Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday named Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and a harsh critic of former President Donald J. Trump, to a newly created special committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, taking the unusual step of giving one of her seats to a member of the opposing party.
Ms. Cheney was ousted from her Republican leadership post for speaking out about the role that Mr. Trump and her own party played in pushing false claims of voting fraud that stoked the riot, which unfolded as Congress met to formalize President Biden’s election.
Her appointment to the committee appeared to be an attempt by Democrats to bring a degree of bipartisanship to an investigation that G.O.P. leaders have fought mightily to block and have already dismissed as an unfair and one-sided inquiry.
Ms. Cheney said in a statement she was “honored to serve.” “Our oath to the Constitution must be above partisan politics,” she said.
Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, reacted angrily to the appointment, calling Ms. Cheney’s decision to accept the post “shocking” and suggesting that he would strip her of her other committee assignments as punishment.
“I don’t know in history where someone would get their committee assignments from the speaker and then expect to get them from the conference as well,” he said.
It would be the second time in as many months that Mr. McCarthy has penalized Ms. Cheney for insisting that Congress should scrutinize the Jan. 6 attack and Mr. Trump’s role in spreading the lie of a stolen election that inspired it. In May, Mr. McCarthy led the charge to oust Ms. Cheney from her post as the No. 3 House Republican.
On Thursday, Ms. Pelosi also announced she had selected Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, to chair the panel, which will also include a number of her closest allies and centrists who represent conservative-leaning districts.
“We have to get to the bottom of finding out all the things that went wrong on Jan. 6,” Mr. Thompson said.
The measure that created the panel was adopted on Wednesday over the opposition of nearly every Republican. Only Ms. Cheney and one other Republican, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, supported it.
Mr. McCarthy has the right to consult with Ms. Pelosi on five lawmakers from his party who would serve on the committee, but he declined on Thursday to say whether he would name any members, or who they would be.
Even without Mr. McCarthy’s appointments, however, the committee would have enough members to proceed with its work.
In addition to Ms. Cheney and Mr. Thompson, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Ms. Pelosi appointed:
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Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Administration Committee;
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Representative Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee;
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Representative Pete Aguilar of California
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Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida and a leader of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition;
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Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland; and
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Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia
Mr. McCarthy denied on Thursday that he had told Republicans privately that he would strip them of their committee assignments if they accepted an appointment to the panel from Ms. Pelosi, saying he was “not making any threats” on the matter.
But he then appeared to confirm that Ms. Cheney should not expect to keep committee posts granted to her by Republicans given her decision to accept Ms. Pelosi’s appointment, noting that the Wyoming Republican had not talked to him before doing so.
“Maybe she’s closer to her than us,” Mr. McCarthy said of Ms. Cheney’s relationship with the top House Democrat.
The select committee was established at Ms. Pelosi’s behest after Senate Republicans blocked the formation of a bipartisan commission to scrutinize the riot. It will investigate what its organizing resolution calls “the facts, circumstances and causes relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack.”
The select committee is also charged with reporting its findings, conclusions and recommendations for preventing future attacks.
“We cannot ignore what happened on January 6th; we cannot ignore what caused it,” Mr. Kinzinger wrote on Twitter, appending the hashtag “TheBigLie.” He pointed to a visual investigation released on Wednesday by The New York Times, which provided the most complete picture to date of how supporters of Mr. Trump planned and carried out the deadly assault.
The House on Thursday narrowly approved a five-year, $715 billion transportation and drinking water bill that would do more to combat climate change than the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure agreement embraced by President Biden, laying down its marker for negotiations on the package.
Democratic leaders see the bill as a baseline for high-stakes talks with the Senate aimed at producing the largest investment in infrastructure since Dwight D. Eisenhower began the interstate highway system. The House measure, which would authorize a 50-percent increase over current spending levels, passed by a vote of 221-201, largely along party lines.
The bill would devote $343 billion to roads, bridges and safety measures. It contains $109 billion for transit, which would increase federal spending by 140 percent. It envisions spending $168 billion for wastewater and drinking water, and it includes a new program to forgive unpaid water bills and then to help pay bills in the future, much as the government helps pay home heating and air conditioning costs.
