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Both the top Democrat and top Republican on the panel have expressed concern about Landers nomination due to his interactions with Epstein, POLITICO has reported, while other lawmakers have questioned his past treatment of fellow female scientists and his embrace of a notable biologist accused of espousing racist and sexist views.

"The Epstein connection is of tremendous concern to us," Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said at Thursday's hearing.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), the first Thai American woman elected to Congress, said she is troubled about those incidents, as well as allegations Lander has downplayed the role female scientists played in developing breakthrough genetics technology.

The bottom line is that if confirmed you will have the authority to promote the representation of women and minorities in STEM fields, so I strongly encourage you to use this hearing as an opportunity to explain how youve learned from your past mistakes, Duckworth said.

Lander on Thursday acknowledged he understated the work of two female scientists, 2020 Nobel Prize winners Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, in a 2016 paper about the pioneers behind the landmark CRISPR gene-editing technology.

"I made a mistake, and when I make a mistake I own it and try to do better," he said in response to questions from Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).

The controversies threaten Lander's confirmation to be OSTP director, a role that Biden is raising to the Cabinet level for the first time. Lander is the only Cabinet nominee who has yet to be confirmed.

A striking contrast: The controversy over Landers handling of issues of race and gender arrives as the Biden administration has pushed to make advancing equity in the U.S. and boosting diversity in the ranks of the federal government one of its top priorities.

Lawmakers had called on Biden to appoint a woman or person of color to the OSTP director spot and other top science roles in the executive branch, given that those demographics have traditionally been underrepresented in those positions and in STEM fields more broadly.

Hundreds of female scientists in January wrote an open letter opposing Landers nomination, which they said showed that the glass ceiling in American science remains intact.

The group applauded efforts the Biden administration has taken to boost diversity in federal office, but said the Lander pick fails to meet the moment and exemplifies the status quo.

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Democrats, Republicans press Bidens top scientist on gender, race and Epstein connection - POLITICO

The point is not to go out and incur new and additional debt, Mr. Toomey said. He rejected the Democratic push to undo key elements of the tax overhaul that Republicans muscled through in 2017, arguing that Congress would not improve the national economy by ruining the tax reform.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader in the House, said that he had not seen the Senate proposal, but that his conference would be preparing its own infrastructure plan. Ms. Capito said the group sent the proposal to the White House shortly before making it public.

Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia and a crucial swing vote who has said he wants any infrastructure package to be bipartisan, told reporters on Thursday that the Republican plan was basically a negotiating starting point.

But even before Republicans formally unveiled it, most other Democrats were panning the proposal.

It goes nowhere near what has to be done to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and the funding is totally regressive and anti-working class, said Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and chairman of the Budget Committee. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, weve got to ask the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share, not demand more taxes on the middle class and working families.

Mr. Biden and his team have said repeatedly that they hope to find bipartisan consensus on infrastructure this year. That includes both Mr. Bidens existing plan and his forthcoming American Families Plan, which will center on human infrastructure spending like education and child care.

White House officials say they are open to breaking those proposals into smaller pieces that could pass with 10 or more Republicans joining Democrats in the Senate. Such a compromise could start with a bipartisan bill aimed at improving American competitiveness with China, which includes $100 billion in research and development spending akin to some provisions in Mr. Bidens jobs plan. Such a slimmed-down bill could move through the Senate in the coming weeks. Some officials are also hopeful that lawmakers could pass a bipartisan highway bill, which would accomplish some of Mr. Bidens transportation goals.

But many officials view significant compromise as unlikely, and they say Mr. Biden is unlikely to be satisfied with incremental spending agreements. That is why Democrats are also preparing to move some or most of Mr. Bidens agenda through the budget reconciliation process if necessary, including his plans to combat climate change and his tax increases on corporations and high earners.

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Republicans Look to Slash the Size of Bidens Infrastructure Plan - The New York Times

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., here in 2017, is pushing his party to focus on working-class voters as a way to win back the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms and the White House in 2024. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images hide caption

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., here in 2017, is pushing his party to focus on working-class voters as a way to win back the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms and the White House in 2024.

A growing number of working-class voters were drawn to Donald Trump's Republican Party, and now top Republicans are searching for ways to keep those voters in the fold without Trump on the ballot.

"All of the statistics and polling coming out of the 2020 election show that Donald Trump did better with those voters across the board than any Republican has in my lifetime since Ronald Reagan," Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told NPR. "And if Republicans want to be successful as a party, win the majority in 2022, win back the White House in 2024, I think we have to learn lessons that Donald Trump taught us and how to appeal to these voters."

Since 2010, the most significant growth in the Republican coalition has been white voters without a college degree an imperfect but widely used metric to quantify the working-class voting bloc along with some marginal growth among similarly educated Black and Hispanic voters. Banks believes the only winning path forward for the GOP is to reimagine itself permanently as the party of working-class America.

