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      Democratic senator Doug Jones stakes re-election bid on threat to voting rights

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      Amid an unprecedented number of early votes cast in the 2020 election cycle, Alabama senator Doug Jones is staking his electoral fortunes on framing his re-election campaign around the threat to voting rights, especially in his native Deep South.Jones, a rare Democratic senator in a red southern state, has been sounding the alarm on his state’s burdensome voting restrictions. He’s been dinging his opponent over comments about a landmark voting law, and he’s arguing that in an age of high partisanship in America there’s a path for lawmakers to reinforce national voting laws.Jones, the Alabama Democrat who was elected to his Senate seat in a 2017 upset race, is also calling for a new extension of the Voting Rights Act, the set of voting protections that were gutted in a ruling by the United States supreme court seven years ago. That ruling struck down a core provision of the law which required nine states to seek federal approval before changing their election laws. Those states were required to seek federal permission because of a history of enforcing voter requirements that dramatically affected minorities.Jones has repeatedly bashed retired coach Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for Jones’s seat, for failing to offer a concise position on the Voting Rights Act.“It’s not that he couldn’t articulate a stance, he couldn’t articulate what the hell it is,” Jones said in an interview with the Guardian.During a 1 September appearance with service organizations in Alabama, Tuberville was asked whether he supported extending the Voting Rights Act. His response suggested he had no idea what the law is.“You know, the thing about the Voting Rights Act it’s … you know … there’s a lot of different things you can look at it as, you know, who’s it going to help? What direction do we need to go with it?” Tuberville said. “I think it’s important that everything we do we keep secure.”Jones has been contrasting Tuberville’s remarks with his own position on the Voting Rights Act.“I think they should do everything they can to get it extended,” Jones said.Jones’s re-election campaign has also turned the clip of Tuberville’s comments into digital media ads. Jones is the heavy underdog in the race. Most polling has found Tuberville leading Jones in the traditionally conservative state by double digits. An October 11 poll conducted by Fm3 Research on behalf of the Jones campaign showing the senator leading Tuberville by 1 percentage point. Even so, Tuberville is widely expected to defeat Jones and Donald Trump is all but certain to win Alabama decisively on 3 November.I just think it took the election of Donald Trump to see how much their vote countsJones finds himself running for re-election in a year that’s seen record turnout in early voting, in part because of the pandemic. Over 66 million votes have already been cast, with no sign that that record breaking pace will let up. Jones himself benefited from high turnout in 2017 and unprecedented enthusiasm from African American voters in the state.Now, as he’s running for re-election in a year where there’s both high voter participation across the country and an active discussion about barriers to voting, Jones is sounding the alarm on Alabama’s own voting requirements.“The fact of the matter is Alabama has just a really burdensome absentee ballot process,” Jones said. “Most absentee ballots in the past have been by mail. And to do that you’ve got to get an application from the secretary of state or your local election official, fill out the application – which in and of itself is not too difficult – but then you’ve got to make a photo copy of your photo ID and send that along. Not everybody has a printer or a scanner at their home, and so that is burden number one.“Not to mention the fact that it has to go through the mails, come back to you with the ballot, and then you have to take the ballot, mark the ballot, put it in their special envelope then put that envelope in another envelope that has to be signed by you exactly the way it is on the voting rolls. Which is not necessarily your usual signature, but the way you are on the voting rolls, and then you’ve got to have two people witness it or whatever. It’s incredibly burdensome.”And, Jones said, if every step isn’t followed correctly, “that ballot is shoved aside and is likely not counted”.While high-raking state lawmakers in other states have taken steps to compensate for voting during an ongoing global pandemic, Alabama secretary of state John Merrill has refrained from easing voting restrictions although he has allowed county courthouses to take early absentee votes. But there are only two county courthouses in Jefferson county, where the senator lives, which has, Jones said, effectively acted as yet another impediment to voting.All of that, Jones continued, is an example of how unnecessarily difficult voting can be in Alabama.“And I think voting across the country needs to be a little bit more uniform. What we’re seeing in Alabama is that early voting can work if they could use the technology to streamline it and just make it early voting, I think that could help a lot. And I think that would get the numbers up, which is the goal for everybody,” Jones said.Even with all that, Jones predicted that Alabama would see “a record number of absentee ballots cast in this election”.The state has already beat previous records and there are still days before the actual election.Asked if he is surprised about the record turnout across the state and elsewhere, Jones said he is not.“I just think it took the election of Donald Trump to see how much their vote counts. I think there are so many people that stayed home, that thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win, or that their vote just didn’t count,” Jones said. “I think now what we’ve seen is an interest to make sure their votes count because it does matter.” More

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      If Biden wins what would the first 100 days of his presidency look like?

