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      Biden's big infrastructure bet could define his legacy – for better or worse

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      Joe Biden, the oldest US president ever elected, seems keenly aware of the sentiment expressed in the Broadway musical Hamilton: “History has its eyes on you.”
      Before taking office he reportedly read biographies of Franklin Roosevelt, who steered the nation through the Great Depression. Recently, at an eerily quiet White House, he hosted presidential historians to explore the virtues of thinking big – or more precisely, the perils of thinking small.
      And on Wednesday, promoting a suitably audacious $2tn infrastructure package, Biden made clear that he has an eye on posterity. “I’m convinced that, if we act now, in 50 years people are going to look back and say this was the moment that America won the future,” he said.

      But often what seems inevitable with hindsight was rarely that way in the moment. The 46th president now faces a tough political grind to turn his expensive vision into reality.
      Indeed, his recent $1.9tn coronavirus relief package will probably look like a breeze by comparison. That plan saw Biden hailed as an unlikely progressive hero and prompted Maureen Dowd, a columnist at the New York Times, to quip: “Democrats are thinking that if he keeps it up, they’ll soon be picking up their chisels to carve his face on Mount Rushmore.”
      In truth, it was a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures. Overall the US government – first under Donald Trump, then under Biden – has now thrown more than $6tn at the once in a century pandemic. “It was an emergency,” the current president acknowledged on Wednesday. “We needed to act to save jobs, to save businesses and to save lives, and that’s what we did.”
      Now comes a bigger ask that will truly test Biden’s Rushmore credentials. Infrastructure – even the word is deadening and uninspiring – is a hardy perennial that everyone wants to get done but no one is willing to pay for. Trump’s “infrastructure week” became a running joke.
      Biden can expect pushback not only from Republicans but moderate Democrats worried about what the required tax hikes will mean for their electoral chances. Progressives and climate activists, meanwhile, have already argued that his new plan does not go far enough. Democratic unity is about to undergo a serious stress test.
      Biden’s strengths, however, were on display on Wednesday in Pittsburgh, the city in his home state of Pennsylvania where he launched his campaign for president two years ago.
      He won that campaign partly because he is seen as unpretentious and lacking artifice. His blue collar background in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and unpolished demeanor make it hard to accuse him of belonging to the metropolitan elite. He is not a champagne socialist so much as a grandfather with grit and a surprising radical streak. “I’m a union guy,” he said.
      So it was that Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” speech took place not with a slick presentation but in the echoey Carpenters Pittsburgh Training Center, where the customary row of US national flags was offset by uneven planks of wood in the wings.
      Removing a black face mask, Biden, wearing dark suit, blue tie and white shirt, promised “not a plan that tinkers around the edges. It’s a once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we’ve seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago. In fact, it’s the largest American jobs investment since world war two.”
      No, infrastructure is not as pressing an emergency as a virus that has killed more than half a million Americans, yet many a visitor to the US has been surprised to find that the richest, most powerful country in the world can often feel like its roads and railways are held together by double-sided sticky tape.
      And now China is breathing down its neck. “Our infrastructure is crumbling,” Biden said. “We’re ranked 13th in the world.”
      Not long ago there were fears that Biden would be hopelessly naive about Republican intentions and expect the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to play ball like in the good old days. The coronavirus relief bill showed how improbable that is. Biden’s White House has concentrated instead on how popular the measure is among Republican mayors and voters.
      That is likely to be the strategy again – for example, the appeal of bringing broadband to remote areas. As McConnell and co prepare to rage about tax increases, Biden made a direct case: “No one making under $400,000 will see their federal taxes go up. Period. This is not about penalizing anyone. I have nothing against millionaires and billionaires. I believe in American capitalism.”
      Still, months of haggling in Congress await.
      Republicans are not buying Biden’s claims of bipartisanship. Democrats who swallowed their objections to certain elements of the coronavirus relief for the sake of urgency are unlikely to be so forgiving this time. Wednesday’s announcement may well prove to be legacy-defining, but not necessarily in a manner of Biden’s choosing. More

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      Biden’s $2tn infrastructure plan aims to ‘finally address climate crisis as a nation'

