Sen. Susan Collins is being criticized for the Supreme Court ruling allowing states to ban abortion because the moderate Republican voted to confirm two of the justices who were in the majority opinion.

Critics attacked the Maine senator on social media, and some called for her resignation. The Maine Democratic Party and others cast some of the blame on Collins because her vote was crucial in confirming Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Collins also voted to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch, who also sided with the majority opinion.

Collins says in a statement that the overturning of Roe is a "sudden and radical jolt to the country" that will sow division.

Collins is a Republican and has been a supporter of a woman’s right to an abortion. She has also crossed the aisle on key issues like splitting with Republicans on former President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several Muslim countries, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and on whether to convict Trump after his impeachment following the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

The senator said in a statement Friday that she had received assurances from Kavanaugh and Gorsuch that Roe v. Wade was an established legal precedent, the Associated Press reported.

“Throwing out a precedent overnight that the country has relied upon for half a century is not conservative,” she said. “It is a sudden and radical jolt to the country that will lead to political chaos, anger, and a further loss of confidence in our government.”

The migrants who were flown from Florida to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts have been taken to a military base.

Approximately 50 migrants were offered shelter and support services at Joint Base Cape Cod, according to CNN.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he sent the migrants to Massachusetts so other communities can share the "burden" of the crisis at the Southern border.

NBC News reports that the number of migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border is approaching 8,000 per day.

“There is also going to be buses and there will likely be more flights, but I’ll tell you this, the legislature gave me $12 million and we’re gonna spend every penny of that to make sure that we’re protecting the people of the State of Florida," DeSantis said.

The U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts said she will speak with the Justice Department about DeSantis' treatment of the migrants. Some of the migrants were reportedly told they were going to Boston.

President Joe Biden said the move by DeSantis and other Republican governors is "un-American."

"Instead of working with us on solutions, Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props," Biden said. "What they're doing is simply wrong... it's reckless."

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A deal has been reached in the state budget, preventing Ohio from having a government shutdown.

The main focus of both the House’s and the Senate’s budgets was education. The Senate plan was much more conservative, while the House plan was bipartisan. After a week and a half of negotiations, agreement was reached on the $191 billion budget. The nearly 2 billion budget will be split for the next two years.

Ultimately, the chambers took pieces of both budgets to reach a compromise that satisfied Republicans in the Senate and House. Although Democrats got a few small wins, many of them still voted no on the budget.

“Our priorities — education, and the fact that we were able to get back the $550 million that the Senate took out of our public schools — I think is a big win for Republicans, Democrats for the people of Ohio, all across the state,” said State Rep. Jay Edwards (R-Nelsonville).

Edwards, the House Finance Chair, was able to reinstate the total funding needed for the Fair School Funding plan, but with that, he had to give Senate Finance Chair Matt Dolan (R-Chagrin Falls) what the Senate wanted when it came to private school vouchers.

“Gives parents the choice to decide where and how their child's going to be educated,” Dolan said of the private voucher program.

Democrats are unhappy with the majority of the budget, but they did get one of their main requests — getting the higher education overhaul bill removed. This bill would have banned public universities in Ohio from having “bias” in the classroom and limiting how and what “controversial topics” were taught.

However, the budget did keep in a bill that would create learning centers on OSU and University of Toledo campuses, meant to specifically target “intellectual diversity, or safe spaces for conservatives” on campus.

“I loved seeing Senate Bill 83 taken out,” said Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood). “Unfortunately, not only did they leave [Senate Bill] 117 and these indoctrination centers at universities in, but then they added they have to now have three more, and they added one in Cleveland State.”

While the chambers have reached an agreement, they aren’t done with the budget just yet. It goes to Gov. Mike Dewine, who gets to veto any provision within it.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on Twitter and Facebook.

Lalo Alcaraz still gets excited when he sees people reacting to one of his political cartoons.

"That never gets old," he said.

A tiny office is where he creates a loud message by using barely any words. 

“I’m just trying to get people to think critically," Alcaraz said.

The thing about political cartoons, he said, is that within seconds people should understand the point.

“I think political cartoons are really accessible, quick format that delivers the truth with a punch,” Alcaraz said.

His work is sometimes controversial. Alcaraz admits he's received hate mail throughout his career. 

“Bluntness. That's what makes my cartoons different. I have a lot of different cartoons I like to be direct," Alcaraz said.

Alcaraz is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated cartoonist whose daily comic strip "La Cucaracha" is the first nationally syndicated Latino political cartoon.

His art has made him an icon in the Mexican-American community.

In the pandemic, his work has carried a new meaning.

“It makes me feel good if someone tells me like, 'that really helped me to talk to my uncle about his dislike of vaccines,'" Alcaraz said. "That’s always a win for me."

He created special cartoons to fight pandemic misinformation as part of the "COVID Latino" project with Arizona State University.

The Latino community’s high reliance on social media for news is a reason why groups like Nielsen say they are at a higher risk for misinformation.

Avaaz, a nonprofit organization, found posts with misinformation in Spanish on Facebook are far less likely to be flagged— compared to posts in English.

“I think we’re all responsible to our communities we can’t expect people to come in and fix things for us and also on the ground level at some point," Alcaraz says.

Facebook has promised to do more to fact-check Spanish posts on its platform.

As the midterm elections near, Alcaraz hopes his messages can be educational.

"You know the information is out there; you have to look at it," he said. "'Use the coco that God gave you.'" That’s an old thing my mom used to say.”

Overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating affirmative action in higher education had been leading goals of the conservative legal movement for decades.

In a span of 370 days, a Supreme Court reshaped by three justices nominated by President Donald Trump made both a reality.

Last June, the court ended nationwide protections for abortion rights. This past week, the court’s conservative majority decided that race-conscious admissions programs at the oldest private and public colleges in the country, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, were unlawful.

Precedents that had stood since the 1970s were overturned, explicitly in the case of abortion and effectively in the affirmative action context.

“That is what is notable about this court. It’s making huge changes in highly salient areas in a very short period of time,” said Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas.

As ethical questions swirled around the court and public trust in the institution had already dipped to a 50-year low, there were other consequential decisions in which the six conservatives prevailed.

They rejected the Biden administration's $400 billion student loan forgiveness program and held that a Christian graphic artist can refuse on free speech grounds to design websites for same-sex couples, despite a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and other characteristics.

The court, by a 5-4 vote, also sharply limited the federal government's authority to police water pollution into certain wetlands, although all nine justices rejected the administration's position.

Affirmative action was arguably the biggest constitutional decision of the year, and it showcased fiercely opposing opinions from the court's two Black justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

They offered sharply contrasting takes on affirmative action. Thomas was in the majority to end it. Jackson, in her first year on the court, was in dissent.

The past year also had a number of notable surprises.

Differing coalitions of conservative and liberal justices ruled in favor of Black voters in an Alabama redistricting case and refused to embrace broad arguments in a North Carolina redistricting case that could have left state legislatures unchecked and dramatically altered elections for Congress and president.

The court also ruled for the Biden administration in a fight over deportation priorities and left in place the Indian Child Welfare Act, the federal law aimed at keeping Native American children with Native families.

Those cases reflected the control that Chief Justice John Roberts asserted, or perhaps reasserted, over the court following a year in which the other five conservatives moved more quickly than he wanted in some areas, including abortion.

Roberts wrote a disproportionate share of the term's biggest cases: conservative outcomes on affirmative action and the student loan plan, and liberal victories in Alabama and North Carolina.

The Alabama case may have been the most surprising because Roberts had consistently sought to narrow the landmark Voting Rights Act since his days as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration. As chief justice, he wrote the decision 10 years ago that gutted a key provision of the law.

But in the Alabama case and elsewhere, Roberts was part of majorities that rejected the most aggressive legal arguments put forth by Republican elected officials and conservative legal advocates.

The mixed bag of decisions almost seemed designed to counter arguments about the court's legitimacy, raised by Democratic and liberal critics — and some justices — in response to last year's abortion ruling, among others. The narrative was amplified by published reports of undisclosed, paid jet travel and fancy trips for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito from billionaire Republican donors.

“I don’t think the court consciously takes opinion into account,” Grove said. “But I think if there’s anyone who might consciously think about these issues, it’s the institutionalist, the chief justice. He’s been extremely concerned about the attacks on the Supreme Court.”

On the term's final day, Roberts urged the public to not mistake disagreement among the justices for disparagement of the court. “Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” he wrote in the student loans case in response to a stinging dissent by Justice Elena Kagan.