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      If Joe Biden wins the 2020 US election against Donald Trump next week, the new president-elect will face enormous pressures to implement a laundry list of priorities on a range of issues from foreign policy to the climate crisis, reversing many of the stark changes implemented by his predecessor.
      But Biden’s first and most pressing task for his first 100 days in the White House would be to roll out a new nationwide plan to fight the coronavirus crisis, which has claimed more than 220,000 lives in the US and infected millions – more than any other country in the world – as well as taking steps to fix the disastrous economic fallout.
      And, while the new president might be fresh from victory, the moderate Biden will also have to wrangle with his own side – a Democratic party with an increasingly influential liberal wing, hungry for major institutional changes to try to answer some of the most urgent questions over the country’s future.
      “He basically has to do something historic,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, a Democratic activist and former chief of staff to the progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “He’s being handed a depression, a pandemic, and he’s being elected on a mandate to actually solve this stuff and do something big.”
      In the best-case scenario for Biden, he would be elected in a landslide, and the Democrats would flip the Senate, taking control of both chambers of Congress. If that happens, Biden and his team could enact their most ambitious plans for a presidency with the same feel as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s, which saw the sweeping New Deal recovery and relief programs in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s.
      “In many ways, they’re going to be stepping in the same situation that we stepped in in 2009. But in some ways worse,” said the former Obama administration deputy labor secretary Chris Lu, who ran the 44th president’s transition team in 2008. “We came in during the Great Recession, they’re going to be taking over within a recession as well. They have the added and much more difficult challenge of dealing with a public health crisis as well.”
      By the time of the inauguration in January 2021, more than 350,000 Americans could have died from coronavirus, according to projections that assume current policies and trajectories are maintained.
      Biden’s “first order of business” in office would probably be aimed at containing the death toll and addressing the economic damage, said Neera Tanden, who was director of domestic policy for the Obama-Biden presidential campaign, and went on to be senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). More

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      ‘He's jealous of Covid’s media coverage’: Obama ridicules Trump at Florida rally

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      Barack Obama ridiculed Donald Trump at a Florida rally on Tuesday for the president’s complaints about the media closely covering the national coronavirus crisis.
      The 44th president has recently abandoned traditional decorum where a former president refrains from publicly criticizing his successor, lambasting the 45th president in recent speeches for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, in particular.
      At a drive-in rally in Orlando to boost support for his former Vice President and now Democratic nominee for the White House, Joe Biden, Obama took a tone combining mockery of Trump with indignation.
      He spoke of record numbers dying of coronavirus in the US and asked rhetorically of the president: “What is his closing argument?” with the election just a week away.
      “That people are too focused on Covid. He said this at one of his rallies ‘Covid, Covid, Covid’, he is complaining. He is jealous of Covid’s media coverage,” Obama said with mock incredulity as the crowd laughed.

      At a rally on Saturday in North Carolina, Trump did say those words and complained that the media was paying too much attention to coronavirus, even as he claimed record case numbers are exaggerated and downplayed the death rates.
      Obama said: “If he had been focused on Covid from the beginning, cases would not be reaching record highs across the country this week, the White House would not be having its second outbreak in a month.
      Staff working for Mike Pence, the vice-president, have come down with Covid, it was revealed at the weekend, just a few weeks after Trump, his wife and youngest son all had coronavirus and multiple prominent people tested positive after the event at the White House to nominate Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court.
      Obama also roasted the White House for chief of staff Mark Meadows’s remark on television at the weekend that the administration was not going to control the pandemic.
      Obama said: “Winter is coming. They are waving the white flag of surrender. Florida, we can’t afford four more years of this, that’s why we’ve got to send Joe Biden to the White House.”
      Trump tweeted that it was a “no crowd, fake speech” and slammed conservative Fox News for airing it.
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      US coronavirus cases surge in midwest as Trump heads there in campaign push

