Tim Scott becomes longest-serving Black senator in US history
(Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Sixty years after Black Americans gained the right to vote in the United States through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Sen. Tim Scott on Friday makes history, becoming the longest-serving African American in the 235-year history of the United States Senate. This historic moment will be shared alongside four other African-American senators, making this the largest group of Black senators to ever serve concurrently in the U.S. Capitol, a building constructed with the labor of enslaved Black people.
The previous longest-serving Black senator was the late Republican Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, who held office from 1967 until 1979. Scott, the first elected Black senator from the South, is the first to serve in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
In his first speech as a freshman senator, Scott said, “I believe in the greatness of America because I have experienced the goodness of our people in America. An ordinary guy like me can be blessed with an extraordinary opportunity like this.”
Born and raised in North Charleston, South Carolina, Scott was raised in a single-parent household after the divorce of his parents. He was a troubled teenager who failed English, Spanish, geography, and civics in his freshman year in High School. He often recalls his close relationship with his grandfather, who was forced to drop out of school in the third grade, picked cotton to survive, and was not allowed to vote for more than half of his life. His grandfather was also unable to learn how to read, only to witness his grandson’s career rise from those humble beginnings in South Carolina to become both a member of Congress and a U.S. senator.
“Our family went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” Scott said at the Republican National Convention in 2020.
After serving in the House of Representatives from 2011 until 2013, Scott was appointed by then-South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to the Senate in 2012 after former Senator Jim DeMint left to become president of the Heritage Foundation. Democratic Senator Cory Booker, who was elected in a special election did not join the Senate until months after Scott’s appointment.
In 2024, the Senate will see its highest-ever Black senators serving concurrently. This group includes Sens. Raphael Warnock, Booker, Scott, Angela Alsobrooks, and Lisa Blunt Rochester. Rochester and Alsobrooks will also break barriers as the first two women to serve together in the Senate concurrently.
During his early days in the Senate, Scott occasionally would serve as the only Black person in the Senate. In 2016, following the controversial deaths of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Philando Castile he delivered a poignant speech about the deep divide between law enforcement and communities in America. He revealed that, as an elected official, he had been stopped and questioned seven times while driving. Even as a senator, Scott was questioned about his identity by Capitol Police despite wearing a pin identifying himenator.
“While I thank God I have not endured bodily harm, I have, however, felt the pressure applied by the scales of justice when they are slanted. I have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness, and the humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself,” Scott said in 2016.
As his career extends into the 119th Congress, Scott will make history as the first Black chairman of a Senate standing committee. He will lead the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee and will also chair the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the only Black Republican to hold such a position.
Marking the milestone achievement, Scott said in a statement, “My goal is simple: make America work for Americans. As we get to work cleaning up the mess from the previous administration, I look forward to working with President Trump on his priorities, including paving a path for all Americans to have the necessary tools and resources to achieve their version of the American Dream.”
“We will unlock opportunity, strengthen our nation, and make America the shining city on the Hill again,” he added.
Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead. Via Flickr
(WASHINGTON) — After a sweeping victory over Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5, President-elect Donald Trump is now set to become just the second ever to serve nonconsecutive terms in office.
Trump has wasted no time in moving to assemble his team for a second term in the White House — naming Susie Wiles as his chief of staff and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik as U.N. ambassador, among other positions.
November 11, 2024, 7:00 PM EST – Trump asks Rep. Mike Waltz to be his national security adviser: Sources
Trump has asked Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., to be his national security adviser, multiple sources said.
Waltz was at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, sources said.
Waltz is a former Green Beret and China hawk who emerged as a key surrogate for Trump, criticizing the Biden-Harris foreign policy record during the campaign.
The Florida Republican sits on the Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees.
He has supported aid to Ukraine in the past but has demanded “conditions,” including increased spending from European allies, additional oversight of funds and pairing the aid with border security measures.
Waltz, who has visited Ukraine, was a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s policy towards Ukraine, criticizing the White House and allies for not providing Ukraine with more lethal aid — such as MiG fighter planes — earlier in the conflict.
Before running for elected office, Waltz served in various national security policy roles in the Bush administration, Pentagon and White House.
-ABC News’ Rachel Scott, Benjamin Siegel, John Santucci and Katherine Faulders
November 11, 2024, 6:06 PM EST – Volunteer-run effort on RFK Jr.’s website crowd-sourcing ideas for Trump admin appointments
A volunteer-run effort on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s website has begun crowd-sourcing ideas for appointments in Trump’s administration.
