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      Biden’s Inaugural Will Be Mostly Virtual, but Money From Donors Will Be Real

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden’s Inaugural Will Be Mostly Virtual, but Money From Donors Will Be RealThe president-elect’s allies have begun an ambitious fund-raising campaign for the celebration of his swearing-in. Big donors will get “virtual signed photos” — and a chance to generate good will.President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration will be mostly virtual, with in-person events scaled back because of the coronavirus pandemic.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesKenneth P. Vogel and Dec. 16, 2020WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s allies have begun an ambitious campaign to raise millions of dollars from corporations and individuals by offering special “V.I.P. participation” in reimagined inaugural festivities that will be largely virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic.Far fewer tickets than normal are being distributed for people to attend the actual swearing-in ceremony outside the Capitol on Jan. 20, which is organized and funded by the government.To create an air of celebration, Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee said it was raising private funds to pay for virtual events that will echo the Democratic convention this year, which featured a 50-state roll call from spots around the nation. There are also plans for a “virtual concert” with major performers whose names have not yet been released — and possibly for an in-person event later in the year.The contrast between the constraints of putting on inaugural festivities in the midst of a public health crisis and fund-raising as usual underscores how donations to an inaugural are not just about getting good seats for the swearing-in or tickets to the glitziest black-tie balls. They are also a way for corporations and well-heeled individuals to curry favor with a new administration, a reality that prompted liberal groups on Wednesday to ask Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee to forgo corporate donations.President Trump’s inauguration nearly four years ago took the practice to a new level. It became an access-peddling bazaar of sorts, and aspects of its record fund-raising and spending emerged as the subjects of investigations.Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee is promising corporations that give up to $1 million and individuals who contribute $500,000 — the largest amounts the committee said it would accept — some form of “V.I.P. participation” in the virtual concert.This special access is among the perks detailed on a one-page sponsorship menu from the committee that circulated among donors on Wednesday. Perks include “event sponsorship opportunities,” as well as access to virtual briefings with leaders of the inaugural committee and campaign, and invitations to virtual events with Mr. Biden and Jill Biden, the future first lady, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff.Top donors will also get a fitting memento for the coronavirus era — “virtual signed photos” with the president-elect and the first lady, as well as Ms. Harris and her husband, replacing the traditional in-person rope-line photo opportunities for which donors usually pay handsomely at fund-raisers and other political events.Incoming presidents have long raised private funds to organize and pay for inaugural festivities beyond the swearing-in ceremony, which is hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies and funded with taxpayer money.Top donors typically get intimate in-person access at parties and dinners to celebrate with members of an incoming president’s campaign and administration.Among the corporate giants who have indicated they are ready to donate despite the lack of in-person events is Boeing, the aerospace manufacturer and military contractor. The company is contributing $1 million to Mr. Biden’s inauguration, an amount it said is consistent with its past contributions to inaugural committees. Representatives from Bank of America and Ford Motor Company also said their companies intended to donate.“We have supported inauguration events over many administrations on a nonpartisan basis because we view it as part of our civic commitment for an important national event,” Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Bank of America, said in a statement. “The private sector has traditionally done so and we expect to provide support for ceremonies in January as appropriate, given the health crisis and other factors that may impact it.”A number of corporations that have been major donors to past presidential inaugurations — like Coca-Cola, Google and United Parcel Service — said this week that they still had not decided how much, or whether, to donate, though Google noted it had provided “online security protections for free” to the inaugural committee.“As you know this is a very different year and as such we have not yet made a decision,” Ann Moore, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola, said in a statement.A spokeswoman for the investment bank JPMorgan Chase, which has donated to past inaugurations, said that instead of giving to Mr. Biden’s committee, it would be donating to food banks in Washington and the hometowns of Mr. Biden (Wilmington, Del.) and Ms. Harris (Oakland, Calif.) “to help those impacted by the pandemic.”The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 17, 2020, 10:00 a.m. ETHere’s a look at the economy Biden will inherit next month.Dominion demands that Sidney Powell retract ‘baseless and false allegations’ about voting machines.Pence will be vaccinated publicly on Friday, the White House says.An inauguration spokesman would not say how much had already been raised, or what the fund-raising goal was.Funds raised for inaugurations cannot be transferred to federal campaigns or party committees. Past inaugural committees have donated unspent funds to charities including those engaged in disaster relief, as well as groups involved in decorating and maintaining the White House and the vice president’s residence.The effort by Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee to raise funds from corporate donors prompted puzzlement and objections from liberal activists, who have expressed concern about what they see as the Biden team’s coziness with corporate interests.A coalition of about 50 liberal groups released a letter to the inaugural committee on Wednesday urging it to forgo donations from corporations to prevent them “from wielding undue influence,” and questioning the need for such donations, given the likelihood that Mr. Biden’s inauguration would cost less than previous inaugurations.“The drive to raise so much money without a clear use for it is perplexing, and the appearance of doing so is disconcerting,” said the letter, which was organized by Demand Progress, a group that has also urged Mr. Biden not to hire corporate executives and consultants or lobbyists.Federal law does not require the disclosure of donations to inaugural committees until 90 days after the event, and limited disclosures about expenditures are not required until months after that. But the Biden inaugural committee said it intends to disclose the names of at least its larger donors before Jan. 20.There are no legal limits on the sizes of donations that inaugural committees can accept, and there are few restrictions on who can give.Mr. Biden’s inaugural committee announced last month that it would voluntarily forgo donations from fossil fuel companies, registered lobbyists and foreign agents, in addition to limiting corporate donations to $1 million and individual donations to $500,000.Those restrictions are less stringent than the ones adopted by former President Barack Obama for his 2009 inauguration. His inaugural committee refused corporate donations and said it limited individual donations to $50,000, though he loosened the rules for his second inauguration in 2013.While Mr. Trump’s team said it would not accept contributions from lobbyists for his 2017 inauguration, its fund-raising was otherwise mostly unrestricted, resulting in a record $107 million haul.The Biden team has so far released few specifics regarding plans for the inauguration, other than a statement on Tuesday urging people not to travel to Washington to attend the event given the pandemic and noting that the “ceremony’s footprint will be extremely limited.”In an expression of just how unusual the event will be, the Biden inaugural committee named Dr. David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, as an adviser to help with decisions on what kinds of events it can hold.