House votes down Speaker Johnson’s funding plan as shutdown deadline approaches
(WASHINGTON) — The House on Wednesday voted down Speaker Mike Johnson’s government funding plan with 14 Republicans voting against it and two others voting present.
The measure failed by a 202-222-2 margin. Three Democrats voted for the bill.
Johnson said after the vote that he was “disappointed that it didn’t pass,” but suggested there would be a “solution” to avoid a shutdown.
“We ran the play. It was the best play; it was the right one. So now we go back to the playbook. We’ll draw up another play, and we’ll come up with a solution,” John said. “I’m already talking to colleagues about their many ideas. We have time to fix the situation, and we’ll get right to it.”
“Stay posted,” he concluded his remarks without taking questions.
Johnson’s measure would have funded the government for six months but also included the SAVE Act, a bill backed by GOP leadership and former President Donald Trump that would require individuals to provide proof of U.S. citizenship to vote. Democrats said the legislation is a non-starter, noting it is already illegal for non-citizens to cast a ballot in federal elections.
Johnson was set to try to pass the funding plan last week but pulled it from the floor because he didn’t have the votes.
Some Republicans in his caucus opposed the measure because they say it would contribute to the deficit while defense hawks say they won’t vote for it because the six-month extension would effect the Department of Defense’s readiness.
Still, he was dug in on the measure and wasn’t talking about what the next steps would be. Congress needs to pass a funding measure before Oct. 1 to avoid a shutdown.
Trump openly called for Republicans to let the government close if they don’t pass the SAVE Act. He wrote on his social media platform that if they “don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET.”
Asked about Trump’s comments that Republicans should let funding lapse in such a scenario, Johnson responded “No, look, President Trump and I have talked a lot about this. We talked a lot about it with our colleagues who are building consensus on the plan. We all believe that election security is of preeminent importance right now.”
Trump again, just before the vote on Wednesday, called for a government shutdown if “every ounce” of the SAVE Act isn’t attached to a funding measure.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the chamber’s top Republican, said it would be “politically beyond stupid” to allow a shutdown to take place with just seven weeks until Election Day.
“I think we first have to wait and see what the House sends us. My only observation about this whole discussion is the one thing you cannot have is a government shutdown,” McConnell said. “It’d be politically beyond stupid for us to do that right before the election, because certainly we’d get the blame.”
Democrats urged Johnson to drop his funding plan and bring a clean short-term measure to the floor to keep the government open.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters last week that the only path forward is a bipartisan agreement that does not include “extreme” measures, such as the SAVE Act.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday also urged the House to pass a clean bill.
“In order to avoid a shutdown, the worst thing our colleagues in the House can do right now is waste time on proposals that don’t have broad bipartisan support,” Schumer said.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris’ post-debate campaign visits to North Carolina and Pennsylvania on Thursday and Friday, respectively, represents the start of a “more aggressive” campaigning stage, her campaign said.
Harris is set to hold two rallies in North Carolina and one in Pennsylvania as part of the kickoff for her “New Way Forward Tour,” which her campaign said is an effort to “capitalize on her decisive victory” against former President Donald Trump at the ABC News debate.
The campaign said that Harris had such a “commanding debate performance” that it spent Wednesday going through the footage to pinpoint moments they can use in upcoming ads in the coming days.
This phase will also see the vice president do more media engagements primarily targeting battleground states and other important constituencies, the campaign said, with local media interviews set for the coming days. She will also participate in a discussion with the National Association of Black Journalists next week.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Gov. Tim Walz and Gwen Walz will each hit the road as part of the tour as well.
Emhoff will be in Arizona and Nevada on Thursday; Gov. Walz will be in Michigan on Thursday and Wisconsin on Friday; and Mrs. Walz will be in New Hampshire on Thursday.
The campaign’s new tour will also feature surrogate events, including a Republicans for Harris function in Phoenix, Arizona, an HBCU student event in Savannah, Georgia, and a veterans and military families event in Columbus, Georgia.
(ST. LOUIS.) — Progressives are on the short end of a spending war with pro-Israel and other establishment Democratic forces. And they know it.
Missouri Democratic Rep. Cori Bush’s primary loss Tuesday at the hands of St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell put into stark relief once again how progressive lawmakers are at risk of getting swarmed by gobs of outside money if they become targets of well-heeled advocacy groups. Bell focused much of his race on local issues and congressional legislation, but he was backed by more than $8 million from the pro-Israel United Democracy Project.
Liberals for years have lamented lax campaign finance laws that allow outside groups to flood races with millions in spending. But until those laws are changed, the rules of the electoral road stand — and even progressives say they probably can’t catch up.
“You can try to out-organize it, the classic left formula of getting enough people at the doors and in the community as the antidote. But how do you do that to scale?” asked progressive Democratic strategist Angelo Greco. “You can’t match that unless you have your own fundraising operation, and we’re not organized at that level just yet.”