Roberts has resisted instituting a code of ethics for the court and has questioned whether Congress has the authority to impose one. Still, he has said, without providing specifics, that the justices would do more to show they adhere to high ethical standards.

Some conservative law professors rejected the idea that the court bowed to outside pressures, consciously or otherwise.

“There were a lot of external atmospherics that really could have affected court business, but didn't,” said Jennifer Mascott, a George Mason University law professor.

Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, pointed to roughly equal numbers of major decisions that could be characterized as politically liberal or conservative.

Levey said conservatives “were not disappointed by this term.” Democrats and their allies “warned the nation about an ideologically extreme Supreme Court but wound up cheering as many major decisions as they decried,” Levey wrote in an email.

But some liberal critics were not mollified.

Brian Fallon, director of the court reform group Demand Justice, called the past year “another disastrous Supreme Court term” and mocked experts who “squint to find so-called silver linings in the Court’s decisions to suggest all is not lost, or they will emphasize one or two so-called moderate decisions from the term to suggest the Court is not as extreme as we think and can still be persuaded from time to time.”

Biden himself said on MSNBC on Thursday that the current court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.” He cited as examples the overturning of abortion protections and other decisions that had been precedent for decades.

Still, Biden said, he thought some on the high court “are beginning to realize their legitimacy is being questioned in ways it hasn’t been questioned in the past.”

The justices are now embarking on a long summer break. They return to the bench on the first Monday in October for a term that so far appears to lack the blockbuster cases that made the past two terms so momentous.

The court will examine the legal fallout from last year's major expansion of gun rights, in a case over a domestic violence gun ban that was struck down by a lower court.

A new legal battle over abortion also could make its way to the court in coming months. In April, the court preserved access to mifepristone, a drug used in the most common method of abortion, while a lawsuit over it makes its way through federal court.

The conservative majority also will have opportunities to further constrain federal regulatory agencies, including a case that asks them to overturn the so-called Chevron decision that defers to regulators when they seek to give effect to big-picture, sometimes vague, laws written by Congress. The 1984 decision has been cited by judges more than 15,000 times.

Just seven years ago, months before Trump's surprising presidential victory, then-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reflected on the term that had just ended and made two predictions. One was way off base and the other was strikingly accurate.

In July 2016, the court had just ended a term in which the justices upheld a University of Texas affirmative action plan and struck down state restrictions on abortion clinics.

Her first prediction was that those issues would not soon return to the high court. Her second was that if Trump became president, “everything is up for grabs.”

Ginsburg's death in 2020 allowed Trump to put Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court and cement conservative control.

Commenting on the student loan decision, liberal legal scholar Melissa Murray wrote on Twitter that Biden's plan “was absolutely undone by the Court that his predecessor built.”

For more updates on outstanding races across the country, click here.Control of the Senate hinged on a series of tight races Wednesday after a midterm election that defied expectations of sweeping conservative victories driven by frustration over inflation and President Joe Biden’s leadership.Either party could secure a Senate majority with wins in both Nevada and Arizona — where the races were too early to call. But there was a strong possibility that, for the second time in two years, the Senate majority could come down to a runoff in Georgia next month, with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker failing to earn enough votes to win outright.In Pennsylvania, Democrats won the governorship and Senate in the key battleground state. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke five months ago, flipped a Republican-controlled Senate seat, topping Trump-endorsed Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz. In the governor’s race Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro beat Republican Doug Mastriano, an election denier who some feared would not certify a Democratic presidential win in the state in 2024.Georgia, meanwhile, was set for yet another runoff on Dec. 6. In 2021, Warnock used a runoff to win his seat as did Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff — which gave Democrats control of the Senate. Both Warnock and Walker were already fundraising off the race stretching into a second round.Both Republicans and Democratic incumbents maintained key Senate seats. In Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson prevailed over Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, while in New Hampshire, Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassen beat Don Bolduc, a retired Army general who had initially promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election but tried to shift away those views closer to Election Day.

Republican Kevin McCarthy was elected House speaker on a historic post-midnight 15th ballot early Saturday, overcoming holdouts from his own ranks and floor tensions boiling over after a chaotic week that tested the new GOP majority’s ability to govern.

After four days of grueling ballots, McCarthy flipped more than a dozen conservative holdouts to become supporters, including the chairman of the chamber’s Freedom Caucus, leaving him just a few shy of seizing the gavel for the new Congress.

As the House resumed for the late night session McCarthy had been on the cusp of victory in the 14th round but he fell one vote short.

He strode to the back of the chamber to confront Matt Gaetz, sitting with Lauren Boebert and other holdouts. Fingers were pointed, words exchanged and violence apparently just averted.

At one point, Republican Mike Rogers of Alabama started to charge toward Gaetz before another Republican, Richard Hudson, physically pulled him back.

“Stay civil!” someone shouted.

Republicans quickly moved to adjourn, but then McCarthy rushed forward to switch his vote to remain in session as colleagues chanted “One more time!”

The few Republican holdouts began voting present as well, dropping the tally he needed to finally seize the gavel in what was heading toward a dramatic finish on the fourth long day of a grueling standoff that has shown the strengths and fragility American democracy.

McCarthy had declared to reporters earlier in the day that he believed “we’ll have the votes to finish this once and for all.”

The day's stunning turn of events came after McCarthy agreed to many of the detractors' demands -- including the reinstatement of a longstanding House rule that would allow any single member to call a vote to oust him from office.

Even if McCarthy is able to secure the votes he needs, he will emerge as a weakened speaker, having given away some powers and constantly under the threat of being booted by his detractors.

But he could also be emboldened as a survivor of one of the more brutal fights for the gavel in U.S. history. Not since the Civil War era has a speaker's vote dragged through so many rounds of voting.

The showdown that has stymied the new Congress came against the backdrop of the second anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which shook the country when a mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters tried to stop Congress from certifying the Republican’s 2020 election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.

At a Capitol event on Friday, some lawmakers, mostly Democrats, observed a moment of silence and praised officers who helped protect Congress on that day. And at the White House, Biden handed out medals to officers and others who fought the attackers.

“America is a land of laws, not chaos,” he said.

At the afternoon speaker's vote, a number of Republicans tiring of the spectacle temporarily walked out when one of McCarthy's most ardent challengers railed against the GOP leader.

Contours of a deal with conservative holdouts who have been blocking McCarthy's rise emerged after three dismal days and 11 failed votes in an intraparty standoff unseen in modern times.

And an upbeat McCarthy told reporters as he arrived at the Capitol, “We’re going to make progress. We’re going to shock you.”

One significant former holdout, Republican Scott Perry, chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus who had been a leader of Trump's efforts to challenge the 2020 election, tweeted after his switched vote for McCarthy: “We're at a turning point.”

Another Republican holdout, Byron Donalds of Florida, who was repeatedly nominated as an alternative candidate for speaker, switched on Friday, too, voting for McCarthy.

Trump may have played a role in swaying the holdouts. Donalds said he had spoken to the former president who had been urging Republicans to wrap up their public dispute the day before.

As Rep. Mike Garcia nominated McCarthy for Friday, he also thanked the U.S. Capitol Police who were given a standing ovation for protecting lawmakers and the legislative seat of democracy on Jan. 6.

But in nominating the Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat Jim Clyburn recalled the horror of that day and told his colleagues: “The eyes of the country are on us today,” he said.

Without a speaker, the chamber is unable swear in members and begin its 2023-24 session, a sign of the difficulty ahead for the new Republican majority as it tries to govern.

Electing a speaker is normally an easy, joyous task for a party that has just won majority control. But not this time: About 200 Republicans have been stymied by 20 far-right colleagues who said he’s not conservative enough.

The disorganized start to the new Congress pointed to difficulties ahead with Republicans now in control of the House, much the way that some past Republican speakers, including John Boehner, had trouble leading a rebellious right flank. The result: government shutdowns, standoffs and Boehner’s early retirement when conservatives threatened to oust him.

The agreement McCarthy presented to the holdouts from the Freedom Caucus and others centers around rules changes they have been seeking for months. Those changes would shrink the power of the speaker’s office and give rank-and-file lawmakers more influence in drafting and passing legislation.

At the core of the emerging deal is the reinstatement of a House rule that would allow a single lawmaker to make a motion to “vacate the chair,” essentially calling a vote to oust the speaker. McCarthy had resisted allowing a return to the longstanding rule that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi had done away with, because it had been held over the head of past Republican Speaker Boehner. But it appears McCarthy had no other choice.

