Politics

By Nate Raymond and Dan Burns

(Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday vetoed legislation to add 66 new judges to understaffed federal courts nationally, a once widely bipartisan measure that would have been the first major expansion of the federal judiciary since 1990.

The JUDGES Act, initially supported by many members of both parties, would have increased the number of trial court judges in 25 federal district courts in 13 states including California, Florida and Texas, in six waves every two years through 2035.

Hundreds of judges appointed by presidents of both parties took the rare step of publicly advocating for the bill, saying federal caseloads have increased by more than 30% since Congress last passed legislation to comprehensively expand the judiciary.

But the outgoing Democratic president made good on a veto threat issued two days before the bill passed the Republican-led House of Representatives on Dec. 12 on a 236-173 vote.

In a message to the Senate formally rejecting the bill, Biden said it “hastily” creates new judgeships without addressing key questions about whether new judges were needed and how they would be allocated nationally.

Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana, who sponsored the bill in the Senate, said in response that the veto was “partisan politics at its worst.”

By staggering the new judgeships over three presidential administrations, the bill’s sponsors had hoped to get around lawmakers’ longstanding concerns about creating new vacancies that a president of an opposing party could fill.

It received the Democratic-led Senate’s unanimous approval in August. But the bill lingered in the Republican-led House and was only taken up for a vote after Republican President-elect Donald Trump won the Nov. 5 election and the opportunity to name the first batch of 25 judges.

That prompted accusations from top House Democrats, who began to abandon the measure, that their Republican colleagues had broken a central promise of the legislation by having lawmakers approve the bill when no one knew who would appoint the initial wave of judges.

If the bill had been enacted, Trump would have been able to fill 22 permanent and three temporary judgeships over four years in office, on top of the 100-plus judicial appointments he is already expected to make.

Those appointments would allow Trump to further cement his influence on the judiciary. He made 234 judicial appointments during his first term in office, including three members of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority.

Biden on Friday surpassed Trump’s total number of judicial appointments with 235, though he named fewer appellate judges and only one U.S. Supreme Court justice during his tenure.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Dan Burns in New York; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Nicholas Yong)

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All you have to do to become a South Dakota resident is spend one night.

Stay in a campground or hotel and then stop by one of the businesses that specialize in helping people become South Dakotans, and they’ll help you do the paperwork to gain residency in a state with no income tax and relatively cheap vehicle registration.

The system brings in extra government revenue through vehicle fees and offers refuge to full-time travelers who wouldn’t otherwise have a permanent address or a place to vote.

And that’s the problem. State leaders are at a stalemate between those who say people who don’t really live in South Dakota shouldn’t be allowed to vote in local elections and those who say efforts to impose a longer residency requirement for voting violate the principle that everyone gets to vote.

And at least one state has gotten wind that its residents might be avoiding high income taxes with easy South Dakota residency and is investigating.

Easy South Dakota residency for nomads has become an enterprising opportunity for businesses such as RV parks and mail forwarders.

“That’s the primary concept here, is the people that have given up their sticks and bricks and now are on wheel estate, we call it, and they’re full-time traveling,” said Dane Goetz, owner of the Spearfish-based South Dakota Residency Center, which caters to full-time travelers. “They need a place to call home, and we provide that address for them to do that, and they are just perpetually on the move.”

Goetz estimated more than 30,000 people are full-time traveler residents of South Dakota, but the actual number is unclear. The state Department of Public Safety, which handles driver licensing, says it doesn’t track the number of full-time traveler applications.

Officials of the South Dakota Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to emailed questions or a phone message seeking the state’s tally of full-time travelers registered to vote. The office is not responsible for enforcing residency requirements, Division of Elections Director Rachel Soulek said.

Victor Robledo, his wife and their five kids hit the road a decade ago in a 28-foot (8.5-meter) motorhome to seek adventure and ease their high cost of living in Southern California. They found South Dakota to be an opportunity to save money, receive mail and “take a residency in a state that really nurtures us,” he said. They filed for residency in 2020.

