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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Julia Carrie Wong (now), Daniel Strauss and Martin Belam (earlier)

Arizona and Wisconsin certify Joe Biden's win as Trump continues to challenge results – as it happened

Joe Biden delivers a Thanksgiving address in Wilmington, Delaware on 25 November 2020.
Joe Biden delivers a Thanksgiving address in Wilmington, Delaware on 25 November 2020. Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

Evening summary

That’s all from me today. Here’s a rundown of the day’s top stories:

  • Joe Biden announced a slate of nominees for various economic positions in his administration, including Janet Yellen as treasury secretary and Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
  • The supreme court heard arguments in an important dispute over whether undocumented immigrants should be included in the census tally that determines the apportionment of congressional seats. The court appeared skeptical of the Trump administration’s arguments in favor of exclusion.
  • Arizona and Wisconsin certified their election results. Biden won both states, despite baseless allegations of fraud by Trump.
  • The justice department filed a motion to dismiss the case against former national adviser Michael Flynn as “moot”, following Trump’s pardon of Flynn on Wednesday. The court filing revealed the sweeping nature of Trump’s pardon, which covers both the crime that Flynn pleaded guilty to (lying to the FBI), and any other possible future charges that could arise from the Mueller investigation.
  • Trump coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas resigned. The Stanford radiologist had no expertise in infectious diseases or epidemiology and used his position to promote ideas that were both baseless and widely criticized by actual experts as dangerous to the public.

You can keep up to date with our global coronavirus liveblog here:

Updated

Scott Atlas, the rightwing radiologist who used his position as a special adviser to Donald Trump on the coronavirus pandemic to attack science-based public health measures, has resigned from his position, Fox News reported.

Atlas is a neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford’s rightwing Hoover Institution, where he works on health care policy. He has no expertise or experience in infectious diseases or epidemiology.

He was nevertheless selected by Trump to advise the president on the viral pandemic. Atlas repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus, which has killed more than 250,000 Americans, and attacked public health measures such as masks, stay-at-home orders and social distancing. He called on residents of Michigan to “rise up” against restrictions put in place by governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had been the target of a kidnapping plot, leading to calls for his firing.

He also promoted the idea that the US should aim to achieve “herd immunity”, a so-called strategy that would likely result in millions of deaths.

He was repeatedly rebuked by public health and infectious disease experts, in addition to Stanford University and the Stanford faculty senate.

Trump campaign attorney Joseph diGenova, a former federal prosecutor, called for the execution of the fired election cybersecurity head, Chris Krebs, in a rant on Newsmax on Monday, the Bulwark reports.

Krebs was the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency where he worked to prevent interference in the election. Trump fired Krebs on 18 November, after the well-respected figure refuted Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.

DiGenova is one of Trump’s “elite strike force team” of attorneys who have mounted overwhelmingly unsuccessful and increasingly incompetent legal challenges against Joe Biden’s decisive victory.

“Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity [for Trump],” diGenova said on the Howie Carr show, according to the Bulwark. “That guy is a class-A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,”

This is not the first time that a Trump associate has called for violence against a public servant in recent weeks. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called for the beheadings of Dr Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray on his video podcast shortly after the election, leading to his permanent suspension from Twitter.

Updated

The Justice Department has moved to dismiss as “moot” the case against disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was pardoned by Donald Trump on 25 November.

While Trump announced the pardon on Twitter, the DOJ filing includes a copy of the official pardon paperwork, which reveals just how sweeping the pardon is.

In addition to the charge to which Flynn pleaded guilty (“making false statements to Federal investigators”), the pardon also extends to “any and all possible offenses arising from” Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation.

In the DOJ filing, the federal prosecutors note that this broad language will cover “any possible future perjury or contempt charge in connection with Flynn’s sworn statements and any other possible future charge that this court or the court-appointed amicus has suggested might somehow keep this criminal case alive over the government’s objections (eg, a charge under the Foreign Agents Registration Act...)”

Prior to the pardon, the DOJ had made the unusual move of attempting to have a judge dismiss the case against Flynn, despite the fact that he had already pleaded guilty.

In recent days, Flynn has become an enthusiastic proponent of baseless conspiracy theories casting doubt on the presidential election results. On Twitter, he has promoted the false conspiracy mongering of the former web admin for 8chan (and its successor site 8kun), the extremist message board that became the site of choice for white nationalist mass shooters publishing their manifestos, and which is home to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory.

Updated

Two indigenous lawmakers in South Dakota have written to the state’s governor Kristi Noem asking for a statewide mask mandate as the state has regained its position as the number one Covid hotspot in the country, Inforum reports.

State representative Peri Pourier and state senator Red Dawn Foster pleaded with Noem for the mandate, writing:

As indigenous women, we are writing from the earnest position of granddaughters, sisters, mothers, and the life-givers of our culture and people. It has been ingrained into us that our decisions must take into consideration the care and safety of our communities and our people above our individual selves. There really isn’t a need to battle over statistics and politics right now. This isn’t a political game of playing roulette with our communities or our families. It is an issue of public health that surpasses political parties and hits the core of our humanity.

As Talli Nauman reported for the Guardian last week, South Dakota has been devastated by the coronavirus while the state’s Republican governor refuses to take action. The rural state tops the CDC’s ranking of average daily cases per 100,000 people over the last 7 days, as well as it’s ranking of per capita death rate over the last 7 days.