Other wins for the holdouts are more obscure and include provisions in the proposed deal to expand the number of seats available on the House Rules Committee, to mandate 72 hours for bills to be posted before votes and to promise to try for a constitutional amendment that would impose federal limits on the number of terms a person could serve in the House and Senate.

What started as a political novelty, the first time since 1923 a nominee had not won the gavel on the first vote, has devolved into a bitter Republican Party feud and deepening potential crisis.

Before Friday's ballots, Democratic leader Jeffries of New York had won the most votes on every ballot but also remained short of a majority. McCarthy ran second, gaining no ground.

The longest fight for the gavel started in late 1855 and dragged on for two months, with 133 ballots, during debates over slavery in the run-up to the Civil War.

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AP writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Kevin Freking and video journalists Nathan Ellgren and Mike Pesoli contributed to this report.

Related video above: Hakeem Jeffries blasts GOP over House Speaker debacle

Electing the House speaker may have been the easy part. Now House Republicans will try to govern.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy passed his first tests late Monday as the Republicans approved their rules package for governing House operations, typically a routine step on Day One that stretched into the second week of the new majority. It was approved 220-213, a party-line vote with one Republican opposed.

Next, the House Republicans easily passed their first bill — legislation to cut funding that is supposed to bolster the Internal Revenue Service. The Republicans' IRS bill ran into a snag ahead of votes because the budget office announced that rather than save money, it would add $114 billion to the federal deficit. The measure flew through on another party-line vote, 218-210, though it has almost no chance of passage in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

It was an effective start to what could otherwise be a new era of potentially crisis governing. House Republicans are expected to be lurching from one standoff to the next after last week's raucous speaker's race that showcased the challenges ahead as McCarthy confronts a rebellious majority as well as the limits of President Joe Biden's remaining agenda on Capitol Hill.

With sky-high ambitions for a hard-right conservative agenda but only a narrow hold on the majority, which enables just a few holdouts to halt proceedings, the Republicans are rushing headlong into an uncertain, volatile start of the new session. They want to investigate Biden, slash federal spending and beef up competition with China.

But first McCarthy, backed by former President Donald Trump, needs to show the Republican majority can keep up with basics of governing.

“You know, it’s a little more difficult when you go into a majority and maybe the margins aren’t high,” McCarthy acknowledged after winning the speaker's vote. “Having the disruption now really built the trust with one another and learned how to work together.”

But McCarthy himself announced Monday evening's final vote tally on the IRS bill to applause from his side of the aisle. “Promises made. Promises kept,” he said in a statement.

As McCarthy gaveled open the House on Monday as the new speaker, the Republicans launched debate on the Rules package, a hard-fought 55-page document that McCarthy negotiated with conservative holdouts to win over their votes to make him House speaker.

Central to the package is the provision the conservative Freedom Caucus wanted that reinstates a longstanding rule that allows any one lawmaker make a motion to “vacate the chair” — a vote to oust the speaker. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi had done away with the rule when Democrats took charge in 2019 because conservatives had held it over past Republican speakers as a threat.

Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., said the rules are about “getting back to the basics.”

But that's not the only change. There are other provisions the conservatives extracted from McCarthy that weaken the power of the speaker's office and turn over more control of the legislative business to rank-and-file lawmakers, particularly those far-right lawmakers who won concessions.

The Republicans are allowing more Freedom Caucus lawmakers on the Rules committee that shapes legislative debates. Those members promise more open and free-flowing debates and are insisting on 72 hours to read legislation ahead of votes.

But it's an open question whether the changes being approved will make the House more transparent in its operations or grind it to a halt, as happened last week when McCarthy battled through four days and 14 failed ballots before finally winning the speaker's gavel.

Many Republicans defended the standoff over the speaker's gavel, which was finally resolved in the post-midnight hours of Saturday morning on the narrowest of votes — one of the longest speaker's race showdowns in U.S. history.

“A little temporary conflict is necessary in this town in order to stop this town from rolling over the American people,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said over the weekend on CNN.

On Monday, Roy praised the new rules he helped craft, saying he could file a motion “right now” to demand a vote on the speaker — as it has been through much of House history.

But heading into Monday evening's voting on the rules package, at least two other Republicans raised objections about the backroom deals McCarthy had cut, leaving it unclear if there would be enough GOP support for passage. In the end, only Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas voted against.

Democrats decried the new rules as caving to the demands of the far-right aligned with Trump's Make American Great Again agenda.

“These rules are not a serious attempt at governing,” said Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee. Rather, he said, it's a “ransom note from far right.”

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., focused his criticism on the GOP's so-called Holman Rule, which would allow Congress to rescind the pay of individual federal employees: “This is no way to govern."

McCarthy commands a slim 222-seat Republican majority, which means on any given vote he can only lose four GOP detractors or the legislation will fail, if all Democrats are opposed.

The new rules are making McCarthy's job even tougher. For example, Republicans are doing away with the proxy voting that Democrats under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. That means McCarthy must demand greater attendance and participation on every vote with almost no absences allowed for family emergencies or other circumstances.

“Members of Congress have to show up and work again,” said Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.

With the Senate still narrowly held by Democrats, the divided Congress could still be a time of bipartisan deal-making. Monday saw a group of Republican and Democratic senators head to the southern U.S. border with Mexico as they try to develop an immigration overhaul to curb the flow of migrants.

But more often a split Congress produces gridlock.

The Republicans have been here before, just over a decade ago, when the tea party class swept to the majority in 2011, booting Pelosi from the speaker's office and rushing into an era of hardball politics that shut down the government and threatened a federal debt default.

McCarthy was a key player in those battles, having recruited the tea party class when he was the House GOP's campaign chairman. He tried and failed to take over for Republican John Boehner in 2015 when the beleaguered House speaker abruptly retired rather than face a potential vote by conservatives on his ouster.

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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Hope Yen contributed to this report.

Rep. Kathleen Rice of New York announced she will not run for reelection in this year's midterms.

Rice said she will remain focused on "protecting democracy" and serving her constituents for the remainder of her term.

"As I turn to the next chapter of my own personal and professional story, I do so with profound thanks to the community leaders, colleagues and staff who have lived our shared commitment to service with courage and humility," Rice said in a statement Tuesday.

Rice was first elected to Congress in 2014.

She is now the 30th Democrat who has announced plans to leave the House.

As President Biden faces declining poll numbers, the Democrats are expected to face an uphill battle in their attempt to keep control of the House.

Currently, Democrats control the House, the Senate and the presidency.

NEW YORK — Democrat Eric Adams has been elected New York City mayor after handily defeating Republican Curtis Sliwa.

Adams is the Brooklyn borough president and a former New York City police captain. He will become the city’s second Black mayor and must steer the damaged metropolis through its recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

Adams’ victory Tuesday seemed all but assured after he emerged as the winner from a crowded Democratic primary this summer in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 7 to 1.

Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels anti-crime patrol. He ran a campaign punctuated by stunts and his signature red beret.

A Capitol Police officer who was indicted for obstructing the Jan. 6 investigation has resigned, according to NBC News.

Michael Riley is accused of telling someone on Facebook to remove posts that showed them inside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack.

"The evidence will show that it is not a felony for one person to suggest to another that they take down ill-conceived Facebook posts," an attorney for Riley said in a statement, according to The Hill.

Riley was not in the Capitol at the time of the attack. He had responded to a report of a pipe bomb. He has been a Capitol Police officer for about 25 years.

Prior to his resignation, Riley was on administrative leave.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden traveled to Capitol Hill Friday and pledged to ‘get it done’ as Democrats strain to rescue a scaled-back version of his $3.5 trillion government overhaul and salvage a related public works bill.

Biden huddled privately with both progressive and moderate Democrats.

The meeting came after days of frantic negotiations with no deal.

The House has delayed a vote on the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed in the Senate. Progressive Democrats want reassurances from moderate senators, most notably Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

Manchin said he wants the social safety net bill scaled back to $1.5 trillion.

It's unclear when the House will vote on the infrastructure bill. However, Democrats have publicly said they are confident both bills will eventually pass.

CNN —

A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit from Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and several Arizona Republicans seeking to force Vice President Mike Pence to help throw the election to President Donald Trump next week when Congress meets to count the Electoral College votes.

