Trump indicted
Trump again made history, becoming the first current or former president to face criminal charges after a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him, reportedly on more than 30 counts related to business fraud.
Even as the indictment was under seal, a number of prominent Republicans rushed to Trump’s defense following his own statement that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s move “is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history,” echoing comments made ahead of his indictment during a rare interview on Fox News where he said Bragg’s probe was “a new way of cheating in elections.”
One of Trump’s expected rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, said the indictment amounts to a “weaponization of the legal system” and said he would not play a role in Trump’s extradition, while former Vice President Mike Pence called it an “outrage” as he mulls his own 2024 bid.
Among the voting public, the indictment is popular with the wider electorate, but there’s broad support for his attacks on the probe among the GOP’s prospective 2024 primary voters, according to our survey conducted on Friday.
The Republican electorate’s initial response lines up with sentiment tracked earlier last month as Trump fueled speculation about his indictment, which showed him maintaining his big lead in the primary and polling close to Biden in a hypothetical general-election matchup.
On top of the proceedings in New York, a federal judge in Washington is said to have ordered former Vice President Mike Pence to comply with a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Pence, who’s been highly critical of Trump’s behavior surrounding Jan. 6, responded to the news by saying, “I have nothing to hide.”
What you might have missed on Capitol Hill
The mass shooting at a private school in Nashville was met by a familiar refrain from GOP lawmakers, who poured cold water on calls to strengthen the nation’s gun laws. “We’re not going to fix it,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said flatly, arguing that Congress doesn’t have a role in addressing incidents of mass gun violence.
Other Republicans were less explicit that nothing is going to happen, but panned efforts to restrict firearms.
On one thing Congress has to tackle this year, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said House Republicans are “very close” to coalescing around a bill to raise the debt limit if Biden won’t agree to negotiations. It marked the first time McCarthy suggested his caucus could act without the president’s input.
It came after a top lieutenant of his — House Financial Services Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) — raised alarm bells by saying “I don’t even see a path” to a bipartisan agreement.
McCarthy — who had reportedly had no contact with the White House on the issue since Feb. 1 — penned a letter to Biden earlier in the week about the debt limit outlining the contours of potential negotiations. Among them: House Republicans are floating legislation to speed up energy permitting in exchange for raising the borrowing cap sometime this summer, which provides a potential pathway forward.
Meanwhile, four Democrats backed a nearly unanimous Republican conference in passing the GOP’s priority energy, permitting and infrastructure legislation — a symbolic measure that will not pass the Senate but will give Republicans a chance to cast themselves as pro-American energy on the 2024 campaign trail.
Across the building, the Senate voted 66-30 to repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for the use of military force in Iraq, sending the bill to the House, where McCarthy thinks a similar measure can pass. The chamber also voted 53-43 to send Biden a resolution to overturn the EPA’s waters of the United States rule, which he has threatened to veto, and voted 68-23 to end the COVID-19 pandemic national emergency ahead of the Biden administration’s own expected action in May.
Biden is expected to sign the COVID-19 measure, which passed the House 229-197 in February, even as the White House continues to say he is opposed to it. That approach, reminiscent of how the White House handled the GOP-led efforts to overturn the District of Columbia’s criminal code revisions, has irked some House Democrats, who reportedly feel blindsided.