With heat records rising from Arizona to Seattle, House Democrats emphasized the billions that would go toward measures aimed at climate change. It would spend money on electric car and truck charging stations, zero-emission transit vehicles and shoring up roads, bridges, tunnels and rail lines to withstand severe weather and rising seas. Funding for Amtrak would be tripled, to $32 billion, and planning for high-speed rail projects would be underwritten.
“We have to rebuild in ways that we never even thought about before,” said Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon, chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, adding, “This is the moment. We have to be bold.”
Just how the House Democratic vision of infrastructure will be melded with the deal struck by five Republicans and five Democrats in the Senate is anything but clear. The House bill and the Senate deal are not far apart in spending on traditional infrastructure. Both efforts take up Mr. Biden’s call to replace all of the country’s lead drinking water pipes.
But the Senate framework only lays down broad categories of spending, while the House bill would extend surface transportation policies and revenues from user fees that are set to expire Oct. 1. It would also establish new policies like Buy-American requirements and a pilot program to give low-income people better access to transit.
Another wrinkle: It is the first bill in a decade to include funds for projects in lawmakers’s home districts, known as earmarks. There are 1,473 of them totaling nearly $5.7 billion. House members in both parties will be reluctant to lose them.
One major thing missing in the House bill, however, is Republican support — even from those who won coveted projects for their districts. Only two G.O.P. lawmakers crossed party lines to support it.
House Republicans criticized the legislation as overly political, too expensive and slanted toward social engineering measures that would outstrip the funds available from gas and diesel taxes and other user fees long dedicated to infrastructure spending. Republican leaders called the bill the “Green New Deal and Inflation Transportation Act.”
With many House Republicans denying the established science of climate change and rural lawmakers feeling shortchanged by the shift toward mass transit and rail, the bill is not expected to draw the broad support usually afforded to such measures.
The climate provisions are substantial. The bill includes $4 billion for electric-vehicle charging stations, $8.3 billion to reduce carbon pollution and $6.2 billion to make infrastructure resistant to extreme weather. Answering Mr. Biden, it would dedicate $3 billion to tearing down bridges and overpasses that separate many poor communities, most of them Black and Latino, from their cities.
To avoid breaking Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on middle-income Americans, House Democrats would not raise the gas tax to cover the increased spending.
Mr. DeFazio said the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee would produce separate legislation later to pay for the infrastructure spending, but House approved the spending without having seen the other side of the ledger.
Two weeks after President Biden met President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and demanded that he rein in the constant cyberattacks directed at American targets, American and British intelligence agencies on Thursday exposed the details of what they called a global effort by Russia’s military intelligence organization to break into government organizations, defense contractors, universities and media companies.
The operation, described as crude but broad, is “almost certainly ongoing,” the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, known as GCHQ, said in a statement. They identified the Russian intelligence agency, or G.R.U., as the same group that hacked into the Democratic National Committee and released emails in an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald J. Trump.
Thursday’s revelation is an attempt to expose Russian hacking techniques, rather than any specific new attacks, and it includes pages of technical detail to enable potential targets to identify that a breach is underway. Many of the actions by the G.R.U. — including an effort to get into data stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud services — have already been documented by private cybersecurity firms.
But the political significance of the statement is larger: It is a first challenge to Mr. Putin since the summit in Geneva, where Mr. Biden handed him a list of 16 areas of “critical infrastructure” in the United States and said that it would not tolerate continued Russian cyberattacks.
“We’ll find out whether we have a cybersecurity arrangement that begins to bring some order,” Mr. Biden said at the end of that meeting, only minutes after Mr. Putin declared that the United States, not Russia, was the largest source of cyberattacks around the world.
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld voting restrictions in Arizona and signaled that challenges to new state laws making it harder to vote would face a hostile reception from a majority of the justices.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.
The decision was the court’s first consideration of how a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to voting restrictions that have a disproportionate impact on members of minority groups, and it was issued as disputes over voting rights have taken center stage in American politics.
As Republican-controlled state legislatures increasingly seek to impose restrictive new voting rules, Democrats and civil rights groups have turned to the courts to argue that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote, thwart the will of the majority and deny equal access to minority voters. The decision suggested that Supreme Court would not be inclined to strike down many of the measures.
