On Capitol Hill, the only rules that really matter are the ones that a majority of lawmakers are willing to enforce. So as Congress races to finalize a $1.2 trillion spending package that will almost certainly become law in the coming days, lawmakers are weighing several shortcuts and tricks to avoid a partial government shutdown after midnight Friday. to prevent.

Although a short closure during the weekend would not be as disruptive as a closure during the work week, it could still have consequences.

“If Republicans and Democrats continue to work together in good faith to fund the government, I hope we are just days away from completing the appropriations process,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and Majority Leader. Wednesday. “The job is not done yet, but we are very close.”

Here are the ways congressional leaders must break, bend or otherwise twist the rules to get the legislation done before 12:01 a.m. Saturday morning, when federal funding for half the government threatens to expire.

Waiving the 72-hour rule

For starters, Republican leaders will almost certainly try to waive a self-imposed rule requiring lawmakers to be given at least 72 hours to review legislation before voting on it. The rule is a clear cut with many Republican conservatives in the House of Representatives who say they have been forced many times in the past to vote for major bills as take-it-or-leave-it proposals, without sufficient time to to process them, to later discover objectionable proposals. provisions.

“If you are a Republican who plans to vote for this omnibus spending package, insist that you read it AT LEAST 72 hours, because you will own every dollar of increased spending, every disastrous Biden policy that funds,” said Representative Bob Good. Republican of Virginia and leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus, wrote on social media.

But because time is running out and the legislative text has not yet been made public as of Wednesday afternoon, it would be impossible to consider and adopt the legislation before the deadline if the rule were to be upheld.

Republicans dissatisfied that they weren’t given enough time to push through the legislation might oppose abandoning the rule, but some of those same Republicans admit they are unlikely to support the spending package anyway. Overriding the rule, however, is likely to fuel more right-wing resentment over Speaker Mike Johnson’s handling of spending issues.

Suspending the rules

Opposition over the right to pass the spending bills has forced Mr Johnson to deal with them under a special procedure that prevents opponents from blocking the vote on the legislation. The far right has used a previously rare tactic to oppose the “rule” of their own party by bringing the spending bills to the floor, a break from House tradition.

As a result, Mr Johnson has brought up the spending legislation under what is known as ‘suspension of the rules’. The process, as the name suggests, invalidates the regular rules of the House, preventing brief debates in the chamber and blocking efforts to amend the bills.

But as a special shortcut typically used for consensus legislation, it would require a supermajority of two-thirds of the House of Representatives — 290 if everyone is present — to pass. Significant numbers of Democrats will have to join Republicans in passing the measure, as dozens of Republicans will vote against any spending plan.

Under internal rules that House Republicans approved at the start of Congress last year, this maneuver cannot be used for a bill estimated to cost more than $100 billion unless the spending to finance it lowers. But a Republican Party official said a spending bill — even one that would cost 10 times as much — could not violate the rule because the Congressional Budget Office does not provide cost estimates for it.

Bypassing the Senate’s Time Limits

Once the legislation is approved by the House of Representatives, it will face a new set of hurdles in the Senate, which typically can only be bypassed if all 100 members agree — an unlikely event given conservative opposition to the spending package.

When the House is ready, Mr. Schumer will move as quickly as possible to bring the legislation to the floor. He will then take steps to limit debate and block amendments that could destroy the agreement. Once that clock starts, the Senate must wait at least a day before taking up the motion to end debate on the package. If successful, the Senate could spend up to 30 hours considering the bill, potentially delaying debate until after the weekend.

In exchange for speeding up the process, members of the Senate’s right-wing Republican bloc will likely demand the chance to offer some amendments, as they did when the first spending package was passed. A combination of Republicans and Democrats defeated them all and would have to do so again, as approval of an amendment would require the measure to be sent back to the House of Representatives.

One factor contributing to faster passage through the Senate is that both the Senate and House of Representatives will go on a two-week Easter break once the legislation is approved. The desire to leave the city could reduce opposition and allow the Senate to act quickly if opponents accept they have no real option to block its passage.

Punting – or briefly blowing – the deadline

If it became clear that the legislation would stall in the Senate as the shutdown deadline approached, Congress could also approve a short-term patch to buy more time. But Senate and House leaders see the end near in the uphill battle to pass legislation to fund the government through September. They want to keep the pressure on.

