Elections

The Biden campaign on Wednesday rejected a New York Post report about Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter that the nation’s leading social media companies deemed so dubious that they limited access to the article on their platforms.The report, appearing just three weeks before the election, was based on material provided by Republican allies of President Trump who have tried for months to tarnish Mr. Biden over his son. It claimed that the elder Mr. Biden had met with an adviser to a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden served. A spokesman for the Biden campaign, Andrew Bates, said that Mr. Biden’s official schedules showed no meeting between Mr. Biden and the adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi. “We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” Mr. Bates said. The Post story cited an email Mr. Pozharskyi allegedly sent to Hunter Biden thanking him for “giving an opportunity to meet your father” and to spend “some time together.” The authenticity of the email correspondence cited by The Post could not be independently verified. Hours after the Post published its article, Facebook said on Wednesday that it had decided to limit the distribution of the story on its platform so it could fact-check the claims. Twitter said it was blocking the article because it included people’s personal phone numbers and email addresses, which violated their privacy rules, and because the article violated their policy on hacked materials.Facebook’s and Twitter’s actions immediately provoked strong reactions from Republicans that the social media platforms were censoring them, an outcry that grew louder later on Wednesday when the Trump campaign said the personal account of the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, had been locked because she had posted the New York Post story. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a staunch Trump ally, called Twitter’s action “despicable” and termed it “the real election interference.”Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been under fire from Mr. Trump and other Republicans for years for allegedly censoring their views. The companies, located in liberal Silicon Valley, have denied those claims.Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings have been a subject of intense Republican focus over the last year, including his ties to a Ukrainian company, Burisma, while Mr. Biden, as vice president, worked on Ukraine policy. Both Bidens have said that the two did not discuss Ukraine with each other. An investigation by Senate Republicans — and significant scrutiny of the issue over the last year — found no evidence that Mr. Biden, the former vice president, engaged in wrongdoing over his son’s business dealings. Asked about the prospect of even a brief encounter with Mr. Pozharskyi, a Biden campaign official said that was “technically possible” but very unlikely. The official said there was “no indication at all” that such an interaction had happened, and that regardless, Mr. Biden would not have discussed anything tied to Burisma. More

“I have never been more proud of a nominee than I am of you. You’ve been candid to this body about who you are, what you believe. You’ve been reassuring in your disposition, and this is history being made, folks. This is the first time in American history that we’ve nominated a woman who is unashamedly pro-life and embraces her faith without apology. And she’s going to the court.” “So this hearing, to me, is an opportunity to not punch through a glass ceiling but a reinforced concrete barrier around conservative women. You’re going to shatter that barrier.” “Would you agree, first, that nobody is above the law — not the president, not you, not me? Is that correct?” “I agree no one is above the law.” “And does a president have an absolute right to pardon himself for a crime?” “Senator Leahy, so far as I know, that question has never been litigated. That question has never risen. That question may or may not arise. But it’s one that calls for legal analysis of what the scope of the pardon power is.” “Of course, a Supreme Court has no army. They have no force. But they do have a force of law. And is a president who refuses to comply with a court order a threat to our constitutional system of checks and balances?” “As I said, the Supreme Court can’t control whether or not the president obeys. Abraham Lincoln once disobeyed an order during the Civil War.” “Many argue that Bush v. Gore — and back to your earlier work — hurt the court’s legitimacy. But will having justices with this background, two of whom were appointed by the current president, decide any cases related to the upcoming election — do you think that will undermine the legitimacy of the court?” “Asking whether something would undermine the legitimacy of the court or not seems to be trying to elicit a question about whether it would be appropriate for justices who participated in that litigation to sit on the case, rather than recuse.” “The reason I asked about that is that this would be unprecedented when we, right now, we’re in an unprecedented time where we have a president who refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power working to undermine the integrity of this election. And yesterday you wouldn’t commit to recuse yourself from the case we just talked about.” “It’s not law, however. The Constitution is law. The severability issue — First of all, the majority holding, as you recognized, was that even though the Medicaid provision was unconstitutional, it was severable. So Justice Scalia expressed his view in dissent. Severability strives to look at a statute as a whole and say, ‘Would Congress have considered this provision so vital that, kind of in the Jenga game, pulling it out, Congress wouldn’t want the statute anymore?’ So it’s designed to effectuate your intent. But, you know, severability is designed to say, ‘Well would Congress still want the statute to stand even with this provision gone? Would Congress still have passed the same statute without it?’ So I think, in so far as it tries to effectuate what Congress would have wanted, it’s the court and Congress working hand in hand. More