A website titled “Nominees for the People” gives anyone the chance to submit names of people they’d like to see join the administration.
“President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. want your help nominating people of integrity and courage for over 4,000 appointments across the future Trump administration,” the website reads.
Stefanie Spear, a Kennedy spokeswoman, told ABC News that the crowd-sourcing effort is “a grassroots initiative run by volunteers,” and is not actually spearheaded by Kennedy, although the page uses the “mahanow.org” URL that Kennedy’s official campaign website adopted after he exited the race.
“We’ve always offered space on our website to our grassroots movement,” Spear said.
This post has been updated to reflect that the crowd-sourcing effort is a volunteer-run effort.
-ABC News’ Sasha Pezenik
November 11, 2024, 5:55 PM EST – Trump’s ‘border czar’ says mass deportation strategy will be a main priority
Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan, Trump’s newly announced “border czar,” said his main priority will be overseeing and formulating Trump’s long-vowed mass deportation strategy while consolidating decisions related to border security.
“Everybody talks about this mass deportation operation. President Trump talks about. I’ll oversee that and come up with a strategy for that,” Homan said during a lengthy interview with his hometown television station WWNY on Monday.
Homan said Trump’s mass deportations is “going to be a targeted enforcement operation, concentrating on criminals and national security threats first.”
He acknowledged that the deportations would be costly but argued the policy would “save the taxpayers a lot of money.”
Homan said he does not plan to “separate women and children” but acknowledged that deporting alleged criminals would result in breaking up families.
“When we arrest parents here, guess what? We separate them. The illegal aliens should be no different,” Homan said.
Homan also said worksite enforcement — an aspect of immigration policy focused on unauthorized workers and employers who knowingly hire them — is “going to get fired back up.”
“Under President Trump, we’re going to work it and we’re going to work it hard,” he said.
-ABC News’ Peter Charalambous
November 11, 2024, 5:46 PM EST – Melania Trump skipping meeting with Jill Biden: Sources
Melania Trump is not expected to travel to Washington with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday, two sources told ABC News.
First lady Jill Biden had extended an invite to Melania Trump for a meeting, according to the sources. In 2016, Michelle Obama had hosted Melania Trump at the White House.
The Trump campaign declined to comment. The first lady’s office confirmed to ABC News that a joint invitation was extended to the Trumps to meet at the White House though declined to comment beyond that.
-ABC News’ Rachel Scott, John Santucci and Molly Nagle
November 11, 2024, 4:26 PM EST – RFK Jr. advising Trump transition on health decisions: Sources
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has continued to broadly advise Trump and the transition team on health-related appointments and has been in discussions to possibly fill a major role in the next administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
While sources caution that a role has not been finalized, RFK Jr. has been discussed as a potential candidate for the next secretary of Health and Human Services. But other roles are also on the table, including a broad “czar”-like position that would advise on policy and personnel decisions in other health arenas, the sources said.
RFK Jr. has been in active discussions with the transition team since Trump’s election victory last week. He’s been spotted at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club multiple times and has been engaging in presentations which include candidates for specific Cabinet and health-related jobs, sources said.
He has spent hours with the co-heads of Trump’s transition team — billionaire Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon — in addition to others at Mar-a-Lago such as Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.; investor and donor Omeed Malik; Tucker Carlson; and Del Bigtree, RFK Jr.’s former campaign spokesperson who produced a documentary called “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe.”
-ABC News’ Katherine Faulders, Olivia Rubin and Will McDuffie
November 11, 2024, 3:30 PM EST – Lee Zeldin named to be EPA administrator
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Lee, with a very strong legal background, has been a true fighter for America First policies,” Trump said in a statement. “He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet. He will set new standards on environmental review and maintenance, that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.
Zeldin, who also ran for New York governor against Andrew Cuomo in 2022, confirmed he had been offered the job via a post on X.
“It is an honor to join President Trump’s Cabinet as EPA Administrator,” he wrote. “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”
-ABC News’ John Santucci, Rachel Scott and Katherine Faulders
November 11, 2024, 3:06 PM EST -RFK Jr. suggests he’ll gut NIH, replace 600 employees
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. indicated over the weekend that he would fire 600 employees at the National Institutes of Health, replacing them with a new cohort of workers as he seeks to dramatically reshape America’s health agencies.