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      Joe Biden has said his new infrastructure plan will allow “transformational progress in our ability to tackle climate change” by bolstering investments in clean energy, electric vehicles and building homes resilient to threats posed by the climate crisis.The $2tn plan will make “crumbling” American infrastructure more robust to extreme weather events, the US president said in a speech on Wednesday, while providing funds to “build a modern, resilient and fully clean grid”.Biden said that tax incentives should allow “all Americans to afford clean electric vehicles” and workers will be able to “seize amazing opportunities in a clean energy future”.Biden opened his White House term with a cavalcade of executive actions to begin the gargantuan task of shifting the US to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and the new $2tn package, known as the American Jobs Plan, is the first indication of the scale of spending that will be required to reshape day-to-day life in order to avert disastrous climate change.As well as huge investments in crumbling roads and bridges, the Biden plan takes aim at the emissions created by transport, currently the country’s largest source of planet-heating gases. There’s $80bn for Amtrak and freight rail, $85bn for public transit, $174bn to promote electric vehicles through various incentives, the electrification of school buses and 500,000 new plug-in recharging stations within the next decade. The federal government’s vehicle fleet will also be electrified.Ports and airports will be upgraded, the plan states, while more than $200bn is proposed to build, modernize and fortify housing for low-income people affected by the storms, heatwaves and wildfires of growing intensity that are upending American lives and threatening billions, if not trillions, of dollars in ongoing damages. A further $100bn will be spent upgrading an electricity grid vulnerable to the sort of climate shocks that recently shook Texas, as well as aiding the transmission of a glut of new renewable energy. In all, 40% of this spending will be aimed at vulnerable communities of color.The scale of the investment, even in the wake of the giant Covid relief bill, is striking. Biden made clear in his speech on Wednesday that this is the point when the US “finally address the climate crisis as a nation”, according to an administration official.“There’s a lot to like in this plan, it’s excellent in almost every way,” said Julio Friedmann, who was a climate and energy adviser in Barack Obama’s administration and is now an energy researcher at Columbia University.“This is a generational commitment and it can only be applauded. The $2tn is half the price tag of World War Two, it exceeds the scale of the New Deal, it’s wildly larger than the Marshall Plan – and appropriately so. This is the hardest thing we’ve ever done. People generally don’t understand how much construction and reduction is required.”But even the administration’s allies concede further, longer-term spurs to remodel the economy and alter behavior will be required on top of this plan.The package includes a major boost to clean energy research and development, as well as a proposal for a clean electricity standard – a mandate for utilities to phase out fossil fuels use across the grid to zero over the next 15 years that Friedmann said will be a “vital” element of eliminating planet-hearting emissions.But these measures will, like the new spending, require congressional support that is far from guaranteed. Republicans have recoiled from Biden’s idea of raising corporate tax rates to help pay for the investments, with Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s Senate leader, calling the plan a “Trojan horse” for climate measures the party doesn’t support.“In an ideal world this plan would be part of a set of policies to lower emissions but with American politics it’s not clear the rest of it will happen,” said David Popp, a climate policy expert at Syracuse University. “Infrastructure alone won’t get you to net zero emissions. The hope is that you build a green economy to the point where emissions reduction mandates become more doable.”Progressives, meanwhile, have complained that Biden’s plan does not meet the scale of the climate crisis.“Needs to be way bigger,” tweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic representative from New York. Ocasio-Cortez and her allies back an alternative $10tn plan, called the Thrive Act, that proponents say would create 15m new jobs and cut emissions in half by the end of the decade. Rallies are set to be held across the US on Wednesday by climate activists who support this plan.Communities of color, which often suffer the brunt of the climate crisis, helped elect Biden and “it’s time to make sure that our government delivers a real recovery that recognizes the harsh reality our communities continue to face on the ground,” according to Elizabeth Yeampierre, co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. “We’ve had enough excuses, enough delays.”The Biden plan is a “big opening gambit, a big downpayment, but it’s not the totality required,” said Friedmann. “It focuses on what’s actionable quickly that yields big emissions abatement. I would like more too, but it’s easy to throw rocks from the outside. It’s a great start but, yes, we will ultimately need more. For the next 30 years, every week is infrastructure week.” More

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      Biden promises 'historic' $2tn spending in infrastructure – but Capitol Hill fight awaits

