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      Biden's make or break moment: president aims to build on success of relief bill

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      In the White House Rose Garden, where for four years Donald Trump raucously celebrated political wins with his allies, it was now the turn of Democrats to take a victory lap – masked and physically distanced, of course.Kamala Harris, the vice-president, heaped praise on Joe Biden for signing a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the biggest expansion of the American welfare state in decades. “Your empathy has become a trademark of your presidency and can be found on each and every page of the American Rescue Plan,” Harris said.Democrats this week passed the plan into law; now they have to sell it. Friday’s event with members of Congress fired the starting gun for Biden, Harris and their spouses to mount an aggressive marketing campaign, travelling the country to tell Americans directly how the hard won legislation will improve their lives.Salesmanship was always seen as Trump’s forte but this is a golden opportunity for Biden, a once unlikely saviour. The oldest president ever elected – at age 78 – is riding high in opinion polls. His rescue plan is endorsed by three in four citizens. His opposition is in disarray with Republicans struggling to find a coherent counter- narrative, squabbling over Trump and obsessing over culture wars.But Biden’s long career will have taught him the laws of political gravity: presidents and prime ministers who start on the up inevitably take a fall. He has also spoken of the need to avoid the fate of Barack Obama who, having intervened to stave off financial disaster in 2009, was repaid with a “shellacking” for Democrats in the midterm elections.Politics is about momentum and, with vaccines coming fast, the economy set to roar back, and spring in the air, Biden has it for now. Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, said: “In politics, good gets better, bad gets worse. Biden is on something of a roll right now and so it’s good for him to be a little more aggressive and be seen out and about.“They do want to take credit and he should. The tides will turn; there’ll be periods when they look like they can’t do anything right.”In what the White House calls a Help is Here tour, first lady Jill Biden is set to travel to Burlington, New Jersey, on Monday, while the president will visit Delaware county, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will go to Las Vegas on Monday and Denver on Tuesday. Emhoff will remain out west and make a stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Wednesday.At the end of the week, Biden and Harris will make their first joint trip in office to Atlanta where Democrats’ victories in two Senate runoff elections in January were pivotal to getting the relief package passed against unyielding Republican opposition.The White House has acknowledged that the public relations offensive is an attempt to avoid a repeat of 2009, when the Obama administration did not do enough to explain and promote its own economic recovery plan. Biden, who was vice-president at the time, told colleagues last week that Obama was modest and did not want to take a victory lap. “We paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility,” he said.That price included a backlash in the form of the Tea Party movement and rise of rightwing populism. But there were important differences in substance as well as style. Obama’s $787bn bill, which followed the bailout of the banks, delivered a recovery that felt abstract and glacial. This time the impact is more immediate and tangible: some Americans will receive a $1,400 stimulus payment this weekend, with mass vaccinations and school reopenings on the way.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “I underestimated the extent to which the experience of 2009 has seared itself into the memory of senior Democrats: the interpretation of going too small and paying the price in a painfully slow recovery, spending too long at the beginning negotiating with members of the other party who were never going to agree and never going to compromise, not telling the American people what they had accomplished for them.“The list of lessons learned is a very long one and, to an extent that I find surprising, the administration is refighting and winning the past war.”Despite preventing financial meltdown, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, the biggest shift since 1948. That fit a pattern in which the incumbent president’s party tends to fare badly in the first midterms, and so Republicans are upbeat about their chances of regaining both the House and Senate next year.Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama, argues that the Covid relief bill is the start of the battle for the 2022 midterms and warns that Democrats cannot take the credit for granted since Americans “currently have the long-term memory of a sea cucumber”.He wrote in the Message Box newsletter last week that despite Obama’s speeches and visits to factories, “it was nearly impossible to break through the avalanche of bad news”. But “this plan’s benefits are more specific, more easily understood, and likely to be broadly felt before too long”.Pfeiffer urged grassroots supporters to join Biden and Harris in the messaging effort via social media. “I spent much of 2009 and 2010 banging my head against the proverbial wall because not enough people knew about how Barack Obama had helped prevent the economy from tumbling into a second Great Depression,” he added. “Let’s not do that again.”The plan will also require strict oversight to ensure money is not misspent or wasted. Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “It is a massive bill with massive consequences but it requires not just the president and vice-president and cabinet but state and local governments to also work together to ensure that the vaccines are rolled out in an equitable way and ordinary citizens are able to take advantage of some of the wonderful initiatives that are in the bill.”There has been a striking contrast between Biden and Harris’s disciplined focus on passing historic legislation and Republicans’ fixation on “cancel culture”, from Dr Seuss, after the children’s author’s publishing house announced it was discontinuing several books that contained racist imagery, to confusion over whether the Mr Potato Head toy will still be a “Mr”.The issue, which often gets more coverage on conservative media than coronavirus relief, is seen as a way of animating the base in a way that attacks on Biden do not. The president is not Black like Obama, nor a woman like Hillary Clinton, nor a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, all of which seem to have inoculated him against demonisation by the rightwing attack machine.And despite its popularity with the public, every Republican senator opposed the American Rescue Plan, offering Biden’s team a chance to score political points. Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “It’ll be interesting to see how much they make it about the benefits of the plan versus about Republicans not having voted for the plan.”Chen, policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, added: “The challenge for Democrats is going to be as elements of this come out that will be unpopular, is it going to be defined by the things that are unpopular or the things that would appear to be politically quite favourable?” The OECD predicts that the rescue plan will help the US economy grow at a 6.5% rate this year, which would be its fastest annual growth since the early 1980s. But as Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair discovered, all political honeymoons come to an end.Republicans are already exploring a new line of attack by accusing the president of ignoring the burgeoning crisis of a surge in children and families trying to cross the southern border. The rare outbreak of unity among Democrats – in the Rose Garden, Biden thanked Sanders for his efforts – is not likely to endure. And the next major item on the legislative wishlist, infrastructure, is likely to be even tougher.But it is the American Rescue Plan, and the political battle to define it, that could make or break Biden’s presidency. Michael Steel, who was press secretary for former Republican House speaker John Boehner, said: “They’re making a bet on economic recovery and I hope they’re right because I want the US economy to recover swiftly.”But, he added, “I think that people will continue learning more about the things in this legislation that are not directly related to Covid relief or economic stimulus. There’s definitely a real risk of blowback.”Steel, now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public affairs consulting firm, added: “We could be on the on the verge of a new Roaring Twenties with a booming economy and so much pent up demand for people to travel and live and spend money. We could also be priming the pump for a devastating wave of inflation. The economy is generally the number one issue going into an election and there’s a very real chance that we have a tremendous upside or some dangers ahead.” More