Banks is the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative faction in the House long rooted in small government, low taxes and social conservatism, and he recently sent a six-page memo to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., making his case. For Banks, it means tougher immigration laws and cracking down on China, Big Tech and, perhaps most provocatively for the GOP, corporate America.

"For too long, the Republican Party fed into the narrative and the perception that the Republican Party was the party of big business or the party of Wall Street," Banks said.

Read the full memo below:

Republicans are increasingly comfortable attacking corporations these days, a political stance made easier after Wall Street donors gave more to President Biden in 2020, major companies halted donations to Republicans who objected to Electoral College results on Jan. 6, and as companies take more liberal positions on controversial issues such as Georgia's new voting law.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., last week issued a rare public lashing toward companies that oppose the law. "My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics. It's not what you're designed for," he said. McConnell a top recipient of corporate political donations walked back his comments, but not a statement his office released warning corporations of "serious consequences" for "behaving like a woke parallel government."

Top Senate Republicans some considering 2024 presidential runs have been echoing the call to remake the party even before the 2020 election. "We've got a big battle in front of us, Republicans do, to try and make this party truly the party of working-class America," Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said in November.

He's among a number of Senate Republicans who have taken recent positions that run counter to longstanding party orthodoxy, such as linking up with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in support of stimulus checks last year and supporting a mandatory $15 minimum wage for companies with annual revenues over $1 billion.

Others include Florida's Marco Rubio, who recently sided with pro-union forces in an organizing dispute at Amazon and speaks frequently of "common good capitalism," and Utah's Mitt Romney, who has introduced legislation to expand the welfare state to provide more generous benefits to combat child poverty.

"I think the claim that says the Republican Party is the party of the working class is at best, insincere, and more likely, political misdirection and rebranding exercises," said John Russo, a visiting scholar at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and a co-editor of the publication Working-Class Perspectives.

The working-class vote is complicated and too often confused with whiteness when about 40% of the working-class vote is people of color, Russo said. Their support also didn't cut overwhelmingly toward Republicans in 2020. Biden still won a majority of voters who earn less than $50,000 year, while Trump won a majority of voters who earn over $100,000 a year.

Russo said about one-third of working-class voters are considered persuadable in elections, and it's never reliable whether cultural or economic forces will drive their vote. "The working class, like all of us, carry multiple identities, race, class, gender, religious, geographic, and people may vote different parts of their identity as situations and moments change in their lives."

Democrats are not ceding this vote without a fight, led by a new president with a blue-collar upbringing who wants to enact the most radical economic investment in working people since the New Deal, with a message to sell it targeted almost squarely at the working-class vote. "I'm not trying to punish anybody, but damn it, maybe it's because I come from a middle-class neighborhood, I'm sick and tired of ordinary people being fleeced," Biden said in a recent speech promoting his $2 trillion infrastructure and economic stimulus plan.

Republicans think Democrats are overreaching with their economic largesse. Banks compared Biden's plans to a feel-good sugar high that will lead to a crash. "And I predict it will crash long before the 2022 midterm election, as we see a lot of government spending inflate the economy, but then when it bottoms out and American workers, blue-collar working-class Americans feel the effect of it, they're gonna blame Joe Biden and Democrats for it," he said.

The battle for the working class is even more urgent for the two parties because it's a growing bloc of voters. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Russo said, more middle-class people have slid economically backward and are experiencing what he calls "the fragility of working-class life."

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Top Republicans Work To Rebrand GOP As Party Of Working Class - NPR

On Saturday, the Nevada Republican Party Central Committee formally censured Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske (R) for her "disregard of her oath of office by failing to investigate election fraud, her dismissive public statements regarding election integrity concerns, and her failure to ensure compliance with Nevada and federal election law."

Shorter version? Nevada Republicans slapped Cegavske on the wrist because she didn't go along with the Big Lie -- the idea, contra all available evidence, that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from former President Donald Trump due to election irregularities.

Cegavske, for her part, said this in the wake of her censure: "Unfortunately, members of my own party continue to believe the 2020 general election was wrought with fraud -- and that somehow I had a part in it -- despite a complete lack of evidence to support that belief."

Rather than punishing her for doing her job, Republicans should be picking her brain to find out how she managed to win a second term in 2018 while every other Republican statewide candidate was losing.

But that's not this version of the Republican Party. Which is why, unless something changes (and soon), they could be spending a lot more time in the political wilderness than they'd like.

The Point: Retribution and relitigation rarely lead to positive future steps for a political party. And the GOP seems hellbent on doing both in service of the former President.

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A Republican election official just got censured for not buying into the Big Lie - CNN

John Boehner, pictured in 2016, was speaker of the House during the Obama presidency. He says he sometimes went along with things he personally opposed because it was what members of his party wanted. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

John Boehner, pictured in 2016, was speaker of the House during the Obama presidency. He says he sometimes went along with things he personally opposed because it was what members of his party wanted.

John Boehner says he couldn't win an election as a Republican these days.

"I think I'd have a pretty tough time," he says. "I'm a conservative Republican, but I'm not crazy. And, you know, these days crazy gets elected. On the left and the right."

