House conservatives blocked a Republican bill to avoid a government shutdown, dealing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy another defeat with the clock ticking toward the midnight deadline on Saturday when federal agencies run out of money.

The failure is the latest display of the dysfunction that has engulfed Congress in the days and weeks leading up to an increasingly inevitable government shutdown. House Republicans have been mired in internal battles over spending and political tactics that have put them at odds with Democrats and most Republicans in the Senate.

The Senate is working on its own bipartisan bill to avert any shutdown, but still has procedural steps to get through and the chamber may not vote before a shutdown begins.

McCarthy ignored the Senate's proposal and chose to move ahead on a GOP crafted measure funded agencies through October 31 and included border security provisions that were part of a Republican-passed bill. It also included a provision creating a bipartisan commission to study the national debt.

But going into the vote there were already a block of hardliners who said they wouldn't approve any short term bill, many of them demanding that Congress complete action on all 12 spending bills. The vote was 198-232, with 21 GOP members voting against it.

At a press conference before the vote McCarthy downplayed internal divisions and essentially dared fellow Republicans to follow through on their threat to block it. "Every member will have to go on record of where they stand. Are they willing to secure the border or do they side with President Biden on an open border and vote against a measure to keep government open?"

Republican holdouts were unmoved. Their argument all along has been that Congress should have their work writing spending bills, not pass stop gaps. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., repeated his stance ahead of the vote.

The House had 9 months to pass 12 individual appropriations bills.

I will not be complicit in extending irresponsible Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending levels.

No CRs. — Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) September 29, 2023

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., noted the White House already issued a veto threat on the GOP bill, stating during the floor debate, "this is a complete waste of time."

Democrats denounced the steep spending cuts in the GOP bill, instead of keeping current spending levels for all agencies, the measure walled off a few departments, but slashed others by 30 percent.

"This bill would slash investments in cancer research, leave communities recovering from natural disasters out to dry, undercut allies with a $1 billion cut to Israel and further cuts to our support of Ukraine, defund law enforcement and makes our communities less safe, and take food out of the mouths of millions. This bill raises costs on American families at a time when the cost of living is already too high," Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations bill said.

The Senate's spending bill would fund government agencies through November 17. It includes $5 billion for disaster aid and $6 billion for assistance for Ukraine. McCarthy opposed pairing additional money for Ukraine on a stopgap bill, and argued Congress needed to address the situation at the southwest border.

A group of Senate Republicans and Independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are working on an amendment to the Senate bill that would address border security, in an attempt to make it more palatable to the GOP House. It's unclear whether their efforts will yield a proposal that will get support from Senate Democrats. But some conservative House Republicans remain staunchly opposed to including any additional aide for Ukraine.

A group of House Republicans and Democrats have been meeting to push a bipartisan plan in the event of a shutdown, many of them representing swing districts across the country, and warning about the negative impact of any shutdown.

On Sunday, an ABC/Washington Post poll gave us all heart attacks when it showed President Biden trailing former President Trump by ten percentage points. Responsibly, the Post and ABC took pains to say that that result was an “outlier.” But, more than a year before the 2024 election—before any of Trump’s trials or jury verdicts, before House Republicans do or don’t impeach Biden, before another sure-to-be-controversial Supreme Court term, and who knows what else—pretty much every major media outlet has weighed in with headline-grabbing polls showing Trump and Biden to be running even.

All of this has created enormous panic – both from Democratic partisans, and from everyone else who dreads a second (and forever) Trump Administration. Could it really be true that Americans are more likely to elect Trump after he tried to overthrow the election than before?

If you share this panic, you might be suffering from Mad Poll Disease. Symptoms include anxiety, problems sleeping, loss of affect, and feelings of helplessness about the future of democracy, which are only exacerbated by frantic Twitter exchanges about polling methodology and sample bias.

Today, I want to show that, regardless of the methodology, pollster, or publication, horse race polls— more formally known as “trial heats,” which ask respondents whom they intend to vote for—are worse than useless. This is especially true more than a year ahead of the election – but, as I’ll explain, it’s also true in the weeks and months before.

Horse Race Polling Is Punditry in Disguise

Imagine that in September 2016 you were watching a panel with five pundits discussing the presidential race in Florida. The first says they think that Clinton is up by 4 points, the second thinks she is ahead by 3, another two think she’s only ahead by 1 point, and the fifth thinks Trump is ahead by 1 point.

Because I used the words “pundit” and “think,” you have no trouble understanding that those were opinions. But since polling glosses itself with scientific veneer, many people don’t understand that polling is also dependent on the opinions of the pollster! To do a poll, pollsters have to make their best guess about who will eventually vote, and then “weight” the survey results they get to match the demographic composition of the electorate they expect on Election Day.

The pundit panel I described above actually happened—with pollsters—thanks to one of the most useful pieces of political data journalism ever in The New York Times. The Times asked four respected pollsters to independently evaluate the same set of survey data to estimate the margin of victory for Clinton or Trump in Florida. The result: including the Times’s own assessment, the same survey produced estimates ranging from Clinton +4 to Trump +1. The 5-point range had absolutely nothing to do with a statistical margin of error, and everything to do with the opinions each pollster had about who was going to vote. (Forty-nine days after that piece was published, Trump won Florida by 1 and a half points.)

But that lesson didn’t stick in The New York Times’s own coverage. In October 2022, the Times blew up the then-conventional wisdom that House Democrats were competitive when it released its survey showing that Republicans had a nearly 4-point lead in the House—an almost 6-point swing since their last poll, just a month before.

The problem? Bear with me. In September, the Times made no assumptions about who would vote; it was a survey of registered voters. That survey found House Democrats leading by 2 points. Then, an October interview of registered voters found that the race was tied. But instead of reporting an apples-to-apples comparison that showed Democrats had lost 2 points among registered voters, the Times reported that among likely voters, Republicans now led by nearly 4 points. The Times’s pollsters basically conjured a dramatic 6-point surge to Republicans out of thin air by applying a different model to the October data than they had in September.

