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      in US Politics

      Biden cabinet picks: confirmation hearings begin one day before inauguration

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      Confirmation hearings for Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees kicked off on Tuesday, one day ahead of the inauguration and as the next step in Donald Trump’s second impeachment loomed.Senators on the relevant committees began hearings to confirm Janet Yellen (treasury secretary), Avril Haines (director of national intelligence), Alejandro Mayorkas (homeland security secretary) and Antony Blinken (secretary of state). The hearings were merely a first wave of confirmations Congress must process as the new president takes office.Biden will take the oath of office on Wednesday, cementing a massive shift in the American political universe. Once Kamala Harris is sworn in as vice-president – the first Black woman in the role using a Bible once owned by Thurgood Marshall, the first Black supreme court justice, as well as one from a close family friend – Democrats will narrowly control both chambers of Congress.As well as holding confirmation hearings, the Senate must hold a second trial for Trump, even after he has left office. Democrats hope Republican sentiment has shifted away from the outgoing president in response to the riot he encouraged at the Capitol. There are signs that might be the case.On Tuesday, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.”John Thune of South Dakota, a member of Republican leadership, told ABC News: “It sounds like we are going to have a trial to examine that and like all senators I’ll fulfill my constitutional duty and listen intently to the evidence, and we will come to the conclusion.”Looking to make good on his promise to lower the political temperature of the country, Biden invited Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress to a prayer session before he takes office, the mere fact of the invitation a tonal shift from how Trump interacted with congressional leaders through his four years in office. Earlier in the day, Biden participated in a sendoff from his home state, Delaware, ahead of his move to Washington. A Covid memorial service was due to take place in the capital in the evening.Biden will need to retain good relations with both parties if he wants any of his policy agenda to become law and cabinet confirmations to go smoothly. WThe Senate will be split 50-50. In any tie, Harris, as vice-president, will hold the deciding vote. In the House, the Democratic majority shrank in the last election but Nancy Pelosi still wields control as speaker.When Biden is sworn in, he will be lagging behind his most recent predecessors on confirmation hearings held, according to data compiled by Axios. Only five Biden nominees will have had hearings by the end of Tuesday, seven fewer than Trump had by inauguration day, six fewer than Barack Obama (whom Biden served as vice-president), seven fewer than George W Bush and nine fewer than Bill Clinton.On the Senate floor on Tuesday, Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, noted that Democrats must deal with an unusually heavy load.“All of us want to put this awful chapter in our nation’s history behind us, but healing and unity will only come if there is truth and accountability, not sweeping such a severe charge, such awful actions under the rug,” Schumer said.“So let me be clear. There will be an impeachment trial in the United States Senate. There will be a vote on convicting the president for high crimes and misdemeanors. If the president is convicted, there will be a vote barring him [from running for office] again.”Privately, there is a worry among Democrats that impeachment hearings held simultaneously with confirmations will delay cabinet confirmations and progress on legislation. Away from Congress, Biden has said he will reverse key Trump policies by executive order, achieving among other objectives re-entry to the Paris climate accord and Iran nuclear deal.Democrats also worry that impeachment could further fuel the sense of heated national division the new president wants to end.“In 2017, the Senate confirmed President Trump’s secretary of defense and his secretary of homeland security on inauguration day,” Schumer said, adding: “Biden should have the same officials in place on his inauguration day at the very least.“That is the expectation and tradition for any administration, especially in the midst of a homeland security crisis … the way the Senate works, it will take cooperation from our Republican colleagues to swiftly confirm these highly qualified national security officials. But make no mistake, the Senate will move quickly to confirm Biden’s cabinet.” More

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      Joe Biden must 'act big' with Covid relief package, says Janet Yellen – video

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      The US president-elect’s nominee for treasury secretary has told lawmakers that “the smartest thing we can do is act big” on the next coronavirus relief package, adding that the benefits outweigh the costs of a higher debt burden.
      In testimony at her virtual confirmation hearing, Janet Yellen said her task as treasury chief would be twofold: to help Americans endure the final months of the coronavirus pandemic, and to rebuild the US economy “so that it creates more prosperity for more people and ensures that American workers can compete in an increasingly competitive global economy”
      Janet Yellen says Biden must ‘act big’ with coronavirus relief package More

