Can Matt Gaetz return to Congress after withdrawing as AG pick?
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(WASHINGTON) — Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrew his bid to serve as attorney general in the next Trump administration, but the question remains: can he go back to his old job as a member of Congress?
Gaetz, for his part, has only expressed an intent not to take the oath of office for the 119th Congress — which begins on Jan. 3, 2024 and for which Gaetz won reelection. He cannot preemptively resign from a session of Congress that has not yet convened or that he has not taken an oath to serve — that means he is still eligible to serve in the 119th although he cannot under any circumstances withdraw his resignation from the 118th to return to the lame duck session, according to House rules.
The House clerk read a resignation letter from Gaetz on Nov. 14 — after President-elect Donald Trump named his as his attorney general pick — which read: “I hereby resign as a United States representative for Florida’s first congressional district, effective immediately. And I do not intend to take the oath of office for the same office in the 119th Congress to pursue the position of Attorney General in the Trump administration.”
The rules of the House of Representatives mandates that at the beginning of the first session of Congress, members must make their presence known to occupy their seat. The rule reads: “House Rules 2. (a): At the commencement of the first session of each Congress, the Clerk shall call the Members, Delegates and Resident Commissioner to order and proceed to record their presence by States in alphabetical order, either by call of the roll or by use of the electronic voting system.”
If Gaetz or another member does not report to the Capitol to record their presence, that district’s seat will be designated vacant.
The House rules have very few further specifics. ABC News has an inquiry out to the Office of the Clerk for additional guidance.
And Florida’s own election laws seem vague on the issue.
Florida elections official Paul Lux, the Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections, which is within Gaetz’s district, told ABC News that he anticipates that the primary for the special election to fill Gaetz’s seat once he announced his plans to resign would likely be sometime in February, and the general election would likely be in April — though he stressed nothing is final until the official dates come out of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office.
DeSantis, for his part, has yet to formally set a date for that special election.
ABC News has reached out to the Division of Elections in the Florida Department of State to inquire whether the language in Gaetz’s letter triggers any sort of automatic vacancy or if there is anything within Florida law that bars him from returning to the 119th Congress. Some Republicans in the district have already declared their intent to run, though one candidate, Joel Rudman, said he would support Gaetz if he wanted to return to Congress.
After prevailing in a state that went for Republican Donald Trump, Democratic Gov.-elect Josh Stein said that his service as North Carolina’s attorney general gave voters confidence and called the Tar Heel state a “bright spot” for Democrats on election night.
Stein told ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl that Kamala Harris ran a “strong campaign,” but was hindered by a condensed timeline and “tough national mood.”
“It was an unfortunate night for Democrats across this country, but North Carolina was a bright spot,” Stein said. ” And we’re proud of what we accomplished here.”
Fresh off his gubernatorial victory, Stein pointed to Democrats winning North Carolina’s secretary of state and attorney general races. As North Carolina’s current attorney general, he defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, whose campaign was plagued by allegations of past racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic comments.
Stein outperformed Harris in North Carolina, winning 55% of the vote to Harris’ 48%. In the statehouse, Democrats won enough seats to stave off a Republican supermajority. Stein heavily outraised his opponent and used social media to highlight Robinson’s incendiary remarks.
While Democrats have won eight of the last nine gubernatorial races in the Tar Heel state, Barack Obama was the last Democrat to take North Carolina in 2008.
Asked to explain his swing state victory, Stein said his campaign was about “fighting for every person.”
“Voters had a really clear choice,” said Stein. “Our vision was positive and forward-looking.”
He pointed to a focus on public safety, education and personal freedoms, including voting rights and reproductive rights. Stein also said his position as attorney general lent a familiarity with voters.
“I think the fact that I had a track record of delivering for the people of North Carolina as their attorney general helped give them confidence in knowing that I wasn’t just speaking words, but that I would work hard every day to deliver,” Stein said.
Stein has promised to govern in a bipartisan way. In his victory speech, he spoke about the importance of working across the aisle since “no person or party has a monopoly on good ideas.”
He spoke about Hurricane Helene recovery efforts across North Carolina and his recent visit to Washington to advocate for relief funding alongside Republican legislators. Stein said he is “eager” to work with the Trump administration to provide relief.
Pressed on his biggest fear in a second Trump term, Stein pointed to the president-elect’s selection of hardliner Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Patel is one of Trump’s fiercest defenders and has said he would turn the FBI into a museum for the “Deep State.”
“I want somebody who respects the rule of law,” Stein said. “And [Patel’s] nomination for the FBI does not give me confidence that that’s a top priority,”
Asked about Trump’s promise of mass deportations, Stein said that it’s “not a priority” to deport law-abiding citizens.
“They are instrumental to our communities, they are instrumental to our economy,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump has vowed, if he’s elected, to conduct a large-scale deportation operation that some immigration and military experts agree is theoretically possible but also problematic, and could cost tens — even hundreds — of billions a year.