Speaking at the Genius Network Annual Event in Scottsdale, Arizona, Kennedy described his role vetting people for Donald Trump’s new administration.
“We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on Jan. 20, so that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave,” Kennedy said, according to a video of his remarks posted on YouTube.
November 11, 2024, 3:06 PM EST- Trump expected to announce Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to announce Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner and one of his senior advisers, will become his deputy chief of staff for policy, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
It’s not clear when Trump plans to formally announce the job, the sources said.
Miller worked in the first Trump administration and played a key role in crafting immigration policies — including those that resulted in thousands of families being separated at the border.
-ABC News’ Rachel Scott, John Santucci and Katherine Faulders
November 11, 2024, 3:00 PM EST – Trump picks Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador
President-elect Donald Trump selected Rep. Elise Stefanik to be his U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, multiple Trump officials told ABC News.
“I am honored to nominate Chairwoman Elise Stefanik to serve in my Cabinet as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Elise is an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement to ABC News.
Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman from New York’s 21st District, was elected last week to her sixth term in the House. She will inherit a role Nikki Haley held for two years in the first Trump administration.
-ABC News’ Rachel Scott, Katherine Faulders and John Santucci
(NEW YORK) — President Donald Trump said he wants Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and author who argued against pandemic lockdowns, to lead the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“He will work under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to, among other things, properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our Nation’s food supply and drugs and biologics being given to our Nation’s youth, so that we can finally address the Childhood Chronic Disease Epidemic,” Trump said in his announcement.
If confirmed by the Senate, Makary’s job would be to oversee the FDA’s $7 billion budget and report to the health secretary. The agency oversees $3.6 trillion in food, tobacco and medical products, including some 20,000 prescription drugs on the market.
Here are three things to know about Makary:
Makary is a respected transplant surgeon who questioned his colleagues’ recommendations on COVID
Makary was known during the pandemic as an experienced medical expert willing to challenge his colleagues’ assumptions on COVID, although he was often criticized by his peers for cherry-picking data or omitting context.
He frequently appeared on Fox News and wrote opinion articles that questioned the value of lockdowns and masks for children. He supported the use of vaccines but opposed mandates and doubted the utility of boosters, at odds with full-throated recommendations on boosters from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Among his views was that the U.S. government was underestimating the number of people who were likely immune to the virus. In early 2021, he predicted much of the country would reach “herd immunity” by that April, reducing risk of the virus dramatically.
That assumption, however, did not happen.
As restrictions eased and a new variant surfaced, virus-related deaths soared from about 4,000 a week to about 15,000 a week by September, making 2021 a deadlier year than when the pandemic began.
Makary stood by his assertion that “natural immunity” was still being underestimated by the U.S. government.
“One reason public health officials may be afraid to acknowledge the effectiveness of natural immunity is that they fear it will lead some to choose getting the infection over vaccination. That’s a legitimate concern. But we can encourage all Americans to get vaccinated while still being honest about the data,” he wrote a separate opinion article in The Washington Post.
He sounds a lot like RFK Jr. when talking about the ‘poisoned’ food supply, pesticides and ultra-processed foods.
After the pandemic, Makary began turning back to his initial focus railing against an overpriced health care system. He’s long argued that the system is broken, overcharging patients and running unnecessary tests.
He also began speaking more critically about America’s food system, echoing a message embraced by Trump’s pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“We’ve got a poisoned food supply. We’ve got pesticides. We’ve got ultra-processed foods and all sorts of things that have been in the blind spots in modern medicine,” Makary told Fox News this September.
Kennedy also would require Senate confirmation to get the job.
In a later interview, Makary praised Trump’s decision to pick Kennedy.
“He wants to address corruption in health care and corruption in our government health agencies,” he said.
He warns against ‘drugging our nation’s children.’
It’s not clear exactly what Makary would do if confirmed as FDA commissioner, as much of his work would likely be steered by Trump and the incoming health secretary, possibly Kennedy.
But Makary has previously suggested an overhaul of FDA’s “erratic” bureaucracy, which he says was too eager to approve opioids and too cautious when it came to other drugs like the COVID antiviral pill Molnupiravir.
