Politics

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette said Monday that he plans to travel to Africa just as the primary campaign season kicks into high gear, banking that his name recognition is so strong he can afford to leave the country with his job on the line.

La Follette told The Associated Press that he plans to leave on a trip to Kenya and Zimbabwe on Sunday and doesn’t plan to return to Wisconsin until “early July.” The 81 year-old Democrat said he booked the trip two years ago but had to postpone it due to the COVID-19 pandemic and doesn’t want to lose his down payment.

The trip comes as La Follette faces a challenge within his own party for his job and with Republicans targeting his office.

“It’s probably not the best time, but I had no choice unless I had to forfeit the payment I made for it,” he said. “So I decided that life has to go on.”

The stakes are high for the sleepy office because Republicans want to shift election oversight from the state elections commission to the secretary of state, following the model of more than 30 other states. Democrats fear that could allow Republicans to improperly influence certification of Wisconsin elections, particularly the 2024 presidential contest.

Worried that La Follette may lack the energy to compete, Dane County Democratic Party Chairwoman Alexia Sabor is challenging La Follette for the party’s nomination.

La Follette plans to stay in small lodges with a group of 10 to 15 people and spend his days on excursions looking at wildlife. Earlier this year, he said he was so scared of contracting the coronavirus he didn’t know how he would circulate his nomination papers across Wisconsin, although he ultimately did manage to secure the 2,000 signatures he needed to get on the ballot. He said he now feels the pandemic has subsided enough that it’s safe to travel overseas.

“I’ll wear my double mask and shield on the airplane,” he said.

La Follette — a distant relative of “Fighting” Bob La Follette, a progressive governor and 1924 presidential candidate — was first elected secretary of state in 1974. After a failed try for lieutenant governor in 1978, he won the office in 1982 and has won reelection nine times.

The Wisconsin primaries are Aug. 9. State Rep. Amy Loudenbeck, Jay Schroeder and Justin Schmidtka are running in a three-way Republican primary.

La Follette said he’s not particularly worried about not being able to campaign in the crucial weeks leading up to the primary. The lodges have internet service so he can stay in touch, he said, and he’s confidant that voters already know plenty about him.

“I’m sure my opponent will try to make hay out of it, but it’s not like I’m an unknown candidate,” he said. “People know who am I. The issues are simple. Who has the best chance of winning in November? I am that candidate. If my opponent tries to drag out any other issues like I’m too old or I’m in Africa, that doesn’t make any difference. The issue is the same. Who has the best chance to beat the Republican?”

Sabor accused La Follette of disengaging with voters.

“This trip demonstrates the same disrespect for voters that Doug has shown for taxpayers his entire 40-plus years in public office,” she said in a text her campaign consultant, Sachin Chedda, forwarded to the AP. “He couldn’t go out and get signatures but he can go on safari?”

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Follow Todd Richmond on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trichmond1

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By Rich McKay

(Reuters) – New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Monday signed a packet of 10 gun control bills into law, setting new limits on buying assault-style weapons and body armor, among other measures, in the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo and Texas.

The legislation, passed on Thursday by the state legislature, raises the age required to buy or possess a semiautomatic rifle from 18 to 21. New York already requires people to be 21 to possess a handgun.

The bill was signed by the Democratic governor after 10 people were slain last month at a supermarket in the western New York city of Buffalo by an 18-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle.

Days after that massacre, another 18-year-old fatally shot 19 students and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

“We cannot keep living like this,” Hochul said at a bill-signing ceremony in New York City.

“This is a moral moment for the people of New York but also the rest of the nation,” said Hochul. “Follow what we did here in New York and we’ll finally start to be at the beginning of the end of all this gun violence and the massacres that are occurring every day in our country.”

Another law signed by Hochul restricts the purchase of bullet resistant vests and body armor to law enforcement or related professions. The package also requires social media companies operating in New York to adopt transparent policies on how they respond to hate speech on their platforms.

