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Russian opposition leader Navalny ordered to remain jailed as supporters plan more protests

InternationalJan 29. 2021Alexei Navalny

By The Washington Post · Isabelle Khurshudyan, Robyn Dixon

MOSCOW — A Moscow judge denied Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s appeal for release from detention Thursday, after the opposition leader slammed the court process and thanked protesters for showing that his supporters “cannot be intimidated.”

Navalny spoke via a video link from a bare room with a single chair in his Moscow pretrial detention center. He was detained Jan. 17 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he recovered from a near-fatal nerve agent poisoning.

Tens of thousands of protesters across more than 100 Russian cities and towns demonstrated in Navalny’s support last Saturday, and more than 3,700 people were reported arrested. More protests have been called for Sunday.

Navalny said authorities may have the upper hand at the moment, “but it will not last forever.”

“I want to express my full support to all those who come out in the streets because only they are the last obstacle to complete degradation of our country, the last obstacle for those in power to steal everything,” Navalny said in his closing message at the hearing. “These people are in fact defenders of our country and patriots of our country.

“You won’t be able to scare us,” he added. “We are the majority. Tens of millions of people, whom this power has robbed, cannot be intimidated. More and more people now understand that the law is on our side, the truth is on our side, we are the majority, and we will not let a bunch of scoundrels impose their order on us.”

The 44-year-old Navalny has said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a toxic attack on him during Navalny’s trip to Siberia last summer. The Kremlin has denied that, rebuffing international calls to investigate the incident.

Wearing a navy hoodie, Navalny chatted via video link with his attorney Olga Mikhailova, who told him about Wednesday’s sweeping police crackdown on the opposition. Police searched Navalny’s apartment and detained more key allies.

Leonid Volkov, chief of Navalny’s national network of regional headquarters, was charged with urging minors to protest in support of Navalny’s freedom. Navalny’s brother Oleg and another close ally, Lyubov Sobol, were detained on charges of breaching coronavirus restrictions during Saturday’s protests.

“Sobol, too? And Oleg for what?” Navalny asked his lawyer before the hearing began. In a conference room, journalists watched two screens showing Navalny at the detention center, and the judge and Navalny’s lawyers in the courtroom. Navalny took notes during much of the hearing, asking the judge to repeat his name so he could note it.

On Jan. 18, in a makeshift courtroom set up inside a Moscow police station near the airport, Navalny was sentenced to 30 days in a pretrial detention center pending his Feb. 2 trial for allegedly violating probation terms. Thursday’s hearing was to appeal the current detention.

As the judge exited the courtroom, one of Navalny’s attorneys asked the bailiff approximately how long it would take before a verdict was announced.

“Not long,” the bailiff replied.

“Not long,” Navalny repeated sarcastically.

The judge deliberated for just five minutes before announcing that Navalny would not be released.

He then asked if Navalny understood the verdict, to which Navalny replied: “Actually, everything was clear even before the start of the trial. Thank you.”

Navalny’s lawyers said they would appeal to the European Court of Human Rights over his 30-day detention. Volkov said there was no known legal basis for Navalny’s continued detention. Navalny faces court Tuesday, when he could be jailed on charges that he violated the terms of a 3½-year suspended sentence in a 2014 case. That case has been declared to be political by the European rights court.

Navalny complained to the judge that he had been given no opportunity to confer with his attorneys, Mikhailova and Vadim Kobzev, since he was detained. The judge told him he could do so over video in the court hearing, but Navalny asked for privacy.

“I’m looking at two guards who are filming me and have stern expressions,” Navalny said. Judge Musa Musaev told them to leave and ordered a 10-minute break to allow him to speak to his attorney.

Navalny appeared in good spirits at times, grinning at the camera and joking to the guards. “Well, I’ve gotten you kicked out,” as they were ordered to leave.

Kobzev submitted documents stating that Navalny was receiving treatment in Berlin until Jan. 15, two days before he flew home. He told the court that bailiffs were informed of Navalny’s address in Berlin – “the whole world knew” where he was, Kobzev said – and that there was no evidence he was violating the terms of his probation by hiding from authorities.

At his last court appearance Jan. 18, Navalny was able to record a video message for his supporters, imploring them to “take to the streets.”

He stopped short of that sort of call this time, instead devoting most of his speaking opportunities to opining on Russia’s “lawlessness” as an intimidation factor for its citizens, citing last week’s makeshift courtroom at a police station as an example.

Mikhailova, Navalny’s attorney, said big protest turnouts could influence Navalny’s next trial “because if no one talks about this, then [officials] can do anything.”

“We see that people are interested, and they understand that Alexei is not being treated fairly,” she said. “As of now, whatever the authorities want is being satisfied despite all norms of the law.”

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U.K. pulls ‘stay home, save lives’ ad after criticism that it revived stereotypes of women

InternationalJan 29. 2021

By The Washington Post · Lateshia Beachum

Only women need to “stay home” to stem the spread of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom – or at least that’s how people interpreted a now-yanked National Health Services campaign.

The National Health Service, Britain’s publicly funded health-care system, released an ad Wednesday that ostensibly was created to encourage people to stay home as much as possible amid the pandemic. It showed four scenes: one with a woman relaxing on a sofa with her male partner and three in which women are home caring for children or cleaning the house.

The stereotypical tone did not sit well with its targeted social media constituency.

Social platforms were buzzing with accusations of sexism after the NHS posted the advert on its Facebook page Wednesday night. Among the most common reactions was “who thought this was okay?”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the image in a statement: “I will make clear that it does not reflect the government’s view on women which is why we have withdrawn it,” Sky News reported.

But the criticism was swift and continued to circulate even after the ad was removed.

Labour MP Yvette Cooper addressed the ad Thursday morning, tweeting: “Turns out 1950s sexism is spread fast too.”

