Summary
- Donald Trump has still not conceded, as his campaign pursues longshot legal challenges and his Republican allies insist he has a right to challenge the results. The president has continued to spread misinformation to spread doubt about the legitimacy of the elections.
- A USPS whistleblower who alleged ballot tampering has reportedly recanted his claims. This is a latest blow for Republicans who are struggling to substantiate their claims of widespread fraud.
- Joe Biden said he has not spoken to Trump since the election was called, and said his opponent’s refusal to accept defeat was “an embarrassment”. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released today found that 73% of the adults surveyed - both Democrats and Republicans - thought the loser of this election should concede.
- The US supreme court justices signaled that they are unlikely to strike down the entire Obamacare healthcare law. A legal challenge brought by Republican-governed states and backed by the Trump administration is seeking to invalidate the entire law based on the claim that the law’s individual mandate is unconstitutional.
- Extreme Republican partisans have been appointed to work at the Pentagon, after defense secretary Mark Esper was fired. The newcomers include Anthony Tata, a retired army brigadier general and Fox News commentator who called Barack Obama a “terrorist leader”.
- The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”. It was not clear if he was joking.
Updated
The misinformation media machine amplifying Trump's election lies
The Guardian’s Lois Beckett and Julia Carrie Wong report:
The networks have made their calls, world leaders have begun paying their respects, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media outlets appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
“I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video.
Read more:
Donald Trump has set up a retirement GoFundMe. Well, not exactly – he doesn’t call it a retirement GoFundMe, but his “election defense fund”.
Those donating may believe that the money will be used towards challenging the election result, but may have missed that their contributions are earmarked for paying off Trump’s re-election debts. It seems to be the latest episode in the Trump team’s comedy of errors.
As Trump continues to refuse to acknowledge the election result by baselessly claiming that Biden’s victory was won through voter fraud, he is also calling on his base for help. Donations can be made to two different funds – Trump’s personal fund, and his joint fund with the RNC.
“President Trump needs YOU to step up to make sure we have the resources to protect the integrity of the election!” the wording on both funds says, which is featured in a huge pop-up on Trump’s re-election webpage. It continues: “Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to the Official Election Defense Fund and to increase your impact by 1,000%!”
It is unclear who matches the donations.
But if you scroll down, past the information about the “Left-wing MOB” trying to “undermine our election”, you’ll see some fine print. On Trump’s personal fund, it dictates that of all donations raised, only 50% will go towards a recount effort, and that “50% of each contribution, up to a maximum of $2,800 ($5,000), [will] be designated toward DJTFP’s 2020 general election account for general election debt retirement until such debt is retired”.
On his joint fund with the RNC, the donations work as follows: “60% of each contribution first to Save America, up to $5,000/$5,000, then to DJTP’s recount account, up to a maximum of $2,800/$5,000. [And] 40% of each contribution to the RNC’s operating account, up to a maximum of $35,500/$15,000.”
This essentially means that depending on the size of your donation, a large portion of any donation won’t go to the “recount” bid but will instead go to the Super Pac sponsoring the bid, and the Republican party.
Read more:
A new poll finds that 79% of Americans believe Joe Biden won the election, including about 60% of Republicans.
Even as Donald Trump and campaign seek to challenge the election results with long-shot lawsuits, 72% of US adults believe loser should concede, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,363 adults.
About 60% believe there ultimately will be a peaceful transition of power.
The survey also found that 83% of Democrats and 59% of Republicans trusted local election officials to “do their job honestly”.
Updated
False or misleading claims of electoral fraud are going viral on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, even as the platforms continue to implement special measures aimed at reducing the spread of misinformation around the US presidential election.
Major social media platforms are nominally cracking down on misinformation, prominently displaying election results or appending warning labels to posts by Donald Trump that seek to undermine the validity of the vote.
According to social analytics platforms such as NewsWhip and CrowdTangle, however, claims about voting irregularities have become among the most-shared content on Facebook.
The top three posts are all from Donald Trump, according to CrowdTangle: one alleges “Fake Votes” in Nevada, where Trump trails Joe Biden by 36,000 votes; another claims Georgia, where Trump trails by 13,000 votes pending a recount, will be a “big presidential win”; and a third says “a very large number of ballots” will be affected by “threshold identification”, the meaning of which is unclear.
The top news stories on Facebook are also dominated by rightwing claims of “irregularities” and “fraud”, CrowdTangle data showed. Three of the top 10 posts are links from Trump to the far-right news site Breitbart, covering attorney general Bill Barr’s inquiry into “voting irregularities” and inquiries in Michigan and Georgia; a fourth is to rightwing site Newsmax, calling Pennsylvania’s situation a “constitutional travesty”.
Joining Trump in the top 10 are two posts from Republican media personality Dan Bongino backing the idea that election fraud is to blame for Trump’s loss, and a report from Fox News quoting Trump’s campaign team saying they are “not backing down”.
Read more:
A postal worker whose claims of voting irregularities have been the basis of Republican calls for investigations, admitted he fabricated his allegations, the Washington Post reports:
A Pennsylvania postal worker whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities admitted to U.S. Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations, according to three officials briefed on the investigation and a statement from a House congressional committee.
Richard Hopkins’s claim that a postmaster in Erie, Pa., instructed postal workers to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day was cited by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in a letter to the Justice Department calling for a federal investigation. Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open probes into credible allegations of voting irregularities and fraud, a reversal of long-standing Justice Department policy.
But on Monday, Hopkins, 32, told investigators from the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General that the allegations were not true, and he signed an affidavit recanting his claims, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tweeted late Tuesday that the “whistleblower completely RECANTED.”
This news comes as the Trump campaign continues to insist that the president’s election loss is due to fraud despite a lack of evidence.
Updated
The lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, said he’s offering $1m as a reward for reports of voter fraud, despite a lack of evidence that there is significant fraud, the Texas Tribune reports.
Republicans – who have been alleging voter fraud since before the elections - have been having trouble finding proof to back their claims. The Trump campaign has lobbed a series of long-shot lawsuits to discount mail-in votes that are unlikely to change the outcome of the presidential election.
Phone lines that the campaign has opened up to collect stories of fraud and inaccuracies have been bombarded by prank calls.
In Texas, as my colleague Erum Salam points out, Patrick’s reward is unlikely to produce any evidence:
dear god what a waste of money https://t.co/0zJgVP0A1X
— Erum Salam (@salamdogmillion) November 10, 2020
Updated
The reasons for the post-election personnel changes ten weeks before the end of Donald Trump’s tenure were unclear, but they came at a time when the president is refusing to accept election defeat.
The former defence secretary, Mark Esper, had refused to allow active duty troops to be deployed on US streets during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer.
In his resignation letter, Anderson, the outgoing Pentagon policy chief, also signalled his unease with the direction the Trump White House was taking in the aftermath of the election.
“Now, as ever, our long-term success depends on adhering to the US Constitution all public servants swear to support and defend,” he wrote.
Democrats raised the alarm over the wave of staff changes at the Pentagon. “It is hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the department of defence is during a period of presidential transition,” Adam Smith, the chairman of the House armed services committee said in a statement, adding that the development “should alarm all Americans”.
“If this is the beginning of a trend – the President either firing or forcing out national security professionals in order to replace them with people perceived as more loyal to him – then the next 70 days will be precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst.”
The top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, Mark Warner said the US had entered “uncharted territory” with Esper’s firing. “There’s never been a time when a senior official like this has been fired during a transition period between one administration to another,” Warner told MSNBC.
Extreme Republican partisans have been installed in important roles in the Pentagon, following the summary dismissal of the defense secretary.
Democrats immediately demanded explanations for the eleventh-hour personnel changes, and warned that the US was entering dangerous “uncharted territory”, reshuffling key national security roles during a presidential transition. However, defense experts argued there was little the new Trump appointees could do to use their positions to the president’s advantage, given the firm refusal of the uniformed armed services to get involved in domestic politics.
Anthony Tata, a retired Army brigadier general, novelist and Fox News commentator who called Barack Obama a “terrorist leader”, has taken control of the Pentagon’s policy department, following the resignation of the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, James Anderson.
Tata had been unable to win Senate confirmation for the post after old tweets surfaced in which he expressed virulent Islamophobic views.
Meanwhile, Kash Patel, a former Republican congressional aide who played a lead role in a campaign to discredit the investigation into Russian election meddling, has been made chief of staff to the new acting defense secretary, Chris Miller.
On the same day, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Vice Admiral Joseph Kernan, a retired Navy Seal, was also reported to have resigned on Tuesday, and was replaced by Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former aide to Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who pleaded guilty to perjury.
Updated
Current and former US Department of Justice (DoJ) officials have reacted with anger and dismay to the latest move in support of Donald Trump by William Barr, the attorney general who has stoked further discord around the president’s refusal to concede electoral defeat by approving federal investigations into voter fraud, despite little evidence of any wrongdoing.
Barr’s two-page memo, delivered to the 93 US attorneys across the country on Monday, was immediately condemned by senior figures inside and outside the DoJ.
In the most dramatic response, the top DoJ official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned from his post, telling colleagues he did so because of the “ramifications” of Barr’s move.
In a statement, Pilger pointed out that for the past 40 years the justice department had abided by a clear policy of non-intervention in elections, with criminal investigations only carried out after contests were certified and completed.
Barr’s memo tears up that rule by giving federal prosecutors the go-ahead to investigate what he called “apparently-credible allegations of irregularities”. His action was specifically aimed at closely fought presidential contests in swing states with prolonged vote counts caused by the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
Complaints about unsubstantiated irregularities have been received by the justice department from three states: Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Outside the DoJ, there was widespread unease that Barr has once again mobilized the might of the justice department in a politicized direction. The memo was interpreted as casting doubt on the propriety of the election, which on Saturday was called for Joe Biden following his victory by a clear and growing margin in Pennsylvania.
Read more:
Updated
Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has drafted “anti-mob” legislation that would expand the state’s Stand Your Ground Law that would allow citizens to shoot anyone they suspect is engaged in looting, the Miami Herald reports.
The legislation is a reaction to anti-police brutality, The Herald’s Ana Ceballos and David Ovalle report:
“It allows for vigilantes to justify their actions,” said Denise Georges, a former Miami-Dade County prosecutor who had handled Stand Your Ground cases. “It also allows for death to be the punishment for a property crime — and that is cruel and unusual punishment. We cannot live in a lawless society where taking a life is done so casually and recklessly.”
The draft legislation put specifics behind DeSantis’ pledge in September to crack down on “violent and disorderly assemblies” after he pointed to “reports of unrest” in other parts of the country after the high-profile death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer.
The proposal would expand the list of “forcible felonies” under Florida’s self-defense law to justify the use of force against people who engage in criminal mischief that results in the “interruption or impairment” of a business, and looting, which the draft defines as a burglary within 500 feet of a “violent or disorderly assembly.”
Read more here.
Updated
Trump's longshot election lawsuits: where do things stand?
Since election day, Donald Trump and other Republicans have filed a smattering of lawsuits in battleground states that have provided cover for Trump and other Republicans to say that the election still remains unresolved.
