On Wednesday morning, Biden attended the funeral of the late senator John Warner (R-Va.) at Washington National Cathedral, where he praised his longtime Senate colleague as a statesman who “understood that democracy is more than a form of government.”
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Top U.S. military leader: ‘I want to understand White rage. And I’m White.’
Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admonished lawmakers over questions about critical race theory at a Wednesday hearing, saying it is important for leaders to be well-versed in many schools of thought.
“I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” Milley told the House Armed Services Committee. “So what is wrong with understanding … the country which we are here to defend?”
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) criticized reports that the U.S. Military Academy teaches a course involving the theory, which broadly explores the idea that racism reaches beyond individual prejudice and affects minorities at the institutional level, particularly in criminal justice.
The course at the academy includes phrases such as “White rage,” Waltz claimed, and he pressed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the nation’s first Black Pentagon chief, to investigate further.
Soon after, when the committee gave Milley a chance to expand, he launched into an impassioned defense of inquiry about U.S. society and its racial dynamics.
“I want to understand White rage. And I’m White,” Milley said, focused on learning more about the mostly White, mostly male mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America. What caused that?” Milley asked. “I want to find that out.”
Milley said he was offended that critics, among them lawmakers and right-wing commentators like Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have accused the military of being “woke or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there.”
Nearly 900 Secret Service members were infected with the coronavirus. A watchdog blames Trump.
Almost 900 Secret Service members have tested positive for the coronavirus since March 2020, according to a watchdog report, and many of those infected had protection assignments that included the safety of the president and vice president.
The nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington published a report Tuesday detailing how 881 Secret Service employees had tested positive between March 1, 2020, and March 9, 2021. The data, which came from a Freedom of Information Act request to the Secret Service, found 477 members of the Special Agent division had been infected. Described by the Department of Homeland Security as “the elite agents you see protecting the President and Vice President,” Special Agents are also responsible for a number of safety assignments overseas and in the United States, such as protecting the president and vice president’s families, visiting foreign leaders and presidential candidates.
CREW said it’s unclear “whom the special agents who tested positive were assigned to protect or when, exactly, they tested positive.”
While the data does not give a breakdown of coronavirus infections between the two administrations during this period, the watchdog placed much of the blame on former president Donald Trump and former vice president Mike Pence for holding “large-scale rallies against public health guidelines.” The group also slammed the Trump family’s regular travel during the pandemic and Trump’s photo op last year outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center “in a car with Secret Service agents while being treated for covid, further putting agents in danger.”
“It’s impossible to overstate the risk the Trump administration put on Secret Service agents,” CREW wrote.
Vice President Harris to travel to U.S.-Mexico border Friday
Vice President Harris will travel to the U.S.-Mexico border Friday, amid mounting criticism from Republicans that neither she nor Biden has been to the border.
Harris will travel with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, according to the vice president’s senior adviser and chief spokeswoman, Symone Sanders.
“Earlier this year, the President asked the Vice President to oversee our diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,” Sanders said in a statement. “As a part of this ongoing work, the Vice President traveled to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month and will travel to El Paso on Friday.”
During her trip to Guatemala and Mexico, Republicans assailed Harris for declining to visit the border.
At Wednesday’s press briefing, White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki defended Harris’s upcoming trip and dismissed the notion that the timing of the trip was influenced by former president Donald Trump’s visit to the border on June 30.
“I would say that we have no way to predict what former president Trump will say when he goes to the border,” Psaki said. “We can only guess." She added that the White House does not believe that Harris’s trip "is going to prevent or change what the former president of the United States does when he goes to the border in a couple of days.”
Indiana woman set to be first defendant sentenced in Capitol riots
The day after taking part in a mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the peaceful transition of power, prosecutors say, a 49-year-old Indiana woman exulted.
“That was the most exciting day of my life,” Anna Morgan-Lloyd told the friend and hairdresser who had joined her that day, according to court filings. “I’m so glad we were there. For the experience and memory but most of all we can spread the truth about what happened and open the eyes of some of our friends.”
