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      ‘You changed America’: Biden marks first 100 days in Georgia – a state key to his victory

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      On his 100th day as US president, Joe Biden spontaneously lowered his black face mask, leaned towards the microphone and shouted: “Go Georgia, we need you!”It was a fitting moment in a state that has more claim than most to be the ground zero of a potentially transformative presidency.Biden had just marked the 100-day milestone with a drive-in rally in Duluth, about 30 miles north of Atlanta, to promote his $4tn plans to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure and vastly expand the government’s social safety net.Troubled by a cough, and briefly interrupted by protesters demanding an end to private prisons, the president gave an abridged version of his speech to a joint session of Congress the previous evening.But he paid particular attention – and gratitude – to an audience that has played an outsized role in the making of his administration.Towards the end of his campaign, he visited Warm Springs, the Georgia town that helped Franklin Roosevelt cope with polio. Come election day, Biden became, by a narrow margin, the first Democrat to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992.Then on 5 January, unexpected runoff wins by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia gave Democrats the balance of power in the Senate. If Republicans had retained control, Biden’s first hundred days would have looked very different.Jonathan Alter, the author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, said on Thursday: “Without the Georgia runoffs, you would not have that transformational presidency. It would be a completely different story. If 6 January is an important date in American history, so is 5 January because of those Georgia runoffs and none of what’s happening would be possible without 5 January.”Ossoff and Warnock joined Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, on stage at Thursday night’s rally. The four joined hands and held them aloft as the song (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher boomed from loudspeakers.Georgia has become a bellwether in a nationwide battle over voting rights. More than a hundred corporations, as well as civil rights organisers and sports leagues, spoke out against restrictions passed by Georgia’s Republican state legislature. Biden condemned the curbs as “just wrong” and called for Congress to pass nationwide protections.Last month Atlanta was the scene of a mass shooting in which eight people died, including six women of Asian descent, helping prompt Biden to take executive actions for gun safety and denounce hate crimes.Long a Republican stronghold, Georgia is now a diversifying swing state that will feature closely watched races for Senate and governor next year. It will almost certainly be one of the most competitive states during the 2024 presidential campaign.With a US national flag behind him, Biden told supporters gathered around vehicles: “Because of you, we passed one of the most consequential rescue bills in American history … You changed America. You began to change America and you’re helping us prove America can still deliver for the people.”That meant, he said, a hundred days that included the creation of 1.3m jobs, more than other president in history over the same period. It meant food and rental assistance, loans for small businesses and an expansion of healthcare. And, he said, the US is on course to cut child poverty in half this year.The president went on to tout the biggest jobs plan since the second world war, building infrastructure, replacing lead pipes to ensure clean drinking water and expanding broadband internet to rural areas.Tackling the climate crisis, Biden added, will “create millions of good paying jobs”, going on to repeat a line from his address to Congress: “There is simply no reason why the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing.”Biden also pushed his new $1.8tn families plan that includes free universal preschool, free community college and support for childcare. “I was a single dad for five years,” he said, recalling the death of his first wife in a car crash and how he had to depend on family members because he could not afford outside help.Republicans have questioned how Biden intends to pay for his bold plans. He insisted: “It’s real simple. It’s about time the very wealthy and corporations started paying their fair share … No one making under $400,000 a year is going to pay a single additional penny in tax.”In an emotional finale, Biden told the crowd: “Folks, it’s only been a hundred days but I have to tell you, I’ve never been more optimistic about the future in America.” America’s on the move again. We’re choosing hope over fear, truth over lies, light over darkness.Biden, who has further campaign-style stops planned in Pennsylvania and Virginia in coming days, is enjoying popular support in opinion polls. A survey by Navigator Research found positive approval among 86% of Democrats, 61% of independents and even 59% of Republicans. Two-thirds of the public believe Biden’s pandemic-related policies have had a positive impact.Navigator also conducted three online focus groups with low-income Republicans and Democrats across the ideological spectrum in Florida, Nevada and Texas. The comments included a man from Florida saying, “I don’t feel like I have to doom scroll through my feed to see what the next thing is,” and a Nevada man commenting, “Almost immediately as soon he took office, everything just kind of calmed down and everyone’s like, ‘OK, we have a normal person there’.”But Republicans in Congress have condemned Biden’s spending spree, suggesting that he is exploiting the pandemic to smuggle in liberal imperatives and that his promise of bipartisanship rings hollow.Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, told Fox News: “We’re friendly. We’ve done deals together in the past. However, the reason we’re not talking now is because he’s not trying to do anything remotely close to moderate.“Think of it as the Biden bait-and-switch. He ran as a moderate, but everything he’s recommended so far has been hard left. Bernie Sanders is really happy. He may have lost a nomination, but he won the argument over what today’s Democratic party is – more taxes, more spending, more borrowing.”Earlier on Thursday, the Bidens visited former president Jimmy Carter, 96, and his 93-year-old wife, Rosalynn, at their home in Plains, Georgia. It was at least the third occasion this month on which Biden has spoken with one of his predecessors, following conversations with George W Bush and Barack Obama about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.Biden was the first senator to endorse Carter for president in 1976. Carter’s defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 ushered in an era in which calls for smaller government and lower taxes for big business and the wealthy were embraced as key to economic growth.Alter, also the author of the Carter biography His Very Best, said: “Biden wants to have a foreign policy that’s based on human rights and that goes back to Jimmy Carter.“He doesn’t want to have an Iranian hostage crisis but in terms of the aspirations for American leadership in the world, and standing up for American values in the world, that really does date from Jimmy Carter, who is no longer in bad odour in the United States, particularly in the Democratic party where in the past Democratic nominees have not really been thrilled to be associated with Carter because he lost in a landslide.“But that was more than 40 years ago. The sting of Reagan’s landslide has worn off and part of what Reagan is selling is a partial return to the pre-Reagan political universe.” More

