SANTA CLARITA, Calif. – An off-duty firefighter opened fire Tuesday at Los Angeles County Fire Dept. Station 81 killing a fellow firefighter and injuring another. The suspect then fled to his home in nearby Acton, barricaded himself inside, and set the house on fire before he was believed to have been found deceased.
“I never thought one of our firefighters would face danger at one of our own community fire stations,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby.
The firefighter specialist who was fatally shot, a 44-year-old male, was a twenty-year veteran of the department, Osby said.
“He was a brave, committed, loyal member of the fire department,” the chief told reporters Tuesday afternoon.
Firefighter killed in ‘tragic’ shooting at LA County Fire Station 81; investigation linked to house fire
A 54-year-old fire captain was airlifted to Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Valencia with multiple gunshot wounds. He is currently listed in critical but stable condition.
Osby said that the off-duty-firefighter, who was also a firefighter specialist, came to the fire station, located in the 8700 block of Sierra Highway, shortly before 11 a.m. Tuesday.
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The firehouse is located in the Agua Dulce neighborhood northeast of Santa Clarita.
Shots fired at LA County Fire Station 81
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department confirmed there was one gunshot victim at Fire Station 81 on the morning of June 1.
Authorities followed the suspect, who fled the firehouse in a white Toyota pickup. That search led to the suspect’s home in the 2600 block of Bent Spur Drive in Acton.
Authorities said the suspect returned to his house, barricaded himself inside, and allegedly set the home on fire.
Video from SkyFOX appeared to show a body in the pool on the property on the house fire in Acton. Authorities later confirmed that the deceased individual found on the property was the suspect, who died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Fire near scene of shooting investigation
A shooting was reported Tuesday at Los Angeles County Fire Dept. Station 81 in the Agua Dulce neighborhood, a rural area located northeast of Santa Clarita.
The fire completely destroyed the residence. After the home burnt to the ground, SWAT team members were able to move onto the scene.
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Property records show that the home was owned by an individual who previously worked at the fire department.
“My heart is with our @LACOFD firefighters and the families of those affected,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger wrote on Twitter.
Supervisor Hilda Solis ordered flags at all county buildings will be flown at half-staff.
“My most sincerest condolences to the family of the firefighter who was tragically killed in today’s shooting at Fire Station 81 in Agua Dulce,” Solis wrote.
Additional details were not immediately available.
If you’re in distress due to recent incidents of mass violence, please know that there is help is available. Talk to experienced counselors at the Disaster Distress Helpline for 24/7 emotional support. Call or text 1-800-985-5990. Click here for additional resources.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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“In Florida, girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports,” DeSantis said, speaking at a private school in Jacksonville.
The Republican governor made a show of signing the bill on Tuesday by highlighting a well-known example of transgender high school sprinters from Connecticut besting their competition on the track.
DeSantis, flanked by student athletes from the Jacksonville-based Trinity Christian Academy on stage, streamed a video of transgender athlete Terry Miller winning a race in 2019, then introduced one of her competitors, Selina Soule, to address the audience. Soule, a Connecticut high school track athlete who has been outspoken against allowing transgender athletes to compete, told the crowd her experience losing to transgender girls was “frustrating” and “demoralizing.”
DeSantis has signed into a law a slate of conservative-leaning bills from the GOP-led Legislature, including measures cracking down on Big Tech, loosening Covid restrictions and tightening voting rules, ahead of his reelection and possible bid for the White House in 2024.
Some 11 transgender athletes have applied since 2013-14 under the Florida High School Athletic Association’s participation policy, which allows students to petition to play sports regardless of the gender listed on their birth certificate. Democrats attempted to use this rule as an example that the law was unnecessary in Florida. The only in-state instance of transgender athletes that lawmakers could reference during session involved bowling.
Democrats on Tuesday were quick to note how DeSantis signed the legislation on the first day of LGBTQ Pride Month, a move Democratic Agriculture commissioner and likely 2022 gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried said was “especially cruel.”
“By signing a heartless ban on transgender kids in sports, Governor DeSantis is marginalizing an entire community,” Fried said in a statement. “Florida should stand for inclusivity, equality, and liberty — not peddling hate for political points.”
When asked, DeSantis said the timing behind the bill signing had nothing to do with Pride Month.
“It’s not a message to anything other than saying we’re going to protect fairness in women’s sports,” DeSantis said.
Shortly after DeSantis signed the measure, the Human Rights Campaign pledged to challenge the legislation in court, claiming it is “fueled by discriminatory intent and not supported by fact.” The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging a similar law that lawmakers recently passed in West Virginia.
A new report on violence gripping Portland amid an anti-police push and more round out today’s top media headlines.
Vice President Kamala Harris is frustrated by her border role being “mischaracterized” by Republicans and some media outlets, CNN reported Tuesday, saying Harris was not in charge of stemming border crossings themselves but rather “root causes” of migration.
CNN’s Natasha Bertrand said there was a “lot of confusion” around Harris’ role when President Biden put her in charge of the border crisis in March.
“Republicans kind of seized on that confusion, and they made it seem as though Vice President Harris was going to be the new border czar,” she said. “That she was going to be responsible and be the envoy to the border, be responsible essentially for all of the problems that arise there.
“When her team saw this being mischaracterized by some media outlets and by Republicans and questions swirling about whether she herself was going to visit the border in her new capacity, they were kind of dismayed by this because her role was always going to be focusing on these Northern Triangle countries and the root causes of this, and they saw her being linked to the border as a potentially political perilous assignment and task.”
Bertrand appeared over a chyron reading, “VP’s team works to get distance between her & border problems.”
Harris has come under fire for not visiting the border since taking her new role. She will visit Mexico and Guatemala this month.
While the White House has said that Harris’ role is not the border per se, critics have pushed back by arguing that in order to do that outreach, the issues are linked and it is necessary to see what is happening at the border.
The border headache comes as Harris takes fierce criticism for her tweet about Memorial Day weekend featuring a photo of herself and the text, “Enjoy the long weekend.” She also made a poorly received joke about green electricity during her commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Bertrand said CNN had been told Harris was “extremely involved” in crafting the administration’s regional strategy to address the illegal immigration surge’s root causes, from “climate change” to “tackling food insecurity.”
“Her team has come out and said publicly, ‘Look, we do not own the issues at the border. We are not managing the issues at the border,’” Bertrand said, saying Harris is pointing to the Department of Homeland Security to handle it.
Mainstream media headlines in March, such as from Axios (“Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis”), the Washington Post, (“Biden taps Harris to handle border crisis”), Politico (“Biden makes Harris the point person on immigration issues amid border surge”),and the Associated Press (“Biden taps VP Harris to lead response to border challenges”) were more broad about Harris’ role.