Health officials around the world have pleaded with people to stay home as much as possible to limit the spread of the coronavirus. In the U.K., the number of new cases has been declining since early January, but experts fear the emergence of new and more contagious variants could lead to another increase. The digital flier was an attempt to get citizens to stay at home as coronavirus cases slowly decline with a new variant discovered in the country contributing to more infection.

Johnson is taking heat this week for claiming that his government had truly done “everything we could” to save the lives that were lost in the pandemic. While the country’s vaccine rollout has been going relatively smooth, Johnson’s critics pointed to a year-long pattern of bold promises followed by failures.

More than 3.7 million cases and 103,000 covid-related deaths have been reported in the U.K., according to data tracked by The Washington Post.

Globally, the pandemic has disproportionately affected women, causing their job losses to be 1.8 times greater than that of men. Women’s voices and perspectives have also been marginalized in the coronavirus conversation, according to multiple studies.

Women and people without a college education have been most affected by the U.K. lockdown restrictions, according to a University of Cambridge study.

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Biden struggles to define his ‘unity’ promise for a divided nation

InternationalJan 29. 2021President Biden speaks about American manufacturing before signing an executive order at the White House complex on Monday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford.

By The Washington Post · Ashley Parker, Matt Viser, Annie Linskey

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama offered “hope and change.” Donald Trump vowed to “Make America Great Again.” George W. Bush promised “compassionate conservatism.”

And for President Joe Biden, the slogan comes down to one word: “unity.”

Biden campaigned on – and came to office promising – the ineffable concept of unity, a feel-good catchall that proffered bipartisan bonhomie, but with few tangible specifics.

Now, Biden and his team are working to implement that amorphous goal, which has already been weaponized by Republicans who disagree with Biden’s policy aims and challenged by some fellow Democrats.

Facing a deadly coronavirus pandemic and a troubled economy, as well as the slimmest of congressional majorities, Biden and his advisers are attempting to implement a blueprint of unity for a country that can only seem to agree on how much it disagrees.

Even coming up with a common definition for what unity should mean has proved impossible to unify around.

“I do think it means a lot of different things,” said John Anzalone, a top Biden adviser and campaign pollster. “When we would ask people in polls what was Joe Biden’s message, they understood it was unity. They would say ‘bringing people together’ or ‘unity.’ “

“It may have meant different things to them,” Anzalone added. “Maybe it was bringing the different parties together. Or healing the country by using a different tone and demeanor.”

Republicans – citing various Democratic initiatives that Biden is putting forth – have already sounded anti-unity alarms, claiming that the fact Biden is governing as a Democrat means he is not committed to his campaign mantra. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., defined “unity” differently still, arguing Sunday on CNN’s “Inside Politics” that the phrase perhaps should mean Democrats being “unified against insurrection,” a reference to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of angry Trump supporters.

The upcoming Senate impeachment trial of Trump over his alleged role in inciting that riot underscores the riven nature of the nation’s politics, with all but five Republican senators voting Tuesday to challenge the constitutionality of impeaching a former president.

Biden and his aides have offered broad, and sometimes conflicting, definitions of what unity entails.

The president told reporters Monday that it means trying to “eliminate the vitriol,” “trying to reflect what the majority of the American people – Democrat, Republican, independent – think,” and trying to “stay away from the ad hominem attacks on one another.”

But Biden also said consensus should not be confused with bipartisanship, and left open the possibility muscling through his coronavirus relief package over the objections of congressional Republicans.

“Unity also is trying to get, at a minimum, if you pass a piece of legislation that breaks down on party lines, but it gets passed, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t unity,” Biden said. “It just means it wasn’t bipartisan.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a press briefing Monday that unity signifies “approaching our work on legislative issues through a bipartisan lens,” but also “projecting that he is going to govern for all people and address all of the issues that the American people are facing.”

“Unity is about the country feeling that they’re in it together,” Psaki said, “and I think we’ll know that when we see it.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., echoed the same phrase, which is often associated with the definition of obscenity famously offered by then-Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.

“I’ll know it when I see it,” Hickenlooper said when asked how to recognize unity. “Isn’t that what they say about pornography?”

Early polling indicates that most Americans agree with Biden’s call for bipartisanship, with 71% saying they would rather see congressional Republicans work with Biden than focus on keeping him in check, according to a new Monmouth University poll conducted in the days after the inauguration. About 6 in 10 Americans have some confidence that Biden will be able to get Washington to be more cooperative, and nearly 8 in 10 said it was very or extremely important that the federal government address the lack of unity in the country.

But Republicans argue that by pursing policy goals with which they disagree, the new president is spurning his own appeals for unity. The stance is arguably disingenuous, but also potentially politically effective, allowing Republicans to undercut Biden’s entire organizing principle.

In a tweet, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, linked to a story on Biden’s move to end Trump’s ban on transgender soldiers serving in the military, writing: “Another ‘unifying’ move by the new Administration?”

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., criticized Biden’s aspirations, as well. “I just wish that his actions matched the words of his inaugural in terms of being unifying and healing,” Johnson said this week. “I’m not seeing his initial actions being that, which is disappointing.”

And Mark Levin, a conservative talk radio and Fox News host, used his show to lambaste what he said were Biden’s false claims of unity. “Joe Biden made much of the word unity,” he said last weekend. “Nothing that Joe Biden has done since his inauguration speech demonstrates any form of unity.”

Writing online, Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama, moved to temper the realm of the possible: “The ‘unity’ conversation is going to be constantly distorted with unfair expectations, bad faith arguments, and general stupidity.”

Natural partisan disagreements, he wrote, should not be misconstrued as disunity, and one metric for success should be consensus from a majority of the country, not a majority from the opposing party.

