US Politics

In the aftermath of former police officer Derek Chauvin being convicted of murdering George Floyd, it seems like there is momentum for the US Congress to pass some kind of police reform bill.Hearings on policing have been held and point people on both the Democratic and Republican sides are in ongoing talks. By most metrics, Congress is in a comfortable position to pass some kind of bill meant to deter police brutality and prevent another George Floyd or Eric Garner.But this is Congress in 2021. There have been plenty of moments where bipartisanship seemed high and failure seemed remote right before failure became certain. As a result, and despite the intense societal reckoning over racism playing out in America, there are few people who see the passing of meaningful new laws as a guaranteed outcome.Yet people are talking. “I’m optimistic that we’re making progress. I’m confident that I’m going to negotiate with people at the table and no one else,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said during a brief interview on Thursday.Scott’s comments came on a day where there was a flurry of movement among the principal lawmakers who will have to be involved in some kind of compromise bill’s passage. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker led a committee hearing on policing reform. The California congresswoman Karen Bass, who sponsored the ill-fated George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020, engaged in early discussions with Scott and other members of Congress.Scott had met with Bass on Thursday and said those conversations went “well” but wouldn’t elaborate on specifics or sticking points in a compromise bill.Outside of Congress, high-profile lawmakers have called for passage of some kind of policing bill.Convicting the man who murdered George Floyd was just the first step toward accountability. Join me and the @NAACP_LDF in calling your senators to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to save lives. pic.twitter.com/9v5XoFxGfs— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 22, 2021
Joe Biden has publicly urged Congress to make another attempt at passing a policing reform bill.“George Floyd was murdered almost a year ago,” the president said in remarks from the White House, adding: “It shouldn’t take a whole year to get this done.”Republicans argued that the Democrat bill put too much power and responsibility at the federal level. So Scott, after being appointed as the point-person on crafting a policing reform bill by the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, pushed his own policing reform bill in 2020 only to have Senate Democrats filibuster it. Scott’s bill proposed to use federal grant money to incentivize police departments to use body cameras and tactics for deescalating situations.But by the end of 2020 a policing reform bill looked like it would stay in the legislative graveyard. Republicans refused to sign on to Democrats’ policing bill and Democrats viewed the Republican counteroffer as a non-starter.In March, after Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, the chamber passed the George Floyd Policing Act. But since then it’s faced ongoing opposition from Republicans in the Senate. The legislation bars law enforcement from engaging in racial profiling, prohibits chokeholds and no-knock warrants. It also creates a national police misconduct registry.But in April 2021 it’s too early to say whether this policing reform momentum is on the same trajectory as in 2020. Discussions, according to multiple congressional aides, are very much in the earliest stages.The presence of Scott at the table is important.“McConnell and the conference trust Scott generally, and on this issue especially because of his past work on it,” said a former Senate Republican leadership chief of staff. “If there’s going to be a bipartisan reform bill that actually comes together this year, the conference trusts him to come up with a compromise that the majority of them will be able to support.”Scott has signaled areas of compromise, such as on qualified immunity where responsibility would fall to police departments instead of individual officers.Talks about sticking points aren’t in full swing yet. Congressional leaders are encouraging early bipartisan talks though. All lawmakers will say, though, is that early progress is being made.“Look, I’ve encouraged Senator Booker to talk to Senator Scott and see if they can come up with something. They are making progress. I’m not going to get into the details of their discussions,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer of New York said. “But if we could come up with a strong bill that deals with this systemic bias that’s been in our police forces for far too long, that would be great. So I’ve encouraged them to talk to one another, and their discussions are making some progress.” More

On the 50th day of his presidency, Joe Biden marched into the Oval Office and took a seat behind the Resolute desk, where the massive, 628-page American Rescue Plan awaited his signature. Across the room hung a portrait of Franklin D Roosevelt, a nod to the transformative presidency Biden envisions for a nation tormented by disease, strife and division.The $1.9tn package was designed to tame the worst public health crisis in a century and to pave the way for an overhaul of the American economy. It overcame unanimous Republican opposition in Congress, where Democrats hold the barest majority.