Newsom opens second term with Jan. 6 rebuke of conservatives seeking to 'take the nation backward'

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom opened his second term Friday by contrasting his progressive vision with that of conservative foes, delivering his speech on Jan. 6 as an explicit rebuke to election deniers who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential contest.

“They’re promoting grievance and victimhood, in an attempt to erase so much of the progress you and I have witnessed in our lifetime,” Newsom said. “They make it harder to vote and easier to buy illegal guns. They silence speech, fire teachers, kidnap migrants, subjugate women, attack the Special Olympics, and even demonize Mickey Mouse.”

The Democratic governor scheduled his inauguration to coincide with the second anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — marking the event with a march across a bridge over the Sacramento River. He was joined by his family and other Democrats, including Sen. Alex Padilla. His speech drew a wide array of prominent California elected officials, including newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

In a wide-ranging denunciation of "red state politicians" and their media enablers, Newsom assailed some prominent Republican rivals without explicitly naming them.

He compared a controversial Florida law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that bars teaching LGBTQ topics — the so-called Don't Say Gay law — with a failed 1978 California ballot initiative that sought to prohibit gay teachers. Unlike other states, Newsom said, California safeguards freedoms like "the freedom for teachers to teach, freedom from litmus tests about their political party or the person they love."

It's hardly the first time Newsom has condemned national Republican figures, often using them as foils to tout his record. After crushing a 2021 recall attempt and decisively winning reelection in 2022, the governor enters his second term with an enlarged national profile as a presidential contender should President Joe Biden not run for reelection.

Much of Newsom’s first term was defined by sparring with a hostile Trump administration. But even with a Democrat in the White House, he used his speech to forcefully push back on Republicans.

Newsom will need to contend with the economic storm clouds massing on the horizon. A projected deficit would reverse years of booming surpluses that enabled ambitious policies, such as extending health care to undocumented immigrants.

POLITICO's Lara Korte contributed to this report.

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Trump Politicized the Military. Was That the Real Problem With the Jan. 6 Response?

Steven Sund, the ex-chief of the U.S. Capitol police who was forced out after the Jan. 6 insurrection, says that the public is failing to comprehend one of the most important legacies of the recent era of partisan discord: how the intense politicization of federal law enforcement is jeopardizing the safety of Washingtonians. The next time a violent threat breaks out or a protest gets dangerously out of control in the capital of the United States, what will be the process for calling out the National Guard?

The question flummoxed Washington two years ago. And today the answer remains elusive, and the politics of security devilishly complicated across the American political spectrum. That uncertainty alone leaves Washington at greater risk of an out-of-control domestic disturbance, and Washingtonians at a greater risk of bodily harm.

That’s not to say that no one has been talking about the subject. In fact, it’s everywhere. The problem is that Washington is treating it as a process problem when it’s actually a political one.

To rewind a bit: The lack of a National Guard response on Jan. 6 is one of the major subjects of lingering finger-pointing two years after the insurrection. Was this Trump administration malfeasance? Poor law enforcement planning? Opinions vary, but the issue is front and center again with this week’s publication of Sund’s memoir, Courage Under Fire.

In the book, Sund is sharply critical of numerous figures he says were responsible for the failure to deploy federal resources to back up the outnumbered police as they battled the mob. He recounts meetings with congressional staffers in the days before the insurrection in which he was told that then-speaker Nancy Pelosi was “never going to go” for deploying the Guard, and meetings in the midst of the crisis when Pentagon brass said they didn’t want to take responsibility for the unprecedented spectacle of the military rushing the citadel of democracy.

“It was sickening,” Sund told me this week. “I’m sitting here watching my men and women fighting, you know, defend every inch of ground. … I get on the call with the Pentagon to find that they’re really [more] concerned about the look of having the National Guard up at the Capitol than they are about my men and women and their asses handed to them. That’s sickening.”

In the book, Sund ruefully notes that on Jan. 6, it took less time for the New Jersey State Police to deploy from the Garden State than it took for the guard to show up from an armory less than two miles down East Capitol Street.

Sund is one of the more controversial Jan. 6 law enforcement figures, the first person ousted over the day’s security failures, and someone who has come under vocal criticism from fellow cops like the injured Metropolitan Police Department Officer Michael Fanone, whose book beat Sund’s to market by three months. When I interviewed him last fall, Fanone scoffed at the idea of Sund writing a book at all. “The reality is that the United States Capitol Police as an agency was an absolute and utter fucking failure,” he said.

