Biden will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the Black teen lynched in Mississippi

President Joe Biden will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, and his mother, a White House official said Saturday.

Biden will sign a proclamation on Tuesday to create the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument across three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, according to the official. The individual spoke on condition of anonymity because the White House had not formally announced the president's plans.

Tuesday is the anniversary of Emmett Till's birth in 1941.

The monument will protect places that are central to the story of Till's life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers and his mother's activism. Till's mother's insistence on an open casket to show the world how her son had been brutalized and Jet's magazine's decision to publish photos of his mutilated body helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement.

Biden's decision also comes at a fraught time in the United States over matters concerning race. Conservative leaders are pushing back against the teaching of slavery and Black history in public schools, as well as the incorporation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs from college classrooms to corporate boardrooms.

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris criticized a revised Black history curriculum in Florida that includes teaching that enslaved people benefited from the skills they learned at the hands of the people who denied them freedom. The Florida Board of Education approved the curriculum to satisfy legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate who has accused public schools of liberal indoctrination.

“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Harris asked in a speech delivered from Jacksonville, Florida.

DeSantis said he had no role in devising his state’s new education standards but defended the components on how enslaved people benefited.

“All of that is rooted in whatever is factual,” he said in response.

The monument to Till and his mother will include three sites in the two states.

The Illinois site is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Thousands of people gathered at the church to mourn Emmett Till in September 1955.

The Mississippi locations are Graball Landing, believed to be where Till’s mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till’s killers were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.

Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when Carolyn Bryant Donham said the 14-year-old Till whistled and made sexual advances at her while she worked in a store in the small community of Money.

Till was later abducted and his body eventually pulled from the Tallahatchie River, where he had been tossed after he was shot and weighted down with a cotton gin fan.

Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were tried on murder charges about a month after Till was killed, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. Months later, they confessed to killing Till in a paid interview with Look magazine. Bryant was married to Donham in 1955. She died earlier this year.

The monument will be the fourth Biden has created since taking office in 2021, and just his latest tribute to the younger Till.

For Black History Month this year, Biden hosted a screening of the movie “Till,” a drama about his lynching.

In March 2022, Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act into law. Congress had first considered such legislation more than 120 years ago.

The Justice Department announced in December 2021 that it was closing its investigation into Till's killing.

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History Has a Warning for Kevin McCarthy About Expunging Trump’s Impeachments

It was singularly ironic that Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri would prove one of President Andrew Jackson’s staunchest defenders in the United States Senate.

Earlier in life, the two men had become embroiled in an elaborate dispute that culminated in a gunfight in Nashville. Benton landed a shot against Jackson, hitting him squarely in the shoulder. The future president nearly died from his wound.

At the time, no one could have predicted that Jackson and Benton would become inseparable political allies. But as their careers progressed, the two onetime enemies came to share a common outlook. In 1836, Benton led a relentless campaign to expunge a Senate resolution passed several years earlier that censured Jackson for illegally usurping congressional authority. The maneuver worked, though coming at the end of Jackson’s second term in office, it carried nothing more than symbolic importance.

The strange story of the Senate’s censure, and then un-censure, of Andrew Jackson, is relevant today, as the Republican majority in the House of Representatives weighs whether to expunge two earlier resolutions impeaching former President Donald Trump. Practically speaking, it’s a shallow political stunt, similar to Benton’s efforts to soothe Jackson’s notoriously fragile ego. Neither president was removed from office in the first instance, and much as one cannot mend a broken egg, a congressional resolution cannot revise history.

And that’s the point. Speaker Kevin McCarthy may feel cornered into placating the MAGA wing of his party, but much as the history books remember Jackson as the first president to receive an official congressional censure, for actions that vastly stretched the outer limits of executive authority, no party-line vote will save Donald Trump from being remembered as the first president to be impeached twice by the House, and to be indicted by a federal grand jury.

In 1832, the United States Senate approved a resolution formally censuring Andrew Jackson for assuming “upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both.” At issue were Jackson’s bold machinations against the Second Bank of the United States, a public-private entity that President James Madison and Congress chartered into existence in 1816. The bank was as controversial as its namesake and predecessor (Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States). Charged with maintaining a stable national currency and economy, it raised the suspicion and ire of populists like Jackson, who viewed it as a den of speculation and money manipulation by Northeastern elites. With its charter set to expire in 1836, the bank’s congressional supporters mounted a fierce effort for renewal. Jackson waged his 1832 campaign largely on opposition to the bank, and after securing reelection, he promptly vetoed its recharter.