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      [embedded content]
      A surge in new cases of coronavirus in the midwest continues, as Donald Trump plans multiple rallies in the region and presidential rival Joe Biden heads out to campaign in Georgia.
      Researchers at Johns Hopkins University recorded 60,789 new cases in the US on Monday, not far off all-time highs reached at the weekend. Total cases have surpassed 8.6m, with more than 225,000 deaths.
      Trump continues to bleed political support from the perception that he does not take the virus seriously. Despite that, on Monday night he held a ceremony at the White House for supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett, which was reminiscent of an earlier event linked to an outbreak of Covid-19 that infected the president himself.
      Trump, Barrett, her husband Jesse Barrett, and supreme court justice Clarence Thomas appeared outside the White House without masks for a ceremonial swearing-in.
      On Tuesday, Trump traveled to a rally in Michigan and planned to go on to events in Wisconsin and Nebraska the same day, on a pre-election blitz across three states where cases are rising most steeply. New daily cases in Michigan have more than doubled in the last week, while Nebraska has one of the highest rates of test positivity in the nation at 21.5% over the last week, according to Johns Hopkins.
      Wisconsin, one of the most important electoral prizes, where the Democratic governor has asked Trump previously not to hold rallies that could spread coronavirus, broke one-day state records on Tuesday in Covid-19 deaths and cases as state officials told residents to stay home, wear a mask, and implored them to cancel travel and social gatherings.
      The state had 64 deaths due to the virus and 5,262 new cases over the last 24 hours, state officials said during an afternoon news conference.
      Thousands of supporters attended a Trump rally last week in Waukesha, Wisconsin, for which a local rural activist group rented out a billboard reading “Trump Covid Superspreader Event”, with an arrow.
      Local doctors urged the president not to hold a rally on Tuesday evening in western Wisconsin.
      “Returning to Wisconsin, repeating a reckless, risky event like a packed campaign rally is just asking for trouble,” said Robert Freedland, an ophthalmologist in La Crosse and state representative for the Committee to Protect Medicare, according to a local media report.
      “In all likelihood, my colleagues in La Crosse will be putting on their N95 masks and dealing with the impacts of Trump’s super-spreader event long after he leaves. It is dangerous and it’s unacceptable,” Freedland said.
      But the plea was likely to fall on unsympathetic ears in the Trump campaign, just as similar pleas did when the president held a rally in Janesville in the state earlier this month.
      Meanwhile Joe Biden delivered speeches with social distancing measures in place in Georgia, which has recorded fewer than 1,000 cases a day over the last seven days and where test positivity is at 7.2%.
      While Covid-19 hotspots are proliferating across the US, the states undergoing the most serious increases are Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, Tennessee and California, according to Johns Hopkins.
      Vice-President Mike Pence, who continues to campaign despite having been in close contact with confirmed Covid-19 cases including his chief of staff, planned to speak in North Carolina and South Carolina on Tuesday.
      Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, planned to speak in Nevada, where most voters vote early and Democrats are in a tough fight to keep the state blue.
      Elections officials across the country have issued health safety guidelines for voters planning to visit polling sites in person.
      The city of Green Bay, Wisconsin, advised voters to wear a mask, wash hands and maintain 6ft distance. In Michigan, the secretary of state issued personal protective equipment to all poll workers. More than half the teams in the National Basketball Association have taken steps to convert their facilities into safe polling places.
      In states such as Texas that do not have a mask mandate, officials advised voters to take extra precautions.
      “To prevent becoming infected from someone who has Covid and is not wearing a mask, be sure to wear a mask to the polling site that is of sufficient quality to protect not only others, but also yourself,” Erin Carlson, director of graduate public health programs at the University of Texas at Arlington, told Mirage News.
      “Also, remember to carry your own black pen, stylus and hand sanitizer. If you don’t have a stylus, bring a wipe to wipe down the polling booth touchscreen before you use it.”
      Residents in the border city of El Paso have been urged to stay home for two weeks as coronavirus cases threaten to overwhelm some hospitals, potentially keeping some voters away from polls.
      “We are in a crisis stage,” said El Paso county judge Ricardo Samaniego. More

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      A Trump win or a disputed result are Canadians' worst fears

