Summary
Here’s a recap of today, from me and Jessica Glenza:
- During the first Covid-19 briefing with Biden administration experts, officials said the US coronavirus death toll would hit 500,000 by February. With new, dangerous variants circulating, they emphasized the importance of surveillance and noted that the Covid-19 relief proposal could boost funding for genomic sequencing.
- Joe Biden signed a flurry of executive orders meant to address the climate crisis, by focusing on creating good-paying jobs in renewable energy. “We must do this, we can do this, we will do this,” Biden said. Among the orders, Biden said he would pause and review all oil and gas drilling on federal lands, instruct federal agencies to switch the government’s massive fleet of cars over to electric vehicles and instruct federal agencies to end subsidies for fossil fuel companies (he needs Congress to complete that last item).
- Three nominees for cabinet secretary posts faced Senate committee hearings today. They included energy secretary nominee Jennifer Granholm, nominee for representative to the United Nations Linda Greenfield-Thomas, and veteran’s affair secretary nominee Denis McDonough. Meanwhile, Senate leader Chuck Schumer has filed a cloture on Alejandro Mayorkas’s nomination for secretary of Homeland Security. The procedural step puts a time limit on debate over the nomination, which is meeting GOP resistance.
- Democratic senator Tim Kaine told reporters he is considering a resolution to formally censure Donald Trump. It is an acknowledgment that the impeachment trial is unlikely to result in a conviction.“Having alternatives on the table is important,” Kaine told CNN.
The San Francisco school board has voted to remove the names of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dianne Feinstein and a number of other politicians, conquistadors and historical figures from public schools after officials deemed them unworthy of the honor.
After months of debate and national attention, the board voted 6-1 Tuesday in favor of renaming 44 San Francisco schools with new names with no connection to slavery, oppression, racism or similar criteria.
School board members have insisted that the renaming is timely and important, given the country’s reckoning with a racist past. They have argued the district is capable of pursuing multiple priorities at the same time, responding to critics who say more pressing issues deserve attention.
Families in some schools have argued for a name change for years. James Denman middle school, for example, was named after the first superintendent and a racist leader who denied Chinese students a public education.
Others have complained that some current names mean students are wearing school sweatshirts with the names of slave owners, including Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. “It’s a message to our families, our students and our community,” said the board member Mark Sanchez. “It’s not just symbolic. It’s a moral message.”
But critics have called the renaming process slapdash, with little to no input from historians and a lack of information on the basis for each recommendation. In one instance, the committee didn’t know whether Roosevelt middle school was named after Theodore or Franklin Delano.
“I support some of the schools being renamed, but there are a lot of schools that do not need to be renamed,” said one Lowell high school sophomore in public comment.
“There is a lot of historical negligence that happened because they do not have a historian on the advisory committee. On the Google sheet of the renaming committee they cite Wikipedia as a source. As a high school student at Lowell, I’m not even allowed to use Wikipedia as a source for my history papers, let alone to spend millions of dollars to rename a school that may not even need to be renamed.”
Read more:
Democratic senator Tim Kaine told reporters he is considering a resolution to formally censure Donald Trump, in an acknowledgment that the impeachment trial is unlikely to result in a conviction.
“Having alternatives on the table is important,” Kaine told CNN. “There has to be accountability for the actions of January 6 including accountability for the President who fomented this violent attack on the Capitol.”
Axios earlier reported that Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine has joined with Kaine in pitching colleagues on a censure.
To secure a conviction, Democrats in the senate would have to convince 17 Republicans to vote with all of them. That seems extremely unlikely - only 5 Republican senators voted with Democrats to hear the impeachment trial. The remaining 45 Republicans voted against trying the case against Trump.
The Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley has claimed he “never” intended to help Donald Trump overturn the presidential election, and called allegations that he helped incite the deadly riot at the US Capitol on 6 January a “lie”.
Hawley was speaking to NewsRadio 1120 KMOX in St Louis.
His claim not to have been seeking to overturn the election contradict his words in an interview with Fox News on 4 January, two days before the Capitol attack.
Then, Hawley was asked if he was “trying to say that as of 20 January [inauguration day] that President Trump will be president?”
“Well,” he said, “that depends on what happens on Wednesday. I mean, this is why we have to debate.”
In that interview, Hawley was defending his decision to become the first Republican senator to say he would object to electoral college results, while Trump continued to baselessly claim that Joe Biden had stolen the presidential election via massive electoral fraud – claims that were repeatedly thrown out of court.
The Democratic candidate won more than 7m more votes nationally and took the electoral college by 306-232, a result Trump called a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Other Republicans followed Hawley in saying they would object when Congress gathered to certify results on 6 January. That day, Trump addressed a rally outside the White House, repeating his baseless claims of fraud and telling supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” in his cause.
Hawley was photographed raising his fist to Trump supporters outside Congress. A mob broke in, ransacking offices, fighting with law enforcement and in some instances allegedly looking for lawmakers to kidnap and kill. Five people died, one a police officer hit with a fire extinguisher.
When Congress gathered again that night, the Capitol become a crime scene, Hawley, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and 145 other Republicans went through with their promised formal objections to electoral college results.
Hawley objected to the result in Pennsylvania. Had that state flipped, it would not have been enough to keep Trump in the White House. No results were overturned. Two weeks later, Biden was sworn in as the 46th president.
Trump was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection against the US government. On Tuesday, Hawley was one of 45 Republican senators who voted against even holding a trial.
Amid fallout from the Capitol attack, Hawley has been rebuked by mentors and lost donors and (briefly) a book deal. He faces calls for censure or expulsion from the Senate, and has been moved to deny widespread speculation he will run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
On Wednesday, KMOX host Mark Reardon told him: “Senator, you more than anyone else, and this is what just personally disappoints me, you knew that there was no constitutional path for that election to be overturned once the electors are certified [by the states] and there was a fair amount of people including me that feel that you led people to believe that that option still existed.”
Reardon said he understood Hawley’s claim to have been concerned about “election integrity and … potential concerns of fraud”, but said: “That didn’t seem to be what the tone was between certainly when the electors were certified and 6 January.”
“I never said that the goal was to overturn the election,” Hawley insisted. “That was never the point and that was never possible.”
Later, Reardon said: “You’re just gonna have to answer the question. There seems to be a disagreement. So there are some people that feel like you lead them down the path that would lead some Trump supporters to … interpret some of the things you were doing as the feeling that he was still going to be sworn into office.”
Hawley answered: “That’s just a lie. That is a lie told by the leftwing mob that now wants to silence me and Ted Cruz and 140 House members and 13 senators and anybody who would dare stand up to them. Anyone who is a Trump supporter who refuses to bow the knee. And I’m just not gonna be silenced. It is a lie that I was trying to overturn an election … It is a lie that I incited violence.”
Hawley’s claim that the left is trying to intimidate and silence him was familiar: he made it after protesters police called “peaceful” held a vigil outside his Washington-area home, and repeated it last Sunday in a front page column for the New York Post, a mass-market tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Such claims, similar to many made by rightwingers claiming to have been silenced by mainstream and social media, met with widespread ridicule.
For somebody who claims he's been consistently muzzled, Hawley is somehow in my face in major media outlets all the time. I would think muzzling would mean I wouldn't have to listen to this treason weasel anymore, but apparently not. https://t.co/VG5GfUOtCj
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) January 25, 2021
Senate leader Chuck Schumer has filed a cloture on Alejandro Mayorkas’s nomination for secretary of Homeland Security.
The procedural step puts a time limit on debate over the nomination. Schumer made the move after Republicans including Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oaklahoma and Josh Hawley of Missouri pushed back against Mayorkas’ nomination.
The Senate can take an initial vote on Mayorkas on Friday, after which senators could debate the nomination for 30 more hours.
“The Senate must continue the process of confirming President Biden’s Cabinet by installing Alejandro Mayorkas to serve as secretary of Homeland Security,” Schumer said.’ Unfortunately, because of the objections of one member, the Senate has not been allowed to vote on this nomination yet.”
Hawley had said he would hold up a vote on Mayorkas.
Other Biden cabinet members, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have sailed through without facing any procedural hurdles.
Milwaukee was already failing students of color. Covid made it worse.
In a city where 55% of children live in poverty, teachers are struggling to fill in for services students have lost while schools are closed, Mario Koran reports:
School closures have been disruptive for students across the United States but, for many students of color in Milwaukee’s public school system, the immediate impacts have been downright alarming.
In the long run, educators fear, Covid and a long history of segregation and discrimination have formed a toxic cocktail that could reverberate for decades to come.
“It’s not only a question of how we get these kids back to where they would have been had the pandemic not occurred, but how do we get them back to where they should be?” said Dan Rossmiller of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
“And that, of course, was the pre-existing problem.”