The border surge has been tied in part to the Biden administration’s looser immigration policies, with some illegal immigrants specifically citing the new government as their reason for the trek.
WASHINGTON — The fight over Texas Republican lawmakers’ attempts to rewrite election laws reached a fever pitch over the Memorial Day weekend.
House Democrats walked out of the Capitol to prevent voting on Senate Bill 7 – a bill that would limit certain ways of voting. In retaliation Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to veto funding for lawmakers’ salaries in the state budget.
The Texas showdown comes as Republican state lawmakers across the nation enact voter legislation they say will crack down on election fraud.
Here’s what we know about the ongoing feud in Texas and beyond.
What happened over the weekend?
House Democrats united to break quorum and vacated the House chamber, blocking Republicans from passing SB 7 before the midnight Sunday deadline to approve the legislation, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
“Breaking quorum is a procedural tool we don’t use often in the House,” Texas state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, a Democrat, said via Twitter. “We had to act last night because #SB7 was a threat to our democracy – including procedurally, as each time it was passed was under the cover of night or w/o the input of those we are elected to serve.”
The state House Democrats tried to prevent the bill from passing by delaying a vote until after the deadline passed. When that tactic wouldn’t work they decided to walk off the floor.
In response, Abbott announced the bill will be added to a special session agenda. “Election Integrity & Bail Reform were emergency items for this legislative session. They STILL must pass,” he wrote. “Legislators will be expected to have worked out the details when they arrive at the Capitol for the special session.”
He also wrote in another tweet that he would veto Article 10 of the budget passed by the legislature, which funds the state budget for lawmaker salaries. “Article 10 funds the legislative branch. No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities. Stay tuned,” Abbott wrote in a tweet.
Democratic state Rep. Donna Howard called Abbott’s threat “a rather ridiculous statement to have made.”
June 20 is the deadline for Abbott to carry out the veto.
It also makes it a crime to aggregate ballots for a candidate, also known as vote harvesting, in addition to creating “at least 10 categories of new or enhanced criminal penalties related to elections,” the Austin American-Statesman reports.
The legislation protects partisan poll watchers by criminalizing elections officials who reject a designated watcher. And it blocks Sunday voting before 1 p.m. which Democrats say will stifle “Souls to the Polls” popular in Black churches to drive voters to the polls during morning services.
“I represent a majority African American district, and we benefited from the drive-thru voting that you’re trying to ban now. I feel like you’re coming for my district,” said state Sen. Borris Miles of Houston.
During debate Sunday night, Democrats singled out new language not previously included in the bill that would allow a court to void an election if there were enough fraudulent votes to change the outcome of the election. “The implications of this are unthinkable,” said state Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Farmers Branch.
Officials from the FBI, Department of Justice and Texas secretary of state’s office have previously acknowledged that the 2020 presidential election was free of widespread fraud.
President Joe Biden said in a statement to The Texas Tribune that SB 7 is “part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year — and often disproportionately targeting Black and Brown Americans.”
Pressure to pass a national voting rights bill
The showdown over voting rights in Texas comes amid Republican state lawmakers’ national push to enact restrictive voting laws.
Texas Democrats who walked out of House chamber have called for Congress to pass national legislation that would protect the right to vote. “We did our part to stop SB 7. Now we need Congress to do their part by passing HR 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act,” tweeted state Rep. Erin Zwiener, D-Driftwood.
Democrats control both the Senate and the House, but for either legislation to pass it will need at least 10 Republican votes to overcome a legislative hurdle in the Senate called a filibuster. Biden also voiced his support for the two bills during his first address to a joint session of Congress.
The For the People Act passed the House in March. It has no Republican backers. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act has yet to be taken up in the House.
“They realize this is a big PR problem because they’re boosting the city. They want it to grow and grow. And these stories of destruction and martial law and train service being interrupted, they realized that was a problem. So they tell the world that white Tulsans are ashamed of this and we’re going to rebuild the Black community and they don’t do that at all,” Ellsworth said.
Ellsworth remembered being twelve and playing with a microfilm machine at a library when he saw a huge headline: “75 killed in race riot.” The next one: “martial law declared.” He wrote his senior college thesis on the massacre using maps and old phone books to trace descendants and survivors. His first book on the subject was “Death in a Promised Land.” It was published in 1982. He said that’s roughly when people started to talk about the event more, and noted that it was the second most stolen book out of the Tulsa library system.
“People didn’t want it available or they wanted it so bad to learn,” so he sent a box every year so they could restock.
In fits and starts, the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre began to receive more attention from leaders, politicians and even Hollywood. All the while, Tulsans begin to talk about what happened more, working to find descendants and, most importantly, survivors. Today, there are three left: siblings Viola Fletcher, 107, and Hughes Van Ellis, 100, and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106.
Tulsans will tell you that over the last two years, key events have forced Americans to begin to come to terms with what happened a century ago.
First, the HBO show “Watchmen” opened the first episode with the Tulsa Race Massacre: Families fleeing, buildings burning and Black people being murdered. The event is central to what has become a hit TV show, which also features something activists are fighting for to this day: reparations to the descendants.
Then there’s former President Donald Trump’s decision to hold his first campaign rally since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in Tulsa on June 19, 2020, or Juneteenth, a day that celebrates the emancipation of African Americans from slavery. In the midst of anti-racism protests across the world, the decision drew intense backlash. The Trump campaign delayed the rally until the following day, just miles from the Greenwood district.
Nehemiah Frank, a descendant who founded the local news organization, Black Wall Street Times, said the Trump visit sent Black Tulsans scrambling to throw a “big ass” Juneteenth celebration as counterprogramming.
“We just started mobilizing. We’re like “we’re about to throw the biggest Juneteenth we’ve ever had. It was huge and it was successful and it was a very diverse crowd. So we were America,” Frank said. “That’s when people were like, ‘oh, we need to help them.’”
Then came another turn. In October 2020, an investigation for mass graves of victims actually found one — at least 12 coffins buried in the Oaklawn Cemetery. The exhumation process began Tuesday, the day of Biden’s visit, and is expected to take weeks.
Ellsworth is part of the team that found the graves. “We have kind of one shot at doing this. They’ll be able to determine age, gender, racial characteristics, cause of death. But the idea is this isn’t going to become somebody’s dissertation. The idea is to get the information as quickly as we can. And then have them reburied with honor,” Ellsworth said. “The community would like that to happen in Greenwood, which I hope it does.”