The problem, of course, was that the bank remained a legal entity for four more years, and its supporters would enjoy additional opportunities to try saving it. In an effort to kill the institution definitively, Jackson ordered his secretary of the Treasury, William J. Duane, to withdraw all federal deposits and distribute them among state banks. The problem was that the original charter gave the Treasury secretary, not the president, authority over the bank, and Duane refused Jackson’s order on the basis that it was both extralegal and likely to cause a national banking panic. In response, Jackson fired Duane and replaced him with a more pliant Cabinet member, Roger Taney — yes, the Roger Taney who later became a Supreme Court justice and authored the infamous Dred Scott decision. Taney readily complied.

With little chance of impeaching or removing Jackson, Senate Whigs under the leadership of Henry Clay managed to cobble together a bipartisan coalition rebuking Jackson. And that is where Thomas Hart Benton entered the story.

Years earlier, in 1813, Jackson and Benton — who considered each other friends — nearly killed each other in a bloody street fight. The dispute began over a duel between two men, William Carroll and Ensign Lyttleton Johnston. Benton’s brother, Jesse, served as Johnston’s second, while Jackson stood in as Carroll’s second. The duel proved messy, and Jackson later learned that the Benton brothers had privately complained that his conduct as a second had been dishonorable — in effect, that he had tried to tilt the scales in Carroll’s favor. (The duel, Benton wrote, had been “savage, unequal, unfair, and base manner.”) In response, Jackson, who had killed a man in an affair of honor several years earlier (and who still bore a bullet lodged in his body), declared that “it is the character of the man of honor, and particularly of the soldier, not to quarrel and brawl like fish women.” He demanded that Benton either retract his words or duel.

The Benton brothers traveled to Nashville, presumably in hopes of smoothing things over, and purposely checked into Talbot’s Hotel, an inn that Jackson was not known to frequent. They hoped, in Benton’s words, to avoid “a possibility of unpleasantness.” It didn’t work out that way. Associates of Jackson spied Jesse Benton exiting the hotel. They gathered up Old Hickory and, with guns in hand, chased Jesse into the hotel, firing (and missing). Thomas happened to be in the lobby. Jackson approached him, gun in one hand, horsewhip in another, and cried, “Now defend yourself, you damned rascal!” He shot at Benton and missed. Benton returned fire and proved the better shot.

Ten years later, when Jackson traveled to Washington to be sworn in as a new member of the United States Senate, he was seated next to none other than his onetime rival, Thomas Hart Benton, who had been elected a year and a half earlier. Several members offered to switch seats with either man, to spare them awkwardness or embarrassment. But they remained in adjoining places and, over time, came to enjoy more cordial relations. Affairs of honor were tricky that way.

Politics also brought the two men together, and by the late 1820s, Benton emerged as an ardent Jacksonian Democrat who unfailingly supported the administration’s fiscal policies. Following the Senate’s censure of Jackson, Benton waged a yearslong battle to expunge the black mark from the record. Opportunity arrived when a more solid and loyal Democratic majority won control of the Senate in 1836. Leaving nothing to chance, Benton furnished “cold hams, turkeys, rounds of beef, pickles, wines, and cups of hot coffee” to hungry senators, who anticipated a drawn-out debate. Clay, their most prominent opponent, told his colleagues that the expungement resolution was folly — “like the blood-stained hands of the guilty Macbeth,” Jackson’s crimes could never be bleached out of the record. Little matter. Benton had the votes, and the resolution carried, 24 to 19.

Nearing the end of his presidency, Andrew Jackson derived a modicum of satisfaction from the Senate’s expungement of his official censure. And it was quite literally an expungement. Weeks after the vote, the Secretary of the Senate drew lines around the original record in the Senate Journal and scribbled the words: “expunged by order of the Senate.”

