On January 2, 2025, President Joe Biden highlighted the confirmation of 235 federal judges during his presidency, a landmark achievement that narrowly surpassed the 234 lifetime judicial appointments made under President-elect Donald Trump in his first term. Among Biden’s confirmations was one Supreme Court justice, marking the culmination of a determined effort by Democrats to shape the judiciary in the final months of his term.
In his remarks, President Biden framed the milestone as a safeguard for democracy and a counterbalance to recent judicial decisions, including the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. “Together, these judges are going to hear cases on issues, ruling on everything from whether Americans can cast their ballot, literally how they can cast their ballot, when it will be counted, to whether workers can unionize and make a living wage for their families,” Biden said. He also highlighted environmental priorities, adding, “whether their children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.”
Flanked by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, Biden reflected on the intense push to confirm his nominees. He praised their shared commitment to diversifying the federal bench, with two-thirds of his appointees being women or people of color. “When I ran for president, I made a promise that I’d have a bench that looks like America and taps into the full talents of this nation,” Biden said. “And I’m proud we’ve kept our commitment.”
Despite the celebratory tone, Biden acknowledged challenges faced during his term, as federal courts blocked several key policy initiatives, including student debt relief programs, immigration reforms, and stricter air pollution regulations. Most recently, a federal appeals court struck down his administration’s net neutrality rules, a signature tech policy. The president’s remarks underscored how the judiciary has become a battleground for polarizing policy disputes, further eroding public confidence in judicial impartiality.
This erosion of trust has been exacerbated by “judge shopping,” where lawsuits are filed in districts perceived to favor particular causes. Polls show public faith in the neutrality of US courts has plummeted, a concern echoed by Chief Justice John Roberts in his year-end report, which also addressed the rise in threats against federal judges. Meanwhile, President-elect Trump, who campaigned on criticisms of the legal system, frequently attacked judges who ruled against him, fueling partisan perceptions of the judiciary.
The urgency to confirm President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees stemmed from a desire to avoid leaving vacancies for Republicans to fill under the incoming administration. The Democratic push mirrored a similar scenario in 2017 when Trump inherited over 100 vacancies after Republicans blocked President Obama’s appointments. Biden’s confirmations now represent over a quarter of the federal bench, setting a new standard for diversity and ensuring a lasting legacy as he concludes his term.
President Joe Biden on January 5 delivered a ferocious condemnation of former President Donald Trump, his likely 2024 opponent, warning in searing language that the former President had directed an insurrection and would aim to undo the nation’s bedrock democracy if he returned to power. On the eve of the third anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by former President Trump’s supporters, President Biden framed the coming election as a choice between a candidate devoted to upholding America’s centuries-old ideals and a chaos agent willing to discard them for his benefit. “There’s no confusion about who Trump is or what he intends to do,” Biden warned in a speech at a community college not far from Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War. Exhorting supporters to prepare to vote this fall, he said: “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question is: Who are we?”
In an intensely personal address that at one point nearly led President Joe Biden to curse former President Donald Trump by name, the President compared his rival to foreign autocrats who rule by fiat and lies. He said former President Trump had failed the basic test of American leaders, to trust the people to choose their elected officials and abide by their decisions. “We must be clear,” Biden said. “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”
President Joe Biden’s harshness on his rival illustrated what his campaign believes to be the stakes of the 2024 election and his perilous political standing. Confronted with low approval ratings, bad head-to-head polling against former President Donald Trump, worries about his age, and lingering unease with the economy, President Biden is turning increasingly to the figure who has proved to be Democrats’ single best motivator. Former President Donald Trump, speaking at a campaign rally in Iowa soon after President Joe Biden’s appearance, quickly lashed back, calling the president’s comments “pathetic fearmongering” and accusing him of “abusing George Washington’s legacy.”
President Joe Biden’s remarks carried echoes of the 2020 campaign when he presented himself as the caretaker of “the soul of America” against a Trump presidency that he and Democratic supporters argued was on the verge of causing permanent damage to the country. The 31-minute speech was President Biden’s first public campaign event since he announced in April 2023 that he would seek re-election and was, in tone and content, arguably his most forceful public denunciation of former President Donald Trump since the two men became political rivals in 2019.
President Joe Biden’s appearance, meant as a kickoff to help define the 2024 campaign, was an early effort to revive the politically sprawling anti-Trump coalition that propelled Democrats to key victories in recent elections. Mr. Biden’s task now is to persuade those voters to view the 2024 contest as the same kind of national emergency that they sensed in 2018, 2020, and 2022. He began with an extensive recounting of former President Donald Trump’s actions before, during, and after the January 6 attack. The country, President Biden said, cannot afford to allow Trump and his supporters to present a whitewashed version of that day and spread falsehoods about the violent outcome of their effort to undo the 2020 election results. Upholding the nation’s democracy, Biden said, is “the central cause of my presidency.”
President Joe Biden made no mention of the 91 felony charges the former president faces in four jurisdictions, sticking to a vow to steer clear of his rival’s legal problems and focusing squarely on Trump’s actions rather than any potential criminal consequences for them. “Trump exhausted every legal avenue available to overturn the 2020 election. The legal path took him back to the truth, that I won the election and he was a loser,” Biden said. “He had one act left, one desperate act available to him, the violence of January 6.”
For a president who has faced intense scrutiny over his vigor in public appearances, the speech was a deftly delivered, focused argument about this year’s stakes. It was President Joe Biden’s latest attempt to build his political identity around the ideas of restoring national unity and upholding fairness, democracy, and collective patriotism. He has come back to those themes many times, during his brief push for voting rights legislation in early 2022, then as the midterm elections approached, and most recently in September, during a speech in Arizona honoring former Senator John McCain.
In the speech, President Joe Biden sought to frame former President Donald Trump as the leader of a cult of personality, and his Republican allies as sycophants. The president mentioned the recent $148 million judgment against Rudolph W. Giuliani for his lies about Georgia election workers, as well as the $787.5 million that Fox News was ordered to pay to settle a defamation case about its role in spreading election lies. Biden lamented that Fox News hosts and Republican officials who condemned Trump’s January 6 behavior in the moment had since changed their tune and repeated his falsehoods. “Politics, fear, and money all intervened, and now these MAGA voices who know the truth about Jan. 6 have abandoned democracy,” Biden said.
What remains unclear is how much President Joe Biden’s democracy pitch will resonate with voters who remain nervous about an improving economy, and wary of re-electing an 81-year-old who is already the oldest president in US history. Even some who have expressed deep fears about Trump’s authoritarian impulses are skeptical that the subject will be a winning message in 2024. “As a Biden campaign theme, I think the threat to democracy pitch is a bust,” 2012 Republican Presidential nominee, prominent Trump critic, and Utah Senator Mitt Romney, wrote in a text message to a New York Times reporter. “January 6 will be four years old by the election. People have processed it, one way or another. Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”
President Joe Biden threaded his speech with warnings that former President Donald Trump and Republicans would threaten not only democracy but also major Democratic priorities, abortion rights, voting rights, and economic and environmental justice. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit dedicated to combating authoritarianism, said he had stressed to Biden’s aides that the president needed to connect democracy to voters’ personal experiences on other issues, in the same way Trump repeats to his supporters that prosecutions of him are persecutions of them. “Democracy is not just a way of structuring elections for order in our government,” Mr. Bassin said. “It’s a set of values about the kind of communities we want to live in and the way that we want to live as neighbors.”
President Joe Biden warned in his speech that former President Donald Trump was not being shy about what he would do in a second term. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future,” President Biden said. “He’s not hiding the ball.” Biden then recounted, in exacting detail, how a Trump campaign rally last year began with a choir of rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 singing the national anthem while a video of the damage played on a big screen. Trump had watched with approval. The scene, Biden suggested, would be the nation’s fate if Trump and his allies returned to power. “This is like something out of a fairy tale,” Biden said. “A bad fairy tale.”
US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping did not produce any big breakthroughs in their more than three-hour virtual summit on November 15, but they managed to lower the temperature in a bilateral relationship buffeted by rising tensions over Taiwan, trade, and security in the Indo-Pacific region. The video meeting was the first opportunity for the two leaders to meet face to face since Biden took office. This helped facilitate a “different kind of conversation,” according to a senior Biden administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, who described discussions as “respectful, and straightforward and open.”
President Joe Biden “underscored that the United States will continue to stand up for its interests and values,” and raised a number of issues of concern including human rights, trade, and freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific, according to a White House statement. The two leaders also discussed areas of mutual interest including health security and climate change; last week at the big United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, China and the US agreed to cooperate on new climate measures over the next decade, though neither offered any substantive details. “What President Xi and President Biden really reinforced to one another at multiple points last night was that this relationship needs to be guided by consistent and regular leader-to-leader interaction,” The US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said at an online event hosted by the Brookings Institution. Sullivan added that the dialogue between leaders should continue between senior officials from both countries.
At the meeting, President Joe Biden also underscored US commitment to the “One China” policy, which recognizes Beijing as representing China rather than Taipei, while reiterating US opposition to any Chinese efforts to unilaterally change the status of the self-governed island of Taiwan, which has become a flashpoint in the relationship amid China’s increasingly aggressive military posturing in the Taiwan Strait. US officials went into the call hoping to come out with some guardrails to prevent any escalation over the island, but the virtual summit did not produce any on Taiwan, the senior administration official said.
One issue that was expected to arise but that did not is the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing. The US has not yet signaled whether it will send a delegation to the games amid calls for a boycott over China’s supposed mass incarceration of Muslims in the Xinjiang region, which the Biden administration determined constitutes a genocide. President Joe Biden, who dialed into the call from the White House’s Roosevelt Room, was joined by senior foreign-policy aides including Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Xi joined the call from the cavernous East Hall in China’s Great Hall of the People alongside Foreign Minister Wang Yi and top Communist Party officials.
The virtual summit was not President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping’s first face-to-face meeting. As vice president a decade ago, Biden traveled through China with Xi at a markedly more optimistic moment in U.S.-China relations. “If we get this relationship right, engender a new model, the possibilities are limitless,” Biden said on a 2013 visit to Beijing. In his opening remarks on Monday, Xi said that he was “very happy to see my old friend.”
The meeting came as both leaders are focused on domestic challenges. Biden just signed into law a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, but he is still trying to pass a bumper social spending bill. Last week, a Chinese Communist Party plenum issued a “resolution on history,” elevating Xi’s status and paving the way for him to seek a third term in office next year. Despite Xi’s consolidated grip on power, experts say Chinese officials are looking to stabilize the international environment as they focus on domestic issues including skyrocketing energy prices and rising inflation.
The House vote followed a day of wrangling over how to enact the two planks of the party’s agenda. The push-and-pull exemplified party leaders’ months-long struggle to get progressives and centrists, who have differing visions of the government’s role in the economy, behind the same bills. Democrats entered the day planning to pass both the infrastructure legislation and the party’s larger $1.75 trillion social safety net and climate package. A demand from a handful of centrists to see a Congressional Budget Office estimate of the social spending plan’s budgetary effects delayed its approval. Progressives sought assurances the holdouts would support the bigger proposal if they voted for the infrastructure bill. After hours of talks, and a call by President joe Biden into a progressive caucus meeting urging lawmakers to back the infrastructure bill, the party’s liberal wing got assurances from centrists that they would support the larger package.
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said the group reached a deal to back the infrastructure plan in exchange for a commitment to take up the safety-net bill “no later than the week of November 15.” A group of five centrists separately issued a statement saying they would back the Build Back Better legislation pending a CBO score that assuages their concerns about long-term budget deficits.
In a statement after the House vote, President Joe Biden said the legislation would “create millions of jobs, turn the climate crisis into an opportunity, and put us on a path to win the economic competition for the 21st Century.” He also noted that the procedural vote on the second Democratic bill will “allow for passage of my Build Back Better Act in the House of Representatives the week of November 15th.” The bills together make up the core of President Biden’s domestic agenda. Democrats see the plans as complementary pieces designed to boost the economy, jolt the job market, provide a layer of insurance to working families and curb climate change.
President Joe Biden and Democrats have looked for a signature achievement they can point to on the 2022 midterm campaign trail as the president’s approval ratings flag. President Biden will welcome the developments, as House passage of the bill followed a strong October jobs report and approval of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine for 5-to-11-year-olds in the US. While President Biden could sign the infrastructure bill soon, the safety net and climate package will likely take weeks longer. The House will have to wait for a CBO score. The Senate may pass a different version of the plan, which would require another House vote. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has set a Thanksgiving target to pass the larger Democratic bill.
Despite much bipartisan support, many Democrats considered the infrastructure bill inadequate because it did not address issues including child care, pre-K education, Medicare expansion, and the enhanced child tax credit. Those policies, priorities for President Joe Biden and top Democrats, made it into the House version of the social safety net bill. Democratic leaders tied the proposals together in an effort to keep centrists and progressives on board with both plans. A thorny legislative process has unfolded for months as Democrats try to get disparate groups with varied visions of the federal government’s role in the economy to back both packages.
The Senate gave overwhelming bipartisan approval on August 11 to a $1 trillion infrastructure bill to rebuild the nation’s deteriorating roads and bridges and fund new climate resilience and broadband initiatives, delivering a key component of President Joe Biden’s agenda. The vote, 69 to 30, was uncommonly bipartisan. The yes votes included Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and 18 others from his party who shrugged off increasingly shrill efforts by former President Donald Trump to derail it. “This historic investment in infrastructure is what I believe you, the American people, want, what you’ve been asking for for a long, long time,” President Biden said from the White House as he thanked Republicans for showing “a lot of courage.” Senator McConnell, who publicly declared that his priority was stopping the Biden agenda, said in a statement that “I was proud to support today’s historic bipartisan infrastructure deal and prove that both sides of the political aisle can still come together around common-sense solutions.” The measure faces a potentially rocky and time-consuming path in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a majority of the nearly 100-member Progressive Caucus have said they will not vote on it unless and until the Senate passes a separate, even more ambitious $3.5 trillion social policy bill this fall. That could put the infrastructure bill on hold for weeks, if not months.
The recently passed infrastructure bill is one of the largest passed by the Senate in recent years. It would be the largest infusion of federal investment into infrastructure projects in more than a decade, touching nearly every facet of the American economy and fortifying the nation’s response to the warming of the planet. Funding for the modernization of the nation’s power grid would reach record levels, as would projects to manage climate risks. Hundreds of billions of dollars would go to repairing and replacing aging public works projects. With $550 billion in new federal spending, the measure would provide $65 billion to expand high-speed internet access; $110 billion for roads, bridges, and other projects; $25 billion for airports; and the most funding for Amtrak since the passenger rail service was founded in 1971. It would also renew and revamp existing infrastructure and transportation programs set to expire at the end of September.
Its success, painstakingly negotiated largely by a group of Republican and Democratic Senators in consultation with White House officials, is a vindication of President Joe Biden’s belief that a bipartisan compromise was possible on a priority that has long been shared by both parties, even at a moment of deep political division. “This is what it looks like when elected leaders take a step toward healing our country’s divisions rather than feeding those very divisions,” Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), a key negotiator, said before the bill’s passage. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), said that “everyone involved in this effort can be proud of what this body is achieving today — the Senate is doing its job.”
With a bipartisan victory pocketed, Democrats turned immediately to a more partisan venture, a second social policy package that would fulfill the remainder of their spending priorities. The Senate’s $3.5 trillion social policy budget, which is expected to pass along party lines later in the week, will allow Senate committees to draft legislation packed with policies to address climate change, health, education, and paid family and medical leave, and pass it over the threat of a filibuster. It will also include tax increases and is expected to generate unanimous Republican opposition. “Despite this long road we’ve taken, we have finally, finally reached the finish line,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). But, directing his comments to colleagues eager to take up unaddressed priorities, he added, “We are moving on to a second track, which will make a generational transformation.”
The Senate vote capped a grueling, months-long negotiation between the Biden administration and Senators in both parties over the scope and size of an infrastructure bill. After an abbreviated effort to work with Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), on a plan that could win backing from Republican leaders, President Joe Biden turned his focus to a group of 10 moderate Republicans and Democrats who had helped strike the compromise that paved the way for a postelection pandemic relief package in December. The Senators and top White House officials spent weeks debating how to structure and finance the legislation over late-night meals, virtual meetings, and phone calls. Even after the group triumphantly announced an outline in June, it took a month to translate that framework into legislation. Along the way, the effort appeared on the brink of collapse, after it failed a test vote in the Senate and former President Donald Trump sniped at it from the sidelines, trying to persuade Republicans that they would pay a steep political price for supporting it.
