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Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley listens as she is introduced during a campaign stop in Hooksett, New Hampshire, U.S., November 20, 2023. REUTERS/Brian Snyder Acquire Licensing Rights

WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (Reuters) - The conservative U.S. political network led by billionaire Charles Koch on Tuesday endorsed Nikki Haley for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, giving the former South Carolina governor a boost among party rivals struggling to make a dent against frontrunner Donald Trump.

The influential group, which pushes for tax cuts and less government regulation, has made clear that beating former President Trump in the Republican nominating contest is a top priority, arguing that he would lose the November election to President Joe Biden. The Democrat beat incumbent Trump in the 2020 White House race.

In addition to controlling tens of millions of dollars for campaign spending, the Koch-affiliated Super PAC known as Americans for Prosperity Action, or AFP Action, has thousands of staffers throughout the country who will now promote Haley among potential voters.

Among Haley's main weaknesses, according to her campaign operatives, has been a relatively underdeveloped network of campaign workers and allies in the early voting state of Iowa.

It is far from clear that the AFP endorsement will be a game changer, given that Trump leads his Republican rivals by more than 40 points in most national polls. About 10% of Republican primary voters support Haley, according to a polling average maintained by poll-tracking website FiveThirtyEight.

But the endorsement could tip the scales in favor of Haley in a tight battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for the No. 2 slot. Around 13% of primary voters support DeSantis, according to FiveThirtyEight.

It could also help her persuade other major donors to get behind her. Many big-dollar donors have been considering supporting Haley for months, but have held off amid concerns she is simply too far behind Trump.

"The Kochs have a tremendous following," said Texas-based Republican donor Fred Zeidman, a top Haley fundraiser.

The group said its internal polling indicates Haley is in the best position to defeat Trump in the Republican primary. It also "consistently shows" that Haley is the strongest candidate by far to beat Biden in a general election, it said.

"We would support a candidate capable of turning the page on Washington's toxic culture and a candidate who can win. And last night, we concluded that analysis," AFP Action said in a statement.

DeSantis supporters have disputed those assertions, saying he is better positioned to siphon supporters away from Trump than Haley is. Haley is beating DeSantis, however, in some of the states that are first to select a Republican nominee.

"Every dollar spent on Nikki Haley's candidacy should be reported as an in-kind to the Trump campaign," DeSantis spokesman Andrew Romeo wrote on X on Tuesday.

Trump campaign adviser Steven Cheung responded to the AFP endorsement with a swipe at Haley's foreign policy positions. AFP Action has endorsed a "pro-China, open borders, and globalist candidate," Cheung said.

While Haley, who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, has staked out a significantly more hawkish position on China than her 2024 rivals, the DeSantis and Trump camps have criticized her for welcoming Chinese investment into South Carolina while governor.

The Koch endorsement marks a turnaround from the previous two presidential cycles, which the Kochs broadly sat out.

DeSantis had been under active consideration for an endorsement, but his disappointing campaign turned off AFP Action, two sources with knowledge of those deliberations said.

AFP Action raised more than $70 million to spend on political races, an official with the group said in July. Super PACs are allowed to raise and spend unlimited sums supporting candidates as long as they don't coordinate with campaigns.

Emily Seidel, a senior adviser at AFP Action, told reporters on Tuesday the group would dedicate significant resources to getting out the vote for the Republican primaries, including encouraging general election voters to vote in the primaries for the first time.

During the 2022 congressional elections, AFP Action says it made more than 2 million phone calls, knocked on 5.5 million doors and sent more than 69 million pieces of mail.

The Democratic National Committee said Haley checks all the Koch group's boxes: "slashing taxes for the ultra-wealthy, gutting Social Security and Medicare, and ripping health care away from millions of Americans.

Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Gram Slattery in Washington and Alexandra Ulmer in San Francisco; Editing by Ross Colvin and Alistair Bell

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Washington-based correspondent covering campaigns and Congress. Previously posted in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Santiago, Chile, and has reported extensively throughout Latin America. Co-winner of the 2021 Reuters Journalist of the Year Award in the business coverage category for a series on corruption and fraud in the oil industry. He was born in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard College.

