Розділ: Політика
Joe Biden’s Next Big Decision: Choosing A Running Mate
Joe Biden faces the most important decision of his five-decade political career: choosing a vice president.The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee expects to name a committee to vet potential running mates next week, according to three Democrats with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans. Biden, a former vice president himself, has committed to picking a woman and told donors this week that his team has discussed naming a choice well ahead of the Democratic convention in August.Selecting a running mate is always critical for a presidential candidate. But it’s an especially urgent calculation for the 77-year-old Biden, who, if he wins, would be the oldest American president in history. The decision carries added weight amid the coronavirus pandemic, which, beyond its death toll, threatens to devastate the world economy and define a prospective Biden administration.”We’re still going to be in crisis or recovery, and you want a vice president who can manage that,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “This seems like a much more important decision than usual.”Biden faces pressure on multiple fronts. He must consider the demands of his racially, ethnically and ideologically diverse party, especially the black women who propelled his nomination. He must balance those concerns with his stated desire for a governing partner who is “simpatico” and “ready to be president on a moment’s notice.”The campaign’s general counsel, Dana Remus, and former White House counsel Bob Bauer are managing the early process, gathering information about prospects. Democrats close to several presumed contenders say they’ve not yet been contacted.Biden has offered plenty of hints about his thinking. He’s said he can easily name 12 to 15 women who meet his criteria, but would likely seriously consider anywhere from six to 11 candidates. He’s given no indication of whether he’ll look to the Senate, where he spent six terms, to governors or elsewhere.Some Biden advisers said the campaign has heard from many Democrats who want a woman of color. Black women helped rescue Biden’s campaign after an embarrassing start in predominately white Iowa and New Hampshire. Yet there’s no firm agreement within the campaign that Biden must go that route.”The best thing you can do for all segments of the population is to win,” said Biden’s campaign co-chairman Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana congressman and former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. “He has shown a commitment to diversity from the beginning. But this has to be based on, like the VP says, who he trusts.”Biden has regularly praised California Sen. Kamala Harris, a former rival who endorsed him in March and campaigned for him. When she introduced him at a fundraiser this week, Biden did little to tamp down speculation about her prospects.”I’m coming for you, kid,” he said.He’s also spoken positively of Stacey Abrams, who narrowly missed becoming the first African American female governor in U.S. history when she lost the 2018 Georgia governor’s race.Yet those two women highlight Biden’s tightrope. At 55, Harris is talented and popular with Democratic donors, a valuable commodity for a nominee with a fundraising weakness. But she’s also a former prosecutor who faces the same skepticism among progressives as Biden. Meanwhile, her home state is already firmly in the Democratic column and could make her an easy target for Republicans eager to blast the party as too liberal.Abrams, 46, is a star for many younger Democrats, a group Biden struggled to win over in the primary. And she could help turn Georgia into a genuine swing state. But the highest post she’s ever held is minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, a possible vulnerability in a time of crisis.Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster based in the battleground state of Wisconsin, said it will be impossible for Biden to choose someone who will please everyone.”You can ask too much of a vice president pick to bridge everything — ideology, generational gap, gender, race, experience,” he said. “There’s going to be something wrong with every one of these choices.”New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is Democrats’ only nonwhite female governor. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has reportedly vouched for his state’s Latina senator, Catherine Cortez Masto. Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth is a veteran who lost limbs in combat. She’s of Thai heritage and has notably jousted with President Donald Trump. And Rep. Val Demings, a black congresswoman from the swing state of Florida, helped lead the House impeachment efforts against Trump.Yet all four women are relative unknowns nationally.Biden could go beyond Washington to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, one of the three Great Lakes states that delivered Trump his Electoral College majority in 2016. She’s won plaudits during the pandemic and meshes with Biden’s pragmatic sensibilities, winning her post in 2018 with promises to “fix the damn roads.”But it’s not clear that a 48-year-old white woman from the Midwest brings Biden advantages he doesn’t already have or can’t find elsewhere.It’s a similar conundrum for others, including Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a former rival who fits seamlessly with Biden’s politics. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, could offer a bridge to progressives, but several Democrats said her age, 70, is a bigger liability than potential policy differences with Biden.Perhaps helping Biden, several African American advocates and progressive leaders said the Democratic ticket’s policies and empathetic appeals are what’s most important.Black voters “have to trust the messenger,” said Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of Black PAC, and “a black woman could stand up and have moral authority to lead on those big issues facing the country right now.” But, Shropshire continued, that doesn’t mean a white, Asian or Latina vice presidential nominee could not “speak to the systemic issues, the structural issues that allow for inequalities to persist.”
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By Polityk | 04/10/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
US Congress Weighs How to Legislate From Afar
“Congress” literally means to gather together. But the coronavirus pandemic and election year politics are forcing lawmakers to consider ways of legislating from afar, some for the first time in U.S. history.The virus’ continuing spread is raising doubts among lawmakers and aides that the House will reconvene in Washington as scheduled after April 20. Democrats are increasingly annoyed that President Donald Trump gets a daily platform to rebut unflattering stories and update Americans on his administration’s response to the crisis. Like millions of people around the world, homebound members of Congress have time on their hands for suggestions, and they’re making them with rising urgency — from virtual congressional hearings to remote voting and the more likely buddy system by which votes are cast by proxy.”There are consistent recommendations and pressure on what remote voting would look like, and I think there are ongoing conversations looking at how you could, in a very secure manner, have remote hearings,” said Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif. “That is one way that the public can see what Congress is doing while they are watching the daily press briefings from the administration.”Politics aside, there are life-and-death matters to legislate. After passing the nation’s largest stimulus bill, Congress is now considering follow-up policy that gives more support for small businesses, medical personnel, unemployed Americans and efforts to slow the virus’ spread. But before more dollars are dedicated, the tradition-bound Congress must untangle questions about its own operations, given that the average age of members is right around 60, and many of its leaders are more than a decade older. Several members of Congress have tested positive for the virus. The last time Congress met, the Senate slowed down its roll call to thin out the number of members sharing the chamber at any one time. The House on March 27 spread its members from the floor into the empty visitors gallery overhead, filling every other seat, to pass the $2.2 trillion bill. The scene was poignant, but also awkward and risky. When it was over, members bolted the building, leaving red tags about cleaning dangling from office doorknobs.Lawmakers aren’t eager to gather there again anytime soon. But they’re abuzz with proposals on how to govern — deliberate, oversee how the $2.2 trillion is spent and vote — without 535 representatives and senators meeting in person. But discussions are still tentative, given concerns about hacking and the efficacy of dozens of garrulous politicians sharing a Zoom-like platform. Several House committees are looking to somehow hold hearings, for example, on the inspectors general Trump has ousted or prevented from taking office. “At this point we’re trying to figure out logistics of doing hearings, and we’re looking into whether we can do virtual or Zoom hearings,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “But we’ve reached no conclusion on that.” Wednesday evening, the Committee on House Administration sent members guidance on how to use remote conferencing. As for floor votes, House Democrats said in a report last month that it’s best to follow the current practice of unanimous consent or, in its absence, roll call votes. The House also could reset the minimum number of members who must be present under a rule changed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Other options would require changing the House rules, which would likely result in an unwanted trip to Washington, anyway. Proxy voting, or the practice of an absent member giving a present member authority to cast both votes, has precedent in Congress. Proxy voting in House committees was permitted until 1995. And it’s still allowed in Senate committees. But remote voting, wrote Rules Committee Democrats, presents a universe of security and other challenges. It has no precedent, which means parties could file legal challenges against any legislation they don’t like. And it’s vulnerable to hackers at a time when other countries have shown great interest in meddling in the U.S. political processes. “Creating a secure, reliable, and user-friendly system while in the midst of a crisis is not realistic,” the report found.Yet remote voting has its fans. Dozens of Republicans and Democrats that make up the Problem Solvers Caucus on Tuesday urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to consider allowing voting by video or having voting machines moved to local offices.”We’re working on a system where we can vote remotely so that we don’t have to go back in times of emergency,” Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., one of the bipartisan caucus members, told reporters on Wednesday. “Might it be better to caucus and be able to vote from your kitchen knowing that it’s only (for) a temporary time?”And Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, wrote last month in a column for The Washington Post that the country has debated governing from elsewhere in times of crisis for centuries, from the British burning of the Capitol in the 19th century to the Cold War in the 20th century and the wake of Sept. 11, 2001.”This time, it is not the Senate’s meeting space that is at risk,” they wrote, proposing remote voting for up to 30 days. “It is the senators themselves.” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., on Wednesday dismissed concerns about the risk of hacking for remote voting, saying that if anyone’s vote is recorded incorrectly, “we’d know immediately.” As for Congress’ cherished tradition of in-person voting, he noted:”Traditionally, Congress didn’t have any women. Traditionally, Congress didn’t recognize the right of Black Americans to vote,” Khanna tweeted. “Traditions change, and so should Congress.”