“When we have more people on both sides of the aisle who want to do things in a partisan way, as opposed to figuring out how we can work together, I don’t think that’s in the best interests of the country,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), one of the key negotiators, said in an interview. “It was really important for the continued relationships within the Senate that are so important to getting things dome. Negotiators were particularly bedeviled by the question of how to pay for their plan. Republicans declared that they would not support any legislation that raised taxes and rejected a proposal to beef up IRS enforcement against tax cheats, and Democrats ruled out raising user fees for drivers.
Democrats and President Joe Biden, who had initially proposed a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, made significant concessions. The package includes far less funding than they had wanted for lead pipe replacement, transit, and clean energy projects, among others. To finance what remained, analysts said the government would most likely have to borrow heavily. On August 5, the Congressional Budget Office said the legislation would add $256 billion to the deficit over 10 years, contradicting the claims of its authors that their bill would be fully paid for. That is nearly half of the new spending in the legislation, which includes a patchwork of measures purported to raise revenue to pay for it, including repurposing unspent pandemic relief funds, more tightly regulating cryptocurrency and delaying carrying out a Trump-era rule that would change the way drug companies can offer discounts to health plans for Medicare patients.
The infrastructure bill also carries major policy changes. It amounts to a tacit, bipartisan acknowledgment that the country is ill-prepared for a worsening climate. Billions of dollars would be invested in projects to protect homes from weather calamities, move vulnerable communities out of harm’s way and support new approaches to countering climate change. It also includes $73 billion to update the nation’s electricity grid so it can carry more renewable energy, $7.5 billion to construct electric vehicle charging stations, $17.5 billion for clean buses and ferries, and $15 billion for removing lead pipes. The agreement targets critical resources toward underserved communities, although not as much as President Joe Biden had requested. It would direct $1 billion over five years, slightly more than half of it in new federal funding, to a program to help reconnect communities divided by highway construction, as well as millions of dollars to help improve access to running water in tribal and Alaska Native communities.
The infrastructure bill also includes money to restore lakes across the country, $66 billion in new funding for Amtrak, and more funding for programs intended to provide safe commutes for pedestrians. It also creates a $350 million pilot program for projects that reduce collisions between vehicles and wildlife. The bill dedicates an increasing amount each year for grants to clean up drinking water by removing lead-contaminated pipes and making other infrastructure upgrades. The legislation reserves at least $25 million per year for “small and disadvantaged communities.” In the days before the measure passed, senators engaged in a last-ditch attempt to allow some exemptions to strict tax regulations on cryptocurrency brokers that had been included in the original bill, after pushback from senators in both parties. But without agreement on other amendments, negotiators ultimately failed to secure unanimous consent to make those changes.
Despite the fact that the infrastructure bill passed the Senate by a decent margin, legislation faces a tricky path in the House, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said she will not take it up until the Senate clears the reconciliation bill. The House has also passed its own infrastructure bill, which includes more money for climate change mitigation and nearly $5.7 billion to pay for 1,473 home district projects, or earmarks, that the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee vetted. A handful of moderate Democrats have urged House Speaker Pelosi to avoid delaying a stand-alone vote on the bipartisan agreement. But leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in a letter to Pelosi, warned that a majority of its 96 members confirmed they would withhold their support for the legislation until the second, far more expansive package cleared the reconciliation process in the Senate.
The US Supreme Court on February 22 brought a formal end to eight lingering disputes pursued by former President Donald Trump and his allies related to the Presidential election including a Republican challenge to the extension of Pennsylvania’s deadline to receive mail-in ballots. The justices turned away appeals by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania and Republican members of the state legislature of a ruling by Pennsylvania’s top court ordering officials to count mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and received up to three days later. Three of the nine-member court’s six conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the decision not to hear the Pennsylvania case.
Former President Donald Trump made false claims that the Presidential election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud and irregularities. From the day after the Presidential election until the middle of December, Trump’s legal team filed some 40 election-related lawsuits challenging the results in seven states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico). The Supreme Court ruled these disputes as invalid on December 11 in 1 7-2 decision, with even Trump’s own Supreme Court appointees ruling against him.
The case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans concerned 9,428 ballots out of 6.9 million cast in the state. The Supreme Court previously rejected a Republican request to block the lower court ruling allowing the ballots to be counted. In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court should resolve whether non-legislators, including elections officials and courts, have any power to set election rules. Thomas said it was fortunate that the state high court’s ruling did not involve enough ballots to affect the election’s outcome.
US President Joe Biden, on February 19, drew a sharp contrast with the foreign policy of his much-derided predecessor, Donald Trump, and urged democracies to work together to challenge abuses by autocratic states such as China and Russia. In his first big appearance as President on the global stage, an online “virtual visit” to Europe, President Biden sought to re-establish the US as a multilateral team player after four years of divisive “America First” policies under Trump. Speaking to the Munich Security Conference, the Democratic president distanced himself from the more transactional foreign policy of Republican Trump, who angered allies by breaking off global accords and threatening to end defense assistance unless they toed his line. “I know the past few years have strained and tested our transatlantic relationship, but the US is determined – determined – to re-engage with Europe, to consult with you, to earn back our position of trusted leadership,” he said.
Several years ago as a private citizen at the Munich Security Conference, now-President Joe Biden reassured participants rattled by the Trump presidency, telling them: “We will be back.” On February 19, he told the virtual online audience: “America is back.” President Biden’s focus on collaboration echoed his message during a private videoconference with the leaders of the Group of Seven advanced economies, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, a senior administration official said. Biden plans to join G7 members for an in-person summit hosted by the UK in June. His spokeswoman said he would not ask Russia to join the group, as had been proposed by Trump.
US partnerships had survived because they were “rooted in the richness of our shared democratic values,” President Joe Biden said. “They’re not transactional. They’re not extractive. They’re built on a vision of the future where every voice matters.” He said US allies must stand firm against the challenges posed by China, Iran, and Russia. “The Kremlin attacks our democracies and weaponizes corruption to try to undermine our system of governance,” he said. “(Russian President Vladimir) Putin seeks to weaken the European project and our NATO alliance. He wants to undermine our transatlantic unity and our resolve,” Biden said.
President Joe Biden also stressed what he called America’s “unshakeable” commitment to the 30-member NATO alliance, another switch from Trump, who called NATO outdated and even suggested at one point that the US could withdraw from the alliance. President Biden also arrived bearing gifts, a $4 billion pledge of support for global Coronavirus vaccination efforts, the re-entry of the United States into the Paris climate accord, and the prospect of a nearly $2 trillion spending measure that could bolster both the US and global economies. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson joined other leaders in cheering Biden’s remarks. “America is unreservedly back as the leader of the free world and that is a fantastic thing,” he told the conference.
President Joe Biden said the world was at an inflection point, but he was convinced that democracies, not autocracies, offered the best path forward for the world. He said major market economies and democracies needed to work together to tackle challenges posed by great-power competitors like Russia and China, and global issues ranging from nuclear proliferation to climate change and cybersecurity. He took particular aim at China, the world’s second-largest economy, and its failure to abide by international standards, arguing that democracies must shape the rules to govern the advance of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. “We have to push back against the Chinese government’s economic abuses and coercion that undercut the foundations of the international economic system,” he said. Chinese companies, he said, should be held to the same standards that applied to US and European companies. “We must stand up for the democratic values that make it possible for us to accomplish any of this, pushing back against those who would monopolize and normalize repression,” he said.
Reparations have been used in other circumstances to offset large moral and economic debt, paid to Japanese Americans interned during World War Two, to families of Holocaust survivors, and to Blacks in post-apartheid South Africa. But the US has never made much headway in discussions of whether or how to compensate African Americans for more than 200 years of slavery and help make up for racial inequality. HR-40, a bill to fund the study of “slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies” has been floated in Congress for more than 30 years, but never taken up for a full vote. Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee reintroduced it in January. Fellow Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen, who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, told a hearing on February 17 it was fitting to consider HR-40 at a time when the country is reckoning with police violence against African Americans and a pandemic that has disproportionately affected African Americans.
President Biden told the Washington Post last year that “we must acknowledge that there can be no realization of the American dream without grappling with the original sin of slavery, and the centuries-long campaign of violence, fear, and trauma wrought upon Black people in this country.” But like nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates at the time, he did not embrace the idea of specific payments to enslaved people’s descendants, instead promising “major actions to address systemic racism” and further study. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last June following the death in police custody in Minneapolis of George Floyd, an African-American man, found clear divisions along partisan and racial lines, with only one in 10 white respondents supporting the idea and half of African American respondents endorsing it.
Calls have been growing from some politicians, academics, and economists for such payments to be made to an estimated 40 million African Americans. Any federal reparations program could cost trillions of dollars, they estimate. Supporters say such payments would act as an acknowledgment of the value of the forced, unpaid labor that supported the economy of Southern US states until the Civil War ended slavery in 1865, the broken promise of land grants after the Civil War, and the burden of the century and a half of legal and de facto segregation that followed.
President Joe Biden expressed optimism on February 16 that most US schools would be open by late spring and vowed to continue accelerating the country’s Coronavirus vaccination program, as he sought to elevate his agenda now the drama of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial is over. In a wide-ranging televised town hall that touched on the pandemic, economic relief, China-US relations, and race and policing, Biden also aimed to build public support for his $1.9 trillion Coronavirus relief plan, which is awaiting congressional action. “Now’s the time to go big,” he said during a CNN prime-time broadcast, as he fielded questions from voters at the landmark Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “If we pass this bill alone, we’ll create 7 million jobs this year.”
After a parent and a teacher asked how President Joe Biden planned to ensure that schools could open safely amid the pandemic, the Democratic president said he anticipated that “most” elementary and middle schools would have in-person classes five days a week by the end of his first 100 days in office. He also said he believes teachers should be moved closer to the front of the line for inoculation. “I think that we should be vaccinating teachers – we should move them up in the hierarchy,” Biden said, although he noted that states, not the federal government, have the authority to decide how to prioritize vaccinations. Biden said he expected everyone who wanted a vaccine would be able to get one by July when his administration will have secured enough shots to inoculate all Americans. But he also warned that the recovery from the pandemic that has killed more than 485,000 people in the United States would still take many months and urged people to wear masks, maintain social distance, and wash hands for the foreseeable future.
The February 16 visit, as well as a trip scheduled for February 18 that will take President Joe Biden to a Michigan vaccine manufacturing site, offered the President an opportunity to tout the importance of a new relief bill even as Republicans remain largely opposed to its massive price tag. President Biden wants Congress to pass the legislation in the coming weeks in order to get $1,400 stimulus checks out to Americans and bolster unemployment payments. Some aspects of the bill, including Biden’s push to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, may have a difficult time gaining enough support to pass. After a small business owner raised concerns at the town hall address, Biden suggested he might be willing to consider a more gradual phase-in.
A CNN poll released on October 6 found Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump by 16 points, his most comprehensive lead of the election cycle. Biden leads Trump 57 to 41 percent in the survey conducted after the first presidential debate and partially after the President’s Coronavirus diagnosis. The survey also found likely voters supporting Biden by wide margins on several issues. Voters prefer the former Vice President on Supreme Court nominations, 57 to 41 percent. Biden also leads on health care, 59 to 39 percent, and on the Coronavirus pandemic, 59 to 38 percent. Biden’s lead is 62 to 36 percent on racial inequality, and he leads on crime and public safety at 55 to 43 percent. The two are statistically tied on the economy, with 50 percent preferring Biden versus 48 percent preferring Trump.
The survey also finds Joe Biden leading on whom respondents consider honest and trustworthy, 58 to 33 percent. He also leads on the question of which candidate “cares about people like you,” 58 to 38 percent, and on who has a clear plan to solve the country’s problems, 55 to 39 percent. While most surveys show Biden leading Trump among women, the CNN poll shows him beating President Donald Trump among women by a 2 to 1 margin, at 66 to 32 percent. This is an increase from a September poll that put his lead at 20 percentage points. The former vice president’s lead among people of color has also widened, from 28 points in September to 42 points in October. Fifty-seven percent of respondents who watched last week’s debate said Biden did the better job, compared to 26 percent who chose Trump and 14 percent who said neither.
Overall, this most recent polling should be a major sign of concern for the Trump campaign. Since assuming office in 2017, President Donald Trump has done little to expand his shrinking base of support. His mishandling of the Coronavirus pandemic, racial unrest, and the economy has only served to reduce his public support to record-low levels. Assuming that these polling trends continue, it is likely that Joe Biden will win the 2020 Presidential election with a historic margin of victory.
President Donald Trump declined on September 23 to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the Presidential election to Democratic rival Joe Biden and said he expected the election battle to end up before the Supreme Court. “We’re going to have to see what happens,” President Trump told reporters at the White House when asked whether he would commit to transferring power. Trump, who substantially trails Biden in national opinion polls, has repeatedly cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, asserting without evidence that mail-in voting would lead to fraud and a “rigged” outcome. “The ballots are a disaster,” Trump said. Democrats have encouraged voting by mail as a way to cast ballots safely during the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of Americans, including much of the military, have cast absentee ballots by mail for years without problems. In 2016, Trump also raised questions about whether he would accept the results of the election. He went on to win the presidency.
Overall, the reaction to President Donald Trump’s comments was met with scorn by members of both political parties. Joe Biden, while speaking to reporters in Delaware, said Trump’s comments on the transition of power were “irrational.” His campaign said it was prepared for any “shenanigans” from Trump, and reiterated comments from July that “the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.” Mitt Romney, a rare Trump critic among Republican senators, said on Twitter that “Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus. Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable.” Additionally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, two of President Trump’s staunchest congressional allies, denounced the President’s statements and underscored that there will be a peaceful transfer of power assuming that President Trump loses re-election.
Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus. Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable.
Despite the overwhelmingly negative reaction to President Donald Trump’s comments, they were generally brushed aside by some of President Trump’s political allies. For example, Senator Mike Braun (R-IN), a strong Trump supporter, said that the topic is “preposterous” and no one should focus on the President’s equivocation. “He stokes the fire sometimes,” Braun said. “If you took it seriously it would be alarming. And I don’t think that that’s the case.” Additionally, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), attempted to shift the argument and claimed that Joe Biden will do the same if he loses to Trump. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer chastised Senate Republicans for their response to the president, arguing “this is not a partisan issue” and that “democracy is at stake.”
President Donald Trump, who is moving quickly to nominate a successor to liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said that he thinks the election “will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.” A Senate confirmation vote before the election would seal a 6-3 conservative majority on the court, potentially spelling trouble for Democrats should it be called on to decide any legal dispute over the results of the election. “This scam that the Democrats are pulling, it’s a scam, the scam will be before the United States Supreme Court, and I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation,” President Trump said. Only one US presidential election, the 2000 contest between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, has had its outcome determined by the Supreme Court.
Overall, President Donald Trump openly floating the idea of ignoring the results of the Presidential election and instead opting to stay in power despite the results may spell the end of democratic governance in the US. For example, a hallmark of any Democratic political system is the peaceful transfer of power. Without assurances for peaceful transitions of power, a democratic system will likely become unstable and ultimately collapse into dictatorship. Additionally, there are some parallels between President Donald Trump’s actions over the course of his Presidency and the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany during the early 1930s. For example, both Trump and Hitler demonized the press, sought to create common enemies to distract their people from their power grabs and failed policies, and promoted nationalism and militarism as a way to “make their countries great again.” It is imperative for the American people to make their voices heard at the ballot box to prevent America from inadvertently sliding into fascism and autocracy, as was the case in Germany during the early 1930s.
