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Senate Holds Hearing on Federal Elections Overhaul Legislation
Senate Democrats took their first steps on Wednesday on a sweeping federal elections bill. The For the People Act would expand voting rights and blunt a wave Republican efforts to restrict voter access in states.
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“Today, now, in the 21st century, there is a concerted nationwide effort to limit the right of American citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government. Instead of doing what you should be doing when you lose an election in a democracy — attempting to win over those voters in the next election — Republicans, instead, are trying to disenfranchise those voters. Shame on them. Some of these voter suppression laws in Georgia and other Republican states smack of Jim Crow rearing its ugly head once again. If one political party believes that when you lose an election, the answer isn’t to win more votes, but rather to try and prevent the other side from voting, we have an existential threat to democracy on our hands. That is why the country so badly needs S.1, a bill that would combat all of these voter suppression efforts.” “This is a solution in search of a problem. Turnout in 2020 was up 7 percent. The turnout in the 2020 election was the highest since 1900. States are not engaging in trying to suppress voters whatsoever. This is clearly an effort by one party to rewrite the rules of our political system. Now, we’ve just seen two consecutive presidential elections, 2016 and 2020, where chunks of Americans on both the left and the right took turns refusing to accept the result when their side lost. We can’t afford to go further down this road. We should be finding ways to rebuild trust, not destroy it further. But that’s exactly what a partisan power grab would guarantee.”
The Senate took its first steps on Wednesday to advance one of Democrats’ top legislative priorities, convening an opening hearing on a sweeping elections bill that would expand voting rights and blunt some Republican state legislators’ efforts to restrict access to the ballot box.
Chock-full of liberal priorities, the bill, called the For the People Act, would usher in landmark changes making it easier to vote, enact new campaign finance laws and end partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts. The legislation passed the House along party lines earlier this month. It faces solid opposition from Republicans who are working to clamp down on ballot access, and who argue that the bill is a power grab by Democrats.
Democrats on the Senate Rules Committee hope that testimony from former Attorney General Eric Holder, prominent voting experts and anti-corruption advocates will help build on a rising drumbeat of support from liberals.
“Today, in the 21st century, there is a concerted, nationwide effort to limit the rights of citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader.
He called the voting rollbacks in the states an “existential threat to our democracy” reminiscent of Jim Crow segregationist laws, chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at the Republicans promoting them.
Republicans are equally adamant in their opposition to a measure that promises to be an extraordinarily heavy lift for Democrats. They call it an attempt by Democrats to give themselves a permanent political advantage by driving up turnout among minority groups and by preventing Republicans, who control a majority of statehouses, from drawing new congressional districts this year that would tilt the playing field in their favor.
“This bill is the single most dangerous bill this committee has ever considered,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. “This bill is designed to corrupt the election process permanently, and it is a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.”
He falsely claimed that the bill would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots, too. In fact, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, and the bill would do nothing to change that or a requirement that people registering to vote swear they are citizens. It would extend the franchise to millions of former felons, as some states already do, but only after they have served their terms.
So far, not a single Republican supports the nearly 800-page bill, and Democrats are unlikely to win support even from all 50 of their senators without substantial changes.
Democrats’ best hope for enacting the legislation increasingly appears to be to try to leverage its voting protections — which many liberals view as a life-or-death matter not just for American democracy, but for their own political chances in the future — to justify triggering the Senate’s so-called nuclear option: the elimination of the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes, rather than a simple majority, to advance most bills. For now, though, even that remains out of reach as long as conservative Democrats in the 50-50 Senate are opposed.
To make the case against the bill, Republicans turned to two officials who backed an effort to overturn President Biden’s election victory. Mac Warner, the secretary of state of West Virginia, and Todd Rokita, the attorney general of Indiana, both supported a Texas lawsuit late last year asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results in key battleground states Mr. Biden won, citing groundless claims of voting fraud and other irregularities being spread by former President Donald J. Trump.
Two former Republican chairmen of the Federal Election Commission also testified in opposition on Wednesday. Republicans were particularly outspoken against changes that would transform the body, which regulates federal elections, from a bipartisan and largely toothless entity into a more partisan and punitive one.
The bill proposes restructuring the F.E.C. from an evenly split bipartisan panel into one with an odd number of members, where a chairman selected by the president would effectively take control.
