DELEITURAS

• Ro Khanna is a liberal Democrat representing California’s 17th congressional district, an area that encompasses much of Silicon Valley. 
• Khanna has devoted much of his career to helping bring high-paying tech jobs to rural communities across Middle America, touting the mutual benefit to both parties. 
• The California congressman, now in his second term in office, has sponsored legislation that has earned widespread bipartisan support and President Donald Trump’s signatures.  

Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley, has made it his life’s work to bring well-paying, high-tech jobs to small towns across America.

“I think it’s so important that we integrate rural communities into technology,” Khanna told The Daily Caller News Foundation, explaining why the small towns that dot Middle America are a better landing place for the high-tech jobs that emanate from the San Francisco Bay Area. “There’s no reason that we should be offshoring 210,000 tech jobs, which are basic jobs.”

After winning election to Congress in 2016, Khanna has heavily focused on helping communities far outside his own district.

“We don’t all have to be rockstar tech leaders that are creating billion-dollar companies. We want to focus on what middle-class jobs in technology are going to look like,” Khanna said.

The California Democrat believes both sides have something to gain when companies like Google or Facebook open up shop in Middle America: Residents enjoy the benefits that come with more high-skilled work, and employers aren’t forced to pay the sky-high salaries required in big cities such as San Francisco.

While he may identify as a liberal Democrat, Khanna’s work on tech development has attracted widespread support across the political spectrum.

The congressman’s Valor Act, which streamlines the process companies must go through to offer apprenticeships to our nation’s veterans, was passed by a GOP-conrtolled House and Senate, and promptly signed into law by President Donald Trump in November 2017. Another piece of legislation spearheaded by Khanna, the IDEA Act, also earned the Republican president’s signature in December 2018. That bill mandated federal agencies update their websites in order to bring them on par with the private sector.

“If you want to make sure we have a unified country then do some basic things. First of all, make sure everyone is participating in the benefits of technology, not that all the wealth is just going to very, very few individuals,” Khanna said during an interview Friday with Tucker Carlson. Both Khanna and the conservative Fox News host agreed certain Silicon Valley tech firms would face a populist backlash if they continued to rip off American taxpayers with labor costs.

California’s 17th congressional district, which Khanna has represented since January 2017, is quite different from your typical Midwest town. The district boasts a median income of $121,000 and is home to a number of famous corporate headquarters: Google, Apple, Tesla and numerous others.

However, the West Coast lawmaker has spent countless hours traveling to rural towns that can be hard to find on a map. His quest to bring tech jobs to Middle America eventually earned him the nickname “ambassador of Silicon Valley.”

Khanna, for example, traveled with a bipartisan delegation to Paintsville, Kentucky in March 2017 in order to support an initiative that trains locals in the fields of coding and computer technology. He participated in a roundtable discussion with Silicon Valley venture capitalists in Youngstown, Ohio in an effort to bring their investment money to communities depressed with a declining manufacturing industry.

In one of his more recent trips, Khanna visited Jefferson, Iowa in December 2018 to lead a local program that seeks to attract tech jobs to rural communities. The small town of around 4,000 hosted executives from big-name companies such as LinkedIn and Microsoft, and toured an empty building that would soon house a new tech facility. The program aims to revitalize small Iowa towns that have been long plagued with underdevelopment.

It appeared the Californian’s visit to Jefferson was well received. In an op-ed from the town’s local paper, Khanna was referred to as “Jefferson’s real congressman.”

“It’s possible Ro Khanna did more for Greene County, Iowa, in 16 hours this past weekend than Steve King has in 16 years,” read an opening paragraph from The Jefferson Herald. “Yes, Khanna represents Silicon Valley, but if you were one of the Iowans [participating in the tech event], you know this, and know it well: Ro Khanna is representing Greene County, Iowa, too.”

The Navy will commission its newest Independence-variant littoral combat ship, the future USS Tulsa (LCS 16), during a 10 a.m. PST ceremony Saturday, Feb. 16, at Pier 30/32 in San Francisco.