It was a bit of news that came and went quickly amid the fury of political developments these days, but last weekend Jaime Harrison, the South Carolina Democrat who is fighting to unseat Lindsey Graham, announced that he had not merely broken the record for fund-raising for a Senate candidate in a single quarter. He had shattered it.From July through September, Harrison took in about $57 million. That was nearly $20 million more than Beto O’Rourke, the previous record-holder, collected during the same span two years ago, when he waged his ultimately unsuccessful battle against Ted Cruz in Texas.“I pinch myself,” Harrison said when I spoke with him on Tuesday night. “Good Lord.”He’s the recipient of so much money because he’s the vessel of so much hope.While he may not have the nationwide celebrity that O’Rourke attained in 2018 and South Carolina is much smaller than Texas, the themes in Harrison’s challenge of Graham are as big as can be.No other political contest in 2020 offers quite the same referendum on the ugliness of Donald Trump’s presidency. No victory would rebut Trump’s vision of America as emphatically and powerfully as Harrison’s would.Harrison would be the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate from the Deep South. The only Black Republican in the Senate, Tim Scott, is also from South Carolina. So South Carolina — where about 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to North America arrived, where the Civil War began and where a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof killed nine Black churchgoers in their house of worship in 2015 — would have two Black senators and would be the only state with an all-Black Senate delegation.How’s that for an answer to Trump’s racism and for a stirringly inspirational turning of the page?Harrison noted that the Senate seat that he is seeking was once held by John C. Calhoun, an infamous defender of slavery. “This was the seat of Benjamin Tillman, who would go to the floor and talk about the joys of lynching,” he added. “This was the seat of Strom Thurmond,” who took a leading role in opposing civil rights legislation.Harrison, 44, rose from a mobile home to college at Yale, law school at Georgetown and the distinction of being the first Black chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. He also worked for Representative James Clyburn, the South Carolina lawmaker who played a key role in salvaging Joe Biden’s beleaguered presidential bid by rallying Black voters to the former vice president.South Carolina turned Biden’s campaign around. Is it about to set the national tone again?“If Jaime is to win, then this is the most thorough rebuke of Trumpism that we’ve seen,” Bakari Sellers, a former state legislator in South Carolina, told me. “It also restores a lot of people’s faith in the basic humanity of this country.”And it’s no pipe dream. While I wouldn’t bet on a Harrison victory — not in a state that Trump won by 14 points in 2016 and that still seems to be safely in his column — some political handicappers now consider the Harrison-Graham race a tossup. Several recent polls show the men effectively tied. Harrison’s financial advantage is overwhelming. And he has been able to blanket the state in ads — excellent ones at that — while Graham has struggled to keep up.Harrison said that while Graham hasn’t done a traditional, in-person town hall with voters in South Carolina in years, “You can find him on Sean Hannity every other night begging for money.”Graham craved this week’s hearings on Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, because, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he’s getting oodles of free television exposure just when he needs it. He’s surely also betting that his role in elevating another conservative justice will please many South Carolina voters and shift their attention from his breathtaking inconstancy.He once vowed that he’d never consider, let alone promote, a Supreme Court nominee put forward in the last year of a president’s term, telling journalists to mark his words and use them against him if the need ever arose. The need sure did.He once railed that the way to make America great again was to “tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” Now he’s Trump’s adoring golf buddy. Does that mean Graham is a fairway-weather friend? It certainly means that his convictions have all the weight of whipped cream.One of the main story lines of the Trump years has been the spectacular moral capitulation of most Republican lawmakers, who junked supposedly cherished principles to placate a president whose hold on his base and capacity for vengeance mattered more to them than honor, than patriotism, than basic decency. Graham is the poster boy of that surrender, Complicitus Maximus, in part because his 180-degree turn to Trump required that he show his back to his close friend and onetime hero John McCain.Graham’s defeat by Harrison would be more than a personal comeuppance. It would be a morality play. And so, just as the unprecedented contributions to O’Rourke owed plenty to the nastiness of Cruz, the even bigger contributions to Harrison speak to the noxiousness of Graham.“Lindsey Graham is, next to Mitch McConnell, the most attractive target for the left to take down,” Todd Shaw, an associate professor of African-American studies and political science at the University of South Carolina, told me.Harrison conceded that a significant measure of his traction in this race is attributable to “the fever about Lindsey Graham,” who personifies what voters dislike most about politicians. “So many people thought so highly of him, and to have him betray that trust has added an extra layer of passion,” Harrison said.He added: “The country is simply tired of being divided. They’re tired of the chaos. They’re tired of the racialized rhetoric. One of the things I say, tongue-in-cheek, is that we need a national holiday after this election so that all of us can sit on a counselor’s couch for a few hours. We all just need that reprieve.”Jessica Taylor, who analyzes Senate races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told me that Graham’s predicament was neatly illustrated by a surprising recent development: “He started running a biography ad this past weekend.” That suggests that he’s concerned about his likability and needs to reintroduce himself to his constituents. “That’s not the kind of ad you run if you’ve been in Congress for 25 years,” Taylor said.Like other prominent political analysts, she favors Democrats, who are currently at a three-seat disadvantage, to regain control of the Senate. She gives them the clear edge to defeat Republican incumbents in Colorado and Arizona, and she puts seven other races with Republican incumbents, including Harrison’s, in the tossup category.One of those races, in Georgia, also involves a Black Democratic challenger, Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He’s trying to unseat Senator Kelly Loeffler, and if both he and Harrison were to win, there would be two popularly elected Black Democratic senators from the Deep South, where there had never been any before.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni). More

