One of Biden’s cabinet picks, Neera Tanden for the director of the office of management and budget, has hit choppy waters with at least four senators already coming out with a ‘no’ vote – including Democrat Joe Manchin.
Yesterday White House press secretary Jen Psaki was still vocal in backing Tanden for the job. Overnight though Axios have published what they’ve labelled a scoop on a “plan B”:
House Democratic leaders are quietly mounting a campaign for Shalanda Young, a longtime congressional aide, to replace Neera Tanden as nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The nascent campaign for Young, who would be OMB’s first Black female leader, reflects a stark reality taking hold in the Democratic Party: Tanden’s prospects are rapidly fading.
Young is a former staff director for the House Appropriations Committee.
“Ms Young is a proven budget expert and is well qualified for the job,” said Rep Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Donald Trump used to promise his supporters that they would be winning so much, they would get sick and tired of winning. But the former US president is now on a seemingly endless losing streak.
He lost the presidential election, lost more than 60 legal challenges to the result, lost his bid to overturn the electoral college, lost control of the Senate and lost an impeachment trial 43-57, though he was spared conviction on a technicality. On Monday, Trump lost yet again – with potentially far-reaching consequences.
The supreme court rejected an attempt by his lawyers to block Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney (DA) in New York, from enforcing a subpoena to obtain eight years of his personal and corporate tax records.
The ruling did not mean the public will get to see Trump’s tax returns, which have gained near mythical status due to him being the first recent president to conceal them, any time soon.
But it did remove an important obstacle from Vance’s dogged investigation. The DA has said little about why he wants Trump’s records but, in a court filing last year, prosecutors said they were justified in seeking them because of public reports of “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization” – Trump’s family business empire – thought to include bank, tax and insurance fraud.
Now that investigation is gathering momentum. Vance, who earlier this month hired a lawyer with extensive experience in white-collar and organised crime cases, will be able to find out whether the public reports were accurate by studying actual financial records, spreadsheets and email correspondence between the Trump Organization and accounting firm Mazars USA.
If wrongdoing is established, it raises the spectre of Trump some day in the future standing in the dock in a New York courtroom and even facing a potential prison term. No wonder he fought so hard to cling to power and the immunity from prosecution that it conferred.
The threat, however real or remote, casts a shadow over Trump’s chances of making a political comeback. On Sunday he is due to make his first speech since leaving office at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, reasserting his command of the Republican party and teasing a new run for president in 2024.
The future of the Republican party is handwritten notes apparently, according to this tweet by NBC’s Henry Gomez.
Henry J. Gomez(@HenryJGomez)
What does a Trump endorsement look like, literally, now that he’s off Twitter? The South Carolina GOP shares this handwritten note to state party chair @DrewMcKissick, who is seeking another term: pic.twitter.com/MyeBfLzsBY
The South Carolina Republican party is one of those that censured their Congressman Tom Rice for failing to back Donald Trump and instead voting for impeachment back in January.
Canadian prime ministers are traditionally the first foreign leader to visit the White House when a new president takes office. It’s slightly different this time around, as due to Covid, Joe Biden’s first official bilateral with another world leader will be over videocall. Aamer Madhani and Rob Gillies at the Associated Press have set out how things are expected to unfold.
The two leaders — Joe Biden in the Oval Office in Washington and Justin Trudeau in the prime minister’s office in Ottawa — will first deliver brief remarks in front of the media at the start of their meeting.
Then Biden, secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan will hold a 45-minute session with Trudeau, deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland, foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau and Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman.
The small meeting will be followed by an extended session that will include vice president Kamala Harris as well as several of Biden’s Cabinet-level advisers and Trudeau’s ministers.
The agenda – apart you imagine from a lot of introductions and “Sorry, you’re on mute, can you say that again?” – includes the two countries’ Covid-19 responses, climate change, economic issues and more. Biden and Trudeau plan to deliver joint closing statements at the end of their meeting. The White House said that the leaders also plan to issue what they are calling a “road map” outlining how the neighboring countries will work together to fight Covid-19, curb climate emissions and pursue other shared priorities.
Although there are some issues between the two countries, Canadian officials expect Trudeau to have a far more productive relationship with Biden than he did with Donald Trump. Trump once maligned the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest and weak” after he had voiced objections to Trump raising tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada, Mexico and the European Union. That era of US diplomacy by Twitter insult seems over.
We are expecting some better news about vaccine manufacture supply to be delivered in Congress today. As Tim Stelloh reports for NBC News, executives with Pfizer and Moderna will say they are able to ramp up supplies in the coming weeks.
In a prepared statement to be made before a House subcommittee Tuesday, John Young, Pfizer’s chief business officer, is expected to say the company plans to increase its delivery capacity of 4 million to 5 million doses a week to more than 13 million by mid-March.
Moderna expects to double its monthly delivery capacity to 40 million doses by April, according to Dr. Stephen Hoge, the company’s president.
With the US having reached the grim total of over 500,000 Covid deaths, Sam Levin in Los Angeles reports for us on issues with the vaccine roll-out:
California, the largest state in the US, has administered more than 7.3m vaccine doses but is lagging behind other states in vaccine administration. Eligibility is due to dramatically expand in March, but with supplies limited and many doses being used for second shots, essential workers could likely be waiting weeks or longer to get appointments.
Facing severe economic strain eleven months into the pandemic, low-wage workers across the state say they can’t afford to stay home from dangerous jobs – and can’t afford to lose income if they get infected. They are exhausted with stressful work conditions and customers who refuse to comply with Covid rules, and are struggling to get basic information on when they might get vaccines.
Dominique Smith, a 33-year-old rideshare driver in Silicon Valley, said he regularly checked his Uber app in hope of an update about vaccine eligibility. He fears he could lose his housing if he contracts Covid from a passenger and then has to stay home: “I do not have enough money saved up to weather three weeks of being sick and out of a job.”
