Category: News

Joy and despair, vitality and darkness course through Bruce Springsteen’s songs. The joy, he told the world, came from his mother, Adele Springsteen, who died on Wednesday at 98.

When he accepted the Ellis Island Family Heritage award in 2010, Springsteen brought his mother onstage with her sisters, Dora and Eda, and declared, “They put the rock ’n’ roll in me.”

Adele, born Adele Zerilli in 1925, was constantly listening to Top 40 radio when Springsteen was growing up, getting her son on his feet to dance with her. She scrimped to buy him his first electric guitar and she encouraged him to be a musician.

She worked for decades as a legal secretary, an example that taught her son the dignity and camaraderie of holding a job. “It’s a sight that I’ve never forgotten, my mother walking home from work,” he said during “Springsteen on Broadway,” his autobiographical stage show. “My mom was truthfulness, consistency, good humor, professionalism, grace, kindness, optimism, civility, fairness, pride in yourself, responsibility, love, faith in your family, commitment, joy in your work and a never-say-die thirst for living — for living and for life. And most importantly, for dancing.”

She also protected him from his father, who had a lifelong struggle with depression — and whose grimmer view of humanity is the counterweight that runs through Springsteen’s songs. “She was a parent,” he wrote in his memoir, “Born to Run,” and that’s what I needed as my world was about to explode.”

As his career took off, she kept detailed scrapbooks of every small milestone. And she danced in the spotlight at her son’s concerts when she was well into her 90s, even when her Alzheimer’s disease had taken its toll and music was an instinctive consolation.

“Through my mother’s spirit, love and affection, she imparted to me an enthusiasm for life’s complexities, an insistence on joy and good times, and the perseverance to see the hard times through,” the musician wrote in his memoir. That’s the measured, grown-up Springsteen, striking his balance. But a key moment in “Springsteen on Broadway” was “The Wish,” a song to his mother that glows with pure fondness.

In it, he looks back to getting a guitar as a Christmas present, and he reminisces about “me in my Beatle boots, you in pink curlers and matador pants/Pullin’ me up on the couch to do the Twist for my uncles and aunts.” He also considers “all the things that guitar brought us” and offers to play his mother a request, but with one proviso: “If you’re looking for a sad song, well I ain’t gonna play it.”

Art is never just autobiography, and children grow up to be far more than the sum of their parents. But anyone who’s ever shouted along on a chorus with an arena full of Springsteen fans — those choruses that often break through the darker thoughts in the verses — clearly owes Adele Springsteen some thanks.

A powerful storm known as an atmospheric river swept over California on Thursday, soaking the state with rain and leaving a trail of damage that has become familiar to residents in recent years: fallen trees, flooded roads and snarled travel.

Though the storm was not expected to cause the kind of chaos that was sown by a succession of atmospheric rivers last winter, forecasters and officials urged Californians to stay alert and be ready for an even larger tempest arriving over the weekend.

“We are in full preparation mode,” said Jackie Ruiz, a spokeswoman for the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management. “We’re definitely encouraging people to stay local, hunker down and if there’s no urgent need to be on the road, stay off the road.”

Communities in Santa Barbara County, tucked between the mountains and the sea, are especially vulnerable to flooding and mudslides. But meteorologists said that significant rainfall from the back-to-back storms was likely to affect almost the whole state.

The current storm hit Northern California first, flooding roads on Wednesday and prompting the closure of streets and schools in rural communities. At least one person had to be rescued from a car that was taking on water in Sonoma County, and forecasters warned of big, dangerous waves on the coast.

The storm was potent enough to push San Francisco’s cumulative rainfall total above normal for the first time this season, according Jan Null, an adjunct professor of meteorology at San Jose State University.

Residents in Southern California awoke on Thursday to flinty gray skies, gusting winds and downpours. Flash flood warnings were posted for part of Los Angeles County near beaches and ports and on hillsides.

Rose Schoenfeld, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Los Angeles area, said that residents of Palos Verdes Estates should be particularly vigilant. That is the area where homes perched atop seaside bluffs began slipping into a canyon last July, in a landslide that was blamed on the saturation of the soil by last winter’s storms.

In Long Beach, flooding forced the closure of a crucial freeway, bringing traffic in the area — which can induce headaches even in sunny weather — nearly to a standstill.

Flooding also closed the Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach. And firefighters in Orange County said that they had rescued someone from a swollen storm drainage channel.

“As you can see, with the heavy rain, the channels are going to fill up quickly, with the water moving at a dangerous speed,” the Orange County Fire Authority posted on social media, along with video of water rushing into a storm drain. “Please stay clear of bodies of water,” the post said.

The storm system that poured down rain in Southern California on Thursday was also bringing much-needed snow to the Sierra Nevada. The rain was expected to continue through the day on Thursday, but forecasters predicted that Friday and Saturday would be clearer.

So far this week, Californians have not seen the kinds of weather-generated disasters that struck last winter, though there was flooding in Ventura County in December and in San Diego in January.

The next storm, expected to arrive late Saturday and continue into Sunday, is likely to be more severe. But contrary to online rumors, nothing suggests that the storm will be anything like the widely feared — but less widely understood — “ARkStorm,” an exceedingly rare and powerful atmospheric event modeled by scientists at the United States Geological Survey that could inundate major West Coast cities.

