WASHINGTON (AP) — Build more wall. Reinstate Trump-era immigration policies. Or simply shut down the U.S.-Mexico border.

Congressional Republicans argue that President Joe Biden already has all the authority he needs to halt the flow of migrants through the U.S.-Mexico border. They’re making the claim as a bipartisan deal that the president negotiated with senators to expand his authority is facing near-certain defeat.

The reality about Biden’s powers to control migration is far more complicated.

Without changes to immigration laws or more funding to manage the growing number of migrants arriving at the Southern border, not much of what Biden can try will stick — just as was the case for presidents before him.

“President Biden needs Congress to be able to address the situation at the border,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “That is the simplest way to put it.”

The $118 billion bipartisan proposal in Congress would overhaul the asylum system to provide faster and tougher enforcement, as well as give presidents new powers to immediately expel migrants if authorities become overwhelmed with the number of people applying for asylum. It also would add $20 billion in funding — a huge influx of cash.

The package, which pairs border enforcement policy with wartime aid for Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. allies, would be the most significant immigration legislation in a decade. It has the potential, for better or worse, to transform some of the most vexing border problems. And up until recently, it appeared to have a chance at passing. Donald Trump’s allies are looking to sink the deal in large part because the Republican presidential frontrunner is loathe to give Biden a win on immigration. Trump wants to hammer the president on the issue during the campaign.

“Just months ago, Republicans were asking for this exact bill to deal with the border, to provide support for Ukraine and Israel. And now it’s there. And they’re saying, ‘Nevermind. Nevermind,” Biden said Tuesday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday he would not put the bill on the House floor in its current form, saying it would act as a “magnet” for illegal immigration, the authority to shut down asylum was “riddled with loopholes” and that the release of migrants into the U.S. would only continue.

“If you give extraordinary authority to the very architect of the catastrophe, it will do no good,” Johnson said.

Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Biden has the power to end the border crisis without Congress. He just doesn’t want to.”

But immigration officials do not have expanded detention capability unless they get more funding for detention. They also can’t hold families in detention longer than roughly three weeks under a longstanding policy, and they can’t mix together single adults and family units for safety reasons under law.

Biden already has flexed his unilateral powers to address the border in multiple ways.

The Biden administration has taken more than 500 executive actions on immigration since he took office, according to the Migration Policy Institute, more than Trump did in four years as president. Some policies have been successful, but the number of crossings has continued to rise to record numbers.

His administration’s approach has been to pair new humanitarian pathways for migrants with a crackdown at the border to try to discourage migrants from making the dangerous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border on foot. He also has tried to make the issue more global, using his foreign policy experience to broker agreements with other nations.

And the administration has worked to restrict asylum through a proposed federal rule. But that policy is currently tied up in litigation, much like what stymied Trump during his tenure. A law change by Congress would make those lawsuits less frequent and less successful, and an infusion of cash would make it possible to hire more employees to dig out from the backlog.

“Just point blank, that Biden could do this on his own is just not true. There’s simply not enough asylum officers,” said Taylor Levy, a longtime immigration attorney who has spent years at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Biden could say he was going to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border entirely, but there would be billions of dollars lost or delayed in trade, and the U.S. would be in violation of international laws that govern what a country must do with refugees.

As for some of the other policies, they’re also not likely to be easily reinstated even if Biden wanted to, which he doesn’t.

The Title 42 policy rolled out by Trump relied on special powers granted a president during a public health emergency. It allowed border agents the ability to turn away many asylum seekers immediately. Those powers went away when the national emergency over the pandemic was ended by Congress last May.

The so-called “ Remain in Mexico” policy put in place by the Trump administration forced asylum seekers to wait out their claims in Mexico in squalid camps riddled with crime and sickness. But that agreement relies on cooperation from Mexico, and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is hinting that talks with the U.S. on migration could suffer after reports of a U.S. investigation into suspected drug money donations for his 2006 campaign. On Tuesday he said he finally agreed to meet with a top White House adviser only after he got a call from the president.

As for the border wall, Trump tried to build some without Congressional approval. He declared a national emergency so that he could divert billions of federal dollars from military construction and other purposes after Congress approved only a fraction of the money he had demanded. The issue was challenged in court almost immediately and went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Anna Cabot, immigration clinic director at the University of Houston Law Center, said reimposing Title 42 rules would require action by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and some sort of justification, like the coronavirus. Even then, it would face litigation. As for the Remain in Mexico policy and “emergency” border wall construction both would “immediately be tied up in most likely losing litigation,” she said.

The bipartisan bill has earned a wide range of support, including from the Border Patrol union, though some Democrats and immigrant advocates say it’s far too restrictive and would change the U.S. role as a haven for refugees.

But Biden has said it was the best effort so far to stop the continued flow of migrants that are straining an already broken system.

He went so far as to adopt Republican language, saying he’d “shut down the border” when he was given the authority to do so. And on Tuesday, he questioned why it appeared Congress was not willing to give him the tools to manage the growing numbers at the border and accused Republicans of being too afraid to stand up to Trump on an issue critical to the country and also to the world.

“Republicans have to decide. Who do they serve? Donald Trump or the American people?” he asked.

___ Associated Press Writer Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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ATLANTA (AP) — Republican presidential candidates will debate Wednesday within walking distance of where George Wallace staged his “stand in the schoolhouse door” to oppose the enrollment of Black students at the University of Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement.

The state that propelled Wallace, a Democrat and four-term governor, into national politics is now dominated by Republicans loyal to Donald Trump, another figure who leans heavily on grievance and white identity politics. The former president will not be on stage in Tuscaloosa but remains the prohibitive favorite to win Republicans’ nomination again.

Alabama’s path since Wallace ‘s rise helps explain the 2024 dynamics and how Republicans evolved nationally from the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Trump. Certainly, Trump argues he helps all races as a defender of everyday Americans forgotten by Washington elites. He even uses that as a defense against four criminal indictments, accusing establishment powers of attacking him as a way to quash citizens. That sort of approach resonated in conservative strongholds like Alabama long before Trump.

“Alabamians, and I think most people, just don’t like to be told how to live,” said former state Republican chairwoman Terry Lathan, referencing Alabama’s motto: “We dare defend our rights.”

For Wallace, that meant fighting federal authorities on integration and then running nationally with the slogan “Stand Up for America.” Trump set up his 2016 rise by spending years questioning the citizenship of President Barack Obama, the first Black president. Like Wallace, Trump is backed strongly by culturally and religiously conservative whites moved by his slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

“Different from Wallace, but Donald Trump is offering a form of nostalgia,” said national GOP pollster Brent Buchanan, who founded his Washington-based firm, Cygnal, in Alabama.

