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Where things stand
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The House voted last night to strip Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments, a move without precedent in the modern Congress that leaves the right-wing congresswoman without much tangible influence in the chamber.
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The House voted 230 to 199, over the opposition of all but 11 Republican members, to remove Greene from the Education and Budget Committees in response to her history of support for bigoted conspiracy theories and encouragement of political violence.
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While party caucuses have from time to time stripped their own members of their committee assignments as a disciplinary measure, yesterday’s vote was the first time in modern U.S. politics that the majority party had used a chamber-wide vote to depose a member from the minority.
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In an impassioned address on the House floor before the vote, Greene called her previous comments “words of the past” that “do not represent me” and said she should be given an opportunity to learn from her mistakes. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret,” she said.
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But Democrats were unimpressed, and some pointed out in speeches of their own that Greene had not apologized at any point in her eight-minute address. The Democratic caucus voted unanimously to remove Greene from her posts, arguing in particular that she did not belong on the Education Committee given her history of claiming that the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., was a hoax.
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President Biden declared yesterday that he would end the United States’ involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which he called a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe,” bowing to a longtime demand of human rights advocates.
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In a speech at the State Department, he heralded the start of a new era in American leadership abroad. He committed the United States to a central role in world affairs going forward and pledged to work closely with allies on issues like fighting the coronavirus pandemic and mitigating climate change’s effects.
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He committed to standing up strongly to Russia and China, saying that he would use “a manner very different from my predecessor” in particular when dealing with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader.
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Biden announced that he was putting a hold on former President Donald Trump’s planned troop redeployments from Germany, a move that had signaled a retreat from the United States’ commitment to its traditional alliances.
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“America is back,” he said. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”
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Absent stronger federal regulation of social media, could the path to reining in disinformation run through the civil courts? If a $2.7 billion lawsuit is any deterrent, then maybe so.
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The election technology company Smartmatic filed suit yesterday against Fox News, some of the network’s hosts, and two of Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani, for leading what the filing called a “disinformation campaign” against the company.
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The Smartmatic lawsuit follows defamation suits that Dominion Voting Systems brought last month against Giuliani and Powell. Both of those suits seek more than $1 billion in damages and stem from baseless arguments that Trump and his allies pushed, suggesting that the company had been involved in a plot to rig its voting machines during the 2020 election.
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Biden isn’t the only Democrat pushing for aggressive action on a range of issues. Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, is putting pressure on the president to embrace a plan that would cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt for all borrowers.
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Flanked by liberal members of Congress including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Ayanna Pressley, Schumer spoke in support of a nonbinding resolution that calls upon Biden to use his executive powers to cancel about 80 percent of the student loan debt that has been run up by some 36 million borrowers.
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The resolution faces a steep climb in the Senate, where it would need significant Republican support to clear a 60-vote threshold. It would also have no legal effect if passed, but it would represent a major assertion of the progressive priorities of Democratic leaders in Congress.
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The resolution calls for cancellation for all borrowers, whereas a previous Democratic proposal limited the program to people earning under $125,000 per year.
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Biden has endorsed a smaller but similar plan that would cancel only up to $10,000 in debt. “We are not going to let up until we accomplish it, until $50,000 of debt is forgiven for every student in the country,” Schumer said yesterday.
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Trump’s legal team yesterday shot down a request for him to testify under oath during his impeachment trial in the Senate, which begins oral arguments next week.
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Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and the leader of the House managers who will prosecute the impeachment case, had asked Trump to answer questions under oath about his actions around the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
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In his letter to Trump, Raskin wrote that the former president’s legal team had disputed a number of “factual allegations” in a court filing this week, and he invited Trump to clear up the problems in live testimony.
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Raskin wrote that if Trump refused to testify, his refusal might be used as evidence to support “a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021.”
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In declining the request, Trump’s lawyers sought to paint it as a “public relations stunt.” In their reply to Raskin, they wrote: “Your letter only confirms what is known to everyone: You cannot prove your allegations against the 45th president of the United States, who is now a private citizen.”
Photo of the day
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene before the House vote yesterday.
Virginia, shifting left fast, moves to abolish the death penalty.
With a big vote expected today in Virginia’s House of Delegates, lawmakers are poised to make the state the first in the South to abolish the death penalty.
It would be a turning point in the region, after Georgia’s recent blue turn put Republicans on notice in the Deep South. But in Virginia, the bill is only the latest in a cascade of liberal policies that have moved through the state’s General Assembly since Democrats won full control in 2019.
Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat who has embraced the state’s liberal turn, supported a ban on the death penalty during his campaign in 2017, when Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic governor at the time, drew criticism from the left for moving forward with the execution of a mentally ill man.
“It’s important that we shut down the machinery of death here in Virginia,” Northam told our reporter Trip Gabriel in an interview for Trip’s article on the new bill.
Since Congress reinstituted the death penalty in 1976, Virginia has executed 113 people, more than any state except Texas. Federal executions had been on hiatus in recent years, until Trump restarted them in 2020, giving the issue a fresh urgency.
Coming after Virginia passed progressive laws on gun control, abortion access and the removal of Confederate monuments, the impending death penalty ban further cements the state’s transition into Democratic stronghold status.
Before Barack Obama carried the state in 2008, Virginia had voted Republican for president since 1964. But last year Biden beat Trump by 10 percentage points, and Democrats maintained their grip on seven of the state’s 11 House districts.
New York Times Audio
An appalled Republican considers the future of the party
What do G.O.P. politicians stand for in 2021?
The Republican academic and writer Yuval Levin isn’t convinced they even know. On today’s episode of “The Ezra Klein Show,” he told Ezra that “the Republican Party has come to be defined far too much by its opposition to the left.”
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