President Trump suggested Wednesday that billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid could hinge on how countries vote on a U.N. resolution condemning his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. Embassy there.
In a Cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump said he would be “watching those votes” in the General Assembly when it meets in emergency session Thursday on the U.S. decision.
“They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us,” he said. “Well, we’ll be watching those votes. Let them vote against us; we’ll save a lot. We don’t care.
“But this isn’t like it used to be, where they could vote against you, and then you pay them hundreds of millions of dollars and nobody knows what they’re doing.”
He ended by asserting, “We’re not going to be taken advantage of any longer.”
Palestinians place on the ground a representation of a U.S. flag during a protest Dec. 20, 2017, against President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. (Mussa Qawasma/Reuters)
Trump’s remarks came after Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, warned on Twitter that “the US will be taking names” of countries that support the resolution. And in a letter she sent to more than 180 U.N. ambassadors of member nations, she said she would report back to Trump on how they voted.
“We will take note of each and every vote on this issue,” she wrote.
The hardball tactics used by Trump and Haley further raised tensions over the U.S. announcement on Dec. 6 to unilaterally recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and begin preparations to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv. Israel, which captured the eastern part of the city in the 1967 war and annexed it, considers the city its undivided, eternal capital. The Palestinians want to make East Jerusalem the capital of a future Palestinian state, and all countries that have diplomatic representation in Israel maintain their diplomatic missions in Tel Aviv to avoid taking a stand on the Jerusalem issue.
Now, the nonbinding resolution is going to the General Assembly, where the United States does not have veto power.
In her letter to the U.N. ambassadors, Haley said the United States is not asking other countries to move their embassies to the city, “though we think it would be appropriate.”
“We are simply asking that you acknowledge the historical friendship, partnership and support we have extended and respect our decision about our own embassy,” she wrote.
Neither Trump nor Haley mentioned any specific countries that could be affected. Apart from Israel, only two other countries receive more than $1 billion in annual aid — Egypt and Jordan.
It is not clear whether the tough talk will swing any votes.
A spokesman for Haley said she had received positive feedback on her letter.
“Ambassador Haley has received numerous replies from ambassadors who are appropriately concerned about maintaining their friendships with the United States,” he said.
But the suggestion that U.S. aid would be linked to the U.N. vote was swiftly criticized by Turkey, which accused the White House of further isolating itself through its threats.
“We expect strong support at the U.N. vote, but we see that the United States, which was left alone, is now resorting to threats,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said before leaving Istanbul for New York. “No honorable, dignified country would bow down to this pressure.”
David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the principle of taking U.N. votes into account in bilateral relations is sound, but he questioned whether the emotional issue of Jerusalem should be the place to take a first stand.
“Do you start a new policy on a vote that has the most religious resonance in the Muslim world?” he said. “I’m not against the principle. But you have to apply it more with a scalpel than a sledgehammer, given the issue at stake.”
Aaron David Miller, a Middle East analyst at the Wilson Center, said Trump’s rhetoric appeals to his supporters.
“The administration is doubling down after the Jerusalem decision, playing on the president’s aversion to the U.N., to allies that don’t pay up and stand up in support of Washington, and on long-standing commitments to have Israel’s back at the U.N.,” Miller said. “Being tough in New York plays well with the base and squares with the president’s tough-guy image.”
This is not the first time Haley has vowed to note which countries vote with the United States at the United Nations. On her first day, she told reporters that “for those who don’t have our back, we’re taking names.”
HONG KONG — A North Korean soldier defected to South Korea on Thursday through the heavily guarded demilitarized zone separating the two countries, leading to gunfire on both sides of the border, the South Korean military said.
The “low ranking” soldier was manning a guard post along the DMZ when he fled through thick fog, the South Korean military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
The escape follows a similar one last month, in which another North Korean soldier was shot by his colleagues as he successfully fled his DMZ posting.
In that case, South Korean border guards who heard the gunshots found the soldier 55 yards from the border line that bisects Panmunjom, the so-called truce village in the Joint Security Area, and carried him to safety. Doctors later found dozens of parasitic worms in his digestive system, some as long as 11 inches, which officials said was a sign of the poor hygiene and nutrition afflicting North Korea.
Officials said the soldier who fled Thursday was not fired upon. South Korean soldiers later fired 20 warning shots at North Korean border guards who were searching for the defector, which was followed 40 minutes later by gunfire in the North, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea since a famine killed at least a million people in the North in the 1990s. The country has recently been the subject of a tightening grip of sanctions that have curbed exports that provide urgently needed revenue, and it has been struggling with the impact of a drought that has reduced agricultural yields.
But it is extremely rare for people to flee across the demilitarized zone. The 2.5-mile-wide DMZ, considered the most heavily fortified border in the world, is guarded by minefields, sentry posts and tall fences topped with barbed wire, some electrified.
The soldier’s defection to South Korea on Thursday was the fourth this year, and the gunfire over the episode is certain to raise tensions on the Korean Peninsula just as hopes have grown for a thaw in relations between the South and North.
South Korean officials have recently held out the possibility that they might be willing to push back the timing of planned joint military exercises with the United States to reduce tensions.
Those exercises have traditionally drawn a fierce response from North Korea, which sees them as a preparation for military action against the North.