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party jointly raised $210 million in August, a robust sum but one dwarfed by the record $364.5 million raised by Democrats and their nominee, Joe Biden. Trump’s campaign released its figure on September 9, several days later than usual, and nearly a week after the Biden campaign unveiled its total, the highest for any one month during a presidential campaign. The President’s reelection team said it brought in more money during its party’s convention than the Democrats did in theirs, and officials insisted they “will have all the resources we need” ahead of November. “Both campaigns are raising massive amounts of money but have very different priorities about how to spend it,” said Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien. “In addition to advertising, President Trump’s campaign has invested heavily in a muscular field operation and ground game that will turn out our voters, while the Biden campaign is waging almost exclusively an air war. We like our strategy better.” The noticeable fundraising gap between the two candidates was certain to further rattle Republicans already nervous about Biden’s advantage over Trump in some battleground states that could decide the election. And whispers about a financial disadvantage led President Trump himself this week to suggest he may put some of his own fortunes into the race.
Joe Biden’s August total spoke to the enthusiasm among Democrats to oust Trump from office. The flood of new contributions came from grass-roots supporters as well as deep-pocketed donors, and should alleviate any lingering concern over whether Democrats will be able to inundate the airwaves in key states. The Trump campaign, however, faces questions about how it has managed to lose a massive financial advantage. Announcing for reelection the day of his inauguration in 2017, which allowed him to begin raising money right away, President Donald Trump built an enormous war chest early on that advisers believed put him at a big advantage over the eventual Democratic nominee.
President Donald Trump’s reelection effort, including the Republican National Committee, has spent more than $800 million so far, while Joe Biden and the Democrats have spent about $414 million through July, according to campaign spending reports. But President Trump’s team has also gone dark on the airwaves for stretches as the general election has heated up, raising questions as to whether it was short on cash. Trump campaign officials have kicked off a review of expenditures, including those authorized by former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who was demoted this summer. Some of his decisions have raised eyebrows, including a $100 million blitz earlier this year before voters were largely paying attention, though that plan was defended by Trump in a Twitter post. Parscale also had a car and driver, unusual perks for a campaign manager, and his spending was the subject of an ad campaign by the Lincoln Project, a group of current and former Republicans looking to defeat Trump. The ad imagined a glitzy Parscale lifestyle full of luxury cars and a tony condo in Florida. The ad infuriated Trump, who has long been sensitive to the perception that others are enriching themselves on his name. And many in the campaign, who largely liked Parscale, grumbled that he rarely showed in the suburban Virginia campaign headquarters, instead frequently calling in from his home in Fort Lauderdale.
Some of the Trump campaign’s expenditures clearly were designed with the President in mind, including a series of cable buys solely in Washington, a Democratic stronghold yet a TV market personally viewed by President Donald Trump, a voracious consumer of television news. Moreover, the campaign dropped millions on a swaggering World Series ad as well as two on Super Bowl game day intended to match former Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg’s $10 million spending that day that totaled more than Trump’s combined advertising in Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Minnesota.
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale had been a favorite of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who is perceived to be the de facto campaign manager. But Kushner soured on Parscale since the debacle of President Trump’s intended comeback rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this summer and the President has complained to advisers that the campaign squandered its massive fundraising advantage, according to two campaign officials not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations. But even Parscale’s internal critics give him credit for helping the Trump campaign construct an unparalleled Republican operation to attract small donors online. Parscale, who did not respond to a request for comment, directed a major investment in digital ads and list-building that appears to have largely paid for itself. Stepien, who replaced Parscale as campaign manager in July, says he is “carefully managing the budget.” He also says the team’s advertising will be “nimble,” and include a TV spree in early-voting states as well as an urban radio campaign in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida that will contrast Trump’s record for African-American voters with Joe Biden. The increased focus on African-American voters has become a key strategy for President Donald Trump, who may win the highest percentage of African-American votes for a Republican candidate since Richard Nixon in 1972.
“We have much more money than we had last time going into the last two months. But if we needed any more, I’d put it up,” President Donald Trump said on September 8, vowing to open his wallet. “If I have to, I would.” Campaign officials, however, privately acknowledge that it is unlikely President Trump will spend much of his own money, something he resisted doing during the general election four years ago. Perhaps in an effort to bury disappointing news, the campaign released its numbers just a short time after the release of explosive excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book in which Trump acknowledges knowingly downplaying the severity of the coronavirus pandemic to the American public. In August, as the President’s campaign held a busy calendar of events, he upped his fundraising haul from $72 million in July. Biden’s campaign raised $49 million in July, and Democratic officials attributed the eye-popping amount raised in August to antipathy toward Trump, the selection of California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, and a convention that showcased the nominee’s empathy.
Michelle Obama delivered a scathing indictment of President Donald Trump’s policies and character August 17 on the first night of the all-virtual Democratic National Convention accusing the White House of sowing “chaos” and “division” and showing a “total and utter lack of empathy.” Coming at the end of a jam-packed two-hour program that tackled the coronavirus crisis, racial justice and the nation’s economic woes, Obama began by acknowledging Americans’ weariness with the current state of affairs. “I know a lot of folks are reluctant to tune into a political convention right now or to politics in general. Believe me, I get that,” she said. “You know I hate politics.” But the former first lady, who has never entertained calls to run for office despite being one of the most popular women in the world, said now is no time to check out. “If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can, and they will if we don’t make a change in this election,” she said.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama said President Donald Trump “is clearly in over his head” in handling the Coronavirus pandemic despite ample time to catch up. “He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is,” she said. Obama added: “Whenever we look to this White House for some leadership or consolation or any semblance of steadiness, what we get instead is chaos, division, and a total and utter lack of empathy. We know that what’s going on in this country is just not right.” The former first lady warned that Trump would do everything he could to stay in power and that the only way to stop him was to commit to vote him out in overwhelming numbers. “We’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night (to vote) if we have to,” Obama said. “We have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.” On August 18, Trump responded on Twitter to the former first lady, saying that he became President because of “the job done by your husband, Barack Obama.”
Somebody please explain to @MichelleObama that Donald J. Trump would not be here, in the beautiful White House, if it weren’t for the job done by your husband, Barack Obama. Biden was merely an afterthought, a good reason for that very late & unenthusiastic endorsement…..
Speaking before Michelle Obama, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont made a similar appeal, focused not on the politically weary but on the politically active people who supported him. He subtly invoked his own Jewish family’s experience in the Holocaust to warn that Trump is trying to destroy democracy. “Under this administration, authoritarianism has taken root in our country. I, and my family, and many of yours, know the insidious way authoritarianism destroys democracy, decency and humanity,” Sanders said. “As long as I am here, I will work with progressives, with moderates, and, yes, with conservatives to preserve this nation from a threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat.” Sanders touted the success his two presidential campaigns have had in moving the Democratic Party and the nation to the left, but said it could all be for naught if Biden does not win. “I say to you, to everyone who supported other candidates in the primary and to those who may have voted for Donald Trump in the last election: The future of our democracy is at stake,” he said. “We must come together, defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as our next president and vice president.”
The socially distanced 2020 Democratic convention is arguably the most unique political convention since the 1944 Democratic and Republican conventions, which occurred during the height of World War II. While both conventions had full coverage on radio, the television coverage of both conventions aired on a one-day film delay due to wartime restrictions and the primitive state of television broadcasting at the time. These technical issues reduced the feelings of immediacy that live coverage would have brought about. Similarly to the 1944 political conventions, the largely virtual nature of the 2020 conventions perhaps reduced the effectiveness of the live convention coverage. Actress Eva Longoria served as emcee, interviewing everyday Americans over video chat between politicians’ speeches, some of which concluded with many tiny video boxes of people applauding from their couch at home. The virtual format allowed for a wider range of backdrops and for the program to stick closely to schedule, but it also felt eerily quiet and rootless at times with no cheering crowds in a packed arena to center the proceedings. There were a few minor technical glitches, such as speakers unsure of when to begin, but they did little to disrupt the flow.
Here are the main events that occurred in Politics this week:
1. 2020 Election: Joe Biden Selects Kamala Harris As Running Mate
Democratic nominee Joe Biden selected California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate this week.
Joe Biden has selected California senator Kamala Harris as his Vice-Presidential running mate, a historic choice he believes will bolster his chances of beating Donald Trump in an election year shaped by the Coronavirus pandemic and a national reckoning on race. Senator Harris, Biden’s one-time presidential rival and a barrier-breaking former prosecutor, is the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India and is the first African-American woman and the first Asian-American to be nominated for a major party’s presidential ticket. “I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked Kamala Harris – a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants – as my running mate,” Biden wrote on Twitter. In a tweet, Harris said she was “honored” to join Biden on the Democratic ticket and pledged to “do what it takes to make him our Commander-in-Chief”. Biden announced his selection in a text and email message to supporters. His campaign said the two would hold their first event together on August 12, in Biden’s home town of Wilmington, Delaware.
I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked @KamalaHarris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate.
2. President Donald Trump Signs Four Executive Orders Providing Economic Relief Amid Coronavirus Pandemic
Amid a breakdown in congressional negotiations, President Donald Trump signed several executive orders this week providing economic relief amid the Coronavirus pandemic.
At his Bedminster, New Jersey golf resort on August 8, President Donald Trumpsigned four executive actions to provide economic relief amid the coronavirus pandemic. The actions amount to a stopgap measure, after failing to secure an agreement with Congress. The three memorandums and one executive order called for extending some enhanced unemployment benefits, taking steps to stop evictions, continuing the suspension of student loan repayments, and deferring payroll taxes. President Trump promised that funds would be “rapidly distributed” to Americans in need, although it remains unclear whether the president has the authority to do certain steps unilaterally, without congressional approval. In any case, legal challenges are expected, which could delay any disbursement of funds.
3. July Jobs Numbers Reveal Mixed Economic Outlook
The July jobs report, which was released this week, revealed a still weakened US economy reeling with the Coronavirus pandemic and an uneven recovery.
The US economy added another 1.8 million jobs in July, a sharp slowdown from June and a small step for an economy that is still down almost 13 million jobs since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic. It was the third straight month of improvement after the spring lockdown that decimated the labor market, and the July job gain exceeded economists’ expectations. Even so, it was far fewer than the 4.8 million jobs added in June. The unemployment rate fell to 10.2%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported August 9 but remains above the recent highs of 10% that were recorded in November of 1982 and October of 2009.
4. 2020 Election: NAACP Announces Initiative to Boost African-American Voter Turnout in Key Swing States
The NAACP this week annoucned a major voter registration initiative ahead of the 2020 Presidential election.
The NAACP, the largest US civil rights organization, is launching a drive ahead of November’s presidential election to boost African-American voter turnout in six key states, it said on August 12. The initiative aims to enlist the services of about 200,000 “high-propensity” African-American voters, or people who turned out to vote in a high number of recent local, state and presidential elections. Those voters, in turn, will seek to mobilize so-called “low-frequency” African-American voters, people who were registered to vote, but who had not voted in the most recent election cycle or several election cycles, in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all competitive states in the 2020 Presidential election that recently saw Joe Biden leading in the polls. The goal is to increase African-American turnout by more than 5% compared to 2016. That year, African-American voter turnout declined to its lowest level since 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. “We’ve seen the outcome of when we have a drop in voter activity in the Black community,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson. “We have racism germinating from the White House,” he said, stressing the urgency of getting African American voters to the polls.
Senate Republicans this week unveiled a $1 trillion Coronavirus economic stimulus package.
Senate Republicans on July 27 proposed a $1 trillion coronavirus aid package hammered out with the Trump administration, paving the way for talks with Democrats on how to help Americans as expanded unemployment benefits for millions of workers expire this week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called the proposal a “tailored and targeted” plan focused on getting children back to school and employees back to work and protecting corporations from lawsuits while slashing the expiring supplemental unemployment benefits of $600 a week by two-thirds. The plan sparked immediate opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats decried it as too limited compared to their $3 trillion proposal that passed the House of Representatives in May, while some Republicans called it too expensive.
2. 2020 Election: Joe Biden Announces That He Is Close To Naming His Running-Mate
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden announced that he is close to naming his Vice Presidential choice and will likely unveil his choice in a week.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden said on July 28 he will choose his Vice Presidential running mate next week. The former Vice President’s comment came during a news conference after a speech in Wilmington, Delaware. Asked by CNN whether he will meet in person with finalists for the role, Biden said, “We’ll see.” Biden has said he will choose a female running mate, and has faced pressure within the party to choose a woman of color. His campaign’s vetting process has played out amid the Coronavirus pandemic, making meetings that could allow Biden to better get to know those being considered more difficult. Noting that news crews were stationed outside his home in Delaware, Biden joked that he is “going to try to figure out how to trick you all so I can meet with them in person.” “I don’t think it matters, actually,” he said.
3. Trump Administration Rolls Back Fair Housing Provision Intended On Combatting Racial Segregation In Housing
Trump Administration this week rolled back a fair housing provision intended tp combatting racial segregation in housing.
The Trump administration moved on July 23 to eliminate an Obama-era program intended to combat racial segregation in suburban housing, saying it amounted to federal overreach into local communities. The rule, introduced in 2015, requires cities and towns to identify patterns of discrimination, implement corrective plans, and report results. The administration’s decision to complete a process of rescinding it culminates a yearslong campaign to gut the rule by conservative critics and members of the administration who claimed it overburdened communities with complicated regulations. A new rule, which removes the Obama administration’s requirements for localities, will become effective 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register.
4. US Senate Introduces Legislation To Curb Big Tech’s Ad Business Activities
US Senator Josh Hawley this week introduced legislation to curb big tech’s ad business activities.
On July 28 Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), a major critic of the big tech industry, introduced legislation that would penalize large tech companies that sell or show targeted advertisements by threatening a legal immunity enjoyed by the industry, the latest onslaught on Big Tech’s business practices. The bill, titled “Behavioral Advertising Decisions Are Downgrading Services (Bad Ads) Act,” aims to crack down on invasive data gathering by large technology companies such as Facebook and Google that target users based on their behavioral insights. It does so by threatening Section 230, part of the Communications Decency Act, that shields online businesses from lawsuits over content posted by users. The legal shield has recently come under scrutiny from both Democrat and Republican lawmakers concerned about online content moderation decisions by technology companies. On July 28, Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI)and Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-SD) will hold a hearing to examine the role of Section 230. The senators recently introduced legislation to reform the federal law.
In May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that seeks new regulatory oversight of tech firms’ content moderation decisions, and he backed legislation to scrap or weaken Section 230 in an attempt to regulate social media platforms. “Big Tech’s manipulative advertising regime comes with a massive hidden price tag for consumers while providing almost no return to anyone but themselves,” said Hawley, an outspoken critic of tech companies and a prominent Trump ally. “From privacy violations to harming children to suppression of speech, the ramifications are very real.” His recent legislation to ban federal employees from using Chinese social media app TikTok on their government-issued phones was passed unanimously by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and will be taken up by the US Senate for a vote.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden said on July 28 he will choose his Vice Presidential running mate next week. The former Vice President’s comment came during a news conference after a speech in Wilmington, Delaware. Asked by CNN whether he will meet in person with finalists for the role, Biden said, “We’ll see.” Biden has said he will choose a female running mate, and has faced pressure within the party to choose a woman of color. His campaign’s vetting process has played out amid the Coronavirus pandemic, making meetings that could allow Biden to better get to know those being considered more difficult. Noting that news crews were stationed outside his home in Delaware, Biden joked that he is “going to try to figure out how to trick you all so I can meet with them in person.” “I don’t think it matters, actually,” he said.
Democratic Presidential candidateJoe Biden has opened up a 13-point lead over President Donald Trump, the widest margin this year, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll as Americans grow more critical of President Trump over the Coronavirus pandemic and protests against police brutality. In the June 10-16 poll, 48% of registered voters said they would back Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in the Presidential election, while 35% said they would support Trump. Biden’s advantage is the biggest recorded by the Reuters/Ipsos poll since Democrats began their state nominating contests this year to pick their party’s nominee to challenge Trump in November. A similar CNN poll from earlier this month showed Biden with a 14-point lead over Trump among registered voters. The Reuters/Ipsos poll also showed that 57% of adults disapproved of Trump’s performance in office, while just 38% approved, marking Trump’s lowest approval rating since November of 2019 when Congress was conducting its impeachment inquiry into the Republican President. In a clear warning sign for Trump, his own support base appears to be eroding. Republicans’ net approval of Trump is down 13 points from March to June, declining every month in that span.