Historian Wayne Flynt said the common thread across the eras is a swath of voters “who feel they are not paid attention to … that there’s not much future for them.” Trump, like Wallace, he said, has “brilliantly analyzed the angst and anxiety.”

That doesn’t mean Alabama Republicans are in lockstep. Lathan, who said “we know how wrong Wallace was” for his racism, backed Trump during her chairmanship. Now she supports Ron DeSantis; she called the Florida governor a “Reagan conservative who gets things done without being a bully.”

But, she acknowledged Trump’s “steamroller effect” makes him “very popular in Alabama.”

Wallace, a four-time presidential candidate, was governor for 16 years spread from 1963 to 1987. That period marked a Southern political realignment, spurred in part by President Lyndon Johnson signing civil rights legislation in the 1960s: Democratic-controlled states shifted to Republicans in presidential politics and, later, other offices.

Alabama Democrats, especially, cite deep historical roots involving racism, class and urban-rural divides when explaining Wallace, Trump and the decades between them.

“To understand it, you really have to go back to the Civil War and Reconstruction,” said Bill Baxley, a former state attorney general and lieutenant governor.

Now 82, Baxley said he knows how stereotypically Southern that sounds. But it’s fact, he said, that Republicans being the “Party of Lincoln” made white Southerners vote Democratic for generations after the 16th U.S. president won the war.

The more layered reality of the so-called “Solid South” was that two unofficial parties operated under one banner. Moderate to progressive “national Democrats” were concentrated in north Alabama, Baxley explained, while reactionary “states-rights Dixiecrats” cohered in south Alabama. Not coincidentally, south Alabama is where plantations anchored the antebellum slavery economy. Politics became “economic populism in the north,” Baxley said, and “race-issue populism” in the south.

Those fault lines shaped Democratic primaries until the late 20th century. National Democrats claimed more federal than state offices: Baxley listed Alabamians instrumental in President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that paved roads, built hospitals, ran electrical and telephone lines, and spurred development in rural areas mired in poverty even before the Great Depression.

Then “Wallace came along as a talented politician who figured out how to bridge all that better than anybody else,” Baxley said, adding his disappointment that Wallace still made segregation his main argument.

Dixiecrats’ shift to Republicans accelerated in 1964, the first presidential election after Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, signed the Civil Rights Act. Republican challenger Barry Goldwater opposed the act and won five Deep South states. It was Alabama’s first flip from Democrats since Reconstruction.

Wallace won four Deep South states as an independent in 1968. Yet in 1970, he secured his second term as governor only through a close Democratic primary runoff. That same electorate made Baxley attorney general. An unapologetic national Democrat, Baxley prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members who bombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, and he memorably told a Klan leader in an open letter to “kiss my ass.”

Meanwhile, Wallace retooled his pitch for a national audience. He sneered about “inner-city thugs” and a “liberal Supreme Court” and Washington “overreach” — a coded version of his Alabama campaigns. It wowed working-class Democratic primary audiences beyond the South. Flynt, the historian, said Trump “does best almost exactly where George Wallace did best, and for many of the same reasons.”

In 1968 and 1972, Wallace held raucous rallies, railing against protesters. At New York City’s Madison Square Garden he said such behavior in Alabama “gets a bullet in the brain.” Wallace’s 1972 campaign ended with a bullet in his spine; it paralyzed him from the waist down.

Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs that he adopted the “Southern strategy” — law-and-order and cultural rhetoric similar to Wallace’s — to stave off Wallace. Ronald Reagan employed his versions in 1980 and 1984 landslides.

Since Wallace’s first presidential bid in 1964, Alabama’s electoral votes have gone to a Democrat once: Jimmy Carter, a neighboring Georgian, in 1976. Even then, Carter sought Wallace’s endorsement after defeating the governor in Florida’s presidential primary.

After Reagan’s inauguration, Alabama’s down-ticket races still turned on what candidate could bridge economic populism and cultural conservatism, said Democratic pollster Zac McCrary, whose firm worked for Hillary Clinton’s and Joe Biden’s presidential campaigns.

“Democrats won when they were able to play up economic sentiments and turn down the volume on the culture wars,” McCrary said. In office, they implemented more liberal economic policies at the state level, especially K-12 education spending.

Wallace won his fourth term as governor in 1982 after disavowing segregation and winning over enough Black voters. Democrats won U.S. Senate seats, including recently retired Sen. Richard Shelby’s 1986 victory. Shelby switched parties to the GOP only after Republicans’ 1994 midterm romp driven by Newt Gingrich, the eventual House speaker whom Wallace biographer Dan Carter called an heir to the Alabama governor’s legacy.

In 1996, Alabama’s other Senate seat flipped. Jeff Sessions, a staunch conservative and lifelong Republican, went on to become the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, giving him high-profile validation on his way to the nomination. Trump made Sessions attorney general but ultimately fired him.

Alabama voters had previewed the turn to Trump: While Republicans nominated moderates John McCain and Mitt Romney for president in 2008 and 2012, Alabama’s primaries went to conservative populists Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. Between those elections, Republicans finally took control of the Alabama Legislature in the first midterms after Obama’s election.

Today, Alabama’s two U.S. senators represent two styles of Republican politics, offering a rough analogue to Southern Democrats’ split in Wallace’s heyday.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville is a Trump acolyte. He talked to Trump from the Senate floor as Trump supporters began storming Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021; now he’s blocking military promotions to protest Pentagon policies for servicemembers seeking abortions.

Sen. Katie Britt, meanwhile, is a former head of the state chamber of commerce and chief of staff to Shelby, the old-guard dealmaker first elected as a Democrat. Like her old boss, Britt operates more behind the scenes and campaigns generically on “conservative Alabama values.”

Still, as Shelby did, she avoids criticizing Trump.

Buchanan, the Republican pollster, said: “It’s Donald Trump’s world and we’re all just living in it.”

—- Associated Press reporter Kim Chandler contributed from Montgomery, Alabama.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The House voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to prevent a government shutdown after new Republican Speaker Mike Johnson was forced to reach across the aisle to Democrats when hard-right conservatives revolted against his plan.

The bipartisan tally — 336-95 with 93 Republicans voting no —showed Johnson’s willingness to leave his right-flank Republicans behind and work with Democrats to temporarily keep government running — the same political move that cost the last House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, his job just weeks ago.

This time, Johnson of Louisiana appeared on track for a temporarily better outcome. His approach, which the Senate is expected to approve by week’s end, effectively pushes a final showdown over government funding to the new year.

“Making sure that government stays in operation is a matter of conscience for all of us. We owe that to the American people,” Johnson said earlier Tuesday at a news conference at the Capitol.

The new Republican leader faced the same political problem that led to McCarthy’s ouster — angry, frustrated, hard-right GOP lawmakers rejected his approach, demanded budget cuts and voted against the plan. Rather than the applause and handshakes that usually follow passage of a bill, several hardline conservatives animatedly confronted the speaker as they exited the chamber.

