Who will succeed Mitch McConnell as Senate leader?
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(WASHINGTON) — In the wake of Donald Trump’s Election Day triumph, Republicans hope to leverage their control of the White House and Congress to pass a sweeping new agenda for the U.S.
Key to making that happen is the Republicans’ Senate leader, a role that’s been held by Mitch McConnell for 18 years. The Kentucky senator, 82, announced his intention to step down in January, igniting a ferocious lobbying campaign to replace him.
Senate Republicans will choose a successor on Wednesday, via secret ballot. With the Senate returning to Republican control following three years with a Democratic majority, McConnell’s successor will wield even more power than he has in recent times.
The Senate is also charged with confirming Trump’s Cabinet nominees, making them a vital stepping stone as he asserts control ahead of his second term as president.
For months, two longtime McConnell allies have been the main figures in the race: Sen. John Thune of South Dakota and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. Both are considered pragmatists and deal-makers, raising plenty of money for the party.
Speaking to Fox News after the election, Thune gave his take on Trump’s policy plans.
“That’s an agenda that deals with economic issues, taxes, regulations, energy dominance,” Thune said. “That deals with border security and, as always, national security.”
Cornyn emphasized the national debt in an interview with Fox News.
“I know the challenges we have in terms of $35 trillion in debt, more money being paid on interest than on defense spending, and then obviously the broken border and so many other issues,” he said.
However, Trump’s Election Day success gave rise to a third possibility: Sen. Rick Scott of Florida. A staunch ally of the president-elect, he was the first lawmaker to join Trump in the New York courtroom during his hush money trial earlier this year.
“Whoever’s going to be the Republican leader needs to work with President Trump,” Scott said in an interview with ABC News’ Rachael Bade. “It’s probably better to have a good relationship than not.”
It’s also possible Scott’s candidacy is designed to elicit concessions from McConnell’s successor and push the entire Senate further to the right.
The Senate’s far-right members aren’t interested in working with their Democratic counterparts on policy, instead focusing on government spending.
“I think we need to do everything we can to counter the policies and ideology of the left,” Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson told ABC News.
Some also want a leader who will let the government shut down if elements of the Republican agenda aren’t met — a shift from McConnell, who avoided such shutdowns.
As the vote looms, Scott’s allies are imploring Trump to endorse him in the hope it will propel him to victory.
Senate Republicans told ABC News that the president-elect won’t have much sway because the election is held by secret ballot, with Republican senators voting for their leader on Wednesday. The party gathered behind closed doors Tuesday evening to hear arguments
Despite this, he took to his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday to demand that the person who wanted the job agree to recess appointments. This would allow him to temporarily install appointments to federal vacancies without Senate approval.
Within hours of Trump’s post, all three candidates essentially agreed.
(WASHINGTON) — Although she was just in her mid-20s, Tulsi Gabbard’s hair had already started turning white shortly before she first set foot in the U.S. Senate as a legislative aide in 2006.
Coming from her native Hawaii, she had landed a job with longtime Hawaii Democratic Sen. Daniel Akaka, chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who would become her mentor.
Now, almost 20 years later, the former Democratic congresswoman returns to the Senate to meet with lawmakers, including members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence after appearing with him a number of times on the campaign trail and serving as an honorary co-chair of his transition team.
Gabbard spent the past week in Oklahoma on Army National Guard duty. She currently holds the rank of lieutenant colonel, something supporters argue qualifies her for the job as critics cite her lack of experience.
She’s also facing renewed scrutiny over her past comments on Syria and her meeting with now-overthrown dictator Bashar Assad.
From Hawaii to Kuwait to Congress
By the time she came to the Senate, Gabbard had already made history in Hawaii as one of the youngest lawmakers elected to a state legislature at age 21. Serving alongside her father, Hawaii state Sen. Mike Gabbard, she became part of the first father-daughter combination in a legislature in the country.
As a Senate staffer, Gabbard remained in Hawaii’s National Guard, drilling on the weekends.
During her first yearlong deployment at Joint Base Balad in Iraq, nicknamed “Mortaritaville” for being hit with daily attacks, she’s said fumes from a nearby burn pit would regularly sicken her fellow service members, causing flu-like symptoms they called the “crud.”