U.S. Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma will deliver the commissioning ceremony’s principal address. Kathy Taylor, former mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, is the ship’s sponsor. The ceremony will be highlighted by a time-honored Navy tradition when Taylor gives the first order to “man our ship and bring her to life!”

“This ship is named in honor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, but represents more than one city,” said Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer. “USS Tulsa represents an investment in readiness and lethality, and is a testament to the increased capabilities made possible by a true partnership between the Department of the Navy and our industrial base.”

The future USS Tulsa is the second naval vessel to honor Oklahoma’s third largest city. The first USS Tulsa was an Asheville-class gunboat designated as PG-22 that served from 1923 to 1944 before being renamed Tacloban. She earned two battle stars for World War II service. A cruiser to be named USS Tulsa was also authorized for construction during World War II, but the contract was canceled before it was built.

 

GULF OF MEXICO (March 8, 2018) The future USS Tulsa (LCS 16) was underway for acceptance trials, which are the last significant milestone before delivery of the Independence-variant littoral combat ship to the Navy. During trials, the Navy conducted comprehensive tests of the future USS Tulsa, intended to demonstrate the performance of the propulsion plant, ship handling abilities and auxiliary systems. (U.S. Navy photo courtesy of Austal USA/Released)

LCS is a highly maneuverable, lethal and adaptable ship designed to support focused mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare and surface warfare missions. The ship integrates new technology and capability to affordably support current and future mission capability from deep water to the littorals. 

The LCS class consists of two variants, the Freedom variant and the Independence variant, designed and built by two industry teams. The Independence variant team is led by Austal USA, Mobile, Alabama, (for LCS 6 and the subsequent even-numbered hulls). The Freedom variant team is led by Lockheed Martin, Marinette, Wisconsin, (for the odd-numbered hulls).

USS Tulsa will join USS Freedom (LCS 1), USS Independence (LCS 2), USS Fort Worth (LCS 3), USS Coronado (LCS 4), USS Jackson (LCS 6), USS Montgomery (LCS 8), USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS 10), USS Omaha (LCS 12) and USS Manchester (LCS 14) in their homeport of San Diego.

Source: Department of Defense

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo blamed state senators Thursday for frightening Amazon as the tech giant sought to create a campus in the Empire State.

“A small group of politicians put their own narrow political interests above their community — which poll after poll showed overwhelming supported bringing Amazon to Long Island,” Cuomo said in a statement. “The New York State Senate has done tremendous damage.” Democrats control the New York Senate.

Amazon backed out of a planned deal after local politicians and critics panned the idea. The multi-billion company is still planning to construct another center in Arlington, Virginia, near the nation’s capital. The project in New York was expected to create 25,000 jobs. A smaller project in Nashville, Tennessee, is expected to create 5,000 new jobs.

“After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens,” Amazon spokeswoman Jodi Seth said in a statement.

Cuomo, a Democrat, made his comment shortly after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cheered Amazon’s decision to vacate New York.

“Anything is possible: today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world,” Ocasio-Cortez told her Twitter followers.

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An Oakland, California, teachers’ union announced Saturday that a strike will begin on Feb. 21 after failing to reach an agreement with the school district over increased pay and smaller class sizes.

Oakland Educators Association (OEA) said teachers were seeking a 12 percent raise over three years to help keep educators in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), according to a Saturday press statement.

“We agree that our teachers deserve to be paid more,” OUSD spokesman John Sasaki said, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday. “It’s just a matter of how much can we pay, given our financial reality.”

The district has suffered from financial woes for awhile, however. California loaned OUSD $100 million in emergency funds — the largest at the time — after gathering a $37 million deficit in 2003. The district managed to get into a $30 million deficit in 2017, according to the Chronicle.

Generous teacher pay raises, decreasing enrollment and hefty special education costs contributed to the financial crisis in the district.

The district has been caught for misusing funds like paying for parking and legal fees, the Chronicle reported.

The union said they have been negotiating for two years, according to OEA’s news release.

“The only option that Oakland teachers, parents and students have left to win the schools Oakland students truly deserve, and to take control of our school district back from the control of billionaire campaign donors, is for the 3,000 members of the Oakland Education Association to go on strike,” OEA President Keith Brown said in a statement.

