Residents of South Florida expressed relief that President Trump’s Labor Secretary Alex Acosta is resigning his post. The Friday announcement was seen as “a victory” by those still angered by Acosta’s handling of a 2008 sex crimes case involving wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Acosta is a former federal prosecutor in South Florida. This week he had been under renewed and intense scrutiny stemming from the deal under which Epstein pleaded guilty to lesser sex crimes and served 13 months in county jail, with work release during the day.

As Acosta announced his resignation, federal prosecutors in Manhattan alleged in court filings that Epstein had attempted to buy influence over people who were set to testify against him. He is accused of wiring $350,000 last year to two associates.

Federal authorities are seeking to block Epstein’s release as he awaits trial stemming from charges brought against him earlier this week. Epstein is due back in court Monday for a bail hearing.

He is accused of sexually abusing underage girls, some as young as 14.

Florida State Sen. Lauren Book, a Democrat, said in a statement that Acosta’s resignation was “a victory for crime victims everywhere.”

She added, “Acosta aided and abetted criminal sex predator Jeffrey Epstein — and was rewarded with one of the top positions within the United States government … until the truth caught up with him.”

“This is a step towards justice for the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse,” tweeted Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla.

Fellow Florida Democrat, Rep. Donna Shalala, started a tweet thread with this opening salvo:

“Sec. Acosta announced his resignation from his position as Secretary of Labor for failing to vigorously prosecute serial child predator Jeffrey Epstein. Good riddance.”

Acosta’s time as labor secretary was ticking down after federal prosecutors in New York brought the new charges against Epstein on Monday.

The indictment alleges Epstein “enticed and recruited” underage girls to his properties in Manhattan and in Palm Beach, Fla. He allegedly not only sexually abused the minors but also constructed an elaborate scheme of paying victims to lure other underage girls to be abused.

Acosta spent roughly an hour in Washington on Wednesday defending his handling of the Epstein case he oversaw in Florida more than a decade ago. Under the deal Acosta brokered, Epstein pleaded guilty to a pair of counts of solicitation, one of the cases involving a minor.

The plea also stipulated that Epstein register as a sex offender.

Epstein was allowed to leave his cell for up to 12 hours a day to work at his office. He also had a personal driver take him from the jail to the office and back.

In a statement Friday, Jack Scarola, an attorney in Palm Beach who represents some of Epstein’s accusers, called Acosta’s decision to leave his post in President Trump’s Cabinet “very good news.”

“Mr. Acosta will now have plenty of time and no distractions that prevent him from fully accounting for the sweetheart treatment Epstein received,” he said. “We look forward to this occurring in a forum where there is no opportunity to get away with untruths, half-truths, evasion, and diversion.”

Isidro “Sid” Garcia, another Palm Beach lawyer who is also representing an Epstein accuser, told NPR it wasn’t a bad idea for Acosta to go.

“I thought the plea deal that was made was very questionable. I wasn’t sure at the time who dropped the ball or failed to do what they had to do,” Garcia said.

He thinks Epstein’s connections to powerful people allowed him to secure such an extraordinary deal on Acosta’s watch.

“[It’s] not entirely shocking that he got the deal that he did,” Garcia said.

“I feel power and influence obviously influenced the scales of justice,” said Kirk Blouin, town manager of Palm Beach, Fla., who prior to his post served 29 years in the Palm Beach police department.

Blouin says he did not work directly on the investigation of Epstein but was in the department and worked with officials who did. He said the Epstein case stood out.

“I was involved in thousands of cases, and not all of them turn out the way you think they should, but in that case it was very bizarre.”

Speaking before reporters at the White House Friday, Acosta said it would be “selfish” for him to remain in the administration at this time.

“I called the president this [Friday] morning. I told him I thought the right thing was to step aside. It would be selfish for me to stay in this position and continue talking about a case that is 12 years old rather than the amazing economy we have right now.”

America is an outlier when it comes to paid family leave — a matter many Democrats had hoped to fix with President Biden’s sweeping domestic spending plan.

But the latest framework — which was cut down from its original size to satisfy centrists and which Biden unveiled Thursday — drops paid leave.

“That is one of my biggest points of dissatisfaction, and it is discouraging,” Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia told NPR.

The talks had initially called for 12 weeks of paid family leave, which includes leave for new parents and elder care. That was whittled down to four and finally down to none.

The United States is one of a handful of countries, and the only wealthy nation, without a national paid leave policy.

Many Democrats said Thursday that they still hope to add provisions to the president’s framework.

That echoes a Wednesday statement from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who has vowed to continue to fight for paid family leave until the very end.

“Until the bill is printed, I will continue working to include paid leave in the Build Back Better plan,” she said in the statement.

The Biden administration has said paid leave would make the U.S. more competitive in the global market. Women are often the hardest hit by restrictive or nonexistent paid leave policies.