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      Joe Biden will unveil an expansive $2tn proposal to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, confront climate change and curb wealth inequality, part of a sweeping spending package that could define the president’s economic legacy.Biden’s plan, which he will lay out at a speech in Pittsburgh on Wednesday afternoon, includes “historic and galvanizing” investments in traditional infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges and highways, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars to fortify the electricity grid, expand high-speed broadband and rebuild water systems to ensure access to clean drinking water, an administration official said on Tuesday. It also seeks to expand access to community care facilities for seniors and people with disabilities and invest in research and development and workplace training.He will propose paying for the new spending with a substantial increase on corporate taxes that would offset eight years of spending over the course of 15 years, officials said. Among the changes, Biden will call for a rise in the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21% and measures to force multinational corporations to pay more taxes in the US on profits earned abroad. The tax plan would unwind major pieces of Donald Trump’s tax-cut law, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.The package, known as the American jobs plan, is only the first part of the president’s sprawling infrastructure agenda. Aides say he will present a second legislative package next month that will focus on investments in healthcare, childcare and education. That package is expected to be paid for, at least in part, by raising taxes on the nation’s highest earners.As a candidate, Biden promised not to raise individual taxes on those earning less than $400,000.The scale of the proposals, together expected to cost as much as $4tn, has been compared to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. A memo outlining its ambition states: “Like great projects of the past, the president’s plan will unify and mobilize the country to meet the great challenges of our time: the climate crisis and the ambitions of an autocratic China.”Biden’s allies on Capitol Hill are gearing up for a fight over the infrastructure legislation that will likely prove to be significantly more contentious than the swift passage of Biden’s $1.9tn economic aid bill, which was enacted earlier this month with only Democratic votes.While the urgency of the pandemic helped Democrats overcome a handful of objections to pass Biden’s coronavirus relief plan, there is infighting over what belongs in the package – and whether the administration should spend time attempting to forge a bipartisan consensus.Both Democrats and Republicans share a goal of fixing the nation’s ageing roads, bridges and other critical infrastructure. Yet they disagree sharply on the details – how much to spend, what constitutes “infrastructure” and how to pay for the investments. This chasm was too big for either Barack Obama or Trump to overcome and both failed to make progress after promising to rebuild the country’s infrastructure.In a briefing with reporters on Tuesday night, the administration official said Biden believed the current moment offered a rare opportunity “to demonstrate that the United States and democracies can deliver for the people that they serve”.“The stakes of this moment are high,” the official continued, adding that the president was confident this package would prove once again that massive public investment programs have the ability to not only create millions of new jobs but “revive and revitalize our national imagination”.“We think that these are investments that as a country we cannot afford not to make,” the official said.But congressional Republicans are already balking at the scope of the project, warning that the tax rises will hurt American competitiveness and slow the nation’s economic growth as it struggles to rebound from the pandemic. Their opposition could force Democrats to pass the bill through reconciliation, a parliamentary process that would allow them to bypass Republicans in the Senate.Even then, rank-and-file Democrats are far from aligned. With a narrow majority in the House and an evenly divided Senate, Biden has little room for error and the jockeying is already well underway as Democrats push an array of competing policy demands and ultimatums.On Tuesday, congressman Josh Gottheimer, a centrist Democrat from New Jersey, said he would oppose any tax proposals that did not include a repeal of the cap on state and local tax deductions implemented as part of the Republican’s 2017 GOP tax-cut plan.Meanwhile, liberal lawmakers want to see Biden go even bigger. On Monday, senator Edward Markey and congresswoman Debbie Dingell proposed a climate and infrastructure plan that would spend $10tn over the next decade.There is also an internal debate over how to proceed. Moderate Democrats say the package should be targeted to attract Republicans, fulfilling a campaign promise Biden made to work with members of both parties. But many progressives see little value in compromise.Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged the administration not to waste precious time attempting to woo Republicans.“We can’t wait for Republicans to have some awakening on climate change here – we’ll be waiting forever if we do that,” she said on Tuesday “We’ve got a window to get this done and we have to move with the urgency and the boldness that this moment calls for.” More

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      Hunter Biden calls Trump 'vile' in new book and denies Ukraine allegations

