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The White House has announced that Joe Biden will travel to Wisconsin next Tuesday, marking one of his first official trips since becoming president last month.
The White House did not provide any additional details about the trip.
This will mark the president’s first visit to Wisconsin since late October, when Biden held a rally in the battleground state days before the November election.
The Wisconsin visit will also be Biden’s first domestic trip since taking office, with the exception of his weekend spent in his home state of Delaware.
Neera Tanden, Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the office of management and budget, is testifying at the first of two confirmation hearings this morning.
Tanden, who has served as president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress since 2011, has been criticized by Republican lawmakers for her past tweets attacking them.
“I know there have been some concerns about some of my past language on social media,” Tanden told the Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee. “I regret that language and take responsibility for it.”
But those comments did not seem to persuade Rob Portman, the top Republican on the panel. Portman opened his comments by criticizing “the tone, content and aggressive partisanship” of Tanden’s social media posts, arguing they could make it hard for serve as OMB director.
Tanden’s nomination is unlikely to attract much Republican support, but with Democrats in control of the Senate, she is still likely to win confirmation.
As Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial gets underway, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will hold a meeting on the coronavirus relief package at the White House.
The president and the vice-president will be joined by treasury secretary Janet Yellen and several business leaders.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and Tom Donohue, the CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce, will be in attendance, as well as the CEOs of Walmart, Gap and Lowe’s.
The meeting comes as Democrats debate whether to attempt to include a $15 minimum wage hike in the coronavirus relief bill. Bernie Sanders, the new chairman of the Senate budget committee, has pushed for incorporating the minimum wage proposal into the relief legislation.
But some Democratic leaders, including Biden, have signaled that they don’t believe a minimum wage increase will meet the requirements of reconciliation to be included in the relief package. The Senate parliamentarian is expected to issue a ruling on the matter.
The prosecution is expected to brandish dramatic footage of the violence at the Capitol on 6 January. The trial is set to strike a sharp contrast of tone with Donald Trump’s first trial in early 2020, at which prosecutors used documents, emails and testimony to tell a complicated story about a Trump pressure campaign in Ukraine.
This time the alleged crime scene is much closer to home – in the very chamber where the trial will play out, which was invaded by Trump supporters moments after members of Congress and staff had been evacuated.
With a majority of Americans expressing horror and outrage at the attack on the Capitol, the allegations against Trump could land much more powerfully with the public than did the story of his seeking political favors from Ukraine in return for official acts.
The impeachment trial will begin with a vote on whether the proceedings are constitutional, given that Donald Trump has already left office.
The former president and his allies, including some Republican senators, have argued the Senate does not have jurisdiction to convict Trump because he is no longer president and thus cannot be removed from office.
Trump’s lawyers wrote in a legal brief filed yesterday, “[T]he Senate is being asked to do something patently ridiculous: try a private citizen in a process that is designed to remove him from an office that he no longer holds.”
But the House impeachment managers have pushed back against this argument, saying the Constitution does not provide any “January Exception” for lame-duck presidents who commit impeachable offenses.
It’s also worth noting that a conviction could prevent Trump from seeking federal office again, so this is not simply a mater of removing someone from office.
The vote on the constitutionality of the trial will be a repeat of an earlier vote in the Senate. When senators voted on the issue late last month, 45 Republican senators supported dismissing the trial.
This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.
The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump begins today, as the Senate prepares to decide whether the former president should be convicted for incitement of insurrection.
The House approved the article of impeachment against Trump last month, just days after a violent mob stormed the Capitol, resulting in five deaths.
Seventeen Senate Republicans would have to vote with Democrats in order to convict Trump, and that seems unlikely to happen.
But it is possible that a handful of Senate Republicans will vote to convict the former president, which would represent a rather stark contrast from Trump’s first impeachment trial, when Mitt Romney was the only Republican senator to support conviction.
The trial is set to start in about three hours, so stay tuned for more updates and analysis as we prepare for the proceedings.
Tucked inside Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan is a seemingly radical notion that children should not grow up in poverty, says Josh Boak at the Associated Press.
Congressional Democrats are now sketching out that vision more fully by proposing to temporarily raise the child tax credit, now at a maximum of $2,000, to as much as $3,600 per child annually. Their plan would also make the credit fully available to the poorest families, instead of restricting it based on the parents’ tax liability.