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      'The Senate is broken': proposals for major changes to outdated system gather steam

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      In the first 50 days of the Biden administration, the US House of Representatives has passed major legislation to strengthen voting rights, reform police departments, empower labor unions and tighten gun laws.
      The public strongly supports each measure, and Biden is poised, pen in hand, to sign each bill into law. It could seem like the dawn of a new progressive era.
      But most analysts think the popular bills are doomed, because to get to Biden, they must first pass the Senate, where Democrats may have a slim majority, but where Republicans are widely seen as having the upper hand.
      On a field of fair democratic play, any legislation might fall short of the votes needed to become law.
      But critics of the US Senate say that for years now, the chamber has not been a field of fair democratic play, paralyzed by its own internal rules and insulated from the popular will by a 230-year-old formula for unequal representation.
      Instead, its critics say, the Senate has become a firewall for a shrinking minority of mostly white, conservative voters across the country to block policies they don’t agree with and safeguard the voter suppression tactics that shore up Republican power.
      The numbers are staggering. Currently Democratic senators represent nearly 40 million more voters than Republican senators – but the Senate is split 50-50, with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, wielding the tie-breaking vote. By 2040, 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states, and to be represented by only 30 senators, while 30% of Americans will have 70 senators voting on their behalf, according to analysis by David Birdsell of Baruch College’s School Of Public And International Affairs. The Senate has counted only 11 African American members in its history, out of almost 2,000 total.
      “There’s no doubt that the Senate is broken and has been broken for a long period of time,” said Ira Shapiro, a former Senate staffer, Clinton administration trade official and the author of Broken: Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country?. “It’s been in decline probably for 30 years, and that decline has deepened over the last 12 years.”