“Talk about ‘shame,’” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader.
Vice President Kamala Harris will be in charge of efforts to reduce illegal immigration by finding ways to improve conditions in Central American countries, President Biden said Wednesday as his administration struggles to confront a surge of migrants at the country’s southern border.
“This new surge we are dealing with now started in the past administration, but it is our responsibility” now to deal with it, Mr. Biden said as he made the announcement during a meeting with top immigration advisers.
He called the vice president the most qualified person to deal with Mexico and Central American countries as they try to limit what he called “serious spikes” in the number of people trying to cross the border illegally.
The announcement puts Ms. Harris in the middle of one of the most charged and contentious issues for the White House, which has scrambled to find space for thousands of minors who have crossed the border without their parents in recent weeks.
Mr. Biden said that Ms. Harris would oversee the administration’s plans to pump billions of dollars into the ravaged economies of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in the hopes of reducing the violence and poverty that often drive families in those countries to seek refuge in the United States.
Ms. Harris said that there was “no question this is a challenging situation,” but that she was looking forward to engaging in discussions with leaders of Central American countries.
For Ms. Harris, the diplomatic assignment is one of the first in a portfolio of responsibilities that aides said would continue to expand in the months ahead. They noted that Mr. Biden, as vice president under President Barack Obama, had been in charge of working to improve conditions in the same Central American countries.
The task is likely to be a difficult one. Mr. Biden’s efforts in Central America were largely unsuccessful, as critics charged that corrupt leaders there had not effectively spent foreign aid money. In the years since, the countries have grown more dangerous and more economically unstable.
Now, Ms. Harris will face similar challenges in an even more heated political environment. Republicans have seized on the surge of migrants at the border as evidence that Mr. Biden’s immigration policies are failing.
Aides sought to describe the vice president’s role as limited to working on long-term improvements in Central America. But it may be difficult for Ms. Harris to avoid political blame for the administration’s broader immigration agenda if her efforts fail to significantly stem the flow of migrants arriving at the southern border of the United States in the short term.
Ms. Harris said on Wednesday that she expected to travel to the border in the coming weeks, but did not provide details. Aides declined to say when she would make a trip to Central America or discuss the immigration issue with the leaders of the nations she will work with.
President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, will deliver remarks at an event on Wednesday that will outline the importance of equal pay after a year in which millions of women left the work force because of the pandemic.
“This is personal to me, because it’s personal to all women,” Dr. Biden will say, according to prepared remarks published in Elle magazine before the event. “It’s one example of how we still treat women differently than men.”
Mr. Biden has sought to make equality a primary focus of his administration, partly through a $1.9 trillion relief package that targets underserved communities and seeks to provide money to families who have struggled to make ends meet. This month, he signed an executive order to re-establish a gender-focused policy council that had been dormant during the Trump administration.
Women earn about 80 percent of what men make, according to census data. Statistics from the Pew Research Center show that the gender pay gap has narrowed considerably over the past few decades, but that women — particularly women of color — still report a difference in earnings compared with white men.
The White House event is one of many recognizing Equal Pay Day, a symbolic marker created in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of civil rights groups. March 24 is the date in the new year when women catch up to the amount of money that men made in the previous year, according to the committee.
In an attempt to add star power to a policy discussion, the Bidens invited Megan Rapinoe of the United States women’s soccer team to participate in the event. Ms. Rapinoe, 35, is one of the most popular soccer stars in the world and has used her platform to call out pay disparities between male and female athletes.
In December, the United States Soccer Federation and its World Cup champion women’s team said they had reached an agreement over a wage-discrimination lawsuit, months after a federal judge dismissed claims that the female athletes were systematically underpaid.
Two years after Ms. Rapinoe publicly feuded with former President Donald J. Trump over whether she would visit the White House, she accepted the invitation from the Bidens.
Ms. Rapinoe is also outspoken on issues of racial justice: Her decision to kneel during the national anthem in a show of support for the former N.F.L. player Colin Kaepernick put her, along with other athletes, in Mr. Trump’s cross hairs.
The running conflicts between the sports world and the Trump administration turned any decision for athletes to visit the White House into a cultural flash point, so her appearance with the Bidens on Wednesday was hardly an accidental course correction.