Now Morgan-Lloyd says her eyes have been opened to a different truth. The registered Democrat-turned-Trump supporter is set to plead guilty Wednesday and become the first person sentenced in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Analysis: Here’s what Biden is doing about crime
Caught between progressive calls to “defund the police” and his career-long inclination to support law enforcement, Biden on Wednesday will unveil a strategy to combat violent crime while stymieing his political critics on the right..
There’s no doubt voters worry about crime, which is near its lowest level in decades despite that year-long surge in murders and the country’s regular plague of mass shootings.
In March, the Gallup polling organization found 78 percent of Americans said they worried a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about crime and violence, while just 17 percent said “only a little” and 6 percent said “not at all.”
Biden praises the late senator John Warner as a statesman who 'understood that democracy is more than a form of government’
Biden delivered remarks at Warner’s funeral Wednesday morning, praising the late senator as a statesman who “understood that democracy is more than a form of government” — that “democracy is a way of being.”
“He understood it begins and grows in an open heart and with a willingness to work across the aisle and come together in common cause, and that empathy — empathy — is the fuel of democracy,” Biden told those gathered for the funeral at Washington National Cathedral.
Warner died of a heart ailment at his home in Alexandria last month.
Biden and Warner served together in the Senate for more than three decades — Warner, a Republican, represented Virginia in the Senate from 1979 to 2009, while Biden represented Delaware from 1973 to 2009.
In his remarks Wednesday, Biden said Warner embodied “the willingness to see each other as opponents, but not as enemies,” and “above all, to see each other as fellow Americans, even when we disagree — from John’s perspective, especially when we disagree.”
“That’s how John forged consensus and made sure our system worked and delivered for the people,” Biden said.
He added that when Warner endorsed him for president in 2020, “it carried an extra meaning for me.”
“The senators and congresspersons here will understand this,” Biden said. “It wasn’t merely that a prominent Republican endorsed me. When John endorsed me, it gave me confidence — not about winning, but about being able to do the job.”
The funeral also included eulogies from Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, both Virginia Democrats, and retired Adm. Mike Mullen.
Supreme Court sides with high school cheerleader in free-speech dispute over profane Snapchat rant
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled for a Pennsylvania cheerleader whose profane off-campus rant cost her a spot on the squad, saying the punishment violated her First Amendment rights.
The court ruled 8 to 1 that the punishment was too severe, although it declined to say that schools never have a role in disciplining students for off-campus speech.
“It might be tempting to dismiss B.L.’s words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed herein,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in his 11-page majority opinion.
“But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary.”
Former DNC chair Tom Perez launches bid for Maryland governor
Former Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez, who served as labor secretary in the Obama administration, is running for Maryland governor in 2022, joining a crowded field of candidates vying for the Democratic Party nomination.
Perez, 59, said his campaign will focus on his experience over the past 35 years and his efforts to create opportunities for people regardless of where they live.
“I think Maryland wants to see that whoever is in the governor’s seat can deliver results,” Perez said in an interview to announce his bid.
Perez said he decided to enter the race for governor because Maryland has a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to make significant progress on issues that have been the focus of his life’s work: civil rights, economic justice and social justice.
India Walton, self-identified socialist, scores upset victory in Buffalo mayoral primary
Buffalo Democrats nominated a self-identified socialist mayor after nurse and community activist India Walton defeated four-term incumbent Byron Brown in Tuesday’s primary.
“We set out to not only change Buffalo, but to change the way progressive politics are viewed in Upstate New York,” Walton told supporters, declaring victory with more than 90 percent of precincts reporting. “All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours.”
The Associated Press projected Walton, 38, the winner on Wednesday morning. She held a lead over Brown with most in-person ballots counted, and with a few more than 1,500 absentee ballots left — fewer than the margin in the mayoral primary. Brown, who refused to debate Walton during the campaign, had not conceded the race by Wednesday.