Their front-page headline also declared that Democrats were losing ground with independents and women. But here’s the thing: Independent voters hadn’t changed their minds; The New York Times changed its mind about which independents would vote. An apples-to-apples comparison of registered voters from that same October survey would have shown not a 9-point net drop for Democrats among Independents since September, but the opposite–a 5-point net gain for Democrats.

In every other context, reporters go out of their way to attribute opinions to sources. But political journalists report their survey results as mathematical facts—which makes it more difficult, especially for general readers, to remember the caveats that should accompany all polling results. Any time you read a sentence like “38 percent of white voters support Biden,” it actually means “our survey found that 38 percent of white voters support Biden.”

Unfortunately, the media is driving us into an epistemological cul de sac where what’s seen in surveys is presumptively more “true” than other evidence (such as administrative records, other sources of data, real-world observations, and more). To be sure, polling can offer important insights. But, to be useful, the results must always be placed in dialogue with other imperfect sources of signals about the electorate. Our confidence in any particular proposition should depend on the number and credibility of independent sources of evidence corroborating the proposition. By failing to meet this standard, the media has become a reckless super-spreader of Mad Poll Disease.

At the same time that media institutions are leading with dire warnings based on their own polling, they are all but ignoring other data showing remarkable Democratic strength in special elections, which has historically been an important harbinger of partisan enthusiasm. Democrats have been significantly overperforming their partisan index in special election after special election. And that’s not even counting Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s 11-point statewide victory in what was technically a non-partisan race, but was well understood by voters in Wisconsin as a MAGA versus anti-MAGA contest.

Horse Race Polling Can’t Tell Us Anything We Don’t Already Know

To begin to cure Mad Poll Disease, make this your mantra: Horse race polling can’t tell us anything we don’t already know before Election Day about who will win the Electoral College.

All we know, or can know, is this:

1. A popular vote landslide is very unlikely.

America is a rigidly divided nation in which the last six presidential elections have been decided by an average of 3 points, and, since 1996 (other than 2008), none have been decided by as much as 5 points.

2. The Electoral College is too close to call.

The Electoral College will almost certainly be decided by which candidate wins at least Georgia or Pennsylvania, plus two out of three of the other battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. (In a few less likely scenarios, Democrats would need to hold onto Nevada as well.) In both 2016 and 2020, the margin of victory in most of these five states was less than 1 point. Yet FiveThirtyEight found that the best polling had differed from the actual results in 2022 by only 1.9 percentage points on average. In other words, in 2016 and 2020, first Trump and then Biden won the states they needed to win the Electoral College by margins too small for the “best” polling to detect in the weeks before the midterms, when tens of millions of people had already voted.

3. Whether the anti-MAGA vote turns out again in the battleground states will determine the winner.

Unlike a voter’s choice between Biden and Trump—which hasn’t changed much in the last several years and is very unlikely to change in the next one—those who do not vote in every election are notoriously poor at forecasting their own behavior even a month before the election.

Since 2016, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have been a continuous ground zero for referendums on MAGA candidates. When the stakes of electing a MAGA candidate are clear to voters in those states, MAGA consistently loses. That’s why, in the 2022 midterms, the Red Wave never happened in those states. When Trump won all five of those states in 2016, Republicans had state government trifectas in four of the states, as well as six of the 10 U.S. Senators. Since 2016, Trump and other MAGA candidates have lost 23 of the 27 presidential, Senate, and governors’ races in those states and only Georgia’s state government still has a Republican trifecta.

If polls taken weeks or months before the election can’t tell us anything useful about close races (which, again, are the only races that matter in our current system), why on earth would we pay attention to polls taken more than a year out?

Change the Channel!

If you are worried that you will miss something crucial by ignoring the polls, consider the following.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast for the governors’ races on Election Day last year favored the loser in two of the five states that will decide the Electoral College and, likely, control of the Senate, and their forecast for the Senate races on Election Day last year favored the loser in three of the five battleground Senate races.

I’m not saying that FiveThirtyEight did a poor job; indeed, FiveThirtyEight has been essential in modeling best practices and data transparency, and serves as an important check on unscrupulous claims by outlier pollsters. I’m saying that, when elections are very close, it’s simply not possible for any polls or forecasting to tell us anything more specific than “the race will be close.” They’re just not accurate enough; it’s like trying to look for bacteria using a magnifying glass.

Now let’s look at FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 Senate forecast. Notice that it began five months before the election, or nine months closer to the election than we are today. In those five months, the odds of Republicans winning a Senate majority started at 60 percent, fell to 30 percent, and then rebounded to 59 percent the day of the election. Then, voters thwarted those expectations by increasing Democrats’ Senate majority, which was obviously even less probable than them simply holding their 50 seats.

Furthermore, the same five Senate races in battleground states mentioned above that were actually close on Election Day were also considered competitive a year earlier, when The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter issued its November 2021 set of race ratings. There is nothing that horse race polling could have told you that you didn’t already know.

(The Media Can) Never Tell Us the Odds

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen argues, correctly, that the media should cover the stakes of an election rather than the odds, because the stakes are more important. To this, I would add that the media cannot cover the odds in a way that gives voters meaningful information—so the stakes are all we have left.

If you are old enough to remember what happened in November 2022, you should be profoundly skeptical of what the polling is telling us now about November 2024. Polling failed to anticipate the anti-MAGA dam that held back the Red Wave, partly because polling cannot tell us in advance who will turn out to vote. This matters because, as I’ve explained before in the Monthly, Democrats turned out in higher numbers in 15 states where the MAGA threat seemed more salient—but in the 35 states that lacked high-profile, competitive MAGA candidates, we saw the expected Red Wave.

It’s not unreasonable to imagine that if House races in “safe” blue states like California, New Jersey, and New York had been covered the same way as Senate races in swing states—with a constant emphasis that control of the chamber was at stake—the results in the House could have been quite different, too.

While the mainstream media cannot tell us what to think about this or that issue, it has a powerful influence on what we think about.

Case in point. In 1974, before the rise of the polling-industrial complex, the midterms were about Watergate—and even though Republicans had mostly abandoned Nixon, they still paid a steep electoral price, losing 49 seats. If the 2022 midterms had been covered in the same way, the central question would have properly been, “Will voters hold Republicans accountable for their efforts to overturn the election?”

