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Boris Johnson dials up warnings of a no-deal Brexit as Britain and E.U. agree to continue talks (nationthailand.com)

Boris Johnson dials up warnings of a no-deal Brexit as Britain and E.U. agree to continue talks

InternationalDec 14. 2020Boris Johnson 

By The Washington Post · William Booth, Quentin Ariès

LONDON – At the 11th hour, Britain and the European Union said on Sunday afternoon they have made enough progress in their seemingly endless trade and security talks to continue negotiations into the coming days.

Many had feared Sunday was the final hour to reach a Brexit deal. But the talks will roll on. Businesses on both sides of the English Channel, fearing chaos at the ports and steep, immediate tariffs, sighed a collective, “whew, that was close!”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in a TV address, did not sound optimstic, however. “I’m afraid we’re still very far apart on some key things,” he said. “But where there is life there’s hope, we’re going to keep talking to see what we can do, the U.K. certainly won’t be walking away from the talks.”

Johnson warned “the most likely” outcome would see Britain leave the European Union with no deal, forcing it to trade on what the prime minister insists on calling “Australian terms,” which really means going forward with no free trade deal at all, but instead defaulting to do business by the rules set by the World Trade Organization.

Britain’s largest trading partner is Europe and so reverting to WTO rules means taxes, or tariffs, on exports sold to the continent. While overall, the average WTO tariff is less than 3 percent, for automobiles it is 10 percent and for fresh meat – such as Welsh lamb – it is 38 percent or higher.

In his remarks, the British prime minister might have been jostling for position. Or he might have been warning the nation.

“The best thing to do now, for everybody, is to follow up all the work that has been done over the last four and half years, colossal amount of preparation at our ports, everywhere across the U.K., get ready to trade on WTO terms,” said Johnson. “There is a clarity and a simplicity in that approach that has it’s own advantages. It is not where we wanted to get to but if we have to end up with that solution, the U.K. is more than prepared.”

Whether Britain is truly prepared to have its import and exports subjected to border controls, inspections and tarrifs is unknown. Many predict chaos at the ports.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was slightly less gloomy. She said it is worth trying to struggle on to a finish line.”We had a useful phone call this morning. We discussed the major unresolved topics,” the commisson president said.

Then she patted both sides on the back, noting, “our negotiating teams have been working day and night over recent days. And despite the exhaustion after almost a year of negotiations, despite the fact that deadlines have been missed over and over, we think it is responsible at this point to go the extra mile.”

And so, “we have accordingly mandated our negotiators to continue the talks and to see whether an agreement can even at this late stage be reached.”

The negotiations will continue, at least for now, in Brussels. Britain exits the European Union at midnight on Dec. 31.

The Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney, who has been a close observer of the talks, told the national broadcaster RTE on Sunday that “a deal can be done, but it really needs to be done within the next few days.”

Jitters of a no-deal “hard Brexit” have been dialed up, regardless.

The Guardian newspaper reported the British government “warned supermarkets to stockpile food and other essential supplies amid increasing fears of a no-deal Brexit in less than three weeks’ time.”

On the Sunday morning TV talk shows, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab sought to assure Britons that there would be enough medicines and vaccines in the country no matter what, because the government has already begun to stockpile supplies.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s government announced that four Royal Navy patrol ships would be ready to take to British waters to protect the country’s fishing grounds in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The vessels would be given the power to board and impound European fishing boats inside Britain’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone.

European Council President Charles Michel, on the French radio on Sunday, said the sides should keep calm and carry on. “The U.K. and Europe are friends, partners, allies and it will be the case after Brexit. I encourage everyone to remain calm. I would not say, like Donald Trump, that our boats are bigger than theirs, because I’m trying to be serious, but, on the European side at least we remain calm …We are reasonable. We want to have close links with the U.K.”

The impasse and issues have not changed over these many months. Britain wants to be able to “take back control” of its sovereignty – for many Brexiteers, that was the whole point of leaving the bloc. Johnson and his allies say it makes no sense to leave the customs union and single market, only to have to continue to align in lock-step with E.U. regulations over state subsidies, labor laws and enviromental regulations.

