Just over a week before the Republican nomination process begins with Iowa’s kickoff caucuses, Trump did not explicitly acknowledge the date. But he continued to claim that countries have been emptying jails and mental institutions to fuel a record number of migrant crossings, even though there is no evidence that is the case.

“When you talk about insurrection, what they’re doing, that’s the real deal. That’s the real deal. Not patriotically and peacefully — peacefully and patriotically,” Trump said, quoting from his speech on Jan. 6, before a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol as part of a desperate bid to keep him in power after his 2020 election loss.

Trump’s remarks in Newton in central Iowa came a day after Biden delivered a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where he cast Trump as a grave threat to democracy and called Jan. 6 a day when “we nearly lost America — lost it all.”

With a likely rematch of the 2020 election looming, both Biden and Trump have frequently invoked Jan. 6 on the campaign trail. Trump, who is under federal indictment for his efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden, has consistently downplayed or spread conspiracy theories about a riot in which his supporters — spurred by his lies about election fraud — tried to disrupt the certification of Biden’s win.

Trump also continued to bemoan the treatment of those who have been jailed for participating in the riot, again labeling them “hostages.” More than 1,230 people have been charged with federal crimes connected to the violence, including assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy.

“They ought to release the J6 hostages. They’ve suffered enough,” he said in Clinton, in the state’s far east. “Release the J6 hostages, Joe. Release ’em, Joe. You can do it real easy, Joe,” he said.

Trump was holding the commit-to-caucus events just over a week before voting will begin on Jan. 15. He arrived at his last event nearly three-and-a-half hours late due to what he said was a mechanical issue with a rented plane.

After Trump spoke in Newton, he signed hats and other items people in the crowd passed to him, including a copy of a Playboy magazine that featured him on the cover.

One man in the crowd, Dick Green, was standing about 15 feet away, weeping after the former president autographed his white “Trump Country” hat and shook his hand.

“It’ll never get sold. It will be in my family,” Green said of the hat.

A caucus captain and a pastor in Brighton, Iowa, Green said he had prayed for four years to meet Trump.

“I’ll never forget it,” he said. “It’s just the beginning of his next presidency.”

Trump spent much of the day assailing Biden, casting him as incompetent and the real threat to democracy. But he also attacked fellow Republicans, including the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose “no” vote derailed GOP efforts to repeal former President Barack Obama‘s signature healthcare law.

“John McCain, for some reason, couldn’t get his arm up that day,” said Trump of McCain, who was shot down over Vietnam in 1967 and spent 5½ years as a prisoner of war. The injuries he suffered left him unable to lift his arms over his head for the rest of his life. His daughter, Meghan McCain, responded on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, calling Trump an expletive and her father an “American hero.”

Earlier Saturday, Trump courted young conservative activists in Des Moines, speaking to members of Run GenZ, an organization that encourages young conservatives to run for office.

Trump’s campaign is hoping to turn out thousands of supporters who have never caucused before as part of a show of force aimed at denying his rivals momentum and demonstrating his organizing prowess heading into the general election.

His chief rivals, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, were also campaigning in the state as they battle for second place in hopes of emerging as the most viable alternative to Trump, who is leading by wide margins in early state and national polls.

Trump has used the trip to step up his attacks against Haley, who has been gaining ground. He again cast her Saturday as insufficiently conservative and a “globalist’ beholden to Wall Street donors, and accused her of being disloyal for running against him.

“Nikki will sell you out just like she sold me out,” he charged.

On Friday, Trump had highlighted several recent Haley statements that drew criticism, including her comment that voters in New Hampshire correct Iowa’s mistakes (“You don’t have to be corrected,” he said) and her failure to mention slavery when asked what had caused the Civil War.

“I don’t know if it’s going to have an impact, but you know like … slavery’s sort of the obvious answer as opposed to her three paragraphs of bulls—,” he told a crowd Friday.

In Newton, he said that he was fascinated by the “horrible” war, which he suggested he could have prevented.

“It’s so fascinating,” he said. “It’s just different. I just find it… I’m so attracted to seeing it… So many mistakes were made. See that was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you.”

Haley’s campaign has pointed to his escalating attention, including a new attack ad, as evidence Trump is worried about her momentum.

“God bless President Trump, he’s been on a temper tantrum every day about me … and everything he’s saying is not true,” Haley told a crowd Saturday in North Liberty, Iowa.

___

Beaumont reported from Clinton, Iowa, and Colvin from New York. AP National Politics Writer Steve Peoples in North Liberty, Iowa, and Andrew Harnik in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

The Pentagon did not inform the White House National Security Council or top adviser Jake Sullivan of Austin’s hospitalization at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, until Thursday, according to NBC News.

The Pentagon’s failure to disclose Austin’s hospitalization for days reflects a stunning lack of transparency about his illness, how serious it was and when he may be released. Such secrecy, at a time when the United States is juggling myriad national security crises, runs counter to normal practice with the president and other senior U.S. officials and Cabinet members.

Still, President Joe Biden spoke with Austin on Saturday, and expressed confidence in him, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In a statement issued Saturday evening, Austin took responsibility for the delays in notification.

“I recognize I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed. I commit to doing better,” said Austin, acknowledging the concerns about transparency. “But this is important to say: this was my medical procedure, and I take full responsibility for my decisions about disclosure.”

Austin, 70, remained hospitalized due to complications following a minor elective medical procedure, his press secretary said, as it became increasingly clear how closely the Pentagon held information about his stay at Walter Reed. In his statement, Austin said he is on the mend and is looking forward to returning to the Pentagon soon, but he provided no other details about his ailment.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were notified about Austin’s hospitalization, but he would not confirm when that notice happened.

Ryder said members of Congress were told late Friday afternoon, and other officials said lawmakers were informed after 5 p.m. It was not clear when key senior members of Austin’s staff were told, but across the Pentagon, many staff found out when the department released a statement about Austin’s hospital stay just minutes after 5 p.m. Many believed Austin was out on vacation for the week.

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who took over when Austin was hospitalized, was also away. A U.S. official said she had a communications setup with her in Puerto Rico that allowed her to do the job while Austin, who spent 41 years in the military and retired as a four-star Army general in 2016, was incapacitated.

Ryder said Saturday that Austin is recovering well and resumed his full duties Friday evening from his hospital bed. Asked why the hospital stay was kept secret for so long, Ryder said on Friday that it was an “evolving situation,” and that due to privacy and medical issues, the Pentagon did not make Austin’s absence public. Ryder declined to provide any other details about Austin’s medical procedure or health.

“The Department of Defense deliberately withheld the Secretary of Defense’s medical condition for days. That is unacceptable,” said Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We are learning more every hour about the Department’s shocking defiance of the law.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, also criticized the delayed notice.

“The Secretary of Defense is the key link in the chain of command between the president and the uniformed military, including the nuclear chain of command, when the weightiest of decisions must be made in minutes,” said Cotton in a statement, adding that if Austin didn’t immediately tell the White House, “there must be consequences for this shocking breakdown.”

The Pentagon Press Association, which represents media members who cover the Defense Department, sent a letter of protest on Friday evening to Ryder and Chris Meagher, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs.

“The fact that he has been at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for four days and the Pentagon is only now alerting the public late on a Friday evening is an outrage,” the PPA said in its letter. “At a time when there are growing threats to U.S. military service members in the Middle East and the U.S. is playing key national security roles in the wars in Israel and Ukraine, it is particularly critical for the American public to be informed about the health status and decision-making ability of its top defense leader.”

Other senior U.S. leaders have been much more transparent about hospital stays. When Attorney General Merrick Garland went in for a routine medical procedure in 2022, his office informed the public a week in advance and outlined how long he was expected to be out and when he would return to work.

Austin’s hospitalization comes as Iranian-backed militias have repeatedly launched drones, missiles and rockets at bases where U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq and Syria, leading the Biden administration to strike back on a number of occasions. Those strikes often involve sensitive, top-level discussions and decisions by Austin and other key military leaders.

The U.S. is also the chief organizer behind a new international maritime coalition using ships and other assets to patrol the southern Red Sea to deter persistent attacks on commercial vessels by Houthi militants in Yemen.

In addition, the administration, particularly Austin, has been at the forefront of the effort to supply weapons and training to Ukraine, and he’s also been communicating frequently with the Israelis on their war against Hamas.

___

Associated Press writer Colleen Long in Wilmington, Delaware, and Lisa Mascaro, Tara Copp and Farnoush Amiri in Washington contributed to this report.

Those who have who gambled — and lost — on a trial have received significantly longer prison sentences than those who took responsibility for joining the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, an Associated Press review of court records shows.

The AP’s analysis of Capitol riot sentencing data reinforces a firmly established tenet of the U.S. criminal justice system: Pleading guilty and cooperating with authorities carries a substantial benefit when it comes time for sentencing.

″On one hand, the Constitution guarantees the accused a right to a jury trial. It’s a fundamental constitutional right. But the reality is that if you exercise that right … you’re likely to be punished more severely than you would have been had you pled guilty to the offense,” said Jimmy Gurulé, a University of Notre Dame law professor and former federal prosecutor.

More than 700 defendants have pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the Jan. 6 attack, while over 150 others have opted for a trial decided by a judge or jury in Washington, D.C. It’s no surprise most cases have ended in a plea deal — many rioters were captured on video inside the Capitol and later gloated about their actions on social media, making it difficult for their lawyers to mount much of a defense.

The average prison sentence for a Jan. 6 defendant who was convicted of a felony after a contested trial is roughly two years longer than those who pleaded guilty to a felony, according to the AP’s review of more than 1,200 cases. The data also show that rioters who pleaded guilty to misdemeanors were far less likely to get jail time than those who contested their misdemeanor charges at a trial.

Lawyers for some Jan. 6 defendants who went to trial have complained about what has long been described as a “trial tax”— a longer sentence imposed on those who refused to accept plea deals. A defense lawyer made that argument last year after a landmark trial for former leaders of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group convicted of seditious conspiracy.

A judge sentenced four ex-Proud Boys leaders to prison terms ranging from 15 to 22 years. Prosecutors had recommended prison terms ranging from 27 to 33 years for a plot to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

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After the sentencings, defense attorney Norm Pattis filed plea offers that prosecutors made before the Proud Boys went to trial. Prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations after the trial were three or four times higher than what they had estimated the defendants would face if they had pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy before the trial.

Prosecutors persuaded the judge to apply a “terrorism enhancement” that significantly increased the range of prison terms recommended under sentencing guidelines. Pattis argued that the government’s recommendations amounted to a trial tax that violated the Sixth Amendment.

“In effect, the defendants were punished because they demanded their right to trial,” he wrote.

In the federal court system overall, nearly 98 percent of convictions in the year that ended Sept. 30 were the result of a guilty plea, according to data collected by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Few criminal cases make it to a jury because defendants have a powerful incentive to plead guilty and spare the government from spending time and limited resources on a trial.

But advocates for reform have long complained that plea bargaining is unfairly coercive and can even push people who are innocent to take a deal out of fear of a lengthy prison sentence if they take their chances at trial.

As of Jan. 1, at least 157 defendants have been sentenced after pleading guilty to felony charges for serious crimes related to the Capitol attack. They received an average prison sentence of approximately two years and five months, according to the AP’s data.

At least 68 riot defendants have been convicted of a felony after trials with contested facts. They have been sentenced to an average of approximately four years and three months behind bars.

The AP’s comparison excludes 10 sentences for seditious conspiracy convictions because nobody who pleaded guilty to the same charge has been sentenced yet. The analysis also excludes convictions from over a dozen “stipulated bench trials,” in which the judge decided the cases based on facts that both sides agreed to before the trial started.

The gap is similarly wide for a subset of felony cases in which a Capitol rioter was convicted of assault. The average prison sentence for 83 rioters who pleaded guilty to an assault charge was approximately three years and five months. The average prison sentence for 28 rioters convicted of an assault charge at trial was roughly six years and one month.

The trend also applies to misdemeanor cases against Capitol rioters who didn’t engage in violent or destructive behavior. Of 467 riot defendants who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, more than half avoided jail time. Meanwhile, judges handed down terms of imprisonment to 22 of 23 defendants who went to trial and were convicted only of misdemeanors.

After the first trial for a Jan. 6 case, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich sentenced a Texas man to more than seven years in prison after a jury convicted him of storming the Capitol with a holstered handgun, helmet and body armor. Prosecutors had recommended a 15-year prison sentence for Guy Reffitt, but before the trial, prosecutors presented him with a possible plea deal that would have recommended less than five years in prison.

Reffitt’s attorney, F. Clinton Broden, said in a court filing that the government’s 15-year recommendation “makes a mockery of the criminal justice system.”

“One of the things when we talk about our democracy and our Constitution is this idea that you have a right to go to trial. You’re not sentenced to three times as high of a sentence if you go to trial,” Broden said during the hearing, according to a transcript.

Justice Department prosecutor Jeffrey Nestler told the judge that the government wasn’t seeking “a trial penalty in any stretch of the imagination,” adding, “It’s because of the defendant’s conduct here.”

The judge said Reffitt’s sentencing guidelines range would have been roughly two years lower if he had accepted responsibility early and pleaded guilty.

“There’s a cost for going to trial, and the guidelines make pretty clear what that cost is,” Friedrich said.

The risks of going to trial also are illustrated by the case against Dr. Simone Gold, a leading figure in the anti-vaccine movement. Gold entered the Capitol with John Strand, a boyfriend who worked for a group that Gold founded.

Both were charged with the same crimes. Gold pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Strand went to trial and was convicted of five charges, including a felony obstruction charge.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper sentenced Gold to two months in prison and sentenced Strand to two years and eight months behind bars. Prosecutors had sought a prison sentence of six years and six months in prison for Strand.

Strand’s lawyer, Stephen Brennwald, questioned why the government’s sentencing recommendation for Strand was nearly 40 times longer than Gold’s prison sentence. Strand was following Gold’s lead on Jan. 6, the attorney argued.

“It would stand to reason that Mr. Strand should receive a lesser sentence. After all, they both engaged in exactly the same conduct that day, though Dr. Gold was the reason that both of them went into the Capitol,” Brennwald wrote in court papers.

The judge told Strand that he wasn’t getting a trial penalty for exercising his constitutional rights. Unlike Gold, Strand didn’t get credit for accepting responsibility for his conduct on Jan. 6.

“And to the contrary, you’ve not accepted responsibility in a pretty remarkable way. You have professed not just that the government didn’t prove its case, but you have professed your innocence numerous times,” Cooper said, according to a transcript.

___

Associated Press writer Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston contributed to this report.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, they write, only one U.S. political party “violated all three.”

Saturday marks the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and Donald Trump, the former president, is far-and-away the leading Republican candidate in 2024. He still refuses to acknowledge his earlier loss to President Joe Biden. Far from rejecting the rioters, he has suggested he would pardon some of those who have been convicted of violent crimes. Rather than distance himself from extremists, he welcomes them at his rallies and calls them patriots.

And Trump is now backed by many of the Republican leaders who fled for their lives and hid from the rioters, even some who had condemned Trump. Several top GOP leaders have endorsed his candidacy.

The support for Trump starkly highlights the divisions in the aftermath of the deadly storming of the Capitol and frames the question about whose definition of governance will prevail — or if democracy will prevail at all.

“If our political leaders do not stand up in defense of democracy, our democracy won’t be defended,” said Levitsky, one of the Harvard professors whose new book is “Tyranny of the Minority.”

“There’s no country in the world, no country on Earth in history, where the politicians abdicated democracy but the institutions held,” he told The Associated Press. “People have to defend democracy.”

The third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack comes during the most convulsive period in American politics in at least a generation, with Congress barely able to keep up with the basics of governing, and the start of the presidential nominating contests just over a week away.

Trump’s persistent false claims that the election of 2020 was stolen — which has been rejected in at least 60 court cases, every state election certification and by the former president’s one-time attorney general — continue to animate the presidential race as he eyes a rematch with Biden.

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Instead, Trump now faces more than 90 criminal charges in federal and state courts, including the federal indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith that accused Trump of conspiring to defraud the U.S. over the election.

Biden, speaking Friday near Pennsylvania’s Valley Forge, commemorated Jan. 6, saying on that day “we nearly lost America — lost it all.”

While the Congress returned that night to certify the election results and show the world democracy was still standing, Biden said Trump is now trying to revise the narrative of what happened that day — calling the rioters “patriots” and promising to pardon them. And he said some Republicans in Congress were complicit.

“When the attack on Jan. 6 happened there was no doubt about the truth,” Biden said. “Now these MAGA voices — who know the truth about Trump and Jan. 6 — have abandoned the truth and abandoned the democracy.”

At a quieter Capitol, without much ceremony planned for Saturday, it will be the last time the anniversary will pass before Congress is called upon again, on Jan. 6, 2025, to certify the results of the presidential election — democracy once more put to the test.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who led Trump’s impeachment over the insurrection, said Biden’s 306-232 electoral victory in 2020 remains “the hard, inescapable, irradicable fact that Donald Trump and his followers have not been able to accept — to this day.”

Raskin envisions a time when there will be a Capitol exhibit, and tours for visitors, to commemorate what happened Jan. 6, 2021. Five people died during the riot and the immediate aftermath, including Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police.

All told,140 police officers were injured in the Capitol siege, including U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick who died later. Several others died later by suicide.

One officer, Harry Dunn, has announced he is running for Congress to “ensure it never happens again.”

Trump’s decision to reject the results of the 2020 election was the only time Americans have not witnessed the peaceful transfer of presidential power, a hallmark of U.S. democracy.

A giant portrait of George Washington resigning his military commission hangs in the U.S. Capitol, a symbol of the voluntary relinquishing of power — a move that was considered breathtaking at the time. He later was elected the first U.S. president.

