Senate leaders struck a deal on Friday to delay former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial for two weeks, giving President Biden time to install his cabinet and begin moving a legislative agenda before they begin a historic proceeding to try his predecessor for “incitement of insurrection.”
The House still plans to deliver its impeachment charge at 7 p.m. Monday evening and senators will be sworn in for the trial the following day. But Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said the chamber would then pause until the week of Feb. 8 to give the prosecution and defense time to draft and exchange written legal briefs.
“During that period, the Senate will continue to do other business for the American people, such as cabinet nominations and the Covid relief bill, which would provide relief for millions of Americans who are suffering during this pandemic,” Mr. Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor.
The delay represented a compromise between the two party leaders in the Senate. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, had initially proposed delaying another week, until Feb. 15, to get the trial underway in person. He had cited the need for Mr. Trump’s legal team, hired only on Thursday, to prepare to give a full defense.
Democrats were weighing competing interests, including Mr. Biden’s agenda, a desire to dispatch with the trial of his predecessor quickly and to force Republican senators to go on the record with regard to Mr. Trump’s actions as soon as possible after the Jan. 6 siege at the Capitol, carried out by a mob of his supporters whom he had exhorted to fight back against his election defeat.
Mr. Biden, who has tried to steer clear of the trial, said earlier on Friday that he was in favor of a delay as the Senate worked to confirm members of his administration and start considering another coronavirus relief bill, his top priority.
“The more time we have to get up and running to meet these crises, the better,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s trial, the second in a little over a year, presents a number of novel questions for senators. No president has ever been impeached twice and no former president has ever been put on trial.
Doug Andres, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, said the leader was “glad” Democrats had agreed to a slower timeline.
“Especially given the fast and minimal process in the House, Republicans set out to ensure the Senate’s next steps will respect former President Trump’s rights and due process, the institution of the Senate, and the office of the presidency,” he said. “That goal has been achieved. This is a win for due process and fairness.”
Rudolph W. Giuliani, former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, conceded on Friday night that an associate had sent an email to campaign officials asking that Mr. Giuliani be paid $20,000 a day for his work after the Nov. 3 election, but he insisted he was unaware of it at the time.
Mr. Giuliani acknowledged in a brief phone interview that his associate, Maria Ryan, had sent the email shortly after Election Day. But he maintained that she consulted with another associate, Larry Levy, about what Mr. Giuliani should ask for from the campaign while Mr. Giuliani was out of town.
A copy of the email, reviewed by the Times, showed that she sent it from a Giuliani Partners email account.
“Mr. Giuliani began working the case in the wee hours of the morning on November 4,” Ms. Ryan wrote. “He has a team in Washington working out of rented hotel rooms.”
She wrote that the company was working on an engagement letter, and that instead of $2,000 an hour, “we will contract for $20,000 a day which will include all of the expenses for Mr. Giuliani and his staff.” The request was sent to at least three campaign officials, at a time when the campaign was raising expansive amounts of money for a legal fund to fight the election results.
When the Times asked about the fee request in November, Mr. Giuliani denied it. He has continued to maintain it was a “lie” that he requested such a fee from the president, saying it as recently as Friday afternoon on his radio show. “I did not do that,” he said.
In the phone interview on Friday night, after the Times asked his spokeswoman about Ms. Ryan’s email, Mr. Giuliani said that he told both the White House chief-of-staff, Mark Meadows, and Mr. Trump, of the $20,000 amount, “It’s ridiculous, I don’t want to be paid.”
Mr. Giuliani said he did not recall precisely when he had that conversation. And it was unclear whether he was aware that Ms. Ryan had sent the email when the Times first asked him about the fee request.
“I never had a single expectation of being paid a penny,” Mr. Giuliani said, adding that he’s had a few expenses reimbursed but nothing more. He faulted Mr. Trump’s other advisers and blasted them as “incompetent” in the lead-up to the election.
“I feel extremely bad that I’m portrayed as some kind of money-grubbing ambulance chaser,” Mr. Giuliani said.
“I represented him out of my sense of commitment,” he continued. “I didn’t see anything about this that was going to lead to great wealth. I did see a lot about this that was going to lead to great torture.”
After issuing a series of executive orders on his first full day in office and pledging a “full-scale wartime effort” to combat the coronavirus pandemic, President Biden on Friday continued apace with two more executive orders aimed at steering additional federal aid to families struggling to afford food amid the pandemic and helping workers stay safe on the job.