“Joe Biden won the election. Republicans lost. Joe Biden doing the things Americans elected him to do is not divisive. The Republicans may not like it, but that’s their problem,” Pfeiffer wrote. “A majority of Americans voted to rejoin the Paris Accords, repeal the Muslim ban, implement more comprehensive pandemic measures and so on. Pushing forward on agenda items supported by the majority of Americans is not divisive just because [Republican Sens.] Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson find it irksome.”

At the same time, even some of Biden’s Democratic allies have struggled to articulate the exact meaning of the word in a Biden administration, often defining it by what it is not.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., said unity can be observed and felt, but not necessarily measured. “Unity to me simply means finding common ground – it doesn’t mean unanimity,” he said. “I don’t know why people think you can’t be unified unless you’re unanimous. That’s all Biden is talking about: trying to find common ground.”

Clyburn liked it to his 58-year marriage to his wife, who died in 2019.

“There was never any disunity to our marriage,” he said. “But there was a whole lot of difference of opinion. We were seldom unanimous in what we did and what we thought, but there was always unity.”

Still, Clyburn added, though he believes Biden’s main goal is seeking common ground, the concept can also be warped – and even dangerous.

“I don’t want to be unfair about this, but one of the reasons I don’t like this unity argument is because I’ve been Black all my 80 years and in the South,” he said. “The South was unified against me. There was Southern unity for segregation. So you have to be relative about this. You can be unified and be inhuman. Unity is to me something we have to be careful about.”

Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del., who often talks with Biden and spoke to him as he prepared the foundation of his campaign, said that some of the symbolic actions in the early days of Biden’s presidency – a day of service shortly before his inauguration, a memorial for coronavirus victims and a bipartisan invitation to lawmakers to join him for a church service – were designed with unity in mind.

“It doesn’t mean uniformity, it doesn’t mean conformity or unanimity, it doesn’t mean we’re all going to agree on everything,” Coons said. “Bringing unity to the country starts with telling us the truth, having a real and concrete plan. It’s not just brave words. It’s actually doing the job of being president.”

Hickenlooper, a former governor of Colorado, laughed out loud when confronted with the question of how unity can be measured. “I’m not sure how you measure when you’re there,” he said. “But I do think that what President Biden is putting out is a road map.”

The concept has been a guiding force for Biden since the earliest days of his campaign, when he was meeting with advisers at a home he was renting in McLean to sketch out his fledgling bid.

“We choose unity over division,” Biden said, again and again, in the climax of almost every stump speech.

On the campaign trail, he frequently used unity and civility interchangeably, often while mentioning the lesson imparted to him by the late former Democratic senator Mike Mansfield: “It’s always appropriate to question another man’s judgment, but never appropriate to question his motives.”

Biden’s rhetoric was generally cast as naive in a Democratic primary in which candidates often engaged in partisan warfare, as Biden trumpeted his ability to work with Republicans.

“I kept talking about unity, and everybody said, ‘No, you can’t have unity any longer. It’s changed so fundamentally, Joe. It can’t be put back together again,’ ” he said during a 2019 fundraiser. “Well, if that’s the case, we’re all dead. We’re in real trouble, because our constitutional system requires consensus.”

Late in the campaign, Biden delivered a major speech in Gettysburg, Pa. – a place chosen to highlight the perils of division, and the merits of unity. “The closing argument is that we need to unify the country,” Mike Donilon, Biden’s chief strategist, said at the time. “He won’t represent just Democrats or Republicans; he’ll represent everyone.”

In his inauguration speech, Biden mentioned “unity” more than a half-dozen times, at one point citing other challenges that tested the nation – the Civil War, the Great Depression, two world wars and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“In each of these moments, enough of us came together to carry all of us forward,” he said, referring not to an end of partisanship but an idealistic joining of the nation. “And, we can do so now. History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity.”

One example of Biden’s approach occurred at the end of a brief question-and-answer session with reporters Monday. As Biden’s aides began to wrap up, ushering the media out of the room, the president paused and turned to Fox News Channel’s Peter Doocy, who as a reporter covering the campaign often rankled Biden and his team with his pointed questions.

“I know he always asks me tough questions, and he always has an edge to them,” Biden said. “But I like him anyway.”

“So,” the president continued, addressing the reporter from a network whose prime-time hosts frequently propagate false conspiracy theories against him, “go ahead and answer – ask the question.”

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Some urge Senate to hit the brakes on a speedy impeachment trial

InternationalJan 29. 2021Mitch McConnell

By The Washington Post · Paul Kane

WASHINGTON – The Senate is hurtling toward a shotgun impeachment trial that will accomplish almost nothing by design and likely leave everyone with a bitter aftertaste.

Democratic voters will be furious that GOP senators refused to hold former president Donald Trump accountable for his role in encouraging a mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6. Republicans will be upset that Congressional Democrats went through with an impeachment trial three weeks after Trump left the White House.

And independent voters, more focused on the health and economic crises fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, will wonder why Congress prioritized an impeachment process at all.

That’s the almost inevitable outcome of the Senate trial crafted by Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., particularly after McConnell and 44 other Republicans stuck by Trump’s side in an initial procedural vote.

With House managers now facing an almost impossible task in reaching 67 total votes to convict, some Trump critics are now debating whether to even hold the trial.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., has been the most outspoken on this front, calling for the Senate to approve a resolution censuring Trump instead. Though Kaine would vote to convict Trump, he said he believes that time might be better spent focusing on moving pandemic relief legislation.

But a vast majority of Democrats have signaled that they support the emerging Schumer-McConnell approach of a shortened impeachment trial that skips some of the phases that produced a three-week trial of Trump last year.

“I think the sooner we get on to solving covid and solving climate, the better. So I think if this gets drawn out too much, it doesn’t help anybody,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., one of the more liberal members of the caucus, said Wednesday.

