US Politics

Following the January riot at the US Capitol in Washington, tech giants moved rapidly to “de-platform” Donald Trump, in a move that could well have hurt more than any impeachment could have. Social media was a key tool for the former US president who would use it to unceremoniously fire personnel, settle scores – even threaten war, as he famously did in 2017 in response to North Korean nuclear weapons tests when he tweeted that the US was “locked and loaded”.

All the signs are that he wants to maintain his hold over large sections of the Republican Party, but he’ll struggle without the help of Big Tech. And there’s no sign yet that the social media giants are planning to roll back on their bans. Despite what a drawcard the former president undoubtedly is, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have clearly come to the conclusion that his brand of incendiary rhetoric is simply too dangerous – for the country and for their brands.

Within two days of the Capitol riots, Twitter released a detailed statement to explain its ban: Trump had breached the company’s glorification of violence policy in two specific tweets sent after the riots. One, in which Trump informed his followers that he wouldn’t be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, “may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending”, it said.

Other tech giants responded in a similar way by disabling platforms associated with Trump. Facebook suspended Trump’s profile indefinitely pending the outcome of a review by its new oversight board.

The five-member panel has begun its review of Trump’s suspension. This is likely to be the board’s most significant review since it commenced work in October 2020. That’s partly due to Trump’s profile – but mostly because its decision (which will be binding on Facebook) will have implications for how the platform responds to political speech going forward. Its decision will be published here.

Google, which also owns YouTube, suspended Trump’s YouTube channel – initially for seven days “minimum”, but the suspension was subsequently made “indefinite” due to “concerns about the ongoing potential for violence”.

Big Tech is notoriously slow to crack down on incendiary contributors – perhaps because it’s in their financial interest to maintain the status quo. Certainly, the fact that Twitter’s share price slumped after Trump’s removal suggests that he and others like him are valuable assets for these platforms and that it’s in their interests to hang on to these assets, even if that means hosting contributors that fray societal cohesion, threaten democracy and ultimately lead to the type of violence that engulfed the Capitol.

Don’t blame the shareholders

Corporations regularly become embroiled in controversial situations, but it’s not just hosting divisive characters on your social media platform that gives rise to controversy. There are plenty of examples of enterprises that make the most of tax loopholes or exploit “gig workers”. You’ll often hear them blaming the “profit-maximising shareholders” and claiming that they are obliged to take these tough decisions to maximise shareholder wealth.

This is simply not true. In fact, most corporate law frameworks around the world allow management to decide whose interests they’ll prioritise in making decisions. They could prioritise employees’ interests, those of the environment and society at large or they could prioritise shareholders’ interests. The point is that they don’t have to prioritise the latter.

It was thumbs down for Donald Trump after the Capitol riots in January.
achinthamb via Shutterstock

This is certainly the case for Big Tech. All of the tech firms referred to above – Twitter, Facebook and Google – are incorporated in the US state of Delaware. The significance of Delaware is that its courts have recognised that management have discretion to pursue interests other than shareholder wealth maximisation.

So, if these tech firms decide to reinstate the accounts of Trump and his acolytes having realised that his removal is hurting their bottom line, don’t believe them if they say, “The shareholders made us do it.” From a corporate law perspective, the power rests with the chief executives.

It’s up to these businesses whether they host Trump and others like him because he attracts the eyeballs and thus the money – just as it’s up to them whether they remove incendiary contributors in the interests of social harmony.

You could reasonably argue “de-platforming” incendiary or divisive voices has a chilling effect on free speech (regardless of what it does for a social media platform’s bottom line). But, perhaps more important is that by taking steps to detoxify the worst content, social media companies are finally recognising their potential impact on democracy – and the responsibility that comes with it. More