The gunman in Buffalo wore body armor during his shooting spree, and shared his intention on social media to carry out such a rampage before the attack.

In most places in New York, people as young as 16 would still be allowed to have other types of rifles and shotguns.

New York now joins a handful of states — including Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Vermont, and Washington – that require buyers to be at least 21 to buy some types of long guns, media accounts say. Similar legislation has been proposed in Utah.

California’s attempt to raise the legal buying age for a semiautomatic weapons has been challenged in court.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)

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By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the right-wing group the Proud Boys, and four of his top lieutenants faced new federal charges of seditious conspiracy on Monday for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a court document.

Federal prosecutors investigating the attack filed the new charges against Tarrio, Dominic Pezzola, Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, according to the document. All five defendants have already pleaded not guilty to other criminal charges related to the attack.

The new indictment accuses the five men of plotting to prevent Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory over incumbent Republican Donald Trump. Trump has made false claims that he lost due to widespread voting fraud.

Prosecutors say Tarrio played a leading role even though he was not in Washington that day, having already been arrested for other charges.

Three members of another right wing group, the Oath Keepers, have already pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy charges. Several other members of that group, including leader Stewart Rhodes, have pleaded not guilty and are due to stand trial later this year.

About 800 people have been charged with taking part in the Capitol riot, with about 250 guilty pleas so far.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan and Timothy Ahmann; Editing by Leslie Adler and Alistair Bell)

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By Nathan Layne and Peter Eisler

LANSING, Michigan (Reuters) – State police in Michigan have obtained warrants to seize voting equipment and election-related records in at least three towns and one county in the past six weeks, police records show, widening the largest known investigation into unauthorized attempts by allies of former President Donald Trump to access voting systems.

The previously unreported records include search warrants and investigators’ memos obtained by Reuters through public records requests. The documents reveal a flurry of efforts by state authorities to secure voting machines, poll books, data-storage devices and phone records as evidence in a probe launched in mid-February.

The state’s investigation follows breaches of local election systems in Michigan by Republican officials and pro-Trump activists trying to prove his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

The police documents reveal, among other things, that the state is investigating a potential breach of voting equipment in Lake Township, a small, largely conservative community in northern Michigan’s Missaukee County. The previously unreported case is one of at least 17 incidents nationwide, including 11 in Michigan, in which Trump supporters gained or attempted to gain unauthorized access to voting equipment.

Many of the breaches have been inspired in part by the false assertion that state-ordered voting-system upgrades or maintenance would erase evidence of alleged voting fraud in 2020. State election officials, including those in Michigan, say those processes have no impact on the preservation of data from past elections.

The search warrants also authorized state police to seize election equipment in Barry County’s Irving Township and have it examined. Local officials acknowledged publicly last month that state police raided the township office on April 29, a day after the warrant was issued.

Additionally, the records shed new light on election-equipment breaches in Roscommon County. One official in the county’s Richfield Township told investigators that he gave two vote-counting tabulators to an unauthorized and unidentified “third party,” who kept them for several weeks in early 2021. The county’s clerk acknowledged that she, too, handed over her equipment to unauthorized people.

Taken together, these documents depict a statewide push by pro-Trump activists to access election machinery in search of evidence for debunked theories that equipment was rigged in a crucial swing state that voted for Trump in 2016 and for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told Reuters that the state is investigating whether the election-system breaches are coordinated.

“If there is coordination, whether it’s among those in our state or reaching up to a national level, we can determine that and then we can seek accountability for all involved,” Benson, a Democrat, said in an interview.

On Feb. 10, Benson announced that she had asked Michigan’s attorney general, Democrat Dana Nessel, to begin a criminal investigation, citing information that state authorities had received about unauthorized access to voting machines and data in Roscommon County. In separate inquiries, state or local law enforcement officials have investigated security breaches involving voting equipment in Cross Village Township in Emmet County and Adams Township in Hillsdale County last year.