Without enough support from his Republican majority, Johnson had little choice but to rely on Democrats to ensure passage to keep the federal government running. Shortly before the Tuesday evening vote, House Democratic leaders issued a joint statement saying that the package met all their requirements and they would support it.

Johnson’s proposal puts forward a unique — critics say bizarre — two-part process that temporarily funds some federal agencies to Jan. 19 and others to Feb. 2. It’s a continuing resolution, or CR, that comes without any of the deep cuts conservatives have demanded all year. It also fails to include President Joe Biden’s request for nearly $106 billion for Ukraine, Israel, border security and other supplemental funds.

“We’re not surrendering,” Johnson assured after a closed-door meeting of House Republicans Tuesday morning, vowing he would not support another stopgap. “But you have to choose fights you can win.”

Johnson, who announced his endorsement Tuesday of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president, hit the airwaves to sell his approach and met privately Monday night with the conservative Freedom Caucus.

Johnson says the innovative approach would position House Republicans to “go into the fight” for deeper spending cuts in the new year, but many Republicans are skeptical there will be any better outcome in January.

The House Freedom Caucus announced its opposition, ensuring dozens of votes against the plan.

“I think it’s a very big mistake,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a member of the hard-right group of lawmakers.

“It’s wrong,” said Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn.

It left Johnson with few other options than to skip what’s typically a party-only procedural vote, and rely on another process that requires a two-thirds tally with Democrats for passage.

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries in a letter to colleagues noted that the GOP package met the Democratic demands to keep funding at current levels without steep reductions or divisive Republican policy priorities.

“Extreme MAGA Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot govern without House Democrats,” Jeffries said on NPR. “That will be the case this week in the context of avoiding a government shutdown.”

Winning bipartisan approval of a continuing resolution is the same move that led McCarthy’s hard-right flank to oust him in October, days after the Sept. 30 vote to avert a federal shutdown. For now, Johnson appears to be benefiting from a political honeymoon in one of his first big tests on the job.

“Look, we’re going to trust the speaker’s move here,” said Rep. Drew Ferguson, R-Ga.

But Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a McCarthy ally who opposed his ouster, said Johnson should be held to the same standard. “What’s the point in throwing out one speaker if nothing changes? The only way to make sure that real changes happen is make the red line stay the same for every speaker.”

The Senate, where Democrats have a slim majority, has signaled its willingness to accept Johnson’s package ahead of Friday’s deadline to fund the government.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called the House package “a solution” and said he expected it to pass Congress with bipartisan support.

“It’s nice to see us working together to avoid a government shutdown,” he said.

But McConnell, R-Ky., has noted that Congress still has work to do toward Biden’s request to provide U.S. military aid for Ukraine and Israel and for other needs. Senators are trying to devise a separate package to fund U.S. supplies for the overseas wars and to bolster border security, but it remains a work in progress.

If approved, passage of the continuing resolution would be a less-than-triumphant capstone to the House GOP’s first year in the majority. The Republicans have worked tirelessly to cut federal government spending only to find their own GOP colleagues unwilling to go along with the most conservative priorities. Two of the Republican bills collapsed last week as moderates revolted.

Instead, the Republicans are left funding the government essentially on autopilot at the levels that were set in bipartisan fashion at the end of 2022, when Democrats had control of Congress but the two parties came together to agree on budget terms.

All that could change in the new year when 1% cuts across the board to all departments would be triggered if Congress failed to agree to new budget terms and pass the traditional appropriation bills to fund the government by springtime.

The 1% automatic cuts, which would take hold in April, are despised by all sides — Republicans say they are not enough, Democrats say they are too steep and many lawmakers prefer to boost defense funds. But they are part of the debt deal McCarthy and Biden struck earlier this year. The idea was to push Congress to do better.

The legislation also extends farm bill programs through September, the end of the current fiscal year. That addition was an important win for some farm-state lawmakers. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., for example, warned that without the extension, milk prices would have soared and hurt producers back in his home state.

“The farm bill extension was the biggest sweetener for me,” said Pocan.

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On Friday, Leonard Bernal stood beside a friend amid a sea of MAGA paraphernalia and was absolutely buzzing.

Former President Trump had just wrapped up a fiery speech to 1,500 paying attendees at the California Republican Party’s fall convention in Anaheim, where he spent the better part of 90 minutes trashing the Golden State, its politicians and its policies.

Bernal, a 62-year-old Modesto retiree, loved every moment of it. Even if Trump was hard to follow as he lambasted the state’s water policies, Bernal said the former president’s speech resonated with him — he’s watched farmers struggle to keep their land fertile. Trump spoke of marauding criminal gangs and called California a “dumping ground” for prisoners, terrorists and mental patients.

“The state deserves to be bashed,” Bernal said. “Even though the country has gone to hell, California has gone into a deeper hell.”

Trump was not alone in flaying California. In the course of trying to loosen Trump’s grip on Republican voters, rival GOP candidates including Sen. Tim Scott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did the same during their swings through the state, castigating the state as a hellhole created by the far left and overwhelmed by homelessness and immigrants who entered the country illegally.

“Growing up in Florida I never remembered seeing a single California license plate in my life,” DeSantis told the audience Friday night. “I never met anybody who had moved from California to Florida. Fast forward 15 years later, and I become governor and all of a sudden we see a sea of California license plates in the state of Florida.”

All the while, and usually behind closed doors, the candidates held fundraisers at the homes of wealthy Californians. The state has long been a popular destination for Republican presidential contenders looking to raise cash. In 2020, Californians donated more than $92 million to Trump’s campaign and to super PACs and other groups that supported his unsuccessful reelection effort, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.

Of the $20 million DeSantis’ campaign raised this year since he entered the race in May, about $2.1 million came from California residents, according to campaign finance disclosures through June.

Polls show Trump so far ahead, he could, because of a recent rules change, end up winning all of the state’s delegates and clinch the nomination in California’s March presidential primary. Trump enjoys about 55% support of likely Republican voters in the state, according to a recent UC Berkeley/L.A. Times poll.

During his midday speech Friday, Trump falsely claimed that the state can “take children away from their parents and sterilize them.” Echoing frequent attacks he made during his presidency, Trump also spoke of rampant crime and said brazen thieves stealing from stores should be shot on sight. He advocated for energy independence and promised to cut federal funding for schools with vaccination mandates.

“Under the Trump administration we will bring back law and order to California,” he said.

Despite his large lead in recent surveys, an effort to have the California Republican Party officially endorse Trump failed Sunday, after impassioned speakers made the case that an endorsement — unprecedented this early in a presidential primary campaign — could affect voter turnout for down-ballot races.