But Europe has appeared in little mood for compromise – especially over these “level playing field” challenges.

The disagreements have touched on areas that have been sore points for years – in some cases, centuries, like fisheries, specifically European access to British waters.

In addition to wrangling over cod and scallops, which represents far less than 1 percent of GDP to either Britain or Europe, the E.U. also doesn’t want Britain undercutting it on issues such as state aid or environmental regulations to gain a competitive advantage. It wants to make sure British rules stay closely aligned with E.U. ones as a prerequisite for Britain to get relatively unfettered access to the European market.

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Members of White House staff to get early access to coronavirus vaccine (nationthailand.com)

Members of White House staff to get early access to coronavirus vaccine

InternationalDec 14. 2020

By The Washington Post · Felicia Sonmez, Josh Dawsey

WASHINGTON – Some White House staff members will be among the first wave of people in the United States to receive coronavirus vaccinations, a Trump administration official said Sunday night.

The news comes as boxes of the first shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine departed a facility in Michigan, with front-line health-care workers, the elderly and other vulnerable people expected to receive top priority.

“Senior officials across all three branches of government will receive vaccinations pursuant to continuity of government protocols established in executive policy,” National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot said in a statement.

President Donald Trump and several of his top aides have played down the severity of the virus that has killed nearly 300,000 Americans, with at least 16 million cases reported since late February. The virus has been surging throughout the United States.

The Trump administration plans come as the White House has forged ahead with a packed season of at least 25 indoor holiday parties, ignoring warnings from the its own public health professionals to limit travel and avoid congregating in large group settings. At a number of the parties, some guests were maskless.

News of the White House vaccinations was first reported by The New York Times.

According to an administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the move, the White House considers a coronavirus vaccine “a necessary resource for those continuity personnel across the executive branch to meet their continuity-focused roles and responsibilities.”

Citing a 2016 policy directive called the National Continuity Policy, the official said vaccinations are warranted for “the appropriate leadership and staff across all branches,” without providing further specifics.

The White House declined to say whether Trump, who contracted covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, earlier this year, would receive the vaccine. Vice President Mike Pence is expected to receive it soon.

If Trump and others take the vaccine publicly, that could encourage many of his supporters to take it. Former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have volunteered to receive it in public. The White House has a steep uphill campaign to build trust in it after repeatedly politicizing the virus, as recently as Friday. The Office of Management and Budget has asked officials in at least four agencies to determine who needs the vaccine.

Moncef Slaoui, chief science adviser to the White House’s effort to develop a vaccine, said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” that officials hope to get about 70% to 80% of the U.S. population vaccinated between May and June.

In the meantime, he said, those receiving priority will be “the long-term-care-facility people, the elderly people with comorbidities, the first-line workers, the health-care workers.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, indoor gatherings pose more risks than those outdoors, and “gatherings with more people pose more risk than gatherings with fewer people.”

Even so, members of the president’s inner circle – including Trump himself – have at times declined to wear masks, and the White House has held parties this month that include more than 50 guests. Those events could risk the health of White House staff members and others who work at the parties.

News of the vaccinations probably will further the perception that those in proximity to Trump have received access to treatment that is unavailable to ordinary Americans amid the pandemic.

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, was recently released from the hospital after being treated for covid-19. In a radio interview after his discharge, Giuliani said he received remdesivir, dexamethasone and “exactly the same” treatment that Trump received when he was hospitalized in October.

He also said he was unaware that most Americans are not able to receive those medications because of scarcity issues.

“I didn’t know that. . . . I’m not sure about that,” Giuliani said.

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Historic Black churches in D.C. targeted during pro-Trump rallies (nationthailand.com)

Historic Black churches in D.C. targeted during pro-Trump rallies

InternationalDec 14. 2020Proud Boys march in Washington, D.C., Saturday night. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post) 

By The Washington Post · Allison Klein

WASHINGTON – A Black Lives Matter banner and sign were torn from historic Black churches downtown and destroyed during pro-Trump protests Saturday night.