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      ‘Not as dramatic as Trump’: Republicans respond to Biden’s address

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      Republican reaction to Joe Biden’s first congressional speech on Thursday centered as much on what the new president was perceived to have omitted as much as the policy proposals he did lay out.“He didn’t discuss the border and the fact that tens of thousands of people are pouring into our country,” former president Donald Trump said during a morning appearing on Fox News’ Mornings with Maria, seizing on a familiar grievance.“It’s out of control. It could destroy our country.” (Biden did, in fact, address immigration, and his proposed plan for border issues and paths to citizenship.)The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs was another to criticize Biden for not addressing the situation at the southern border, which has seen migrant apprehensions surge.“That is the worst crisis that America is facing today and I was sorely disappointed that the president did not take that on,” he told Fox & Friends.Biggs said Biden “was more methodical and not as dramatic or energetic” as Trump was while delivering his final address to Congress last year, but praised elements of the speech.“When he started talking about the need to end forever wars, and getting us out of Afghanistan, that was good. When he started talking about being competitive with China and we need to buy America, support America, those things, on narrative messaging point, were right on the money,” he said.“However, his policy statements affiliated with those things are dubious. You can’t throw $6tn in spending out the door as quickly as they want to do, we just don’t have the money for that. Taxes will have to go up across the board.”It was Biden’s ambitious social agenda, and accompanying price tag, that led senior Republicans to frame Biden’s address as a “bait and switch” operation“He talks like a moderate but is governing to satisfy the far left,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said, according to the Kentucky Courier Journal, rehashing a favored Republican talking point.“I think the storyline on the Biden administration, underscored by the president’s speech tonight, could best be described as bait and switch. The bait was that he was going to be a moderate, a unifying force, and bring us all together. The switch is that Bernie Sanders, for all practical purposes, won the debate in the Democratic party over what it ought to look like.”The perceived lack of a unifying message was the main topic of the South Carolina senator Tim Scott’s rebuttal, the only Black Republican in the chamber insisting that: “The actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.”Predictably, Scott’s performance drew praise from Trump, who said: “I thought Tim Scott last night was fantastic. I thought he did an incredible job.” More

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      Why a filibuster showdown in the US Senate is unavoidable

