Harris will not speak as tearful supporters leave watch party
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(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.
(WASHINGTON) — Amid rising tensions in the Middle East, White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby said Sunday that the Biden administration is doing “everything we can to try to prevent this from becoming an all-out war there with Hezbollah across that Lebanese border.”
Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah traded fire earlier Sunday morning, with an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson saying that Hezbollah launched 150 rockets toward Israel, reaching deeper into the country than many previous strikes. In response, the IDF said it was striking “Hezbollah terrorist targets” in Lebanon. The IDF struck 400 targets on Saturday and said that the attacks will only intensify.
The fresh strikes come as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledges to “take whatever action is necessary to restore security and to bring our people safe back to their homes” near the Lebanese border in the north of the country.
Asked by ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos if escalation in the region is inevitable, Kirby said the White House believes a “diplomatic solution” is still possible.
“We believe that there are better ways to try to get those Israeli citizens back in their homes up in the north, and to keep those that are there, there safely, than a war, than an escalation, then opening up a second front there at that border with Lebanon against Hezbollah,” Kirby said.
But Stephanopoulos pushed back, noting it seems like Netanyahu is not listening to the United States’s consistent pleas for de-escalation.
“Look, the prime minister can speak for himself and what — and what — what policy he’s trying to pursue, what operations he’s trying to conduct. We’ll, of course, recognize that the tensions are much higher now than they were even just a few days ago. … But all that does, George, is underscore for us how important it is to try to find a diplomatic solution,” he said.
Hezbollah called the Sunday assault an “initial response” to attacks from Israel earlier this week. In Lebanon and Syria, thousands of people were injured Tuesday by exploding pagers used by Hezbollah members as part of an Israeli operation. Another round of attacks targeting two-way radios used by the group followed on Wednesday. The two attacks killed at least 39 people and injured more than 3,000, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Kirby reiterated that the U.S. was “not involved” in these attacks, but refused to say much more than that, saying he would not “get into the details.”
“I will just say, though, George, that we are watching all of these escalating tensions that have been occurring over the last week or so with great concern, and we want to make sure that we can continue to do everything we can to try to prevent this from becoming an all-out war there with Hezbollah across that Lebanese border,” he said.
A panel of United Nations specialists in international law and human rights has condemned Israel’s use of the exploding devices as illegal “booby traps” with the potential of harming civilians.
Israel had a hand in the manufacturing of the devices with this type of “supply chain interdiction” operation having been planned for at least 15 years, a U.S. intelligence source confirmed to ABC News.
In response to a question about the security of U.S. supply chains, Kirby said that President Joe Biden “has made it clear that he wants the American supply chain to be as resilient and as vibrant as possible.”
The attacks, including Israel’s Friday strike on a Beirut suburb that took out a top Hezbollah commander, signal a new stage of escalation in the Middle East and raise fears of that they will increase the likelihood of an expanded conflict in the region.
How these recent attacks impact the efforts to achieve a cease-fire between Israeli and terrorist organization Hamas in Gaza remains an open question.
Kirby conceded to Stephanopoulos that, “We are not achieving any progress here in the last week to two weeks,” and said that Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, doesn’t appear to be negotiating in good faith.
“But it doesn’t mean that we’re not trying,” he added.
Kirby’s response follows a report from The Wall Street Journal that U.S. officials believe an Israel-Hamas cease-fire deal is unlikely before the end of Biden’s term. When asked Friday about the likelihood of a deal, Biden replied, “A lot of things don’t look realistic until we get them done.”
Stephanopoulos also asked Kirby about alleged election meddling efforts by Iran that U.S. security agencies warned about last week. Kirby said there is “a very robust interagency effort all across the government to deter and to defeat foreign malign actors.
“The American people ought to know that the federal government is working hand in glove with their local and state officials to ensure the safety and security of their ballots and their election day activities,” Kirby said.
(WASHINGTON) — The White House is touting its American Rescue Plan (ARP) COVID emergency funding program as a win for public education with nearly 90% of its funds exhausted by Monday’s deadline, according to senior Department of Education officials.