“We are asking Americans to participate in inaugural events from home to protect themselves, their families, friends and communities,” Dr. Kessler said in a statement.In a typical inauguration year, a congressional committee that organizes the swearing-in ceremony typically distributes 200,000 tickets to lawmakers for seats on the platform, risers and seating close to the West Front of the Capitol, which are then distributed to constituents and friends who want to attend.But this year, the committee announced it would give just two tickets to the outdoor festivities to each of the 535 members of Congress, for them and a guest to attend.Beyond this event, it is largely up to the Biden inauguration committee, where officials have said in recent days they are still working to “reimagine” and “reinvent” the inauguration.There will still be some kind of an inauguration parade, but it will be considerably pared down and will most likely feature video or live shots of groups performing from spots across the country.The inaugural committee this week disclosed that it had retained Ricky Kirshner, a New York-based entertainment industry television and events producer. His past experience includes the Super Bowl halftime show this year that featured Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, as well as past Tony Awards and Kennedy Center Honors events, and the largely virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, among many other events.Major donors will also get “V.I.P. tickets” to some kind of future event to celebrate the start of the new administration in person, according to the one-page menu of donor perks.But given the continued uncertainty associated with the pandemic, that event is listed as “date to be determined.”Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Kamala Harris Deserves a More Important Job

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      Credit…Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOpinionKamala Harris Deserves a More Important JobShe could be at the forefront of helping a part of America that’s been left behind.Credit…Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistDec. 15, 2020, 7:00 p.m. ETI was speaking recently to Matt Dunne, founder of the Center on Rural Innovation, which promotes digital economic development in small-town America, and he was telling me about a Vermont community near his home with a great public library: “You could drive by on any Sunday and the parking lot would be full,” he said. “There was just one problem: The library was closed on Sundays.”The parking lot was full of cars with kids doing their homework and adults doing their office work — using the wireless connectivity spilling out of the empty building because their rural homes lacked high-speed broadband. Alas, stories abound of rural Americans going to Subway sandwich shops and Dairy Queens in search of free Wi-Fi.And that is why I want to talk today about Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.Harris is too smart and energetic to be just the vice president, a position with few official responsibilities. I’d love to see President-elect Joe Biden give her a more important job: his de facto secretary of rural development, in charge of closing the opportunity gap, the connectivity gap, the learning gap, the start-up gap — and the anger and alienation gap — between rural America and the rest of the country.President Trump feasted off those gaps in our last two presidential elections to dominate Democrats in rural America. Putting Harris in charge of fixing them would be a real statement by the Biden team.It would provide a vision for American renewal and signal that Democrats were no longer going to cede rural America to Republicans but were instead going to seize it from them. And it would make Harris a super-relevant vice president from Day 1.A school in Summertown, Tenn., recognizes some students don’t have internet access at home.Credit…Brett Carlsen for The New York TimesIn Tucson, Ariz., school buses are equipped with Wi-Fi and parked in poor neighborhoods so access is available.Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesDemocrats must not kid themselves. Biden won this election by narrowly winning the suburbs and urban centers in key battleground states, where just enough people decided that they wanted to “de-Trump” the White House but not “defund” the police.That is, a lot of suburban voters rejected Trump personally but also rejected far-left Democratic ideas that had percolated up in the last few years. Democrats won the presidency but took a beating from those same suburban voters in many statehouse, U.S. House and U.S. Senate races.If Democrats go into 2022 — let alone 2024 — appealing only on the cities and suburbs, they’re crazy. They will be highly vulnerable if the G.O.P. is led by a smarter, less offensive populist than Donald Trump.Most important, lifting rural America is the right thing to do for all of America and fulfills Biden’s vision of a nation that “grows together” in every way.That concept remains in the DNA of the Democratic Party, which in my home state, Minnesota, is still known as the “D.F.L.” — the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The party needs to reconstitute that coalition.“One way to do that is by reconnecting with its populist roots — when it really was a party focused on the empowerment of workers and farmers and ordinary citizens,” argued Harvard’s Michael Sandel, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” “Trump gave populism a bad name. Democrats should provide an alternative to Trump’s xenophobic, plutocratic populism by showing how populism can be a source of civic activism, engagement and renewal across urban and rural America.”That should be Harris’s mission, and it’s one worthy of a vice president. And it starts in rural America.“I fear the word ‘rural’ connotes a geography that is not my problem,” Beth Ford, president of Land O’Lakes, the influential farmer-owned cooperative headquartered in Minnesota, said to me. But, in fact, spreading connectivity and technology to rural America “is an American issue, an American competitiveness issue and an American national security issue,” she argued.Persistent “underinvestment in rural America will leave us less secure and less prosperous as a nation” — and less competitive with China, which is rapidly connecting its rural heartland, Ford said. “Some 35 percent of farmers lack enough bandwidth to run the equipment on their farms, ensure their kids get a good education and that Grandma has access to telemedicine.”What should a Biden-Harris rural strategy look like? It would start with showing up regularly. “Showing up” and “just listening to people” with respect goes a long way in rural America, Duluth’s mayor, Emily Larson, remarked to me. Actually, nothing earns more respect than listening to people respectfully.“Rural areas have their own social networks,” Larson said, but they’re different from the metropolitan ones. “Here, people will show up for you in the middle of the night, but they don’t post about it on Facebook.”On policy specifics, the Biden-Harris team should commit that in four years every rural community in America will have access to broadband — the basic infrastructure needed for an inclusive modern economy.Dunne suggests a new federal loan program that would offer 50-year, no-interest loans to communities and co-ops (and ease regulations) so rural public-private coalitions can build broadband networks with a minimum 100 megabits per second of speed for downloading and uploading all kinds of remote learning tools, work tools and telehealth tools. Representative James Clyburn has already won passage of a bill in the House with a similar approach.Every rural community in America needs access to broadband to succeed.Credit…Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesTraveling with Dunne last year to Red Wing, Minn., to see how gigabit networks can support high-tech start-ups and traditional farmers, I wrote about a couple of inventors we met who had created a robotic rooster that patrols the poultry house for dead birds and tills the bedding, but with an unexpected byproduct: The birds exercise more and gain weight faster, because they are constantly running away from or pecking at the robot.While these “Poultry Patrol” robots work autonomously 80 percent of the time, said Dunne, “there are significant periods when they need to be remotely operated and receive coding updates from afar, which is only possible with very fast broadband.”But while better connectivity is necessary, it’s not sufficient. “We also need to ensure investment in digital skills training in rural communities and incentives for tech companies to hire remote workers in small towns,” added Dunne. “Today rural America represents 15 percent of the nation’s work force, but only 5 percent of digital economy jobs of the future. But the pandemic has opened people’s eyes to the idea that digital economy jobs can be created anywhere.”Kamala Harris is a natural for that task. Who better to bridge Silicon Valley and the rural valleys of America?She is also a natural