Jacob Fischler, Ohio Capital Journal

Supreme Court justices signal skepticism over TikTok's effort to avoid ban

U.S. Supreme Court justices on Friday questioned why they should intervene to block a law forcing the sale of TikTok in nine days, saying the short-form video platform’s Chinese parent company does not enjoy First Amendment rights.

Lawyers for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and a group of the platform’s users faced sharp questions from justices on both sides of the court’s ideological split about how any party other than ByteDance would have its rights restricted.

Under the bipartisan law passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden, ByteDance must divest TikTok by Jan. 19 or the wildly popular platform will be banned from app stores in the United States.

ByteDance holds the intellectual property rights to the algorithm that powers what content TikTok users see. If severed from the parent company, as required by the law, TikTok would lose access to the proprietary algorithm, which the company argued was a form of speech.

But the justices suggested only ByteDance — which, as a foreign company, they said, does not have the presumption of First Amendment rights — would be the only party directly harmed by the law.

The law targets ownership and potential control of the platform, including access to user data, by the Chinese Communist Party, Chief Justice John Roberts said. The law designates the Chinese government a foreign adversary.

“Congress doesn’t care about what’s on TikTok, they don’t care about the expression,” Roberts, a member of the court’s conservative majority, said. “That’s shown by the remedy: They’re not saying, ‘TikTok has to stop.’ They’re saying, ‘The Chinese have to stop controlling TikTok,’ so it’s not a direct burden on the expression at all.”

Lawmakers when the law was debated said the platform was dangerous because ByteDance is subject to Chinese national security laws that can compel companies to hand over data at any time.

“Are we supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate parent is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?” Roberts said.

Justice Elena Kagan, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, also noted the law would mainly affect ByteDance, not its U.S.-based subsidiary. Separated from its Chinese parent company, TikTok would be free to pursue its own algorithm to compete with Meta’s Instagram and other video-based social media, she said.

“The statute only says to this foreign company, ‘Divest or else,’ and leaves TikTok with the ability to do what every other actor in the United States can do, which is go find the best available algorithm,” Kagan said.

National security vs. free speech

Noel Francisco, who represented TikTok and ByteDance, argued that the law’s true aim was to stop “manipulation of content” by the Chinese government, which he said amounted to censorship in violation of the Constitution.

“The government’s real target, rather, is the speech itself, it’s fear that Americans, even if fully informed, could be persuaded by Chinese misinformation,” Francisco said. “That, however, is a decision that the First Amendment leaves to the people.”

The law burdens TikTok’s speech, Francisco said, “shutting down one of the largest speech platforms in America” that boasts about 170 million U.S. users.

He asked the court to analyze if that burden on speech was “content-based,” which he reasoned it was, noting the government’s national security argument speculated that TikTok could be used to misinform Americans.

The singling out of TikTok presents a particular problem, he said.

The law “says there’s one speaker we’re particularly concerned about, and we’re going to hammer home on that one speaker,” he said. “One of the reasons they’re targeting that speaker is because they’re worried about the future content on that platform — that it could, in the future, somehow be critical of the United States or undermine democracy.”

Jeffrey Fisher, an attorney for TikTok creators, said a law to prevent content manipulation — the government’s argument that TikTok users were vulnerable to being force-fed content approved by China — was not permitted by the First Amendment.

“That argument is that our national security is implicated if the content on TikTok is anti-democracy, undermines trust in our leaders — they use various phrases like that in their brief,” Fisher said. “That is an impermissible government interest that taints the entire act. … Once you have an impermissible motive like that, the law is unconstitutional.”

TikTok lawyers react

Lawyers for TikTok and several creators expressed confidence in their case following the arguments.

“We thought that the argument went very well, the justices are extremely engaged. They fully understand the importance of this case, not only for the American citizens of this country, but for First Amendment law, generally, the rights of everybody,” Francisco said at the National Press Club Friday afternoon.

Francisco also defended the ownership makeup of ByteDance as a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands that “is not owned by China” — though 21% is owned by a Chinese national who lives in Singapore, he said. Francisco also said TikTok’s source code for the algorithm is stored on servers in Virginia.

Three TikTok users shared stories about the livelihoods they’ve built through their presence on the platform.

Chloe Joy Sexton of Memphis, Tennessee, said TikTok allowed her to jump-start her baking business after a job loss and difficult family circumstances.

“I have now shipped thousands of cookies all over the world and even published a cookbook. As a small business without a lot of capital, I rely almost entirely on TikTok to market my products. To say TikTok changed my life is an understatement,” Sexton said.

It’s boom time in the Midwest for carbon dioxide pipelines — thanks to federal tax credits

Thousands of miles of carbon dioxide pipelines planned in the Midwest have been spurred, in part, by a major expansion of federal tax credits in Democrats’ 2022 climate law.

That could lead to billions of dollars per year in federal tax credits benefiting the powerful Midwest ethanol industry, even as the proposals create intense conflicts between developers and local landowners worried about pipelines on their property.

Some critics also say it’s going to be difficult to tell how much the federal government is spending on the tax credits and if they are really being earned by the companies claiming them. There are also questions about whether the pipelines will be that influential in removing carbon and slowing climate change.

The tax changes created incentives for larger-scale regional pipelines, Sasha Mackler, the executive director of the Center on Energy Policy at the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center, said.

Less than a year since Congress passed the law, the effect is hard to quantify, but the changes have generated huge interest in the nation’s ethanol-producing states, he said.

“It’s definitely created an enormous amount of enthusiasm and activity in the development community,” he said. “It’s very safe to say there’s been a significant uptick in commercial activity around carbon capture.”

Among the tax credits for various clean energy programs in the climate law, seen as the largest U.S. effort to date to address climate change, was a major expansion of tax credits for carbon sequestration, a technique of removing carbon emissions from industrial processes.

The 2022 law raised the credit from $50 to $85 per metric ton of carbon stored underground. It also extended a construction deadline and allowed for direct payment of the credit — making it simpler for companies to take advantage of — and made other changes that incentivized carbon storage.