Representatives of the state police and attorney general’s office declined to comment on the investigations detailed in this story.

Trump won all of the counties where breaches or attempted breaches in Michigan have been alleged. The results in those jurisdictions were affirmed by multiple audits and an investigation by the Republican-controlled state senate, which found no evidence of widespread fraud. But some activists and officials pushing election-fraud conspiracy theories claim that Trump’s margin should have been larger in these areas, and their efforts are roiling communities across the state.

In rural Barry County, Republican Sheriff Dar Leaf has teamed with proponents of the debunked claim that voting machines were rigged against Trump. Leaf is pursuing his own investigation, despite being urged last year by the Republican county prosecutor to suspend it for lack of evidence. Trump won the county by a 2-1 margin.

In recent weeks, Leaf’s office has sent expansive public records requests to the county’s township and city clerks, seeking an array of election-related records. The requests were condemned by clerks and local officials in Reuters interviews and public statements as baseless and burdensome. An editorial in the local newspaper, The Hastings Banner, called Leaf’s probe “a waste of time and an affront to our citizens.”

Leaf did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview with Reuters in February, he defended his investigation. He said he was “concerned” by theories that voting machines nationwide were rigged to favor Biden, and “we need to know if that happened in Barry County.”

‘INAPPROPRIATE ACCESS’

The records obtained by Reuters show that in Lake Township, a community of about 2,800 people in Missaukee County, state police obtained a warrant on April 22 to search the clerk’s office for evidence of potential violations of election law.

Township Clerk Korrinda Winkelmann, an elected Republican who oversees local voting, declined to comment.

Missaukee County, where Trump won in 2020 with 76% of the vote, is home to Daire Rendon, a Republican state lawmaker who has embraced the bogus claim that widespread fraud robbed Trump of victory in 2020. Rendon approached multiple clerks in her district, which includes Missaukee, Roscommon and other counties, asking them to give people seeking fraud evidence access to their voting equipment, Reuters previously reported https://www.reuters.com/world/us/michigan-pro-trump-state-lawmaker-sought-access-voting-machines-2022-05-20.

In December 2020, Rendon was one of two Republican members of Michigan’s House of Representatives who joined an unsuccessful federal lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden’s victory in five battleground states.

Rendon did not respond to requests for comment. In a May 25 interview with the Cadillac News, a local newspaper, she acknowledged contacting clerks but said she “never touched a voting machine” and did nothing wrong.

State police are also stepping up an examination of alleged breaches in Roscommon County. In February, Secretary of State Benson said unauthorized people “gained inappropriate access to tabulation machines and data drives” used in the county and in one of its townships, Richfield. Benson, however, didn’t name any suspects or provide other details.

The state police records show that investigators are probing allegations that the Richfield Township supervisor allowed a “third party” to take possession of the town’s two ballot tabulators for several weeks in early 2021. The records identify the supervisor only by title, not by name, but the county only has one person in that position, Republican John Bawol.

The records detail an interview with a “suspect.” The name and title is redacted but the suspect is described as an elected township official. The official told investigators he believed the tabulators were taken to “the northern suburbs of Detroit” in early February by an unidentified group of people driving a small SUV. The tabulators were not returned until March, the official added. The official said at one point he checked in with a woman, whose name is redacted, about when the machines would be returned, and “she advised they were almost done.”

State police found that both security seals on one machine indicated that it had been tampered with, the records show. The seals were intact on the other machine.

Greg Watt, the township clerk, whose job includes safeguarding election equipment, told investigators that he did not know the identity of the third party who accessed the voting machines, according to the records. Police documents identify Watt by name and call him a witness in the case.

Watt and Bawol did not respond to requests for comment.

The breaches are costing taxpayers money. The Richfield Township Board voted on May 25 to purchase two new vote tabulators and three memory devices at a cost of $8,763. The move was necessary to “ensure election integrity,” Watt said at the board meeting, according to an audio recording reviewed by Reuters.