The brunt of the pandemic is being borne by the state’s tribal communities, according to data collected by the Covid Tracking Project, which reports that Native Americans account for 14% of the state’s cases and deaths, despite being just 8% of the total population.

In May, Noem threatened to sue the Cheyenne River Sioux and Oglala Sioux tribes after they established checkpoints in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus.

Updated

Hi everyone, this is Julia Carrie Wong in Oakland, picking up the blog for the rest of the afternoon.

In the annals of “why your vote matters”, the state of Iowa has just certified the election of a Republican congressional candidate by the razor thin margin of six votes.

Mariannette Miller-Meeks lead Democratic candidate Rita Hart by 47 votes after the initial count, but her lead shrank to just six following a recount. The final tally was 196,964 to 196,958.

Following Monday’s certification, Hart has two days to file a challenge, and she likely will, the AP reported.

Afternoon summary

That’s it for me. I’ll hand the blogging baton over to my colleague Julia Carrie Wong. Here’s what’s happened today so far:

  • Coronavirus cases are surging in California.
  • Top Republican officials in Georgia pushed back on criticism from Donald Trump.
  • Arizona and Wisconsin certified their election results today. Joe Biden won both states.
  • Trump has been losing followers on Twitter while Biden has been gaining them.
  • The supreme court indicated skepticism about the Trump administration’s play to exclude undocumented immigrants from its census tally.

Updated

Add Wisconsin to the list of states certifying its election results with a victory for Joe Biden.

Earlier today Arizona certified its election results for Biden as well. Donald Trump has vowed to fight these results, arguing (without evidence) that he lost the presidential election only because of widespread fraud.

Iowa senator Chuck Grassley has returned to his Washington office after quarantining because he tested positive for Covid-19.

Per a press release from Grassley’s office the senator said:

“While I continued working from home during my quarantine, I’m glad to be back in the office working for Iowans. During my quarantine, I heard from so many Iowans and Americans across the country. I’m thankful for their prayers and well wishes. This disease affects people differently. I did not experience symptoms, but more than a thousand Americans are dying every day and many more are hospitalized. That means we all have to do our part to help protect our friends, family and fellow Americans. I will continue to wear a mask and practice social distancing.

“Promising vaccine news means there is light at the end of the tunnel. That makes staying vigilant in the coming months all the more important. Congress must do its part and pass long overdue relief legislation to help families, businesses and communities get through this crisis. I hope my colleagues reach the same conclusion and a bipartisan bill can pass very soon.”

Grassley is one of a still-growing number of lawmakers who have tested positive for coronavirus. In the Iowa senator’s case he was asymptotic and cleared to return to work.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, the highest ranking Republican in the Senate, welcomed Grassley back during remarks on the Senate floor:

“First, as the Senate reconvenes this afternoon, I’m especially happy to welcome back our President Pro Tem.

“Senator Grassley quarantined and worked from home following his positive COVID test two weeks ago. We all predicted that if any member of this body had the stamina and spirit to kick the virus to the curb, it would be him — and sure enough, our colleague reports that he experienced no symptoms. His doctors have cleared him to come back to work and we are sure glad to see him today.

“Chairman Grassley had to put his epic streak of consecutive votes temporarily on hold for the sake of others. Of course, leadership and example-setting are nothing new for the senior Senator for Iowa. I am confident our colleague will pick up exactly where he left off, resuming both his perfect attendance record and the tireless work for Iowans that it represents.

“We all benefit so much from his leadership.”

Updated

California’s coronavirus cases continued to surge after a week of holiday travel, hitting all-time highs unseen before even at the worst of the pandemic.

The state was reporting a seven-day average of 14,657 cases a day, with 14,034 cases reported in the last 24 hours, Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, said at his Monday briefing. During the peak of the pandemic in California in July, the state reported a seven-day average of just 9,881 cases a day.

Hospitalizations have increased by 89%, with 59% of all hospital beds in use within the state’s healthcare system, Newsom said. Public health officials project that without any intervention, hospitalizations could increase to 78% by Christmas Eve.


Currently, 51 of California’s 58 counties are once again living under the most severe coronavirus restrictions. That includes a 10pm curfew, a restriction that was not part of the original lockdown that took place in March.

California has reported more than 1.21m coronavirus cases since the pandemic began. In ranking California by case rate, California comes in 39th in the country, with 34.5 cases per 100,000 residents. More than 19,000 people have died.

Updated

Joining Georgia governor Brian Kemp in pushing back on Donald Trump, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger weighed in on Monday as well, according to CNN. Here’s that report:

“There are those who are exploiting the emotions of many Trump supporters with fantastic claims, half-truths, misinformation, and frankly, they are misleading the President as well, apparently,” he said.

He also said that a post-election audit, along with the ongoing recount, prove that the election was fair.

“Once this recount is complete, everyone in Georgia will be able to have even more confidence in the results of our elections,” he said, adding that the recount is on track to finish by a Wednesday night deadline.

Updated

More on Arizona certifying the election results. Here’s Arizona governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, tweeting about it.

And here’s Democratic lawyer Marc Elias taking a victory lap:

Updated

Arizona certifies Biden win

Arizona certified its election results on Monday, effectively putting to rest any doubt that Biden won the state in the 2020 presidential election.

Biden won the state by about 11,000 votes, a slim margin although in past election cycles Arizona has trended reliably toward Republicans. Biden’s victory there was essential to him passing the 270 electoral vote mark needed to beat Trump and win the presidency.

