Politics

By Josephine Walker and Joseph Ax

(Reuters) -Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature on Friday passed a new congressional map that increased the number of Black voters in one of the state’s districts, but Democrats said the plan defied a U.S. Supreme Court ruling intended to protect minority voters’ rights.

Civil rights groups have already vowed to challenge the new map in court, a month after the Supreme Court ruled that the state’s previous district lines marginalized the state’s sizable Black population in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

“Alabama lawmakers appear hell-bent on preventing Black voters from fully participating in the democratic process and they are blatantly ignoring their constituents, federal law, and the highest court of the land to disenfranchise us,” one plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, Scott Douglas, the executive director at Greater Birmingham Ministries, said in a statement.

More than one-quarter of Alabama’s residents are Black, but under a Republican-drawn map approved in 2021, only one of the state’s seven congressional districts, the 7th, is majority Black. The state’s lone Democratic U.S. representative, Terri Sewell, represents that district.

After the Supreme Court decision, a federal three-judge panel gave lawmakers until Friday to create a second district with either a Black majority or “something quite close” to give Black voters another opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.

The new map increases the proportion of Black voters in the 2nd district from about 32% to 40%, a level that Democrats and civil rights groups said was not enough to comply with the court’s directive.

Adding another majority-Black district, as the Supreme Court plaintiffs have proposed, would increase Democrats’ chances of picking up another seat in the 2024 elections. Republicans hold a narrow 222-213 majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Democratic lawmakers decried the move on the floor of the legislature. Senator Bobby Singleton, a Black Democrat, accused fellow lawmakers of playing a “game” with Black voters.

“We don’t care about your voice,” Singleton said. “That’s what it ultimately ends up saying.”

But Republicans said they were confident the 2nd district’s new lines provided a meaningful opportunity for Black voters.

Michael Li, a redistricting expert with New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, called the Republican plan “flabbergasting,” saying it fell far short of the court’s order.

“The court ruling was very clear about what you need to have in order to satisfy the Voting Rights Act,” he said.

The map will require approval from the federal three-judge panel. If the court determines that the new map is still illegal, a court-appointed special master would draw a new version to be used in the 2024 congressional election.

Last week, a New York state appeals court ordered lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map. The decision, opposed by Republicans, could give the Democratic-controlled legislature a chance to flip as many as half a dozen Republican-held U.S. House seats by enacting a partisan plan.

(Reporting by Josephine Walker in Washington, additional reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Aurora Ellis)

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By Andrea Shalal and Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday said he had asked CIA Director William Burns to become a member of his cabinet, elevating one of his closest advisers on national security and foreign policy.

“Under his leadership, the CIA is delivering a clear-eyed, long-term approach to our nation’s top national security challenges,” Biden said in a statement, referring to Burns’ approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and U.S. competition with China.

The move was reported earlier by the Washington Post, which said it was largely symbolic and would not give Burns any new authorities.

Bonnie Glaser, head of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said the appointment reflected Biden’s confidence in Burns and his career experience.

Burns, who became the first career diplomat to lead the CIA in 2021, “has made a significant contribution to national security decision-making, especially with regard to Russia and China” Glaser said.

Burns is not the first CIA director to attain cabinet status. Former President Bill Clinton also named his CIA directors – John Deutch and George Tenet – to serve in his cabinet, as did Ronald Reagan with William Casey.

Daniel Byman, director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, saw it as testament to Burn’s “incredible effectiveness rather than a broader decision about the role of the CIA in cabinet.”

“Burns has been a very important part of Biden’s foreign policy, serving as of course an intelligence leader but also as a diplomat to Ukraine, the Middle East, and other parts of the world,” he said. “Biden wants to draw on Burns’ knowledge and skill as he shapes his foreign policy.”

A White House official said it was common for presidents to vary the agencies represented in their cabinets.

For instance, former President Barack Obama elevated the head of the Small Business Administration to the cabinet and Clinton added Federal Emergency Management Agency head James Witt to his cabinet.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Cynthia Osterman)

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By Jacqueline Thomsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Former President Donald Trump’s trial over his alleged mishandling of classified documents will begin on May 20 next year, according to a U.S. court order on Friday.

Trump’s lawyers had resisted setting a date but said any trial should take place after the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, in which he is front-runner for the Republican nomination.