But John Falcicchio, the D.C. deputy mayor who sat in on the day’s panicked law enforcement conversations from the city police command center, says that Sund’s depiction of the unheeded calls for federal backup rings true.

“[D.C. Police] Chief [Robert] Contee kind of says, Hey, listen, guys. Let’s just get right down to it. Chief Sund, are you inviting the National Guard to come support the U.S. Capitol Police on the grounds of the Capitol? And there’s like a silent moment. Then he says yes. And literally, the Pentagon is the next voice heard. And they’re literally like, we’re not going to be able to fulfill that request.” The room deflated. “The Pentagon, in fairness, was saying: Listen, that visual of the National Guard charging up to the Capitol is one we don’t know that it’s the best one to portray.”

Whatever his intentions — and I’m not competent to litigate whether he was a goat or a scapegoat — Sund’s book draws an interesting connection, one that is worth pondering as the country looks forward: In his telling, there’s a direct connection between the decision making on Jan. 6 and something that had happened just a half-year earlier, when the Trump administration flooded the city with federalized law enforcement to counter the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.

If the consensus about Jan. 6 is that there was an unconscionably weak federal response, the general opinion about the summer of 2020 is that there was a disgracefully excessive military presence when Donald Trump took his infamous walk across a freshly-cleared Lafayette Square in the company of the uniformed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

From the aforementioned general — Mark H. Milley, who soon gave a full-throated apology for an appearance that “created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics” — on down, the photo-op was panned as a dangerous break from American traditions.

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” retired General and former Trump administration defense secretary James Mattis wrote in a statement at the time. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo-op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

It’s less well remembered now, but the summer of protests was full of smaller-scale versions of this disagreement. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser remade her previously conflict-averse political reputation by clapping back at Trump’s threats to sic Secret Service dogs on protesters. As late as Jan. 5, Bowser was writing Trump’s acting attorney general to note that the city’s requests for assistance the next day did not mean there was any interest in a repeat of 2020, when “unidentifiable personnel — in many cases armed — caused confusion among residents and visitors.”

And of course, the New York Times’ decision on June 3, 2020, to run an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton headlined “Send In the Troops” famously led to a staff revolt and the ouster of the paper’s editorial page editor as the organization disavowed the column’s publication.

Sund’s book got advance attention ahead of its publication because of the former chief’s warning that the failures ahead of Jan. 6 could easily be repeated — in his view, the system that failed to pass along intelligence about far-right insurrectionists’ plans has not really changed. When we spoke this week, he went into wonky detail about the system for calling out the guard and other reinforcements, a cumbersome process that involved sign-offs from Pentagon brass as well as from the congressional leadership to whom the Capitol Police report. He thinks a single person should be put in charge of Capitol security.

The complicated reporting structure remains, he said, though the 2021 recommendations of a panel of security experts to make it easier for the chief to call in the Guard were instituted later that year. Still, Sund said, the chief’s call for backup can be overridden, and depends on there already being an emergency — something that wouldn’t make it any easier to pre-deploy in response to intelligence.

“It’s a no-win situation for a chief,” he told me.

In Washington’s local government, meanwhile, the issue connects to a perpetual sore point: D.C.’s lack of statehood. Anywhere else in the country, a governor could simply call out the Guard. But in the capital, it requires sign-off from the executive branch, which on Jan. 6 was occupied by the administration whose admirers were behind the disturbance. In pushing for statehood, the locals would like to change that arrangement.

All of this process stuff makes sense as far as it goes. But as with so much else about permanent Washington’s perennial hope of a return to normal after the chaos of 2020, it doesn’t factor in the reality of what America is in 2023: a country where the kinds of crises that lead to calls for the National Guard are likely to have a partisan overlay.

That’s an enormous change. Beyond hurricanes and other natural disasters, there’s a long history of federal backup being brought in to deal with things that were in some sense enormously political: civil disturbances like the 1968 riots that burned swathes of D.C., standoffs like the eviction of the Bonus Army of jobless World War I veterans that marched on the capital in 1932. Further afield, federalized Guard units enforced desegregation rulings during civil rights-era standoffs like the one in Little Rock.