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      in US Politics

      Rapper Lil Wayne in line for last-day pardon from Donald Trump

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      The rapper Lil Wayne was among those reportedly expected to receive a pardon or clemency from Donald Trump on his last full day in office on Tuesday.Sources familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters suggested that neither the president himself, nor Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, or former aide Steve Bannon would be on the list, which may number up to 100. Neither would members of Trump’s family get pre-emptive pardons, reports suggested.While the legality of a presidential self-pardon remains untested, aides have cautioned Trump that pardoning himself and members of his family may imply guilt that becomes a liability in future state or civil lawsuits.It has also been suggested that a self-pardon could antagonise some Republican senators who will be voting during the second impeachment trial, expected later this month.Lil Wayne pleaded guilty last month to possessing a loaded, gold-plated handgun when his chartered jet landed in Miami in December 2019. He faces up to 10 years in prison at a 28 January hearing in Miami.The rapper appeared to support Trump during last year’s presidential campaign when he tweeted a photo of himself with the president and said he backed Trump’s criminal justice reform programme and economic plan for African Americans.On Tuesday morning, the New York Times reported that the list of new pardons or acts of clememcy “includes the names of people who have been serving life sentences for drug or fraud charges and who for years have been seeking clemency”.The paper said the White House was keen to blunt criticism for Trump’s handing of pardons to allies and cronies, reporting: “Tuesday’s group includes non-violent offenders whose names have been percolating for years among advocates who believe their punishments never fit their crimes and whose cases underscore the broken nature of the country’s criminal justice system.”The Times also reported that the list of pardons and commutations was expected to include the former New York assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, 76, who was convicted of corruption charges in 2015. After a lengthy legal process, Silver was sentenced in July 2020 to six-and-a-half years in prison and a $1m fine. He is held in the federal prison at Otisville, New York.Also said to be under consideration for a pardon was Sholam Weiss. Weiss was sentenced to 835 years in prison in 2000 for crimes including racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering. It is frequently described as the longest sentence imposed in the US for a “white collar” crime.Bannon, 66, who has pleaded not guilty to charges that he defrauded donors to “We Build the Wall”, an online fundraising campaign that raised $25m, was not expected to be on the list. Neither was Giuliani.It has been reported Giuliani has fallen out with the president over unpaid legal fees, and the former New York mayor has recused himself from defending Trump in his Senate impeachment trial, since Giuliani was also involved in the rally on 6 January that preceded a pro-Trump mob ransacking the US Capitol.He notoriously told the crowd “Let’s have trial by combat,” a remark he has since claimed was a reference to Game of Thrones.Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, another name frequently mentioned in connection to a possible Trump pardon, was also not expected to be on the list.The list of pardons was prepared over the weekend in a series of meetings involving the White House counsel, Pat A Cipollone, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.It is traditional for US presidents to issue pardons and clemency at the end of their term in office. Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, George W Bush commuted the sentence of former staffer Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who had been found guilty of perjury, and Bill Clinton controversially pardoned the financier Marc Rich in a move widely criticised as being corrupt, after Rich’s ex-wife had made substantial donations to Clinton-related causes. More

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      in Elections

      How will Trump pass 'nuclear football' to Biden if he's not at swearing-in?

