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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Dani Anguiano (now) and Vivian Ho (earlier)

US Congress reports unprecedented surge in Covid-19 cases – as it happened

Snow falls over the US Capitol building on Monday.
Snow falls over the US Capitol building on Monday. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/REX/Shutterstock

Summary

  • The surge in Covid cases linked to the Omicron variant is disrupting school reopening plans across the US. Several major districts have announced they would delay returning to the classroom after the winter break. LA Unified, the country’s second largest public school system, will require all students and staff to have proof of a negative test before classes resume on 11 January.
  • The Biden administration has expanded enforcement of the controversial Remain in Mexico program originally crafted by the Trump administration, even as it seeks to terminate the program. Advocates have warned the policy will subject thousands more asylum seekers to “enormous suffering” and leave them vulnerable to violence.
  • The first snowstorm of 2022 to hit Washington delayed the arrival of Joe Biden and Air Force One, resulted in the cancelation of the White House press briefing and delayed a Senate confirmation - and that’s on top of snarling up traffic, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands and causing the closure of Covid-19 testing and vaccination centers all along the eastern seaboard.
  • Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer announced that he planned to hold a vote to change the filibuster rules either before or by 17 January, Martin Luther King Jr Day, the latest bid by the Democrats to advance national voting rights protection legislation.
  • With the introduction of the Omicron variant, there’s been an unprecedented increase in Covid-19 cases on Capitol Hill.

- Vivian Ho and Dani Anguiano

Updated

The US, Russia, China, the UK and France have pledged to avoid nuclear war. In a rare joint pledge, the permanent members of the UN security council declared that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and that the spread of nuclear weapons must be prevented.

“As nuclear use would have far-reaching consequences, we also affirm that nuclear weapons – for as long as they continue to exist – should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war,” the joint statement says.

More from my colleague Julian Borger:

The surge in Covid cases linked to the Omicron variant is disrupting school reopening plans across the US. Several major districts have announced they would delay returning to the classroom after the winter break due to outbreaks.

Milwaukee public schools, which serve 75,000 students, announced Sunday it would return to virtual learning for at least a week because of an outbreak of Covid cases among district staff.

Public school officials in Detroit said there would be no school Monday-Wednesday of this week as the city’s test positivity rate reached an all-time high of 36%. “This high rate of infection will inevitably mean that a return to in person learning on Monday, January 3, 2022, with nearly 8,000 employees and partners and nearly 50,000 students will lead to extensive Covid spread placing employees, students, and families at risk along with excessive staff shortages due to positive and close contact scenarios,” the district said.

The Los Angeles unified school district, the country’s second largest public school system with more than 640,000 students, announced it would require all students and staff to have proof of a negative Covid-19 test, regardless of vaccination status, to return to school on 11 January.

The Biden administration has expanded enforcement of the controversial Remain in Mexico program originally crafted by the Trump administration, even as it seeks to terminate the program.

The program, known as Migrant Protection Protocols, forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, where they were routinely targeted for rape, robbery and abduction by organized crime groups, as their cases went through the US immigration system. A US human rights group documented more than 1,500 cases of kidnappings and attacks against migrants sent across the border to Mexico.

A bus leaves a closed border facility as migrants subject to a Trump-era asylum restriction program were expected to begin entry into the United States at the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego.
A bus leaves a closed border facility as migrants subject to a Trump-era asylum restriction program were expected to begin entry into the United States at the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

The administration has asked the supreme court to allow it to end Remain in Mexico, Axios reports, but has also expanded the program into San Diego. The White House says it’s ensuring migrants have better access to legal counsel ahead of court hearings and that migrants will now be provided with transportation directly to shelters in Mexico. Meanwhile, the Mexican government has committed to improving security at local shelters, the administration said.

Joe Biden repealed the policy after taking office, but a court ordered the administration to restart the program late last year, and since then more than 200 migrants have been forced to return to Mexico. Migration advocates have warned restarting the program would subject thousands of people to “enormous suffering” and leave them vulnerable to violence.

Updated

Good afternoon. I’m Dani Anguiano and I’ll be taking over the Guardian’s live US politics coverage for the rest of the day.

The highly transmissible Omicron variant is driving a huge wave of Covid-19 cases across the US, including an unprecedented rise at the US capitol. In Florida, cases have risen by 948% in just two weeks. My colleague Alexandra Villarreal reports:

Even as Dr Anthony Fauci – Joe Biden’s top medical adviser – cautioned the public to look at hospitalizations and not infections in order to gauge Omicron’s severity, the seven-day average for US patients hospitalized with Covid-19 increased by more than 40% during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

Cases have risen by more than 100% nationally, despite tests being in short supply in many areas, and infections have doubled in the last seven days to an average of 418,000 a day, according to a Reuters tally.

