The U.S. Capitol stands in Washington, U.S., November 7, 2016. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts.

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

WASHINGTON — The Republican effort to repeal Obamacare is officially under way, after the House passed a budget resolution Friday that will allow Republicans to vote to undo the healthcare law.

Despite some hesitation from House Republicans earlier this week, the party banded together for the Friday vote, passing the budget resolution, 227 to 198, with not a single Democrat voting in favor. The vote comes after the Senate passed the procedural legislation earlier this week.

Various members of the Republican conference in both chambers had voiced concerns about moving forward with repeal without any concrete plan or deadline for replacing the healthcare law. But ultimately just nine House Republicans defected, a result that Majority Whip Steve Scalise deemed “better than expected.”

“I don’t think you want to be a Republican, go home, and say, ‘I voted against the first step in repealing Obamacare because I wasn’t sure what the last step would be.’ I think that’s a pretty weak position, and I think most of our members know that,” Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole told reporters before the vote.

What’s more, President-elect Donald Trump made his support for the budget resolution clear in a Thursday, tweeting: “Congrats to the Senate for taking the first step to #RepealObamacare – now it’s onto the House!”

The nine dissenters were Reps. Justin Amash, Charlie Dent, Brian Fitzpatrick, Walter Jones, John Katko, Raul Labrador, Tom MacArthur, Tom Massie, and Tom McClintock. The group is an odd mix of more moderate Republicans and more hardline conservative or libertarians. Among Senate Republicans, only Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul voted against the measure.

“I wanted to know what both repeal and replacement looked like before we started the process,” MacArthur, a member of the Tuesday Group, a more moderate informal caucus of House Republicans, told reporters after the vote. MacArthur added that he felt there had not been enough clarity on what the substance of the replacement bill would look like.

Massie, a staunch libertarian who often votes with the conservative Freedom Caucus, though he is not a member, said his concern was about the cost. "I didn't like the vehicle. It was all the debt it would add to our national debt,” he told reporters.

Dent, another Tuesday Group member, said moving so early to do repeal, with neither a set timeline nor a specific plan for replacement, left too many unknowns. “I thought it was premature to launch today,” he told reporters.

A real concern, Dent said, was that having done repeal, Republicans would be unable to pass the replacement plan. Facing fierce Democratic opposition to the repeal effort, Republicans are using a procedural method called reconciliation, which will allow them to repeal Obamacare with a simple majority in the Senate, instead of the 60 votes that would normally be needed.

But Republicans cannot pass the replacement bill the same way, and will need to get 60 votes in the Senate to make that happen. “The question remains, who are the eight Democrats in the Senate who will help us to replace this?” Dent said. “That’s a concern, they would repeal and not replace,” he added.

What would happen in that case, Dent said, is “the question we all want to get answered.”

“Before we take this plane in the air, I want to be sure where we’re gonna land it. And right now I don’t know where we’re gonna land it,” he said.

Paul McLeod contributed to this story.

LINK: Republicans Walk Away From Jan. 27 Target To Repeal Obamacare

LINK: Republicans Want To Keep Popular Parts Of Obamacare, Despite Votes Against Them

Campaign Zero activist Brittany Packnett and Al Sharpton, among others, meet with President Obama in 2016.

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Three months after the National Urban League sent a 40-question survey to each presidential candidate, only three Republicans were left in the race. Ted Cruz and John Kasich hadn’t bothered with it, and neither had presumptive nominee Donald Trump. And Marc Morial was annoyed.

For Morial, the group’s president, it wasn’t the first time weeks had passed without a peep from Trump. The previous year, Morial invited Trump to speak to NUL’s national conference. He didn't come. On a muggy, overcast day in Ft. Lauderdale two years ago, Morial rose at the presidential plenary to say that the candidates who had come to address them took them seriously. Morial rattled off the names of candidates who didn’t respond, including “New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump.” The mention garnered laughter.

But last year, with Trump on his way to victory, Morial was flustered. Privately, Morial wondered if the snub by Trump was intentional — he had no real way of knowing. Trump had ignored the 2015 conference, the questionnaire, and declined the invitation to attend the convention three months before the election.

Even with the election between Hillary Clinton and Trump up in the air, a new era between legacy civil rights groups and the presidency seemed inevitable. Civil rights stakeholders had engaged President Obama closely on a range issues of mutual concern. That work that was buttressed by a unique foundation: Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said in an interview that he saw himself as one of them, an organizer at his core.

But now the ground is shifting beneath the feet of a large and varied group of civil rights and black faith groups, whose influence involved direct audience with the president of the United States and people within the White House. No one quite knows how President Trump will deal with principal civil rights advocates like Morial and Rev. Al Sharpton — or the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund’s Sherrilyn Ifill, currently leading a crusade against the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions to lead the Justice Department.

The groups have little leverage, as they have in previous administrations across parties, but particularly in Obama’s. Trump did not need black voters to win, and indeed has mocked black Americans who did not vote, and enabled his victory. And while the Trump administration, will likely feature many social conservatives including the vice-president-elect, Trump himself does not come from the evangelical wing of the Republican Party — a traditional bridge between the party’s presidents and black leaders. It’s causing anxiety for groups used to being on the inside.

“We are surely going to miss Obama and we are going to miss him more than we realize,” said civil rights leader and prominent pastor Rev. Herbert Daughtry. “I don't think that it’s dawned on us yet.”

Trump and Steve Harvey talk to reporters this month, after meeting with Trump about urban development and race.

Bryan R. Smith / AFP / Getty Images

In interviews, leaders described an unexpected departure from a honed game plan. Some leaders said they were unsure about the next steps or not ready to discuss them; groups like the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund are reticent to share a specific strategy regarding how it plans to advance its agenda. More important, the groups say, there is an outright agreement that groups will push for more progress on issues like voting rights and criminal justice. Civil rights groups this week met in Washington with leadership from the Congressional Black Caucus to get on the same page about their goals. Ultimately, they’re willing to play, in a sense, left-handed.

“Everyone is trying to figure out this moment,” said Ifill, the president and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “We want to understand what it means for the work that we do and the clients we serve. The question is do we have a fundamental difference of understanding about the importance of civil rights law and the vindication of civil rights law?”

That issue, whether Trump administration officials believe civil rights statutes remain necessary and what the role of discrimination is in America, is not one that Trump has really addressed. Still, many civil rights leaders have indicated already how they'll move.

“It’s time for us to put our fighting uniform again,” Sharpton said.