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      In a keenly awaited memoir, Joe Biden’s son Hunter attacks Donald Trump as “a vile man with a vile mission” who plumbed “unprecedented depths” in last year’s US presidential election.Hunter, 51, is a lawyer and businessman who has been the focus of Republican bile ever since Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani sought information on his business dealings in Ukraine to use in the 2020 campaign.On the page, Biden insists he did nothing wrong in joining in April 2014 the board of Burisma, the gas company at the heart of the Ukraine affair. He dismisses the controversy as “remarkable for its epic banality”. But he says he would not do so again.He found the company’s role as a bulwark against Russian aggression under Vladimir Putin “inspiring”, though the five-figures a month fee was also a factor. Biden acknowledges that his famous surname was considered “gold” by Burisma. “To put it more bluntly,” he writes, “having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakable fuck-you to Putin.”Giuliani’s search for dirt saw Trump impeached – and acquitted – for the first time. Republican attacks on Hunter Biden have continued, focusing on his business dealings and also his troubled personal life, including well-known struggles with drink and drug addiction and recently a decision to purchase a gun which became part of a domestic dispute.Biden’s memoir, Beautiful Things, deals with such personal issues as well as the deaths of his mother and sister in a car crash in 1973 and that of his older brother, Delaware attorney general Beau Biden, from brain cancer in 2015. The book will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Describing what it felt like to be in the eye of a political storm over business interests he says “sometimes” unavoidably coincided with his father’s work as vice-president to Barack Obama, Biden writes: “I became a proxy for Donald Trump’s fear that he wouldn’t be re-elected.“He pushed debunked conspiracy theories about work I did in Ukraine and China, even as his own children had pocketed millions in China and Russia and his former campaign manager [Paul Manafort] sat in a jail cell for laundering millions more from Ukraine.”He adds: “None of that matters in an up-is-down Orwellian political climate. Trump believed that if he could destroy me, and by extension my father, he could dispatch any candidate of decency from either party, all while diverting attention from his own corrupt behavior.”Insisting he is “not Billy Carter or Roger Clinton” – relations of previous presidents who proved magnets for media and opposition attention – Biden writes that he knows his surname has helped him in business. But, he adds, “I am not Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr. I’ve worked for someone other than my father. I rose and fell on my own.”Biden criticises Trump for his efforts to attack his father on the debate stage last October, writing that Trump showed “trademark callousness” in playing “the only card he ever plays: attack”.Joe Biden defended Hunter then, saying he was proud of how he handled his struggles with addiction and telling viewers: “There’s a reason why [Trump is] bringing up all this malarkey. He doesn’t want to talk about the substantive issues. It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family.”Hunter Biden also criticises Trump allies, calling the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz a “troll”.The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, he writes, is a family friend from Joe Biden’s long service in the Senate who nonetheless “morph[ed] into a Trump lapdog right before my eyes, slandering me and my father in the coldest, most cynical, most self-serving ways.”In the book, Hunter offers some insights into the Biden family, including an occasion when his father sought to intervene in his addictions by bringing two counselors from a rehab centre to the family home in Delaware. When Hunter refused, Joe Biden “suddenly looked terrified” and chased him down the driveway, then grabbed him, hugged him and “cried for the longest time”.Hunter had a brief romantic relationship with Beau’s widow, Hallie, after Beau’s death. “Our relationship had begun as a mutually desperate grasping for love we both had lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy,” he recalls. More

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      It’s Time to Act, Not React, on North Korea

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      Although things have been quiet in recent months and there has been no active dialogue between North Korea and the United States, developments in recent days suggest that Pyongyang is back on the agenda of the international community.

      First, it became known that the US has been reaching out to North Korea through several channels, starting in mid-February, but it has not heard back. North Korea then published two statements within as many days by two high-ranking officials. On March 16, Kim Yo-Jong — the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un — criticized the joint US-South Korea military exercise, warning that if Seoul dares “more provocative acts,” North Korea may abrogate the Inter-Korean Comprehensive Military Agreement of 2018. She also cautioned the US that if it “wants to sleep in peace for [the] coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.” Two days later, First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-Hui was quoted saying that North Korea sees no reason to return to nuclear talks with Washington, calling its outreach a “cheap trick.”