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      It is a responsibility that has passed to every president since John F Kennedy – the custody of the so called “nuclear football” – the hardened brief case that is handed over on the day of the inauguration of new presidents by their predecessor.The question being asked, given Trump’s almost unprecedented decision not to meet Joe Biden or attend his swearing in, is what will happen to the nuclear football?The reality is that while the briefcase, carried by a military aide, and containing nuclear attack plans, access to command and control systems and the mechanism for authorising the nuclear codes has become a shorthand for the president’s singular responsibility to order a nuclear attack, the mechanisms are a little more complex.The “football” itself – also known as the “emergency satchel” or simply “the button” is a metal Zero Halliburton briefcase covered in leather to look rather like an old fashioned doctor’s bag, weighing around 20kg.The bag is said to contain a copy – in some form – of the Black Book, the options for nuclear retaliation, the “biscuit”, an active electronic card identifying the president as the person able to authorise the “watch signal” triggering the use of nuclear weapons and the ability to communicate with command and control hubs.Finally, perhaps most important, the briefcase contains an emergency broadcast system to allow the president to communicate any orders.The football itself, however, is very much a backup, designed for use when the president is away from the fixed and protected command and control centres such as the White House situation room, where he would expect to be briefed by key officials in most circumstances ahead of authorising a nuclear retaliation as the US, while not having an all-encompassing no first strike nuclear policy, does have a “negative security assurance” on nuclear weapons use with 180 countries, although excluding the likes of Russia, China and North Korea.In 2013 Dick Cheney, Gerald Ford’s former chief of staff, described what usually happens on inauguration day when the responsibility for that attack moves to a new president.“The passing of the football occurs at high noon. No one says a word but I knew what to look for.“So you got the ceremony going down front, [but] behind one of the big pillars there, these two guys are standing in their uniforms. And at the right moment, [the outgoing military aide] reaches over and hands it to the newly designated military aide and he takes it from that moment on.”While the physical transfer has become part of the ritual of the transfer of power, albeit an unseen one among the pomp and circumstance, described by one of Bill Clinton’s aides as a “sacred duty”, the real transfer of responsibilities is actually somewhat more prosaic.During the briefing about the nuclear codes and the briefcase on the morning of the inauguration, the key thing that happens is that “the biscuit” or rather “a biscuit” is reprogrammed and given to the new president or his designated military aide activating at noon on the day of the swearing, meaning that the new president can identify himself.According to reports, the Pentagon has long had a plan for the transfer of responsibility in the event of Trump skipping the transfer of power.Given the importance of the football, with its antenna protruding from it, it seems unlikely that there would be no redundancy in so important a system, a fact underlined by reports that there are actually three physical briefcases, not a solitary presidential satchel, one that can be assigned to the vice president and one to the “designated survivor” – usually a member of the cabinet designated by the president to ensure continuity if both the president and vice president are incapacitated.“We war-game this stuff, and we practise it ad nauseam for years and years,” Buzz Patterson, who carried the football for Clinton, told Business Insider, adding that the transfer needed to be instantaneous.“There are systems in place to make sure that happens instantaneously. There won’t be any kind of question about who has it, who is in charge at that point in time.“We don’t take this stuff lightly. There won’t be any kind of hiccup. It’ll just go down without anybody even noticing, which is what is supposed to happen.”At midday, as Joe Biden is sworn in, Trump’s “nuclear biscuit” will become inactive. The most frightening of his powers will be gone. More