Mr. Biden, who has vowed to use the power of the presidency to help mitigate economic fallout from the pandemic, directed the Treasury Department to find ways to deliver stimulus checks to millions of eligible Americans who have not yet received the funds.
Mr. Biden also signed a second executive order that will lay the groundwork for the federal government to institute a $15 an hour minimum wage for its employees and contract workers, while making it easier for federal workers to bargain collectively for better pay and benefits.
“The crisis is only deepening,” Mr. Biden said during remarks at the White House, calling the need to help those out of work and unable to afford enough food “an economic imperative.”
“We have the tools to help people. So let’s use the tools. All of them. Now,” he said.
The executive actions are part of an attempt by Mr. Biden to override his predecessor, former President Donald J. Trump, on issues pertaining to workers, the economy and the federal safety net. The orders Mr. Biden signed on Friday are a break from the Trump administration’s attempts to limit the scope of many federal benefits that Trump officials said created a disincentive for Americans to work.
The orders follow an ambitious raft of measures Mr. Biden took on his first full day in office, on Thursday. He signed a string of executive orders and presidential directives aimed at combating the worst public health crisis in a century, including new requirements for masks on interstate planes, trains and buses and for international travelers to quarantine after arriving in the United States.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: Biden’s Executive Orders
On his first day, President Biden reversed some of his predecessor’s most divisive policies. But governing by decree can be fraught.During the presidential campaign, he had called for using the Korean War-era law to increase the nation’s supply of essential items like coronavirus tests and personal protective equipment. On Thursday, he signed an executive order directing federal agencies to make use of it to increase production of materials needed for vaccines.
With thousands of Americans dying every day from Covid-19, a national death toll that exceeds 400,000 and a new, more infectious variant of the virus spreading quickly, the pandemic poses the most pressing challenge of Mr. Biden’s early days in office. How he handles it will set the tone for how Americans view his administration going forward, as Mr. Biden himself acknowledged.
In a 200-page document released earlier Thursday called “National Strategy for the Covid-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness,” the new administration outlined the kind of centralized federal response that Democrats have long demanded and that Mr. Trump had refused.
But the Biden plan is in some respects overly optimistic and in others not ambitious enough, some experts say. It is not clear how he would enforce the quarantine requirement. And his promise to inject 100 million vaccines in his first hundred days is aiming low, since those 100 days should see twice that number of doses available.
Efforts to untangle and speed up the distribution of vaccines — perhaps the most pressing challenge for the Biden administration that is also the most promising path forward — will be a desperate race against time, as states across the country have warned that they could run out of doses as early as this weekend.
Maggie Astor and Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
The Senate on Friday confirmed Lloyd J. Austin III as defense secretary, filling a critical national security position in President Biden’s cabinet and elevating him as the first Black Pentagon chief.
The 93-2 vote came a day after Congress granted General Austin, a retired four-star Army general, a special waiver to hold the post, which is required for any defense secretary who has been out of active-duty military service for fewer than seven years. It reflected a bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that it was urgent for Mr. Biden to have his defense pick rapidly installed, a step normally taken on a new president’s first day.
“It’s an extraordinary, historic moment,” said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “A significant portion of our armed forces today are African-Americans or Latinos, and now they can see themselves at the very top of the Department of Defense, which makes real the notion of opportunity.”
Mr. Austin, 67, is the only African-American to have led U.S. Central Command, the military’s marquee combat command, with responsibility for Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria. He retired in 2016 after 41 years in the military, and is widely respected across the Army.
Lawmakers in both parties initially had been uneasy at the prospect of granting General Austin an exception to the statutory bar against recently retired military personnel serving as Pentagon chiefs, a law intended to maintain civilian control of the military. They had already done so four years ago for President Donald J. Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, a retired four-star Marine officer, and many had vowed not to do so again.
But facing intense pressure from officials from Mr. Biden’s transition team and top Democrats, and after receiving assurances from General Austin that he was committed to the principle of civilian control, lawmakers rallied behind a barrier-shattering nominee. Two Republicans, Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Mike Lee of Utah, voted against the confirmation.
Even though 43 percent of the 1.3 million men and women on active duty in the United States are people of color, the leaders at the top of the military’s chain of command have remained remarkably white and male. When President Barack Obama selected General Austin to lead the United States Central Command, he became one of the highest-ranked Black men in the military, second only to Colin L. Powell, who had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Mr. Austin will be the first Black Pentagon chief since the position was created in 1947 — just nine months before President Harry S. Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, Representative Anthony Brown, Democrat of Maryland and a Black retired colonel in the Army Reserve, noted.