Ethanol byproduct

Carbon dioxide is released during the fermentation process that’s part of ethanol production. That byproduct is a relatively pure — and easy-to-transport — form of carbon dioxide, compared with other industries.

Because the ethanol byproduct is easy to move, carbon sequestration in the industry has long been cheaper than in coal power plants, concrete manufacturing or other sectors.

The cost to ethanol producers of sequestration ranges from about $36 to $41 per metric ton, according to a report from the clean energy group Energy Futures Initiative, meaning the $50 tax credit was already profitable for the industry in most cases.

But costs varied on a case-by-case basis, depending on variables such as the length of a needed pipeline, Mackler said. The $85-per-ton credit provides even more of an incentive and makes more proposals profitable.

The expanded tax credits provide “a large economic opportunity” to retrofit or build new ethanol facilities with carbon capture in the Midwest, where plentiful corn crops helped create the center of domestic ethanol production, Joseph Hezir, executive vice president with Energy Futures Initiative, said in a late June event hosted by EFI and the environmental issues think tank Resources for the Future.

Producers may judge the potential benefits to outweigh the difficulties — including resistance from landowners opposed to pipeline construction — of building out carbon sequestration infrastructure, he said.

“Being able then to move that CO2 once you capture it to a place where you can sequester it is going to be a challenge,” Hezir said. “But the economics look promising and motivating enough for companies to want to begin to pursue that.”

While the full scope of the tax credit is hard to determine, the individual companies proposing carbon pipelines could see billions of dollars in annual tax benefits.

Summit Carbon Solutions, which has proposed a pipeline network that would connect 34 ethanol plants across Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota and deposit carbon dioxide in underground storage in North Dakota, says the project could permanently store 18 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.

At $85 per ton, that would equal $1.5 billion per year from the sequestration tax credit.

Navigator CO2 Ventures, another company seeking permits to build pipelines across Iowa, estimates it could transport and store up to 15 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which would earn tax credits of $1.3 billion.

Transparency issues

In theory, climate scientists say incentivizing carbon capture is good policy. It’s one of several climate solutions that major economies like the United States must use in combination to reach international climate goals.

“To meet all of our global climate goals we need to both rapidly scale up renewable energy, but then we also have to deal with the legacy carbon that’s in the atmosphere,” said Daniel Sanchez, a professor studying bioenergy at the University of California-Berkeley. “We need all of these tools at our disposal in order to effectively decarbonize the transportation sector.”

But critics say it’s hard to tell in practice exactly how much taxpayer money has been spent on carbon sequestration credits — or if the credits are going to facilities that are successfully removing carbon.

Companies must meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards for underground carbon storage to qualify for the credit. But the agency and the Internal Revenue Service both lack the staffing to verify companies claiming the credits are earning them, said Jim Walsh, the policy director for the advocacy group Food and Water Watch, which opposes tax credits for carbon capture.

“These tax credits are shrouded in secrecy and ripe for corruption, with no ability for oversight by the public,” he said.

Carbon capture itself is not an effective strategy to address climate change, Walsh said. Pipelines and storage wells can leak carbon, but even without those problems, sequestration is a half-measure, he added.

“The only way that we’re going to address the climate crisis is to stop fossil fuel development and phase out fossil fuels quickly,” he said.

Carbon storage and other technologies that boost fossil fuel use are counter-productive, he said.

“That leaves us with a lot of solutions that are going to waste money while enriching powerful interests and undermining our ability to address the climate crisis in a meaningful way.”

Most climate scientists, though, say that carbon sequestration is part of a long-term solution.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change most recent report projected that reaching mid-century climate goals will require 6 gigatons of carbon dioxide sequestration.

Federal spending on carbon storage recognizes that the U.S. economy is largely fossil-fuel based, Mackler said.

“From a climate perspective, fossil fuels are not the problem,” he said. “The problem is emissions from fossil fuels. And so if we can develop a pathway for continuing to use at some scale, especially with the oil and the natural gas that we take advantage of to power our economy, if we can use them in a way that does not damage the climate, that’s fantastic.”

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Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

Norfolk Southern CEO apologizes for Ohio crash, but won’t back bipartisan rail safety bill

The CEO of Norfolk Southern, the railroad operating the train that last month derailed and spilled toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, apologized for the derailment at a U.S. Senate hearing Thursday, but declined solicitations to endorse a bipartisan rail safety bill.

Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw opened his testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee with an apology to residents of the community and pledged “to make this right,” though he resisted senators’ invitations to endorse policy specifics.

“I want to begin today by expressing how deeply sorry I am for the impact this has had on the residents of East Palestine and the surrounding communities,” Shaw said.

“I am determined to make this right. Norfolk Southern will clean the site safely, thoroughly and with urgency. You have my personal commitment. Norfolk Southern will get the job done and help East Palestine thrive.”

The railroad has announced direct investments of $21 million and helped more than 4,000 families through an assistance center, Shaw said, calling that spending “just a down payment.”

Rail safety legislation

Senators on the panel, including those from Ohio and neighboring Pennsylvania, sought Shaw’s endorsement for a rail safety bill and other policy proposals — but were rebuffed.

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, was among the three Democrats and three Republicans who introduced a bill last week that would increase civil penalties for railroad safety violations, increase inspections of wheel bearings and create other safety regulations.

The bill’s sponsors from Ohio and Pennsylvania — Brown, Ohio Republican J.D. Vance and Pennsylvania Democrats Bob Casey and John Fetterman — all promoted it at Thursday’s hearing, though Fetterman did so by sending written questions to committee Chairman Tom Carper. Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri were the measure’s other original cosponsors.

“It’d be a good start by Norfolk Southern to tell us today, in addition to what more they’re going to do for the people of Ohio and Pennsylvania … that they support the bill,” Casey said. “That would help, if a major rail company said we support these reforms, and we’ll help you pass this bill.”

Vance, a new senator who was elected on a populist message, also urged his fellow Republicans to support the rail safety bill. A political realignment over the past 30 years meant Republicans should not be afraid to establish additional regulations on the railroad industry, he said.