How to fight animates the left now. There’s a sharp generational divide, and has been for years, about how to press leaders and whether access expedites or impedes action. So far, younger activists have sharply critiqued a recent meeting where civil rights advocates met with the Trump transition team (as well as other figures in media and advocacy who have met with Trump in smaller groups in recent weeks). Participants were asked to share their priorities, but attendees said it was not an exchange; reps from the transition team listened idly while leaders expressed concern with the appointment of Sessions.

But what if the option is off the table, and the Oval Office isn’t open under Trump? There’s a few schools of thinking on this. One is that they may have a key ally: In 2014 and 2015, incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus addressed the Urban League, and has been a staunch supporter of black Republican activists deeply entrenched in civil rights issues. Those activists say Priebus’ presence in the White House gives them hope that their issues will have a listening ear.

Morial — whose group gave Obama an “excellent” rating on its first presidential scorecard — said civil rights leaders’ access to Obama as a black president had no bearing on how it chose to hold the president accountable, offering some clues about how he might proceed under Trump. He bristled at the idea that blasting Obama publicly meant that the group was carrying out the duty of holding the president accountable.

“The question is not whether it’s easier or harder [because the president is black] — that’s our job,” Morial said in 2016. “But it’s also our job because we have access to policy makers in the White House not to think that the way you play out accountability and influence is by having press conferences. There’s a mindset which is sometimes unsophisticated thinks if you’re not calling somebody out that you’re not holding them accountable.”

Another school of thinking is that access doesn’t really matter.

“The people that speak on the national stage for black people is not determined by who’s in the White House,” Sharpton said, calling the suggestion “insulting.” “Those of us who spoke while Obama was in [office] were already on the national stage. He didn’t create us, he worked with us.”

Protecting Obama’s legacy was one of the aims of “We Shall Not Be Moved,” a Washington march led by Sharpton on Saturday. Supported by other civil rights groups, Sharpton said events like this are intended to put pressure on Trump, but also serve as a warning to Democrats that any failure to stand up to him on bread-and-butter civil rights issues, and on promises to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, will result in more action.

“Our march gives some backbone and guts to the Democrats and lets them know that even though you’re in the minority that you need to stand up and block anything that interferes with these areas or you’ve got to face us in the community,” Sharpton said.

He called the Sessions nomination to lead the Justice Department “a nightmare” for expanding voting rights for black Americans and criminal justice and policing, calling for a “collective response” from civil rights groups to fight against it. Sharpton says he’s ready seize yet again the role for which he became so well-known — as an outside agitator — yet again. Sharpton shrugged off the idea that, given his ascent as the one of the most preeminent civil rights figures during Obama’s presidency, his influence might wane with Obama’s exit, too.

The reason he and other leaders kept access with Obama is that they “agreed with him more than we disagreed with him.”

Still, Sharpton’s regular appearances inside the White House lent him a different kind of stature and influence. After an appearance on cable news, Trump phoned Sharpton, who said he told the president-elect that he knew Trump was “no pushover,” but that they were going to be engaged in a battle, especially as it relates to Obama’s legacy. Sharpton said he wasn’t opposed to keeping an open line with Trump, but that “the question is what do we get out of the talk. I don’t need to talk. I’ve talked to the last three presidents. We need action.”

“It’s more advantageous to be in a position to push and challenge and demand things from a leader who need your community to be in power versus not,” Color of Change executive director Rashad Robinson said of his time working with the Obama administration. “That is certainly a challenge we are heading into.” Although far too often many confused presence for power -- the presence of a Black president for the rules actually changing.

Robinson, among a younger generation of civil rights leaders, espouses the view popular with many Black Lives Matter activists and others who feel that negotiating with Trump or his administration is destructive. The idea is that these activists will push Democrats, media, corporations and some Republicans on progressive issues — but that the willingness of other, particularly older and more established groups, harms progress.

“Pushing back asking him to be less racist — there’s nothing strategic in that, there’s no fight or leverage in that,” Robinson said. “We have a fighting strategy that doesn’t include going to him hat-in-hand asking him to not be bigoted or not appoint a certain person, but in clear and very public ways make it hard on the enablers -- both in politics and corporations -- who will let him sell off this country and the progress that's been achieved to make money for himself, his family and friends and put his name on everything. We have to fight and we have win real victories at the local level, asking Trump for anything is a waste of time and won't help us protect vulnerable communities."

Ifill was front-and-center during the confirmation of Sessions, listening for clues that Sessions would indeed enforce civil rights law if confirmed. If “we get pushed back, that’s one thing,” she said. “But we won’t turn back.”

“I don’t feel myself to be crouched in a defensive position, that’s just not in the cards,” Ifill said. “We still have to find ways to move the needle on equality and justice for people who are marginalized and or don’t have a voice, and have a right to be part of whatever it is that America has to offer.”

Demonstrators on Jan. 20, 2001, as the inaugural parade passed by Freedom Plaza.

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

President-elect Donald Trump will face his critics at his inauguration this week — large protests are planned across Washington, DC — but not to the extent that some demonstrators were hoping for.

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the National Park Service could reserve space along the inauguration parade route for the Presidential Inaugural Committee, rejecting First Amendment objections from protesters planning anti-Trump demonstrations.

Federal regulations allow the National Park Service to set aside a portion of Freedom Plaza — a prime spot along Pennsylvania Avenue to see, or protest, the parade — for the inaugural committee to set up bleachers for ticketed seating. On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit found that this was a "content-neutral" restriction on the use of public space divorced from the opinions or speech of whoever else wanted to use it.

ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition sued the government to challenge the regulations, arguing that the set-aside for the inaugural committee favored one type of speech — that of the president-elect's supporters — over others.

"There is no evidence in the record that the regulation was adopted because of any disagreement with ANSWER’s — or any demonstrators’ — message, nor any evidence of desire generally to suppress dissent or otherwise discriminate with regard to content," Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote for the unanimous panel.

The appeals court compared the set-aside for bleachers with areas reserved for portable toilets, reporters, and individuals with disabilities.

Every four years, the National Park Service reserves space downtown for the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Other groups can file requests for permits to use those spaces on Jan. 20, but the National Park Service won't grant them unless the inaugural committee releases its hold.

When the latest case was argued in the DC Circuit on Nov. 14, ANSWER was still waiting for the inaugural committee to decide what space it needed. ANSWER now has permits to demonstrate in the western part of Freedom Plaza and along a section of Pennsylvania Avenue near the Trump International Hotel, in addition to other locations downtown.

The DC Circuit's decision on Tuesday wasn't limited to the specifics of ANSWER's permit requests, however, and would apply to how the National Park Service handles future inaugurations.