And the last time Congress missed a Friday deadline to pass a major spending package earlier this month, President Biden didn’t sign it until the next day, technically allowing for a brief shutdown that went unnoticed.

Even if the clean air rules announced in Washington on Wednesday are less powerful than some environmentalists would have liked, they should still have a powerful effect on the types of cars that appear in showrooms in the coming years, experts say.

The rules will strengthen market forces pushing the industry toward battery power, giving automakers a strong incentive to sell a broader, more affordable variety of electric cars — not just the expensive SUVs that have dominated sales so far .

“It probably means more models and lower prices,” said Craig Segall, former deputy director of the California Air Resources Board, an agency that played a key role in promoting electric vehicles in that state. “The way you win,” he said, referring to automakers, “is to make sure you have an electric car in every segment.”

Despite rumors of a slowdown, sales of electric vehicles are growing much faster than sales of fossil fuel vehicles. Electric vehicle prices have fallen significantly and are likely to fall further as automakers get better at making them and the costs of batteries and raw materials plummet.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s rules announced Wednesday “certainly will not slow the pace at which our members scale up production,” said Albert Gore III, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association. The association’s members include Tesla and other electric car manufacturers, as well as battery manufacturers, charging companies and suppliers.

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Democrats in 2022, led to a boom in investment in battery factories and electric vehicle factories. Since then, companies have announced investments of more than $110 billion in battery factories and electric vehicle assembly plants, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. These are long-term financial obligations that companies will likely adhere to regardless of what the federal government does.

Within a few years, electric cars that can drive more than 500 kilometers on a single charge will likely cost less than gasoline cars, not to mention the fuel savings. Electricity is usually much cheaper than gasoline. This will give more car buyers strong economic reasons to drive electric.

The average price of a new electric car has fallen substantially. According to Kelley Blue Book, it was $52,314 in February, still about $5,000 more than the average for all vehicles. But electric vehicle prices fell 13 percent in February from a year earlier, and by more than $2,500 from January alone. The cost of used battery powered vehicles has fallen much more.

Prices will continue to fall sharply as batteries, the most important and expensive component, become much cheaper, analysts say. The average cost of a battery pack is expected to drop by more than 40 percent in 2030 compared to 2022, according to estimates from the International Council on Clean Transportation, a research organization.

Electric vehicles “are moving closer to parity with gasoline cars,” said Katherine García, a transportation expert at the Sierra Club. “We will see that sooner than originally predicted.”

During the first years of the EPA rules announced Wednesday, automakers will face slightly less pressure to reduce emissions than under an earlier proposal from the agency. The EPA does not dictate to automakers how to meet the standards. They can also reduce emissions by improving the efficiency of gasoline engines or by selling more hybrid cars that augment gasoline engines with batteries and electric motors.

Plug-in hybrids, which can travel short distances on battery power alone and are becoming increasingly popular, could proliferate in the coming years. According to EPA estimates, they will account for as much as 9 percent of new car sales by 2030, up from about 2 percent last year.

But automakers will get most of the credit for fully electric cars that have no tailpipe emissions. According to the EPA, they will make up 44 percent of new cars by 2030

Longer term, most automakers recognize that they need to sell attractive electric vehicles to survive.

“EVs are clearly the future and what consumers want and what will be cheapest to produce,” said Stephanie Searle, chief program officer at the International Council on Clean Transportation. “Car manufacturers must invest in this to keep up.”

Tesla has already shaken up the car market and become the world’s most valuable automaker. New competitors from China are looming as Beijing seeks to capitalize on the technological shift to become a major auto exporter.

Tariffs and other restrictions have so far limited Chinese exports to the United States. But automakers like BYD, which sells an electric car for less than $12,000 in China, could find a way out by manufacturing in Mexico or even building factories in the United States.

For automakers, the rise of Chinese rivals is a powerful motivator. It brings back unpleasant memories of how Toyota, Honda and other Japanese automakers broke the dominance of Ford Motor, General Motors and Chrysler in the 1970s with cheap, fuel-efficient cars. Tesla, Ford and Volkswagen are among the major automakers working on low-cost electric vehicles clearly inspired by the threat from China.