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the runner-up in the last two Democratic presidential primary campaigns, has endorsed a speedy trial to get on with bills to help “working families.”

The current thinking imagines a trial finished in a week.

It’s a stunning reversal for a Democratic caucus that cried out for witnesses and documents during last year’s trial, focused on Trump’s attempt to force Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family

They didn’t have the majority during that trial, so McConnell could muscle through his wishes. Now, with 50 members of Schumer’s caucus, plus a handful of Republicans who voted against Trump in Tuesday’s proxy vote, Democrats have a working majority to actually call witnesses and subpoena documents.

A small but vocal group would like to at least give that a try, given the severity of events in a riot that left five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer beaten to death by the mob, and at least 140 officers injured, some quite seriously.

“We just had one of the most terrifying incidents in American history that put in question the viability of our democracy,” Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del., told Politico on Wednesday. “How much time do you think we should spend on that?”

Coons is a close Biden ally who wants to quickly move on to the new president’s agenda. Yet at the same time, he is angry about how many senators are prepared to move past the Jan. 6 attack in a speedy trial.

“There’s still evidence that we need,” Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said Wednesday of Trump’s Jan. 6 actions. “The evidence that I’m particularly interested in is: What did he know about the intention of that crowd when he was addressing them? What did he have in the way of intelligence that may or may not have put him on notice that this was a dangerous situation? And then secondly, what I am interested in is, what did he do that afternoon when it was unfolding?”

Democrats privately rejected the easiest way to handle such an evidentiary task. They could have created a special impeachment trial committee that would have been tasked with issuing subpoenas, conducting depositions of witnesses along with House managers and Trump’s lawyers, and fighting in court any efforts to block testimony or documents.

This approach would have allowed Schumer to move ahead with Biden’s agenda and confirming his cabinet, while the trial committee handled those legally protracted issues.

But that might have meant delaying the full Senate trial for several months when the fury of the moment will have faded.

But advocates of this approach believe that the initial 55-45 vote signaled that the only way to change GOP minds would be to produce evidence showing that Trump was more complicit than is currently known.

“We have an obligation to get the facts, it seems to me,” King said. “And I think those are two relevant facts. If he had intelligence, when he was talking to that crowd, that their plan was to come here and storm the Capitol, to me that is a very important piece of evidence in terms of his culpability.”

After harrowing ordeal, Rep. Joe Neguse to play key role in impeachment trial

The Senate twice used special trial committees in the late 1980s to handle the scut work of impeachments of federal judges, procedures that were upheld by the Supreme Court.

After brushing aside this idea, some Democrats considered handing off the Trump matter to the already existing Judiciary Committee, a panel that is already swamped with the confirmation of Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland and immigration legislation.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the incoming chairman, said he would leave procedural questions up to the House managers.

“I’m waiting to hear what their proposal is, but for us to suggest a trial strategy for the House managers, I don’ think that’s our job,” Durbin said.

So, instead, the Senate will rush through a trial in which the only evidence likely to be presented will be the stuff that senators themselves already lived, video clips of rioters breaking into the Capitol as senators fled through underground tunnels to their secure location.

Senators will likely not even attempt to answer the fundamental questions of every impeachment trial – what did the president know and when did he know it?

“It will be surprising to me if we ever know the answers to that,” Durbin said.

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Senate Democrats and White House fast-track relief bill, frustrating Republicans

InternationalJan 29. 2021House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

By The Washington Post · Erica Werner, Seung Min Kim, Jeff Stein

WASHINGTON – The two newly elected Democratic senators from Georgia pressed White House officials and fellow Senate Democrats Thursday to act quickly to pass a new round of stimulus checks, arguing that this promise won their party the Senate majority and needs to get done.

The comments by Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock during a private lunchtime call with the Senate Democratic caucus and top White House economic advisers were confirmed by several people with knowledge of them, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussion was private.

Ossoff and Warnock won special elections in Georgia this month on promises to deliver voters a new round of $2,000 stimulus checks if elected. President Biden made the same pledge to Georgia voters while campaigning for the two candidates, whose victories gave Democrats narrow control of the Senate.

The stimulus checks are a centerpiece of Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan, which Democrats are aiming to move quickly through Congress in coming weeks through special budget rules that would allow them to pass the legislation without GOP votes. The checks in the Biden plan are $1,400 per person, but would come on top of $600 checks included in the last relief package in December, a two-payment total of $2,000.

The arguments from Ossoff and Warnock in favor of fast action on the checks played into a larger sense of urgency among Democrats during the discussion Thursday that Biden’s package must be enacted swiftly, with or without GOP support. Aides to Ossoff and to Warnock declined to comment on the closed-door lunch.

“My strong impression was that there is general unanimity, and it’s strong that we need to be bold and decisive, particularly in putting shots and putting vaccines in people’s arms and putting money in people’s pockets and putting kids back to school,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said. “And one way to put money in people’s pockets is to fulfill our promises on stimulus payments.”

Biden administration officials on Thursday’s call included National Economic Council Director Brian Deese; Jeff Zients, who heads the administration’s covid-19 response team; and Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to the White House. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., added in a statement: “Both Brian and Jeff showed us how serious the White House takes this pandemic and the actions needed to get our arms around this crisis. We know Americans need urgent help and Senate Democrats are prepared to act as soon as possible.”

The discussion came as Democrats formalized plans to move forward on their own with the stimulus legislation, despite warnings from Republicans that they might regret doing so, especially after Biden ran for president as a bipartisan dealmaker.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said earlier Thursday that the House and the Senate would take initial votes next week on a budget bill that would allow subsequent party-line passage of the sweeping relief package. She portrayed the partisan “budget reconciliation” approach as a fallback position that could pressure Republicans to come on board.