“I believe that we are the party of working people, but it’s time to be the party of working people,” he said. “We have a choice. Are we for big business and big government or are we for the people?”

Vance added that he had initially been frustrated with Norfolk Southern’s response to the Feb. 3 disaster, but said the railroad had “finally started to do the cleanup in earnest.”

Now, Vance said, the problem slowing down the cleanup was the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s delay in approving the removal of toxic materials.

“We need leadership,” he said. “We need the EPA to get on the ground and aggressively get this stuff out of East Palestine into properly licensed facilities.”

Fetterman, who has been absent from the Capitol as he receives medical treatment for depression, relayed to Carper, a Delaware Democrat, questions for Shaw.

In those questions, Fetterman asked if Shaw would support the bill.

Shaw said the company supported “the legislative intent to make railroads safer,” and could support some provisions of the bill, but declined to offer an endorsement for the measure in its entirety.

Democrats blame greed, push for commitments

Brown blamed the derailment on the railroad for prioritizing its executives’ compensation and stock price over safety. Norfolk Southern spent $3.4 billion on stock buybacks last year, he said, while it has cut 38% of its workforce in the last 10 years.

The money spent on stock buybacks could have gone to hiring track inspectors or safety equipment, he said.

“Norfolk Southern chose to invest much of its massive, massive profits in making its executives and shareholders wealthy at the expense of Ohio communities along its rail tracks,” Brown said.

Shaw said a federal National Transportation Safety Board investigation showed no evidence that additional personnel would have prevented the derailment.

Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley asked Shaw to commit to halt stock buybacks until the company finished making safety improvements.

Shaw declined, though he said the railroad would invest in safety.

Sen. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, pushed Shaw to commit to compensate homeowners and small businesses for the loss in value of their real estate.

Shaw would say only that he was “committing to do what’s right for the community.”

Markey said Norfolk Southern would have to balance what’s right for the community with what is in the best interest of the railroad, predicting the company would continue to offer stock buybacks and would sue to avoid paying for the harm to East Palestine residents.

Communication issues undermine trust

The cleanup efforts, which involved federal, state and local authorities as well as Norfolk Southern, have been rife with communication mishaps, senators said.

U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, said neither her office nor state officials, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and state environmental regulators, were notified that Norfolk Southern was bringing waste from the accident into Michigan.

Norfolk Southern and EPA officials could not tell where the toxic material was sent, ranking Republican Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said. That lack of communication made local residents more fearful, she said.

“What does that do to trust?” she said. “We just need to get some transparency of where this material is going, how long it’s going to take to get out.”

House GOP would make it easier for feds to give public lands away to states

U.S. House Republicans included in the new rules for the chamber they passed this month a provision meant to make it easier for Congress to give away public lands.

The provision is a fairly technical piece of the 55-page rules package. It affects internal House accounting and requires that anytime Congress were to give any federal lands to a state, municipality or tribe, it would not be counted as a loss to the federal budget. House Republicans had an identical rule when they controlled the chamber from 2017 to 2019.

Advocates and critics agree the measure would be helpful to any effort by the House to transfer federal lands to states.

But they disagree about the wisdom of such giveaways.

Republicans and conservative groups see states as preferable stewards of most public lands. Those closest to the land are in a better position to make decisions on how to manage them than those in Washington bureaucracies, they say.

Environmental groups and Democrats see federal divestment as a step toward restricting access to places to which all Americans should have a claim. States couldn’t afford to protect public lands, which would lead them to sell to private companies, they say.

Republicans “want to make it easier to cheat American taxpayers and give away our public lands for nothing in return,” House Natural Resources ranking Democrat Raul Grijalva, of Arizona, said in a written statement.

“They’re ordering Congress’s accountants to cook the books for them. This is not good economic or environmental policy. This is Republicans doing the bidding of anti-public lands extremists.”

Rebekah Hoshinko, a spokeswoman for new House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman, a Republican from Arkansas, said Grijalva misrepresented the rule change, which would only apply to transfers to states, local governments and tribes — not the private sector.

“Republicans are committed to ensuring federal land management best reflects the needs of the local people closest to these lands,” she wrote in an email. “This provision is not a giveaway to private industry like Mr. Grijalva is claiming.”

The rule would apply to any land owned by the federal government, almost all of which is in 11 Western states and Alaska. In practice, it would likely be pertinent mostly to undeveloped tracts.

Accounting dispute

The two sides disagree about the accounting merits of the rule change.

Environmental groups and some Democrats say federal lands do have real value. The federal government could make money from leasing energy or mineral rights, or from selling the land. Giving land away is not neutral to the budget.

“You are giving up any potential revenue, whether it’s from entry fees, usage fees, or from natural resources if there were rights there,” said Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the public lands group Center for Western Priorities. “That’s money that would have gone to taxpayers.”

Groups that favor less federal involvement in public lands, though, say any value tied to potential extractive industries such as mining, oil and gas or logging is overstated by a federal government that limits such activities.

“It’s kind of a false cost,” said David McDonald, an attorney with the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a group that litigates on behalf of private property interests. “This is more of an honest accounting.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which is not bound by House Republican rules, would still have a final score of any legislation to convey federal lands. The Senate is also not bound to use the same accounting rules.

But the House rules are still important because they could make giving away those valuable lands more palatable to a Republican majority that wants to protect an image of fiscal responsibility, critics of the provision say.

“The internal rules would let Republican members of the House say, ‘This bill is revenue neutral,’” Weiss said. “It lets them just wave their hands away the fiscal cost. So a party that pretends to care about fiscal responsibility is abdicating that fiscal responsibility.”

Supporters of the measure agree that it would make it easier for Congress to divest public lands, but they say that’s a good thing.

Karla Jones, a senior director for federalism at the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, said in an email that the federal government should seek opportunities for more local control of federal lands.

Policies that facilitate the transfer of federal land — excluding national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and military installments — to the states “will ensure that territory is managed by those who have the greatest interest in its preservation and condition and the best understanding of how to care for it,” Jones wrote. “The states are the optimal environmental and economic stewards of the lands within their borders.”

How could states pay for maintenance?