“It was as simple as coming into the state, staying one night in one of the campgrounds, and once we do that, we bring in a receipt to the office, fill out some paperwork, change our licenses. I mean, really, you can blow through there — gosh, 48 hours,” Robledo said.

Residency becomes thorny around voting. Some opponents don’t want people who don’t physically live in South Dakota to vote in its elections.

“I don’t want to deny somebody their right to vote, but to think that they can vote in a school board election or a legislative election or a county election when they’re not part of the community, I’m troubled by that,” said Democratic Rep. Linda Duba, who cited 10,000 people or roughly 40% of her Sioux Falls constituents being essentially mailbox residents. She likes to knock on doors and meet people but said she is unable to do “relationship politics” with travelers.

The law the Republican-controlled Legislature passed in 2023 added requirements for voter registration, including 30 days of residency — which don’t have to be consecutive — and having “an actual fixed permanent dwelling, establishment, or any other abode to which the person returns after a period of absence.”

The bill’s prime sponsor, Republican Sen. Randy Deibert, told a Senate panel that citizens expressed concerns about “people coming to the state, being a resident overnight and voting (by) absentee ballot or another way the next day and then leaving the state.”

Those registered to vote before the new law took effect remain registered, but some who tried to register since its passage had trouble. Dozens of people recently denied voter registration contacted the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, according to the chapter’s advocacy manager, Samantha Chapman.

Durational residency requirements for voting are, in general, unconstitutional because such restrictions interfere with the interstate right to travel, said David Schultz, a Hamline University professor of political science and a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas.

“It’s kind of this parochialism, this idea of saying that only people who are really in our neighborhood, who really live in our city have a sufficient stake in it, and the courts have generally been unsympathetic to those types of arguments because, more often than not, they’re used for discriminatory purposes,” he said.

Earlier this year, the Legislature considered a bill to roll back the 2023 law. It passed the Senate but stalled in the House.

During a House hearing on that bill, Republican Rep. Jon Hansen asked one full-time traveler when he was last in South Dakota and when he intends to return. The man said he was in the state a year earlier but planned to return in coming months. Another man who moved from Iowa to work overseas said he had not lived “for any period of time, physically” in South Dakota.

“I don’t think we should allow people who have never lived in this state to vote in our state,” Hansen said.

Republican Sen. David Wheeler, an attorney in Huron, said he expects litigation would be what forces a change. It’s unlikely a change to the 30-day requirement would pass the Legislature now, he said.

“It is a complicated topic that involves federal and state law and federal and state voting rights, and it is difficult to bring everybody together on how to appropriately address that,” Wheeler said.

More than 1,600 miles (2,500 kilometers) east, Connecticut State Comptroller Sean Scanlon has asked prosecutors to look into whether some state employees who live in Connecticut may have skirted their tax obligations by claiming to be residents of South Dakota.

Connecticut has a graduated income tax rate of 3.0% to 6.99%. Connecticut cities and towns also impose a property tax on vehicles. South Dakota has none.

Scanlon and his office, which administers state employee retiree benefits, learned from a Hartford Courant columnist in September that some state retirees might be using South Dakota’s mail-forwarding services for nefarious reasons.

Asked if there are concerns about other Connecticut taxpayers who are not state retirees possibly misusing South Dakota’s lenient residency laws, the Department of Revenue Services would only say the agency is “aware of the situation and we’re working with our partners to resolve it.”

A South Dakota legislative panel broached the residency issue as recently as August, a meeting in which one lawmaker called the topic “the Gordian knot of politics.”

“It seems like it’s almost impossible to come to some clear and definitive statement as to what constitutes a residency with such a mobile population with people with multiple homes and addresses and political boundaries that are easy to see on a map but there’s so much cross-transportation across them,” Republican Sen. Jim Bolin said.

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Dura reported from Bismarck, North Dakota. Associated Press Writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed to this report.