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By Polityk | 04/09/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
How Trump Amassed Power in Battling the Coronavirus Pandemic
In a matter of weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump has assumed extraordinary power and influence at a time of national crisis. In the fight against COVID-19, Trump has declared a national emergency that has enabled him to deploy military hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles, force carmakers to manufacture ventilators and relax vaccination and treatment regulations. These and other steps have been hailed as critical public health measures, but they have come with a cost to civil liberties and democratic governance. After years of frustration in blocking illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America, the administration now has the power to arrest and immediately deport undocumented immigrants based on the need to protect public health. And in a signal that his administration can spend trillions of dollars as it sees fit to respond to the coronavirus crisis with diminished oversight from Congress or government watchdogs, Trump is waging an assault on a network of federal inspectors general to weaken their investigative clout and mandate. From left, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Vice President Mike Pence and Rep. Kevin Brady applaud President Trump during the signing of the CARES Act, March 27, 2020.Kimberly Wehle, a visiting professor of law at American University in Washington, D.C., said Trump’s recent firings of two inspectors general appear to be an attempt to “consolidate power” during a national emergency. “This is a serious affront to the rule of law and an accountable government,” Wehle said. “The IGs exist to protect the public from fraud, waste and abuse.” Conservative constitutional scholars say Trump has carefully avoided invoking any inherent constitutional authority in confronting the pandemic. Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said Trump has taken “a very traditional conception” of executive power, relying largely on powers given to him by Congress. “He’s not stretching and straining, as far as I can tell, to read the Constitution as if it granted him a whole host of authorities,” Prakash said. To be sure, as extraordinary as they are, the Trump administration’s actions pale by comparison to the draconian steps taken by some governments around the world. Digital signs signal closed at an international bridge checkpoint at the U.S-Mexico border that joins Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, March 21, 2020.ImmigrationNowhere has the effect of the administration’s newly assumed emergency powers revealed itself more directly than immigration. Last month, the administration restricted all nonessential traffic across the border with Mexico and Canada in the name of public health safety. “Our nation’s top health care officials are extremely concerned about the grave public health consequences of mass uncontrolled cross-border movement,” Trump said. FILE – Personnel at the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention work at the Emergency Operations Center in response to the 2019 novel coronavirus, Feb. 13, 2020, in Atlanta.While Congress rejected an administration proposal to end protections for asylum-seekers, the administration found another way to restrict asylum applications: a designation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that unauthorized immigrants pose a “public health threat.” The designation has enabled the administration to abandon a long-standing policy of not returning asylum-seekers to countries where they might face persecution, according to Sarah Pierce of the Migration Policy Institute. Now, virtually all Central American immigrants caught at the U.S. border are quickly “expelled” from the country without seeing an immigration officer, while growing numbers of unaccompanied children are turned away, where once they were handed over to a guardian or family member. Pierce said the COVID-related border restrictions will be hard to roll back, even after the crisis is over. “This is something that the administration has been working toward for so long,” Pierce said. “I don’t expect them to walk it back willingly.”
John Malcolm of the conservative Heritage Foundation dismissed the notion that Trump’s actions are politically motivated. “I think there’s no question that the president and every governor are trying to react to a very, very difficult circumstance,” he said. FILE – In this March 16, 2011, file photo, a security fence surrounds inmate housing on the Rikers Island correctional facility in New York.Indefinite detention power
In the lead-up to the enactment of a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package last month, the Justice Department asked Congress for emergency powers that alarmed many rights advocates.One proposal would allow judges to halt court proceedings during an emergency. Another would allow the Bureau of Prisons to hold detainees indefinitely during an emergency. Robinson said what made the proposed measure to hold detainees “dangerous” was its potential use in the future. “That’s extreme. It’s dangerous. It’s unnecessary,” he said. A Justice Department spokesperson said the proposed measure was part of “draft suggestions” made in response to a congressional request and that it did not “confer new powers upon the executive branch.” Challenging inspectors general Long a critic of government watchdogs, Trump has used the crisis to exert authority over independent inspectors general appointed to ensure government transparency. Last month, Trump vowed that his administration would not cooperate with a key transparency provision of a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package he signed into law. “I do not understand, and my administration will not treat this provision, as permitting the (new coronavirus inspector general) to issue reports to Congress without the presidential supervision required by the Take Care Clause,” Trump wrote in a signing document. The U.S. Constitution’s Take Care Clause states that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Then in the span of four days, Trump ousted two inspectors general and publicly berated a third. FILE – In this Oct. 4, 2019, photo, Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, arrives at the Capitol in Washington for closed-door questioning about a whistleblower complaint.The first casualty was Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community watchdog who notified Congress about a whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment last year. Trump fired him last week. This week, Trump sidelined Glenn Fine, the acting Pentagon inspector general tapped to chair a new coronavirus pandemic accountability committee. Trump twice criticized the Department of Health and Human Services watchdog over a report that disclosed testing delays and shortages at many hospitals. He called the report a “fake dossier” and questioned the inspector general’s impartiality.
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By Polityk | 04/09/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Trump Confirms US ‘Holding Back’ Funding for WHO
The United States is “holding back” funding to the World Health Organization, according to U.S. President Donald Trump, who said the WHO “got it wrong” about the advance of COVID-19.Trump and members of his administration accuse the international agency of having a bias in favor of China, where the coronavirus was first reported.“It hasn’t accomplished what it was intended to deliver,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alongside Trump at the Wednesday briefing by the White House coronavirus task force. “We’re reevaluating our funding” with respect to the WHO.Trump said the government would conduct a study about the organization before deciding on future funding for it, which from Washington totals hundreds of millions of dollars per year.It was the second consecutive day the president attacked the WHO and threatened its funding from the United States, which is the largest contributor to the specialized agency of the United Nations.Officials at the U.N. and WHO pushed back on Trump’s threat.“It is possible that the same facts have had different readings by different entities,” said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. “Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis.”“The lessons learned will be essential to effectively address similar challenges, as they may arise in the future. But now is not that time,” added Guterres in a statement Wednesday. “Now is the time for unity, for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences.””Please don’t politicize this virus,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during an emotional briefing in Geneva when he was asked about Trump’s remark. “If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it.”Some U.S. cable networks have stopped airing the full daily White House coronavirus task force briefings, cutting in and out of live coverage, having made that decision because of the frequent political nature of some of the president’s comments.Earlier Wednesday, Trump criticized that approach to the briefings in a tweet, saying “Radical Left Democrats” had tried to shame “the Fake News Media into not covering them, but that effort failed because the ratings are through the roof.…” The Radical Left Democrats have gone absolutely crazy that I am doing daily Presidential News Conferences. They actually want me to STOP! They used to complain that I am not doing enough of them, now they complain that I “shouldn’t be allowed to do them.” They tried to shame…..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2020The president, a former host of a reality television program, described viewership as on the level of “Monday Night Football” and the finale of “The Bachelor.”…the Fake News Media into not covering them, but that effort failed because the ratings are through the roof according to, of all sources, the Failing New York Times, “Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale” type numbers (& sadly, they get it $FREE). Trump Derangement Syndrome!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2020That comparison generated criticism.“It takes a certain twisted mind to take pleasure in the fact that more people are watching him because more people are dying,” tweeted a Clinton-era White House press secretary, Joe Lockhart. “It doesn’t even matter that most people who are watching are throwing things at the TV and his ratings for handling the crisis are plummeting.”4. It takes a certain twisted mind to take pleasure in the fact that more people are watching him because more people are dying. It doesn’t even matter that most people who are watching are throwing things at the TV and his ratings for handling the crisis are plummeting. Like— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) April 8, 2020The number of U.S. deaths from the virus has topped 14,000 — more than 4,500 of them in New York City. Across the country, 430,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19, by far the most of any nation.Government officials have said they expect the pandemic to possibly peak this week in the United States.“We are in the midst of a week of heartache,” Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the coronavirus task force, said at the close of Wednesday’s briefing.
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By Polityk | 04/09/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Linda Tripp, Whose Tapes Exposed Clinton Scandal, Dies at 70
Linda Tripp, whose secretly recorded conversations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky led to the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton, died Wednesday at age 70. Her death was confirmed by attorney Joseph Murtha. He provided no further details.In August 1994, Tripp became a public affairs specialist at the Pentagon, where Lewinsky worked after being a White House intern. The two reportedly became friends. Tripp made secret tapes of conversations with Lewinsky, who told her she had had an affair with Clinton. Tripp turned almost 20 hours of tapes over to Kenneth Starr, the independent prosecutor investigating the president, prompting the investigation that led to his impeachment. As news broke Wednesday that Tripp was near death, Lewinsky tweeted that she hoped for her recovery “no matter the past.”
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By Polityk | 04/09/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Amid Coronavirus Outbreak, Trump Assails Push for Mail-In Voting
U.S. President Donald Trump is waging a new political fight against the adoption of mail-in voting rights throughout the U.S., claiming it is rife with possible fraud and would significantly benefit opposition Democrats.Trump himself recently requested an absentee ballot to vote in the Republican presidential primary in Florida, the Atlantic coastal state he now claims as his official home after spending his entire life as a New York resident.But he said on Twitter on Wednesday, “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting.”“Democrats are clamoring for it,” he said. “Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans. FILE – Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during the 11th Democratic candidates debate, held in CNN’s Washington studios, March 15, 2020.Democrats have long voiced support for expansion of the electorate through mail-in voting, on the theory that given an easier option to vote other than showing up at polling stations on Election Day, more people would cast ballots. It also would likely help more Democrats win office. Some polling over the years has suggested Republican voters are more committed than Democrats to showing up at polling places and thus as a group do not necessarily need the added possibility of voting by mail. Trump claims that if mail-in voting becomes the dominant way to vote, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”In fact, voting by mail already plays an important role in some U.S. elections, but not nationwide and not just in Democratic-leaning states. Can Vote-by-Mail Save US Elections From Coronavirus?COVID-19 could reshape the way Americans practice democracyThe National Vote at Home Institute says that in the western part of the country, 69 percent of ballots are already cast by mail, but only 27 percent nationwide.The western part of the country includes the deeply conservative state of Utah, which votes heavily for Republicans, and has moved almost entirely to vote-by-mail in recent years. The Republican secretary of state in the northwestern state of Washington also champions mail-in voting.Democrats failed in their efforts to include financial assistance for states to adopt mail-in voting as it recently approved a $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package. Republicans in Washington remain adamantly opposed, citing security concerns and objecting to transforming election laws as part of the coronavirus aid measure.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline. Embed” />CopyNow, one Democratic activist, Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, said, “With the insanity of Wisconsin, Democrats have the proof they need to make this a mandate for November.”She urged Democrats to ensure vote-by-mail becomes a possibility throughout the country as a “fallback” in the event the virus limits people from voting in person.Trump pointedly expressed his opposition to mail-in voting at his Tuesday coronavirus news conference, particularly if some activists collect the votes of many people rather than people mailing in their ballots themselves. “Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, cause they’re cheaters,” he said. “They go and collect them, they’re fraudulent in many cases. You gotta vote. And they should have voter ID, by the way, you want to really do it right, you have voter ID.”
