YOUNG IMMIGRANTS SHOUT DOWN PELOSI Interior chief urges shrinking 4 national monuments in West GOP weighs popular tax breaks to finance overhaul
San Francisco — Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the U.S. House, was shouted down Monday by young immigrants at an event in her hometown of San Francisco where she planned to drum up support for legislation that would grant legal status to immigrants like those who protested. The demonstrators were angered by Pelosi’s recent talks with President Donald Trump about the federal program that shields from deportation hundreds of thousands of young immigrants. “We are immigrant youth, undocumented and unafraid,” several dozen young people chanted as they overtook the event. After smiling and occasionally trying to speak through much of the protest, an aggravated Pelosi told the protesters to “just stop it now,” shortly before she was led out of the room.
Washington — Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is recommending that four large national monuments in the West be reduced in size, potentially opening up hundreds of thousands of acres of land revered for natural beauty and historical significance to mining, logging and other development.
Zinke’s recommendation, revealed in a leaked memo submitted to the White House, prompted an outcry from environmental groups who promised to take the Trump administration to court to block the moves.
The Interior secretary’s plan would scale back two huge Utah monuments — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — along with Nevada’s Gold Butte and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou. The monuments encompass more than 3.6 million acres — an area larger than Connecticut — and were created by Democratic administrations under a century-old law that allows presidents to protect sites considered historic, geographically or culturally important.
Zinke’s plan also would allow logging at a newly designated monument in Maine and urges more grazing, hunting and fishing at two sites in New Mexico. It also calls for a new assessment of border-safety risks at a monument in southern New Mexico.
Bears Ears, designated for federal protection by former President Barack Obama, totals 1.3 million acres in southeastern Utah on land that is sacred to Native Americans and home to tens of thousands of archaeological sites, including ancient cliff dwellings. Grand Staircase-Escalante, in southern Utah, includes nearly 1.9 million acres in a sweeping vista larger than the state of Delaware. Republicans have howled over the monument since its creation in 1996 by former President Bill Clinton.
Cascade-Siskiyou, which juts into Northern California, protects about 113,000 acres in an area where three mountain ranges converge, while Gold Butte protects nearly 300,000 acres of desert landscapes that feature rock art, sandstone towers and wildlife habitat for bighorn sheep and the threatened Mojave Desert tortoise.
Washington — Republicans straining to find about $1 trillion to finance sweeping tax cuts are homing in on two popular deductions that are woven into the nation’s fiscal fabric — the mortgage interest deduction that millions of homeowners prize and the deduction for state and local taxes popular in Democratic strongholds.
About 30 million Americans, or about 20 percent of taxpayers, deduct mortgage interest from their income taxes, a deduction Realtors and homebuilders argue is a catalyst to home ownership in the United States. According to the most recent IRS tally, nearly 44 million people claim the deduction for state and local taxes in 2014, especially in the high-tax, high-income states of California, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Republicans are determined to overhaul the nation’s tax code after more than three decades, delivering on a top legislative priority for President Donald Trump. Highlighting items that have been modernized since 1986, the last year the tax code was overhauled, Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., made a pitch for reform, saying on Monday, “Just like the rotary phone of the 80s, the American tax code is seriously outdated.”
The two deductions are in the cross-hairs as Republicans look to slash the corporate and individual tax rates, according to congressional aides and strong hints from some lawmakers. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The deductions point up how what’s seen by some as a special-deal loophole is embraced by others as a revered middle-class touchstone. That’s a major reason why an overhaul of the tax system — a political imperative for the GOP — is so difficult.
House Republicans are promising to reveal details of their plan next week.
The Trump administration has thrown its weight behind a revamp of the tax system, but Republicans are split on some core issues.