Month: May 2023

As negotiators for the White House and House Republican leaders struggle to reach a deal over how to raise the nation’s debt limit, a solution that harks back to old budget fights has re-emerged as a potential path forward: spending caps. Putting limits on future spending in exchange for raising the $31.4 trillion borrowing cap could be the key to clinching an agreement that would allow Republicans to claim that they secured major concessions from Democrats. It could also…

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President Biden and his allies spent much of the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, announcing new arms packages for Ukraine, including a pathway to providing F-16 fighter planes. They spent hours discussing strategy with President Volodymyr Zelensky for the next phase of a hot war started by Russia. So it was easy to miss Mr. Biden’s prediction on Sunday of a coming “thaw” in relations with Beijing, as both sides move beyond what he called the “silly” Chinese act…

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Senator Thomas R. Carper, a veteran Democrat from Delaware, announced on Monday that he would not seek re-election next year, opening up a seat in a deep-blue state that he said he hoped would go to his handpicked successor. Mr. Carper, 76, is in his fourth term in the Senate and is the last surviving Vietnam veteran to serve there. He has held public office since the 1970s, first as Delaware’s treasurer, then for a decade as a congressman,…

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The number of Americans who will fly this summer could eclipse the prepandemic high from 2019. That would be great news for airlines, but it could also cause a backlash against the industry if it fails to keep up with demand and delays or cancels thousands of flights. The recovery from the pandemic has been punctuated by several major travel meltdowns, stranding millions of travelers and angering lawmakers and regulators. In recent months, the Transportation Department has proposed requiring…

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The Justice Department kept open the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s family foundation for nearly all of President Donald J. Trump’s administration, with prosecutors closing the case without charges just days before he left office. Newly released documents and interviews with former department officials show that the investigation stretched long past when F.B.I. agents and prosecutors knew it was a dead end. The conclusion of the case, which centered on the Clinton Foundation’s dealings with foreign donors when Mrs. Clinton…

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President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy expressed optimism on Monday that they could break the partisan stalemate that has prevented action to avert a default on the nation’s debt, but remained far apart on a deal to raise the debt limit as Democrats resisted Republicans’ demands for spending cuts in exchange. The two met face to face at the White House for the second time in two weeks in a show of good will after a weekend of behind-the-scenes clashes among negotiators, punctuated…

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Tim Scott, the first Black Republican elected to the Senate from the South since Reconstruction, announced his campaign for president on Monday, bringing a positive, aspirational message to a growing field of Republicans running as alternatives to former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Scott’s decision, which followed a soft rollout in February and the creation of an exploratory committee in April, came this time with a signal to the Republican establishment that he was the candidate to rally around…

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Arizona, California and Nevada have agreed to take less water from the drought-strained Colorado River, a breakthrough agreement that, for now, keeps the river from falling so low that it would jeopardize water supplies for major Western cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles as well as for some of America’s most productive farmland. The agreement, announced Monday, calls for the federal government to pay about $1.2 billion to irrigation districts, cities and Native American tribes in the three states…

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Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who announced his presidential campaign on Monday, is the first Black Republican senator from the South in more than a century and has been one of his party’s most prominent voices on matters of race, often navigating a political tightrope. Here are five things to know about Mr. Scott. A rapid rise Mr. Scott was elected to Congress during the Tea Party wave of 2010 to represent South Carolina’s First District, which would…

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As a 44-year-old member of Generation X, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida might be an unlikely candidate to wrest his party’s older voters away from Donald J. Trump, a 76-year-old baby boomer. But he is trying anyway. As Mr. DeSantis closes in on the official rollout of a 2024 campaign for president, he is seeking to make early inroads with this large, politically influential group of voters, and doing so by appealing to their pocketbook concerns. He has focused…

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