Biden to Fund Infrastructure Plan With Increase in Corporate Taxes

Biden to call for increase in corporate taxes to pay for $2 trillion infrastructure plan.

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President Biden is set to reveal the details of his infrastructure plan on Wednesday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden intends to pay for the $2 trillion package of infrastructure spending he will propose on Wednesday with a substantial increase in corporate taxes, people briefed on the plan said Tuesday.

The scale of the infrastructure program — one of the most ambitious attempts in generations to shore up the nation’s aging roads, bridges, rail lines and utilities — is so big that it will require 15 years of higher taxes on corporations to pay for eight years of spending, they said.

Despite his ambitious programs, Mr. Biden had pledged that his long-term economic agenda would not add further to the growing national debt. But the fact that his proposed tax increases would not cover his spending over the same period shows the challenge he has in balancing his big goals and the deficit.

Mr. Biden’s proposals include raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent and efforts to force multinational corporations to pay significantly more in tax to the United States on profits they earn and book overseas. The corporate tax rate had been cut under President Donald J. Trump from 35 percent to 21 percent.

The new plans come on top of the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan Mr. Biden signed into law this month, which was financed entirely by borrowing and was passed with no Republican support.

If his full set of proposals became law, they would mark a new era of ambitious federal spending to address longstanding social and economic problems. Their odds of passing Congress have risen in the midst of a pandemic in which lawmakers have approved record amounts of government spending to rescue the economy from recession.

Mr. Biden will lay out his infrastructure plan in an afternoon speech in Pittsburgh. It is the first step in a two-part agenda to overhaul American capitalism, fight climate change and attempt to improve the productivity of the economy.

Together, those two proposals could cost as much as $4 trillion between spending increases and tax incentives. The second phase of the proposals is expected to include tax increases on high-earning individuals.

Internal administration documents and people familiar with the plans suggest the first phase will include $625 billion for roads, bridges, transit, rail, ports and electric vehicle charging stations, along with $25 billion for federal government infrastructure including for veterans.

That phase will also includes hundreds of billions of dollars for utilities, water delivery systems, rural broadband, worker training, advanced manufacturing and research and development.

The first package will now include hundreds of billions of dollars to support home-based care for older and disabled Americans, a change from the plans that aides had drawn up earlier this month. That shift was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

Mr. Biden’s aides briefed top committee leaders and staff from both parties on the plan Tuesday afternoon, as rank-and-file lawmakers continued to pepper the administration with specific policy requests and ultimatums about what could be the one of the most expansive infrastructure investments in American history.

Matt Gaetz is said to face Justice Dept. inquiry over sex with an underage girl.

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Representative Matt Gaetz said in an interview that he had no plans to resign his House seat and denied that he had romantic relationships with minors. Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

The Justice Department is investigating whether Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican of Florida and a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, according to three people briefed on the matter.

Investigators are examining whether Mr. Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws, the people said. A variety of federal statutes make it illegal to induce someone under 18 to travel over state lines to engage in sex in exchange for money or something of value. The Justice Department regularly prosecutes such cases, and offenders often receive severe sentences.

It was not clear how Mr. Gaetz met the girl, believed to be 17 at the time of encounters about two years ago that investigators are scrutinizing, according to two of the people.

The investigation was opened in the final months of the Trump administration under Attorney General William P. Barr, the two people said. Given Mr. Gaetz’s national profile, senior Justice Department officials in Washington — including some appointed by Mr. Trump — were notified of the investigation, the people said.

The three people said that the examination of Mr. Gaetz, 38, is part of a broader investigation into a political ally of his, a local official in Florida named Joel Greenberg, who was indicted last summer on an array of charges, including sex trafficking of a child and financially supporting people in exchange for sex, at least one of whom was an underage girl.

Mr. Greenberg, who has since resigned his post as tax collector in Seminole County, north of Orlando, was at the White House with Mr. Gaetz in 2019, according to a photograph that Mr. Greenberg posted on Twitter.

No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear.

Mr. Gaetz said in an interview that his lawyers had been in touch with the Justice Department and that they were told he was the subject, not the target, of an investigation. “I only know that it has to do with women,” Mr. Gaetz said. “I have a suspicion that someone is trying to recategorize my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward.”

Mr. Gaetz called the investigation part of an elaborate scheme involving “false sex allegations” to extort him and his family for $25 million that began this month. He said he and his father, Don Gaetz, had been cooperating with the F.B.I. and “wearing a wire” after they were approached by people saying they could make the investigation “go away.”

In a second interview later Tuesday, the congressman said he had no plans to resign his House seat and denied that he had romantic relationships with minors. “It is verifiably false that I have traveled with a 17-year-old woman,” he said.

Representatives for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Central Florida.

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Biden administration announces plans to combat anti-Asian attacks.

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People participating in a rally against hate in New York this month after a mass shootings in Georgia that killed multiple Asian women.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

President Biden on Tuesday laid out plans to address rising racism against Asian-Americans, increasing accessibility to hate crime data, requiring new training for local police and establishing nearly $50 million in grants to support survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault who face language barriers.

The Justice Department will also review for the next month how it can better crack down on violent acts against people of Asian descent in the United States, including by prioritizing prosecution of those who commit hate crimes.

The steps by the federal government to combat racist violence came a day after a man was captured on surveillance video in New York stomping on a 65-year-old woman while making anti-Asian remarks. Mr. Biden also traveled to Atlanta this month to express grief for victims of a mass shooting in which a gunman killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.

“We can’t be silent in the face of rising violence against Asian Americans,” the president wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, adding, “These attacks are wrong, un-American, and must stop.”

In his first week in office, Mr. Biden condemned the xenophobia against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders and directed the Health and Human Services and Justice Departments to develop ways to combat racist actions. The details released by the White House on Tuesday were the next step in carrying out plans to address the problem.

The administration said in a statement that it would expand a White House initiative on Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders that had previously worked to provide economic opportunities to the communities by mandating that the group also counter anti-Asian violence. Mr. Biden will also appoint a White House official to review policies across the government affecting Asians, Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.

The Justice Department will publish a new hate crimes page with a focus on attacks against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, and the F.B.I. will soon hold civil rights training events to encourage reporting of hate crimes. Language barriers and concerns over questions of immigration status have made some victims reluctant to report crimes in the past.