bridge builder to a more inclusive American heartland, because rural America is not white America. According to a report by the Urban Institute, “one in five Americans lives in rural communities, and more than one in five (22 percent) rural residents are people of color.” I wrote last year about Willmar, Minn., a town that was all white back in the 1950s and today is nearly half Hispanic, Somali, Asian and Native American.In Minnesota, small towns like Willmar that can manage inclusion and diversity are the ones now thriving, because they can attract new labor and home buyers when so many of the young white adults have left for the big cities.Harris will soon be the first woman, the first Black and the first Indian-American vice president, which certainly resonates with a lot of urban voters. However, if she could make herself the person in the Biden cabinet who always shows up FIRST to listen in rural America and the FIRST to appreciate its concerns and the FIRST to make sure its concerns are addressed, she and the Democrats could make themselves competitive in a lot more rural counties.Even if it is just 10 or 15 percent more competitive, it might be enough to deprive today’s deeply warped Trump-led G.O.P. from taking back the White House or the House in the next four years — and maybe force it back to sanity. The Republican Party needs shock therapy, and nothing would shock this G.O.P. more than losing its automatic hold on rural America.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Defying Trump, McConnell Seeks to Squelch Bid to Overturn the Election

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDefying Trump, McConnell Seeks to Squelch Bid to Overturn the ElectionSenator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, congratulated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and pleaded with Republicans privately not to join an effort by House members to throw out the results.“The Electoral College has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, said on Tuesday.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020, 6:13 p.m. ETBreaking with President Trump’s drive to overturn his election loss, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky on Tuesday congratulated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on his victory and began a campaign to keep fellow Republicans from joining a doomed last-ditch effort to reverse the outcome in Congress.Although Mr. McConnell waited until weeks after Mr. Biden was declared the winner to recognize the outcome, his actions were a clear bid by the majority leader, who is the most powerful Republican in Congress, to put an end to his party’s attempts to sow doubt about the election.He was also trying to stave off a messy partisan spectacle on the floor of the House that could divide Republicans at the start of the new Congress, forcing them to choose between showing loyalty to Mr. Trump and protecting the sanctity of the electoral process.“Many of us hoped that the presidential election would yield a different result, but our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on Jan. 20,” Mr. McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. “The Electoral College has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”A short time later, on a private call with Senate Republicans, Mr. McConnell and his top deputies pleaded with their colleagues not to join members of the House in objecting to the election results on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to ratify the Electoral College’s decision, according to three people familiar with the conversation, who described it on the condition of anonymity.A small group of House members, led by Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, plans to use a constitutional process to object to the inclusion of five key battleground states that day. There is almost no chance they will succeed. But if they could persuade at least one senator to join them, they could force a vote on the matter, transforming a typically perfunctory session into a bitter last stand for Mr. Trump.So far, no senator has committed to joining them. In seeking to prevent anyone from doing so, Mr. McConnell argued that a challenge would force senators to go on the record either defying Mr. Trump or rejecting the will of the voters, potentially harming those running for election in 2022. He dispatched his top deputy, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, to lobby lawmakers one by one.The remarks were a decisive shift for Mr. McConnell. They came only after members of his leadership team in the Senate — and even the chamber’s chaplain — began softening the ground by congratulating Mr. Biden on Monday evening and Tuesday morning.Though he never repeated them, Mr. McConnell had allowed Mr. Trump’s false allegations of election fraud and fantastical claims that he had been the true winner to circulate unchecked for more than a month, defending the president’s right to challenge the election outcome in court. Allies insisted privately that he would ultimately honor the results, but did not want to stoke a year-end conflict that could hurt the party’s chances in two Georgia Senate runoffs and imperil must-pass legislation.That calculus changed late Monday, after electors across the country cast their ballots for Mr. Biden, cementing his 306 to 232 Electoral College victory. By Tuesday morning, Mr. McConnell and his leadership team were openly acknowledging the results and creating the political space for other Republicans to begin belatedly recognizing Mr. Biden as the winner.The Senate leader also spoke by phone with Mr. Biden, apparently for the first time since his former Senate colleague won the presidency more than five weeks ago.“I called to thank him for the congratulations, told him although we disagree on a lot of things, there’s things we can work together on,” Mr. Biden told reporters, adding that it was a “good conversation.”Mr. Biden won the Electoral College vote on Monday.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn normal times, such a call would have drawn little notice. But Mr. Trump’s push to deny his loss has created a charged political moment for Republicans, spotlighting rifts within the party and placing Mr. McConnell in a particularly dicey position.Polls suggest a clear majority of Republicans believe Mr. Trump’s fabrication that the election was fraudulent, and they are likely to follow the president’s words, not those of Mr. McConnell. Meanwhile, many of the president’s allies in the House continue to support his challenges to the results, with more than 60 percent of them signing on last week to a legal brief endorsing the failed effort by Texas to overturn results in key battleground states. The House’s top leaders were mostly silent on the question on Tuesday, and their aides did not respond to questions about Mr. Biden’s victory.Mr. Trump himself showed no signs of backing down, repeating his false allegations on Twitter just after Mr. McConnell spoke: “tremendous evidence pouring in on voter fraud.” Mr. Trump also shared a news article about Mr. Brooks’s efforts, raising the possibility that he could begin pressuring members of the party to join in, stoking an even bigger fight in the weeks ahead.Moving to head off potential backlash, Mr. McConnell told reporters pressing him to rebuke Mr. Trump’s rhetoric that he did not have “any advice” for Mr. Trump. Earlier in the day before congratulating Mr. Biden, he had used his speech on the Senate floor to lavish praise on the president’s record on foreign and domestic policy.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 15, 2020, 6:45 p.m. ETBiden will name Gina McCarthy as the White House’s climate coordinator.Dominion’s C.E.O. defends his firm’s voting machines to Michigan lawmakers, denouncing a ‘reckless disinformation campaign.’Biden will nominate Jennifer Granholm for energy secretary.The blowback was immediate from the party’s outspoken right flank anyway and foreshadowed the return to an old dynamic briefly abated during the Trump years in which Mr. McConnell was a favorite punching bag for conservatives. Mark Levin, the talk radio host and strident supporter of Mr. Tump, declared that Mr. McConnell had been “AWOL” from “challenging the lawless acts of the Biden campaign and Democrats.”“Trump helped you secure your seat, as he did so many Senate and House seats, and you couldn’t even wait until January 6th,” Mr. Levin wrote on Twitter. “You’ve been the GOP ‘leader’ in the Senate for far too long. It’s time for some fresh thinking and new blood.”Nor did Mr. McConnell earn much love from the few voices of Republican dissent that have raised alarms in recent days that Mr. Trump’s defiance of democratic norms — and the acquiescence of much of his party — would do lasting damage both to the G.O.P. and to the country.One of them, Representative Paul Mitchell of Michigan, who is retiring, went as far as to quit the party on Monday in protest. Another, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, said on Tuesday that merely recognizing Mr. Biden’s victory was not enough for his party.