Instead, forecasters said that Californians should expect a storm more like the ones last winter that broke a number of daily rainfall records and were the first significant precipitation in the state after several bone-dry years.

Of course, those storms caused major damage. But meteorologists said it was too soon to say with certainty how dangerous the incoming storm would be.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who focuses on public communication of weather phenomena, said in an email that he was “becoming increasingly concerned regarding what has the potential to become a major regional flood event somewhere between Santa Barbara and San Diego counties” at the beginning of next week.

He said that some of the prediction models showed precipitation totals that could overwhelm flood-control infrastructure in the state’s largest metro areas, including Los Angeles.

“This will bear close watching over the next couple of days,” Dr. Swain said.

Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.

A bipartisan group of senators holds weeks of closed-door talks to assemble a border and immigration package in response to mounting demands to fix the migrant crisis. The president gets on board despite blowback from the left. The Republican-controlled House is another matter, with hard-right conservatives flexing their muscle and demanding harsh restrictions.

That was the situation in 2014 when a major congressional push to enact far-reaching changes to immigration law appeared tantalizingly close to bearing fruit — only to come to nothing.

And a similar scenario could be playing out today, as lawmakers struggle to find agreement on a new border security measure. After months of private talks, a bipartisan deal is on the brink of emerging from the Democratic-led Senate, but it is unclear whether it will have enough G.O.P. support to advance — and House Republicans, egged on by former President Donald J. Trump, are pre-emptively threatening to tank it.

As they look back, those involved in past negotiations say it is frustrating that they have come so close so many times to enacting major legislation only to see it fly off the rails — not once, but twice in the past two decades. Had the proposals become law, they say, the border would be secure today, and the nation could have moved past the constantly raging immigration fight.

“If we’d have done any of those bills, we wouldn’t have these problems today,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a charter member of numerous “gangs” of lawmakers that have repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to strike border deals, notably in 2007 and 2014.

“Most of this problem would be manageable at least,” agreed Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and a leading proponent of providing undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children a path to legal status.

The spectacular legislative failures and the teetering of the current compromise underscore the enormous difficulty of reaching agreement on such a volatile issue. The past also accounts for some of the present lack of trust and wariness as lawmakers take on a subject that has bedeviled presidents of both parties and eluded resolution for decades.

“This is an incredibly challenging political discussion we’ve been having,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said on Wednesday in trying to explain why the Senate negotiations were dragging on.

Managing the politics and policy of immigration has proved almost impossible since a major 1986 initiative of the Reagan era. The two parties have repeatedly tried and failed to thread the needle among progressive politicians and Hispanic constituencies seeking legal status for millions of undocumented immigrants, conservatives demanding tight border restrictions and no “amnesty” for those who entered without proper authorization, and a business community clamoring for more workers.

When George W. Bush was re-elected president in 2004 with significant Hispanic support, he saw an opening for an immigration overhaul and a signature second-term achievement. He began pressing for action in 2006 in an Oval Office address.

A bipartisan group of senators led by Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Jon Kyl of Arizona went to work and came up with what they termed a “grand bargain” that traded new border restrictions for a path to citizenship for millions. But conservative Republicans attacked the legislation, making the now familiar arguments that it would reward those who had come to the United States illegally and did not do enough to fortify the border. Months of work fell to a bipartisan Senate filibuster in June 2007.

The next big push came in 2013 and 2014. The re-election of Barack Obama in 2012 had exposed declining Republican appeal to Hispanic voters and persuaded party leaders that they must embrace an immigration overhaul to halt that slide.

While talks quietly got underway in the House, a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” emerged in the Senate. On the Republican side, it included John McCain of Arizona; Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising star with Hispanic and conservative credibility; and Mr. Graham. Democratic participants included Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Durbin and Michael Bennet of Colorado.

What emerged from months of deliberations was the 1,200-page Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. It tied a 13-year pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people to tough benchmarks on border security. It established a new employee verification program to protect jobs from undocumented workers and created new visa programs for workers under an agreement between business and labor.

In contrast to 2007, the bill cleared the Senate with surprising strength, attracting 68 votes, including 14 Republicans and all Democrats. Mr. Schumer said at the time that the level of support would force the House to take up the issue, a dynamic similar to today, when senators hope a solid Senate vote will propel any plan over House Republican resistance.

But a decade ago, as now, the situation in the House was complex. Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, a traditional Republican with powerful ties to the business world, was willing to consider an immigration overhaul. But he was confronting the rising influence in his ranks of far-right Republicans, who made railing against illegal immigration a signature issue, so he moved carefully. A series of smaller bills emerged from the House that excluded a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Hoping to rally House Republicans, Mr. Boehner used a party retreat in January 2014 to unveil a set of immigration “principles” that were heavy on border security. They also omitted a path to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants, but instead proposed allowing them to remain in the United States and work if they met certain tests, including paying taxes and admitting they broke the law. But within days, Mr. Boehner was backtracking under pressure from the right, and the effort stalled.

In June, Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and the majority leader, was defeated in a stunning primary upset by a challenger who had attacked him as a backer of amnesty for illegal immigrants.

