Representative Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, said on Tuesday that he would oppose an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, denouncing the proposed bipartisan inquiry into the deadliest attack on Congress in centuries because it would not examine unrelated “political violence” associated with the left.
The announcement by Mr. McCarthy, Republican of California, suggested that a House vote this week to create the panel would likely be a partisan affair, with much of the G.O.P. opposing the effort to scrutinize the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
But in yet another sign of how the former president’s election lies continue to drive wedges through the G.O.P., the position put him at odds with his counterpart in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who said later he was open to supporting a commission depending on a review of the “fine print.”
Mr. McCarthy had been pushing for any outside investigation to look at violence by anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter, rather than focus narrowly on the actions of former President Donald J. Trump, whose false claims of election fraud drove the riot.
“Given the political misdirections that have marred this process, given the now duplicative and potentially counterproductive nature of this effort, and given the speaker’s shortsighted scope that does not examine interrelated forms of political violence in America, I cannot support this legislation,” Mr. McCarthy said in a statement.
In rejecting the commission, Mr. McCarthy essentially threw one of his key deputies, Representative John Katko of New York, under the bus in favor of shielding Mr. Trump and the party from further scrutiny. Mr. Katko had negotiated the makeup and scope of the commission with his Democratic counterpart on the Homeland Security Committee and enthusiastically endorsed it last Friday.
It was all the more striking coming just days after Mr. McCarthy had maneuvered the ouster from leadership of his No. 3, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, because she refused to drop criticisms of Mr. Trump and Republicans who abetted his election falsehoods. Ms. Cheney has said the commission should have a narrow scope, and that Mr. McCarthy should testify about a phone call with Mr. Trump during the riot.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, immediately slammed Republican opposition as “cowardice.”
Mr. Katko was more conciliatory. He defended his work as “a solid, fair agreement” but said the opposition was “not something I take personally.” He predicted a “healthy” number of Republicans would still vote for it.
“I can’t state this plainly enough: This is about facts,” Mr. Katko told the House Rules Committee at a hearing on the bill. “It’s not about partisan politics.”
Republican leaders do not plan to formally whip their members against the creation of the commission, or a related $2 billion package to harden the Capitol’s defenses and repay debts incurred around the violence.
House Democrats have the votes to pass the measure with or without Republicans. They got a boost from the White House, as well, which formally endorsed the bipartisan bill on Tuesday.
But Mr. McCarthy’s opposition raised questions about the breadth of Republican support. In the Senate, Democrats need 10 Republicans to join them to create it.
Mr. McConnell said Senate Republicans would “listen to the arguments on whether such a commission is needed.” He said he had concerns that the body might interfere with ongoing prosecution of suspected Capitol rioters and that the panel was not truly bipartisan.
Mr. McCarthy’s biggest complaint about the commission appeared to be the idea of a panel focused exclusively on the right-wing violence inspired by Mr. Trump, rather than a broader look at what he called “interrelated political violence,.”
“The renewed focus by Democrats to now stand up an additional commission ignores the political violence that has struck American cities, a Republican congressional baseball practice, and, most recently, the deadly attack on Capitol Police on April 2, 2021,” he said Tuesday.
President Biden traveled to Michigan on Tuesday to visit the factory where Ford will produce the first electric version of its signature F-150 pickup truck, seeking to harness the horsepower of an American icon as he continues to make the case for his $4 trillion economic agenda.
Mr. Biden’s remarks at the Ford Rouge Electric Vehicle Center centered on the hundreds of billions of dollars for domestic manufacturing, electric vehicle deployment and research into emerging technologies like advanced batteries that are included in the first half of his two-part economic agenda.
“My name is Joe Biden,” the president said at the start of his remarks, “and I’m a car guy.”
In a state that helped deliver the White House to Mr. Biden last year, after going for former President Donald J. Trump in 2016, the president pitched the idea that a transition to electric vehicles can position the United States to beat out China in the global automotive market, while creating high-paying union jobs. He did so flanked by trucks from the best-selling vehicle line in the country.