“The Democratic plan would likely mark the most significant step in the fight against child poverty since LBJ’s Great Society,” said Daniel Hemel, a law professor at the University of Chicago, who noted that a family with two school-age children and no income would get $6,000 under the proposal.
Biden has pitched his rescue plan as an immediate response to the pandemic, but the child tax credit expansion might end up seeding the kind of lasting change that tends to bring a political fight. Some conservatives say the plan would discourage parents from working and would not reduce poverty as a result. But liberals view it as an investment in children that needs to stay in place to ultimately improve people’s lives and the economy.
In a Friday speech about his full Covid-19 relief proposal, Biden said the spending would ultimately lead to durable economic gains. His plan includes funding for school reopenings, child care and other programs to help the youngest Americans.
“The simple truth is, if we make these investments now, with interest rates at historic lows, we’ll generate more growth, higher incomes, a stronger economy and our nation’s finances will be in a stronger position as well,” Biden said.
“This is a really bold idea,” said C. Nicole Mason, CEO of the liberal Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “Things that we wouldn’t have been talking about as possible a year before the pandemic are suddenly on the table — and this is one of those things.”
Supporters of the package also see a return to grappling with big ideas about poverty that has not occurred for decades. The child tax credit is possibly the start of a larger transformation in how the government addresses child poverty.
“A one-year improvement is great, and it puts the architecture in place,” said Michelle Dallafior, senior vice president for the advocacy group First Focus on Children. “But we need to keep doing more and build something permanent. … No child should live in poverty.”
In her speech to the House last week while trying to avoid being thrown off her committee assignments, Marjorie Taylor Greene said that she “was allowed to believe things that weren’t true”. She appears to be at that same game again this morning, as Politico reporter Kyle Cheney has just pointed out about her latest tweetstorm.
Kyle Cheney(@kyledcheney)
After vowing to distance herself from conspiracy theories, Taylor Greene pushes another one: raising doubts that the people who stormed the Capitol were Trump supporters (which clear evidence and the criminal affidavits have proven). There’s no ‘if’ here. https://t.co/x42hqdurU7
Perhaps it would be helpful for Taylor Greene to read this piece put together this morning for Newsweek by Ewan Palmer, which claims to list every capitol rioter who has said that Donald Trump incited them. For example, Texas-based real estate agent Jennifer Ryan:
“I just want people to know I’m a normal person, that I listen to my president who told me to go to the Capitol,” Ryan told a Dallas news station KTVT.
On 6 January , Ryan posted a video on her Facebook stating, “We’re gonna go down and storm the capitol.” She later posted a photo of herself in front of a broken window at the Capitol building on Twitter with the caption: “Window at the capital [sic]. And if the news doesn’t stop lying about us we’re going to come after their studios next.”
Donald Trump vetoed a series of brutal attack ads in the 2020 election campaign that targeted Joe Biden’s behavior towards women, because he was afraid of opening his own “can of worms”.
Biden has been criticized for touching and hugging women in ways widely deemed inappropriate, behavior he has said was not meant to be “disrespectful” and complaints to which he said he would “listen respectfully”. In early 2020, he faced a claim that he sexually assaulted a former aide. He forcefully denied it.
Trump famously boasted he was allowed to “grab” women “by the pussy”. He has been accused of sexual harassment or assault by no fewer than 25 women. He forcefully denies all such claims. But some have landed him in court and his former attorney Michael Cohen was convicted of violations of campaign finance law over hush money payments made to women before the 2016 election.
The news site Axios reported on Monday night on campaign ads it said were considered by Trump but which proved “so far-fetched even he vetoed them”.
One, titled “Predator”, showed Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate who is now the first woman to be vice-president, saying: “I know a predator when I see one.”
The clip included quotes from Tara Reade, the former aide who accused Biden of assault, and Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state politician who in 2019 told CNN Biden’s behaviour towards women including her was “disqualifying”.
But Trump “never wanted to run the predator or women’s-style ads against Biden”, Axios reported an unnamed campaign source as saying, “because he was afraid he was going to open up his own can of worms”. Axios said a second unnamed source confirmed the story.
We know that Donald Trump won’t be appearing in person at his second impeachment trial this week. But will he be watching it? Apparently so, at least according to Jacqueline Alemany at the Washington Post, who has spoken to Trump spokesman Jason Miller. She writes:
Unlike his successor, cable news hound Trump, who is camped out in his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach is expected to turn on the television “at some point.”
