Live Updates: Biden Will Meet With Republicans’ Top Infrastructure Negotiator

President Biden is scheduled on Wednesday to meet with Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a Republican leading talks on a bipartisan infrastructure package, as negotiations reach a critical juncture.

Two months after Mr. Biden introduced his $2 trillion infrastructure plan, the administration has signaled that it is ready to move on from bipartisan negotiations barring significant developments this week.

While Republicans and the administration have exchanged offers in recent weeks, a wide gulf still remains over the scope, the size and how to finance what could be one of the largest single federal investments in infrastructure in American history. Some Democrats are ready to abandon the negotiations, as they are reluctant to narrow their ambitions to accommodate what could be just a handful of Republican votes.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg set a deadline of sorts for negotiations to bear fruit, saying on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that “a clear direction” was needed by the time Congress returns on June 7 from a Memorial Day recess.

Ms. Capito, who has been doggedly pursuing a deal with the White House for weeks, struck an optimistic tone about the state of the negotiations over the weekend.

“I think we can get to real compromise, absolutely, because we’re both still in the game,” Ms. Capito said on Fox News. “We realize this is not easy. I think we bring every idea that’s on the table into the negotiations to see how we can achieve this and get it across the threshold.”

Last week, Senate Republicans made a counteroffer that included roughly $257 billion in new funding for roads, bridges and other public works projects. Their overall $928 billion proposal consisted mostly of funding for expected maintenance of existing programs, with new spending largely financed with unspent coronavirus relief funds and increased user fees for drivers.

But Mr. Biden and White House officials have panned using funds from the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package for infrastructure investments. Mr. Biden has proposed raising taxes on corporations and wealthy taxpayers to finance the package, which would involve rolling back some of the tax cuts Republicans pushed through in 2017.

Democrats have also taken initial steps toward beginning the fast-track budget reconciliation process, which would allow them to pass an infrastructure package without Republican support. They used the maneuver earlier this year to muscle the pandemic aid package through both chambers.

President Biden said on Tuesday that he had directed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead Democrats in a sweeping legislative effort to protect voting rights, an issue that is critical to his legacy but one that faces increasingly daunting odds in a divided Senate.

“Today, I’m asking Vice President Harris to help these efforts, and lead them, among her many other responsibilities,” Mr. Biden said during a trip to Tulsa, Okla., to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. “With her leadership and your support, we’re going to overcome again, I promise you, but it’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.”

Mr. Biden told the crowd that he saw the protection of voting rights as one of the most fundamental — and most endangered — pathways to ensure racial equity.

But his decision to install Ms. Harris as the leader of an effort to beat back bills in states nationwide that are trying to tighten voting rules — “a truly unprecedented assault on our democracy, ” Mr. Biden told the crowd — added another politically thorny problem to the vice president’s policy portfolio.

Ms. Harris has already been tasked with leading the administration’s efforts to deter migration to the southwestern border by working to improve conditions in the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The vice president — who will visit Mexico and Guatemala next week — and her staff have worked to reframe expectations around her role, stressing that she will examine the root causes of migration, not single-handedly stop the flow of migrants to the United States.

Her Northern Triangle work comes in addition to a host of other engagements, including but not limited to: selling the “American Rescue Plan,” advocating Mr. Biden’s infrastructure package, representing women in the work force, highlighting the Black maternal mortality rate, assisting small businesses, assessing water policy, promoting racial equity, combating vaccine hesitancy, and fighting for a policing overhaul.

Ms. Harris said she would embrace the new assignment.

“In the days and weeks ahead, I will engage the American people, and I will work with voting rights organizations, community organizations, and the private sector to help strengthen and uplift efforts on voting rights nationwide,” she said said in a statement. “And we will also work with members of Congress to help advance these bills.”

Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona who gained national attention for her stalwart defense of the state’s electoral system in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, announced Wednesday that she was running for governor, portraying herself as a pragmatic leader who does not back down in the face of criticism and threats.

Ms. Hobbs has become a frequent fixture on cable news shows since the fall — first as Arizona’s vote count continued for several days after Election Day in November, and again this spring as Republicans conducted a widely criticized audit of ballots cast in Maricopa County. Ms. Hobbs has repeatedly condemned the partisan recount as a dangerous threat to democracy and has assigned observers to track problems with the process.

“We did our job,” she said in a video announcing her bid. “They refused to do theirs. And there’s a lot more work to be done.”

In some ways, the recount has elevated Ms. Hobbs, who some polls suggest is the most popular statewide elected official. She joined a lawsuit to try to stop the recount, which has no official standing and will not change the state’s vote. She issued a scathing six-page letter detailing problems with the audit and has recommended that Maricopa County replace its voting machines and vote tabulators because of the lack of physical security and transparency around the process.