“The future of the auto industry is electric,” Mr. Biden said. “There’s no turning back.”
“The American auto industry is at a crossroads and the real question is whether we’ll lead or fall behind in the race to the future,” he said. “Or whether we’ll build these vehicles and the batteries that go in them here in the United States or rely on other countries, or whether the jobs to build these vehicles and batteries are good-paying union jobs with benefits, jobs that will sustain and grow the middle class.”
Upon arrival in Michigan, Mr. Biden huddled for several minutes with Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who has criticized Mr. Biden for siding too heavily with Israel in the current conflict with Palestinians in Gaza. Mr. Biden singled her out in his remarks.
“I admire your intellect, I admire your passion and I admire your concern for so many other people,” he said. “From my heart, I pray that your grandma and family are well. I promise you that I’m going to do everything to see that they are, on the West Bank. You’re a fighter, and God thank you for being a fighter.”
Negotiations over a possible bipartisan economic package in Washington — centered on new spending for roads, transit and broadband internet — continued on Capitol Hill even as the president is away. A group of administration officials, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, will meet with Republicans on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters.
“Certainly, the president’s trip to Michigan will of course be on the minds of our officials from our end,” Ms. Psaki said.
The Republicans are expected to give the administration their updated counteroffer to Mr. Biden’s infrastructure proposal. Their plan will be significantly smaller than Mr. Biden’s, and won’t be paid for by raising taxes on corporations, as Mr. Biden has proposed.
The $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan, as Mr. Biden calls it, focuses heavily on physical infrastructure and federal spending meant to drive the transition to an economy that relies less on fossil fuels, in order to combat climate change. The plan includes tax incentives to purchase low-emission vehicles, an effort to convert one-fifth of the nation’s school bus fleet to electric power, money to build 500,000 electric charging stations across the country and a wide range of other spending meant to encourage research, production and deployment of electric vehicles and their component parts.
The arrival of an electric F-150 is an important milestone in the auto industry’s transition to E.V.s. So far, only Tesla has sold electric models in high volume, but Ford’s F-Series trucks make up the top-selling vehicle line in the United States. Ford typically sells about 900,000 F-Series vehicles a year.
“We’re not just electrifying fringe vehicles,” the company’s chairman, William C. Ford Jr., said. “The Mustang and the F-150 are the heart of what Ford is, so this is a signal about how serious we are about electrification. This really showcases where the industry can go and should go.”
President Biden on Monday delivered a firmer message in private to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel than he has done in public, warning that he could put off growing pressure from the international community and from Congress to call on Israel to change its approach to Hamas for only so long, according to two people familiar with the call.
The private message hinted at a time limit on Mr. Biden’s ability to provide diplomatic cover for the actions of the Israeli government, as well as a new dynamic in American politics: the president presenting himself as a closer friend to Israel than it might find in Congress.
“We have a new dynamic with Congress playing the bad cop with Israel and asking the president to put a hold on an arms sales while the president plays the good cop,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and the director of the Middle East Security program at the Center for a New American Security. “It may give President Biden more flexibility and leverage down the line with the Israelis.”
The tactic — private pressure, combined with the president’s public support for Israel’s right to defend itself — has come under fire from Democratic members of Congress and progressive Jewish groups. But administration officials defended it on Tuesday as a product of Mr. Biden’s decades of foreign policy experience.
“He’s been doing this long enough to know that the best way to end an international conflict is typically not to debate it in public,” the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday.
She added: “Sometimes diplomacy needs to happen behind the scenes, it needs to be quiet and we don’t read out every component.”
Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu on Monday discussed Israel’s right to defend itself against “indiscriminate rocket attacks,” according to the White House’s public readout of the call. In the brief summary, the White House said that Mr. Biden “expressed his support for a cease-fire,” while stopping short of calling for one.
The statement, released Monday, earned Mr. Biden criticism for failing to call on Israel to change its approach despite rising international condemnation.