“Frankly, we have some Republicans who want other people other than President Trump. We need them all there,” said Fred Whitaker, chairman of the Republican Party of Orange County.

Broadly speaking though, delegates attending the three-day confab said the state had lost its way and many wanted California to return to the days of the past.

Some craved more economic opportunity and affordable living, while others expressed frustration about transgender athletes or school districts that decline to notify parents when their child identifies as transgender.

An upstart campaign to make California’s Republican Party more welcoming to a broader spectrum of views on abortion and LGBTQ+ issues failed by a large margin Saturday.

The convention overwhelmingly supported adopting its traditional platform, following a contentious weekend-long discussion over a proposal to remove language from the party platform explicitly opposing abortion and defining marriage as “between one man and one woman.”

Loud cheering accompanied the platform vote, which passed with 79%.

Committee members tasked with reforming the party platform proposed the change over the summer, appalling many conservative members. Outside the hotel ballroom where the platform was discussed, activists held signs that read, “Pray to end abortion” and “God is pro-life.”

“I don’t believe in the big tent. I believe in a tent that will house like-minded people,” GOP delegate and Paso Robles resident Randall Jordan said of the changes to the platform, the push to make the GOP more inclusive and the state’s increasingly liberal tilt. “When Trump attacks the state, I hear hope. I hear hope that someone actually is going to do something.”

For lifelong Californians Guadalupe and Hilario Gonzales, anti-California rhetoric from the presidential candidates felt validating. Guadalupe Gonzales, who attended Trump’s speech at the Anaheim convention Friday, said his gripes about how the state has handled drought, wildfires, crime and immigration resonated with her own beliefs.

“I was like, ‘Yes, you hear me!’ Because we’re hurting,” she said.

The couple didn’t seem to mind the widespread California-bashing they heard at the weekend convention.

“We’re a little bit embarrassed when we go to other states because they go, ‘Oh, you’re from California,’” Guadalupe Gonzales said. “Because they think we’re nuts!”

Like Trump and Scott, DeSantis has hosted multiple fundraisers — including one in Salinas last week — since the campaign started. At the convention, at a campaign stop in Long Beach and at Wednesday’s presidential debate in Simi Valley, the Florida governor’s message across the state was that California was adrift and Florida represented a path forward.

But before DeSantis unloaded on California during his convention speech Friday night, he spoke about returning from military duty to Coronado Island in San Diego and marveling at the state’s natural beauty and “just having the freshness of the Pacific Ocean within you.” He also highlighted his televised debate with Gov. Gavin Newsom next month, which he has said will show Americans the clear difference between states run by Republicans and Democrats.

“California is really the petri dish for American liberalism and American leftism,” DeSantis said. “What Biden is doing are things that California was doing many years ago. What California is doing now is likely what a second Biden term would do, or God forbid Kamala Harris, or God forbid Newsom himself, who knows, right?”

He touted his fights with Disney and waded into the school district controversies over policies affecting transgender students, saying, “It’s wrong to tell a second-grader that their gender is a choice. It’s not true and it’s inappropriate.”

Lines like this from DeSantis, Scott and Trump drew rapturous applause from attendees at these speeches who paid hundreds of dollars to be in close proximity to the candidates. DeSantis and Trump both ripped into Newsom — who has emerged as President Biden’s chief defender and leader of the Democratic offense this reelection season.

The California governor attended the GOP debate Wednesday as a Biden proxy and to forcefully rebut the Republican attacks on the state and the president.

“It’s so dull and so predictable. There’s this lack of originality in all this California bashing,” Newsom told reporters before the debate, adding that GDP growth in the state over the last 10 years has outpaced the nation.

“We just dominate in every category — hunting jobs, fishing jobs, manufacturing jobs — more factory jobs here than any other state by a factor of larger than the next five states combined. I’m really proud of the state,” he said.

Somewhat surprisingly, presidential candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy spent little time trashing the state or even really talking about it at all during his speech Saturday. Asked why, he told reporters that despite real problems here, this type of rhetoric bored him.

“I am sick and tired of lazily just bashing” the place, Ramaswamy said. “It’s too easy.”

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A referral from a trusted source is the gold standard in marketing. It’s the basis of websites like Yelp, Trip Advisor and the entire “influencer” industry.

We often turn to friends for recommendations on what restaurant to take a date, the best hotel to stay at in a new city, the latest fashion trends or what realtor to hire.

The same dynamic exists in politics.

When voters are mailed their ballots and confronted with a long list of candidates, they often turn to their local and state parties for guidance.

There is an expectation from voters and a duty for the parties to vet candidates. These endorsements should be coveted, competed for and earned by candidates so that they have meaning and value to the voters.

As an institution, we should put great a deal of seriousness into the people we lend our name and credibility to.

Unfortunately, the California Republican Party adopted a bylaw 12 years ago that automatically endorses any Republican running in a partisan race who is not opposed by another Republican. Sight unseen. No vetting, no interview, no background check, not even a phone call.

This has led to some very embarrassing endorsements.

We the authors of this commentary, a former CAGOP chairman and a Contra Costa County Republican Party chairman, have submitted a bylaw proposal to remove this reputation-damaging mechanism at this weekend’s California Republican Party convention taking place in Anaheim.

While we are writing this, Politico’s California editor Chris Cadelago Tweeted: “Omar Navarro, 34, is charged in a 43-count grand jury indictment — Four-Time Congressional Candidate Charged in Long-Running Misuse of Campaign Funds.”

Navarro had been automatically endorsed by the California Republican Party while running one of the most egregious grift operations in the nation.

In another instance, a lifelong Democrat in the San Francisco Bay Area had unsuccessfully run for Congress three times. Then in 2018, he decided to try it as a Republican.

The congressional seat has been held by an incumbent Democrat and only 15% of its voters are registered Republicans. No viable Republican ran, and this man breezed into the general election without campaigning or attending a local Republican Party meeting.

He was automatically endorsed by the California Republican Party.

Then, a month after the primary election, The New York Times published an article headlined “Holocaust Denier in California Congressional Race Leaves State G.O.P. Scrambling.”

The California Republican Party endorsed a candidate who said the Holocaust was a “complete fabrication” and that the Israeli government was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Shupe, a Jewish man, was the chairman of the county’s Republican Party at the time and had to answer to the press as to why the California Republican Party endorsed him.

Fortunately, the county party never spoke to or endorsed him. Shupe’s rebuke of his candidacy was often not appropriate for publication, but was euphemized to “Mr. Shupe called Mr. Fitzgerald’s views unwelcome in the party, but said there was ‘no legal way’ to prevent a person from getting on the ballot.”

In the 2022 election, a candidate for legislative office sent the California Republican Party a cease-and-desist letter after she was automatically endorsed.