Before joining the Bidens, Ms. Rapinoe was scheduled to testify to the House Oversight Committee about the need to close gender-based pay gaps.
“The women’s national team has won four World Cup championships and four Olympic gold medals on behalf of our country,” she wrote in a prepared statement. “Yet despite all this, we are still paid less than men — for each trophy, each win, each tie, each time we play.”
If that can happen to women “with the brightest lights shining on us,” she added, it can happen to women in any industry.
The Pentagon on Wednesday rolled out a new task force set up to recommend ways to address sexual assault in the military, a problem that has long afflicted every branch of the service and drawn intense criticism of the military’s failure to stem its tide.
The independent review committee, led by Lynn Rosenthal, a former White House adviser and executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, is populated by a variety of experts on sexual assault, from former prosectors, military brass and policymakers, many of them veterans. It is more female than male. At least one has endured sexual assault in the past.
The commission is charged with coming up with recommendations over the next few months, which Ms. Rosenthal said could include substantive changes to the way the military adjudicates such crimes.
Although there is some skepticism on Capitol Hill and beyond of yet another study taking on the issue, some have cited the role of Ms. Rosenthal, a respected advocate for survivors of assault, as a potential ray of hope that something substantive will result. “The lived experience of survivors are the very foundation of the work,” Ms. Rosenthal said. “The most powerful voices sadly come from trauma and pain.”
In 2019, the Defense Department found, there were 7,825 sexual assault reports involving service members as victims, a 3 percent increase over 2018. From 2018 to 2019, the conviction rate for cases was unchanged — 7 percent of cases that commanders took action on resulted in convictions, the lowest rates since the department began reporting in 2010.
The issue took on new urgency last summer, after Specialist Vanessa Guillen of the Army was killed by another soldier at Fort Hood, the large Army base in Texas.
Although reports that she had been sexually harassed by her killer — who died by suicide — were never confirmed, the case set off a far broader look into the problems of harassment and assault of both men and women in the armed forces. A recent report about the culture of Fort Hood found a “permissive environment for sexual assault and sexual harassment,” and numerous leaders on the base were relieved of their duties.
Lloyd J. Austin III, President Biden’s defense secretary, ordered a review of how the Pentagon handles sexual assault cases as his first act in the position.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, has spent years pushing legislation on the issue. She has introduced a bill that would give military prosecutors, rather than commanders, the power to decide which sexual assault cases to try. Her first hearing on the matter in this Congress coincided with the commission’s first news conference at the Pentagon on Wednesday.
Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Austin said he was open to considering significant revisions to how those crimes were prosecuted, a potential sea change that generations of commanders have resisted. Mr. Biden spoke in favor of such a move during his campaign but has since been largely silent.
“I think what we will be asking is what hasn’t been tried,” Ms. Rosenthal said, adding that would include “carefully considering the role of command.”
Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday called on Republicans “to stop with the false choices” in the debate over guns — criticizing opponents of gun control for blocking proposals, modest or sweeping, on the grounds that they would endanger the Second Amendment.
Ms. Harris, in her first extended remarks since Monday’s mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., reiterated President Biden’s call for the Senate, where Ms. Harris has the power to cast a tiebreaking vote, to quickly enact a pair of gun control bills recently passed by the House.
“It is time for Congress to act and stop with the false choices,” Ms. Harris said in an interview on “CBS This Morning.” “This is not about getting rid of the Second Amendment. It’s simply about saying we need reasonable gun safety laws. There is no reason why we have assault weapons on the streets of a civil society. They are weapons of war. They are designed to kill a lot of people quickly.”
The vice president also spoke candidly about the rapidly escalating migrant crisis at the country’s southern border, calling the situation a “huge problem.” Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden intend to visit the border, she said, although she did not say when.
Ms. Harris’s remarks came a day after Mr. Biden made a similar appeal for rapid legislative action on guns. It was immediately, and predictably, rebuffed by Senate Republicans.
“There’s not a big appetite among our members to do things that would appear to be addressing it, but actually don’t do anything to fix the problem,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said Tuesday.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said that he was “open to the discussion” around gun control measures, but that he was opposed to the two bills passed by the House.
Some Senate Democrats, including Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, have opposed many gun control bills, but the hardest core of opposition is rooted in the Republican Party’s ardently pro-gun base. Major gun bills would probably require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, which is why many gun control groups favor scrapping the rule.