Judge Jeremy Kernodle of the Eastern District of Texas said on Friday that Gohmert and the others lacked standing to sue. In a filing late Friday, Gohmert and other plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal to the Fifth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Gohmert's suit was part of the GOP's attempt to overturn the presidential election using unproven allegations of mass voter fraud and charging that multiple states that President-elect Joe Biden won illegally changed their voting rules due to the pandemic.

Those arguments have failed dozens of times in state and federal courts over the past two months.

Gohmert and a slate of would-be Trump electors from Arizona had said only Pence could decide what electoral votes count — a remarkable argument suggesting vice presidents can directly determine who wins a presidential election, regardless of the results.

Kernodle, who was nominated by Trump and confirmed in the Senate by voice vote in 2018, wrote that Gohmert "alleges at most an institutional injury to the House of Representatives. Under well-settled Supreme Court authority, that is insufficient to support standing."

As for the group of Arizona Republicans, who claimed that Biden's electors in the state were unlawfully certified, Kernodle wrote that they "allege an injury that is not fairly traceable to the Defendant, the Vice President of the United States, and is unlikely to be redressed by the requested relief."

Kernodle does not get into the constitutionality of the Electoral Count Act or Pence's ceremonial role overseeing the certification process in his 13-page opinion.

Pence on Thursday asked Kernodle to reject the case, arguing that the legal issues from Gohmert should be directed to the House and Senate, rather than the vice president. Pence's filing did not say if he would entertain the possibility of interfering in the Electoral College count, but there is no public indication that he will.

"(A) suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction," Pence said.

"Ironically, Representative Gohmert's position, if adopted by the Court, would actually deprive him of his opportunity as a Member of the House under the Electoral Count Act to raise objections to the counting of electoral votes, and then to debate and vote on them," Pence's filing added.

At least 140 House Republicans are expected to vote against counting the electoral votes on Jan. 6, CNN reported Thursday. Gohmert has said he will be one of them.

There have been no credible allegations of any issues with voting that would have impacted the election, as affirmed by dozens of state and federal courts, governors, state election officials and the departments of Homeland Security and Justice.

Both a House member and senator are required to mount an objection when Congress counts the votes. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said Wednesday he will object, which will force lawmakers in both the House and Senate to vote on whether to accept the results of Biden's victory.

The Justice Department gave the White House a heads-up earlier this week that the Pence filing was coming, according to a person familiar with the matter. Word was sent to chief of staff Mark Meadows that the department would be asking the judge to reject the lawsuit. White House counsel Pat Cipollone was also aware it was coming.

It's not clear whether Trump, who remains furious at the Justice Department for its perceived inaction on voter fraud, was informed himself. He has taken an interest in Pence's role during the Jan. 6 proceedings, though Pence and others at the White House have tried to explain to him that it's merely a ceremonial post.

House General Counsel Doug Letter filed an amicus brief with the court on Thursday, asking for the Gohmert case to be dismissed, calling it a "radical departure from our constitutional procedures and consistent legislative practices."

"At bottom, this litigation seeks to enlist the federal courts in a belated and meritless assault on longstanding constitutional processes for confirming the results of a national election for President," the House attorney wrote.

The Trump campaign is also continuing its quest at the Supreme Court with the same baseless and unproven voter fraud claims. It twice this week asked the court to overturn Biden's win in Wisconsin. Other cases from the President and his allies looking to throw out Biden's victories in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona are pending on the court's docket.

WASHINGTON —

Congress is resuming its joint session after a dramatic and unprecedented day saw a mob of violent protesters storm the U.S. Capitol building.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is set to open the proceeding in the Senate at 8 p.m. The Senate originally suspended its deliberations after chanting protesters gained entry to the Capitol, prompting police to lock down the building. Some lawmakers tweeted that they were sheltering in place. Thousands of pro-Trump protesters rallied in the nation's capital, answering appeals by Trump himself, who addressed supporters gathered outside the White House.

Earlier in the day, McConnell urged fellow Republicans to abandon their effort to overrule President-elect Joe Biden's election triumph, directly rebuking defeated President Donald Trump and asserting that the GOP drive threatened the country's democratic foundations.

“The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken,” said McConnell, R-Ky., as the Senate debated a challenge by a handful of GOP lawmakers to the 11 electoral votes that Arizona cast for Biden. “They've all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever.”

Arizona's were the first of several states’ electoral votes that some Republicans are challenging, encouraged by Trump’s groundless charges that the election was riddled with fraud. Congress seemed certain to reject all those challenges and formally affirm Biden’s victory. All 50 states have certified the electoral votes.

The showdown came on one of the most convulsive days in the country's recent political history.

Follow along below for updates:

8:25 p.m.

U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, says the Senate will set a peaceful example and move toward the certification of the election result, showing Joe Biden will become the next president. Lankford was among the group of senators who vowed to reject the Electoral College tallies unless Congress launched a commission to audit the election results.

8 p.m.

The Senate has resumed debating the Republican challenge against Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory, more than six hours after pro-Trump mobs attacked the Capitol and forced lawmakers to flee.

Scores of Republican representatives and 13 GOP senators had planned to object Wednesday to the electoral votes of perhaps six states that backed Biden. It was unclear whether those objections would continue in light of the day’s violent events.

President Donald Trump has falsely insisted that the election was marred by fraud and that he actually won. He reiterated those claims in remarks to thousands of protesters outside the White House early Wednesday and goaded them to march to the Capitol, which many of them did.

The mayhem had forced the House and Senate to abruptly end the day’s debates and flee to safety under the protection of police. And it prompted bipartisan outrage as many lawmakers blamed Trump for fostering the violence.

Some of America's biggest companies are suspending donations to Republican Congress members who objected to the Electoral College's votes.

The growing list of those corporations, including American Express, BlueCross BlueShield, Commerce Bank, Dow and Marriott, comes after a pro-Trump mob breached the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday to fight against the ceremonial counting of electoral votes that confirmed President-elect Joe Biden's win.

147 Republicans voted against certification of the electoral votes in a joint session of Congress last Wednesday evening. They included Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, among hundreds other congress members.

Airbnb: The home-rental company is "withholding" its PAC donations to all of the legislators involved in contesting certification of the electoral results.

"Airbnb strongly condemns last week's attack on the US Capitol and the efforts to undermine our democratic process," the company said in a statement. "We will continue to uphold our community policies by banning violent hate group members when we learn of such memberships, and the Airbnb PAC will update its framework and withhold support from those who voted against the certification of the presidential election results."

American Express: American Express said its political action committee would no longer make contributions to those 147 Republicans who voted to challenge the election results.

"Last week's attempts by some congressional members to subvert the presidential election results and disrupt the peaceful transition of power do not align with our American Express Blue Box values; therefore, the AXP PAC will not support them," the company said in a statement.

AT&T: AT&T released a statement Monday afternoon via its Public Policy Twitter account: "Employees on our Federal PAC Board convened a call today and decided to suspend contributions to members of Congress who voted to object to the certification of Electoral College votes last week."

CNN's parent company, WarnerMedia, is owned by AT&T.

Blue Cross Blue Shield: "At the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, we continuously evaluate our political contributions to ensure that those we support share our values and goals," said Kim Keck, BlueCross BlueShield's president and CEO, in a statement. "In light of this week's violent, shocking assault on the United States Capitol, and the votes of some members of Congress to subvert the results of November's election by challenging Electoral College results, BCBSA will suspend contributions to those lawmakers who voted to undermine our democracy."

The health insurance company's BLUEPAC political action committee -- supported only by employee contributions — donated $246,750 to Republican lawmakers during the 2020 cycle. That included $10,000 to Sen. Tuberville, $1,000 to Sen. Marshall and $500 to Sen. Hawley.

BlueCross BlueShield said it's stopping donations to all Republicans who challenged the Electoral College results.

Commerce Bank: Commerce Bank said it, too, is halting its PAC contributions to officials it says "have impeded the peaceful transfer of power." The bank donated a total of $49,750 to Republicans during the 2020 cycle, which included $2,500 to Sen. Marshall.

"Commerce Bank condemns violence in any form and believes the actions witnessed this week are abhorrent, anti-democratic and entirely contrary to supporting goodwill for Americans and businesses.

Dow Chemical: Dow said in an emailed statement that it is immediately suspending all corporate and employee political action committee contributions to any member of Congress who voted to object to the certification of the presidential election.

Dow said its suspension will last for one election cycle — two years for House members and up to six years for Senators — which specifically includes donations to candidates' re-election committees and affiliated PACs.