“While a large number of congressional Democrats and at least one senior Senate Republican have called on both Israelis and Palestinians to reach an immediate cease-fire, the Biden administration has still not publicly done so,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J-Street, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy group that has worked for years to shift the debate as a counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“This combination of inadequate ‘quiet’ appeals for de-escalation,” he added, “and otherwise nearly unquestioning public support for and tolerance of the Netanyahu government’s actions, is unhelpful.”
MIAMI — Representative Val B. Demings, Democrat of Florida, intends to run for the Senate next year, two people with knowledge of her plans and the party’s strategy on Senate races said Tuesday. Her entry into the race gives Democrats a high-profile challenger against Senator Marco Rubio, the incumbent Republican.
Ms. Demings is expected to formally announce her candidacy in the coming weeks, according to one of her advisers. Her plans were first reported by Politico.
Her impending campaign comes as Florida Democrats, battered from mounting electoral losses there since 2016 and by former President Donald J. Trump’s comfortable win in the state last year, jostle over how to best take on Mr. Rubio and Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who also faces re-election next year.
Ms. Demings, a former police chief who represents a district in Orlando, had been weighing whether to run for Senate or for governor. Mr. DeSantis is a top target for Democrats because if he wins re-election, he will be considered an early favorite for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2024 election. Early signals suggested Ms. Demings was leaning toward the governor race: When Representative Charlie Crist declared his Democratic candidacy against Mr. DeSantis this month, her team released a polished biographical web video on the same day.
But Mr. DeSantis is a formidable foe whose political committee raised nearly $14 million in April, an intimidating sum for his would-be challengers. Besides Mr. Crist, Democrats also expect Nikki Fried, the Florida agriculture commissioner, to run for governor. (She has teased an announcement for June 1.)
Ms. Demings ultimately favored a Senate run because she could continue the legislative work she has done in the House but make a bigger difference, said her adviser, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
In the House, Ms. Demings made a name for herself as an impeachment manager during Mr. Trump’s first trial last year. She was also a contender to be selected as Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s vice-presidential choice last summer.
Ms. Demings could find herself running against familiar faces: Among the Democrats also considering Senate runs are two from the Orlando area, Representative Stephanie Murphy and former Representative Alan Grayson.
“It’s become clear to me that the only thing Marco Rubio cares about is Marco Rubio, so I think he needs to retire or be retired,” Ms. Murphy, who has been on a tour of the state, said in Tallahassee on Monday night, according to The Tallahassee Democrat newspaper.
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Rubio said Democrats “are tripping over themselves” to find a candidate. “While Democrats are flailing to find their next candidate to advance their radical agenda, Senator Rubio is focused on delivering wins for the people of Florida,” the statement said.
President Biden on Tuesday released a plan to bolster legal services for the poor, an overlooked and underfunded element of the justice reform agenda that he campaigned on implementing to address inequality and police violence.
Ahead of his trip to Michigan, Mr. Biden signed a memorandum directing the Department of Justice to reopen the Access to Justice Office, a 2010 Obama-era initiative intended to create new legal services programs that was shut down under President Donald J. Trump.
He will also reconstitute a task force in the White House to discuss expansion of legal aid for low-income people and minority groups.
Attorney General Merrick Garland will follow up with a more detailed plan to be released later on Tuesday, an administration official said.
The challenges are immense: Many poor defendants who appear in housing, family and immigration courts do not have legal representation, or are represented by incompetent or disengaged counsel, while the quality of criminal representation by court-appointed public defenders varies widely from locality to locality, according to researchers and advocates for the poor.
The result, legal experts say, is a two-tier legal system in which affluence often determines outcomes, especially if the defendant is Black, Latino or a migrant.
About 90 percent of landlords have legal representation in eviction hearings, for example, compared with 10 percent of tenants, according to a study by the Institute for Research on Poverty at Harvard.
Only 37 percent of all immigrants and 14 percent of detained immigrants are represented by counsel at hearings on residency and deportation, according to a 2016 American Immigration Council study.
For decades, a patchwork of nonprofit legal aid groups, covering a range of clients, have cobbled together federal, local and private contributions to staff their defense teams.