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      in Elections

      Biden to target Covid and the economy amid stack of orders in first 100 days

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      When Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Wednesday, he plans to trigger a range of executive orders aimed at solving two of the biggest crises facing the country: the economic downturn and the coronavirus pandemic.The president-elect’s team has been floating its ideal scenario for how Biden’s first hundred days in office will go. That includes almost a dozen executive orders and pushing for a massive $1.9tn coronavirus and economic stimulus plan. The Biden team is also planning another proposal aimed at reinforcing the economy.The executive orders concern fighting climate change, battling Covid, pausing payments on student loans, rejoining the Paris climate agreement and ending the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries. He also plans to quickly take steps to change the country’s criminal justice system and expanding healthcare to low-income Americans.“President-elect Biden is assuming the presidency in a moment of profound crisis for our nation. We face four overlapping and compounding crises: the Covid-19 crisis, the resulting economic crisis, the climate crisis and a racial equity crisis,” Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, circulated in a memo the campaign released to the public over the weekend.Klain added: “All of these crises demand urgent action. In his first 10 days in office, President-elect Biden will take decisive action to address these four crises, prevent other urgent and irreversible harms, and restore America’s place in the world.”On immigration, Biden is aiming to end some of the hardline immigration policies of the Trump administration. He plans to unveil proposals that will offer a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and foreign aid to countries in Central America.At the same time, however, a Biden official cautioned to NBC that did not mean the next administration would grant entry to all asylum seekers coming to the country.In laying out his agenda, Biden has worked to frame it as more of a moment for the nation to rally and forget partisan divides.“It’s not hard to see that we’re in the middle of a once-in-several-generations economic crisis with a once-in-several-generations public health crisis,” Biden said during a press conference over the weekend.The stimulus proposal and the executive actions underscore Biden’s hypothesis that his decades-long career in the Senate and deep ties in Washington can help heal the partisan rancor and political divides that kept Congress in gridlock through multiple presidencies.“Unity is not some pie-in-the-sky dream, it’s a practical step to getting the things we have to get done as a country get done together,” Biden said at the press conference.The incoming president has shown more interest in trying to work with Republicans and Democrats rather than vowing than this presidency would fulfill progressives’ legislative wishlists.Unity is not some pie-in-the-sky dream, it’s a practical step to get things doneDemocratic control of the House of Representatives, and the slimmest of majorities in the Senate (a 50-50 split where Kamala Harris, as vice-president, will play the tie-breaker) also means that much of Biden’s first – and possibly only – term as president depends on whether enough senators support a bill to overcome a filibuster.This is unlike the beginning of the Trump administration, where the new president opted to fulfill the No 1 item on Republicans’ wishlist: gutting Obamacare. That decision resulted only in a partial victory. It also erased any tiny vestige of openness Democrats may have secretly kept that maybe some kind of bipartisanship was possible under Trump.Biden, though, is starting out advertising priorities that, at least in the abstract, aren’t obviously objectionable to Republicans or Democrats: curbing the virus, helping small businesses and improving the economy.Biden has also set a goal of 100m vaccine shots in the first 100 days of his presidency.“We’ll have to move heaven and earth to get more people vaccinated,” Biden said.One Biden transition adviser who is joining his administration said of the $1.9tn plan: “We believe that across this plan are proposals that are pragmatic, that have support not only in Washington but in capitals and cities and communities across the country and are urgently necessary. And so the president-elect will make the case that we need to come together and move on this as well.”Asked which part of Biden’s first 100 days in office would be the toughest, the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, the most influential African American Democrat in Congress, said stimulus payments.“Because all that’s wrapped into one. Everybody’s out for that, so I don’t see them being able to turn around for that,” Clyburn told the Guardian. “I think the toughest thing is going to be his infrastructure package.”Clyburn said “you’ve got to have some ‘pay-fors’. I don’t think he ought to put all of that on the credit card. The Republicans are always going to try to keep Wall Street from paying for anything, but I think the time has come, and I’m going to be very vocal, and other people are going to be very vocal about it.“We can’t keep doing these infrastructure programs and having them paid for by rural farmers, rural communities. We’ve just got to stop doing that.”Despite Biden’s vocal optimism that the Trump fever will leave with his administration, there are already signs of top Republicans getting ready to stonewall Biden’s agenda and paint it as a thinly veiled push by progressives and the left.“I think we are going to have, in the first 100 days by the Biden administration, the most aggressive socialized policy effort in the history of the country,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said during a recent appearance on Fox News.Still, that opposition may be weaker than the obstruction put up during Barack Obama’s administration.Biden and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Senate Republican, have a longstanding relationship, and Republican and Democratic veterans of Washington say they are in closer contact than is publicly known. Publicly they have both been relatively quiet, refraining from lobbing potshots.That detente could turn into a quiet working relationship where bipartisan policy proposals become law, just as Biden has hoped. More

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      in World Politics

      Why Is Joe Biden’s Presidency Anathema to So Many US Catholics?

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      When I was growing up in Germany in the 1960s, during the holiday seasons, both Christmas and Easter, one of the highlights on television was the reruns of “Don Camillo and Peppone.” These are movies that involve the adventures of a Catholic priest and a communist mayor, taking place in a small village in the Po valley in northern Italy. The protagonists are constantly at loggerheads, yet in the end they always find a compromise, based on mutual understanding and appreciation. The time is the immediate postwar period, when both the Italian Catholic Church and Italy’s Communist Party were at the height of their influence and power. For the Catholic Church, this meant substantial interference in Italian politics.

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      One of the most drastic attempts to wield such influence was the Vatican’s decision in mid-1949 to excommunicate all members of the Communist Party. Given the fact that communism was “materialist and anti-Christian,” anyone who came out in support of the ideology automatically expressed their hostility “to God, religion and the Church” and, therefore, had no place among the community of believers. In a country where faith in the Catholic Church and its teachings were deeply ingrained, this was a formidable weapon. It is to the credit of the creator of Don Camillo and Peppone, Giovannino Guareschi, that he showed in many of his stories that this had little to do with reality on the ground — that somebody could be a communist and a good Catholic.

