DeSantis must decide whether to take the reins on the 2024 legislative session already in session, or revert to his more hands-off style during his first year of office, Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, said Monday.

“Will he be a more typical governor, meaning he will have some influence, but legislative priorities will really be showcased?” Jewett asked. “That’s the way it looked the day before yesterday, when he was busy out of the state and hadn’t really been pushing so hard [in Florida]. He may just be exhausted and tired now, physically, emotionally, mentally.”

Former state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat running for state Senate, said he expected nothing different from the governor.

“DeSantis told us what to expect during his State of the State [address], and we should believe him,” Smith said. “He told Republicans to ‘stay the course.’ Which means DeSantis will continue the culture war attacks on abortion rights and LGBT people.”

DeSantis’ last three years “are not going to be a lame duck administration,” Smith said. “We’re going to be stuck with an angry duck, who’s shown a willingness to weaponize government and punish his political enemies with impunity.”

State Sen. Joe Gruters, a Sarasota Republican and prominent Donald Trump supporter in 2024, said he didn’t think DeSantis ever stopped being in control. He said DeSantis still has a great relationship with state Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, and House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast.

“We should go back to business as usual … [with DeSantis] allowing the Legislature to move but working hand in glove,” Gruters said. “I don’t think his power is diminished. He is still widely supported in Florida.”

Brian Ballard, a longtime Trump supporter who also chaired DeSantis’ inaugural committee, said between DeSantis and his predecessor Sen. Rick Scott, the office of governor has increased in power.

“His role is just as vital as any session before,” Ballard said of DeSantis.

GOP lawmakers also know that the success of their agendas rely on his agenda moving forward as well, Ballard said.

What will the agenda be?

Just what that agenda will be, however, is unclear.

Legislative leaders so far this session have said they reject bills that ban most abortions at conception, end universal mail-in voting and allow open carry of guns, all of which are culture war issues.

“He might not have the same sense of urgency, that same pace of rolling out one after another of conservative, controversial proposals that we’ve seen over the last couple of years,” Jewett said. “He’ll pursue some things because it is his sincere belief, and he’ll pursue others more because he thinks that might help him win over the Republican primary voters of the future.”

Jewett said he thinks DeSantis will again seek the GOP nomination for president four years from now.

“Much of what DeSantis does in his last three years will still take into account his plans to run for president again,” Jewett said.

DeSantis gained a national profile amid the COVID-19 pandemic for his stance against most coronavirus restrictions, and eventually against mRNA vaccines themselves, despite promoting the shots in the first months they were made available.

He leveraged his newfound fame and presidential ambitions by leading the GOP-controlled Legislature into attacks on “critical race theory” and diversity initiatives. He also launched a war on his state’s largest single-site employer, Walt Disney Co., after its then-CEO criticized what critics call the “don’t say gay” law that he signed.

“He always governed by intimidation, threats and carrying out those threats,” said Mac Stipanovich, a Tallahassee consultant, former Republican, and longtime DeSantis critic. “He’s not as threatening today as he was a year-and-a-half ago. … There will be some glimmers or sparks of independence among the Legislature. Whether they burst into flames remains to be seen.”

DeSantis has already transformed himself in office, Stipanovich said. When he first was elected governor in 2018, largely in part to then-President Trump’s endorsement, “he was just a hologram, a projection of Trump’s mind.”

In 2019, though, “he surprised people by coming out as a center-right conservative. Then he figured out he could get more far to the right … [But] he was after a constituency that loved Trump, that he could not win.”

Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, said DeSantis had seemed to be more contemplative near the end about what went wrong, and possibly what he would do differently in the future.

Projected to do well

DeSantis started as the odds-on favorite to mount a real challenge to Trump, only to pull out of the race after the first contest of the election, the Iowa caucuses.

“He was doing something of an autopsy of his own campaign,” Scala said. “The pressure was off, and he started to put things a little more in perspective. And he’s a young guy, he figures 2028 is another possibility.”

His campaign in New Hampshire, a key first primary state, never really got off the ground in 2024. A future run would have to include some major changes, Scala said.

“Sometimes running to the right makes you a lot less appealing to mainstream, even somewhat conservative Republican voters, who don’t like all of the culture war rhetoric,” Scala said. “How do you have a better campaign that isn’t just this raw meat for social conservatives?”

How he performs during the next three years in office will have a large role in determining his political future, Ballard said.

“Ron’s legacy is going to be tied directly to his ability to govern the state of Florida,” Ballard said.

Stipanovich, however, said DeSantis’ further ambitions may be a pipe dream.

“I believe he peaked at his reelection and he will not be a significant factor in 2028,” Stipanovich said. “He’s just too damaged. … What DeSantis did is the opposite of establishing credibility for a national race.”

He compared DeSantis with previous stars-turned-presidential losers such as former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

In addition, he said, any path padding his political resume by becoming a U.S. senator is currently blocked by fellow Republicans Scott and Marco Rubio, unless he were to take a major gamble and run against one of them in a primary. Scott is up for reelection this year.

“I think DeSantis will come back here [to Florida],” Stipanovich said. “He’ll be sullen, he’ll be angry, he’ll be vindictive, he will make excuses. But I think he’s done.”

Evan Power, the new state GOP chair, had a warning for Florida Democrats.

“It appears that @FlaDems have spent hours celebrating,” Power wrote on X, formerly Twitter, after DeSantis withdrew from the race on Sunday. “I don’t think they realize that 3 more years of @RonDeSantis’s leadership here will just speed up their extinction. Be careful what you wish for.”

WASHINGTON — Capitol Police investigated more threats against members of Congress and staff in 2023 than the previous year, a stark reminder of the potential dangers that members face while the agents tasked with vetting those threats are understaffed.

The 8,008 cases investigated in 2023, which includes direct threats and concerning statements, is up by more than 500 cases in 2022. But that’s still fewer than the 9,625 cases in 2021, the year of the attack on the Capitol, and the 8,613 cases in 2020.

The agency’s Threat Assessment Section has been inundated with cases. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger told lawmakers at a hearing last year that agents in that section carry an annual caseload of nearly 500.

“I am proud of our agents who are working around the clock and across the nation to keep up with a significant caseload to protect the Members of Congress and the Capitol Complex,” Manger said in a news release Thursday. “We continue to improve and enhance our investigative and protective responsibilities by focusing on security both here on Capitol Hill and in Member’s home districts.”

House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said there has been a “challenging security environment for a number of years” and it’s an issue they have to “remain vigilant” about.

Ranking member Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., said he is concerned about the volume of threats. “We’re concerned about any threat to a member of Congress, and I just think the size of the numbers indicates, understandably, why we’re taking this so seriously,” Morelle said.