An entry-level teacher with only a bachelor’s degree can earn around $47,000 a year. A teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 90 graduate level credits can start earning $55,000 and bring in as much as $84,000 annually after working for 31 years as a certified teacher, according to OUSD data.

Brown added that 18 percent of teachers left each year due to increasing housing costs, the Chronicle reported.

The median home value in Oakland is $735,000 and is expected to increase by nearly 8 percent over the next year, according to Zillow. The median monthly rent price was a little over $3,000.

OUSD does spend, however, $13,500 for full health care benefits for educators and their families, according to the Chronicle.

The district contacted OEA for renegotiation Saturday, but did not hear back, according to the district’s press release.

Up to 150 administrative and support employees could be laid off in order for the district to save $21.7 million, the newspaper reported.

OUSD is planning to hire substitute teachers in the event of a strike, which could affect 36,000 students.

The northern California city’s teacher strike follows after Los Angeles teachers walked out of classes in January. Their strike resulted in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) agreeing to a 6 percent raise for teachers and “meaningful” class size reductions.

The Los Angeles deal, however, could bankrupt the system already running on a $500 million deficit, according to The Associated Press.

OEA and OUSD did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi refused to acknowledge Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s comments on late-term abortion, claiming she does not know what he said Thursday.

“I just don’t know what he said yesterday,” Pelosi said in response to a reporter’s question about Northam’s comments.

This comes as Northam defended the “Repeal Act,” a proposed bill that would remove all restrictions on abortion in the Commonwealth of Virginia, saying controversial comments about late-term abortion.

“If a mother is in labor…the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable,” Northam said. “The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and mother.”

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The comments received massive pushback from Republican’s on Capitol Hill and across the country.

Pelosi’s office did not respond when contacted by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a paper internally that suggests President Donald Trump may have the authority to use Department of Defense resources to build a wall without obtaining congressional approval or declaring a state of emergency.

CRS, Congress’s in-house research arm, internally published a paper Jan. 10 titled “Can the Department of Defense Build the Border Wall?,” which The Daily Caller News Foundation has obtained. It says (emphasis added):

Another statute that authorizes the Secretary of Defense to assist civilian law enforcement with counterdrug activities may provide some authority for the construction of barriers along the border. 10 U.S.C. § 284 (Section 284) provides that the Secretary of Defense “may provide support for the counterdrug activities or activities to counter transnational organized crime” of any law enforcement agency, including through the “[c]onstruction of roads and fences and installation of lighting to block drug smuggling corridors across international boundaries of the United States.” …

Use of Section 284 would not require a declaration of a national emergency under the NEA. However, the DOD’s Section 284 authority to construct fences appears to extend only to “drug smuggling corridors,” a condition that may limit where DOD could deploy fencing.

“Drug corridors” are not defined in law, according to a congressional aide.

The president has suggested using executive authority as a workaround to the stalemate that led to the partial government shutdown. House Democrats have refused to allocate $5.7 billion Trump requested to build part of a wall along the southern border, and the president has refused to support legislation opening the government that does not include border wall funding. Trump said Jan. 4 that he has considered using a “state of emergency” to build the wall. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley urged Trump not to declare a state of emergency, expressing concerns about overreach and setting a precedent that Democrats could also use when in power.

But the CRS report suggests that there is another option beyond negotiating with Congress or declaring a national emergency.

Arkansas National Guard building a wall (Department of Defense photo)

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Fervid speculation as to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s well-being was set off in December when the Supreme Court abruptly announced that she was being treated for lung cancer.

Though a positive prognosis has since allayed the worst fears of Ginsburg’s admirers, her continued struggles broach important but little discussed questions about judicial fitness in an era when unprecedented longevity often entails sudden declines in mental and physical faculties.

Those questions are hardly theoretical: the modern history of the Supreme Court is replete with examples of real or perceived incapacity among the justices, who alone decide when to leave active service.

Ginsburg had two cancerous nodules removed from her lungs at the Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in Dec. 2018. The procedure is called a pulmonary lobectomy. The cancerous growths were discovered when Ginsburg was hospitalized for rib fractures resulting from a fall in her chambers at the high court.

