By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jordan Fabian
The United States will ban entry to most non-U.S. citizens who have recently been in South Africa in response to the new coronavirus variant there, according to a White House official familiar with the plan.
It’s unclear how long the restrictions will continue.
The Biden administration will also continue restrictions on travel to the United States from Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland and other countries in Europe that the Trump administration planned to relax, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans have not been made public.
That’s consistent with comments from White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who tweeted on Monday that “this is not the time to be lifting restrictions on international travel.”
The U.S. is warily viewing new coronavirus variants that have originated in South Africa and Brazil, as well as one recently identified in the United Kingdom.
Reuters first reported the U.S. plan to ban travel from South Africa for most non-U.S. citizens, citing officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Why dealmakers expect tech M&A to keep up its red-hot run
InternationalJan 25. 2021Pedestrians wearing protective masks walk past Slack Technologies Inc. headquarters in San Francisco in December 2020. Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to buy Slack Technologies Inc. for $27.7 billion in cash and stock, giving the corporate software giant a popular workplace-communications platform in one of the biggest technology deals of the year. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Liana Baker, Katie Roof
Dealmakers say technology CEOs are pondering their dream deals after a record year for global tech M&A that saw mega-transactions in areas from chips to enterprise software.
Global volume for tech and internet mergers and acquisitions reached $470 billion in 2020, second only to the dot-com bubble of 2000, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Salesforce.com Inc.’s December announcement that it was buying Slack Technologies Inc. for $25 billion – the largest software deal of the year – could spur other companies to revisit their wish lists, advisers said.
“Just the visibility of that transaction, a large deal of people pursuing dream deals using their currency has resonated with others,” said Sam Britton, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s co-head of global technology, media and telecom. “I do think we’re going to see some similar things, maybe not of that size, but of people trying to capture their dream deals.”
Potential buyers will be watching whether the market supports the stock of the acquirers doing deals. Salesforce shares have fallen about 14% since the Slack deal, wiping $32 billion off its market cap in what could be a cautionary tale.
Other buyers fared better with less sizable transactions. Twilio Inc. saw its shares gain $4 billion in market value in October when it announced a $3.2 billion all-stock deal for customer data company Segment.
Advisers expect enterprise technology companies with market values in the range of $20 billion to $100 billion to pursue acquisitions as they angle to overtake companies such as Adobe Inc. and Salesforce, once upstart software companies that are now valued at more than $200 billion. This class of the next big acquirers could include Twilio, ServiceNow Inc., Snowflake Inc., Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Okta Inc., industry bankers said.
More mature technology companies such as SAP SE and Oracle Corp., meanwhile, may be looking for transformative deals similar to International Business Machines Corp.’s 2019 purchase of Red Hat Inc.
Big tech players must still persuade private companies to sell to them instead of going public in a strong IPO environment. The market welcomed stock debuts last year by Snowflake and Airbnb Inc. by doubling their share prices. DoorDash Inc. was rewarded with a first-day share pop of 86%.
The robust IPO market could add to M&A, especially with IPOs by blank-check companies still surging. Once public, special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, begin their hunt for merger targets.
“The strong IPO market doesn’t take away from M&A,” said Marco Caggiano, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s co-head of North America M&A. “It actually spawns more SPACs, which in turn drive M&A volume.”
While the coronavirus pandemic has hurt many industries, it has shone a light on the tech space as so much of life goes virtual. CEOs got a front-row look at their IT systems during the pandemic, which could fuel IT spending for decades as companies adapt to new ways of working, said Jason Auerbach, global co-head of TMT at UBS Group AG.
“Whenever there are these kinds of shifts in tech spend, that drives M&A,” Auerbach said. “For many large-cap tech companies, if you want to continue to evolve and grow, M&A is going to continue to be the most efficient way to do it most of the time.”
With President Joe Biden’s administration still taking shape, executives will be watching for signs of how it will treat “Big Tech.” Advisers say it’s too early to know what the administration’s regulatory posture on tech deals will be.
Most bankers say they’re continuing to operate under the assumption that outside of the big four – Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. – tech companies can proceed with large deals.
One factor that would likely affect dealmaking is any change to the tax code under Biden. Tina Longfield, managing director and co-head of software at Truist, said some executives could try to push through deals ahead of that.
“There are some CEOs and founders with whom we are engaging who are thinking about capital gains taxes, and as such, have expressed a desire to get liquidity this year with the expectation they will save on tax rate as compared to next year,” Longfield said.
Even if trade tensions with China ease under Biden, the increasingly active role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in its reviews of deals won’t change, according to M&A lawyer Kenton King, a Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP partner.
That means cross-border deals with China will still suffer.
“I don’t see the CFIUS regime in the Biden administration pulling the brakes back on what we saw from the Trump administration,” King said. “That is here to stay for the foreseeable future.”
Some of the biggest-ever semiconductor and hardware deals were struck last year. They include: Nvidia Corp.’s $40 billion purchase of Arm Ltd.; Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s $35 billion acquisition of Xilinx Inc.; and Analog Devices Inc.’s $21 billion deal for Maxim Integrated Products Inc.
All three are still under review. China’s antitrust regulator presents a real risk to getting further deals done, advisers to chip companies said.
Any M&A involving hardware companies in the supply chain usually means there is product and revenue in China. That triggers a regulatory review at China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR).
Companies could avoid deals even if the industrial logic makes sense to avoid two years of regulatory limbo, King said.
So far this year, one company has used the lengthy China review process to its advantage. With its sale to Cisco Systems Inc. mired in the SAMR review, Acacia Communications Inc. had grown weary of waiting and pulled out of the deal this month.
The result: Cisco added a 64% premium on top of its original July 2019 offer – and saved the deal.
WASHINGTON – One year after the coronavirus pandemic first disrupted global supply chains by closing Chinese factories, fresh shipping headaches are delaying U.S. farm exports, crimping domestic manufacturing and threatening higher prices for American consumers.
The cost of shipping a container of goods has risen by 80% since early November and has nearly tripled over the past year, according to the Freightos Baltic Index. The increase reflects shifts in consumption during the pandemic when consumers have redirected money they once spent at restaurants or movie theaters to the purchase of record amounts of imported clothing, computers, furniture and other goods.
That abrupt and unprecedented spending shift has upended long-standing trade patterns, causing bottlenecks from the gates of Chinese factories to the doorsteps of U.S. homes.
The commercial disorder is the latest blow to globalization’s finely tuned engine, capping more than a decade of financial crisis, trade wars, contagion and recession. Each shock has triggered swings in the flow of cash and goods through the $91 trillion global economy. But reverberations from the pandemic are exposing vulnerabilities in the physical plumbing of cross-border commerce that may linger, according to exporters, port officials and trade specialists.