Steil and Morelle, in conjunction with representatives from the House Sergeant-at-Arms Office and Capitol Police, brief their colleagues when security issues arise. The House sergeant-at-arms and Capitol Police have been working with members to coordinate more residential security and ensure local law enforcement presence at public events.

With the Democratic and Republican conventions approaching, along with a presidential election, the department could face another busy year in 2024. The Capitol Police attributed some of the high threat level to social media users and said decreasing violent political rhetoric will lower the threats.

“Members of Congress of both political parties receive a wide range of threats and concerning statements that are sent through the mail, email, telephone, and social media/the internet,” the agency news release stated.

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., had her house vandalized three times and her car keyed twice over the past three years.

“It’s a problem. Many of us get threats all the time. I got a text threat last week,” Mace said. “It’s a very divisive world out there right now.”

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., attributed an increase in threats to the violent language promulgated by former President Donald Trump and “some of my colleagues on the Republican side here in the House.”

“These are people who disparage democracy, who lie, who engage in conspiracy theories, and it’s really frightening,” McGovern said.

©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Thanks to Iowa Republicans, the first 2024 election is in the books, and we have the first opportunity of the year to chew over some results.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump did what he needed to do. The former president came into Monday as the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination and emerged with a majority of the vote and a dominant, 30-point victory over the rest of the field. Amidst all the chatter about who is in a distant second place, Trump continues on the clearest path to victory after the rest of the states finish their primaries.

Despite seven years of hand-wringing about polling, it was a pretty good night for surveys. The final FiveThirtyEight average before the Iowa caucus had Trump at 52.7 percent followed by former Gov. Nikki Haley (18.7 percent), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (15.8 percent), and Vivek Ramaswamy (6.4 percent). The final results look like Trump (51 percent), DeSantis (21 percent), Haley (19 percent), and Ramaswamy (8 percent).

People seeking perfection from polling will quibble with the DeSantis polling versus his final result, but overall, Iowa should be considered a victory for the polling industry, especially in the context of a low-turnout caucus in extreme weather.

Even though there’s a negligible difference in vote totals between DeSantis and Haley for second and third place, the precise order could have an impact on the race. If a distant second place (rather than third place) convinces DeSantis to stay in the race, it mutes the narrative about Haley’s momentum going into New Hampshire, and ties up potential voters.

DeSantis peaked?

That being said, the argument that everyone supporting a non-Trump candidate would line up behind a different non-Trump candidate if their first pick quit the race was always a bit simplistic. When DeSantis drops out, Trump will undoubtedly get some of his supporters. And even though Ramaswamy was only getting a few percentage points, more of his supporters could gravitate toward Trump than anyone else based on their similar messages.

A second place finish should not be seen as a sign of momentum for DeSantis, according to his own numbers. A May 30-June 1 poll conducted for Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, as the Florida governor was just getting into the race showed DeSantis down by 10 points, 39 percent to 29 percent, in a crowded field in Iowa. On Monday night, DeSantis received 21 percent and lost by 30 points. Whether it’s in Iowa or nationwide, it looks like DeSantis peaked the moment he got into the race.

It’s also time to put an end to the idea that retail politics are required to win Iowa. The two candidates who spent the most time on the ground in the Hawkeye State finished second (DeSantis) and fourth (Ramaswamy). DeSantis finished 30 points behind and Ramaswamy dropped out of the race after the votes were counted. It’s also time to end the notion that “Iowa breaks late.” That really wasn’t the case before Monday night and wasn’t the case this year. The result was expected.

It’s also possible that DeSantis’ vaunted ground game wasn’t as good as advertised. He outsourced his grassroots operation — and virtually every other important part of the campaign — to Never Back Down, which boasted months of organizing on the ground culminating with Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis knocking on the one millionth door in the state.

Taking the campaign at face value, that means Iowa Republicans just weren’t that into Ron DeSantis. Caucus goers appeared to have plenty of information about DeSantis and he barely topped 20 percent.

Original preferred over Trump lite

How did that happen? It’s clear that many Republicans in Iowa and elsewhere are not ready to move on from Trump. And when DeSantis offered himself as a lite version of Trump for much of his campaign, Trump supporters still preferred the original.

It’s hard to believe DeSantis will be able to stomach a third-place finish in New Hampshire on Jan. 23 in order to finish in third place in South Carolina on Feb. 24 and have momentum going into the 16 states tht vote on Super Tuesday on March 5.

It was also striking to watch handwritten paper ballots be counted by hand and wondering how many people wished this was the way general election ballots were counted around the country. But there’s a big difference between counting 110,000 votes for one race and 150 million votes that contain multiple races (for Congress, state legislature, ballot measures etc). And many states have decided it’s unreasonable to ask all 150,000,000 voters to cast their ballot at the same time on the same day.

Overall, it was a good night for Trump. He had a big win and Haley didn’t get more momentum with a quick DeSantis departure. The best news for Iowa is that, for the first time in more than 20 years, it might have finally chosen the likely GOP nominee.

Nathan L. Gonzales is an elections analyst with CQ Roll Call.

©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. Visit at rollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

U.S. lawmakers released a stopgap spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown on Jan. 20, greatly reducing the chances of a closure but risking conservative Republican ire against House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The temporary spending bill would extend funds for some agencies that face a Jan. 20 deadline through March 1 and for others that face a Feb. 2 deadline through March. 8. The Senate will begin procedural votes on the bill, known as a continuing resolution, on Tuesday and will require cooperation among the 100 senators to pass it before the deadline.

“To avoid a shutdown, it will take bipartisan cooperation in the Senate and the House to quickly pass the CR and send it to the President’s desk before Friday’s funding deadline,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.

While the bill preserves a bifurcated approach to the 12 annual spending bills favored by Johnson as a way to avoid a catch-all package, or omnibus, it violates the speaker’s pledge in November to refuse to support any more temporary funding.

Johnson, a Republican, last week defied hardliners in his party by sticking to a spending-cap deal with Schumer, setting an effective limit on discretionary spending of $1.66 trillion for the current U.S. fiscal year. House Freedom Caucus Republicans have sought at least $70 billion in lower spending and some have hinted at ousting the speaker for staying with the deal.

“This is what surrender looks like,” the House Freedom Caucus said on the social media platform X Sunday night.

Johnson defended the deal late Sunday, saying it eliminates the “worst” budget gimmicks and paves the way for passage of spending measures.

Ultraconservative Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made it clear on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures that she isn’t threatening to oust the speaker over a stopgap bill. She said she would only force a vote on his speakership if he struck a border security deal with Democrats that she rejects, which also funds aid to Ukraine.

“I told Speaker Johnson, if he made that deal in exchange for $60 billion for Ukraine, I would vacate the chair, and I still stand by those words,” she said.