The shift in opinion comes as Americans are whipsawed by the Coronavirus pandemic, the ensuing economic collapse, and the outpouring of anger and frustration following numerous deadly confrontations between police and African-Americans, including the death last month of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. President Donald Trump, who dismissed the threat of the Coronavirus early on, sparred with state governors as they tried to slow its spread and has pushed authorities to allow businesses to reopen despite warnings from health experts about increasing risks of transmission. More than 116,000 people in the US have died from the virus and more than 2 million people have been infected, by far the most in the world. Some states that have reopened such as Florida, Arizona, and Texas are seeing a jump in cases. Altogether, 55% of Americans said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the Coronavirus, while 40% approved, which is the lowest net approval for the President on the subject since Reuters/Ipsos started tracking the question in early March.
President Donald Trump also has been criticized for the way he has responded to the protests that were sparked by George Floyd’s killing. While nearly two-thirds of respondents sympathized with the protesters, according to the poll, Trump has openly flirted with deploying the military to “dominate” them. Earlier this month, police in Washington DC forcibly removed peaceful protesters so that Trump could pose for photographs in front of a church near the White House. As businesses shuttered across the country because of coronavirus lockdowns, Americans have increasingly turned their focus to the economy and jobs as a top concern. In that area, President Trump still has the upper hand over Joe Biden. 43% of registered voters said they thought President Trump would be a better steward of the economy than Biden, while 38% said Biden would be better.
The American economy defied forecasts for a Depression-style surge in Unemployment this week, signaling the economy is picking up faster than anticipated from the coronavirus-inflicted recession amid reopenings and government stimulus. A broad gauge of payrolls rose by 2.5 million in May, trouncing forecasts for a sharp decline following a 20.7 million decrease during the prior month that was the largest in records back to 1939, according to Labor Department data released on June 5. The figures were so astonishing that President Donald Trump held a news conference, where he called the numbers “outstanding” and predicted further improvement before he is up for re-election in November. While the overall picture improved, there remain several underlying issues facing the economy. For example, 21 million Americans remain unemployed with a jobless rate higher than any other time since 1939, indicating a full recovery remains far off with many likely to suffer for some time. And the return to work is uneven, with unemployment ticking up among African Americans to 16.8%, matching the highest since 1984, even as unemployment rates declined among white and Hispanic Americans. That comes amid nationwide protests over police mistreatment of African-Americans, which have drawn renewed attention to race-based inequality.
The latest figures may give a boost to President Donald Trump, who has siginficantly fallen behind Democratic challenger Joe Biden in polls amid dissatisfaction with his response to the pandemic and the death of George Floyd. The numbers could also reduce pressure on policy for another round of fiscal support, with Democrats and Republicans at odds over the timing and scope of new measures following record aid approved by Congress. “The only thing that can stop us is bad policy, like raising taxes and the Green New Deal,” President Trump said on June 5. He also said that he will ask Congress to pass more economic stimulus, including a payroll tax cut.
One caution noted by the US Labor Department is that the unemployment rate “would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” so 16.3% if data were reported correctly, according to the agency’s statement. That refers to workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to other reasons, rather than unemployed on temporary layoff. The broader U-6, or underemployment rate, which includes those who have not searched for a job recently or want full-time employment, fell only slightly to 21.2% in May from 22.8%, which is its highest rate since 1982. In February, it was 7%, with the main unemployment rate at a half-century low of 3.5%.
Here are the main events that occurred in Politics this week:
1.President Trump Threatens To Deploy Military In Response To Protests Against Police Brutality, Systemic Racism in the US
To the surprise of few, President Donald Trump this week threatened to use the military to crack down on the ongoing series of protests in the US against police brutality and systemic racism.
As the nation prepared for another series of violent protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, President Donald Trump on June 1 threatened to deploy the military if states and cities failed to quell the demonstrations. “I am mobilizing all federal and local resources, civilian and military, to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans,” President Trump said during a hastily arranged address at the White House. “Today I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets. Mayors and governors must establish an overwhelming presence until the violence is quelled,” Trump said. “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” said the president. Trump stopped short of invoking the Insurrection Act, an archaic law from 1807 that would allow Trump to deploy active-duty U.S. troops to respond to protests in cities across the country. “During his address, Trump said he was taking “swift and decisive action to protect our great capital, Washington DC,” adding, “What happened in this city last night was a total disgrace.” “As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults, and the wanton destruction of property.”
2. Senate Republicans Block Measure Condemning President Trump’s Response To Anti-Racism Protesters
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell this week block a measure condemning President Trump’s response to anti-racism protesters
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blocked a resolution proposed by Senate Democrats that would have censured President Trump’s response to protesters in Washington, D.C., on June 1, when federal law enforcement officers forcefully removed demonstrators from a park across from the White House. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), introduced the resolution on June 2, saying on the Senate floor that the removal of the protesters was “appalling” and “an abuse of presidential power.” Schumer attempted to pass the measure by unanimous consent, which does not require a vote by the whole Senate but can be blocked by any member. McConnell objected, accusing Democrats of pulling a political stunt in the middle of the crisis sparked by the death of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer pinned his knee to his neck.
3. Presumptive Democratic Nominee Joe Biden Denounces President Trump For His Response To US Protests Over Racism & Police Brutality
In powerful remarks earlier this week, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden denounced President Trump for his racial policies and called for an end to police brutality and institutional racism in the US.
Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden on June 2 blasted President Donald Trump’s response to US protests over racism and police misconduct, vowing to try to heal the country’s racial divide and not “fan the flames of hate.” Speaking in Philadelphia, a city rocked by sometimes violent demonstrations in recent days, the former Vice President sought to draw a vivid contrast between himself and President Trump, whom he will face in the general election. Biden, who served eight years as Vice President under Barack Obama, the first African-American US President, cast himself as the candidate who best understands the longstanding pain and grief in the country’s African-American communities. He said the killing of George Floyd, the African-American man who died at the hands of Minneapolis police last week, was a “wake-up call” for the nation that must force it to address the stain of systemic racism.“We can’t leave this moment thinking we can once again turn away and do nothing,” Biden said. “We can’t.” He accused Trump of turning the nation into “a battlefield riven by old resentments and fresh fears.” “Is this who we want to be?” he asked. “Is this what we want to pass on to our children and grandchildren? Fear, anger, finger-pointing, rather than the pursuit of happiness? Incompetence and anxiety, self-absorption, selfishness?” Biden pledged he would “not traffic in fear or division.”
4. Trump Administration Announces Intentions To Declare Antifa A Terrorist Organization
President Donald Trump this week announced that his administration is considering the left-wing group Antifa a terrorist organization.
President Donald Trump tweeted on May 31 that the US will designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, even though the US government has no existing legal authority to label a wholly domestic group in the manner it currently designates foreign terrorist organizations. Current and former government officials say it would be unconstitutional for the US government to proscribe First Amendment-protected activity inside the US based on its ideology. US law allows terrorist designations for foreign groups since belonging to those groups does not enjoy the same protections. Antifa (short for anti-fascists), describes a broad group of people whose political beliefs lean toward the left-wing of the political spectrum, but do not conform with the Democratic Party platform. Antifa positions can be hard to define, but many members support anti-imperialist viewpoints and policies and protest the amassing of wealth by corporations and elites. Some employ radical or militant tactics to get out their messages. An additional problem with Trump’s is that groups who identify as Antifa are amorphous and lack a centralized leadership structure, though some local activists are highly organized, according to federal law enforcement officials. That has made it difficult for US law enforcement to deal with violence from members of groups that label themselves as Antifa.
The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.
Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden on June 2 blasted President Donald Trump’s response to US protests over racism and police misconduct, vowing to try to heal the country’s racial divide and not “fan the flames of hate.” Speaking in Philadelphia, a city rocked by sometimes violent demonstrations in recent days, the former Vice President sought to draw a vivid contrast between himself and President Trump, whom he will face in the general election. Biden, who served eight years as Vice President under Barack Obama, the first African-American US President, cast himself as the candidate who best understands the longstanding pain and grief in the country’s African-American communities. He said the killing of George Floyd, the African-American man who died at the hands of Minneapolis police last week, was a “wake-up call” for the nation that must force it to address the stain of systemic racism.“We can’t leave this moment thinking we can once again turn away and do nothing,” Biden said. “We can’t.” He accused Trump of turning the nation into “a battlefield riven by old resentments and fresh fears.” “Is this who we want to be?” he asked. “Is this what we want to pass on to our children and grandchildren? Fear, anger, finger-pointing, rather than the pursuit of happiness? Incompetence and anxiety, self-absorption, selfishness?” Biden pledged he would “not traffic in fear or division.”
Joe Biden’s speech on June 2 at Philadelphia’s City Hall marked the first time he has left his home state of Delaware to campaign in person since mid-March when the outbreak of the Coronavirus forced him to halt in-person campaigning indefinitely. While Biden had made public appearances in Delaware in recent days and convened a virtual conference of big-city mayors on June 1, his most recent speech suggested he may soon begin to again move about the country as states slowly re-open. Biden formally launched his White House bid in Philadelphia last year, and it is also where his campaign headquarters, currently empty because of the pandemic, is located. The city was also the birthplace of the US Constitution, which Biden cited in his speech as support of the right to peacefully protest. “Our freedom to speak is the cherished knowledge that lives inside every American,” he said.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s lead over President Donald Trump has fallen by three points over the last week, according to new polling data. The latest survey by Reuters and Ipsos found that Biden led Trump by six points among registered voters, with 45% backing him and 39% favoring Trump. The former Vice President also had a four-point lead among Independent voters. A third of the group (33%) said they would back Biden, while 29% said the same of Trump. When the same poll was published last week, the presumptive Democratic nominee had a nine-point lead on the president, with 47% of polled voters saying they would back Biden as only 38% opted for Trump. The former Vice President also had a stronger eight-point lead among Independent voters polled last week.
Despite the fact that he lost some ground compared to last week, former Vice President Joe Biden is polling well in the twelve battleground states in the 2020 campaign. For example Joe Biden is polling well ahead of President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Hampshire, Maine, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona. Additionally, Biden is polling narrowly ahead of Trump in the battleground states of Texas, Georgia, and Utah. Assuming that his lead continues to remain, is likely that former Vice President Joe Biden will win the 2020 election with a substantial electoral college margin and solid popular vote margin.
In their latest survey on the 2020 election, Ipsos pollsters also found that President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus approval rating remained steady this week as the US death toll in the growing Coronavirus pandemic topped 100,000 on May 27. 41% of polled US adults said they approved of the President’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, down by just a single point on last week. 53% told Ipsos they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, giving the commander-in-chief a net disapproval rating of 12%. When the same poll was conducted the week before, the President’s net coronavirus disapproval rating was at 10%. President Trump’s rating on healthcare reform will make harder reading for the President and his team, with just 38% of polled Americans approving of his handling of the issue and 52% disapproving. However, the President recorded net approval ratings on the economy and employment, despite almost 40 million Americans filing initial jobless claims since March.
Here are the main events that occurred in Politics this week
1.US Unemployment Rate Hits Highest Level In 80 Years
The Labor Department announced this week that the unemployment rate in the US has hit its highest level since 1939 amid measures to limit the spread of the Coronavirus.
As the Coronavirus spread accelerated in March, President Donald Trump and a number of state and local leaders put forth restrictions that led businesses to suddenly shut down and shed millions of workers. Many businesses and households also canceled all travel plans. Analysts warn it could take as long as five years to return to the 3.5% unemployment rate the nation recorded in February, in part because it is unclear what the post-pandemic economy will look like, even if scientists make progress on a vaccine. President Trump, though, claimed in a Fox News interview that there would be a quick rebound. “Those jobs will all be back, and they’ll be back very soon,” Trump said. Former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s expected opponent in November’s presidential election, said that the jobs report illustrated “an economic disaster” that was “made worse” in part by a slow and uneven response to the crisis earlier this year.
The stark employment data could create even more urgency for a number of governors who are debating when to reopen parts of their state economies. Many are weighing the health risks and the economic toll, a harrowing choice, analysts say. Some hope that reopening quickly will get people back to work, but it will be difficult with many businesses operating at partial capacity and parents wrestling with child-care challenges. The sudden economic contraction has already forced millions of Americans to turn to food banks, seek government aid for the first time,or stop paying rent and other bills. As they go without paychecks for weeks, some have also lost health insurance and even put their homes up for sale. There is a growing concern that the damage will be permanent as people fall out of the middle class and young people struggle to launch careers. “The impact on women and youth is particularly shocking and disproportionate,” said Lisa Cook, a professor at Michigan State University and former economic adviser to President Barack Obama. “Those who grew up during the Great Depression were hesitant to spend for the rest of their lives.”
Job losses began in the hospitality sector, which shed 7.7 million jobs in April, but other industries were also heavily affected. Retail lost 2.1 million jobs, and manufacturing shed 1.3 million jobs. White-collar and government jobs that typically prove resilient during downturns were also slashed, with companies shedding 2.1 million jobs and state and local governments losing nearly a million. More state and local government jobs could be cut in the coming weeks as officials deal with severe budget shortfalls. April’s unemployment rate was horrific by any standard, yet economists say it underestimates the extent of the pain. The Labor Department said the unemployment rate would have been about 20 percent if workers who said they were absent from work for “other reasons” had been classified as unemployed or furloughed. The official figure also does not count millions of workers who left the labor force entirely and the 5 million who were forced to scale back to part time.
There is a growing consensus that the economy is not going to bounce back quickly, as President Donald Trump wants, even as more businesses reopen this month. Many restaurants, gyms, and other businesses will be able to operate only at limited capacities, and customers, fearful of venturing out, are proving to be slow to return. And many businesses will not survive. All of this means the economy is going to need far fewer workers for months, or possibly years, to come. “It’s not like turning a light switch and everything goes back to where it was in February,” Loretta Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said in an interview. “We depopulated everything quickly. Repopulating it will take a lot longer.” Mester said the best cure for the economy at this point is probably more virus testing, monitoring, and investment in a COVID-19 treatment. Without those measures, people are unlikely to go out and spend again, even if stores and restaurants reopen. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty about the second half of the year,” Mester said. “Consumer confidence has been really, really bad since mid-March.”
2. 2020 Election Polling: Joe Biden Leads Donald Trump Nationwide
2020 Election polling released this week shows former Vice President Joe Biden with a clear lead over President Donald Trump.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden‘s lead over President Donald Trump now stands at five points, but Trump has an edge in the critical battleground states that could decide the electoral college, according to a new CNN poll. In the new poll, 51% of registered voters nationwide back Biden, while 46% say they prefer Trump, while in the battlegrounds, 52% favor Trump and 45% Biden. Partisans are deeply entrenched in their corners, with 95% of Democrats behind Biden and the same share of Republicans behind Trump. The two are close among independents (50% back Trump, 46% Biden, not a large enough difference to be considered a lead), but Biden’s edge currently rests on the larger share of voters who identify as Democrats. The former Vice President continues to hold healthy leads among women (55% Biden to 41% Trump) and African-Americans (69% Biden to 26% Trump). The two run more closely among men (50% Trump to 46% Biden) and Trump holds a clear edge among whites (55% Trump to 43% Biden). Surprisingly, the poll suggests Biden outpaces Trump among voters over age 45 by a 6-point margin, while the two are near even among those under age 45 (49% Biden to 46% Trump).
Though other recent polling has shown some signs of concern for Joe Biden among younger voters and strength among older ones, few have pegged the race as this close among younger voters. The results suggest that younger voters in the battleground states are tilted in favor of President Donald Trump, a stark change from the last CNN poll in which battleground voters were analyzed in March, even as other demographic groups shifted to a smaller degree. Given the small sample size in that subset of voters, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the movement is significant or a fluke of random sampling. Nationally, Biden holds a lead over Trump among voters age 65 and older, a group that has been tilted Republican in recent presidential elections.
President Donald Trump’s biggest advantage over Joe Biden in the poll comes on his handling of the economy. Most voters, 54%, say they trust the President to better handle the nation’s economy, while 42% say they prefer Biden. An earlier release from the same CNN poll found the public’s ratings of the economy at their worst level since 2013, as a growing share said the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus outbreak could be permanent. But Biden does have the advantage as more trusted to handle the response to the coronavirus outbreak (51% Biden to 45% Trump) and health care (54% Biden to 42% Trump). Voters divide over which of the two has the stamina and sharpness to be President (49% say Trump, 46% Biden), a frequent attack Donald Trump levels against the former Vice President. But Biden outpaces Trump across five other tested attributes. His advantage is the largest on which candidate would unite the country and not divide it (55% say Biden would, 38% Trump), followed by being honest and trustworthy (53% choose Biden, 38% Trump). Biden is seen as caring more about people like you (54% Biden vs. 42% Trump), better able to manage the government effectively (52% Biden to 45% Trump) and more trusted in a crisis (51% Biden to 45% Trump).