On Tuesday, South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, told NBC News that he was open to curtailing the exercises ahead of next year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February.
“It is possible for South Korea and the U.S. to review the possibility of postponing the exercises,” he said. “I’ve made such a suggestion to the U.S., and the U.S. is currently reviewing it. However, all this depends on how North Korea behaves.”
China and Russia have proposed a “freeze for freeze” agreement in which North Korea would halt its nuclear and missile tests in return for a halt to the military exercises.
But on Wednesday, the Pentagon distanced itself from Mr. Moon’s suggestion about delaying the exercises.
“The United States and our allies and partners in the region have long conducted routine exercises to maintain readiness,” Lt. Col. Chris Logan, a Defense Department spokesman, told Yonhap. “But it would be inappropriate to discuss plans for future exercises at this time.”
In a possible sign of worsening conditions in the North, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said that 15 North Koreans, including the four soldiers, had fled directly to South Korea this year, compared with five people, including one soldier, last year. Most defectors avoid such a perilous crossing to the South, instead fleeing through China.
Around the country, cities have removed symbols ranging from the Confederate flag, to memorials of rank-and-file Confederate soldiers, to statues of prominent generals including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Within an hour of the Memphis City Council’s vote, police officers and cranes were deployed to Health Sciences Park.
Photo
Janet Jackson, left, and her daughters Janiah, 12, center, and Tatiana, 14, watch as the statue of Confederate general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan is removed from a park in Memphis, Wednesday night. Credit
Brandon Dill for The New York Times
Just after 9 p.m., the crane began to lift the statue into the air, the horse and rider dangling above the pedestal. Onlookers cheered. Someone yelled, “Now drop it!” Others chanted: “Hey hey! Ho ho! That racist statue has got to go!”
Kyle Veazey, a spokesman for Mr. Strickland, wrote on Twitter that the statue was lifted at 9:01 p.m., an apparent nod to the city’s 901 area code. One of the groups that led the movement to remove the statues was called Take ’Em Down 901.
“Just to finally get to this moment is overwhelming,” Tami Sawyer, a leader of the group, said.
“I looked Nathan Bedford in the eyes and shed a tear for my ancestors,” she said, recalling the history of African-Americans from slavery to modern incarceration.
Bruce McMullen, the chief legal officer for the city, said in an interview on Wednesday night that the parks had been sold to Memphis Greenspace, a nonprofit led by Van D. Turner Jr., a Shelby County commissioner.
The nonprofit seems to have been created expressly for the purpose of buying the parks: It filed its incorporation papers in October, Mr. Strickland said. Mr. Turner did not immediately return a request for comment.
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The city sold Health Sciences Park in its entirety, Mr. McMullen said, and it sold its interest in an easement in Memphis Park. Each was sold for $1,000, he said.
The transfer of the parks to private ownership effectively allowed the city to skirt the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, a state law that prohibits the removal, relocation or renaming of memorials on public property.
In October, the Tennessee Historical Commission, a state agency that oversees the law, voted to deny the city’s application for a waiver of the law regarding the two statues, the television station WREG reported.
Photo
A memorial to Jefferson Davis in Memphis. Credit
George Tames/The New York Times
Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, praised the City Council’s move, calling the statues “not representative of Memphis today” and “an affront to most of the citizens of Memphis.”
“As we approach the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, it’s important that these relics of the Confederacy and defenders of slavery don’t continue to be displayed in prominent places in our city,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement.
Mr. McMullen said another motivation for removing the statues was ensuring that they would not create an “incendiary type of environment” during the city’s commemorations of Dr. King in April.
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He dismissed the criticism of some groups, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who had accused the city of willfully violating state law. He said the city had been weighing the sale of the parks to a private group for a year.
“We’ve always felt that we had a right to sell city property. We have in the past, and we probably will in the future,” Mr. McMullen said. “And what we did was perfectly legal and right.”
At the news conference, Mr. Strickland echoed Mr. McMullen’s comments. The mayor said the City Council had undertaken a long, complex process to ensure that the handoff was done legally, including passing a law in September that allowed Memphis to sell the parks for less than their market value.
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But he also invoked the violent protests in Charlottesville, Va., in August as the “sea change” that spurred those efforts to success. One woman was killed after white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
In the days after the deadly rally, Mr. Strickland said, “we saw an avalanche of support come together behind our efforts.”
“But this day, this day should be more about where we go from here,” he said. “I want to say this loud and clear: Though some of our city’s past is painful, we are all in charge of our city’s future.”
It is not clear whether Mr. Trump is going to sign the bill before the end of the year. Republicans need to work with Democrats to avert automatic spending cuts that could be set off as a result of the tax bill adding to the deficit. They need support from Democrats to avoid these spending cuts, and if they wait until next year, it will buy them extra time to reach such a deal. Republicans in Congress were struggling to reach an agreement that would keep the government funded into January and avoid a shutdown.
At the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump presided over a grand celebration on the South Portico, flanked by Republican lawmakers and members of his cabinet in a show of unity. A Marine Band played Christmas carols while the president and his party soaked up a moment long in coming.
“This will indeed be a very big day, when people look back at our country. It’s a whole different attitude, a whole different way,” Mr. Trump said, congratulating the lawmakers behind him. “They have been working on this for years, years and years. And I just want to turn around and I want to thank them all. They are very, very special people.”