The Biden administration’s response won praise from members of Congress, including Senator Mazie K. Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, who along with Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois criticized the administration last week for lacking Asian representation at its highest levels.

“Today’s clear demonstration of presidential leadership is a critical step forward,” Ms. Hirono said.

State Dept. reverses Trump policies on reproductive and religious freedoms.

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State Department Reverses Trump Policies on Women’s Health Rights

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Tuesday that women’s reproductive rights would be monitored by the United States, reversing a Trump policy that overlooked barriers for women seeking sexual health services worldwide.

President Biden is committed to putting human rights back at the center of American foreign policy, and that’s a commitment that I and the entire Department of State take very seriously. We will bring to bear all the tools of our diplomacy to defend human rights and hold accountable perpetrators of abuse. The reports we’re releasing today are just one way to do that. For many years, our human rights reports contained a section on reproductive health, including information about maternal mortality, discrimination against women, and accessing sexual and reproductive health care and government policies about access to contraception and skilled health care during pregnancy and childbirth. These topics were removed from the country reports by the previous administration, so they’re not part of the report’s release today, which cover the year 2020. I’ve asked our team to release an addendum for each country report later this year that will cover these issues. And we’re restoring the practice of documenting these rights in 2021 and in future years.

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Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Tuesday that women’s reproductive rights would be monitored by the United States, reversing a Trump policy that overlooked barriers for women seeking sexual health services worldwide.CreditCredit...Pool photo by Mandel Ngan

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken declared on Tuesday that women’s access to contraceptives and reproductive care is a global human right that will be monitored by the United States, reversing a Trump administration policy that overlooked discrimination or denials of women seeking sexual health services worldwide.

The announcement was one of several departures Mr. Blinken made from the previous administration’s approach as the State Department issued its annual report on human rights violations.

The report was completed during the Trump administration and, Mr. Blinken said, did not include examples of women who were refused health care and family planning information in nearly 200 countries and territories in 2020. He has directed officials to compile that data and identify violators this year “because women’s rights — including sexual and reproductive rights — are human rights,” Mr. Blinken told reporters at the department.

Mr. Blinken also announced that he had dismantled an advisory committee, set up by Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state at the time, that had prioritized religious liberties and property rights among universal freedoms. Critics of the panel had accused Mr. Pompeo of using it to promote his evangelical Christian beliefs and conservative politics.

On Tuesday, Mr. Blinken said his disbanding of the panel, the Commission on Unalienable Rights, was to “repudiate those unbalanced views.”

“There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,” he said.

Mr. Blinken also said the Biden administration would call out foreign governments’ persecution of dissidents, not just within their borders, but abroad as well — a reference to the 2018 killing of the journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey by a squad of hit men from Saudi Arabia. The administration released an intelligence report in February that concluded Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia had approved the assassination, although the United States has not announced penalties against him.

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Biden signs an extension of the Paycheck Protection Program, calling it a ‘bipartisan accomplishment.’

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President Biden signed the extension less than a week after Congress gave final approval.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden on Tuesday signed a two-month extension of the Paycheck Protection Program, which offers loans for small businesses struggling with the economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Biden signed the extension in the Oval Office alongside Vice President Kamala Harris and Isabella Casillas Guzman, the administrator of the Small Business Administration, less than a week after Congress gave final approval to the extension.

“It is a bipartisan accomplishment,” Mr. Biden said before signing the act. “Small business is the backbone of our economy.”

The House approved the extension on a 415-to-3 vote earlier this month, and the Senate on Thursday cleared the legislation on a 92-7 margin. The program had been set to expire on Wednesday. The extension also gives the Small Business Administration an additional 30 days to process loans submitted before the new May 31 deadline.

The federal loan program was first established in the $2.2 trillion stimulus law passed last March under President Donald J. Trump. In December, Congress restarted the program and added more funding. Around 3.5 million borrowers have received forgivable loans this year, taking the program’s total lending to $734 billion.

The Biden administration overhauled the program in late February, prompting self-employed people and the smallest of businesses to rush to take advantage of newly freed-up aid. The extension by lawmakers gave small businesses, as well as lenders, more time to adjust to the overhaul.

Mr. Biden said the extension would especially help small businesses in minority communities.

“Many small businesses, as you know, particularly Hispanic as well as African-American small businesses, are just out of business because they got bypassed the first time around,” Mr. Biden said.

JPMorgan Chase, the program’s largest lender, had previously refused to make the Biden administration’s changes to the loan formula for self-employed applicants, saying it lacked the time to do so before the program’s deadline. A bank spokeswoman said Chase would now make those changes in the next few days. And Bank of America, which stopped accepting new applications earlier this month, reopened its system on Monday.

Around $79 billion remains in the fund. Banks and financiers, which make the government-backed loans, generally expect the money to be depleted in mid- to late April, well ahead of the program’s new deadline.

A federal judge threw out a confidentiality agreement signed by a Trump campaign aide.

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Jessica Denson stands in front of a mural by Richard Haines titled Celebration of our Homeland at the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles in August. A federal judge has invalidated the confidentiality agreement she signed with the Trump campaign. Credit...Allison Zaucha for The Washington Post, via Getty Images

An effort by former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign to silence a former campaign worker who claimed she was the target of abusive treatment and sexual harassment by another member of Mr. Trump’s campaign was effectively voided on Tuesday by a federal court judge in New York.

Judge Paul G. Gardephe nullified a confidentiality agreement signed in 2016 by Jessica Denson, who had worked on Mr. Trump’s campaign that year as a phone bank supervisor and Hispanic outreach coordinator. Judge Gardephe concluded the agreement was “invalid and unenforceable.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign had won a $50,000 award against Ms. Denson after asserting that she had violated the confidential agreement when she first raised the mistreatment claims. That award was overturned by a New York State court last year.

Ms. Denson then sued on behalf of herself and other Trump campaign aides who had been forced to sign confidentiality agreements, asking that they all be invalidated as too broad and illegal in New York because they lasted indefinitely.

Judge Gardephe declined on Tuesday to invalidate all of the confidentiality agreements. But he did rule that the one Ms. Denson had signed was invalid.

“It is difficult if not impossible for Denson or another campaign employee to know whether any speech might be covered by one of the broad categories of restricted information,” the ruling says.