State police have also sought to question the Roscommon county clerk in connection with a separate alleged voting system breach, the police records reveal. The county clerk, whose name is redacted in the documents, is Michelle Stevenson, a Republican.

In February, the county clerk acknowledged to a state election official that she had provided a data storage drive containing election information “for one or both” of Richfield Township’s vote tabulators to an unidentified third party, according to an email from the official to police, in which the name of the clerk was also redacted. She also gave the person access to one of Roscommon County’s vote-tabulating machines, according to the email.

When state investigators attempted to interview the county clerk on Feb. 17, she indicated a willingness to speak with police but declined to discuss the matter at that time, the police records show.

Two weeks later, on March 2, investigators executed a search warrant on Stevenson’s office, accompanied by representatives of Election Systems & Software LLC, the Nebraska-based manufacturer of voting machines used in Roscommon County, the records show.

Stevenson declined to comment. Election Systems & Software did not respond to requests for comment.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne and Peter Eisler; editing by Jason Szep and Brian Thevenot)

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(Reuters) – U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disclosed new stock market trades on Monday, showing purchases of options to buy shares of Apple Inc and Microsoft Corp.

In a periodic transaction report signed last Friday and appearing on the House of Representatives’ website on Monday, the senior Democrat disclosed that her husband, financier Paul Pelosi, on May 13 bought Apple call options for between $500,001 and $1 million.

On May 24, he bought more Apple call options, in an amount between $250,001 and $500,000, the disclosure https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2022/20021142.pdf shows. On the same day, Paul Pelosi bought Microsoft call options for as much as $600,000.

Users on social media platforms including Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and TikTok have scrutinized Pelosi’s trade disclosures in recent months, believing her position as House Speaker gives her and her husband an edge.

A 2012 law makes it illegal for lawmakers to use information from their work in Congress for their personal gain. The law requires them to disclose stock transactions by themselves or family members within 45 days.

Pelosi in January signaled that she might be willing to advance legislation to completely ban stock trading by lawmakers. That was a reversal from her previous position defending lawmakers’ right to trade stocks.

Proposals by Democrats in Congress this year to prohibit stock trading by lawmakers have yet to pass.

Pelosi’s stock trading performance ranked sixth-best in Congress in 2021, with Republican Congressman Austin Scott leading the way, according to an analysis https://unusualwhales.com/i_am_the_senate/full by Unusual Whales, a service selling financial data.

Paul Pelosi’s purchases of Apple and Microsoft options in May followed a steep Wall Street selloff this year related to worries about inflation and rising interest rates.

So far in 2022, Pelosi has filed six transaction reports, disclosing several trades in Apple, the world’s most valuable company. She has also disclosed trades in Walt Disney Co, Tesla Inc, PayPal Holdings and other widely held stocks.

The Justice Department ended investigations of stock trades by at least three senators ahead of the 2020 market slump, caused by the coronavirus pandemic, without filing charges.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — When leaders gather at the Summit of the Americas this week, the focus is likely to veer from policy issues — migration, climate change and galloping inflation — and instead shift to something Hollywood thrives on: the drama of the red carpet.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed Monday that he will not show up, dealing a blow to the event hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden.

López Obrador said it was concerns over the guest list that led him to skip. He wanted Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to be invited, but Washington did not want to include autocratic governments. Other leaders also have indicated they’ll stay away if not all are invited.

Experts say the event could turn into a embarrassment for U.S. President Joe Biden.

Even some progressive Democrats have criticized the administration for bowing to pressure from exiles in the swing state of Florida and barring communist Cuba, which attended the last two summits.

“The real question is why the Biden administration didn’t do its homework,” said Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister who now teaches at New York University.

While the Biden administration insists the president in Los Angeles will outline his vision for a “sustainable, resilient, and equitable future” for the hemisphere, Castañeda said it’s clear from the last-minute wrangling over the guest list that Latin America is not a priority for the U.S. president.

