Latest news with #Mfume
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Lynch, Mfume enter race for top Oversight Committee Dem
Two additional Democrats, Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) and Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), on Thursday launched their bids for the top Democratic spot on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Mfume, in a letter announcing his candidacy, stated he was 'prepared to meet that moment; as my lifelong friend, successor, and predecessor Elijah Cummings did when he was Oversight Chair under the first twisted Trump administration.' 'The dismantling of our democracy at the hands of the Trump administration and his congressional enablers demands Committee leadership that meets this moment with vigor, experience, principle, and resolve,' Mfume wrote in a 'Dear Colleague' letter. In a letter by Lynch obtained by Punchbowl News, he highlighted his work with the late Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who stepped back from his daily responsibilities as ranking member earlier this year due to his battle with cancer. Connolly died earlier this month. 'As we all know, Gerry Connolly was all about the work, and I am honored to have earned his trust and endorsement to continue this important work and lead Oversight Democrats at a moment when our decisions and our actions over the coming months may determine the course of our American experiment,' Lynch said in his letter. He also mentioned his more than two decades of experience on the Oversight Committee, which would make him 'well-prepared to manage an extremely talented group of Oversight Democrats as we fight like hell against every action taken by the Trump Administration to curtail individual rights, dismantle our democratic institutions and unload the costs of reckless economic plans onto the backs of America's workers and vulnerable communities.' Earlier on Thursday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) was the first Democrat to officially announce his candidacy. 'From the Trump administration's attacks on the rule of law, weaponizing the government against its critics, and decimating the services our constituents rely upon–there is a clear and immediate threat to our democracy,' Garcia wrote in a 'Dear Colleague' letter. 'As citizens, patriots, and members of Congress, we must organize, fight back, and defend the principles of freedom, equality, and justice. I'm ready to help lead that fight.' Both Mfume, 76, and Lynch, 70, had voiced interest in the role before announcing their bids. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), 44, has also expressed interest. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who lost her bid for the position to Connolly late last year, passed on running earlier this month. The House Democratic Caucus is slated to hold the election for the ranking member position on June 24. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Lynch, Mfume enter race for top Oversight Committee Dem
Two additional Democrats, Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) and Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), on Thursday launched their bids for the top Democratic spot on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Mfume, in a letter announcing his candidacy, stated he was 'prepared to meet that moment; as my lifelong friend, successor, and predecessor Elijah Cummings did when he was Oversight Chair under the first twisted Trump administration.' 'The dismantling of our democracy at the hands of the Trump administration and his congressional enablers demands Committee leadership that meets this moment with vigor, experience, principle, and resolve,' Mfume wrote in a 'Dear Colleague' letter. In a letter by Lynch obtained by Punchbowl News, he highlighted his work with the late Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who stepped back from his daily responsibilities as ranking member earlier this year due to his battle with cancer. Connolly died earlier this month. 'As we all know, Gerry Connolly was all about the work, and I am honored to have earned his trust and endorsement to continue this important work and lead Oversight Democrats at a moment when our decisions and our actions over the coming months may determine the course of our American experiment,' Lynch said in his letter. He also mentioned his more than two decades of experience on the Oversight Committee, which would make him 'well-prepared to manage an extremely talented group of Oversight Democrats as we fight like hell against every action taken by the Trump Administration to curtail individual rights, dismantle our democratic institutions and unload the costs of reckless economic plans onto the backs of America's workers and vulnerable communities.' Earlier on Thursday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) was the first Democrat to officially announce his candidacy. 'From the Trump administration's attacks on the rule of law, weaponizing the government against its critics, and decimating the services our constituents rely upon–there is a clear and immediate threat to our democracy,' Garcia wrote in a 'Dear Colleague' letter. 'As citizens, patriots, and members of Congress, we must organize, fight back, and defend the principles of freedom, equality, and justice. I'm ready to help lead that fight.' Both Mfume, 77, and Lynch, 70, had voiced interest in the role before announcing their bids. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), 44, has also expressed interest. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who lost her bid for the position to Connolly late last year, passed on running earlier this month. The House Democratic Caucus is slated to hold the election for the ranking member position on June 24.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Rep. Kweisi Mfume vying for key congressional role: Why it matters