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,During Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office, there are few issues more pressing than the escalating attack on the right to vote in America. Democrats may be running out of time to address it.As Republicans have pushed more than 360 bills across the country to restrict access to the ballot, the president and Democrats have strongly condemned those efforts, but they’ve been unable to stop them. Even though Democrats control both chambers of Congress in Washington, they can’t pass a sweeping voting rights bill because they don’t have enough votes to get rid of the filibuster, an arcane senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation. A showdown over the filibuster has loomed over the first 100 days of the Biden administration, but during the next 100 days, it’s clear that a showdown over getting rid of the procedure is unavoidable.Amanda Litman, the executive director of the Run for Something, a group that recruits candidates for state legislative races, told me this week she thinks some Democrats still don’t fully appreciate how dangerous and consequential the GOP’s ongoing efforts are. “This is really an existential crisis. It’s a five-alarm fire. But I’m not sure it’s quite sunk in for members of the United States Senate or the Democratic party writ large,” she told me.“If the Senate does not kill the filibuster and pass voting rights reforms … Democrats are going to lose control of the House and likely the Senate forever. You don’t put these worms back into a can. You can’t undo this quite easily,” she added.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, last week set August as a deadline for Democrats to pass their sweeping voting rights bill, which would require early voting, automatic and same-day registration, among other measures. Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, said the White House supports that effort.But the window for Democrats to have the most impact with their legislation is rapidly closing. The decennial process of redrawing district lines is set to take place later this year, and a critical portion of the Democratic bill would set new limits to prevent state lawmakers, who have the power to draw the maps, from severely manipulating districts for partisan gain. While it’s probably already too late to set up independent redistricting commissions for this year, Democrats could still pass rules to prevent the most severe partisan manipulation.“You could pass new criteria, including a ban on partisan gerrymandering…require greater transparency in the process,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “There’s a lot that could be done.”I also asked the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat who chairs the Senate committee currently considering the bill, what kind of message it would send if Democrats failed to take any action to protect voting rights while they held the reins of government. “Failure is not an option,” she said, adding she wasn’t going to let the filibuster stand in the way.“This is our very democracy that’s at stake,” she said. “I’m not gonna let some old senate rule get in the way of that.”Also worth watching …
      My colleague Tom Perkins and I reported on a particularly anti-democratic effort underway in Michigan, where Republicans have already hinted they plan to utilize a little-used maneuver to get around a gubernatorial veto and enact voting restrictions.
      The Census Bureau announced its long-awaited apportionment totals on Monday that determine which states gain and lose seats in Congress. Colorado, Montana, Oregon, North Carolina, and Florida will all gain a seat and Texas will add two. California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will all lose a seat. More

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      Joe Biden’s speech to Congress: five key takeaways