“That night, I knew it was over,” said Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican and veteran of multiple immigration negotiations who was a leading proponent of the plan. “The folks who had supported what we had done immediately started saying, ‘Look, this is a problem.’ That’s what killed it.”

Mr. Bennet still laments the failure.

“If we had passed that, the country would be in a far better place today than we are,” he said. “It’s tragic.”

During the Trump era, immigration proposals popped up in the regular spending fights, including a plan to extend temporary protection to the so-called Dreamers brought to the United States as children in exchange for substantial border wall funding, but those too went nowhere, consumed by politics as the ones before them were.

As Congress tries to strike a deal to secure the border to free up assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, the substance of the discussion has moved substantially to the right. No one is talking about citizenship for undocumented people — only how to secure the southern border and stem the tide of migrants seeking refugee status. It is a marked change for Democrats and President Biden, but they seem ready to give substantial ground to both tighten border security and win the assistance for Ukraine. The question now is whether election year considerations will prevent any bipartisan agreement.

But at some future point, the stubborn immigration issues that have tied Congress in knots for years will need to be resolved.

“What this country is really going to need,” Mr. Bennet said, “is a comprehensive approach like the Gang of Eight bill to not just address the immediate issues of the border, but to make sure we have a functional immigration system as well.”

“Let’s be honest, this is a good economy.”

So declared Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, in his news conference on Wednesday after the Fed’s latest policy meeting. He’s right, even if the public isn’t fully convinced (although the gap between economic perceptions and reality seems to be narrowing). In fact, Powell is clearly wrestling with a dilemma many countries wish they had: What’s the right monetary policy when the news is good on just about all fronts?

Contrary to what you may have heard, this is not a “Goldilocks economy” — get your children’s stories right, folks! Goldilocks found a bowl of porridge that was neither too hot nor too cold. We have an economy that is both piping hot (in terms of growth and job creation) and refreshingly cool (in terms of inflation).

Hence the Fed’s dilemma. It increased interest rates in an attempt to reduce inflation, even though this risked causing a recession. Now that inflation has plunged, should it quickly reverse those rate hikes, or should rates remain high because we have not, in fact, had a recession (yet)?

I believe that the risk of an economic slowdown is much higher than that of resurgent inflation and that rate cuts should come sooner rather than later. But that’s not the kind of argument that’s going to be settled on the opinion pages. What I want to talk about, instead, is what the good economic news says about policy and politics.

Before I get there, a quick summary of the good news that has come in just in the past few weeks.

First, inflation. For both historical and technical reasons, the Fed aims for 2 percent inflation; over the past six months, its preferred price measure has risen at an annual rate of … 2 percent. “Core” inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, has been running slightly below target.

The Fed also looks at wage growth, not because workers have caused inflation, but because wages are usually the stickiest part of inflation and therefore an indicator of whether disinflation is sustainable. Well, on Wednesday, the Employment Cost Index came in below expectations and is now more or less consistent with the Fed’s target. On Thursday we learned that productivity has been rising rapidly, so unit labor costs are easily consistent with low inflation.

It’s true that prices haven’t actually gone back down, but a one-time jump in prices is normal after a major disruption, like the conversion back to a peacetime economy after World War II or a pandemic that temporarily shut down normal activity.

Finally, real G.D.P. grew a very solid 3.3 percent in the fourth quarter, making all those predictions of a 2023 recession look even sillier.

As typically happens when there’s a Democrat in the White House, the usual suspects are questioning the official data. But the strength of the job market and the fall in inflation are confirmed by many independent surveys of consumers and businesses.

So it has been good news all around. This is arguably the best economy we’ve had since the late 1990s.

What does all of this say about policy and politics?

Although some on the left refuse to believe it, President Biden has spent a lot of money on progressive priorities. Many critics, including some Democrats, predicted that this spending would have catastrophic effects. Perhaps most famously, Larry Summers, a top official in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, called the 2021 American Rescue Plan the “least responsible” fiscal policy in 40 years.

We did in fact get a one-time burst of inflation, but so did other advanced countries, and America has in other ways greatly outperformed its peers — probably in part because Biden’s spending boosted growth and employment. Now that we’ve achieved what appears to be a better-than-Goldilocks soft landing, Bidenomics looks pretty good in retrospect. Maybe progressive economic policies don’t necessarily lead to disaster, after all.

What about the political consequences?

Once upon a time, a president presiding over our current economy would have been strongly positioned for re-election. But we live in an age of hyperpartisanship, where the state of the economy seems to have much less effect on elections than it did a few decades ago. Indeed, many voters — especially Republicans — seem to base their evaluation of the economy on their politics rather than the other way around. Amid all the good news I’ve just laid out, 71 percent of Republicans say the economy is getting worse, while only about 7 percent say it’s getting better.

So I don’t expect Biden to ride to easy victory on the strength of economic success. But the economy is doing well enough that Donald Trump is back to insisting that the unemployment numbers are fake and claiming, ludicrously, that he somehow deserves credit for a rising stock market.

And there’s been a perceptible shift in Republicans’ messaging away from the economy (although they’re still claiming it’s terrible) to immigration — I’ll talk about their remarkably cynical strategy on that issue another day.

For now, the point is that Powell is right: This is a good economy.