But, after January 6th, most political reporters didn’t even entertain the notion that the midterms could be about Trump/MAGA. Instead—made savvy by academic research about how midterms are always thermostatic elections—they regularly insisted that, according to their polls, voters only cared about rising prices and crime.

Einstein said, “It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” So, even after the January 6th hearings began, the media continued to discount the idea that the midterms could be another referendum on Trump and MAGA, relying on polls that showed that the hearings were not substantially increasing the number of Americans who thought Trump was guilty. They couldn’t “observe” the fact that the hearings were re-energizing infrequent anti-MAGA voters who already believed Trump was guilty, and were convincing them of the importance of keeping his MAGA fellow travelers out of office in their states.

I am not arguing that journalists have a responsibility to help Democrats get elected; I am arguing that journalists’ most important, First-Amendment-justifying responsibility is to give voters the information they need to be democratic citizens. Instead, the fraternity of leading media pollsters (and it is, sadly, pretty much a fraternity) judge themselves after an election by how well they anticipated what voters would do rather than by how well informed they were, or what they actually cared about. Thus, there has been no public soul searching about how to better understand what motivates voters even after this latest epic miss.

Margin of Error or Margin of Effort?

Enough of the statistical stuff. Stressing over polling makes us think election outcomes are like the weather—something that happens to us. In reality, election outcomes are what we make happen—especially in the battleground states, which are so evenly and predictably divided.

Remember: any election within the margin of error is also within the margin of effort—the work we must always put in to get enough of those who dread a MAGA future to turn out to vote. The only FDA-approved cure for Mad Poll Disease is to pay attention to what matters: the ongoing MAGA threat.

The House Republicans have been promising that the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden was going to be filled with fireworks from the word go. We would see evidence of bribery and extortion and payoffs from foreign companies in the tens of millions of dollars, the "Biden Crime Family" would finally be exposed as the international gangsters they are Donald Trump would be exonerated. Or something. They held their first hearing yesterday and all those fireworks blew up in their faces.

Keep in mind that they decided to hold this preposterous hearing two days before the government is set to shut down because a tiny rump faction of extremists in their party is demanding that they get everything they ever wanted or they'll hold their breath until they turn blue. Nobody knows exactly what that is other than to torture Speaker Kevin McCarthy and make America miserable again. It's been reported that they have no plans to table their "inquiry" when the government is shut down even though their staff won't be paid and all regular business is usually curtailed until an agreement is reached. Not this time. It's full speed ahead.

It would be one thing if they had even bothered to prepare for this silly hearing. But clearly they did not. The day before the hearing we caught a glimpse of just how bad it was going to be when Jason Smith, R-Mo., the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, one of the committees tasked with pursuing the "inquiry," was asked a question by NBC News reporter Ryan Nobles during a press conference.

That was a perfect preview of what was to come in the hearing the next day. They have been blatantly manufacturing what look like WhatsApp messages based upon IRS summaries of what was allegedly in them. In the hearing on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., caught them red-handed creating a fake Whats App message that totally distorted the actual text.

Even though, once again, Joe Biden wasn't in office at the time which these Republicans don't seem to realize means that he wasn't in a position to commit treason or whatever they think he's done, they sure made it sound suspicious.

The fabricated text message implied that back in 2018 Joe Biden's brother James told Hunter Biden that he would "work with" his father alone for some nefarious purpose to give Hunter a "safe harbor." Even though, once again, Joe Biden wasn't in office at the time which these Republicans don't seem to realize means that he wasn't in a position to commit treason or whatever they think he's done, they sure made it sound suspicious.

But more importantly, the rest of the summary, which they left out, showed that Hunter (then in the throes of substance abuse disorder) needed help from his father to pay for his alimony and his kid's school tuition and his uncle Jim was offering to talk to his Dad to help out. This had nothing at all to do with business of any kind. It's a personal text dealing with a family matter. They knew that and they purposefully doctored the text to make it sound fishy. I doubt it's the only time their "evidence" has been similarly manufactured.

That was pretty much how it went all day long with Republicans stepping in it over and over again. The Democrats, led by the extremely competent Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin and aided by excellent committee members, Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, Jasmine Crockett, D-Tx., Maxwell Frost, D-Fl., and more all of whom obviously did much more homework than any of the Republicans who babbled their way through the hearing, casting aspersions and throwing out innuendo with no evidence that the president had done anything wrong.

Even their "star witnesses" who had no evidence of their own to present, testified that a president could not be lawfully impeached with the evidence that has been presented although one of them, the perennial GOP impeachment witness Jonathan Turley, did say it was absolutely fine to go on a fishing expedition to see if they can find something that would fit the bill. (He didn't say it quite that way, but that's the gist of it.)

It's clear that the plan is to use the hearings to curry favor with their Dear Leader, smear Biden and hope that a smoking gun emerges that they can use as an excuse to vote to impeach. But it seems that they themselves have lost the thread and no longer even know what they are accusing the president of doing. When confronted with facts, they can't explain it.

Their Republican colleagues were dismayed.

Stephen Neukam of The Messenger reported that one GOP aide told him "Comer and staff botched this bad. So much confusing info from Republicans and Dems are on message. How can you not be better prepared for this?"

The right-wing media, or certain elements of it, also seem to be shocked that the hearing was such a train wreck. Fox News' Neil Cavuto seemed somewhat befuddled by what he'd just watched:

I don't know what was achieved over these last six-plus hours. The way this was built up — where there's smoke there would be fire…but where there's smoke today, we got more smoke...The promise of explosive testimony and proof …did not materialize today. The best they could say now after this six-plus hours of testimony back and forth is that they're going to try to get more bank records from Joe Biden and his son. Said that they're needed to determine if a crime was committed. Understood. But none of that was presented today, just that they would need those records to further the investigation after months of Republican probes that failed to provide anything resembling concrete evidence.

That is exactly correct. On the other hand, some of his colleagues were convinced that this was all part of a master plan:

I think we can all agree that blowing witnesses at a House inquiry would be a risky strategy. That's something you definitely want to save for the trial.

