Congress members urge Biden to exonerate Black civil rights leader Marcus Garvey

(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris will not be speaking as election night went into Wednesday morning, according to Harris Campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond who took the stage at a Harris watch party at Howard University.

Photos show partygoers thinning out and Harris supporters crying as results continued to come in.

The mood at Howard University had dampened over the last couple of hours. The night started out with music pumping and crowds dancing.

Later on in the evening, muted crowds watched as the results came in, with many glued to the screen.

The crowd cheered anytime races are called for Harris and booed whenever states were called for Trump.

Former President Donald Trump was reported to be riding over to the convention center with his family and his top campaign leadership team.

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(WASHINGTON) — Republican Rep. Nancy Mace said Tuesday that the bill she introduced to ban transgender women from using biological women’s restrooms at the U.S. Capitol was “absolutely” in response to Rep.-elect Sarah McBride’s entering Congress.

“Yes, and absolutely. And then some,” Mace told reporters at the Capitol.

“I’m not going to stand for a man, you know, someone with a penis, in the women’s locker room,” she said.

McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, didn’t respond to questions on the topic as she entered the House Democratic caucus meeting Tuesday morning.

Monday night, she responded to Mace in a post on X, saying, “This is a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.”

Outside the Republican conference meeting, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called McBride a “biological man” and said she had confronted House Speaker Mike Johnson at during the House Republican Conference meeting Tuesday morning about what “men in leadership” would do to address their concerns.

“You know, Sarah McBride, as he calls himself, formerly Tim McBride, is a biological man, and he should not be using any of our restrooms in the Capitols, in the in our office buildings. But Nancy Mace’s resolution doesn’t go far enough,” Greene said.

“A resolution is just a statement by Congress saying that Congress disagrees with something we need, something more binding. And that’s what I just brought up at the microphones there — in our conference, I directly asked Speaker Johnson what the men in our leadership are going to do about this, because this this has to be stopped,” Greene added.

Mace invoked her own experiences as a victim of rape as part of the reason she introduced the measure.

“That’s not okay. And I’m a victim of abuse myself. I’m a rape survivor,” Mace said. “I have PTSD from the abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of a man, and I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces, so I’m absolutely 100% going to stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom, in our locker rooms, in our changing rooms. I will be there fighting you every step of the way,” she said.

Mace told ABC’s John Parkinson that she wanted to expand her efforts and push a measure that would ban transgender women from using biological women’s bathrooms on all federal property.

“Number one, I want to see this in the House Rules package. I want to make sure that no men are in women’s private spaces. And it’s not going to end here. This shouldn’t be going on any federal property. If you’re a school or an institution that gets government funding, this kind of thing should be banned. I think it’s sick. It’s twisted,” Mace said.

Mace said that her position was a feminist one.

“I have fought like hell for women’s rights. I mean, 25 years ago, this year, I became the first woman to break the glass ceiling and graduate from a military college that was formerly all male, and to see the way that I’ve been attacked today and last night for fighting to protect women and girls — it’s ridiculous. So, if that — being a feminist makes me an extremist, I’m totally here for it,” she said.

“And if McBride wants to go to the gym, she can go to Planet Fitness, where they allow biological men to be around in a room in a private space with underage girls like no thank you. It’s not going to happen, not on my watch,” Mace said.

During his weekly news conference Tuesday morning, Johnson declined to speak about McBride’s gender when asked by a reporter whether she is a man or woman. Johnson also would not say if he’d support Mace’s proposal to ban transgender women from women bathrooms in the Capitol.

Asked whether McBride is a man or a woman, he responded, “Look, I’m not going to get into this. We welcome all new members with open arms who are duly elected representatives of the people. I believe it’s a it’s a command we treat all persons with dignity and respect. We will. And I’m not going to engage in silly debates about this. There’s a concern about uses of restroom facilities and locker rooms and all that. This is an issue that Congress has never had to address before. We’re going to do that in deliberate fashion with every consensus on it, and we will accommodate the needs of every single person.”