      How Joe Biden Looks at the World

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      These statements coincided with a warning issued by the head of the US military’s Northern Command that North Korea might begin flight testing an improved design of its intercontinental ballistic missiles “in the near future.” On March 23, Pyongyang tested two cruise missiles before qualitatively upping the ante with a short-range ballistic missile test on March 25, constituting a breach of UN Security Council resolutions.

      Although these developments may suggest that a further escalation on the Korean Peninsula is inevitable, North Korea has thus far been following its traditional playbook by signaling a message that leaves all options on the table, ensures maximum room for maneuver and, at least from Pyongyang’s view, places the ball in Washington’s court. North Korea is raising the stakes ahead of the conclusions of the policy review process in the US, while simultaneously conveying the message that the door is open for reengagement at some point. “In order for a dialogue to be made,” Choe said, “an atmosphere for both parties to exchange words on an equal basis must be created.”

      Biden’s North Korea Policy Review

      Further developments in US-North Korea relations will, to a significant extent, depend on the outcomes of the policy review process. Although this process is not yet complete, it is apparent that the policies of the Biden administration will differ significantly from those of the previous administration under Donald Trump.

      First, we should not expect Trump’s personalized diplomacy to continue under President Joe Biden. Rather, the US is trying to restore a consultative process by involving the regional actors in Northeast Asia more directly in the North Korea question — and possibly trying to (once again) multilateralize the nuclear issue in the longer run.

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      During the visits of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Japan and South Korea earlier this month, Blinken stated that the Biden administration was consulting closely with the governments of South Korea, Japan and other allied nations. He also acknowledged that Beijing “has a critical role to play” in any diplomatic effort with Pyongyang. Whether more consultation leads to actual consensus remains to be seen.

      Second, the US will most likely propose a processual solution to the nuclear issue. In an op-ed for The New York Times in 2018, Blinken himself argued that the best deal the US could reach with North Korea “more than likely will look like what Barack Obama achieved with Iran.” He wrote that an interim agreement “would buy time to negotiate a more comprehensive deal, including a minutely sequenced road map that will require sustained diplomacy.”

      Third, the new administration seems to place a greater focus on the human rights issue in its policies on North Korea. During his visit to Seoul, Blinken made clear that the US would not only address security concerns, but also the North Korean government’s “widespread, systematic abuses” of its people.

      Three Lessons From the Past

      Act, not react: As past experiences with North Korea have shown, it is now critical for the United States to act quickly and clearly communicate its new North Korea strategy to both its allies and Pyongyang. If official communication channels are blocked, the facilitation activities of individual European Union member states and/or Track 1.5 intermediaries could be helpful. Until then, it is crucial not to get sucked into rhetorical tugs-of-war with North Korea.

      If the international community fails to act quickly on North Korea, Pyongyang will likely once again resort to a crisis-inducing policy, thus forcing the international community to react to its expected provocations, rather than preventing further escalation in the first place.

      Separate the issues: The North Korean nuclear issue is complex. Solving the military and security components of this issue will inevitably require addressing a range of related political, diplomatic, economic and even historical issues. As the case of the Six-Party Talks has shown, however, one individual negotiation process can quickly become overwhelmed by the multitude of challenges and issues associated with the nuclear issue. As such, it is essential to establish adequate formats with the right participants to address the respective issues and challenges.

      There is a role for Europe: Although there is no doubt that the EU is only a peripheral player in Korean Peninsula security issues, the current debate on a new Indo-Pacific strategy provides an important opportunity for Brussels to critically reflect on its own approach to North Korea, as it has failed to achieve its stated goals — i.e., denuclearizing the peninsula, strengthening the nonproliferation regime and improving the human rights situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

      Although the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula will not be front and center of this new strategy, the EU needs to show greater political will to contribute toward solving the pending security issues in the region if it wants to strengthen its profile as a security actor in the region.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      'Best and brightest': Biden announces 'trailblazing' slate of judicial nominees