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      Before every US presidential election, a few disgruntled Americans can be relied on to promise that they’ll move to Canada if the results don’t go their way.
      Canadians watch US elections with close attention – and occasional horror – but they rarely expect many voters to make good on that vow. A few do make the move; most do not.
      However, in recent weeks the political temperature in the US has mounted: senior Republicans have called for supporters to“guard” polling stations, and right-wing militias have openly called for armed revolt in the event that Donald Trump loses.
      In Canada, fears are growing that the fallout from a contested vote could spill across the border.
      The spectre of unrest, trade disruption, and even violence is likely to have prompted frantic strategising among senior government officials, said Thomas Juneau, a professor of international relations and security studies at the University of Ottawa.
      “We are absolutely at the point where we have to think about scenarios that … start raising really difficult questions for Canada,” said Juneau.
      A contested election, or a second term of Trump where he begins making decisions that are bad for Canada, are both looking like plausible outcomes, he said.
      As one of the United States’ largest trading partners, Canada cannot afford to be caught off-guard. The two nations share the world’s longest undefended border and have highly integrated economies.
      “There are few things that Canada does better than understanding the United States,” he said. “There is not a single department in the Canadian government, that doesn’t devote a considerable proportion of its resources and time to managing relations with the US. Folks in the Canadian government think about the relationship every day.”
      The prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who has spent much of his tenure restraining any urge to overtly criticise Trump, has expressed cautious optimism about the upcoming election and downplayed fears of violence or disruption.
      “I think we’re certainly all hoping for a smooth transition or a clear result from the election, like many people are around the world,” he said earlier this month. “If it is less clear, there may be some disruptions and we need to be ready for any outcomes, and I think that’s what Canadians would expect of their government, and we’re certainly reflecting on that.”
      Hundreds of billions of dollars cross the border each year in trade networks that thrive not least because of mutual co-operation and the predictability of the bilateral relationship.
      Any disruption could prove catastrophic to Canada.
      “I’ve made no bones about saying that the greatest damage to the US-Canada relationship is Donald Trump,” said Bruce Heyman, former US ambassador to Canada. “[Trump] has never admitted failure. So when you get down to an election where you either win or lose, he has a hard time accepting the fact that he can lose. He has never used the words ‘defeat’ or ‘loss’ in terms of the election.”
      In office, Trump has frequently challenged the norms of the relationship with his country’s closest ally.
      He has feuded with Trudeau, calling the prime minister “two-faced”. He has slapped tariffs on aluminium and steel and forced a redrafting of the continent’s free trade agreement. He has called into question Canada’s critical alliances such as Nato, and the missile defence system Norad.
      Trump’s administration has also failed to stand up for Canada during diplomatic rows with China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, leaving the country to fend for itself.
      “And I think a second term of Donald Trump will be an extreme version of what we have seen in the first,” said Heyman.
      While the Trump era may mark a historic low in the relationship, he is not the first US president to oversee strained relations with Canada.
      Prime ministers and presidents have often sparred in past, most recently when Canada decided not to join the US in its invasion of Iraq.
      Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, who was prime minister for 15 years from the 1960s to the 1980s, likened the relationship to that of a mouse beside a snoring elephant. His clash with President Richard Nixon led to a period of chilled relations.
      “It is time for us to recognise … that we have very separate identities; that we have significant differences; and that nobody’s interests are furthered when these realities are obscured,” Nixon told the Canadian parliament in 1972.
      But the current damage is clear: a recent poll found that Canadian sentiment towards the US had reached its lowest point in 40 years. Only 29% of residents have a favourable view of their southern neighbour.
      And many blame Trump: nearly 66% want Joe Biden to win the election.
      But whatever happens on 3 November, tussles over trade and tariffs are likely to persist. A Biden administration would still face domestic pressure to bring manufacturing jobs home and to maintain hardline US positions on commodities such as softwood lumber.
      “Because Trump is so unpopular in Canada, people naturally tend to idealise what a Biden presidency would look like,” said Juneau. “But the idea Biden would just erase all of the bilateral trade irritants between the two countries is not true. And I think the Canadian government understands that very well.” More

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      The Arizona county that could decide the future of Trump – and America

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      For years, Carlos Garcia would grab his bullhorn each afternoon and head downtown to the office of Joe Arpaio, the brash, hardline, anti-immigrant Maricopa county sheriff who became known as “the Donald Trump of Arizona”.
      When Garcia’s protests began in 2007, just a handful of devoted activists joined him. A conservative firebrand, Arpaio was re-elected every four years by the mostly white residents of the state’s most populous county. He was seemingly untouchable.
      But as Arpaio’s crusade against immigrants intensified, the backlash grew. “We literally went from five to 200,000 people,” Garcia said of the protests.
      On 8 November 2016, the same night Donald Trump won the White House, Arizona finally ousted Arpaio. After nearly a quarter-century in power, the sheriff was undone by Latinos, young progressives and white voters who Garcia believes “felt shame over Maricopa’s reputation” as a hostile and intolerant place.
      interactive
      Just as Arpaio’s tenure foreshadowed Trump’s national rise, the same forces that expelled the sheriff in Maricopa county appear to have flourished across the country as the president pursued his own hardline agenda. And now, those forces – catalyzed by the coronavirus pandemic – may seal the president’s fate in next week’s US election.
      “We are a community that has suffered through Trump-like policies for such a long time,” said Garcia, who was elected to Phoenix city council in 2018. This year, Latinos and others are mobilizing to defeat the “Arpaio in the White House”.
      The future of America
      Maricopa county, which encompasses Arizona’s capital, Phoenix, and blossoming rings of surrounding suburbs, has nearly 4.5 million residents and dominates the state politically. One third of Maricopa residents identify as Latino, according to US census data. More