In Florida, local and state officials warned that residents were waiting hours in sometimes miles-long lines just to get a test. Some accused the state health department and the governor, Ron DeSantis, of being missing in action.

“It’s every man/woman for themselves, because leadership is MIA,” tweeted state senator Shevrin Jones.

Evidence suggests Omicron is a more mild if highly infectious variant. But it “will still do terrible damage among the unvaccinated in both the US and worldwide”, according to the New York Times.

Today so far

  • The first snowstorm of 2022 to hit Washington delayed the arrival of Joe Biden and Air Force One, resulted in the cancelation of the White House press briefing and delayed a senate confirmation - and that’s on top of snarling up traffic, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands and causing the closure of Covid-19 testing and vaccination centers all along the eastern seaboard. But here’s a video of the National Zoo’s giant panda cub playing in the snowfall for the first time.
  • Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer announced that he planned to hold a vote to change the filibuster rules either before or by 17 January, Martin Luther King Jr Day, the latest bid by the Democrats to advance national voting rights protection legislation.
  • With the introduction of the Omicron variant, there’s been an unprecedented uptick in Covid-19 cases on Capitol Hill.

Updated

US attorney general Merrick Garland will update justice department employees on Wednesday on department efforts to hold accountable those responsible for the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.

Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, will propose in her state of the state address this week a state constitutional amendment that would impose a term limit on governors and other high-ranking officials, Reuters is reporting.

The proposal would limit governors to two four-year terms in office and would also apply to the offices of lieutenant governor, attorney general and comptroller.

“I want people to believe in their government again. With these bold reforms, we will ensure New Yorkers know their leaders work for them and are focused on serving the people of this state,” Hochul said in a statement.

This comes four months after the resignation of Andrew Cuomo, who was serving his third four-year term as governor when a report from state attorney general Letitia James accused him of sexual harassment and other transgressions.

Updated

Congress reporting unprecedented rise in Covid-19 cases

Congress is experiencing an unprecedented rise in Covid-19 cases, with the attending physician at the US Capitol saying today that the seven-day positivity rate at a congressional test site surging to 13% from just 1% in late November, Reuters is reporting.

Dr Brian Monahan told lawmakers and staff in a letter that most of the infections have been occurring among the vaccinated with Omicron variant making up about 61% of the cases and the Delta variant making up 38%, according to a limited sample as of 15 December.

The breakthrough infections among the vaccinated on Capitol Hill have not led fo hospitalizations, complications or deaths, as is the case with most breakthrough infections among the vaccinated.

This uptick in cases on Capitol Hill comes amid a surge in new cases across the country, with the daily average doubling in the last seven days to an average of 418,000 a day.

Though Monahan did not call for any changes in existing mask mandates at the Capitol, he advised members and staff to wear medical-grade masks rather than cloth ones. He also urged congressional offices, committees and agencies to immediately review operations and adopt “a maximal telework posture” to reduce in-person meetings and in-office activities.

While on the topic of coronavirus and taking precautions, it appears far-right congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene has been fined yet again for refusing to wear a mask on the House floor.

When it comes to mask wearing in the House, first offenses merit a warning, second offenses attract a $500 fine and subsequent offenses are fined $2,500. It’s hard to keep track of Greene’s tab, but the Georgia Republican who famously had to apologize after mask-wearing to the Holocaust has racked up a number of offenses at this point in the pandemic. The New York Times is reporting that her office says she has racked up at least $80,000 in fines for more than 30 maskless instances, while the ethics committee has reported only 20 instances totalling nearly $50,000.

The current surge in coronavirus infections may be having some effects on the Capitol soon:

....but not for everyone:

Updated

An attorney for Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, said today that he was contacted by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and informed that the office has closed the investigation into Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

To recap: Cuomo was once lauded for his handling of the crisis in New York, scoring a $5.1m book deal about his leadership during the state’s darkest hours. But as time went on, it became clear that all was not what it seemed: the New York state health department confirmed that Cuomo’s Covid-19 taskforce altered a report from that same health department that omitted 9,250 of the total nursing home patients killed by the coronavirus. Cuomo was ordered to return the $5.1m after it was discovered that he used state resources to write the book. And he later was forced to resign from his position as governor amid findings that he sexually harassed 11 women.

On the nursing home front, however, his attorney says the investigation is closed:

Laurence H Tribe: risk of coup is now greater than under Trump

In light of the impending anniversary of 6 January 2021 and the US Capitol attack, and indeed in light of events in the Senate today, concerning voting rights reform, an esteemed legal scholar writes for Guardian US:

Only free and fair elections in which the loser abides by the result stand between each of us and life at the mercy of a despotic regime – one we had no voice in choosing and one that can freely violate all our rights.