Continuing the back and forth between Georgia governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, and Donald Trump that I noted earlier, Kemp’s spokesperson shot back that Kemp has acted within the bounds of his job.

According to The Washington Post:

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Monday pushed back on exhortations by President Trump, suggesting that the president was asking him to interfere in the Nov. 3 election in a way prohibited by state law.

Georgia law prohibits the Governor from interfering in elections,” Kemp spokesman Cody Hall said in a statement. “The Secretary of State, who is an elected Constitutional officer, has oversight over elections that cannot be overridden by executive order.”

The Trump campaign on Monday made its fifth request for election officials in Georgia to audit signatures in the counting process. The press release announcing the request said:

“Trump Campaign attorneys requested that the Georgia Secretary of State uphold his duty to preserve the legitimacy of his state’s elections, saying: “It is not possible for you to accurately certify the results in the presidential race from the November 3, 2020, election until and unless there is a thorough audit of the signatures, which we have now requested four times in writing prior to this request. You cannot in good faith conclude the ongoing statutory recount until you have instituted a signature matching audit,” said Ray S. Smith, III, Counsel to Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.”

Donald Trump has been losing Twitter followers since he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden – while the Democratic president-elect has been adding them.

According to Factbase, a website dedicated to tracking Trump’s public utterances, the president has lost 133,902 followers since 17 November while the president-elect has gained 1,156,610.

It is not clear yet whether US democracy “survived” the 2020 presidential election unscathed.

If Donald Trump’s playbook of seeking to undermine a legitimate election becomes standard Republican practice – refuse to concede, make false claims of fraud, fan the flames of conspiracy, sue everywhere and refuse to certify any win by the other side – then American democracy might already have sustained a fatal wound.

But Trump has not succeeded in stealing the 2020 election, despite his historic attempt to do so, in what analysts call the most dangerous frontal assault on US democracy since the civil war era. The two states upon which Trump’s plot most hinged, Pennsylvania and Michigan, certified their results in Joe Biden’s favor earlier this week. The presidential transition is at last under way.

Yet while the election exposed key areas where American democracy is failing, it also highlighted structural features that make national elections in the US hard to steal, no matter how determined the would-be despot or how complicit his party colleagues.

Here is a select list of those features:

Raffensperger announces Georgia voter group investigations

Reuters reports:

Election authorities in Georgia have opened investigations into progressive groups trying to sign up new voters in advance of twin January elections that will determine control of the US Senate, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Monday.

Brad Raffensperger.
Brad Raffensperger. Photograph: Dustin Chambers/Reuters

Raffensperger, a Republican, said his office was examining registration efforts by America Votes, Vote Forward and the New Georgia Project. He said some groups had been encouraging people who lived outside Georgia to register to vote in the state.

“These third-party groups have a responsibility to not encourage illegal voting. If they do so, they will be held responsible,” Raffensperger said.

Representatives of the organizations did not immediately respond to questions about the announcement.

The state is the site of a pair of 5 January runoffs for Senate seats that will determine which party controls the chamber for the next two years and with it the ability to advance or block Democratic president-elect Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.

Raffensperger said his office also had several investigations open into accusations of wrongdoing in the US presidential election.

Donald Trump has repeatedly and without evidence claimed his loss to Biden was the result of widespread fraud, though state and federal election officials have said there is no evidence of it.

Much of Trump’s anger has been trained on fellow Republicans Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp, after Biden narrowly won their state.

Supreme court considers Trump census gambit

The supreme court appeared skeptical on Monday of Donald Trump’s effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from a key census population tally, but appeared hesitant to put an immediate halt to the policy.

The court heard oral arguments on Monday in a high-stakes dispute focused on a July memo in which Trump ordered the Department of Commerce to exclude undocumented people from the census tally that’s used to determine how many seats in congress each state gets. The decennial census, conducted since America’s founding, has long used the total population as the basis for allocating congressional seats. The Trump administration’s policy would likely cause the most harm to immigrant-rich places like California and Texas, while benefiting whiter, more conservative areas for the next decade.

Several states, led by New York, as well as a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups have challenged the policy in courts across the country. Lower courts in several of the cases have blocked the policy as unlawful.

On Monday, even two of the court’s more conservative justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, appeared somewhat wary of the idea that the constitution authorizes the president to categorically exclude all undocumented immigrants from the apportionment counts. The constitution says congressional seats should be apportioned based on “the whole number of persons.”

“A lot of the historical evidence and the longstanding practice really cuts against your position,” Barrett told Jeffrey Wall, the acting solicitor general, the government’s top lawyer.

But much of Monday’s argument focused not on the merits of the president’s actions, but whether it was simply too early for the US supreme court to step in and stop Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census, from sending Trump a dataset with a tally of undocumented immigrants. Wall told the justices on Monday that the commerce department was behind schedule in preparing the data for the president, and it was still unclear how many undocumented people the government would be able to exclude. The court should wait until that uncertainty was resolved to see the scope of how many people could be affected before issuing a ruling.

Updated

Today so far

Here’s what’s been going on so far today:

  • Joe Biden unveiled key members of his economic team, including Janet Yellen for treasury secretary.
  • Democrat Mark Kelly will be sworn-in to the Senate on Wednesday, slightly shifting the balance of power in the chamber.
  • Donald Trump is once again focusing his ire on Georgia Republican election officials. And once again the president is making baseless claims.
  • Trump is losing Twitter followers and Biden is gaining followers.
  • Biden plans to compile a list of judicial appointees before inauguration day. That’s a move to reverse the advantage conservatives have enjoyed across America’s courts.