      Structural problems with the Senate in the past have been treated as too ingrained to be fixed. But as urgent social movements struggle toward fruition, a focus on the chamber as the last and greatest obstacle to the free exercise of democracy in the United States has sharpened.
      More than two centuries ago, to incentivize small states to join the union, the framers of the US constitution gave every state two senators, an arrangement that has always left some citizens vastly overrepresented in the body. But not until recent decades did a clear partisan split emerge in which Democrats were far more likely to represent bigger states, while Republicans represented many small states.
      The trend has created an immense discrepancy in the influence that voters from less populous, mostly rural – and white, and Republican – states wield in the Senate, compared with voters from states with big cities and more voters of color.
      Today, thanks to urbanization and related shifts, the state of California has 70 times as many people as the state of Wyoming – but each state still gets two senators, giving the small, conservative state the ability to counterbalance the giant, liberal state in any vote on energy policy, taxation, immigration, gun control or criminal justice reform.
      As part of this dynamic, Democratic Senate candidates regularly rack up millions more votes overall than Republican candidates – but the Republican caucus, as if by magic, does not shrink, and sometimes even grows.
      Chart showing how senate elections have gone and their outcomes
      Few analysts think the basic formula for the Senate will change anytime soon. “I think that of all the things that will not change, the equal representation of every state is at the top of that list,” said Shapiro. “That’s baked into the constitution.”
      But other proposals for major changes in the Senate are gathering steam in a way that could produce a breakthrough. One such proposal would reform the filibuster, a rule giving the Senate minority unilateral power to block almost any majority move it chooses.
      The filibuster has historically been used by both parties in different ways, but it “has always been used to block measures that would lead to racial equity and justice”, said Erika Maye, deputy senior director of criminal justice and democracy campaigns for Color of Change, a racial justice advocacy group.
      “It’s been used to stop anti-lynching bills, to uphold the racist poll tax, to delay civil rights legislation – and more recently healthcare, immigration and gun violence reform,” Maye said.
      “And so in this Congress, in the Senate, we expect it to be used to halt progress on many major policy initiatives that would improve the lives of Black people in particular.”
      The filibuster is not the only bulwark of white power built into the Senate, which currently counts only three African American members out of 100 total, next to 68 white men. The disproportionate power of rural states in the chamber translates to a disproportionate power for white voters in general.
      The columnist David Leonhardt calculated in 2018 that white Americans are represented in the Senate at a rate of 0.35 senators for every million people, versus 0.26 senators for African Americans and 0.19 for Hispanic Americans, prompting the New York Times opinion page to brand the Senate “affirmative action for white people”.
      To address this discrepancy, a growing number of leaders, including Barack Obama, have advocated for statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington DC – two majority-minority territories whose representatives in Congress do not currently have the power to vote.
      Adding the two as states could add multiple Democratic senators of color to the body, not enough to guarantee a majority, but enough to better reflect the populace and its policy priorities.
      Another avenue for progressive change would be to elect Democratic senators in supposedly Republican states, as Georgia did earlier this year, thanks to determined grassroots organizing. The announced retirements next year of three moderate Republican senators, apparently disillusioned with the Donald Trump era, from swing states present an opportunity for Democrats in the 2022 elections.
      The battle for the Senate has also intensified as partisan lines have grown deeper. The makeup of the Senate majority mattered less decades ago, when senators voted across party lines more frequently.
      Chart showing metrics of DW-Nominate scores which scores voting history on a liberal to conservative scale
      But cross-party cooperation in the Senate has dwindled as American politics has grown more sharply partisan, with pressure from cable news and social media, a culture of partisan demonization and recrimination, nonstop fundraising demands and the rise of incessant campaigning for office allowing no time to breathe – or legislate – between one election and the next.
      That does not mean senators are no longer capable of breaking ranks, as the Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy notably did in voting to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial, along with six other Republicans.
      The key to fixing the Senate, Shapiro thinks, lies in more senators acting like Cassidy, to “put national interest above partisan interest”.
      “I try to call on senators to be senators, like what they’re supposed to be,” Shapiro said, instead of blindly following the party leadership. “They’ve abandoned their responsibility to do the job.” More