“By the end of the week we will be finished with the budget resolution, which will be about reconciliation if we need it,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly news conference.

“We have to be ready. I do think we have more leverage to get cooperation on the other side if they know we have an alternative,” she said.

The “reconciliation” process allows a budget resolution to pass the Senate with a simple majority vote instead of the 60 votes normally required for major bills. That could allow the Democrats who control the Senate to pass the legislation with no GOP support, though it would be a struggle because the Senate is split 50-50 between the two parties after Ossoff and Warnock flipped two GOP-held Senate seats in Georgia. Democrats have the majority because Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties.

Senate Republicans, including members of a bipartisan group that has been meeting with administration officials about the relief plan, criticized Democrats’ plans to move forward under reconciliation – especially given Biden’s call for unity.

“It starts the whole process off in a very different place than I think President Biden was in his inaugural address just two weeks ago,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., a member of GOP leadership.

“It’s confrontational. It’s certainly not collaborative,” Blunt said.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a leader of the bipartisan group, told reporters that “it’s certainly not helpful” if reconciliation moves forward. She also said she had spoken personally with Biden and had “a very friendly call,” in one of the first public indications that the president is engaged in the kind of personal bipartisan outreach he promised while campaigning.

Several Republicans suggested that they would be open to a narrower bill focused on money for vaccines and other priorities. But Democrats and White House officials said they were not going that route. In addition to the new round of stimulus checks, Biden’s plan includes an extension of unemployment benefits set to expire in mid-March, an increased child tax credit, and hundreds of billions of dollars for schools, vaccines and the health-care system.

“We are not looking to split the package,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

“And the reason is because we are not going to put ourselves in a place where . . . we’re choosing between helping families to put food on the table and making sure kids get back to school and getting a vaccine in the arms of Americans,” Psaki said.

Democrats said they were determined to move ahead, especially in light of alarming economic reports released Thursday, including news that economic growth shrank in 2020 more than it did during the Great Recession.

It remains uncertain whether Democrats will have the votes to move forward with a partisan reconciliation bill. The most conservative Senate Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, sidestepped when pressed Thursday on whether he’d support that approach, insisting several times that “we’re going to make Joe Biden successful.”

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The recession may be over – technically

InternationalJan 28. 2021On a rainy day in Portland, Ore., deli manager Talia Light prepares for outdoor seating only on Sept. 23, 2020. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Leah Nash. Photo by: Leah Nash — For The Washington Post Location: Portland, United States

By The Washington Post · Heather Long 

WASHINGTON – The pain in the U.S. economy remains deep with more than 15 million Americans on unemployment, long lines at food banks, and restaurants, shops and entertainment venues fighting for survival, but this recession might be over – at least technically.

The textbook definition of a recession is the period between the economy’s last peak and trough. Think of it like a hiker descending a mountain after reaching a summit. Once the hiker reaches the bottom again, the hike is over, even if it’sa long walk with blistered feet to the car or a long time before the hiker climbs another mountain again.

It’s abundantly clear that the U.S. economy took a big plunge in March and April of 2020. The coronavirus crisis required many parts of the economy to shutter to minimize human contact to slow the virus’s spread. Economic activity declined so severely that the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, which officially declares recessions, sprung into action:February 2020 was the peak, and the U.S. was in a recession. That declaration process normally takes months. This time, it took 15 weeks, the fastest ever.

The committee hasn’t declared an official end to the recession yet, but one of its eightmembers says the U.S. recession is technically over.

“The recession is when the economy is going down,” said Robert Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University and longtime member of the recession-declaring committee. “The trough was clearly last April with unemployment at 14.7% and production way down as half of the country closed down. There is no way we are going to go back and revisit those trough levels of April.”

Gordon says NBER’s committee will probably end up declaring May or June 2020 as the official turning point from recession to recovery. The committee hasn’t come out and said thatyet, because it is notoriously slow-moving. Plus, there is still a chance that a fast-spreading coronavirus variant could force another massive shutdown of the economy. But Gordon expects this will be “one of the shortest recessions on record.” (The current shortest on record is the six-month recession in 1980).

On Thursday, the Commerce Department is expected to report that the U.S. economy grew at a decent pace in the fourth quarter from October through December. That comes after a strong rebound in the third quarter. The data supports Gordon’s view that the turning point was probably in late spring or early summer.

But for many Americans, the idea that the recession is over is laughable. It shows a disconnect between how economists and Wall Street investors think about the conditions versus how the broader public views the nation’s fortunes.

The economy is still clearly operatingbelow its potential. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that it’s a “long way” from normal, echoing the sentiment many Americans feel.

The same thing happened during the Great Recession. NBER’s committee said the official recession lasted from December 2007 to June 2009. Yet job losses kept mounting even after that point. Unemployment hit its high point of that downturn – 10% – in October 2009. And the economy spent years in a “jobless recovery.”

Right now there are nearly 10 million people who lost a job in March and April and are still out of work. That’s more unemployed than in October 2009.

“It’s not unusual for the economy to be in terrible shape during the first months or even years of the recovery,” Gordon said.

Thea Lee, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute put it this way: “This is not a normal recession. We are definitely in uncharted territory due to the nature of this recession.” She emphasized the especially deep losses that low-income workers, Black and Hispanic workers, and women have faced this time around.

That is why there has been a push in recent years to get policymakers in the White House, the Federal Reserve and beyond to look at a much wider array of data and perspectives as they make their assessments about the health of the economy. Simply looking at whether the economy is expanding or contracting doesn’t tell you everything – like hikers who only see that they are going up or down. They also want to know how steep the trail is and whether it’s likely to be icy or require climbing and special equipment.

In short, there’s a difference between the economy being out of a recession and being healthy.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is among many economists who have pushed for policymakers to watch a dashboard of indicators, including the Black unemployment rate, which is often the last to fall, and how many people are out of work for six months or more.