In 2007, she attended the Accelerated Officer Candidate School at the Alabama Military Academy, graduating at the top of her class as its first distinguished woman honor graduate. After two years working in the Senate, Gabbard volunteered for a deployment to Kuwait.
As a military police platoon leader and trainer for the Kuwait National Guard’s counterterrorism unit, Gabbard achieved another milestone in 2009, becoming one of the first women to set foot in a Kuwaiti military facility and the first woman to be honored by the Kuwait National Guard.
In her limited free time, Gabbard continued working on her bachelor’s degree from Hawaii Pacific University, taking online classes in an education tent.
Although her hair returned to its natural color, she told ABC News in 2019 she eventually kept a distinctive streak of white.
“It’s a reminder, every single day of the cost of war of those we lost and my mission in life to to seek peace and to fight for peace,” Gabbard said.
Gabbard later returned to Hawaii and ran for Honolulu City Council, serving from 2010 until 2012, before being elected to Congress as the then-youngest female member.
Bipartisan outreach
As a new member of Congress, Gabbard worked to forge relationships with members on both sides of the aisle.
She arrived armed with 434 boxes of macadamia nut toffee, homemade by her mother, for every member of Congress and an additional 435 boxes for staffers. Each box came with a handwritten letter, a form of diplomacy as a Democrat facing a Republican-controlled House.
During her freshman year in Congress in 2013, Gabbard was appointed vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, but stepped down from that position to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid.
She co-chaired the Future Caucus, a bipartisan effort to engage members of Congress under 40 years old. Gabbard also bonded with lawmakers over sports, playing on the Congressional Softball Team with New York Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and joining early morning workouts with colleagues such as Oklahoma GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin. She and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul co-sponsored legislation, including the Stop Arming Terrorists Act.
After an unsuccessful bid for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, she left the Democratic Party and became an independent and campaigned for Republicans, including Sens. Mike Lee and Chuck Grassley. She told Trump on a rally stage in October that she was registering as a Republican.
Controversial views on Russia, Syria
Gabbard was one of the first to enter the crowded Democratic 2020 primary and was one of the last three remaining candidates. One of her rivals in that race, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, announced she would oppose Trump’s choice of Gabbard, alleging she had suggested NATO had provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.
“Do you really want her to have all the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies when she has so clearly has been in Putin’s pocket? That just has to be a hard no,” Warren said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in November.
However, Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri defended Gabbard in November on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” taking aim at accusations that Gabbard was a “Russian asset.”
“It’s a slur, quite frankly. You know, there’s no evidence that she is an asset of another country. She served this country honorably,” Schmitt said.
Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who entered the Senate as the first female combat veteran while Gabbard was doing the same in the House, has opposed her pick for DNI, alleging she’s been compromised.
“The U.S. intelligence community has identified her as having troubling relationships with America’s foes. And so my worry is that she couldn’t pass a background check,” Duckworth said on CNN’s “State of the Union” in November.
Mullin struck back at Duckworth’s comments, saying “That’s the most dangerous thing she could say — is that a United States lieutenant colonel in the United States Army is compromised and is an asset of Russia.”
“If she was compromised, if she wasn’t able to pass a background check, if she wasn’t able to do her job, she still wouldn’t be in the Army,” he said.
Now, with the rebel takeover of Syria and the fall of Assad, Gabbard is drawing renewed attention to her controversial visit to Syria in 2017 — what she called a fact-finding mission — and sympathy she expressed after meeting with the Syrian dictator, saying the U.S. should stop aiding the “terrorists” trying to overthrow him.
Gabbard noted in 2019 that a CIA program “was directly and indirectly helping to equip and train and provide support to different armed groups, including those who are allied with and affiliated with al-Qaeda, to overthrow the Syrian government.”
The “Stop Arming Terrorist Act” she worked on with Paul in the Senate said the U.S. should stop aiding the “terrorists” trying to overthrow Assad.
Assad has been accused of war crimes against his own people during the Syrian civil war, in which hundreds of thousands have been killed. A few months after meeting with Assad, Gabbard said she was skeptical he had used chemical weapons against his own people, despite evidence from the U.S. government that he had, to argue against military intervention during Trump’s first administration.