But states may also be hard-pressed to afford formerly federal lands.

“The biggest problem is the cost of maintaining public lands,” Nicole Gentile, the senior director for public lands at the liberal Center for American Progress, said. “Fighting wildfire alone would bankrupt a lot of states.”

If states can’t afford new acquisitions, they’d look to sell, likely to oil and gas or other industries that covet spaces in the West, the location of most federally owned land. So, while the rule change only applies to transfers of federal land to other governments, it could quickly result in privatization that could block access to regular users, opponents of the provision say.

Advocates of relinquishing federal lands say pushing the costs to states would be a good thing.

The provision “will ensure that the House can process legislation that will actually benefit the federal government by reducing maintenance costs and increasing tax revenues,” Hoshinko said.

Even if the states don’t end up having to sell newly acquired lands, public access could become an issue.

Access to federal lands is stronger than in many state trust lands.

According to a 2017 analysis by the Center for Western Priorities, Montana had the highest score of eight Mountain West states rated for access to public lands.

Idaho, New Mexico and Nevada were rated “average.”

Arizona “needs improvement,” according to the analysis. Colorado had the most restrictive access laws but scored well for having strong dedicated funding for conservation and wildlife management.

Ratings today would be similar to the six-year-old study, Weiss said.

No rush of land transfers

The rule’s return is significant because it shows the new Republican House majority is aligned with the industries that stand to benefit from a divestment of federal lands, Gentile said.

“The reason it’s important to shine a light on is the question of, which interests are they actually looking out for?” she said.

House Republicans and their allies dispute that the measure is primarily intended to enrich industry. Allowing private landowners to manage pieces of land, though, would be more beneficial, McDonald said.

Rather than setting land aside for those who can afford to take a long backpacking trip, the areas could be used for ranchers or oil and gas interests to earn a livelihood, he said.

“It’s the democratizing of federal land,” he said.

The rules change is perhaps unlikely to result in a federal lands giveaway to states anytime soon.

It would only apply to internal House bookkeeping. The Congressional Budget Office would still weigh in on any bill with a budget impact and the Democratic Senate and Biden White House would be unlikely to rubber stamp House Republican calculations.

The last time the rule was in effect, when Republicans held the House, Senate and White House in the first half of the Trump administration, the only major bill to transfer federal land to states went nowhere.

Then-Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz of Utah pushed a bill to give away 3 million acres of federal land in Utah, but ultimately withdrew it under public pressure.

PR work for ‘Big Oil’ helped stymie climate action, House Democrats say

WASHINGTON – Public relations firms aligned with oil and gas companies have tested the limits of their industry ethics and caused major slowdowns to federal climate change policy, Democrats on a U.S. House panel said at a Wednesday hearing.

The firms’ conduct went beyond the bounds of ethical public relations work, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee and industry experts said. Oil and gas groups have spent exorbitant sums to promote their agenda and drown out opposing views, resulting in energy policy that has deterred action on climate, they said.

“The fossil fuel industry is strategically misleading members of all of our constituencies to line their own pockets, stymie climate action and disrupt the democratic process,” New York Democrat Paul Tonko said.

Climate activists have also faced harassment as they worked on campaigns opposed by fossil fuel companies, Anne Lee Foster, a former spokeswoman for environmental group Colorado Rising, told the committee.

No representatives from public relations firms testified at the hearing. But several Republican members, and a representative of the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina-based nonpartisan conservative think tank, defended the oil and gas industry’s right to broadcast their views.

Harassment described

Foster described being followed and harassed by protesters while working on a campaign in favor of a 2018 Colorado ballot measure to establish buffer zones between homes and other sensitive areas and oil and gas operations.

On one occasion, a man she did not know persisted in following her around the state Capitol, she said. Others started appearing at cafes she and her group frequented. One volunteer was followed home, she said.

“I was harassed during the first week of signature-gathering when men carrying signs targeted me, yelling at potential signers and standing between the individual and myself,” she testified to the committee. “There are many accounts of particularly women being followed around by multiple protesters for extended periods. Many folks reported being intimidated and scared.”

The oil and gas industry was linked to the harassment, she said.

A leaked document from Anadarko Petroleum showed the company was soliciting text messages to report the location of activists collecting signatures, Foster said Wednesday. A Colorado Public Radio reporter tested the number and found that protesters against the initiative appeared within 15 minutes of learning canvassers’ reports.

‘Greenwashing’

Public relations firms were not linked to the harassment campaign described by Foster.

But the firms otherwise overstepped accepted practices to give a false impression that oil and gas operations were less destructive for the climate, Christine Arena, the founder of strategy and design firm Generous Ventures and researcher on greenwashing, told the panel. That practice is sometimes known as greenwashing.

“Most of these ads, they don’t contain blatant lies,” she said. “They contain a blend of factual omissions and distortions.”

The industry has long relied on public relations campaigns to boost its image and advocate for its interests, she said.

“But what’s new is the intensity of its pursuits, the complexity of its operations and the vast resources it deploys to bulldoze regulatory obstacles and its path,” Arena said.

“Ordinary citizens possess neither the specialized knowledge needed to detect the myriad of factual omissions and distortions included in greenwashed ads, nor the financial resources needed to make their voices heard over the industry’s extensive lobbying and public relations efforts.”

Republicans call hypocrisy

Republicans on the panel dismissed the hearing as an election-year attempt to score political points at the expense of the oil and gas industry and accused Democrats of hypocrisy for seeking to limit fossil-fuel industry public relations but not pro-climate action groups.

“This hearing is just another attempt to vilify the nation’s most significant energy sector,” ranking Republican Blake Moore of Utah said.

The committee should instead be focused on developing more energy sources to bring costs down, Moore said.

Moore and other Republicans also objected to what he said was the hearing’s premise that environmental groups could run aggressive public relations campaigns, but that fossil-fuel companies who did the same were engaged in misinformation or disinformation.

“It’s extremely concerning to me and hypocritical that we’re even having this hearing today,” Georgia Republican Jody Hice said. “This is totally bogus, totally hypocritical.”