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By Polityk | 04/09/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Lawmakers Race to Approve Additional Coronavirus Funding for Struggling Americans
Less than two weeks after U.S. lawmakers passed the largest economic relief package in the country’s history, Congress is set to advance even more funding Thursday to help struggling American workers. The measure would provide additional funding for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a $350 billion program that is part of the broader Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act.That $2.2 trillion rescue package was quickly written and passed by Congress late last month, as businesses nationwide dealt with the economic fallout of coronavirus stay-at-home orders.The temporary closure of millions of businesses triggered historic levels of unemployment, with nearly 10 million Americans filing assistance claims in a two-week span in March. That marked the worst period for unemployment filings since 1982. Many analysts predict those numbers could soon reach levels last seen in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s.FILE – In this image from video, the final vote of 96-0 shows passage of the $2.2 trillion economic rescue package in response to coronavirus pandemic, passed by the Senate at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, March 25, 2020.The CARES Act gives federal unemployment benefits of $600 a week to laid-off and out-of-work Americans in addition to state unemployment benefits. The new bills also make benefits available for the first time to the self-employed and small-business owners. The PPP gives loans to small businesses to cover their payroll and expenses during the economic slowdown. According to the White House, the Small Business Administration has awarded over 220,000 loans totaling $66 billion as of April 7, just five days into availability of the program. In a request to Congress, the White House asked lawmakers for an increase of $251 billion for the program.”It is quickly becoming clear that Congress will need to provide more funding, or this crucial program may run dry,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement Tuesday. “That cannot happen. Nearly 10 million Americans filed for unemployment in just the last two weeks. This is already a record-shattering tragedy, and every day counts.”The program had a rocky rollout when it opened for applications last Friday. Many business owners were deemed ineligible to apply because their business banks were not on the list of lenders participating in the government program. Others reported long hold times to obtain information on applications that had been quickly written to encompass a rapidly changing situation.In a joint statement Wednesday, congressional Democrats appeared to support the increase, while calling for some of that new funding to be directed to women, minority and veteran-owned businesses.”As Democrats have said since day one, Congress must provide additional relief for small businesses and families, building on the strong down payment made in the bipartisan CARES Act,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.FILE – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., joined by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., speaks during a news conference, on Capitol Hill, Feb.11, 2020.The U.S. Senate is set to vote on the increase Thursday, using fast-track procedures that would pass the measure without requiring most senators to fly back to Washington. The legislation would then move to the House of Representatives for a likely vote on Friday.Republican Congressman Thomas Massie has already tweeted concerns about fast-tracking the legislation in the House. He voiced similar objections to the CARES Act vote last month, forcing many members to fly back to Washington to establish the necessary numbers to overcome his objection.But there appears to be bipartisan consensus to move quickly on the increases and get the legislation to President Donald Trump to be signed into law.”We have days, NOT weeks to address this,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the co-sponsors of the PPP legislation, tweeted Tuesday. The fear that #PPP will run out of money is creating tremendous anxiety among #SmallBusiness. We have days, NOT weeks to address this. We are working with @USTreasury to make a formal request for additional funds ASAP & with Senate leadership to get fast track vote ASAP.— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) April 7, 2020 Negotiations on a second-round economic relief package are already under way, with lawmakers set to return to session on Capitol Hill on April 20.Pelosi initially proposed legislation heavy on infrastructure initiatives that would address broader problems exposed by the coronavirus outbreak — failures in broadband technology and the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges. But that approach did not gain sufficient traction.Democrats will likely ask for another round of direct payments to Americans, even as the first $1,200 payments to many lower- and middle-class Americans are set to be distributed through April. A proposal for vote-by-mail is also likely to receive a renewed push following criticism of Tuesday’s primary election in Wisconsin, the first state to hold in-person elections since coronavirus stay-at-home orders went into effect.In a press call with reporters Tuesday, Schumer also called for $25,000 pay increases for essential emergency and health care workers fighting the coronavirus.”No proposal will be complete without addressing the need for essential workers,” Schumer said.
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By Polityk | 04/08/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Sanders Drops 2020 Presidential Bid, Leaving Biden as Likely Nominee
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who saw his once strong lead in the Democratic primary evaporate as the party’s establishment lined swiftly up behind rival Joe Biden, ended his presidential bid on Wednesday, an acknowledgment that the former vice president is too far ahead for him to have any reasonable hope of catching up.The Vermont senator’s announcement makes Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge President Donald Trump in November.Sanders plans to talk to his supporters later Wednesday.Sanders initially exceeded sky-high expectations about his ability to recreate the magic of his 2016 presidential bid, and even overcame a heart attack last October on the campaign trail. But he found himself unable to convert unwavering support from progressives into a viable path to the nomination amid “electability” fears fueled by questions about whether his democratic socialist ideology would be palatable to general election voters.The 78-year-old senator began his latest White House bid facing questions about whether he could win back the supporters who chose him four years ago as an insurgent alternative to the party establishment’s choice, Hillary Clinton. Despite winning 22 states in 2016, there were no guarantees he’d be a major presidential contender this cycle, especially as the race’s oldest candidate.Sanders, though, used strong polling and solid fundraising — collected almost entirely from small donations made online — to more than quiet early doubters. Like the first time, he attracted widespread support from young voters and was able to make new inroads within the Hispanic community, even as his appeal with African Americans remained small.Sanders amassed the most votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, which opened primary voting, and cruised to an easy victory in Nevada — seemingly leaving him well positioned to sprint to the Democratic nomination while a deeply crowded and divided field of alternatives sunk around him.But a crucial endorsement of Biden by influential South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, and a subsequent, larger-than-expected victory in South Carolina, propelled the former vice president into Super Tuesday, when he won 10 of 14 states.In a matter of days, his top former Democratic rivals lined up and announced their endorsement of Biden. The former vice president’s campaign had appeared on the brink of collapse after New Hampshire but found new life as the rest of the party’s more moderate establishment coalesced around him as an alternative to Sanders.Things only got worse the following week when Sanders lost Michigan, where he had campaigned hard and upset Clinton in 2016. He was also beaten in Missouri, Mississippi and Idaho the same night and the results were so decisive that Sanders headed to Vermont without speaking to the media.The coronavirus outbreak essentially froze the campaign, preventing Sanders from holding the large rallies that had become his trademark and shifting the primary calendar. It became increasingly unclear where he could notch a victory that would help him regain ground against Biden.Though he will not be the nominee, Sanders was a key architect of many of the social policies that dominated the Democratic primary, including a “Medicare for All” universal, government-funded health care plan, tuition-free public college, a $15 minimum wage and sweeping efforts to fight climate change under the “Green New Deal.”He relished the fact that his ideas — viewed as radical four years ago— had become part of the political mainstream by the next election cycle, as Democratic politics lurched to the left in the Trump era.Sanders began the 2020 race by arguing that he was the most electable Democrat against Trump. He said his working-class appeal could help Democrats win back Rust Belt states that Trump won in 2016, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But as the race wore on, the senator reverted to his 2016 roots, repeatedly stressing that he backs a “political revolution” from the bottom up under the slogan “Not me. Us.”Sanders also faced persistent questions about being the field’s oldest candidate. Those were pushed into the spotlight on Oct. 1, when he was at a rally in Las Vegas and asked for a chair to be brought on stage so he could sit down. Suffering from chest pains afterward, he underwent surgery to insert two stints because of a blocked artery, and his campaign revealed two days later that he had suffered a heart attack.But a serious health scare that might have derailed other campaigns seemed only to help Sanders as his already-strong fundraising got stronger and rising stars on the Democratic left, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, endorsed him. Many supporters said the heart attack only strengthened their resolve to back him.Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren outshone him throughout much of the summer, but Sanders worked his way back up in the polls. The two progressive candidates spent months refusing to attack each other, though Sanders offered a strong defense of Medicare for All after Warren offered a transition plan saying it would take the country years to transition to it.The two longtime allies finally clashed bitterly, if briefly, in January, when Warren said that Sanders had suggested during a 2018 private meeting that a woman couldn’t be elected president. Sanders denied saying that, but Warren refused to shake his outstretched hand after a debate in Iowa.Warren left the race after a dismal Super Tuesday showing in which she finished third in her own state.In 2016, Sanders kept campaigning long after the primaries had ended and endorsed Clinton less than two weeks before their party’s convention. This cycle, he promised to work better with the national and state parties. His dropping out of the race now could be a step toward unity.
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By Polityk | 04/08/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Wisconsin Voters Brave Coronavirus
Amid coronavirus fears, Wisconsin voters went to the polls Tuesday after the state supreme court reversed the Democratic governor’s postponement of the election. Mike O’Sullivan reports, disputes over the voting process foreshadow battles ahead of the presidential election in November.
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By Polityk | 04/08/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Trump Sidelines Watchdog Tapped for Virus Rescue Oversight
President Donald Trump has sidelined the inspector general who was tapped to chair a special oversight board of the $2.2 trillion economic package intended to help businesses and individuals affected by the coronavirus, officials said Tuesday.Glenn Fine, the acting Defense Department inspector general and a veteran watchdog, had been selected by peers last month for the oversight position.But Trump has instead nominated a replacement inspector general at the Pentagon and appointed an acting one to serve in Fine’s place, according to an email from a Defense Department official obtained by The Associated Press.That means Fine will no longer serve on the oversight board, which was created by Congress to be the nexus of oversight for coronavirus funding. He will instead revert to the position of principle deputy inspector general.It was not immediately clear Tuesday who will oversee the rescue law.