The recent CNN polling shows that a majority of Americans say they have an unfavorable view of President Donald Trump (55%) while fewer feel negative about Joe Biden (46%). Among the 14% of registered voters who say they have a negative impression of both Trump and Biden, the former Vice President is the clear favorite in the presidential race: 71% say they would vote for Biden, 19% for Trump. Congressman Justin Amash (I-MI), who announced he is exploring a run for the presidency on the Libertarian ticket, is unknown to 80% of Americans and is viewed more unfavorably (13%) than favorably (8%). As Biden’s campaign moves closer to the selection of a Vice Presidential running mate, 38% of Democratic voters say choosing a candidate who brings racial and ethnic diversity to the Democratic ticket is one of the top two traits they would like to see in Biden’s choice, 34% name executive experience as a top-two trait, 32% say bringing ideological balance to the ticket is one of their top two criteria, and 31% say representing the future of the Democratic Party is that important. Proven appeal to swing voters and the legislative experience was a top tier concern for about a quarter of voters.
3. House Democrats Unveil $3 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Package
Amid Republican opposition, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a $3 trillion Coronavirus relief package this week.
House Democrats on May 12 unveiled a $3 trillion Coronavirus relief measure, an ambitious package with aid for struggling states and another round of direct payments to Americans that Republicans instantly dismissed as an exorbitantly priced and overreaching response to the Coronavirus crisis. The proposal, which spanned 1,815 pages, would add a fifth installment to an already sweeping assistance effort from the federal government, although its cost totaled more than the four previous measures combined. And unlike those packages, which were the product of intense bipartisan negotiations among lawmakers and administration officials who agreed generally on the need for rapid and robust action, the House bill represents an opening gambit in what is likely to be a bracing fight over what is needed to counter the public health and economic tolls of the pandemic. The new proposal includes nearly $1 trillion for state, local and tribal governments and territories, an extension of unemployment benefits, and another round of $1,200 direct payments to American families. The measure would also provide a $25 billion bailout for the Postal Service, which the beleaguered agency has called a critical lifeline, but President Trump has opposed, and $3.6 billion to bolster election security.
“There are those who said, ‘Let’s just pause,’ ” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, invoking a word used by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has said lawmakers should “push the pause button” on further coronavirus aid. “The families who are suffering know that hunger doesn’t take a pause. The rent doesn’t take a pause. The bills don’t take a pause. The hardship of losing a job or tragically losing a loved one doesn’t take a pause.” Senate Republicans immediately rejected the measure. But the House will return to session on May 15 to approve it, Democratic leaders said, along with historic changes to the chamber’s rules that will allow lawmakers for the first time to vote without being physically present in the Capitol.
The measure from House Democrats underscored the gulf between the two parties over how to respond to the coronavirus crisis. Economists and policy experts warn that the government’s relief efforts to date, as unparalleled and far-reaching as they have been, have barely sustained individuals and companies affected by the pandemic, and that abandoning them could result in a deep and protracted recession. But Republicans and the White House have begun to argue that a new round of relief should wait, and Senate Majority Leder Mitch McConnell has said any such aid must be paired with a measure to give companies sweeping protections from a wide range of potential lawsuits as they try to reopen during the pandemic. President Donald Trump and White House officials have also indicated they want any further economic aid legislation to contain tax cuts, although they have yet to agree on which ones to pursue. Democrats are headed in the other direction, as Nancy Pelosi suggested in a letter this week in which she encouraged her colleagues to “think big” about additional federal aid.
Even before Democrats presented their proposal on May 12, top Senate Republicans were voicing vehement opposition, urging restraint in doling out another substantial round of taxpayer dollars as the federal government and banks scramble to distribute the funds from the $2.2 trillion stimulus law enacted in March. And with the US recording its largest monthly deficit in history last month, some Republicans have begun to balk at the prospect of another multitrillion-dollar package, calling for more limited relief. Some Republicans, however, are exploring the possibility of broadening the terms of the stimulus law as an alternative to doling out more funds, but still supporting state and local governments. A small group of Republican senators met with President Donald Trump and top administration officials to discuss giving more flexibility in spending previously allocated funds. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), a close congressional ally of President Donald Trump, said in a statement that he had requested the meeting to discuss his proposal, which would eliminate guardrails set on the $150 billion in the stimulus law, but prohibit the use of the aid for shoring up pension programs. “This is not something designed to deal with reality, but designed to deal with aspirations,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said of the Democrats’ proposal, adding that he would begin discussions with them once Republicans and the White House agreed on how to proceed. “We’re going to insist on doing narrowly targeted legislation
In the legislation unveiled on May 12, Democrats included provisions intended to provide more protections for essential workers. The bill would also provide for $75 billion in mortgage relief and $100 billion for rental assistance. It would substantially expand eligibility and increase the value of some tax credits targeted to the poorest Americans, like the earned-income tax credit. The bill would temporarily suspend a limit on the deduction of state and local taxes from federal income taxes, a move that would disproportionately benefit high-income taxpayers in high-tax areas, and which Democrats have pushed for since the limit was imposed by President Donald Trump’s signature 2017 tax overhaul. The bill also proposes rolling back a widely-criticized tax break for the wealthy included in the stimulus package. That provision permits married couples making at least $500,000 a year to use losses in their business to wipe out their tax bills from gains in the stock market.
Some of the most liberal members of the Democratic caucus, however, balked at the proposal, arguing that it fell short of what was needed to salvage the American economy and support vulnerable populations. The Congressional Progressive Caucus urged its members to officially inform party leaders that they were undecided on the measure, effectively threatening to block it. They also called for the vote to be delayed by a week, and for a meeting of all Democrats to discuss the legislation. “In no circumstance are we ready to vote on this on Friday,” Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in an interview that “We need a full caucus conversation, an open dialogue, and we need to figure out how to address the crisis with a solution that matches its scale.” Congresswoman Jayapal has called for the federal government to guarantee business payrolls, extend emergency health coverage for the uninsured and tie relief funding for states to requirements that they follow guidelines from health experts as they begin to reopen. She said she grew frustrated when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi informed Democrats on a conference call that a payroll guarantee program would not be included in the proposal.
4. In A Major Defeat For Civil Liberty Advocates, Senate Rejects Proposal Limiting Federal Law Enforcement Officials From Obtaining Internet Search History Data Without A Warrant
The Senate this week rejected a proposal by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) to limit federal law enforcement officials from obtaining internet search history data without a warrant.
The Senate came one vote short on May 12 of approving a proposal to prevent federal law enforcement from obtaining internet browsing information or search history without seeking a warrant. The bipartisan amendment won a solid majority of the Senate but just shy of the 60 votes needed for adoption. The 59-37 vote to allow such warrantless searches split both parties, with Republicans and Democrats voting for and against. The amendment’s authors, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana, have long opposed the expansion and renewal of surveillance laws that the government uses to track and fight terrorists. They say the laws can infringe on people’s rights. “Should law-abiding Americans have to worry about their government looking over their shoulders from the moment they wake up in the morning and turn on their computers to when they go to bed at night?” Wyden asked. “I believe the answer is no. But that’s exactly what the government has the power to do without our amendment.”
The amendment vote came as the Senate considered the renewal of three surveillance provisions that expired in March before Congress left due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The legislation is a bipartisan, House-passed compromise that has the backing of President Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It would renew the authorities and impose new restrictions to try and appease civil liberties advocates. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), encouraged senators to vote against Wyden and Daines’ amendment, saying the legislation was already a “delicate balance.” He warned changing it could mean the underlying provisions won’t be renewed. “We cannot let the perfect become the enemy of the good when key authorities are currently sitting expired and unusable,” McConnell said on the Senate floor before the vote. The House passed the compromise legislation shortly before the chamber left town two months ago, but McConnell could not find enough support to approve the measure in the Senate, and instead passed a simple extension of the surveillance laws. The close outcome on the Wyden and Daines amendment indicates that a majority of the Senate would like to see the House legislation changed to better protect civil liberties.
Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank, said it was striking that the amendment failed by only one vote and said the vote total would have been “inconceivable” five years ago. “It suggests a sea change in attitudes” following revelations in problems with how the FBI has used its secret surveillance powers, Sanchez said. “It goes to the sort of collapse in trust in the intelligence community to deploy these authorities in a restrained way.” The Senate did adopt an amendment by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont that would boost third-party oversight to protect individuals in some surveillance cases. If the Senate passes the legislation with that amendment intact, the bill would then have to go back to the House for approval instead of to the president’s desk for signature. A third amendment by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a Republican who is a longtime skeptic of surveillance programs, is expected to be considered before a final vote. Paul’s amendment would require the government to go to a traditional federal court, instead of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to get a warrant to eavesdrop on an American.
Bernie Sanders rebounded late in the evening in delegate-rich Western states: He was quickly declared the winner in Colorado and Utah after polls closed there, and he also claimed the largest delegate lode of the primary race, California. Sanders also easily carried his home state of Vermont. Yet Joe Biden’s sweep of states across the South and the Midwest showed he had the makings of a formidable coalition that could propel him through the primaries. As he did in South Carolina, Biden rolled to victory in several states with the support of large majorities of African-Americans. And he also performed well with a demographic that was crucial to the party’s success in the 2018 midterm elections: college-educated white voters. “We were told, well, when you got to Super Tuesday, it’d be over,” a triumphant Biden said at a celebration in Los Angeles. “Well, it may be over for the other guy!” After a trying stretch in February, even Biden appeared surprised at the extent of his success. “I’m here to report we are very much alive!’’ he said. “And make no mistake about it, this campaign will send Donald Trump packing.”
For his part, Bernie Sanders continued to show strength with the voters who have made up his political base: Latinos, liberals and those under age 40. But he struggled to expand his appeal with older voters and African-Americans. The results also called into question Sanders’s decision to spend valuable time over the past week campaigning in both Minnesota and Massachusetts, two states where he had hoped to embarrass rivals on their home turf. The gambit proved badly flawed, as it was Joe Biden who pulled off upset wins in both states, with the help of a last-minute endorsement from Senator Amy Klobuchar that upended the race in Minnesota.
2. President Donald Trump Announces Support For Economic Stimulus Package To Assist Business, Individuals Hurt By Coronavirus
Amid increasing criticism over his response to the Coronavirus outbreak and handling of the slowing economy, President Donald Trump announced his support for an economic stimulus package this week.
President Donald Trump’s decision to push for a stimulus package represented a departure for the administration, which has insisted that the fundamentals of the economy are solid and that the coronavirus would cause only a short-term blip in growth. But the coronavirus threat continues to rattle financial markets. American stocks collapsed on March 9, with the Dow Jones industrial average plummeting by more than 2,000 points for its worst day since 2008 after a free fall in oil prices and a growing number of coronavirus cases. Total coronavirus cases around the globe surpassed 111,000, with confirmed US cases exceeding 600. The worldwide death toll approached 4,000 and rose to 26 in the US
On March 6, President Donald Trump signed an $8.3 billion package of emergency funding to help treat and slow the spread of the virus. The package includes funding for research and development of vaccines as well as money for prevention, preparedness, and response. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who appeared alongside President Trump at the news conference, said the US has “the most resilient economy in the world.” But, “there are parts of the economy that are going to be impacted, especially workers that need to be at home, hard-working people who are at home under quarantine and are taking care of their family,” he said. “We’ll be working on a program to address that.”
At the congressional level Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a strong ally of President Donald Trump, also has begun exploring the possibility of a stimulus package. “While we continue to assess the economic impacts, Senator Grassley is exploring the possibility of targeted tax relief measures that could provide a timely and effective response to the coronavirus,” said Grassley’s spokesman, Michael Zona. “Several options within the committee’s jurisdiction are being considered as we learn more about the effects on specific industries and the overall economy.” Some economists are recommending broader steps Congress can take in the short term to aid those immediately affected by the virus, such as defraying the health care costs of those infected and reducing the Social Security payroll tax for all workers.
3. The US Begins Withdrawing Troops From Afghanistan
The US military began withdrawing from Afghanistan this week after signing a tentative peace agreement with the Taliban two weeks ago.
US troops have started to leave Afghanistan for the initial troop withdrawal required in the US-Taliban agreement, a spokesman for US Forces in Afghanistan announced on March 9, amid political chaos in the country that threatens the deal. The US will cut the number of forces in the country to 8,600, according to a statement by US Forces Afghanistan spokesman Colonel Sonny Leggett. “In accordance with the US-Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Joint Declaration and the US-Taliban Agreement, US Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) has begun its conditions-based reduction of forces to 8,600 over 135 days,” Leggett said in the statement quoted by. “USFOR-A maintains all the military means and authorities to accomplish our objectives -including conducting counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda and ISIS-K and providing support to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces,” he added. “USFOR-A is on track to meet directed force levels while retaining the necessary capabilities. The pullout came as Afghanistan’s rival leaders were each sworn in as president in separate ceremonies on March 9, creating a complication for the US as it figures out how to move forward on the agreement, signed late last month, and end the 18-year war. The sharpening dispute between President Ashraf Ghani, who was declared the winner of last September’s election, and his rival Abdullah Abdullah, who charged fraud in the vote along with the elections complaints commission, threatens to wreck the next key steps and even risks devolving into new violence.
The US has not tied the withdrawal to political stability in Afghanistan or any specific outcome from the all-Afghan peace talks. Instead, it depends on the Taliban meeting its commitment to preventing “any group or individual, including al-Qaeda, from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the US and its allies.” Under the peace agreement, the US troop withdrawal had to begin within 10 days after the deal was signed on February 29. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on March 2 that he had already approved the start of the withdrawal, which would then be coordinated by military commanders in Afghanistan. The US official said that the troops leaving now had been scheduled to depart, but they will not be replaced. Esper has said General Scott Miller, the US commander in Afghanistan, will pause the withdrawal and assess conditions once the troop level goes down to 8,600. The long-term plan is for the US to remove all troops within 14 months if security conditions are met. The agreement with the Taliban followed a seven-day “reduction in violence” period that, from the Trump administration’s viewpoint, was meant to test the Taliban’s seriousness about moving towards a final peace agreement.
4. U.N. Announces Sharp Increase In Iran’s Uranium Stockpile In Violation Of The JCPOA
The UN this week announced that Iran has dramatically increased its uranium production in the wake of the Trump Administration’s decision to abandon the JCPOA and reimpose sanctions on the Iranian economy.
Iran is dramatically ramping up production of enriched uranium in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to abandon the 2015 nuclear deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed on March 4 while also criticizing the Iranian government for blocking access to possible nuclear-related sites. Inspectors from the IAEA reported a near-tripling of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium just since November of 2019, with total holdings more than three times the 300-kilogram limit set by the nuclear accord. Iran also substantially increased the number of machines it is using to enrich uranium, the agency said, allowing it to make more of the nuclear fuel faster. The confidential report provided to member states is the first since Iran announced it would no longer adhere to any of the nuclear pact’s restrictions on uranium fuel production, in a protest of the Trump administration’s decision to walk away from the deal. Iran has declined to formally pull out of the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in which it had to sharply curtail its nuclear activities and submit to intrusive inspections in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.
Inspectors confirmed that Iran now possesses more than 1,020 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, up from 372 kilograms in the fall, although the IAEA found no evidence that Iran is taking specific steps toward nuclear weapons production. Independent analysts said the bigger stockpile and faster enrichment rate has substantially decreased Iran’s theoretical “breakout” time, the span needed for acquiring enough weapons-grade material for a single nuclear bomb. When the Iranian nuclear was fully implemented in 2015, US officials said that Iran would need about a year to reach the “breakout” point if it chose to make a bomb. Based on the new figures, one Iran analyst calculated that the window has been reduced to about 3½ months. Iran’s enriched uranium soared to “levels not expected just a few weeks ago,” said the analyst, David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington nonprofit specializing in nuclear weapons research.