Doctors have since pronounced Ginsburg in excellent health, telling reporters there are no indications of remaining disease following her December surgery. The justice was seen for the first time since the procedure at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington on Feb. 4 for an event honoring her life and professional accomplishments. She may return to the bench as soon as Feb. 19, when the Court will hear a new round of cases.

Incapacity can take many forms which are not triggered by physical disease or advanced age, as has occurred with Ginsburg. Such was the case of Justice Charles Whittaker, the 56-year-old Kansan President Dwight Eisenhower elevated to the high court in 1957, whose travails were thoroughly documented in Professor David Garrow’s 2000 article in the University of Chicago Law Review “Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court”.

Whittaker suffered from intense bouts of depression and anxiety, and the attendant strain seriously impeded his professional abilities. The high court’s tremendous workload immediately triggered those complexes — his colleague Justice Harold Burton observed that Whittaker very nearly suffered a nervous breakdown just ten weeks after taking the bench.

Whittaker’s deterioration continued in fits and starts in the years that followed, according to Garrow’s research. A worsening crisis climaxed in February 1962 as the Court contemplated a landmark gerrymandering case, Baker v. Carr. Amid the mounting pressure of those deliberations, the justice retreated to the seclusion of a Wisconsin cabin.

Whittaker returned to the capital three weeks later distraught and considering suicide. He was admitted to Walter Reed Hospital on March 6. Chief Justice Earl Warren and a panel of doctors entreated Whittaker to retire, which he did on March 28, having served two months as a justice despite total psychiatric collapse.

He left judicial service a diminished figure, having managed just eight majority opinions in his five years as a justice, a trifling figure for a prodigious court.

A similar if less frightening incident arose in 1981, when Justice William Rehnquist appeared impaired during oral arguments throughout the fall and winter. The justice frequently slurred his speech and struggled to summon certain words, creating the impression of serious impairment.

Rehnquist’s condition was a function of his ongoing addiction to Placidyl, a powerful sleeping agent he took to alleviate acute back pain. Though Placidyl is usually proscribed over limited time spans, Rehnquist used the drug for a decade, often in significant excess of proscribed amounts. He was voluntarily admitted to George Washington University Hospital on Dec. 27, 1981 to undergo detoxification.

Though the hospitalization appeared in contemporary press accounts, the full extent of the experience was not fully understood until the FBI released its confidential files on Rehnquist after his death in 2005, which The Washington Post obtained and summarized in 2007.

Hospital personnel later told the FBI that Rehnquist suffered from hallucinations and paranoid delusions as withdrawal became acute. Among the fantasies the Post describes was Rehnquist’s unfounded fear that the CIA was plotting against him. On a separate occasion, he attempted an escape, appearing in a hospital lobby in pajamas.

Once the detoxification was complete, the attending physicians said the justice could return to the Court at full function. The issue was not broached when he was elevated to the chief justiceship in 1986. There is no evidence that the experience ever affected Rehnquist’s work on the high court.

A devastating account of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s fitness during the last years of his tenure appeared in 1998, when Edward Lazarus published his inside account of the Supreme Court’s internal operations called “Closed Chambers“. Lazarus clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun during the during the 1988-1989 term.

Lazarus’s assessment, which appears in Garrow’s article, suggests Marshall was somewhat addled in the twilight of his career. The charge is all the more alarming in that Marshall tended to delegate liberally to his law clerks. One particular report touches a deeply disturbing scenario: a death penalty case in which a compromised justice casts the decisive fifth vote.

The case, Lankford v. Idaho, asked whether a defendant’s due process rights were violated after his trial judge imposed the death penalty, despite the fact that prosecutors had previously informed the defense they would not seek execution. As such, defense lawyers had not entered mitigating evidence which could have helped the defendant evade capital punishment into the record.

For the first time in his career, Marshall — a committed death penalty abolitionist — voted against a capital defendant and joined his conservative colleagues to affirm the sentence. The Court broke 5 to 4 on the decision, making Marshall’s vote decisive. He later changed his vote after furious lobbying from one of his law clerks.