“This ambitious agenda, no one knows exactly what it is, other than a series of bromides,” he said.

The U.S. is hosting the summit for the first time since its launch in 1994, in Miami, as part of an effort to galvanize support for a free trade agreement stretching from Alaska to Patagonia.

But that goal was abandoned more than 15 years ago amid a rise in leftist politics in the region. With China’s influence expanding, most nations have come to expect — and need — less from Washington.

As a result, the premier forum for regional cooperation has languished, at times turning into a stage for airing historical grievances, like when the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez at the 2009 summit in Trinidad & Tobago gave President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic tract, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”

The U.S. opening to former Cold War adversary Cuba, which was sealed with Obama’s handshake with Raul Castro at the 2015 summit in Panama, lowered some of the ideological tensions.

“It’s a huge missed opportunity,” Ben Rhodes, who led the Cuba thaw as deputy national security advisor in the Obama administration, said recently in his “Pod Save the World” podcast. “We are isolating ourselves by taking that step, because you’ve got Mexico, you’ve got Caribbean countries saying they’re not going to come — which is only going to make Cuba look stronger than us.”

To bolster turnout and avert a flop, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris worked the phones in recent days, speaking with the leaders of Argentina and Honduras, both of whom initially expressed support for Mexico’s proposed boycott. Former Sen. Christopher Dodd crisscrossed the region as a special adviser for the summit, in the process persuading far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and hasn’t once spoken to Biden, to belatedly confirm his attendance.

Ironically, the decision to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela wasn’t the whim of the U.S. alone. The region’s governments in 2001, in Quebec City, declared that any break with democratic order is an “insurmountable obstacle” to future participation in the summit process.

The governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela aren’t even active members of the Washington-based Organization of the American States, which organizes the summit.

“This should’ve been a talking point from the beginning,” said Tom Shannon, a former undersecretary of state for political affairs who in a long diplomatic career attended several summits. “It’s not a U.S. imposition. It was consensual. If leaders want to change that, then we should have a conversation first.”

Instead of going to the summit, López Obrador said he would visit communities hit by Hurricane Agatha last week. His foreign affairs secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, will lead the Mexican delegation in his absence. He said he sent word to Biden that he would like to visit him at the White House when his schedule allows to discuss the integration of the Americas.

“There cannot be a summit if all countries are not invited,” López Obrador said Monday. “Or there can be one, but that is to continue with all politics of interventionism.”

After the last summit in Peru, in 2018, which Trump didn’t even bother to attend, many predicted there was no future for the regional gathering.

In response to Trump’s pullout, only 17 of the region’s 35 heads of state attended. Few saw value in bringing together for a photo op leaders from such dissimilar places as aid-dependent Haiti, industrial powerhouses Mexico and Brazil and violence-plagued Central America — each with their own unique challenges and bilateral agenda with Washington.

“As long as we don’t speak with a single voice, no one is going to listen to us,” said former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who also faults Mexico and Brazil — the region’s two economic powers — for the current drift in hemispheric relations. “With a cacophony of voices, it is much more difficult to find our place in the world.”

To the surprise of many, the U.S. in early 2019 picked up the ball, offering to host the summit. At the time, the Trump administration was enjoying something of a leadership renaissance in Latin America, albeit among mostly similar-minded conservative governments around the narrow issue of restoring democracy in Venezuela.

But that goodwill unraveled as Trump floated the idea of invading Venezuela to remove Nicolás Maduro — a threat recalling the worst excesses of the Cold War. Then the pandemic hit, taking a devastating human and economic toll on a region that accounted for more than a quarter of the world’s COVID-19 deaths despite making up only 8% of the population. The region’s politics were upended.

The election of Biden, who was Obama’s point man for Latin America and had decades of hands-on experience in the region from his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, set expectations for a relaunch.