Legal experts have noted these suits are meritless, and even if they were successful, would not be enough to overturn the election results. Indeed, judges in several of these lawsuits have already dismissed them, noting the Trump campaign has failed to offer evidence to substantiate allegations of fraud.
Here’s where some of the key lawsuits stand:
Cheri Bustos, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), just had a call with House Democrats offering insight into what happened on Election Day when House Democrats lost five seats to Republican opponents – a disappoint after Democrats gained the house two years ago.
Reporters with sources who were on the call said that Bustos reaffirmed that her team did everything they could do, but were set back from Republicans overperforming in at-risk districts.
Bustos on Dem call addressing #FL26: “Trump’s massive overperformance with Cuban voters was simply too much for her to overcome.” Also says the DCCC saw “similar shifts with white working class voters in Abby Finkenauer’s Northeast Iowa district”
— Kirk A. Bado (@kirk_bado) November 10, 2020
On a call with House Democrats, DCCC Chair Bustos says "defund the police" was the most common GOP attack across the battlefield, per source on the call
— Bridget Bowman (@bridgetbhc) November 10, 2020
Bustos said yesterday that she will not run for the chair position again, what is largely seen as an acknowledgment of the party’s chagrin for losing seats to Republicans.
I’m signing off and handing the blog over the my Guardian colleague Maanvi Singh. Stay tuned for more live updates.
CIA director Gina Haspel had a brief meeting with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell this afternoon amid rumors that Donald Trump plans to fire her from her position.
After Mark Esper, former defense secretary, was fired yesterday after his relationship with the president became tense over the use of active-service troops for Black Lives Matter protests over the summer. Esper reportedly has said he fears Haspel and Christopher Wray, FBI director, will be the next to go.
Haspel refused to answer questions from reporters about the rumors of her termination as she was going to and leaving her meeting with McConnell. It is unclear what the subject of the meeting was, but as CNN’s Manu Raju said on Twitter, McConnell is a strong supporter of Haspel, and both share a Kentucky background.
CIA Director Haspel departs the Hill after meeting with Mitch McConnell for roughly 20 minutes.
— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotnbc) November 10, 2020
“Have a good evening everyone.” Did not answer multiple Qs from @AllisonMPecorin @JulieNBCNews pic.twitter.com/vFmuYkK2Oq
North Carolina’s governor Roy Cooper lowered the state’s indoor gathering limit today as cases in the state continue to rise. The new limit has been adjusted to 10 people, down from 25. The limit does not apply to universities or schools.
The state saw 2,582 cases yesterday and has over 1,200 people in the hospital with the virus. The state has averaged over 2,000 new cases a day over the last three weeks.
Our numbers are too high. Considering our trends and cooler weather driving events indoors, North Carolina will remain paused in our current Phase 3 and we will adjust our indoor gathering limit down from 25 to 10 people.
— Governor Roy Cooper (@NC_Governor) November 10, 2020
Covid has spiked around the country, with new cases topping 130,000 in the US in recent days. Unlike previous waves, cases are no longer rising in regional “hot-spots” but can be found all around the country.
Public health experts have long warned that the winter would bring a new rise in cases as people head indoors, where the virus is more likely to spread, as the weather cools. State and local officials have been hesitant to implement the sweeping stay-at-home orders that were seen in the spring over fears of furthering economic declines.
The Biden campaign released the names of members of its transition team. The list has around 500 people who will specialize in different government agencies, from the Department of Defense to the US Postal Service.
Most of the people on the team are volunteers. The list posted on Biden’s website includes each member’s most recent employer. Many of the larger department teams include former staffers from Obama’s administration.
Lots of former DHS folks on Biden’s transition team, including a former DHS chief of staff (Rosen), former USCIS chief counsel (Jaddou) and former FEMA administrator (Fugate) pic.twitter.com/3OL2lJNAwC
— Tal Kopan (@TalKopan) November 10, 2020
Biden releases names for agency review teams.
— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) November 10, 2020
Leaders of HHS squad include Robert Gordon (Obama OMB veteran, now Michigan Health Dept. Director) and Chiquita Brooks-LaSure (who helped write and implement the ACA, in Congress and then at HHS). https://t.co/G1B1g9FPRu pic.twitter.com/TsNHBgsjLF
Transition teams can typically coordinate with officials at the agencies they will take over, but that requires an election certification from the White House’s General Services Administration. Because Donald Trump is refusing to concede to the election, members of the transition team cannot contact the agencies they will take over.
Updated
The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe in Miami reports:
It seems that Florida’s improbable new status as an adult in the room, following an unusually orderly and well run election process, may be a little premature. The Sunshine State has reverted to type with the appointment by its Republican governor Ron DeSantis of a conspiracy theory-peddling Uber driver and sports blogger as a senior analyst of Covid-19 data.
As the Miami Herald reported Tuesday, Kyle Lamb’s credentials for the $40,000-a-year job in the office of policy and budget are at best questionable.
“Fact is, I’m not an ‘expert.’ I’m not a doctor, epidemiologist, virologist or scientist,” the Ohio native admits on his subscription-only podcast Beyond the Fold, whose 43 patrons paying $3 per month have also learned that Lamb considers himself to be a “jack of all trades [and] master of none!”
“I have no qualms about being a ‘sports guy’ moonlighting as a Covid-19 analyst,” he writes.
Florida is currently experiencing a surge in cases of Covid-19, with the state having surpassed 850,000 cases and 17,200 deaths.
Despite this, DeSantis, a keen Donald Trump ally, has discontinued almost all lockdown restrictions across Florida and signed executive orders to thwart local authorities who seek to reimpose them.
According to the Herald, Lamb, 40, has stated in frequent posts on Twitter and sports message boards that masks do not prevent the spread of coronavirus, that lockdowns are ineffective, and that he believes Covid-19 could be part of an international “cultural biowar” instigated by China.
The process that was followed to recruit Lamb is unclear, but in a tweet four days ago he said he had “accepted an offer to go work for Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Florida state capitol. I will be doing data analysis on several fronts for them including but not limited to Covid-19 research and other projects.”
Fred Piccolo, spokesperson for DeSantis, told the Herald in a statement that Lamb had been hired to an “entry level” position” and was “not a Covid-19 hire”.
DeSantis’s history with data analysts employed by the state has been rocky. In May, Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who created and maintained Florida’s official Covid-19 database, claimed she was fired for refusing to manipulate figures or censor information.
The Associated Press has a useful explainer about the election and how evidence so far shows it was not full of widespread voter fraud.
Donald Trump has refused to concede the election, saying that he would have won if it weren’t for “illegal” votes that have been counted. Trump and his campaign have not given any specific evidence of voter fraud to back their claims.
Here’s more from the Associated Press:
WHAT IS TRUMP CHALLENGING?
The Trump campaign has filed more than a dozen lawsuits in at least five states.
In Pennsylvania, the campaign has challenged the state Supreme Court ruling allowing election officials to accept mail-in ballots up to three days after the election as long as they were postmarked on Election Day. Trump has also sued over campaign observers allegedly being blocked from witnessing vote tallying in Pennsylvania. And he’s challenged the secretary of state instructing counties that voters whose absentee ballots were rejected could cast a provisional ballot.
Trump has won one victory so far: A state court ruled his campaign observers had to be allowed closer to the actual vote counting. That ruling had no impact on the outcome of the race.
Four other lawsuits filed by the campaign have been dismissed. Others are pending.
On Monday, his campaign sued to force Pennsylvania not to certify the results of the election altogether. The 85-page lawsuit itself contained no evidence of voter fraud, other than a smattering of allegations such as an election worker in Chester County altering “over-voted” ballots by changing votes that had been marked for Trump to another candidate.
Top Democratic leaders in the state accused Trump of trying to disenfranchise voters and overturn an election he lost.
WHAT ARE TRUMP’S ALLIES SAYING?
Trump’s lawyers and campaign staff say the election is not over and that they are investigating claims in several states, though they continue to lack any evidence of widespread fraud that affected the outcome of the race. Top Republicans have supported the president’s efforts to fight the election results in court.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Trump was “100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” Attorney General William Barr authorized the Justice Department to investigate “clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities.”
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
All disputes over the counts in each state must be complete by Dec. 8. Members of the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14. The U.S. House and Senate hold a joint session on Jan. 6, 2021, to count the electoral votes in each state.
The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:
A Republican candidate for Congress has defeated an incumbent Democrat in California, a major victory for the GOP and rare loss for Democrats in the blue state.
Republican Michelle Steel won her race against first-term Congressman Harley Rouda, who conceded this morning. The seat is in Orange county, a traditionally Republican stronghold in southern California that has become increasingly liberal in recent years. Rouda won in 2018 against longtime GOP congressman Dana Rohrabacher, one of seven House seats swept by Democrats in California that election.
Roud was the first Democrat to represent the district:
Thanks to the incredible energy brought by our thousands of grassroots volunteers, I was proud to be the first Democrat ever to represent #CA48.
— Harley Rouda (@HarleyRouda) November 10, 2020
Serving the people here has been the honor of my life. https://t.co/up1YVZTnuU
Steel won about 51% of the votes, according to the AP, even though Trump lost by huge margins in California, backed by roughly 33% of voters. Steel and Washington state’s Marilyn Strickland (a Democrat elected last week) are the first Korean American women to join Congress. Steel is currently the head of the Orange county board of supervisors.
Read more from my colleague Lauren Gambino on the aftermath of the Democrats’ losses in the House this year:
Updated
This is Lauren Aratani taking over for Joanna Walters.
Cal Cunningham, a Democratic candidate for Senate in North Carolina, conceded to his opponent Thom Tillis, the incumbent Republican senator.
Before Election Day, the race was seen as a possible flip that would help the Democrats gain a majority in the Senate. But Cunningham fell short of about 95,000, getting about 47% of votes casted. About 97% of votes have been counted.
“The voters have spoken and I respect their decision,” Cunningham said in a statement. “Though this isn’t the electoral outcome we worked for, I’ll always be grateful to be a North Carolinian.”
In the weeks leading up to the election, Cunningham faced scrutiny for leaked, sexually suggestive texts between him and a woman who is not his wife. Despite the scandal, Cunningham was still polling neck-to-neck with Tillis.
My statement on the results of this race: pic.twitter.com/dWo5gipxw8
— Cal Cunningham (@CalforNC) November 10, 2020
'America is back', says Biden to world leaders
Joe Biden just spoke of his contacts with various world leaders since he won the US presidential election.
Biden received a phone call from the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, this morning.
At the address and press conference in Delaware moments ago, Biden signaled that his presidency will be a repudiation of Donald Trump’s nationalist, insular “America first” policy.
Biden said his signal to the world was: “America is back. We are back in the game. I’m not going to be ‘America alone’.”
Biden said he had taken with six world leaders and had some calls to return.
“Great Britain, France, Germany, Canada, etc … Ireland,” he said, which obviously leaves out the major powers of China and Russia and Middle East nations.