The lawmakers — many of whom face re-election next year — eagerly returned the favor as the president brought several of them to the lectern, where they offered a common refrain: paeans to Mr. Trump, his legislative victory and his presidency.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the Finance Committee, said Mr. Trump might end up being one of the country’s greatest presidents. Members of Congress who have at times been on the receiving end of brutal Twitter posts made by the president, including Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, returned the president’s praise in kind.
“This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishment for the Trump administration,” Mr. McConnell said, as the president grinned broadly behind him.
But though Mr. Trump listed a series of accomplishments during his first year in office, he confronts a challenge in the new year of persuading more Americans to get behind him.
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His approval rating in polls of the American public is at historic lows, with a majority of people holding negative views of his presidency. Next year, he will face a Senate majority that will have shrunk to just one vote, making it even harder to win approval for the rest of the Republican agenda.
And while his lawyers have suggested that they believe the special counsel’s Russia investigation is winding down, there is evidence that Mr. Trump and his associates will remain under scrutiny for months, if not longer. Two members of Mr. Trump’s campaign team have been indicted, and two others, including Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser, and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy consultant, have pleaded guilty to federal crimes and are cooperating with the special counsel.
The tax victory was a rare moment of legislative success for a president who has struggled to govern in a city that he derided as “a swamp.” He has repeatedly used Twitter, his favorite means of communication, to demean and belittle members of both parties, undermining Republican leaders and generating intense opposition from Democrats.
On Wednesday, he struck a different tone, posting on Twitter to praise Mr. McConnell for shepherding the tax bill through the bitterly divided chamber.
I would like to congratulate @SenateMajLdr on having done a fantastic job both strategically politically on the passing in the Senate of the MASSIVE TAX CUT Reform Bill. I could have not asked for a better or more talented partner. Our team will go onto many more VICTORIES!
The president’s most significant legislative misstep was a failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a Republican pledge that he echoed repeatedly on the campaign trail. In May, the president and his Republican allies in the House held what proved to be a premature victory ceremony over the chamber’s vote to replace the health care law, a feat that the Senate never matched.
The tax bill that passed includes the elimination of the Obama-era requirement that people have health insurance, handing Mr. Trump and Republicans a talking point when they confront constituents who expected full repeal of the health care law. Speaking to reporters before a cabinet meeting Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump bragged about getting rid of the health care mandate, saying that it amounted to a full repeal of Mr. Obama’s signature law.
“We didn’t want to bring it up,” Mr. Trump said. “I told people specifically, ‘Be quiet with the fake news media because I don’t want them talking too much about it.’”
Whether that proves to be a political victory for Mr. Trump and Republicans is unclear. Many of his core supporters will appreciate the move. But the president’s eager declaration that “Obamacare has been repealed” also means that he will be held responsible if premiums rise or people struggle to secure health insurance.
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The tax overhaul also provides a break to owners of pass-through businesses, whose profits are taxed through the individual code, and lowers the top individual rate to 37 percent, down from 39.6 percent. It nearly doubles the standard deduction and doubles the child tax credit and the size of inheritances shielded from estate taxation.
In a move that drew significant criticism from lawmakers from states with high taxes, the bill caps the deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000. Twelve House Republicans voted against the tax bill, and 11 of those members were from California, New Jersey and New York, three states with high taxes.
It also opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling.
Polls suggest that most Americans view the tax overhaul with suspicion. In a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, a majority of people said they saw the plan negatively, with only about 16 percent saying they believe it will lower their taxes. Democrats predicted Wednesday that the political benefits for Mr. Trump would evaporate quickly.
“He hasn’t accomplished any meaningful part of his legislative agenda since the beginning of the year,” said Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado. He added, referring to the fact that the cut is so large that independent analysts say it will produce a deficit for years to come, “As soon as the American people see what’s in the bill, and that it borrows from their children to pay for it, it they will reject it.”
Republican lawmakers said they believed the public’s opinions about the tax overhaul would improve as more people began paying lower taxes next year. If they are right, the party could benefit just as lawmakers face voters in the fall.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who spent most of his almost 20 years in Congress pushing for an overhaul of the tax code, said he was “excited” about making good on a core part of the Republican Party’s orthodoxy.
“We are going to launch next year this fantastic tax reform so that the American people can see how we can truly reach our economic growth and our economic potential,” Mr. Ryan said.
In remarks before the cabinet meeting, Vice President Mike Pence offered the kind of effusive praise that Mr. Trump is unlikely to receive very often, even after the tax bill victory.
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“I want to thank you, Mr. President,” Mr. Pence said. “I want to thank you for speaking on behalf of and fighting every day for the forgotten men and women of America. Because of your determination, because of your leadership, the forgotten men and women of America are forgotten no more, and we are making America great again.”
For the president, passage of the tax bill could be even more important — depending on how people come to view the legislation. As a candidate, Mr. Trump pitched himself as a champion of working Americans whose interests had been forgotten or ignored by a political establishment that cared little about their fortunes.
If people conclude that the tax bill lowers their taxes, that could improve Mr. Trump’s dismal job approval rating. If they decide that rich people and corporations benefit most, the president could anger his own supporters.