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By Nora Eckert

DETROIT (Reuters) – Toyota Motor of North America is donating $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, a company spokesman said on Tuesday, a day after Detroit’s Ford Motor and General Motors, said they would give the same amount.

Ford and GM are also contributing vehicles to the festivities, while Toyota is not planning to, the Japan-based company said.

Trump’s proposed tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada would affect many automakers in North America, including Toyota, which produces the Toyota Tacoma pickup truck in Mexico. The incoming president also aims to unravel many of Democratic President Joe Biden’s policies on electric vehicle and emissions, Reuters has reported.

Other large companies, including Amazon and Facebook parent Meta Platforms have also donated to the inauguration.

(Reporting by Nora Eckert; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday he will direct his Justice Department to “vigorously pursue” the death penalty to protect Americans from “violent rapists, murderers, and monsters” when he takes power on Jan. 20.

Trump’s statement on his social media platform Truth Social was in response to President Joe Biden’s announcement on Monday that he had commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 federal inmates on death row, converting them to life in prison without parole.

“As soon as I am inaugurated, I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters,” Trump said.

Trump restarted federal executions during his first term in office from 2017 to 2021 after a nearly 20-year pause.

Biden, who ran for president opposing the death penalty, put federal executions on hold when he took office in January 2021.

Unlike executive orders, clemency decisions cannot be reversed by a president’s successor, although the death penalty can be sought more aggressively in future cases.

The Trump transition team on Monday had denounced Biden’s decision, calling it abhorrent and favoring convicts who are “among the worst killers in the world.”

(Reporting by Ismail Shakil, Eric Beech and Steve Holland; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

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(Reuters) -Former Democratic U.S. President Bill Clinton, 78, was hospitalized on Monday with a fever, according to his deputy chief of staff.

It is not an emergency situation, NBC News reported.

“President Clinton was admitted to Georgetown University Medical Center this afternoon for testing and observation after developing a fever,” Angel Ureña wrote on X.

“He is in good spirits and grateful for the care he is receiving.”

(Reporting by Costas Pitas and Kanishka Singh)

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RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina’s current governor and his successor tacked on another lawsuit Monday disputing a key provision within a GOP law that erodes the powers of several incoming Democratic state leaders — the latest in a longstanding power struggle between North Carolina’s executive and legislative branches over who controls the state’s elections.

The lawsuit challenges one of the law’s core power shifts that move the ability to appoint members of the North Carolina State Board of Elections from the governor’s authority to the state auditor’s office — which will be run by Republican Dave Boliek next year. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Gov.-elect Josh Stein, who currently serves as the state attorney general, filed the suit in Wake County Superior Court on Monday, saying in the complaint that the provision is unconstitutional and violates the separation of powers.

The change to state election board appointments will take place next spring if it isn’t blocked in court. The state elections board would likely remain under GOP control for the next few years and, the partisan shift would trickle down to county boards as well.

“We have had the same structure for our state board of elections for nearly a century and it has served North Carolina well, with fair and secure elections across our state through every cycle,” Cooper said in a news release Monday. “These blatantly partisan efforts to give control over elections boards to a newly elected Republican will create distrust in our elections process and serve no legitimate purpose.”

The suit from Cooper and Stein is the second challenge the pair has levied against the GOP-controlled state legislature concerning the law. Cooper and Stein are also contesting another provision that prevents the governor from choosing his State Highway Patrol commander.

Those alterations to the governor’s powers were part of a larger swath of changes to several statewide offices that Democrats won in November and will preside over next year — such as attorney general, state schools superintendent and lieutenant governor.

If the law withstands the court challenges, it would further underscore the GOP-led legislature’s tightened grip over the other two branches of government since Republicans took control of the General Assembly more than a decade ago. Last year, GOP supermajorities in both the House and Senate firmed up power even more.