Joe Biden’s team is planning on putting an early and serious focus on judicial appointments, a move Republicans have prided themselves for doing throughout the last two presidential administrations.

Per the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON—President-elect Joe Biden in January will begin an effort to recalibrate the federal judiciary with more liberal appointees who embrace a robust judicial role in addressing national problems and protecting an evolving spectrum of individual rights, a shift from the conservative appointees under President Trump.

“Joe Biden thinks the law should be interested in protecting the little person,” said Cynthia Hogan, who served as Mr. Biden’s counsel when he was vice president and on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Not to determine an outcome, but to say people should not be at a disadvantage because they’re working class, they’re poor, they’re Black, they’re women, they’re immigrants.”

Biden advisers say they will have compiled a list of potential nominees by Inauguration Day—including a short list for the Supreme Court, where the eldest justice, President Clinton appointee Stephen Breyer, is 82 years old.

Mr. Trump and Senate Republicans are determined to leave no vacancies for Mr. Biden to fill. But once he takes office, Clinton and Obama appointees might begin to step down with the assurance that a Democratic president can appoint like-minded successors.

Updated

In the final days of Donald Trump’s presidencies, the metrics that he obsesses over are going the wrong way. His approval rating, which has never been above water, is taking yet another dip.

There’s more too. President-elect Joe Biden is gaining Twitter followers at a notable clip while Trump is actually losing followers, even as he uses the social media platform to vent false claims about how this election was “rigged” against him (it wasn’t). The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly has more.

After the Biden team rolled out its senior staff for communications and press relations, Trump officials began to complain that theirs was the first administration to have an all-woman-run communications team.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake poured coldwater on this argument. There are, after all, multiple men in the Trump press shop (who happen to be the more responsive officials) in key positions as well. Here’s Blake:

The first is that, objectively, Biden’s team will be more female. As plenty of people noted after McEnany tweeted what she did, Judd Deere carries the title of deputy assistant to Trump and deputy press secretary. Brian Morgenstern is also a deputy press secretary and deputy communications director. Biden’s principal deputy press secretary will be Karine Jean-Pierre, while his deputy communications director will be another woman, Pili Tobar.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether those are technically “senior” roles. Deere for one seemed to agree that he’s not in a senior role, retweeting McEnany’s tweet and drafting his own version of the same complaint.

But the same is true when it comes to Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris’s press team. Her top spokesperson will be Symone Sanders. That job is currently filled by Devin O’Malley.

In other words, three of the seven jobs Biden filled Sunday currently have men serving in the equivalent roles in the Trump White House. Call it “senior” or anything else, the Biden White House’s communications team will feature significantly more women.

The second problem, though, is that McEnany et al. are erecting a bit of a straw man. The headline McEnany featured in her tweet said merely that Biden had appointed an all-female senior communications team, which is true no matter how you define “senior.” The headline doesn’t reference a claim that this is in some way unprecedented or that Trump didn’t do the same. Yet McEnany suggested that headline was somehow “fake news” that discredits The Post.

The president is once again criticizing Georgia governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, for his stewardship over Georgia’s secretary of state and the vote counting process in Georgia.

Trump has been fuming for days now that Kemp and Georgia secretary of state Brian Raffensperger did not block certification of the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia where Joe Biden beat Trump.

President-elect Joe Biden formally announced a slate of economic appointments he plans to make for his cabinet and in his administration. The names the incoming president is rolling out today have all been reported already so what’s really happening is Biden is making it more official.

Here are the names the Biden transition team announced this morning, according to a press release:

  • Janet Yellen is nominated to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. If confirmed, she will be the first woman to lead the Treasury Department in its 231-year history, and the first person to have served as Treasury Secretary, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Chair of the Federal Reserve. She has previously been confirmed by the Senate on four separate occasions.
  • Neera Tanden, whose career has focused on pursuing policies designed to support working families, foster broad-based economic growth, and curb rampant inequality, is nominated to serve as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. If confirmed, Tanden would be the first woman of color and first South Asian American to lead the OMB.
  • Wally Adeyemo, a veteran of the Executive Branch and expert on macro-economic policy and consumer protection with deep national security experience, is nominated to serve as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, having previously served as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, Deputy National Security Advisor, and the first Chief of Staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If confirmed, Adeyemo would be the first African American Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.
  • Cecilia Rouse, a leading labor economist and the Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, is nominated to serve as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, having previously been confirmed by the Senate as a member of the CEA in 2009. If confirmed, she will become the first African American and just the fourth woman to lead the CEA in the 74 years of its existence.
  • Jared Bernstein, who previously served as Chief Economist to President-elect Biden in the first years of the Obama-Biden Administration, will serve as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers.
  • Heather Boushey, a distinguished economist focused on economic inequality and the President, CEO, and co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, will serve as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Not listed here is Brian Deese, who the Times reported Biden will name to run the National Economic Council. Deese had previously been mentioned as a possible director of the Office of Management and Budget. But his time after the Obama administration working at investment management company BlackRock sparked widespread opposition from progressive Democrats.

The makeup of the Senate will change (slightly) this week. Democrat Mark Kelly will be sworn in on Wednesday.

Kelly is joining the Senate early because he won the Senate seat formerly represented by the late-Arizona senator John McCain. He is serving out the remainder of the six-year term.