He said the attitude of those calling was “fulsome, energetic” and said, “I feel good” – despite the recognition that he is “going to inherit a divided country” in “a world in disarray” because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Updated
Biden labels Trump's refusal to concede the election an 'embarrassment'
At an address and press conference in Wilmington just now, Biden said that he has not spoken to Donald Trump since the election was called in Biden’s favor on Saturday, but joked: “Mr President, I look forward to speaking with you.”
But Biden was solemn, almost downbeat, about Trump’s refusal to concede defeat.
“It’s an embarrassment, quite frankly,” he said in response to a press question.
He went on: “How can I say this tactfully? It will not help the president’s legacy. I think that … from my discussions with foreign leaders so far, they are hopeful that US democratic institutions are strong and have endured and at the end of the day it’s all going to come to fruition on January 20.”
Updated
At Joe Biden’s speech and press conference, the president-elect just said: “We are already beginning the transition.” The answer was in response to a press question about his response to Donald Trump’s refusal to concede that Biden and Harris won last week’s election.
“The fact that they are not willing to acknowledge that we have won at this point if not of much consequence in our planning and what we are able to do between now and January 20,” he said.
Biden said he hoped to avoid legal action to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to overturn the result of last week’s election.
“Nothing will slow up our efforts to put things together,” he said of the transition team’s efforts to prepare to take power... “nothing is going to stop that.”
'Families are reeling' – Biden on effects of coronavirus on US
President-elect Joe Biden has promised that America will “get through this together” about the coronavirus pandemic.
“Families are reeling,” he said. He promised to expand the reach of Obamacare after taking office in January.
“We have a moral obligation to ensure that health care is a right for all, not a privilege for a few,” Biden said.
Updated
Biden condemns 'rightwing ideologues' for trying to tear down Obamacare
Joe Biden is giving an address in which he has condemned the latest attempt by Republican “right wing ideologues” to strike down the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, in the latest case before the supreme court.
He pointed out that previous attempts have been rejected by the court, in 2012 and 2015, “and Congress has rejected numerous efforts.”
“In the middle of a deadly pandemic that’s affecting more than 10 million Americans, these ideologues are once again trying to strip health coverage away from the American people,” he said.
Updated
Kamala Harris is speaking....
That’s vice president-elect Harris to you, Mr vice president.
Harris is lamenting the death toll in the coronavirus pandemic and warning that if the Affordable Care Act is struck down by the supreme court, “communities of color will be particularly hard hit” in the US.
“Joe Biden won the election decisively,” Harris just said.
She says they won’t let Trump overturn the election. Here’s comes Biden now.
Updated
We’re waiting for president-elect Joe Biden to make his latest speech, this time on healthcare and the Republicans’ attempt to scupper the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
But the dude appears to be running a bit late.
We have a live stream poised, so do tune in, surely won’t be long, they’re doing microphone checks now.
Biden will be accompanied by vice-president elect Kamala Harris.
The supreme court held an oral hearing this morning to air arguments out of Texas, backed by the Trump administration to, ultimately, tear down the signature legislative achievement of the Obama-Biden administration.
Led by chief justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, both considered part of the conservative wing of the court, the bench signaled that it’s unlikely to go along with the destruction of the ACA. A ruling will come before the end of the current supreme court term, at the end of June, 2021.
Updated
Here’s a terrific explainer from my Guardian US senior politics colleague, Lauren Gambino, with our video team in London, about the work ahead for president-elect Joe Biden and vice president-elect Kamala Harris to unite a very divided America.
The major issues that the team will have to tackle include the coronavirus pandemic and racial injustice and inequality in the US, which Biden acknowledged in a recent speech was systemic, and the climate crisis.
And there are the issues to be addressed of re-humanizing immigration and related policies after Donald Trump’s hardline approach to immigration, migration and refugee assistance.
It’s an excellent five minute watch and it’s here, and here:
Updated
Secretary of state talks publicly about smooth transition 'to second Trump' term
Mike Pompeo has just told reporters in the State Department: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”
He gave a little smile right after saying it so it is hard to know if it was intended as a joke, though it seems an odd thing for a US secretary of state to joke about, my Guardian colleague Julian Borger writes.
“We’re ready,” Pompeo went on. “The world is watching what’s taking place. We’re gonna count all the votes. When the process is complete, there’ll be electors selected. There’s a process - the constitution lays it out pretty clearly.
“The world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the State Department is functional today, successful today and successful with a president who’s in office on January 20 a minute after noon, will also be successful”
Pompeo said he that he was getting “calls from all across the world”, but did not say who from. The leaders of America’s main allies have already congratulated president-elect Biden.
“They understand that we have a legal process. They understand that this takes time,” the secretary of state said, comparing the situation now to the 2000 election. In 2000, George W Bush was leading by 537 votes in Florida, when the Supreme Court intervened to stop vote counting. Biden is ahead by tens of thousands of votes in four states.
Echoing Trump’s line which has become the party line for Republicans, Pompeo said “We must count every legal vote, we want to make sure that any vote that wasn’t lawful ought not be counted - that dilutes your vote, if it’s done properly. Got to get that right. When we get it right, we’ll get it right. We’re in good shape.”
When a journalist asked whether Trump’s refusal to concede undermines US promotion of democratic norms abroad, Pompeo called the question “ridiculous”, a word he often uses for questions he doesn’t like.
Updated
More legal heckling from the losers.
Election officials in Orange county, a California region with strong Trump support, have announced an audit of the results in the presidential race to “check on the integrity of the election process”, the Guardian’s Sam Levin writes from Los Angeles.
The so-called “risk-limiting audit” is voluntary and is not the same as a recount, but comes as Trump and his supporters across the country are demanding recounts and spreading baseless and false claims about fraud in the election won by Biden.
“Conducting a risk-limiting audit is an excellent way to audit elections and provide an important check on the integrity of the election process,” said Neal Kelley, the Orange county registrar, who is Republican. “This is a valuable opportunity to utilize the enhanced auditing capability of Orange County’s voting system, while at the same time ensuring that the outcomes are true and correct.”
The audit involves reviewing more ballots by hand to provide “strong statistical evidence that the election outcome is correct”, he said. The audit is not expected to impact the race, and nearly 54% of Orange county ballots went to Biden, compared to 44% for Trump, according to the Los Angeles Times’s data.
Updated
Early afternoon summary
It’s been a lively morning, at the US supreme court and in the Trump administration, especially. And at the top of the hour, president-elect Joe Biden is due to make a fresh address to the public, with the focus this time on healthcare. So stay tuned.
Here are the main events so far today:
- With comments in the supreme court hearing on the Affordable Care Act from chief justice John Roberts and associate justice Brett Kavanaugh this morning, Obamacare appears to have a fresh chance of surviving.
- British prime minister Boris Johnson called president-elect Joe Biden this morning to congratulate him and pledge to work together, particularly on ending the coronavirus pandemic and taking action on the climate crisis.
- Pentagon acting police chief James Anderson resigned this morning, just a day after Donald Trump fired defense secretary Mark Esper.
- As the coronavirus rages across the US afresh, it’s emerged that there are almost 60,000 people in the nation who are in hospital with the disease, a record total.
Here is some more on the call between British prime minister Boris Johnson and US president-elect Joe Biden, who have never met.
Johnson said he spoke to Biden today about working together on tackling the climate crisis and on their nations recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic.
As a reminder, Donald Trump pulled the US out of the world climate crisis action plan known as the Paris accord, and has no official items on his public schedule today and went golfing twice at the weekend, as the US Covid death toll approaches 250,000.
England just went into a new phase of lockdown to try to block the latest surge of the virus, while Wales has just emerged from a two-week lockdown and now has less-tight restrictions in place, for example.
In the US the virus is spreading like wildfire right now, having kept its status as nation with the world’s highest number of cases and deaths, according to Johns Hopkins data.
Johnson has predicted close ties with the United States under Biden, seeing common ground on issues like climate change even though the president-elect has aired concerns about his Brexit policy removing Britain from the European Union.
Johnson has never met Biden and could have to work hard to foster the so-called “special relationship” between the historical allies, Reuters reports.
After the call, Johnson’s office said the prime minister had invited Biden to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26, in Glasgow next year.
It said Johnson and Biden committed to build their countries’ partnership in areas such as trade and security, including through the NATO defense alliance.
There was no reference to any discussion of Brexit on the call. Johnson’s government is seeking a trade deal with the European Union but is facing a no-deal exit.
Johnson has put forward legislation that would break the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit divorce treaty that seeks to avoid a physical customs border between the British province and EU-member Ireland.
That prompted a warning from Biden, who has talked about the importance of his Irish heritage, that the United Kingdom must honor Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace agreement as it withdraws from the bloc or there can be no separate U.S. trade deal.
Meanwhile, Biden has called Trump a “climate arsonist” and is pledged to return the US to the Paris climate accords asap upon taking office.
Here is a piece from Guardian US’s Climate Countdown special series.
Updated
Supreme court indicates Obamacare likely to survive its scrutiny
US supreme court justices a little earlier signaled that they are unlikely to strike down the entire Obamacare healthcare law, in a legal challenge brought by Texas and other Republican-governed states and backed by Donald Trump’s administration.
The justices heard about two hours of arguments by teleconference this morning in an appeal by a coalition of Democratic-governed states including California and New York and the Democratic-led House of Representatives to preserve the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as Obamacare is formally known.
Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh both asked questions that suggested they were skeptical of Republican arguments that all of Obamacare must fall even if one key provision, known as the individual mandate, is found to be unconstitutional. That provision originally required people to obtain insurance or pay a financial penalty, Reuters writes.
“It’s hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire Act to fall if the mandate was struck down,” Roberts said, noting that Congress did not repeal the entire law in 2017 when it eliminated the mandate’s financial penalty.
The case represents the latest Republican legal attack on the 2010 law, which was the signature domestic legislative achievement of Democratic former president Barack Obama.
The supreme court in 2012 and 2015 fended off previous Republican challenges to it. Republicans also have failed in numerous efforts to repeal Obamacare in Congress, though Trump’s administration has taken steps to hobble the law.
If Roberts and Kavanaugh in the court’s eventual ruling, due by the end of June, 2021, join with the court’s three liberal justices, it would be enough to keep the vast majority of the law intact.
President-elect Joe Biden, who served as vice president under Obama, has criticized Republican efforts to throw out the ACA, especially in the midst of a deadly coronavirus pandemic, and hopes to buttress Obamacare after taking office on January 20.
Roberts and Kavanaugh appeared to agree that the mandate to obtain insurance can be separated from the rest of the law.
“We ask ourselves whether Congress would want the rest of the law to survive if an unconstitutional provision were severed,” Roberts said.
The fact that Congress in 2017 left the rest of the law intact “seems to be compelling evidence,” Roberts added.
The justices – conservatives and liberals alike – also raised questions over whether the Republican challengers had the proper legal standing to bring the lawsuit.
Updated
If Fauci’s rolling up his sleeve....get ready.
America’s top infectious diseases expert, Anthony Fauci, said a little earlier that he will take Pfizer/BioNTech’s new coronavirus vaccine if the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves it and that he has confidence in the company and the government agency.