The court found that the regulation allowing the National Park Service to set aside space for the inaugural committee doesn't mention speech; the rules won't stop someone with a ticket to sit in the bleachers from speaking out against Trump, for instance. The restrictions affect a protester as much as any member of the public without a ticket who wants access to the bleacher area for a better view, Pillard wrote.

The restriction is "content-neutral," the court held, which means that the government is subject to less intense scrutiny under the First Amendment than if it were content-based — for example, a rule that specifically banned anti-government protests.

The restriction was "narrowly tailored" to achieve the government's interest in helping the congressionally authorized Presidential Inaugural Committee plan the day's events, the court found.

"Part of organizing the Inauguration is providing seating for spectators; the Inaugural Committee’s regulatory priority allows just that," Pillard wrote.

The court found that the regulation leaves plenty of space available for the public, even if it doesn't include ANSWER's preferred location to protest. Pillard noted that the park service reserved 13% of the parade route along Pennsylvania Avenue for the inaugural committee and left 70% of the route open to the public.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, who argued for ANSWER in the DC Circuit, told BuzzFeed News that the decision allowed for the "privatization" of public space, noting that the Presidential Inaugural Committee for Trump's inauguration had raised tens of millions of dollars. She said the committee was granting access to the Freedom Plaza bleachers to politically approved Trump supporters, not the general public.

A spokesman for the US attorney's office in Washington, which argued for the National Park Service, declined to comment. The National Park Service released a statement praising the "solid opinion."

"The court recognized that the NPS policies reasonably balance the priority need for the Presidential Inaugural Committee along very limited parts of the parade route with the First Amendment rights of demonstrators to assemble and be heard, and the right of the public to participate in the inaugural events," the National Park Service said.

DC Circuit judges Sri Srinivasan and Patricia Millett also heard the case.

Updated with comment from the National Park Service.

An Iraqi traffic policeman inspects a car destroyed on Sept. 16, 2007, by a Blackwater security detail in Nisur Square in Baghdad.

Khalid Mohammed / ASSOCIATED PRESS

It's been nearly a decade since private security contractors working for the US government opened fire on a busy traffic circle in Baghdad, leaving more than a dozen Iraqi civilians dead and many more wounded.

Four of the guards, employed by the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, were convicted in 2014 of manslaughter and, in one case, first-degree murder for the 2007 shooting. The guards have fought the prosecution at every step. Now, as 2017 gets under way, the legal sparring continues.

The guards want a full acquittal. At a minimum, they're asking for a new trial. The first trial in 2014 lasted 11 weeks, followed by seven weeks of jury deliberation.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court in Washington heard arguments on the guards' challenge to their convictions. The lawyers argued over whether federal law permitted prosecutors to charge the guards for conduct abroad, and, if so, whether the trial should have taken place in Washington, DC, as opposed to Utah, where the guards were arrested.

The guard found guilty of first-degree murder, Nicholas Slatten, separately contends that the evidence presented by prosecutors at trial didn't support the more serious charge he faced, and that he was a victim of vindictive prosecution.

The case has bounced between the trial and appeals courts for years. The convictions in 2014 were a hard-fought win for the US Department of Justice — the government nearly lost the case several years earlier because of how it handled evidence. A ruling for the defendants now would be a big setback in a high-profile case that's seen as a test of how the United States polices the private contractors it hires around the world.

The guards, through Blackwater, were hired to do diplomatic security for the US Department of State in Iraq. On September 16, 2007, a car bomb went off in Baghdad, and Blackwater guards were dispatched to secure a safe route for a US official who was near the explosion. While stopped around a traffic circle known as Nisur Square, the guards fired on cars and people in the area. Prosecutors say it was a one-sided firefight. The guards say they thought they were under attack.

At least two dozen of the guards' friends and family members attended Tuesday's hearing at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. The defendants are serving sentences ranging from 30 years to life in prison. The wife of one of the guards declined to comment on the morning's arguments on behalf of the group.

A major focus of Tuesday's hearing was the jurisdiction of US courts over the conduct of US government employees and contractors working abroad. The guards were charged under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which allows the US government to prosecute individuals for alleged criminal activity overseas who are employed by or otherwise supporting the armed forces.

Notably, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions — President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for US attorney general — in 2004 successfully introduced the amendment to the jurisdiction law that extended its reach to civilian contractors who weren't employed by the Defense Department but were working for a federal agency in support of the military's mission.

The guards argue that they were contractors for the State Department whose contract was not aimed at support of the military's mission, and, as such, the military jurisdiction law doesn't apply to them.

Brian Heberlig, a lawyer with Steptoe & Johnson LLP in Washington who argued on Tuesday for the three guards convicted of manslaughter, pointed to trial testimony from former Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, who said that the guards' contract with the State Department was not part of the military's mission. "That should end this matter," Heberlig told the court.

Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson asked if the guards were still supporting the military's overall mission in Iraq by protecting diplomats and other officials. No, Heberlig replied, unless the court supported the government's "overbroad" interpretation of the law.

Prosecutors argue that the Defense Department and State Department were operating as "one team" in Iraq in 2007. Congress passed the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act to hold US contractors responsible for their actions overseas, and siding with the guards' narrow reading of the law would undermine that goal, US Department of Justice lawyer Demetra Lambros argued on Tuesday.

Lambros said that by hiring the Blackwater guards, soldiers who were handling diplomatic security could go back to working for the military. Judge Janice Rogers Brown said that argument seemed to "undercut" the government's position, since it would suggest separate missions. Lambros replied that the mission, to rebuild and stabilize Iraq, was the same across the State and Defense departments.

Slattten's lawyer, Timothy Simeone of Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis, argued separately on Tuesday. Prosecutors alleged Slatten fired the first shot in Nisur Square, killing a medical student who was driving with his mother. The government said Slatten hated Iraqis, and had bragged in the past about firing on Iraqis to provoke a fight. Simeone argued there was conflicting testimony at trial about whether Slatten fired first, or if the first shot came from another member of the Blackwater team.

Simeone also argued that the government filed the murder charge against Slatten to punish him for successfully challenging the original manslaughter charge.

The indictments against the guards were dismissed in 2009 after a judge found that prosecutors wrongly relied on compelled statements the guards gave shortly after the shooting. The DC Circuit revived the case in 2011, but Slatten argued that order didn't apply to him, and that as a result prosecutors missed the deadline to reindict him for manslaughter.

The DC Circuit in 2014 agreed with Slatten, criticizing the Justice Department for its "inexplicable" failure to act in time. Prosecutors instead charged him with first-degree murder, the only charge they could bring at that point. Slatten said it was an act of vindictive prosecution; prosecutors said they could file charges they believed were supported by the evidence, and were motivated by a legitimate desire to bring Slatten to justice.