John Locke Foundation CEO Amy O. Cooke said there are tradeoffs involved in working to lower carbon dioxide emissions. People are concerned, for example, about the potential that renewable energy could lead to less reliable energy for consumers, she said.

“I’ve been on the ground working with those who have concerns and stories to tell regarding these tradeoffs,” Cooke said. “They have a right to tell their story, and the public has a right to hear them. But they’re often shut out or marginalized by legacy media, big tech and government.”

Documents fight

The committee also published a report Wednesday, mostly made up of primary documents showing oil and gas companies’ public relations strategies.

They included campaigns to highlight energy companies’ efforts to cut emissions through biofuels, for example. Arena testified that such campaigns overstate those efforts.

Subcommittee Chair Katie Porter, a California Democrat, said at the close of the hearing that the panel was unable to obtain documents from FTI Consulting, whose work includes strategic communications according to its website.

The panel has “initiated the subpoena process” for FTI, Porter said. Negotiations over document sharing are ongoing, she said.

FTI spokesman Matthew Bashalany said in an email that the company is cooperating with the committee.

“The work FTI Consulting’s strategic communications professionals provide for clients in all sectors of the economy is consistent with our company’s climate and net-zero commitments,” he wrote. “We continue to cooperate with Committee, just as we have since receiving its initial request.”

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jarvis DeBerry for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and Twitter.

Jan. 6 panel to detail Trump’s 187 minutes of delay as insurrection grew

The U.S. House committee investigating the Jan.6 attack and Donald Trump’s role in it will focus in a Thursday evening hearing on the former president’s refusal for more than three hours to call off the rioters storming the U.S. Capitol, committee aides said Wednesday.

The hearing will be the eighth in the panel’s series to document its findings but is the first evening meeting since its initial presentation last month. It will begin at 8 p.m. ET and can be watched on a livestream here.

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The committee leaders once indicated the series would comprise eight major public hearings, but aides now say more are likely, as the panel has heard from additional witnesses since the start of public meetings.

“There is potential for future hearings,” a committee aide said. “As we continue to gather evidence, continue to hear from witnesses, the committee will make a determination.”

Committee members Elaine Luria, a Democrat from Virginia, and Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger will lead the Thursday’s hearing, aides said. Chairman Bennie G. Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, will participate remotely after he tested positive for COVID-19 this week.

The hearing will examine Trump’s actions in the 187 minutes between the end of his speech on the White House Ellipse at about 1:10 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, and when he tweeted a video asking his supporters to leave the Capitol at 4:17 p.m., aides said.

Trump knew of the violence happening at the Capitol, where Congress was scheduled to certify the 2020 election results, aides said. Trump was the only person with the power to call off the attack, but declined to do so, the committee will show, according to aides.

Rather than intervene, Trump inflamed the mob with a tweet about Vice President Mike Pence.

Wendy Via, the president and cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a group that has provided expert analysis to the committee, said in a Wednesday interview that the Pence tweet “shows intent” to incite a riot to disrupt the transfer of power.

Trump knew or should have known that tweet would agitate the crowd, she said.

The panel will show who in the White House, including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, spoke to Trump on Jan. 6.

The panel has not announced which witnesses will testify live, citing security concerns.

Testimony from the deposition of Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, whom the committee questioned last week after it had already conducted six hearings, is expected to be a major part of the hearing.

Cipollone provided information on every aspect of Trump’s plan to overturn the election result, which the committee has detailed over its seven previous hearings, aides said.

The panel changed course and reordered the information it presented as more testimony came in, Via said. Cipollone coming forward “was huge,” she said.

Former Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson also provided much more information midway through the series after she changed her legal team. Hutchinson was the sole witness at a surprise hearing last month that detailed Trump’s activities on Jan. 6 and the days leading up to it.

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Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

How the fake Trump elector scheme fizzled in four states

Part of Donald Trump’s plan to reverse his loss in the 2020 presidential election hinged on replacing legitimate electors in a handful of swing states with “fake electors.”

In theory, these bogus Republican slates in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada and Wisconsin would cast their electoral votes for the incumbent — canceling out the popular vote for Joe Biden in their states.

Groups of fake electors met on Dec. 14, 2020, in those seven states, an investigative counsel working for the panel, Casey Lucier, said in a video presentation shown in a Tuesday hearing of the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The hearing revealed some intriguing details of the fake elector plot, which the U.S. House panel says Trump and his lawyers knew was illegal, and how it played out in four states in particular:

ARIZONA

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a self-described conservative Republican who campaigned for Trump in 2020, testified in person Tuesday about the pressure the Trump campaign put on him to revoke the state’s legitimate electors — and his steadfast refusal to participate.

Presidential elections in the United States are not straight popular vote contests, but are mediated by electoral college voters chosen by state, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who led much of the hearing Tuesday, reminded the audience.

Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, and outside counsel Rudy Giuliani were involved in a discussion near Thanksgiving 2020 about having fake electors meet, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Meadows, said.

Trump and Giuliani were also personally involved in a pressure campaign on state officials, according to committee testimony.

Some time after the election, Bowers received a call from Trump and Giuliani, who wanted the Arizona speaker to convene a committee to hear supposed evidence of election fraud, Bowers testified.

Bowers asked for evidence of fraud. It never materialized, and he declined in the coming weeks to form the committee.

Bowers told the panel he then asked Giuliani what the end goal of forming the committee would be. Giuliani said that a high-ranking Republican legislator had told the campaign that there was a legal theory that would allow the Legislature to replace electors for Biden with electors for Trump, and that the proposed committee could facilitate that.

Bowers said he hadn’t heard that legal theory. When Giuliani pressed the point, the speaker refused more pointedly.

“I said, ‘You are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath, when I swore to the Constitution to uphold it,’” Bowers said he told Giuliani.

“’And I also swore to the Constitution and the laws of the state of Arizona. And this is totally foreign as an idea or a theory to me, and I would never do anything of such magnitude without deep consultation with qualified attorneys.’”

He couldn’t recall the timing, but Bowers said Giuliani would appeal to their shared political party in an attempt to cajole him into helping Trump.