“You cannot be competitive if women can’t productively engage in the workforce because they don’t have access to child care or care for their elderly loved ones,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in an interview with NPR last month. “We can’t compete globally if we’re the only industrialized nation without paid family leave, which severely underpins our workers’ productivity.”

Disagreements over the price tag

Democrats largely seemed to agree that family leave provisions should be in the massive spending package.

But Democrats plan to push the measure through the Senate using a process called reconciliation, so there needs to be complete unanimity within a party’s caucus that includes two major holdouts on the overall size and scope of the bill — Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Manchin has been quite vocal about what he wants and what he doesn’t want in the spending measure. The conservative Democrat — who this month made waves for saying he had offered to switch parties if he had become a “problem” to Democrats — had balked at the plan’s size, which initially rang in at $3.5 trillion.

A Sinema spokesman released a statement earlier this month saying she “does not negotiate policy details through the press,” but she previously said that she, like Manchin, would not support a package as pricey as the original $3.5 trillion proposal.

That led Democrats to have to narrow the bill down — including slashing paid leave.

Despite his discouragement that the leave policy has been dropped, Kaine and others pointed to other provisions in the bill, including an extended child tax credit and universal prekindergarten, as victories.

“What we’ll say to folks who care deeply about the issue, and I do too, is that it’s disappointing and we got more work to do,” he said. “But the combination of pro-family and pro-child issues is so strong here that it’ll give us momentum on the other things. And there’s a lot of good in this bill.”

Biden, for whom the historic measure would represent a major win for his young presidency, spoke optimistically about what has been achieved thus far.

“We spent hours and hours and hours over months and months working on this,” Biden said in remarks made before leaving for the G-20 and the U.N. climate summit. “No one got everything they wanted, including me. But that’s what compromise is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on.”

Minnesota’s sprawling, rural 7th Congressional District has been represented by conservative Democrat Collin Peterson for 30 years. It was considered one of Democrats’ most vulnerable seats going into this year’s election, and the GOP flipped it when Michelle Fischbach won by 13 points.

Rep.-elect Fischbach credited one particular Republican with helping her win: Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York.​

“Whenever advice was needed, I always was able to call and talk to her about whatever kinds of bumps or things you would run into,” Fischbach said. “But in addition to that, she provided fundraising and dollars to the campaign, which is so important.”

Now, Fischbach is one of a record 35 Republican women who will serve in Congress next year, breaking the previous record of 30 and a sharp increase from the 13 GOP women elected to the House of Representatives in 2018.

This year’s number could still grow as more races are called. The Republican Party is celebrating that as a win, just two years after Democrats had their own record-setting year electing women.

Stefanik’s role in 2020

Stefanik has become the face of efforts to boost Republican women in Congress. She was in charge of recruitment for House Republicans in 2018, an abysmal year for GOP women. Among the 13 women elected to the House from the Republican Party in the midterms, there was just one nonincumbent candidate.

After that, Stefanik clashed with National Republican Congressional Committee chair Tom Emmer over whether the party should do more to boost women in primaries. Emmer told a reporter that would be a “mistake.” Stefanik, for her part, focused her energy on building up her leadership PAC, E-PAC.

Her committee promoted more than two dozen candidates and gave $415,000 to Republican women, including Fischbach.

Stefanik credits the candidates with their wins, but she also feels that she played a key role.

“What I believe is different this cycle is I publicly made this a priority for the Republicans I served with in Congress,” Stefanik said. “I very publicly said at the end of the midterms in 2018 that we needed to do better.”

A giant partisan gender gap

Even while setting a new record, the GOP is set to have around one-third the number of women that Democrats will have in Congress next session, according to data compiled by Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics.

Republicans will also have around one-tenth Democrats’ number of women of color. (Those numbers may yet shift somewhat as several races have yet to be called.)

Altogether, according to the latest numbers, that means women will account for nearly 40% of Democrats on Capitol Hill, compared with less than 15% on the Republican side.

In that light, University of Virginia political science professor Jennifer Lawless explained why she thinks GOP women’s success this year is important.

“​It’s a big deal in that the Republicans have demonstrated that when they make some effort to recruit female candidates, they see an increase in women’s representation,” Lawless said. “But we haven’t not known that. Since the 1980s, when women run for office, whether as Democrats or Republicans, we know that they’re as likely as men to win elections.”

Lawless pointed out that Republican groups like E-PAC, though growing, are dwarfed by groups on the Democratic side like EMILY’s List, which recruits and promotes Democratic women who support abortion rights.

Changing candidates for a changed GOP

The crop of Republican candidates this year was different from past years, not just quantitatively but qualitatively, according to Republican pollster Christine Matthews.