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By Polityk | 04/08/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Press Secretary Who Never Held Briefing Leaving Her White House Post
Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary who never held a briefing for the media during her nine months in the position, is shifting from the West Wing back to the East Wing where she will become first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff and spokesperson. “I am excited to welcome Stephanie back to the team in this new role,”said the first lady in a statement released Tuesday morning. “She has been a mainstay and true leader in the Administration from even before day one, and I know she will excel as Chief of Staff.” Grisham, who is 43, will succeed, effectively immediately, Lindsay Reynolds who resigned early this week “to spend time with her family,” according to the White House. “I continue to be honored to serve both the President and First Lady in the Administration,” said Grisham in a statement. “My replacements will be announced in the coming days and I will stay in the West Wing to help with a smooth transition for as long as needed.”Grisham is expected to be succeeded by Kayleigh McEnany, the top spokesperson for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. McEnany is a 31-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who was previously the national spokesperson for the national committee of the Republican Party. “Grisham will be remembered for what she didn’t do — which was hold one single White House briefing,” noted Joe Lockhart, a White House press secretary during the administration of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. “She managed to kill an important institution in our country in less than a year,” Lockhart told VOA.While Grisham rarely appeared on camera, she was active behind the scenes in the West Wing press office and frequently spoke to White House reporters off camera, including on Air Force One. She won admiration from the traveling press corps when she got into an altercation with North Korean officials who attempted to block access to U.S. journalists covering Trump inside the Demilitarized Zone at Panmunjom when the president crossed north to greet the reclusive country’s leader, Kim Jong Un. Grisham previously was Melania Trump’s communications director and has a long relationship with the Trump family. She worked as an assistant on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.“Loyalty and being able to guard the secrets is the single most important job qualification in Trumpworld,” according to Nina Burleigh, author of “Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women.” During Grisham’s tenure working in both wings of the White House, she “distinguished herself by never holding a daily briefing — a spectacular snub to fact-based journalism that few standard-issue publicists would have dared to or been able to pull off. In that, she amplified Trump’s contempt for journalism,” Burleigh told VOA. As White House press secretary, Grisham succeeded two higher-profile figures who became household names — Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders for their on-camera sparring with correspondents in the press briefing room. The room remained largely unused during Grisham’s tenure until the president himself began briefing reporters directly as the coronavirus pandemic grew. “I can’t think of a more irrelevant press secretary. Trump is his own press secretary,” University of Texas-Austin Associate Professor of Public Affairs, Joshua Busby, told VOA.Grisham self-quarantined after attending a March 7 dinner at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where she was exposed to two or more people who later tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The White House announced on March 24 that Grisham had tested negative and would return to work the next day. The timing of her departure from the West Wing comes with the arrival of the new White House chief of staff, former congressman Mark Meadows, who is said to be interested in restoring regular press briefings.
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By Polityk | 04/08/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Wisconsin Votes Despite Coronavirus Health Threat
Even with a rising tide of coronavirus cases, the Midwestern U.S. state of Wisconsin started in-person voting Tuesday in a Democratic presidential primary the state supreme court reinstated after the governor had postponed it.The number of polling places was sharply reduced throughout the state, with hundreds of Election Day poll workers refusing to honor their commitment to work for fear of contracting the deadly virus as they checked in voters off registration lists. In Milwaukee, the state’s biggest city, only five of the planned 180 polling stations were open.But long lines of self-distancing voters quickly emerged at the open polling stations, with health care workers handing out masks to people waiting in line.Voters masked against coronavirus line up at Riverside High School for Wisconsin’s primary election, April 7, 2020, in Milwaukee.The voting started after the conservative-dominated state supreme court, in a 4-2 ruling, overrode the executive order by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to postpone in-person voting until June. He had called off voting after people from throughout the state said it was too dangerous to risk voting as the number of coronavirus cases mounts by the day.Wisconsin has more than 2,400 confirmed coronavirus cases and recorded 84 deaths.U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams cautioned Wisconsin voters to be careful as they head to the polls.”I say as a black man that I know that people have died for the right to vote,” Adams told NBC’s “Today” show. “This is very important to our entire country, and if people are going to go out there and vote, then please do it as safely as possible.”More than a dozen U.S. states have postponed Democratic presidential primaries in April and May between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders until weeks from now in hopes that by then the effects of the virus will have dissipated enough to allow voters to show up at polling places to cast ballots without endangering their health. But Wisconsin was the last holdout refusing to postpone its vote.Workers wipe down tables after each person votes at Riverside High School for Wisconsin’s primary election, April 7, 2020, in Milwaukee.As Tuesday’s voting started, officials took unusual precautions to try to prevent the spread of the virus, wiping down voting stations every 15 minutes. Plexiglass barriers were installed at voter check-in tables to separate poll workers from voters and the poll workers wore masks and gloves.There were markers two meters apart on floors at polling stations to show voters where to distance themselves from others waiting in line.Tuesday’s featured Wisconsin vote in the Democratic presidential primary pits Biden against Sanders, his remaining rival, but there are other state and local contests being decided as well.Biden appears to have an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates to party’s national presidential nominating contest in August, in Milwaukee as it happens, and is on track to face Republican President Donald Trump in November’s national election. Pre-election surveys in Wisconsin show Biden with a substantial lead over Sanders in the Tuesday voting. The contentious lead-up to the Wisconsin voting could be a precursor of legal fights to come over U.S. voting rights seven months ahead of the Nov. 3 election. Wisconsin Democrats, aside from trying to postpone the vote, wanted to allow absentee mail-in ballots to be tallied for a week after the Tuesday vote and won a federal court ruling to permit them to be counted.But Wisconsin Republicans and the national Republican party fought the ruling and won. On Monday night, hours before the Wisconsin voting started, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 conservative majority ruled that the late absentee votes could not be counted.National Democratic leaders, including Biden, have been pushing for greatly expanded mail-in voting in the U.S., especially with the uncertainty over the spread of the coronavirus in the coming months.Voters masked against coronavirus line up at Riverside High School for Wisconsin’s primary election, April 7, 2020, in Milwaukee.A handful of U.S. states already conduct their elections by mail-in ballots, but Republicans have steadfastly opposed such an expansion of voting nationwide, saying they believe it would invite widespread fraud.Wisconsin is a politically divided state, with decidedly liberal enclaves of Democratic voters in Milwaukee and the state capital of Madison, with vast reaches of more conservative voters in rural communities, smaller cities and farming regions.After years of voters favoring Democratic presidential candidates, the state voted for then real estate mogul Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, helping him win a four-year term in the White House.Early 2020 polling shows Biden with a slight edge over Trump in Wisconsin, with the November outcome in the state again playing a key role in determining the national election.U.S. presidential elections are not decided by a national popular vote, but rather in the Electoral College, where the outcome of the votes in each of the 50 states determines the national outcome.
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By Polityk | 04/07/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Wisconsin Election Back on, After State Court Overrules Governor
Voters in the Midwestern U.S. state of Wisconsin are due to cast ballots Tuesday in the state’s Democratic presidential primary after a back-and-forth legal battle over whether to hold the election amid the coronavirus outbreak. Democratic Governor Tony Evers had issued an order postponing the vote until June, but the state’s supreme court ordered it back on, saying Evers lacked the authority to push back the election on his own. The court’s four conservative judges voted in support of the ruling while the two liberal judges voted against it. Voters now face a choice of whether to vote in the primary election or to follow the advice of health officials and stay away from crowds. Thousands of poll workers have said they will not work, leading to the closure of hundreds of polling sites in the state. The city of Milwaukee, the biggest Wisconsin city, said it would have just five polling stations open instead of the planned 180. National Guard troops have been dispatched to help staff the polls. More than 2,200 confirmed coronavirus cases have been reported in Wisconsin and 73 deaths. More than a dozen U.S. states have postponed Democratic presidential primaries in April and May between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders until weeks from now in hopes that by then the effects of the virus will have dissipated enough to allow voters to show up at polling places to cast ballots without endangering their health. But Wisconsin was the last holdout refusing to postpone its vote. Evers had previously questioned his own authority to postpone the state primary, but he said Monday he was acting in the interest of public health. He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, “The bottom line is the people of Wisconsin, they don’t care about the fighting between Democrats and Republicans — they’re scared. I’m standing up for those people who are afraid and that’s why I’m doing this.” Key state Republican lawmakers called Evers’s action “an unconstitutional overreach.” Recent polling shows that Biden is running well ahead of Sanders in Wisconsin. Biden appears to hold an insurmountable lead over Sanders in pledged delegates to the Democratic presidential nominating contest in August and is likely to face Republican President Donald Trump in the November national election. But on Sunday Biden did not directly call for postponement of the Wisconsin election, telling ABC’s “This Week” show, “Whatever the science says, we should do.” Sanders had called for the election’s postponement.
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By Polityk | 04/07/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
John Lewis, Once a Trump Target, Lines Up Behind Joe Biden
Civil rights icon and Georgia Rep. John Lewis is backing Joe Biden for president, giving the prospective Democratic nominee perhaps his biggest symbolic endorsement among the many veteran black lawmakers who back his candidacy.
“We need his voice,” the 80-year-old Lewis told reporters ahead of the campaign’s Tuesday announcement. He described the 77-year-old Biden as “a man of courage, a man of great conscience, a man of faith,” and said the former vice president would “help us regain our way as a nation.” A 17-term Atlanta congressman, Lewis is battling pancreatic cancer but said he’d “travel around America” for Biden if social distancing guidelines are eased amid the coronavirus pandemic. Lewis tailored a message to younger black voters who’ve not backed Biden with the same enthusiasm as older African Americans. “I would tell young people the story of Selma and Montgomery and Mississippi,” Lewis said, remembering being beaten nearly to death by Alabama state troopers as he marched for voting rights in 1965. “If we fail to vote, we don’t count. The vote is the most powerful, nonviolent tool we have in society, and we must use it.”
Lewis did not name President Donald Trump but said pointedly, “We have a choice.”