But as popular angst spread during the pandemic, the Biden administration was slow to match the vaccine diplomacy of Russia and China, although it did eventually provide 70 million doses to the hemisphere. Biden also maintained the Trump-era restrictions on migration, reinforcing the view that it was neglecting its own neighbors.

Since then, Biden’s hallmark policy in the region — a $4 billion aid package to attack the root causes of migration in Central America — has stalled in Congress with no apparent effort to revive it. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also diverted attention from the region, something experts say could come back to bite Biden if rising interest rates in the U.S. trigger a stampede of capital outflows and debt defaults in emerging markets.

There have been smaller snubs too: When leftist millennial Gabriel Boric was elected president in Chile, setting high expectations for a generational shift in the region’s politics, the U.S. delegation to his inauguration was led by the second-lowest ranking Cabinet member — Isabel Guzman, head of the Small Business Administration.

Shannon said for the summit to be successful Biden shouldn’t try to lay out a grand American vision for the hemisphere but rather show sensitivity to the region’s embrace of other global powers, concerns about gaping inequality and traditional mistrust of the U.S.

“More than speeches, he will need to listen,” Shannon said.

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By Katharine Jackson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican U.S. Representative Liz Cheney warned that the nation’s democratic system is threatened by ongoing efforts to deny the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

“People must pay attention. People must watch, and they must understand how easily our democratic system can unravel if we don’t defend it,” Cheney said during an interview broadcast on CBS Sunday Morning, days before Congress’ official probe of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol begins public hearings.

Cheney, a vocal critic of Trump who voted to impeach him, is one of two Republicans serving on the committee. She warned that Trump continues to damage trust in American democracy by repeating his false claims that his loss was the result of widespread fraud.

Those claims have been repeatedly debunked by courts, state and local election officials and members of Trump’s own administration.

“It’s an ongoing threat,” Cheney said of the efforts to undercut confidence in elections. “It is extremely broad. It’s extremely well organized. It’s really chilling.”

The House of Representatives Select Committee investigating the attacks will hold a prime time hearing at 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT June 10) on Thursday, the committee announced. It will be the first of six public hearings, set for June 13, 15, 16, 21 and June 23, according to media reports.

With seven Democrats and two Republicans, the panel has spent much of the past year investigating the events preceding and driving the attack by thousands of Trump supporters, who stormed the building in a failed bid to prevent Congress from formally certifying his 2020 election loss to now-President Joe Biden.

Cheney was once the third most powerful Republican in Washington. She was ousted from leadership after repudiating Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen. Trump has endorsed a challenger to Cheney in Wyoming’s August primary.

(Reporting by Katharine Jackson; Editing by Richard Chang)

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By Katharine Jackson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Bipartisan U.S. Senate negotiations on how or if to respond to the latest wave of mass shootings are focused on a range of options, including improving school safety and “red flag” laws to allow police to seize guns from people deemed dangerous.

The talks will continue into early this week, when Congress returns from a Memorial Day break, and follow a prime-time speech last week in which Democratic President Joe Biden implored lawmakers to act.

Previous mass shootings like the ones that claimed 19 young children and two educators at a Texas school, 10 Black shoppers at a New York state grocery store and a pair of weekend shootings in Philadelphia and Chattanooga, Tennessee, have led to similar talks but no action in the deeply divided Congress.

Democratic U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, who is leading the talks with Republican counterpart John Cornyn, said options on the table included investments in mental health and school safety.

“Do some significant mental health investment, some school safety money and some modest but impactful changes in gun laws. That’s the kind of package we’re putting together right now. That’s the kind of package I think can pass the Senate,” Murphy said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

Democrats control razor-thin majorities in Congress but Senate rules mean they need at least 10 Republicans to pass major legislation. That is a tall order with less than six months before November midterm elections when Republicans aim to retake the majority.

U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican member of the negotiating group, said some expansion of background checks is on the table, along with possible “red flag” laws that allow states to maintain adequate due process.

