Politics

WASHINGTON (AP) — Liz Cheney’s resounding primary defeat marks the end of an era for the Republican Party as well as her own family legacy, the most high-profile political casualty yet as the party of Lincoln transforms into the party of Trump.

The fall of the three-term congresswoman, who has declared it her mission to ensure Donald Trump never returns to the Oval Office, was vividly foreshadowed earlier this year, on the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

As the House convened for a moment of silence, Cheney, who is leading the investigation into the insurrection as vice chair of the 1/6 committee, and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, stood almost alone on the Republican side of the House floor.

Democratic lawmakers streamed by to shake their hands. Republicans declined to join them.

“Liz Cheney represents the Republican Party as it used to be. … All of that is gone now,” said Geoff Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the center-right Niskanen Center.

What comes next for Liz Cheney is still to be determined.

“Now the real work begins,” she said in an election night concession speech in Wyoming, summoning the legacy of both Abraham Lincoln and his Civil War-era military and presidential successor Ulysses Grant in her campaign against Trump.

Cheney could very well announce her own run for the White House — unlikely to win a hostile Republican Party’s nomination but to at least give those opposed to Trump an alternative.

Overnight, she transferred leftover campaign funds into a new entity: “The Great Task.” That’s a phrase from The Gettysburg Address.

“I will be doing whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office,” Cheney told NBC’s “Today” show early Wednesday. Pressed, she said that running for president “is something I’m thinking about and I’ll make a decision in the coming months.”

Whether she runs or not, her belief that Trump poses a danger to democracy is a conviction that runs deep in her family.

But it’s a view that has no home in today’s GOP.

Trump is purging the Republican Party, ridding it of dissenters like Cheney and others who dare to defy him, shifting the coast-to-coast GOP landscape and the makeup of Congress.

Of the 10 House Republicans including Cheney who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, at the Capitol, only two remain candidates for re-election. The others have bowed out or, like Cheney, have been defeated by Trump-backed challengers.

If Republicans gain control of the House and Senate in the November elections, the new Congress is destined to be remade in Trump’s image. However, his influence may in fact cut two ways, winning back the House for Republicans but costing the party the Senate if his candidates fail to generate the broader appeal needed for statewide elections.

“It’s just a party of Donald Trump’s fever dreams,” said Mark Salter, a former longtime Republican aide to the late Sen. John McCain.

“It’s just Donald Trump’s club.”

For 50 years, the Cheneys have had important influence in Washington, from the time Dick Cheney first ran for Congress — later being elected vice president — to the arrival of his daughter, elected in 2016 alongside Trump’s White House victory.

Identified with the hawkish defense wing of the Republican Party, the Cheneys with the Presidents Bush represented a cornerstone of the GOP in the post-World War II era, when it thrived as a party of small government, low taxation and muscular foreign policy.

Liz Cheney never wavered, chosen by House GOP colleagues to the same position her father held, the No. 3 Republican in the House, its highest-ranking woman.

But the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol changed all that.

Cheney was unequivocal, laying blame for the attack on the defeated president and his false claims of voter fraud and a rigged election.

Trump “summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” she said at the time, announcing her vote to impeach.

“There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy initially defended Cheney but quickly reversed as Republicans booted her from party leadership. When Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Cheney to the 1/6 panel, her exile was all but complete.

Trump gloated at Cheney’s GOP primary defeat Tuesday night, deriding her as “sanctimonious” and a “fool” for suggesting his claims of a rigged election were false.

Trump had swooped into the Cowboy State to rally for Harriet Hageman, who was once highly critical of him but beat Cheney by embracing the former president, backed by McCarthy and other party leaders.

Cheney’s defeat follows that of the last Bush in public office, Jeb’s son George P. Bush, who was defeated in the Republican primary for Texas attorney general by Trump-backed Ken Paxton in May.

On Fox News, conservative author Charlie Kirk called Tuesday’s election a “mass repudiation” of the Bush-Cheney-McCain era.