“It’s crazy. Prices are at record highs. Multiple things are happening all at once,” said Phil Levy, an economist with Flexport, a San Francisco-based freight forwarder. “People work off of expectations. But now there’s just so much uncertainty.”
At the Port of Los Angeles one day last week, 42 ships were anchored offshore, waiting to unload their cargoes, even as every warehouse within 60 miles was already full. A shortage of dock workers amid California’s worsening coronavirus outbreak is complicating operations; inbound cargo volumes in December were more than 23% higher than one year earlier.
“Some areas of the supply chain need to be sharpened,” Gene Seroka, the port’s executive director, said. “People are a little bit on edge.”
It’s a global problem, and it may get worse before it gets better. More than one-third of the containers transiting the world’s 20 largest ports last month did not ship as scheduled, according to Ocean Insights, a data provider.
The cost of imported industrial supplies jumped 4.2% in December and is up 27% since April’s pandemic low, with manufacturers citing shortages of materials such as steel.
Shipping issues are affecting familiar brand names such as Gap, where an executive recently told investors that “port issues” were impeding operations. At WD-40, higher freight and warehousing costs lowered profit margins last quarter, Jay Rembolt, the company’s chief financial officer, told investors this month. Bang & Olufsen, a maker of music systems and televisions, said it had resorted to more expensive airfreight to compensate for a lack of seaborne options.
“These challenges have put inflationary cost pressures on our and many businesses and, as the market is anticipating, will put further inflationary pressure on transportation rates in 2021,” Shelley Simpson, chief commercial officer for J.B. Hunt Transport Services, said on a recent earnings call.
Household appliances and some clothing items have been in short supply in recent months. The price of goods arriving from China posted its largest one-month gain in more than three years last month, rising by 0.3%. Overall, prices of imported goods rose 0.9%, their largest rise since August.
By themselves, shipping cost spikes probably will have a modest effect on inflation, according to Neil Shearing, chief economist for Capital Economics in London. But they will reinforce the effects of other factors, such as oil prices and fiscal and monetary stimulus, that are expected to drive the 1.4% inflation rate higher.
“All of these temporary factors come together at the same time the market narrative is primed for a post-covid inflation surge,” Shearing said.
As the pandemic rippled around the globe last year, it interfered with typical seasonal patterns of global production and distribution. Factories closed, first in China, then elsewhere, as the world slipped into recession.
Shipping carriers initially idled vessels to match reduced demand. But as consumers stuck at home began buying desks, computers, backyard fire pits and entertainment systems – and Chinese factories resumed normal operations – Asian exporters clamored for space aboard cargo ships.
The sudden changes played havoc with supply chains that were designed to operate on “just in time” principles, bringing goods to ports when vessels were waiting to whisk them to distant customers.
The surge in demand overwhelmed the system.
Fewer ships arriving in U.S. ports meant fewer shipping containers available for the return trip to Asia. With department stores and other retailers closed by shutdowns, goods piled up at U.S. port terminals and warehouses. That made it harder for 18-wheelers to get into such facilities to pick up new loads and drop off empty containers, further clogging logistics channels.
Months later, ports and cargo carriers optimized for traditional trade flows continue to struggle with the resulting dislocations, even as shipping companies have rushed to return capacity to busy transit routes.
“It seems to be getting worse, not better,” said Nate Herman, senior vice president for policy at the American Apparel and Footwear Association. “I don’t see this ending any time soon.”
Last year’s stop-and-go global economy effectively shifted 5 million shipping containers from the first half of the year to the second half – on top of customary trade flows, said Lars Jensen, chief executive of SeaIntelligence, a Copenhagen-based consultancy company.
“It’s multiple different bottlenecks all at the same time,” Jensen said. “It’s like a train wreck in slow motion.”
At the nation’s busiest container port, officials in Los Angeles have seen cargo volumes soar and plunge in dizzying cycles. Inbound shipments fell in the first months of the pandemic before roaring back to life in August.
Average monthly import volumes in the second half of 2020 were more than 50% greater than during the first six months of the year, according to Seroka, the port’s executive director.
Because there is more demand to send goods from China to the United States than to ship in the other direction, ocean carriers – after delivering their cargoes to Los Angeles – are refusing to wait for their containers to be reloaded with U.S. exports before returning them to China.
In December, the port processed about 2 1/2 times as many empty containers headed to China as full ones.
“It is simply a matter of supply and demand,” Seroka said.
That practice has irked American farmers, who say the shippers’ refusal to bring containers into the heartland is raising their costs and causing them to lose overseas sales of soybeans, grains and lumber. A coalition of agricultural exporters wrote to Biden transition officials this month, citing “supply chain dysfunction” for supporting an ongoing Federal Maritime Commission probe of shippers’ behavior.
The World Shipping Council, representing the cargo carriers, said the industry is doing its best. But “no part of the supply chain is geared to managing the extremes currently occurring,” it said this month.
Even as the carriers rush containers to Asia, some companies in China are struggling to get their U.S.-bound products out of the country. Manufacturers of specialized products such as fireworks are paying twice per container what they were a few months ago.
“Even paying the high price, we can’t get all the containers we need. We can only get a small percentage,” said one executive in China, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships with Chinese shippers.
This executive fears that up to 40% of his annual production will be stranded in China. That shortfall will ripple through to the company’s U.S. distributors, lowering their profits and potentially leading to shortages for July 4.
Problems getting Asian goods through West Coast ports are crimping the rebound in U.S. manufacturing, and the situation is getting worse. In December, factories recorded “minimal gains in inventory levels and difficulties in expanding imports. Supply chains continue to struggle compared to November,” the Institute for Supply Management said in its monthly report.
The group noted that 16 industries reported that supplier deliveries were slowing and that no industry reported improvement.
James Keane, chief executive of Steelcase, told investors last month that the office furniture manufacturer was facing an “acute shortage of steel” amid ongoing shipping constraints.
“There is [a] shortage of containers on the water, and then even in domestic shipping there [are] shortages of drivers, shortages of carriers and therefore upward pressure on fleet costs,” he said.
Many companies, frustrated by soaring shipping costs, blame the problems on the ocean carriers, saying they deliberately idled vessels last year to raise prices. But while the number of “blank sailings,” or canceled routes, did rise last year, carriers have increased their total capacity, Larsen said.
On the key trans-Pacific route, he said, capacity is up 30% from one year ago. Demand has risen more.
In Los Angeles, Seroka is offering financial incentives for trucking companies to pick up and drop off their loads more quickly. The 93-minute average turnaround time should be more like 25 minutes, he said.