WASHINGTON — Democrats have a sudden vacancy in a visible committee role. Rep. Kweisi Mfume is in the race to fill it. A number of lawmakers are campaigning to become the Democratic leader of the House Oversight Committee. Among them is Mfume, a Baltimore Democrat. Whoever wins will be the chief Democrat on a committee vital to the party's messaging while it's in the minority. It frequently serves as their congressional microphone. Members use hearings to target President Donald Trump and his administration at large. In 2019, the committee played a leading role in the investigation into Trump's involvement with Ukraine. Recently, they've targeted Trump's plan to receive a passenger jet from Qatar and his cryptocurrency business ventures. House Democrats have little ability to disrupt legislation being passed by their Republican colleagues. Since their hands are tied on policy, Mfume has advocated for Democrats to publicly resist Trump's administration, hoping rallies and demonstrations will help the party regain favor with voters. 'We just have to have good ol' plain resistance by speaking out and making people understand what is going on,' Mfume told The Sun earlier in May. Mfume previously called for Trump to be arrested, citing an 'assault on the Constitution.' Whoever is elected would replace the recently deceased Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat. Connolly passed away last week. He died after a recurrence of esophageal cancer. His funeral was on Tuesday. Four members are seeking the role. Apart from Mfume, Reps. Robert Garcia of California, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, and Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts are involved. Lynch has led the committee in an unofficial capacity since Connolly's abrupt announcement on April 28 that he would step down. The lamentable cause of the vacancy has affected the campaign for the position. Some members have been more open about their aspirations. Others, including Mfume, have been quieter about their interest. But all have begun to approach their colleagues with entreaties for support. Mfume's office declined to comment on Wednesday. Mfume has mentioned following in the footsteps of the late Elijah Cummings, a Baltimorean who served as Oversight chair during Trump's first administration, according to Politico. Cummings helped lead the impeachment inquiry into Trump during his first term. He replaced Mfume after Mfume left to lead the NAACP in 1996. Mfume won the seat after Cummings passed away in 2019. The pair were close friends. The four candidates for Oversight this year are in a clash between old guard Democrats and a new generation of progressives. Mfume, 76, was first elected to Congress in 1986. He left office in 1996 to lead the NAACP, then returned to Congress in 2020. Lynch, 70, was elected in a special election in 2001. Garcia, 47, and Crockett, 44, sharply contrast the senior pair in both age and experience. Garcia was elected in 2022. Crockett was elected in 2020. Oversight holds a unique place among the congressional committees. Most committees deal with important but sleepy issues that sink into the depths of policy. Oversight excels at the opposite. For some time, the committee has served a multipurpose role for both parties. Officially, it's the congressional avenue for certain investigations, like the Republican probe into Hunter Biden. Unofficially, it's a key tool that both parties use to stir up their base voters. It's also an ideal spot to stash certain bombastic members — the ones known more for TV hits and high fundraising totals than for crafting serious legislation. It's become a haven for the socially active in recent years. Members gain fame and infamy alike from viral clips of outbursts, insults and arguments. With Democrats in the minority, the committee is an ideal place to hone the party's message ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Mfume was placed on the Oversight Committee after his election in 2020. The Democratic conference will choose the ranking member by secret ballot on June 24. The race comes as the party continues to face a reckoning over age. Three Democratic House members have died since March: Reps. Sylvester Turner of Texas, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, and Connolly. Each was at least 70 years old. Former President Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis, along with a book about his time in the White House, has also triggered renewed questions about the party's aging leaders. ------------
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Let's Start Talking About Jail Time for Trump and His MAGA Enablers