Over the Memorial Day weekend, hundreds have flocked to Tulsa for a slate of events surrounding the Greenwood District, culminating in Biden’s remarks. The president is set to tour the cultural center, meet with survivors and descendants and speak in the afternoon.
Sitting in the wine cellar, Bruner said both Biden’s visit and the visit of his Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this year mark “the introduction to the conversation.”
“Now we’re moving on to the real story, the real action, the real opportunity,” Bruner said. She considers Tulsa the crucible to the ever-changing conversation about race in this country: from policing to education to housing to healthcare.
“Basically these are the same issues that we’ve been grappling with since the founding,” said Bruner. “One of our greatest strengths is the fact that we are not a homogeneous society, but it’s also our greatest challenge. In many ways, we struggle to get past this. But it’s not a matter of getting past it. It’s a matter of deeply enmeshing yourself in this issue and working it out.”
The WHO says it will start assigning new names for variants of the coronavirus based on letters from the Greek alphabet — part of an effort to help avoid stigmatization around the virus.
Fabrice Coffrini /AFP via Getty Images
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Fabrice Coffrini /AFP via Getty Images
The WHO says it will start assigning new names for variants of the coronavirus based on letters from the Greek alphabet — part of an effort to help avoid stigmatization around the virus.
Fabrice Coffrini /AFP via Getty Images
The World Health Organization is hoping to simplify the way the public talks about the growing number of variants of the coronavirus. It will start assigning different letters of the Greek alphabet to each new mutation of the virus.
The new system takes the names of new variants of SARS-CoV-2 and moves them away from what can be sometimes confusing scientific nomenclature, or shorthand that puts heavy emphasis on where the variants were first discovered.
For example, under the new system, the B.1.1.7 variant, which was first identified in the U.K., will be known as Alpha. The B.1.351 variant, first spotted in South Africa, will be called Beta, while the variant initially found in Brazil, known as P.1, will go by Gamma.
The new names won’t officially replace the scientific names already assigned to new variants, but the WHO said it is making the change in an attempt to avoid fueling stigma towards nations where new variants arise.
“While they have their advantages, these scientific names can be difficult to say and recall, and are prone to misreporting,” the WHO said in a statement on Monday. “As a result, people often resort to calling variants by the places where they are detected, which is stigmatizing and discriminatory.”
It’s meant to avoid stigmatization
The danger of stigmatization is an issue the WHO has warned about since the early days of the pandemic, when some politicians, most notably former President Donald Trump, would routinely refer to the virus as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus.” Trump said he used the terms “to be accurate” and maintained that they were “not racist at all,” yet he continued to use them even after the WHO cautioned against language that can “perpetuate negative stereotypes or assumptions.”
Use of such language became widespread. In one study released in May, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco directly linked Trump’s first tweet about a “Chinese virus” to an exponential rise in anti-Asian language on Twitter.
The rhetoric has been followed by violence
More than a year later, much of that rhetoric has given way to violence. Last month, the group Stop AAPI Hate released a report documenting 6,603 hate incidents between March 2020 and March 2021. Physical assaults rose from 10% of total hate incidents in 2020 to almost 17% in 2021, according to the report.
In India, sensitivity around stigmatization led the government last month to ask social media companies to remove any references to the “India variant” from their platforms. A government official told Reuters the notice was issued to send a “loud and clear” message that mentions of “Indian variant” fuel miscommunication.
The new names are going fast
It’s a message that was echoed Monday by Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for the COVID-19 response. “No country should be stigmatized for detecting and reporting variants,” she wrote on Twitter. Under the WHO’s new naming system, the variant, known among scientists as B.1.617.2, is called the Delta variant.
The new system applies to two different classifications of variants — “variants of concern,” considered the most potentially dangerous, and second-level “variants of interest.”
There are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. The WHO has already assigned 10 of them — four to variants of concerns and six to variants of interest.
The obstruction that finally pushed the Democratic leader to change the Senate’s rules in 2013 was the GOP’s refusal to consider three of President Barack Obama’s DC Circuit Court picks. But his frustration with Republican blockades had been building for months.
“I had no choice,” Reid told Vox in a May interview. “They stuck by their guns opposing everything [Obama] tried to do. And that’s where I found myself.”
It’s a place where current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could soon find himself, too.
“It’s not a question of if the filibuster goes away; it’s only a question of when,” said Reid, who retired from his Nevada Senate seat in 2017, adding that he has “every bit of confidence in Chuck Schumer” and that he’s “not about to second guess what Chuck Schumer should do.”
In 2013, Reid systematically built a case for the rules change: For months, he put up votes on nominee after nominee, an effort that underscored the extent of Republican obstruction as the GOP attempted to slow many of them. Schumer, it seems, is now taking a similar approach.
Last week, he brought a bill to the floor knowing that Senate Republicans would mount a legislative filibuster. They did just that, with most Republicans voting to block a measure that would establish a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, a sign some Democratssay is a clear message about how little openness there is for working across the aisle.
Schumer and then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid seen during an unveiling ceremony of Reid’s official portrait on Capitol Hill in 2016.Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Back when Reid eventually gathered the votes to blow up the filibuster for appointees, he was fed up with GOP intransigence. He stands by that decision today, even though these reforms were later used by Republican leader Mitch McConnell to justify altering the rules again and push through three Supreme Court justices with little or no Democratic support.
“I have no regret about having done so because Obama’s presidency was made as a result of what we did,” he said.
Reid’s realization — that Democrats needed to forge onward without Republicans — could hold a valuable lesson for Schumer as he weighs what to do about the filibuster. While Schumer is notably more constrained by the size of his caucus — and the opposition of moderates within it — he’ll ultimately have to decide just how aggressively to pursue possible reforms as well.
So far, he hasn’t ruled anything out. “Our preference is Republicans work with us to get things done, to get the big, bold change we need,” Schumer said in a March interview. “But if they don’t, like I said, everything’s on the table.”
Activists have long pushed for Schumer to move more quickly, especially given how little time Democrats have to implement policies like voting rights protections. They’ve been pleased with how he’s leveraged reconciliation to approve a sweeping Covid-19 relief bill, but have worried that he wasn’t setting up test votes fast enough and really making the case for eliminating the legislative filibuster.
Schumer confronted this issue head-on last week with both the vote on the January 6 commission and an announcement about a more aggressivetimeline for Democratic prioritiesin June. On Friday, he announced that he would be holding a floor vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which Republicans filibustered during the Obama administration, and on the For the People Act, Democrats’ landmark voting rights bill, when lawmakers get back from recess.
A rules change seems inevitable if Democrats want to deliver on high-profile promises they’ve made on everything from voting rights to gun control. Currently, these bills need at least 60 votes to pass if they get filibustered — and there’s little indication that ten Republicans will join the 50-person Democratic caucus to support such efforts.