It would only take four Republicans voting together with all Democrats to remove Johnson from his position and grind the House to a halt, as occurred in October when former speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted over a short-term spending bill that averted an Oct. 1 shutdown.

Johnson has demanded a full array of conservative migration policies be attached to any Ukraine bill without hinting he would be willing to compromise. A bipartisan group of senators working on a border bill has yet to propose any compromise despite weeks of work.

Under the temporary bill, funding for the departments of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development would be extended through March 1. The rest of government, including the Defense Department, would be funded through March 8.

The temporary bill is needed because even with a spending cap agreement, lawmakers still need to negotiate, write and pass 12 full-year funding bills. They have yet to agree on how to divide up the alloted funds among 12 bills, let alone among thousands of specific programs.

Conservative demands to attach policies ranging from banning abortion drugs to cutting the salary of Homeland Security officials must also be reckoned with, along with hundreds of earmarked pet-project requests from individual lawmakers.

The bill does not contain a proposed tax cut agreement that is in the works between Republicans and Democrats. Negotiators are hoping to seal a deal that would expand the child tax credit and a trio of business tax breaks in time for the Jan. 29 start of tax season. Forgoing the opportunity to attach it to the must-pass spending bill could threaten the measure being held up in either chamber by opponents.

Tax bill proponents could look to Federal Aviation Administration fee extension legislation as an opportunity to attach their proposal to a must-pass bill.

(With assistance from Billy House.)

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

At least 15 states have enacted or are pursuing legislation that would require online companies to protect the safety and privacy of kids using their platforms, putting pressure on Congress to pass more unifying federal legislation.

California in 2021 was among the first to do so when it enacted a measure that requires social media and online companies to “prioritize” the health and well-being of children before launching apps and services publicly.

The California law was halted after NetChoice, a tech industry trade group, sued to block it. In September, a U.S. District Court ruled that parts of the law probably violated First Amendment rights to free speech. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Despite that setback, however, legislators in other states have proposed bills modeled on California’s approach, known as age-appropriate design, as well as other measures that require parental consent for kids using online services.

Advocates for children’s online safety are hoping that Congress will enact federal legislation rather than allowing a piecemeal, state-by-state approach. They hope to rein in tech platforms designed to keep kids online for hours every day, blaming the platforms for a host of mental health problems, sleeplessness and eating disorders.

A study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health released in late December found that social media companies Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube collectively generated $11 billion in ad revenue in 2022 from U.S. based users younger than 18. Of that, about $2.1 billion came from users 12 or under who are not permitted on such platforms under the terms of service, the study found.

Unlike federal data privacy legislation, which has stalled in Congress while states have enacted measures, kids’ online safety is a more tangible issue for voters and therefore has a broader bipartisan support, said Josh Golin, executive director at Fairplay for Kids, a nonprofit group that aims to stop marketers’ targeting of children.

“The harm that parents are seeing every day with kids who can’t put their phones down, who are cutting themselves, who are helpless and hopeless because of what they’re consuming nonstop online, is so real and so tangible,” Golin said in an interview. Therefore, “you have public opinion on the side of more regulation.”

Golin said polling commissioned by Fairplay conducted in October showed that 87 percent of the 1,200 online respondents, including Democrats, Republicans and independent voters, ranked addressing the harmful impact of social media on children and teens as important, second only to improving the economy and ahead of border security and climate change concerns.

Golin is optimistic that two bipartisan bills approved by the Senate Commerce Committee last year, which combine elements of age-appropriate design and parental control requirements, will pass this year.

The first, sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., would require online platforms and social media apps to exercise a duty of care and take steps to mitigate harm for minors using their platforms. The requirement would apply to children below the age of 13.

The other measure, sponsored by Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and co-sponsored by Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., would prohibit online platforms from disseminating children’s personal information without obtaining a verifiable parental consent, effectively ending ads targeted at kids and teens. The bill would raise the age of children protected to 17, from 12 and below under current law.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, in a brief interview in November said that the Senate “would like to get some kids’ privacy bills done” before turning to broader data privacy measures.

State efforts

The states that have either passed or are considering kids online safety laws include Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin.

Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico and Nevada are pursuing an age-appropriate design approach to safety modeled on California’s law, said Nichole Rocha, the head of U.S. affairs at 5Rights Foundation, a U.K.-based nonprofit group that advocates for child safety online. Rocha has worked with the states to develop legislation.

The design approach to safety calls on platforms to build their products in ways to minimize or avoid harms to children before they occur instead of trying to fix problems that already exist, Rocha said.

The “design-based approach starts at a foundational level,” Rocha said. “It’s a data-privacy framework, so if there are kids on your site or app there are all sorts of privacy requirements, like, you can’t collect data that’s not necessary to provide services, you can’t track their location.”

This approach also requires companies to identify potential risks and to try to mitigate them, Rocha said.

This is unlike parental consent that puts the burden on parents, Rocha and Golin said.

Kids use dozens of apps and online platforms making it tough for parents to understand the risks of each and decide whether to allow their use, Golin said.

NetChoice, which represents Amazon.com Inc., Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc. and TikTok, among other tech companies, argues that apps and online platforms are mostly neutral and any attempt by state or federal governments to regulate or control platforms is a violation of free-speech rights. The trade group also won an injunction against a kids online law passed by Arkansas and has sued to stop a similar measure in Utah.

Lawmakers around the country are “trying to use social media as a scapegoat” for a much broader mental health problem facing kids and teens, said Carl Szabo, vice president at NetChoice.

Szabo likened social media apps and online platforms to newspapers, TV shows, video games and movies, and pointed to self-regulation in those cases as the appropriate approach.

“What we should be talking about is, what is a better way to help teens and parents navigate and use this new technology,” Szabo said. “So the correct answer is not to begin banning free speech or creating essentially an ID for the Internet, which is the effect of California, which is the effect of Utah, which is the effect of Arkansas” laws, Szabo said. “The answer is not for the government to come in and decide what speech is appropriate for families.”

Szabo said laws requiring tech companies to figure out whether a user is a child or a teen would compel companies to use age verification systems that can lead to greater violations of privacy.

Child safety advocates dismiss such warnings.

“It’s a complete red herring,” Golin said of the tech industry’s argument. “It is laughable that the same companies that boast about their ability to micro-target their ads to people who are in same sex marriages and live in the mountains and are unicycle enthusiasts say that if a child enters the wrong date on their birthday, they are helpless to determine what their actual age is.”

Children who enter fake birthdays to gain access to an app reveal real information about themselves when they wish “each other happy 10th birthdays or put things like fourth-grade hash tags in their posts,” Golin said. Tech companies already have such data to determine the real ages of kids, he said.

___

©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. Visit at rollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

WASHINGTON — As the calendar turns to a presidential election year with control of both chambers in play, Congress and the White House are facing a full slate of leftovers from 2023, headlined by a stalled emergency supplemental spending request and looming deadlines to keep the government open.