Gabbard warned in June of 2019 that she was concerned that the toppling of Assad’s regime could lead to terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda to step in to fill the void and “completely massacre all religious minorities there in Syria.”
In a 2019 interview on ABC’s “The View” while running for president, she called Assad a “brutal dictator,” but said the U.S. regime-change strategy had not improved the lives of the Syrian people.
-ABC News’ Selina Wang contributed to this report.
Signage is displayed outside the CBS Broadcast Center ahead of the U.S. vice presidential debate on September 30, 2024 in New York City. (ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance are set to hold their only scheduled vice-presidential debate on Tuesday.
The pair will face off just a few weeks after former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris sparred at the ABC News presidential debate.
The vice-presidential debate is a chance for both Walz and Vance to show their political chops, tout their running mates’ plans for the nation and introduce themselves to Americans after months spent crisscrossing the country campaigning.
Here’s what to know about the debate and how to tune in:
How to watch the debate
The vice presidential debate hosted by CBS News is set for 9 p.m. ET Tuesday, Oct. 1 in New York City.
The 90-minute debate will air on CBS and be simulcast on the ABC network and stream on ABC News Live.
ABC pre-debate coverage begins at 8 p.m. ET; post-debate ABC News coverage will go on until 11 p.m. ET.
ABC News Live, ABC News’ 24/7 streaming news channel, will provide full coverage beginning at 7 p.m. ET and run through 12 a.m. ET.
Who is moderating the VP debate?
The debate will be moderated by CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan.
VP debate rules
CBS News announced the debate rules on Friday.
The Walz-Vance debate, like the Harris-Trump debate, will be in a studio without an audience but unlike that debate, the candidates’ mics will not be routinely muted when it’s not their turn to speak — but the moderators will retain the ability to do so.
How are the candidates preparing?
To prepare for the debate, Vance has turned to Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer to help him in debate rehearsals by playing Walz, sources told ABC News. The Ohio senator has also had sessions with his team and Jason Miller, a senior advisor on Trump’s campaign.
Also, Vance has spent the last month reviewing debate plans, strategies and potential questions, according to a source familiar with the senator’s debate preparations.
Walz has also held some mock debates with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acting as a Vance stand-in, sources told ABC News. Walz has also held policy sessions with his own longtime aides, Biden White House alumni and members of the Harris-Walz campaign team.
Walz has also been practicing on the road as he campaigns, sources said.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday thanked supporters during a virtual call and vowed that the “fight’s not over” in her first remarks since conceding defeat to President-elect Donald Trump three weeks ago.
“The fight that fueled our campaign, a fight for freedom and opportunity, that did not end on Nov. 5. A fight for the dignity of all people? That did not end on Nov. 5,” Harris said. “A fight for the future, a future in which all people receive the promise of America No. A fight that is about a fight for the ideals of our nation, the ideals that reflect the promise of America That fight’s not over.”
“That fight’s still in us, and it burns strong,” Harris later added. “And I know this is an uncertain time. I’m clear-eyed about that. I know you’re clear-eyed about it, and it feels heavy. And I just have to remind you: Don’t you ever let anybody take your power from you. You have the same power that you did before Nov. 5 and you have the same purpose that you did and you have the same ability to engage and inspire. So don’t ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power from you.”
The grassroots call came immediately after Harris held a call with her campaign’s finance committee. The finance call was attended by more than 400 donors, according to a source familiar.
On the grassroots call, Harris also briefly discussed the historic sum of money that ran her campaign, though she did not address what went wrong as she and her campaign face intense scrutiny over how they could raise that money and lose to Trump so resolutely.
”The outcome of this election, obviously, is not what we wanted. It is not what we work so hard for,” Harris said. “But I am proud of the race we ran. And your role in this was critical. What we did in 107 days was unprecedented.”
Harris said that over the course of those 100-plus days, her campaign raised $1.4 billion, much of which was from grassroot donors: “Nearly 8 million donors contributed an average donation of about $56.”