Sadly, this will not be the end of it. It's very likely that they will proceed to an impeachment vote and it's also quite likely it will fail which is going to make Donald Trump very, very unhappy. They'd better hope that he is so busy with the two civil cases and 91 felony indictments he's juggling that he doesn't have time to pay close attention to this farce.

One of Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia lawyers is moving to withdraw himself from representing the former New York mayor and Trump co-defendant.

David Wolfe filed notice Thursday to withdraw from the Fulton County 2020 election conspiracy case.

Giuliani was among the 19 individuals, including former President Donald Trump, indicted in a sprawling Georgia racketeering case centered around the group’s efforts to subvert the state’s 2020 election results.

Earlier this month, Giuliani pleaded not guilty to 13 charges related to his role in the alleged conspiracy. Still, the charges in Georgia are just a splash in the bucket amid a growing torrent of legal problems.

Last week, Giuliani’s former attorneys sued him for almost $1.4 million worth of unpaid legal fees, all accumulated through a myriad of lawsuits, investigations, and litigation brought against their ex-client. These include the Georgia case, an investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation, his disbarment proceedings, and 10 other civil lawsuits brought against Giuliani.

In May, Giuliani’s former assistant Noelle Dunphy sued him, alleging she had been subjected to sexual harassment and abuse while under his employment. On Monday, an excerpt of former White House aid Caddisy Hutchinson’s upcoming book included claims that Giuliani had groped her as they waited backstage during Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 2021.

Earlier this year a D.C. disciplinary committee recommended Giuliani be disbarred. The committee wrote that “Mr. Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy. His malicious and meritless claims have done lasting damage and are antagonistic to the oath to ‘support the Constitution of the United States of America’ that he swore when he was admitted to the Bar.”

The way lawyers are Ditching Giuliani, he soon may find himself struggling to find representation, even his own.

House Republicans really don’t want to hear from Rudy Giuliani.

Though their impeachment crusade grew out of the former New York City mayor’s anti-Biden machinations, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee spent much of Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing voting down repeated efforts by Democrats to subpoena Giuliani and Lev Parnas, his former sidekick.

But Republican attempts to limit what they hear about Giuliani’s activities apparently go further than a few committee votes, according to an FBI whistleblower. In a memo obtained by Mother Jones, Johnathan Buma—an FBI agent who says he conducted foreign influence investigations— alleges that investigators working for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told him in June that they were not interested in what he knew about Giuliani potentially being “compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.

The memo suggests that Republican investigators privately imposed the same fact-finding limitations Democrats highlighted on Thursday: GOP lawmakers say they want to investigate allegations about Joe Biden, but they appear reluctant to scrutinize the origin of their own probe or turn up details that undermine their preferred narrative. Judiciary Committee staff dispute Buma’s allegations, telling Mother Jones that his account of his interactions with House investigators isn’t accurate. (The Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees are working on the Biden investigation with the House Oversight Committee, which held Thursday’s hearing.)

As Insider, the New Yorker and others have previously reported, Buma—who originally filed a whistleblower complaint with the FBI last year—submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee in April 2023. He sent another statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. (Here is Buma’s full statement to the House committee, which recently became public.)

In both statements, the active FBI agent said that his own experience belied claims by GOP lawmakers that the Justice Department obstructed efforts to investigate Hunter Biden while more zealously probing Donald Trump and Trump’s allies. Buma, who says he personally developed leads that helped launch federal probes into Hunter Biden, said his bureau bosses welcomed his Hunter-related information. By contrast, Buma says, his efforts to investigate potential Russian influence over Giuliani were thwarted by FBI higher-ups during both the Trump administration and the Biden administration. The FBI declined to comment on his claims.

Buma, as Mother Jones has reported, said in his July statement that he learned that Pavel Fuks, a wealthy Ukrainian developer who hired Giuliani in 2017, paid Giuliani $300,000, supposedly for security consulting work. But Buma says that the FBI suspected Fuks was a “co-opted asset” of a Russian intelligence service and that his payments were potentially part of an effort to gain influence over Giuliani, who in 2018 became Trump’s personal lawyer.

Fuks denies working for Russia. “Mr. Fuks has never cooperated with Russian intelligence,” a spokesperson says. A Giuliani spokesperson did not respond to questions about Buma’s account.

Giuliani working for a Russian agent would be an obvious security risk. Buma’s allegations are an additional data point, among many, suggesting that America’ Mayor may have been manipulated by Russian agents as he scoured Ukraine for political dirt that could damage Trump’s top rival.

The memo Mother Jones obtained is Buma’s account of his interactions with the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican staff. It details a June 14, 2023, phone call during which Buma made his case to two former FBI agents working for the committee.

Buma writes that after one of the ex-agents referred to the FBI supposedly “slow playing” its Biden probe, “I explained that I was perhaps the first FBI Agent to collect and report information from Ukrainian sources concerning Hunter Biden.” Buma says he told the investigators that his FBI superiors were “happy to receive the information” and that “I never experienced any intelligence suppression when I collected and reported information concerning the Bidens.”

Buma reports that he then described information he received indicating that Giuliani had “collected money from a Ukrainian agent who had been co-opted by the Russian Intelligence Service, Pavlo Fuks…, as well as a group of political operatives located in California, in and around 2020. I said that reporting concerning Giuliani was corroborated extensively by follow up investigations.”

Buma says he told the investigators that “my reporting concerning Giuliani and those surrounding Giuliani was suppressed and my reputation was also blackballed.” That’s when the committee staffers cut him off, according to Buma: “When I tried to explain what was actually going on in Ukraine and where I actually experienced suppression, [the investigators] interjected and said that they were only interested in matters pertaining to Biden.”

A Judiciary committee spokesperson said the staffers involved remembered the phone call differently. “This is not an accurate depiction and misrepresents the Committee’s exchanges with Mr. Buma,” the aide said. “Their discussions with Mr. Buma covered a wide range of topics under the Committee’s purview, including the FBI and Hunter Biden.”