The guards are all also arguing that the case should have been heard in Utah, where they were arrested, instead of Washington, and that a key prosecution witness contradicted his trial testimony in a written statement he submitted before sentencing.

The DC Circuit sealed the courtroom for arguments in Slatten's case about witness statements that haven't been part of the public record. Judge Judith Rogers also heard the case.

Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be the next secretary of education.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Betsy DeVos would not commit in a Senate hearing Tuesday to keeping federal rules in place for how schools must address sexual violence if she's confirmed as secretary of education, or that she wouldn't scale back federal Title IX investigations.

Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) used all of his time during a Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pension Committee hearing to ask DeVos, Donald Trump's nominee for education secretary, about what she'd do to address campus rape.

The Obama administration ramped up federal enforcement of how colleges address sexual violence, starting in earnest with a 2011 Dear Colleague letter that dictated key policies that schools must have in place. Those policies included how long school investigations of sexual assault cases should take, what standard of evidence to use, what information should be shared with the alleged victims and accused students, among other items.

DeVos, however, said "it would be premature" for her to commit to keeping that 2011 letter in place.

“I know that there’s a lot of conflicting ideas and opinions around that and, if confirmed, I would look forward to working with you and your colleagues and understand the range of opinions, and understand the views of the higher ed institutions that are charged with resolving these and addressing them, and I would look forward to finding some resolutions," DeVos further told Casey.

DeVos declined to say whether the preponderance of the evidence standard, which means at least 50% certain of someone's guilt, should be used in campus adjudications of sexual violence. Most colleges used that standard prior to 2011, but there were still some holdouts until the Education Department issued its Dear Colleague letter.

“If confirmed, I look forward to understanding the past actions and the current situation better, and to ensuring that the intent of the law is actually carried out in a way that recognizes both the victim, the rights of the victims as well as those who are accused as well," DeVos said.

Casey quickly turned to Twitter to voice his reaction to DeVos's answers.

The ranking Democratic member of the committee, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wa.), also raised concern in her opening remarks about how DeVos will deal with sexual assault issues.

“I’m very interested in your thoughts on Title IX and how we can do everything possible to end the scourge of campus sexual assault,” Murray said. “I was not happy about how you talked about this issue when we met. I’m hopeful you have learned more about it since then and are prepared to address it seriously.”

Democrats repeatedly complained in the hearing to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the committee, that they were not allowed more than five minutes of time to question DeVos.

Casey and Murray sent a letter to Trump earlier this month asking that his administration not roll back Title IX guidance documents sent by the Education Department under President Obama, particularly the the 2011 Dear Colleague letter.

At the end, Murray brought up Trump’s remarks about how he’s able to grab women “by the pussy,” and asked DeVos, “If this behavior, kissing and touching women and girls without their consent, happened in a school, would you consider it sexual assault?”

"Yes,” DeVos responded.

Murray then asked if DeVos she would promise not to “rein in” the Office for Civil Rights, the department’s agency that investigates whether schools mishandled sexual assault cases.

“Senator, if confirmed, I commit that I will be looking very closely at how this has been regulated and handled with great sensitivity to those who are victims and also considering perpetrators as well,” DeVos said.

Advocates for sexual assault victims have increasingly voiced concern that DeVos has donated thousands to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a civil liberties group that sponsored a lawsuit last year charging that the 2011 Dear Colleague letter was issued illegally. Top officials at FIRE told BuzzFeed News that they haven't had substantive conversations with DeVos since her nomination. Robert Shibley, the executive director of FIRE, said he's never met her.

FIRE has repeatedly criticized the Obama administration's crackdown on how colleges handle sexual violence. But Ed Patru, spokesman for a group called "Friends of Betsy DeVos," noted FIRE doesn't just focus on sexual assault.

"It's a mistake to cherry pick a single issue, from any multi-issue organization, and extrapolate from that a conclusion as to how she may come down on a hypothetical public policy question," Patru told BuzzFeed News on Tuesday.

Other critics, like groups of law professors at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, have charged that the policies prescribed by the Education Department do not provide enough due process protection for accused students.

In the past five years, DeVos has also donated to Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Penn.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who were original co-sponsors of recent legislation to increase rules on how colleges deal with sexual assault, according to paperwork she filed for the Senate HELP committee.

There are currently 301 federal investigations ongoing into how 222 colleges and universities handled sexual assault cases, and another 110 K-12 school districts under similar Title IX probes.

LINK: Senators Urge Trump Not To Roll Back Federal Rules On Campus Rape

LINK: People Are Telling Trump’s Education Nominee To Protect Rape Survivors

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump's nominee for commerce secretary admitted at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday that he had employed an undocumented household worker for seven years.

Wilbur Ross told the Senate Commerce Committee that while preparing for the hearing, he "rechecked" the identification of his approximately one dozen household employees. Ross confirmed that one employee, hired in 2009, wasn't able to provide proper US documentation and that he was fired within the past month or so.

The issue came up at the start of Ross' hearing, when committee chairman Sen. John Thune asked Ross to clarify what had happened. Thune said Ross had informed the committee of the issue during the vetting process.

"Upon your nomination and as part of this nomination process, my understanding is that you determined that you had hired a household employee in 2009 who presented a Social Security card in the employee's name along with a valid driver's license," Thune said. "But he recently was unable to provide similar documentation again."

"Those are the facts and we did the best that we thought we could do," Ross said.

Thune thanked Ross "for being forthcoming about this particular matter," as did ranking Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson.

Trump will become the 45th president around noon on Friday.

6 a.m.: The gates will open at the US Capitol grounds.

Crowds walk toward Capitol Building Thursday.

John Minchillo / AP

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Virginia Department of Corrections via AP

After another abnormally long execution using the controversial sedative midazolam — this one taking place in Virginia — the deceased inmate's attorneys are calling for an independent inquiry.

Late Wednesday, Virginia executed Ricky Gray for the 2006 murders of Bryan and Kathryn Harvey and their two daughters, 9-year-old Stella and 4-year-old Ruby.

Executioners took more than 30 minutes behind closed curtains to set IV lines in Gray.

"This is far longer than typical, and VDOC has been able to provide no plausible explanation for failure to insert the IV for such a delayed period of time," attorneys Rob Lee and Elizabeth Peiffer said in a statement. They added that Gray had no history of intravenous drug use.

Problems with IV access are not uncommon in executions. In 2014, Oklahoma officials misplaced an IV, resulting in a badly botched execution that lasted for 45 minutes with the inmate writhing on the gurney. Last year, BuzzFeed News examined Georgia's internal lethal injection timelines and found that executioners struggled to set IV lines — struggling for nearly an hour before one execution.