Asked on MSNBC if he would take the vaccine, Reuters reports that Fauci said: “I’m going to look at the data, but I trust Pfizer. I trust the FDA.”
He continued: “These are colleagues of mine for decades, the career scientists. If they look at this data, and they say this data is solid, let’s go ahead and approve it, I promise you, I will take the vaccine, and I will recommend that my family take the vaccine.”
Pfizer is understood to be seeking US emergency authorization for the vaccine.
Fauci said yesterday that a US nascent vaccine by pharmaceutical Moderna is not fare behind.
He’s the top public health official on the White House coronavirus task force, but has fallen out of favor with Donald Trump because he refuses, unlike the president, to lie about the pandemic and what needs to be done about it.
Fauci has served six different presidents. He told CNN last night that he hasn’t spoken to Trump since the president was a patient at Walter Reed hospital on the outskirts of Washington, DC, last month suffering from...coronavirus.
Johnson congratulates Biden directly
British prime minister Boris Johnson has taken to Twitter to let us know that he’s just spoken with US president-elect Joe Biden and congratulated the Democrat on his victory in the election, despite the fact that Donald Trump has yet to concede defeat and Johnson has been awkwardly in bed with the Republican, pro-Brexit “populist” occupant of the White House.
Johnson told Biden he looked forward to strengthening the partnership between the UK and the US.
He also said, crucially, that he looks forward to working with the incoming president Biden on tackling climate change, promoting democracy and - in the Biden campaign phrase that Boris recently “borrowed” from Joe - “building back better” from the coronavirus pandemic ravaging both their nations.
I just spoke to @JoeBiden to congratulate him on his election. I look forward to strengthening the partnership between our countries and to working with him on our shared priorities – from tackling climate change, to promoting democracy and building back better from the pandemic.
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) November 10, 2020
“I just spoke to @JoeBiden to congratulate him on his election,” Johnson said in a tweet.
“I look forward to strengthening the partnership between our countries and to working with him on our shared priorities * from tackling climate change, to promoting democracy and building back better from the pandemic.”
Updated
Senior pentagon policy official quits a day after defense secretary is fired
The Pentagon’s acting policy chief, James Anderson, has resigned today, just a day after Donald Trump fired his defense secretary, Mark Esper.
SCOOP: The Pentagon’s acting policy chief, James Anderson, resigned on Tuesday after falling out of favor with the White House. He pushed back on several Trump loyalists the White House tried to install at DoD. (w/ @laraseligman) https://t.co/AULFGghUkD
— Daniel Lippman (@dlippman) November 10, 2020
He fell out of favor with the White House, raising fears of a post-election purge at the Defense Department, Politico reports.
The departure of Anderson, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, potentially paves the way for Anthony Tata, Trump’s controversial nominee for the top policy job who was pulled from consideration due to Islamophobic tweets, to take over the policy shop.
Anderson, who was confirmed in June as the No. 2 policy official but has been acting in the top job, submitted his letter of resignation on Tuesday morning, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO. He had been expected to be asked by the White House to resign in the next few days.
“I am particularly grateful to have been entrusted with leading the dedicated men and women of Policy, who play a key role in our Nation’s security,” Anderson wrote in the letter. “Now, as ever, our long-term success depends on adhering to the U.S. Constitution all public servants swear to support and defend.”
Anderson stepped down after clashing with the White House personnel office, according to current defense officials and one former defense official, who expect Anderson will be the first of several departures in the wake of Esper’s firing.
A Pentagon spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment. A White House spokesperson said they don’t comment on personnel.
Anderson pushed back on several Trump loyalists the White House tried to install at DoD, including Frank Wuco and Rich Higgins, said one of the people, who like others requested anonymity in order to discuss sensitive personnel issues.
Talking about the news on CNN earlier, the network’s Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr, said insiders are worried that if Trump also fires, alongside Esper, CIA director Gina Haspel and FBI director Christopher Wray that it would amount to “the decapitation of career professionals” at the top of the government’s national security apparatus, literally putting the US at greater risk from overseas enemies.
Roberts and Kavanaugh inject doubt into argument to strike down Obamacare
Supreme court chief justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, the last justice to be appointed to the court before Amy Coney Barrett skidded in on the eve of the 2020 election, are both deemed to be on the conservative wing of the court.
They just expressed skepticism during oral arguments before the bench this morning that the entire Affordable Care Act must be struck down [even] if one of its key provisions, the individual mandate, is [as opponents of the law argue] unconstitutional.
Roberts now suggests he, like Kavanaugh, is skeptical of the challengers' severability argument. "It's hard for you to argue," Roberts says to Hawkins, that the 2017 Congress intended for the entire ACA to fall if the individual mandate were struck down.
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) November 10, 2020
Roberts continues.
Maybe it's true that some lawmakers would have wanted the court to strike down the full law, but "that's not our job," Roberts says.
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) November 10, 2020
Roberts, like Kavanaugh, wrote an opinion last term in which he found one provision of a statute invalid but upheld the remainder of the law.
Ultra conservatives have been concerned (read aghast) about Roberts of late, after rulings last term where he favored arguments supporting reproductive rights and immigration and LGBTQ rights.
Kavanaugh, not so much. So, as Trump likes to say, we’ll see what happens.
President-elect Joe Biden has named a 13-member coronavirus advisory board to begin preparations for his administration’s response to the pandemic, including epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, Michael Osterholm.
But, to temper what current health sec Alex Azar said on NBC this morning, Biden task force member Osterholm voiced caution over on CBS about the speed of being able to distribute what we think are at one or two successful coronavirus vaccines coming out of trials in the next few weeks.
“We have to understand that Operation Warp Speed has been a remarkable effort in terms of bringing vaccines forward. I give them great credit for that. But there are still huge challenges on how to distribute it,” Osterholm told “CBS This Morning” anchor Gayle King.
“Remember, this vaccine has to be kept at -94 degrees Fahrenheit [that’s minus 94] ...we don’t have refrigeration operations like that out here, and there have been very few resources provided to states and local health departments to go beyond the initial planning,” Osterholm added.
“We at the public health world out here are concerned about the planning the military is bringing forward as touted by many as the answer. When in fact in many cases we are concerned it’s part of the problem.”
President-elect Joe Biden has named a 13-member #coronavirus advisory board to begin preparations for his administration's response to the pandemic.
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) November 10, 2020
Task force member @CIDRAP's Michael Osterholm (@mtosterholm) joins us with more on how the new group will handle the crisis. pic.twitter.com/QjOgKuKQtI
“You did the right thing” - what Cindy McCain thinks her husband John is saying from the great yonder about the election result and her endorsement of Joe Biden.
“I think my husband would be very pleased,” Cindy McCain, who is now part of Biden’s transition team, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night.
“We were good friends with the Bidens,” she said, adding “and I just know he is looking down and going, ‘You did the right thing.’”
"I think my husband would be very pleased."
— CNN (@CNN) November 10, 2020
The late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain would be happy that Joe Biden has won the presidency, his widow Cindy McCain said https://t.co/XnlYQLulq1
The McCains are basically Republican royalty in the state John McCain represented in the Senate, Arizona, just as the Bidens are Democratic royalty in Delaware, and the two Senators were comfortable with bipartisan cooperation.
And Arizona flipped to the Democrats in a historic landmark of the 2020 election.
Cindy McCain said her husband and Biden were used to “working directly across the aisle with each other, disagreeing a lot, but they were able to get things done because they did for the good of the country.”
Without mentioning the outgoing Republican president, Donald Trump, McCain added: “That is the difference in President-elect Biden with regards to this White House. I believe they can get things done and I also think that they’re going to heal the country by working that way -- and that’s of course what we all want.”
John McCain died in 2018 and Trump wasn’t invited to the funeral after spending years dissing the military veteran, former prisoner of war and longtime Senator.
And in a handy loop back to the supreme court’s hearing arguments today on the Affordable Care Act, here’s to remembering that McCain nixed the GOP attempt to scuttle Obamacare with his famous, emperor-like thumbs down vote in on the senate floor in 2017.
Updated
President-elect Joe Biden has criticized Republican efforts to throw out the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as the law is formally known, in the midst of a deadly coronavirus pandemic.
Biden hopes to buttress Obamacare after taking office on January 20.
As you recall, Biden got in mild trubs when he congratulated his boss Barack Obama’s announcement that the law he drove had passed, in 2010. A mike picked up the then vice president telling Obama that what became the president’s signature legislative achievement was “a big fucking deal”.
Classic Biden stating of the obvious in an inappropriate way. But the incident wasn’t an impediment and, compared with Donald Trump’s daily rudeness, it’s a nothingburger.
Reuters adds:
The justices were hearing a scheduled 80 minutes of arguments by teleconference in an appeal by a coalition of Democratic-governed states including California and New York and the Democratic-led House of Representatives to preserve Obamacare.
The case represents the latest Republican legal attack on the 2010 law...The Supreme Court in 2012 and 2015 fended off previous Republican challenges to it.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority after the Republican-led Senate last month confirmed Trump’s third appointee, Amy Coney Barrett. Most legal experts think the justices will stop short of a seismic ruling striking down Obamacare.
A group of states led by Texas, later joined by Trump’s administration, sued in 2018 in Texas to strike down the law.
“We believe there are nine justices who connect the dots and see how important this is,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat who is leading the coalition of 20 states defending Obamacare.
“We think there’s a very strong chance that Americans will continue to have good healthcare coverage,” Becerra added.Texas-based US District Court Judge Reed O’Connor in 2018 ruled that Obamacare was unconstitutional as currently structured in light of a Republican-backed change made by Congress a year earlier.
The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals last year partially upheld that ruling, saying the law’s “individual mandate,” which required people to obtain insurance or pay a financial penalty, afoul of the Constitution. But the 5th Circuit stopped short of striking down the law. The Democratic-led states and the House then appealed to the Supreme Court.
Updated
Supreme court Obamacare arguments to begin
Arguments begin at the top of the hour in the US supreme court, the first hearing since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in October.
What’s heard today will sound largely arcane to the lay ear, so we’ll try to bring you meaningful snippets. For more frequent updates, though some more abstruse, of course, Scotusblog will be all over it, so you could always follow that on Twitter.
Good morning. It's Obamacare day at the Supreme Court. At 10 a.m. EST, the justices will hear argument in a constitutional challenge from Republican state officials, joined by the Trump administration, seeking to invalidate the law. We'll be live-tweeting the argument right here.
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) November 10, 2020
When the court weighs the fate of the Affordable Care Act, alias “Obamacare”, arguments will revolve around arcane points of law like ‘severability’ - whether the justices can surgically snip out part of the law and leave the rest, The Associated Press writes in its summary moments ago giving the lie of the land.
But what’s at stake has real-world consequences for just about every American, as well as the health care industry, a major source of jobs and tax revenues. Whether the ACA stays, goes or is significantly changed will affect the way life is lived in the US.
The argument against the law from the Trump administration and conservative states is that the 10-year-old statute was rendered unconstitutional in its entirety when Congress dialed down to zero a penalty on those remaining uninsured.