Trump opened his first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign with a popular recording of the J6 Prison Choir — riot defendants singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” recorded over a phone line from jail, interspersed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

More than 1,200 people have been charged in the riot, with nearly 900 convicted, including leaders of the extremist groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who are serving lengthy terms for seditious conspiracy.

Trump has called Jan. 6 defendants “hostages” and said there was so much love at the “Stop the Steal” rally he held near the White House that day before he encouraged the mob to march down Pennsylvania Avenue, assuring he would be with them at the Capitol, though he never did join.

Allies of Trump scoff at the narrative of Jan. 6 that has emerged. Mike Davis, a Trump ally sometimes mentioned as a future attorney general, has mocked the Democrats and others for turning Jan. 6 into a “religious holiday.”

Republican Kevin McCarthy, who went on to become House speaker, had called Jan. 6 the “saddest day” he ever had in Congress. But when he retired last month he endorsed Trump for president and said he would consider joining his cabinet.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said he would back whomever becomes the Republican Party nominee, despite a scathing speech at the time in which he called Trump’s actions “disgraceful” and said the rioters “had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election.”

Asked about Trump’s second-term agenda, GOP lawmakers brushed off his admission that he would be a dictator on “day one.”

“He’s joking,” said Trump ally Byron Donalds, R-Fla.

“Just bravado,” said Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn. “There’s still checks and balances.”

Levitsky said when he and his colleague wrote their earlier book, they believed that the Republicans in Congress would be a “bulwark against Trump.”

But with so many of the Trump detractors having retired or been voted out of office, “We were much less pessimistic than we are today.”

The justices acknowledged the need to reach a decision quickly, as voters will soon begin casting presidential primary ballots across the country. The court agreed to take up a case from Colorado stemming from Trump’s role in the events that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Underscoring the urgency, arguments will be held on Feb. 8, during what is normally a nearly monthlong winter break for the justices. The compressed timeframe could allow the court to produce a decision before Super Tuesday on March 5, when the largest number of delegates are up for grabs in a single day, including in Colorado.

The court will be considering for the first time the meaning and reach of a provision of the 14th Amendment barring some people who “engaged in insurrection” from holding public office. The amendment was adopted in 1868, following the Civil War. It has been so rarely used that the nation’s highest court had no previous occasion to interpret it.

Colorado’s Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, ruled last month that Trump should not be on the Republican primary ballot. The decision was the first time the 14th Amendment was used to bar a presidential contender from the ballot.

Trump is separately appealing to state court a ruling by Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, that he was ineligible to appear on that state’s ballot over his role in the Capitol attack. Both the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine secretary of state’s rulings are on hold until the appeals play out.

The high court’s decision to intervene, which both sides called for, is the most direct involvement in a presidential election since Bush v. Gore in 2000, when a conservative majority effectively decided the election for Republican George W. Bush. Only Justice Clarence Thomas remains from that court.

Three of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Trump, though they have repeatedly ruled against him in 2020 election-related lawsuits, as well as his efforts to keep documents related to Jan. 6 and his tax returns from being turned over to congressional committees.

At the same time, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have been in the majority of conservative-driven decisions that overturned the five-decade-old constitutional right to abortion, expanded gun rights and struck down affirmative action in college admissions.

Some Democratic lawmakers have called on Thomas to step aside from the case because of his wife’s support for Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Thomas is unlikely to agree, and there was every indication Friday that all the justices are participating. Thomas has recused himself from only one other case related to the 2020 election, involving former law clerk John Eastman, and so far the people trying to disqualify Trump haven’t asked him to recuse.

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The 4-3 Colorado decision cites a ruling by Gorsuch when he was a federal judge in that state. That Gorsuch decision upheld Colorado’s move to strike a naturalized citizen from the state’s presidential ballot because he was born in Guyana and didn’t meet the constitutional requirements to run for office. The court found that Trump likewise doesn’t meet the qualifications due to his role in the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. That day, the Republican president held a rally outside the White House and exhorted his supporters to “fight like hell” before they walked to the Capitol.

The two-sentence provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states that anyone who swore an oath to uphold the constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” against it is no longer eligible for state or federal office. After Congress passed an amnesty for most of the former confederates the measure targeted in 1872, the provision fell into disuse until dozens of suits were filed to keep Trump off the ballot this year. Only the one in Colorado was successful.

Trump had asked the court to overturn the Colorado ruling without even hearing arguments. “The Colorado Supreme Court decision would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.

They argue that Trump should win on many grounds, including that the events of Jan. 6 did not constitute an insurrection. Even if it did, they wrote, Trump himself had not engaged in insurrection. They also contend that the insurrection clause does not apply to the president and that Congress must act, not individual states.

Critics of the former president who sued in Colorado agreed that the justices should step in now and resolve the issue, as do many election law experts.

“This case is of utmost national importance. And given the upcoming presidential primary schedule, there is no time to wait for the issues to percolate further. The Court should resolve this case on an expedited timetable, so that voters in Colorado and elsewhere will know whether Trump is indeed constitutionally ineligible when they cast their primary ballots,” lawyers for the Colorado plaintiffs told the Supreme Court.

The issue of whether Trump can be on the ballot is not the only matter related to the former president or Jan. 6 that has reached the high court. The justices last month declined a request from special counsel Jack Smith to swiftly take up and rule on Trump’s claims that he is immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, though the issue could be back before the court soon depending on the ruling of a Washington-based appeals court.

And the court has said that it intends to hear an appeal that could upend hundreds of charges stemming from the Capitol riot, including against Trump.

The event was set to be hosted by the Republican Party of Osceola County at the Westgate Resorts in Kissimmee. It was originally pitched to Westgate as a small book-signing event featuring Greene, without mention of Jan. 6.

“Please be advised that Westgate was not made aware of the purpose of this event when we were approached to host a book signing,” Westgate Resorts said in a statement. “This event has been canceled and is no longer taking place at our resort.”

Greene refused to discuss the development when asked for her reaction to the cancellation by NBC News in Iowa, where she was doing an event for former President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

On Friday, the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, Dunn launched a campaign in Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District, joining a crowded Democratic primary to replace retiring Democratic Rep. John Sarbanes.

“Because of Jan. 6 and everything that happened afterwards, it’s clear how much of a threat the extinction of our democracy is — it’s very present right now,” Dunn said in a phone interview Thursday ahead of his announcement. 

“I do believe that we’re literally one election cycle away from the extinction of our democracy,” he added.  

Dunn, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Capitol Police force, spent the months after the Capitol riot recounting his story from that day, when he was physically attacked by the mob, which also hurled racial slurs at him.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com

At least 14 of the 42 Iowa state legislators who have endorsed DeSantis received donations from the leadership PAC, ranging in individual sums from $2,500 to $15,000. The first donations were made in early October, followed by several more in November and another three in December, the campaign finance records show.

While other campaigns and leadership PACs have done this in the past, the practice is not overwhelmingly common. A search of Iowa’s campaign finance system for other PACs affiliated with GOP presidential candidates came up empty for donations to state legislative candidates, suggesting these contributions to DeSantis’ supporters are the only ones of their kind in this election, at least so far.

The disclosures provide the first glimpse at Great American Comeback’s spending since the DeSantis campaign began to use the vehicle last summer. It can raise money in concert with DeSantis’ campaign, but it has restrictions on how it can be spent — and it doesn’t have to file a campaign finance disclosure detailing its activity since July until the end of Jan. 31, after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

Iowa state Senate President Amy Sinclair and state House Majority Leader Matt Windschitl — two of the governor’s most high-profile legislative endorsers — received the largest single donations to their campaign committees, at $15,000 each. Both contributions came in late Dec. 2023, according to Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board data.

While the leadership PAC “is a separate entity from the campaign, Ron DeSantis strives to make sure the party succeeds as a whole,” DeSantis spokesman Andrew Romeo said in a statement in response to an inquiry about the donations. “Rising tides lift all boats — just as Republicans were victorious up and down the ballot in Florida under his leadership, as president, he will end the Republican Party’s culture of losing and make winning contagious,” he added.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

The presidential candidate touted efforts in Florida to keep schools safe in a joint interview with NBC News and the Des Moines Register. “We obviously, you know, have a responsibility to create safe environments. The federal government is probably not going to be leading that effort,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis added: “I think it is more of a local and state issue. But we’ve shown how it’s done in Florida. The things that we’ve done have been very, very effective.”

He also pointed to mental health reforms in Florida as measures that could be expanded to prevent future shootings.

“That’s an underlying sickness in society,” DeSantis said, adding, “And I think that involves things like mental health.”

But when asked if there are any changes he’d support at the federal level if elected president, DeSantis did not name any.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com here.

The lawsuit is intended to cover past shelter, food, and health care costs for migrants transported from Texas, as well as future costs of migrants already here and migrants who may be transported in the future, according to the mayor’s office. The city said more than 33,600 migrants have already been transported to NYC from Texas.

The Adams administration has been trying to navigate ways to stem the tide of buses bringing migrants to the city and the mayor said he hopes the lawsuit serves as a warning for future transports.

“New York City has and will always do our part to manage this humanitarian crisis, but we cannot bear the costs of reckless political ploys from the state of Texas alone,” Adams said in a statement. “Today, we are taking legal action against 17 companies that have taken part in Texas Governor Abbott’s scheme to transport tens of thousands of migrants to New York City in an attempt to overwhelm our social services system.”

Gov. Abbott said Adams is “interfering” with the migrants’ “constitutional authority” to travel.

“This lawsuit is baseless and deserves to be sanctioned. It’s clear that Mayor Adams knows nothing about the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, or about the constitutional right to travel that has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court. Every migrant bused or flown to New York City did so voluntarily, after having been authorized by the Biden Administration to remain in the United States,” Abbott said in a statement.

In December, Adams announced an executive order requiring charter buses to only drop off migrants between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and noon on weekdays, and only at a specific location — West 41st Street by the Port Authority Bus Terminal — or face fines. The order also required a notice period of 32 hours before arriving in the city.

In order to “thwart” the order and take advantage of a “loophole,” charter buses were dropping off migrants in New Jersey cities before they boarded a train to New York, according to the mayor of Secaucus.

A spokesperson for New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said the administration is working with federal and local partners, including New York City.

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“Our Administration has tracked the recent arrival of a handful buses of migrant families at various NJ TRANSIT train stations,” said Tyler Jones, deputy press secretary for Murphy, in a statement. “New Jersey is primarily being used as a transit point for these families — all or nearly all of them continued with their travels en route to their final destination of New York City.”

In the lawsuit, the city accuses the bus companies of acting in “bad faith” by profiting off bringing migrants to the city. The city said many of the companies being targeted in the lawsuit “are the same companies that are now evading compliance with the executive order by busing migrants to New Jersey train stations.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she supports NYC’s lawsuit.

NBC New York has reached out to the bus companies named in the lawsuit for any comment.

The incentives announced Thursday include $90 million to improve a plant in Colorado Springs, Colo., and $72 million to expand a factory in Gresham, Ore., the Commerce Department said. The investments would enable Microchip Technology Inc., which is based in Chandler, Ariz., to triple its domestic production and reduce its dependence on foreign factories.

Much of the money would fund the making of microcontrollers, which are used by the military as well as in autos, household appliances and medical devices. Government officials said they expected the investments to create 700 construction and manufacturing jobs over the next decade.

Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council, emphasized that the funding would help to tame inflation.

“Semiconductors are the key input in so many goods that are vital to our economy,” said Brainard, adding that greater U.S. production of chips would have reduced the supply problems that caused the cost of autos and washing machines, among other goods, to rise as the country emerged from the coronavirus pandemic in 2021.

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The inflation rate has since eased, but the scars caused by the sudden price increases have damaged President Joe Biden’s public approval.

In August 2022, the Democratic president signed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which provides more than $52 billion to boost the development and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States.

In December, the Commerce Department announced the first grants by saying it reached an agreement to provide $35 million to BAE Systems, which plans to expand a New Hampshire factory making chips for military aircraft, including F-15 and F-35 jets.

Government officials expect to make additional funding commitments this year.

To mark the moment, President Joe Biden plans to visit a site near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on Friday where George Washington and the struggling Continental Army endured a tough winter during the American Revolution. Biden’s advisers say the stop in a critical swing state will highlight Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 siege and give the Democrat a chance for him to lay out the stakes of this year’s election. Weather concerns led Biden to move up his appearance from Saturday.

With Biden and Trump now headed toward a potential 2020 rematch, both are talking about the same event in very different ways and offering framing they believe gives them an advantage. The dueling narratives reflect how an attack that disrupted the certification of the election is increasingly viewed differently along partisan lines — and how Trump has bet that the riot won’t hurt his candidacy.

Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory, and they forced lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence to flee for their lives. Many Trump loyalists walked to the Capitol after a rally outside the White House in which the Republican president exhorted the crowd to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Nine deaths were linked to the attack and more than 700 people have gone to court for their roles in it, and more than 450 people have been sentenced to prison.

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Federal prosecutors in Washington have charged Trump in connection with the riot, citing his promotion of false and debunked theories of election fraud and efforts to overturn the results. Trump has pleaded not guilty and continued to lie about the 2020 election.

Trump has still built a commanding lead in the Republican primary, and his rivals largely refrain from criticizing him about Jan. 6. He has called it “a beautiful day” and described those imprisoned for the insurrection as “great, great patriots” and “hostages.” At some campaign rallies, he has played a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by jailed rioters — the anthem interspersed with his recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Republican strategist Alice Stewart said that “a lot of Republican voters don’t love Jan. 6, but they’re not obsessed about it either” and may support Trump because they oppose Biden’s economic policies.

“Republican voters can hold two consecutive thoughts and say, ‘Jan. 6, that wasn’t great, but that doesn’t affect my bottom line,’” she said.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination, called Jan. 6 a “protest” that “ended up devolving,” and has more recently said Trump “should have come out more forcefully” against the rioters. Another candidate, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, frequently tells crowds that Jan. 6 “was not a beautiful day, it was a terrible day.”

But views overall of the attack have hardened along partisan lines.

In the days after the attack, 52% of U.S. adults said Trump bore a lot of responsibility for Jan. 6, according to the Pew Research Center. By early 2022, that had declined to 43%. The number of Americans who said Trump bore no responsibility also increased to 32% in 2022 compared to 24% in 2021.

A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released this week found that about 7 in 10 Republicans say too much is being made of the attack. Just 18% of GOP supporters say that protesters who entered the Capitol were “mostly violent,” down from 26% in 2021, while 77% of Democrats and 54% of independents say the protesters were mostly violent — essentially unchanged from 2021.

A December poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, meanwhile, found that 87% of Democrats and 54% of independents believe a second Trump term would negatively affect U.S. democracy. Some 82% of Republicans believe democracy would be weakened by another Biden win, with 56% of independents agreeing.

Biden’s campaign also announced an advertising push starting Saturday with a spot centering on the Capitol attack.

In the ad, Biden says, “There’s something dangerous happening in America.”

“There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy,” Biden says as images from the insurrection appear. “All of us are being asked right now, what will we do to maintain our democracy.”

His campaign is spending $500,000 to run the 60-second ad on national television news and on local evening news in TV markets in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as shorter versions on digital platforms.

It’s a theme Biden has returned to repeatedly.

He marked the first anniversary of the riot in 2022 by standing inside the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall — which was flooded by pro-Trump rioters during the attack — to suggest that his predecessor and his supporters had had “a dagger at the throat of America.”

Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, the president repeatedly characterized Trump as a threat to democracy. That included a speech at Philadelphia’s Constitution Hall, where he said that the “extreme ideology” of Trump and his supporters “threatens the very foundation of our republic.”

On the second anniversary of the attack in 2023, Biden awarded presidential medals to 14 people for their work protecting the Capitol during the attack and decried “a violent mob of insurrectionists.” More recently, he said there was “no question” Trump supported an insurrection.

“Not even during the Civil War did insurrectionists breach our Capitol,” said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, manager of Biden’s reelection campaign, in a call with reporters this week. “But, at the urging of Donald Trump, insurrectionists on January 6, 2021 did.”

Trump now counters that the federal charges he’s facing related to Jan. 6 — as well as authorities in Maine and Colorado trying to keep him off primary ballots on grounds that he incited an insurrection — show that Democrats are the ones looking to undercut the nation’s core values.

“Joe Biden and his allies are a real and compelling threat to our democracy,” Trump senior campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles wrote in a memo this week.

Aside from the back and forth of politics, such arguments over who endangers America more could indicate a deeper problem.

“When each side starts talking about the other as a threat to democracy — whatever the reality is — that’s a sign of a democracy that’s deconsolidating,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a government professor at Harvard University and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.”

Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report.

Trump on Wednesday appealed a ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court that he’s ineligible for the presidency because he violated a rarely used constitutional prohibition on those who hold office having “engaged in insurrection.” On Tuesday, he appealed a similar ruling from Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, but it’s the Colorado appeal that’s most significant.

That’s because the nation’s highest court has never before ruled on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868 to prevent Confederates from regaining their former government posts. Whatever the Supreme Court decides applies to Colorado will apply to all other 49 states, including Maine.

Trump remains on the ballot in both states until the appeals are done.

What is Section 3?

The provision is only two sentences and seems relatively straightforward.

Section 3 reads: “No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Nice and simple, right?

Not so fast, Trump’s attorneys say.

What does Trump’s legal team contend?

Trump’s lawyers say this part of the Constitution wasn’t meant to apply to the president. Notice how it specifically mentions electors, senators and representatives, but not the presidency, they say.

Also, it says those who take an oath to “support” the United States, but the presidential oath doesn’t use that word — instead, the Constitution requires presidents to say they will “preserve, protect and defend” the document. And, finally, Section 3 talks about any other “officer” of the United States, but Trump’s lawyers argue that language is meant to apply to presidential appointees, not the actual president.