“Trumpism, in the end, as a domestic policy, comes down to jobs,” Mr. Gingrich said. “As a baseline of the conversation, he has to produce a better economy for anything else he is doing to make sense.”
A train car was removed from the scene of an Amtrak train derailment near Tacoma, Wash., on Tuesday. Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
DUPONT, Wash. — The investigation into the fatal Amtrak crash near Tacoma, Wash., is focusing on the possibility that the engineer was distracted by a cellphone, another person in his cab or something else when the train barreled into a curve 50 miles per hour over the posted speed limit.
The crew did not activate the emergency brake before the derailment on Monday morning, said Bella Dinh-Zarr, the National Transportation Safety Board official overseeing the investigation, which might indicate that the engineer failed to perceive the danger.
At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, she said the badly damaged cameras in the engineer’s cab — one facing forward, and the other inward, toward the person driving the train — had been sent to the safety board’s laboratory in Washington D.C. There, investigators will try to extract images showing what went on in the moments before the train plunged into a stand of trees and onto a busy highway, killing three people.
Ms. Dinh-Zarr stressed that the crew members — all of them hospitalized — had not yet been interviewed, and most of the evidence not yet analyzed. A data recorder on the train, carrying 77 passengers and seven crew members, indicated that it was racing at 80 miles per hour into a curve that is limited to 30 miles per hour, the safety board said. Excessive speed appeared to be the immediate cause of the crash, but the reason for that speed remained unknown.
“Distraction is one of our most wanted list of priorities at the N.T.S.B.” she said. “It’s protocol for us to look at all of the cellphone records of all the crew members whenever there is an accident of this type.”
There was a second person in the cab at the time of the crash, “a conductor who was getting experience and familiarizing himself with the territory,” Ms. Dinh-Zarr said. While that is common practice, rail safety experts say it can also be a distraction to the engineer, a possibility that she said would be investigated.
Drug and alcohol testing of crews is routine after train accidents, and the inward-facing cameras could show not only whether the engineer was distracted, but also whether he was impaired or fatigued — factors that have been blamed in other rail accidents.
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These Trains Outpace the U.S. on Speed and Safety
High-tech rail systems in countries like Japan and across Europe are reaching top speeds with strong safety records. But Chinese rail construction may be the thing to watch.
By SARAH STEIN KERR and CHRIS CIRILLO on Publish Date December 19, 2017.
Amtrak 501, on the Cascades service between Seattle and Portland, was the first to carry passengers on a new, faster route between Tacoma and Olympia, on tracks recently upgraded for passenger service. The unfamiliar, 14.5-mile stretch includes a spot where southbound trains leave a straightaway on a downhill slope before reaching the crash site, where the tracks curve onto an overpass crossing Interstate 5.
On that new part of the trip, “crews have been operating for at least two weeks prior to the accident with nonrevenue trains,” she said, including the engineer who was at the controls on Monday morning. But she would not say whether they had enough training before hauling passengers.
The fact that the train was on its inaugural run — and that the tracks had only recently been improved — may have contributed to the derailment, said Allan Zarembski, a professor of railroad safety and engineering at the University of Delaware.
The accident mirrored a 2015 crash in Philadelphia that killed eight people, when an Amtrak train took a turn much too fast and jumped the tracks. In the 2015 Philadelphia Amtrak derailment, the N.T.S.B. found that the engineer had lost “situational awareness” of where the train was on the route.
In this week’s accident, “the operator may not have been 100 percent familiar with that route or misjudged where he was and didn’t start to slow down for that curve,” Dr. Zarembski said. “I’m sure there was some familiarization, but the question is, how familiar was he with it?”
Operators generally carefully study documents known as track charts, which describe the route’s speed limits and tricky areas, before stepping into the cab, he said.
A former safety board railroad investigator, Russell Quimby, said that while there was no national standard for how many dry runs a railroad had to perform before opening a line, it was common to run practice trains under a variety of weather conditions and other circumstances.
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Amtrak Train Derails South of Seattle
An Amtrak passenger train derailed and crashed into oncoming traffic on Monday morning. Multiple deaths were reported.
By BARBARA MARCOLINI, SARAH STEIN KERR and CHRISTOPH KOETTL on Publish Date December 18, 2017.
After a private briefing by investigators, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington said, “there are a thousand unanswered questions about this right now.”
The safety board blamed the 2008 crash of a commuter train in Los Angeles, which killed 25 people, on the distraction of the engineer, who was composing a text message when he ran a red light and collided with a freight train.
That accident played an important role in evolving rail safety standards. It led the safety board to recommend inward-facing cameras in train cabs, and Amtrak committed in 2015 to installing them.
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The crash also prompted Congress to require that railroads adopt a system called positive train control — which the safety board has sought for decades — that automatically slows or stops a train that is moving too fast, or is in danger of running a red light or hitting another train. The law originally set a 2015 deadline for positive train control, which uses sensors both on the trains and along the tracks, communicating by radio frequencies. But after lobbying by railroads, Congress postponed the requirement.
“Unfortunately, the deadline was the end of 2015, but Congress extended that deadline to the train companies, and allowed them to have until the end of 2018,” Ms. Dinh-Zarr said.