“Secretary Austin’s confirmation is a historic first and symbolizes the culmination of the nearly 75-year march toward genuine integration of the department,” Mr. Brown said. “He is well positioned to draw upon his experiences as a seasoned military commander, respected leader and as a Black man who grew up amid segregation to drive progress forward as our next Secretary of Defense.”
The White House has ordered the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to work with the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the threat from domestic violent extremism.
The new task for the intelligence community comes only days after Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, pledged to members of Congress during her confirmation hearing that she would do just such an assessment.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, announced the assessment at her regular briefing. It is the second request to Ms. Haines in as many days. On Thursday, the White House ordered a new intelligence look at Russia and the broad hack of government computers.
This intelligence assessment, looking at domestic extremism, is less of an area of expertise for the intelligence agencies but shows the Biden administration’s focus on homegrown threats.
“This assessment will draw on the analysis from across the government and, as appropriate, nongovernmental organizations,” Ms. Psaki said. “The key point here is that we want fact-based analysis upon which we can shape policy.”
The request will be tricky for the intelligence agencies, which by law cannot collect information on Americans, and must work with the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.
But senior intelligence officials have said privately that just as the F.B.I. and C.I.A. began to work more closely on the threat of global terrorism after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, there is more the intelligence agencies can do to improve cooperation and information sharing with domestic law enforcement agencies.
With domestic violent groups, the main focus of the intelligence agencies is to monitor the efforts of foreign powers, including Russia and others, to push the groups to more extremist positions.
While traditional intelligence teams focused on Russia have tracked Moscow’s work in recent years, the C.I.A. also has officers in its counterterrorism mission center who specialize in tracking racially-motivated violent extremists overseas.
As President Donald J. Trump boarded the plane home to Florida on Wednesday, he cast his administration’s policy achievements as sweeping, ambitious and, above all, enduring — but the undoing of his legacy was just about to begin.
“We’ve accomplished so much together,” he said to a crowd of his supporters. “We were not a regular administration.”
Many of Mr. Trump’s proudest accomplishments were not written in law but instead rammed through via executive fiat, making them vulnerable to reversal the moment he left office.
And that is just what happened. In his first 72 hours in office, President Biden cranked out about two dozen executive orders, using the process not to build a legacy, as Mr. Trump had attempted, but to demolish.
Mr. Trump did not master the levers of power and congressional negotiation, nor did he have much interest in the history of his office, which offered lessons on the pitfalls of relying on go-it-alone presidential power.
In a remarkable interview 10 days before his death in 1973, former President Lyndon B. Johnson explained why he had resisted the temptation to ram through landmark civil rights reforms by using executive orders. Instead, he pursued the more difficult legislative path, seeking to armor his efforts with the force of law.
Black civil rights leaders “wanted to me to issue an executive order, and proclaim this by presidential edict,” said Mr. Johnson, speaking of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
But Mr. Johnson, a skilled legislative strategist, said he did not think the reform “would be very effective if the Congress had not legislated.”
Mr. Trump did not always heed that guidance — with the exception, perhaps, of his criminal justice reform bill — and is paying the price now.
The list of Biden clawbacks is growing but so far includes: Restoring the country’s commitment to the World Health Organization, rejoining the Paris climate accords, reversing Mr. Trump’s ban on immigration from some predominantly Muslim nations, stopping construction of the border wall, reviving protections for L.G.B.T.Q. workers, killing the Keystone XL pipeline permit and re-banning drilling in the Arctic Wildlife refuge, imposing new ethics rules and tossing out Mr. Trump’s “1776” commission report.
But not all of Mr. Trump’s doings can be quickly reversed. Repealing his signature tax cuts will be a heavy legislative lift, though Mr. Biden and his aides have committed only to a partial rollback.
The packing of the federal courts with conservative judges — more a joint project between the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader — might be Mr. Trump’s most enduring legacy. And Mr. McConnell’s use of congressional riders to repeal some regulations gave the rollbacks some force of law that may make them harder to undo.
Whether Mr. Biden will himself be overly reliant on executive action remains an open question. In fact, many of the environmental regulations put into place at the end of President Barack Obama’s term were quickly scrapped by Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Biden, a former senator who is intent on passing a massive new coronavirus relief bill quickly, seems to know the path to completing his agenda leads to legislation, including a bipartisan infrastructure package that Mr. Trump had also longed for but never championed. (For Mr. Biden, there are hopeful harbingers: a group of 17 newly-elected House Republicans signed a letter signaling their intentions to negotiate such a package.)