Ms. Denson’s lawyers — David K. Bowles of Bowles & Johnson, Joe Slaughter of Ballard Spahr, and John Langford from the nonprofit group Protect Democracy — worked on the case pro bono and now intend to ask the court to consider broadly invalidating all of the confidentiality agreements that Trump campaign workers signed.

Ms. Denson claimed she was “subject to a hostile work environment and experienced sex discrimination, and that after she complained, high-ranking persons in the campaign retaliated against her.”

Mr. Trump’s post-presidential office did not respond to a request for comment.

Her case was one of several in which Mr. Trump — using lawyers paid for by his campaign or at times even the Justice Department — went after former aides that criticized him or his campaign, including Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Mr. Trump, and Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former White House aide.

“The campaign has been using this to beat up campaign workers for years,” Mr. Bowles said on Tuesday. “Our position is now these things are illegal.”

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The N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights groups sue Georgia to overturn a new law that limits voting.

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Demonstrators protested new state-level voting restrictions at Liberty Plaza in Atlanta last week.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

A coalition of civil rights groups led by the N.A.A.C.P. have filed a federal lawsuit against Georgia officials arguing that a new law severely curtailing voting access represents “intentional discrimination” against the state’s Black voters.

The suit, dated March 28 and filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, is the second case brought since Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, signed the bill (not the third case, as an earlier post said). The G.O.P.-backed measure that drastically limits the use of drop boxes, requires proof of identity for absentee voting, and makes it a crime to provide food or water to voters forced to line up outside of polling locations.

Opponents of the bill are mounting an all-fronts battle to roll back the law and others like it, state by state — as Senate Democrats debate scrapping or suspending the filibuster rule to pass two sweeping electoral overhaul bills that would void state-level restrictions.

Civil rights groups and progressive activists are looking increasingly to the courts as the best chance to stop the voting restrictions that Republican-controlled legislatures in many states are considering or passing.

The law “is the culmination of a concerted effort to suppress the participation of Black voters and other voters of color by the Republican State Senate, State House, and governor,” wrote the lawyers from the Georgia chapters of the N.A.A.C.P. and several other groups, including the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda.

The plaintiffs argue that Mr. Kemp and other Republicans violated the First, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by seeking to limit the participation of Democratic voters who are a growing force in the state’s urban and suburban areas.

“Unable to stem the tide of these demographic changes or change the voting patterns of voters of color, these officials have resorted to attempting to suppress the vote of Black voters and other voters of color in order to maintain the tenuous hold that the Republican Party has in Georgia,” they added. “In other words, these officials are using racial discrimination as a means of achieving a partisan end.”

One of the defendants named in the suit is Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who had rebuffed former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn President Biden’s narrow win in the state.

The plaintiffs claim that “detailed records” on “the racial demographics of voting” maintained by his office were used to draft the legislation.

“As a result, the Georgia legislators and its elected officials are well aware of the implications of making decisions as to voting on racial and ethnic minorities,” they wrote.

The coalition, which includes Georgia’s Lower Muskogee Creek Tribe in the southern part of the state, also argues that the targeting of early in-person voting, absentee ballots and drop boxes discriminates against “Black, Latinx, Asian-American, members of Indigenous populations.”

The earlier suit, making nearly identical legal arguments, was filed by Marc Elias, a top Democratic elections lawyer, and the Black Voters Matter Fund, a civil rights group, shortly after Mr. Kemp signed the law on March 25.

Republicans in Georgia and several other states considering similar laws have argued that restrictions are needed to address claims of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 elections, even though election officials in the state have repeatedly reported that there were few, if any, instances of fraud in last year’s balloting.

The Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: A National Campaign to Restrict Voting

Following the 2020 election, Georgia Republicans have restricted voting rights. Other states are likely to follow suit.
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Listen to ‘The Daily’: A National Campaign to Restrict Voting

Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Austin Mitchell, Asthaa Chaturvedi and Luke Vander Ploeg; edited by M.J. Davis Lin and Paige Cowett; and engineered by Dan Powell.

Following the 2020 election, Georgia Republicans have restricted voting rights. Other states are likely to follow suit.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]

Today, In the weeks after the 2020 election, Georgia’s Republican leaders were seen as defenders of election integrity, repeatedly rebuffing demands by President Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Now, after adopting a sweeping election law, they’ve emerged as a threat to voting rights. My colleague, Nick Corasaniti, on what happened in between.

It’s Tuesday, March 30th.

So Nick, what is the story of how Georgia came to pass this sweeping new election law?

nick corasaniti

Well, I think you have to look at these hearings that were held in the Georgia legislature back in mid to late December.

michael barbaro

Mhm.

nick corasaniti

As the president was going around looking for people to support his claims and falsehoods about the election and was constantly getting rebuffed by statewide election officials like the secretary of state, he found a lot of allies in the state legislature. The state of Georgia is one of the Republican trifecta states, where both houses of the state legislature as well as the governorship is held by Republicans. And so what they did is they held these hearings, where they invited people like Rudy Giuliani to testify, to kind of prove his points that there was lots of fraud, lots of issues with the election. And in those hearings, Giuliani in particular said some pretty inflammatory things, casting about a bunch of conspiracy theories, falsehoods about the elections, falsehood about the company that provided the elections machines to Georgia.

michael barbaro

Right.

nick corasaniti

And it was in those meetings that I think you started to see a legislature see an opportunity to seize on this moment and this doubt that had been cast among the Republican base about the results of the election to possibly do something with the state’s election laws.

michael barbaro

And why exactly is that, given just how little fraud was ever documented in Georgia in the 2020 election? Why would these Republican lawmakers seize on this mostly false message from President Trump and people like Rudy Giuliani and start to run with it, and try to come up with a plan to remedy it?

nick corasaniti

Well, publicly what the lawmakers were saying was that there was now a crisis of confidence within the electorate. There were a lot of people, particularly their supporters, who had bought into a lot of the lies and the falsehoods that were told about the 2020 election, some in which they might have helped spread by holding some of these hearings.

michael barbaro

Right.

nick corasaniti

And that therefore, something needed to be done. But I think you also need to look at the political reality that is on the ground in Georgia right now. It had been a reliably Republican state at the statewide level for years, and then in 2018, Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor, only lost by about 50,000 votes.