Seroka would also like to see the federal government take steps to make U.S. exports more competitive, balancing trans-Pacific trade.
The supply chain disruptions probably will continue until the pandemic wanes and consumer buying patterns return to normal, analysts said.
“There’s only one thing that can fix this,” Jensen said, “and that’s time.”
The UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 is the annual UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day, to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Six million Jews were brutally murdered by the Nazis.
This year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Embassy of Israel will hold an online Holocaust remembrance ceremony on January 27 at 10am on the Facebook page of the Embassy “Israel in Thailand”.
The ceremony will start with opening remarks by Meir Shlomo, the ambassador of Israel, followed by a message from United Nations Secretary-General António
Guterres.
The ceremony also includes the screening of “Whose child are you?”, a documentary testimony of a Holocaust survivor, Tswi Herschel, who was born in 1942 to a Jewish-Dutch family in
a small town in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. As the family had to move to Amsterdam, as part of deportation of Jews to Ghettos, concentration camps and eventually extermination camps,
Tswi’s father contacted non-Jewish Dutch friends and asked for help for his newborn son. A Protestant Dutch family took in baby Tswi, caring for him and raising him as their own child.
Tswi’s parents were deported to the extermination camp of Sobibór, where they were murdered shortly after arrival. Tswi’s grandmother, his only surviving relative, took him from his foster family after the war. Tswi grew up, got married and had two daughters. In 1986, Tswi and his family immigrated to Israel. Since 1991, Tswi is sharing his personal story with young people and adults around the globe.
Volkoviski with lyrics in Yiddish by Shmerke Kaczerginski. It was one of the best-loved songs of the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania, where the lullaby was first performed in 1943, shortly before the ghetto’s liquidation. The poignant lyrics chronicle the murder of more than 70,000 Jews in Ponar, a forest near Vilna, and lament the pain and suffering of the ghetto inmates.
The Holocaust happened more than 70 years ago and is commemorated annually in ceremonies around the
globe. Ambassador Shlomo said: “The real issue which I believe should really worry us all is the lack of knowledge, and dare I say even ignorance, about the Nazi era and the Holocaust in particular. A deficient knowledge of the history of the human race is a
perfect breeding ground for racism, discrimination and hate – and maybe the next genocide… As hard and as challenging as it is – the only effective antidote to racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination is education.”
By The Washington Post · Robyn Dixon, Isabelle Khurshudyan
MOSCOW – More than 2,700 people were arrested Saturday in protests spanning nearly 70 cities and towns across Russia calling for the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny – a massive show of defiance against President Vladimir Putin and his widening crackdowns against challenges to his power.
Among the detained was Navalny’s wife, Yulia, and many heads of Navalny’s regional offices. It was the largest number of protesters taken into custody in a day since the Russian rights group OVD-Info began monitoring demonstrations in 2011.
The rallies – from Russia’s Far East to central Moscow – came less than a week after Navalny returned from Germany, where he recovered from a nerve agent poisoning in August during a trip to Siberia. Navalny was arrested shortly after stepping off the plane.
The wide turnout sent apowerful message to the Kremlin on the reach and resolve of Navalny’s network. The swift crackdowns by authorities underscored the pressure facing Russian authorities who must decide whether to keep Navalny behind bars.
Navalny once more proved he can mobilize mass support to confront Putin’s government, particularly among young Russians, and even when he is behind bars.
Scuffles broke out in central Moscow, and police beat protesters with batons, according to video posted by independent media. Protesters at times pelted police with snowballs and plastic bottles.
“Putin is a thief,” some chanted in Moscow. “This is my home, I’m not afraid!” Passing cars honked in support.
Police loudspeakers bellowed: “Respected citizens, the current event is illegal. We are doing everything to ensure your safety.”
Protesters cried: “Police are the shame of Russia.”
After nightfall, police charged at groups of young protesters trying to get close to the Matrosskaya Tishina detention center, where Navalny is held. Some protesters were wrestled to the ground before being dragging to police buses. Dozens were arrested near the detention center.
Some 40,000 people participated in the Moscow protest, Reuters reported, while police said 4,000 people took part.
According to OVD-Info, more than 2,700 people were taken into custody around Russia, including about 900 in Moscow. Russian officials did not immediately give figures on detentions.
Video posted on social media showed sporadic clashes, including police beating protesters with batons. Protests took place in nearly 70 locales, OVD-Info reported.
Navalny’s wife, Yulia, wearing a black woolen hat and black jacket, posted a selfie at the protest, saying: “What happiness that you’re all here. Thank you!” Minutes later, she sent a selfie from the inside of a police van, saying she had been detained. Local media showed video of police leading her to the van. She was released from police custody after several hours, the Russia news outlet RIA Novosti reported.
The protests marked one of the most forceful displays of opposition to Putin since anti-government rallies in Moscow in summer 2019 over the banning of candidates for local elections.
Saturday’s demonstrations came after a sweeping national crackdown in which police detained opposition activists and courts locked up Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, and another team member, Georgy Alburov, co-author of the bombshell viral YouTube video “Putin’s Palace – History of the World’s Largest Bribe.”
The video, posted Tuesday, alleging colossal corruption in the construction of a vast Black Sea palace for Putin, has been viewed more than 70 million times. The Kremlin denies any relationship between Putin and the palace.
Navalny has led opposition to Putin for more than a decade. But Putin has recently moved to crush dissent, with some measures that appear aimed squarely at Navalny.
New Russian laws allow authorities to brand individual activists as “foreign agents,” while others have made it more difficult to express dissent, organize and protest. It follows constitutional changes last summer that gave Putin the opportunity to stay in power until 2036.
The showdowns in Russia could pose an early foreign policy challenge for the Biden administration as it looks to define its relations with Putin. A State Department statement said the United States “strongly condemns the use of harsh tactics” and called for Navalny’s “the immediate and unconditional release.”
In Moscow, key Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol, an investigator at his Anti-Corruption Foundation, was arrested at the square soon after the protest started. She was later charged with repeatedly participating in illegal protests.
Sobol live-streamed a message directly from the police truck after her arrest, urging Russians: “Don’t be silent! Don’t be afraid.
“I believe that I am right,” she said as other arrested protesters cheered in the police truck. “You cannot close your eyes to what is going on in Russia right now.”
Nikolai Agilko, 23, one of the protesters in Moscow, said he was inspired by Navalny’s return to Russia on Jan. 17. “He’s like a hero, I think. It’s very inspiring. He’s brave, so we should all be brave today.”
“I have a lot of friends who are scared in this situation, so they’re not here,” he said. “But I wanted to be brave and come here today.”
