Daily Political Briefing
July 13, 2021, 5:41 p.m. ETtranscript
‘The 21st-Century Jim Crow Assault Is Real,’ Biden Says
President Biden spoke out forcefully against Republican efforts to curtail voting rights across the country and vowed that his administration would seek to limit their impact.
Some things in America should be simple and straightforward. Perhaps the most important of those things, the most fundamental of those things, is the right to vote. The right to vote freely. The democratic threshold is liberty. With it, anything’s possible without it, nothing, nothing. And for our democracy in the work and to deliver our work and our people, it’s up to all of us to protect that right. This year alone, 17 states have enacted, not just proposed but enacted, 28 new laws to make it harder for Americans to vote, not to mention — and catch this — nearly 400 additional bills Republican members of the state legislatures are trying to pass. The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real. It’s unrelenting. And we’re going to challenge it vigorously. The 2020 election was the most scrutinized election ever in American history. No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards. The big lie is just that, a big lie. Time and again, we’ve weathered threats to the right to vote in free and fair elections, and each time, we found a way to overcome. That’s what we must do today.
WASHINGTON — President Biden made an impassioned case for voting rights on Tuesday, excoriating a Republican-led cascade of restrictive voting laws around the country as “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War” and calling for a “coalition of Americans of every background and political party” to protect the right to vote.
But his rhetoric immediately collided with reality: Scores of Republican-led bills meant to restrict voting access are working their way through statehouses across the country, and two ambitious pieces of legislation meant to expand voting rights currently have no path to adoption in Congress. On top of it all, Mr. Biden has bucked rising pressure from Democrats to support eliminating the filibuster, which would allow the voting-rights bills to pass the Senate with a simple majority.
Instead, Mr. Biden used the bully pulpit to frame the issue as a moral reckoning that has the potential to derail American democracy, and confronted the limits of his power as president to deliver on one of his most consequential promises.
“We’ll be asking my Republican friends in Congress and states and cities and counties to stand up for God’s sake,” Mr. Biden said. “And help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote. Have you no shame?”
Mr. Biden also spoke more directly than he has in the past about the conspiracy theories about the election, hatched and spread by his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, as a “darker and more sinister” underbelly of American politics. Mr. Biden did not mention Mr. Trump by name, but instead warned that “bullies and merchants of fear” have posed an existential threat to democracy.
“No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards,” Mr. Biden said. “The big lie is just that: A big lie.”
Aside from reckoning with the doubt Mr. Trump and his associates have spread about the veracity of the election, Mr. Biden was in Philadelphia to reassure Democrats who say he has not done enough to deliver on a promise to make voting rights a central theme of his presidency. His speech came as Democrats see a worrying increase in efforts by Republican-led state legislatures to restrict voting, along with court rulings that would make it harder to fight back against encroachments on voting rights.
A Supreme Court ruling this month weakened the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court invalidated its major provision in 2013. Mr. Biden said a year ago that strengthening the act would be one of his first priorities upon taking office. On Tuesday, he sought to put the onus on lawmakers.
“The court’s decision, as harmful as it is, does not limit the Congress’s ability to repair the damage done,” Mr. Biden said. “As soon as Congress passes the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, I will sign it and let the whole world see it,” he added, referring to the two Democratic bills seeking to expand voting rights.
But his rallying cry only underscored the impossibility of the task. Neither bill currently has a path to his desk amid unified Republican opposition. Republicans filibustered the broad elections overhaul known as the For the People Act last month, and are expected to do the same if Democrats try to bring up the other measure, named for a former congressman and civil rights icon, which would restore parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Activists who had hoped Mr. Biden would stake out a public position on eliminating the filibuster to get those bills through the Senate got their answer on Tuesday: “I’m not filibustering now,” Mr. Biden told reporters who shouted questions at him after his speech.
“It was strange to hear,” Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for the anti-filibuster group Fix Our Senate, said after watching Mr. Biden’s speech. “He did a great job of laying out the problem but then stopped short of talking about the actual solution that would be needed to passing legislation to address the problem.”