A Trump spokesperson said the trial schedule “allows President Trump and his legal team to continue fighting” the criminal case. A spokesperson for U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office declined to comment.

Friday’s ruling came from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who sits in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Trump was indicted on June 8 on charges that he unlawfully kept national security documents when he left office and lied to officials who sought to recover them. He has pleaded not guilty.

Federal prosecutors had asked Cannon to schedule the trial for December.

The case is one of several legal woes Trump faces as he campaigns for 2024.

Trump is set to go to trial in Manhattan on March 25 on separate charges that he falsified business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star.

He said on Tuesday he had received a letter saying he is a target of a grand jury investigation into efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat.

(Reporting by Katharine Jackson and Jacqueline Thomsen; Editing by John Stonestreet and David Holmes)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to raise the mandatory commercial pilot retirement age to 67 from 65 and make other aviation reforms, Republican House leaders said Friday.

The House bill approved 351 to 69 reauthorizes Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) aviation safety and infrastructure programs for the next five years.

House lawmakers did not agree to add additional round-trip flights at Washington Reagan National Airport that had been sought by Delta Air Lines, and opted to retain pilot training rules that were adopted after a February 2009 fatal passenger airplane crash near Buffalo.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Thursday said he did not make any promises to former President Donald Trump that he would get legislation passed that would erase Trump’s two impeachments by the chamber when he was president.

“There’s no deal,” McCarthy, a Republican, told a reporter in the Capitol following a report by the Politico news outlet that he had made such an agreement with Trump, the current frontrunner for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

The House, then controlled by Democrats, voted in 2019 and again in 2021 to impeach Trump, with the Senate acquitting him both times thanks to the votes of Republicans.

The House the first time charged Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after he asked Ukraine to investigate Democrat Joe Biden, who went on to win the 2020 presidential election, and his son on unsubstantiated corruption accusations. The second time it charged Trump with inciting an insurrection, relating to the attack on the Capitol by his supporters.

McCarthy voted against impeaching Trump both times. McCarthy on Thursday called both impeachments politically motivated and not based on evidence that Trump had committed a high crime or misdemeanor, as spelled out in the U.S. Constitution.

McCarthy’s remarks came after Politico reported that Trump was outraged at the speaker for withholding his endorsement of Trump’s third run for the White House in 2024. In return for delaying that endorsement, according to Politico, McCarthy promised to work to pass legislation to “expunge” both impeachments.

Politico said McCarthy had promised to do so before Congress leaves for an August recess.

A Trump representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump, the only president to have been impeached twice, said on Tuesday he had received a letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith stating that he is a target of a grand jury investigation into efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat. That would be his third criminal indictment since leaving office.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan, additional reporting by Josephine Walker, Moira Warburton and Nathan Layne; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)

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By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump on Thursday urged the United Auto Workers union to back his campaign, a day after the union’s president met with President Joe Biden after raising concerns about electric- vehicle policies.

Trump, the former Republican president seeking a return to office in 2024, said Democrat Biden was “waging war on the U.S. auto industry” through “crippling” electric vehicle mandates and urged the UAW to endorse him. Trump made the comments in a video posted on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Biden’s campaign responded that Trump was “the most anti-union president in modern history, stacking his cabinet with anti-union officials.” It added that under Biden, “more than 120,000 auto manufacturing jobs have come back to the United States, and new auto factories are popping up across the country.”

Trump said he advocated trade policies to help U.S. autoworkers during his presidency, including renegotiating trade deals. Biden’s campaign said that he supported incentives that helped dramatically add more U.S. electric vehicle and battery production.

UAW President Shawn Fain, who represents 150,000 U.S. hourly workers at General Motors, Ford Motor, and Chrysler parent Stellantis, has held off so far on endorsing Biden for re-election and has criticized some administration EV policies. Most other major unions have already endorsed Biden.

The UAW said in May that “another Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster. But our members need to see an alternative that delivers real results.”

In his Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump vowed to “terminate” green vehicle mandates, warning that if they continued under Biden, “American auto production will be totally dead.” Many congressional Republicans have also criticized Biden’s electcric-vehicle rules, arguing they would force automakers to end gasoline-powered production.