The spokesperson did not specify exactly what the committee disputed. Still, in Buma’s account, committee staffers were explicit: They only wanted to hear about the Bidens. That suggests they didn’t want to consider evidence indicating that a key adviser to Trump might have been compromised by Russian agents. And they didn’t want to deal with the possibility that the president’s lawyer was used to pass along phony claims that helped launch the investigation House Republicans are now pursuing.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said at Thursday’s hearing that lawmakers should hear from Giuliani because he an author “of the lie on which this sham impeachment is based.” Republicans clearly contest that, but they don’t seem too interested in the details of how their investigation really got started.

Ever since debt was invented in ancient Sumer, there have probably been people enriching themselves through bad investments. The trick is to make these investments using other people’s money.

Suppose, for example, that a wheeler-dealer uses borrowed funds to make risky investments in New Jersey casinos. If the investments somehow end up making money, he can pocket the profits. But if the investments fail, he may — if he’s been tricky about the wording in his loans or manages to persuade his creditors not to go after his other assets — be able to walk away and leave other people holding the bag. That is, it’s heads he wins, tails the creditors lose.

He may also be able to siphon off some of the borrowed money, say by having the casinos pay him or businesses he owns large sums for various services before they go bust.

As readers may have guessed, this isn’t a hypothetical example. It is the story of Donald Trump’s New Jersey casino empire, a venture ending in multiple bankruptcies that was a disaster for outside investors but appears to have been quite profitable for Trump.

The problem for someone who wants to play that game is how to persuade lenders to play along. Why would any people risk their money in such dubious ventures?

Well, there are a couple of ways to pull this off. One, perhaps the main story with those casinos, is sheer power of persuasion, perhaps supported by a cult of personality: Convince lenders that these dubious ventures are actually good investments or that you’re a uniquely effective businessman who can turn straw into gold.

Alternatively, you can try to persuade lenders that they’re safe by offering collateral that seems sufficient to protect them but isn’t, because you’ve inflated the value of the assets you put up and possibly also inflated your personal wealth to make it seem you are both a brilliant businessman and a reliable borrower.

Which is why making false claims about the value of assets you control is illegal. And on Tuesday, Justice Arthur F. Engoron ruled in New York that Trump did, in fact, persistently commit fraud by overvaluing his assets, possibly by as much as $2.2 billion.

Trump and his lawyers offered, as I read it, three main defenses against accusations of fraud.

First, they argued that the value of real estate is, to some extent, subjective. Indeed, if you own a building, you don’t know for sure what it’s worth until you try to sell it.

But while there’s some wiggle room in valuing real estate, it’s limited. And Engoron ruled that Trump went far beyond those limits, creating a “fantasy world” of indefensible valuations. For example, the Trump Organization treated rent-regulated apartments as being worth as much as noncontrolled apartments. The judge made special note of Trump’s claim that he had a 30,000-square-foot residence in New York, when the true number was only 11,000; square footage isn’t subjective.

Second, Trump’s lawyers argued that banks that lent to him got repaid in full, so there was no harm done. Of course, that wasn’t true for lenders caught up in Trump’s earlier bankruptcies. More generally, playing heads-I-win-tails-you-lose based on fraudulent valuations isn’t legal even if sometimes the bets come up heads.

Finally, Trump declared on social media that “my Civil Rights have been taken away from me” and that he borrowed money from “sophisticated Wall Street banks” that presumably wouldn’t have been easily deceived by fraud. If you know anything about Wall Street’s attitudes toward Trump, that’s a real hoot. For years, only one major Wall Street player, Deutsche Bank, was willing to deal with him at all, leading to much puzzlement about that bank’s motives. And eventually Deutsche Bank also pulled the plug, citing concerns about his financial claims. Trump did manage to pay off that debt, although it’s a mystery where he found the cash. But as I just explained, getting lucky is no excuse for fraud.

What’s remarkable about Engoron’s finding that Trump committed large-scale fraud (it’s now a ruling, not a mere accusation) is what it says about the man who became president and the voters who supported him.

Back in 2016, some observers warned conventional political analysts that they were underrating Trump’s chances because they didn’t appreciate how many Americans believed that he was a brilliant businessman — a belief based largely on his role on the reality TV show “The Apprentice.” What we now know is that the old joke was, in Trump’s case, the simple truth: He wasn’t a real business genius; he just played one on TV.

But the truth is that this was obvious, to anyone willing to see, from the beginning of Trump’s political rise.

I’d like to predict that this ruling will finally destroy Trump’s public persona. In reality, however, his supporters will probably brush this ruling off, partly because they’ll view it as the product of a left-wing conspiracy, partly because at this late date, few of those who backed him will be willing to admit that they were taken in by a charlatan.

But they were. And the fact that so many Americans were and remain fooled should lead to some serious national soul-searching.

One of the House Republicans' witnesses in their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden doesn't believe enough evidence has been presented.

Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar and George Washington University law professor, was questioned during Thursday's first impeachment inquiry hearing by the House Oversight Committee as conservatives move forward with their effort to impeaching the president for allegedly aiding his son, Hunter Biden, in business dealings in Ukraine and China.

The mounting evidence as claimed by Republicans has drawn strong responses from Turley, who has been critical of the Bidens following whistleblower testimony in the summer alleging that federal agencies hid or covered up Hunter Biden's tax affairs and other potential criminality.

"I have previously stated that, while I believe that an impeachment inquiry is warranted, I do not believe that the evidence currently meets the standard of a high crime and misdemeanor needed for an article of impeachment," Turley wrote in his written statement, which he read verbatim during the hearing.

Turley said that the purpose of his testimony was to discuss how past inquiries pursued evidence of potentially impeachable conduct, adding that the House has passed the threshold for an inquiry into whether President Biden was directly involved or benefited from Hunter Biden's practices.

"However, I believe that the record has developed to the point that the House needs to answer troubling questions surrounding the president," Turley added. "Polls indicate that most of the country shares those concerns while expressing doubts over the Biden administration investigating potential criminal conduct."

A CNN poll conducted in late August found that 61 percent of respondents think the president—who was vice president at the time the alleged conversations and deals occurred—had at least some involvement in his son's business dealings, while 42 percent said he acted illegally. Another 55 percent believed that Biden acted inappropriately.