In one of the incidents, a series of videos posted on Twitter shows a group of people identified as Proud Boys marching with a Black Lives Matter banner held above their heads, then cheering as it is set on fire while chanting “f— antifa.”

The banner was taken from Asbury United Methodist Church, one of the oldest Black churches in the city. Ashbury United has stood at the corner of 11th and K streets NW since 1863.

“Last night demonstrators who were part of the MAGA gatherings tore down our Black Lives Matter sign and literally burned it in the street,” senior pastor Rev. Ianther Mills said in a statement. “It pained me especially to see our name, Asbury, in flames. For me it was reminiscent of cross burnings.”

Another video, posted by @BGOnTheScene, shows a Black Lives Matter sign being torn down from in front of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The demonstrators are heard chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” as they destroy the sign in front of the church where worshipers have included historic leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, and presidents, including Obama, Clinton and Taft.

District of Columbia police on Sunday declined to say whether any arrests were made in the cases, but said they were investigating the incidents as possible hate crimes.

“We take these offenses seriously and we are currently investigating them as a possible hate crimes,” police spokeswoman Alaina Gertz said.

Nearly three dozen people were arrested during the protests and overnight, including 10 who police said were charged with misdemeanor assault, six with assaulting police officers and four with rioting.

The protesters were in the District of Columbia on Saturday to demonstrate their refusal to accept the results of the presidential election, before the electoral college meets Monday to make President Donald Trump’s loss official.

Mills’s statement, which was sent Sunday morning, emphasized the history of her church.

“We are a resilient people who have trusted in God through slavery and the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and now as we face an apparent rise in white supremacy,” it said.

The videos of the banner burning shows someone squirting what appears to be an accelerant on the sign as flames consume it. One video was tweeted by a Daily Caller reporter, and it is stamped with the logo of the right-wing media website.

The tweet says the people burning the banner are Proud Boys. “The Proud Boys and Trump supporters burn the BLM banner while chanting and cheering in downtown DC.”

D.C. Council member-elect Janeese Lewis George, D-Ward 4, tweeted the video, saying it showed “there are two justice systems in this country.”

“Tonight, violent white supremacists stole and burned a Black Lives Matter banner from Asbury United Methodist, the oldest Black Methodist church in DC,” she tweeted. “But yet no militarized police force used against them. There are two justice systems in this country, separate and unequal.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, responded to the incidents by saying the Mayor’s Office of Religious Affairs and D.C. police had been in contact with the churches Sunday.

“D.C.’s faith-based organizations are at the very heart of our community, giving us hope in the face of darkness,” Bowser tweeted. “They embody our DC values of love and inclusivity. An attack on them is an attack on all of us.”

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, said the church incidents warrant a federal probe.

“We call on the U.S. Department of Justice to immediately open a federal civil rights investigation under the Church Arson Prevention Act to hold accountable those responsible for these racist and violent acts,” Kristen Clarke, the group’s president and executive director, said in a statement.

Mills’s statement pointed out that the Proud Boys, a male-chauvinist organization with ties to white nationalism, have not been denounced by the White House. The group received recognition from Trump at the first presidential debate this September, when he refused to specifically condemn white supremacists and told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

“Sadly, we must point out that if this was a marauding group of men of color going through the city, and destroying property, they would have been followed and arrested,” Mills said in her statement. “We are especially alarmed that this violence is not being denounced at the highest levels of our nation.”

But Mills also struck an optimistic tone to fight hate.

“We are a people of faith. As horrible and disturbing as this is for us now – it doesn’t compare with the challenges and fears the men and women who started Asbury, 184 years ago, faced. So, we will move forward, undaunted in our assurance that Black Lives Matter and we are obligated to continue to shout that truth without ceasing. We are assured that our church is surrounded by God’s grace and mercy.”