Richard H. Anderson, the president of Amtrak, said at a news conference in Tacoma on Tuesday evening that it was too early to know whether positive train control could have prevented the accident. While some Amtrak routes have the technology, the Cascades line is scheduled to have it by the end of 2018, he said.
“We have to keep this as a wake-up call,” Mr. Anderson said. “It is not acceptable that we are involved in these kinds of accidents.”
Photo
Investigators inspected the tracks at the scene of an Amtrak train derailment near Tacoma, Wash., on Monday. Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Sound Transit, the regional agency that owns the track where the train derailed on Monday, said the system had been installed along the line, and the Washington State Department of Transportation has said that the entire Cascades route will have the system by mid-2018.
“The locomotive was in the process of getting a P.T.C. system installed but it was not yet functional,” Ms. Dinh-Zarr said.
Last Friday, a Cascades train took local dignitaries on the new route, including Eric F. Corp, a DuPont city councilman. Long before then, he said, people who knew anything about the line knew that there was a big curve going over the highway, requiring a major slowdown.
“What speed we were going when we went around the corner I’m not sure, but it was slow and methodical,” he said. “It wasn’t like we were leaning or at no time did I think we were going too fast.”
Two of the people killed, Zack Willhoite and James Hamre, were close friends and rail enthusiasts, traveling together on the train’s first public voyage. Mr. Hamre, a retired engineer, was a volunteer for All Aboard Washington, a rail advocacy organization; Mr. Willhoite worked as a customer support specialist for Pierce Transit, a local transportation agency.
“It was just a given that they would be there,” said Lloyd Flem, a friend of the victims and the executive director of All Aboard Washington. “They had wanted to be on that very, very first run.”
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Flem said that he had seen both men just a few days ago and that they were eager to board the train early Monday morning.
On Tuesday, the scene of the crash, surrounded by police and emergency vehicles, began to look more like a construction site than a disaster. In a steady rain, huge cranes moved into place and began to lift the wrecked pieces of the train, while the crumpled remains of cars and trucks were loaded onto tractor-trailers to be taken away.
The crash left at least two coaches tumbled onto their sides, one of them on top of another coach, and two dangling precariously off the edge of the bridge; the locomotive that was pulling the train came to a stop on the highway. Of the 14 cars in the train, only the locomotive at the rear, which was not in use at the time, did not derail.
The Virginia state capitol in Richmond. (Sue Kovach Shuman for The Washington Post)
The surprise victory of Democrat Shelly Simonds after a nail-biting recount has given Democrats yet another win in Virginia’s legislature, ending 17 years of Republican control.
But the question of who will be in control of the House of Delegates going forward is a bit up in the air. Simonds’s victory brought the House of Delegates to a rare 50-50 tie between the parties, a split that could change depending on the outcome of a couple of other recounts in the state. But the split raises questions about how the legislature will govern, given that Virginia has no official tie-breaking mechanism for its House of Delegates, if the results hold.
“It’s not a crisis,” said Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center For Politics. “This happens almost every election in one of the 50 states.”
Some clues about how the state might proceed can perhaps be found by looking at how some recent partisan stalemates have been broken around the country. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which tracks the bodies, notes more than 40 state legislatures that have dealt with even partisan splits in the last 50 years.
These splits have been resolved through a few ways:
1) State laws. At least three states have laws that help break ties, according to the NCSL. In the event of a tie in Montana and South Dakota, the leaders of the chambers are chosen from the party of the governor, for example. In Indiana, the speaker must be chosen by the party affiliated with either the governor, or the secretary of state, if the governor was not up for election.
2) Lieutenant governor’s vote. In about half of the states in the country, a lieutenant governor presides over the senate and can break ties the way a vice president can in the U.S. Senate. The Virginia Senate has considered this option during previous splits — Republicans currently have a two-vote margin — but it is not available to the state’s House of Delegates.
3) Coin toss. Not kidding. The use of coin toss helped break a legislative tie in Wyoming in 1974 and remains the preferred method to dealing with partisan gridlock, according to the NCSL.
4) Negotiation The most common way to break a legislative gridlock is through good old-fashioned dealmaking.
“Most ties have been settled when the two political parties negotiate a shared power agreement,” the NCSL says. Many states have negotiated power-sharing agreements that involve co-chairing leadership and committee positions. These include the Washington House in 1978, 1998, and 2000, the Indiana House in 1988, the Michigan House in 1992 and many others.
“The dual leaders and committee chairs alternate the times during which they preside,” the NCSL said. Some power structures alternated daily; others monthly or bimonthly.
Another way to compromise is a division of power made in the spirit of balance, giving one party a presiding officer and the other leadership of the most powerful committees, according to the NCSL. For example, in a divided house in Minnesota in 1978, “the speaker of the House was Republican, but the chairmen of the powerful rules, appropriations and tax committees were Democrats.”
The NCSL writes that deadlocked chambers have generally performed better than many expect. “Cooperation rather than confrontation seems to be key to the success of shared power in a chamber, as well as good will and the personalities of the players,” it noted.
In Virginia, the Democrats could have a slight upper hand given the near landslide victory that swept them into power, Sabato said, beginning with Gov. Ralph Northam.
“They had a wave with Northam, who deserves a lot of the credit,” he said. “Trump deserves even more credit. If the state Senate had been on the ballot, I’m convinced Democrats would have one that too. The Republicans are narrowly in charge of the Senate mainly because they weren’t on the ballot.”