Sign up for the Guardian’s Green Light newsletter Glenn Helkenn lives in a spruce forest, in a tiny log cabin he built himself on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska’s third largest city.Give him an hour and a handsaw and Helkenn says he can harvest enough firewood to heat his 96 sq ft home for a couple of days, even when the temperature drops to -40F. For him, it’s about more than free fuel.“It is what I enjoy doing,” Helkenn said. “You know, it’s the fresh air. It’s the time out in the woods. It’s the snowshoeing. It’s the exercise.”The trouble is about 12,000 much larger Fairbanks-area homes heat with wood too. The city is partially ringed by hills, so smoke can get trapped in low-lying neighborhoods for days or weeks.Fairbanks has some of the dirtiest air in the country, in large part due to smoke from wood stoves. Wood smoke is a serious health threat. It emits high levels of fine-particle pollution that can be inhaled deep into the lungs, exacerbating respiratory problems like asthma and increasing the risk of premature death from heart attacks and strokes.In 2015, the US government required that newer models of wood stoves perform better and began spending millions of dollars to subsidize the transition away from older models. Now, an investigation by state environment officials is revealing a critical flaw in that plan: the latest stoves might not be any less polluting than the previous ones.A review of 250 wood-burning stove certifications found unexplained data omissions and atypical lab practices. When the officials retested about a dozen of the heaters in their own labs, they were not able to reproduce the certification results. They found many stoves were polluting as much as the previous models. One was producing so much pollution that it wouldn’t have met the Environmental Protection Agency’s first-ever standards from 1988.“We pulled the test reports that are supposed to be publicly posted and we compared – did this certification report meet all the rules? And we couldn’t find any that actually met all the rules,” said Cindy Heil, an air official with Alaska’s department of environmental conservation. “That’s a problem.”Alaska, along with a group of north-east air regulators called Nescaum, expanded the review and concluded the certification procedures and EPA’s oversight of them are a “systemic failure”.As long as the stove review process continues virtually unsupervised, people inhaling wood smoke from the stoves will continue to get sick and die early, not just in Alaska but around the US, the state officials said.Fairbanks resident Patrice Lee has been campaigning for cleaner air for 14 years, since her son, who was born with heart defects, collapsed outside his high school on an especially smoky day.Lee says millions of dollars have been wasted trying to get people to burn wood more cleanly when it would have been better spent switching them to another fuel.“We have a whole generation of young people who may never achieve their full lung capacity, or even potentially their cognitive potential, because they’ve been breathing this smoke,” Lee said.Lee says the problem isn’t just stove technology. Wet wood sends more particulates up the smoke stack, so Fairbanks is steeped in public service messages about how to split and store firewood. A new kiln in town dries firewood for three days before it’s offered for sale. A local stove dealership offers classes every Saturday to ensure residents know how to operate their stoves for minimal pollution.And yet Lee can drive around her city on a cold day and see chimneys emitting thick plumes. “This house right here is a habitual offender. Just burns and burns and burns,” she said, pointing out a home in an older neighborhood. An air sensor there, on the porch of an 86-year-old woman, regularly registers the worst readings in Fairbanks, Lee said.Lee doubts the problem will be solved in her lifetime. The attempts to clean up Fairbanks’ air are a story of half measures, technology that didn’t pan out, administrative blunders and political resistance. It’s also been hard for many to accept that burning wood – an activity that seems so wholesome and close to the land – should be subject to intense regulation.Lee says her neighbors are nice people who believe that what they do on their property is their own business.“Their smoke all blows on to my property,” she said. “My most personal property is my body. And when I can’t avoid smoke, that’s invading the most personal property I have.”Airborne particulates from burning wood in homes may be to blame for 10,000 to 40,000 premature deaths annually in the US, according to two studies. In 2017, the particle pollution from residential wood heating was four times higher than the particle pollution from coal-fired power plants.Only about 4% of residential heating in the US is from wood. But that wood heating is responsible for more particulate pollution than any other source – 22%.People in Fairbanks have limited options. Most residents who have wood stoves use them to supplement another heater – typically one that burns oil. But oil costs more. Propane doesn’t perform well in extreme cold. A new utility is trucking natural gas to Fairbanks and piping it to homes, but it’s not available everywhere and residents say the cost of getting it installed is steep.With those factors in mind, the state of Alaska has spent about $12.5m in EPA grants to replace older wood stoves with newer ones in Fairbanks. It has about $15m more available to spend on wood stove programs.At the end of 2020, Congress also approved a 26% tax credit for new wood stoves that meet a certain efficiency level. Ten states provide tax incentives or rebates for the newer stoves, ranging from a 100% tax deduction in Alabama, Georgia and Idaho to a $500 tax deduction in Arizona.In 2015, the Obama administration wrote new rules for wood stoves. They were the first revisions since 1988. The regulation was in full effect as of May 2020. It basically requires that newly manufactured wood stoves meet stricter pollution restrictions and are certified by independent laboratories.But the wood stove industry is suing the federal government over the rule. It also lobbied federal regulators to change testing methods while the rule was under development. The state officials behind the wood stove report argue that led to loopholes that made certification easier.Although the EPA has approved hundreds of new wood stove models, Alaska has double-checked those certifications and allows only a few dozen to be sold or installed in the Fairbanks area, which is not meeting federal standards for particle pollution.“Right now we’ve made compromises and have left some things on the list that we still have concerns on – because we need to have something on the list,” said Heil, the Alaska air official. “We’re hoping through time that will get better and we’ll have more and more confidence.”The EPA is reviewing complaints about the certification program and acknowledged it could revoke approvals for stoves and test labs if appropriate.“Having wood-burning devices that are not meeting the standards is problematic for homeowners, as well as for communities and states working to meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for [particulate matter],” the agency said.The wood stove industry has defended its new models. John Crouch, public affairs director for the trade group the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, said he doesn’t know of any significant data missing from stove test results.Crouch said he was not surprised a second lab can’t reproduce the same results.“This is fire. Fire is pretty random,” he said. “And these are in the laboratory. You can imagine when you get out into the real world. It varies a lot.”Crouch said many Fairbanks residents are still using stoves that predate the standard. Area residents have sent hundreds of older stoves to be crushed in change-out programs, but as many as 2,000 may still be in use, according to state regulators.A company called Blaze King produces some of the most popular wood stoves in Fairbanks – black boxy things with catalytic converters.Blaze King’s vice-president, Chris Neufeld, said he had had to run a regulatory obstacle course to sell stoves in the Fairbanks area. The Alaska DEC added a metric that Neufeld calls arbitrary: a particulate limit of six grams for the first hour, when stoves burn less efficiently.“That same stove that might be burning dirtier at the first hour – in hour three, four and five, it might be immaculate,” he said. “It might be burning super-clean. But we’re not giving it any credit for that.”Neufeld said a first-hour standard is like judging a car by how many miles per gallon it gets driving uphill. One Blaze King stove series did not make Alaska’s approved list for the Fairbanks area, even though it was certified by the EPA. Neufeld suspects a testing fluke.“If the wood fell just the way it was intended, it probably would have been like some of the other stoves that were below one gram per hour in the first hour filter-pull. We just got a bad run,” he said.Paul Miller, the executive director of the group of north-east US air associations, said the issue is a “backwater area for EPA”. He said the agency had not double-checked a stove certification in decades.“It’s like having your car out there and EPA never going back to check to see if one of these millions of cars on the road actually performed as certified by the automaker.”Go behind the scenes with the reporters on this story at Floodlight. More