Boehner has a new memoir, On the House, about his time in politics.

His refrain is familiar a retired politician bemoaning increased polarization and partisanship, laying the blame squarely on both parties though as a member of House Republican leadership for much of his career, he has more experience and more stories about dealing with the "noisemakers" and "knuckleheads" within his own ranks.

Boehner was first elected to the House in 1990 as a firebrand conservative from Ohio, rising to become House speaker with the help of Republican Tea Party victories in the 2010 midterms. Until his retirement in 2015, he led a Republican caucus largely focused on undoing former President Barack Obama's signature health care overhaul even if it meant shutting down the government.

Boehner's memoir tells of his attempts through the years to corral his members. As he tells Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition, often that meant going in directions he personally opposed.

He relates the situations to one of his folksy sayings "Boehnerisms" that says, "A leader without followers is just a man taking a walk."

"There were a couple of times where I found myself taking a walk. And I was going one direction, the team was going some other direction," Boehner says.

One of those times came in 2013, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and other hard-line Republicans forced a government shutdown in a failed attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act.

"And even though I didn't really want to go the direction where the team's going, they were the ones who elected me to be the leader and I had an obligation to go lead them," Boehner tells NPR. "So that means I had to go jump out in front of them, even if I thought what they were trying to do really made not a whole lot of sense."

Boehner's retirement in 2015 allowed him to avoid working with former President Donald Trump in the White House. By the time of Trump's swearing in, Boehner writes that he was "not sure I belonged to the Republican Party he created."

Boehner tells NPR that when Trump refused to accept his election loss, "he really abused the loyalty and trust that his voters and supporters placed in him."

Here are excerpts of the interview, edited for length and clarity.

You describe the way that you ran meetings when you were speaker of the House or really in any leadership position. You say that the key thing was to listen to other people and figure out what was on their minds and which way the room was going.

Well, I was in the sales and marketing business before I got into politics and learned a few things about sales. The most important thing about a salesman is not his ability or her ability to talk. It's their ability to listen. Because if you're listening to the person across the desk, you have a pretty good idea what it is they're looking for and you can figure out a way to get there.

And no different in politics, because in politics especially in the Congress you've got this large body of people that you're trying to move in a particular direction. You really can't even begin to move them until you understand where they are and why they are where they are.

Your party captured the House in 2010. It was driven by the Tea Party movement. You make it clear that there are a lot of people in the Tea Party movement that you consider "crazies." But at the time, you made sure there was no distance, no gap between mainstream Republicans and Tea Party types. You knew that was the way to power.

Well, the fact is they got elected as Republicans, they were members of the Republican conference and most of those so-called Tea Party candidates became what I would describe as regular Republicans. There were a few who I would describe as knuckleheads who all they want to do is create chaos. But the fact is they got elected. I was the speaker and I had to find a way forward as a team.

What do you think about some of the leading figures in your party, the way that it has gone in recent years?

Well, the people of governing in Washington today on both sides of the aisle have an even more difficult task than I did. The country is far more polarized now than it was 10, 12 years ago. And that means the people trying to govern have an even more difficult time trying to bring two sides together, or for that matter bring one side together.

I get the impression, though, that you think that a lot of leading personalities in your party don't really stand for anything, don't really believe in anything.

Well, listen, I've been around politics now for 40 years, and I thought I knew something about politics. But clearly today, I don't know as much as I thought I knew about politics. Because, you know, I'm a Republican, actually. I'm a conservative Republican, but I'm not crazy. And then they've got, I don't know, these noisemakers, I'll call them. But Nancy Pelosi's got the same problem on her side of the aisle.

When you talk about noisemakers, who do you mean? Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan?

Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan. I could go down a long list of people who are more interested in making noise than they are in doing things on behalf of the country. Sometimes I get the idea that they'd rather tear the whole system down and start over because I've never seen anything that they were for. I know what they're against, but I've never really seen what they're for.

There's a case to be made that the Republican Party today is abandoning the idea of democracy. So many people supported the effort to overturn the 2020 election. So many state lawmakers now are pushing for voting restrictions based on false claims about that election. What do you make of that argument?

Listen, the election is over. I listened to all that noise before the election, after the election. And, you know, there's always a few irregularities, but there's really been nothing of any significance that would have changed one state's election outcome, not one. Nothing even close.

I just find what President Trump did before the election, especially what he did after the election, he really abused the loyalty and trust that his voters and supporters placed in him by continually telling them that the election was going to be stolen before the election. And then after the election, telling them that the election was stolen without providing any evidence, no facts. And that's the part about this that really disturbs me the most.

People who were loyal to me, people who trusted me, I felt like I had a responsibility to be honest with them, straightforward with them. And to see this loyalty and trust be abused by President Trump, it was really kind of disheartening at best.

Bo Hamby and Reena Advani produced and edited the audio interview. James Doubek produced for the Web.

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John Boehner On The 'Noisemakers' Of The Republican Party - NPR