Defections from one party to another are possible but not likely, Sabato said. And in a highly partisan era, compromise is going to be hard to come by, he said.
“It’s not going to be easy because of the polarization,” he said. “They’re politicians, they make do. They pursue partisan advantage when they can. And the voters spoke. They have to live with it.”
Of course, the final makeup of the legislature may yet change. Two additional recounts are taking place this week for seats won by slim margins: a Democrat in Richmond and a Republican in Fredericksburg, where Democrats are pushing for a new vote after 100 voters were given ballots for the wrong district.
There have been some famously split legislatures federally, of course. What is referred to by the Senate Historical Office as the Great Senate Deadlock of 1881 ensued after the 47th Congress convened, with 37 Republicans, 37 Democrats and two independents on the Senate. Each side was able to persuade one of the independents to join, giving the Republicans an edge with a Republican vice president. The independent who helped sway the advantage for the Republicans was awarded with a plum position as the chair of the powerful Agriculture Committee.
In recent times, the Senate found itself in a similar position in 2000, after a contentious election awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. Democrats, who had evened up the seats in the Senate and seen their candidate, Al Gore, take the popular vote, argued that the committees should reflect an even divide.
“The agreement for equal shares of committee seats — Republicans held all the chairmanships — was reached largely through a direct conversation between the two Senate leaders at the time, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott and South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle,” CNN reported.
And Republicans allowed Daschle to serve as Senate majority leader for 17 days until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were sworn in, before handing the position over to Lott.
At least 12 people died after a bus carrying cruise ship passengers from South Florida to Mayan ruins in eastern Mexico flipped over a highway early Tuesday.
The nationalities of those who died have not yet been confirmed. Among those injured were seven Americans and two citizens of Sweden, said Quintana Roo state civil defense spokesman Vicente Martin, according to the Associated Press. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico is monitoring the situation.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman said in an emailed statement that U.S. officials “are in contact with local authorities and are working with them to determine if there were U.S. citizens on board.”
“We express our condolences to all those affected by this tragedy.”
The cause of the accident, which occurred on the Mahahual-Cafetal Highway in the southern part of Quintana Roo, is being investigated. The bus was heading to the ruins at Chacchoben, 110 miles south of Tulum, Mexican authorities said.
Those injured were taken to hospitals in Bacalar, Chetumal and Tulum, officials said.
The majority of the passengers came from two ships belonging to Miami-based Royal Caribbean Cruises: the Celebrity Equinox and the Serenade of the Seas, which are both seven-night Caribbean cruises, the company said in a statement. About 23 passengers on the bus came from the Celebrity Equinox, which left Saturday from Port Miami, while four came from the Serenade of the Seas, which departed Friday from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale.
“Our hearts go out to all those involved in the bus accident in Costa Maya,” the company said. “We are doing all we can to care for our guests, including assisting with medical care and transportation.”
In addition to the passengers, the bus was carrying a driver and guide, Costa Maya Mahahual, the bus company involved, said in a statement to the Associated Press.
The Chacchoben ruins are a popular tourist attraction, where people can explore ancient Mayan settlements, the earliest of which date to 1000 B.C., according to the area’s website. Discovered in 1942, the site comprises several temples in natural condition surrounded by jungle and wildlife.
The bus was part of a fleet traveling to Chacchoben, said Chris Brawley, a Texas passenger on the Serenade of the Seas who was on another bus to the ruins when they came upon the accident minutes after it occurred, according to the AP. It was shortly after 9 a.m. and they had been on the road for about 35 to 40 minutes.
The crash happened on a narrow, two-lane road with no shoulder or guardrail, he said, and it did not appear that any other vehicle was involved. The sky was clear.
While he didn’t see the crash, the “bus clearly lost control somehow,” evident by swerve marks on the road, he told the AP.
His ship had been in Roatan, Honduras, on Monday and was scheduled to be in Cozumel on Wednesday, he said.
A Cleveland passenger, Michael Schuenemeyer — who was on another bus that passed the accident an hour later — told the AP that the bus was “in pretty sad shape.”
More than a dozen cruise bus excursion accidents have happened near Caribbean ports of call over the last decade, Miami maritime lawyer James Walker of Walker O’Neill told the Miami Herald.
In 2006, 12 peopledied in a bus accident in Chile after visiting a national park — but their tour had been arranged privately, and was not among those the cruise line offered.
Video images from the scene showed the bus on its side off the two-lane highway, according to the AP. Some survivors lay on the pavement while others walked around.
There were crucial steps that ensured passage, including a deficit bargain struck between Senators Patrick J. Toomey and Bob Corker in September, pressure from Mr. Trump on a controversial push to tweak retirement savings in the bill and, in the Senate, an early and crucial endorsement from John McCain of Arizona, the Republican wild card whose late defection killed the health care bill.
“There was never a moment where I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’re going to fail at this,’” Mr. Toomey said in an interview. “There were many moments I thought, ‘This is still an open question.’”
What there never was, in the minds of Republican leaders, was doubt the bill would pass — not even in the scattered moments over the past several weeks when individual senators held it up to demand changes.