Black voters have anchored Biden’s primary coalition, starting with overwhelming support in South Carolina. A Feb. 29 victory there propelled Biden through victories that yielded an insurmountable delegate lead over Bernie Sanders before the COVID-19 virus prompted more than a dozen states, including Lewis’ Georgia, to delay their primaries.Biden’s team once viewed Georgia’s March 24 contest as a likely knockout blow for Sanders. Georgia is now set to vote May 19, so Lewis’ blessing at this point is more about his national profile than any heavyweight status at home.Perhaps the most visible living representatives of black Americans’ civil rights struggle, Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders. The group rode buses through the segregated South in the early 1960s to challenge Jim Crow laws. They were beaten at multiple bus stations along the way. In March 1965, Lewis was among those battered and gassed by authorities on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, as they tried to march to the Capitol in Montgomery. “I gave a little blood on that bridge, almost died,” Lewis said Monday. In 1963, he was a lead organizer of the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his best-known address. Lewis was in Indianapolis in April 1968, campaigning for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the night King was assassinated in Memphis. Kennedy would be assassinated eight weeks later. Biden was a young law school student at the time and now frequently cites King and Kennedy as his “two political heroes.” Biden credits the civil rights movement, decades before he’d become vice president to Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, as the inspiration for his political career. Still, Biden sometimes overplays his social action in that era.
As a first-term U.S. senator from Delaware, Biden pushed for the extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had been adopted after Lewis’ marches. Biden fought against redlining — banking standards that made it difficult, if not impossible, for black families to secure mortgages in white neighborhoods. But Biden also was a leading critic of court-ordered busing to force integration of public schools. He notes that many black parents joined whites in opposing busing, and he points to redlining as the real structural impediment to school integration.
Early in his 2020 campaign, Biden recalled the “civility” of that 1970s Senate, despite its roster of several avowed racists elected during the Jim Crow era. He clarified that he’d fought his older colleagues on matters like voting rights but found common ground on issues unrelated to race.
Young African American commentators excoriated Biden as anachronistic and unfit to lead Democrats in 2020. Lewis joined several older black lawmakers to defend Biden — and illuminate generational fissures on the left.
Nodding to the party’s diversity, Biden has promised his administration would “look like the country.” He’s committed to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court upon his first vacancy. He’s pledged to name a woman as his running mate.
“It would be good to have a woman of color” as vice president, Lewis said, stopping short of saying he expects such a move.
Though Lewis avoided explicit criticisms of Trump during his remarks, he alluded to Biden’s campaign theme that is directed squarely at the Republican incumbent. Biden’s election, Lewis said, would “redeem the soul of America.”
Lewis memorably tangled with Trump days before the president’s inauguration in 2017. Lewis said he did not see Trump as a “legitimate president,” prompting Trump to blast Lewis as “all talk” and denigrate his majority black district as “crime infested” and “falling apart.” Among other markers, the Atlanta-based district includes Coca-Cola world headquarters, site of the 1996 Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, King’s church and burial site, Jimmy Carter’s presidential library and museum, the Georgia Capitol and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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By Polityk | 04/07/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
US State Court Rules Election Back on, After Governor Orders Postponement
The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday ordered the state’s Democratic primary election back on, hours after the governor issued an order postponing it in the face of a growing number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths in the state. The court in the U.S. Midwestern state ruled 4-2 that Democratic Governor Tony Evers lacked the authority to postpone the election on his own. The court’s four conservative judges voted in support of the ruling while the two liberal judges voted against it. Evers issued an executive order earlier Monday to postpone the primary election until June 9 after he was unable to agree with the Republican-controlled state legislature on a plan for moving the vote to a later date as well as the terms of the balloting, such as whether to allow mail-in voting. Voters now face a choice of whether to vote in the primary election or to follow the advice of health officials and stay away from crowds. Thousands of poll workers have said they will not work, leading to the closure of hundreds of polling sites in the state. The city of Milwaukee, the biggest Wisconsin city, said it would have just five polling stations open instead of the planned 180. National Guard troops have been dispatched to help staff the polls. More than 2,200 confirmed coronavirus cases have been reported in Wisconsin and 73 deaths. More than a dozen U.S. states have postponed Democratic presidential primaries in April and May between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders until weeks from now in hopes that by then the effects of the virus will have dissipated enough to allow voters to show up at polling places to cast ballots without endangering their health. But Wisconsin was the last holdout refusing to postpone its vote. Evers had previously questioned his own authority to postpone the state primary, but he said Monday he was acting in the interest of public health. He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, “The bottom line is the people of Wisconsin, they don’t care about the fighting between Democrats and Republicans — they’re scared. I’m standing up for those people who are afraid and that’s why I’m doing this.” Key state Republican lawmakers called Evers’s action “an unconstitutional overreach.” Recent polling shows that Biden is running well ahead of Sanders in Wisconsin. Biden appears to hold an insurmountable lead over Sanders in pledged delegates to the Democratic presidential nominating contest in August and is likely to face Republican President Donald Trump in the November national election. But on Sunday Biden did not directly call for postponement of the Wisconsin election, telling ABC’s “This Week” show, “Whatever the science says, we should do.” Sanders had called for the election’s postponement. Residents in 41 U.S. states are under orders from their governors – including Evers in Wisconsin – to stay at home except for essential trips out in public, but Evers did not include voting as essential in issuing his stay-at-home edict. Some Wisconsin Republicans suggested that Evers did not aggressively push to win legislative votes to postpone the election until recent days. On Saturday, Evers sought to move the voting to May 19 and convert it entirely to mail-in voting, but the Republican-controlled legislature quickly adjourned. It also did not block the election when it met briefly Monday ahead of Evers’ order. Federal district court judge William Conley had refused to stop the election, saying he did not have the power to do so. “Let’s assume that this is a bad decision from the perspective of public health, and it could be excruciatingly bad,” he said last week. “I don’t think it’s the job of a federal district judge to act as a super health department for the state of Wisconsin.” On Sunday, the mayors of Milwaukee and Madison, the state capital, along with other Wisconsin mayors asked state homeland security officials to make the decision to postpone Tuesday’s election.
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By Polityk | 04/07/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Trump Sees Limits of Presidency in Avoiding Blame for Virus
President Donald Trump is confronting the most dangerous crisis a U.S. leader has faced this century as the coronavirus spreads and a once-vibrant economy falters. As the turmoil deepens, the choices he makes in the critical weeks ahead will shape his reelection prospects, his legacy and the character of the nation.
The early fallout is sobering. In the White House’s best-case scenario, more than 100,000 Americans will die and millions more will be sickened. At least 10 million have already lost their jobs, and some economists warn it could be years before they find work again. The S&P 500 index has plunged more than 20%, and the U.S. surgeon general predicted on Sunday that this week will be “our Pearl Harbor moment” as the death toll climbs.
Those grim realities are testing Trump’s leadership and political survival skills unlike any challenge he has faced in office, including the special counsel investigation and the impeachment probe that imperiled his presidency. Trump appears acutely aware that his political fortunes will be inextricably linked to his handling of the pandemic, alternating between putting himself at the center of the crisis with lengthy daily briefings and distancing himself from the crisis by pinning the blame for inadequate preparedness on the states.
Trump and those around him increasingly argue he is reaching the limits of his power to alter the trajectory of the outbreak and the economic fallout, according to White House officials and allies, many of whom were granted anonymity to discuss the situation candidly. The federal government has issued guidelines that in many areas have resulted in the shutdown of all but essential businesses, throwing the economy into a tailspin. The remaining options, the officials argue, are largely on the margins.
The limits of the presidency are self-imposed to some extent as the Trump administration continues to cede authority to state and local governments, which have adopted a patchwork of inconsistent social distancing policies. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, prickled at the suggestion that the Republican president has limited options, calling it “a diminished view of the presidential responsibility.”
“Was Franklin Delano Roosevelt done with his work 30 days after Pearl Harbor? Heavens, no. That’s ludicrous,” Inslee said in an interview. “For a person who’s struggling to get [personal protective equipment] to my nurses and test kits to my long-term care facilities, that is more than disappointing. It’s deeply angering.”
White House advisers note that Trump has already pulled vast levers to blunt the impact of the pandemic. He worked with Congress to pass a record $2.2 trillion rescue package; a fourth package is expected in the coming weeks. The Federal Reserve, which is technically independent of the White House, has unleashed another $4 trillion.
The administration extended for another month new social distancing recommendations calling for those who are sick, are elderly or have serious health conditions to stay home. And Trump has used the authority granted to him under the Defense Production Act to try to force private companies to manufacture critical supplies, though some have faulted him for not using the tool early or aggressively enough.
Those who are dying now were likely infected weeks ago, and most highly impacted states across the nation have already taken drastic steps — unthinkable just months ago — forcing their residents to stay in their homes. And though the federal government has faced widespread criticism to do more to force the production of critical supplies, it’s already too late for most new production to blunt the oncoming wave.
“I really think he’s done everything humanly possible. I don’t know what else he could do,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University and a Trump confidant.
By delegating significant responsibility to state leaders and the business community, Trump can continue to approach his job as he often has: as a spectator pundit-in-chief, watching events unfold on television with the rest of the nation and weighing in with colorful Twitter commentary.
But governors across the nation, including some Republicans, have screamed for additional assistance from the federal government. They warn of dangerous shortages of protective equipment for medical professionals on the front lines of the outbreak and ventilators that can help keep the death toll from exploding. Other critics suggest Trump can take a much more aggressive posture in forcing stricter social distancing rules upon reluctant state officials, while ordering all domestic flights and international arrivals grounded.
There is some debate about how visible the president should be as the crisis escalates. Inside the White House, some fear Trump’s continued role as the face of the government’s response will be increasingly dangerous politically as things get worse.
Trump is insistent that he remain in front of the public, where he can shower praise on his own performance and make the case for deflecting responsibility. He has also tried to take credit for averting a worst-case scenario in which more than 2 million Americans could die.
The last president to face a crisis of comparable scale and depth was Herbert Hoover, a Republican who held office during the onset of the Great Depression, according to Yale University historian Joanne Freeman. Like Trump in some ways, Hoover resisted sweeping federal government intervention to address the economic crisis of the early 1930s.
