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A lawyer for Paul Pelosi, the multimillionaire husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, appeared on his behalf in a Napa County, California, court for his arraignment on DUI charges Wednesday morning.

The attorney, Amanda Bevins, entered a plea of ​​not guilty to both accounts on her client’s behalf before Napa County Superior Court Judge Monique Langhorne.

Pelosi’s 2021 Porsche and the other driver’s 2014 Jeep sustained “major collision damage” in a crash around 10:17 pm on May 28, and responding officers found Pelosi in his driver’s seat in his damaged car near the intersection of California Route 29 and Oakville Cross Road.

He faces two misdemeanor charges, DUI causing injury and driving with a blood alcohol level of .08% causing injury.

Aimee McLeod, a deputy district attorney in Napa County, appeared for the prosecution.

PAUL PELOSI ALLEGEDLY SLURRED SPEECH, HAD DRUG IN SYSTEM AND HANDED OVER POLICE PRIVILEGE CARD DURING DUI BUST

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and husband Paul Pelosi
(Samuel Corum/AFP via Getty Images)

Pelosi will remain free on her own recognition and is due back in court on Aug. 23 at 9 am PT for a settlement conference.

The parties could discuss the possibility of a plea agreement, continue the case or prepare for trial, Bevins said.

If convicted, Pelosi could face up to five years of probation, a minimum of five days in jail and be ordered to install an ignition interlock device in her car, according to District Attorney Allison Haley’s office. Other punishments could include fines and fees and a court-ordered “drinking driver class.”

The arraignment comes a day after Pelosi’s wife, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, rattled US-China relations with a trip to Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory. And it comes a week after he reports that he sold millions of dollars in Nvidia stock leading up to a House vote on a bill that would impact the industry.

A spokesperson for Speaker Pelosi’s office noted that the shares had been sold at a loss.

“Mr. Pelosi bought options to buy stock in this company more than a year ago and exercised them on June 17, 2022,” the spokesperson, Drew Hammill, said in a statement. “As always, he does not discuss these matters with the Speaker until trades have been made and required disclosures must be prepared and filed.”

HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI’S HUSBAND PAUL’S DUI TRIAL ‘RIGGED,’ BESET BY ‘DECK-STACKING’: JESSE WATTERS

On the night of the crash, Pelosi allegedly handed officers his driver’s license and an “11-99 Foundation” card when they asked for his ID, according to the documents. The 11-99 Foundation is a California Highway Patrol charity that supports officers and provides scholarships for their children.

Pelosi allegedly exhibited “signs of impairment” during field sobriety tests and officers “observed objective signs and symptoms of alcohol intoxication,” according to the documents.

Those allegedly included “red/watery” eyes.

“He was unsteady on his feet, his speech was slurred, and he had a strong odor of an alcohol beverage emanating from his breath,” the complaint alleges.

The other driver, identified only as John Doe, was standing outside an SUV, according to the documents.

Both of them declined medical treatment at the scene, but Doe on June 2 told Napa County prosecutors that he had begun suffering pain in his upper right arm, right shoulder and neck the day after the crash. He also complained of headaches and said it was difficult to lift things with his right arm, according to the documents.

PAUL PELOSI TO BE ARRAIGNED ON DUI CHARGES WEDNESDAY

Pelosi allegedly injured the other driver “while under the influence of an alcoholic beverage and a drug and under their combined influence,” the first count in the two-charge complaint reads.

Investigators later determined he had a blood-alcohol content of .082%.

Pelosi’s attorney Bevins told Fox News Digital, “I believe that the drug reference is part of the statutory boilerplate language in the complaint.”

Previously, descriptions of property damage and injuries stemming from the crash had been withheld.

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Records show Pelosi made bail the morning after the crash for a $5,000 sum.

Speaker Pelosi’s office has previously said it would not comment on the incident, which a spokesperson said happened while she was on the opposite side of the country.