michael barbaro

Right.

nick corasaniti

And it was a really close election. Fast forward to 2020, Biden carries the state as a presidential candidate for Democrats for the first time in decades. And then you have the two United States senators, both Republican incumbents, who are now facing runoff elections by two Democratic challengers. And both of those elections at this point in December are way too close to call. They’re basically dead even.

michael barbaro

Right.

nick corasaniti

So you have a Republican legislature that is looking at this state that had once been reliably red just turning more and more purple. And so they view this political reality and they see maybe an opportunity to change some of these voting laws.

michael barbaro

So Nick, it sounds like President Trump and those around him are giving voice in this moment, and perhaps cover, to preexisting electoral anxieties among Georgia Republican lawmakers, who are starting to fear that they’re losing total control of power in Georgia.

nick corasaniti

Exactly. The Republican legislators in Georgia know very well just how changing voting laws and restricting access to voting can impact their ability to hold onto power. It’s a state that has a history of restrictive voting laws that date back to the Reconstruction era, and even most recently, after the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013, had enacted numerous different laws that severely restricted voting. You had purges of voter rolls for inactive voters. There was, at one point, 500,000 that were just knocked off in one single day in July of 2017. And there have been over 200 voting precincts that have been shuttered since 2012, a majority of those impacting communities of color. So there is a history of changes to voting laws, creating new barriers to the ballot box in Georgia that have often been used by Republican legislators to kind of help hold onto power amid shifting electorates.

michael barbaro

Mhm. Right. And then in January, not that many weeks after those hearings you just described, those two Republican senators in Georgia go on to lose their seats to two Democratic challengers. And I have to imagine that deepens the sense of crisis among Republican state lawmakers in Georgia.

nick corasaniti

Exactly. In the arc of history, Georgia almost turns blue overnight. Biden wins the state in November. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win their Senate runoff elections in January. And the Republican state legislature realizes that, if they’re going to make changes, they’re going to have to move quickly.

michael barbaro

So what do they do?

nick corasaniti

So what happens is, over the kind of month of January, they’re meeting with different groups, they’re talking to their constituents, and then all of a sudden, about 80 bills and resolutions are just unfurled.

michael barbaro

80 bills?

nick corasaniti

80 different bills and resolutions, all varying degrees of trying to restrict access to voting. Some very strident, some dealing with very minute things. But they all just kind of unfurl in the legislature in late January and early February.

michael barbaro

Tell me about the most strident of these proposals.

nick corasaniti

Well, one of these proposals specifically looked to restrict early voting on the weekends, in particular on Sunday. And voting on Sunday is an incredibly popular and important part of voting within the Black church, known as Souls to the Polls. And the Black church is such an important part of the Black community, particularly in Georgia. And for years, they have just been increasing their role in civic engagement, and getting more and more of the Black community able to vote, helping them to vote, bringing them to vote. And so this provision was seen as almost specifically targeting those churches to prevent them from helping large parts of the Black community from voting on Sunday.

michael barbaro

So this is clearly aimed at weakening the power of Georgia’s Black electorate, which is heavily Democratic.

nick corasaniti

No question.

michael barbaro

And so what is the reaction to that proposal?

nick corasaniti

It’s immediately met with outrage both within Georgia and nationally. And eventually, the Republicans backed off that measure.

michael barbaro

So Nick, what proposals do end up in this final package of legislation?

nick corasaniti

Well, let me give you a few examples. But broadly, they deal with absentee voting, with drop boxes, with voting in person, and with election oversight.

michael barbaro

Mhm.

nick corasaniti

So when it comes to absentee voting, one big change is that an ID is now required. Basically, anyone who wants to request an absentee ballot will need to show a driver’s license or a state ID number instead of just doing a signature, which was then matched on a file and created a host of issues. So Republicans argued that bringing in these IDs made it both secure and a little easier. At the same time, civil rights groups will point that, anytime you add an ID requirement to voting, it normally disproportionately impacts communities of color and poor communities. So therefore, introducing identification requirements make it harder for them to vote.

michael barbaro

OK, got it. What else?

nick corasaniti

They’re also going to ban state and local election officials, as well as third-party groups, from sending out absentee ballot applications. This was done a lot in the 2020 election to kind of encourage people who weren’t familiar with absentee voting to know that they had the ability to.

michael barbaro

Hm.

nick corasaniti

They’re going to limit drop boxes, which is where a voter can come and drop off their filled out absentee ballot. During the 2020 election, those were open 24/7. They were just kind of outside, and you could bring it there. The new law will limit the amount of drop boxes to just one per 100,000 active voters in a county. And then also, it will force them to be brought inside offices, meaning that they’re no longer a 24/7 option. Instead, they’re going to have much more restrictive hours as to when the building is open.

michael barbaro

Huh.

nick corasaniti

Yeah. And then there’s a whole host of new proposals that deal with oversight of elections and who gets to run elections and what kind of power the secretary of state has over the state that just kind of will alter and basically give more power to the state legislature over the administration and governance of elections.

michael barbaro

Hm.

nick corasaniti

But there’s this one other proposal that has gotten a lot of attention. And that’s basically Georgia is known for having very long lines when it comes to in-person voting. Sometimes they stretch for hours.

michael barbaro

Right.

nick corasaniti

Now, lines tend to stretch longer in poorer communities and urban areas, and so there’s been third-party groups that will sometimes come and bring food and water to those people who are waiting in line for hours on end and in the blistering Georgia heat. Now, this law would ban those groups from bringing food and water and other assistance to voters waiting in hours-long lines.

michael barbaro

Nick, that proposal seems very hard to understand as anything other than an attempt to make it harder for certain people to vote.

nick corasaniti

Exactly.

michael barbaro

And so how do the people who proposed that defend it?

nick corasaniti

There hasn’t been that much of a defense, except that they’ve tried to say, technically, it’s just there’s a radius of 150 feet that this ban affects. And so it gets into this kind of technicality. And that’s where the defense has been. But the reality is it’s going to prevent help, assistance, and resources from reaching voters who are waiting in line to vote.

michael barbaro

So once this final package is complete and is introduced, how intensely is this debated in a Republican-controlled legislature? My sense is that it’s kind of a fait accompli.