As Reid’s experience — both with nominees and with bills like the Affordable Care Act — demonstrated, waiting on Republicans only ever got Democrats so far.
“I think the biggest lesson is never trust Republicans and always expect the worst from Mitch McConnell,” says former Reid staffer Murshed Zaheed. “I don’t think Democrats should be giving Republicans any chance at this point.”
Republicans seem to be running the same obstruction playbook they did against Reid
Reid’s willingness to take a hard line with Republicans, so much so that former House Speaker John Boehner has since called him a “ruthless bastard,” was a product of enduring years of obstruction.
Now he supports doing away with the legislative filibuster, previously going so far as to say it should be the “first item of business” if Democrats retook the majority, in an NBC News interview last fall. In the May interview with Vox, he declined to comment on timing, deferring to Schumer.
During Schumer’s first five months as majority leader, Republican leadership has signaled very little willingness to operate in good faith: McConnell recently rejected the creation of the January 6 commission, suggesting that the effort was “slanted and unbalanced.” And even on the US Innovation and Competition Act, legislation that incorporated bipartisan discussion and amendments, McConnell has pushed to drag out debate and eat up floor time, delaying a final vote on the bill.
President Biden and Vice President Harris (center left) meet meet with members of congressional leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (far right) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (far left) on May 12.Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
Infrastructure talks are also moving slowly — a delay that’s prompted comparisons with the passage of the ACA, which didn’t end up garnering Republican support despite Democrats’ efforts to find points of compromise.
GOP successfully re-running what they did with the ACA with infrastructure. I predict there will be zero (0) GOP votes for the bill no matter what.
It’s a continuation of what Democrats previously experienced in the Senate minority. “What we’ve seen is that Republicans, McConnell, at least, become far more intransigent, far less willing to put things on the floor, far less willing to debate them,” Schumer told Vox. “We have to be aware that the Republican Party of today is not the Republican Party of 20 years or 15 years ago.”
McConnell has also been nearly as explicit about his aims this term as he was during the Obama administration. “One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration,” McConnell said in early May. “I’m anxious on stopping the Biden agenda — depending on what it is,” he later said as a caveat.
Schumer thus far has noted that he wants to give bipartisanship a chance, much like President Joe Biden, an effort that Reid says he supports. By going out of their way to court Republicans, Democrats can show moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) that they’ve exhausted their options before trying to go it alone.
Given how narrow his margins are, Schumer has to contend with the size of his caucus and moderate pushback in a way that Reid did not.
When he decided to amend filibuster rules, Reid had a bit more breathing room with 55 members in his caucus, while Schumer only has 50. Since it took 51 votes to make the rules change, Reid was able to let three members defect, including Manchin, who voted against it at the time. Reid also reportedly had Obama’s backing when he made this move, while neither Schumer nor Biden has yet taken a firm stance on eliminating the filibuster.
To complicate matters further, Democrats are presently fractured when it comes to policy, too. On priorities such as the For the People Act, the party’s lawmakers aren’t yet unified, a sign that support for such measures isn’t guaranteed even without the filibuster, and an indication that test votes may actually reveal Democratic divides.
Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (not pictured) have been vocal about preserving the filibuster.Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Still, Schumer is majority leader, and activists hope he’ll find a way to bring the caucus together. “One of the important aspects of leadership in this position is guiding your caucus on critical issues. If Manchin has concerns, if [Sen. Kyrsten] Sinema has concerns, the job of the leader is to get to caucus unity,” says Fix Our Senate’s Eli Zupnick, a former Senate staffer and the head of a coalition of groups pushing for reform.
There’s only so much Schumer can do as a Majority Leader to try to sway members who are opposed to rules changes like Manchin and Sinema, former Democratic Leader Tom Daschle says. Schumer’s noted, though, that votes like the one on the January 6 commission can help demonstrate the limitations of bipartisanship to Senators who are holding out for it.
“I think the events of the last few days probably made every member of our caucus realize that a lot of our Republican colleagues are not willing to work with us on a whole lot of issues, even issues where we try to be bipartisan,” he said at a press conference on Friday.
Schumer and Reid have different leadership styles
Schumer and Reid are well known for their different styles and were often described as effective complements when they worked together. They overlapped for a few years in the House, and then later in Senate Democratic leadership when Reid became leader in 2004, and Schumer served as the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. While Reid shied away from the spotlight, Schumer was seen as Democrats’ communications guru as well as a master fundraiser.
“They became foxhole buddies in the 2006 and 2008 cycle when they picked up and tried to add to Democratic control of the Senate,” says former Reid staffer Jim Manley. Schumer’s success with Senate campaigns bolstered his case for succeeding Reid, and also earned him loyalty from members who he helped recruit or support. In those two cycles, Democrats picked up more than a dozen seats and outraised Republicans by millions of dollars.
“Schumer was DSCC chair for a long period of time, and he was a prolific fundraiser for members. He probably ran the DSCC as well or better than anyone has run it before,” said Daschle.
Several lawmakers laughed when asked to describe Reid and Schumer’s stylistic differences, given the stark contrast in their personalities.
Schumer is press-friendly, gregarious, and renowned for his congenial calls on his flip phone. Reid, meanwhile, was more reclusive, soft-spoken, and generally terse on and off the phone. “Reid’s phone calls were so efficient. He wouldn’t say hello when he got on the phone with you, [and] he would just hang up,” a Democratic aide told Vox. While Reid was the former boxer known for never mincing his critiques, Schumer is the longtime dealmaker who favors a big-tent coalition.
Then-Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer in the Capitol on March 26, 2019.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid talks about the financial bailout on the phone at his desk in the Capitol on October 2, 2008. Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty Images
“Harry Reid does it with the fewest words possible, and nobody would say that about Chuck Schumer,” quipped Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA). “One of the things about Chuck that’s really good is Chuck thinks out loud and is always strategizing by dialoguing with you.”
After he took over, Schumer opened up a standing weekly leadership meeting significantly, bringing nearly a quarter of the caucus into the fold, a marked contrast from the four-person meetings Reid would often hold. “He talks to the caucus and lets them lead to where he’s going to go,” said a Democratic aide. Under Schumer’s leadership, moderates like Manchin, who may have previously felt squeezed, became part of that group.
“The best way our caucus has worked successfully in the past is coming together,” Schumer emphasizes. “I have a leadership team — [12] senators, Monday nights. Who’s on that leadership team? Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Joe Manchin and Mark Warner.”
“Pretty much whatever [Harry] said goes. Chuck seems to ask a lot more questions and go with the flow of the entire caucus,” said Sen. Warren (D-MA).