      Bygone Era

      In contemporary Italy, these are stories of a bygone era, one where the Christian Democrats still were the predominant party and where Italians still flocked to the churches. By now, the Christian Democrats are politically dead, and Italian churches have become museums rather than places of worship. In my own country, Germany, the Catholic Church has long abandoned its anti-socialist rhetoric aimed at the Social Democrats, perhaps, but not only, because the SPD has largely abandoned any pretense to be a socialist party.

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      Even in Ireland and in Poland, the Catholic Church is increasingly in a defensive position. Take, for instance, recent shocking official revelations about decades of neglect and abuse in Ireland’s mother and baby homes. Most of them run by religious orders affiliated with the Catholic Church, they reflected a “brutally misogynistic culture” promoted by the church. This culture resulted not only in unmarried women and girls being held “virtual prisoners” in these “homes” but also in the death of thousands of babies, oftentimes buried anonymously in mass graves. Under the circumstances, the Catholic Church’s adamant pro-life stance rings somewhat hollow.

      The church’s taking the moral high ground has also started to undermine the position of the Polish Catholics. It was recent scandals about the sexual abuse of children involving, most infamously, an icon of Polish Catholicism, Henryk Jankowski, a legend of the Solidarność movement that was instrumental in putting an end to Poland’s communist regime. His statue was toppled by protesters in 2019 in the city of Gdansk, before being officially dismantled and removed. The fact that until today, the Polish Catholic Church has refused to accept responsibility has led to a dramatic loss of trust in its authority. The church, in turn, has sought to divert attention from the crimes committed in its name by targeting the country’s LGTBQ community as the new “plague that seeks to dominate our souls, hearts and our mind.”

      I doubt that the American Catholic Church is tuned in to developments in contemporary Poland or that it has any awareness of the far-reaching influence of the Italian Catholic Church in the immediate postwar period. Yet the parallels are striking, particularly in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. This time, President Donald Trump garnered roughly 50% of the Catholic vote and about 57% among white Catholics. To be sure, Catholics voted for Trump for a range of different reasons. “Pro-life” considerations probably rank very high, if not highest, particularly among white Catholics. So do anti-immigrant sentiments. Among Hispanics, economic considerations appear to have had a significant influence on electoral choice, plus the open hostility a number of Catholic spiritual leaders have expressed toward Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in general.

      Take, for instance, Jesse Romero, a former cop turned into a well-known Catholic evangelist, who appears to have personally “witnessed diabolical satanic activity,” recounted in his 2019 book, “The Devil in the City of Angels: My Encounters With the Diabolical.” A cop staring down the devil — what other qualifications does one need to be a major authority on spiritual guidance? In early 2020, Romero published a book that proclaimed that a vote for Trump was the only choice for Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike. Those interested in the rationale behind Romero’s plea should consult his response to a Never Trump Catholic, which provides a long list of Trump’s “accomplishments” starting with his “pro-life” measures. What about him being a liar and philanderer? Who cares?

      To be sure, Romero is nothing more than another one of these evangelical snake oil salesmen that clutter America’s airwaves. Usually, they are of the Protestant persuasion; but then, the US is an equal opportunity country, and Romero is certainly not the worst of the lot, at least on the Catholic side.

      Party of Death

      A recent post on the Jesuit America magazine website provides a sobering account of the extent to which Catholic officials have gone to incite hatred toward Joe Biden and the Democrats. The author quotes one priest who posted a clip to YouTube that charged that the Democratic platform was “against everything the Catholic Church teaches.” Therefore, American Catholics who voted for the Democrats should “just quit pretending” to be Catholics. Those contemplating voting for Biden should repent of “their support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell.” Christianity in action.

      And who cares that Biden is, in fact, a practicing Catholic, while Donald Trump, as his Presbyterian Protestant congregation puts it, is not an “active member.” As Rick Stika, the bishop of Knoxville, Tennessee, put it in a tweet in August, Biden should not claim to be a good Catholic “as he denies so much of Church teaching especially on the absolute child abuse and human rights violations of the most innocent, the not yet born.” As a member of an institution infamous for widespread abuse of the most innocent, Stika should have known better than to use this kind of language. And yet, as an article in the National Catholic Reporter has documented, he was hardly the only top Catholic dignitary to question Biden’s Catholic faith and credentials.