“This historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country and giving people in this nation, working people, middle-class folks, people who built the country, a fighting chance,” Biden said. And with the flick of a pen, he signed into law one of the most expensive economic relief bills in American history.Biden took office at a moment of profound grief and turmoil, inheriting from Donald Trump a virus that has killed more than 550,000 and exposed glaring inequalities in healthcare, education and the economy. Fear and anxiety still gripped the nation in the aftermath of the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol, when Trump loyalists stormed the building in a bloody attempt to stop lawmakers certifying Biden’s electoral victory. All of this amid a generational reckoning on race and the ever-accelerating threat of climate change.One hundred days into his term, Biden’s solution to the myriad crises is an ambitious economic agenda that promises to “own the future” by dramatically expanding the role of government in American life.The White House is guided by the belief that if it can lift the nation from the Covid-19 crisis and the economic havoc it wrought, it can begin to restore Americans’ faith in government and pave the way for the next phase of the Biden presidency.“We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital,” Biden said in his first primetime address, hours after signing the American Rescue Plan. “It’s us. All of us.”The pandemic remains an inescapable challenge. But the picture is inarguably brighter than it was when Biden delivered his inaugural address in January to a sea of American flags marking the crowds absent from the Mall. Now, Biden is dangling the prospect of backyard barbecues by the Fourth of July.Marshaling a “full-scale, wartime effort”, his administration has built one of the largest and most effective mass immunization campaigns in the world.At its peak the US was administering more than 3m shots a day. In a nation of nearly 330 million, more than 50% of adults including 80% over 65 are at least partially vaccinated. Last week, Biden surpassed his goal of administering 200m shots by his 100th day. The problem is rapidly becoming too much vaccine and not enough people willing to be vaccinated.“That was arguably one of his main jobs as president – to start getting this pandemic under control,” said Dr Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, “It’s not fully under control yet, but it is clearly in much better shape than it would have been had this incredible vaccination effort not happened.”Jha credits the campaign’s success to several factors, from improving coordination between the federal government and states to tweaking the way doses are extracted from vials. He added that such success is due in part to the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, which dramatically accelerated vaccine development.Deaths from the coronavirus have declined sharply since a peak in January, as many of the most vulnerable Americans are vaccinated. Yet infections are rising again in many parts of the country. The more contagious B117 variant of the coronavirus that was first discovered in the UK has emerged as the dominant strain in the US, and young people are at particular risk. Even so, a number of Republican states have ignored Biden’s pleas to keep mask mandates and other restrictions in place.Reaching the roughly 130 million Americans who have yet to be inoculated remains a challenge, as demand softens and vaccine hesitancy persists. As of 19 April, all adult Americans became eligible to receive a vaccine, marking what Biden called a “new phase” of the immunization effort.Public health experts are working to confront misinformation and conspiracy theories. The decision by federal health officials to temporarily halt the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after rare instances of blood clots among millions who have received the shot further fueled mistrust in some corners.“The biggest challenge that the administration faces over the next 100 days is in building confidence in people who are not sure they want the vaccine,” Jha said. “That is going to take an enormous amount of effort and, in some ways, it’s much harder than simply building vaccination sites because it’s sociological.”As the vaccine campaigns help Americans push past the pandemic, and the economy begins to show signs of recovery after a year of hardship, Biden is turning to the potentially legacy defining pieces of his agenda. He plans to spend trillions more on an infrastructure package.“It is not a plan that tinkers around the edges,” Biden said, introducing the first half of a multi-trillion dollar agenda in a speech outside Pittsburgh. “It is a once-in-a-generation investment in America.”The president’s “Build Back Better” agenda widens the definition of infrastructure to include investments in home care, an expansion of broadband and a restructuring of the tax system in addition to more traditional public works projects like roads, bridges and railways. It also represents the cornerstone of Biden’s fight against climate change, which he has called the “the existential crisis of our time”. Embedded throughout the plan are proposals to reduce carbon emissions by investing in green infrastructure and technologies, electric vehicles and clean energy, as well as a clean electricity standard that aims to ​decarbonize the nation’s power sector by 2035 – and the whole economy by mid-century.At a White House virtual climate summit with world leaders, Biden unveiled an ambitious ​new pledge ​to cut US carbon emissions by at least half by 2030.A forthcoming piece of his infrastructure agenda is expected to center on expanding childcare services and making education more affordable and accessible. It too envisions hundreds of billions of dollars of spending.It is perhaps a surprising approach for a man who has spent nearly four decades in public life building a reputation as a consensus-minded moderate eager to negotiate with his “friends across the aisle”. In the Democratic primary, he was cast as the establishment alternative in a field of rising stars and progressive challengers.But since emerging as the party’s standard bearer, Biden has steadily embraced a more expansive vision, arguing that the social and economic moment demands bold action.During his first press conference last month, Biden said repeatedly he wanted to “change the paradigm” – a stark shift in tone from the early days of his presidential campaign, when he promised donors that under his leadership “nothing would fundamentally change”.Congressman Jim Clyburn, the Democratic majority whip and a close ally and friend of the president, said Biden’s tenure has so far “exceeded my expectations – not my hopes are my dreams – but my expectations.”Clyburn, who is widely credited with saving Biden’s campaign by endorsing him weeks before the South Carolina primary, said he was pleasantly surprised by Biden’s infrastructure proposal, which he “didn’t expect to be as bold as it is”.