But in a sense, Clay was right. Just as no one could clean the blood from Macbeth’s hands, no retroactive act of the Senate could change the historical record. Today, historians remember Jackson’s role in usurping congressional authority to kill the bank, and they remember Jackson as the first president to face congressional rebuke for his conduct. The episode hardened political lines in the 1830s and created a vibrant political debate between Democrats, who were comfortable with the exercise of strong executive authority, and Whigs, who, like their English namesakes, feared usurpation by elected and unelected kings who arrogated powers to themselves that should have been reserved for the legislative branch.

The lesson for Kevin McCarthy is pretty clear. Once impeached — or, in this case, twice — a president cannot be unimpeached. The original act lives on in public memory — through news articles, history books and, now, criminal proceedings. But one suspects Kevin McCarthy already knows this. A vote to expunge Trump’s impeachments from the record solves a short-term political problem. It does nothing to address the underlying challenges that led to the impeachments in the first place.

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U.S. pulls plug on authorization for lithium exploration next to a national wildlife refuge in Nevada

RENO, Nev. — Federal land managers have formally withdrawn their authorization of a Canadian mining company’s lithium exploration project bordering a national wildlife refuge in southern Nevada after conservationists sought a court order to block it.

The Center for Biological Diversity and the Amargosa Conservancy said in a lawsuit filed July 7 that the project on the edge of the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge outside Las Vegas posed an illegal risk to a dozen fish, snail and plant species currently protected under the Endangered Species Act.

They filed an additional motion this week in federal court seeking a temporary injunction prohibiting Rover Metals from initiating the drilling of 30 bore sites in search of the highly sought-after metal used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles.

But before a judge in Las Vegas could rule on the request, the Bureau of Land Management notified Rover Metals on Wednesday that its earlier acceptance of the company’s notice of its intent to proceed “was in error.”

“The agency has concluded that proposed operations are likely to result in disturbance to localized groundwaters that supply the connected surface waters associated with Threatened and Endangered species in local springs," said Angelita Bulletts, district manager of the bureau’s southern Nevada district.

“BLM is rescinding the Acknowledgment of the Notice issued on April 6 (because) the operator cannot prevent unnecessary or undue degradation based on the record before it," she wrote in the formal notice Wednesday.

Conservationists said the reversal provides at least a temporary reprieve for the lush oasis in the Mojave Desert that is home to 25 species of fish, plants, insects and snails that are found nowhere else on Earth — one of the highest concentrations of endemic species in North America at one of the hottest, driest places on the planet.

“This is a remarkable victory for our community here in the Amargosa Basin,” said Mason Voehl, the Amargosa Conservancy's executive director. “Mining doesn’t belong near our beloved Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.”

Rover Metals didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The company announced in April that it had received an "exploration drill permit” from the bureau for its Let's Go Lithium project planned on 6,000 acres of federal land near the California-Nevada line and Death Valley National Park.

The company maintained that a formal environmental review wasn't necessary under the National Environmental Policy Act at this stage of the work.

But the Center for Biological Diversity said in a letter to the bureau in May the project planned within 2,000 feet of the refuge was subject to review even at the exploratory stage because of the presence of the protected species, including the endangered Devils Hole pupfish.

It argued the company had to submit a formal plan of operations so the bureau could determine whether it complies with the law in consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The agency said Wednesday it agrees.

Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the center, said he was relieved that the combination of the lawsuit and “overwhelming public opposition compelled federal officials to slam the breaks on this project just days before drilling was supposed to start."

“We need lithium for our renewable energy transition, but this episode sends a message loud and clear that some places are just too special to drill," he said.

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Tim Burchett: Americans should know what the government knows about UFOs

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said he is 100% sure that the federal government is covering up documents about UFOs — and he’s not alone among members of Congress in trying to push for more information about what could be out there.

“We've requested documents, we've gone to interview pilots and been stonewalled by our Pentagon. It's ridiculous, it’s been going on since the ‘40s,” Burchett said Saturday afternoon on Fox News. “We are taking the gloves off.”

Public interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, officially labeled as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) in government circles, has bubbled for decades — often fraught with conspiracies — and seen a recent resurgence. Lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have ramped up their efforts for greater disclosures to allow Americans to better understand the phenomenon.

Burchett, one of Capitol Hill’s loudest voices for increased government transparency around UFOs, sits on the House Oversight Committee, where Republicans have pushed to host a long-anticipated hearing next Wednesday on the recent rise in reports of UFOs. The Pentagon has been investigating that trend since at least April. It said then that no proof of alien life had surfaced.