That was enough to convince the initial Denver judge who heard the case, who agreed it wasn’t clear that Section 3 applied to the president. But that judge’s decision was reversed by the Colorado Supreme Court.

The majority of the state’s highest court wrote: “President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oathbreaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land.”

What are the Trump team’s other arguments?

His lawyers contend that the question of who is covered by a rarely used, once obscure clause is political and cannot be decided by unelected judges. They contend that Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection — it wasn’t widespread, they say, and didn’t involve large amounts of firearms or other markers of sedition. They say Trump didn’t “engage” in anything that day other than in exercising his protected free speech rights.

Their final argument is the one that convinced the dissenting three of Colorado’s seven high court justices — the ad hoc way the court went about finding that Trump violated Section 3, in turn, violated the former president’s due process rights. They contend he was entitled to some structured, adversarial legal process rather than a court in Colorado trying to figure out if the Constitution applied to him.

That gets at the unprecedented nature of the cases. Section 3 has rarely been used after an 1872 congressional amnesty excluded most former Confederates from it. The U.S. Supreme Court has never heard such a case. Arguments about legal precedents go back to a sole 1869 opinion from Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who was hearing an appeal as a circuit judge rather than for the high court.

Trump’s critics have filed dozens of lawsuits seeking to disqualify him, and all failed until Colorado. But they usually failed because the judges dodged the constitutional issues or declared themselves unqualified to rule on them. Presuming it takes the case — and every observer expects it will — the Supreme Court doesn’t have much room left to dodge.

What will the Supreme Court do and when?

Colorado’s Republican Party has already appealed the Colorado ruling, so the justices have had time to think about what they’ll do.

The high court has dozens of different ways it can rule.

It could uphold the Colorado ruling and say Trump is no longer qualified to be president.

The court could say Trump is qualified to be president. That would end all Section 3 challenges, including in Maine.

It could dodge by overruling Colorado on a technicality about the procedures used to get the case there and set itself up for another case in the fall.

It could say Congress makes the final decision.

When the court might rule is another mystery. In Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case that ended the Florida recount and made George W. Bush president, the court ruled in three days. The court could also go slowly and wait until the end of its term on June 30 to rule.

Obviously, that could open the door to more chaos and leave it uncertain during the primaries whether Republicans are voting for someone qualified to be president. That’s why all the parties have sought an expedited appeal and a ruling as quickly as possible.

Aren’t Republicans just going to rule for Trump?

The Colorado high court’s seven justices were all appointed by Democrats. Six of the nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices were appointed by Republicans, three by Trump.

But the Colorado court split 4-3 on the ruling. The majority quoted a ruling from Neil Gorsuch, one of Trump’s conservative Supreme Court appointees, when he was a federal judge in Colorado. He ruled then that the state properly kept a naturalized citizen born in Guyana off the presidential ballot because he didn’t meet the constitutional qualifications.

Democrats have already begun to suggest that Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself because his wife, a Republican activist, supported Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. Thomas has only recused himself from one other case related to the 2020 election and so far the people trying to disqualify Trump haven’t asked him to do so here.

Some of the strongest advocates of using Section 3 against Trump have been prominent conservative legal theorists and lawyers who argue that courts have to follow the actual words of the Constitution. They argue there’s no wiggle room here — Trump is clearly disqualified.

The question of whether Trump is qualified hasn’t broken on traditional partisan lines in the legal world, partly because this is completely new legal ground, it’s hard to predict how individual justices will rule based on their ideology.

But the reason most legal observers expect Trump to win at the high court is because courts are very hesitant to limit voters’ choices. There’s even a term for that — the “political question,” whether a legal dispute is better settled by the people the voters have selected to make the laws than by unelected judges.

If that doesn’t happen, some critics warn, and Trump’s campaign is ended by Section 3, expect it to become weaponized in political races. Imagine a world where any politician’s career can end in a moment when a court or an election official decides that person “engaged in insurrection,” they caution.

Unless the high court shuts this down, they warn, Trump might only be the start.

Trump appealed a 4-3 ruling in December by the Colorado Supreme Court that marked the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was used to bar a presidential contender from the ballot. The court found that Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol disqualified him under the clause.

The provision has been used so sparingly in American history that the U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on it.

Wednesday’s development came a day after Trump’s legal team filed an appeal against a ruling by Maine’s Democratic Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, that Trump was ineligible to appear on that state’s ballot over his role in the Capitol attack. Both the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine secretary of state’s rulings are on hold until the appeals play out.

Trump’s critics have filed dozens of lawsuits seeking to disqualify him in multiple states. He lost Colorado by 13 percentage points in 2020 and does not need to win the state to gain either the Republican presidential nomination or the presidency. But the Colorado ruling has the potential to prompt courts or secretaries of state to remove him from the ballot in other, must-win states.

None had succeeded until a slim majority of Colorado’s seven justices — all appointed by Democratic governors — ruled last month against Trump. Critics warned that it was an overreach and that the court could not simply declare that the Jan. 6 attack was an “insurrection” without a judicial process.

Trump’s new appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court also follows one from Colorado’s Republican Party. Legal observers expect the high court will take the case because it concerns unsettled constitutional issues that go to the heart of the way the country is governed.

Sean Grimsley, an attorney for the plaintiffs seeking to disqualify Trump in Colorado, said on a legal podcast called “Law, disrupted” that he hopes the nation’s highest court hurries once it accepts the case, as he expects it will.

“We have a primary coming up on Super Tuesday and we need to know the answer,” Grimsley said.

The Colorado high court upheld a finding by a district court judge that Jan. 6 was an “insurrection” incited by Trump. It agreed with the petitioners, six Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters whose lawsuit was funded by a Washington-based liberal group, that Trump clearly violated the provision. Because of that, the court ruled he is disqualified just as plainly as if he failed to meet the Constitution’s minimum age requirement for the presidency of 35 years.

In doing so, the state high court reversed a ruling by the lower court judge that said it wasn’t clear that Section 3 was meant to apply to the president. That’s one of many issues the nation’s highest court would consider.

Additional ones include whether states such as Colorado can determine who is covered by Section 3, whether congressional action is needed to create a process to bar people from office, whether Jan. 6 met the legal definition of insurrection and whether Trump was simply engaging in First Amendment activity that day or is responsible for the violent attack, which was intended to halt certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. Trump held a rally before the Capitol attack, telling his supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Six of the U.S. Supreme Court’s nine justices were appointed by Republicans, and three by Trump himself.

The Colorado ruling cited a prior decision by Neil Gorsuch, one of Trump’s appointees to the high court, when he was a federal judge in Colorado. That ruling determined that the state had a legitimate interest in removing from the presidential ballot a naturalized U.S. citizen who was ineligible for the office because he was born in Guyana.

The provision has barely been used since the years after the Civil War, when it kept defeated Confederates from returning to their former government positions. The two-sentence clause says that anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection cannot hold office unless a two-thirds vote of Congress allows it.

Legal scholars believe its only application in the 20th century was being cited by Congress in 1919 to block the seating of a socialist who opposed U.S. involvement in World War I and was elected to the House of Representatives.

But in 2022, a judge used it to remove a rural New Mexico county commissioner from office after he was convicted of a misdemeanor for entering the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Liberal groups sued to block Republican Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for reelection because of their roles on that day. Cawthorn’s case became moot when he lost his primary in 2022, and a judge ruled to keep Greene on the ballot.

Some conservatives warn that, if Trump is removed, political groups will routinely use Section 3 against opponents in unexpected ways.

Biden’s administration has noted that the president has no role in the litigation.

The issue of whether Trump can be on the ballot is not the only matter related to the former president or Jan. 6 that has reached the high court. The justices last month declined a request from special counsel Jack Smith to swiftly take up and rule on Trump’s claims that he is immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the presidential election, though the issue could be back before the court soon depending on the ruling of a Washington-based appeals court.

And the court has said that it intends to hear an appeal that could upend hundreds of charges stemming from the Capitol riot, including against Trump.

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Kennedy has met the 1,000-signature requirement needed to qualify for the Utah ballot and can officially file to run as a presidential candidate in the state before a March 5 deadline, state Elections Director Ryan Cowley said.

Utah is the first state where Kennedy’s campaign submitted signatures and qualified for ballot access, campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear said. She did not indicate which day he would file for candidacy.

A scion of one of the nation’s most famous Democratic dynasties, the longtime environmental lawyer veered from the party last fall and announced his independent bid for the White House. He is a son of former senator and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and a nephew of Democratic President John F. Kennedy.

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The candidate rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic for his embrace of public health conspiracy theories and has a loyal following of people who reject the scientific consensus that vaccines are safe and effective.

His success at gaining ballot access in Utah reignites questions of whether the independent could play spoiler for the eventual Democratic and Republican nominees. While it’s unlikely that an independent or a third-party candidate would win the presidency, they could siphon support from the major candidates in a way that tips the scales.

Allies of both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the likely nominees for their respective parties, have questioned whether Kennedy could be a spoiler for their candidate. Both Biden and Trump are unpopular among voters, increasing the likelihood that third-party support could play a deciding role in 2024.

In an increasingly polarized political climate, Kennedy is playing the middle, aligning with influential people on the far-right while touting his background as an environmentalist. It’s not yet clear in how many states he will qualify for ballot access. Each state sets its own requirements, and the process for collecting signatures and navigating legal hurdles can be costly for candidates not backed by the major parties.

An organization that Kennedy founded, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines.

The U.S. Treasury Department issued a report Tuesday logging U.S. finances, which have become a source of tension in a politically divided Washington that could possibly see parts of the government shutdown without an annual budget in place.

Republican lawmakers and the White House agreed last June to temporarily lift the nation’s debt limit, staving off the risk of what would be a historic default. That agreement lasts until January 2025. Here are some answers to questions about the new record national debt.

The national debt eclipsed $34 trillion several years sooner than pre-pandemic projections. The Congressional Budget Office’s January 2020 projections had gross federal debt eclipsing $34 trillion in fiscal year 2029.

But the debt grew faster than expected because of a multi-year pandemic starting in 2020 that shut down much of the U.S. economy. The government borrowed heavily under then President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden to stabilize the economy and support a recovery. But the rebound came with a surge of inflation that pushed up interest rates and made it more expensive for the government to service its debts.

“So far, Washington has been spending money as if we had unlimited resources,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University. “But the bottom line is there is no free lunch,” he said, “and I think the outlook is pretty grim.”

The gross debt includes money that the government owes itself, so most policymakers rely on the total debt held by the public in assessing the government’s finances. This lower figure — $26.9 trillion — is roughly equal in size to the U.S. gross domestic product.

Last June, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in its 30-year outlook that publicly held debt will be equal to a record 181% of American economic activity by 2053.

The national debt does not appear to be a weight on the U.S. economy right now, as investors are willing to lend the federal government money. This lending allows the government to keep spending on programs without having to raise taxes.

But the debt’s path in the decades to come might put at risk national security and major programs, including Social Security and Medicare, which have become the most prominent drivers of forecasted government spending over the next few decades. Government dysfunction, such as another debt limit showdown, could also be a financial risk if investors worry about lawmakers’ willingness to repay the U.S. debt.

Foreign buyers of U.S. debt — like China, Japan, South Korea and European nations — have already cut down on their holdings of Treasury notes.

A Peterson Foundation analysis states that foreign holdings of U.S. debt peaked at 49 percent in 2011, but dropped to 30 percent by the end of 2022.

“Looking ahead, debt will continue to skyrocket as the Treasury expects to borrow nearly $1 trillion more by the end of March,” said Peterson Foundation CEO Michael Peterson. “Adding trillion after trillion in debt, year after year, should be a flashing red warning sign to any policymaker who cares about the future of our country.

The debt equates to about $100,000 per person in the U.S. That sounds like a lot, but the sum so far has not appeared to threaten U.S. economic growth.

Instead, the risk is long term if the debt keeps rising to uncharted levels. Sohn said a higher debt load could put upward pressure on inflation and cause interest rates to remain elevated, which could also increase the cost of repaying the national debt.

And as the debt challenge evolves over time, choices may become more severe as the costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid increasingly outstrip tax revenues.

When it could turn into a more dire situation, is anyone’s guess, says Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, “but if and when that happens, it could mean very significant consequences that occur very quickly.”

“It could mean spikes in interest rates, it could mean a recession that leads to lots more unemployment. It could lead to another bout of inflation or weird going on with consumer prices —several of which are things that we’ve experienced just in the past few years,” he said.

Both Democrats and Republicans have called for debt reduction, but they disagree on the appropriate means of doing so.

The Biden administration has been pushing for tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations to reduce budget deficits, in addition to funding its domestic agenda. Biden also increased the budget for the IRS, so that it can collect unpaid taxes and possibly reduce the debt by hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years.

Republican lawmakers have called for large cuts to non-defense government programs and the repeal of clean energy tax credits and spending passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. But Republicans also want to trim Biden’s IRS funding and cut taxes further, both of which could cause the debt to worsen.

A Treasury Department representative did not respond to a request for comment.

Akabas said, “There is growing concern among investors and rating agencies that the trajectory we’re on is unsustainable — when that turns into a more dire situation is anyone’s guess.”

It’s one of numerous cases involving abortion restrictions that have played out in state and federal courts after the U.S. Supreme Court ended abortion rights in 2022. The administration issued guidance that year saying hospitals “must” provide abortion services if there’s a risk to the mother’s life, citing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986, which requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing treatment for anyone who arrives at the emergency room.

Abortion opponents have challenged the guidance in multiple jurisdictions. In Texas, the state joined abortion opponents in a lawsuit to stop the guidance from taking effect and won at the district court level. The Biden administration appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. But a unanimous three-judge panel rejected the appeal in Tuesday’s ruling.

The ruling said the guidance could not be used to require emergency care abortions in Texas or by members of two anti-abortion groups that filed suit — the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations. The California-based 9th Circuit has allowed the use of the guidance to continue in an Idaho case, which is pending at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Opponents of the guidance said Texas law already allows abortions to save the life of the mother but that the federal guidance went too far, calling for abortions when an emergency condition is not present and eliminating obligations to treat the unborn child.

The 5th Circuit panel sided with Texas. The opinion said language in the 1986 emergency care law requires hospitals to stabilize the pregnant woman and her fetus.

“We agree with the district court that EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child especially when EMTALA imposes equal stabilization obligations,” said the opinion written by Judge Kurt Engelhardt.

In the appellate hearing last November, a U.S. Justice Department attorney arguing for the administration said the guidance provides needed safeguards for women and that the district court order blocking the use of the guidance was an error with “potentially devastating consequences for pregnant women within the state of Texas.”

The panel that ruled Tuesday included Engelhardt and Cory Wilson, nominated to the court by former President Donald Trump, and Leslie Southwick, nominated by former President George W. Bush.

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Dec 8, 2023

Texas Supreme Court pauses lower court's order allowing pregnant woman to have an abortion

The developer cited in the indictment is Fred Daibes, who has also been charged in the case.

During the time of the discussions in late 2021 into 2022 for the investment in the deal, Sen. Menendez is accused of making a number of positive statements supportive of Qatar.

The indictment says, “Menendez provided Daibes with these statements so that Daibes could share them with the Qatari Investor and a Qatari government official associated with eh Qatari Investment Company.”

The indictment also alleges that Menendez introduced the New Jersey developer to a member of the Qatari royal family who was also a principal of the investment company, identified in the indictment as “Qatari Investor”.

Prosecutors allege in the indictment that Daibes, exchanged text messages with Menendez about the alleged scheme and in Sept. 2021, Daibes sent Menendez (via an encrypted app) photos taken from Daibes’ computer of luxury watches valued from $9,990 to $23,990 and asked Menendez “how about one of those”.

Daibes and Menendez have both denied any wrongdoing.

An attorney for Daibes previously told NBC New York he is confident his client “will be exonerated when all the evidence is heard.” Daibes has pled not guilty.

Menendez pleaded not guilty at a hearing in October.

At the time, the senator said, “I will not litigate this case through the press, but have made it abundantly clear that I have done nothing wrong and once all the facts are presented will be found innocent.”

In response to the latest indictment, a lawyer for Menendez released a written statement saying, “The government’s new allegations stink of desperation.  Despite what they’ve touted in press releases, the government does not have the proof to back up any of the old or new allegations against Senator Menendez.  What they have instead is a string of baseless assumptions and bizarre conjectures based on routine, lawful contacts between a Senator and his constituents or foreign officials.  They are turning this into a persecution, not a prosecution.”

The lawyer went on to state that Menendez “acted entirely appropriately.”

The indictment indicates that federal prosecutors reviewed web searches by Menendez after he returned from a trip to Qatar in October 2021 where they allege Menendez searched, “how much is one kilo of gold worth.”

Prosecutors allege Menendez received items of value from the Qatari Investment Company. In particular, they allege, the Qatari Investor provided four tickets for the 2023 Formula One race in Miami to an unnamed relative of Nadine Menendez at the request of Sen. Menendez.

The new conduct is all included in the previous counts Menendez was facing. Sen. Menendez faces no new charges in the latest indictment.

Last week, the judge denied the defense counsel’s request to adjourn the trial until July, setting a start date for May 6.

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The Republican candidate appealed the Maine decision by Shenna Bellows, who became the first secretary of state in history to bar someone from running for the presidency under the rarely used Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That provision prohibits those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office.

The appeal now goes to Maine’s Superior Court.

Trump was also expected to appeal a similar ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation’s highest court has never issued a decision on Section 3, and the Colorado court’s 4-3 ruling that it applied to Trump was the first time in history the provision was used to bar a presidential contender from the ballot.

Trump’s critics have filed dozens of lawsuits seeking to disqualify him from the ballot in multiple states.

