Ohio's Senate jurors prepare for start of former President Trump's second impeachment trial

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Ohio's Senate jurors prepare for start of former President Trump's second impeachment trial

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    Even by Washington standards, this has been a particularly shameless week. With millions of Texans freezing in their homes, Sen. Ted Cruz fled to a Mexican beach, offering his constituents little more than the political cliché of wanting to be a “good dad.” (Apparently, flying your daughters to Cancún is just like carpooling — if your minivan were the Ritz-Carlton resort.) Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas blamed the complete meltdown of state infrastructure not on a lack of preparation from leaders in the state but the Green New Deal — a liberal policy proposal that is not even close to becoming law. His predecessor, former Gov. Rick Perry, suggested that Texans would willingly endure days of blackouts to keep the “federal government out of their business.” It seems hard to believe that any Texan — or really any human — would choose to have to melt snow for water. The outrageous behavior extended beyond the Lone Star State. In New York, a state lawmaker said that Gov. Andrew Cuomo had vowed to “destroy” him for criticizing Cuomo’s handling of the deaths of nursing home residents in the past year — an issue that is under investigation by the Justice Department. And Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin senator, said the armed attack on the Capitol did not seem all that well armed. Apparently, he missed the many, many videos of attackers carrying guns, bats and other weapons. And yet, beneath all this noise was the sound of something even more unusual: silence. For much of the past six years, former President Donald Trump has dominated the political conversation, prompting days of outrage, finger-pointing and general news cycle havoc with nearly every tweet. The audacious behavior of other politicians was often lost amid Trump’s obsessive desire to dominate the coverage. Well, the former president has now gone nearly silent, leaving a Trump-size void in our national conversation that President Joe Biden has little desire to fill. That has been a rude awakening for some other politicians, who find themselves suddenly enmeshed in controversy that is not quickly subsumed in a deluge of Trump news. It is unclear whether any will pay a significant political price for their actions. The last administration delivered a constant stream of chaos that may have fundamentally reshaped the kind of fact-based rhetoric and norm-abiding behavior we expect from our political leaders. Already, some politicians have adopted Trump’s playbook for surviving controversy: Blame liberals, double down and never admit any mistake. Biden, at least, seems determined to set a different tone. T.J. Ducklo, a deputy press secretary who reportedly used abusive and sexist language with a female reporter, resigned last Saturday — reflecting Biden’s Inauguration Day promise that he would fire anyone he heard being disrespectful. And in his first presidential town hall Tuesday, Biden repeatedly used two words that many in Washington have not heard in a while: “I’m sorry.” Democrats in Disarray. Kind Of? After a few weeks of party unity, Democrats are showing some fresh signs of division. Over the past week, Biden indicated that he was not fully sold on two proposals backed by his progressive base: forgiving $50,000 of student debt for each borrower and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Both plans have some high-profile champions. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have called on Biden to use his executive authority to cancel about 80% of the student loan debt run up by about 36 million borrowers. And the party is fairly united over a $15 minimum wage, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont committed to including it in the COVID-19 relief package currently making its way through Congress. The issue for Democrats is how quickly to move. Biden favors a more gradual phase-in of the $15 minimum wage, in part to assuage concerns from business owners. And on student debt, Biden is not convinced that he can erase so much with a stroke of his executive pen. He has also signaled that the proposals should include income caps. “My daughter went to Tulane University and then got a master’s at Penn; she graduated $103,000 in debt,” he said at a CNN town hall Tuesday. “I don’t think anybody should have to pay for that, but I do think you should be able to work it off.” Biden may simply be looking at some political realities. Polls indicate that both proposals are popular, though support for a $15 wage drops when voters are told of potential economic effects — like a Congressional Budget Office forecast that it could cost more than 1 million jobs. As for student debt, majorities back the $50,000 in relief, but support rises when the plan is targeted at lower-income families. By the Number: 16 That was the number of crossover districts — congressional districts where the two parties split results between the presidency and Congress — in 2020, according to a new analysis by Daily Kos. That is the lowest number in a century. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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    SAN ANTONIO — Carrol Anderson spent much of his life in southeast Texas, where the most feared natural disasters spin up from the Gulf of Mexico during the warm months of hurricane season. But last week, Anderson, a 75-year-old who breathed with the help of oxygen tanks, knew that a different kind of storm was heading his way. To prepare, he ordered a fresh supply of oxygen that his stepdaughter said never arrived. There was a spare tank, however, in the pickup outside his one-story brick house in Crosby, Texas, just northeast of Houston. So when Anderson, an Army veteran who went by Andy, was found dead inside his truck Tuesday, his stepdaughter figured he had gone outside to retrieve it. His main tank, back in the house, runs on electricity, and the power had gone out the night before as a deadly cold descended on much of Texas. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times While the final tally could be much higher, Anderson was among at least 58 people who died in storm-affected areas stretching to Ohio, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning, car crashes, drownings, house fires and hypothermia. In Galveston County, along the Texas Gulf Coast, the authorities said two residents had died from exposure to the cold and one person from possible carbon monoxide poisoning. Four other deaths remained under investigation and were possibly linked to the frigid weather. County Judge Mark Henry, the county’s top elected official, said he would have evacuated some of his most vulnerable residents before the winter storm had he known that power outages would plunge the county into darkness for a few days. He said the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid, had warned only of rolling blackouts. Instead, most residents were without power for at least 48 hours. “We would have been happy to order an evacuation if we’d been told Sunday the power was going to go out and stay out for four days,” he said, noting the county is more accustomed to ordering evacuations before hurricanes. A spokeswoman for ERCOT said Friday that the surge in demand stressed the power grid, a crisis so dire that the “local utilities were not able to rotate the outages.” At its height, about 4 million Texans were without power this week as temperatures plummeted to the teens and single digits. About 165,000 remained without electricity on Friday, though millions were still without running water or under notices to boil their tap water. Still, there were signs of relief. In hard-hit Austin, City Manager Spencer Cronk said Friday that more than 1 million gallons of water would arrive over the next two days. The city plans to set up distribution centers, and Cronk said water would be delivered to the city’s most vulnerable citizens, such as older people and those without homes. Greg Meszaros, the director of Austin’s water utility, said he expected that most residents would have their water pressure restored over the weekend. Boil water advisories should be lifted sometime next week, he said. Coming into clearer view were the dimensions of a public health crisis exacerbated by poverty, desperation and, in some cases, a lack of understanding of cold-weather safety. Texas hospitals and health providers saw more than 700 visits related to carbon monoxide poisoning between Monday and Wednesday. Thayer Smith, division chief with the Austin Fire Department, said his city had seen dozens of incidents of toxic exposure from people burning charcoal in their homes. The weather also hampered the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The White House on Friday said 6 million doses of coronavirus vaccines had been held up because of snowstorms across the country, creating a backlog affecting every state and throwing off the pace of vaccination appointments over the next week. In Texas, hospitals spent the week grappling with burst pipes, power outages and acute water shortages, making it difficult to care for patients. In Abilene, authorities said a man died at the Hendrick Medical Center after he was unable to get dialysis treatment at the site. Large amounts of filtered water, in addition to electricity and heat, are required to properly provide care for dialysis patients, and water at the hospital was shut down, said Cande Flores, the Abilene fire chief. Flores said that at least four people had died in Abilene as a result of the state power grid failure, including a homeless man who died from exposure to the cold, a 60-year-old man who was found dead in his home and an 86-year-old woman whose daughter found her frozen in her backyard. Elsewhere in the state, a 69-year-old man was found dead inside his home in a rural community south of San Antonio, where he lived alone. He did not have electricity, and the authorities said his bedroom was 35 degrees when they found him. In Houston, an Ethiopian immigrant died in her idling car, which was parked in her garage, where she sat while charging her phone. The woman, Etenesh Mersha, was talking to a friend when she started to feel tired. “She tried to drink water,” said Negash Desta, a relative by marriage to Mersha. “After she told her friend she couldn’t talk anymore, there was no response after that.” The friend tried to call the police in Houston but did not have an address, Desta said. The friend turned to Facebook, where she found Desta. Hours later, he eventually received a message about what had happened and alerted the police. They found an entire family, poisoned. “When they get in, they found the mother and daughter were just dead and the son and father alive. They had all fainted,” he said, adding that the car had still been running. The daughter, Rakeb Shalemu, was 7 years old. Mersha’s husband and 8-year-old son were hospitalized. Desta said that the husband has since been released and that the boy, Beimnet Shalemu, was still in the intensive critical unit. Near Houston in Conroe, Texas, an 11-year-old boy, Cristian Pineda, was found dead in his bed on Monday morning. His family had no power the night before, and the parents, the boy and his siblings had huddled together in one bedroom, Lt. James Kelemen of the Conroe Police Department said Friday. Like Anderson and Mersha and her family, Cristian was the focus of a hastily assembled GoFundMe page. It requested donations to cover the expenses of his burial in Honduras, where his family is from. It had raised more than $38,000 as of Friday afternoon. The page showed a picture of a boy in a thin red hoodie, smiling and standing in the snow. On Tuesday, while Anderson’s wife was mopping up their living room after a frozen pipe burst, he walked to the garage to try to get a generator going, hoping he could help clean up with a Shop-Vac. His wife would not know until later that he had walked to his truck in search of oxygen, said his stepdaughter, Brandi Campanile. It was 19 degrees. His spare oxygen tank, it would turn out, was empty. “He was trying to get oxygen and it was just a losing battle,” Campanile said Friday. “Texas is not meant to handle freezing temperatures. It’s not something that happens out here.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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