“This level of government overreach — literally interfering in the decisions a physician and patient make together — has resonated with people in Kansas,” she said. “It’s a scary moment to think that you or your loved one might be in a situation where it’s not up to you or your provider what care you can get and instead it’s up to the government and what they think you deserve.”

Turnout for the primary also soared above usual levels Tuesday, and in some counties was closer to the participation usually seen in a presidential election. The in-person early vote, which tends to favor Democrats, was also nearly 250% higher than the last primary midterm election in 2018, when both Democrats and Republicans had competitive governors’ races, while the number of mail-in ballots was more than double.

The “no” campaign also outperformed in fairly conservative areas — like in Shawnee County in the eastern part of the state — coming in several points ahead of President Joe Biden’s results there in 2020.

At abortion rights groups’ campaign watch party in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, supporters cheered, cried, jumped and hugged each other tightly as new waves of votes were counted in their favor. Teens with purple hair wearing cutoffs mingled with older men and women in suits in a hotel ballroom. One woman cradled a doll of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as she watched the results.

“Abortion isn’t a partisan issue — that’s a trap people fall into,” Ashley All, the spokesperson for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, told POLITICO. “That’s just not the way most Americans or most Kansans think about the issue.”

The results were also hailed by abortion rights groups around the country that see the defeat of the Kansas referendum as a blueprint for future efforts in cities and states across the country. The vote also countered the narrative that the abortion issue is a bigger motivator for conservative voters, and may signal a warning to Republican lawmakers across the country that the gnaws decision may generate considerable backlash over the coming months and years.

“Reproductive freedom is a winning issue, now and in November,” NARAL Pro-Choice America President Mini Timmaraju said in a statement. “Anti-choice lawmakers take note: The voters have spoken, and they will turn out at the ballot box to oppose efforts to restrict reproductive freedom.”

The decision means abortion clinics in the state can continue to serve not only Kansans but also patients from Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and other states that have banned the procedure after gnaws fell, many of whom have traveled to Kansas in recent weeks. The anti-abortion campaign seized on this trend, warning in ads that the state would become an “abortion destination” like California if the amendment failed.

Value Them Both, the umbrella group of anti-abortion advocates who pushed for the amendment, called the decision a “temporary setback.”

“Our dedicated fight to value women and babies is far from over,” they said in a statement Tuesday night. “We will be back.”

The referendum’s result particularly shocked the state because the pro-amendment campaign had some structural advantages heading into Tuesday, and they were ahead in recent polls.

Not only is Kansas a solidly red state that twice voted for President Donald Trump, but also the supermajority Republican legislature decided to schedule the vote for the primary instead of the general election. Turnout is usually far lower in August and favors Republicans, who have more competitive primaries than Democrats in Kansas. And many college students, who trend more progressive, are away for the summer.

Student activists working to defeat the amendment said they were all more motivated by what they saw as an underhanded effort to suppress their votes.

“It was very intentional, and I think young people have taken note of that and have realized that there are political structures in place to put us down,” said Donovan Dillon, a University of Kansas sophomore who helped lead the country-western-themed Vote Neighbor campaign against the amendment. “When I reached out to friends and asked, ‘Do you want to come canvas this weekend?’ everyone’s been all hands on deck — even friends who haven’t been involved politically before.”

The “Value Them Both” amendment was rocket fuel for the usually sleepy primary election. Hundreds of volunteers from around the country converged on the state to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors. Both sides raised and spent millions of dollars on ads, mailers, phone banking and other outreach — much of it from the Catholic Church on the anti-abortion side and Planned Parenthood on the abortion rights side.

But while the state served as proxy war for the groups fighting over abortion rights nationally in a post-gnaws America, the campaigns also had a distinctly Kansas flavor.

Outside the state capital in Topeka on Saturday, people protesting against the amendment waved posters covered in sunflowers while speakers on the capitol steps invoked the state motto “Ad astra per aspera” — to the stars through adversity. Local businesses down the street showed Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz urging her fellow Kansans to vote no.