Freeman noted that the results were disastrous for the nation’s economy and Hoover’s presidency. As the nation slipped deeper into depression, he suffered a landslide loss in 1932 to Roosevelt.
The American public has mixed reviews for Trump’s performance, although his polling numbers have been ticking up.
The latest polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found Trump’s approval ratings are among the highest of his presidency, with 44% supporting his oversight of the pandemic. State and local leaders have earned much higher marks.
While few are thinking about traditional politics, Election Day is just seven months away.
Republicans have seized on the absence of the leading Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, who has struggled to break through the dire daily news cycle despite frequent appearances on cable television from a newly created television studio in his home basement.
“Biden is inconsequential for the next three months, and that’s weird,” said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. “I mean, this is the Trump show, for better or worse.”
Former Trump aide Steve Bannon dismissed traditional politics as an afterthought as the nation enters a critical month to blunt the spread of the virus, yet the man who helped elect Trump four years ago said the political stakes could not be more dire.
“Every day for President Trump is now Nov. 3,” Bannon said, referencing Election Day.
There is no political playbook for a crisis of this magnitude. For the foreseeable future, there will be no more political rallies, traditional fundraisers or door-to-door canvassing that makes up the lifeblood of modern campaigns.
The Trump campaign 2020 slogan — “Keep America Great” — is already painfully disconnected from the reality on the ground in most states now fighting massive unemployment and health concerns.
Campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh described the evolution of Trump’s messaging in the midst of a pandemic this way: “Our argument is that it was President Trump’s leadership that built the economy up to such heights in the first place, and he’s the one to lead us back up again.”
He said the virus has “caused dramatic increase in desire” by the president’s supporters to get involved in the campaign, even if most have been encouraged not to leave their homes.
And while they believe his ability to implement new policy solutions may be limited, some Trump allies stressed his rhetorical ability to comfort an anxious nation.
“In the minds and the hearts of the American people, his ability to carry out the rhetorical functions of the presidency — to encourage, to comfort, to rally — those are among the most essential elements of leadership in a moment of crisis,” said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition and a member of the White House Faith Initiative.
“It is critical right now to be a consoler-in-chief, to keep people’s spirits up, to give people optimism and hope,” Reed said, “and also show empathy and share in the sorrows of the struggling.”
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By Polityk | 04/06/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Lincoln Chafee Ends Libertarian Run for President
Former Rhode Island governor and senator Lincoln Chafee has ended his run for president as a Libertarian.Chafee said in a Facebook post Sunday that he looks “forward to helping other Libertarians seeking office.”He said his campaign was changed by the coronavirus but had a successful transfer to virtual connections amid the outbreak.Chafee moved to Wyoming last year and joined the Libertarian Party. He was a Republican in the U.S. Senate and became an independent after losing his seat in 2006. Chafee was elected Rhode Island governor in 2010 as an independent and became a Democrat in office.He mounted a short-lived run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2015.
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By Polityk | 04/06/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Trump Uses Coronavirus Crisis to Push his Broader Agenda
President Donald Trump is taking an old political adage to heart: Never let a crisis go to waste.The coronavirus is projected to kill more than 100,000 Americans. It has effectively shuttered the economy, torpedoed the stock market and rewritten the rules of what used to be called normal life.
But in this moment of upheaval, Trump and his advisers haven’t lost sight of the opportunity to advance his agenda.
A look at some of the president’s notable moves:BRINGING BACK THE ENTERTAINMENT TAX DEDUCTION
Trump has called on Congress to revive the tax deduction for business-related expenses on meals and entertainment, arguing it would help bolster high-end restaurants hammered by the outbreak.
Trump’s own tax law in 2017 sliced the tax rate for corporations from 35% to 21% and eliminated the deduction.
“This is a great time to bring it back,” Trump said of the resurrecting the tax break. “Otherwise a lot of these restaurants are going to have a hard time reopening,” he said at White House briefing Wednesday.
During a Rose Garden briefing last Sunday, Trump said he had spoken with celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck about the idea. Trump also name-checked prominent restaurateurs including Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten as he tried to make the case for reviving the deduction. Vongerichten is a tenant at the president’s Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York.
“Congress must pass the old, and very strongly proven, deductibility by businesses on restaurants and entertainment,” Trump tweeted recently. “This will bring restaurants, and everything related, back – and stronger than ever. Move quickly, they will all be saved!”USING VIRUS TO MAKE CASE FOR TIGHTER BORDERS
Trump has repeatedly credited himself with moving in late January to bar entry from foreigners who had recently been in China.
The president later also ordered the temporary suspension of travel from much of Europe to the United States, and has largely closed the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico.
But Trump has notably used the crisis to remind Americans about his 2016 campaign promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He argues a wall would help contain the coronavirus. In a tweet last month, he said the structure is “Going up fast” and “We need the Wall more than ever!”
Leading public health experts disagree. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told lawmakers last month that he was unaware of any indication from his agency that physical barriers along America’s borders would help halt the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S.
Still, Trump argues that the virus has only spotlighted that his instincts on the border wall were right.
The virus — and the subsequent opportunity to invoke emergency powers — has allowed Trump to lock down the borders and make sure virtually no immigrants are getting in.PANDEMIC UNDERSCORES NEED FOR PROTECTIONISM, TRUMP SAYS
Trump in recent days has grumbled that American companies such as 3M and GM are not doing enough to provide American medical workers and first responders with vital equipment they need.
But the president and his aides have also made a broader argument about the need for the country to retool regulations to encourage the manufacturing of medicine and other key safety equipment on American soil.
Peter Navarro, a senior trade adviser to Trump, said the pandemic, which has left hospitals short of ventilators and protective masks, has underscored the president’s “buy American, secure borders, and a strong manufacturing base” philosophy.
“Never again should we have to depend on the rest of the world for our essential medicines and countermeasures,” Navarro said.ADMINISTRATION ROLLS BACK MILEAGE STANDARDS
On the same day that the White House announced projections that 100,000 to 240,000 Americans are likely to die from coronavirus, the Environmental Protection Agency introduced a controversial new federal rule that will relax mileage standards for years to come.
The rollback is a victory for Americans who like their SUVs and pickup trucks, but it’s hardly without a cost. The government’s own projections indicate that the new standards also mean more Americans will die from air pollution, and there will be more climate-damaging tailpipe exhaust and more expense for drivers at the gas pumps.
Trump hailed the new rule as reason for Americans to go out and buy big, new cars.
“Great news! American families will now be able to buy safer, more affordable, and environmentally friendly cars with our new SAFE VEHICLES RULE,” Trump tweeted.
Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups condemned the rollback, and years of legal battles are expected, including from California and other states opposed to the change.KEEPING AN EYE ON OVERHAULING COURTS
Trump announced Friday he was nominating a young, federal judge to fill a high-profile vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Judge Justin Walker, 37, was confirmed less than six months ago for a seat on the U.S. District Court in Western Kentucky after a contentious nominating fight about his credentials.
The former clerk to retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is one of the youngest federal judges in the country. He also has deep ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who hailed the nomination as an opportunity to “refresh the second-most-important federal court in the country.” Walker also clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh when Kavanaugh was a judge on the D.C. appeals court.
Walker drew a rare “Not Qualified” rating from the American Bar Association when Trump nominated him last year to be a federal judge. Despite reservations from Democrats and the legal community about Walker’s credentials, his nomination was approved, 50—41. Opponents noted he was barely 10 years out of law school and had never served as co-counsel at trial when he was tapped for the federal bench.
The Trump administration has worked feverishly to overhaul the federal courts, nominating and winning Senate confirmation for more than 190 judges over the past three years, a pace unseen since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
Even in the midst of battling a pandemic, Trump hasn’t lost sight of the long-term impact his nominations to the federal bench will have on his legacy.
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By Polityk | 04/06/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
US State Holding Election Despite Coronavirus Emergency
The Midwestern U.S. state of Wisconsin is set to hold elections, including a Democratic presidential primary, on Tuesday, with its state officials at odds on how to stop voting during the national coronavirus pandemic.More than a dozen U.S. states have postponed Democratic presidential primaries in April and May between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders until weeks from now in hopes by then that the effects of the virus will have dissipated enough to allow voters to show up at polling places to cast ballots. But as of Sunday, Wisconsin’s vote is still planned, even if hundreds of polling places throughout the state cannot open for lack of Election Day workers. The workers by the droves have canceled their promise to work at the polls checking in voters from registration lists.Biden appears to hold an insurmountable lead over Sanders in pledged delegates to the Democratic presidential nominating contest in August and is likely to face Republican President Donald Trump in the November national election. But on Sunday Biden did not directly call for postponement of the Wisconsin election, telling ABC’s “This Week” show, “Whatever the science says, we should do.”Sanders has called for the election’s postponement.More than 2,100 confirmed coronavirus cases have been reported in Wisconsin and 56 deaths.A total of 41 U.S. states are under orders from their governors — including Democrat Tony Evers in Wisconsin – to stay at home except for essential trips out into the public, but Evers did not include voting as essential in issuing his edict.However, Evers and his Republican political opponents in the state legislature have been unable to agree on how the election should be postponed and the terms of how it could be held later. Numerous state and city elections are also on Tuesday’s ballot.Republicans have suggested that Evers did not aggressively push to win votes by postponing until recent days. On Saturday, Evers sought to move the voting to May 19 and convert it entirely to mail-in voting, but the legislature quickly adjourned until Monday without taking any action.Federal judge William Conley refused to stop the election saying he did not have the power to do so.“Let’s assume that this is a bad decision from the perspective of public health, and it could be excruciatingly bad,” he said last week. “I don’t think it’s the job of a federal district judge to act as a super health department for the state of Wisconsin.”Conley has ruled that absentee ballots should be counted if they are received by April 13 because tens of thousands won’t get their forms for absentee voting until after the Tuesday vote. He said that voters who requested ballots deserve to have their votes counted.On Saturday, however, the state Republican Party and the Republican National Committee asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block absentee ballots from being counted in the days after Tuesday’s election.On Sunday, the mayors of Milwaukee, the biggest Wisconsin city, and the state capital of Madison and other Wisconsin mayors asked state homeland security officials to make the decision to postpone Tuesday’s election.