Marriott: Marriott is following suit by suspending its PAC donations to lawmakers who opposed election results.

"We have taken the destructive events at the Capitol to undermine a legitimate and fair election into consideration and will be pausing political giving from our Political Action Committee to those who voted against certification of the election," the company said in a statement.

In an internal memo to employees on Friday, Citigroup said it would temporarily suspend all political giving from its PAC in the first quarter, referred to as the Citi PAC. The company also denounced candidates "who do not respect the rule of the law."

Suspending all donations

Some companies have opted to suspend donations to all politicians, regardless of whether or not they voted against upholding the Electoral College results.

Charles Schwab: Schwab is discontinuing its financial contributions from its PAC to all lawmakers for the remainder of the year.

"This pause will give the firm an opportunity to evaluate the best path forward to fulfill our long-standing commitment to advocate on behalf of individual investors and those who serve them," said the company in statement.

Citigroup: Citi noted that of the legislators who contested the electoral college vote certification, Citigroup's PAC had given $1,000 to Sen. Hawley in 2019.

"We intend to pause our contributions during the quarter as the country goes through the Presidential transition and hopefully emerges from these events stronger and more united," said Candi Wolff, managing director and head of global government affairs, in the memo.

Coca-Cola: The beverage company has "suspended political giving."

"We were all stunned by the unlawful and violent events that unfolded in our nation's capital on Jan. 6, and we are grateful that Democracy prevailed with the subsequent certification of the election results," the company said. "The current events will long be remembered and will factor into our future contribution decisions."

Facebook: Facebook said it will suspend all donations from its political action committee through the first quarter, in light of last week's Capitol violence.

"Following last week's awful violence in DC, we are pausing all of our PAC contributions for at least the current quarter, while we review our policies," Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told CNN in a statement.

JPMorgan: JPMorgan said it will pause all political donations from the bank's PAC for six months.

"The country is facing unprecedented health, economic and political crises," said Peter Scher, head of corporate responsibility for JPMorgan. "The focus of business leaders, political leaders, civic leaders right now should be on governing and getting help to those who desperately need it most right now. There will be plenty of time for campaigning later."

Visa: The credit card company has temporarily suspended all of its PAC contributions as it reviews its "candidate contribution guidelines."

Since the Capitol riots, a large number of companies and business leaders have come forward to condemn the violence that ensued in Washington, with some calling for Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th amendment. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have banned President Trump from posting to his accounts for at least the remainder of his term in office -- or indefinitely. Twitter has permanently banned Trump from from its platform.

CNN's Alison Kosik contributed to this report.

Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyers accused Democrats of waging a campaign of “hatred” against the former president as they sped through their defense of his actions and fiery words before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, hurtling the Senate toward a final vote in his historic trial.

The defense team vigorously denied on Friday that Trump had incited the deadly riot and said his encouragement of followers to “fight like hell” at a rally that preceded it was routine political speech. They played dozens of out-of-context clips showing Democrats, some of them senators now serving as jurors, also telling supporters to “fight," aiming to establish a parallel with Trump's overheated rhetoric.

“This is ordinarily political rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from the language that has been used by people across the political spectrum for hundreds of years," declared Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen. "Countless politicians have spoken of fighting for our principles.”

But the presentation blurred the difference between general encouragement to battle for causes and Trump’s fight against officially accepted national election results. The defeated president was telling his supporters to fight on after every state had verified its results, after the Electoral College had affirmed them and after nearly every election lawsuit filed by Trump and his allies had been rejected in court.

The case is speeding toward a vote and likely acquittal, perhaps as soon as Saturday, with the Senate evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans and a two-thirds majority required for conviction. Trump's lawyers made an abbreviated presentation that used less than three of their allotted 16 hours.

Their quick pivot to the Democrats’ own words deflected from the central question of the trial — whether Trump incited the assault on the Capitol — and instead aimed to place impeachment managers and Trump adversaries on the defensive.

His lawyers contended he was merely telling his rally crowd to support primary challenges against his adversaries and to press for sweeping election reform.

After a two-day effort by Democrats to sync up Trump's words to the violence that followed, including through raw and emotive video footage, defense lawyers suggested that Democrats have typically engaged in the same overheated rhetoric as Trump.

But in trying to draw that equivalency, the defenders minimized Trump's months-long efforts to undermine the election results and his urging of followers to do the same. Democrats say that long campaign, rooted in a “big lie,” laid the groundwork for the mob that assembled outside the Capitol and stormed inside. Five people died.

“And so they came, draped in Trump’s flag, and used our flag, the American flag, to batter and to bludgeon," Rep. Madeleine Dean, one of the impeachment managers, said Thursday as she choked back emotion.

On Friday, as defense lawyers repeated their own videos over and over, some Democrats chuckled and whispered among themselves as many of their faces flashed on the screen. Some passed notes. Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal threw up his hands, apparently amused, when his face appeared. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar rolled her eyes. Most Republicans watched intently.

During a break, some joked about the videos and others said they were a distraction or a “false equivalence” with Trump's behavior.

“Well, we heard the word ‘fight' a lot,” said Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett said it felt like the lawyers were “erecting straw men to then take them down rather than deal with the facts."

“Show me any time that the result was that one of our supporters pulled someone out of the crowd, and then we said, ‘That’s great, good for you,’” said Delaware Sen. Chris Coons.

Trump's defenders told senators that Trump was entitled to dispute the 2020 election results and that his doing so did not amount to inciting the violence. They sought to turn the tables on prosecutors by likening the Democrats' questioning of the legitimacy of Trump's 2016 win to his challenge of his election loss.

The defense team did not dispute the horror of the violence, painstakingly reconstructed by impeachment managers earlier in the week, but said it had been carried out by people who had “hijacked” what was supposed to be a peaceful event and had planned violence before Trump had spoken.

“You can't incite what was going to happen,” he said.

Acknowledging the reality of the January day is meant to blunt the visceral impact of the House Democrats' case and pivot to what Trump's defenders see as the core — and more winnable — issue of the trial: Whether Trump actually incited the riot. The argument is likely to appeal to Republican senators who want to be seen as condemning the violence but without convicting the president.

Anticipating defense efforts to disentangle Trump's rhetoric from the rioters' actions, the impeachment managers spent days trying to fuse them together through a reconstruction of never-been-seen video footage alongside clips of the president's months of urging his supporters to undo the election results.

On Thursday, they described in stark, personal terms the terror they faced that January day — some of it in the very Senate chamber where senators now are sitting as jurors. They used security video of rioters searching menacingly for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence, smashing into the building and engaging in bloody, hand-to-hand combat with police.

Though defense lawyers sought to boil down the case to a single Trump speech, Democrats displayed the many public and explicit instructions he gave his supporters well before the White House rally that unleashed the deadly Capitol attack as Congress was certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. And they used the rioters’ own videos and words from Jan. 6 to try to pin responsibility on Trump. “We were invited here,” said one Capitol invader. “Trump sent us,” said another. “He’ll be happy. We’re fighting for Trump.”

The prosecutors' goal was to cast Trump not as a bystander but rather as the “inciter in chief” who spread election falsehoods, then encouraged supporters to come challenge the results in Washington.

The Democrats also are demanding that he be barred from holding future federal office.

Trump's lawyers say that goal only underscores the “hatred” Democrats feel for Trump. Throughout the trial, they showed clips from Democrats questioning the legitimacy of his presidency and suggesting as early as 2017 that he should be impeached.

“Hatred is at the heart of the house managers’ fruitless attempts to blame Donald Trump for the criminal acts of the rioters — based on double hearsay statements of fringe right-wing groups, based on no real evidence other than rank speculation," van der Veen said.

Trump's lawyers noted that in the same Jan. 6 speech he encouraged the crowd to behave “peacefully,” and they contend that his remarks — and his general distrust of the election results — are all protected under the First Amendment. Democrats strenuously resist that assertion, saying his words weren’t political speech but rather amounted to direct incitement of violence.

WASHINGTON —

Video above: What's the deal with infrastructure?

Senate Republicans reached a deal with Democrats on Wednesday over major outstanding issues in a $1 trillion infrastructure package, ready to begin consideration of a key part of President Joe Biden's agenda. An evening test vote was possible.

Lead GOP negotiator Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio made the announcement at the Capitol, flanked by four other Republican senators who have been in talks with Democrats and the White House on the bipartisan package.