Dr Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of global health and infectious diseases at Stanford, said the Trump administration had not made significant investments in infrastructure to administer vaccines, making the initial rollout especially challenging in a state like California, which has 58 counties and two dense metropolitan regions.
The state has broad guidelines to prioritize immunocompromised people and those with occupational risks, “but the problem is that it’s such a high-level framework that how you operationalize it becomes really tricky”, Maldonado said. “These are tough choices … because you’re judging whose life is worth more. You could make an argument for all kinds of groups.”
The hearing into appointing Merrick Garland as US attorney general will continue today. Alex Rogers and Jeremy Herb for CNN identified six key takeaways from yesterday, of which this is perhaps one of the more significant for a certain former president:
Democrats largely didn’t mention Donald Trump by name when they asked about the investigation into the January 6 riot at the Capitol, but they touched on the question of whether the Justice Department should examine the former president’s role for encouraging the mob, which led to his impeachment. Even Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, after voting to acquit Trump in the Senate trial, suggested that the criminal justice system is the right venue in which to consider those allegations.
Sen Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, encouraged Garland to look “upstream” and “not rule out investigation of funders, organizers, ringleaders, or aiders and abettors, who were not present in the Capitol on 6 January.”
“We begin with the people on the ground and we work our way up to those who were involved and further involved,” responded Garland. “We will pursue these leads wherever they take us.”
CNN also suggested that Garland’s disquiet over the death penalty, pledge to ‘protect’ the Justice Department from political pressure, and his suggestion that there is no reason special counsel John Durham’s investigation of the FBI’s Russia probe wouldn’t continue were all important moments.
Mike DeBonis and Karoun Demirjian write for the Washington Post that what it is at stake today in the Senate is who gets to write the narrative of what happened on 6 January. While there has been a push to make the hearing as bipartisan as possible, it is inevitably going to surface divisions. They write:
Sen Amy Klobuchar said in an interview that preparations for the hearing have been strictly bipartisan and that she expected a “constructive tone” to prevail. “This is a moment to get the actual facts about what happened at the Capitol,” she said. “The issues we identify and the answers we get are part of the solution, so this isn’t just about throwing popcorn at a movie screen to try to get sound bites. We actually have to make decisions in the coming months.”
But she acknowledged that other senators may focus on contested aspects of the narrative surrounding the riot. At least one senator who will ask questions Tuesday has shown a willingness to challenge the prevailing evidence showing that the Capitol attack was conducted by Trump supporters.
Sen Ron Johnson has publicly suggested that Nancy Pelosi is to blame for the riot and last week questioned whether the events of 6 January could be fairly considered an “armed insurrection,” despite the fact that several rioters were carrying weapons and a cache of weapons was found near the Capitol grounds.
Today’s hearing is not likely to be the last, either:
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters said in an interview Monday that he expects Tuesday’s hearings to “lead to even more questions” about what contributed to the security failures on 6 January. Both he and Klobuchar said that at least one additional hearing will be called featuring senior officials of the federal agencies who were involved in the preparations and response to the insurrection.
You might think that an impeachment trial was enough of an investigation into the events of 6 January and to put them on the record in Congress, but today there will be more delving into what happened. Here’s a reminder of the video montage that Democrats used when presenting their evidence that Donald Trump was responsible for what unfolded.
Democrats play montage of footage from Capitol siege during Trump impeachment hearing – video
The session today will start at 10am EST (1500 GMT) and we are expecting four witnesses:
Robert J. Contee III, the acting chief of police of the Metropolitan Police Department in DC
Steven A. Sund, former chief of the Capitol Police (2019-2021)
Michael C. Stenger, former sergeant at arms and doorkeeper of the Senate (2018-2021)
Paul D. Irving, former sergeant at arms of the US House of Representatives (2012-2021)
You’ll notice a lot of 2021 dates in that list – Sund, Stenger and Irving all resigned after the Capitol attack. Neither Stenger or Irving have spoken publicly about the 6 January assault before.
Welcome to our live coverage of US politics for Tuesday. Here’s a catch-up on what is happening, and what we might expect to see later today…
The Senate will begin a hearing on the 6 January Capitol attack, with witness testimony from law enforcement officers, three of whom have subsequently resigned over security failings on the day.
It’s likely to be contentious – among those on the Senate panel are Republican Ron Johnson, who has said the events did not amount to an armed insurrection, and Sens Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, both of whom continued to dispute the election result and chose to discount states’ electoral votes after the riot.
Yesterday, president Joe Biden held a ceremony at the White House to mourn those lost to Covid as the US reached the grim milestone of over half a million deaths, the first country in the world to do so.
The US recorded 56,044 new cases and 1,413 further deaths yesterday. The total US death toll, according to figures collated by the Johns Hopkins University, stands at500,071.
The court also said it would not hear an appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans trying to disqualify mailed ballots in the 2020 presidential election.
Emma Coronel, the wife of El Chapo, was arrested in Virginia on drug trafficking charges.
In Joe Biden’s diary today he will be meeting with Black essential workers at 1.15pm EST (1815 GMT).
Biden will then virtually meet Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau at 4pm. There might be a little bit of frostiness in the air after his Keystone order halted work on the pipeline between the two countries, although you expect Trudeau will find Biden easier to work with than Donald Trump. They are expected to give a joint statement at 5.45pm.
Jen Psaki will give the White House press briefing at noon today.
It’s a busy day in Congress. Today will see further hearings in the lengthy process of confirming Joe Biden’s cabinet – Xavier Becerra and Deb Haaland will be up today. It is also the concluding day of the Senate hearing into appointing Merrick Garland as US attorney general.