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      The coronavirus pandemic cast a strange pall on the yearly political traditionAs Biden took the podium, he brushed past a sparse, masked crowd. He fist-bumped and elbow-tapped lawmakers and members of his cabinet – greeting a crowd that was physically distanced, and ideologically divided.Because fewer people were in attendance, due to coronavirus safety protocols, applause and cheers were muted – as seemed appropriate for a somber moment in history. Although Biden’s speech signaled hope – there was no denying that the country was still grappling with enormous loss and grief.After a long, dark year, the vaccine offered a light, Biden said. “Grandparents hugging their children and grandchildren instead of pressing their hands against a window to say goodbye,” he said.But, he added: “There’s still more work to do to beat this virus. We can’t let our guard down now.”It was a historic evening for women in governmentAs soon as he took to the podium, Biden acknowledged Kamala Harris, stood behind him, as “Madam vice-president,” and then reflected: “No president has ever said these words from behind this podium. And it’s about time.”For the first time in US history, two women were seated behind the president addressing a joint session of Congress. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker and the third person in the chain of command, after Biden and Harris, also flanked Biden.In 2007, Pelosi was the first woman to sit behind a president during a joint address to Congress after she became the first woman to hold the position of House speaker. Harris is the first woman, and Black and South Asian American person to be elected vice-president. Asked about the significance of the occasion, Harris told reporters it was just “normal”.‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’Biden’s populist, direct appeal to working-class Americans could be summed up by one four-letter word: jobs. At each step, Biden is explaining that his proposals – to improve water infrastructure, to increase internet access, to build highways, to increase childcare options for working families – will boost jobs.He used the word 43 times throughout his speech.“When I think about climate change, I think jobs,” he said. “There’s no reason the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing.”Biden ushered in a new era of big government, and big government spending“Our government still works – and can deliver for the people,” Biden said.The president introduced his sweeping $1.8tn plan, which would invest billions in a national childcare program, universal preschool, tuition-free community college, health insurance subsidies and tax cuts for low- and middle-income workers.The vision would be funded by rolling back Trump-era tax cuts, raising the capital gains rate for millionaires and billionaires, and closing tax loopholes for the wealthy.“Trickle-down economics has never worked. It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out,” Biden said. “We’re going reform corporate taxes so they pay their fair share – and help pay for the public investments their businesses will benefit from.”The messaging was a clear example of how much Biden has embraced and adopted progressive ideas and policies – even if many of the administration’s proposals are more modest, or watered-down versions of what leading progressive lawmakers have championed.The president pitched reforms that have bipartisan support – among voters, if not lawmakersBiden proposed major reforms to gun control and policing, and made a major pitch to protect voting rights. Republican lawmakers have fought the administration and their Democratic colleagues on all three issues. But polls indicate that though the country remains deeply divided on many issues, there’s actually broad, bipartisan support among voters for the president’s proposals.About two-thirds of Americans support tougher gun laws, a USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll found after the mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder this year. “The country supports reform, and the Congress should act,” Biden said.A March Morning Consult poll found that about 7 out of 10 voters, including majorities of Republicans, support the House’s sweeping elections reform measure. And while Republicans have many reservations about the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the reform bill introduced by Democrats in Congress, polls indicate they largely support many provisions.Republicans, who have routinely denigrated and voted against Biden’s proposals, including his widely popular coronavirus relief plan and proposed infrastructure plan, have found themselves in an odd position of having to convince voters that they don’t actually want what they want. More

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      Biden declares ‘America is on the move again’ in first congressional address – video

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      Joe Biden argued that ‘America is on the move again’ in his first address to Congress, on the eve of his 100th day in office. The president, flanked by two women – Vice-President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – for the first time in US history, addressed the coronavirus pandemic, the 6 January assault on the Capitol, plans to raise the minimum wage, police reform, climate change and historic levels of investment in the country. Due to social distancing measures, only 200 people, mainly politicians, attended rather than the usual 1,600 guests

      ‘Crisis into opportunity’: Biden lays out vision for sweeping change in speech to Congress
      Biden flanked by two women as he addresses Congress in historic first More

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      GOP’s Tim Scott delivers a rebuttal to Biden’s speech with Trumpian talking points