None succeeded until a slim majority of Colorado’s seven justices — all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors — ruled against Trump. Critics warned that it was an overreach and that the court could not simply declare that the Jan. 6 attack was an “insurrection” without a more established judicial process.

A week after Colorado’s ruling, Bellows issued her own. Critics warned it was even more perilous because it could pave the way for partisan election officials to simply disqualify candidates they oppose. Bellows, a former head of Maine’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, has previously criticized Trump and his behavior on Jan. 6.

Bellows said her own views had nothing to do with her ruling, which sought to apply the law. She acknowledged the Supreme Court would probably have the final say after the Colorado case but said she still had a responsibility to act. She was the first top election official to do so. Many others, Democrats and Republicans had told activists urging them to strike Trump from the ballot that they did not have that power.

Section 3 is novel legal territory in the past century, barely used since the years after the Civil War, when it kept defeated Confederates from returning to their former government positions. The two-sentence clause says that anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection cannot hold office unless a two-thirds vote of Congress allows it.

Congress granted amnesty to most former Confederates in 1872, and Section 3 fell into disuse. Legal scholars believe its only application in the 20th century was being cited by Congress in 1919 to block the seating of a socialist who opposed U.S. involvement in World War I and was elected to the House of Representatives.

But it returned to use after Jan. 6, 2021. In 2022, a judge used it to remove a rural New Mexico county commissioner from office after he was convicted of a misdemeanor for entering the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Liberal groups sued to block Republican Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for reelection because of their roles on that day. Cawthorn’s case became moot when he lost his primary in 2022, and a judge ruled to keep Greene on the ballot.

Some conservatives warn that, if Trump is removed, political groups will routinely use Section 3 against opponents in unexpected ways. They have suggested it could be used to remove Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, because she raised bail money for people arrested after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020.

Trump and his allies have attacked the cases against him as “anti-democratic” and sought to tie them to President Joe Biden because the Colorado case and some others are funded by liberal groups who share prominent donors with the Democratic president. But Biden’s administration has noted that the president has no role in the litigation.

Those who support using the provision against Trump counter that the Jan. 6 attack was unprecedented in American history and that there will be few cases so ripe for Section 3. If the high court lets Trump stay on the ballot, they’ve contended, it will be another example of the former president bending the legal system to excuse his extreme behavior.

More on the Trump primary ballot debate

Maine Dec 30, 2023

‘Swatting' at Maine secretary of state's house after Trump kept off primary ballot

decision 2024 Dec 30, 2023

What comes next for Trump in the Maine ballot dispute

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A second state has blocked Trump from the GOP primary ballot. Can he still run for president?

The assassination of Kennedy has remained an enduring mystery in the public imagination. A live operator interview poll of 2,000 voters commissioned by the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization dedicated to maintaining records related to the assassination, found that only 38% of Americans believed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Gallup polling since 1963 has consistently found this skepticism to be widespread.

The ongoing debate about the release of the JFK documents has made its way into the 2024 presidential election. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Kennedy’s nephew, who is known for pushing conspiracy theories that are outside of the mainstream — has long been outspoken about his disbelief in the official narrative surrounding his uncle’s death. In July of this year, former President Donald Trump posted an interview on Truth Social of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticizing President Joe Biden’s decision to block the complete release of remaining documents.

“When I return to the White House, I will declassify and unseal all JFK assassination-related documents,” Trump wrote. “It’s been nearly 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH!”

Jefferson Morley, a writer who has chronicled the events surrounding Kennedy’s assassination and is vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, said the group — which pushes for more disclosures about the events surrounding Kennedy’s death — “did not expect JFK’s assassination to be an issue in the 2024 election. But it is and it doesn’t surprise us.”

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

When state legislatures kick off their fresh sessions in the coming weeks — 37 will go into session in January and another nine will follow in February — lawmakers will immediately dive into a host of big policy issues.

Some of those areas — like how to tackle artificial intelligence and deepfakes — will be relatively new. For others, like how state governments can best deal with major workforce shortages, legislators will be picking up where they left off last year.

Meanwhile, in areas like abortion rights, it will be organizers attempting to place measures on the November ballot, not lawmakers, who are taking the lead.

“2024 will be an incredibly important year as we think about the progress that can be made at the state level,” said Jessie Ulibarri, the co-executive director of the State Innovation Exchange, a policy shop that helps draw up model state legislation that advances traditionally progressive issues.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

The move comes as authorities say at least 10,000 migrants a day have been arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, many of them asylum seekers. It also comes as a migrant caravan of thousands of people from across the region — largely Venezuelans — has trekked through southern Mexico this week.

The repatriation flights are part of an agreement made between regional leaders during a summit in Mexico in October that aimed to seek solutions for migration levels that show few signs of slowing down.

Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Relations said the two countries began repatriations with a flight on Friday and a second on Saturday in an effort to “strengthen their cooperation on migration issues.” The statement also said the two countries plan to implement social and work programs for those repatriated to Venezuela.

“Mexico and Venezuela reiterate their commitment to address the structural causes that fuel irregular migration in the region, and to achieve a humanitarian management of such flows,” the statement read.

Mexico’s government said it previously carried out a similar repatriation flight last Jan. 20 with 110 people.

Venezuelan authorities said Saturday that 207 Venezuelans had landed in Caracas on one of the latest flights.

Gustavo Vizcaino, director of Venezuela’s migration agency, said the migrants came on a “voluntary return flight,” part of a 2018 program of President Nicolas Maduro’s government seeking to bring back Venezuelans who have fled the country’s economic and political crisis.

As migration has soared in recent years, the U.S. government has pressured Latin American nations to control the movement of migrants north, but many transit countries have struggled to deal with the quantities of people.

This week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Biden administration officials were in Mexico City to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador about the high levels of migrants landing on the U.S.-Mexico border.

López Obrador said he also spoke about the issue in a phone call with Presient Joe Biden on Dec. 20.

“He asked — Joe Biden asked to speak with me — he was worried about the situation on the border because of the unprecedented number of migrants arriving at the border,” Mexico’s leader said. “He called me, saying we had to look for a solution together.”

López Obrador has said he is willing to help, but in exchange he wants the U.S. to send more development aid to migrants’ home countries and to reduce or eliminate sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela.

Mexico’s president and other critics of American foreign policy have cited the sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela as one of the root causes of high migration.

The “swatting call,” as such hoaxes are known, involved a person calling police about 8:15 p.m. to say he’d broken into Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ home in Manchester, Maine, according to state police.

No one was inside at the time, troopers found, including Bellows, and nothing suspicious was found, according to police, who were still investigating Saturday.

“The Maine State Police is working with our law enforcement partners to provide special attention to any and all appropriate locations,” a police representative said in a statement, without sharing more details about the call.

Bellows has come under intense scrutiny following her decision on the ballot Thursday. She’s said she was duty-bound by state law to make a determination on three challenges brought by registered Maine voters and that she suspended her decision pending an anticipated appeal by Trump in Superior Court.

“Under Maine law, I have not only the authority but the obligation to act,” she said. “I will follow the Constitution and the rule of law as directed by the courts,” she added.

The move in Maine came after a ruling earlier this month by the Colorado Supreme Court that removed Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment; after it came down, social media outlets were flooded with threats against the justices who ruled in the case, according to a report obtained by NBC News.

That decision is also on hold until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether Trump violated the Civil War-era provision prohibiting those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office.

“In 150 years, no candidate was kept off a ballot for engaging in an insurrection. It’s now happened twice to Donald Trump in the last two weeks. There will be major pressure on the Supreme Court to offer clarity very soon,” said Derek Muller, a Notre Dame Law School professor and election law scholar.

At least one Republican lawmaker in Maine has vowed to pursue impeachment against Bellows, a Democrat, despite long odds in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

Bellows said Friday that she had no comment on the impeachment effort.

State Rep. John Andrews, who sits on the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, called the decision “hyper-partisanship on full display” as he pressed for an impeachment proceeding. He said he sent a notice to the state revisor’s office for a joint order to set the wheels in motion ahead of lawmakers’ return to Augusta next week.

“There is bipartisan opposition to the extreme decision made by the secretary of state. She has clearly overstepped her authority. It remains to be seen if her effort at voter suppression will garner enough Democrat support to remove her from her position,” said House Republican leader Billy Bob Faulkingham.

The decision has exposed Bellows to hate and vitriol on social media as well — along with posts showing support — and her office said Bellows and members of her staff were subjected to threats, something she called “unacceptable.”

“My obligation is to the Constitution and the rule of law. It’s the Constitution and the rule of law that make our Democratic Republic so great. No one should be threatened for doing their job,” she said Friday evening.

“I hope those people who are engaging in angry and threatening communications consider the impact of their words and actions,” she added.

More on former President Trump and Maine's primary ballot

decision 2024 Dec 28, 2023

Maine bars Trump from ballot as US Supreme Court weighs state authority to block former president

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Among Maine’s congressional delegation, only Democratic U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, who represents the liberal 1st Congressional District, supported Bellows’ conclusion that Trump incited an insurrection, justifying his removal from the March 5 primary ballot.

U.S. Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said Friday that absent a final judicial determination on the issue of insurrection, the decision on whether Trump should be considered for president “should rest with the people as expressed in free and fair elections.”

U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat representing the 2nd Congressional District, agreed that “until (Trump) is found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot.”

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, the state’s senior senator, was one of a handful of Republicans to vote to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial, and she criticized him in a floor speech for failing to obey his oath of office.

But she nonetheless disagreed with Bellows’ decision. “Maine voters should decide who wins the election, not a secretary of state chosen by the Legislature,” she said.

The former president’s campaign plans to immediately appeal Thursday’s decision by Maine’s top election official, as they did the one last week from the Colorado Supreme Court. Both deemed Trump disqualified from the presidency under the 14th Amendment because of his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump remains on the ballot in both states for next year’s GOP presidential primary, since both paused implementation of their decision to allow time for higher courts to intervene.

In Maine, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said in an interview with NBC News that she would have preferred to wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to issue guidance on the novel legal question — no presidential candidate has ever been disqualified under the 14th Amendment — but she said Maine law required her act now. “The country would be well served if the United States Supreme Court issues clear guidance on this unprecedented constitutional question for all to follow,” Bellows said.

Maine election law, an outlier nationally, allows any registered voter to challenge the eligibility of any candidate. It requires the secretary of state to hold a public hearing on the challenge and then issue a decision on a tight timeline. 

Three voters challenged Trump’s eligibility, two on 14th Amendment grounds.

For more on this story go to NBCNews.com.

More coverage

decision 2024 Dec 28, 2023

A second state has blocked Trump from the GOP primary ballot. Can he still run for president?

decision 2024 Dec 28, 2023

Maine bars Trump from ballot as US Supreme Court weighs state authority to block former president

The State Department said Friday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had told Congress that he had made a second emergency determination covering a $147.5 million sale for equipment, including fuses, charges and primers, that is needed to make the 155 mm shells that Israel has already purchased function.

“Given the urgency of Israel’s defensive needs, the secretary notified Congress that he had exercised his delegated authority to determine an emergency existed necessitating the immediate approval of the transfer,” the department said.

“The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to ensure Israel is able to defend itself against the threats it faces,” it said.

The emergency determination means the purchase will bypass the congressional review requirement for foreign military sales. Such determinations are rare, but not unprecedented, when administrations see an urgent need for weapons to be delivered without waiting for lawmakers’ approval.

Blinken made a similar decision on Dec. 9, to approve the sale to Israel of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth more than $106 million.

Both moves have come as President Joe Biden’s request for a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs remains stalled in Congress, caught up in a debate over U.S. immigration policy and border security. Some Democratic lawmakers have spoken of making the proposed $14.3 billion in American assistance to its Mideast ally contingent on concrete steps by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza during the war with Hamas.

The State Department sought to counter potential criticism of the sale on human rights grounds by saying it was in constant touch with Israel to emphasize the importance of minimizing civilian casualties, which have soared since Israel began its response to the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7.

“We continue to strongly emphasize to the government of Israel that they must not only comply with international humanitarian law, but also take every feasible step to prevent harm to civilians,” it said.

“Hamas hides behind civilians and has embedded itself among the civilian population, but that does not lessen Israel’s responsibility and strategic imperative to distinguish between civilians and Hamas terrorists as it conducts its military operations,” the department said. “This type of campaign can only be won by protecting civilians.”

Bypassing Congress with emergency determinations for arms sales is an unusual step that has in the past met resistance from lawmakers, who normally have a period of time to weigh in on proposed weapons transfers and, in some cases, block them.

In May 2019, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an emergency determination for an $8.1 billion sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan after it became clear that the Trump administration would have trouble overcoming lawmakers’ concerns about the Saudi and UAE-led war in Yemen.

Pompeo came under heavy criticism for the move, which some believed may have violated the law because many of the weapons involved had yet to be built and could not be delivered urgently. But he was cleared of any wrongdoing after an internal investigation.

At least four administrations have used the authority since 1979. President George H.W. Bush’s administration used it during the Gulf War to get arms quickly to Saudi Arabia.

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a measure Friday that would have banned gender-affirming care for minors and transgender athletes’ participation in girls and women’s sports, in a break from members of his party who championed the legislation.

GOP lawmakers hold enough seats to override DeWine’s veto, but if or when they would do so was not immediately clear. Both within and between chambers, Republican legislators have not been in lockstep this year.

Hundreds of opponents testified against Ohio’s multifaceted measure when it was moving through the Legislature, including medical and mental health providers, education professionals, faith leaders, parents of transgender children and transgender individuals themselves.

They decried the legislation as cruel, life-threatening to transgender youth, and based on fearmongering rather than science.

The measure, which passed the Legislature earlier this month with only Republican support, would have prohibited Ohio minors from taking puberty blockers and undergoing other hormone therapies or receiving gender reassignment surgery that would further align them with their gender identity. It would, however, have allowed any minor who is an Ohio resident to continue treatment they are currently receiving.

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DeWine’s veto departs from a nationwide trend toward passing such laws. Since 2021, more than 20 states have enacted laws restricting or banning such treatments, despite them having been available in the United States for more than a decade and long endorsed by major medical associations. Most of those states face lawsuits, but courts have issued mixed rulings.

The bill also would have required public K-12 schools and universities to designate separate teams for male and female sexes, and explicitly banned transgender girls and women from participating in sports that align with their gender identity. Supporters argued that banning transgender athletes from girls and women’s sports maintains the integrity of those sports and ensures fairness.

At least 20 states have passed some version of a ban on transgender athletes playing on K-12 and collegiate sports teams statewide. Those bans would be upended by a regulation proposed by President Joe Biden’s administration that is set to be finalized early next year.

Both decisions are historic. The Colorado court was the first court to apply to a presidential candidate a rarely used constitutional ban against those who “engaged in insurrection.” Maine’s secretary of state was the first top election official to unilaterally strike a presidential candidate from the ballot under that provision.

But both decisions are on hold while the legal process plays out.

What’s the legal issue?

That means that Trump remains on the ballot in Colorado and Maine and that his political fate is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Maine ruling will likely never take effect on its own. Its central impact is increasing pressure on the nation’s highest court to say clearly: Can Trump still run for president after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol?

After the Civil War, the U.S. ratified the 14th Amendment to guarantee rights to former slaves and more. It also included a two-sentence clause called Section 3, designed to keep former Confederates from regaining government power after the war.

The measure reads:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

How does this apply to Trump?

Congress did remove that disability from most Confederates in 1872, and the provision fell into disuse. But it was rediscovered after Jan. 6.

Trump is already being prosecuted for the attempt to overturn his 2020 loss that culminated with Jan. 6, but Section 3 doesn’t require a criminal conviction to take effect. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed to disqualify Trump, claiming he engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6 and is no longer qualified to run for office.

All the suits failed until the Colorado ruling. And dozens of secretaries of state have been asked to remove him from the ballot. All said they didn’t have the authority to do so without a court order — until Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ decision.

The Supreme Court has never ruled on Section 3. It’s likely to do so in considering appeals of the Colorado decision — the state Republican Party has already appealed, and Trump is expected to file his own shortly. Bellows’ ruling cannot be appealed straight to the U.S. Supreme Court — it has to be appealed up the judicial chain first, starting with a trial court in Maine.

The Maine decision does force the high court’s hand, though. It was already highly likely the justices would hear the Colorado case, but Maine removes any doubt.

Trump lost Colorado in 2020, and he doesn’t need to win it again to garner an Electoral College majority next year. But he won one of Maine’s four Electoral College votes in 2020 by winning the state’s 2nd Congressional District, so Bellows’ decision would have a direct impact on his odds next November.

Until the high court rules, any state could adopt its own standard on whether Trump, or anyone else, can be on the ballot. That’s the sort of legal chaos the court is supposed to prevent.

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What are the arguments in the case?

Trump’s lawyers have several arguments against the push to disqualify him. First, it’s not clear Section 3 applies to the president — an early draft mentioned the office, but it was taken out, and the language “an officer of the United States” elsewhere in the Constitution doesn’t mean the president, they contend.

Second, even if it does apply to the presidency, they say, this is a “political” question best decided by voters, not unelected judges. Third, if judges do want to get involved, the lawyers assert, they’re violating Trump’s rights to a fair legal procedure by flatly ruling he’s ineligible without some sort of fact-finding process like a lengthy criminal trial. Fourth, they argue, Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection under the meaning of Section 3 — it was more like a riot. Finally, even if it was an insurrection, they say, Trump wasn’t involved in it — he was merely using his free speech rights.

What’s taken so long?

Of course, the lawyers who want to disqualify Trump have arguments, too. The main one is that the case is actually very simple: Jan. 6 was an insurrection, Trump incited it, and he’s disqualified.

The attack was three years ago, but the challenges weren’t “ripe,” to use the legal term, until Trump petitioned to get onto state ballots this fall.