nick corasaniti

Exactly. So once they arrived on a final package of proposals, it moved very quickly.

archived recording

The hour of convening. Having arrived, all members of the House will please report to their assigned seats. The clerk will ring the bell.

nick corasaniti

On Thursday, both chambers of the state legislature set about for a final passage. And though it was going to pass probably along party line votes, they had to leave it open for debate.

archived recording

I rise today in opposition to the voter suppression bill, otherwise known as SB 202.

nick corasaniti

And what happened on Thursday was a lot of Democratic lawmakers stood up and gave pretty impassioned speeches against the bill.

archived recording

We will not stand idly by and let Jim Crow 2.0 roll back the clock on our new Georgia. Mr. Speaker, thank you. I yield the well.

nick corasaniti

They invoked the state’s long history of repressive and racially targeted voting laws, and connected these current restrictions to that long history.

archived recording

But it’s time to take a chill pill, folks.

nick corasaniti

Republicans stood up and tended more to push back on those attacks than necessarily offer any other defense.

archived recording

There’s time to read the bill. Don’t just listen to what you’re being told. Actually read the bill. Show me where there’s suppression. There is no suppression in this bill.

nick corasaniti

Other than pointing to that the bill was designed to improve election security and, quote unquote, restore confidence within the electorate.

archived recording

The ayes are 100, the nays are 75. This bill, having received—

nick corasaniti

After they passed the bill along party line votes in both chambers, they sent the bill quickly over to Governor Kemp, who was poised to sign it. He held a signing ceremony behind closed doors late on Thursday night. But in a final moment of protest—

[indistinct chatter]

—one of the Democratic lawmakers, Park Cannon, who is a young Black woman, came to attend the signing just to view it.

michael barbaro

Hm.

nick corasaniti

And at one point, she knocked lightly on the door, as if someone were coming to your house. It wasn’t a loud bang. And she was immediately put in handcuffs and walked away—

archived recording

Are you serious? No, you are not. Represent— No, no. She’s not under arrest.

nick corasaniti

—while handcuffed, while a bunch of activists and protesters—

michael barbaro

Wow.

nick corasaniti

—caught that moment on tape.

archived recording

Cite— cite the violation. Cite the code. What is she in violation of? I want you to cite the code. Cite the code. Cite it.

[music]

michael barbaro

And Nick, what is the reaction to this law being so quickly passed and signed into law beyond Georgia?

nick corasaniti

Well, the reaction is almost as swift as the passing, as Democrats across the country denounced this effort as being harsh and restrictive in creating new barriers to the ballot box. President Biden himself called the effort sick and un-American. And what Biden knows, and what Democrats across the country know, is that what just happened in Georgia is poised to happen in states across the country.

[music]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

So Nick, if President Biden and fellow Democrats are right to see Georgia as one of many states poised to pass these kinds of voting restrictions, where else are we starting to see these measures being introduced?

nick corasaniti

Well, you could almost look at any state across the country for restrictions being introduced. The Brennan Center found that there were more than 250 voting-related bills in 43 different states across the country. And that number might have even gone up since the weekend. But where we’re seeing the kind of greatest likelihood of some pretty impactful piece of legislation moving is in Texas, in Arizona, and in Florida, three states that also have complete Republican control of both the state legislatures and the governorship.

michael barbaro

Right. And three states that are very much like Georgia in that they’re battleground states.

nick corasaniti

Exactly. Florida, the most traditional of all swing states. Texas is like Georgia in that it’s experiencing a kind of increasing population shift that’s leading it more toward seeing it possibly go purple, if not blue. And Arizona, which, like Georgia, did actually turn blue for the first time in years in the presidential election, and now has two Democratic United States senators for the first time in decades, just like Georgia.

michael barbaro

So there’s a pretty clear pattern starting to emerge here of Republican state lawmakers sensing in these states that their grip on power is loosening and taking action to try to restrict voting in ways that would perhaps allow them to hold onto that power.

nick corasaniti

Exactly. And you’re even seeing some similar proposals that you saw in Georgia appear in other states. In Florida, Republicans there are looking to restrict the availability and utilization of drop boxes. In Arizona, Republican lawmakers are looking to basically make it easier for state and local election officials to clean the voter rolls. It’s known as purging, when they can remove voters who weren’t active in recent elections from their registration. And in Texas, they’re bringing a host of proposals that are very similar to Georgia.

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One is they are imposing an early voting restriction that would limit the hours that early voting is permitted from 6:00 AM to 00 PM, which would essentially ban the 24-hour voting locations that were in Harris County, home to Houston, last November.

michael barbaro

Hm. Nick, the similarity of these proposals would seem to suggest a fair bit of coordination. So what have you found about that?

nick corasaniti

Well, there’s multiple groups that are working behind the scenes to push these new voting restrictions. There’s conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, who has publicly taken credit when Georgia’s law passed last week.

michael barbaro

Hm.

nick corasaniti

They’ve been sending around what they consider their best practices. And often, you’ll see laws that very similarly reflect the language in those best practices. At the party level, there are two, quote unquote, election integrity committees, one within the Republican National Committee and one within the Republican State Leadership Conference, which is the state legislator committee.

michael barbaro

Mhm.

nick corasaniti

And both of those committees are looking to bring some form of coordination and organization to this effort to restrict voting. The one amongst the Republican state legislatures, in particular, is hoping to draft what’s been described to me as an e-notebook of statutory language, executive orders, anything that’s been tested and withstood either court challenges or is just considered a best practice for other states who are looking to bring in new voting restrictions.

michael barbaro

So the idea is that these outside groups and these parts of the Republican Party are going to deliver legislative language to these state legislatures that they know is most likely to pass legal muster and become law.

nick corasaniti

Exactly.

michael barbaro

But of course, Nick, this larger coordination would seem to undercut the idea that this is some kind of organic state-by-state response to allegations of fraud or fears of fraud by Republican voters, and it raises the prospect that this is actually just a national electoral strategy being pursued by national Republicans.

nick corasaniti

In a way, it can actually be both. I think what has to be taken into account here is just how core the question of voting rights and questioning the 2020 election has become within the Republican base. It’s almost as animating right now as some of the core cultural issues, like abortion, has been in terms of some of their priorities and what they want to see their legislators focusing on. So if you look at Georgia, where nearly 80 bills and resolutions were spilled onto the floor relating to voting, there wasn’t necessarily much coordination there. But what I think happens afterwards, and I think what you’re seeing across the country, is there is now a movement by some of these outside groups and by some of the arms of the Republican Party apparatus so that they don’t necessarily lose the momentum and the opportunity that they see here.