That’s because of longer-term partisan demographic realignment, with women — and particularly college-educated women — increasingly identifying as Democrats. It’s a trend that may in fact be related to increasing polarization.

Matthews says that realignment has changed which women run and what issues they run on.

“As, increasingly, college-educated women and men are leaving the Republican Party to becoming more rural, more non-college educated, male, [and] older, one way to appeal to that type of electorate is not anymore to be the Chamber of Commerce Republican woman, but to be the Second Amendment Republican woman,” she said.

Among the women who won this year are Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, who not only ran on opposition to gun control, but have in the past expressed support for the baseless, far-right conspiracy theory QAnon. (E-PAC, for its part, lists Boebert but not Greene among its promoted candidates.)

“Identity politics” in the GOP

Promoting women politicians in particular can mean walking a tricky line in the GOP. Republican voters often say they are voting for the best candidate, regardless of gender or race.

And there were echoes of that when NPR asked Emmer, the National Republican Congressional Committee chair, if celebrating women’s victories qualifies as so-called “identity politics.”

“These people are not going to be great representatives just because of their gender, their race. These are people with incredible backgrounds,” he said. “And I’ll tell you that we wanted the best candidates. That’s what we were looking for across this country.”

On the other hand, while Stefanik stressed that she worked to back high-quality candidates, she also stressed that it’s important for the party to try to make its lawmakers look more like the party itself. She also believes she’s proven something to her party leadership.​

“I was really proud that [Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy, [Minority Whip] Steve Scalise and many of my male colleagues embraced this effort, including Tom Emmer, who learned pretty quickly that it’s important to prioritize recruitment of women candidates and nontraditional candidates,” she said.

It’s not clear what this will mean for how Congress legislates. Recent research has cast doubt on the popular view that women candidates are more bipartisan than men.

And while there’s limited evidence that women legislators tend to focus on different issues than men, it remains to be seen what effect a bigger number of women will have on the GOP’s actions. Lawmakers, like voters, vote based on party, not gender.

Updated at 10:14 a.m. ET

The Vatican has defrocked former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, it said Saturday, making him the highest-ranking church official to date to be expelled from the priesthood for sex abuse.

A church tribunal found McCarrick guilty of “solicitation in the Sacrament of Confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power,” the Vatican said. Pope Francis has approved the ruling and there is no possibility of appeal, the statement said.

McCarrick, 88, resigned his post as cardinal last year after an investigation found evidence he had molested a minor altar boy almost a half-century ago. Another man told The New York Times that he was in his 20s when McCarrick abused him in the 1980s. McCarrick was a bishop in New Jersey at the time. The Times also found that two New Jersey dioceses had secretly paid settlements to two men who had accused McCarrick of abuse.

“Both abuse and its cover-up can no longer be tolerated,” Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti said Saturday as he announced McCarrick’s punishment. “A different treatment for bishops who have committed or covered up abuse in fact represents a form of clericalism that is no longer acceptable.”

Reporting on Weekend Edition, NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli said at the peak of his power, McCarrick was a “globe-trotting power broker” and one of the church’s most powerful figures. He served as archbishop of Washington from 2000 to 2006, and he was elevated to the elite position of cardinal in 2001. His successor as Washington’s archbishop, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, resigned last year after reports suggested he knew of widespread abuse while he was bishop of a Pennsylvania diocese but didn’t act to stop it.

For years, McCarrick had been rumored to have used the power of his office to coerce seminarians — young men training to be priests — to have sex with him, Sylvia reports. One priest who encountered McCarrick while in seminary said McCarrick had frightened him. “When he would speak to you, he would touch you,” the Rev. Desmond Rossi told NPR’s Renee Montagne last year. “He was very tactile. He would, at one point, put his hand on my knee and kind of just leave it there when I was alone with him in an office.”

“In situations like that, it isn’t only so much as what this person has done in that moment,” Rossi said. “It’s what they can do because they have this power. What are they going to do next? And that’s what can be traumatizing.”

Stripping clerical status is considered one of the most severe forms of punishments for Catholic priests. The announcement of McCarrick’s defrocking comes days before Pope Francis convenes an extraordinary summit on sex abuse in the church. That meeting is already expected to receive intense media coverage. Last month, Philip Pullella, a veteran Reuters Vatican correspondent, told NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli that defrocking McCarrick before the conference would send a “strong signal” that Pope Francis is serious about addressing abuse.

In addition to the allegations against McCarrick, the Catholic Church last year dealt with a number of other reports of widespread sex abuse and abuse of power around the world. A Pennsylvania grand jury found that for decades, 300 “predator priests” had abused at least 1,000 victims in six of the state’s eight dioceses. German church leaders detailed the cases of more than 3,600 children who were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014. In October, Pope Francis defrocked two Chilean bishops for what the Vatican called “manifest abuse of minors.”