Virtual instruction has been the norm in Milwaukee public schools since March, when schoolhouse doors were first forced to close because of Covid. And in few places are the concerns about its impacts more acute than on Milwaukee’s north side, a majority-Black area in one of the most segregated cities in the nation. In the neighborhoods surrounding Martin Luther King Jr elementary, a school on the city’s near-north side, 55% of children live in poverty – nearly four times the state average for children in poverty.
Angela Harris, a 41-year-old teacher at the school, recalled the distress among students when she told them in the spring they wouldn’t be returning to the classroom.
She remembers rushing to the stockpile of snacks she kept in the classroom for hungry students and how she had loaded them into children’s backpacks so they’d have something to eat if food at home was scarce. She recalls one student in particular, wearing a green and black jacket donated by a local NBA star, and the way his face tightened in devastation at the news he might not see his teacher again.
“I can just visualize his face, in that coat, in that moment, asking me, ‘Mrs Harris, but what do I do if mommy is mean to me again?’ And me not knowing how to help him,” Harris said.
In the following weeks, as the school district scrambled to distribute Chromebooks and cobble together a plan for the remainder of the school year, Harris spent afternoons hand-delivering packets of homework print-outs to the doorsteps of the 20 students in her class.
“I knew they needed the reassurance of seeing me, and I needed the reassurance, too. For some of them, the only time I could make sure they were OK was when they were with me,” she said.
With more than 92% of the schools’ students qualifying for subsidized lunch, Harris also put out a call for donations of food and toiletries and organized a roster of people willing to help deliver meals to families, securing 500 volunteers on the first day. By Harris’s count, the mutual aid group has delivered more than 1,000 hot meals to families in 10 different zip codes across the city.
Teaching, Harris said, last year looked more like social work, hunting for missing students and social workers to fill in the wraparound services schools provided. “Educators have always been rushing in to fill in these services. But this is a pretty tattered safety net,” said Amy Mizialko, president of Milwaukee’s teachers union.
Read more:
A very busy day one week into a new administration...
Exactly one week into the Biden-Harris administration, the new administration had another day of rapid-fire briefings, executive order signings and cabinet confirmation hearings in a bid to underscore what it says is the urgency of the moment.
On Covid-19...
- The Biden administration held the first of what it said would be regular, formal Covid-19 briefings led by experts on the subject – including Dr Anthony Fauci – not the president. The new style is a sharp contrast with the free-wheeling and factually challenged briefings of the Trump era.
- CDC director Dr Rochelle Walinsky struck a hopeful tone early in the briefing, but was clear that many thousands more people would die in America because of the ongoing pandemic, likely totalling 500,000 deaths by February.
- In that briefing, administration officials said they were working to increase vaccine manufacturing and distribution, and give states clarity on forthcoming allotments.
- They also highlighted concerning Covid-19 variants, specifically B117 which is believed to be more transmissible, as another reason the administration wants Congress to pass a Covid-19 relief bill. The stimulus would provide more funding to surveil for variants using genomic sequencing.
- In another healthcare measure, the president said his administration would also reopen Obamacare health insurance exchanges to people who lost employer-sponsored health insurance during the pandemic. A plurality of Americans get health insurance through an employer.
On the climate crisis...
- Joe Biden signed a flurry of executive orders meant to address the climate crisis, by focusing on creating good-paying jobs in renewable energy. “We must do this, we can do this, we will do this,” Biden said.
- Among the orders, Biden said he would pause and review all oil and gas drilling on federal lands, instruct federal agencies to switch the government’s massive fleet of cars over to electric vehicles, and instruct federal agencies to end subsidies for fossil fuel companies (he needs Congress to complete that last item).
- In spite of the focus on jobs in the president’s plan, Republican legislators called the plan “pie-in-the-sky” government mandates which would hurt jobs.
- Just a contextual note here: oil and gas companies have overwhelmingly donated to Republicans in recent years. Here’s a chart.
On cabinet secretaries...
- Three nominees for cabinet secretary posts faced Senate committee hearings today, including energy secretary nominee Jennifer Granholm, nominee for representative to the United Nations Linda Greenfield-Thomas, and veteran’s affair secretary nominee Denis McDonough.
Now, I’ll pass the blog over to my esteemed colleague Maanvi Singh.
Updated
A Virginia state senator has just been censured for her praise of the Capitol rioters on 6 January.
NOW: In Virginia they censured a senator @AmandaChaseVA who praised the insurrection crowd as “patriots”. Chase is running for Governor of Virginia. https://t.co/RXpcxIOBDo
— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) January 27, 2021
As a reminder of the violence of the Capitol riot, five people were killed, and many police officers injured. Here are examples of those injuries.
Capitol Police injuries from Capitol insurrection —
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) January 27, 2021
One officer stabbed
One lost an eye
Smashed spinal discs
Brain injuries
(Plus the one suicide and one death from injuries inflicted by rioters) pic.twitter.com/xxL6naibAZ
The election of Joe Biden could be a step towards a “safer and saner world” but the planet remains dangerously close to nuclear and climate change catastrophe, at “100 seconds to midnight” according to a panel of top scientists.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the hands of its “Doomsday Clock”, a measure of the “world’s vulnerability to catastrophe”, had not moved since last year.
“The pandemic revealed just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly,” the Bulletin, co-founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, said in a statement.
Doomsday clock panel at @BulletinAtomic welcomes Biden win as possible step to "safer and saner world" but keeps hands at '100 seconds to midnight'https://t.co/XOjaHySk8P
— Julian Borger (@julianborger) January 27, 2021
It added that the worsening spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories was acting as a multiplier to the worsening threats of nuclear conflict and the climate emergency. The statement did not mention Donald Trump by name, but pointed to the 6 January storming of the US Capitol, which was incited by the former president, saying it renewed “legitimate concerns about national leaders who have sole control of the use of nuclear weapons”.
“In 2020, online lying literally killed,” it added.
The statement welcomed Biden’s first steps as president, rejoining the Paris climate accord and extending the New Start arms control agreement with Russia for five years.
“The election of a US president who acknowledges climate change as a profound threat and supports international cooperation and science-based policy puts the world on a better footing to address global problems,” the Bulletin said.
“In the context of a post-pandemic return to relative stability, more such demonstrations of renewed interest in and respect for science and multilateral cooperation could create the basis for a safer and saner world.”
In further Marjorie Taylor Greene news, footage has resurfaced today of the Republican representative from Georgia harassing David Hogg, a Parkland school shooting survivor who campaigns for gun control reform, on a Washington street.
The video was posted to Greene’s YouTube channel on 21 January 2020.
Taylor Greene, who as yet has faced no action from Republican House leadership for words and actions including appearing to advocate the execution of Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – see post from 3.02pm and story below – has claimed the Parkland shooting was staged.
Seventeen people died and 17 were wounded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on 14 February 2018. Hogg rose to prominence as survivors mounted a national movement for meaningful gun reform.
On Twitter on Wednesday, Hogg wrote: “It’s so frustrating that we have people like Greene in Congress that would rather spread conspiracies about mass shootings than confront the reality people are dying every day from gun violence.”
In addition to the back-to-back events this morning, multiple nominees for Biden’s cabinet are also facing scrutiny from Senate committees.
While Joe Biden signed executive orders meant to tackle the climate crisis, his nominee for energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, was grilled by Congressional Republicans, according to the AP.
The last Democratic administration went on a regulatory rampage to slow or stop energy production,” said Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, a leading Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “I’m not going to sit idly by .. if the Biden administration enforces policies that threaten Wyoming’s economy.”
Granholm, as the governor of Michigan during the 2008 recession, said she knew what it was like to “look in the eyes of men and women who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.”
She promoted emerging clean energy technologies, such as battery manufacturing, as an answer for jobs that will be lost as the U.S. transitions away from fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, Linda Thomas-Greenfield is nominated to be the US Representative to the United Nations. Thomas-Greenfield was the nation’s senior-most black diplomat when she was abruptly fired by Donald Trump.
In her hearing before the The Senate committee on foreign relations, she called China “a strategic adversary” that threatens the world. She also expressed that she praised China’s initiatives in Africa in a 2019 speech, but made no mention of its human rights abuses.
It was not my intention, nor do I think that I cheered on the Chinese Communist Party,” Thomas-Greenfield said, in response to question from Senator Ted Cruz. “I do regret that speech – one speech in a 35-year career...
“I am not naive about what the Chinese are doing. I have called them out,” she stressed.
Thomas-Greenfield was also questioned about a host of other issues, including the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major powers, which former President Donald Trump pulled out of in 2018. After the US then ramped up sanctions, Iran gradually and publicly abandoned the deal’s limits on its nuclear development.