“He would say, ‘Aren’t we all Republicans here? I would think we would get a better reception,’” Bowers related Tuesday.

Bowers had gone public in December 2020 with a statement that Giuliani, fellow Trump attorney Jenna Ellis and others had made the “breathtaking request” that he replace Arizona’s electors with a slate for Trump.

Giuliani and Ellis made their case to Arizona lawmakers twice, he said, once with a small group of them and again in a closed-door meeting with Republican leaders in both chambers.

Tuesday, Bowers said that the small-group meeting took place because he’d denied an official legislative hearing.

On Jan. 4, two days before the attack on the Capitol, Bowers took a call from Trump lawyer John Eastman, who again asked him to hold a vote to decertify the state’s election results.

Bowers again invoked his oath of office in declining, he said.

“I said, ‘What would you have me do?’” Bowers said of his Jan. 4 call with Eastman. “And he said, ‘Just do it and let the courts sort it out.’”

Finally, on Jan. 6, U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, another Arizona Republican, called Bowers to ask him to support the decertification of the electors, Bowers said Tuesday. The speaker again declined, he said.

A spokesman for Biggs did not return messages seeking comment this week.

MICHIGAN

Republican lawmakers across the country were feeling similar pressure.

Trump invited leaders from Michigan and Pennsylvania to the White House in November 2020.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey told Trump he would follow Michigan law, meaning he would award the state’s electors to Biden, Shirkey said in a taped deposition.

On Facebook the next day, Trump disclosed Shirkey’s cell phone number. The majority leader then received almost 4,000 text messages “calling to take action,” he said. Many asked him to replace the state’s electors, he said.

State lawmakers did not have that power, he said.

“They were believing things that were untrue,” Shirkey said of the correspondence.

Schiff pointed out during the hearing that there cannot be substitutes of electors.

“There is only one legitimate slate of electors from each state. On the sixth day of January, Congress meets in a joint session to count those votes and the winner of the Electoral College vote becomes the president,” Schiff said.

“President Trump and his campaign were directly involved in advancing and coordinating the plot to replace legitimate Biden electors with fake electors not chosen by the voters.”

Michigan was also the site of one of the most bizarre episodes in the scheme.

A group of fake electors considered hiding in the state Capitol overnight because of a state law that required elector certification to be in that building, according to Laura Cox, the former GOP chair in the state who testified in a taped deposition.

Cox said she found this out from an attorney working with the Trump campaign. The Detroit News identified the attorney as Robert Norton, a Hillsdale College official. The video clip does not include Norton’s first name.

“He told me that the Michigan Republican electors were planning to meet in the Capitol and hide overnight so that they could fulfill the role of casting their vote per law in the Michigan chambers,” Cox said. “And I told him in no uncertain terms that that was insane and inappropriate.”

Michigan’s fake electors did meet, but did not make it inside the Capitol.

They did, though, apparently have a U.S. senator willing to deliver their names to the vice president on Jan. 6, according to a text exchange the committee revealed Tuesday.

The chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, texted an aide to then-Vice President Mike Pence that Johnson would hand the vice president elector votes from Wisconsin and Michigan. The Pence aide clearly texted not to follow that plan through.

A Johnson spokeswoman said Tuesday he “had no involvement in the creation of an alternate slate of electors and had no foreknowledge that it was going to be delivered to our office.”

WISCONSIN

In Johnson’s home state, local Republican officials were misled about the fake elector scheme.

Rather than being used as a pretext for Pence to overturn the election results — which he refused to do — officials in Wisconsin thought the Trump slate of electors would be sent to the U.S. Capitol only in the event a court overturned the state’s election results.

“I was told that these would only count if a court ruled in our favor,” Andrew Hitt, the former chair of the state party said in video testimony. “So that would have been using our electors in ways that we weren’t told about and that we wouldn’t have supported.”

Eastman believed a dispute over which electors to count would be “enough” for Pence to certify the Trump slate, Eastman wrote in an email to a campaign staffer.

Jan. 4 text messages the panel acquired between Wisconsin GOP workers show the Trump team asked about bringing fake elector paperwork to Washington on Jan. 6.

“Freaking trump [sic] idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the senate President,” one text read.

GEORGIA

The panel played a Dec. 3, 2020, video call showing Eastman, the architect of the false elector scheme, advocating for Georgia lawmakers to “to adopt a slate of electors yourselves.”

Eastman told the legislators that their counterparts in Florida were “prepared to do” the same thing.

The lawmakers were not only able, but should be compelled to overturn their state’s election results because of “outright election fraud,” Eastman said on the call.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr, Trump campaign officials and others have testified throughout earlier hearings that widespread voter fraud to overturn the election did not exist and there was no evidence to support the claim.

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Arizona and Georgia GOP officials to testify before Jan. 6 panel

The fourth Jan. 6 hearing on Tuesday will focus on pressure put by President Donald Trump and his allies on state officials in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

The U.S. House hearing will include live testimony from Republican officials in those states, committee aides said Monday. It begins at 1 p.m. ET and will be streamed through the committee website.

The pressure on state-level officials was part of a broader scheme Trump pursued to overturn his election loss, which eventually led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the committee argues.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling will appear before the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th, 2021, Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In a call that was recorded and made public, Trump called Raffensperger following the November election and pressured him to “find” enough ballots to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers will also testify before the panel about how Trump pushed state officials to overturn Biden’s victory in that state. He will discuss pressure he received directly from Trump, Rudy Giuliani and others in the former president’s orbit, committee aides said.

Raffensperger and Bowers both hold elected office as Republicans.

Fake electors

The committee will also take a detailed look at the “unprecedented” scheme to replace legitimate electors with slates of electors who would cast Electoral College votes for Trump, overturning the election results in their states, aides said.

The committee will present text messages from former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that show the former North Carolina congressman was directly involved in campaigns to get Republican state officials to reject election results.

Former Georgia election worker Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss will also testify. Trump accused Moss by name of election fraud, leading to threats of violence, aides said.

