The U.S. strongly condemns the use of harsh tactics against peaceful protesters and journalists in Russia today. We call on Russia to release those detained for exercising their rights, including Aleksey Navalny, and to credibly investigate his poisoning. https://t.co/FnYRt3RAkQ
We’re watching reports of protests in 38 Russian cities, arrests of 350+ peaceful protesters and journalists. The U.S. supports the right of all people to peaceful protest, freedom of expression. Steps being taken by Russian authorities are suppressing those rights.— Rebecca Ross (@USEmbRuPress) January 23, 2021
InternationalJan 25. 2021Vice President Kamala Harris being sworn in last Wednesday by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton
By The Washington Post · Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
For a moment, everyone on the Zoom call was crying.
The women of color had gathered Thursday to strategize for the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency. But Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, which helped organize the conference, “started my ugly cry” as she spoke of the first female vice president taking the oath of office, and the tears spread from there. Panelists muted microphones, looked away, dabbed their eyes.
But they quickly admonished each other to quell their emotions: Too much focus on the moment might distract from the pressure they needed to exert on President Joe Biden and his administration – including Vice President Kamala Harris.
The important thing, stressed Clayola Brown, president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, was “not to do what we did with Barack Obama, which is sit back and think now we have it fixed. It’s not fixed. Or to sit back and think that the work has been done. It’s only started.”
Others agreed. “I want us to make sure that (Biden) delivers,” said another attendee, Cora Masters Barry, chief executive of the Recreation Wish List Committee, which pushes to create places for youth to play. If the president does not deliver, she warned, “he’s going to have hell on his hands.”
Days after Harris became the first Black and south Asian woman to win a national election, racial justice activists are trying to balance their elation over having representation at the highest levels of government with a determination to press the administration on racial issues that have festered for decades and spilled protesters into American streets last year.
They say Biden’s emphasis on having a diverse administration will not deflect their demand for action on everything from fair policing to economic inequity to environmental justice. Some worry the White House will seek to use Harris’s seat at the table to justify delay as it grapples with competing crises – chief among them the pandemic, whose U.S. death toll could reach 500,000 next month.
Symone Sanders, a spokeswoman for the vice president, said Harris’s job will not be solely to address issues of racial inequity or listen to the concerns of civil rights groups. Rather, she said, Harris will help Biden tackle the range of crises facing the country, from the pandemic to the economic collapse to climate change.
“The approach the administration is taking to address each of these crises is a whole-of-government approach,” Sanders said in an emailed statement. “Racial equity work is a part of every single thing the Biden-Harris administration does. … The president and vice president have been very intentional when it comes to the racial equity piece, being clear that this is a priority for them.”
Campbell said she understands the importance of addressing covid-19 as well as anyone. Several people in her family contracted the disease, including her; at one point her doctors were close to putting her on a ventilator. But she said the pandemic is tied to racial justice, with its outsize effect on people of color, and in any case systemic racism continues to fester elsewhere in society.
“I understand there’s covid,” Campbell said. “But we’ve still been fighting because George Floyd was killed, Ahmaud Arbery was killed – and all these things that happened, they are still happening every day. Our justice issues weren’t going to go away because of covid.”
Campbell and her group have joined others in personally urging Biden to deliver on the racial justice agenda he campaigned on. She was among those advocating for Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, to receive a cabinet appointment; Biden nominated Fudge to be secretary of housing and urban development.
Still, many considered that a partial victory. Fudge would be the second Black woman to lead HUD in its 40-year history, but some Black leaders wanted Biden instead to put her at the helm of the Agriculture Department, where they say change is more urgently needed.
Campbell was also in a briefing where Biden and Harris discussed their legislative priorities with civil rights activists. Those include the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore voter protections weakened by the courts, and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which among other things would make it easier to prosecute police for misconduct.
Civil rights groups are pressing Biden to take action on a range of issues. Criminal justice and policing reform is at the top of many lists, as well as fighting voter suppression. Beyond that, many activists say they want Biden to put resources toward reducing disparities in educational and economic opportunities.
Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police sparked protests across the country and prompted a national reckoning on racism. Floyd family members spoke at the Democratic National Convention, and Black voters favored Biden over Trump by large margins, after resuscitating his primary campaign in South Carolina and propelling him to victories in Super Tuesday states.