Both leaders have kept a wide-ranging caucus together on pivotal votes: In 2009, Reid managed to keep all 60 Democrats united to pass the Affordable Care Act on a party-line vote. Schumer similarly kept all his members together as they blocked attempts to repeal the ACA, opposed President Trump’s tax cuts, and advanced a $1.9 trillion coronavirus aid package without any Republicans earlier this year.
“The best [lesson from the minority] is unity — on every major issue,” says Schumer.
The two have also had their respective clashes with Republicans though Schumer has been viewed as less confrontational in the past.
“Reid was much more pugilistic. He wasn’t afraid to get into a fight with Republicans. Schumer might be doing that, but he might not be as quick to the draw,” Manley said.
Their takes on blowing up the nominees’ filibuster in 2013 is perhaps one example of these differences: At the time, Reid moved forward with the decision amid moderate Democratic outcry — and he’s since stood by it. Schumer, though he ended up voting for it, later said that he had opposed the move.
“I argued against it at the time. I said both for Supreme Court and in Cabinet should be 60 because on such important positions there should be some degree of bipartisanship,” Schumer said in a 2017 CNN interview. “Wish it hadn’t happened,” he added.
Since then, Schumer’s emphasized that “everything’s on the table” when it comes to the legislative filibuster, though it’s not clear where he personally stands on a rules change, as Politico reported this March. “I don’t think he personally wants to change the rules,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) told the publication. “I think Chuck would rather find a way to make this place work together.”
Previously, Schumer wouldn’t commit to preserving the filibuster in the Senate’s organizing resolution, and more recently he’s said that Democrats will only pursue bipartisanship for so long.
“Senate Democrats are doing everything we can to move legislation in a bipartisan way when and where the opportunity exists,” Schumer wrote in a Dear Colleague letter last week. “But we will not wait for months and months to pass meaningful legislation that delivers real results for the American people.”
Progressives are happy with Schumer’s work on Covid-19 — but they’re pushing for more
Progressive activists have been growing impatient with how Schumer is handling the filibuster and his willingness to keep on working with Republicans, a concern that his recent votes announcement helped address.
Many were impressed with how he used budget reconciliation to push through Covid-19 relief, but some had been worried that few bills expected to garner a filibuster had hit the floor up until this point. Although Schumer has the barest of majorities — and understandable limitations that come with that — activists have been eager to see him moving more quickly on at least establishing a case.
“I can’t count how many pieces of House-passed legislation are languishing on Schumer’s desk so far,” said Tré Easton, a senior adviser for Battle Born Collective, a group dedicated to advancing progressive policies. “It’s good to see some crucial votes getting slated for June, but there’s a long laundry list of to-do items and an ever-dwindling legislative clock.”
Thus far, after passing Covid-19 relief through reconciliation, Schumer has scheduled votes on multiple measures which have garnered bipartisan support including most recently, the Innovation and Competition Act — in an effort to show how Republicans could stymie even more collaborative bills.
Activists, however, have said they wanted to see more action on other Democratic priorities as well. Multiple House bills including the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, the Equality Act, the For the People Act, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the Dream Act, the PRO Act, DC statehood, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act all have yet to get a Senate vote — though that’s soon poised to change.
Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hold a press event on a stimulus bill in the White House Rose Garden on March 12.Alex Wong/Getty Images
During the work period this June, Republicans will be forced to vote on both the Paycheck Fairness Act and the For the People Act. And since they’re expected to filibuster both measures, those votes are expected to add to the argument Democrats have for blowing up the rule.
“It took a lot of GOP obstruction of nominees before the caucus was ready to change the rules” in 2013, says Fix Our Senate’s Zupnick, who was heartened to see Democrats beginning to establish that same pattern this year. “Sen. Reid put up a bunch of nominees that kept getting filibustered in 2013 to make his — ultimately successful — case for rules reform in November.”
“I’m very encouraged they are going to bring the For the People Act to the floor and do whatever it takes to get it done,” he added.
Schumer has signaled that he doesn’t have much patience for potential Republican obstruction, and that he’s focused on bringing even more House bills to the floor. “This is going to be totally different than when McConnell was majority leader,” Schumer told Vox. “He had the legislative graveyard. He never had debate; he never let these bills come to light.”
Activists are eager to see what comes of these votes, which could reveal just how willing Democratic leaders — and the broader caucus — are to pursuing more ambitious policy goals on their own.
“Learn the lesson of the eight years of Obama that you can’t wait for bipartisanship. Why does it have to bipartisan? Go it alone,” says Mary Panzetta, an Indivisible chapter leader in New York.
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photos via Getty/YoutubeAn alt-right comedian’s plans for a remote patch of land in Idaho have terrified his neighbors, who fear it could become a hostile compound or mark the start of a new Ruby Ridge-style standoff.Comedian Owen Benjamin once had a moderately successful Hollywood career, landing roles in movies and TV shows and briefly becoming engaged to actress Christina Ricci. After moving to the right, he appeared on podcasts hosted by Joe Rogan, Steven Crowder, and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire.As his following among conservatives grew, however, Benjamin became increasingly racist and antisemitic. He repeatedly used the n-word at a February 2018 comedy show, and embraced conspiracy theories about the Holocaust, claiming that Adolf Hitler was only trying to “clean [Germany] of the parasites.” Benjamin’s broadcasts to his fans grew more erratic, seeing the one-time comedian embrace flat-Earth theory and recommend drinking turpentine as a medicinal cure.But being on the internet’s fringes can be lonely, so Benjamin decided to build a place where his remaining, bear-themed following—who call themselves “Unbearables”—could meet in person.Exactly what Benjamin’s intentions for the property in Sandpoint, Idaho, are has become a hot topic in Idaho’s Boundary County. Dubbed “Ursa Rio” by Benjamin, after the Moyie River that abuts the property, the land marks the culmination of Benjamin’s year-long plan to establish a gathering place for his fans.As Benjamin and his supporters set up basic sanitation and housing on the property, Benjamin’s neighbors are getting nervous, urging local officials to step in and issue a cease-and-desist order blocking construction.“You are the only people who can prevent this reenactment of Ruby Ridge,” a flyer distributed at a hearing last week urging county commissioners to block construction on Benjamin’s property reads.For Benjamin’s opponents, the prospect of a far-right encampment in Idaho recalls the state’s history with other extremists. The Aryan Nations once ran a compound in the state. In 1992, three people were killed in the Ruby Ridge standoff between federal agents and white separatist Randy Weaver.Ammon Bundy Violates Ban by Delivering Signs to Idaho Capitol ProtestThe controversy over Benjamin’s property was first reported by the Kootenai Valley Times and the Bonners Ferry Herald. In an April 14 letter obtained by the Kootenai Valley Times, the man who sold the land to Benjamin warned a county planner that the situation could have an “unpleasant outcome,” saying he had read a Twitter post after the sale about the possibility that Benjamin’s fans would flock to the remote area.