OK, fine, I was wrong. But, in this case, I’m very happy to be wrong: it seems that Joe Biden may be shaping up to be a progressive president after all. I supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, but I can now see that Biden was the better choice.When Biden announced he was running for president, I was dismayed. I thought he was Hillary Clinton 2.0 and we were going to see a repeat of 2016. (And I maintain that, had it not been for the pandemic, which changed everything, then it probably would have been.) Then, when Trump lost, I was relieved but not exactly thrilled by the prospect of a Biden presidency. He largely campaigned on a platform of returning the US to “business as usual” – but business as usual just wasn’t working for most people.Instead of simply turning back the clock four years, however, Biden has been pushing forward undeniably progressive policies. The $1.9tn pandemic relief bill that just passed is expected to reduce US poverty in 2021 by more than a third. And many of its provisions won’t be temporary: the Biden administration has indicated that it will aim to make permanent the increase in child credits contained in the bill, which could cut child poverty in half.How is all this going to be paid for? Partly by – get this – taxing the rich. Biden’s next big move may be the first major federal tax hike since 1993. The White House is expected to propose raising the corporate tax rate, increasing capital gains tax for people earning more than $1m annually, and raising income tax for those earning more than $400,000. Whether all this will get passed by the Senate is yet to be seen, of course, but it’s a big shift in the right direction.I don’t want to go overboard here. Biden is far from perfect. It only took him a month, for example, to start doing what American presidents love doing best: bombing the Middle East. And a number of things he is being effusively praised for also don’t really stand up to scrutiny. Biden’s executive order pausing new oil and gas drilling on federal land, for example, is riddled with loopholes; one industry analyst told the Financial Times it presented a “best-case scenario for the oil industry under a Biden administration”. Indeed, Biden issued at least 31 new drilling permits in his first few days of office.Nevertheless, he is advancing a far more progressive agenda than I expected. And, while I was rooting for Sanders to be president, I think Sanders would have got a lot more pushback than Biden from Republicans on the same policies. Sanders is a brilliant agitator: he has helped to bring into the mainstream a lot of progressive thinking in the US. In the end, though, I think he is probably more effective at putting pressure on Biden to move to the left than he would have been as the president.In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks called Biden a “transformational” president. That is a ridiculously premature assessment: we are only a couple of months into his presidency. Plus, Biden is not going to change anything if Republicans block his most ambitious policies. For Biden to really be effective, he needs to end the filibuster – a tactic that has significantly increased in recent years, in which you debate a bill endlessly in order to block or delay it. Biden doesn’t seem to want to do this – which is frustrating because he does have the potential to be transformational. Time and time again, it seems establishment Democrats like talking about change a lot more than they actually like making it happen. Still, I’ve been proved wrong about Biden once. I hope he proves me wrong again. More