But the length of time also gets at another issue — no one has really wanted to rule on the merits of the case. Most judges have dismissed the lawsuits because of technical issues, including that courts don’t have the authority to tell parties whom to put on their primary ballots. Secretaries of state have dodged, too, usually telling those who ask them to ban Trump that they don’t have the authority to do so unless ordered by a court.

Why did Maine do this?

No one can dodge anymore. Legal experts have cautioned that, if the Supreme Court doesn’t clearly resolve the issue, it could lead to chaos in November — or in January 2025, if Trump wins the election. Imagine, they say, if the high court ducks the issue or says it’s not a decision for the courts to make, and Democrats win a narrow majority in Congress. Would they seat Trump or declare he’s ineligible under Section 3?

Maine has an unusual process in which a secretary of state is required to hold a public hearing on challenges to politicians’ spots on the ballot and then issue a ruling. Multiple groups of Maine voters, including a bipartisan clutch of former state lawmakers, filed such a challenge, triggering Bellows’ decision.

Bellows is a Democrat, the former head of the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and has a long trail of criticism of Trump on social media. Trump’s attorneys asked her to recuse herself from the case, citing posts calling Jan. 6 an “insurrection” and bemoaning Trump’s acquittal in his impeachment trial over the attack.

She refused, saying she wasn’t ruling based on personal opinions. But the precedent she sets is notable, critics say. In theory, election officials in every state could decide a candidate is ineligible based on a novel legal theory about Section 3 and end their candidacies.

Is this a partisan issue?

Conservatives argue that Section 3 could apply to Vice President Kamala Harris, for example — it was used to block from office even those who donated small sums to individual Confederates. Couldn’t it be used against Harris, they say, because she raised money for those arrested in the unrest after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020?

Well, of course it is. Bellows is a Democrat, and all the justices on the Colorado Supreme Court were appointed by Democrats. Six of the 9 U.S. Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republicans, three by Trump himself.

But courts don’t always split on predictable partisan lines. The Colorado ruling was 4-3 — so three Democratic appointees disagreed with barring Trump. Several prominent legal conservatives have championed the use of Section 3 against the former president.

Now we’ll see how the high court handles it.

While Maine has just four electoral votes, it’s one of two states to split them. Trump won one of Maine’s electors in 2020, so having him off the ballot there should he emerge as the Republican general election candidate could have outsized implications in a race that is expected to be narrowly decided.

The decision by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows follows a December ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that booted Trump from the ballot there under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Colorado is a Democratic-leaning state that is not expected to be competitive for Republicans in November.

Bellows found that Trump could no longer run for his prior job because his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol violated Section 3, which bans from office those who “engaged in insurrection.” Bellows made the ruling after some state residents, including a bipartisan group of former lawmakers, challenged Trump’s position on the ballot.

“I do not reach this conclusion lightly,” Bellows wrote in her 34-page decision. “I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”

In a statement issued following the Maine ruling, the Trump campaign said it intended to file a legal objection to the “atrocious decision,” claiming it amounts to election interference.

“Make no mistake, these partisan election interference efforts are a hostile assault on American democracy,” the statement from campaign spokesman Steve Cheung read in part.

Read the full text of the decision

Legal experts said that Thursday’s ruling demonstrates the need for the nation’s highest court, which has never ruled on Section 3, to clarify what states can do.

“It is clear that these decisions are going to keep popping up, and inconsistent decisions reached (like the many states keeping Trump on the ballot over challenges) until there is final and decisive guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote in response to the Maine decision. “It seems a certainty that SCOTUS will have to address the merits sooner or later.”

In her decision, Bellows acknowledged that the U.S. Supreme Court will probably have the final word but said it was important she did her official duty.

That won her praise from the former state lawmakers who filed one of the petitions forcing her to consider the case.

“Secretary Bellows showed great courage in her ruling, and we look forward to helping her defend her judicious and correct decision in court. No elected official is above the law or our constitution, and today’s ruling reaffirms this most important of American principles,” Republican Kimberley Rosen, independent Thomas Saviello and Democrat Ethan Strimling said in a statement.

But other Republicans in the state were outraged.

“The Secretary of State’s decision would deny thousands of Mainers the opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice, and it should be overturned,” U.S. Sen. Susan Collins wrote on the social media site X.

“This is a sham decision that mimics Third World dictatorships,” Maine’s House Republican leader, Billy Bob Faulkingham, said in a statement. “It will not stand legal scrutiny. People have a right to choose their leaders devoid of mindless decisions by partisan hacks.”

The criticism wasn’t just along normal partisan lines, though. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat who represents Maine’s 2nd congressional district that Trump won in 2020, noted on X that he’d voted to impeach Trump for the Jan. 6 attack and doesn’t believe he should win next year’s election.

“However, we are a nation of laws, and therefore until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot,” Golden wrote.

The Trump campaign on Tuesday requested that Bellows disqualify herself from the case because she’d previously tweeted that Jan. 6 was an “insurrection” and bemoaned that Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate after the capitol attack. She refused to step aside.

“My decision was based exclusively on the record presented to me at the hearing and was in no way influenced by my political affiliation or personal views about the events of Jan. 6, 2021,” Bellows told the Associated Press Thursday night.

Bellows is a former head of the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. All seven of the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, which split 4-3 on whether to become the first court in history to declare a presidential candidate ineligible under Section 3, were appointed by Democrats. Two Washington, D.C.-based liberal groups have launched the most serious prior challenges to Trump, in Colorado and a handful of other states.

That’s led Trump to contend the dozens of lawsuits nationwide seeking to remove him from the ballot under Section 3 are a Democratic plot to end his campaign. But some of the most prominent advocates have been conservative legal theorists who argue that the text of the Constitution makes the former president ineligible to run again, just as if he failed to clear the document’s age threshold — 35 years old — for the office.

Likewise, until Bellows’ decision, every top state election official, whether Democrat or Republican, had rejected requests to bar Trump from the ballot, saying they didn’t have the power to remove him unless ordered to do so by a court.

The timing on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is unclear, but both sides want it fast. Colorado’s Republican Party appealed the Colorado high court decision on Wednesday, urging an expedited schedule, and Trump is also expected to file an appeal within the week. The petitioners in the Colorado case on Thursday urged the nation’s highest court to adopt an even faster schedule so it could rule before March 5, known as Super Tuesday, when 16 states, including Colorado and Maine, are scheduled to vote in the Republican presidential nominating process.

The high court needs to formally accept the case first, but legal experts consider that a certainty. The Section 3 cases seem tailor-made for the Supreme Court, addressing an area of U.S. governance where there’s scant judicial guidance.

The clause was added in 1868 to keep defeated Confederates from returning to their former positions of power in local and federal government. It prohibits anyone who broke an oath to “support” the Constitution from holding office. The provision was used to bar a wide range of ex-Confederates from positions ranging from local sheriff to Congress, but fell into disuse after an 1872 congressional amnesty for most former Confederates.

Legal historians believe the only time the provision was used in the 20th Century was in 1919, when it was cited to deny a House seat to a socialist who had opposed U.S. involvement in World War I. But since the Jan. 6 attack, it has been revived.

Last year, it was cited by a court to remove a rural New Mexico County Commissioner who had entered the Capitol on Jan. 6. One liberal group tried to remove Republican Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene from the 2022 ballot under the provision, but Cawthorn lost his primary so his case was thrown out, and a judge ruled for Greene.

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In a Facebook video Wednesday evening, Boebert announced she would enter the crowded Republican primary in retiring Rep. Ken Buck’s seat in the eastern side of Colorado, leaving the more competitive 3rd District seat she barely won last year — and which she was in peril of losing next year as some in her party have soured on her controversial style.

Boebert implied in the video that her departure from the district would help Republicans retain the seat, saying, “I will not allow dark money that is directed at destroying me personally to steal this seat. It’s not fair to the 3rd District and the conservatives there who have fought so hard for our victories.”

“The Aspen donors, George Soros and Hollywood actors that are trying to buy this seat, well they can go pound sand,” she said.

Boebert called it “a fresh start,” acknowledging the rough year following a divorce with her husband and video of her misbehaving with a date at a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” in Denver. The scandal in September rocked some of her faithful supporters, who saw it as a transgression of conservative, Christian values and for which Boebert apologized at events throughout her district.

She already faced a primary challenge in her district, as well as a general election face-off with Democrat Adam Frisch, a former Aspen city council member who came within a few hundred votes of beating her in 2022. A rematch was expected, with Frisch raising at least $7.7 million to Boebert’s $2.4 million.

Instead, if Boebert wins the primary to succeed Buck she will run in the state’s most conservative district, which former President Donald Trump won by about 20 percentage points in 2020, in contrast to his margin of about 8 percentage points in her district. While it’s not required that a representative live in the congressional district they represent, only the state the district is in, Boebert said she would be moving — a shift from Colorado’s western Rocky Mountain peaks and high desert mesas to its eastern expanse of prairie grass and ranching enclaves.

In 2022, Frisch’s campaign found support in the conservative district from unaffiliated voters and Republicans who’d defected over Boebert’s brash, Trumpian style. In this election, Frisch’s campaign had revived the slogan “stop the circus” and framed Frisch as the “pro-normal” alternative to Boebert’s more partisan politics.

In a statement after Boebert’s announcement, Frisch said he’s prepared for whoever will be the Republican candidate.

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“From Day 1 of this race, I have been squarely focused on defending rural Colorado’s way of life, and offering common sense solutions to the problems facing the families of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.” he said. “My focus will remain the same.”

The Republican primary candidate who has raised the second most behind Boebert in the 3rd District, Jeff Hurd, is a more traditional Republican candidate. Hurd has already garnered support from prominent Republicans in the district, first reported by VailDaily.

Boebert rocked the political world by notching a surprise primary win against the incumbent Republican congressman in the 3rd District in 2020 when she ran a gun-themed restaurant in the town of Rifle, Colorado. She then tried to enter the U.S. Capitol carrying a pistol and began to feud with prominent liberal Democrats like Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Asked during a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire, what she believed had caused the war — the first shots of which were fired in her home state of South Carolina — Haley talked about the role of government, replying that it involved “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”

She then turned the question back to the man who had asked it, who replied that he was not the one running for president and wished instead to know her answer.

After Haley went into a lengthier explanation about the role of government, individual freedom and capitalism, the questioner seemed to admonish Haley, saying, “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery.”

“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley retorted, before abruptly moving on to the next question.

Haley, who served six years as South Carolina’s governor, has been competing for a distant second place to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. She has frequently said during her campaign that she would compete in the first three states before returning “to the sweet state of South Carolina, and we’ll finish it” in the Feb. 24 primary.

The campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another of Haley’s GOP foes, recirculated video of the exchange on social media, adding the comment, “Yikes.”

The exchange also drew response from President Joe Biden, who shared the video on X with the statement: “It was about slavery.”

Haley’s campaign did not immediately return a message seeking comment on her response, but the presidential hopeful appeared on local New Hampshire radio station The Pulse of NH on Thursday morning and addressed her response.

“Of course the Civil War was about slavery,” Haley said. “We know that. That’s the easy part of it. What I was saying was what does it mean to us today. What it means to us today is about freedom.”

“That’s what that was all about. It was about individual freedom. It was about economic freedom. It was about individual rights. Our goal is to make sure, no, we never go back to slavery but what’s the lesson in all of that? That we need to make sure that every person has freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do and be anything they want to be without anyone in government getting in the way.”

“Yes I know it was about slavery. I’m from the South. Of course you know it’s about slavery.”

Issues surrounding the origins of the Civil War and its heritage are still much of the fabric of Haley’s home state, and she has been pressed on the war’s origins before. As she ran for governor in 2010, Haley, in an interview with a now-defunct activist group then known as The Palmetto Patriots, described the war as between two disparate sides fighting for “tradition” and “change” and said the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.”

During that same campaign, she dismissed the need for the flag to come down from the Statehouse grounds, portraying her Democratic rival’s push for its removal as a desperate political stunt.

Five years later, Haley urged lawmakers to remove the flag from its perch near a Confederate soldier monument following a mass shooting in which a white gunman killed eight Black church members who were attending Bible study. At the time, Haley said the flag had been “hijacked” by the shooter from those who saw the flag as symbolizing “sacrifice and heritage.”

South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession — the 1860 proclamation by the state government outlining its reasons for seceding from the Union — mentions slavery in its opening sentence and points to the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as a reason for the state removing itself from the Union.

On Wednesday night, Christale Spain — elected this year as the first Black woman to chair South Carolina’s Democratic Party — said Haley’s response was “vile, but unsurprising.”

“The same person who refused to take down the Confederate Flag until the tragedy in Charleston, and tried to justify a Confederate History Month,” Spain said in a post on X, of Haley. “She’s just as MAGA as Trump,” Spain added, referring to Trump’s ”Make America Great Again” slogan.

Jaime Harrison, current chairman of the Democratic National Committee and South Carolina’s party chairman during part of Haley’s tenure as governor, said her response was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor.”

“Same person who said the confederate flag was about tradition & heritage and as a minority woman she was the right person to defend keeping it on state house grounds,” Harrison posted Wednesday night on X. “Some may have forgotten but I haven’t. Time to take off the rose colored Nikki Haley glasses folks.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to add Nikki Haley’s comments during her appearance on The Pulse of NH.

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The first impact of the appeal is to extend the stay of the 4-3 ruling from Colorado’s highest court, which put its decision on pause until Jan. 4, the day before the state’s primary ballots are due at the printer, or until an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is finished. Trump himself has said he still plans to appeal the ruling to the nation’s highest court as well.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was added after the Civil War to prevent former Confederates from returning to government. It says that anyone who swore an oath to “support” the constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” against it cannot hold government office.

The Colorado high court ruled that applies to Trump in the wake of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, intended to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. It was the first time in history that the provision was used to block a presidential contender’s campaign.

“The Colorado Supreme Court has removed the leading Republican candidate from the primary and general ballots, fundamentally changing the course of American democracy,” the party’s attorneys wrote Wednesday.

They added: “Unless the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision is overturned, any voter will have the power to sue to disqualify any political candidate, in Colorado or in any other jurisdiction that follows its lead. This will not only distort the 2024 presidential election but will also mire courts henceforth in political controversies over nebulous accusations of insurrection.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to take the case, either after the Colorado GOP’s appeal or Trump’s own appeal. If Trump ends up off the ballot in Colorado, it would have minimal effect on his campaign because he doesn’t need the state, which he lost by 13 percentage points in 2020, to win the Electoral College in the presidential election. But it could open the door to courts or election officials striking him from the ballot in other must-win states.

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Sean Grimsley, an attorney for the plaintiffs seeking to disqualify Trump in Colorado, said on a legal podcast last week that he hopes the nation’s highest court hurries once it accepts the case, as he expects it will. “We obviously are going to ask for an extremely accelerated timeline because of all the reasons I’ve stated, we have a primary coming up on Super Tuesday and we need to know the answer,” Grimsley said.

More than a dozen states, including Colorado, are scheduled to hold primaries March 5 — Super Tuesday.

To date, no other court has sided with those who have filed dozens of lawsuits to disqualify Trump under Section 3, nor has any election official been willing to remove him from the ballot unilaterally without a court order.

The Colorado case was considered the one with the greatest chance of success, however, because it was filed by a Washington D.C.-based liberal group with ample legal resources. All seven of the Colorado high court justices were appointed by Democrats.

However, the unprecedented constitutional questions in the case haven’t split on neatly partisan lines. Several prominent conservative legal theorists are among the most vocal advocates of disqualifying Trump under Section 3. They argue the plain meaning of the constitutional language bars him from running again, just as clearly as if he didn’t meet the document’s minimum age of 35 for the presidency.

The half-dozen plaintiffs in the Colorado case are all Republican or unaffiliated voters.

Trump has been scathing about the cases, calling them “election interference.” He continued that on Wednesday as he cheered a ruling earlier that day by the Michigan Supreme Court leaving him on the ballot, at least for the primary, in that state.

“The Colorado people have embarrassed our nation with what they did,” Trump said on Sean Hannity’s radio show.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said he is willing to help, but he wants to see progress in U.S. relations with Cuba and Venezuela, two of the top sources of migrants, along with more development aid for the region.

But Mexico’s top priority appeared to be getting the United States to reopen border crossings that were closed because of the migrant surge.

“We spoke about the importance of the border, and about the economic relationship … the importance of reopening the border crossings, that is a priority for us,” Foreign Relations Secretary Alicia Bárcena said after the meeting.

Both sides in the talks face pressure to reach an agreement after past steps like limiting direct travel into Mexico or deporting some migrants failed to stop the influx. This month, as many as 10,000 migrants were arrested daily at the southwest U.S. border.

The U.S. has struggled to process thousands of migrants at the border, and house them once they reach northern cities. And Mexican industries were stung last week when the U.S. briefly closed two vital Texas railway crossings, arguing that border patrol agents had to be reassigned to deal with the surge. Another non-rail border crossing remained closed in Lukeville, Arizona, and operations were partially suspended in San Diego and Nogales, Arizona.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken left open the possibility that those crossings could be reopened if Mexico provides more help.

“Secretary Blinken will discuss unprecedented irregular migration in the Western Hemisphere and identify ways Mexico and the United States will address border security challenges, including actions to enable the reopening of key ports of entry across our shared border,” his office said.

Mexico says it detected 680,000 migrants moving through the country in the first 11 months of 2023.

Mexico has assigned over 32,000 military troops and National Guard officers — about 11% of its total forces — to enforce immigration laws, and the National Guard now detains far more migrants than criminals.

But the shortcomings of that approach were on display Tuesday, when National Guard officers made no attempt to stop a caravan of about 6,000 migrants, many from Central America and Venezuela, from walking through Mexico’s main inland immigration inspection point in southern Chiapas state near the Guatemala border.