Experience shows that technology often moves faster than regulations require. Under EPA rules that went into effect in 2017, electric vehicles were expected to make up 3 percent of new car sales by 2025. But battery-powered cars already make up about 8 percent of the U.S. new car market.

In California, which long had the strictest pollution limits, electric cars made up 25 percent of new cars sold last year. And under rules adopted in 2022, the state will phase out fossil fuel-powered cars by 2035.

“California has more than its share of electric cars because we asked for them,” said Mr. Segall, the former state official who is now vice president of Evergreen, an activist group.

Another twelve states, including New York and New Jersey, model their rules after California’s and won’t be much affected by the EPA regulations because their rules are already stricter. The federal rules will have the most impact on states like Texas, Florida and Connecticut that do not follow California.

The rules will also put pressure on automakers like Toyota and Stellantis, owners of Chrysler, Dodge, Ram and Jeep, which have been slow to sell all-electric vehicles.

The EPA rules are among the Biden administration’s numerous policies aimed at promoting electric vehicles. Tax credits of up to $7,500 are available for vehicles manufactured in the United States, Canada or Mexico that meet other requirements intended to promote a domestic supply chain. The number of eligible vehicles is small but is expected to grow as automakers like Hyundai produce more vehicles in the United States.

The government is also subsidizing the construction of fast-charging stations, which along with investments by automakers like Mercedes-Benz and charging companies like Electrify America, will soon remove a major bottleneck for many car buyers.

Surveys show that many people are interested in electric cars, but worry about finding a charging point during road trips. If governments and companies implement all the plans they have announced, according to a study Published this month by the International Council on Clean Transportation, there will be more than enough fast chargers by 2030.

The Biden administration on Wednesday issued one of the most important climate rules in the country’s history, a rule intended to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States by 2032 will be all-electric or being hybrid.

Nearly three years in the making, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new tailpipe pollution limits would transform the U.S. auto market. A record 1.2 million electric vehicles rolled off dealerships last year, but they represented just 7.6 percent of total U.S. auto sales, far short of the 56 percent target under the new regulations. Another 16 percent of new cars sold are said to be hybrid.

Cars and other forms of transportation together are the largest source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and has helped make 2023 the hottest year on record. Electric vehicles are central to President Biden’s strategy to tackle global warming, which calls for halving the country’s emissions by the end of this decade. But electric vehicles have also become politicized and are becoming an issue in the 2024 presidential campaign.

“Three years ago, I set an ambitious goal: that half of all new cars and trucks sold by 2030 would be zero-emission,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “Together we have made historic progress. Hundreds of new expanded factories across the country. Hundreds of billions in private investment and thousands of good-paying union jobs. And we will reach my 2030 goal and race ahead in the years to come.”

Over time, the rule increasingly limits the amount of pollution allowed from tailpipes, so that by 2032, more than half of new cars sold in the United States will most likely be zero-emission vehicles, helping automakers meet the standards to fulfil.

That would avoid more than seven billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 30 years, according to the EPA. That’s equivalent to removing a year’s worth of all the greenhouse gases generated by the United States, the country that has historically pumped the most carbon. dioxide in the atmosphere. According to the agency, the regulation would provide society with nearly $100 billion in net annual benefits, including $13 billion in annual public health benefits from improved air quality.

The standards would also save the average American driver about $6,000 less fuel and maintenance over the life of a vehicle, the EPA estimates.

The transition to electric vehicles would require massive changes in production, infrastructure, technology, labor, global trade and consumer habits.

And it has become politically charged. Former President Donald J. Trump, who is campaigning to retake the White House from Mr. Biden in November, has tried to weaponize electric vehicles, repeating false claims about their performance and affordability and using increasingly heated rhetoric at campaign rallies. He recently warned of a “bloodbath” amid comments about electric vehicles.

The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a lobbying organization, has started what it says is a “seven figurecampaign of ads, phone calls and text messages against what it incorrectly calls “Biden’s EPA car ban” in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, as well as in Ohio, Montana and the Washington, DC market.