As New York governor Andrew Cuomo tried to focus on work on Monday, one of his sexual harassment accusers met for more than four hours with investigators working for the state attorney general.Charlotte Bennett revealed new details about Cuomo’s behavior and what she said was a “sexually hostile work environment”, according to her lawyer, including a claim the governor frequently made suggestive remarks about the size of his hands.“One piece of new information that came to light today was the governor’s preoccupation with his hand size and what the large size of his hands indicated to Charlotte and other members of his staff,” her lawyer, Debra Katz, said in a statement.Bennett also provided 120 pages of records to corroborate her accusations, Katz said.Bennett, 25, is one of a number of women who have accused Cuomo of harassment. Some have said he demeaned them with nicknames or objectifying remarks, subjected them to unwanted kisses and touches or asked about their sex lives. A few, including Bennett, said they believed the governor was gauging their interest in a sexual relationship.Cuomo also faces an allegation that he groped a female staff member after summoning her to the governor’s mansion in Albany late last year.The claims have led to a chorus of Democrats demanding Cuomo’s resignation, including both New York’s US senators. Overshadowed by scandal, Cuomo has tried to press on. On Monday he appeared at a vaccination site on Long Island and talked about the importance of getting a new state budget done by 1 April.That process normally involves intense negotiations and deal-making between Cuomo and leaders in the state legislature – people who have demanded he step down. More than 130 state lawmakers have said Cuomo should go, including Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. The state assembly has opened an impeachment investigation.“The majority of the legislature has called for his impeachment or resignation,” said Baruch College political science professor Doug Muzzio. “How can you work with a legislature that is composed of his antagonists? It doesn’t work.”Assembly speaker Carl Heastie said he would try.“I’m going to proceed as if it’s a normal negotiation,” he said.The state attorney general, Letitia James, last week named a former federal prosecutor, Joon Kim, and employment discrimination attorney Anne Clark to lead the Cuomo investigation. They have full subpoena power and will document their findings in a public report.Cuomo has said he will “fully cooperate”. His office did not comment on Monday when asked about Bennett’s interview with investigators.The attorney general’s investigation is on top of scrutiny from federal prosecutors over how Cuomo’s administration handled data on Covid-19 at nursing homes. Cuomo has insisted he won’t be distracted and won’t resign. At his event on Monday, from which reporters were barred, ostensibly because of Covid-19, the governor spoke generally of comebacks in the face of adversity.“Sometimes, God comes and he knocks you on your rear end for one reason or another, or life comes and knocks you on your rear end for one reason or another,” Cuomo said. “The question is what you do when you get knocked on your rear end. And New Yorkers get up, and they get up stronger, and they learn the lesson.” More

At a crowded campaign event early in the 2020 US election race, Joe Biden was asked for “a quick word for the BBC”. Half-incredulously, Biden glanced over his shoulder, replying, “The BBC? I’m Irish,” before flashing a smile and disappearing into an adjacent room.
The video gained substantial attention after Biden’s victory last November. It seemingly foretold an ominous shift in the US-UK relationship from a son of a British immigrant who loved the Queen (“A great, great woman,” oozed Donald Trump after a state banquet in 2019) to a man who wouldn’t even speak to the BBC on grounds of his Irish ancestry.
Biden is the most strongly identified Irish-American in the White House since John F Kennedy, the only other Catholic president. As vice president, Biden made jokes about banning the colour orange from his house (the colour of Northern Irish unionism) and, as he prepared his run for president, he met with the former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams to discuss, as Adams put it, “UI” (a united Ireland).