Then asked whether he would respond to Mace’s measure, he answered, “I’m not going to address plans on any of that. I just told you what I’m going to say about the issue. I’m not going to engage in this. We don’t look down upon anyone. We treat everybody. That’s a principle that would have pursued my whole life issue, a first impression for Congress, as we will any other thing. We’ll provide appropriate accommodation for every member of Congress.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for the director of national intelligence, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, has little experience working with the nation’s spy agencies and a long track record of echoing the Russian disinformation they work to expose and to counter — a combination her critics claim should be disqualifying.

Gabbard, 43, who represented Hawaii as a Democrat from 2013-2021 and ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020 before becoming a Republican earlier this year, has been accused of harboring sympathies for the Kremlin and parroting propaganda generated by Russia to justify its invasion of Ukraine.

At the outset of the conflict, Gabbard blamed the Biden administration and NATO, claiming they had provoked Russia’s aggression by ignoring what she called its “legitimate security concerns” about Ukraine potentially becoming a member of the defensive alliance.

In March 2022, Gabbard posted a video to Twitter, now X, sharing what she said were “undeniable facts” about U.S.-funded biolabs in the war-torn country, claiming that “even in the best of circumstances” they “could easily be compromised.”

“Instead of trying to cover this up, the Biden-Harris administration needs to work with Russia, Ukraine, NATO, the U.N. to immediately implement a ceasefire for all military action in the vicinity of these labs until they’re secured,” she said.

About the same time, a commentator on Kremlin state media referred to her as “Russia’s girlfriend” and her comments have been featured on the country’s state-run TV programs, along with those of Tucker Carlson, an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement with Ukraine.

Gabbard’s claims closely mirror a false, decade-old Russian conspiracy theory that Washington is secretly funding the development of biological weapons in former Soviet countries, which has been repeatedly debunked by the U.S. and international organizations.

Although she later claimed her comments were about public health research labs in the conflict zone, she also expressed concerns that Ukraine was in possession of biological weapons during an interview with former Fox News host Carlson a few days before taking to social media.

Democrats and opponents of the president-elect were quick to condemn Trump’s choice of Gabbard — who appeared regularly with him in the final months of his campaign.

“You really want her to have all the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies when she has so clearly been in Putin’s pocket?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, pressed during a recent interview.

“Her judgment is non-existent,” Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, now a fierce Trump critic, asserted on Sunday.

“The idea that somehow she would be put in charge of this critical function should be giving our adversaries in Moscow and Beijing a lot of relief,” he continued.

But in their criticisms of Gabbard, some Democrats have made their own unfounded claims.

Florida Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz sparked backlash after she claimed Gabbard was a “Russian asset” that would “essentially would be a direct line to our enemies” in a television appearance on Friday.

In 2019, Hillary Clinton suggested, without offering any evidence, that the Russians were “grooming” Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate for president in order to spoil Democrat’s chances of winning the White House. Gabbard refuted the allegations and sued Clinton for defamation, but later dropped her compliant.

If Gabbard ultimately becomes the director of national intelligence, she will oversee 18 U.S. intelligence agencies and play a critical role in determining what material is including in the president’s daily intelligence briefings.

She is expected to face a confirmation battle in the Senate, but some hawkish Republicans in the chamber have expressed tepid support for her nomination.

“While we have differences on foreign policy, I think she’s extremely bright and capable,” South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham said in an X post on Wednesday.

Gabbard has taken other controversial stances on foreign policy matters. In 2017, she journeyed to Syria to meet with its authoritarian leader Bashar al-Assad, whose government has carried out numerous deadly attacks on Syrian civilians through the course of the country’s civil war, according to the U.N.

The then-congresswoman said after meeting with al-Assad that he was not an enemy of the U.S. and opposed American intervention in the conflict.

In 2015, Gabbard also defended Russian airstrikes in Syria conducted at the request of the Assad regime, echoing Moscow’s claim that the operation was focused on terrorist targets when in reality it focused on Syrian opposition strongholds.

Gabbard has taken a much softer approach to China than the president-elect, calling on Trump to end his trade war against Beijing in 2019 and expressing her opposition to the remilitarization of Japan, a response to the strategic challenge posed by China.

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