Rev. Al Sharpton, who attended the speech in Philadelphia and spoke to the president shortly afterward, said that he had praised Mr. Biden for framing the issue as a “21st century Jim Crow assault” on voting rights, but said he told the president he still needed to go further on the filibuster: “He said ‘we’re still working through our position on that,’” Mr. Sharpton said.
Joanna Lydgate, the cofounder of the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization advocating for secure elections, said in an interview that Mr. Biden effectively captured the nature of what Democrats feel is an assault on democracy.
“He did not pull any punches,” Ms. Lydgate said. “He was very clear that our country is under attack, our democracy is under attack, and we are at a turning point in our country.”
Mr. Biden’s speech came as a group of Democrats in the Texas Legislature fled their state on Monday and traveled to Washington to prevent State House Republicans from attaining a quorum, a temporary way to delay state lawmakers from taking up restrictive voting measures proposed there.
Both measures would ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; prohibit election officials from proactively sending out absentee ballot applications to voters who have not requested them; add new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; limit third-party ballot collection; increase the criminal penalties for election workers who run afoul of regulations; limit what assistance can be provided to voters; and greatly expand the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers.
Representative James Talarico, the youngest member of the Texas State Legislature at 32 years old, said the group of Democrats had come to Washington, in part, to pressure Mr. Biden to do more.
“I’m incredibly proud not only as a Democrat but also an American of what President Biden has accomplished in his first few months in office,” Mr. Talarico said. “But protecting our democracy should’ve been at the very top of the list, because without it none of these issues matter.”
The restrictions mirror key provisions of a restrictive law passed in Georgia earlier this year, which went even further to assert Republican control over the State Election Board and empower the G.O.P. to suspend county election officials. In June, the Department of Justice sued Georgia over the law, the first significant move of the Biden administration to challenge voter restrictions at the state level.
Outside the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, 47 Texas Democratic state representatives appealed for passage of the For the People Act, which would aim to rein in state restrictions on voting. Back in Austin, Republicans vented their anger and the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, vowed to call “special session after special session after special session” until an election bill is passed.
The group is set to meet later in the week with Vice President Kamala Harris and Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who has opposed weakening the filibuster to pass voting measures.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.
Just days after President Biden called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and demanded that he act to shut down ransomware groups that are attacking American targets, the most aggressive of the groups suddenly went off-line early Tuesday morning, terminating negotiations over ransom payments and even bringing down the page where it boasted about its most successful extortion schemes.
The mystery is who made that happen.
The group, called REvil, short for “Ransomware evil,” has been identified by U.S. intelligence agencies as responsible for the attack that brought down one of America’s largest beef producers, JBS. Two weeks after Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin met in Geneva last month, REvil took credit for a hack that affected thousands of businesses around the world over the July 4 holiday.
That latest attack led to Mr. Biden’s ultimatum in a phone call on Friday to the Russian president. Later, Mr. Biden said “we expect them to act,” and when asked by a reporter later if he would take down the group’s servers if Mr. Putin did not, the president simply said, “Yes.”
He may have done exactly that. But that is only one possible explanation for what happened around 1 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, when the group’s sites on the dark web suddenly disappeared. Gone was the publicly available “happy blog’’ that the group maintained, listing its victims, and internet security groups said the custom-made sites where victims negotiate with REvil over how much they will pay to get their data unlocked were also missing.
While their disappearance was celebrated by many who see ransomware as a new scourge, one that Mr. Biden has called a critical national security threat, it left some of the group’s targets in the lurch — unable to pay the ransom to get their data back and their businesses back up and running.
“What’s the plan for the victims?” asked Kurtis Minder, the chief executive of Groupsense, a digital risk protection company that was negotiating with the extortionists on behalf of a regional law firm whose data was stolen.
There were three main theories floating around about why REvil, which seemed to revel in the publicity and reaped huge ransoms — including $11 million from JBS — suddenly disappeared.
