President Joe Biden will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping Friday morning to try and enlist China’s support in mitigating the worsening humanitarian crisis sparked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion.

The call — likely brokered in national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s one-on-one in Rome on Monday with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi — occurs amid intensifying verbal sparring over Beijing’s failure to condemn Russian aggression and parroting of Moscow’s invasion narrative.

Biden and Xi seeded a modicum of goodwill with a virtual meeting in November. But Washington has been angry with Beijing’s neutral position over Ukraine and has threatened punitive economic sanctions if China provides assistance requested by Putin.

You might remember the uproar last year over Texas’s new voting law: Democratic lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature fled the state for weeks in an attempt to block the bill, which they said would disenfranchise voters, and Republicans threatened them with arrest upon their return. The law eventually did pass, and with Texas’s primary earlier this month, we got our first look at whether the worst fears of Democrats and voting rights advocates were warranted.

Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.

And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.

“It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”

But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.

President Joe Biden will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping Friday morning to try and enlist China’s support in mitigating the worsening humanitarian crisis sparked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion.

The call — likely brokered in national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s one-on-one in Rome on Monday with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi — occurs amid intensifying verbal sparring over Beijing’s failure to condemn Russian aggression and parroting of Moscow’s invasion narrative.

Biden and Xi seeded a modicum of goodwill with a virtual meeting in November. But Washington has been angry with Beijing’s neutral position over Ukraine and has threatened punitive economic sanctions if China provides assistance requested by Putin.

You might remember the uproar last year over Texas’s new voting law: Democratic lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature fled the state for weeks in an attempt to block the bill, which they said would disenfranchise voters, and Republicans threatened them with arrest upon their return. The law eventually did pass, and with Texas’s primary earlier this month, we got our first look at whether the worst fears of Democrats and voting rights advocates were warranted.

Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.

And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.

“It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”

But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.

President Joe Biden will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping Friday morning to try and enlist China’s support in mitigating the worsening humanitarian crisis sparked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion.

The call — likely brokered in national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s one-on-one in Rome on Monday with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi — occurs amid intensifying verbal sparring over Beijing’s failure to condemn Russian aggression and parroting of Moscow’s invasion narrative.

Biden and Xi seeded a modicum of goodwill with a virtual meeting in November. But Washington has been angry with Beijing’s neutral position over Ukraine and has threatened punitive economic sanctions if China provides assistance requested by Putin.

You might remember the uproar last year over Texas’s new voting law: Democratic lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature fled the state for weeks in an attempt to block the bill, which they said would disenfranchise voters, and Republicans threatened them with arrest upon their return. The law eventually did pass, and with Texas’s primary earlier this month, we got our first look at whether the worst fears of Democrats and voting rights advocates were warranted.

Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.

And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.

“It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”

But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.