But they have, more often than not, been hobbled by a shortage of lawyers willing to work pro bono, a lack of government support and constant attacks by Republicans who view their work — particularly class-action lawsuits on behalf of the poor — as a progressive arm of the Democratic Party.
The move follows $1.5 billion to bolster local criminal justice systems, including public defenders, in the proposed budget Biden released earlier this month.
Many states have already taken steps on their own, with a handful eliminating cash bail for defendants charged with low-level crimes, as a way to lower incarceration rates.
In 2018, Mr. Trump signed a sweeping bipartisan criminal justice reform measure that reduced some federal sentences and instituted changes in the federal prison system. But he defunded or shuttered nearly all the Obama-era initiatives to improve legal representation for the poor.
“Affordable access to the legal system can make all the difference in a person’s life — including by keeping an individual out of poverty, keeping an individual in his or her home, helping an unaccompanied child seek asylum, helping someone fight a consumer scam, or ensuring that an individual charged with a crime can mount a strong defense and receive a fair trial,” a White House spokesman wrote in an email on Tuesday accompanying the memorandum.
Mr. Biden briefly served as a public defender in Wilmington before entering politics in the late 1960s, and spoke about his past work often during the 2020 campaign to express his solidarity with protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.
Administration officials have quietly begun evaluating clemency requests and have signaled to activists that President Biden might start issuing pardons or commutations by the midpoint of his term, possibly before the 2022 elections.
The effort, which is being overseen by the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department, is an implicit rebuke of President Donald J. Trump’s approach to clemency, which mostly bypassed the Justice Department and relied on an ad hoc network of friends and allies, resulting in a wave of late pardons and commutations to people with wealth or connections.
Mr. Biden’s team has signaled in discussions with outside groups that it is establishing a more deliberate, systematic process geared toward identifying entire classes of people who deserve mercy. This approach could allow the president to make good on his campaign promise to weave issues of racial equity and justice throughout his government.
Mr. Biden’s approach to his pardon powers is part of a long-term shift in his criminal justice policies. During his 35 years in the Senate, he helped fashion a string of bills that enacted harsh sentences for drug crimes and laid the groundwork for the mass incarceration that disproportionately affected Black communities.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Biden apologized for portions of one of the more aggressive tough-on-crime measures he championed, the 1994 crime bill. And as president, he has surrounded himself with supporters of overhauling the system.
President Biden released tax forms on Monday showing that he and his wife, Jill Biden, earned just over $600,000 in 2020. The release resumed a presidential tradition of disclosure broken by Donald J. Trump.
The Bidens paid an effective federal income tax rate of 25.9 percent after donating about 5 percent of their income to charity, the documents showed. Their total federal income tax bill was just over $157,000. For 2019, the Bidens had an adjusted gross income of $985,000 and paid federal income taxes of nearly $288,000.
Mr. Trump declined to release his tax returns while a candidate and while president from 2017 through the start of this year, saying he was under audit. He fought efforts by prosecutors and congressional Democrats to obtain the returns. Documents obtained last year by The New York Times showed that Mr. Trump paid $750 in federal taxes in 2016, the year he won the presidency, after reporting heavy losses in his business empire to offset his income.
Previous presidents had released tax returns annually, dating back to Richard Nixon.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, also released their 2020 tax forms on Monday. They earned nearly $1.7 million for the year and paid an effective federal income tax rate of 36.7 percent.
The disclosures came hours before the deadline for Americans to file their annual income tax returns without penalty. Federal officials had delayed that deadline by a month this year, citing the complications of the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris also released their personal financial disclosure forms, which are required under federal law.
Both the presidential and the vice-presidential households appear to fall safely in the top 1 percent of American income earners, based on statistics from the Internal Revenue Service. And both would face tax increases this year if Mr. Biden succeeds in pushing Congress to raise a variety of taxes on high earners, as he is proposing to help fund nearly $2 trillion in new spending and incentives meant to strengthen education, child care, paid leave and other social programs.
