The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been carrying out an intimidation campaign to influence the United States, and one group it targets is Shen Yun Performing Arts.
The New York group aims to revive traditional Chinese heritage before the Party’s takeover of China.
After threatening emails to the company and theaters and slashing of tires, a lawmaker asks in a congressional hearing:
“What could the United States be doing to protect this group?”
Per Peter Mattis of Jamestown Foundation, it’s about actively “investigating those as crimes,”
“They have to be a priority for investigative resources not simply for local police departments, but also for federal law enforcement,” he told Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.).
“When we see those actions, they are frankly criminal acts by a foreign government against our people on our soil. This is something that has to be prioritized with a response in the bilateral relationship with the PRC, rather than a shoulder shrug, or something that we can quietly say that we talked about later.”
Many Shen Yun performers practice the meditation discipline Falun Gong, which is heavily persecuted in China.
They are targeted on the basis of their faith, Ms. Norton said at a hearing on the CCP’s political warfare against the United States.
Witnesses at the hearing shared how the Chinese regime can shut down criticism of human rights abuses by controlling the narrative.
“One good example is its attack on the Falun Gong. It’s basically convinced the entire academic university system in the United States that they are a brainwashed cult. They’ve done the same thing to our media institutions. That is the way they do it, it’s by controlling our own narratives,” said retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding.
—Eva Fu
SENATE DEMOCRATS SHUT DOWN IMPEACHMENT TRIAL
In an unprecedented move on Wednesday, the Senate dismissed the two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The dismissals, made in party-line votes, came after vocal objections by Senate Republicans who said not allowing the impeachment to go to a full trial flouted the Constitution and long-held precedent.
House Republicans in February voted to impeach Mayorkas over his handling of the border crisis that has seen more than 8 million illegal immigrants enter the country since President Joe Biden took office. The first impeachment article accused Mayorkas of refusing to enforce immigration laws; the second article charged him with breaching public trust.
Shortly after all 100 senators were sworn in as jurors for the trial, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) raised points of order to effectively dismiss each of the two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas on the grounds that they were “unconstitutional.”
The impeachment articles, Schumer contended, did not meet the threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors” required under the Constitution. Schumer has previously described Mayorkas’s impeachment as a “sham,” an awful precedent for Congress,“ and the result of a ”policy disagreement.”
Senate Republicans raised a series of motions to thwart Schumer’s moves, arguing the Constitution required a full impeachment trial. Each of those attempts was defeated in party-line votes.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said the Senate majority leader was “setting our Constitution ablaze and bulldozing 200 years of precedent.”
In protesting Schumer looking to dismiss the trial, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) called the pending move a way to “add a new chapter to the movie ‘Pulp Fiction.’” He requested the Senate move into executive session to argue about dismissing the trial, which Kennedy noted would be “unprecedented.”
Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) lamented that Biden and Mayorkas’ policies have led to “the worst border crisis in American history”
He noted that 357 of the 7.6 million illegal aliens that have been apprehended during the Biden administration are on the terrorist watchlist. The Senate had a responsibility to hear the impeachment articles, Thune said.
There have now been 18 Senate impeachment trials since the first Congress in 1789, with eight resulting in convictions, while nine ended without convictions. A two-thirds majority of the Senate is required to convict an impeached officer of the federal government.
Having dismissed the trial, the Senate will resume its regularly scheduled programming of passing legislation and confirming executive and judicial nominees.
-Jackson Richman and Mark Tapscott
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) listens during a press conference following a House GOP caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on April 10, 2024. Samuel Corum/Getty Images
FOREIGN AID BILLS RELEASED
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has revealed a series of foreign aid bills totaling $95 billion that come as he faces renewed challenges and frustrations from his conference.
The packages unveiled yesterday include funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific partners.
The $95 billion price tag puts it nearly evenly in line with an earlier Senate-passed foreign aid and national security package that Johnson declined to take up in the House.
A little more than $26 billion of the package will go to Israel, and $16.5 billion of that funding is dedicated to military funding, including replenishing the depleted reserves of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
Nearly $10 billion in additional funding is slated for humanitarian relief for “vulnerable populations and communities” in the Gaza Strip.
Finally, the bill includes roughly $8 billion for the United States’ Indo-Pacific partners—namely Taiwan—amid increasing Chinese aggression in the region.
A fourth bill includes a provision that would force China to divest from TikTok—a bill that passed the House but has stalled in the Senate—and the REPO Act, which would allow the United States to finance some of the package’s foreign aid by seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs. It also allows for some aid to Ukraine to be structured as a loan, albeit a forgivable one.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times that it’s hard for him to say whether he’ll back the normally party-line procedural step on a rule vote to advance the legislation.
But he did predict that enough Republicans will seek to block the advancement of the Ukraine package that Democrats will need to defect to get it over the finish line.
The move, likely to inflame tensions in an already deeply divided House Republican conference, increases the likelihood that Johnson, like his predecessor Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), will face a motion to vacate.
Since Monday evening, when Johnson announced his plan to put new foreign aid on the floor, he has faced pressure from two members of his conference—Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)—to resign.
That’s a call that Johnson said he has no plans to heed.
However, with his paper-thin two-vote majority that will soon be reduced to a one-vote majority when Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) leaves later this week, the threat posed by Greene and Massie is far from an idle one.
Still, many Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy, including Reps. Bob Good (R-Va.), Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) have indicated that they’re not anxious to remove Johnson, fearing it could end in a Democrat taking the speaker’s gavel.
Nevertheless, talk of a motion to vacate is picking up following the release of the bills—and should it be taken up, Johnson will almost certainly need Democrats’ help to keep his job.
—Joseph Lord
BOOKMARKS
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik said in a congressional hearing on Wednesday that calling for the annihilation of Jews violates the Ivy League school’s code of conduct, as she came under fire over the university’s response to growing on-campus antisemitism since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, reports The Epoch Times’ Jackson Richman. Jewish and pro-Israel students have experienced virulent antisemitism on campus.
Items that would have gone through the Port of Baltimore have been rerouted, reports The New York Times’ Peter Eavis. This comes in the aftermath of the Francis Scott Key Bridge falling down last month after a ship hit it.
The Supreme Court unanimously made it easier for workers who are transferred from one job to another against their wishes to sue and claim they are being discriminated against, reports The Associated Press’ Mark Sherman. Justice Elena Kagan wrote, “Although an employee must show some harm from a forced transfer to prevail in a Title VII suit, she need not show that the injury satisfies a significance test.”
The Team USA basketball roster for the Summer Olympics this year in Paris has been announced with NBA superstars, reports CBS Sports’ Sam Quinn. The team will include LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant. Team USA is looking for its fifth consecutive gold medal.
A top military official allegedly lied about what he was doing as the Capitol was breached on Jan. 6, 2021, The Epoch Times’ Zachary Stieber reported. The whistleblower allegations claim that then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy made multiple false claims, including that he spoke to the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard on two separate occasions after officials requested that the Guard be deployed to the Capitol.