“Marshall’s health, deteriorating for many years, had continued to slip,” Lazarus wrote in his book. “His eyes were failing, his breathing ever more labored, and he had taken a nasty fall that put him in the hospital for several days. In truth, Marshall was no longer up to his responsibilities, or even the appearance of being up to them. Without [Justice William] Brennan’s lead to follow he made mistakes, some embarrassing.”

Scholars who assessed Marshall’s deliberating in the Lankford case are much less harsh in their judgments than Lazarus, though none believe the justice acquitted himself especially well.

Justice Elena Kagan clerked for Marshall the term before the Lankford decision. Marshall retired in 1991 and was succeeded by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Despite its periodic encounters with judicial disability, the Supreme Court has no official mechanism for assessing the mental or physical health of a justice. What’s more, short of impeachment, there is no process to remove a justice who is medically impaired, as with a coma or Alzheimer’s disease.

Fix the Court, a nonpartisan watchdog that advocates for increased transparency at the high court, said the judiciary should take steps to promote awareness and accountability among judges about mental degeneration.

“Removing a federal judge or Supreme Court justice is difficult, and it should remain that way,” Fix the Court executive director Gabe Roth told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Instead of focusing on removal, I think the judiciary should proactively establish programs that could help identify and mitigate cognitive decline in judges before we get to this point of public questioning.”

Roth noted that several federal appeals courts have established so-called wellness committees or advisory boards that encourage regular cognitive assessments for judges and host medical experts at judicial conferences. He also suggested that term limits for the justices would mitigate against mental or physical decline.

“Term limits would not eradicate the potential for cognitive decline completely, of course, but the public would rest easier knowing that a potentially impaired justice would have a duly established — and pending — retirement date,” Roth said.

Proposals for a mandatory retirement age usually fall somewhere near age 75. Justice John Paul Stevens served on the Supreme Court until age 90 — he left after fumbling his dissent in the 2010 Citizens United case as he read it from the bench. Doctors determined he had suffered a mini-stroke.

Paul Ingrassia contributed to this report.

A massive winter storm stretching from the Great Plains to the East Coast is dumping snow and causing hundreds of traffic accidents as thousands shelter under winter storm warnings.

Winter Storm Gia hit Missouri hard Friday evening, stranding motorists overnight and causing five deaths from traffic accidents in the icy conditions. Roughly 500 traffic accidents have been reported to authorities, The Weather Channel reports.

Thousands in Missouri remained stranded on highways Saturday morning with traffic stopped or barely inching forward. Parts of the state had received up to 15 inches of snow by that point.

Winter storm warnings stretch from areas in Kansas to Rhode Island as Gia continues to drop snow across hundreds of miles. Parts of Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska all received more than 10 inches of snow. Parts of Illinois received over a foot.

In Columbia, Missouri, the icy conditions caused an airplane to slide off a runway at the city’s airport. No injuries were reported. The 80 passengers stranded on the runway were forced to evacuate the plane three at a time by emergency personnel because a bus could not reach them on the ice-covered tarmac, KOMU reports.

Meteorologists expect snow to come down over a wide area Saturday evening, from North Carolina to Pennsylvania and from Kansas to New Jersey. The storm is expected to lessen some on Sunday, but still drop freezing rain and some snow over hundreds of miles while moving slowly toward the direction of New England, The Weather Channel reports.

• In congressional testimony last year, former FBI general counsel James Baker said that the bureau was aware that the founder of Fusion GPS was shopping the infamous dossier around Washington, D.C. prior to the 2016 election.
• Baker also said that his friend, the liberal reporter David Corn, was ‘anxious’ to provide him with the dossier, which was funded by the Clinton campaign and DNC.
• Baker’s testimony reveals new details about the full court press to put the unverified dossier onto the FBI’s radar.

James Baker, the former general counsel for the FBI, told Congress last October that the bureau was aware that  the founder of Fusion GPS was spreading the Steele dossier “to a lot of different” people in government and the media in an effort to “elevate” the document’s profile.

Baker also told lawmakers in his Oct. 3, 2018 testimony that his longtime friend, the liberal reporter David Corn, was “anxious” to provide him with the dossier.