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      Lower ranks followed suit. One priest posted a clip that called the Democrats the “party of death.” This is a trope that has been around for years, first introduced by the former St. Louise Archbishop Raymond Burke. Burke was appointed to the Vatican’s highest court in 2008 from where he attacked both Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, who, he charged, “while presenting themselves as good Catholics, have presented Church doctrine on abortion in a false and tendentious way.”

      Given the relatively long tradition of labeling the Democratic Party as the party of death by the gotha of American Catholicism, it is hardly surprising that the recent video clip received enthusiastic support from Joseph Strickland, a bishop from Tyler, Texas. Strickland not only endorsed the message but exhorted his flock to listen to this “wise and faithful priest.” It might also come as no surprise that according to one witness in Pennsylvania, some priests were “openly suggesting that politicians who support abortion rights should be denied Communion.”

      This is akin to what the Italian Catholic Church told its flock in the postwar period. This is what the Polish Church has been telling its flock since the collapse of the communist regime. The result: In 2019, a mere 20% of the Polish population expressed trust in the country’s Catholic Church.

      Blood on Their Hands

      Things are likely to move in the same direction in the United States. The headline of a recent article in National Catholic Reporter minced no words: Catholics, the article charged, “need to confess their complicity in the failed coup.” The author claims that, given the five casualties caused by the assault on the Capitol, “Catholic apologists for Trump have blood on their hands.” The tacit or open support of parts of the American Catholic Church’s clergy and affiliated lay organizations, such as Catholics for Trump, CatholicVote.org and LifeSiteNews, for a president who represents the very antithesis of Gospel teaching is bound to have a significant fallout, given the assault on the nation’s cradle of democracy.  

      This comes at a time when the Catholic Church is under tremendous pressure given the growing number of revelations of widespread sexual abuse, more often than not hushed up by the Church hierarchy. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Catholic Church spent more than $5 million on lobbying to prevent victims of sexual abuse from getting meaningful compensation.

      Ever since the creation of the United States, Catholics have been under a cloud of suspicion. It took more than a century to alleviate these suspicions and allow Catholics to be accepted as equal members of the nation. By openly supporting a president who represents the very antithesis of Christ’s teaching, parts of the American Catholic Church have managed to erase much of the progress the American Catholic Church has managed to accomplish over the past several decades. Consumed by one issue, the question of abortion, they condoned Trump’s behavior by looking the other way on questions of racism, white supremacy, refugees and Black Lives Matter.  

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      On the contrary, radical right-wing influencers, such as Michelle Malkin (who once said that what was at the heart of her “outspokenness” was her Catholic faith), characterized Black Lives Matter protesters as “vigilante terrorists.” A few weeks before the assault on the Capitol, Malkin ridiculed the idea that Trump supporters might be “the real threat to civil order” or that the “populist movement to ‘stop the steal’ of election 2020 is rooted in hate.”   

      In the wake of the assault on the Capitol, it has become clear that the American Catholic Church’s narrow focus on the question of abortion is a dead end with serious consequences. It is time to shift the focus to pressing issues like social justice, affordable health care for all, human dignity independent of skin color, gender and sexual orientation, and, last but not least, a fundamental break with the Trump administration’s approach to the global climate crisis. In other words, following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ rather than kowtowing to the likes of Donald Trump and many within the Republican Party who care only about themselves. 

      A recent article in the Chicago Tribune suggests that this is going to be an uphill battle. When a Catholic priest in Chicago raised uncomfortable questions about the church’s complicity with the Trump administration and the assault on Congress, a significant number of his congregation walked out, clearly unprepared to confront reality. This suggests that the rift in American society extends deep into the country’s Catholic community. This is hardly surprising, giving the polarizing figure of Pope Francis.  What many of his detractors in the Catholic Church have objected to is that his “theology stems from reality: from the reality of injustice, poverty and the destruction of nature.”

      As it happens, the American Catholic Church is a hotspot of opposition to Pope Francis. This might, in part at least, explain the support of many American Catholics for Donald Trump and the vitriol parts of the Catholic community have directed at Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Hence the irony that the country’s second Catholic taking over the Oval Office since John F. Kennedy is anathema to so many American Catholics.  