But in none of those cases was it about the results of an election pitting one party against another, as on Jan. 6, or even about an issue that tracked as closely with party as did the protests in the summer of 2020, by which point opinions on the civil rights issues of the day had — unlike in the era of Little Rock — sundered along partisan lines. Especially after the spectacle of Lafayette Square, can you blame the brass for not wanting to get involved on their own?

It’s healthy, in a free country, to feel uncomfortable about having armed forces sort out partisan battles. But it’s dangerous to not police political lawlessness because the authorities are afraid they’ll be dragged by the insurrectionists’ elected admirers.

Which is why Sund’s preferred solution, that deployment decisions somehow be yanked away from politics, isn’t going to cut it. All the procedural improvements in the world won’t change the fact that political timidity will hamper any fight against insurrection. Ending the partisan divide over insurrectionism would be the best way out of danger. But if that’s not possible, ending the timidity about fighting it would help, too.

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Gingrich and Pelosi Agree: The GOP Is Rudderless

On Jan. 6 two years ago, Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), a sober-minded military man, looked on his television screen with horror as he saw his then-colleague, former Rep. Mo Brooks, urge a group of soon-to-be rioters gathered at the Ellipse to “start taking down names and kicking ass.” Womack was so appalled at House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s refusal to punish Brooks for his conduct that the Arkansan resigned in disgust from the powerful Steering Committee, as Alex Burns and I reported last year in our book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future.”

Now, on the two-year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, Womack is scarcely less disturbed about the images from Washington again being broadcast to the world. Yet this time, he’s less angry than he is embarrassed about people seeing the first, rotten fruits of the House Republican majority in the party’s speakership battle.

“People are watching this with a certain amount of disbelief,” Womack told me about the week-long C-SPAN bacchanalia, which his wife, who he said hates politics, had told him was absorbing everybody. “This is the Congress of the United States of America, man, the greatest country in the world.”

It’s also the Republican Party of 2023, man, which is still suffering from what plagued it on that day of infamy two years ago: a lack of serious leadership.

But at least then the party had more of an identity, even if it was Donald Trump’s cult of personality. Now it’s both leaderless and lacking any widely shared anchorage, outside of hostility toward the left.

“To characterize the party today as messy, somewhat dysfunctional and lacking a true identity is an accurate depiction of where we are and it is a challenge we must fix and fix quickly because the ’24 election cycle is underway,” said Womack, likening House Republicans’ performance this week to a Kentucky Derby gone horribly wrong. “The gate opened and we threw our jockey,” he said.

If you’re not persuaded by Womack, or me, perhaps two former House speakers with very different politics will convince you that Republicans are confronting a more fundamental challenge beyond McCarthy agonistes.

Nancy Pelosi was never shy about her skillset — she often called herself “a master legislator” — yet when I caught up with her this week in the Capitol she downplayed her talents to make a point about the structural differences between the two parties.

“People always give me credit, ‘Oh you keep them together,’” she recalled of her days leading House Democrats, though still using the present-tense. “I said I really don’t, our values keep us together. We’re committed to America’s working families. If you don’t have that, what’s your why?

Republicans, Pelosi said, lack that why. “They don’t have any value system,” she said. (And if you’re wondering about her own plans, and the prospect of a scion in a San Francisco succession special, Pelosi insisted she had not talked to her daughter, Christine, about running and was “not leaving” at least “through the term.”)

Anyways, I would argue that, in recent years, Democrats have been just as unified by their antipathy to Trump than their shared commitment to working families. Negative partisanship is the most powerful current in this age of polarization, and you need not look any further than the former speaker herself. The Pelosi memes aren’t of her shepherding Covid legislation or delivering her caucus on Build Back Better — they’re of her ripping up Trump’s State of the Union speech, standing up to him at a White House meeting and putting on shades as she left his West Wing.

That said, her point remains about Democrats benefiting from shared values.

As one of her GOP predecessors explained to me, in characteristically longer fashion, Republicans at this moment lack any such unity of purpose.

Newt Gingrich said his party is contending with a band of “deranged disrupters” in the House, a cadre of “Biden Republicans” enabling the president in the Senate and “a grassroots base that wants anger.”

Stuck in the middle, Gingrich said, is the sunny son of 1970s Bakersfield.

“Kevin is a good California guy who isn’t angry because he grew up at a time when the surf was up, the Beach Boys were playing and California girls were worth singing about,” said the former speaker (before you ask, he teed up that line off the cuff in a telephone interview).