Good morning. Daniel Strauss here taking over for Martin Belam.

The New York Times’ Shawn Hubler and Alex Burns take a look at California governor Gavin Newsom’s choice on who to succeed vice-president elect Kamala Harris as a senator from California. Harris will leave her Senate seat when she’s sworn-in as vice president in January.

Here’s the Times on Newsom’s decision:

He must appoint someone to fill the soon-to-be-vacant U.S. Senate seat of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Though many names have been floated to succeed Ms. Harris, Mr. Padilla has emerged as the front-runner, according to more than a half-dozen advisers, political consultants and fellow lawmakers familiar with the governor’s thinking.

Yet nearly a month after Ms. Harris’s election, Mr. Newsom has not yet named a successor — and the pressure is mounting.

[...]

Mr. Newsom has held conversations with a few potential appointees, though he does not appear to have conducted formal interviews for the job, people familiar with the process said.

Mr. Padilla, 47, has emerged as the favorite of Latino lawmakers, advocacy groups and a number of labor officials, and his circle of political advisers overlaps significantly with Mr. Newsom’s. The middle son of Mexican-born parents — a short-order cook from Jalisco and a housekeeper from Chihuahua — Mr. Padilla worked his way through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a degree in 1994 in mechanical engineering.

Updated

Biden-Harris team announce formation and leadership of Presidential Inaugural Committee

The Biden-Harris team have just announced the formation and senior composition of their Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC). The team leading it will be Tony Allen as chief executive officer, with Maju Varghese as executive director, and Erin Wilson and Yvanna Cancela as deputy executive directors.

In a quote briefed out to the media, Tony Allen says “I’ve known and loved the Biden family for 25 years and am deeply humbled to help organize the historic inauguration of a good and decent patriot during an unprecedented time in our country. This year’s inauguration will look different amid the pandemic, but we will honor the American inaugural traditions, and engage Americans across the country while keeping everyone healthy and safe.”

They’ve got a shiny new website too – bideninaugural.org

And that’s it from me in London today. I’m handing over across the Atlantic to Daniel Strauss, who will take you through the rest of Monday…

If that little video raised your Christmas spirits, it might be worth recalling that last month Stephanie Winston Wolkoff released tapes of first lady Melania Trump in which she was heard to say:

I’m working ... my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right? OK, and then I do it and I say that I’m working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, ‘Oh, what about the children that they were separated?’ Give me a fucking break.

Her husband isn’t spreading the holiday cheer yet either. He’s up and tweeting about, well, you can probably guess…

In our house we don’t allow anybody to do any Christmas activities or put decorations up until 1 December, but the White House is ahead of that schedule and this morning Melania Trump has posted a short video of the Trump’s last Christmas decor at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s got a little model railway in it.

Covid hospitalisations in the US reached new record high of 93,238 on Sunday

Hospitalizations of Covid-19 patients in the US reached a new record high of 93,238 on Sunday, according to figures from the Covid Tracking Project.

CNN reports that the number eclipsed Saturday’s 91,635 figure. It marked the third time there have been more than 90,000 Americans hospitalized with Covid-19, all of which have occurred around the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Sunday also marked the 27th consecutive day that the US has reported more than 100,000 new Covid-19 cases.

Azar says the first two vaccines against coronavirus could be administered in US before Christmas.

Health Secretary Alex Azar has said this morning that the first two vaccines against the novel coronavirus could be administered to Americans before Christmas.

Moderna has already said today that it is the second vaccine maker applying to receive emergency authorization in the US.

Azar told CBS This Morning that he and vice president Mike Pence will speak to the nation’s governors later on Monday to discuss the vaccines and which groups of people should be prioritized to get them first.

TSA says it screened highest number of air passengers on Sunday since March

A quick snap here from Reuters that the Transportation Security Administration said it screened 1.18 million airline passengers on Sunday, the highest number since mid-March – but still about 60% lower than the comparable day last year. This suggests that a lot of people heeded warnings not to travel during the coronavirus pandemic.

The number of passengers screened on the Sunday after Thanksgiving last year was 2.88 million, which at the time was the highest number ever recorded by the agency.

“Hope springs eternal but I believe in history” says Senate minority whip Dick Durbin about the prospect for Joe Biden getting any judiciary appointments confirmed unless the Democrats can with the two Senate run-offs in Georgia in January. Marianne Levine writes for Politico today that:

Should Senate Republicans win the fight to keep their majority, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have unilateral authority to stifle Biden’s picks to the federal judiciary, weakening Democrats’ hopes to make up for four years of confirming conservative judges and two years of a McConnell blockade during President Barack Obama’s final years.

While an increasing number of Republicans say they’re willing to work with Biden on his Cabinet nominees, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin isn’t optimistic about GOP cooperation on judicial nominees. In an interview, Durbin, who is vying for the top spot on the Judiciary Committee, predicted Biden will have “very little” impact on the federal judiciary if Republicans keep the Senate in January and remained skeptical they’d approve his appointments to the federal bench.

Biden, who chaired the Judiciary Committee from 1987 to 1995, will be confronting an institution that’s only become more partisan since he left it, especially when it comes to the courts. Last month, Amy Coney Barrett became the first Supreme Court justice in 151 years not to receive a single vote from the minority party.

If Republicans keep the Senate, they’ll be in the unusual position of vetting and pushing through the minority party’s nominations. President George H.W. Bush was the last president to take power without his party in control of the Senate.