The EPA regulation is not a ban. It does not mandate the sale of electric vehicles, and gas-powered cars and trucks can still be sold. Rather, it requires automakers to meet stringent new average emissions limits across their entire product line. It is up to the manufacturers to decide how to comply.

Under the Clean Air Act, the agency can limit the pollution caused by the total number of cars sold each year. EPA officials said automakers could meet the emissions caps by selling a mix of conventional gasoline cars, hybrids, electric vehicles or other types of vehicles, such as hydrogen-powered cars. The new regulation, which would not apply to sales of used cars or light trucks, would take effect from the 2027 model year.

Car companies that exceed the new restrictions could face significant fines.

John Bozzella, chairman of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents 42 auto companies that produce nearly all new vehicles sold in the United States, said in a statement that the new rule was “an ambitious goal,” but one that allows some flexibility offered. “The rules take into account the importance of freedom of choice for drivers and preserve their ability to choose the vehicle that suits them,” he said.

But the rules are expected to face immediate legal challenges from a coalition of fossil fuel companies and Republican attorneys general, complaints that will likely make their way to the Supreme Court.

“They may want us to have all electric cars or no cars at all, but ultimately that’s not their decision,” said Elizabeth Murrill, the attorney general of Louisiana, a major oil and gas producing state involved. in a series of lawsuits challenging the Biden EPA, “there is a limit to their authority to reshape society according to their own vision and the court has realized that.”

The auto emissions rule is the most impactful of four major climate regulations from the Biden administration, including limits on emissions from power plants, trucks and methane leaks from oil and gas wells. The rules come on top of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the largest climate bill in the nation’s history, which provides at least $370 billion in federal incentives to support clean energy, including tax breaks for electric vehicle buyers.

The policy is intended to help the country achieve Mr. Biden’s goal of halving U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and eliminating them by 2050. Climate scientists say all major economies must do the same if the world is to avoid the deadliest and costly consequences. of climate change.

“These standards represent what we see as a historic climate grand slam for the Biden administration,” said Manish Bapna, chairman of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, a political action committee that aims to advance the environment.

Mr. Bapna’s group has calculated that the four regulations, combined with the Inflation Reduction Act, would reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent by 2030, putting the country most of the way toward Mr. Biden’s target for would reach 2030.

Mr. Trump has pledged to scrap those climate programs when he returns to the White House.

The Biden administration is rushing to finalize climate regulations to protect them from one looming threat in a polarized political climate: Under law, as long as the rules are published more than 60 legislative days before the end of the presidential term, not be eliminated. by a simple majority vote in Congress.

In writing the final tailpipe regulation, the government relaxed some elements in a concession to automakers and their largest union, the United Auto Workers.

While major auto companies have invested substantially in building and marketing all-electric vehicles, they have complained that the pace of change required under the rule originally proposed a year ago was too rapid.

Union auto workers, who fear a rapid transition to electric vehicles because they have fewer parts that require fewer workers to produce, and because many new EV factories are being built in states that don’t support union labor, told the White House as much. .

In a statement on Wednesday, the United Auto Workers said the EPA “has come a long way to create a more viable emissions rule” that would protect workers who build gas-powered cars while creating a path for automakers to “ to implement the full range”. of automotive technologies to reduce emissions.”

Mr. Biden needs both the auto industry’s cooperation and the political support of the unionized auto workers who supported him in 2020. The auto industry employs thousands of voters in Michigan, a swing state that could determine who wins the White House in November.

In response, the final EPA rule relaxed the pace at which automakers must comply with the rule in its early years, only sharply increasing it after 2030.

That lowers the number of electric vehicles automakers need to sell before 2030, and it also means emissions will fall more slowly. Climate scientists have warned that emissions must fall sharply and quickly to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.

EPA officials said the final rule would still reduce the same amount of emissions over 30 years.

Asked about that trade-off, EPA administrator Michael S. Regan said the changes were intended to lead to a “stronger, more sustainable” policy — in other words, one that is less likely to be reversed by a future administration. or the courts. “We are not sacrificing the environmental benefits we would like to see,” he said.

Even if the new EPA limits survive legal challenges, a transition away from the internal combustion engine will depend on a number of other factors.