One is that Mr. Biden ordered the United States Cyber Command, working with domestic law enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I., to bring the group’s sites down. Cyber Command proved last year that it could do just that, paralyzing a ransomware group that it feared might turn its skills to freezing up voter registrations or other election data in the 2020 election.
The second theory is that Mr. Putin ordered the group’s sites taken down. If so, that would be a gesture toward heeding Mr. Biden’s warning, which he offered, in more general terms, when the two leaders met on June 16 in Geneva.
And a third is that REvil decided that the heat was too intense, and took the sites down itself to avoid becoming caught in the crossfire between the American and Russian presidents. That is what another Russian-based group, Darkside, did after the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, the U.S. company that had to shut down the gasoline and jet fuel running up the East Coast in May.
But many experts think that Darkside’s going-out-of-business move was digital theater, and that all of the key ransomware talent would reassemble under a different name. If so, the same could happen with REvil.
Just a few months ago, ransomware was considered largely a criminal problem. But after the attack on Colonial Pipeline, Mr. Biden and his advisers began to declare that attacks that threaten critical infrastructure constitute a major national security threat.
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The Morning newsletter broke down the major themes in the restrictive state voting measures that Republicans are passing in state legislatures around the country.
Increase partisan control
So far, at least 14 states have enacted laws that give partisan officials more control over election oversight — potentially allowing those politicians to overturn an election result, as Donald J. Trump urged state-level Republicans to do last year after he lost his bid for re-election.
In Georgia, a Republican-controlled commission now has the power to remove local election officials, and has already removed some. Arkansas has empowered a state board to “take over and conduct elections” in a county if the G.O.P.-dominated legislature deems it is necessary. Arizona Republicans took away the Democratic secretary of state’s authority over election lawsuits and gave it to the Republican attorney general.
It’s not hard to imagine how Republican legislators could use some of these new rules to disqualify enough ballots to flip the result of a very close election — like, say, last year’s presidential election in Arizona or Georgia. The election-administration provisions, The Times’s Nate Cohn has written, are “the most insidious and serious threat to democracy” in the new bills.
Making voting harder
Many Republican politicians believe that they are less likely to win elections when voter turnout is high and have passed laws that generally make voting more difficult.
Some of the new laws restrict early voting: Iowa, for example, has shortened the early-voting period to 20 days from 29 and reduced poll hours on Election Day. Other states have made it harder to vote by mail: Florida has reduced the hours for ballot drop-off boxes and will also require voters to request a new mail ballot for each election.
Notably, some of the provisions are targeted at areas and groups that lean Democratic — like Black, Latino and younger voters. Georgia has lowered the number of drop boxes allowed for the metropolitan Atlanta area to an estimated 23 from 94 — while increasing drop boxes in some other parts of the state. Texas Republicans hope to ban drive-through voting and other measures that Harris County, a Democratic stronghold, adopted last year. Montana has ruled that student IDs are no longer a sufficient form of voter identification.
And the impact?
That’s not so easy to figure out. The laws certainly have the potential to accomplish their goal of reducing Democratic turnout more than Republican turnout. In closely divided states like Arizona, Florida or Georgia — or in a swing congressional district — even a small effect could determine an election.
David Leonhardt and
Among the more than 500 people arrested so far in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, there have been several married couples and any number of parent-and-children teams. There have even been sets of siblings charged.
On Tuesday, however, in what seemed to be the first move of its kind, the Justice Department unsealed a complaint against almost the entire Munn family of Texas, accusing the father, the mother and three of their children of illegally breaching the Capitol through a broken window.
Prosecutors say that Thomas Munn, the family’s patriarch, began writing about going to Washington for a pro-Trump rally in late December, posting an image on Facebook with a caption reading, “POTUS HAS REQUESTED YOUR ATTENDANCE WASHINGTON DC JANUARY 6TH 2021.”