People who lose a job and can’t get back to work for half a year tend to have a much harder time getting their career and finances back on track. They often end up having to take a lower-paying job or needing to retrain. Long-term unemployment skyrocketed after the Great Recession and helped contribute to alarming numbers of Americans giving up on even looking for a job.

Nearly 4 million Americans were long-term unemployed in December, the highest level in U.S. history, except for during the Great Recession.

Harvard economics professor Gabriel Chodorow-Reich predicts long-term unemployment probably will peak in February at just above 4 million and then decline, but that is contingent on getting the coronavirus under control.

“The most important policy for the overall labor market is vaccination rollout and how well that goes,” Chodorow-Reich said.

Rebekah Love of Louisville, Ky., is among the millions of unemployed who still feel a deep recession. Love owned a pottery studio that had to close last March. The loss of her job – and her business – derailed her family’s life.

“I grew up poor. This has really plunged me back into what life was like at my parents’ house – poor,” said Love, a single mother of a teenager. “I’ve got no money in the bank. I am currently late on January’s rent. I don’t know how I’m going to make February rent. I think more community aid will come back online, but the money has yet to trickle down from the recent bill that was passed.”

Love, 46, has been searching for jobs without any luck. She ran the pottery business for just over two years. Before that, she was a computer programmer for more than a decade who never had any trouble landing good-paying jobs.

She’s barely getting any bites when she sends her resume out, even with her programming background. Companies and recruiters that do reach out have told her they want to make connections, but they also make it clear they aren’t ready to hire yet.

For Love and millions like her, the economy won’t be healthy until there are a lot more job openings and people back at work. That’s far more important than whether the nation is technically in a recession.

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Farmer’s son becomes billionaire after early bet on wind power

InternationalJan 28. 2021Wind turbines at a wind farm during sunset in Nauen Brandenburg, Germany, on Dec. 30, 2020. MUST CREDIT; Bloomberg photo by Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Yoojung Lee

Gim Seong-gon was running a steel-manufacturing business in the late 1980s when he became fascinated by wind power. The South Korea native saw growth potential in the field and decided to get involved.

It was a good decision. With an early injection of capital from Goldman Sachs, his CS Wind Corp. has become the world’s biggest manufacturer of wind towers. The firm’s shares have rallied for the past four years, surging almost fivefold in 2020 alone, and expectations are running high for even more growth with the change of administrations in Washington.

Gim, 67, the son of a farmer, is now one of the wealthiest people in South Korea. The 51% stake in the company he owns with his family is valued at $1.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

“Gim was quick to identify the growth potential globally,” said Han Byung-hwa, an analyst at Seoul-based Eugene Investment & Securities Co. “The industry has seen faster growth than other traditional businesses.”

Gim made the shift to renewable energy in 2003, setting up CS Wind’s first wind-tower factory in Vietnam to take advantage of lower labor costs. Five years later, his company received an investment of 47.2 billion won ($43 million) from Goldman Sachs, which helped it expand into seven countries.

CS Wind now operates plants in countries including Malaysia, China and the U.K., selling its wind towers to firms such as Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, General Electric and Vestas Wind Systems It also plans to build factories in the U.S., where newly elected President Joe Biden has pledged to prioritize suppliers based in the nation.

“Running a business is all about constantly finding new goals to challenge,” Gim said in an interview with a company magazine in 2014. “When a goal is achieved, you need to go for a new one. That’s how I’ve managed the business.”

CS Wind shares rose as much as 3% on Wednesday, rebounding after four days of losses. A company spokesman declined to comment on Gim’s fortune.

A shift to green energy has helped lift the fortunes of companies that make everything from electric vehicles to batteries to solar panels. Investments in low-carbon energy projects and technologies more than doubled in the past decade to $501.3 billion last year, and almost two-thirds of that came from renewables — mostly solar and wind, according to a BloombergNEF report this month.

With governments around the world pushing to go green, wind and solar are expected to meet 56% of the world’s electricity demand in 2050, a BNEF analysis found. In the U.S., Biden wants to make the nation’s electricity grid carbon-free by 2035, while China plans to go carbon-neutral by 2060 and European Union leaders agreed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030.

The rush to renewables has boosted the fortunes throughout the world. Claus Sauter, the chairman of German biofuel maker Verbio Vereinigte BioEnergie, and his family, as well as George Sakellaris of U.S. energy-solutions supplier Ameresco Inc. have become billionaires as shares of their firms have jumped more than threefold in the past year.

Through a company representative, Sauter said the gain “spurs us on to consistently continue on the path we have chosen,” while not commenting on his wealth. An Ameresco spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

CS Wind’s offshore manufacturing operations were what appealed to Goldman Sachs when it invested in 2008, according to a spokesman for the bank. The firm, which has since exited most of the bet, said it’s one of the biggest backers of the renewable-energy sector in the region.

“We were able to couple Chairman Gim’s passion and more than two decades of deep industry expertise with our global experience and network in the alternative- and clean-technology industry,” said Stephanie Hui, co-head of Goldman Sachs’s merchant banking division in Asia.

Revenue at CS Wind more than doubled in the two years to 2019 and climbed 16% to 695 billion won in the first nine months of 2020, with net income jumping 68% to 49.3 billion won. Still, more than 80% of CS Wind’s third-quarter sales were from three clients, making it vulnerable should one of them end the relationship.

For Gim, who paid his way through college by working at the post office and giving private tutoring lessons, the company has marked a big change in fortunes.

After graduating Seoul’s Chung-Ang University with a degree in trade, he worked at a property developer and moved to Saudi Arabia in a bid to make more money. That’s where he set up his first business venture, before returning to South Korea to start a business manufacturing steel structures including chimneys for thermal power plants in 1989.