Once they were able to set the IV line, executioners started the lethal injection. After the inmate is injected with the sedative, the department of corrections pinches him to see if he responds to pain. If the inmate is awake or capable of feeling pain, the next two drugs, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, would be incredibly painful.

"Mr. Gray was observed turning his head from side to side a minute or more after the VDOC's 'pinch test,'" the attorneys said.

They said it could indicate he was reacting to suffocating, or it could show "that he was roused to consciousness by the introduction of a 'noxious stimuli.'"

"If Mr. Gray were conscious during the administration of either of the second two drugs, he would have suffered excruciating pain," they noted.

In a statement, Virginia Department of Corrections spokesperson Lisa Kinney said that the execution "was carried out in accordance with" the protocol, and that the "time needed to find a vein for IV insertion varies from person to person."

"Contrary to statements made to media by Mr. Gray’s attorneys, Mr. Gray did not respond to the noxious stimuli test," Kinney said.

The ACLU weighed in to back the questions raised by Gray's attorneys, with a Virginia ACLU official saying on Thursday that the known facts "certainly suggest that something unusual happened" with Gray's execution.

"The ACLU of Virginia opposes the death penalty and seeks an end to its practice in Virginia," ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Claire Guthrie Gastañaga said in a statement. "Until that happens, however, the Commonwealth must, at a minimum, be fully accountable for the manner in which executions are done. The culture of secrecy must end."

Virginia is the first state known to have used a compounded version of midazolam. Unlike manufactured drugs, compounded drugs are regulated largely by the states and have a significantly higher failure rate.

Other states have relied on a manufactured version of the drug and have met with similar complications. Last month, Alabama's execution of Ronald Smith took more than 30 minutes with him heaving and coughing for about 13 minutes, according to two press witnesses. An Associated Press witness noted Smith "clenched his fists and raised his head during the early part of the procedure."

In Alabama's previous attempt using midazolam, one of the inmate's eyes were open during the procedure.

In recent months, two death penalty states — Arizona and Florida — removed midazolam from their execution protocols. Arizona has also agreed to never use the drug again.

David Sirota / Via davidsirota.com

WASHINGTON — True Blue Media, pitching itself as the left's answer to Breitbart, has picked an investigative reporter critical of Republicans and Wall Street Democrats alike as its new CEO.

David Sirota is leaving his role as senior investigations editor at the International Business Times to lead True Blue, which currently operates as ShareBlue and was part of a network of liberal outlets supporting Hillary Clinton's failed presidential campaign.

The move suggests that a shattered and divided Democratic Party establishment is looking to embrace the combative, progressive wing that backed Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Primary. Sirota has been a loud critic of President-elect Donald Trump — but he does not come from Clinton's wing of the Democratic Party, and indeed wrote a slew of stories up through the last month of the general election critical of Clinton's ties to Wall Street.

ShareBlue is the brainchild of David Brock, the former conservative journalist turned liberal political warrior who is building a liberal fundraising and politics machine explicitly modeled on the network established by the conservative Koch brothers. After the election, Brock also told donors that he was seeking money to finance a "Breitbart of the left," a phrase he modified in a speech Tuesday to the left's "answer to Breitbart."

And Sirota's hire moves the project, in fact, out of Brock's — and Breitbart's — path of disciplined, intensely politicized journalism in support of the dueling 2016 campaigns and into something more independent.

"Now more than ever, people are hungry for substantive, incisive, fearless reporting — and that's Sirota's trademark," Brock said in a statement. He's expected to announce Sirota's hire at a gathering of progressive donors in Miami on Friday.

Despite Brock's comparisons with a right-wing site driven explicitly by the goal of advancing politicized narratives, Sirota cast his role as that of an independent watchdog.

“At a time when mass misinformation threatens journalism and American democracy, compelling accountability reporting is needed now more than ever,” he said in the statement. “The public is being inundated with gossip, half-truths, partisan propaganda and stories that have little connection to people’s daily lives — and all this is happening just as major crises threaten our country and our planet.

"Our mission is straightforward: to fearlessly report on the most important issues of the day, to break original news, and to scrutinize the political forces and elite powerbrokers that affect — and often harm — the public at large. Our coverage areas will not be dictated by Beltway conventional wisdom, but instead by the real issues and crises facing millions of people throughout the country," Sirota said.

ShareBlue's model has been to produce stories from a left-wing viewpoint to be shared on Facebook, where it has more than a million followers.

Sirota's hire suggests that the site is moving beyond partisan argument and advocacy into combative reporting. Sirota is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work has often taken him into the intersection of corporate influence and government policy. His work raised questions about the handling of pension funds by Republican governors in New Jersey and Massachusetts. His investigation of the health care industry's influence on the Democratic Connecticut state government prompted an official ethics probe into a massive merger.

He also has a history in the progressive wing of Democratic politics, and once worked as press secretary to then-Rep. Bernie Sanders.

Brock has been a key fundraiser for Clinton through super PACs like American Bridge and Correct the Record, as well as Media Matters, which he also founded. Earlier this month Brock posted a public letter to Bernie Sanders calling for all factions of the Democratic Party to "unify in resistance" to Trump.

Sirota replaces Peter Daou.

Here’s what the crowd looked like in 2009, 2013, and today.

2009

The view facing the Capitol

CNN / Via youtube.com

2017

The view facing the Capitol

Earth Cam / Via earthcam.com

View Entire List ›

Gabriella Demczuk / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — As President Trump took office, a Washington watchdog group sent a letter asking the General Services Administration to "immediately" begin the process of determining whether the Trump company responsible for running his new D.C. hotel at the Old Post Office Building is now violating the terms of the lease for the government property.

Under the lease for the Trump International Hotel, "No ... elected official of the Government of the United States ... shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom" — a provision that the GSA told lawmakers in December that Trump could violate once he took office.

"Unless GSA has received new information demonstrating President Trump no longer owns Trump Old Post Office LLC, and there is no evidence it has, it is now time for GSA to initiate the process for establishing that President Trump'd company has breached the lease and is in default," Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), wrote to the GSA's administrator on Friday.

After Trump's news conference in which he announced changes to his business dealings in anticipation of his becoming president, the GSA announced it would review the changes to determine whether the changes would solve any potential issues.

"We are seeking additional information that explains and describes any new organizational structure as it applies to the Old Post Office lease. Upon receipt, consistent with our treatment of any contract to which we are a party, we will review this new organizational structure and determine its compliance with all the terms and conditions of the lease," the GSA announced in a statement this past week.

In Bookbinder's letter, he wrote, "If President Trump's company does not resolve this breach, GSA should exercise its rights to terminate the lease or take other legal action."