“How many Republicans will say that what the president is saying is simply wrong and dangerous?” Mr. Romney said on CNN. “We need to have people who are strong Trump supporters say that as well, or you are going to continue to have this country divided, which is pretty dangerous.”Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a senior Republican committee leader and former head of the party’s campaign arm, argued that fears like Mr. Romney’s were somewhat overwrought, but reflected a general loss of trust by many Americans in the electoral process.“We need to accept our institutions. They worked in 2016,” Mr. Cole said in an interview. “They worked again in 2020.”Elected officials, he said, need to “be honest with your voters.”“You have to recognize when you are not successful, and you move on and accept the election results,” he said. “The American people, I hope, will do that.”In the Senate, at least, that view appeared to be gaining currency.In a statement, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah and a defender of the president, said that “absent new information that could give rise to a judicial or legislative determination altering the impact of today’s Electoral College votes, Joe Biden will become president of the United States.” An aide said he had no plans to join Mr. Brooks in challenging the results.Another leading contender for that task, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, seemingly threw cold water on the idea as well. Though Mr. Johnson plans to convene a hearing on Wednesday to give Mr. Trump’s specious arguments of voting fraud an airing in Congress, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he thought the outcome was legitimate and he did not plan to object to the Electoral College results.Still, other possible contenders remained. One was Tommy Tuberville, the newly elected Alabama Republican. Another possible candidate, those watching the process said, was Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, one of the two Republicans competing in January runoffs that will determine which party controls the Senate next year. Those races will play out the day before the joint session to ratify the presidential election results convenes in Washington.Ms. Loeffler’s office did not respond to a question about Mr. Biden on Tuesday, but on Twitter, she suggested she was not ready to accept the result.“I will never stop fighting for @realDonaldTrump because he has never stopped fighting for us!” she wrote.Luke Broadwater More

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      Biden Faces Intense Pressure From All Sides as He Seeks Diverse Cabinet

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden Faces Intense Pressure From All Sides as He Seeks Diverse CabinetThe pressure on the Democratic president-elect is intense, even as his efforts to ensure ethnic and gender diversity already go far beyond those of President Trump. And it’s coming from all sides.The introduction of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s cabinet and White House picks has created angst among many elements of the party.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMichael D. Shear and Dec. 12, 2020Updated 9:33 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The head of the N.A.A.C.P. had a blunt warning for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. when Mr. Biden met with civil rights leaders in Wilmington this week.Nominating Tom Vilsack, a secretary of agriculture in the Obama administration, to run the department again would enrage Black farmers and threaten Democratic hopes of winning two Senate runoffs in Georgia, the N.A.A.C.P. head, Derrick Johnson, told Mr. Biden.“Former Secretary Vilsack could have a disastrous impact on voters in Georgia,” Mr. Johnson cautioned, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The Intercept. Mr. Johnson said Mr. Vilsack’s abrupt firing of a popular Black department official in 2010 was still too raw for many Black farmers despite Mr. Vilsack’s subsequent apology and offer to rehire her.Mr. Biden promptly ignored the warning. Within hours, his decision to nominate Mr. Vilsack to lead the Agriculture Department had leaked, angering the very activists he had just met with.The episode was only one piece of a concerted campaign by activists to demand the president-elect make good on his promise that his administration will “look like America.” In their meeting, Mr. Johnson and the group also urged Mr. Biden to nominate a Black attorney general and to name a White House civil rights “czar.”The pressure on the Democratic president-elect is intense, even as his efforts to ensure ethnic and gender diversity already go far beyond those of President Trump, who did not make diversity a priority and often chose his top officials because they looked the part. And it is coming from all sides.When Mr. Biden nominated the first Black man to run the Pentagon this week, women cried foul. L.G.B.T.Q. advocates are disappointed that Mr. Biden has not yet named a prominent member of their community to his cabinet. Latino and Asian groups are angling for some of the same jobs.Allies of the president-elect note that he has already made history. In addition to nominating retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, to be the first Black secretary of defense, he has chosen a Cuban immigrant to run the Department of Homeland Security, the first female Treasury secretary, a Black woman at the Housing and Urban Development Department and the son of Mexican immigrants to serve as the secretary of health and human services.Retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III would be the first Black secretary of defense if confirmed. Mr. Biden passed over Michèle Flournoy, who would have been the first woman for the job.Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesAnd, perhaps most notably, he picked Kamala Harris to be his running mate, making her the first Black person and the first woman to be vice president.But the rollout of Mr. Biden’s cabinet and White House picks has created angst among many elements of the party. While some say he appears hamstrung by interest groups, others point out that his earliest choices included four white men who are close confidants to serve as chief of staff, secretary of state, national security adviser and his top political adviser, leaving the impression that for the administration’s most critical jobs Mr. Biden planned to rely on the same cadre of aides he has had for years.“Added consternation,” the leader of one advocacy group in Washington said of Mr. Biden’s initial picks.Glynda C. Carr, the president of Higher Heights for America, a political action committee dedicated to electing progressive Black women, said there was a feeling of defeat that Mr. Biden had not awarded key jobs in his cabinet to Black women, as the group had hoped.Susan Rice, a Black woman who was United Nations ambassador and national security adviser in the Obama administration, had been seen as a candidate for secretary of state. Instead, she will become the director of Mr. Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, a position that does not require Senate confirmation. Representative Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, another Black woman, was passed over for secretary of agriculture, the job she and her allies had pushed for, and instead was nominated to be secretary of housing and urban development.Both the state and agriculture jobs went to white men instead.“For me, I certainly would want Susan Rice to be on the team rather than not be on the team,” Ms. Carr said, but that it was “disappointing” to see Ms. Rice in a position that was not cabinet-level. “We need to continue pushing,” she added.Women’s groups were also disappointed by Mr. Biden’s decision to pick General Austin for defense secretary instead of Michèle Flournoy, a longtime senior Pentagon official who had been seen as the leading contender for the job for months.It did not help Mr. Biden’s case with women that he also chose Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, as the health and human services secretary over Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, who was singled out as a likely candidate for the job just days before she was passed over.Picking General Austin also did not assuage civil rights leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is adamant about the need for a Black attorney general, or at least someone with a background on voting rights enforcement.California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, right, was nominated as health and human services secretary over Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico.Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesIn an interview after his meeting with Mr. Biden, Mr. Sharpton was blunt about when he would feel satisfied that the president-elect had kept his diversity promise.“If we get a genuine attorney general that has a credible background on civil rights and voting rights enforcement,” he said. “If we get a credible person with a genuine background in labor, and education, then I would be willing to say that I’m willing to accept some defeats or setbacks” in other positions.Mr. Sharpton has also been clear about who he will not accept. He said Black activists would not support any position for Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff for President Barack Obama whose legacy as mayor of Chicago he condemns because of Mr. Emanuel’s handling of the killing of Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager, in 2014 by a police officer.Other activists are equally determined to prevent the president-elect from nominating people they view as too conservative and too timid in confronting racial injustices or too connected to the corporate world.This month, a group of over 70 environmental justice groups wrote to the Biden transition team urging the president-elect not to appoint Mary Nichols, California’s climate change regulator and one of the nation’s most experienced climate change officials, to run the Environmental Protection Agency.“We would like to call your attention to Ms. Nichols’s bleak track record in addressing environmental racism,” the groups wrote, saying that she pushed California’s cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gases at the expense of local pollutants, which disproportionately affect minority communities.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 11, 2020, 9:07 p.m. ETCongress might ban surprise medical billing, and that’s a surprise.Biden is considering Cuomo for attorney general.‘Our institutions held’: Democrats (and some Republicans) cheer Supreme Court ruling on election suit.People close to the transition say Ms. Nichols may end up losing the job to Heather McTeer Toney, a regional E.P.A. administrator in the Obama administration, who is a top choice of liberal activists and would be the second Black woman to lead the agency.Adam Green, the founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said liberal organizations have been largely happy with some of Mr. Biden’s picks, including Ron Klain, one of his longtime advisers, as chief of staff and Janet L. Yellen, a former chair of the Federal Reserve, to be Treasury secretary.But he said that Mr. Biden had not selected any champion of the progressive movement, adding, “Those at the tip of the spear so far are not in the biggest positions.”And nominees like Mr. Vilsack, whom Mr. Green accused of having too many ties to large corporate agriculture industries, are a disappointment, he said.“There is so much opportunity with agriculture, especially if we want to make gains in the Midwest,” he said. But that would require a secretary willing to “go to bat for family farmers against big agriculture.”As Mr. Biden mulls his choices for interior secretary, a coalition of Democrats, Native Americans, liberal activists and Hollywood celebrities is pressing him to appoint Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, a Native American, instead of Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico and a longtime friend of Mr. Biden’s.On Thursday night, a group of liberal activists, including the Sunrise Movement, one of the left’s most prominent groups, wrote to Mr. Udall, who is white, urging him take himself out of the running for a job that his father, Stewart L. Udall, had under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.“It would not be right for two Udalls to lead the Department of the Interior, the agency tasked with managing the nation’s public lands, natural resources and trust responsibilities to tribes, before a single Native American,” they wrote.On Capitol Hill, progressive Democratic lawmakers like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, are reserving judgment on Mr. Biden’s choices.“I think one of the things I’m looking for when I see all of these picks put together is, what is the agenda?” she told reporters.Janet L. Yellen, a former chair of the Federal Reserve, was nominated to be Treasury secretary. She would be the first woman to lead the department.Credit…Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesDuring his meeting with the activists, Mr. Biden bristled at the idea that his nominations suggest he was not pursuing a progressive agenda.“I don’t carry around a stamp on my head saying ‘I’m progressive and I’m A.O.C.,’” Mr. Biden said, referring to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. “But I have more of a record of getting things done in the United States Congress than anybody you know.”The comments reflect what people familiar with Mr. Biden’s thinking say is his growing frustration with the public and private pressure campaigns.But promises to interest groups during his campaign tend not to be forgotten.Alphonso David, the president of Human Rights Campaign, a group dedicated to advancing the interests of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, said Mr. Biden assured him months ago that he was committed to diversity in his appointments. For Mr. David, the goal is for an L.G.B.T.Q. person to be named to a cabinet-level position requiring Senate confirmation — something that has never happened.“That is an important barrier to break. we need to make sure that all communities are represented,” Mr. David said. Like other activists, Mr. David hesitated to pass judgment on Mr. Biden until he finished picking his cabinet.“It’s too soon to tell yet,” he said. But he added a warning that Mr. Biden has heard all too often in recent days.“If we don’t have the diversity of representation that Joe Biden has been pledging and that we are looking for,” he said, “there will be huge disappointment.”Still, defenders of the president elect are equally direct.“He picked the first woman and first Black vice president. First woman Treasury secretary. First Black defense secretary,” said Philippe Reines, a veteran Democratic operative and former top adviser to Hillary Clinton. “But if they can’t trust Joe Biden to continue to do the right thing and seek to pick the cabinet, they should do what he did: run for and win the presidency.”Luke Broadwater More

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      Biden’s Iowa Bus Tour Is Headed for a D.C. Reunion

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPolitical MemoBiden’s Iowa Bus Tour Is Headed for a D.C. ReunionA year ago, Joe Biden was on a grim bus tour through Iowa, joined by many old friends, including Tom Vilsack and John Kerry. Now Mr. Biden wants to bring some of the crew back to Washington with him.Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry traveled through Iowa on a bus tour in December 2019. Last month, Mr. Biden, as president-elect, named Mr. Kerry to a top climate post.Credit…Calla Kessler/The New York TimesSydney Ember and Dec. 12, 2020, 10:01 a.m. ETJoseph R. Biden Jr. wasn’t the main event, and he knew it.As he trudged from one small Iowa town to the next on a cold, grim bus tour last winter, trying and failing to generate even a spark of enthusiasm for his presidential candidacy in the leadoff caucus state, he had a habit of quietly delivering his stump speech and then welcoming a more formidable closer.“Thank you for listening,” Mr. Biden said at a campaign stop in Storm Lake last December before ceding the spotlight to Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa.“I’m going to turn this over to a guy who’s forgotten more about farm and rural policy than I know about foreign policy,” he quipped.It was a lonely road for Joe Biden in Iowa a year ago. As his rivals enjoyed big crowds and splashy surrogates, friends of Mr. Biden’s who had retired from elected office — including Mr. Vilsack and John Kerry, the former secretary of state — suited up once more to lend their support in what looked at times like a last hurrah as Mr. Biden plummeted toward a fourth-place finish.Yet those frosty days in Iowa have now led somewhere more glamorous: Mr. Biden’s administration, or so he hopes.In recent weeks, Mr. Biden — now the president-elect and unquestionably the next main event in Washington — rewarded Mr. Vilsack and Mr. Kerry with nods for prominent roles, alongside others who championed Mr. Biden during the roughest stretches of the primary campaign. The early Iowa surrogates embraced his comparatively modest pledge of a return to normalcy — and his relentless focus on the fuzzy concept of electability — when party activists in the leadoff caucus state seemed more captivated by new faces like Pete Buttigieg or the ambitious ideas of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.One year later, Mr. Biden is again facing skepticism from activists and officials alike. This time, it is around whether the administration he is assembling reflects the racial and generational diversity of the party and the nation — something he has promised to achieve. And Mr. Biden’s elevation of Mr. Vilsack has sparked considerable backlash from progressives and from some civil rights leaders.The expected nominations, however, are a vivid illustration of how central personal relationships are to Mr. Biden’s view of governing. Selections including his chief of staff and his nominee for secretary of state are people who have known the former vice president for decades and often bear extensive Washington credentials.Not to mention, in some cases, extensive Iowa credentials.For Mr. Vilsack, Mr. Kerry and other former politicians who braved the frigid expanse of Iowa before Mr. Biden’s bid caught fire with the support of Black voters in South Carolina, the possibility of a significant role in the incoming Biden administration is a vindication of their efforts during the bleakest days of the caucuses, when their alliance with Mr. Biden was viewed by other teams more as a vestige of long-ago politics than as a winning strategy.Mr. Biden’s winter bus tour failed to generate even a spark of enthusiasm for his presidential candidacy in the leadoff caucus state.Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesEven Mr. Biden’s friends realized his campaign was not doing well at the time.“When I got there, we were going door to door in a blizzard,” said State Senator Dick Harpootlian of South Carolina, joking that he had developed post-traumatic stress disorder “as a result of my experience in Iowa,” where he volunteered and where he recalled running into Biden allies like Mr. Vilsack. “Those folks that were there in Iowa and stuck with it, those are the folks who basically bought into Joe Biden,” he said. “The politics of it at that point were not particularly bright.”None of that dampened their zeal for the task at hand. For some of his surrogates, campaigning for Mr. Biden back then meant advocacy for a man who, they believed, could defeat President Trump. It also meant a return to the campaign trail — and perhaps renewed political relevance.Several top surrogates had run for president themselves, including Mr. Vilsack and Mr. Kerry, and their enduring support for Mr. Biden afforded them another turn in the spotlight, complete with rallies in school gyms and coaxing of voters at coffee shops. Other allies (and former candidates) like former Senators Christopher J. Dodd and Bob Kerrey were also on-hand sometimes.They had staff members shepherding them again. They received news media requests. They hobnobbed with friends and ran into rival candidates at Des Moines hot spots.Mr. Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee, joined a diverse, rotating slate of other Biden endorsers on a seven-day bus tour across Iowa 16 years after he had won the state’s caucuses.As the tour’s headliner, Mr. Kerry’s moves and snack cravings were captured by the Biden campaign on Instagram as he attested to Mr. Biden’s foreign policy experience.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 11, 2020, 9:07 p.m. ETCongress might ban surprise medical billing, and that’s a surprise.Biden is considering Cuomo for attorney general.‘Our institutions held’: Democrats (and some Republicans) cheer Supreme Court ruling on election suit.There was some occasional rust, and some anxiety, too.At an event in Des Moines last November as he promoted his endorsement of Mr. Biden, Mr. Vilsack admitted that he “woke up at 4:30 this morning pretty nervous about this speech.”And Mr. Kerry, on the day before the caucuses, tweeted and then deleted a profane message rebutting a news report about his own presidential ambitions — and reaffirming his support for his friend.Mr. Biden visited a farm with Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, in November 2019. Mr. Biden nominated Mr. Vilsack to be his agriculture secretary this week.Credit…Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesMr. Vilsack in particular was viewed as an important endorsement in the state at the time. But some of Mr. Biden’s rivals, including Mr. Sanders, Ms. Warren and Mr. Buttigieg, were enjoying boosts from celebrities like Mandy Moore and young progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — which contributed to the sense that Mr. Biden, with his stable of silver-haired white men, was out of date.“Circulating in Iowa at the time was ‘Biden’s too old,’” said Mr. Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska who was among the friends who campaigned for Mr. Biden during the primary race. “That was the conversation that was going on — he’s yesterday’s business. He’s too moderate.”Mr. Kerrey allowed that the Biden lineup might not have been the most dynamic.“If you think Vilsack was boring, you should have been with me!” said Mr. Kerrey, who is in his 70s. (He did, however, bristle at the suggestion from a reporter that Mr. Biden’s supporters were not seen to be quite as youthful or hip as those of his now-vanquished opponents. “You are suffering from ageism,” he said. “I called you out. I’ve become woke!”)As it turned out, traditionally conservative-leaning senior citizens would help propel Mr. Biden to the presidency, and he had stronger appeal in the primary campaign among Black voters than any of his rivals did.Now on the verge of entering the White House, Mr. Biden has signaled his intent to gather his faithful squad together again with the alacrity of a coach rallying his team for one last game. This past week, he named Mr. Vilsack as his choice for agriculture secretary. He has picked Mr. Kerry for a top climate post. And Antony J. Blinken, a longtime top aide to Mr. Biden who was spotted in Iowa with him, is now his choice for secretary of state.If Mr. Biden’s selections so far underscore his experience and his deep bench of long-lasting relationships, it is also a stark reminder of his roots in an older, whiter generation that has at times seemed at odds with the energy in the current Democratic Party.He may not have won over youthful crowds a year ago, but he is, his team insists, committed to empowering the next generation of Democratic leaders.At a briefing with the news media on Friday, the incoming White House press secretary, Jennifer Psaki, made a point of highlighting younger members of Mr. Biden’s team. Mr. Biden has also named a number of people of color to major cabinet positions, including helming the Pentagon and the Homeland Security Department, even as he faces intense pressure from some in his own party who believe he needs more people of color in senior positions.Not everyone who assisted him, even in Iowa, is so far an administration choice, including Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, who joined Mr. Kerry on the bus tour.Mr. Kerrey also said he was not on Mr. Biden’s list.“There are a lot of people that have endorsed Joe Biden that aren’t going to be in his cabinet,” he said. “You’re talking to one.”Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Biden Clashes With the Left

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn PoliticsBiden Clashes With the LeftDec. 11, 2020, 7:01 a.m. ETDemocrats are trying to work out their differences as Biden prepares to take office. But across party lines, a lot feels unbridgeable. It’s Friday, and this is your politics tip sheet.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.Where things standThe seams in the Democratic Party have been showing this week, with progressives and moderates fixing their attention on President-elect Joe Biden’s major staff choices. All the while, eyes are locked on Georgia, where the Senate majority — and with it the Democrats’ legislative agenda, no matter how centrist or progressive — hangs in the balance.Biden this week argued that the rallying cry to “defund the police” was a political third rail, saying in a private call with leaders of civil rights groups that it could hurt the Democratic candidates in Georgia’s two Senate runoffs next month.“That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police,” Biden said on Tuesday, referring to down-ballot races last month, according to audio obtained by The Intercept. “We’re not. We’re talking about holding them accountable.”Over the summer, Biden resisted the calls of demonstrators and progressive organizers to defund police departments and shift funding to social services, though his website promises to “reform our criminal justice system.”A separate, intraparty battle is brewing on another issue: student loan debt. Biden has endorsed canceling up to $10,000 per person in federal student debt, but Democrats in Congress are pushing him to multiply that number by five. Both sides of the debate acknowledge that tackling the $1.7 trillion in student debt nationwide, which is spread among more than 43 million borrowers, would go far toward jump-starting the economy.