A campaign video announcing her run opens by referring to the attacks and death threats that she has faced in the wake of the election — including armed protesters showing up at her home.

“When you’re under attack, some would have you believe you have two choices: fight or give in. But there is a third option: get the job done,” Ms. Hobbs says in the video announcement. “I’m here to solve problems.”

It is difficult to overstate the significance to Native people of Deb Haaland’s role as the first Native American to lead a cabinet agency, specifically the Interior Department, which was once responsible for eradicating the homes, culture and often the lives of Indigenous people.

It is also difficult to overstate the pressures and expectations Ms. Haaland faces from them, as they hope she will address 150 years of betrayal by a department officially entrusted with ensuring Native Americans’ welfare.

“Our ancestors have long foretold of a day of reckoning, when our values and the values of those who came to this country would collide. We’re at that day of reckoning,” said Fawn R. Sharp, the president of the National Congress of American Indians. “Deb will not only do the work to respond to and serve this generation, but her leadership is going to have a ripple effect for generations to come.”

Ms. Haaland’s portfolio is immense, addressing climate change, regulating mining and oil drilling on federal land and national waters, irrigating much of the West, monitoring earthquakes, preserving national parks and protecting wildlife.

But her early moves make clear she prioritizes the Interior Department’s responsibility for Native peoples, who fall under the jurisdiction of the department’s Bureaus of Indian Affairs and Indian Education.

Ms. Haaland was born in Arizona to a Laguna mother and a father of Norwegian descent. She enrolled in the University of New Mexico at the age of 28, eventually earning a law degree, and plunged into politics while running a salsa-making business. In 2019, she and Representative Sharice Davids, Democrat of Kansas, became the first two Native women to serve in Congress.

She was not angling for the Interior Department job when Julian Brave NoiseCat, a young writer and political strategist, began “a little guerrilla campaign” for her nomination that grew into a groundswell, with progressive activists and celebrities joining American Indians in support.

“She in many ways embodies the idea that has come out of grass-roots activism that Native people have real things to add to the environmental conversation,” Mr. NoiseCat said. “For young people and progressives, it can feel hard to get any authentic real wins. But that whole experience showed me it is possible to show the right thing can happen.”

Texas Democrats staged a last-minute walkout on Saturday to kill an elections bill that would have restricted voting statewide. The quorum-breaking move — a decades-old maneuver favored by Democratic lawmakers — worked, in dramatic fashion.

But by Tuesday, the reality of their short-lived triumph had settled in. The bill was very much still alive, with the Republican governor vowing to call lawmakers back to Austin for a special session to revive and pass the measure. It was a top legislative priority for the Republican Party, and would have been the final achievement in the ultraconservative session that concluded on Monday.

Democrats staggered out of that session after the passage of a number of other conservative measures, including a near-ban on abortion and a bill allowing the carrying of handguns without permits.

And Republicans, who seven months ago staved off a high-profile, top-dollar campaign by Democrats to flip the Statehouse for the first time in nearly two decades, applauded themselves for a series of conservative victories. They included bills that died in previous sessions for being too extreme but were now viewed as middle-of-the-road in the post-Trump era.

In past legislative sessions, Bush-style Republicans blocked many bills put forth by the far right. Many of those moderates are gone now from the Legislature, replaced in large part by pro-Trump Republicans who have taken to criticizing Gov. Greg Abbott for not being conservative enough.

“They’re flexing their muscle going into the 2022 primaries, so they’re all looking over their right shoulders and I think that’s driving a lot of this,” said State Representative Chris Turner, who is the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “They certainly are pushing the envelope in a way they haven’t before.”

Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat, won a landslide victory in a special House election in New Mexico on Tuesday, claiming the seat previously held by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and easily turning back a Republican effort to make the race a referendum on rising crime in the Albuquerque-based district.

Just after midnight Eastern time, Ms. Stansbury, a state representative, had captured 60 percent of the vote, while her Republican rival, Mark Moores, had won 36 percent.

Her dominating performance represented an early vote of confidence in the Democratic-controlled White House and Congress in a heavily Hispanic district and could quiet some anxiety in the party about its prospects going into the 2022 midterm elections.

An environmental policy expert who has worked as a congressional and White House aide, Ms. Stansbury emphasized economic fairness, the urgency of addressing climate change and the importance of Democrats’ retaining their four-seat House majority.

Mr. Moores, a state senator, ran almost entirely on crime and related issues. He assailed Ms. Stansbury for endorsing a bill in Congress that would shift money away from police departments, noting that there have been twice as many murders in Albuquerque this year as there were at this point in 2020.

Ms. Stansbury’s victory illustrates that the crime issue alone is insufficient for Republicans to win on in Democratic-leaning districts, at least when their candidates receive little financial help from the national party, as was the case with Mr. Moores.