GOP lawmakers seek answers on whether athletes contracted covid-19 at 2019 Military Games in Wuhan
Two Republican lawmakers are pressing for answers from Pentagon leaders and a top Biden administration official on whether athletes who participated in the 2019 Military Games in Wuhan, China, may have contracted the coronavirus while they were there.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) has written to Xavier Becerra, the secretary of Health and Human Services.
Some 280 American athletes and staff were among more than 9,000 people from around the world who took part in the games Oct. 18-28, 2019 in Wuhan. Gallagher cited a Daily Mail piece from May 2020 which quoted several European athletes as claiming they had gotten sick with covid-like symptoms during the games.
The article also quoted one Swedish athlete who said that several of her fellow competitors got sick during the event but later tested negative for the coronavirus.
“Given unanswered questions surrounding the origins of the pandemic, information involving the health of service members who participated in the 2019 games could provide key evidence in understanding when COVID-19 first emerged,” Gallagher said in the letter, which he sent Monday. “While anecdotal, these reports raise important questions about the timeline of the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.”
Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report.
States across the country are dropping barriers to voting, widening a stark geographic divide in ballot access
More than half of U.S. states have lowered some barriers to voting since the 2020 election, making permanent practices that helped produce record voter turnout during the coronavirus pandemic — a striking countertrend to the passage of new restrictions in key Republican-controlled states this year.
The newly enacted laws in states from Vermont to California expand access to the voting process on a number of fronts, such as offering more early and mail voting options, protecting mail ballots from being improperly rejected and making it easier to register to vote.
Some states restored voting rights to people with past felony convictions or expanded options for voters with disabilities, both long-standing priorities among advocates. And in Virginia, a new law requires localities to receive preapproval or feedback on voting changes as a shield against racial discrimination, a first for states after the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the federal Voting Rights Act in 2013.
‘I’m so proud of your courage’: Biden praises athletes Carl Nassib, Kumi Yokoyama for coming out
Biden on Tuesday tweeted his support for Carl Nassib, a defensive end for the Las Vegas Raiders who came out as gay, and Kumi Yokoyama, a women’s soccer player who recently came out as a transgender man.
“To Carl Nassib and Kumi Yokoyama — two prominent, inspiring athletes who came out this week: I’m so proud of your courage,” Biden said in a tweet Tuesday night. “Because of you, countless kids around the world are seeing themselves in a new light today.”
Nassib is the first active NFL player — the only one to have played regular season games and to still be under contract with a team — to be openly gay. Yokoyama is a Japanese soccer player who is a forward for the Washington Spirit.
Nicki Jhabvala contributed to this report.
Senate Republicans block debate on elections bill, dealing blow to Democrats’ voting rights push
Senate Republicans banded together Tuesday to block a sweeping Democratic bill that would revamp the architecture of American democracy, dealing a grave blow to efforts to federally override dozens of GOP-passed state voting laws.
The test vote, which would have cleared the way to start debate on voting legislation, failed 50-50 on straight party lines — 10 votes short of the supermajority needed to advance legislation in the Senate.
It came after a succession of Democrats delivered warnings about what they said was the dire state of American democracy, accusing former president Donald Trump of undermining the country’s democratic system by challenging the results of the 2020 election in a campaign that prompted his supporters in numerous state legislatures to pass laws rolling back ballot access.
Biden has proposed a new agency to turbocharge medical treatments. But there’s a fight over where it should live.
There’s at least one proposal left over from the Trump administration that Biden is set on reviving: the creation of the Advance Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
In the administration’s debut budget proposal, the National Institutes of Health received $6.5 billion to launch the new agency modeled after the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). ARPA-H would accelerate the development of medical treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease and more.
For Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, the potential creation of the agency is personal. Biden and his wife Jill founded the Biden Cancer Initiative in 2017 to continue the Obama administration’s “cancer moonshot,” which Biden led as vice president. The nonprofit organization indefinitely suspended operations during Biden’s presidential campaign, but his attention to the issue has continued into his presidency.
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