Alexandra covers the 2024 U.S. presidential race, with a focus on Republicans, donors and AI. Previously, she spent four years in Venezuela reporting on the humanitarian crisis and investigating corruption. She has also worked in India, Chile and Argentina. Alexandra was Reuters' Reporter of the Year and has won an Overseas Press Club award. Contact: +4156053672

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Influential Koch group endorses Haley's 2024 Republican presidential bid - Reuters

The solution? Reverse course on a party maxim to oust Trump from the public consciousness, according to Democratic leadership, who no longer feel that ignoring the real estate mogul is an effective tactic and instead are quietly hoping for live broadcasting of his notorious campaign rallies, reported The New York Times.

Not having the day-to-day chaos of Donald Trump in peoples faces certainly has an impact on how people are measuring the urgency of the danger of another Trump administration, Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, an African American political organizing group, told the Times. It is important to remind people of what a total and absolute disaster Trump was.

Its a surprising about-face. From Trumps descent down the escalator in June 2015 until January 6, 2021, the consensus among mainstream Democrats was that the media was far too beholden to Donald Trump and that, in the cynical pursuit of eyeballs and profits, they essentially allowed him to act as their assignment editor. The notion that the press was complicit in Trumps rise was widely held during this period, as was the idea that the nation would wake up if they covered him as a dictator in training. The presss coverage of Trump has become more disciplined and aggressivewhen it happensin the aftermath of January 6. But it hasnt dimmed Trumps popularity. Now the hope is that more coverage of Trumps derangement will damage his candidacy.

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It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Republican Government Shutdown - The New Republic

The roots of the Republican crackup this fall that paralyzed the House, fueled the unexpected rise of Speaker Mike Johnson and now threatens to force a government shutdown crisis early next year lie in a fateful choice the party made more than a decade ago that has come back to haunt its leaders.

In early 2009, congressional Republicans were staring down a long exile in the political wilderness. Barack Obama was about to assume the presidency, and Democrats were within reach of a filibuster-proof, 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and the largest House majority in more than 20 years after the economic crisis of 2008.

But Republicans saw a glimmer of hope in the energized far-right populist movement that emerged out of a backlash to Mr. Obama the first Black president and his partys aggressive economic and social agenda, which included a federal health care plan. Republicans seized on the Tea Party and associated groups, with their nativist leanings and vehemently anti-establishment impulses, as their ticket back to power.

We benefited from the anger that was generated against the one-way legislation of the Obama years, said Eric Cantor, the former House leader from Virginia who became the No. 2 Republican after the 2010 midterm elections catapulted the party back into the majority. It was my way or the highway.

Mr. Cantor and his fairly conventional leadership team of anti-tax, pro-business Republicans set out to harness that rage to achieve their partys longstanding aims. But instead, the movement consumed them.

Within four years, Mr. Cantor was knocked out in a shocking primary upset by a Tea Party-backed candidate who had campaigned as an anti-immigration hard-liner bent on toppling the political establishment. It was a sign of what was to come for more mainstream Republicans.

We decided the anger was going to be about fiscal discipline and transforming Medicare into a defined contribution program, Mr. Cantor said recently. But it turned out it was really just anger anger toward Washington and it wasnt so policy-based.

The forces that toppled Mr. Cantor and three successive Republican speakers reached their inexorable conclusion last month with the election of Mr. Johnson as speaker, cementing a far-right takeover that began in those first months after Mr. Obama took office.

Mr. Johnson, who identifies as an archconservative, is the natural heir to the political tumult that began with the Tea Party before evolving into Trumpism. It is now embodied in its purest form by the Freedom Caucus, the uncompromising group of conservatives who have tied up the House with their demands for steep spending cuts. And the situation wont get any easier when Congress returns from its Thanksgiving respite to confront its unsettled spending issues and what to do about assistance to Israel and Ukraine.

The ranks of more traditional Republicans have been significantly thinned after the far right turned on them in successive election cycles. They have been driven out of Congress in frustration or knocked out in primaries, which have become the decisive contests in the nations heavily gerrymandered House districts.

They thought they could control it, Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who has studied the Houses far-right progression, said of G.O.P. leaders. But once you agree essentially that Democrats are satanic, there is no room in the party for someone who says we need to compromise with Democrats to accomplish what we need to get done.