In FY 2023, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers conducted 170,590 administrative arrests, representing a 19.5% increase over the previous year, and more than any year of the Trump presidency.
Should he win a second term, Trump has promised to exponentially increase this work and suggested deporting all of the estimated 11 million people living in this country without legal immigration status.
His team, at various points, has suggested starting with “criminals,” though they have provided few specifics about who would be prioritized.
One cost estimate: $88B – $315B a year
A new report from the American Immigration Council, an immigration rights research and policy firm, estimates that to deport even one million undocumented immigrants a year would cost over $88 billion dollars annually, for a total of $967.9 billion over more than ten years.
The report acknowledges there are significant cost variables depending on how such an operation would be conducted and says its estimate does not take into account the loss of tax revenue from workers nor the bigger economic loss if people self-deport and American businesses lose labor.
A one-time effort to deport even more people in one year annually could cost around $315 billion, the report estimates, including about $167 billion to detain immigrants en masse.
The two largest costs, according to the group, would be hiring additional personal to carry out deportation raids and constructing and staffing mass detention centers. “There would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step,” the report reads.
Trump campaign official agree one of the biggest logistical hurdles in any mass deportation effort would be constructing and staffing new detention centers as an interim solution.
Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, has repeatedly said that should Trump win the White House, his team plans to construct facilities to hold between 50,000 – 70,000 people. By comparison, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, is currently 1.9 million people.
The American Immigration Council report estimates that to deport one million immigrants a year would require the United States to “build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists.”
There are currently an estimated 1.1 million undocumented immigrants in the country who have received “final orders of removal.” Those individuals, in theory, could be removed immediately by ICE agents, but because of limited resources ICE agents have instead focused lately on those people who have recently arrived or who have dangerous crimes
“I think it is possible that they could execute on this. The human resources would be the hardest for them to overcome. They would have to pull ICE agents from the border if they want to go into cities,” Katie Tobin, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served as President Joe Biden’s top migration adviser in the National Security Council, told ABC News.
ICE agents currently help Customs and Border Patrol agents on the border, carrying out expedited deportations of new arrivals who have recently crossed into the country illegally and provide logistical support to the Department of Homeland Security.
A new mandate to round up and deport individuals who have been living in the country for some time could mark a significant change for the law enforcement agency.
The American Immigration Council report estimates that to carry out even one million deportations a year, ICE would need to hire around 30,000 new officers, “instantly making it the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government,” the report reads.
Trump campaign: Deportation cost less than migrant costs
The Trump campaign has argued the cost of deportation “pales in comparison” to other costs associated housing and providing social services to recent migrants. “Kamala’s border invasion is unsustainable and is already tearing apart the fabric of our society. Mass deportations of illegal immigrant criminals, and restoring an orderly immigration system, are the only way to solve this crisis,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for Trump’s campaign, told ABC News in a statement.
Trump has promised to mobilize and federalize National Guard units to help with the deportation effort, which would likely be a first for the military.
Under U.S. law, military units are barred from engaging in domestic law enforcement, although Trump has proposed invoking the Insurrection Act, a sweeping law, that could give him broader powers to direct National Guard units as he sees fit.
“We don’t like uniform military in our domestic affairs at all,” William Banks, professor at Syracuse University and Founding Director of the Institute on National Security and Counter Terrorism, told ABC News in a phone interview. “The default is always have the civilians do it. The cops, the state police, the city police, the sheriffs,” he went on.
Using the military for domestic law enforcement would be a fundamental shift, one which Banks argues too few Americans have considered or grappled with.
“It would turn out whole society upside down … all these arguments about him being an autocrat or dictator, it is not a stretch,” he said. For example, uniformed military officers are not trained in law enforcement and if they were asked to conduct civilian arrests there could be significant civil liberties conflicts and violations.
In order to, target and deport immigrants whose have not received “final orders of removal” but whose cases are still pending, Trump has discussed using another rare legal maneuver to himself broad authority to target and detain immigrants without a hearing, specifically invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law last used during World War II to detain Japanese Americans.
Trump would also need other nations to accept deported individuals and allow deportation flights to land back on their soil.
Katie Tobin, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served as President Joe Biden’s top migration adviser on the National Security Council, told ABC News, “Last time the Trump administration did not hesitate to threaten punitive action to countries that didn’t cooperate with them on immigration, but there are some practical issues there in terms of just how many flights a country like Guatemala or Colombia can accept per week.”
There would likely be less tangible and more indirect costs of a mass deportation effort as well. Inevitably there would be ripple effects throughout the economy. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes, according to the report, and “undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.”
The human toll
Experts also predict that if a future Trump administration were to follow through with some large, initial and highly visible deportation operation, a significant number of individuals and families would likely choose to self-deport in order to avoid family separations or having to spend time in a military-style detention center.
