Tag: U.S. House of Representatives

House to hold Barr contempt vote over Mueller report next week

The House will vote next week to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for declining to comply with a subpoena for special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report and related evidence.

The resolution will also target former White House counsel Don McGahn, who has defied a Democratic subpoena to appear before Congress.

The vote, scheduled for June 11, marks a major escalation of tensions between the Trump administration and House Democrats, who have launched a series of investigations into the president’s conduct in office — probes in which the White House has largely refused to cooperate.

View the complete June 3 article by Cristina Marcos, Scott Wong and Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

 

5 things to watch as Trump, Dems clash over investigations

The White House is seeking to thwart more than 20 congressional investigations into President Trump and his administration, accusing Democrats of trying to score political points against the commander in chief ahead of a reelection year.

The executive branch has refused to cooperate with the requests for documents and witness interviews and fought resulting subpoenas from Democrats seeking to compel the administration to comply.

Democrats have accused Trump and his administration of flouting congressional investigative and oversight powers in an unprecedented way, blocking demands for everything from the president’s tax returns to files on security clearances.

View the complete May 18 article by Morgan Chalfant and Olivia Beavers on The Hill website here.

Clash Between Trump and House Democrats Poses Threat to Constitutional Order

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s wholesale refusal to provide information to Congress threatens to upend the delicate balance that is the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution.

Earlier administrations fought isolated skirmishes over congressional subpoenas. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has declared an all-out war on efforts by House Democrats to look into his official conduct and business dealings. And that has legal experts across the ideological spectrum warning that the president’s categorical opposition to what he sees as partisan meddling could create a constitutional crisis — an impasse that the allocation of interlocking powers and responsibilities by the framers cannot solve.

“A president who refuses to respond to congressional oversight is taking the presidency to new levels of danger,” said William P. Marshall, a law professor at the University of North Carolina. “We’re supposed to be in a system of checks and balances, and one of the biggest checks that Congress has over the executive is the power of congressional oversight.”

View the complete May 7 article by Adam Liptak on The New York Times website here.

House Democrats start contempt of Congress process against Barr

The House Judiciary scheduled a Wednesday markup for the 27-page contempt resolution

House Democrats plan to take the first step to holding Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress on Wednesday, in their push to get an unredacted version of the Mueller report and its underlying investigative material.

The House Judiciary Committee scheduled a markup of a 27-page contempt resolution that lays out the need for the full report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the negotiations so far with Barr to get it.

Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said that Barr’s failure to comply with the congressional subpoena for the full report “leaves us no choice” but to initiate contempt proceedings — but he left the door open to canceling them as well.

View the complete May 6 article by Todd Ruger on The Roll Call website here.

MN Congressional delegation fights proposed federal cuts to MinnesotaCare funding

In a show of unity, all but one member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation has signed a letter seeking to preserve $24 million in federal funding for MinnesotaCare, and protect health coverage for over 80,000 Minnesotans.

The proposed change by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would significantly cut federal payments to Minnesota’s Basic Health Plan program, MinnesotaCare

That’s why U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, and U.S. Reps. Angie Craig (MN-2), Dean Phillips (MN-3), Betty McCollum (MN-4), Ilhan Omar (MN-5), Tom Emmer (MN-6), Collin Peterson (MN-7), and Pete Stauber (MN-8) are fighting the proposed changes.

View the complete April 11 article by the News Staff of DL-Online here.

3 things to watch: Trump kids, associates eye pleading the Fifth as Dems bore in

Credit: Mary Altaffa, APr

WH counsel’s letter to Rep. Cummings reveals legal strategy to fight probes

ANALYSIS — It was a remarkable 24-hour reversal, with President Donald Trump first saying Monday he cooperates with “everybody” before turning to an unlikely source for a precedent to reject House Democrats’ demands for reams of documents: Barack Obama.