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who replaced Cheney in House GOP leadership and endorsed Hageman, said in a statement she was glad to see Pelosi’s “puppet” defeated.

Former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming who served in Congress alongside Dick Cheney and has known Liz Cheney since she was a child, says he can no longer recognize the party that he joined, casting his first presidential vote for Dwight Eisenhower.

“What’s happened to our party is a fear of Donald J. Trump,” Simpson said.

Founded in the mid-19th century, the Republican Party’s core conservative values have shifted in the Trump era into a strain of politics that is more inward focused on grievances at home and isolationism abroad.

Those running for Congress include many Republican incumbents who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election, amplifying Trump’s relentless false claims of a rigged election and fueling the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

And many of the new GOP candidates for Congress are also election deniers, according to a tally by Democrats.

“The House is — should be — the people’s House,” said former Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida. Instead, he said, “It’s controlled by Mr. Trump,”

Cheney walks alone many days at the Capitol, flanked by plain-clothes Capitol police who guard her amid an onslaught of violent threats.

Her mission of denying Trump a return to the presidency can be seen in her daily schedule, much of her time devoted to the 1/6 committee deepening and completing its work.

Fellow Wyoming Republican Simpson said he has no doubt what’s next for Cheney: “She’ll mount a new set of horses and ride to the finish line.”

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(Reuters) – Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s onetime personal lawyer, arrived at an Atlanta courthouse on Wednesday to testify in a Georgia criminal probe examining attempts by the former U.S. president and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results.

Giuliani, who helped lead Trump’s election challenges, was due to testify before a special grand jury in Fulton County after a judge ordered him to comply with a subpoena. His lawyers say he will refuse to answer questions that violate attorney-client privilege.

The former New York City mayor, 78, appeared before Georgia state lawmakers in December 2020, echoing Trump’s false conspiracy theories about stolen ballots and urging them not to certify Democratic President Joe Biden’s victory over the Republican Trump.

“It’s a grand jury and grand juries, as I recall, are secret,” Giuliani told CNN on his arrival at the courthouse, when asked to comment on his testimony. “They ask the questions and we’ll see.”

The Fulton County probe began after a January 2021 recorded phone call in which Trump urged the state’s top election official to “find” enough votes to alter the outcome. The former president has asserted falsely that he won Georgia, as well as the 2020 presidential contest.

The special grand jury was convened in May at the request of county District Attorney Fani Willis.

Giuliani, a former crime-fighting U.S. Attorney, was among several Trump advisers and lawyers who received subpoenas from the grand jury last month, including U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

(Reporting by Rami Ayyub, editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller)

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By Liliana Salgado and Nathan Layne

JACKSON, Wyo. (Reuters) -U.S. Republican Representative Liz Cheney vowed to do all she could to keep Donald Trump out of the White House and said she would decide in the coming months whether to run for president herself, after she lost to a Trump-backed primary challenger in Wyoming on Tuesday.

But Senator Lisa Murkowski, another Republican who has defied the former president, cleared a hurdle in Alaska. She was set to face Trump-endorsed challenger Kelly Tshibaka in the Nov. 8 congressional election, as the two candidates advanced in that state’s non-partisan primary.

Cheney’s defeat, by Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman, marks a significant victory for the former president in his campaign to oust Republicans who backed impeaching him after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol building last year.

In conceding the race, Cheney — a fierce critic of Trump who has played a prominent role in the congressional investigation of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — said she was not willing “go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election” to win a primary.

“It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic. That was a path I could not and would not take,” she told supporters.

Cheney told NBC’s “Today” show on Wednesday that she “will be doing whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office” and that she was considering running for president.

“It is something that I am thinking about, and I’ll make a decision in the coming months,” she told “Today” when asked about a presidential bid, adding she had a lot of work left to do with the Jan. 6 committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol assault.

“I believe that Donald Trump continues to pose a very grave threat and risk to our republic. And I think that defeating him is going to require a broad and united front of Republicans, Democrats and independents. And that’s what I intend to be part of,” Cheney said.