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By Polityk | 04/05/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Biden Assails Trump’s Coronavirus Response
Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic presidential nominee in the November national election, accused Republican President Donald Trump on Sunday of being slow to react to the coronavirus threat and still lacking the drive now to deal with the pandemic. “It’s about urgency and I don’t think there’s been enough of it,” Biden said on ABC’s “This Week” show. He said Trump needs to “move swiftly, more rapidly” in dealing with the crisis. Trump, while leveling his own attacks on Biden’s competence in recent news conferences, has said he appreciated his praise for Trump’s action in January blocking flights from China to the U.S. after the coronavirus first broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan. But Biden retorted, “We started off slow. Forty-five countries had acted before he did” to cut off flights from China. Trump’s routinely refers to Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” while his re-election campaign last week told political surrogates to characterize Biden and other Democrats as “the opposition” in Trump’s effort to combat the outbreak. Biden, making his third run for the presidency over three decades, said the U.S. could need two more coronavirus rescue packages beyond the $2 trillion package Trump signed into law more than a week ago. Trump and some Democratic congressional leaders have suggested that more aid may be needed, but currently the dominant sentiment in Washington seems to be to see how effective the initial assistance is before passing new legislation. Biden said he would wear a face mask when venturing out in public, but so far has not left his home in the eastern state of Delaware. U.S. health officials are now recommending, but not requiring, that people wear masks when they leave home. FILE – U.S. President Donald Trump addresses the daily coronavirus task force briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 3, 2020.But Trump said Saturday he would not adhere to the face mask recommendation. “He may not like how he looks in a mask,” Biden said of Trump. “My point is you should follow the science.” He said Trump should “fully implement” the Defense Protection Act to order U.S. corporations to ramp up production of medical supplies — masks, gloves and other equipment – beyond Trump’s order directing auto makers to manufacture ventilators. He attacked Trump for refusing to reopen enrollment in the national health insurance program popularly known as Obamacare that was adopted in 2010 during the administration of former President Barack Obama, when Biden was his second in command. “It will leave people naked to this problem,” Biden claimed. Trump said the government would pay for Americans’ coronavirus health care costs, but rejected expanding Obamacare, which he has long sought to undermine. Biden said that as the Obama administration left office in early 2017, it briefed incoming Trump officials about the possibility of a pandemic and laid out the shape of government agencies to deal with such a threat. But Biden said, “The president dismantled almost all of it. He didn’t follow through with almost anything. We said there would be a problem.” The former vice president also assailed the Trump administration’s removal of the commander of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, Capt. Brett Crozier, after the Pentagon claimed he showed “poor judgment” in copying a letter to 20 or 30 people that he had written to his superiors about a widespread outbreak of coronavirus on his ship. “I think it’s close to criminal way they’re dealing with this guy,” Biden said. Navy Secretary Thomas Modly dismissed Crozier, with both Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper supporting Crozier’s firing. Esper told the ABC show, “This was Secretary Modly’s call and I told him I’d support him.” Esper called Crozier’s actions “an issue of trust and confidence.” As Crozier left his ship, his crew of about 5,000 sailors cheered him wildly. As of late last week, 114 of the sailors had tested positive for the coronavirus.
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By Polityk | 04/05/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Trump Calls Fired Intelligence Watchdog ‘A Disgrace’
U.S. President Donald Trump says the intelligence community watchdog that he fired late Friday was “a disgrace.”Trump said Saturday that Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson should not have told Congress about the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment earlier this year.“He took a fake report and he took it to Congress,” Trump said.Congressman Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told the U.S. news network MSNBC Saturday that Trump is “decapitating the leadership of the intelligence community in the middle of a national crisis.” Schiff, a Democrat, said the president’s action is “unconscionable.”Republican Senator Susan Collins, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Atkinson’s firing “was not warranted.”Trump officially notified the congressional intelligence committees Friday that Atkinson’s firing would go into effect in 30 days.He said in a letter that he “no longer” had “the fullest confidence” in Atkinson. Trump said he would name a replacement for Atkinson “at a later date.”
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By Polityk | 04/05/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Can Vote-by-Mail Save US Elections From Coronavirus?
As millions of Americans hunker down to avoid the coronavirus, they’ve turned to technology to do business, keep in touch with family and stay somewhat social.But when it comes to voting in this year’s presidential election, the solution to staying safe may be decidedly low-tech.As in snail mail. Most Americans 18 and older are used to gathering in person to cast their ballots at a local polling place. This year, faced with the prospect of mandatory lockdowns and social distancing, that’s likely to be too dangerous.Already, 14 states have postponed their primary election voting because of the virus – with the notable exception of Wisconsin, which will hold its primary contest Tuesday. These postponements have posed a major disruption to the normal presidential nominating process.So across the U.S., election officials are looking at mail ballots. Because voting can take place at home with little more than a pen and signature, vote-by-mail offers a way to both protect voters’ health and give all a chance to participate.”We’re talking about an emergency situation, but there is bipartisan support across the aisle for vote-by-mail election reform,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, which promotes mail balloting.”Considering what’s going on with the coronavirus, maybe voters don’t want to be exposed,” added McReynolds, a former director of elections in Denver, Colorado.Despite its allure, voting by mail would be a sea change for most of America. Skeptics and even some supporters question whether there’s enough time to put the mechanisms and security for widespread mail voting in place by November.“Facilitating a well-orchestrated vote-by-mail election is the equivalent of a logistical nightmare,” researchers Collier Fernekes and Rachel Orey wrote in an April 1 analysis for the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research group.“And with a global pandemic sweeping the country, this logistical nightmare can only get worse,” they said, cautioning about possible voter confusion.The recent $2.4 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump includes $400 million to help elections officials adapt to the coronavirus.But proponents are pushing for far more, including Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate who have drafted bills to give all Americans the ability to vote by mail.National vote, run locallyWhile the United States will vote on November 3 to choose a president and members of Congress, the actual election machinery is run by state and local officials. They operate under a hodgepodge of different laws specifying who can vote and how.Of the 50 U.S. states, only five conduct all their elections almost entirely by mail: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington.Still, large numbers of ballots are also cast by mail in many other states as well. These “absentee” ballots are for residents in the military, those traveling at election time or the disabled.But 33 states, most in the West and Midwest, and the District of Columbia now allow absentee voting for any reason – or “no-excuse” mail ballots.Among them is California, the state with the most voters in the nation. In the 2018 midterm Congressional elections, more than 8 million Californians sent absentee ballots by mail – or two out of every three votes cast.Last month, Michigan reported an avalanche of absentee ballots for its presidential primary election, the first under a new state law allowing “no-excuse” absentees. Wyoming and Alaska have said they will go all-mail this year, Reuters reported.In all, nearly a quarter of ballots nationwide were cast by mail in the 2016 presidential election, in which Republican Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton.During the 2018 midterm voting, Democrats captured the House of Representatives from Republicans. A record number of mail ballots – 42 million – helped boost the highest turnout in a century, the Vote at Home Institute said.FILE – Mail-in ballots for the 2016 U.S. general election are seen at the Salt Lake County Government Center, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Nov. 1, 2016.The Oregon modelOregon is the first state to adopt universal vote-by-mail and held its first all-mail presidential votes in 2000. Election officials there say the process has increased participation, and the state ranks among the highest in voter turnout.Oregon voters receive ballots at least two weeks before Election Day. They arrive with two envelopes: a privacy sleeve and a return envelope with pre-paid postage.Once a voter marks his or her ballot, it goes into the privacy sleeve. Voters sign the outside of the return envelope. That signature is compared to one placed on file earlier at the time they register to vote.A ballot isn’t removed from the privacy envelope and counted unless the signatures match. Voters can either mail their ballots or drop them off at official drive-up locations or election offices if it’s more convenient.Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden was the first U.S. senator to be elected in an all-mail vote in a 1996 special election. Along with former presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, he is sponsoring legislation to make mail ballots universally available in November. “We’re not saying to get rid of all polling places by any means,” Klobuchar recently told The New York Times. “It’s just that the more people we can get to vote this way, the better off this is.”A reality checkAs enticing as vote-by-mail is in the era of coronavirus, even some who are supportive see hurdles – including a ticking clock and the complexity of introducing a whole new system, including security mechanisms.Elizabeth Howard, counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice Democracy Project, has firsthand experience trying to hurriedly reconfigure an election system.In August 2017, as deputy commissioner of Virginia’s Department of Elections, she had less than two months before Election Day to convert the state’s machinery after security vulnerabilities were exposed in paperless voting machines.Howard pulled it off, but she said that switching to vote-by-mail with just seven months before the vote will be a very complex and expensive process.“Most states have a very low percentage of votes cast with absentee mail-in ballots, and it would take a lot of work for a state like that to transition over to a system that is fully vote-by-mail,” Howard said.“There are big equipment purchases local election officials would need,” she said. “With many more mail-in ballots, depending upon the size of your locality, you may need high speed scanners, high speed tabulation.”Political tug of war Still, last month the Brennan Center proposed a detailed plan to guarantee a vote-by-mail option. The estimated cost of that guarantee alone is $1.4 billion – for technology, ballot printing, postage, drop boxes, security, voter education, and ballot processing.Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed spending $2 billion and even as much as $4 billion to make sure the November election goes off without a hitch.Over the years, the politics of vote-by-mail have been partisan. Democrats, who tend to benefit from high turnout, support it. Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have said a national vote-by-mail mandate would trample on the right of states to control their own elections.Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation claim it’s vulnerable to different kinds of fraud. In one example, North Carolina officials last year had to order a re-vote after an operative working for a Republican candidate was accused of illegally “harvesting” absentee ballots from voters, tipping a congressional primary.States have varying rules on who can return an absentee ballot on a voter’s behalf. Vote-by-mail backers say instances of fraud are rare and the risk exaggerated.Speaking recently on “Fox & Friends”, President Trump criticized the Democrats’ efforts to get more money for mail balloting in the recent stimulus bill, casting it as a move to gain partisan advantage.“They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” he said.Vote-by-mail advocate McReynolds noted that the president and first lady Melania Trump voted by absentee in this year’s Florida primary election.“And maybe a lot of U.S. Senators vote-by-mail from D.C. too,” she said. “Every study that we’ve seen recently, having a vote-by-mail ballot benefits all voters –whether you are a Republican or a Democrat.”