If the House follows through on this week’s committee recommendation and impeaches Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, it will be the first time in American history that a sitting cabinet officer has been impeached. But Mr. Mayorkas is not as lonely as all that.

Republicans have also filed articles of impeachment against his boss, President Biden, as well as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, while threatening them against Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.

Indeed, threats of impeachment have become a favorite pastime for Republicans following the lead of former President Donald J. Trump, who has pressed his allies for payback for his own two impeachments while in office. The chances of Mr. Mayorkas, much less Mr. Biden, ever being convicted in the Senate, absent some shocking revelation, seem to be just about zero, and the others appear in no serious danger even of being formally accused by the House.

But impeachment, once seen as perhaps the most serious check on corruption and abuse of power developed by the founders, now looks in danger of becoming a constitutional dead letter, just another weapon in today’s bitter, tit-for-tat partisan wars. Mr. Trump’s two acquittals made clear that a president could feel assured of keeping his office no matter how serious his transgressions, as long as his party stuck with him, and the impeachment-in-search-of-a-high-crime efforts of the Biden era have been written off as just more politics.

“Impeachment has become more of a political and public relations tool than a serious mechanism of executive branch accountability,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. “It is of a piece with the decline of norms across Washington institutions and the ever-rising weaponization of legal tools to harm political opponents.”

The current impeachment drives in the House have been nettlesome to the Biden team and certainly to Mr. Mayorkas, who issued a defiant seven-page letter before the House Homeland Security Committee voted for articles of impeachment against him along party lines this week. But where impeachment consumed the White House under Richard M. Nixon, Bill Clinton and Mr. Trump, it is barely an afterthought in the Biden West Wing.

Not a single Democrat has expressed support for impeaching Mr. Biden or his advisers, unlike past impeachments when at least a handful of the incumbent’s party were open to it. Indeed, to the contrary, several Republicans have derided their party’s zeal for impeachment. Whatever his son Hunter did, they note, there is no evidence that Mr. Biden did anything wrong, and the Mayorkas impeachment centers on a policy dispute, not a criminal accusation.

Nor will that change if Mr. Trump beats Mr. Biden this fall and returns to office. It is hard to imagine that impeachment will serve as much of a restraint against any excesses in a second Trump presidency — already the only president ever to be impeached (and acquitted) twice, would Mr. Trump seriously be worried about being impeached a third time?

It is remarkable how quickly impeachment has been diminished as a serious constitutional instrument for reining in a rogue executive.

In crafting the Constitution, the framers opted to include an impeachment clause to prevent the despotism Americans had just freed themselves from in the Revolution. At first, they decided that presidents and other officers could be subject to impeachment by a majority in the House and conviction by a two-thirds majority in the Senate for “treason or bribery.”

George Mason thought that was too limited and proposed adding “maladministration” as an impeachable offense, meaning incompetence. But James Madison objected, deeming it too broad and arguing that it would make the president subject to the whims of the Senate. Mason backed down but then proposed as an alternative the phrase “or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It was elegant, but the framers did not define it precisely. Alexander Hamilton made clear that the phrase meant offenses that “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself” — in other words, not any old crime would be impeachable, but only those that were an offense against the people or the system.

It was meant to be rare and for decades it was. Only 21 times has the House voted to impeach a government official, and only eight times has the Senate convicted and removed them from office, all of them judges who otherwise had life tenure. The only other cabinet official targeted for impeachment, William Belknap, the war secretary under President Ulysses S. Grant accused of corruption, resigned tearfully minutes before the House took up his case in 1876, but lawmakers voted to impeach him anyway.

It was so rare that no president was impeached until 1868, when President Andrew Johnson came within one vote of being convicted in the Senate. It took another 130 years for there to be another presidential impeachment, the one against Mr. Clinton, who was also acquitted, and just 21 years passed between the second presidential impeachment and the third, involving Mr. Trump.

A little over a year passed between the third and the fourth, when Mr. Trump was impeached a second time. If the House goes ahead and impeaches Mr. Biden, there will have been three presidential impeachments in five years — more than in the previous 230 years of the republic combined.

But until recently, at least, impeachment also served as a useful deterrent. At least seven other presidents were targeted at one point with impeachment without it going anywhere. Some, like George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama, have described contemplating the risk of impeachment before taking actions that might push the boundaries of their power.

Philip Bobbitt, a longtime Columbia Law School professor who in 2018 released an updated version of Charles L. Black’s classic “Impeachment: A Handbook,” agreed that impeachment had been devalued but argued that it could yet serve its purpose.

“It’s still in the holster,” he said. “Yes, it’s been degraded in this poll-driven way of raising money, but it’s not inconceivable that you’ll have a president who really will do something that is down the center stripe of the law. It’s not enough to say that impeachment is so changed now that it’s just one more tool of character assassination. It is that. But it’s not just that.”

Michael J. Gerhardt, an impeachment scholar at the University of North Carolina, said Republicans were using impeachment not for accountability but for political damage. “The pushes to impeach President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas are plainly attempts to make impeachment just another weapon in the partisan warfare of Washington,” he said.

“Nonetheless, impeachment still stings,” he added. Impeachment will still be a useful constitutional tool because of the scarlet letter that presidents perceive in being impeached, Mr. Gerhardt said, citing Mr. Clinton and Mr. Trump. “Presidents care about their legacies, and impeachments taint them for all time.”