Sunday’s announcement of a topline agreement between House Republicans and Senate Democrats means that appropriators know the maximum amount they can spend to fund the government for the rest of this fiscal year. But they are still haggling on how to apportion that among 12 bills covering various departments and agencies, let alone navigate a thicket of contentious partisan policy riders.

“The bipartisan funding framework congressional leaders have reached moves us one step closer to preventing a needless government shutdown and protecting important national priorities,” President Joe Biden said in a statement supporting the deal, which would allow $886.3 billion for defense and $772.7 billion for nondefense programs.

The enactment of an unusual bifurcated continuing resolution in November set up multiple funding deadlines. Funding for departments and agencies covered by four appropriation bills was extended through Jan. 19, with the balance running through Feb. 2, or Groundhog Day.

Ukraine aid, border security

The Biden administration has also said resources for aid to Ukraine’s effort to repel an invasion from Russia have largely run out.

Biden asked for $110.5 billion in supplemental funding for Ukraine, assistance to Israel, border security and other urgent needs, but the Democratic Senate took no action in December, deferring to off-the-floor bipartisan talks about overhauling immigration laws to deal with migrants seeking asylum.

Speaker Mike Johnson, who led more than 60 of his members to the U.S.-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Texas, last week, said there was “deep resolve” on the part of House Republicans to hold out for border policy changes.

“Listen, this is a catastrophe down here,” Johnson, R-La., said in a CNN interview. “And what the White House is proposing is more money to process and allow more illegals into the country. We need to do the opposite of that.”

Biden’s response has been that the requested spending would pay for hiring extra Border Patrol officers and bolster efforts to fight fentanyl trafficking, and he’s said failing to stand by Ukraine could embolden Russia to attack NATO allies that U.S. forces are committed to defend.

Senate negotiators continued to work this weekend to try to find a path for an immigration agreement. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said on Fox News Sunday that the hope was to have text available for review by week’s end.

“When money has been sent to the White House, they’ve used that money to facilitate more people coming into the country rather than actually stopping the flow,” Lankford said. “So let’s deal with the policy issues on it.”

House Republicans argued that not setting a holiday deadline on spending deals last year prevented their members from getting jammed up in a negotiation with the Senate and the White House. And the schedule change provided the Capitol community a somewhat rare assurance of being able to spend Christmas with family.

But to avoid incessant jokes about Bill Murray’s weatherman character ahead of Feb. 2, congressional leadership will need to finish the process and get spending measures to the president’s desk.

There is plenty of other big-ticket legislation that will expire without further action during the year. That list is topped by the multiyear farm bill, which sets policy for agriculture and food assistance, and the reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Congress also faces an April 19 deadline for further addressing reauthorization of foreign surveillance authorities. Section 702 was set to expire at the end of 2023, but Congress passed a short-term extension as part of the fiscal 2024 defense policy bill, which moved the deadline for reauthorization to April 19.

Slimmer majority

The second session of the 118th Congress actually began last week, but both chambers held only pro forma sessions and members will not be back in their Hill offices until this week.

House Republicans remain in the majority, but only narrowly following the resignation of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and the expulsion of Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y. In addition, Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s cancer treatment will keep him out of Washington until next month.

There could be more members announcing plans to retire ahead, while the number of House vacancies will grow when Republican Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio and Democratic Rep. Brian Higgins of New York step down in the coming weeks to pursue other jobs.

Impeachment inquiries and other probes aimed at Biden, his Cabinet and his family will be near the top of the agenda as the early presidential and congressional primary season gets underway and Johnson appeases more hard-line members who pushed McCarthy out of leadership.

The GOP-led House voted just before breaking for Christmas to formally launch an impeachment inquiry against Biden on a 221-212 party-line vote. The adopted resolution outlines the jurisdiction of three committees involved in the effort.

Among the questions asked by committees involved since then is whether the president knew in advance that his son Hunter Biden planned not to comply with a subpoena from the House Judiciary and Oversight and Accountability committees. Rather than testify behind closed doors, the younger Biden appeared outside the Capitol and read a statement, challenging lawmakers to question him at an open hearing.

The two House panels are scheduled to meet Wednesday on measures recommending holding the president’s son in contempt of Congress.

Separately, the House Homeland Security Committee has scheduled a hearing Wednesday to begin impeachment proceedings against Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security, over allegations related to the administration’s handling of border security. The committee’s chairman, Tennessee Republican Mark E. Green, announced that schedule just before the GOP House members’ visit to the border on Jan. 3.

The Senate is sure to continue work on nominations. With the presidential election and control of the Senate both very much in play, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., will be eager to work with the White House to get as many lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary confirmed as possible.

Campaign season

Schumer may face pressure, however, from vulnerable members hoping to spend as much time as possible on the campaign trail.

Campaign season is already here, with Republicans holding their Iowa caucuses for president next Monday, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. New Hampshire holds its primary the following week, and a special election to fill Santos’ seat in New York, a race sure to be seen as a bellwether for November battles, will take place the day before Valentine’s Day.

Super Tuesday arrives on March 5, a mashup of presidential primaries in 14 states and congressional primaries in five. They include Texas and California, home to 90 House seats combined and a Senate primary for California’s open seat that pits three House Democrats — Barbara Lee, Katie Porter and Adam B. Schiff — against each other.

Perhaps even before knowing the results of all the Super Tuesday primaries, Biden will be in the House chamber to deliver the final State of the Union address of his first term on March 7.

_____

(CQ-Roll Call staff writers Aidan Quigley and Ryan Tarinelli contributed to this report.)

©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The programs affected include an expansion of Medicaid, rebates for energy-saving appliances and upgrades, a program to cut motor vehicle emissions, and summer lunches for children from low-income families. Millions of mostly low-income Floridians could have benefited from the funding, the governor’s critics say.

As the Legislature convenes on Tuesday to build next year’s state budget, federal COVID-19 recovery funds that have fueled tax cuts, road projects and padded the state’s $10 billion rainy day fund are drying up. State economists warn of a slowdown in tax revenue over the next few years.

At the same time, DeSantis continues campaigning for the Republican nomination for president by railing against the federal government’s spending. He also says he wants to plow several billion more dollars into the state’s ample reserves, despite no recession in sight.

Democrats say they believe the governor’s main goal is to target President Joe Biden.

“It’s so painful to watch as DeSantis turns people into political talking points against the Biden administration,” House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell said. “He’ll do it regardless of how it hurts his constituents in Florida. And since he has no logical reason for rejecting those funds, it must be political.”

But DeSantis does take federal funding for the programs he wants. About one of every three dollars in the $114 billion budget he recommended to the Legislature comes from federal coffers.