“I’m telling you this because I was recently made aware of an unsettling situation with potential unpleasant outcome and want to do everything I can to prevent it,” the land’s previous owner wrote.Benjamin has pitched Ursa Rio as an “Unbearable” haven. His supporters refer to Benjamin as “Big Bear” and often take bear-related aliases of their own, adopting bear handles based on their personalities or what they can contribute to Benjamin’s cause in a style reminiscent of the Care Bears.The roots of the clash over Ursa Rio began last year, when Benjamin began raising funds for “Beartaria,” a then-unspecified place he imagined as a location where Benjamin and his “bears” could lead the simple rural lifestyle Benjamin has advocated for after detonating his entertainment career. Benjamin, who said he wasn’t allowed to have “internet friends” at his actual home, said Beartaria would be a place where he could meet his “internet friends,” with 10 percent of the land set aside for camping as a “refuge.”“I’m not allowed to have internet friends over at my house,” Benjamin said in one video. “But if we get land and yurts—internet friends.”In exchange for a $400 donation, Benjamin said in a June 2020 video, his “Bears” would be entitled to a “two-weeks vacation” on the land. After fundraising to buy a much-larger, better-equipped property for “Beartaria,” fell short, however, Benjamin backed away from his camping offer, pitching “Beartaria” as more of a concept than an actual place and calling himself “an idiot” for offering to exchange the $400 donations for camping rights.“Don’t plan your life around Beartaria at all,” Benjamin cautioned his fans.In an email to The Daily Beast, Benjamin now says many of his donors will never come to the Idaho property, describing it as a place for families “to take their kids fishing and sleep under the stars.”“It is a private residence not commercial and we have no obligation to donors as was indicated on the website,” Benjamin wrote.A group of nine of Benjamin’s neighbors have grown concerned about the prospect of Benjamin’s fans trekking out to the property, which they say is zoned for agricultural or forest uses.In an email to county officials, one neighbor pointed out that the property isn’t serviced by utilities, raising the threat that inexperienced campers could start forest fires in their attempts to have campfires. The property is connected to a narrow, crude road, according to the neighbors, whose meager maintenance amounts to residents adding rocks to it every year.Benjamin’s neighbors have also become alarmed over the possibility of organized military training at the property.“This poses a clear and present danger,” a Vietnam War veteran who lives near Benjamin told the Kootenai Valley Times. “This is a commercial enterprise offering training in weapons and tactics and not a use allowed in this zone. There is no conceivable reason to allow this use. If we wait too long, it will be too late.”Benjamin told The Daily Beast no guns have been fired on the property since he purchased it. But his attempts to downplay the possibility of guns at Ursa Rio have been undermined by his habit of describing grandiose plans for the land in hours-long livestreams several times a week, with the most incendiary statements archived and analyzed by his online detractors.For example, Benjamin has often referenced having a paramilitary force at his property, saying he is “friends with, basically, a paramilitary group” in Idaho.“If you try to squat on my land when I offer you campgrounds, I have my own paramilitary squad,” Benjamin said in one video, warning off “Bears” who might try to live on the land permanently.“I’d have my own private paramilitary force, which is always a good thing,” Benjamin said in another video.Benjamin insists he was just joking about the paramilitary.“I do not have a paramilitary squad,” Benjamin told The Daily Beast in an email. “I was making a joke as a comedian. Unless you consider my goats and chickens a military.”In his videos, Benjamin has also discussed the prospect of guns at “Beartaria.”“Shooting range?” Benjamin said in one video, describing his plans for a bear-themed community in Idaho. “Yes! Will there be a gun range? Yes!”By his own accounts, Benjamin does not come off as an ideal neighbor. In several videos, he relates stories where he berates store employees or fellow customers who asked him to wear a face mask. In one incident, according to Benjamin, he called an elderly man in a post office who asked him to wear a mask a “crusty old hunchback” and accused him of being a pervert, saying that masks are only used by criminals or perverts.After a reporter in the area covered the controversy over Benjamin’s property, the comedian baselessly accused the reporter during a livestream of being a pedophile and mocked him for using a wheelchair.The Boundary County commissioners didn’t respond to a request for comment. Commissioners are talking with other local officials about how to respond to Benjamin’s construction, according to the Kootenai Valley Times.Benjamin purchased the property through real estate broker Todd Savage, who describes himself as a “strategic relocation consultant” assisting conservative city-dwellers relocating to rural areas like the plot Benjamin purchased. In a video on the website for his company, Black Rifle Real Estate, Savage’s business is described as helping people move to places where “where we support our nation and its allies in the fight against radical terrorism, and where the residents proudly support Blue Lives Matter.”Savage told The Daily Beast that he’s seen an uptick in business as conservative urbanites try to move to rural areas. But Savage won’t work with just any buyer—his website warns that “snowflakes” and “Marxists” need not apply.“We only work with people who are libertarian-right, end of story,” Savage told The Daily Beast. “Because we want people who will have the same belief system around us, and that’s OK.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
Voters will go to the polls Tuesday to fill the House seat left vacant when Deb Haaland was confirmed as the first Native American to head the Department of the Interior.
Evan Vucci/AP
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Evan Vucci/AP
Voters will go to the polls Tuesday to fill the House seat left vacant when Deb Haaland was confirmed as the first Native American to head the Department of the Interior.
Evan Vucci/AP
Democrats in New Mexico are hoping to keep control of the House seat in the state’s 1st Congressional District when voters take to the polls Tuesday to fill the position vacated by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.
A recent opinion poll by the Republican elections blog RRH Elections shows Democrat Melanie Stansbury with a comfortable double-digit lead — 49% to 33% — over Republican opponent Mark Moores.
Both Stansbury and Moores serve in the state legislature.
Democratic congressional candidate Melanie Stansbury speaks during a campaign rally in Albuquerque, N.M, on Thursday.
Susan Montoya Bryan/AP
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Democratic congressional candidate Melanie Stansbury speaks during a campaign rally in Albuquerque, N.M, on Thursday.
Susan Montoya Bryan/AP
The congressional seat has sat vacant since March, when Haaland, a Democrat, was confirmed as the first Native American to head the Department of the Interior.
While the central New Mexico district has historically favored Democratic candidates, Republicans are hoping an upset win can help them move closer to taking back the House majority in next year’s midterm elections. But the party faces steep odds in a district that President Biden won in November by 23 points.