A lack of public charging stations for electric vehicles remains a problem. While more than 172,000 were installed last year, analyst project that the nation will need more than two million chargers by 2030 to support the growth in electric vehicles envisioned by the EPA regulation.

At the same time, electric vehicle sales growth is slowing, even though the new regulations would require a nearly tenfold increase in sales within just eight years. Buyers of new electric vehicles are eligible for up to $7,500 in federal tax credits, but currently only 18 models qualify for that full credit, compared to about two dozen last year. One of those eligible models, the Ford F-150 Lightning, an all-electric pickup that once had a waiting list of 200,000 units, sold 24,000 last year, well below Ford’s forecast of 150,000.

“Ultimately, this is a consumer issue,” said Stephanie Brinley, Auto Intelligence analyst at S&P Global Mobility. “They are being asked to change their patterns in what they drive, what they buy and how they handle their vehicles. And you can’t push them faster than they will go.

The Supreme Court decided unanimously Tuesday in favor of a Muslim man who said he was placed on the no-fly list in retaliation for refusing to become a government informant. The court rejected the government’s claim that removing the man from the list had made his case moot.

The no-fly list, which was quickly expanded after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, appears to include tens of thousands of people. The criteria for inclusion on the list are opaque, allowing for errors and misuse.

Yonas Fikre, a US citizen, challenged his inclusion on the list, saying it violated due process and amounted to discrimination based on race, national origin and religion.

The legal proceedings are in their early stages and Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, writing for the court, said it was necessary to assume that the following version of events outlined in the lawsuit was true.

Mr. Fikre, who lived in Portland, Oregon, had moved to Sudan from his home country of Eritrea as a child. In 2009, he traveled back to Sudan in search of a consumer electronics company in East Africa.

When he was invited to lunch at the U.S. Embassy, ​​he was confronted by FBI agents, who told him he had been placed on the no-fly list and could not return to the United States. They questioned him about activities at a Portland mosque, asked him to act as an informant and said they would take steps to remove him from the list if he agreed.

He refused. Weeks later, during a trip to the United Arab Emirates, he was arrested, detained, interrogated and tortured. After 106 days, he was flown to Sweden, where he lived until 2015, when the Swedish government returned him to Portland by private jet.

The following year, the government told Mr. Fikre that he had been removed from the list. It provided no explanation but argued the move made its lawsuit moot.

Judge Gorsuch wrote that defendants cannot automatically moot a dispute by “the simple expedient of suspending the challenged conduct after it has been charged.”

Instead, he wrote, citing an earlier decision, “a defendant’s ‘voluntary cessation of a challenged practice’ will only raise a case if the defendant can demonstrate that the practice ‘could not reasonably be expected to will repeat itself’.”

Judge Gorsuch wrote that it remains possible that the government will place Mr. Fikre back on the no-fly list. “The government could reinstate him,” the judge wrote, “if he does the same or similar things in the future — for example, visiting a particular mosque or refusing new overtures to serve as an informant.”

Justice Gorsuch added: “What matters is not whether a defendant repudiates his past actions, but what the repudiation may prove about his future conduct. “We base our judgment on that consideration alone – the potential for a suspect’s future behavior.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, delivered a brief concurring opinion. It stressed that “our decision does not suggest that the government should release classified information to Mr. Fikre, his lawyer or a court to demonstrate that this case is moot.”

Hina Shamsi, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a brief support from Mr Fikrewelcomed the decision.

“For decades,” she said in a statement, “rights groups have documented the secrecy and unfairness of the no-fly list program and its devastating impact on people’s lives, yet the program has remained a black box. Not only are people left in the dark about why they were listed, they are also given no meaningful explanation when they are removed, or any assurance that they will not be wrongly listed in the future.”

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that federal appeals courts can review many rulings by immigration judges on whether deporting someone would, in the words of a federal statute, result in “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a family member lawfully in the United States.

The vote was 6-3, with the majority made up of an unusual coalition: the court’s three liberal members and the three justices appointed by President Donald J. Trump.

The case involved Situ Kamu Wilkinson, born in Trinidad and Tobago. In 2003, fleeing violence, he overstayed a tourist visa in the United States. About ten years later, he and his girlfriend had a son, a U.S. citizen identified in court documents as M.