That, some civil rights leaders suggested, created an informal pact: Black voters would get Biden to the White House, and in return he would break the frequent pattern in which politicians court African Americans during the campaign but forget them once they’ve won.
Biden’s selection of Harris as a running mate, and his naming of several African Americans to his cabinet, has signaled that minority voices will be elevated in a Biden administration. But it remains to be seen what Harris’s role will look like and whether it will be enough for activists focused on racial justice, especially given that it is the president who determines role of his second-in-command.
Harris’s ascent, these activists say, is the beginning of real change, not the end. “As much as I participated in the pomp and circumstance (of Inauguration Day), today I am still thinking about what we need to do to keep the pressure on,” said Alicia Garza, an activist and organizer who co-founded Black Lives Matter.
“I don’t expect that Kamala does, or really should, feel a mandate from Black people to do right by Black people,” Garza said. “Black people have to keep that mandate strong and have to apply it across the board.”
People with knowledge of the Biden administration, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics, said it’s too early to know exactly what Harris’s role will be, but that advancing racial equity will not be the job of any one person within the administration.
In most of Harris’s events so far, she has flanked Biden, looking on as he signs executive orders and joining him for the President’s Daily Brief on national security matters. On Friday, Harris met with business leaders hurt by the coronavirus pandemic, stressing the need to pass Biden’s pandemic relief bill.
Harris could be deployed to lobby her former colleagues in the Senate, said a Biden aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Biden served in the Senate from 1973 to 2009 and has connections with longer-serving Senators, while Harris was elected in 2016 so she has fresher connections with younger members.
As the president of the Senate, Harris will break any tie votes in the chamber, and since it is split 50-50 between the parties, she is likely to exercise that role more than most of her predecessors.
Sanders said that during her first days on the job, Harris previewed Biden’s American Rescue Plan for mayors of both parties, spoke to labor leaders and addressed small business representatives.
As Harris emerged as a front-runner to be Biden’s running mate over the summer, she met with numerous activists, including some who were suspicious of her previous role as a prosecutor. Among other meetings, Harris spent more than an hour with Garza, who said she now has the vice president’s cellphone number.
Garza said supporting Harris does not have to be at odds with keeping her accountable. “On my mind is, how do we strengthen her to be the best advocate that she can possibly be,” Garza said. “And in the case where she fails to meet expectations, how does she come to realize, right, that that’s not acceptable?”
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy organization founded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, said he has been working with the Biden administration.
Along with other activists, he met with Biden’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen. Last summer Robinson spoke extensively with Harris, who has appeared on his podcast. Robinson said he’s waiting to see if those conversations yield significant action and if he will continue to be consulted, adding, “We’re not just looking to be brought in at the end of something, to cheer.”
“I think that there are going to be signs along the way that will tell us if racial justice is showing up in more places than just speeches,” Robinson added. A central question, he said, is whether the administration will allocate significant resources for racial justice initiatives.
“It’s one thing to say you’re for racial justice – and not showing up in terms of what budget you request from Congress,” Robinson said, citing the Departments of Justice, Agriculture, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, as critical agencies.
Robinson’s organization has urged the Biden administration to take steps on racial justice “in the early days of the administration,” including holding law enforcement agencies responsible for discriminatory practices, strengthening voting protections and creating civil rights regulations for big tech companies.
Robinson said he has already had more interaction with Biden than with his predecessor, which is a positive step. He was careful to note that the administration is moving in the right direction – for now.
“I want to acknowledge the weight of everything that’s been taken on,” Robinson said, “and be clear that when we do have something to say – when we are in a position where we are raising our voices, pushing back – (they) will know that I didn’t start off that way.”
Democratic, GOP lawmakers lobby White House for a more targeted relief bill
InternationalJan 25. 2021National Economic Council Director Brian Deese speaks during a briefing at the White House on Friday, Jan. 22, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
By The Washington Post · Erica Werner, Seung Min Kim
WASHINGTON – Lawmakers from both major political parties lobbied White House officials Sunday for a more targeted relief bill as they questioned the need for some of the items included in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus plan.
The discussion came on a private Zoom call involving some key centrist lawmakers in both parties and Biden administration officials led by National Economic Council Director Brian Deese. It was an early test for whether Biden’s relief plan has a chance of getting the kind of support it would need to pass Congress with bipartisan backing.
Lawmakers on the call raised questions including whether a new round of $1,400 checks included in the proposal could be more narrowly targeted to those who need them the most, according to several people familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was private.