“I think there is a place to land that is consistent with the Second Amendment,” Toomey said, speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program. “It hasn’t been finally resolved but something in the space of expanding background checks I think is very – well, certainly is on the table and I hope will be part of a final package.”

The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the right to keep and bear arms, and Republicans defend a broad reading of that right, opposing most new limits on gun ownership.

While the White House and Congress struggle to agree on any response to the wave of shootings, the U.S. Supreme Court this month is expected to rule on a New York case that could bring a sweeping expansion of gun rights.

“Red flag” laws allowing police to seize weapons from people with some mental illnesses have been implemented in 19 U.S. states. Gun rights advocates criticize such measures, saying they violate the Second Amendment and deny individuals the right to argue their cases with due process in court.

Murphy, of Connecticut, where a gunman killed 26 children and educators at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, said parents in his state are worried.

“There’s just a deep, deep fear for our children right now. And also a fear that government is so fundamentally broken that it can’t put politics aside to guarantee the one thing that matters most to adults in this country – the physical safety of their children,” he told CNN.

(Reporting by Katharine Jackson in WashingtonEditing by Scott Malone and Matthew Lewis)

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin Democrats are challenging the paperwork Donald Trump’s preferred candidate for governor filed to get on the ballot in the GOP primary on technical grounds.

The state Democratic Party said Sunday that construction company co-owner Tim Michels’ failed to include his correct mailing address on the nominating forms, making thousands of signatures invalid. But Michels’ campaign dismissed the complaint as frivolous.

“This challenge shows that Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary, Tim Michels, only has 345 valid signatures to get on the ballot,” state Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler said. The state requires 2,000 signatures to run for governor.

Michels’ campaign acknowledged that some of the nominating forms list his physical address in the village of Chenequa instead of his official mailing address that is in the nearby town of Hartland, but it said all of the forms include the campaign’s post office box mailing address.

“Tony Evers and his insider allies are feverishly working to keep me from beating him in November,” Michels said in a statement. “It comes as no surprise that they launched a frivolous complaint in an attempt to keep me off the ballot, just days after I was endorsed by President Trump. They will not succeed.”

Michels, who joined the race late in April, faces former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, state Rep. Tim Ramthun and business consultant Kevin Nicholson in the contested Aug. 9 GOP primary. The winner of that race will take on Democratic incumbent Evers.

The state’s bipartisan elections commission will consider the challenge to Michels’ candidacy at its meeting on Friday.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Donald Trump was impeached in late 2019 after pressuring Ukraine’s leader for “a favor,” all while withholding $400 million in military aid to help confront Russian-backed separatists, even the staunchest defense hawks in the Republican Party stood virtually united by Trump’s side.

But as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military marched toward Kyiv this February, threatening not only Ukraine but the rest of Europe, Republicans and Democrats in Congress cast aside impeachment politics, rallied to Ukraine’s side and swiftly shipped billions to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s defense.

The question ahead, as Ukrainians battle Russia’s grinding invasion now past its 100th day, is whether the rare bipartisanship on Capitol Hill is resilient enough to withstand Trump’s isolationist influences on his party or whether Republicans who yielded to Trump’s “America First” approach will do so again, putting military and humanitarian support for Ukraine at risk.

“Maybe there is a recognition on both Republican side and Democratic side that this security assistance is very important,” said Bill Taylor, a former ambassador to Ukraine, in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

“And maybe neither side is eager to crack that coalition.”

The fraught party politics comes at a pivotal moment as the Russian invasion drags on and the United States gets deeper into the conflict before the November elections, when lawmakers face voters with control of Congress at stake.

New polling from The Associated Press shows public support in the U.S. for punishing Russia over the war is wavering if it comes at the expense of the economy.

While Congress mustered rare and robust bipartisan support to approve a $40 billion Ukraine package, bringing total U.S. support to a staggering $53 billion since the start of the war, opposition on the latest round of aid came solely from the Republican side, including from Trump.