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      It is Donald Trump, not Democrats, who deserves credit for wresting the coronavirus pandemic under control, Tim Scott argued on Wednesday night as the Republican senator gave his party’s official response to Joe Biden’s first address to Congress.Scott, a South Carolinian seen as a rising star in the Republican party, was handpicked by GOP leaders to deliver a rebuttal to Biden’s optimistic message, and duly did so, opening with a solidly Republican criticism of “socialist dreams” before taking aim at the president over some public schools having failed to reopen – a decision which is taken at state-level, frequently by local districts, rather than by the federal government.As the only Black Republican in the US Senate, Scott had been expected to address the issue of racial inequality and the repeated police shootings of Black men, but those hoping for strident criticism of the racial crisis in the US were disappointed, with Scott instead saying, “Hear me clearly, America is not a racist country.”Scott, a conservative, Christian southerner, has walked the fine line between the establishment and Donald Trump wings of the Republican party with more aplomb than most. His status as a potential GOP star is one of the few things that Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, still agree on, and Scott won a coveted endorsement for his 2022 re-election bid from Trump in March.The extent to which Trump still looms over the Republican party was clear in Scott’s speech, with the senator praising the Trump administration and on occasion using talking points that could have been lifted straight from a Trump stump speech.“This administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run,” Scott said, seemingly ignoring the fact that in December, Trump’s last full month in office, the US set a record for the highest daily number of new Covid cases, deaths and hospitalizations.“Thanks to Operation Warp Speed and the Trump administration, our country is flooded with safe and effective vaccines. Thanks to our bipartisan work last year, job openings are rebounding,” Scott said.He then harked back to before the Covid pandemic, which so far has killed more than 573,000 Americans. Trump has been widely blamed for allowing the virus to spiral out of control, and failing to take action once it did.“Just before Covid, we had the most inclusive economy in my lifetime. The lowest unemployment ever recorded for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. And a 70 year low, nearly, for women,” Scott said.Trump, ensconced in his holiday resort in south Florida, will have been pleased – these are claims he repeatedly made during his presidency, even if they are not totally supported by evidence.In 2019, the Washington Post’s factchecker called Trump’s claim that the black unemployment rate was the lowest in history “skewed and outdated”, and gave it three Pinnochios. Both Trump – and Scott – failed to note that the unemployment rate among Black and Hispanic people began to decline, steeply, under the Obama administration.Scott is leading the Republican party’s efforts to craft legislation with Democrats on police reform in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, but in his speech, he accused Democrats of voting against a police reform bill he introduced in 2020. At the time, Democrats said the bill did not go far enough to tackle police violence.Scott has also previously joined Democrats Cory Booker and Kamala Harris to work on a bipartisan bill that would make lynching a federal crime, and led the way in creating Opportunity Zones – aimed growth and jobs in low income communities – in Trump’s 2017 tax reform package.Once hesitant to focus on race in his political career, Scott has increasingly talked about his experience as an African American. On Wednesday, Scott said he had “experienced the pain of discrimination”.“I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason. To be followed around a store while I’m shopping,” Scott said, but then pivoted to criticism of Democrats.“I’ve also experienced a different kind of intolerance,” Scott said. “I get called Uncle Tom and the n-word by progressives and liberals.”Scott then addressed a familiar Republican talking point, and a favorite of Trump: that schools and colleges are now exhibiting bias against white children.“A hundred years ago kids in classrooms were being taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic, that if they looked a certain way they were inferior,” Scott said.“Today students are being taught that the color of their skin defines them again and if they look a certain way they are an oppressor.”In July 2020, Trump was fiercely criticized after he offered a dystopian vision of America, along the same lines as Scott’s classroom remarks if more emotional in tone.“Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains,” the then-president said, adding that there was a campaign to “indoctrinate our children”.Scott, who accused Democrats of a “Washington powergrab” over their opposition to a Georgia law that would make it more difficult for people to vote, later claimed that Biden would increase taxes, despite the president having said minutes earlier he would not raise taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year.Having warned darkly of a tax-heavy Democratic future, pitched the Republican message, and paid his dues to Trump, Scott ended his speech with a hopeful, and vague, vision for how the US might succeed – and with a shout out to law enforcement.“Our best future will not come from Washington schemes and socialist dreams,” he said.“It will come from you, the American people. Black, Hispanic, white and Asian. Republican and Democrat. Brave police officers and black neighborhoods.“We are not adversaries. We are family, and we are all in this together, and we get to live in the greatest country on earth.” More

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      Biden’s speech to Congress is a once unthinkable call for transformation | David Smith's sketch