Ruslan Ivanov, 79, stood out in the Moscow crowd amid many young demonstrators. “I wanted to come out to support all of the young people here, to show that their demands are correct,” he said, referring to the calls for to release Navalny.
Elena, 60, who declined to give her name because the protest was not authorized by authorities, said she came out in support of Navalny, but also because she was unhappy at “how people in this country live.”
“I have five grandchildren, and I want them to live in a different country – a free country,” she said.
Navalny accuses Putin of ordering the nerve agent attack that left him in a coma and under medical care for months in Berlin. The Kremlin denies any links to the poisoning, but ithas refused to open a criminal investigation.
In Khabarovsk – about 3,800 miles east of Moscow – riot police wrestled protesters to the ground and dragged them to waiting police trucks, according to videos posted online from the city.
Popular Russian video blogger Yury Dud, whose YouTube channel has more than 8.6 million subscribers, participated in the Vladivostok protest in support of Navalny. Another popular blogger, Ilya Varlamov, was detained in Moscow. Journalists from independent media outlets Mediazona and Meduza were arrested in St. Petersburg.
Many coordinators of Navalny’s regional headquarters were detained in different Russian cities, according to the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, Ivan Zhdanov.
Zhdanov made the comments on a live YouTube broadcast on Saturday with more than 200,000 viewers.
A court ordered Navalny jailed on Monday over allegations that he violated the terms of a suspended sentence in a fraud case, a case that the European Court of Human Rights has declared was political. Facing two other criminal cases in a justice system notorious for politicizing cases, he could face years in jail.
Navalny says the cases against him are political.
“Russian authorities arresting peaceful protesters, journalists – appears to be concerted campaign to suppress free speech, peaceful assembly,” said Rebecca Ross, spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. “This continues years of Russia tightening restrictions, repressive actions against civil society, independent media, political opposition.”
Russian authorities said Friday that the embassy posted information on the website on the planned location of the protests. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said U.S. Embassy officials would be summoned to address the Russian complaints.
France advises delaying second covid shots to speed vaccines
InternationalJan 24. 2021A healthcare worker receives a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine in a care home in Paris on Jan. 7, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Nathan Laine.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Tara Patel, Suzy Waite
France’s top health authority is recommending doubling the time between the two required covid-19 vaccine shots as a way to stretch supplies and inoculate as many people as possible amid a resurgence in the spread of the coronavirus.
Giving a second injection six weeks after the first would allow at least 700,000 more people to be protected with a first shot during the first month, the country’s Haute Autorite de Sante said in a statement Saturday. The advice is for the vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE as well as another supplied by Moderna Inc., it said.
“The risk of a loss of efficacy appears limited,” the health body said, noting that the regime recommended by the companies is for a lag of three or four weeks between shots, but that protection from the virus actually begins between 12 and 14 days after the first jab.
Surging covid infections from the spread of a new virulent strain and supply issues have increased pressure on some governments to experiment with dosing regimens. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week said that said follow-up doses could be given up to six weeks later.
The U.K. has already pushed the maximum wait time from three weeks to 12 weeks as Boris Johnson’s government seeks to vaccinate 15 million people by Feb. 15. That strategy is now facing some resistance. A group of senior doctors called on England’s chief medical officer to cut the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech vaccine by half, according to the BBC.
The British Medical Association on Saturday urged Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, to “urgently review the U.K.’s current position of second doses after 12 weeks,” the AP reported. The association said there was “growing concern from the medical profession regarding the delay of the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as Britain’s strategy has become increasingly isolated from many other countries.”
“No other nation has adopted the U.K.’s approach,” Dr. Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the BMA council, told the BBC, the AP said. He noted the World Health Organization recommended that the second Pfizer vaccine could be given six weeks after the first but only in “exceptional circumstances.”
“I do understand the trade-off and the rationale, but if that was the right thing to do then we would see other nations following suit,” Nagpaul said, according to the AP. The BBC cited a private letter sent from the association to Whitty.
The government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation says unpublished data shows that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is still effective with doses 12 weeks apart, but Pfizer has said it has tested its vaccine’s efficacy only when the two doses were given up to 21 days apart, the BBC said.
The French health authority said it based its new recommendation on models carried out by France’s Institut Pasteur and U.S. and Canadian studies.
In its recommendation released on Jan. 21, the U.S. CDC said that if it’s impossible to get the follow-up shot on time, people may schedule it as long as six weeks, or 42 days, after their initial dose. There is “limited data on efficacy” of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines beyond that interval, according to the guidance, but if the second dose is administered later, “there is no need to restart the series.”
Both those vaccines are authorized for emergency use in the U.S. and were cleared based on trials of two doses weeks apart. A grace period of four days ahead of schedule would be considered valid for a second dose, but people shouldn’t receive the second dose earlier than that.
He overstated the “carnage” he was inheriting, then later exaggerated his “massive” crowd and claimed, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that it had not rained during his address. He repeated the rain claim the next day, along with the fabricated notion that he held the “all-time record” for appearing on the cover of Time magazine.
And so it went, day after day, week after week, claim after claim, from the most mundane of topics to the most pressing issues.
Over time, Trump unleashed his falsehoods with increasing frequency and ferocity, often by the scores in a single campaign speech or tweetstorm. What began as a relative trickle of misrepresentations, including 10 on his first day and five on the second, built into a torrent through Trump’s final days as he frenetically spread wild theories that the coronavirus pandemic would disappear “like a miracle” and that the presidential election had been stolen – the claim that inspired Trump supporters to attack Congress on Jan. 6 and prompted his second impeachment.
The final tally of Trump’s presidency: 30,573 false or misleading claims – with nearly half coming in his final year.
For more than 10 years, The Fact Checker has assessed the accuracy of claims made by politicians in both parties, and that practice will continue. But Trump, with his unusually flagrant disregard for facts, posed a new challenge, as so many of his claims did not merit full-fledged fact checks. What started as a weekly feature – “What Trump got wrong on Twitter this week” – turned into a project for Trump’s first 100 days. Then, in response to reader requests, the Trump database was maintained for four years, despite the increasing burden of keeping it up.
The database became an untruth tracker for the ages, widely cited around the world as a measuring stick of Trump’s presidency – and as of noon Wednesday it was officially retired.
Whether such a tracker will be necessary for future presidents is unclear. Nonetheless, the impact of Trump’s rhetoric may reverberate for years.
“As a result of Trump’s constant lying through the presidential megaphone, more Americans are skeptical of genuine facts than ever before,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said.
