ABC7 News: Treasury secretary on turning over Trump tax returns: ‘We will follow the law.’

| Posted in In the News

House Democrats grilled Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday about how he would handle a request from Congress for the president's tax returns at a Capitol Hill budget hearing.  Democrats, led by the Ways and Means Committee and Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., are carefully preparing to request 10 years of the president's personal returns - and fight…

Yahoo: Ocasio-Cortez and House Democrats roast Wilbur Ross over census citizenship question

| Posted in In the News

At Thursday’s hearing, Ross appeared, at times, evasive, unconvincing and confused under the unrelenting Democratic assault. “"Were you trained by your attorneys to dodge these questions?” an irate Rep.Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., asked at one point. On several occasions, Ross cited the fact that he had turned over 8,700 pages of documents. In response to a number of questions, he cited either…

CBS News: FAA under ever-mounting pressure to ground Boeing 737 Max 8s

| Posted in In the News

The Federal Aviation Administration is facing growing criticism for backing the airworthiness of Boeing's 737 Max jetliners as the number of countries that have grounded them grows in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash over the weekend. The rest of the world typically takes it cues from the FAA, long considered the world's gold standard for aircraft safety. Several U.S.…

NBC News: House Democrats to grill Wilbur Ross over census citizenship question

| Posted in In the News

His long-awaited appearance before the House Oversight Committee comes only days after a second federal judge said Ross violated federal law and the Constitution by hastily adding the question to the upcoming survey. Democrats have sought answers from the Trump administration for more than a year about its handling of the all-important headcount, zeroing in not only on potential…

Newsweek: College Admissions Scandal 2019: Applicants, Parents, Others Speak Out

| Posted in In the News

Federal prosecutors Tuesday charged 50 people with bribery and cheating to get college applicants into prestigious universities, from Yale to Stanford, USC to Georgetown and other major colleges in between. Those charged range from Hollywood celebrities to top business leaders and even some college athletics coaches. In all, about $6.5 million of “bribery” flowed from wealthy parents to…

Talking Points Memo: How One House Oversight Dem Is Approaching The Big Wilbur Ross Census Hearing

| Posted in In the News

Ross claimed — both in a March 2018 memo and in congressional testimony around that time — that it was added at the request of the Justice Department to improve the Department’s voting rights enforcement. In fact, Ross was seeking the question well before the DOJ formally asked for it and his aides had actually pushed for the Department to make the official request. One person who…

ABC News: Here's how Trump wants to fund an illegal immigration crackdown

| Posted in In the News

The budget also includes proposals aimed at “sanctuary cities.” The measures would allow the administration to withhold funding from cities that don’t “cooperate with specific federal immigration enforcement activities and requests.” The Trump administration’s efforts to crack down these jurisdictions have been stopped by appellate courts multiple times. In resistance to…

Insider NJ: Pascrell Calls for National Security Investigation of Carbon Pollution

| Posted in In the News

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-09), a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee and its Subcommittee on Trade, sent a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross calling on him to initiate an investigation into the threat of carbon pollution. The letter was also signed by Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA-34) and Judy Chu (D-CA-27), both…

Common Dreams: As Second Judge Rejects Census Citizenship Question, Trump’s Backup Plan to Count Non-Citizens Exposed.

| Posted in In the News

In the wake of the second legal defeat of President Donald Trump's plan to count all non-citizens in the 2020 census, new reporting reveals the Census Bureau has been secretly working with Homeland Security officials to develop a new method of sharing immigration status data in order to identify individuals and target communities nationwide. As the Associated…