Meanwhile, the Senate committee on veteran’s affairs held a hearing to consider Denis McDonough to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs this afternoon.
Updated
The Department of Homeland Security issued a rare warning to Americans today, that the nation could see increased threats from domestic terrorism in the coming weeks.
Although the agency did not site a specific, credible threat, it said”ideologically motivated violent extremists” may commit violent acts in the coming weeks.
Here’s more from Reuters:
The US could face a heightened threat of domestic extremist violence for weeks from people angry at Donald Trump’s election defeat and inspired by the deadly storming of the US Capitol, the Department of Homeland Security warned on Wednesday.
The advisory, which said there was no specific and credible threat at this time, comes as Washington remains on high alert after hundreds of Trump supporters charged into the Capitol on 6 January, as Congress was formally certifying President Joe Biden’s election victory. Five died in the violence.
“Information suggests that some ideologically motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence,” the department said in a national terrorism advisory.
Biden’s inauguration last week occurred under heavy security, with more than 20,000 National Guard troops on duty. Officials have said about 5,000 troops will remain in Washington for the next few weeks, when Trump will face his second impeachment trial in the Senate on a charge of inciting insurrection.
Trump spent two months peddling the false narrative that his defeat in November’s presidential election was the result of widespread voter fraud. He urged a crowd of thousands of his followers to “fight” in a fiery speech before the 6 January violence.
The DHS advisory said domestic violent extremists were motivated by issues including anger over COVID-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, and police use of force.
It also cited “long-standing racial and ethnic tension – including opposition to immigration” as drivers of domestic violence attacks. White supremacist groups have posed “the most persistent and lethal threat” of violent extremism in the United States in recent years, Trump’s acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told a congressional hearing in September.
DHS warned that the attack on the Capitol could inspire domestic extremists to attack other elected officials or government buildings. DHS typically issues only one or two advisory bulletins in a year. The bulletins have mostly warned of threats from foreign terrorist groups.
The last one, issued by the Trump administration in January 2020, declared Iran a state sponsor of terrorism and designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization.
Biden last week directed his administration to conduct a full assessment of the risk of domestic terrorism. The assessment will be carried out by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in coordination with the FBI and DHS, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters.
“The January 6th assault on the Capitol and the tragic deaths and destruction that occurred underscored what we have long known: the rise of domestic violent extremism is a serious and growing national security threat. The Biden administration will confront this threat with the necessary resources and resolve,” Psaki said.
Updated
Biden press secretary Jen Psaki was asked earlier if the White House had any response to comments on social media by Marjorie Taylor Greene, in which, before taking office, the Republican from Georgia indicated support for executing House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Psaki was also asked if the White House thought disciplinary action should be taken. Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have shown little interest in doing so.
“We don’t [have comment],” Psaki said. “And I’m not gonna speak further about her, I think, in this briefing room.”
Psaki on Marjorie Taylor Greene: "I'm not gonna speak further about her, I think, in this briefing room." pic.twitter.com/5DhFeFLju0
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 27, 2021
Earlier, Greene, who has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, called Rev Raphael Warnock, a new Democratic senator from Georgia, a “heretic”. She also had a short Twitter exchange with Clinton.
Clinton said: “This woman should be on a watch list. Not in Congress.”
Greene replied: “Actually, you should be in jail.”
Here’s the full story:
Even as Joe Biden’s administration focused its climate crisis plan on jobs and the private sector, Republicans have criticized the plan as a “job killer”.
Here’s more from the Associated Press, on Biden’s plans to use his executive orders to spur growth, and Republican’s stalwart opposition:
[Biden’s] orders are aimed at “revitalizing the US energy sector, conserving our natural resources and leveraging them to help drive our nation toward a clean energy future,’’ the White House said in a statement before Biden signed the orders.
Still, Kerry and other other officials emphasized that the orders are also aimed at “creating well-paying jobs ... and delivering justice for communities who have been subjected to environmental harm.’’
Republicans immediately criticized the plan as a job killer.
“Pie-in-the-sky government mandates and directives that restrict our mining, oil, and gas industries adversely impact our energy security and independence,’’ Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“At a time when millions are struggling due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the last thing Americans need is big government destroying jobs, while costing the economy billions of dollars,’’ she said.
Biden also is elevating climate change to a national security priority. The conservation plan would set aside millions of acres for recreation, wildlife and climate efforts by 2030 as part of Biden’s campaign pledge for a $2 trillion program to slow global warming.
Donald Trump, who ridiculed the science of climate change, withdrew the US from the Paris global climate accord, opened more public lands to coal, gas and oil production and weakened regulation on fossil fuel emissions. Experts say these emissions are heating the Earth’s climate dangerously and worsening floods, droughts and other natural disasters.
Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb called the executive orders an “excellent start” for the week-old Biden administration.
“If this Day 7 momentum is representative of this administration’s 4-year term, there is every reason to believe that we might achieve carbon neutrality sooner than 2050,” even as key roadblocks lie ahead, Cobb said.
Updated
Here is a great breakdown of some of the climate related actions the Biden administration took today:
- Instruct the US government to pause and review all oil and gas drilling on federal land
- Called on federal agencies to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies
- Instructed the federal government to transform the government’s vast fleet of cars and trucks into electric vehicles
Here’s some more context from my colleague Oliver Milman:
The directive opens up a path to the banning of all new drilling on federal land, a campaign promise made by Biden that has been widely praised by climate groups and caused outrage within the fossil fuel industry. Biden has called the climate crisis the “existential threat of our time” and the White House has said the new executive orders will help push the US towards a goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
...
Biden’s new set of executive orders, dubbed “climate day” by environmental campaigners, adds up to one of the most wide-ranging efforts ever taken by a US president to tackle the climate crisis, building upon his decision last week to re-enter the Paris climate agreement.
Biden says he will put climate change “at the centre of our domestic, national security and foreign policies” before signing his executive orders pic.twitter.com/yNd6PoS1wg
— Oliver Milman (@olliemilman) January 27, 2021
Updated
Biden plans world summit on climate, pledges greater environmental justice and funding for communities of color
Biden is saying words unthinkable in the Trump administration. He’s not only mentioned the climate crisis in so many words, he said the US was not only rejoining the Paris climate accord but was keen to talk to other nations to help “the most vulnerable from the impact of climate change”.
The US president vowed to convene a world summit on Earth Day (April 22) to talk about action for the more vulnerable as well as “collective resilience”.
“Environmental justice will be at the center of all we do,” he said.
He talked about funneling extra federal funding to communities badly affected by, for example, environmental pollution. He specifically named the so-called “Cancer Alley” region of Louisiana about which the Guardian has done extensive and in-depth reporting.
“We can do this, we must do this and we will do this,” said Biden, as he walked over to sign executive orders to “meet the climate crisis”. The president said his focus was on jobs, equity and scientific integrity.
“We know what we’ve got to do, we’ve just gotta do it,” Biden says on the climate crisis, argues shift to clean energy will create millions of jobs paying above $9 an hour
— Oliver Milman (@olliemilman) January 27, 2021
The US president is pledging a million new jobs in the US automobile industry being generated by the federal government switching it entire fleet to electric vehicles.
Biden ran on a platform that addressing the human-caused climate crisis would be an opportunity for “jobs of the future”.
He confirmed the creation of a new White House office of domestic climate policy, to be led by Gina McCarthy, who spoke at the press briefing earlier with the new US global climate envoy and former secretary of state John Kerry.
Biden just turned a page on Trump by referring sincerely to the “climate crisis”.
Pres. Biden: "I'm signing today an executive order to supercharge our administration's ambitious plan to confront the existential threat of climate change." https://t.co/yPhEq7IQIC pic.twitter.com/i1vh8bzoe3
— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) January 27, 2021
Biden just reiterated: “We are not going to ban fracking”
Updated
Biden: 'We've waited too long to deal with this climate crisis'
In a sharp 180-degree turn from the Trump administration, Joe Biden just began a briefing on what he is calling the White House’s “Climate Day”.
“We’ve waited too long to deal with this climate crisis,” he said, using a phrase Trump never used, preferring to call climate change a hoax or something dreamed up by Democrats and other mad liberals.
Biden just referred to “the existential threat of climate change, because it IS an existential threat”.
Updated
Refugees, asylum, family separations - latest from Biden administration
Joe Biden is expected this Friday to issue executive orders on asylum at the US-Mexico border, refugee resettlement and the reunification of migrant families, according to a Biden transition team memo shared with lawmakers and interviews with two people familiar with the plans.
Biden has vowed to reverse many policies put in place by the former Republican president, Donald Trump, a process that could take months or years.
The White House declined to comment and people familiar with discussions cautioned that plans could change, Reuters reports.
