NYC NOW - October 4, 2023: Midday News

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

The National Network to End Domestic Violence warns those dealing with domestic violence to turn off any hidden phones ahead of this afternoon’s FEMA emergency alert test. Also, Norton Blake has been indicted in Manhattan for beating a 60-year-old woman with a cane inside a Harlem subway station last month. And Mayor Adams is going to Mexico to learn more about the path asylum seekers take to the USA, and to discourage them from coming to New York. Finally, following yesterday’s historic ousting of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Congress member Jerry Nadler, representing New York’s 12th District including Manhattan, joins us to share his reaction.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Wednesday, October 4th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Advocates are warning people dealing with domestic violence to turning any hidden phones off before this afternoon's FEMA emergency alert test taking place at 2 o'clock. The National Network to end domestic violence says survivors often have hidden phones that can connect them to help whenever they needed.

Today's alert will issue a loud sound that could pose a threat to their privacy and safety. A man has been indicted to Manhattan for the beating of a 60-year-old woman with a cane inside a Harlem subway station last month. WNYC Samantha Max reports. Norton Blake has been charged with three counts of assault and attempted assault, according to the indictment. Prosecutors say Blake and the woman were on the stairs at the West 116th Street and Lennox Avenue subway station in Harlem, when the woman's walker began to fall down the stairs and they started to argue. Blake's attorney says his client was trying to help the woman carry her walker.

It's unclear who hit whom first, but prosecutors say Blake ultimately hit the woman more than 50 times with a cane. The woman spent two weeks in the hospital, but has since been released. Police did not immediately arrest Blake, and the NYPD says their response to the incident is under internal. review. Mayor Adams is going to Mexico this evening to kick off a four-day trip to Latin America to learn more about the path asylum seekers often take to the USA and to discourage them from coming to New York. He'll visit the dangerous Darien Gap, a path migrants used through the jungle to go north from South America. 78 and sunny now. Today's forecast sunny in mid-80s, and then tomorrow we'll begin to cool off highs in the 70s, and this weekend will be in the 60s.

As we've been reporting, this happened yesterday in the U.S. House of Representatives. The resolution is adopted. The office of Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant. That was the historic moment yesterday when far-right Republicans led 216 to 210 vote to oust their party's own speaker, Kevin McCarthy. The move leads the chamber now without a permanent leader. Congressman Jerry Nadler represents the 12th District of New York, including Manhattan. He joins us now after what I imagined felt like a pretty long day yesterday. Congressman, would you describe yesterday's Republican against Republican debate on the House floor? What was that like to watch for you? Well, it was watching a Republican civil war. They were

tearing into each other. Clearly Matt Gates was a hated figure. A number of people really attacked him personally. And he set up the, I mean, he was the one, along with a few Confederates, who forced McCarthy as a condition of getting the speakership back in January in 15 votes to agree to a change in the House rules that one person, as opposed to the previous 20, any one person could move to vacate the chair, which set up a very unstable situation, obviously, where the speaker served essentially at the pleasure of one person moving to oust him. There was a lot of very ill-will toward him by other Republicans on the floor. The Democrats throughout the entire hour of debate

just sat there watching and said not a word. Last hour we heard Republican Congress member Mark Alford referred to his party in the House as rudderless. What was the conversation among Democrats about whether to rescue McCarthy? Well, we had a caucus and our conversation, was basically that the man is utterly untrustworthy. He does not keep his word. You can't trust anything he says. He made an agreement back in May to settle the debt ceiling crisis to have expenditure levels at a certain level.

The Senate on a partisan basis is marking up appropriations bills to that level. The House under the Speaker's direction is marking up appropriations bill, and I assume under pressure from the altars, is marking up appropriations bills to a much, much lower level and putting in lots of poison pill amendments knowing that no Democrats can vote for those bills and the Senate won't give them any attention at all.

And I think the final straw came when he suddenly presented us the other day with the bill to avert a shutdown, but the bill was 71 pages long. We asked him for 90 minutes to read, the bill. He said no. So we had to engage in dilatory tactics, calling a long roll call vote, and Hakeem Jeffrey's making a 50-minute extemporaneous speech just to give us and our staff time to read the bill. We found it was acceptable, so we voted for it. And then he has the nerve to go

and face the nation on Sunday and blame us for trying to shut down the government by not being willing by dilatory tactics on that bill as if we were using dilatory tactics to try to defeat the bill rather than just to have time to read it. Was that the final straw for Democrats? I think that was the final straw, yes. In our conference, almost nobody got up to say anything decent about him. In fact, nobody got up to say anything decent about him. Some people said, well, maybe we can extract a big price from him.

At the answer to that, it was you can't believe anything he promised. The next step is to elect his replacement, but whoever takes the seat is likely to immediately face many of the same issues McCarthy did. Who would want that and who has the skills to survive it? Well, I'm not going to comment on an intra-Republican family fight. A number of people have, according to the news media, I'm not privy to anything else. According to the news media, a number of Republicans have indicated their interest. the Republicans kind of have to choose, and hopefully the person they choose will be someone whose word can be relied on and who can do business. Remember, the speaker is a constitutional

officer. He's a speaker of the entire House, not just of the majority party. You know, earlier on the show, we heard Republican strategist Liam Donovan saying speakers can't do their job if every time they try to pass legislation, they're risking their seat. Well, that's true, and that's why this rule that the Republicans adopted at the behest of the Matt Gates of the world as a condition of electing McCarthy on 15 ballots, as you recall back in January, that any one person can move to vacate the chair is insane. Hopefully they will restore the rule that we've had for years that it takes 20 people to make such a motion so the House doesn't hang on a precipice on a daily

basis. Do you have any optimism that the House can get back to that place that you're describing? I don't know. I'm not privy to the internal politics of the Republican Party. Hopefully it can. Democrats have planned to reconvene at 9 this morning to discuss what's next, but I understand in light of the Republicans' decision to go home, that plan has changed. What do you expect to happen next? That plan was abandoned. We're going home. I expect that we'll convene next week. and that the first order of business for Democrats will be to hold the caucus and to discuss the whole question.

So in the meantime, as the clock is ticking toward November 17th, Congress has just more than 40 days to avoid another potential government shutdown. What does this development likely mean as far as that is concerned? Well, that depends on how fast we can reorganize the House. Hopefully, it won't take long, and hopefully we can avert a shutdown.

And we also have to vote, aid to Ukraine very rapidly. I mean, one thing that disturbed me greatly and disturbed a lot of us about the about the bill that we adopted, what was it, Saturday to keep the government going, was that it omitted aid to Ukraine. The Senate wants the aid to Ukraine. A majority of the House does. The last time we had a vote on aid to Ukraine, every Democrat,

bar two or three, I think, voted for it, and the Republicans voted for it, 140 in favor, 70 opposed. So there is a heavy majority in the House, as in the Senate, for AT Ukraine, but it's been put off because McCarthy apparently felt he had it excluded from that bill to get all the Republican votes. I hope we can rectify that very rapidly. Congressman, yes or no, here just a couple seconds left. Is this what democracy is supposed to look like to a certain extent? No, it's not. People are supposed to depend on each other's words and congressional bodies are supposed to be able to operate. We haven't had a motion to vacate the chair since 1910, and it failed.

We've never had a successful motion to vacate the chair in history of the country until yesterday. Congressman Nadler, thank you so much for joining us. You're quite welcome. Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

We'll be back this evening.