With 99% of expected ballots counted in Wyoming, Hageman led the Republican field with 66.3% of the vote, followed by Cheney with 28.9%, according to Edison Research, an election monitoring firm.

The results were less clear cut in Alaska.

With 72% of expected ballots tallied, Murkowski narrowly led with 42.7% of the vote, followed by Tshibaka at 41.4% and Democrat Patricia Chesbro at 6.2%, according to Edison. The non-partisan primary format in that state weeds out all but the top four vote-getters.

Murkowski, a moderate who is one of the more independent voices in the Senate, has held the seat since 2003.

Also in Alaska, Edison predicted that no candidate would emerge as a clear winner in the three-way contest to complete the term of Representative Don Young, who died in March.

That race pits Sarah Palin, a former governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee who has been endorsed by Trump, against fellow Republican Nick Begich III and Democrat Mary Peltola. The winner will be announced on Aug. 31.

Both Wyoming and Alaska are reliably Republican, making it unlikely that the results will influence whether President Joe Biden’s Democrats lose their razor-thin majorities in Congress. Republicans are expected to retake the House and also have a chance of winning control of the Senate.

WEEDING OUT TRUMP CRITICS

The ousting of Cheney is the latest sign of Trump’s enduring sway over the Republican Party.

Trump, who has hinted that he will run for president in 2024, made ending Cheney’s congressional career a priority among the 10 House Republicans he targeted for supporting his impeachment in 2021.

Cheney, the daughter of Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney, has used her position on the Jan. 6 committee investigating the circumstances surrounding the Capitol riot to keep attention on Trump’s actions that day and his false claims that he won the 2020 election.

Republican leaders are expected to dissolve the Jan. 6 investigation if they win control of the House in November. The representatives in the new Congress take their seats in January.

Hageman, a natural resources lawyer who has embraced Trump’s election lies, criticized Cheney’s concession speech, saying it showed she cared little about the issues facing her state.

“She’s still focusing on an obsession about President Trump and the citizens of Wyoming, the voters of Wyoming sent a very loud message tonight,” Hageman said on Fox News.

Cheney, in the House, voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting the Capitol riot, while Murkowski, in the Senate, voted to convict him on that charge. Trump was ultimately acquitted.

Of the 10 Republicans who supported impeachment, it is possible that only one – Dan Newhouse of Washington – will be in Congress after November’s election.

(Reporting by Liliana Salgado in Jackson, Wyoming, and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut, additional reporting by Kanishka Singh, Eric Beech, Moira Warburton and Chris Gallagher; Editing by Alistair Bell, John Stonestreet, Alex Richardson and Bernadette Baum)

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — An elected Florida prosecutor who was removed from office by Gov. Ron DeSantis because of his positions on abortion and transgender rights filed suit Wednesday to get his job back, saying the Republican leader violated his First Amendment rights.

DeSantis said he suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren this month for signing a national pledge to not prosecute women and doctors for violating state abortion laws or families seeking treatments for transgender minors.

“If the governor’s allowed to do this, what’s left of democracy? If the governor’s allowed to retaliate against me for speaking out, what’s left of the First Amendment,” Warren asked at a news conference in Tallahassee.

The lawsuit alleges that DeSantis did not identify any actual conduct involving criminal activity that would warrant a suspension and says the governor is punishing Warren for voicing positions that DeSantis opposes.

DeSantis, criticized by Democrats for signing abortion restrictions and bills seen as anti-LGBTQ into law, held a campaign-like event to announce Warren’s suspension where supporters cheered the decision. The governor’s office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday morning.

Now seeking re-election in November and positioning himself as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, the governor cited Warren’s “neglect of duty” and other alleged violations.

In his executive order, DeSantis cited Warren’s policy of not pursuing some lesser categories of crime, including “trespassing at a business location, disorderly conduct, disorderly intoxication, and prostitution.”