The Oversight hearing next week will feature David Grusch, a former intelligence employee who claimed in June that the government had a secret UFO recovery program that found a “partially intact craft of non-human remains." While at least one Democrat has helped Republican colleagues push the issue, members say they have faced pushback from different corners and seen witnesses drop out.

Bolstering the transparency effort is a bipartisan charge on the other side of the Capitol led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has pushed legislation that would lead to the declassification of documents on the matter. The bill would amend the annual defense authorization to mandate government agencies to collect and submit records on UFOs to a review board within 300 days.

“The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Schumer said of the legislation in a release. “We are not only working to declassify what the government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public.”

Schumer’s legislation has echoes of a 1992 law that declassified documents around former President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — another event that had garnered public interest and associated conspiracy theories — after 25 years.

As of April, the Pentagon was tracking around 650 incidents of unidentified aircraft — an increase from a January report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that recorded 510 cases. From that earlier report, 171 sightings appeared to demonstrate “unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.”

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said at the White House press briefing last Monday that the administration was taking the UFO issue seriously.

“The Pentagon has stood up an entire organization to help collate and coordinate the reporting and analysis of — of sightings of UAP across the military,” Kirby said. “Before that, there wasn’t really a coordinated, integrated effort to do that.

But Kirby’s comments have done nothing to assuage Burchett.

“They're not telling the truth,” Burchett said Saturday. ”The hearings that they’ve had have been bogus.”

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Mississippi lawmaker says tutu photo is misused in campaign. He's raising money for cancer research.

JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi Republican state Sen. Jeremy England says he intentionally wore what he considers a “very embarrassing” Halloween costume to raise money for breast cancer research — a shiny pink bodysuit with a short pink skirt.

Now, England says a photo of him in the outfit has been misused, with a slur directed at him, in an increasingly divisive GOP primary as he supports Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann for reelection.

A person backing one of Hosemann's opponents posted an image of the tutu-clad England on Twitter along with a comment: “Hosemann and his groomer weirdos.”

"I consider that to be some of the worst, dirty form of politics — which is, of course, where we are now in this race,” England told The Associated Press.

"Groomer” is commonly used to describe how sex offenders initiate contact with their victims. The word has become ubiquitous in American politics as certain conservatives try to equate certain educational materials with pornography or pedophilia.

Hosemann faces two challengers in the Aug. 8 primary. State Sen. Chris McDaniel has run two unsuccessful U.S. Senate races in the past decade, including a bitter race against longtime incumbent Thad Cochran in 2014. Tiffany Longino is an educator who is spending little in her first run for public office. If nobody wins a majority, the race goes to an Aug. 29 runoff.

In a new Hosemann TV ad, England says he supported McDaniel in 2014 for Senate but now considers that a mistake and is endorsing Hosemann for a second term as lieutenant governor. England said that soon after the ad started airing, he received a text message from state Sen. Melanie Sojourner, who is publicly supporting McDaniel. England said the message had no words — just a photo of England wearing the tutu.

“It was obvious that she was sending that to me as a threat,” England said.

England responded to Sojourner with a “HaHa” on the picture and wrote he had worn the costume in his neighborhood to raise money for breast cancer research as part of the American Cancer Society's “Real Men Wear Pink” effort.

The next day, another McDaniel supporter posted a similar photo of England on Twitter with the “groomer weirdos” reference. The tweet has been deleted, but England saved a screenshot of it.

England posted about the episode on Facebook, and he revived his fundraising effort for the American Cancer Society. By Saturday he had raised more than $5,400.

In response to questions from the AP, Sojourner said the tone of the text exchange between her and England “is absent of any intention to threaten and/or bully Sen. England.” She said he laughed and liked her messages.

“As the jokester of the Senate chamber, Sen. England's newfound decorum is both ironic and bizarre,” Sojourner said. “Sen. England is crying foul purely to score political points for his enabler in chief, Delbert Hosemann.”

Sojourner said she does not know whether the person who called England a “groomer” is associated with the McDaniel campaign.

McDaniel said in a statement to the AP: “To be clear: I do not condone any vitriol aimed at Sen. England, nor any of the toxicity our modern political environment breeds. Volunteers are what campaigns are won and lost on, but it’s impossible for any campaign or candidate to police every volunteer on social media.”