michael barbaro

Hm. So that leaves us with the inevitable question, will this effort work by Republicans? Do we expect these measures to keep passing in states like Florida and Arizona and Texas, and do we expect them to help Republicans hold onto power?

nick corasaniti

Well, there’s no reason to think that, in any of these states where Republicans control both the legislature and the governorship, that they won’t continue passing these bills to either restrict voting or set up new barriers to the ballot box. Now, federal courts may strike these laws down as illegal. That’s certainly a possibility. And congressional Democrats are trying to block them with a major voting rights bill in Congress, which has already passed the House, but faces a pretty uphill battle in the Senate.

michael barbaro

Mhm.

nick corasaniti

But the question of how successful these bills and laws will be for Republicans is a layered and kind of open-ended debate. And let me just give you an example. In the 2018 Georgia governor’s race between Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp, there was a host of actions taken by Governor Kemp, who, at that point, was secretary of state, that was viewed as having an outsized impact on voters of color, from purging voter rolls to delaying the registration of different voters whose names didn’t perfectly match. And Stacey Abrams lost in a very close race, and has since claimed that it was the result of these changes and voter suppression. And many Democrats believe that where Georgia is today is, in part, because of the energy and the motivation that the 2018 governor’s race has brought to the base of the Democratic Party and the voters in Georgia.

michael barbaro

Hm. Right, there’s potentially a version of this where efforts to restrict Democratic voting ends up energizing Democratic voting in exactly the way Republicans did not intend.

nick corasaniti

Yes. You could see almost anytime a particular community’s right to vote has been questioned or attempted to be restricted, it can be a motivating factor, an energizing factor. And you wonder, if the Republicans continue doing this in these battleground states, in these purple states, trying to restrict voting, could it completely backfire? Could it actually animate the growing Democratic base there to turn out and flip these states blue?

michael barbaro

And what will be the first big test of that question, whether or not these laws will help Republicans or help Democrats?

nick corasaniti

Well, looking ahead to the 2022 midterms, perhaps the most important state will be Georgia. It has a very highly anticipated governor’s race, where, although she hasn’t necessarily said whether she intends to run or not, Stacey Abrams is likely seen as challenging Governor Kemp again. And you also have Senator Raphael Warnock, who is, again, the first Black man to ever be elected senator from the state of Georgia in history, up for a quick re-election after just winning in January against a Republican challenger. So Georgia will again be at the top of the nation’s attention, and garnering among the most interest, most money, and most outside support to kind of test whether these new laws will indeed have an impact benefiting one party or the other.

michael barbaro

And so the first battleground state to pass these pretty sweeping voting restrictions since the 2020 election is likely to deliver the most meaningful verdict on which party they will ultimately benefit.

nick corasaniti

Absolutely. Georgia is the state that raised the question for us here. And Georgia may indeed end up providing the answer.

[music]

michael barbaro

Nick, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

nick corasaniti

Thanks, Michael.

[music]

Tomorrow on The Daily, my colleague, Astead Herndon, speaks to Georgia senator Raphael Warnock about his experience with voting rights and race.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (joe biden)

Please, this is not politics. Reinstate the mandate if you let it down.

michael barbaro

On Monday, President Biden pleaded with state leaders to maintain or reimpose mask mandates as Covid-19 cases surge and fears of a new wave of infections mount.

archived recording (joe biden)

Mask up. Mask up. It’s a patriotic duty. It’s the only way we ever get back to normal.

michael barbaro

Several states, including Texas, Mississippi, Iowa, Montana, and North Dakota, have ended their mask mandates, prematurely, according to federal health officials. And—

archived recording

We plan to prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Chauvin was anything other than innocent on May 25th of 2020.

michael barbaro

On the first day of the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer accused of killing George Floyd, prosecutors said that witness testimony and video evidence would show that Chauvin’s actions led to Floyd’s death and were in no way the result of split-second judgments by an officer.

archived recording

This case is not about split-second decision-making. In nine minutes and 29 seconds, there are 479 seconds, not a split second among them. That’s what this case is about. Finally—

[honking]

—after six days, crews of diggers and a flotilla of tugboats successfully dislodged the 220,000-ton cargo ship from the muddy banks of the Suez Canal, ending a crisis in global trade that had held up tens of billions of dollars in cargo. Soon after, hundreds of ships delayed by the incident sounded their horns in celebration and began their journey through the canal.

Today’s episode was produced by Austin Mitchell, Asthaa Chaturvedi and Luke Vander Ploeg. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lin and Paige Cowett, and engineered by Dan Powell.

[music]

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

G. Gordon Liddy, the mastermind behind the Watergate burglary, dies at 90.

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G. Gordon Liddy in the car with his wife as they drove back to Maryland after he was released from the Federal Correctional Institution on September 7, 1977, in Danbury, Conneticut.Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

G. Gordon Liddy, a cloak-and-dagger lawyer who masterminded dirty tricks for the White House and concocted the bungled burglary that led to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974, died on Tuesday in Mount Vernon, Va. He was 90.

His death, at the home of his daughter Alexandra Liddy Bourne, was confirmed by his son Thomas P. Liddy, who said that his father had Parkinson’s disease and had been in declining health.

Decades after Watergate entered the lexicon, Mr. Liddy was still an enigma in the cast of characters who fell from grace with the 37th president — to some a patriot who went silently to prison refusing to betray his comrades, to others a zealot who cashed in on bogus celebrity to become an author and syndicated talk show host.

As a leader of a White House “plumbers” unit set up to plug information leaks, and then as a strategist for the president’s re-election campaign, Mr. Liddy helped devise plots to discredit Nixon “enemies” and to disrupt the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Most were far-fetched — bizarre kidnappings, acts of sabotage, traps using prostitutes, even an assassination — and were never carried out.

But Mr. Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent, engineered two break-ins at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. On May 28, 1972, as Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt stood by, six Cuban expatriates and James W. McCord Jr., a Nixon campaign security official, went in, planted bugs, photographed documents and got away cleanly.