Pending legal disputes in a few outstanding races, Republicans could lose their supermajority if Democratic challenger Bryan Cohn’s attempt to oust incumbent Republican Rep. Frank Sossamon in last month’s election proves successful. That would give Stein a slightly more effective veto stamp on future Republican legislation if Democratic lawmakers stay unified.

Republican legislators passed the law in both chambers earlier this month — not without scathing disapproval from crowds of protesters in the building.

The bill drew the ire of House and Senate Democrats, as well as some community organizers, who denounced it as a “power grab.” They also criticized Republican lawmakers for tying the power shifts to disaster relief funding for western North Carolina in Hurricane Helene’s aftermath. Most of the $252 million in recovery funds included in the law can’t be spent until the next time the General Assembly acts.

But GOP legislators defended the bill, with incoming House Speaker Destin Hall saying during the House vote that the changes are within the legislature’s constitutional right. Republicans also point to previous Democratic actions, such as weakening the state’s first GOP governor elected in the 20th century in 1972, as reasons justifying the legislation.

Spokespeople for Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore — who are both defendants listed in the lawsuit — did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday evening. A state elections board spokesperson also did not immediately respond.

Changes to the state elections board aren’t a first for GOP lawmakers. Previous attempts have been blocked by courts, including a suit last year that would move board appointment authority from the governor to the General Assembly. Berger and Moore’s attorneys moved to dismiss that case last week, and the new lawsuit from Cooper and Stein seeks to replace it.

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By Maggie Fick and Ahmed Aboulenein

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Members of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team are laying the groundwork for the United States to withdraw from the World Health Organization on the first day of his second term, according to a health law expert familiar with the discussions.

“I have it on good authority that he plans to withdraw, probably on Day One or very early in his administration,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health at Georgetown University in Washington and director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law.

The Financial Times was first to report on the plans, citing two experts. The second expert, former White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha, was not immediately available for comment. 

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The plan, which aligns with Trump’s longstanding criticism of the U.N. health agency, would mark a dramatic shift in U.S. global health policy and further isolate Washington from international efforts to battle pandemics.

Trump has nominated several critics of the organization to top public health positions, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who is up for the post of secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees all major U.S. health agencies including the CDC and FDA. 

Trump initiated the year-long withdrawal process from the WHO in 2020 but six months later his successor, President Joe Biden, reversed the decision.

Trump has argued that the agency failed to hold China accountable for the early spread of COVID-19. He has repeatedly called the WHO a puppet of Beijing and vowed to redirect U.S. contributions to domestic health initiatives.

A WHO spokesperson declined to directly comment but referred Reuters to comments by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press briefing on Dec. 10 in which he was asked whether he was concerned that the Trump administration would withdraw from the organization.

Tedros said at the time that the WHO needed to give the U.S. time and space for the transition. He also voiced confidence that states could finalize a pandemic agreement by May 2025.

Critics warn that a U.S. withdrawal could undermine global disease surveillance and emergency response systems. 

“The U.S. would lose influence and clout in global health and China would fill the vacuum. I can’t imagine a world without a robust WHO. But U.S. withdrawal would severely weaken the agency,” Gostin said.

(Reporting by Maggie Fick in London and Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington; Editing by Howard Goller)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Monday announced that he is commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office.

The move spares the lives of people convicted in killings, including the slayings of police and military officers, people on federal land and those involved in deadly bank robberies or drug deals, as well as the killings of guards or prisoners in federal facilities.

The decision leaves three federal inmates to face execution. They are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.

“I’ve dedicated my career to reducing violent crime and ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” Biden said in a statement. “Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole. These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”

Reaction was strong, both for and against. A Trump spokesperson called the decision “abhorrent.”

“These are among the worst killers in the world and this abhorrent decision by Joe Biden is a slap in the face to the victims, their families, and their loved ones.” said Trump spokesman Steven Cheung. “President Trump stands for the rule of law, which will return when he is back in the White House after he was elected with a massive mandate from the American people.”

Heather Turner, whose mother was killed during the 2017 robbery of a Conway, South Carolina, bank, blasted the decision in a social media post, saying Biden didn’t consider the victims of these crimes.