After being detained by authorities in 2019, Mr. Wilkinson sought to avoid deportation under a provision of a federal statute that allows immigration judges to grant relief to people whose removal would cause great hardship to a spouse, parent or child. (Mr. Wilkinson met the law’s other criteria: having been present in the United States for at least 10 consecutive years, being of good moral character, and not having been convicted of certain crimes.)

An immigration judge ruled that M. had severe asthma and that Mr Wilkinson provided him with financial and emotional support. The judge also found that M. had been struggling with behavioral problems since Mr Wilkinson’s detention, when the boy was 7.

But the judge ruled that these circumstances did not amount to the kind of hardship that would justify an exception to the usual rules. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed this ruling.

Mr. Wilkinson sought review before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which ruled that it had no jurisdiction under a 1996 law that stripped federal appeals courts of much of their jurisdiction over deportation rulings.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for five justices, said a change in the law allowed appeals courts to consider “questions of law.” She writes that the immigration judge’s application of the legal standard to the facts concerning M. met this requirement.

“Mixed questions of law and fact, even if primarily factual, fall within the statutory definition of ‘questions of law,’” Judge Sotomayor wrote, allowing appellate review.

Pure questions of fact are another matter, she wrote. “Thus,” she wrote, an immigration judge’s findings “regarding the credibility, severity of a family member’s medical condition, or the level of financial support currently provided by a noncitizen remain unreviewable. Only the question of whether those established facts meet the legal suitability standard is subject to judicial review.”

Justices Elena Kagan, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined Justice Sotomayor in Wilkinson v. Garland, No. 22-666. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson voted with the majority, but did not adopt the reasoning.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said. that the majority had defied immigration laws by treating almost all questions as legal issues subject to review by appellate courts.

Such a reading of the immigration laws, he wrote, “would be the equivalent of a city council passing an ordinance banning all dogs from a park, except all dogs weighing less than 125 pounds.” Or the municipality adopts an ordinance that prohibits everyone from cycling without a helmet, but then adopts an exception for all persons under the age of 90.”

Over the past decade, some of Apple’s biggest regulatory woes have come from a little-known federal agency, the US International Trade Commission. The office’s patent judges have found Apple guilty of appropriating innovations in smartphones, semiconductors and smartwatches. And recently they forced Apple to remove a health feature from Apple Watches.

Now the tech giant is pushing back. As it defends itself against patent complaints at the ITC, Apple has begun lobbying lawmakers to help rewrite the agency’s rules.

The company has campaigned across Washington for legislation that would make some patent owners ineligible to file complaints with the ITC. It has tried to influence the language of committee reports that could affect how the agency imposes penalties. And it has increased its lobbying power by hiring one of the agency’s former commissioners.

The lobbying effort comes as Apple is embroiled in a multi-year legal battle with two US medical device makers over technology in the Apple Watch. The companies, LevendCor And Masimofiled complaints with the ITC against Apple in 2021 for appropriating innovations they had developed to measure the electrical activity of the heart and oxygen levels in people’s blood.

After losing both cases, Apple this year removed the technology to measure blood oxygen in its watches, which infringed on Masimo’s patent. It is appealing the ITC’s decision. A similar sentence has been suspended as legal proceedings related to the case continue ITC finding that Apple has infringed on AliveCor innovations with the electrocardiogram function of the Apple Watch.

Apple is trying to dilute the agency’s signature power. Unlike traditional patent courts, where juries or judges typically hand out fines, the ITC’s judges can discipline a company that infringes a patent by banning the import of the infringing product.

Since Apple makes all its signature devices abroad, a block on the import of its devices would be dangerous for the company. To avoid that fine in the future, the company says, it wants the service to put the public interest of a product above a ban. The company is betting that the court would then give more credence to Apple’s argument that Americans would be harmed by an import ban because they would lose access to the communication and health functions of iPhones and Apple Watches.

An Apple spokeswoman said existing law requires the ITC to consider how the public interest might be harmed before ordering an import ban. But it said public data showed that the agency had conducted public interest evaluations in only a fifth of the cases it had heard since 2010. As a result the lobbyists have spoken with White House and Congressional leaders on the ITC, as well as other issues such as privacy and domestic manufacturing.