“He’s happy to take federal funds for police officer bonuses or … to score political points,” Driskell said. “But there is no real nuance to why he rejects so many funds that would help Floridians and take credit for that, too. He just wants to draw a distinction between himself and Biden.”

DeSantis Press Secretary Jeremy Redfern has said that the governor has the right to veto or turn down programs he considers to be bad policy. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Depending on the uptick in enrollment, Medicaid expansion would bring at least $4 billion from Washington to the state if 700,000 to 1 million enroll. The state would also get an additional $2 billion over the next two years as an incentive offered to holdout states.

To receive that federal money, the state would have to provide about a 10% match, which DeSantis and Republicans complain is a condition that would cost too much.

Instead, hundreds of thousands of Floridians are losing health care coverage since the continuous enrollment policy enacted during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic ended last year. About a quarter million of those Floridians are children.

DeSantis also forfeited about $5 billion in food benefits aimed at families struggling during the pandemic by opting out of an emergency allotment two years before it expired in March.

The state missed the Jan.1 deadline to get $248 million for a summer food program for 2 million children. The state would have had to pay a $12 million matching fee for administrative costs, but officials said their existing food programs were adequate and worried about “strings” attached to the federal funding.

Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue turned down $320 million in federal funds to cut down on exhaust emissions from cars and trucks, calling the program an example of government overreach and “the continued politicization of our roadways.” Florida was the only state to turn down the funding.

Those grants also would have helped the DOT expand parking spaces for semitrailers at rest stops along the state’s highways along with the other measures to fight emissions most scientists have linked to climate change.

In July, DeSantis vetoed $30 million that would have made $346 million in federal funding available to Florida to give rebates for installing energy-efficient appliances and making energy-saving electrical upgrades to people’s homes.

DeSantis rejected the program at first because it includes measures that address climate change. But facing public pressure to reverse this decision, DeSantis has asked for $1.7 million to administer the program next year. State officials won’t say how much of the $346 million that amount of money would draw.

State leaders also turned down a $400 million program for low-income families to install solar panels on the roofs of their homes.

“This is more money Gov. DeSantis and the Republican supermajority left on the table,” U.S. Rep. Darren Soto, a Central Florida Democrat, said previously. “All this is doing is hurting poor people.”

Soto has a bill before Congress that would allow local governments to apply for the $346 million energy program and distribute it themselves.

The state also left an estimated $499 million in federal funds on the table by not spending $290 million budgeted for services for the disabled, according to an analysis by The ARC, a nonprofit group representing people with disabilities.

ARC officials said that was enough to provide services to the 23,000 children and adults who qualify for care but remain on a waiting list due to a lack of services.

State officials disputed ARC’s study, saying the agency returned to state coffers $145 million that wasn’t spent on services for the disabled as the Legislature intended. Once that money was put into a reserve account, it could no longer be used for ongoing benefits.

“By continuing to opt out of federal funding for essential programs for Florida families, like health coverage, disability services, mental health funding, climate resiliency programs, and more, the state not only continually sends billions of our tax dollars to other states, but also prevents improvements in quality of life for thousands of Floridians,” said Holly Bullard, chief strategy & development officer of the Florida Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

The $11 billion is money Floridians send up to Washington when they pay income taxes. It often will go to other states if Florida doesn’t take it.

State economist Amy Baker warned lawmakers in November that the three-year outlook for state revenue is slowing.

One-time or short-term tax breaks — sales tax holidays for back to school, hurricane preparation and concert tickets among them — cost the state coffer’s $541 million, she said.

“We expect to be lower in terms of revenue collection than last year, [due to the state] adopting measures that affect revenues like tax holidays and other measures coming out of session at a record-setting pace,” Baker said.

The three-year outlook shows a year-end surplus dropping from $7 billion to $2.7 billion, she said, in part because of the billions of dollars in one-time funding the federal government sent to Florida during the pandemic that has stopped flowing.

Spending all that money now could mean no surplus available down the road, she said. No budget approach changes are needed in the short run, she told lawmakers.

But, she added, “there is a cautionary note or warning note that that balance is dropping that much over the three years.”

As pundits and politicos spar over whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign will factor into the outcome of the 2024 election, one thing is clear: Kennedy’s political following is built on a movement that seeks to legitimize conspiracy theories.

His claims decrying vaccines have roiled scientists and medical experts and stoked anger over whether his work harms children. He has made suggestions about the cause of COVID-19 that he acknowledges sound racist and antisemitic.

Bolstered by his famous name and family’s legacy, his campaign of conspiracy theories has gained an electoral and financial foothold. He is running as an independent — having abandoned his pursuit of the Democratic Party nomination — and raised more than $15 million. A political action committee pledged to spend between $10 million and $15 million to get his name on the ballot in 10 states.

Even though he spent the past two decades as a prominent leader of the anti-vaccine movement, Kennedy rejects a blanket “anti-vax” label that he told Fox News in July makes him “look crazy, like a conspiracy theorist.”

But Kennedy draws bogus conclusions from scientific work. He employs “circumstantial evidence” as if it is proof. In TV, podcast, and political appearances for his campaign in 2023, Kennedy steadfastly maintained:

• Vaccines cause autism.
• No childhood vaccines “have ever been tested in a safety study pre-licensing.”
• There is “tremendous circumstantial evidence” that psychiatric drugs cause mass shootings, and the National Institutes of Health refuses to research the link out of deference to pharmaceutical companies.
• Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were discredited as COVID-19 treatments so COVID vaccines could be granted emergency use authorization, a win for Big Pharma.
• Exposure to the pesticide atrazine contributes to gender dysphoria in children.
• COVID-19 is “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

For Kennedy, the conspiracies aren’t limited to public health. He claims“members of the CIA” were involved in the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy. He doesn’t“believe that (Sirhan) Sirhan’s bullets ever hit my father,” former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He insists the 2004 presidential election was stolen from Democratic candidate John Kerry.

News organizations, including PolitiFact, have documented why those claims, and many others, are false, speculative, or conspiracy-minded.

Kennedy has sat for numerous interviews and dismissed the critics, not with the grievance and bluster of former President Donald Trump, but with a calm demeanor. He amplifies the alleged plot and repeats dubious scientific evidence and historical detail.

Will his approach translate to votes? In polls since November of a three-way matchup between President Joe Biden, Trump, and Kennedy, Kennedy pulled 16% to 22% of respondents.

Kennedy’s movement exemplifies the resonance of conspiratorial views. Misinformers with organized efforts are rewarded with money and loyalty. But that doesn’t make the claims true.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign based on false theories is PolitiFact’s 2023 Lie of the Year.