Much of the Bidens’ income came from pensions, including Mr. Biden’s government pension from his years as a senator and vice president. That disbursement will pause now that Mr. Biden has re-entered the government, White House officials said. Dr. Biden received nearly $300,000 in income — including income from business profits — from an S corporation controlled by the Bidens, which received money in 2020 from two publishing houses, Simon & Schuster and Flatiron. An S corporation is a small business designation that allows business income, credits and deductions to pass through to shareholders.
Ms. Harris’s and Mr. Emhoff’s income included nearly $350,000 for writing by Ms. Harris, who published a book, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” in 2019.
White House officials took a slight jab at Mr. Trump in a news release announcing the disclosures. “Today, the president released his 2020 federal income tax return,” they wrote, “continuing an almost uninterrupted tradition.”
White House Memo
Mike Donilon is one of the most trusted presidential advisers in the Biden White House, but he comes and goes from his West Wing office almost as a spectral presence.
Described by those who have worked with him as having the demeanor of a parish priest, he abhors speaking to the news media and is not particularly chatty with his own colleagues. On conference calls, they describe him as a low talker. “Hey, it’s Mike,” he will say, often in a barely audible voice.
Mr. Donilon’s low-key presence is emblematic of the overall culture of the Biden White House: It is the least personality-driven West Wing in decades.
Because of his longevity in politics and underdog personality, combined with the depth of the crises he is facing, President Biden is undoing a longstanding Washington tradition in which staff members enjoy their own refracted fame.
The phenomenon was pronounced during the presidency of Donald J. Trump — his adviser Kellyanne Conway was so well-known that she needed her own security detail; the White House press secretary Sean Spicer was a recurring character on “Saturday Night Live”; Hope Hicks, a communications director, was photographed regularly by the paparazzi as she left her home in workout clothes. But Mr. Trump did not invent the celebrity staff.
“Every White House takes on the personality of the president,” said Paul Begala, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, who became a well-known figure himself after appearing in “The War Room,” a documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign.
“President Clinton didn’t mind having famous staffers,” Mr. Begala said. “He enjoyed it. There’s a blue-collar sensibility with Biden and his team. You carry your pail to work, you punch the clock. You just show up every day and do your job.”
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Arizona Republican Leaders Criticize Election Audit
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which administers elections for the majority of Arizona voters, called the ongoing audit of the county’s votes in the 2020 election a “mockery.”
“This board is done explaining anything to these people who are playing investigator with our constituents, ballots and equipment, paid for with real people’s tax dollars. People’s ballots and money are not make-believe. It’s time to be done with this craziness and get on with our county’s critical business.” “The election wasn’t in question until a couple of days after the final vote count. That’s when all of a sudden, whoa, there might be problem. We don’t like who won the election. So let’s call into question. Let’s start rumors and unfounded statements and conspiracies. Let’s throw these out there. Let’s do everything we can to undermine the will of the voter, undermine our democracy. Let’s do everything we can. And I don’t see this ending, Mr. Chairman, unfortunately, because you have some folks right now that are in control of the Arizona State Senate and it is not elected members of the body.” “The reality is there was doubt cast. So I supported an audit. I supported cooperating with the Senate. What I didn’t support is a mockery. And that’s what this has become.” “We ran a bipartisan, fair election. That’s every piece of evidence that I’ve ever seen put in front of us. We are operating on facts and evidence presented to this board. That’s why we certified the vote. That’s why we canvass the vote.”
The Republican leaders of Arizona’s most populous county issued a blistering rebuke to a review of the November election that had been ordered by Republicans in the State Senate, calling it “a grift disguised as an audit” that had spun out of the legislators’ control.
The senior Republican in Maricopa County, Jack Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said flatly that the county would stop cooperating with the review and suggested that it would challenge in court any of its conclusions that pointed toward improprieties.
“This board is done explaining anything,” Mr. Sellers said at a special meeting of the five-member board, four of whose members are Republicans. “People’s ballots and money are not make-believe. It’s time to be done with this craziness, and get on with this county’s critical business.”
It was an extraordinary pushback to an election review that was supposed to placate voters who insisted that President Donald J. Trump’s narrow loss in the state was a result of fraud, but which has mushroomed into a political spectacle with what experts call serious procedural lapses.