Read CREW's letter:

LINK: Donald Trump Is Going Postal

LINK: Trump Gave His Kids A Big Stake In Huge Government Deal, Document Shows

Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Win Mcnamee / Getty Images

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Carlos Barria / Reuters

Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Images

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Alex Wong / Getty Images

Rick Wilking / Reuters

Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Patrick Smith / Getty Images

Adrees Latif / Reuters

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

Pool / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — As President Trump's administration began, the White House website was turned over from former President Obama's team to the Trump team.

Understandably, the Trump White House started anew — with a barebones site that includes just six short "issues" sections. (There is news in what the new administration chose immediately to highlight.)

Via whitehouse.gov

The whole site is basically empty — less than four hours into Trump's presidency. In the news section, for example, there is only one entry.

Via whitehouse.gov

A Trump White House official noted that the Trump administration will be adding information to the site in the weeks and months to come.

"The initial launch featured biographies, select new issue pages, and a live stream of the Inaugural events," the official said. "Additionally, the Trump transition team worked with the White House's IT Team to ensure that the Trump Administration's version of WhiteHouse.gov maintained and replicated content about the White House as an institution, about the building, and historical information about Presidents."

Nonetheless, news organizations and advocacy groups pressed the argument that, as the Washington Post put it, "LGBT rights page disappears from White House web site." The Human Rights Campaign — an LGBT advocacy group — followed up with a news release, "Trump Administration Removes All Mentions of LGBTQ People or Rights from The White House Website."

LGBT mentions, though, aren't alone. Everything from the Obama White House site is gone — because it's a brand new site. What's more, the Obama White House coordinated this plan; they laid out the plan for removing all of the Obama White House content from the site back in October 2016.

As Ohio State law professor Chris Walker pointed out, even the Office of Management and Budget website — within the White House — had been "removed" as of Friday afternoon.

Via whitehouse.gov

While it's not clear — in any sense — what will happen with LGBT rights under the Trump administration, this does not appear to be a sign of anything beyond the fact that the new president has a new website.

Obama's LGBT page — and everything else — is still available at the now-archived Obama White House site.

The Trump White House official added, "The Trump Administration appreciates the hard work of the Obama Administration's Office of Digital Strategy and White House IT teams which laid the foundation for a smooth digital transition and the seamless handoff of social and digital platforms."

Via obamawhitehouse.archives.gov

President Donald Trump on Friday took over the @POTUS Twitter account shortly after the inaugural ceremony in Washington, DC.

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

Although Trump had not yet tweeted from the account, his profile photo and background photo had been changed.

But people began to notice something strange about Trump’s Twitter cover photo of people waving American flags in front of the Capitol.

Indeed, the initial banner image used on Trump’s new presidential Twitter page was a photo from Obama’s 2009 inauguration. It's available for use on Getty as a stock image.

Getty / Via gettyimages.com

A protester in downtown Washington, DC, following the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2017.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Protesters demonstrating against President Donald Trump raise their hands as they are surrounded by police on the sidelines of the inauguration in Washington, DC.

Adrees Latif / Reuters

People protest against the inauguration of Donald Trump outside the US Embassy in London.

Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

Protesters display placards as they march towards the US embassy in Manila, Philippines, for a rally to coincide with the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

Bullit Marquez / AP

Protesters attend Donald Trump's Inauguration ceremony in Washington, DC.

Amanda Edwards / WireImage

Anti-riot police block protesters holding placards against Donald Trump outside the US embassy in Manila, Philippines.

Romeo Ranoco / Reuters

Police officers push back demonstrators as they protest against President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, on Jan. 20, 2107.

Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images

Protesters clash with police after the inauguration of President Donald Trump in Washington, DC.

Andrew Caballero-reynolds / AFP / Getty Images

An activist demonstrating against President Donald Trump is helped after being hit by pepper spray in Washington, D.C.

Adrees Latif / Reuters

A banner against President Donald Trump is on Avenida Paulista during a protest on Jan. 20, 2017, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Cris Faga / Getty Images

Demonstrators link arms across the Golden Gate Bridge during a peaceful demonstration against the inauguration of President Donald Trump in San Francisco, on Jan. 20, 2017.

Stephen Lam / Reuters

Demonstrators hang a banner that reads "Act Now! Build Bridges not Walls" from Tower Bridge during a protest in London against the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Toby Melville / Reuters

Argentine leftist activists march toward the US embassy in Buenos Aires to protest against President Donald Trump.

Eitan Abramovich / AFP / Getty Images

An anti-Trump demonstrator sets a "Make America Great Again" hat on fire in Washington, DC.

Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images

Protesters set a parked limousine on fire in downtown Washington, DC, during the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

Juliet Linderman / AP

Men hold flags during a protest against President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the inauguration in Washington, DC.

Adrees Latif / Reuters

Pool / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Nobody’s ever been a less popular president on day one than President Trump. But those low approval ratings won’t be an issue when it comes to pushing the new administration’s agenda in Washington.

Elated Republicans now control both houses of Congress and have a president unlikely to veto ambitious pieces of legislation. Asked if the president’s high unfavorables will affect what the Senate passes in the coming weeks, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley repeated twice: “Absolutely nothing.”

“I don’t think it’s going to affect his ability to get things done because his party controls both chambers and very much feels the need to produce,” Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole told BuzzFeed News as he headed to the Capitol for Trump’s inauguration.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump critic during the campaign, said the president would have plenty of opportunities to define himself as someone who got things done. "He's got a lot of low-hanging fruit like infrastructure bills. I would advise him to put some points on the board. [President] Obama came out of the gate pretty divisive the first 100 days. I'd advise him to go the other way,” Graham added.

Obama used his high popularity — 78 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the then-incoming president — eight years ago to start pushing through his agenda. But even when his popularity fell, it didn’t change much: Most Republicans still blocked his proposals and most Democrats still supported them.

What did change was how many Democrats he had to support him and how many Republicans he had blocking him. By the 2010 midterms Obama’s approval rating had fallen to the mid-40s as a result of his efforts to pass the Affordable Care Act. Voters took it out on his party. Democrats lost 63 House seats in the midterm elections, giving Republicans a large majority, and six Senate seats.

Trump will likely use that kind of electoral impact of his agenda to his advantage by wielding an incredibly powerful weapon: Republicans fear the new president’s interference in their re-election campaigns.

Defying Trump comes with attendant costs: Just a single Trump tweet can bring out intense protest from constituents, especially for House members’ whose heavily Republican districts most strongly supported the president in 2016.