As vice president, Mr. Biden was tasked with persuading Congress to enact gun control legislation by President Barack Obama. The effort failed. Then, as now, the most likely quick path to change is the use of executive action to implement modest and temporary restrictions.
Ms. Harris has not been assigned a similar role in the Biden administration, which had not, until this week, prioritized the issue.
But on Wednesday, she signaled that she would try to make the case to her former colleagues in the Senate, especially in pushing for beefed-up background checks, a proposal that has widespread public support.
“I’m not willing to give up on what we must do to appeal to the hearts and minds and the reason of the members of the United States Senate,” she said. “Reject the false choices, stop pushing it for sure. Stop pushing the false choice that this means everybody’s trying to come after your guns. That is not what we’re talking about.”
The White House said Tuesday that it would appoint a senior official to focus on Asian-American priorities after the Senate’s two Asian-American Democrats called on President Biden to address what they said was an unacceptable lack of representation at the highest levels of his administration.
In a late-night statement, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Biden would name “a senior-level Asian-American Pacific Islander liaison who will ensure the community’s voice is further represented and heard.”
“The president has made it clear that his administration will reflect the diversity of the country,” Ms. Psaki said. “That has always been, and remains, our goal.”
The announcement came hours after Senators Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii promised to withhold their votes on some nominees until Mr. Biden engaged more actively on the issue amid a rising tide of racism toward Asian-Americans during the pandemic, culminating in last week’s deadly shootings in the Atlanta area.
With the Senate divided evenly between the two parties, the move temporarily threatened to derail the president’s hopes of confirming several executive branch officials, including the Pentagon’s No. 3. Apparently, it also created considerable pressure to find a solution to a diversity problem the senators said they had been quietly raising for months.
Open disputes between Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats have been relatively rare in his first months in office, and the senators’ ultimatum was an unusual public disagreement within a party in uniform control of Washington. But by late Tuesday, Ms. Duckworth and Ms. Hirono had dropped their threats and appeared satisfied by the administration’s response.
Ben Garmisa, a spokesman for Ms. Duckworth, said in a statement that the senator appreciated the White House’s “assurances that it will do much more to elevate A.A.P.I. voices and perspectives at the highest levels of government,” referring to Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. He added that the White House had given assurances that its new appointee would work both to confirm more Asian-American and Pacific Islander nominees and to advance legislation that was “relevant and important to the community.”
“Accordingly, she will not stand in the way of President Biden’s qualified nominees — which will include more A.A.P.I. leaders,” Mr. Garmisa said of Ms. Duckworth.
Citing her own conversation with the White House, Ms. Hirono said on Twitter that she would also “continue voting to confirm the historic and highly qualified nominees President Biden has appointed to serve in his administration.”
Congress has plunged once again into a red-hot dispute over the 2020 balloting, this time weighing whether to overturn the results of a House race in Iowa that could tilt the chamber’s narrow balance of power.
At issue is the outcome of November’s election in a southeastern Iowa district, where state officials declared Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican, the winner in one of the closest contests in American history. Ms. Miller-Meeks prevailed by only six votes out of nearly 400,000 cast in the state’s Second Congressional District; in January, she took the oath of office in Washington.
But her Democratic opponent, Rita Hart, has refused to concede the race, pointing to 22 discarded ballots she says would have made her the winner if counted. Now Democrats, who hold the majority in the House and spent months pushing back on President Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about a stolen election — including his claim that Congress had the power to unilaterally overturn the results — are thrust into the uncomfortable role of arbiters of a contested race.
Ms. Hart has appealed to the House, including in a new filing on Monday, to step in to overrule the state and seat her instead, sending Ms. Miller-Meeks back to Iowa.
“This was not something I sought, believe me,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the panel looking into the race.
Ms. Lofgren and other Democrats say they have little choice but to take the appeal seriously under a 1960s law Ms. Hart has invoked. In recent weeks, Ms. Lofgren’s panel, the House Administration Committee, has opened a full-scale review into the contest that lawmakers say could lead to impounding ballots, conducting their own hand recount and ultimately a vote by the full House to determine who should rightfully represent the Iowa district.
Reversing the result would give Democrats a crucial additional vote to pad one of the sparest majorities in decades. The House is currently divided 219 to 211, with five vacancies.