In the past, Mexico has let such caravans go through, trusting that they would tire themselves out walking along the highway.

By Wednesday, Lazara Padrón Molina, 46, from Cuba was sick and exhausted. The caravan set out Dec. 24 from the city of Tapachula and had walked about 45 miles (75 kilometers) through the heat to Escuintla in southern Chiapas state.

“The route is too long to continue walking. Why don’t they just give us documents so that we could get a bus or a taxi?” Padrón Molina said. “Look at my feet,” she said, showing blisters. “I can’t go on anymore.”

But wearing the migrants out — by obliging Venezuelans and others to hike through the jungle-clad Darien Gap, or corralling migrants off passenger buses in Mexico — no longer appears to work.

So many migrants have been hopping freight trains through Mexico that one of the country’s two major railroad companies suspended trains in September because of safety concerns. Police raids to pull migrants off railway cars — the kind of action Mexico took a decade ago — might be one thing the American delegation would like to see.

A few blocks from Mexico City’s main plaza — where Blinken will meet with López Obrador at the National Palace — migrants stayed at an improvised shelter at a church, gathering strength before continuing north.

David Peña, his two daughters and his pregnant wife, Maryeris Zerpa, hoped to reach the United States before the child is born in about a month.

“The goal is to cross over so the baby will be born there,” Peña said. But with no asylum appointment, he had no idea how the family will enter.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall also are attending the meeting.

The U.S. has shown that one country’s problems on the border quickly become both countries’ problems. The Texas railway closures put a chokehold on freight moving from Mexico to the U.S., as well as grain needed to feed Mexican livestock moving south.

López Obrador confirmed last week that U.S. officials want Mexico to do more to block migrants at its southern border with Guatemala, or make it more difficult to move across Mexico by train or in trucks or buses, a policy known as “contention.”

But the president said that in exchange he wanted the United States to send more development aid to migrants’ home countries, and to reduce or eliminate sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela.

“We are going to help, as we always do,” López Obrador said. “Mexico is helping reach agreements with other countries, in this case Venezuela.” He said Mexico has proposed to President Joe Biden that a U.S.-Cuba bilateral dialogue be opened.

In May, Mexico agreed to take in migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba who had been turned away by the U.S. for not following rules that provided new legal pathways to asylum and other forms of migration.

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The court said Wednesday it will not hear an appeal of a lower court’s ruling from groups seeking to keep Trump from appearing on the ballot.

The state’s high court said in an order that the application by parties to appeal a Dec. 14 Michigan appeals court judgment was considered, but denied “because we are not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this court.”

The ruling followed a Dec. 19 decision by a divided Colorado Supreme Court which found Trump ineligible to be president because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That ruling was the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

The Michigan and Colorado cases are among dozens hoping to keep Trump’s name off state ballots. They all point to the so-called insurrection clause that prevents anyone from holding office who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution.

Trump pressed two election officials in Michigan’s Wayne County not to certify 2020 vote totals, according to a recording of a post-election phone call disclosed in a Dec. 22 report by The Detroit News. The former president ’s 2024 campaign has neither confirmed nor denied the recording’s legitimacy.

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Attorneys for Free Speech for People, a liberal nonprofit group also involved in efforts to keep Trump’s name off the primary ballot in Minnesota, had asked Michigan’s Supreme Court to render its decision by Christmas Day.

The group argued that time was “of the essence” due to “the pressing need to finalize and print the ballots for the presidential primary election.”

Earlier this month, Michigan’s high court refused to immediately hear an appeal, saying the case should remain before the appeals court.

Free Speech for People had sued to force Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to bar Trump from Michigan’s ballot. But a Michigan Court of Claims judge rejected their arguments, saying in November that it was the proper role of Congress to decide the question.

About one-third of Republicans say they have a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that votes in the Republican primary elections and caucuses will be counted correctly. About three in 10 Republicans report a “moderate” amount of confidence, and 32% say they have “only a little” or “none at all.” In contrast, 72% of Democrats have high confidence their party will count votes accurately in its primary contests. Democrats are also slightly more likely than Republicans to have a high level of confidence in the Republican Party’s vote count being accurate.

Republicans continue to be broadly doubtful about votes being counted accurately — in the early contests or beyond them. About one-quarter of Republicans say they have at least “quite a bit” of confidence that the votes in the 2024 presidential election will be counted accurately, significantly lower than Democrats. Slightly fewer than half of U.S. adults overall (46%) believe the same, which is in line with an AP-NORC poll conducted in June.

The skepticism among Republicans comes after years of former President Donald Trump falsely blaming his 2020 loss on election fraud. Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence the election was tainted. The former president's allegations of fraud were also roundly rejected by courts, including by judges Trump appointed.

“Nothing will be fair because the last election was rigged,” said Julie Duggan, 32, of Chicago, a Trump voter, referring to 2020. “I don't trust any of them at this point.”

The AP-NORC poll found a widespread lack of trust in both major political parties among U.S. adults overall.

About one-quarter of U.S. adults say they have “only a little” confidence or “none at all” that both the Democratic Party and Republican Party have a fair process for selecting a presidential nominee. About half of independents have that low level of confidence in both party’s processes, compared with one-quarter of Republicans and 19% of Democrats.

Slightly fewer than half of U.S. adults — 46% — say they are pessimistic about the way the country's leaders are chosen.

About half of U.S. adults are pessimistic about the future of the Republican Party, including one-third of Republicans and 45% of independents. The poll found 45% of U.S. adults are pessimistic about the future of the Democratic Party, including about one-quarter of Democrats and 41% of independents.

“The way they're spending our money, sending it all over the world and not protecting our people here in the United States of America,” said Gary Jackson, a 65-year-old retired trucker and Republican in Boise, Idaho. “Right now, I'm not impressed with either party.”

Christine Allen, a political independent in Gambrills, Maryland, sees her state's last governor, Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican, as a model for the country. But Hogan refused to run in the GOP presidential primary, which she sees as emblematic of how the two-party system prevents talented leaders from holding office,

“Everybody right now is a bunch of children, stomping their feet until they get their way,” Allen, 44, said. “Everybody's at fault here. There's no winners.”

Nonetheless, Allen thinks the primaries will be fair. “They're fairer than the Electoral College,” she said.

Even those who identify with the two political parties are uneasy about whom their organizations will nominate. A recent AP-NORC poll found that Democrats and Republicans are also not especially confident that their party’s primary contests will result in a candidate who can win the general election in November. Additionally, there are some doubts on both sides that the emerging candidates will represent their party’s views or Americans overall.

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Only three in 10 Democrats say they are confident the Democratic party's process will result in a candidate whose views represent most Americans. About one-quarter of Democrats believe the process will produce a candidate whose views represent their own. Similarly, about three in 10 Republicans say the GOP process will produce a candidate who represents a majority of Americans. About one-third of Republicans expect they'll get a nominee whose views represent their own.

Mark Richards, a 33-year-old middle school teacher in Toledo, Ohio, and a Democrat, said he expects President Joe Biden will be nominated again by the party, despite his low job approval numbers. The incumbent faces only token opposition in the Democratic presidential primary.

“I feel like there's got to be someone better out there, but I don't think another Democrat is going to unseat Joe Biden,” Richards said.

Though Richards thinks the primaries will be fair and the votes accurately counted, he sees the nominating system as inherently flawed. “It's all about money, who can get the most money from PACs and Super PACs,” he said, referring to political committees that donate to candidates or spend millions of dollars on their behalf.

The poll of 1,074 adults was conducted Nov. 30–Dec. 4, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, designed to represent the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.

Riccardi reported from Denver.

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Experts warn it will likely be worse in the coming presidential election contest. The safeguards that attempted to counter the bogus claims the last time are eroding, while the tools and systems that create and spread them are only getting stronger.

Many Americans, egged on by former President Donald Trump, have continued to push the unsupported idea that elections throughout the U.S. can’t be trusted. A majority of Republicans (57%) believe Democrat Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president.

Meanwhile, generative artificial intelligence tools have made it far cheaper and easier to spread the kind of misinformation that can mislead voters and potentially influence elections. And social media companies that once invested heavily in correcting the record have shifted their priorities.

“I expect a tsunami of misinformation,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial intelligence expert and professor emeritus at the University of Washington. “I hope to be proven wrong. But the ingredients are there, and I am completely terrified.”

AI Deepfakes Go Mainstream

Manipulated images and videos surrounding elections are nothing new, but 2024 will be the first U.S. presidential election in which sophisticated AI tools that can produce convincing fakes in seconds are just a few clicks away.

The fabricated images, videos and audio clips known as deepfakes have started making their way into experimental presidential campaign ads. More sinister versions could easily spread without labels and fool people days before an election, Etzioni said.

“You could see a political candidate like President Biden being rushed to a hospital,” he said. “You could see a candidate saying things that he or she never actually said.”

Faced with content that is made to look and sound real, “everything that we’ve been wired to do through evolution is going to come into play to have us believe in the fabrication rather than the actual reality,” said misinformation scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Federal Election Commission and Republicans and Democrats in Congress are exploring steps to regulate the technology, but they haven’t finalized any rules or legislation.

A handful of states have passed laws requiring deepfakes to be labeled or banning those that misrepresent candidates. Some social media companies, including YouTube and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have introduced AI labeling policies. It remains to be seen whether they will be able to consistently catch violators.

Social Media Guardrails Fade

It was just over a year ago that Elon Musk bought Twitter and began firing its executives, dismantling some of its core features and reshaping the social media platform into what’s now known as X.

Since then, he has upended its verification system, leaving public officials vulnerable to impersonators. He has gutted the teams that once fought misinformation on the platform, leaving the community of users to moderate itself. And he has restored the accounts of conspiracy theorists and extremists who were previously banned.

The changes have been applauded by many conservatives who say Twitter’s previous moderation attempts amounted to censorship of their views. But pro-democracy advocates argue the takeover has shifted what once was a flawed but useful resource for news and election information into a largely unregulated echo chamber that amplifies hate speech and misinformation.

In the run-up to 2024, X, Meta and YouTube have together removed 17 policies that protected against hate and misinformation, according to a report from Free Press, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights in tech and media.

In June, YouTube announced that while it would still regulate content that misleads about current or upcoming elections, it would stop removing content that falsely claims the 2020 election or other previous U.S. elections were marred by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches.” The platform said the policy was an attempt to protect the ability to “openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions.”

X, Meta and YouTube also have laid off thousands of employees and contractors since 2020, some of whom have included content moderators.

The shrinking of such teams “sets the stage for things to be worse in 2024 than in 2020,” said Kate Starbird, a misinformation expert at the University of Washington.

Meta explains on its website that it has some 40,000 people devoted to safety and security. It also frequently takes down networks of fake social media accounts that aim to sow discord.

Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, said the platform has recommendation and information panels, which provide users with reliable election news.

The rise of TikTok and other, less regulated platforms such as Telegram, Truth Social and Gab, also has created more information silos online where baseless claims can spread. Some apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat, rely on private chats, making it hard for outside groups to see the misinformation that may spread.

“I’m worried that in 2024, we’re going to see similar recycled, ingrained false narratives but more sophisticated tactics,” said Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas. “But on the positive side, I am hopeful there is more social resilience to those things.”

The Trump Factor

Trump’s front-runner status in the Republican presidential primary is top of mind for misinformation researchers who worry that it will exacerbate election misinformation and potentially lead to election vigilantism or violence.

The former president still falsely claims to have won the 2020 election.

Without evidence, Trump has already primed his supporters to expect fraud in the 2024 election, urging them to intervene to “ guard the vote ” to prevent vote rigging in diverse Democratic cities. Trump has a long history of suggesting elections are rigged if he doesn’t win and did so before the voting in 2016 and 2020.

That continued wearing away of voter trust in democracy can lead to violence, said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks misinformation.

“If people don’t ultimately trust information related to an election, democracy just stops working,” he said.

Election Officials Respond

Election officials have spent the years since 2020 preparing for the expected resurgence of election denial narratives.

In Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said informative paid social media and TV campaigns that humanize election workers have helped inoculate voters against misinformation.

“This is an uphill battle, but we have to be proactive,” she said. “Misinformation is one of the biggest threats to American democracy we see today.”

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon’s office is spearheading #TrustedInfo2024, a new online public education effort by the National Association of Secretaries of State to promote election officials as a trusted source of election information in 2024.

His office also is planning meetings with county and city election officials and will update a “Fact and Fiction” information page on its website as false claims emerge. A new law in Minnesota will protect election workers from threats and harassment, bar people from knowingly distributing misinformation ahead of elections and criminalize people who non-consensually share deepfake images to hurt a political candidate or influence an election.

In a rural Wisconsin county north of Green Bay, Oconto County Clerk Kim Pytleski has traveled the region giving talks and presentations to small groups about voting and elections to boost voters’ trust.

“Being able to talk directly with your elections officials makes all the difference,” she said. “Being able to see that there are real people behind these processes who are committed to their jobs and want to do good work helps people understand we are here to serve them.”

Fernando reported from Chicago. Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Fortenberry was convicted in March 2022 on charges that he lied to federal authorities about an illegal $30,000 contribution to his campaign from a foreign billionaire at a 2016 Los Angeles fundraiser. He resigned his seat days later following pressure from congressional leaders and Nebraska’s GOP governor.

In its Tuesday ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote that the trial venue of Los Angeles was improper because Fortenberry made the false statements during interviews with federal agents at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in his lawyer’s office in Washington.

“Fortenberry’s convictions are reversed so that he may be retried, if at all, in a proper venue,” the decision said.

A federal jury in Los Angeles found the nine-term Republican guilty of concealing information and two counts of making false statements to authorities. He vowed to appeal from the courthouse steps.

Fortenberry and his wife, Celeste Fortenberry, praised the court’s decision.

“We are gratified by the Ninth Circuit’s decision,” Jeff Fortenberry said in a statement. “Celeste and I would like to thank everyone who has stood by us and supported us with their kindness and friendship.”

Thom Mrozek, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, noted that the appellate court left a path open for future proceedings against Fortenberry.

“The ruling does not preclude a retrial on the charges that then-Congressman Fortenberry made multiple false statements to federal agents,” Mrozek said in a statement. “We are evaluating potential next steps before deciding how best to move forward.”

Patricia Hartman, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, declined to comment on the ruling’s potential impact for federal prosecutors in Washington.

“We cannot comment on matters where we don’t have charges filed,” she said in an email Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nebraska did not immediately return a phone message.

Fortenberry was charged after denying to the FBI that he was aware he had received illicit funds from Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent.

At trial, prosecutors presented recorded phone conversations in which Fortenberry was repeatedly warned that the contributions came from Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent. The donations were funneled through three strawmen at the 2016 fundraiser in Los Angeles.

The case stemmed from an FBI investigation into $180,000 in illegal campaign contributions to four campaigns from Chagoury, who lived in Paris at the time. Chagoury admitted to the crime in 2019 and agreed to pay a $1.8 million fine.

It was the first trial of a sitting congressman since Rep. Jim Traficant, D-Ohio, was convicted of bribery and other felony charges in 2002.

The Rome Police Department quickly verified that the call was a hoax and did not send officers to the house, department spokesperson Kelly Madden said.

“I was just swatted. This is like the 8th time. On Christmas with my family here. My local police are the GREATEST and shouldn’t have to deal with this,” Greene wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

A man in New York called the Georgia suicide hotline just before 11 a.m. Monday, claiming that he had shot his girlfriend at Greene’s home and was going to kill himself next, Madden said. The call was quickly transferred to police when suicide hotline responders recognized the Georgia congresswoman’s address.

The department said it contacted Greene’s private security detail to confirm she was safe and that there was no emergency at her residence. The call was then determined to be a swatting attempt, so the police response was canceled en route, Madden explained.

“We determined before our personnel could get to her location that there was no emergency and there was no reason to respond,” she said. “Her security detail had it all under control, and there actually was nothing going on.”

The congresswoman, who represents the cities of Rome, Dalton and Calhoun in northwest Georgia, spent her first term stripped of committee assignments by the former House Democratic majority over racist comments, her embrace of conspiracy theories and her past endorsement of violence against Democratic officials. She has since gained more influence under the House’s current Republican leadership and continues to be a firebrand for the far-right.

Greene’s statement that she has been the target of roughly eight swatting attempts is accurate, Madden said. Past calls claimed that dead bodies had been found in the bath tub and in other areas of her home, which is located about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northwest of Atlanta. Police also responded last year to false reports of shootings outside her residence.

The department said it sent officers to the house in response to those prior incidents but has since formed a close working relationship with Greene’s security detail, which allows officers to better assess the threat level. The criminal investigations division is working to identify Monday’s caller and build a case, Madden said.

Another New York man was sentenced to three months in prison in August for making threatening phone calls to Greene’s Washington, D.C., office.

Republican U.S. Rep. Brandon Williams said in a post on X that he was also targeted by a swatting attempt on Christmas Day. The Cayuga County Sheriff’s office said it received a false report of a shooting at the congressman’s home in central New York and sent officers to confirm that there was no present danger. Sheriff Brian Schenck did not immediately respond to phone messages seeking further details.

“Our home was swatted this afternoon,” Williams wrote. “Thanks to the Deputies and Troopers who contacted me before arriving. They left with homemade cookies and spiced nuts! Merry Christmas everyone!”

Retirement announcements often come after the holidays, as lawmakers discuss their next steps with their families and weigh whether to continue in an increasingly dysfunctional Congress. And because Democrats need a net gain of just five seats to take control of the House in 2024, every seat is going to matter, and the dynamics can shift if a race suddenly becomes an open contest.

So far, 35 House members — 23 Democrats and 12 Republicans — have announced they are retiring or leaving the chamber to run for other offices, according to the House press gallery. That’s still behind the 49 House members who decided not to run for re-election in the midterms in 2022, a redistricting year, but it’s only one shy of the 36 who bailed before the 2020 election, with time to add more to the list.