So everything is at stake in the peaceful transfer of power from a government that has lost its people’s confidence to its victorious successor. It was that peaceful transfer that Donald Trump and his minions sought to obstruct and almost succeeded in overthrowing when Joe Biden was elected president.

Here’s the full piece:

MLK's son welcomes Schumer voting rights gambit

Democrats are seizing on this week’s anniversary of the deadly US Capitol insurrection to renew a push for voting rights legislation to safeguard democracy.

Majority leader Chuck Schumer announced on Monday that the body will vote on changing its own rules on or before 17 January, the federal Martin Luther King Jr Day holiday, if Republicans continue to obstruct election reform.

The deadline appears part of a concerted effort to use Thursday’s commemorations, marking a year since a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s election win, to give fresh impetus to the long-stalled legislation.

In a letter to Senate Democrats, Schumer argued that the events of 6 January 2021 are directly linked to a campaign by Republican-led state legislatures to impose voter restriction laws.

“Let me be clear,” the New York senator wrote. “6 January was a symptom of a broader illness – an effort to delegitimise our election process, and the Senate must advance systemic democracy reforms to repair our republic or else the events of that day will not be an aberration – they will be the new norm.

“Much like the violent insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol nearly one year ago, Republican officials in states across the country have seized on the former president’s Big Lie about widespread voter fraud to enact anti-democratic legislation and seize control of typically non-partisan election administration functions.”

Schumer’s announcement was welcomed by Martin Luther King III, son of the civil rights activist and chairman of the Drum Major Institute.

“There is no better way to honor my father’s legacy than protecting the right to vote for all Americans,” he said.

“The King holiday is historically a day of service, and we hope the United States Senate will serve our democracy by passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

“We applaud Senator Schumer for his commitment to expanding voting rights, but we won’t halt our plans for action until legislation has been signed.”

Speaking of subpoenas in New York for Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr, as Viv was earlier, this piece from 2016 by Jon Swaine (late of this parish, now of the Washington Post) ought to be interesting secondary reading:

John’s intro: “An attempt by Donald Trump to slash the property tax bill on a golf club outside New York City may be undermined by records indicating that he previously said the property was worth 35 times more than the value he is now trying to convince a judge to approve.”

That sort of thing is what Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is looking into in an investigation which could result in a civil lawsuit. Such alleged practices at the Trump Organization are also part of a criminal inquiry run out of Manhattan.

Here’s Jon’s story:

Yesterday, Twitter permanently suspended the private account of Majorie Taylor Greene. Today, the far-right congresswoman said Facebook has suspended her account for 24 hours.

The New York state attorney general’s office is now seeking to question Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump in its inquiry into the Trump Organization and its business practices.

Attorneys subpoened Donald Trump last month.

According to the New York Times, Eric Trump was already questioned by the attorney general’s office in 2020.

Updated

More than 140 mayors have asked the US Senate to act to pass two pieces of sweeping voting rights legislation. Both bills have been stalled for months because no Republicans support them.

Senate Democrats are expected to make a new push in the coming days to do away with the filibuster, a senate rule that requires a 60-vote supermajority to advance legislation. Republicans used the rule to block the voting rights bills several times last year.

One bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, would set sweeping national guarantees for voting access, including 15 days of early voting, as well as guaranteed automatic and same-day voter registration. The second measure, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, would restore a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act that gives the federal government more oversight over US elections.

The bills would neutralize many new voting restrictions Republicans enacted in the last year.

“These bills would stop this voter suppression. They would create national standards for voting access in federal elections that would neutralize many of the restrictive voting laws passed in the states,” the group of 146 mayors wrote. “America’s mayors urge you to take whatever steps are necessary to assure that the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act can get a straight up or down vote.”

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has just announced plans to hold a vote before or on 17 January, Martin Luther King Jr Day, to change the filibuster rules. But what that means all entails is still up in the air.

To recap: the filibuster is an oft-used parliamentary tactic of the Republicans that requires a 60-vote majority to break. With voting rights, Republicans have used it repeatedly to either block passage of or debate on the For the People Act, now known as the Freedom to Vote Act.

A change to the filibuster rules could mean any number of things. Some advocates have called for abolishing the filibuster all together, while others are calling for ways to make using the filibuster more difficult, like requiring senators who oppose a bill to actually be physically present in the chamber. The Wall Street Journal, for example, is reporting the option of changing the rules so that instead of requiring 60 votes to break a filibuster, the opponents of the bill - the ones calling for a filibuster - must have 41 senators who show up in person to block it.

Meanwhile, the biggest obstacles for the Democrats at the moment remain moderate senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, both of whom have staunchly thrown their support behind the filibuster and have stated on the record that they would be opposed to abolishing it.

Schumer announces plans to hold vote to change filibuster rules

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has announced plans to hold a vote to change filibuster rules to advance legislation on voting rights protections. The vote, he wrote in a Dear Colleague letter, will take place on or before 17 January, Martin Luther King Jr Day, “to protect the foundation of our democracy: fair and free elections.”