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      CBS releases footage of Trump walking out of 60 Minutes interview

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      US president halts recording after question about his use of social media and name-callingUS politics live – the latest updatesFootage of the US president abruptly walking out of a CBS 60 Minutes interview has been released by the network, in a row that has been rumbling since the interview was taped on Tuesday.Donald Trump had already posted clips on his own social media, in an effort to show he had been mistreated by the interviewer, Lesley Stahl. He had called the segment “fake” and “biased” in advance. Continue reading… More

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      Democrats hold Senate floor overnight to protest Amy Coney Barrett confirmation – live

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      Key events

      Show

      5.52am EDT05:52
      Kremlin criticises Joe Biden over his Russia comments, saying they ‘encourage hatred of Russia’

      3.27am EDT03:27
      McConnell: ‘they won’t be able to do much about this for a long time’

      1.46am EDT01:46
      Democrats hold senate floor overnight in protest of Barrett

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      5.52am EDT05:52

      Kremlin criticises Joe Biden over his Russia comments, saying they ‘encourage hatred of Russia’

      A quick bit of foreign policy news from Reuters here, firstly over nuclear weapons. The New Start treaty between Russia and the US expires shortly, it’s the last remaining nuclear agreement between the two nations, and there’s as yet no concrete signs of it being extended.
      Russia has today suggested that it would refrain from deploying thousands of missiles if Nato would agree to similar measures, and is proposing “mutual verification measures”.
      The Kremlin has also commented again on the US election, saying that a statement from Joe Biden that Russia is the main threat to the US is “not true”. A Kremlin spokesperson said such statements encourage hatred of Russia.

      5.47am EDT05:47

      We’ve got a live feed of Senate proceedings up above in the blog – you may need to refresh the page to get the play button to appear. Here’s a clip of Sen. Chris Murphy from earlier.

      Senate Democrats
      (@SenateDems)
      Senate Republicans are rushing through Judge Barrett’s nomination so they can finally do what they’ve been trying to do for years: repeal the ACA, end insurance for millions, and strip protections for pre-existing conditions.Sen. Murphy explains. pic.twitter.com/HBiWQUn70d

      October 26, 2020

      Sen. Tim Kaine followed him, and he finished his speech by saying that Republican leaders would not wear masks to cover their noses and mouths and protect themselves and others from the coronavirus, but that the “soulless process” of confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court showed they were willing to “cover their eyes and their ears”.

      5.43am EDT05:43

      Oliver Milman writes for us that the choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is pretty stark in terms of consequences for the global environment.

      The international effort to constrain dangerous global heating will hinge, in large part, on which of the dichotomous approaches of Donald Trump or Joe Biden prevails.
      On 4 November, the day after the election, the US will exit the Paris climate agreement, a global pact that has wobbled but not collapsed from nearly four years of disparagement and disengagement under Trump.
      Biden has vowed to immediately rejoin the Paris deal. The potential of a second Trump term, however, is foreboding for those whose anxiety has only escalated during the hottest summer ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, with huge wildfires scorching California and swaths of central South America, and extraordinary temperatures baking the Arctic.
      “It’s a decision of great consequence, to both the US and the world,” said Laurence Tubiana, a French diplomat and key architect of the Paris accords. “The rest of the world is moving to a low-carbon future, but we need to collectively start moving even faster, and the US still has a significant global role to play in marshaling this effort.”
      Few countries are on track to fulfill commitments made in Paris five years ago to slash their planet-heating emissions and keep the global temperature rise to “well below” 2C of warming beyond the pre-industrial era. The world has already warmed by about 1C since this time, helping set in motion a cascade of heatwaves, fierce storms and flooding around the planet.

      Read more here: Climate at a crossroads as Trump and Biden point in different directions

      5.31am EDT05:31

      The summer has been characterised by a series of extreme weather events on both coasts of the US, and that looks set to continue.
      Hundreds of thousands of Californians lost power as utilities sought to prevent the chance of their equipment sparking wildfires and the fire-weary state braced for a new bout of dry, windy weather.
      More than 1 million people were expected be in the dark Monday during what officials have said could be the strongest wind event in California this year, reports the Associate Press. More