WASHINGTON — For months, Massachusetts Representative Richard Neal resisted calling for a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump — at his own political peril — as dozens of his Democratic colleagues jumped on board.
Now, after joining House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in making that call this week, the Springfield Democrat finds himself at the center of the action as one of six House committee chairs investigating Trump.
Read here.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi meets with her caucus in a closed session ahead of impeachment inquiry announcement.
WASHINGTON — In one hectic day in the nation’s capital, Donald Trump’s presidency — which has already survived a special counsel investigation and countless political scandals — shifted back into the danger zone.
Trump began the workday declaring that the increasing calls for impeachment over his alleged pressure on Ukraine to dig up dirt on a political rival were “nonsense.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ended the day by announcing the start of a formal impeachment inquiry after she strenuously resisted one for months.
Read here.
WASHINGTON — Senator Ed Markey stood in front of the US Capitol on Tuesday surrounded by about 20 climate change activists young enough to be on a school field trip but who are energizing a movement that potentially holds the key to his reelection.
Kallan Benson, 15, from Maryland, said she was terrified of what could happen if legislators don’t take action to reverse global warming. Nadia Nazar, 17, of Baltimore, compared the destruction caused by mass flooding in her family’s home in India to that of hurricanes increasingly devastating the East Coast.
“We refuse to be the last generation,” said Nazar, cofounder of the climate change organization Zero Hour. “We will no longer be known as the kids fighting the apocalypse. We will be known as the solution to the climate crisis.”
Read here.
WASHINGTON — On a hot evening in June last year, an eclectic mix of people mingled under the glow of a neon pink light in the living room of a small Greenwich Village apartment, intent on altering American politics.
This was not your typical glitzy Manhattan fund-raiser. The fare was cheese, chips, and guacamole, with a large ice bucket filled with craft beer in the bathtub. The attendees — young activists, artists, and political campaign staffers — had spent the better part of the year organizing a Democratic insurgency meant to sweep big money out of politics and defeat Republicans.
Among those in the room were two little-known congressional candidates who had never met: Ayanna Pressley, who had traveled down from Boston and was stirring up the crowd that had gathered to raise money for her campaign, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who made a late entrance after a quick trip from her home in the Bronx. The two were about to form a bond, later extended to two other largely unknown candidates of color, that would shake up the Democratic political establishment.
Read here.
Guerrera cover art on home page by Rosanna Alvarez. Find her art here.
Risograph print of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by Bronx artist Steph Guez. Find her art here.
EL PASO — Here is what I remember from the place in my hometown where 22 people were massacred: high school dates, taking shopping carts for a ride through empty parking lots, making videos of our pranks on an old camcorder, watching the city lights and cars passing by as we waited for our parents or debated what to do next — with the night and our lives.
Read here.
EL PASO — Hours before President Trump arrived in this desert city on the Mexico border, high school students clad in black released white balloons for every one of the 22 victims killed in one of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern American history.
Hundreds of people later gathered at a central park to protest the president’s visit, saying he had inflamed the kind of racial and ethnic hostilities that led the shooter to target Latinos at a Walmart in the commercial center of the city. Condemnation of the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has been inescapable, too, at a memorial near the site of the shooting where people have stopped by the thousands — after work, between lunch breaks, often in scorching heat — to march and pray and drop off flowers, stuffed animals, and balloons.
Read here.
MIAMI — There is outrage over Trump administration policies that have torn migrant families apart and left some children locked up. There is pervasive fear of immigration raids. And there is the new political reality that Latino voters came out in such force in the 2018 congressional midterm elections they helped flip key seats in the House to Democrats from Republicans.
If there was ever a campaign in which Democratic contenders for the White House were sure to engage in an early courtship of Latino voters, it would be the 2020 race. But Latino advocates like Jacqueline Martinez Garcel have been baffled by the lack of urgency from presidential candidates when it comes to reaching out to Latino voters. And only four of the two dozen candidates have even put forth detailed plans on immigration.
Read here.
California saw a decrease in the number of women who died giving birth in 2013, as the maternal mortality rate climbed across the country, according to state officials. But expectant black mothers across the state are still three to four times more likely to die from complications at childbirth than white women.
State health researchers say the wide disparity probably isn’t attributed to social factors, such as patients’ levels of education or socioeconomic backgrounds. Instead, they point to evidence of racism and implicit bias in the medical community: A survey of white medical students and residents published in 2016 by the University of Virginia found that roughly half of those who participated believed myths about biological racial differences, including that black patients tolerate more pain and have thicker skin.
Read here.
When Lee Seale became Sacramento County’s chief probation officer in 2013, officials at his juvenile hall were grappling with how to prevent probation officers from using force against young detainees after multiple lawsuits, the resignation of a prior leader and a judge’s decree.
For more than a decade, guards often resorted to “dipping,” a practice in which a juvenile offender’s arm is twisted behind his or her back before the child is flipped face down with a knee behind the neck, court records alleged. Minors said they were subject to strip searches and cold, filthy cells. They reported broken limbs and scratches on their lips, chins and noses.