The suspension was backed by several law enforcement officers including Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister, who said Warren had been acting as a kind of “supreme authority” to decide ”what crimes will be legal or illegal in our county.”

Similar uses of prosecutorial discretion by progressives elected around the country in recent years have prompted some pushback.

In San Francisco, voters in June recalled Chesa Boudin, a former public defender who was elected district attorney in 2019 on a criminal justice reform platform. Boudin faced criticism over rising crime after declining to prosecute most drug offenses. A similar effort to recall the Los Angeles D.A. failed to garner enough signatures this week.

Warren, who was elected in 2016 by Tampa-area voters and re-elected in 2020, said the governor is overturning the will of the people who put him in office.

“The governor has attacked our democracy and it should worry everyone,” Warren told reporters. “If the governor’s attempt to unilaterally overturn an election is allowed to stand, it threatens to undermine the integrity and outcome of elections across our state for years to come.”

Warren described the pledge circulated by prosecutors around the country as “a value statement,” not a definitive decision on how he might handle any particular case. He also noted that Florida’s new ban on abortions after 15 weeks of gestation has been ruled unconstitutional, and that the state doesn’t even have a law against hormone treatments for transgender minors.

Warren’s lawsuit says the suspension was retaliatory after he opposed the governor on a number of issues, including DeSantis’ efforts to deny the restoration of voting rights for felons and create new crimes for public protests in response to the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the new abortion restrictions.

“Of course, DeSantis is free to express his views and his disagreements with Warren as often as he likes. Indeed, the Federal Constitution ensures that he is,” the suit says. “DeSantis went too far.”

The suit says Warren has an obligation to voters to say where he stands on such issues, and that as a prosecutor, he has the right to decide how the limited resources he has should be used to prosecute crimes. That priority should be on public safety, it said.

“The First Amendment protects the right of elected officials to speak out on matters of public controversy, and in fact it does so because it’s so important that the voters who choose these elected officials know where they stand on these issues,” Jean-Jacques Cabou, a lawyer for Warren, said in a phone interview.

Warren’s suspension is now an issue in the governor’s race as Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, the state’s only statewide-elected Democrat, and Democratic U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist enter the final week of the primary to see who will challenge DeSantis.

“For this governor to weaponize his office and remove a state attorney — a prosecutor — who has prosecutorial discretion over which cases he brings forward and which he doesn’t, this is the overreaching and overstepping of this governor,” Fried said at a campaign event Tuesday night. “It is the most dangerous thing to our democracy that we have seen.”

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In a triumphant signing event at the White House, Biden pointed to the law as proof that democracy — no matter how long or messy the process — can still deliver for voters in America as he road-tested a line he will likely repeat later this fall: “The American people won, and the special interests lost.”

The House on Friday approved the measure on a party-line 220-207 vote. It passed the Senate days earlier with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking a 50-50 tie in that chamber.

“In normal times, getting these bills done would be a huge achievement,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said during the White House ceremony. “But to do it now, with only 50 Democratic votes in the Senate, over an intransigent Republican minority, is nothing short of amazing.”

The White House announced Monday that it was going to deploy Biden and members of his Cabinet on a “Building a Better America Tour” to promote the recent victories. One of Biden’s trips will be to Ohio, where he’ll view the groundbreaking of a semiconductor plant that will benefit from the recent law to bolster production of such computer chips. He will also stop in Pennsylvania to promote his administration’s plan for safer communities, a visit that had been planned the same day he tested positive for COVID-19 last month.

“In the coming weeks, the President will host a Cabinet meeting focused on implementing the Inflation Reduction Act, will travel across the country to highlight how the bill will help the American people, and will host an event to celebrate the enactment of the bill at the White House on September 6th,” the White House said in a statement.

Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., on Tuesday continued those same criticisms, although he acknowledged there would be “benefit” through extensions on tax credits for renewable energy projects like solar and wind.