A few weeks later, on June 17, four Cubans and Mr. McCord, wearing surgical gloves and carrying walkie-talkies, returned to the scene and were caught by the police. Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt, running the operation from a Watergate hotel room, fled but were soon arrested and indicted on charges of burglary, wiretapping and conspiracy.

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Major, one of the Bidens’ German shepherds, ‘nipped someone’ on Monday, a spokesman said.

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Major, one of President Biden’s German shepherds, at the White House.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Major, one of President Biden’s German shepherds, “nipped someone” during a walk on Monday, a spokesman for the first lady, Jill Biden, said on Tuesday.

The spokesman, Michael LaRosa, said that “out of an abundance of caution,” the individual, whom he did not identify, was seen by the White House medical unit “and then returned to work without injury.”

“Major is still adjusting to his new surroundings,” Mr. LaRosa said. The episode was reported earlier Tuesday by CNN, which said the individual was a National Park Service employee. A spokeswoman for the agency referred a request for comment to the White House.

The Bidens have two German shepherds: Major, the younger of the two, and Champ. Earlier in March, the dogs were sent back to Delaware for a time after a previous incident involving Major.

In that episode, Major “was surprised by an unfamiliar person and reacted in a way that resulted in a minor injury to the individual,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.

The White House accused China of hindering a W.H.O. inquiry into the origins of the virus.

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White House Calls for ‘Transparency’ on Pandemic’s Origin

On Tuesday, the White House called for more answers into the origins of the coronavirus, stating the report released by the World Health Organization lacked crucial data.

“The American people, the global community, the medical experts, the doctors, all of the people who have been working to save lives, the families who have lost loved ones, all deserve greater transparency. They deserve better information. They deserve steps that are taken by the global community to provide that. There are steps from here that we believe should be taken. There’s a second stage in this process that we believe should be led by international and independent experts. They should have unfettered access to data. They should be able to ask questions of people who are on the ground at this point in time. And that’s a step the W.H.O. could take. Well, the report is still being reviewed by our team of experts, 17 experts are reviewing it.” Reporter: “We know the headline of it, and it’s not sufficient.” “We agree. And we have long said, as I just stated, it lacks crucial data, information. It lacks access, it lacks transparency. It certainly — we don’t believe that in our review to date that it meets the moment, it meets the impact that this pandemic has had on the global community. And that’s why we also have called for additional forward-looking steps.”

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On Tuesday, the White House called for more answers into the origins of the coronavirus, stating the report released by the World Health Organization lacked crucial data.CreditCredit...Aly Song/Reuters

The White House on Tuesday accused China of hampering the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of the coronavirus and demanded Beijing be more “transparent” by providing greater access to data about the initial outbreak in late 2019.

The joint report from a W.H.O. team and Chinese scientists, released on Tuesday, was inconclusive, but surmised that the pandemic most likely began from animal-to-human transmission and began widely circulating in the city of Wuhan, China, as Chinese officials have long asserted.

Some observers, including Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have questioned that theory, arguing that the virus might have originated in a government lab, although U.S. intelligence officials have said they do not have evidence to determine where the virus came from.

“The report lacks crucial data information and access — it represents a partial and incomplete picture,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said at a news conference on Tuesday, adding that Chinese officials “have not been transparent, they have not provided underlying data.”

W.H.O. officials should have been given “unfettered access” and “should be able to ask questions of people who were on the ground,” Ms. Psaki said.

“That certainly doesn’t qualify as cooperation,” she added, summing up the White House view at a moment of already heightened tensions between the United States and China.

Later in the day, the United States co-signed a letter with officials from Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel and Japan calling for a “transparent and independent analysis” of the origins of the virus free from “undue influence.”

At times, Ms. Psaki intermingled her criticism of Beijing with skepticism about the W.H.O.’s investigation, and the value of Tuesday’s report.

It doesn’t lead us to any closer of an understanding or greater knowledge than we had six to nine months ago about the origin,” she said. “It also doesn’t provide guidelines or steps, recommended steps, on how we should prevent this from happening in the future. And those are imperative.”

Some of the Biden administration’s dissatisfaction with China and the W.H.O. echo former President Donald J. Trump’s scathing criticism of the agency — although Mr. Biden opposed Mr. Trump’s effort to cut off federal funding to the W.H.O. or withdraw as a member over its handling of the virus crisis. Officials with the agency have argued that they have no enforcement authority, and do not have the power to demand greater cooperation from nations.

Ms. Psaki said Mr. Biden had no plans to disengage from the W.H.O. but that he had long expressed frustration with China’s actions in the crisis.

“He believes that the American people, the global community, the medical experts, the doctors — all of the people who have been working to save lives, the families who have lost loved ones, all deserve greater transparency, they deserve better information,” she said.

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Democrats debate their strategy for pushing through voting rights legislation.

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Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, at a hearing last week. Democrats believe that pushing back on voting restrictions is a modern-day civil rights battle that the party cannot afford to lose. Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Democrats in Congress are quietly splintering over how to handle the expansive voting rights bill that they have made a centerpiece of their ambitious legislative agenda, potentially jeopardizing their chances of countering a Republican drive to restrict ballot access in states across the country.

President Biden and leading Democrats have pledged to make the elections overhaul a top priority, even contemplating a bid to upend bedrock Senate rules if necessary to push it through over Republican objections. But they are contending with an undercurrent of reservations in their ranks over how aggressively to try to revamp the nation’s elections and whether, in their zeal to beat back new Republican ballot restrictions moving through the states, their proposed solution might backfire, sowing voting confusion and new political challenges.

The hand-wringing demonstrates how urgent the voting issue has become for both parties since November, when President Donald J. Trump spread false claims of voter fraud that many Republicans believed. In the months since, Republican-led statehouses have advanced a wave of new laws clamping down on ballot access.

Democrats have coalesced around the idea that pushing back on such measures is a modern-day civil rights battle that the party cannot afford to lose. “Failure,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said last week, “is not an option.”

But while few Democrats are willing to publicly say so, the details of the more than 800-page bill — which would radically reshape the way elections are run and make far-reaching changes to campaign finance laws and redistricting — have become a point of simmering contention. Some proponents argue that Democrats should break off a narrower bill dealing strictly with protecting voting rights to prevent the legislation, known as the For the People Act, from collapsing amid divisions over other issues.