An assessment of the Fact Checker database shows the dramatic escalation in the rate of Trump’s dishonesty over time. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in his third year – and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and another 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
Trump made false claims about just about everything, big and small, so the Fact Checker database provides a window into his obsessions (and the news cycle) at the time. When Trump felt under siege or in trouble, he responded by trying to craft an alternative reality for his supporters – and to viciously attack his foes. Nearly half of the false claims were communicated at his campaign rallies or via his now-suspended Twitter account.
Claims about immigration spiked just before the 2018 midterm elections, as Trump unsuccessfully tried to keep the House of Representatives in GOP hands with exaggerated claims about “caravans” of undocumented immigrants approaching the border. Then in late 2019 he responded to the uproar over a phone call in which he urged Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden with more than 1,000 false and misleading claims on the issue in just four months.
False and misleading claims about the coronavirus pandemic emerged in 2020, so that by year’s end he had made more than 2,500 cornavirus-related claims – more than all of his trade claims over four years, even though trade has been one of the animating features of his presidency. Trump touted phony metrics to claim he successfully defeated the virus, pitched ineffective “cures” and constantly attacked former president Barack Obama for alleged failures, such as leaving a “bare cupboard” of ventilators (there were almost 17,000) and bungling the response to the swine flu pandemic in 2009-2010 (the response was considered a success).
In October, Trump was largely quiet for six days as he recovered from his own bout with covid-19. But even so, he made nearly 4,000 false or misleading claims that month, an average of 150 a day on the days he was not ill.
In speech after speech, he laid the groundwork for challenging the election, making baseless claims of potential election fraud, while attacking Biden as a mental incompetent – and a “grimy, sleazy and corrupt career politician” – who could not possibly emerge as the victor.
“It’s going to be a fraud,” Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News a month before voters went to the polls. “This is a terrible thing that’s happening to our country.”
After his election defeat, Trump spoke or tweeted about little except to offer lies about a stolen election, even as he or his supporters lost more than 60 court cases as judges repeatedly rejected his claims as bogus. After Nov. 3, he made more than 800 false or misleading claims about election fraud, including 76 times offering some variation of “rigged election.”
At his Jan. 6 speech at the Ellipse, in which he incited the attack on the Capitol, Trump made 107 false or misleading claims, almost all about the election.
The aftermath of what Biden and other Democrats now call the “big lie” hovers over Washington as both parties figure out whether there can be a return to a shared set of facts undergirding national debate, or whether one of the major political parties will remain captive to the sorts of conspiracy theories that marked so many of Trump’s final year of claims.
The events of Trump’s final weeks demonstrated the extent to which his alternate reality became woven into the fabric of the Republican Party, with the majority of GOP lawmakers voting against certifying Biden’s victory even after the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
One hallmark of Trump’s fibs was his willingness to constantly repeat the same claims, no matter how often they had been debunked. One-fifth of his nearly 2,500 claims about the economy was the same falsehood – that he was responsible for creating the greatest economy in U.S. history. After the coronavirus outbreak tanked the economy, he amped up the rhetoric to say he had created the greatest economy in world history. Neither claim is true; under just about every metric, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton had more robust economies during their presidencies. Even before the pandemic, Trump’s economy was already faltering because of his trade wars, with the manufacturing sector in a technical recession.
Nearly 300 times Trump falsely said that he passed the biggest tax cut in history. Even before his tax cut was crafted, he promised that it would be the biggest in U.S. history – bigger than President Ronald Reagan’s in 1981. Reagan’s tax cut amounted to 2.9% of the gross domestic product, and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level. Yet Trump persisted in this fiction even when the tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9% of the gross domestic product, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in 100 years.
Trump’s penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that the Fact Checker database has recorded about 750 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times.
The Fact Checker also tracked Three- or Four-Pinocchio claims that Trump has said at least 20 times, earning him a Bottomless Pinocchio. Trump completed his term with 56 of those entries, including three – about the “rigged election,” allegations that Dominion voting machines changed votes and the falsehood that GOP poll watchers were denied access to vote-counting – that only emerged in the final months of his presidency.
The Bottomless Pinocchio list gives a rough approximation of the types of major falsehoods Trump said during his presidency. Roughly 25% exaggerated about his accomplishments, and 15% misled about his policies. Another 15% dissembled about the Russian investigation or the probe into the Ukraine phone call. Roughly 10% each were fibs made out of whole cloth, attacks on people he considered foes, falsehoods about the coronavirus, phony claims about the election, or false statements about Biden and his proposals.
As the 2020 election neared, Trump nearly 50 times falsely reassured his supporters that Mexico was footing the $15 billion bill for his barrier along the southern border. U.S. taxpayers are paying, mostly via money Trump diverted from authorized military construction projects. This was perhaps Trump’s most famous campaign promise – during the 2016 campaign, Trump more than 200 times said Mexico would pay for the wall – so he simply pretended he had fulfilled it in an effort to reassure his base that he had succeeded.
Many repeated claims just barely missed the cutoff for a Bottomless Pinocchio, such as the claim that he repealed a provision of the U.S. tax code that prohibits religious organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. (All he did was issue a toothless executive order, but he obviously thought it was important to evangelical groups that he falsely claimed he achieved one of their key political objectives.)
Trump rarely abandons his falsehoods, so as he neared the end of his presidency his campaign rallies became longer and longer. Each speech had a familiar pattern. He would cycle through various grievances about the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller III and the impeachment over his Ukraine call. He trashed Obama, various Democrats and of course Biden. He falsely extolled his achievements in trade, foreign policy, the economy and immigration. He offered false assurances about the pandemic and warned darkly about fraud in the upcoming election.
The growth of falsehoods over the course of Trump’s presidency is illustrated by one remarkable statistic.
The Fact Checker team recorded 492 suspect claims in Trump’s first 100 days. Just on Nov. 2, the day before the 2020 election, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to save his presidency.
The database website has a search engine that will quickly locate suspect statements made by Trump. Readers can also isolate claims by time period, subject or venue.
Maintaining the database over four years required detailed examination of every Trump speech, news conference, press gaggle, campaign rally and interview, as well as more than 25,000 tweets. The fact checks of Trump’s statements in the database amount to about 5 million words.
The database includes any statement that might merit Two or more Pinocchios under The Fact Checker’s rating scale. Trump often would repeat the same falsehood two or more times in a speech but only one instance of a claim per venue would be counted. The database did not include Facebook posts because they were often duplicative of tweets and likely staff-generated. The tally also generally did not count retweets, except for retweets of false or misleading videos.
Justice Department, FBI debate not charging some of the Capitol rioters
InternationalJan 24. 2021Thousands of Trump supporters violently storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to support President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that he won the election. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez
By The Washington Post · Devlin Barrett, Spencer S. Hsu
WASHINGTON – Federal law enforcement officials are privately debating whether they should decline to charge some of the individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol this month – a politically loaded proposition but one alert to the practical concern that hundreds of such cases could swamp the local courthouse.