“I think it’s too much spending, too much taxing, and in my view wrong priorities, and a super-charged, super-sized IRS that is going to be going after a lot of not just high-income taxpayers but a lot of mid-income taxpayers,” said Thune, speaking at a Chamber of Commerce event in Sioux Falls. The administration has disputed that anyone but high earners will face increased tax scrutiny, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen directing the tax agency to focus solely on businesses and people earning more than $400,000 for the new audits.

The measure is a slimmed-down version of the more ambitious plan to supercharge environment and social programs that Biden and his party unveiled early last year.

To Manchin, who struck the critical deal with Schumer on the package last month, Biden said, “Joe, I never had a doubt” as the crowd chuckled.

The bill will direct spending, tax credits and loans to bolster technology like solar panels, consumer efforts to improve home energy efficiency, emission-reducing equipment for coal- and gas-powered power plants, and air pollution controls for farms, ports and low-income communities.

Another $64 billion would help 13 million people pay premiums over the next three years for privately bought health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Medicare would gain the power to negotiate its costs for pharmaceuticals, initially in 2026 for only 10 drugs. Medicare beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket prescription costs would be limited to $2,000 annually starting in 2025, and beginning next year would pay no more than $35 monthly for insulin, the costly diabetes drug.

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a powerful political ally to Biden, noted during the White House ceremony that his late wife, Emily, who battled diabetes for three decades, would be “beyond joy” if she were alive today because of the insulin cap.

“Many seem surprised at your successes,” Clyburn told Biden. “I am not. I know you.”

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed into law a $430 billion bill that is seen as the biggest climate package in U.S. history, designed to cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions as well as lower prescription drug prices.

At a White House event, Biden was joined by Democratic leaders including Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whose support was crucial to passage of the Inflation Reduction Act along party lines after he had initially opposed a similar measure.

“Joe, we never had a doubt,” Biden said of Manchin.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Steve Holland; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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By David Shepardson and Lisa Baertlein

WASHINGTON/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s emergency board tasked with helping major freight railroads and unions end a contract negotiation stalemate delivered its recommendations on Tuesday, a White House official told Reuters.

“The president is optimistic the report will provide a good framework for successful negotiations between the parties over the next 30 days,” the official said, adding the recommendations were delivered to the White House and the parties.

Talks between major freight railroads, including Union Pacific, Berkshire Hathaway-owned BNSF and CSX, and unions representing 115,000 workers have dragged out for more than two years.

Biden appointed the three-member board in July to reduce the risk of a potential strike or lockout that could damage the fragile U.S. economy and choke supplies of food and fuel.

Railroads move everything from Amazon.com Inc packages to fuel oil and soybeans. Service shutdowns of any kind could send prices for necessities higher and upend battered U.S. supply chains.

Work stoppages are prohibited for 30 days following the issuance of the presidential emergency board (PEB) report to give the two sides time to reach a voluntary settlement. If employers or unions reject the board’s recommendations, Congress can intervene.

“To avoid a national rail shutdown, it is in the nation’s interest that the parties reach a prompt resolution,” the White House official said.

The unions and railroad groups involved in the talks did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, rail service at major U.S. seaports recently has suffered due to spreading supply-chain snarls and labor and equipment shortages.

“It is in the best interest of all stakeholders for the parties to reach agreements that provide our employees with well-deserved pay increases and prevent rail service disruptions,” Union Pacific said in a statement.

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington and Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by Chris Reese and Matthew Lewis)

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By Nandita Bose

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Cheered by a decisive win for abortion rights in a Kansas vote and eyeing November midterm elections, the White House is launching a push for abortion access that aims to influence men as well as women, sources with direct knowledge told Reuters.

The Biden administration’s three-prong playbook leans on two specific federal statutes to target states that limit abortion, communicates to voters the impact on women, and accentuates how forced pregnancies negatively affect both women and men.

Senior White House officials, advisers and abortion rights advocates have held multiple strategy and engagement calls in recent days, including an Aug. 4 call with nearly 2,000 participants, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings.