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Trump’s election goal posts keep shifting (nationthailand.com)

Trump’s election goal posts keep shifting

InternationalDec 14. 2020File Photo: President Trump 

By The Washington Post · David Weigel

Until early Friday evening, a lawsuit brought by Texas against four swing states was the last, best hope of President Donald Trump and his supporters. “This is the big one,” the president tweeted Wednesday. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who had previously promised to argue another suit if it got to the Supreme Court, promised to argue his home state’s. One hundred and twenty-six House Republicans, few of whom had backed other lawsuits, signed an amicus brief asking the court to “restore the confidence of all Americans” and toss out enough state election results to defeat President-elect Joe Biden.

The Supreme Court dismissed that case, and Trump barely changed his tune. The president flew Marine One over Saturday’s “MAGA March,” hours before some demonstrations turned violent. He told Fox News that there were “numerous local cases” that could still overturn the election, arguing that he “won big” in states that he actually lost. And he suggested that his defeats were not about merit, but about legal standing, a talking point adopted by House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., in a separate Fox News interview Sunday.

“The Supreme Court said they weren’t going to take the case,” Scalise told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. “They said Texas didn’t have standing. They didn’t say they were going to address the merits. Look, the Supreme Court, I think a lot of people know, didn’t want to be anywhere near this.”

With the president’s permission, the goal posts had shifted again. As Biden prepares to take office, he has already rejected some demands from the left, approaching the presidency as a consensus-building job rather than a windfall for his base. The outgoing president has raced in the other direction, continuing to indulge his most devoted supporters, even though he cannot deliver what they are demanding – four more years in power.

Politically, there’s not much evidence that this approach is hurting Trump. Polling has found that about 80% of the president’s voters are willing to believe that the election was rigged against him. Donations to the president’s campaign and political action committee, as well as the GOP’s recount efforts and the Senate runoffs in Georgia, have been pouring in amid the effort to overturn the election, even though the race is functionally over. (The Trump campaign is waiting for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court to rule on an appeal that would retroactively disqualify most absentee ballots cast in the state’s two biggest Democratic counties.)

Twin defeats at the Supreme Court – the Texas case and a case brought by a Pennsylvania congressman who argued that the GOP legislature violated the state’s constitution by allowing more absentee voting – have moved a few Republican officials off the bench. Of the 18 Republican state attorneys general who supported the Texas case, three had said by Sunday afternoon that Biden won the election. Republicans still facing voters have not dared.

“The Supreme Court won’t hear it, so that’s terrible,” said Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., at a rally after the court’s decision. “All I know is, the evidence they demonstrated in that case was that in Fulton County, not one absentee ballot was turned down because of an invalid signature. Not one. Now, y’all, that’s physically impossible.”

That was not true, either, but there has been no penalty for denying the election results, apart from condemnation by news outlets that Republicans do not take seriously anymore. At a Saturday hearing in the outstanding Wisconsin case, Trump campaign attorney Jim Troupis argued that even his ballot, cast using the looser pandemic rules approved by election officials, should be tossed as part of a mass disqualification of votes. At the same time, at Saturday’s overlapping marches in downtown Washington, Trump supporters repeatedly said a second term had been ordained by God. MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who is expected to run for Minnesota governor in 2022, told his audience that they were living in the biblical “end times.”

The response of Biden and most Democrats has been to shrug and wait, in Barack Obama’s old phrase, for “the fever to break.” On CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” incoming Biden adviser Cedric Richmond handled a question about a majority of House Republicans rejecting Biden’s win by suggesting that they did not believe it.

“They recognize Joe Biden’s victory. All of America recognizes Joe Biden’s victory,” said Richmond, who is leaving a House seat in Louisiana to join the administration. “This is just a small portion of the Republican conference that are appeasing and patronizing the president on his way out because they are scared of his Twitter power and other things.”

Richmond’s dismissal underscored how little Biden and Democrats are doing to goad or punish Republicans who will not go along with the results. The biggest threat levied against the GOP came this week from Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., a 12-year incumbent with some gadfly tendencies, who urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., not to seat any Republican who signed the amicus brief. Pelosi ignored him, as did the Biden campaign.