Biden plans to rescind some Trump policies that made it harder to obtain asylum in the United States, according to the memo.
The memo did not specify which polices would be reversed, but a person familiar with the plans said Biden would end a controversial Trump program known as the Migrant Protection Protocols.
The Biden administration announced last Wednesday that it would end all new enrollments in the program, which has forced more than 65,000 asylum seekers back to Mexico to wait for US immigration court hearings.
The Biden administration has not said what will happen to migrants already enrolled in the program, but DHS stated in its announcement last week they should “remain where they are” and await further US government instruction.
In addition, Biden plans to roll back a Trump rule that sought to block asylum seekers who pass through another country en route to the United States, the person said.
Biden will also direct US agencies to create strategies to address the root causes of migration from Central America and expand opportunities for migrants to come to the United States legally, the memo said.
Biden is eventually expected to scrap asylum agreements struck by the Trump administration with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, three people close to the Biden transition told Reuters last month. Whether he will take that step on Friday remains unclear.
Biden will create a task force to reunite migrant families who were separated at the US-Mexico border by Trump’s immigration policies.
Parties in a lawsuit over the separations have been unable to reach the parents of more than 600 children, according to a court filing this month.
Biden is expected to issue an executive order that would remove barriers to legal immigration and citizenship.
As part of that effort, the order will begin the process of rescinding Trump’s so-called “public charge” rule, which makes it harder for immigrants who are poor or need certain government benefits to secure residency and stay in the country, according to two people familiar with the plans.
Biden is expected to lay out principles that will guide his administration’s global refugee policy.
He has pledged to raise annual refugee intake levels to 125,000, up from the record-low 15,000-person ceiling set by Trump for fiscal year 2021, which began on 1 October 2020.
Biden is not expected to immediately raise the refugee limit. Instead, the Biden administration will follow a formal process that involves consulting with Congress, according to two people familiar with the plan.
Updated
White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients says it’s essential that Congress pass Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief bill to keep the momentum on vaccinations and more testing capacity to contain the virus.
Zients says the administration is committed to delivering on Biden’s goal of 100 million shots in 100 days, and more if doable.
But his top aide, Andy Slavitt, also says 500 million shots would be needed to vaccinate all Americans 16 and older.
Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” has a total price tag of $1.9trn, which is making some Republicans in Congress balk. But most of the cost is to shore up the economy, The Associated Press reports.
Updated
Interim summary
It’s been a busy morning in US political news. The White House press briefing is still going on, now with Q & A with press sec Jen Psaki, and Joe Biden is expected within the half hour to talk about the climate crisis. So do stay tuned.
Here are the main developments so far today:
- White House new climate experts refer to “climate crisis” and discuss urgent action to be taken to create “jobs of the future” and climate justice in clean break from Trump era.
- Biden administration leaves Covid-19 briefings to scientists and researchers. At the first public briefing by the White House coronavirus task force under the new president, Joe Biden, the president himself was absent – by design.
- In call with Nato secretary general, Biden reaffirms US support for military alliance, doesn’t push on funding complaints, in another break from Trump.
- Biden is expected to sign an executive order tomorrow to reopen the HealthCare.gov insurance markets for a special sign-up opportunity geared to people needing coverage in the coronavirus pandemic.
Updated
A reporter just asked how international partners will know the US is fully committed to combatting climate change, and will not double back on efforts.
Kerry said he hopes the Biden administration will be “move the marketplace”, to the extent that, “no one would be able to undo” what the planet will be doing in the coming “months and years”.
He also said major banks and asset managers are increasingly realizing “the need to put assets into this endeavor”.
McCarthy follows: in spite of the Trump administration’s efforts, “clean energy has gone faster and farther than anyone would have expected.” She said the “private sectors going to drive,” these changes.
The administration continues to focus on jobs, jobs, jobs. “It’s going to benefit jobs, it’s going to benefit our health and it’s going to lead to the future we want to hand down to our children,” said McCarthy.
“Workers have been fed a falsehood,” said Kerry. He said workers have been “fed” that “dealing with climate” will end their livelihood. He said the same workers who put together internal combustion engine cars can put together electric cars.
“Quality of life will be better,” said Kerry. Fewer fossil fuel driven jobs will result in, “healthier [jobs], less cancer, cleaner air.”
“We spend $55bn a year on it is environmentally induced asthma... that will change as we begin to reign in what we used to call pollution in this country,” said Kerry.
“We’re not going to ask people to go from the middle of Ohio or Pennsylvania to ship out to the coasts for solar jobs,” said McCarthy. Instead, the administration will focus on putting people to work in their own communities, such as capping methane-emitting abandoned oil and gas wells.
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Kerry just fielded a question on how the US will bring China, which like the US is a major greenhouse gas emitter, to the table for negotiations. He said the US will need to “compartmentalize” on climate despite policy differences of the two nations.
McCarthy also took a question on the administration’s coal policy. She said the administration is committed to taking a “close look” at how to handle coal, and said the president intends to lead with jobs.
She then refers back to the question of how to bring China to the table, and the importance of bringing manufacturing back to the US.
“There is going to be a large discussion of building up our manufacturing base again,” said McCarthy. Part of that is “making sure the federal government buys American.”
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Now it’s John Kerry’s turn. He is the first international presidential envoy on climate change.
“The stakes on climate change just couldn’t be any higher,” said Kerry. “We have a big agenda in front of us on a global basis,” he said.
Among the president’s actions, Kerry said, the 17 intelligence agencies of the US would come together to assess the security risks of the climate crisis, and develop a global climate finance plan, among other international actions.
“Failure, literally, is not an option,” said Kerry. “2021 is going to be the year to make up for the last four years.”
White House new climate experts refer to 'climate crisis' in clean break from Trump era
The White House press briefing is now beginning, focusing on the “climate crisis,” according to press secretary Jen Psaki and passes the mic to Gina McCarthy, a top climate advisor to Biden.
When the president thinks about the climate crisis, she said, “His first thought is about jobs.” McCarthy then begins to go through some of the executive orders Joe Biden plans to sign today.
She said this effort will “power the economy with good paying union jobs.”
Updated
Biden administration leaves Covid-19 briefings to scientists and researchers
Before we barrel into the White House press briefing with press secretary Jen Psaki, here are the main takeaways from the Biden administration’s first formal Covid-19 briefing:
- Joe Biden was not present, by design. Covid-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said the president wants to leave briefings on the virus to the experts, and the administration intends to hold them regularly. The next one will be Friday.
- CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walinsky said there are signs of hope in the pandemic, but many thousands more people will likely die in the US before the pandemic is over, including almost certainly reaching 500,000 deaths in February.
- Experts urged people to continue to wear masks, wash hands and social distance to mitigate spread of the virus as cases remain “extraordinarily high” according to Wakinsky.
- Dr. Anthony Fauci said vaccines remain efficacious against concerning new Covid-19 variants, including the B117 variant first identified in the UK. However, he said the US will need to continue to look to the future to develop drugs to treat new variants of Covid-19, specifically including monoclonal antibodies.
- Right now, the US is 43rd in the world in terms of monitoring for new coronavirus variants through genomic sequencing. That process requires resources, which Walinsky said researchers need to continue this work. She called on Congress to pass Biden’s proposed $1.9tn stimulus package.
- And the team also highlighted some of the policy changes made yesterday to expedite vaccine manufacturing and distribution. Among them: the US bought 200 million more vaccine doses from Pfizer and Moderna; it will provide 10 million vaccine doses per week to states for the next three weeks; and states will get more transparency about upcoming allotments.
White House Covid coordinator Zients says US tracking of virus varients "unacceptable"
Here’s an important point: the US is 43rd in terms of tracking genetic variants of Covid-19, like the B117 variant first identified in the United Kingdom. That means the US is not doing enough surveillance to identify changes in the coronavirus early.
The situation is “completely unacceptable,” said Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients.
RNA viruses mutate all the time, that’s what they do, that’s their business,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci. Once in a while, “there are very few, but they do happen, that you get one that has a functional relevancy to it,” he said, referring to the increased transmissibility of the B117 variant.
To track these variants, scientists need to do genomic sequencing of coronavirus samples. And in order to systematically collect, sequence and analyze those changes, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walinsky said they need resources.
There are resources allocated for just this type fo surveillance in Biden’s $1.9tn American Resuce Plan, she said. Scientists “need access to those resources to do the level of sequencing we need.”
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Slavitt: "We do not keep a stockpile of a large number of vaccines. We keep a 2 to 3-day supply as a practice. That's it. The rest moves out to states."
— Sabrina Siddiqui (@SabrinaSiddiqui) January 27, 2021
Zients says there used to be a stockpile but the practice has shifted to delivering vaccines to states as soon as possible.
