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Biden swings by Pennsylvania in Covid relief tour and promises ‘more help’
Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden stopped by a unionized, Black-owned flooring company in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday to highlight how the provisions of his $1.9tn coronavirus relief package will help lift small businesses hurt by the pandemic, part of a cross-country campaign to promote the first major legislative achievement of his presidency.During his visit to Smith Flooring Inc, located in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester, Biden said the sweeping new law was a “big deal” and promised the owners: “More help is on the way – for real.”“We’re gonna be paying our employees,” James Smith, who co-owns the business with his wife, Kristin Smith, said of their plan for the relief checks. “We’ve been paying them. Since the first run of PPP, we decided we wanted to take that money and not lay anyone off. We put everybody in a group and said, ‘Look, we’re gonna do this for you as a team, we’re gonna get through this together.’”Biden’s visit to Smith Flooring, in a state he clawed back from Donald Trump in 2020, was his first stop on the White House’s “Help is Here” tour and comes a day after Biden announced that his administration was on track to mark two key milestones in the coming days: delivering 100m Covid vaccinations since his inauguration – far outpacing his initial promise to administer those doses in his first 100 days – and distributing 100m stimulus checks to Americans.The tour includes Biden, Kamala Harris and their spouses, Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff. Later this week, Biden and the vice-president will visit Georgia, another swing state that he narrowly won in 2020.During the visit, Biden explained how his plan would help small businesses like Smith Flooring, which saw its revenue fall by roughly 20% during the pandemic, according to the White House. The flooring company recently qualified for a federal Payment Protection Program (PPP) loan under an action taken by the president targeting businesses with 20 or fewer employees.Biden’s plan, one of the largest emergency aid packages ever enacted, will provide $1,400 direct payments to most Americans, send $350bn in aid to state, local and tribal governments, dramatically expand the child tax credit and spend tens of billions of dollars to accelerate Covid-19 vaccine distribution and testing.“Shots in arms and money in pockets,” Biden said in brief remarks on Tuesday. “That’s important. The American Rescue Plan is already doing what it was designed to do: make a difference in people’s everyday lives.“We’re just getting started.”Alawi Mohamed, the owner of a commercial strip in Chester, said the first loan given in last year’s coronavirus relief package had helped him stay afloat, but he was hoping Biden’s plan would give him a much-needed boost.“Everybody got affected by Covid-19. When they shut down everything, we got affected big time. Nobody was around and people were actually staying home,” he said. Now he said, he is “back to business, gradually, but everything came out good”.Also on Tuesday, Biden introduced Gene Sperling, a longtime Democratic policy aide, to oversee the implementation of the $1.9tn package.Democrats are increasingly confident that the stimulus package will boost their prospects in 2022, when they will attempt to keep their slim majorities in both chambers of Congress despite a long history of the president’s party losing seats during the congressional midterm elections.Every Democrat except one House member voted for the bill while Republicans unified against it.Republicans have attacked the plan as bloated, filled with liberal priorities that run far afield of the coronavirus response. But Democrats argue that the package will lift the nation from the dual crisis by rushing immediate aid to those hit hardest by the economic downturn and help ensure a more even recovery. They also say it will go further to tackle deep-seated economic inequalities, halving child poverty and expanding financial aid for families squeezed by job loss and school closures.Polling has consistently found that Americans favor Biden’s stimulus plan. According to a new CNN/SSRS poll released this week, 61% of Americans approve of the coronavirus relief package, while 37% oppose it.Haunted by their lashing in the 2010 midterms, Democrats now believe that they didn’t do enough to promote their sweeping stimulus package, shepherded by the new Obama administration and passed by Democratic majorities in response to the financial collapse.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has touted the package as among the most consequential bills of her decades-long career, putting it on par with the Affordable Care Act. In a letter to colleagues after the bill was signed, she urged members to hold tele-town halls and send informational literature to constituents to explain how the bill could benefit them and their families.“We want to avoid a situation where people are unaware of what they’re entitled to,” Harris said during her visit to a culinary academy in Las Vegas on Monday. “It’s not selling it – it literally is letting people know their rights. Think of it more as a public education campaign.” More
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‘The border is closed’: US deters adults but allows processing for child migrants
Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary said on Tuesday that even as the US processes a growing number of unaccompanied child migrants at the US-Mexico border, the country remains closed to most asylum seekers.“Now is not the time to come to the border,” Alejandro Mayorkas said.US border patrol officials encountered more than 15,000 children traveling without adults in January and February and officials have warned the numbers continue to grow in the first weeks of March. The arrivals threaten to overwhelm stretched federal agencies, putting children at risk, though Mayorkas told ABC News it was a challenge his department could handle.“What we are doing is addressing young children who come to the border to make claims under the humanitarian laws established years and years ago and we are building capacity to address the needs of children when they arrive,” Mayorkas said. “But we are also, and critically, sending an important message that now is not the time to come to the border.”Mayorkas said the border was not permanently closed to adults and families, but urged people to wait before approaching it.“Give us the time to rebuild the system that was entirely dismantled in the prior administration,” he said.The secretary also issued a lengthy statement, warning that the US was on pace to encounter more individuals at the border with Mexico than it had in the past 20 years.His projection did not reflect a record number of people crossing the border, however, because it only included people apprehended by US border patrol – not those who cross without getting caught. That group has shrunk dramatically since the early 2000s.