“There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “If we don’t deliver quick relief, it’s going to be very difficult to get them back.”But economists also argue that above a certain point, most student loan debt is held by relatively affluent borrowers, given who tends to attend costly colleges and universities without being covered by financial aid. The fundamental problem, they say, is the high cost of tuition — something that debt forgiveness may not do much to combat.Progressives are expressing concern over Biden’s pick to head the Agriculture Department, Tom Vilsack, since news emerged this week that Biden plans to bring him back to run the agency he’d led throughout President Barack Obama’s two terms.His appointment was met with some disappointment from progressives, Black farmers and some farm groups that had pushed for an appointee who would bring a fresher perspective and shift the department’s focus more firmly toward confronting poverty and food scarcity.Vilsack drew some criticism during the Obama years for hiring people with ties to Monsanto, and for his relative leniency on labeling genetically engineered food. Since 2017, Vilsack has led the U.S. Dairy Export Council, which pushes the dairy industry’s interests abroad.Many progressives had aligned themselves with Representative Marcia Fudge, Democrat of Ohio, who represents an urban district and has made food access and equity a major theme of her work. Biden instead named Fudge as his pick for secretary of Housing and Urban Development.Biden also announced yesterday that Denis McDonough, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, will be his nominee for the secretary of Veterans Affairs. Susan Rice, who was national security adviser when Mr. Biden was vice president, will become the director of his Domestic Policy Council, overseeing a large part of the new president’s agenda.The latest picks underscore a theme running through Biden’s appointments thus far: He tends to be choosing people he has worked with, most often in the Obama administration.The implications are varied. He has managed to assemble a diverse team, full of “firsts” and at least somewhat representative of the country’s demographic makeup. He has also signaled that in his quest to “Build Back Better,” he intends to hand the keys back to many of the officials whose work helped to define what came before.And he is also drawing upon a number of figures who, after leaving the White House, made their way in private industry, often serving in lucrative positions for companies with direct contracts with the federal government.An independent advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration recommended approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine yesterday, by a vote of 17 to 4.Some committee members expressed some reservations about possible allergic reactions reported in Britain, which authorized the vaccine last week but recommended this week that people with a history of severe allergic reactions should not take it.In the Senate, hopes of a bipartisan stimulus compromise faded a bit on Thursday, as reports emerged that aides to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, had told colleagues that they didn’t expect Republicans to get behind a bill.Republicans have been particularly resistant to Democrats’ demands for aid to struggling state, local and tribal governments. In exchange, Republicans have sought liability protections for businesses that have reopened during the pandemic — anathema to Democrats.Only a few days remain before the 116th Congress ends and both chambers are scheduled to adjourn for the holidays. The prospects for a one-week stopgap government funding bill intended to avert a shutdown were unclear in the Senate late yesterday.Photo of the dayCredit…Samuel Corum for The New York TimesMembers of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance drove past the Capitol yesterday during a protest for more pandemic relief aid.Seven in 10 Republican voters think Biden’s win is illegitimate, poll findsBiden has made a message of national unity central to his presidential transition, but he faces a challenge in bringing together a country that simply can’t agree on basic facts anymore.The depth of the divide can be seen in a smattering of recent polls, which have found a fundamental disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over the very legitimacy of Biden’s win.In a Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday, 70 percent of Republican registered voters said Biden’s win was not legitimate, while just 23 percent said it was. Among white male registered voters, only 47 percent said Biden had won fair and square.Comparatively, 98 percent of Democrats said Biden had won legitimately.Asked about whether there had been significant voter fraud — as the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed, but failed to find — 77 percent of Republicans said yes. Ninety-seven percent of Democrats said no.The results of this poll dovetail with those of a Pew Research Center survey conducted in mid-November, after most major news outlets had called the election but before President Trump’s legal team had suffered some of its most humiliating losses in court.While 94 percent of Biden voters said they were at least somewhat confident the election had been “run and administered well,” just 21 percent of Trump voters said the same. And whereas 82 percent of Biden voters were very confident that their own vote had been accurately counted, that number plummeted to 35 percent among Trump voters.The Pew poll, published on Nov. 20, found that most Trump voters were uninterested in letting bygones be bygones: Eighty-five percent said the president should continue his “legal challenges to the voting process in several states.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Student Loan Cancellation Sets Up Clash Between Biden and the Left

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStudent Loan Cancellation Sets Up Clash Between Biden and the LeftDemocratic leaders are pressing the president-elect to cancel $50,000 in debt per student borrower by fast executive action, but he wants Congress to pass more modest relief.Marquette University in Milwaukee last month. Student debt has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages.Credit…Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesErica L. Green, Luke Broadwater and Dec. 10, 2020Updated 7:09 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is facing pressure from congressional Democrats to cancel student loan debt on a vast scale, quickly and by executive action, a campaign that will be one of the first tests of his relationship with the liberal wing of his party.Mr. Biden has endorsed canceling $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower through legislation, and insisted that chipping away at the $1.7 trillion in loan debt held by more than 43 million borrowers is integral to his economic plan. But Democratic leaders, backed by the party’s left flank, are pressing for up to $50,000 of debt relief per borrower, executed on Day 1 of his presidency.More than 200 organizations — including the American Federation of Teachers, the N.A.A.C.P. and others that were integral to his campaign — have joined the push.The Education Department is effectively the country’s largest consumer bank and the primary lender, since 2010, for higher education. It owns student loans totaling $1.4 trillion, so forgiveness of some of that debt would be a rapid injection of cash into the pockets of many people suffering from the economic effects of the pandemic.