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By Polityk | 04/04/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Trump Removes Intel Watchdog Who Revealed Whistleblower Complaint That Led to Impeachment
U.S. President Donald Trump has removed the U.S. intelligence community watchdog from office.Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson informed Congress about the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment earlier this year.Trump officially notified the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress on Friday that Atkinson’s firing would go into effect in 30 days.He said in a letter that he “no longer” had “the fullest confidence” in Atkinson. Trump said he would name a replacement for Atkinson “at a later date.”The move was quickly criticized by top congressional Democrats.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described Atkinson’s firing as “shameful,” calling it “a brazen act against a patriotic public servant who has honorably performed his duty to protect the Constitution and our national security, as required by the law and by his oath.”“Michael Atkinson is a man of integrity who has served our nation for almost two decades,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. “Being fired for having the courage to speak truth to power makes him a patriot.”The move was also criticized by the top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees.“At a time, when our country is dealing with a national emergency and needs people in the Intelligence Community to speak truth to power, the President’s dead of night decision puts our country and national security at even greater risk,” House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said in a statement. “President Trump’s decision to fire Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson is yet another blatant attempt by the President to gut the independence of the Intelligence Community and retaliate against those who dare to expose presidential wrongdoing.”Sen. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement, “In the midst of a national emergency, it is unconscionable that the President is once again attempting to undermine the integrity of the intelligence community by firing yet another intelligence official simply for doing his job. … We should all be deeply disturbed by ongoing attempts to politicize the nation’s intelligence agencies.”
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By Polityk | 04/04/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Trump Fires Watchdog Who Handled Ukraine Complaint
President Donald Trump has fired the intelligence watchdog who handled the complaint that triggered his impeachment.
Trump informed the Senate intelligence committee Friday of his decision to fire Michael Atkinson, according to a letter obtained by The Associated Press.This is a breaking story. Check back with VOA News for further developments.
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By Polityk | 04/04/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Coronavirus Concerns Challenge Biden Campaign
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s journey to the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination just got a little longer and a lot more complicated. Biden’s recent call for his party to delay the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee to later in the summer reflected the growing concern that the massive gathering of thousands of politicians and party faithful would accelerate the spread of the coronavirus. The Democratic National Committee announced Thursday that the event nominating the presidential and vice presidential candidates and formally kicking off the general election campaign would begin August 17. That is three weeks later than originally scheduled and a week before the Republicans convene in Charlotte, North Carolina, to nominate President Donald Trump for a second term. The abrupt convention schedule shift marks one more disruption in Biden’s presumptive path to becoming his party’s nominee. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to the press after loosing much of super Tuesday to former Vice President Joe Biden the previous night, in Burlington, Vermont on March 11, 2020.State primaries that could have delivered Biden the decisive number of delegates needed to end rival Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the nomination have been rescheduled because of coronavirus quarantine measures. Biden holds a commanding lead in the race, with 1,217 pledged delegates to Sanders’ 914 delegates. But he is still short of the 1,991 delegates needed to wrap up the nomination, and Sanders has refused to concede.Now both men are in a kind of campaign limbo, deprived of the chance to hold in-person rallies of voters while Trump holds daily White House briefings on the national public health crisis. “There is a real disadvantage here. President Trump gets to get on TV every night and surround himself with experts and officials and look very authoritative, as though he is in charge. And that’s what the nation wants during a time of crisis,” said Todd Belt, the director of the political management program at George Washington University. “This sort of scenario with Biden and Trump is a natural advantage of an incumbent,” said Matt Gorman, a strategist who worked on Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign as well as Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign. Gorman noted that during that 2012 campaign, Obama traveled to areas of New York and New Jersey battered by Superstorm Sandy in his role as commander in chief. “That is something a candidate cannot replicate,” Gorman said. Jovita Carranza, administrator of the Small Business Administration, speaks about the coronavirus in the White House, April 2, 2020, as Vice President Mike Pence, President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin listen.In an unprecedented national emergency, Biden and Sanders run the risk of appearing crass and undermining national safety if they go too far in criticizing Trump. “Anything that they would do more than they’re doing now might look mean-spirited,” Belt said. “Could you imagine if they did something like the [Democrats’ negative] response to the president’s State of the Union? If they did a response completely undermining all the efforts of the nation’s response to it?”Alex Wall, who was director of social media for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, notes that Biden’s digital campaign strategy has included pushbacks against Trump’s coronavirus response. Wall singled out the Biden campaign’s use of surrogate Ron Klain, a former Obama administration official who led government efforts to address the Ebola epidemic, in digital outreach. “The whiteboard explainer that they released across their channels last week from him was really effective,” Wall said. “Regular, consistent updates, whether it’s from Ron Klain, whether it’s from the candidate, I think those are going to be really critical to just give people sort of the facts on how do we combat this crisis.” At a time when millions of Americans are housebound and on their phones more than ever, Biden has had to pivot to digital campaigning when his strength has always been with in-person interactions on the campaign trail. Former U.S. vice president Joe Biden, left, and Senator Bernie Sanders greet each other with a safe elbow bump before the start of the 11th Democratic Party 2020 presidential debate in a CNN Washington Bureau studio in Washington, March 15, 2020.The Biden campaign spent five days refitting a room in his Delaware home as an ad-hoc studio for television broadcasting following tightened coronavirus shelter-in-place procedures. That delay noticeably contrasted with the Sanders campaign, which has been broadcasting out of the candidate’s home for over a year and often re-creates the enthusiasm of his in-person rallies with well-attended Facebook Live events. Wall says Biden has strengths as a candidate that can be matched to this moment on social media. “In some of the Facebook Live video livestream events that he’s done or even interviews on cable, he really sort of meets people where they are in terms of loss and struggle,” he said. Biden lost his wife and 1-year old daughter in a car accident in 1973 and lost an adult son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. Instagram Live, Facebook Live and even his recently launched podcast can provide Biden with important opportunities to connect with voters.“People really need to hear and see a leader across channels that is empathizing with them, that is talking about what it’s like to lose a loved one or lose a job or be facing some of these hardships,” according to Wall.This is one way Biden can try to overcome Sanders’ social media strength and challenge Sanders’ call for Medicare for All, which is resonating in the face of huge gaps in health care amid the coronavirus crisis. While both men are bound by social distancing procedures that rule out in-person interactions on the campaign trail, the pressure is on Biden to eliminate his one remaining primary rival and then take on the president. “The longer this gets drawn out, the more difficult it will be for Biden to bring over Sanders’ voters,” Belt said. Supporters of Democratic presidential hopeful former Vice President Joe Biden cheers as he speaks at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, on March 10, 2020.That makes this summer’s Democratic National Convention – when Biden likely will have that long-denied moment of cementing his nomination – so important. “A convention is basically an infomercial for the candidate,” Belt said, noting that with any change in the convention, “you’re losing that whole block of time to present the candidate on a national stage.” Neither is there a chance to show the delegates, who serve “as visual props, holding up their signs. I really think we underestimate how important that is to generate enthusiasm as well.” But even that rescheduled convention start date in August is uncertain. There’s no guarantee the nation will be out of the coronavirus crisis and fully back to normal in a way that could allow such a large gathering to draw all attention back to the presidential election.
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By Polityk | 04/04/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
Democrats Want FCC to Reject Trump Campaign Threat to Broadcasters
Two top Democrats in Congress on Thursday asked Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai to reassure broadcasters the agency will not revoke their licenses for airing advertisements critical of President Donald Trump.On March 25, Trump’s campaign sent letters to broadcasters in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin demanding they stop airing an ad critical of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and suggested continued airings “could put [the] station’s license in jeopardy.” The states are all expected to be battleground states that could prove decisive in November’s presidential election. Such states are hotly contested because their populations can swing either to Republicans or Democrats.FILE – Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., speaks during a hearing of the Committee on Energy and Commerce on Capitol Hill, May 8, 2018.Democratic Representatives Frank Pallone, who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Mike Doyle, who chairs the subcommittee overseeing the FCC, said the law prohibits the commission from interfering with programming decisions to air legally protected content. “At a time when autocratic governments around the world are using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to suppress press freedoms, we must reaffirm – not undermine – America’s commitment to a free press,” Pallone and Doyle wrote. “By remaining silent, the FCC sends a disturbing signal that it sanctions these threats and that broadcaster licenses could be in jeopardy.” Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., speaks at a news conference about net neutrality in Washington, May 16, 2018.Last week, Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, which created the ad, said it planned to expand its use despite the Trump’s campaign’s cease-and-desist letters. The ad plays verbatim quotes from the president, including, “We have it totally under control” and “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” as a graph shows the rising number of coronavirus cases. In the opening, the ad includes his quote that “this is their new hoax.” Trump’s re-election campaign said that quote was referring to Democratic “criticisms and politicization of the federal response to the public health crisis” and demanded the ad be taken down for falsely asserting he used the term to describe the coronavirus. Trump has faced criticism for initially playing down the seriousness of the coronavirus. The FCC declined to comment, saying it is reviewing the letter.The Trump campaign did not immediately comment. The White House declined to comment. In October 2017, Pai rejected Trump’s suggestion that the FCC could challenge the license of NBC, a unit of Comcast, after Trump suggested it reported stories that were not true. The FCC, an independent federal agency, does not license broadcast networks, but issues licenses to individual broadcast stations that are renewed on a staggered basis for eight-year periods.
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By Polityk | 04/03/2020 | Повідомлення, Політика
