You may have a hard time believing a key argument the Trump administration is using to rebuff efforts by Congress to obtain information legislators need to do their job. The administration has claimed — for example, in a letter from the White House counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in response to congressional subpoenas of […]
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WASHINGTON — Representative Justin Amash, an iconoclastic Republican of Michigan who has considered a run against President Trump in 2020, became the first member of his party serving in Congress to publicly suggest that the president’s conduct had reached the “threshold of impeachment.” Mr. Amash, 39, used Mr. Trump’s favorite medium — Twitter — to […]
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Image: iStock On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, which expands protections for members of the LGBTQ community. Business Insider reports that they would be protected from discrimination in housing, applying for credit, the workplace, public accommodations and more. But it’s not without its critics, of course, who believe it would […]
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WASHINGTON — House Democrats, frustrated by President Trump’s efforts to stonewall their investigations and eager to stoke public anger about the president’s behavior, are pinning their diminishing hopes on Robert S. Mueller III. They had a plan: dramatize the special counsel’s damning but dense report on national television in their committees, animating his prose with […]
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WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday passed a suite of health care bills that tied shoring up the Affordable Care Act to lowering drug prices, as Democrats tried to hold Republicans to their campaign promises to secure coverage for pre-existing medical conditions and rein in the cost of prescription medicine. But Democratic leaders appeared to […]
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WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Thursday that House Democrats could always open an impeachment inquiry to pry free documents and testimony from stonewalling Trump administration officials — a sharp response to the White House’s blanket claim that House requests served no “legitimate” legislative purpose. “The courts would respect it if you said we need […]
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WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday asked sharply skeptical questions of a personal lawyer for President Trump about his attempt to block a congressional subpoena seeking years of financial records from Mr. Trump’s accounting firm — and suggested that he could rule on the dispute as early as next week. The hearing, before Judge […]
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LEAWOOD, Kan. — Representative Sharice Davids stared out at the large water treatment plant construction site, one animated by cranes, concrete pumpers and scores of workers, a testament to the exponential growth of a county that helped her sweep to victory last year. It is the sort of place where she — like many of […]
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We watch daily as the constitutional and conventional fabric of this country is clawed at and unraveled by Donald Trump, while those with any power to prevent or punish his actions are suspended in a state of listlessness, making political calculations rather than performing constitutional duty. We are drifting dangerously close to an imperial presidency […]
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“Own the center-left. Own the mainstream.” This is the advice — some might even call it a warning — that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been drilling into her caucus of late. If Democrats want to send President Trump packing in 2020, she told The Times recently, they must resist being pulled toward the hard, […]
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WASHINGTON — The witness rose from her seat, raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth before Congress. But four words were missing: “So help me God.” In the House of Representatives, to the winner go the spoils, and Democrats, the new decision makers, control everything, including what legislation gets a vote and […]
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The Trump administration has spent the past week refusing to give an inch, wielding executive privilege as a shield against every subpoena and request from Democrats. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend that the full House hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt for failing to hand over an unredacted version of […]
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Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, on Thursday pronounced the United States to be in a “constitutional crisis,” saying that President Trump has crossed a line with his war on congressional oversight. “Every day they are advertising their obstruction of justice by ignoring subpoenas and by just declaring that people shouldn’t come speak to […]
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In their best-selling 2018 book “How Democracies Die,” the Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote about the concept of “constitutional hardball,” in which politicians “deploy their institutional powers as broadly as they can get away with.” One example they gave was the way that Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president, responded when the opposition […]
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Our system of checks and balances requires that political leaders hold two opposing ideas in their heads simultaneously. If you’re a political leader, the first is that your political opponents are wrong about many things and should be defeated in elections. The second is that you still need them. You need them to check your […]
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Good morning, We’re covering the uproar over U.S.-China trade tensions, Democrats’ concerns of a constitutional crisis and a typo on Australia’s $50 bill. Complications with U.S.-China trade deal multiply President Trump is expected to impose new tariffs on Chinese goods at (12:01 a.m. Eastern). That cast a definite shadow over two days of trade talks […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday that he would leave it to Attorney General William P. Barr to decide whether the special counsel testifies before Congress, a concession of sorts after Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared the country in a “constitutional crisis” over the president’s blanket refusal to cooperate with the Democrats investigating him. His comments […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Thursday that he would leave it up to Attorney General William P. Barr to decide whether Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, may testify before Congress on the Russia investigation. His comments were a seeming reversal, since Mr. Trump wrote over the weekend on Twitter that Mr. Mueller […]
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WASHINGTON — House Democrats, infuriated by President Trump’s stonewalling, are struggling to mount a more aggressive campaign to compel him to cooperate with their investigations — a push that could include a threat to jail officials, garnish their wages and perhaps even impeach the president. With Mr. Trump throwing up roadblocks on practically a daily […]
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President Trump owes the American people a fuller account of his financial dealings, including the release of his recent tax returns, because politicians should keep their promises, because the public deserves to know whether his policies are lining his pockets and because the integrity of our system of government requires everyone, particularly the president, to […]
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