“The pain and trauma we have endured over the last 7 years has been indescribable,” Turner wrote on Facebook, describing weeks spent in court in search of justice as “now just a waste of time.”

“Our judicial system is broken. Our government is a joke,” she said. “Joe Biden’s decision is a clear gross abuse of power. He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”

Some of Roof’s victims supported Biden’s decision to leave him on death row.

Michael Graham, whose sister Cynthia Hurd was killed by Roof, said Roof’s lack of remorse and simmering white nationalism in the U.S. means Roof is the kind of dangerous and evil person the death penalty is intended for.

“This was a crime against a race of people who were doing something all Americans do on a Wednesday night — go to Bible study,” Graham said. “It didn’t matter who was there, only that they were Black.”

The Biden administration in 2021 announced a moratorium on federal capital punishment to study the protocols used, which suspended executions during Biden’s term. But Biden actually had promised to go further on the issue in the past, pledging to end federal executions without the caveats for terrorism and hate-motivated, mass killings.

While running for president in 2020, Biden’s campaign website said he would “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.”

Similar language didn’t appear on Biden’s reelection website before he left the presidential race in July.

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden’s statement said. “But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vice president, and now president, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”

He took a political jab at Trump, saying, “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has spoken frequently of expanding executions. In a speech announcing his 2024 campaign, Trump called for those “caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts.” He later promised to execute drug and human smugglers and even praised China’s harsher treatment of drug peddlers. During his first term as president, Trump also advocated for the death penalty for drug dealers.

There were 13 federal executions during Trump’s first term, more than under any president in modern history, and some may have happened fast enough to have contributed to the spread of the coronavirus at the federal death row facility in Indiana.

Those were the first federal executions since 2003. The final three occurred after Election Day in November 2020 but before Trump left office the following January, the first time federal prisoners were put to death by a lame-duck president since Grover Cleveland in 1889.

Biden faced recent pressure from advocacy groups urging him to act to make it more difficult for Trump to increase the use of capital punishment for federal inmates. The president’s announcement also comes less than two weeks after he commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and of 39 others convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.

The announcement also followed the post-election pardon that Biden granted his son Hunter on federal gun and tax charges after long saying he would not issue one, sparking an uproar in Washington. The pardon also raised questions about whether he would issue sweeping preemptive pardons for administration officials and other allies who the White House worries could be unjustly targeted by Trump’s second administration.

Speculation that Biden could commute federal death sentences intensified last week after the White House announced he plans to visit Italy on the final foreign trip of his presidency next month. Biden, a practicing Catholic, will meet with Pope Francis, who recently called for prayers for U.S. death row inmates in hopes their sentences will be commuted.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has long called for an end to the death penalty, said Biden’s decision is a “significant step in advancing the cause of human dignity in our nation” and moves the country “a step closer to building a culture of life.”

Martin Luther King III, who publicly urged Biden to change the death sentences, said in a statement shared by the White House that the president “has done what no president before him was willing to do: take meaningful and lasting action not just to acknowledge the death penalty’s racist roots but also to remedy its persistent unfairness.”

Madeline Cohen, an attorney for Norris Holder, who faced death for the 1997 fatal shooting of a guard during a bank robbery in St. Louis, said his case “exemplifies the racial bias and arbitrariness that led the President to commute federal death sentences,” Cohen said. Holder, who is Black, was sentenced by an all-white jury.

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Weissert reported from West Palm Beach, Florida. Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, and Jim Salter in O’Fallon, Missouri, contributed to this report.

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By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Days before he retires as chairman of the influential U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat Ben Cardin acknowledged worries about human rights being less of a U.S. priority during President-elect Donald Trump’s second term.

“I don’t want to prejudge, but I am very concerned that protecting human rights may not be as important as other objectives he’s trying to get done,” Cardin told Reuters in an interview, when asked about Trump, a Republican, who returns to the White House on Jan. 20.