How an Environmental Fighter Took Up Vaccines

Kennedy, the third of 11 children, was 9 when he was picked up on Nov. 22, 1963, from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., because Lee Harvey Oswald had shot and killed Uncle Jack. He was 14 when he learned that his father had been shot by Sirhan Sirhan following a victory speech after the California Democratic presidential primary.

RFK Jr., who turns 70 in January, wouldn’t begin to publicly doubt the government’s findings about the assassinations until later in his adulthood.

As a teenager, he used drugs. He was expelled from two boarding schools and arrested at 16 for marijuana possession. None of that slowed an elite path through higher education, including Harvard University for his bachelor’s degree and the University of Virginia for his law degree.

He was hired as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan in 1982 but failed the bar exam and resigned the next year. Two months later, he was arrested for heroin possession after falling ill on a flight. His guilty plea involved a drug treatment program, a year of probation, and volunteer work with a local anglers’ association that patrolled the Hudson River for evidence of pollution that could lead to lawsuits.

Kennedy’s involvement with Hudson Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council ushered in a long chapter of environmental litigation and advocacy.

An outdoorsman and falconer, Kennedy sued companies and government agencies over pollution in the Hudson River and its watershed. (He joined the New York bar in 1985.) He earned a master’s degree in environmental law at Pace University, where he started a law clinic to primarily assist Riverkeeper’s legal work. He helped negotiate a 1997 agreement that protected upstate New York reservoirs supplying New York City’s drinking water.

In 1999, Kennedy founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, an international group of local river and bay-keeper organizations that act as their “community’s coast guard,” he told Vanity Fair in 2016. He stayed with the group until 2020, when he left “to devote himself, full-time, to other issues.”

On Joe Rogan’s podcast in June, Kennedy said that virtually all of his litigation involved “some scientific controversy. And so, I’m comfortable with reading science and I know how to read it critically.”

PolitiFact did not receive a response from Kennedy’s campaign for this story.

He became concerned about mercury pollution from coal-burning power plants; methylmercury can build up in fish, posing a risk to humans and wildlife. As he traveled around the country, he said, women started appearing in the front rows of his mercury lectures.

“They would say to me in kind of a respectful but vaguely scolding way, ‘If you’re really interested in mercury contamination exposure to children, you need to look at the vaccines,’” Kennedy told Rogan, whose show averages 11 million listeners an episode.

Kennedy said the women sounded “rational” as they explained a link between their children’s autism and vaccines. “They weren’t excitable,” he said. “And they had done their research, and I was like, ‘I should be listening to these people, even if they’re wrong.’”

He did more than listen. In June 2005, Rolling Stone and Salon co-published Kennedy’s article “Deadly Immunity.” Kennedy told an alarming story about a study that revealed a mercury-based additive once used in vaccines, thimerosal, “may have caused autism in thousands of kids.” Kennedy alleged that preeminent health agencies — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization — had colluded with vaccine manufacturers “to conceal the data.”

Kennedy’s premise was decried as inaccurate and missing context. He left out the ultimate conclusion of the 2003 study, by Thomas Verstraeten, which said “no consistent significant associations were found between [thimerosal-containing vaccines] and neurodevelopmental outcomes.”

Kennedy didn’t clearly state that, as a precaution, thimerosal was not being used in childhood vaccines when his article was published. He also misrepresented the comments of health agency leaders at a June 2000 meeting, pulling certain portions of a 286-page transcript that appeared to support Kennedy’s collusion narrative.

Scientists who have studied thimerosal have found no evidence that the additive, used to prevent germ growth, causes harm, according to a CDC FAQ about thimerosal. Unlike the mercury in some fish, the CDC says, thimerosal “doesn’t stay in the body, and is unlikely to make us sick.” Continued research has not established a link between thimerosal and autism.

By the end of July 2005, Kennedy’s Salon article had been appended with five correction notes. In 2011, Salon retracted the article. It disappeared from Rolling Stone.

Salon’s retraction was part of a broader conspiracy of caving “under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry,” Kennedy told Rogan. The then-Salon editor rejected this, saying they “caved to pressure from the incontrovertible truth and our journalistic consciences.”

Kennedy has not wavered in his belief: “Well, I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he told Fox News’ Jesse Watters in July.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, interviewed Kennedy for a July story. Noting that Kennedy was focusing more on vaccine testing rather than outright opposition, Remnick asked him whether he was having second thoughts.

“I’ve read the science on autism and I can tell you, if you want to know,” Kennedy said. “David, you’ve got to answer this question: If it didn’t come from the vaccines, then where is it coming from?”

How COVID-19 Helped RFK Jr.’s Vaccine-Skeptical Crusade

In 2016, Kennedy launched the World Mercury Project to address mercury in fish, medicines, and vaccines. In 2018, he created Children’s Health Defense, a legal advocacy group that works “aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures,” its website says.

Since at least 2019, Children’s Health Defense has supported and filed lawsuits challenging vaccination requirements, mask mandates, and social media companies’ misinformation policies (including a related lawsuit against Facebook and The Poynter Institute, which owns PolitiFact).

From the beginning, the group has solicited stories about children “injured” by environmental toxins or vaccines. This year, it launched a national bus tour to collect testimonials. The organization also produces documentary-style films and books, including Kennedy’s “The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race” and “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”

In 2020, Children’s Health Defense and the anti-vaccine movement turned attention to the emerging public health crisis.

Kolina Koltai, a senior researcher at Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group, had seen anti-vaccine groups try to seize on Zika and Ebola outbreaks, with little success. But the COVID-19 pandemic provided “the exact scenario” needed to create mass dissent: widespread fear and an information vacuum.

Children’s Health Defense published articles in March and April 2020 claiming the “viral terror” was an attempt to enact the “global immunization agenda” and a “dream come true” for dictators. The group echoed these points in ads and social media posts and grew its audience, including in Europe.

On X, then known as Twitter, Children’s Health Defense outperformed news outlets that met NewsGuard’s criteria for trustworthiness from the third quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2021, according to a report by the German Marshall Fund think tank, even as Children’s Health Defense published debunked information about COVID-19 and vaccines.

In 2019, Children’s Health Defense reported it had$2.94 million in revenue, and paid Kennedy a $255,000 salary. Its revenue grew 440% through 2021, according to IRS filings, hitting $15.99 million. Kennedy’s salary increased to $497,013. (Its 2022 form 990 for tax disclosure is not yet public. Kennedy has been on leave from the organization since he entered the presidential race in April.)

On social media, the message had limits. Meta removed Kennedy’s personal Instagram account in February 2021 for spreading false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines, the company said, but left his Facebook account active. A year and a half later, Meta banned Children’s Health Defense’s main Facebook and Instagram accounts for “repeatedly” violating its medical misinformation policies. Several state chapters still have accounts.