Democrats currently hold a a razor-thin advantage of only eight seats in the House.
Republican state Sen. Mark Moores, pictured above on March 20, has emphasized his support for lifting environmental regulations in the race for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District.
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Republican state Sen. Mark Moores, pictured above on March 20, has emphasized his support for lifting environmental regulations in the race for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District.
Morgan Lee/AP
New Mexico is a state rich in natural resources and home to one of the nation’s largest Native American populations. Stansbury has called on her background in science to promote herself as a champion of the state’s land and water resources.
Moores, a third-generation state official, has sought to accuse Democrats of villainizing law enforcement, while emphasizing his support for lifting environmental regulations aimed at drilling for oil and gas.
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Bystanders on Friday were captured on surveillance video rescuing a San Francisco police officer moments after she was attacked in the city’s Chinatown, reports said.
The Asian officer responded to a call about an individual who was making racially motivated threats. The suspect was identified by police as Gerardo Contreras, 33, according to reports.
Surveillance video shows the officer ordering the man in the video to put his hands on his head. The man appears to comply, but when asked if he had any weapons in his possession, he becomes violent, the video appears to show.
The man in the video appears to overpower the officer and wrestles her to the ground. Bystanders rush in to assist the officer.
“He’s a big guy, he was not letting go. He had a death grip on her. And he was not letting go,” says Michael Waldorf, who had just finished eating dinner with his family when he jumped in to help, according to San Francisco’s KGO-TV. “I saw it as an emergency. She needed our help and she needed it right away.”
Waldorf was one of several bystanders who jumped into action. The officer was able to regain control and backup arrived soon after.
The officer, who has yet to be identified, suffered a bloody nose and minor injuries, according to KGO-TV.
The attack is currently under investigation. Police have yet to say whether it will be investigating as a hate crime.
Community activist Max Leong told FOX 2 that people in that area of the city know Contreras and that he appears to have mental health issues.
“He’s been kind of a fixture here in San Francisco Chinatown,” Leong said. “It speaks to the fact more services need to be provided for the mentally ill.”
The San Francisco Police Officers Association tweeted their appreciation for the bystanders who jumped in to help rescue the officer.
“We’ve seen a rise in violent attacks by homeless individuals, including attacks on police officers,” the union wrote. “We are deeply grateful to these citizens who rushed to our officer’s aide. Our staffing shortage left this officer working alone instead of with a partner.”
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday he would withhold pay from Texas lawmakers by vetoing the section of the state budget that funds their paychecks.
His announcement comes just hours after Texas Democrats walked out of the House, breaking quorum, and blocking the possibility of a vote before a midnight deadline. “I will veto Article 10 of the budget passed by the legislature. Article 10 funds the legislative branch. No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities,” Abbott tweeted Monday afternoon. “Stay tuned.”
I will veto Article 10 of the budget passed by the legislature.
Article 10 funds the legislative branch.
No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities.
The Democratic walk-out was a last-ditch effort to block the passage of a controversial, restrictive voting law that would make it much harder for some Texans to vote. The elections bill, which has already passed the Texas Senate, would make it harder to vote absentee, ban drive-through and 24-hour voting, pump up punishments for election official errors or offenses, and grant more power to poll watchers.
“Democrats in the House and Senate in Texas have been working all session long to kill these Republican vote suppression measures. And Senate Bill 7 was the worst of the worst,” Texas House Minority Leader Chris Turner, a Democrat, told CNN on Monday. “And so we were determined to kill this bill in any way we could.”
Turner was instrumental in leading enough Democrats out of the House to break quorum. “Any bills that don’t pass by midnight effectively die,” he explained.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said on Monday that he would withhold pay from Texas lawmakers by vetoing the section of the state budget that funds their paychecks. Here, Abbott gives a State of the State speech on February 17 2015. Robert Daemmrich/Getty
For the moment, the walk-out has been successful in blocking the vote, which could not take place before the deadline. Abbott called this “deeply disappointing.” However, the Governor said he will call a special session to force a vote on the bill, though he has not yet released a specific timeline.
Article 10, which Abbott has threatened to veto, does fund lawmakers’ and the paychecks their staffs. It also funds other legislative agencies that serve the public.
Democratic Texas state Rep. Donna Howard of Austin tweeted that vetoing this funding provision “would eliminate the branch of government that represents the people and basically create a monarchy.”
Just before the state senate passed the bill on Saturday, President Joe Biden made a statement condemning the legislation, as well as similar measures that have recently passed in both Florida and Georgia.
“Today, Texas legislators put forth a bill that joins Georgia and Florida in advancing a state law that attacks the sacred right to vote. It’s part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year—and often disproportionately targeting Black and Brown Americans,” the president said in a Saturday statement.
“It’s wrong and un-American. In the 21st century, we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote.”
Newsweek has reached out to House Minority Leader Turner for comment.
White paint was smeared on the window of a Lower Manhattan art gallery named Black Wall Street on the 100th anniversary of the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre — and the NYPD is probing the vandalism as a possible hate crime.
A security guard at a Nike store across from the Black Wall Street Gallery on Mercer Street spotted the vandalism around 7 a.m. Monday — the date in 1921 when white residents of Tulsa, Okla., laid deadly waste to the city’s Greenwood District, also known as Black Wall Street for its budding black business clout.
The Manhattan art gallery decried its shop’s defacement as “deliberate and intentional” in an Instagram post.
“Some perpetrator(s) vandalized our space at 26 Mercer Street sometime last night between 11pm and 7am,” the post read, noting that the business determined the earlier end of the timeframe based on when Dr. Ricco Wright, the gallery’s Tulsa-born curator, left Sunday night.
The post includes a photo of the gallery’s front window thick with white paint over much of its name.
An interior view of the Black Wall Street gallery in New York City, which was defaced early Monday.Instagram
The gallery said in the caption that the NYPD initially declined to categorize the vandalism as hate speech, though a department rep told The Post that the incident has been referred to the Hate Crime Task Force for investigation.
“We are demanding that the police review their policies on what constitutes hate speech because this was indeed deliberate and intentional,” the gallery’s post read. “All one has to do is look at the facts. We are Black Wall Street Gallery and this incident occurred exactly 100 years after the massacre.
“As far as we’re concerned, smearing white paint on the word ‘black’ is deliberate and intentional and therefore constitutes hate speech.”
The Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where an estimated 300 people were killed in one of the deadliest race massacres in US history.Universal History Archive/Univer
The gallery noted that no other businesses on the block were vandalized overnight and that it had not previously been targeted since opening its doors in October.