If Mr. Trump needed a more contemporary lesson in presidential power than Mr. Johnson’s, he had to look back no further than to his predecessor, Mr. Obama, who endured a protracted and messy process to pass his signature accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.
That law has endured despite Mr. Trump’s repeated efforts to destroy it.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said on Friday that she was committed to remaining a Republican, calling liberal aspirations that she might switch parties and hand Democrats an edge in the evenly divided Senate “a dream by some that will not materialize.”
Ms. Murkowski, a vocal critic of former President Donald J. Trump who has indicated she is open to convicting him at his impeachment trial for his role in egging on the violent mob that stormed the Capitol, had raised questions about whether she might defect from the G.O.P. when she told a home state newspaper that she had doubts about her place in the party.
Days after the Jan. 6 assault, she told The Anchorage Daily News that, “if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me.”
Speaking to reporters at the Capitol on Friday, Ms. Murkowski expressed the same sentiment, but added that she had “absolutely no desire to move over to the Democratic side of the aisle — I can’t be somebody that I’m not.”
“As kind of disjointed as things may be on the Republican side, there is no way you could talk to me into going over to the other side,” she added. “That’s not who I am, that’s not who I will ever be.”
Ms. Murkowski, who is up for re-election in 2022, has long held an independent streak. She voted against the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, helped shut down the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and was one of the first in her party to recognize President Biden’s victory when a majority of her colleagues refused to do so.
On Friday, she confirmed that she had not voted for Mr. Trump, though she would not divulge the name of the person whose name she wrote in instead. Even as she vowed to remain a Republican, Ms. Murkowski conceded that her party was having difficulty coalescing around an identity in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
“I think in many ways we are a party that is struggling to identify,” Ms. Murkowski said. “We have some that have solidly identified with Trump, and probably will continue to identify for years going forward. But you have a lot of other people that were not really sold, but they absolutely embraced the policies.”
Asked what role she planned to play as the party struggles to recalibrate after losing control of both the White House and the Senate, she said she would remain a senator “that is not afraid to be in the middle, even if there’s not a lot of people there that are with me.”
President Biden on Friday called the chief of the National Guard Bureau to apologize after troops who had been brought in to protect his inauguration were ordered to sleep in an unheated parking garage after they were booted from the Capitol on Thursday, administration officials said.
The issue has generated controversy in the first days of Mr. Biden’s term. Several governors and members of Congress have criticized the move, even as the reasons for the troops’ relocation remain murky.
In the telephone call with Gen. Daniel R. Hokanson, the head of the National Guard Bureau, Mr. Biden apologized and asked what he could do, the officials said. Jill Biden, the first lady, visited some of the troops stationed outside of the Capitol on Friday afternoon, thanking them for their work and handing out chocolate chip cookies.
“The National Guard will always hold a special place in the hearts of all the Bidens,” she said, noting that their son Beau, who died in 2015, was a member of the Delaware Army National Guard.
Photographs of the troops sleeping on the floor of the parking garage on Thursday night at the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, where they had scant toilet facilities and were breathing in exhaust fumes, have sparked an uproar.
The governors of Texas, Florida, New Hampshire and Montana said they had ordered their National Guard troops to return home from Washington, D.C., with some directly criticizing their move to the garage.
“They’re soldiers, they’re not Nancy Pelosi's servants,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, said on “Fox and Friends” on Friday morning. “This is a half-cocked mission at this point, and I think the appropriate thing is to bring them home.”
Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, also a Republican, wrote on Twitter that the troops “should be graciously praised, not subject to substandard conditions.”
Only some state’s troops were left to sleep in the parking garage. Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who attended Mr. Biden’s inauguration, said on Friday afternoon that he had been angered by the photographs he saw, but that New Jersey officials had ensured that all of his state’s troops had hotel rooms to sleep in.
“This is no way for our heroes to be treated,” Mr. Murphy said.
The troops were eventually moved back into the Capitol, Capt. Edwin Nieves Jr., a spokesman for the Washington, D.C., branch of the National Guard, said early on Friday morning.
He said the troops had been moved out of the Capitol on Thursday afternoon at the request of the Capitol Police because of “increased foot traffic” as Congress came back into session, but a statement from the acting chief of the Capitol Police on Friday sought to distance the beleaguered agency from the decision.
Chief Yogananda Pittman said that the Capitol Police had not told the troops to leave the Capitol except for certain times on Inauguration Day, and that even then, the troops were encouraged to return to the building by 2 p.m. that day. She said the managers of the office building whose parking lot the troops were using had reached out “directly to the National Guard to offer use of its facilities.”