To rescind her endorsement, the California Republican Party’s executive board had to meet, essentially hold a trial, with speakers for and against, and then take a vote on whether or not to rescind the automatic endorsement that she didn’t want.

While this is all very inside baseball, it is an important change that directly impacts millions of voters throughout the state.

If you asked a friend for a restaurant recommendation and the place made you throw up, would you go back to that friend for referrals? I doubt it.

We hope that the Rules Committee and the delegates of the California Republican Party join us to protect our Republican candidates in 2024 by closing this crazy loophole in the CRP bylaws.

Matt Shupe is chairman of the Contra Costa Republican Party and a delegate to the California Republican Party. Ron Nehring is former chairman of the California Republican Party and a delegate to the California Republican Party.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author’s articles on this Opinion piece or elsewhere online or in the newspaper where we have articles with the header “COLUMN/EDITORIAL & OPINION” do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints or official policies of the Publisher, Editor, Reporters or anybody else in the Staff of the Hemet and San Jacinto Chronicle Newspaper.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — With less than a month to go until the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 campaign, seven candidates say they have met qualifications for a spot on stage in Milwaukee.

But that also means that about half the broad GOP field is running short on time to make the cut.

To qualify for the Aug. 23 debate, candidates needed to satisfy polling and donor requirements set by the Republican National Committee: at least 1% in three high-quality national polls or a mix of national and early-state polls, between July 1 and Aug. 21, and a minimum of 40,000 donors, with 200 in 20 or more states.

A look at who’s in, who’s (maybe) out and who’s still working on making it:

The current front-runner long ago satisfied the polling and donor thresholds. But he is considering boycotting and holding a competing event.

Campaign advisers have said the former president has not made a final decision about the debate. One noted that “it’s pretty clear,” based on Trump’s public and private statements, that he is unlikely to appear with the other candidates.

“If you’re leading by a lot, what’s the purpose of doing it?” Trump asked on Newsmax.

In the meantime, aides have discussed potential alternative programming if Trump opts for a rival event. One option Trump has floated is an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who now has a program on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

RON DESANTIS

The Florida governor has long been seen as Trump’s top rival, finishing a distant second to him in a series of polls in early-voting states, as well as national polls, and raising an impressive amount of money.

But DeSantis’ campaign has struggled in recent weeks to live up to the sky-high expectations that awaited him when he entered the race. He let go of more than one-third of his staff as federal filings showed his campaign was burning through cash at an unsustainable rate.

If Trump is absent, DeSantis may be the top target on stage at the debate.

TIM SCOTT

The South Carolina senator has been looking for a breakout moment. The first debate could be his chance.

A prolific fundraiser, Scott enters the summer with $21 million cash on hand.

In one debate-approved poll in Iowa, Scott joined Trump and DeSantis in reaching double digits. The senator has focused much of his campaign resources on the leadoff GOP voting state, which is dominated by white evangelical voters.

NIKKI HALEY

She has blitzed early-voting states with campaign events, walking crowds through her electoral successes ousting a longtime incumbent South Carolina lawmaker, then becoming the state’s first woman and first minority governor. Also serving as Trump’s U.N. ambassador for about two years, Haley frequently cites her international experience, arguing about the threat China poses to the United States.

The only woman in the GOP race, Haley has said transgender students competing in sports is “the women’s issue of our time” and has drawn praise from a leading anti-abortion group, which called her “uniquely gifted at communicating from a pro-life woman’s perspective.”

Bringing in $15.6 million since the start of her campaign, Haley’s campaign says she has “well over 40,000 unique donors” and has satisfied the debate polling requirements.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY

The biotech entrepreneur and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam” is an audience favorite at multicandidate events and has polled well despite not being nationally known when he entered the race.

Ramaswamy’s campaign says he met the donor threshold earlier this year. He recently rolled out “Vivek’s Kitchen Cabinet” to boost his donor numbers even more, by letting fundraisers keep 10% of what they bring in for his campaign.

CHRIS CHRISTIE

The former New Jersey governor opened his campaign by portraying himself as the only candidate ready to take on Trump. Christie called on the former president to “show up at the debates and defend his record.”

Christie will be on that stage, even if Trump isn’t, telling CNN this month that he surpassed “40,000 unique donors in just 35 days.” He also has met the polling requirements.

DOUG BURGUM

Burgum, a wealthy former software entrepreneur now in his second term as North Dakota’s governor, has been using his fortune to boost his campaign.

He announced a program this month to give away $20 gift cards — “Biden Relief Cards,” as a critique of President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy — to as many as 50,000 people in exchange for $1 donations. Critics have questioned whether the offer violated campaign finance law.

Within about a week of launching that effort, Burgum announced he had surpassed the donor threshold. Ad blitzes in the early-voting states also helped him meet the polling requirements.

WHO HASN’T QUALIFIED:

MIKE PENCE

Trump’s vice president has met the polling threshold but has yet to amass a sufficient number of donors, raising the possibility that he might not qualify for the party’s first debate.

Pence and his advisers have expressed confidence he will do so, noting that most other Republican hopefuls took a month or two of being active candidates to meet the mark. Pence entered the race on June 7, the same day as Burgum and one day after Christie.

“We’re making incredible progress toward that goal. We’re not there yet,” Pence told CNN in a recent interview. “We will make it. I will see you at that debate stage.”

ASA HUTCHINSON

According to his campaign, the former two-term Arkansas governor has met the polling requirements but is working on satisfying the donor threshold. As of Wednesday, Hutchinson marked more than 11,000 unique donors.

Hutchinson is running in the mold of an old-school Republican and has differentiated himself from many of his GOP rivals in his willingness to criticize Trump. He has posted pleas on Twitter for $1 donations to help secure his slot.

FRANCIS SUAREZ

The Miami mayor has been one of the more creative candidates in his efforts to boost his donor numbers. He offered up a chance to see Argentine soccer legend Lionel Messi’s debut as a player for Inter Miami, saying donors who gave $1 would be entered in a chance to get front-row tickets.

Still shy of the donor threshold, he took a page from Burgum’s playbook by offering a $20 “Bidenomics Relief Card” in return for $1 donations. A super political action committee supporting Suarez launched a sweepstakes for a chance at up to $15,000 in tuition, in exchange for a $1 donation to Suarez’s campaign.

Suarez’s campaign did not return a message seeking details on his number of donors or qualifying polls.

LARRY ELDER

The conservative radio host wrote in an op-ed that the RNC “has rigged the rules of the game by instituting a set of criteria that is so onerous and poorly designed that only establishment-backed and billionaire candidates are guaranteed to be on stage.”

His campaign last week declined to detail its number of donors, saying only that there had been “a strong increase the last few weeks.” He has not met the polling requirements.