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      In national address, Biden tells states to make all adults vaccine eligible by 1 May

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      Joe Biden has directed states to make all American adults eligible for coronavirus vaccines by 1 May and set an audacious goal of 4 July for gatherings to celebrate “independence” from the deadly pandemic.
      But in his first prime-time address, which marked the anniversary of America’s shutdown, the president warned that restrictions could be reinstated if the nation lets down its guard against the virus.
      “Tonight, I’m announcing that I will direct all states, tribes and territories to make all adults – people 18 and over – eligible to be vaccinated no later than 1 May,” Biden said in the east room of the White House. “That’s much earlier than expected.”
      He went on to make clear that this does not mean every person can get their shot in the arm by then but they will at least be able to join a waiting list. It signified the growing confidence of an administration that Biden said remains on “a war footing to get the job done”.
      The president said his target of 100m vaccine doses in his first 100 days has already been exceeded, with the US now on track to achieve that figure on his 60th day.
      In a 24-minute speech that carefully balanced caution and optimism, Biden also announced that the federal government will create a website before 1 May to help people find vaccination sites and schedule appointments. He promised he would “not relent” until the virus is beaten but he needs every American to “do their part”.
      He then offered a tangible target with emotional resonance: “If we do this together, by July the fourth there’s a good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your back yard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate independence day.”
      He added: “After this long hard year, that will make this independence day something truly special, where we not only mark our independence as a nation, but we begin to mark our independence from this virus.”
      Trump was frequently criticised last year for setting wildly optimistic dates for reopening businesses and schools. With many states already lifting restrictions again, Biden was at pains to say the fight is far from over. “Because if we don’t stay vigilant and the conditions change and we may have to reinstate restrictions to get back on track,” he warned. “Please, we don’t want to do that again. We’ve made so much progress. This is not the time to let up.”
      Wearing a black mask, dark suit, white shirt, striped tie and white handkerchief in his breast pocket, Biden walked up a red carpet flanked by flags to make the address – the first on live television from the east room since Donald Trump falsely claimed election victory at 2.20am on 4 November. More

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      Surge in migrants seeking to cross Mexico border poses challenge for Biden

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      The number of migrant children and families seeking to cross the US-Mexico border has increased to levels not seen since before the coronavirus pandemic – a challenge for Joe Biden as he works to undo the hardline immigration policies of predecessor Donald Trump.Statistics released Wednesday by US customs and border protection (CBP) showed the number of children and families increased by more than 100% between January and February.Children crossing by themselves rose 60% to more than 9,400, forcing the government to look for new places to hold them temporarily.Roberta Jacobson, the administration’s coordinator for the southern border and a former ambassador to Mexico, joined the White House press briefing on Wednesday.She said the president is committed to building a fair immigration system, but cannot undo the damage of the Trump administration “overnight”.She sidestepped a question about whether the situation at the border qualifies as a crisis.“Whatever you call it wouldn’t change what we’re doing,” Jacobson said.The secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, previously said he does not consider the situation to be a crisis, which sparked intense criticism among Republicans, including Trump.But Jacobson said: “Surges tend to respond to hope. There was a hope for a more humane policy.”She also argued that the election of Biden allowed human smugglers to spread disinformation about migrants’ ability to enter the US immediately.“The border is not open,” Jacobson said and urged undocumented people not to make the dangerous journey.The Biden administration is turning back nearly all single adults, who make up the majority of border-crossers, under a public health order imposed by Trump at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.And the administration is temporarily holding children and families, mostly from Central America, in government and private facilities for several days while it evaluates claims for asylum or determines if they have any other legal right to stay in the US.Republicans have argued that migrants are drawn by incentives such as the immigration bill backed by Biden and many Democrats that would offer a path to citizenship for millions of people living unlawfully in the US.“We’re seeing a surge of unaccompanied children coming across the border. Why? Joe Biden promised amnesty,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, tweeted.There were nearly 29,000 family units or unaccompanied minors in February. The last time it was higher was in October 2019.Biden officials have faced mounting questions about the temporary detention of migrant families, an issue that the two previous presidents had to deal with because of the instability in the region.Jacobson said the administration is asking Congress for $4bn for targeted aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.“Only by addressing those root causes can we break the cycle of desperation and provide hope for families who clearly would prefer to stay in their countries and provide a better future for their children,” she told reporters at the White House.Jacobson said the US is also restoring a program, ended under Trump, that reunited children in the three Central American countries with parents who are legal residents in the United States.The Department of Homeland Security has also begun processing the asylum claims of thousands of people who were forced by the Trump administration to stay in Mexico, often in dangerous conditions for a long time, for a decision on their case.A migrant camp that formed in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, in south-east Texas, recently was emptied of migrants as they were allowed into the US to process their immigration or asylum claims. More

