Congress
Rick Scott will oppose embattled Trump nom Ingrassia
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) says he will oppose Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the White House Office of the Special Counsel following revelations of the nominee’s history of racist and antisemitic remarks.
“I’m not supporting him,” said Scott in an interview Monday evening. “I can’t imagine how anybody can be antisemitic in this country. It’s wrong.”
Assuming all Democrats oppose Ingrassia, he can only afford to lose three Republican votes on the Senate floor before Vice President JD Vance is called in to break a tie for confirmation.
Scott is a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is set to hold a hearing Thursday on Ingrassia and other pending Trump nominees.
He was among the GOP lawmakers who expressed concerns about Ingrassia back in July, when the panel was last set to hear his testimony. At that time, Ingrassia was known for his ties to Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, and Andrew Tate, a Holocaust denier.
“This big thing for our state is, he’s had some statements about antisemitism,” Scott said then.
In recent weeks, Blue Light News has reported further on Ingrassia’s actions and viewpoints. As the current White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security, he allegedly sexually harasseda female colleague. A text chat shows Ingrassia boasting about his “Nazi streak” and claiming the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell.”
The office of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chair of Senate Homeland, referred comments to the White House regarding the latest reporting on Ingrassia and whether the committee hearing would move forward Thursday as planned. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Other Republican members of the panel were less definitive in how they would proceed. Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma said he wasn’t familiar with the new reporting but he planned to ask Ingrassia about his previous social media posts.
“He has lots of posts that he’s done in the past, and there’s plenty of questions there,” Lankford told reporters Monday.
Diana Nerozzi contributed to this report.
A Democratic trio attempted to pass an artificial intelligence bill via a unanimous consent request on Tuesday but were blocked on the Senate floor.
Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) sought to pass their Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act using the procedural mechanism, which allows expedited consideration of legislation but fails if one senator opposes it.
“The whole world has recognized that we’ve got to do something,” Warner said in a speech on the floor. “We should not miss the moment to put a safety protocol in place now.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) objected to the bill, preventing any chance of passage.
“Congress must not legislate on the issue of artificial intelligence hastily or in a closed manner,” he said on the floor, adding that it gave some in the government too much power to dictate the technology that could be permitted to be released.
As some lawmakers grow concerned over dire warnings from AI labs’ top executives about the technology’s risk to humanity, Congress’ attempts to legislate AI guardrails have largely stalled.
In the past few weeks, two other AI-related bills, the Ratepayer Protection Act and AI Emergency Button Act, were also nixed in an attempt to pass them unanimously.
Warner, Schatz and Kim’s new bill would have established a new safety board within the Commerce Department to vet models before they are deployed and set safety standards for the industry. It would also have created a reporting process for safety and security incidents.
Sen. Darline Graham sought to take up her brother’s mantle Tuesday, going after former special counsel Jack Smith for obtaining the late-Sen. Lindsey Graham’s phone data.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the South Carolina Republican told Smith as he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that the anguish the prosecutor caused her brother “makes me sick.”
Lindsey Graham, until his unexpected death in July, was among the most vocal in his outrage over revelations that Smith secretly collected electronic data from GOP lawmakers as part of the Biden-era investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The late senator was also unapologetic in his support for a provision tucked into a government funding package, which was later repealed, allowing senators to sue the federal government for $500,000 or more if they discover their electronic records were seized without notification — language specifically designed to compensate Smith’s targets.
But Smith replied that Lindsey Graham was not a target of his investigation and was not suspected of wrongdoing — in fact, he considered Darline Graham’s brother “a patriotic public servant” who likely would have been a “witness” in his case against Trump for attempted election subversion.
“Your brother investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making,” Smith told Darline Graham. “He found them to be false.”
The federal government’s internal watchdog told Congress Tuesday that it has concluded President Donald Trump acted unlawfully in unilaterally canceling $810 million in federal funding.
In a letter to congressional leaders obtained by Blue Light News, the Government Accountability Office’s top lawyer panned Trump’s declaration Friday that he is nixing money Congress appropriated through a controversial budget maneuver called a “pocket rescission.”
“The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse,” GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez wrote,
adding that “Congress did not cede this important power” by enacting the 1970s impoundment law intended to stop presidents from withholding money Congress approves.
“Any withholding of appropriated funds beyond their date of expiration, regardless of size, subverts both the constitutional process for enacting federal law and Congress’s constitutional power of the purse,” Perez added. “The President may not force the expiration of budget authority Congress has already enacted and did not rescind.”
It is unclear what practical effect, if any, the letter will have on the interbranch funding fight. Outside groups sued the administration last year over a prior pocket rescission, but the Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling that they did not have standing to challenge the matter. The Trump administration has argued that only the head of the GAO is able to sue under the 52-year-old law governing rescissions.
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