After the ruling, President Biden said in a statement that “the court has now done severe damage” to two important provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
“After all we have been through to deliver the promise of this Nation to all Americans, we should be fully enforcing voting rights laws, not weakening them,” he said. “Yet this decision comes just over a week after Senate Republicans blocked even a debate — even consideration — of the For the People Act that would have protected the right to vote from action by Republican legislators in states across the country.”
“While this broad assault against voting rights is sadly not unprecedented, it is taking on new forms,” Mr. Biden said. “It is no longer just about a fight over who gets to vote and making it easier for eligible voters to vote. It is about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all.”
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld voting restrictions in Arizona and signaled that challenges to new state laws making it harder to vote would face a hostile reception from a majority of the justices.
The 6-3 ruling left voting rights activists on the defensive, grappling with a ruling that seemed to indicate an uphill battle for those using the Voting Rights Act to challenge these laws in court.
The ruling established a series of “guideposts” for what could potentially constitute a violation under the act, appearing to limit the paths for mounting legal challenges to new measures being proposed and passed in Republican-controlled states.
“The test is more difficult to meet than Congress intended when it passed the act,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder of the Voting Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a former election lawyer. “So on that point, I think the dissenting justices got it exactly right: The test is too restrictive.”
There are other legal avenues to challenge restrictive voting laws besides the Voting Rights Act, including under the First, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.
But the act has been the paramount tool for voting rights groups seeking to rein in laws that could disproportionately affect communities of color, and the decision could threaten some of the legal strategies that these groups and election lawyers have been drafting to challenge some of the new laws.
President Biden said he was “deeply disappointed” in the court’s ruling and said it would cause “severe damage” to the federal government’s ability to protect voting rights. He again urged Congress to enact new protections for voting.
“The court’s decision, harmful as it is, does not limit Congress’s ability to repair the damage done today,” Mr. Biden said. “It puts the burden back on Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act to its intended strength.”
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Biden Promises Continued Federal Aid for Surfside Building Collapse
President Biden met with local officials in Surfside, Fla., and pledged that his administration will continue to provide federal aid after the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building.
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“I just came to say thanks, and listen to find out what I can do as president, what I can do in terms of help for whatever you need. The governor and the mayor have been completely open with me — whatever they’ve asked for, I think we’ve been able to deliver, and I think there’s more that we can do, including, I think I have the power and we’ll know shortly, and that’s to be able to pick up 100 percent of the costs for the county and the state over the next 30 days. I just want to, you know, start today, if I could with as thorough a briefing as you’re able to give me. Tell me what you need, and that goes for both the senators and the congresswoman and anyone in Florida, just to pick up the phone. For real, I’m not joking about it.” “As we talk to the family members, as you will soon be doing, as they are waiting and waiting for news of their loved ones, as you said, and also those who’ve been displaced, I mean, it’s just a crisis all around. But we are working together to handle the crisis, to get the answers about what happened here. And we can update you on that. And we are going to be examining every inch of this catastrophe.” “The fact that we now have that search-and-rescue team from Virginia here, and I know we have some more on the way, that’s going to be helpful because this is grueling and obviously the families lives have been shattered. Mental health is going to be important. We do appreciate the collaboration from local, state and federal. And, you know, what we just need now is we need a little bit of luck and a little bit of prayers. And, you know, we would like to be able to, you know, to see some miracles happen.”
President Biden pledged ongoing help from the federal government as he arrived in Florida Thursday to resume his role as consoler in chief following the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building which has left at least 18 people dead and as many as 145 unaccounted for.
At a briefing where he sat next to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican and frequent critic of the president, Mr. Biden hailed the cooperation between state, local and federal agencies in the wake of the tragedy.
“I mean just the simple act of everybody doing whatever needs to be done really makes a difference,” he said.
Mr. DeSantis returned the compliment, saying that Mr. Biden’s administration had been quick to recognize the severity of the incident.
“You guys have not only been supportive at the federal level but we’ve had no bureaucracy,” Mr. DeSantis told the president.
“I promise there will be none,” Mr. Biden responded.