“We’ve identified 12 areas where the president has authorized us to use,” the Defense Production Act, said Andy Slavitt. The administration is also “actively exploring” whether factories can be retrofitted to produce more vaccines.
“We have to make sure the vaccines that are produced are done the right way,” said Slavitt. Based on the current timeline, manufacturers would deliver all doses by early fall. “We don’t want to make a commitment to the public based on things that have not been accomplished,” said Slavitt.
Slavitt is now running through some of the measures the Biden administration has taken to get more vaccines to people. Here are some of those measures:
- The US has exercised an option to purchase an additional 200 million doses of vaccine from Pfizer and Moderna, which will bring the total US supply to 600 million doses. That should be enough to vaccinate everyone older than 16.
- The administration increased vaccine distributions to states to 10 million per week, from 8.6 million per week, for the next three weeks.
- The administration will give states three weeks’ notice of upcoming vaccine allotments, to give them time to prepare.
Andy Slavitt, who is helping coordinate the Covid-19 response, said the Biden administration is working to get vaccines to Americans, “despite not inheriting a fully developed strategy or infrastructure to make vaccines available to Americans.”
Now, we’re hearing from Dr Marcella Nunez-Smith, who is speaking about equity in the Covid-19 response. Communities of color have been disproportionately impacted by Covid-19. A task force for equity is being formed, she said, and will serve an advisory roll in the response.
“All Americans, everyone in our country, should have the benefit of a safe effective vaccine,” said Nunez-Smith. Being able to pay should not play a roll, not should transportation or work hours.
“We’re working to make sure transportation and paid time off are available,” she said. In some cases, the vaccine will need to be brought to people who need them, rather than vise versa.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is now giving an update on vaccines and drugs to treat Covid-19. He said current evidence shows vaccines appear to still be very effective against concerning Covid-19 variants.
“What we’re seeing is a very slight, if at all, impact on vaccine induced antibodies,” for B117, said Fauci, and a “moderate” reduction in efficacy against the South African variant, though the vaccine is still effective.
“We have to be looking forward,” on virus mutations, said Fauci.
Walensky said the CDC is also monitoring virus variants, most notably the most transmissible variant B117 first identified in the UK.
“Viruses mutate and we have always expected variants would emerge,” said Walensky. However, more cases could “increase stress on our already taxed healthcare system,” she said. To date, 308 cases of the B117 variant have been found in 26 states.
The first case of the P1 variant was found in the US in Minnesota. Researchers have not found any cases of the B1351 variant in the US. The variant was first identified in South Africa.
Walensky has now moved on to address potential adverse reactions from vaccines, including potential cases of allergic reactions. Allergic reactions are, “rare, treatable” and the risks from Covid-19 are “much higher” than risk of allergy.
Covid task force meets with scientists taking lead, Biden absent by design
Dr Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) starts the briefing out optimistically: “There are some hopeful signs we are watching very closely,” she said. The number of daily deaths are decreasing in the US.
Nevertheless, the number of cases remains, “extraordinarily high,” said Walensky. “Now, is the time to remain vigilant.”
She said that inauguration day, 20 January, was the peak for daily deaths from Covid-19: 4,383 people died from the coronavirus in America that day.
Updated
People watching the Covid-19 briefing may notice Joe Biden is not present. That is purposeful. The president has said, and Covid-19 task force coordinator Jeff Zients just emphasized, that the president wants Americans to hear directly from his scientific team.
The Covid-19 briefing has started. Follow along with us here.
While we wait for the Biden administration’s Covid-19 briefing to begin, here is where the US stands in the pandemic today:
- More than 25 million people have been diagnosed with Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University
- More than 425,000 Americans have been killed by Covid-19 (again, according to JHU)
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) forecasts Covid-19 deaths will continue to rise in the coming weeks, reaching up to 508,000 killed by 13 February
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.7M tests, 144k cases, 108,957 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, and 3,734 deaths. pic.twitter.com/NeIk6qx6fq
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) January 27, 2021
Biden is also expected to sign “sweeping” climate change executive orders today, on what climate activists have dubbed “climate day”.
Here’s more from Guardian US climate reporter Oliver Milman:
Joe Biden is to instruct the US government to pause and review all oil and gas drilling on federal land, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and transform the government’s vast fleet of cars and trucks into electric vehicles, in a sweeping new set of climate executive orders.
The battery of executive actions, to be signed by the US president on Wednesday, will direct the Department of the Interior to pause new oil and gas leases on public lands and offshore waters and launch a “rigorous review of all existing leasing”, according to a White House planning document.
It’s Biden’s ‘climate day’ today -
— Oliver Milman (@olliemilman) January 27, 2021
- review of oil & gas drilling on public land
- halt to fossil fuel subsidies
- govt vehicle fleet to go electric
- 30% of US to be protected by 2030
- new WH climate and enviro justice bodieshttps://t.co/CiHm2Sv9In
Biden raises hopes of addressing climate crisis as Cop26 nearsRead more
The directive opens up a path to the banning of all new drilling on federal land, a campaign promise made by Biden that has been widely praised by climate groups and caused outrage within the fossil fuel industry. Biden has called the climate crisis the “existential threat of our time” and the White House has said the new executive orders will help push the US towards a goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
“President Biden and his administration are taking an important step in the right direction by limiting oil and gas development on federal lands,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology at Cornell University, who added that the world “must rapidly transition away from fossil fuels” to avoid disastrous climate change.
While we’re waiting for a Covid-19 briefing, it’s worth remembering just how many people have gone through a year of pandemic without health insurance: likely at least 28.9 million.
The number of people who lacked health insurance rose through the Trump presidency, and grew by experts millions were added to the ranks of uninsured as the pandemic drove unprecedented job losses. A plurality of Americans rely on private health insurance through an employer.
Now, Biden is fulfilling one of his campaign promises, to remove barriers to accessing health insurance. One of the ways he is doing that is by reopening a health insurance marketplace for people affected by the pandemic.
To do so, Biden will use a health insurance law he helped pass during the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act best known as Obamacare.
Here are more details on the policy shift from the Associated Press:
Fulfilling a campaign promise, President Joe Biden plans to reopen the HealthCare.gov insurance markets for a special sign-up opportunity geared to people needing coverage in the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden is expected to sign an executive order Thursday, said two people familiar with the plan, whose details were still being finalized. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the pending order ahead of a formal announcement.
Although the number of uninsured Americans has grown because of job losses due to the economic hit of Covid-19, the Trump administration resisted calls to authorize a “special enrollment period” for people uninsured in the pandemic. Failure to repeal and replace “Obamacare” as he repeatedly vowed to do was one of former President Donald Trump’s most bitter disappointments. His administration continued trying to find ways to limit the program or unravel it entirely. A Supreme Court decision on Trump’s final legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act is expected this year.
The White House had no comment on Biden’s expected order, but the two people familiar with the plan said the new enrollment period would not go into effect immediately. Instead, the White House wants to provide time for the Department of Health and Human Services to mount a marketing campaign, and for insurers to get ready for an influx of new customers.
The Obama-era health care law covers more than 23 million people through a mix of subsidized private insurance sold in all states, and expanded Medicaid adopted by 38 states, with Southern states being the major exception. Coverage is available to people who don’t have job-based health insurance, with the Medicaid expansion geared to those with low incomes.
Biden’s order would directly affect HealthCare.gov, the federal insurance marketplace currently serving 36 states. The marketplace concluded a successful annual sign-up season in December, with enrollment for 2021 growing by about 7%. Final numbers for this year that include insurance markets directly run by the states will be available soon.
Opening the insurance markets is also likely to result in higher Medicaid enrollment, since people who qualify for that program are automatically referred.
The special sign-up opportunity is only a down payment on health insurance for Biden, who has promised to build on former President Barack Obama’s health law to push the U.S. toward coverage for all. For that he’d need congressional approval, and opposition to the health law still runs deep among Republicans.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki signaled Tuesday that Biden is also looking at limiting or reversing Trump administration actions that allowed states to impose work requirements for able-bodied low-income adults as a condition of getting Medicaid. Such rules are seen as a way to cull the program rolls.
“President Biden does not believe, as a principle, it should be difficult ... for people to gain access to health care,” she said. “He’s not been supportive in the past, and is not today, of putting additional restrictions in place.”
Of some 28 million uninsured Americans before the pandemic, the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation estimates, more than 16 million were eligible for some form of subsidized coverage through the health law.
Experts agree that number of uninsured people has risen because of layoffs, perhaps by 5 million to 10 million, but authoritative estimates await government studies due later this year.
Biden’s expected order was first reported by The Washington Post.
Updated
Hello – this is Jessica Glenza taking over from Martin Belam. Among the most high profile events happening in Washington DC today is the first Covid-19 briefing, which the Biden administration promised will be a regular feature of his administration.