"We now have an agreement on the major issues," Portman said. "We are prepared to move forward."

Asked about the agreement during a tour of a truck plant in Pennsylvania, Biden expressed approval.

"I feel confident about it," he said.

For days, senators and the White House have worked to salvage the bipartisan deal, a key part of Biden's agenda.

The outcome will set the stage for the next debate over Biden’s much more ambitious $3.5 trillion spending package, a strictly partisan pursuit of far-reaching programs and services including child care, tax breaks and health care that touch almost every corner of American life, and that Republicans strongly oppose.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer opened the Senate on Wednesday announcing a possible test vote on the bipartisan package in the evening. It will require 60 votes in the evenly split 50-50 Senate to proceed to consideration, meaning support from both parties. That would launch a potentially long process to consider the bill, and any possible amendments.

Republican senators met Wednesday morning with Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who appears to have given his nod to proceed. Portman said McConnell "all along has been encouraging our efforts."

Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona, a lead Democratic negotiator, said she expected the package would have enough support to move forward.

Sinema said she spoke with Biden Wednesday and he was "very excited" to have an agreement.

Democrats, who have slim control of the House and Senate, face a timeline to act on what would be some of the most substantial pieces of legislation in years.

The bipartisan package includes about $600 billion in new spending on highways, bridges, transit, broadband, water systems and other public works projects.

Filling in the details has become a month-long exercise ever since the senators struck an agreement with Biden more than a month ago over the broad framework. There remains work to do as they draft the legislative text.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who has been central to talks, said, "That doesn’t mean every 't' is crossed, every ‘i’ dotted, but on the major issues we are there."

Republican senators sparred at their closed-door lunch Tuesday, one side arguing against doing anything that would smooth the way for the Democrats’ broader bill, according to a person granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting. Others spoke in favor of the bipartisan package.

A recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC found 8 in 10 Americans favor some increased infrastructure spending.

House Democrats have their own transportation bill, which includes much more spending to address rail transit, electric vehicles and other strategies to counter climate change.

At a private meeting of House Democrats on Tuesday, Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, called the Senate's bipartisan measure complete "crap," according to two Democrats who attended the session and spoke on condition of anonymity to describe it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not commit to supporting the bipartisan package until she sees the details, but said Wednesday she's "rooting for it."

Pelosi said, "I very much want it to pass."

Senators in the bipartisan group have been huddling privately for weeks. The group includes 10 core negotiators, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, but has swelled at times to 22.

Transit funding has remained a stubborn dispute, as Republican senators are wary of formalizing what has been a typical formula for the Highway Trust Fund allotting around 80% for highways and 20% for transit.

Most Republican senators come from rural states where highways dominate and public transit is scarce, while Democrats view transit as a priority for cities and a key to easing congesting and fighting climate change. Democrats don't want to see the formula dip below its typical threshold.

Expanding access to broadband. which has become ever more vital for households during the coronavirus pandemic, sparked a new debate. Republicans pushed back against imposing regulations on internet service providers in a program that helps low-income people pay for service.

Sinema said transit and broadband were the remaining issues being finished up Wednesday.

Democrats also have been insisting on a prevailing-wage requirement, not just for existing public works programs but also for building new roads, bridges, broadband and other infrastructure, but it's not clear that will make the final package.

Still unclear is how to pay for the bipartisan package after Democrats rejected a plan to bring in funds by hiking the gas tax drivers pay at the pump and Republicans dashed a plan to boost the IRS to go after tax scofflaws.

Funding could come from repurposing COVID relief aid, reversing a Trump-era pharmaceutical rebate and other streams. It's possible the final deal could run into political trouble if it doesn't pass muster as fully paid for when the Congressional Budget Office assesses the details.

Portman said the package will be "more than paid for."

Meanwhile, Democrats are readying the broader $3.5 trillion package that is being considered under budget rules that allow passage with 51 senators in the split Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris able to break a tie. It would be paid for by increasing the corporate tax rate and the tax rate on Americans earning more than $400,000 a year.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Josh Boak in Washington and Tali Arbel in New York contributed to this report.

The partisan showdown over redistricting has hardly begun, but already both sides agree on one thing: It largely comes down to the South.

The states from North Carolina to Texas are set to be premier battlegrounds for the once-a-decade fight over redrawing political boundaries. That's thanks to a population boom, mostly one-party rule and a new legal landscape that removes federal oversight and delays civil rights challenges.

It's a collision of factors likely to tilt the scales in the GOP’s favor with dramatic impact: Experts note the new maps in the South alone could knock Democrats out of power in the U.S. House next year — and perhaps well beyond.

“The South is really going to stand out,” said Ryan Weichelt, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire who tracks redistricting.

Of the 10 new congressional seats expected this year, six are likely to be in Southern states, with one new one expected in North Carolina, two in Florida and three in Texas.

Republicans control the legislatures in those states, leaving them with near total say over what those new districts will look like — a sharp contrast to other parts of the country where state governments are either divided or where nonpartisan commissions are tasked with redrawing congressional and state legislative lines.

Finally, this will be the first time in more than 50 years the Justice Department will not automatically review new legislative maps in nine mostly Southern states to ensure they do not discriminate.

"It is a very different landscape from the one that it’s been for 50-plus years,” said Deuel Ross, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Republicans are under added pressure to bolster their political standing in the region as its population has grown, largely due to an influx of Democratic-leaning newcomers. That’s weakened the GOP’s grip, highlighted most dramatically in Georgia, where Democrats just won a presidential race and two Senate races.

Related video: Georgia Senate votes to curb absentee ballots

The party is already eyeing targets. In Georgia, they can choose whether to target Democratic Reps. Lucy McBath or Carolyn Boudreaux or both by adding more conservative voters from far north of Atlanta to the two lawmakers' districts.

In Florida, they could try to swamp Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy's district with new GOP voters as they carve out a new seat in the Orlando area, one of the two the state is expected to add.

And in Texas, which is expected to gain a whopping three congressional seats, the most of any state, the GOP may try to carve out more seats in the center of their state's boom — Democratic-leaning Houston — that could still elect Republicans.

Currently, a gain of five seats would hand control of the House to the GOP. That number may rise or fall before November 2020 depending on the outcome of special elections for several vacant seats.

To be sure, there will be limits — both legal and practical — on how much power Republicans can win with a new map. While they control the process, the demographic trends in Southern states are working against them. Many of the new residents are college-educated, racially diverse and young — all groups Republicans have struggled to win over.

That means the party can only draw so many “safe” districts. And, because these states are seeing explosive growth, efforts to perfectly divvy up major cities like Houston and Atlanta may collapse over time as tens of thousands of new residents continue to move in.

“You’ve got all these countervailing things," said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist. "Democrats doing better in suburban areas, states getting more diverse, coupled with Republicans being in control of all the levers of government.”

Control in the South has a history of leading to rigging the democratic process — from voting rules to district maps — to disempower Black voters. In Georgia, the state's GOP-controlled legislature is responding to Democrats' recent surge and former President Donald Trump's false claim of voter fraud with a raft of proposals that would make it harder to vote — including one to end Sunday early voting, popular among Black churchgoers.

Such restrictions wouldn't have been possible eight years ago, when the Justice Department was required to approve any changes ahead of time in states with a history of voting rights violations. But, in 2013, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down federal requirements that Georgia and eight other states “preclear” voting and redistricting changes. It ruled the federal formula based on the states' previous violations was outdated.

Several states — including Texas and North and South Carolina — quickly responded with new voter identification laws. Some civil rights advocates fear the party will take advantage of the lack of oversight in redistricting as well.

“If they’re using what was obviously a lie about voter fraud in 2020 to pass new restrictions on voting in Georgia and Texas, then I think the same will apply when the Census data comes out” to kick off the redistricting process, Ross said.

Redistricting on the basis of race remains illegal under the Voting Rights Act. But proving a violation can take years in court, allowing multiple elections to go forward with maps that may later be found illegal. For example, in North Carolina — the Republican legislature alone has redistricting power, without input from the state's Democratic governor — the legislature drew maps in 2010 that were eventually found to be racially gerrymandered. But those maps remained in place for two House elections before being redrawn to cost the GOP two seats.

“It means a state can engage in midnight gerrymandering and essentially evade court review, run elections with those gerrymandered maps and get away with it until the next election," said Kathay Feng, Common Cause's redistricting director.