House Republicans — more than half of whom voted to overturn Mr. Biden’s win — are accusing Democrats of a screeching, 180-degree turn now that flipping an election result would be to their advantage.
“One hundred percent, pure partisan politics,” said Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, the top Republican on the Administration Committee.
New videos obtained by The New York Times show publicly for the first time how the U.S. Capitol Police officer who died after the Jan. 6 attack was hit with chemical spray — with one of the rioters seen reaching in a friend’s backpack to retrieve what he called “bear spray.”
The officer, Brian D. Sicknick, who had been guarding the west side of the Capitol, collapsed later that day and died the next night. Little had been known about what happened to him during the assault, and the previously unpublished videos provide new details that clarify the confusing sequence of events.
Two men, Julian Elie Khater and George Pierre Tanios, were arrested on March 14 and charged with assaulting Officer Sicknick and two other officers with chemical spray. The investigation is continuing, and federal prosecutors haven’t ruled out pursuing murder charges.
Here’s what the videos show.
Mr. Khater and Mr. Tanios arrive near the police line on the west side of the Capitol at 2:09 p.m., more than an hour into the battle between rioters and police officers. Mr. Khater observes the fighting as tear gas and chemical spray waft through the crowd, then turns back toward where Mr. Tanios is standing.
At 2:14 p.m., he and Mr. Tanios huddle just a few yards from the police line, according to the F.B.I. Part of their conversation is captured in a separate video.
“Give me that bear shit,” Mr. Khater tells Mr. Tanios, most likely referring to a canister of bear repellent spray that prosecutors say Mr. Tanios purchased earlier that day.
He appears to retrieve something from Mr. Tanios’s backpack. After Mr. Tanios tells him to wait, Mr. Khater responds, “They just sprayed me.” He holds a white spray canister in his right hand.
On Monday, federal prosecutors alleged in court that Mr. Khater and Mr. Tanios were carrying Frontiersman bear spray, which can be many times more powerful than pepper sprays sold for self-defense and is not meant for use on humans.
By 2:20 p.m., six minutes later, Mr. Khater has returned to the police line, where Officer Sicknick and his colleagues are standing behind a row of bike rack barricades. He stands just a few feet from Officer Sicknick, who can be seen wearing a blue Capitol Police jacket, bicycle helmet and black coronavirus face mask.
At 2:23 p.m., Mr. Khater raises his arm over other rioters and sprays something toward Officer Sicknick.
A thin stream of liquid is visible shooting from a canister in Mr. Khater’s hand. It is unclear in the video what Mr. Khater is firing, and prosecutors have alleged that Mr. Tanios brought two smaller canisters of pepper spray to the Capitol in addition to two cans of Frontiersman bear spray.
Officer Sicknick reacts immediately to the spray, turning and raising his hand.
The last time Officer Sicknick appears in the videos or the photographs, he is bent over by the scaffolding erected for President Biden’s upcoming inauguration.
Leaders of the Oath Keepers militia and the far-right group the Proud Boys were in communication in the weeks before the Capitol riot and appear to have coordinated some plans for the day of the attack, prosecutors said in court papers.
The evidence presented in the papers effectively connects the two most prominent targets of the federal government’s vast investigation into the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, though there is no indication that the government intends to merge the separate inquiries.
The new disclosure was contained in a motion filed late Thursday by prosecutors seeking to keep Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, in jail before his trial. Prosecutors cited several of Mr. Meggs’s private Facebook messages in which he said that as many as 100 Oath Keepers planned to be in Washington for a rally in January answering a call by President Donald J. Trump.
“He called us all to Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!!” Mr. Meggs wrote on Dec 22. “Sir yes Sir!!! Gentlemen we are heading to DC.”
That same day, prosecutors say, Mr. Meggs wrote to an unknown correspondent that he had recently made contact with the Proud Boys, who he said could act as a “force multiplier.” In a separate message, Mr. Meggs noted that he had “organized an alliance” among the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and the Florida chapter of the Three Percenters, a radical gun rights movement that takes its name from the supposed 3 percent of the U.S. colonial population that stood up to the British.
On Christmas Day, court papers say, Mr. Meggs wrote that his group of Oath Keepers would serve as security guards in the days surrounding the pro-Trump event — a likely reference to protecting Mr. Trump’s old friend and former adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. — but had “orchestrated a plan with the proud boys” at night.