Then on Jan. 5, court papers say, Mr. Munn posted another Facebook image showing what appears to be the family’s car and trailer on the road from their home in Borger, Texas. A homemade sign is visible on the back of the trailer reading, “D.C. Bound We are Q,” in an apparent reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
According to the complaint, the Munn parents and their children Dawn, Joshua and Kayli entered the Capitol through a broken window at around 2:25 p.m. on Jan. 6 and took what amounted to a brief tour of the building, breaking nothing and harming no one. Afterward, court papers say, they all posed for a photo with another family member — a minor child — who was not charged in the case. The exact ages of the children were not released.
The charged family members were arrested in Borger on Tuesday and could not be immediately reached for comment. A lawyer had yet to file an appearance in their case .
Prosecutors say that investigators tracked the family down with the help of a tipster and interviews with at least three of the Munn children’s teachers. The F.B.I. also obtained private Facebook conversations that some members of the family had with their friends.
For example, on the day of the riot, according to the complaint, Dawn Munn sent a Facebook message to a friend saying, “We went in and stormed capital!” In another message to a different person, Dawn Munn wrote, “We were in capital!!…I do mean IN the building!!”
That same day, Joshua Munn wrote a Facebook message to someone named Joel, prosecutors say, describing how he and his family had crawled through the window and saying it was “super cool.”
Joel was not entirely impressed, court papers suggest.
His response: “Oh so u broke in?”
President Biden intends to nominate Dr. Rahul Gupta, who led West Virginia’s response to a devastating opioid crisis, to run the National Office of Drug Control Policy — a choice that may generate opposition from advocates for people with substance abuse problems.
If confirmed by the Senate, he would become the first medical doctor to serve as the nation’s “drug czar” since the role was created in 1988. Dr. Gupta is currently the chief medical and health officer at March of Dimes.
White House officials confirmed Mr. Biden’s choice of Dr. Gupta, which was reported earlier in The Washington Post. The president is expected to make his announcement later on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will publish statistics on drug overdose deaths that, by all indications, will shatter previous records. Overdose deaths rose by nearly 30 percent over the 12-month period that ended in November, from more than 71,000 to over 90,000, according to preliminary federal data released last month.
As West Virginia’s commissioner of public health and state health officer from 2015 to 2018, Dr. Gupta won praise for his aggressive response to the opioid crisis. Mr. Biden’s choice of Dr. Gupta may also be politically strategic: He is an ally of Senator Manchin, the moderate West Virginia Democrat whose vote is crucial to the president’s legislative agenda.
But Dr. Gupta also garnered criticism for failing to stop the city of Charleston from closing its needle exchange program — a key component of the strategy known as “harm reduction,” which has been embraced by the Biden administration.
Instead of helping drug users achieve abstinence, harm reduction aims to reduce their risk of dying or acquiring infectious diseases like AIDS, including by giving them sterile equipment.
While Dr. Gupta was health commissioner, his department issued a report that found fault with the Charleston program and led to its decertification after it had already shut it down. The program had been nationally recognized, but was criticized by the city’s mayor at the time. Public health experts said its closure had a chilling effect on other programs, and kept some from getting off the ground.
“The Biden administration has made enhancing evidence-based harm reduction programs a priority, and it’s my sincere hope that Dr. Gupta will embrace that policy and show clear leadership on that issue,” said Robin Pollini, an associate professor of behavioral medicine of psychiatry at West Virginia University, who has in the past been critical of Dr. Gupta.
In a 2018 interview with West Virginia public broadcasting, Dr. Gupta spoke out against the closure, saying it was “not in the best interest of the community” when needle exchange programs like Charleston’s are shut down “reactively.”
“It plays into that stigma and is more harmful long-term than it is beneficial,” the outlet quoted him as saying.
The son of an Indian diplomat, Dr. Gupta was born in India and grew up in Washington, D.C. He completed medical school at the University of Delhi when he was 21, according to a biography supplied by the White House.
The drug control policy office was created by Congress as part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.
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Jill Biden, the first lady, will travel to Japan next week to attend the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, scheduled for July 23, her office said on Tuesday.