Jason Torchinsky, general counsel of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said there's significant limits on what Republican legislatures could accomplish even if they went down the road of racial gerrymandering — which, he noted, could still result in damaging lawsuits and injunctions against maps from federal judges.

“This notion that, somehow, the lack of preclearance is going to leave minorities unprotected is false,” Torchinsky said.

Some Republicans note the party should be careful not to let its power over the rules and the boundaries replace persuasion. It must still try to win over new arrivals in the South with ideas.

“We need to remind these new residents that they're moving to these states, ideally, based on policies Republicans have put in place,” said Hooff Cooksey, a Virginia-based GOP strategist.

Virginia looms as a warning to the GOP — a once solidly Republican state that became a solidly Democratic one as the growing, educated population in the Washington, D.C., suburbs turned against the party. A federal court redrew the state's maps in 2016 because it found the legislature — split between both parties — and a Republican governor had improperly used racial criteria in redistricting.

Democrats won the statehouse in 2019 and Virginia now uses a nonpartisan commission to draw its legislative maps.

WASHINGTON —

Related video above: Biden discusses COVID-19 relief

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell warned ominously Tuesday of a “scorched earth” landscape if Democrats use their new majority to bring an end to the Senate filibuster in hopes of muscling legislation supporting President Joe Biden's agenda past GOP opposition.

McConnell unleashed the dire forecast of a Senate that would all but cease to function, implying that Republicans would grind business to a halt by refusing to give consent for routine operations — from the start time for sessions, to the reading of long legislative texts, to quorum call votes.

"Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin to imagine — what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like," McConnell said in a Senate speech.

McConnell said the partisan gridlock of the Trump and Obama eras would look like "child's play" compared to what's to come.

The GOP leader's stark remarks landed as the Biden administration is taking a victory lap over the just-passed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the big COVID-19 relief package that was approved by Congress without a single Republican vote. Republicans acknowledged privately they are struggling to pry attention away from the bill, which appears to be popular among Americans benefitting from $1,400 cash payments, vaccine distribution and other aid, as the GOP focuses on future battles.

With the Senate evenly divided, 50-50, the rest of Biden's priorities face a tougher climb in Congress. While the Democratic-controlled House is able to swiftly approve a long list of potentially popular bills — to expand voting rights, extend gun purchase background checks and other measures — the rules of the Senate are more cumbersome. It typically requires 60 votes to break a filibuster to advance most legislation.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer brushed off McConnell's remarks as a "diversion" and said he hopes to work with Republicans on the upcoming bills, but said all options for filibuster changes are on the table.

Biden told ABC News’ George George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday: "I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster, you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days. You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking."

Senate Democrats are talking privately about changing the decades-old rules for the filibuster, which allows a single senator to block a bill by objecting. In earlier eras, senators would seize the floor, speaking for hours about their objections, as was done in the Hollywood movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” They also used it to stall civil rights legislation in the middle of the 20th century.

Supporters of the process say it protects the rights of the party not in power, but detractors argue it is being used to block popular bills.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Tuesday that nearly 65 years after South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond’s record-setting 24-hour-plus filibuster over the 1957 Civil Rights Act, "the filibuster is still making a mockery of American democracy."

It takes 51 votes to change the Senate rules and do away with the filibuster, and Democrats do not appear to have support from within their ranks to do so, even with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker. At least two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have signaled their objections, but there may be more.

The Senate will be put to the test in the weeks ahead. As senators start considering the House-passed bills, Democrats will be testing Republican willingness to participate in the legislative process by amending the bills toward eventual passage.

If Republicans simply block the bills, Democrats are expected to lean in more forcefully to try to change the rules.

Some Democrats want to require senators who engage in filibusters to be forced to hold the floor, as Jimmy Stewart did in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” These days, senators can simply signal their filibuster, which Durbin derided as "Mr. Smith Phones it in."

"We must change the rules," Durbin said.

McConnell warned Democrats not to take the next step, unveiling the actions he could take in retribution.

"This is an institution that requires unanimous consent to turn the lights on before noon, to proceed with a garden-variety floor speech, to dispense with the reading of a lengthy legislative text, to schedule committee business, to move even non-controversial nominees at anything besides a snail’s pace," he said.

Changes to the filibuster have been underway for a decade, an escalating procedural arms race alongside the nation's rising partisanship.

Democrats did away with the filibuster rules to overcome Republican stonewalling of President Barack Obama's executive branch nominations and some judicial nominees.

Republicans and McConnell then escalated the process by eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, smoothing confirmation of President Donald Trump's three high court nominees.

WASHINGTON —

As congressional Democrats gear up for another bruising legislative push to expand voting rights, much of their attention has quietly focused on a small yet crucial voting bloc with the power to scuttle their plans: the nine Supreme Court justices.

Democrats face dim prospects for passing voting legislation through a narrowly divided Congress, where an issue that once drew compromise has become an increasingly partisan flashpoint. But as they look to reinstate key parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights-era law diminished over the past decade by Supreme Court rulings, they have accepted the reality that any bill they pass probably will wind up in litigation — and ultimately back before the high court.

The task of building a more durable Voting Rights Act got harder when the high court's conservative majority on July 1 issued its second major ruling in eight years narrowing the law's once robust power.

“What it feels like is a shifting of the goal posts,” said Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the left-leaning Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Sparring in Congress for months has focused on a different Democratic bill overhauling elections, known as the For the People Act, which Republican senators blocked from debate on the chamber's floor last month.

Separately, however, Democrats have held a marathon series of low-key “field hearings” to prepare for votes on a second measure, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which could come to the House floor for a vote in September. The bill would allow courts and the Department of Justice to once again police changes to voting rules in places with a history of electoral discrimination against minorities, a practice the Supreme Court put on hold in 2013.

Democrats hope the hearings they have conducted with little fanfare will help build a legislative record that could withstand a court challenge. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Friday that the process will document what he called "the disgraceful tactics that Republican-led state legislatures are using across the country to keep people from voting.”

That's criticism that Republicans reject, arguing that the courts and Democratic administrations have selectively enforced the law in the past.

“It’s not a coincidence that a decade of court cases were only focused on Republican states,” said Rep. Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican who sits on a committee that conducted the field hearings.

Pressure has built for months on congressional Democrats to counteract a concerted state-level Republican push to enact new voting restrictions, inspired by President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election. But there is a new sense of urgency among many in the party’s activist base following the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which upheld two restrictive Arizona laws and will limit the ability to challenge voting restrictions in court.

“We cannot wait until October or November," said Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus.

While the specifics of the legislation have not yet been released, it would develop a new formula for determining which states and local governments would be subject to a review process known as “preclearance.” The court blocked the practice in 2013, reasoning that the formula used to determine which places are subjected to it was outdated and unfairly punitive. But the court also ruled that Congress could develop a new formula.

Though laws and rules already in place wouldn't be subject to a retooled Voting Rights Act, future ones would.

“We want to get our work done, but it has to be data-focused and defensible within the courts,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, a California Democrat who serves on a committee that has held many of the hearings.

Yet serious questions remain about whether the Supreme Court, which has a new and expanded conservative majority, would still be receptive to a new preclearance formula.

There's also been a major shift in the Republican Party.

The Voting Rights Act enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress for decades. It was reauthorized five times with commanding majorities, the most recent in 2006. But the bipartisan support eroded dramatically after the court's first ruling, in 2013, in the case of Shelby County, Alabama, v. Holder.

“If you look at the sea change in the politics, it all stems from Shelby and the political opportunity that it offers,” Hewitt said.

Republicans say vast strides have been made in ballot access since the civil rights era, which is when the law's preclearance formula was first established. The initial law targeted states and localities with low minority turnout and a history of using hurdles such as literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise minority voters.

Such barriers are no longer used, and Republicans point to a swell of minority turnout in the last election as proof that many conservative-leaning states, particularly in the South, should not be subjected to preclearance.

They also point blame at Democrats, who in 2019 rejected a bipartisan bill to reestablish preclearance. Many Democrats instead favored their own measure, which would have eschewed the use of minority voter turnout data, a pillar of the original Voting Rights Act, while leaning heavily on looser standards, such as using the number of legal settlements and consent decrees issued in voting rights cases, to pull places into preclearance.

That would, Republicans argue, play into the hands of Democrats, who have built a sophisticated and well-funded legal effort to challenge voting rules in conservative-leaning states.