At 11am ET, we’re expecting Biden’s first Covid-19 briefing. Here’s a closer look at what is expected:
For nearly a year it was the Trump show. Now President Joe Biden is calling up the nation’s top scientists and public health experts to regularly brief the American public about the pandemic that has claimed more than 425,000 US lives.
Beginning Wednesday, administration experts will host briefings three times a week on the state of the outbreak, efforts to control it and the race to deliver vaccines and therapeutics to end it.
Expect a sharp contrast from the last administration’s briefings, when public health officials were repeatedly undermined by a president who shared his unproven ideas without hesitation.
“We’re bringing back the pros to talk about Covid in an unvarnished way,” Biden told reporters Tuesday. “Any questions you have, that’s how we’ll handle them because we’re letting science speak again.”
The new briefings, beginning just a week into Biden’s tenure, are meant as an explicit rejection of his predecessor’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak.
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School closures have been disruptive for students across the United States but, for many students of color in Milwaukee’s public school system, the immediate impacts have been downright alarming.
In the long run, educators fear, Covid and a long history of segregation and discrimination have formed a toxic cocktail that could reverberate for decades to come.
“It’s not only a question of how we get these kids back to where they would have been had the pandemic not occurred, but how do we get them back to where they should be?” said Dan Rossmiller of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
“And that, of course, was the preexisting problem.”
Virtual instruction has been the norm in Milwaukee public schools since March, when schoolhouse doors were first forced to close because of Covid. And in few places are the concerns about its impacts more acute than on Milwaukee’s north side, a majority-Black area in one of the most segregated cities in the nation. In the neighborhoods surrounding Martin Luther King Jr elementary, a school on the city’s near-north side, 55% of children live in poverty – nearly four times the state average for children in poverty.
Angela Harris, a 41-year-old teacher at the school, recalled the distress among students when she told them in the spring they wouldn’t be returning to the classroom.
She remembers rushing to the stockpile of snacks she kept in the classroom for hungry students and how she had loaded them into children’s backpacks so they’d have something to eat if food at home was scarce. She recalls one student in particular, wearing a green and black jacket donated by a local NBA star, and the way his face tightened in devastation at the news he might not see his teacher again.
“I can just visualize his face, in that coat, in that moment, asking me, ‘Mrs Harris, but what do I do if mommy is mean to me again?’ And me not knowing how to help him,” Harris said.
Read more of Mario Koran’s report from Milwaukee: Milwaukee was already failing students of color. Covid made it worse
By the way, if you want to get a sense of the pace at which Joe Biden has been attempting to set his agenda for the next four years, NBC News have published a list of all of Biden’s executive orders to date. Elizabeth Janowski has gathered 40 so far – with more expected today.
Read more here: NBC News – Here’s the full list of Biden’s executive actions so far
Biden publishes clip of call with Nato General Secretary, reaffirms US commitment
There’s a markedly different tone in foreign relations coming out of the Biden administration already compared to his predecessor. This morning Joe Biden has published a clip of a call he had with Nato General Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, and he didn’t appear to complain once about how much money the US spent on defense in Europe.
Instead, Biden said “I intend to rebuild and re-establish out alliances, starting with Nato. I strongly, strongly, strongly support our collective defense based on mutual democratic values. I want to re-affirm the United States’ commitment to article 5. It’s a sacred commitment.”
Article 5 provides that if a Nato member is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of Nato will consider this an armed attack against all members. It was invoked for the first time after the 9/11 terror attacks.
You can view the clip here:
It’s been a busy first week of calls with foreign leaders, and yesterday I spoke with NATO Secretary General @JensStoltenberg. I reiterated my strong commitment to NATO and to working together to tackle the shared challenges we face. pic.twitter.com/rXhP8m5QvO
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 27, 2021
Investigators have found no evidence that terrorism, politics or any bias motivated the rampage of a 64-year-old Oregon man who witnesses said repeatedly drove into people along streets and sidewalks in Portland, Oregon, killing a 77-year-old woman and injuring nine other people, police said.
Police identified the driver as Paul Rivas of Oregon City. He was booked into the Multnomah county detention center on initial charges of second-degree murder, assault and failure to perform the duties of a driver, Portland police said.
Rivas is accused of striking the woman, who was dragged a short distance beneath the wheels of a small SUV, and then continuing to drive, hitting other people and vehicles. After the driver fled on foot, neighbors surrounded him until police arrived.
The Oregon state medical examiner determined that Jean Gerich died of blunt force trauma and ruled her death a homicide. Police released a statement from her family thanking the people at the scene who tried to help her.
“Jean Gerich was not a nameless victim. She was a loving mother of two. She was a proud grandmother of five, ages 4 to 16. She would have turned 78 in twelve days. She beat cancer five years ago. She received her first vaccination shot last week and was overjoyed to get out in the world again,“ the family said.
Read more here: Police say no evidence of terror motive in deadly Portland car attack
Ohio nearly purged 10,000 legitimate voters who ended up casting 2020 ballots
More than 10,000 people whom Ohio believed had “abandoned” their voter registration cast ballots in the 2020 election, raising more concern that officials are using an unreliable and inaccurate method to identify ineligible voters on the state’s rolls.
In August, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, released a list of 115,816 people who were set to be purged after the November election because the election officials in each of Ohio’s 88 counties flagged them as inactive. Voters could remove their name from the list by taking a number of election-related actions, including voting, requesting an absentee ballot, or simply confirming their voter registration information.
Last week, LaRose’s office announced that nearly 18,000 people on the initial list did not have their voter registration canceled, including 10,000 people who voted in the November election. About 98,000 registrations were ultimately removed from the state’s rolls, LaRose’s office announced last month. There are more than 8 million registered voters in the state.
In a statement, LaRose said the fact that so many people prevented their voter registrations from being canceled is a success of the state’s unprecedented efforts to notify voters at risk of being purged. But voting rights groups say the fact that Ohio nearly purged thousands of eligible voters is deeply alarming and underscores the inaccurate and haphazard way the state goes about maintaining its voter rolls.
Read more of Sam Levine’s report here: Ohio nearly purged 10,000 voters who ended up casting 2020 ballots
Biden to reopen ‘Obamacare’ markets for Covid relief
President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order tomorrow to reopen the HealthCare.gov insurance markets for a special sign-up opportunity geared to people needing coverage in the coronavirus pandemic.
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reminds us for the Associated Press that although the number of uninsured Americans has grown because of job losses due to the economic hit of the coronavirus, the Trump administration did nothing to authorize a “special enrollment period” for people uninsured in the pandemic.
Former president Trump’s repeatedly promised a new healthcare plan, but in his four years in office did not produce it. Meanwhile his administration continued trying to find ways to limit Obamacare or unravel it entirely. A supreme court decision on Trump’s final legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act is expected this year.
Biden’s plan will not re-open the market immediately. Instead, the White House wants to provide time for the Department of Health and Human Services to mount a marketing campaign, and for insurers to get ready for an influx of new customers.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki signaled Tuesday that Biden is also looking at limiting or reversing Trump administration actions that allowed states to impose work requirements for able-bodied low-income adults as a condition of getting Medicaid. Such rules are seen as a way to cull the program rolls.
“President Biden does not believe, as a principle, it should be difficult ... for people to gain access to health care,” she said. “He’s not been supportive in the past, and is not today, of putting additional restrictions in place.”
President Joe Biden’s nominee for energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, is expected to face questions on the administration’s push to compete with China on electric vehicles at her Senate confirmation hearing later today.
While governor of auto-manufacturing Michigan from 2003 to 2011, Granholm led a charge to secure $1.35 billion in federal funding for companies to produce electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries in the state.
Granholm, 61, who is expected to be confirmed by the Senate in days after the hearing, wants to steer the department to help the United States compete with China on EVs and green technologies like advanced batteries and solar and wind power.
“We need to be the leader, rather than passive bystanders, or otherwise we’re going to allow other countries like China and others we’re fighting to be able to corner this market,” Granholm told ABC News last month.
She would be the second female US energy secretary after Hazel O’Leary served in the 1990s. Granholm has done few media appearances since being nominated by Biden, but said on Twitter this month she was doing a “deep dive” into the department and was awed by the work of its lab scientists.
Timothy Gardner of Reuters reports that Granholm is likely to be asked about the department’s Loan Programs Office, or LPO, founded with stimulus funding in 2009 during the Obama administration. The office has loaned money and been paid back by successful businesses including Tesla, but has been slammed by some Republicans for support of Solyndra, a failed solar company.
The LPO has more than $40 billion available for loans and loan guarantees for advanced technologies that went unused by the Trump administration. Nearly $18 billion can go to direct loans for green cars, which could spark Biden’s support for the industry, though the department would likely need Congress to approve more money to make sweeping changes.