The court has shifted solidly to the political right under Donald Trump. Here’s a look at some of what’s at stake if the opponents of the law prevail:
Covid-19 - a new pre-existing condition
Before the ACA, insurers could turn a person down for an individual policy, or charge them more, based on their medical history. The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that about 54 million working-age adults have health issues that would have made them “uninsurable” before former Barack Obama’s signature law.
Tens of millions more have issues that could have led to higher premiums. Female gender was one, as insurers routinely charged women more.
Coverage for more than 20 million
The ACA’s two main programs for covering uninsured people would be wiped out if the law is overturned, leaving more than 20 million people uninsured unless a divided Congress can put a new safety net in place.
Prevention
Most American women now pay nothing out of their own pockets for birth control. That’s covered as a preventive service, free of charge to the patient, under the ACA.
Many other services, from colonoscopies to flu shots, are also free.
Return of a Medicare gap
“Obamacare” took the first major steps to close Medicare’s unpopular “doughnut hole,” a coverage gap that used to leave older Americans on the hook for hundreds of dollars in prescriptions drug costs. Congress later accelerated the timetable.
Repealing the ACA would mean the return of the coverage gap.
Longer runway shortened
One of the earliest benefits to take effect after the passage of “Obamacare” was a requirement that insurers allow young adults to stay on a parent’s plan until they turned 26. That would go if the law is destroyed.
Updated
A safe Thanksgiving during a pandemic is possible, but health experts know their advice is as tough to swallow as dry turkey: Stay home. Don’t travel. If you must gather, do it outdoors.
With a fall surge of coronavirus infections gripping the US, many Americans are forgoing tradition and getting creative with celebrations, The Associated Press writes.
For the first time in five years, Atlanta nutrition consultant Marisa Moore won’t travel to South Carolina to see her large extended family. Instead, she plans to video chat with them as she attempts her first home-baked apple pie. When it’s time to eat, they’ll compare plates.
“We’ll talk all day,” Moore said.
Yesterday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its holiday guidance, noting the virus crisis is worsening and that small household gatherings are “an important contributor.”
The CDC said older adults and others at heightened risk of severe illness should avoid gathering with people outside their households.
Experts point to Canada, where Thanksgiving was celebrated October 12. Clusters of cases tied to family gatherings followed. “This sucks. It really, really does,” Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said two weeks later.
There’s no need to cancel the holiday. Spending time with loved ones is important for health too, said Lacy Fehrenbach, Washington state deputy secretary of health.
The coronavirus spreads more easily when people are crowded together inside, so Fehrenbach encourages new outdoor traditions such as hiking as a family. Guest lists for indoor feasts should be small enough so people can sit six feet apart while unmasked and eating, she said. Open the windows to keep air circulating.
The more people who attend a gathering, the greater the chances that someone in the party will be carrying the virus, Fehrenbach said, “even someone that you know and love.”
What about a quarantine? The magic day to start a pre-Thanksgiving quarantine is Nov. 13, according to Lindsey Leininger, who leads the Nerdy Girls, a cadre of scientists collaborating on a website called Dear Pandemic.
A strict quarantine would mean no grocery shopping, no working outside the home and no in-person school for 14 days.
What about testing? The best day to test would be as close to Turkey Day as possible while still leaving enough time to get results. But a test might not catch a still brewing infection so the best plan is the quarantine for two weeks the time it can take for symptoms to show up.
Some might gather outside or meet neighbors in the front yard for socially distanced pie and gossip. Gobble gobble.
Updated
This is Joanna Walters in New York, taking over from my colleague Martin Belam in London. US Politics Live with Joan E Greve will be back tomorrow.
There is cautious excitement (if that’s not an oxymoron) about the coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer that is closest to approval for use from a western world pharmaceutical company.
The US company Moderna, with an almost identical vaccine, is not far behind and is generating optimism by public health official Anthony Fauci that Moderna will also announce a successful vaccine as its trial head for the finish line.
Health secretary Alex Azar was on NBC’s Today show this morning touting good prospects for distribution.
“We have anticipated that we will have enough vaccine by the end of December to have vaccinated our most vulnerable citizens,” he told anchor Savannah Guthrie, such as elderly people in nursing homes.
He reckoned US healthcare workers could be vaccinated by the end of January.
Then there would be “enough for all Americans by the end of March to early April,” he said.
“We have anticipated that we will have enough vaccine by the end of December to have vaccinated our most vulnerable citizens… and enough for all Americans by the end of March to early April.” -HHS secretary Alex Azar tells @SavannahGuthrie pic.twitter.com/kxUoXjMgjq
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) November 10, 2020
If the election wasn’t over, this might have been dismissed as propaganda, given that other signals lately have indicated that ordinary, health folk can’t expect a jab until next autumn or later in 2021/early 2022.
And that could still be true if Azar is among those in the Trump administration clinging to the notion that the president still has a legitimate path to re-election.
But let’s assume/hope that Azar knows he has 10 weeks to do some good before Joe Biden ascends to the White House and he disappears and that this timetable is realistic and he’s going to help to make it happen...
Updated
Pope John Paul ll promoted a senior figure in the US Catholic church despite being aware of rumors of his sexual misconduct, a two year Vatican investigation has found.
My London Guardian colleague, Harriet Sherwood, writes this morning in a piece about to go live that the report, published today, highlighted failings by successive popes, Vatican officials and US clerics. They allowed Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to rise through church ranks despite multiple allegations of abuse.
McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington DC, became the most senior figure in the Catholic church to be defrocked after a Vatican hearing last year found him guilty of sexual crimes in the 1970 and 80s, “with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power”.
Pope Francis, who was accused of ignoring the allegations against McCarrick, ordered the Vatican’s disciplinary branch, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to investigate in October 2018 – more than two decades after the alarm was first raised.
The inquiry heard from 90 witnesses and examined dozens of documents, letters and transcripts from Vatican and US church archives. Its 460-page document said the US church hierarchy was aware of consistent rumors that McCarrick preyed on adult male seminarians, but “credible evidence” did not surface until 2017.
McCarrick has said he had no recollection of child abuse and has not commented publicly on allegations of misconduct with adults. Now aged 90, he is living in isolation.
In 1999, Cardinal John O’Connor advised Pope John Paul II that it would be imprudent to promote McCarrick because of “rumours” of sexual misconduct with seminarians dating back to the 1980s.
An investigation by the Vatican ambassador to the US, requested by Pope John Paul, “confirmed that McCarrick had shared a bed with young men” but said there was no certainty that he had engaged in sexual acts.
In August 2000, McCarrick wrote to Pope John Paul’s private secretary to rebutting the allegations. “McCarrick’s denial was believed,” the report said.
Three months later, Pope John Paul appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington DC, one of the most prestigious posts in the US church.
The report said Pope John Paul’s willingness to believe McCarrick’s denial was probably influenced by his experience in his native Poland when the communist government used “spurious allegations against bishops to degrade the standing of the church”.
Sen. Chris Coons has been on CNN this morning, suggesting that in private Republican senators are asking him to convey best wishes to president-elect Joe Biden while stating that they cannot yet say that in public because of Trump’s insistence on not conceding defeat.
Coons also said “This is an uncertain time these next 71 days. I think it is past time for Republican leaders to stand up and say we should accept the results of this election.”
He went on to say:
I see no evidence of voter fraud in the key states that would need to have their outcomes changed, and I so far, see little evidence of any republicans standing up to the President. We are beginning to threaten the foundations of our democracy, which is a regular orderly peaceful transfer of power after every quadrennial election.
Moments ago on @NewDay... Sen. @ChrisCoons reveals what some of his Republican colleagues have said to him in private -- "please convey my well wishes to the President-Elect, but I can't say that publicly yet." pic.twitter.com/lr6J2XigGa
— Alisyn Camerota (@AlisynCamerota) November 10, 2020
And that’s your lot from me today in London. I’m handing across the Atlantic to Joanna Walters who will see you through the next few hours…
National Nurses United, the largest US union of nurses, has issued this statement about today’s supreme court case which could strike down the Affordable Care Act:
As the Supreme Court hears arguments today on California v. Texas, a case seeking to destroy the Affordable Care Act (ACA), nurses across the country know we cannot go backward on health care, only forward. This is especially true given the Covid-19 pandemic, which has not only killed more than 235,000 people in the United States—but also infected more than 10 million, with new infection numbers rising every day.
Tens of millions of people in America gained health coverage under the ACA, mainly through the expansion of Medicaid for low- and moderate-income individuals, and for those previously shunned by insurance companies due to even minor pre-existing conditions. Covid-19 could be considered a pre-existing condition, making now an especially ridiculous and cruel time to try to revoke any gains made through the ACA.
We cannot return to a time when those tens of millions of our patients were left with no health care at all—and when health care corporations were even more able to profit off of our patients’ suffering. We can only go forward toward Medicare for All, the one true solution that would guarantee health care to all people, regardless of ability to pay.
Joe may run a second time – but he will never see Trump again, says Biden's sister
Joe Biden is “never going to see Donald Trump again”, the president-elect’s younger sister, sometime campaign manager and close political adviser Valerie Biden Owens says in a new interview, when asked if there can be any forgiveness for the 45th president once he leaves the national stage.
“I mean, it’s a moot point,” Biden Owens told Axios on HBO in excerpts released on Tuesday. “He’s never going to see Donald Trump again. Donald Trump is going off the stage and on 20 January that’s history, that’s past. Joe’s not gonna talk about Donald Trump. Who cares?”
Biden Owens also said her brother, who will be 78 when he takes office and who has described his intent to be a transitional president, would run for a second term. Asked about a run in 2024, Axios reported, Biden Owens said “sure” and “absolutely”.
“He’s transitional in that he’s bringing in all these young people and bringing [us] back again [so] we’re not a divided country ... But sure. He’s going strong.
“He is the most experienced person to ever enter the White House in American history, because of his 36 years in the Senate and then his eight with President Obama. So he’s very clear eyed.
“He really, really believes that where we are now in this country, we have such a tremendous opportunity to make things better for all Americans.”
Biden himself has indicated that he may run again. So has Trump.
The Trump administration’s war of words on the World Health Organisation (WHO) continues, even as the US exit from the body progresses. The US has said today that the terms under which a WHO-led team of experts is to investigate the origins of the new coronavirus were not transparently negotiated or in line with the mandate agreed by member states.
The Trump administration has accused the UN agency of being “China-centric”, which WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeatedly denied, and has accused China of having hidden the extent of its initial outbreak.
Reuters report that Garrett Grigsby, head of the global affairs office at the US Department of Health and Human Services, told the WHO’s ministerial assembly that member states had been made aware of the investigation’s terms of reference only a few days ago.
“The TOR (terms of reference) were not negotiated in a transparent way with all WHO member states. The TOR and the investigation itself appear to be inconsistent with the mandate provided by member states,” he said, without elaborating.
WHO’s top emergency expert Mike Ryan said on 30 October that the WHO-led team of scientists and their Chinese counterparts had held a first virtual meeting regarding joint investigations into the origin of the novel coronavirus.
Updated
Donald Trump has just tweeted about Texas congressman-elect Ronny Jackson giving the president and the administration credit for the potential deployment of a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year. This claim is untrue.