Baker’s testimony, which was first detailed by The Wall Street Journal and has been confirmed by The Daily Caller News Foundation, sheds new light on what the FBI knew about efforts before the election to spread the dossier, which was written by former British spy Christopher Steele and financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

Republicans have criticized the FBI for failing to disclose those efforts in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser who is a major target of the Steele report. Some GOP lawmakers have asserted that the FBI should have been leery of Steele and Fusion’s opposition research of Trump.

Page has vehemently denied Steele’s allegations that he served as the Trump team’s backchannel to the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign.

As has been previously reported, Simpson served as a PR man of sorts for the dossier, setting up meetings with reporters from numerous news outlets in an effort to get Steele’s reporting into the media bloodstream.

Both Steele and Simpson were also in contact with U.S. government officials, including the Justice Department’s Bruce Ohr and the State Department’s Jonathan Winer. Steele shared some of his findings with both officials, as well as his FBI handler, Michael Gaeta.

In his testimony, Baker said that the FBI was aware of Simpson’s full court press on the Steele report.

“My understanding at the time was that Simpson was going around Washington giving this out to a lot of different people and trying to elevate its profile,” said Baker.

He also said that the FBI was aware of “various copies of the dossier floating around Washington.”

Baker also addressed his interactions with David Corn, a reporter at Mother Jones who published a report on Oct. 31, 2016 that quoted Steele.

“I know that David was anxious to get this into the hands of FBI. And being the person at the FBI that he knew the best, he wanted to give it to me,” Baker testified.

The FBI severed ties with Steele after Corn’s report on the grounds that the former spy improperly revealed that he was a confidential source for the bureau.

Corn’s contact with Baker has been previously reported. The journalist has said that nothing improper occurred and that he shared the dossier with Baker after the election in hopes of authenticating the document.

“I tried the FBI again after the election. On my own accord, I shared a copy of the dossier with the FBI in order to see if the bureau would authenticate the documents and now comment on them. Once again, it would not,” Corn told The Hill in July 2018.

Corn also said it was “inaccurate” to describe him as a source for the FBI.

“I was merely doing what a journalist does: trying to get more information on a story I was pursuing.”

The effort to spread the dossier far and wide appears to have picked up steam after Trump’s election win.

David Kramer, an associate of late Arizona Sen. John McCain, said in a deposition in December 2017 that he provided the dossier to at dozen journalists, including one at BuzzFeed News, which published the report on Jan. 10, 2017.

According to Kramer, Steele asked him to meet with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger and CNN’s Carl Bernstein.

Kramer also met with Corn in early December 2016. He said that Corn was inquiring about a meeting that McCain planned to have with then-FBI Director James Comey. Kramer said that he was unsure how Corn found out about the meeting.

Minnesota Democratic Sen. and 2020 hopeful took a swipe at her Democratic opponent Beto O’Rourke saying unlike him, she was not “born to run” for president.

“It was probably more when I got to college. When I was growing up, in high school, that’s not what girls thought they were going to do,” Klobuchar said in a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Politico reported.

“My parents, I think, thought it was a possibility. But I really didn’t. And so for me, it’s something that’s happened over time, as I’ve realized I can do things,” Klobuchar said. “I can get elected to the secretary-treasurer of my high school class. I can move on from there. And so I think it’s something that I didn’t have from birth.”

This comes as O’Rourke said he feels “born to be in” the 2020 presidential race in an interview with Vanity Fair released Wednesday before launching is official bid Thursday.

Klobuchar was one of the first Democratic senators to announce her candidacy for the 2020 presidential campaign. The Minnesota Democrat made the announcement on Feb. 10 in her home state. After her announcement, reports broke that she has a history of allegedly being rude to staff, making many of her employees cry, as well as reportedly hitting one of her staffers with a binder.

The Minnesota Democratic has since defended the reports about treating her staff poorly, saying she is tough enough to deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin if elected president.

Both Klobuchar and O’Rourke will have to fight through the crowded Democratic primary in order to take on President Donald Trump in the 2020 general election.