“It shunned objective data,” said Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project. “They want to target Georgia and Texas and Florida. But when you actually look at turnout data, it's Massachusetts that has half the Black turnout rate that Georgia does. That's why you get these games being played.”

Regardless, Democrats have a difficult climb to enacting their new bill under current Senate filibuster rules, which require 60 votes to advance legislation in a chamber that is split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has made clear his opposition. He said last month that Democrats were aiming to achieve through the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act what they couldn't through their other elections bill, the For the People Act.

“It’s against the law to discriminate in voting on the basis of race already,” he said. “It is unnecessary.”

WASHINGTON —

The Democrats' sweeping attempt to rewrite U.S. election and voting law suffered a major setback in the Senate Tuesday, blocked by a filibuster wall of Republican opposition to what would be the largest overhaul of the electoral system in a generation.

The vote leaves the Democrats with no clear path forward, though President Joe Biden declared, "This fight is far from over."

The bill, known as the For the People Act, would touch on virtually every aspect of how elections are conducted, striking down hurdles to voting that advocates view as the Civil Rights fight of the era, while also curbing the influence of money in politics and limiting partisan influence over the drawing of congressional districts.

But many in the GOP say the measure represents instead a breathtaking federal infringement on states' authority to conduct their own elections without fraud — and is meant to ultimately benefit Democrats.

It failed on a 50-50 vote after Republicans, some of whom derided the bill as the "Screw the People Act," denied Democrats the 60 votes needed to begin debate under Senate rules. Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to hold her office, presided over the chamber as the bill failed to break past that filibuster barrier.

Biden praised Senate Democrats for standing together "against the ongoing assault of voter suppression that represents a Jim Crow era in the 21st Century." In a statement from the White House, he said that in their actions, though unsuccessful on Tuesday, they "took the next step forward in this continuous struggle."

The rejection forces Democrats to reckon with what comes next for their top legislative priority in a narrowly divided Senate. They've touted the measure as a powerful counterweight to scores of proposals advancing in GOP-controlled statehouses making it more difficult to vote.

"Once again, the Senate Republican minority has launched a partisan blockade of a pressing issue," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said from the chamber floor. He vowed that the vote was the "starting gun" and not the last time voting rights would be up for debate.

Whatever Democrats decide, they will likely be confronted with the same challenge they faced Tuesday when minority Republicans used the filibuster — the same tool that Democrats employed during Donald Trump's presidency — to block consideration of the bill.

Republicans showed no sign of yielding.

Republican leader Mitch McConnell called the bill a "a solution looking for a problem" and vowed to "put an end to it." Texas Sen. Ted Cruz dismissed it as "partisan legislation, written by elected Democrats, designed to keep elected Democrats in office."

And, more graphically, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito called the bill "a despicable, disingenuous attempt to strip states of their constitutional right to administer elections" that "should never come close to reaching the president's desk."

Pressure has been mounting on Democrats to change Senate rules or watch their priorities languish. A group of moderate Democratic senators, however, including Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have ruled that out, denying the votes needed to make a filibuster change.

Biden has vowed what the White House calls the "fight of his presidency" over ensuring Americans' access to voting. But without changes to Senate rules, key planks of his agenda, including the voting bill, appear stalled.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat and senior pastor at the Atlanta church Martin Luther King Jr. once led, called minority Republicans' willingness to prevent debate on the voting bill a "dereliction" of duty.

"What could be more hypocritical and cynical than invoking minority rights in the Senate as a pretext for preventing debate about how to preserve minority rights in the society," Warnock said during a floor speech Tuesday.

The changes being enacted in many Republican states are decried by voting rights advocates who argue the restrictions will make it more difficult for people to cast ballots, particularly minority residents who tend to support Democrats. Republicans, cheered on by Trump, talk instead about fighting potential voting fraud and say the Democrats' concerns are wildly overblown.

As the Senate discussion churns, more changes could be coming to the bill.

Democrats want to protect against intimidation at the polls in the aftermath of the 2020 election. They propose enhancing penalties for those who would threaten or intimidate election workers and creating a "buffer zone" between election workers and poll watchers, among other possible changes.

They also want to limit the ability of state officials to remove local election officials. Georgia Republicans passed a law earlier this year that gives the GOP-dominated Legislature greater influence over a state board that regulates elections and empowers it to remove local election officials deemed to be underperforming.

But Democrats have divisions of their own. Until Tuesday, it wasn't even clear that they would be united on the vote to bring the bill up for debate. Manchin, a moderate from West Virginia, announced earlier this month that he couldn't support the bill because it lacked Republican support.

Manchin flipped his vote to a "yes" after Democrats agreed to consider his revised version. His proposal was endorsed by former President Barack Obama and called a "step forward" by Biden's administration.

Manchin has proposed adding provisions for a national voter ID requirement, which is anathema to many Democrats, and dropping a proposed public financing of campaigns. The ID requirement would be less strict than ones pushed by Republicans in certain states and allow voters to provide non-photo ID such as a utility bill.

Those changes did little, however, to garner the bipartisan support Manchin was hoping for. Senate Republicans said they would likely reject any legislation that expands the federal government's role in elections. McConnell dismissed Manchin's version as "equally unacceptable."

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Alaska Republican, said some aspects of the Democratic bill were laudable and she supports other voting rights legislation, like a reinstatement of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.

But, ultimately, she said the "sprawling" bill amounted to "a one-size-fits-all mandate coming out of Washington D.C." that "in many cases doesn't work."

Months in the making, Tuesday's showdown had taken on fresh urgency as Trump continues to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election and new limits move ahead in Republican-led states.

State officials who certified the results of the 2020 election have dismissed Trump's claims of voter fraud, and judges across the country have thrown out multiple lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies. Trump's own attorney general said there was no evidence of widespread fraud that would change the outcome.

A proposed compromise on voting rights now has the support of a key advocate.

Stacey Abrams says she "absolutely could" support Senator Joe Manchin's proposed changes to the Democrats' elections package and that she'll look to Senate Democratic leaders to build on it to protect voters and reverse state-level restrictions.

"Basic building blocks that we need to ensure that democracy is accessible no matter your geography. Those provisions that he is setting forth are strong ones that will create a level playing field, will create standards that do not vary from state to state and, I think, will ensure that every American has improved access to the right to vote despite the onslaught of state legislations seeking to restrict access to the right to vote," Abrams said.

But the top Republican in the Senate calls Manchin's changes unacceptable and says the legislation isn't necessary at all.

"I've taken a look at all these new state laws, none of them are designed to suppress the vote. There is no rational basis for the federal government trying to take over all of American elections," said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell doesn't expect the bill to get support from Republicans, which would be necessary to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. 

This story originally reported by Kamil Zawadzki on Newsy.com.

Related video above: Trump Administration secretly seized phone and email records of reporters

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats called for an investigation on Thursday after The New York Times reported that the Justice Department under President Donald Trump seized the communications data of members of the House Intelligence Committee.

"The news about the politicization of the Trump Administration Justice Department is harrowing," Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement. "These actions appear to be yet another egregious assault on our democracy waged by the former president."

The Times reported Thursday that the DOJ subpoenaed Apple for data from at least two committee members, as well as aides and family members, in 2017 and 2018. The Times report anonymously cited committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry.

Among those whose records were seized was California Rep. Adam Schiff, then the top Democrat on the committee.

Rep. Schiff: Subpoenas were extremely broad

Schiff, now the panel's chair, said in a statement Thursday night: "Though we were informed by the Department in May that this investigation is closed, I believe more answers are needed, which is why I believe the Inspector General should investigate this and other cases that suggest the weaponization of law enforcement by a corrupt president."

The Times reported that the subpoenas came as the DOJ was trying to hunt down the sources of leaks that had led to news stories about contacts between Trump associates and Russia.

As with a lot of things, there will be some compromise when it comes to the next infrastructure bill and President Joe Biden said he's open and willing to negotiate. 

During his meeting with GOP lawmakers earlier this month, he told them to offer a counter proposal. They did that Thursday.

Republicans say the president's plan goes beyond what is considered infrastructure.

Their $568 billion plan addresses more traditional infrastructure, including roads and bridges, drinking and wastewater, and public transit.

"This is the largest infrastructure investment that Republicans have come forward with," Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said. "This is a robust package when we look at where we're focusing our infrastructure needs."

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the White House looks forward to reviewing the proposal.

She also said we should expect the president to meet with Republican lawmakers after his address to Congress next week. 

This story was originally published by Lauren Stephenson at Newsy.

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