Yesterday vice-president Mike Pence also tried to claim the administration’s Operation Warp Speed programme had helped the vaccine’s development. Pfizer said absolutely not.
“We were never part of the Warp Speed,” Kathrin Jansen, a senior vice-president and the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said in an interview yesterday. “We have never taken any money from the US government, or from anyone.”
David Sirota has this for us today, asking can Joe Biden avoid Obama’s mistakes?
By the end of Obama’s presidency, Democrats held fewer elected offices than at any time since the early 20th century. Trump in 2016 made fraudulent promises to crack down on Wall Street – and he won the White House by flipping disaffected voters in locales that had been particularly hurt by a financial crisis that had never been rectified or reckoned with.
To be sure, Republicans were a powerful and determined opposition to Obama. But Democrats’ capitulations were disasters. They never understood the truism about political capital articulated by Republican strategist Karl Rove: “If you don’t spend it, it’s not like treasure stuck away at a storehouse someplace. It is perishable. It dwindles away.”
With a likely GOP Senate, a prospective Biden administration is certainly in a weaker position than Obama was in 2008 – but there are ways for the new White House to spend political capital on a working class agenda.
Read more here: David Sirota – Can Joe Biden avoid Obama’s mistakes? He must – for the future of the party
There’s an interest take in the Washington Post this morning on the Republican party’s indulgence of Donald Trump refusing to accept the election result. They write:
Only a smattering of Republican senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory, and there has been little coaxing on the part of senior GOP lawmakers to help Trump come to terms with his loss. Some said there is value in ensuring the integrity of this year’s results, while others described a chaotic and scattershot operation that they hoped would eventually push Trump to cooperate in a peaceful transfer of power.
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on 20 January. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
Read more here: Washington Post – Top Republicans back Trump’s efforts to challenge election results
In the UK, Downing Street’s congratulatory message to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from prime minister Boris Johnson for winning the US presidential election contains a hidden message congratulating Donald Trump for winning a second term in office.
The message, posted on Twitter as an image a few hours after the US TV networks called the election for Biden, congratulates the president-elect on his election, and Harris “on her historic achievement”.
But the image, a white-on-black block of text, is more than it seems. A simple colour adjustment reveals a second message hidden in the background.
Above and behind the words “Joe Biden on his election”, the shadow of the words “Trump on” become faintly visible. Where the main message reads “the US is our most important ally and I look forward to working closely together”, the words “second term” appear. And below the words “shared priorities” is the phrase “on the future of this”.
somewhat unbelievably, there really is a hidden message congratulating Trump just about visible underneath the graphic Boris Johnson tweeted congratulating Biden on his win. I have no idea why Downing Street just didn't start a new image, or why they are so bad at Photoshop pic.twitter.com/RLY0SV0680
— Matthew Champion (@matthewchampion) November 10, 2020
The message suggests that Number 10 was preparing for the possibility of congratulating Donald Trump on a re-election long after it had become clear that Joe Biden was winning the count in key battleground states.
But the baffling decision to alter a pre-existing image rather than create an entirely new one, let alone to not then fully delete the original message, looks likely to create more friction between the UK Government and the incoming administration.
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Four years ago today, president Barack Obama welcomed Donald Trump to the Oval office for the first time. Here’s how ABC News reported it at the time.
By the way, in the interest of balance, I should point out that Trump campaign senior advisor for strategy Steve Cortes has written an article for the National Pulse outlining the four reasons why he believes last week’s voting shows evidence of widespread voter fraud.
His key points boil down to this:
- The levels of voter turnout “defy reasonable expectations”.
- He doesn’t believe that “a candidate as doddering and lazy as Joe Biden” could out-perform Barack Obama who “boasted rock star appeal”.
- There were too many ballots cast just for Joe Biden without filling out the Senate and House races.
- States haven’t been rejecting enough mail-in ballots compared to historic levels.
I’ve got to be honest with you, if I was trying to lay out this argument, I would not have started with the opening line “The statistical case is, admittedly, circumstantial rather than conclusive”, but that is possibly why Steve is in Trump’s strategy team, and I’m not.
You can do your research and make up your own mind here: National Pulse – Steve Cortes: The statistical case agains Biden’s win
59,000 Covid patients currently in US hospitals – highest number ever reported
While we are talking about numbers, you will recall that it has been a constant refrain from Donald Trump that the reason the US has the highest incidence of coronavirus cases in the world is because it tests more than anybody else. Experts have repeatedly pointed out that other benchmarks belie this spurious claim.
Anurag Maan notes today that there were just over 59,000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals across the United States on Monday, the country’s highest number ever of in-patients being treated for the disease.
The number of Americans with Covid-19 currently hospitalized has surged around 73% over the past 30 days according to a Reuters tally - to a record level of at least 59,008 that surpasses the previous high of 58,370 on 22 July.
Hospitalizations are a key metric of how the pandemic is progressing, and Texas reported the highest number with 6,103, followed by Illinois with 4,409 and California with 3,668 patients.
The data shows the US is experiencing its worst phase so far of the outbreak. It has reported more than a million new cases in the past 10 days, the speediest surge in infections since the country reported its first cases, in Washington state, 294 days ago.
On 26 February, president Trump boasted that the coronavirus was about to disappear altogether. “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he insisted.
Here’s a reminder of how senior Republican figures have reacted to the election in the last couple of days. Along with the president himself, the vast majority of them have refused to accept Trump’s election loss.
The former president George W Bush was among a handful of Republicans who have congratulated the Biden-Harris team, while the senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said Trump was ‘100% within his rights’ to question election results.
The US attorney general, William Barr, has authorised federal prosecutors to begin investigating ‘substantial allegations’ of voter irregularities despite their being scant evidence.
Just to expand on that point for a minute, I posted earlier the current state of the vote count in the key contested states [see 6:33/11:33]. There’s nowhere that Joe Biden’s lead isn’t currently in at least five figures.
For Trumps’s allegations that the election has been “rigged” or “stolen” to be true, the Trump team need to demonstrate that there has been voter fraud amounting to literally thousands of ballots across multiple US states.
There is simply no evidence to support this.
It should also be noted that Republicans are not contesting the down-ticket results, where they appear to have maintained control of the Senate – fending off several well-funded competitive Democratic party challengers – and increased their representation in the House. These votes were all conducted on the exact same ballot papers.
President-elect Joe Biden is championing the Obama administration’s signature health law as it goes before the supreme court in the case that could overturn it amid the greatest health criss the nation has faced in a century. Biden will deliver a speech on the Affordable Care Act and his healthcare plans later today.
Biden has pledged to build on the Affordable Care Act while championing a “public option” that would allow more people to opt into government-sponsored health insurance, even as millions of others could stick with their current, usually employer-based coverage.
The supreme court ruled eight years ago to leave the essential components of the law known as Obamacare intact, but there is increased concern about today’s challenged as it is now controlled 6-3 by a conservative majority after outgoing president Donald Trump’s unseemly rushed appointment of Amy Coney Barrett.
The suit challenging the healthcare law was brought in America’s largest conservative state, Texas, and is backed by Trump and top Republicans. It asks the supreme court to declare the law’s mandate to buy health insurance unconstitutional because Congress had previously repealed the penalties for noncompliance.
Biden’s speech reflects the importance he is putting on health care, reports Will Weissert for the Associated Press. On Monday, Biden pleaded with Americans to put aside their political differences and wear masks to protect themselves and their neighbors from the virus.
“We could save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democratic or Republican lives, American lives,” Biden said. “Please, I implore you, wear a mask.”
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Abbe R Gluck puts into perspective what is at stake in the supreme court today, as it hears a case that might strike down the Affordable Care Act.
It is the most challenged statute in modern American history. In addition to the supreme court cases, there have been more than 1,700 cases in the lower courts; Republicans in Congress have tried more than 70 times to repeal it; the Trump administration has engaged in an unprecedented array of executive actions to undermine the insurance markets and financially starve the law; red states rebelled against it from the day it was passed; and state initiatives have been enacted by supporters to force states to effectuate it.
And still the Affordable Care Act, which may be the most resilient statute in American history, has done more than survive: It has transformed our healthcare system and the way Americans think about their right to care.
What is at stake is even more than the nearly one-fifth of our economy that the health care industry represents and what has become a new baseline on coverage for Americans. It is democracy, and the court’s duty to leave political decisions to the elected branches of government.
It’s not just the abstract legal arguments, it is the real world effect in the middle of a pandemic too. Gluck notes:
What would an adverse ruling in this case mean? We now take countless things for granted that come from the law and that so many Americans – not just those on public programs – benefit from: insurance covering childhood vaccines, colorectal cancer screenings with no co-pay, no annual caps on insurance, older people’s vastly expanded drug coverage, no denials based on pre-existing health conditions and much more. All of that and more will be gone if the court strikes down the law.
Already 133 million Americans have benefited from the ban on pre-existing conditions, and Covid-19 might now be deemed a pre-existing condition.
Thanks to the huge national caseload under the Trump administration’s care, that latter point would now impact over 10 million Americans.
Read more here: New York Times – Abbe R. Gluck – Obamacare is back in court. The stakes couldn’t be higher
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Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, writes for us today:
It is now certain that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are our next president and vice-president. Black voters across the US are taking a well-earned victory lap. Not even the masks we must wear can hide the joy and hope on people’s faces.
For hundreds of years, Black folks have shown love and dedication to a country that has not reciprocated; still we show up for ourselves and our allies. We are responsible for saving this democracy from chaos and ruin.
Let’s talk about how Black voters shaped this ticket. To be clear, Biden owes his selection as the party’s nominee to Black voters in the south, who were prescient enough to know that he was the candidate most likely to win. Kamala Harris’s selection as his running mate is also a legacy of Black voter organizing and demands that he choose a Black woman to bring the expertise and racial acumen that he needed to govern the US. Even FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has noted: “Democrats are 3-0 this century when they have a Black person on the ticket, and 0-3 when they don’t.”
Let’s talk about the Black turnout in the race. Nationally, it’s estimated that 87% of Black voters supported Biden/Harris, while 12% backed Trump/Pence. Let’s be clear: the majority of white voters once again voted for Trump.
Read more here - it’s blistering stuff: Cliff Albright – Black voters drove Joe Biden’s victory – and have offered this country a reboot
Votes are still being counted, by the way. Joe Biden has 76,343,332, and is nearly 4.9m ahead of Donald Trump, who is set to become the first one-term president of the 21st century.
Here’s the state of play in some of the key states we’ve been keeping a close eye on during the campaign:
Arizona: Biden leads by 14,746. The state was called early for the Democratic nominee by Associated Press and Fox News – attracting the wrath of the president’s fans.
Georgia: Biden leads by 11.413. The state has already said it will recount.
Florida: Trump is ahead by 374,394 after his campaign barbs that Biden represented radical left socialism appears to resonate with some Latino voters.
Michigan: Biden leads by 146,123. A quickly rectified clerical error in this state that led to a sudden jump in the Biden vote has been the subject of a great deal of social media conspiracy theory attention, but has been thoroughly debunked.
