Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin explains why she voted against Hegseth’s confirmation
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(WASHINGTON) — Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin explained why she voted against confirming Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host, was sworn into the role Saturday following a hair-thin vote in the Senate.
Slotkin told “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz she had not been confident Hegseth would be more loyal to the Constitution than he would be to President Donald Trump.
“He couldn’t unambiguously say that he will push back if the president asked him to do something that wasn’t constitutional, and that, to me, is why I couldn’t confirm him,” Slotkin said. “There’s a lot of other things in his background I don’t like, but I look at what is the strategic and irreversible threats to our democracy, and that’s using the uniform military in ways that violate the Constitution.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — A Massachusetts man was found to be carrying a gun after attending a tour of the U.S. Capitol as he left the nearby Library of Congress on Tuesday, police officials told ABC News on Thursday.
Authorities in Washington were alerted by police in Carlisle, Massachusetts, on Monday that a man with a gun who had expressed suicidal ideations on social media was headed to Washington.
The U.S. Secret Service and Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police found the man in a Washington hotel early Tuesday morning and interviewed him, sources said. They searched for a gun and found no weapon and no further action was taken at that time, they said.
Later that day, the man went through a Capitol Police magnetometer screening and entered the Capitol Visitor Center. The magnetometer sounded an alarm and “an officer performed a secondary hand search, and the man was let into the building,” according to a statement from U.S. Capitol Police.
After getting past security, Capitol Police were alerted to his presence and issued a bulletin to be on the lookout for the man. They located him after he had completed the full tour of Congress outside the Library of Congress a short time later and found that he had a 9mm handgun in his waistband, law enforcement sources said.
Authorities said the suspect was arrested for “Unlawful Activities, Carrying a Pistol Without a License, Possession of an Unregistered Firearm, Unlawful Possession of Ammunition, and Resisting Arrest.” The case is currently with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Capitol Police statement said.
The officer who performed the screening at the magnetometer at the Capitol Visitor Center “is suspended while the USCP’s Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting an administrative investigation into the officer’s performance of that search.”
There is no indication he intended to cause any harm to harm the Congress, according to Capitol police. But sources told ABC News that a man who was possibly suicidal was able to take a full tour of Congress with a gun with members of the public and Congress nearby.
“A full review of this incident has already been ordered, as well as mandatory refresher training on security screening, so this never happens again,” Capitol Police said in their statement.
Members of Congress were briefed on the situation on Thursday.
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump will meet with Senate Republicans Wednesday to try to get lawmakers “on the same page” on how to advance some of his major policy initiatives after he takes office on Jan. 20.
Trump will meet with Senate leadership and the rank and file after paying his respects to former President Jimmy Carter, who lies in state in the Capitol before his funeral on Thursday.
The president-elect wants to deliver on campaign promises, but how to move them forward has divided congressional Republicans.
Trump has pitched one massive bill that would include several of Trump’s top priorities: Immigration reform and energy production, and extending the tax cuts passed during his first term and other spending cuts. He’s also suggested that the bill should raise the debt ceiling or eliminate it altogether.
With small majorities in each chamber and little to no support expected from Democrats, Republicans plan to push “reconciliation” — a fast-track process limited to spending and revenue legislation that needs only a majority rather than the 60-vote threshold in the Senate needed to pass legislation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson faces resistance to the one-bill approach from fiscal conservatives in his conference. And some Senate Republicans are advocating for two bills — one on border issues and a second to deal with fiscal policy.
One of the key objectives in Wednesday’s meeting will be “how we get on the same page with the House,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso said Tuesday.
Barrasso said the “goal is the same,” whether it’s done with one or two bills, but he said a two-part plan would allow Trump to deliver on some of his promises and allow more time to address tax policy that doesn’t expire until the end of the year.
“It was a suggestion by [Senate Majority Leader] John Thune — this was before Christmas — he said, ‘Let’s get an early win on the border,'” Barrasso, R-Wyo., said. “It was an issue in the election and it is a big issue for the American people and it is a big issue for national security, and we just thought we could get that done in a quicker fashion with a focus on that, on taking the handcuffs off of American energy as well as military strength, and then have the longer time to work on the financial component of this.