“If you look at Trump’s approval rating among those voters who by and large elect congressional Republicans, it’s still pretty good,” pointed out Doug Heye, who served as communications director for former Majority Leader Eric Cantor. For Trump, whose base is as fiercely loyal as his critics are antagonistic, that could give him plenty of leverage with the legislators who will actually pass policy.

The first few months of a new administration are traditionally when a new president pushes through some of the biggest legislative priorities, taking advantage of the momentum and political capital that comes from being newly elected — at that point, they haven’t yet had time to mess anything up. Not so for Trump, who, according to Gallup, has a favorability of just 40%. That’s more than 20% lower than any of the three presidents that took office before him.

But, as Cole pointed out, Trump wouldn’t be the first president to succeed in the face of a divided electorate.

“He’s probably always gonna be a very polarizing personality, I just think that’s in the nature,” Cole said. “But Richard Nixon was, too, and yet he got reelected in a landslide.”

Yuri Gripas / Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Trump has selected a senior lawyer who worked to defend Republican-led states against challenges to their redistricting plans after the 2010 Census for a top civil rights job in the Justice Department.

John Gore, a partner at Jones Day, is Trump's choice for Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division. The division is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws and investigating allegations of civil rights violations by state and local governments.

Jones Day announced Gore's new role on Friday, shortly after Trump took the oath of office. Above the Law first reported the news on Thursday night.

Gore worked with Mike Carvin — the lawyer who regularly sparred with the Obama administration at the Supreme Court — in defending Florida, New York, and South Carolina's redistricting plans in 2012.

More recently, Gore was part of a team of lawyers — including others headed to the Trump administration — who represented the University of North Carolina in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against state and university officials challenging the state's anti-transgender HB 2 "bathroom bill."

While the state officials defended the law on its merits, UNC did not. Instead, the lawyers argued this past year that "the UNC Defendants have not enforced or threatened to enforce [HB 2] at all." They asked to be dismissed from the lawsuit, which has been put on hold.

(Gore, Noel Francisco, and James Burnham — all of whom are taking roles in the administration — withdrew from representing UNC in the case earlier this week.)

Marc Elias — the Perkins Coie partner who led Democrats' election law litigation strategy as Hillary Clinton's general counsel this past election cycle — sees the move as part of a potential path ahead.

Although Elias complimented Gore personally, he added, "I have no illusions about what it means for voting rights and redistricting. Those of us who support voting rights are on our own for the next four years."

In fact, hours after Jones Day announced Gore's new role on Friday, the Justice Department filed a brief in the federal court in Texas that is overseeing the longstanding challenge to that state's voter ID law. The Obama administration Justice Department had opposed the voter ID provision in court.

On Friday, Justice Department lawyers sought a delay of an upcoming scheduled hearing in the case "because of the federal government’s change in administration, which took place on January 20, 2017."

The filing continued: "Because of the change in administration, the Department of Justice also experienced a transition in leadership. The United States requires additional time to brief the new leadership of the Department on this case and the issues to be addressed at that hearing before making any representations to the Court. This motion is made in good faith and not for the purposes of delay."

The court quickly granted the request — setting the next hearing in the case for Feb. 28 — after a telephone hearing before Magistrate Judge Jason Libby.

Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump vowed to repeal Obamacare throughout the campaign, and on his first day in office, he signed an executive order making clear he's serious about that promise.

The order directs every agency that has jurisdiction over the law to find ways to delay or waive provisions that would "impose a fiscal burden."

But how exactly this order will be implemented, and its practical effects, is unclear.

Obamacare isn't going away overnight. Because the Trump order is very broad, insurance companies and other health care stakeholders will need to wait to see what agency heads end up deciding to do, several insurance sources said.

The vast majority of provisions of the law require Congress to help overturn them. But Trump's executive order does give the agencies a directive to start finding ways to weaken the law, as soon as they possibly can.

The biggest issue at hand is the individual mandate, the lynchpin that requires every American to buy insurance. The executive order directs federal agencies to waive, defer, or grant exemptions, to the maximum extent of the law, to provisions of the ACA that impose a cost.

Larry Levitt, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation said that if the agencies are able to exempt a large number of individuals from the individual mandate, insurance companies could quickly pull out the individual market.

"This is a very sweeping order that could have major ramifications for the ACA. Potentially the biggest step implied by this order would be granting wide-scale hardship exemptions from the individual mandate, which could create chaos in the individual insurance market," he said. "This order doesn’t create any new authority for federal agencies, but it signals that the Trump administration is planning to use whatever authority it has to scale back and undo provisions of the ACA."

An executive order still has to comply within the law, but the agencies, especially Health and Human Services, have a lot of flexibility in how they interpret the law. During the ACA's enactment, Obama used his executive order power to delay parts of its implementation.

Agency heads will also still have to go through the normal rule-making process to adjust or rollback certain regulations — a process that can take months.

The executive order has four main orders, which can be summarized as:

• Directs agencies to ensure the law is being implemented efficiently until it can be repealed.
• As mentioned above, directs agencies to grant as many exemptions as possible to ACA provisions.
• Directs agencies to grant greater flexibility to the states and cooperate with them in implementing healthcare programs.
• Directs agencies to "encourage the development of a free and open market."

There are two more sections, one dealing with regulatory logistics and the other acting as a legal disclaimer.

Trump's plan for the replacement of Obamacare remains unknown. Multiple proposals are expected to be introduced in the Senate this week, but top Senate Republicans say they still do not know Trump's plan.

A key player in repeal and replacement will be Tom Price, Trump's nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. But Price has not yet been confirmed and has the second of two confirmation hearings scheduled for Tuesday.

Republicans in Congress are split over whether Obamacare repeal can begin in earnest before a replacement plan is clearly outlined. The next major crossroads in repeal is the upcoming budget reconciliation process. Republicans can use this tool to repeal some parts of the Affordable Care Act without Democrat support, but will need some Democrats in the Senate onside to pass any new replacement legislation.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has repeatedly said the onus of replacement is on Republicans, and Democrats will not help craft a replacement bill until one is presented.

Read the order:

Andrew Harnik / AP

WASHINGTON — The head of a leading group that protects journalists around the world described Donald Trump's decision to define his first day by an attack on reporters as a disturbing precedent.

"To single out an individual reporter in that context is deeply chilling," said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, adding that he'd expected the campaign tactic of attacks on the press to die down in the White House.

"Now he’s got the power to turn this obsession into policy, so now that’s the other shoe to drop," Simon said.

Trump used an appearance at the CIA to charge that members of the media are among the most "dishonest people in the world" to cheers in front of those assembled at Langley. He lambasted Time magazine's Zeke Miller for reporting, incorrectly, that the new administration had removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. Miller quickly corrected himself publicly and apologized for his mistake.