According to the messages, Mr. Meggs had already been in touch with a leader of the Proud Boys whose name was redacted in the papers. Apparently expecting an encounter with the antifascist activists known as antifa, the two men had devised a plan to catch their left-wing adversaries in a kind of pincer move on the streets. “We will have the proud boys get in front of them,” Mr. Meggs wrote. “The cops will get between antifa and proud boys. We will come in behind antifa and beat the hell out of them.”
Mr. Meggs’s lawyer, David A. Wilson, declined to comment on the filing. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, said he did not know Mr. Meggs and did not believe the reference in the Facebook message was to him.
The entry of two hard-right candidates this week into Senate races in Missouri and Alabama exposed the perils for Republicans of a political landscape in which former President Donald J. Trump is the only true north for grass-roots voters.
Strong state parties, big donors and Republican national leaders were once able to anoint a candidate, in order to avoid destructive demolition derbies in state primaries.
But in the Trump era, the pursuit of his endorsement is all-consuming, and absent Mr. Trump’s blessing, there is no mechanism for clearing a cluttered primary field. With the former president focused elsewhere — on settling scores against Republicans who advanced his impeachment or showed insufficient loyalty — a combative Senate primary season is in store for the 2022 midterms, when Republicans who hope to regain the majority face a difficult map. They are fighting to hold on to five open seats after a wave of retirements of establishment figures, and even deep-red Missouri and Alabama pose potential headaches.
A scandal-haunted former Missouri governor, Eric Greitens, entered the race on Monday to replace the retiring Senator Roy Blunt. His candidacy set off a four-alarm fire with state party leaders, who fear that Mr. Greitens may squeak through a crowded primary field, only to lose a winnable seat to a Democrat.
In Alabama, the entry of Representative Mo Brooks, a staunch but lackluster Trump supporter, into the race for the seat being vacated by Senator Richard C. Shelby raised a different set of fears with activists: that Mr. Brooks, who badly lost a previous statewide race, would cause waves of Republican voters, especially women, to sit out the off-year election and crack open the door for a Democrat.
Both candidacies are likely to pose challenges for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who has weighed in to cull potentially flawed candidates in the past and has said he may do so again this time.
Mr. Trump has so far stayed out of the potential pileups to fill the open Senate seats — the others to date are in Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Alabama and Missouri, both Republican strongholds, afford the party a margin of error even with a flawed candidate, a cushion not available in the more competitive traditional battleground states.
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Biden Extends Obamacare Enrollment Period to Aug. 15
President Biden said on Tuesday, the 11th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, that Americans who need health insurance would have until Aug. 15 to sign up through Healthcare.gov.
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Eleven years ago today, President Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act, a historic achievement that would not have been possible but for the vision and determination of one of the most successful presidents in recent American history, Barack Obama. If you enroll in Obamacare, you’re going to save an average of $50 a month, $600 a year by the reduction in payments. For millions who are out of work and have no coverage, thanks to this law, there’s an Obamacare plan that most folks can get with $0 premiums. We’re also making it easy, easier to sign up for Obamacare. We’ve opened Healthcare.gov for special enrollments on Feb. 15. In the first two weeks alone, more than 200,000 Americans gained coverage. Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve extended that period to run through Aug. 15. With the American Rescue Plan, and the Affordable Care Act, millions of families will be able to sleep a little more soundly at night because they don’t have to worry about losing everything if they get sick.
Americans who need health insurance will now have even longer to select a health plan for the rest of the year. The Biden administration announced Tuesday that it would extend enrollment for Obamacare plans sold on Healthcare.gov until Aug. 15, from a May deadline.
The change was announced on the 11th anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, the law that established the markets where individuals could buy their own health insurance, and made plans available to shoppers regardless of pre-existing health conditions, among many other provisions.
“We have a duty not just to protect it but to make it better and keep becoming a nation where health care is a right for all and not a privilege for a few,” President Biden said at the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital at the Ohio State University on Tuesday.
The stimulus bill signed this month expanded subsidies that help people buy such coverage, lowering the price of a typical plan to zero dollars for low-income families and offering financial assistance for the first time to households higher on the income scale. But it is taking time for the Department of Health and Human Services to implement the new provisions, and so far it has decided not to make the changes automatic. That means that even people who currently get coverage on the exchanges will need to go back to request new benefits. The extended enrollment period will give them more time to do that.
