| Good morning, Early Birds. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and the father of Mark Brzezinski, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, Mika Brzezinski of "Morning Joe" fame and former Pentagon official Ian Brzezinski, would've turned 94 today. He died in 2017. Tips: earlybirds@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us. | | |  | At the White House | | Some lawmakers worry Afghan refugees will be forgotten as focus turns to Ukrainians |  Lawmakers are worried refugees from Afghanistan are not getting the help they need. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/The Washington Post) | | | The other refugee crisis: As President Biden moves to admit up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees to the United States, lawmakers and advocates are urging him not to forget about the other refugee crisis facing his administration: the thousands of Afghans still waiting to be admitted to the country. The White House says that its push to accept Ukrainian refugees — announced last week while Biden was in Europe — won't divert resources or attention from its ongoing effort to help Afghans who aided American forces and their families come to the United States. "Our commitment to resettling Afghans — particularly those who served on behalf of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan — remains steadfast," a White House spokesperson said in a statement to the Early. "That commitment will not wane as we open our doors to Ukrainians." Some lawmakers aren't so sure. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) praised Biden's decision to accept Ukrainian refugees and said he thought the administration had learned from the chaotic effort to help Afghans flee their country. Biden announced his Ukrainian refugee plan only a month after Russian invaded, Moulton noted, in contrast to the administration's foot-dragging in Afghanistan. | | But Moulton said he was concerned the Ukrainian effort would distract attention from the unfinished Afghan one. "There are still Afghans being killed by the Taliban because we haven't gotten them out of the country," he said. The administration's steadfast commitment, Moulton added, has been mostly "steadfastly slow." Moulton and Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) told the Early they've been trying for months to help Afghan evacuees reach the United States but have been stymied by bureaucratic delays. Meijer, who served in Afghanistan, has pressed the State Department every week for more than six months to help the wife and young son of one of his former Afghan comrades, without success. | - "It's enraging to theoretically be in a position of power and to be absolutely impotent in the face of the callous bureaucratic indifference of the Biden administration," Meijer said.
| | Some lawmakers who have pressed the Biden administration to make it easier for Afghans who aided American forces to come to the United States say they think the administration can juggle the Ukrainian and Afghan efforts. "If they make it a priority to dedicate the resources to it, I think it can be done," Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), one of eight lawmakers who sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last week urging them to take steps to make it easier for Ukrainians to come to the United States, told the Early. But the Biden administration still hasn't finished rebuilding a refugee program that former president Donald Trump spent four years undermining, leading other lawmakers to worry about the government's ability to process as many as 100,000 more refugees. "It's a legitimate concern, because our refugee resettlement system was broken during the Trump administration and has not yet recovered," said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.). | | There are significant differences between the Afghans trying to escape the Taliban and the 3.8 million Ukrainians who've fled the Russian assault on their country. It remains unclear how many Ukrainians will seek to come to the United States, with many expressing a desire to stay closer to home so it will be easier to return someday. The Afghans, meanwhile, mostly don't expect to go back. Several Democratic lawmakers who applauded Biden's decision to accept 100,000 Ukrainians told the Early that they wished the administration would take a similar approach to accepting refugees from the rest of the world. | - Biden's announcement last week "is the type of humane and compassionate policy response that we should equitably extend to families fleeing from humanitarian disasters in Haiti, Cameroon, and other non-European countries," Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), a co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus, said in statement to the Early.