"So Zeke, Zeke from Time magazine, writes the story about I took down — I would never do that, because I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King," Trump said. "But this is how dishonest the media is. Now, big story. The retraction was, like, where? Was it in a line? Or do they even bother putting it in?"

Miller, who declined a request for comment to BuzzFeed News, did not write a story about the missing MLK Jr. bust but included it in a press pool report sent to reporters around the country. He pointed BuzzFeed News to his tweets, where he repeatedly apologized for his error and his colleagues in the press who relied on his report.

While the new press secretary, Sean Spicer, tweeted that he accepted Miller's apology, that didn't stop him from calling it "deliberately false reporting" that was "irresponsible and reckless." He then set his targets on the press reporting of the inauguration crowd size, as Trump did in his speech to the CIA, where he said it must have been a million or a million and a half people, despite shots of the crowd and National Mall that showed large swaths of empty space.

Spicer said, falsely, that Trump's inauguration was the first to feature coverings on the grass, claiming they made the crowd look smaller, and he cited statistics that 420,000 people took the Metro during Trump's inauguration, while only 317,000 did for Obama in 2013. In reality, the Washington Post reported that the numbers were 571,000 for Trump and 782,000 for Obama. The grass coverings were also in place for Obama's inauguration in 2013.

Trump's administration has already indicated an interest in going after the media, but in this instance they appear driven by a desire to minimize reporting they don't like.

Advocates for the free press were alarmed both by Trump's attack on an individual reporter and the introduction of a new set of "facts" approved and pushed by the administration.

Lynn Walsh, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, said that Miller made an unfortunate error and that it wasn't unusual for the aggrieved party — in this case the president of the United States — to respond, but said the more alarming part was that Spicer then came out with his own set of inauguration size numbers.

She said if the administration is "trying to twist the truth to make them look good or trying to spin facts so it supports or looks favorably on President Trump or his administration, as journalists we need to see through that."

While Walsh said journalists should not focus on the attacks, the Committee to Protect Journalists' Simon noted that the new controversy allowed the administration to draw attention from the huge crowds across the country and around the world for the Women's March that rose as a response to Trump's election.

And Simon said ignoring the attacks on the press is hard when the new administration has repeatedly put the media in its sights.

"Now he’s got power. What’s next?" Simon said.

Marie Kirschen / BuzzFeed News / Via Twitter: @mariekirschen

The inauguration of Donald Trump and the giant global protests that followed crystallized a central fact of the new political landscape: that it is truly international, for the first time since the 1960s, and bound together by technology in a way the reactionaries and revolutionaries of that decade couldn't have imagined.

The protests hit across the broader “West.” They began of all places in a stronghold of the old order, Brussels’ Place de la Monnaie, where a relatively modest 2,000 people turned up for a moment of silence as Trump was sworn in. They picked up a few hours later in Sydney and Auckland, and then as the sun rose in big protests in European capitals: London, Berlin, Rome. Then in the US, where many cities seem to have hosted the biggest protests in memory.

This new globalism — as Steve Bannon calls it — has not totally found its shape, but you see its outlines: feminism, internationalism, a deep concern for the rights of minorities and especially Muslims, the canaries in the coal mine of Western nationalism.

And if people turned out Saturday on seven continents — a few dozen scientists tramped out among the penguins in Antarctica — that too reflected the weakening of national identities, as well as the fact that the US is still the lone superpower and the fight with the highest stakes.

Trump’s inauguration — small and inward-looking as it was — was an equally global moment. It was the greatest triumph yet for the nationalist reaction on both sides of the Atlantic. The author of his inaugural address, Bannon, saw this early and clearly. In 2014 he described a “global revolt” spanning Europe, the Americas, and India, a “center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos.”

There is an inherent irony in “global nationalism,” of course. Will traditional American values really lead to the exact same place as traditional French and German ones? To the same destination as traditional Russian nationalism? Back in the 20th century, that was where you got wars. And the role of Russian money and media is another decidedly global thread in this new nationalist fabric.

But Bannon is also obviously right about the shared factors of the reaction against self-satisfied and preposterously prosperous elites. And he's right about the existence of a coherent counter movement, which nationalists label “globalist,” with anti-Semitic echoes meant or unmeant, depending on who you're talking to.

But who are these globalists? Are they the army of Davos? Certainly to a degree: A lot of the people I ran into in Washington today were well-educated professionals, globalization’s winners. Or are they the descendants of Occupy, the voice of globalization’s losers whom Bannon recognizes as kind of estranged siblings?

“The beginning of all this was the anti-globalization movement,” he pointed out to me in an email as the protesters tromped home Saturday evening. He suggested that “Trump's populism and nationalism really talk to the original economic issues these guys brought up.”

So far, Trump hasn't shaved off much of that lefty protest tradition. And the mirror-image global movements have a lot in common: they spread and define themselves on social media and globalizing media companies — BuzzFeed and Breitbart, Huffington Post, The Guardian, and the New York Times. The protests of 1968 — from Paris to Washington — had their common features, but the tight and instant emotional connection through media is something new. Social media proved powerful and fickle in the only recent precedent for these international movements, the Arab Spring. In the United States, the new social media politics has homogenized and polarized. Will the apparently secular Trump movement follow Russia and Poland toward traditional religious values? Will the whole left embrace the notion of a unified intersectional struggle that ties social and economic values together?

One of the great global questions is who, if anyone, gets to opt out of this binary struggle, and how its contours fit into unfamiliar contexts. Ideologues and diplomats have never gotten along, and it's easy to see why. Do the anti-establishment stirrings among young Mexicans ally them with Trump, whom they loathe? Would Trump prefer a Chinese leader who drew more on that country’s confrontational nationalism than the one who starred at Davos? And how does the anti-Muslim vitriol at the center of Western nationalism line it with natural allies among nationalists and strongmen in the Muslim world? (The confusion on the right over whether Turkey’s Erdogan is a friendly strongman or a Muslim enemy is instructive.)

Here in the US, perhaps the most striking consequence of this globalization is whom it leaves out: conservatives. Small-government Reaganism was always a homespun American product, its fervor viewed with curiosity even by strategic allies from London to Tokyo to Jerusalem, none of whom seriously question socialized medicine and other “big government” features. Trump’s nationalism is an obvious European import, a blood-and soil-ethnic politics that the Republican Party’s corporate-minded elite had kept at bay ever since importing its adherents from the Democrats in the 1960s.

Trump did not even breathe in the direction of small-government conservatism Friday. No conservative was allowed on stage at the women’s march a day later. And now those small-government conservatives have no party and no country. It's hard see what becomes of them.