Louisiana

House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler is officially issuing a subpoena to obtain the full, unredacted report authored by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and the underlying materials used in his investigation.

Just a few hours after the Department of Justice released a redacted version of Mueller’s report to Congress and the public, Nadler said he will issue a subpoena for the full report and investigatory materials. The Judiciary Committee had voted to authorize him to do so earlier this month, and the chairman had said he would if the Department of Justice declined to willingly provide the full report to Congress.

A united Louisiana congressional delegation is lobbying a key California official to try to avert a pending Golden State ban on the “importation, possession or sale of alligator and crocodile products.”

Gators are big business in Louisiana. The state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries estimates alligator harvesting is a $50 million-a-year industry in the state. It says ranchers collect over 350,000 alligator eggs, trappers harvest over 28,000 wild alligators and farmers harvest over 250,000 farm-raised alligators annually.

OPINION — When people are being threatened, intimidated and murdered, you would think that partisan bickering would take a back seat. But this is the U.S. Congress we’re talking about. Instead, what was supposed to be an examination of white nationalism and the rise of hate crimes on Tuesday devolved into what Americans have wearily begun to expect from their elected representatives. The House Judiciary Committee members inhabited different parties and different planets.

When what’s at stake is this serious, that’s pretty frightening.

House Republicans should have virtually no power in the minority, but Democrats’ inability to unify as a caucus around topline fiscal 2020 spending levels has given them some unexpected leverage. The question now is what they’ll do with it.

President Donald Trump and his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, don’t want to raise the statutory discretionary spending caps for fiscal 2020, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to reach a bipartisan deal to do just that to avoid a 10 percent cut in spending from fiscal 2019 levels.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel offered a scathing rebuke of President Donald Trump’s climate change policies to lawmakers on the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

But while they were there Tuesday, both men also had to tussle with the panel’s conservative firebrands who said fears of climate change were “alarmist notions” and repeatedly challenged Kerry and Hagel on whether they were qualified to talk about the subject.

Rep. Clay Higgins reprised his role as a tough-talking sheriff’s deputy nicknamed “Cajun John Wayne” this week condemning fires that engulfed three predominantly black Louisiana churches. But the Republican drew criticism for rebuking the violence without acknowledging his past inflammatory statements and endorsements of anti-government militia groups.

Fires at the Baptist churches in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, are prompting fears that they were the targets of arson in a racist hate crime. Investigators have been cautious in their public statements, but acknowledged Sunday that the blazes are connected. 

The special counsel’s nearly two-year probe of Russian interference in the 2016 elections may have let the president himself mostly off the hook, but one sector emerged positively scathed: international lobbying.

Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation resulted in the convictions of onetime lobbyists, of course, but more consequentially, it put an unprecedented glare on the sometimes shadowy foreign influence campaigns that play out on U.S. soil — and the disclosure rules of those engagements.

The House on Thursday cleared a historic measure ordering the president to end military operations in Yemen, the first time lawmakers have gone this far in trying to end a foreign military campaign since the Vietnam era.

President Donald Trump has promised to veto the bipartisan joint resolution, which the Senate passed in March. Based on previous Yemen-related votes, there likely will not be the two-thirds support necessary in both the House and Senate to overturn the veto.

Democratic lawmakers want to raise caps on federal spending. So do many Republicans. But despite the desires of each party’s congressional leadership, President Donald Trump is refusing to go along, possibly complicating his re-election bid.

In its latest federal spending request, the White House proposed a steep hike in the Pentagon budget for fiscal 2020 — an unsurprising move by a Republican president who has vowed to “rebuild” the U.S. military. But Trump and his team would keep existing spending caps in place.

OPINION — Nearly 50,000 people died from an opioid overdose in 2017. Today, Americans are more likely to die from opioid overdoses than car accidents. While the United States is beginning to see a few positive signs that overdose deaths are leveling off, this doesn’t mean we’re even close to ending the epidemic.

Untreated opioid use disorder has numerous consequences, including neonatal abstinence syndrome, the spread of infectious diseases and family separations. These consequences will be with us for years to come. So too should federal investments to address the epidemic, and they should be transparent to policymakers and the public.