Yes, it’s Newt.

I can see some of you rolling your eyes about Gingrich. But he has his finger on the conservative pulse today just as he did when, speaking of C-SPAN, he was a younger rebel with a cause, chastising Tip O’Neill by way of the new cameras in the House chamber.

More significantly, Gingrich remains in touch with many of the party’s key players, most notably McCarthy, whom he joined on a barnstorming tour ahead of last year’s midterms. The two have been in touch this week. Gingrich’s advice to him, as related to me: “Smile, feel inevitable, be enormously patient, have other people do the negotiating.” (McCarthy’s mood, Gingrich said, could be described as “be nice if it was over” but he was “not despondent”).

Of late, Gingrich, ever the historian, has been likening this moment in the GOP to the lead-up to the cataclysmic 1964 primary between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, which split the party and led to the Democratic landslide that year. Yet as I reminded the former speaker, two years later a new tide of Republicans swept into office, including a Californian by the name of Reagan, and two years after that Republicans reclaimed the White House.

Which is to say that the pendulum swings in American politics. As another grand old man of the GOP, Haley Barbour, likes to say: “In politics, things are never as good or bad as they seem.”

And to be fair to today’s Republicans, it’s hardly unique for the party out of the White House to find itself in the wilderness, lacking leadership and identity.

Yet what makes this moment different is the long shadow of Trump.

Until the party determines whether it’s going to embrace Trump for a third consecutive nomination or move on, it won’t fully resolve its identity crisis.

Gingrich said the proposition was very simple: “If Trump focuses his anger and gets serious he will be the nominee or he doesn’t focus and doesn’t get serious, in which case you’ll get probably DeSantis.”

This week was illustrative of the difficulties of a party in transition, no longer fully embracing of Trump but also not yet totally past him two years after he incited the insurrection.

He doesn’t want to relinquish control, so he got pulled into the speaker’s race just enough to make some calls and weigh in with a good-if-not-great public endorsement of McCarthy. But Trump isn’t interested enough in the contest, or seizing power generally, to pull himself away from the fairways long enough to understand the key issues and figures shaping the race.

And because of that, and due to his overall waning since the midterms, he’s not been able to steer the race toward McCarthy or an even Trumpier alternative.

Trump moved no votes after reiterating his support for the man he called “My Kevin” and Rep. Matt Gaetz’s gambit to put Trump’s name in nomination for the speakership resulted in one vote (Mr. Gaetz of Florida).

“If they’re giving him the back of the hand, it says a lot,” Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) argued about the hardliners dismissing Trump’s appeal. “Trump has a strong following in this party but he’s now one of many, I don’t believe he’s the only voice taking the oxygen out of the room.” (As for her own 2024 preferences, Wagner cited her former House colleague from Kansas: “I’m a Pompeo kind of girl at this point.”)

What was striking from spending the week talking to House Republicans in the Capitol, though, was that in conversations about the party the name of a different former Republican president came up. It was the same one who DeSantis invoked in his inaugural address on Tuesday.

Even as the party struggles to find itself, Reagan remains their north star.

Republican lawmakers as different as Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin (a leadership loyalist who delivered one of McCarthy’s nominating speeches) and Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina (who nominated one of McCarthy’s challengers and is among the 20 renegades) both brought up Reagan as a model without prompting.

But when I reminded Bishop that Reagan was not available for nomination in 2024, the North Carolinian could only chuckle.

Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), however, was not laughing when he considered this messy interregnum and the difficulties of keeping House Republicans together for the next two years.

“If we get through this,” Armstrong said of the speakership battle, “it’s just the beginning, not the end.”

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Miami Democrats face internal feud after disastrous 2022 midterms

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The 2022 midterms saw Republicans win Miami-Dade County for the first time in 20 years. Now, the Democratic infighting has begun.

Ten party officials in Florida’s most populous county are asking the statewide Florida Democratic Party to audit the county party over alleged campaign finance “improper activity.” The request comes after Republicans won nearly every race in the county, which Hillary Clinton won by nearly 30 percentage-points just six years ago. The county has long been held up as an overwhelming Democratic home turf.

Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chair Robert Dempster has said an audit of the county party is underway, but the group of 10 say they would like to hand off those duties to the statewide party. The Miami-Dade Democratic Executive Committee has 257 total members.