The trade group representing nearly all major automakers last month urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ease its proposal to cut vehicle emissions through 2032, saying this approach was “neither reasonable nor achievable.”

The EPA said in April the proposed 2027-2032 standards would cut emissions by 56% and require 67% of new vehicles to be electric by 2032.

Earlier this month the UAW called on the Biden administration to soften its proposed vehicle emissions rules.

Fain said last week the UAW was not ready to endorse Biden. “We have expectations and that’s why we haven’t made endorsements yet,” he said. “We expect people to be there for us if they want our endorsement.”

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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By Moira Warburton and Josephine Walker

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Thursday he did not promise Donald Trump that he would pass a measure aimed at expunging the former president’s two impeachments.

“There’s no deal,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told NBC following a report by the Politico news outlet that he had made such an agreement with Trump, the current front-runner for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

A Trump representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s House allies are rallying around him as he braces for a pair of potential criminal indictments for his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat – one from U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith and another in Fulton County, Georgia.

No. 4 House Republican Elise Stefanik and hardline Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene last month introduced a bill aimed at expunging Trump’s historic two impeachments, from 2019 and 2021. Both impeachments passed the then-Democratic-controlled House but in each case Senate Republicans voted to acquit him.

There is no historical precedent for expunging an impeachment, but Greene said that would not stop her from pushing the measure forward.

“We’re lawmakers. We can do things that haven’t been done before, and this one certainly needs to be done,” Greene told reporters, calling Trump’s impeachments “an embarrassment, a stain on our history, and they shouldn’t have happened.”

It is a move, however, that could make more moderate House Republicans squirm. Some of them are likely to face difficult re-election bids next year in congressional districts that are often closely contested between the two political parties.

Another Trump controversy might be the last thing they would want hovering over their campaigns.

Democrats will be vying to recapture majority control of the House, which is now narrowly held by Republicans with a 222-212 margin, in the November 2024 elections.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, called the idea of an expungement vote “a disgrace.”

NEW INDICTMENTS LOOM

Trump, the only president to have been impeached twice, said on Tuesday he had received a letter from Smith stating that he is a target of a grand jury investigation into efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat. That would be his third criminal indictment since leaving office.

There is no constitutional provision providing for the House to obliterate the two impeachments approved during a prior Congress. If such a measure were to pass, the historical record of those impeachments would remain, as would the Senate trials that were triggered by the House impeachments.

The House the first time charged Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after he asked Ukraine to investigate Democrat Joe Biden, who went on to win the 2020 presidential election, and Biden’s son on unsubstantiated corruption accusations. The second time it charged Trump with inciting an insurrection, relating to the attack on the Capitol by his supporters.

McCarthy voted against impeaching Trump both times. McCarthy on Thursday called both impeachments politically motivated and not based on evidence that Trump had committed a high crime or misdemeanor, as spelled out in the U.S. Constitution.

McCarthy’s remarks came after Politico reported that Trump was outraged at the speaker for withholding his endorsement of Trump’s third run for the White House. In return for delaying that endorsement, according to Politico, McCarthy promised to work to pass the legislation.

Politico said McCarthy had promised to do so before Congress leaves for an August recess.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton and Josephine Walker in WashingtonAdditional reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, ConnecticutWriting by Richard CowanEditing by Scott Malone, Will Dunham and Matthew Lewis)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House on Wednesday expanded its war on junk fees to the rental housing market, announced a crackdown on price-fixing in food and agricultural markets, and unveiled draft merger guidelines as part of an ongoing push to aid U.S. consumers.

President Joe Biden, who has made attacks on corporate greed and power a centerpiece of his presidency, explained the government’s latest actions at the fifth meeting of his 18-agency Competition Council at the White House on Wednesday.

“It’s about basic fairness,” he told Cabinet members and other council members, underscoring the need to continue driving down inflation. “Folks are tired of being played for suckers.”

The new measures came near the second anniversary of a Biden executive order creating the council and a government-wide attack on anti-competitive practices. It has already taken aim at meatpacking, ocean shipping and consumer junk fees.

The White House said four decades of “misguided economic philosophy” had resulted in rising concentration in three-fourths of U.S. industries, costing the median U.S. household up to $5,000 a year in higher prices and lower wages.

“We cannot accept bad mergers that lead to mass layoffs, higher prices and fewer options for workers and consumers,” Biden said. “I’ve said before, capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation.”