What's in the water in the state of Maryland? Whatever it is, it's certainly more invigorating than the sewage that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his grandchildren have been swimming in. A few weeks ago, one of the Old Line State's senators, Chris Van Hollen, dropped his gloves to take on President Donald Trump's unlawful banishment and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This week, his House colleague Kweisi Mfume was responding to an administration flirting with suspending the habeas rights of its citizens in stark, but welcome terms. 'It's a damn shame to continue to see what is happening to our nation under the guise of this Trump administration and his Department of Government Evil,' he said. 'He and Elon Musk, really in my opinion, deserve to be arrested and charged with assault on the Constitution.' One of the more unfortunate realities of the Trump era is that to speak the plain truth about it requires you to get over the feeling that you're being shrill or alarmist. 'I know that might sound crazy and ludicrous,' Mfume said, commenting on his call to arrest the president and his pet oligarch. As someone who's spent the past few years issuing Cassandra-like warnings only to watch so many of my ostensible industry peers take a dive, I can relate. But the thing about Cassandra is that she's correct, and so is Mfume. Trump isn't a president. He's the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power. Trump 2.0 has been a remarkable speedrun into lawlessness, a testament to the fact that there might have actually been some adults in the room during his first term. (During which time he still fomented an insurrection and got impeached twice!) Now, freed from those guardrails that were once upstanding, he's rocketed into a new level of infamy. I once held that George W. Bush's reign was much more costly than Trump's. No longer; his return has truly been a thing apart. As TNR's Alex Shephard documented this week, Trump's trip to the Gulf States has been a vertically integrated grift, in which the president has racked up more corrupt enterprises than most politicians manage in their whole careers. This week's skullduggery is, of course, just one brief crime spree among many. Over at The Nation, Jeb Lund lays down the lengthy rap sheet that Trump has written for himself in his first 100 days. The Trump administration has heisted the private data of millions of Americans, unlawfully terminated thousands of federal employees, extorted law firms and businesses and broadcasters; they're gaming the markets, raking in corrupt money with crypto-tokens, kidnapping people and exiling them to foreign prisons without due process, and much much more. As Lund notes: 'The question is not whether Trump and his people committed a crime while you read that last sentence but how many.' It shouldn't come as any surprise that the Trump administration is canceling the FBI's investigations into white-collar criminals. But if these sorts of crimes aren't dramatic enough for you, we could also simply stick with good old-fashioned manslaughter. As TNR's Matt Ford reported this week, one of the hallmarks of Trump's public health policies is that they will kill a lot of children—probably not a surprise given that the aforementioned Kennedy is well known for directing officials in Samoa to run an open-air eugenics experiment that killed 83 kids. 'The net effect of these policy changes,' Ford writes, 'is to make this country a more dangerous place for Americans to give birth and grow up.' Abroad, Trump administration policies have the same eugenicist bent. As TNR contributor James North chronicled, the gutting of PEPFAR—the Bush-era HIV/AIDS intervention that has saved countless lives in Africa and one of the most highly regarded U.S. policies the world over—'has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow.' The administration's approach to PEPFAR is of a piece with a range of policy decisions that will, in the best-case scenario, cede soft-power space to China and others to secure the developing world's regard for stepping into a vacuum and providing humanitarian assistance. The worst-case scenario is, naturally, millions of needless deaths. Back in March, The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof attempted to quantify the harms done by the Trump administration's decimation of foreign aid agencies in terms of lives lost. Here are his calculations: 1.65 million deaths from AIDS, 500,000 from lack of vaccines, 550,000 from lack of food aid, and approximately 300,000 each from lack of malaria and tuberculosis prevention, respectively. This all raises an interesting question: How many people have to die before the word holocaust is in play? I'm not gunning for shock value here, at least not solely. I want to suggest that there is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate. It's an undertaking that will require no small amount of courage, and it will break with a long-standing status quo that has favored the absolution of numerous mortal sins, from the Bush administration's unlawful torture network to Wall Street's ruination of the economy to the many costly foreign misadventures that have feathered the nests of the military industrial complex over the years. The 'look forward, not backward' ways etched into the civic firmament have served us poorly; in retrospect, what