Special elections in the first year after a president is newly elected can often carry grim tidings for the party in control of the White House. And with few such contests this year taking place on even remotely competitive terrain, Democrats moved aggressively to ensure that they were not caught by surprise in New Mexico.

Ms. Stansbury enjoyed a commanding financial advantage while benefiting from the Democratic tilt of the district, the First Congressional, which President Biden carried by 23 percentage points last year.

She also moved to rebut Mr. Moores’s line of attack, broadcasting a commercial that featured a retired sheriff’s deputy and trumpeted her work in the Legislature bringing state dollars for law enforcement back to Albuquerque.

The gun control organization backed by Michael R. Bloomberg will for the second time in four months begin an advertising campaign aimed at pressuring Republican senators to back expanding and strengthening background checks for gun buyers.

Everytown for Gun Safety will begin airing $500,000 worth of television and digital advertisements Wednesday evening in Alaska, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas, as well as on national cable television, the organization said.

An official with the group said there was optimism that Republican senators, including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and John Cornyn of Texas, might support background checks and other gun control measures.

Mr. Cornyn told NBC News last week that he was discussing background checks legislation with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat who has led the party’s gun control efforts since joining the Senate in the wake of the 2012 massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

The ads are also targeting Senators Rob Portman of Ohio and Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, who are both retiring following the 2022 elections.

All four Republican senators voted against the 2013 gun control legislation sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania. That proposal had support from a majority of the 100-member Senate but failed to advance because Republicans denied it the 60 votes necessary to bypass a filibuster.

As American mass shootings continue unabated, Republicans in Congress have offered little indication they are willing to support universal background checks for gun purchases. During an earlier gun control push in 2013, leading Democrats negotiated for weeks with Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a conservative Republican who ultimately voted against the proposal.

Two of the four Everytown advertisements feature Texans shooting shotguns at clay targets. The other two show the police chief and sheriff from Columbia, S.C., a city whose mayor, Steve Benjamin, is a longtime ally of Mr. Bloomberg. The advertisements do not mention any of the Republican senators by name.

Whoever wins the race to become the next Manhattan district attorney will take over one of the most contentious, highest-profile criminal investigations in the office’s history: the inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his business.

Two of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary field, Alvin Bragg and Tali Farhadian Weinstein, have had past contacts with Mr. Trump’s administration — dealings that could become an issue if one of them becomes the next district attorney.

Mr. Bragg, a former official with the New York attorney general’s office, reminds voters frequently that in his former job, he sued Mr. Trump’s administration “more than a hundred times.”

Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who once served as general counsel to the Brooklyn district attorney, has been less vocal about Mr. Trump. She only occasionally notes her involvement in a successful lawsuit against the Trump administration. And she has not spoken publicly about interviewing with Trump administration officials for a federal judgeship early in his term.

Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein are among eight Democratic candidates vying to replace Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney, who is not running for re-election. With the primary less than one month away, Mr. Trump continues to loom over the race.

Mr. Vance’s office recently convened a grand jury that will hear evidence about Mr. Trump and his company, according to a person with knowledge of the matter — a sign that the investigation could soon intensify.

Prosecutors were already using grand juries to issue subpoenas, obtain documents and hear some testimony, but the new grand jury is expected to hear from a range of witnesses in the coming months. There is no indication that the investigation has reached an advanced stage or that prosecutors have decided to seek charges against Mr. Trump or his company.

Mr. Trump’s advisers have said that he will try to impugn the motives of the prosecutors investigating him.

The Biden administration on Tuesday said it would suspend oil drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that were issued in the waning days of the Trump presidency.

The decision could ultimately end any plans to drill in one of the largest tracts of untouched wilderness in the United States, delicate tundra that is home to migrating waterfowl, caribou and polar bears. Democrats and Republicans have fought over whether to allow oil and gas drilling there for more than four decades, and issuing the leases was a signature achievement of the Trump White House.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Tuesday published a secretarial order formally suspending the leases until the agency has completed an environmental analysis of their impact and a legal review of the Trump administration’s decision to grant them.

While the move was widely expected and follows President Biden’s Inauguration Day executive order to halt new Arctic drilling, it serves as a high-profile way for the president to solidify his environmental credentials after coming under fire from activists upset by his recent quiet support for some fossil fuel projects.

Arctic tribal leaders who have protested oil drilling praised the move.

The refuge, 19 million acres in the northeastern part of the state, had long been off limits to oil and gas development, with Democrats, environmentalists and some Alaska Native groups successfully fighting efforts to open it.

But Mr. Trump made opening part of the refuge, about 1.5 million acres along the coast, a centerpiece of his program for developing more domestic fossil fuel production. The area, known as the Coastal Plain, is thought to lie over as much as 11 billion barrels of oil.