“This is not new,” Mayorkas said. “We have experienced migration surges before – in 2019, 2014 and before then as well.”He also acknowledged several factors pushing people north, including poverty, violence, corruption and two damaging hurricanes which hit Honduras in November.The measured tone from the Biden administration is a marked departure from US policy under Donald Trump, when migrants were routinely vilified. Advocates have said this tone shift is an important step in itself but they are also watching closely to see if Biden administration acts reflect its promise of “a safe, legal and orderly immigration system”.A first test for the administration is how it processes children who make the dangerous journey to the US without adults.After encountering border patrol agents, unaccompanied children are supposed to be moved to US health department custody within 72 hours. The health department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement attempts to place children into homes with sponsors in the US, usually close relatives, while their cases are assessed.In recent weeks, thousands of unaccompanied children have been held in border patrol facilities beyond the three-day limit, prompting concerns for their health and welfare.Lawyers who spoke with more than a dozen children held at a border patrol facility in Texas last week told the Associated Press some said they had been there for more than a week. Some children reported being held in packed conditions, sleeping on the floor and not being able to shower for five days, the lawyers said.To cope with the increase, the Biden administration has opened temporary facilities to house children, deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and changed rules to move to children to the custody of a sponsor.Mayorkas said the administration was also attempting to rebuild the immigration system after the Trump administration shrank legal pathways to the US.“The system was gutted, facilities were closed and they cruelly expelled young children into the hands of traffickers,” Mayorkas said. “We have had to rebuild the entire system, including the policies and procedures required to administer the asylum laws that Congress passed long ago.”Trump’s immigration policy was shaped by adviser Stephen Miller, who has endorsed white supremacist views. On his watch, the Trump administration made more than 1,000 changes to US policy, according to the Immigration Policy Tracking Project.These changes included a March 2020 rule which effectively stopped asylum processing under coronavirus guidelines. As a result, more than 13,000 children traveling alone were expelled in the fiscal year to 30 September according to the American Civil Liberties Union.Overall, there were 197,000 expulsions in that time, a count including repeated crossings, or recidivism, which jumped from 7% in 2019 to 37% in 2020.Biden stopped using the rule, Title 42, to block unaccompanied children from seeking asylum. But it is still being used to expel adults and families. Advocates are critical of this decision, saying the public health justification is flimsy at best, but the administration has defended the Trump-era rule.At a White House briefing last week, the US southern border coordinator, Roberta Jacobson, spoke in Spanish and English.“La frontera está cerrada,” she said. “The border is closed.” More
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Deb Haaland confirmed as first Indigenous US cabinet secretary
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 - in US Politics
Republicans try to derail Biden’s Covid aid publicity blitz by turning focus to border
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
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Bidenomics beats Reaganomics and I should know – I saw Clintonomics fail | Robert Reich
A quarter-century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and abiding poverty. But Clinton’s political advisers warned that unless he went along, he would jeopardize his reelection.That was the end of welfare as we knew it. As Clinton boasted in his State of the Union address to Congress that year: “The era of big government is over.”Until Thursday, that is. Joe Biden signed into law the biggest expansion of government assistance since the 1960s – a guaranteed income for most families with children, raising the maximum benefit by up to 80% per child.As Biden put it in his address to the nation, as if answering Clinton: “The government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us, all of us, we the people.”As a senator, Biden supported Clinton’s 1996 welfare restrictions, as did most Americans. What happened between then and now? Three big things.First, Covid. The pandemic has been a national wake-up call on the fragility of middle-class incomes. The deep Covid recession has revealed the harsh consequences of most Americans living paycheck to paycheck.For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor. Ronald Reagan portrayed black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to “a woman in Chicago” as the “welfare queen”.Trump replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud and cultural paranoiaStarting in the 1970s, women had streamed into paid work in order to prop up family incomes decimated by the decline in male factory jobs. These families were particularly susceptible to the Republican message. Why should “they” get help for not working when “we” get no help, and we work?By the time Clinton campaigned for president, “ending welfare as we knew it” had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs. (In Britain, enlarged child benefits actually increased employment among single mothers.)Yet when Covid hit, a new reality became painfully clear: public assistance was no longer just for “them”. It was needed by all of “us”.The second big thing was Donald Trump. He exploited racism, to be sure, but also replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud and cultural paranoia stretching from Dr Seuss to Mr Potato Head.Trump obliterated concerns about government give-aways. The Cares Act, which he signed into law at the end of March 2020, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he calculatedly attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000.But Trump’s biggest give-away was the GOP’s $1.9tn 2018 tax cut, under which benefits went overwhelmingly to the top 20%. Despite promises of higher wages for everyone else, nothing trickled down. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, America’s 660 billionaires – major beneficiaries of the tax cut – became $1.3tn wealthier, enough to give every American a $3,900 check and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic.The third big thing is the breadth of Biden’s plan. Under it, more than 93% of the nation’s children – 69 million – receive benefits. Incomes of Americans in the lowest quintile will increase by 20%; those in the second-lowest, 9%; those in the middle, 6%.Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this unites them. Some 76% of Americans supported the bill, including 63% of low-income Republicans (a quarter of all Republican voters). Younger conservatives are particularly supportive, presumably because people under 50 have felt the brunt of the four-decade slowdown in real wage growth.Given all this, it’s amazing that zero Republican members of Congress voted for it, while 278 voted for Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the rich.The political lesson is that today’s Democrats – who enjoy popular vote majorities in presidential elections (having won seven of the past eight) – can gain political majorities by raising the wages of both middle class and poor voters, while fighting Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months. More