PERRY JOHNSON

Johnson, a wealthy but largely unknown businessman from Michigan, said in a recent social media post that he had notched 23,000 donors and was “confident” he would make the debate stage. He added that all donors were “eligible to attend my free concert in Iowa featuring” country duo Big & Rich next month.

Johnson, who has reached 1% in one qualifying poll, has also offered to give copies of his book “Two Cents to Save America” to anyone who donated to his campaign.

WILL HURD

The former Texas congressman — the last candidate to enter the race, on June 22 — has said repeatedly that he would not pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee, a stance that would keep him off the stage even if he had the qualifying donor and polling numbers.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — When Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggested recently he might stop the FBI from relocating its downtown headquarters to a new facility planned for the Washington suburbs, it was more than idle thinking about an office renovation.

The nod from the Republican speaker is elevating a once-fringe proposal to upend the FBI in the aftermath of the federal indictment of Donald Trump over classified documents and the Justice Department’s prosecution of his allies, including some of the nearly 1,000 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Moving from far-right corners into the mainstream, the emerging effort to overhaul the nation’s premier law enforcement agency is rooted in increasingly forceful conservative complaints about an overly biased FBI that they claim is being weaponized against them.

“This is a pretty dramatic reversal of what the politics would have been 50 years ago,” said Beverly Gage, a historian at Yale who won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of the legendary FBI director, “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”

The shifting attitudes among Republican members of Congress toward the FBI underscore the way Trump’s personal grievances have become legislative policy. Once the party of law and order, Republicans are now antagonists of federal law enforcement, undermining a storied institution and attacking Justice Department officials whose work is foundational to American democracy.

While political criticism of the FBI has followed the bureau since its founding with Hoover, who famously wiretapped civil rights leaders and orchestrated the infiltration of left-wing political organizations, the right-flank campaign against federal law enforcement had mostly simmered at the margins of party politics.

But the Justice Department’s indictment of Trump, who has pleaded not guilty to 37 felony counts over storing and refusing to return classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, and the ongoing prosecution of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol, have fueled conservative anger. The Justice Department is also investigating Trump and his allies over the effort to challenge President Joe Biden’s election in the run-up to the 2021 Capitol attack.

Conservatives criticize the federal law enforcement on multiple fronts; among them, its work with social media companies to flag potentially dangerous postings, and a COVID-era memo from Attorney General Merrick Garland directing resources to combat violence against school officials. They compare the Trump investigations with what they say was a sweetheart deal for Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who is pleading guilty to misdemeanor tax evasion after a long investigation.

“Looking at the actions of the FBI, I think the whole leadership needs to change,” McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol last month.

Fresh from a visit with law enforcement in California, McCarthy said he envisions decentralizing the FBI by spreading operations into the states.

“This idea that we’re going to build a new, big Pentagon and put all the FBI mainly in one place, I don’t think it’s a good structure,” McCarthy said Friday, panning a conservative-led proposal to relocate the FBI to Alabama.

“I’d like to see the structure of a much smaller FBI administration building, and more FBI agents out across the country, helping to keep the country safe,” he said. “To me that’s better.”

In many ways, the resistance to a robust federal law enforcement agency extends a thread that has run across American history — from the aftermath of the Civil War, when Southern states rejected federal troops for Reconstruction, to Trump’s own 2024 campaign announcement in Waco, Texas, a region known for the federal siege of a separatist compound in 1993.

“The Washington headquarters is symbolic,” said Steven G. Bradbury, a former Trump administration general counsel who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Heritage is among those outside entities and advocacy organizations encouraging Congress to reimagine the FBI.

Bradbury’s “How to Fix the FBI” report outlines nearly a dozen options. One is scaling back its jurisdiction. Another is to overhaul section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, that was part of the Trump-Russia investigation over 2016 election interference and is a program some Democrats also want to limit.

“We have our finger on the pulse of what conservatives are reacting to,” said Bradbury. “The FBI needs to be rebuilt.”

Last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time since Republicans took control in January, facing a long list of criticisms, complaints and accusations of bias at the bureau.

“Are you protecting the Bidens?’ asked Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.

“Absolutely not,” Wray said.

At another point Wray said, “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background.”

He is a longtime Republican who had been appointed by Trump to fill the job after Director James Comey was fired in 2017.

Wray told the lawmakers that dismantling or defunding the FBI would be disastrous for the bureau’s 38,000 employees and “hurt our great state local law enforcement partners that depend on us each day to work with them on a whole slew of challenging threats.”

Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called the hearing “bizarre.”

“I didn’t think I would ever see Republicans attacking a Republican appointed by Donald Trump to lead the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, essentially saying they want to defund the FBI,” she said.

The lawmaker said it was also odd to find herself defending the federal law enforcement agency that she, too, believes needs strong oversight from Congress. But she felt Democrats had to step in to counter Republican attacks on the FBI.

“That’s their message: They want to shut down the FBI because the FBI is continuing to investigate Donald Trump,” said Jayapal. “And that is really what this is about.”

Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, submitted a proposal before the hearing that calls for “eliminating taxpayer funding for any new FBI headquarter facility.”

Jordan said in a letter to the Republican chair of the House appropriations committee that he also wants a plan for moving the FBI headquarters out of Washington, noting an existing facility in Huntsville, Alabama — a recommendation Heritage has also made.

“One of the goals we’ve set in this Congress as Republicans is to do the oversight so we can impact the appropriations process,” Jordan said in a brief interview at the Capitol, and “put limitations on how taxpayer money is spent to stop the weaponization of these agencies against the American people.”

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, which is competing with neighboring Maryland to host the new FBI headquarters, called the Republican ideas “a solution in search of a problem.”

“I think they just got a political bug against federal law enforcement agencies,” he said.

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Few Republicans have high confidence that votes will be tallied accurately in next year’s presidential contest, suggesting years of sustained attacks against elections by former President Donald Trump and his allies have taken a toll, according to a new poll.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds that only 22% of Republicans have high confidence that votes in the upcoming presidential election will be counted accurately compared to 71% of Democrats, underscoring a partisan divide fueled by a relentless campaign of lies related to the 2020 presidential election. Even as he runs for the White House a third time, Trump continues to promote the false claim that the election was stolen.

Overall, the survey finds that fewer than half of Americans – 44% — have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that the votes in the next presidential election will be counted accurately.

While Democrats’ confidence in elections has risen in recent years, the opposite is true for Republicans. Ahead of the 2016 election, 32% of Republicans were highly confident votes would be counted accurately — a figure that jumped to 54% two years later after Trump won the presidency.

That confidence level dropped to 28% a month before the 2020 election, as Trump signaled to voters that the voting would be rigged, and now sits at 22% less than 16 months before the next presidential election.