Following the briefing in Surfside, Fla., the president met briefly with a group of emergency workers, including firefighters and search-and-rescue teams who had been working for the past week at the site of the disaster.
“I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” Mr. Biden told them. “No one fully appreciates what you do. But I promise you we know. We know. What you are dealing with here is incredible, having to deal with the uncertainty.”
The president is scheduled to meet later in the afternoon with family members of those killed or missing in the still unexplained destruction of the residential structure.
For Mr. Biden, who has faced his own personal tragedy — including the deaths of his wife and daughter, and later his grown son — it is a role that is all too familiar. His successful campaign for the presidency was built in part on his ability to display an empathy for those suffering that often eluded former President Donald J. Trump, especially in the midst of a pandemic that has claimed 600,000 American lives.
When space shuttles explode or mines collapse, presidents have often expressed grief, horror and sadness with the cameras running, hoping to help the public grapple with the difficult emotions that flow from tragedy. But Mr. Biden’s task on Thursday may be among the trickier ones in recent memory.
Because rescuers have not publicly given up the possibility that survivors may be found under the rubble, the president cannot simply eulogize the dead. Families are clinging to hope, no matter how slim. And yet, Mr. Biden’s visit is an indication that the efforts at the collapse site are moving to a new, less hopeful phase.
No survivors have been found since shortly after the collapse, and on Thursday rescue work was paused while engineers evaluated concerns that the rest of the tower could also fall.
The visit comes just three months after the president traveled to Georgia to express grief for the victims of a mass shooting that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent, amid a spasm of racial violence across the country.
“I know they feel like there’s a black hole in their chest they’re being sucked into, and things will never get better,” Mr. Biden said after a meeting with leaders of Atlanta’s Asian American community. “But our prayers are with you. And I assure you, the one you lost will always be with you, always be with you.”
White House officials declined to say much on Wednesday night about what the president will say in Florida. After his closed-door sessions with family members, the president is expected to deliver remarks to the nation from the hotel before leaving to return to Washington.
The White House did not say whether Mr. Biden would visit the actual site of the building’s collapse. Earlier in the week, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the president was determined not to let his presence get in the way of the search-and-rescue teams.
For most of the families, the visit will be a high-profile interruption of their desperate vigil as they wait for word from the pile of crushed concrete and bent steel that used to be the homes of their loved ones. For a handful of them, Mr. Biden’s appearance will serve as a kind of grim exclamation point.
The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that California may not require charities soliciting contributions in the state to report the identities of their major donors.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.
The requirement was challenged by Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a group affiliated with the Koch family, and the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative Christian public-interest law firm. They argued that the requirement violated the First Amendment’s protection of the freedom of association by subjecting donors to possible harassment.
The disputed measure requires charities to file with the state a copy of a federal tax form that identifies major donors. Under federal law, the Internal Revenue Service must keep the form confidential. California also promised to keep the forms secret, but it has not always done so.
According to court papers, the challengers discovered in 2015 that the state had displayed about 1,800 forms on its website. State officials said that the disclosures were inadvertent and promptly corrected and that the state had imposed new security measures.
In a call secretly recorded by an individual working for the environmental group Greenpeace UK, a veteran oil-industry lobbyist described efforts by Exxon Mobil to undermine government action on climate change.
During the call with a person he believed was a recruiter, Keith McCoy, a senior director of federal relations for Exxon, described how the oil and gas giant had targeted influential United States senators in an effort to weaken climate action in President Biden’s flagship infrastructure plan. That plan now contains few of the ambitious ideas Mr. Biden initially proposed to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.
Mr. McCoy also said that Exxon’s support for a tax on carbon dioxide was “a great talking point” for the oil company, but that he did not believe the tax would ever happen. He also said that the company had aggressively fought climate science through “shadow groups.”
On Wednesday, excerpts from the conversation were aired by the British broadcaster Channel 4. The affiliate of Greenpeace that recorded the video, Unearthed, also released excerpts.
Darren Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, said in a statement that the comments “in no way represent the company’s position on a variety of issues, including climate policy, and our firm commitment that carbon pricing is important to addressing climate change,” and that Mr. McCoy and another lobbyist interviewed in the recording “were never involved in developing the company’s policy positions on the issues discussed.”