The final $122 billion phase of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund (ESSER), a part of the ARP law signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, was distributed to state and local education agencies to reopen schools and promote physical health, safety and mental health and well-being.
In total, that funding and two prior installments of ESSER during the 2020 pandemic is roughly $190 billion. It has been obligated or used on school recovery projects that are wrapped up. Senior Department of Education officials said about 12% of ARP projects that are still underway are expected to be finished by the end of a January, 2025, liquidation extension window.
The ESSER package that was doled out to states as discretionary funding sparked controversy over how the funds were being spent. Many conservatives speculated whether it was being utilized at all, blaming the federal Education Department for a lack of academic recovery and low test scores on national assessments coming out of the pandemic.
Education finance expert Jess Gartner, who has been tracking school spending projects, told ABC News that school districts had planned for the window closing on ESSER funding.
“The reality is, the vast majority of school districts turned the page on Fiscal Year 25 on July 1: that means budgets for the year are done and dusted. They were approved in May or June,” Gartner said, adding, “It’s not like September 30 is going to catch CFOs by surprise. You know, they’ve been planning for this deadline for three, four years, and they have a budget for the whole year that’s already in motion and fully approved.”
What is ESSER?
ESSER was granted by the Department of Education’s Education Stabilization Fund. It was meant to meet the challenges of the pandemic and academic recovery, according to the COVID relief data website.
In ESSER I, Congress allotted about $13 billion through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act when the pandemic first closed schools for in-person learning in March 2020.
In ESSER II, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act provided an additional $54 billion in December 2020.
The final installment of nearly $122 billion, or ESSER III, came under the American Rescue Plan Act — the fund enabled states to reopen schools and for students to recover from the pandemic. ARP provided additional FY 2021 funding for the Department of Education to assist states with addressing the impacts of COVID-19 on elementary and secondary schools.
ESSER III brought the total to about $190 billion in emergency funding for state and local education departments.
How is ESSER III being used?
That $122 billion was tacked onto the roughly $68 billion in money in ESSER I and ESSER II the previous year. As discretionary funding, states could distribute the allotment however they chose. In the last 3 1/2 years, school districts have used it on infrastructure projects, school enrichment and summer programs, and staff positions where needed.
Baltimore City Superintendent Dr. Sonja Santelises said her district’s large projects — critical in supporting an urban school population — included building bathrooms, expanding summer programs and providing tutoring sessions.
“We didn’t want to leave money on the table,” Santelises said. “There was an intentional decision [in some urban school districts] to invest one-time money in building back what was already an under-resourced infrastructure in the school district — these are the districts that are least likely to have the funding to do the capital projects,” she added.
Despite critics ridiculing the spending practices in some states — leading to tense debates about learning loss — education experts told ABC News the summer programming and high-impact tutoring proved to be vital in academic recovery. Students who were socially isolated and fell behind used robust tutoring programs to not only catch up, but to also return to school if they were showing attendance issues, according to FutureEd Director Thomas Toch.
“Tutoring creates connections between students and adults and one of the things that we’ve learned in the wake of the pandemic is that kids are feeling more alienated, more isolated, than ever,” he said. “An important sort of antidote to these high levels of chronic absenteeism is connecting kids to adults more fully than they have in the past.”
A recent Pew Research Center survey of public K-12 teachers found more than 90% of teachers said their students are chronically absent. Of the teachers surveyed, about half of them said in five years the American education system will be worse than it is now.
Despite gains from the academic recovery programs ESSER provided during the pandemic, Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research Faculty Director Tom Kane said students are potentially facing permanent damage from the closures if learning loss ceases to improve.
What happens to ESSER now?
The obligation deadline for the last portion of ESSER funding is today — Sept. 30 — more than four years after the start of the pandemic and three years after ARP became law.
New emergency funding will not be granted to aid in the effort to help school communities recover from COVID. As U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona fights attacks on public education writ-large, he told ABC News “the recovery dollars were intended to prevent further exacerbation.”