The rest of the party has generally adopted Biden’s tone, which has not changed since his campaign began, and presumes that fighting for everything his base demands is a rotten way to run the country. That came into sharper view this week when The Intercept obtained a recording of Biden talking to Black civil rights leaders, defending his decision to return Tom Vilsack to the Agriculture Department and laying out why he would not jump when his party’s left demanded him to use executive power.

“Where I have executive authority, I will use it to undo every single damn thing this guy has done by executive authority, but I’m not going to exercise executive authority where it’s a question,” Biden said. As an example, he floated the idea of an executive order to ban assault weapons. “There’s no executive authority to do away with that. And no one has fought harder to get rid of assault weapons than me, but you can’t do it by executive order. We do that, next guy comes along and says, ‘Well, guess what? By executive order, I guess everybody can have machine guns again.’ “

Throughout his career, Biden has bristled at his party’s left-wing activists, bucking them in ways that he would sometimes come to regret. On the Intercept tape, Biden emphasized a trait that flashed frequently in the election: When challenged on his fealty to civil rights, or his political instincts, he pushes back hard, sometimes leaving bruised egos on the other side of the table.

That’s not how Trump has operated, and the results have been both disastrous – he is the first incumbent president to lose reelection this century – and effective at enforcing party loyalty. In an open letter this week, conservative Trump allies ranging from the former president of the Heritage Foundation to the president of the Council for National Policy signed a letter declaring Trump the “lawful winner of the presidential election” and urging six state legislatures to void Biden’s wins. The idea that the election was so fatally flawed that rules in each state must be rewritten, with new restrictions, is already catching on in those states. The Democrats’ hope is that this becomes either too embarrassing to continue or that it fades – just as soon as the goal posts stop moving.

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Biden’s Obama-era Cabinet picks frustrate liberals, civil rights leaders (nationthailand.com)

Biden’s Obama-era Cabinet picks frustrate liberals, civil rights leaders

InternationalDec 14. 2020President-elect Joe Biden introduces Cabinet nominees at the Queen in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 

By The Washington Post · Seung Min Kim, Annie Linskey

WILMINGTON, Del. – President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to fill his White House and Cabinet with longtime colleagues has led to frustration from liberals, civil rights leaders and younger activists, who worry he’s relegating racial minorities to lower-status jobs while leaning on Obama-era appointees for key positions.

Biden’s Cabinet process has also discomforted some allies on the Hill, who say senators from his own party have not been sufficiently consulted about picks, even though Biden will need influential Senate Democrats to help steer nominees through the confirmation gauntlet. Senior Democratic senators have gotten little or no advance warning about the president-elect’s selections, according to a half-dozen senior congressional officials and others familiar with the process.

Taken together, these concerns bring into focus the challenges Biden confronts as he tries to unite the party around his ambitious agenda and immediately staff his administration. Dissatisfaction from the party’s grass roots, and lawmakers not read into the president-elect’s decisions, could hobble Biden’s ability to quickly move his nominees into position so he can execute on pressing priorities like the coronavirus pandemic response.

On the campaign trail, Biden promised to appoint a Cabinet that elevated up-and-coming leaders in the party and reflected the diversity of America.

Of the 14 Cabinet-level picks announced so far, seven are women and nine are people of color. But Biden has also mostly selected people he’s known for years, or even decades. The average age of Biden’s department heads so far is 63 years old, according to a Washington Post analysis. About 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word “Obama” on their resume from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs, the analysis found.

Some of them will be in similar roles as they held in the last administration.

Tom Vilsack – secretary of Agriculture for all eight years of President Barack Obama’s term – will take up that role again under Biden, if confirmed. Vivek Murthy, who was Obama’s surgeon general, will have the same job for Biden. The incoming White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, worked for Biden in the same capacity when he was vice president.

“We cannot move forward in a new direction with just the same people, including some of the people who are responsible for the mess we are in,” said Evan Weber, the political director of the Sunrise Movement, a liberal group focused on climate issues. “We would like to see more young progressives in roles in the Biden administration.”