“Life was tough back then,” Gim said in a 2014 interview with a local newspaper, adding that’s also what drove him to take on new challenges. “In retrospect, that time planted confidence in me.”

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Germany’s recovery stumbles with forecast cut on extended curbs

InternationalJan 28. 2021A social distancing sign stand near the checkout counters in a supermarket in Berlin on Jan. 19, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Birgit Jennen

Germany’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic will be slower than expected as extended restrictions hit activity.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government now expects gross domestic product to expand by 3% in 2021, according to its updated outlook. That’s down from a 4.4% prediction in October – before the most recent curbs on businesses and people were imposed.

“The recovery will continue in 2021, albeit with less momentum,” Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said Wednesday. “The situation is still serious, and the danger of virus variants hasn’t been overcome. We therefore can’t rashly put at risk what we’ve achieved.”

After a 5% contraction last year, Germany forecasts a return to pre-pandemic levels in mid-2022 – about six months later than the government’s previous projection. The prolonged recovery has sparked a debate about debt spending, a sensitive topic that will likely play a role in national elections in September.

Increased borrowing to prop up Europe’s largest economy probably will increase the government’s deficit to 7% of GDP this year, boosting the debt ratio to about 72.5% of national output, according to the government’s report. Debt levels are expected to shrink to less than 69% of GDP in 2024.

Helge Braun, Merkel’s chief of staff, roiled conservative allies Tuesday by proposing that constitutional debt limits be altered to allow more borrowing to help offset the impact of the pandemic. The plan, rejected by Merkel’s bloc, highlights the tension facing authorities as they plot their way out of the crisis.

Merkel and the leaders of Germany’s 16 states have gradually tightened restrictions since November. The curbs now include closing nonessential stores, limiting private gatherings and restricting movement in hard-hit areas. The current package of measures will run until at least Feb. 14.

Amid concerns about faster-spreading mutations, there are no signs that the lockdown will be eased soon. Merkel has repeatedly said that the contagion rate needs to fall to a manageable level, and while the number of infections per 100,000 people over seven days is coming down, it’s still double the government’s target.

The forecast downgrade reflects deteriorating prospects across the euro zone as the bloc heads for a double-dip recession. Germany has fared better than many of its neighbors, in part thanks to generous government support, but is struggling with business disruptions and concern over vaccine shortages.

The German economy showed divergent signs with manufacturing robust, Altmaier said, while services are being hit hard. He added that the government will continue to support companies affected by the pandemic and invest in future industries such as hydrogen energy and artificial intelligence.

Europe is starting to follow the familiar script of lagging its international peers when recovering from a crisis. That was the upshot of the International Monetary Fund’s forecasts on Tuesday, which downgraded the growth outlook for 2021 across Europe and underscored a generally poorer performance compared with China and the U.S.

Europe’s rebound largely hinges on vaccination programs, which have gotten off to a sluggish start. The tensions have sparked a spat between the European Union and drugmaker AstraZeneca, which has said production problems will hit deliveries to the bloc of a coronavirus vaccine that could be recommended this week.

Merkel waded into the dispute Tuesday, hinting at potential retaliation against the U.S. efforts to restrict vaccine trade after Health Minister Jens Spahn proposed export limits for shots produced in the European Union.

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Jobless for longer: How the pandemic has hit Asian Americans

InternationalJan 28. 2021A worker pulls a cart outside a nail salon in Palo Alto, Calif., on July 28, 2020., MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Reade Pickert

Asian Americans who lost their jobs during the pandemic have found it harder than most to get them back.

The 5.9% unemployment rate among the roughly 10 million-strong Asian workforce in December was below the national rate. But in the final three months of 2020, almost half of jobless Asians had been out of work for at least 27 weeks — a bigger share than White, Black or Hispanic Americans.

The reasons are largely economic and geographic. Many work in industries particularly vulnerable to business closures, and almost one-third of Asian Americans live in California, one of the states hit hardest by pandemic restrictions.

Ivy Nguyen, a nail technician in Santa Ana, California, has been unemployed since the salon where she worked closed in mid-March. When it reopened, she wasn’t among those asked to return.

Nguyen, who moved to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1980 and is in her late 50s, has received just $2,184 in unemployment benefits. Speaking by phone through a translator, she said she has relied on financial support from her children and stimulus payments.

Almost one in four Asian-American workers is employed in hospitality and leisure, retail, or other services such as salons and dry cleaners, according to a July study of covid-19’s impact on Asian employment. Those sectors are among the hardest hit by the pandemic.

“Asian Americans were hard-hit initially,” said Don Mar, co-author of the study and a professor emeritus of economics at San Francisco State University. The researchers estimated that there was a disproportionate decline in the number of Asian-owned small businesses over the first two months of the pandemic, compared with those owned by non-Hispanic Whites.

Asian Americans are diverse. More than half are foreign-born, and no single country of origin dominates, according to a Pew Research Center report. On aggregate, the population has higher education and income levels than the U.S. as a whole. But it also includes many groups — such as refugees, or those with limited English-language skills — who are at greater risk of suffering lasting scars as a result of the pandemic slump.

In California, Asian-Americans made up 16% of the state’s labor force in February and filed 19% of initial unemployment claims in the first two-and-a-half months of the shutdown, according to Mar. In New York State they made up 9% of workers and 14% of claims by mid-April.

Many of the applicants needed help for linguistic reasons. Dung Nguyen (who’s not related to Ivy) at the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative estimates she’s helped as many as 300 people apply for government financial support during the pandemic. It involved hours of filling out forms or battling an overwhelmed and glitchy state computer system. One submission took 105 attempts.

“There’s a lot of confusion,” Nguyen said. “So folks just come to us.”