Participants also asked administration officials to justify the need for hundreds of billions of dollars allocated toward other purposes, including for schools, given that Congress has already spent about $4 trillion on the coronavirus relief effort, including $900 billion approved in December.
There was more widespread support among the lawmakers on the call for spending on vaccine production and distribution, the people said.
They said the call, which lasted more than an hour, was cordial, and Deese and other officials promised to get back to them with answers.
A White House official declined to comment on specifics of the call.
The call came with the stimulus package facing criticism from Republicans who say it’s too costly, making prospects tough for the kind of bipartisan deal Biden promised to deliver as president. The lawmakers involved were part of the group that broke through a partisan logjam late last year and helped ensure passage of the $900 billion relief bill in December.
The group includes 16 senators, eight from each party, among them Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Mitt Romney, R-Utah. The leaders of the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House also joined Sunday’s call.
Before the call, Deese told reporters that he intended to impress upon lawmakers that “we’re at a precarious moment for the virus and the economy. Without decisive action, we risk falling into a very serious economic hole, even more serious than the crisis we find ourselves in.”
Republicans have been lukewarm to such arguments thus far.
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday” before the call with Deese, Romney called the nearly $2 trillion cost of Biden’s plan “pretty shocking,” while saying he could support individual elements of it.
In addition to a new round of $1,400 stimulus checks, the proposal includes an increase in and extension of emergency unemployment benefits set to expire in mid-March, and an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour – an item Republicans have pointed to as problematic and unrelated to the coronavirus. It also includes hundreds of billions of dollars to assist schools in reopening safely and to boost testing capacity and vaccine manufacturing and distribution.
Biden faces a difficult balancing act in pushing the proposal into law. The types of concessions that might be necessary to win support from Republicans such as Romney probably would make the proposal smaller and less palatable to liberal lawmakers. Liberals are pushing for Biden to use special Senate rules to force through the package with only Democratic votes, but doing that would undercut Biden’s pledges to seek unity and bipartisan outcomes.
The path ahead for the legislation is also complicated by unrelated disputes happening in the Senate, including the impending impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump. The Senate is split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, giving Democrats control because Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties – but giving Biden little room to maneuver.
InternationalJan 25. 2021President Joe Biden has asked for the resignation of Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who had been nominated by President Donald Trump in 2017 to a four-year term set to expire in September. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
By The Washington Post · Lisa Rein, Anne Gearan
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden is trying to shake a Trump hangover in the federal government by acting to remove some holdovers and install his own appointees, but a quiet push to salt federal agencies with Trump loyalists is complicating the new president’s effort to turn the page.
The Biden team, showing a willingness to cut tenures short, moved quickly last week to dump several high-profile, Senate-confirmed Trump appointees whose terms extended beyond Inauguration Day – in some cases by several years.
They include the surgeon general, the National Labor Relations Board’s powerful general counsel, and the heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
But other, lower-profile Trump loyalists, some of whom helped carry out his administration’s most controversial policies, are scattered throughout Biden’s government in permanent, senior positions. And identifying them, let alone dislodging them, could be difficult for the new leadership.
The Jan. 16 appointment of Michael Ellis, a former GOP operative who served in the Trump White House, as the National Security Agency’s top lawyer caused such a furor that he was placed on paid leave within hours of taking office.
And in the former president’s final months and weeks, dozens of other political appointees had their status similarly converted to permanent civil service roles that will allow them to stay in government for years to come. These new career officials are protected from partisan removal unless the new administration discovers that they got their jobs illegally – without competition and because of their political affiliation.
As Biden tries to reset the government to match his priorities, Democrats fear the Trump holdovers, who served in partisan roles, could undermine the new administration as they move into the civil service, which is supposed to operate free of partisanship.
The practice of shifting employees from appointee to career status, informally called burrowing, occurs at the end of every presidency – and it is controversial. Trump aides and their GOP allies in Congress, for example, threatened at the start of Trump’s term to remove any Obama-era political appointees who had been replanted in the civil service, and dozens were, records show.
But the just-departed president is on track to exceed the number of Democrats the Obama administration rewarded with permanent roles. In his final year, President Barack Obama moved 29 political appointees into career jobs. As of November, Trump had installed almost that many, 26, in the first 10 months of 2020, according to data provided to Congress by the Office of Personnel Management.