“Democrats have a narrow opportunity. There is a window here that could close anytime,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine. “I worry the kind of fights necessary to keep even the Democratic coalition together could blow up the whole thing and lose the chance to get anything done.”

Biden nominates a diverse slate of candidates to serve as federal district or appeals court judges.

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President Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.Credit...Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post, via Getty Images

President Biden began a drive to reshape the federal courts on Tuesday with a burst of judicial nominations that put an emphasis on diversity and drew from a broad range of backgrounds including public defenders.

The effort is motivated in part by a desire to offset the conservative mark stamped on the federal judiciary by former President Donald J. Trump, who won confirmation of more than 220 judges, mostly white men. But Mr. Biden’s first round of nominations also sought to make good on his campaign promise to draw from a more diverse pool than either party has in the past and to redefine what it means to be qualified for the federal bench.

In a statement early Tuesday, the president announced the nominations of 11 people to serve as federal district or appeals court judges, moving faster than any president in decades to fill open positions in the courts.

His nominees — led by Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — included three African-American women for appeals court vacancies and candidates who, if confirmed by the Senate, would be the first federal judge who is Muslim, the first Asian-American woman to serve on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit and the first woman of color to serve as a federal judge in Maryland.

“This trailblazing slate of nominees draws from the very best and brightest minds of the American legal profession,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “Each is deeply qualified and prepared to deliver justice faithfully under our Constitution and impartially to the American people — and together they represent the broad diversity of background, experience, and perspective that makes our nation strong.”

Allies say Mr. Biden, a former longtime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee with a deep background in judicial nominations, is determined to install judges with different sets of experiences from the mainly white corporate law partners and prosecutors who have been tapped for decades by presidents of both parties. Mr. Biden has also promised to appoint the first African-American woman to the Supreme Court.

The first judicial picks of a new presidency typically set the tone for the administration. The White House tightly controlled information about who was under consideration for nominations. With 68 slots now open and an additional 26 scheduled to become vacant later this year, liberal activists are encouraging the administration to be aggressive to counter the Mr. Trump’s choices, particularly since Democrats could lose control of the Senate in next year’s midterm election.

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Mike Pompeo grows more combative as he eyes 2024.

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Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo speaking last month, on the third day of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

In a series of speeches, interviews and Twitter posts, Mike Pompeo is emerging as the most outspoken critic of President Biden among former top Trump officials. And much as the former Trump secretary of state did when in office, he is ignoring the custom that current and former secretaries of state avoid the appearance of political partisanship.

In back-to-back appearances in Iowa and during an interview in New Hampshire over the past week, Mr. Pompeo questioned the Biden administration’s resolve toward China. In Iowa, he accused the White House of reversing the Trump administration’s immigration policy “willy-nilly and without any thought.” He derided Mr. Biden for referring to notes during his first formal news conference on Thursday.

“What’s great about not being the secretary of state anymore is I can say things that when I was a diplomat I couldn’t say,” Mr. Pompeo said the next morning, to a small crowd at the Westside Conservative Club near Des Moines.

It seems clear that Mr. Pompeo, a onetime Republican congressman from Kansas, is animated not just by freedom but also by a drive for high elective office long evident to friends and foes. His appearances in a pair of presidential battleground states only seem to confirm his widely assumed interest in a 2024 presidential campaign.

“Usually former presidents and secretaries of state try not to quickly trash their successors — especially in foreign policy,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian. He said Mr. Pompeo “probably believes he is demonstrating his Trumpiness by castigating the performance of the newly installed President Biden.”

Last week, Mr. Pompeo tweeted that the Biden administration’s plans to restart aid to the Palestinians canceled under Mr. Trump were “immoral” and would support terrorist activity. “Americans and Israelis should be outraged by the Biden administration’s plans to do so,” Mr. Pompeo wrote.

But his commentary goes beyond foreign policy. Mr. Pompeo has also condemned Mr. Biden’s “backward” “open border” policies. And on March 19, he simply tweeted the number 1,327 — an apparent reference to the number of days until the 2024 election.

There is little sign that Mr. Pompeo’s criticism has struck a nerve among Biden officials and their allies. Asked about the remarks last month, a State Department spokesman, Ned Price, declined to respond directly but said the Biden and Trump administrations shared the goal of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

“No one cares,” Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted in response to a recent news report about a Pompeo critique of Mr. Biden’s policies.

As Biden prepares to unveil his infrastructure plan, mothers are pushing for long-sought pandemic aid.

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Bridget Hughes quit her job as a supervisor at Burger King last year after her children were sent home during the pandemic for virtual school.Credit...Katie Currid for The New York Times

As President Biden starts rolling out a major infrastructure proposal on Wednesday that is expected to include significant child care aid, on top of the financial support for families included in the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, parents across America are weighing these new attempts to help against a year’s worth of anxiety, exhaustion and logistical nightmares of patchwork schooling.

For many parents, there are no real feelings of relief yet, and resentment lingers that the government is helping too late.

This is especially true for many American mothers: Almost one million had left the work force as of late last year, while nearly a quarter of children experienced food insecurity in 2020 and more than three-quarters of parents say the uncertainty around the current school year caused them stress. It is a strained and wary demographic — but also one that both political parties are trying to court with competing messages about pandemic relief.

Republicans are casting Democrats as unwilling to move quickly enough to reopen schools and the economy, saying they are kowtowing to the teachers’ unions. Democrats, in turn, hope to appeal to mothers with “human infrastructure” spending that Mr. Biden will also announce soon. Proposals under consideration include universal pre-K education, a national paid leave program and efforts to reduce child care costs.

Passage of such costly plans won’t be easy, given the Democrats’ narrow control of both chambers of Congress and the aversion of some moderates to pushing through another expansive package without Republican support.

For the last several years, Bridget Hughes worked as a supervisor in a Burger King near her home in Kansas City, Mo. But when her three children were stuck at home with online school, Ms. Hughes found it impossible to manage their care and her job. So she quit, taking three months before she found another as a shift manager at McDonald’s, where she makes $13 an hour.

“We were losing work that we should not have to lose,” Ms. Hughes said. “Child care should have been available during this pandemic. They had no preparation for this. They just left us out here for ourselves.”

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