“I just didn’t like the way the last election went,” said Lynn Jackson, a registered nurse from El Sobrante, California, who is a registered Republican. “I have questions about it. I can’t actually say it was stolen — only God knows that.”

Trump’s claims were rejected by dozens of judges, including several he appointed. His own attorney general and an exhaustive review by The Associated Press found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the results. Multiple reviews, audits and recounts in the battleground states where Trump disputed his loss confirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, including several overseen by Republican lawmakers.

Even so, Trump’s attempts to explain his loss led to a wave of new laws in GOP-dominated states that added new voting restrictions, primarily by restricting mail voting and limiting or banning ballot drop boxes. Across the country, conspiracy theories related to voting machines have prompted many Republican-controlled local governments to explore banning machines from tallying votes in favor of hand counts.

The AP-NORC poll suggests that the persistent messaging has sunk in among a wide swath of the American public.

The survey found that independents — a group that has consistently had low confidence in elections — were also largely skeptical about the integrity of the 2024 elections. Just 24% have the highest levels of confidence that the votes will be counted accurately.

Chris Ruff, a 46-year-old unaffiliated voter from Sanford, North Carolina, said he lost faith in elections years ago, believing they are rigged to favor certain candidates. He also sees no difference between the two major parties.

“I don’t vote at all,” he said. “I think it only adds credibility to the system if you participate.”

The conspiracy theories about voting machines, promoted through forums held around the country, also have taken a toll on confidence among Republicans even though there is no evidence to support them.

About four in 10 U.S. adults are highly confident that scanning paper ballots into a machine provides accurate counts. Democrats are about twice as confident in the process as Republicans —63% compared to 29%. That marks a notable shift from a 2018 AP-NORC poll that found just 40% of Democrats were confident compared to 53% of Republicans.

Gillian Nevers, a 79-year-old retiree from Madison, Wisconsin, has worked as a poll worker and said she has confidence — based on her experiences — in the people who oversee elections.

“I have never seen any shenanigans,” said Nevers, who votes Democratic. “The claims are unfounded and ridiculous. Because they are being so widely projected, I think they have a lot of people worried who I don’t think should be.”

The conspiracy theories have led to death threats against election officials and an exodus of experienced workers. The attacks against voting machines have been especially dispiriting for election officials because of the testing and audits they perform before and after elections to ensure votes are recorded accurately. All states except Alabama and Wisconsin reported using a method referred to as logic and accuracy testing to confirm that voting machines were tabulating votes correctly before the 2022 midterm elections, according to a report by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

In most jurisdictions, any challenged result also can be checked against the paper ballots.

James Grove, a 74-year-old retiree from Sharon, Pennsylvania, is among the minority of Republicans who are confident votes will be counted accurately next year and said he does not believe the 2020 election was stolen.

“I think most of the elections are run pretty honestly,” said Grove, who backed Trump in 2016 and 2020. “There are Republican election watchers and Democratic ones. And do I think the 2020 election was crooked? No, I really don’t.”

Among other poll findings:

— Most Republicans — 62% — are opposed to allowing people to vote using mailed ballots without an excuse, compared to just 13% of Democrats. Roughly seven in 10 Democrats support no-excuse mail voting.

— Requiring a photo ID to cast a ballot receives broad bipartisan support. Seven in 10 U.S. adults would favor a measure requiring voters to provide photo identification, including 87% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats.

— A slim majority of Americans – 55% – support automatically registering adult citizens to vote when they get a driver’s license or other state identification.

— Four in 10 U.S. adults say eligible voters being denied the right to vote is a major problem in U.S. elections, but about as many Americans say the same about people voting who are not eligible. The perceived significance of each issue varies by political party: 56% of Republicans call illegal voting a major problem in U.S. elections, compared to 20% of Democrats. At the same time, 53% of Democrats say eligible voters being unable to vote is a major problem, compared to 26% of Republicans.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden vowed Friday to push ahead with a new plan providing student loan relief for millions of borrowers, while blaming Republican “hypocrisy” for triggering the day’s Supreme Court decision that wiped out his original effort.

Biden said his administration had already begun the process of working under the authority of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which he called “the best path that remains to provide as many borrowers as possible with debt relief.”

In the meantime, since student loan-payment requirements are to resume in the fall, the White House is creating an “on ramp” to repayment and implementing ways to ease borrowers’ threat of default if they fall behind over the next year.

The president said the new programs will take longer than his initial effort would have to ease student loan debt.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Biden said borrowers now angry about the court’s decision should blame Republicans. He is trying to stay on the political offensive even as the ruling undermined a key promise to young voters who will be vital to his 2024 reelection campaign.

“These Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working class, middle class Americans,” Biden said. “The hypocrisy of Republican elected officials is stunning.”

Trying to place staunch opposition to student loan forgiveness on the GOP could allow Biden’s reelection campaign to maintain the issue as one of strength in the short term. But that may ultimately offer little solace to 43 million Americans who benefited from the initial program and will now have to wait for its replacement to take shape.

“We do not want to go into excruciating debt for our entire lives to enhance our education,” Voters of Tomorrow, a Gen Z-led organization that promotes the power of young Americans, said in a statement.

The White House efforts to forgive loans were an attempt to keep a Biden promise stretching back to his 2020 campaign to wipe out student loan debt — an idea that was especially popular with young voters and progressives. Both will be key for the president in next year’s presidential race but may be less energized about supporting him after the high court’s decision.

Wisdom Cole, the national director of the NAACP Youth & College Division, said Black Americans helped put Biden in the White House, so there’s an obligation for him to “finish the job” with his pledges to provide relief for borrowers.

“It’s going to have a huge impact on the next election,” Cole said, adding, “If we don’t do this, we continue the cycle of seeing our elected leaders make promises and not follow through.”

A May poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 43% of U.S. adults approve of how Biden sought to handle student debt, similar to his approval rating overall of 40% in the same poll.

The poll suggested that Biden gets credit for his handling of the issue among young adults in particular. Fifty-three percent of adults under age 30 said they approved of Biden’s handling of student debt, compared with only 36% who approved of his job performance overall.

Senior administration officials said Biden’s top advisers had met frequently lately to prepare for a high court ruling on student loans. They also spoke with advocates and allies in Congress. After Friday’s decision, Biden met with top advisers and ordered them to immediately begin implementing a new loan plan.

The White House argues that its new efforts will stand up to future legal challenges, even given the Supreme Court’s 6-3 current conservative majority. However, the administration also insisted its original plan was legal .

Biden bristled at suggestions his efforts to ease student loan burdens got borrowers’ hopes up unnecessarily.

“I didn’t give any false hope,” he said. “The Republicans snatched away the hope that they were given.”