It will be the first solo trip abroad for Dr. Biden, whose traveling schedule currently outpaces her husband’s. Dr. Biden has been a frequent traveler in service of promoting the Biden administration’s coronavirus vaccine efforts domestically, and her appearance in Tokyo comes as the host city extended a state of emergency in response to a spike in coronavirus cases.
Officials have barred spectators from most of the events and urged residents to watch the proceedings on television at home. The declaration of the state of emergency disrupted carefully laid plans to revive the Games, which have already been delayed a year because of the pandemic.
Mr. Biden will not attend the Games, but he has voiced his support for them to the country’s prime minister, Yoshihide Suga. During an April visit to the White House, Mr. Suga told reporters that Mr. Biden “once again expressed his support” to host the events.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters last month that the White House would send a delegation from the United States, “but we will continue to also convey the public health guidelines and guidance that we’ve been delivering out there about only essential travel.”
The East Wing did not have further information about what the first lady would be doing while in Tokyo, and administration officials said the White House was still in negotiations with the Japanese over how much access she and her delegation would have to the Games.
A Labor Department report on Tuesday that showed prices rising at their fastest monthly pace since 2008 in June presents a new political challenge for President Biden’s economic team, which has quietly concluded that rising prices could linger in the economy slightly longer than administration officials initially expected.
Mr. Biden’s aides continue to say that the current rate of inflation — a 5.4 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index from a year ago, according to the data released on Tuesday — is temporary and largely a product of special circumstances from the pandemic. They point to snarled supply chains in areas like automobile manufacturing, where a shortage of semiconductor chips is slowing production and contributing to a rapid rise in used car and truck prices. Used vehicles accounted for one third of June’s price increases, the Labor Department said.
Administration officials did not appear to be expecting that magnitude of a surge for June. But they continued to insist on Tuesday that the pressures were not going to lead to 1970s-style calamity.
“Headline inflation is up but we need to look under the hood to understand what’s really going on,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Used cares, new cars, auto parts, and car rentals accounted for 60% of month-over-month price increases.”
The Biden team sees early signs that the used-car market is beginning to cool off and that other supply pressures, like a jump in lumber prices earlier this year, were also starting to ease, an official said Monday on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the inflation report publicly.
Officials were also hopeful that consumers were beginning to shift more of their spending from goods that have been affected by the supply chain disruptions, like lumber and cars, toward services like dining and tourism.
The official repeated the administration’s long-running view that the sharp uptick in prices this spring and summer was the product of those supply constraints, and that it will prove temporary and not the start of a sustained cycle of wage and price increases like the 1970s.
The administration also continues to view the price increases as being inflated by data quirks given that prices fell substantially last year during the depths of the recession, making their rebound this year look larger than it actually is. Those “base effects,” as they are known, are still affecting the inflation data, though they began to moderate in June.
Still, administration officials have subtly shifted their views on how long the so-called transitory price effects will linger in the economy, according to two administration officials, even before this month’s report was released.
In Mr. Biden’s official budget request, released this spring, officials forecast an inflation rate that stayed near historical averages for 2021 and never rose past 2.3 percent per year over the course of a decade. But internally and publicly, administration officials have now begun to acknowledge the possibility that higher inflation could stay with the economy for a year or more.
A recent post from Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, titled “Historical Parallels to Today’s Inflationary Episode,” concludes that the past period of inflation most comparable to today’s economy in the United States came immediately after World War II, when supply disruptions drove up prices. That period, the post notes, lasted about two years.
President Biden will nominate Jeff Flake, the former Republican senator from Arizona, to serve as ambassador to Turkey, the White House announced on Tuesday, placing a prominent, moderate Republican in line to assume a high-profile diplomatic role.
Mr. Flake, who became one the most vocal Republican critics of Donald J. Trump during Mr. Trump’s presidency, had been largely absent from the national stage after stepping away from politics in 2019. In 2017, he announced he would not seek re-election the following year, citing the changing face of the G.O.P., which he said had grown too accepting of Mr. Trump’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior.