“There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “If we don’t deliver quick relief, it’s going to be very difficult to get them back.”Many economists, including liberals, say higher education debt forgiveness is an inefficient way to help struggling Americans who face foreclosure, evictions and hunger. The working poor largely are not college graduates — more than 70 percent of currently unemployed workers do not have a bachelor’s degree, and 43 percent did not attend college at all, according to a report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.While many Black students would benefit greatly from even modest loan forgiveness, debt relief overall would disproportionately benefit middle- to upper-class college graduates of all colors and ethnicities, especially those who attended elite and expensive institutions, and people with lucrative professional credentials like law and medical degrees.An October analysis by the Brookings Institution found that almost 60 percent of America’s educational debt is owed by households in the nation’s top 40 percent of earners, with an annual income of $74,000 or more.People who go to college “are often from more advantaged backgrounds, and they end up doing very well in the labor market,” said Adam Looney, a former Treasury official who helped write the analysis.Without a parallel effort to curb tuition growth, one-time debt relief could actually lead to more higher-education debt in the future as students take on larger loans, hoping the government would at some point wipe them clean, a “moral hazard” that often accompanies one-time interventions. And it would be expensive: Canceling even $10,000 per person in debt would eliminate more than $400 billion in government assets, although calculating the true cost to the Treasury is tricky because of student loans’ long repayment time and high default rate.Mr. Looney said that canceling $50,000, at a projected cost of $1 trillion, would be “among the largest transfer programs in American history,” on par with decades of targeted spending on programs that exclusively benefit low-income families, such as the $992 billion spent on federal Pell grants since 1972 and the $1.4 trillion spent on welfare since 1975.If debt relief overall would disproportionately flow to better-off Americans, even modest debt forgiveness would help many financially vulnerable people, especially people of color. Student debt load has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed both credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages, and much of it falls on Black graduates, who owe an average of $7,400 more than their white peers at the time they leave school. Black borrowers also default at higher rates.College dropouts, especially those who attended for-profit schools, often end up trapped by debt they cannot afford to repay.“In this moment of national reckoning on racial injustice, the president-elect must cancel all federal student debt on Day 1 of his administration,” Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “The president-elect must meet the moment. If he fails to, we will hold him accountable.”An economic working paper published by the Roosevelt Institute casts debt forgiveness explicitly in racial-justice terms. The total percentage of Black households that would benefit would be greater than white households, and the relative gains for those households’ net worth are far larger, the researchers found. The greatest marginal gains come from canceling the smallest debts; wiping out $20,000 would end student debt for half of all households with loans.Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a joint op-ed last week that $50,000 debt cancellations would give “Black and brown families across the country a far better shot at building financial security” and would be the “single most effective executive action available to provide massive stimulus to our economy.”To truly break the debt cycle, though, forgiveness would need to be paired with policy changes addressing the underlying cause of America’s skyrocketing student debt: affordability, an issue Democrats have tried to address.“The real problem is the cost of higher education,” said Betsy Mayotte, the president and founder of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors. “Unless you’re going to solve the problem, forgiveness is just throwing away money.”Mr. Biden’s campaign platform proposed making public universities tuition-free for families making less than $125,000 a year.“The virus epidemic has accelerated some of the trends that are strangling public higher education,” said Louise Seamster of the University of Iowa and a co-author of the Roosevelt Institute paper. She said a momentous move like debt forgiveness could spur “new ways of thinking.”“A lot of the debate has gotten stale because we’ve been limited in thinking about the fixes,” she said.Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have pushed for up to $50,000 in debt cancellation.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBut student debt forgiveness could have serious political implications. In 2009, relief extended by President Barack Obama to homeowners with houses suddenly worth less than their mortgages was the original spark for the Tea Party movement, driven by people who fastidiously paid their home loans and felt left out. The dynamic would almost certainly repeat itself as earlier and later borrowers wondered why they had to pay off their loans.“I don’t believe any president has the authority to give away hundreds of billions of dollars through the stroke of a pen,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. “And I think doing so is profoundly unfair to the millions of Americans who worked hard to pay down their student debt.”The legal argument for debt cancellation by executive action hinges on a passage in the Higher Education Act of 1965 that gives the education secretary the power to “compromise, waive or release” federal student loan debts. Mr. Schumer and Ms. Warren maintain that Mr. Biden can broadly use that power, and several lawyers have written analyses backing that view.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 10, 2020, 8:48 p.m. ETThe federal investigation into his son is likely to hang over Biden as he takes office.The Trump administration may sharply draw back military support for the C.I.A. in its final weeks.State Department watchdog announces early departure as Pompeo criticizes his office.But former government lawyers have warned that across-the-board forgiveness would face legal challenges from Republicans. And Mr. Biden has never publicly endorsed the idea. Some close to him say he recognizes the risks and consequences of bypassing Congress.There is more consensus that the $10,000 proposal would reach the most vulnerable borrowers, the estimated 15 million who have low debt under $10,000, often because they did not complete their degrees.Some experts argue that Mr. Biden has other, more progressive options for taming student debt, such as improving existing repayment plans that link borrowers’ loan payments to their incomes.The government has struggled to get all borrowers who would benefit from income-linked plans enrolled in them, in part because the loan servicers it hired to work with borrowers and collect their payments have not guided people through the complicated process of getting and staying enrolled.A separate program to forgive the debts of those who work in public-service careers has an even grimmer track record, and a longstanding program to forgive the debts of graduates bilked by their universities — usually for-profit colleges — has been crippled by the Trump administration.The “benefit of outright cancellation is simplicity,” said Eileen Connor, the legal director at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, which represents thousands of students defrauded by their colleges and mired in legal fights with the Education Department over loan forgiveness.“We are facing an unprecedented public health and economic crisis, and we need to use every tool readily available to keep families and the economy afloat,” Ms. Connor said.Mr. Biden has continued to push for the passage of legislation that called for some loan forgiveness, named the Heroes Act, that the House passed in the spring.Student debt holders are “having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent, those kinds of decisions,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference last month.Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat in the House whose endorsement was key to Mr. Biden winning the presidency, said the president-elect should first try legislation. If that fails, Mr. Clyburn argued, Mr. Biden should use an executive order.“I sit here in this Congress because of an executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation. Harry Truman used an executive order to integrate the armed services,” Mr. Clyburn said.“Let them sue,” he added. “They’re not the only ones that can employ lawyers.”Mr. Clyburn, who speaks with Mr. Biden frequently, said in an interview that he did not think that what Mr. Biden proposed during the campaign “goes quite far enough.”Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina said President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. should use an executive order to provide student debt relief if legislation fails.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“I’ve got people with $130,000 in student debt. What’s $10,000 going to do for that person?” asked Mr. Clyburn, whose legislation to eliminate up to $50,000 would completely cancel student debt for 75 percent of borrowers.Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said he hoped the two parties could find common ground on the issue. He introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow employers to contribute up to $5,250 tax-free to their employees’ student loans, which was included as a temporary provision in the coronavirus relief law this spring.“There’s no question that student debt is a problem in this country, but simply forgiving student loans is not the answer,” Mr. Thune said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More