“Many signers of this letter have been raising the alarm for many months that Robert Dempster was unfit to lead our Party,” former Miami-Dade County Democratic Chairman Juan Cuba said during a Friday interview. “And even after losing every race in Miami-Dade this November, there has been zero accountability and very little self-reflection.”

Dempster said the county party is behind on audits, but those were due before he took office and the “10 signatories are well aware of that.” He also said that Cuba also fell behind on audits when he was chairman of the county party.

“We have been exceedingly transparent with our membership about our finances, reporting and our efforts to reconcile any good faith errors, and can provide meeting minutes since we installed a new treasurer a few months ago as such,” Dempster said.

The group says if Florida Democratic Party Chairman Manny Diaz does not conduct an audit, they will turn the matter over to the Miami-Dade County Inspector General’s Office and the Florida Elections Commission.

“Our sincere hope is that there was no illegal campaign activity during his tenure, but if this audit finds wrongdoing, we demand you to take immediate action in suspending and removing Robert Dempster as DEC Chair,” read the letter.

Diaz did not return a request seeking comment. He is facing his own calls to resign after a disastrous election cycle that saw Gov. Ron DeSantis wins by a historic 19-points and Republicans take legislative supermajorities even though Republicans underperformed across the country.

Among those signing the letter are Cuba, former Democratic state Rep. Cindy Lerner, former state Rep. Robert Asencio and Verlance Echoles, president of the Miami-Dade Democratic Black Caucus.

The letter to Diaz alleges the county party has $61,000 in contributions and $107,000 in expenditures not accounted for on campaign finance reports, no expenses reported for the second quarter, and a contribution given to Miami City Commission candidate Quinn Smith recorded two months after he lost.

The 2022 midterms were a disaster across the board for Democrats, but losing Miami-Dade County was perhaps the single biggest symbolic blow. There had been signs in recent years that Republicans had been making in-roads into what was once one of the state’s bluest counties, but its flipping red was still seen as a big blow to Florida Democrats.

Diaz, the state party chairman, is a former Miami mayor, who was elected by party leaders amid the promise that he could help boost fundraising efforts, but that never materialized. Republicans raised significantly more than Democrats in nearly every key midterm race, but Diaz has so far declined to step down.

The 10 signatories want the audit completed by Jan. 20, which coincides with a Florida Democratic Party organizational meeting where they will decide on party leadership headed into the 2024 presidential election cycle.

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Appeals court blocks Jen Psaki deposition in social media lawsuit

A federal appeals court has blocked efforts by Republican-led states to force former White House press secretary Jen Psaki to testify about efforts by the Biden administration to urge social media firms to take down certain kinds of posts or bar users from posting.

The order on Thursday afternoon from the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is another not-so-veiled rebuke to District Court Judge Terry Doughty, who has been overseeing the suit the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed last year claiming that the administration’s pressure on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was so intense that it amounted to censorship.

The three-judge appeals court panel said Doughty failed to give adequate weight to longstanding legal principles calling for depositions of current and former senior government officials to be limited to instances where they are truly essential.

The attorneys general and several private individuals have argued that Psaki’s statements about encouraging social media firms to take down misinformation about the coronavirus and about election fraud are grounds to subject her to questioning, but the appeals judges sharply disagreed.

“The plaintiffs argue that a deposition is required in order to, among other things, illuminate the meaning of these statements. Much of this desired illumination, though, is apparent from the record,” Judges Edith Clement, Leslie Southwick and Stephen Higginson wrote in their joint order. “In a similar vein, the plaintiffs say they need to uncover the identities of government officials and social media platforms mentioned in Psaki’s statements. The record is already replete with such information.”

The 5th Circuit panel also suggested that in the absence of evidence that Psaki herself was interacting with the social media firms or dictating policy, there was little reason to demand her testimony.

“As Press Secretary, Psaki’s role was to inform the media of the administration’s priorities, not to develop or execute policy,” the appeals judges wrote. “Unsurprisingly, then, the record does not demonstrate that Psaki has unique first-hand knowledge that would justify the extraordinary measure of deposing a high-ranking executive official.”

Clement and Southwick are appointees of President George W. Bush. Higginson was appointed by President Barack Obama.