Read more here: Politico – ‘They’ll freeze them out’: Democrats fear Senate Republicans will block Biden’s judges

Trump and his allies are 'undermining democracy' says former head of US election security

Donald Trump and his allies are “undermining democracy” with evidence-free claims of fraud and conspiracy, the former head of US election security said on Sunday, discussing the effort he led before he was fired by the president.

“What I saw was an apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people,” Chris Krebs told CBS 60 Minutes.

Trump called the interview “ridiculous, one-sided [and] an international joke”, as he continued to tweet conspiracy theories and baseless claims of electoral malpractice.

Trump lost the electoral college to Joe Biden by 306-232, the result he said was a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden is more than 6m ahead in the popular vote and won the support of more than 80m Americans, the most of any presidential candidate.

Krebs, 43, was fired as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) two weeks after election day. Two days after that, at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani gave a press conference in which he and then team member Sidney Powell pushed Trump’s false claims.

“It was upsetting,” Krebs told CBS.

“It’s not me, it’s not just Cisa. It’s the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working nonstop, 18-hour days, for months. They’re getting death threats for trying to carry out one of our core democratic institutions, an election. And that was, again, to me, a press conference that … didn’t make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And that’s dangerous.”

“There is no foreign power that is flipping votes,” Krebs said. “There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.”

Read more of Martin Pengelly’s report here: Trump’s claims of fraud aim to ‘scare people’, says ex-head of US election security

NBC News White House correspondent Geoff Bennett has a few names in the frame here to be Joe Biden’s attorney general.

Moderna says it expects FDA to consider emergency approval of Covid vaccine at 17 December meeting

Final results from the trials of Moderna’s vaccine against Covid-19 confirm it has 94% efficacy and nobody who was vaccinated with it developed severe disease, says the company, kickstarting the approval process with regulators around the world.

The US company is submitting the data to the regulators in the US, Europe and the UK for an emergency licence. It expects the Food and Drug Administration in the US to consider it at its meeting on 17 December, Moderna said.

Although it has done deals around the world, the US will get access first. Moderna said it expected to have 20m doses of its vaccine ready for use in the US by the end of this year. In August, the US bought 100m doses with an option on 400 million more. Moderna says it is on track to manufacture 500 million to 1 billion doses globally in 2021.

Like Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna has used novel mRNA (messenger RNA) technology to develop its vaccine, involving the genetic code of the virus rather than any killed or weakened part of it. The two companies have announced remarkable and very similar results. Pfizer’s final data analysis gave its vaccine 95% efficacy.

Read more of Sarah Boseley’s report here: Moderna Covid vaccine has 94% efficacy, final results confirm

Updated

US Supreme Court justices today are set to consider president Donald Trump’s move to exclude illegal immigrants from the population totals used to allocate congressional districts to states, a facet of his hardline stance toward immigration being pursued in his final weeks in office.

The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority including three justices appointed by Trump, is scheduled to hear an 80-minute oral argument by teleconference. The justices are deciding the case on a expedited schedule, with a ruling due before the end of the year. That would make it difficult for president-elect Joe Biden to revisit Trump’s plan if it is upheld.

The challengers to Trump’s July directive include various states led by New York, cities, counties and immigrant rights groups. They have argued that the Republican president’s move could leave several million people uncounted and cause California, Texas and New Jersey to lose seats in the US House of Representatives.
House districts are based on a state’s population count in the decennial national census.

Lawrence Hurley reports for Reuters that the challengers have said Trump’s plan would dilute the political clout of states with larger numbers of illegal immigrants, including heavily Democratic California, by undercounting their true populations and depriving them of House seats. If California loses House districts, that likely would mean Democrats lose House seats, benefiting Republicans.

There are an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally.

Until now, the government’s practice was to count all people regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. The US Constitution requires the apportionment of House seats to be based upon the “whole number of persons in each state.”

The challengers have argued that Trump’s policy violates both the Constitution and the Census Act, a federal law that outlines how the census is conducted. Trump’s lawyers said in court papers that he acted within his authority and that the challengers lacked the necessary legal standing to bring the case.

The census itself does not gather data on a person’s citizenship or immigration status. Trump’s administration would base its numbers on data gathered elsewhere, though it has not explained the methods being used. The US Census Bureau, a spokesman said, “will make public the methods used to provide state-level counts once we have them finalized.”

By statute, the president is due to send Congress a report in early January with the population of each of the states and their entitled number of House districts.
Once states are allocated their districts, they themselves draw the boundaries for the districts, which will be used first in the 2022 congressional elections.

The Supreme Court last year ruled 5-4 against Trump’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census. Critics said the question was intended to frighten immigrants from taking part in the population count and artificially reduce population numbers in heavily Democratic areas, also to benefit Republicans.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices in that ruling. But the addition of Trump’s third appointee Amy Coney Barrett to the court changes its dynamics.

Incidentally I keep seeing – and you may be too – conservative and Republican voices on the internet demanding to know why vice president-elect Kamala Harris hasn’t resigned her position in the Senate yet. The implication being that she isn’t confident that the election result won’t yet be over-turned, or that she knows that the Democratic victory is a hoax, or somesuch conspiracy theory.

I know facts are out of fashion on social media these days, but it made me curious to check up on when her recent predecessors in the role had stepped down in order to prepare to become part of the White House administration.