| | Malinowski has been talking with the administration about standing up a similar effort to take in the thousands of Russians who have fled their country in recent weeks. "These are the best and brightest people in Russia, and it would be overwhelmingly in our interest to make Putin's loss our gain," he said. | | The administration is still working out the details of how it will use to admit the Ukrainians. One option, known as "humanitarian parole," has a backlog of tens of thousands of Afghans who have applied, as the New York Times' Miriam Jordan reported last month. But refugee advocates said that taking in thousands of Ukrainians via the same program wouldn't necessarily slow it down. "It's not like there's a dedicated group of people that are processing Afghan parole applications every day that would then be diverted to processing Ukraine applications," said Becca Heller, the executive director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. "There's just a pile of applications sitting there, not being processed." If the administration decides to admit Ukrainians through humanitarian paroles and redirects resources to help process their applications, it could actually help Afghans whose applications have languished, Heller said. "Those same resources could be used to clear the rest of the backlog and then a rising tide could lift everyone's boat," she said. | Biden unveils new minimum tax on billionaires in budget proposal |  President Biden gives remarks on July 15, 2021. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) | | | Happening today: Biden will unveil his budget proposal, which will include a proposed new minimum tax targeting billionaires, as our colleague Jeff Stein reported over the weekend. It will also emphasizes "strengthening our military" and "putting more cops on the beat for community policing, fighting gun crime, and investing in crime prevention and community violence interventions," according to a White House official. | | |  | On the Hill | | January 6 committee weighs whether they will seek testimony from Ginni Thomas |  The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection meets on Oct. 19, 2021, to vote on whether to hold Steve Bannon in contempt. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) | | | WWCD: What will the committee do? The revelation that Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent text messages to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election has unearthed a political land mine: whether to subpoena the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice and a fixture among Republicans during today's committee meeting. | - When asked on CBS News's "Face the Nation" whether the Jan. 6 committee would subpoena Virginia Thomas, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) suggested they hadn't decided yet. "When it comes to any potential future calling in of Ms. Thomas, we'll take a look at what the evidence is and we'll make a decision and you all will know as soon as we do," he said.
| | Reality check: "In the Thomases, the committee is up against a couple that has deep networks of support across the conservative movement and Washington, including inside the committee," the New York Times's Luke Broadwater, Jo Becker, Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer wrote over the weekend. "The panel's Republican vice chairwoman, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), has led the charge in holding Trump to account for his efforts to overturn the election, but has wanted to avoid any aggressive effort that, in her view, could unfairly target Justice Thomas, the senior member of the Supreme Court." | - "If the committee does not summon Thomas … it runs the risk of appearing to have a double standard. The panel has taken an aggressive posture toward many other potential witnesses, issuing subpoenas for bank and phone records of both high-ranking allies of the former president and low-level aides with only a tangential connection to the events of Jan. 6."
| | What we do know: The committee will vote on whether to recommend contempt charges against former Trump White House aides Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas. | - The committee released a 34-page report laying out their case for contempt charges Sunday night, ahead of today's full committee vote. The committee claimed it "granted Scavino six extensions of his deadline to sit for an interview and hand over documents and [noted] that several of the issues Navarro said he could not discuss he had previously written about in his book," CNN's Ryan Nobles, Zachary Cohen and Whitney Wild write.
| | |  | The campaign | | Cruz's effort to keep Trump in power sparks new questions |  Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) walks out of a meeting room for the lawyers of former president Donald Trump on Feb 12, 2021, the fourth day of Trump's Senate Impeachment trial. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) | | | Inside Man: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) "was dining near the Capitol on the evening of Dec. 8, 2020, when he received an urgent call from President Donald Trump," our colleague Michael Kranish writes. "A lawsuit had just been filed at the Supreme Court designed to overturn the election Trump had lost, and the president wanted help from the Texas Republican." | - "'Would you be willing to argue the case?' Trump asked Cruz, as the senator later recalled it."
- "'Sure, I'd be happy to' if the court granted a hearing, Cruz said he responded."
- "The call was just one step in a collaboration that for two months turned the once-bitter political enemies into close allies in the effort to keep Trump in the White House based on the president's false claims about a stolen election. By Cruz's own account, he was 'leading the charge' to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president."
| | "An examination by The Post of Cruz's actions between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, shows just how deeply he was involved, working directly with Trump to concoct a plan that came closer than widely realized to keeping him in power," Kranish writes. | - "Now, Cruz's efforts are of interest to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in particular whether Cruz was in contact with Trump lawyer John Eastman.
| | |  | The Media | | | |  | Viral | | | The slap heard around the world … |  | | | | | … and the tweets we never got to see |  | | | | | | AM/PM | | Looking for more analysis in the afternoon? | | | | Weekday newsletter, PM |  | | | | | | |