Adam Mossoff, a patent law expert and professor at George Mason University, said Apple misinterpreted the law, which requires the ITC to block a product if it finds it infringes a patent. An import ban should only be lifted if there is a proven threat to health or safety, he said. Blocking the sale of an Apple device would not be considered harmful.

“The problem with their lobbying is that they are trying to neutralize a well-functioning court by closing its doors to Americans whose rights have been violated,” he said.

When Congress created the ITC in 1916, it sought to protect American innovation by allowing the U.S. government to ban the importation of products containing stolen technology. But as production moved abroad, the federal agency’s legal system became a forum for disputes between U.S. companies.

The ITC judges, who are appointed by the committee, conduct hearings with different standards for patent litigation than those applied to district court cases. The cases are fast-paced and compressed and can culminate in the courts punishing a patent abuser by blocking his products.

Before a ban takes effect, a company found guilty can appeal to the White House for a reprieve. But it is rare for a government that oversees the agency to go against a judge’s recommendation.

Apple has become the prime example of how the ITC can be used. Because the company produces almost all of its products abroad, the judges who found it guilty of infringing patents on smartphones, semiconductors and smartwatches say it should be punished by blocking the import of iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches.

Apple has largely escaped the import bans. In 2013, the The Obama administration vetoed it the ITC’s plan to block imports of iPhones after the agency found that Apple had infringed on one of Samsung’s smartphone patents. In 2019, Apple agreed to pay Qualcomm a royalty on a number of wireless technology patents, a precursor to an ITC ruling that could have blocked iPhone sales. And after losing the Masimo case, Apple agreed to remove the violative health feature to avoid an Apple Watch ban.

For years, Apple avoided the kind of lobbying that was common for a major company. It had a small office in Washington with just a few people and employed only one lobbying firm, said two people familiar with the firm’s practices. But as the company’s regulatory challenges have increased, its policy team has expanded to include dozens of people and 11 lobbying firms.

Despite AliveCor and Masimo’s patent complaints, Apple’s Washington team prioritized lobbying to change the ITC. In 2022, it began working with the ITC Modernization Alliance, a loose coalition of companies that also includes Samsung, Intel, Dell, Google, Verizon and Comcast. The group worked with members of Congress to write the Advancing America’s Interest Act in 2019 supported its reintroduction in 2023.

The bill’s proponents — Reps. David Schweikert, a Republican from Arizona, and Donald S. Beyer Jr., a Democrat from Virginia — have promoted it as a way to curb abuse of the ITC by patent trolls. It would prohibit patent holders from suing unless they manufactured a product that used the patented technology or had already licensed the technology to someone else.

AliveCor and Masimo are medical companies that have focused more on selling products to healthcare providers and consumers than on licensing innovations to consumer technology companies like Apple.

Last year, Apple’s lobbyists filed three reports revealing that Apple had campaigned on behalf of the bill, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit organization that researches campaign finance. It has also expanded its lobbying ranks by Hire Deanna Tanner Okuna former one ITC Chairman who works for the law firm Polsinelli. (The hiring was previously reported by Politics.)

The lobbying campaign coincided with an effort in Washington to argue that an ITC ban on Apple Watch imports would deprive people of a device crucial to their health, two people familiar with the lobbying said.

In addition to direct legislative lobbying, Apple also worked with a member of Congress to put language on page 97 of a committee report for the 2024 Appropriations Bill, said Rep. Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican. This language would require the ITC to assess how it determined a product’s value to the public before proposing a ban and to report to Congress on that process.

“To me, this circumvented the legitimate process,” said Mr. Buck, who is leaving Congress this month. He told Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who sits on the Government Committee, that he had 10 votes and would block the bill unless the language was removed. Mr. Massie’s office confirmed that the language had been removed at Mr. Buck’s request, but declined to comment further.

An Apple spokeswoman disagreed with Mr. Buck’s claims that his lobbying work circumvented the legitimate legislative process. She said the public federal lobbying reports detail how the company worked on issues important to its products and customers.

The spokeswoman also pointed to the Senate’s approval of a committee report that included a sentence expressing support for the ITC conducting a thorough analysis of the public health impact of a product ban before issuing one, which Apple said in the future wants.