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6 minutes ago
Anita Dunn defends Biden's mental fitness in GOP House committee grilling
Anita Dunn, who was a senior adviser to former President Joe Biden, defended him during a five-hour closed-door deposition at the House Oversight Committee Thursday. Dunn told investigators that while she observed a "physical" decline in Biden during his four years in office, she maintained the belief that he was calling the shots and mentally engaged in decision-making at the White House. "From what I experienced and observed in the White House, President Biden made all of the important decisions expected of someone serving as the president of the United States," she told the committee, according to her prepared remarks obtained by ABC News. Dunn refused to answer any questions from reporters as she arrived and later left the deposition. But her statement indicates she believes Biden was fit to serve and West Wing staff did not usurp his power. "I did not observe White House staff making key decisions or exercising the powers of the presidency without President Biden's knowledge or consent," Dunn testified, according to the prepared remarks. "The President made it clear that decisions rested with him, and White House staff brought issues to him for him to decide." Her remarks continued, "Before scheduling a press interview or releasing statements under his name, we sought his approval, and he was an active participant in the preparation of his speeches and public I observed that President Biden aged physically during his time in office, which is something that happens to every President, he remained throughout my interactions with him fully engaged and clear in his directions and supervision. His ability to probe, to find the weakness in an argument, and to make well-informed decisions, did not change during my time in the White House." House Republicans reacted to Dunn's closed-door interview, saying Dunn "revealed" that Biden's "inner circle" decided against a cognitive test, concluding it would offer no political benefit, a source familiar with her account told ABC News. Dunn confirmed that President Biden's team decided against doing a 2024 Super Bowl interview due to information contained in the special counsel Robert Hur's report that probed Biden's handing of sensitive documents and questioned his mental fitness. She is the latest Biden official to answer questions after several former senior officials invoked their Fifth Amendment right to not answer questions.
Atlantic
7 minutes ago
- Atlantic
A Political Game Could Redefine Voting in America
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Activists and organizers like to say that the world is run by those who show up, so the fact that what Texas's Democratic legislators need to do to further their agenda is not show up is inauspicious for them. Those lawmakers, most of whom are currently holed up in Illinois, are seeking to prevent Republicans from drawing new, gerrymandered districts that would help them expand Texas's GOP delegation in the U.S. House—and perhaps give the party a better shot at holding the House in the midterms, when the sitting president's party tends to suffer (even with presidents far more popular than Donald Trump is currently). Democrats hope to deprive the legislature of quorum, thus blocking the passage of any new map. Traditionally, states redistrict after the decennial Census, and those maps endure for a decade, unless courts order changes, as they sometimes do. Texas's current maps were drawn by Republicans, and in the most recent election, they produced 25 GOP seats and 13 Democratic ones. That's 66 percent of districts with 58 percent of the total House vote for Republicans—not bad. But under pressure from the White House, Texas Republicans are now trying to squeeze out a little more juice. The attempt to redistrict is an unusual, brazen, and questionable move, though not entirely without precedent. In 2003, Texas Republicans redrew maps so as to give themselves a majority of the state's House seats. Democrats, dubbed the 'Killer Ds,' fled the state to prevent a quorum. They were initially successful, but a later attempt to prevent a quorum failed when a member broke ranks, and a new map passed. Texas Democrats are hoping they can learn the lessons of that attempt and win this time. They have a strategy, they have support from governors out of state, and, as Politico notes, they have the chance to run out the clock on a new map before a December deadline. Still, if Democrats had any better options, they'd take them. Maintaining caucus discipline for the next four months will be no easy task. And that's assuming some of the more draconian ideas offered to break them fail. State Attorney General Ken Paxton wants to have the Democrats removed from office for their absence. (Experts say this is legally dubious, and the idea of Paxton enforcing rectitude and duty is grimly hilarious.) U.S. Senator John Cornyn, whose reelection hopes are teetering precariously in a GOP primary against Paxton, tried to one-up that by requesting that the FBI help locate the Democratic fugitives. (Never mind that they haven't obviously committed any crimes.) All things being equal, legislators skipping sessions to prevent a state government from accomplishing business isn't a good thing. Oregon Democrats were so sick of state GOP legislators doing so that they enacted a law blocking chronic absentees from running for reelection in the next term. Then again, opportunistic mid-decade redistricting isn't a good thing, either. Gerrymanders produce worse governance because they are less representative; they also feed polarization by making elected officials dependent less on the general electorate and more on primary voters. And what's happening in Texas has already spread further. As soon as Republicans began talking about a Texas redistricting effort, Democrats in states including California and New York threatened to redraw maps to retaliate and push out Republicans. Now the GOP is looking at other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to gain more seats. This is a disheartening example of what I've called total politics, in which officials try to use every legal tool to gain any advantage, no matter the long-term consequences. In this worldview, what matters is what's possible, not what's wise. How successful these efforts outside Texas will be is not clear. Hoosier State Republicans appear unenthusiastic about redistricting, though the White House seems to believe it can twist their arm. Democrats, meanwhile, have challenges of their own. By some measures, the map over the past two elections has had a slight Democratic advantage. Moreover, as my colleague Russell Berman reports, Democrats have spent the past decade pushing good-government reforms such as independent redistricting commissions that are designed to make extreme gerrymandering more difficult. People such as former Attorney General Eric Holder, who