“A lot of people, I among them, felt that because of this 50-50 split in the Senate, he would go less bold,” Clyburn said. “But I think that he has calculated, the way that I would, that in the legislative process, you never get all that you ask for … so it’s much better to get some of a big bill, then some of a little bill.”Republicans are balking at the scale and cost of Biden’s plans, as well as his proposal to pay for it by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to fight Democrats “every step of the way” on Biden’s infrastructure plan, which he has panned as a “Trojan Horse” for liberal priorities.“It won’t build back better,” he said last week. “It’ll build back never.”Democratic leaders have yet to choose a legislative path forward for Biden’s infrastructure plan, but, thanks to a recent ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, they now have multiple avenues to circumvent Republican opposition.Biden’s infrastructure plan has not sat well with moderate Republicans, who say they were expecting a governing partner in the White House.“A Senate evenly split between both parties and a bare Democratic House majority are hardly a mandate to ‘go it alone’,” Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah who is part of a working group that hopes to find a bipartisan solution on infrastructure, wrote recently on Twitter.The group unveiled a counterproposal hat is a fraction of the size of Biden’s public works plan, touting it as a “very generous offer”. The White House welcomed the effort but the vast spending gap suggested the differences between the parties may be too wide to overcome.The president is keenly aware of the difficult math in the Senate, having spent more than 30 years in the chamber. Even if bipartisan discussions collapse and Democrats go it alone, Biden will still face challenges keeping his ungainly coalition together.But in choosing bold action over incrementalism, Biden is gambling that voters will forgive the price tag if Democrats can deliver tangible results like universal broadband and affordable childcare while seeking to put Republicans on the defensive over their opposition to a plan that polling suggests is broadly popular.A recent New York Times survey found that two in three Americans, including seven in 10 independents, approve of Biden’s infrastructure spending.Progressives are pressing the 78-year-old president to act urgently, knowing Democrats’ precarious hold on Congress is only guaranteed through January 2022. Declaring the “era of small government” over, they argue that there is a political risk to being too cautious. Pursuing an expansive economic agenda, they say, is not only good policy but good politics.Biden, for the most part, appears to agree. He has argued that spending too little confronting the nation’s crises is riskier than spending too much. He told Republicans at a meeting last week that he was open to compromise, but vowed that “inaction is not an option”.In a recent speech, Biden said it was time to retire the theory of “trickle down” economics, saying now was the time for building an economy that “grows from the bottom up and the middle out”.“This is the first time we’ve been able, since the Johnson administration and maybe even before that, to begin to change the paradigm,” the president said.Shortly after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd last week, Biden placed an emotional call. Huddled in the courthouse, Floyd’s family put the president on speakerphone.“At least, God, now there is some justice,” Biden told them. “We’re all so relieved.”Their attorney, Ben Crump, urged the president to pressure Congress to pass policing reform and to use this moment to confront America’s violent legacy of racism.“You got it, pal,” Biden said. “This gives us a shot to deal with genuine, systemic racism.”The murder of Floyd, who was Black, at the hands of a white police officer touched off global protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Biden said then that the long overdue racial reckoning created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to directly historic racial injustices.As president, Biden has placed emphasis on racial equity, drawing support from civil rights activists and criticism from conservatives.He assembled a cabinet that is the most diverse in history, including the first female, first African American and first Asian American vice-president, as well as the first Native American and first openly gay cabinet secretaries, the first female treasury secretary, the first African American defense secretary and the first immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.Confronting systemic racism is the “responsibility of the whole of our government”, the White House declared, laying out steps the new administration would take to address inequality in housing, education, criminal justice, healthcare and the economy.He has emphasized equity in vaccine distribution and targeted underserved communities with his $1.9tn relief plan. His infrastructure plan dedicates funding to neighborhoods harmed by pollution and environmental hazards as well as to homecare aids, predominantly women of color. He endorsed statehood for the District of Columbia, a heavily Black city that does not have voting representation in Congress. He warned that some states were “backsliding into the days of Jim Crow” by imposing new voting restrictions.Yet a major voting rights bill remains stalled along with a long-promised policing overhaul. Biden’s sweeping immigration reform has yet to gain traction as Republicans hammer the administration over an influx of migrant children at the Mexico border. Spasms of gun violence have renewed calls for gun control.Biden’s first in-person meeting with a foreign leader began with the Japanese prime pinister, Yoshihide Suga, extending his condolences for a mass shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis, which left eight people dead. Suga also condemned a rising tide of violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders since the start of coronavirus lockdowns.The summit underscored Biden’s belief that the nation’s crises are not only an inflection point for America – but for the world. Biden has framed his domestic revitalization effort as part of a global conflict between authoritarianism and democracy.