But that doesn’t mean Team Trump is all that worried about how the trial will play out — at least not publicly.
“I mean, they already had that vote two weeks ago where 45 Republican senators said it was unconstitutional right off the bat and nothing has been presented or proven to change any minds since then,” Miller told us. “Democrats are nowhere near getting enough votes — he will be acquitted next week. This is a simple charade to inflict political damage to Trump.”
Miller proceeded to call the potential for a vote to permanently disqualify Trump from holding future office “dead on arrival.”
One practical outcome of the Biden administrations push to reverse the isolationist policies of the Trump era. Reuters report this morning that an official has told a World Health Organization meeting today that the US would shift its status from observer to participant in a programme to boost Covid-19 testing, diagnostics and vaccines.
“We want to underscore the commitment of the United States to multilateralism and our common cause to respond this pandemic and improve global public health,” Colin L. McIff, acting director at the Office of Global Affairs in the US Department of Health and Human Services, said at the WHO virtual meeting.
The meeting in Geneva aims to help fill a $27 billion funding gap for the WHO-backed programme, called the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator Facilitation Council, that is aimed at broadening global access to Covid-19 fighting tools.
That Trump legal team defense testimony we are expecting to probably start on Friday might not last as long as we thought, according to NBC News White House correspondent Monica Alba who has just tweeted this nugget.
Monica Alba(@albamonica)
Trump team timing: the expectation is that the former president’s defense will likely not use its full 16 hours, two sources familiar with the legal strategy tell @LACaldwellDC & me. This is fluid & subject to change but reflects their outward confidence heading into the trial.
A bill that would likely ban almost all abortions in South Carolina is expected to move closer to final approval today, report Associated Press.
The state’s House Judiciary Committee is meeting to discuss the “South Carolina Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act.” The bill has already passed the Senate and the governor promises he will sign it.
The proposal would require doctors to use an ultrasound to try to detect a fetal heartbeat if they think pregnant women are at least eight weeks along. If they find a heartbeat, and the pregnancy is not the result of rape or incest, they can’t perform the abortion unless the mother’s life is in danger. A fetal heartbeat can be detected as soon as six weeks after conception and before many women know they are pregnant.
Republican lawmakers plan no more public hearings on the bill.
In committee meetings, lawmakers typically discuss bills and sometimes make changes. But this abortion ban has already been passed by the House several times in the past before failing in the Senate.
If the committee approves the bill at their meeting Tuesday afternoon it will head to the full House, which passed a similar bill 70-31 in 2019. About a dozen other states have passed similar bills, although they are tied up in court challenges.
Republicans were able finally to get the proposal through the South Carolina Senate after flipping three seats from Democrats in the 2020 elections.
At Associated Press, Mary Clare Jalonick has singled out her things to watch over the next few days during Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. She identifies among them:
The effort to dismiss – Tuesday’s proceedings will begin with a debate to dismiss the trial before it even begins. It is expected to fail. Democrats point to the opinion of many legal scholars — including conservatives — who say the trial is valid under the constitution. They also point to an 1876 impeachment trial of a secretary of war who had resigned and note that Trump was impeached before he left office. Trump’s lawyers dismiss that precedent and say language in the Constitution is on their side.
16 hours of arguments each – Democrats are expected to try and take advantage of the senators’ own experiences, tapping into their emotions as they describe in detail — and show on video — what happened as the mob broke through police barriers, injured law enforcement officers, ransacked the Capitol and hunted for lawmakers. The carnage led to five deaths. Defense arguments are likely to begin Friday. Trump’s lawyers have made clear that they will not only argue against the trial on process grounds, but also present a full-throated defense of Trump’s actions that day and why they believe he did not incite the riot. The lawyers argue that Trump’s words “fight like hell” did not mean to literally fight, that the rioters acted on their own accord.
The Republicans to watch – Democrats appear to have little chance of persuading the 17 Republicans they need to find Trump guilty. Five Republican senators voted with Democrats two weeks ago not to dismiss the trial on constitutional grounds. Additionally some GOP senators who voted in favor of the effort to dismiss, such as Rob Portman of Ohio and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, have said they are coming into the trial with an open mind. Democrats are likely to focus, too, on senators who are retiring in 2022 and will have less to lose politically if they vote to convict.
In January, over 39,000 people detained across America became the first incarcerated recipients of the Covid-19 vaccine in the United States.