The IAEA reports are certain to rekindle debate over President Donald Trump’s decision to walk away from the accord, which the Trump administration says failed to address long-term concerns over Iran’s nuclear intentions. Critics of the deal pointed to Iran’s lack of cooperation with IAEA inspectors as evidence that Iran cannot be trusted. “The problem is not breakout at known facilities; it is sneakout at clandestine facilities through advanced centrifuges permitted by JCPOA,” Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in a Twitter posting, using the acronym for the nuclear deal. Other experts said the report highlighted the administration’s folly in torpedoing a deal that was demonstrably working, without having a viable alternative plan for keeping Iran’s nuclear activities in check. “The bottom line: Iran is closer to being able to build a bomb now than under JCPOA and the previous administration, and we are less capable of addressing that danger,” said Jon Wolfsthal, the senior director for arms control on the Obama White House’s National Security Council, in an email.
In a last-minute bid to unite the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg on March 2 threw their support behind former Vice President Joe Biden, giving him an extraordinary boost ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries that promised to test his strength against the liberal front-runner, Senator Bernie Sanders. Even by the standards of the tumultuous 2020 campaign, the dual endorsement from Klobuchar and Buttigieg, and their joint appearances with Biden at campaign events in Dallas on March 2, was remarkable. Rarely, if ever, have opponents joined forces so dramatically, as Klobuchar and Buttigieg went from campaigning at full tilt in the South Carolina primary on Saturday to joining on a political rescue mission for a former competitor, Joe Biden, whom they had once regarded as a spent force.
Amy Klobuchar, who sought to appeal to the same moderate voters as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, and focused her campaign on calling the Democratic Party’s attention to Midwestern states like her native Minnesota, withdrew from the race after intensive conversations with her aides following Biden’s thumping victory in South Carolina. Rather than delivering a traditional concession speech, Klobuchar told associates she wanted to leverage her exit to help Biden and headed directly for the joint rally. Before a roaring crowd in Dallas, she hailed her former rival as a candidate who could “bring our country together” and restore “decency and dignity” to the presidency. Pete Buttigieg, for his part, endorsed Biden at a pre-rally stop, saying that Biden would “restore the soul” of the nation as president. And Biden offered Buttigieg the highest compliment in his personal vocabulary, several times likening the young politician to his own son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
For the three moderates, as well as for Bernie Sanders and other remaining candidates, the crucial question hanging over the fast-moving events was whether any of it would make a difference in Tuesday’s primaries across 15 states and territories, including the critical battlegrounds of California and Texas. Millions of voters are expected to go to the polls, but many states have had early voting underway; more than 2.3 million Democratic and independent ballots have already been processed in California. Bernie Sanders has significant head starts in many of the Super Tuesday states and beyond: His popularity has risen in recent weeks, and so has Democratic voters’ estimation of his electability in a race with President Donald Trump. The Vermont senator has a muscular national grass-roots organization, backed by the most fearsome online fund-raising machine in Democratic politics, one that collected more than $46 million last month, far outdistancing every other candidate in the race.
As news emerged of the shift of centrist support toward Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders projected confidence and defiance, dismissing it as a phenomenon of “establishment politicians” supporting one another. On Twitter, Sanders posted a video criticizing Biden for having supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, linking him to unpopular Republicans like former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney. Additionally, Sanders assailed Biden’s record on the Iraq war and Social Security. “It is no surprise they do not want me to become president,‘’ Sanders said, referring to his moderate opponents.
I do not believe we will defeat Donald Trump with a candidate like Joe Biden who supported the Iraq War. pic.twitter.com/8tII7O3Mal
Here are the main events that occurred in Politics this week:
1. Former Vice President Joe Biden Wins South Carolina Democratic Primary
Former Vice President Joe Biden this week won a resounding victory in the South Carolina Democratic Primary, cementing himself as one of the new front-runners for the Democratic nomination.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s resounding victory in the South Carolina primary was a major win for a politician who has been in public life for nearly 50 years, and his first primary victory in his three presidential runs. Cheers went up at a Biden election-night rally in Columbia when MSNBC called the race, Biden cast the win as the first of many number of dominoes that will now fall his way, noting that some were counting him out just days ago. “Now, thanks to all of you — the heart of the Democratic Party — we just won and we won big . . . and we are very much alive,” Biden said in a victory speech that was pointed directly at Sanders. “We have the option of winning big or losing big. That’s our choice,” Biden told a raucous crowd in Columbia. “We have to beat Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but here’s the deal: We can’t become like them. . . . We can’t have a never-ending war.” The Biden campaign hopes to use Saturday’s win to consolidate support from many of his rivals, hoping that several drop out, which one of them, businessman Tom Steyer, did shortly after the polls closed. “Honestly, I can’t see a path where I can win the presidency,” Steyer said in announcing his decision. Biden also plans a series of high-profile endorsements over the coming days. Congressman Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-VA) and former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe announced shortly after Biden’s win that they were backing the former vice president. Nearly half of South Carolina voters said Congressman James Clyburn’s (D-SC) final-week endorsement of Biden was an important factor in their vote, according to exit poll results from Edison Research.
Bernie Sanders, speaking at a February 28 rally in Virginia sought to put the results in perspective, ticking off his previous strong performances in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. “But you cannot win ’em all . . . and tonight we did not win in South Carolina,” Sanders said. “And that will not be the only defeat. There are a lot of states in this country, and nobody wins them all.” After congratulating Biden, he proclaimed, “And now we enter Super Tuesday — and Virginia!” For all the candidates but Sanders, a further winnowing of the field is crucial to winning the nomination. Sanders is broadly expected to come out of Super Tuesday with a substantial delegate lead in the race, anchored in his huge polling advantage in California. Under party rules, such leads can be difficult to overcome as the race moves on.
With most precincts reporting, Joe Biden was poised to win about half the vote, giving him a symbolic victory over Bernie Sanders, who did not win more than 34% of the vote in any of the first three states. Under party rules, nominees need to secure more than 50 percent of delegates to win the nomination at the convention in Milwaukee. But the continued viability of so many candidates has increased the likelihood that no candidate will be able to secure such a victory with initially pledged delegates alone, setting up the potential for either a brokered convention or a pre-convention horse-trading of delegates by the candidates. Complicating the hunt for the nomination is former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising his candidacy to the Super Tuesday states, after deciding not to compete in the first four contests. Although his rise in polls had slowed since his first debate performance, Bloomberg still appears positioned to win delegates in many early states, as he continues to swamp his rivals in spending. His advisers vowed Saturday night that Bloomberg will stay in the race at least through Super Tuesday when he will appear on the ballot for the first time. They cited internal campaign data showing that if Bloomberg dropped out it would strengthen Sanders, whose left-leaning policies the former mayor abhors “Mike Bloomberg has not been on the ballot yet,” said Bloomberg campaign manager Kevin Sheekey. “Our campaign is focused on organizing Democrats and building infrastructure in states all around the country.”
After Saturday’s outcome became clear, President Donald Trump tweeted, “Sleepy Joe Biden’s victory in the South Carolina Democratic primary should be the end of Mini Mike Bloomberg’s Joke of a campaign.” Biden’s support among black voters, who made up most of the electorate in South Carolina, appeared ready to lift a campaign that has struggled to find its footing for more than a year. Biden, a national polling leader in 2019, finished in fourth place in Iowa, fifth place in New Hampshire and second place in Nevada. African American voters have been a crucial part of the Democratic Party Coalition since the New Deal era, and Biden, along with other Sanders critics, have argued that it will be hard for the Democratic nominee to defeat Trump if he does not have enthusiastic support from the black community. Sanders has replied that he alone among the Democratic contenders has shown the ability to electrify voters and draw big crowds from a broad portion of the electorate.
Sleepy Joe Biden’s victory in the South Carolina Democrat Primary should be the end of Mini Mike Bloomberg’s Joke of a campaign. After the worst debate performance in the history of presidential debates, Mini Mike now has Biden split up his very few voters, taking many away!
2. In A Bid To Unite Democratic Party, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar Drop Out, Endorse Joe Biden’s Candidacy
In a bid to unite the Democratic Party against President Donald Trump, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar drop out of the Democratic Primary, endorse Former Vice President Joe Biden.
In a last-minute bid to unite the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg on March 2 threw their support behind former Vice President Joe Biden, giving him an extraordinary boost ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries that promised to test his strength against the liberal front-runner, Senator Bernie Sanders. Even by the standards of the tumultuous 2020 campaign, the dual endorsement from Klobuchar and Buttigieg, and their joint appearances with Biden at campaign events in Dallas on March 2, was remarkable. Rarely, if ever, have opponents joined forces so dramatically, as Klobuchar and Buttigieg went from campaigning at full tilt in the South Carolina primary on Saturday to joining on a political rescue mission for a former competitor, Joe Biden, whom they had once regarded as a spent force.
Amy Klobuchar, who sought to appeal to the same moderate voters as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, and focused her campaign on calling the Democratic Party’s attention to Midwestern states like her native Minnesota, withdrew from the race after intensive conversations with her aides following Biden’s thumping victory in South Carolina. Rather than delivering a traditional concession speech, Klobuchar told associates she wanted to leverage her exit to help Biden and headed directly for the joint rally. Before a roaring crowd in Dallas, she hailed her former rival as a candidate who could “bring our country together” and restore “decency and dignity” to the presidency. Pete Buttigieg, for his part, endorsed Biden at a pre-rally stop, saying that Biden would “restore the soul” of the nation as president. And Biden offered Buttigieg the highest compliment in his personal vocabulary, several times likening the young politician to his own son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
For the three moderates, as well as for Bernie Sanders and other remaining candidates, the crucial question hanging over the fast-moving events was whether any of it would make a difference in Tuesday’s primaries across 15 states and territories, including the critical battlegrounds of California and Texas. Millions of voters are expected to go to the polls, but many states have had early voting underway; more than 2.3 million Democratic and independent ballots have already been processed in California. Bernie Sanders has significant head starts in many of the Super Tuesday states and beyond: His popularity has risen in recent weeks, and so has Democratic voters’ estimation of his electability in a race with President Donald Trump. The Vermont senator has a muscular national grass-roots organization, backed by the most fearsome online fund-raising machine in Democratic politics, one that collected more than $46 million last month, far outdistancing every other candidate in the race.
As news emerged of the shift of centrist support toward Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders projected confidence and defiance, dismissing it as a phenomenon of “establishment politicians” supporting one another. On Twitter, Sanders posted a video criticizing Biden for having supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, linking him to unpopular Republicans like former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney. Additionally, Sanders assailed Biden’s record on the Iraq war and Social Security. “It is no surprise they do not want me to become president,‘’ Sanders said, referring to his moderate opponents.
I do not believe we will defeat Donald Trump with a candidate like Joe Biden who supported the Iraq War. pic.twitter.com/8tII7O3Mal
3. Trump Administration Orders Four Chinese News Outlets in The US to Reduce Staffs
In a major escalation of the ongoing tensions between China and the US, the Trump administration on March 2 ordered four Chinese news outlets operating in the US to reduce the number of Chinese nationals working on their staffs by more than a third
In a major escalation of the ongoing tensions between China and the US, the Trump administration on March 2 ordered four Chinese news outlets operating in the US to reduce the number of Chinese nationals working on their staffs by more than a third. The action comes on the heels of a State Department decision on February 18 requiring five Chinese news organizations considered organs of the government to register as foreign missions and provide the names of employees. China responded by expelling three Beijing-based Wall Street Journal reporters, condemning as “racist” an essay that ran in the news outlet’s opinion section criticizing China’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. American officials said that by March 13, the Chinese news outlets can have no more than 100 Chinese citizens on staff, down from 160 currently employed by the five outlets. The officials said it was an effort to bring “reciprocity” to the US-China relationship and to encourage the ruling Chinese Communist Party to show a greater commitment to a free press. “As we have done in other areas of the US-China relationship, we seek to establish a long-overdue level playing field,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement. “It is our hope that this action will spur Beijing to adopt a more fair and reciprocal approach to US and other foreign press in China. We urge the Chinese government to immediately uphold its international commitments to respect freedom of expression, including for members of the press.”
In announcing the move, senior Trump administration officials cited the disappearance of citizen journalists chronicling the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan. In a report by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, called “Control, Halt, Delete,” 8 in 10 correspondents said they had encountered interference, harassment or violence while arriving and described the environment for journalists as deteriorating. “We’re witnessing an assault on free speech inside of China that goes even beyond what it was a decade ago,” said an administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity under administration rules for briefing reporters. Other officials sought to distinguish the US action from China’s expulsion of nine foreign reporters since 2013 when Xi Jinping ascended to power. The expulsions were usually attributed to the government’s unhappiness with news coverage. American officials said it will be up to the designated outlets to determine which employees to cut and said there will be no restrictions placed on their content or choice of what to cover. But they said they are considering imposing duration limits on Chinese nationals working for the outlets, similar to those used by China on foreign correspondents. The officials pointedly refused to refer to the affected employees as journalists, calling it an insult to free and independent reporters who are not working for “propaganda outlets.”
Every year, hundreds of Chinese citizens are granted visas allowing them to report in the US, though it was not immediately clear how many are currently working as reporters. The move against employees of China’s government-controlled media comes amid an escalating series of critical statements by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the Chinese government. He has repeatedly criticized the government’s maltreatment and detention of Muslim Uighurs, warned US allies of risks associated with technology from the Chinese company Huawei and castigated China’s expanding economic influence in developing countries. Pompeo has said China is intent on international domination, and during a January visit to London, he called the Chinese Communist Party “the central threat of our times.” Now, as the world braces for the spreading coronavirus that originated in China, the Trump Administration has taken the battle to the journalistic arena.
4. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wins Third Israeli Election Held Since 2019
During the third election held in the country since last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the right-wing coalition won another victory, setting the stage for a coalition government to be formed.
As counting gets underway in Israel’s unprecedented third election in 11 months, initial exit polls projected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party as the winners. But even if the final results bear out these projections from Israel’s three main news channels, Netanyahu will still need to find partners to form a coalition government with a majority in the 120-seat parliament. Just after polling stations closed across Israel, the Israeli TV stations flashed the result of their individual exit polls, all showing Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party ahead of former military chief, Benny Gantz’s centrist Blue and White Party. Exit polls in Israel, as elsewhere, come with a disclaimer. Sometimes they prove to be extremely prescient, while other times they are woefully wide of the mark. Even so, politicians and voters alike still take them seriously and watch them closely. With almost one-quarter of the votes counted, all three main TV stations are projecting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party will finish between three and five seats ahead of its main rival, the Blue and White party of Benny Gantz. But all three channels continue to project that a bloc made up of Likud plus Netanyahu’s preferred coalition partners, the hardline right-wing Yamina, along with the two religious parties, would win 59 seats, which is two seats short of an overall majority.
Israel’s third election in less than a year reflects a political system in deadlock. Following the last poll in September of 2019, both Netanyahu and Gantz were given the chance to try to form a government but neither man was successful in building a coalition with a 61-seat majority. Gantz refused point-blank to sit in a government with Netanyahu due to the charges against the prime minister, while Netanyahu refused to go second in any rotating prime ministership with Gantz. This third campaign saw barbs traded between the two leaders and the release of several secret recordings aimed at damaging both the main campaigns, though particularly that of Blue and White. Casting his vote Monday, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin castigated the country’s politicians. “We don’t deserve another awful and grubby election campaign like the one that ends today, and we don’t deserve this never-ending instability. We deserve a government that works for us.” As the exit polls suggest, the two largest parties are likely to be Netanyahu’s Likud and Gantz’s Blue and White.
Another issue during the campaign was the Trump administration’s “Deal of the Century.” The US president delivered his “Peace to Prosperity” plan at the end of January 2020, with Benjamin Netanyahu standing next to him at the White House. The proposal effectively gives US approval to Israeli annexation of all Jewish settlements in the West Bank, along with the Jordan Valley. Netanyahu has embraced the plan and has talked about a “window of opportunity” to deliver on it, widely seen as meaning before the US presidential election in November. For his part, Gantz also welcomed the plan but said annexation should happen with international coordination. Perhaps the biggest immediate electoral effect of the Trump plan has been to motivate Israel’s Arab community to vote. The Kan News exit poll projects the Joint Arab List, an alliance of the four main Arab parties, on track to win 15 seats. List leader Ayman Odeh hailed it as the best result ever for Arab parties in Israeli elections.