“That’s what competition between America and China and the rest of the world is all about,” Biden said in his infrastructure speech. “It’s a basic question: Can democracies still deliver for their people?”Jonathan Alter, author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, said Biden, like the 32nd president, has a rare opportunity to transform the political landscape for generations.“Roosevelt and his New Deal represented a new social contract between the government and the people in terms of what the government owed Americans,” he said. That lasted for nearly five decades, he said, until Ronald Reagan gave rise to a new era of small-government and free-market competition.Whether Biden can forge a new social contract to meet the most urgent challenges of the 21st century – yawning inequality, a warming climate and rising authoritarianism – is a question unlikely to be answered by his 100th day in office, Alter cautioned. But he expects the next 100 to be revealing.“It’s hard to imagine but Biden has already spent several times as much in 1933-dollars as Roosevelt did in his first 100 days,” Alter said. “And the odds that a Rooseveltian achievement in American political life will take place this year are highly likely.” More

“Just imagine,” tweeted Pete Buttigieg last October, “turning on the TV, seeing your president, and feeling your blood pressure go down instead of up”.Joe Biden’s first hundred days in the White House appear to have been successful in lowering the nation’s blood pressure after a four-year white knuckle ride with Donald Trump.Americans no longer dread awakening to all caps tweets that run the gamut from threatening war to insulting some celebrity’s looks. Journalists express gratitude for getting their weekends back. Cable news has returned to its old drumbeat of hurricanes, mass shootings and the British royal family soap opera.It is evidence that Biden has adopted a get-out-of-the-way approach, returning to the stylistic norms of Trump’s predecessors and an era when citizens did not have to think about their president all day every day. The mood change in Washington is tangible.“I found myself for the last four years waking up in the morning and feeling quite happy and then this dark cloud would come over my head and I’d think: something’s wrong,” recalled Sally Quinn, an author and journalist. “And then I would think, Donald Trump got elected president! My God. That’s gone now and honestly, it’s like it never happened.“I look back on what went on and how we were all just filled with a constant anxiety and upset and disruption and chaos and anger and outrage and everything else. Everybody I know is just calmer and, of course, Biden comes at the same time that we’ve got the [coronavirus] vaccine and summer is coming. It’s such a different environment now. It’s so peaceful.”Trump’s vice-like grip on the nation’s consciousness quickly began to fade after he was banned from Facebook and Twitter following the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. He now releases email statements from his “45 Office”, sometimes in the style of a tweet, but most of them drift harmlessly into the ether.His interviews on Fox News and other conservative media have a similarly modest impact. An analysis by the Washington Post found that in March 2021, “Google search interest [in Trump] was lower than at any point since June 2015, as was the amount of time he was seen on cable.“The networks were covering him far less, down to the point reached last year when the pandemic overtook Trump in the national attention. Besides that, the average mentions of Trump in March were back to the levels seen in November 2015.”But this is not because Biden has emulated the shock and awe tactics that gave Trump the constant media attention he craved. The Democrat has given only one solo press conference and indulges less “chopper talk” with reporters before boarding Marine One on the White House south lawn. His press secretary, Jen Psaki, avoids the banana skins that felled her predecessors so her live briefings are seldom shown on cable news.Whereas the Trump White House produced almost nightly revelations of palace intrigue or the latest twist in the Russia investigation, Biden’s version is proving stubbornly leakproof. There has even been mental space for “dog bites man” stories involving the president’s German Shepherds, Champ and Major.One of the impacts of Biden’s 100 days on my personal life: my wife has reverted to happily listening to music in the morning instead of anxiously listening to news.— David Frum (@davidfrum) April 25, 2021
Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “President Trump was in our faces 24/7 and Joe Biden, if anything, has moved closer to the other end of the spectrum.“He and his team appear to have decided that when it comes to presidential visibility less is more, that if presidential appearances are reserved for events of significance, whether they’re speeches, press conferences, comments on important issues or important meetings, that’s just fine. There are real advantages to not being the focal point of everything.”Although Biden is similarly unspectacular on Twitter, his chief of staff, Ron Klain, is a feistier presence. Klain frequently tweets updates on vaccination progress and other accomplishments of the administration, and is not averse to retweeting spiky posts about Republicans or whatever is the talk of Washington that day.Chris Whipple, author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, said: “It’s unusual but, in a way, it’s a perfect bully pulpit for Klain, a combination of cheerleading and agenda setting that seems to work for him.“The White House chief traditionally tries to keep everybody in the administration on the same page and I think this may be one way to do it. Everybody knows what his priorities are at any given moment of the day, whenever he’s tweeting. He’s able to advance Joe Biden’s agenda by cheerleading and also keeping everybody in line. It seems to work for him.”A return to “normal” is not inherently a positive. There is a school of thought that the political status quo was what got America into trouble in the first place, giving rise to an outsider like Trump who promised to smash the system. But analysts point to a difference between Biden’s style and substance.His quiet, almost boring approach belies an audacious agenda that has earned comparisons with with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Ezra Klein, a columnist for the New York Times, argues that dialing down the conflict allows Biden to dial up the policy: “Speak softly and pass a big agenda.”Or to put it another way, whereas Trump’s sound and fury may have signified not very much, Biden’s near disappearing act could ultimately allow him to be far more consequential.Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, added: “This feels a lot more normal. In many respects, it’s an administration whose mores we can recognize, whether we celebrate them or not. But the administration is not normal in the way that perhaps counts the most: namely, in its policy ambition.”Trump is not necessarily gone for good. He continues to exert huge influence over the Republican party and could soon return to the political stage, campaigning during the 2022 midterm elections and perhaps even for the White House in 2024. But for now, many of those whose dreams he haunted are enjoying a new dawn.Moe Vela, who was a senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said: “It’s the biggest sigh of relief in the sense that my stress levels are reduced dramatically because I don’t have to go and read about what that idiot was tweeting or what damage did he do today.“I don’t think that we, as the majority of Americans that voted for Joe Biden, realised just how much that was stressful emotionally, mentally and spiritually. I feel like a tremendous burden has been lifted off my shoulders and my heart. There’s a feeling that somehow everything’s going to be OK with Joe Biden there, and that was the absolute antithesis of what I felt under Donald Trump.” More

Val Demings, a Democratic congresswoman and a former police chief, said on Sunday the officer who fatally shot teenager Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio this week “responded as he was trained to do”.In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Demings spoke about the Columbus officer’s actions and how her time as Orlando police chief informed her perspective on police reform.Ma’Khia, 16, was shot and killed on Tuesday, about 20 minutes before the former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.Franklin county, where Ma’Khia was killed, has one of the highest rates of fatal police shootings in the US. In a departure from protocol, officials released body camera footage soon after Ma’Khia was killed. The video appears to show her swinging a knife at another individual. Officer Nicholas Reardon shoots at Ma’Khia, who falls.One of Ma’Khia’s close friends, Aaliyaha Tucker, told the Columbus Dispatch her friend was funny, kind, helpful and outgoing. “She’ll talk about how beautiful that you are,” Tucker said. “She was just a nice person.”On Saturday, a rally was held in memory of Ma’Khia’s at the Ohio statehouse.On CBS, host John Dickerson asked Demings about Reardon’s conduct, which would still be protected under a police reform bill, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which has passed the US House. The bill would restrain police officers from using excessive force unless a third party was in danger and de-escalation was not possible.“Everybody has the benefit of slowing the video down and seizing the perfect moment,” Demings said. “The officer on the street does not have that ability. He or she has to make those split-second decisions and they’re tough. “But the limited information that I know in viewing the video, it appears that the officer responded as he was trained to do with the main thought of preventing a tragedy and a loss of life of the person who was about to be assaulted.”Dickerson asked what Demings would say to officers who believe they are being scrutinized unfairly because of an increased focus on accountability. She said that when she spoke to officers, she told them to remember their training and that they work with human beings, and to use compassion.“The overwhelming majority of law enforcement officers in this nation are good people who go to work every day to protect and serve our communities,” Demings said. “I remind them of that. Always stand on the right side. Speak up.” More