The final days leading up to the vote were also marked by tension and confusion.

Some lawn signs for the “Value Them Both” campaign had NO spray painted over them in black capital letters. Catholic churches — the main funders of the anti-abortion campaign — have also been vandalized, while abortion rights demonstrators have been threatened with arrest.

On Saturday, a group of anti-abortion advocates marched up and down the sidewalks of Lawrence — a progressive college town — yelling “Don’t kill babies” at passersby.

On Sunday, an 18-year-old anti-abortion canvasser who came from Texas to volunteer with the group Students for Life said she was physically assaulted by a resident while knocking on doors in the Kansas City suburb of Leawood. She filed a police report and posted a video that doesn’t show the incident itself but shows the resident yelling and giving her the finger afterward.

On Monday, several residents alerted the state’s ACLU chapter that they received a deceptive robotext from an unknown number suggesting that a “yes” vote would protect abortion access.

“Women in Kansas are losing their choice on reproductive rights,” the messages read, according to screenshots shared with POLITICO. “Voting YES on the amendment will give women a choice.”

Former Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius received the texts and said in a statement that she was not surprised by the tactic.

“The anti-choice movement has been lying to the voters of Kansas for decades,” she said. “This act of desperation won’t stop the voters of Kansas from protecting their constitutional rights and freedom.”

Many voters told POLITICO the debate has also pitted family members against one another.

Asked about the “Vote Yes” sign in his front yard, Olathe resident David Schaffer said that it belonged to his daughter and that he vehemently disagrees.

“She can do what she wants. Ella she’s a grown adult, ”he said. “But I say, if we turn it over to the legislature, I don’t get no say anymore — none. And that’s what this is doing.”

One of his neighbors, Edianna Yantis, told POLITICO her “Vote Yes” was recently stolen from her front yard and she suspected her son, who had been trying to convince her to vote no.

“He said, ‘Mom, I don’t like abortion but this means they’re going to take all abortion away.’ I told him, ‘You need to do your research,’ but he says he has,” she said with a sad smile.

Ultimately, despite the state’s conservative leanings, voters saw the amendment as a bridge too far.

And while younger voters in the state lean more progressive, the defeat of the proposal was also fueled by older Kansans like Barbara Lawson, who remembers life before gnaws v. Wade.

When canvassers with Kansans for Constitutional Freedom came to her door on Monday to urge her to vote against the amendment, Lawson shared that she had a baby when she was 17 years old after being raped.

“I don’t know if I would have [had an abortion] because I had no choice — abortion was illegal. It was very hard,” she said. “Now I fear they’re going to restrict all abortions again and we’re going to be left back in the Dark Ages.”

Leading up to Tuesday’s contest, there were signs that voters’ views on abortion were more nuanced than their partisan leanings. A July poll, for example, found that a third of voters favored no restrictions on abortion, while only 9 percent said they preferred a total ban. And a 2021 survey conducted by Fort Hays State University found that over 50 percent of Kansans agreed with the statement: “The Kansas government should not place any regulations on the circumstances under which women can get abortions.”

“People make a lot of assumptions about Kansas,” said Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.), the sole Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, who flipped a previously red district in 2018. “People here care about their community and care about things being fair.”

Sen. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, speaks to reporters about the compromise bill that could substantially alter a tax provision called the “carried interest loophole.”

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

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Sen. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, speaks to reporters about the compromise bill that could substantially alter a tax provision called the “carried interest loophole.”

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Tucked inside the sprawling Senate compromise bill for climate change and health care is an effort, years in the making, to close what Democrats say is a loophole that benefits a handful of the richest Americans: the carried interest tax.

The legislative compromise, reached last week by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, could represent the single largest federal clean energy investment in US history.

About $14 billion meant to fund those efforts would come, Democrats say, from a change to the way the US taxes what is called “carried interest,” a better way that many fund managers and private equity investors earn their compensation.