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      It has always been Washington’s version of the Oscars: a primetime TV audience, an overlong speech and fierce disagreement among critics.On Wednesday, Joe Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress, on the eve of his first 100 days in office, followed the Academy Awards with a small, physically distanced gathering that, given the US president’s love of trains, might have switched to a railway station too.His 65-minute speech, the most important since his inauguration 99 days ago, could be summed up with three Bs: Big (in ambition), Boring (at times) and Bipartisan (or maybe not so much, judging by Republican grimaces).It will not go down as a rhetorical masterpiece, but nor will it be seen as the cringeworthy equivalent of a tearful Oscar acceptance speech. Instead, in the sparsely populated chamber of the House of Representatives, it laid out a transformative presidency and offered some more healing for post-Trump stress disorder.Indeed, even in the extraordinary circumstances of a global pandemic, with masked members sitting several seats apart on the floor and in the public gallery, this scene felt more ordinary than when Donald Trump delivered red meat to raucous cheers from Republicans and boos, heckles and sorrowful head shakes from Democrats.The Trump era culminated in a deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January with members cowering in the public gallery of this very chamber, with agents pulling guns to keep the mob at bay. On Wednesday night, as the first lady, Jill Biden, entered the gallery to cheers on Wednesday evening, all that felt like a lifetime ago.Instead, the new age was best summed up in a single image: behind “Uncle Joe”, the 78-year-old white man at the lectern, sat two women, Vice-President Kamala Harris and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi – both from deeply liberal California.“Madam Vice-President,” Biden said. “No President has ever said those words from this podium … and it’s about time.” Harris and Pelosi exchanged glances above their masks.The tableau was a vivid reminder that Biden’s discovery of progressive politics did not come to him as a sudden revelation. He has always been roughly in the middle of the Democratic party. As the party moved left, so he moved with it. An old dog can learn new tricks but it takes some prompting.That led him to Wednesday night’s once unthinkable menu of grand plans for coronavirus relief, building infrastructure and helping families, measured not in billions but trillions of dollars. In the choice between going big and going bipartisan, big is winning, remaking America with government at the centre.“My fellow Americans, trickle-down economics has never worked,” he said, effectively sounding the death knell for Ronald Reagan’s low-tax logic that has been Republican religion for four decades and within which even Bill Clinton and Barack Obama operated. “It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out.”Senator Bernie Sanders, sitting on the House floor, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, up in the balcony, visibly lapped it up. Both were forced to endure four years of Trump blasphemies in this very room. Their time has come and Biden is the unlikely vessel.“The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America,” Biden said. “And it recognises something I’ve always said. [There are] good guys and women on Wall Street, but Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class built this country. And unions build the middle class.”He talked about green energy and corporate tax reform and described healthcare as “a right, not a privilege”. Democrats were delighted by it all, rising to their feet and clapping with such enthusiasm that it almost compensated for their diminished numbers.Republicans joined in when Biden warned of the threat posed by China (“deadly earnest on becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world”) and struck some Trumpian notes about American products made in America. “There’s no reason the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing.”But they were silent, stony faced and riveted to their seats on many of the applause lines. Senator Lindsey Graham frowned, a hand to his chin. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, clapped limply if at all.Hours earlier, perhaps seeing Harris and Pelosi in his mind’s eye, McConnell had warned: “Behind President Biden’s familiar face, it’s like the most radical Washington Democrats have been handed the keys, and they’re trying to speed as far left as they can possibly go before American voters ask for their car back.”Biden did utter the word “bipartisan” several times but his pitch was framed about the costs of division and paralysis. “Doing nothing is not an option,” he warned. “We can’t be so busy competing with each other that we forget the competition is with the rest of the world to win the 21st century.”The members in attendance had, like children at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, got golden tickets. Instead of the usual 1,600 people for a state of the union-style address, this time there were only 200 with no guests permitted (except virtually), because of coronavirus safety restrictions. Some tickets were decided on a first-come-first-served basis, others by lottery.Members greeted each other with fist bumps or elbow bumps. Chief Justice John Roberts was the only member of the supreme court present. The cabinet was represented by only two members, Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Lloyd Austin, the secretary of defense, meaning there was no need this time for a “designated survivor” – a senior official who typically stays away at a secure location in case catastrophe strikes.Biden sought to end on a high note. “We have stared into an abyss of insurrection and autocracy – of pandemic and pain – and ‘We the People’ did not flinch. At the very moment our adversaries were certain we would pull apart and fail, we came together, we united,” he said.They were stirring words but, like Sunday’s Oscars, ended in anticlimax. Whatever respect they’ve had for Biden over the years, when Republicans looked up at the dais, they were triggered by the sight of Harris and Pelosi looming behind him.“Boring, but radical,” was the verdict of Senator Ted Cruz who, as if to prove it, looked like he was dozing off. More