During the 2014 U.S. Senate campaign, some McDaniel supporters entered a nursing home without permission and photographed Cochran's wife, who had dementia. Images of her appeared briefly online. McDaniel said he had nothing to do with the incident. McDaniel refused to concede his loss in the GOP primary runoff after the Cochran campaign courted Black voters who usually cast ballots in Democratic primaries.

Republican-led Mississippi is electing state officials this year, including a governor and a lieutenant governor. Although candidates for the two jobs run as a ticket in some states, the governor and lieutenant governor are elected separately in Mississippi.

The lieutenant governorship is one of the most powerful positions in Mississippi government. The person presides over the 52-member state Senate, appoints Senate committee leaders and has great leeway to decide which legislation lives or dies.

In the Nov. 7 general election, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor will face Democrat D. Ryan Grover, who reports spending no money on his campaign so far.

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As a child, she sold street tamales; a senator now, she’s shaking up Mexico’s presidential race.

MEXICO CITY — A street-food salesgirl who became a tech entrepreneur and senator is shaking up the contest to succeed Mexico’s popular president and offering many voters the first real alternative to her country’s dominant party.

Xóchitl Gálvez, 60, helped her family as a girl by selling tamales on the street. Today the straight-talking opposition senator is a long shot against Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party, which holds Congress and 22 of Mexico’s 32 states.

Despite her slim chances, Gálvez seems to have shaken the president so badly that he’s been insulting her almost daily during his morning briefings. The opposition senator comfortably sits in the national spotlight nearly a year ahead of the June 2, 2024 national election.

“She fills a space that was completely empty,” said Roy Campos, president of polling firm Mitofsky Group. “All of the opposition population starts to see her and it generates hope.”

Next year’s election is López Obrador’s chance to show if he has built a political movement that can outlast his charismatic leadership. Whoever his successor is, they will have to tackle persistently high levels of violence, heavily armed drug cartels and migration across the nearly 2,000-mile border with the United States.

Campos’ group has not conducted an opposition candidate survey but that doesn’t prevent him from feeling comfortable declaring Gálvez a “political phenomenon.”

A political independent who initially set her sights on competing to be Mexico City mayor and often travels the sprawling capital on a bicycle, Gálvez entered the Senate chamber in December dressed as a dinosaur, an allusion to party leaders known known for their archaic, unmovable practices. At the time, López Obrador had proposed electoral reforms that critics said would weaken the country’s National Electoral Institute. The Senate passed them earlier this year, but the Supreme Court later blocked them from taking effect.

Gálvez never shies from conflict with López Obrador. She went to a judge in December asking for an order to let her speak at the president’s daily press briefing. She was granted the order, but the president rejected it.

Gálvez’s fluid use of profanity, contrasting with her comfort moving in political circles, is an advantage with much of the working class, and with many young Mexicans. She registered this month to compete for the presidential nomination of a broad opposition coalition — the historically leftist PRD, the conservative PAN and the PRI that ruled Mexico for 70 years — joking that López Obrador was her campaign manager.

López Obrador remains highly popular, and while he cannot run for another six-year term, several high-profile members of his Morena party have been jockeying fiercely for months. They include Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard and Interior Secretary Adan Augusto, who all agreed to resign their positions last month to campaign in earnest.

Their faces are plastered on billboards across the country, while Gálvez makes clever videos often shot with her own iPhone, some viewed millions of times.

Mexican society is looking for someone new to believe in, Gálvez told The Associated Press.

“We’ll have to see how much I manage to connect and how much I can convince,” she recently told the AP.

Growing up poor in the central state of Hidalgo, her father was an Indigenous Otomi schoolteacher. He was also abusive, macho and alcoholic, Gálvez said. She learned to speak his native ñähñu as a child, holds her Indigenous roots close and favors wearing embroidered huipils.

As a girl, she sold gelatin and tamales to help her family. She worked as a scribe in a local civil registry office as a teen. At 16, she moved by herself to Mexico City and worked as a phone operator until earning a scholarship that allowed her to study computer science. Then she started a technology company, that, as López Obrador noted recently, has won government contracts.

Gálvez served as Indigenous affairs minister for President Vicente Fox, a plain-talking politician from the conservative National Action Party (PAN) who broke the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s 70-year stranglehold on Mexican politics.