“You gave all that you could to support our campaign. Because of your efforts — get this — we raised an historic $1.4 billion, almost $1.5 billion from grassroots supporters alone, the most in presidential campaign history,” she said.
“Being involved can make a difference, and that remains true. And that’s one of the pieces that I just want us to please take away — that our fight for freedom and for opportunity and for the promise of America, it included, for example, nearly almost 4 million first-time contributors to our campaign because of the work you did, of helping people know that they can be engaged and that they’re not outside, that they’re inside, that we’re all in this together,” she added.
Harris was joined by her former running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on both calls — a rare appearance from the two, though Harris joined the call from San Francisco and Walz from Minnesota.
Walz on the grassroot donor call also spoke to supporters’ feeling of loss following the election and repeated Harris’ claims that she is not finished with fighting.
“I think all of us saw the possibility, and I know there’s a bit of a feeling of loss because we saw what a real leader looks like,” Walz said.
“She did deliver the best of our better angels,” he added. “She delivered a vision where all of us mattered. She did it with grace and dignity and continues to do that every single day. She is still in this fight. She is doing it every single day. She is not done with her current job. She’s not done being part of it with all of you.”
Harris’ and Walz’s remarks follow some postelection analysis from Harris campaign senior officials during an episode of “Pod Save America” that aired on Tuesday, including some reaction to finances.
Harris campaign Chairwoman Jennifer O’Malley Dillon said that during the cycle, the bulk of the campaign’s spending was used to reach out to “very-hard-to-find voters,” including low-propensity and young voters, while investing across all swing states because polling reflected that each was in play.
“We were trying to, yes, spend more resources on digital … because we’re trying to find young people, we’re trying to find these lower-propensity voters that were tuned out to politics,” O’Malley Dillon said.
“We had some unique things that we had to do in this race that I think were really critical to do early and spent a lot of resources at an earlier stage than we would have to,” she added, noting those resources were spent on both advertising and field programming. “We saw, up until the very end, that … every single state was in such a margin of error. There was nothing that told us we couldn’t play in one of these states.”
During the podcast, O’Malley Dillon and senior campaign adviser David Plouffe accused the Trump campaign of coordinating with its super PACs, a practice that is not legal, but noted the Democrats need to take note and do the same.
“We have to stop playing a different game as it relates to super PACs and the Republicans. Love our Democratic lawyers. I’m tired of it, OK? They coordinate more than we do. I think amongst themselves, I think with the presidential campaign, like I’m just sick and tired, OK? So, we cannot be at a disadvantage,” Plouffe said.
“I think our side was completely mismatched when it came to the ecosystem of Trump and his super PACs and ours,” O’Malley Dillon said.
“We had a super PAC that was helpful, very important and necessary for the work that they did because they were the kind of central recipients of a lot of the funding on our side and they staked a strategy and a plan, and we clearly could see it, and we knew what it was [going] to spend, but we did not have the ability to have people come in with us early. And so every ounce of advertising, every ounce of carrying these strategic imperatives, of defining the vice president and trying to bring down Trump’s numbers, all sat with us as a campaign,” O’Malley Dillon added.
Harris has rarely been seen since she delivered her concession speech at Howard University the day after the election. She attended the Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery a week later and was seen making her first return to the White House a day after that. The vice president also spent the last week on vacation in Hawaii.
Walz, in the month since the election, has remained almost entirely out of the national spotlight, resuming his duties as the governor of Minnesota.
He delivered his final speech of the 2024 campaign cycle on Nov. 8 from suburban Minneapolis, joining a chorus of fellow Democratic governors who said they would protect their states from threats to reproductive freedoms, citizenship and other things under the Trump administration. The former vice presidential nominee also said he’d work to find common ground with swaths of people who voted “for the other side” on Nov. 5.
Harris and Walz remained mostly separate on the campaign trail in the roughly 15 weeks she had him as her running mate. The governor was present at Harris’ concession speech at Howard University the night after the election but did not speak or publicly interact with her. Before that, the two held a joint rally on Oct. 28 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, their first event together since late August, when they were seen together in Savannah, Georgia, on a bus tour.
Prior to that, their last time at a rally together was in Milwaukee for programming linked to the Democratic National Convention in August.