More Democratic lawmakers in competitive districts have retired, resulting in seven open seats that the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter rates as in play.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

It was the third time in recent months the Colorado Democrat has kept the Senate working late by holding up unrelated legislation in a bid to cajole lawmakers to approve tens of billions of dollars in weaponry and economic aid for Ukraine. During a nearly hour-long, emotional speech, he called on senators to see the nearly 2-year-old conflict as a defining clash of authoritarianism against democracy and implored them to consider what it means “to be fighting on that freezing front line and not know whether we’re going to come through with the ammunition.”

Yet Congress broke for the holidays and is not expected to return for two weeks while continued aid for Ukraine has nearly been exhausted. The Biden administration is planning to send one more aid package before the new year, but says it will be the last unless Congress approves more money.

With support slipping in Congress even as conflicts and unrest rattle global security, the United States is once again struggling to assert its role in the world. Under the influence of Donald Trump, the former president who is now the Republican Party front-runner, GOP lawmakers have increasingly taken a skeptical stance toward U.S. involvement abroad, particularly when it comes to aid to Ukraine.

Leaders of traditional allies Britain and France have implored Western nations to continue their robust support, but Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is emboldened and building up resources for a fresh effort as the war heads towards its third year.

Ukraine’s lifelines to the West are also imperiled in the European Union, which sent 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) each month to ensure macroeconomic stability, pay wages and pensions, keep hospitals and schools running, provide shelter for displaced people and rebuild infrastructure destroyed in the war.

That package has now expired and the EU’s executive branch failed to produce another one for the new year when Hungary vetoed a 50 billion euro ($55 billion) package this month.

Bolstering Ukraine’s defense used to be celebrated in the U.S. Capitol as one of a few remaining bipartisan causes. But now the fate of roughly $61 billion in funding is tied to delicate policy negotiations on Capitol Hill over border and immigration changes. And in the last year, lawmakers have had to mount painstaking, round-the-clock efforts to pass even legislation that maintains basic functions of the U.S. government. Bills with ambitious changes have been almost completely out of reach for the closely divided Congress.

Still, congressional leaders are trying to rally members to address global challenges they say are among the most difficult in decades: the largest land invasion of a European nation since World War II, a war between Israel and Hamas, unrest and economic calamity driving historic levels of migration and China asserting itself as a superpower.

In the Senate, both Democratic and Republican leaders have cast the $110 billion aid package, which is attempting to address all those issues, as a potential turning point for democracy around the world. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters last week that “history will look back if we don’t support our ally in Ukraine.”

“We’re living in a time when there are all kinds of forces that are tearing at democracy, at here and abroad,” Bennet said.

In a year-end speech, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said: “From South Texas to Southeast Asia and from the Black Sea to the Red Sea, it is an historically challenging and consequential time to protect America’s interests, our allies and our own people.”

The Republican leader, a key supporter of Ukraine aid, has tried for months to build support in his party for Ukraine. But after a $6 billion military and civilian aid package for Ukraine collapsed in October, McConnell began telling top White House officials that any funding would need to be paired with border policy changes.

The White House deliberately stayed out of the negotiations until senior officials felt the time was right to do so. But senior Republicans involved in the border talks believe the administration stepped in too late, ultimately delaying the prospects of additional Ukraine aid getting approved until the new year.

Senate negotiators have had to navigate both the explosive politics of border policy as well as one of the most complex areas of American law.

“This is a tightrope, but we are still on it,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, the lead Democratic negotiator.

At one point during the negotiations, McConnell felt compelled to stress the urgency to administration officials and impose a deadline to reach a border deal in time for the agreement to be drafted into legislative provisions before the end of the year.

With the negotiations still plodding along, McConnell called White House chief of staff Jeff Zients on Dec. 7 and said a deal must be reached within five days — a message that the Kentucky Republican emphasized to President Joe Biden himself when the two men spoke later that day, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

It wouldn’t be until five days later, on Dec. 12, that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and senior White House aides came to the Capitol to participate directly in the negotiations. A White House official said the administration got involved when it did because it felt the talks had moved beyond the realm of unacceptable or unattainable measures — and to a more productive phase.

A second White House official stressed that previous legislative negotiations, such as the bipartisan infrastructure law that is now more than two years old, started similarly, with Republican and Democratic senators talking on their own and the administration stepping in once it felt the talks were ready for White House involvement.

Still, “it would be nice to have had them earlier,” Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, the chief GOP negotiator, said last week.

“We would have a lot more progress, and we would have had potential to be able to get this done by this week if they would have gotten earlier,” Lankford said. The two White House officials and the person familiar with McConnell’s phone call to Biden all spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private and ongoing negotiations.

The White House’s strategy of including Republican priorities such as Israel aid and border security in the package has also raised several thorny issues for Democrats.

Progressive lawmakers, critical of Israel’s campaign into Gaza that has killed thousands of civilians, have called for humanitarian conditions to be placed on the money for Israel. And Latino Democrats in both the Senate and House have also been critical of restrictions on asylum claims.

Any package also faces deep uncertainty in the House, where Republican Speaker Mike Johnson holds tenuous control of the closely divided chamber. Before becoming speaker in October, Johnson had repeatedly voted against aid for Ukraine, but he has surprised many by offering support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and saying he wants to find a way to approve the aid.

But Trump’s allies in the House have repeatedly tried to stop the U.S. from sending more aid to Ukraine. And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a close ally to the former president, said it was a mistake for Republicans even to insist on border policy changes because it could “give the Biden administration some kind of policy wins out on the campaign trail.”

As the border and immigration talks drag forward in the Senate, Johnson has weighed in from afar to push for sweeping measures. On social media, he has called for “transformational change to secure the border,” and pointed to a hardline bill that passed the House on a party-line vote.

As senators left Washington, they still sought to assure Ukrainians that American help was on its way. White House staff and Senate negotiations planned to work on drafting border legislation for the next two weeks in hopes that it would be ready for action when Congress returns.

Schumer told The Associated Press he was “hopeful,” but “I wouldn’t go so far as to say confident yet.” He sought to put the pressure on Republicans, saying they needed to be ready to compromise.

Yet Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican who is a Ukraine supporter, expressed confidence that Congress would act. He alluded to the words of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, another European leader who eventually elicited robust support from the U.S. to repel an invasion.

“Americans will always do the right thing,” Wicker said. “After they’ve exhausted every other alternative.”

Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

The attorneys also asserted in a filing late Saturday night that the “historical fallout is tremendous” from the four-count indictment charging Trump with plotting to overturn the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

No other former president has ever been indicted; Trump has been indicted four times, in both state and federal court, as he campaigns to reclaim the White House.

“The indictment of President Trump threatens to launch cycles of recrimination and politically motivated prosecution that will plague our Nation for many decades to come and stands likely to shatter the very bedrock of our Republic — the confidence of American citizens in an independent judicial system,” the attorneys wrote in a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

At issue before the court, which has set arguments for Jan. 9, is whether Trump is immune from prosecution for what defense lawyers say are official acts that fell within the outer perimeter of a president’s duties and responsibilities.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan earlier this month rejected that argument, siding with prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith’s team and declaring that the office of the presidency “does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.”

The appeals court’s role in the dispute is center stage after the Supreme Court on Friday rejected a request from Smith to fast-track a decision on the immunity question. After Trump appealed Chutkan’s order, Smith urged swift intervention from the high court in an effort to get a speedy decision that could keep the case on track for a trial scheduled to start on March 4.

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But with that request denied, the two sides are advancing their arguments before the appeals court, where a three-judge panel will decide as early as next month whether to affirm or overrule Chutkan’s decision.

In their latest filing, Trump’s lawyers say that all of the acts Trump is accused of — including urging the Justice Department to investigate claims of voter fraud and telling state election officials that he believed the contests had been tainted by irregularities — are “quintessential” presidential acts that protect him from prosecution.

“They all reflect President Trump’s efforts and duties, squarely as Chief Executive of the United States, to advocate for and defend the integrity of the federal election, in accord with his view that it was tainted by fraud and irregularity,” they said.

They also contend that, under the Constitution, he cannot be criminally prosecuted for conduct for which he was already impeached, but then acquitted, by Congress.

Federal prosecutors, by contrast, say Trump broke the law after the election by scheming to disrupt the Jan. 6, 2021, counting of electoral votes, including by pressing then-Vice President Mike Pence to not certify the results and by participating in a plot to organize slates of fake electors in battleground states won by Biden who would falsely attest that Trump had actually won those states.

Though Trump’s lawyers have suggested that he had a good faith basis to be concerned that fraud had affected the election, courts around the country and Trump’s own attorney general and other government officials have found no evidence that that was the case.

One of the most iconic White House photos comes, of course, from the Oval Office. President John F. Kennedy, while reading the newspaper at his historic desk in the Oval Office, his son John F. Kennedy, Jr., was photographed under the desk with the front trap door open.

In a recent tour of the White House with Architectural Digest, President Joe Biden showed off his version of the Oval Office, which every president gets to design themselves, and showed off a picture of his grandson Beau recreating the iconic image (it happens at around the two-minute mark).

The Resolute Desk, which was gifted to the White House in 1880 by Queen Victoria of Britain, has been used by nearly every president since then.

Biden also showed off other interesting artifacts he keeps in the Oval, including a moon rock and a signed rugby ball of the All-Irish rugby team, given to him by two of his cousins on the team.

The president then took his tour over to his private office in the West Wing, where he said he likes to go if he has to work on speeches.

In his private office, Biden has framed drawings kids have sent to him. The president said he takes a picture of the drawings on his wall and sends the photo to the young artists.

“I think they’re really neat,” Biden said.

At the end of his White House tour, Biden stopped in the Cabinet Room to show off the homemade chocolate chip cookies available for visitors. A tradition the president has brought with him to his official residence.

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House lawmakers proceeded not only to oust the GOP speaker, they also punished their own colleagues with censures and expulsion, launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and were barely able to conduct the basics of governing by keeping federal offices from shuttering.

While this first year of the 118th Congress was a historic one, thanks to the dizzying turmoil coming from the Republicans on the House side of the Capitol, next year is headed toward more of the same. With just 27 bills and resolutions signed into law, not counting a few board appointments, it’s among the most do-nothing sessions of Congress in recent times.

“This fall has been a very actively stupid political environment,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry, the bow-tie-wearing Republican from North Carolina, who emerged as a voice of reason as the interim House speaker leading the chamber during the upheaval.

While Americans typically give low marks to Congress, as the branch of government closest to the people, it’s still the main venue the U.S. relies on, at times more so than the presidency or the courts, to work out the nation’s problems and challenges.

The need for a functioning Congress — what one scholar calls “the place” where it all happens — is even more apparent heading into a tumultuous presidential election year and with hot wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East.

“People’s expectations for this Congress were so low, and so just doing the bare minimum seems like a passing grade,” said Philip Wallach, author of “Why Congress” and a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington.

He said he’s grading this Congress on a curve. “I see this as symptoms rather than causes — symptoms of a lot of sort of institutional and cultural breakdowns or decay that have led to a lot of really bad feelings and a lot of desire to lash out across the aisle,” he said.

Next year has its own challenges ahead with Biden facing a potential rematch against Donald Trump, the former president and Republican party front-runner. Trump’s loss in 2020 resulted in his supporters laying siege to the U.S. Capitol, and a charge of insurrection led to his second impeachment, for which he was acquitted by the Senate. It now threatens his removal from the Colorado ballot.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said “the dark cloud of Donald Trump looms” as the GOP tries to find its way.

“We’re going to persevere,” Schumer said in an interview with The Associated Press, listing bills to lower the price of insulin, ensure child safety online and others he is lining up for the new year.

While the House Republicans, in majority control, led the chaos, including the removal of indicted GOP Rep. George Santos of New York, the Senate, despite its proclivity toward moderation, was not immune to the dysfunction.

One single Republican, Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, threw the Defense Department into crisis by blocking the promotions of hundreds of military officers, including some of the nation’s most essential four-star generals. He finally relented just before the holiday recess.

And as Ukraine fights for its political survival against the Russian invasion, senators tried, and failed, to broker a U.S.-Mexico border security deal demanded by Republicans in exchange for providing more American military aid to the Western ally — despite a personal visit from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleading to help.

“I’m not very happy with how productive the Senate has been this year, and hopefully it will get better,” acknowledged Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

Trump’s influence is especially felt in the border security talks as the former president intensifies his long history of lashing out at immigrants to the U.S. in alarming language evocative of World War II. It’s putting pressure on his party as Republicans follow his lead.

The chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said he’s “heartsick” Congress failed to approve Ukraine aid before year’s end. But he remains confident it will get done in the new year.

Heading into 2024, new House Speaker Mike Johnson will start the year under the same pressure to pass legislation to keep the government funded, starting Jan. 19, that led to then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster after he brokered a budget-cutting debt deal with Biden.

The Republican-era speakers are being forced to relinquish control, a bottom-up approach, as the hard-right Freedom Caucus and its allies, many aligned with Trump, refuse to go along with compromises emanating from the Speaker’s office.

The GOP’s right flank is fueling the revolt, deploying rarely used procedural tactics to advance their own ideas and halt those of Republican leadership.

Much like the “motion to vacate,” which was used to eject McCarthy, the right wing is relying on privileged resolutions to censure Democrats and try to impeach Biden and others, seizing control of the House floor.

And in a series of stunning rebukes to GOP leadership, enough Republican lawmakers opposed procedural rules to advance the few major bills that did become law this year — to keep the government running and authorize military programs — that the Republican speakers had no choice but to rush to Democrats for help.

“The speakers are just trying to cope,” Wallach said.

While House Republicans passed a strict border security bill that the Senate refused to consider, Johnson, in a sign of challenges ahead, urged Biden on Thursday to act on his own, without Congress, to stem record numbers of migrant arrivals.

“It must start with you,” Johnson wrote. “I urge you to immediately take executive actions.”

It’s a shift from Nancy Pelosi’s run as speaker, when the powerful gavel wielded political fear and discipline, but also legislative results. The last Congress, among the most productive in decades, passed more than 300 pieces of legislation over two years, including major infrastructure and climate change bills.

By year’s end, it wasn’t just the ousted McCarthy calling it quits, but dozens of lawmakers heading for the exits.

After his stint as interim speaker, McHenry, a powerful committee chairman with allies across Congress, promptly announced he, too, would be retiring at the end of his term, as his far-right colleagues claim increasing power.

“We need people to be realists, not just blind ideologues,” he said.

Associated Press writer Stephen Groves contributed to this report.

The issue will now be decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has signaled it will act quickly to decide the case. Smith had cautioned that even a rapid appellate decision might not get to the Supreme Court in time for review and final word before the court’s traditional summer break.

Smith had pressed the Supreme Court to intervene over concerns that the legal fight over the issue could delay the start of Trump’s trial, now scheduled for March 4, beyond next year’s presidential election.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has put the case on hold while Trump pursues his claim in higher courts that he is immune from prosecution. Chutkan raised the possibility of keeping the March date if the case promptly returns to her court.

She already has rejected the Trump team’s arguments that an ex-president could not be prosecuted over acts that fall within the official duties of the job.

“Former presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability,” Chutkan wrote in her Dec. 1 ruling. “Defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts undertaken while in office.”

The Supreme Court separately has agreed to hear a case over the charge of obstruction of an official proceeding that has been brought against Trump as well as more than 300 of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In the immunity case, Smith had tried to persuade the justices to take up the matter directly, bypassing the appeals court.

“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin,” prosecutors wrote.

Underscoring the urgency for prosecutors in securing a quick resolution that can push the case forward, Smith and his team wrote: “It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected.”

Justice Department policy prohibits the indictment of a sitting president. Though there’s no such bar against prosecution for a former commander in chief, lawyers for Trump say that he cannot be charged for actions that fell within his official duties as president — a claim that prosecutors have vigorously rejected.

Trump faces charges accusing him of working to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden before the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol. He has denied any wrongdoing.

The high court still could act quickly once the appeals court issues its decision. A Supreme Court case usually lasts several months, but on rare occasions, the justices shift into high gear.

Nearly 50 years ago, the justices acted within two months of being asked to force President Richard Nixon to turn over Oval Office recordings in the Watergate scandal. The tapes were then used later in 1974 in the corruption prosecutions of Nixon’s former aides.

It took the high court just a few days to effectively decide the 2000 presidential election for Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore.

The abortion landscape has been in flux since the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, which touched off a round of abortion policy changes and new litigation about them.

There are still looming ballot questions and court decisions. And lawmakers could tweak current abortion laws.

Here’s a look at what to know.

Abortion will be on the ballot in 2024

Since Roe was overturned, abortion-related questions have been on the ballot in seven states – and the abortion rights side has prevailed on all of them.

Legislatures in the East Coast blue states of Maryland and New York have already put questions on the November 2024 ballot to amend the state constitutions to include rights regarding reproductive health care.

Both states already allow abortion through viability, which is generally considered to be about 24 weeks gestational age.

While those are the only states where ballot questions are a sure thing, they’re possible in several others.

There are pushes to add constitutional rights to abortion in Minnesota, Montana, Nevada and Virginia, where it’s legal in most cases already; and in Arizona, Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota, where heavier restrictions are in place.

In Missouri, where abortion is banned throughout pregnancy, there are dueling ballot measures to expand abortion access. One would bar the government from banning it during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. Another, from moderate Republicans, would make it legal but for fewer weeks.

In Colorado, where abortion is legal in most cases, there are pushes for ballot measures both to enshrine abortion rights and to roll them back.

Lawmakers in Iowa, where abortion restrictions have been put on hold by a court, are pushing for an amendment that would clear the way for a ban. There could be a similar effort in Pennsylvania, where abortion is legal until viability.