Indeed, it is that sting that may be driving Mr. Trump, who has made no secret of his desire to impeach Mr. Biden and his team as revenge for his own impeachments. “They did it to me,” he said in a radio interview last fall. “Had they not done it to me,” he added, “perhaps you wouldn’t have it being done to them.”

The proliferation of impeachment resolutions covers a gamut of supposed offenses, but as in the case of Mr. Mayorkas they mainly stem from Republican criticism of the way officials do their jobs. In Mr. Mayorkas’s case, Republicans fault him for releasing illegal immigrants pending court dates rather than detaining them, but Congress has not provided enough detention facilities to actually hold all of the migrants coming across the border.

Republicans, arguing that Mr. Mayorkas is not fulfilling the law, have contorted to define his flaws as a high crime, a contention that even some fellow Republicans have rejected, including Michael Chertoff, a secretary of homeland security under the second President Bush. In effect, that logic resembles more a parliamentary system in which lawmakers can vote no confidence in a minister.

Mr. Biden’s team has mocked Republicans over their appetite for impeachment. In a statement issued this week, the White House asked cheekily, “Is there anyone House Republicans won’t impeach?”

David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter who has become one of the most vocal Trump critics, added his own suggestion. Noting the Republican uproar over the possibility that a famous singer might endorse Mr. Biden, he joked that the “countdown” had “begun to the House Republican impeachment of Taylor Swift.”

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said on Thursday that he would set up a test vote next week on a measure pairing an immigration crackdown with tens of billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine and Israel, but the package is facing a rough road with Republican resistance in both chambers.

Mr. Schumer’s promise came as a small group of Republican and Democratic senators rushed to finalize a plan to clamp down on migration across the U.S. border with Mexico, which Republicans had demanded be paired with any further aid to Kyiv for its war against Russian aggression.

Senate leaders in both parties have called the emerging border agreement the best chance in decades to address the intractable issue of immigration, and President Biden has endorsed it. But right-wing Republicans, egged on by former President Donald J. Trump, have denounced it as too weak, prompting Speaker Mike Johnson to call it dead on arrival in the House and indicating that it may have no path through Congress.

And since negotiators have yet to release the text of their agreement, it is not yet clear whether Senate Republicans will embrace or reject it. Mr. Schumer said the finished product would be public “no later than Sunday,” to give senators enough time to examine it before an initial vote expected by Wednesday.

“We are getting very close,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor, arguing that the forthcoming bill would be a vital tool for “enabling us to address multiple crises around the globe.”

“Addressing these challenges is not easy, but we cannot simply shirk from our responsibilities just because a task is difficult,” he added.

The deal would make it more difficult for migrants to be granted asylum in the United States, increase detention capacity, step up deportations of individuals seeking to enter the country without authorization, and shut down the U.S.-Mexico border to new entries if crossings exceed a certain level.

It would be part of a package with an infusion of funding to Ukraine and to Israel for its war in Gaza, as well as humanitarian assistance for Palestinians under bombardment, and resources to help counter Chinese influence and threats in the Indo-Pacific region.

In recent weeks, leading Republicans in the House, and many rank-and-file G.O.P. senators, have denounced the compromise, arguing that it is not stringent enough to make an appreciable difference in border crossings — and insisting the Biden administration cannot be trusted to implement the proposed measures fully.

Mr. Biden last week urged Congress to pass the deal, promising to use it to “shut down the border.” Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, tore into the president for those words in a speech this week on the House floor, arguing that he already had the power to close the border to most new arrivals.

“He falsely claimed that he needs Congress to pass a new law to allow him to close the southern border; he knows that’s not true,” Mr. Johnson said, adding: “This so-called deal does not include these transformational policy changes that are needed to actually stop the border catastrophe.”

The Senate’s planned vote on the border deal could coincide with the House G.O.P.’s plans to impeach Mr. Biden’s homeland security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, as soon as next week, on charges of refusing to enforce border laws and breaching the public trust. The Biden administration and several leading constitutional law experts, including conservatives, have argued that the case is a policy dispute that does not rise to the level of an impeachable high crime or misdemeanor.

Senate Republican leaders and those close to the negotiations have been trying to persuade skeptics not to listen to the critics until they see the text of the deal for themselves. But the longer it takes to finalize a deal, the more they are concerned about losing ground.

“If we don’t get this published, and build momentum, like I said earlier, the hill keeps getting steeper,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, told reporters on Thursday.

The resistance in the House and by Mr. Trump, who is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is proving to be a significant obstacle. Last week, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, warned that Mr. Trump’s hostility to the deal had put Republicans “in a quandary.”

On Thursday, when asked whether his colleagues would be able to overcome Mr. Trump’s opposition and embrace the deal, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, said: “I can’t answer that yet.”

Democrats said time was running out for the compromise, noting that Republicans, who demanded a border deal in the first place, were now threatening to stand in the legislation’s way.

“They’re making a decision as to whether they want to do what they said they wanted — to pass a bipartisan border bill — or whether they want to do the bidding of Donald Trump,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut, the lead Democrat in the border talks. “Every day that goes by in which they don’t commit to funding the deal is a day that we’re closer to their decision being made in favor of Donald Trump.”