The president's perceived involvement tends to fall along party lines. While about half of Americans in an Associated Press-NORC poll from mid-September felt little to no confidence in the Justice Department for its handling of the Hunter Biden investigation, just one in three respondents were highly concerned about the president's wrongdoing.

That translated to a party breakdown of 67 percent of Republicans but just 7 percent of Democrats.

"I do not believe there is a constitutional basis for impeaching President Biden," attorney Alan Dershowitz told Newsweek via email following Turley's statement. "He has not committed treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors while serving as president."

"The entire impeachment inquiry is based on politics, not evidence, so it's no surprise that their own legal expert threw cold water on it," Dave Aronberg, a state attorney for Florida's Palm Beach County, told Newsweek via social media.

Rather than focus on the impeachment inquiry, the White House is channeling Republicans' efforts by comparing their "chaos and inability to govern" to a looming government shutdown that could take hold this weekend.

The most remarkable and unique feature of American politics is one that is rarely discussed: the Republican Party’s extreme anti-statist ideology. The Republican party is the only major conservative party in the world whose governing doctrine rejects higher taxes on absolute principle, refuses to acknowledge anthropogenic global warming, and denies that health insurance should be a right of all citizens. This last point surfaced during the second Republican presidential debate when Ron DeSantis was asked to explain why his state ranks near the national bottom in health insurance coverage. Because these moments occur so rarely, it was highly revealing.

The backdrop is that the Affordable Care Act provided health insurance to poor people by expanding Medicaid. A conservative Supreme Court ruling gave states the right to opt out of the expansion, turning down free funding from Washington if they wished. Originally, just 24 states joined Medicaid expansion. Over time, the sheer economic logic brought more states into the program. Turning down the money not only hurts people who can’t get health coverage, but it also hurts hospitals, which legally must treat people who show up in the emergency room, even if they lack coverage.

In other words, states were not choosing between spending money and hurting people. Helping people get insurance was practically free. (The federal government covers 90 percent of the cost, and the economic benefit of getting health care for the uninsured, both to covered workers and their health providers, easily exceeds the remaining 10 percent cost, paying for itself.) The states that refused to join Medicaid expansion literally had to accept economic sacrifices in order to pay for the privilege of denying health insurance to low-income citizens in their state.

Florida is now one of only ten states that reject Medicaid expansion. DeSantis almost never has to explain or justify this position. Shockingly, he had to do so at the debate.

Stuart Varney asked DeSantis why 2.5 million Floridians lack health insurance, which is a rate much higher than the national average. (Florida ranks fourth from the bottom in residents with health insurance). DeSantis first tried deflecting the problem to overall inflation:

DESANTIS: Well, I think this is a symptom of our overall economic decline. Everything has gotten more expensive. You see insurance rates going through the roof. People that are going to get groceries, I’ve spoken with a woman in Iowa. And she said, you know, for the first time in my life, I’m having to take things out of my grocery cart when I get to the checkout line …

This is obviously a total non sequitur. The uninsured rate in Florida did not get worse due to inflation. Indeed, it got temporarily much better because the Biden administration made emergency COVID-19 funds available to people in non-expansion states, like Florida. In any case, inflation is a national phenomenon that could not possibly explain why Florida ranks near the bottom in health insurance coverage.

Varney, amazingly, pointed this out. He asked DeSantis why Florida’s health insurance rate was “worse than the national average.”

“It’s not,” DeSantis replied. This was a pure lie. (Florida’s uninsured rate is in fact well above the national average, according to the Census Bureau).

But then, DeSantis proceeded to give something like an explanation for his position:

“Our state’s a dynamic state. We’ve got a lot of folks that come. Of course, we’ve had a population boom.

We also don’t have a lot of welfare benefits, in Florida. We’re basically saying we want to — this is a field of dreams, you can do well in the state. But we’re not going to be like California and have massive numbers of people on government programs without work requirements. We believe in your work, and you got to do that. And so, that goes for all the welfare benefits.

And you know what that’s done, Stuart? Our unemployment rate is the lowest, amongst any big state. We have the highest GDP growth events (ph) of any big state. And even CNBC, no fan of mine, ranked Florida the No. 1 economy in America.”

In the middle of this word salad, some coherent thought can be extracted. Florida is a “field of dreams.” It rejects “welfare benefits.” DeSantis never uttered the word “Medicaid” or “Obamacare,” which explains why his state’s citizens lack health insurance at such high levels. Yet he did manage to express his belief that health insurance ought to be an earned benefit, not a right. If people get jobs working in construction or day care or at a convenience store, and those jobs do not have employer-provided health insurance, the state should not step in. Those people should work harder.

Indeed, to give them subsidized access to medical care will sap their incentive. Poor people need motivation to work hard, and denying them the ability to see a doctor and get medicine is part of that necessary motivation. And while Florida is now a minority among states refusing Medicaid expansion, DeSantis’s fanatical stance lies comfortably within the heart of conservative movement thinking. Indeed, this is what is considered “normal” conservatism.

The horrifying nature of this normality is generally invisible. It fell to Fox Business host Stuart Varney, of all people, to make DeSantis explain himself.

Poverty in the U.S. is a choice directly reflecting federal, state, and local policies. The expansion of safety net programs in response to the pandemic-driven recession reduced poverty rates nationally in 2021 to below pre-pandemic levels. However, because policymakers ended many of these programs—including expanded unemployment insurance, the expanded Child Tax Credit, and economic impact/stimulus payments—poverty rates rose from 7.8% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022. Child poverty, which had fallen to record lows in 2021, increased from 5.2% to 12.4% in 2022.

Two bills due for House Ways and Means Committee consideration this week contain a slate of provisions that would expand health savings accounts (HSAs) — increasing tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit high-income people, exacerbating racial and ethnic differences in wealth, and costing over $70 billion combined, without tackling the most urgent problems people with low incomes face in accessing affordable health care.

Under current law, people enrolled in high-deductible health plans that meet certain standards can establish and set aside money in an HSA. These accounts offer a unique “triple tax advantage” enjoyed mostly by high-income people: (1) contributions are not taxed; (2) contributions can be invested for years in stocks and bonds with tax-free earnings; and (3) withdrawals are not taxable if they are used for qualified medical expenses that occurred after establishment of the HSA.