And it’s still in the courts

For nearly 50 years, abortion legal questions were waged mostly in federal courts.

But the U.S. Supreme Court finding that there’s no national right to abortion directed the latest generation of legal battles over abortion mostly to state court.

Some of the big issues that are yet to be decided:

Women in Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas are suing over being denied abortion while facing harrowing pregnancy complications. The Texas Supreme Court heard arguments in a similar case in November, and this month it denied a woman’s request for an immediate abortion, finding that her life was not in danger, so she did qualify under the exceptions in state law.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up the question of whether the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone was appropriate.

State courts are considering several challenges to abortion bans and restrictions, including in Iowa, Montana, Utah and Wyoming, where courts have blocked enforcement of the measures.

In Idaho, a federal judge in November blocked enforcement of the state’s first-in-the-nation “abortion trafficking” ban while courts sort out the constitutionality of the measure.

Abortion could also be on the legislative agenda

Legislative sessions begin in January or February in most states, and there haven’t been many abortion-related bills filed yet.

But activists on both sides anticipate that bills will emerge.

Inrgid Duran, the legislative director at National Right to Life, said other states could pursue provisions like Idaho’s to make it illegal to transport a minor for an abortion without parental consent. Enforcement in Idaho is on hold.

She also said there could be more efforts to fund organizations, sometimes called crisis pregnancy centers, that seek to dissuade abortion, and more measures to clarify abortion definitions.

“The pro-life movement has faced challenges before and will continue to face challenges,” she said. “But it’s not going to deter us from continuing to do what is right by advocating for the vulnerable.”

Some conservative groups are also prioritizing providing more resources to support women during pregnancy and after birth, including with tax credits or grants to boost organizations that encourage women not to seek abortions.

Missouri lawmakers have introduced measures that would make it possible to file homicide charges against women who have abortions. Most major anti-abortion groups oppose that approach, which has been introduced in other states but never gained traction.

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Gray, 81, said serving in the District government has been one of the greatest honors of his life in a statement, but the mission to make the District a better place will never be complete.

“I will continue to be an advocate for our city and the people who call it home, but the time has come for me to pursue that as a private citizen,” Gray said.

Gray plans to serve out the rest of his term as Ward 7 Council Member until it ends in January 2025.

Gray said his final year in office won’t be different than any others.

“The council member has occupied a big space in Ward 7 politics for a long time,” said Mayor Muriel Bowser, who defeated Gray when he ran for reelection as mayor in 2014.

“I think he can look back on lots of years in elective office where he’s contributed a lot to the District … I know those decisions aren’t easy to make, and I wish him well,” she added.

Gray served as D.C.’s mayor from 2011 to 2015 after running on a “One City” platform aiming to unite the diverse District. He lost his 2014 reelection campaign amid a long-running federal probe into a shadow campaign scandal that helped elect Gray mayor in 2010. Prosecutors ended that probe without charging Gray.

Two years later, he returned to elected office as the Ward 7 Council Member. According to his website biography, he pushed for school reform and government transparency.

In 2020, Gray won the Democratic primary with about 48% of the vote in his 2020 primary, ensuring an easy path to reelection to the council.

Gray had a “mild stroke” in 2021. According to The Washington Post, other council members became concerned about his health in the following months.

Ward 7 voters will choose a new representative at the June 4 primary and Nov. 5 general election next year. Longtime political analyst and former News4 reporter Tom Sherwood said he expects at least a dozen people to run for Gray’s seat. Even before his announcement, six candidates had filed run for the seat. Bowser said Wednesday that she will consider whether or not to endorse a candidate.

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The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

“A majority of the court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” the court wrote in its 4-3 decision.

Colorado’s highest court overturned a ruling from a district court judge who found that Trump incited an insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but said he could not be barred from the ballot because it was unclear that the provision was intended to cover the presidency.

The court stayed its decision until Jan. 4, or until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the case. Colorado officials say the issue must be settled by Jan. 5, the deadline for the state to print its presidential primary ballots.

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” wrote the court’s majority. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

Trump’s attorneys had promised to appeal any disqualification immediately to the nation’s highest court, which has the final say about constitutional matters.

Trump’s legal spokeswoman Alina Habba said in a statement Tuesday night: “This ruling, issued by the Colorado Supreme Court, attacks the very heart of this nation’s democracy. It will not stand, and we trust that the Supreme Court will reverse this unconstitutional order.”

Trump didn’t mention the decision during a rally Tuesday evening in Waterloo, Iowa, but his campaign sent out a fundraising email citing what it called a “tyrannical ruling.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel labeled the decision “Election interference” and said the RNC’s legal team intends to help Trump fight the ruling.

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Trump lost Colorado by 13 percentage points in 2020 and doesn’t need the state to win next year’s presidential election. But the danger for the former president is that more courts and election officials will follow Colorado’s lead and exclude Trump from must-win states.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed nationally to disqualify Trump under Section 3, which was designed to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War. It bars from office anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, and has been used only a handful of times since the decade after the Civil War.

The Colorado case is the first where the plaintiffs succeeded. After a weeklong hearing in November, District Judge Sarah B. Wallace found that Trump indeed had “engaged in insurrection” by inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and her ruling that kept him on the ballot was a fairly technical one.

Trump’s attorneys convinced Wallace that, because the language in Section 3 refers to “officers of the United States” who take an oath to “support” the Constitution, it must not apply to the president, who is not included as an “officer of the United States” elsewhere in the document and whose oath is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution.

The provision also says offices covered include senator, representative, electors of the president and vice president, and all others “under the United States,” but doesn’t name the presidency.

The state’s highest court didn’t agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine the framers of the amendment, fearful of former Confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.

“You’d be saying a rebel who took up arms against the government couldn’t be a county sheriff, but could be the president,” attorney Jason Murray said in arguments before the court in early December.

Biden and Chief Justice John Roberts were among who spoke at the funeral held at Washington National Cathedral. O’Connor retired from the high court in 2006 after more than two decades, and died Dec. 1 at age 93.

“Sandra Day O’Connor, daughter of the American West, was a pioneer in her own right — breaking down the barriers in the legal and political worlds and the nation’s consciousness,” Biden said. “To her, the Supreme Court was the bedrock — the bedrock of America.”

Biden, referring to O’Connor’s trailblazing career in the courts, added: “How she embodied such attributes under such pressure and scrutiny helped empower generations of women in every part of American life.”

In his eulogy, Roberts also paid tribute to his late colleague’s barrier-breaking career.

“Sandra Day O’Connor had to study and launch a career in the law when most men in the established profession did not want women lawyers — let alone judges,” Roberts said.

Her life’s work, he said, is measured by the fact that “younger people today cannot understand what it was like before Justice O’Connor and what now seems a distant past.”

“She was so successful that the barriers she broke down are almost unthinkable today,” Roberts added.

O’Connor was nominated in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan. Largely unknown on the national scene until her appointment, she would come to be referred to by commentators as the nation’s most powerful woman.

O’Connor wielded considerable influence on the nine-member court, generally favoring states in disputes with the federal government and often siding with police when they faced claims of violating people’s rights. Her impact could perhaps best be seen, though, on the court’s rulings on abortion. She twice helped form the majority in decisions that upheld and reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, the decision that said women have a constitutional right to abortion.

Thirty years after that decision, a more conservative court overturned Roe, and the opinion was written by the man who took her place, Justice Samuel Alito.

O’Connor was a top-ranked graduate of Stanford’s law school in 1952, but quickly discovered that most large law firms at the time did not hire women. She nevertheless built a career that included service as a member of the Arizona Legislature and state judge before her appointment to the Supreme Court at age 51.

When she first arrived, there wasn’t even a women’s bathroom anywhere near the courtroom. That was soon rectified, but she remained the court’s only woman until 1993.

In a speech before her casket lay in repose Monday, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor remembered O’Connor as a trailblazer and a “living example that women could take on any challenge, could more than hold their own in any spaces dominated by men and could do so with grace.”

news Dec 1, 2023

Sandra Day O'Connor's legacy on the bench includes deciding votes on affirmative action, abortion

sandra day o'connor Dec 18, 2023

The late Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, honored as trailblazer

O’Connor retired at age 75, citing her husband’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. She later expressed regret that a woman had not been chosen to replace her, but would live to see a record four women serving on the high court.

President Barack Obama awarded O’Connor the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

She died in Phoenix of complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness. Her survivors include a brother, three sons and grandchildren.

The family has asked that donations be made to iCivics, the group she founded to promote civics education.

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Associated Press writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report.

Hindle was another replacement in what was a revolving door of county election officials across Nevada as the 2022 midterms approached. He had just unseated the interim clerk, who had stepped in after the prior clerk resigned.

But Hindle’s tenure in the heavily Republican county is part of a trend across battleground states where fake electors have retained influence over elections heading into 2024.

He is among six Republicans who were indicted this month by Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford for their alleged roles in attempting to overturn the election outcome in the swing state, which Democrat Joe Biden carried by more than 33,000 votes over the GOP president.

Hindle and the others, who are scheduled to be arraigned Monday, coordinated with Trump’s team directly, according to transcripts of testimony before the U.S. House committee that investigated the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

Hindle told The Associated Press he will continue running local elections despite the charges. He declined to comment further.

Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania also have fake electors who are involved in the 2024 election.

The list includes Bob Spindell, who remains on Wisconsin’s bipartisan election commission despite calls from Democrats for him to be removed. A Republican legislative leader who appointed Spindell said last week that he will not rescind the appointment, calling the fake elector scheme a “failed legal strategy” and “not a sinister plot to overturn an election.”

Spindell and the fake electors in Wisconsin agreed to a settlement this month conceding that their actions were “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”

In Arizona, fake electors Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern are Republican legislators with powerful roles. Hoffman is chairman of the Senate Elections Committee, and Kern leads the Judiciary Committee. The Arizona attorney general is investigating the role of fake electors; no one has been charged.

Hoffman’s position makes him a gatekeeper for virtually all election-related legislation under consideration. That has become especially contentious in the Western swing state where Republicans have been aggressive in trying to overturn or cast doubt on Democratic victories.

The FBI in 2022 interviewed Sam DeMarco, a member of the three-member election board in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County. Despite the subpoenas served to DeMarco and that state’s other GOP electors, they have faced no legal consequences after qualifying their electoral votes as “conditional” in case Trump had prevailed in court. DeMarco has often been critical of Trump’s influence on the state party.

Michigan is a rare example where a fake elector has lost influence due to charges. In July, the Michigan Bureau of Elections barred Shelby Township Clerk Stan Grot from running any elections as the state attorney general brought criminal charges against him and 15 other Republicans for their roles as fake electors.

In Nevada, Storey County’s 3,750 active registered voters represent a speck of the state’s electorate. Even while Hindle and others remain in their roles as elections officials and legislators, state election officials and state and federal courts can provide checks on their authority, said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar’s office, which runs elections across the state, did not respond to questions about whether the indictment could affect Hindle’s elections role.

But Hindle’s influence does not stop at the county line. He is one of three fake electors involved in the state GOP’s organization of a party-run caucus in early February that is scheduled just days after the state-run presidential primary. The Nevada GOP has come under intense scrutiny for confusing voters with the dueling elections and for adopting rules that many say benefit Trump over other Republican candidates.

The Nevada GOP did not respond to a request for comment on whether the indictment affects members’ abilities to organize the caucus.

The Nevada Republican chairman, Michael McDonald, one of the indicted fake electors, has said the state party is bypassing the primary because the Democratic-controlled Legislature did not consider the Republican governor’s proposals for a voter ID requirement and other measures.

On Sunday, several of Nevada’s fake electors attended a Trump rally in Reno, where the former president thanked three of them personally, including Hindle and McDonald, while saying they were treated unfairly. He did not mention the specific charges.

McDonald introduced Trump at the rally, while encouraging the crowd to advocate and vote for Trump at the party-run caucus. He ended the speech with the same pledge he made at an October rally, before his indictment.

“You give us a fair election, I’ll give you the next president of the United States — Donald J. Trump,” he said.

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Associated Press writers Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix, Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.

The Biden administration, which is becoming more deeply involved in the talks, is facing pressure from all sides over any deal. Negotiators had hoped to reach a framework by the weekend, but that’s highly unlikely. Republican leaders signaled that without bill text, an upcoming procedural would likely fail.

The talks come as Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner in 2024, delivered alarming anti-immigrant remarks about “blood” purity over the weekend, echoing Nazi slogans of World War II to cheers at a political rally.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about the record numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. without immediate legal status.

Speaking in the early-voting state of New Hampshire, Trump, drew on words similar to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kempf” as the former U.S. president berated Biden’s team over the flow of migrants. “All over the world they’re pouring into our country,” Trump said.

Throughout the weekend, senators and top Biden officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, have been working intently behind closed doors at the Capitol to strike a border deal, which Republicans in Congress are demanding in exchange for any help for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs. Mayorkas arrived for more talks late Sunday afternoon.

“One step at a time,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., as he and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent, headed into talks.

The senators have insisted they are making progress, as they narrow on proposals to limit migrants from entering at the U.S.-Mexico border, but other influential lawmakers are doubtful any deal can be approved by Congress before year’s end.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said senators don’t want to be “jammed” by a last-minute compromise reached by negotiators.

“We’re not anywhere close to a deal,” Graham, whose staff has joined the talks, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Graham predicted the deliberations will go into next year. He was among 15 Republican senators who wrote to GOP leadership urging them to wait until the House returns Jan. 8 to discuss the issue.

Top GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell also signaled in their own letter Sunday that talks still had a ways to go, and that this week’s planned procedural vote would likely fail.

The Biden administration faces an increasingly difficult political situation as global migration is on a historic rise, and many migrants are fleeing persecution or leaving war-torn countries for the United States, with smugglers capitalizing on the situation.

The president is being berated daily by Republicans, led by Trump, as border crossings have risen to levels that make even some in Biden’s own Democratic Party concerned.

But the Biden administration, in considering revival of Trump-like policies, is drawing outrage from Democrats and immigrant advocates who say the ideas would gut the U.S. asylum system and spark fears of deportations from immigrants already living in the U.S.

The White House’s failure to fully engage Latino lawmakers in the talks until recently, or ensure a seat at the negotiating table, has led to a near revolt from leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

“It’s unacceptable,” said Rep, Nanette Barragan, D-Calif., chair of the Hispanic Caucus, on social media. “We represent border districts & immigrant communities that will be severely impacted by extreme changes to border policy.”

Progressives in Congress are also warning the Biden administration off any severe policies that would bar immigrants a legal path to enter the country. “No backroom deal on the border without the involvement of the House, the House Hispanic Caucus, Latino senators is going to pass,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., on Fox News.

White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, along with Mayorkas, heard from leading Latino lawmakers during a conference call with the Hispanic Caucus on Saturday afternoon.

The senators and the White House appear to be focused on ways to limit the numbers of migrants who are eligible for asylum at the border, primarily by toughening the requirements to qualify for their cases to go forward.

The talks have also focused removing some migrants who have already been living in the U.S. without full legal status, and on ways to temporarily close the U.S.-Mexico border to some crossings if they hit a certain metric, or threshold. Arrests of migrants have topped 10,000 on some days.

There has also been discussion about limiting existing programs that have allowed groups of arrivals from certain countries to temporarily enter the U.S. while they await proceedings about their claims. Decades ago, those programs welcomed Vietnamese arrivals and others, and have since been opened to Ukrainians, Afghans and a group that includes Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Haitians.

Meanwhile, Biden’s massive $110 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other security needs is hanging in the balance.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a dramatic, if disappointing, visit to Washington last week to plead with Congress and the White House for access to U.S. weaponry as his country fights against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Many, but not all, Republicans have soured on helping Ukraine fight Russia, taking their cues from Trump. The former president praised Putin, quoting the Russian leader during Saturday’s rally while slamming the multiple investigations against him as politically motivated — including the federal indictment against Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election that resulted in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States said Sunday she believes in “Christmas miracles” and won’t give up hope.

Of Biden’s package, some $61 billion would go toward Ukraine, about half of the money for the U.S. Defense Department to buy and replenish tanks, artillery and other weaponry sent to the war effort.

“All the eyes are on Congress now,” the envoy, Oksana Markarova, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“We can just only pray and hope that there will be resolve there, and that the deal that they will be able to reach will allow the fast decisions also on the support to Ukraine,” she said.

The House already left for the holiday recess, but Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is being kept aware of the negotiations in the Senate.

Ziegler is accused of raping a woman with whom he and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, had a prior consensual sexual relationship, according to police records.

“Christian Ziegler has engaged in conduct that renders him unfit for the office,” the party’s motion to censure Ziegler said, according to a document posted on the social media platform X by Lee County GOP Chairman Michael Thomason.

Ziegler tried to defend himself during the closed-door meeting, but the party board quickly took the action against him, Thompson said.

“Ziegler on soap box trying to defend himself, not working,” Thompson posted before confirming the votes.

The party’s executive committee will hold another vote in the future on whether to remove Ziegler.

The Sarasota Police Department is investigating the woman’s accusation that Ziegler raped her at her apartment in October. Police documents say the Zieglers and the woman had planned a sexual threesome that day, but Bridget Ziegler was unable to make it. The accuser says Christian Ziegler arrived anyway and assaulted her.

Christian Ziegler has not been charged with a crime and says he is innocent, contending the encounter was consensual.

The accusation also has caused turmoil for Bridget Ziegler, an elected member of the Sarasota School Board, though she is not accused of any crime. On Tuesday the board voted to ask her to resign. She refused.

The couple have been outspoken opponents of LGBTQ+ rights, and their relationship with another woman has sparked criticism and accusations of hypocrisy.

In addition to DeSantis, Republican Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz and Florida’s Republican House and Senate leaders have all called for Christian Ziegler’s resignation.