Since then, Mr. Flake has rotated between academic fellowships at Harvard, Arizona State University and Brigham Young University. Mr. Flake was also one of a number of former Republican congressmen who endorsed Mr. Biden for president in 2020.
The decision to nominate Mr. Flake comes at a moment in which the Biden administration is aggressively pursuing bipartisan support for a number of legislative priorities and seeking to represent itself as eager to work with members of the opposing party in the process.
While it was rumored for some time that the president was considering a handful of moderate Republicans for ambassadorships to closely-allied countries in Europe and elsewhere, the selection of Mr. Flake to oversee relations with Turkey demonstrates that the administration is confident that the former senator can navigate difficult diplomatic ties with a country that has turned toward authoritarianism under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Despite being a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey has repeatedly taken actions in recent years that the United States and other European countries have viewed as at odds with the alliance’s foreign policy and national security goals.
If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Flake would bring to the role experience working in Africa before his election to Congress, both as a Mormon missionary in South Africa and as the director of the Foundation for Democracy in Namibia during the nation’s push for independence from South Africa.
“Given the strategic importance of the United States’ relationship with our longtime NATO ally, the Republic of Turkey, I am honored and humbled by the trust President Biden has placed in me with this ambassadorial nomination,” Mr. Flake said in a statement accepting the nomination on Medium.
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A former Chicago bank executive was convicted on Tuesday of financial crimes related to his facilitation of millions of dollars in high-risk loans to Paul Manafort, all in an effort to obtain a coveted position in the Trump administration.
A jury in New York unanimously found the banker, Stephen M. Calk, 54, guilty of one count each of financial institution bribery and conspiracy to commit financial institution bribery.
The charges stemmed from Mr. Calk’s use of his position as chairman and chief executive of the Federal Savings Bank to push the bank to give $16 million in loans in 2016 to Mr. Manafort, who served as chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign during a key stretch.
Just after the election, Mr. Calk sent Mr. Manafort a list of 10 positions ranked in order of preference, including Treasury secretary, commerce secretary and defense secretary, as well as 19 ambassadorships, which he also ranked, starting with Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
In a statement after the conviction, Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said Mr. Calk “used the federally-insured bank he ran as his personal piggy bank to try and buy himself prestige and power.”
At the time of the loans, Mr. Manafort was trying to stave off foreclosure on several properties and was pressed for cash to support an opulent lifestyle after a stream of payments from Ukrainian consulting clients ran dry.
Mr. Manafort made two calls on Mr. Calk’s behalf in late 2016 to officials on Mr. Trump’s transition team, urging them to appoint Mr. Calk secretary of the Army, prosecutors said. Mr. Calk was interviewed at Trump Tower in 2017 for a job as under secretary of the Army, but was not hired.
Mr. Manafort, 72, was identified as a co-conspirator in the case against Mr. Calk, but he was not charged. He was, however, convicted of 10 felonies in 2018, including bank fraud related to the loans, in two cases brought by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
Mr. Manafort’s seven-year prison sentence disappeared in December when Mr. Trump pardoned him.
Mr. Calk, who is scheduled to be sentenced in January, faces a maximum of 35 years in prison for the two charges.
Democrats in Iowa have been increasingly locked out of power, and with major offices on the ballot next year, the party’s bench is thin. On Tuesday, one of the state’s best known Democrats, J.D. Scholten, took himself out of the running for governor or U.S. Senate in 2022, instead saying he will work for a progressive group that seeks rural votes in battleground states.
Mr. Scholten nearly defeated former Representative Steve King in 2018, setting up Mr. King’s eventual demise as the House’s most outspoken white nationalist. Mr. Scholten considered running for statewide office in 2020, but also passed that year.
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, is expected to seek a second term in 2022. Senator Charles E. Grassley, also a Republican, has said he would announce in the fall whether he will run for an eighth term next year, when he would be 89 on Election Day.
The lone Democrat in Iowa’s congressional delegation, Representative Cindy Axne, who survived major losses for her party last year, is Democrats’ top choice for a statewide run. She has said she is considering challenging for either Mr. Grassley’s or Ms. Reynolds’s seat, but has made no public decision. Other Democrats eyeing statewide runs are State Representative Ras Smith, who has declared his candidacy for governor, and Rob Sands, the state auditor.