Progressives, who had been on an upswing since 2016, found themselves playing defense after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in the Gaza Strip.
UDP, which is affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and newer groups such as Democratic Majority for Israel, dumped millions into races to defeat candidates or lawmakers perceived as critical of Israel.
Bush’s defeat followed New York Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s loss to Westchester County Executive George Latimer. Latimer and UDP outspent Bowman and his allies by a nearly 5-to-1 margin, and Bush and her allies were outspent by Bell’s allies (including UDP) by a roughly 3.5-to-1 margin, according to AdImpact.
The attacks on Bush and Bowman largely didn’t focus on Israel, instead homing in on issues like their opposition to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill. But the two lawmakers’ criticism of Israel opened the door to the spending — and neither Bush nor Bowman could keep up on the airwaves.
“If she had just enough money to be on the air, they could have countered it,” said Joseph Geevarghese, the head of Our Revolution, a progressive group. “We’re not saying you’ve got to match dollar-for-dollar, but you’ve got to be able to have a presence.”
To be certain, not every liberal lawmaker is facing such daunting opposition. Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the highest profile House progressives, is outspending her rivals in her Minneapolis primary, according to data from AdImpact.
But the Bowman and Bush losses have progressives confronting their inferior financial footing, all while still railing against campaign finance laws they deem too loose, experts said.
Some progressives said the best strategy is making such hefty outside spending unappetizing in Democratic politics and that investing more money of their own, even for progressives, shouldn’t be the objective.
“The goal should not be, how can we turn $20 million Democratic primaries into $40 million Democratic primaries. That is a race to the bottom for our democracy,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for the progressive group Justice Democrats.
“We should force more members of Congress to stand up to these interests and make taking this money toxic,” he added. “Part of it is educating voters about who these special interest groups are … and why they’re advancing those interests.”
One avenue progressives eyed is triggering a legal challenge.
A petition in Maine would limit contributions to super PACs, vehicles that can spend unlimited sums. The goal is to trigger a court battle that makes its way to the Supreme Court, hoping to convince the justices that the 2010 Citizens United decision — which limited what campaigns themselves can raise, but not super PACs due to their perceived independence — is too permissive in today’s politics.
Other operatives pointed to progressives’ overall structure as an area for improvement.
The movement is highly fractured, with multiple advocacy groups with their own origin stories and policy niches all competing for a slice of the money pie. That’s on top of the candidates themselves running their own races.
Cooperation could be key, given that not all races are considered competitive and outside groups’ goals end up overlapping.
The tactic was tried once already this year, with Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a progressive without a serious primary challenger this year, donating $500,000 from her campaign to Justice Democrats’ “Squad” protection branch to help Bowman. And while the move didn’t save the New Yorker in the end, it could offer a precedent for greater collaboration.
“There needs to be a convening among progressives from different organizations, different leaders, to talk about the challenge, because what happened to Jamaal Bowman and what happened to Cori Bush is going to continue to happen,” Geevarghese said.
Beyond cooperation, some progressives also urged a more discerning strategy.
Some candidates have raised mounds of dough for safe races. Others have raked in cash for challenges to incumbents who are fairly well insulated. And still others have raised decent money but, as in the case of Bowman and Bush, adopted a more defensive posture, responding to attacks that defined them in voters’ eyes rather than establishing their own brands.
That, operatives said, has to change.
“Organizationally, we can do better about picking and choosing where to deploy those resources,” Greco said, adding that candidates and campaigns need to be better about “anticipating those attacks.”
“Cori Bush, actually as a Squad member, progressive member, if maybe more resources were put into telling the story that … she was a champion for the president’s agenda, instead of getting smeared as someone who was a detractor.”
Progressives’ critics, for their part, insisted that money isn’t the problem and that liberal lawmakers they targeted are just unpopular.
“I think the whole spending disparity issue, the way it’s being raised, is fundamentally insulting to voters. We provide voters with information that they may not otherwise have had. It’s up to them to decide whether that information is important,” said Democratic Majority for Israel President Mark Mellman.
And progressives conceded that the movement’s problems can’t be entirely chalked up to spending disparities.
Bowman, beyond being critical of Israel, floated false theories that sexual assault and rape did not occur during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and he drew negative headlines after pulling a fire alarm in the Capitol ahead of a House spending bill vote. Bush found herself in hot water after the Justice Department launched an investigation over her campaign’s spending on security services that included work by her husband.
And both voted against Biden’s signature infrastructure bill, a vote they chalked up to the legislation not fulfilling the president’s original promise, but that helped critics tag them as unserious legislators.
“Tactically, the campaign was messy. It was not a well-run campaign, and she had some unforced errors,” one progressive operative said of Bush’s reelection bid.
“Could they have been less principled and voted with everyone else? Sure, probably might have saved their careers. But that’s not the type of people we try to send to Congress,” the person added of the infrastructure votes.
But strategists expressed confidence that progressives could pick themselves up off the mat and that the movement’s fire hadn’t been doused by the recent losses.