Nevada: Biden leads by 36,186. In this state mail-in ballots can still arrive as late as the 12 November and be counted, provided they are postmarked on or before election day.
North Carolina: Trump leads by 74,819. The president retained the state that won in 2016.
Pennsylvania: Biden holds a lead of 45,336 in the state that is the home to Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Texas: Trump leads by 647,282. Democrats had poured cash into ads in the state in the hope that it might be in play. It was not.
Wisconsin: Biden leads by 20,540. Like Pennsylvania and Arizona, it is worth noting that the Libertarian party candidate Jo Jorgensen polled more than the difference between Trump and Biden. Those voters could have potentially flipped 41 electoral college votes in his favour if they’d opted for Trump instead.
Updated
Here’s the short shrift that Trump’s legal challenges were getting in Pennsylvania from the state’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro:
The Trump campaign’s latest filing is another attempt to throw out legal votes. Sleep tight. We will protect the laws of our Commonwealth and the will of the people.
Earlier yesterday, Trump’s campaign had filed a lawsuit to block Pennsylvania officials from certifying Biden’s victory in the battleground state, where Biden led by more than 45,000 votes.
It alleged the state’s mail-in voting system violated the US constitution by creating “an illegal two-tiered voting system” where voting in person was subject to greater oversight than voting by mail.
It was filed against Pennsylvania secretary of state Kathy Boockvar and the boards of elections in Democratic-leaning counties that include Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Boockvar’s office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the latest lawsuit in Pennsylvania was unlikely to succeed and “reads like a rehash of many of the arguments the Trump legal team has made in and outside the courtroom”.
Updated
Reuters have this update on where we are with the Trump’s lawsuits against his election defeat. Steve Holland and Simon Lewis report that Donald Trump will push ahead today with legal challenges to the results of last week’s election after Attorney General William Barr told federal prosecutors to look into any “substantial” allegations of voting irregularities.
Barr’s directive to prosecutors prompted the top lawyer overseeing voter fraud investigations to resign in protest. It came after days of attacks on the integrity of the election by Trump and Republican allies, who have alleged widespread voter fraud, without providing evidence.
The Trump campaign has filed several lawsuits claiming the election results were flawed. Judges have already tossed out lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia, and experts say Trump’s legal efforts have little chance of changing the election result.
Barr told prosecutors on Monday that “fanciful or far-fetched claims” should not be a basis for investigation and his letter did not indicate the Justice Department had uncovered voting irregularities affecting the outcome of the election.
But he did say he was authorizing prosecutors to “pursue substantial allegations” of irregularities of voting and the counting of ballots.
Richard Pilger, who for years has served as director of the Election Crimes Branch, announced in an internal email he was resigning from his post after he read “the new policy and its ramifications”.
The previous Justice Department policy, designed to avoid interjecting the federal government into election campaigns, had discouraged overt investigations “until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded”.
Biden’s campaign said Barr was fueling Trump’s far-fetched allegations of fraud.
“Those are the very kind of claims that the president and his lawyers are making unsuccessfully every day, as their lawsuits are laughed out of one court after another,” said Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to Biden.
Jeff Abbott reports for us from Guatemala City
US authorities have radically accelerated the expulsion of unaccompanied children to Guatemala, but advocates accuse the Trump administration of using the Covid-19 pandemic as a pretext to rob vulnerable youngsters of asylum protections enshrined in US and international law.
Since tighter migration controls were announced in March, the US has deported more than 1,400 unaccompanied minors to Guatemala, according to data from the Guatemalan Migration Institute. A total of 407 children were expelled in October alone.
In comparison, in the whole of 2019, the US deported 385 unaccompanied minors to Guatemala.
US officials cited the threat of coronavirus when they invoked Title 42, a previously obscure clause of the 1944 Public Health Services Law, to justify the crackdown.
The law, which gives the government the power to take emergency action to prevent “introduction of communicable diseases”, orders the immediate expulsion of migrants detained between ports of entry. It also denies nearly everyone who arrives at the border the ability to apply for asylum.
Migration legal advocates argue the measure violates migrants’ rights to access the asylum process.
“Without a court order currently blocking the Trump administration from subjecting unaccompanied children to these rapid expulsions, children continue to be denied their right to seek protection in the United States,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer and policy counsel with the American Immigration Council.
Read more of Jeff Abbott’s report here: US steps up pace of child deportations to Guatemala citing pandemic emergency
More seriously, Chris Hayes also last night interviewed Jon Ossoff. He’s one of the Democrats involved in the Senate run-offs in January which have a chance of flipping control of the Senate to the Democrats.
Yesterday the incumbents in the state, Sen. David Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler, jointly called on their fellow Republican, Gerogia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, to resign. They accused him of failing “to deliver honest and transparent elections.”
Despite claims of fraud coming from Trump and his allies, Raffensperger has said that he has not been notified of any verifiable instances of fraud or voting irregularities this election. Loeffler and Perdue did not mention any specific allegations or provide evidence of such claims.
Ossoff, who runs-off against Perdue, told Hayes:
It’s bizarre. Total disarray. David Perdue needs to be gearing up for a run-off that he enters badly damaged. He needs to be preparing for upcoming debates that I’ve challenged him to. And this just demonstrates the total lack of competence, coherence, and momentum among GOP politicians in Georgia right now. They are shell-shocked. They felt entitled to a cakewalk. And instead they’re getting the fights of their lives. They’re not liking it, and they’re taking out their rage on one another.
Instead of working to earn Georgians’ votes, Georgia Republicans are on the attack...
— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff) November 10, 2020
against one another. pic.twitter.com/nWfPBoarb6
The run-off is on 5 January. Perdue took 49.7% of the vote in their contest to Ossoff’s 47.9%. Under Georgia’s laws a candidate has to reach a 50% threshold to be elected in November, which is why the two now face each other again.
If, like me, you just cannot get enough Four Seasons Total Landscaping news, you’ll probably enjoy this segment from Chris Hayes on MSNBC, with another attempt to deconstruct what actually happened at the weekend.
In the course of it he throws out such lines as “You almost couldn’t tell Rudy Giuliani was at Four Seasons Total Landscaping except for the big yellow reel of hose off to the side” and how Giuliani “recited a few unsubstantiated claims about dead people voting in Philadelphia in front of a garbage door covered in Trump posters”.
There’s a bitter sting, of course:
At one level, all this stuff is hilarious. But, at another, there’s a reason the president’s casinos went bankrupt and he’s overseen one of the worst coronavirus responses in the industrialised world. These are the people, this is the crew that’s been running our country for four years. No frickin’ wonder we are where we are.
Former Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs points out the absurdity of some of the margins that Republicans claim can be put down to voter fraud.
A Republican House candidate who will lose 75-25 is now falsely claiming massive voter fraud cost her the election pic.twitter.com/C4L8cHO0S3
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) November 10, 2020
Donald Trump spent months telling Republican voters not to use mail-in ballots, and Republicans are expressing surprise that people who voted by mail were overwhelmingly not Republicans.
Updated
Davey Alba at the New York Times has this interesting look at the top 10 misinformation storylines during election week, as put together by Zignal Labs. The company tallied all mentions of those topics on social media, cable news and print and online news outlets, and produced a list which includes:
- Voter fraud. Allegations like software glitches in Georgia or suitcases full of ballots were falsely pushed in 4.7m mentions.
- Sharpiegate. The claim that Republicans were deliberately given felt-tip pens that would invalidate their vote in Arizona. They were not.
- Magically found ballots. These often point to quickly fixed clerical errors in the publishing of votes, like a sudden and rectified jump of 138.339 votes for Biden in Michigan.
- The deep state. Suggestion with more than a hint of antisemitic tropes that a top-level secret elite cabal must be controlling the election.
- Biden ‘admits’ voter fraud. A deceptively edited video was viewed more than 17m times before election day
- Dead people voting. Lawsuits and clerical errors being used as false evidence of widespread problems.
Read the list in full here: New York Times – Top 10 misinformation storylines on election week
Updated
The abrupt dismissal of the US defence secretary, Mark Esper, and reported plans for multiple layers of new sanctions on Iran have made clear that Donald Trump’s last 10 weeks in office could still prove a very bumpy ride for the rest of the world.
While he launches a quiver of baseless legal challenges to the results, he is also seeking to demonstrate he is still in charge of foreign and defence policy – fuelling fears about the impact a vengeful president might have on the US role on the world stage over the coming 10 weeks of transition.
It was unclear on Monday whether Esper’s firing by tweet was just an act of score-settling with an outgoing defence secretary who openly disagreed with the president, or whether it was intended to clear the way for actions in the domestic or foreign sphere that Esper had been blocking.
On the same day as Esper’s departure, the Axios news website cited Israeli sources as saying the US, Israel and their Gulf allies were discussing a plan to add more bricks to the sanctions wall they have built around Iran, potentially with a new raft of punitive measures a week running up to Biden’s inauguration on 20 January.
The Trump administration strategy in recent months has been to build up pressure on Iran with the aim of provoking a response from Tehran which would make it harder for the incoming administration to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action (JCPOA).
So far, Tehran has remained broadly within the JCPOA, while shrugging off some of the constraints it imposed on its nuclear activity in a calibrated response to US sanctions. But the Trump administration has clearly not given up trying to goad the Iranians into more irreversible actions.
“Given Donald Trump’s record of chronically ignoring norms and customs, I would be quite concerned about the hijack that he and his administration might pull during this transition period” said Rebecca Lissner, co-author of a book on US foreign policy, An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order.
Read more of Julian Borger’s analysis here: Trump poised to leave legacy of chaos with last-minute foreign policy moves
Updated
As pointed out in this piece by Newsweek, this is what was happening four years ago today. Vice-president Joe Biden was welcoming vice-president-elect Mike Pence to the White House.
I just met with @VP-elect Pence at the @WhiteHouse to offer our support for a smooth, seamless transition of power: https://t.co/yKj1JyiOD3 pic.twitter.com/3bFdQjuQ6K
— VP Biden (Archived) (@VP44) November 10, 2016
Newsweek remind us that:
A statement issued after the meeting and linked in that tweet said that Biden and Pence had spoken about “their time working together in Congress and their friendship dating back many years.”
It added that Biden also discussed with his successor “a number of specific policy portfolios that have been a critical focus for him during his time in office, including NATO and eastern Europe and expanding access to the middle class.”
It will be intriguing to see when, or if, we get a similar shot of Pence with his successor, Kamala Harris, the first woman to hold the office.
Updated
Senior adviser to the Biden-Harris transition team, Jen Psaki, spoke to CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night talking about the team’s options should the Trump administration continue to stall with moving forward with the transition. She told him:
We’re just trying to get ready to govern. But I will say we’ve all seen these tactics for weeks, if not months, from the Trump team, even before the election. And with every effort to delay this, it’s delaying us getting access to the resources we need, getting people onto agency review teams, into agencies to talk about Covid, and the recession, and moving forward.