      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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      in Elections

      Biden to 'hit ground running' as he rejoins Paris climate accords

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      Joe Biden is set for a flurry of action to combat the climate crisis on his first day as US president by immediately rejoining the Paris climate agreement and blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, although experts have warned lengthier, and harder, environmental battles lie ahead in his presidency.In a series of plans drawn up by Biden’s incoming administration for his first day in office, the new president will take the resonant step of bringing the US back into the Paris climate accords, an international agreement to curb dangerous global heating that Donald Trump exited.The Democrat, who will be sworn in on Wednesday, is also set to revoke a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, a controversial cross-border project that would bring 830,000 barrels of crude oil each day from Alberta, Canada, to a pipeline that runs to oil refineries on the US’s Gulf of Mexico coast. The president-elect is also expected to reverse Trump’s undoing of rules that limited the emission of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas drilling operations.“Day one, Biden will rejoin Paris, regulate methane emissions and continue taking many other aggressive executive climate actions in the opening days and weeks of his presidency,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House, now with the Progressive Policy Institute.Bledsoe said Biden’s nominees to tackle the climate crisis, spearheaded by the former secretary of state John Kerry, who will act as a climate “envoy” to the world, is “by far the most experienced, high-level climate team US history. They intend to hit the ground running.”The aggressive opening salvo to help address the climate crisis, which Biden has called “the existential threat of our time”, is set to include various executive orders to resurrect a host of pollution rules either knocked down or weakened by the Trump administration.The US will convene an international climate summit in Biden’s first few months in the White House and is set to join a global effort to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are used in refrigeration and air conditioning and contribute to the heating of the planet.Biden has also vowed to support federal government scientists beleaguered by years of climate change denial and sidelining of politically inconvenient science by the Trump administration.“It will be a starkly different approach to the Trump administration on almost every front,” said Helen Mountford, vice-president for climate at the World Resources Institute. “Science will once again guide America’s policymaking and inauguration day will mark a new era for climate ambition in the US. He will have a lot on his plate but there’s no doubt that Biden intends to make a full court press on climate change.”However, climate experts point out that simply re-establishing Barack Obama’s climate policies will not be enough to help the world avoid the worst ravages of heatwaves, flooding and mass displacement of people.“It’s not sufficient for where the science says we need to be and it’s not sufficient because we’ve lost critical time over the last couple of years,” said Brian Deese, Biden’s nominee for director of the National Economic Council. Planet-heating emissions dipped in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic but are already surging back to previous levels despite the UN warning countries must at least triple their emissions cuts promised under the Paris deal.Biden has pledged to cut US emissions to net zero by 2050 and has a $2tn plan he claims will create millions of new jobs in energy efficient retrofits for buildings and clean energies such as solar and wind. These ambitions have been bolstered by Democrats’ slender control of the US Senate, although several of the party’s senators, such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who once shot a piece of climate legislation with a gun in a TV campaign advertisement, are wary of big-spending climate bills. US lawmakers have been divided and inert on climate legislation for a decade, despite polls showing record bipartisan support for climate action among the American public.The outcome of the political wrangling will be most keenly felt by poorer people and people of color who disproportionally live near sources of air and water pollution such as coal-fired power plants and highways. Biden has promised to help these communities but will need to “put his money where his mouth is”, said Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency.“Folks will be more focused on the greenhouse gas side of the paradigm, which is maybe a quarter of the work,” Ali said. “There needs to be a comprehensive federal strategy for environmental justice. We have to rebuild trust with communities that we took decades to build up and then was broken. The bogeyman, which is Trump, may be gone but we still need to focus on dismantling that structural environmental racism. Trump just threw more gasoline on what was already there.” More

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      US Capitol on security lockdown ahead of Biden inauguration – video

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      The tightest security measures in recent memory are in place in Washington, two days ahead of the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the US.
      25,000 National Guard soldiers from across the east coast are stationed in the city. The streets around the Capitol remain eerily empty as all but the most determined protesters have stayed away after the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol on 6 January. 
      The FBI has vetted all troops who are guarding the event because of fears of an insider attack at the inauguration.  More