The result, Mr. Podhorzer said, is a Republican majority that his research shows across various data points to be more extreme, more evangelical Christian and less experienced in governing than in the past. Those characteristics have been evident as House Republicans have spent much of the year in chaos.

It isnt that they are really clever at how they crash the institution, Mr. Podhorzer said. They just dont know how to drive.

From the start, members who were more rooted in the traditional G.O.P., which had managed to win back the House majority in 1994 after 40 years, struggled to mesh with the Tea Party movement, which was driven to upend the status quo. Many top Republicans had voted for the bank bailout of 2008, a disqualifying capital crime in the eyes of the far-right activists.

Leading congressional Republicans were leery of the Tea Partys thinly veiled racism, illustrated by insulting references to Mr. Obama and the questioning of his birthplace, though they said they saw the activists as mainly motivated by an anti-tax, anti-government fervor.

Traditional Republicans appeared at Tea Party rallies where they were barely tolerated, while the far-right Representatives Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Steve King of Iowa, then outliers in the party, were the stars. They tried to mollify activists with tough talk on taxes and beating back the Obama agenda, but saw mixed results.

The Republican National Committee also sought to align itself with the Tea Party, encouraging angry voters to send virtual tea bags to Congress in a 2009 Tax Day protest. Tea Party activists rebuked the national party, saying it hadnt earned the right to the tea bag message.

But the Tea Party paid huge electoral benefits to the House G.O.P. in 2010, as it swept out Democrats and swept in scores of relatively unknown far-right conservatives, some of whom would scorn their own leaders as much as the Democrats. The steady march to the modern House Republican Conference had begun.

It truly was bottom up, said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who was then the spokesman for the R.N.C. Then how do you have control over that? When you have that big a win, you are going to have people who just arent on your radar screen, but if they were, you would have tried to prevent them from winning their primary.

In the Senate, the Tea Party was having a different effect. Far-right conservatives such as Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine ODonnell in Delaware managed to prevail in their primaries, only to lose in the general election. That cost Senate Republicans a chance to win a majority in that chamber. The extreme right has had less influence in the Senate than the House ever since.

The ramifications of the far-right bargain for congressional Republicans quickly became clear. Mr. Cantor was defeated in 2014, and Speaker John A. Boehner, dogged by hard-line conservatives he branded knuckleheads, resigned in 2015. In 2018, Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Boehners successor and the partys vice-presidential nominee in 2012, had his fill of clashes with President Donald J. Trump who aligned himself with the Tea Party in its early days and chose not to run for re-election.

Then Representative Kevin McCarthy the last of a trio called the Young Guns, with Mr. Cantor and Mr. Ryan, that once seemed to be the future of the party fell from the speakership in October. That ended the reign of House Republican speakers who had tried unsuccessfully to weaponize the ultraconservatives in their ranks while holding them at arms length.

Mr. McCarthys ouster cleared the way for Mr. Johnson, who was chosen only after House Republicans rejected more established leaders, Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who would have easily ascended in the previous era.

Despite his unquestioned conservative bona fides, Mr. Johnson is already encountering difficulties in managing the most extreme element within his ranks.

Last week, Freedom Caucus members blocked a spending measure in protest of Mr. Johnsons decision to team with Democrats to push through a stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown.

The move underscored the far-rights antipathy to compromise and the dominance it now enjoys in the House, and raised the prospect that Mr. Johnson could face another rebellion if he strays again.

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Mike Johnson's Rise to Speaker Cements Far-Right Takeover of GOP - The New York Times

[1/2]U.S. President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, walks outside on the day of his appearance in a federal court on gun charges in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., October 3, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein Acquire Licensing Rights

WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden on Tuesday offered to testify publicly in the House Republican impeachment inquiry of his father's Democratic administration, while a leading lawmaker stuck to his demand of testimony behind closed doors.

Escalating a months-long investigation across three congressional committees, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden in September, which focuses on Hunter Biden's business dealings.

House Republicans allege Biden and his family improperly traded access to Biden's office as vice president in President Barack Obama's administration. The White House denies wrongdoing.

As part of the inquiry, the House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Hunter Biden, 53, to appear before the panel in a closed-door interview on Dec. 13. The panel also subpoenaed the president's brother, his late son's widow and Hunter Biden's business associates, among others.

The House Oversight Committee has held one public hearing as part of the probe, instead conducting most of their interviews in private.