House Democratic chairmen of committees in the embryonic stages of investigations into all things Trump have requested documents from and interviews with a long list of individuals and entities related to the president’s time in office, 2016 campaign and business dealings. Trump seemed willing to, at least in some form, comply with some of those requests when he said this on Monday: “I cooperate all the time, with everybody.”

But by the next afternoon, it appeared the president had been trying to buy time for his aides to determine the extent to which they believe the law will require White House compliance. As he often does — even as White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told House Oversight and Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings that “we are prepared to continue negotiations in good faith” — the president went to the most extreme option, appearing to reverse himself.

View the complete March 6 article by John T. Bennett on The Roll Call website here.

10 things you might not know about HR 1

Some significant changes have not been talked about much as the bill has advanced to the House floor

As the House begins debate Wednesday on HR 1 — the Democratic majority’s package overhauling voting, campaign finance and ethics law — some parts of the bill will likely get more attention than others, but several under-the-radar provisions in the 622-page legislation would nevertheless have sweeping impacts.

Here are 10 provisions that have not received much attention as the legislation advanced through committee hearings and markups on its way to the floor.

1. Support for D.C. statehood

HR 1 changes a lot of laws, but it also contains nonbinding provisions to express Democrats’ support for policies that, for whatever reason, they didn’t include in the package. One declares support for D.C. statehood — a matter Congress hasn’t voted on since 1993.

View the complete March 6 article by Lindsey McPherson and Kate Ackley on The Roll Call website here.

Videos of Mark Meadows saying ‘send Obama home to Kenya’ resurface hours after he’s accused of racist stunt

After being accused of a “racist act” on Feb. 27, three instances emerged of Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) making birther comments about President Barack Obama. (Video: JM Rieger/Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

(This post has been updated with a third video unearthed by the Fix’s JM Rieger.)

The most emotionally fraught moment during the Michael Cohen hearing had nothing directly to do with President Trump’s former lawyer but was a tense exchange after one lawmaker accused another of engaging in a racist act by bringing a black woman to the hearing “as a prop.”

Though the issue was mostly resolved during the hearing, the aftershocks of it continued Thursday with the resurfacing of three videos from 2012 of Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) making birther comments about President Barack Obama and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) going on CNN to reiterate her belief that Meadows’s actions were insensitive to people of color.

Tlaib, one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, was the last to speak at the end of the marathon Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday. She used her time to criticize Meadows — not by name — for bringing Lynne Patton, a black woman who has worked for the Trump family and now for the White House, to vouch for Trump not being racist.

View the complete February 28 article by Colby Itkowitz on The Washington Post website here.

Dems introduce resolution to overturn Trump’s emergency to build wall

Democrats in the House introduced a resolution on Friday that would block President Trump‘s emergency declaration on the southern border, a step he took to free up as much as $8 billion in funding to build his proposed border wall.

The resolution sponsored by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) had 222 co-sponsors.

The measure is expected to pass the Democratic-held House but will need to win GOP support to get through the Senate.

View the complete February 22 article by Niv Elis on The Hill website here.

Adam Schiff: An open letter to my Republican colleagues

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff at the Capitol on Wednesday. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite, AP

This is a moment of great peril for our democracy. Our country is deeply divided. Our national discourse has become coarse, indeed, poisonous. Disunity and dysfunction have paralyzed Congress.

And while our attention is focused inward, the world spins on, new authoritarian regimes are born, old rivals spread their pernicious ideologies, and the space for freedom-loving peoples begins to contract violently. At last week’s Munich Security Conference, the prevailing sentiment among our closest allies is that the United States can no longer be counted on to champion liberal democracy or defend the world order we built.

For the past two years, we have examined Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and its attempts to influence the 2018 midterms. Moscow’s effort to undermine our democracy was spectacularly successful in inflaming racial, ethnic and other divides in our society and turning American against American.

Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat, represents California’s 28th Congressional District in the House and is chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

View the complete February 21 commentary by Rep. Adam Schiff here.