People with low and moderate incomes are far less likely to be able to contribute substantial savings to their HSAs compared to high-income people. And people with low and moderate incomes benefit much less for each dollar contributed, because they are in lower marginal income tax brackets. For example, a married couple earning $80,000 per year can deduct 12 cents for each dollar contributed to an HSA from their taxes, while a married couple earning $700,000 per year can deduct 37 cents for each dollar put into an HSA.

Data show that the benefits of HSAs skew heavily toward people with high incomes. An analysis of 2017 IRS data found that tax returns exceeding $500,000 in adjusted gross income were the most likely to report individual HSA contributions, and returns between $200,000 and $1 million were the most likely to report employer contributions. According to Joint Committee on Taxation estimates for tax year 2023, 77 percent of the total deductible value of HSA contributions goes to households with incomes over $100,000. (See graph.) Only 4 percent of the value goes to households with incomes $50,000 or below, and 44 percent goes to those with incomes over $200,000.

The House bills would expand HSA tax benefits, primarily helping high-income people, in various ways: by allowing more types of health plans to qualify for use with them, increasing how much people can contribute to their accounts, and allowing new health services to be covered pre-deductible without running afoul of federal tax rules.

For example, one provision would allow health plans that cover $500 of mental health services pre-deductible to qualify for HSA tax breaks. Another would let people who get care from a worksite clinic to get HSA tax benefits. Other provisions would newly allow Medicare enrollees to contribute to an HSA, allow people 55 and older to put more money in their accounts, and deem “bronze” and catastrophic plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as qualifying for HSA tax breaks.

While making health care more affordable is a critical priority, and some of the provisions are directed at populations or health care services in need of support, they do not target help to the people who need it most ― especially those with low and moderate incomes who are struggling to access health coverage and care.

Also making these bills counterproductive is their promotion of racial wealth differences. Privately insured Latino and Black people are about half as likely to have HSAs than are white and Asian people. This, combined with the accounts’ use as lucrative tax shelters, represents one of the many ways in which access to economic opportunity is inequitable, and it exacerbates long-standing differences in wealth, under which a typical white family in 2019 had eight times the wealth of a typical Black family and five times the wealth of a typical Latino family.

HSA tax breaks also come at a steep cost; they are already projected to cost the federal government $180 billion over the next ten years. The new provisions, which are assumed to be in effect after 2025, are estimated to cost over $70 billion combined over the eight years from 2026 through 2033, with costs increasing each year. Instead of throwing more money into these tax breaks, policymakers should target federal resources toward expanding coverage, increasing affordability, and improving health equity.

For example, for states that haven’t adopted the ACA Medicaid expansion, the federal government should close the Medicaid coverage gap, which would focus resources squarely on helping uninsured people below the poverty line — 60 percent of whom are people of color. Policymakers should also permanently extend enhanced premium tax credits for ACA marketplace plans, which are set to expire after 2025. These tax credits, unlike HSAs, have made health insurance more affordable for millions of people, narrowed racial differences in coverage rates, and helped fuel record coverage gains.

Reddit rolled out some changes this week as its continues its push for revenue and profitability jumpstarted by its API rule changes in July. Among the most controversial, the company will no longer allow users to opt out of ad personalization based on their Reddit activity and started a program that lets users exchange virtual rewards for their posts for real money.

On Wednesday, Reddit announced plans to "improve ad performance," including by preventing users from opting out of personalized ads except for in "select countries." Reddit didn't specify which countries are excluded, but the exceptions could include countries falling under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard declined to provide further clarification when reached by Ars Technica for comment.

Reddit's announcement, authored by Reddit's head of privacy, going by "snoo-tuh" on the platform (Reddit has refused to confirm the identity of admins representing Reddit on the site), said that its advertisers look at "what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals" to gauge your interests.

Snoo-tuh wrote:

For users who previously opted out of personalization based on Reddit activity, this change will not result in seeing more ads or sharing on-platform activity with advertisers. It does enable our models to better predict which ad may be most relevant to you.

Still, Reddit users have expressed concern over suddenly losing a privacy control they've long had. Meanwhile, Reddit's policy update aligns with its outspoken goals to become profitable and its plans to eventually go public. Reddit has already sacrificed other aspects of the user experience, as well as some community trust, in an effort to drive revenue. Reddit declined to provide comment regarding privacy concerns related to this latest update.

Other privacy policy changes announced Wednesday include allowing users to choose to see "fewer" ads regarding alcohol, dating, gambling, pregnancy and parenting, and weight loss. Reddit didn't commit to all ads being removed initially since its system of "manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads" may not be totally accurate at first. Snoo-tuh said things should get more accurate "over time," though. Reddit’s Contributor Program

Also this week, Reddit announced its Contributor Program, launching in the US only for now. Reddit users with 100–4,999 karma can earn $0.90 per gold received. Users with over 5,000 karma can get $1 per gold received. Users can pay for gold to award to other users.

The scheme is reminiscent of the Creator Ads Revenue Sharing program by X, formerly Twitter, where premium subscription members can get a portion of ad revenue generated from their posts. Elon Musk announced the program in February, and it launched in July.

X's program has been criticized for potentially encouraging spam-y, bait-y posts and posts that are controversial and offensive, just for the sake of generating reactions and comments that will lead to the user making money. But that hasn't stopped Reddit from enacting a user payment scheme of its own (after all, Huffman has said Musk's X is an example for Reddit.)

However, clickbait and shock value posts are a strong deviation from what people tend to treasure most about Reddit: real human advice, discussions, and insight.

In an interview with BBC, social media analyst and consultant Matt Navarra noted that Reddit was incentivizing and providing opportunity for its top users but that it could also jeopardize Reddit's content quality.

Navarra told BBC:

[X's ad sharing program] incentives X users to post content that sparks the most replies, and the characteristics of content that typically generates the most replies is content that is divisive, polarizing, provocative, and controversial... exactly the sort of content that brands do not want to have their ads placed amongst. This has been problematic for Elon Musk, and it could become a new problem for Reddit's founders too.