In addition to the live witnesses, the panel will present recorded testimony from officials in other states who were pressed by the Trump campaign and White House to overturn legitimate election results, aides said Monday.

Other states Trump and his allies targeted in the fake electors scheme include Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Witnesses appearing via taped testimony would also include Trump White House and campaign officials, aides said.

Debunked claims

Trump’s complaints about the election’s integrity are not based in fact and have been widely debunked. Trump knew the claims were not true — and that they could lead to violence — but continued to push them anyway, the committee will show, aides said.

Raffensperger will testify that his office investigated claims of election fraud and could not substantiate any, committee aides said.

Sterling will talk about the increasing threats of violence because of Trump’s continued untrue fraud claims, aides said.

The panel will also show Trump was warned that his actions could incite further violence, but continued to push false fraud claims anyway, aides said.

U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who also chairs the Select Intelligence Committee, will lead the presentation of the state-official pressure scheme, aides said.

Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and Twitter.

Here are 3 things from the second Jan. 6 hearing you might have missed

A “definitely intoxicated” Rudy Giuliani. Conspiracy theories in Pennsylvania. Fundraising for a non-existent Trump “Election Defense Fund.”

The second hearing in the series held by the Jan. 6 U.S. House panel to present its findings focused on claims repeatedly voiced by former President Donald Trump that fraud occurred in the 2020 election.

Members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and witnesses examined various theories in some depth on Monday to show that spurious claims raised by Trump and allies including former New York Mayor Giuliani fell apart under moderate scrutiny from campaign lawyers and the U.S. Justice Department.

The panel provided several interviews of campaign and Justice Department staff that showed advisers and officials repeatedly told Trump there was nothing to his claims.

Trump’s continued expression of the debunked claims helped drive his supporters to siege the Capitol on Jan. 6, the panel said.

Here are some intriguing details from Monday’s hearing:

‘Intoxicated’ Giuliani pushed for declaring immediate victory

At the White House on Election Day 2020, a mix of campaign staff, outside advisers and Trump family watched election returns come in.

Later in the night, the results looked better for Democrat Joe Biden. A turning point for most in the room came when Fox News called Arizona for the former vice president, former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien testified.

As the night turned into early morning, the results were inconclusive for Trump’s chances, at best.

Stepien and campaign spokesman Jason Miller advised Trump not to say anything conclusive that night until more votes were counted.

In taped testimony for the committee, both identified Giuliani as disagreeing with that strategy, vocally advocating for declaring victory that night.

Asked if anyone had too much to drink, Miller singled out the former New York mayor.

“The mayor (Giuliani) was definitely intoxicated, but I did not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president,” Miller said.

Giuliani posted and deleted tweets Tuesday saying that Stepien and Miller lied about what happened on and after Election Day and disputed that he was drunk.

“I REFUSED all alcohol that evening,” he wrote in a since-deleted post. “My favorite drink..Diet Pepsi.”

Trump that night sided with Giuliani, declaring victory in the early morning hours of Nov. 4.

Pennsylvania conspiracy theory debunked

The panel spent time Monday individually explaining and debunking several prominent election conspiracy theories.

One of those concerned Doug Mastriano and Bill McSwain, both of whom ran in the 2022 Republican primary for Pennsylvania governor, a contest Mastriano won last month.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr testified that Mastriano, a state senator, originated a false claim that more people voted by mail in Pennsylvania than had requested mail-in ballots.

Barr called McSwain, then the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, and asked about it. McSwain explained Mastriano’s error was comparing the number of requested ballots for the 2020 GOP primary with the number of ballots cast in the general election, according to Barr.

“The problem is that Mastriano threw out this number, and what he did was he mixed apples and oranges,” Barr said he was told by McSwain. “Once you actually go and look and compare apples to apples, it’s no discrepancy.”

Fake election defense fund

The Trump campaign continued to fundraise after the election, using unsubstantiated fraud theories as a marketing tool. The campaign asked for donations to an official Election Defense Fund, which it said would pursue claims of a fraudulent election.

Contributors provided $100 million in the week after the election, and $150 million more before the end of the year, Amanda Wick, an investigative staffer with the committee, said in taped remarks.

But no Election Defense Fund actually existed, and most of the money was not spent on the fruitless efforts to uncover fraud.

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“The Trump campaign aggressively pushed false election claims to fundraise, telling supporters it would be used to fight voter fraud that did not exist,” Wick said.

Instead, Wick said, funds were sent to a variety of pro-Trump organizations.

Most went to a newly created “Save America PAC.” The pro-Trump research group America First Policy Institute and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ charitable foundation each received $1 million from the PAC.

Event Strategies Inc. has received more than $5 million from the Trump campaign and related committees since Election Day 2020, according to Federal Election Commission records. That Virginia-based event management and production company “ran President Trump’s January 6 rally on the Ellipse,” Wick said.

Save America PAC has paid $5.4 million to Event Strategies in the 2022 election cycle, when Trump has held events with candidates for state and federal offices, including U.S. Senate hopefuls Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and J.D. Vance in Ohio, U.S. Sen Chuck Grassley of Iowa — and Harriet Hageman, who is challenging House Jan. 6 committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney in the Wyoming Republican primary.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

Biden condemns racist theory of white supremacy in visit to Buffalo after mass shooting

President Joe Biden on Tuesday commemorated the victims of last weekend’s mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, and condemned the ideology that drove the killer to “carry out a murderous, racist rampage” at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

In a visit to the Upstate New York city, Biden and other New York Democrats, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, rebuked the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory the shooting suspect adhered to and called for federal action to restrict access to guns.

But before talking about gun policy or replacement theory, Biden named the victims in the Saturday rampage at Tops Friendly Markets. The Buffalo News reported that 13 people were shot and all 10 victims who died were Black, in the city’s worst shooting in history.

They included 77-year-old Pearl Young, a grandmother and public school teacher who also ran a local food pantry, and Andre Mackneil, a restaurant worker who was buying a cake for his son’s third birthday.

“His son’s celebrating a birthday asking, ‘Where’s Daddy?’” Biden said.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has said the crime is being investigated as a hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism, with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives working in conjunction with Buffalo police.