Winning either seat will be a tough slog for the party, which in 2020 lost two congressional seats in Iowa and a U.S. Senate race.
Mr. Scholten came within three percentage points of defeating the divisive Mr. King in a deep red district in 2018. The Republican establishment in Washington and Des Moines, fearing for the loss of the seat in 2020, backed a more conventional candidate in that year’s primary, who ousted Mr. King and easily cruised to victory in the general election against Mr. Scholten.
Now, Mr. Scholten, 41, a former professional baseball player, will become executive director of RuralVote.org, a super PAC that aims to “improve the Democratic brand in rural communities” and counter what it calls Republican “misinformation.’’ In 2020, the group’s first election cycle, it raised $313,000 and says it placed 42,500 yard signs in rural areas. For the midterms, it is targeting 39 counties in battleground states.
“Democrats need to stop ignoring rural voters,” Mr. Scholten said in a statement. “One of the reasons why we continue to lose statehouses across the country is because we’re ceding rural America to Republicans. If we want to win over hearts and minds for progressive policies everywhere, we need to up our game in rural America big time.”
A federal judge in Michigan held a nearly six-hour hearing on Monday seeking to determine whether nine pro-Trump lawyers — including Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood — should face sanctions for making unverified arguments in a lawsuit that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The judge, Linda V. Parker, repeatedly pressed the lawyers about how — and even whether — they had verified the statements of several witnesses who took part in the suit by filing sworn statements making claims of widespread fraud and tampering with voting machines. Several times, Judge Parker expressed astonishment at the lawyers’ answers, telling them they had a responsibility to perform “minimal due diligence” and calling some the lawsuit’s claims “fantastical.”
After the election, Ms. Powell, a Dallas-based lawyer, led an effort to attack President Biden’s victory by filing several suits in courts across the country claiming that tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with by a bizarre set of characters — from the financier George Soros to Venezuelan intelligence agents — in what she baselessly described as a covert plot to flip votes from President Donald J. Trump to Mr. Biden.
Dominion subsequently filed a defamation suit against Ms. Powell and others, including Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, accusing them of launching “a viral disinformation campaign” about the election and seeking damages of more than $1 billion.
Judge Parker, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, is considering a separate motion, filed by the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit, on whether to levy punishments against Ms. Powell, Mr. Wood and the other lawyers that could include disbarment. A ruling is not expected on the motion until later this summer.
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President Biden took office with bold warnings for Russia and China about human rights as he pressed democracies around the world to stand up against autocracy. But this week, he is facing a string of similar challenges in America’s neighborhood.
On Monday, a day after huge protests across Cuba, Mr. Biden accused officials there of “enriching themselves” instead of protecting people from the coronavirus pandemic, repression and economic suffering.
An hour later, the State Department announced it was revoking visas that had allowed 100 Nicaraguan politicians, judges and their family members to travel to the United States, as punishment for undermining democracy, suppressing peaceful protests or abusing human rights.
By early afternoon, Mr. Biden refocused on Haiti, urging its political leaders to “come together for the good of their country,” less than a week after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bed.
“The United States stands ready to continue to provide assistance,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House. He promised more details on Haiti and Cuba later: “Stay tuned,” he said.
The turmoil presents a potential crisis closer to home, with a possible exodus of Haitians as the Biden administration contends with a surge of migrants at the southwestern border. It is also forcing the White House to focus on the region more broadly after years of indifference — or limited attention — from previous Republican and Democratic administrations.
But U.S. influence began waning in the region over the past decade, as it turned toward fighting terrorism in the Middle East and as Russia and especially China moved in to finance projects and offer political support and other incentives.
Ryan C. Berg, a senior fellow and scholar in the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that China was now the top trading partner for at least eight Latin American nations, and that 19 countries in the region were participating in Beijing’s extensive infrastructure and investment project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative.
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