That is a warning sign over the sturdiness of the bipartisan coalition that the top Republican in Congress, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, tried to shore up when he led a delegation of GOP senators to stand by Zelenskyy’s side in a surprise trip to Kyiv last month.

“There is some isolationist sentiment in my party that I think is wrongheaded, and I wanted to push back against it,” McConnell told a Kentucky audience this past week, explaining his Ukraine visit.

The divisions within the GOP over Ukraine are routinely stoked by Trump, who initially praised Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a “genius” negotiating strategy. Trump has repeatedly lashed out against the U.S. aid to Ukraine, including last weekend at a rally in Wyoming. Before the Senate vote on the $40 billion in assistance, Trump decried the idea of spending abroad while America’s “parents are struggling.”

As Trump considers whether to run for the White House in 2024, the persistence of his “America First” foreign policy approach leaves open questions about the durability of his party’s commitment to U.S. support for a democratic Ukraine. Senators are poised this summer to vote to expand NATO to include Sweden and Finland, but Trump has repeatedly criticized U.S. spending on Western military alliance.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, among 11 Republican senators who voted against the Ukraine package, called the tally an “astronomical number” at a time when foreign policy should be focused elsewhere, including on China.

“That is nation-building kind of number,” Hawley said in an interview. “And I think it’s a mistake.”

It was nearly three years ago that Ukraine was at the center of U.S politics with the 2019 Trump impeachment proceedings that rocked Washington.

Zelenskky, a comedian turned politician, had just been elected when he asked Trump during a July 25, 2019, phone call for a meeting to strengthen U.S.-Ukraine relations and ensure military aid, according to a transcript released by Trump’s White House.

“We are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes,” Zelenskyy told Trump, referring to anti-tank weaponry Ukraine relies on from the West.

Trump replied: “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”

Trump asked Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden, a chief Democratic rival to Trump at the time and now the American president, and Biden’s son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

The impeachment investigation, sparked by a government whistleblower’s complaint over Trump’s call, swiftly became a milestone, the first in a generation since Democrat Bill Clinton faced charges over an affair with a White House intern.

During weeks of impeachment proceedings over Ukraine, witnesses from across the national security and foreign service sphere testified under oath about the alarms that were going off in Washington and Kyiv about Trump’s conversation with Zelenskyy.

Complicated stories emerged about the scramble by Trump allies to secure the investigations of the Bidens — and of the civil servants pushing back against what they saw as a breach of protocol.

Yet American opinions over the gravity of the charges against Trump were mixed, polling at the time by the AP showed.

Trump was impeached by the Democratic-led House and acquitted by the Senate, with just one Republican, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, joining Democrats to convict.

“The allegations were all horse hockey,” said Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., recalling his decision not to impeach.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., brushed back questions about whether Trump’s actions then played any role in Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine this February.

“It wasn’t like Putin invaded right after. It’s been almost two years,” Rubio said.

Republicans are quick to remind that Trump was, in fact, the first president to allow lethal arms shipments to Ukraine — something Barack Obama’s administration, with Biden as vice president, declined to do over worries of provoking Putin.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, the co-chair of the Senate’s Ukrainian Caucus who persuaded Trump in a phone call to ultimately release the $400 million in aid, stood by his decision not to convict Trump over the delay of that assistance.

“As long as it was done,” Portman said about the outcome.

But Romney said people need to remain “clear-eyed” about the threat Putin poses to the world order. “I did the right thing at the time, and I haven’t looked back,” he said.

Democrats are blistering in their criticism of Republicans over the impeachment verdict.

“It’s a shame,” said Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Every single Republican who voted in support of Donald Trump’s geopolitical shakedown and blackmail of Volodymyr Zelenskky and the Ukrainian people should be ashamed of themselves,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., “because the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions were understood to us then, and now the world understands.”

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Follow AP’s coverage of the tensions between Ukraine and Russia at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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