Yet, relying on the simple fact of Biden’s ancestry to predict US-UK relations under his presidency is misguided. Irish nationalist sentiments run high in the US, especially among its large diaspora. US presidents frequently indulge these views, at least symbolically. But, in practical terms, they have had little impact on the US-UK relationship. Compartmentalisation, not sectarianism, has been the US’s foreign policy approach. In other words, the US does not see its relationship with the UK through the prism of the Irish question, and it seems likely to remain this way under Biden.

More than 30 million people in the US – about one in ten Americans – identify as “Irish”. The population of Ireland is less than 5 million, meaning there are over six times as many people in the US who claim to be Irish in the US as those living in the Republic of Ireland itself.
During the Troubles, this group was even larger – both in absolute and percentage terms. In the 1980 census, 40 million Americans identified as Irish, constituting about one-fifth of the US population (a higher percentage than African Americans or Hispanics at the time).
Read more: How Brexit is leading a resurgent Irish American influence in US politics
Republicanism has found strong support among the Irish diaspora in the US. At the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, a Gallup poll found a majority of Americans supported a united Ireland, and just 17% thought that Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom.
During the Troubles, a variety of pro-nationalist interest groups were set up by the Irish diaspora in the United States. The most “militantly republican” group of the Irish lobby was Irish Northern Aid (Noraid). A 1981 federal court judgment revealed the group’s links to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Such groups were condemned by moderate nationalist leaders.
Other elements of the Irish lobby focused on change through legislation and executive action. They experienced some success but largely limited to symbolic gestures. In 1994, Bill Clinton reluctantly agreed to grant Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams a 48-hour visa to visit New York to speak at a conference in New York, in spite of protestations from the British government.
Friends of Ireland (but also the UK)
The so-called Irish lobby has gained renewed attention in recent years. Before the UK secured a free trade agreement with the EU in December 2020, members of the US congress threatened to block a US–UK trade deal unless the UK–EU agreement maintained an open border between the north and south of the island of Ireland.
The House Committee on Ways and Means, which would scrutinise a US–UK trade deal, was chaired by Congressman Richard Neal (a Democrat from Massachusetts). Neal is co-chair of the Friends of Ireland Caucus, founded in 1981 at the time of the IRA prisoner hunger strikes.
In spite of this, US presidential administrations have sought a more balanced approach. The US considers the UK to be one of its most valuable and important strategic partners. US presidents work closely with British governments, while also offering symbolic affirmation for Ireland.
‘Sláinte’: then US president Bill Clinton enjoys a beer in a Dublin pub with the Irish taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, in December 2000. EPA PHOTO / POOL- Maxwell
This leads to US presidents indulging in a bit of double-speak. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was shown by Jimmy Carter, who – on St Patrick’s Day 1976 – marched down Fifth Avenue in New York wearing a badge emblazoned with the slogan “England, get out of Ireland”.
Yet, the following year, Carter chose to make England the destination of his first international visit as president. Carter addressed a 20,000-strong crowd in Newcastle with the traditional, “Howay the lads”, which was returned with rapturous applause. Carter declared himself “to be a Geordie now”. Relations between Carter and Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan were reportedly good.
Biden’s references to his Irish ancestry do not distinguish him from other US presidents. With Donald Trump being the exception, nearly every president of the last half-century has identified as “Irish”, even when the evidence of such a link has been tenuous. Bill Clinton, for example, claimed to have Irish roots, but there is scant record to link him with Irish ancestors.
If measured by when their last ancestor left Ireland, Joe Biden is no more Irish than Barack Obama. Indeed, the Irish ancestors of Kennedy, Obama and Biden all left Ireland within a decade of each other, during or just after the Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1852). The last ancestor of Joe Biden to be born in Ireland was his great-great grandfather, born in 1832, one year after Barack Obama’s closest Irish ancestor.
Nearly all US presidents like to say, “I’m Irish,” but traditionally this has not meant being anti-British. While Biden’s personal affinities are clear, we should expect him to follow his predecessors in placing US security interests before Irish nationalist affections. More