Energy secretaries traditionally promote the interests of the fossil fuels industry but with Biden’s promise to make curbing climate change one of the pillars of his administration, Granholm will almost certainly focus less on oil and gas than her predecessors.
Giovanni Russonello’s On Politics newsletter for the New York Times today has an interesting exchange with their chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse on the calculation in the Senate around the filibuster.
As it stands at the moment, debate in the Senate on a measure can only be cut off if at least 60 senators support doing so, giving ample opportunity for Republicans to delay Biden’s legislation. Hulse says:
I do believe Democrats were caught off guard by McConnell’s willingness to make a fight over the filibuster essentially the first order of business. It was classic McConnell, using a moment of maximum leverage to try to extract something from Democrats.
But Chuck Schumer, the new majority leader, knew he could not cave to McConnell at the start. Once McConnell saw that Democrats were not going to budge, he began looking for a way out and seized on promises by two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to not support any effort to get rid of the filibuster.
But this fight is far from over. Democratic strategists think McConnell overreached and just put more focus on the filibuster and the likelihood that Republicans will try to block many of the new administration’s initiatives.
Even though it has often been used to block progressive legislation like civil rights bills, there is an aura around the filibuster that holds it as the key to forcing bipartisan compromise. Manchin and Sinema definitely think that way. Other Democrats worry — with good reason — that if Democrats ditch the filibuster, conservative Republicans would get a free hand when they next control Congress and the White House.
Russian parliament votes to extend New Start nuclear treaty with US
Reuters report that Russia’s upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, has voted to ratify an extension of the New Start nuclear arms control treaty, a move towards preserving the last major pact of its kind between Russia and the United States.
The Kremlin said yesterday that the two countries had struck a deal to extend the pact, signed in 2010 and set to expire next week, which limits the numbers of strategic nuclear warheads, missiles and bombers that Russia and the US can deploy.
The lower house of Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, earlier voted to ratify the extension.
By the way, if you haven’t been following the extraordinary stock market developments over the last few days involving GameStop, then Edward Helmore has a report on it here. It’s well worth a read:
Investors on the WallStreetBets subreddit forum have been promoting GameStop aggressively, with many pitching it as a battle of regular people versus hedge funds and big Wall Street firms.
“This is quite the experience for my first month in the stock market. Holding till infinity,” posted one user on the thread. Another user said: “We’re literally more powerful than the big firms right now.”
In some cases, they’ve been right, with larger investors like Citron Research taking a sharp lesson in what can happen when “herd investors” squeeze a stock higher.
Citron’s founder, Andrew Left, called GameStop a “failing mall-based retailer” in a report earlier this month and then predicted that the stock would plunge to $20 in a video he posted to Twitter on Thursday. According to CNN, Left has now given up on shorting the stock, citing harassment by the stock’s backers.
About 71.66m GameStop shares are currently shorted – worth about $4.66bn. Year-to-date, those bets have cost investors about $6.12bn, which includes a loss of $2.79bn on Monday.
“As someone who started trading stocks in the late 90s in college, I would always remember watching when the small retail trading groups would get crushed by hedge funds and savvy short-sellers,” Oanda market analyst Edward Moya said in a report. “What happened with GameStop’s stock is a reminder of how times are changing.”
Read more here: How GameStop found itself at the center of a groundbreaking battle between Wall Street and small investors
Andrew Gawthorpe, host of the podcast America Explained, writes for us today that the Democrats’ priority in power must be to stop minority rule:
The case for the Democratic Party to commit itself to a radical pro-democracy agenda is simple. The last four years have shown the horrors of minority rule. Political institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate and gerrymandered House districts reward Republicans for appealing to a narrow minority of the population. They take this easily-won power and use it not for the good of the country as a whole but to push through extremist policies and fight culture wars. When they abuse their power, as Donald Trump did, little can be done to stop them.
As inheritors of this situation, it is the duty of Democrats to do what they can to alter it. This is no time for incrementalism. Only a radical program aimed at strengthening American democracy and preventing the return of rightwing minority rule in the future will rise to the moment.
The specifics of such a program have already been spelled out. Many of them are contained in the For The People Act, a bill passed by the Democratic House in 2019. This bill would create apolitical committees to draw House district boundaries, create a national voter registration program, remove barriers to voting enacted by states, enforce transparency in campaign finance, and much more besides. It died in the Senate when Mitch McConnell declined to bring it up for a vote – but the Senate is now under new management.
Democrats should not stop there. Though important, these reforms would not alone save America from minority rule. There is a need to be bolder still – firstly, by admitting new states to the union, and secondly, by abolishing the Senate filibuster.
Read more here: Andrew Gawthorpe – The Democrats’ priority in power must be to stop minority rule
Alexander Bolton at The Hill has rounded up some of the key Republican reaction to yesterday’s impeachment developments in the Senate, in particular that of Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski one of only a handful of Republican senators actively considering whether to vote to convict Trump, on Tuesday said it’s now hard to imagine there will be anything close to the 67 votes needed to convict Trump.
“Whether or not we’re going to see members change their mind after they’ve already taken a vote, I think that’s hard for people to do,” she said.
“Because [people] are like, ‘Wait, wait, wait. You voted to say that this was not constitutional and now you’re changing your mind?’ We don’t get a lot of credit and we don’t get a lot of allowance to change our mind around here,” she added.
“That’s why I think it was a little unfortunate that we had this very spontaneous vote on an extraordinarily significant matter without the considered debate and brief and analysis,” she said. “People had to make really quick decisions.”
Murkowski said she and her colleagues were caught “flat-footed” by the key procedural vote. She said she was not aware until Tuesday morning that she would be voting on Paul’s motion later in the day.
“I think just about everybody was quite surprised to be in a position to actually take not only a public position but a vote on this today. And so I think that there were a lot that were perhaps not as prepared. I don’t feel I am as prepared as I wanted,” she said.
Read more here: The Hill – Senate GOP boxes itself in on impeachment
The National Nurses United union will be holding a series of socially-distanced events in more than 19 states today to demand that their hospital employers put patients first above profit motives.
The union has repeatedly been critical of the protection measures afforded to its members during the pandemic. So far the union has documented the deaths of more than 3,000 US healthcare workers after frontline Covid exposure, a number which they say is likely undercounted.
2021 marks a year where there will be a series of contract negotiations with major healthcare employers, and the union says it will be aiming to improve health and safety and infectious diseases provisions. In a statement the NNU says it will also aim to address the racial disparities in health care outcomes they observe daily.
Jenn Caldwell, a registered nurse at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri said “We have learned the hard way through this Covid pandemic that our hospital employers do not value the essential nursing care we risk our lives daily to give. Instead, they view us as disposable. They found every excuse to deny us the personal protective equipment, the staffing, the testing, the contact tracing, the sick leave, the resources, and all the other proper infection control measures we know we need to stay safe and keep our patients safe.”
Amazon is attempting to force workers planning to unionize at an Alabama warehouse to vote in person rather than by mail as it fights off a landmark attempt by its staff to organize.
The company is appealing against a ruling by a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officer to permit 5,800 employees at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, to begin casting ballots by mail to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
The NLRB, the federal agency responsible for enforcing US labor law, favors manual elections but has moved to supporting mail-in ballots during the coronavirus pandemic. Between March and November 2020, 90% of union election representation cases presided by the NLRB were conducted by mail rather than in-person.
On Monday the state said there had been 350,988 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Alabama since March and 6,662 confirmed deaths.
The appeal was filed on 21 January by attorneys representing Amazon, who argued a mail-in ballot election would take too long and involve too many resources, and requested the board postpone the election until the NLRB reviews Amazon’s appeals.
The NLRB is currently scheduled to begin mailing out ballots for the election on 8 February. The union filed their initial petition requesting a union election on 20 November.
If successful, Amazon workers at the BHM1 warehouse in Bessemer would be the company’s first warehouse in the United States to unionize.
Read more of Michael Sainato’s report here: Amazon seeks to block workers from voting by mail in landmark union drive
The Washington Post this morning have a piece to tee-up some of the climate crisis action expected from Joe Biden later today. They say that the president “plans to make tackling America’s persistent racial and economic disparities a central part of his plan”.
As part of an unprecedented push to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and create new jobs as the United States shifts toward cleaner energy, Biden will direct agencies across the federal government to invest in low-income and minority communities that have traditionally borne the brunt of pollution.
Biden will sign an executive order establishing a White House interagency council on environmental justice, create an office of health and climate equity at the Health and Human Services Department and form a separate environmental justice office at the Justice Department, the individuals said.