Following the back-and-forth, the National Guard Bureau and the Capitol Police issued a joint statement on Friday afternoon saying they were “united in the common goal to protect the U.S. Capitol and the Congress” but shedding no more light on how or why some of the troops had ended up in the garage.
Many troops were already leaving the city, their mission concluded after Mr. Biden was successfully sworn in on Wednesday.
The Pentagon said Friday that 19,000 of the nearly 26,000 National Guard troops who had helped secure the event were beginning to return to their home states, a process that will take about five to 10 days and include coronavirus screenings. On Friday evening, a defense official said nearly 200 of the Guard troops in Washington had tested positive for Covid-19.
About 7,000 troops are expected to stay in Washington through January.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday revealed a slate of new executive orders and presidential directives intended to speed up production of Covid-19 supplies, increase testing capacity and require mask wearing during interstate travel — part of a sprawling 200-page national pandemic strategy he announced at a White House event. He is expected to sign more orders on Friday.
Taken together, the orders signal Mr. Biden’s earliest priorities in mounting a more centralized federal response to the spread of the coronavirus. Some of them mirror actions taken during the Trump administration, while most look to alter course.
Here’s what the orders aim to do.
Ramp up the pace of manufacturing and testing.
One order calls on agency leaders to check for shortages in areas like personal protective gear and vaccine supplies, and identify where the administration could invoke the Defense Production Act to increase manufacturing.
Another order establishes a Pandemic Testing Board, an idea drawn from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board, to ramp up testing. The new administration is promising to expand the nation’s supply of rapid tests, double test supplies and increase lab space for tests and surveillance for coronavirus hot spots.
Require mask wearing during interstate travel.
Mr. Biden has vowed to use his powers as president to influence mask wearing wherever he is legally allowed to, including on federal property and in travel that crosses state lines. An order issued Thursday requires mask wearing in airports and on many airplanes, intercity buses and trains.
The same order also requires international travelers to prove they have a recent negative Covid-19 test before heading to the United States and to comply with quarantining guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention once they land.
Publish guidance for schools and workers.
Mr. Biden issued an order meant to protect the health of workers during the pandemic, telling the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to release new guidance for employers. The order also asks the agency to step up enforcement of existing rules to help stop the spread of Covid-19 in the workplace.
The president also directed the departments of Education and Health and Human Services to issue new guidance on how to safely reopen schools — a major source of controversy over the summer when White House and health department officials pressured the C.D.C. to play down the risk of sending students back.
Find more treatments for Covid-19 and future pandemics.
The Biden administration is calling on the health and human services secretary and the director of the National Institutes of Health to draft a plan to support the study of new drugs for Covid-19 and future public health crises through large, randomized trials.
Democrats have spent years promising to repeal the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Republicans passed without a single Democratic vote and was estimated to cost nearly $2 trillion over a decade. But President Biden appears more likely to tinker with it, despite saying during a presidential debate that he was “going to eliminate the Trump tax cuts.”
Mr. Biden and his aides are committing to only a partial rollback of the law, with their focus on provisions that help corporations and the very rich. It’s a position that Mr. Biden held throughout the campaign, and in the September debate he promised to only partly repeal a corporate rate cut.
In some cases, including tax cuts that help lower- and middle-class Americans, the Biden administration is looking to make former President Donald J. Trump’s temporary tax cuts permanent.
Mr. Biden still wants to raise taxes on some businesses and wealthy individuals, and he remains intent on raising trillions of dollars in new tax revenue to offset the federal spending programs that he plans to propose, including for infrastructure, clean energy production and education. Much of the new revenue, however, could come from efforts to tax investment and labor income for people earning more than $400,000, in ways that are not related to the 2017 law.
Mr. Biden did not include any tax increases in the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan he proposed last week, which was meant to curb the pandemic and help people and companies endure the economic pain it has caused.
His nominee for Treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, told a Senate committee this week that the president would hold off on reversing any parts of the tax law until later in the recovery, which most likely means as part of a large infrastructure package that he is set to unveil next month.
Two days after the riot at the Capitol, a man was making such a ruckus aboard a plane on the tarmac at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that the crew turned the flight around in order to escort him off.
It was a U-turn that quickly brought him to the attention of the authorities.
The man, John Lolos, had been shouting “Trump 2020!” and disturbing his fellow passengers, according to a court filing. An airport police officer was alerted to his arrival back at the gate, where he would await another flight.