Months after Donald Trump’s election defeat, Republicans in Arizona are challenging the outcome with an unprecedented effort to audit results in their most populous county – all run by a Florida company, Cyber Ninjas, with no elections experience.The state senate used its subpoena power to take possession of all 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county and the machines that counted them, along with computer hard drives full of data. The materials were then handed to Cyber Ninjas, a consultancy run by a man who has shared unfounded conspiracy theories claiming official election results are illegitimate.Elections professionals fear the process will severely undermine faith in democracy.“I think the activities that are taking place here are reckless and they in no way, shape or form resemble an audit,” said Jennifer Morrell, a partner at The Elections Group, a consulting firm advising state and local officials which has not worked in Arizona.Conspiracy theories about Joe Biden’s victory have had particular staying power in Arizona, which went Democratic for just the second time in 72 years. On Friday, Trump predicted the audit would reveal fraud and prompt similar reviews in other states he lost.“Thank you state senators and others in Arizona for commencing this full forensic audit,” he said in a statement. “I predict the results will be startling!”Cyber Ninjas began a manual recount on Friday, a day after Democrats asked a judge to put an end to the audit. The judge ordered the company to follow ballot and voter secrecy laws and demanded it turn over written procedures and training manuals before a hearing on Monday. He offered to pause the count over the weekend if Democrats posted a $1m bond to cover added expenses. The party declined.On a since-deleted Twitter account, Cyber Ninjas owner Doug Logan used hashtags and shared memes popular with people promoting unsupported allegations casting doubt on Biden’s victory. Logan says his personal views are irrelevant because he is running a transparent audit with video streamed online.“There’s a lot of Americans here, myself included, that are really bothered by the way our country is being ripped apart right now,” Logan said. “We want a transparent audit to be in place so that people can trust the results and can get everyone on the same page.”Logan refuses to disclose who is paying him or who is counting the ballots, and will not commit to using bipartisan teams for the process.The Republican-dominated Arizona senate refuses to let media observe the count. Reporters can accept a six-hour shift as an official observer but photography and note-taking are prohibited. It would be a violation of journalistic ethics for reporters to participate in an event they were covering.The state senate has put up $150,000 for the audit but Logan has acknowledged that is not enough to cover his expenses. A rightwing cable channel, One America News Network, raised money from unknown contributors which went directly to Cyber Ninjas. Logan would not commit to disclosing the donors and would not provide an estimate for the cost of his audit.Cyber Ninjas plans to have teams of three people manually count each ballot, looking only at the presidential and US Senate contests, which were won by Democrats.Logan said the counters were members of law enforcement and the military as well as retirees. He would not say how many were Democrats or Republicans and would not commit to ensuring the counting teams are bipartisan.The process was to be overseen by volunteers. As of a week ago, 70% were Republicans, according to Ken Bennett, a Republican former secretary of state serving as a liaison between the Senate and the auditors.Cyber Ninjas plans to review ballot-counting machines and data and to scan the composition of fibers in paper ballots in search of fakes. It plans to go door-to-door in select precincts to ask people if they voted. Logan was vague about how the precincts were chosen but said a statistical analysis was done “based on voter histories”.The audit has been beset by mistakes. Hand counters began the day using blue pens, which are banned in ballot counting rooms because they can be read by ballot machines. A crew from a group of Phoenix television stations, azfamily, had unfettered access to the supposedly secure facility as auditors were setting up equipment and receiving ballots and machines.Election experts said hand counts are prone to errors and questioned a lack of transparent procedures for adjudicating voter intent.Maricopa county conducted pre- and post-election reviews to check the accuracy of voting machines, including a hand count of a representative sample of ballots, as required by state law. The county hired two auditing firms that reported no malicious software or incorrect counting equipment.“We’re going to set up a new norm where we don’t accept the outcome of elections in a free and fair and just democracy, and that is the core of what is at stake here,” said Tammy Patrick, senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and a former Maricopa county elections official.“I think that is incredibly, incredibly problematic.” More

One of the few House Republicans to vote for Donald Trump’s impeachment over the US Capitol attack said on Sunday his party was “in a perpetual state of denial” over the former president’s lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.At the same time, the Republican leader in the House refused to deny that during the deadly riot on 6 January, when he asked Trump to call off supporters the then president told to “fight like hell” to overturn the election, Trump said: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people were more upset about the election than you are.”Representative Peter Meijer spoke to CNN’s Inside Politics. The minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, appeared on Fox News Sunday. Both are part of a party which remains in the former president’s grip.In February a Republican congresswoman, Jaime Herrera Beutler, said McCarthy told her what Trump said on a call as the riot progressed.“When McCarthy finally reached the president on 6 January and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot,” she said, “the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa [leftwing activists] that had breached the Capitol.“McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said: ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’”Her account contradicted Trump’s claim that he took immediate action to stop an attack that resulted in five deaths as the mob sought lawmakers including Vice-President Mike Pence to kidnap and possibly kill. More than 400 charges have been brought.News outlets have also reported that the call between McCarthy and Trump became heated, the minority leader asking: “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?”McCarthy was initially critical of Trump’s behaviour but quickly backed down and supported the president when he was impeached for inciting an insurrection.Meijer and Herrera Beutler were among 10 Republicans who voted with Democrats to send Trump for trial in the Senate, the most bipartisan such vote in US history. Trump was acquitted when only seven Republican senators voted to find him guilty.Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked McCarthy if Herrera Beutler’s account of his conversation with Trump was accurate.“I was the first person to contact [Trump] when the riot was going on,” McCarthy said. “He didn’t see it. What he ended the call [he] was saying, telling me he’ll put something out to make sure to stop this. And that’s what he did, he put a video out later.”Wallace replied that Trump’s appeal to supporters to stop the violence came “quite a lot later. And it was a pretty weak video. But I’m asking you specifically, did he say to you, ‘I guess some people are more concerned about the election than you are’?”“[In] my conversation with the president,” McCarthy said, “I engaged in the idea of making sure we could stop what was going on inside the Capitol. At that moment in time the president said he would help.”McCarthy was also asked if Trump “ever reached out to you since that report came out to discuss what you talked about in the 6 January phone call, and did you say to him, ‘I can’t because we’re under oath’?”“No, that never happened,” McCarthy said. “Never even close.”“And if it did happen,” Wallace said, “you would agree that would be witness tampering?”“Yeah,” said McCarthy, “but never happened, never even came close, never had any conversation like that. Never heard that rumour before till today.”McCarthy’s denials found an echo – or a reflection – in Meijer’s remarks to CNN.Like others who voted for impeachment, the Michigan representative has attracted a pro-Trump challenger. On Sunday he said the former president’s lies were “being pursued at the exclusion of actually being able to win more elections”.“Now one of the biggest challenges,” he said, “is if you don’t believe that you lost, if you think that the 2020 election was stolen, and then you drag that out and say, ‘Well, of course then the Georgia Senate elections must be stolen too,’ you just live in a perpetual state of denial. And I know there are plenty who don’t deny it, but it’s a conundrum.”On Fox News Sunday, McCarthy also refused to commit to supporting a congressional investigation of the Capitol attack, despite concessions from Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, in an attempt to get Republicans on board.Insisting any investigation should look into “political violence across this country”, McCarthy claimed the issue was “too important to negotiate in the press”. More

Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser said on Sunday the recent pause on the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine should raise confidence in health agencies’ focus on vaccine safety, as the administration tries to curb deadly outbreaks across the US.The most dangerous outbreak is in Michigan, where more younger people are being hospitalized than at any point in the pandemic.“Something we need to pay attention to is that we’re having still about 50,000 new infections per day,” Dr Anthony Fauci told ABC’s This Week. “That’s a precarious level and we don’t want that to go up.”An independent government advisory panel on Friday voted in favor of resuming use of the Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine after it was put on pause to review cases of a blood clotting disorder in six women who received it. The vaccine will now include a warning on its label about the potential risk for rare blood clots and a fact sheet on potential side effects will be given to medical providers and vaccine recipients.Fauci said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were “the gold standard for both safety and the evaluation of [vaccine] efficacy”.“I think in the long run what we’re going to see – we’ll probably see it soon – is that people will realize that we take safety very seriously.”The risk of developing the clotting disorder after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is extremely low. The highest-risk group appears to be women aged 30 to 39, in which there have been 11.8 cases per million doses given. Among men and women 50 and older, there has been less than one case per million doses.“We’ve looked at it,” Fauci said. “Now let’s get back and get people vaccinated. And that’s what we’re going to be doing, get as many people vaccinated as we possibly can.”Fauci said he expected updated guidance on mask use for vaccinated people to be released soon. In the US, 28% adults are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.He said he was encouraged by the effectiveness of the vaccines available, but warned that the US has still not reined in Covid-19. More than 568,000 people have died from the virus in the US.Across the country, people in their 20s, 30s and 40s account for a growing share of hospitalizations. Michigan has confirmed 91,000 new cases in the past two weeks, more than in the two most populous states, California and Texas, combined.The seven-day average for Covid-19 hospitalizations last week was 38,550, according to the CDC. At the peak of the pandemic, in December and January, the highest such average was 123,907.The majority of the Michigan residents 65 and older have been vaccinated but that does not fully explain why cases have risen among those 60 and younger. Part of the change is being attributed to the B117 virus variant, which is more contagious and more deadly, and to an easing of restrictions on dining, crowds and mask wearing.Dr Mark Hamed, medical director in the emergency department at McKenzie Hospital in Sandusky, Michigan, said people may have been lulled into a false sense of security because the region was spared from rampant cases last year.Many people are still unvaccinated and the area “is being hit pretty hard”, Hamed told the Associated Press. “Our ER is absolutely swamped beyond belief.”On ABC, Fauci was asked to address those who are hesitant to be vaccinated, including the Wisconsin Republican senator Ron Johnson, who has no medical expertise or background but said this week there was no reason to “push” vaccines on the American people.