As the group’s face, Kennedy became a leader of a movement opposed to masks and stay-at-home orders, said David H. Gorski, managing editor of Science-Based Medicine and a professor of surgery and oncology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine.

“The pandemic produced a new generation of anti-vaxxers who had either not been prominent before or who were not really anti-vax before,” Gorski said. “But none of them had the same cultural cachet that comes with being a Kennedy that RFK Jr. has.”

Rallying a crowd before the Lincoln Memorial on Jan. 23, 2022, Kennedy protested COVID-19 countermeasures alongside commentator Lara Logan and anti-vaccine activist Robert Malone. The crowd held signs reading “Nuremberg Trials 2.0” and “free choice, no masks, no tests, no vax.” When Kennedy took the stage, mention of his role with Children’s Health Defense prompted an exuberant cheer.

In his speech, Kennedy invoked the Holocaust to denounce the “turnkey totalitarianism” of a society that requires vaccinations to travel, uses digital currency and 5G, and is monitored by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates’ satellites: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

Days later, facing criticism from his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, Jewish advocacy groups, and Holocaust memorial organizations, Kennedy issued a rare apology for his comments.

Asked about his wife’s comment on Dec. 15 on CNN, he said his remarks were taken out of context but that he had to apologize because of his family.

Recycle. Repeat. Repeat.

When he’s asked about his views, Kennedy calmly searches his rhetorical laboratory for recycled talking points, selective research findings, the impression of voluminous valid studies, speculation, and inarguable authority from his experience. He refers to institutions, researchers, and reports, by name, in quick succession, shifting points before interviewers can note what was misleading or cherry-picked.

There is power in repetition. Take his persistent claim that vaccines are not safety-tested.

• In July, he told “Fox & Friends,” “Vaccines are the only medical product that is not safety-tested prior to licensure.”
• On Nov. 7 on PBS NewsHour, Kennedy said vaccines are “the only medical product or medical device that is allowed to get a license without engaging in safety tests.”
• On Dec. 15, he told CNN’s Kasie Hunt that no childhood vaccines have “ever been tested in a safety study pre-licensing.”

This is false. Vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccines, are tested for safety and effectiveness before they are licensed. Researchers gather initial safety data and information about side effects during phase 1 clinical trials on groups of 20 to 100 people. If no safety concerns are identified, subsequent phases rely on studies of larger numbers of volunteers to evaluate a vaccine’s effectiveness and monitor side effects.

Kennedy sometimes says that some vaccines weren’t tested against inactive injections or placebos. That has an element of truth: If using a placebo would disadvantage or potentially endanger a patient, researchers might test new vaccines against older versions with known side effects.

But vaccines are among “the most tested and vetted” pharmaceutical products given to children, said Patricia Stinchfield, a pediatric nurse practitioner and the president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

Kennedy encourages parents to research questions on their own, saying doctors and other experts are invariably compromised.

“They are taking as gospel what the CDC tells them,” Kennedy said on Bari Weiss’“Honestly” podcast in June.

Public health agencies have been “serving the mercantile interests of the pharmaceutical companies, and you cannot believe anything that they say,” Kennedy said.

Experts fret that the Kennedy name carries weight.

“When he steps forward and he says the government’s lying to you, the FDA is lying to you, the CDC is lying to you, he has credence, because he’s seen as someone who is a product of the government,” said Paul Offit, a pediatrics professor in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s infectious diseases division and the director of the hospital’s Vaccine Education Center. “He’s like a whistleblower in that sense. He’s been behind the scenes, so he knows what it looks like, and he’s telling you that you’re being lied to.”

Kennedy name-drops studies that don’t support his commentary. When speaking with Rogan, Kennedy encouraged the podcaster’s staff to show a particular 2010 study that found that exposure to the herbicide atrazine caused some male frogs to develop female sex organs and become infertile.

Kennedy has repeatedly invoked that frog study to support his position that “we should all be looking at” atrazine and its impact on human beings. The researcher behind the study told PolitiFact in June that Kennedy’s atrazine claims were “speculation” given the vast differences between humans and amphibians. No scientific studies in humans link atrazine exposure to gender dysphoria.

In July, Kennedy floated the idea that COVID-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” The claim was ridiculously wrong, but Kennedy insisted that it was backed by a July 2020 study by Chinese researchers. That study didn’t find that Chinese people were less affected by the virus. It said one of the virus’s receptors seemed to be absent in the Amish and in Ashkenazi Jews and theorized that genetic factors might increase COVID-19 severity.

Five months later, Kennedy invoked the study and insisted he was right: “I can understand why people were disturbed by those remarks. They certainly weren’t antisemitic. … I was talking about a true study, an NIH-funded study.”

“I wish I hadn’t said them, but, you know, what I said was true.”

Kennedy answered using scientific terms (“furin cleave,” “ACE2 receptor”), but he ignored explanations found in the study. He didn’t account for how the original virus has evolved since 2020, or how the study emphasized these potential mutations were rare and would have little to no public health impact.

Public health experts say that racial disparities in COVID-19 infection and mortality — in the U.S., Black and Hispanic people often faced more severe COVID-19 outcomes — resulted from social and economic inequities, not genetics.

Kennedy says “circumstantial evidence” is enough.

Antidepressants are linked to school shootings, he told listeners on a livestream hosted by Elon Musk. The government should have begun studying the issue years ago, he said, because “there’s tremendous circumstantial evidence that those, like SSRIs and benzos and other drugs, are doing this.”

Experts in psychiatry have told PolitiFact and other fact-checkers that there is no causal relationship between antidepressants and shootings. With 13% of the adult population using antidepressants, experts say that if the link were true they would expect higher rates of violence. Also, the available data on U.S. school shootings shows most shooters were not using psychiatric medicines, which have an anti-violence effect.

Conspiracy Theories, Consequences, and a Presidential Campaign

The anti-censorship candidate frames his first bid for public office as a response to “18 years” of being shunned for his views — partly by the government, but also by private companies.

“You’re protected so much from censorship if you’re running for president,” Kennedy told conservative Canadian podcaster and psychologist Jordan Peterson in June.

In June, Kennedy’s Instagram account was reinstated — with a verified badge noting he is a public figure. Meta’s rules on misinformation do not apply to active political candidates. (PolitiFact is a partner of Meta’s Third Party Fact-Checking Program, which seeks to reduce false content on the platform.)

In July, he was invited to testify before the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. He repeated that he had “never been anti-vax,” and railed against the Biden White House for asking Twitter to remove his January 2021 tweet that said Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly,” weeks after Aaron, 86, received a COVID-19 vaccine. The medical examiner’s office said Aaron died from unrelated natural causes.

Throughout 2023, alternative media has embraced Kennedy. He has regularly appeared on podcasts such as Peterson’s, and has also participated in profiles by mainstream TV, online, and print sources.