The internal discussions are in their early stages, and no decisions have been reached about whether to forgo charging some of those who illegally entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.
Justice Department officials have promised a relentless effort to identify and arrest those who stormed the Capitol that day, but internally there is robust back-and-forth about whether charging them all is the best course of action. That debate comes at a time when officials are keenly sensitive that the credibility of the Justice Department and the FBI are at stake in such decisions, given the apparent security and intelligence failures that preceded the riot, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss legal deliberations.
Federal officials estimate that roughly 800 people surged into the building, though they caution that such numbers are imprecise, and the real figure could be 100 people or more in either direction.
Among those roughly 800 people, FBI agents and prosecutors have so far seen a broad mix of behavior – from people dressed for military battle, moving in formation, to wanton vandalism, to simply going with the crowd into the building.
Due to the wide variety of behavior, some federal officials have argued internally that those people who are known only to have committed unlawful entry – and were not engaged in violent, threatening or destructive behavior – should not be charged, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Other agents and prosecutors have pushed back against that suggestion, arguing that it is important to send a forceful message that the kind of political violence and mayhem on display Jan. 6 needs to be punished to the full extent of the law, so as to discourage similar conduct in the future.
There are a host of other factors complicating the discussions, many of which center not around the politics of the riot, but the real-world work of investigators and prosecutors, these people said.
The Justice Department has already charged more than 135 individuals with committing crimes in or around the Capitol building, and many more are expected to be charged in the coming weeks and months. By mid-January, the FBI had already received more than 200,000 tips from the public about the riot, in addition to news footage and police officer testimony.
“There is absolute resolve from the Department of Justice to hold all who intentionally engaged in criminal acts at the Capitol accountable,” Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi said in an email. “We have consistently made clear that we will follow the facts and evidence and charge individuals accordingly. We remain confident that the U.S. District Court for Washington, DC can appropriately handle the docket related to any resulting charges.”
The primary objective for authorities is to determine which individuals, if any, planned, orchestrated or directed the violence. To that end, the FBI has already found worrying linkages within such extremist groups as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, and is looking to see if those groups coordinated with each other to storm the building, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors have signaled they are looking to bring charges of seditious conspiracy against anyone who planned and carried out violence aimed at the government – a charge that carries a maximum possible prison sentence of 20 years.
But even as Justice Department officials look to bring those types of cases, they privately acknowledge those more determined and dangerous individuals may have operated within a broader sea of people who rushed through the doors but didn’t do much else, and prosecutors will ultimately have to decide if all of those lesser offenders should be charged.
Officials insisted they are not under pressure in regards to timing of decisions about how to handle those type of cases. For one thing, investigators are still gathering evidence, and agents could easily turn up additional photos or online postings that show a person they initially believed was harmless had, in fact, encouraged or engaged in other crimes.
Investigators also expect that some of those charged in the riot will eventually cooperate and provide evidence against others, and that could change their understanding of what certain people said or did that day, these people said.
Nevertheless, these people said, some in federal law enforcement are concerned that charging people solely with unlawful entry, when they are not known to have committed any other bad acts, could lead to losses if they go to trial.
“If an old man says all he did was walk in and no one tried to stop him, and he walked out and no one tried to stop him, and that’s all we know about what he did, that’s a case we may not win,” one official said.
Another official noted most of those arrested so far have no criminal records.
Meanwhile, defense lawyers for some of those charged are contemplating something akin to a “Trump defense” – that the president or other authority figures gave them permission or invited them to commit an otherwise illegal act.
“If you think of yourself as a soldier doing the bidding of the commander in chief, you don’t try to hide your actions. You assume you will be held up as a hero by the nation,” criminal defense lawyers Teri Kanefield and Mark Reichel wrote last week.
Such a defense might not forestall charges but could be effective at trial or sentencing. Trump’s looming impeachment trial in the Senate will also focus further attention on his actions and raise questions about the culpability of followers for the misinformation spread by leaders around bogus election-fraud claims rejected by courts and state voting officials.
“It’s not a like a bunch of people gathered on their own and decided to do this, it’s not like a mob. It’s people who were asked to come by the president, encouraged to come by the president, and encouraged to do what they did by the president and a number of others,” said one attorney representing defendants charged in the breach who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss legal strategy.
Prosecutors have other options. For rioters with no previous criminal records or convictions and whose known behavior inside the Capitol was not violent or destructive, the government could enter into deferred plea agreements, a diversion program akin to pretrial probation in which prosecutors agree to drop charges if a defendant commits no offenses over a certain time period.
Such a resolution would not result in even a misdemeanor conviction, and has been used before in some cases involving individuals with a history of mental illness who were arrested for jumping the White House fence. Criminal defense attorneys note there may be further distinctions between individuals who may have witnessed illegal activity or otherwise had reason to know they were entering a restricted area, and those for whom prosecutors can’t show such awareness.
There is also a question over whether charging all of the rioters could swamp the federal court system. In 2019, D.C. federal courts recorded only about 430 criminal cases, and fewer than 300 last year, when the legal system slowed significantly due to the pandemic. Many of those cases, however, had multiple defendants.
The workload of prosecuting the rioters could be eased if some of the cases were farmed out to other U.S. attorney offices around the country, but so far D.C. prosecutors have shown no interest in doing so. The law generally requires that individuals be prosecuted in the district in which a crime occurred.
“The crime happened here. Prosecutors and judges can see the crime scene from their office windows. I find it strange anyone would suggest it be done anywhere else,” a person familiar with the investigation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an internal debate.
Beyond all the evidence-gathering and charging decisions left to do, federal officials concede there will likely be some number of people who were there that day and are simply never identified, due to some combination of luck, masks or lack of social media posts.
Biden aims for ‘normal’ after four years of tumult
InternationalJan 24. 2021President Biden speaks about the economy before signing executive orders in the State Dining Room at the White House on Jan. 22, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford.
By The Washington Post · Annie Linskey, Ashley Parker
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden and his team issued 17 executive actions and directives, fielded 28 questions during a news briefing and swore in more than 1,100 people to serve in his administration. And that was just on Day One.
In the first few days of Biden’s administration, aides to the new president have also blasted out fact sheets and memorandums – a veritable redwood worth of paperwork – and quietly reached out to a range of interest groups and politicians of both parties.
The technocrats, in other words, are back – complete with their return to regular order and aspirations of rigorous monotony.