But when the majority of the 2.3 million incarcerated Americans will receive the vaccine depends largely on where they are detained – in a federal prison, state prison or county jail – and the jurisdiction’s unique vaccine prioritization plans, many of which have been in flux over the last few months in no small part due to politicization of the issue from lawmakers and the public alike.
“The stakes are extremely high,” says Renaldo Hudson, who was recently released from the Illinois department of corrections after 37 years of incarceration. “Most states do not have death sentences. But being incarcerated can be a death sentence if you die inside. They’re putting people in body bags.”
On most days of the pandemic, the largest Covid-19 outbreaks in this country have been in prisons and jails. In December, the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice found that the Covid-19 mortality rate in prisons was twice as high as for the general population, with four times as many positive cases overall. In some states, the mortality rate in prisons is over seven times as high as it is among the state’s general population.
“We have no protection,” says James Swansey, who was incarcerated at Statesville prison for most of the pandemic. “For months, we would see people sent out of the penitentiary to the hospital and we would get word back that such-and-such died and that such-and-such died. The same dude that we were just talking with the other day is no longer with us. We need a voice, we need somebody that’s going to fight for us.”
Vaccination in jails and prisons doesn’t just affect those inside. Vendors and staff working in jails and prisons travel in and out of detention facilities every day, potentially carrying the virus from these incubation sites to communities across the country. Additionally, thousands of people are released from jails and prisons daily, most without receiving a Covid-19 test before release.
Yesterday there were 89,727 new coronavirus cases and 1,596 Covid deaths in the US, according to the latest Johns Hopkins University figures. It is the second day in a row that the number of new cases has been recorded at lower than 100,000.
In Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds lifted the state’s partial mask mandate on Friday. She also said businesses no longer have to limit the number of customers or enforce social distancing. The Des Moines Register’s editorial board called the move “inexplicable and irresponsible.”
Reynolds isn’t acting alone. Democratic and Republican governors alike have been loosening restrictions. The moves come as the most-recent seven-day average for new cases in the US is 119,509 for the past week. The last time that figure was that low was 9 November, near the beginning of the latest surge. The current new case numbers still far surpass the spring and summer highs.
“I have some concern it’s premature” to loosen restrictions, said Dr. Justin Lessler, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Lessler said the very restrictions in place are what is allowing Covid-19 infection rates to decline. “When we remove interventions, we frequently see resurgences,” he said, advising caution if states want to see continued decline. “When new variants come along, the stepping back that may have been OK before is not OK anymore because of the more transmissible variants.”
The nine House impeachment managers plan to avoid any long or abstract legal analysis in favor of efforts to tell the “gripping and spellbinding story” of how Trump incited the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January.
That strategy, they believe, carries at least two advantages: It keeps the message simple and easily digestible for the TV audience; and it allows the prosecution to wrap up quickly so that Democrats can get on with the ambitious legislative agenda of the nascent Biden administration, starting with another massive round of Covid-19 relief.
Not only were the Senate jurors eyewitness to — and victims of — the Capitol siege, but countless hours of videotaped footage of the rampage have been circulating incessantly in the weeks since the violent attack, captivating a country that remains sharply divided over who bears the blame.
Democratic prosecutors will rely heavily on that trove of video evidence, including portions of Trump’s “Save America” speech outside the White House just moments before the siege. They’ll argue that his instructions to “fight like hell” incited his followers to sack the Capitol that day. The managers are also expected to present senators with video clips of insurrectionists hunting for lawmakers and attacking police.
If you were looking for something to lighten the mood…
The US ambassador to Vietnam has recorded an original rap and music video ahead of Tet, the lunar new year, risking inevitable ridicule by styling himself as “the boy from Hanoi”.
“I’m from Nebraska. I’m not a big city boy,” raps Dan Kritenbrink in the song, released on the US embassy in Hanoi’s Facebook group. “Then three years ago I moved to Hanoi.”
He goes on to sip tea, walk the streets with an entourage, which includes bona fide Vietnamese rapper Wowy, and check a sheet of paper that appears to contain the lyrics.
Khang Vu(@KhangXVu)
US ambassador to Vietnam Dan Kritenbrink just released this rap song to wish everyone in Vietnam a Happy Lunar New Year.🧧The full original video can be found on the Facebook of US Embassy in Hanoi. pic.twitter.com/ERAi9SJDAf