A ‘poison’ in U.S. society

After that introduction memorializing the victims, Biden focused his remarks on white supremacy, which he called “a poison … running through our body politic.”

He alluded to politicians and media members who exploited the so-called great replacement theory — a false view that holds white Americans are under threat of extinction by a plot to systematically replace them with nonwhite people.

The suspected Buffalo killer, 18-year-old white man Payton Gendron of Conklin, New York, reportedly posted a 180-page document filled with “great replacement” talking points before traveling to the supermarket on Buffalo’s predominately Black East Side to commit the killings. Gendron has been charged with one count of murder and will return to court on Thursday for a felony hearing, officials said.

“The internet has radicalized angry, alienated, lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be ‘replaced,’” Biden said. “I and all of you reject the lie. I call on all Americans to reject the lie. And I condemn those who spread the lie for power, political gain and profit.”

Biden did not specifically name anyone who exploited that lie for their own gain. White replacement is a frequent theme on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program and leading Republicans, including the No. 3 House Republican, Elise Stefanik of New York, have echoed its core premise.

Earlier Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration was choosing not to name anyone associated with the ideology, to deny them attention.

“The people who spread this filth know who they are, and they should be ashamed of themselves,” she told reporters en route to Buffalo. “But I’m not going to give them or [the] obnoxious ideas they’re pushing the attention that they desperately want.”

Schumer writes to Fox executives

Schumer took a different approach, writing to Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and three other Fox executives Tuesday, calling for an end to the airing of great replacement views. Carlson was carbon copied on the letter.

“This pernicious theory, which has no basis in fact, has been injected into the mainstream thanks in large part to a dangerous level of amplification by your network and its anchors,” Schumer wrote.

In a Tuesday afternoon tweet, Schumer said Carlson had invited him on the program to “debate the letter.” Schumer declined, he said.

On his Monday show, Carlson distanced himself from Gendron’s writings and accused Democrats of using the tragedy against him.

“Because one mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud,” he said. “That is what they are telling you. That is what they wanted to tell you for a long time, but Saturday’s massacre gives them a pretext and justification.”

A representative for Fox News did not immediately return a message seeking comment Tuesday.

The letter followed a Monday floor speech Schumer gave that also called out Carlson by name and linked great replacement ideology to former President Donald Trump.

“Unfortunately, with each passing year, it seems harder and harder to ignore that replacement theory, and other racially motivated views are increasingly coming out into the open and given purported legitimacy by some MAGA Republicans and cable news pundits,” Schumer said Monday.

Schumer said the shooter’s goal was to kill as many Black people as possible. Hochul noted Gendron drove three hours and chose the location specifically with that goal in mind.

Biden called the shooting “domestic terrorism.”

Biden said radicalization could not be stopped, but that the use of the internet to advance its dangerous effects possibly could be.

“We can’t prevent people from being radicalized to violence,” he said. “But we can address the relentless exploitation of the internet to recruit and mobilize terrorism.”

Biden linked the Buffalo attack to shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and three Asian-American spas in Atlanta last year and to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that he said inspired him to run for president.

Charlottesville rally goers chanted replacement theory slogans. Trump later defended the rally, calling some participants “very fine people.”

Hate and guns a lethal combination

Hochul blamed the shooting on a mix of hateful ideology and easy access to guns.

“It is that lethal combination that resulted in the loss of 10 decent, good people,” she said.

Gendron used a rifle with a modified magazine that she said was illegal in New York. She called for “a national gun policy,” saying that the killer easily brought a magazine from Pennsylvania that was not permitted under New York state law.

U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins, a Democrat who represents Buffalo, also called for a national gun law.

Biden called for keeping assault weapons off the streets, saying a previous ban enacted when he was U.S. Senate Judiciary chairman led to a decrease in shootings. Congress did not renew that ban when it expired in 2004.

Schumer said he would work in the Senate to combat white supremacy and rid “our streets of weapons of war.”

Congressional Democrats have for years routinely tried to pass federal gun legislation after mass shootings, but have not been successful.

Nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin for Fed seat in doubt after Manchin opposition

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin III will not support one of President Joe Biden’s picks to sit on the Federal Reserve Board, Sarah Bloom Raskin of Maryland, Manchin said Monday.

The announcement casts serious doubt on the chances of Senate confirmation for Raskin, who was a Fed governor from 2010 to 2014 and deputy Treasury secretary from 2014 to 2017. She is married to U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat.

Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia seen as the linchpin in the evenly divided U.S. Senate, highlighted a disagreement about energy policy in a statement announcing his opposition to her appointment.

“Her previous public statements have failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy to meet our nation’s critical energy needs,” the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee chairman said.

Manchin, whose family has financial interests in West Virginia’s coal industry, is often at odds with his party over policies meant to shift to less carbon-intensive forms of energy.

Biden tapped Raskin to be the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, the top banking regulator on the board.

Her confirmation was already held up by Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee, who refused to meet to consider her nomination, depriving the panel of the quorum needed to approve her.

Representatives for that committee’s chairman, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

With Manchin in opposition, she would need at least one Republican vote on the Senate floor, but no Senate Republicans have publicly said they would support her.

The ranking GOP member on Senate Banking, Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, said in a statement the panel’s Republicans are ready to vote on the other four nominations to the Fed.

Toomey echoed Manchin’s reservations about Raskin’s position that the Fed should not invest in fossil fuel producers because climate change makes such investments riskier.

“As Senator Manchin suggested today, Ms. Raskin’s past advocacy for having the Federal Reserve allocate capital and discriminate against traditional energy companies would not only politicize the Fed, but weaken economic growth at a crucial moment in history,” he said.

In an email, a White House spokesperson said the administration was continuing to work on bipartisan support for Raskin, noting that she received votes from Republicans during her confirmation to other positions.

“Sarah Bloom Raskin is one of the most qualified people to have ever been nominated for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors,” the spokesperson said. “She has earned widespread support in the face of an unprecedented, baseless campaign led by oil and gas companies that sought to tarnish her distinguished career.”