It has taken a full decade to conceive, but a $10 billion transformation of New York City’s dreary main bus terminal may get rolling in the next few months.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the terminal, unveiled an updated design for its replacement on Thursday. Instead of the dismal, brick hulk that has darkened two full blocks of Midtown Manhattan for over 70 years, there would be a bright, modern transit hub topped by two office towers.

“The bus terminal has become a poster child for a failed infrastructure facility that desperately needs to be replaced,” said Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority. “It’s going to be an extraordinary transformation from a rundown, 1950s-era, outdated facility to one that will be intended to be state of the art.”

Construction is expected to take eight years, he said, meaning the project could be completed by 2032. Planning was delayed at least a year by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Port Authority is seeking financial help from the federal and city governments but is pressing ahead to get the plan approved by the Federal Transit Administration, Mr. Cotton said. The public will have 45 days to comment on the plan the agency released on Thursday and there will be four public hearings about it, he said.

Community leaders in Midtown have already exerted significant influence on the design of the project, Mr. Cotton said. They had objected to the condemnation of property for expansion of the terminal and insisted that the project cater to the needs of local residents as well as commuters and travelers, he said.

A previous design that had included building towers on Port Authority property near the terminal has been scaled back. The revised plan calls for fewer new buildings, with office towers that could be more than 60 stories tall on Eighth Avenue at the corners of 40th and 42nd Streets. Payments from the developers of those buildings would help cover the cost of the project, Mr. Cotton said.

“We’re moving forward with somewhat reduced ambitions,” Mr. Cotton said, though he added that the Port Authority was confident there would be ample demand for office space in Midtown in the 2030s to fill those towers.

The agency is negotiating with city officials for tax breaks similar to those that helped pay for the transformation of the old post office near Pennsylvania Station into the Moynihan Train Hall, Mr. Cotton said. The agency is also seeking a $1 billion loan from the federal government, he said.

But the Port Authority would have to come up with the bulk of the estimated $10 billion cost. So far, it has earmarked $3 billion in its long-term budget for improvement projects.

The project would be built in two four-year phases.

The first would involve constructing a separate building west of the terminal to serve as a storage and staging area for buses, as well as ramps to connect the terminal directly to the Lincoln Tunnel. The second phase would consist of building the new terminal where the old one now stands without disrupting the flow of buses that stream in and out of the city at rush hours.

“This community is going to endure the vicissitudes of construction for eight years,” Mr. Cotton cautioned.

In Bangkok this week, members of an antiwar Russian-language rock group were fighting deportation to Russia, detained in what supporters described as a cramped, hot, 80-person immigration holding cell.

On Wednesday in Moscow, the lower house of Parliament passed a law that will allow the Russian government to seize the property of Russians living abroad who, in the words of the legislature’s chairman, “besmirch our country.”

The two developments, though thousands of miles apart, reflected the same grim calculus by the Kremlin: Using new legislation and apparent diplomatic pressure on other countries, it is turning the screws on Russia’s sprawling antiwar diaspora.

“Historic Russia has risen up,” President Vladimir V. Putin said at a meeting with backers of his presidential campaign on Wednesday, reprising his contention that the time has come to cleanse Russian society of pro-Western elements. “All this scum that’s always present in any society is being slowly, slowly washed away.”

Under the law, any Russian, even those in exile, found to be engaged in “crimes against national security” — including criticizing the invasion of Ukraine — could have their assets confiscated. Mr. Putin is expected to sign the law, though it is not yet clear how widely or aggressively the Kremlin plans to use it.

But the law’s quick passage — it sailed through the rubber-stamp State Duma unanimously — is another signal that the Kremlin, having stamped out dissent at home, is increasingly turning its attention to criticism from abroad. Hundreds of thousands of Russians fled after the war began, including many celebrities who can still reach their fans through platforms like YouTube, which remains accessible inside Russia.

Among the first to feel this increasing pressure are popular performers who have drawn large audiences in places popular with Russian émigrés like Dubai and Southeast Asia. In recent weeks, Russian antiwar celebrities have accused Thailand and Indonesia of bending to Russian pressure to cancel their shows, while an antiwar rapper found himself banned from re-entering the United Arab Emirates, his adopted home.

The most dramatic case unfolded after members of the rock group Bi-2, originally from Belarus and one of Russia’s most popular bands, were arrested in Thailand last week for an immigration violation. Their supporters said Russian officials spent days pushing Thailand to deport some of them to Russia, where the musicians could have faced prosecution for criticizing the war.

By Wednesday, the rockers had escaped that fate thanks to the intervention of Israeli and Australian diplomats, who arranged for all seven band members to be deported to Israel, according to the group’s lawyer, who requested anonymity for security reasons. (Four are citizens of Israel, and one of Australia.)

The extent of the Kremlin’s efforts to get the rockers sent to Russia was not clear, but on Tuesday, the group said in a statement that the Thai authorities had canceled an earlier plan to deport some of them to Israel after Russian diplomats visited the immigration center where they were being held.

Analysts and human rights advocates consider the case a stark demonstration of the Kremlin’s increasingly aggressive efforts to punish Russians speaking out against Mr. Putin abroad — especially when they do so in non-Western countries that are interested in maintaining good relations with Moscow.