When I reached out to Reddit about these concerns, spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt pointed me to Reddit's blog post about the program. It says that users have to be at least 18 years old and verified by Reddit to participate and that:

All monetizable contributions are subject to Reddit’s User Agreement and Content Policy. In addition, Reddit will take the same enforcement actions against contributions breaking Reddit’s rules and withhold any earnings on content that violates the Content Policy or the new Contributor Monetization Policy and Contributor Terms for the program.

A support page says Reddit's Contributor Program will avoid "fraud, spam, bad actors, and illegal activities" by putting users through Persona's Know Your Customer screening. It also points to "Reddit internal safety signals," "new monetization policies with enforcement and repercussions," "daily gold purchase limits," "automated detection and monitoring via Reddit’s safety tools and systems," "user reporting," and "admin auditing."

PHOENIX (AP) — President Joe Biden is arguing that “there is something dangerous happening in America” as he revives his warnings that Donald Trump and his allies represent an existential threat to the country’s democratic institutions.

“There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement,” Biden says in excerpts of the speech Thursday in Arizona, released in advance by the White House, referring to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.

Although voting in the 2024 Republican primary doesn’t begin for months, Biden’s focus reflects Trump’s status as the undisputed frontrunner for his party’s nomination despite facing four indictments, two of them related to his attempts to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

Biden’s speech is his fourth in a series of presidential addresses on the topic, a cause that is a touchstone for him as he tries to remain in office even in the face of low approval ratings and widespread concern from voters about his age, 80.

He’s also facing fresh pressure on Capitol Hill, where House Republicans are holding the first hearing in their impeachment inquiry.

On the first anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, Biden visited the Capitol and accused Trump of continuing to hold a “dagger” at democracy’s throat. Biden closed out the summer that year in the shadow of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, decrying Trumpism as a menace to democratic institutions.

And in November, as voters were casting ballots in the midterm elections, Biden again sounded a clarion call to protect democratic institutions.

The location for Thursday’s speech, as was the case for the others, was chosen for effect. It will be near Arizona State University, which houses the McCain Institute, named after the late Arizona Sen. John McCain — a friend of Biden and the 2008 Republican presidential nominee who spent his public life denouncing autocrats around the globe.

“I have come to honor the McCain Institute and Library because they are home to a proud Republican who put country first,” Biden says in the excerpts. “Our commitment should be no less because democracy should unite all Americans – regardless of political affiliation.”

The late senator’s wife, Cindy McCain, said the library, still to be built, is the result of bipartisan support from Biden, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and her predecessor, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey.

“President Biden has been a longtime friend, tough political opponent and strong leader,” McCain said in a statement. “All traits that my husband, John, also possessed.”

As Biden has tried to do in the past, Thursday’s speech is designed to avoid alienating moderate Republicans while confronting the spread of anti-democratic rhetoric.

“Not every Republican -– not even the majority of Republicans –- adhere to the extremist MAGA ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with Republicans my whole career,” Biden says. “But there is no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA extremists.”

Republicans competing with Trump for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination have largely avoided challenging his election falsehoods. In addition, Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill are only becoming more emboldened as he eggs them on, including toward a looming government shutdown that appears all but inevitable.

In closed-door fundraisers, Biden has spoken at length about reelection, imploring supporters to join his effort to “literally save American democracy,” as he described it to wealthy donors this month in New York.

“I’m running because we made progress — that’s good — but because our democracy, I think, is still at risk,” Biden said.

Advisers see Biden’s continued focus on democracy as both good policy and good politics. Campaign officials have pored over the election results from last November, when candidates who denied the 2020 election results did not fare well in competitive races, and point to polling that showed democracy was a highly motivating issue for voters in 2022.

Candidates who backed Trump’s election lies and were running for statewide offices with some influence over elections — governor, secretary of state, attorney general — lost their races in every presidential battleground state.

In few states does Biden’s message of democracy resonate more than in Arizona, which became politically competitive during Trump’s presidency after seven decades of Republican dominance. After Biden’s victory, the state was a hotbed of efforts to overturn or cast doubt on the results.

Republican state lawmakers used their subpoena power to obtain all the 2020 ballots and vote-counting machines from Maricopa County, then hired Trump supporters to conduct an unprecedented partisan review of the election. The widely mocked spectacleconfirmed Biden’s victory but fueled unfounded conspiracy theories about the election and spurred an exodus of election workers.

In the 2022 midterms, voters up and down the ballot rejected Republican candidates who repeatedly denied the results of the 2020 election. But Kari Lake, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, has never conceded her loss to Hobbs and plans to launch her a bid for the U.S. Senate. Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters and Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, also repeated fraudulent election claims in their respective campaigns.

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who defeated Masters, said the importance of defending democracy resonates not only with members of his own party but independents and moderate GOP voters.

“I met so many Republicans that were sick and tired of the lies about an election that was two years old,” Kelly said.

Indeed, Republicans privately concede that the election denialism rhetoric that dominated their candidates’ message — as well as the looming specter of Trump — damaged their efforts to retain the governor’s mansion and flip a hotly contested Senate seat, according to three Republican officials who worked in statewide races last cycle.

The issue of democracy resonated more in Arizona than in other competitive states, and to have candidates deny basic facts on elections helped reinforce other claims from Democrats about GOP extremism on other, completely separate issues, said the Republican officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to candidly describe the party’s shortcomings last year. Though Trump-animated forces in the party dominate public attention, many Republican voters were concerned about other issues such as the economy and the border and did not want to focus on an election result that was two years old.

Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is seeking the Democratic nomination in next year’s Senate race, said a democracy-focused message is particularly important to two critical blocs of voters in the state: Latinos and veterans, both of whom Gallego said are uniquely affected by election denialism and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

“You know, we come from countries and experiences where democracy is very corrupt, and many of us are only one generation removed from that, but we’re close enough to see how bad it can be,” Gallego said. “And so Jan. 6 actually was particularly jarring, I think, to Latinos.”

As he pays tribute to McCain on Thursday, Biden will also announce new federal funds being directed to build the McCain Library, which the White House says will offer various programs for underserved communities. The money comes from a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed in the early months of Biden’s presidency, and the project is in partnership with the with the McCain Institute and Arizona State University.