As countries have awakened to the hazards of climate change, they have slowly started curbing their greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. Some energy giants, like BP,now expect global demand for oil to plateau in the decades ahead.

But scientists warn that governments aren’t acting nearly fast enough to avoid severe global warming. And every year of delay makes the problem harder to solve.

The clock is ticking. Global temperatures have already risen 1 degree Celsius from preindustrial times. For that increase to stay well below 2 degrees Celsius, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that global carbon dioxide emissions need to get down to zero by around mid-century. Blowing past that limit, the panel warned, could bring about a world of worsening food and water shortages, collapsing polar ice sheets, and a mass die-off of coral reefs.

Getting emissions all the way down to zero would entail a staggeringly rapid transformation of the world economy.

In the United States, climate activists have rallied around the Green New Deal, which envisions getting the United States to net zero emissions as quickly as possible in order to give less-wealthy nations more time to make their own transitions. Mr. Biden has called the Green New Deal a “crucial framework” but has distanced himself from its particulars, instead aiming to zero out America’s emissions by 2050.

Doing so would require doubling or tripling the pace at which clean electricity sources like wind or solar get installed,one recent study found, all while slashing pollution from cars, trucks, buildings, industry and agriculture.

Mr. Trump hasn’t committed to any climate targets. One analysis by Wood Mackenzie, an energy research firm, suggested that another four years of delay would “dramatically reduce the possibility” of the nation meeting the 2050 goal for eliminating carbon emissions. More

US elections 2020

‘Trek the vote to victory!’ hosted by Democrats Stacey Abrams, Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang featured raft of Star Trek stars More

US elections 2020

Two events came about after Trump backed out of virtual debate with Biden, following president’s testing positive for coronavirus More

US markets

Investors move into renewables and other sectors that could benefit from ‘blue wave’ victory More

President Trump may not be debating Joseph R. Biden Jr. on the same stage on Thursday night as originally planned. But the two candidates will still face off in prime time.NBC said on Wednesday that it would broadcast a televised town hall with Mr. Trump from Miami on Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern — the exact time that Mr. Biden will appear on ABC for his own town-hall-style event in Philadelphia. Mr. Biden’s town hall has been on the books since last week, after Mr. Trump, who had recently contracted the coronavirus, rejected plans to convert the second formal presidential debate into a virtual matchup; the debate was eventually canceled. Mr. Trump’s campaign then sought its own telecast to rival Mr. Biden’s, leading to a lengthy negotiation with NBC officials who wanted independent proof that the president would not pose a safety risk to other participants — including network crew members, the Florida voters on hand to ask questions, and the moderator, Savannah Guthrie of the “Today” show. On Wednesday, NBC said the town hall would occur “in accordance with the guidelines set forth by health officials” and proffered a statement from Clifford Lane, a clinical director at the National Institutes of Health. More