At the heart of Biden’s executive action Wednesday is an effort to improve conditions in Black, Latino and Native American communities targeted for hazards that others did not want: power plants, landfills, trash incinerators, shipping ports, uranium mines and factories.
Read more here: Washington Post – Biden to place environmental justice at center of sweeping climate plan
There were 142,511 new coronavirus cases recorded in the US yesterday, and 3,990 further deaths. That’s the fifth highest daily death toll recorded in the US since the pandemic began.
In a more positive sign, Covid hospitalizations in the US fell again for the 14th consecutive day. They stand at 108,957, the lowest level since 13 December, according to the Covid Tracking project.
At least 19.9 million people in the US have received one or both doses of the vaccine. There have been 44.4 million doses distributed. This still leaves the Biden administration three weeks behind the schedule set out by the outgoing Trump White House, which had promised to vaccinate 20m people by the end of December, and which did not. Yesterday, Biden vowed to vaccinate 300m people in US by end of summer or early fall.
Alaska, West Virginia, New Mexico and Connecticut have become the first states to deliver at least one vaccination dose to over 8% of their population.
The Biden administration’s climate policies aren’t just facing opposition at home, as Leyland Cecco in Toronto reports:
US president Joe Biden’s move to cancel a controversial pipeline project has hit Canada like “like a gut punch”, according to one political leader, and left the country to weigh the future prospects of its ailing oil and gas industry.
On 20 January, one of Biden’s first executive orders was to reverse approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, making good on a campaign promise to kill the project as a broader strategy to address the climate crisis.
Environmental groups in Canada have applauded the decision, but the cancellation has left the country’s western provinces in disbelief.
“The Biden administration refuses to give this country sufficient respect to hear us out on this pipeline. In that policy context then, yes, there absolutely must be reprisals,” Alberta premier Jason Kenney told CBC News. “We need to stand up for ourselves.”
The outspoken provincial leader, who called the decision a “gut punch”, has largely tied his province’s prosperity to the success of oil and gas projects – and demanded that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau move swiftly to reverse the decision.
“Obviously the decision on Keystone XL is a very difficult one for workers in Alberta and Saskatchewan who’ve had many difficult hits,” Trudeau told reporters last week, adding that it would be a top priority in his first call with president Biden. But Trudeau has stopped short of endorsing Kenney’s calls for “economic sanctions” against Canada’s largest trading partner.
Read more of Leyland Cecco’s report here: Alberta leader says Biden’s move to cancel Keystone pipeline a ‘gut punch’
Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, has a new job. Well according to what Axios are labelling a scoop this morning, anyway,. They report:
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is joining the Conservative Partnership Institute, a group run by former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint that operates as a “networking hub” for conservatives.
Meadows, who is still in frequent contact with former President Trump and has been advising him ahead of his impeachment trial, will now operate behind the scenes to help create more members like Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley — conservative firebrands with strong networks and staffs.
The House Freedom Caucus founder will also play a key role in gathering grassroots support to oppose Biden nominees and policies in the first 100 days, sources said.
DeMint founded CPI because he felt the conservative movement did a lousy job at helping members of Congress be effective legislators once they get to DC.
Read more here: Axios – Mark Meadows’ new gig
Sen. Patrick Leahy home from hospital after falling ill at the Capitol last night
One concern overnight was that Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy was taken to hospital “out of an abundance of caution” after being taken ill in the Capitol, hours after the 80-year-old Democrat began presiding over the impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump. He’s now at home.
Leahy, who’d been in his Capitol office, was taken to George Washington University Hospital after being examined by Congress’ attending physician, Leahy spokesman David Carle said.
Associated Press remind us that Leahy is presiding because he is the Senate’s president pro tempore, a largely ceremonial post. The Senate president pro tempore job normally goes to the longest-serving member of the Senate’s majority party. Chief Justice John Roberts presided over Trump’s first impeachment trial a year ago when Trump was still president.
Here’s a reminder of what happened in the Senate last night. After Senators were sworn in as the jury for Trump’s second impeachment trial and signed the oath book – each using a different pen due to coronavirus precautions – Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky challenged the legitimacy of the trial.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, dismissed Paul’s theory as ‘flat-out wrong’, but 45 Republican senators went on to vote to dismiss the entire trial. The move failed, but it suggests that a vote to convict the former president is unlikely.
Welcome to our coverage of US politics for Wednesday. Here’s a catch-up on where we are and a little of what we might expect from today…
- President Joe Biden vowed to ramp up vaccination programs so that most of the US population is inoculated by the end of summer or early fall.“This will be enough vaccine to fully vaccinate 300m Americans by the end of the summer,” the US president said.
- There were 142,511 new coronavirus cases recorded, and 3,990 deaths, the fifth highest daily death toll recorded in the US since the pandemic began. In a more positive sign, Covid hospitalizations in the US fell again for the 14th consecutive day.
- There will be a Covid task force briefing from Dr Anthony Fauci and team at 11am EST (4pm GMT), and they will also participate at a CNN “Town hall” event in the evening.
- Yesterday Biden signed more executive orders in an effort to advance US racial equity. Domestic policy chief Susan Rice said “every agency will place equity at the core”.
- Attention will turn today to the climate crisis – Biden will speak about the environment ahead of signing executive orders related to climate change at 1:30pm EST (6:30pm GMT).
- Jen Psaki will give a press briefing at 12:15 EST (5:15 GMT) where she will be joined by climate envoy John Kerry and White House national climate advisor Gina McCarthy.
- Senators were sworn in for Trump’s impeachment trial. Afterward, 45 Republican senators voted to dismiss the trial. That move failed, but it did signal that Democrats are extremely unlikely to win over enough Republicans to convict the former president.
- The Senate voted to confirm Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. And Kamala Harris swore in Janet Yellen as the nation’s first female Treasury secretary.
- White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden held a phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin. She said Biden pressed Putin on a litany of contentious issues, including election interference, the arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the country’s “ongoing aggression” to Ukraine, among other topics.
- Bernie Sanders and progressive lawmakers in both chambers unveiled new legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Sanders called it a “moral imperative”.
- Pete Buttigieg, Jennifer Granholm, Denis McDonough and Linda Thomas-Greenfield will all be up before the Senate today as the process of confirming Joe Biden’s cabinet contiues.
Biden to focus on environmental agenda today with press briefing and executive orders
Joe Biden will address the nation about the climate crisis later today, and sign further executive orders aimed at environmental impacts. Those directives include spelling out how US intelligence, defense and homeland security agencies should address the security threats posed by worsening droughts, floods and other natural disasters under global warming. Biden’s appearance is due at 1:30pm EST (6:30pm GMT).
Before that, White House press secretary Jen Psaki will also hold an event, joined by climate envoy John Kerry and White House national climate advisor Gina McCarthy.
Kerry has already been laying the ground for today’s environmental announcements since taking up his role. Ellen Knickmeyer writes for the Associated Press that he has been trying to make clear that the US isn’t just revving up its own efforts to reduce oil, gas and coal pollution but that it intends to push everyone in the world to do more, too.
Kerry’s diplomatic efforts match the fast pace of domestic climate directives by the week-old Biden administration, which created the job Kerry now holds.
At 77, Kerry is working to make a success out of the global climate accord that he helped negotiate in Paris as president Barack Obama’s secretary of state and that he then saw rejected by president Donald Trump
Success for Kerry is hardly assured. At home, he faces pushback from the oil and gas industry and loud Republican concerns that jobs will be lost.
In the end, Biden will have killed thousands of jobs with just this one action.
— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) January 26, 2021
If only someone had warned that Biden would be an enemy of the energy industry and kill jobs at the behest of the radical, environmental left. https://t.co/S1C9EbNdwL
Internationally, there’s uncertainty about whether Biden’s climate commitments can survive the United States’ intensely divided politics, let alone the next presidential transition. Meanwhile, environmentalists are pushing Kerry to be more aggressive – demonstrating outside his house on his first full day on the job.
Already Kerry has spoken virtually with US mayors, foreign presidents and premiers, government ministers and others. His message is: put your big one-off Covid economic recovery funding into projects that boost cleaner energy. Get green projects going fast in Republican-leaning U.S. states to prove renewable energy can mean jobs and build needed political support. Get everyone to talk to China about things like stopping the building of dirty-burning coal-fired power plants.
If China and the US, as the world’s No. 1 and 2 top carbon emitters, don’t spell out exactly how they will curb climate-damaging emissions more quickly, “we’re all going to lose credibility,” Kerry told an online gathering of American mayors last weekend.
The US has to have the “credibility to go to the table, show people what we’re doing and push them to do more,” Kerry said then. “So everybody can can understand it’s not fake, it’s not a phony, empty promise it really is getting real. They’re not going to believe it when we just say it. We have to do it.”
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