“We have a highly efficacious and effective vaccine that’s really very, very safe,” Fauci said. “That is the reason why you want everyone to get vaccinated, so I don’t understand the argument.”Surveys have shown Republicans to be one of the most vaccine hesitant groups. Democrats (67%) are more likely than independents (47%) and Republicans (36%) to report getting a first dose, according to a Monmouth University poll in early April.Former president Donald Trump, who downplayed the severity of the pandemic throughout 2020, has encouraged people to get a vaccine.On Sunday the Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia, encouraged people to get vaccinated and said of Johnson: “I definitely think that comments like that hurt. I believe that we should all have confidence that we should to not just protect ourselves, but our communities and our neighbors. We should get vaccinated.”West Virginia was an early national leader in the vaccine rollout and 28.8% of residents are now fully vaccinated.“We’re starting to find that we have more vaccine than we do have people who are willing to step forward,” Capito, who has been vaccinated, told CNN’s State of the Union. “So I’m trying to do whatever I can to say it’s safe, it’s reliable and it’s really about you and your neighbor.” More

As Joe Biden welcomed a series of polls showing majority approval for his first 100 days in the White House, and prepared to address Congress for the first time on Wednesday, Republicans attacked his progressive record in office.One senior senator said: “AOC said his first 100 days exceeded her expectations. That’s all you need to know.”Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was talking to Fox News Sunday about remarks by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman and leading progressive from New York.Speaking to an online meeting on Friday, she said: “The Biden administration and President Biden have definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had.”Citing the $1.9tn Covid relief and stimulus bill, Ocasio-Cortez said Biden had been “very impressive” in negotiating with Congress to pass “progressive legislation”. She also voiced dissatisfaction with Biden’s $2.25tn infrastructure package.On Sunday, speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, Vice-President Kamala Harris trumpeted the administration’s achievements.“We are going to lift half of America’s children out of poverty,” she said. “How about that? How about that? Think about that … That’s good stuff. That’s really good stuff.”Republicans oppose the price tag on the American Jobs Plan and priorities within it, including plans to raise taxes on wealthier Americans and proposed spending on environmental initiatives.So do some Democrats – on Sunday the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, a key vote in the 50-50 chamber, told CNN he favoured a slimmed down, “more targeted” bill.Graham was not the only senior GOP figure to complain about something many on the left have praised: that Biden campaigned as a moderate but is governing more as a progressive.Also speaking to Fox News Sunday, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, accused Biden of “a bait and switch. The bait was he was going to govern as bipartisan but the switch is, he’s governed as a socialist”.Graham said: “During the campaign, he made us all believe that Joe Biden would be the moderate choice, that he really thought court-packing was a bonehead idea. All of a sudden we got a commission to change the structure of the supreme court. Making DC a state, I think that’s a very radical idea that will change the make-up of the United States Senate.”Progressives defend Biden’s commission on the supreme court as a necessary answer to Republican hardball tactics that skewed the panel 6-3 in favour of rightwing judges. However, Biden’s commission to examine the issue both contains conservative voices and is unlikely to produce an increase beyond nine justices any time soon.A bill to make DC a state, thereby giving the city representation it currently lacks and almost certainly electing two Democratic senators, has passed the House but is unlikely to pass the Senate.“AOC said his first 100 days exceeded her expectations,” Graham added. “That’s all you need. I like Joe Biden, but I’m in the 43%.”Sunday brought a slew of polls. Fox News put the president’s approval rating at 54% positive to 43% negative, nine points up on Donald Trump at the same time four years ago. NBC put Biden up 51%-43%, ABC made it 52%-42% and CBS reported a 58%-42% split.Graham also insisted Biden had “been a disaster on foreign policy”.The South Carolina senator was once an eager ally of John McCain, the late Arizona senator, presidential nominee and a leading GOP voice on foreign affairs. Biden was a senator from Delaware for 36 years and chaired the foreign relations committee.“The border is in chaos,” Graham said, “the Iranians are off the mat … Afghanistan is gonna fall apart, Russia and China are already pushing him around. So I’m very worried.“I think he’s been a very destabilising president, and economically thrown a wet blanket over the recovery, wanting to raise taxes a large amount and regulate America basically out of business.“So I’m not very impressed with the first 100 days. This is not what I thought I would get from Joe Biden.” More