The political stakes are especially high since progressive Democrats in Congress and activists have been clamoring for the administration to offer an alternative to Biden’s original student loan plan for months, fearing that the Supreme Court would ultimately move to block the president’s original efforts.

Many progressives argued that the Higher Education Act was the best vehicle all along, though the administration worried that implementation might have been slower had it originally tried employing the act.

The new approach uses a provision allowing Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to “compromise, waive or release” student loans. The Biden administration used the same basis last year to forgive $6 billion in loans for borrowers who were deceived by their colleges.

The details of the new forgiveness will be negotiated through a federal rulemaking process that the administration launched Friday. The process allows the Education Department to write or change federal regulations with the weight of law.

But there’s no guarantee that the plan could survive another legal challenge.

The Higher Education Act has been used to cancel student debt but never at this scale, and lawyers for the Trump administration concluded in 2021 that the education secretary “does not have statutory authority to provide blanket or mass cancellation” under the act.

The GOP has long countered that repaying student loans is a fairness issue, and many leading Republicans celebrated Friday’s ruling. Betsy DeVos, who served as secretary of education under President Donald Trump, called Biden’s original plan “deeply unfair to the majority of Americans who don’t have student loans.”

Republicans now seeking their party’s 2024 presidential nomination lined up to applaud the decision, with former Vice President Mike Pence saying he was “pleased that the court struck down the radical left’s effort to use the money of taxpayers who played by the rules and repaid their debts in order to cancel the debt of bankers and lawyers in New York, San Francisco, and Washington.”

Addressing the Moms for Liberty conference in Philadelphia on Friday, Trump slammed Biden’s efforts on student loans as “a way of trying to buy votes, that’s all it was.” Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nation’s Nikki Haley said the Supreme Court was “right to throw out Joe Biden’s power grab.”

After Biden announced his response, some Republicans were equally quick to reject it.

“Taxpayers just got sucker punched – again – by this administration,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican. “Today, President Biden announced that taxpayers will be forced to pay for the costliest regulation in our nation’s history.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — An optimistic President Joe Biden declared Wednesday he is confident the U.S. will avoid an unprecedented and potentially catastrophic debt default, saying talks with congressional Republicans have been productive. He left for a G-7 summit in Japan but planned to return by the weekend in hopes of approving a solid agreement.

Biden’s upbeat remarks came as a select group of negotiators began meeting to try and hammer out the final contours of a budget spending deal to unlock a path for raising the debt limit as soon June 1. That is when the Treasury Department says the U.S. could begin defaulting on its obligations and trigger financial chaos.

“I’m confident that we’ll get the agreement on the budget and America will not default,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Later Wednesday evening, negotiations resumed behind closed doors at the Capitol.

Democrat Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have traded blame for a debt-ceiling impasse for weeks. But Biden said of the latest White House session with congressional leaders that “everyone came to the meeting, I think, in good faith.”

McCarthy was upbeat, too, though contending Biden had given ground. The president said the budget talks were still separate from the debt limit issue, but the speaker said Biden had “finally backed off” his refusal to negotiate.

“Keep working — we’ll work again tonight,” McCarthy told reporters later. “We’re going to work until we can get it done.”

Biden said that every leader at Tuesday’s Oval Office meeting — Vice President Kamala Harris, McCarthy, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — agreed the U.S. must not default on its obligations.

“It would be catastrophic for the American economy and the American people if we didn’t pay our bills,” Biden said. “I’m confident everyone in the room agreed … that we’re going to come together because there’s no alternative. We have to do the right thing for the country. We have to move on.”

He said he would be in “constant contact” with White House officials while at the summit in Hiroshima. He is canceling stops in Australia and Papua New Guinea that were to follow so he can return to Washington on Sunday.

Biden and McCarthy tasked a handful of representatives to work swiftly to try and close out a final deal. They include Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president; legislative affairs director Louisa Terrell and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young for the administration, and Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., a close McCarthy ally, for the Republicans.

McCarthy, who has said he would personally be involved, said he planned to stop by the talks later Wednesday. He said he would be in Washington for the weekend while negotiations are underway.

Agreement by the negotiators would still leave any deal needing approval by Democratic Senate and Republican House.

Democrats are upset about the possibility of new work requirements for some recipients of government aid. And Republicans want much tougher budget restraints than the Democrats support.

The positive comments by Biden and McCarthy suggest they believe they can gain the backing of their parties’ lawmakers.

McCarthy was flanked Wednesday on the Capitol steps by some of the most conservative Republicans from the House and Senate in a feisty show of support.

The national debt currently stands at $31.4 trillion. An increase in the debt limit would not authorize new federal spending; it would only allow for borrowing to pay for what Congress has already approved.

The contours of an agreement have begun to take shape, but the details of spending cuts and policy changes will make or break whether the divided Congress can strike a bipartisan deal with the White House.

In exchange for lifting the debt limit to keep paying the bills, newly majority House Republicans are trying to extract steep budget caps of no more than 1% growth a year over the next decade, alongside bolstered work requirements.

Negotiators are preparing to claw back some $30 billion of unspent COVID-19 aid, now that the government has lifted the pandemic emergency. And they are working on a potential agreement for permit changes that would speed the development of energy projects that both Republicans and Democrats want, though the details remain daunting.

But Democrats are not at all willing to accept the 10-year cap on spending that Republicans approved in their own House bill, and the Democrats are instead pushing for a shorter window of budget cuts.

Biden is facing fierce blowback from progressive Democrats after he opened the door to tougher work requirements. But he insisted Wednesday any new work requirements would be of “no consequence” and that he’s not willing to impact health programs, presumably referring to Medicaid.

Asked about that, the Republicans behind McCarthy — who support more work requirements on Medicaid, food stamps and cash assistance programs — broke out in laughter at the Capitol.

The Republicans scoffed aloud as helicopters with the presumably departing Biden flew overhead.

McCarthy, who depended on Donald Trump’s backing to become the new speaker, still has work to do to keep his narrow House majority in line for any final deal, particularly among the hardline Freedom Caucus conservatives who almost blocked his election earlier this year for the gavel.

Former President Trump has encouraged Republicans to “do a default” if they don’t get everything they want from Biden.

“Bipartisanship is needed,” Schumer said Wednesday. “It’s the only way to go.”

As backup on Wednesday, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries launched a process that would force a vote on raising the debt limit.

It’s a cumbersome legislative discharge procedure, but Jeffries urged House Democrats to sign on to the measure in hopes of gathering the 218 majority backers including Republicans needed to put it in motion.

“Emerging from the White House meeting, I am hopeful that a real pathway exists to find an acceptable, bipartisan resolution that prevents a default,” Jeffries said in a letter to colleagues.

“However, given the impending June 1 deadline and urgency of the moment, it is important that all legislative options be pursued in the event that no agreement is reached.”

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