“At the end of the day,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview, “I didn’t have a single person say, ‘If you don’t do this, I’m going to vote no.’”
The House approved the final version of the bill on Tuesday afternoon over the opposition of 12 Republicans and every Democrat who cast a vote. Because of a procedural issue, the House will have to vote again on Wednesday, but the bill is expected to land on Mr. Trump’s desk within days.
On the House floor, Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s voice cracked as he signaled victory.
“My colleagues, this is a day I’ve been looking forward to for a long time,” Mr. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, said Tuesday, in teeing up a vote he had worked toward his entire career. “Today, we are giving the people of this country their money back.”
To get to that moment, Republicans walled themselves off from criticism, convincing one another that unfavorable economic analyses of their bill were wrong, and that its poor poll numbers would improve once the cuts worked their way into Americans’ paychecks.
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The schedule minimized time back home for members, allowing them to largely avoid the contentious town hall meetings that helped sink their efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. They caught a break when Democrats reached a deal with Mr. Trump to keep the government open in early fall, freeing up valuable legislative time to push the tax bill forward.
Mr. Trump pushed party leaders again and again to deliver a bill quickly, and for the most part, he let them write it, intervening only to push for a low corporate rate and to nix an idea to meddle with tax-advantaged 401(k) plans. At times, the president would briefly derail the process with stray and unexpected Twitter posts that sent lawmakers and his own staff scrambling to reconsider major parts of the plan.
In the end, the bill met nearly every deadline in an “optimistic” timeline party leaders prepared in early October. That timeline called for House and Senate votes on a conference committee bill to occur Dec. 18. It was off by a day.
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Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, in October in Washington. Credit
Tom Brenner/The New York Times
The failure of health care gave life to the tax bill
Mr. Ryan and other Republican leaders have laid the groundwork for a large tax bill for years, but their efforts stalled in the early months of the Trump administration, as the party engaged in a high-visibility effort to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health law. That effort crashed to the ground in the early hours of July 28, when Mr. McCain and Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine broke from their Republican colleagues in a dramatic late-night defeat for party leaders.
Republicans took fire from the party’s base, which had voted for Republicans in large part over health care concerns, from conservative donors and from the president himself. Congressional aides said that criticism galvanized lawmakers, almost immediately, to rally behind what at that point was still only the broad outlines of a tax plan — but which Mr. McConnell and others saw as the key to appeasing furious Republican voters.
A congressional aide said the health care failure united Republicans toward a single goal: tax cuts.
At the time of the health care collapse, Republicans had made little public progress toward a tax bill, and it appeared on the back burner. The White House had released a one-page memo in April outlining its priorities. The House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Kevin Brady of Texas, a low-key business advocate better known for his work on health care, had put forth a tax-reform framework. But conservative groups had spent months killing one of its core provisions, a so-called border adjustment that would have effectively taxed imports, raising an estimated $1 trillion over a decade to help offset the revenues lost from reducing tax rates.
When Mr. Brady and Mr. Ryan officially abandoned that provision in late July, Republicans faced a difficult question: How would they raise enough revenues in a tax bill to ensure they did not add further to the federal budget deficit, after complaining throughout the Obama administration that deficits and debt were choking the economy?
The answer was, they did not.
Deficit concerns were played down
This was the first critical decision Republicans made to keep on their accelerated timeline: They embraced a budget that allowed for much higher deficits, on the assumption that their tax cuts would generate enough new growth and revenues to pay for themselves.
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A few senators voiced concerns about the possibility of adding more to the debt. They included Mr. Corker of Tennessee, a member of the Budget Committee, who announced this year he was not going to run for re-election and got into a public Twitter fight with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Corker was one of the committee members who gathered in Mr. McConnell’s office in August and were charged with writing a budget document that would accelerate passage of the tax bill. Congressional leaders and administration officials had already agreed to utilize the budget reconciliation process, which would allow them to bypass a Democratic filibuster in the Senate and approve a bill entirely on party lines. To do that, they needed a budget, which would include a limit on how much the tax cuts in the bill could add to the budget deficit over the next decade.
Many senators, led by Mr. Toomey, wanted a $2.5 trillion limit, which was less than Mr. Trump had proposed in his campaign tax plan but would all but ensure an immediate return to $1 trillion a year deficits.
At Mr. McConnell’s request, Mr. Toomey negotiated for weeks with Mr. Corker, and they eventually compromised on a $1.5 trillion limit. Mr. Toomey convinced many of his colleagues, including Mr. McConnell, that the bill could easily produce enough growth to offset those lost revenues — an estimate that no detailed economic analysis of the bill has yet supported.
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“For some time there was a lot of talk from a lot of sources that tax reform had to score as revenue neutral,” Mr. Toomey said. “I was 100 percent certain we would never get it done if we held ourselves to that constraint, and furthermore that there was no need to hold ourselves to that constraint.”
Mr. Corker felt $1.5 trillion was the best deal he could get, and he worried that if he refused, party leaders would bypass his committee and allow a vote on a budget with a much larger tax-cut cap.
“Hindsight being 2020,” Mr. Corker said this week, “I wish we had attempted to limit even more on that front end.”
Key votes fall into place
A significant moment came in September, when Mr. Trump cut a deal with the Democratic leaders, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, to prevent a government shutdown and raise the federal debt limit. Republicans say the move averted a protracted fight in both chambers, and left Republican leaders optimistic that they could move quickly on a tax bill by fall.