Hunter Biden's lawyer on Tuesday blasted the panel's probe as "a fishing expedition" and an "empty investigation," telling the panel chairman a public hearing was the only way to prevent "your cloaked, one-sided process."

"We have seen you use closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and misinform the public. We therefore propose opening the door," attorney Abbe Lowell wrote committee chairman James Comer.

Hunter Biden would appear for a public hearing on Dec. 13 or any other date in December that they could arrange, his lawyer said.

Comer said in a statement that the subpoena required Hunter Biden to appear for a deposition on Dec. 13, but added that he should also have a chance to testify publicly at another time.

"Hunter Biden is trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else. That won't stand with House Republicans," Comer said.

The White House has called the investigation a "smear campaign" that "has turned up zero evidence."

Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has cheered on the impeachment probe. During his four years in the Oval Office, he became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. He was acquitted both times by the Senate.

Hunter Biden in October pleaded not guilty to charges that he lied about his drug use while buying a handgun, in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a sitting U.S. president's child.

Special Counsel David Weiss brought those charges against Hunter Biden after an earlier proposed plea deal unraveled under questioning from a judge. Weiss is still investigating whether the younger Biden can be charged for tax law violations.

The younger Biden earlier this month sought a federal court's permission to subpoena documents from Trump and top Justice Department officials in his administration as part of his defense against federal gun charges.

Reporting by Makini Brice and Susan Heavey; Editing by Scott Malone and Nick Zieminski

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Makini Brice has covered U.S. Congress since 2021. Aside from Washington, she has also reported in Senegal, Haiti and France. She was part of a team of journalists who detailed lawmakers' ancestors' ties to slavery.

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Hunter Biden offers to testify publicly in House Republicans ... - Reuters

Government shutdown is back on the menu. The House GOP has made some ominous omissions from this weeks agenda: the appropriations bills that are meant to forestallsay it with us, once againthe impending government shutdown that is now scheduled to occur in mid-January.

After this week ends, the House will have just 16 legislative days to come up with a solution before the first of a two-part deadline is breached, which will set off a partial shutdown on January 19. Should the House continue to flail after that date, the government will roll into a full shutdown two weeks later, on February 2.

Funding the government for which they work hasnt been a major priority for House Republicans this year. So far, the caucus has passed two stopgap spending measures, narrowly avoiding shutdowns on crunched deadlines, all while garnering attention for their penchant for toxic infighting, which reached a fever pitch in early October when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his leadership position for daring to arrange a bipartisan spending bill to prevent a shutdown calamity.

It has yet to be determined if the man who replaced him, Speaker Mike Johnson, is operating under the same conditionsrisking losing the gavel for simply doing what needs to be done to keep Capitol Hills lights on.

We need to show some real guts [on spending cuts], Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told The Hill. Thats what weve kind of asked for.

While the names have changed atop the House GOP caucus, Johnson faces the same predicament as McCarthya divided yet rambunctious GOP with a razor-thin majority, set against a Democratic Party with a strong opposition to any cuts.

Conservatives are hoping to get through all 12 of the governments annual appropriations bills on a case-by-case basis, a strategy that might give them a slight edge in negotiations with the Senate, reported The Hill.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said he supported that plan on Monday, noting that hed prefer to see the bills passed before Congress breaks for Christmas. His Democratic counterparts werent so hopeful.

If you cant do it by September, then you cant do it by the middle of November, and you cant do it by December, why the hell do you think youre gonna get it done in January? Montana Senator Jon Tester told Politico. Theres never any urgency around this place to get shit done.

However, the appropriation bills are just one part of the puzzle. Congress has several big legislative matters on the near-term horizon, including about a half-dozen major priorities that could touch off showdowns of their own, including a border security bill and contentious foreign aid packages to Israel and Ukraine.

The same time constraints apply in these instances as well. But rather than forging ahead on this long parliamentary to-do list, the House GOP will first have to cope with another salacious story thats returned to the front and center this week: the proposed expulsion of Representative George Santos, who faces 23 charges related to wire fraud, identity theft, and credit card fraud. And if Santos gets expelled, that thin margin that Johnson is working with to prevent a shutdown and keep the lower House on track will become even more fragile.

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Its Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Republican Government Shutdown - Yahoo! Voices