“This is a special operation,” said Dmitri Gudkov, an exiled Russian opposition politician who is close to Bi-2, referring to what he described as Russia’s efforts to get the band members sent to Russia. “Their task is to grab someone big outside the country to show that they can grab anyone, anywhere.”

The rock group’s brooding hits are part of the soundtrack of the early Putin era, and in later years the group was rubbing shoulders with the Russian elite at marquee events — performing, for example, at Mr. Putin’s annual economic conference in St. Petersburg in 2019. But by last year, Bi-2’s lead singer, Igor Bortnik, was writing that Putin’s Russia evoked “only disgust and squeamishness.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry denied interfering in the Bi-2 case in Thailand, but it referred to the band members soon after their detention as “sponsors of terrorism.” A Russian lawmaker, Andrei Lugovoi, said the country was awaiting Bi-2’s deportation “with open arms” and predicted: “Soon they’ll be playing and singing on spoons and metal plates, tap dancing in front of their cellmates.”

(Mr. Lugovoi is no stranger to Russian intervention abroad, having been charged by Britain in 2007 with poisoning a Putin critic in London.)

Thailand, which has stuck to a largely neutral stance on the war in Ukraine and is a prime destination for Russian tourists, said it was following established procedure. Asked by a reporter on Wednesday about the potential deportation to Russia of Bi-2 band members, the country’s foreign minister, Parnpree Bahiddha-Nukara, said that if they are found to have “committed illegal acts,” then Thailand “has to follow the process.”

The band released a statement from its concert organizer, VPI Event, acknowledging that it had failed to obtain the right visas for the band’s Jan. 24 show on the Thai island of Phuket. But VPI asserted that the Thai authorities’ decision to arrest the performers — rather than sanction the concert organizers — was unusually harsh.

“We are making every effort to free the performers, but we are facing unprecedented pressure at every stage,” the company’s statement said while the musicians were still behind bars, adding that shows in Thailand by two other Russian antiwar performers had been canceled in recent weeks. “The campaign to cancel concerts under pressure from the Russian consulate began in December.”

Some pro-Kremlin figures have started praising Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for getting more aggressive in putting pressure on antiwar Russians abroad.

“The M.F.A. has really gotten to work in this regard,” Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst who appears frequently on Russian state television, said in a phone interview. Russian diplomats, he added, have been “actively informing” foreign governments in recent months about Russians who have “gone over to the enemy’s side.”

Alisher Morgenshtern, a rapper who had criticized the war and moved to Dubai, said last Friday that the United Arab Emirates had banned him from re-entering the country. Ruslan Bely, an antiwar comedian, had two shows in Thailand canceled in January.

Another Russian comedian who opposes the war, Maksim Galkin, last week announced a show in Bali, Indonesia, days after Russian state media reported that his two planned shows in Thailand had been canceled.

But last weekend, Mr. Galkin told his 9 million Instagram followers that the Bali show, too, was canceled. The Indonesian authorities, he wrote, had turned him away at the border and told him they were doing so at the request of the Russian government.

“It’s funny,” Mr. Galkin wrote, that the Russian state was expending so much effort on “the maniacal persecution of dissenting artists abroad.”

The head of the Bali regional office of Indonesia’s Ministry of Law and Human Rights, Romi Yudianto, said he was not familiar with Mr. Galkin’s case but that Indonesia “has its own sovereignty” and the right to reject unwanted visitors.

But Mr. Markov, the pro-Kremlin analyst, described the pressure on antiwar performers, as well as the new law allowing the confiscation of the property of Russians criticizing the war, as part and parcel of the same government effort.

“This is a message to those who are against Putin,” but aren’t sure how loudly to voice their disapproval, Mr. Markov said. It is a reminder to them, he said, that if they do speak up, even outside Russia, “don’t think that you’ll be fine.”

Reporting was contributed by Sui-Lee Wee, Hasya Nindita, Muktita Suhartono and Oleg Matsnev.

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.

Last May, Fabuwood, a kitchen cabinet manufacturer in Newark, instituted a new company policy: No phones allowed during meetings.

To enforce it, the company installed “device shelves” outside each of its six glass-walled conference rooms. On a recent Wednesday morning, there were animated meetings in three of the conference rooms, and the shelves outside were full of smartphones, tablets and ’90s-style flip phones. The 1,200-person company pays the cost of a flip phone for anyone who gives up their smartphone, and 80 people have acted on the offer.

Surprisingly, employees say they like it. Rena Stoff, a project manager, said that while at first she hated the idea of being deprived of her smartphone, she now finds it has made meetings — that she once found boring and unnecessary — engaging and productive.

“Having the phone away from me has almost made my brain more open to information,” she said.

Fabuwood’s founder and chief executive, Joel Epstein, was motivated by his personal belief that smartphones are “destroying our personal and professional lives.”

He started using a flip phone seven years ago after developing carpal tunnel symptoms in his hands from near-constant use of his BlackBerry. He said that he slept better, felt more productive at work and had more meaningful communications. Mr. Epstein, a Hasidic Jew, said his choice of device was not unusual in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, which encourages the use of “kosher phones” with limited internet access.