In the Senate, groups of members and their staff met on an almost daily basis to work through individual provisions in the bill to come.
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By the end of the month, top congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump had released a more detailed framework, identifying a 20 percent corporate tax rate, down from a high of 35 percent today.
But Mr. McConnell and Mr. Ryan pushed back on administration officials, including Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, when they attempted to release even more details, such as the break points for individual tax rates. That move, congressional staff said, gave House and Senate tax writers more freedom to craft their own bills and avoid getting boxed into proposals that could prove problematic.
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Senators Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, left; Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah; and Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, at a Senate Finance Committee meeting in November in Washington. Credit
Eric Thayer for The New York Times
The House and Senate approved Mr. Corker and Mr. Toomey’s budget compromise in October. House leaders introduced their bill at the start of November, and it sailed to passage two weeks later. Senators released their bill before Thanksgiving and quickly amended it in two controversial ways: To stay within the budget guidelines, they set individual tax cuts to expire at the end of 2025. And to free up more space for tax cuts, they eliminated the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate for health insurance coverage.
To the surprise of their aides, senators embraced both changes.
Mr. Trump beat a public drum for the tax bill throughout the process, but he engaged selectively on policy details, often over Twitter, sometimes backed with phone calls. He urged lawmakers to eliminate the mandate, and he scuttled a proposal in the House that would have raised revenue by shifting the tax treatment of some popular retirement contributions.
On a long trip to Asia, Mr. Trump often called Mr. Brady to discuss the bills. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump stayed behind to lobby senators, and she helped push for an expansion of the child tax credit that was added in the Senate Finance Committee.
In late November, Mr. Trump flew to the St. Louis suburbs to rally for the tax bill on a stage decorated for the holidays. It was there that he unveiled what would become his tagline for the closing presidential push on the bill, promising Americans a tax cut for Christmas.
Back in the Senate, key votes were falling into place. Mr. McCain, satisfied that the bill was moving through proper Senate channels, turned to an old friend to assess its effect on the economy. That was Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist who had overseen economic policy on Mr. McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, who gave Mr. McCain a frame for considering the bill.
“‘This is first and foremost about giving better opportunity to workers,’” Mr. Holtz-Eakin recalled Mr. McCain saying. “I said, ‘It’s going to create some debt. It’s going to have some deficits, no matter what you hear. So your question is, is it worth it?’”
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Mr. McCain concluded it was. He announced his support for the bill before the Senate vote.
That was a crucial moment, Mr. McConnell. “John was not there for us on Obamacare, and he was getting urged by everybody center-left,” Mr. McConnell said, “to do it to us one more time.” Mr. McCain will ultimately not vote on the bill, having returned to Arizona for medical treatment.
Ms. Collins also announced her support, after conversations with business owners in her state and with Mr. Holtz-Eakin, though she came away with the impression that the bill would pay for itself. Other wavering senators signed on — all but Mr. Corker, who was alone in being rattled by a Joint Committee on Taxation analysis that showed the bill would add $1 trillion to deficits even after accounting for additional growth. His lone no was not enough to stop the bill, even when coupled with every Democrat in the chamber, though it gave Republicans a slim margin for error. Mr. Corker later reversed course and said he would support the final version.
Choosing to negotiate with Republicans
As the bill raced through Congress, it sank in the eyes of the public. Majorities of Americans told pollsters they opposed it, and that they expected it would raise, not lower, their tax bills. Republicans told each other those polls would flip — that the country would come to love the bill when it saw its benefits.
Democrats fanned the dissatisfaction, with constant complaints about the bill and its process. Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi thundered on the Senate and House floor that the bill would hurt middle-class Americans, clearly setting up a campaign theme for Democrats to embrace in the midterm elections.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, said he started the year with a sense of cautious optimism about tax policy but found Republicans unwilling to engage in a serious way.
Mr. Wyden described a visit from Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, as a “show and tell” and said that Mr. Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, never followed up on a promise to look into ways to make the tax plan more populist.
Mr. McConnell and Mr. Toomey lamented that the bill was not bipartisan and thus was less likely to be enduring. Mr. Toomey said that Republican leaders talked seriously about working across the aisle, but that when Democratic senators sent a letter last summer with strict conditions for working with them, it was clear that Republicans would have to proceed on their own.
The final negotiations this month were entirely between Republicans. The Senate version of the bill largely won out, but House leaders pushed, successfully, for an immediate cut of the corporate rate, which was raised slightly to 21 percent from 20 percent, and for a reduction in the top individual tax rate to 37 percent.
Negotiations completed, Republicans congratulated each other for what they remain convinced will be seen as a landmark legislative victory. On Tuesday, a few hours before the final Senate vote on the bill, Mr. McConnell acknowledged that Democrats believe the bill will spark a backlash that could determine control of Congress.
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“They must believe it must be a political winner for them,” he said. “We believe it’s a political win for the country, and thus, it’s going to be good for us. So we’ll take it to the country and see what happens in 2018.”
Palestinians place on the ground a representation of a U.S. flag during a protest Dec. 20, 2017, against President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. (Mussa Qawasma/Reuters) 