An estimated 300 people were killed, hundreds more wounded, and businesses, homes and churches burned to the ground in the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Peru officials revised the country’s COVID-19 death toll Monday from 69,342 to 180,764 after a review.
Why it matters: The almost tripling of the number listed Sunday means the country has the worst pandemic death rate per capita, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
By the numbers: Per Johns Hopkins, Hungary previously had the highest coronavirus death toll per capita —about 300 per 100,000 people.
With its revised toll, Peru stands at over 500 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people.
Driving the news: Officials said that the undercounting was partially down to “a lack of testing that made it difficult to confirm whether a person had died due to the virus or some other cause,” Reuters reports.
Experts had long raised concerns that the official death toll had been undercounted, as hospitals packed out with coronavirus patients and oxygen ran short, the news agency notes.
What to watch: The revised numbers come ahead of a hotly contested June 6 presidential election runoff between the leftist Pedro Castillo and former lawmaker Keiko Fujimori.
Surveillance video shows masked gunmen entering Florida banquet hall before they open fire on crowd
The distraught father of one of the victims in a deadly shooting outside a Miami banquet hall early Sunday interrupted a press conference on Monday hours before city police released new details about evidence.
Clayton Dillard’s son, Clayton Dillard III, was one of the two individuals killed in the shooting that left 20 others injured. Investigators said the gunmen waited in their vehicle for 20 to 40 minutes for concertgoers to gather out front and that’s when the gunmen ‘indiscriminately’ opened fire. Several people in the crowd who were armed returned fire, authorities said Monday.
Miami-Dade Police Director Freddy Ramirez was holding a press conference at the time when Dillard walked up to the rostrum.
Dillard, whose son was 26, yelled, “You all killed my kid. You must burn.” He was escorted away by police officers. Ramirez said Dillard’s pain was evident.
“That is the pain that affects our community,” he said. “Right there before you. That’s why together, all of us, we must work harder to bring for these families.”
The press conference was held hours before police alerted the public that they found the vehicle used by three gunmen in the attack. The Nissan Pathfinder was reported stolen on May 15 and found by drivers in Key Biscayne, which is a notorious dumping area.
Police also released a snippet from surveillance video that showed a white SUV driving into an alley at the strip mall housing the El Mula Banquet Hall in northwest Miami-Dade, near Hialeah.
The video shows three people getting out of the vehicle, one gripping a handgun, while the other two carried what police described as “assault-style rifles.”
Businessman and TV personality Marcus Lemonis, star of “The Profit,” pledged $100,000 toward a reward fund to help authorities capture the suspects.
Fox News’ Louis Casiano and the Associated Press contributed to this report
President Joe Biden, observing his first Memorial Day as commander-in-chief, delivered remarks Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, painting democracy as the “soul of America” and one that “worth fighting for … worth dying for.”
“Democracy itself is at peril, here at home and around the world,” Biden warned in an emphatic and emotional address, speaking to military families at Arlington National Cemetery’s Memorial Amphitheater. “How we honor the memory of the fallen will determine whether or not democracy will long endure.”
“For those who mourn a loved one today, Jill and I have some idea how you’re feeling. Our losses are not the same, but that black hole you feel in your chest as if it’s gonna suck you into it, we get,” Biden said, noting that Sunday marked the sixth anniversary of his son Beau’s death. “I know the incredible pride you felt seeing your loved one wear the uniform of our country and the pride they felt wearing it.”
On Friday in Hampton, Virginia, Biden shared details about Beau, who deployed to Iraq in 2008 with the Delaware National Guard. He died at the age of 46 from cancer.
“Our son did not die in Iraq, but he came back — went as an incredibly healthy young man and came back with a severe brain tumor because his [living quarters] was just downwind from those burn pits — I don’t know if that’s the reason. But he came home. It was just a matter of how long he lived,” Biden said in an address to troops.
His speech Monday focused on the ultimate sacrifice — U.S. service members dying for their country — and what he said President Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion.”
“They did not only die at Gettysburg or in Flanders Field or on the beaches of Normandy, but in the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iraq, in the last 20 years,” Biden said.
He said walking through Arlington’s Section 60 — where many of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been buried — “reminds me of the cost of war.”
“Hundreds of graves here from recent conflicts. Hundreds of patriots gave their all, each of them leaving behind a family who live with their pain and their absence every single day. I want to assure each of those families we will never forget what you gave to our country,” he said.
The president announced last month that the U.S. will withdraw all troops from Afghanistan before the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. He said he carries a piece of paper in his jacket pocket with the number of troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Today, that number is 7,036. 7,036 fallen angels who have lost their lives in these conflicts and this Memorial Day we honor the legacy and the sacrifice,” Biden said. “Duty. Honor. Country. They live for it. They died for it. And we as a nation are eternally grateful.”
He went on, “Our freedom and the freedom of innumerable others has been secured by young men and women who answered the call history and gave everything in service of an idea.”
The president underscored throughout his speech what American troops have fought for and are still fighting for — democracy — or, as he called it, “the soul of America.”
“Democracy must be defended at all costs for democracy makes all this possible,” Biden said. “Democracy. That’s the soul of America. And I believe it’s a soul worth fighting for. And so do you, a soul worth dying for.”
Biden also mentioned voting rights in his remarks hours after Texas Democrats staged a walkout to block passage of a bill that would have restricted voting rights. It comes as a handful of states have introduced voting bills that advocates have called too restrictive.
“Democracy thrives when the infrastructure of democracy is strong. When people have the right to vote, freely and fairly and conveniently,” he said.
“This Memorial Day, remember that not all of us are called to make the ultimate sacrifice. We all are called by God and by history and by conscience to make our nation free and fair,” Biden concluded. “If we do our duty, then ages still to come will look back on us and say that we, too, kept the faith.”
While leaving Arlington National Cemetery, Biden and the first lady made an unplanned stop to visit a grave at Section 12 — a primary burial location of those killed and recovered in World War II and the Korean War. They also met with some families.
Ahead of his remarks, Biden participated in a short wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, also known as the Tomb of the Unknowns, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Biden on Sunday gave a somber speech in New Castle, Delaware, near his home in Wilmington, at a Memorial Day observance ceremony at Veterans Memorial Park, again paying tribute to Beau.
“If he were here, he would be here as well, paying his respects to all those — all those who gave so much for our country,” Biden said of his late son.
Comedian Jon Stewart joined lawmakers last week on Capitol Hill to unveil broad legislation that would make it easier for veterans exposed to toxic substances to access Veterans Affairs benefits.
ABC News’ Justin Gomez and Ben Gittleson contributed to this report.
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