“The central concern of this court is that absent ‘extraordinary circumstances,’ depositions of high government officials should not proceed,” the appeals judges wrote. “That rule is a constant across the decades regardless of who the officials are.”

The federal government has turned over numerous records in the case and depositions of other officials have gone forward, including of an FBI agent who detailed the agency’s interactions with social media companies. Last month, the FBI issued a statement defending its contacts with Twitter, among other social media firms.

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the statement said. “The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Psaki, who left the White House in May and now works for MSNBC, declined to comment on the ruling on Thursday. A spokesperson for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey declined to comment.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry’s office said in a statement: “We have no problem with the court’s request. We look forward to obtaining more discovery.”

The appeals court has also placed a hold on three other depositions that Doughty, an appointee of President Donald Trump, approved in the case. In November, the same appeals panel said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly and White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty did not have to submit to questioning while the appeals court deliberated further on the issue.

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Biden to mark Jan. 6 anniversary by warning the Big Lie remains

President Joe Biden on Friday will mark the two-year anniversary of a violent mob storming the U.S. Capitol with a solemn tribute of the day.

He’ll also deliver a warning: the threats that were exposed by the Jan. 6 select committee, and appeared beat back in the 2022 midterms, remain very much at large.

According to multiple advisers, Biden will use Friday’s address to again put center stage the danger and chaos posed by election deniers even as the November elections in which many of them lost their races for office begin to fade from view. He will link Republicans to the extremists who attempted to forcibly overturn the results of Donald Trump’s defeat.

“Our democracy still stands on a knife’s edge: the forces that brought us to the brink on January 6th continue to work to undermine the basic pillars of our Republic [and] the radicalism of the Republican Party has not disappeared,” said Eddie Glaude, a professor at Princeton University who has met with Biden on the topic.

“President Biden has to keep sounding the alarm,” Glaude said. “What ails us cannot be remedied with one election or with the decline of Donald Trump.”

There was never any debate within the White House about whether to prominently commemorate the anniversary of the insurrection. This year the date falls at a moment of political opportunity for Biden, who will address the nation at the same time the Republican-led House of Representatives has descended into chaos in choosing its next speaker and Donald Trump, the GOP’s only declared presidential candidate, continues to espouse widely-rejected election denialism.

A year ago, Biden made the trip to the Capitol and delivered a forceful condemnation of Trump and his allies for holding “a dagger at the throat of America” by promoting lies about the election that spurred the violence in the very hall where he stood.

That speech began a year-long thread which Biden used to connect the events of Jan. 6 with the fringe elements of the GOP as well as the election deniers who sought posts in Congress and statehouses across the country. The House Jan. 6 committee toiled throughout the year to shed light on the factors that led to the insurrection in 2021, and the midterms ended with many of the most high-profile election deniers going down in defeat.

But internal polls show the issue resonated with voters — and the White House and Democrats have no plans to let go of it as they approach the runway of 2024.

White House aides have stressed that the central focus of Friday’s speech will be to primarily commemorate the tragedy and heroism of that day. Officials said Biden would salute members of law enforcement, including Capitol Police officers who held off rioters andelection officials who stood their ground in the face of Trump’s onslaught of lies.

“An important focus of his remarks will be on recognizing Americans who showed courage and patriotism, who put themselves in danger on behalf of others and on behalf of our democracy,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre aboard Air Force One this week. “Jan. 6 was… one of the darkest days and sometimes [that] can lead to light and hope.”

Homegrown threats against the nation’s democracy have been a familiar theme for Biden, who launched his presidential campaign because he felt Trump was tearing at the nation’s fabric; and who returned to it repeatedly in his first months of his term.

When Biden met last summer with a group of prominent historians to discuss threats to American democracy, many emphasized the importance of him publicly calling out anti-democratic behavior, according to three people familiar with the discussions who asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The historians warned Biden that ignoring it would be dangerous and could allow violent rhetoric and election denialism to become considered normal aspects of the country's politics. And they urged him to act, warning that how he responded to the challenges would inexorably become part of his legacy.

Biden took the warnings to heart. As the general election campaign ramped up last fall, he delivered a pair of speeches urging vigilance against violent anti-democratic forces, one set against the backdrop of Independence Hall and the other, just days before the midterms, coming after the brutal assault of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

It was not a universally cheered decision. Some party members expressed concern that the president was emphasizing concerns immaterial to most voters, who were consumed by inflation and loss of abortion rights.