Here are the main events that occurred in Politics this week:
1. President Donald Trump Announces 2021 Fiscal Year Budget
President Donald Trump unveiled his proposed $4.8 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2021 this week.
On January 10, President Donald Trump proposed a $4.8 trillion election-year budget that would slash major domestic and safety net programs, setting up a stark contrast with President Trump’s rivals as voting gets underway in the Democratic presidential primary. The budget would cut Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program and also wring savings from Medicare despite Trump’s repeated promises to safeguard Medicare and Social Security. It aims domestic spending with cuts that are sure to be rejected by Congress, including slashing the Environmental Protection Agency budget by 26.5% over the next year and cutting the budget of the Health and Human Services department by 9%. HHS includes the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which will see a budget cut even as the coronavirus spreads, although officials said funding aimed at combating the coronavirus would be protected.
The budget is a proposal to Congress, and lawmakers have mostly rejected President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts in the past. Still, the budget plan sets up the Trump administration’s policy priorities heading into the November elections and is likely to draw scrutiny. It would target the Education Department is for a nearly 8% cut, the Interior Department would be cut 13.4%, and Housing and Urban Development would be cut 15.2%. The State Department and US Agency for International Development would be cut by 22%. The proposed cuts stand in contrast to proposals by major Democratic candidates to expand environmental, education and health care spending, setting up a clash between President Trump and his 2020 rivals over their major campaign priorities. Not all agencies would face cuts, however. Trump proposes to increase spending for the Department of Homeland Security while keeping military spending at roughly the same level as in last year’s budget. The NASA budget would also increase by 12% as Trump has said he wants the agency to prepare for space travel to Mars. Even with all the proposed spending cuts, the budget would fail to eliminate the federal deficit over the next 15 years, only if the economy grows at an unprecedented, sustained 3% clip through 2025, levels the administration has failed to achieve for even one year so far.
During President Donald Trump’s first year in office, his advisers said their budget plan would eliminate the deficit by around 2028. This new trend shows how little progress the White House is making in dealing with ballooning government debt, something Republican party leaders had made a top goal during the Obama administration. Trump’s first budget projected the deficit in 2021 would be $456 billion. Instead, it is projected to be more than double that amount. Trump has shown little interest in dealing with the deficit and debt, though some Republican leaders say it remains a priority. The $4.8 trillion budget for 2021 would represent a $700 billion surge over levels from 2018. White House officials have blamed congressional Democrats for inaction on the federal deficit. However, Trump has agreed to increase spending throughout the government because it was the condition on which Democrats accepted a higher military budget. “Trying to balance the budget in 10 years is very difficult, so having a longer time horizon makes a lot of sense,” said Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates reducing the deficit. “Fifteen years is still very aggressive.”
President Donald Trump’s budget aims to cut spending on safety-net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps, cutting food stamp spending by $181 billion over a decade. It proposes to squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare over a decade through cost-saving proposals such as reforming medical liability and modifying payments to hospitals for uncompensated care. The budget cuts Medicaid spending by about $920 billion over 10 years, a change Democrats and administration critics warn would lead to reductions in benefits and the number of people on the health care program. A senior administration official defended the cut, noting it reflects a decrease in the rate at which Medicaid spending would grow rather than a reduction from current spending levels. The official said the administration would save money on Medicaid spending through new work requirements and recouping payments incorrectly spent by the federal government. Liberal economists rejected that argument. “This is a budget that would cause many millions of people to lose health care coverage. That is unambiguous,” said Aviva Aron-Dine, a former Obama official and vice president at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think-tank.
Democrats such as Congressman John Yarmuth (D-KY), chairman of the House Budget Committee, said early reports indicate the budget includes “destructive changes … while extending [Trump’s] tax cuts for millionaires and wealthy corporations.” During the last year that President Barack Obama was in office, the deficit was less than $600 billion, but it has grown significantly since then. The 2017 tax cuts and new domestic spending approved by bipartisan majorities in Congress have widened this gap markedly. However, the Trump administration’s new budget summary contains the line: “All administration policies will pay for themselves, including extending tax cut provisions expiring in 2025.” Without action by Congress and the administration, tax cuts for families and individuals would expire at the end of 2025. Budget experts have projected that extending those tax cuts would reduce revenue by roughly $1 trillion.
2. Federal Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Against Trump Administration For Its Failure To Preserve Records Of The President’s Meetings With Foreign Leaders
A federal judge this week dismissed a potential lawsuit against the Trump Administration for its failure to preserve adequate records of the President’s meetings anc calls with foreign leaders.
A federal judge on February 10 dismissed a lawsuit brought by historians and watchdog groups to compel the White House to preserve records of President Trump’s calls and meetings with foreign leaders, saying that Congress would have to change presidential archiving laws to allow the courts to do so. Federal courts have ruled that the Presidential Records Act is one of the rare statutes that judges cannot review and that another law, the Federal Records Act, does not specify exactly how agency heads should preserve records, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in a 22-page opinion. “The Court is bound by Circuit precedent to find that it lacks authority to oversee the President’s day-to-day compliance with the statutory provisions involved in this case,” Jackson wrote of the US Court of the Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. However, the judge added pointedly, “This opinion will not address, and should not be interpreted to endorse, the challenged practices; nor does it include any finding that the Executive Office is in compliance with its obligations.” Jackson said that though those who brought the lawsuit allege Congress expressed “grave concerns” about the practices at issue, it is Congress that has the power to “revisit its decision to accord the executive such unfettered control or to clarify its intentions.”
The lawsuit was filed against the Trump Administration for its record-keeping policies was in May of 2019 by three organizations, government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the National Security Archive at George Washington University, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). The groups alleged that the White House was failing to create and save records as required of Trump’s meetings and communications with foreign leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The lawsuit preceded Congress’s impeachment inquiry into the White House, which ended last week in a Senate acquittal, that was triggered by a July 25 phone call in which Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate unsubstantiated corruption allegations against former vice president Joe Biden, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, and his son Hunter Biden. The groups suing had asked unsuccessfully for an emergency ruling, citing allegations that the episode exposed record-keeping practices “specifically designed to conceal the president’s abuse of his power,” CREW said in a statement. The groups sought a court order to ensure records are not destroyed, misfiled or never created. In a statement, CREW spokesman Jordan Libowitz said the watchdog was “disappointed to see today’s ruling” but is reviewing an appeal.
Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University said it would “certainly appeal.” “Congress assumed presidents would want to save their records. Even [Richard M. Nixon] saved the tapes,” Blanton said, referring to Oval Office audio recordings that helped expose the Watergate scandal. Lawmakers also must decide whether they will give archiving laws “teeth,” making them enforceable and subject to congressional oversight, he said. The Justice Department had moved to dismiss the lawsuit, saying appeals courts have precluded courts from weighing in on presidents’ compliance with the archiving law. Without conceding their arguments for dismissal, department lawyers in October of 2019 promised the court that the White House would not destroy records of Trump’s calls and meetings with foreign leaders while the lawsuit was pending. Justice Department lawyers also said the government had “instructed relevant personnel to preserve the information” sought. They include records of communications with foreign leaders, record-keeping policies and practices, White House or agency investigations into such matters and efforts to return, “claw back” or “lock down” such records.
3. Joe Biden Plummets, Bernie Sanders & Michael Bloomberg Surge In Democratic Primary Polling
Recent polling released this week shows Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg surging ahead of the New Hampshire Democratic Primary on February 11.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has plummeted in a new national poll out on February 10 that also shows Bernie Sanders with a clear lead among Democratic voters heading into the February 11 New Hampshire primary. The new Quinnipiac University poll, conducted after Sanders’ strong showing in the Iowa caucuses a week ago, has the Vermont senator boasting the support of 25% of Democratic voters, making an 8-point lead over Biden and a 4-point increase over the last national survey taken before the caucuses. Biden dropped 9 points to 17% after his dismal performance in Iowa, followed close behind by former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who rose 7 points to 15%, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who dropped 1 point to 14%. While former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg got a 4-point bump after appearing to narrowly edge Sanders out for first place in the Iowa state delegate count, results which Buttigieg and Sanders are both challenging, Buttigieg came in at fifth place nationally in the Quinnipiac poll, with 10% of the vote. Senator Amy Klobuchar rounds out the top six with 4%, a drop of 3 points, while no other candidate broke 2% in the poll.
The Quinnipiac survey is the latest yet to show a still-fluid race in the Democratic primary but continues a trend in which both Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg are on the rise, while Joe Biden, once considered the prohibitive frontrunner, is losing standing. Sanders looks likely to continue gaining momentum, heading into Tuesday’s primary as the candidate to beat in New Hampshire. Bloomberg’s steady rise, meanwhile, comes as he has continued to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising nationally. He has also shirked the critical spotlight of the debate stage thus far and has been banking on mixed results for his rivals out of the first four early-voting states before the Super Tuesday contests he’s staked his candidacy on.
The February 10 poll finds the former Vice President with his lowest national numbers yet in a poll, but his weakened stance nationally is likely not the only cause for concern for the Biden campaign. The survey also shows that Michael Bloomberg is successfully eating into Joe Biden’s popularity among black voters, a key Democratic voting bloc that had been considered the Vice President’s firewall should he falter in New Hampshire. While Biden is still holding onto his lead among black voters, according to the poll, his support has plummeted from 49% before the caucuses to 27%. Bloomberg, meanwhile, has rocketed into second place among black voters, with 22% support compared to 7% late last month. The poll also brings Bloomberg one step closer toward qualifying for the next Democratic primary debate, which is on February 19 in Nevada. He needs to hit at least 10% in two more polls by February 18 to qualify. So far, Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, and Warren have qualified for the debate.
4. US Economy Adds 225,000 Jobs In January In A Surprising Sign Of Continued Economic Strength
The American economy in January added 225,000 jobs, signaling continued economic growth heading into the first quarter of the year.
The US economy added 225,000 jobs in January, a surprising sign of continued strength for the economy. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 3.6%, mostly due to more people rejoining the labor force. The jobless rate remains near a 50-year low. The areas of strongest job growth came in construction and health care, as well as transportation and warehousing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retail and manufacturing were the two areas with the most significant job losses. “I can say that it pretty much blew estimates out of the water,” said Beth Ann Bovino, the chief economist at S&P Global. “It’s just a really nice report. I’d also say that the recession fears of last year seem to be a thing of the past when you look at this report.”
President Donald Trump is staking his reelection campaign in part on the strength of the economy, touting the job creation under his administration repeatedly during the State of the Union address. But analysts have urged caution, pointing to other economic measures. Relatively modest wage growth, around 3%, remains a puzzle for economists who say it has not grown as expected given the increasingly tight labor market. Business investment has fallen for three straight quarters. And problems at Boeing as well as fears about the coronavirus have raised fears about more economic headwinds on the horizon. “It’s a powerful antidote, in many ways, with respect to what’s been happening in Washington,” said Mark Hamrick, an economic analyst at Bankrate. “In many ways, we’ve seen a political environment that is violently ill, and yet the economy appears to be very robust. … A year or so ago we were thinking we could be on the precipice of a recession. The reality is that the expansion looks good for some time to come for the future.”
5. President Donald Trump’s Approval Rating Hits Highest Level Yet In His Presidency
In the aftermath of his acquittal, President Donald Trump’s approval rating hits the highest level yet seen in his Presidency.
President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has risen to 49%, his highest in Gallup polling since he took office in 2017. The new poll finds 50% of Americans disapproving of President Trump, leaving just 1% expressing no opinion. The average percentage not having an opinion on Trump has been 5% throughout his presidency. Trump’s approval rating has risen because of higher ratings among both Republicans and independents. His 94% approval rating among Republicans is up six percentage points from early January and is three points higher than his previous best among his fellow partisans. The 42% approval rating among independents is up five points and ties three other polls as his best among that group. Democratic approval is 7%, down slightly from 10%. The 87-point gap between Republican and Democratic approval in the current poll is the largest Gallup has measured in any Gallup poll to date, surpassing the prior record, held by Trump and Barack Obama, by one point.
As President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has improved, so has the image of the Republican Party. 51% of Americans view the Republican Party favorably, up from 43% in September of 2019. It is the first time Republican favorability has exceeded 50% since 2005. Meanwhile, 45% of Americans have a positive opinion of the Democratic Party, a slight dip from 48% in September of last year. Additionally, the poll finds 48% of Americans identifying as Republicans or leaning toward that party, compared with 44% Democratic identification or leaning. Recent Gallup polls had shown a fairly even partisan distribution after the Democratic Party held advantages for much of 2019.
Whether the rise in Trump’s approval rating and the Republican Party’s image is being driven by a backlash against impeachment, the strong economy or other factors may become clearer in the near future. If it is mostly impeachment-based, his approval rating may revert quickly back to pre-impeachment levels, as it did for Clinton. Within two months of his acquittal in February 1999, Clinton’s approval rating returned to where it was before he was impeached, as did the Democratic Party’s advantage in party identification and leaning. If Trump’s higher approval rating is being driven by Americans giving him credit for improvements in the economy, his support may increase over the course of the year, as it did for Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2012. All of those recent presidents held office during periods of sustained economic improvement and were re-elected with job approval ratings of better than 50%.
One of the main candidates running for the Democratic Presidential nomination is former Vice President Joe Biden
Background
Joe Biden developed an interest in politics from an early age and was inspired to pursue a career in public policy by the likes of President John F. Kennedy.
Joe Biden was born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton Pennsylvania to a middle-class, Irish Catholic family. His father, Joseph, Biden Sr., had a variety of jobs ranging from cleaning furnaces to selling used cars, and his mother, Catherine Eugenia “Jean” Finnegan was a housewife who took care of Biden and his three other siblings. In 1955, the Biden family moved to Mayfield, Delaware, a rapidly growing middle-class community sustained primarily by the nearby DuPont chemical company. Biden attended the St. Helena School and later on, the Archmere Academy, graduating in 1961. Joe Biden Biden attended the University of Delaware, where he studied history and political science and played football. He would later admit that he spent his first two years of college far more interested in football, girls and parties than academics. But he also developed a sharp interest in politics during these years, spurred in part by Presidency of John F. Kennedy. After graduating from the University of Delaware in 1965, Biden enrolled in Syracuse law school, graduating in 1968. During this time, Biden also met his first wife, Neilia Hunter and married her in 1966.
Early Political Career (1968-1972)
After graduating from law school in 1968, Biden moved to Wilmington, Delaware, to begin practicing at a law firm. He also became an active member of the Democratic Party, and in 1970 he was elected to the New Castle County Council. While serving as councilman, in 1971, Biden started his own law firm. In addition to his increasingly busy professional life, Biden had three children: Joseph Biden III (born in 1969), Hunter Biden (born in 1970) and Naomi Biden (born in 1971). “Everything was happening faster than I expected,” Biden said about his life at the time.
Joe Biden during his first Senate campaign, 1972.
In 1972, the Delaware Democratic Party encouraged the 29-year-old Biden to run against the popular Republican incumbent J. Caleb Boggs for the US Senate. Although few thought he had any chance of winning, Biden ran a tireless campaign organized mostly by family members. His sister, Valerie Biden Owens, served as his campaign manager, and both of his parents campaigned daily. That November, in a tight race with a large turnout, Biden won an upset victory to become the fifth-youngest senator elected in the nation’s history. Just as all of Biden’s wildest dreams seemed to be coming true, he was struck by devastating tragedy. A week before Christmas in 1972, Biden’s wife and three children were involved in a terrible car accident while out shopping. The accident killed his wife and daughter and severely injured both of his sons. Biden was inconsolable and even considered suicide. He recalls, “I began to understand how despair led people to just cash in; how suicide wasn’t just an option but a rational option … I felt God had played a horrible trick on me, and I was angry.” At the encouragement of his family, Biden decided to honor his commitment to representing the people of Delaware in the Senate. He skipped the swearing-in ceremony for new senators in Washington and instead took the oath of office from his sons’ hospital room. To spend as much time as possible with his sons, Biden decided to continue to live in Wilmington, commuting to and from Washington each day by Amtrak train, a practice he maintained through his entire long tenure in the Senate.