  • Mike Pence stepped down as Governor of Indiana eleven days before being inaugurated in 2017.
  • In 2009 Joe Biden stepped down from the Senate just five days before inauguration as vice president.
  • Dick Cheney was CEO of Haliburton directly before becoming VP, so isn’t really relevant for this.
  • Al Gore stepped down from the Senate on January 2, 18 days ahead of his inauguration.
  • Dan Quayle quit the Senate on 3 January 1989, some 17 days ahead of his inauguration.

Just so we are clear, those asking why Harris hasn’t resigned her Senate seat in November and trying to draw conclusions from it are asking her to do something that nobody else did in the previous 30 years.

Updated

Samuel Moyn writes for us this morning to remind us that those pining for a return to the status quo have forgotten that US foreign policy disasters helped pave the way for Trump in the first place.

Since the shock of 2016, Washington foreign policy elites, both mainstream Democrats out of power and their Never Trump Republican allies, have developed a just-so story about their benevolent role in the world. It goes like this: the US was once isolationist, but then committed after the second world war to leading a “rules-based international order”, a phrase that is increasingly hard to avoid in assessments of the presidential transition. In this story, Trump’s election represented atavism and immorality, the return of rightly repressed nationalism and nativism at home and abroad. In response, the agenda has to be to restore US credibility and leadership as the “indispensable nation” by embracing internationalism again.

Trump’s boorish attack on traditional pieties understandably makes Washington traditions seem like comfort food after a hangover. The darker truth this response conceals is that generations of foreign policy mistakes both preceded and precipitated Trump – who often went on to continue them anyway. The record of Washington’s “wise men”, who coddled dictators, militarised the globe, and entrenched economic unfairness at home and abroad, opened an extraordinary opportunity for any Trump-like demagogue – making his ascendancy less a matter of atavism than another form of the blowback to mistakes that America perpetually made abroad. If his presence shamed US foreign policy elites, it was because they helped make him possible.

Read more here: Samuel Moyn – Biden says ‘America is back’. But will his team of insiders repeat their old mistakes?

The Hill brings us this write-up from Jordain Carney and Juliegrace Brufke on what we can expect to see from Congress this week – and there’s quite a bit on.

The Senate will return on Monday, with the House not scheduled to hold its first votes of the week until Wednesday. Much of the action will be off of the floor. Congress is juggling a looming deadline for funding the government with unresolved fights over a fifth coronavirus relief bill and a mammoth defense policy measure.

Lawmakers have a matter of days to craft a government funding agreement and avoid a holiday shutdown. Leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees reached a deal over the Thanksgiving recess on top-line figures for each of the fiscal year 2021 bills, a key stepping stone to a larger deal.

But if they are without a deal by 11 December, Congress will need to pass a continuing resolution (CR), which extends funding at fiscal 2020 levels, either for a matter of days to give themselves time to finalize an agreement or until early next year, if it seems they aren’t close.

The General Services Administration (GSA) deputy administrator Allison Brigati is slated to conduct a 30-minute briefing to the House committee chairs and ranking Republican members today to discuss the presidential transition process.

Senator-elect Mark Kelly is expected to be sworn in this week after the results of his Senate race against Sen. Martha McSally are certified today, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has teed up several nominations on the Senate floor.

There’s a lot more where that came from: The Hill – Congress races to wrap work for the year

It is not clear yet whether US democracy “survived” the 2020 presidential election unscathed.

If Donald Trump’s playbook of seeking to undermine a legitimate election becomes standard Republican practice for future elections – refuse to concede, make false claims of fraud, fan the flames of conspiracy, sue everywhere and refuse to certify any win by the other side – then American democracy might already have sustained a fatal wound.

But Trump has not succeeded in stealing the 2020 election, despite his historic attempt to do so, in what analysts call the most dangerous frontal assault on US democracy since the civil war era. The two states upon which Trump’s plot most hinged, Pennsylvania and Michigan, certified their results in Joe Biden’s favor earlier this week. The presidential transition is at last under way.

But while the election exposed key areas where American democracy is failing, it also highlighted structural features that make national elections in the United States hard to steal, no matter how determined the would-be despot or how complicit his party colleagues.

Read more of Tom McCarthy’s analysis here: Five factors that helped US democracy resist Trump’s election onslaught

A quick one from Reuters here: the Trump administration is poised to add China’s top chipmaker SMIC and national offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies, curbing their access to US investors and escalating tensions with Beijing just weeks before president-elect Joe Biden takes office.

A recent executive order issued by Donald Trump would prevent US investors from buying securities of the listed firms starting late next year. The list is [art of a broader effort by Washington to target what it sees as Beijing’s efforts to enlist corporations to harness emerging civilian technologies for military purposes.

In response SMIC said it continued “to engage constructively and openly with the US government” and that its products and services were solely for civilian and commercial use. “The Company has no relationship with the Chinese military and does not manufacture for any military end-users or end-uses.”

China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said, in response to a question about Washington’s planned move, that China hoped the United States would not erect barriers and obstacles to cooperation and discriminate against Chinese companies.

The upcoming move, coupled with similar policies, is seen as seeking to cement outgoing one-term president Trump’s tough-on-China legacy and to box Biden into hardline positions on Beijing amid bipartisan anti-China sentiment in Congress.

There’s a couple of reasons why November’s US elections are not yet done and dusted and in the rearview mirror. One, of course, is the Trump team’s refusal to accept their defeat, despite providing no credible evidence of the widespread fraud they keep baselessly alleging.