Weber and other liberals say they do not believe that Obama, who came into office with his party in control of both chambers of Congress, took bold enough steps on issues from climate to banking rules.

And while Biden’s team is racially diverse, some observers note that Biden is leaning on older Black and Hispanic leaders, who may not understand the needs and priorities of a younger generation.

“There’s more appointments of color, but there is a lot of same old, same old,” said Sayu Bhojwani, a pro-immigration activist and president of New American Leaders, a group that pushes for more diversity among elected leaders. “Having voices of color who have kind of grown up in a system that wasn’t built for people of color means that we’re not going to get innovation and we’re going to get people who are risk averse because they know the system.”

Biden’s bias toward government veterans stems from his view that the Trump administration steered the country significantly off track, that deep expertise will be necessary to restore it and a sense that there’s not time for a learning curve, according to transition aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberation.

And the focus on Obama-era appointees could have advantages some argue, creating in Biden’s team an automatic cohesiveness. “This is the mother-of-all-alumni group,” said Reed Hundt, who worked on the Obama transition and is author of the book “A Crisis Wasted” about decisions made during that time to respond to the Great Recession.

In contrast, he noted, many members of Obama’s economic team didn’t know each other or the then-president particularly well when they started. That left key players learning to work with each other and determining how to best work with the president as they were also trying to solve a huge economic crisis.

Biden’s engagement with the Hill has also worried some allies, who say the lack of consultation has often caught top senators off guard and, with one prominent pick, left them scrambling to get on the same page with an administration nominee. The lack of notice, in particular, to the ranking Democrats on committees was notable because that senator is poised to be the nominee’s chief defender during the confirmation fight against attacks from Republicans.

For instance, the transition never reached out to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., about Biden’s decision to tap Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to a person familiar with the lack of communication, despite Sanders’s role as the top Democrat on one of the committees that will hold Tanden’s confirmation hearings. Sanders’s office declined to comment.

And while Sen. Jack Reed. D-R.I., who in 2017 was adamant that he would never again support waiving a law meant to uphold civilian leadership at the Pentagon, was told about Biden’s decision to tap recently retired Gen. Lloyd Austin as defense secretary, one person said the discussion was rather perfunctory – a surprise, considering Reed’s definitive remarks nearly four years ago.

Biden’s decision left Reed, the Democrats’ point person on defense issues, in an uncomfortable position as he tried to reconcile his past statements on the waiver and the fact that the president-elect’s pick as defense secretary would need one, turning a policy meant to be a once-in-a-generation exception into a pattern of installing recently retired military leaders at the Pentagon.

A transition official said Biden’s team, on top of consultation with lawmakers, tries to notify Congress ahead of Cabinet announcements and brief their offices within a few hours of the news being public.

Senior congressional aides also said while they believed Biden could do a better job of reaching out to Democratic senators, they recognized transition officials were in somewhat of a bind because the Senate majority remains up in the air.

Many GOP senators won’t even acknowledge Biden is the president-elect.

Aides also said the transition’s consultations and notifications were limited because Biden’s team appeared concerned about leaks, with one congressional official saying that, “certainly, they keep things appropriately close to the vest” when it came to Biden’s decisions on nominations.

Incoming White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the process on Friday, saying that there have been “hundreds of engagements” between transition officials and congressional staff as part of the confirmation process.

Before he chose Janet Yellen to be his treasury secretary, for example, Biden’s team sought input from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s top allies, a delicate process given that the Massachusetts Democrat and one of Biden’s opponents in the presidential primaries was hoping that she’d be the one selected for the role.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, weighed in with transition officials on his views about who should be tapped as director of national intelligence, according to a spokeswoman – a slot that ultimately went to Avril Haines.

A spokesman for Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, said she was notified in advance of the announcement that Biden planned to ask Vilsack to reprise his role.

“President-elect Biden’s team has been incredibly responsive and stayed in close contact about the process and my priorities,” said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the influential Finance Committee that manages confirmations for top Cabinet positions overseeing health care, fiscal policy and trade. “Biden is picking his team. I didn’t expect to be asked for explicit sign off.”