Asian immigrant workers often aren’t eligible for a lot of the social safety net, according to Howard Shih, director of research and policy at the Asian American Federation. He also says that aid programs generally weren’t designed with the Asian community in mind, citing the Paycheck Protection Program of loans for small companies as an example.Many Asian businesses “were unable to get assistance because the translations of the forms that they had to fill out and the instructions came out way too late,” Shih said.

Some firms won’t survive the pandemic, putting their employees and owners in jeopardy.Ivy Nguyen, who’s been a nail technician since 1986 and says she’s never really thought of doing anything else, is concerned about catching Covid if she goes back to work. But she’s also worried that opportunities will be hard to come by when the pandemic ends — because there’ll be so many unemployed nail-salon workers looking for a job.

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The Constitution is murky on whether a former president can be subject to an impeachment trial

InternationalJan 28. 2021House impeachment mangers walk through National Statuary Hall after leading a procession with the an article of impeachment against former president Donald Trump on Monday, Jan. 25, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges

By The Washington Post · Ann E. Marimow, Robert Barnes

WASHINGTON – The question of whether former president Donald Trump can be convicted at an impeachment trial now that he has left office is likely to be settled by political muscle rather than the Constitution, which is murky on the matter and provides support for those on both sides of the issue, experts said Wednesday.

Although many legal scholars take the view that a president can be tried by the Senate even when he is no longer president, they acknowledge that there is enough ambiguity in the Constitution for Republicans to embrace as reason not to convict Trump at his trial set to begin Feb. 9.

Most who have studied the question say post-presidential impeachment, conviction and disqualification from holding future office is permitted, said Brian Kalt, a leading scholar on the subject. But it is far from unanimous because of ambiguous language in the Constitution.

“It’s a tough call because there is so much uncertainty,” said Kalt, a Michigan State University law professor.

In a 2001 law review article, Kalt concluded that there is a “solid basis” because of the history, text and past practice in Congress.

“The removal requirement was a way of protecting the office from bad presidents, not a way of protecting bad presidents from impeachment for things they do right at the end of their term,” said Kalt, who helped craft a recent letter signed by 150 constitutional scholars, including a founder of the conservative Federalist Society.

Republicans overwhelmingly signaled their support this week for the opposite argument, advanced by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. – and backed by former federal judge Michael Luttig – that there is no constitutional basis for putting a former president on trial. All but five Republican senators backed Paul’s objections.

They also point to Chief Justice John Roberts’s absence as the presiding officer at the trial as supporting evidence that the impeachment is inappropriate. Roberts oversaw Trump’s first impeachment, but he has declined to comment on why he is not presiding over the coming trial.

Democrats and others say that has nothing to do with the bigger question of whether Trump must be held accountable for fomenting the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that resulted in the deaths of one police officer and four rioters.

The relevant section of the Constitution states that the “President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Separately, it says, “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

Although it makes clear that the Senate’s punishment cannot go beyond removal or disqualification, the Constitution does not say anything about the timing of a trial.

Among those leading the arguments on both sides are legal heavyweights Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University law scholar, and Luttig, the former judge. The two frequently exchange emails on constitutional issues, most recently about this subject, and express great admiration for each other even when they disagree.

The Senate does not lose its power to hold an impeachment trial just because the official is no longer in office, Tribe said, in part because it has the authority to disqualify the person from holding future office. Although a powerful argument could be made that Congress cannot impeach a private citizen, he said, Trump was impeached by the House while still in office.

If an official could only be disqualified while still an office, that person could avoid accountability by resigning just before a final conviction vote in the Senate, he said.

Democrats have pointed to examples of the Senate holding impeachment trials for former officials, but those did not result in convictions. In 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap resigned shortly before the House voted to impeach him. The Senate affirmed its authority to hold a trial for the former executive branch official, but it did not get the two-thirds vote needed to convict him.

In response, Republicans have largely espoused Luttig’s view, first outlined in an opinion piece in The Washington Post before the House impeachment vote. Luttig says the Senate’s power to convict extends only to a sitting president. The purpose of the power, he wrote, is to remove a president before “he could further harm the nation from the office he then occupies.”

“The historical fact that the Congress has impeached former officers after they were no longer incumbent in their offices is evidence only that at times the Congress has assumed that it had the constitutional power to impeach former officers,” Luttig added in an interview Wednesday.

Only the Supreme Court, he said, can decide the legal question of whether Congress does in fact have that authority.

Two former solicitors general from Democratic and Republican administrations said courts probably would not settle the question of whether the impeachment trial is permissible.

The Supreme Court in a 1993 case involving the impeachment of a federal judge named Walter Nixon said the question of whether the Senate proceedings against Nixon were proper was a “political question,” meaning it was to be resolved by the Senate, not the judiciary.

Because of that precedent, “it’s pretty clear that the Supreme Court will not get involved in these issues,” said Paul Clement, solicitor general under President George W. Bush. “My strong sense is that the courts – starting with the first district court that addresses it up to the Supreme Court – will say, ‘No thank you – political question.’ “

The two also agreed that Roberts’s absence from the second trial does not signal the chief justice’s opinion about the legality of the proceedings. Under the Constitution, the chief justice presides over a trial of “the president,” not necessarily a former president.

“I don’t think the chief is foreshadowing a view of that separate question” of the legitimacy of a post-presidency trial, Clement said. “And if he thought he were, he’d have done something different, maybe explain it in writing.”

He added: “I think the chief has just made it clear he reads that clause to mean the current president of the United States.”

At a seminar at Georgetown University’s law center, Clement and Neal Katyal, solicitor general in the Obama administration, agreed. Katyal said that Roberts would have presided if the trial began before Jan. 20, and that the question then would have been whether to continue.

“I 100% think the chief is right in not presiding over this impeachment the way it was structured,” Katyal said.