Cardin, 81, is leaving Congress at the end of this month after nearly 60 years in public office, the last 18 as a U.S. senator from Maryland. Cardin became chairman of the foreign relations panel unexpectedly in September 2023, after he had announced his retirement, replacing fellow Democrat Bob Menendez, who faced felony bribery charges and was later convicted.

“I didn’t expect that, and I was looking forward to my last two years for many different reasons,” Cardin said.

Cardin is best known as a human rights advocate, notably for co-authoring the Global Magnitsky Act, named for a lawyer who exposed corruption in Russia before dying in prison after being beaten and denied medical care.

Cardin said the Senate, which is about to shift from a thin Democratic majority to Republican control, will have to push back against Trump, as it has in the past, and noted Trump’s willingness to impose Magnitsky sanctions during his first term.

Enacted in 2012, the Magnitsky Act mandated that the U.S. government restrict travel and freeze assets of individuals who committed gross violations of human rights in Russia. In 2016 it became the Global act, extended to rights violators worldwide.

“It’s hard to predict. But Donald Trump, in his first presidency, he used the Magnitsky sanctions quite frequently and that was helpful,” Cardin said.

DEALS OR VALUES?

Cardin said Trump could be too eager to establish relations with autocratic leaders or cede too much in ending Russia’s war on Ukraine. During his successful campaign for re-election this year, Trump vowed to swiftly end the conflict, without giving details on how he might do so.

“So I recognize that Donald Trump likes to think of himself as a deal maker,” Cardin said. “And to me, I want to make sure that we don’t try to get an immediate deal that doesn’t represent our values. So I am concerned that he will look for a shortcut to foreign policy that could compromise some of our values.”

Cardin said he hoped the Senate, where Republicans will have a narrow 53-47 seat majority starting next month, could act as a balance to the incoming president. Trump, in his first term, had sought to slash foreign aid by 50%, but dropped the idea after both Republicans and Democrats pushed back.

A staunch supporter of Israel who has faced protests himself during the 14-month-long war in Gaza, Cardin acknowledged that Trump’s second presidency could complicate efforts toward Middle East peace and the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.

But he said the desire of the U.S. and its partners for an alliance to isolate Iran and recent changes in Syria were causes for optimism. “There’s a lot of things happening in the region to give us optimism that we can move past Gaza,” he said.

Trump in his first term, from 2017-2021, pulled the United States out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, praised autocrats such as Hungarian nationalist leader Viktor Orban and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and spoke out against funding humanitarian aid in major conflicts.

Cardin said he was confident Global Magnitsky would continue long after his retirement, noting that 30 countries are using it and it is the only major sanctions regime targeting individuals.

“It really puts the fear in the hearts of oligarchs. They don’t want to get on these lists,” Cardin said.

“It’s here to stay, and it’s solid,” he said.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; editing by Don Durfee and Leslie Adler)

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FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Longtime Republican U.S. Rep. Kay Granger of Texas is having “unforeseen health challenges” that have worsened in the final months of her more than two decades in Congress, a statement from her office said Monday.

Granger, 81, has not cast a vote in Washington since July. In a statement provided by her office, Granger said she has been “navigating some unforeseen health challenges over the past year” but did not specify or elaborate.

“However, since early September, my health challenges have progressed making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable,” the statement said.

Granger’s office did not immediately respond to questions emailed Monday about her condition or why they did not publicly disclose her health status earlier. Messages left with Granger’s family also were not immediately returned.

Granger announced in 2023 that she would not seek reelection, saying at the time that it was time for a new generation of leaders to step up. Granger also announced in March that she would step down as chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

First elected to Texas’ 12th Congressional District in 1996, Granger was the first Republican woman elected to represent the state in the U.S. House. Before that, she was the mayor of Fort Worth.

Her seat will be filled in January by Republican Craig Goldman, a former Texas House member, who was elected to the district that includes parts of Fort Worth, western Tarrant County and most of neighboring Parker County.

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