Jess Gartner believes school districts, by and large, handled the lump sum money well. With FY 2025’s budget already in the books, school district leaders shouldn’t panic and should be prepared to rely on the funds they would have typically received before COVID, Gartner said.
“These budgets are planned years in advance,” Garner told ABC News. “It’s kind of like if you were planning to buy a house, right? You don’t show up at the closing, like, ‘Oh man, how am I gonna pay for this?'” she quipped.
Now school districts have to make due with the chunk of funding they annually receive from the federal government, which is on average about 10%. Similar to before the pandemic, they will be supported by state and local governments, which make up roughly 90% of public school funding.
But the COVID-19 emergency exposed infrastructure and workforce problems that public schools were dealing with before the pandemic and were exacerbated on a large scale during it, education experts said.
Some leaders like Santelises are calling for more help as the pandemic’s impact on students continues.
“It’s the federal government’s responsibility to champion looking at the long term impact and to not take the posture that somehow three years you wave a wand and all the kids are back, ” Santelises said. “The kids are not all back.”
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to soon face her first post-convention test when she sits for a formal interview airing in primetime Thursday.
CNN announced Tuesday that Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz will be interviewed by anchor Dana Bash, marking the first sitdown with a reporter since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race.
The announcement came as Harris faced growing calls from critics about her availability to reporters since she took over the campaign.
Ian Sams, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, appeared reiterated on Monday that Harris would “schedule” a sit-down interview by the end of the month.
The initial absence of plans for any such sit-down prompted accusations by Republican critics of dodging the press.
“She refuses to do any interviews or press conferences, almost 30 days now, she has not done an interview,” former President Donald Trump said of Harris at a North Carolina event earlier this month. “You know why she hasn’t done an interview? Because she’s not smart. She’s not intelligent.”
His campaign has said Harris is trying to “duck and hide” from the news media, which is sure to sling several tough questions her way when she meets the press.
The lack of a media interview has yet to hurt Harris, whose poll numbers are outpacing those of President Joe Biden when he was atop the Democratic ticket, according to 538’s national polling average. As of Tuesday, Harris is polling ahead of Trump, 47.2% to 43.6%; when Biden left the race, he was polling at 40.2% compared to Trump’s 43.5%, according to 538’s polling average.
Harris has also stirred enthusiasm from Democrats that had been absent most of the campaign cycle — and is riding a high following last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Moreover, she chose a running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose rural background has helped the ticket craft a message Democrats have said they believe will make inroads with voters in conservative parts of the country.
All the while, Trump has seemed to abandon the discipline Republicans had lauded him for this summer. Recently, he has made false claims about the crowd size at a Harris rally and appeared to forget to mention a policy proposal he had been slated to unveil at an event in Michigan.
Democrats have cautioned that Harris has several hurdles to clear in the coming weeks.
One of those hurdles is the pending media interview, where Harris would likely have to defend the decisions of the Biden administration and specify some of her policy stances.
On Monday, Trump sought to spotlight Harris’ connection to the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying wreaths in Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump claimed when he spoke to National Guardsmen at a Detroit event later Monday.
Harris is also likely to be pressed on how much she knew about Biden’s capacities prior to the June 27 debate. That night, she urged Americans to judge Biden not on the “90 minutes” on stage but the “three-and-a-half years of performance.”
Yet, that same debate performance set in motion a weekslong effort by top Democrats to nudge Biden from the race.
Few had a better understanding of what Biden was like behind the scenes than Harris, his No. 2, and an interviewer would likely challenge her about what she witnessed in private.
Harris would surely be asked about the war in Gaza. She said recently, “We need a cease-fire,” but is a member of an administration that has yet to help broker one.
The situation at the southern border would likely be another topic an interviewer would press Harris on. Republicans have linked her to an increase in unauthorized border crossings earlier in Biden’s term, misleadingly dubbing her the “border czar.”
An interviewer might also ask Harris to respond to the criticism of her recently unveiled economic plan, in which she called for an end to grocery “price-gouging,” prompting accusations by some Republicans that she wants “communist price controls.”
Harris travels this week to south Georgia, where she will embark on a bus tour and hold a rally in Savannah, Georgia.
