Live Updates: House Expected to Vote to Curb Presidential War Powers
As two decades of wars move toward a turbulent close, Congress is poised to place its first significant check in a generation on a president’s war-making powers.
The House is expected to vote on Thursday to repeal an authorization it gave President George W. Bush in 2002 to invade Iraq. That authorization was repeatedly applied well beyond its original intent, including in a campaign much later against the Islamic State in Iraq and for the killing of the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani last year.
“It has been nearly 10 years since this particular authorization has been cited as a primary justification for a military operation,” said Mr. Schumer, who voted for the 2002 measure, known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force. “It no longer serves a vital purpose in our fight against violent extremists in the Middle East.”
Most Democrats in the House have signaled that they will join a handful of Republicans in approving the legislation, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said on Wednesday that he would put similar legislation on the Senate floor.
President Biden said this week that he would sign the House measure, making him the first president to accept such an effort to constrain his authority to carry out military action since the war in Afghanistan began 20 years ago. At the time, Congress effectively ceded much of its power to declare war to the presidency. Mr. Biden’s decision comes on the heels of announcing a full troop withdrawal from the country.
Even if the Senate joins the House in repealing the 2002 authorization, Congress would still leave in place a much broader authorization, passed three days after the Sept. 11 attacks. Critics say the 2001 authorization has also given presidents excessive latitude to wage “forever wars” without further congressional approval in the Middle East and beyond.
But a broad coalition of antiwar interests see a vote to repeal the 2002 measure as a step across the threshold of a bigger and perhaps long-term effort.
“This is one battle in a long war,” said Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser at Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative organization. “I am increasingly confident in our coalition’s ability to not only achieve a repeal of the 2002 A.U.M.F., but in the long run to also outright repeal the 2001 A.U.M.F. or substantially narrow its focus, so it can’t be so easily abused by presidents of both parties.”
Efforts to strike a bipartisan agreement on infrastructure gained traction in Congress on Wednesday, as a group of 10 moderate senators announced that support had doubled for a framework they have not yet made public.
As those lawmakers rallied support for the unfinished plan — expected to total about $1.2 trillion over eight years for roads, bridges and other physical infrastructure, including roughly $579 billion in new spending — other Senate Democrats moved forward with a parallel effort to pass President Biden’s more ambitious proposals without Republican votes.
The two tracks, discussed in a series of meetings across Capitol Hill, will be critical as the administration and congressional Democrats work to enact Mr. Biden’s $4 trillion economic agenda.
The 10 moderate senators — led in part by Rob Portman of Ohio and Mitt Romney of Utah, both Republicans, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a Democrat — huddled with a broader bipartisan group on Wednesday. Soon after, the group joined five Democrats and six Republicans in professing support for “this bipartisan framework that provides an historic investment in our nation’s core infrastructure needs without raising taxes.”
They offered no details, though the plan is widely expected to address roads, highways, bridges, broadband and other areas that fit a more narrow definition of infrastructure than what the president proposed. How to finance it remains a hurdle.
“I know that my chief of staff thinks that there’s some room — there may be a means by which to get this done, and I know that Schumer and Nancy have moved forward on a reconciliation provision as well,” Mr. Biden told reporters, referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. “So I’m still hoping we can put together the two bookends here.”
Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council; Steve Ricchetti, a top adviser to President Biden; and Louisa Terrell, the director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, met with five Democratic senators to discuss the plan, a meeting that attendees described as positive.
“It was great,” Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said as he left. “Once again, maybe trying to prove conventional wisdom wrong.”
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, said the administration officials had found the meeting “productive and encouraging” and would brief Mr. Biden on Thursday.
At the same time, Mr. Schumer hosted a separate meeting with the 11 Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee to discuss starting the fast-track budget process known as reconciliation, which shields fiscal measures from filibusters, allowing them to pass with a simple majority vote.
“We had a great first discussion,” he told reporters afterward. “I think there was universal agreement — we have a lot of things they have to do to help the American people, and we have to have unity to do it. Everyone has to listen to one another.”
Republicans largely oppose many of Mr. Biden’s infrastructure proposals, including tax increases, measures to combat climate change, and funds for child care and home care. Using reconciliation would require nearly every House Democrat and all 50 senators who caucus with Democrats to remain united, and some want the bipartisan process to play out.
“I do believe there has to be a reconciliation vehicle, but if there can be a bipartisan bill on some chunks of it, why not?” Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, told reporters. “That would be great.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent in charge of the Budget Committee, and other liberal Democrats want to move forward with a sweeping package that would include more funding than Republicans are comfortable with.
“This is the moment that we have to start addressing issues that have been neglected for a very long time,” Mr. Sanders said before the meeting with Mr. Schumer, adding that Mr. Biden had “given us a very good framework with which to work.”
The House voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, sending President Biden legislation to enshrine June 19 as the national day to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.
One day after the Senate rushed the measure through with no debate, the House approved it by a vote of 415 to 14, with 14 Republicans opposed. Mr. Biden is expected to sign it.
Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery and is also known as Emancipation Day, Jubilee Day and Juneteenth Independence Day. Its name stems from June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas, issued General Order No. 3, which announced that in accordance with the Emancipation Proclamation, “all slaves are free.” Months later, the 13th Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery in the final three border states that had not been subjected to President Abraham Lincoln’s order.
“Juneteenth celebrates African American freedom while encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures,” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas and a lead sponsor of the legislation, said on the House floor, standing beside a poster of an enslaved man whose back showed the scars of whip lashes. “These are the brutal backs upon which the whip went over and over and over again.”
Representative Guy Reschenthaler, the Pennsylvania Republican who led the floor debate for his party, said he was supporting the bill as a way to carry on the tradition of American soldiers who fought in the Civil War to end slavery.
But many Republicans opposed it. Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana said the measure was an effort by “the left” to “make Americans feel bad and convince them that our country is evil.”
The push to designate Juneteenth as a national holiday had been building for years. But it came on suddenly in the Senate on Tuesday, when Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, who had been the lone impediment to passing the bill, dropped his objection.
The senator had raised concerns about the estimated $600 million cost of providing another paid holiday for federal employees and suggested ending an existing national holiday to make room for the new one. His move gained no traction, and he eventually relented.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who announced last week a vague ambition to pick up where former President Donald J. Trump left off and complete the construction of a multibillion-dollar wall along the border with Mexico, revealed on Wednesday how he planned to pay for it: Donations.
Flanked by lawmakers at the State Capitol, Mr. Abbott, a Republican who has found himself defending his conservative credentials in recent months, encouraged people to donate on a state website to help fund the project. He also said he would set aside $250 million from the state’s general revenue as a down payment and hire a program manager who would determine the total cost of the project and the length of the wall.
But he was short on other details, saying they would emerge later, and his announcement was dismissed by critics and immigration advocates as political theater and an obvious attempt to appease right-leaning voters before his re-election campaign next year.
Right-leaning voters in neighboring border states, like Arizona, have pursued donation campaigns, but all previous efforts eventually went nowhere, including one in 2019 launched by an Air Force veteran that raised $25 million but ended in scandal.
Advocacy groups said legal challenges were likely if Mr. Abbott pushed forward.
By all appearances, President Biden’s much-anticipated meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was not warm, but neither was it hot.
As he became the fifth American president to sit down with Mr. Putin, Mr. Biden on Wednesday made an effort to forge a working relationship shorn of the ingratiating flattery of his immediate predecessor yet without the belligerent language that he himself has employed about the Russian leader in the past.
If their opening encounter in Geneva proves any indication, theirs seems likely to be a strained and frustrating association, one where the two leaders may maintain a veneer of civil discourse even as they joust on the international stage and in the shadows of cyberspace. The two emerged from two and a half hours of meetings having reviewed a laundry list of disputes without a hint of resolution to any of them and no sign of a personal bond that could bridge the gulf that has opened between their two nations.
Their assessments of each other were dutiful but restrained. Mr. Putin called Mr. Biden “a very balanced, professional man,” while Mr. Biden avoided characterizing his counterpart. This year, the president had agreed with an interviewer that Mr. Putin was a “killer.” But on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said that he had no need to discuss that further. “Why would I bring it up again?”
But in a sign of his sensitivity to criticism that he was too accommodating to Mr. Putin, Mr. Biden grew testy with a reporter who asked how he could be confident that Mr. Putin’s behavior would change. “When did I say I was confident?” he snapped.
The critique has turned into an increasingly loud talking point by Republicans, who rarely protested President Donald J. Trump’s chummy bromance with Mr. Putin. But it is also a worry shared by some inside Mr. Biden’s own administration.
During a solo news conference that followed the sit-down between leaders — Mr. Biden opted not to share a stage his Russian counterpart — the president emphasized that he did not place his faith in Mr. Putin.
“This is not about trust,” Mr. Biden said. “This is about self-interest and verification of self-interest.”
Five years after a gunman attacked a popular gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., killing 49 people and wounding dozens more, Congress has adopted legislation to formally designate the site as the National Pulse Memorial.
President Biden has said he plans to sign the legislation, “enshrining in law what has been true since that terrible day five years ago: Pulse nightclub is hallowed ground.”
The legislation, H.R. 49, named for the number of people killed in the rampage on June 12, 2016, is largely ceremonial and is part of an effort to transform the former site of the Pulse nightclub at 1912 South Orange Avenue into a permanent memorial that will feature a reflecting pool encircling the Pulse building and a nearby museum with vertical gardens, public plazas and a rooftop promenade.
The federal legislation specifies that the national memorial will not accept federal funds and will not be part of the National Park system.
“It is so meaningful to everyone here,” Barbara Poma, the former owner of the Pulse nightclub, said of the memorial designation by Congress. “This is such a huge, I believe, sign to the community, the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, that what happened at Pulse matters and it will never be forgotten.”