Read here.
Cindy Rael was home Wednesday morning watching television when the news turned personal — Gov. Gavin Newsom was halting executions in California, including for the man who killed her daughter Brandi eight years ago, shooting her and lighting her body on fire in front of her children.
“I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I was shocked and angry,” said Rael. “I have to live with this every day of my life…. There is one question I would like to ask the governor: What if it was his daughter who was brutally murdered?”
Five hundred miles north, another mother, Aba Gayle, had made the trip to Sacramento from northern Oregon to meet with the governor. She said she felt grateful for his decision.
“What I say is, ‘Don’t murder someone in my name,’ it does nothing to benefit my daughter, it won’t bring anybody back,” said Gayle. After years of living in rage and pain, she befriended the death row inmate who killed 19-year-old Catherine Blount in September 1980 at a home north of Auburn.
Read here.
A landmark California law signed last year to enact the strongest privacy rules in the country and regulate the online marketplace of personal data is caught in a tug of war between industry lobbyists who want to weaken it and consumer groups that say it doesn’t go far enough.
The California Consumer Privacy Act, which takes effect in January, will grant people in the state new rights to control the information that businesses gather about them and sell at a time when tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are facing pressure to change their data collection and advertising practices.
But as state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra puts together new regulations to implement the law, advocacy groups are seeking more protections for consumers and business groups are working to rein it in, arguing that it will stifle competition and burden companies struggling to comply with a much broader privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.
Read here.
As President Trump pushes Mexico further away, declaring a national emergency to force the construction of a wall along the border, Gov. Gavin Newsom and California lawmakers have made clear they want to draw the country closer.
Along with a commitment to reopen a trade office in Mexico City, the governor also plans to revitalize a state commission that would allow California officials to work on issues with their counterparts in Mexican government. And over the course of his first term, Newsom and state Democrats are expected to refocus attention on what they consider the real issues at the heart of the U.S.-Mexico relationship: tackling cross-border pollution, promoting cultural and educational exchanges, and defending the human rights of all immigrants.
Read here.
As a second partial government shutdown looms in Washington over border discussions, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed an order to withdraw and redeploy roughly 360 National Guard members from California’s southern boundary with Mexico, repudiating President Trump’s characterization of a recent influx of Central American refugees and migrants as a national security crisis.
Speaking to reporters Monday, Newsom said he was giving the National Guard a new mission so that troops would not take part in the White House’s “political theater” in perpetuation of what he once more called “a manufactured border crisis.”
Read here.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that he intends to shift control of the state’s Juvenile Justice Division away from corrections officials to government health and human services providers, a move he called long overdue and necessary to build on past efforts to divert children and teens from a path to prison.
Under the proposal, first unveiled as part of his January budget, the California Health and Human Services Agency would oversee more than 660 young offenders, the majority held at a camp in Pine Grove and three detention centers in Stockton and Camarillo. It is a small population compared with the more than 39,000 young people on probation or detained in juvenile halls statewide and the hardest to serve because of the serious charges and mental and medical health needs they face.
Corrections and health and human services officials say the plan heralds a cultural change in the state’s approach to the youngest in the justice system, and creates opportunities to better bridge educational, mental health and social services to prepare minors for release.
But probation officers, healthcare professionals and community activists who have long been at the forefront of a push to shut down youth detention centers and improve treatment are wary that the changes could merely be symbolic — or worse, halt progress that they say has led to fewer young people in custody.
Read here.
When Gov. Jerry Brown’s final term in office ends next week, he will leave behind a California criminal justice system infused with a new commitment to second chances, a shift away from an era in which tens of thousands — many poor, most black or Latino — were imprisoned with little opportunity to turn their lives around.
“It’s called hope,” Brown said in a late December interview. “One hundred fifty thousand young men with zero hope bolsters the gangs, leads to despair, leads to violence and makes the prisons very dangerous. Many of them, the majority, will get out anyway. And they’ll get out as very wounded human beings.”
The governor’s attempt to unwind the old approach stands in contrast to his legacy from the 1970s. Despite a professed belief in redemption, no governor did more to launch the state’s tough-on-crime era — signing a seminal law four decades ago that paved the way for strict sentences, even for nonviolent crimes.
Read here.
Gabriela Cruz, who was brought to the U.S. illegally when she was 1, couldn’t vote, but in the final hours before the Nov. 6 election, she was making one last run to get people to the polls.
The sun was setting in Modesto when she found Ronald Silva, 41, smoking a cigarette on a tattered old couch behind a group home. He politely tried to wave her off until she reminded him he had a right that she as an immigrant without citizenship didn’t have.
“It could really make a change for us,” said Cruz, 29.
Read here.
A bumper crop of Democrats convened Monday in the California Legislature, the largest group in the state’s modern history, swept into office by an electoral flood that could create a significant change on big-ticket issues including healthcare and child poverty.