About 45 minutes later, that same officer was scrolling through his personal Instagram feed and spied a video that appeared to show Mr. Lolos exiting the Capitol on the day of the attack, according to an affidavit from a Capitol Police special agent. Mr. Lolos was wearing the same shirt he had on at the airport and was waving a red “Trump 2020 Keep America Great” flag that was hooked to an America flag, according to the affidavit.
“We stopped the vote!” an individual on the video says. According to the special agent’s account, Mr. Lolos replies, “We did it, yeah!”
With that, Mr. Lolos joined the scores of people who have been identified through social media videos as participants in the Jan. 6 riot. As law enforcement officials scour the internet, Instagram and other social media sites have become a key tool to identify those who stormed the Capitol and to charge them with federal crimes.
When the airport officer realized that the unruly passenger appeared to be a participant in the riot, he alerted other officials. Law enforcement officials detained Mr. Lolos, brought him to a holding room at the airport and placed him under arrest.
Amid an inventory of his property during the arrest, a Capitol Police special agent found the flags that appeared in the video, still connected.
AUSTIN, Texas — With President Biden, a Democrat, just days into his term, Republican-led Texas is serving notice that it is poised to return to the days of legal warfare that characterized relations between Austin and Washington under the last Democratic president, Barack Obama.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is under federal investigation for bribery and abuse of power allegations raised by former aides, sent a letter to the Biden administration on Thursday threatening a lawsuit after the Department of Homeland Security announced a pause on some deportations.
On Wednesday evening the department announced that it would pause on deportations for certain noncitizens. The halt, which took effect on Friday and will last 100 days, is meant to help the agency focus its resources on “the most pressing challenges that the United States faces,” the agency said in a statement.
Mr. Paxton called the plan a “complete abdication of the Department of Homeland Security’s obligation to enforce federal immigration law” that would “seriously and irreparably harm the State of Texas and its citizens.”
The threat harkened back to the days when Mr. Biden served as vice president under Mr. Obama. During that time, Texas leaders sued the Democratic administration over a variety of fronts, from clean air to immigration.
Gov. Greg Abbott, who served as attorney general before Mr. Paxton, campaigned for office by boasting of the number of lawsuits he had filed against the Obama administration. Under the two attorneys general, Texas lodged nearly four dozen suits during Mr. Obama’s eight years in office.
Mr. Paxton had hinted at a revival of that strategy on Wednesday, the day of Mr. Biden’s inauguration. In a tweet, he congratulated the new president but declared that he was prepared to “challenge federal overreach” that threatened Texas and would “serve as a major check against the administration’s lawlessness.”
“Texas First! Law & Order always!” he declared in the tweet.
President Biden’s top economic adviser warned on Friday that the United States economy is in a “precarious” position and that the country would face a far more painful and protracted recovery if Congress did not agree to provide more aid.
The comments from Brian Deese, the director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, came as the White House unveiled a series of executive actions intended to help workers and families struggling during the pandemic. The orders are the Biden administration’s latest attempt to use the power of the presidency to take immediate action to help the economy ahead of what is expected to be a long debate with Congress over another stimulus package.
“We’re at a precarious moment for the virus and the economy,” Mr. Deese said during a White House press briefing. “Without decisive action, we risk falling into a very serious economic hole, even more serous than the crisis we are in.”
Mr. Deese noted that 10 million jobs that were lost during the pandemic still have yet to be recovered and that families need immediate help.
The measures announced on Friday are focused on those who have been hit hardest by the pandemic. They direct the Treasury Department to find ways to ensure that people who did not get their stimulus payments receive the money. The orders also seek to increase the weekly value of food stamps and boost the emergency benefits that families get to replace the free meals that students would otherwise receive at school.
A separate action would also begin the process of ensuring that federal employees and those who work for government contractors receive a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Mr. Deese said the executive actions are not a replacement for legislation. He will hold a call with a group of Republican and Democratic senators on Sunday to discuss relief legislation, and he said Mr. Biden has instructed his advisers to continue bipartisan discussions.
Mr. Biden has called for a $1.9 trillion relief package that would provide $1,400 direct payments and allocate billions of dollars to help states reopen schools and deploy vaccines. The proposal has already met swift resistance from Republicans in Congress.
"time" - Google News
January 23, 2021 at 08:35AM
https://ift.tt/39U6Gd4
President Biden and Trump Impeachment News: Live Updates - The New York Times
"time" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3f5iuuC
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "President Biden and Trump Impeachment News: Live Updates - The New York Times"
Post a Comment