Hannah Garden Monheit, the new director of Competition Council Policy at the National Economic Council, told Reuters the administration would “use all the tools that we have” to curb anti-competitive practices.

While the junk fee crackdown has found strong bipartisan and public support, industry has chafed at the increased oversight, accusing the Biden administration of “regulatory overreach.”

Sean Heather, a senior official at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said industry agreed that transparency was critical, but didn’t want to see overly prescriptive rules for junk fees or mergers, and said government data showed the U.S. economy was no more concentrated now than it was two decades ago.

Morgan Harper, a former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official, welcomed Bid en’s drive for more competition and said it would help smaller firms and entrepreneurs.

“We don’t really have a competitive marketplace unless we have strong government enforcement,” Harper, now at the American Economic Liberties Project, said. “Concentration issues all over the economy are hurting workers, they’re hurting small businesses, and they’re hurting consumers.”

RENTAL HOUSING FEES

Biden said three of the largest rental housing platforms – Zillow, Apartments.com and AffordableHousing.com – had agreed to disclose total, upfront data on rental costs such as application fees that can run to $100 or more per application, and “convenience fees” sometimes charged for paying rent online or disposing of trash.

A senior official said the move would not lower fees on its own, but increased transparency should cut them down by giving tens of millions of renters a chance to comparison-shop.

Biden has repeatedly called for federal agencies, Congress and private companies to address surprise fees that can jack up consumers’ cost by 20%. Three of the biggest airlines have already agreed to scrap fees for children to sit with parents.

Other actions announced Wednesday included draft merger guidelines that pave the way for tougher scrutiny of planned mergers by Big Tech companies like Amazon.com and Alphabet’s Google.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren hailed the guidelines as a sea change after four decades of lax antitrust enforcement. “Giant corporations and their armies of lobbyists will cry foul at the prospect of more competition, but this action by the Biden administration is welcome news for American small businesses, workers, and consumers,” she said in a statement.

One senior official said the goal was to eliminate “various blind spots” that had contributed to consolidation, noting that the Federal Trade Commission had received over 5,000 comments as it was shaping the new guidelines.

The White House also announced moves by the Department of Agriculture, joined by 31 states and Washington, D.C., to target price fixing and other anticompetitive behavior in highly consolidated food and agriculture sectors.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; additional reporting by Diane Bartz and Leah Douglas; Editing by Leslie Adler, Heather Timmons, Daniel Wallis and Diane Craft)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican and Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation on Wednesday that would authorize President Joe Biden’s administration to negotiate a tax agreement with Taiwan, seeking to foster investment as Washington works to shore up the island against a rising China.

The lawmakers, including House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul and top Democrat Gregory Meeks, said the agreement, similar to a treaty, would facilitate investment, protect against tax evasion and allow businesses in both the United States and Taiwan to avoid double taxation.

“In addition to the advantages we will receive from more investment from Taiwan, this is another important step in safeguarding Taiwan and maintaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific,” McCaul said in a statement.

The bill is a companion to a measure introduced in the Senate in May by lawmakers including the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Washington and Taipei do not have formal diplomatic relations, so the lack of a tax agreement means Taiwanese businesses and individuals are taxed on their income by both the U.S. and Taiwanese governments.

China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has increased military, political and economic pressure to assert those claims.

Taiwan is a major global supplier of the semiconductor chips essential to a wide range of consumer goods and military equipment.

(This story has been refiled to correct a typo in the headline)

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

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By Karen Freifeld and Luc Cohen

(Reuters) -A U.S. judge on Wednesday denied former U.S. President Donald Trump’s bid to move from New York state court to federal court the case against him stemming from a hush money payment to a porn star.

“Trump has failed to show that the conduct charged … is for or relating to any act performed by or for the President under color of the official acts of a President,” U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said in a written decision.

Hellerstein also said Trump failed to show he has a federal defense to the indictment.

Trump was indicted this spring on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payment to silence porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. He has pleaded not guilty.

Justice Juan Merchan of New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan set a trial for March 2024, but Trump claimed the case belonged in federal court, arguing that his actions were related to the presidency.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump. He denies it.

(Reporting by Karen FreifeldEditing by Chris Reese and Leslie Adler)

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