Abortion rights advocates have accused U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration in the past of being slow to act around a Supreme Court ruling in June that ended the constitutional right to abortion. Two Biden executive orders and engagement with key stakeholders led by Vice President Kamala Harris have assuaged some concerns, several told Reuters.

The White House is “really going all the way in trying to promote their message on the issue of abortion in the midterms,” said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of Georgetown University’s Institute for National and Global Health Law, who has been working with the White House. “They are hoping this will play well among suburban women and that was Biden’s edge in the presidential election.”

A senior White House official said that the administration thinks the issue could win Democrats’ support from many Republican voters during the midterms.

NEW LITIGATION STRATEGY

The Biden administration plans to lean on two specific federal statutes, which predated the abortion ruling, to fight its legal challenges – the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) and FDA preemption under the Federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act (FDCA), the sources said.

EMTALA requires hospitals that accept Medicare funds to provide medical treatment to people that arrive with an emergency medical condition. That includes providing a woman an abortion if her life is in danger https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/hhs-says-federal-law-preempts-state-abortion-bans-emergency-situations-2022-07-11.

This law is the backbone of the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the state of Idaho, but may be hard to enforce, some legal experts say https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/federal-guidance-life-saving-abortions-puts-doctors-bind-2022-07-20.

The FDA preemption argues states cannot ban an approved abortion drug because federal law preempts or overrides state law. More than 30 states have enacted legislation that restricts access to medication.

Mini Timmaraju, president, NARAL Pro-Choice America, who also is working with the White House on the issue, said the litigation strategy is key.

“It’s not just executive orders and policies, it’s (legal)enforcement,” she said.

VOTING, RESEARCH AND MESSAGING

The White House plans to replicate the success in Kansas, said the sources. It is closely tracking similar ballot initiatives in California, Kentucky, Michigan, and Vermont and gubernatorial races like Michigan’s, where abortion has become a central issue, sources said.

In Kansas, a team of the Democratic National Committee made about 30,000 phone calls and sent over 130,000 text messages to help turn out the vote.

The White House is compiling research on the physical and mental harms women face if they’re denied access to abortion, as well as the economic impact that forced pregnancies can have on men, women and families; and plans to communicate that to voters with a consistent messaging plan, sources said.

It will target men in its messaging, asking them to consider how their sisters, nieces, cousins could be affected if abortions were unavailable, and to think about the costs related to supporting an unplanned pregnancy, the sources said.

In 2020, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that women who are forced to have an unwanted baby face medical costs associated with prenatal care, birth, postpartum recovery in addition to costs associated with raising a child that exceed $9,000 a year.

Another message will be aimed at religious Americans, telling them they don’t have to change their faith to support abortion rights, they just need to resist government overreach, they said.

“The idea is to be much more disciplined and consistent in messaging to break through to the everyday American,” said one of the sources.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington; Editing by Heather Timmons and Aurora Ellis)

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By Valerie Volcovici

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With President Joe Biden expected to sign a long-negotiated climate spending bill later on Tuesday, environmental groups are turning their focus to their next fight – halting efforts to fast-track permitting for major infrastructure projects like pipelines and highways.

Green groups hailed last week’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and its $369 billion for climate and energy spending. But amid the celebration, some frontline and indigenous groups said they felt betrayed.

For Senate Democrats to win backing from their final holdout – West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – they offered compromises that would boost fossil-fuel production, including a pledge to work on legislation for speeding up the years-long process for infrastructure permits.

Some low-income communities warned that the effort could open the door to hasty approvals for polluting industries without local objections being heard.

“The permit reform bill will be harmful and damaging to environmental justice communities and will eliminate the tools that we do have available to fight back against projects,” said Dana Johnson, senior director of strategy and federal policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

A RIFT EMERGES

The celebration that followed last week’s passage in Congress of the climate bill left environmental justice campaigners cold.

Anthony Rogers-Wright, the environmental justice director at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, resigned from the board of environmental policy group Evergreen Action, which had helped shape the bill. He said he no longer wanted to be part of an organization “taking a victory lap knowing full well the pain this behavior causes.”