The other reason is because of the way Georgia runs Senate elections. Neither incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue or Kelly Loeffler got the 50% they needed to return to Congress in January, and so there is a run-off. Perdue faces Jon Ossoff, and Alex Seitz-Wald at NBC has a look at the young Democratic party nominee today. It quotes a rather unfavorable view from Jesse Hunt, the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Only a trust fund socialist could spend his early 30s trying to run for office with zero real-life accomplishments. This all began with Ossoff losing a high-profile race after DC Democrats and California liberals flooded the state in support of his candidacy, and that’s exactly how this will end.

Hunt is referring to the fact that right at the start of the Trump era, Ossoff was involved in another high profile election – failing to flip Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat. However, Seitz-Wald goes on to write:

Georgia Democrats say a lot has changed between these two bookends of the Trump era: Ossoff is a better candidate, and, as shown in president-elect Joe Biden’s win here, Georgia has become a much friendlier state for them.

State Rep. Jasmine Clark, a scientist who narrowly defeated a Republican incumbent in the “blue wave” of the 2018 midterms, said you can draw a direct line from Ossoff’s first race to Stacey Abrams’ near-miss run for governor and then to Biden’s projected win this month.

“That 2017 special election was the catalyst for what we saw in 2018. And the 2018 election served as an even bigger catalyst for 2020, when the state finally flipped from red to blue,” Clark said.

Georgia is one of the fastest-growing states in the country, with a booming economy attracting especially young people of color. More than 600,000 new voters have been added to the rolls since the 2018 election, and an estimated 23,000 more young people will become eligible to vote just by the Jan. 5 runoff.

“Georgia has become younger and more diverse by the hour,” Ossoff said when asked what’s different this year. “What we’ve done to build infrastructure ... much of this work led by Stacey Abrams, has been historic.”

Read more here: NBC News – Jon Ossoff lost the first high-profile race of the Trump era. Can he win the last one?

Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told ABC’s This Week that the level of infection in the US would not ‘all of a sudden turn around’. The nation’s top infectious disease expert said: ‘So clearly in the next few weeks we’re going to have the same sort of thing. And perhaps even two or three weeks down the line ... we may see a surge upon a surge.’

Yesterday the US recorded 138,903 new coronavirus cases, and 826 further deaths.

At CNN, Stephen Collinson warns that “America is sliding into a winter limbo of alarming spikes in Covid-19 cases and deepening economic pain while an apathetic lame duck White House and a deadlocked Congress provide no political leadership.”

Dr. Megan Ranney, a Brown University emergency physician who has been treating Covid patients, said Sunday that political failures had brewed a disaster in the nation’s hospitals.

“We have been talking for months about the need for increased supplies of personal protective equipment, about the need for increased testing supplies, we still desperately need those,” Ranney said on CNN’s Newsroom.

“But even if those were all available, the trouble is that the surge in Covid-19 patients right now is so great, it is overwhelming hospitals, it is overwhelming available beds and worst of all, it is overwhelming the number of available staff.”

default

Jeffrey Frankel is a professor at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government who served as a member of president Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. He writes for us this morning: Joe Biden will lead the US back to international cooperation

Biden did not campaign on international economic cooperation per se; US presidential candidates never do. But he has pledged to immediately reverse Trump’s monumentally short-sighted decisions to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization and the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Pandemic diseases such as Covid-19 are a classic example of an international externality that individual governments can’t adequately address on their own. International cooperation is a far more effective way to investigate local disease outbreaks and warn of global dangers; coordinate research, development, production and distribution of vaccines or treatments; and agree on procedures for restricting or quarantining cross-border travellers. The WHO is not perfect, but it is obviously needed now.

Likewise, the global climate crisis is the archetypal global externality. A ton of carbon dioxide emitted anywhere has the same greenhouse effect everywhere. National regulation cannot by itself correct the misalignment of incentives, owing to the free-rider problem across governments. Hence the need for an international accord like the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Biden and other world leaders must also tackle the deepest global recession since the 1930s. Beyond measures to address the pandemic itself, advanced economies must agree above all on joint fiscal stimulus, as they did at the 1978 Bonn summit of G7 leaders and at the 2009 G20 meetings under the leadership of the UK’s then prime minister, Gordon Brown.

Read more here: Jeffrey Frankel – Joe Biden will lead the US back to international cooperation

Here’s some more detail of the economics line-up we are expecting to hear from president-elect Joe Biden this week. It’s not clear when we will get an official announcement, but it is being reported as a done deal – well, with the caveat of the obvious hurdle of his nominations being accepted by the Senate in January. Annie Linskey and Jeff Stein report for the Washington Post:

Biden is expected to nominate Neera Tanden, the chief executive of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, as director of the influential Office of Management and Budget, according to people familiar with the matter. Tanden, whose parents immigrated from India, would be the first woman of color to oversee the agency.

The president-elect will also appoint Princeton University labor economist Cecilia Rouse as chair of the three-member Council of Economic Advisers, with economists Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey serving as the other members. Rouse, who is African American, would be the first woman of color to chair the council, which will play a key role in advising the president on the economy, which has been ailing since the pandemic struck the country.

Read more here: Washington Post – Biden hires all-female senior communications team, names Neera Tanden director of OMB

Welcome to our live coverage of US politics for Monday. Here’s a quick catch-up on where we are and what we can expect today.

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