While she entered the Senate with the PAN, she has registered to compete for the nomination of the broad coalition of the country’s traditional parties.

Galvez has assured PAN voters that she wants to keep advocating for them despite her moving to win over other parties with interests outside the traditional conservative base.

Her sense of humor and ability to speak comfortably, even at times profanely, with people in the street are characteristics she shares with López Obrador. They may be why he treats her as a threat.

The president accuses Gálvez of using her humble origins and speech to “trick” the poor, who make up much of his base of support. Instead, he paints her the candidate of the rich, the “oligarchs” and “conservatives.”

She dismisses him as a fearful male chauvinist.

“He’s going to try to deny my origins and deny my work, but there it is,” she said.

“I had to face a very patriarchal culture, very macho, where as women we weren’t seen as anything else but for work,” she said.

Gálvez said she’s not put off by the challenge posed by the favorites from the president’s party.

“They’re there because they want to continue doing the same as the president,” she said. “They don’t have their own identity.”

Víctor Gordoa, president of Public Image Group, said Gálvez’s life story is the kind that can reach people across social strata, resonating with the working class who see themselves in Gálvez, as well as the wealthy who see her as a potential weapon who has been untouchable so far.

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Record temperatures kindle interest in heat legislation

With several states experiencing punishing temperatures, some lawmakers want to treat extreme heat the same as other natural disasters.

It's just one of several proposals on Capitol Hill in response to rising temperatures and their toll on people. As heat waves intensify, so does the attention on action from Congress.

Thermometer readings soared this weekend to nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of Arizona. The heat has hit the state particularly hard, but similar conditions extend throughout the Southwest and Gulf Coast.

The bipartisan "Extreme Heat Emergency Act," H.R. 3965, from Reps. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) and Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) would add high temperatures to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s list of major disasters. That would open the door to federal aid.

"Every summer, we are experiencing hotter and longer heat waves in the Valley,” said Gallego, who represents large swaths of Phoenix, in a statement about the bill.

“Despite the too often deadly effects of this heat, Arizonans are left to deal with the impacts themselves, and it is draining their resources," said Gallego.

Disasters that currently qualify for FEMA aid include hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, tidal waves, earthquakes and snowstorms, among other calamities.

But Amodei noted in a statement: "Extreme heat kills more people in the U.S. than all other natural hazards and extreme weather events."

On average, there are 702 heat-related deaths each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Heat & Health Tracker. In 2022, 425 deaths were linked to heat in Maricopa County, Ariz., according to the county Department of Public Health.

The legislation came up Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." Host Jake Tapper asked Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly weather FEMA should treat heat like another natural disaster.

"Yes, I think maybe in some cases. I haven't taken a look at his legislation, the specifics on it, and I will. But that could be an approach here," Kelly said.

Kelly also linked the heat to climate change. "We have got to continue to work towards reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we're putting in the atmosphere," he said.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) similarly addressed climate change when asked about the legislation on NBC's "Meet the Press." However, she didn't seem keen on expanding FEMA's role.

"I don't think so," Duckworth said. “But I will tell you, one of the things that we can do to cool the Earth back down is to transition into greener energy alternatives."

Republicans and conservative voices have been questioning whether the severe weather and extreme heat are tied to climate change.

“Climates adjust over time, but we're going to say that man did it now? Nope, not there," said Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) when asked about the record temperatures.

Earlier this year, Gallego reintroduced the "Excess Urban Heat Mitigation Act," H.R. 2945, with Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), to authorize Department of Housing and Urban Development grants. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is sponsoring a Senate companion, S. 1379.

The legislation would authorize $30 million each year through fiscal 2030. At least 75 percent of the money would go to low-income and disadvantaged communities. No Republican has signed on.

Watson Coleman, Gallego and several other Democrats are also supporting H.R. 4314, the "Stay Cool Act," which includes provisions for cooling centers, health studies and grants. The legislation would also revise public housing rules to make sure people have access to air conditioning.

Lawmakers in the past have also introduced legislation to push the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers from heat.

It now remains to be seen whether conditions will propel committees to prioritize heat legislation. The White House, in the meantime, announced a research effort with money from the Inflation Reduction Act. The administration also plans a "National Heat Strategy."

Nico Portuondo contributed to this report. This story was reported and written by E&E News reporter Rebekah Alvey.

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