Nine more requests await review by personnel officials. More are expected. Congress has not received data covering December and the first 20 days of January, when outgoing administrations tend to move quickly to reward appointees who want to stay in government.
Burrowing is frowned upon by good-government groups – and by members of the party that is out of power – even when it is carried out legally, which means the appointee competed for the position and was the top candidate on the basis of merit and work experience, with no nod to political affiliation or loyalty.
The hiring of a political appointee for a career job must be scrutinized by the federal personnel office for five years after the person left the partisan job.
Such conversions also can violate civil service laws, as occurred during the George W. Bush administration, when a young Justice Department lawyer from the Republican National Committee, Monica Goodling, was found to have broken the law by using politics to guide hiring decisions for a range of critical jobs.
Goodling was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony, and was reprimanded by the Virginia Bar. She acknowledged during a House hearing that she “crossed the line” and broke civil service hiring rules.
“There’s a great irony here,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., who leads a House oversight panel on federal government operations, referring to Trump’s efforts to place his appointees in government. “The crowd that didn’t believe in government and called its agencies the deep state now wants to work for them.”
Connolly has asked the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s research arm, to tally all of Trump’s conversions over four years.
Many of the new hires were not announced by their agencies, which may have presented a challenge for Biden’s transition teams to discover them.
“The incoming Biden-Harris administration is keenly aware of last minute efforts by the outgoing administration to convert political appointees into civil service positions,” a transition official said in a statement.
“We anticipate learning more in the weeks ahead as our work to restore trust and accountability across the federal government begins, including reviewing personnel actions during the Trump administration,” the official said.
Trump partisans work in Biden’s government at a range of agencies, including the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Many are serving in senior executive roles, the highest echelon of career leaders. They work as assistant U.S. attorneys, general counsel, intelligence leaders, immigration judges.
Some got significant raises when they joined the permanent bureaucracy. Jordan Von Bokern, who clerked for Amy Coney Barrett when she was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, went in April from counsel in Justice’s Office of Legal Policy, making $93,642, to a career trial attorney in the agency’s civil division making $109,366, records show. Von Bokern did not return a call seeking comment.
At the Energy Department, there’s Brandon Middleton, a lawyer who fought the Endangered Species Act for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation before joining the staff of then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. When he was Trump’s first attorney general, Sessions hired Middleton to work in the Justice Department’s environmental division. Then Middleton held a deputy solicitor job at the Interior Department before his permanent appointment as Energy’s chief counsel in the office that manages contracts for cleaning up toxic waste. He got a $10,000 raise to $172,508, records show.
“If I was at Energy, I would be looking at Mr. Middleton very warily,” said Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.
Middleton declined to comment.
In June, then-Attorney General William Barr hired Tracy Short as the chief immigration judge at Justice, after he served three years in a political role as senior adviser and legal adviser to the leadership at Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Homeland Security. ICE was responsible for carrying out Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, which Biden is moving to reverse. Short also got a $10,000 raise, to $185,368.
Short did not return a call seeking comment.
About that time, Lawrence Connell, a senior executive who was chief of staff in the Veterans Health Administration, a political appointment with a $179,700 salary, was hired to a permanent job leading the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health-care system in Rhode Island, which provides care to more than 35,000 veterans. His new salary is $190,400. Connell did not respond to an email seeking comment.
These hires were approved by the Office of Personnel Management, which reviews requests from federal agencies. Some requests are rejected, when personnel experts conclude that political considerations played a role. The OPM declined 14 of the Trump administration’s requests during the first 11 months of 2020, compared with 10 during the final year of Obama’s second term, data shows.
Recently denied conversions include Charles Cowan, an appointee in the Office of Administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, hired in 2017 as a senior executive. Cowan applied to be senior adviser for public affairs.
“We could not conclude appointment was free of political influence and complied with merit system principles and applicable civil service laws and regulations,” the reviewing official wrote.
Ellis’s hiring at the NSA was not made available to the personnel agency, which recently told Democrats in Congress that it does not review requests from the intelligence community, sealing those decisions off from the public and Congress.
Ellis is on leave pending an inquiry by the Pentagon inspector general into the circumstances of his selection. NSA Director Paul Nakasone put Ellis on paid administrative leave four days after then-acting defense secretary Christopher Miller was ordered by the outgoing administration to install Ellis in the job.