Last year, Mr. Epstein queried Fabuwood managers on how often their workers were on their phones; they estimated two hours per day on average. He asked a warehouse safety officer, whose job typically entails monitoring for unsafe conditions, to secretly document each time he saw an employee using a phone in the office. Mr. Epstein said that many of the company’s poorest performers were on the list.

Mr. Epstein decided to fight back against the devices competing for his employees’ time and attention with an “InFocus” initiative, asking workers to keep personal devices out of sight while on the job. No one is punished for violating the rule, but managers will email reminders when they notice any backsliding.

There was some grumbling when the initiative was proposed, with some predicting that people would quit. But that didn’t happen, Mr. Epstein said. Instead, poor performers improved. “Within six months, productivity was up 20 percent,” he said, citing internal corporate metrics.

What has surprised him most, he said, was the steady stream of messages from employees saying the program has been life-changing.

I heard about Fabuwood’s initiative after I published an article about fighting my own iPhone addiction by switching to a flip phone for a month. Abraham Brull, a manager of software development at Fabuwood, emailed me saying that he had struggled with his smartphone dependence in the past and that it had helped him to join a company where healthier technology use was encouraged.

His was among hundreds of emails I received. Many were from flip phone enthusiasts who disagreed with my suggestion that using a “dumb phone” indefinitely wasn’t an option. Long-term flip phone users of all ages and professions said their lives were better without smartphones, and that their marriages, relationships with their children and mental health had flourished as a result.

Alba Souto, 29, from Spain, said not having a smartphone had made her relationship with her husband, who also switched to an old Nokia, “more mysterious and exciting.”

“Not having access to each other at all times via messaging apps has improved the quality of the time we spend together,” she wrote in an email. “We have more to talk about.”

“I love it,” wrote Christopher Casino, 29, of Brooklyn, N.Y., who switched in October to a Cat flip phone that allows him to access Uber, Maps and Spotify, but not social media or news apps. “I do my hobbies more consistently. I read on the subway. I talk to my husband more. I don’t feel the crushing pressure of knowing everything instantly and saying the perfect thing online.”

Advice for ‘Flip Phone February’

Sarah Thibault, 43, an artist in Los Angeles, said she planned to participate in “Flip Phone February,” an idea that I proposed to follow Dry January. She was inspired to give up her smartphone by a viral video of a crowd of phones ringing in the New Year in Paris.

She created a Flip Phone February community on Reddit to share messages and tips with other participants. I joined and posted a link to a contest that Siggi’s Yogurt recently announced offering $10,000, flip phones, smartphone lockboxes and, of course, free yogurt to 10 people who commit to a monthlong digital detox. The company’s spokeswoman told me 322,935 people had entered the contest.

Longtime flip phone users advised newbies to “look things up” before leaving the house, carry a pen and notebook and to warn friends, colleagues and family members about the decision to go smartphone-free.

My own advice is to consult the Dumbphone Finder to see the options on the market; Sunbeam and Kyocera were popular recommendations from readers. But make sure to check with your carrier to find out which “feature phones” — industry parlance for non-smartphones — your network supports.

You may also need to get other tech to fill in the gaps. I turned to a digital alarm clock that I got in middle school in the ’90s. (It still works!) Kelin Carolyn Zhang, a product designer who does an annual smartphone detox, wrote that she was using an old digital camcorder this year so she can TikTok her way through the flip phone journey.

The Downsides

Those who make the switch be warned: There were quite a few complaints in my inbox about our increasingly smartphone-centric world.

“The issue that is most disturbing to me, and one that I wish that journalists and regulators would turn their attention to, is the ever-increasing need to have a smartphone to navigate daily life,” wrote a 47-year-old father with no mobile phone at all. “Ten years ago, lacking a phone meant some minor social challenges; nowadays, it can be hard to go through ordinary life.”

He has been frustrated by the now common use of QR codes to get into sporting events and to access restaurant menus. He and many others said payment machines at parking lots often direct people to pay via a smartphone.

“I just got a parking ticket this week because I couldn’t go online and pay via their QR code or app,” wrote a 31-year-old Missouri mother with a flip phone. But she said it was worth it.

“Even in these moments I wouldn’t go back to the smartphone. I am done being enslaved to a piece of tech that has robbed me and my kids of my attention,” she wrote. “Your child-raising years are short. Your kids NEED YOU. Want to be a good mom? Want to raise healthy kids? The best thing you can do is throw your smartphone into the toilet, even for a short while.”

(But don’t actually throw your smartphone in the toilet. You might need to connect it to Wi-Fi at some point to get a two-factor authentication code.)

Some readers, such as one corporate executive and mother of three, said they “could never go flip.”

“The invention of the smartphone has enabled work-life integration in ways I couldn’t imagine!” she wrote.

She said her hacks for making it less addictive included turning off notifications and deleting social media apps. She and others thanked me for pointing to a study that found switching a smartphone from color to gray scale mode helped people significantly reduce their screen time. “Pumped about the grayscale tip,” she wrote, “turning that on today!”

For those who are wondering, I’ve now been using my flip phone as my main phone for two months. But I did get a second line for my smartphone to use when access to the internet is a necessity. I’m not sure, for example, that I would have been able to find Fabuwood’s headquarters — on unfamiliar roads in industrial Newark — without it.