we had to look forward to was this exact moment with this perfidious administration. Real accountability is not something I expect will be popular with the rotted mass media and its grotesque aversion to good governance or the wholly out-of-touch pundit class, whose opinions on Trumpian corruption tend to lag years behind most functional adults'. This is where the avatars of 'Let the bad guys off the hook and move on' obtained their intellectual cover over the years. Suffice it to say, they'll like a better world wrought from taking these criminals down and locking them up just fine. But those who want to pursue justice for all those wronged by this administration should expect to be branded as heretical. We hear so much about the 'rule of law' these days. So many people are concerned about it! They just don't know what's going to happen to it. Even among the gravely worried, there is this sense that the 'rule of law' is like a machine someone turned on at some point in the past, which runs in the background of American life like some sort of ambient presence. What the rule of law really is, it turns out, is the sum total of our deeds—and our inaction. The rule of law lives or dies on our willingness to act—occasionally with grim resolve. It's time for people who value justice to screw their courage to the sticking place. This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Three House Democrats ask to be removed from Trump impeachment resolution
A trio of House Democrats asked to be removed as co-sponsors of a resolution to impeach President Trump, a sign that many in the party do not want to go down the path of trying to remove the president from office — at least at the current moment. Reps. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.), Robin Kelly (D-Ill.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) had signed on as co-sponsors of Rep. Shri Thanedar's (D-Mich.) impeachment resolution — which includes seven articles of impeachment — but Tuesday afternoon, they went to the House floor and asked for their names to be taken off the legislation. The House clerk granted their request. Spokespeople for Kelly and Mfume said the lawmakers initially signed on to the effort because they assumed it had been reviewed by leadership. When they learned it was not, they asked for their names to be removed. 'Congressman Mfume removed himself as a cosponsor from H. Res. 353 because he was made aware it was not cleared by Democratic leadership and not fully vetted legally — and he preferred to err on the side of caution,' a spokesperson for the Mfume said. 'The Congresswoman was under the impression that the resolution was drafted and reviewed by both the House Judiciary Committee and Leadership when she originally signed on during a vote series on the floor,' a spokesperson for the Kelly echoed. Nadler's office did not respond to several requests for comment. There is now just one co-sponsor of the impeachment resolution — Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) — who signed on to the measure Tuesday. Thanedar, however, is not deterred: In a statement to The Hill on Wednesday, he doubled down on his effort. 'I can not speak for the actions of other members. But I am doing this because Trump has blatantly violated the constitution,' Thanedar said. The decision by Mfume, Kelly and Nadler to distance themselves from the impeachment effort came hours after Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.), the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said trying to remove Trump from office 'is not an exercise that we're willing to undertake,' pointing to the GOP's total control of Congress. 'Impeachment is, at times, a tool that can be used. This president is no stranger to that; he's been impeached twice,' Aguilar told reporters in the Capitol. 'But we don't have any confidence that House and Senate Republicans would do their jobs. And so this is not an exercise that we're willing to undertake.' Aguilar did not, however, say that Trump has not committed impeachable offenses. The House impeached Trump twice during his first term, but he was acquitted by the Senate in both instances. Thanedar's resolution — which he introduced on Monday, Trump's 99th day in office — charges the president with seven articles of impeachment: obstruction of justice, violation of due process and a breach of the duty to faithfully execute laws; usurpation of the appropriations power; abuse of trade powers and international aggression; violations of first amendment rights; creation of unlawful office; and tyranny. 'He started on day one with his meme coin pump and dump scheme,' Thanedar said on Wednesday. 'Trump unconstitutionally dismissed charges against Eric Adams for political gain. He unlawfully created DOGE, cutting funding that was appropriated by Congress. He's taken the power of the purse away from Congress with his tariffs, which has led to economic turmoil. He is attacking the freedom of the press because he doesn't like what they say.' 'Finally, when he ignored the 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to facilitate the return of those deported without due process, he completely ignored our system of checks and balances,' he added. 'That's when I said enough was enough.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