“You’re like, ‘But you’re talking right now. I’m listening to you. I hear your words. You’re not being censored,’” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon who researches how news media covers conspiracy theories and their proponents. “But a person can believe they’re being censored because they’ve internalized that they’re going to be,” or they know making the claim will land with their audience.

Time will tell whether his message resonates with voters.

Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Kennedy may be a “placeholder” for voters who are dissatisfied with Trump and Biden and will take a third option when offered by pollsters.

The only 2024 candidate whose favorability ratings are more positive than negative? It’s Kennedy, according to FiveThirtyEight. However, a much higher percentage of voters are unfamiliar with him than they are with Trump or Biden — about a quarter — and Kennedy’s favorability edge has decreased as his campaign has gone on.

Nevertheless, third-party candidates historically finish with a fraction of their polling, Kondik said, and voters will likely have more names and parties on their fall ballots, including philosopher Cornel West, physician Jill Stein, and a potential slate from the No Labels movement.

Kennedy was popular with conservative commentators before he became an independent, and he has avoided pointedly criticizing Trump, except on COVID-19 lockdowns. When NBC News asked Kennedy in August what he thought of Trump’s 2020 election lies, Kennedy said he believed Trump lost, but that, in general, people who believe elections were stolen “should be listened to.” Kennedy is one of them. He still says that the 2004 presidential election was “stolen” from Kerry in favor of Republican George W. Bush, though it wasn’t.

American Values 2024 will spend up to $15 million to get Kennedy’s name on the ballot in 10 states including Arizona, California, Indiana, New York, and Texas. Those are five of the toughest states for ballot access, said Richard Winger, co-editor of Ballot Access News.

Four of Kennedy’s siblings called Kennedy’s decision to run as an independent“dangerous” and “perilous” to the nation. “Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment,” the group wrote in a joint statement.

Kennedy brushes it off when asked, saying he has a large family and some members support him.

On her podcast, Weiss asked whether Kennedy worried his position on autism and vaccines would cloud his other positions and cost him votes. His answer ignored his history.

“Show me where I got it wrong,” he said, “and I’ll change.”

In a campaign constructed by lies, that might be the biggest one.

____

PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.​

____

(KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

“Maybe you should sit this one out,” wrote Carlos Guillermo Smith, a former Democratic state representative from Orlando and current state Senate candidate, addressing the DeSantis campaign’s comments.

Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the union in 1860, said in response to a questioner in New Hampshire on Wednesday that the cause of the war “was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

“We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom, we need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties, so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way,” she continued.

“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you’d answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery,’” the questioner said, to which Haley responded, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

Her answer drew widespread criticism, including from President Joe Biden. “It was about slavery,” he wrote on X, the former Twitter.

The DeSantis War Room account also jumped in, posting a video of her “disastrous town hall” and writing, “Haley inexplicably does not mention slavery in her response.”

“It’s been 12 hours and Nikki Haley still hasn’t offered an explanation for her comments,” the War Room account wrote on Thursday morning. “What’s the hold up?”

Haley did backtrack later on Thursday, saying, “Of course the civil war was about slavery. We know that. That is unquestioned, always the case.”

But, she added, “it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.” She also alleged the questioner was a Democratic plant.

DeSantis campaign mired in controversies over slavery, anti-gay video, alleged Nazi symbol

DeSantis, though, faced his own uproar on the subject in July after the state Board of Education approved Black history standards that included teaching “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Vice President Kamala Harris said shortly afterward at an event in Jacksonville.

The DeSantis campaign initially responded with a statement that Democrats were “obsessed with Florida” and were lying about the standards.

Two members of the workgroup that put together the standards then released a statement listing some individual blacksmiths, shoemakers and shipping industry workers they claimed were examples of slaves who benefited from developing skills.

But at least four of the individuals they listed were likely born free, the Tampa Bay Times reported, while others were children when slavery ended.

DeSantis appeared to take a pass on the responsibility for the standards, saying at a campaign event, “I didn’t do it. I wasn’t involved in it. … These were scholars who put that together. It was not anything that was done politically.”

But at the same time, he added, “They’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”

DeSantis’ then-primary rival, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, was one of several Black Republican Congress members to criticize the standards, including U.S. Reps. Byron Donalds, R-Naples, John James, R-Mich., and Wesley Hunt, R-Texas.

“What slavery was really about was separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives,” Scott said. “It was just devastating. So I would hope that every person in our country — and certainly running for president — would appreciate that.”

Reaction to the DeSantis War Room’s criticism of Haley on Wednesday cited the controversy and slammed the campaign as hypocritical.

Austin Ahlman of the Open Markets Institute wrote that “sliding into a feeble third place has apparently given the DeSantis team a newfound appreciation for the legacy of slavery.”

Recent polls in New Hampshire have placed DeSantis behind Haley and former President Donald Trump. The 538 poll average has Trump in first with 44%, Haley second with about 26% and DeSantis well behind at less than 8%.

The DeSantis campaign’s blast at Haley also received criticism from the right, with many replies to the post defending Haley’s initial answer. “BTW DeSantis War Room, you are in a REPUBLICAN primary,” one person wrote. “Your tweet was not a good one.”

California has a unique primary election system in which the top two candidates in several races — such as Congress, governor and the state legislature — advance to the general election, no matter the political party.

But presidential primaries are held differently — and may not be on your ballot for the March 5 election depending on what political party you indicated a preference for.

The Republican presidential primary election is closed, meaning only voters who have marked the GOP for their party affiliation can vote in that election.

The Democratic presidential primary, on the other hand, is a modified-closed election. That means only voters who have marked Democrat as their party affiliation or have chosen no party preference can participate in that election.

Aside from the Democratic presidential primary election, NPP voters can participate in the American Independent Party or the Libertarian Party primaries.

NPP voters must request a ballot with presidential candidates on it, per the secretary of state’s guidelines.

An application to request a presidential primary election ballot can be found on the secretary of state’s website (sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-info) and can be submitted to your county elections office by phone, email, fax, other electronic means or in person. Or, ask a poll worker for a ballot with either of those primary races on it if you vote in person.

Voters who wish to participate in a closed or modified-closed primary election can change their political party preference at any time, said Jordan Reilly, a spokesperson for the California secretary of state.

There is no commitment for how long a person must retain that party affiliation, Reilly said.

You can check your voter registration status online at voterstatus.sos.ca.gov by inputting your name, birthday and other identification information like the last four numbers of your social security number and California driver license number. There, you can also change your voter registration.

The last day to register to vote for the primary election is Feb. 20, but same-day registration, or conditional voter registration, is available. Voters who participate in the election this way will still have their ballots processed and counted, albeit, just after the county elections office has completed their verification.