But senior Biden advisors saw private polling after the midterms that showed that, even if the Jan. 6 committee’s work didn’t move the needle much with voters, warnings about prominent election deniers – including several candidates for governor and state secretaries of state – did have a significant impact, according to two people familiar with the findings but not authorized to discuss internal documents.

Though the midterms have passed and the committee has all but closed up shop, Biden will continue to sound the alarms in the months ahead, believing the threat has not dissipated.

The president’s speech on Friday comes as the House of Representatives has devolved into chaos, with a right-wing faction of the GOP that has paralyzed the process to select a speaker. Many of those same lawmakers – as well as others expected to play prominent roles in the new Congress – voted against Biden’s certification and have pushed false claims of election fraud.

“This speaker's fight is about the same thing Jan. 6 was about,” said Pete Giangreco, a veteran Democratic consultant in Chicago. “It isn't ideological. This is a group of people who don't believe in American democracy, institutions or the idea of majority rule.”

West Wing aides also point to Trump’s shadow looming over the political landscape. Though the former president has been politically weakened in recent months, many close to Biden believe Trump will still emerge as the GOP presidential nominee next year. As Biden takes steps to likely launch his own campaign in the coming months, some in his orbit are preparing to make Jan. 6 a central issue in the campaign.

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll out Thursday reveals that 45 percent of voters believe Trump is “very” responsible for the events of Jan. 6, 2021. More than 75 percent of Democrats say insurrection could impact their 2024 vote while 53 percent of independents and 35 percent of Republicans say the same.

“The evidence that the [Jan. 6] committee revealed has made even more clear that what happened almost two years ago was an attempted coup,” said Brendan Nyhan, democracy expert at Dartmouth College. “Threats still remain, though — most notably, from former President Trump, whom our experts identify as a serious or extraordinary threat to democracy if he is again nominated by the Republican Party.”

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Biden aides struggle to respond to Taliban’s latest curbs on women

The Biden administration is grappling with how to respond to new Taliban restrictions on women’s rights in Afghanistan, knowing that punishing the ruling Islamists risks rupturing the limited relationship the United States has with them.

The discussion among administration officials is fluid and positions have varied depending on the proposed penalties, a current administration official and a former U.S. official familiar with the talks said. Those proposals include new economic sanctions and tighter bans on Taliban leaders’ travels abroad, as well as limiting certain types of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan.

But in broad terms, according to the current and former officials, the debate has pitted Tom West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, against Rina Amiri, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan women, girls and human rights. West is wary of going too far in isolating the Taliban, with whom the U.S. tries to cooperate on counter-terrorism, while Amiri wants to get tougher on them as they try to erase women from public life.

While insisting that the Taliban will face consequences, a State Department spokesperson on Thursday downplayed claims of differences between West and Amiri. In the latest deliberations, “Tom and Rina have been of a similar mind” and “in the same camp advocating for similar accountability mechanisms.” The spokesperson, however, would not describe the mechanisms being discussed or how far each official wanted to go.

Nearly 18 months after the U.S. military left and the Taliban took charge, Afghanistan’s deepening misery is a growing blight on President Joe Biden’s human rights record. It’s a topic that Republicans, who are taking control of the House, are likely to hammer as they launch investigations into the administration’s handling of Afghanistan.

But while Biden has long said that human rights are central to his foreign policy, he has defended his decision to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan after a 20-year war effort. In the past, Biden has said the U.S. doesn’t bear responsibility for the fate of Afghan women and girls. He has largely avoided talking about the country in recent months, fueling a sense of helplessness among administration staffers grappling with how to respond to the growing crisis.

“We knew this was coming but dreaded it and couldn’t stop it,” said the current official, who, like the State Department spokesperson and others, requested anonymity to describe sensitive internal administration conversations.

The White House said it would offer comment on Biden’s position, but had not provided one as of publication time.

The Taliban leadership’s latest edicts, issued last month, bar women from universities and from working for many NGOs — leading several humanitarian groups to suspend operations in Afghanistan, where millions face starvation and other insecurity.

Months ago, the militant group’s top leaders barred girls from secondary schools, and they also have issued other decrees that ban women and girls from certain public spaces and jobs. There are fears they will ultimately bar girls from primary school.

The current administration official said there are interagency meetings scheduled this week to discuss a U.S. response, but a decision may not come until next week.