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      Joe Biden has announced a “trailblazing” set of federal judicial nominees, 11 picks including three Black women.Ketanji Brown Jackson, a US district judge, was nominated on Tuesday to replace attorney general Merrick Garland on the influential US appeals court for the District of Columbia circuit.In 2016, Garland was nominated for the supreme court by Barack Obama but blocked from even receiving a hearing by Republicans determined to fill the vacancy themselves.It was a hugely dramatic gambit by then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, as he set out to transform the federal judiciary. With McConnell’s help, Donald Trump was able to do so.On the campaign trail last year, Biden pledged to name the first Black woman to the supreme court. Jackson, who regularly clashed with the Trump administration, now moves into that spotlight. Many liberals are eyeing retirement for Stephen Breyer, at 82 the oldest member of the court, for whom Jackson once clerked.When she was sworn in as a district judge, in May 2013, Breyer delivered the oath.“She sees things from different points of view,” he said, “and she sees somebody else’s point of view and understands it.”In December, Biden asked senators for a diverse slate of possible judicial picks.“We are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench,” he said, “including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys and those who represent Americans in every walk of life.”His first picks, which the Washington Post called “the largest and earliest batch … by a new administration in decades”, also include the first Muslim named to a district court, Zahid Quraishi, a New Jersey judge.Biden also named Candace Jackson-Akiwumi for the Chicago-based seventh circuit and Tiffany Cunningham for the federal circuit in Washington.Among other appointments, Florence Pan will if confirmed be the first Asian American woman on the DC district court, while Lydia Griggsby will be the first black woman on the Maryland district court.Judge Rupa Ranga Puttagunta, a Washington DC local judge of Indian ancestry, is nominated for DC superior court.Carl Tobias, Williams chair in Law at Richmond University, said the president had delivered on his promise and chosen “an incredible group of people”.“There is diversity along a number of lines, ethnicity, gender, I assume sexual orientation and experiential diversity in terms of former federal public defenders or criminal defense lawyers as opposed to big, firm, lawyers and federal prosecutors,” he said.“Biden made promises both on the campaign trail and since being elected that he wants to rebalance the bench, which was unbalanced in terms of ideology with the appellate appointments that Trump made.“The question is how quickly they can be confirmed and how many more similar nominees he will bring forward. There are seven vacancies now on the appeals courts, 61 on the district court, and I think he’s committed to bringing forward many more very similar nominees.”In a statement to the Post, Biden said: “This trailblazing slate of nominees draws from the very best and brightest minds of the American legal profession.“Each is deeply qualified and prepared to deliver justice faithfully under our constitution and impartially to the American people – and together they represent the broad diversity of background, experience and perspective that makes our nation strong.”Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group, praised Biden’s choices.“Today’s nominees embody the demographic and professional diversity and forward-thinking that will ensure justice is served to the American people when they enter a courtroom,” the group’s president, Nan Aron, said in a statement.Referring to recent battles over picks for cabinet posts and other administration positions, she added: “We have already seen Senate Republicans’ willingness to maliciously smear Biden’s nominees, particularly targeting those who are not white men. We will not abide their callous attacks. Today’s nominees, and the many more outstanding jurists to come, will be confirmed.”Nomination hearings could begin in April. Biden and the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, have work to do.McConnell and Trump placed three justices on the supreme court, giving it a 6-3 conservative majority. But the extensive reshaping of the judiciary below the highest court could be their most lasting legacy.Observers have noted, for example, that though punitive voting rights restrictions being passed in Republican-led states are being challenged in court, the judiciary that will hear such cases is heavily staffed with conservatives.McConnell was proud of his ruthlessness, telling Fox News there was one reason so many vacancies were left for Trump to fill.“I’ll tell you why,” he said, in December 2019. “I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”Last April, he told an interviewer his “motto for the year is leave no vacancy behind”.Biden, Tobias said, will have paid attention.“I think Obama had one person on 17 March, but then it was very slow the first year, and Biden was vice-president. He and his people have learned from that, that you have to move very expeditiously,” he said.“I expect to see other similar packages sooner rather than later and [Biden is] watching the 2022 election because [Democrats] can lose the Senate.”Trump’s success contributed to his strength at the polls. In 2019, Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law, told the Guardian: “Not all conservatives are happy with a lot of things Trump has done, but on judges he’s killing it. It’s an across-the-board success that we’ve seen in this area.”Tobias, and others, saw Biden’s picks on Tuesday as the first steps in redressing the balance. More