“For too long, FDA leaders have acted like a crusty librarian who gets annoyed when someone wants to borrow a book. But then give preference to people they like,” Makary wrote in a 2021 opinion article in Fox News.
More recently, he’s called for a ban on cell phones on schools, and praised Kennedy for questioning the use of anti-anxiety and anti-obesity drugs in children.
“What he is really focused on is this concept that we can’t keep drugging our nation’s children,” Makary said of Kennedy.
When asked if Kennedy can accomplish what he wants to do in four years, Makary told Fox News he’ll try by bringing in more scientists and letting “them do good work.”
Kennedy “is really the quintessential environmental health attorney of our era, and that may be the quintessential issue of our era,” Makary said.
(WASHINGTON) — Experts who’ve spent decades studying the assassination of President John F. Kennedy told ABC News Friday they are hopeful that President Donald Trump will see to the disclosure of government documents on the killing that have been withheld from the public.
But despite the president’s order Thursday directing a plan for “full and complete release” of the material, some prominent researchers are not holding their breath.
“This order is a good first step, but it has loopholes in it,” warns author Jefferson Morley, whose website, jfkfacts.org, says it seeks to “abolish the official secrecy” that surrounds the 1963 assassination.
Pointing to language in Trump’s order that calls for a “plan” for the release, Morley fears continued foot-dragging within the intelligence community over some 3,600 documents in the National Archives’ JFK collection that still contain redactions.
“These agencies have not been cooperative with the law, with Congress, or with anybody over the last 60 years,” Morley said. “That resistance to full disclosure is not going to stop because Trump issued an order.”
New York-based attorney Larry Schnapf, who has in the past sued the government to compel the release of JFK documents, says years of experience battling a reluctant national security apparatus inform his skepticism.
“We’re hoping this is going to be a mechanical plan,” Schnapf said. “But if they’re going to do a substantive [document-by-document] review, then it’s going to be a while before the records are released.”
Schnapf also worries that the current lack of confirmed Trump-appointees in key roles at the intelligence agencies could slow the disclosures.
“If [Trump] doesn’t get his people in within 15 days, I think we’re going to have an initial delay, anyway,” Schnapf said.
In 1992, Congress passed a law requiring full disclosure of the JFK documents by 2017. But the law also allowed for exceptions if the president certified that “identifiable harm” to national security would be done if the secrets were revealed. Even as they oversaw the release of tens of thousands of pages, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden yielded to concerns of the CIA, FBI and other agencies, that thousands more documents should remain redacted.
A December 2022 memo to the White House has the CIA’s chief data officer writing that “limited redactions” were still necessary to keep secret the names of CIA employees, intelligence assets, sources and methods still in use, as well as “still-classified covert action programs still in effect.”
Jefferson Morley calls that bunk.
“The fact that they’re using techniques today that they used in an operation involving Oswald — and therefore it should remain secret — that’s absurd,” Morley said.
Author Gerald Posner, who wrote the 1993 book, “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” is less pessimistic than Morley and Schnapf about the timing of the releases.
“[Trump] doesn’t like to be humiliated or made to look as though there’s a limit on his power,” Posner said. “And if [the agencies] come back and want to hold onto stuff this time, they’re going to have a tougher road.”
Posner and the other experts agree that the CIA is likely to be embarrassed by the disclosures, since the redacted documents are expected to shine further light on the spy agency’s tracking of Lee Harvey Oswald as early as 1959 — surveillance that intensified in the months leading to Kennedy’s death as Oswald traveled to Mexico City with a plan to defect to Communist Cuba.
“In an ideal world, we would get to that bottom of that story by finding out more about the officers who had Oswald under surveillance, more about the CIA operations that enveloped Oswald as he made his way towards Dallas,” Morley said, calling the CIA’s files “key to the story.”
One key advocate for release aims to have a seat at Trump’s cabinet table, and is hoping to learn more from government records about the 1968 assassination of his father.
“The 60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship, and defamation employed by Intel officials to obscure and suppress troubling facts about JFK’s assassination has provided the playbook for a series of subsequent crises,” Robert F. Kennedy Junior said in a statement, pointing to the killings of RFK and MLK, the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, 9/11 and the government’s handling of Covid-19.
“[E]ach accelerated the subversion of our exemplary democracy by the Military/Medical Industrial Complex and pushed us further down the road toward totalitarianism,” Kennedy said.