In the letter, Schumer makes a connection between the anniversary of the 6 January attack on the US Capitol with the attack on voting rights.

“As we are all witnessing, the attacks on our democracy have not ceased. In fact, they have only accelerated,” Schumer wrote. “Much like the violent insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol nearly one year ago, Republican officials in states across the country have seized on the former president’s Big Lie about widespread voter fraud to enact anti-democratic legislation and seize control of typically nonpartisan election administration functions.”

Read the letter in full here:

Updated

Speaking of snow delays:

It looks like Washington might be calling a snow day soon.

The heavy snow is putting a damper on a number of plans today. The daily White House press briefing just got canceled because of the snow, even as Joe Biden is set to return to the White House today from Delaware.

At the Capitol, the snow is expected to make the return of Congress particularly brief:

Ex-US archivist: Trump scared of 'prison time' over 6 January

A former US official archivist thinks Donald Trump is so desperate to stop the 6 January committee accessing records from his White House because he wants to avoid “prison time” as a result of any release.

Trump’s fight to keep the records secret is on its way to the supreme court, after repeated losses for the former president.

The House 6 January committee is preparing for televised hearings and in rounds of interviews on Sunday its Democratic chairman, Bennie Thompson, and senior Republican, Liz Cheney, said a criminal referral for Trump remains a possibility.

“Given how frantic [Trump’s lawyers] are... there are things in those records that are going to make real trouble. I’m talking about prison time,” John W Carlin told the Daily Beast. “It reinforces the fact that they know they’re in real trouble if these things are released – particularly if they’re released soon.”

Five people died around the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden.

On Sunday, Cheney said the House select committee investigating 6 January now had “first-hand testimony” confirming Trump was in his private dining room at the White House watching TV as the riot unfolded.

Speaking to ABC’s This Week, Cheney said there were “potential criminal statutes at issue here, but I think that there’s absolutely no question that it was a dereliction of duty [by Trump in not trying to stop the attack]. And I think one of the things the committee needs to look at is … a legislative purpose, is whether we need enhanced penalties for that kind of dereliction of duty.”

Carlin was one of two former US archivists who spoke to the Beast about Trump’s fight to keep records pertinent to 6 January away from the House committee.

He said: “It’s important that records are used to get the truth out. Nothing highlights that more than the controversy we’re going through. Records are going to have a huge impact in determining who did what, particularly as you get to the justice department.”

While all the politics and talks may be heating up behind office doors, outside, a snowstorm is sweeping across Washington.

Updated

Former senate majority leader Harry Reid, who died last week at 82 after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer, will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on 12 January.

What with this being the week of the first anniversary of the US Capitol attack, a lot of US news organisations are out with polls on the state of US democracy.

At the weekend, we had more than a third of Americans telling the Washington Post violence against government was sometimes justified; CBS finding that just over two thirds think US democracy is threatened; and ABC finding that a little more than half of Republicans thought the 6 January rioters were trying to protect democracy.

This morning NPR has joined the rush, working with Ipsos to find that just under two-thirds of Americans, 64%, believe US democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing”.

They have a point: two-thirds of Republican respondents told NPR they agreed “with the verifiably false claim that ‘voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election”, and fewer than half such Americans said they accepted the election result.

Mallory Newall, a vice-president at Ipsos, told NPR: “There is really a sort of dual reality through which partisans are approaching not only what happened a year ago on 6 January, but also generally with our presidential election and our democracy.

“It is Republicans that are driving this belief that there was major fraudulent voting, and it changed the results in the election,” Newall said.

Here’s some further – and alarming – reading, from Richard Luscombe:

Schumer set to bring voting rights protections to Senate

Happy New Year, live blog readers. Welcome to 2022.

We kick off the year with the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, expected to lay out a plan to bring to the floor much-anticipated nationalized voting rights protections.

A quick refresher on the battle: Democrats have repeatedly been trying to pass versions of the For the People Act in the Senate since it passed in the Democrat-majority House in 2019. Republicans have time and time again used the parliamentary tactic of the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote majority to break, to block debate or passage.

The bill is now called the Freedom to Vote Act and is supported by all 50 Democrats including the moderate Joe Manchin, who wrote an oped opposing the original bill last year.

The bill will likely be filibustered once again. But Schumer is entering the new year swinging, signalling that he will open a debate about changing filibuster rules.

It will be an uphill battle. He will need everyone he can on his side, and two moderate Democrats – Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema – have been clear in their support of allowing the filibuster to remain as is.

Punchbowl News is reporting that Democrats will likely try to use the emotionally charged one-year anniversary of the 6 January attack on the US Capitol to sway Manchin and Sinema.

More to come. Stay tuned.

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