The authors of the American Immigration Council report argue that the effect of a mass deportation program, as described by Trump and his advisers, would “almost certainly threaten the well-being” of even those immigrants with lawful status in the United States and “even, potentially, naturalized U.S. citizens and their communities.”
“They would live under the shadow of weaponized enforcement as the U.S. went after their neighbors, and, as social scientists found under the Trump administration, would be prone to worry they and their children might be next,” the report says.
In recent interviews and conversations with reporters, Trump’s running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance has dodged the question of whether a future Trump administration would separate families during a new deportation effort or in detention centers along the border.
“If a guy commits gun violence and is taken to prison, that’s family separation, which, of course, is tragic for the children, but you’ve got to prosecute criminals, and you have to enforce the law,” Vance told reporters in September when visiting the border.
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail but has since nominated several authors or contributors from the controversial conservative presidential wishlist to his administration.
Trump called the Project 2025 policy proposals — which include restrictions on abortion pills, birth control pills and Medicare access, as well as eliminating a couple of federal agencies — “extreme, seriously extreme” in a July 20 rally.
“I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it,” he previously said, despite having many connections to its authors and contributors.
Democrats pounced on Trump for Project 2025 during the election season, calling it a warning of what is to come under a second Trump term.
“Project 2025 is the plan by Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican allies to give Trump more power over your daily life, gut democratic checks and balances, and consolidate power in the Oval Office if he wins,” the Biden campaign stated.
Project 2025 is an over 900-page playbook of policy proposals created by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation intended to guide the next conservative administration. The organization behind the document told ABC News in a past statement that it was not intended to speak for any candidate during the election.
Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda47 share similarities — including proposals to eliminate the Department of Education, increase fossil fuel energy production, and begin mass deportations.
At the ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump reiterated his earlier sentiment on the project. “This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas, I guess some good, some bad, but it makes no difference. I have nothing to do [with it].”
Now, several Project 2025 authors and contributors are not just connected to Trump, but also nominated for roles in his administration.
Russ Vought, who authored a chapter on “Executive Office of the President” for Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” is also under consideration for a cabinet-level position in the next administration and has been vetted by Trump’s transition team, sources told ABC News. He was also the RNC platform committee’s policy director.
Here’s a look at which Project 2025 contributors may have a place in the incoming Trump administration:
Brendan Carr
Brendan Carr, Trump’s nomination for chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is credited as the author of Project 2025’s FCC recommendations which include: a ban on TikTok, restrictions on social media moderation, and more.
Carr would be tasked with regulating broadcasting, telecommunications and broadband. Trump has suggested that he would expand the White House’s influence over the FCC and potentially punish TV networks that cover him in a way he doesn’t like.
Carr is a longtime member of the commission and served previously as the FCC’s general counsel and as the senior Republican for the FCC. He has been unanimously confirmed by the Senate three times and was nominated by both Trump and President Joe Biden to the commission.
John Ratcliffe
Ratcliffe, listed as a contributor who assisted “in the development and writing” of Project 2025, has been nominated to serve as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Ratcliffe is a three-term Republican congressman from Texas and served as the director of national intelligence from mid-2020 until the end of Trump’s first term.
Project 2025’s Intelligence Community chapter, credited to The Heritage Foundation’s intelligence research fellow Dustin J. Carmack, notes that the “CIA’s success depends on firm direction from the President and solid internal CIA Director–appointed leadership. Decisive senior leaders must commit to carrying out the President’s agenda and be willing to take calculated risks.”
Tom Homan
Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan has been designated as Trump’s “border czar” — which is not an official Cabinet position.
Homan, who is expected to be in charge of the mass deportations promised by the Trump campaign, is listed as a contributor to Project 2025 who assisted in its “development and writing.”
Project 2025’s Department of Homeland Security chapter, credited to Trump’s former Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli, calls for full use of ICE’s “expedited removal” authority and further development of immigrant detention spaces. This all aligns with Trump’s immigration proposals on mass deportations and funds for the construction of detention centers.
Other links to Project 2025
Christopher Miller is credited with the project’s Department of Defense recommendations. Miller served as Acting Secretary of Defense and Special Assistant to the President under Trump from November 2020 to January 2021.
Ben Carson is credited with the project’s Housing and Urban Development recommendations. He served as the Secretary of HUD under Trump’s first administration.
Adam Candeub is credited with the project’s Federal Trade Commission recommendations. He served under the Trump administration as Acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Telecommunications and Information.
Bernard L. McNamee is credited with recommendations on the Department of Energy and Related Commissions. He was nominated to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Trump in October 2018.
Cuccinelli — who wrote the Department of Homeland Security section — was also part of Trump’s former administration as the Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security.
The RNC platform committee’s Deputy Policy Director Ed Martin is also president of the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, which is listed on the project’s advisory board.
Others connected to Trump, including Trump’s United Nations Commission on the Status of Women appointee Lisa Correnti, are listed among the contributors.