But it has long been controversial because this kind of income is currently taxed at a much lower rate than the salary most Americans earn from ordinary jobs.

The long-standing provision has survived repeated attempts and promises to eliminate it, from Democrats and Republicans alike.

“There’s a lot of money at stake. Some of the richest Americans have made their fortunes by earning carried interest, especially through private equity funds,” said Steve Rosenthal, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center, in an interview with NPR.

How does the loophole work, and what have Democrats proposed?

“Partners in private equity firms and hedge funds who generally manage other people’s money get a share of the profits from any deal they do — often about a 20% share, even if they have invested any of their own money in it,” said David Wessel, an economics fellow at the Brookings Institution, in an interview with NPR.

Here’s the rub: While that slice of profit pocketed by hedge fund managers is essentially their salary, it is taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. Rather than be subject to the normal individual income tax rate — 37% for the highest bracket of earners — carried interest, so long as it is held for at least three years, is taxed at the capital gains rate, which is typically 20% for those high-income earners.

The difference could represent billions of dollars. (Precise estimates can be difficult because “there’s a lot of opaqueness to private equity,” Rosenthal noted.)

Senate Democrats say their proposal would raise $14 billion over a period of 10 years. That number is equal to an estimate issued by the Congressional Budget Office for a 2019 proposal to treat carried interest as ordinary income. (In 2020, the Congressional Research Service noted that the amount of money under this kind of management had reached $14.3 trillion, a dramatic increase in recent years.)

Currently, these kinds of investors must hold their earnings for three years to qualify for the 20% capital gains rate, rather than a higher short-term rate. The Democratic proposal would change the holding period from three years to five. (The longer holding period requirement would apply only to people earning more than $400,000 annually, a nod to Biden’s previous promise that he would not raise taxes on any Americans making less than that amount.) Other technical changes would attempt to prevent hedge fund managers from structuring their income in different ways.

“It wouldn’t completely close the loophole, but it would substantially restrict it,” Wessel said.

Where did the idea come from, and why hasn’t it passed before?

The idea of ​​closing the loophole has been around for a long time.

Carried interest first surfaced in national headlines in 2007, after a law professor wrote a journal article about the loophole and helped launch a debate on Capitol Hill over whether to close it. The issue found itself on the table again in 2010, then again in 2011 amid the Occupy Wall Street protests. In 2012, carried interest came up in discussions about taxes paid by Mitt Romney, then the Republican nominee for president, during his years running a private equity investment firm. In 2016, presidential candidates Jeb Bush, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton all promised to close the loophole (though President Trump’s tax bill in 2017 fell far short of eliminating it).

But no previous proposal to close the loophole has stuck — in part because of aggressive lobbying to keep it.

“There are a lot of private equity and hedge fund partners who are big campaign contributors, including to Democrats, and they care about this a lot,” Wessel said. Meanwhile, he added, “all the other constituents of Congress don’t even know what it is.”

Supporters of the loophole say it’s not a loophole at all — rather, the difference in tax rates represents an incentive to invest in the economy. They also say they pay taxes in other ways.

Another argument, perhaps more pragmatic, is that hedge fund managers would simply find other ways to structure their income to avoid the higher tax rate.

Will it pass this time? Maybe.

To pass their proposal, Democrats will likely have to secure all 50 votes from their own caucus — including that of Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who last year helped to torpedo Democratic legislation over her opposition to any form of higher taxes for corporations or wealthy Americans.

In a Sunday interview on Fox News, Manchin disputed the characterization that the proposal, including its carried interest provision, would raise taxes.

“We did not raise taxes. We’ve closed loopholes. That’s all we did. I made sure there were no tax increases in this whatsoever,” Manchin said.

The Senate could take up the bill as early as this week. If it passes, the changes to the carried interest provision, along with the establishment of a corporate minimum tax rate of 15%, would help fund the development of renewable energy projects, encourage Americans to buy electric vehicles and support communities affected by climate change.