“These issues and the urgency of the tax issue doesn’t really come into play until the end of the year to the level that these other issues have the higher urgency right now,” he said.
Trump reiterated his preference for one bill when he spoke to reporters on Tuesday, but said he could live with two.
“Well, I like one big, beautiful bill, and I always have, I always will, he said. But if two is more certain [to pass], it does go a little bit quicker because you can do the immigration stuff early,” he said.
In the House, Johnson said he remains convinced that the one-bill strategy is the “best way to go,” but conversations with Thune are continuing.
“Yes, Leader Thune and I are on exactly the same page with regard to the objectives, and we’re determining right now the final sequence of the play call, so to speak,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “This is not some sort of, I feel like sometimes the media tries to make this an existential threat to the objectives or to what we’re doing with the legislation. It’s not that, this is two chambers deciding the best sequence of events, and we’ll get to a perfect alignment here in the next I think a couple of days.”
Johnson said he hopes to have a bill ready by the first week in April, but it remains to be seen if he can get fiscal conservatives in his conference, who have long opposed all-in-one bills like the one Johnson is proposing, on board.
The speaker pushed back on Tuesday about the one-bill approach being a kitchen sink approach.
“This is not an omnibus spending bill, but appropriation,” Johnson said. “This is reducing spending, which is an objective we talked about. I’ll keep reiterating this: that just because the debt limit is raised, to give stability the bond markets and to send a message around the world that we will pay the nation’s debt. We are doggedly determined to decrease the size of scope of government and to limit spending, cut spending so you can you’ll see both of those things happen simultaneously.”
Johnson also intends to handle the debt limit in the reconciliation bill — without Democratic support.
“That way, as the Republican Party, the party in charge of both chambers, we again get to determine the details of that. If it runs through the regular order, regular process… then you have to have both parties negotiating. And we feel like we are in better stead to do it ourselves,” he said Tuesday.
But it remains to be seen whether Johnson can sell the fiscal conservatives in his conference on that idea. They nearly derailed the short-term government funding bill to avert a shutdown last month after Trump demanded that it dealt with the debt ceiling.
After his meeting with senators, Trump will meet with groups of House Republicans at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida this weekend.
“He’s bringing in big groups of House Republicans to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend three days in a row to meet with and talk with all of our team members about what’s ahead of us and the challenges and how we can accomplish all this together,” Johnson said, though the speaker is not expected to attend.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed, without evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration — under Democratic presidents — were partly to blame for the tragic plane and helicopter collision in Washington on Wednesday night.
The air disaster occurred as an American Airlines passenger jet approaching Reagan Washington National Airport collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on a training flight.
“I put safety first, Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen,” Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room, referring to the policies, even as the investigation into what happened is just getting underway.
“I had to say that it’s terrible,” he said, citing what he called a story about a group within the FAA that had “determined that the [FAA] workforce was too white, that they had concerted efforts to get the administration to change that and to change it immediately. This was in the Obama administration, just prior to my getting there, and we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans.”
But when a reporter pressed him, saying that similar language on DEI policies existed on the FAA’s website under Trump’s entire first term, Trump shot back, “I changed the Obama policy, and we had a very good policy and then Biden came in and he changed it. And then when I came in two days, three days ago, I said, a new order, bringing it to the highest level of intelligence.”
When asked by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce whether he was saying the crash was the result of diversity hiring, Trump said, “we don’t know” what caused the crash, adding investigators are still looking into that. “It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a higher, much higher standard than anybody else.”
Even as he made unfounded claims about the FAA’s diversity initiatives being a factor in the disaster, he then said the Army helicopter crew could be at fault — and claimed he wasn’t blaming the air traffic controller who communicated with the helicopter.
When asked how he could come to the conclusion that FAA diversity policies had something to do with the disaster, he said, “Because I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.”
Trump called Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary in the Biden administration, “bulls—,” and said he had “run [the Department of Transportation] right into the ground with his diversity.”
“Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” Buttigieg responded in a statement on X. “We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”