Deb Haaland has been confirmed as the secretary of the interior, making her the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in US history.The 60-year-old from New Mexico will be responsible for the country’s land, seas and natural resources, as well as overseeing tribal affairs.The US Senate confirmed the Democrat on Monday by a vote of 51-40, after she secured the support of Republican senators including Lindsey Graham, Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan and Susan Collins.In a statement after the vote, Haaland said she was “ready to serve”.Thank you to the U.S. Senate for your confirmation vote today. As Secretary of @Interior, I look forward to collaborating with all of you. I am ready to serve. #BeFierce— Deb Haaland (@DebHaalandNM) March 15, 2021
Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, one of 574 sovereign tribal nations located across 35 states. She is the most senior Indigenous American in the US government since the Republican Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw nation situated in what is now Kansas, who served as vice-president to Herbert Hoover between 1929 and 1933.She will lead about 70,000 staff who oversee one-fifth of all the land in the US and 1.7bn acres of coastlines, as well as managing national parks, wildlife refuges and natural resources such as gas, oil and water.Haaland will also be responsible for upholding the government’s legally binding obligations to the tribes – treaty obligations that have been systematically violated with devastating consequences for life expectancy, exposure to environmental hazards, political participation and economic opportunities in Indian Country.According to the 2010 census, 5.2 million people or about 2% of the US population identifies as American Indian or Alaskan Native – descendants of those who survived US government policies to kill, remove or assimilate indigenous peoples.“Native youth look to Representative Haaland as a role model, as a fierce defender of their rights and their communities, and as the living representation of the future of Indigenous communities in this country,” said Nikki Pitre, the executive director of the Center for Native American Youth.New Mexico’s Democratic senator, Ben Ray Luján, who presided over the Senate during Monday’s vote, said Haaland’s appointment sends a signal to young Native Americans.“She’s the embodiment of the old adage that if you see it you can be it,” he said.Haaland’s confirmation comes after several days of grilling by senators over her past criticism of Republicans, even though she had one of the best records of bipartisanship in the previous Congress. She also faced hostile questions from senators from oil and gas states, who claimed her opposition to fossil fuels projects would destroy jobs.Last year, Haaland sponsored a bill that would set a national goal of protecting 30% of US lands and oceans by 2030 – the 30 by 30 commitment since made by Biden in an executive order.In a recent interview, Haaland told the Guardian that as secretary of the interior she would “move climate change priorities, tribal consultation and a green economic recovery forward”.She added: “I’m going to continue to reach across the aisle, to protect our environment and make sure that vulnerable communities have a say in what our country is doing moving forward.”Nick Tilsen, the president and chief executive of the NDN Collective, a grassroots indigenous power organization, said: “Deb Haaland is going to be a breath of fresh air who will fight for lands, jobs and people.”Reuters and Vivian Ho contributed reporting More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden has launched a publicity blitz for his coronavirus rescue plan but faces disruption from a messaging war with Republicans over an escalating humanitarian emergency at the US-Mexico border.In brief remarks at the White House on Monday ahead of a national tour, the US president touted the $1.9tn relief package passed by Democrats in Congress last week, Biden’s first major legislative victory.“In the next 10 days, we will reach two giant goals: 100m shots in people’s arms and 100m cheques in people’s pockets,” he said.The law will cut child poverty in half, Biden said, and is “focused on rebuilding the backbone of this country – working families, the middle class, people who built this country”.But it is one thing to pass the bill, another to implement it, the president warned. “The devil is in the details. It requires fastidious oversight … We’re going to have to stay on top of every dollar spent.”Biden added: “We can do this, we will do this. Help is on the way.”The president, who has still not held a formal press conference after nearly two months in office, did take one question from a reporter about whether his predecessor Donald Trump should encourage sceptical Republicans to take the coronavirus vaccine.Biden replied: “I discussed it with my team, and they say the thing that has more impact than anything Trump would say to the ‘Maga’ folks is what the local doctor, the local preacher, the local people in the community would say. I urge all local docs and ministers and priests to talk about why it’s important to get that vaccine.”Maga refers to Trump’s campaign slogan Make America Great Again.The year-long coronavirus pandemic has infected nearly 30 million Americans, killed 534,890 and put millions out of work. But about 107m vaccine shots have been administered, leading Biden to predict a return to a semblance of normality by independence day on 4 July.His stimulus package includes direct $1,400 payments to millions of Americans – the first of which hit bank accounts over the weekend – as well as an extension of unemployment benefits, funding for state, local and tribal governments and money to accelerate vaccinations and reopen schools.It was announced that Biden has appointed Gene Sperling, a longtime Democratic economic policy expert, to oversee the implementation of the package.Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris, and their spouses are starting an ambitious cross-country “Help is Here” tour to extol its benefits with daily themes such as small businesses, schools, warding off evictions and direct cheques.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday: “We want to take some time, more than a moment, to engage directly with the American people and make they sure they understand the benefits of the package. What the president recognises from his own experience is that, when it’s a package of this size, people don’t always know how they benefit or what it means for them.”The PR offensive began on Monday with Harris heading to a Covid-19 vaccination site and a culinary academy in Las Vegas and the first lady, Jill Biden, touring a New Jersey elementary school.Biden himself is due to visit a small business in Delaware county, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. He and Harris will appear together on Friday in Georgia, a swing state where Democrats’ victory in two Senate runoffs in January were fundamental to the passage of the bill.The White House has said it does not believe Barack Obama’s administration did enough to champion its $800bn economic rescue programme in 2009. Democrats went on to suffer a heavy defeat by Republicans in the House in the following year’s midterm elections.This time the new law is broadly popular among the public, posing a headache for Republicans who were united in voting against it and described it as an overpriced bundle of liberal pet projects unrelated to the pandemic.Lanhee Chen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, said: “The policy argument is a fair one and in fact is the right one to be making but it’s hard in the context of what we see, which is, do you want your $1,400 cheque or do you not? That’s a much easier argument for the Democrats to make in the short run. So I think Republicans have a tall order ahead of them.”Republicans are instead seeking to change the political narrative by switching attention to the southern US border, where there has been a surge of people trying to cross and a record number of children are now in US custody.CBS News reported that by Sunday morning, US border patrol was holding more than 4,200 unaccompanied children in short-term holding facilities, including “jail-like stations unfit to house minors”. Nearly 3,000 of them had been held longer than the legal limit of 72 hours.Sensing Biden’s first major vulnerability since taking office, Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, led a group of Republicans to the border in El Paso, Texas, on Monday. They argued that Biden has created a crisis by halting construction of Trump’s border wall, placing a moratorium on deportations and promising a pathway to citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants.“The cartels were listening,” said Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana. “It’s beyond a crisis at the border. It’s a threat to the republic.”McCarthy said: “It’s more than a crisis. This is a human heartbreak. This crisis is created by the presidential policies of this new administration. There’s no other way to claim it than a ‘Biden border crisis’.”Apparently caught by surprise, the government is scrambling to respond. Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to support efforts to shelter unaccompanied minors. The Associated Press reported on plans to use a downtown Dallas convention center to hold up to 3,000 immigrant teenagers.At the White House press briefing, Psaki said the Biden administration recognises the scale of the challenge and is working to move children to homes or shelters as quickly as possible. “We have been looking at additional facilities to open to move children, unaccompanied children,” she said.A reporter pressed Psaki on whether Fema’s presence means the administration considers the situation a “disaster”.She replied: “I know we always get into the fun of labels around here, but I would say our focus is on solutions and this is one of the steps that the president felt would help – not become a final solution – but help expedite processing, help ensure that people who are coming across the border have access to health and medical care.”The press secretary was also challenged on reports that children are going hungry, sleeping on cold floors and not being allowed outside. The conditions are “not acceptable”, she acknowledged.“This is heartbreaking. It’s a very emotional issue for a lot of people and it’s very difficult and challenging … We want to expedite getting these kids out of these CBP facilities as quickly as possible.”In a swipe at Donald Trump’s administration, Psaki added: “We are trying to work through what was a dismantled and unprepared system because of the previous administration.” More