But if Ellis and the others who burrowed were hired properly, firing them outright will be hard for Biden to accomplish. At most agencies, career officials serve a year on probation – that period is two years at the Defense Department – during which they can be fired without cause. If some of the Trump loyalists already have made it through probation, they can be reassigned to other roles or given little to do. Like all career employees, they have rights to due process, experts said.
Incoming officials at the Energy Department are weighing whether they can remove at least two Trump appointees who just landed postings as foreign attaches to support international energy cooperation, according to people familiar with the appointments who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Michael Brown, a former coal executive who was national political director for Republican Ben Carson’s campaign in 2016 for president, had been deputy general counsel at Energy. Brown was recently approved for a job representing the agency in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Kyle Nicholas, a political appointee with a health-care background who served as an adviser in Energy’s international affairs offices under Trump, was just posted to a similar job in Brussels. The appointments were first reported by E&E News.
The moves were made possible after the Trump administration stacked a little-known panel called the Overseas Presence Advisory Board with political officials, removing some career appointees. The board then facilitated the appointments, which last up to three years and do not have to be reported to the Office of Personnel Management.
Obama’s Energy Department prohibited political appointees from taking overseas posts. The Biden Energy Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Biden has more control over political appointees. He has asked for the resignation of Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who had been nominated by Trump in 2017 to a four-year term set to expire in September. The new president has moved to install new leadership at health agencies that will be crucial to fighting the coronavirus pandemic, after accusing the Trump team of muzzling federal scientists and pursuing a political agenda at the cost of public health and lives.
In other cases, Biden has sought to get rid of people installed by Trump in what the new president considers bad faith.
For example, Biden quickly forced out Michael Pack, the controversial head of the agency that oversees the Voice of America and four other networks that broadcast news to millions of people abroad, amid complaints of censorship and political interference by Pack. Biden also removed the VOA’s director and deputy director after they had been on the job only a few weeks, and the head of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting resigned.
Andrew Saul, a Trump appointee whose six-year term as Social Security commissioner officially ends in 2025, had a curious new “acting” title on a list of temporary government leaders distributed by the new White House last week. Saul announced Thursday that several high-ranking deputies on his team, who had pushed for stricter eligibility for benefits, had been replaced – with labor-friendly Democrats. The Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment about the acting title.
In firing the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, Peter Robb, Biden broke with precedent to end the tenure of a figure seen as a foe by worker advocates and labor unions.
Robb had refused to resign when asked to do so just hours into the new presidency. The request was a departure from the norm that presidents of both parties have followed to allow the general counsel to serve out their term. Robb’s term was scheduled to run another 10 months.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked last week whether Biden is pursuing a political purge.
“That’s an individual who was not carrying out … the objectives of the NLRB, and so they were, they are, no longer in their position,” she said. “We’ll make those decisions as needed.”
ประเทศจีนกลายเป็นจุดหมายของการลงทุนใหม่จากต่างชาติอันดับหนึ่งของโลกแซงหน้าสหรัฐเป็นที่เรียบร้อย
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สหรัฐแถลงประณามการใช้ความรุนแรงของเจ้าหน้าที่รัสเซียในการจับกุมกลุ่มผู้ชุมนุมพร้อมเรียกร้องปล่อยตัว ด้านรัสเซียโต้กลับอย่ายุ่งเรื่องภายใน
ทางการฮ่องกงประกาศยกเลิกคำสั่งล็อกดาวน์เขตเกาลูนแล้ว หลังรัฐบาลลุยตรวจประชาชนกลุ่มเสี่ยงในพื้นที่กว่า 7,000 ราย ซึ่งส่วนใหญ่อยู่ในย่านที่มีตลาดกลางคืน
สถานการณ์ในเอเชียตะวันออกตึงเครียดอย่างมากในช่วงสุดสัปดาห์นี้ หลังจากที่จีนส่งเครื่องบินล้ำไต้หวัน ส่วนสหรัฐประกาศประชับพันธมิตรกับญี่ปุ่นต้านจีน
ปฏิบัติการช่วยคนงานเหมืองสำเร็จ หลังติดอยู่ใต้ดิน2สัปดาห์
Vice President Kamala Harris being sworn in last Wednesday by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton
National Economic Council Director Brian Deese speaks during a briefing at the White House on Friday, Jan. 22, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
President Joe Biden has asked for the resignation of Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who had been nominated by President Donald Trump in 2017 to a four-year term set to expire in September. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