has been the leader of Democratic advocacy for fairer districts, are now embracing the tactics they shunned and trying, somewhat painfully, to rationalize them. The explanations really come down to this: Democrats believe that they are losing an existential battle and must do whatever they can. But what they can do is limited. Gerrymanders that use race as a basis are unconstitutional, but gerrymanders that use partisanship are not—although, in the South, Democratic affiliation is often a good proxy for Black voters. Chief Justice John Roberts has written that partisan gerrymanders are unfair, but the Supreme Court ruled that it has no authority to do anything about them. Roberts recommended that states handle the issue on their own. This is where gerrymandering becomes a devilish, self-perpetuating problem. Voters who want to stop gerrymanders at the state level find their path blocked by … gerrymandering. Take North Carolina, which went from a 7–7 split in the U.S. House to a 10–4 GOP edge under a new map enacted ahead of last year's elections. State legislators have also gerrymandered their own maps, so that although Democrats won narrow majorities of all the votes cast for both the state House and state Senate, they hold only two-fifths of the seats in both chambers. For decades, the Voting Rights Act has provided a path by which Black voters are guaranteed representation, through the drawing of majority-minority districts that would be otherwise considered unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. (Texas has one of the highest proportions of Black voters among states.) Yet as the law professor Richard Hasen writes in Slate, the Supreme Court now appears to be considering throwing out majority-minority districts as unconstitutional. This week marks the 60th anniversary of the VRA, but after years of hollowing out by the Roberts Court, the VRA seems to be nearing irrelevance. The Trump administration has indicated that the Justice Department will move away from prosecuting racial discrimination in voting and toward pursuing bogus allegations of voter fraud, while the Court may soon eliminate the ability of individuals and outside groups to bring claims under the law. President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Texan who signed the VRA into law, once said, 'This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless.' If the shameless use of total politics to game districts is successful, it threatens to strip the meaning from that right. Today's News President Donald Trump's new tariff policy took effect at midnight, raising the overall average effective tariff rate to more than 18 percent, the highest since 1934. Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday that 'billions of dollars' will begin flowing into the U.S., largely from countries he says have 'taken advantage of the United States for many years.' Trump has directed the Commerce Department to change how the U.S. Census Bureau counts the population, aiming to exclude undocumented immigrants. A federal judge ordered a two-week pause on construction at Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention center after a lawsuit raised concerns about its impact on the Everglades ecosystem. Evening Read My Brother and the Relationship That Could Have Been By Liz Krieger The day my brother died, the dogwoods were in bloom. I sat by my bedroom windowsill, painting my nails. Junior prom was just hours away. I was 16. My brother, Alex, was 18—just 22 months older than me. The car accident happened on a highway in upstate New York in the early morning. My brother was driving a group of his college classmates to an ultimate-frisbee tournament. Over time, my family has settled on the theory that he fell asleep at the wheel, though for a while my parents thought it was mechanical failure. They couldn't bear the alternative. The car flipped, and the roll bar above the driver's seat broke his neck. Everyone else walked away. This May marked 33 years after his death. Since it happened, I've been thinking in numbers: days, months, eventually years. It's a compulsion, really, this ongoing tally. My own private math. I have just turned 50, an age unimaginable to that 16-year-old girl, and I will have been without him for more than twice as long as I knew him. Here's a story problem: If I live to 80, what percentage of my life will I have spent as someone's sister? What percentage as no one's sister? More From The Atlantic Culture Break Explore. Last summer, Alan Taylor compiled photos of people keeping cool in the heat. Play our daily crossword.
CNBC
7 minutes ago
- CNBC
Stock futures are little changed as Dow tries to recover from Thursday's losses: Live updates
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during morning trading on August 05, 2025 in New York City. U.S. stock futures were little changed on Thursday night after the Dow Jones Industrial Average logged its second losing day in the past three. Futures tied to the blue-chip index rose 39 points, or 0.1%. S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures both climbed 0.1%. In Thursday's regular trading, the 30-stock Dow closed down about 224 points, or 0.5%, while the S&P 500 ended the session off 0.08%. The Nasdaq Composite outperformed and added nearly 0.4%. The blue-chip Dow saw some sharp swings during the day, up 305 points at its high and down nearly 394 points at its low. President Donald Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs took effect at midnight on Thursday, with some of the steepest duties including Syria's 41% and the 40% rate facing Laos and Myanmar. Stocks initially rose Thursday morning after Trump announced a day earlier that his 100% tariff on imported semiconductor chips would not affect companies that are "building in the United States." Going forward, the main area of focus for investors continues to be watching Trump's trade policies play out, said Thomas Martin, senior portfolio manager at Globalt Investments. "There's less turbulence with tariffs, but there's still plenty of turbulence. There's still plenty of questions out there as to how they're going to affect companies' decision making, supply chains, costs, margins, pricing, how it's going to affect consumers and whatnot," Martin told CNBC. "So I think there's still a lot of a lot of uncertainty associated with the tariffs. It's still the most important thing, at this point, that just has to be worked out." On Thursday afternoon, the president announced that he has selected Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, as his pick to replace Adriana Kugler on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Miran will serve out the rest of Kugler's term, which expires in January, following her resignation last Friday. The major averages are on pace for weekly gains, with the S&P 500 up 1.6% and the Dow on pace for a 0.9% advance. The Nasdaq is poised for a 2.9% gain. On Friday, traders will watch for earnings from Under Armour , AMC Networks and Wendy's .