Sixty Democrats joined the Assembly, making up three-quarters of the lower house’s membership and the party’s largest caucus in the chamber since 1883. In the 40-member Senate, 29 lawmakers are Democrats, a high-water mark reached just once before in more than half a century.
Read here.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher has lost the congressional seat he held for 30 years in one of the most conservative stretches of Orange County, a stunning defeat for the GOP as other Republicans’ early leads receded in the latest ballot counts, putting the party in fear of losing all six tightly contested House races in California.
Read here.
To resounding cheers and applause on Tuesday, Democratic congressional candidate Josh Harder took the stage at a downtown Modesto banquet hall and said he was proud of running a campaign that didn’t “get dragged down into the mud” but painted a brighter picture for the Central Valley.
Read here.
Streets are packed with cars. Businesses have put up “no parking signs.” More than a dozen volunteers expected to hit the streets for Josh Harder today. Campain staffers say it’s the largest canvassing operation for a congressional district in the country. #CA10 #midterms2018 pic.twitter.com/mJJVkXZ4Ry
— Jazmine Ulloa (@jazmineulloa) November 3, 2018
Republican Rep. Jeff Denham and California gubernatorial candidate John Cox on Sunday called for a repeal of the state’s gas tax increase and underscored the need to expand roads and add jobs.
Stumping in Modesto, where Cox’s bus made a stop at Denham’s campaign headquarters, the two made little mention of President Trump in an area where Democrats hold a slight edge in registered voters. Their most passionate pleas were to bring water to Central Valley farmers and to build not a wall along the border with Mexico but greater storage capacity.
Read here.
Lots of shots taken at San Francisco and Bay Area values. “There is a real battle here,” Denham said.
— Jazmine Ulloa (@jazmineulloa) November 4, 2018
“I would love to hear somebody say something postive about the president,” a woman in the back as they ended their speeches. “Build the wall,” yelled another. pic.twitter.com/0wHJavTh0W
Republican Rep. Devin Nunes is beloved by his supporters in this rural Central Valley district where GOP registered voters safely outnumber Democrats. But that hasn’t stopped 71-year-old Patty Lennon from working to unseat him over the last year.
Read here.
What’s good Fresno? Starting off today at campaign headquarters for Democrat Andrew Janz. He’s posing the most serious challenge Republican incumbent Devin Nunes has faced in years. #CA22 pic.twitter.com/d9T1zPPYuY
— Jazmine Ulloa (@jazmineulloa) November 5, 2018
One is the world’s richest person, another has been described as a “chain-smokerwho often dresses without socks,” and yet another has changed political parties twice, most recently this year.
With the election just around the corner and their party on the defensive, Republicans have railed against Democratic billionaires pouring big money into this year’s midterm. But the top political donors of the closely watched battle for control of Congress are a bipartisan and varied lot.
Read here.
For many Californians, Saturday was a sunny gift of a fall day, a chance to stroll the beach, rake leaves, visit a park or take in a child’s soccer game.
For Cristina Escobedo, it was a time to save her daughter from possible deportation. For Marylee Sanders, an opportunity to stand up for Brett Kavanaugh. For Paul Samuels, a chance to learn some newfangled technology and feel as though he was making a difference.
Read here.
Immigrant rights advocates and farmworkers hit the streets early Saturday to get out the vote in the 10th Congressional District, where Republican Rep. Jeff Denham and Democrat Josh Harder are locked in one of the most intense races in California.
Read here.
Out in Ceres, south of Modesto, United Farm Workers Union volunteers are at it again. They’ve ticked off more than 32 houses and had 17 conversations with people who answered the door. #midterms2018 pic.twitter.com/ktPBB4w5kV
— Jazmine Ulloa (@jazmineulloa) November 3, 2018
Jake Wenger grows walnuts on land where early settlers arrived in search of gold and instead found rich soil. His orchards just west of Modesto stretch 700 acres and supply a nut company that has remained in his family for four generations.
Like other farmers in this congressional district at the northern end of the San Joaquin Valley, Wenger, 34, said he fears his livelihood is under siege by a state plan to reduce the waters diverted from Northern California rivers for irrigation.
Read here.
For years, Rep. Devin Nunes and the Fresno Bee got along just fine. But now, facing his first serious election challenge in years, the Central Valley congressman is on the attack — not against his Democratic opponent, but his district’s largest newspaper and what he calls its “band of creeping correspondents.”
The Republican from Tulare is bashing the Fresno Bee in TV and radio ads and a glossy, 40-page mailer after the newspaper angered him with harsh editorials and less-than-flattering news stories. In one ad, he looks into a camera and accuses the paper — which had endorsed him in the last eight elections — of “working with radical left-wing groups to promote fake news stories.”
It’s a tactic that Nunes — along with other Republican candidates — has borrowed from President Trump when encountering coverage he doesn’t like.
Read here.