“I have no doubt that does dissuade people from potentially running and dissuade them from speaking their conscience. So yeah, there’s concern about that,” Faiz Shakir, a prominent liberal operative, said of the spending against progressives. “But as long as there’s a beating heart of progressives out there to call attention to it, I believe that at least you’ll hear a debate and discourse about it.”
(WASHINGTON) — With Tim Walz joining Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the campaign trail as her newly selected running mate, critics are blasting the Minnesota governor for what they claim was his failure to prevent a massive COVID-19 fraud scheme that has ensnared the state government.
According to federal charges filed over the past couple of years, at least 70 people were part of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that exploited two federally-funded nutrition programs to fraudulently obtain more than $250 million in one of the largest COVID-era fraud schemes anywhere in the nation.
The defendants allegedly used a Minnesota-based nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future to avoid tough scrutiny from the Minnesota Department of Education, which was supposed to be conducting oversight of the programs.
On Tuesday, shortly after Walz was announced as Harris’ running mate, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper published a story saying the case was one of the leading “vulnerabilities for Walz.” By then, the pro-Trump group MAGA Inc. had already blasted out an email calling Walz “an incompetent liberal” for, among other things, “allow[ing] one of the largest fraud schemes to happen under his watch.”
“Governor Walz and the people he directly hired and oversaw lost half a billion dollars to fraud in a few short years as governor,” Joe Teirab, a pro-Trump Republican and former federal prosecutor running for Congress in the Minneapolis suburbs, posted to X on Monday night, just hours before Harris picked Walz. “Imagine fraud at that scale nationwide.”
So far, more than 20 people have pleaded guilty or been convicted for their roles in the fraud scheme. None have been sentenced yet. Two of those charged were found not guilty, and most are still awaiting trial.
“Defendants falsified documents, they lied, and they fraudulently claimed to be feeding millions of meals to children in Minnesota during COVID,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said at a press conference in June, after the first trial in the case concluded. “This conduct was not just criminal. It was depraved, and brazen.”
But it may have also been preventable, according to a state audit released in June.
“[T]he failures we highlight in this report are symptoms of a department that was ill-prepared to respond to the issues it encountered with Feeding Our Future,” said the 103-page report, detailing the findings of a limited “special review” by Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor.
The state agency not only “failed to act on warnings signs known to the department prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to the start of the alleged fraud,” but its “actions and inactions created opportunities for fraud,” the auditor said.
The report said that while officials inside the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) had at times expressed concerns about the nonprofit, they felt hamstrung in acting on their concerns due to “operational challenges” during the pandemic, including limited ability to visit sites in person, and due to a “litigation and public relations campaign” from Feeding Our Future that included allegations of discrimination.
“While we acknowledge these factors created challenges for the department, we also believe MDE could have taken more decisive action sooner in its relationship with Feeding Our Future,” the audit report said.
According to the report, after laundering tens of millions of dollars, the fraudsters allegedly used shell companies to buy luxury cars, boats and jewelry, to travel and pay off debts, and to purchase properties in Minnesota and around the world.
After the report’s release, Walz said his administration can always “do better,” and said, “We certainly take responsibility” for any failures that took place.
The report, which hardly mentions the governor at all, does not find any specific fault with Walz or his immediate office. But Teirab and other critics say Walz still deserves at least some of the blame for the massive fraud.
“He owns what happens within his administration,” said Jim Schultz, a Minnesota business advocate and outspoken Republican who two years ago narrowly lost a race to become the state’s next attorney general.
“There was this massive fraud under his watch,” Schultz told ABC News on Tuesday. “To this day, he has never fired anybody, nobody’s been rebuked.”
Walz has said there have been leadership changes within state government, including at MDE, since the fraud occurred.
Teirab, who says he “helped investigate and prosecute the Feed Our Future fraudsters” when he was still a prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota several years ago, wrote on X last week, “Tim Walz was asleep at the wheel, allowing a quarter-BILLION in fraud.”
A few weeks after five of the defendants were convicted of federal fraud charges in June, the Justice Department indicted five individuals for allegedly trying to bribe a member of the jury in the midst of deliberations, saying they offered the jury member $120,000 in exchange for a not guilty verdict.
One of those who allegedly took part in the bribery scheme was one of the defendants acquitted during the trial.
The Feeding Our Future case is not the only fraud scheme that has impacted Walz’s administration.
In June, another audit found that a second state agency failed to adequately oversee a program to pay frontline workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Auditors reportedly estimated that more than $200 million may have been paid to people committing fraud or otherwise ineligible to receive payments from the program.
“This wasn’t malfeasance,” Walz said in response to both audits in June, according to Minneapolis-St. Paul ABC News affiliate KSTP-TV. “Both of these cases, there’s not a single state employee that was implicated doing anything that was illegal. They simply didn’t do as much due diligence as they should have.”
According to Teirab’s campaign, a number of Medicaid-related programs have also suffered from fraud and waste under Walz.
A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.