Senate Career (1972-2008)
During his time in the Senate, Joe Biden established a reputation as a leader on foreign policy and legal issues and earned the respect of politicians from both political parties.
From 1972 to 2008, Joe Biden served a distinguished Senate career. During his time in the Senate, Biden won respect as one of the body’s leading foreign policy experts, serving as chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations for several years. His many foreign policy positions included advocating for strategic arms limitation with the Soviet Union, promoting peace and stability in the Balkans, expanding NATO to include former Soviet-bloc nations and opposing the First Gulf War. In later years, he called for American action to end the genocide in Darfur and spoke out against President George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraq War, particularly opposing the troop surge of 2007, and Middle Eastern foreign policy in general. In addition to foreign policy, Joe Biden was an outspoken proponent of tougher crime laws. In 1987, Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s failure to receive confirmation was largely attributed to harsh questioning by Biden, who was then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 1994, Biden sponsored the Clinton Administration’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act to add 100,000 police officers and increase sentences for a host of crimes.
Joe Biden first ran for the Presidency in the 1988 Democratic presidential primary, but his campaign gained little traction.
In 1987, having established himself as one of Washington’s most prominent Democratic lawmakers, Joe Biden decided to run for the Presidency. He dropped out of the Democratic primary after reports surfaced that he had plagiarized part of a speech. Biden had been suffering severe headaches during the campaign, and shortly after he dropped out in 1988, doctors discovered that he had two life-threatening brain aneurysms. Complications from the ensuing brain surgery led to blood clots in his lungs, which, in turn, caused him to undergo another surgery. Always resilient, Biden returned to the Senate after surviving a seven-month recovery period.
In 2007, 20 years after his first unsuccessful presidential bid, Biden once again decided to run for the Presidency yet again. Despite his years of experience in the Senate, however, Biden’s campaign failed to generate much momentum in a field dominated by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Biden dropped out after receiving less than one percent of the vote in the crucial Iowa caucuses. Several months later, Barack Obam, having secured the Democratic nomination after a hard-fought campaign against Clinton, selected Biden as his running mate. With his working-class roots, Biden helped the Obama campaign communicate its message of economic recovery to the blue-collar voters crucial to the swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. On November 2, 2008, Barack Obama and Joe Biden convincingly defeated the Republican ticket of Arizona Senator John McCain and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin by a 7% margin, willing back several states that had not voted Democratic for decades such as Virginia, Indiana, and North Carolina.
Vice Presidency (2009-2017)
Joe Biden established a reputation as an active and effective Vice President under Barack Obama and helped to redefine the role for the first time in many decades.
On January 20, 2009, Obama was sworn in as the 44th U.S. president and Joe Biden Biden became the 47th vice president. While Biden mostly served in the role of behind-the-scenes adviser to the president, he took particularly active roles in formulating federal policies relating to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, the vice president used his well-established Senate connections to help secure passage of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation.
Running for re-election in 2012, the Obama-Biden team faced Republican challengers Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Obama defeated Romney in the 2012 election, earning a second term as president and Biden another term as vice president. President Obama received nearly 60 percent of the electoral vote and won the popular vote by more than 1 million ballots. Later that year, Biden showed just how influential a vice president he could be. He was instrumental in achieving a bipartisan agreement on tax increases and spending cuts to avoid the fiscal cliff crisis. With a looming deadline, Biden was able to hammer out a deal with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. On January 1, 2013, the fiscal cliff bill passed in the Senate after months of tough negotiations. The House of Representatives approved it later that day.
Around this time, Biden also became a leading figure in the national debate about gun control. He was selected to head up a special task force on the issue after the school shooting at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school that December. Biden delivered solutions for reducing gun violence across the nation to President Obama in January 2013. He helped craft 19 actions that the president could take on the issue using his power of executive order among other recommendations.
Joe Biden has been married to his second wife, Jill Biden, since 1977. The couple’s daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981. On May 30, 2015, Biden suffered another personal loss when his son Beau died at the age of 46, after battling brain cancer. “Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known,” Biden wrote in a statement about his son. Following this tragedy, Biden considered a run for the presidency, but he put the speculation to rest in October 2015 when he announced that he would not seek the 2016 Democratic nomination. In the White House Rose Garden with his wife Jill and President Obama by his side, Biden made his announcement, referring to his son’s recent death in his decision making: “As my family and I have worked through the grieving process, I’ve said all along what I’ve said time and again to others, that it may very well be that the process by the time we get through it closes the window. I’ve concluded it has closed.”
Joe Biden receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
On January 12, 2017, President Obama presented Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom with distinction, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in a surprise ceremony at the White House. Obama called Biden “the best vice president America’s ever had” and a “lion of American history,” and told him he was being honored for ‘‘faith in your fellow Americans, for your love of country and a lifetime of service that will endure through the generations.’’
Post-Vice Presidency (2017-2019)
Defying the traditional role of most former Vice Presidents, Joe Biden refused to remain quiet even after leaving office. Known for his fervent opposition to Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, Biden occasionally surfaced to criticize the 45th president. At an October 2017 campaign event for NJ Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Phil Murphy, he declared that Trump “doesn’t understand governance,” and the following month he blasted the White House incumbent for his seeming defense of white nationalist groups.
Additionally, Joe Biden occasionally revealed his mixed feelings on bypassing the chance to run for president in 2016. In March 2017, he said he “could have won,” and in November, he elaborated on those thoughts in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. “No woman or man should announce they’re running for president unless they can answer two questions,” he said. “One, do they truly believe they’re the most qualified person for that moment? I believed I was — but was I prepared to be able to give my whole heart, my whole soul, and all my intention to the endeavor? And I knew I wasn’t.”
2020 Presidential Campaign
On April 25, 2019, Joe Biden delivered the expected news that he was running for president in 2020. In his 3 1/2-minute video announcement, the former Vice President referenced President Trump’s attempt to equate people on both sides of the violent, racially charged clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, saying he knew then that “the threat to our nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.”
Although he has easily led in a majority of Democratic primary polls at the time he entered the race, Joe Biden’s candidacy soon became a litmus test for a party with an increasingly progressive base. Underscoring the challenges of presenting himself as a moderate, Biden drew criticism regarding his record on foreign policy, abortion rights, and his role in implementing “tough on crime” policies at the federal level during the 1990s that many critics claim directly resulted in the rise of the prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration. Despite this criticism, Joe Biden remains the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination, with the support of anywhere from 20% to 35% of likely Democratic primary voters. Additionally, Joe Biden is currently leading President Donald Trump by roughly 8-15% in most polls and is ahead in numerous swing states such as Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida.
Joe Biden’s policies are aligned with the centrist wing of the Democratic Party.
Economic Policy
Joe Biden supports increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, arguing that higher minimum wage will do much to reduce income inequality.
Joe Biden is in favor of closing the gender wage-gap and compelling businesses to abolish policies that discriminate against their employees based on gender.
Joe Biden notes that the tax code is excessively friendly to investors as opposed to workers and has called for higher taxes on rich busienss owners passive income to finance things including a tripling of the Child Tax Credit and other benefits for working-class individuals.
Joe Biden notes that regional inequality is a major economic issue facing the US and has pledged to promote development in areas of the country facing much inequality.
Joe Biden has called for “laws that allow labor unions to flourish and fight for basic worker protections” but also for a suite of new kinds of protections that operate outside the scope of traditional union-focused labor law.
Joe Biden wants a ban on non-compete agreements, a suite of measures to ensure that workers can discuss their pay without fear of retaliation, and stronger measures against wage theft.
Foreign Policy
Joe Biden wants to implement a more multi-lateral approach to foreign policy in direct contrast to the bilateralism and neo-conservative foreign policy position promoted by the Trump Administration.
Joe Biden wants to “forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East” by removing the “vast majority of troops” from the region.
Joe Biden has pledged to end support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in the Yemen war, which is guilty of committing genocide against the Shi’a Muslims of Yemen
Joe Biden strongly supports re-entering the 2015 Iranian Nuclear Deal and would work to strictly enforce the provisions of the agreement.
Work to empower negotiators to work on denuclearizing North Korea with the help of regional powers such as Japan, South Korea, and China.
A more interesting aspect of Joe Biden’s foreign policy platform is his idea of convening a “summit of the world’s democracies” to strengthen the ties between leaders of foreign democracies, private industry executives, and heads of US technology companies.
Joe Biden wants to challenge social media companies to take responsibility in upholding Democratic values, including addressing the abuse of technology by “surveillance states facilitating oppression and censorship, spreading hate, stirring people to violence.”
Social Policy
Joe Biden supports a women-right-to-choose and would fight against Republican efforts to overturn this right by codifying the Roe v. Wade precedent into federal law in case the ruling is overturned by the US Supreme Court
As a way to address the issue of gun violence, Joe Biden supports the implementation of an assault weapons buyback program, universal background checks, and reinstating the assault weapons ban and high-capacity magazines, which was a piece of policy he helped craft in 1994. Additionally, Biden also calls to ban gun manufacturers from building modifications to their products that make pistols as deadly as rifles and to build smart-gun technology, which has long been opposed by gun manufacturers.
In contrast to many of the other Democratic candidates, Joe Biden has reservations about legalizing marijuana. Instead, he calls for expungement of all past convictions for pot use and would take marijuana off of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most severe drug classifications list.
Joe Biden has pledged to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals in the face of attempts to roll back the 2015 Oberfell v. Hodges decision by the Republicans. Biden supports the Equality Act, which would expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act to ban discrimination in employment, housing, jury selection and public accommodations based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Criminal Justice
Joe Biden supports the elimination of mandatory minimum prison sentences for non-violent crimes.
Despite hsi past support for the death penality as recently as 1995, Joe Biden is now opposed to the death penalty and would work to abolish the death penality in the US
Joe Biden is opposed to the private prison system, the practice of cash bail, and the incarceration of children and would work to eliminate all three practices as President.
Joe Biden would also create a new $20 billion grant program that encourages states to reduce incarceration and crime. And he would direct the savings from less incarceration at the federal level, along with additional federal money, to boost spending on education (including universal pre-K), mental health care, addiction treatment, and other social services.
Healthcare
Joe Biden has pledged to defend and build upon the Affordable Care Act to ensure every American has access to quality, affordable health care.
Joe Biden wants to allow every American the right to choose a public option healthcare plan such as Medicare.
The Biden healthcare plan would offer premium-free access to any public option healthcare plan to people who would otherwise qualify for Medicaid, but for the fact they have been denied access to it by governors and state legislatures who have refused the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.
Joe Biden will dedicate the full force of our nation’s expertise and resources to tackle public health challenges such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, opioid addiction, and mental health.
Racial Justice
Joe Biden stated that the US needs to “deal with the systemic things” that plague the African-American community over the past 300 years and has made racial justice a centerpiece of his campaign.
Joe Biden supports implementing federal programs meant to close the gap between white Americans and racial minorities and to directly address the lingering issues of racial inequalities.
Joe Biden has yet to comment whether he would support reparations for slavery but signaled a willingness to explore the issue at the Congressional level.
Joe Biden has promised to push for reforms that would allow the federal government to conduct oversight of how some jurisdictions with track records of voter discrimination conduct their elections.
Immigration
Joe Biden is strongly opposed to President Donald Trump’s bigoted immigration strategy, calling it “inflammatory rhetoric” that does little than to inflame tensions in the US regarding the immigration system.
Joe Biden supports a pathway to citizenship for a majority of undocumented immigrants in the US.
The first step of Joe Biden’s immigration reform plan includes recognizing the DREAMers (the children of undocumented immigrants in the US) as American citizens.
Joe Biden also pledged to on addressing the “root causes that push people to flee” their homelands by improving security, reducing inequality and expanding economic opportunity in Central America, citing his success in this area during his time as Vice President.
Joe Biden is opposed to the Trump Administration’s proposed border wall, calling it a proposal “divorced from reality.”
Environmental Policy
Joe Biden has come out in favor of the “Green New Deal,” a proposed climate change mitigation program in the mold of the New Deal programs implemented by President Franklin Roosevelt during the 1930s.
Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that the US will achieve 100% clean energy and reach net-zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.
Joe Biden supports making smart infrastructure investments a priority.
Joe Biden supports re-entering the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (which President Trump withdrew from at the urging of all Senate Republicans and one Senate Democrat, Joe Manchin) and working aggressively with the global community to solve the issue of climate change.
Joe Biden will stand up to the industries and businesses that disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities with pollution and environmental degradation.
Education Reform
Joe Biden has been in favor of four years of free college education for all American citizens since at least 2015 and will work to implement this policy as President.
Joe Biden calls to triple the money the federal government sends to low-income school districts.
Joe Biden also supports increasing mental health care in schools and expanded resources for families, including home visits by nurses for parents of newborns and the creation of “community schools” in low-income areas that offer social services, doctors, and other help.
Joe Biden has called on the Department of Education to create grants to help schools diversify.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, former Vice President Joe Biden contacted a group of his supporters on March 19 to ask for help in raising several million dollars from major donors, making it known he is planning to enter the 2020 presidential election. Biden has been contemplating a White House run for some time and continues to lead in polls among Democrats as a favorite to take on President Donald Trump. Biden would enter a crowded field of close to 20 presidential candidates that have already declared, or are expected to announce that they will be joining the 2020 race. The report said Biden asked at least a half-dozen supporters for help in lining up major donors. Biden also reportedly expressed concern he may not have the same immediate success in raising political funds online as other Democrats, such as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas. O’Rourke, who formally entered the 2020 race on March 14, raised more than $6 million in the first 24 hours, trouncing the $5.9 million Bernie Sanders raised in the first 24 hours.
A day before the Wall Street Journal report, President Donald Trump criticized Biden’s indecision about running for President, calling him “another low I.Q. individual!” in a Twitter post. Despite some concern for his indecisiveness regsrding making the plunge into the Democatic primaries, Joe Biden still retains much support among Democratic Primary voters. A CNN Poll released on March 19 shows Joe Biden enjoys 28 percent support among the crowded field of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Bernie Sanders comes in second with 20 percent support followed by Kamala Harris, who is third with 12 percent.
Joe Biden got tongue tied over the weekend when he was unable to properly deliver a very simple line about his decision to run for President. Get used to it, another low I.Q. individual!
The reaction to former Vice President Joe Biden’s candidacy is mixed. It can be argued that Joe Biden perhaps has the most comprehensive record of any of the candidates running, having served in the Senate for 36 years before becoming Vice President. During his time in the Senate, Biden emerged as a leader on both international and legal issues, having served as both the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Additionally, Biden developed a reputation as a dedicated, honest, and hard-working politician during his time in the Senate and earned the universal respect of his colleagues. Joe Biden also took an active role as Vice President, working closely with President Barack Obama on both foreign and domestic policy. Despite his strong resume and depth of experience, some liberal activists have expressed concern with Joe Biden’s record regarding criminal justice issues, foreign policy, and votes in favor of confirming conservative Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in the 1986 and 1991 respectively.
Overall, it seems that Joe Biden has the strongest chance out of all the Democratic Presidential candidates for several reasons. The first reason is that he retains much appeal in several states in the industrial Midwest (namely, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan). All three of these states voted for President Donald Trump by narrow margins in 2016 and are vulnerable to flipping back to the Democrats with the right candidate. Considering Joe Biden’s political record in support of many policies that benefit this area of the country, as well as his time as Vice President during the Obama administration, he might be the right candidate to flip these three states, which are worth 46 Electoral Votes in total, which would give Biden 278 Electoral Votes, slightly more than what is required to win the Presidency.
Another reason why Joe Biden could potentially defeat Donald Trump is because his appeal in the Midwest could force the Trump Administration to play defense in what is typically an area of the country that votes Republican. While it is unlikely for Joe Biden to come close to winning states such as Ohio and Iowa considering how far to the right they have swung in recent years, his presence on the ballot would slightly improve Democratic support in those states, which would trigger President Trump to make unnecessary campaign stops in those states. By distracting the Trump campaign, Joe Biden would be able to campaign in several of the key swing states such as Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Maine. While Biden may not carry all of these states, his campaigning in all of them will help out Democratic Congressional candidates, which may be enough to secure a Democratic Senate majority and larger House majority after the 2020 elections.