It was an abrupt moment after several years of unity, after national green groups vowed in 2020 to focus on addressing racial injustice in the wake of the George Floyd murder by police. Together, U.S. environmental campaigners and grassroots groups fought the deregulatory policies of former President Donald Trump.

Evergreen Action did not comment on Rogers-Wright’s resignation, but executive director Jamal Raad said the group’s work advocating for environmental justice is “far from over.”

“We will continue to work closely with leaders across the climate movement … to stop the buildout of any new fossil-fuel infrastructure and to prevent the erosion of bedrock environmental laws and community participation in the environmental review process,” Raad said.

Johnson, of the group WE ACT, said the best way to rebuild unity and trust within the environmental movement is for all groups to work together on ensuring that frontline communities are protected through the permit process reform.

Current proposals for the reform include setting a two-year limit on the permitting process for major projects under the National Environmental Policy Act, and addressing anti-infrastructure litigation that can drag on for years.

That targets the two ways local communities most often voice opposition – through filing lawsuits challenging projects, or through registering objections during the public-comment process that is a traditional part of NEPA’s approval process.

Also included in the reform proposals is a promise to fast-track the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which runs through Manchin’s state and had been nearly halted due to protests and legal challenges.

Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, the mayor of Nuiqsut City, on Alaska’s North Slope, said the roughly 500 Iñupiat residents she represents need to be consulted as the government weighs a new oil project nearby that she said could affect the community’s hunting grounds as well as their air and water quality.

“It is very important that we are engaged effectively,” she said. “When we are not at the table, the severity of impacts are amplified.”

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici in Washington; Editing by Katy Daigle and Matthew Lewis)

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NEW YORK (AP) — Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a memoir coming out this fall. “Bibi: My Story” will be published Nov. 22, three weeks after parliamentary elections are to be held in Israel.

“Born a year after the founding of the Jewish state, I have dedicated my life to combat the forces that seek its destruction and make peace with those that do not,” Netanyahu, 72, said in a statement released Tuesday by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster that publishes conservative books.

“My story is one of tragedy and triumph, setbacks and successes, lessons learned and loved ones cherished. It is woven with that of Israel, which has proven that faith and resolve can overcome insurmountable odds to forge a brilliant future.”

Other Threshold authors have included former Vice President Dick Cheney and former President Donald Trump, a close ally of Netanyahu’s while he was in the White House. Netanyahu has previously written “A Durable Peace” and “Fighting Terrorism,” among other books.

Before being ousted in elections in 2021, Netanyahu was Israel’s longest-serving leader — and its most polarizing, supported and condemned for his hard-line stance against the Palestinians. He now stands at the center of Israel’s protracted political crisis, where a cluster of parties has refused to sit with him in government because he is on trial for corruption: Israel has held five elections in less than four years.

Netanyahu’s 12-year tenure included heightened settlement building in the occupied West Bank and the presiding over three wars against the Hamas militant group ruling Gaza. He was also a leading opponent of the 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and several world powers, including the United States. Iran resumed some of its nuclear activities after Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018.

Netanyahu is the son of a prominent Zionist and educator, Benzion Netanyahu, and brother of Jonathan Netanyahu, who was killed while leading the famed 1976 rescue of hostages on a hijacked plane in Entebbe, Uganda. A longtime leader of the nationalist Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu also served as prime minister from 1996-1999.

According to Threshold, “Bibi” will range from Netanyahu’s early years to “his singular perspective on the geopolitics of the Middle East” and “his negotiations with Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Trump to secure the future of his country.”

Known as a political wizard able to outmaneuver his opponents, Netanyahu has vowed to regain his old job. But he currently faces charges in three separate cases, including allegations that while in office, he accepted gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from Hollywood film producer Arnon Milchan and Australian billionaire James Packer. He is also accused of trying to orchestrate positive coverage in a major Israeli paper in exchange for promoting legislation that would have hampered the news outlet’s chief rival, a free pro-Netanyahu daily.

Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing.

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