“Every American deserves access to quality, affordable health care — especially as we fight back against the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services. His statement encouraged uninsured Americans to sign up and current Obamacare customers to review new discounts.
The administration also announced that sign-ups for special subsidies for Americans who receive unemployment insurance this year will start July 1. Congress established a system for them to receive zero-premium health plans all year, but carrying out that provision quickly has proved complicated.
Enrollment in Affordable Care Act plans for most Americans is typically limited to a six-week period each year, as a means of encouraging people to enroll when they are healthy. But the Biden administration had already opened a second enrollment period this year, arguing that the pandemic and its economic effects presented an emergency that justified expanding options for coverage. The original special enrollment period had been set to expire in mid-May.
The changes apply in the 36 states that use the federal Healthcare.gov platform to manage their insurance marketplaces. But several states that run their own marketplaces have also extended their enrollment periods.
Mr. Biden, who wore a black mask throughout his speech in Ohio, said the extension would also benefit minority communities that “historically have gone without insurance at higher rates” and have been disproportionally impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Millions of families will be able to sleep a little more soundly at night,” the president said, “because they don’t have to worry about losing everything if they get sick.”
Dr. Vivek Murthy, who helped found several health-related advocacy groups and later tackled the opioid epidemic and e-cigarettes as surgeon general during the Obama administration, was confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday to reprise that role for President Biden.
The vote, 57 to 43, was a much smoother ride for Dr. Murthy than the first time he was confirmed, in 2014, when Republicans cast him as a politically connected supporter of President Barack Obama who would use his position to push for stricter gun control. The fight dragged on for months, leaving the country without a top doctor for more than a year.
When President Donald J. Trump was elected, Dr. Murthy was asked to resign. He refused and was fired, his wife, Alice Chen, said at the time.
Dr. Murthy will return as surgeon general at a critical moment, as the president tries to steer the nation out of the worst public health crisis in a century while expanding access to health care for millions of Americans. During his confirmation hearing, he told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that he would make ending the coronavirus pandemic his highest priority.
Dr. Murthy, 43, helped found Doctors for Obama, a group that worked to elect Mr. Obama and now works to expand health care access for Americans. It now goes by Doctors for America.
As an undergraduate at Harvard University, he helped found two nonprofits, one focusing on H.I.V./AIDS education in the United States and India, and the other to train women as community health workers in rural India.
A son of Indian immigrants and the first person of Indian descent to hold the surgeon general’s post, Dr. Murthy, 43, was born in England and grew up mostly in Miami, watching his parents in their own medical practice. He invoked them during his confirmation hearing.
“I have tried,” Dr. Murthy said, “to live by the lessons they embodied: that we have an obligation to help each other whenever we can, to alleviate suffering wherever we find it, and to give back to this country that made their lives and my life and the lives of my children possible.”
Companies harmed by the coronavirus pandemic can soon borrow up to $500,000 through the Small Business Administration’s emergency lending program, raising a cap that has frustrated many applicants.
“The pandemic has lasted longer than expected,” Isabella Casillas Guzman, the agency’s administrator, said on Wednesday. “We are here to help our small businesses, and that is why I’m proud to more than triple the amount of funding they can access.”
The change to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program — known as EIDL and pronounced as idle — will take effect the week of April 6. Those who have already received loans but might now qualify for more money will be contacted and offered the opportunity to apply for an increase, the agency said.
The Small Business Administration has approved $200 billion in disaster loans to 3.8 million borrowers since the program began last year. Unlike the forgivable loans made through the larger and higher-profile Paycheck Protection Program, the disaster loans must be paid back. But they carry a low interest rate and a long repayment term.
Normally, the decades-old disaster program makes loans of up to $2 million, and in the early days of the pandemic, the agency gave some applicants as much as $900,000. But it soon capped loans at $150,000 because it feared exhausting the available funding. That limit — which the agency did not tell borrowers about for months — angered applicants who needed more capital to keep their struggling ventures alive.
The agency has $270 billion left to lend through the coronavirus program, James Rivera, the head of the agency’s Office of Disaster Assistance, told senators at a hearing on Wednesday.