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      Merrick Garland confirmed as attorney general, turning page on Trump era

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      Merrick Garland has been confirmed as America’s top law enforcement officer, a boost for Joe Biden’s drive against racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.Garland’s rise to attorney general, approved 70-30 by the US Senate in a strongly bipartisan vote, turns the page on former president Donald Trump’s harsh “law and order” rhetoric and efforts to bend the justice department to his will.It also marks a poignant second chance for the 68-year-old judge who, nominated to the supreme court by then president Barack Obama in 2016, was denied a hearing by Senate Republicans on the pretext that it was an election year.This time around his confirmation had been widely expected, especially after a relatively uneventful hearing where Republicans landed few punches. Mitch McConnell, who was Garland’s nemesis in 2016, told reporters last Tuesday that he would back him for attorney general.“After Donald Trump spent four years – four long years – subverting the powers of the justice department for his own political benefit, treating the attorney general like his own personal defense lawyer, America can breathe a sigh of relief that we’re going to have someone like Merrick Garland leading the justice department,” said Majority Leader Chuck Schumer ahead of the vote. “Someone with integrity, independence, respect for the rule of law and credibility on both sides of the aisle.”McConnell said he was voting to confirm Garland because of “his long reputation as a straight shooter and a legal expert” and that his “left-of-center perspective” was still within the legal mainstream.“Let’s hope our incoming attorney general applies that no-nonsense approach to the serious challenges facing the Department of Justice and our nation,” McConnell said.Garland faces a daunting inbox at a justice department that critics say was left in tatters by Trump and his own attorney general, William Barr. He must attempt to restore morale while addressing demands for racial justice in the wake of last year’s police killing of George Floyd and widespread Black Lives Matter protests.At last week’s confirmation hearing in Washington, Garland stressed his commitment to combating racial discrimination in policing, arguing that America does not “yet have equal justice” as well as confronting the rise in extremist violence and domestic terror threats.He said his first briefing as attorney general would be focused on the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January. He told the committee he fears that the riots were “not necessarily a one-off” and pledged to provide prosecutors with all the resources they need to bring charges over the mob violence.“We must do everything in the power of the justice department to prevent this kind of interference with policies of American democratic institutions,” he said.Born in Chicago and educated at Harvard, Garland is a federal appellate judge and former prosecutor. He held senior positions at the justice department including as a supervisor in the prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and led to the execution of Timothy McVeigh.Last week, reflecting on the rise in hate crimes and extremist groups, he said: “I certainly agree that we are facing a more dangerous period than we faced in Oklahoma City.”Garland assured senators that the justice department would remain politically independent – a line that often became blurred under Trump and Barr. He emphasized that he had never spoken to Biden about a federal tax investigation into the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and that he did not expect interference from anyone.“The president nominates the attorney general to be the lawyer, not for any individual, but for the people of the United States,” he said.At one point in the hearing, Garland fought back tears after Cory Booker of New Jersey asked him about his own family’s experience of hateful extremism.“I come from a family where my grandparents fled antisemitism and persecution,” the judge said. “The country took us in, and protected us, and I feel an obligation to the country to pay back, and this is the highest, best use of my own set of skills to pay back.“So I very much want to be the kind of attorney general that you’re saying I could become, and I’ll do my best to become that kind of attorney general.”Associated Press contributed to this report More