The whirlwind of activity, both public and private, was part of a planned launch of his presidency that began in late April – before Biden had formally clinched the Democratic nomination – designed to showcase Biden’s promise to restore what he and his aides view as normalcy to the White House.
“They are running normal policy processes,” said Neil Bradley, the executive vice president and chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “For those of us who’ve been in Washington a long time, it is the normal policymaking process that we’ve been familiar with for a long time. And that, from our perspective, seems to produce better, more informed policy.”
But if Biden and his team view his mantra of “Build Back Better” as a lofty goal, many Republicans see it as a return of the swamp. Former president Donald Trump’s rise was fueled by voters who viewed Washington as a town of bureaucrats and elites removed from the struggles of their daily lives – and who appreciated Trump’s disdain for the usual way of doing things.
“I’m not sure what a new normal looks like, because I think the Trump way of doing things and his nonpolitical approach has a certain appeal to voters, and that’s going to have to be part of this new normal,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster.
Referring to Biden’s relatively staid Twitter feed, Newhouse joked, “Are we still waiting for his first tweet? Many Americans are used to right now communication by Twitter. I think some people actually miss that.”
The president’s team is betting that most Americans won’t.
Biden tapped former senator Ted Kaufman, D-Del., to run his transition on April 22. He pulled in several others, and what started as handful of trusted Biden advisers ballooned to a staff of more than 400 paid transition employees by Jan. 20.
Another 1,000 volunteers also helped in a number of ways, including vetting potential hires – a mammoth task that involved more than 8,000 interviews.
Guided by Biden’s speeches and remarks on the campaign trail, they turned the candidate’s public decrees and promises into legislative language. When Biden delivered his major economic speeches over the summer, they took the text and broke it down into separate executive orders and tracked what he was promising on the first day, first week and first 100 days.
“Every single one of the things you’re seeing, there is a massive amount of planning,” said Kaufman, referring to the opening days of the administration.
“You’ve got to sit down and figure out, ‘What do I want to have on day one, two, three, four and five?’ ” he said. “Then, ‘When do I have to have the substance ready to go?’
Proposals were drafted and then vetted by multiple rounds of attorneys, including career lawyers inside the Justice Department. Two major pieces of legislation were put together: One for coronavirus relief and another on immigration.
There was also an employee handbook for the transition. “There is no transition without a successful campaign” was one quote from the book. Another focused on tone: “No egos, no drama, no task too small for anyone. We have each other’s backs.”
Their work accelerated once Biden was elected, with transition officials reaching out to interest groups in key players in Washington, making over 3,500 calls to organizations, according to a transition official.
The groups included the typical constituencies that are part of the Democratic coalition including labor unions, civil rights organizations and women’s groups. But they also targeted those more typically aligned with the GOP.
“Uniting America is not about just giving speeches – it’s not even about announcing policies,” Kaufman said. “It’s about getting down, doing the hard work and talking to members of Congress, talking to governors and talking to people in normally Republican areas.”
Bradley, whose group has commonly aligned with Republicans, called it “a highly organized, I would say very efficient process.”
“It removes multiple layers of uncertainty or confusion,” he said. “We may not always agree with the direction that they’re going, but at least you have a sense of understanding it and that is exceptionally helpful to the business community – just knowing how policy is unfolding.”
With the Trump administration, by contrast, “everyone was scrambling to figure out what was going on,” he said.
Biden’s nominees have also been making the rounds, such as a visit by Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen with the National Association of Manufacturers executive committee.
It was “a very candid, open, frank conversation,” said Jay Timmons, the group’s president.
Timmons, who was once the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that Biden’s approach has been “refreshing.”
It helps that he’s known Biden since he was a Senate aide two decades ago. “In Joe Biden, you have just a decent human being,” Timmons said. “He’s willing to listen to all points of view.”
The outreach provided an early benefit when these right-leaning groups, including the Chamber, NAM and the Business Roundtable issued statements on Jan. 4 urging members of Congress and others to accept Biden’s electoral college victory.
That happened in some cases after the Biden transition reached out asking for the help, according to a business lobbyist familiar with the effort who requested anonymity to discuss private talks.
“They expressed their concerns about the road that we were going down and where that might lead, which were, frankly, concerns that a lot of people in the business community shared,” the lobbyist said.
The Biden team’s message was clear: “Folks speaking up would be helpful,” the lobbyist recalled. “A lot of folks in the business community were happy to.” Biden’s transition confirmed the outreach to business groups, but noted that in some cases business organizations proactively asked how they could help.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has highlighted the support for Biden’s covid relief package from business groups, saying there has been an “outpouring of support” for various parts of the package “from everyone from Bernie Sanders to the Chamber of Commerce.”
But the Biden team’s concerted effort to revive some of the basic traditions of past White Houses also has its risks. Washington trying to work together can look an awful lot like elites palling around, or the overly clubby atmosphere that gave rise to the early enthusiasm for Trump’s candidacy.
And key Republican senators have already expressed skepticism, if not outright opposition, to Biden’s $1.9 trillion covid-19 relief proposal.
“President Biden is talking like a centrist, he is using the words of the center, talking about unity, but he is governing like someone from the far left,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said in a video message on Friday.
“He has ordered more executive fiats than anyone in such a short period of time – ever. More than Obama, more than Trump, more than anyone,” Rubio said, referring to the flurry of executive actions Biden has signed.
Over about 48 hours, Biden signed more than two dozen executive actions and one piece of legislation – granting his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin a waiver exempting him from a law requiring the head of the Pentagon to have been out of uniform for at least seven years.
He took aim at Trump’s record on climate change, immediately rejoining the Paris climate accords and rescinding the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. He reoriented his administration on the response to the coronavirus pandemic, reversing Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization and imposing a mask mandate on federal property.
The Biden White House is also engaging in some age-old traditions, like blaming the previous administration for the crises they face. Jeff Zients, the head of Biden’s coronavirus task force, told reporters recently that “what we are inheriting from the Trump administration is much worse than we could have imagined,” and other aides – without providing specifics – have anonymously claimed that the Trump team left behind absolutely no coronavirus strategy.
Biden’s team says it plans to bring back the practice of daily press briefings, and promised transparency with the American public. But that doesn’t mean they are above the timeless tradition of skilled obfuscation: Psaki, for instance, has repeatedly declined to share Biden’s position on whether he believes Trump should be convicted of inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in the upcoming Senate impeachment trial.
“Well, he’s no longer in the Senate, and he believes that it’s up to the Senate and Congress to determine how they will hold the former president accountable and what the mechanics and timeline of that process will be,” Psaki said Friday.
For many Democrats, the return of the so-called establishment – or the “seasoned,” in the preferred nomenclature of Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich. – is a welcome change.
