American States, which organizes the summit.

“This should’ve been a talking point from the beginning,” said Tom Shannon, a former undersecretary of state for political affairs who in a long diplomatic career attended several summits. “It’s not a U.S. imposition. It was consensual. If leaders want to change that, then we should have a conversation first.”

Instead of going to the summit, López Obrador said he would visit communities hit by Hurricane Agatha last week. His foreign affairs secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, will lead the Mexican delegation in his absence. He said he sent word to Biden that he would like to visit him at the White House when his schedule allows to discuss the integration of the Americas.

“There cannot be a summit if all countries are not invited,” López Obrador said Monday. “Or there can be one, but that is to continue with all politics of interventionism.”

After the last summit in Peru, in 2018, which Trump didn’t even bother to attend, many predicted there was no future for the regional gathering.

In response to Trump’s pullout, only 17 of the region’s 35 heads of state attended. Few saw value in bringing together for a photo op leaders from such dissimilar places as aid-dependent Haiti, industrial powerhouses Mexico and Brazil and violence-plagued Central America — each with their own unique challenges and bilateral agenda with Washington.

“As long as we don’t speak with a single voice, no one is going to listen to us,” said former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who also faults Mexico and Brazil — the region’s two economic powers — for the current drift in hemispheric relations. “With a cacophony of voices, it is much more difficult to find our place in the world.”

To the surprise of many, the U.S. in early 2019 picked up the ball, offering to host the summit. At the time, the Trump administration was enjoying something of a leadership renaissance in Latin America, albeit among mostly similar-minded conservative governments around the narrow issue of restoring democracy in Venezuela.

But that goodwill unraveled as Trump floated the idea of invading Venezuela to remove Nicolás Maduro — a threat recalling the worst excesses of the Cold War. Then the pandemic hit, taking a devastating human and economic toll on a region that accounted for more than a quarter of the world’s COVID-19 deaths despite making up only 8% of the population. The region’s politics were upended.

The election of Biden, who was Obama’s point man for Latin America and had decades of hands-on experience in the region from his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, set expectations for a relaunch.

But as popular angst spread during the pandemic, the Biden administration was slow to match the vaccine diplomacy of Russia and China, although it did eventually provide 70 million doses to the hemisphere. Biden also maintained the Trump-era restrictions on migration, reinforcing the view that it was neglecting its own neighbors.

Since then, Biden’s hallmark policy in the region — a $4 billion aid package to attack the root causes of migration in Central America — has stalled in Congress with no apparent effort to revive it. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also diverted attention from the region, something experts say could come back to bite Biden if rising interest rates in the U.S. trigger a stampede of capital outflows and debt defaults in emerging markets.

There have been smaller snubs too: When leftist millennial Gabriel Boric was elected president in Chile, setting high expectations for a generational shift in the region’s politics, the U.S. delegation to his inauguration was led by the second-lowest ranking Cabinet member — Isabel Guzman, head of the Small Business Administration.

Shannon said for the summit to be successful Biden shouldn’t try to lay out a grand American vision for the hemisphere but rather show sensitivity to the region’s embrace of other global powers, concerns about gaping inequality and traditional mistrust of the U.S.

“More than speeches, he will need to listen,” Shannon said.

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By Katharine Jackson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican U.S. Representative Liz Cheney warned that the nation’s democratic system is threatened by ongoing efforts to deny the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

“People must pay attention. People must watch, and they must understand how easily our democratic system can unravel if we don’t defend it,” Cheney said during an interview broadcast on CBS Sunday Morning, days before Congress’ official probe of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol begins public hearings.

Cheney, a vocal critic of Trump who voted to impeach him, is one of two Republicans serving on the committee. She warned that Trump continues to damage trust in American democracy by repeating his false claims that his loss was the result of widespread fraud.

Those claims have been repeatedly debunked by courts, state and local election officials and members of Trump’s own administration.

“It’s an ongoing threat,” Cheney said of the efforts to undercut confidence in elections. “It is extremely broad. It’s extremely well organized. It’s really chilling.”

The House of Representatives Select Committee investigating the attacks will hold a prime time hearing at 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT June 10) on Thursday, the committee announced. It will be the first of six public hearings, set for June 13, 15, 16, 21 and June 23, according to media reports.

With seven Democrats and two Republicans, the panel has spent much of the past year investigating the events preceding and driving the attack by thousands of Trump supporters, who stormed the building in a failed bid to prevent Congress from formally certifying his 2020 election loss to now-President Joe Biden.

Cheney was once the third most powerful Republican in Washington. She was ousted from leadership after repudiating Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen. Trump has endorsed a challenger to Cheney in Wyoming’s August primary.

(Reporting by Katharine Jackson; Editing by Richard Chang)

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