“We are working with our partners throughout the government and also with like-minded partners around the world to devise an appropriate set of consequences that register our condemnation for this outrageous edict on the part of the Taliban, while also protecting our status as the world’s leading humanitarian provider for the people of Afghanistan,” the State Department’s lead spokesperson, Ned Price, told reporters during Wednesday’s press briefing.

Washington has some leverage over the Taliban, both diplomatically and economically. The Taliban have sought international recognition as a government, and they also want foreign investment. The United States has sway over billions of dollars in Afghan funds that could help stabilize the country’s economy, and American sanctions have ripple effects that deter foreign investment.

But the Taliban have leverage, too, including the freedom they give to terrorist groups that operate from Afghan soil. Former Al Qaeda chief and 9/11 attacks plotter Osama bin Laden used Afghanistan as a base. Last year, his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Kabul. The Islamic State terrorist group, meanwhile, is a Taliban rival and U.S. foe that has staged a number of attacks in Afghanistan over the past year and a half.

Cooperation on counterterrorism is just one of many factors that U.S. officials including West and Amiri — neither of whom responded to requests for comment — have to consider as they weigh how to respond to the Taliban’s human rights abuses.

The differences between West and Amiri are not massive and are more a matter of degree — both want to hold the Taliban accountable. Their stances also reflect their specific jobs, the current administration official said. “It’s generally true that Tom wants to find some way to keep working with the Taliban. I think he thinks that’s his mandate from the president,” the official said. “Rina has a more human rights-principled approach — do what we should do and let the chips fall where they may.”

To make things harder, the Taliban’s top leaders are deeply conservative Islamists who appear personally immune to most U.S. economic sanctions and travel bans; they are unlikely to have many financial assets outside Afghanistan and don’t travel much. They are said to be based in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

If the United States decides to cut or change humanitarian aid to Afghanistan as part of its penalties, it’s unlikely to be severe, the current official said.

U.S. officials have little — if any — contact with these top Taliban figures, which include the group’s No. 1 leader or “emir,” Haibatullah Akhundzada, said former U.S. officials in touch with the administration. Instead, U.S. officials deal with the Taliban’s more public faces in Kabul and in third party countries such as Qatar, but those people have less power.

Even if U.S. officials set aside diplomatic sensitivities and were willing to publicly engage with Akhundzada, the secretive Taliban leader is unlikely to agree to meet, former officials and analysts said.

Not all Taliban members support Akhundzada’s deeply conservative approach to women and girls’ rights. In fact, one prominent Taliban figure, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is believed to support educating girls and women, said a second current U.S. official familiar with the Afghan file. The Haqqani network is among the most violent Taliban factions.

Still, the Taliban have a strong central structure, so even more progressive elements defer to the conservative leadership, the U.S. official said. That makes it hard for the United States to sow division in the group.

Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban official, insisted to POLITICO via a WhatsApp message that the education bans were only temporary. He referred questions about the NGO work bans to another Taliban official who could not be reached for comment.

Afghan officials are “working in full swing” to ensure a “conducive environment” for women’s education, Shaheen wrote. “None is against women’s education per se, but they want women [to] receive education in an environment compliant to our values and rules,” he said, in a nod to strict Islamic law.

But the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan for much of the 1990s, have previously claimed that such bans are temporary, only to keep schools closed to girls.

Lisa Curtis, who oversaw Afghanistan at the National Security Council in the Trump administration, argued that Biden aides should use sanctions as well as other tools to pressure the Taliban. The administration can, for instance, engage more publicly with Afghan opposition leaders or re-open the Afghan Embassy in Washington but under the control of non-Taliban figures, she said.

“It’s been almost 18 months. The Taliban has not changed,” she said. “At some point there has to be consequences.”

Others outside the Biden team, however, said it would be a mistake to further isolate the militant movement. In the long run, for the good of all Afghans, engagement is critical, said a former U.S. official familiar with the issue.

“We need to own up to the fact that our policy of shrilly criticizing them every five minutes isn’t working,” the former official said.

A former U.S. diplomat also familiar with the Afghan file argued that one approach is for the United States to lower its profile and empower institutions such as the United Nations to pressure the militant rulers.

The current strategy isn’t working, the former diplomat said, and in the meantime, “this country has so grievously erased the basic rights of half its citizens.”

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