“I don’t care what anyone says – it was a beautiful, wonderful inauguration but 26,000 National Guard troops surrounding you isn’t a sense of calm, and I think just normal is good,” Dingell said, referring to the heavy security implemented in the wake of the Jan. 6 siege by pro-Trump supporters. “People want to hug each other and go out to dinner and we can’t do that, but at least here’s a process by which you can try to get things done.”
In another return to tradition reaching out to North American allies, Biden made Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau his first phone call with a foreign leader Friday, followed by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The Biden White House also reinstated its subscriptions of the New York Times and The Washington Post in the West Wing – a practice stopped under Trump during a moment of fury at the publications, though he continued to avidly consume news from both papers.
And during a new conference Friday, Psaki jokingly made clear that Biden’s priorities are distinctly different than those of his predecessor.
“I can confirm to you here: The president has not spent a moment thinking about the color scheme of Air Force One,” Psaki said, a jab at Trump’s fixation on replacing the traditional baby blue of the presidential aircraft with colors inspired by the American flag.
Biden may not have the same chance Obama did for early legislative wins
InternationalJan 24. 2021President Biden, with Vice President Harris by his side, signs executive orders at the White House on Jan. 22. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford.
By The Washington Post · Paul Kane
WASHINGTON – On Jan. 29, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, delivering on a longtime liberal goal of equal salary opportunities for women.
Six days later, he expanded a program to provide health insurance for more than 4 million lower-income children.
And on Feb. 17, Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, flew to Denver to sign the roughly $800 billion Recovery Act, the finale of a rapid-fire first few weeks.
“Less than a month into his presidency, the president is about to sign into law what is, I believe, a landmark achievement. Because of what he did, America can take a first, very strong step leading us out of this very difficult road to recovery we find ourselves on,” Biden said that day.
That’s how Democrats came out of the gate the last time they controlled Congress and the White House. They orchestrated their first few weeks the way a smart football coach scripts his offense’s first few possessions of the ball, winning quick passage of key laws and setting the tone for the first two years of the Obama presidency.
Twelve years later, the early days of Biden’s presidency may be consumed by a host of side issues that could delay his Cabinet appointments and, more importantly, any legislative victories. No issue has emerged as a bigger obstacle than the impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced early Friday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would send over the impeachment article Monday, charging Trump with inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Republicans warned that would mean the Senate would stop all business until it completes the trial.
“If the impeachment articles come over Monday, the opportunity for President Biden to get a Cabinet in place is done until impeachment is done,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told reporters Friday.
By Friday afternoon, Biden signaled some concern about a trial getting in the way of his early work. Hours later, Schumer announced a bipartisan plan to start the full trial Feb. 9, giving the Senate more than two weeks to get moving on confirming the Cabinet.
Still, there’s little time to get any legislative victories. Pelosi set the coming week as committee work, with no votes on legislation, leaving only a week with both chambers in session before the trial begins.
Biden and some senators have discussed a “bifurcated” setup, doing legislation or nominations in the mornings, before the 1 p.m. mandate to start each day’s trial proceedings. History suggests that’s unlikely.
The previous two presidential impeachment trials, of Bill Clinton in 1999 and of Trump in 2020, lasted five weeks and nearly three weeks, respectively. No other business was conducted as the trials consumed the Senate.
As much as they want to punish Trump for encouraging his supporters to descend on the Capitol, some Democrats grimace at the idea of putting Biden’s early days on hold for a man already ejected from the Oval Office.
“I want to focus as much attention right now on the Biden agenda as possible, and minimize the attention on anything other than the Biden agenda,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., his party’s 2016 vice-presidential nominee. He would prefer to punish Trump with legislation to bar him from holding office in the future.
“It would give us more time to focus on the things that are most important to the public,” Kaine told reporters Friday.
Pelosi and Schumer have set up a timeline that will allow for the most critical Cabinet posts to be filled, but with little chance for substantive victories emerging from Congress. Biden has issued more than two dozen executive orders, some reversing controversial decisions by Trump, but nothing with the full force of an actual law.
Back in early 2009, Democrats did not face an impeachment dilemma. They were able to begin immediately moving initiatives that had been stalled during George W. Bush’s presidency. In an April 2017 interview, Rahm Emanuel reflected on those early Obama days when he was chief of staff, how even some of the less ambitious legislation helped keep momentum going.
“The bunt singles,” he said, explaining how any bill getting to the president’s desk helps.
Emanuel, then the Chicago mayor, was critiquing the first months of the Trump administration, arguing that they kept swinging for legislative home runs but striking out.
So far, that critique applies to the Biden White House and his Democratic allies.
There are no “bunt singles” waiting on the legislative deck. Instead, the leaders are trying to pack everything they can into one massive package, with a current price tag of $1.9 trillion, dwarfing the combined annual funding for every federal agency, and whatever can’t fit into that package will go into another massive bill later in the fall.
This isn’t just swinging for the home-run fences. It’s akin to trying to hit 10 grand slams with just two swings of the legislative bat.
Part of the Democratic dilemma is their minuscule margin for error. Their current House majority has 35 fewer seats than in early 2009 and, with just 50 members in Schumer’s caucus, they have eight fewer votes to bank on than in early 2009.
Back then, Biden got dispatched to lobby old friends such as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who rallied two other Republicans to pass the Recovery Act.
Now, even Collins is shrugging at the need for Biden’s nearly $2 trillion pandemic relief proposal. “It’s hard for me to see, when we just passed $900 billion worth of assistance, why we would have a package that big. Now maybe a couple of months from now, the needs will be evident,” Collins told reporters Friday.
So, in this polarized environment, congressional leaders try to pack everything they can into one massive, grand-slam legislation, everything from actual coronavirus relief to raising the minimum wage.
Even without the impeachment trial, mid- to late February would have been optimistic to pass the initial massive Biden package. Now, with the trial potentially sidelining Senate action until the end of February, Biden will have to wait quite a while before a big win.
Pedestrians wearing protective masks walk past Slack Technologies Inc. headquarters in San Francisco in December 2020. Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to buy Slack Technologies Inc. for $27.7 billion in cash and stock, giving the corporate software giant a popular workplace-communications platform in one of the biggest technology deals of the year. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris
A healthcare worker receives a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine in a care home in Paris on Jan. 7, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Nathan Laine.
Thousands of Trump supporters violently storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to support President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that he won the election. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez
President Biden speaks about the economy before signing executive orders in the State Dining Room at the White House on Jan. 22, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford.
President Biden, with Vice President Harris by his side, signs executive orders at the White House on Jan. 22. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford.
SootinClaimon.Com 