I think over the last couple of days we really wanted to give some space, even though it’s a longer delay than we’ve seen historically. But it’s clear now there’s no mathematical path forward for Trump. We are obviously trying to get our jobs going here. We’re not going to take any options off the table. That could include direct engagement with the administrator. It could include more public advocacy for what the importance is of getting this done. The impact on national security. The impact at a time where we’re facing a global pandemic and our officials can even get into these agencies.
You can watch it here: CNN – Here are options Biden team has if Trump’s effort continues
Here’s that awkward moment for White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.
As she began doubling-down on the Trump campaign line of allegations of voter fraud, for which they have produced scant evidence, from the studio the Fox News host cut in and switched her off.
Neil Cavuto said: “Whoa, whoa, whoa – I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this.”
He added: “I want to make sure that maybe they do have something to back that up, but that’s an explosive charge to make, that the other side is effectively rigging and cheating. If she does bring proof of that, of course we’ll take you back. So far she has started saying, right at the outset – ‘welcoming fraud, welcoming illegal voting’. Not so fast.”
Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News has shifted away from its loyalty to Trump over the past week, instead seeming in what appears to be closely co-ordinated messaging to warn its readers that Trump has lost the election despite his claims to the contrary.
Fox was one of the first news organisations to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden – provoking ire from the president’s fans.
Updated
LA health official urges those who gathered to celebrate Biden victory to quarantine to avoid Covid spread in California
Still on Covid for a minute, Associated Press report that California’s coronavirus cases are at their highest levels in months, a disquieting reality Gov. Gavin Newsom said was “obviously sobering” and that led San Francisco Bay Area health officials to urge people who travel outside the region to quarantine for two weeks upon return.
Newsom said some of the increase could be tied to Halloween celebrations while Barbara Ferrer, the health director for Los Angeles County, urged people who gathered during the weekend to celebrate Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential race to quarantine to avoid fueling the spread.
LA County is home to 10 million people, roughly one-quarter of California’s population, and was seeing 750 cases per day in September. Last week, four days saw case counts above 2,000.
“Recovery just doesn’t continue when you have thousands of new cases each day,” Ferrer said. “And many of these cases stem from people taking risks that are frankly not appropriate. It isn’t that hard to play by the rules, especially since these rules are what keep some people alive and allow our economy to improve.”
The positivity rate the number of people who test positive climbed from 2.5% to 3.7% in about three weeks, hospitalizations are 29% over 14 days and “that trendline continues up,” Newsom said. Meantime, California is nearing two grim milestones: 1 million cases and 18,000 deaths.
Now, health officials for 10 Bay Area counties and the city of Berkeley expanded a recommendation last week by San Francisco recommending residents self-quarantine when they return home from outside the state to try to prevent a spike in coronavirus cases.
In a joint statement, the officials said people who insist on getting together for the holidays should keep their visits outdoors and lasting no more than two hours, and include a maximum of three households.
“This surge in COVID-19 cases is not what we want to see going into the fall and winter holiday season,” Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody.
Cody said the increase is largely among people between the ages of 18 and 34 and could be because people are letting their guards down on safety measures such as wearing masks and staying socially distant.
Aside from unmasked family gatherings, the upcoming holidays and simultaneous flu season, Newsom injected a new worry: That people will drop their guard because of positive news regarding testing of coronavirus vaccines.
“This vaccine is not going to be readily available for mass distribution ... likely well into the next year,” he said. “I am concerned, truthfully, that we may get overexuberant ... and people may go back to their original form. That would be a terrible mistake.”
Yesterday the US recorded 111,433 new coronavirus cases, and 590 new Covid deaths. It takes the total caseload, according to Johns Hopkins University figures, to 10,101,007.
According to figures from the New York Times, infections are running at a rate 64% higher than 14 days ago, and deaths are 18% higher over the same time period.
In his speech yesterday, Joe Biden implored Americans to stop politicizing masks and social distancing.
“Please, I implore you, wear a mask,” the president-elect said. “Do it for yourself, do it for your neighbor. A mask is not a political statement but it is a way to start pulling the country together.”
There are currently 15 states which don’t have any kind of statewide mask mandate: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming.
Several of those states do allow mask mandates at a county or city level.
South Dakota’s Republican Gov Kristi Noem said in October that it wasn’t up to government. “If folks want to wear a mask, they should be free to do so. Similarly, those who don’t want to wear a mask shouldn’t be shamed into wearing one.”
South Dakota currently has the second highest incidence of Covid cases per 100,000 people in the US
Mississippi did have a mandate, but Republican Gov Tate Reeves lifted it on 4 September.
Updated
Here’s a reminder about what president-elect Joe Biden said about the coronavirus crisis in the US yesterday. He said:
There’s a need for bold action to fight this pandemic. We’re still facing a very dark winter. The bottom line: I will spare no effort to turn this pandemic around once we’re sworn in on 20 January. To get our kids back to school safely, our businesses growing, and our economy running at full speed again, and to get an approved vaccine manufactured and distributed as quickly as possible, to as many Americans as possible, free of charge. We’ll follow the science. We’ll follow the science, let me say that again.
In response, the outgoing president of the US approvingly shared a message on social media accusing his successor of being an “ambulance chaser”.
Nothing! https://t.co/OurKkatwbE
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2020
A reminder that yesterday vice-president, Mike Pence, tried to claim their administration’s Operation Warp Speed programme had helped the vaccine’s development. Pfizer said absolutely not.
“We were never part of the Warp Speed,” Kathrin Jansen, a senior vice-president and the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said in an interview. “We have never taken any money from the US government, or from anyone.”
Updated
One of the things fuelling Trump supporters’ belief that the election has been fraudulent is the sheer volume of misinformation out there on the internet. New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose points to just a few examples here.
A Newsmax video full of debunked voter fraud conspiracy theories (dead people voting, poll watchers barred, software glitches) is the 3rd most-shared post of the past three days. 15 million views, 345,000 shares. pic.twitter.com/BQw4WhYM6J
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) November 10, 2020
He also puts his finger on the nub of some of the dilemma for social media networks. Often a false narrative has been constructed to misrepresent something that did happen. It’s hard for fact-checkers to intervene and label that as 100% false.
The tricky thing, for Facebook, is that some of the most viral stories aren't strictly false. (Perdue + Loeffler *did* call for the SOS's resignation.) But they are feeding a stolen election narrative that is going to be hard to dial back.
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) November 10, 2020
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Of course, as well as the supreme court hearing today, we’re still in a situation where president Trump, the first incumbent to fail to win a second term since 1992, is refusing to concede defeat. Ed Pilkington and Sam Levine report for us on attorney general William Barr’s highly unusual move to have “vote irregularities” investigated, despite a lack of evidence.
The intervention of Barr, who has frequently been accused of politicizing the Department of Justice, comes as Donald Trump refuses to concede defeat and promotes a number of legally meritless lawsuits aimed at casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election.
Barr wrote on Monday to US attorneys, giving them the green light to pursue “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities” before the results of the presidential election in their jurisdictions are certified. As Barr himself admits in his letter, such a move by federal prosecutors to intervene in the thick of an election has traditionally been frowned upon, with the view being that investigations into possible fraud should only be carried out after the race is completed.
But Barr, who was appointed by Trump in February 2019, pours scorn on such an approach, denouncing it as a “passive and delayed enforcement approach”.
The highly contentious action was greeted with delight by Trump supporters but with skepticism from lawyers and election experts. Within hours of the news, the justice department official overseeing voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, had resigned from his position.
Read more here: Barr tells prosecutors to investigate ‘vote irregularities’ despite lack of evidence
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Obamacare under threat as supreme court to hear ‘California v. Texas’ case
Why is the Affordable Care Act (ACA) up before the supreme court again? Well, its the latest chapter of Republicans trying to get Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare reforms struck down.
My layman’s understanding of the case is this: In the Affordable Care Act, there is a provision requiring minimum essential coverage provision, known as the ‘individual mandate’.
The individual mandate says most people must maintain a minimum level of health insurance coverage. If they don’t, they have to pay a financial penalty, which is known as the “shared responsibility” payment to the IRS.
In 2012, the supreme court case, in an opinion written by the chief justice John Roberts, upheld the individual mandate to buy health insurance as a constitutional exercise of Congress’s taxing power.
But that didn’t end the Republican fight, hence the “California v. Texas” case today.
In the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Trump administration changed the tax penalty – the “shared responsibility” payment – to be a penalty of precisely zero dollars. So the new case is essentially arguing that now the penalty is zero, the premise is again unconstitutional, because the financial penalty no longer “produces at least some revenue” for federal government.
Will the Republicans win today? A lot of people have pointed that the 2012 case was decided 5-4 to preserve the ACA, and that the court is rather more conservative now. They also point to the newest member, Amy Coney Barrett, previously having written critically of that 2012 opinion by her now-colleague Roberts.
What could be the impact? I defer to this Kaiser Family Foundation explainer, which says:
The ACA remains in effect while the litigation is pending. However, if all or most of the law ultimately is struck down, it will have complex and far-reaching consequences for the nation’s health care system, affecting nearly everyone in some way. A host of ACA provisions could be eliminated, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions, subsidies to make individual health insurance more affordable, expanded eligibility for Medicaid, coverage of young adults up to age 26 under their parents’ insurance policies, coverage of preventive care with no patient cost-sharing, closing of the doughnut hole under Medicare’s drug benefit, and a series of tax increases to fund these initiatives.
Nobody would do that in the middle of the nation’s great health crisis for a century, would they?
Read more here: KFF – Explaining California v. Texas: A guide to the case challenging the ACA
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Hi, and welcome to our live coverage of American politics in the wake of last week’s election. There’s an important hearing at the supreme court today about Obamacare. It could see the law struck down as unconstitutional and deprive millions of healthcare amid a pandemic. Here’s a little of where we are and what we might expect …
- President-elect Joe Biden vows to ‘spare no effort’ in tackling Covid, as the US experiences its seventh consecutive day with more than 100,000 new cases reported. The US has had over 10m coronavirus cases, and 238,251 deaths.
- Donald Trump has no intention of admitting his heavy defeat in the US presidential election or offering a concession, his campaign insisted.
- In a highly politicised move, US attorney general William Barr has authorized federal prosecutors to begin investigating “substantial allegations” of voter irregularities across the country in a stark break with longstanding practice and despite a lack of evidence of any major fraud.
- Fox News cut away from a briefing by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany during which she doubled down on allegations of voter fraud.
- Overnight Trump has tweeted approvingly of somebody calling the president-elect an “ambulance chaser” for commenting on a potential coronavirus vaccine.
- The supreme court will hear oral arguments in California v Texas, a case that could determine the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, often known as Obamacare.
- The Trump administration has sided with those arguing one of the law’s key provisions is unconstitutional and thus the whole law should be struck down.
- British politician Lord Kilclooney’s reference to vice-president-elect Kamala Harris as “the Indian” in a tweet has been condemned for racism on both sides of the Atlantic.
- Four Seasons Total Landscaping launched a range of merchandise to cash in on that weekend Trump fiasco.
- The president has nothing in his diary for today.
- President-elect Biden will deliver remarks on the Affordable Care Act, and meet with his transition advisers.
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